“Hello everybody my name is Roger, and I do not remember how long I have been underground. When China and America decided to blow each other to smithereens, I was unable to return to foggy London, where I used to lay my weary head at night. It was with great fortune that my half-brother, that bitch Joseph Godon-Levitt, opened the doors to his prototype vault turned lair for wicked schemes and badminton, and took me in. If he hadn’t… I don’t even want to think about what sort of Bam Miller creature I may have become.

But this fate may be worse. I no longer remember those grunts that my sweet, sweet Molly would make as she carried her eleven-month pregnant tummy up the front steps of our love palace. Alas! Time is now lost to me! All I am left with is memories of my past while I bat a shuttlecock to and fro with a master necromancer, Hollywood man of sex, and budding radiobiologist.

But even that has been harder lately. He has been so busy in his lab with his dark magic–”

“Roger!” a voice shouted at me. I glanced off-camera in its general direction. “Roger, come quick!” it screeched again. I almost threw up. No matter how long I had been down here with him, my brother’s voice still sounded to me like a million bats eating the kidneys of six adventurous donkeys.

Still… there was urgency in it.

“Be right there!” I called back, and then I switched the camera off.

My brother’s necro-laboratory had become my second-least favourite room in this would-be vault, only behind the room that was full of bees. But even with all of the wickedness that happens inside, I had to be brave. I thought of the Game Girl who was once known as the Game Boi before becoming the first ever game to transition to a different gender, no doubt inspiring other games to also do the same (looking at you, Mouse Trap!)

It inspired my legs to have a step through the doorway and into the lab.

My brother stood over a cauldron of some smaragdine-coloured concoction that no doubt would cause misery and woe to mankind. Next to him lay a naked ghoul stretched out on an operating table. I took a wee gander at the computer screen that hovered over top of it:

NAME:	Madison
SPECIES:	Ghoul
STATUS:	As dead on the outside as she has been for years on the inside
HAIR COLOUR:	Peroxide
STRENGTH:	Always has time for twinks
WEAKNESS:	Witty comebacks against adorable ginger English men
LANGUAGES SPOKEN:	English, German, Cursing, the horrific screeching of feral ghouls, Ebonics
NOTES:	A twisted abomination, even by ghoul standards, ‘Madison’ is a mysterious figure in the wasteland. In some respects, she resembles the feral ghoul: dwelling in darkness for long periods of time until suddenly awakening with a terrifying screech and insatiable bloodlust. Also, really easy to kill. Like… actually. She died. Super easy, barely an inconvenience. On the other hand, Madison appears to be able to talk like a regular human, even if everybody wishes she wouldn’t. The truth is, there is nobody else quite like her. If anybody else’s level of radiation could give their very personality cancer like Madison has, they would kill themselves the moment that they looked in the mirror. Madison, however, has broken every mirror she has ever looked in. And so the degenerate continues to waft along through existence until the next sexy twink comes along to kill her again.

“Wait until you get a load of this,” that bitch Joseph Gordon-Levitt said. He dipped a flask into his cauldron and then hovered it over the corpse of the ghoul.

“What are you up to, you toe fungus of a human?”

He didn’t have time to answer. We both heard a sound that sounded like a smash.

SMAAAAAAASH!

Yes! That was the sound that we heard!

“What was that?” I asked.

That bitch Joseph Gordon-Levitt didn’t have time to answer!

SMAAAAAAASH!

A super mutant just smashed my evil half-brother’s head in!

How the heck did that thing get in here?

There was no time to ponder the question, and I had left my warhammer in my other pants. Without it, and without that bitch Joseph Gordon-Levitt to shoot a necrosex-powered plasma bolt into the mutant’s face, I had no way to fight back. I had to flee!

I dove forward into the best roly poly that anyone had ever rolled or polled, and got out of the super mutant’s range! I pumped my fist in the air in celebration, but I might have forgotten for a little bit that super mutants could turn around and that’s exactly what this one did. So I ran.

I didn’t run fast enough.

The super mutant busted through all the walls and whatnot and was really quite rude about the whole thing. Just as I reached the vault door and tried to escape, the foul creature decided to have a wee grab at little old me by my little old neck.

Even wriggling my neck back and forth like I did to escape from my new pal Jake Borden (whose name isn’t apparent Jake Boden after all), wasn’t enough to shake the mutant’s grip!

Oh no!

I’m going to die!

SMAAASH!

The mutant let me go and I fell to the ground.

SMAAASH!

SMAAASH!

SMAAASH!

Those were different smashes! Non-mutant smashes!

I had a wee peek through my hands and saw a mysterious man bludgeoning the mutant to death with the hubcap of a Daihatsu Charade.

When the mutant was finally dead, the large, mysterious man came and offered me a hand up.

“Are you okay?” he asked. His voice sounded like a gentle stream falling off the edge of a cliff and passing through clouds before it landed in a really deep lake. “I’ve been tracking Ozzy there for a while, hope he didn’t get too many shots in on you.”

“Ozzy…?

The beautiful, mysterious man tinkered with a device on his wrist. A hologram burst open, showing an image of the mutant that had just been destroyed.

NAME:	Ozzy
SPECIES:	Super mutant
STATUS:	Making up the numbers
PREVIOUS AFFILIATIONS:	Anyone who pretended he mattered
STRENGTH:	Strength
WEAKNESS:	Relevance
FAVOURITE MOVIE:	Ghostbusters (2016)
NOTES:	A super mutant who pretends to be a human, but is bad at it. And is bad at pretending in general, really. He kind of forgets that in order to fool people, there needs to be some believability behind what you’re selling. Unfortunately for ‘Ozzy’ - as he is affectionately known, he might very well be the dumbest super mutant in existence. Honestly, at this stage, it seems like instead of annihilating Ozzy with absolute ease like absolutely everybody could, people are content to keep him around for the lulz. He may be a super mutant, but in terms of his threat to any passersby, he is more of a sideshow curiosity.

“Whoa!” I said, marvelling at the device. “This is like the post-apocalyptic technology that bitch Joseph Gordon-Levitt had. But on your wrist! Where did you get it?”

This rugged, mysterious man regarded me with a sensitivity I hadn’t experienced since skipping stones on the river Thames with my darling rabbit Elmer so many moons ago. “You can have it, if you want. I’ve got plenty back at base.”

My eyes widened as he detached the device from his own wrist and strapped it to mine. It felt so comfortable and cosy - exactly how I thought giving this man a cuddle (which I promptly did, I should add) would feel like.

“My name’s Barney,” the generous, mysterious man said. “Barney Green.”

“Roger,” I said, and we shook hands. “So how does this thing work?”

“Oh, it can do all sorts of cool things. This icon here shows you your stats…”

He pressed on the screen of the device. A new holographic image appeared:

NAME:	Roger
STRENGTH:	1
PERCEPTION:	1
ENDURANCE:	1
CHARISMA:	1
INTELLIGENCE:	1
AGILITY:	1
LUCK:	9

“You already saw how it can show you information about enemies in the world…”

A menu sprung up with a list of names in alphabetical order. I skipped past Adam Garcia and Atara Raven, and pressed the next name on the list.

NAME:	Aurora
SPECIES:	Human
STATUS:	Going through some things
WHICH ‘SEX IN THE CITY’ CHARACTER ARE YOU?	Thinks they're Samantha, but really they're Charlotte
STRENGTH:	Likes pineapple on pizza
WEAKNESS:	Fire, Fighting, Rock, Steel
SCENT:	Coconut and shea butter
NOTES:	Who is she? What is she? These are the questions Aurora seeks answers to! Luckily, it’s really not that hard. She’s a human, and her name is Aurora. Boom! Done! Move on already, girlfriend! But that’s the thing. She can’t move on. From anything! She’s like a stroppy teenager who just broke up with their boyfriend of three weeks: ‘I’ll show everyone that I’m great just the way I am! I don’t need Chad!’ But she doesn’t believe it. Aurora knows the answers to every question she’s ever tried to ask about herself, she just doesn’t want to accept the truth: she will forever be defined by others, not by herself. She’s less a ‘mystery wrapped in an enigma’, and more a ‘scared little girl wrapped in the constant shadow that Lucy Wylde casts over her’. And also wrapped in a partially metal skull. That seems like cheating, TBH, and cheaters are buttholes. But not the good kind of buttholes. So… yeah. Aurora is a butthole. But if that butthole has to answer a question, can it be ‘what exactly is shea butter?’ and ‘am I allergic to that?, because I don’t do well with dairy.

My eyes were wide with astonishment. I didn’t know that humanity had gotten even worse than Charlie Nickles!

Barney simply grunted and pressed another button. “You can also see your inventory…”

1x Leopard Print Bandana

“And there’s even a map!”

With another press, a green grid floated into the air from the device. “What’s that square over there?” I pointed to a mark on the map that seemed to stand out amongst the rest.

“That’s where I’m going to meet some friends,” he replied. “You should come.”

And so off we set - out into the wasteland together!

Every night upon our journey, the eloquent Barney would regale me with tales of his life, and I would lay my head into his lap and drift off to lovely dreams of my sweet and succulent Molly back in foggy London who must by now be twenty-something weeks pregnant with my child.

But then, one night, disaster struck.

A deathly screech punctured my ear holes, worse than any sound that bitch Joseph Gordon-Levitt had ever made, even in the depths of his sluttiest necro-orgies.

A scary monster burst through the treeline and came straight towards me.

It slashed viciously at me with its untrimmed fingernails, and I made a noise that was somewhere between the sound of a dog's chew toy squeaking and my diabetic uncle Mick stepping on a piece of Lego at 3:14am after coming home late from the pub.

I also moved my head out of the way just in time to not be murdered.

“I’ll protect you!” the valiant Barney shouted as he leapt to his feet.

It was hard to keep track of the fight that followed. Everything moved so quickly like it was a Michael Bay movie crossed with a video game crossed with the massive nosedive Enigma’s XWF career has been post-Madness. I could tell that the gallant Barney was doing well to fight back, but ultimately, I knew his energy was running low.

He turned to me, with a Rorschach test of blood stained across his face that looked exactly like my nan knitting me a cardigan when I was a wee Roger. “My pack!” he shouted. “Get me a drink from my pack!”

He needed health! Eek!

I tore his backpack open. “There’s no Nuka Cola in here!”

“I don’t want Nuka Cola! Give me the can that you see!”

Sure enough, there was a white can amongst his knickers and shurikens. I threw it through the air and even the monster’s mouth gaped open with how awesome Barney’s catch was.

My hero stared the critter in the eye and said “Deathclaw… meet White Claw.” He guzzled the White Claw in one gulp and it gave him the power to keep fighting the Deathclaw!

The fight raged for seven more hours and sixty four minutes!

It gave me lots of time to have a read of all things Deathclaw-related:

NAME:	Deathclaw
SPECIES:	Deathclaw
STATUS:	Much more worth reading about than Matthias Syn
PARENTS:	Alpha Deathclaw and Mother Deathclaw
STRENGTH:	Not Matthias Syn
WEAKNESS:	Garbage men drunk on White Claw, apparently
CHRISTMAS PLANS:	Visiting parents because they still love each other very much, unlike Matthias Syn
NOTES:	If you had the choice to be a Deathclaw or to be Matthias Syn, definitely choose the Deathclaw. Deathclaws are loyal creatures who work together to better the herd; Matthias Syn tries to work with others only if it benefits himself. The most powerful Deathclaws lead the pack; Matthias Syn isn’t even the best on his own team. Deathclaws have sharp claws; Matthias Syn has to tape things to his fingers like Edward Scissorhands to have claws. When Deathclaws eat the human body, they eat all of it; Matthias Syn doesn’t even eat ass. There are recorded instances of sentient, intelligent Deathclaws; Despite his attestations, there is no evidence of Matthias Syn being any more intelligent than a cucumber - and did we mention the Deathclaw’s claws are super useful for cutting up cucumbers? Deathclaw > Matthias Syn, every day of the week.

When I looked up from my studies, I saw that both Barney and the Deathclaw had fallen to their knees. They traded one final karate chop on each other.

The Deathclaw exploded into goo.

Barney began vomiting up hot dogs and seltzer.

“The watch…” he sputtered. “Follow it… The apocalypse… find the monument… death!!!”

“Yes, sweet prince.” I said to him as he closed his eyes for another classic Barney Green snooze. “I shall follow where your post-apocalyptic watch is taking me! I shall do something with or about the apocalypse! I shall make a monument to your death! I shall never forget you!”

And so I never did forget the hero Barney Green.

When I reached the location on the map that he had sent me, I saw a big monument that had already been created to memorialise the wasteland’s mightiest saviour.

It spoke to me.

“DEATH,” it said, just like Barney had! And as I saw the others approaching the monument too, I knew I was exactly where I needed to be: with Barney’s buds.

Thank you for listening to my tale.