Archibald Cox

Background: Archie was born in the rickety, rusty quonset hut medical building of Nellis AFB around thirty years after the former inhabitants of Vault 34 began calling it home; his grandparents had been oddities in the Vault but also part of the group that revolted against the Overseer -- Irish immigrants with historical roots in other civil uprisings. As a boy young Archibald was very close with his old Gran-da', and as a result Archie has a distinct pattern of speech, a faint Irish brogue that gets thicker when he's upset. From a young age he showed an aptitude for mechanical things, from scavenging the local scrap piles for important components to assembling and repairing the various mechanisms that kept the base going and, naturally, repairing the group's weapons. 

When he was nineteen he left the base with a couple of older members on a trading expedition; he needed parts to fix a few critical components of their water and air filtration systems after a bad outbreak of a respiratory issue they couldn't pinpoint. While on this trip he met a girl, Lucille, with whom he was immediately smitten. She agreed to come back with him if the others let her in; it took effort, but eventually they allowed her to join the group, and when they returned to the base she and Archie were married. She proved a valuable addition; thanks to her wastelander upbringing she had better eyes and ears than the Boomers who'd grown up around artificial light and explosives and whose ancestors had grown up underground, and she knew the migration patterns of the radstags and feral bighorners.

She was very soon pregnant, too. Unfortunately, where there is good news, bad news isn't usually far behind. One afternoon some raiders tried to get through a weak spot in the fences surrounding the base, and while Archie helping defend the line, one of the rockets misfired. Its thrusters failed only a few feet out from its mortar, and the ensuing explosion left a crater in the airfield, three dead, the water filtration system destroyed, and Archie gravely injured. Though the base surgeon was skilled, he wasn't a miracle worker. He managed to save all of Archie's fingers and picked shrapnel from his core, but his left leg was beyond saving. It had to be amputated above the knee.

While he was recovering, Lucille's pregnancy wasn't going so well. She'd developed a nasty cough and a fever, landing her in the next bed over in the infirmary as the surgeon and nurses struggled to control the pneumonia. And while Archie slowly regained his strength and was able to start sitting next to her bed, Lucille slowly faded. It was as if all the strength she had, she put toward her fetus -- and when the day came that she went into labor, she barely had the energy to bring their daughter into the world before she slipped away. 

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