Fallout New Vegas: A Rose Among The Ashes

Chapter 1

A Rose Among The Ashes — Ch.1:

By Any Other Name

[UPDATE]

19th April 2015:

It's been a long time since I've visited this old, old story of mine. I had all but forgotten it, but recently some kind comments from what I can only describe as fans made me remember.

As it happens I had begun the process a while ago of revising some of the content within the first few chapters I had published, in order to add some more backstory and improve continuity, and the existing chapters have been updated with that new edited content. Do tell me your thoughts if you're still reading, I'll welcome your critiques.

So if you were one of those people who liked my writing and want to see it continued, stay tuned. I finish university for the year in a couple of weeks, so I should have considerably more time on my hands.

-Holylemons

My dad used to have a saying.

In times of great stress, or sadness, he'd defer to that saying to remind us of all the good things in life. It was his creed, and he lived by it as a religious man lives by the word of his Bible. Whenever I had fallen over and hurt myself as a child, or I couldn't get something to go my way, he'd lean on one knee so that he was at my eye level, put a warm, reassuring hand on my shoulder, and remind me of his trusty old philosophy. It meant that no matter how bad things got in this dusty wasteland, there was always something amazing, heartwarming... fulfilling... waiting for you at the end.

But that was before he died.

Maybe I'm getting a bit sidetracked here. My name is Jacob Royal, but just call me Jake. I'm 20 years old, and I was born on the 20th of June, 2260, right here in the bleak, irradiated waste of space they call the Mojave desert. At least, it was a desert, so they say, until the war.

This war, according to the many sad, decaying history books I've picked over from the chunks of masonry and twisted metal reinforcements of old buildings, was simultaneously the shortest, yet most singularly devastating conflict in all the recorded history of mankind. Turn the clocks back three centuries, and man's readiness to adopt fossil fuels, it would seem, was the seal that binded us to our pointlessly wasteful fate. Decades of squabbling over territories that still offered some menial quantity of crude oil, the lifeblood that kept industry alive, had produced bored, bitter countries that would no sooner stab each other in the back than form a meaningful alliance. After tauntingly bold moves such as China's invasion of Anchorage, Alaska, and its subsequent, costly liberation at the hands of the United States of America, it seemed the human race had had enough. A particularly interesting metaphor I picked up from one of these books had it compared to "Children taking magnifying glasses to ants", which I never understood, since no ant I've ever seen has been less than about 10 feet long, nor incapable of goring a man clean in two with a single bite.

That aside, on that one day in 2077, the nations of the world all may as well have turned their guns away from the backs of their 'allies', and on themselves. All over the globe, what remained of the oh-so-coveted oil was burned in the rocket engines of hundreds upon hundreds of nuclear warheads, some headed the same way, others passing each other as a tired commuter would have a stranger on the metro on his way to work that morning. Upon their return to earth, they branded it with fire that shaped the landscape in an almost poetic reflection of man's future. Whole lives were extinguished instantly, all traces of their existence on God's green earth purged without mercy or exception.