#time borrowed

"New Vegaser?? But I hardly know her!" quipped Johanna Barnes just moments after this photo was snapped of her and husband Robert House.

I edited the June 5, 1954 cover of the New Yorker to look like my courier OC Johanna and Mr. House, catch them both in my fanfiction Time Borrowed, Stolen, or Otherwise Misplaced!

Original cover is under the cut.

[ID: a digital sketch of a robot and a magic automaton sitting on top of it. The robot is flat and rectangular, with cut sections of pool noodles taped to its sides and top. On its interface, the text reads “STAND BACK” with an angry face between the two words. The magical automaton on top is an oversized wooden beer mug, with metal pieces and forks for arms and a small broom head for a head. Sunglasses are skewed on her broom face. She’s holding up a small ace flag with a fork arm. This is Slip (the rectangular robot) and Tom (the magical beer mug automaton). end ID]

Slip & Tom

Sentient automatons. 

Agents of chaos. 

And, because both Garnet (Time Borrowed) and Banneker (A Rival Most Vial) are ace: they say Ace Rights.

I've been seeing other people making FNV playing cards of their OCs and thought I'd give it a try!

Johanna Barnes of The Lucky 38 and Albert Parr of The Tops from Time Borrowed, Stolen, or Otherwise Misplaced.

Credits below the cut

Tagged by @mojavediscodancer (Thank you! Thank you!) to use this template so here are Johanna and Albert, the competing couriers from my fanfiction Time Borrowed, Stolen, or Otherwise Misplaced.

Robert House

“Guess it beats sedating myself with a Miltown and a martini.” Johanna said, starting to pat down her clothes and smooth her hair, “So that’s what you did, you started installing shelves, changing lightbulbs, painting walls. Busywork.”

“I wouldn’t call reversing the derailment of our species busywork, but yes.” House said.

Johanna guffawed, “Oh, is that all? That doesn’t sound very quantifiable.”

“You jest but it is on a bimonthly basis. Though reverse is the wrong word since my aim isn’t to restore society to its 2077 condition, but rather to improve upon and surpass what we once had.”

“Aren't you humble? What’s so bad about the way things were?”

“Come now, be serious.” House lightly chided, “Your entire world was run by corrupt politicians using picturesque propaganda and foreign fearmongering to pacify the masses.”

Johanna put on a Transatlantic accent and mimed waving a long cigarette holder around, “Be careful, Mr. House, you’re starting to sound frightfully communist.”

“This is 2281, Ms. Barnes, no need for you to jump at Red Menace ghosts here. If you recall, I ran one of the most profitable companies in the world, do you really think I would have communist sympathies?”

“A lot can change in two hundred years.”

“You’re being purposefully irksome and I won’t respond to it. I have never and will never shelter those that refuse to work for themselves – but those with ambition, that dream of the stars and will do whatever it takes to get to them? That is the sort of talent I pride myself on identifying and cultivating, and together we can accomplish unimaginable things. And we have.”

House spoke quietly, fervently, and with such absolute conviction that Johanna felt her heart squeeze into her throat.

“You… aren’t serious.” Even as she fought it, Johanna’s act was slipping, genuine hope bleeding into her words, “These are delusions of grandeur, you can’t actually be working to fix… everything.”

“When I set my mind to something, I get results. I understand your incredulity, but you’ve never seen anything like New Vegas.” House was audibly beaming, Johanna could practically see the proud sparkle in his eye, “Electricity, running water, public sanitation, paved roads, cable cars, low crime rates and high literacy, a growing financial sector, a city-wide intranetwork, and we’re soon to be connected to a telecommunications grid that spans Nevada and a great deal of the New California Republic. You could wander the wreckage of this nation for a hundred years and not find her equal.”

Continue reading in Time Borrowed, Stolen, or Otherwise Misplaced...

Time Borrowed, Stolen, or Otherwise Misplaced

Despite living in a city full of flashing neon and enormous personalities, Robert House captures attention like no other. It’s as if he has his own gravitational pull; when he wants something, the world bends to make it so. It’s this willpower, combined with his impressive intellect and considerable wealth, that makes his survival of the apocalypse an absolute certainty.

Following House into this next age are Jane Alderidge and Victor Laughlin, his dutiful employees and longtime friends, with optimistic plans to resume their normal lives when Vegas is finally reborn, but what these three don’t realize is that their saving grace - the Platinum Chip - will be 536 miles away when the bombs drop a day earlier than expected, violently altering the course of House’s predictions.

In the post-war wasteland, there are tales of times that fate plays favorites. These rare individuals are called many things - chosen ones, wanderers, survivors - but what these heroes all have in common is their actions always define a generation. The Mojave already has one such person, but fate is about to deal in a new player.

Not that Johanna Barnes would consider herself one of fate’s favorites at the moment. One minute, she was an up-and-coming Hollywood actress reconsidering both her career and her choice in friends, the next she was waking from forced cryogenic freezing in the distant future, trapped in a sealed bunker with only a radio to piece together what happened on that disastrous day two hundred years ago.

Fate is about to place the Platinum Chip in Johanna’s hands, bringing her face to screen with the enigmatic House and pulling them into a precarious partnership that'll change the face of the Mojave forever. With a murderous NCR sniper hot on her heels, mutated monsters descending from on high, and the treacherous leader of the Chairmen Benny ahead, the odds seem stacked against Johanna Barnes and Robert House, but if they manage to stop bickering for five minutes they might just survive.

That is, until the second courier shows up with plans of their own.

Find out what happens next in: Time Borrowed, Stolen, or Otherwise Misplaced!