unapologetic weirdo was taken

Summary

Kate is a botanist in the Followers of the Apocalypse, passionate about finding alternative ways to manufacture medicine without relying on scavenging Old-World resources. To do so, she'll need to breed hardier crops that can survive the Mojave climate, as well as express the chemical compounds necessary to craft them. A USDA Seed Lab located in the Spring Mountains northwest of New Vegas might just offer her the opportunity to do so, but the journey there is treacherous. It isn't until the crops on the farms just outside of the city begin showing signs of disease that Kate, headstrong and determined, sets out on her own to find a way to save the people of New Vegas from a potential famine.

Basic Information

S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

S - 2

P - 5

E - 6

C - 5

I - 9

A - 5

L - 8

Tag Skills

Science

Survival

Sneak

Traits

Good Natured

Small Frame

Inventory

Silenced 10mm Pistol

Hatchet

Broc Flower

Xander Root

Maize

Background

Vault 42

Kate is originally from Vault 42, located in Olympia, Washington. It was an agrarian vault, tasked with growing nearly every fruit and vegetable imaginable, with the hope of reintroducing them to the wasteland on Reclamation Day, or so the dwellers inside were told. For nearly two hundred years, they lived in abundance, never going hungry—until the famine hit. One day, the crops were flourishing. The next, they were diseased and sickly.

Kate's father, the lead botanist, tried to save as many crops as he could, but ultimately, it was in vain. Everything had to be scrapped. The killing blow was the discovery that Vault 42's food rations had been ransacked. Paranoia over hoarding, chaos, and civil unrest broke out. The Overseer initiated a lockdown, ensuring the vault would stay sealed, and kept himself protected in his office by posting guards outside with orders to kill anyone who came near. With their supplies running out and no means to escape, the vault was doomed to starve.

It didn't take long until the dwellers began killing each other—parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends, and lovers—over the last remaining scraps of food, but the atrocities didn't stop there. Those who survived the food riots resorted to cannibalism to satiate their hunger. To protect her, Kate's parents hid her in an access panel and sacrificed their last remaining rations to feed her. Her father had plans to sabotage the reactor to force the Overseer to open the vault, but before he could, the cannibals found him. From the access panel in the reactor room, at ten years old, Kate watched as her parents were murdered, then dragged off to be butchered.

Desperate not to let her parents' deaths be in vain, Kate, herself, sabotaged the reactor to draw both the Overseer and security downstairs, then snuck up to the Overseer's office. She picked the lock on his door and found he had been the one who had ransacked the vault's food stores. Towers of purified water, stacks of Instamash, sugar bombs, and Salisbury steak, crates full of fresh fruit and vegetables lined the walls of his office. Kate was devastated.

While the Overseer attempted to stop the reactor from malfunctioning, Kate accessed his terminal. Though the clock was ticking before both he and security would return, curiosity got the best of her. Searching through his communications, she found evidence suggesting that the vault was merely an experiment to begin once the population had reached a certain threshold. The disease that killed the crops was manufactured by the Overseer himself. The last communication on the terminal was an outgoing message that the experiment had begun.

Infuriated that her parents' deaths, and the deaths of those she had once called friends, had been reduced to nothing more than data points, she chose to wait instead. She hid in a locker within the Overseer's room, then waited for him to return. She watched as he stuffed and gorged himself on the rations, her belly growling and threatening to give her away. Then she waited until he fell asleep and stabbed the Overseer to death in his bed.

As he lay dying, Kate, covered in blood and gore, looked down at her hands in horror. She had become just like everyone else. Shame and guilt overcame her. Quickly, she packed a bag with all the supplies she could carry, overrode the bault door controls, shot and killed both security guards who had been stationed outside the office, and fled the vault, running as fast as she could to put as much distance between her and the cannibals that were sure to follow.

With raiders around every corner, the city of Olympia was too dangerous for her to stay in, so she headed east into the wilderness. Using stealth and sheer luck, she managed to stay alive for about a month on her own, but eventually her supplies ran out. Thanks to her father's botany expertise passed down to her, and through trial and error, she quickly learned what plants were safe to eat and which ones would put her through agony.

For a while, she stole from farmsteads, always retreating into the wilderness in shame before she could be caught. Eventually, she came across a caravan and overheard them talk about the New California Republic. They spoke about politics and the expansion into the Mojave, and how taxes were bound to go up yet again. Recognizing these as signs of a functional civilization, Kate set out to find it, but before she could, winter settled in.

The Watchers

Wearing nothing but her PIP-Boy and a vault suit stained with blood, Kate attempted to trek through the Cascades. The wind was brutal and icy, and the snow relentless. Exhausted, malnourished, scared, and alone, she found a little alcove in the rock just off the trail. In there, she brought her knees to her chest and cried into them, only for her tears to freeze to her cheeks.

But just when she thought her time had come, a man wearing a firefighter's respirator mask and helmet found her. He wrapped her up in a tattered wool blanket and carried her up the mountain to the Lookout, an old fire watch tower, where a group of Forest Rangers provided her with medical care, food, and warmth.

Kate would learn that the Forest Rangers belonged to a group of settlers calling themselves the Watchers—the descendants of tourists and U.S. Forest Service workers who had been on Mount Rainier when the bombs dropped. Relatively isolated and protected by miles of wilderness, they survived for years by living off the land and trading with travelers who passed through the Cascades.

The Forest Rangers were elite woodsmen, trained in firefighting and search and rescue operations, and were responsible for protecting their park and keeping order. The man who had saved her was a Ranger by the name of Mason, who had seen her attempting to hike the trails from his station at the Lookout. Once Kate was well enough to talk, he asked about the blood on her suit and how it got there, but fearing he'd put her in jail—or worse—for killing the Overseer, she kept silent. Mason accepted that the child before him had been through something awful and let it go. Instead, he focused on what he could do, and that was teaching her to survive.

Over the winter, Kate learned that the Watchers, those who lived in and maintained the settlements within the state park, kept farms at the lower-elevation campgrounds, and living quarters, medical care, trading posts, and schools at the lodges and cabins. She saw a functional society, where everyone was compelled to help each other, and felt sadness. It was the future on the surface that the vault dwellers had been promised.

It did not take long for Kate to discover that Mason, the oldest and most experienced of the Rangers, was a man of few words, but when he did speak, everyone listened. He taught Kate that the wasteland could be cruel, but that didn't mean she had to be, and that it was everyone's job to make the world a better place. From him, she learned to fight, hunt, fish, track, farm, cook, and use the land around her to her advantage, while ensuring that the forest they lived in, and all the creatures who lived alongside them, were also treated with respect. Finally feeling like she had a home again, Kate couldn't bring herself to leave when the snow thawed, and Mason, who had always wanted kids but never quite got around to it, adopted her.

In Kate's spare time, she pursued botany, identifying plants and their properties to see if and how they could benefit humanity. In a way, nature became her best friend. Whenever she spoke to her flowers and herbs, they listened, unlike the other children her age.

Though the Watchers had taught her a great deal and had become family to Kate, she still wondered who was at the other end of the communication that the Overseer of Vault 42 had sent. She wanted answers, and staying with the Watchers would mean a lifetime of uncertainty. When she turned 18, she said goodbye to her old friends and began her search for what she'd later learn was the Enclave.

Followers of the Apocalypse

Kate traveled to many vaults and, in her search, found very few details about Project Safehouse. Discouraged, she decided to head south and find the New California Republic, hoping someone there had some answers. The journey was long and dangerous, but since Kate now had the tools and knowledge to protect herself, she felt more comfortable traversing the wasteland than she had when she was a child. 

Upon reaching Shady Sands, she couldn't believe her eyes. It was an oasis of civilization, with power, technology, running water, and social order. Kate learned that the Enclave had been all but annihilated some years ago, with their members branded war criminals due to face execution for their crimes against humanity. It didn't sit right with her, though—the timeline was off. If they had been destroyed before her vault executed their experiment, then with whom had the Overseer been communicating? At the behest of a compassionate local, she was encouraged to give up her search and do something she was passionate about instead.

Kate came across a Followers of the Apocalypse outpost, learned about their mission, and felt that their organization most aligned with her values. Upon learning more, she was instructed to travel to the Boneyard, where she was embraced with open arms.

There, she finished her education and studied pharmacology and botany, but her dream was to craft medicine without relying on pre-war manufactured materials. To do so, she focused her research on integrating natural remedies, like the ones she had learned from the Watchers, into western medicine, though she was gently discouraged by others to put her time and energy into proven methods instead.

During her final years in the NCR, Kate began a relationship with a medical doctor, but it ended rather poorly and rather publicly when she caught him cheating on her with his receptionist in the exam room. To get away from him and all the looks of pity others gave her, she transferred to the Mojave Chapter of the Followers. Since then, she has kept her heart locked up to avoid another heartbreak. It also meant fewer distractions, so her focus was solely on her research.

In New Vegas, she helped Tom Anderson get the West Side Co-Op up and running and took on the task of creating a community garden in Freeside, working closely with The Kings to keep it protected and watered. Not long after arriving there, she met Angela Williams, an OSI scientist, and befriended her, despite the tensions between the NCR and the Followers.

Seeing Kate's brilliance, Angela told her about the NCR Agricultural Project, their investigation into Vault 22, and the existence of a USDA Seed Depository and Botany Lab located in the Spring Mountains, in an effort to recruit Kate from the Followers and into the OSI. She then elaborated that while the OSI was able to send contractors into Vault 22, they had no such luck getting into the USDA Lab. What little intel that had made it back to them suggested that it was heavily fortified on the outside, and that the seed vault was protected by Vault-Tec technology, impenetrable without a PIP-Boy to override the door lock—something, Angela pointed out, Kate possessed.

The idea burrowed its way into her brain and stayed there for weeks. With tensions rising between the Legion and the NCR, Kate knew that it was too dangerous to go alone and attempted to convince Beatrix Russell to accompany her on the journey. Beatrix agreed to go only if Kate received Julie Farkas's blessing, knowing it was a mission Julie, in good faith, could not sign off on. Kate attempted to persuade Julie, promising that she could craft medicine and solve their supply crisis, but the attempt failed. It was too risky.

While tending to the garden, Kate vented to Ross, a King's gang member, about her troubles and how she was disappointed with the garden's yield. He asked her if there was anything that could have been done differently, but Kate explained that it was a genetic problem—the species of maize they planted wasn't meant to thrive in desert conditions. If she had the right tools, she could genetically modify the crops to make them hardier, but the tools she needed were in the mountains, and Julie wouldn't sanction such an endeavor. Ross then told her that although The King had final say on Freeside matters, every man was free to live for himself. The way he figured it, she was free to make her own path, too.

Kate took the advice to heart and later that night set out for the lab, launching the events of The Fruits of Our Labor.

Personality

Kate is an intelligent, compassionate, kind, if not stubborn member of the Followers of the Apocalypse. Although she says she has a hard time relating to other people and prefers the company of plants, almost everyone around her has something kind to say. Her hard-headedness does have a tendency to rub people the wrong way, but her intentions are good.

Due to her trauma, she's not always forthcoming with information about her past. When initially questioned about it, she comes off as stand-offish and even rude—the reason being that even though she acknowledges "wasteland justice," the little girl in her still fears that she will be killed or put on trial for killing her Overseer.

When Kate later learns about the Enclave and their role in the vault experiments, she considers it a blessing that they were wiped out. She will comment on their atrocities and though she doesn't advocate for capital punishment, she believes all members of the Enclave should stand trial for their crimes against humanity.

Despite her hatred of the Overseer and the Enclave, she believes all living beings are worthy of respect and dignity—even deathclaws, who she cites play a keystone role in the ecosystem by keeping other predator populations under control.

Harkening back to her Watchers upbringing, she believes in conserving the native ecosystem of the Mojave and is hesitant about introducing non-native crops to the desert. Although she'd prefer to capitalize on existing flora, she is not naive enough to believe that humans won't grow what they can to avoid starvation.

As for her romantic life, Kate admits she doesn't have much experience, and the experiences she does have weren't good. After her last failure of a relationship, she put romance on a hiatus, preferring to focus on her work. When asked what she looks for in a person, she says she looks for someone kind, patient, and not afraid to do the hard stuff. Making her laugh is the quickest way to win her heart.

Overall, Kate is a bright light in what some would consider a hopeless, desolate wasteland. Though she is kind, she is not afraid to defend herself, often taking the route of stealth rather than rushing headfirst into battle.

Tag List