King Under the Mountain (Fallout self insert AU) by Stupid the Ork

Words: 28k+

Link: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/king-under-the-mountain-fallout-self-insert-au.1094711/

(A man wakes up in a Fallout different than the norm, smells the ashes of the old world, and ends up becoming a legend as he restores civilization.)

Waking up

I'm pretty sure there are lots of stories out there about how a single person became a one-man industrial revolution by themselves, be it on fantasy or even sci-fi, progressing through a metaphorical tech-tree and creating an empire without actually wanting it

Well, this isn't that kind of story. Why the comparison? Because it's the closest thing I can think of, what with turning the American Southeast into the first legit civilized region of postwar America.

Be me. Wake up cold, confused and scared in some kind of pod in a metallic room instead of my room.

"W-what the fuck?!" What else to say?

There were no lights on, so I had to wait a bit for my sight to get used to the darkness to find the switch and put on some lights. After that happened, I screamed my heart out because there were thirty or so skeletons in the room, fortunately of the dead dead kind and not undead or robotic. Didn't change the fact they were, y'know, skeletons.

In resume, I woke up in something eerily similar to your run of the mill Vault, except it was all mine. Oh, and it had enough firepower to arm the entire U.S Marine Corps, hyperbole nonwithstanding. Yeah, you read that right, more than enough guns, armor of all varieties and even vehicles to arm an army.

No information, no orders, no directives... Just me, myself, a cryochamber, the aforementioned firepower and the silence.

And I didn't know where I was, nor the goal of the place. It could've been worse, though, I could have started in a legit Vault instead of not-Lost Hills.

First, again, I was alone in the place. Again, there were other occupied pods in the room I woke up in, but they were all dead, apparently a failure in the systems, or maybe Vault-Tec had much longer reach, or some other scatterbrained reason I made up, no idea. All I knew was that this place was entirely mine.

Another thing, the stuff in the bunker. It didn't look, well, Fallout-y enough. I ought to elaborate. Yeah, if not for the line of T-60s on that room and the warehouse full of assaultrons and sentries (no Gutsies or Handies sadly, but there was little to clean anyway), all of course smoother, I'd thought I ended somewhere else, but no, it was indeed Fallout, if a different one than I knew of.

And it was going to get, well, more different.

There were lasers, gauss guns and the like, of course, but it was all more, dunno, modern? I mean, even New Vegas didn't seem to move further than Vietnam when it game to their small arms, but these guns... I'm no gun expert, but they looked a tad more advanced than M4s and P90s, with polymers and lots of bullpups and all that jazz, but then, the earlier Fallouts had them too, methinks. Even what they fired was pretty advanced, caseless high velocity ammunition and gyrojet rounds (miniature bolter bolts, basically) for the guns, more weird types of ammo I'm not going to list, and... lasers and plasma for the lasers and plasma guns, which came in several forms, none of them blocky or long or weird like in the games. Weird.

Except this one bigass thing called a meson gun. Not sure if it existed in the games, but given it was a fucking BFG9000 in all but name (seriously, it just blew through the wall of the firing range before exploding!), and was essentially a toolbox with buttons, it probably existed in some form. Oh, it also nearly killed me, but that's not important.

And the power armor. There were more 'conventional' T-series, but the ones I took a liking to looked like they'd be at home in Halo. Whereas Fallout's were enormous, retro-looking and bulky as fuck, these were smallish, smooth-ish, obviously heavy but light enough I could put it on like normal clothes, kinda like the earlier 3d games, and of course pretty futuristic.

And then came the motorpool. Again, no expert on military tech (back then), but last time I checked Vertibirds were fiftied Ospreys, not turbofan VTOLs. It still looked nigh exactly like a Vertibird, but again, no propellers, and much smoother. There were also a tank, an APC and a car respectively, and a couple drones too, but the VTOL was what got me. I mean, flight is cool, right? Especially when it was faster than the prop plane you got on as a kid. But why was that even there at all?

Another thing (third A in a row, eh), nothing was nuclear powered (well, nothing except the base itself); anything that would've needed a fusion cell to work, from energy weapons to robots, now required hydrogen to work. I'm not an expert in energy even now with all the research I've helped with, and past me even less, so I rolled with it; plus, Fallout physics are like that anyway, right?

Finally, I found the command center of the yet-to-be-named place, and while it didn't have stuff that I'd killed for like, say, cameras to the outside, and of course any kind of info about the bunker itself, it did have a map of the world (which unfortunately didn't pinpoint my exact location, only the continents and weird colouring that turned out to be radiation pockets, and more), and a live calendar.

The date? Fuckall nothing, except the thing resetted a couple hundred times while we were asleep. Some enth years after the Great War, then.

Fuck. No date, no idea of what part of the timeline I was on, and no location either? California during the Unity War? Columbia after James reached Rivet City? Nuka World? The Mojave? The hillbilly swamp? Colorado? Nothing! If I wanted to find out, well, anything at all, I had to go outside and find out myself.

I couldn't just go outside right then, though, wouldn't last even a minute even with all the stuff at hand. No, I had to grind first, get myself stronger, and of course find out where the hell was I.

But how could one know how strong they were without a fucking Pip-Boy? They didn't, but hey, three months practicing and walking around in lite power armor in an empty underground base and eating up any book and holotape in there had to account for something, didn't it?

Nothing. Not a sign of intelligent life anywhere I looked, ignoring the ranger watchtower I could see in the distance. Now, plant and animal life was another matter, what with the entrance to the bunker lying inside a shack atop a low mountain overlooking a forested valley. Kinda neat to wake up there instead of the Mojave, a generic wasteland, or maybe something worse, think the Pitt. Nothing bigger than lone moose (or is it meese? I mean, goose, geese, mongoose, mongeese...) lived there, and those froze or outright fled at the sight of me, even though they were as tall as the armor at the shoulders (are real moose that freaking big?).

No, seeing moose around didn't help me pinpoint my location, I knew shit of what animals lived in the U.S, I wasn't american.

Of course, that was only the stuff I could see from the base. Thanks to one of the drones, it turned out that, just a tad farther from what my eyes could reach, it wasn't all that nice: a good ol' bombed city several klicks wide and long and accordingly radioactive. Again accordingly, there were mutants, but the drone's camera couldn't zoom far enough to see if they were ghouls or if there were signs of (intelligent) human life, and it couldn't go far before losing control.

And what could I do to pass the time before something interesting happened or passed by? Why, of course, waste time making myself a castle! A nice motte-and-bailey to spend some time before going to California and going Terminator on the Master, or become a third faction in the Brotherhood-Republic War, or even do nothing and wait for something to pass by because I still didn't know where and when I was!

If only I had known how little time I would spend on it before even laying the first tree trunk... or that I was being watched.

The reason the guns and armor are so modern-looking? It's a mix from a later divergence point for Fallout, and them being from Wasteland. Yeah, the title should've given it away (the pure AU things like the vehicles and the widespread use of hydrogen are more like the actual AU), but I don't know if to classify it as a multi x-over, given Fallout started as not-Wasteland 2. Aside from Wasteland, I'll also use/be heavily inspired by, at least for now, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Metro, Nausicaä, a few others that are obscure as hell and only exist as tabletop RPGs... and post-dark ages legends. Yeah, that's right, our boy is going to bring out America (or at least the region he's in) out of the post-apocalyptic Dark Ages, embellished Charlemage/Arthur style (no mass executions of saxon men, but a lot of death anyway). That said, it'll take some time to write all that.