Death was not kind to John.
Death did not arrive with judgment or revelation, with angels descending in radiant columns or fire roaring up from some abyssal pit. There was no tribunal, no final accounting, no voice asking him to justify the sum total of his existence. There was not even cruelty with intention. Death did not care enough for that. It simply happened, sudden and meaningless, and when it was done it did not escort him anywhere.
It discarded him.
Like refuse scraped from the bottom of a boot, John was cast aside—not into heaven, not into hell, but into something far worse than either.
The VOID.
It was not darkness in the comforting sense, not the gentle black of sleep or unconsciousness where thought dissolves and pain loses its edges. This was absence given form. A negation so complete it felt actively hostile, pressing in from every direction without ever touching him. There was no ground beneath his feet, no sky above his head, no sense of distance or orientation. There was no warmth or cold, yet somehow it felt freezing. There was no sound, yet the silence roared.
There was nothing to anchor his thoughts.
And so his mind began to eat itself.
John screamed.
At first it was instinctive, an animal response torn from him without words or structure. A raw, strangled sound born of panic, echoing into nothing and vanishing instantly, as though it had never existed. He screamed again, louder, forcing meaning into the noise, forcing himself to be heard in a place that could not listen.
Then the words came.
Profanity poured out of him in every language he knew, hurled into the VOID with manic fury. English curses spat with venom. Spanish insults he barely remembered learning. Broken French dragged up from old classes and half-forgotten movies. Slang, slurs, internet shorthand, insults sharpened by years of forum arguments and late-night rage posts typed with shaking hands.
He cursed gods he did not believe in.
He cursed fate, entropy, luck itself.
He cursed Todd Howard with a bitterness so reflexive it almost made him laugh, a hollow bark of humor that died the instant it formed. He cursed executives, writers, developers—anyone he could imagine holding the invisible knife that had ended his life. He cursed the unseen thing he was certain existed, some eldritch, laughing cruelty that had grown bored and decided to erase him out of spite.
He screamed until his voice felt shredded.
Until anger burned itself out and left only exhaustion.
Until even hatred felt too small to fill the VOID.
Time did not pass here. Not properly. There was no sun to rise or fall, no hunger to measure days by, no fatigue to force rest. And yet—somehow—he knew a week had gone by. Or at least he felt as though a week had passed, though that might have simply been the shape despair took when it had nowhere else to go.
The question came eventually, unavoidable and relentless.
Was this it?
It was not shouted. It was not even spoken. It simply existed, circling his thoughts like a vulture that never landed.
Was this all he amounted to?
His parents drifted into his mind next, unbidden. They were there, but never present. Conversations that felt obligatory rather than affectionate. Phone calls that were short, stiff, and ended with mutual relief. Holidays endured rather than celebrated. Love expressed more through habit than intent, if it existed at all.
They would mourn him, perhaps. Briefly. Out of expectation.
Then they would move on.
His friends—if the word even applied—were few enough to count on one hand, with fingers left unused. People he knew through screens more than faces. Relationships built around shared grievances rather than shared lives. Bonds forged through complaining about media, about politics, about how everything used to be better and was now irreparably ruined.
And Fallout.
God, the hours he had poured into Fallout.
Years spent replaying the same games, memorizing dialogue trees, arguing endlessly about canon and cut content. Sitting in cramped hobby shops that smelled of dust and stale coffee, surrounded by other disgruntled voices, all of them convinced they were right, all of them desperate to prove it. Everyone competing to be angrier, more bitter, more knowledgeable.
John had been good at it.
Too good.
He had learned how to argue without listening, how to dismantle enthusiasm with a single cutting remark. He had outlasted others not through passion, but through sheer stubborn negativity. The last man standing after conversations collapsed under their own weight.
The king of the haters.
What had it earned him?
Nothing.
No legacy. No creations. No relationships that extended beyond shared outrage. No one who depended on him. No one who would feel the world dim because he was gone. He imagined his death announcement—if one even existed—scrolling past unnoticed, buried beneath advertisements and trivial headlines.
He imagined his ashes sitting in some forgotten place, a cheap urn or unmarked plot, untouched. Hell, his parents might not even bother visiting. Why would they? He had never given them a reason to linger on his absence.
He had no wife. No girlfriend. No children.
No money, either. No inheritance to attract false mourners. No estate to divide. Not even the bitter consolation of knowing people would pretend to care for personal gain. Death could not make him important.
The world did not pause for him.
It did not stutter or shift.
It did not notice.
John was gone.
And in the VOID—a realm of forgetting so complete it felt intentional—there would be nothing left of him at all. No echo. No residue. No proof he had ever existed beyond the brief inconvenience of a body being removed from a system that continued functioning perfectly well without him.
"I… I wasted my life…"
The words felt pathetic the moment they left him, swallowed instantly by the VOID. They carried no weight here. No absolution.
"I need another chance…"
He begged then, dignity stripped away by desperation. His voice trembled, not with hope, but with the childish terror of someone realizing too late that the game was over. He did not plead to gods—those had never mattered to him. Instead, he reached for the only higher powers he had ever truly believed in.
Creators.
"Oh please… John Gonzalez… Chris Avellone… Josh Sawyer… anyone…" The names tumbled out, reverent and ridiculous all at once. "Please. Give me another chance. I don't want to be no one. I don't want to end like this."
No answer came.
Of course it didn't.
Even in the things he loved most, he had done nothing but tear them apart. He had consumed endlessly and created nothing in return. He had confused criticism for insight, cynicism for intelligence. And now—now he was dead, suspended in an endless dark without even the mercy of annihilation.
When his thoughts inevitably circled back to Fallout—because they always did—they settled on New Vegas.
And on him.
Mr. House.
The man who would never end up like John.
The master of the Vegas Strip. The architect of survival. A pre-war titan who had looked at the future, calculated the odds, and refused to accept extinction as inevitable. He had not relied on hope or morality. He had relied on preparation, foresight, and ruthless competence.
Robert Edwin House.
He did not need a second chance. He had made his first one count.
Where John complained, House eliminated obstacles. Where John wasted time, House converted hours into infrastructure, into contingency plans, into power. Where John left nothing behind, House built something that endured beyond nuclear fire.
He was John's opposite in every way that mattered.
Someone John wished he could be.
Someone he would have killed to be.
"I'm sorry I beat your head in with a golf club, Mr. House," John whispered weakly into the VOID, the absurdity of the apology almost painful. The nothingness pressed in around him, forcing him to curl inward, folding into himself as though he could make himself smaller, easier to erase.
The last thought he had—his final, bitter, devastating realization—was simple.
I wish I had been you.
John woke to stillness.
For several long seconds, he did not open his eyes. He lay suspended between states, waiting for the familiar pressure of the VOID to close back in around him. He expected the suffocating absence, the formless negation that had crushed thought and sensation alike. Instead, there was weight beneath him. Uneven. Yielding in places, stiff in others. Fabric scratched against his skin. Air brushed his face, cool and faintly stale.
At first, he assumed the VOID had simply changed shape.
That this was another layer of cruelty, another construct meant to lull him into false relief before tearing it away. The darkness felt different—thicker, edged with texture—but darkness had been all he knew for what felt like an eternity. He remained still, braced for revelation or torment, for the moment when the illusion would collapse.
Then he heard it.
Snoring.
Soft. Wet. Irregular. Human.
The sound crawled into his awareness and lodged there, impossible to ignore. It carried breath, rhythm, the unconscious vulnerability of someone alive and unguarded. It was not the echo-less mockery of the VOID. It was irritatingly real.
John's eyes snapped open.
The motion was clumsy, disoriented. He tried to sit up too quickly and tangled in unfamiliar sheets, thin and rough against his skin. His body did not move the way he expected it to. There was resistance—muscle and bone responding sluggishly, then all at once. His foot swung down and struck something solid.
Wood.
Pain flared sharp and immediate, a bright spike that shot up his leg and stole his breath.
He gasped.
Pain.
Real pain.
The sensation was so vivid it nearly overwhelmed him. His heart hammered, his lungs dragged air in too fast, too shallow. Pain meant nerves. It meant flesh. It meant a body that existed somewhere, subject to physics and consequence.
He was not in the VOID.
Light seeped into his vision as his eyes struggled to adjust. The darkness retreated reluctantly, resolving into shapes, then edges, then forms. A long room stretched out before him, its ceiling low and uneven. Rows of bunk beds lined the walls and extended down the center, metal frames creaking softly under shifting weight.
Almost every bunk was occupied.
Dark silhouettes lay beneath thin blankets, bodies sprawled in exhaustion rather than rest. Some slept curled inward, defensive even in unconsciousness. Others lay flat on their backs, mouths open, breath rasping faintly as if even sleep offered no relief.
Young men.
Late teens. Early twenties. Faces and bodies varied wildly—skin tones, builds, scars, hairstyles—but John felt the unifying thread instantly, the way one recognizes rot beneath paint.
Poverty.
Not just the absence of money, but the weight of it. The way it bent posture and dulled eyes. The way it stripped futures down to survival and little else. These were lives that had slipped sideways before they ever truly had a chance to stand upright.
The air was thick and oppressive. It smelled of dry, untreated wood and old dust, of mold clinging stubbornly to corners where sunlight never reached. Beneath that lingered the sourness of unwashed clothes and recycled air, layered over something harder to name. Not despair—despair implied awareness.
This was resignation.
The VOID had not vanished. It had simply taken on a more familiar shape.
John swallowed.
He was in a halfway house.
The realization settled over him like ice water poured down his spine. The setting was unmistakable now—the bunk arrangement, the institutional sameness, the muted palette meant to be inoffensive and comforting but accomplishing neither. He had never been in this place before, and yet everything about it felt known.
How he had escaped the endless dark was a question he could not yet bring himself to examine. The sheer fact that he had escaped felt too fragile to probe. But one certainty cut through the confusion with crystalline clarity.
He would not stay here.
If the young men filling these bunks were guards—hellhounds left behind by some sadistic force to torment him in a new, subtler way—he wanted space between himself and them. If this was a holding pen, he would not wait to see what came to collect him.
He slid from the bed carefully, bare feet touching the cold floor. His balance wavered for half a heartbeat before correcting itself. His body felt… competent. Responsive. Not the sluggish, protesting mass he remembered inhabiting for decades. There was strength here, coiled and ready, unfamiliar but intuitive.
Keeping his movements slow, he followed a thin ember of sunlight leaking through heavy curtains at the far end of the room. Dust motes drifted lazily in the beam, glowing gold against the gloom. The light drew him forward, a promise of clarity or at least isolation.
He moved quietly, instinctively avoiding loose floorboards and jutting bed frames. Each step felt guided, precise. He knew where to place his feet without looking. He navigated the space as though he had walked it a thousand times before.
That realization unsettled him more than the VOID ever had.
He knew this place.
The shared restroom was exactly where he expected it to be—tucked just off the main sleeping area, door chipped and paint peeling around the handle. He slipped inside and closed it softly behind him, easing the latch into place.
Only then did he exhale.
The sound that escaped him was strangled, halfway between a sob and a laugh. He braced his hands against the sink, shoulders shaking as the delayed weight of everything pressed down at once. The walls were thick enough to muffle sound—a mercy, given the noise threatening to claw its way out of his chest.
He reached up and flipped the switch.
The light flickered, buzzed, then steadied.
John froze.
The face staring back at him from the mirror was not his.
It was younger. Sharper. The years had been stripped away with surgical precision. Gone was the softness, the accumulated neglect, the dull puffiness of a body worn down by poor habits and worse resignation. This body was compact, lean, built with an economy of motion rather than indulgence. Muscle lay tight beneath skin, not bulky but efficient, as if shaped for endurance rather than display.
He stared at his hands.
They were long-fingered, steady. Veins traced faint lines beneath the skin. He flexed them experimentally, watching tendons shift with mechanical smoothness. There was no tremor, no hesitation.
Seventeen.
The number surfaced unbidden, settling into place with absolute certainty.
This body felt important.
Not in the narcissistic way of adolescent delusion, not the hollow belief that the universe revolved around him. This was something colder, heavier. A sense that the world itself was balanced precariously around this moment, waiting—watching—to see what he would do.
He leaned closer to the mirror.
Peach fuzz darkened his upper lip, a faint shadow hinting at maturity not yet fully claimed. His jawline was clean, angular, already suggesting the severity it would one day possess. His cheekbones were pronounced, giving his face a sculpted, almost austere quality that felt out of place in a halfway house bathroom.
His eyes stopped him.
Dark. Focused. Intelligent in a way that was immediately uncomfortable. There was calculation there, not cruelty but assessment. Dark circles lingered beneath them, the mark of long nights spent thinking rather than sleeping. These were not the eyes of someone lost or uncertain.
They were the eyes of someone already planning.
His hair was dark and meticulously groomed, parted with care despite the environment, as though personal standards existed independently of circumstance. Even now, even in shock, his posture was straight. Controlled. Precise.
It clicked into place with terrifying clarity.
Robert Edwin House stared back at him.
Young. Brilliant. Untouched by the ruin that would one day scour the world clean.
This was not John anymore.
This was House.
The realization did not come with triumph or elation. It came with weight. With the crushing understanding of what this identity represented—not just power, but responsibility. Not destiny, but the capacity to shape it.
As if summoned by the thought, the air before him shimmered.
A translucent interface unfolded into existence, hovering just beyond his reach. Clean lines. Muted amber glow. Familiar fonts and structured fields arranged with ruthless efficiency.
A Fallout-style character sheet floated before him, alien and intimate all at once. The display normally found on a pip-boy now existed before him as a system style sheet.
And John—no, House—knew what exactly was going on now.
Name: Robert Edwin House
Age: 17
Level: 1
Health: 46
SPECIAL:
Strength — 5
Perception — 8
Endurance — 8
Charisma — 5
Intelligence — 5
Agility — 5
Luck — 10
Skills:
Science — 80
Repair — 75
Computer — 70
Barter — 65
Speech — 70
Medicine — 45
Survival — 50
Energy Weapons — 10
Explosives — 10
Small Guns — 10
Unarmed — 12
Melee Weapons — 12
Lockpick — 20
Sneak — 30
No perks. No modifiers. Just raw potential with starting skills that surpassed any other starting Fallout character.
The interface glowed faintly in the pale light of the bathroom, an impossible artifact suspended between tangible reality and some otherworldly design. Robert stared, taking in each number, each skill, as if by memorization he could will himself into understanding its breadth. His mind had already begun cataloging advantages, drawing mental lines between what he had, what he lacked, and what he could bend reality to achieve. The raw potential was staggering, but the true power lay elsewhere. In knowledge. In memory. In the convergence of two lives now layered into one.
Memories flooded him—House's memories, the intricate web of his upbringing, blended and fused with John's bitter, lived experience. A palimpsest of understanding: formulas, engineering schematics, software architecture, economic strategy, the quirks of human psychology, the mechanics of persuasion and manipulation. What had once been arcane and frustrating for John now unfolded like the most elementary of puzzles. Concepts that had strained his mind—the principles of leverage, of compounding advantage, of strategic timing—clicked instantly, crystallizing in the space behind his eyes. It was as if some door in his brain had opened, revealing a vista he had never dreamed of before.
But it was only the beginning.
A second prompt blinked into existence above the glowing character sheet, sterile, efficient, impossible to ignore:
Mission Notification — Quest Alert
Objective: Arrival at Commonwealth Institute of Technology, Boston — First Session
Status:Accepted
Scholarship: Tuition Fully Covered — Room and Board Not Included
Departure Window: 30 Days Remaining — On-Time Arrival Required
Quest Benefits:
Early Arrival Perk — "Prime Positioning": Arrive 3 days before the first session. Unlock Prime Positioning, which enhances interactions with faculty and staff, ensuring you are noticed as a capable, motivated student. Early arrival allows you to reserve optimal lab or lecture seating, and professors remember him positively when distributing mentorships or recommending projects. Fellow students perceive you as organized and competent, improving initial social connections.
Punctuality Perk — "Clockwork Presence": Arrive exactly on the day of the first session and on time. Activates Clockwork Presence, granting enhanced first impressions with professors and peers. This improves the likelihood of forming alliances with influential classmates, being chosen for leadership roles in early group projects, and gaining access to exclusive opportunities during the first semester.
Appearance Perk — "Impeccable Presence": Dress to impress. Attend the first session in the most stylish, polished attire possible. Unlocks Impeccable Presence, which immediately improves social standing among peers and faculty alike. Students respect and gravitate toward you in group settings, while professors take a favorable view of your confidence and composure. Those who neglect presentation miss subtle networking advantages that may persist for weeks.
Mission Failure — "Late or Unkempt Arrival":
Arriving after the first session begins, or appearing disheveled, inappropriate, or unprepared triggers Failure Status — Negative Impression. Faculty record you as unreliable or careless, leading to reduced willingness to mentor, lowered reputation among peers, and missed opportunities for leadership in projects or extracurricular initiatives. The social standing loss lasts for the remainder of the academic year unless actively mitigated through exceptional effort. Future scholarships will be held from you entirely if you fail to make it.
Mission Status: Time-sensitive. Optimal results require strategic preparation. Failure carries persistent social penalties.
"Boston?" Robert breathed the word aloud. It sounded strange coming from this body, this new voice, precise and controlled. His hands tightened on the sink, knuckles whitening as his heart thundered against ribs that were not yet accustomed to this volume of blood, this vitality.
A full scholarship from what the old memories of the universe lore had mentioned. It seems that right now would be House's chance to rise up, and tread upon the path to his destiny. John would have cowered, unable to even acclimate to the world that he was dragged into, but Robert House, the being whose body he now inhabited, had long hoped for this opportunity, and now it had arrived. A chance to change the fate of who he currently was and rise beyond the shadows of his half-brother's looming figure. Ever since Anthony House had stolen Robert's inheritance, leaving him destitute, the only path before him was the Commonwealth Institute of Technology. With his current stats, college would forge him into the mastermind that would one day save Las Vegas, and through Las Vegas, the human race.
He straightened, shoulders rolling back, spine stiffening with instinctive pride. Boston was critical, yes—it was the keystone of a career that could define his existence—but it was not his first move anymore. Not when other pieces were already in motion. Not when there were scores to settle, opportunities to seize before the rest of the world could awaken to them.
Exiting the restroom, Robert's gaze swept across the dormitory, the thin flickers of light highlighting peeling walls, worn linoleum, and the scattered belongings of transient residents. The halfway house was both a prison and a refuge. It had sheltered him, albeit inadequately, during his final year of adolescence—the year in which his brother had refused him, abandoned him in the guise of courtesy and appearances.
Anthony House.
The name flared in his consciousness, unbidden, unrelenting. Anthony, the elder half-brother, smooth-faced and merciless, the man who had consumed the House inheritance, hoarded control of HH Tool Company like a dragon atop its mountain of treasure. The memory burned, bright and white-hot, illuminating every slight and injustice with horrifying clarity.
If the rebirth of John as Robert House had preserved any lingering personality of the old Robert House, it was this horrifying malevolent sensation that drove the desires of the current body of the new Robert House. Hatred. Endless and dark, if Hatred could be measured, Robert knew, even the most ambitious tally of enmity could never come close to calculating it. If the word Hate was engraved as a 1 inch by 1 inch word repeatedly within every one of the 50,000 square miles that made up the Mojave desert it would fall incomprehensibly short of the fire that burned for Anthony House. Even now, the mere memory of Anthony burns like an inferno, injecting every nerve, every synapse, with a chemical cocktail of rage, cunning, and homicidal. The thought of sowing Anthony House's mouth shut to prevent him from screaming and torturing him endlessly till the day Anthony House died a sad, pathetic, but extremely long drawn out death, was still not enough to calm the tempest that embedded deep within Robert House's heart.
After sixteen years of strategic PR care and courtesy, the mask his half brother wore had slipped. Anthony had executed the ultimate betrayal: theft and exile. Robert had been thrown out of the family estate with nothing but a backpack, a few papers of documentation, and a single set of clothes. No inheritance. No apology. No soft landing. Just the concrete finality of a life erased.
That hatred had driven Robert. It had honed him in the darkness of poverty, in the half-lit corridors of a run down relief center, hours wasted in a stifling monotony of odd jobs just to feed and clothe himself. Yet now a future path had opened, once equipped with the needed knowledge of the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, Robert would have everything he needed not only to architect the downfall of his brother Anthony, but thrive in a world doomed to fall. Even better was the caveat of all the meta lore knowledge of the Fallout world and the wonders that Robert House could call upon to change the odds and not depend on a mail man with brain damage to solve the critical threat of human extinction. With unnerving clarity of House's cognitive architecture, the future ahead burned all the brighter.
Robert's mind was already calculating, cataloging, simulating every possible scenario. The world unfolded before him like a chessboard. Every interaction, every ally, every potential obstacle could be predicted, exploited, and used to build a foundation far stronger than any the past had offered. Knowledge alone was no longer sufficient—he had foresight, leverage, and the accumulated insight of two lives.
The old Robert had survived by instinct and bitterness reacting to what was going on currently; the new Robert House operated with strategy foresight of what would happen in the future. Every slight, every betrayal, every opportunity for leverage was now cataloged, stored, and ranked. A vast mental ledger stretched before him, ready to be executed with absolute precision.
Thirty-five years until the bombs fell. Pre-War America had much to offer before the fall of the world into a barbaric post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, and Robert plan to take advantage of it all.
The number was abstract, horrifying in its precision. Thirty-five years before civilization fractured, before the world he knew—through Robert's eyes—would dissolve in fire, radiation, and chaos. But within that span lay infinity, compressed into actionable moments. Time, measured in decades, could be bent into opportunity if he struck with calculation, if he positioned himself correctly.
Plenty of time—if used correctly.
And Robert Edwin House had no intention of wasting a single second. Already he returned to his bunk, placing his handful of belongings away into a duffle bag. In less than 30 minutes he was ready to leave. Exiting out of the Halfway house and into the Nevada desert night.
The hovering Quest notification reminded him, silently, insistently, of the lifeline waiting in Boston. The doors, the opportunities, the mentors, the networks—everything ready for House to claim. And yet he understood instinctively: the rise to power did not begin in Boston. Not now. Not yet.
There was one more move—a singular step to consolidate power beyond imagination, and if Robert's guess was right then the most powerful artifact within the Fallout universe awaited someone brave enough to acquire it. If this gamble paid off then the House would not only win, but will soon never have to worry about anything ever again. Robert's mind raced, recalling maps, knowledge, and the unfolding of opportunity. And as the images and strategies crystallized in his mind, one city loomed as both symbol and first test of his intent.
Reno.
It held the item he would need to upend the table, and make the proper alterations that would not leave Robert at the mercy of a brain damaged mail man.
Boston would waited. Reno on the other hand held something more powerful than anything else in all of the Fallout world combined. And as soon as Robert claimed it, he would change the tragic future that awaited him.