A few days after the Raid on the Buchenwald, Grunt has been finally let alone to pursue his own endeavors.  The laptop has been returned to Smoker and the data painstakingly copied into a proper sandbox.  Then the laptop was shot out of a cannon and blasted by essence cannons for good measure.

So, in essence, Grunt is free.  However he has a video call as soon as he wakes up from some well-deserved sleep.  It's his friend in Pandora Bay, Peter Renkden, nowadays just a minor-league physicist slaving away at power converters.

"Hey Grunt," His face appears haggard and bereft of sleep, "I'm in need of a guinea pig.  Sorry if that sounds blunt.  But I figured you'd appreciate the chance to step into some of that old-school scifi armor, you know, big walkers with a guy in the cockpit?  I finished the power source and thought of you.  Gimme a call if you want in on the ground floor.  Night man."

With friends like Grunt's...

Ah well. He needed something no one would mind being damaged to shake the rust off. Burning Feather's last cocktail had largely obliterated most of thirty six hours from memory. Something about a dog - maybe a pug? - barking in time to a song nagged for a moment.

The odds of Peter being asleep were nil. Still, easiest to just show up in person. Less time for hiding whatever was likely to go wrong before the guinea pig arrived.

So Grunt cleaned up slightly, mostly just cleaner clothes and some water splashed on his face, before heading for the tiny, rickety spot in engineering Renkden had laid claim to.

The time spent to get to Pandora Bay is long enough to work out the mental cobwebs.  Not like there are many left, in that regard- Burning Feather's drink was probably part acid and ate away the cobwebs and left behind their shadows like bodies caught in the blast of a nuclear airburst.

Renkden's private workshop is the worst of the worst, a dingy metal room that was once used to store the waste of the old nuclear reactors.  Geiger counters left in the room would be reduced to a sentient whimpering mess.  Renkden's hair has long fallen out but cancer is much less of an issue with Sanctuary's modern medicine.

"Oh, uh, hey,"  Renkden says as Grunt arrives, staggering under the weight of a glowing blue and green orb with numerous hoses sprouting from it like a dead octopus.  "You could've given me a call?"

"And you would have tried to clean up the mess that told the story of what this project's stumbling block is," Grunt agreed as he helped the radiation poisoned mortal with the object, "Resulting in extra surprises and work for both of us."