Chapter 1: Chapter One: Meet The Ghoul
"Ah, aren't you a poor sod." A gravely voice echoed softly inside a dark tunnel. Ivan crouched down onto the balls of his feet as he inspected the person curled up inside a ball. A keen and whine came from the horribly mutated person, and upon closer inspection to the ball of flesh, Ivan deduced it was likely once a service man working on the tunnels before the bombs had fallen. That, and the worn uniform the feral ghoul wore.
Ivan raised his left arm and bared his Pip-Boy, navigating the menus with the analogue. He selected a journal and pen inside the inventory section of the personal computer. Both items flashed before the man, and he caught them with a practiced ease before they clattered to the floor.
Leaning over the withered ghoul, Ivan started to draw. His penmanship was steady, and he rolled up his sleeve to use his glowing arm to cast a dim blue light on the paper to illuminate his work. A few hours passed as he devoted his time to his artistic passions in capturing the horrors of this mutant world, like taking a picture of a newborn child, capturing every essence of the act of birth and rebirth.
Standing up and stretching his back for a moment, Ivan then pulled out his laser pistol from his holster at his waist and blasted a round in the creatures skull. The energized sound echoed throughout the tunnel and without a pause he continued on his way through the dilapidated subway system.
Every so often his Geiger Counter would tick up on his Pip-Boy, causing an insufferable racket in the tunnels. To which he quickly fixed by zeroing the measurement on the device, casually ignoring the fact that radiation levels down in the subway system of New York city was in the couple hundreds in certain areas.
Not that it bothered the Glowing One.
An hour passed of him walking the dark tunnels of the Subway, taking several turns before arriving at an underground terminal. The entrance to this terminal was blocked not only by several military vehicles, but also by a massive amount of rubble cast down onto the entrance way when one of the buildings collapsed during the initial blast so many years ago.
Ivan had found this place while exploring the tunnels of New York several years ago, and had quickly marked it as a wonderful place to set up a base, as it was secluded isolated, but also had plenty of equipment that the now exceedingly feral U.S Soldiers and construction workers that were offloading supreme amounts of nuclear waste into the abandoned tunnel weren't using anymore.
This included a number of weapons, a decent amount of ballistic weave and combat armor, and a cashe of Fusion Cores to power the portable Reactor that they were powering the drill bore with.
Why the U.S Army was doing this was completely beyond him, as in his looting he'd only found vague orders of disposing of various materials, all of which were Low and Medium Grade Radioactive waste usually disposed of in landfills. It wasn't likely they were just throwing the control rods down here, but were more disposing of items and materials that had been exposed to the radiation.
Ivan wrote it off as them trying to save costs or something similar, and simply counted himself lucky that he had a very secure and remote place to kick up his feat every once in a while. After several decades of being hopelessly homeless, this was a nice break.
Inside the terminal he'd made various constructs to assist him in his needs for an outpost. Notably was the removal and disposal of all the feral ghouls, which was easy as they failed to react to a fellow Ghoul, and he stealth killed them all. Glowing Ones might be shunned even by fellow Ferals, but Ivan was a unique one as he had the sole unexplainable ability to actually control the radiation his body gave off in the form of a toggable aura. That and being blue instead of green.
Disposing of them was simpler, just throwing them in the radioactive waste barrels that the army was using and tossing them all into where they were digging.
After that, he'd ventured into the Wastes, obtaining materials and goods to start up a decent workshop for him to operate in.
From his chemistry set made from lab equipment from various universities and schools, to his blacksmithing, gun smithing, and metallurgy setup that he klept from far-out garages and industrial areas. This base was a work in progress years into the making, and he'd not have it any other way.
Ivan moved to the security office he'd made to be his home, and started to undress. Tossing his ballistic weave reinforced lab coat onto a nearby hanger, before stripping down his Riot Gear to a clean white wife-beater and a pair of suspenders that hugged his well muscled form tightly. Despite being a ghoul and a glowing one at that, Ivan's physic was extremely refined. His mutated and ghoulish skin only brought out his extreme muscle definition, the fibers practically bleeding through his skin.
Hell, the ghoul would even say he'd look handsome, if it weren't for the fact that he was a Glowing One, had a pair of missing lips and a missing nose, that and his blue irradiated glow that was offset by his charcoal black skin meant he was a monster at the best of times better hidden by the concealment his Lab Coat and Riot Armor bought him.
'You win some, you lose some.'
Ivan fell back into a rolling chair as he looked over the various workbenches he had placed all over the terminal, before kicking off the smooth marble of the terminal and sped off towards his chem bench.
The ghoul inspected the various flasks and beakers, before cracking his neck and started getting to it.
From his inventory he unloaded a massive amount of materials. From Brahmin fertilizer, and more advanced synthetic proteins needed to produce quality versions of Jet, to the chemicals and metals needed to make Buffout, and the mutated hallucinogenic plants needed to grow organic Psycho.
From Hydra, Daddy-O, Mentats, Calmex, Rad-Away, Rad-X, Med-X, Fury, Daytripper, Sludgepacks, Fire Belly, Stim-Packs, and even Anti-Biotics, over the next thirty-three hours, Ivan started producing a truly insane amount of drugs. Like a machine, no, even beyond that, he moved through the tasks and procedures to manufacture these drugs, producing a truly insane amount of drugs with a quality that beggared belief.
Ivan stored the last shipment of drugs, fifty-eight Stim-Packs in a cooler, before wincing. "Ah, forgot to eat." Ivan groaned, stumbling over to his freezer and started to rifle through the storage of food inside. He found a few pieces of brahmin steak and a Deathclaw egg that he snatched and quickly started grilling up to make a mean meal to break his fast.
Ghouls didn't exactly need to eat all that much compared to their less-irradiated kin, which was great for survival, but despite being horribly mutated, ghouls were still human. It fucked with the mind not needing or even wanting to eat, as the stomach got confused why it wasn't being used and why it was even being used. Biology had a very strange minimalistic affect, in which when things weren't in use they started cutting back and atrophying.
Why have muscles when they aren't used, why produce a ton of stomach acid to digest food when they never eat?
Ivan ground some sea-salt over his eggs and steak, before grabbing some Tarberry Jam from his inventory and spread it on a piece of toast he grilled up. A piece of toast covered in jam, a thin cut of steak onto of said jam, before a sunny side egg was broken on top of the meat and toast. A crude Eggs-Benidict was created and the ghoul moaned grotesquely with his gravel-like voice when he bit into the meal.
"Fuck yeah, that's the stuff." Ivan mumbled, leaning back into his lawn chair, pulling out a still cool Nuka-Cola Quantum, a cigar, and took a shot of Jet to really kick back.
A quake shook the roof the subway system, not bothering Ivan as they were quite common what with the skeletal remains of New York collapsing every so often.
As Ivan kicked back, he started brewing distantly on how he'd gotten here, as...eighty? No, around ninety or so years ago and he'd just been another kid, another kid in another reality living his life.
A puff of smoke left the clasp of a pair of glowing blue teeth biting into his cigar; the bone the same shade of the drink he had by his side.
'I miss Earth, my Earth at least.' Ivan thought, thinking back to his family and life before he'd woken up in this hellhole of a world, alone and mutated with a secondary set of memories as a scientist in this strange ass-world that never left the fifties. That, and a plethora of supernatural abilities that he still didn't have any answer for.
It was almost ironic in a sense, as despite being from another time-line, Ivan was in fact in the same place as the original hold of this body. Stranded and lost in another world, except this one was his own, just changed and warped by nuclear fire and rampant mutation.
Ivan tilted back his Nuka-Cola, only to come up dry and sigh despondently. Placing it back on the subway floor, Ivan stood up and walked over to his Workshop. Now fed and watered, and his need for sleep being roughly an hour or so of closed eyes near a source of radiation, he moved back to his workshop and started looking through what needed doing.
He had his shipments of Drugs he'd start peddling to various settlements, either for food, tech, or scrap, as he usually refused to take Caps or Old World Cash. Most of the more recreational drugs went to Raider Clans that he knew would love to get their hands on the supply, and smart and wise enough not to provoke a dealer with his reputation.
However, there were always raiders who thought their numbers would make it an easy play to take down a solo dealer with a massive supply.
That...never ended well.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone