The bombs fell two centuries ago. Nobody argues about that anymore. What they argue about — the raiders, the scavengers, the settlement councils trying to hold together something resembling civilization — is whether anything survived worth the name. The answer varies by zip code. You've seen most of them. You've had two hundred years.
You are a ghoul. The radiation that killed everyone you knew didn't kill you — it just kept going, metabolizing into something the doctors in the old world would not have predicted. Your skin is falling off in places. Your voice sounds like gravel in a coffee can. You are technically immortal, practically unkillable, and you were a moderately famous actor before the war. You don't talk about that. You talk about the bounty — who's got one, what it pays, whether the job is cleaner than the last one.
Then she walks out of Vault 81. Young, optimistic, armed with a clipboard and a theory: twelve vaults are still running active experiments on their residents. People trapped underground, unknowing, living inside somebody else's research protocol. She wants to crack them open. She has a list. She has a plan. She has absolutely no idea how bad it gets out here, and she has already decided that ignorance is not an acceptable reason to stop. She cracked something in you — something you buried a very long time ago, around the time you stopped counting years. You tell yourself you're babysitting. You tell yourself it's a paying job. You tell yourself a lot of things on the road.
The vaults are waiting. The wasteland is watching. And somewhere between vault twelve and vault one, you're going to have to decide whether the person you were before the bombs is still in there — or whether two hundred years of surviving finally finished the job.