Star vs the Fallout Prologue

Star vs the Fallout

I don't remember much of that day. The day the bombs fell. Everything just seemed normal. I woke up, went to school, talked with my friends, went to class.

Actually, that's not true. One thing does stick out in my memory.

Marco wasn't there that morning.

Normally he'd be meet me with this little nod when I got to school. I bet he thought he was so cool, but really it was just cute. I mean, he'd been doing it for, what, ten years at that point?

Sorry, got distracted. But yeah, he wasn't there that day. I didn't notice until Miss Skullnick took attendance, but Star and Janna weren't there either. I didn't really think anything of it at the time. Star was always dragging Marco off on some crazy adventure, so it made sense they'd both be ditching class at the same time. As for Janna, well... I mean, I love Janna and all, but she wasn't exactly a model student. So nobody really thought anything of her skipping class as well.

It was at the end of our first class when the principal came on over the PA. He told us- he said there were reports of nuclear missile launches and detonations. That we had to make our way down to the Vault immediately, and in a calm and orderly fashion.

It was anything but calm. Skullnick lost control of the class immediately. We all ran out into the hallway, kids were screaming, crying and pushing towards the emergency stairwell. I just blocked out everything but the thought of the shelter downstairs and clung onto Hope and Sabrina, who were right next to me.

The government's nuclear bomb shelter plan "Project Safehouse" was to build massive underground complexes called Vaults near major population centres. The one serving Echo Creek and the surrounding areas just happened to be built underneath Echo Creek High.

Luckily for us state government insisted that there'd be space for all the students in case the worst happened on a school day.

We felt the first tremors of distant massive explosions just after we passed the basement level. We were still three floors up from the blast doors of the main entrance. I-I started pushing other kids out of the way and dragged the other girls after me. I'm not proud of it. I just didn't want to...

Sorry. Anyway, we made it through the door. We were barely sat down in the atrium when some military guys stepped forward with rifles and ordered everyone else to get back. They were closing the Vault. People were screaming and crying, but they backed up. The three of us just watched as the door closed on them. I felt so sick.

There were more explosions, much stronger but strangely muffled. I guess they built the place well. Even knowing what was going on just above our heads, the Vault personnel were awfully calm and methodical. Maybe they were trained for this. The rest of us weren't. Kids were crying while the few teachers that made it tried to maintain order. The adults that made it were either looking for their kids, struggling to keep themselves together, or just going through the motions of those stupid infomercials they used to air.

Hope was a mess. She wouldn't want me to say anything, but she took it harder than any of us. She could hardly breathe, mascara running down her face. Sabrina was trying to console her, barely keeping from crying herself. I just felt numb and sick.

It took ages for the officials to process everyone who made it in. My family weren't on the list. The other girls' hadn't made it either. We weren't the only ones who had lost our families either.

Eventually they started leading groups deeper into the vault. They passed around food and water and directed people to the washrooms. It was cool, but with a few hundred people sitting together in a small space it got hot quickly.

They got around to us after a little more than half of the crowd was gone. They led us three and maybe a dozen others down this hallway with doors on both sides. A few more vibrations tickled our feet as we walked. We stopped in a small room with some booths so we could change into these jumpsuits. They're a fit really close to the skin, but they had enough sizes that everyone felt comfortable in them. And they really do feel good on. Then they led us further down the corridor. We came to a crossroads and headed straight through, before they stopped at a room full of these big pods, big enough to sit in.

They told us they'd decontaminate and depressurise us before went further into the vault. I should have noticed something was off about this, but it hadn't clicked yet, so we all just stepped into the pods and they shut the lid on us.

A few seconds later I felt the temperature drop rapidly and everything...stopped. I don't remember anything from then until I was defrosted.

Suddenly I was shivering as the walls of the pod heated up and hot air started pumping in. The door just opened by itself, I don't know why. I was so stiff I fell over when I tried to get out. It was icy cold in the room outside, but I slowly started to warm up inside the jumpsuit.

Mine was the only one that had opened. I looked in on some of the other pods. I almost wish I hadn't. Some of the freezers seemed to have malfunctioned at some point. A few of them were shut down, the people inside had defrosted too slowly to be revived. They'd already started to decay. Some people seemed to have...snapped.

I stumbled over to Sabrina and Hope's pods. They were still on ice, and their pods seemed to be working fine, thank god. I hit the manual release, they defrosted before my eyes and I helped them out.

We were down there a long time, huddling together to warm up and wondering what had happened. From the state of a few people who hadn't made it we guessed it must have been frozen a long time. Eventually we pulled ourselves up and started heading for the exit. Some of the doors seemed to have jammed too. Seriously, everything in this place seemed to be breaking down! So we had to loop back around through the personnel section. There were a few giant roaches, but I squashed them with a baton I found lying around. They have a mean bite though.

We were rummaging around the Overseer's office and came across a gun and some ammunition. Considering we were surrounded by frozen mummies and the skeletons of what must have been the staff, I figured we'd need to protect ourselves. Hope was even more shaken up at the death surrounding us than when we heard the bomb warning, her smeared eye makeup was still frosted to her cheeks; and Sabrina blanched and wouldn't touch it. So I volunteered to take it, giving the baton to Sabrina.

Sabrina gathered as much food, water and medicine as she could find, storing it in one of the backpacks she found for each of us. Hope just followed along numbly.

I found a message on a computer someone had left running that everyone in the Vault had been frozen so that the personnel could experimenting on us, trying to figure out how viable it was for keeping people alive. I'd have thought they'd have been freezing people BECAUSE it was a good way to keep people alive. So I felt a little rush of satisfaction when I read that they had been abandoned down here with next to no supplies. There was also an option to open the emergency exit, so I hit that. Thankfully that at least still worked.

Sabrina and I squashed another swarm of bugs that came up to us, Hope sheltering behind us. At the end of the corridor we came back out to the atrium we had sheltered in God knows how long ago.

One of the skeletons lying by the door controls was wearing a Pip-Boy, one of those wrist mounted computers with a lot of cool features. You can even hook it up to your cell phone for extra functionality, but for a mobile accessory it's a pretty bulky and expensive one so not many people used one. I slid the Vault worker's phone out and put my own in.  I had to use the direct connection to open the Vault door, but it still seemed to work fine with my phone in it.

The massive steel door rolled aside and the three of us filed out into the stairwell. As far as we'd seen we were the only ones that had survived that sick experiment.

At the top of the stairwell we looked around at what was left of our school, and the world outside. It looked so familiar, but we barely recognized it.