*Beep*

*Beep*

*Beep*

A digital metallic voice echoed through the facility known as the Vault on the overhead speakers.

Good morning inhabitants of Vault 9271. The current date is March 31, in the year 2032. Tomorrow morning at 0800 The Vault doors will be opened. Please ensure that you are prepared for this event. The external temperature is currently 60 degrees with an expected high of 71. Tomorrow's forecast will have a high of 73 and a low 62. Dwellers are advised to prepare to exit the vault.....

The voice droned on mentioning a planned party in the cafeteria to celebrate the last night in the vault as well as the cafeteria menu plans for the day. There was also another required training meeting to attend for the Vault dwellers before the party.

-Later that evening in the Meeting Hall-

The metallic voice droned through a pre-planned speech, recorded years earlier by the creators of the Vault to be given on the evening before their exit.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the doors to this Vault will be opened tomorrow morning. The world you will be entering will be a hazardous one. Th world is completely different than the way it was when your parents entered the vault. There are no known cities remaining. There are ruins in place but there are no cities or towns in existence. This is your chance ladies and gentlemen to re-shape the future, your future into something better than it was before. In the coming days, weeks and months you will face seemingly insurmountable odds and challenges; but remember you are red-blooded Americans. You once defeated the most powerful country in the world and then became a world power. The keys to this country are no in your hands. Through the sweat of your labors our nation will once more rise. Resurrect her back to her greatness, by working together and re-building new towns and cities. The major cities that were once the anchors of our country have been laid waste to by nuclear bombs. These zones have coded Yellow zones due to fallout still in the immediate area. The nearest Yellow Zone is Southeast of this vault by an estimated 119 miles. Due to wind and weather patterns the wind form the great lakes has continuously pushed the fallout from Pittsburgh in a south easterly direction. You will each be used a basic set of tools including shovels, garden rakes, axes as well as several packs of seeds. You will also be issued water testers to verify the cleanliness of you water before it is ingested. I highly recommend that you talk among yourselves and elect a leader and council for making decisions. You will need to learn to hunt for food, build shelter, and defend yourselves from outside threats. I wish you all the best in this endeavor. Good Luck and Godspeed.

As the speech concluded the lights came back up to normal levels. This was the day that so many in the past had planned for, the hope of a rebirth of civilization as we know it.

(View outside of the Vault)

Complete silence...not a sound but the constant crunching of vegetation by Jack's target. It was a buck, unfortunately for Jack, it barely had any meat on it, but if Jack could kill it, he would have enough meat for the month. He silently crouched behind a large shrub about 50 yards away from the buck. It did not seem to notice him yet, Jack had worn full camo, a hood to cover his head, goggles, a small backpack, and to top it all off, a wagon for the dead buck. He mounted the butt of his father's old .270 Winchester, aimed, and fired.

BANG!!

Jack's body shuddered and rocked from the recoil but he held his ground. With a muffled cry the buck galloped away farther into the forest, cocking his gun, he snuck up to the location in which the buck was first standing. He kneeled down for a closer look, there was red liquid in the ground, he dipped his fingers in the liquid in it and took a whiff. Blood, that meant that he hit the buck, it would die of blood loss soon. He followed the trail of blood into the forest until he found the body of the buck laying in a field. Grabbing his wagon and tools, he hung the body of the buck on a tree for about a hour in order for the blood to drain away. After doing that he skinned the buck, cut it and put the body in his wagon.

Jack wheeled the body back to his farm house and went into the back yard. Stopping the wagon in front of his smoke house, he grabbed the meat and placed it inside, that would keep the meat from rotting for a long time. After doing chores around the compound he looked up at he sun, it was setting already, and he needed to get dinner started, squirrel meat stew was on the menu. Jack walked back inside his house, tomorrow he would venture into the city, a place he had not been in since the start of the war.

Greg closed the book he's been reading since morning, it was a book about economy, brought down by some of the survivors. It was by far his favourite book, and he knew it almost by heart, having it read over and over again several times. He planned to put its basics into practice when things have settled.

A metallic voice echoes through the Vault while Greg stood up and put the book back into its place before heading for the meeting hall. That's where it will all start, the new era for human race, a new civilisation.
The meeting hall had quite a few people in them, all talking to each other. The voice suggested appointing a leader or a council, but Greg knew already what he wanted. He planned all this for years. What he could plan at least. He was thinking of having a leading council of professionals, and various groups led by the fittest for the set job. Greg wanted to be in the council at all costs, sadly, he wasn't yet sure if the people of the Vault will trust him enough.
The most important things would be food, water, shelter, and defence at the start, which they all had in the Vault. The vault, Greg thought, should still be their home for until they can find a suitable place, and gather enough material, for the first settlement.

Greg positioned himself in a corner and observed the rest of the people, listening to them, trying to figure out what they wanted. This way it would be easier to convince them if he needed to. This was probably he last chance he'd get to get people to put each other in the right positions. Fair and good leaders were needed, who can hold everyone together and make the best of everyone's abilities.

Olaf Grubisaki had been woken up by the metallic voice telling them that the doors to their vault would be open to the free world in just one day to finally see the old world and how it had been since he was only a kid last time he saw the wonderful overworld. Sighing and rubbing his face with his hand he took his feet from the desk within his little office in the Security department that he had been working since he took over from his father, being an old cop did help him become more interested in doing this job in the first place to keep the peace and order, the rule of law and all that stuff his father had taught him. Making sure the Colt 1911 was still there he patted his left side down at his hips to feel the lovely gun still was in it's holster, sealed up good and tight, taking it out from the holster he put it on the table and smiles as he takes the mag out from it, pressing the ammo out from the clip and onto the table.

Taking the gun apart he took a cleaning kit out from the desk and placed it onto the table, disassembling the gun the best he could without tools he took the barrel off and started to clean it from gunpowder leftovers that could had been stuck to the guns barrel. After a good twenty minutes from cleaning the barrel and assembling it again he put it into the holster, standing up and walking toward the door that automatic opened he walked into the metallic walkway with a smile on his face and a hand on his holster. " Today is sure to be a good day" He said with his heavy Russian accent.

Luce woke up with a jolt, the sprinkler system spraying water onto his unsuspecting face. The brightness of the glow light he had been working on the night before pierced through his worn goggles. He'd fallen asleep in the garden rooms again.

With a groan he stretched his limbs, pushing the goggles up into dark, tousled hair and rubbing at his eyes. He must have finished the repairs if the lights were working now. No use in sitting around getting wet. He stood and gathered his scattered tools, wiping away the worst of the dampness on his grease-stained shirt. The Head Engineer must be looking for him by now; it had been a busy week preparing for the door opening. Things needed to be packed away safely, tools secreted in mobile satchels to be pulled out at a moment's notice, and the vaults' gardens and medical facilities in order in case something happened top-side.

Luce was scared. Sure, the other engineers assured him that they had big, interesting engines and machines outside. But was it worth leaving the vaults, where everything is safe and bright all the time? Mama had told him stories about the sun and how warm it had been on her face, how her skin had turned browner if she stayed out too long. Of course they wouldn't really be leaving yet. The vaults would act as home base before they establish a colony but Luce couldn't help but feel that this was the end of their way of life anyway. He was scared.

He traced the metallic walls of the vaults on his way back to the Engineering Department, saying a silent goodbye with his fingertips. He passed the generator room on his way, gears ticking and pumps hissing, and imagined that he had heard an odd rhythm in the beating of the vaults' heart, as if it was saying goodbye to him too in its own way.

Marcus lay on the bed in the small room of the Vault that had been allocated 'his' for the last twenty years, thinking. It had been a long time, hadn't it? A long time both since he'd been able to just sit in quiet contemplation, but more pressingly a long time since he'd stepped foot into the open air. He longed to be able to feel sunlight, rather than cold sterile fluorescent lights, and to maybe feel some wind for the first time in a while.

The lights dimmed; an announcement blared, and Marcus half-listened. He had friends in the upper workings as well as the engineering of the vault, and they'd had a vague idea that /something/ was going to happen. This was something. He stood and walked stiffly to the meeting hall, and arrived in a crowd of maybe fifty or a hundred people.

Something something red-blooded Americans, basic tools, rebuild civilization, end speech. With any luck there were more than just this fifty people around to do it -- probably half of them had spent most of their life inside of this cramped nuclear shelter, and the other half had been teenagers or children when they'd gone in. Marcus was the eldest person in the room, by... Ten years, maybe? One or two people at least looked thirty or forty.

The announcement died down and the lights shone once more on the rather pitiful crowd assembled. Marcus wondered what anyone's odds of surviving were. The announcement had said something about farming tools and water testers, but even if everyone was a master farmer, and even if the streams were clean and the rainwater wasn't acidic, that was still a good half a year before anything started to pay off. Idly, he wondered if there was enough food left for everyone to last that long. Marcus wasn't a farmer and he wasn't any sort of hunter of scavenger -- he was a lawyer and, recently, a teacher.

Anyways, enough thinking. Things would work out or they wouldn't; there was no point stressing about it. Marcus stepped out of the doorway and into the crowd of the meeting hall, looking for a familiar face to discuss with -- one of his former students, maybe. A lot of them had been teenagers going into the vault and he'd taught them something at some point or another.

((Triple-post, goddamnit website))

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