Also btw if you could i would love to keep reading if you ever update so if you ever do could you hit me up at

Goddamn been reading this for a few years.

Not sure if you will see this but goddamn is that a satisfying end to this trilogy.

Been reading it since 2013? Its been too long. I stopped for a few years when u stopped updating. I think this was before Jason made the trip to Lil Lamplight.

Thanks for finishing this and i wanted you to know that this was damned good work and i really enjoyed reading it.
Would like to continue to read more content from you in the future too but eh all the best to you and keep writing!

Oh man just finished this after 3 days of nonstop reading, loved every bit of it except the ending. Killing off Sarah just got me pissed as hell and still is as I'm typing this now. Who would've thought a simple fanfic could make my blood boil this much eh?

I think this was fantastic from beginning to end. I've actually read all three fics in the trilogy and they are all great. Yes there are some spelling errors and some parts that names were switched accidentally but otherwise a very compelling read. The scenes are quite descriptive but not overly so. The author definitely has a great gift.

I'm a 21 year old college girl. I've been reading this story since I was a freshman in high school. I'm glad to see the trilogy ended! I can't wait for the continuation. Thank you so much.

Bethesda won't learn that lesson, sadly. Todd and his team honestly should have retired awhile ago. They're too old, too out of touch, too bland. They were at their best a long time ago, but they've been slipping for years, and Fallout 76 is their crowning achievement, as far as they're concerned, which is as baffling as it is angering. They genuinely don't understand what made them popular, they have no idea why people loved what they did.

Bethesda thinks we love tombs and stabbing and gribblies and treasure. They never valued writing in their games, not really. It was always secondary, or at least it has been since mid-2000s. They've been obsessed with mechanics and gimmicks for a long time now, and oblivious to the fact that modders aren't only patching their mechanical fuck-ups, but patching the holes they keep ripping open in their once-vibrant worlds.

They think they don't need to write. That the world doesn't matter, that characters don't matter. That stories don't matter. As far as things that offend me go, it's about three rungs below open bigotry, and nothing else is on those rungs. Art and stories, more than anything, are what make us human, are what makes law and order and civilization and government for the people, by the people, possible. Lessons to learn from our cultures, evolved over time, spread through story and painting and pictures and song. For a company that produces art exclusively to decide that the soul of art doesn't matter...it's pretty ugly and sad and confusing, in a heartbreaking way. To me, anyways.

#preachyartisttalk

The real point, though, is that your story is art. You were worried about denigrating Lincoln's speech back there, by making it part of your story about a story. But you didn't. You gave it the highest praise. You made art, and gave it emotion and feeling using the words of one of the greatest orators our country ever produced, using perhaps the most inspiring speech our country has ever given, showing everything that was ever _good_ about America.

There's no higher compliment, no better use of great words. Even in something as niche as a Fallout fanfic, read by a few hundreds or thousands, rather than the hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of hearts Lincoln has touched, it's still a compliment, it's still worthy praise of a great legacy. Nothing is more precious than art, save the lives and happiness of the humans who make it. However small someone might think this story is, it's still art, and it was made by an artist who poured their heart into it. There are diamonds worth far less that that.

Hah. You had a very similar path to me, over the years. Hats off to coming out of it intact. The game I mentioned, in an earlier review, has another similarity here that I adore: The best use of a demi-god is tactically placing them at a point where humans alone won't work, or when you need resources in too many places, so you have the demi-god hold the line with a handful of supporters, while you move the actual army elsewhere.

Narg is very like that, in this story. The ace in the hole, the one you need when what you need is one last shot. Everything I love about an epic hero in a human struggle.

I had similar issues with Fallout 4 as you, as well. It's saddening, that Bethesda chose to double-down on the loot cycle after Skyrim did so well, rather than double-down on the world building of Fallout 3, or following Obsidian's example and making the narrative a much bigger focus, as in New Vegas. That they learned the lesson "People don't want clever, they want power gaming and loot" frustrates me to no end.

Life marches on. Time moves so slowly, except, sometimes, it moves so fast.

We're all human, Brutus. Each and every one of us. The only inferior species here are the super mutants you created. You crippled their souls, and filled them with violence and hate. You stole from them their humanity, everything precious about the beings who can explain to someone why they love them, who can sacrifice their life to save a stranger.

The sacrifice your soldiers make is fundamentally coerced. They are incapable of making informed decisions, of consenting. You created a race of handicapped children, and sent them out to die for you. The Master understood, at the end. He understood his crime. He gave the Vault Dweller the chance to flee, and ended his life for the horror he felt.

If only he hadn't. If only he'd lived to explain to his generals how terribly wrong they were. To explain to his people that they are _people,_ all of us, people. That there can't be a utopia, that it was all for nothing, and they should go free.

Richard Grey, a man of many failings. Brutus, a deluded wreck of a human being devoted to the misguided cause of a long-dead madman whose one moment of sanity was the moment he took his own life. Tragedy wrapped in tragedy, built upon layer after layer of horror, dehumanization, atrocity and arrogance.

Truly, Brutus is as much an heir to the United States of America as the most arrogantly genocidal of the Enclave.

The one issue I have with this chapter is you spread it a little bit too wide. It'd work for the game world, but the game map is shrunk by a factor of something like 60. Unless I wildly miss my guess, you have Jackrum covering almost twenty miles there, which would take at least a full day, probably more, under the circumstances.

That said, it's not really a huge issue, most readers aren't going to be thinking in those terms, I'm just super used to mentally adding in travel times, exhausting, the need for food in Fallout 3, in the absence of Vegas' hardcore mode, so I immediately went "wait from Wilhem's Wharf to the Super Duper Mart, is this all in the same day-oh right I'm a weird nerd, dur"

"War, the act of war, it's the very worst of humanity. But the individual warriors, the soldiers fighting and dying to protect their homes? They're the best of us."

Badly paraphrased from a childhood favorite of mine, but rings true here. Every human on the field is a hero.

I'm a good while too late, but my opinion is the Sarah should not be _allowed_ to die. That's what Obediah stole from her. That's the abomination Point Lookout made of her. Sarah will never die. Centuries will pass. Maybe she falls asleep, for long aeons. But she isn't dead. She will never be dead. She will not lie eternally. Her death has died, stolen by a vicious old monster and a well-meaning young man shredded by the world around him.

When the sun burns out, the body that held Sarah Lyons, the consciousness that was once her, will exist, somewhere, in some time. Even if she floats in an eternal dream in empty space. Unless the Worm eats her, she will persist.

To be honest, the entire population of Vault 101 really isn't much of a loss. Like, all human deaths are a tragedy, but in the scale of the apocalypse, I honestly prefer to kill the leadership, ruin the Vault, and let them live or die in the Wasteland. It'd be a bit different if there was value in the culture the Vault preserved, but old America was ugliness and selfishness, and unlike New Vegas, Fallout 3 makes it hard to care for goodness and justice.

If a few dozen spoiled children from Vault 101 die, does it matter, asks my Wanderer, so distant and broken by the endless numbing awfulness of the wastes, if they die, should I care, when so many with valuable traits, those who earned survival with strength, die of thirst and hunger and infection and violence?

Fuck 'em all, she decides, as she rigs the Vault to die, because, really, she's too tired to fucking care anymore, and they have it coming anyways.

And, across the world and years in the future, my Courier would look on with sadness and pity, because there _is_ hope, lives _are_ valuable, even a man as awful and pitable as Edward Sallow had potential, had value, once upon a time he was a child who became a young man, who could have made the world brighter, if only he wasn't the man he was. There's nothing more tragic, she thinks, than good people burnt out by the world's horrors. It's why she believes so hard in NCR. Why she killed Caesar and House, to clear their way. Why she forces their hands with an army of war machines, because they need someone to give them the drive to become the beacon the world so desperately needs.

Out of the ashes, the Eagle rises still, to quote a song that is pretty much the Ranger's anthem. The tonal distinctions between the two games are something I really love, how they shape such different characters, offer such a different feeling. The Capital Wasteland embodies mankind before the advent of Christ, filthy, ignorant, violent, inherently stained by the sins of the past, and it takes the sacrifice of a Savior to bring a future worth holding.

And in it all, the Wanderer can only try to be the human James was, and always always fail (in my playthroughs at least, because I can only into people like James from the outside, as a contrast for human failure and a beacon for human hope). Fallout 3 tells the very ham-handed and flawed story of a Christ figure, and that figure was _James._ You are, ultimately, the Apostle carrying his words and work past his death. Another thing I like about Fallout 3, despite how utterly obnoxious it could get with its weird take on the Passion. Living up to or falling short of James' shadow is always fun to work out, playthrough by plathrough.

There's a game I love, Exalted. It's about human heroes, wandering demi-gods, all the flaws and virtues of humanity, a world where heroes roam and the power of the economy needs to be considered by all who would move it.

A reason I love the Fallout games, and this story, is for capturing that feeling, of being a hero of old, in a world where human concerns matter, as much or more than the concerns of gods and monsters. Jason as Odysseus, Narg as Achilles or Hercules. Jackrum offering the perspective of Sam Vimes in a war of devils and demi-gods for the fate of mankind is a wonderful touch, to keep it all grounded.

My life has been very unpleasant of late, but this story helps keep it all together.

I adore this story so much. It captures what I love most about Fallout, the tone of the Wasteland, and the lovely detail that the end of the world ushered in an age of heroes, where demi-god figures walk the Wastes, pursuing their epic goals, for good or ill. I'm so glad it didn't vanish over the years, as so many good works have done.