Commonwealth Fall

Chapter One: Raven Rock's Sole Survivor

Alarms were blaring across Raven Rock, one of the last functioning US Military installations. Certainly one of the last that was staffed by human soldiers who weren't mutated by radiation. However, these soldiers were falling like pins, blasted aside as the bunker's self-destruct system went off. Clad in thick, black suits of hydraulic armour, these well-trained soldiers were dying to the most unlikely of enemies. A nineteen year old boy in a lightly armoured Vault 101 jumpsuit, armed with a historical relic of a weapon.

This person, this monstrous human being, was only trained with an old BB gun in the depths of a Vault-Tec Societal Preservation Chamber, simply called a Vault, and yet he had survived in one of the harshest wastelands that the former United States of America had to offer. He had survived through pure luck, nothing more. Each bullet that hit him seemed to miss major blood vessels, organs, and bone, if they hit at all. No matter where he went, he found more .44 Magnum rounds for his rifle. And through it all, any time he hit the brink of death, he brought himself back with a couple of stimpacks.

He was the Lone Wanderer, and to the Enclave, the people he perceived responsible for the death of his father, he was death.

However, he was not the only youth moving around in the complex.

While the Lone Wanderer held a conversation with the deranged ZAX supercomputer calling itself the President, a seventeen year old was navigating level two, heading for Colonel Autumn's quarters. Very few people were meant to be allowed direct access to this room, indeed it was limited to five people. Colonel Autumn himself, three of his closest advisors…and his only son, Blake.

Blake was fair-haired, lean and muscular, and had bright green eyes like his father. He rounded the corner to the room and pressed the button in the centre of the door, opening it. Blake's eyes darted across the room rapidly, looking for anything more useful than the cracked and nearly drained laser rifle he had snatched off of one of his mentors' corpses in the hallway outside. His eyes flicked to the still intact laser security grid blocking off a trio of weapon crates. With only a few long strides, he was standing in front of the terminal to the grid, typing in the passcode that his dad had given him.

With a flicker, the grid deactivated, and Blake moved rapidly towards the crates, the alarms blaring in his ear. The centre crate opened with a hiss, and Blake grinned widely, Lady Luck finally showing him some good grace. Inside of the crate was a suit of the Enclave's Advanced Power Armour, Mark Two. The design of it though, it was what Blake had taken to calling Navarro Armour. On top of all of the components, an insectisoid helmet glared up at him, the orange-stained eyes capable of boring a hole into any random wastelander's soul.

And yet his luck turned sour again. He faintly heard the loudspeakers chirp out the words "self-destruct" over the blast that tore a large hole in the wall next to him. Fire lanced out and scorched his right cheek, shrapnel barely missing his nose and eyes, but slicing a gash along the skin over his left eye. With a scream, Blake tumbled backwards, roughly landing on his backside. In a rush, he stumbled up, grabbed the armour pieces, shoved them into a duffel bag while throwing cartridges and their matching plasma auto-rifle into another bag. Throwing both bags onto his shoulder, Blake sprinted to the other wall and slammed his hand onto a hidden button. A portion of the wall slid open, revealing a reinforced tunnel that led to a cliff and a power armour frame. The wall slid closed behind Blake as more explosions resonated throughout the remainder of the complex.

Shakily, he crawled to his feet. He looked back at the wall, dropped the bags, and put his head in his hands, silently weeping. However cruel he had heard the Enclave was on the surface, they had been his family for all his life. His best friends, his mentors, even one of his old girlfriends, they had all gone up in flames. It occurred to Blake that even his dad could have still been in the bunker. The one thing that made him happy was hearing the Vertibirds blasting across the sky overhead.

Wiping his face, he opened the power armour bag and began affixing the plates to the frame. Slowly, an intimidating suit of armour came into being as each piece was mounted on the frame. Blake couldn't help but chuckle to himself, this armour was likely the single strongest thing the Enclave had. Of all the things to have been dragged off of the Poseidon Oil Rig, the corpse of one Frank Horrigan was the best item to have been grabbed before the whole rig exploded. Most of the armour had been scrapped, but Blake's great grandfather had saved the raw materials. When he turned fourteen, the materials had been finally made into a functioning suit of armour. And now, at seventeen, it would be what saved his life time and time again.

He pulled out an experimental fusion core he had snagged from the nuclear lab and plugged it into the suit. From what he had heard the scientists muttering about weeks ago, this fusion core could enable the suit's constant usage for upwards of a century. It was an almost neverending fusion core, made from cells scavenged from what could only be called an alien crash site. The suit beeped a few times in short succession, indicating that it was receiving power. With that done, Blake turned his attention to the other bag.

Reaching into it, he removed a short, sleek plasma rifle. Most were a jumble of tubes, wires, and coils, but this one had a casing on it. Blake pulled back a small port on top of the rifle and plugged a cartridge into it, having to smack the top of it down. The rifle beeped once and was silent. That done, Blake pulled out the remaining cartridges and placed them into the ammo pouch built into the right hip of the armour. Throwing both bags aside, he pulled himself up to his full height. The armour still towered over him, but he could fit into it. In fact, it was a little bit too big on him. It would fit him perfectly by the time he finished growing entirely.

With a hiss, the armour depressurised and he stepped into it, the suit sealing itself up with him inside. The heads-up display flickered to life in the corner of his vision, displaying his heart rate, the armour's condition as a percentage, and a compass which currently pointed towards the east. He took a few short steps, the hydraulics syncronising with his footsteps and moving perfectly. All the suit's systems seemed to be functioning, the hermetic sealing keeping the air out. Everything set, Blake grabbed the plasma rifle and walked to the end of the tunnel. After ten seconds of hesitation, he jumped out of the cliff and slammed into the ground below. He would find out what became of the remnants of the Enclave.

They were gone. Anyone who had survived Raven Rock had gone to the water purifier, expecting to hole up there. And yet that vault dweller, the damn Lone Wanderer had bested them again. The Brotherhood of Steel, assisted by associates of the Wanderer, had activated Liberty Prime. With the robot on their side, the Brotherhood had effectively blasted through the soldiers, and the robot had deactivated the photonic resonance barriers between the Pentagon and the Jefferson Memorial. And when the Wanderer had encountered Colonel Autumn in the control room…

He shot him. The Lone Wanderer shot Blake's dad without a second thought, a small smirk on his face. When he reached the control room, his ghoul companion had walked into the control room and activated it. The Lone Wanderer had won, and the Enclave had lost.

That had been about five months ago. Blake had broken down the armour into its plates, kept the core and components in a bag, grabbed a leather overcoat, and started making his way North. His overall destination was Boston, Massachusetts. From what he had heard from caravaneers, it was now simply referred to as "The Commonwealth". Apparently the biggest threat in that wasteland was an organization known only as "The Institute". That had intrigued Blake, apparently the Commonwealth Institute of Technology had adapted to the wasteland in much the same way that the US Government had.

His current objective was simply to make his way to the actual area. At the moment, Blake was only fifty miles south of the southernmost edge of the Glowing Sea, ground zero for the nuclear bomb that had devastated Boston. Blake was stumbling around a pre-war ruin searching for a power armour frame. If he could find the frame, he could put the pieces on it and cut a week off of his travels by going straight through the Glowing Sea in the space of a day if he moved nonstop.

And just his luck, there was a frame sitting there, rusted T45 plates mounted on the frame. It took him less than half an hour to strip the old plates and put the Navarro plates on. By the end of the day, he was at the edge of the Glowing Sea. After a day's rest and careful avoidance of one of the radiation storms, he started off into the sea. Twenty-four grueling hours later, he found himself outside of a Vault, number 95. He slept inside for a short while and left rapidly. It took him another two days to reach the Northeastern corner of the Commonwealth, and within a day he had established a small bunker under the ruins of a coastal cottage.

It took him nearly five months, but he managed to make enough caps by killing raiders for bounties and selling their old gear to traders to buy a small house in what people called the "Great Green Jewel of the Commonwealth". Diamond City wasn't ideal, but most people seemed to respect the fact that a nineteen year old showed up with scars and enough caps to pay for a small house high up in the stands. The man's only neighbour was a grizzled old mercenary named Kellogg and what seemed to be his son, Shaun.

It was a quiet life, and it was his life. Occasionally, he would go do some jobs and get enough caps to stock his house with food, but other than that he kept to himself.

Over time, Blake came to be respected for a different reason; he was an exceptional inventor and mechanic. He had created new hydraulics for the main gate of Diamond City, rigged up an intercom system to the outside, and performed repairs on the various robots and the DCR Antenna set. He never charged much for most minor maintenance jobs, really the only ones he charged for were anything that the mayor asked for. Blake never quite got along with Mayor McDonough, the man was more secretive about how the government functioned than Blake was about his Enclave past. That, and the majority of Blake's new friends lived in the Lower Field, an area of the city which never seemed to like the mayor anyways.

It was probably this distrust of the mayor which earned Blake his three closest friends over the years. McDonough had issued a decree against allowing ghouls into the city, driving out numerous residents, including his own brother. Blake ended up making numerous trips to another community in the wasteland that the brother, now going by the name of John Hancock, founded nearby. Hancock had a rather laid back attitude, but whenever someone tried to mess with one of his friends, they could expect a knife to the gut. The local extortionist found that out one morning, and his body was left to rot for three days before it got removed.

Diamond City's local detective, Nick Valentine, was the next one on Blake's list of close friends. He was the only person to ever find out about Blake's Enclave past, having found a piece of the Navarro armour in a locked box one day. Even though Nick knew about it, he didn't seem to care overmuch, as long as Blake didn't suddenly decide to commit genocide. Blake agreed, as long as Nick vowed not to try and replace him. When it came down to it though, Blake's plasma rifle had scorched more than its fair share of Nick's enemies, with the synth covering his back and putting .38 calibre holes into others.

But overall, Blake could safely say that his closest friend was the local journalist, Piper Wright. Having been raised on the American principles, Blake ended up a fierce defender of the newspaper and freedom of press. By extension, he ended up doing as much as possible to keep the printing press rolling, usually just performing repairs on the machine. Occasionally, he ended up having to run security to get Piper from one end of the Commonwealth to the other to get the story down. The only time they had to run away was University Point. Outside of that, however, they formed a close, albeit extremely professional, friendship.

This life continued for numerous years, with Blake taking jobs against Raiders, Super Mutants, Ghouls, and even butting heads with the Gunners over time. And no matter what happened, he ended up on top, though a combination of superior weaponry, training, and willpower. He had more than just money to think about. He had friends. Life in the Commonwealth had mellowed him out, whittling away at the inner Enclave superiority complex and racism that had been a part of his youth.

And then he heard about the Quincy Massacre. And Lexington.

So he grabbed his power armour, his plasma rifle, and walked off to try and save the survivors.