#also this is my first attempt at a photoshop edit hehe

[harrisonsblues]

“It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now.” - George Harrison

HAPPY 50TH ALL THINGS MUST PASS

[randamhajile]

@malpaislegate AM I WRONG!!! and YES the flag still kills me too...... I was just.... putting together shit in photoshop based on some old Deseret flags and I made the edit with the gun in the claw and zoomed out and just. lost my fucking shit. showed it to emily. we both lost it. had to keep it. 

AS FOR THE 12 SURVIVORS OF VAULT 70.......... here’s their entry on our timeline:

May 22nd, 2140: The 12 ghoul survivors of Vault 70 emerge just outside of the ruins of SLC, including amongst them Byrum Pratt and Bert Gunnarsson

May 22nd, 2150: After a decade of prayerful discernment in isolation in the main temple in SLC, the 12 depart the ruins of the city and seek out civilization, running into scavengers heading north, whom they accompany to Ogden, finding a small but stable rag-tag group of Mormon survivors living there

Late 2150: The Mormon Church is officially reformed with the 12's guidance, especially driven by Byrum, and Ogden is renamed New Canaan. The 12 then part ways to find other Mormon settlements to re-integrate into the new church

Basically, the canon lore for Vault 70 is that it was located just outside SLC and populated almost entirely with devout Mormons, and then the vault suit extruders were set to break after six months so they eventually wouldn’t have proper clothing LOL. Where our AU kicks in is establishing that after a while two factions emerged in the vault: those desperate for clothes and those who said fuck it, and essentially became devout nudists. The first generation in the vault see the problem get worse when the clothed half attempt to fix the suit extruders and eventually find some success, except the clothing they make is irradiated, but they wear it anyway because they think it’s better to be sick and pure than healthy and immodest. the nudists naturally reject this and become more devout in response to prove they aren’t sinners. The breaking point comes when the clothed faction had accidentally rendered themselves sterile thanks to the suits, and out of desperation tried to fix the extruders again only to unleash a newer, more intense wave of radiation that kills almost everyone in the vault except for 12 of the nudists who are flash-irradiated and ghoulified.

Lordy I’m putting this under a cut because it’s getting long ofc

They survive and cling to their faith after the disaster, leaving the vault to find an empty, dead, irradiated world. Because they’re ghouls, they can survive the radiation just fine, and head north to SLC, which is still empty thanks to lingering radiation. The big main temple and churches are miraculously intact even though they’re surrounded by craters from the bombs lol. In the Survivalist’s logs it’s mentioned there are 13 nukes that hit the SLC area, which I have to believe is intentional because like, Jesus + 12 apostles..... (later on the craters are named for the Holy Son and each apostle.... we have them drawn on our map. did we mention we have a google map with all our AU stuff on it? because we DO). Anyway like it says up there, they help firmly re-establish the church in the region and provide guidance for the Mormons who survived in Utah.

Bert Gunnarsson, who you can meet in game at the Aerotech Office Park and who canonically is an Elder from New Canaan, is one of them. The OC we made who’s the crux of the group, however, is Byrum Pratt, and he’s just. The Best. Despite losing his family and everyone else in the vault, his faith guided him and he still remains hopeful, being an extremely jovial person with an infectious personality, always ready with a joke or a long-winded story at hand. As one of the nudists, while most of the time these days he’s clothed, he still likes to remind people of his origins and so you never know if you’re gonna see a naked ghoul sunbathing near the temple on a nice day LOL.... a lot of people still find this pretty unacceptable but also like. Everyone loves him and he’s one of the 12 so what are you gonna do??? lmao.

His whole deal and what he preaches is that 12 were spared by God to help guide the Mormons left in Utah, as well as serving as a reminder for their own sins--not ones of immodesty, but the spiritual and communal negligence of the clothed faction who spurned them, and who they in return spurned as well in bitterness. They are now stricken with the same condition they scoffed at them for--sterility. But the lesson remains, the clothed ones were so obsessed with trivial details of their faith like modesty that they were willing to give up something, far, far more important--their fertility, and ultimately, their lives.

Under him and the 12, the church gets a little more lax on certain details of the faith, as they stress the importance of really keeping God in your heart and that God, family, and community come above all else, and not to lose sight of this by falling into performative routines that lead to a false, sinful sense of superiority.

When Lex forms the Latter Day Nephites, he’s super on board with the idea, being declared their leader in a figurehead capacity. He commands a lot of loyalty and helps wrangle a lot of folk to help the effort, and later is crucial in the establishment of New Deseret.

He’s also the one that FINALLY gets Joshua to help the resistance.... by personally asking him to come, and well, Joshua can’t say no to BYRUM.... but that’s ANOTHER long explanation, hehe.