You've experienced the FALLOUT series in your own way, but want to learn more about its story.
Well- to get to the heart of the story- you have to go back to the beginning...
"We interrupt this program to give you a bulletin just received from one of our naval units
at sea. A large object traveling at supersonic speed is headed over the North Atlantic, toward
the east coast of the United States.
The army has taken every precaution to meet any emergency
which may develop. Just a minute, ladies and gentlemen, I think something is happening!"
When the sun rises on the wasteland, a wanderer can look out over this vast stretch of lifeless
dust and feel utterly alone. When that sun sets, and the stars shine, mankind must accept
that we are far from alone in this universe. Of late, humanity has had to share the Earth
with mutants, ghouls, and robots, but it has been centuries since our species could claim
this planet as our sole domain. Even when America was just a group of colonies six hundred
year ago it was being watched from afar by a diabolical race from the far reaches of
the cosmos. Most people will laugh if you say that aliens
exist. Folk will believe in walking corpses, talking deathclaws, and brains in jars with
psychic powers, but they draw the line at little green men in flying saucers. That's
the stuff of pre-war holotapes and radio shows. But no matter how stubborn the skeptics are,
the evidence is undeniable. Go to the right part of the wasteland, and anyone can see
the remains of a crashed UFO for themselves. Some people wave these sightings off as experimental
pre-war air craft that just look like UFO's, but that flying saucer North of Washington
DC sure wasn't a pre-war bomber. Alien ships have been crashing all over the wasteland
for over a hundred years. They're hidden deep in the wasteland, but they're out there for
those who want to believe. The descendants of the Vault Dweller from
Vault 13 swear that the Vault Dweller stumbled upon such a craft over a century ago, and
briefly carried an alien weapon. The wasteland's top scientific minds have held the thing in
their hands. It doesn't work anymore -- runs on some kind of alien power cell that humanity
can't reproduce, but some of the brightest minds in the wasteland have examined it and
are convinced that it's beyond anything made by human hands, even before the war.
That particular space blaster disappeared a while ago. Last anyone knew it was in the
hands of a talkative merchant who probably had no idea what the thing was. Might have
made its way into the hands of someone who put it to good use, or it could be at the
bottom of old saddlebag adorning some brahmin skeleton in the middle of the NCR.
Other alien artifacts have been discovered all over the wasteland, and some of the more
wondrous technology out there is said to be derived from alien designs. A few unfortunate
people out in the wasteland are cursed with mutations that grant them psychic powers.
Sounds like a tall tale, but when you've seen a person's head explode from within, you'll
become a believer right quick. The only thing that keeps these folk from nuking their noggins
is a "Psychic Nullifier" that uses alleged alien engineering. The Master used these to
keep some of his more unique mutants under control, but the design can still be found
out there being used by "Highly Intuitive" denizens of the Mojave.
Much of the amazing technology that the Enclave used is speculated to have extraterrestrial
origins back before the war, and some military installations even have artificial intelligence
that was said to be created in pre-war times with alien technology.
The government back then never officially admitted it, but they knew that aliens had
visited Earth. Right before the Great War, some of the smarter folk figured out that
the apocalypse was a-coming, and they came up with all kinds of plans to survive. Vaults,
and secret oil rigs, but one of the more daring plans was to leave Earth entirely. The knowledge
that there were other inhabitable worlds out there inspired the Enclave to look into space
travel, although the war hit before they could actually get off the planet.
The Enclave are probably lucky that they never made it to another world, because by all accounts
the aliens are just as nasty as anything here on Earth.
Yup, there are people who've met these malevolent visitors face to face and can still talk about
it. A few years ago, a person who came out of one of the vaults on the East Coast ended
up getting teleported aboard one of the mother ships. That's right, those little saucers
that are crashed all over the place, those are just scout ships. There was a whole army
of aliens up there in a mothership, and their own records prove that they've been here for
a good six hundred years. Kidnapping and experimenting on humanity the whole time.
The aliens own records indicate that they've been here since 1697, maybe even longer considering
that some of their captives were wearing medieval armor and carrying swords. A handful of those
unfortunates survived the ordeal, and now have the rare privilege of looking down at
the ruins of Earth from their home in the sky. The view probably ain't as pretty as
it used to be before the war -- and some of them know firsthand. They were kept in a form
of suspended animation that's more advanced than anything on Earth. People hundreds of
years old, emerging from stasis without aging a day. Bet the folks at Vault-tec would have
loved to have had access to that sort of tech back when.
These alien captives are among the few un-mutated people who were alive before the Great War.
They can not only talk about their lives back in by-gone centuries, but they can also describe
what it was like to live among the invaders from space.
These beings do not see humanity as equals. Our lives mean no more to them than brahmin.
According to the survivors, when a human is captured, they are interrogated briefly, then
tortured and stored away in stasis until the day their captors decide to use them for gruesome
experiments. Maybe at some point in the past, the aliens'
goal was simple vivisection, to open us up and see what makes us tick, but eventually
they learned to manipulate the human body and transform us into mindless abominations.
Maybe they needed these half-human abominations as soldiers to fight in some far off war.
Maybe they were the unexpected results of a failed experiment in trying to transform
humans into something else entirely. Or maybe -- maybe these aliens are just a bunch of
little green jerks. We can't truly fathom their goals, though.
We can only gather evidence and seek out patterns in the nigh inscrutable collection of objects
discovered in the cargo holds of their ships. Their teleportation beams have been sucking
up junk from the Earth's surface for centuries and the random materials are crudely organized
around their ship, as though they are trying to learn about us by examining our junk foods
and soda machines. Elsewhere in the massive ship are neatly organized
rooms devoted to unlikely objects that were carefully collected and preserved. Just what
were the aliens planning with that vast armada of robot ponies? Was alien technology used
to make children's toys in the pre-war days? Could these visitors have done more than merely
observe us in the years leading up to the war? The answer could be too terrifying to
imagine. Humanity is not the only species to suffer
at the hands of these creatures, though. They seem to have spent some time interrogating
various other Earth species before determining Humanity to be the most intelligent. They
might have gotten the impression that Brahmin were the smartest creatures around on account
of the two heads, but that hasn't kept the brahmin out of harm's way in the alien experimentation
labs. Our species are alike in some ways, though.
We can eat their food, such as it is. As far as we can tell they live on a diet of space
squids, and giant worms. Not exactly a delicacy from BlamCo, but no worse than mirelurk meat.
We can use their biogel too to heal our wounds, and even keep disembodied brains alive for
decades after they've been removed from their bodies. But it doesn't seem like our visitors
appreciate the similarities between our species. To them, were no more than lab rats.
The good news is that whatever pony-loving scheme they were up to was stopped a few years
ago when that vault dweller got beamed up to the mothership. That fancy light show over
the Eastern horizon a while back was a battle happening in outer space. Somehow humanity
got the upper hand in that ruckus, and now there are a lot fewer aliens around.
They ain't all gone, though. A little North of Vegas, some of the farmers have been seeing
strange lights in the sky recently, and you can bet it isn't a Vertibird. The aliens have
held off any sort of full-scale invasion, but those little scout ships are still out
there causing trouble for people who wonder into the wrong parts of this wild wasteland.
There are people who claim to have seen other species of alien life around the wasteland.
With all the weird mutants out there, you can't blame them for thinking that some of
these critters can't be from this world. The wanamingos out in California are often
called aliens, but they're actually the descendents of genetically engineered creatures that were
bred back before the Great War, using the Forced Evolutionary virus. They look like
something out of an old science fiction holotape, all tentacles and gaping maws.
Most of them were wiped out a few decades ago when some adventurers killed the wanamingo
queen out in Redding. That was only known queen, but there have been sightings of wanamingos
as far West as San Francisco too. Luckily, as a species they've all but died out these
days. Good thing too since they were mighty tough to bring down. A good flamer helped
keep them at bay, but if you ever come across one of them, just shoot it in the groin socket
to show it whose boss. Wanamingos aside, it seems like the skies
have become a safer place for now, but the aliens are still out there. Who knows what
they're after? It's not unrealistic to think an alien race flew all this way for raw materials,
or a sip of water. Water. Now that's a resource that's always
been in demand, and those who control it, control the wasteland.
But that- is a story for another day...