#ruby boomhealer

The journey there was, difficult to put it lightly. You ever try to avoid getting killed by mirelurks, terrifying abominations you never even knew could exist, alongside fucking raddolphins that were way too good at scaring the shit outta you? Ruby did. He’d be dead if the world wasn’t having too much fun laughing at the guy.

The real fun began when Ruby actually made it to the island. Whatever was beckoning to him was louder than before. A horrific, ethereal sense of awe took over him when he saw the island.

Buildings with uncannily pristine conditions with lights that resembled the eyes of a radscorpion peering over the world in the darkness of the night, the only thing obscuring it being the mixture of fog and smoke that floated throughout like a ghost. In contrast, they stood in the middle of a series of untouched yet aged concrete buildings. Fences of rusted steel, extending towards the sky like the gates of hell guarded the majority of the land.

If there was a hell for synths, it would look an awful lot like this.

And maybe he did deserve that hell. Who knows. He didn’t know anything about the original Ruby—not much anyways.

So when Ruby did truly enter the island, he was met with the sight of…people? They looked like people from a distance. But they were certainly not. Some moved in uncanny ways, some straight up looked like nightmares. They acted like they never saw another living thing besides themselves, and took Ruby in as a bit of a “project.” Modifying his DNA, asking him questions, having him do strange tasks—things one might compare to big MT, the major difference being that they seemed weirdly…managed? Moral? Contained? It was hard to describe. The specimens felt more like AI trying to fulfill a request, despite its team being long dead.

Ruby didn’t understand what the hell was going on for the first hour. That is, until he was called upon from the dark, looming pristine building. Never a good sign, he thought. And when he reached it, he saw what can only be described as a portal to hell. Eyes. There were so many eyes. They were everywhere—on the floors, the ceiling, the wall—it was a sight to behold. As he ventured deeper, he saw the source of them all—a woman who could only be described as a cosmic horror extension of what it meant to be human.

Her robotic voice echoed as the eyes connected to the surfaces of the room honed in on Ruby. “I’ve been waiting for someone like you.”

The feeling was indescribable.

Specimen 101 was her name. She wasn’t one for beating around the bush, but she knew best answer the questions before they were asked. 101 explained how the island was a pre war experiment to create near immortal, highly intelligent researchers that would aid the government post war.

Of course, we all know what happened to the government after the bombs fell. Before then, they had made an emergency vault. Like vault 111, they froze the specimens. The previous 100 specimens were all failures, with the remaining 14 being their only chances of success. Of course, there was more complexity to it, but 101 figured it was unnecessary to go into that level of detail.

How this relates to Ruby is simple: 101 worked hard to make sure the other specimens would not leave the island and turn the rest of the world into their hellish lab. However, she could not stop 114 from leaving. Ruby was to keep an eye on 114, so to speak. Thankfully she had calculated that 114 was the least likely to cause harm to the world, but she needed to make sure.

And how was Ruby going to do this? He wasn’t. 101 was going to do all the work. Her plan was to use Ruby as signal. The specimens had a distress signal built into them already—that she knew. The purpose of Ruby’s signal was to attempt to find 114’s exact location, and from that send that data to 101.

101 didn’t trust Ruby, and in a way, wanted to apologize (in her own strange way) for the behaviors of the other specimens. She somehow found a way to retrieve the original Ruby’s memories and implanted them onto him alongside his own while erasing his memories of Library7. 101 did this as a way of ensuring that Ruby would continue to behave in a way that wouldn’t make 114 suspicious of what she was doing with the signal. Adding some extra things to him to make Ruby juuuuust a bit more resilient (afterall, 101 was likely never going to have this opportunity again).