Approximately half an hour later, the cafeteria was abuzz with conversation and excitement over the complete success of the vault security forces in defeating the radroach incursion. Party streamers, noisemakers, paper hats, and all sorts of other festive decorations lent their color and sounds to the party atmosphere in the room. The security team were ushered into the largest booth, and waited on by everyone who hadn't already heard the re-telling of the events with their own ears. The cooks had pulled out all the stops for the celebration: fresh bread and even orange juice were pressed on the 'defenders of the vault' until they could eat or drink no more. The overseer walked in with Nadine, who was still holding her pre-war rum bottle from the overseer's private stock, and the crowd hushed a little while glancing furtively in her direction. Not being overly concerned with social graces, she wasn't exactly popular in the vault, but her contribution to saving the day could not be overstated or ignored, so the festivities carried on after the effect of her entrance wore off. "And here's to our unsung hero of the day" Farnan said, stepping out of the booth and putting his arm around Nadine's shoulders. With his free hand he further messed up her hair. Some of the guards swore they saw her eyes glow red and smoke start to curl out of her ears, and started to glance around nervously for available defensive assets. Even the Overseer considered diving for cover, but she simply shrugged and passed him the bottle. The crowd started up a chorus of "For he's a jolly good fellow" and Nadine chose that moment to melt into the background. She never liked crowds, and so had no problem with Jason getting the lion's share of the recognition. I'll get him for that hair bit though, she thought to herself. Just another in the seemingly endless string of pranks the childhood friends had played on each other, she was already plotting what sort of fun she was going to have with his vault network account. Farnan rejoined the guards, and split the bottle among them as evenly as possible. "You've all done very well today" he said as he poured himself the last little bit in the bottle after everyone else was served. As the chorus came around to "which nobody can deny" he toasted the room before downing his shot along with his squad.
Several hours later, the vault was bodily shaken and an ear splitting BOOM stopped everyone in their tracks. In a matter of seconds, the power started shutting down in a rolling blackout radiating outward from the engineering level level. The retreating slam, slam, slam of the light fixtures shutting off caused many to jump or gulp each time it repeated. THe mechanical noises of the ventilation system wound down to a stop, and the temperature in the passageways jumped ten degrees in as many seconds. Dust and debris choked the air, and the weak beams of battery powered emergency lighting struggle valiantly to filter down to floor level. Suddenly, the emergency lights started to flash pink and yellow as the power plant alarm started vying for peoples attention over the panic stricken shouting in the rooms and corridors.
I must be dreaming, Nadine thought sleepily as she was once again rudely awoken. Recognition of the alarm jolted her upright, and she found herself dressed, holding her toolbox, and sprinting for the admin section before she consciously knew what was happening.
Farnan woke with a start when his locker crashed against his bunk, and coughed out dust that until recently composed his ceiling plaster. He wrenched open the locker, buckled on his kit, and charged out the door just as the power plant alarms started blaring. Realizing that the corridor lights were out, he hit the light switch of his pip boy against the side of his helmet and took off at a run towards the overseer's office. Rounding the corner of the corridor, he saw several flashlight beams aimed at a smaller young man, who was being roughly pushed and kicked by three tough looking boys who were a few years older than him. Without thinking, Farnan charged the biggest one and delivered a crippling uppercut, downing his surprised foe without a word. The young man dove behind him, and he finally got a good look at the assailants. Norman Decker, accompanied by his gang, the Labyrinth Rats. "I don't have time for this" Jason said. Return to your quarters and we'll settle this later. I won't repeat myself" he said as his hand went to his police baton. Norman and the other gang member quickly retreated towards the stairs, shouting "you'll regret this" and "some overseer you'll be" over their shoulders. Only then did Farnan realize who he had just saved from a potentially brutal beating; Ian Macgregor, the Overseer's son! He pulled out his key card and handed it to Ian, saying "go wait in my quarters, when this is over I'll show you a few tricks that will make them reconsider picking on you." Ian mumbled his thanks and took off in the opposite direction as fast as his legs could carry him.
Nadine and Farnan nearly collided when they emerged from corridors in the opposite directions in front of the Overseer's door. He planted his feet and caught her before she fell, at which point she looked up at him, out of breath, and says "I bet you've wanted to hold me like this for years" with a sly smile. "Guilty, although ideally not under these circumstances" he said, as he pulled the emergency override for the hydraulics to the Overseer's door with his free hand. He set her back on her feet and they both nervously walked into the outer office of the administration wing. Whatever they expected to find when they got to the admin office, it was not what they found. The temperature was at least fifteen degrees higher in the main office than it was even in the corridors. the smell of burned flesh, blood, and the acrid stench of fresh vomit were overpowering. Farnan led the way as the pair rushed to the Overseer's side. The Overseer looked like ten miles of bad road that lost a fight with an irradiated lawnmower. He was sitting in a pile of vomit and splotches of blood, pulling bits of shrapnel out of his skin, and the skin was coming off with it. "Please" he croaked out in an increasingly gravelly sounding voice as more blood and vomit free fell down his chest. "Listen...to...me, I...don't have much time. The damage to the reactor was more severe than initial reports stated. Everyone has performed admirably in their assigned duties. But...there was just too much wrong to prevent a total system failure. This damned Vault Tec crap was" ( he coughs up more blood and bits of organs) "never designed to save anybody. I had engineering doing everything they could to patch things back up, but when you're patching the patched patches there's only so much you can do." A coughing fit seized him at that moment, and the floor in front him was covered in a new layer of vomit, blood, and pieces of skin. "Our uninvited guests severed the power to the coolant pumps and the hydrogen exhaust fans downstairs, and it was a race against time until things started to heat up." He smiled briefly, painfully, at his own joke. Farnan and Nadine didn't laugh. Seeing this, the overseer continued. "As these reports were coming in to me, I received an email from Vault Tec that...per design specifications, the outer door would open by itself today, but the date of the message was for the year 2339. I queried the mainframe about this, and was instructed to ignore the mainframe...power spike readings right before the message was sent." He pulled a chunk of skin off of his left arm, revealing the cooked, but still moving, muscle tissue below, and a piece of shrapnel that was embedded within. The overseer picked it out and tossed it aside. It landed with a clatter that made Nadine wince. "The overseer's instruction manual came up onscreen, with orders to prepare to leave the vault, and let the last remnants of humanity perish. I ran down to the engineering level and ordered Taylor into the reactor pit to attempt a manual shutdown, and all the computers in the room flashed the Vault Tec logo before stating that failure to comply would result in termination of the experiment. All the engineers looked to me, and I shouted 'What are you waiting for, do it.' When they got the door open, our Geiger counters sounded like a ticker tape, and I ran. The door to the engineering space was about halfway closed when the reactor vessel exploded. The lucky ones died in the explosion or of their wounds, but I had the misfortune to...survive, if that's what you call this" he said, indicating his present condition with a sweep of his arm. "My fear of change and the unknown sent good men to their deaths, and has resulted in the" (he hacked out another racking cough, splattering the floor in front of him with still more vomit and blood splotches) "termination of the Vault 76 experiment. I, I've killed us all." Before Farnan or Nadine could react, the Overseer pulled out his N99 and put it in his mouth. The discharge was deafening in such a small space, even for Farnan who was accustomed to gunfire. Nadine's shocked silence and blank look held Farnan captive for a moment, until the radiation alarms and rotating hazard lights pulled him back to reality. He shook Nadine a few times, but she still seemed to be staring off into space with a blank look and gaping mouth. "Nadine, I need you here with me now. Come on, wake up." He snapped his fingers in front of her eyes again, then tried slapping her cheek a few times. "Nadine, come on, we have to go, NOW! Do you know where on the network the door controls are, or where the access to the door is? Come on, network, vault door, lets go" he said, snapping his fingers as he was waving his hands around her head. As soon as he said network, the lights started coming back on behind her eyes. She closed her mouth, and consciousness came back. "I've never tried to figure it out before. It just never seemed that important." "It's important now, unless you want to end up like him" Farnan replied, a little more harshly than necessary. Nadine sat down in front of the Overseer's terminal and got to work. Within seconds, she was inside the overseer's personal files, and downloaded them all to her Pip boy. She found a file marked entrance key codes, and quickly committed them to memory. There was a hiss and a rush of released steam as the overseer's desk raised up into the ceiling, revealing a yawning chasm leading into a dimly reddish lit corridor below. Farnan pocketed the Overseer's N99 and ammo, then grabbed Nadine's hand and led her into the chamber below. It smelled musty and stale, as though unused for centuries, which it was. "I'll bet nobody's been in here since the day the bombs fell" Nadine said. "I wish I could see the looks on the maintenance personnel's faces when I tell them I've been somewhere nobody else alive ever has been before." "That's because there is nobody else alive" Farnan said softly, realizing along with her what that actually meant. They locked gazes for a moment, before Farnan grabbed her arm and pulled her towards the huge gear that served as Vault 76's protector, and enforcer of isolationism for the last two hundred plus years. "We have to get going, or we'll share their fate. We can stay here and die, or we can take our chances out there." "I..." "I'm not staying, and I won't leave you to get liquified by ionizing radiation either, or end up turning into whatever was happening to the Overseer. We're going. Besides, you know the codes to the door." "The code is" Nadine started to say, but Farnan clamped his hand over her mouth and marched her over to the panel. She hunched over the console and started punching in numbers and symbols, then pulled a small lever. Buzzer alarms went off immediately, and the creaking and groaning of ancient metal machinery activating, and bright rotating hazard lights started throwing an eerie glow over the area, compensating for the dim glow from the one remaining overhead bulb that intermittently threw sparks over the area. A hydraulic piston swung towards the door, drilling into the internal mechanism of the twelve ton gear, before hissing, groaning, and with the shriek of metal on metal rolled the ancient gear to the side in a cloud of dust and debris. The buzzers and hazard lights started to sputter and die at this point, trailing off until they were silent and the only light in the room came from a hole in the wooden door at the end of a natural stone tunnel. As the two survivors stepped across the threshold of the track the gear once occupied, their boots crunched on bones and bits of clothing from people who gathered outside the vault begging for admission once the missile sirens went off that fateful day in October of 2077. 'Let us in you bastards', 'you're killing us', 'a curse on both your houses', and other protest signs with rusted nails stuck to rotting wood poles were mixed in with the remains. "There's so many" said Nadine softly, initially trying not to step on anyone's earthly remains. The further from the door they crept the thicker the piles of bones became, until treading on them was unavoidable. Each audible snap evoked a wince from Nadine. Eventually she just closed her eyes and held onto the back of Farnan's plate carrier, trusting him to lead her out of the mausoleum borne from the last panicked moments of hundreds of people's lives before they were snuffed out in an instant by nuclear fire. They reached the rotted wooden gate-like door that covered the end of the tunnel leading from the vault entryway to the next chapter in their lives. "I hope you didn't forget anything" Farnan quipped, and Nadine nearly rose to the bait. "What's every part and person of life as you know it when adventure awaits" she said as stoic as possible, not letting any emotion creep into her voice and not meeting Farnan's eyes. "On the count of three, I'm opening the door, you might want to cover your eyes. One, two..." Nadine pushed past him and booted open the door herself. "Like I'd let you be the first person to walk out of the vault in over two hundred years" she said with a laugh, as she strode out the door.
Several hours later, the vault was bodily shaken and an ear splitting BOOM stopped everyone in their tracks. In a matter of seconds, the power started shutting down in a rolling blackout radiating outward from the engineering level level. The retreating slam, slam, slam of the light fixtures shutting off caused many to jump or gulp each time it repeated. THe mechanical noises of the ventilation system wound down to a stop, and the temperature in the passageways jumped ten degrees in as many seconds. Dust and debris choked the air, and the weak beams of battery powered emergency lighting struggle valiantly to filter down to floor level. Suddenly, the emergency lights started to flash pink and yellow as the power plant alarm started vying for peoples attention over the panic stricken shouting in the rooms and corridors.
I must be dreaming, Nadine thought sleepily as she was once again rudely awoken. Recognition of the alarm jolted her upright, and she found herself dressed, holding her toolbox, and sprinting for the admin section before she consciously knew what was happening.
Farnan woke with a start when his locker crashed against his bunk, and coughed out dust that until recently composed his ceiling plaster. He wrenched open the locker, buckled on his kit, and charged out the door just as the power plant alarms started blaring. Realizing that the corridor lights were out, he hit the light switch of his pip boy against the side of his helmet and took off at a run towards the overseer's office. Rounding the corner of the corridor, he saw several flashlight beams aimed at a smaller young man, who was being roughly pushed and kicked by three tough looking boys who were a few years older than him. Without thinking, Farnan charged the biggest one and delivered a crippling uppercut, downing his surprised foe without a word. The young man dove behind him, and he finally got a good look at the assailants. Norman Decker, accompanied by his gang, the Labyrinth Rats. "I don't have time for this" Jason said. Return to your quarters and we'll settle this later. I won't repeat myself" he said as his hand went to his police baton. Norman and the other gang member quickly retreated towards the stairs, shouting "you'll regret this" and "some overseer you'll be" over their shoulders. Only then did Farnan realize who he had just saved from a potentially brutal beating; Ian Macgregor, the Overseer's son! He pulled out his key card and handed it to Ian, saying "go wait in my quarters, when this is over I'll show you a few tricks that will make them reconsider picking on you." Ian mumbled his thanks and took off in the opposite direction as fast as his legs could carry him.
Nadine and Farnan nearly collided when they emerged from corridors in the opposite directions in front of the Overseer's door. He planted his feet and caught her before she fell, at which point she looked up at him, out of breath, and says "I bet you've wanted to hold me like this for years" with a sly smile. "Guilty, although ideally not under these circumstances" he said, as he pulled the emergency override for the hydraulics to the Overseer's door with his free hand. He set her back on her feet and they both nervously walked into the outer office of the administration wing. Whatever they expected to find when they got to the admin office, it was not what they found. The temperature was at least fifteen degrees higher in the main office than it was even in the corridors. the smell of burned flesh, blood, and the acrid stench of fresh vomit were overpowering. Farnan led the way as the pair rushed to the Overseer's side. The Overseer looked like ten miles of bad road that lost a fight with an irradiated lawnmower. He was sitting in a pile of vomit and splotches of blood, pulling bits of shrapnel out of his skin, and the skin was coming off with it. "Please" he croaked out in an increasingly gravelly sounding voice as more blood and vomit free fell down his chest. "Listen...to...me, I...don't have much time. The damage to the reactor was more severe than initial reports stated. Everyone has performed admirably in their assigned duties. But...there was just too much wrong to prevent a total system failure. This damned Vault Tec crap was" ( he coughs up more blood and bits of organs) "never designed to save anybody. I had engineering doing everything they could to patch things back up, but when you're patching the patched patches there's only so much you can do." A coughing fit seized him at that moment, and the floor in front him was covered in a new layer of vomit, blood, and pieces of skin. "Our uninvited guests severed the power to the coolant pumps and the hydrogen exhaust fans downstairs, and it was a race against time until things started to heat up." He smiled briefly, painfully, at his own joke. Farnan and Nadine didn't laugh. Seeing this, the overseer continued. "As these reports were coming in to me, I received an email from Vault Tec that...per design specifications, the outer door would open by itself today, but the date of the message was for the year 2339. I queried the mainframe about this, and was instructed to ignore the mainframe...power spike readings right before the message was sent." He pulled a chunk of skin off of his left arm, revealing the cooked, but still moving, muscle tissue below, and a piece of shrapnel that was embedded within. The overseer picked it out and tossed it aside. It landed with a clatter that made Nadine wince. "The overseer's instruction manual came up onscreen, with orders to prepare to leave the vault, and let the last remnants of humanity perish. I ran down to the engineering level and ordered Taylor into the reactor pit to attempt a manual shutdown, and all the computers in the room flashed the Vault Tec logo before stating that failure to comply would result in termination of the experiment. All the engineers looked to me, and I shouted 'What are you waiting for, do it.' When they got the door open, our Geiger counters sounded like a ticker tape, and I ran. The door to the engineering space was about halfway closed when the reactor vessel exploded. The lucky ones died in the explosion or of their wounds, but I had the misfortune to...survive, if that's what you call this" he said, indicating his present condition with a sweep of his arm. "My fear of change and the unknown sent good men to their deaths, and has resulted in the" (he hacked out another racking cough, splattering the floor in front of him with still more vomit and blood splotches) "termination of the Vault 76 experiment. I, I've killed us all." Before Farnan or Nadine could react, the Overseer pulled out his N99 and put it in his mouth. The discharge was deafening in such a small space, even for Farnan who was accustomed to gunfire. Nadine's shocked silence and blank look held Farnan captive for a moment, until the radiation alarms and rotating hazard lights pulled him back to reality. He shook Nadine a few times, but she still seemed to be staring off into space with a blank look and gaping mouth. "Nadine, I need you here with me now. Come on, wake up." He snapped his fingers in front of her eyes again, then tried slapping her cheek a few times. "Nadine, come on, we have to go, NOW! Do you know where on the network the door controls are, or where the access to the door is? Come on, network, vault door, lets go" he said, snapping his fingers as he was waving his hands around her head. As soon as he said network, the lights started coming back on behind her eyes. She closed her mouth, and consciousness came back. "I've never tried to figure it out before. It just never seemed that important." "It's important now, unless you want to end up like him" Farnan replied, a little more harshly than necessary. Nadine sat down in front of the Overseer's terminal and got to work. Within seconds, she was inside the overseer's personal files, and downloaded them all to her Pip boy. She found a file marked entrance key codes, and quickly committed them to memory. There was a hiss and a rush of released steam as the overseer's desk raised up into the ceiling, revealing a yawning chasm leading into a dimly reddish lit corridor below. Farnan pocketed the Overseer's N99 and ammo, then grabbed Nadine's hand and led her into the chamber below. It smelled musty and stale, as though unused for centuries, which it was. "I'll bet nobody's been in here since the day the bombs fell" Nadine said. "I wish I could see the looks on the maintenance personnel's faces when I tell them I've been somewhere nobody else alive ever has been before." "That's because there is nobody else alive" Farnan said softly, realizing along with her what that actually meant. They locked gazes for a moment, before Farnan grabbed her arm and pulled her towards the huge gear that served as Vault 76's protector, and enforcer of isolationism for the last two hundred plus years. "We have to get going, or we'll share their fate. We can stay here and die, or we can take our chances out there." "I..." "I'm not staying, and I won't leave you to get liquified by ionizing radiation either, or end up turning into whatever was happening to the Overseer. We're going. Besides, you know the codes to the door." "The code is" Nadine started to say, but Farnan clamped his hand over her mouth and marched her over to the panel. She hunched over the console and started punching in numbers and symbols, then pulled a small lever. Buzzer alarms went off immediately, and the creaking and groaning of ancient metal machinery activating, and bright rotating hazard lights started throwing an eerie glow over the area, compensating for the dim glow from the one remaining overhead bulb that intermittently threw sparks over the area. A hydraulic piston swung towards the door, drilling into the internal mechanism of the twelve ton gear, before hissing, groaning, and with the shriek of metal on metal rolled the ancient gear to the side in a cloud of dust and debris. The buzzers and hazard lights started to sputter and die at this point, trailing off until they were silent and the only light in the room came from a hole in the wooden door at the end of a natural stone tunnel. As the two survivors stepped across the threshold of the track the gear once occupied, their boots crunched on bones and bits of clothing from people who gathered outside the vault begging for admission once the missile sirens went off that fateful day in October of 2077. 'Let us in you bastards', 'you're killing us', 'a curse on both your houses', and other protest signs with rusted nails stuck to rotting wood poles were mixed in with the remains. "There's so many" said Nadine softly, initially trying not to step on anyone's earthly remains. The further from the door they crept the thicker the piles of bones became, until treading on them was unavoidable. Each audible snap evoked a wince from Nadine. Eventually she just closed her eyes and held onto the back of Farnan's plate carrier, trusting him to lead her out of the mausoleum borne from the last panicked moments of hundreds of people's lives before they were snuffed out in an instant by nuclear fire. They reached the rotted wooden gate-like door that covered the end of the tunnel leading from the vault entryway to the next chapter in their lives. "I hope you didn't forget anything" Farnan quipped, and Nadine nearly rose to the bait. "What's every part and person of life as you know it when adventure awaits" she said as stoic as possible, not letting any emotion creep into her voice and not meeting Farnan's eyes. "On the count of three, I'm opening the door, you might want to cover your eyes. One, two..." Nadine pushed past him and booted open the door herself. "Like I'd let you be the first person to walk out of the vault in over two hundred years" she said with a laugh, as she strode out the door.
