This was only written after I had discovered vault 106 in Fallout 3, which was both a heartbreaking and yet strangely creepy experience. Thus, it inspired me to write this.





This was bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. I could hardly see a damned thing through the smoke in the room, even with my Pip-Boy light turned on. My head was rolling and flipping and doing whatever other kind of insane cartwheels that it had been doing for the past three minutes, and I wasn’t just getting agitated, I was getting scared. One thing that astounded me about the other vaults around here was that they all seemed to be in far worse shape than vault 101 or 112, hell, they even looked like they were a couple hundred years old. But that just simply wouldn’t be possible since they had sole survivors in some of them...at least, ones that had simply either lost their minds or had died of irradiation. But that wouldn’t be logical either...and my brain couldn’t fucking calculate the probabilities and logical explanations for such things because I felt like I had been drugged. Perhaps I should’ve known better than to enter a foreign vault and not expect any consequences.

“Charon!” I shouted, nearly frightened, as I ran through the bleak hallway which I had accidentally destroyed in a result of whatever the fuck my mind was causing me to see. A generator off to the side was lit with fire and smoke filled the narrow hall so much to where I thought I couldn’t breathe. Well, wasn’t this just fucking great. “Charon! God damn it, where are you!? Oh, God, please don’t tell me I killed you...”

Hearing myself say those words sent a visibly frightening chill down my spine, causing me to shake as if I had goosebumps. I would never forgive myself if I had killed him. I doubt I’d even leave the vault for a while, even if it meant my mind having to rot like the other surviving residents in here. Finally pushing through the smoke, I managed to enter a room that relieved my claustrophobia and made it easier to breathe due to the smoke thinning out. I looked around as best as I could to try and find the Ghoul, but every fucking thing was blurred out of my way. Shit.

But before I could even turn to look at a single thing, my vision flurred once again and all the color in my eyesight drained, a strange violet-like color eerily seeping into my world. I began hyperventilating, my head flying in all directions as things seemed to become slightly clearer and...cleaner. Shit, it didn’t even look like I was in the rusted, bloodstained media room I was previously in. My heart is racing now. I swear to God I’m going to have a heart-attack. I swear it.

The room is clean, looking like it should have those 200 years ago. I blinked, and the room abruptly gained a new amount of entities in it. Humans, actually. They all looked like original, every day vault dwellers. Perfectly normal. Except for the fact that Butch Deloria and his gang of Tunnel Snakes had suddenly appeared in the room and charged for me, all attempting a dog-pile to attack me. I felt like I was home about a year ago, the time when I had to practically kick Butch’s ass to get him to leave Amata alone. Fear ran through my veins as I readied my rifle and prepared to shoot, whether he was real or not. I wasn’t going to die down here in this godforsaken rat-hole.

“Oh, Christ!!” I shrieked, opening fire upon the Snakes like mad. Before I knew it I was backed into a corner and nowhere else to run, and my bullets didn’t seem to be affecting Butch or his buddies at all. This defied any logical sense. I really wished I had dad here right now to give me at least some form of rationality for what I was seeing.

“Fuck, kid, watch your aim!”

Someone else in the room shouted. That didn’t sound like no damned Tunnel Snake...let alone anyone else’s in the room. Unless they’d been smoking a hell of a lot of cigarettes and their voice had long gone under the weather from it. Suddenly, my vision seems like it’s beginning to clear up, and the room began to turn back into its original filthy, rotten image...and a rather agitated looking Ghoul standing not two feet from me.

“Oh, God...”

“What the hell’s gotten into you, kid?” He addressed me. “First you blow up half the goddamned vault and then you play target practice with my head. I’m starting to wonder if you’ve taken more Jet than you needed, back there.”

I sighed heavily, my voice becoming ragged and weak. “Charon.” I breathed thankfully. “Oh, thank God, I thought I killed you!” I gasped. Dammit, I still couldn’t breathe in here.

“If you turned your gun about 90 degrees to the left then you would’ve performed a pretty fucking good headshot.” He snapped. He had every reason to be angry with me. I was, for lack of a better word, hopped up on some weird shit at the moment.

“Shit, where’d the others go?” I said suddenly. I had almost forgotten the other people in the room...if there were any there at all.

Charon looked at me curiously, raising a brow at me - well, what was left of his brow - and shifting his eyes to glance around the room. I believe I sensed his thoughts, and I agreed with him: we had killed everyone else in the room...or rather I did after shooting at the generator a moment ago. Something wasn’t right. Not right at all, and my brain was having difficulty trying to process what the fuck was going on. What the hell was in this smoke?

“Kid?” Charon spoke, not nearly gaining my attention. “In case you haven’t noticed, the rest of the people, here, are in sticky little pieces, thanks to you.”

Well, thanks for making me feel better, Ghoul-boy.

“No, I saw others in this room and they were alive. I even...God, a few of them looked like some of the people I knew in vault 101.” My voice trailed off, and once again, so did my head.

“Kid, I highly doubt anyone from ol’ 101 would have made it all the way up here in such a short time.”

Charon kept a tight grip on his shotgun as if the thing were his life, looking at me oddly. Right now, I kind of wished he’d club me in the face with the thing and knock me out cold so that I might wake up to a logically, properly functioning world. But then again, my head repeated what it had done before; all color was falling and that bluish touch bled into view like watercolor on paper. The room soon became clean and Charon practically vanished from my sight and was replaced with an unfamiliar person, who seemed to not notice me and walk straight by.

“FUCK, Charon can you not see this?!” I snapped, my head rolling once more. “Everything is blue! There are people here I don’t even know! The room is practically spotless...it...it looks like it had 200 years ago...shit, this is unbelieveable, how can you not see it!?”

Though I couldn’t see it, Charon seemed to grow a little concerned at my behavior. I highly doubt it was any kind of affection, it was probably more where he was worried about what I might do, to both him and myself. Not that I could incapacitate him in the first place, the guy was a foot taller than me and was thrice as strong. He’d have no trouble cutting me down if he needed to.

Everything around be blurred out of sight and out of sound, and I was given a horrific, nostalgic image of the one person that I’d lost. The one that I would never see again, and the one that had taught me everything that I’d learned. “Eve!” Charon’s voice was blotched and barely audible, but I could hear it. I was just too fixated on the sight before me. “Shit, kid, snap out of it! There’s something going on down here and it’s fucking up your mind real bad! The last thing I need is you getting any crazier than you already are.”

Had I not been distracted, I would have listened to him. I lowered my weapon and stared ahead, not daring to blink, afraid that I might lose sight of the person ahead of me. He looked just like he did that year before the vault exploded into disaster. I took one step forward as if in a trance, my eyes just desperate to let loose a few tears, even though they had yet to come. The Wasteland fucked me up a good bit, and I found it even harder to cry these days.

“Daddy?” The word stung my throat, probably because half of me knew that this was not real, and the other half was pleading that it might be.

There it was, that genuine, reassuring smile that he gave me, tilting his head slightly as he regarded me. The pureness of the image absolutely killed me, and I felt like collapsing into a pile of ash right then and there. My body began shaking harshly and I found it to be relatively difficult to hold my weapon in my hands, so I slung the strap over my shoulders and let my arms hang. I was too weak to hold it.

A single teardrop managed to slip out and down onto my cheek, though I didn’t notice it. “...Daddy?” I attempted communication again.

His smile appeared to grow even wider, a look of pride, almost as if he was proud of what he was beholding. I couldn’t take it. “Hello, honey.”

My eyes widened. Did...did it just reply back to me? This only depressed me even further, seeing as his tone of voice and the phrase sounded exactly how he had addressed me at one point while we were in Rivet City just before our departure. He had touched my cheek and brushed my hair affectionately as if I was a child once again, and God be damned did I miss that feeling.

I didn’t reply to the entity after those few words, however, it seemed that I didn’t have to when ‘Dad’ beckoned for me to enter the room in which he was standing in the doorway of. Reluctantly, I took a step forward, and then he nodded in approval, so I continued further. Charon’s words were completely blocked out now, and I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was a good idea or not. For all I knew, this could have been a ridiculous cliche attempt to lure me into a pool of severely irradiated water, the same cliche that was used in the child’s movie of Anastasia. Sense be damned right now, my mind was fucked in all directions. Whatever was poisoning the air in the vault had already gotten to me.

I was inside the room now, and ‘Dad’ stopped next to a terminal on a table nearby, leaning over as if to type something in, and he gestured for me to come closer. I didn’t want to get too close, fearing that if I tried to hug him that I would be clutching on to the wrong person, and I didn’t want to piss of Charon anymore than I already had. I stood in front of the terminal, the entity about a foot or two away from me. I looked down at the terminal and then looked back to the being posing as my father, and he gave a nod of approval. From what I saw, it seemed as if he wanted me to read what was on this terminal. Tearing my eyes away from the computer, I locked eyes with the colorless opposite upon my father’s familiar face in front of me, awaiting him to say something else.

I didn’t expect him to, but he surprised me by doing the exact opposite: “I’m very proud of you.”

That was it. I couldn’t take it anymore. In an instant, the world went back to normal in a flash, the nauseating smell of the smoke filled the room again, the walls returned to their brownish, rusted color, and I lost all sense of focus and crumbled right in front of Charon, who I’m sure was confused out of his fucking mind. Sobs wracked my body as I lay slumped against what was left of the table the terminal was sitting on, refusing to move or speak. Goddamn it, I already had a bloody headache and my crying was making it worse.

But I’m sure Charon was having a more difficult time here than I did, comforting another and being affectionate was not his strong point in the field, even I could understand that. Much to my surprise, though, he knelt next to me, gun still in hand, and leaned in a little to try and get a look at my face. I refused to look at him. I would rather him leave the entire vault and let me sit there and rot than to trouble himself with how pathetic I was acting right now.

“...Kid?” He tried to speak to me.

“Don’t,” I replied, hiccuping once and wiping my cheeks, not knowing why that did any good seeing as they were absolutely drenched now. “I just want to die.”

His eyelids slumped a little, giving me a strange look. “Don’t go crazy on me now, kid. We need to get the fuck out of here, now, and we can’t do that until you grab hold of your brain and pull yourself together.”

I hiccupped again. “I let him down.”

Charon regarded me for a moment, though reluctantly slung his shotgun around onto his back and stepped over my sprawled legs, placing his hands underneath my armpits and attempting to hoist me to my weakened feet. “The only person you’re gonna let down, here, if you don’t grab hold of reality, is me.”

I gasped loudly and sniffled, managing to maintain a stable balance. He had a point. There were no doubt other hostile survivors in this vault and they would find us eventually, if we didn’t get out soon. But first, I had to read what was on this terminal...I had to, even if I didn’t really believe in ghosts, I just wanted to make sure.

I wobbled a bit, grabbing hold of the Ghoul’s arm in an attempt to keep myself stable. “Come on, kid. We shouldn’t’ve even come down here in the first place. The world is fucked up enough already, no need to delve deeper into a place where its survivors don’t have anything left of their minds.” Sometimes it amused me how poetic he was about certain things.

“Alright,” I said quietly. “alright, I’m sorry. We’ll leave, but I need to read what’s on here first.” I turned to face the terminal, typing a code into it.

“What for?”

I went silent. “...Someone told me to.”

I could tell from the long silence between us that he had already come up with two solutions to my behavior: one, I wasn’t dealing with my father’s death too easily. And two, something down here made me even more insane than I already was. Whatever the reason, I wanted to honor my dad’s decisions, whether or not his ghost really did speak to me just now.