.... JASON COLE, HISTORY
Jason was born on July 13, 2258 to a scientist named James Cole and his wife, Catherine. Unfortunately, what should have been a joyous moment for a young couple turned into tragedy, as Catherine passed away not long after due to complications arising from the strain of childbirth. Fearing for his newborn son’s safety in a place as dangerous as the Capital Wasteland, James abandoned his passion, Project Purity, for the sake of finding a place he could raise his son in safety. Happily, he knew of one place already that existed, a nearby Vault, number 101.
They nearly weren’t allowed in. The Vault’s Overseer, Alphonse Almodovar, had elected to reject the exploratory trends of previous Overseers, holding tightly instead to the directive laid out for the vault nearly two hundred years previously: Keep the Vault sealed. No-one enters. No-one leaves. The only saving grace was that the Vault had no trained medical personnel, and James’ scientific knowledge included medicine. The only condition was that James was banned from speaking about the Wasteland. The denizens of the Vault were to pretend that James had always been there, and that Jason had been born there. It was this environment in which Jason grew up, never questioning why, exactly, the other adults in the vault always seemed to treat his father differently. Or why there were only a few dozen people in a vault designed, ostensibly, to hold and house a thousand. He didn’t have much in the way of friends, given that of the precious few children that lived in the vault, the vast majority seemed to internalize their parents’ distant attitudes towards James, and turn it into an instinctive dislike of Jason. The only child who didn’t was the Overseer’s own daughter, Amata. In spite of this, Jason’s childhood was a relatively normal and positive one, until one day in August 2277, when Jason awoke suddenly to alarms blaring and Amata telling him in frantic tones that his father had left the Vault, and her father’s men had already killed people trying to quell any talk of leaving with him. Worse, her father’s men were likely coming to interrogate or kill Jason as well, given James’ close friend Jonas had also been killed.
With Amata’s help, Jason fled the Vault, narrowly escaping with his life and, in a scuffle with one of the Vault’s security personnel, having killed without meaning to. Knowing now that he had nowhere to go back to, Jason tried to do the only other thing that made sense: Follow his father and try to determine what, exactly, had caused him to leave. The search took him to a nearby settlement, called Megaton, then on to a radio station in the D.C. ruins. To Rivet City, a town built out of a wrecked aircraft carrier in the Potomac, where Jason first met some of his father’s old associates, and first learned about Project Purity, his parents’ dream. A machine that would purify the Potomac river of radiation, making drinkable water for the Capital Wasteland a reality, instead of a fantasy. Following the trail left by his father took months of searching, months of gathering information, searching for ‘Vault 112’, the place his father had gone to search for something called a G.E.C.K., but without much to go on aside from ‘somewhere on the western end of the Capital Wasteland’ and ‘underneath a gas station’, it was slow going. Jason helped in a number of ways as best he could in the interim, finding a place to live among the people of Megaton, as well as helping a local woman named Moira to write a book on surviving the Wasteland.
Eventually, though, he found it, in rumors heard by traders, about a vault under a gas station near the old Raider camp in Evergreen Mills. Jason took off at once, and when he got there he found, through a complicated series of events involving the vault’s state of the art Virtual Reality systems… his father. James was initially angry to find his son had left the Vault in which he’d been raised, but after realizing the state the vault had been left in, they both agreed it had been the best option. More importantly, however, Jason knew now about Project Purity, knew from experience how rare and valuable purified water was… and knew that he wanted to help his father make Project Purity a reality. The pair of them departed, rallying James’ old colleagues to kickstart the old project once more, with James explaining that what the Purifier needed was a GECK- a ‘Garden of Eden Creation Kit’, an incredibly powerful device designed by the same company that had created the Vaults to turn the Wasteland into a livable place. Moreover, he knew where one was, in Vault 87, due to records he’d uncovered while imprisoned in Vault 112. He would have set out with Jason to find it- had the remnants of the pre-war government not chosen the time to arrive on the scene. Calling themselves the Enclave, the group unfortunately had more than enough firepower to make good on the threats of killing anyone who resisted, and rather than hand over the keys to Project Purity to a dangerous army that would use it to seize control of the wasteland entirely, James deliberately overloaded the Purifier with radiation, killing himself and leaving the Purifier Room a radioactive death chamber, inaccessible to the Enclave. With a GECK, it could be reversed… but to Jason, who’d just lost his father, it was difficult to bring himself to care. In desperation, wanting to forget about the Wasteland, to try and reclaim something from his old life, he responded to a distress call from his old friend Amata, to help quell a violent revolution that had sprung up in Vault 101. In spite of obstacles in the way, Jason was able, with effort, to help Amata to bring an end to the violence, to convince the Overseer to step down, realizing that keeping the Vault shut would only mean a slow death by attrition as the remaining population was killed off by disease and inbreeding, to install Amata as the new overseer, and to open trade with nearby settlements. In Jason’s mind, he’d saved the day, and maybe at the end of all this horror he could finally just… go home.
But, Amata told him, he couldn’t. The Wasteland had changed him. He made people uneasy. To preserve the fragile peace, he couldn’t stay. Jason Cole disappeared from the Wasteland, that day, leaving the Vault that had been his home forever and, seemingly, vanishing for a period of several months. It wasn’t long after that that rumors began to crop up, rumors of a man wearing strange, faceless black armor underneath a Regulator’s duster, who walked into settlements and left no-one alive. Paradise Falls, the hub of the Wasteland’s slave trade. Fort Bannister, home of the Talon Company mercenary group. Evergreen Mills, the largest raider encampment in the region. All went silent suddenly, within a few months, with surviving witnesses claiming the man had spared everyone who’d been held prisoner in such places- and killed everyone else with mechanical efficiency. The faceless figure garnered the title ‘Lone Wanderer’ on the radio, and other rumors surfaced, of him saving a town from mutants, of how he’d been involved in stopping the raiders coming from the Pittsburgh region, about how he’d rescued people from a cult at Point Lookout… and, later, how he’d walked out of Raven Rock, the Enclave’s most heavily-fortified bastion, and left nothing in his wake but corpses and burning rubble. The Lone Wanderer was a boogeyman, a ghost that showed up on occasion, bought ammunition and chems, and then disappeared. Jason Cole returned to Megaton, though the connection between the two was never made. While Jason’s breakdown and hiatus had seen him wandering the wastes for months, something he’d seen had, inadvertently, snapped him out of it, somehow caused him to pursue the completion of Project Purity once more. With the GECK from Vault 87 in hand and the Lone Wanderer’s ‘aid’ in dealing with Raven Rock, Jason was able to lead the Brotherhood of Steel on a march towards the Purifier, decimating Enclave forces as they stood in the way, and activate it with help from a radiation-immune friend in the form of Fawkes, a mutant from Vault 87. While he barely survived the incident, Jason continued working with the Brotherhood once he recovered, ensuring that the purified water from the river was able to reach as many people as possible, while the Lone Wanderer aided them in driving back the Enclave, culminating in the destruction of their last remaining stronghold.
- Karma: Good
- Escaped Slaves helped during Heads of State
- Megaton Bomb disarmed
- Fawkes sent into control room
- Charon freed
- Amata as Overseer
- Sided against Ashur at the Pitt, still wonders if it was the right call
- Helped the Outcasts
- Braved Point Lookout
- Paulson and Toshiro died on the Mothership
- Saved Big Town
- Wasteland Survival Guide written to the best of his ability, with snide and humorous commentary
- Harkness aided
- Joined the Regulators
- Helped Reilly's Raiders
- Helped Roy Phillips enter Tenpenny Tower peaceably
- Enclave Destroyed
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