Community:Fanfiction/Camilla at Sea

Camilla at Sea is a work in progress fanfiction by RurinGas.

Background
This story is a prequel to Camilla on Ice, set 16 years prior, and before Camilla first arrived in Appalachia.

Prologue - Back To The Beginning
The story has already been told. We know what caused Camilla, head of a thriving Raider gang, to lose her status and awaken over a hundred years later in the Late-23rd century. But what if I told you this was just one adventure in a lifetime of thrills and spills? Indeed, the story involving her journey to Vault 113 in 2110 and at age 35 is possibly one of the most notable misadventures she's had. However, what if we wound the clock backwards some years? No, not to the time of Appalachia's settling in 2102 to 2104 where she first entered the region along with former members of the Diehards, but to before even that...

To the year 2094...

Chapter 1 - Landlocked
Camilla rolled off her bed onto the ground, giving an audible "oof" and groaning as the impact almost knocked the wind out of her. Eyes half open, and hair amess, the 19 year old Camilla pushed herself up off the ground, and sat on the edge of her bed. She checked the alarm clock on what could generously be called her bedside table. Yep, unsurprisingly, the clock had not miraculously fixed itself overnight, same as the past 17 years since the bombs ceased its operation. It still read around 2:05, just as it did the day the bombs fell. Camilla was just a toddler when that all happened, but like the rest of the wasteland, she had not escaped it's consequences. She slugged herself out of her bed and tiredly shuffled out of her house. Though, calling it a "House" was quite liberal. Chateau Camilla was far more of a metal awning than it was a building, no bigger than a bathroom in most pre-war buildings, and lacking any kind of wall save for the ruins of some pre-war structure that served effectively as one. The 'wall' was decorated with a single tattered poster that Camilla had smuggled out of the latest salvaging gig she had got, it was an illustration of a picturesque seaside village, a bright blue sky and a small alley of old looking houses, at the end of which stood the open arms of the sea.

"Wakey Wakey, layabout!" came a shrill voice. Camilla looked up and saw a man arriving at her shack on mechanical horseback, a man she was all to familiar with, and loathed seeing. Joseph, her boss. The man was slightly rotund, puffy in face and dressed in a slate grey suit of some Italian cut that was clearly not tailored for him. His limp and withered string tie did not do his look any favours, as he excluded a particular sense of bloated pompousness; the kind you only develop if you're born with more power than sense, and take no measure to humble or relate yourself to anyone with even so much as a penny less than you. Camilla stared at him, scowling. She did not want to address him any more than she had to, though she knew that simply ignoring the pompous prick would cause more problems than she cared for, the least of which being that bruising his ego would likely send him off on an ear-blistering tirade about his own grandeur to try and reinflate it.

"Good." puffed Joseph, sensing the hostility but revelling slightly in the kind of immunity his power gives him. "You're joining Team G for today, you're starting in about 30 minutes, best hurry up" he pompously instructed, peering down his undersized glasses at Camilla. This was Camilla's job, the one she'd been effectively born into. Joseph ran the Louis Family Salvage Operation, a position he'd inherited from his father, who had died over 2 years ago but was no less of a bourgeois caricature. Camilla's job, much like the job of everyone else living within the 15 miles of territory that the Salvage Operation owned, was to comb the ruins of the nearby towns and cities for either anything of note, or whatever was on the quota for that day. This day however, there was no quota, so she just had to pick up roughly anything of note. As she arrived at what was she assumed was at some point a town square, she saw Site G had been set up.

Inspired by pre-war archaeological practises, an area had been cordoned off with an border of fraying twine, about 300 meters long and 300 meters wide. Camilla and 19 other people comprised Team G, each member of which would cover a 1 meter column of this space and slowly progress up it, picking through the scraps and ruin as they went. After each person completed their column, they would cycle right to the next column and scan that one, making sure the person previous had not missed anything. It was a thorough process that lasted dawn til dusk, leaving the scavengers' fingers bruised and bloody from digging through scrap concrete and shattered glass. Throughout the whole process, each group had a supervisor that watched over them, assuring that none of the team slacked off or stole away with any salvage.

At the end of the day, each worker was payed 50 shillings, a kind of scrip named after some ancient pre-war currency, and part of the grand prison each person within the Salvage Operation's territories was trapped inside of. Shillings could be spent inside of the Operation's territories, but had no value anywhere else. If anyone wanted to leave, they could, but would have to do so effectively penniless... As Camilla dug through her first column, the supervisor espoused the same usual phrases he always did; "Hard work is happy work", "A day of work, a lifetime of fulfilment", "Mr Louis Appreciates Your Efforts" and so forth... The same slogans that had long since devolved into white noise to the ears of any worker that overheard it.

Camilla's findings for the day were a few pieces of pre-war currency, and some rare fabrics. A pitiful find for one person for one day, but with every person in a 15 mile radius doing the same thing, Joseph was able to gain a years worth of salvage in just a couple days. And for no work on his part, as he sat in his mansion drinking gin and tonic. She stood in a line that felt like a mile long, hell it might have actually been a mile long, each and every member exuding a sense of fatigue and hopelessness... Even those small few that attempted to keep a positive demeanour had the vague aura of hopelessness plain to see behind their false smiles and fake laughs... When it came her turn; the supervisor took her scavengings, stared at them for a moment, then tossed them into a pile of the hundreds of other findings that had been presented by others before her, before he ushered her to move on.

Thus was Camilla's life, this same routine every day for the past 6 years ever since she had turned 13. She received her pay and skulked off to the pub, where she settled down for the night, drinking along with the other Salvage Operation's members. The pub was a pre-war structure, a rare intact structure amidst an ocean of wreckage, likely surviving by merit that it was recessed slightly underground, as the roof was clearly the most scorched area on the building. It became a regular routine among the workers to come up with new ways to insult Joseph, and even after so many years they had not failed even once to devise fresh and new barbs. It wasn't as if Joseph himself would ever visit the pub, in the years she had done this, he had not paid it so much as a cursory visit even once. The latest bout of barbs were particularly potent pieces, ones ill-advised to repeat in polite company, but ones that were enough to make the whole bar erupt in a cavalcade of laughter and giggles.

And, as the evening wound off into night, Camilla and the other workers wound up their jeering and drinking and decided to head home. Her closest friends lived at opposite ends of the Operation's territory, and so the group bid eachother a good tidings until tomorrow (or, about as well as they could, inebriated as they were) and disappeared off into the darkness of the night. For what little that Joseph actually provided them, his supervisors had ensured that the roads in his territory were safe, and surely that was something to be accredited thought Camilla, as she staggered down the ruined avenue back towards her home. It was not an especially long journey, roughly 15 minutes on a good day, so for Camilla in her current state, it would be about 30 minutes.

As Camilla returned home, she lazily slammed down her day's earnings on her quote-unquote bedside table and flopped aggressively onto her bed. As a sharp wind blew through her wall-less house and fluttered her moth-eaten bedsheets, threatening to blow them away were it not for Camilla's own weight holding them firmly to her bed. She imagined all her friends were repeating very much the same routine at their own respective homes. And as her addled mind drifted from consciousness, she wondered if this would ever change. If like her parents she would be stuck in this bottomless well of servitude until she died. It has been almost 4 years now since they died. She hadn't been present at the time, it was during a workday and she was assigned to a different scavenging group back then due to her inexperience... According to the Operation Occurrences newsletter, the closest thing to a newspaper the Operation's territories had, a massive collapse of a Pre-War structure that Team K was scavenging inside of caused all hands to be lost, with the exception of their supervisor. It wasn't like she ever had time to mourn, work marched on, even the fallen rubble that crushed her parents bodies was made just another site for a new Team K, and it quickly became yesterday's news. Filed away along with the multitudes of other scavenging accidents, and forgotten...

Tomorrow, maybe, was another day...