TOM FRANCIS
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Fallout Girl, A Diary

My name is Sophie, because the way in which Fallout 3 asks you to pick your name is a way that makes silly names, or obtuse ones like Pentadact, seem rather cruel. I’m not going to spoil what that is right now, but I will in the following entry.

I’m going to location-tag these spoilers, so if you’re playing right now, or you plan to, you can skip the sections about any areas you haven’t visited. I’m not doing the main plot, so I won’t be spoiling anything about that. I ended up picking a different main quest.

Starting the player as a baby is genius, not least because players, first plunged into a new game world, act like babies.

Remember that guy in the opposite cell to you when you start Oblivion? What did he see you do? Bat the manacles like a kitten, hold them and wave them around, knock a bottle over, bump into your cell bars, pick everything up and try to eat or use it.

Before I took my first steps towards dad, I picked up teddy, swung him around my head and threw him across the room. Then I took all the toys out of my toy box and tossed them randomly around. Then I threw one at dad. Then I jumped up high to pull down the Nuka Cola truck from the shelf and play with that. Then, when dad had gone, I felt bad and tidied up all my toys into the box again.

I grew up to be kind of a difficult kid. At sixteen, I beat a man unconscious seven consecutive times in a GOAT exam. It started as a scuffle, but I got carried away and kept hitting him after he’d put his guard down. And after he’d passed out. And after he’d come to again. And for some time after that.

When I finally stopped, I looked up to find all the other students staring at me, and a trail of blood smattered across the walls leading to the limp body at my feet. I lowered my guard, and talked to the examiner. He agreed I should probably just skip the exam. He suggested I become a Vault Loyalty Inspector.

So when chaos breaks out in the vault, I’m in the middle of bludgeoning a man to death with a baseball bat. I forget who started it, but his face isn’t in a good way anymore. Or there. Mid-combat, my body’s forcibly twisted around and my face sucked in towards Butch, my bully, my victim. As you might expect after the beating I gave him three years ago, he’s a gibbering wreck. His mother’s in trouble.

I’m actually not against helping his mother – I don’t know her – but I head the wrong way to get into her room, and by the time I get there mutant cockroaches were already eating her dead face off, so I strip her naked, steal her clothes and most of her booze, drink quite a lot of it and beat her son to death with a baseball bat. His Vault Loyalty was lacking.

I am now addicted to vodka.

I also found my own Vault Loyalty lacking, so I slipped past the overseer and staggered blinking into the outside world. At that point, a man in a welding mask sprinted up to me and started hitting me in the head with a pool-cue. Ah, the great outdoors.

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