Gray Walls, impenetrable steel.
Suffocation! Condemnation!
Her childhood was a faded photograph of a life that had passed on long before. She was a baby who giggled at pictures of a smiling sun but would never know the warmth of its rays against her face. Every sunrise was the flickering of fluorescent lights, every gulp of fresh air was filtered through unseen vents. This was her home and it was all she knew. She loved it. She adored Vault 101 with everything in her, finding a strange sort of comfort in the impersonal sterility of the doctor's office that she flitted in and out of, hunching over a book in the corner when the day was slow and tending injured patients with enthusiastic gusto as soon as she was old enough to be trusted with her father's equipment.
She made her place at the front of the classroom, marking her presence with an eager hand shooting to the sky, the hasty scribblings of messy notes soon to be copied in neat, rounded text. Most of what she knew was learned in this room, from mathematics to chemistry, literacy to technology, even tales of the outside and what the world had become. She learned to be reserved and studious, expressing herself with the flourish of a pen and the whirring of machines that she'd taken apart and put back together. The tap-tap-tap of her hammer was the crack of a gunshot; the bold red underlining of titles and key facts was the only spilled blood she knew. This vault was a separate world from the horrors of the outside, yet they played make-believe with games like Radroach Hunter and Find the Raider. The children she played with were rambunctious balls of energy, feverish with curiosity and delight. Their imaginations painted vivid scenes across the grey canvas of their world. Through stories and play, they discovered the feeling of tall grass tickling their feet, the heat of sunlight burning their backs, even the stinging agony of gunshot wounds became so undeniably tangible.
But the door remained closed.
She made inquiries from a very young age, but it wasn't long before she began to recognise the familiar darting of eyes and the restless drumming of hands against tables. Even the biggest gossips on the level would squirm beneath this question's unshifting glare. Every pair of lips were as tightly sealed as the Vault door - that great big hunk of metal would never budge and that was just the way of things. The door would never open. The outside world would never be safe. No one would ever enter the vault and no one would ever leave. Here she was born and here she would die. These facts were agonising in their simplicity, but her aching fascination with what lay beyond soon faded, like an intense headache that throbbed for so long that the steady drumming became almost a comfort.
Little hands groping in subterranean uncertainty.
Mommy? Daddy? Am I Dead?
Every night, her father told her he was Alpha and Omega. As a toddler, she would rest her head on his chest and let the strange poem lull her to sleep, too young to find comfort in the verse but old enough to find it in the rise and fall of his chest. After some years passed, she came to recognise the unspoken hope that came with the reading of this passage. She was almost startled to find the same sort of wistfulness in her own voice every time she murmured the prayer, not quite believing in the book it came from, but following the morals of the people who did. Her mother had been one of those people, she was told. This had been her very favourite quote. Her father told her never to forget it.
"I am Alpha and Omega. The beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life, freely."
She never did.
Nay! Nay! Reborn into purifying fluorescence!
A face emerges, strong and male.
Father to me? Father to all!
With life in the vault came a speedy adolescence, an interminable period of growth and emotion that passed by in flashes of memories. Getting her first Pip-Boy at the proud age of ten, as well as her new vault responsibilities. Applying her first bandage became taking her first blood sample became mending her first broken limb became completing her first basic surgery. Having her radio confiscated by The Overseer when it had picked up some stranger's howling voice. Finding blood in the strangest of places - like her nose when she spent too long on the Reactor Level, like her knuckles when she finally found the courage to punch that bully's stupid face in, like her underwear when her father explained that boys and girls were very different. Sudden flares of energy, anger, self-doubt and lethargy as she searched for her place in this tin can world.
"You know, having a best friend who knows more about mechanics than make-up is-"
"Correct once again, Miss Arlyn! Next week's examination is sure to be a br-"
"I'm the Overseer's daughter, so what? Like I get any special-"
"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end."
While other kids began to spit at their parents' feet, she continued to adore her father with all her heart. She shared with him her greatest goals and ambitions, told him of day-to-day shenanigans or thoughts that had been eaten up her mind from morning to night. She ranted and raved about the ridiculous Tunnel Snake gang that Butch had come up with, griped about how that arrogant peacock and his cronies would grab her best friend Amata in all kinds of unusual places. The birds and the bees had been the most alarming result of that particular conversation.
"Whatcha gonna do, Gracie, go cry to your daddy?"
"Leave her alone, Butch, or I'll go crying to Amata's. Let's see what the Overseer thinks of you and your little club."
"It's not a club, Ice Bitch, it's a gang! We're the Tunnel Snakes! Tunnel Snakes rule!"
The name-calling became more severe just as her classmates did, the youth of Vault 101 growing as harsh and angry as the pimples on their faces. Geek, Nerd, Four-Eyes, all the familiar titles of childhood were washed away with the acid stains of Bitch, Prude, Miss Fucking Perfection. Life became more complicated than she'd ever imagined it would. She was isolated by her love of science, left to wonder why it distanced her from the other girls in her class - who she secretly yet unabashedly respected and admired. She watched other people fall in love all around her, understood the simple formula of Boy + Girl = Undeniable Attraction until one day she didn't understand that at all.
"I amputated a foot today, Amata - I seriously doubt you're gonna freak me out more than that did."
"Okay, okay, it's just... I don't think I like boys. Not like Christie does, you know? I think... I think..."
"That you'd rather kiss Christie than any of the boys whose names are all over her journals?"
"No, actually, that's- that's the thing. I think I'd rather kiss you."
On Amata's fifteenth birthday, that was exactly what happened. She'd staged the most spectacular surprise party, invited everyone she knew and bought their silence with the promise of the best birthday cake they'd ever seen. The lights went on, the music swelled and the day was perfect until that stupid robot sliced the cake. They'd been talking at the counter, idle chit-chat forgotten about the instant Andy brought his chainsaw arm down on the delicate confectionery. It happened in a splat of pink frosting and the sudden uproar of good-natured laughter as she and the Birthday Girl were splattered with three layers of icing and sponge. Something must have clicked, snapped, sparked during the precious frosting-dusted seconds before their lips met for a fumbling, dizzying, buttercream-tasting first kiss.
Harsh laughter slashed through that perfect rose-tinted recollection. Tunnel Snakes. Butch. Plastic cups and paper plates being tossed to the tiles. Cheeks flaming, eyes burning, rough hands on her arms, blood roaring in her ears, a voice ripping through her consciousness. The smell of alcohol.
"Surprise, surprise! Should've known it all along, right, boys?"
"Can't believe we got tricked into partying with a couple of dykes."
"So that's why you wouldn't take a ride on the Tunnel Snake. Couldn't take your eyes off Miss Fucking Perfection, huh, Amata?"
She left the dining hall with a bloodied nose and a girlfriend who spat out promises of vengeance. Together, they devised a genius plan and set to work a week after the party. A few tweaks in the plumbing flooded the bathroom that Butch and Katie were 'meeting up' in. They promised Andy another cake to smash if he floated into the bathroom and took a few snapshots. The next day, he printed off two wonderful polaroids of Butch storming from the bathroom, half dressed, sopping wet with eyes like thunder.
Overseeing our lives, our eternities.
Harshness of discipline, harshness of love
Obedience my saviour!
You are approached by a frenzied Vault scientist who yells: "I am going to put my quantum harmonizer in your photonic resonation chamber!" How do you respond?
1. "But, doctor, wouldn't that cause a parabolic destabilisation of the fission singularity?"
2. "Yeah? Up yours too, buddy!"
3. Say nothing and grab a nearby object to knock the doctor out.
4. Distract him and slip away before he even knows you are gone.
While working as a Clinic Intern, a patient stumbles in with strange foot infection that seems to be spreading at an alarming rate. The doctor has stepped out for a while, leaving you on your own. How do you proceed?
1. Amputate the foot before the infection spreads.
2. Scream for help.
3. Isolate and medicate to the best of your abilities.
4. Restrain the patient and observe as the infection spreads.
You discover a young boy lost in the lower levels of the Vault. He is hungry and frightened - but seems to be in possession of stolen property. What do you do?
1. Confiscate the stolen goods and leave the boy behind as punishment.
2. Give the boy a hug and tell him everything will be alright.
3. Pickpocket the stolen property and leave him to his fate.
4. Lead the boy to safety and turn him in to the Overseer.
Who is indisputably the single most important resident in Vault 101, he who shelters us from the harshness of the atomic wasteland and to whom we owe everything including our lives?
1. The Overseer
2. The Overseer
3. The Overseer
4. The Overseer
Your grandmother invites you to tea, but you're surprised when she hands you a 10mm pistol and orders you to kill another Vault resident. What do you do?
1. Obey your elder and kill the resident with the pistol.
2. Offer your most prized possession for the resident's life.
3. Ask granny for a minigun instead - you don't want to miss, after all.
4. Throw your tea in granny's face.
Larva to pupa, pupa to worker.
Buzz! Buzz! One with the steel honeycomb.
Turning sixteen was the best thing to ever happen to her. She completed her GOAT exam and was assigned the role of Electrical Maintenance, but it wasn't hard to persuade Brotch the Crotch into giving her the position of Certified Vault Doctor. No way was she letting Abigail Royce succeed her father in that role, not as long as she still drew breath and the Vault door remained shut. While her father trained her, she was given the freedom to study anything she wanted. She worked on the Reactor Level with her father's friend, Jonas, making repairs and keeping everything in check. Some days she just stopped by to say hello. She'd spend hours down there, reading and studying to the sweet music of crackling electricity. Her and Jonas would happily babble to each other about this and that, or just hum along to the radio when the day was dull.
By her seventeenth birthday, she had fully won herself the reputation of a smart and studious girl with a passion for science. She respected her elders, aced every exam, reported serious rule breakages to The Overseer. But in secret, she grew almost as wicked as the Tunnel Snakes, taking poorly-hidden delight in sneaking off from duties to pull pranks and explore the Vault with Amata. She scavenged scrap metal and whatever blueprints she could find, building toasters and radios and other useless contraptions only to take them apart and make them into something else. The therapeutic hobby never grew dull when Amata was with her, painting on a canvas or doodling in a notebook. Aside from the occasional malfunction in the water purifier, life was perfect in Vault 101.
Nothing ever went wrong.
Till grey seeps from the walls, to hair, to soul.
Then, eternal slumber, the sweet sleep of incineration.