Xander looked out of the window of the RobCo facility and sighed at the Wasteland he had grown so used to. How has humanity continued on for over two hundred years, after the devastating strength of the combination that is human greed and atomic fission? For whatever reason, he was thankful for his kind's persistence. Without it, where would he be?

He turned back to the factory and walked over to the shelf closest the hallway door. It was mostly scrap metal. "How much more of these do we need?" He muttered, and shoved all the metal carelessly to the floor. He heard a thud that sounded slightly different than the rest. He looked down and saw a fission battery resting atop the pile of metal. "Heavy, but worth a decent amount of caps." He said as he grabbed it.

He walked out into the hallway and carelessly shouted to his partner. "Hey, Deke! Got any room for a fission battery in that sack of yours?" If there were any hostile bots left, they wouldn't be too much of an issue.

Scrap metal, microfusion cells, robot parts, and lots and lots of sensor modules. These RobCo factories sure were a damn good find when one had the firepower to get past the robots. A few months ago, Deke would never have been able to get this far inside without losing a lot of blood or having a hole burned in his chest.

This was now, though, and right now he was partnered up with a honest to God Brotherhood Scribe. That had bumped up his profit margins. The wastelander took a drag on his smoke as he tossed a sensor into his Loot Sack, his head turning to his partner's cry.

"Got plenty of room! Those batteries sell real well! Think we can do anything' with that protection in the recharge station?"

"Protectron?" He asked as he entered the room in which both Deke and the aforementioned protectron occupied. "Oh, that one. Let me take a look at it."" He said, handing the battery to Deke without a glance. He popped the rear off the bot with is and played with the wiring for probably less than a minute before the machine suddenly jumped to life. He threw the hatch back on before it started to walk at a snails pace around the facility.

"Perform a security sweep of the facility." Xander ordered.

"Command acknowledged. Initiating facility patrol protocol." It replied, and slowly walked out of the room

"Ha! Great! Now that's a smaller chance of anything sneaking up behind us. And, time permitting, I can deactivate it once more and pull its battery, and maybe even its ammo. Heck, if Im lucky, I could get some parts to repair a laser gun out of it." He turned to Deke and pulled out a Nuka Cola, making it clear he was taking a break for now. He popped the cap off of it and tossed it to his partner as well.

Deke caught the offered drink deftly, spitting the smoke onto the floor and taking a swig. It was piss warm, buy nuka was still a damn fine drink. He turned back to his partner with a bit of a frown.

"Scrap it for parts? Shit, I was thinkin' take it with us an' sell it. Maybe that sheriff down in Atlanta." Deke really didn't know if Xander was up to that job, but the kid was good to robots. Plus these days he had to think in terms of big profit. Times were toughz even for the wasteland, and a man needed all the caps he could get. "Y'know, when I look at my 12 gauge an' your gauss rifle, feel a lil' fuckin' inadequate."

"Do you know how slowly these things walk? It'd take us days to get back, let alone take it all the way to Atlanta." Xander replied, trying to point out efficiency issues with his plan. "So unless you have a working car or a Vertibird or something, the only way we're getting any worth out of that thing is removing the usable parts."

When he finished explaining this to his friend, he sat down at the computer terminal and hacked it with ease. He pulled up a file that explained how to remove the portion of the laser part of the arm of a protectron, and leave the entire thing intact. All it would need is the outer body of a laser rifle. "Hey, I'm going to download a file. Could help us make quite a few more caps if I slightly change it and turn it into a schematic." He stuck his memory drive into the terminal and began the transfer.

Xander tuned in his swivel chair to say something, when suddenly a gatling laser was heard down the hall, followed by a loud clang that sounded like a robot hitting the ground. "... I think something just destroyed our protectron."

Deke swore violently as he heard the shots, immediately reaching for his shotgun. He knew that sound, heard it more than a few times in his life. Once in Monroeville, after those Brotherhood types were making their way out of The Pitt. Again when he ran into a sentrybot in a military bunker. He was guessing a sentrybot here.

"Well shit. Too much to hope for an easy scav job?" He grumbled as he tightened his grip on his weapon. "Take it you got an idea of what to do here?"

Xander peeked out of the room they were in, seeing nothing. "Only one thing we can do- kill it. We can do a simple flanking technique. I'll jump into the room opposite this one and shoot him with my Gauss rifle. Plan A is that we hope I nail it in a spot that'll knock it over, then we can take it out easily once it's off its wheels. Plan B is, if I don't knock it over, to bring it into my room, then you come out of this room and blast a hole through its control panel with that shotgun of yours." Xander explained. It wasn't the perfect plan, but it'd have to do. "Sound good? Good. Let's go." He said without waiting for a reply. He peeked out again, and the sentry bot was just turning to come down this hall. Before it fully turned to shoot him, he dove into the doorway across from the one he was in and hopped back to his feet. "Here we go!" He turned around the corner, lined up a shot, and fired, nailing the machine in ts gatling laser arm and throwin off its aim as it shot laser past his head. He ducked back behind cover. "Oh boy..."