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And with that, Madison Li was left standing among the disassembled limbs of Liberty Prime, the echoes of the Brotherhood's machines whirring around her like distant thunder. She closed her eyes for a moment, just long enough to remember what had once been a dream — and what now had to become redemption.
Far below the cracked streets of the Commonwealth, buried in marble-white serenity and the ever-sterile glow of clinical lighting, the Institute pulsed on as if untouched by the chaos above. But this morning, the silence in the executive chamber was anything but peaceful.
The circular room was composed of sleek surfaces and smooth lines, its design reflecting the Institute's dogma of control through precision. In the center stood the round table, polished and ringed by reclining chairs occupied by some of the most brilliant minds still living. Though most wore the traditional white coats of senior staff, there was a distinctly uneven air among them — not just in posture or tone, but in eyes, voices, and tightly pressed lips.
At the head of the table stood Shaun — not the boy from the past, but the man, the Director, Father — his features calm, his bearing resolute. Yet beneath his composed demeanor, something dark threaded through his gaze: disappointment, calculation, and something harder to read — perhaps a trace of betrayal.
He pressed a button on the embedded console before him. The door slid open with a sigh, and Nora walked in.
She carried herself with rigid composure, dressed in her white synth-division uniform, eyes scanning the table as she stepped to her assigned seat. Ayo glanced up briefly, offering no more than a nod. Clayton Holdren, Director of Bioscience, folded his hands and stared at the space between them, avoiding both Nora and Shaun. The other directors murmured soft greetings or remained silent.
Shaun didn't waste time.
"Let's begin," he said, his voice low but authoritative.
The table lit with projected data: schematics, telemetry records, surveillance snapshots from surface recon drones — and, most striking of all, a vertibird feed with a freeze-frame of Madison Li stepping out onto the runway at Boston Airport, flanked by Brotherhood soldiers.
"Dr. Madison Li," Shaun continued, looking from one face to the next. "Has defected to the Brotherhood of Steel."
A sharp breath caught in someone's throat — likely Dr. Zimmer — but no one interrupted. Shaun let the statement hang in the air, weighted like a verdict.
"She was last seen in Lab Sector Three twenty-seven hours ago. According to standard procedure, we checked the teleportation logs. Dr. Ayo?"
Justin Ayo, ever the picture of precision and quiet irritation, leaned forward, tapping a control on his datapad.
"I ran a full diagnostic sweep," he said. "Every teleportation event from the Institute in the last seventy-two hours was accounted for. There is no record of Madison Li leaving. No exit authorization, no signal trace, no anomaly in the emitter log."
Shaun raised an eyebrow. "So she vanished."
Ayo's jaw tightened. "If she used an Institute relay, it was either wiped before my sweep or… bypassed entirely. And only a handful of people even understand how to manipulate the relay system at that level."
He paused meaningfully, eyes sweeping toward Nora — not accusatory, but probing.
Nora met his gaze without flinching. "I understand what you're implying," she said calmly, "but I didn't help her escape."
"Then who did?" Dr. Holdren asked, finally breaking his silence. "This isn't just a leak — it's a structural failure. Madison Li doesn't get out without inside help."
"There's another possibility," said Allie Filmore from the robotics division. Her voice was cool, analytical. "She's had surface access for months. All it would've taken was one field assignment, one maintenance rotation at a relay relay tower… She could've seeded a remote access protocol."
"But she'd need time," Ayo insisted. "And oversight. She's brilliant, but the Institute's systems are not child's play. This was premeditated — carefully done."
Nora leaned forward slightly, her voice quieter but firm. "What if she didn't wipe the logs? What if someone else did — after the fact?"
A few heads turned. Zimmer frowned, his age-lined face betraying suspicion. "Are you suggesting infiltration?"
"I'm suggesting," Nora replied, "that Madison Li's defection may not have been her only objective. If the Brotherhood has Prime… they needed her to reactivate it. But how they got to her — and how they got her out — that's the question we need to focus on now. Not blame."
Shaun interjected before the conversation could derail.
"I agree. This isn't about political embarrassment or personal betrayal," he said, though his eyes sharpened at those last words. "This is about the future of the Commonwealth. Liberty Prime was incomplete when we lost track of it, but if Madison can reconstruct its command systems, we may be facing the most powerful pre-war war machine since the Great War. In Brotherhood hands."
He looked again to Ayo. "I want real-time surveillance prioritized on the airport and any activity around Prime's known components. Use relays, use synth scouts — I don't care. Just get me something."
Ayo gave a tight nod.
"Zimmer," Shaun continued, "review our internal security protocols. If someone inside helped her — and we have no guarantee they didn't — I want to know who. Cross-reference the movement logs for the last forty-eight hours. Anyone with anomalous access, anyone in her vicinity. Flag everything."
Zimmer gave a grunt of affirmation, already tapping furiously into his console.
Shaun's gaze turned to Nora last. There was a subtle flicker in his eyes, a shift from command to something more personal. "And you, Nora… I want you to assist me directly in this matter. You know the Brotherhood better than most. If there's any chance you can identify who she's working with… we'll need that insight."
Nora nodded slowly. "You'll have it."
But even as she said the words, a cold knot was forming in her gut.
She knew what Shaun was really asking. He trusted her — or perhaps wanted to trust her — but his eyes betrayed the deeper truth: that trust was conditional. Fragile. And rapidly wearing thin.
Shaun touched another command on the interface, and the projection on the table shifted again: Liberty Prime's skeletal frame as seen from Brotherhood drone footage, its head illuminated under a scaffolding floodlight. A timestamp flickered in the corner — only six hours ago.
"According to this," Shaun said grimly, "they've already begun partial assembly. If they complete the neural interface, they could have it operational within weeks. And we both know they won't hesitate to turn it against us."
Nora looked at the image, lips tight. "And what happens when they march it to our front door?"
Shaun answered without hesitation. "Then we neutralize it. Whatever it takes."
The room fell silent. Not out of disagreement — but out of the dawning awareness of what was coming.
War.
Not the cold kind of before, fought in secret tunnels and hidden labs, but the old kind. The kind with fire, with machines the size of houses, with death raining from the sky.
Then Dr. Ayo spoke again, breaking the silence with words sharp enough to cut through the tension like a scalpel.
"What about the Minutemen?" he asked, voice taut with restrained concern. "Even though we attacked Greenetech — this time under your direct order," he added, glancing at Shaun, "we still failed. If the Brotherhood joins the war and forms an alliance with the Minutemen… it'll be over for us soon."
The room didn't explode — it imploded.
The unspoken reality behind Ayo's words pressed down on them like weighty dust from a crumbling ceiling. No one immediately responded. Not because it wasn't true, but because it was. Every person in the room, for all their genius and power, had been dancing around this fact for days. Ayo had simply voiced what the rest didn't dare say aloud.
Shaun's face didn't flinch, but his fingers drummed slowly on the glass-topped table. A quiet tic. A signal that his mind was racing beneath the placid surface.
Holdren shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "The Minutemen were a disorganized rabble just a months ago. Who even leads them now? That man, Preston Garvey?"
"Not anymore," Ayo said, and now his tone took on a hint of wariness. "The man leading them now is more than a symbol. He's a strategist. They've taken back half of downtown Boston from raiders, fortified settlements across the region, take back the Castle, take back Quincy, destroying the Gunners, and reestablished defensive networks that rival pre-war planning. Greenetech was a fortress by the time we moved in. Intel said eighty, maybe hundreds defenders. We lost one hundred synths to nearly two hundred coordinated fighters."
Zimmer made a scoffing noise. "They're farmers with pipe rifles. No discipline."
Nora glanced at Ayo, her expression unreadable. She knew who he was talking about. Sico. A name she hadn't spoken aloud in weeks, but one that had stayed with her like a song you couldn't forget. That man had become the center of a movement — and it terrified the Institute, even if they weren't yet ready to admit it.
"You're wrong," she said, her voice low. "They're not farmers anymore."
That made the room pause again.
Zimmer narrowed his eyes. "You've spent time topside, but don't pretend they're more than they are."
"They're more than you think," Nora said, still calm but firmer now. "And if the Brotherhood links up with them — if they combine technology and numbers — we won't have the advantage anymore. We'll be outflanked, outnumbered, and possibly outgunned."
"But the Minutemen don't like the Brotherhood," Holdren said. "They've clashed over settlements, haven't they?"
"They have," Nora agreed. "But that's before. Before Prime. Before Li. If the Brotherhood offers them protection from synth incursions, if they give the Minutemen access to armor, weapons, tech they've never even dreamed of…"
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to.
Shaun looked at her, eyes narrowing slightly.
"You've seen this coming," he said. Not a question. An observation.
Nora didn't blink. "I've seen the possibility."
"And you didn't warn us sooner?"
"I did," she replied. "I gave tactical reports, filed threat assessments. I said we should monitor Sanctuary and the Castle more closely. They were dismissed."
Zimmer muttered something under his breath. Probably about traitors. Ayo didn't look at her — his attention was back on his datapad, eyes flicking across cascading data streams. Filmore just studied Nora in silence.
Shaun slowly rose from his seat, turning to face the projection still hovering over the table — Liberty Prime's frame suspended in steel scaffolding. The glow from the hologram lit the underside of his jaw, casting a strange shimmer across his otherwise impassive face.
"We assumed this war would be fought in shadows," he said softly. "That the surface would remain divided. Distracted. That the Brotherhood would stay isolated at the airport, and the Minutemen fragmented in their homesteads. But now…"
He turned to face the table again.
"Now we're looking at a potential unification. One driven by fear — of us. One enabled by our own inability to fracture our enemies when we had the chance."
Ayo leaned forward. "Then we must consider drastic action."
Zimmer's eyes lit up with something too eager. "Preemptive strike?"
"Too late for that," Ayo snapped. "They've already fortified. Any direct assault now would cost us even more."
Filmore finally spoke. "So we subvert instead. Divide them again. Sow discord between the Brotherhood and the Minutemen before this alliance cements. They've never been friends. We can exploit that."
Shaun nodded slightly. "It's a start. But it won't be enough."
He looked to Nora again.
"You know this man — the one leading the Minutemen now. You fought with him, didn't you? Sico."
Nora felt something twist inside her at the sound of his name.
"I did."
"Then you'll go topside," Shaun said. "Meet with our field operatives. You'll find the cracks in this alliance. And if they don't exist, you'll create them."
It felt like a trap. Like a test.
"And if I can't?" she asked.
Shaun looked her dead in the eye.
"Then we prepare for war."
The meeting concluded not long after, each director leaving the room with urgent assignments. But Nora lingered. Shaun stood alone at the center of the room now, arms crossed behind his back, staring at the flickering hologram of Liberty Prime.
She approached slowly, footsteps soft on the polished floor.
"You don't trust me," she said.
Shaun didn't turn. "I trust you more than most. But that's not saying much anymore."
There was silence between them — not awkward, but heavy. She stared at the same hologram, trying to find comfort in its static flicker and blue hue. None came.
"I never expected it to come to this," she said quietly. "To have to choose again."
Shaun finally turned, studying her closely. "Then don't."
She looked at him.
"You don't have to choose sides," he said. "You just have to choose survival. Ours. The Institute's. The future."
She nodded slowly. "I'll do what you ask."
But as she walked away, her thoughts raced. She could feel the tightening pressure of fault lines beneath the surface of every conversation, every command, every silent exchange. She wasn't sure how much longer she could walk that line — between obedience and conscience. Between Shaun and Sico. Between war and peace.
By evening, she was in the relay chamber, already prepped for field deployment.
As the technicians made final calibrations to the emitter sequence, she pulled on her coat, checked the holotags inside her sleeve — and thought about Greenetech. About the graves MacCready dug. About the twenty synths she knew by name who never came back. About how Sico had been there, not just as a fighter but as a leader. And how the Institute still underestimated him.
The pad lit beneath her feet.
"Coordinates locked," said the technician. "You're clear to go."
The light enveloped her.
She materialized in the ruins of Back Bay — the old husk of Boston still silent and eerie in the evening twilight. Wind whispered between crumbling brownstones, and the faint scent of smoke lingered in the air.
________________________________________________
• Name: Sico
• Stats :
S: 8,44
P: 7,44
E: 8,44
C: 8,44
I: 9,44
A: 7,45
L: 7
• Skills: advance Mechanic, Science, and Shooting skills, intermediate Medical, Hand to Hand Combat, Lockpicking, Hacking, Persuasion, and Drawing Skills
• Inventory: 53.280 caps, 10mm Pistol, 1500 10mm rounds, 22 mole rats meat, 17 mole rats teeth, 1 fragmentation grenade, 6 stimpak, 1 rad x, 6 fusion core, computer blueprint, modern TV blueprint, camera recorder blueprint, 1 set of combat armor, Automatic Assault Rifle, 1.500 5.56mm rounds, power armor T51 blueprint, Electric Motorcycle blueprint, T-45 power armor, Minigun, 1.000 5mm rounds, Cryolator, 200 cryo cell, Machine Gun Turret Mk1 blueprint, electric car blueprint, Kellogg gun, Righteous Authority, Ashmaker, Furious Power Fist, Full set combat armor blueprint, M240 7.62mm machine guns blueprint, Automatic Assault Rifle blueprint, and Humvee blueprint.
• Active Quest:-