The Prep’s mansion was everything I thought it would be. The first thing you saw when entering the house was an Enclave set of Power Armor. It sat upright like a soldier with a plasma caster in its hands, looking like it was still geared up to shoot anyone and anything that stepped in its path. I hadn’t seen Enclave power armor in my life, but it was just as imposing and glamorous as my parents told me it was. To my left was a living room with prewar furniture that had been reskinned with Nightstalker hides. A few Prep gangsters were sitting on them, reloading their weapons and gossiping about scouts outside the city going missing. I filed that away for later, if they really were missing that meant that either somebody was hitting the Preps again or something Dangerous was coming out of the mountains to eat. Nobody looked at me twice as I walked up the stairs towards the bedrooms. If I was inside the doorman must have let me in. As I walked up the stairs I the sound of someone yelling became louder. I hadn’t met the leader of the Preps before, I assumed it was going to be him. Nobody screams more than a rich asshole who knows that there’s no chance anyone would decide to even contradict, much less take a swing at.
Hartman had been leading the Preps for years now. He started out with a high rank from birth because his uncle was already high in the food chain. John Hartman went from the middle to the top by being even more brutal than the guys around him. Through coercion, bribery, and a few broken bones Hartman gained control of the once proud Energy Weapons industry, Once the Preps wiped out the Van Graff’s hold in Salt Lake things got bloody. The Graffs decided to show that they were going to teach the Preps a lesson, and sent a couple dozen mercenaries led by a group of Van Graff enforcers into what was the Prep’s Stronghold at the time. The street that the war was fought on still has deep gouges in the area surrounding both the stronghold and the area where the Van Graffs made their assault. The Van Graffs got their asses handed to them, and haven’t been back since. Hartman was made the boss just six months later following the death of the last boss who died in a suicide bombing from a ghoul who grew up in Vault 51. I got off the stairs and walked down a hallway with multiple doors on each side. The invoice for the package I had to deliver the door I was supposed to knock on was the last one on the left. As I passed an open door, I saw Hartman himself screaming into his radio.
“I told you I don’t fucking care about the people on that street! That street is still owned by us, and if they don’t want to live somewhere else we can just shoot them and move them ourselves.” A voice responds too low for me to hear it.
“Send two squads of low ranked Preps there. Have Goodman lead them and force those squatters off my street. Everyone knows that our stronghold used to be there, and if they try to resist just shoot them until they start moving themselves.” He saw me walking towards his daughters room, and he stopped what he was doing, grabbed a plasma pistol on his desk, and started walking towards me.
“Hey! Who are you and why are you in this house?” I noticed that the people who were relaxed hanging around the area now had their own guns in their hands, and every one of them pointed in my direction. The Preps were even more well equipped than I thought. Two guys in full power armor had Multiplas Rifles in their hands, while two girls in recon armor put their hands on my shoulders with ballistic fists ready to splatter my head all over each other. I started sweating immediately, and held up the folder I had in my hands.
“I’m a courier! Emma hired me to deliver this to her. Instructions told me that I had to deliver this personally. I’m not here to cause any harm.” The angry look Hartman had went away once he saw the signature on the folder, then he walked back to his desk and told me “Yeah, well hurry up and get out of here then.”
The people around me put down their guns.The two girls in recon armor went into a room and closed the door. I breathed a sigh of relief and went into Emma’s room to give her the folder which almost cost me my life.
Emma Hartman is a mystery to almost everyone in Salt Lake. Everyone knew John Hartman had a daughter, but nobody ever got to know her. Emma was occasionally seen walking through the city with enforcers trailing her, but she talked to nobody and was talked to by nobody. The only times I’ve thought about her were to think about how lonely the life of a crime boss’s daughter must be. Emma was sitting down, looking over an odd piece of tech that was glowing blue. It didn’t look like any weapon I had ever seen; just a metallic looking cube that had a small dome on top. Emma never even looked at me, just kept working on the cube in front of her and said
“You’re Molly, right? I told Joey that your reputation for getting things delivered would ensure that I got my package. Well, just hand me the pictures that are in the folder.”
I opened the folder and handed her the pictures. I took a glance at them and asked “Why are these pictures so important to you? It’s just a picture of the Courier and some crudely drawn schematics for a grenade launcher.”
“It’s not just a grenade launcher. The scientific community got wind that Big Mountain and the Sierra Madre have working Hologram technology a few weeks ago. The unfortunate thing is that the Courier controls who does and doesn’t get to buy it or even have it. He refuses to give holograms to anyone who would use them for anything not defensive, and outright has blacklisted anyone even remotely tied to crime from ever buying it. The Courier has also made it known that even if someone develops Holos themselves they cannot use them offensively without the Courier declaring war on them and obliterating them from the map. Do you know why?” [Science check 60]
[Succeeded] “Because holograms are completely invulnerable to damage. Anyone who had one could set it loose and kill anything they wanted without losing a single unit. Why are you trying to develop holograms if you know all of this? Even the Prep’s firepower and army couldn’t hope to stand up to the Securitrons and Roboscorpions that the Courier uses as his army.”
Emma looked at me for a while. I could almost see Emma asking herself whether or not she should trust me. She eventually nodded and told me “ If I can develop this Hologram technology, I can make sure that this city has an emergency defense plan, and I might also find some way to defend against other people using them as weapons. These Holograms are worse than nukes, because right now nobody knows how to defend themselves against them. I’m not making this for the Preps. I hate everything my family has done to this city, and the only thing I want to do is to protect it from people like my Dad. ”