Chapter 1
 My name is Carter Brennan. I have been up and down the greater part of what remains of a land once called America. I've been from New Vegas to the New California Republic, and I was tired. I had been tired for about three days since entering the fringes of the Commonwealth wasteland. Though, really it could hardly be called a wasteland from where I stood. This place had so much green in it, even the blasted ancient trees of yesteryear had the look of something … vital. The brush had recovered pretty well too, carpeting and obscuring the landscape with undergrowth.

This oddly did not put me at ease. I was a Mojave Wastelander. Born and raised outside the shelter of vaults or tall ramshackle walls. I was used to seeing nothing but grim, dry, brown desert wasteland. That was familiar. That was normal. That was home. Though, I say 'was' a Mojave Wastelander, past tense. Y'see I had left the Mojave six years ago and hadn't stopped moving since. This greenery wasn't totally new to me, but it was still far more abundant than say, the Capitol Waste, or New California.

So I was marching on through the wilderness and hills of what had once been Massachusetts, a name that most no one even recalled outside of the Commonwealth. As was my habit, I started talking to myself. I know it sounds kinda crazy, but you get lonely when you're out walking the waste with no one around besides your gun for company on cold nights. Don't read too much into that.

"Y'know." I mumbled to myself, brushing aside scraggly bushes, careful of my steps and eyes alert. "This would be a lot more pleasant if it weren't so quiet. Gimme a psycho-damned gecko cry or… a coyote howl… this quiet is makin' me think a fucking Deathclaw is on my ass…" Hey, it was true, and it wouldn't have been the first time.

I had stopped marching as soon as I saw that the hill I was on was clear of brush and trees for the most part. I clambered up the path with my pack sliding off my shoulder, since it seemed like a good place to camp. I found my luck had also won out with the discovery of ancient, ruined bits of a portable shelter and boxes with a few paltry goodies. Roll of duct-tape and a couple screwdrivers. I had about four of the latter, but I had been running low on the tape, so it was a good find. After pitching my tent I looked around for other bits of junk to pick through.

Half hour of searching before dark didn't get me more than a couple rounds for my gun, Charlotte. I like to think every Wastelander worth their salt had a name for their trusty side-arm. Suppose I'm just romantic like that. She wasn't much, just a 10mm pistol with a long barrel I had converted from a revolver of the same caliber. Her grip had been from the same gun and was shiny black wood. I didn't like revolver's myself, though I'm told they're less likely to jam than the clip-action. She'd never failed me in a pinch, so I suppose she was just lucky like that. Why 'Charlotte'? I just thought the name sounded nice.

I didn't start a fire, I find it attracts more things and people than the dark does, so I just pitched my tent and set a couple alarm wires around it before sleeping the night away, holding Charlotte for security. In the morning I packed up and looked across the shining metal platform that I swear to you couldn't have been there before when I went to bed. I must have missed it in the night. I mean, I saw the guard rails around it but I just assumed this spot had held a children's playground or something.

But no, it was a large metal platform, circular and with odd painted marks on it that I'm sure must have made some sense back before the world exploded. I walked around it. Then I walked around it again, just be sure. I was pretty sure I knew what this was, even though I had only seen a pretty sorry excuse for one back home. I was looking at a Vault Entrance. This wasn't just a major score, this was a phenomenal and dangerous score. Sure, sometimes vaults had a populace of slightly-off but well-meaning friendlies, but nine times in ten they were death traps.

Either the inhabitants went crazy, or the vault itself was deadly all on its own. So for all I knew, there could be a giant robot down there, a group of people with the heads of Radroaches, or Death-claws with Flamers surgically attached to their arms. That last one is something I've actually SEEN. So anyone who's half-decent at the Wastelander life knows that a Vault is a psycho-damned good way to get killed if you put greed before good sense.

Unfortunately, the folks who raised me would have written the book on greed before good sense, if more than a few of them were literate. So I began having a poke around.

"I mean, I know it was a long shot, but the best way to not look foolish later is to check for the obvious first right?" I remember saying to myself, as I looked in and around every nook and ancient cranny I could find. "I mean, I sure would feel stupid if there was just an 'open door here' switch and I missed it." I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out how this thing would even open in the first place, so much debris and shrubbery and leaves had covered it. I had just done my twentieth lap, hot tired and hungry as hell, before I decided to sit down.

I broke out some rations; bits of molerats and radroach à la stick. I hadn't had the chance to do any hunting in this area, so I wanted to keep eating light, which meant I was only slightly less starving when the rumbling started. It was deep, loud, weird siren noises started going off and I immediately rolled behind a rock for cover. The rumbling was getting worse, the ground was shaking. Thought it must be an earthquake before I remembered what I had devoted half my day to, rather than satisfying my growing hunger pangs. I drew Charlotte and waited.

The steel doors opened up in the floor of the clearing, pouring dirt and fluttering leaves into a big circular chasm beneath. A grinding sound began, like a loud sliding of metal on metal that hadn't seen any lubricant in a couple hundred years. It was a wonder that the mechanisms worked at all, but they did, and a platform rose up from the depths as I looked on from behind my rock. A person stood in the middle of it. He was male, dressed in a blue vaultsuit with the three vertical bars of yellow in the middle of his back. He seemed dazed and dazzled by the sun, since he put his hand up in front of his face. He cut a pretty impressive figure though. Fresh clean skin shining bronze in the afternoon sun, light glinting off the Pip-Boy on his arm and the shiny Vault-tec metal platform around him. Looking out across the Commonwealth wilderness in his blue jumpsuit, like a whole new world had opened up to him, ready to be explored.

I shot him twice in the back of the head.