Disclaimer: There's a quote in this chapter which belongs to Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Chapter 2: Paradise Falls
Sybil walked and walked. Her skin burned with the ever-present touch of the sun, blazing and bright, an illusive phenomenon she never witnessed in all her 10 years in this post apocalyptic world. The tiny, emaciated girl had nothing but a rancid lab coat and dusty goggles to clothe herself from the callous and empty world of the Wasteland. For about nine days she had been barely ambling along, bathing under the harsh sun whilst living upon the shadows it cast on her. Now only the darkness could shelter her from the atrocities and ubiquitous malignancy transpiring all around her. Never had she expected to see the macabre reality from which her home, the Vault, was excluded. And yet she couldn't find the right emotion to trigger the appalling sense of disbelief and shock. She could only swim in the murky depths of apathy and self-denial, hoping for hope when there was clearly none.
After hours of traversing an endless sea of unsettling brown, she sat herself underneath the shade of a welcoming boulder, beckoning her to rest and shy away from the pernicious world and her deplorable situation. Abandoned by her mother and taken away from home by her deceased father, she had nowhere to go nor a life to live. All she had was the contents of her father's note encrypted into her convenient mechanism bracing her right wrist, like a manacle telling her all she needed. The map was a sea of a virtual expanse of green, vacant and yearning for more geographic discoveries. But Sybil did not feel the need to explore and sojourn for she had no strength nor the capacity to fill the emptiness of her PipBoy. The terse message written into it would suffice for now.
"Look for Pinkerton. Follow the river SE."
Sybil did not know who this stranger was neither did she understand his significance in the recent transpirations of her deplorable life. If her father trusted her to find him, then he must trust the man to care for her.
She looked around the vast horizon. If there was anything Sybil knew, she definitely did not comply to the directions. Despite a built-in compass, Sybil ran off in a frenzy upon the intrusion of hostile locals in her cave where her dead father was currently resting. The rest of the panic was blurred into an equivocal event she could hardly discern, becoming abstruse in her memory amidst its pain and suffering. Running and running, she wound up somewhere far north after weeks of mindless fleeing, encountering no settlements as of yet and surviving on her canteen filled with purified water. It wasn't until the depletion of food and water supplies did she recollect her rationale and initial destination. So far, Sybil had survived on irradiated water and rotting mole rat corpses. The lethal effects of radiation did not prompt a sense of fear or precaution despite the fact that her father warned her to watch the Geiger Counter on her PipBoy and to stay away upon its raucous ticking. Strangely enough however, Sybil remained unaffected. She would drink from nearby puddles and quench her thirst with only dirty water, but what was supposed to be radiation sickness from living off of irradiated organisms and water seemed to have nothing. Sybil began to worry, but a helpless child as she found that desperation surpassed that of paranoia and meticulous dieting. She needed to live.
Sybil continued on, grabbing one last bite of some mole rat meat she picked up from her last scavenging. Days before, she came across a derelict diner filled with boxes of preserved foods. She carried what she could in her father's hallow labcoat pockets, and she was pleased for it was definitely more scrumptuous than the rancid remains of Wateland delicacies. Her blistered feet followed ruined roads a little further southeast. She stuck to the dark abodes of shadows adjacent to proximitous boulders, rocks, and shriveled trees and bushes. Her day was mundane and uneventful. The blazing sun with the company of the cerulean sky became prosaic as she seemed to be going nowhere, with the road stretching as far as it could without ever changing the monotony of the horizon.
The exasperated, bored little girl began to enter into a deep reverie of her past, conjuring abstruse illusions of her life's events and woes. She began to recall a day in class when she was forced to reiterate the words on the chalkboard as a reading exercise. It was humiliating and tedious for she did not excell in eloquence and speech. Upon lamenting to her father, he had promised that she will soon like to read, but not with the "literary junk preserved in these mundane confines." It was then when he had opened the family safe and uncovered a dusty, archaic book. Of course, this was many years before and it was the inception of her days in literacy. Her father would habitually read to her passages of the cogent play, but as she had gotten older and he had gotten busier, those days of dictation ceased. Now she can no longer remember the book, the author, nor the main storyline. But she could muster up a line her father liked to repeat when describing the future her absent mother had visualized for them.
"O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in't!"
The deceased doctor would often repeat it when speaking of anything related to her mother and her philanthropic aspirations. But the world, in reality, seemed dissonant with optimism and futuristic idealism. The esoteric remedies needed by this decrepit world were long gone and so were the people from which the fruit of hope had grown. Now Sybil was on an endless and dangerous journey, enduring the detriments of the Wasteland, in hopes of maybe finding her mother and restoring balance to an acrimonious world. But as for now, she was living the antithesis of their dreams back in the confines of their stifling society in the Vault, where boredom led to idyllic scenes and wishful thinking.
When the sun was ready to set, the sky was bathed in a crimson light and clouds began to hug the expanse before her. Shadows began to encroach the rest of the land while Sybil hurried along, trying to find a safe and derelict sanctuary. However, time elapsed and the night arose but she couldn't find a suitable spot. Tenacious and determined, Sybil walked on and eventually, she was led to what seemed like forlorn settlement abundant with rusty cars and barricaded with all sorts of debris and ruined parts of a house. She went around its perimeter, looking for an entrance to the settlement and she eventually caught sight of a huge, tarnished billboard sign. "Paraidse Falls."
The settlement seemed inauspicious to her, but it was dark and she couldn't seem to compromise her safety for the demeanor of a few buildings. When she finally found what resembled an entry way, Sybil cautiously approached it, but her clandestine efforts were in vain. Upon reaching the small gate, she felt something hit her hard in the back and the lucidity of her consciousness slowly escaped her.
"Quick put the collar on the kid!" a voice called out in the darkness. Sybil was frightened but she didn't talk. Her neuroses seemed asleep as she was paralyzed and perplexed at what was transpiring. Within a second, she felt a cold metallic necklace wrap around her small neck. Terrified and bewildered, Sybil began to make a run for it, but a sudden jab at her arm prevented her from moving and constrained any movement. "Sorry kid, but you're staying with us." A few chuckles emanated near her as she closed her eyes, finding tears in her eyes where fear should have been.