Welcome back to my deep dive into the deep lore of Fallout 4! That sentence feels like Dr. Seuss wrote it, but I digress. Radio Stories is all about appreciating the small and isolated stories hidden amongst the Commonwealth, primarily through the lost and forgotten radio signals that were set to repeat years, decades, or centuries ago. This rendition is for Relay Tower 0SC-527, a tower located pretty southward, just southwest of Big John’s Salvage. There is almost always mole rats standing by, so heads up on your approach. Then you just do the usual: access the terminal at the base of the tower and extend those satellite dishes to the sky above! You will then become privy to three new radio signals.

Distress Signal

This signal will bring you straight into super mutant land, so be careful. In the same neighbourhood as Milton Hospital and Roxbury Station lies Fallon’s Department store. It’s a huge three-floor store that’s full of clothing stores, appliance showcases and currently, super mutants galore. To find the source of this signal, you have to go into the basement, which is the jewelry and accessories section and press the big red button under the central counter. There are wires leading to it. This opens the super secret safe room hidden behind a bookshelf. This room can only be opened from the outside, which leads to the reason why the voice on the radio lived their last days there. I can only assume it’s a safety feature in the event that someone holds the place up, you could trap them in the room until the police arrived.

Unfortunately for the lady on the radio signal, that made it a less than optimal bunker to wait out the apocalypse. It’s certainly pretty depressing to know that the reason why no one is answering her call is that pretty much everyone is now dead. It’s also upsetting since it’s about the easiest solution ever to get her out. Literally, anyone can press a simple button and let her out, but no one ever heard the call. On the plus side, the room she died in is still full of locked safes that are ripe for the picking.

Miller Family Radio Signal

We’re still in super mutant territory with this signal. Northeast of the tower lives Big John Salvage, a large and slightly confusing junkyard full of cars and old train parts. As mentioned in the radio message, there is a hatch leading into one of the train cars that is locked when you arrive. Follow the wire attached to it and you can find a switch on the big blue generator. That’s the very switch that would have allowed the Miller family to get a breath of fresh air. Alas, it seems that Chuck and John weren’t available while they tried to survive the nuclear fallout.

Inside the bunker is the usual sad scene. On a mattress on the floor lay the skeletons of the two parents, held tightly in each other’s embrace. Beyond that, a portion of the train car has been broken through and a small alcove has been dug into the ground. There you can find two small graves, one with a baseball mitt and baseball, the other with a teddy bear. It seems the children died early enough before the parents that they were able to put them to rest. Empty cans are strewn about the kitchen as well, implying that the family was also running out of food as well as oxygen.

Supermutant Radio Broadcast

This broadcast always makes me laugh, despite how horribly gruesome the location it’s coming from is. It starts off with a woman making a genuine and totally real plea for humans to come to the local high school to receive help and not violence. Then a very smart super mutant interrupts to inform the radio voice that they, in fact, do want to kill and eat the human. He seems to not quite grasp lying and trickery, despite his best efforts.

The room where this broadcast originated is absolutely disgusting. There are headless bodies hanging from hooks, a corpse lying across the counter, and another body, who I can only guess is the lady on the radio, tossed in the corner. Peaking into the large cooking pot on the ground reveals where the heads of the hanging raiders are. I can only imagine that the super mutants keep kidnapping humans who walk by, threatening them into reading the broadcast, getting frustrated when they forget the point of the broadcast, and then killing and eating them.