<strong>Overseer's Office</strong><br/><br/>Michael had a tune stuck in his head. The previous Overseer had been a fan of pre-war records, he'd saved a sizable collection of them and Michael had gotten into the habit of playing them when he needed something to fill the strangely sticky silence in his office, a silence that had a habit of filling itself with thoughts he didn't want to be having. Mostly those thoughts were about rules. You had to have rules. Humans were natural savages. Look at his poor doomed pre-war ancestors, all presumably fried into radioactive dust on the surface above them because they couldn't stop their own nature.<br/><br/>Rules and someone to enforce the rules. That was him, now. He had waited, had thought, all the time, in the noise and the smell of the canteen, in the bubble made by other people's voices he had thought about the rules. And wrong and right. What was wrong, what was right...he licked his top lip, smiled and went over to the record collection. The old player was scratching out the voice of Elvis Presley, crooning from the other side of life. Michael raised the needle with precision and care, then picked up the record and smashed it, flat-palmed against the wall.<br/><br/>Right and wrong. Some things were right. There was a natural order to right. You knew right, felt it in your bones like the hum of Vault technology, always with you. Or so it had always been for him. Some poor souls, he saw, they couldn't feel it, the subtle hum of right, the correct order of things, the way things had to be. They needed correction. They needed guidance. And he saw that as his purpose. Gentle guidance, the care and feeding of a Vault of souls who, with enough work, could all be perfect.<br/><br/>He put on another record. Carols, for a holiday long gone. He hummed along, bobbing his head. There it was, the tune he'd been looking for. He looked with some surprise at the smashed remains of Elvis, scattered all over his floor, then dismissed them. It hadn't been right. That long-ago crooning had scratched against his bones, it had felt sticky and wrong. He'd have a Mr. Handy in to clean them up. Or maybe a denizen.<br/><br/>The denizens. His poor beleaguered children. He would never admit it, but he felt closer to them than the citizens and security. Those other people, they needed only a gentle polish now and then, the occasional reminder of which way right lay. The denizens, though, they were the ones who needed true guidance. Many of them barely seemed to know right from wrong at all. He was blessed, truly blessed, to have the capable help he had and even then, sometimes he despaired. That was a sticky thought, crept up in on him in the quiet spaces, wrapping tendrils around his thoughts and whispering that the true path was a cleansing. A clean start. A new beginning.<br/><br/>But no. He would guide them. He would<em>show</em>them right from wrong, he would make them see the light, make them crawl and beg until it shown bright in their eyes, until they could feel what was right and natural and good. He would be so proud of them. He wanted to be proud of them, his grasping, savage children, he wanted to make them clean and pure and right, until they didn't scratch at his thoughts, didn't make him feel so<em>wrong</em>. He smiled at the thought, closing his eyes to savor it. The image of all of them, his denizens, his children, learning right from wrong.<br/><br/>Whatever it took, he would see they learned.<br/><br/>He heard footsteps behind him and turned toward the door of the office, startled out of his momentary reverie.<em>Jingle Bells</em>continued to play behind him, lending the whole scene a strangely cheerful air, and he smiled in greeting at his visitor.