There Was A War....

Date: 8/8/2224
Location: Vault 288, Library

Since awakening, I’ve been digging through the data—vault terminals, weather logs, military records—trying to piece together the world before this frozen sleep. It’s hard to swallow that it’s 2224, and the last real time I remember was 2076. Hurricane Kendra raged then, a warning from the skies, but nothing prepared us for what came next.

The bombs—they fell in ’77, the records say. I wasn’t there. I was frozen before it all broke loose. The New Orleans I knew, full of life, music, and spirit, is lost to me. Vault dwellers and historians here can tell me only fragments. Their knowledge is secondhand, pieced from faded terminals, broken records, shadows of memory.

The weather alerts paint a grim picture. Skies burned with fire, the land drowned beneath endless floods. Fires tore through what remained, and the rains came heavy, washing away streets, neighborhoods, history. Each log reminds me of what slipped through our fingers—the culture, the souls, the music that once filled the air.

What shakes me most is the silence about New Orleans itself. Vault 288’s history files list it as unknown—no confirmed status after the storms, after the war. It is as if the city vanished, swallowed by fire, flood, and time. I keep asking, seeking stories. But the answers are whispers or dead ends. No one knows if my people survived, if my family still breathes beneath the wreckage.

There was a war. A bad one. The military logs show panic, failed evacuations, desperate defenses. Cities burned. Entire regions were lost. And then nature returned with fury, flooding the bayous, drowning what little remained.

I carry the weight of not knowing like a stone in my chest. Did the music stop? Did the people fall silent? Or are there survivors, shadows walking the ruins, waiting for someone like me to come home?

The past I knew is gone—obliterated by fire, water, and man’s own madness. But the spirit? The legacy? That is the flame I hold onto.

I am here now, a stranger in a new time, trying to find a path forward. But every time I close my eyes, I see the city I lost, and hear the echo of a trumpet fading in the dark.

I am restless. I am searching. Somewhere beneath these ashes and waters, New Orleans may still breathe. And if it does, I will find it.

— Big Chief Mike Marcel