I stood there on the bluff above Sanctuary Hills, looking down on the remains of my home. Even though I'd watched the mushroom cloud blossom, it shocked me to see the aftermath. And worse, I was alone. So I stood, I looked, and when my legs started to get tired I sat. It took me a good long time to move past the sight of everything destroyed and to start thinking about what I was going to do next. I'd read enough post-apocalyptic novels that I had a general idea of what I needed to do to survive. I needed shelter. I needed clean food and water. And to do that I needed materials and some sort of home base to work from. 

At last, I roused myself to action and made my way to the path into town. I suspected the best and easiest resources were long since looted, but if I was lucky I hoped I could find enough to at least cobble together a small A-frame where I could get out from the elements. As I walked along the path, though, that raised another thought: was the environment still contaminated with fallout? The Geiger counter on my Pip-Boy was showing a pretty low background level, but I was going to have to be careful, especially disturbing the remains of the houses, lest I stir up contaminants buried under the debris.

Lady luck must have been smiling on me - or perhaps I was simply reaping the karmic reward of all I'd suffered over the last century - because what I found in Sanctuary Hills exceeded my wildest expectations. My family's robot, Codsworth, was there - and not in a rusted heap, either. Codsworth was fully operational, more or less sane, and entirely ready to help. After insisting on checking the neighborhood to try and find Shaun (to no avail, sadly but unsurprisingly), he calmed somewhat and we discussed the state of the world. No one had set foot here in many years. The lake and surrounding streams were severely contaminated, but surface fallout had been dispersed over many years by rainfall. There were people living in Concord, but they were unfriendly. There was wildlife in the hills, but their meat was likely to contain bioaccumulated radioactive isotopes; the same for edible plant life. 

All in all, it was a bad situation. That said, despite it being late fall, the outside temperature was still fairly warm - any nuclear winter had come and gone a long time ago. That meant that I could get away with fairly basic shelter, mostly just enough to keep out rain and animals while I slept, at least to start. I considered that a reasonable goal to start with, as long as I could find something safe to eat and drink along the way. According to my Pip-Boy, it was October 23rd, 2287, and I resolved to not just have a basic shelter, but a comfortable one built by the end of the month.

As it turned out, that was one of the easier goals that I'd set for myself. While I searched the remains of the Rosa family's house across the street from my own, I came across a weather-worn skeleton. The bones showed the signs of long years of abuse, but large scraps of his jumpsuit remained intact. The Robco branding suggested he was a robot repairman, but his pockets revealed something different. Now that I thought about it, the Rosas had said they were planning to do a big renovation on their home, and this poor schmuck must have been there to get it started. How did I know? Because he had a service manual for a Robco automatic workshop. Better yet, he had an administrator password scribbled on the back cover. 

This was a huge discovery. It meant that I could override the ownership data on any workshop I found within this technician's service area. All of a sudden, it was looking like my shelter-building job had just changed from an all-week project to something I could do in an afternoon. If I could find the workshop. Lucky for me, it was hiding in plain sight, buried under some fallen ceiling material right inside the Rosa's carport. I cleared away the debris and then, on a hunch, punched in the administrator code and started feeding the ceiling materails into the workshop's hopper. Sure enough, it dutifully chewed them up and reported the summary of materials reclaimed.

I was still going to have to do a fair amount of hauling to get any salvage back to the workshop for processing but... there was wreckage everywhere. I resolved then to clean the debris out of my old house and check to see if the roof was intact. If so, I'd use that as the site for my shelter. My old home, I hoped, would soon be my new home. The cleanout and haulaway of all the debris (well, most of the debris. I couldn't bring myself to clean out Shaun's room yet) took most of the afternoon, but with some help with Codsworth we even managed to strip down and dismantle the rusted out remains of my car.

In the end, I looked through the resource display on the workshop. Plenty of wood and metal, even some oil and rubber. Not much cloth or other organics, but that was no surprise. No plastics at all and, more to my disappointment after feeding my car's engine block into the hopper, no radioactives. I clearly wasn't going to be making any fusion power cells today. Flipping through the operator's manual, I found the catalogue of preset outputs. There were quite a few nice items, not the least of which being lighting, but my low supply of copper and ceramics made me approach that part with caution. What I needed first was somewhere to sleep or rather, something to sleep on. 

The bedding in the catalogue almost entirely came in the form of kits, with no option to break them down into their parts. This put a sharp limit on my options, since the majority of the choices came with box spring mattresses that called for springs - a resource that the workshop was reading a big fat zero on. No futons of course, can't have "communist" sleeping options in the catalogue, but there were some bunkie board beds that didn't require springs. Almost all of them, however, came with elaborate bedclothes sets or even in one case a leather mattress topper. I didn't have enough cloth - or any leather - to fabricate those kits.

At the end of the day, I had two choices: a sleeping bag or the one bunkie board bed that didn't come with some kind of luxury bedding set. It was an easy choice: I fabricated the bed. I was very impressed with the end result - perfectly cut wooden boards, a comfortable looking mattress and blankets, even a little shelf on the back where I imagine I could put a reading lamp or something. It looked great, though it struck me that machines like the automatic workshop were exactly the kind of inventions that'd been fueling the unemployment rate.

After fantasizing for a bit about setting up a generator and some lights, my stomach reminded me that a better way to spend the day would be to find food and water. The first part I solved rather easily, at least for the moment, when I found watermelon growing wild in the Rosas' back yard. While I was sure they'd taken up some radioactives through bioaccumulation, I doubted I'd find anything better. Water was trickier - I really wanted to avoid that contaminated lake Codsworth had warned me about. However, I couldn't find anything in the ruins and there was no sign of impending rain for me to gather from. Then I thought to check the workbench catalogue. After some browsing I found what I needed: a self-deploying deep well kit with decorative pump handle. I think I would have preferred an artesian well hooked up to some kind of storage container, but I couldn't find anything like that in the catalogue.

Even the hand-pumped well was going to be a mild problem, as it required concrete. Fortunately, there was concrete everywhere in Sanctuary Hills, and it was just a matter of finding a chunk large enough for the workshop but small enough to carry. One broken piece of curb later, the workshop spat out the prefabricated installation kit. All I'd have to do would be to seat the pump handle and tighten some screws. I found a flat spot in my yard and firmly seated the installation box. It whirred and rumbled and did its thing, eventually leaving just a small concrete pad with a metal pipe extending out. I secured the handle and gave it a few experimental pumps.

The water came quickly and in a steady stream. I let it run over my geiger counter first, and after that didn't show a heightened reading I tried a taste. It was cold and freshing, just what I needed. Making a note to try and find some Rad-X if I couldn't find a safer source of food in the future, I chopped up and ate one of the melons. It wasn't as sweet as the watermelons from before the war, and the rind was a lot thicker, but the insides were juicy and well-textured. 

The sky hadn't quite started shading into dusk, but I could tell from the lengthening shadows that daylight was fast waning. I used the rest of the day walking the perimeter and the streets of town. I wanted to get a better feel for what was still standing, what was damaged beyond any hope of repair, and, if I decided to stay here in the long run, where I'd need to erect walls and where I wanted to put gates. With the workshop at my fingertips, those kind of improvements were real options, and I wanted to stack every possible factor in my favor for survival. 

And then at last, the day was over. I didn't have working lights yet, so when the sun set, I had little choice but to go to bed. My Pip-Boy had a flashlight of sorts, but its weak green light didn't have much value. I idly paged through a magazine I'd found forgotten on a shelf during my escape from the vault - Flirt Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 4. Promising to share the latest in "bedroom fashion," if was just another cheap 'family encouragement' rag trying to cash in on the HHS education subsidies. I chuckled at some of the ham-fisted advice it had for flirting, but it didn't hold my interest and after the day's hard work I was fast asleep in no time.

It was October 23rd, 2287, and I'd found a place to rest my head.

Behind The Scenes

So... I screwed up. I forgot to check if SS2 Chapter 2 added more buildable areas, and as a result I created a situation where I overflowed the game's limit of 128 settlement sites. I had to go in and uninstall a number of settlement mods, which in turn put my game into a state where it wasn't safe to continue playing on my current save. Fortunately, I had the foresight to export my character appearance and with Start Me Up I was able to skip the intro on my second time through. On a related note, I finally tracked down the rest of the Frogprincess Seasons of Fallout mod, so as Charley works through her problems we'll see the landscape change to reflect it.