"Makes sense. The legion loves pulling tricks like this to pressure towns or tribes into joining them fully. I guess that's it then. Doesn't feel as good as I thought it might." he said with a lost look.
"Wanna kill legion still?" I asked at that with a grin.
"Only good legionary is a dead one." he said firmly.
"Then come with us. We are definitely going to run into more of them and I don't intend to spare the fuckers when we do. Having an expert at putting them in the dirt around will always be a nice bonus." I offered cheerfully.
"You don't know me, what i've done. You'd want to get as far from me as possible if you did." He said rejecting the offer without explicitly saying so.
"Oh you mean that Bitter springs massacre? A bit rough even for the wasteland but during war? Not even close to how fucked up humanity has gotten." I said with a scoff.
"You are just dismissing what happened?" he asked with a dark expression.
I shook my head "No, it is definitely a stain on the NCR and those that participated. The thing is, you regret it. That means you aren't a monster, you have honor and discipline, a line in the sand. If I can't trust my back to someone like that then who else qualifies?" I said frankly.
"Fine. I still think this is a mistake. I'll meet you at the motel gate in the morning." he said with a sigh before turning to scan the horizon since he was still technically on duty.
I grinned and left him to it since I still had to let Jess know what was going on. She was sitting up on the bed waiting when I walked in the door.
"That was fast." she said surprised to see me so soon.
"It wasn't all that complicated. Jeanie May sold Boone's wife to the legion. Had a receipt in the safe in the main office. The problem has been taken care of. On an extremely related note Boone will be coming along with us in the morning." I said casually.
"Do I even get a say in this?" she asked a little annoyed.
"I mean sure you do. Doesn't mean i'll listen but you can certainly try to argue." I said with a shrug.
"You are literally the worst." she said with a groan.
"No, that title belongs to Caesar. Used to belong to The Master but he's dead. I'm not evil, just selfish. There's a difference." I said as I shook my body and let the armor open up to spit me out.
She stared at me for a good minute making me frown.
"What? Do I have something on my face?" i asked as i felt my face up worriedly.
"No. I just haven't seen you out of that armor is all. Was almost beginning to think you were actually a robot in disguise." she said poking fun of me.
I rolled my eyes "Well excuse me if I don't want to leave my squishy flesh and blood self exposed to the elements if I don't have to. I happen to have a lot of valuable shit on me, my armor included, and would rather not make myself an easy target." I said with a huff.
She laughed but left that there and didn't even argue with me about Boone. Sleeping was a little awkward since there was only one bed but we worked it out by wadding up the comforter like a wall between our sides of the bed.-
I woke up at the exact instant the day rolled over not from the system but because of it. After seven days of sudden awakenings my body worked it into my sleeping pattern. I sighed at it and got up for a moment to store my bike in my inventory before going back to sleep. Even then I still ended up getting up at dawn and putting on my armor again and making a quick meal since I had skipped yesterdays. The smell woke Jess up and it was funny watching her blink over and over again as she noticed the missing bike.-
"I stashed it since three is a bit too much for it to handle at once. Not weight wise because it's a beast but the seat's not big enough." I said and she nodded in understanding.
As agreed Boone met us at the gate to the motel and from the looks of things it didn't look like he had gotten any sleep at all.
"Think you'll be good for action without rest?" I asked seriously.
"I once stayed awake for three days in a row before landing a headshot from fifteen hundred feet. I can handle it." he said firmly.
That was good enough for me so we set off following the road West out of town past the small cattle ranch. The road was all fucked up like usual but soon we all drew our weapons as raw fleshy looking things appeared from further up the path, ghouls. These things were what happened when you were exposed to a lot of radiation and it didn't straight up kill you. You all but stopped aging which was nice but the real problem was what it did to your flesh.-
Radiation and flesh tended not to like each other so when you became a ghoul you gained immunity and even the ability to heal through radiation. But in exchange your flesh turned soft and sloughed off in places making you look like old movie zombies. The process also tended to cause your brain to deteriorate because, go figure, that too was made of flesh. If you were lucky you'd go feral the moment you turned ghoul and wouldn't slowly watch your rationality fade away until you were little more than a crazed animal that needed to be put down.-
There were plenty of ghouls that didn't go feral though and were the same as normal people in every way except they looked like zombies and were effectively unaging. There were a good amount of ghouls who were around before the great war as a result and had to reach this two hundred years later wasteland world the old fashioned way, by living through it. For these ones though the scraps they wore and the animalistic movements along with the frequent twitching marked them as feral ghouls.
Killing them was a mercy.