Dear Diary,

Somewhere between being attacked by giant rats and making awkward small talk with a trio of passive-aggressive radiation zombies, I began to regret my decision to leave the vault the other day. After all, that cooped-up atomic-bomb shelter was the only home I’d ever known. But when my father mysteriously went missing, I knew I had to put my life of watching I Love Lucy reruns and eating canned beans on hold for a while.

The view from the vault is stunning...

That said, it wasn’t an easy decision. I stood in front of the vault door’s control pod for what seemed like forever, debating whether or not to flip the switch. When I finally did, I never could have expected the view awaiting me from the outside. Once my eyes adjusted to the burning light, I saw a desolate, burned-out wasteland: to the right, the collapsed remains of a freeway overpass, and to the left, the battered shell of the Washington Monument. Everything in-between appeared to be little more than scattered rubble and charred trees.

I cautiously stepped down from the cliff that I emerged from and began to look for some remnants of a road. I needed to find a path I could follow to a town, city, or any semblance of civilization. Soon enough, I found a small village called Springvale, but the only "life" nearby was a floating robot that I later learned was an Enclave Eyebot. It seemed to be some sort of radio broadcasting a heartwarming story about what life was like when we had professional baseball teams to root for. Being more of a foosball man myself, I walked right on by.

Off in the distance I noticed a school, so I decided to investigate what might be inside. Turns out it was just a whole lot of dead raiders. All right, all right, so they were alive when I first came in, but they were shooting at me! I had to defend myself! Even with my disdain for baseball, I swing a pretty good bat (at least when cornered by an angry raider). But once I took care of the threat, there wasn’t much worth exploring inside.

I left the school and wandered around until I came to a great big river. I noticed a fairly large city past the opposite bank, so I decided to swim across. Not a good idea. I should have suspected something odd was afoot when I first noticed the river’s greenish hue, but life in the vault seems to have sheltered me from the dangers of radiation. I tried to make it across, but when the sound of a Geiger counter in my ears and the slight trembling in my limbs became too much to handle, I swam back ashore and took the long way around.

The city on the other side turned out to be the ruins of Bethesda, Maryland. Although I’d never been there before, something about the name sounded oddly familiar, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I spent a good long time trying to figure out where I remembered that name from. My mind was so occupied that I didn’t even notice when I strolled right into a camp of vicious raiders. Mind you, these raiders were much tougher than the ones back in the school. (Something about hanging out in the streets rather than the art room will do that to you.) They gave me a pretty good beatdown. I managed to take care of them, but not before I exhausted my entire supply of stimpaks, those friendly little needles that restore my health when I’m feeling a bit down. By the time I took them all out, I had developed a pretty savage headache. I couldn’t walk more than 10 meters without suffering a severe fit of wooziness. Nervous, I had a look at my condition on my little wrist-mounted Pip-Boy 3000 computer. Yep, just as I thought: I had a crippled head. No amount of mildly irradiated-but-health-restoring rat meat would help me now. I had to find myself a stimpak and inject it directly into my head.

...and of the local wildlife, slightly less so.

I stumbled my way across the barren nighttime landscape, and just as the sun began to rise, I found a walled-off city called Megaton. The friendly robot patrolling the door could tell I was in a bad way (I think my busted and throbbing face tipped him off), so he let me in right away. Immediately inside, I was greeted by a rough-and-tumble-looking fellow in a cowboy hat. He introduced himself as Lucas Simms, Megaton sheriff and sometimes mayor (but only when the need for civility arises). I chatted him up for a bit, asking about the giant atomic bomb sitting smack-dab in the middle of the city as some sort of twisted town-square statue. Even among the makeshift scrap metal and airplane-fuselage houses, that thing stood out like a sore thumb.