"What the hell is this, anyway?"

It feels strange to have the first chapter of a new story be nothing but a very long author's note but I couldn't think of a better way to go about it. I might just be overthinking it but, since this is going to be something that's a bit different for me, I expect that the question will come up from time to time. Assuming that I'm right, I figure that it's best to address the matter once now rather than every time later. It's important to do it that way mostly because it's a long story. As long as I'm at it, I can give a little background, something that will likely be useful as this isn't the kind of story where I can cleanly work it all into the story itself. If interested, settle in and we'll get into this. If you'd rather skip it, though, the first real chapter should already be up.

Essentially, this is a roleplay journal. The long story always comes in when I tell someone that I'm posting in my roleplay journal and they either don't know what that is or, more often, they can guess based on the name and just can't figure out why I'm doing it. What is pretty simple: It's exactly what it sounds like it is. Open world games like Fallout 4 make for a world of opportunities to roleplay, something that I'm nearly always looking for an excuse to do. My roleplay journals are really just the story of everything that my character has experienced along the way.

Answering the question of why I do it, on the other hand, is a little more complicated. Putting aside the fact that I'm just plain weird, the problem is that a single playthrough of a game with a scope like this can take hundreds of hours if you stretch it out (which is always my intent when I sit down to start playing). Adding to the issue is the fact that mods only increase the amount of time it can take to finish a playthrough. A running gag among people that know me centers around just how bad I can be about never actually finishing games like this. The thing I'm reminded of most often is the fact that I've put over 1,200 hours into Skyrim and have never gotten far enough in the main quest to finish learning the first shout. (Even when the game first came out, I only got as far as the quest to retrieve the horn of Jurgen Windcaller before completely forgetting about saving the world.)

It isn't that I'm uninterested in the main story; I'm just more interested in the world in which it takes place. In both Skyrim and Fallout, the world is so full of people with their own stories that I want to experience all of it. I'm so interested, in fact, that I like the idea of being just another part of the world more than being the hero of my own story. Quite possibly my favorite mod for Skyrim was You Are Not the Dragonborn, my first and best opportunity to do exactly that without constantly having the game remind me that it isn't true. Its most fierce competition comes from Requiem, which removes all of the gameplay balancing that makes you feel like you're a god amongst men. This is my idea of a perfect game. I still like the main stories of these games and I may eventually embrace the idea of being a legendary hero but, before that, I want to feel as though I've earned it by being a normal person that gradually got stronger rather than just having been thrust into the role because it was my destiny or that it was just an inevitable conclusion because I'm somehow inherently better than everyone else. It lets me build characters with their own lives and histories. Their pasts define who they are when the game starts and their interactions with other people and the world shape who they become as the game's story progresses. I can play as a character that I actually care about on a personal level rather than as someone that already has a story and a destiny, which feels more like watching a story play out. It isn't that don't enjoy that—my library of visual novels is proof—but the opportunity to put myself into a character that I've built and feel as though I'm truly in control of the story is relatively rare.

With daily obligations, a desire to play other games and my notoriously short attention span, when I start a game this long I eventually have to leave it for anything from a matter of days to a matter of months. It was always a problem for me that I would invest all of this time and energy into building a character and establishing their place in the world just to end up leaving the game. By the time I got back to it, I would usually have forgotten nearly everything about the world and my character's story. I couldn't remember my character's friends, experiences or even the things that motivated their actions. Trying to get back into the game felt like experiencing any other story where I was seeing through the eyes of a character that someone else had created. In the end, I'd have to start over from the beginning with a new playthrough. I openly admit that I get attached to my characters; even though I love making new characters, having to abandon one is always heartbreaking. It eventually occurred to me that if I kept a journal—something common for NPCs in both Elder Scrolls and Fallout games to add to the story—I could just read it and get back to where I was when I left off. I've got far more interest in carrying on with the game than writing about it later (which usually takes at least an hour for even brief summaries), so these entries aren't always detailed. Still, it's enough to remind me of what my character was doing, thinking and feeling and get me back into the story, even after a long hiatus.

All of that brings me to exactly what this story is. It's a collection of those journal entries that one of my characters has written since a bit before the beginning of Fallout 4. I'm going back and adding to them, partially so that it reads like a story as much as a journal but mostly to flesh out the entries that are mostly summaries. I'm hoping that it will tell the character's story and, at the same time, show the thoughts and feelings behind the decisions being made. Also, as a sucker for the lore of worlds this expansive, it's a perfect opportunity to finally put my knowledge of that lore to use by working it into the story. In addition to all of that, I'm hoping to make some things about the story feel a bit more realistic. I aim for as much realism as possible and there is no end of things that happen in the game that can outright kill my immersion if I take notice of them. One of the best examples is the building system as a whole, allowing you to build things like generators and turrets in an instant out of random scrap. I'm not complaining about these things, exactly; they were necessary for gameplay balance. Still, it was a problem for the way that I play and, lacking mods to fix the problem, I came up with a solution of my own. Instead of just trying to ignore it (which never works), I instead started working explanations for these things into my entries. It was a quick and easy way to get my mind off of whatever it was that was starting to bug me and back into either the game or the writing. It was also an excuse to write more, something that I'm not in the habit of turning down. Doing this also led me to start working in explanations for the perks that I'd take, which I suppose was a natural progression. Even something as simple and mundane as selecting perks is something that I do with my characters' thoughts and motivations in mind rather than thinking of it purely as a gameplay mechanic. They make an effort to get better at what they do because it's necessary, desired or just a consequence of the things that have happened to them.

Now that all of this has been properly explained (at least, I hope it has been), on to this character's story specifically. The story will follow Aria, my character from a relatively recent playthrough of Fallout 4. It follows the canon beginning to Fallout 4...sort of. I suppose that it would be more accurate to say that it runs alongside it for the most part. The most important thing to take from that is that she is most decidedly not Nora. In fact, I actually removed Nora from this playthrough entirely as I actually like Nora and the character I replaced her with isn't exactly likable. Aria is a character that I created myself and, that being the case, I had to write her into the story in what I'm hoping is a realistic and interesting way. She's going to be going through the game's main story (which is frustratingly more difficult to avoid than in other Bethesda games), though the fact that she's a character that I've written in means that her reasons for doing what she does are going to be a bit different than Nora's no matter what dialogue option I've chosen in the game.

The journal entries that will make up the story's chapters are all written by Aria. There's likely going to be a bit of a disconnect from normal journal entries as much as from normal story telling; in the interest of prioritizing presenting a story over presenting a normal journal, her entries are likely going to be a bit more descriptive than any normal person's would be in this situation...or just about any other situation that I can think of, for that matter. If this story ends up being like others that I've written, each chapter will be about eight hours of continuous writing and editing. While I'm going to be aiming to make these chapters shorter than what I usually write for the sake of realism, I know myself well enough to know to expect to fail at it from time to time. I can't imagine that many people would take eight hours out of each day just to sit down and write about what happened in the other sixteen, especially if close to half of those sixteen hours were spent sleeping. That's just an unfortunate consequence of the fact that I'm trying to tell a story through journal entries and trying to not miss anything significant or interesting that happened each day. While there's probably a good way to do this that has already been discovered, I can't say that I know what it might be. I've never tried writing a story purely through journal entries before so I'm looking at this as a learning experience as much anything else.

So, who is Aria, anyway? Most of that will become clear as the story progresses. For now, I'm just going to stick to a few things won't be obvious because of the changes that I made to work Aria into the game's story. Aria is an old friend of Nate's that grew up with him in Boston. Though they remained close, she has long since left Boston behind without ever looking back. She headed to the Southwest Commonwealth to start college in Los Angeles after high school and, after graduation, she moved north to Portland to begin a career as a freelance software developer. Firmly established in what she now considers her home, it wasn't until she got a call from Nate in a time of crisis that she ever considered moving back to Boston. Her journal entries begin immediately following that call from Nate in late February of 2077, eight months before the The Great War.

Aria begins writing about her experiences as a means of coping with them long enough to sort out her thoughts, something that she generally has trouble doing. She writes the way she thinks and doesn't worry about how the words come out or how they look on her screen; she just puts it out there before she can get sidetracked or find an excuse to not do it. The only important thing to her is to get it written down somehow. She writes as if she's talking to someone, something that makes it easy to say what she has to say without actually having to talk to anyone. Once that's done, she can go back and look at it as if she's reading something that someone else has written. It makes it easier to make sense of her thoughts when she can distance herself from them, whether she's putting them out there or reading them later.

I think that's more than enough exposition...actually, it's probably a little too much. I was tempted to write more but that would just be taking the lazy way around properly working it into the story itself. Speaking of the story, it's about time to get on with it.