How the Water Baron of Dry Basin Lost Every Loyal Settlement in One Poisoned Season | Fallout

There is a kind of thirst that changes what a person is. I do not mean the kind you feel walking a long stretch between towns, the kind a canteen fixes. I mean the deep kind, the kind that gets into a place and stays there, the kind that turns a man's whole life into a straight line pointing at whatever wet thing he can reach. I have seen that thirst do things to people. I have used that thirst to build everything I ever built. And I am going to tell you how I lost all of it in the space of one season, because I think somebody ought to hear it said plain by the man who caused it, instead of hearing it the way the Basin tells it now, which is not plain, and which does not use my name kindly.

They called me the Water Baron of Dry Basin. Some of them called me that with a laugh in it, back at the start, the way you'd nickname a man who'd gotten above himself. Later they said it a different way. And later than that they stopped saying it at all, which is worse than either, and I will get to why.

Dry Basin is not a name somebody made up to be dramatic. It is a description.