CHAPTER ONE: PROLOGUE

SUBJECT STATUS: ONLINE
UNIT: X7-77

NOW REBOOTING

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SYSTEM ERROR: SOUND WAVE MODULATOR DAMAGED - REPAIRS SUGGESTED

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REBOOTING IN 3

2

1

GOOD MORNING

A blinding light bombards the girl's eyes, temporarily blurring the world around her. She opens her mouth to try and groan but finds no noise coming out. Panic starts to seize her as she attempts to scream but to no avail. At least for the time being, it seems she has no voice.

"Damn it, just calm down, panicking won't do you any good." The girl thought to herself. Rational thought has begun to crowd out the initial confusion. She began to take stock of her situation.

She was wearing a long smock of some kind that must have been white at some point. Right now it was covered in dirt, grime, and other general wasteland unpleasantries that she must have been laying in. The smock was torn and tattered, especially where it fell around her ankles and looked a tad singed in some parts. The girl had no idea how that came about. The final thing of note on the uniform was the symbol of a man with outstretched arms and legs contained within a small circle.

She looked at her surroundings, hoping to get some sort of idea of where she was, but it was no use, she was hopelessly lost. The place looked like nowhere she could remember seeing, which to be fair, wasn't much. She was in a forest of the husks of long dead trees interspersed with scrappy looking shrubbery barely clinging to life, and smaller bush-like trees that appeared to be thriving and had a strange fleshy red fruit hanging from them.

Above her the sky was a deep blue and the air was warm. Had it not been for the fact she had no idea what was going on, the girl might have thought the day a nice one.

"Oh god what am I supposed to do now? I'm lost, unarmed, without food, and can't even remember my own name" The fleeting rationality quickly started losing ground to her initial panic. She began pacing the small clearing, desperately trying to think of what to do.

"It is unwise to stray too far from the caravan. We must return to the group, we are moving out soon" the girl heard a robotic, but distinctly feminine voice say.

"Oh come ON, Ada! I swear this is the last place we'll check, and I double swear that I saw something over here!" A much more human voice responded. The girl froze. Every negative possibility flooded her mind, what if it was murderers? Thieves? Worse?

As she was thinking of all the horrible ways she might be killed or maimed by the disembodied voices, they grew louder. "It was just right up here, can't those little legs run any faster Ada?" the now distinctly male voice shouted.

The girl quickly armed herself with a formidable and intimidating stick that had snapped off one of the surrounded trunks and turned to face her foe.

"Aha! Found 'em Ad-uhh" the voice finally burst into the clearing with a mean looking lever action rifle aimed directly at her. The boy wore a look of surprise clearly visible under a pair of aviator sunglasses and a dark green scarf half covering his mouth. The militia hat on his head had one side of the brim pinned up and a few bullets tucked neatly into the band. He was wearing a blue colonial duster that was probably a size too big and fell just around his knees. The look was completed with worn military boots and ragged cloth fingerless gloves. At his hip the girl could plainly see a flare gun and machete, and on his back was a bulging backpack.

She could now see that he was probably around her age, or what she guessed her age was. Somewhere in the ballpark of 22 or 23, with tousled brown hair peeking out from beneath his cap and a tan skin, weathered from time outside. He opened his mouth to say something before being abruptly cut off by a blue robotic figure.

"STAY BACK, LET ME HANDLE THIS!" The robot said, raising what appeared to be a laser rifle in the place where its right hand should have been, while simultaneously pushing the boy out of the way with a claw-like left arm. The girl quickly dropped her defensive branch and raised her hands with a look of panic, helpless to yell anything to stop these aggressors.

"Wait a sec Ada, she's got one of those Institute jumpers! Don't shoot!" The boy said frantically to the robot, slinging his rifle. The robot, "Ada," turned its vaguely humanoid head towards the boy, its two eyes lighting up as it did. "Just slow down for a sec Ada, calm down." He said. The robot seemed to sigh (if that's even possible for a robot) and lowered the laser.

"I hope you know what you're doing James," the robot said, lowering its laser rifle but not totally pointing it away from the girl just yet.

"Don't get your gears in a twist Ada, I've got this." Slowly, the boy approached the girl, slinging his rifle over his shoulder and approaching with open hands the way one might approach a frightened animal. The girl remained rooted in place, skeptical eyes trained on the boy who had been pointing a deadly weapon in her face not moments ago. The boy lowered his scarf to reveal a smiling face. "Hi there, James Thatcher, Commonwealth Minutemen. Sorry our first impression was so rough, but I promise I'm here to help."

(A/N) Hey everyone! This is a reupload of a story on here I wrote a few years ago but ended up taking down. Recently I've been on a big Fallout kick and decided to revisit it and try and finish this whole thing. Really hope you enjoy and feel free to leave a review :)

I should hopefully have the next few chapters up relatively quickly as it's mostly just editing or rewriting what I already had. I really like exploring what happens in the Commonwealth after the Institute is destroyed and this is my attempt to do so through the eyes of my OCs. Thank you again for reading!