Fallout One-shot story thing

“Vault-Tec is always prepared!”

I’d been hearing that a lot lately. While I wandered the New England Wasteland, I’d picked up a pre-war transmission over my 3000-series Pip-Boy radio. Though I’d have thought a few weeks ago that pre-war broadcasts aren’t really my preferred style of radio entertainment, I quickly found myself drawn to this one. The only other stations my Pip-Boy would pick up – regardless of where I was in the New York Ruins – were the pre-war Enclave station that I was sure played across the U.S., being broadcast from a satellite or something and New Radio New York, which had spotty reception depending on where I was, sometimes cutting out to static almost completely.

This station, however, seemed to come in loud and clear everywhere much like the Enclave station. I guess pre-war radio stations primarily used satellites to broadcast. It had a decent selection of music, I thought, and most of them didn’t grate on my nerves after the twenty-fifth time hearing them – much unlike the Enclave station which I’d usually shut off after only a few seconds of airtime. Outside of music, it didn’t seem to have an MC like most other stations did. Instead, songs would be intercut with Vault-Tec broadcasts and commercials all related to their “revolutionary, new” Vaults. I didn’t mind the ads so much, but it was hard to miss that trademark slogan of theirs, since they tended to end every ad on the station with it.

I had become curious just how prepared Vault-Tec actually was. The Vault-Tec station broadcasts had informed me that they were commissioned before the war by the then still-standing U.S. government to build one hundred and twelve Vaults to house the population of the U.S., five of them being here in the New England Wasteland itself. Not only that, but also that each Vault was designed to hold around a thousand people. Now I’m not a master mathematician, but that only adds up to one hundred twelve thousand people. And if Vault-Radio is to be believed, there were over four hundred million people in the U.S. alone. And unless Vault-Tec had planned to build three hundred ninety-nine thousand, eight hundred eighty-eight extra Vaults before the bombs dropped, that was a large number of American people doomed to a fiery demise – a demise, if that was the case, that Vault-Tec hadn’t been prepared for.

Further investigation led me to mark the locations of those five New York Vaults on my Pip-Boy map and see for myself how well they’d held up. If Vault-Tec was as prepared as they constantly claimed, the Vaults – not to mention the supplies inside – would be in absolute pristine condition. It was a hard deal to pass up, really. I’d feed my burning curiosity and at the same time get something better to eat than Dandy Boy Apples or Fancy Lady snack cakes. And while those two things taste alright even after hundreds of years in an unplugged and war-battered refrigerator, having to pop a RadAway after every meal got pretty tiresome.

What I found – or rather what I’ve found thus far – has been disappointing to say the least. Of the five Vaults in the New York Ruins, I had explored only two thus far.

The first – Vault 63 – was almost completely destroyed from the inside. Most of the rooms had caved in, denying me access, and the wealth of un-irradiated supplies I had expected instead turned out to be a handful of stimpacks and some ten millimeter rounds from the part of the security office I could get into. Everything else was entirely derelict, and pairs of skeletons littered the floor beneath my feet.

One major feature that stood out in 63 was a sign that read “Clone Lab” at the far end of the dorms. Beside it was a terminal-locked high-security door and a wall-mounted computer terminal beside that. The terminal had a decent security lock on it, but after several tries, I was finally able to hack the password and use the terminal to unlock the door. Outside of that function, the terminal served no other purpose, since it was a basic-functions terminal, not a data-entry terminal. If I had questions about Vault 63, this terminal was not the one to ask.

Fortunately, inside the Clone Lab – besides the large, glass tubes that dominated the room and were largely empty, save for some glowing, blue fluid – there were a handful of desks scattered about, and on one of them was a data-entry terminal with thorough logs of the experiments performed down here.

I won’t go too far into detail, but apparently Vault 63 admitted only half of the one thousand-person capacity, all male. The other half, they filled by creating female clones from their dwellers – or at least they tried to. Turns out something went wrong with the project around the mid-three hundreds, and the machine overloaded, causing catastrophic damage to the Vault and surrounding area.

I glanced up from the terminal and noted that only one of the four tubes in the middle of the room actually still had that blue fluid in it. The other three were shattered open, some of their electronic top halves having smashed through the glass to meet the bottom halves below.

Besides that and a few Med-X needles, there wasn’t much else to discover in Vault 63, so I’d decided to make my way to the next nearest Vault – 110.

Vault 110 wasn’t much to talk about, really. Save for the swarms of irradiated insects I had to fight my way through, I didn’t find much down there worth talking about. As far as the bugs go, turns out Vault-Tec planted them in the Vault as normal garden-variety insects then exposed them to controlled amounts of radiation in order to sort of guide the mutation process and examine how the residents would respond and be able to adapt.

From what I’d seen inside 110, it wasn’t very well, and I started to wonder if Vaults were even meant to keep people safe from nuclear holocaust in the first place.

All this lead up to me standing outside the door to Vault 49, making sure I had enough rounds for my Chinese assault rifle to take care of whatever lay behind the giant, metal door. I’d hoped to myself for it to be full of happy, healthy Vault dwellers who just never received the all-clear and had no idea that it was safe for them to come out. Of course, recent experience with Vaults did a pretty rough number on that expectation, and I would have been surprised at the least to find survivors in there.

Interestingly, Vault 49 wasn’t among the Vaults listed on Vault-Tec radio; I had just been lucky enough to stumble across it as I made my roundabout way from Vault 110 to the next closest Vault marked on my map.

Only more reason for me to be suspicious of its contents, I thought. Maybe Vault-Tec didn’t advertise it because it was already full. Or maybe it was a secret Vault where some kind of experiments that would seem extreme even for what I’ve seen of Vault-Tec’s standards took place, and they didn’t advertise it because admittance was limited to only an elite group of people.

Either way, I wasn’t going to find out from staring at the door.

Hesitant, I approached the command console. Though 110 was wide open by the time I got there, 63’s console remained intact – at least enough for me to be able to throw a switch and watch the door slide open. I’d assumed the case with 49’s door was the same, but once the switch was thrown, the door remain closed.

A static-drowning voice came over the speaker on the console, barely clear enough for me to make out what it had said, “Please input Vault 49 access password.”

Taken aback, my eyes danced around the console in an attempt to find some kind of keyboard or at the very least a way for me to hook up my Pip-Boy.

Nothing.

The only other option I could think of was voice-activation, so carefully, I leaned in close to the console and took my best guess, “Uh… Vault-Tec.”

“Password rejected,” the console buzzed, a hiss of static shortly following the statement. It then repeated, “Please input Vault 49 access password.”

Well, crap. What could they have used as the password for this thing? I couldn’t just stand here talking to this machine for the rest of my life, but I wasn’t about to give up on 49. I needed to know what was going on behind that giant, metal door and – more importantly – what it could tell me was up with Vault-Tec.

But what could the password have been? Enclave? New California Republic? Big apple? Dandy Boy apples? I flipped through every pre-war thing I could think of – and even may have tried one or two of them as password inputs – but nothing seemed to convince this vault door to budge.

Maybe something they said on the Vault-Tec radio station would give me a clue, I thought. I stepped away from the console so it wouldn’t pick up the radio and wind up thinking every word spoken was an attempted password and eventually lock me out of the system permanently. Turning to my Pip-Boy, I flipped over to the radio screen and tuned into the Vault-Tec station just in time to hear an advertisement for a Vault ad.

“Where will you be when the apocalypse hits?”  it opened, an appropriately upbeat and cheery tagline. “With this war taking its toll on our and other countries, the threat of nuclear extermination looms just on the horizon. If those bombs drop, don’t you want you and your family to be secure?

"With Vault-Tec’s innovative Vault bomb shelters, you can rest knowing you’ll be safe from whatever this war throws at you. Register at your local Vault-Tec office, and reserve your spot in a Vault today!

"Remember: no matter what may come, Vault-Tec is always prepared."

An idea came to me. I shut off the radio and sauntered back over to the console, which was still awaiting my input. With a slight increase in confidence, I presented my latest guess at the Vault 49 password, “Prepared.”

Instead of the repeat response, I heard something else buzz over the small speaker on the console’s panel.

“Please try again.”

I must have been close to the actual password, I thought. Why else would the console’s request change like that? Every other attempt I’d made at guessing the password had been unanimously met with the standard, “Please input Vault 49 access password” line, after all.

I felt around for another guess that was close enough to “prepared” for it to be accepted as almost right.

Then, cautious as the first guess, “Preparation?” I’d said, almost as if I was asking a question.

The console stayed silent for a moment – probably analyzing the password – then a pop was heard from the speaker, followed by the fuzzed-out computer voice. “Password accepted. Please stand clear of the blast door.”

Just like Vault 63, the metal door shrieked as it scraped along the metal opening around it, moving in toward the Vault as the hydraulic arm behind it dragged it open. I couldn’t help but giggle a little bit to myself, even though throughout the process, I was covering my ears from the eardrum-wrenching noise.

After almost a minute, the door stopped moving backwards, then hung there for a second before rolling away to the side, revealing an emaciated figure standing hunched over just beyond it. Upon seeing me, the figure released what I could best describe as a strange combination between a hiss and a roar.

My C.A.R. hanging ready at my side, it didn’t take long for me to draw it and aim it at the creature. With the V.A.T.S. system my Pip-Boy provided, I was able to put three bullets through the thing’s head before it got close enough to me to swipe at me with its unkempt claws.

“I hate feral ghouls,” I muttered as I returned the assault rifle to hip-position and approached the now-decapitated ghoul.

Though it didn’t have anything worth looting save for a tattered pair of shorts protecting its dignity – the norm for ferals, I noted – there were still pockets in those shorts, and at the very least I’d be able to get a few bottle caps or some chems off of the thing.

After looting the feral ghoul, I turned my attention back to the now-open Vault door. The gear-shaped opening it left almost seemed to invite me in to the empty entrance room just beyond. From where I stood,  I could see the short corridor up to the slightly raised level of the entrance room where the interior Vault door command console stood. Beyond that – at the far side of the room – a security door that no doubt led into the Vault proper.

Before I crossed the threshold into the Vault, a thought occurred to me, and I turned to look back at the cave behind me. With the other two Vaults I’d been to, the tunnel leading up to the blast door had their fair share of skeletons, left there from the poor New Yorkers who were denied access to the Vaults when the bombs dropped.

It was an unnerving sight to be sure, but even more unnerving was the fact that this particular cave was completely empty. There were no skeletons, no picket signs… not a single sign of life to be spoken of. For how much it twisted my stomach to think about, I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it before. If this was the last hope for humanity during the war, why wasn’t there any evidence that people had lined up outside the blast door, trying to get in?

Though part of me said I shouldn’t be surprised since this Vault was probably a secret to the public, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to it than just that. I’d stumbled across this Vault completely by accident, after all, and I had to wonder why no one else had before me.

On top of all that, why was there a dead feral ghoul at my feet? I mean I know I just killed it and everything, but why was it there for me to kill in the first place?

A barrier seemed to form in the opening to the Vault entrance, and once I finally stepped through, I felt most of my body turn to gelatin. I was still strong enough to hold myself up despite my weapon and armor – if only just barely – but the nerves were almost crushing. What was I going to find in this Vault, and was I going to like what I found?

Despite the unease, my curiosity was stronger. I had to piece together the Vault-Tec puzzle, and I believed exploring 49 would help me accomplish that. Before I knew it, I was standing in the airlock just beyond the Vault entrance as the security door shut behind me.

The walls of the airlock hissed around me, and I could feel the room pressurizing to acclimate me to the environment within. I found it funny that this Vault seemed to be in better condition than the last two Vaults I’d visited. Though it was still in poor shape, the difference in condition was at least noticeable. Just another thing to add to the list of questions, I thought.

Finally, the security door at the other end of the airlock swung open, welcoming me – if you could call it that – into the Vault.

There was an eerie silence that hung in the air once the hissing of the airlock had died down, and I briefly considered shouting, “Ricola!” down the hallway before me, just to hear something bouncing off the rusted Vault walls.

Fortunately however – or perhaps unfortunately – my ears were able to pick up the faintest sound echo down the hall after a brief moment. I leaned in slightly, focusing my hearing in an attempt to better figure out what I was hearing. The noise was soft but not distant, and it was rhythmic, though it seemed to drop rhythym at random. It sounded like the padding of bare feet on metal – most likely, more feral ghouls.

Assault rifle at the ready, I took a step into the hall, my boots clanking against the metallic floor. I cringed and listened for a break in the padding, hoping I hadn’t alerted whoever was walking around to my presence. Hearing nothing more than the occasional rhythmic breaks, I breathed a silent sigh of relief and decided to get my bearings.

The hallway I was in stretched for only about twenty feet before t-boning with another hall that stretched both to the left and the right. In the middle of this junction was a door with a sign over it that read, “Overseer,” and there was a door on either side of my hall that most likely opened to maintenance rooms.

Almost hugging the wall, I inched my way as silently as I could toward the door on the right, listening intently to the footsteps just down the hall as I did. With a push of the button just off to the side, the door whooshed open, and I made my way into the room, closing the door behind me.

Inside the room was a large generator-looking structure with tesla coils still crackling with electricity atop it. The generator sat at the very center of the room, and the floor seemed to circle around it like the safety railing that – realistically – would barely even serve to keep children at bay.

Wasn’t much of interest inside the first generator room – save for some scrap metal and an old toolbox in the back corner – so I was in and back out into the hall within about a minute. Across the hall from me sat the other door – slightly worse for wear than the one behind me – and I could assume it led to another generator room.

Still, even if I found nothing else in the room across the hall, I could definitely use the extra scrap metal. In the worst-case scenario, I’d be in and back out without losing much time, and I could check the room off as having already been searched.
With one step, I was across the hall, pressing the button to open the door to the generator room on the left.

With a squeal only half as loud as that of the blast door from earlier, the generator room door scraped against its frame, scratching some of the rust off as it did. I cringed from the sound, turning my ears once it had finally opened to the footsteps of the creatures that loomed just down the hall. Though the Vault had fallen back into silence, it only lasted a second before I heard that hiss-roar I’d come to know just minutes ago, followed by a second… and a third.

Before I knew it, a pack of feral ghouls filed down the halls on either side of the T-junction, all making their way to the source of the shrill noise – me.

I barely had time to draw my weapon and drop the first of the three before the other two were on me, clawing and slashing at me in an attempt to break through my armor. In a panic, I hip-fired at the two of them, filling them with enough bullets to drop a feral ghoul, based on my previous experience.

But they didn’t go down. I hadn’t noticed before, but these two ferals were wearing some rudimentary armor over their chests and shoulders. It didn’t look like much, but it was enough to at least partially defend against some of the shots I put into them.

I growled, using the butt of my gun to knock the ghouls back off of me before taking a step back myself and improving my stance. Bringing the sights of my gun up to my eye, I entered V.A.T.S. and targeted both of the ghouls’ heads. With a few squeezes of my trigger, their heads popped open like melons, and the bodies dropped to the floor.

I shuddered once they fell, seeing fit to take that chance to remind myself aloud that I hate feral ghouls – especially if they’re wearing armor.

Looting the bodies didn’t provide me with much. Not surprising for ferals, all I was able to get off of them was a handful of caps and some Jet, which I’d probably sell later for more caps. There were some Jet and Psycho junkies in the New York Ruins, but I wasn’t one of them. If selling the chems to them got me some much-needed caps though, I was happy to provide.

The overseer’s office at the end of the hall would have been my next investigation if the door hadn’t been password-secured. I’d tried the terminal just beside the door, but it couldn’t be hacked. If I wanted to get into the Overseer’s office, I would have to hope the password was written down somewhere.

To the left and the right, the short halls ended at sets of stairs that led down to the atrium below the office. I decided to take the left stairwell for no real reason and followed it down into the next room.

The atrium – as the name suggested – was a large, open two-level room with half of the top level occupied by the Overseer’s office and the other half by a ring of catwalks that connected to the Overseer’s back door as well as a series of other doors that most likely led to other admin offices. The lower level had a few metal crates lying around, but it was mostly open space where feral ghouls could be free to roam around as they pleased. As I made my way down the stairs, the myriad of red indicators on my compass indicated that wasn’t far from the truth.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t notice until I’d stepped out into the atrium and the red blips I should have noticed noticed me.

In the atrium, I estimated about fifteen ghouls. Most of them were regular ferals, but there was also a handful of the armored variety – that I’d taken to calling roamers to better differentiate them. There was also, smack dab in the middle of the room, a ghoul whose sickly melanin skin tone was replaced with a bright green that radiated from its body, giving it a green glow that was still very noticeable even with the Vault’s internal lighting.

As the cluster of ghouls rushed me, quick thinking led me to lob a frag grenade into the center of the crowd. It bounced against the atrium floor a time or two before exploding, violently sending lethal shards of metal into anything within a few-foot radius. The blast wiped out nearly all of the regular ferals, but the roamers remained standing – not to mention the glowing one, who seemed barely scratched.

Just after the blast, the glowing one did its own impression of the explosion, sending out a green shockwave that stretched far enough to wash over the roamers. Besides the shockwave breaking against the roamers’ backs, it seemed to have little other effect on the surrounding area – especially when compared to the damage the ‘nade had done.

Figuring the roamers probably had the least remaining health, I’d decided they would be the next to go as I drew my C.A.R. and prepared to fire. From what I’d seen of the glowing one, it didn’t have any special abilities that the ferals didn’t, outside of a higher resilience and that benign energy blast, so I reasoned it wouldn’t be much of a challenge to take on one-on-one.

Pulling up V.A.T.S., I twice targeted the two nearest of the roamers’ heads. It was pretty much the limit on what I could do with a single usage of V.A.T.S., but I figured it would be enough to eliminate two of the five remaining problems in the room.

Four shots rang out from my rifle – each hitting their marks – but strangely, the roamers remained standing. Shocked, I had to stop and take everything in for a moment. After the damage they sustained from the frag grenade, they should have dropped by the second time I pulled the trigger against them. The only thing that happened between the explosion and the shots was the glowing one hitting them with that green shockwave, and unless that healed them somehow—

That moment I’d taken was long enough for three of the four roamers to be on me, clawing at me just like the two from earlier had done. There was a certain, uncomfortable sense of déjà vu to it, and that only served to intensify my response.

Screaming, “You guys really need to learn a thing or two about personal space!” I swung the butt of my rifle at the group once, twice, three times… as many as it took to get them a comfortable distance away from me.

Between the roamers, I glowered at the green ghoul, reprioritizing. If I didn’t take it out first, its healing ability would make it so that eliminating the roamers proved near impossible. There was a new greatest threat in the room, and it just happened to be glowing my favorite color.

I looked down the sights on my rifle, lining up the shot for straight in the glowing ghoul’s chest. The head, I figured, was a small enough target to necessitate using V.A.T.S. to hit it, and at the moment, my Pip-Boy hadn’t fully recovered from the last V.A.T.S. usage. That in mind, I decided to aim for the next best thing.

The glowing one hiss-roared at me, daring me to take the shot, but just before I could pull the trigger, one of the roamers got back between me and the glowing one. With only a light start, I beat it back with my rifle, fighting my way past it as I closed the gap between myself and the glowing one.

I could feel all four of the roamers clawing at my back and could see the glowing one slashing at my chest, but V.A.T.S. still hadn’t entirely charged yet. Buying time, I hip-fired, unloading most of the rest of my clip into the glowing one’s chest.

With only a pair of bullets left in the clip and V.A.T.S. finally fully recharged, I beat back the glowing one and took my stance, opening V.A.T.S. as I brought up the assault rifle sights. The advanced system let me know that the glowing one was low on health and that these last two bullets – if they hit – would more than likely take it out.

The glowing one was charging up, preparing another healing burst, and that afforded me enough time to target its head twice and follow through with a pair of bullets.

Both made contact, and much to my satisfaction, were enough to drop the green ghoul – even if its head didn’t pop open.

With the glowing one eliminated, that just left the four roamers to deal with. My C.A.R. was out of ammo though, and my 10mm pistol would be inadequate for taking them down in a timely manner.

Whirling on the group of ghouls, I stunned them with a whack from my rifle, giving me time enough to drop a frag mine before darting across the room. Sure enough, the roamers soon followed and howled in pain from the blast that erupted beneath them.

Grinning a cocky grin, I threw down another mine down as I continued to make my way backward across the atrium. As expected, the roamers bulldozed over that one as well, all but one of them unable to go on after sustaining such damage.

The last one hiss-roared at me, and I could tell it was barely hanging on to whatever little remaining life it had. As it charged me, I drew my 10mm and held it out at full extention. Once the roamer’s head made contact with the barrel, I pulled the trigger, and a 10mm bullet flew through the back of the ghoul’s head. That bullet was enough to stop the charge, but I still had shots left in the clip.

Keeping the barrel as close as I could to the head, I pulled the trigger again and again until the body finally gave way below, finally dropping the dressed up feral ghoul to the floor. Satisfied, I holstered my pistol and surveyed the damage done.

All in all, I had fifteen bodies to loot, and in total I figured I’d get enough bottle caps and chems to match what I’d have been able to loot off of just one raider’s corpse.

“Cheap ferals,” I muttered as I dug through the pockets on the glowing one. “Did I mention I hate you guys?”

From the atrium, four doors besides the two that led to the entrance were dotted around the room. On the left was two doors – one that would take me to the male dorms and another that opened to a small supply closet. On the right was the door to the male dorms’ female counterpart, and at the center of the far wall I was now hugging was a security door that led down to the Vault’s maintenance level.

Going off the logic that one level should be explored as fully as possible before progressing to the next, I decided to start with the dorms. Inside the women’s dorm was a single feral ghoul to greet me. Glad for the first time to see a garden variety feral, I quickly dispatched it with a few shots from my 10mm. From the body and the rooms in the women’s dorm, I was able to loot twenty-something bottle caps, a handful of stimpacks, a decent supply of irradiated pre-war food and a great deal of scrap metal.

The male dorm across the way was very much the same as the dorm I’d just picked clean, down to the quality of stuff I was able to scavenge from it. Where it differed from the female dorms however, was in that there was no feral ghoul occupying its hall, and at the end of the hall was a locked door with a security terminal beside it.

Thinking back, the only other time I’d seen a terminal like that was back at the door to the Overseer’s office, so I figured it was safe to assume this door was that of the Overseer’s personal quarters. Luckily, this terminal I was able to hack and use to unlock the door beside it.

As the door whooshed open, I was met face to face with another ghoul. Almost reflexively, I raised my 10mm and set the sights between the ghoul’s eyes.

“Whoa!” It yelped in a radiation-torn voice that grated like I could only assume its vocal cords were grating against one another. “Don’t shoot!”

I had seen more than my share of ghouls today, and I wasn't about to let this one smooth talk me into sparing its life -- at least not without good reason. “Give me one good reason… ” I growled.

“What, you mean besides my obvious grasp of the English language?” it snarked. “Look, I hate those feral bastards just as much as you do, smoothskin. Why do you think I locked myself in here?”

“What are you doing here?” I pressed, still suspicious of the ghoul as I ever so slightly lowered my gun.

“I just thought I’d pop in and pay the locals a visit.”

His sarcasm was really starting to grate on me.

“I live here, Smoothskin! What do you think I’m doing down in this hole? I should be the one asking you what you’re doing here. Ain’t ever been smoothskins in this vault besides the doctors, and they’re all dead.”

My gun had entirely been dropped to my side by this time, and the pile of peeled flesh talking to me seemed quite relieved.

“What do you mean? The Vaults were built to protect smoothski—” I caught myself, realizing I had accidentally adopted the ghoul’s terminology. I quickly corrected, “regular people from the war.”

“That what they told you in the ads? Listen, maybe most of the Vaults were made for smoothskins, but this one here – good ol’ 49,” I could almost see his praise dripping with sarcasm – or maybe that was just drool, “this hunk’a junk didn’t even open its doors until after the bombs dropped. For those of us that were unfortunate to survive the blasts, Vault 49 promised a safe haven where Vault-Tec and RobCo specialists would work round the clock to bring us the healing we needed.”

He motioned toward the rest of the Vault as he continued, “I dunno if you noticed on your way in here, but the docs didn’t exactly deliver on their promise. Maybe they didn’t have the technology or the medicine to reverse the ghoul-ification, or maybe they were just assholes. Fact is, they didn’t last long once the radiation ate away at our brains and turned most of us feral. I guess you could call it cosmic justice or whatever.”

“Karma,” I agreed, offering a knowing smile as I nodded my head. “So if everyone else went feral, why didn’t you?” I had only just noticed the Vault 49 jumpsuit the ghoul had been wearing.

“Maybe because I didn’t do nothin’ to deserve it,” he chuckled. “But probably because my will was stronger than the rest of them. When they admitted me, Vault-Tec said I was a natural-born leader and elected to appoint me Overseer of the Vault. I turned down the offer, sayin’ I just wanted to get the same healing everyone else was gonna get. So, they went and put a smoothskin in charge. Poor bastard didn’t last much longer than the doctors.”

As he went on explaining, I noted to myself how ironic it seemed. Vault-Tec was prepared for a nuclear holocaust and even had a Vault prepared for those that survived the atomic destruction of the planet. And though they had prepared enough to have some Vaults set up with dubious social experiments, they hadn’t prepared for the chance that their experiments would go wrong.

“I remember one of their proposed treatments was pumping us full of ‘a different kind of radiation’ in hopes it would cancel out what we’d been exposed to or some other bull. I’m guessing you’ve seen how well that one went as well. Poor guy’s name was Gus, not that he’d have been able to remember it.”

“And what’s your name?” I found myself asking. A strange sort of sympathy started to well up within me. At the very least, I could justify killing the ferals outside out of self defense. This guy here wasn’t even trying to attack me.

“Murphy,” he answered. “Listen smoothskin, if you’ve got the room, I wouldn’t mind getting out of this hellhole. In exchange, I got the password on me that will get you into the Overseer’s office. Rumor says there’s a priceless collectible in there along with the safe full of caps and RadAway and the computer terminal that can tell you anything else you want to know about this place. You strike me as the curious type,” he observed. “Why else would you fight your way in here?”

I considered the offer, taking in all the variables. I could leave Murphy the ghoul behind in Vault 49 after I’d already scavenged half of it for food and chems and just forget about getting into the Overseer’s office, but neither my conscience nor my curiosity toward Vault-Tec would allow it. The more merciful option would be to sign my denial of the offer with a bullet to the ghoul’s brain, steal the password, and break into the office myself, but it still wasn’t something I would morally allow myself to do. If nothing else, I knew the karma would come back to bite me some time further down the road.

“Murphy,” I finally addressed the last resident of Vault 49, “You’re going to need a weapon.”

The ghoul’s cheeks seemed to split painlessly apart as a smile tore its way across his face. “Now you’re talkin’ my language.”