[color=00aeef]FRIEDA RICHTER[/color] - Diner -- evening

"Oh...uh..water, please. Just water. Make that purified water if you have it," Arthur said with a nervous smile. 

[i]Water?  Really? -- oh, wait.  He doesn't have any money...[/i]  Frieda raised a finger to call the waitress back but she'd already turned, with quite a bit of attitude no less, and walked off.

He cleared his throat.  Frieda looked back at him, forgetting the waitress for a moment. "They are quite fascinating you know," He began cheerfully. He then lowered his voice, leaned in, and whispered the next few words more softly, "...wastelanders that is..." With a nod, he sat back up and continued talking normally, "You can live among them for months and come to the likely conclusion that they're a very simple people, and yet....they still find ways to surprise you. Take this diner for instance, I would never have imagined that out here there would be such a thing as an old-world style diner. Serving, umm...delicious food. Well, serving food anyway." He chuckled to himself and looked around.

Frieda softened.  Enlightened perspective was precisely what she needed, then.  "You don't disappoint, Arthur.  Spoken like a true man of science."  She took another sip of her beer.  "...that was meant as a compliment..."

He didn't seem offended.  "What about you? What do you think?"

"Me?"  [i]The truth, or what will keep me from being rushed out of town?[/i]  "I suppose you could say I'm not so...optimistic."  Frieda rested her bottle on the bar surface and turned it around in her hand.  "Mind you, I was thinking about their," she paused to swallow a lump in her throat, "[i]capability[/i], myself, earlier when Ace came over to talk to us after the gunshots.  Though mainly to the tune of, how do so many manage to survive, and keep surviving?"

She took another swig of her beer.  "Though perhaps what you've said has quite a bit of merit.  I hadn't thought of it that way, before.  They figured out how to feed themselves, and each other, and turn it into some kind of trade based economy no less.  Maybe there's some hope, at least, for some of them."

The waitress came back with Arthur's water and put it in front of him.

"Wait!" Frieda called before the annoyed looking woman could disappear.  "My friend here needs a beer, too. 
 Something...sophisticated," she flashed a quick wink at Arthur before looking back to the waitress.  "How about one of those stouts?"

"Those what?" the waitress all but groaned.

"Stout.  It's a kind of beer, in this bar you work at?" Frieda couldn't contain her snippy tone.  

"You make it sound like I should care."

"Ess, tee, oh --"

"Shut up, grandma," the waitress growled, placing a bottle of the dark beer onto the counter in front of Arthur.

"Oh, that goes on Barney's tab, too."

Barney wagged his middle finger at Frieda, who mimed a kiss at him.  She twisted the cap off Arthur's beer, then held out her own.  "Cheers."

"So, I'm interested to know, how did a sealed vault have so many scientific, or medical resources?  Most, if not all, of them were set up to study certain phenomena of human behaviour, but our records allegedly showed that many of them imploded from the inside by one factor or another.  That, or they opened to the world, and who knows what happened to those folks after that."  She paused, then flashed a wide, genuine smile.  "Sorry, I'm sure you're more than aware of the internal politics of a Vault, being from one, and all.  But anyways, how did your Vault make it?  Honest question."