The next morning, the first thing I did was walk out to the barracks and hire two more soldiers, officially filling our ranks to their current maximum. Our two new soldiers, Kelsey Jacobs and Stewart Port, both claimed their bunks in the improved barracks. Both Carlos and Madison voluntarily moved back into the barracks as well, which went a long way toward making me feel more comfortable leaving them alone out there.

  After hiring our new compatriots, I was down to a hundred bottlecaps, which I decided to keep, just in case I needed to negotiate, grease some palms, or otherwise throw money at a problem.

  Once our new members settled in, we brought them back to the main hall, where I introduced them to the rest of our team and explained what we would be doing.

  "Alright, so today is going to be pretty basic, just to let our new members get a feel for the area," I explained. "Joseph, Madison, and Leon, I want you guys to stay behind for the day and keep an eye on everything. While you're here, I want you to take the supplies from the construction yard and use them to secure the cleared building along the west side of the wall. You can strip down the interior, up to the second floor, and seal off the rest."

  "Yes, sir," Joseph accepted with a nod, continuing a moment later. "Sir, may I ask why? I understand the need to secure them so they aren't a security risk, but why clear them out?"

  "The whole reason I included them with the wall was because they are reasonably intact buildings, close enough to be useful," I explained. "If we need extra storage, a place for merchant caravans or other groups to sleep, they would be perfect. They just need to be made secure first."

  "Understood, sir."

  "You don't need to get it all done today," I assured him. "Make sealing them off with plywood and scrap sheets your priority. Everything else after that is secondary. We will trade off who stays behind while the larger group leaves every day, unless some sort of outstanding circumstance arises."

  Joseph nodded in agreement, as did Leo and Madison, the two who would be staying back with him.

  "The rest of us will be running an easy day through the uncleared residential sections," I explained, turning to look at the rest of my soldiers. "Pretty simple, but it's a good opportunity to teach you what's worth taking and what isn't."

  "You're not worried about running with one less person?" Carlos asked. "Leaving three people home leaves us with seven. And two of them are babies."

  "We've cleared homes with much less," I pointed out. "With the right tools and the right people, both of which we have, we can handle it. I'm not saying it will be easy, but we can handle it."

  Carlos nodded, and we quickly began to prepare for our day, putting on our armor and stashing our gear in our pockets. I slipped into my blue undersuit first, before pulling on my BDUs and my armor after that. I needed to sit down with everyone and have them strip down a few of their own vault suits, as so far, wearing mine had been a great success. Ninety percent of the time, I didn't even notice I was wearing it, which was why I kept forgetting to test them.

  Rather than putting it off, only to inevitably forget about it again, I grabbed one of the suits and carried it outside, while my soldiers raided the weapons area of the secure storage. After some debate, we ended up hanging it up on a piece of plywood from the construction yard, before shooting it with a couple of our weapons, followed by stabbingit with our combat knives.

  As Moira predicted, the vault suit was not bulletproof, though it did seem to at least slow the bullets down. It did seem to lessen the impact of laser weapons, distributing the heat and reducing the damage to whoever was wearing it. It was also consistently knife-proof, which was more than enough of a reason to wear them, even without the energy resistance. Not to mention, it was genuinely comfortable and seemed to help stabilize my temperature.

  "Tonight, when we get home, we will all strip down at least one of these suits," I said to the group. "I want everyone to have at least two."

  Thankfully, Maxwell could clean our clothes, though he wouldn't be able to keep up if our group continues to grow.

  When we were done with our little experiments, the two teams split up. The home team went to investigate the state of the two buildings to the west, in preparation to work on them, while we headed to the residential area. As we walked, crossing wrecked homes and cracked streets, Carlos spoke up, kicking a half-rotted plank of wood.

  "At least we have plenty of firewood," he said. "Assuming it's not too wet to burn."

  "Huh… not sure why we would need firewood, all of our buildings are temperature-controlled," I pointed out. "But it might be a good busy work task to drag in a few wheelbarrows full of wood and store them somewhere protected from the elements, so it can dry out."

  John jokingly slapped Carlos on the back for giving me more ideas for work, but there wasn't any real hostility. Besides, it's not like I would be sending them off to work while I sat around doing nothing. They may be bound to follow my orders, but I had no plans to lead from the back. Anything I ordered them to do would be something I would do myself, unless I was busy doing something else.

  We started clearing the reinforced homes, the only ones that had survived, going from one to the other. The first one was empty of danger, allowing us to quickly scavenge for anything useful before moving on to the next home a few rows down. After that, the old dwellings consistently had between two and three ghouls, all feral, immediately charging us as we kicked down their doors.

  Throughout the day, the new recruits handled themselves well, even when they were the ones breaching and pushing into the house, the tip of the spear. As usual, they started out sort of empty and bland, simply nodding and accepting orders, rather than having a conversation. Thankfully, by the time we were done for the day, they were already being a bit more talkative.

  We continued to clear homes for most of the day, eventually having lunch in one of them before continuing. Eventually, as we worked together, we fell into a steady rhythm, and, aside from a few deviations, clearing and looting each home took less than an hour. When we were finally done for the day and returned home, we had cleared almost every home up to where the ground started to rise to the hills that ran along the north. There are more homes on top of that area, and roads that led up there as well, so we aren't done looting residential areas, but it would likely be a while before we set out to continue in that direction.

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  As we return home, my people split up to spread out their loot. Kelsey and John head to the medbay to drop off all of our medical supplies, which completed Dr. Berken's order of standard medical supplies, and filled up the resource meter a reasonable amount. Now, all that was left was to start generating supplies to sell to Adam as he came through.

  Carlos and Stewart carried the crap weapons and ammo that we found to the armory. The crap weapons, whether they were rotted, cheap, or rusted, were stacked in a corner, just waiting for when I upgraded the building. There was already a pretty big pile from our various raider encounters. The ammo, mostly useless calibers, but also several handfuls of corroded brass and partially crushed shotgun shells, were dumped right into the reprocessing chute, converting them directly into 5.56. The armory had already produced a magazine overnight, and we were saving up for an upgrade that would allow us to convert one of our standard magazines into one loaded with armor-piercing ammunition.

  I wanted that upgrade so we could go and explore the. I knew from memory that we would be able to make a massive profit from that place, but I also knew it was filled with robots. Heavily armored robots, whom I was not about to throw my people at without having at least a solid advantage against them, which the armor-piercing would count as.

  Or maybe some explosives heavier than a grenade, or a new weapon option. Either way, it was on the list, but had a few prerequisites to fulfill before we could get it done.

  While my soldiers worked outside, John and I carried the rest of the loot down into secure storage. There, we stored any weapons, ammo, caps, liquor, or anything else we grabbed that was decently intact.

  When we were done unloading everything, we grabbed the vault suits and brought them up with us to the main hall, where everyone gathered. While we stripped them down, Joseph and his team described the progress they made on reinforcing the buildings and clearing the first floors, dumping their trash into the collapsed building beside the intact ones. When Carlos, John, and Kelsey stayed behind next, they would finish clearing the building, as well as start on the final building in the north-west corner of the camp.

  That one just needed to be boarded up, as while it was also a stable building we could use as extra space, we didn't need it yet, and it would have been a lot of work to secure it entirely.

  After our group vault suit stripping session, we shared a dinner, before Carlos, Madison, Kalsey, and Stewart headed back to the barracks. I hated that they were being forced to leave, as it felt like we were banishing them, or shunning them out to the lesser area, but I could at least take solace in the fact that they wouldn't be cramped, and that the living conditions had been greatly improved by the upgrade.

  I could only hope that as we continue to upgrade the barracks, those conditions would continue to improve. If every other upgrade increased its capacity, then maybe the non-capacity grades were all about improving the living conditions.

  The next morning, we gathered for breakfast. As we ate, we tried to figure out what to gift the people of Oakanrest. I was determined to make it something special.

  "Today we are making a trip back to Megaton to sell the medical supplies to Dr. Berken," I explained. "I want to decide what we are presenting them, so that if we need to buy something, we can buy it there."

  "Sir, I think you might be overthinking things," Joseph said with a frown. "I know you envision some sort of profound gift, but this isn't first contact with aliens or anything."

  "What do you mean?" I asked, furrowing my brow. "Making a good impression might be key to starting off on the right foot."

  "Maybe, but they are just humans, tribal sure, but still human. A crate full of booze, a few trinkets, and maybe a tool or two would be more than enough," He pointed out. "I mean, they are mostly low tech, so a bag of salt, with no radiation, would probably be amazing to them. Same with sugar, though, who knows where you would find that here."

  "We get salt packets in our meals, and sugar for our instant coffee," John volunteered, pointing to one such packet with his fork, only to lose his bite of eggs in the process. "Could we gather some of those?"

  "Our meals cannot be handed out like that," Maxwell said, responding before I could. "The food created by the Grow Hut can be, however."

  "The stuff from the medbay is fine, right?" Leon asked, leaning forward. "Even if we mess around with it?"

  "Yes, everything produced by the medbay exists permanently," Maxwell responded.

  "Why? Do you have an idea?" I asked curiously.

  "Yeah, sodium chloride tablets," he responded easily. "I honestly don't know if the medbay produces them, but they do exist. You could find them in most hospitals or pharmacies."

  "Sodium ch- Table salt? In a tablet?" I asked, a bit confused. "Thats a thing?"

  "Yeah, they exist," Leon confirmed with a nod. "But I'm not sure what the chances are that the medbay has it. Unless the issue was acute, most doctors would suggest oral rehydration salts, which is a mix of things that is definitely not table salt."

  "We can check later," I said, leaning back in my seat. "I… do think you might be right, though, Joseph. I was treating it as some grand moment, but a gift of alcohol and food would likely be just as welcome…"

  I chewed on my lip for a moment, trying to work through the possibilities. After a few seconds, I nodded, leaning forward.

  "Alright, here is the plan," I said with a look around. "Today we send over a box full of booze as the days transfer, and tomorrow we can send over food, or anything else we think of that might be interesting. If we are feeling that isn't enough, we can come up with some other things."

  "Wouldn't armor be something they would like?" John suggested, but I shook my head.

  "Horizon is strange. Yes, they are tribals, but they have access to advanced robots, made from advanced alloys. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the armor they make from their parts is vastly superior to what we have."

  "Then that probably excludes things like knives as well," Joseph pointed out with a frown. "If they can yank some sort of crazy knife out of a random robot's mouth, then trading them some prewar combat knife isn't going to mean much."

  "We can keep an eye out for things when we go to Megaton, but at least we have a solid start," I said with a nod. "Food and booze, and maybe salt. Or whatever other baubles we find while we are away."

  We finished our breakfast and once again broke up into groups, with my group heading off to Megaton. We were hoping to make the whole trip in a day, rather than spending the night in the town. To make that possible, we only took our medical supplies, spreading them out between all of us so we could set a much faster pace than the first time. Between the sun rejuvenating us and the lighter load, we made good time towards the scrap-metal town.

  As promised, Dr. Berken eagerly purchased the supplies, though he couldn't pay nearly as much as he did for the medication. Still, around seven hundred and fifty caps wasn't bad, it just seemed low since we had done so well previously.

  When we were done with our business, we walked through the market district, doing some shopping. While we did, we spent about a hundred caps on a few things that the Oakanrest people might find interesting. After that, it was time to head home. We ended up cutting it pretty close to the setting sun, the night engulfing the wasteland not long after we arrived back at the HQ. We were tired, hungry, and eager to take shelter in the safety of our familiar home.