You See Ed. Fallout Chapter 2!

So when all’s said and done, here’s our guy. Well, girl. See, I really like the idea of naming the character after my fellow webcrawlers, and Athena both called dibs and did a pretty good job of selling me on the glory that is Athena. So we’ll we’re going to be Athena. Sorry, LightningEllen. I am going to do my best not to drag her name through the mud. But, then again, that’s really going to be up to you guys, isn’t it?

I took the liberty of setting her stats based largely on the skills you folk chose. Since you guys made the strong tactical decision of just being born better than everyone else, we ended up with a lot of stat points to play with, here. Yes, we’re Gifted. That’s going to make us slightly weaker at the very beginning of the game, as our increase in stats doesn’t make up for the decrease in skills, but we’ll catch up.

Red Metal had a great idea of maxing out her Agility. Agility’s one of the most useful stats in the game, determining how many action points you get per turn, and your natural armor class i.e. how hard it is for Athena here to end up pummeled. I only set it to 9, however, rather than the max of 10. There’s a reason for this. A reason that’s not going to come to fruition for a long time, at which point I am going to forget to mention that’s why I did this so you won’t know how smart I am, but there’s a reason for it nonetheless. How about you guys just go ahead and think I’m really smart right now.

We’re pumping Intelligence so that we can say smart things about videogames boost our skill points per level back up to normal levels and compensate for the lowered rate we see from being gifted. It also plays into our good talking to people skills, as a higher intelligence opens up more dialogue options. Fun fact, if you have an intelligence of 3 or less, you are not smart enough to hold a normal conversation with people. Makes playing the game a totally different experience. Perception, we’re boosting because I took Mishka’s ‘combat skills’ suggestion as a seconding of Athena’s ‘small guns’ suggestion, so we’re rolling with that. Perception impacts a lot of things, but the most important is our accuracy with ranged weapons, so we’ll need that to, you know, actually hit our enemies. Of course, we’re a Night Person, so our Perception and Intelligence are never actually going to be at 8. They’ll be at 7 during the day, and 9 at night. So when we have the choice, we’re going to want to wait to fight and level up at night, because we’ll get better bonuses then.

Strength theoretically isn’t all that useful since we’re never going to not be shooting people in a fight, but all weapons have a minimum strength requirement or else Athena will be shooting like a stormtrooper.  For small guns, it hits out at 5. Otherwise, the only thing it will impact is how much we can carry. Charisma doesn’t have very many impacts this game, vaguely affecting disposition and prices, but I still figured that since we’re going to be using our speech quite a bit, it’s still handy to have high. I couldn’t bear to have a third stat at 8, so I left it one point short. I left our Endurance subpar, because we need a weakness somewhere to give enemies a chance, and shunted it into Luck. Endurance determines your rate of healing over time, but since we’re a skilled doctor, it’s not so important, your resistances to things you’ll only see a few times in the game, and your hit points. Luck does exactly what it always does every single game it comes up.

So where does this leave us? Athena’s going to be walking out into the wild, rabid wasteland (seriously, they don’t even have Dragon Age out there) able to handle conflicts in a variety of ways. It’s not always going to be the case that we’ll have to the option both to fight and talk our way through, but one of those two will almost always come into play. With our doctor skills, we’ll be able to recover from anything we find on the wastes that doesn’t kill us outright. This is a solid set of skills you’ve started us out with.

And here I was worried that everyone was going to jerk me around by picking Gambling, Outdoorsman, and Throwing for your tagged skills and leaving me with nothing viable to do.

War Never Changes. Let’s Play Fallout!

War never changes.

Ages ago, they had the War to End All Wars. That was supposed to be the end of it. With that one, we as a species were supposed to end it wiser, safer, saner. With that, we knew the horrors of war, we knew what it did to people, and we knew we wanted no more of it.

Not even thirty years later, we did it again. Ironic, isn’t it? War never changes.

Our species grew with time. We grew in numbers, and we grew in technology. We were smarter, living better lives. You’d think we’d be above it all, after all that. But war never changes. As we grew, so too did our needs. There wasn’t enough to go around. It got to the point where we were making war for the same resource we were consuming in war.

War never changes, but war changes people. Three quarters of the way through the 21^st century, October 21^st, 2077, war changed the world forever. We don’t know how launched the first bombs. Or who launched the last bombs. Maybe it wasn’t even man at all. Maybe this was the act of an angry God, hitting the reset button on a humanity who by that point was just making war to get what they needed to sustain their war. Whoever it was, it doesn’t really matter by that point. That war came to an end, along with the rest of the world. Nuclear bombs impacting all over the place, both the blasts and the fallout changing it forever, scarring the world in ways few would survive.

At least, that’s what I’ve been told. To be honest, we don’t really know what’s out there. Whether there is anything out there. War never changes, but war hasn’t hit us, these past 84 years. My grandparents were some of the lucky few to make it into a vault. Vault 13, specifically. In Southern California, if that matters to anyone. Safe from the blasts, completely isolated from the outside world, or whatever’s left of it. Here, we had internal conflicts, but things were relatively peaceful. My grandparents lived out the rest of their lives here. My parents were born here, and have lived out their entire lives in the safety of the vault. That was the plan for me as well.

Until recently. Our enclosed, self-sustaining vault suddenly became not so self-sustaining. Our water chip, which was a vital part of the machine that recycled and purified Vault 13’s water, broke. It couldn’t be repaired. We had no replacement. Our cisterns hold months and months of water, but we still had another 120 years before it’d be safe to leave the vault and rehabitate the world. Our water would not last. We’d need a replacement.

Ed was the first to be sent out into the world, seeking salvation. He was a hard, hard man, a survivor, and one who kept up his skills and his edge even in a world that didn’t need them anymore. He was also the single closest person to me in the entirety of Vault 13. Months passed, and we didn’t hear from him again. Then, we sent out Talius. A bit of a somber fellow, but one who was gifted, showing a high level of competence at nearly everything he did. Again, months passed, and we never heard from him again.

It’s time to send someone else out, in search of a new water chip. We only have 150 days of water left. Things are getting desperate. And now, it’s my turn.

A part of me worries. Ed was one of the baddest men I knew, and he’s still vanished, like something’s happened to him. I’ve got the skills. My life, such as it is, has prepared me far beyond the cushy, soften bodies and minds of some of my fellows, but even so, not know what’s out there, aside from that its still in the aftershocks of nuclear bombardment, it’s fearsome.

It doesn’t matter. I have to go. The overseer is not giving me a choice in the matter, however much I want one. I have to find out what’s happened to Ed. I have to save our water supply.

Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe the 84 years has been enough for most of the Fallout to pass over. Maybe the total bombardment has left whatever remains to wise, fearful, and sparse to pose any real danger. Maybe the world outside is now just as peaceful as the world inside.

War never changes.