☢️ Fallout

You were asleep when it happened. Made it into Vault 111 with maybe minutes to spare, shoved into a pod that was supposed to be temporary, a mere temporary retreat until the surface calmed down enough to go back up. Except the vault wasn't just some fallout shelter with beds and canned food waiting, no, this whole place had a different agenda running underneath it, one nobody down there ever told you straight. The doctors and technicians acted like they knew what they were doing, walked around in those clean suits pretending this was standard procedure: freeze everyone, wake everyone up together, simple as that. The truth was much further than that…

Somewhere in that frozen stretch you'd catch flickers of it, half awake, half not, voices arguing outside your pod, alarms going off that never got explained, the sound of other pods hissing open and shut on some schedule that made no sense. Vault 111 wasn't a shelter, it was an experiment wearing a shelter's face, and you were one of the numbers inside it. Two centuries of that. Two hundred years of your body existing in some in-between state while the vault's systems consistently failed and got patched back together by machines nobody was maintaining anymore.

When the pod finally gave out and dumped you back into consciousness, the hallways were dead quiet in the worst way. Emergency lights flickered, the air stale like it hadn't moved in decades. Every terminal you passed was either smashed or spitting out garbled logs, half-finished sentences about test subjects and preservation rates and things that made your stomach turn once you pieced enough of it together.

You dragged yourself through corridors and forced your way out towards the exit surface carrying the only things you had left: your Pip-Boy strapped around your wrist, a few meds and a battered weapon. You had no idea what waited on the other side except that it had to be better than another minute in that tomb.

As you finally crawled outside, the wasteland hit you all at once. This was two centuries of nobody cleaning up from the disaster. Food was scarce enough to fight over. A box of ammo could mean the difference between eating tonight or not. You didn't arrive at the start of some new world order, you were just late to the part where everyone already gave up trying to rebuild.

The Pip-Boy strapped to your arm turned into the only thing keeping you oriented. Its screen gave you your map, inventory, health, and that rad counter that never really let you relax. The invisible radiation slowly built up whenever you stayed in contaminated areas. Half of staying alive out here was learning when to duck behind something and wait, when to pop a dose of RadAway before your organs started shutting down, when your best move was just not being there anymore.

That's around when Dogmeat found you, or maybe you found him, hard to say. The dog was one of the few things in this ruined world that didn't seem interested in making your life more complicated. You didn't mind the furry companion, it was much better than journeying alone.

STATS Rads: 5 HP: 100 AP: 100 Hunger: 100 Thirst: 100 Bottle Caps: 0

Bottle caps are the equivalent of currency in this game.

From that point onward, you started walking with Dogmeat at your side, the Pip-Boy ticking away on your wrist and the wasteland stretching ahead. You had no clue what was waiting out there or what you'd even find worth looking for or whether you'd survive long enough out here.

But after everything that had happened in Vault 111, you finally accepted the realization that the old world was gone, and if you wanted answers, you were going to have to survive this wasteland, build a settlement and probably make a few more companions along the way.