With the tip of his tongue hanging from the corner of his lips, Knight-Sergeant McDowell drew careful, deliberate motions with his pen on the sheet of paper laid on his lap. Despite his slow movements, the handwriting was near indiscernible from the drawings of a squire. A particularly young squire, even. It was a good matter that nobody else had to read this particular piece of paper. “Weapon…?” he slowly asked himself, sounding out what he had just written down. On his bed laid Atomic Annie, his trusty supersledge. He nodded affirmatively to nobody else but himself, as if he had to pair his thoughts with a physical movement of sorts. “Check…” he sounded out again, putting a checkmark next to the horribly written word. Gregory, or Greg for short, had received a written notice not too long ago that he had been appointed to a mysterious squadron of sorts. A normal knight-sergeant of particular wit or intelligence might have been able to deduce, at the very least, what this squadron was meant to be doing – or, indeed, had questioned [i]why[/i] such a mysterious squadron needed to exist to begin with. For Gregory, on the other hand, such an appointment meant that he had a chance to the Elder Maxon – who was most likely not familiar with Knight-Sergeant Gregory’s appointment on a personal level regardless – how good a soldier he was. It didn’t take much brainpower for anyone – besides Gregory himself – to determine that his soldiering ways were probably why he was assigned to this squadron. After all, who better to send to unknown territories than a brave or suicidal scribe to catalogue their findings, and a hulking knight-sergeant or two to protect the nerd? “Armor…?” For a moment, Gregory put his pen to his lip, mindlessly coloring a part of the corner of his mouth blue, before he nodded again. “Yes, I saw it somewhere. Check.” It was at that point that his ‘roomie’ walked in, scribe Greenfield. He was a twig of a man, barely breaching 5’5”, and not weighing much more than a handful of radroaches would. The two were… an unfortunate duo. On their assignment in the barracks, McDowell had hoped for someone like him – tough, strong, brave and above all, really interesting. Greenfield was none of those things and for the most part seemed to be the opposite of those things. Talk about bad luck. “Hey, Greenfield,” Gregory said without looking up. There were only a few people on the Prydwen that managed to walk so loudly without the physical stature to back it up. Greenfield was rather clumsy, though, so there was some sort of explanation, sometimes. “Read any of those nerd-books today?” “Sure, Gregory,” was all Greenfield could get out before Gregory laughed that thunderous laugh of his that, if the engineers that were down a floor were to believed, could shake the Prydwen hard enough to shake some of the bolts out of their holes. “Haha! Of course you did!” “Yeah, great, laugh it up. You know, without those books, the engineers couldn’t fix your power armor when you break it for the fourteenth time. So yeah, go ahead, keep laughing at me for daring to read [i]books[/i], something you probably can’t even do,” Greenfield responded, taking great care to bring his point across as well as he could. Gregory, however, did no such thing. “Haha, bet you typed some words into a computer too, pansy!” He slapped his knee very hard, making it even more obvious he was very amused with the prospect of a scribe doing scribe-y things. “Sure, Greg. What are you doing, I didn’t know you could write?” Greenfield sneered back, although the jab was lost on Gregory, who seemed more amused with Greenfields ‘genuine’ interest in what he was doing. “Oh, I’m just checking if I have all my equipment. Us big guys have big important business to do,” was the cheerful reply, making it all the more apparent that Gregory had misunderstood that what Greenfield had said was a thinly-veiled insult. “If I write it down, I can’t forget anything. Smart, right? See, it’s not just the scribes that come up with intelligence stuff.” He presented the paper with illegible scribbles on it to Greenfield, who briefly raised his glasses to get a better look up close. “You mean intelligent, and yes, I suppose that this is smart. But if you’re just writing down things off the top of your head, you could still forget stuff. For example, you didn’t write down “rations,” or “canteen,” or “brains.” Those are important, although I’m not sure you have any.” Greg scoffed at the notion. As if [i]he[/i] would forget his rations and his drinks. In fact, he had already prepared those and attached them to his power armor frame. “Sure, just like you forget your sledgehammer. Oh wait – you’re a nerdy scribe, you don’t get any! Ha!” The hard part about arguing with someone who is, putting it lightly, not as smart as you, is that no matter what smart rhetoric and intelligent way of insulting them you can come up with, it won’t land. The only way to beat them, or indeed, even participate would be to lower yourself to their level, and that was something that Greenfield would never do. “Right. Have a nice evening Greg, I’m going to tend to my duties.” Greenfield dropped off a clipboard on the small shelf that hung next to his top bunk, and disappeared as quickly as he had appeared. If anything, Greenfield was likely very happy that the bottom bunk was going to be empty for a while. Some peace and quiet would be nice for him. Greg focused on his paper again, but could not muster the energy to continue his checklist. It seemed done for the most part anyway, and he was hankering for a cold beer. With a loud thump he slapped the paper on the sidetable next to the lower bunk, and patted his supersledge. “I’ll be right back, Annie,” he whispered to her, before standing up and marching himself over to the canteen. As he walked through a hallway – if it could be called that, since they were actually just walkways – he passed by Paladin Moss. Within a second he had come to a full stop, perched his chest out and stepped aside for the senior officer. “Paladin Moss!” he said, standing at attention and performing a Brotherhood of Steel salute, pressing his fist against his chest while extending his elbow up to the side, “Ad Victoriam!” Once the idol, err, officer had passed, and Gregory was sure he wasn’t coming back, he relaxed and continued his way into the mess hall. Without much finesse or subtlety he sat down in one of the red barstools that they had most likely “appropriated” from a diner somewhere long, long ago. He was just in time to hear the tail end of the bartender sharing some insight on how he had once been a scribe, but had a run in with a deathclaw. “Hey, pal,” he said, “do me for a pint, if you can?” Once a glass had been filled with a cool, refreshing half liter of beer, the mess officer would most likely have continued his story, but Gregory rudely inserted himself into the conversation, lacking any manner of tact. It was generally well known that the Knight-Sergeants were of a more direct sorts, but Gregory truly took the cake in that regard. “A deathclaw, huh? Well, you should’ve been wearing power armor, obviously! And a big gun, or a sledgehammer. Something to make that overgrown lizard think twice about smacking you around like some sort of little snack,” he interjected, before raising his glass and pouring at least half the glass into his mouth before setting it down. “Would’ve ended much better!” He glanced at the scribe to his side, who had been the subject of this mess officers’ tale but didn’t recognize the man. “The name’s knight-sergeant Gregory McDowell,” he opened the conversation, “pleasure to meet you.” He grinned at the man, before continuing. “For however long this meeting may last. I’m shipping out and getting off of this metal coffin in a few hours to do some actual work.” He looked at the mess officer then, before realizing the clumsiness in his words. A little too late, probably. “Not to say that working on this ship is not actual work. Who else is gonna hand me a beer, am I right?” he told the man, slapping the bar with his oversized hands as if it were something hilarious he’d just said. The mess officer seemed unenthused, but given the frequency with which Knight-Sergeant McDowell came here for beer, he probably was used to his antics by now. Greg turned to the scribe to his side again, and decided to ask him something instead of continuing on about himself. “So what about you? Doing anything interesting recently, besides reading books and typing into the computers?” He held back a slight laugh at the notion of a scribe doing nerdy things like Greenfield would, and instead did his best to maintain a serious, curious look. The attempt went over horribly, and he couldn’t help but stifle his laugh, barely so. But at least he tried…?