You learn a lot about a person when you clean their house. The Hawthornes were running a drug operation out of their living room. Who would have thought? Or that one of the Ables seemed to be hooked on painkillers. Fortunately, their well-stocked medicine cabinet also had a bottle of Rad-X, just the thing until I found an alternative to wild watermelon. As I kept scrounging for materials and filling up the Workshop, I found more and more little remnants of my neighbors' interrupted lives. After a while, I started to feel a strange dissociation within myself. My mind told me that I should be deeply depressed over this, that the normal reaction would be to want to crawl into a corner, roll into a ball, and give up on life. But I didn't feel that. I didn't quite feel empty, either, more like... all I could do was keep going, keep moving forward, step by step.

 

And I did just that. I kept clearing wreckage, kept thinking about my position, kept looking at my needs. Also, I kept reading that catalogue. I needed to know it inside and out. But eventually, I started to run out of simple work to do, and turned my eyes back to the house. If this was going to be my home again, I needed to address the issue of creature comforts. I also needed to stop dragging my heels and find out if the plumbing still worked. All the houses in Sanctuary Hills had private wells - no municipal water here - but I was well aware that a nuclear war was just the sort of thing to break - or contaminate - those systems.

 

I knew that one way or another I needed to break down my kitchen appliances. Either I'd need to replace them, or I'd want to reclaim the space if I couldn't pipe clean water into the house. When they were gone, I had easy access to the water lines. I wasn't getting any flow off them, but I had a hunch that it wasn't as bad as it looked. Checking around the back of the house, I found that the water cutoff was indeed tripped. I vaguely remembered something about the Civil Defense Administration being able to remotely turn off utilities in the event of an emergency. That must have happened here. Tentatively, I moved the handle while listening for any indication of running water. Almost immediately, I heard splashing and glugging, and I shut off the water right away. I headed back to the kitchen and found a rather large puddle on the floor - a puddle that, according to my Geiger counter - was free from radiation. 

 

Perfect.

 

Now I knew what I needed to do. Refabricate first my kitchen appliances and then - after verifying the piping was intact and could handle the pressure - do the same for the bathroom. With no easy way to drain the septic tank, I was a bit less optimistic about my options for the toilet, but I resolved to investigate those as well in due time.

 

 

Something to file under "first world problems" - or, in other words, not a problem at all right now - Robco 's prefabricated kitchen suites didn't come in consistent colors. The cabinetry was cyan blue, whereas the appliances were sky blue. The oven actually offered five different colors, but I stuck with the sky blue to match the dishwasher. Dishwasher! Not something I ever would have imagined having after a nuclear apocalypse. An equally first world problem, but somewhat more frustrating, was the lack of any option to fabricate individual appliance risers. As a result, my stove ended up sitting a good four or five inches below the level of the counter. Not that it had any sort of functional impact, but on some level it offended my aesthetic sense. 

 

I had the same issue with the new refrigerator, ultimately, and I just had to accept that too. But with each passing day I was getting more and more comfortable with the Workshop. After checking to make sure the chimney wasn't blocked (it was - but with some help from Codsworth we got that sorted out) I fixed the fireplace. I cleaned out the last few piles of junk, and to my shock and delight found that somehow my diploma had survived more or less intact. Buried in a pile of rubble, it was a little faded, but the frame hadn't broken and it didn't look like any moisture had got in. Still, the frame was all scuffed up and generally trashed, so I fabricated a brand new frame with a stand and put it on the shelf behind my bed. After one last check of the pipes, I ripped out the old shower stall and set about installing a new one. I wish Nate had made it too... he'd have been so proud of my fast-maturing handyman skills. Though, I suppose if he'd made it, Nate would have done the work himself.

 

Nate... for all that the ruins of my former world didn't move me, I felt a heavy sadness whenever I thought of Nate. A long time ago, I'd had to accept that I'd never see him alive again. The director held him in stasis along with Shaun, frozen hostages to ensure I submitted to every degrading experiment and procedure. As they're reshaped my body, injected me with God knows what until my hair literally changed color, and indulged in sexual "tests" that couldn't possibly have served any scientific purpose, the whole time I submitted because I knew resistance would mean his death.

 

And then, on my penultimate awakening, the Vault-Tec pigs were gone, and someone else was there. They stole my son and gunned down Nate without a second thought, then sneered at me, trapped in my cryo pod, as they left. Thinking about Nate filled me with sadness, yes. But it also filled me with a burning desire for revenge. The first revenge I'd get would be to just survive. The second revenge? To see that man, the man with the mechanical arm who'd shot Nate, to see him die like a dog. 

 

As to my "first revenge" though... let me tell you. That shower... when I finally got that shower hooked up and working, and I got under the stream, it felt so good. I don't think a person really understands how good it is to be clean until they've got really, truly filthy.

 

 

I found that continuing to browse through the Workshop's service manual paid dividends too. Some of the pages had codes scribbled into the margins, strings of numbers and letters. I'd ignored these at first because I already had the administrator password, but out of curiousity one day I typed in a code. The most curious message appeared on the Workshop's status panel: family planning audiovisual aids: statutory limitations disabled. What ever did that mean, I wondered? I didn't know about the audio part, but I recalled seeing a section in the catalogue with wall art. I'd scrolled right past it when I was looking for the frame to put my diploma in. Backtracking to that section of the catalogue, I found that it had substantially increased in size. At first it seemed like the main difference was the addition of copyrighted materials, like artwork with corporate branding. But continuing deeper, I found items that must have been excluded for other reasons.

 

Remember how I said the LGBT community had lost most of its protections under the natalism policies? Well right before the war, I'd read that there was a lawsuit working it way through the courts challenging the ban on gay and transgender pornography (evidently, the government felt that lesbian porn wouldn't hurt the birth rate - something that leads me to believe that lesbians weren't actually the target audience). Based on what I was seeing in the catalogue, Robco must have been hedging its bets on the outcome of the case, because hidden behind that access code I found some options that were stark departures from the norm. While I realized this was a fine example of a corporation playing both sides of a divisive issue, it still made me feel good that maybe not every lawyer was impotent after all. That, and I have to admit the novelty of this art tickled at my baser interests. After some consideration, I fabricated one that I'd found especially eye catching to decorate my bedroom.

 

 

Now Charley, you might be asking yourself right now, you're still walking around in that very exposing vault suit, and now you're hanging up a painting of a person getting sodomized while they're chained to a chair. Is this related in some way to what happened in the Vault? Are you maybe not handling the trauma from that very well? Maybe even suffering from a little Stockholm Syndrome? Well, yes and no. On a conscious level, I hated what they'd done to me and I was just a ready to get some violent revenge on Vault-Tec as I was on the man who killed Nate. But subconsciously? I told you they changed me inside and out.

 

While they had me, they put me through what they called "conditioning." I actually found some more or less intact clothes while I was cleaning out the ruins, but every time I wore them, I felt terribly claustrophobic, like I had bugs crawling on my skin or something. In the end, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't wear it comfortably. And honestly, neither Codsworth nor the dog had any complaints, so I just stuck with what I could wear comfortably. And the artwork? I don't know if I'm ready to talk about their techniques in detail, but for now just understand that given enough time, Vault-Tec can definitely change - or at least supplement - what someone finds arousing. Don't judge me, it's literally not my fault - but this is the stuff that turns me on now.

 

On the 26th, another storm rolled through. The boards we'd put up around the sides of the house did a good job keeping out the wind and the blown rain, but I was still getting some drips working their way through the ceiling. I realized, despite my preferences to the contrary, that I needed to fix - or at least reinforce - the roof. The crawlspace was still no good, but I was pretty confident I could pull down the panels from the drop ceiling. After that... well, suffice it to say that Codsworth and I put our heads together. It turns out he knows a thing or two about home repair, and we worked out a way to fix the ceiling while also keeping water from pooling on top where it go through the roof. Easier said then done, by the way, considering the limitations of the Workshop catalogue. 

 

Well, it worked. But it was an absolutely unmitigated pain in the ass. I was pushing the limits of the Workshop further than I'd ever tried before, and it showed in the level of effort we had to put in. For example, one thing that quickly became clear was that the conduit we'd put down earlier was going to have to be above the new ceiling - and that meant before we put in the panels we had to plan out and run all the remaining conduit in a way that would ensure we had power to the whole building. At the same time, I ran some conduit out to the carport and the street side exterior, then capped them off so I could hook up to them without having to pull out the ceiling panels in the future. I hoped I'd done a good enough job predicting my future needs. I also cut a few corners - since they'd be right underneath the diverter, I didn't bother replacing the ceiling in the bathroom, the laundry room, or the central hallway. That saved us a bunch of time.

 

And of course, mid way through the project I ran out of wood; I just had to leave everything be for a while and go out looking for more logs to feed into the Workshop. While I was doing that, I found myself thinking about the Ship of Theseus. At some point, would I have replaced so much that this wasn't my home anymore? When was that going to be? When all the walls were replaced? When I put on a new roof? At first I wasn't sure why the question troubled me, but then it struck me suddenly: what about me? How much of the old Charley Ellison had Vault-Tec replaced? Was I me anymore? The fact that I couldn't definitively answer 'no' chilled me somewhere deep inside.

 

Behind The Scenes

First let me say that the old adage to safe frequently holds true here. There's few things more frustrating than meticulously hand placing a bunch of objects just to have FO4 crash on you and make you lose all your work. 

 

Now, the big takeaway from this chapter is that the ceiling panels were just as annoying for me as they were for Charley. In their somewhat dubious wisdom, Bethesda neglected to make the ceiling panels capable of snapping together with one another, and the snap points on Charley's house ranged from oddly placed to non-existent depending on where she was standing. It's possible to fix, but requires monkeying around in NifSkope. The one saving grace here is that all three of the Midcentury Modern DLC's ceiling pieces use the same nif, so it's a one-and-done fix.

 

Here's the weird part: the connect points are present in the mesh. They're even rigged correctly to snap to other ceiling pieces. So what gives? 

 

 

Here we can see a comparison with one of the vanilla roof parts. See the difference?

 

 

While the CPA data is present, the connect point nodes are missing. This is why I can connect the panels to other things, but I can't connect things to the panels (including other panels). Let's add these nodes (along with the matching editor marker trishapes) and see if that fixes the problem. (Spoiler: it didn't. There's something deeper here that I'll be continuing to look at in my next session).

 

So that's frustrating, and it's really holding me back on completing the house renovations. That in turn is important because the ruined house is not in and of itself stopping the rain shader. That tells me that it's not considered a sheltered location, and that'll cause problems down the road when I have to start managing happiness. But for now, I'm ready for a break!