The Change, a fallout fanfic

The Change.

Many times as she was growing up, Alessa Gillespie wondered exactly where her father, James, had come up with her name. It certainly wasn't anything like other people's names, and when her dad told her that she had chosen it at birth, Alessa just snorted, her green eyes flashing as she flicked back her long black hair with a toss of her head. Everyone knew newborn babies were quite some time from acquiring language, so how could she have told anyone what her name was, especially as it wasn't one she would have chosen for herself. Thus it was that, many times since that conversation, Alessa had searched her dad's things for some clue as to where he might have gotten her name, but without success.

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During her nineteenth year, while she was sleeping, Alessa was woken up by bright lights flashing and the blaring of an alarm before her best friend, Amata Almodovar, came dashing into her room in her dad's apartment. The Hispanic girl was initially babbling, but once Alessa had got her calmed down sufficiently, she was able to relate the story of James escaping the vault, and the chaos that was the result. What most worried the other girl, however, was when Amata told her how her own father, the Overseer, was blaming her for James' actions and quite literally gunning for her blood. She needed to get out without being seen, or be prepared for the possibility of serious injury. A few of the guards were sensible people, but not all of them were, and some were even as insane as the Overseer.

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Finally, she'd made it! Alessa breathed a huge sigh of relief as she heard the massive vault door groan shut behind her. As she walked through the tunnel that led out of the vault, she prayed that she would never again have to face anyone as clearly psychotic as those damn guards whose bodies she'd left behind, not realising that it was a vain hope because of Raiders. Then Alessa reached the door at the end of the tunnel, pulled it open, and stepped through.

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Alessa squeezed her eyes shut against the unfamiliar brightness of the sun, and realised something. She was no longer a she, she was a he! His name wasn't Alessa Gillespie any more, either. It was now Jiheishou-no Daigakusha, and that's what puzzled him the most. How did he have a clearly Japanese name, another one he would never have chosen for himself, when he was still Caucasian? As Jiheishou thought this, other questions occurred to him. Would his father still recognise him in his altered form? After all, the older man had raised a daughter, but it was a son that was going to be searching the Capital Wasteland for him. And how had he even changed in the first place? Because his dad had been the vault doctor, Jiheishou knew all of the necessary stages of a sex change, although none had ever been requested that he could recall, and the simple act of stepping through a door was not one of them.

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Pressing the start button on his DualShock 2, Jack Dalton turned to his mother and said, "See, I told you non-surgical sex change was possible. I just never said it could be done in real life!"