Steel Rose, Welcome to the Capital Wasteland Options

[Silver]

Steel Rose

Tick. Wait... let the burning sensation fill your chest as your lungs ache for air. Tick. Steady, bring the lines of the crosshair down across thier chest. Tick. Hold perfectly still, and fire.

For that moment, the chatter of automatic weaponry, the crack of hunting rifles was silent, the thunderous report of a sniper rifle ringing in her ears, even as she brought her scope back down to see the raider raise his hands to the gaping wound in his ribs, dark arteriel blood bubbling onto his rough leather clothes. His knees gave out a moment later, leaving the mohawked bandit face down in his own blood. Another raider, running backwards and firing a ten millimeter pistol indescriminately tripped over the new cadaver, and Shadow promptly took his head off.

The heavy chop of blades echoed in the small valley as the first of three vertibirds came over the edge of the rocky cliffs. The whirr of it's gatling laser spurring up wasn't audible over the gunfire, but when the stiches of burning light etched the ground, the raiders scattered, a good few of them getting cut down, limbs tumbling into the dark recesses of the afternoon light. That left Shadow, and a few wasteland hunters, to face the Enclave soldiers that began to crop up over the enbankments.

The wastelanders scattered into the rocks, while Shadow who already had a vantage point that was quite like her namesake, only twisted around and fired a shot at the power-armoured soldiers who were skirmishing with the hunters, and winning. The Enclave troops were organized, trained, and armed with quality laser rifles, and they were trying to fight against them with hunting rifles, and a sniper. It really wasn't going to work out.

[Silver]

::Double, admittedly, but I decided that for an opening that was far too short. So! On to the development!

...

The hunters were dead. Shadow was hiding between two of the boulders, trying to edge away from the soldiers who were sliding down the hillside, combing the area, trying to find her. Two of them were armed with plasma rifles that gave off a sickly green glow, lighting up the face of thier helmets eerily, like a pair of hideous demons from some twisted fairy tale, and they were advancing straight twoard her, as she scrabbled at the rocks, trying to stay off the gravel that would make that fatal rattle. Even as quiet and invisible as she was, they seemed drawn to her like a lodestone to iron, when she slipped, her foot touching the dirt for a moment, and setting off a tiny avalanche of pebbles.

They drew nearer, more of the dark armoured figures drawing in close with them, the steady Thock-thock-thock of the vertibirds keeping pace with the beat of her heart, that was hammering furiously in her chest. The soft crunch of thier boots stopped, and one cried out in alarm, just before she was struck blind and deaf, tumbling down the hill to lie like a rag doll in a tiny polluted stream, floating along on her back with a feeling like her skin was being torn apart by thousands of little needles. A green glow lit the back of her eyelids, and she squinted, trying to see through the blurring that was burned to her retina. The world slowly regained focus, and the fuzzy grey blob resolved into one of the most symbolic shapes in the wasteland ; a Brotherhood of Steel helmet.

She looked at him for a moment in disbelief, as the Knight pushed her sniper to her chest, her arms moved up instictively to cradle it close, and he calmly slid another mininuke into the Fatman, and turned away. That's when she noticed the Pip Boy strapped to his forearm. "Your the Wanderer!" The heavy shoulders shrugged, and another miniature nuclear weapon went jetting up the side of the valley, and torn the end of a vertibird off as it tried to get away. The wanderer reloaded and fired again, and again, faster than what seemed humanly possible, and soon the clifftop was a smouldering edge, with the broken bodies of the helicopters lying like the ectoskeletons of insects in the radioactive fires. By the time her blindness was gone again from the immaculately bright blasts, he was gone.