Having reached an understanding with Holly's family, I next visited the Workshop and plugged in my administrator code. The Workshop accepted it happily and hummed to life, ready to get to work. While Fred went topside to gather some wood - the one thing I was sure we'd need - I asked the women to put together a list of the implements they'd need to get some farming going. Meanwhile, I went looking for the medical room. I knew there was one around here somewhere because I'd visited it many times during my stay.

I finally found the room squirreled away off one of the main hallways and, fighting my reticence to return to that room in particular, I hooked up a Radaway drip and laid back. I did my best to relax, ignoring the foul taste in my mouth as the drugs did their work. Half an hour later, the infusion was done and the brain fog I'd been suffering for quite a while had finally dropped off a bit. 

While I was feeling better, there still wasn't much I could do about my hair. Spotting a particular chair in the corner however riled another unpleasant memory - of the nurses shaving off all my body hair before each round of experimentation started. I checked the the drawers by that chair and sure enough, I found a shaving kit. When I was done, I can't say I especially cared for the look, but at least any new hair would grow in evenly.

The next order of business was food. Winter came to check up on me, list in hand, and I started using the Workshop to spit out farming implements. Down here I didn't have everything I needed in stores, but I at least managed to fabricate a few complete sets of gardening tools. With those made, I ventured back to the surface and revisited the spots where I'd been harvesting melons and gourds. I stocked up as much as I could, not just to keep us fed in the short term, but to give us some seed stock to start growing more down here. The "cavern" Holly had mentioned before was just that - a large excavated but undeveloped wing of the vault with a soil floor - and located close enough a utility junction for easy access to water.

It took a few trips and a lot of hard work to get our makeshift farm set up, but between the stockpiles we'd been able to lay in and the makeshift farm we'd started setting up, it looked like we'd at least be bringing in enough food to break even over the winter. With that done, I borrowed Fred to help me haul some of the storage containers from the Sanctuary Hills Workshop into the vault. Once winter set in fully, it was going to be hard for me to get back out there for supplies, so I wanted to transfer as much as we could into the vault.

That was tough work, but when we dropped the last container into the vault Workshop, I was glad we'd gone through all the effort. While Fred kept venturing out to gather more resources and food, the women really got going with the farm. I, meanwhile, set my hands to getting the vault systems back online. At some point, some of the water mains had been shut off, and I went through them one at a time looking for damage or leaks, before restoring pressure. After a lot of grunt work, I was quite satisfied when I could confirm that not only were the showers working again, but the toilets were flushing - a major improvement over the state of affairs in Sanctuary Hills, where I'd been scouting out a good location to build an outhouse.

Holly kept pressing me about the vault suit. I explained the functions - vital signs monitoring, hook-ups for the Pip-Boy, one size fits all design - but as you can imagine what she was more interested in was the features it didn't have. I brushed it off at first, just telling her it was comfortable, but she didn't really buy that. At length, I explained in very broad strokes about the kind of research that had been going on in the vault. I left out a lot of detail and skipped over all the difficult parts; I wasn't ready to talk about that back then. Holly looked a little scandalized by the whole thing, and I think it confirmed some feelings she'd had about the state of the world before the War. But I noticed Winter snooping on the conversation at a distance, and there was a very different look in her eyes.

A couple days later, Winter stopped me with something in her hand. Plopping it down on a table, I took a look at the device. The casing was hard plastic - a fairly rare material by the time of the War - and the inside was lined with small metal plates and protrusions. It looked like a collar, and as I studied it I realized that I think I'd seen some of the Vault Tek staff wearing something like this. Inside the device, I could see a small inscribed label plate, with the phrase "Neural Sentry VT-2075-NS111-2" inscribed on it in fine block letters.

"What is it?" she asked.

Honestly, I wasn't sure, but I had a suspicion I knew where to find out.

Moving to the Workshop, I brought up the catalogue and started scrolling through the index. As I expected, I found an additional category that hadn't been on the other unit - "Vault-Tec Proprietary". In it, I found a number of new options - ranging from custom sized light bulbs and power cabling to more mundane objects such as signage and small hand tools. I also found patterns for making more vault suits and for the Neural Sentry. I scrolled through the description and found it quite enlightening.

The device monitored brain activity. In its basic function, it could detect a number of problematic mental conditions - panic, depression, even hunger and cold - and prompt a biofeedback response that would reduce their intensity. Within an operational vault, the Sentry could connect to a server and conduct much more sophisticated processes ranging from ensuring restful sleep to reversing stubborn conditions such as addictions or deep-seated phobias. It actually sounded like a rather remarkable breakthrough, though I could also imagine the kind of creative uses that the Vault 111 staff had surely come up with for the Sentry.

I tried to explain this to Winter without going overboard on the technology side, and she seemed to get it. 

"So if I wanted to use this, I could just put it on and the basic functions would work automatically?"

I thought about that. It seemed like that's what the catalogue entry was saying. On consideration, I told her that was probably correct - but I didn't know for sure. Before I could warn further, she took the collar and snapped it around her neck. After a moment, a green light came on, flashed twice, and then switched to a pulsing red light that looked like it was flashing an error code. Then the light turned off.

I shrugged. "Something's not working right," I said, "but if I can figure out what the issue is, I'll tell you. Why do you want to use this anyway?" 

Winter explained that during the first few days in the vault, she kept feeling really hungry. It was like her rations never quite filled her. Based on how I'd described the Sentry, she thought that it would be helpful for getting used to the winter rations we were all getting onto. As we talked, I got the impression that Winter was a bit more open to new experiences that her jaded aunt. Still, for now the Neural Sentry was a bust, but we had plenty of time to figure it out later.

As the days passed by, we started settling into a routine and things didn't seem too bad. Then, we fixed the radio and made an unexpected discovery.