Fallout 3 plot

The Player Character is a young inhabitant of Vault 101. The Vault has supposedly been sealed for the last 200 years and no one has ever left it - until it turned out that the PC's father has disappeared from it without any explanation. The Vault Overseer believes that the Player Character was in on it and sends his people after him or her. This leaves the player no choice but to leave the Vault. The player then sets off on a journey to find their father and find out why he left.

Abandoned to rust, decay, and creeping vegetation, monuments from before the Great War still stand amidst the ruins of Downtown DC: the Capitol, the Jefferson Memorial and the battered remains of the Washington Monument; this desolate area is known as Capital Wasteland. The central hub of civilization in the ruins of the former capital is Rivet City, based in and around the remains of an aircraft carrier carried far inland and beached by a catastrophic tsunami whose waters have long since receded. Other settlements include the towns of Megaton, Arefu, Tenpenny Towers and Paradise Falls. Movement between the towns is possible through the Washington Metro tunnels.

The Brotherhood of Steel community is stationed in the Citadel built in the ruins of the pre-War Pentagon. The mysterious Mister Burke and his employer, Allistair Tenpenny send the player on a mission of sabotage and destruction in the town of Megaton. But it is Super mutants, who since emerging from their refuges, have waged an unceasing war against humans to invade their territory, and the Enclave - the self-styled inheritors of the power of the United States government - under the leadership of their new President John Henry Eden, who are the player's biggest foes in the game.

As you search for your father (eventually through either a person called Three Dog in Galaxy News Radio or directly speaking to a scientist in Rivet City) you find that he went to the Jefferson Memorial turned water purification plant, in a project called Project Purity that was meant to purify huge amounts of water for the entire wasteland. However when you reach the Jefferson Memorial you can only find a holotape of his detailing that he went to search for a brilliant scientist called Doctor Braun who worked for Vault-Tec because he invented the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (G.E.C.K.) a device meant to terraform the world after a nuclear holocaust. Doctor Braun apparently went to Vault 112.

As you find and enter vault 112 (conveniently hidden under a persons garage) you find the inhabitants have all gone into virtual reality simulators and are trapped in a virtual existence in Tranquility Lane. Upon entering this place you talk to Betty, who asks you to cruelly make another child cry. Upon doing so she (then beginning to speak with a startlingly male voice) allows you to ask a single question which she says she will answer to the best of his/her ability. He/she then asks you to ruin the marriage of two of the people living in Tranquility Lane, However alternatively one can go to an abandoned house and through activating a set pattern of items in a melodic tune, You can make a fail-safe computer terminal appear. You can then read from the records of Stanislaus Braun how he has been playing cruel games with the residents of the vault, sadistically torturing them and then changing the simulation when it got "boring", you find out that he entered a fail-safe program that would initiate a simulation of a Chinese invasion (borrowed from the government at his request) which will physically kill the residents of the vault because their "safety" is off. However, Braun cannot put off his own safety and therefore cannot commit suicide, meaning that when the Chinese invasion simulation is initiated he is left alone with no one else to torture, as they are permanently dead. Once you do this he reveals your father has been (inside the simulation) a dog next to him, and you can leave freely by using a door next to him (yes, it just appears floating) as he has no power over you now that you used the fail-safe computer terminal. Your father then goes out of the stasis pod and tells you that he went to Braun because he wanted to confirm that the G.E.C.K could be used for Project Purity, and he believes that it is correct!

Once your father is out, he asks you to help him reinitialize Project Purity, and he goes to Rivet City to find the scientists that formerly worked on the project to help him. Once he does, you go to Project Purity's headquarters (the Jefferson Memorial) and try and help fix up the place, upon which you are attacked by the Enclave. You try and find your father but the door is locked and you can only see him talking to Colonel Autumn of the Enclave, which does not reveal why the Enclave wants the non-functioning Project Purity. Your father then floods the closed area he is in with radiation to buy you some time and kill the Colonel, but dies in the process. You then must escape with the other scientists through the Taft tunnels to the Citadel. Once you go through the tunnels you find the elder of the Brotherhood who specially allows you access to the Citadel and allows you to learn how to wear power armor (the most powerful type of armor in the game) You can then look through the archives and find out what the vaults were equipped with, and Vault 87 is equipped with the G.E.C.K. You can then learn the location of that vault (and several others) and must head out to find it.

You must then go to Little Lamplight due to the fact that the normal entrance to vault 87 is completely and utterly irradiated, you can then convince Mayor Macready to let you into Little Lamplight (a town full of children and only children, who leave once they turn 16 into a larger town called Big Town) either through the Child at Heart perk or by freeing some children that are enslaved in Paradise Falls.

Inside Vault 87 you can find Fawkes, a highly intelligent super-mutant who gained intelligence by having access to the vault computers. She was presumably trapped in the room by the other super mutants, or that she reacted positively to the F.E.V experiments in the vault, unlike most of the other experiments which either became centaurs or very deformed creatures. She prefers being called a meta-human. She automatically assumes you are looking for the G.E.C.K and offers to retrieve it for you if you can free her. If you choose not to there is also a room with a radiation suit and rad-away that was used by scientists to monitor the room with the G.E.C.K when radiation flooded into it. Upon having Fawkes retrieve the G.E.C.K or doing it yourself, you can head back, however you are flash-banged by a grenade and captured by Enclave soldiers.

Upon awakening you find yourself in Raven Rock, a Enclave stronghold in the extreme northwest of the map, there Colonel Autumn questions you and asks you for the purifier code upon which president Henry Eden orders him to come talk to him. After a moment he then tells you to go meet him, and orders Enclave soldiers not to harm you (an order then promptly recalled by Autumn) You can then fight through the citadel to the floor with Eden, upon which you can talk to him and find that he is an advanced model of the ZAX supercomputer and was an adviser to all the previous enclave presidents, and is actually an amalgam of all of America's former presidents. He tells you that the only way to get humanity to function properly in the wasteland is through water, however he asks you to take a modified F.E.V vial, which kills all humans with mutations because non-humans are obviously destabilizing the wasteland to the point of making it a misery to exist there. You can then choose to destroy President Eden either through a speech check or Intelligence check or find his self-destruct code and tell it to him. If you ask why the colonel cannot carry the F.E.V for him he tells you that the colonel does not agree with his plans. You can then leave Raven Rock and find Fawkes outside, who came a little late to rescue you. You must then head back to Elder Lyons in the Citadel.

Upon arrival, you can talk to the guard outside about it. He says that he (and many others) thought that you were dead and that you are to meet Elder Lyons down in the lab. When you come, you find a heated discussion between Scribe Rothchild, Elder Lyons, and Sarah. Rothchild is complaining that Liberty Prime is not ready for action, while Sarah is arguing that there isn't any time for other things. Eventually, it ends with Lyons giving up and allowing Sarah, and Lyon's Pride, to go to the Jefferson Memorial with Liberty Prime. Once the Lone Wanderer gets to Project Purity, he/she confronts Colonel Autumn one last time, and must decide his fate. Then, you have three main choices(go into the irradiated chamber of Project Purity and sacrifice himself/herself for the good of mankind, let Sentinel Sarah Lyons go in, or do nothing at all) a small choice should the Lone Wanderer accept is put the modified FEV virus inside the water killing anyone irradiated. The game ends with the picture that Jonas took at the beginning of the game when the player got the BB gun.