Marilyn, her family, and the other survivors are given some sweet blue jumpsuits and then herded into rooms holding what the Vault-Tec personnel call “decontamination pods.” If there’s one thing that history should have taught us, it’s to not trust people in uniforms who are this insistent upon decontamination and cleanliness.
Marilyn obediently climbs into her pod, which is directly across from Nate and Shaun. The pod door closes and frost begins to form on the glass. Before Marilyn can even say, “How the fuck does ice decontaminate anything?,” she slips into cryogenic slumber.
At some point, she’s awakened from hibernation, although she can’t open her pod. She can’t do anything but watch as two masked figures bust up into Nate’s pod, shoot him dead, and kidnap Shaun.
You woke me up for this? Gee fucking thanks.
Marilyn’s pod ices up again, and she goes back into stasis. An unknown amount of time passes before she’s rudely jolted back into existence by a shutdown of Vault 111’s life support system. The first thing she does is wrest Nate’s wedding ring off of his cold dead body, less for sentimental reasons and more because gold is hopefully still valuable in whatever world she’s woken up in.
Marilyn roams around the vault, desperately looking for the exit. This is a good time to mention that Marilyn has an abysmal sense of direction (as all of my characters do, strangely enough…). So don’t be surprised if it takes her a really long time and a lot of profanity before she finds her goal. On the plus side, wandering obliviously into every possible room means more loot.
After encountering nothing but skeletons and gigantic roaches, Marilyn is beginning to fear the worst. She used to joke about roaches surviving the apocalypse when humans wouldn’t. She wonders what else has survived. She only hopes that there isn’t anything too horrifying out there, like gigantic bipedal raptor-crocodiles.
She uses her sweet science skillz to hack into various computers in the vault. On one, she finds documents revealing the true purpose of Vault 111 — it was Vault-Tec’s sociobiological experiment, on unsuspecting people, to research the effects of suspended animation. I mean, that’s not the worst fucking experiment to unknowingly be a part of, you know? Marilyn should count herself lucky that she didn’t wind up in the Effects-of-Ass-Rape Vault.
Wait, so I can’t trust the American military industrial complex? It’s like everything I thought I knew is wrong…
After Marilyn finally (FINALLY) makes it to the vault exit, she finds an unexpected but welcome gift. It’s a skeletal hand — just what she’s always wanted!
Now if she can just get this useless Pip-Boy off of it.
With great trepidation, Marilyn activates the vault door. She has no idea what to expect. She has no idea what the world outside is like.
The world outside is, apparently, full of junk.
Is it post-apocalyptic Boston, or is it Fred Sanford’s yard?
After rummaging around for random things that somehow Marilyn intuitively knows will be useful, she finally faces the inevitable: her walk back to her old home.
She decides to take the scenic route.
I never said it was pleasant scenery.
After a short but depressing walk, Marilyn finds herself in the ruins of Sanctuary Hills. She runs to her old home, where she encounters a friendly, uh, face.
Codsworth isn’t doing so well. In fact, he appears to have gone mildly psychotic. Marilyn is able to calm him down and extract some useful information from him. She learns that the year is 2287…a full 210 years after the Great War that ended human civilization as she knew it, the war that drove her and her family into Vault 111. She processes this pretty well, I must say. If it were me, I’d just be gibbering “what the fuck” over and over again until 2288.
Unfortunately, Codsworth hasn’t seen hide nor hair of Shaun. He recommends that Marilyn go to Concord and ask some human people who live there. Marilyn is immensely grateful that it’s not just her, a batshit-crazy robot, and giant roaches left in this world. Codsworth chooses to hang out in Sanctuary Hills while Marilyn makes her way to Concord.
While stopping to loot everything that isn’t nailed down at the Red Rocket truck stop, halfway between Sanctuary Hills and Concord, Marilyn encounters a welcome sight — a fellow mammal. It’s a friendly German shepherd, who seems to want nothing more than to follow Marilyn around.
Who’s a good boy? You’re a good boy! Es oo are!
Now that Marilyn has a warm-blooded companion, she feels slightly more optimistic about the long, scary journey ahead of her. She’ll walk right into Concord, talk to the people there, and hopefully find information about her missing son.
She’s already been through hell. It’s not like anything waiting for her in Concord could possibly be any worse…
pretty girls kill things 