Kabedon

Lily stared at the dumbass who was waving his own severed hand at her in front of her for a moment before shaking her head and walking towards him, "Merde... Crétin..."

Everyone else except Grace was cracking up, and even she was trying very hard not to grin. Finally, Lily asked, "What the hell happened? Did you run into a ninja?"

Three people said different things at the same time. Big John yelled, "Yes, I told you!" while Grace said, "No," and Little John said, "Sort of."

Grace elaborated, "We had killed about nine raiders in the dorms, and we got a little complacent, and this guy jumped out of the roof with a PLA Officer's sword. He must have spent a long time sharpening it, too, cause it took off Big John's hand in one chop. Tangent shot the guy in the head, though." She paused, "Normally, all we'd be able to do is kind of slather it in StimPak and hold the severed hand up to the stump. Usually, it doesn't work out too well; you can barely lift a spoon after that, much less a gun. But I remember from--well, I remember that a good medic or surgeon could ensure it was reattached properly before using the StimPaks."

Big John glared at Grace, "The fucker was hiding in the ceiling and jumped out and attacked me with a sword! That's a ninja in my book. It's MY hand, so it's a ninja, hear? If I got my hand chopped off, then it was by a fucking ninja, not some raider high on Jet. GOT IT?"

Grace paused for a moment before shrugging and nodding, "Fair enough," which was followed by the others who verbalized assent.

Lily gazed at him, "You've got fucking dirt all on the wound! What are you, some crazed animal? At least the ninja's sword was sharp, I suppose. That will make it easier." She tilted her head up to think, "Yes, we should be able to get you back to full operation. But there's no way we'll be able to make it back to town tonight. This will take me a couple of hours, minimum."

Grace clucked her tongue, "Well, we planned for that possibility. How'd that lab look?"

Lily grinned, "I found a great harvest! And I've verified that there's nothing in the air, no diseases spread anywhere, and it is relatively clean -- well, we'll have to clean up a little bit of ghoul blood, but we could fort up in there tonight? There are three lab rooms, two offices, a break room and a sort of maintenance area where they sterilized equipment. There must be some kind of reactor underneath the school or maybe Geo-Thermal units because everything is powered -- including A/C that is still operational. Honestly, it would make an excellent FOB here in the outskirts of D.C." She was amazed that an HVAC system had been running for two hundred years. She remembered having to call the service techs out every three months or so when she lived in Virginia.

The Amazon woman considered it for a moment before nodding, "Okay, that sounds pretty good actually, if you're sure it's safe. We'll have to keep a continual watch, probably in this basement in shifts. I'd rather be far away from this area soonest, but I'd rather Big John had a working hand tomorrow more."

Lily nodded. "Yeah, there is even an eye-wash station in the maintenance room. It must have a fifty-litre tank attached to it. We could use it to take showers, but we'd have to cart in the water from outside before half of us were done."

That settled it; everyone was in favour of showering. "Tangent and NJ, go drag the dead ghouls out of our new nest before they start to stink it up too much."

The two groaned but complied, heading into the lab proper. They drug two dead ghouls out and kept going until they were out of the basement also, before returning and heading back in. The blonde giant came out not too long after that looking empty-handed and churlish. He just stared at the Assaultron, "Hey! Did you gotta do him like that, you crazy murderblender?"

Lily blinked; she had noticed one that was in a couple more pieces than the rest of them but hadn't really put much thought to it because the body was in the maintenance room, and she wasn't really interested in that area of the lab at all after finding the lab areas.

The Assaultron, sometimes called Matilda, stared back at him before gracing him with an answer to his question, "Yes." This caused him to scoff and return back into the lab.

Lily brought some purified water and ethanol from her pack and cleaned both sides of the wound, and debrided the dirt from the severed hand's stump. She glanced at him, "Monsieur, are you sure I can't interest you in a robotic prosthesis? I am really close in my research to building the first one. It'd be connected to your nerves and feel like a regular hand! Even hooked up to your proprioception system, so it doesn't feel like a ghost hand! It'd also be swordproof." She paused, then continued in a conspiratorial tone, "Flesh is weak, you know..."

Big John shook his head rapidly, "No. Not just no, but fucking no. No fucking way, this is my RIGHT hand!"

Lily tilted her head to the side, "So? It would still work as your dominant hand. It'd be just as dextrous and ten times as strong!"

Big John groaned, "Look, girlie, you don't understand why a man has to have his dominant hand not be a fucking metal robot hand, no matter how good it is. It's important, alright!"

Grace started chuckling when she walked up, "Girlie, he won't say it, but he's worried about trying to jerk off and ripping his dick off or something."

Lily blushed, but only for a second. She wasn't innocent. It was just that she never even considered the possibility that a synth hand would make that activity a problem, but she was still thinking about cyber hands from her past. She had to admit that a first-generation cybernetic hand built in what amounts to the dark ages... might... be dangerous for such intimate activities. The second or maybe third generation she would eventually make would be fine, though! Better than a regular hand, probably!

Big John groaned and then threw his stump in the air, "Alright, yes! I don't want to squeeze my dick off with some super strong robot hand!"

Lily smirked, "Couldn't you just, you know, use other hand?" to which Big John shook his head wildly again, "No! You just... you're not a man, alright? You wouldn't understand... And don't judge me. There's no way you'd 'flick the bean' with some crazy robot hand, either, would you?"

There was zero hesitation in Lily's response, "No, but only because I would probably include a vibrating motor in one of the fingertips." Instead of embarrassment, there was the fire of zealotry in her eyes now, "That's the beauty of cybernetic limbs! Customization! Attachments!"

There was a snicker that turned into a full guffaw behind her. When she glanced over her shoulder at Grace, she just held both hands up placatingly, "No, no. You tell 'em, girlie."

Lily watched the dark-skinned man blush and felt that the slight reddening was really quite fetching when combined with his colouration. But, she decided against teasing him anymore, "Fine, come with me. The Lab #1 inside is empty, and it has a table and bright enough lights. This is going to take a while, but at least it won't hurt.."

As they headed inside with Grace, Lily asked, "Are we going to need to loot the dorms tomorrow?"

Big John snorted and said, "Uh, no." Grace smacked him in the back of the head, "No, there was enough stuff from the raiders. Uhh, girlie... tell me, we know you seem like a good girl, doing the right thing and all that, but what is your opinion on chems?"

Lily followed them into the first lab room, "What do you mean?" There were so many chemicals. How could a person have a single opinion on them?

She paused to parse over the sentence she had just heard again. Shaking her head, she decided she must have been hanging out with The Mechanist too long; she wasn't used to people prevaricating or being subtle anymore. She'd have to fix that, "Oh. Recreational drugs, you mean? I'm not really interested but thank you. Big John probably could stand to use some here soon, but no stimulants, not even coffee or tobacco -- they cause vasoconstriction and will make my job much, much harder."

Grace chuckled, "No. Selling them. The raiders had an absolute fuck-ton of drugs of all sorts, like kilos and kilos of the stuff. They must have been a warehouse for a more prominent gang. Which reminds me, we will have to start hiking out a little before light, just in case their comrades find them all dead tonight."

Her memories of her life in America were very much against the sale of harmful narcotics, although she felt that the entire drug war her nation had foisted off on the people was futile and worse than the actual vice of drugs in many ways. Meanwhile, her opinions as a researcher in a space habitat were that recreational sarin gas should be sold in vending machines, no I.D. required, if people wanted it. Taken together and merged, the composite entity just shrugged her shoulders, "Who cares? I mean, c'est la vie, no? Try to avoid offloading them on a gang that will sell them to kids, if you can avoid it, but it is just a commodity as far as I am concerned."

Big John muttered, "Told you," and Grace chuckled, "Sorry, I was worried you'd have some kind of moral objection. We still would have sold them, but I was wondering how much I would have to make it up to you."

Lily sat down at the table and motioned Big John to sit across from her, "Oh, in that case, what I meant to say was I have a deep and abiding moral objection to the destruction of our society with the evil of recreational drug use."

Grace grinned wickedly, "Well, I'll just have to think of something sufficient to make it up to you, then. Uhhh... but for now, I'm not really interested in watching him get sliced open, so I'm going to take first watch on the door."

Big John seemed nervous all of a sudden, "Uhh... so you said this wouldn't hurt, huh? What do you even need to do to reattach a hand?"

Lily, who had been digging a number of supplies out of her bag, clucked her tongue, "Well, you're actually in luck on that score. I do have a fair supply of a local anaesthetic. However, and it has been my experience that men are the biggest babies when it comes to this, some people get a little nervous about the route of administration."

Big John stammered, "Uhh.. I don't do any butt stuff."

Lily snorted, paused and then snorted and laughed. "Ah, perhaps you just don't know what you are missing, no? But no, it is this..." she finally showed him a giant syringe. He almost backed away in the chair, face going a bit green looking, "Holy fuck! Why is it so fucking big?!"

Lily smacked his arm, "Don't be being the baby. I have to immerse your nerve in the local anaesthetic. That blocks all sensation from anywhere below that point on the nerve, so it has to be big. It is better than feeling me filet you like a fish so I can reattach all the vasculature and nerves, no?" He gulped, "I'm not really liking your choice of words."

Lily smiled, "Yes, usually the surgeon will block the seeing of this, but it is not like we have a lot of supplies here. So maybe, just close your eyes or look at the ceiling, yes? The pre-war hospitals, they had the auto-doc for this surgery. Very fine robotic manipulators, some of which were as thin as a pencil lead, guided by the expert system, it was very effective. But, you'll just have to rely on my fleshy hands and eyes for now." Lily grinned at him and half-joked, "At least, until I build myself a vibrating auto-surgery hand." It wouldn't vibrate, though. It was simpler to just install a computer in your brain that could give you an orgasm on demand if that was what you really wanted.

With that, she got to work. Despite being a bit shy, Big John was a reasonably easy patient. Her ability to perform micro-sutures with barely any equipment was quite good, and every so often, she would spray a bottle of saline with medichines suspended into it into the surgical area. Even if she didn't suture them perfectly or missed some, the medichines would help fix her errors, especially after she administered the StimPak.

After about two hours and fifteen minutes, she was administering a combination of StimPak juice and medichines via IV, "Don't move your hand for fifteen minutes," she warned him.

With him trying to stay as still as possible, she was able to get behind him and scan him with her diagnostic scanner, peering at it briefly before shoving it back into her bag and beginning to clean everything, including her hands. She had reconnected over 85% of the vasculature and nerves herself, which would have been considered an excellent replantation effort in a hospital in America, and the patient would probably still only have half use of the hand with weakness and loss of dexterity for the rest of their life. In transhumanity, virtually every biomorph had gene expressions that would regrow a hand like a lizard's tail as standard. Lily, sadly, did not have these herself, though.

But with the medichines and StimPak... what she missed the StimPak was regrowing, and what it was regrowing oddly, the medichines would try their best to correct over the next couple of days.

"Okay, we're done. We'll keep your hand wrapped up tightly like this until the morning, don't try to move it if at all possible. The surgery was a success." Lily shook her head, still marvelling over the curative properties of StimPaks. "Light duty tomorrow. That means no firing guns with it, or picking anything up, or practically anything but scratching your nose." She paused and looked at him sceptically, "You can shoot left-handed, right? I mean, you said earlier..."

Big John scoffed, "Just because I can't... yes, I can shoot left-handed if I have to. Anyway, thanks, Doc."

Lily nodded, "And don't get it wet until tomorrow, especially with the water we're probably using for showers. If you take a shower, keep that arm out of the water. And no vigorous hand movements, if you know what I mean!" In case he missed her meaning, she made the universally recognized gesture to elucidate him.

"Yes, yes! I am leaving now!" He got up and walked out.

Lily went up and told everyone she was going to take a shower so as not to be interrupted bare assed, and quickly but thoroughly cleaned herself as well as she could. She glanced up at the still rather full water reservoir. Maybe they wouldn't need to fill it, after all. Eye stations had to have enough water to run for 15 minutes non-stop. She put on her bodysuit but left her armour off; there was no way she'd ever get comfortable if she had to wear all that.

For the next couple of hours, she finished her work with the cryo-freezer and got it ready to transport; it would have to ride on top of Mr Handy. It wasn't so much that it was very heavy; stripped down, it was only thirty-five kilos or so, but it was awkward and bulky.

Grace came into the lab she was in while she was finishing. Her hair was still damp, and she had switched to vaguely street clothes and was carrying her armour. She asked, "Hey girlie, can I see you for a moment? I'm using that office in the back as my quarters."

Lily raised an eyebrow and got up, "Sure." She followed Grace, who indicated her room with a hand, so Lily went ahead of her inside. Grace followed her inside and closed the door, which caused Lily to smile a little. They were off-duty, at least until the next time one of them was on duty for watch, so Lily asked archly, "Oh? So you figured out how to make it up to me, then?"

"Yes," said the mercenary in a slightly husky manner. Then she moved quite quickly to stand in front of Lily and semi-pinned her to the wall by firmly placing one of her palms against the wall, in effect "trapping" her.

Oh, my! Is this the legendary kabedon?! It is, it is! I can actually see why people like it, thought Lily.

The Amazon looked down at her, the hand that wasn't kabedoning her falling to touch Lily's hip possessively, "Remember this morning when you pretended to stand at attention, ready to take my orders?" Lily grinned a bit and nodded, "Well, we're going to do that for real, now. I want to see how long I can keep you... At. Attention. But, I don't think you will need to be standing at all."

Ohhh, it was going to be like that, eh? Well, that was perfectly fine and was actually in line with Lily's preferences anyway. In any case, Lily knew what role she was expected to play now, so she grinned and said jauntily, "Ma'am, yes, ma'am!"

---

SoME tiME LaTER

---

Eventually, there was some cuddling, as much by necessity considering Lily hadn't gone to retrieve her sleeping bag before being "seduced." But it was cosy, and they both got some sleep, even. Lily was quite comfortable laying on the Amazon's chest, crooked into her arm.

Neither of them got more than an hour or two of sleep, though. When they were both getting dressed, Grace was awkwardly trying to get through a conversation with her that was basically saying that she wasn't looking for any kind of long-term partners, what with her job and all. Lily got the feeling that Grace thought she was letting her down gently?

Lily couldn't help it and giggled furiously, "My dear Grâce, I feel exactly the same. This world, it is, " Lily paused before saying the next word with its French pronunciation and with feeling, "terrible!" Lily stood on her tippy-toes, still quite naked and kissed the other woman, who still had to lean down, softly once, "I am years from wanting of the wife or the 'usband and the white pickets, yes? 'Ave to build a world, or at least part of one, where you can even 'ave that, first."

Grace looked very relieved. Did she expect Lily to be a stage-5 clinger, Lily wondered? If so, Lily felt rather smug at that because that said a lot about her desirability and irresistibleness, as generally, you'd avoid at all costs being entangled in one of those types of people even if they were hot. Lily smiled, "So let us remain the friend. The intimate friend, if we are lucky."

The truth was that while half of herself had memories of wanting and finding long-term relationships, the other longer set of memories of her time in space were, while quite sexually active, almost completely uninterested in romance. So, paradoxically, Lily was open to either sort of situation, in theory, if the conditions were right. Lily supposed that did make her quite the easy-going sort, which she liked.

Grace smiled, "Thank you, my girlie. We should get dressed and ready to head out."

It took less than an hour for everyone to eat breakfast, get kitted up and be ready to depart. Her PipBoy said it was a little after 0400, but that was partly a guess since the date and time on her PipBoy had to be reset when she fixed it so many weeks ago.

They started hearing automatic weapons fire and energy discharges as they entered the basement, and immediately, everyone was all business. Lily took the time to close and redog the hatch to the lab, anyway, though.

"It's coming from outside to the north. Close. Upstairs, double quick, and get switched on," Grace ordered.

They quick timed it up the stairs, peering stealthily out the windows. They couldn't quite tell who was fighting who, but they'd very likely run into one or the other combatants if they went out the front door and would run straight into the crossfire if they ran out the side door. And there weren't any other ways out; the entire west side of the building was blocked by rubble on the ground floor.

Grace shook her head, "Can't see anything. Let's head up to the third floor. We can't go out, and we don't want to be on the ground floor if one of those assholes sees this building as a sound position to retreat to. Quick and quiet, everyone."

They went up the stairs two and three at a time, so Lily was wondering about the quiet part of this evolution, but said nothing. As everyone reached the third floor, they took a door to a classroom in the middle of the building, and they each crouched next to or under windows.

Little John spoke up after peeking out the window, "Ones on the right are definitely Brotherhood, boss. Four of them, they're pinned down."

Lily looked at the other combatants; her eyesight and night vision was good even when they weren't being briefly illuminated by sporadic weapons fire, "There's more than a platoon of raiders over here, red skulls painted on their armour. How the fuck did they get crew-served heavy weapons over here? Is that a Dushka??"

It was, indeed, an old Russian heavy machinegun that was keeping the Brotherhood suppressed. Lily wondered how they got ammunition for it because they certainly didn't seem too worried they'd run out.

Big John asked awkwardly, "Red skulls? Wasn't that..."

Grace swore, "Yeah, I knew it wasn't a good idea to stay so close, but I didn't want to see you end up crippled, B.J. They must have brought in the reinforcements and heavy weapons after finding their friends ventilated and their stash gone, and then a Brotherhood patrol happened to run into them."

Lily glanced down at the group of raiders arrayed in almost a skirmish line perpendicular to her. She could see more or less every raider. The tracer fire and occasional laser and plasma fire going back and forth left to right and right to left was mesmerising. She looked at Grace, seeing that the Amazon saw the same thing. Lily offered weakly, "Well... we are in enfilade, ma'am." Shit! Lily didn't mean to call her that but got too used to it last night.