Disclaimer - I do not own Fallout or any of the characters therein.
Fallout
New Vegas
Prologue
If an unbiased onlooker were capable of taking in the vast span of human history, they might say it all started on October 23rd, 1959, when a group of promising young musicians were killed in a horrific bus crash. John, Paul, George, Stu and Pete. The driver was distracted, listening to his vacuum-tube radio through which the authoritative tones of the leader of the US Republican Party was giving yet another powerfully rhetorical speech about the weakness of his opponent. Mr Nixon would sweep into power a few weeks later with almost sixty per cent of the popular vote, the grateful reward given by an American people for the GOP's harsh stance on Korea.
Perhaps it was the decision to launch the first strike, whoever's it had been. Whichever hand, Chinese or American, didn't really matter any more. Not on October 23rd, 2281, 204 years after the 120-minute Great War in which two billion were killed, a further two billion within a month as radiation sickness became advanced radiation sickness and headaches gave way to vomiting, tumours, and death. That first winter dealt with two billion more, and the human race lurched from crisis to crisis for the next three decades, approaching extinction every winter.
Then the first Vaults opened, the wealthy, the lucky and the paranoid suffusing the wretched remains of the human race – perhaps a few million in the defunct United States of America and former Canada, if that. Humankind hung on, just about, against total societal collapse, strange mutations borne of radiation and engineered viruses, and themselves. New societies evolved, ever so slowly.
So it was that on October 23rd, 2281, the New California Republic, a swollen morass of assimilated tribes and towns, a million souls spanning hundreds of miles, found itself in the Mojave Desert facing the unknown numbers of an empire known as Caesar's Legion, cast adrift in history once again, not knowing what the following spring's campaign season would bring.
And a courier with the Mojave express was about to be shot in the head.
Twice.
Surprisingly, this courier will survive, although he does not at this juncture of the story know this. He will also end up an integral part of the war raging in the Mojave, a conflict of the new-old, new and old-old worlds. A conflict fought, in part, with the rifles, bullets, cigarettes and drugs, tactics and strategy, of the Great War, the wars before that, even the skirmishes between the very first men, as soon as civilisation had allowed the destruction of the other.
Because war... war never changes.