(Sorry this ended up taking so long-- I left it on my hard drive at work.
)
It was always nice to come home.
There had been a time, long enough ago that only the stories remained, that the land beneath her feet had once been beautiful. Rolling hills, pristine lawns, the promise of wealth and freedom that came from living in America. Before the Great War, before fire had rained from on high like the hand of an avenging god, the Capitol Wasteland had been a thriving metropolis and home to thousands, if not millions, of people.
But it surely wasn't that way now. And yet Bethany Ann Masters still got a little thrill of joy whenever she found her steps leading that way. It was populated -inasmuch as there were populations anymore-, there were places to find fresh enough water, to trade or sell whatever largesse the open road had given, and yet there was still enough open space for her to find a corner or two for herself and her pack each night with only minimal disturbances.
Home sweet home.
It hadn't always been so, of course. The earliest years of her life -memories grown fuzzy with age and distance- had been spent in what had once been Kentucky. There had been a Vault there, underpopulated when the End came, and so for three generations had sheltered the descendants of those wise enough to listen when those fateful sirens sounded. It had been her parents who had left initially, though the steel doors were never locked behind them, and Beth had been raised in what could arguably be called a community scrapped together in what was left of the fallen city of Louisville. And it had been a decent life, from what she could recall, but fortune didn't always favor the bold. She'd been twelve when raiders or mutants or whatever threat that prowled the darker places came knocking, and in a fateful day while she had been blithely digging caps out of ruined buildings her whole world had been slaughtered.
There'd been options, of course. Beth had known at the time that she could go back to the vault, could have found solace and shelter there if she'd wanted it. But she was a month's shy of thirteen, and childhood in the Wasteland was often brutally short. Hiding got you nowhere but cornered, she'd reasoned, and she'd been moving when the attacks happened. Ergo, movement must be key to survival. It was childhood logic and yet logic that she'd built her life on.
And so it went. Like so many lone travelers before her, in a tradition spanning back to the first faltering steps of early and curious humans, Bethany carried most of her world on her back. The pack was built on a frame that tied snugly at her waist with straps around her shoulders, and was packed with ergonomics and speed in mind. Her staples, the cooking wear, the bedroll, stimpacks and whatever rations she had available were rolled tightly together to prevent noise or excess movement that might throw off her stride. Pouches along the pack's olive dun sides held whatever treasures she'd found for trade or sale, though her even more precious soapbox of caps was kept more securely and hidden, belted to the small of her back and resting beneath the pack's weight. Beneath her battered leather armor -gleefully scavenged from a Raider who thought she was faster on the trigger than Bethany- it was all but invisible, and that suited her fine.
It was a spare fortune, one that rose and fell with her own luck and risk, but one that she called her own and was content with.
And yet one she was always seeking to grow, hence her return to the familiar silhouettes of the Capitol Wasteland, and the scant but hardy population that might be convinced to part with their own valuables for what she herself had hoarded. Following as she always did the long ridge that had once, she supposed, been a river bank Beth picked her way down the long embankment and stopped for only a moment to catch her bearings.
There was, if memory served, a settlement perhaps five or six miles farther on that she'd not visited in the last three trips to this corner of the world. It meant new faces, less trading with merchants or citizens grown familiar with her and no longer as willing to bargain. The light was with her and the day was decent for traveling, and so with a spring in her step and a hand that rested constantly on the butt of her chinese pistol -faster than getting to the hunting rifle strapped to her pack but less satisfying than the tire iron of baseball bat- she set her stride with her back to the sun and set off to make her fortune.
(I left her age a little ambigious and tried to chose a picture that had a range of options -- not sure what we had in mind for an age difference.)
