Beau Harley

Pre-war, Beau was a well-respected Vault-Tec animator from Boston who had moved to California chasing artistic dreams. Now, left behind by Vault-Tec, Beau is uncertain on how to navigate a complex wasteland that is constantly challenging his life and morality. This eventually pushes him to begin a long journey back home, to hopefully find a sense of solace and stability there.

If you had asked him years later, before his post-war return, Beau would have said that the Boston Commonwealth had never treated him kindly. He spent much of his youth in the hallways of the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, much like his professor parents. The nice little town overlooking the city where their residence technically was, was often disused in favor of late nights sleeping in teachers’ lounges. There had always been a strange sense that permeated the institution, some sort of otherworldly influence hung densely over the feverish campus, leaving Beau a distressed onlooker of the eldritch affliction. His parents became disengaged and absent-minded and he became fixated on the idea of leaving the Commonwealth, chasing a sense of normalcy because no matter where he went odd happenings seemed to follow him. In the city across the river, in the foothills behind the campus, he’d grown familiar with a sense of being watched and observed. He spent much of his teenage and young adult life saving up for a train ride to California and art school attendance there, to get away from it, at least for a while. A megacenter of the entertainment industry and on the opposite side of the country, he figured he might as well take a chance on some far-off artistic pipe dream.

Art school was largely uneventful, which Beau had hoped for. Artistic expression had been just another way to untangle the vague weirdness of his life. And although that life was still present - small trappings of the Commonwealth had followed him here - it was stifled by the sun and the blue skies. In the months leading up to his graduation and then following it, Beau had been trying to contact home. He hadn’t left on poor terms, he’d said his goodbyes, but despite that there had never been an answer. Calling and writing to them never yielded any response. He wasn’t sure why he made the effort; maybe just to check to see if anything had changed there. Maybe he wanted reassurance that he had made the right choice, or he wanted some kind of affirmation from them. In any case, they never responded, so Beau just had to pick up his life and career without them. On recommendation, Beau had landed a local job at Vault-Tec as an animator in the months following his graduation.

He worked there for many years, becoming a respected member of the team and climbing the corporate ladder, as was expected of folks his age. Beau moved closer to his workplace. After a while, they offered him a place in the nearby vault, a celebration of the many years he’d spent working for them. Of course, he’d accepted it. Beau wasn’t oblivious to the signs, he worked at a company whose brand was at the forefront of the talk around nuclear doomsday, he’d seen it in the papers and the news, and he had felt the tensions heighten - guaranteed safety was a blessing. However, underneath their supposed sincerity and his own immense gratefulness, was a gnawing worry, old anxieties coming back to haunt him. He moved closer to work still, hoping to be prepared for the day, figuring the sense was just fear of war.

And when that day came, his worries all came to a head when he was refused a spot in the vault at the gate, along with a couple other workers. He watched the line file onto the platform and lower into the shelter that had been guaranteed to them on paper. Beau would not know the extent of Vault-Tec’s evil history until many years later.

Beau would go on to survive, luckily or not. He was the only one of the people who were refused at the gate to have made it. He didn’t know the term yet, but he had been ghoulified. From the height of his apartment, he watched the city dissolve into sickness and madness, left again as a distressed onlooker. And that was how he spent the following many months and years, roaming the surrounding area, avoiding the chaos, opting to watch as a bystander. Out of necessity, he learned how to hide and avoid hostile encounters - how to sneak around and scavenge for supplies without getting shot. Though he had turned most of his living space into a shelter, he still maintained an effort to tether himself to reality and follow a flimsy routine. He kept tidy, and ate what little he could recover at the dinner table. He spent many hours flipping through his old sketchbooks, or reading, back turned to the unfolding of society outside.

Only some days, between the struggle of survival and willful ignorance, was there time and energy to ruminate and reflect. Anger and wild resentment would rise and then fall into tired sadness, regret, and an unplaceable guilt. He wondered every day of this new life why he hadn’t been let into the vault, and he could never come up with a definitive answer. He searched his old workplace, eyed by the Vault-Boy paraphernalia, as he searched file after file for answers. Had there been fine print in the contract? Had a place in the vault really been an employee lottery? Which quickly dissolved into wondering if they had found out his ties to the eldritch, *that* he quickly ruled out, surely not. The tentative searching turned into desperate scavenging which turned into a days-long nervous breakdown that resulted in the complete trashing of the building’s interior. Torn posters and broken terminals, the anger and post-apocalyptic nature he repressed in his home reared its ugly head here instead. He soon stopped coming, tried to stop thinking about it and the vault down the road where others just like him lived subterranean sheltered lives free from the concerns of contemporary survival.

However, although he had stagnated into pre-war rituals and isolation, the world around him didn’t stop, and others had other ideas on how to go about living in the post-war era. One morning, some raiders broke in and trashed the precarious life he’d tried maintaining for himself. He had been an easy target, he was alone, after all. Stealing away his stability and his supplies, they left him alive but shaken, promising to be back and to be ready for the same thing, to have more to give them if he wanted to live. He had watched the little piece of home he’d tried to carve out of the wasteland suddenly destroyed by that same wasteland’s volatile nature in an instant. And it threatened to do it again. Soon.

Horrified that he had brushed so close with death, Beau realized that he was at his limit. He’d done this song and dance for years, and though he harbored many, many feelings (at the time, positive and negative) for the company that had abandoned him and left him to die, he didn’t see any other clear option. He gathered the things the raiders left behind and went down roads he’d previously refused to go down for many, many years.

Pushing his shame aside, he begged for a spot in the vault, pleading into the intercom to take a chance on him, promising he could be useful. Sympathetic to their old coworker, they hesitantly allowed him to be their errand runner in the stead of their old one who had been injured in the wasteland. He'd go out, trade, and bring them back supplies in exchange for a safe place to eat and rest. It was enough for him, just enough to ignore the disturbed glances he got in a place that was, at least in theory, built to keep out radiation and the horrors it caused. He worked for them again, through gritted teeth and the grief and anguish that boiled beneath his otherwise agreeable demeanor. What set him apart from the rest of these people? He could often feel the stare of the overseer burning into his back or side, never when he was looking his way. Had he been the one to deny him entry into the vault? Had he been the one who had effectively ordered for the other people denied at the gate to die?

In the end, it was all the same as before, he felt just as isolated and upset here as he did in his apartment. This time, however, it came with either sneering remarks, pitiful glances, outright hostility, or other sorts of demeaning things. At least before the only thing espousing such horrible insults was parts of his own mind, he could deal with that, but now it was others confirming his fears.

He was a tolerant person, but there was only so much hate and his own self-hatred that he could stand. During one of his excursions for the vault, he got an idea, one of those that you just can’t shake unless you somehow act on it. There in California, some of the best surgeons were situated, some of which were of the reconstructive kind. In pre-war times, they had been available for those with enough wealth, but now he was sure their clientele was much reduced. There was one that advertised himself in one of those markets he traded at, and once Beau had scrounged up enough caps, he asked him if he could undergo some sort of experimental facial reconstructive surgery. The surgeon was cautious at first, but ultimately agreed to it, on account of Beau’s scarring not being as severe as others he’d seen. The process would be done over a series of visits, and he’d pay over the course of them, as a consequence of its unknown nature and because Beau was always performing tasks for the vault. Apparently the caps hadn’t been quite enough. It was okay, though, Beau would do anything to restore his previous appearance , associating it with simpler and happier times where he was a man not pushed to the brink by hostile wasteland.

This attempt at recovering his identity would be cut short. The vault overseer had kicked him out, on account of him disturbing the dwellers and disrupting the community. There had been so much talk in hushed whispers about his presence, he’d noticed, but he’d hope it wouldn’t come to this. Parents complained that the sheltered children were scared of the zombie who’d invaded their home. After this, Beau had a moment of clarity. Feeling guilt weigh heavily on his heart, he realized he had a decision to make now. He had overstayed his welcome, and now he no longer had a steady income of caps, there was no way he’d be able to pay for the rest of the procedure. And it was still in progress, about half-way done, leaving a strange-looking man torn between two identities and two times.

Hesitantly and carefully, he returned to his apartment, his feet and muscle memory carrying him more than his brain. Once he gauged that no one was inside, he went in and realized that it had been stripped bare. The raiders must have followed up on coming back. He knew he couldn’t stay here, and there was no going back to the vault. Then where would he go from here? There were very few options, in his job with the vault he had seen first-hand just how terrible this city had become. Then the thought occurred to him. He could go home. It was risky, but at least it gave him a waypoint in a world that he was lost in. Maybe there in the Boston Commonwealth, he’d find something at least vaguely familiar, maybe he’d find out what happened to his parents after all of the pre-war radio silence.

At first, he traveled extremely cautiously, steering clear of others and watching from afar, before realizing that it wasn’t sustainable for this long journey. Unlike the city, he didn’t know the ins and outs of the places he traveled through. He didn’t know where he might reliably find food, water, or shelter. He begins to take more chances, of course, some don’t work out. But some people he meets along the way are unexpectedly kind. Far more than he had expected. His fast-paced, worried travels slow down and he begins to take his time more. Taking scenic routes, visiting places he had always wanted to see, and staying a while in those welcoming places. His love for art and storytelling is rekindled, and he begins to document his experiences along the way in the sketchbooks he’d brought along with him.

As he neared Boston, odd things resembling childhood memories started to happen. A feeling of being watched here, maybe strange sounds at night there, or other such things. He had hoped for something familiar, but preferably not like this. It all builds and eventually culminates in one of the worst post-war winters that the Commonwealth had seen. Trudging through the snow, he meets the people of the Commonwealth and begins to uncover the mysteries of the Institute, his family’s lovecraftian ties, and the debilitating winter that seemingly came with his arrival. He helps others with their individual plights as well. A mechanical man who doesn’t understand his origins and can’t reckon with his past, a headline-hunting journalist who can’t quite reach the public, and other people down on their luck. What he couldn’t anticipate was how intertwined all of these things actually were.