Random: Fallout 4 · 9:44am Sep 15th, 2015
-by RubleGun
Well then. I just woke up from this dream.
It's a beautiful day. My two brothers and I - in the perspective of, for some reason, a man - are exploring a mountaintop crevice in search of something, anything, we might find useful. The area has been growing wild and beautiful (such graphical fidelity!) for some time. Whatever we came here for, it's likely long gone.
I sigh, and look up at the explosive-cut rock walls of the crevice. It hasn't been so long since the bombs fell; I was little, but my family knows much of the pre-war world. I imagine myself surrounded by a small crowd of people - God, I wish I could know for sure that so many people are still alive - and stare up at the worn rock, guided by the imaginary tour guide.
"Here you can see the wear and tear of decades of rainwater," he says. "Look at the channels cut into the stony face by mere precipitation; isn't nature just grand?"
"We need to get out of here." My little brother - I say "little" ironically, because though built like a beanpole and five years my younger, he's the tallest of the three of us, at six-foot-four - points up at the rock wall as he disturbs my reverie. "This place could come down in a landslide at any moment. It's not stable."
I shake my head and continue searching. No use arguing with him. We need to find the place and loot whatever we can, and standing around talking about it is just going to waste time. Besides, the rock looks stable enough to me.
I finally find what we were looking for, but not what we had hoped. A simple door, set into the bottom of the cliff face, has a sign on it; the weathered black letters declare that this is "Coal Mine 01." Didn't know the business started in what used to be Pennsylvania. Don't know how knowing that is useful now. But though we've found it, it's our loss.
"We can't go in," I say. Unfortunate, but I know one of these places when I see it. "This is a Vault. It's too dangerous; we have to leave. Now."
Though my little brother and I are in agreement, my other brother - a fat man of about middle age, who carries and dresses himself in the fashion of old-world business executives - convinces us to go inside anyway. The door crashes shut behind us, sending a reverberating clang down the featureless concrete entry passage. It carries with it a sense of finality and foreboding. We're not leaving, not that way at least.
"Damnit! Why did we come in here?!" I can barely constrain my panic, though my brothers are able to calm me, and we continue. Not that we have much choice, now.
The first room we find is a large office, about fifteen by fifteen feet, with three desks covered in potentially-useful junk. As the most technically-inclined of us, I park myself at a desk with one of Vault-Tec's signature clunky terminals. Clunky, but guaranteed to last five centuries. It's not password-locked, for some reason, and while my little brother helps himself to the stock of hyper-preserved food in a dead refrigerator in the corner, I immerse myself in the computer's log files.
It looks like this was one of the earliest Vaults - built more for demonstration of concept and peace of mind than preservation in a real war. The place was built before Vault-Tec's vaunted Exchange Calculation that nuclear war was, in fact, inevitable. Though this is called "Vault 200", there's no Vault here in the sense that we've come to know them through barely-survived experience. This is little more than a complex of simple underground bunkers. A direct nuclear strike would kill everyone here, though it seems the place was missed; it makes sense, given how rural this area is, and how dead the coal industry was by the time of the War.
But that means there should be people here. There aren't.
My middle brother bursts back in from his deeper exploration. His appearance has become that of Billy Mays, if Billy Mays shaved once a week, and he's also terrified by whatever he found. "Get your grenades ready, guys!"
My mind springs into a defensive mode. "We need to fortify ourselves some space, right? Which room?" Adjacent to this office is a stock room of some sort that I haven't gotten around to taking inventory from, but my brother shakes his head. Wordlessly, we set to work barricading the three doors - two to the stock room, one to the hallway - against the coming threat. As I pull a heavy, promising trolley full of packs of water bottles into place, I wonder what my brother found. Giant, mutated bugs? Super-mutants? Something worse?
I realise our mistake when I start pulling the doors shut in preparation for the coming threat.
"... um, guys, these doors open outward."
Nobody says anything.
The camera shifts, panning around the cut mountaintop, as something starts thumping and pounding against the doors.
The view goes black, and the Portal-like Fallout 4 logo appears.
As the real game begins, I'm in a primitive wooden cage, high off the ground. I'm a woman again (thank goodness), and for a change that's the default setting, but my situation doesn't seem good. Not that I know what my situation is. This isn't like Skyrim - I don't have a pair of talkative companions to unwittingly talk me through how I got here.
The cage starts moving, and I look down. Beneath me is what would be best described as a Troll village from World of Warcraft, with its wall-less huts and tents and tribalistic decorations. Littering the ground are old skeletons - long-dead zebras, whose alchemy and occult rites are so feared that nobody has dared come to strip the gold earrings from their bones. Probably just superstition, but I don't dare challenge it, and I'm not in a position to.
Carried by the cage, I pass from the village. What used to be the desert's network of power lines now serve as transit lines for cages like mine, and I am borne along them at a decent clip. There's nothing of note beneath me until I enter a narrow canyon and start passing over people. They are clad in whatever they could find, like straps of leather filled in with bent license plates. They are raiders.
I'm so fucked.
Maybe literally, the way they leer at me as I pass lower and lower overhead.
I look down at myself, and note that there's writing on my shirt, but I can't understand it. When did I become illiterate?
I break out of the canyon, my cage skimming along just above the ground now. The canyon opens to a small camp, full of hide tents decorated with Native American symbols. The men here are red-skinned and decorated in the soft leather clothing and wampum stereotypical of natives of the US Northeast, and someone talks about an execution as I pass. Someone else mentions that I somehow angered the warlord; that doesn't sound good at all...
The cage stops in front of another woman, marked a slave by her simple, ragged clothing and pale skin. She simply directs me to continue, and the cage moves again, now ignoring the absence of the power lines that supported it. Everything begins to fade to black again...
My last thought before waking is that Bethesda might have gone a little far with the "(player) is so fucked" opening this time.
The odd thing is that Fallout 4 hasn't really been on my mind lately, but this is the most vivid dream I've had in a few months. The even stranger thing is that I dreamed up an intro movie and the actual game intro sequence two months ahead of time. The characters could've stood to be a little more consistent - in real video games, they don't change appearances at the drop of a hat - but that was actually kind of fun. Of course, I doubt a game could be immersive enough to make me feel like I'm actually in it and thus make the desert cage sequence interesting, unless Bethesda goes all Optimalverse on us, but still.
... now I want a Fallout that deals with the Native Americans of the US Southwest before Caesar came along and "united" them all.
I had a lot of cute Sonata Dusk images... but I really don't want to look them up again. And a Billy Mays image with AJ...
The gender change could be explained with a shoddy character creation point. Little bit of game play then you great the character. Immersion broken -5/10 never play again.
Caesar? What is this, Fallout: Equestria?
3395023
Caesar is the leader of Caesar's Legion in Fallout: New Vegas.
Pleb.
3395029
I am not a pleb, I am a whore...
Least going off of everything that happens in Bethesda's game that I do play.
3395031
"Whore" implies payment in coin.
3395039
I had to buy that house somehow...
Just, uh, 50% of the time I was not paid directly. But, um, cause of some succubus "powers" looting became much easier.