camwyn | Philly Notes, Part 2

- Several Vaults are present within a day's walk of Philly; I will number them later and just name them for now
- Libria Vault: "Society needs to be built on a non-emotion-influenced basis in order to survive"
- Found in Libria Vault: meditation vids and books, conflict resolution volumes, psychoreactive chems
- Libria Vault lost a number of people when they decided to get up and leave instead of putting up with the constant injections and meditation regimen
- May or may not have inhabitants at the moment, but it's in bad shape either way
- Huxley's Vault: "Can we tinker with our citizens before they're born to ensure a supply of people who are both good with and content at their jobs without being able to conceive of rebelling out of them? Seriously, will people put up with that?"
- Huxley's Vault is a failure because there is nowhere to send the aberrations other than execution, which kinda cuts into the gene stock
- More to the point, uterine replicators haven't been invented, so they tried to alter the babies during pregnancy
- The women got violent when they found out what was going on
- There may have been pheromones pumped into the ventilation and/or the water as well
- This is not a good Vault to go into
- The Vault of the Chickens: "What varieties of domestic animal will be most necessary to reconstruction as well as the most efficient uses of space and resources?"
- "... and what do you mean that the ordering committee made a mistake and instead of a wide selection of agricultural animals, we now have a Vault with more than two hundred varieties of chicken?"
- "... and a bunch of humans, I guess that's good too"
- Two kinds of people developed in this Vault: people who wanted to be ANYWHERE EXCEPT WHERE THE CHICKENS WERE, and Gonzos
- This one is still operational and is populated almost entirely by Gonzos and every kind of chicken mutation that is still compatible with life
- The Walnut Vault: "Theater and music and other forms of entertainment are a powerful form of propaganda. Can we reconstruct a society shaped to wholesome American standards if we push the importance of musical theater on everyone as part of everyday life?"
- Vault originally populated by actors, musicians, stage hands, performers, etc.
- Unlike Vault 92, the propaganda in this one was not subliminal, but overt
- Also unlike Vault 92 there was more than one source
- And also also unlike Vault 92, at least one of the alternate sources turned into competition
- It became custom in the Walnut Vault to tell people who disagreed with you to do better if they could
- This had the end result of all disputes and strong emotional moments of any kind being cast in the form of spontaneous songs and/or musical numbers
- While the Walnut Vault is no longer operational, its people survived pretty well
- To the point where in certain parts of Philly you hear muggers coming because they're doing West Side Story-style synchronized finger-snaps as they stalk you down alleys
- The Blood Prince may or may not have ancestors who lived in the Walnut Vault
- Presidential Challenge Vault: "Americans are weak and flabby and are not going to survive the world to come if they continue this way. Anyone who wants to live in this Vault is going to have to maintain massive physical fitness to do it."
- Has the unique distinction of being the only Vault in which significant amounts of on-site power were generated by treadmills/rowing machines/etc.
- Actually worked pretty well at first until breakdowns in the system caused the Overseer to start resetting the goalposts for everyone's daily exercises higher
- At some point this tipped into people being asked to do more labor than they had the calories/nutrients to handle, and being severely punished for not running/lifting/whatever as much as they should, even when they were sick or overworked
- It got ugly from there; there may have been other problems as well
- NB: this one should not be structured to say 'physical fitness standards and athleticism are bad', the idea here is to say 'arbitrarily imposed standards that do not take into account the fact that different bodies have different physical needs and capacities are not good things'