Fire and brimstone. Fire and brimstone and flaming swords. Such was the life of the Forged. Psyk, born the bastard son of a man who had once been a lieutenant to the raiders’ leader, seemed cursed even before life by his status, and was born a runt. He was unliked and unloved, or if not one of those two, unknown. He slinked around unseen for most of his childhood, often to avoid the experiments he was put under.
The Forged were enthusiasts of many things--death, sacrifice--but most of all, branding. Their obsession with fire did not end with their weaponry, or the braziers of oil flame that polluted the air and the youth. However, many of their techniques were dangerous, and so even the brave fighters of the group were unwilling to be put under the hot iron without a test. Such was the usage of Psyk’s body.
The brandings were many, though not all at once, and Psyk was outfitted with the experimental adornments of a decade of cruelty. They were numerous but all different--letters and numbers with meanings unknown to the poor boy. At one point they had tested a series of hot letters, and had attempted to spell F-O-R-G-E-D on his back. They only realized the small size of his back halfway through their searing, and so he was left with a F-O-R embossed on his skin.
“For what?” some of the raiders had joked.
“For shit like this,” the branding artist laughed back.
The Forged, with their vast array of fire-based weaponry, were not content to leave them idle. So they took to war often. However, the Forged were not particularly good at war, despite their wide array of molotovs and shishkebabs, and when they began to fight the Nomads, they lost handily.
The Nomads were, as their name expressed, roaming raiders. Unlike nomads of old, they followed a different sort of herd, replacing herds of buffalo or other animals with unrazed lands. They carved a path of pillagery through the wasteland, from New Hampshire to where they came then, Boston.
There had been rumors of such men coming, savage men unfit for even the roughest raider camp. They destroyed the land they passed through, leaving little or nothing alive, and they had set their sights on the territory of the Forged.
Psyk had lived most of his memorable life at war with these nomads, who had ironically settled down in order to protect their nomadic ways. They warred in a different way from the Brotherhood to the south, or the civilizations of the past from which they drew their inspiration. Instead of assaults or plans, each battle was generally led by whoever had roused the most men, or had had the most fervent speech. Such battles were inconclusive, with both sides so blinded by feverish fanaticism that their weapons proved inaccurate.
Eventually they reached a peace, if only because, during their battles, both sides had a penchant for taking the other’s men prisoner. And with small wars like theirs, each raider was a recognizable percentage of the force, a force that would be needed for future raids.
But when the Nomad Khan revealed the number of prisoners he held--more than the Forged kept in their torture chambers--there was a problem. The Forged had a solution...they would send some of their less desirable members along. And so Psyk was shipped away, along with those others who had been marked as outcasts in the flaming society.
***
Life with the Nomads was short--they went back to war. After some time roaming the regions north of Boston, the leader had to return. There simply was not enough land left to roam! He had exclaimed in a fervent speech. Even if there had been any place unpicked beside the heart of the Commonwealth, revenge was in the air.
But several years away from the area had taken its toll on the memorized maps of the Khan, and they had lost the location of the Forged base, and so their revenge would have to be directed elsewhere.
After a short period of wandering, they found exactly the kind of place they had been looking for. It was an apartment block, several stories and painted with what would have been a hideously bright yellow before the war, but was now reduced to a beige, moss intertwined with cracks in the concrete facade.
Despite its aesthetic disaster state, it had been converted easily into a staging ground for the world’s undesirables--those that were labelled thieves or brigands even amongst their own circles of raiders and rapists. So Psyk was kneeled in the woods that partially encapsulated the fortress, aptly named Hard Rock Estates.
The night was dark, and had been for a few hours, when they were to begin the assault. Though the Nomads were sparsely armed, they were infamous for their hit and run tactics, which resembled less a Blitzkrieg than a wave of scrawny thieves swarming their enemy. That was, after all, the whole of the plan that the Khan had laid forth--charge--and Psyk, now considered old enough for battle, was on the front lines.
So the battle-cry was sounded, and the charge commenced. Staggering through the pitch-black thicket, the Nomads emerged into the clearing...and the spotlights lit upon them. They came from the top of the flat-roofed building, the rays of light descending like a solar flare upon the apartment-dwellers’ adversaries. And once they had lit upon the charging men, the rifles began to fire. Clods of dirt and grass were spit up by stray bullets that had hit the slight embankment. Men fell too, their groans unheard amongst the sounds of battle, but Psyk, perhaps due to his small size, made it safely to the wall of the building, catching his breath as he leaned against the slightly-exposed basement wall. His shotgun seemed heavy in his hands, and, had he not required it, he would’ve dropped it as soon as was possible, and never thought to pick it up. However, the sounds of the warzone in front of and around him assailed his ringing ears, and he decided to get inside. A basement window, thin, but large enough for him to enter, was locked beside him. He took up his shotgun, and, upon finding the old brass lock, hit it with the butt of his weapon. One, two, three shots against it with the tough wood of the stock, but to no avail.
He pounded at the lock one last time, perhaps more out of frustration than of effort. When he hit the lock, however, his unbalanced position caused his weapon to shift, and crack straight through the lower pane of the window. Surprised, Psyk reached around the broken glass and opened the window from the inside. He slipped in with little effort, apparently unnoticed.
The room was a supply closet, lightly stocked with first aid equipment. The sounds of battle were waning outside the window, but Psyk didn’t notice--he had achieved his goal. Looking around, he saw a few things that were desirable to him, mostly chems, and shoved them in his pockets. He reached for the door as the rifle fire died, and the snap of the high-power spotlights’ illumination ending. He was in the prototypical basement, with cold cinderblock walls encompassing storage bins and unused bathrooms. The rest of the area was uninteresting, so Psyk ascended the stairwell, his bare feet brushing against dust balls and rusty nails as he went up.
When he opened the door, he came into a common room of sorts. Couches, unkempt, lined the walls, and paintings of lighthouses and storms were hung crookedly on the walls. Despite the cozy surroundings, six men, beards rough and heads bruised, stood in a circle polishing their rifles. A creak on a floorboard, and they all turned around, gleaming weapons (in contrast to their hygiene) pointed at the kid’s face.
***
Life as a prisoner of the apartment-dwellers wasn’t that bad, Psyk supposed. There was food, as well as relative security, and the beating weren’t all too bad. The bruises also nicely covered his brandings, so that was an upside.
After discovering Psyk’s method of entry, and how he had avoided the bullet hail they had laid down on the charge, several members of the outcast raiders had thought that he could, potentially, make a worthwhile addition to their ranks.
When the tests had been run--rifle aptitude (they enjoyed rifles), endurance, and beatability, they found that he was most excellent at the last, and so he was confined to that position.
They quite enjoyed beating little Fire-Ass (he had made a slip, and revealed to them his original home), but after they were done, they could be quite friendly to him. This even extended to the position they offered him--Headquarters Guard--though the official reason was to “learn from real raiders” rather that “we like the little rat nearby”. Despite the liking they took to him, the feeling was not mutual, and the boy was so disenfranchised that he would dream everyday of his old home with the Forged, and the brandings on his back now seemed like love letters from a long-lost home. Such was the disillusion Psyk held.
So when he was guarding the front door to the Battle Room one day, and heard the plan, he came up with his own. It was evening, when less raiders roamed the halls, and so the leaders thought their planning largely in secret:
“Soft. Target,” one had said to his audience, “Who gives a shit about the wall? There’s tons’a gates an’ shit all up there, ya just hafta find ‘em.”
“Agreed,” said a darker voice, “Their guards have goddamn baseball pads on, for chrissake. We could smash ‘em in with their own bats.”
Though they never said it, Psyk knew what they spoke of. Some called it the Jewel, the Diamond, but in all official correspondences, it was named Diamond City. And it was the target of the well-armed raiders.
He knew what he needed to do, but he would have to leave quickly.
It was midnight when Psyk slipped from his bunk in the common area. Had he owned shoes, he would have donned them, but he instead slinked outside the door.
The spotlights were off, as they had been for some time, and the guards that patrolled the rooftop were unable to see the ground at all, blinded by the light of the lanterns that illuminated the roof. Psyk crouched his way down the slight hill, and, slipping under the newly-installed metal fence, escaped to the forest unseen.
***
He approached the checkpoint as openly as was possible, hands by his waist, away from his weapons, and sounded his approach with a shrill whistle. The guards at the scaffold tower raised their arms, but upon hearing what he said, lowered them. With the weapons pointed to his head, he calmly told them, in vague words, that there was a plot against them, and he would have to see the mayor.
The mayor, of course, would have none of it. There could never be a plot against Diamond City! Its allies too great and its walls too tall!--such were the words of the mayor, said hastily whilst he kicked the raider from his office. The mayor’s guards took Psyk by the arms and dragged him to the elevator. They threw him on it and turned back.
“Find your own way out,” they said.
When the elevator reached the ground floor, Psyk panicked, only then realizing his predicament. He was about to let all these people, the traders and innkeeps and children, die. Anxiety took over, and so when the steady hand of a guard touched the shaking raider’s shoulder, his instincts took over. Flipping around, he dropped to the ground, and, though he didn’t know how, managed to take a bite of the poor guard’s leg as he fell.
Through the haze of panic, Psyk could have sworn he saw a man in a thick black suit observe it all. Had he a hawk’s vision, he would have seen the name tag--Hi! It said...I’m Doctor Sookram!
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