Today in the CBO
Settlements Today
by Nat Wright-Kowalski
28 July 2296 - Starlight Drive-In
Each Tuesday for the upcoming weeks through the playoffs, we will feature one of the settlements, teams, and owners of the Commonwealth Baseball Organization. This is meant to tell you more about life in the Commonwealth, as well as give you more information about the teams and their owners.
In our fifteenth installment of "Settlements Today," I visited the settlement with the best entertainment feature, Starlight Drive-In, the settlement with a movie screen as its left field wall for its baseball stadium.
Starlight Drive-In, 2287. The view of this picture is now approximately the pitcher's mound of Valentine Detective Agency Field.
When Nate Howard first came across Starlight Drive-In, it was abandoned and inhabited by molerats. From the initial terminal information, "As the name implies, this location is a drive-in movie theater with a large three-story screen and a parking lot filled with the rusted hulls of destroyed cars. There are three major structures: the screen, the shack that houses the workshop, and the diner attached to the projector tower.
"In the middle of the lot is a large water-filled crater containing a number of extremely radioactive barrels; however, removing the barrels through the workshop will stop the severe radiation. Once this has been done, the area will no longer be radioactive, although the water will still cause radiation damage if consumed.
"The diner is booby trapped in two places; a booby trap on the door detonates when opened, avoided by entering from the second floor via the collapsed roof and disarming it. The other booby trap is an active bottlecap mine set in the left-hand window, which can prove lethal.
"The top of the screen is accessible by way of the stairs inside the screen, though there are armed land mines on the landings. A handful of locked rooms behind the screen contains useful supplies and building materials, and can also be used to shelter beds for settlers prior to constructing more centrally-located housing."
Nate easily dispatched the molerats and took control of the workbench at Starlight. He cleaned up the "pond" by removing the nuclear waste barrels and built a water purification system there. He put out a call to settlers with a radio frequency and got to work on exterior turret systems. Newcomers then started planting gardens to raise food. A settlement was begun.
In time, Nate returned to the settlement and helped the settlers there convert the old film house into the start of living quarters. From late 2286 until 2290, the settlement grew exponentially, with settlers fixing the movie projector and finding a few old movie reels. They also cleared out the parking space that eventually became Valentine Detective Agency Field, using the movie screen as its left field wall. Nate has plans to use the BosCom technology to make the left field wall a video and highlights screen.
Now, Starlight Drive-In has the largest building as a living area in all of the Commonwealth, bigger even than the Great Green Jewel was when it was old Diamond City. The building is called "The Compound" and settlers can watch baseball and movies from an elevated advantage. There are some field-level bleachers available also, but most settlers prefer to watch the game from their front "porch."
Starlight Drive-In, 2296 - "The Compound." Check out this awesome build at: https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/25519
Owner - Irish Cait
Cait, all Irish and stuff. How it possible to have an Irish accent in a post-apocalyptic Boston with no overseas travel? Who knows?
Cait has a long history. Based on the terminal entries about her, her past looks like this:
"Cait was born into a distant and abusive family of Irish descent in 2261, her parents would routinely beat and yell at her. She attempted to run away twice, the first time she did it, they locked her in a shed outside of the house they lived in. The second time, they broke one of her legs. Cait eventually became convinced she was a mistake, due to the constant abuse, but deluded herself into thinking that they loved her enough not to kick her out of the house. The illusion was shattered once her eighteenth birthday came: They had slapped a shock collar around her neck and sold her into slavery, all without a hint of regret.
"For the next five years, Cait was used as an entertainment slave, for a variety of purposes she refuses to detail. While it wrecked her emotionally and warped her personality, Cait developed significant resentment towards them and eventually learned some tricks of their trade. Stealing caps from sleeping men after they used her, she eventually managed to buy her freedom. With 23 years worth of pent-up fury, she tracked down her parents and gunned them down in bloody vengeance.
"After everything was said and done, Cait took to alcohol and chems to help forget her past. She joined the Combat Zone as a cage fighter and fought to provide her with the funds to buy everything she needed to forget. The point of the fighting wasn't just to provide her with funds, though. She hated everyone, herself the most, and the violence - and pain, and wounds, and the Psycho - were ways to punish herself and find death. Unfortunately, Cait proved too tough to beat, even when raiders took the joint over and it got decidedly more lethal. Those who didn't keep their head on a swivel were liable to be sucker-punched and robbed in the best of circumstances. Cait herself learned that, short of buying friends, she's a victim waiting to be preyed upon. The teacher of that vital lesson was a raider named Stratton, who dumped her to be beaten up by raiders the moment she stopped having sex with him.
"By the time the [Nate] comes, Cait has been a cage fighter for three years, two of them under raider management - all with a hundred victories to her name. As the Sole Survivor enters the Combat Zone and defeats the raiders, Tommy Lonegan offers [Nate] Cait's contract because of her self-destructive reliance on Psycho."
Nate helped Cait break that habit by finding old Vault-Tec technology in a Gunner hotspot, Vault 95. They then became friends and Cait helped Nate rid the Wasteland of all the Gunners and other raiders she could find, one angry bullet at a time.
Today, Cait relaxes in her own haven at Starlight Drive-In. Nate often comes to visit, so they reminisce on the good and not-so-good times. Nate will catch baseball games at the Drive-In whenever business or other responsibilities do not keep him away.
The Best Damn Detective Agency in the Commonwealth
Nick Valentine at his Valentine Detective Agency desk
Pre-war, Nick Valentine was a human detective for Boston. After the Eddie Winter fiasco, he agreed to a psychological study where he uploaded his consciousness and memories at the Commonwaelth Institute of Technology.
Post-war, he emerged as a synth prototype thanks to the Institute using the CIT's old technology.
According to the intranet, "An unusual robotic detective, Nick Valentine is the sole detective of a small agency he runs in Diamond City alongside his assistant Ellie Perkins. In addition to possessing the memories of a late pre-War detective, Nick has certain abilities that complement his investigative skills: he is very effective at hacking computers, and adept at both ranged and melee combat. Valentine believes himself to be a prototype between second-generation synths and the latest, which might explain why he exhibits sapient intelligence and is not innately hostile towards non-Institute humans. He is generally well respected throughout Diamond City despite his mysterious origins.
"Although Diamond City holds no small amount of hatred for the Institute and their synths, Nick gained their respect by saving the daughter of the city's former mayor, Henry Roberts, when she ran away with a caravan trader. The caravan trader and his companions were, unbeknownst to the girl, actually kidnappers who proceeded to take her hostage. Nick stumbled upon the kidnappers purely by accident when he was wandering the Commonwealth wasteland, having been almost exclusively itinerant since his "awakening." Finding himself held at gunpoint and likely the girl's only hope, Nick scared the abductors away by claiming that he had a bomb inside him and beeping (Nick claims that he literally just said the word "beep" repeatedly).
"When the Mayor's daughter told Nick what had happened, he returned her to her father, who in turn gave him a house in Diamond City as compensation despite the citizens' dismay and objections; Nick gradually eased the citizens' fears by acting as Diamond City's handyman. His formidable detective skills were brought to the forefront when he helped to find a wife who was thought dead: Nick discovered that she had in actuality run away with her lover. In time, people stopped asking Nick to fix things when it became clear that he had found his true calling as Diamond City's private investigator."
A Nick Valentine case file - coming soon to a dynasty near you!
The Valentine Detective Agency is highly successful. Nick and Ellie Perkins still run the joint, though the offices have moved out of the Great Green Jewel and into the new Diamond City, areas surrounding the baseball stadium. They stay busy and the cases of missing and dead people keep piling up.