Fallout: Lone Star State

[Pineapple]

Spoiler

Fallout: Lone Star State

V. Jance​

Cold air filled my lungs and my eyes snapped open to bright light and the smell of alcohol filled my nose. Before that there'd been nothing at all. I had a vague awareness that there had been something before that, but what it was eluded me.

I was naked but I wasn't cold. The room was warm under huge spot lights I couldn't see past. I was standing but I didn't remember getting there. I looked down to see olive skin over thin arms, flat belly and flat chest. Thighs a little flabby, but not too--

"Subject is revived successfully. Proceed with phase one testing."

The voice was masked, robotic sounding. It came from above me and sounded very clinical; devoid of emotion or feeling of any kind.

I turned around, looking for a door or a window or even a wall. The flood lights were washing everything out and my eyes hadn't quite adjusted.

There was a loud 'twack' noise and a blast of wind blew my hair back, the room got cold. I blinked and stared ahead for a moment before anything else really registered to me. I tried to move but my body wouldn't answer me, and then I started to fall forwards.

My vision rolled around and I saw my own headless body falling towards me before my head hit the ground with a sickening crunch of my teeth smashing together and then--

I took a sharp intake of breathe and fell forward onto my hands and knees. The floor was hard and the lights were bright and everything smelled like alcohol and... and my head was still attached? I reached up to feel my neck and there wasn't even a mark. What in the hell?

"Hello? What's going on?"

"Do you remember anything before this moment?" the same voice as before asked me, and I still couldn't figure out where it was coming from, other than from above.

"I think so? Something about a phase one test?" I asked up to the voice. I was still naked, still a little too flabby on the thighs. Still olive.

There was something itching at the corner of my mind but I couldn't quite grab onto it. I knew English, I knew I was speaking it. I knew things, but no real memor--

"Proceed with testing."

"What does that mean?" I asked towards the ceiling.

I heard a metallic clacking noise and a loud bang, then a flash of pain--

I opened my eyes to a brightly lit room that smelled like alcohol. I spun around in circles, it was the same room. "What's going on!?" I finally yelled as I lowered myself into a defensive position.

"Proceed with testing."

I laid flat on my stomach and tried to avoid whatever might come for me next. I felt like I was starting to figure it out--

A pain blossomed through my belly and I was in the air, the room was full of fire and--

My eyes snapped open and I started to shake.

"Proceed with testing."

Again, and again, and again.

It felt like days or years or months, I lost track of how many times that damn voice said 'Proceed with testing' and they found some new and creative way of killing me. Laser beams, fame throwers, electrocution, injections.

They used a saw one time, bled me to death another. Another time it was vivisection and another time I was dropped into a grinder.

The longest I'd spent alive was the nine months it took to die after being exposed to organic mercury, and that was the first time they'd given me clothes or food. A one-piece suit made out of some kind of synthetic fiber, blue with gold trim and a big '49' on the back of it.

I would have enjoyed at least that much, if I hadn't spend the next nine months going insane and dying. I didn't know how much actual time had passed, but for me it had only been, at most, two days. Well, two days plus the nine months of dying.

I didn't know how long I stayed dead each time, just that the moment of death lead directly into waking up, seamlessly. The smell of alcohol on the air and every injury I'd taken previously was gone, only memories remained.

Waking up after organic mercury poisoning was the most jarring. I took in the sights and smells and the sensation that my brain worked correctly for the first time in what felt like forever, but again I remembered. Maybe that was what they were trying to figure out?

Maybe they were trying to figure out if they could kill me in a way that would break continuity of consciousness. I'd never actually even seen them, they'd never actually interacted with me directly, just through remotely opened doors and food delivered through slots in the walls.

Maybe they were too cowardly to look me in the eye.

It was different this time, more than just not being brain damaged anymore. The lights were a little dimmer, the room a little dirtier. The voices never came and the door--

The door was open.

Naked or not, I needed to check this out. I stalked my way around the edge of the room that, now that I was alive for long enough to really appreciate it, was shaped a lot like a cinnamon roll, with rounded areas where the walls met the floor and ceiling. That probably made cleaning up my remains easier.

I was sure that there was a time in my life that thought would have been repulsive, but I couldn't remember anything before my first death.

Once through the doorway the corridor outside was more conventional; metal grating on the floor and pipes in the ceiling with more or less squared off walls. The floor was rusty and the pipes were corroded, but the lights were on, and I kept going the only direction I could, forward.

As I pushed further into... wherever it is that I was, it looked like there'd been some kind of fight. There was blood on the floor, the walls. No bodies, never bodies, but lots of dried blood. I caught sight of a knife with blood stains on the blade and I decided to pick it up; just in case.

I was sure I was a sight to behold if anyone was watching. Naked as the day I was born carrying a bloody knife through a poorly lit hallway. Some kind of escaped mental patient or a crazy slasher, that's what they'd think.

Above and ahead there was a sign set into the ceiling indicating that I was entering the residential area. To the right of the sign was a hydraulic door labeled 'storage' and so I pushed the button to the right of it and it retracted into the ceiling and floor.

Chittering sounds were my first clue that something was going to go very very badly very quickly. I raised the knife on instinct. A cockroach the size of a golden retriever lunged out at me and I slashed at it to limited effect.

I was thrown back against the wall as it pushed against me and I managed to jam the knife into its torso, or whatever the middle part of the body was on a giant roach. The attack made it scream and twist and the knife came out of my hand.

I threw a right handed punch and cut my hand open on the hard shell of the bug. The blow I took in return came from one of the legs and went right through my midsection and pinned me to the wall. I spit blood out onto the hard shell of the giant insect and then the mouthparts closed around my neck.

A moment later I felt nothing below the neck, and then--

I opened my eyes and fell onto my hands and knees. Alive again. I lost a fight with a giant roach. That was no fun. I instinctively rolled my head and my shoulders and was rewarded with the clicking and popping of joints.

I was naked, the lights were still dim, and the room was covered in even more dust. It didn't seem to matter what killed me or where, I'd still end up back in the same place when I came around.

The door was still open and I left through it, this time moving much faster, eager to get further than I had last time. Rusty floors and corroded pipes passed by at a brisk pace and I was back to the sign set into the ceiling in half the time it had taken me the last time.

The door to the right was open. In front of me the giant cockroach still had my knife stuck in it, but it was clearly very dead. My headless corpse was next to it, half eaten and very dried out. Half-eaten, desiccated husk of a human being. I didn't know how long it might take for a body to get into that state or what had fed on it, but it had to be more than a few minutes.

So it might have been instantaneous for me, but in reality I spent a long time dead before waking up each time. I pulled the knife out of the roach and wiped it off as best I could on the back of the bug's shell. It was still pretty gross.

I stepped across the hallway and into the storage room and the lights came on for me, must have been motion sensitive. Lockers were set into the right side of the room, shelves on the left. Footlockers lined the back wall, and there was a workbench in the middle.

The lockers were my first choice, and so I took the right side of the room. The latches were smooth despite the layer of dust and I popped the first one open. Paydirt, another one of those blue suits they'd given me before.

I pulled it out of the locker and held it against my front. It was sized properly for me, which felt like it should have been rare, but I couldn't exactly remember why. I shook the thought out of my head and pulled it on.

The fit was snug, like I imagined it was supposed to be, but at least I wasn't naked. I slid the blade of the knife into the belt around my waist and stretched my limbs out, letting the material settle in properly to take out all the wrinkles.

No longer naked, I felt a little more comfortable and a lot more warm. I opened the next few lockers to find more jumpsuits like the one I was wearing, in all there were probably about sixty of them.

The foot lockers were locked, but they were shitty locks and thin metal. I jammed the blade of my combat knife against the latch and worked it back and forth until the rivets broke and then flipped the flimsy lid open.

On the right side of the foot locker was a row of Colt automatic pistols sitting in a rack, on the left side a few dozen loaded magazines. I didn't know why I knew what they were, but I did. I also knew I wanted one.

I pulled the pistol out of the footlocker by the grip and grabbed a magazine to slide into the bottom of it. With one fluid motion I racked the slide and then slid it into my belt. Next, I grabbed as many magazines as I could carry and slid them into my belt on the opposite side.

I moved to the next foot locker and pried it open like I'd done the first one. This one wasn't full of guns, this one had what looked like some kind of protective vest. Armor. I could use armor. I pulled a few of the vests out and under them found a holster with pouches for spare magazines.

It would have been convenient to find that before I'd stretched out my belt with a bunch of stuff jammed into it, but it didn't take long to transfer everything over and clip it around my waist.

The body armor went a lot further down my body than I thought it would, it was almost a dress but it covered the important parts and wasn't terribly loose, even though it was a bit long, after I tightened up all the straps as tight as they would go.

I left the remaining footlockers locked and found a row of helmets on the shelf. The smallest was still a little big, but nothing I couldn't deal with. I was protected, so any more of those roaches would have a hard time taking me out.

I stepped back out into the hallway and turned towards the residential zone. The lights were flickering worse than they had been last time, and that probably wasn't a good sign. The hallway eventually emptied out into a large atrium with a few stair cases leading to an upper level, with a large circular window overlooking it.

I pulled the pistol out and moved slowly through the huge open room, there were blood stains all over it, pockmarks in the walls too. I didn't know what happened, but after having my head bitten off by a giant cockroach I figured that caution was the order of the day.

I was half way to the staircase at the far side of the atrium when I heard the first skittering, I was two thirds of the way there before I saw the first roach. The second was soon after. I really hated bugs. The small ones were bad enough, the big ones were scary and smelled bad.

The pistol bucked in my hand when I squeezed the trigger, almost by instinct. The roach had rushed me and I'd turned it inside out with a forty-five caliber slug. The noise drew the attention of the second bug and I put it down just as quickly.

With a gun it was easy enough to kill them. Without a gun they'd killed me, so I couldn't afford to get complacent. I continued towards the stairs and then up them as the skittering noises continued to echo through the chamber.

It made my teeth hurt. It made my neck hurt, but that was just memory.

The second level had fewer blood stains than the first, and after a right turn on the second level a backlit sign on the ceiling told me that the overseer's office was ahead, whatever that was. Probably the circular window overhead.

I took that path and ended up doubling back on a staircase, but after only a few minutes of wandering I found myself standing in front of another hydraulic door. I stabbed the button to the right of it and the panels retracted--

The sound of a circular saw and an agonizing burning in my chest greeted me inside. I looked down to see half a saw blade sticking out of me with a robotic arm on the other end of it, attached to a ball with eye stalks floating on a rocket engine.

"Oh no! Terribly sorry! I thought you were one of the roaches!"

A robot. A robot was talking to me. A robot killed me with a buzzsaw.

I fell backwards and the blade slid out of my chest, and with it came a fountain of blood. My back hit the ground first, then my head--

My eyes opened up to a slightly less dusty version of the same room I'd been revived in before, it looked like it had been cleaned recently. Another new addition was a folding table set up in front of me, with a fresh jumpsuit and the gun and holster I'd been wearing when I died. The Mister Handy that killed me must have known I'd be back. That's what he was called, his model, but I didn't know where I'd pulled that information from.

Getting dressed and armed was quicker than it had been previously, even if I didn't have armor. I could always go get more from the storage room. But if that robot could kill me so easily he could probably take care of the roaches too.

I picked up the jumpsuit and found clean white panties and a bra that looked like it would fit, so I didn't have to go commando like I'd done previously. It's the little things. Whoever or whatever his purpose was, he at least made me comfortable, and so a short while later I was dressed, armed, and on my way back down the hallway.

The first thing I noticed was the lack of rust on the floor, the second thing was that my body and the dead roach had been cleaned up. The door to the storage room was closed, and also looked cleaner than it had been.

I made my way down the hallway and noticed that the smell of roaches had dissipated and the lighting quality had improved remarkably. The atrium itself was fully lit and, if not sparkling, at least didn't look like trash, and the chittering of roaches was gone.

"Miss Victoria! You're awake!"

I turned towards the processed sounding voice of the Mister Handy unit that'd jammed a saw-blade into my chest and took a step back. "Oh, uh... hi?" I offered with a non-committal wave of my hand.

My name was Victoria? No, that felt right, somehow.

"We haven't met, but I was well versed in all of the experimental subjects. My name is Montgomery, and this is Vault 49, but you probably remember that from when you signed up!" The robot, Montgomery, explained in a not quite over the top cheery tone while his three arms gestured wildly.

"Experimental subjects? I guess... that makes sense." I conceded while rubbing my chin. "But what happened? Is it over?"

His eye stalks twitched violently for a moment before settling back down and the outer two raised upwards in what I assumed was a shrug. "The Vault-Tec personnel expired. Yours was the only completely successful trial, and so you are all that remains. As 'last man standing' that makes you the de facto overseer of this vault."

Overseer sounded like 'leader' and if I was the leader of just myself, that didn't really seem like it granted me very much.

"I don't really remember much, Monty." I shook my head and rubbed my temples, it gave me a headache to try to force it. "How long was I uh... dead?"

"Four thousand three hundred and eighty hours. This is the average timeframe for a resurrection procedure to complete, with the exception of the dimethyl mercury trial, which resulted in resurrection taking four hundred and forty four thousand hours," he answered helpfully. This time his voice didn't seem quite so much like he was faking it. Clearly he enjoyed the analytics of it all.

"My math isn't so good, can you uh, put that into other terms for me?"

"Certainly, Miss Victoria. On average you are dead for six calendar months at a time, however for the dimethyl mercury trial, you were dead for approximately fifty years."

I felt the world spinning around me, light headed and wobbly on my feet. I started to fall but Montgomery caught me with his grasping arm and held me upright on my feet. I leaned against his spherical torso until I caught my balance.

That was a lot of time, even if it was six months each time, it was a lot of times. That, plus the fifty? I'd been at this for... a hundred years? Ish?

"What now?" I finally croaked out, not sure if I wanted to cry or take a shortcut through the next six months. I did have the gun on my hip to do it with.

Montgomery stroked my back with his other arm, the one without a saw on it. He seemed more human that I would have expected out of a robot. "A request has been placed with Vault-Tec for relief, the door is on lockdown until they arrive. I have been waiting thirty seven years and sixteen days, so far."

I pulled away, I didn't feel better but I didn't feel worse; I could still stand at least. "Well, at least I know I'll be alive no matter how long it takes..." I wasn't sure if that was a blessing or a curse, or some point in between.

"In that case you will definitely need to eat something. Let me whip something up, shall I, Miss Victoria? Follow me to the cafeteria. You must be absolutely famished." Montgomery started floating away from me and towards the red and white checkered half of the atrium.

There were old restaurant style booth seats along the wall and I followed him far enough to find a seat. The cushion was softer than I'd expected it to be, given the age. It had been made to last. The table was clean, salt and pepper was prepared and in shakers.

It was almost like being in a restaurant, if I wasn't locked inside of this place with a robot anyway. The Monty was still better company than the cockroaches were, and definitely better company than the people who'd been using me for experiments.

The smell of sizzling meat filled the air, garlic, pepper, onions. Whatever he was cooking, it smelled amazing and my mouth started to water. I hadn't eaten in... well, fifty years, right? I was due to put some food down my neck hole.

I leaned back in the booth and waited, didn't want to rush him. Just figured I'd let my eyes close for just a few minutes, just resting them. Just...

***​

"How long do you think this is going to take?"

The headset was itchy as all get out. With the migraines that had plagued me for most of my life I finally decided to do something about it. They were going to map it all out, every part of my brain, figure out where the migraines were starting and...

Well, something.

"Could take a while. We'll need to do some preliminary scans today, but we'll do more next week. If we can catch you during a migraine then it'll be even better," the doctor explained, for the third time. He was getting tired of me asking, but I kept asking.

"Well, it's starting to make my head itch."

He stopped what he was doing and turned towards me, "That's... bad. Let's shut it down and recalibrate."

I shrugged at him. Re-calibrations, right. See if I go back to a quack like--

***​

"Miss Victoria?"

I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and looked up into the somehow concerned-looking eyes of Montgomery. "What'r y'all makin so much... noise."

I did not sound very intelligent upon first waking. That much, I did know. He was holding a plate in front of me, full of steaming hot food, looked like tacos and refried beans.

Damn skippy.

"Sorry about the delay, but the food has been prepared, I do hope it is to your liking, Miss Victoria."

"Right... Right! Thank you!" I blurted out as I finished waking up. I took the plate from his outstretched arm and set it down on the table in front of me.

The first bite was amazing, but that could have been because this was technically the first time I had ever eaten food. The second bite cleared the bar set by the first. The temperature, spices, the consistency of the flour tortilla and the tenderness of the meat combined into something amazing.

I considered asking him where he found such fresh meat when we'd presumably been locked in here for over a hundred years, but there were some questions that I was happier not having answered.

A glass of lemonade appeared to my left while I was concentrating on hoovering down my tacos and I snatched it up and slurped down greedy gulps of the sour-sweet liquid. Whatever Montgomery's purpose had been before, he was a damn fine preparer of food now.

"So after this, what's on the agenda?" I asked him around a mouthful of tortilla.

"A lot of waiting, I'm afraid. Reactor maintenance has already been performed for this quarter, the water system is utilizing a fraction of a percentage of capacity so the next filter change is in about... four hundred years."

I nodded and swallowed by food. "So what you're telling me is that I've got a lot of free time?"

"Oh, endless free time you might say." He answered with a bob of his central eye. That must have been a nod?

"Well I guess I could go exploring then."

"I would only ask that you do please be careful. While you do have access to the entire vault, it is still over six million square feet of floor space so I cannot guarantee that it will be entirely devoid of hostile lifeforms."

I shrugged, "Not like I stay dead."

All three of his eyestalks drooped, "Well that may be the case, Miss Victoria, I don't fancy another six months waiting for your revival. I rather like having someone to talk to."

"I think we'll have plenty of time for that, Monty."

 

[Strypgia]

"Proceed with testing."

Click to shrink...

Who the fuck is running this place, GlaDOS?

I stabbed the button to the right of it and the panels retracted--

The sound of a circular saw and an agonizing burning in my chest greeted me inside. I looked down to see half a saw blade sticking out of me with a robotic arm on the other end of it, attached to a ball with eye stalks floating on a rocket engine.

"Oh no! Terribly sorry! I thought you were one of the roaches!"

Click to shrink...

Oh, bugger...

Well, at least you come back? Still annoying.
if this Droid has been waiting 37 years for a vault-tec guide to come open the door, how long do we have to wait before we can go out on our own?

At least this isn't the vault with all the puppets?

 

[Pineapple]

Droid

Click to shrink...

This isn't star wars. *looks around for a lucasfilm executive with a lawyer*

 

[JennyDracos]

No point in waiting for Vault Tec, once the war hit they just merged on into the Enclave.

Opening vaults is a tricky business. Most, I think, were opened from the inside, either by the vault computer as part of either test protocol or they were in the control group, or the overseer or escapees opened it. Some were opened from the outside. Vault Tec could do it, obviously, which means Poseidon (which bought Vault Tec before the war) or the Enclave (which Poseidon rolled into after the war) can do it. Aside from that? Well, the Institute managed in the Commonwealth. Did the Master manage it in California?

Well, six million square feet is enough space that Miss Victoria might be able to find a pipboy or the password to the overseer's computer, which would let her force the vault door to open.

...Did I say no point in waiting for Vault Tec? I should have said no hope in waiting for Vault Tec. Because that thirty seven years Monty was waiting for rescue, he was the one functioning robot in a tomb with a bunch of failed resurrection experiments. Thirty seven years means that as far as anyone knew, they'd figured out how to reverse Miss Victoria's immortality thirteen years prior.

If anyone is watching the vault -

and there's no reason for them to not be watching the vault -

- they know she's immortal now.

 

[BlackAeronaut]

Who the fuck is running this place, GlaDOS?

Click to shrink...

HAH. I was thinking the same thing myself. definitely shades of Portal happening here in these opening scenes.

if this Droid has been waiting 37 years for a vault-tec guide to come open the door, how long do we have to wait before we can go out on our own?

Click to shrink...

...Did I say no point in waiting for Vault Tec? I should have said no hope in waiting for Vault Tec. Because that thirty seven years Monty was waiting for rescue, he was the one functioning robot in a tomb with a bunch of failed resurrection experiments. Thirty seven years means that as far as anyone knew, they'd figured out how to reverse Miss Victoria's immortality thirteen years prior.

Click to shrink...

This is rare for for me, but you guys missed something that I caught right away...

That was a lot of time, even if it was six months each time, it was a lot of times. That, plus the fifty? I'd been at this for... a hundred years? Ish?

Click to shrink...

Though in order to do the math properly, I'd need to know exactly how many times Victoria got rebooted here.

Also, can someone point me at a good source for Fallout lore? Because evidently there's a lot I need to learn.

 

[obssesednuker]

Also, can someone point me at a good source for Fallout lore? Because evidently there's a lot I need to learn.

Click to shrink...

Fallout wiki.

 

[Pineapple]

Invasion​

Fifteen years later...



"I got my first real six string, bought it at the five and dime! Played it till my fingers bled, was the summer of sixty-nine!" I screamed into the microphone as my fingers slid across the guitar strings. My voice echoed through the atrium. The acoustics could have been better, but they weren't bad.

Montgomery was on drums, and after a few false starts he was fantastic at it. With three arms and a little duct tape he was playing better than any human I'd ever heard of. Tearing through pieces that shouldn't have really been possible, he was the best partner I could ask for.

And the only one I had.

Memory had come back to me, bits and pieces. Nothing really finite, other than songs. Oh the songs, so many. More than we had recordings of in the vault, for sure. I took them from my memory, we played them, we recorded it.

There was nothing else to do, nothing in the time between maintenance cycles, the time between pest control and washing the floors. A vault door that wouldn't open without a device I didn't have, with codes I didn't know.

I wiped the sweat off my brow after we finished the last few notes of the song and I leaned the guitar against the amplifier stack. We'd made the guitar and the amplifiers from scratch, we had plenty of raw materials to work with to do it, and Montgomery was quite technical, which made sense for a robot.

Montgomery was still 'sitting' at the drums, hovering low and in one place, but usually he'd have gone off to pick up refreshments of some kind by this point. His eye-stalks were all pointed straight up, which isn't something I'd ever seen before. "Monty?"

"Miss Victoria, it appears the request for aid has been answered. The cave perimeter sensors have been triggered. I am receiving video-- oh no. This just won't do!" he answered me after a few long moments. His body language seemed... tense.

After fifteen years, I couldn't not have become familiar with him, after all.

"What's going on Monty?"

"Miss Victoria I may not have been completely honest with you about how this vault came to be empty, unfortunately there just isn't enough time to go through it all!" He yelled with his arms held up over his central sphere. "I never thought it would matter, I never thought they'd get here!"

It had been a while since he'd gotten himself this out of sorts, usually I could calm him down. Programming being what it was, he probably didn't handle being online for as many years as he had been.

"Monty what do you need me to do?" I asked him as I put a hand on his metal shell. He usually seemed to appreciate the contact.

His eyestalks swiveled almost violently towards me. "You need to arm yourself, they're here to kill us!"

***​

They were on foot, at least. The perimeter sensors were out at least six miles from the door, and it would take them a while to open the door. That's what Monty had said and I believed him. I also believed that I didn't want to die again for a while.

That meant a trip to the armory.

The armory door slid open with some hesitation, it had been a few months since we'd been up here. The vault door was visible through the windows in the front of the room, so I'd at least have a few seconds of warning if everything went faster than I expected.

The armory itself doubled as a security office, not that I'd ever needed it to. Some intake terminals were set on a desk under the window and there were enough chairs for at least three security officers.

In the lockers along the wall opposite the door was what I was here for; my armor.

As had become clear to me after a few days, and Montgomery had cofirmed, I was well below the average height of a human being. So much so that most of the apparel in the vault didn't fit me, at least not without serious alterations. Three different custom sets of body armor were stored up here just in case I needed them.

I didn't fancy having my head eaten off by a roach again, after all.

The locker popped open with a squeal of dry hinges and my chosen set of armor was hung up in front of me. I put the helmet on first and locked the ballistic visor in the down position. I needed to get used to it before they showed up, after all.

The metal leg armor went on next, pulled up like pants and secured around my waist with a ratcheting belt mechanism. The armor plates we'd fashioned for it were made out of spare blast door parts, so they were definitely impact rated, and using Monty's 'precision flame device' allowed us to harden it.

The torso armor came down over the helmet and strapped into place around my shoulders, it too was made out of blast door parts, with extra protection that extended up to the sides of the helmet. I really didn't want to have my head bitten off again.

I buckled the sleeves into the torso piece and finally took the gun belt and bandolier down from their hooks. All in all, everything was overkill for taking on roaches, but overkill kept my head from being bitten off.

Or maybe Montgomery had expected this eventuality.

He was smarter than me, it would have made sense. He also told me he hadn't been completely honest with me. I'd want answers there too.

I ran back down the hall leading away from the armory and towards the elevator back down to the atrium level. That was the real choke point; there was only that one door in or out and they'd have to take it.

I didn't stop running till I was in the elevator, and only then because there was no where else to go until it made it down to the atrium. A push of the button had the door closed and the motors chugging along, lowering me back down.

I probably didn't need to run, the time it made up wouldn't really matter, but I was anxious. It was something that kept popping up, with and without a reason. Maybe that was just something that happened with me, even before this.

Acid in the pit of my stomach, sweaty hands, shivering. Felt like I wanted to throw up or jump off a bridge or climb out of my own skin, just a bitter and sick feeling deep inside. Could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

The floor bounced under my feet and the door slid open, the atrium was ahead of me and Monty was hovering around with metal plates, tack-welding them to the support columns with his laser. Cover to shoot from behind.

What I would have given to actually have control of the vault. I hadn't had trouble using the computers, but even then I was locked out of core functions, like the door and the defense systems. Even Montgomery was unable to control everything, though he refused to elaborate as to why and after fifteen years of asking I still hadn't gotten anywhere about it.

And that? That would have made it easy. Keep the door shut, turn off the elevators, pump all the oxygen out. We could loot them after they died, throw the bodies back outside--

I blinked and shook my head. Spending all this time in isolation and dying a few dozen times had definitely made me way more comfortable with murder than was probably healthy. I mean, I was still gonna try to kill these guys when they came down the elevator, but it was still the principle of the thing.

"The vault door is opening, Miss Victoria." His voice had the closest thing to human panic I'd ever heard in it.

All the cover he'd put up looked pretty ramshackle, to be entirely honest. It looked like it might or might not hold up to small arms fire, but if anyone had anything more powerful than a pop gun... no, it was definitely more concealment than cover. That... That was less than comforting.

One burst of full auto out of anything in rifle calibers would swiss cheese the whole thing and anyone hiding behind it.

"Let's... Let's fall back to the overseer's office. That's way less out in the open than waiting here." I suggested with a wave of my pistol towards the staircase.

His eyes followed my gesture and then turned back towards me. "That is not a bad idea."

The fear of an impending confrontation drove my adrenaline; I don't think there was ever a time before that that I'd made the run from the atrium to the overseer's desk quite so quickly. My legs were burning by the end of the sprint and I was certain, if I lived through the day, that I'd have a hard time walking the next day.

I dropped into the overseer's chair and panted to catch my breath. After the first couple years I'd gotten lazy; there wasn't really much to do that needed to be done and I'd let Monty handle it. That was really starting to bite me in the ass.

It wasn't that I'd gotten fat, it was more the lack of muscle tone and everything bad that happened when you forced action after a long period of inaction. I could already feel the soreness that I was sure was going to be much worse before it got better.

Monty sealed the door behind us right before the lights dimmed. That must have been the door opening. I'd spent a lot of time looking at it, I could see how it would take a lot of power to move it. The terminal beeped and restarted behind me and... and that was definitely something new.

I sat down at the desk to investigate. The terminal was sitting at a main menu. "Monty, did the lockdown lift when the door opened?"

"My connection to the vault mainframe is offline. It would seem the system has restarted, the lockdown should no longer be in effect."

That made sense. If it all restarted it would take time for his connection to come back, right? I tapped at the keyboard and started navigating through the menus. A lot of it was irrelevant garbage. Inventory reports, science reports, water consumption reports. Security and door control was a promising heading, however.

Most of the doors were still stuck in manual only, so I couldn't lock down the vault and keep the invaders contained, but the security camera feeds were still active. I pulled up the atrium feed and zoomed in on the elevator doors.

And then nothing happened. The car went past the atrium and kept going down.

I knew that it could do that, of course. I didn't expect it to do that. The only things down there were waste processing, water treatment, power distribution, and the freezer. Monty had always handled those things and so I hadn't had a reason to go down there myself, it was all rather boring and--

"If they're here to answer the request for help... why are they skipping the atrium?" I asked, not really expecting that Montgomery would have an actual answer for me, more so just to voice my confusion.

I toggled through the cameras until I found the one in the sublevel under the atrium. There were several elevators and even more staircases throughout the vault, but the main entrance elevator only serviced three locations; the vault door, the atrium, and the service sublevel.

Other elevators serviced the reactor room, the water storage tanks, waste storage tanks, and food processing, which was just a nicer way of saying 'automated farm'. Residential was all staircases leading off the atrium, so there was no elevator access for that.

I finally found the feed I was looking for and zoomed in as the elevator doors opened. Three people, the first out of the door was... something. Maybe a robot but I doubted it. I wanted to say it was someone wearing power armor but I also wasn't sure how I knew that. He looked eight feet tall if he was an inch, or if he even was a he.

The silver metal and green trim seemed military-ish but the American flag on his shoulder sealed the deal for that. He was holding some kind of automatic-looking rifle, but it was one I didn't recognize offhand.

Following out behind him was a girl with spiked green hair and a submachine gun, wearing a leather jacket and leather pants with steel plates attached to both. I would have put her armor's effectiveness at near what my own could handle. The SMG might be a problem, but nowhere near the kind of problem that power armor giant would be.

The third person out of the elevator had a shotgun with a drum magazine under it, and he was wearing green armor and what looked like military fatigues under it. Those two things were inconsequential compared to what he looked like. I could only compare it to a burn victim that had spent some time rotting, he looked like he should be dead but he was strolling along casually like it wasn't a big deal to him.

I'd looked worse than him before, but I'd also been dead at the time.

They seemed to be talking, but without sound I had no idea what they were saying. The big guy in the power armor lead them along the hallway until they reached a doorway on their left, at which point he punched the door switch and the hydraulics sucked the door up into the ceiling.

"What's that room?" I asked over my shoulder towards Monty.

"That is the freezer. I don't imagine they're going to like what they find in there," he answered with a somber tone.

"What is? In there?" I asked as the power armored guy backpedaled away from the door and turned away. That was definitely not the kind of reaction I expected out of someone wearing that kind of gear.

"You, Miss Victoria. That is where we stored... you."

I felt my stomach flop over. It made sense, in a twisted, morbid kind of way. They'd need to store my bodies for science or something. That I'd spent the last decade and a half less than a hundred yards away from dozens of my own corpse wasn't exactly a comforting thought though.

"Yeah that's probably not a good look for us."

"I dare say it's not."

On the screen, the guy in the power armor was gesturing his arms around at the guy who looked like a corpse, and the chick with the green hair didn't seem to be reacting much one way or another. The burn victim guy hit the door switch to close the freezer and all three of them started walking back towards the elevator.

I pulled up the menu on the terminal again and accessed the intercom function. From here, I could broadcast throughout the entire vault. I selected the option and the terminal beeped, waiting for input.

"Hello, and welcome to vault forty-nine! Please take the elevator in front of you to the immigration level and exit through the vault door as soon as you are able!" I spoke, in a faux cheerful voice that I was only partially confident wasn't filled with the quavering of fear induced adrenaline. I couldn't take them, maybe I could get them to leave?

The punky chick looked up at the camera and raised her gun, and then I lost the feed.

So much for that.

I looked out through the huge observation window that overlooked the atrium and saw the elevator doors open. It was only one level, so I shouldn't have been surprised it hadn't taken long. Power armor guy was out of the door first and he immediately raised his rifle to point directly at me through the window.

My legs tensed up, coiled and ready to launch me out of the chair. The muzzle flash from his rifle reflected off the floor and bullets peppered the window, but it held. Armored glass in an office? Considering what they'd been doing in this vault, it shouldn't have surprised me.

I jumped for the floor anyway, just in case he managed to punch through the glass, or if he had something bigger that could do the job. My shoulder hit the floor under the desk with a jolt that knocked the wind out of me and I rolled onto my back to catch my breath.

Bullets continued to plink against the armor glass and I pulled my pistol and one of the grenades from my belt. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the fancy power armor wouldn't be able to fully protect him from a hand grenade at point blank range.

I was still considering the grenade when I heard the door opening, Montgomery was behind the desk with me and so it wasn't him. I pulled the pin out with my teeth, released the spoon, and chunked the grenade through the doorway. Probably the punky chick running up on us while the power armor guy served as a distraction.

I didn't see the burn victim making the sprint.

I heard a clang noise and then the grenade I'd thrown dropped back down next to me, and I grabbed it and threw it over the desk a moment before it exploded. Monty took the opportunity to re-seal the door and I tried to shake the ringing out of my ears.

Something heavy hit my arm and I turned to look towards it; the bottom of the overseer's desk had popped open and a large rifle and a Pipboy fell out of it. All this time locked in here, and there was a Pipboy hidden in the desk. The shock from the explosion must have popped the panel open.

I heard banging on the door, but they wouldn't be able to open it up as long as Monty was holding it from this side. I grabbed the Pipboy and the rifle and rolled over to the sitting position, and then stood up.

I jammed my left hand through the hole in the Pipboy and it tightened up around my forearm, stabbed some electrodes into my flesh, and booted up. The green glow of the self test illuminated the dimly lit office: the hand grenade had taken out most of the lights.

The rifle wasn't any kind I'd ever seen before, looked more like a science experiment than a gun, but it had a power switch and a magazine, and a bunch of round coils along the barrel, so I could guess at what it might be. I toggled the switch and the gun started to hum in my hands.

"Open up! You're just making it harder on yourself! If you run you're just gonna die tired!" The voice was female, it was definitely the punky chick. She sounded unreasonably angry.

I shouldered the rifle and stared down the sights as the Pipboy finished booting up. The beep drew my attention and I glanced over at the screen. 'M72 Gauss Rifle 20/20 2mmEC' was displayed on the screen, next to a smiling Vault Girl mascot, flashing me a thumbs up.

"Bitch, if you don't open that door--"

I squeezed the trigger and the rifle rocked hard against my shoulder. The recoil felt different from anything else I'd ever felt and the noise it made sounded like a sheet metal punch slamming into a blast door. The fist sized hole in the wall between the office and the hallway outside was new, but I'd meant for that.

I knew, without knowing exactly how I knew, that this gun could punch through the interior walls of the vault without breaking a sweat. If this girl was so insistent on getting into a fight, well, I could bring the fight to her, and that guy in the power armor wasn't going to be much of a match for me either.

I saw the girl's face through the hole for a second, and she looked... surprised.

There was a long moment of silence while everything seemed to settle down and we both waited for... something. Montgomery remained silent and mercifully out of sight, but I still had my finger on the bang switch.

Clanking and hydraulic noises echoed up the hallway outside and kept getting closer, finally hesitating for a moment before I heard a metal-on-metal knocking on the office door.

This time, a male voice, piped through microphones and speakers. Definitely the power armor guy. "Uh, parley?"

 

[BlackAeronaut]

Ah yes. Nothing like a display of vastly superior firepower to make the other guy shut the fuck up and play nice.

And now, we'll hopefully be learning just what in the flipping hell was going on with this vault.

 

[JennyDracos]

Huh. I wonder if the punk chick was double-taking at the new hole, or because she got a good look at Vicky's suddenly familiar face? I know Power Armor shot at her earlier, but the window on the Overseer's office is mostly there to remind you that they're the overseer and they're looking down at you.

Ah yes. Nothing like a display of vastly superior firepower to make the other guy shut the fuck up and play nice.

And now, we'll hopefully be learning just what in the flipping hell was going on with this vault.

Click to shrink...

...We know what in the flipping hell was going on, they were experimenting with resurrection. How to start it and, apparently, how to end it.

It's possible they thought they succeeded with dimethyl mercury, though apparently they were wrong.

 

[Strypgia]

they might have stopped shooting because they got to look at Victoria's face and realize that she's the same as on all of corpses in the freezer. Before that they would have had no reason not to think she was the one doing the experimenting.

 

[Ripclaw52]

Now I really need to get another chapter. I'm watching with interest.
Also, just a thought, if you managed to FriendTM​ them, ask them to join you as a band.
Maybe one of the three has a good singing voice, and the continuation of reproducing good, diverse music continue.

 

[Night_stalker]

they might have stopped shooting because they got to look at Victoria's face and realize that she's the same as on all of corpses in the freezer. Before that they would have had no reason not to think she was the one doing the experimenting.

Click to shrink...

Could be, or she did just put a gauss slug through a Vault's interior wall, which probably is tougher then his T-51 PA suit of armor, so parleying until she puts the highly dangerous gun down is advisable.

 

[Pineapple]

Fajita Wrap Supreme​

The sizzling in the background was a sharp, almost comical contrast to the dead silence at our table. I was sitting on one side of the booth, with the green haired girl sitting between me and the wall. Opposite was the burn victim looking guy with the guy, and since he wasn't wearing his armor I knew it was a guy, the guy with the power armor was sitting next to him on the outside, across from me.

Montgomery was feigning ignorance to everything, simply frying up some kind of food behind the grill and pretending to be stupid. It was an act he put on the instant we decided to 'negotiate' instead of kill each other. In the few moments we'd had alone together since then I'd come to realize that most Mister Handy units weren't quite as self aware as he was, and this was to prevent tipping our hand.

I was the shortest person at the table by a good ten inches. I hadn't had much opportunity to compare myself to other people in the last... probably hundred years. That was a mind-fuck to think about. Memory was spotty after all, but this confirmed that I wasn't exactly average.

I took a long drink off a glass of water and just kind of stared a hole through the man sitting in front of me. "So uh... Power... armor... guy..." I trailed off, not actually knowing his name and realizing how ridiculous it sounded to call him what I'd been calling him in my head.

"Eddie North," he corrected with a laugh. "This is my older brother Billy, and that's our ex-Raider friend Katrina." His waved his hand around the table. I guess burn victim guy could be a brother.

And 'Katrina' definitely looked the part he'd described. It didn't take a rocket surgeon to understand 'Raider'.

I looked over at billy and tilted my head. "So uh, Billy looks a little... uh..."

"Crispy?" 'Billy' provided in a raspy, throaty kind of voice that reminded me of what it might sound like if a frog could talk and also happened to have end stage lung cancer.

"Deep fried." I responded deadpan. "I'm not exactly sure how you're alive, actually."

"Alive is a pretty funny concept after the first hundred years. Some people weren't lucky enough to make it to a vault, I got 'deep fried' by the radiation of a nuclear bomb and came out the other side looking like this, I'm what you'd call a ghoul." He explained with his smoker's rasp. Despite the fact that he looked like a pile of hot garbage he seemed solid enough and seemed to move around well enough.

"I take it there are more like uh, you?" I asked him with more curiosity than disgust. After all the experiments I'd been through even making out with him wouldn't have been the worst thing I'd had to do.

"You don't get out much do you?" Billy asked me with a narrowing of his eyes. At least, it seemed like he was narrowing his eyes.

"Eh, not exactly, I've been down here for... Well, I think at least a hundred years. Door was locked till you guys opened it up."

"Speaking of doors," Katrina interrupted. She was... Well she wasn't hard to look at. Tall and lean and with a skin tone that reminded me of brazilian rosewood and muscle tone that was equally distinguished. Eyes of ochre and--

"I said, speaking of doors, why was there a freezer full of corpses that all look just like you down in the basement?" She looked mad. I'd gotten distracted by her figure and I was almost certain she'd noticed.

I figured it was going to come to this sooner or later, and it turned out to be sooner. "Well..."

"Well?" Eddie probed with a look on his face that seemed like a mixture between confusion and concern. At least it wasn't hostility, and at least Montgomery had the gauss rifle hidden behind the counter to clean up if I got taken out again.

"Well, I kinda... die a lot. Every time I die my body resets to what I looked like when I was about, maybe fifteen to seventeen years old? After I 'revive' I age normally, need food, water. I can get hurt or sick or fat, I can die, but then I just come back again after about six months." I explained to a surprising lack of gasps.

I had assumed that it would be at least somewhat shocking but maybe 'radiation zombie' and 'guy in power armor suit' had seen some shit that made me look small time.

"So how long have you been alive this time?" Billy asked in that raspy-ass voice of his.

"About fifteen years. I took the death shortcut through most of my time down here, at least I think I did. I don't remember much before being down here, just a few scraps here and there, flashes of memory from before."

"Well that's better than what we'd been thinking before we saw you up in that office. Honestly I'm just glad this isn't another vault full of insane clones or cannibals." Eddie waved his hand and leaned back in the bench seat. "Your gun was definitely the biggest I've had pointed at me in a while but at least you stopped shooting."

"And you guys are the first people I've seen since I've been down here who didn't kill me. So what brought you down here in the first place?"

"We were gonna steal all your shit." Katrina said simply as she leaned back. God damn that leather was tight--

"Miss Victoria! Food is ready!" Montgomery announced as he carried a large sizzling tray of fried meat and peppers down in the middle of the table. Onions, steak strips, peppers, and enough tortillas and cheese to sink a battleship.

"At least you had company. Eddie was frozen till I found him. I had to go the long way around. I'm his two hundred year older brother." Billy said with a laugh, or what sounded like a laugh if I turned my head sideways and squinted really hard.

I would have assumed Billy was caucasian, at least originally. He was more of a burnt cedar at this point. His brother Eddie, however, was definitely more of a light maple, blonde in skin tone and hair color. Built like a brick shit-house, he seemed like military. His complete lack of tan told me that he probably didn't climb out of that armor very often. The Pipboy strapped to his left arm told me how he'd popped the cork on this vault.

"I guess that means we're both pre war, so I think your sense of time is a little off, Victoria. War's been over for almost two hundred years. We're definitely some of the oldest people here." Eddie said with a shrug, "We should start a club."

I cocked an eyebrow and shrugged back. "So what's Katrina's story?"

"A death claw was trying to eat me after one of my 'companions' shot me in the leg to use me as a distraction." Katrina explained with a bit of venom in her voice. Hell hath no fury and all that.

"And Eddie, white knight that he is, couldn't let that slide. Power armor or not, a death claw is a hell of a beast, but he had never seen one before so he didn't know that. Lunatic charged in all full of piss and vinegar and got in a fist fight with the damn thing. They were trading blows for about fifteen minutes before he snapped its neck." Billy explained in a tone of voice that was a mixture of incredulous amusement and pride.

"After that," Eddie continued for his brother, "Billy gave her half of our stimpaks to get her back on her feet and we teamed up."

"Because Billy is a horndog and thought I might express my gratitude physically." Katrina finished with a smirk and a slow shake of her head.

I blinked and looked at Billy. "Uh, can you even, like, you look like..." I stumbled over my words and trailed off. I didn't imagine someone who looked like that had much in the way of soft tissue.

"You're damn right I can. Give me an hour and--"

"Anyway!" Eddie cut in with a shove of his brother, "That's how we met up."

I nodded along and rolled some meat and vegetables up into a tortilla and started chewing on the end of it. Montgomery was a treasure, because as good a cook as I was I wasn't this good. "So, now that that's out of the way, what do we do from here?"

"That depends on you. Tell me, what are you good at?" Billy asked me with... some kind of look.

"Well, I can't actually stay dead for more than about six months, most of the time. Uh... hmm... Well, I seem to be pretty good with guns, and I know a lot about wood." Mostly because I was thinking about a certain plank of Brazilian rosewood I wanted to nail--

"I guess if you're sick of rotting down here you could gather up some supplies and come with us. There's more down here than you'll ever use so I'm sure you wouldn't mind sparing some of that for us, right?" Billy asked with what I'm sure he thought was a charming expression on his face. It kinda just looked more like leering.

"I've been waiting behind that closed door for far too many years to stay down here now that you've opened it. I'd be up for stretching my legs out." I answered with a shrug and a glance over at Montgomery, just to see if he might signal an objection to the idea.

A flash of movement across the table drew my attention back to Billy and Eddie, with the latter having punched the former across the shoulder. Eddie locked eyes with me and shook his head, "Don't mind it, it was just Billy being Billy."

Billy being Billy. Billy was a man made out of radioactive beef jerky and his brother wore a giant suit of armor and they were paired up with the coolest drink of water I'd seen in two centuries. I'd not been physical with another person in either two hundred years or ever depending on if you counted it by body or not.

Maybe I wasn't too different from Billy if I was thinking about heading out with them just to get laid, as unlikely as that probably would be. But then he probably wasn't on a bicentennial dry spell, so who could really judge me?

"You mind if I bring my robot?"

***​

The air tasted different, more wet than I was used to, and there was more of it. The vault door was sealed and at my back, the exit tunnel ahead of me. Gauss rifle on my back, colt pistol on my hip, my riot armor encased me and... and...

I took a deep breath and steadied myself against Montgomery's warm steel skin as we ventured forward, trailing in behind our three companions. Eddie took the lead in his armor, Katrina behind him, with Billy at her side.

They trusted me enough to show me their backs, although I had already established I could shoot through their fronts just fine. Maybe that was a pragmatic decision rather than one of trust.

The trek along the tunnel was damp and slippery and it smelled like feet and I couldn't have been more excited because of how different it was to everything that had previously been. Something other than concrete and steel and sterile filtered air. Even if the Geiger counter on my Pipboy kept chirping ominously at me, it was okay.

The tunnel sloped upwards and light came in through the end of it, only a few more yards to go. I raised my hand over my forehead and stepped out into the heat, let my eyes adjust to the light, and beheld.

I stepped past my three new companions and looked out at the ruined city before me, collapsed highways and crumbling skyscrapers all. Felt like my breath might never return, even when it did. Better than a century underground, and I'd escaped from it.

The whirring of power armor servos came before the pressure on my shoulder, Eddie patted me with his armored gauntlet before from the speakers in his suit came a robotic voice. "Welcome to Houston, Vault Dweller."

 

[JennyDracos]

Of course the radiation level is okay, Vicky. What's the worst that can happen? You die?

And far enough from the Vault that it sticks?

Mind you years with nothing to do except the occasional routine maintenance and one half-mad-scientist robot for company...

 

[Motoko]

Ohoho! What do have here? Watched for certain.

 

[Night_stalker]

the ruined city before me, collapsed highways and crumbling skyscrapers all. Felt like my breath might never return, even when it did. Better than a century underground, and I'd escaped from it.

Click to shrink...

So has anything really changed about it over the years? I mean, it's Houston.

 

[Pineapple]

So has anything really changed about it over the years? I mean, it's Houston.

Click to shrink...

Houston isn't so bad. Port Arthur would look the same before and after a nuclear exchange.

 

[Pyro Hawk]

So just to double-check, is her resurrection range-limited to some distance from the bunker? And does she know that if it is?

Also nice to see this back, was very interested in the premise before it went to sleep, and still am now that it's woken up.

 

[Night_stalker]

Houston isn't so bad.

Click to shrink...

[Citation Needed]

But in all seriousness, morbidly curious about how Galveston turned out here.

 

[JennyDracos]

We know what she knows, and she knows that every time she's died she's been in the bunker.

 

[Strypgia]

"We were gonna steal all your shit." Katrina said simply as she leaned back. God damn that leather was tight--

Click to shrink...

So, she stretches and bends over to pick up a few things and Victoria will give her whatever the hell she wants?

Even if the Geiger counter on my Pipboy kept chirping ominously at me, it was okay.

Click to shrink...

You'll get used to that. You'll probably also get a whole selection of very interesting cancers, but eh...

I stepped past my three new companions and looked out at the ruined city before me, collapsed highways and crumbling skyscrapers all. Felt like my breath might never return, even when it did. Better than a century underground, and I'd escaped from it.

The whirring of power armor servos came before the pressure on my shoulder, Eddie patted me with his armored gauntlet before from the speakers in his suit came a robotic voice. "Welcome to Houston, Vault Dweller."

Click to shrink...

So it looks about the sam-

So has anything really changed about it over the years? I mean, it's Houston.

Click to shrink...

GDI, I was going to make that joke.

 

[JennyDracos]

You'll get used to that. You'll probably also get a whole selection of very interesting cancers, but eh...

Click to shrink...

Only until they kill her! Then, one way or the other, no more cancer! Until the next time, anyway~