Radioactive Grace part 1: August 17, 2277

Radioactive Grace is a Let’s Play of the games Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, told in a narrative epistolary form. You can find the index page here.

My daddy gave me this diary when I was sixteen, said I could use it to write down my thoughts, deal with some of the anger I’d been feeling. It was kind of a big deal, really… paper’s hard to come by down in the vaults, and he had to pull some hardcore strings to get it. I threw it in a drawer and forgot about it until now, but that’s the kind of kid I was. Angry and ungrateful.

Maybe that’s why he left me here. There. In the vault.

I should start over.

My name’s Grace, and I grew up in a steel-walled vault set into the side of a mountain. Never saw the sun. Never saw the stars. Just six steel surfaces and recycled air at all times. It all seemed so normal then, living in a sealed jar, but what did we know?

Reminds me of this lame poem Butch’s mom gave me for my tenth birthday. Still got it on my pip-boy. I always thought it was so dark for such a cheerful woman, but now that I’m older I think I understand a little about the difference between who people are and who they pretend to be.

Gray Walls, impenetrable steel.

Suffocation! Condemnation!

Little hands groping in subterranean uncertainty.

Mommy? Daddy? Am I Dead?

Nay! Nay! Reborn into purifying fluorescence!

A face emerges, strong and male.

Father to me? Father to all!

Overseeing our lives, our eternities.

Harshness of discipline.

Harshness of love

Obedience my savior!

Larva to pupa, pupa to worker.

Buzz, buzz! One with the steel honeycomb.

10 lies within the 101, significant at last.

Till gray seeps from the walls to hair, to soul.

Then, eternal slumber, the sweet sleep of incineration.

Yeah. That’s sort of what it was like. Only now it’s gone all wrong, and I’m out, and breathing fresh air, and I just know it’s a matter of time before something kills me. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this, so that when you find my bleached bones out there under the sun you’ll know who I was. That I lived. That I mattered.

Okay, backing up.

A few hours ago Amata wakes me up and tells me that her dad — the Overseer — has gone nuts because my dad left.

Read that again.

My dad left.

Guy who found my corpse, I don’t know if you know what it’s like in the vault, but nobody leaves. Somehow, my dad slipped out the door without telling anyone. Without telling me.

I’m still trying to process that, but every time I think about why he would have gone and left me here I start getting a panic attack. Like this big sky over my head isn’t terrifying enough.

Okay. Easy, Grace, easy.

What happened next is a blur. Amata and I set up our pip boys to automatically take snapshots when our pulse-rates jump, but I… I don’t want to look at the pictures. Not yet.

First coherent memory I have is running through the cave, hearing the vault door closing behind me, and tripping out into the sunlight.

Sunlight. Real sunlight. Blinded me, so much brighter than the lights down in the vault. So much oranger. So much warmer.

But I’m alone. Amata’s not here. Whatever happened, she didn’t make it, and something about that makes me feel like the dirt on the bottom of a grave. My heart’s pounding, my lungs are burning, my limbs feel like rubber. It was all I could do to crawl over to the shade where I started writing this.

Ha. I don’t even remember grabbing it when I left, but it’s suddenly important that I record this, that I’m remembered.

I see some houses down the road. Will check them out. Hand hurts from writing. First let me scan in a pic of the Outside.

I just… feel so overwhelmed.

Technical details:

I’m playing Fallout 3 & NV as a single game using the Tale of Two Wasteland mods, and all the DLC. While it becomes feasible to travel between the capital wasteland and mojave midway through Fallout’s main quest, I don’t plan on doing so until after I’ve finished it — the story is more cohesive that way.

I’m not playing in a very optimized manner. My focus is on a good story, not efficiently. Further, I’m going to have a ton of XP by the time I hit New Vegas, so I’m not going to be a completionist.

This is going to be a long series involving a lot of screenshots.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

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