10 September 2277: The Road to Vault 92

Arkansas ARKANSAS ArkaNsaS my name is ARKANsas ArkANSas ArkansaS

Every wall, every cement beam of the ruin was scrawled on as far as a lonely, deranged old man with a sniper rifle could reach. He'd used ashes, pencils, mud, and quite possibly his own blood, piss and turds. Sheogorath was his only company, poor sod.

Well, there were plenty of landmines until recently but they don't count.

According to Haines, who filled me in between ordinary adventures on the way (you know, mutant bugs, raiders, stuff like that) he'd been sent to this town by Moira, barely two days or so before our first meeting, to secure one of those borbas for her research. "She cooed over it like it was a baby," said he at one point, "thank God she didn't name it George."

I didn't get the reference.

Originally called Fairfield, the sheer number of mines that old Arkansas had laid pretty much gave the settlement its new name. There were a number of houses that looked surprisingly intact. As we walked along the main street, We passed one house that still had the name Gibson visible on the battered mailbox.

Ernie and I performed a comparison experiment on landmines. It seemed that while my Flare wasn't enough to ignite a mine, my Firestarter was able to blow them up in one go. The problem was that Firestarter needs more magicka than Flare, so it took longer to, ah, 'reload'. As such, in terms of speed, Ernie's laser pistol was superior. This is why you shouldn't look down your nose at ordinary, non-magical weapons, unless I'm sticking them in your face.

Still had some close calls as we satisfied our curiosity about the ex-residents.

The Gibson patriarch, I worked out, was an architect, thanks to a mostly intact book of house designs along with a model house in the front room. A desk in back suggested he worked from home too. They had a fairly rambunctious son, or maybe a sickly one, since his room not only had plenty of sporty-looking toys, but also a pair of crutches and some sort of brace.

I stood in what must have been the parents' bedroom looking at the skeletons on the bed, where they seemed to have died in their sleep. I had a nasty feeling poison had been involved.

And their son... wasn't there. I had a horrid vision of a small boy crawling out of the house, no doubt already dying, looking for help for his mum and dad...

The Gillians apparently went to die with their friends, the Bensons.

I doubt little Miss Zane ever got her mechanical horse, the Giddy-Up Buttercup. She had a poster of it on her wall still.

They survived the war itself. They must have. They attempted to fortify the town, barricade the road, hells, they might even have laid some of those mines to protect themselves while waiting for help to arrive.

Certainly Arkansas wasn't there at the time. From what we've learned, life expectancy in the Capital Wasteland was about thirty – if you were lucky. He just came along, didn't get killed, and decided to stay here and make this town of the dead a fortress, moated with mines.

"If you ask me," Haines stated, "He wanted to go back there. If he was from that state at all..."

We were looking at what appeared to be song lyrics amongst the old man's endlessly repeated name.

Sweet HOMe ARKANSAS wheRE the sKy's alWaYs BLuE sWeEt hOMe ARKANSAS I'm coMINg HomE to yoU

That wasn't the only name that preyed on Arkansas' mind though. Two others, 'Eulogy' and 'Jones', featured, along with some nasty statements I won't repeat here. Arkansas hated these jokers and kept claiming that they wouldn't get him.

"Those corpses we found," says I, "the fresh ones. Think they might be Eulogy and Jones?"

"Might be," Haines shrugs, "but now I want to get out of here. We need to keep going north if we're to reach Vault 92. I've seen an industrial building that way, so let's go there first."

It was a power station, according to the remaining paint on the walls. Huge bold letters, ten feet high: MDPL-13. Almost as high as the hairs on the back of my neck.

"We're being watched," says I quietly.

"I second that," says Haines doing something to his Pip-Boy, "Actually, these mines are kind of heavy..."

So we slipped into what turned out to be an office after plopping mines about the exit. If we were being watched, and the watchers decided to follow us in, we'd hear about it. More importantly, we'd know if the things still all worked.

Apart from ghouls and radiation, there wasn't much else. After Ernie worked his magic on the security system – the ghouls were unappreciative – we decided to stop playing and get on to Vault 92.

"There!" was our watchers' greeting. This was subsequently followed by variations on "Aargh!" Landmines tend to make you say things like that.

After we'd cleared up various wrong assumptions and patched up our gear with the late Talons' donations, we had a look at an ancillary building. Lots of dials and lights and fiddly-diddly bits. And a work table where someone had been working on some sort of weapon.

"Interesting," says Haines looking at the drawing, "it's called a 'Railway Rifle', because it fires these railway spikes." And he holds up a few big chunks of metal, about six inches long and half an inch thick, wrapped in a bit of wire. Not the sort of thing you'd want lodged in yourself. "You could pin your foes to the wall with that thing."

I didn't understand how it all worked, but the idea was it built up pressure enough to send one of those spikes flying through the air and hopefully into someone's joints. Gods know those rusty spikes wouldn't do much against decent armour.

-o-o-o-o-

Another rotten night's sleep heralded further slog northward. A major road swept a little east and a lot north, and we soon came to a turnoff with a notice, still vaguely legible. Greener Pastures Waste Disposal. More recently someone had scratched into the wood Raydeashun KEEP OUT!

"Someone didn't," Haines remarked, pointing at obvious bootprints. Either it was a scavenger we were following, or someone in trouble. But we followed them anyway.

The Earth concept of waste disposal was pretty simple: take a big hole and gardy-loo until it was full up. Food scraps, broken machinery, ruined clothes, toxic muck or just plain unwanted – into the big hole. Then they'd dump dirt on top and sell it as cheap land – until the trash started to rot away and cause subsidence, or emit toxic miasmas, or mutate local wildlife into ravening monsters, or other interesting effects.

Greener Pastures was a perfect example. The earth was pockmarked with evil-looking pools of vile fluids emitting nose-raping fumes, in the middle of which a large 'truck' – think a self-powered wagon, but able to carry more – lay on its side, broken in two. Just to underline the danger, plenty of signs warned of the danger of radiation, and advised who to call if any did get out.

"Let's check the office," was Haines' suggestion. I thought it a good idea.

Inside were desks, cracks in the floor which reeked of corruption and, yep, radioactivity, and a safe. While Haines did his magic with that, I went over to a small figurine and looked at it. Picture a big-headed doll of a blonde lad in a blue suit with yellow trim, balancing on one hand. The head jiggles gently when you touch it. The base of the figurine reads VAULT-TEC along the side, and if you turn it upside-down the base reads: AGILITY: Never be afraid to dodge the sensitive issues.

Dodging the issues. I could understand Ernie being angry at his father for shooting through without any explanation; he felt Dad had dodged an issue he was sensitive about. Later research would show that the resident politicians had repeatedly evaded confronting issues that turned into the Resource Wars. And there was one chap we'd meet who took issue-dodging to an art – anything to further his idiot crusade.

But I digress. There wasn't much to find in the office, but there was a shelter further along the trail of bootprints, made out of an old cargo container that somehow kept the interior radiation-free. Someone, apparently, had been living in the middle of this death zone.

As we rested and let our Rad-Away 'drips' do their thing, I wondered what sort of man would live here. Or maybe it was a temporary... no, the camp bed bolted to one wall had been carefully installed. This was meant to be a permanent residence.

My meditations were interrupted by something bumping against the outside, followed by a scraping like huge claws. The container was metal, so we knew all about it. Haines makes a frantic gesture at me and I immediately understand and dispel Starlight.

Whatever was outside made a sort of chuff and then its friend arrived. Or maybe its enemy. Had quite the discussion, then there was a groan that sounded painful. And so we sit there in the darkness until I see their life signs fade into the distance. Whatever they were the shapes of their life signs made me think of a cross between a daedroth and a hunger, both nasty daedra in a fight, and long may they stay away from me.

-o-o-o-o-

The next morning we finally left Oblivion on Earth and kept going north, veering westward to avoid some of the biggest, meanest and most decayed-looking bears I'd ever seen. Whatever radiation might have done to beasts that, in their normal state, could shove a dremora through a stone wall, or outrun a courier's horse, neither of us was all that interested in finding out.

Yes, I know, but there were plenty of opportunities later on, and some researchers actually survived.

As we went westward, Haines frowns and starts fiddling with his Pip-Boy. "What?" asks he, twiddling away, "That's odd..."

"What is?" is my intelligent inquiry.

"This," and out of his Pip-Boy emerges this strange gabbling sound – clearly something's language, but apparently Julianos didn't think it worth translating. High-pitched and flat, and oddly soulless. Now that I think of it, as I relate this tale, it reminds me of the chatter of goblins.

Now Haines is sweeping his arm about, one ear cocked, and I realise he's listening to the loudness. So while he's ear-farming that, I'm eye-farming the countryside for potential interruptions. "This way," says he at last and we're off almost due west.

We almost missed our destination because of a pack of dogs which were out for food and didn't really care that dinner shot back.

"That's... really odd," says Haines looking at the mostly circular contraption partly obscured by dead dogs. From the trail behind it, the thing must have been flying, as it apparently smashed through the upper level of what was a two-story house.

Also pretty smashed was a glassy bubble on what probably was the prow, and another glassy bubble on the head of the rider. A rider that looked like an angry sun-dried bell pepper.

"My god!" Haines exclaims, beholding the nasty thing, "An alien! A real live dead space alien!" And he starts dancing about like when my boy got his first toy sword!

"This is amazing!" cries he, "I mean, there's stories and such, but to meet a real live dead space alien–! Oh, I wish Dad could see..."

And it's about this time that he winds down a bit, and sees me looking at him.

"'Real live dead'?" is my enquiry.

And he just does this impersonation of a freshly caught fish.

"Well," says he at last, "you have to understand that, ah, encountering evidence of alien life was not what I was expecting."

"Of course."

"So discovery of an unequivocally extraterrestrial vehicle, and with occupant to boot, is an event bound to cause some excitement."

"Of course."

"And so naturally, ah, one might lapse into a bout of, um, exuberance."

"If he's coming with us, you carry him, right?"