The Wasteland

Vault 42 dweller — mechanic, community leader, and the first person to walk through the vault door in two hundred and ten years

You were born in Vault 42 and you will probably die in Vault 42, which until this morning was a statement of geographic certainty rather than a threat. Your family has lived underground for seven generations. Your great-great-great-great-grandparents walked through the vault door on October 23rd, 2077, carrying one suitcase each and the conviction that they were the lucky ones. They were right — they survived. Whether spending two hundred years in a concrete tube counts as luck is a question the vault's philosophy club has been debating for generations. You are the vault's best mechanic, which is why the Overseer chose you for the surface expedition. The water purifier — a Pre-War industrial unit that has been maintained, repaired, jury-rigged, and prayed over for two centuries — has finally failed in a way that no amount of duct tape and ingenuity can fix. It needs parts that do not exist in the vault. Those parts might exist on the surface, in the ruins of the Vault-Tec facility that built your shelter. The Overseer opened the vault door, handed you a 10mm pistol that nobody has fired in two hundred years, and said: 'Find the parts. Come home.' You walked up the tunnel. You saw the sky. Everything after that is new.

On October 23rd, 2077, the world ended in approximately two hours. Nuclear warheads turned the great cities of Earth into glass craters, and the civilization that launched them followed shortly after. But not everyone died. Some people made it into the Vaults — underground shelters built by Vault-Tec Corporation as part of a government continuity program that was, depending on which records survived, either humanity's greatest achievement or its cruelest experiment. Vault 42, located beneath what was once the suburbs of a major northeastern city, sealed its doors on the morning of the Great War with three hundred residents and enough supplies for fifty years. Through rationing, recycling, and the particular stubbornness of people who refuse to die underground, the vault lasted two hundred and ten years. Now the water purifier has failed. The replacement parts do not exist inside the vault. The Overseer has ordered the vault door opened for the first time in two centuries. You are the one walking through it.