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FOTV The Winning Team! Bud Askins

Bud's Buds is an experimental management training group organized by Bud Askins within the broader Vault-Tec Corporation, featured in the Fallout TV series.

Background[]

According to Bud, the group's stated goal was to achieve an "absolute monopoly" by outliving and overpowering all other factions. In his own words, "The ultimate weapon of mass destruction is time." The group's members were hand-picked Vault-Tec junior corporate employees, including recent Vault-Tec University graduates.[1] Bud envisioned a Vault dedicated to his program, which would allow him and his "Buds" to carry out their project past the end of the world. This vision was used by Bud and Barb Howard during a meeting between them and several key industry figures, intended to encourage Vault-Tec's corporate rivals to support the Vault program by designing their own experimental Vaults.

Bud's vision would eventually come to fruition with the construction of Los Angeles' Three Vaults: the interconnected Vaults 31, 32, and 33. Vault 31 would contain only cryostasis pods where members of Bud's Buds would be preserved, while Vaults 32 and 33 would contain actual civilian populations (also hand-picked by Bud and his team for genetically desirable traits). Every few years, or as needed, a member of Bud's Buds would be awakened from their pod and released from Vault 31 into the population of the other two connected vaults, who had all been taught that Vault 31 was also a normal, populated Vault just like theirs. The Buds would find a way to become the overseers of Vaults 32 and 33, including by engineering disasters, and use their positions to indoctrinate their dwellers into model Vault-Tec citizens. The ultimate goal was to breed a generation of "super-managers" from the original Vault-Tec staff, who would go on to claim the post-War world as their own and lord over it, unchecked by Old World government regulations.

Post-War[]

FOTV Vault 31 Cryobay

Bud's Buds members in the cryobay of Vault 31

On the day of the bombs, the members of Bud's Buds flocked to Vault 31, where they would then enter cryonic pods, similar to those found in Vault 111, planning to reawaken one day in the future and covertly integrate into the populations of the two nearby Vaults.[2] As of 2296, around 219 years after the Great War, the majority of the group's members remain dormant in their cryostasis.[3]

The experimental process carried on uninterrupted for 217 years up until 2294, when the residents of Vault 32 apparently managed to figure out the truth behind the three Vaults and Vault 31's "management." This caused them to rebel, destroying their home and capturing and killing their Overseer before seemingly turning on and killing each other; their corpses remained strewn around the Vault for the next two years before Lee Moldaver's group of raiders came to invade Vault 33, for which a cover story was invented that 32 had suffered a famine.

Bud Askins himself was able to live past the Great War for all 219 years to the present by turning himself into a so-called "brain-on-a-roomba." By 2296, some members of Bud's Buds that awoke and left Vault 31 were also still alive, including Hank MacLean, Betty Pearson, and Stephanie Harper.

Members[]

Appearances[]

Bud's Buds appears only in the Fallout TV series.

References[]

  1. Bud's Buds!
  2. Norm MacLean: "Is this where my dad's from?"
    Bud Askins: "You'll never find out. Oh. He's gonna find out. These are Bud's Buds. My Buds. America outsourced the survival of this country to the private sector. But it would have been insane to keep a failed nation alive. So, we kept Vault-Tec alive instead. A well-trained staff of highly supervised junior executives from my own assistant training program. Because the future of humanity comes down to one word: Management."
    (The Beginning)
  3. Fallout, The Radio
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