A/N: Hello, everyone. It's been a long time since I published anything, huh? Well, the short explanation is twofold: nonstop Writer's Block, and my career as a pharmacy technician started to take off, leaving me little time with which to publish even if I didn't suffer Writer's Block.

But this idea entered my head after reinstalling and modding the crap out of Fallout 4 for the first time since 2016. A particular mod caught my fancy, and I decided to give my shot at a little bit of an AU. With this fact in mind, be aware that not everything is going to line up with lore 100%. In fact, I'm deliberately taking as many liberties as possible with this tale.

I'll be approaching this a little bit different to normal; there's no definitive end or even outline with where I want to go with this tale. As such, I'm open to suggestions. Else, I'm just going to write for as long as my imagination for this holds out. Who knows?

Without further ado, let's get into this.

A/N 2: Reuploaded to resolve some logic and narrative flow errors. I sent it over to someone who usually edits for me, and she pointed out a few discrepancies. She also figured that shortening my character's name would aid in narrative flow more.

Sanctuary Hills, 2077

It was as far away as Doctor Weyland could get from Mariposa Military Base before he left the country altogether. A general practitioner with a Master's degree in Virology, Doctor Karl Weyland had spent many a tireless night working on an upgraded version of the virus, well outside of his contract's bounds. He dubbed it simply "IIA", owing both to its untested nature and the virus used as a base for making it. When the original virus was tested, it was an impressive leap forward with regards to mutating humans into super soldiers. The subjects suffered negligible intelligence loss along with infertility, but were resistant to injury, aging, and disease.

They also had an intimidating presence due to their external changes; bred purely to fight with no consideration to any post-War implications should the Sino-American War come to an end. So, Doctor Weyland undertook modifying the strain as a method to prove there was a way to limit the virus's physical damage while maintaining the exceptional combat performance that had been requested so that subjects could ultimately assimilate into society again. Hey, nothing says Weyland can't do right by the subjects and get paid a king's ransom for doing it.

It's about the money; helping super soldiers find a comfortable form that allows them to see their families again is just the cherry on top.

Animal tests seemed to prove positive, with no intelligence loss, though strength and resilience gain was lower compared to the base viral model (though still well-within requested parameters). Weyland had submitted his results pending human trial, though the bureaucracy inherent in West Tek meant that the request was "lost". Given the context, "lost" was "bureaucratese" for "the request was never forwarded and ultimately thrown out". So, Weyland opted to bring a sample to the researchers in D.C. directly to secure the funding; failing that, he'd secure funding abroad.

A vial filled with the experimental upgrade had been smuggled on his person before the shit hit the fan; he didn't calculate that the nuclear bombs were going to be dropped. The Chinese dropped them, alright. And "had been" was the operative phrase; a family of three ran into him while the sirens rang, with the woman colliding with him outright during her careless fear. He'd gotten careless enough to take it out of his pocket, and it tumbled right out of his hand as it fell to the ground, shattering on contact only to get stuck right in the woman's arm when the two of them fell. The careless bitch was kind enough to help him to his feet, but to no avail – the woman and her family were bound to head to a local Vault, built by the aptly-name Vault-Tec Corporation.

Weyland's name was not on the list, and that split them.

"What about him? What about all of them?" the woman protested.

"We're doing everything we can! Keep moving!" the military guard said.

"Thena, let's go!" the woman's husband called out.

The woman, Thena, turned to look at her husband before looking back at Weyland and yelling "I'm sorry, sir! Stay safe!"

As she ran, Weyland could not miss the small shards of glass embedded in her arm. His entire future was gone, into a vault, along with an impromptu test subject. No money, no future. Nothing – all those sleepless nights working on the upgraded virus came to nothing.

Though, as the flash came from the nuclear explosion from the other side of the hill, Weyland felt a regret of a different sort. The loss of money or funding was the least of his problems. Death by nuclear fire was coming, and he was never going to see how his research panned out. That hurt more than anything imaginable.

Vault 111, Moments later

Athena – or "Thena", as most people called her – felt a great deal of pain from the glass shards that were stabbed into her arm. She was also coming down from the adrenaline high from narrowly avoiding the shockwave from the nuclear bombs dropping. If they had been on the surface a second longer, they would have been blasted off their feet and carried Gog-only knew where.

The glass shards were removed, and the area cleaned and disinfected, but Thena still felt a bit woozy. At least Nate and Shaun were in the Vault, too, without a single scratch on either of them. Already in their issued jumpsuits, Nate and Shaun were waiting in one of the decontamination pods while the doctors insisted that Thena stay out for a few more moments for a blood draw to make sure there was no trace of pathogens.

Exactly what pathogen they worried about was beyond her; medicine was not her area of expertise. She was a newly graduated law student, so perhaps this was a corporate liability concern. If there was something she caught that could be transmitted, it was in the interests of Vault-Tec's bottom line to keep her quarantined from others in such a small space.

Following the blood draw, they eased Thena into the decontamination chamber, with assurances that they'd get back to her with the results after the procedure was done. Nate offered a reassuring nod as the hatch in front of her sealed tight.

The chamber grew colder and colder. Her ability to stay awake diminished, and she could not help but wonder what was going to happen next as he drifted off into slumber…

Later…Much Later

Thena struggled as the haunting images that she wasn't sure were reality ran through her head: Nate being shot, and two people taking Shaun away. She even got a solid glimpse of one of the abductors: a man with a shaved head and a scar across his eye. And she'd been powerless to stop them.

The other, more immediate concern was that the pod she was in seemed to have grown smaller over God-knows how long she'd been in here. There was a hiss as the seals of the pod started loosening, and the frigid air in here began to rush out.

"Come on. Come on!" she yelled, barely noticing that her voice was deep and hoarse, like someone who had been chain-smoking since their teen years.

The hatch raised open in front of her as she fell out of the pod on her hands and knees…along with the tattered remains of her jumpsuit. She stood, a sense of vertigo hitting her as she finally started to come to her senses, her ears picking out heavy footfalls: her footfalls. As her vision cleared, Athena noted that everything looked smaller than she was.

It was difficult to make out in this dim lighting, but when she looked at her forearm, she was greeted not by the sight of her fair light skin, but by olive-green skin. It lay tight over musculature that would not look out of place on a Grognak the Barbarian character.

The very first thought that ran into her mind was as simple as it was apt: What the fuck?

She brought her hand on the manual release of Nate's pod and stood back as the seals disengaged, silently begging the stupid machine to hurry. When the hatch finally raised, she saw Nate…dead from a single bullet to the chest, with no Shaun in sight.

What she had seen – Nate's murder, Shaun's kidnapping – it was all real, and Thena fought back tears as the images replayed themselves in her mind. She eased her hand on Nate's body, covered head-to-toe in frost, and mused about what was going on in this Vault.

As untrained in the field of cryonics as she was, even Thena knew about the theory of cryogenic stasis. The idea of putting a person on ice was not unheard of. Hell, since the days of Hippocrates, hypothermia has been used therapeutically in medicine. She'd gone through several medical journals that investigated the idea. But to think that she signed her family up to be Vault-Tec guinea pigs…

She squeezed her eyes shut as a white-hot flush of anger coursed through her body. She yelled as she threw a fist somewhere…anywhere it would go. The sound of a loud clank reached her ears, and the sensation of dull pain registered in her hand. Panting, she opened her eyes to see that she had narrowly missed Nate's head and embedded her hand into the metal of the pod; moving her hand, she saw that she had left a sizable dent about two inches deep in the pod. Looking at her hand, there was hardly even a scuff on her knuckles.

What about the thing she had become? Was Vault-Tec responsible for that, too? If so, she was going to hunt down anyone that would be able to fix this.

Thena warmed Nate's hand enough to take off his wedding band without a struggle. It felt tiny…like she had been holding a dime in the palm of her hand. Looking at her own hand, she saw that her wedding band was locked tight against her skin. Frankly, it was uncomfortable to move that finger.

"I'll avenge you. And I'll get Shaun back…I promise," she vowed by Nate's body before closing his pod again. She'd give him a proper burial when she got a chance.

Looking through the logs, she was the only one who seemed to have survived the experiment. That doesn't count Shaun being kidnapped, of course. And, at least on an initial reading, it seemed the members of the Vault staff were just as clueless about Thena's, er… "condition" as she was. The only thing she could find was her blood tests hinting at some type of viral exposure with an unknown source.

The only thing Thena could think of was during the evacuation, when she had run into that stranger he ended up with shards of glass in her arm. That may have been the source. Maybe if she got back to the surface, she could start searching for answers alongside searching for Shaun.

She heard something skitter, and she grabbed a nearby collapsible baton before she started walking lightly. Rounding out the door of the security office, she was shocked as she saw a giant cockroach make a dive right for her face. She swung the baton with all her force, and the roach came apart effortlessly. The baton itself also came apart at its connection points and as she looked down, all she had in her hand was the handle.

"Giant…roaches? What the Hell is going on?" she muttered.

The window to the power generation room was shiny and made for a good mirror, and she looked at her reflection. Apart from the general shape of her face and the red color of her hair, everything about her was…different. For one thing, Thena's skin was olive green, and her body was well-muscled. Her physique was outright Amazonian, and she easily stood over two meters in height. Her eyes glowed a dim green that really stood out.

In short, she really did look like something out of a Grognak the Barbarian comic. Sure, on her first date with Nate, she joked that Nate was Grognak, and that she would jump in to fight at his side, complete with his foes coming apart. This was not what she had in mind, however.

Finally – and it was something she opted to correct soon – was her complete lack of any modesty. Her jump suit had come apart at the seams, leaving her naked.

Everyone that wasn't a roach in the vault was dead. Everyone. And everyone that wasn't in the cryo-pods was decomposed. Frankly, Thena didn't much like touching dead things, but what choice did she have?

Based on both the Overseer's terminal and the security officer's terminal, everyone was starting to get stir-crazy after some all-clear signal that was being awaited from Vault-Tec never came. The overseer felt that the mandatory six months shelter period was insufficient to allow the radiation on the surface to dissipate. Facing a supply shortage, the rest of the vault staged a mutiny, and the overseer forced a lockdown on everyone in response, demanding all water, food, and medicine be turned in.

Thena almost felt sorry for the staff. Almost, because they had deliberately been toying with the lives of the people from Sanctuary Hills purely for some type of experiment. As for who the people that came in and took Shaun were, there was absolutely no record.

A 10 mm Pistol lay on the desk beside what Athena suspected was the overseer's body. Nate had served in the US Army during the Resource Wars and after he mustered out, he taught her to shoot a bit. Nothing so large caliber, of course, and Thena had never fired at a person. Getting her finger inside the trigger guard was trickier than it should have been – she put that down to her increased bulk – but she eventually had her finger comfortable on the trigger.

She looked down at the overseer. The poor bastard must have offed himself after everyone else was dead and he had gone through all the food and water he had left. As far as Athena was concerned, he got off easy; he and Vault-Tec had a lot to answer for. She searched through his terminal once more and opened the emergency escape tunnel, and she treaded softly on through the door, bending down slightly to avoid hitting her head.

Turning to her left, Thena saw four…no, five more giant roaches. Taking aim, she managed to gun two down before the other three began closing in, jumping and biting at her. Thena managed to swipe one out of the air with the grip of the pistol, but the others closed the distance and began nipping at her. The bites felt like someone was poking her with a fine-bore needle rather than tearing her skin off, but she still thrashed around to get the things off.

She didn't think she grabbed one that hard, but it crumpled in her hand like notebook paper, leaving its…disgusting innards behind in her hand.

Gross! Holy shit! Get this off me!

Her panicked thrashing sent one flying at the wall behind her with incredible force, reducing it to chunky giblets on impact. Thena panted hard, placing down her pistol, and using her clean(er) hand to check herself for bites. Stunningly, not a single drop of blood came from either of the bites; deep enough to be felt, but not enough to draw blood.

She didn't have time to really consider what this meant, or what those pests were carrying – she simply had to focus on getting out and finding Shaun. She ultimately came to a familiar sight after she stomped a few more roaches: the entryway to the vault. A large, circular door of thick metal was locked in place – something she didn't even need to try moving to know that brute force alone was not going to move it.

Near a console, the remains of one of Vault 111's residents lay dead. Around the bones of his forearm was some type of computing device; Thena gently took the thing off from and tried it around her wrist. It was an uncomfortably tight fit, so she resorted to just operating it like a tablet. She booted the thing up; the screen showed that it was a RobCo Pip-Boy 3000, Fourth Edition (or Pip-Boy 3000 Mark IV). A type of cable was sticking out from the device with an electronic device that looked like it fit into a socket of some kind – an identically-shaped socket was on the control panel near the skeleton, and things clicked immediately. Thena inserted the jack on the end of the cord into the socket, and the Pip-Boy established a connection.

The durable cover that concealed the hatch release flipped right off, and she gave the button a solid knock. Klaxons sounded and warnings to keep clear of the hatch blared over the speakers as the visible gears within the vault door moved. A hiss of air could be heard as the seals released. The giant cog that was the Vault's main door began moving aside, allowing the bridge to extend to the other side. The elevator to the surface came down, and the grate that guarded the elevator raised.

Thena had her way out – to get to a surface that she hadn't seen in what felt like days, and a place to start searching for Shaun. Sanctuary Hill was not far away; it may have been worth seeing if Codsworth survived the explosion.

But first…

Thena looked down at her form: tall, muscular, curvaceous. She was not setting foot outside the Vault in the nude, yet nothing would fit her. She needed to improvise.

She spent the next hour or so salvaging what was left of the Vault staff's wardrobe to put something together. What she came up with was more belts than actual coverings, but she needed to make do. At very least, her…well, her assets were covered and supported, and she fashioned a makeshift skirt around her waist.

Thena stepped on to the cool floor of the elevator. The sensors seemed to detect that she was planning to go up, so it started up with a lurch that made her flinch, before proceeding up smoothly. Her 10 mm Pistol was snug in her hand – who knew what awaited up top?

A/N: There it is...inspired by the infamous Female Half-Super Mutant race. Open for review and criticism (constructive only, please; if you comment purely to be a jerk, your review will be removed).