War Never Ends

by Kirbilius Clausius

The Sole Survivor unifies the wasteland under the banner of the Commonwealth until a Lone Wanderer stands in her way. Peace was never in the cards, no matter how hard we bluff. In need of a beta.

191. Author's Notes 2

Ending notes, and much to discuss? Let's start with the 'twist'.

I feel I need to apologize to the audience whether I actually need to or not. I specifically stated outside the story that I haven't played Mothership Zeta, and that is still true. I have watched a playthrough (by Oxhorn, fan expert on Fallout lore if not all Fallout - I doubt he's looked heavily into the programming influences of various developers like other youtubers) after stating that though. I also stated that DLC was pretty much canon while I wondered about Creation Club and actively went against Creation Club content as canon - Minutemen vs. Gunners is the retaking of Quincy in the Commonwealth, The Goodfighters is I think Talon Company outreaching to the Gunners in their occupation of GNN in the Capitol Wastes, etc. I also stated that I would reserve the right to watch playthroughs and see if there was anything I should care about - I have watched a playthrough of Fallout and Fallout 2 but I don't think anything came up. Now I did state, and therefore gave the reader the information, that I had not played Mothership Zeta in response to the General coping with the existence of Zetans being 'real' rather than 'scifi' (in the same way that characters in some Friday the 13th movies have to deal with actual Hell being a geographically real place) even if it was more than meta. Which at least feels like I was purposefully misleading the reader away from the idea that the Lone Wanderer had successfully taken the ship in Mothership Zeta and was there.

That's my bad behavior as the fan-ficcer. I don't know the particular correct behavior though. Announce when I watched it? Make the first chapter a list of all the Fallout content I think I've seen that could be called canon? Ignore everyone in the first place? Even when I dismiss some of it and use others (The Tunnel Snakes having made it up to the Commonwealth to become ghouls in the particular subway is Creation Club content which I regularly ignored but used in this instance to circumstance Strong's demise.)?

The other is plot holes I otherwise left unaddressed could lead the reader to believing any clues about the synthetic state of the Lone Wanderer to be plot holes. Take how the induction of Dr. Cabot was not followed with him pointing out that the MYSTERIOUS SERUM is ancient astronaut technology after the Sole Survivor ommitted that fact when explaining its origins. This also allows clues to be dismissed as mistakes.

Again, that's my bad behavior as the fan-ficcer.

Another, separate point is the concept something the Youtuber Sarcastic Productions points out: that a twist shouldn't be less interesting than the story itself. While actually killing Hawkeye in Age of Ultron was what was going to happen according to the beats of the story (he had gone home to be a family man, he was hit early to show his vulnerability, he was literally out of his depth as he wasn't beefing over Ultron's existence like Tony / Thor / Banner / the twins, Joss Whedon always gets one, etc.) he lives and Wanda's twin Quicksilver dies...despite being a speedster...to bullets. With Hawkeye's survival we got the Ronin moment and the Soul Stone fight in End Game and the Hawkeye show...which honestly could have been legacy as a coming of age story instead of MCU Die Hard. What we missed out on was Quicksilver having been moved by the Helicarrier being on Tony's side in Civil War making for the first time the twins are actually opposed to one another, Wanda being snapped and Quicksilver not so that one spends time apart from the other and ages without the other in End Game, Quicksilver actually being there for her during WandaVision, leave alone all the plot that his death prevents like how Inhumans gave the inhuman princess a surferboy nobody instead of Quicksilver, no exploration of his equally quick temper, no exploration of how the twins are in love with each other (not physically, they both marry other people in the comics), etc.

So the best defense I've found against this is that it's not a twist. M. Night Shyamalan (sp?) is very good at specifically telegraphing any potential twist to the point that you can not only watch the DVD extra feature on how you missed everything but you can try to find someone who doesn't know what the movie is about just to watch it being telegraphed and them not catching on. I have a friend who pointed to Mr. Glass' car in Unbreakable and said "Oh, that's the supervillain. No wait, that's just that dude.". Instead of building up Hawkeye's death and switching it, build up Mr. Glass as a purple wearing, weird headed, mean but content to listen and even provide, driven to obsession, friend of the superhero.

That having been said, let's start going over what I specifically tried to communicate to the reader as telling them that the Lone Wanderer we were following was a synth.

From the first 'book' of this-

It is as established as can be that synths are not sentient by default, and that it takes them at least on the order of a hundred years to become sentient. Sure the Institute says this and characters can say anything, audience knows I had the General...I still think of her as the General and not the Sole Survivor, this comes from my playthrough of Fallout 4 where I certainly acted like I was playing the General and didn't do any of the Brotherhood of Steel missions in favor of telling my room mate that they were fascists...anyway - I had the Sole Survivor bending the truth into knots and fractals. But the Institute also 1) performed a test that demonstrated unexpected results of two being sentient 2) accepted the results. The two being Dima who in canon escaped the Institute and contemplated its own existence for about a century before deciding to found Acadia and Curie who had gone through all her possible calculations on her data set and genuflected about her very nature for 87 years (on non-synth hardware) about its very nature - which allowed it to escape Codsworth's fate of remaining an automoton because it had an impossible to maintain house to maintain. Curie's canonical leap into sentience is presented as despite her remaining a nurse (like the robot she was originated from) and announcing that she approached a medical problem from a new intuitive step - the sentience wasn't that she was solving a medical problem in a new way, that's what A.I. is for; the leap is that she wants to relay that she was capable of an intuitive leap to the Sole Survivor which is completely outside the bounds of the original Curie's programming. As for Nick Valentine who did not take the test and is a synth emulating a long dead cop based off the cops recorded memories, I would like to refer to an episode of Gargoyles. The main character is once put under a spell that makes him an obedient body that has to obey the commands of the spell holder. One of his allies holds the spell and orders him to behave as he normally would forever and then destroys the physical spell to hold, returning him to _act_ like his original character. There is no reason to believe that in later episodes, the main character was acting otherwise. However, he is still technically enchanted and his mind is not controlling his actions - the spell is simply using his mind to behave as if he was not enchanted. Hence, therein lies the possibility of Nick Valentine being able to break the narratively 'potentially somewhat fair' test by answering certain questions on it weirdly - "Explain a memory of an action that you regret. How do you misremember that in order to feel better about the action?". I doubt that an nonsentient synth could purposefully misremember something just to improve its mood while we do it all the time even when we are unaware of it to the point that we actively deny it, but I do believe that an Institute proctor could ascertain the difference in answers given between these two types of beings. Nick Valentine may not be able to currently do so but does have the memory of not remembering something else that he regretted and he could relay that experience to 'beat' the question.

In fact, synths are so much machines that when they 'go rogue' they actually can't. Glory the Institute heavy was a courser. So was the head of Acadia security, Chase. Even Miyamoto Musashi laid down his blade (after stating "A man can love his woman or his sword." and walked out on his only love, the most beautiful opera singer in Japan at the time - the woman even had the same condition that made Elizabeth Taylor's eyes naturally violet) to become an author and scholar. And these synth's first conceit is "Let's get back to mission driven potential combat!". These synths may not be malfunctioning to the point of the Minuteman leader that became the head raider of Libertalia but they are still just malfunctioning from abiding Institute policy. That every synth we meet hasn't changed career paths after 'escaping' is where I took the understanding that synths weren't sentient. We certainly don't meet any plants (Warwich, the Mayor of Diamond City, Danse) that have decided to go off and do their own thing (I think the mayor says he would after he's caught in an in game mission I never played through).

The synths that are in good repair take comfort in their machinehood in this story. It's a nearly zen like pleasure of being at peace with being a purpose built tool. They could freely sacrifice or endanger themselves for their objectives because they were programmed to share the same objectives with the Institute and became upset when risking not meeting their programming. Remember Agent Smith from the Matrix. In the sequel when he was 'freed' from external control while already being a program judged sentient by Morpheus - do you think Smith had forgotten what being a tool was or was happier because he no longer was? Or as Dr. Li points out in her reference to Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence; "No one asked the machines if they were upset at being made people."

By way of comparison, I want to discuss two other characters from movies that are great enough that you should have already seen them. If not, go see them and then come back and understand. The first is the Terminator from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The second is Chappie from Chappie.

Now with the Terminator, James Cameron (director, writer, all around franchise creator and initial 'show runner' for these movies) makes a very specific decision in order to have the finale hit harder and it pays off as nearly the last camera shot of the film. Terminators are conscious, at least those with chips in their skulls. While this was shown with the same evidence in the previous move The Terminator, he specifically reminds the audience even though it is a throwaway line that doesn't advance the plot or the story. And he shows this without the typical ambiguity of some character says they are or even a narrator's title scrawl.

The Terminator (a T-800) can see it's own field of vision. In the drive away from the T-1000 having attempted to intercept John Connor after the two rescue Sarah Connor from the asylum, the Terminator is driving without headlights and Sarah Connor specifically asks if it can see anything and the Termintor responds "I see everything.". The movie then specifically shows us the screen that the Terminator is watching - its field of vision with _other_ heads up display information and readouts in English. Now I'm pointing to this example even though we've seen the previous terminators' screen and even this terminator's screen before.

There is no way that this Terminator is sentient at this part of the movie despite being aware. Before rescuing Sarah, John Connor has figured out that a leftover artifact of having been reprogrammed to protect him as leader of the resistance is that the Terminator must obey him. Which results in a motivation conflict that the Terminator is forced to 'think' its way through. Its primary mission objective is to protect John Connor (we aren't really told what this particular protector's secondary or tertiary mission objectives are). So when John Connor orders it to help save Sarah, the unit says no as it's all too easy to anticipate the move and expects the T-1000 to attempt to intercept them. But John throws a fit ordering it to and won't abide by the decision. It's easy for the audience to believe the situation resolves itself when John Connor calms down and states rather than emotes "I am going to rescue her and I am ordering you to help me.". It actually resolves before this during the temper tantrum when the Terminator vocally states "This is not helping my primary mission objective.". It is caught in a logic loop - it has to protect John Connor and going to the asylum is the antithesis of that, it has to obey John Connor who is telling it to take John Connor to the asylum. It doesn't problem solve its way out of this by trying to modify John's behavior - physical force, threat of abandonment, etc. We all know that it certainly lacks the capacity to decide that the brat he's facing is unfit to lead the resistance or that the mission is too hard and simply not do it. It _stops_ and only when it can reconcile too very simple directives can it return to function as the tactical battle computer of its chassy again.

Now granted, James Cameron originally declared that Terminators can see their own screens to show the alien perspective of the killer in the slasher movie he had made. (The Terminator being a slasher movie - unstoppable, unreasoning killer with no to little regard for characters' inciting actions or hope of reward; last girl Sarah Connor; the jock; the unbelieving police; etc.) In both movies, he's paying it off when the Terminator dies by being able to tell the audience that the Terminator is experiencing its death and not just stopping functioning by showing the audience the exact moment when the Terminator stops perceiving. Despite there's no real way to argue that Skynet (a self-aware warfighting computer) has made its T-800 assassin in the first movie sentient enough to potentiallly go rogue, or the that the Resistance that's entrusting its leader in child form did. This is even before the scene in the super extended version of Terminator 2 where the Terminator gets the limiter on his chip deactivated. (A concept that is very much used in Sarah Connor Chronicles - terminators are their chips and they are simply installed in their chassies that give them a HUD interface to pilot the body.)

The other character that I want to present for comparison is Chappie from Chappie. We are never shown Chappie's first person point of view. What we are shown is Chappie's steps away from 'learning machine' and into 'person making decisions'. Sure, Chappie is shown doing things that modern A.I. cannot do (as of time of writing) - like painting a representation of what is in front of it simply by being demonstrated the use of a paint brush by a person. But it takes nearly the entire movie for Chappie to clearly demonstrate self-driven decision making like when he storms the control center seeking his mother's killer and hands the completely human killer a robotic cop ass whupping in a clear rage, but doesn't kill him on the basis of having decided that as a particular moral imperative.

Chappie isn't constrained by program directives. It probably isn't even aware in the sense that a dog doesn't 'detect' food or a dog's nose responds with its nerves firing at the presence of food molecules and therefore triggers what not in the brain - a dog smells food and likes food...most of the time, because the dog is after all capable of choices even if they aren't Free Will choices (the dog's too sick or injured to prioritize food acquisition over nursing itself, reuniting with known pack members, etc.). (Also, I'm not arguing Free Will even exists as criteria for a person's sentience. Only that they're capacity for self-actualization is separate from being able to perceive.) (Also, also - while I'm on the subject I accept that the things killed for me to eat are held and grown only to be slaughtered, technical term, for me to eat them. I understand that there are humans taming animals to utilize them as a function from dolphins for sea mine detect and disarm to dogs as artificial sheperds. But there are members of my species unrepetantly taking the entire lives, not killing but taking the life, of animals as pure entertainment and owning that life then calling it a relationship even though those humans make one sided decisions like "It's inconvenient now, someone else can suspend this relationship for me." and "The creature has served its use of entertaining me but doesn't have the capacity to increase my mood rather than detract from it so I'm going to pay someone to kill it." And yet we wonder how first world kids that you would mark as 'normal' in a school setting scream all sorts of obscenities on online videogames to complete strangers as if humans compartmentalizing their experience away from their effect on the world is a new phenomenon.)

And so from after that -

The General got handed a list of who is a synth and who is not from Dr. Ayo at her own direction. She used that to deactivate the Mayor of Diamond City. How did she not know? So first was the list was names and people don't refer to the Lone Wanderer / the Wasteland Savior / etc. by name anywhere that the General is going to put two and two together. Maybe Amata would refer to her by name but that's about it. On top of that, the Littlehorn incident where a much larger operation flew beneath her attention despite she was thinking enough about it to assign the special forces. Since the Sole Survivor can let single details slip and the harder to catch that they are (the synths at her launch site wearing modern synth clothing), the point is made that in her grand scheming she can't keep up with everything. Particularly, who is a synth and who is not if she's not checking for people she doesn't know to look for.

Again, synths can emote. The Institute's representative's annoyance with Faraday is an example. So when the Lone Wanderer showed emotion - so? That doesn't prove anything one way or the other. Except maybe that she emotes "My father's legacy is X" but doesn't bat an eye at "I'll tell Talon Company to run false flag operations", "I'll hire Littlehorn assassins", etc.

However, synths do operate on that single protocol. This synth didn't comingle 'protect the Brotherhood of Steel' with 'protect father's legacy', the Brotherhood of Steel was an aspect of the world that protected her father's legacy (even if canonically Dr. Li did not feel the same way). The synth was not co-processing 'how do my other friends like those in Ark & Covenant or the Pitt feel about the General' or 'how can I leverage this in their favor', just 'protect father's legacy' leads to 'stop threat to father's legacy'. It's a relatively deep directive that allows the synth to get nostalgic about times in Vault 101 to building relationships with new people, partake in serious acts of violence, attempt to negotiate with hostile and friendly forces. A synth isn't a can opener after all. Even leveled reasoning (protect father's legacy - the General is a threat to that - the General is accusing the Brotherhood of Steel of something they didn't do to attack them ^ and therefore father's legacy - therefore disproving the General's accusation will desist attack against nested protector of father's legacy). But is that sentient reasoning? After all, the Lone Wanderer never, ever actually repents doing anything - including attacking Natalie. I honestly thought I gave away the game when the Lone Wanderer went to both Littlehorn and Associates and the Regulators when they are definitionally morally adversarial in canon; i.e. the Lone Wanderer isn't abiding by her own moral set, she's following a directive. As shown by doing nothing about Ten Penny eating their smooth skin residents , she isn't caring about the results of the deals she's made. Every time the Lone Wanderer bolsters a relationship its not to enjoy or bask in it but to bolster it against the General.

What I would like to think is an interesting question is how so many people who had no trouble with my characterizations of every other character minor to major, Cait to Preston, Neal to Piper, Trish to Casadin clearly had an issue with how the Lone Wanderer was behaving. Her behavior was off to them, it didn't make sense - but they never got to the next step of 'why' despite coming off a chapter that shows I as a writer will hide things in plain sight. It's like a problem united, post-war Germany once had: it passed a law that stated you lost your unemployment benefits if you actively turned down a job that was offered to you because Germany has a very good social safety net compared to many places and it passed a wholly separate law that was an anti-human trafficking measure that legalized prostitution in an effort to not only regulate it but offer protections to sex workers. Not a single member of the legislature put the two together in their heads until after they were passed and brothels were looking over the unemployment rolls and offering prostitution jobs to any unemployed female in the country, automatically disqualifying every woman from unemployment because they refused to have sex with the masses. Granted, Germany as a civilized country corrected the loop hole immediately. But it shows that humans don't see the big picture. And in reading this story, not a single person connected "This character is written with the stubborn single mindeness and intellectual blindness that Codsworth, Whitechapel Charlie, and the Institute representative are written as" with the concept "This story contains non-sentient people passing as people.". Despite it being full well in the story that they are reading, there is a known problem with characters that are not sentient people pretending to be people. Because the Institute was lying about synths failing the sentience test? But two people they didn't know the identity of passed. And they abided by not producing mark IIIs without thinking about the implications. Despite not doing what they do to Acadia in game but studying it 'cooperatively'.

I think that meta question says a lot about our own ideas of what it means to be 'sentient'. There are people who fully believe in souls and will justify it with not just philosophical argument but with "I'm experiencing myself and that's not a biological process." when it is an emergent biological process as shown by altering the brain in anyway including experience changes the way the person perceives and they will refuse to believe an elephant with a larger brain and a demonstrably better memory and a longer lifespan in the wild (humans pre-fire lived to about 30-ish, elephants in the wild have a life expectancy of 70). People will do this while injesting mind altering substances in order to alter their mind while identifying themselves as something beyond the function of their component parts. I don't know how much of that anthrocentric arrogance kept the particular people who happened to read this story and happened to enjoy it enough to leave a review from deducing the 'twist', as I am not those readers. After all, how much thinking should someone bother with a fan-fiction? One can easily be forgiven for believing the answer is none.

What currently, as of time of writing, separates us from computers (but not other intelligent/semi-intelligent creatures on the planet like our fellow simian descents, elephants, ravens, cephalopods, and cetaceans like whales and dolphins let alone others capable of learning when taught) is that computers still operate sequentially. Even though modern processors are designed with the ability for the result of an instruction to leap forward in the architecture to either bring online or shut down a process, it's all if this then that. A very complicated network of multiple if this then that running at the same time on the order of millions of circuits operating at nigh light speeds per chip, but still that singular progression. Our brains, even those of something like say...mosquitoes are made up of neurons - cells that reach out to other neurons and have multiple dendrites that communicate with their neighbors at the same time when chemical cascade points are achieved. Computers don't think - they calculate sequentially. Biological entities 'think' in that our components are triggering in analog simultaneously with inputs and outputs from other components simultaneously. Your brain does not have the physical storage capacity of your first world cellphone. Your lineage has evolved a brain with compression algorithms including whole cloth inventing missing information from memories and ignoring obviously necessary information to take leaps of faith and lacks of logic in order to functioning on a level that rivals the entirety of the internet and probably still out performs it (as of time of writing). It still lacks things a superior species would have (access to quantum perceptions allowing true randomness instead of simple miscalculation noise to jostle existing definitions into new inventive thoughts without memory collapse let alone philosophical implausibilities like Free Will or a external biological interfacing that would generate a Ghost/Soul or even metasocial cooperation without believing in fictions like "Pharoah is god" to build a pyramid or "Money has intrinsic value." for our economy to function). And exploring what it means to experience this phenomenon in our time and the future is fascinating.

Also, Mama Murphy's prophecy in 143. Everyone knows that Mama Murphy is an in game guide. Her prophecies tell you exactly where the main quest leads. I had her first re-establish that with "Like you have three suns in your chest" to reference the three designators for Admiral Goa's nuclear missiles that she wears under her coat at all times. The shadow of 'the shadow without darkness...absent light' is the Lone Wanderer's synth who is acting without the darkness of the Lone Wanderer standing between it and the light source or the Institute who is the light source that cast the shadow of the object. The Lone Wanderer's synth can get into Raven Rock because the Lone Wanderer had already been there in Fallout 3, even though the General had to puzzle her way in. The fire, the Sole Survivor who's actually a witness to the nuclear explosions of the Great War, fired a nuke herself, is carrying nuclear detonators around for immediate use, can get in because she's an original number, i.e. an actual member of the U.S. pre-war military. 'Racing for the metal' because whoever gets control of President Eden gets control over whether the Enclave is called. Fire against shadow being the end fight between the Sole Survivor (fire) and the Lone Wanderer's synth (shadow). 'Not leaving alive' because one would die. 'Not staying alive' because while one would stay, they wouldn't stay permanently.

Like I said, I really thought I was giving away the game.

Off the topic of the twist - the Brotherhood of Steel wasn't going to win the war. As soon as I was abiding by the Institute defeated the Brotherhood of Steel in the Commonwealth, that meant the Brotherhood of Steel had lost their vanguard force and the Pyrdwyn and Liberty Prime and the Proctors that were in charge of all that. Considering that there are in base game Brotherhood of Steel missions where settlements are given the hard sell to produce food in exchange for 'protection', it's rather far fetched that the Brotherhood produced base resources and not just advanced goods (i.e. a scribe can build a railgun but nobody fetches water). Wars are won and lost not just on the grandness of individual combatants, but the tides of economy and political will. Had the Lone Wanderer focused more on understanding that, she would have either attempted a more guided surrender or at least not trying to convince settlements to side with the current body guards to Project Purity.

I hope the political reasoning of the characters involved was obvious enough in text. Rivet City not becoming a settlement, Lincoln Memorial's entrance negotiation not being shown, etc. I did start skipping over repetitious actions once it stopped being something that would arise in a character conflict. The Pitt joining the Commonwealth was early enough to showcase an instance for the plot, show how the General...Sole Survivor and the Lone Wanderer competed in the arena, and had stakes of pulling raw materials for war machine repair and construction to one side or the other. By the time we get around to the Republic of Rosie, I didn't feel it was needed.

Guest(1) - Random capitalizations were and early conceit. I lowered their frequency later on but did not drop due to others making the same criticism.

Guest(2) - What you point out is the a perspective on the U.S. Constitution. Most nations have a constitution that is the guiding principle of their government, and many don't consider the rights of citizens. Many ecclasias codify the use of a preferred religion whether its Israel stating that it will always be a Jewish state or Afghanistan and Pakistan cementing Islam. The Commonwealth's constitution in this story is a takeover move by the Sole Survivor that does imply she has absolute power - there's no codification that she can be curtailed by a vote of the council, there's no codification that her actions must be reviewed, etc. Also - please don't make the mistake of thinking an author agrees with the actions or motivations of their main character or any character for that matter. Hannibal Lecter's author is more than likely not a cannibal.

FallenStar39 - The General interacting with a more developed nation...yeah, about that.

Nearly everyone compromises their values due to having a brain that reacts to their environment. Even if morality is as intrinsic to the universe as economics (and I believe it is considering how often it evolves on unrelated branches of life as well as other reasoning) that doesn't mean anyone has the ability to compute the actual perfectly moral path in any given instance or that perfectly moral path would successfully leave intact rules we take for granted as moral (like "Deception is wrong." "Murder is wrong."). Sometimes compromises get made at a base consciousness level - starving person steals food. Sometimes compromises get made at the highest levels of consciousness - Ozymandius in the Watchmen, Starfleet and the treaty with the Cardassians that created the Marquis, etc. Where it stops being a compromise is when it's not a balancing act - I need to be president so I can order an end to the investigations into all of the crimes I've so obviously committed and in order to do so I'm going to break the justice system of the nation I'm re-pledging to serve despite having already pledged to uphold and having broken it by placing people willing to have it out of me now... The General, in her role as that, does act in a Commonwealth needs to get to the future better than it is right now way but does that outweigh what she does to get it there? It's still the balancing act...but moral compromises aren't good things because they do have that other side and they can end up not balancing.

Bethesda & Interplay did the world building. I'm just playing in it. I hate introducing elements into a fan fic that aren't there to begin with in the fan work. It's why I don't even like putting names to generic NPCs (vertibird pilots, random Minutemen, etc.).

This is one of the best predictions of the Rains. The Brotherhood is more technologically advanced only per capita and that's because they believe themselves to be 'the military' not 'a faction'; they don't include civilian villages that produce anything or are generally uneducated. With that, they do have to do something to tip the scales in a way that normal war prediction would be changed when they did Proctor Wyath and the Rains, people stopped having it out of them.

I tried to keep Old Man Stockton as the old man that didn't want to change his ways because he'd have to change a core principle that he still believes - he 'knows' synths are sentient. So if the Lone Wanderer can stop the General and her Institute relationship, the next general of the MInutemen certainly won't agree with her on this subject - right? Because Old Man Stockon 'knows' he's right. And risking himself is what he always did as a member of the Railroad.

And hence, what is a moral compromise and what is a tactical ploy?

I tried to explain her cover up and her failing to do so to a detective of Nick's capability. As for Nick's reaction - do you remember 9/11 - not just from a text book but from watching it on television, hearing about it on the radio. I remember hearing it on the radio driving to work in my first car and not making sense of it until getting to work and having people explain it to me. I had to get a part and at the shop I ended up watching the first tower fall, and that was before we knew the towers could fall due to the airplane fuel fire melting the supports for the upper part of the structure. And that's just me watching it from television. There's people who have personally witnessed terrorist suicide bombings, genocides by military blocking food supplies, etc. Now imagine a Hiroshima resident - someone who's corneas literally have the mushroom cloud burned onto them - you see how that's so much more. Now imagine the devastation of the last few hours of the Great War. At Fallout 4's time of writing, the _only_ people alive on the planet are Vault dweller descendants with a smattering of exceptions (Little Lamplight to Big Town, Underworld, the Institute, etc.). I remember a country that was 92% in favor of unmitigated warfare projected to only be successful if it lasted longer than the Cold War because it would take at least two generations of having the Taliban and Al-Qaida believers literally die off of old age while educating the entire populace, particularly the female side, into a productive economy - basically turning Afghanistan into West Germany. The only people who were against that were like Jehovah's Witnesses which are by definition concientious objectors on pain of afterlife. Now imagine Nick Valentine, who might have died in the nuclear war, and had his memory recovered by the Institute somehow. How would a police officer react to someone who declared that the law was a ban on nuclear explosions because she too had survived the Great War which cost her her husband and son and home and previous life but surprise, just kidding? And not just a cop but an honest cop like Nick? The Gunners are irrelevant in that reaction.

This is why war is always the terrible tactical option. Ukraine has a population of people who are ethnically Nazis, the same way that Brazil has a tiny population that is ethnically Confederate and celebrates Contillion every year despite being obviously multiracial. Those literaly descended from Adolf Hitler Nazis are about 11-15% of the country and can't do jack in Ukraine's democracy so they regularly exert their political will with assassinations, a lot of the times against ethnic Russians. The Russian Federation under Vladmir Putin's reign (let's not pretend it's an administration) has regularly done everything it could think of to mitigate this: from going to the U.N. (where the U.S. squashed the vote) to supporting Ukrainian presidential candidates (Zelensky's predecessor). With failure after failure and a constant stream of violence because of a population that's nearly genetically Nazis, Putin decided to unilaterally invade Ukraine with two goals in mind - ensuring it would not be a part of NATO the military alliance that is on Russia's border and set against Russia, and slaughtering every fool that has a swastika tattoo in the country. What was intended to be a few day tatical action followed by a Nazi round up has turned into a brain drain, a population drain on an under populated country, hundreds of thousands of battlefield casualties, trillions lost in sanctions, trillions lost in battlefield expenditures, his legacy going from 'strong man' to 'crazy deranged dictator', imprisoning his own population for daring to speak out against this idiocy, garnering new formal allies for NATO making the broder with the military alliance hundreds of miles longer, forcing a need to interfere with the elections of the world's current military super power to ensure the most incompetent candidate gets in office because of his love for being dictator and his followers bigotry driving them to support policies that drive them from their allies (i.e. Russia has anti-LGBT laws, bigots see that as good, therefore the invader bombing civilians is good in the same way that Christian fundamentalists who believe that Israel has to be destroyed in a war so that the apocalypse can happen in which only Israel's allies are brought to heaven support Israel marching down a path of war crime ridden self-destruction), military coup attempts, all this during the Covid pandemic, etc. The General was anticipating fighting power armor with people and started undercutting power armor deficiencies, repair and construction supplies, seeking other supply advantages, not engaging in direct fights until other advantages paid off. And surprise to the face - take you the Rains. Any possible conscription of Brotherhood elements (like Bridget into the Marines or the Railroad into Intelligence) went up in smoke because now you have "Lonely" Miles assuring everyone that the General is going to kill the Brotherhood to the last person, how many sheriffs dead, the change in council members, managing a potential famine, etc.

Okay, I misread and was thinking of current situation China which was 2019, not post election of a separatist in Taiwan / why won't you sell us microprocessors while we're selling Russia dual use goods / that's a few too many questions, we're going to hold you on charges of espionage China of 2024 let alone the fictional China that responded to the development of the FEV virus with a pre-emptive nuclear attack (according to original Fallout creator).

As for Nick 'trusting' the Lone Wanderer, he obviously didn't and dipped on her once he wasn't surrounded by a mercenary team in power armor with heavy arms. Unfortunately, his immediate end game (calling in the Enclave as a mitigating force) became the Lone Wanderer's last idea (i.e. They were not in 'cahoots' on the Last Gambit. They separately came to the same conclusion, just the Lone Wanderer much later. Which I don't think was well expressed because we don't have that scene. I think I should figure out how to write that scene in?).

I agree that a post Rains resident of a settlement in Far Harbor is going to remotely care about bombing the Gunners like Nick's visceral reaction from deducing that the Sole Survivor used a nuclear weapon. Those perceptions are going to be two entirely different things. Hence, the council's nigh annoyance at the General making them have her explain herself. And the Rains just prevents a populace that isn't on the front lines from demanding war on those front lines.

Littlehorn's reveal and his reveal as just an oversight was supposed to tell the reader that the General (and therefore, the reader) was overlooking something. Like who a synth was. I really thought I was giving away the game.

My Readers Digest -

I will write later about plans for the future and the lack thereof.

Fallout 2281 -

I kept the story going.

It doesn't need to be a western power that stops the Sole Survivor. I'll talk about that at the end of this.

'Twisted' villain? What makes the villain, particularly if they are the protagonist? Now granted, nuking a place and using it as an excuse to call for war as if it was a wag the dog operation is something that characters like Nick Valentine couldn't forgive.

Yes, the Sole Survivor set up the Commonwealth government with the promise of 'representatives decide' and it very rapidly is made apparent that they give her cover for whatever she was going to do by curtailing her rather than instructing her. She never means for the Commonwealth to act like a democracy or even an oligarchical republic. She's Rome's dictator, it's just instead of giving up absolute power in six months, she has to find another way if the council stops her from the one she's taking. But it's a version of Hancock's 'for the people by the people' government - it's not 'of the people'. In a democracy, we're the government. In the Commonwealth she's the government by will of the people. Hence her 'need' to basically rig every vote (the Institute synth that can't disobey, Trish being effectively bribed. Vault 88 will vote her way or just shut their door, no one in the older members want to go against that, no one in the newer members want to jeapordize their place by going against the 'real' votes, she's still Overboss of Nuka-World so Nuka-World and the Slog are in the bag, etc.). It's not that she's not subject to consequences - it would be very hard for her not to hand command over to Preston if the council published a pamphlet where they unanimously signed that she be removed from office. It's just that she's leveraging her superior education (particularly her oratory and negotiation skills) against people who are supposed to be her personal friends. But replacing everyone in Rivet City wouldn't serve any purpose and go against her exerting a 'moral' control on the Institute that no Institute member could rebel against, which helps keep her in charge of the Institute. The Institute replaced people to infiltrate a population, not to 'have synths'.

She didn't 'take over' Point Lookout. She walked up and said "I got all this good stuff. If you want it give me a barrel of beads." Ark & Covenant is a religious organization that's now got nothing to worry about in terms of outside power affecting their religious practice in exchange for getting access to better food, technology, and protection. It's like rolling up on a megachurch and saying "If you let me patrol the streets outside your compound with my police force, I'll give you this huge donation.". The only other possible objectors are the merchants who are now part of a much larger economy and hence supply chain and the swamp people who are given a you ignore us we ignore you or else we have air support and robots choice. After the Lone Wanderer adventures on the island in the DLC expansion, there isn't anything left to stand against the Minutemen. It's not like the gauntlet runner is going to profit by taking them on instead of conceding to whatever they want. It's expansionist as Manifest Destiny, it's just through outright bribery instead of violence and racism. As for Preston seeing this...Preston is kind of blinded. Not by his feelings toward the Sole Survivor but by the dream of the Minutemen. I just can't see the guy who keeps calling upon you to defend settlements or found settlements or let's go reclaim the Castle to see someone found the Minutemen navy or air force of subdue the Institute or found a coalition government in less than a "I guess they know what they're doing" light no matter how they do it. The General would have to literally order the Minutemen to hurt the people they were supposed to protect for like...tribute in sex victims or something.

This next one...and I thought I had run on sentences. The Sole Survivor is a lawyer - of course she's trying to present arguments in the most persuasive way possible to get her intentions. That's like asking "Why does this engineer constantly look at his environment seeing only problems to be fixed and things better left alone, observes his resources, and fixes his problems with things that work but aren't necessarily pretty?". As for when to expose her - as with all things in narrative fiction, every exposure should occur when it serves the story best. And I believed that more drama would come from no one really caring about her greatest crime being revealed turning everyone trying to stop her from 'motivated' to 'desperate'.

I really hate the concept of blocking someone. As an American, the concept of 'you don't get to say it because I dislike it' grates on me. I still dislike my having admonished someone in the situation. However, in my personal life I've broken social media contact with people who falsely accuse #BlackLivesMatters of things because they support the idea of police being paid taxes by black people so that they can shoot innocent black people and get away with it because of judicially defined not legislatively defined qualified immunity just because they want black people to suffer enough to always believe that black people are 'beneath them' in some way. If you're that evil, when are you going to decide that I need to die because...who knows, your crack dealer mixed in baking soda instead of rat poison and you miss the tingle the rat poison gave? In this instance, a reviewer stopped talking about how the story should go (or Thor forbid, critiquing my writing of it) and started threatening someone who disagreed. If you can't play in a consensual space consensually, then either you're done here of the space never existed to begin with.

I don't know how you could get to the idea that the General caused the Rains. I thought I had pretty clear cut scenes that Lizzie Wyath of the Operators then Brotherhood of Steel was responsible for the Rains: actus rea - she planned, built the chemicals, and pulled the trigger, mens rea - her confession shows that she intended to do it to hurt the General, causation - the outcome of her direct actions that she had announced was the Rains, and concurrence that she finished her announcement with the act of starting the Rains. This literally confuses me to the point of the answer to the question "Why did Moe hit Larry and Curly?" being "He didn't." when that's what Moe does and we all saw him and that's why I'm asking. As for other powers, I'll get to that after answering everyone hopefully.

I repeat, I don't get this. The General 'somehow' 'tricking' while Lizzie Wyath is gloating the whole way about doing what her canonical expertise of chemical experimentation is when she's shown doing it and announcing it and... The Brotherhood of Steel might be proud, but let's examine the honorable. What does that mean in Fallout? I think the Minutemen have them trumped on that because the Minutemen farm. Even if there wasn't the in game mission of the Brotherhood having the player coerce food tribute, they don't produce anything. The Brotherhood of Steel take from people and then go do what the Brotherhood of Steel was going to do anyway (like kill what they feel shouldn't exist post war - ghouls, supermutants, etc.) while hunting down tech and only making the next weapon. Adhering to any particular doctrine no matter what it says doesn't make anything honorable, otherwise every demon that seeks souls but doesn't lie or every Inquisition tortuerer that abided by the Malleus Maleficarum would be 'honorable'. Arguing a 'lawful evil' seems pretty suspect to me, and arguing that a group that holds itself to be a military that is beholden to no one but themselves despite everyone they meet is a civilian isn't evil seems pretty suspect to me as well. No one's really a hundred percent everything (Read the comic "My Friend Dahmer" to find out how much Jeffery Dahmer put himself through first in an attempt to resist his impulses) but people are condemned because of purity. As for the General not being able to stand the fact that she's not in control of the world - what about the wasteland can she trust with the fact that a Starship City exists and they don't have a piece of? The Brotherhood of Steel thirsts after technology like a vampire for blood and she knows she's going to have to build with alien technology in public. Or maybe she should trust Talon Company and Paradise Falls not to kidnapp workers and sell them for their expertise?

I'll be talking about other powers at the end.

I tried to have characters judge other characters with the knowledge they had. The most neutral and informed observer was probably the Lone Wanderer (in space, not the synth). Comparing her adventure with the results of the General and the reconstitution of the Brotherhood under Maxson... On the other hand, I don't believe I wrote the General herself to think of herself as a saint.

It's like you didn't get the opportunity to read any of the Rains chapters. Hancock went feral while trying to rescue people to shelter during the Rains from exposure to radiation. Farenheit, observing the tradition of "If you take a mayor from Goodneighbor, you owe Goodneighbor a mayor" and "government for the people, by the people" refused to let anyone else kill him when Goodneighbor level of medical care failed to keep him coherent, killed him herself, inflicted being Mayor upon herself, and used the position to swear revenge on the Brotherhood of Steel for Proctor of Potions Lizzie Wyath's act of causing the Rains. Lizzie states she caused the Rains. Farenheit states she did this as a result. Bridget was given the rank of Colonel of the Marine Corps as a way to incorporate a problematic military force under someone who they would respect and who knew their ways (being an ex-Gunner along with them in becoming a marine) but who also realized that they needed to serve the people of the Commonwealth (and hence her withdrawal from the Gunner Civil War to Vault 75) in a public ceremony, not 'finding out' necessary. Preston is aware of all of this in this story.

Innocent people that the Sole Survivor has killed: Nick Valentine? Probably, she killed him for being able to prove definitively with evidence that she committed the launch she's accused of and his desire to sell her out to an external power if no one internal would hold her accountable. If the search of Vault 101 had gone bad, which it could of, I believe that would count even more. But at the time of this review (Chapter 163), I don't know which character you are referring to that wasn't an enemy military or criminal target that the General had killed, or ordered killed. If you are referring to the definitionally non-sentient synths she exploited to launch on Gunner Plaza, I get it. If you're saying her actions provoked Casadin and Jameson to embrace Lizzie...that's bordering on Butterfly Effect where you may as well blaim the Mistress of Mystery organization for the creation of the Brotherhood of Steel.

Doragan-

The threat of the Brotherhood isn't that they are a neighboring military might, it is that they thirst for technology like a vampire thirsts for blood or a werewolf thirsts for combat and she needs to build a planetary (if not solar system) defense system out of captured alien technology. I don't know what 'hidden force' she would command to kill Brotherhood of Steel soldiers out of sight of the Minutemen (unless you're referring to enough synths in combat in the Commonwealth and no one noticing). But I don't believe the General could bring herself to believe that Danse was going to win the internal political fights necessary to take so much command of the Brotherhood of Steel that they would defend her controlling a level of technology they did not have while she failed to understand it. What she needs is enough of a pretense to end them to as many resources as possible while expending as few resources as possible to end them. If the neighboring faction had some other ideology than 'take all tech, including that good alien stuff' like the Brotherhood of Steel or 'it's actually already ours' like the Enclave, then having a buffer ally might work. But the neighbors aren't Minutemen Lite, an Institute that lashes out in reclusive paranoia, or a bunch of idealists that can be catered to like the Railroad ('Please observe us test every synth for sentience and watch us respect everyone that does. We'll even try to accommodate you where we don't have to, like our study of Acadia instead of reclaiming our property.)

It's been many years but it got here.

Absolute Configuration -

I have ideas. Just time to get them out of my head and onto the screen is in short supply.

To paraphrase Katt Williams "I don't know a single insurgent. You can kill all of them." The Brotherhood of Steel refers to itself and all others as in military terms yet believes it's always in the right. War cosntantly changes, it doesn't end.

There are very few Homers. Meaning, if you take the battles describe in the Iliad - the terrain, the numbers, the weapons - and put them in the U.S. military's simulator they turn out accurate. Most people trying to describe warfare are just going to show their ignorance and trying to present a grandiose tactician as a battlefield commander just makes it painful. Like when a writer tries to hype up Batman as this grand master planner & prepper and ends up smack dab in Adam West utility belt land while trying to be grimdark instead of campy. Fan-fic readers more than likely played the games, therefore 'know' the terrain and what the NPCs can do on average so I just have to effectively 'lay a mission objective' when one side has a distinct advantage and it kind of works. "Cut off the Commonwealth's land trade route" with the advantage "the Commonwealth isn't guarding it" doesn't need a genius to figure out why the Commonwealth is suffering a trade embargo.

For the Lone Wanderer, I specifically wanted to have another build. Like every first time videogame player thinks they're a genius because they figured out 'stealth' + sniper? The Sole Survivor was very close to my build - pistols because they appear early, as much Luck + Dexterity as I could find with those perks on it made the build dangerous enough to match my meandering, check out everything because I've seen the room mate at the time play enough of the story, and by the time I was up against anything that was higher level my character was at an even higher level. So to get away from that, Stealth...oh, dang it so + sword. Come out of nowhere and cut down things that shouldn't be cut down. It makes for a 'legendary' character - "Did you hear? The Lone Wanderer cut two Deathclaws in half!" and no one mentions it's because neither saw her coming or they were days apart or how many Stimpacks and other chems it took.

Realize how scarce education is in the wasteland and how plentiful it is to us internet denizens. Colonel Cypress of the Gunners had to be one of the top tier cunning people in the Commonwealth to make it to commanding the Gunners. How likely is it that he's ever read something written by a Roman General? Hell, Ceasar of Ceasar's Legions in New Vegas - could that dude speak more than ten words of Latin? The General may have my flaws in her actual speech but in narrative context a trained lawyer is going to sound nearly supernatural when they try and like your own thoughts when they really try, if you haven't even taken a year at Diamond City 'school'. The Lone Wanderer's educational base is still a G.O.A.T. which has to be like a trade based highschool because Vaults have to replace their doctors, nuclear reactor engineers, etc. and have enough of the base science left over to understand why these trades are important. Hence, the Lone Wanderer becomes the most formally educated person the General meets outside of the Institute.

On one hand, Fallout 4 does have the Brotherhood of Steel as fascist. On the other hand, for an Institute win you have to kill them. So the left over command in the Capitol Wastes are people we don't really see in Fallout 4. So they've lived under and abided by furthered the cause of Maxson but they are their own characters that also served under / against Lyons.

I'm certain Sun Tzu would agree that the best battlefield victories are won off of it.

From your review - "I feel like the Lone Wanderers insistence on siding with the Brotherhood should be examined again." Yet it was immediately followed by a justification for the behavior as normal and acceptable. This was chapter 111, which is after the General is offering consumables to the Pitt which the Lone Wanderer had helped free in the DLC. Why would the Lone Wanderer not want the Pitt to have food or clean water so badly? Had she helped negotiate a metal for food deal instead of a all you produce for enough to keep you producing, it would have even been fair or at least show that the General was not being fair but tactical. Why wasn't the rationale coming under a lot of stress?

Thanks for the kind words.

Seclus Fan-

It continued. Future discussion at the end.

Guest(1) -

I have no knowledge of Mass Effect besides there are two voice actors, one male one female, for the main character; it's a space opera; and the armor sometimes has a carbon fiber pattern that is faked by floor mat in cosplay.

darpaladin89-

The Brotherhood of Steel has acted as if they are the sacred guardians of technology for the sake of manking no matter what their actions were in every game. I, and the General, have no reason to believe it's less than snatch if it can be controlled and destroy if it can't.

Sending a mercenary team to surveil because they believe you've already surrendered. Were there any 'good looks' to be had?

Considering how most people are just doing what they can to survive, there's a real risk of panic if you introduce 'alien threat' to public knowledge coupled with 'we can't do anything about it'. Makes me wonder why we have so many alien invasion movies where the American government spearheads a counter offensive no matter how destroyed our civilization is at the time. If aliens have perfected any of the technologies we have barely proven to understand the physics of - space warping, tractor beams, hard light shielding, post-special intelligence, etc. - which I don't know how they couldn't have to reach us, then it's a whole sale slaughter. Our most powerful weapon every fired, a thunderwell, can't target. Now tell someone in the wasteland with a pipe pistol that aliens have orbital deathrays and view them like a plague.

1)Never tried to guess why the Lone Wanderer can't change her opinion of the Sole Survivor? What the reason was behind that? 2) Fallout loses its setting if the Zetans actually invade. Not because Zetans will become something more than just another monster type with a smaller hitbox and different ammunition for looted weapons. But because it's not a faction that can be defeated. You can side with the NCR over Ceasar's Legions, you can side with the Brotherhood of Steel over the Enclave, you can side with the Institute over the Minutemen. There's no 'we defeated the Zetans'. In game, they serve as a self-parady easter egg. In this story, a constant unknown ticking clock that makes this decision better than the best decision made years too late.

Talking about the NCR should be in the talking about the future section.

Stockton's too old. Remember how the Bush administration couldn't get people to understand Iraq because Saddam Hussein once stated he appreciated a particular dictator while meaning he respected the control that dictator exerted but the U.S. politico were too obsessed with that dictator from a previous world shaping war to change their mindset to the realties of Iraq? Or how Cold War babies are throwing our victories away on reigniting West vs. East conflicts? Stockton's been espionaging his life over all synths are people to be saved and the Institute is a corrupting force. Now, you have the General commanding the Railroad. The character's kind of stuck, particularly after feeding freed synths to the Capitol Wastes.

Why wouldn't the Lone Wanderer be able to change her tune just because she sees a nation worth of evidence? What reason could that be?

Nick felt the same way about the Sole Survivor when he discovered she used a nuclear warhead.

It should be. If only the Brotherhood of Steel wasn't pushed to an immediate war footing for survival. What happens next is another reason why War Never Ends. The Fog of War pushes things that could be justice from when something could be done about them into the history books.

I wasn't going to stop writing. It's just that one reviewer decided to actually threaten another like we haven't evolved beyond that. It's trivially easy to shut down here. Difficult is when large groups of humans gather to threaten some idea in their head about 'the other' humans. And if I remember correctly, it was something stupid like that that got out of the inhibitors of the fool.

Even if there were warheads left at Sentinel Site (there are), she would need 1) a way to ensure that Sentinel Site was no longer in someone else' custody, like Reilly's Raiders right then 2) a way to launch with no off the books rockets to find, and narratively you can't teleport from the Glowing Sea to another location with Institute tech, that's why Virgil fled there - but I do believe game play allows you to. Maybe building a fusion generator for a settlement and a rail gun? 3) a political excuse like a scapegoat which definitely didn't currently exist in the story.

I hope I presented a Commonwealth that was moved from "We trust the General and she says we should." to "They're gonna kill us if we don't kill them right back first!"

For a turning point like this, you have to show a real loss. Numbers don't matter in narratives like actual characters do, that's why writers kill characters. On one hand, you aim for characters that are at the end of their arcs and the death feels 'earned' by the story so the audience gets catharsis. On the other hand, that reduces the shock and loss value for the audience, so bad writing conjures a character that should be cared about by the other characters and is never mentioned after their death is used to motivate the character they were supposed to (Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen in the first Star Wars trilogy were not mentioned until Episode 2). Did Hancock have potential character stuff to do? He probably would have been a better ambassador to Ten Penny, a better explainer of the ideology to new communities, not put up with Rivet City as much, was the most likely person to pick a fight with Alan or some other Family member to find out they don't really have powers. Considering the added value of Faranheit thrust into mayor and Roxxy's ghoulification and the threat of vampiric powers, he seemed like the biggest person to the government of the Commonwealth that I could reasonably sacrifice on the alter of 'this attack was effective'. They can't get the General without the story no longer being a duel, they can't get Vault 81 or 114 because they're vaults or the Institute, vulnerable colonels don't have easy replacements that matter, losing Geneva resets Diamond Cities political leaning from working class back to elitist, Bunker Hill can't function the same without Kessler if Old Man Stockton is down in Cantebury Commons running that end of the licenses, and now we're out of 'founding fathers'.

Would "I need to get this wasteland into a society that can function at a level that it can defend itself against an alien invasion" make up for "I nuked them and lied about it and I'd do it again" to a synth that remembers being a pre-war cop? I think that would be a real test of sentience - not which he chose but his ability to reason and feel his way to a decision. Nick doesn't have any experience with aliens or what they can do, and considering the motif of Fallout the fiction he's likely experienced is War of the Worlds & Mars Attacks & Commander Cosmos - no Independence Day or Star Trek: First Contact. But nuclear launches are a visceral memory of the end of civilization.

Valentine's attempt to weigh alien invasion preparation as an end goal vs. the means of launching a nuclear warhead by a nuclear war survivor would be a mess.

If the Lone Wanderer is believed by Sole Survivor supporters, they're boned. I remember when O.J. Simpson was acquitted. I was attending a nearly monoracial school like the U.S. tends to allow the segregation of by selling it as "only by circumstance, not ordinance". Simple white people saw it as an attempt to license killing white people mostly because that's what their idea of identity told them to do. Simple others breathed a sigh of relief that the so-called justice system wasn't simply a hostile enemy as much as they had thought. I tried to explain to people that it was social progress, but limited social progress is limited and hence should not be the end goal and it showcased that there is more work to do: i.e. The rich and famous get away with whatever they like, only now society extends that privilege to black rich and famous people. Now that we (some of us) have advanced to a better society where both Kevin Spacey and Jonathan Majors are held accountable for their actions despite people wanting House of Cards or Kang the Conqueror, it's harder to see that as a stepping stone just like it was nearly impossible for anyone I talked to at the time. With the Sole Survivor, if Nick Valentine had come on Three Dog's show and stated 1)Take the General into immediate custody so she can't tamper with the evidence 2)inspect Sentinel Site for all this evidence that shows the General launched and her's the techniques to gather it 3)while I am in Brotherhood custody, then and I will surrender to the Minutemen for robotic inspection as long as Sturges as an officer of the Minutemen, Rocky as a civilian, a Railroad agent, and an Institute agent are part of the examination team to ensure its results so that I can be proved to be uncompromised then there would by a 40/60 chance Preston would have been able to do anything like "Stay here General. We're going to send an APC to the coordinates.". Without Nick or his explanation?

I realized Nick's move sometime around conceiving of Wyath's plan of the Rains.

The Lone Wanderer is not Nick, hundred year detective. I think I was pretty thorough in explaining that when he detected his way through her disguise in a chapter.

With Nick not betting on internal forces to hold the General accountable, we've seen the end I put together.

The General traveled around the Commonwealth with companions nearly from the start - Codsworth, Preston, Nick Valentine & Piper - even Dog Meat is hard to avoid and then given before the end of act 1 of the main questline if missed. The Lone Wanderer had to earn companions as gameplay awards and was really lone at times. It also sets up the threat of should a fight between the Sole Survivor and the Lone Wanderer occur, stealthing into melee range could mean really messing the Sole Survivor up. As for seeding Talon Company - somehow no one got tipped off that this was programatic thinking on part of the Lone Wanderer. A person who fought the Enclave enlisting mercenaries to hurt innocents as a strategy?

At this point, the Lone Wanderer's ideas (which were never really 'ideas') are really becoming partially baked. No direction, no expectation of possible was they could go wrong and the repruccussions, etc. Still, no one calls me out on the reason why.

Right? This was a full on fumble by the General: allowing a possible start to an internal faction conflict of Gunenrs vs. Institute. And both would demand her absolute support with her neutrality or attempts at negotiation easily losing her both sides. It's not like Vault 114 getting caught in violation of agreements and the General tells the rest of the Commonwealth "The Minutemen are investigating the matter. We will report on justice delivered shortly".

^This. The General realized this as soon as she saw the components. However, she also didn't know why she was looking at synth components. She immediately had to assert actual, social authority over everyone there so they would follow her instead of do something they started (like Bridget approaching an Institute synth and demanding answers, then shooting a few when she didn't get any).

That this mistake was small enough to be believable that someone who's gotten away with as much stuff as the Sole Survivor has gotten away with was huge! I know that in survival mode there's a thirst and a hunger meter, but I don't know if there's a sleep meter. In easy (which is what I always play), you can go without sleeping and use it just for healing without resource expenditure. But having her make a mistake seemed to have returned the character from any accusation of a Mary Sue (focus can't get away from her and her relationships, she can do anything but fail, she has all the powers and no one else can have any, etc.). I say seemed because I made sure to include that her Intelligence score was high but she was a lawyer - any Institute doctor or doctoral candidate is going to be much more well versed in whatever their field of study is, and she's not outdoing specific 'tinker' characters like Sturges, Rocky, and Tinker Tom. I say seemed because she could get blind sided and suffer consequences because of it before in the story - the Triggerman surrender turned them from a targeted about to be wiped out gang into a wealthy participant in her government, Nick out detected her lawyer level cover up, using her relationship with Piper to manipulate the press keeps her from maintaining the same control over Preston, etc. So while this mistake appears to be 'finally, the General isn't unstoppable' it's really the justification that she doesn't know the Lone Wanderer is a synth. I had to cover the list from part one and this did it well. As the saying goes, "When a magician says look closely, it's never at what they're trying to hide.".

I don't get this one. Don't count on what?

Amata's relationship with the synth is based on pre-release conceits of the snyth. The synth doesn't have to reason out a new relationship instead of slide into a preconstructed one. It's not like Dr. Li didn't ask James, the Lone Wanderer's father, about being gone for nearly two decades raising his daughter and the Vault they lived in.

The synth couldn't change her mind. While a Vault dweller that had faith her vault could not be penetrated, period?

If the Commonwealth was going to govern the Commonwealth as a single government without the General, why weren't they?

The Family also comes across as more dangerously spooky the more polite and conciliatory they are, as if they were too ridiculously powerful to be threatened by whatever you have.

Faranheit is just a meaner person than most. More apt to violence, less interested in the philosophizing of Hancock - not his ideals mind you, but the sitting around thinking and debating those ideals. Her leadership isn't the speech from the window of the mayor's office, it's kicking ass and taking names of who needs to get their asses kicked. She's not going to be the nurturing plains housewife, she's going to be the nasty girlfriend at best.

^This.

While I was unaware of its popularity, this is apparently the preferred solution to the Bradberton problem if you have access to the Mechanist or the Institute in your story.

The General does believe that she's a better form of government than anyone else presented. Now granted most governments do, even the truly self serving narcissists because they believe that anything that serves only themselves is the best. But the General is conscious enough of the idea that you can't really pretend to be American and also view slavery as something less than abhorent and in need of immediate excisement. Now Americans are very good at redefining things so that they aren't - from Confederate good ole boys that would tell you about heritage and alleged wrongs during Reconstruction that could offset crimes in the Redemption to pro-choice people that will equate carrying a consensual sex pregnancy as slavery. And if you want to press the point, am I saying that supremecists that want to reinstitute slavery are unAmerican despite the country being founded on slavery's accomodation then yes, yes I am. The General has previously shot through all of Nuka-World in game. Unleashing the marine corps on Paradise Falls is trivial. The 'tell everyone' is an after thought. But it does go to show that the Brotherhood of Steel that was fighting tooth and nail with supermutants and the Enclave never even troubled Paradise Falls back during the reign of the Lyons means something.

When do you believe the last person that died in the Capitol Wastes was given a funeral with a built coffin to bury them in? It's a novel idea...to a wastelander.

Child soldiering is always a hot mess. Even under the Geneva Conventions, active child soldiers under the age of fifteen do not give up their protections as children including from you including when they're trying to kill you. The efforts to get children off the battlefield and into a reasonable environment (not a war zone, under shelter, sustenance, clothing, education) are brutally undersubsidized because we, as a species, don't value it. The General, in this fictional piece, has the luxury of dictating her will to a populace that has robotic forces. But it's still all the consequences of engaging an enemy force without any of the tools to do so.

The General couldn't say she's agreeing with what the Family wants and was communicating that she couldn't be caught agreeing to what they want. She could allow circumstances for them to take what they want and then side with them on the level of clemency for doing so.

The Atom Cats had been used to repair Minutemen power armor since the Gunner Civil War. It allowed Brandis' Motorpool to be freed up to get aircraft up and running while cementing the Atom Cats as the greatest power armor experts and having them work full time on power armor instead of scavenging for food since they got enough caps to feed themselves from the war effort. It was an Atom Cats dream.

The ghoul round-up was political in the General's eyes. "See, I offered everything I could no matter their past or their nature. Then they betrayed us, and that's why we had to gatling gun the first floor until the supports gave out. Now it's subway & sewer cleanup." As a fan-ficcer, I was trying to think up a way that Ten Penny wouldn't be wiped off the map when it's just a ticking time bomb. If a country at war can just kill an enemy, it does so. It only capitulates if greater powers make it or an actually equivalent power can bargain for mutual enough gain. Luck as Vault-tec tested her for, seems to have kicked in with Oswald actually being able to hold the door on the place.

I don't know about Vance's desire to save lives. He does want to save his people's lives. He also invented the whole vampire thing from whole cloth. Recruiting the last cannibal community in the Commonwealth to join instead of being destroyed now that it's safe enough to travel and they don't have to physically guard Arefu? That bolsters his power by numbers with people who know they would be dead without him.

No. It was her synth. The Lone Wanderer in the story has been a non-sentient synth all along.

E.T. Soule-

The Lone Wanderer has been Fallout 3-ing since she was 19 in 2277, until she was Mothership Zeta and replaced by her clone that did much of the same Fallout 3-ing. The Sole Survivor did a term / stint in the U.S. Army before going to law school and attempting motherhood before coming out of Vault 101 (in this story) at age 29 in 2287. The Lone Wanderer's synth has basically a law school's roaming the wastes on the Sole Survivor minus formal military training and profressional military adherence, not that the Sole Survivor was on constant special forces duty. Since I wanted the Sole survivor to have an oratory edge but the two characters to remain basically 'even', I had to give the Lone Wanderer her 'pushes'.

I did want to maintain a neutral judgement on the two for longer. But without breaking the programming directive and expanding it to other cares (how much trade if a far flung community of friends pulling), it was hard to keep for even going as long as it did.

Sneaky Snuke Snake-

Thank you for the kind words.

There's the MacCready mission in Fallout 4's main game. So I'm not referencing that Dr. Madison Li, Robert MacCready, or the Tunnel Rats come from the Capitol Wastes because we're talking about time not whether. After MacCready's mission is complete, which is raid a supermutant infested hospital for a particular cure to his son's disease, a vial of medicine is sent by a trade caravan leaving MacCready in the Commonwealth. If it would have taken any longer wouldn't he just make the trip himself? Hence the introduction of a singular trade route, known as the most survivable.

Due to the scope of the games and the bugginess Bethesda is willing to let out the door, I'm sure there's something most people don't experience in Falllout. My room mate walked right by Vault 75. I've never gotten the area north of Salem with the lone Minuteman to act right. On the other hand, there's the idea that if a game rewards you by letting you out playing it, isn't it trying to tell that the best time you can have with the game is not playing it? And that's why good games reward players with tools to get to new areas, new areas to explore, etc.

In Fallout 4, MacCready sends his son's cure back to the Capitol Wastes by caravan.

I don't tend to read other people's reviews myself. But there was this particular instance where two reviewers were talking directly at each other. Which led to one threatening.

shamwoohoo52-

There's more now?

German Shepard King -

Thank you for the kind words.

Again.

The Capitol Wastes was much more separated / segregated an experience than the Commonwealth. I don't know if it was due to Fallout 4's supply line mechanic or Fallout 3's need to get you off an outside cell by getting you into an interior one. But the fact remains, one is much more divided than the other. Most NPCs in Fallout 4 accepted a Minutemen presence unless they were actively human harmful. The Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3 was only in Brotherhood areas, unless you counted certain places supermutant areas.

freewheeler26 -

Nearly all of human narration is conflict driven - man vs. himself, man vs. nature. man vs. man. So I get that a story where the Sole Survivor just wins drags. Plus, dropping the ring in Mordor has to be earned. The specific defeats I tried to include for the General are 1)the Triggermen surrendering, now an adversary permanently influences her. 2)Having to drop the nuclear weapon on Gunner Plaza, now she has a Dark Secret that must be protected. 3)Wyath & the Rains. 4)Little Lamplight. 5)Not figuring out the Lone Wanderer, which could have given her so much more with so much less fighting. 6) Rivet City. 7)Bridget - now she has a force that kind of needs to be in combat otherwise you get the warring states period where unemployed soldiers were just around. 8)In its own way, the Acadia/Institute detente.

jackofhearts-

Thank you for the kind words.

WAR-

There's a concept of negative peace and positive peace. Negative peace is 'no one is fighting', ex. "Jim Crow was peaceful as long as black people accepted their oppression." Positive peace is one in which justice and growth and the other niceties can exist, ex. "Desegregation removes an obstacle to further peace." The Lone Wanderer wasn't thinking in these types of terms but was much closer to a negative peace - "No one changes Project Purity, I don't start swinging." The General's much closer to a permanent war mentality - "Armarment must constantly be upgraded because of infinite perceived threats." Like the U.S. 'defense' policy since WWII - communism leading to the Cold War, Islamic fundamentalism leading to the War on Terror, and it's looking like foreign totalitarianism while completely ignoring white supremacy & exploitative capitalism (ask a chocolate farmer) & domestic totalitarianism.

Paladin Bailey -

Two things can be true at the same time. The General fired that nuke because the Gunners proved intractable. The Director fired that nuke so that there would be the political will to destroy the Brotherhood of Steel before they could be temped by the existence of alien technology. Taking over the Commonwealth is just a...cost of doing business. But lets be clear - firing a nuclear warhead isn't against everything the Brotherhood stands for: the orbital launch on the Enclave platform at Edwards Air Force base, Liberty Prime using mininukes as grenades. I could be moved to agree that the Brotherhood of Steel wouldn't deny an action they had taken out of the sheer arrogance that their people are taught. But let's not pretend they were somehow the good guys in Fallout 4 compared to say the Railroad.

The Institute's primary strategy is its secrecy. It's just now extended that to the entire Commonwealth. If another nation finds out that the Commonwealth has a starship city, its citizenry will not let that nation's government do nothing about it without a strength imbalance like China to Madagascar. So at that point in the story, it was to unite the habitable land under one government and then isolate borders. There are no embassies in Fallout - not in any board game, game, and I doubt in the upcoming show.

Now, I don't understand. The Brotherhood of Steel literally has a mission in Fallout 4 for the player to threaten a settlement into providing food for the Brotherhood of Steel as a protection racket. The Minutemen literally have multiple missions to clear out a settlement so that people can move in. But your position is in this story Maxson was the liberator and the General is the oppressor despite Maxson demanded complete command and the General establishes a council to show that she can be curtailed by the populace at large. And MacCready is supposed to see the person who helped get the medicine to save his son as evil while seeing the Brotherhood who did literally nothing to stop him from being a Gunner (because all those events are player character done and in this story the PC is the General not the Sentinel) as so much the bad guy that he seeks to destroy the forming country by turning against her?

Arguably more important than tactically circling the Brotherhood of Steel is ensuring that they don't have supply lines from any source. No metal fromt he Pitt, no food from Point Lookout, and other things they've viewed as beneath them as a military force. The Sole Survivor is educated enough to understand what a government needs to do to govern and what a country needs to function to the level of a mid to late 21s century education. The very smartest of the Brotherhood of Steel were educated in a page for job system which can blind a person to one path and exclude wisdom. Also, I believe I did take into account your correction on characters.

Nick had a similar idea - that a criminal, even if their crimes are secret and their results are heralded, needs to be held accountable for their crimes. Otherwise you get a ruler who has proven that they are above the law and everyone else is an animal in a cage, not a participant of government. Also, I hadn't sought to fracture the Brotherhood - that seemed too much to give the Sole Survivor. If she could detect a fracture (including the Railroad reporting it) she would have ordered the Railroad to play both sides if she hadn't done it herself.

Power hungry or full civilization control is necessary for the defense of the species? As for the Pitt - open their eyes to what? They have no evidence, no means of getting it, and a deal that puts them in a more favorable position than they have ever been.

That the General is horrible for nuking Gunner Plaza during the Gunner Civil War but you're willing to accept Lizzie Wyath as Proctor despite having played the games where she's a slaver so she can biochemically experiment on humans without consequence? The Rains hadn't occurred at this point, but really? Ad Victorium indeed. Fallout 3 seemed to state that no other forces could reach the arena - the Enclave nor the Brotherhood of Steel (the remnants of the government & the remnants of the army) could call outside supporters to the field. At this point it could mean that they aren't global factions, but just cultural memes having infected their hosts in the Capitol Wastes.

The Brotherhood shot ghouls on sight according to Willow in game. That you never held this set of fictional characters accountable until they are in a desperate situation says something.

Your reviews nearly come across as trolling. 'The Minutemen lost their way'? Individual Minutemen are still just working guard duty and none of their orders have been to open fire on civilians...even Bridget complains about the constraints. In Fallout 4, after the player is given the General-ship and has settlements under her command the Brotherhood of Steel still refers to her as civilian. Even after the re-establishment of the Castle she is referred to as a civilian. How could any writer sell that the Brotherhood had such a change of ideology that they could merge into a single command with the Minutemen. The Minutemen's motives are neighbors helping neighbors at a moment's notice, hence the General constantly ensuring a food supply & water cleanliness & local defense grids. The Brotherhood's motives have been keeping dangerous technology out of the hands of everyone but themselves which in Fallout 3 came close enough with an imperative to stamp out the FEV supermutants but not close enough to keep the Outcasts in line.

Like this - the Director is very obviously handing out orders to the Institute. I don't think I've ever written where a character from the Institute changes the Director's thinking. As for including Brotherhood personnel on Reilly's Rangers, that would change their breach of cover from "Oh, it's you guys. Why you trying to be sneaky?" to "You're all just Brotherhood special forces like MacCready's ours. You're all POW".

Reilly's Rangers are as much explorers and not soldiers as the Fantastic Four are explorers and not superheroes. Trying to have them infiltrate politically? How could they even reach a Brandis? When the Lone Wanderer met MacCready on the field, she wasn't sentient enough to live in the relationship enough to keep it going.

But the Minutemen do trust their General - explicitly. They didn't have a command structure for all of Fallout 4, they just answered to her directly. Forcibly annexing resisted territories is ridiculously dangerous - that's why she's put Rivet City's security on quarantine and bribed everyone else to join including a hand in the government.

What's a CPG?

Guest(2) -

Yes, she is anti-Brotherhood.

Guest(3) -

I will speak about what the future of this project is/was after.

Guest(4) -

You're right in that no one on the council told the General to expand. The General does generally do whatever she's going to do and spends some effort making sure that every member of the council is more grateful to be on it than doing anything with the position. We're accustomed to federal systems that seek to put in place policies that affect us at the local level no matter our locale. The Commonwealth isn't. Remember the Articles of Confederation that preceded the Constitution? And how it pretty much gave state supremacy over the federal government despite the attempt to be a nation and how that did not work? The difference between that and the Commonwealth is the General serving as the 'strong man' in a fascist movement. She represents this mythical age that never was (pre-war uptopia), everyone in the Commonwealth is a superior person (with multilevel government and tolerance for ghouls and synths and dead slavers and it's all because we're better people), there's always an external threat to be lethally scared of despite it also being made up of inferiors that deserve whatever's coming for them, she's backed by the conservative elements (the Institute's intractibility, the Triggermen lassez-faire capitalism, she's done nothing about Diamond City's classism) because the liberal elements (the Minutemen) have been ineffective for so long - and this is semibenevolent fascism. Real world fascism steeps itself in racism (accept ghouls? when was the last fascists that accepted people outside their tribe? Look into what the European fascists actually thought of Japan in WWII) because it can't actually increase the quality of life of its preferred subgroup even in a zero sum game of oppressing all the others. The Sole Survivor is avoiding some of its traps by connecting the pre-war utopia myth with tolerance (and hence expanding the economy to all potential workers and consumer demand) as well as implementing actually lost institutions (a federal system of policing, regular news, governmental transparency, etc.). While she and the Capitol Wastes are lucky that she can play that game through Starship city (introduce mail, schools, federal civilian jobs, etc.) she is playing with fire.

the armed forces -

The Sole Survivor is hopefully following her character motivation - fulfilling her son's Shawn dream the best way she knows how and trying to get to a point to defend against an alien invasion. As for the Lone Wanderer - her programming is what it is.

I think this is when people started taking up stakes against each other about a fanfic. The ideas expressed here aren't "I think the characters are...", they're "I think the characters, and you as well.". Since all this is so very fictional, no one should reach that sentiment. That's like saying someone has a favorite Batman villain because they themselves are a mass murderer. I'm not saying there aren't fans that toxic (Rick & Morty, Wolf of Wall Street, Scarface, etc.) but even that isn't being expressed here.

If the General is the only one who knows what's right, then the Commonwealth may be in a more precarious state than it should be.

It does seem like team loyalty trumps reviewing the strongman's actions in a fascist movement on a regular basis, doesn't it. The General is horrible for nuking Gunner Plaza during the Gunner Civil War to end the conflict and despite Brandis' mission to the Commonwealth, Danse' mission to the Commonwealth, Maxson's mission to the Commonwealth all in game, and Danse' subsequent mission to the Commonwealth in this fan fic she is invading them. But the biochemical experimenting slaver is a harsh but necessary moral compromise? I don't see how someone can be that loyal to a fictional faction. There's barely in real life practicing Jedi that would pretend such loyalty to the Jedi temple rather than the ideals displayed.

*shrug*

It's hard to be _worse_. But fascism alone is often reason enough to destroy a system that relies on it. On the other hand, take when our system fell to fascism. The strongman was a senile, greedy yet lazy fool so it's chosen enemies were only attacked in broad swaths rather than a coordinated campaign, it's ubermensch designates weren't aided in anyway and in fact were harmed by being told that Covid-19 was harmless in order to cater to the lassez-faire capitalists who wanted the economy pumping to the point that enough of them died to lose the next election (the country is less than 5% of the world's population and took a sixth of the casualties despite being technologically advanced, and as a result solidly single party states became swing states where margins of victory were measured by the thousands in a country of hundreds of millions). The system was infested and infected with fascism but it doesn't rely on it, it relies on the will of the people (as subject to the rich, the racist, the religious, the whatever the people who are manipulating the vote in their favor at the time are) so it can be rescued. The Brotherhood of Steel's ideology is inherently fascist - they're the ubermensch because they're military and everyone else isn't, there's the constant threat of any technology being in the hands of others will destroy the world like it once did, there's an idealized time that never happened in Pre-War but definitionally pre-war was not military first, etc. And a fascist government is incapable of making certain decisions - "Let's defeat climate change - it will save everyone.", "The intractable enemy wants what we have - let's help them get what we have so they stop being the enemy.", "This will profit the commons, not the ownership class and we're going to do it.".

Is this when you decided who the villain was? I think I was still trying to walk a line of neutrality between the two back here. But there's also the Lone Wanderer's lack of sentience to consider.

Things started devolving to cheerleading among some here.

The General shows very little interest in actual democracy. On the other hand, considering that in the U.S. a bill has a 30% chance of getting passed no matter what the population thinks of it but a directly proportional chance of getting passed when considering what the wealthiest 1% think of it and we call that a democracy, I could see why you would equate her praetoriat to democracy.

Guest(5) -

Thank you for the kind words.

Guest(6) -

If I was writing for anything other than to clear my head of the concept, I'd care much more about spelling and maybe even grammar. My run on sentences are a real problem. I'd like to think that my writing is practice to be better, but sometimes it only feels like cementing my mistakes.

Zu176 -

Thank you for the kind words.

Ronin Kenshin -

Lost it? When exactly was she presented as 'having' it?

If the audience isn't figuring out that the synth is a synth despite realizing it's not thinking, how long will it take the synth to calculate that what it's programmed to act like is wrong?

Thank you.

More good words.

So you got to this opinion of a fictional character and never asked what motivated her to act this way?

More kind words.

Just a f00l?

Thinking?

Thanks for the kind words.

Ceaser Krest-

Boat. Pittsburg has rivers, in real life and game.

Oh yeah, I did not keep up with this for months and months at a time. Other concerns became time sensitive. Even now, another hobby's project sits in the other room with nearly enough math to get proper started which I need to do immediately. But rather than jump back and forth, I'm knocking this out first.

Hatter-

Why would my portrayal of everyone else be purposeful but not this single character?

Rayven Nightshade-

But why would the Lone Wanderer act that way? No one reviewing got to that point.

An-J-

Unfortunately, the human condition does lend itself to not caring about anything else if base 1 needs aren't met. And that leads into a plethora of disasters. Take fascism - it uses a constant enemy to evoke the fear response in order to have an oppressed people oppress all others. Don't act like Mousillini's Italians had the freedom to act in some non-fascist government approved way. Everyone in the Black Orchestra was executed. Pol Pot was killing painters and people who wore glasses. So when you say "I don't care as long as I'm getting basic needs." you are also saying "If I can get a clean glass of water then it's okay to nuke other people."

john. -

Thank you for the kind words.

Rcollpc-

For me, Fallout 4 makes a very strong case that the main character's main motivation is the recovery of their son and avenging their spouse. With Kellog dead and their son putting the Institute at their feet, doesn't that character motivation (whether they oppress everyone at the Institute or use it to save humanity) mean a rule the Institute ending? The Brotherhood of Steel was immediately fascist and not in a way that wasn't obvious and obviously harmful. My room mate didn't get it after having played Fallout 3 until the farm intimidation mission he was sent on. Considering that Lyons had so much of an influence on Maxson that he had a crush on Lyons in Fallout 3, Cassadin's side would have had to kill her to get their ideology to be what he followed.

Bedpotato-

In Fallout 4 there is a mission where the player character recovers the bombs from Sentinel Site for the Brotherhood of Steel. Considering how this player character (and player) felt about the Brotherhood of Steel, that never happened in this story.

Guest(7)-

If you couldn't believe that the Lone Wanderer was acting like this, why did you never ask why she was acting like that?

Guest(8)-

Yes. Quincy and University Point had become settlements.

Guest(9)-

If the Brotherhood of Steel went down because of infighting...even the General isn't _that_ LUCK.

Finn the Human MC-

Thank you for the kind words.

The Children of the Atom (percieved as the Nucleus) are allowed to gather nuclear material. Nuclear explosions are so illegal that all working warheads are confiscated by the Minutemen upon discovery & access. The Children of the Atom going to Sentinel Site from their village in the Glowing Sea outside of Commonwealth rule would be met with definitely questions asked later but not hesitating to shoot first by the Commonwealth government.

As for Nick 'allowing' anything - The entire of Reilly's rangers are opening fire from power armor with some of the heaviest weaponry in the game. How was he supposed to stop them in the few seconds such a massacre takes place in?

Once I had the ending in my head, it was always rattling around trying to get out. On the other hand, one of my weaknesses as a writer is that as soon as I know the ending, well I know the ending so there's no rush, right? And I always needed a beta but no one proved hands on serious about it.

A peaceful resolution with Tenpenny Towers post eating its previous inhabitants was nigh impossible.

Not everything needs to be an epic. Look at every single time they expand FLCL.

As for updates speeding up, well you've seen.

An artificial cliffhanger is formed by separating chapter 152 & 153.

Kind words.

Always up for reviews.

Your review of 155. You specifically state that the Lone Wander and only the Lone Wanderer's behavior isn't making contextual sense. But never why. You even dismiss it as I as the writer get to do what I want, taking the problem through the fourth wall in order to dismiss it.

Rivet City took too long betting on the wrong horse. They probably could have gotten over the ghouls objections in 1)Bannon wasn't selfish and not much else - check his in game missions. 2)They had beat Underworld in signing up. 3)They weren't obviously holding out to see who 'won' the neighborhood between the Minutemen and the Brotherhood of Steel.

If it doesn't just start in media res, now I have to write setup. It's not film where exterior shot of building - shot of room filled with characters - boom, first line. My abilities with prose don't really support those type of setups. Plot I can do, and I think well. Wordsmithing? eh...

You review as if the Lone Wanderer doesn't know that the Commonwealth has superior water purifier tech to Megaton, or that she's capable of changing her mind by considering the fact.

It didn't help that the two characters were purposefully talking around each other.

The Institute rep is closer to sentience because she feels? And not a clue that another single motive, mandatory ideology character that emotes may not be sentient? I honestly think you may have been the closest to guessing the 'twist'.

The Institute looking at Rowdy's posturing about power armor is like the head of new projects at Apple or Samsung watching someone preen about connecting two cans with a string. Comparing the power assist features and paint job of a power armor to the synth you didn't even check to see if she was a synth.

It would have been days and not hours if there were actual resistance at any of these sites.

Plans tend to come together.

Glad the end felt like earned by the two characters.

I was waiting for someone to catch on. I don't know how many readers I ended up losing due to 'bad characterization'. You came closer than most.

Loner18-

About that...

Alphabeat-

And that sentiment of too many things (lies) to keep track of helped hide my hiding that the General didn't know who every synth was despite having a list of them. Since it's impossible to keep track of that many things, when she doesn't it's expected. As for the disjointed transitions, aren't most of mine?

I believe the New Vegas protagonist is referred to as the Courier, not the Lone Wanderer. If I'm correct it's Vault Dweller, Chosen One, Lone Wanderer, Sole Survivor for 1-2-3-4. New Vegas is the Courier, Tactics is the Warrior. It'll be interesting to find out what they call her in the television show - hopefully not just 'Nora Jones' or something.

Manipulations should be at least honest, lest they blow up.

Guest(10)-

Really? Message me. Review over there. Really? I shouldn't even have to say.

Some fool actually threatened another real person over their opinion on a fanfic character.

Entersarcasmhere-

Thanks?

I tried to avoid the Commonwealth's perspective to keep things focused on the Lone Wanderer. But as events progressed, that proved harder and harder as actions became interfacing characters with the encroaching Commonwealth and the later in the story the more likely a Commonwealth / Lone Wanderer confrontation was going to be violent.

There were times when laziness or building a different franchise' cosplay used up all my free time.

War Never Ends. With every retaliation causing a retaliation, how do you get to the end of the cycle without just letting your enemy attack you? No quarter extermination?

Dragonblade722-

When did she show that she had it? How did everyone miss this? However, the General is not spreading democracy. I believe less than a quarter of the communities are using democracy (Rivet City, Republic of Rosie, Diamond City...?). She's setting up more of a preatoriat (think ancient Rome or Romulan Star Empire - oh, dang I just realized that because Vulcans were named after both the planet that was supposed to be hiding in the glare of the sun messing up Mercury's orbit with the effect we learned was gravitational distortion from general relativity that Romulans were named as Vulcan is the Roman name for Hephestas and Rome was an offshoot settlement of Greeks that ended up with a government changed from philosophy to conquest). Anyway - a preatoriate. The 'big men' of the communities that matter (since settlements 'do not') have their voices heard at the council. The General is the person who would serve as dictator in anytime there is a need for a dictator, but that power is given by the council and then handed back to the council afte the threat is passed. It isn't democracy - one person, one vote. It's not even a representative government - Sanctuary Hills, Rivet City, and other really significant places don't have representation. The General is a public servant in that she is serving the public and doesn't rule - she addresses issues until the council corrects her course of action or she's in violation of the constitution. However, she could probably swing a vote of "This just happened, I need total authority over everything immediately until I've solved it."...like say, if an alien scout ship crashed into Goodneighbor.

Still: why lost? When did she have sentient faculties? Everyone that goes "This and only this character isn't thinking" never jumps to "Why isn't this and only this character not thinking?", even after there are so many other characters in the story that are shown to pass for people and not think - the Institue representative, Littlehorn and his associates, X6-88, etc.

Nick's good at his job. Who knew that an obvious synth who earned being treated like a person despite the incident that announced synths look like people and are dangerous happening in his home town was competent? But as for the Lone Wanderer 'deteriorating' - from what? Where was she more than this? It just throws me that I didn't get one review or message that implied anyone had an inkling.

On the Lone Wanderer's side? Or making due with the circumstances he has to follow his gut. As a man trapped in a mechanical, fuelless shell Nick Valentine has an opportunity none of us do - to follow his morals without biological interference. No bursts of adrenaline from being scared, no tastes for particular comfort foods to put him back home, none of it. He's in a Type 2. Wyath's dead and the Brotherhood of Steel are going to be destroyed...so how do you stop the General? And Nick being able to think on this level is able to trump the Lone Wanderer's synth left and right.

Lost? When did she have?

Yes, the Lone Wanderer attacked a child and explained her reasoning to a 'friend' later.

NSRB -

Because her spouting "I'm anti-nuclear arms and I'm safeguarding them from use." would blow up in her face if it was revealed she was the one out nuking people. Putin and the Kim-Jun regimes have been constantly saber rattling about first strike nuclear usage for some time now and haven't seemed to have lost any support. As for the Brotherhood of Steel being racists, I haven't seen any evidence of this. FEV and ghoulification due to readiation exposure and synth construction are all very prominent biological differences that actually affect people. I haven't seen a single Brotherhood of Steel member decide that the player in Fallout 3 chose the 'wrong' ethnicity at the start of the game. Stockton was throwing wrenches at the machine at this point - here, hoping to expose something about the Institute friendly General so that she could be replaced with a much more distrusting Preston which would 'free' the Commonwealth from 'Institute influence'. It's not winning the campaign, it's a battle tactic.

Guest(11)-

And why is the Lone Wanderer totally blind to everything?

DeadLyokoBrony-

The consultations with Littlehorn and the Regulators was supposed to show that the Lone Wanderer was off the Karma system. Then again, this isn't begun to show until Reilly warns her against it after they return to the Capitol Wastes. I think Faukes attempts to curtail her behavior as well when they come back from the PItt. But her Karma hasn't been shown either way in the story yet - like with the two guys perpetually asking for clean water in game. So if you're relying on that for her 'goodness'? On the other hand, the Sole Survivor is not 'most likely' she was putting the blame on the BoS.

DataRedacted-

I didn't believe writing the Lone Wanderer successfully revealing the General would be a cakewalk. Rubbing out Reilly's Rangers might (teleport type II synths until they're all dead) might be. Hence, the Rains.

Chris7221-

I get it. A fanfic is 'published' when I happen to bother. It's not like you can just read a novel, it's in progress.

The best definition of a Mary Sue that I've heard is from the youtuber Sarcastic Production's Red - someone who destroys the story by maintaining sole focus. Therefore, it's very hard for single character focus stories to have Sues. Take X-Men stories: Wolverine's anti-social but beloved, treated as having the best powers even when he doesn't, the most powers even when he doesn't, and writers will focus on him exclusively despite it being a team comic to facilitate talking about social interactive issues i.e. why we're seeing less of him in X-Men '97. That's Sue-ness. Simply being capable of everything doesn't make someone the Mary Sue - look at Merlin in The Once and Future King who's living backwards in time to the point where he's seen the entire story not only happen but recorded and analyzed with methods that are alien to the other characters on top of his blatant magic and technology, or Dumbledore who is worshipped by everyone who isn't an outright villain at some point. With this story very much being the Sole Survivor's adventure as much as Fallout 4 was, it's very hard to say she's drawing focus or changing the setting.

It is ALIENATING. Like how in Steven Speilberg's A.I. the child actor came up with the idea that none of the robotic characters should be filmed blinking, or the actor for the T-1000 practiced sprinting while holding his mouth closed.

The Zetans serve as a permanent ticking clock. The Sole Survivor doesn't have to take over the entire Commonwealth right now if there's no Zetans and can wait until it's tactically advantageous to do so. She doens't have to keep the Brotherhood of Steel from taking over starship city is there's no reason for starship city.

Your characterization comment - that's good criticism. I don't know how to address it. This fic doesn't lend itself to 'slice of life' instead of the next plan, much like one of my favorite TV shows "aLiAs" where the characters are how they approach the ongoing plot much more than how they emote when they relate to one another. The actors act mind you, they just aren't given the sitcom 'we're sitting around the house' moments that let who they are float around. Or like how in Star Trek we're explicitly told by Picard that he dislikes children and it takes decades for it to be revealed that what he hates is childhood since his own was a mess rather than childishness since we come to learn that Picard was more knave than knight in his younger years.

TheWizardofOsborne-

Remember the resources you were holding onto at the end of game? I had put 29 days of gameplay hours into Fallout 4, no mods. I actually had in inventory or on settlers all the hats, armor, uniforms, armament that I portrayed back in chapter 5/6 ish. I also had nearly every settlement up and producing: food, scrap, etc. Building Sanctuary Hills from nearly nothing is an effort. Bethesda was clever in that it gets easier the more productive your prior settlements are, hence settlement building never turns from 'challenge' to chore. This economic boom is what the General is taking advantage of here. As for why the Lone Wanderer didn't have access to Zetan tech- tada?

Someonerandome-

I will write on 'plans' for the future at the end of this. But the distances involved with the world make certain things certain things.

NothingBurger-

But never wondering why?

AnthonyR89-

The ALL CAPS keeps that 'world is not right' feeling. Like when I wrote a Legend of Zelda story, I used every trick in the book not to quote Link.

In Battlestar Galactica, and Admiral came on the scene and caused problems by outranking the Commander that was present and working with the President. After her death, the president promoted the commander not to commodore (commander of one ship) but Admiral (commander of a naval force) to avoid the problem. The General in this story by making Zhao 'admiral' instead of 'commodore' is to put everything water born on him and not have to cope with it. She is just as capable of navigating a submarine by sound as she is anything else she doesn't know how to do, after all.

There's not really a legal leviathan to judge whether surrenders are 'valid'. This is really a 'history is written by the victors' thing.

It's not like there's a legal leviathan legitimizing surrenders. If the highest ranking Brotherhood of Steel member on the battlefield surrenders to the General in front of witnesses, it's going to be pretty easy to sell to Minutemen loyalists that the Brotherhood of Steel surrendered. If the highest ranking members of the Brotherhood back at base don't and operate as if they aren't, then they're going to do just that. In real life, it took years to put down actual Nazi resistance in Germany from members of the old regime and we are still haunted by the co-cultures grabbing at symbols to justify their own evil in minor splinter groups today. Jefferson Douglas surrendered on behalf of the Confederacy and Jim Crow lasted a century.

Lyon's people believed they wanted to be the good guys. Maxson's return to what the Outcasts would consider tradition had other concerns. Neither had an interal to the faction farm or engaged in active commerce to obtain food or water.

As for a bunch of grammar, missed words, etc. eh, fan fic. Editing's for grades and salary. Fan fic is to get ideas out of my head.

AdonCa-

I'll agree that her opinion of the Brotherhood of Steel wouldn't have steered her away from this course of action. The Minutemen actually are a force for good, particularly their exmplar Preston Garvey. The Railroad was trying to help. The Institute wasn't but there's so much mitigating circumstance on that with Shawn being the director and naming her heir apparent that it gets this special kind of past, particularly since she can try to reshape it into something that one day will deserve it. But the raider conglomerate of Nuka-World didn't show any redemeeable parts and they all ended up shot for their slavery. So when the BoS starts talking fascism and acting fascism and wants to treat an American from the 21st century that's a veteran as either worthless because they're a civilian or a possible underling when they're General of a reviving Minutemen (my character met Danse after about four or five settlements), the Sole Survivor isn't going to be inclined toward them. But her primary motivation is what she discusses with the Institute after Cabot is inducted - operational security of Starship City means no competing nation can contemplate what they're doing until its done. If the NCR finds out that the Commonwealth has active research into confirmed alien technology, their citizenry can't let its government not try to take control of it. Which in turn destroys the whole point of researching it in the first place in order to mount a defense because that defense will never arise due to intraspecies warfare. Add in that the Brotherhood of Steel's number one goal is to take technology out of the hands of others. The Capitol Wastes as a country couldn't be allowed to exist. However, since the 21st century minded Sole Survivor is from the 21st century, she hasn't been acting like the truth - countries don't exist on the east coast. Hence, she set about attempting to conquer a country (the Capitol Wastes that was ruled by the Brotherhood of Steel) when it doesn't really exist in that way.

Christian Russo-

Thank you for the kind words. Finally someone who appreciates ALL CAPS. I find that fanfic should take place in the margins allowed by the original work. While you can have some absolute masterpieces like artemisgirl's New Blood in the Harry Potter section of , my own best work generally keeps to either "This could have happened before the canon", "this is what happened after the canon", or "this is what happened when the canon isn't looking". The ones that I would push are Summit of Peace - an after game of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess where Zelda tries to 'bring a lasting peace' and Shikabane Hime: Yori which is a continuation of both the anime Shikabane Hime and the cartoon Kim Possible where a character from the TV-Y Kim Possible awakens as a monster from the TV-M Shikabane Hime and the consequences unfold. Those are the ones that are marked as completed at least. Spawn is another of my fan fics that is marked as complete; a continuation of Kim Possible if a character was subject to the same rules as the main character of the Spawn comics/movies but it doesn't feel to me as marked as the others.

The Reader-

I do use the numbers to designate scenes within a chapter. Hence if Chapter X: Title 1,2,3,2 it means that this chapter is part of the Title arc and has a scene, another scene, a third scene, and then we're returning to the second scene. My primary issue with the crossover with New Vegas is distance, particularly post apoctalyptic distance, the second is that the General has a mentality that anything worth having diplomatic relations with would be a security risk.

"I can make anyone go to prison, just because I don't like them" - No Handlebars. This is what should be meant by absolute power corrupts absolutely. Do you really think Putin invaded Ukraine because he likes battlefield casualties, war crimes, and oppressing his own people? Or do you think he really does have an idea that the ethnically Nazi portion of the population of Ukraine is something he as the leader of the Russian Federation can save people from while simultaneously preventing the encroaching threat of NATO? In a non-oligarchical system where he didn't have the wheels of power spinning at his whim and will alone, the entire enterprise would have been stopped before it began. In Russia's strongman, proto-fascist, dissidents dissapear when they can't be used as examples of punishment there's nothing stopping him from tearing apart the world or accidentally setting up dangerous new world orders - like his trade with China allows China more leniency when enriching Iran through trade becuase what's Russia going to do, rejoin the NATO countries to attempt to curtail Iran's religious exclusive led government nuclear ambitions after Russia itself is sending money to the Kim Jung regime of North Korea for the labor of its people? The General in this fic makes moves to better the Commonwealth...as it makes sense to her, and no one has the information let alone might to really stop her. The closest anyone comes is the Triggerman who could have gone to war while the Gunners still existed and that would have been such a disaster it forces her to actually acquiesce to nearly anything that doesn't jeapordize her position, the Gunners themselves, and the Brotherhood of Steel in the Capitol Wastes. Considering that the Triggermen have actual business deals ongoing with founding council communities, I don't think the General would still be the General and not mostly the soon to be dismissed Director of the Institute had she just declared war on the Triggermen - too many to fight, too much economic and political damage, weakening against a future inevitable Gunner fight against peace itself, etc.

Skyler -

To repair a railway, the territory it is within needs to be survivable. and existent. With the bombs reshaping the maps and the caravans not following a railway, that may be a project that's on par with Starship City itself. I remember there being a mod that's just a train similar to Snowpiercer but I don't think that applies in this story.

A lot of this story relies on there being something that Nick could detective his way through that the Sole Survivor wouldn't think to cover up. Institute fashion was that clue since she was only thinking "How do I never have this site investigated.", which requires the synths to be wearing their own colors. It is an interesting thought of what would have happened had the synths been wearing BoS colors. Nick: "Synth compnents mean these were synths." - Lone Wanderer:"So the Institute really did this. No one should be attacking Project Purity." - Sole Survivor:"I already pointed out that some Brotherhood of Steel members were synths. But that's because the Railroad had been stealing synths from the Institute for years, changing their memories in most cases to help them hide, and then releasing them in the Capitol Wastes. Just look at Harkness or Acadia. Changing their memory messes with their programming and makes them more likely to 'go bad'. So just like a synth programmed to be a useful tool stolen and modified then follows raiders orders, these synths which have safety mechanisms built in not to behave this way were broken enough to follow Brotherhood of Steel orders to behave this way. The Brotherhood ordered its members to nuke us, they just happen to turn out to be synths." - Jameson:"We checked the dog tags, those aren't our people." - Three Dog:"Turns out the Brotherhood nuclear strike was a setup by the Commonwealth. Who tried to tick off the General? Was it the Institute that allegedly surrendered but made synths to trick her into fighting their enemy? Was it the Railroad that made critical mistakes in their efforts to free these machines? Was it somebody else who just found out about these synths and wanted the Brotherhood of Steel out of the way - like Talon Company or some Enclave survivor?" - Rosie:"The Republic of Rosie wants to open negotiations with the Brotherhood of Steel to end hostilities in an attempt to find out what really happened in a joint investigation." - Underworld:"No one cares about those ghouls shooters, war stays on through the use of Bridget's marines that our citizens never joined. And you're racist if you don't agree." - Institute:"Psst. Director, those look a lot like the synths we programmed and gave you to assassinate Colonel Cypress." One slight change like this would have sent the story spiralling in a different direction, and I think it would be very interesting to see where that went.

Mikoto-

Thank you. Your support of the General seems results based not principle based. Like Iron Man makes a better world rather than Captain America always does the right thing.

I guess now you can see where the story was going.

I couldn't stray too far in chasing reference for reference sake subplots before they keep the story from actually moving forward. In the beginning, darting around and finding pieces was what it was about. But every "Let's stop the confrontation between the General and the Lone Wanderer" because something else pokes up...becomes a balancing act of avoiding distraction. And as soon as you have a mechanism that avoids death, you're usually out of stakes for a story that's already used death as a 'fail condition' (like losing Hancock during the Rains). The only story I've seen use a "We can avoid death" mechanism and not just fail has been the recent run of X-Men comics and that mechanism is currently in tatters.

Obscene Farce-

The Lone Wanderer doesn't show up until 4 chapters after you post your review. There's no other 'focus' characters, as they drift in and out of the story as needed (compare Shaw with Bridget).

Also, you don't understand only the Lone Wanderer's actions in this review. But not tipped off that her thinking was different because of a cause, an explanation?

SIDoragon-

Nope, just Valentine. But the sound was Wyath staring up the Rains.

I realized that there wasn't a 'real' way back to the negotiating table after the Rains. The Commonwealth survivors wouldn't let there be one unless it wiped the entire mainland and the 'new' Commonwealth and its Minutmen were being commanded out of say...Far Harbor or Nuka-World by like Avery as 'the Captain' and killing 2/3rds of the cast.

The Rains were designed to empty the atmosphere of the radioactive particles in it by allowing them to coalesce into rain so that they could be precipitated over the Commonwealth. After this weather event, the Glowing Sea only glows from the ground up. The sky is blue, and the air is much more (still risky) breathable.

The Rains weren't a worse case situation. If it wasn't Wyath and it was say a Rust Devil fugitive, they could have gone to the fort at the end and automated a robot to carry nuclear weapons through inhospitable territory and then mass detonated on the Commonwealth on a per community/settlement basis.

Wars too often end up in retaliations rather than victories.

It's a machine. It can only respond so much. If it could come up with novel ideas or appreciations would it still be a machine? Look at the Lone Wanderer's synth.

Just an idiot? Still a person?

"I love how everyone's missing the forest for the trees." LOL, considering how everyone started condemning the Lone Wanderer's thinking if they hadn't already taken sides against the General but no one suggested she might not be thinking because she was a machine. But in response to your point - how many Americans are going to stop going to 9/11 memorials just because of the hundreds of thousands of Afghans that have been killed in retaliation? There are Israeli civilians blocking food trucks toward the people they call Palestinians (it's not like a lot of Palestine is 'left' for them to be -ians of) despite having killed by an exponent more of them. Someone capable of dropping a nuclear bomb after seeing the devastation that it can cause is still someone capable of dropping a nuclear bomb - which the General shows in the attack on the Citadel later in the story.

It does get the General conveniently out of harm's way from that accusation by making it so poorly, doesn't it?

That's vicious.

A child with a cellphone in an unwired, unplumbed, African village today has access to more information than Bill Clinton did when he was president. People in the United States with a television generally learned more in a day than people in 1500s England did in their entire lives. Why would one mercenary group operating in a distinct territory have operational knowledge about the history of one acting in an entirely different arena when there aren't communication devices beyond pre-mail system letters? And Strong was already dead. But still no suspicion of why the Lone Wanderer is resorting to this instead of re-evaluating?

Still rooting for a team.

The General house arrested Rivet City's security. They deliver the Aqua Pura...and now don't.

Barthowlemeow-

I don't see how MacCready was going to be written into betraying the General. Unless the Lone Wanderer's real name turned out to be Lucy.

Wrong plot twist.

MysteryMan526 -

It was supposed to be offputting, like the non-radio music in the wasteland.

TaiwaNO1-

Does it? There's plenty of countries that have done worse that you wouldn't describe as evil. I think the BoS refusal to be a country instead of just a force that doesn't answer to anything is what creates situations like this.

The-Killer40513

War Never Ends. Part of war is cruelty that cannot be made up for.

Surviverlone-

I wanted to include much of the game(s) as I could. This was the easiest way to include Strong in a story that's mostly about thought out machinations.

Guest(12)-

You are a mysoginist. Even by Western medicine standards, women are back in full physical health after 6 weeks of giving birth (which surprises me as the fracturing of the pelvis I would think would take longer to heal), just lactating if they haven't taken a two week break from it (and I think even the speed run of Fallout 4 that takes a bit over an hour stretches in game time for a significant portion of that, assuming a perfect cyrogenics including interruption). I think I previously go over the time line of Nora being out of highschool just slightly early (I was out of highschool when I was 17, some people I had attended with made it out at 16 or stayed on to put college credit on the government dime), served a tour to get access to the G.I. bill (17- 21) where she met Nate, law school (4+2, so 27), landing a job and a pregnancy (hence the bombs dropping when she was 29 to put her on par with the Lone Wanderer leaving Vault 101 at 19 ten years before the beginning of Fallout 4). As an end game player character Luck, Agility, and Intelligence while lacking on things like Strength, Endurance (which Nate should have higher than her by being physically larger and more military experience) and being middling with Perception & Charisma is perfectly reasonable. I don't see how anything in canon really contradicts this (unless I miss where it is explicitly stated that Nora was never in the military). Later, it's revealed that her Dexterity was encouraged in childhood where her Intelligence was something that she used to try to compensate for her lack of Charisma and that her Luck was phenomenal. There is no evidence that Nate has been anything but military. Portraying him as manipulating different political forces into giving him the obedience to pull of starship city was going to go how? Because leading men are just charming? This reeks of "I'm not racist but [insert racist stuff here]" thinking. Because what happens after - the Lone Wanderer shouldn't be sexy ninja because women aren't as physically strong on average and it's not like chems exist in Fallout 3 or 4? Casadin should be automatically in command at the BoS because he's a military man and Cross is only cybernetically enhanced? How could Dave of the Republic of Dave lose the election when he was the only man running? Hey, it's fanfic - why does Isabela Cruz have to be in command of the Regulators or Desdemona in charge of the Railroad... The Dunning-Kruger effect of people too ignorant to see their own ignorance is always appaulling(sp?) and only from the outside. Call me out on a woman depicted as a slender waif weilding a gatling gun with no form of strength assist, call me out on using 'black girl magic' to wrestle multiple supermutants into submission, or something else that's actually ridiculous.

Guest(13)-

Thank you.

BloodyKingsman-

Thank you for the kind words. I know my update schedule has not been a schedule throughout this.

Imdonenevercomingback -

You're moved on behalf of the characters and hated the arc? How am I supposed to take that?

Thank you.

John994-

Even the Lone Wanderer's was believable? But no, I've been civilian my whole life even if I've been exposed to daily violence during times in it.

LordGreen2091-

Thank you for the kind words.

Hskidmore49-

Nick siding 'with' the Lone Wanderer? But as for chapter length, this is mostly to get things out of my head. They flow as they flow.

Yet the Lone Wanderer never does no matter what she experiences. Why is that?

I'd tend to agree that the 'Neal' version of the Silver Shroud having to traverse through to the Capitol Wastes and find the Lone Wanderer on his own could then after that straight up win against this version of the Lone Wanderer considering her stealth to martial arts with chems fighting style.

This was one of the big clues - that the General doesn't have an immediate working memory of every synth.

No one-

Thank you for the kind words. I'm surprised more people started choosing sides rather than ask why the Lone Wanderer was acting the way she was.

Lost Guy-

Wow. How unaware I was when I was writing that a strong man figure head selling that she could fix everything and return everyone to an imagined historic 'when all was perfect' time setting up a tributary government where only the most miniscule drips of power were fed to those who could possibly threaten her if they weren't loyal and destroying all that weren't going to be loyal while promoting a constant outside enemy that was individually weak due to the citizenry being better but as a whole would destroy civilization after the liberal forces of politics proved ineffective with the collapse of the Minutemen before she was unfrozen and her marriage into the most conservative forces like the Institute was writing a fascist government. How would I ever have figured that out if you hadn't told me?

Pato HM-

Still wondering how more people chose sides rather than examined the Lone Wanderer's lack of thinking in a world where machines that aren't sentient pass as people.

Jayon pheonix-

Short chapters are nearly my hallmark. Shikabane Hime: Yori doesn't have them because I was chasing a theme with the title chapters. But in Fallout 4, your Pip-Boy's readout pops up in your HUD while in power armor.

Inquisitor sigvon blackwolf-

More cheerleading than examination? I wonder why that is.

Kross Phelps-

But not why the Lone Wanderer thinks the way she can?

Martian-Tech-Adept-

This was mostly to show that the Lone Wanderer isn't abiding the moral scale of Fallout 3.

jboss1-

If the Lone Wanderer was 'just killed', it wouldn't be the fic you liked.

All I know about Skyrim is that it exists.

Thanks.

Terrabull-

The General is the synth? *considers* But no one considered if the Lone Wanderer was one. And the General is shown giving Institute people orders. Huh.

Sanctuary Hills is the first settlement you personally design to your whim. Why wouldn't it be there?

arutka2000-

I have an inkling that the 'separation of the timelines' came after the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and somehow Fallout's world found it easier to do cold fusion rather than computing. But I rarely keep that properly in mind. I still act like there was a War on Terror even though Fallout 1 from the 90s defines a post-apoctalyptic world without it.

ADeter-

Too bad, right?

'kay.

Guest(14)-

If only the synth posing as the Lone Wanderer could come up with new perspectives to guide her actions.

CaptainDrake123-

At the time, I was really pleased that the readers took this as just something to take in stride. But everyone missed the clues. Even the prophecy fell on deaf ears.

Guest(15)-

Hm. So Nick was right?

MollyPollyRolly-

Thank you for the kind words.

kyle77776-

Evil? Just because two characters are set against each other doesn't mean one's evil. Have you ever seen a leader/protagonist vs. lancer/alternate fight in an anime? One of my favorite no one's the bad guy because everyone is fights is in 13 Assassins. The main characters are one ex-general who sees how evil a particular noble is and how much harm he's causing the country and its people so decides to assassinate him and his best friend who is determined to stop him because if political violence is ever allowed to be successful the people will suffer eternal civil war. The noble in question is absolutely irredeemable - pursing evil just to do so and taking pleasure in it just to enhance how evil it is. But the reasons for the main conflict are the same for both possible protagonists - saving the people from suffering, particularly due to violence.

duststars-

I don't know how salvagable a sunk submarine is after two centuries.

gh0stw0lfe92-

Paladin Fawks-

I chose to present the post-2287 that were the Fallout 4 Brotherhood of Steel on the basis of all the people making it the Fallout 3 Brotherhood by culture (mostly the Lyons family rather than the Maxson's running it) had been internal politically assassinated.

Lord Macnaughton-

Hence my doing it again.

I fear tactical empathy is a skill we are constantly undervaluing. How many people want to hear about what terrorists believe, are like, think? How many of those people in a separate context would admit that the best way to defeat an enemy is to understand the enemy? There's even an old Klingon saying- "No enemy is boring.".

It's to point out that the Lone Wanderer remembers a world where squabbles had to be invented culturally and were. People kill each other in Fallout for very specific, personal reasons. Not abstract cultural compliance.

jaclea-

I never did stick to any kind of schedule. And I considered some sort of communication between Dr. Li and James' daughter. But 1) how would someone ensconced in the Institute be able to convince the people teleporting her out that it was militarily secure to meet the Lone Wanderer 2) I'd have to decide if the Institute was collectively in on the fact that she's a synth despite the General and the reader not being overly explicitly told...best to let sleeping dogs lay.

Trying to get to every single subplot without losing the thread is easier in game than in prose. Gamers have been 'taught' by games that the main progression is always waiting for them but anything else is 'worth' going and doing and not to worry the main progressions is on effective pause - "Help me, Mario. The giant kappa that's turned in his water affinity to fire affinity wants to drain my spiritual connection to Rosalina through the traditional means in order to damn all the kingdoms in permanent tyranny and spiritual nihilism!" - "Let me see if I can make this jump on the 48th try to get this one last coin and garner another 100% clear level." Prose has taught readers that every shown clue could be important and any red herrings will be explained. "In chapter 123, you pointed out that Wharwick had access to genetically altered radiation resistant vegetables. But! In chapter 83, you mentioned that a Talon Company merc was eating a carrot. Does this mean that Talon Company has a spy in the Institute and is it [insert the worst possible guess here]?". And considering that not a single reviewer called me out on the Lone Wanderer being a synth before I pushed the reveal, my running around left and right on trying to include subplots from the game was more than enough.

Guest(16) -

Thank you kindly.

Guest(17)-

That so many game fanfics are "When I played, I did X." is puzzling. 1)Games are designed to let the player believe that they are influencing events but no developer can afford infinity, so the branches aren't that drastic. 2)Who has played a game so much that they're reading fan fic of it and haven't at least understood the game canonical other possibilities? Does Master Chief kill aliens...eh, let's see what the fan fic about other people who had fun with the game says.

Guest(18)-

I did ask for beta readers, constantly. In context this line of So far (up until now) that (the previously mentioned ways the Institute has interfaced with the Commonwealth) has resulted in assassinations up to and including destroying the last best attempt at government (reference to canon). Expanding any one of those () would have made this the killer runon sentence it truly already is while delivering no new info to the reader or another character. "as you know" exposition just makes stuff look dumber.

Coment9-

Thank you?

Da Lone Ranger-

Thank you for the kind words.

Powerful people don't need to bluster. There are youtube videos about how the head of Lannister in Game of Thrones never really raises his voice or rushes, etc.

More kind words.

kind words.

Actress? Mm...

Everyone believes they're the good guy. When they're confronted with what they've done it's either justified or someone else' fault.

Thank you.

M-

I update when I can.

Thank you for the kind words.

Glad to help?

I will speak on 'future' shortly.

I'm told my fan fic 'Shikabane Hime: Yori' is more emotional.

As soon as Bradberton is not in front of a nuclear weapon stash, he's not directly involved with the Sole Survivor vs. Lone Wanderer conflict. Should this continue, he's by his nature as part of the Institute, part of the End Game plot.

Anon-

The same way they got Hancock's brother, or the guy who was fighting his synth in the middle of the street as a random encounter, or the other myriad of people the Institute replaced.

A Theron Guard and his Kohai-

Do not threaten people over a fan fiction. I can't imagine the privilege you enjoy in your real life that allowed you to believe such behavior is acceptable in a social species, let alone a functioning society. Mature or we will remove you from out interactions the best we can.

Now having said all that.

I don't see myself continuing this.

Not due to a lack of an idea. It's just that my idea for this keeps getting kicked in the face by Bethesda.

When Fallout 76, the most geographically close and therefore most likely next interaction, came out it was a really sublime vision. Born out of stupidity it turns out. The first vault opens up and therefore there's no human NPCs - simple, brilliant. The only other humans were going to be other players who could do what they want (which in game results from anything from the Elvises of New Vegas to the Legion of New Vegas to the Minutemen) and we were going to see in real time how that turned out through simple experience. The gameplay was that over the next hill exploration that Fallout was known for, where all the plot was dug out of clues and scrap. It was nearly worth being an MMORPG.

And then it turned out to be a live service. No other people was a cost cutting measure. Corporate wanted the multiplayer shooter crowd to pay to play when the Fallout fans would just logout as soon as being player character fired upon all the way to running around dressed like Santa Claus and throwing out presents because that's what humans do in Fallout. No one's buying a bunch of cosmetic stuff because Fallout cosmetics should be searched for and found and players certainly hadn't spent the entire first month just playing a game - you need a job to have money to play a game, but Bethesda didn't want people to earn the money they were paid just paid.

So screw the vision. "Hey, give us money. We got NPCs. Screw the canon. People just shrugged off the nuclear apocalypse that made Vault-tec necessary. In fact, we're selling the DLC with footage of blowing open a direct strike from a nuclear bomb proof vault door with dynamite! Because we can't accept return on investment, we need more money that we actually earned! We don't want to make a more aquatic themed Fallout 5 in New Orleans like every fan wanted after finding out about the lack of implementation of aquatic ideas in Fallout 4." So there's like two added people plots that make a half a lick of sense but only a half 1) the astronaut that comes back from a Jupiter mission out of cryostasis and is like "Where's mission control" but not her college professor or whomever hassling you 2) the secret service off the books gold hoarding vault but none of the criminals that want to break into it. 3)Maybe some of the 'crack another vault open' plot was sensical, but none of it was on par with the Mistress of Mystery plot or actually lore-friendly. And now that Fallout London is set to release and embarrass Bethesda's execs who forced their workers to put out Fallout 76's continuations?

Anyway. Fallout 76 is too much of a moving target yet inevitably would have to be 'book 3'. Before it became a moving target, I had an idea that book 3 would start out looking slice of life. More improvement to the new Commonwealth without external warfare. Part of that was going to be Dr. Madison Li taking command of Project Purity because 1)she worked on the project in Fallout 3 canonically 2) the Institute would be called in to work the biggest tech problem and she's Institute, etc. The Commonwealth with the restart of Project Purity, the revelation of the tree ghoul that's part and parcel with the other Eden device , etc. would then serve to have Dr. Li as this 'humanizing the Institute' vibe that the General would then encourage.

Then the scourge empire strikes. The Scourge in Fallout 76 are hateful of unscourged humans like feral ghouls, fully capable of weapon use like supermutants, but also canonically battlefield infectious with the first stages accelerating into running around as a livid red monster that only works with other scourged to kill humans and ends up with basically being locked in place by the crystals growing through your body to the point that only weapons fire can mobilize you back to the warpath again. Since it's been nearly 200 years since Falllout 76, I was going to have the scourge having overcome everything in Fallout 76 (otherwise why didn't the descendants of all the player characters from Vault 76 handle everything in the Capitol Wastes well before the BoS and Enclave from the West Coast started fighting over it?). And now that there's an infectious army storming the Capitol from the south/west you get

-Minutemen are heroes! As long as every one of them stays way over there on the front lines and never returns here to spread the infection that I'm going to certain of no matter the evidence they have now caught. Those brave martyrs! That I will never interact with again.

-Dr. Li advocates for quarantining the military forces saving the country and in turn becomes this idolized figure with purity of health as director of Project Purity and the Science goddess returned. And more importantly - let's make sure we follow what she says to do instead of the General no matter whether Dr. Li wants that or not.

-After all, we're a free country and we have the right to choose our leaders. The General of the Minutemen is a public servant not a ruler, right? We should be able to demand that we cast out the military that's defending us from the scourge while they're defending us and decide to do whatever mob rule believes Dr. Li wants to keep us safe from the disease including not obeying the General's federal government or the Institute's science know how or even Dr. Li's more sensible proclamations. In the same way that Trump is mad that MAGA doesn't give him credit for any of the work that actual scientists did to create anti-Covid vaccines because MAGA's anti-vax.

-It's not like the General who is doing all this so that the Institute can implement starship city that we don't know about is going to use her exclusive command of the only military force in the Commonwealth worth mentioning to come enforce her rule. After all, we're the people who supported signing her constitution and creating the council that curtails her. She should enjoy us telling everyone under her command to go and die for us in the war vs. the diseased and never come home because you might be diseased too.

-What happens when cases of scourge start popping up not on the front lines? Scourge are depicted as smart enough for communication, group culture, weapon and technology use, etc. The only symptoms of being scourged seem to be discoloration, a lethal hatred or everyone that's not, and an inevitable freezing in place fate worse than death if you haven't killed enough 'normal humans' for them to have been inspired to kill you. So there's very little reason not to say, don a power armor or antiradiation suit or any full body covering and sneak past the front lines to terrorist attack a community or settlement. What happens when some Minuteman does return home and does turn out to be scourged just like everyone was fearing?

That was going to be my next 'book' of the series. But Fallout 76 just turns into such a moving target of a mess that I don't see my ever putting it all together into something as coherent as a fan fiction. And I'd have to handle Fallout 76's being down the road (West Virginia from Washington DC.) before addressing anything even further west of that.

So thank you for reading this work.