Chapter 117 - Broken But Fixable

After the talk with Jeannie Karl and Afton were finally able to rent a room. They even got a discount due to the heavy praise Karl was laying on the woman... He didn't think the old man was still in the "romance" game, but apparently not.

The next day Afton stepped outside of his motel room, it was placed on the second floor and overlooked the opposite houses next to the huge green dinosaur. People were already up and about, milling around to attend to their respective duties.​​

Having nothing better to do he immediately headed for Ada Straus's tent to make sure she wasn't treating anyone. Fortunately, it seems that no one had needed her services so early in the morning.

"Ah, partner, how're you doing!" she says with a stupid smile on her face.

"You remember what I said yesterday right?"

She nods, "Your the doc and I'm the pretty nurse... Until you leave at least."

He raises a brow at the weird way she'd put it but shakes his head, "Alright, I've got other things I need to do so just call me if someone turns up." he says, giving a small wave before leaving.

The trader Karl had spoken to yesterday had already left, he woulda wanted to buy some extra stuff to help him with this experiment he wanted to try out, but it's too late for that now, isn't it. Instead he headed behind the motel, between the back of the motel and some residential buildings were the ruined remains of a variety of vehicles.

A few cars, trucks, and motorbikes greeted his eyes as he walked over and examined them. They were strange to say the least looking old fashioned yet futuristic... Obviously, he was basing his judgment on his old world's aesthetic. Due to the pre-war fuel crises most petrol engines were scrapped and replaced with reactor cores, these were usually bulkier than a regular engine but didn't need to be refuelled, nor maintained.

The only negatives to having them were the fact that if the casing of the reactor was cracked, and the safety's failed it'd go up like a nuclear explosive. This ended up adding extra bulk to the vehicles due to the extra protection giving to the reactor, the government couldn't very well have nuclear blasts going off whenever there was a car crash, could they?

Afton walked up and examined a ruined car, someone seemed to have scavenged bits and pieces from it, but the reactor core was all there... Many spiderweb-like cracks could be seen littering it, it wasn't breached, but if he started messing around with it he might just irradiate the whole of Novac.

Regardless, it wasn't the car that interested him right now. He turned his attention towards the nearby motorbike. It was a relatively long vehicle with dirty grey metal covering it. Its tires were completely deflated and seem to have been slightly melted, whether it was from the sun or something else was anyone's guess.

Its lights were all smashed in and the bulbs stolen, wing mirrors were missing and the reactor core was heavily damaged... Like, a few good strikes away from completely cracking the casing. This wasn't really a problem though, if what he was trying to do would work, everything would work out fine in the end.

He glances over to the nearby car and intones in his mind, "Jury Rigging".

*Ping*

[Jury Rigging is in effect]

As soon as the notification pops up he spots something peculiar... The car's reactor core looked to be... Melting? No, that wasn't right. It seemed to be changing shape... Afton wasn't sure if he should let the phenomenon continue or not, the Perk seemed to be causing this so he'd let it go for a while longer to see what it was doing.

After a couple minutes the melting reactor core had finally finished it transformation... It'd shrunk and become almost identically similar to the motorbike's engine... The only difference being that it seemed brand new

Did [Jury Rigging] just create a brand new engine for the motorbike? That's fucking overpowered! Quickly he examined it all over to check if it was suitable, and found that it did indeed look brand factory new.

Afton didn't waste any time and quickly pulled out his tools from his Deathclaw leather satchel, going over to remove the damaged engine from the bike to allow room for the new one. His tools weren't really suited to mechanics, but his high skill level in Repair almost made him able to do it with his bare hands.

After a couple minutes, he dumps the damaged reactor on the floor and lifted the other into its place, connecting all the wires, tubes, and other necessary things together before taking a step back.

He nods to himself, "Nice. This still isn't close to being usable though." in his old world engine fans helped cool the engine... But here and now where the engine was literally a nuclear reactor, the cooling fans were way more advanced. This, in addition to the engines, made it terribly difficult to fix vehicles. Most were irreparably damaged due to the great war, and even if that hadn't destroyed them all, time would've dealt the final blow.

This wasn't a problem for Afton anymore though! Again he finds a car wreckage and uses [Jury Rigging] to collect the brand new part that'd appeared, using these parts to slowly repair the motorbike.

In the end, he had only managed to repair thirty percent of it before the day was done. He was rather unfamiliar with vehicle repair so connective all the vital systems together, even with brand new parts proved to be incredibly difficult. He knew the theory, but lacked the experience to quickly pull it off...

What Afton didn't know was that it'd usually take a professional mechanic a week to fully repair a vehicle in the same manner he had. His [Mechanicus] Perk had allowed some of the stray wiring to sliver towards each other and connect on their own, momentarily confusion the teen before he saw spotted the notification.

[Mechanicus is in effect]