The others seemed to understand where I was coming from, even if they didn't necessarily agree with me. I had been hesitant to discuss creating a teleporter since I wasn't sure I would get access to it, so I didn't want to start bragging about it. At the very least, Jackie seemed to believe me when I said I wasn't abandoning the town or Night City, even if I was putting the vault before a few things.

  "Samwise, Noah, the bunker is going to be a major priority. I still need to be able to do my work, but once the bio lab is done, I want at least fifty percent of our production capabilities focused on that during the day and a hundred during the night," I explained. "I want the two of you working out what we need to start a solid base operations there and getting it ready. Samwise, work on finding the perfect spot for us. Until we do, we can build up the equipment that we will need."

  "What projects are you canceling?" Samwise asked.

  "As of right now, the fake borg plan is kaput. It was already more trouble than it was worth, but with my workshop being moved to my bunker, the nomads wouldn't have anything to stick their noses in, so I don't need anyone watching over them," I explained. "Other than that, not much is being canceled, but plenty is being moved around. The plans for more buildings, apartments, and the like are still on, just further down the road. As I said, a secure vault is our first big step to really being able to affect the world.

  We talked for a while longer, and by the time we went our separate ways, Kaytlyn, Riggs, and Jackie seemed to understand me a bit better. All though, I could tell that Jackie was still clearly worried about what moving to a bunker further away from the city would do to the team. I assured him I was with him to the end, no matter where I went, which seemed to satisfy him.

  With the little update slash meeting over, I headed back to the garage. It was seven thirty, which meant I had some time to work with, but not enough to tackle something too massive. That was, of course, after I finished putting together the particle bore, which was now ready to assemble.

  "Alright, Sam, how about we give the power armor a shot?" I asked, sitting down and spinning around in my chair. "I'll probably end up making a few different sets to get everything that I want, but I can at least make one tonight."

  "Very well," He responded. "Noah and I will be conversing about possible locations and what we may need for a base of operations. I will send a few MRVNs to assist you."

  "Sure, buddy, thank you for your hard work," I said, giving him a short wave as he left to find Noah.

  Once the MRVNs arrived, we started putting together the particle bore. The heart of the device was the accelerator core, which created the tangles of exotic particles, split them, and fired them down the dual tubes, where the TV-esque device at the end would adjust the final shot. Beyond that, the rest of the device consisted of control mechanisms and safety systems, as well as thick insulating barriers around most of the essential parts. The creation of the exotic tangle did generate some unsavory things, but the insulation was actually in place to isolate the sensitive acceleration process. Without it, the particle tangle could unravel due to outside influence, causing a whole heap of problems.

  When the mining tool was finally finished, I paused as the flow of information started. It was a relatively interesting chunk of knowledge concerning exotic particles, though a lot of it felt theoretical. In true Fallout universe fashion, the people who created the particle bore didn't quite know how the particles worked, or at least they didn't when they built the bore. Instead, they saw what it could do, did a few tests to make sure it wasn't spectacularly dangerous and then turned it into a way to turn bedrock into gravel.

  It was a classic case of Fallout SCIENCE!, and if I couldn't tell that this device was used on a daily basis by Vault-Tec workers, I would be a lot more hesitant to use it.

  When we were done with the particle bore, I reclaimed my seat, tapping my computer awake. I quickly started up my design software before diving back into my mind to examine the power armor designs I had access to. Even if it may not be a groundbreaking source of new tech, I was eager to get started on the power armor. The idea of walking around in Fallout-style power armor was a dream my younger self would have been very jealous to hear that I was going to achieve.

  The first I had access to was the, and it was almost completely revealed to me. I understood all of the tech in the basic, unmodified model, as none of it was groundbreaking. The most technologically advanced part was its power systems, and by now, I probably knew more about the Fallout world's power tech than anyone who actually lived in that universe.

  The T-45 was unique among power armor developed by the US in conjunction with because the first models were not built around power armor frames. Instead, the entire suit was divided into limbs and torso sections, which were put on one at a time and locked together around a recon suit, which the user would wear. This made it harder to repair, slower to put on, difficult to clean and maintain, and difficult to improve through multiple iterations. That's why, in later T-45 models, and for all proceeding models, power armor was set on top of the power armor frame. The frame provided strength and power, while the armor system around it provided protection and other technological advantages.

  Not only did the power armor frames make it easier to replace parts, but it also made it easier to maintain, clean, and upgrade individual pieces. The armor platting became almost replaceable parts, switched out when damaged rather than repaired on the spot.

  Since the T-45 was basically a prototype for the proper power armor, and I had access to the next version, the, I decided to skip it entirely. Instead, I began working on the power armor frame for the T-51, eagerly copying down the design, doing my best to focus and not start redesigning it using better technology already.

  The power armor frame worked through a combination of hydraulics and servomotors. These would take orders from pressure sensors built in all over the frame interior, which would react to the pilot's movements as they shifted around inside the frame. The whole system actually reminded me of how the original version of the Warden armor worked from the XCOM tech tree, which had the same if significantly reduced issue of being on the slow and ponderous side.

  It was a bit confusing, because I knew that Fallout, hypothetically, had the tech to directly link someone's nervous system to technology. And yet, they still went with the clearly inferior method of control. While this style of power armor would never be what I would consider agile, getting rid of the pressure sensor system would be a top priority once I started tinkering with the design. I would have to play around with the system to find out if there was a reason for the inferior method that I wasn't seeing.

  I spent an hour and some change getting the frame design onto the computer, before letting the MRVNs get everything printed out. While they were working, I got to work on the armored parts, starting with the helmet and working my way down. I was halfway through the chest plate when the parts were ready, and we started to assemble the frame.

  After getting a good chunk of the frame assembled, we eventually moved it to the drone station, where we hoisted it into the air by chains. When we were finished, we carefully let it back down and confirmed it was stable before I grabbed the fusion core I had made not too long ago.

  After taking a minute to confirm the process,, locking it in place with a slight twist of the core. When it was firmly locked in place, I could finally feel the download of information finally flowing into my brain. I now understood a great deal about why certain servomotors were set at certain angles and why specific parts were used in particular sections of the armor rather than just using a more uniform construction method.

  Once the short download was completed, I reached out and gripped the wheel along the back, turning it until I could feel it clunking into an active state. With a hiss and a series of clicks, the power armor frame opened, revealing the interior space.

  "Well... in for a penny, in for a pound," I muttered before climbing inside, gripping the preset handholds to pull myself in.

  Once I was in position, I activated the switch that I knew closed the frame up, the back structure swinging down and locking me into place. I could feel the legs and arms doing the same. For a moment, I was stuck, unable to move or shift. Logically, I knew that the suit was going through its final boot-up and that systems were coming online. The sensors wouldn't respond until everything was locked in place and the suit was ready to be moved. Despite knowing all of that, and despite my head being completely uncovered, even if it was just for a split second or two, it was still unnerving to be completely sealed inside, unable to move at all.

  "Make a note, emergency bolt releases, just in case the system has a catastrophic failure," I muttered to myself, looking down at the robust metal frame surrounding my body. "Being sealed inside one of these would be horrifying."

  Finally, the systems engaged, and I was free, the sensors reading my movements properly so that when my limbs moved, the heavy metal limbs moved with them. I resisted the urge to jump around or immediately test my flexibility. Instead, I calmly stood up straight, slowly flexing my body to find my range of motion.

  The armor was easier to move than I thought, though it was clearly slow to respond, the movement and pressure sensors reacting split seconds after my limps moved against them. It was enough to be noticeable, but it was also small enough that, if you stopped paying attention and got used to it, it wouldn't hold you back much. Of course, this was only the frame, who knew how much input lag I would get with several hundred pounds of metal and polymer.

  "How does it feel?"

  I turned my head to see Riggs, still in his armor, walking closer as I stepped slowly out of the garage.

  "Clunky, slow, heavy," I commented. "But it's still way better than it has any right to be. And this is only the first iteration of this frame. There are like five more in the base tree and like dozens of iterations around those."

  Unlike the video game, which only had one model of power armor frame, there were actually several different versions of the supportive system used throughout Fallout's history. Most of the differences in strength and power came directly from advancements in the frame itself. Luckily, every progressive version was backward compatible, meaning that even the frame designed to accompany the would fit T-51 armor on it.

  I spent a few minutes messing around with the frame before activating the release and climbing out. I then helped Riggs resize the internals a bit so he would fit inside, the taller, bulkier AI sliding into the frame once he stripped down out of his armor. Once everything was locked in place, he started going through the same sort of stretches and flexes I did just moments before to test the armor.

  "It does feel remarkably similar to my warden armor," He agreed after a few minutes. "Less responsive, but also more sturdy. The warden armor always makes me feel as if I could break it if I pushed too hard."

  "Even the improved version we made for you?" I asked curiously. "I thought we did pretty well with that."

  "You did, and you're right, the second version that was less of a problem," He admitted. "But this feels like heavy armor, while the warden feels like light armor."

  "I think your perceptions might be a bit skewed by what you're used to wearing," I pointed out with a snort. "But I get what you mean. All right, hop out before you drain the fusion battery. I don't want to make another of those if I can help with it."

  As Riggs more or less stepped out of the frame and began the much more protracted process of putting his usual armor on, I realized there was another pretty big advantage with the power armor. It took a few seconds to get in and out, meaning that it was completely viable to do during a fight, especially since I was sure I could cut that time down considerably.

  For a moment, I envisioned soldiers slamming down into a combat zone and unloading with heavy weapons. Then, once their weapons were empty or the obvious targets were gone, they would pop out the back of their armor, grab their weapons from a pack, and start cleaning up stragglers or runners. A group could simultaneously be the heavy hitters and their agile backup as long as they could find some cover for a few seconds.

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  Filing the idea away for potential future use, I climbed back into my chair and got back to work with the rest of the T-51 plating and armor. Out of everything, the helmet and the boots took the longest, but I managed to finish by ten thirty, and we finished putting it together and mounting it on the frame an hour later.

  "Fucking hell…"

  I said, walking around the hung-up behemoth of steel, unique alloys, and durable tech. The style and shape were familiar, since through the many hours I spent playing various Fallout games, armor like this was usually a prized piece of my collection.

  Despite that sense of distant familiarity, it was impossible not to feel how intimidating the armor was. It dwarfed all members of the group, and the thick plating screamed durability that could outlast just about every borg on the planet.

  "It makes an impression," Riggs admitted, standing behind me as we admired the final product. "You gonna try it out?"

  "No, I just need to turn it on,"

  I re-inserted the fusion core, locking it in and finally getting a suffusion of knowledge. I wasn't all that surprised that, due to its simple nature, the knowledge I gained was pretty widespread, including things like several upgrades for the armor, a few dozen modules for the helmet, and other parts. It was some solid information and a deeper understanding of how the methodology behind the power armor system worked, but ultimately nothing major.

  "Alright, with that, I am officially done for the night," I said, brushing myself off a bit and standing up straight. "If you really wanna play around with it some, ask Samwise if he could replace the fusion core with an Elerium node. Shouldn't be too hard."

  Riggs nodded, and I whistled to Duke, who came running from outside and followed me back to my trailer. I spent some time unwinding in a hot shower before crawling into bed and getting some much-needed sleep.

  I woke up the next morning refreshed and ready to get back to work, a full night's rest under my belt. It was a bit later in the morning than I would have liked, but by and large, that was fine. With my knowledge of bunker and vault building secure, it was time to start digging into the higher-end branches, looking for the single branch that would eventually lead me to teleportation. There was a solid chance I would end up wasting some time, but the ability to teleport in a world where No one else could would be so fucking broken that I would an idiot not to push hard to unlock it, even if it took me the rest of the week.

  Unfortunately, while I knew what I wanted, I had no idea how I would go about getting it done. My best bet, at least until I picked up a trail, was to chase down any exotic energy devices that I could find in the tech trees, building them so that I could unlock more, and hopefully, after repeating that process for a bit, finally reveal the proper path or maybe even reveal the tech itself.

  Thankfully, it seemed that working with the particle bore had helped, revealing several possible exotic energy options to toy with.

  The first option I selected was the Fallout universes shield or barrier tech. It showed up in quite a few different places along the tech tree, and while all of them more or less functioned on the same principle, there were some minor differences between them. Rather than tackle all of them, I decided to go with the most advanced version I could find, the one developed by the Institute. They took designs from the old world, which were developed by Big MT for a variety of uses, and improved upon them. This was very different from what the enclave had achieved, which was an inferior version of the pre-war options. This was, as far as I could tell, because they were using patchwork designs and improvised solutions to missing design plans.

  The force fields were technically called photonic resonance barriers, and they were remarkably similar to the only other barrier tech I had learned so far, the particle shields from Titanfall. Like the Titanfall shields, it used an energy field to force light to release its energy as it passed through, creating the tactile illusion of a solid barrier. On the one hand, it was absolutely inferior to the clean, crisp shields that Titanfall had. However, on the other, it used a combination of electromagnetism and advanced particle physics to create the necessary energy field that interacted with light. This meant that the Fallout version didn't require a back-boxed space crystal that originated in a different universe, while the Titanfall version did.

  Unfortunately, the Fallout version also had an extreme weakness for electromagnetic pulse weapons, which interacted with the electromagnetic portion of the field creation, shutting it down with one or two shots as long as they were comparable to the amount of power being poured into the barrier. Both the pulse gun designed by the US military and stored in Vault 34 and the one designed by Big Mountain could do this.

  Once I put together a small field projector, gave it a quick test, and sat through the information download, I was happy to see a few more spots light up, including one further up a branch I was realizing was part of a Big MT grouping.

  The from the was developed in the Big MT and was the next step in the progression of the photonic resonance barriers. The holograms, which were not technically holograms, were essentially complicated barrier systems projected at a significant distance rather than only a few inches away from the projector.

  It was an impressive system, for sure, but it was not exactly what the game portrayed it to be. Whether it was a lie fabricated by, or just another variation between the game and "reality," the hard light holograms were not unkillable or unstoppable. First off, they required multiple projectors for each hologram, meaning there was a limit to how many a system could create at once. On top of that, the projectors themselves remained a weak point. If they were damaged or obstructed by anything thicker than a robust piece of cardboard too close to the projector, the hologram would fizzle out.

  On top of that, the holograms retained their weakness to EMP pulse weapons. In fact, due to the complexity of their fields, they were actually more sensitive. They could also just simply be overloaded with sufficient force, which was the most significant deviation from their in-game counterparts. It was hard to do with handheld weapons, but with enough firepower, you could punch through the barrier, usually causing feedback that would damage the projector. On top of that, the strength of the barrier did not increase with size, so a four-inch projection would take the same amount of abuse as a four-story one.

  Their reliance on electromagnetic field projection also meant they were absolutely useless in many working roles since they needed to be kept away from anything sensitive to magnetic fields.

  Still, despite all those weaknesses, they would make incredible stealthy security. Alone, once people figured out their trick, they would probably become next to useless, but if combined with other types of security, their weakness could probably be mitigated.

  Once I completed a couple of projectors and finished programming the control systems, I turned the system on to project a simple spinning cube. While the electromagnetic field the "hologram" put off made it difficult to work with in some scenarios, it was impossible to deny that having a way to project solid surfaces on command was something that could absolutely come in handy. Even more interesting, as the Inspired Inventor was done downloading the extra info to my brain, Samwise made an excellent point.

  "Combining this technology with the version from Titanfall could have interesting results," He pointed out, looking at the designs curiously. "While it would rely on a black boxed material, the hologram would also be immune to EMP pulse weapons since the Titanfall version does not use electromagnetic fields."

  "That… is a solid idea," I admitted, nodding my head. "If you have some free time, feel free to investigate it if you'd like. Our main focus is the bunker and related projects, but that doesn't mean you can't take any time for other things."

  Samwise nodded, starting to take down the projectors, which we had stuck temporarily to the walls of the garage. I was tempted to have him leave them in place for now, but with the way that the "hologram" had pulled a chunk of steel off Samwise's workstation with its electromagnetic field, it was better to move out. Samwise might be protected from that to a degree, but plenty of our projects might not be as hardy.

  With the holograms done, it was time to look through what sort of information and tech we had unlocked. It seems like they were experimenting on how to make mounted shields for tanks and even power armor, but they were having issues with the hologram programing keeping up with fast-moving tanks, never mind the ever-active soldier inside power armor.

  "Teleportation, teleportation, where are you?" I mumbled to myself, searching through the tech tree. "Alright, time to pick something else…"

  For the next eight hours, I bounced around the tech tree, building anything I thought would advance my understanding of exotic energies and SCIENCE! that eventually led to either Big MT or the Institute's teleportation system. I would be ecstatic to have either of them, though if I got the Big MT one first, I would continue to look for the Institutes since it was superior in some ways and I wanted to know as much about the tech as possible.

  Seeing the chance to kill two birds with one stone, I designed and put together a handful of random energy weapons, both, and, before moving on to a,, and. At this point, building things of that size was easy, and I pumped out fifteen weapons in about four and a half hours. By the end of it, I had the plans for most of the energy weapons from the Fallout universe in my head, so it was time to move on. I would leave the study and analysis of how effective they were compared to what I already had access to for later.

  After finishing with energy weapons, I bounced around building some high-tech lab equipment with various uses, including a miniature particle bombardment chamber, which was designed to accelerate various exotic particles and slam them into basically whatever you wanted to observe the effects. It was definitely something that existed to test and run experiments with, and completing it unlocked a whole lot of information about the particles it could work with.

  Finally, after spending almost the entire day messing around with exotic energies and dangerous equipment, I finally got the first hint of teleportation. It was not the final device but rather a proof of concept, consisting of two sealed boxes that were foot wide and just about as tall. They were connected by a thick cable and powered by a specially designed fusion generator, which fed into a custom capacitor bank. I could barely see the outline of this device, and it was the first of its own branch with several items on it.

  The problem was that I could feel that the machine required a specific exotic ingredient, which I would need to create on my own. Thankfully, finding my first real lead on teleportation had swept away any fatigue I had started to feel, replacing it with an eager, excited energy that I had to take several deep breaths to keep from becoming manic. I quickly got to work building the Quantum Particle Entangler, which was a machine that essentially took either a pair or multiple photons and linked them together inexorably on a quantum level.

  They did this by slamming them into each other as an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, which was counterintuitive since the photons are light, so the entangler was actually slowing down photons. This required building another particle manipulator, which was made easier, thankfully, by the parts of the one I had finished making earlier.

  When the QPE was done, we hit another roadblock, this one forcing me to call it a night and pick up where I left off the following day. While the QPE was relatively safe and easy to use, it also took an incredibly long time to complete its primary task, namely four hours per paired photon.

  So, despite me being practically wired with excitement, I went to bed relatively early, requiring a sleep aid from Frank in order to have any chance at all of actually getting any shut-eye. When I woke up the next morning, barring any issues, Samwise would have run the QPE at least once

  Yeah, a sleeping aid was absolutely necessary.