Post-Atomic-Designated Vault: 8069

You've been on the road for a few days when you reach your destination, "The Post-Atomic-Designated Vault: 8069, Surface Community". Who you are exactly isn't important yet right now: nor is why you have come here, or when exactly you chose to make this your destination, be it an hour ago when you first spotted the rising smoke of the settlement, or a journey of a thousand miles to this specific place already behind you at that point, or if any companions currently travel with you: those are questions for a later time; the point right now is that you are here and being let in past the main gates.

"Welcome to Post-Atomic-Designated Vault: 8069 weary traveler. I know you've just joined, and you're not actually a full vault-dweller yet, but set a spell and listen to our story, won't you...?" Says the old woman sitting tending-to a cooking station fire-pit made of two halves of an ancient oil-drum filled with coals from burning wood and over which slowly turns an auto-rotating spit hooked to an electric motor on the ground by a re-purposed bicycle chain and some gears on which meat is cooking. All of this is situated under an old and drab but extremely large plastic tarp of the kind common before the war, made into a crude cooking tent with some poles and rope: that is stationed just inside the gate. She's wearing an old and much-patched Armor-Enhanced Vault-Suit with the number 8069 on the lapel, heavy padding and radiation-shielding integrated into its structure, and has a highly-customized Vault-Tec branded 10mm pistol holstered at her right hip, and some kind of heavily customized stunner-bolt energy-pistol at the left: but they're colored backwards, yellow-with-blue-accents, instead of blue-with-yellow, and though the vault-suit is normal, the armor added to it appears to have the same inverted "Vault-Tec" color scheme. She seems friendly enough, smiling at you with her slightly worn, occasionally-gold-capped, and gap-toothed, but otherwise well maintained smile that certainly doesn't include any of the artificially sharpened teeth you tend to see amongst raider-kin, and is doing it in that jovial and friendly manner common to the more kindly sort of elder-human-folk: so you pull up one of the cut lengths of thick tree-trunk that appear to serve as rough stools for sitting here, and listen.

"Good to have a chance to tell the old tales, stranger, thanks for taking a minute to listen to me ramble. This tale begins in the last hours before the War to End the World, when Nora Destiny Luella Cooper-Lee and her husband Nathan Lee-Cooper were invited into Vault 111. They made it inside as the bombs fell, but they'd been tricked. I'm sure you've heard all the stories; the experiments, and all that? Its all true I'm afraid, and likely worse that you haven't heard as well. Well, after Nora watched her husband be shot, their son stolen, woke again from cryo-suspension and then had to find Shaun, only to discover that he'd grown old without her, she held him as Shaun died in her arms from a cancerous tumor, leaving Nora the leadership of 'The Institute' as his parting gift to the mother he barely got to know before he died. She combined that bequest with both the Minutemen of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who she'd been made their "General" and led them to several major victories, and the Railroad, who had once been The Institute's sworn enemy, but after Nora convinced them to sit down at a negotiation table she laid out her terms: and they reluctantly accepted them. Continued Sinth production would remain a fixture of their program, but also freedom for those new synths and existing ones after service for 14 years, to both pay for the cost of their creation via service and provide, simultaneously, basic training in skills, math, reading/writing, history, and such similar to those received by human children in the commonwealth going forward, (and also-like-children, they would be under the supervision/direction of a specific pair of "Parents" during this time). The Railroad didn't want to agree to join this alliance at first, but the members were especially moved by her sorrowful speech about how the synths, created from Shaun's DNA, were all she had left of the baby that had been stolen from her while her husband died trying to protect him."

"This left the Brotherhood of Steel as the odd-man-out, but with some not-entirely-peaceful and exceedingly tense negotiations where a combine **** of human Minute-Men and Railroad agents teleported directly onto the bridge of the Prydwyn and held elder-Maxon and rifle point, the brotherhood agreed to withdraw, on the two conditions that all nuclear weapons and fuel and such in commonwealth territory be decommissioned into fuel rods for power-plants to restore function to the commonwealth electrical grid under their watchful gaze, and any powered-armor they recovered either be sold to the brotherhood in exchange for rare industrial materials not naturally found in the commonwealth or reserved exclusively for active-combat-duty military use by Commonwealth elite troops, with no new suit-chassis allowed to be created, only maintained and/or repaired from existing examples and then clad in fresh plating as-needed. The Prydwyn and the brotherhood headed west, instead; except for a handful that remained behind in a few specific outposts that were treated as Brotherhood 'Consulates' to keep an eye on the terms of the agreement being followed."

"After restarting democracy and serving her two terms as President of the 'United American Commonwealth', Nora/President Cooper-Lee, like President Washington before her, stepped down from leadership. Again, like a previous president, (Carter this time), she decided to tackle America's ongoing homelessness problem. She had been drawing up plans for the past few years, for a new 'Vault-Tec' INSPIRED series of underground shelters, but not duplicates, these would be much-more-closely based on what Vault-Tec had SAID they were making, instead of what was actually MADE, entire cities, including single-family-condo-homes, buried under the mountains of the former United States expanded territorial possessions."

"And so 'The Post-Atomic Vault Corporation' was born: a successor-company to Vault-Tec this time the experiments are very open, not nearly as crazy, weird, or dangerous, and you're required to disclose what they will be to any potential residents of your vault in-advance of their entry. Speaking of that, this vault, PADV-8069, is an experiment in polygamous hyper-fertility. All female vault-dwellers are required to have a minimum of 1 child per 2 years from adulthood at 18 to menopause, or at least after being accepted into the vault, if not right at 18 due to having been born elsewhere; and the balance of adult humans in the vault will be maintained at somewhere between 80% female, 20% male, & 90% Female, 10% Male; so most of your sons will be 'Sent on Walkabout' to find at least 4 women and preferably more to bring back to the vault as their wives/concubines, (A formal term for people who you are having sex and children with but not technically married to, around these parts of the world), which might be how you were recruited, though I don't know. These old eyes ain't what they used to be and I can't even tell if you are a man, or woman, or really tall kid yet."

"Once you get vetted by doing a few missions for one of the overseers on 'the O-5 council', what? Oh, right, most of the new Vaults aren't just one by itself, but between 3 and seven very close together and connected by a rail-way network deep underground, all the same number, but with an 'A, B, C, D...' (well, you get it), added at the end. the overseers of each sub-vault work together as an 'executive council' with the longest-serving one being 'first among equals' and chairing the meetings and such, ours has five, thus the 'O-5 Council', short for 'The Overseer's Five-Person Council'. they'll give you missions, tasks to do out here in the 'PADV-8069 Surface Community' and immediate area around it, in order to test you and see what you're made of, see if you can adapt to vault-life and be useful 'once inside', if you pass, you're on easy street; don't even have to marry if you don't want, but the children thing is still mandatory, both in terms of carrying them and at-least providing Sperm samples for Impregnation for the men. I hear it helps to 'Lie back and think of Humanity's Future', if you don't find the process pleasant unto itself. You're also free to leave, if you really come to hate it down there, but you can't take the kids, so few do."

"On a final note about that: once you pass 'breeding age', if you're a woman like me: no new pregnancies for at-least two years and all your children gown up at 18 years old: you'll be expected to leave the vault for the surface-community here, but with the very-best gear and equipment that the vault can provide reliably, an 'Elders Kit' that's how I ended up up here. You'll be required to keep order in the upper settlement, and what have you, but you receive ongoing food , water, and ammunition rations in exchange, so it's not too bad; most of the elders up here are respected, since the whippersnappers know that we have extensive marksmanship training and a lifetime of experience in the wargames rooms below; so if they don't mind their Ps-&-Qs we'll drop 'em like a sack of potatoes, and the same goes for other elders that get surly and rude. Don't worry deary, the stunner is for that, the 10mm is for raider attacks; and we wont get them confused."

"Well, listen to me go-on! I've taken up enough of your time nattering on about our history, I'm sure: occupational hazard, being elderly and all. Welcome to the vault, stranger. We're not technically members up here, but they provide most of our fertilizer, purified water, and almost ALL of the electricity, so we're, 'halfway' between Vault-Life and that of the wasteland. Most of us also either came out from there a while back, or are on our way in at some point in the future, like you; so you ought to fit-in just fine. Welcome to Post-Atomic-Designated Vault: 8069 stranger, and I hope to see you head inside one day!" She finish's, and only then do you catch a glimpse of your own reflection in the dusty mirror behind her.