The Lost Ones (Vault 66)

Name: The Lost Ones

Other Names: The Crazies, the Hive.

Type of Faction: Vault

Faction Leader: The Lost Traveler

Other Names: The Drake, It.

Active Characters: Jimbo

Other Notable Figures: N/A

Goals: The goals of the Lost Ones are simple – they wish to eat and grow. From their base of Vault 66, they scour the concrete and rebar ruins of the pre-war city of East Hampton, lying in wait with machetes, bats and other hand to hand weapons to maul on their prey. That prey is usual anything that ventures into the city or the surrounding areas. Anything they do not kill they drag back to the Vault to add the Hive.

Beliefs: The Lost Ones worship the Lost Traveler as their god. Given they have all been driven insane by having their minds linked and taken over by the powerful psyker, their doctrines about him are highly inconsistent. But the overarching belief is that he is somehow linked to the fundamental workings of reality and that his goal is to bring all to himself.

Allegiances: While the Lost Ones are generally hostile to all intelligent creatures not within the Hive, there are a few exceptions. Particularly, the Lost Ones are insane but not necessarily always evil. This means that there is a factor of chance in their dealings with others. The basic break down is as follows:

70%: Hostile
20%: Convert
5%: Answer questions and speak randomly
3%: Answer questions and speak honestly but cryptically
1%: Answer and speak coherently
1%: Other

Because of this irrationality, there are some who actually willingly venture into East Hampton, either out of a worship for the Lost Traveler and desire to be added into the Hive or to use the Lost Traveler and the Lost Ones as a oracle – to seek whatever knowledge they've scrapped from countless minds. The primary ones to do so are the raiders of the Port, a city constructed over the East Hampton Airport. In particular, the Wanderers, the cult that is set up on the outside of the city, often tries to make it into the town – only to die in the process.


The sole exception to surviving the ordeal is taking the guide. His name is Jimbo the Jethead, or to those who actually believe and trust in him, Jimbo the Journeyman. He has made a small business in actually guiding those who wish to question or join the residences of Vault 66 to the Vault entrance. Since, for some reason, the Crazies are less likely to be hostile while at the mouth of the Vault and much more likely to lure them inside so that the Lost Traveler can take over the wastelanders' minds bit by bit.

Enemies: In general, the Lost Ones are enemies to all intelligent creatures. However, the Project despises them, seeing them as one of their own failed experiments that also causes collateral damage in taking over the minds of other specimens like the Telefrags and the Crawlers. They wish to kill off the tainted Lost Ones and take in their leader for further experimentation.

There is also the raiders of the Port, who are divided over the issue. There are the Wanderers outside of the city who worships the Lost Traveler. But within the Port, there are some who sees them as a dangerous, but practical tool to locate and avoid the freaks from the Project(primarily the Steadies, Mendes' Men, and the Bootleggers) while the Scavs and the Inquisitors just wants them dead.



Headquarters: Vault 66 was built underneath the St. Luke Episcopal Church in East Hampton, NY. The entrance to the Vault was in the basement of the Home Sweet Home Museum just across the street on 18 James Lane. Just like the instance with Smith Casey for the founding of Vault 112, the Musuem served as a mask for the darker secrets within.

The Vault itself is broken up into three sections. Directly after the Vault entrance are the living quarters, eight hundred rooms broken up into eight quadrants of a hundred. Outside of each room is a table with scattered cards, bags of puzzle pieces, and tanks of dead moths lying on the tables or tipped over to shatter against the metallic floor. Also on the floor are countless bloodstains and long forgotten skeletons. The skeletons that were not ignored were nailed up, spread eagle (arms and legs wide apart) against the walls at random points.

The second section is the atrium with the overseer's office, security office (under which is the armory), the scientists living quarters and the reactor room ( Assistant Matthew Hill, Dr. Howard White, Dr. Alissa Cromdell and several other survivors locked and barricaded themselves in there. However the long term exposure to the leaking radiation from the reactor turned them into feral ghouls, feeding on each other's corpses to stay alive) all branching off it in different corners.

The last section is the laboratory, where the scientists gathered and compare the data collected. Here is also the archives of the holodisks taken of each individual test taken by the subjects along with the SIM-U-TEC Chamber 002 in the middle. The possessed Lost Ones in this inner chamber guard the area around the pod and the computers which, when looked at, causes a nearly instantaneous take over by the Lost Traveler. However, the computers are also necessarily to unlock the armory and the storage area which contains three vats of FEV.

Locations:While the Crazies can be found in most parts of East Hampton, they do not dare venture too close to the Port. They are most heavily concentrated at the Home Sweet Home Museum, the St. Luke Episcopal Church, and the South End Cemeter. With a lesser spread in the East Hampton Library, the Hunting Inn and the Maidstone Golf Club.

Maps:

Vault 66:

The Lost One's Influence:

Armaments: Even in the beginning, when the Lost Traveler's grasp hadn't been so strained over so many minds, the Crazies were just that – crazy. Far too crazy to be conscious enough to know how to aim, point and shoot. They prefer mauling their foes with thrashing hands to picking up anything on hand and beating their prey to death. Though the most common weapons would be police batons, taken from the old Vault, and 9 irons from the Maidstone Golf Club, some wield machetes and axes – dried blood still caked on them.

Armor and Uniform: All the Crazies wear identical Vault 66 jumpsuits. Worn, tattered and covered with grime, but still faithfully handed out to any new member of the Hive. In their addled state, there is a sense of unity and wholeness with all the Hive adorn similarly - all the better to display their oneness with the Lost Traveler. The suits, along with their glowing eyes, are the one thing that is coherent about them. And the last thing you will ever see is those green eyes, as they chant nonsense and hold up the suit, or at all other times, when those eyes shift to a deep red and those suits contort as they charge at you.

Vehicles: N/A

Technology: The Vault still contains security armor, police batons and N99 10mm pistols left forgotten and rusted in the security office, as well as some shredded armor from corpses left rotting on the ground, now nothing more than bleached bones in ghastly stains. There is a armory that holds some more heavier weaponry, like assault rifles, combat shotguns, cattle prods, and riot armor, but to unlock it a code is needed for the Overseer's computer in his office – the same computer that can unleash a knock out gas through the Vault's vents should the ventilation system is made functional again. Lastly, the Vault houses a SIM-U-TEC Chamber 002 which is currently occupied.

Other: The Crazies share a hivemind, linked and controlled by the Lost Traveler, because of that they have the unique ability to act in sequence. Should a victim be spotted by just one of them, they all know where the person is. And so any attempt to escape may meet up with random ones popping up, the victim not seeing them but they knowing where you are. It's what makes traversing through East Hampton nearly impossible, just being spotted by one of them means a horde will be coming after you soon.

Numbers: Like most Vaults, even the experimental ones, Vault 66 was issued with a thousand people. However, for the purpose of the experiment, eight hundred of these were test subjects while the other two hundred were scientists, broken up into teams assigned to eight blocks. But after the Lost Traveler, or Subject 65, took over the test subjects broken out of their locked rooms and fought off the scientists, Overseer and guards. By the time the night was over, six hundred were dead and the remaining four hundred were a through mix of Vault dwellers, scientists and guards. Since then their numbers have fluctuated, some dying through exposure to the outside or just old age if they manage to eat and kill long enough. But with some being added over the years the total numbers is now five hundred.

[/img][/center]

When the employees in the Vault Tech Headquarters in Washington D.C. thought up of the experiment for Vault 66 the idea itself was simple. Take all the proclaimed or suspected persons within the country who had supernatural gifts, test to see if they truly exist and if they don't then see if they can be awakened and then formed into a fighting force.

It was during this planning stage that Dr. Howard White suggested that the Vault be moved to Montauk, Long Island and the surrounding area. A recent addition to Vault Tec, he had been working in that area for some time before he had been reinstated to the capitol. While unable to give specifics, he mentioned that he personally knew some great minds in Montauk who would be essential in operating and managing the testing facility. Made head researcher of the Vault-in-construction, the whole team moved to Long Island.

Once there, Howard was quick to recontact his past coworkers. Dr. Alissa Cromdell and her assistant Matthew Hill were the head of a experiment in the Montauk Project that concerned both awakening and controlling mind control powers in subjects. When given the opportunity to take the experiment and do it on a much larger scale and to devote her time solely to the project, Dr. Cromdell jumped at the chance. The Montauk Project signed off on the transfer of the experiment, with the conditional clause that they would reap the benefits of the experiment in the unlikely event of a nuclear holocaust.

That unlikely event occurs on October 23, 2076. However, unlike other Vaults, Vault 66 was already operational at that point. The primary reason for this, of course, was Dr. Cromdell's research and ongoing experiment at the time. She merely moved her subjects and procedures into the newly made Vault and continued where she left off. Therefore, there was a concern of gathering new subjects for the experiment that meet the requirements (namely had some suspicion of supernatural abilities) while staying out of the sight of the public and keeping the facade that 66 was just a standard Vault. They solved the problem with only giving out around five hundred acceptance letters, with the additional three hundred subjects being undesirables taken off the streets – orphans, widows, homeless and the like.

One of those undesirables was Richard Drake.

Born and raised in Germantown, Maryland to Arthur and Mariland Drake, the couple quickly realized that the boy was “special”. Not wanting the shame of having their relatives know that they had a mentally-unhinged son, they hid him away, hoping homeschooling, private physician visits and the good ol' American way would cure him. However, he only got worse. Odd things started to occur around him – he would walk by kitchens alone for just a moment and then the parents would find shattered plates and broken cupboards - though they hadn't heard a word. He would spend hours staring at birds in the backyard, mumbling to himself, as if he could hear them - rumors about psychic powers quickly swept through the neighborhood and the Drakes could no longer get anyone to show up to their dinner parties.

Just when they were at their wits end, the situation slipped out of their control when Richard got a hold of one of the house phones and, pushing numbers randomly, called the police station.

He is taken in by dispatch and is confined while they consider transfer options. His parents are brought in multiple times to clarify the nature of his condition. It was during these talks that the odd supernatural aspects surrounding Richard Drakes were noticed by the Vault-tec personnel in the D.C. Headquarters. Drake is listed as a person of interest and his file is faxed over to Dr. Cromdell. A day later on paper the transfer is finalized to the Maryland Hospital of the Insane while he is really taken up north to Vault 66.

But whether the Vault dwellers were taken prior to the bombs dropping or after their answering of the alarms on October 23, 2076 their fate was the same. They were all knocked unconscious with a sleeping gas, either in transit or upon entering the Vault, and then injected with FEV in the pineal glands along with the Amygdalae and Medulla for good measure. The subjects then awoke in their assigned rooms, marked with their test subject number. The room itself is very bare. A single bed, a bathroom, a dresser and a table and chair. The table and chair is set against a wall with a window, with a mirroring one on the other side of the window, underneath which is a metal slot.

At the beginning, there is only meals provided through the slots to the tables, so they only sat there to eat. However, after the first day one of those from the scientist teams would then come, sit down at the opposite table, and ask questions. This first stage was merely to establish if any of those taken from among the test subjects already have active psychic powers.

The experiment was meant to test five psychic skills: clairvoyance, telekinesis, teleportation, materialization and mind control (which included powers such as mind reading and telepathy). There were different levels for each category, getting increasingly more difficult as the test went on.

For example, the first level of the clairvoyance test used a deck of cards. The deck was shuffled, three cars were drawn blindly (so not to be mistaken for mind control),placed face down, and the subject had to tell them what cards they each were, pointing to each. The next level dealt with a scientist pulling out a puzzle piece from a bag and holding up the piece without looking at it – the subject had to be able to envision the completed puzzle without having ever seen it.

It was because of the harmless nature of these tests, that the Vault dwellers dropped their guards. So when the second time they went up to be tested they went into the chairs without fear – only to have it lock them in place. For now that the scientists had a basic grasp of what the subjects were capable of, now they had to test whether any results were merely flukes and to awaken their full potential. When the subjects tried to concentrate they would be shocked with a low pulse voltage, spiking their brain activity in a short burst.

The Vault 66 dwellers had been warned upon their initial awakening in their cell blocks that refusal to do the procedure would mean a day without eating. They did not understand the purpose of such a rule until then. The day after the shocks, a good portion of the test subjects refused to sit in the chair, preferring not to eat. But as the days went on, their resolution faltered. And the few holdouts were knocked out through the vent system in their rooms, force fed some food, and then strapped in the chair.

So they charted the results, wracked up the voltage for the next test, and repeated.

After the findings came clear, Dr. Alissa Cromdell felt discouraged. It seemed that any supernatural rumors around them, either self-claimed or otherwise, were merely false alarms. More disappointingly, they couldn't create superpowers just through the shocks and the FEV, though the FEV was having effects on a few of the test subjects, driving them into insanity and forcing their test chambers to be made into quarantine rooms. Just when Cromdell was convinced the experiment was a failure, Dr. Howard White brought to her attention Richard Drake, a subject under the guide of one of his scientists. While he had shown minor results in telekinesis and clairvoyance, what he excelled at was mind control.

The level one stage of mind control was a test which involved a moth fly. A single glass container is put on the table outside the room. Within it, a moth flies around in the left half while the right half is empty – separated by a wall. The goal was to take control of the moth and then press it against three buttons on the roof in a specific order, A,C,B, to lower the wall and then fly it to the other half.

The results for Richard Drake were both promising and unnerving.

During the first stage, before the shocks, the moth seemed to just flutter. Richard Drake did not seem to be interested in it, or the test at all. Despite finally sitting down when prompted. When the lowest level voltage occurred, Drake was just confused, eyes darting around with each zap. When the scientist gestured to the moth, his eyes went to it, before darting around again, muttering about, “The months eat my kidneys. The moon burns … burns!”

It was the next day that the first results came in. The scientist was once again prodding for answers, and Richard was screaming through the pain when, suddenly, as if coherence came out of nowhere, the man shot a glare to the researcher and suddenly the moth came careening out of nowhere, slamming at the glass wall – desperate to get at the scientist. The man stumbled out of his chair and the test ended.

Time passed, and both Richard's and the moth's behavior became increasingly erratic, until there was a breakthrough at last. He succeeded in taking over the moth, or, at least, they believed he did. But instead of following the instructions he had the moth slam itself against the buttons again and again and again, so that when the door finally did open the moth had already died on the bottom, the glass smeared.

They decided to move Richard Drake to a different holding cell, one closer and more isolated to aid in further testing. However, while he was almost at the new chambers he suddenly woke up – much sooner than he should have. Instantly he fought off his holders, and when the security team came to apprehend him, they suddenly stopped, screaming and clutching their heads, looking up a moment later with eyes glowing green.

As a fight broke all around him, Richard Drake giggled and spun in place, utterly unconcerned with escaping, singing lines like, “The wings on my shoes have grown! They flutter on kiss of cupids!” and “Elvis Presley oinks gun blasts in space!”. Finally though, the possessed security guards are taken down and Drake is tackled and forcibly injected to be knocked out.

Realizing that he was far more dangerous than expected, Dr. Alissa Cromdell and Howard White decided to enact the protocol in place for such a situation. Vault Tec had ordered a SIM-U-TEC Chamber 002 from Virtual Strategic Solutions, Inc. This allowed them to put Richard Drake into stasis, and view his brainwaves.

But once again they miscalculated.

For when the pod activated and Richard Drake's mind went into the virtual reality and his brainwaves were recorded on the computer screens the scientists yelled, cradling their heads. It turns out, looking directly at the brainwaves of a mad mind controller is not such a good idea, even if it was encrypted in binary. When the scientists opened their eyes, they were green, and, all of a sudden, Richard Drake saw the contents of virtual reality and the desolate, underground Vault at the same time.

And any last shred of sanity he had left was gone.

So, the scientist must have been banging against the keyboard like drums because it was not coherent thought which unleashed the Vault dwellers from their cages.

The fight was quick. The fight was violent. Drake was lost in the tumult of it all, his mind jumping from one to another, but always lashing out, always clawing, always biting, always being shot in a rain of bullets, blood and guts. But when the dust cleared, the Vault was his.

..................................................................................

Notes:

1. The Lost Traveler is limited in his mind control ability in two main ways. First is range. The original scientists who viewed his brainwaves on the computer monitor he has complete control over, however, when he hopped from them to the other test subjects within the Vault he retained less control, hence why they worship him as a god. Jimbo, a ex-Raider who fell under the Lost Traveler's sway, lives in seclusion outside of both the Port and the Vault and so is pretty much free of influence save for voices in his head driving him mad.

Second is that his power works best on human psyches. One of the reasons why it took him a while to control the moth is because it was unnatural to him. Regular humans he can control just fine, but ghouls (like the feral ones locked away in the Vault), the freaks from the Project or even supermutants (should they ever come to East Hampton) are much harder for him to manipulate.

2. The Lost Traveler is the only psyker in the Lost Ones. None of the others awoke to powers or will awake to powers. Hordes of hiveminded mandmen are enough of a threat without adding physic powers to the list.