Because I am ignoring the main quest, I've altered the events in the tutorial section of the game. As I'll mention again later, James tried to leave the vault when the Lone Wanderer was 16, and died in the process. She took over as vault doctor until she left, at 19. Chapter 1 begins just after she's left. Just to clear up any confusion. Other than the questlines, I haven't messed with any canon game lore.

A lot of my OCs share names with NPCs. In general, it will be pretty obvious when I'm talking about a game NPC, and there are only a few in the whole story anyway.

Also, this story is already complete. I'm uploading it one chapter at a time so that it'll stay on the front page for more than a week or whatever. If you want to just read all of it now, PM me and I'll send you the whole thing.

Chapter 1

Where am I?

Slowly, the ex-vault-dweller became aware of a bright light shining on her. She opened her eyes drowsily, then quickly shut them. Even through her eyelids the light burned her eyes, so she made a curtain of her hands in front of them. She tried to organize her thoughts as her eyes adjusted.

Then memories of the previous night came rushing back: the security officers shooting at her, the door closing...and the Wasteland. A large white circle had floated in the black and blue of the sky. The moon. She remembered reading that it was many thousands of miles away, but it looked closer than that. She could see the valleys and ridges on the bright surface, even from this distance.

It was day now, and the sun had banished the comforting dark. She squinted her eyes open and stared at her fingers, which were still planted on her face. The edges glowed red from the light. Remembering some tinted glasses she'd taken from the vault, she searched her backpack one-handed for them, then slipped them into place on her ears. She blinked and the grass she was looking at blurred into place. How did people ever live like this? It's like staring at a lightbulb.

The dark glasses helped enough that she could open her eyes without squinting. It was only after she stopped worrying about the light that she noticed something else odd: a soft crackling noise. She had a vision of a giant insect clicking its jaws together. She looked over one shoulder, then another. There was only dirt and rocks around her, and a few stray blades of long, dead grass twitching in the wind. It was silent but for that noise.

It was a little annoying, but she decided to ignore it. It was hard to pay attention to something so small when there was so much else to look at, after all. In the light of day it was even more beautiful and terrifying. In front of her lay the rolling hills, mountains, and plains that were the Wasteland, extending in all directions for what seemed like forever. She looked out farther and farther, her eyes following the decrepit roads, overpasses, and silhouettes of ancient cities to the horizon, where the land met the sky. And the sky... her jaw fell as she gazed at it. Now it was light blue, and still huge. Enormous. She felt dizzy again. She'd never imagined that anything could possibly be this big. The world just went on forever. No walls or ceilings, just open space. What holds it all up? The open space made her feel vulnerable, as though something might swoop down and attack her at any moment. Actually, that's probably a possibility...

A light breeze blew, brushing a red-blonde hair across her face. It was different than the air that came out of the vents in the vault. It was cool, and it smelled strange. She wondered if it would make her sick. The Overseer said the air outside was toxic...

No, he was wrong. Her father was killed trying to get out here, and it wasn't for no reason. He wasn't stupid. He'd been here before. He'd never told her outright, but she knew. Whatever was out here, it couldn't be worse than what was behind her.

She picked up her bag and turned to begin walking in the direction she'd been going last night, but stopped at the ominous sight before her.

Sickly looking yellow-brown clouds hung in the air above a pool of brownish sludge that she guessed wasn't just mud, judging by the oil drums half buried in it. That can't be good. She could have kicked herself when she realized that the clicking noise she'd heard was the geiger counter on her Pip-Boy. She'd never heard it before now. Those annoying announcements on the Vault 101 radio flashed in her mind: "Zero rads, as always!"

She backed away quickly until the noise stopped, but she knew it was pointless. She was dead meat if she'd been sleeping there that whole time. She must have been too out of it to notice the clouds and the counter last night. She sat down and stared at the poisonous clouds in disbelief. She couldn't believe it. Barely 24 hours out of the vault and she was going to die from something as stupid as sleeping next to toxic waste. How could she not have seen it there?

But...maybe it was better this way. Better to die out here than to rot in the vault for the rest of her life. She'd seen the Wasteland, the moon. She'd been prepared to die when she came out here.

Although, she noted, she didn't feel sick. That was surprising. Radiation poisoning was supposed to be horribly painful, and if she had absorbed as many rads as she thought, she should be feeling it by now. She checked the health status screen on her Pip-Boy. The line that indicated absorbed rads was pressed up against the right edge of the screen: over 1000. She swallowed hard. She should be dead now, according to this. She navigated to another screen, then came back, but it read the same thing. It must have been malfunctioning. There was no way she could still be alive after taking over 1000 rads.

She stared at the screen, unsure of what to do. She hadn't died yet, at least, and she hadn't started throwing up. She remembered the pills she'd carefully chosen from her father's cabinet before she left. She'd brought a bottle of rad-x, but it wouldn't do her any good to take it now. There hadn't been any rad away that she could find. Maybe she could find some somewhere.

She started off in the direction of the nearest shell of a building she could see. It looked unbelievably far away, but it took only ten minutes or so to get there. Still, she was winded after going so far and had to walk slower than she usually did. The longest hallway in the vault was only fifty yards long, so never took long to get anywhere. She realized this was another problem she'd overlooked. Everything was so huge out here that you had to walk for miles to get anywhere, and she was by no means in good physical shape.

As she neared her destination, it grew into a broken house that was little more than two walls and a foundation. She stepped over a broken beam into the rubble that was left of the house. The floor was covered in large piles of broken sheetrock and furniture, all dull grey with ash and dirt. She sneezed as she kicked up cloud of dust.

There was a bookshelf leaned up against one of the still-standing walls. Some objects were sitting on the shelves, she saw, and she picked her way across the debris to investigate. There was an unused stimpak lying there, but no rad away. The stimpak was dirty, so she didn't touch it. Using an unsanitary needle made her uncomfortable. It technically didn't matter since the solution in the stim would kill any viruses or bacteria on contact, but habits learned from years as a medical assistant die hard.

A small movement to her right caught her eye, and she turned to see a radroach skittering by. She quickly drew her BB gun and trained it on the insect, but then stopped. The roach wasn't attacking her. It ignored her, innocently wagging its antennae. She holstered her weapon. This wasn't the vault. This time, it was she who was intruding.

She stepped around the roach and went to the front of the house, where the walls had fallen but the front door still stood. She saw that not far away were the remains of an entire neighborhood. This house was merely one of many decimated by the war. She absentmindedly began walking down the road that ran through the middle of the neighborhood.

The vault had had almost no contact with the outside since the war, and there wasn't much information about the current state of the world. All the drawings and photographs she'd seen of the outside were pre-war. Everything was so colorful and idyllic, so perfect. There were green trees and grass everywhere, and lawns were perfectly manicured, as flat as the pavement. Everything: clothes, cars, faces, were clean and sparkling. It seemed that the world she had discovered outside the vault was the complete opposite of the one that had existed 200 years ago.

Which might have been why the Overseer, and everyone else in vault 101, for that matter, was so reluctant to open the vault. They wanted to preserve a part of pre-war America, however small. It was fine, for them. But they had no right to force her to take part in it.

"At least that's what Dad thought," she said aloud. And perhaps he'd been right to try to escape, even when his services were so important to the survival of the vault. This place was unlike anything she'd ever imagined. There were no green trees, but there was something attractive in the way the black, bare tree branches were silhouetted against the sunlight. As she pondered all of this, she wandered past the last houses of the ruined neighborhood and down the road beyond for what was probably several hours, but seemed like several days.

She jumped when a gunshot rang out nearby. She recognized the sound right away; she'd heard similar sounding shots fired from the 10 mm pistols that the Vault 101 security guards had, but this was considerably louder, and the pitch was lower. She was tempted to go toward it, but knew how unintelligent that was. She wasn't about to make another idiotic mistake. She turned to go in the opposite direction of the sound, then stopped. What the heck? She was dead anyway. She might as well satisfy her curiosity. Turning around again, she hurried toward the sound.

It had come from the other side of a hill, which she climbed as quickly as her sore legs would allow. Peeking over the crest of the hill, she saw the skeleton of a house on the other side. There were more gunshots on the opposite side of the house. The distinct sounds were becoming more clear. One gun had a higher pitch and let out shots in quick succession. The other was low and sounded off less often. A wall blocked her view of the shooters, but a shower of bullets skidded across the ground at the base of the hill, spraying a cloud of dirt in their wake. Someone yelled something unintelligible. She couldn't see anything. She had to get closer. She tip-toed down the slope and crouched next to the standing wall of the house.

An inhuman scream was cut short by a final gunshot. She heard someone slump to the ground, and then it was quiet. There were some metallic noises-the survivor reloading their weapon. Rustling. Soft footsteps. They seemed to be moving away from her, so she risked a glance around the edge of the wall.

Two corpses were sprawled on the ground, blood still spreading in pools around them. They wore strange clothing that looked like it was homemade out of recycled bits and pieces of leather and cloth rags, and all but small sections of their heads were shaved.

The one closest to her still had his eyes open, gazing unseeingly at her. There was a row of ragged red holes across his chest. She'd seen plenty of blood before, but this...this was something different entirely.

She tore her eyes away to glance at his killer, who was standing over to the left, bending over the other corpse. She adjusted her sunglasses. The sun was behind him and she could only make out his silhouette. He took something from the body and pocketed it, then turned back toward the house. She darted back behind the wall. Her heart pounded. Had he seen her? She waited, but no more sounds came.

As quietly as she could, she moved one eye out from behind the wall. She couldn't see anyone. She moved out a little farther, looking wildly left and right. The man was gone.

Then she froze. Something hard was pressed against her spine.

"Don't move." The voice was low and rough, and serious as could be. He must have gone around the other side of the house. How had he been so quiet?

She scarcely breathed. She probably couldn't have moved even if she'd tried. Not that it had happened to her often, but it was easy enough to recognize the barrel of a gun when it was pressed up against you like that. The knowledge that she would be dead from radiation poisoning soon anyway didn't keep her from being terrified. Achingly slow seconds passed. The spot where the gun dug into her throbbed with the anticipation of pain.

"What do you want?" he said.

"Nothing! I mean... I heard gunshots, and I just... thought maybe I could help." It was a lie, but she really didn't know why she had come after the gunshots, anyway. Boredom?

"With a BB gun?" He was making fun of her. At least he didn't seem to be taking her seriously as a threat. Maybe he'd let her go.

She felt the tip of the gun leave her back as man circled around to face her. When she saw his face, she gasped, choked on some spit, and broke into a coughing fit. She thought for sure that he would shoot her at this sudden movement, but he just stood and watched. She buried her head in the crook of her arm until the coughing subsided.

She raised watery eyes to look at him in awe. She was reminded of the pictures of mummies in her history book. His skin was yellowish and in many places appeared to have worn off, revealing muscles, tendons, and even bone beneath. His nose was missing entirely beyond his nasal bone, leaving a large hole in the middle of his face. The left side of his mouth had deteriorated so much that she could see a bit of teeth where his lips were gone. A very large gun hung from his shoulder by a leather strap.

"Are-" cough, "-are you okay?"

The man didn't answer, but gave her a mildly puzzled look. He looked her up and down. "You're from that vault," he said. "One-oh-one, up the hill?" He jerked his head toward the vault.

"Yeah," she replied. "Do you need some stimpaks?"

"No. Look, kid, if you aren't here to jet up with those idiots," he gestured to the corpses, "or make a futile attempt to rob me, then get out of here. Vault dwellers attract too much attention for my taste." He turned to leave.

"Wait!"

He glared at her.

"Um... do you have any rad away? I wouldn't ask, normally, but it's kind of an emergency."

For a moment he looked annoyed, but the look faded. "No."

Well, it was worth a try.

He went to the body of the other man he'd killed and patted it down, searching for something. Since he didn't say anything further, she took her cue to leave before he changed his mind and decided to kill her. She started back the way she came.

As she crested the hill, however, another danger loomed into view: something large and black, with the same decayed appearance as the man, but with claws and teeth.

Uh-oh.

The thing turned its head to look at her, and for a long, tense second they just blinked at each other, each equally surprised to see the other. Then it charged. She turned on her heel and took off faster than she had ever run before. Her backpack jumped on her back and slowed her down, so she shrugged it off and kept running. She could hear the animal's feet pounding behind her. It would catch up with her in seconds, by the sound of it. Skidding around the corner of the house, she slammed into the man. He shoved her to the ground and told her to stay down. She covered her head with her arms as she heard the beast round the corner. There was a loud bangingclose to her ears, and the animal roared. She looked up in time to see another round of bullets pumped into the skull of her pursuer. It collapsed without further vocalizations.

The man squatting beside her rose and quickly disappeared around the wall. She crawled forward to watch him run off to the right, over the hill. He stopped at the top and looked slowly back and forth. As he searched for more monsters, she saw something shining on the ground by her foot. It was a pistol. The man must have dropped it. She picked it up gingerly. It was surprisingly heavy, though it wasn't very big. She held it with both hands, close to her chest. Just in case. She looked around the corner again.

And there, creeping up behind the man on the hill, was another of the huge black animals. How something that big could be so quiet was beyond her. It seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, and she saw that it was going to reach the man before he saw it. Taking a deep breath, she raised the pistol. She felt a pinprick on her arm, under her Pip-Boy, and the world seemed to slow to a crawl. She could see the behemoth clearly, as though she were standing right next to it. She aimed carefully at its slowly bobbing head, and pulled the trigger. She saw the bullet fly through the air and through the thing's head. A splash of blood spurted out the other side, droplets falling in slow motion. The man whipped around at the sound of her firing and brought up his own gun to finish it off. It groaned, and finally fell.