Session 1

The party wakes in their tents to reveille on a bugle at a Scout Jamboree campground. The Vault-Tec employees who've spent the whole week quietly observing the scouts — watching, taking notes, clipboards in hand — are already gathered by the buses. They move through the campers selecting specific kids. The party is among them.

They're directed onto a bus — "a tour of the Mt. Rushmore renovations," one employee explains, lazy and dispassionate. Boarding with about thirty other selected kids, they're driven the few miles from Keystone up to Mount Rushmore. The bus doesn't head for the visitor center — it turns onto a gravel construction road, ending at a pre-fab office built against the base of the mountain.

Inside: three Vault-Tec employees, two in hushed tense conversation, one glued to a terminal. Petra investigates a cheap, flimsy papier-mâché model of Rushmore at the room's center — a decoy. The party notices the filing cabinets along one wall are built into a much sturdier section, secured with high-quality locks. Trying the cabinets gets them shouted away; the terminal-watcher won't answer questions; Bishop's bluff about needing medicine doesn't land.

So the party improvises. Zendaya kicks a table leg out from under the Rushmore model, sending it crashing down in a cloud of plaster dust, pulling two employees away to cough through the mess — and drawing the terminal-watcher's attention too. Johan fumbles with the safe to pull him even further away. In the chaos, Cheesesteak reads the terminal screen: a countdown, fluctuating but steadily converging toward zero, running for a very long time. He tries to hack a file marked "Intake Database" — fails, triggers an alarm, and gets yanked hard enough to slam his head into the wall, opening a bleeding gash (the start of a concussion that recurs later this session).

Then the terminal beeps. "Alright. It's go time." All three employees move to the filing cabinets and input long code sequences in eerie, practiced unison. While they work, Bishop turns up a screwdriver searching the room; Petra's attempt to glean anything from the whiteboard yields nothing.

The cabinets split apart, revealing a tunnel into a cave. As the employees funnel the kids in, Zendaya tries to hang back and stall — caught and shoved into line. Silas notices a girl, Rosa, frozen and cowering behind a desk, unnoticed by staff. When the stern terminal-watcher spots her too and moves in, Silas gets there first, gently leading her into the cave himself.

Deep in the tunnel, a faint rumbling builds. The group reaches a vault door and files through — the last of them barely inside when it begins sealing. As it closes, flashes of light flare from the cave mouth behind them, and a wave of hot air rolls in. This is the Great War happening in real time, right as Vault 44 seals.

The party is seated in a long hallway lined with chairs, called through a guarded door hour by hour, group by group. Pressed for answers, a guard claims it's a "routine medical exam" — a lie, which Zendaya reads instantly. Johan's pushing only annoys him further; Petra's sweet talk misjudges his accent as Bostonian, Cheesesteak piles on with Red Sox talk, and the guard snaps that he's actually a Packers fan from Wisconsin. His hand drifts to his sidearm — irritation, not a real threat — and the party backs off.

As the last group through, they find rows of sterile, dentist-like chairs wired with cables and tubes. No sign of struggle, everything clean and recently maintained. Doctors administer injections and check vitals. Cheesesteak's doctor notices his dilated pupils (the earlier concussion), gets a "ligma" joke for his trouble that lands well enough to make the doctor give up and move on — though he's rougher with the actual injection after.

Then the clamps come down, locking everyone in. A deafening buzz. Dish antennae descend in front of each face. From the side of each chair, a large syringe presses slowly through temple and bone into brain. Nobody dares move. The needle withdraws at the edge of their vision — and everything goes black.

The party wakes on cold steel tables, robotic arms cleaning strange amniotic gel from their skin and dressing them. Their bodies feel too big, wrong. Gestation vats sit behind each bed, terminals reading five years and either eight or nine months of gestation. Two other tanks nearby: one holding a malformed failure, another marked "Experiment terminated, 23 days into gestation." Silas finds a faint reflection in the tank glass and, for a moment, sees his father's face before realizing it's his own.

A robotic voice asks each of them to verify identity by name. Bishop's "Bishop" is rejected — his real name, Weston Cole, is what's on file. Zendaya's system flags an error: no last name on record, file marked for a Vault-Tec update.

The party enters a cavernous room with fake rocks and metal trees, split by a river. The rocks are hollow and unstable — they spin underfoot when tried as a floating bridge. The party settles on pushing over trees instead. Zendaya crosses first and slips, injuring her leg; Cheesesteak, watching her mistake, straddles the trees and scoots across safely; Bishop talks a water-fearing Silas across with a comforting lie about the water being safe.

The two fallen bridge trees snap loose several usable metal-branch spears — but only enough for two people. Cheesesteak climbs a still- standing tree hoping to pull more branches free by hand; they're welded solid and won't budge. The party knocks over a third tree instead — this time with a natural 20, snapping loose plenty of branches for everyone.

A robotic voice congratulates them on passing Assessment Chamber One, directing them onward.

The party arms up with BB pistols and rifles from a rack. A buzzer reveals cardboard targets bobbing in windows around a fake town facade. A metallic voice repeats "jammed, jammed, jammed" — the sixth target. Bishop investigates without taking cover and takes a burst of BB fire from a hidden, malfunctioning Protectron, losing use of his arm. While the others pick off the stationary targets, Silas takes a full turn to line up a precise shot and shuts the Protectron down cold — but not before another wild shot hits Bishop's leg, severely injuring it. The rest of the targets fall easily once the threat's down.

A third chamber follows: mostly ruined, computer-lab aesthetic, with a single corrupted terminal still running an old Cold War loyalty-and- patriotism test. Cheesesteak reads a bit, decides it's not worth pursuing, and the party moves on without engaging it further.

The party emerges into the vault's main foyer — decades of rust and dust, most doors sealed shut. One office shows signs of long habitation: a desiccated corpse at a terminal, nametag reading "Silas." The logs reveal the truth — this Silas was one of the original children inducted into Vault 44, later conscripted into the genetic cloning program. He tried to raise a clone of his own; it died. The vault's population collapsed as the cloning process failed again and again, and Silas grew cold and distant watching it happen.

The terminal's intake records give the party the fates of their originals. Most lived out their lives doing maintenance and clerical work in the vault. Cheesesteak's suffered a traumatic brain injury during extraction, worsened over time, and lived out his life as a vegetable — grimly mirroring Cheesesteak's own concussion this same session. Petra's original died during the extraction procedure itself.

Under the bed, Cheesesteak finds a teddy bear — the original Silas's, containing only stuffing and memories. Petra uses that stuffing to treat Bishop's leg wound, and somehow it works, sealing the injury clean.

The vault entrance's cave beyond is long collapsed, but a shaft of light and a trace of moisture suggest a way up. Everyone but Bishop makes the climb cleanly; he slips and reopens his wound. At the top, the party emerges onto the unfinished face of Eisenhower's carving on Mt. Rushmore, looking out over the Black Hills. Below, the wasteland bears the scars of nuclear war — craters, ruin — but the woods are alive with sound: birds and animals crying out, their calls strange and wrong. Session ends here.