Standing in front of the dilapidated building, Andy couldn't help but sigh at the crumbling pieces of concrete.

Colonel Green told him that one of the several ghouls living in the dilapidated building was the oldest on the reservation, and that it was generally difficult for the old man to survive the ravages of ghouls, but there was one exception.

This is an old lady who likes to chat and gossip, and perhaps "old" is difficult to describe her.

She knew a lot of things, more than most of the ordinary members of the reservation, and even knew more about what was going on inside the temple than Colonel Greene, because she had witnessed everything that was going on inside and outside the reservation, or even if she hadn't seen her in person, she was sure to have gotten the information she wanted from some people, making her an important source of information.

Cautiously walking into the ruins of a crumbling office building, Pip-Boy meets the first ghoul to inhabit the area, guided by the mapping function of Pip-Boy.

It was an old fellow covered in dust, and his face was as ugly as if he had been punched.

"Hello..."

Andy walked over, and the red-colored ghoul woke up from his curled up state and looked up at him, his eyes were empty, as if he had no thoughts or emotions, and he felt that he was left here as a soulless body.

"Where's Florence?"

The ghoul's mouth opened slightly, revealing a row of bad teeth.

"Florence.... That shitty bitch... It's time to feed her...."

He let out some foul-smelling murmurs, then turned and walked into the shadows and disappeared.

Helpless, Andy continued to walk inside, and then met two more ghouls, one was covered in bandages, and after meeting Andy, he only knew that he could not communicate by roaring, and the other was naked and exposed with withered and shriveled folded skin, and when Andy came to him, he just looked at him coldly, and did not make any sound from beginning to end.

Depressed and continue to walk inside, the degree of collapse of the building is getting more and more serious, it is hard to imagine what it is like to live here for many years, and live here alone, I don't know what the ghoul will think, but if it is a human, this kind of solitary person in the wasteland is most likely a dangerous madman, and anyone who comes close will be attacked by them.

"Florence!"

Andy shouted into the darkness.

"I'm looking for you something, are you here?"

The voice echoed, but there was no response.

Just when Andy was thinking about where to find her next, a slight noise caught his attention, and when he turned his head, he saw a very short ghoul standing in the corner, about 1.4 meters tall, with long hair like withered grass hanging directly to the ground, and his body was very thin, his skin was gray, and his eyes were blue-white, staring at Andy without blinking.

"Who the are you? What the are you looking for me? ”

The short ghoul made a weak voice, and the strange thing was that her skin was relatively smooth, if Andy didn't know that she was an old lady who was super old, he might have mistaken her for a little girl just by judging by the naked eye, of course, it was the ghost version of the little girl in the horror movie.... What is this, is it too old to rejuvenate?

The unqualified speech made Andy stunned for a moment.

According to what I learned from Colonel Green, most of the talented people in the reservation were absorbed by Dr. Clark into the Children of the Wasteland to participate in the research projects in those temples, and those who had no talent but had a sincere faith also had the opportunity to become a protector after the screening test, that is, those in the Children of the Wasteland who were armed with guns and wore green robes, and they were the armed group organized by Dr. Clark to target Colonel Green's guard.

Of course, Colonel Green scoffed at their combat effectiveness, whether it was training methods, weapons or equipment, or overall numbers, these protectors were not as strong as Colonel Green's men, which was why the Children of the Wasteland did not dare to act for the time being.

Ghouls who have no talents, lack faith in Dr. Clark, or fail to pass the screening are judged by the Children of the Wasteland to be ' There is no use', such ghouls are also allowed to live in the reservation, but they do not have the opportunity to enter the temple except when they are fulfilling the breeding agreement, let alone get any weapons or jobs, and their only place is the harsh surface shanty towns, where they have to build their own huts and find their own food and a way to relieve their boredom.

Objectively, these ghouls were abandoned.

Colonel Green had to pinch his nose to help Dr. Clark deal with the drag, and although the reservation did not dissuade them, he did not take them as a part either, he could only let the soldiers maintain basic order here, occasionally handing out scarce relief food and absorbing some of the worthwhile ghouls into his own guard, this life was so far from life in the temple that it was no wonder that his heart was filled with negative feelings against Dr. Clark.

And the four ghouls in front of me, including Florence, are the ones who can't even stay in the shantytown, and they are all widely disgusted because of their various personality habits, not only useless guys, but also annoying useless guys, and it is precisely because of this that there is no place for them in the shantytown, and they have to run to live in abandoned office buildings.

Florence, the oldest ghoul on the reservation, a grumpy and obedient old lady who loves to chew her tongue....

"Ahem..."

Andy decided to ignore the low quality in her words.

"Colonel Green asked me to come to you."

Florence blinked, held up a piece of meat in her hand and stuffed it into her mouth to chew, a strange glowing liquid flowing from the corner of her mouth, the piece of meat in her hand took on a strange honeycomb texture, and glowed purple and green.

"Little Green.... What's the matter with him? ”

Andy struggled to take his eyes off that strange piece of meat.

"Colonel Green recently suspected that Dr. Clark was doing something not very good, so please let me help him investigate, and he said that you are the one who knows the most about all kinds of things on the reservation, so I came to talk to you."

Florence barely tore off a piece of flesh with her crumbling few remaining teeth, then casually threw it onto a nearby pile of rubble.

"That kid let a disgusting slippery skin come to me? Ha ha... I guess he's still angry at me for telling him about his crazy party in his tent 30 years ago, you're not here to trouble me, are you? I'm telling you, old Florence is not something to be messed with! Fucking mom is going to punch you in the head and get you back to the beginning of your life! Come on! Come on! ”

She raised her withered arms and made a few movements, like a child's favorite windmill punch in a fight.

Andy looked at the old guy in front of him a little speechless, no wonder she couldn't stay in the shantytown.... Random talk, foul mouth, temper tantrum...

"I'm serious, Florence, I can help you, or I can also teach you a little lesson first, as you said..."

He picked up an ancient piece of concrete in front of Florence, slowly crushed it in his hand, and then scattered the dust at Florence's feet with his backhand, which made her give up her windmill fist and stand stunned and silent.

"Very good, it seems that we have reached a preliminary consensus.... One thing I'm a little curious about is, how old are you? ”

Florence stared at the dust beneath her feet, twitched the corners of her mouth, then looked up and answered Andy in a very humble tone.

"244 years old... Or 245 years old, I don't remember specifically, because I was already an old fool before those bombs fell... I was a cleaner and gatekeeper at Los Alamos, and I was cleaning the dorm room in Level 1 that day, and there happened to be a toilet bowl that had been poured out of the toilet, and no matter how I tried to clean it, I couldn't clean it, and then I kept trying to do my job there, until someone came and told me what was going on and I knew I couldn't listen to my favorite radio station anymore..."

"After that, everyone was in despair, but I didn't care, I didn't have a few days to live anyway... But then the radiation leaked out from above, my skin, my nose, my teeth, my hair... Everything was falling off, and I saw other people who had this kind of thing happen to me so scared that they cried and even shot themselves, but I still didn't care, I just found a place to lie down, and the dead skin and rotten flesh that fell didn't cause me any discomfort, I just felt like I was undressing... Then they grew some more, and I think it's much better than what I used to have. ”

Andy looked at the unremarkable ghoul in front of him, the era in which she lived and grew up was an ancient age even before the Great War, looking for her statement, she was almost 70 years old when the nuclear bomb fell, and she was still working at such an age and happened to have escaped the nuclear explosion, and completed the transformation of the ghoul very smoothly, a series of coincidences are simply a miracle.

Of course, this old guy means nothing to Dr. Clark, she doesn't have the strength to fight and barely knows a single word, she's just a cleaner old lady who survived...

"What are you doing every day now?"

Florence casually pointed to the tattered garbage around her.

"I wander around the whole reservation, picking up pieces and scrapped knick-knacks, and sometimes I get something interesting, like this piece of meat..."

She picked up the piece of meat she had nibbled on.

"I picked it up in a pit, it tastes very good, like beef jerky, do you want to try it?"

Andy took the piece of meat and looked it up and down, fully doubting if it was left by aliens, and after depositing it in the Pip-Boy to check it out, he got the answer.

Returning it to Florence, she asks Andy in surprise how he managed to make her baby disappear and come back again, and Andy tells him that he can do magic, which provokes Florence to applaud and ask him to perform it again.

"Let's get back to business... Florence, I would like to ask you some questions. ”

Florence smiled confidently.

"My favorite thing to do is sneak into places where they don't let anyone in, the guards and the locks don't matter to me, I'm the best at sneaking under their noses and opening those closed doors, so I do know a lot of interesting news that no one else knows, do you want to know that?"

Andy nodded.

"There's... Crazy guys, right? I'm talking about the kind of people who have completely broken down their minds, but now they can't be found in the reservation, where are they? ”

Florence was struggling to tear the piece of ionized meat, and Andy, who couldn't stand it, snatched the meat and cut it into pieces with a military dagger and threw it back into Florence's hands.

"Oh... Thanks, it's hard to find something to eat, I can't even remember the last time I ate real food. ”

She gulped down the strange pieces of flesh that were covered in radiation, not caring if the things that still glowed to this day belonged to some hapless ghost who had been covered in the terrifying energy of the nuclear bomb.

"The kind of people you are talking about do exist, and there are actually quite a few of them, and many of them still have intact sanity at first after becoming like me, but after a few years, they gradually start to feel wrong, they start to lose their memory and lose control of their emotions, sometimes they start to roar like beasts while talking, as if they are suffering from Alzheimer's disease or mental illness, and one of my friends one day began to run outside alone day by day, and finally did not respond to other people's words at all, and at that time I thought he was dead, Although the flesh is still alive. ”

Andy listened carefully, it turned out that the process of the ghoul went crazy like this.

"What do you think is the catalyst for this change? You haven't been like that yet, have you? ”

Florence scratched at her hair, which was almost longer than herself.

"I think there are many reasons, first of all, some people are more likely to become like that, I don't understand why, it may be the difference in talent, when I see a person who is slow and slow-thinking, I know that it will not be long before he loses himself... In addition to this, there is also a very important point is the environment, those who live alone without talking to others have a very high probability of going crazy after a while, and those who have been sentenced to endless banishment can also reflect this, I have seen those endless walkers, they no longer have any reason in their heads. ”

Andy thinks back to the three ghouls he had encountered, and according to Florence, they were probably not far from becoming mad ghouls.

Not communicating with others for a long time, living alone in a harsh environment, will undoubtedly increase the speed of mental collapse, and eventually lead to the degeneration of the mind, turning the ghoul into a living corpse with only the desire to attack.

"What happened to those who went crazy? Will they attack you? ”

Florence gave an exaggerated expression, and it seemed that she was enjoying telling others about these old things.

"In the old reservation, the madmen were running around, and they were so stupid that they either squatted or lay in one place all day and didn't move, or they ran after some cockroaches, and when they caught up, they tore the bugs apart and ate them all with the dirt. Can you believe it? William Clark actually asked his scientists to do an experiment, they caught a few crazy people and tried to re-instill knowledge in them from 0 like teaching children to make them sanity again, but these experiments finally came to a ridiculous conclusion after more than ten years: those who went crazy did not have any possibility to relearn any reason, they were not even as good as a puppy, a dog can do a lot of things after being fully trained, but the final training result of a madman is... Able to distinguish between forks and spoons, as well as distinguish several colors. ”

"They did a lot of things like that, like injecting strange liquids into the maniac's head, making the head look like a giant balloon, or injecting a large amount of glowing blood from their body into a maniac's body, and the blood almost turned him into a glowing light bulb, but these experiments were useless, the maniac's head was completely broken, and no one could save them."

"Later... About 50 years ago, the Wasteland Sons began to hunt down those madmen, and it was not an easy thing to do, and although those madmen were usually safe with us, once we tried to do something about them, their reaction was very violent, and if we hurt them, even we would be countered by them... But in the end, they were all taken away, and there was no need for violence, just some traps that could control them and easily deal with them. ”

Andy's reaction after learning about the contact between the ghoul and the mad ghoul for the first time turns out to be like this.

"Then why do you think they did it?"

Florence pointed at Andy.

"Of course, it's for you slippery skins, you don't know, do you? The crazy guys will jump to their feet as if you were being stuffed with dynamite in your ass, and they'll run at you with a roar and desperately try to tear you apart. Think about it, if we can't get these guys out before we open up for trade, then you slippery skins who come to do business will become a door-to-door dish, and they won't hesitate to tear you apart. ”

Andy thought about it, this is also true, so the reservation to clean up the ghouls is to prepare for the opening of trade in the future.

"And where are they going to lock up those who are going crazy?"

Florence mysteriously lowered her voice, though there was no one else here.

"I saw, I saw once, there was a big secret room in Level 1, and through the glass window I saw the crazy guys down there huddled together like sardines in a can, each wearing a kind of restraint suit that looked like a psycho, and wearing the same collar around his neck as a sinner sentenced to endless banishment, you can't imagine... When I turned on the light that day, they turned to look at my face, and they had no soul in their flesh, only a terrible rage..."