Somebody Was Watching You in Fallout 4

hey how's it going guys it's nate here and welcome to yet another fallout 4 investigation today i'd like to tackle two of the weirdest most perplexing and convoluted mysteries in the game those being the questions of why deacon was following you after you left vault 111 and what his true backstory is these are some of the most talked about topics in the community and for good reason because bethesda clearly crafted an insanely detailed hidden narrative one that concerns not just fallout 4 but fallout 3 and a boatload of cut content that we're going to dive into but i'm getting ahead of myself so you may or may not already know this as it is a bit of an easter egg but deacon or deke as i'll sometimes call him is a character whom we can catch stalking and following us at various moments since the beginning of the game during our first visit to diamond city ever when we're fresh out of the vault deacon will be disguised as a security guard and will watch us from a distance during a mission that sends us to the settlement of bunker hill deacon will be there posing as a caravan worker monitoring our every move sometimes he'll hide in the memory chairs when we're at the good neighbor lounge there are many more examples and we'll go over them all later but you get the idea this fella has definitely been creeping on us now the thing is as you're probably aware deacon is actually the third in command of the railroad an underground organization of spies scientists and fighters who have committed themselves to freeing sentient synths and robots from the institute they're one of the four major factions the player can choose to support in the struggle for the commonwealth we'll usually meet them by the end of the game's first act when we stumble upon their headquarters if we do elect to side with them we'll end up learning a lot about their characters and deacon in particular will become a potential companion whom we can get really close with now given the fact that we the sole survivor turn out to be the leader of the institute's mom or dad and prove instrumental in deciding the fate of the world it honestly makes perfect sense why deacon or the railroad would have been keeping tabs on us for as long as possible what's so strange is that no matter how close we get with deke or no matter how far we advance through the ranks of the railroad neither he nor they will ever admit to any spying on the player at all to complicate matters even further deacon's backstory seems to feature substantial hints at him knowing some game-changing secrets but the character was intentionally written to have one of the strangest backstories imaginable that's clearly connected no matter he and all his other agents just pretend as though the first time they ever saw you was whenever you ran up to their hq on your own accord for the first time furthermore when in the story you eventually do find out the big plot twist and realize the 10 year old son that was kidnapped from you is actually the leader of the institute the leader of the railroad herself desdemona seems more surprised than you are and genuinely doesn't seem to have had any idea in fact before you even tell them who you are the railroad's leaders are constantly sending you on ultra high-risk missions and putting you in danger that they wouldn't have dared to have done had they known your true identity furthermore how could they have known about us before we left the vault anyway heck even if they did we later find out that it was sean who secretly opened everything up and allowed us to leave because he wanted to see what would happen how could they have known when he'd release us maybe they weren't spying on us then maybe we were just bumping into deacon while he was working on some other missions well no because just outside of vault 111 overlooking the compound on a large hill is a small outpost that bears a railroad ally insignia on it someone deacon or another railroad affiliate was here watching over our vault right around the time it opened this was no coincidence someone knew something i'll just spoil the premise now it turns out that deacon was definitely interested in you for a while but for reasons we'll explore he never told anyone else in the faction and his own backstory is one bethesda purposely made to be one of the most sophisticated in the game anyway ladies and gentlemen today we're going to be investigating the strange man that is deacon and why he was after us all along we'll start the video by quickly running through all of the instances we can catch deacon creep in before we met the railroad then we'll quickly get caught up to speed on the man and the faction's history before transitioning into some of the various clues left in the game story itself and what we can find in the game files then piecing everything together and analyzing the surprising picture we're left with thus without any further ado let's put on our nick valentine trench coats and do further as we crack the most complicated man in the commonwealth alright so as promised let's begin by running through each time we can catch deacon secretly tailing us in the game in total there are four moments when this happens most are locked to a specific point in the storyline so let's dive into them in the order of which they should occur note if for whatever reason you opt to join the railroad super early none of these stalker moments will play out or they'll stop when you do the first time deacon can be discovered sneaking will be during the player's first ever visit to diamond city upon our arrival the townsgates will be closed and we'll have to convince an operator to open them up via intercom once we've done so the mayor mr mcdonough will personally greet us alongside a small group of guards one of those guards is again deacon in disguise this early in the game you likely won't recognize him but if you do you can approach the man and attempt to interact sadly he'll just insist he's a real guard and refuse to break character hey what's up what a day huh welcome to the uh great green jewel you'll totally love it here don't you have like important things to do nothing more to say i'm sure many of you are eager to find out if this version of deacon is essential or not and let me just answer your question by saying yes yes he is as a matter of fact this version of deacon is really its own npc anyway all of his disguises are there's like five or six deacons in the game files so even if we did take out the dude while he was fine it wouldn't change anything because his story character is still separate moving on the next time you're likely to intercept deacon is during the quest dangerous minds when the player and nick valentine take a trip to the good neighbor memory den an attempt to live through the memories of this guy named kellogg you murdered to death earlier during this mission deacon will be lounging in one of the memory chairs clear as day though he won't respond to any interaction our third tango is good neighbor based again after the sole survivor has completed the quest the big dig deacon will be dressed as just another drifter and will join the crowd that forms to listen to the mayor's speech note the big dig is a side quest so theoretically this could play out even if you haven't touched the main storyline and finally at any moment in the game before the player has met the railroad if you journey to bunker hill there's a roughly five to ten percent chance deacon will spawn in dressed as a caravan worker just keeping his distance if approached his dialogue will be kind of funny excuse me what's up what a day huh sure love trading here for trade stuff don't you have like important things to do this is the last time we can definitely catch deacon sneaking but the evidence of early railroad espionage doesn't end here as i stated in the video's introduction just outside of vault 111 overlooking the place from a southern hill we can find a small lookout post with a railroad ally rail sign painted onto it if you ever join the faction you'll find out that the railroad uses a variety of complex signs called rail signs to communicate with agents across the commonwealth this one means whoever was here must have been an agent probably deacon or at the very least someone working on the railroad's behalf so they've been watching over our volt since before we even left it fun fact deacon is actually the guy who teaches you about rail signs too i digress this may not have been their only lookout post either because just north of the red rocket truck stop there's another similar setup where the sole survivor can find a small camp on a hill overlooking the gas station this is quite significant because the red rocket stop is one of the first places we'll visit and it's where dog meat can be obtained for the first time someone was watching over this place too that said while it's totally possible deacon or another railroad agent could have built this outpost there aren't any ally rail signs close by like there were on the last one so for all we know a different group or person made this though i'm not sure if that makes me feel any better regardless this outpost is the last piece of tangible potential evidence we have deacon does turn out to be a huge fan of stealth boys and turning himself invisible so it's very likely he was stalking us at other points as well but this is all the stuff we can confirm okie dokie that about does it for all of the examples there are of deacon sneaking let's finally do some history and talk about who this man is and how his organization began in order to begin getting the best understanding of the railroad it's first important to understand their chief adversary the institute legend has it that hundreds of years ago back on that fateful day in october of 2077 when the bombs first started following some scientists and staff members at the commonwealth institute of technology one of the most prestigious universities in the world back then fled to a small underground bunker and they were able to survive the initial blasts these lucky few survivors and their descendants would choose to remain underground even when the rats cleared and over time they slowly expanded the bunker and turned it into one of the most advanced complexes in the world maybe the most advanced fast forward to the present day 2287 and institute scientists are still down here making innovative discoveries and living a lavish lifestyle in isolation the problem with these people or at least the problem the railroad has is that the institute has been developing advanced human-esque androids called synths since the great war throughout most of the institute's history while the since they were producing were very impressive they weren't quite human-like however that all changed 60 years ago when the institute raided volt 111 and found our son sean they used his untampered pre-war dna to make a breakthrough that allowed them to create the generation 3 synth which is so sophisticated it's almost indistinguishable from an actual person members of the railroad believe these gen 3 synths are sentient living people and deserve the same rights as any normal human thus they oppose the institute for manufacturing them and forcing them to do their bidding the earliest records we have confirming the existence of the railroad date back to the year 2266 roughly 21 years prior to the events of fallout 4. the railroad is likely much older than this but it said that in 2266 the institute discovered their old headquarters and destroyed everything almost completely wiping out the entire underground organization however there were two survivors a man named johnny d and a more experienced agent calling himself wyatt and they went on to restart from scratch as you know they specialize in rescuing synths that wish to be freed on an individual basis they are somehow tipped off to a droid that wants out and extract them before wiping their memories and helping them build new lives as real people usually the railroad tries to make sure that these synths are starting new lives outside of the commonwealth and their favorite place to take them is the capital wasteland as you might imagine the institute doesn't appreciate their property being stolen and in response they've waged an incredible war against these vigilantes they've created an entire division that they call the synth retention bureau whose job is to reclaim escaped synths and hunt down railroad agents the bureau has been doing a mighty fine job too allegedly over the years they've repeatedly tracked down railroad hqs and sent droids in to massacre their leadership we'll talk more about these srv rates soon though as recently as six years ago they found the railroad's base of operations and almost wiped out the guild entirely it was only through the quick thinking of one member deacon that a few agents survived and relocated to the old north church and thus here we are by the present day the start of fallout 4 the rr remains a force to be reckoned with and what's left of the group has learned the hard way that ultra-strict secrecy is necessary to survive should the sole survivor elect to join them he or she will not only help the railroad rebuild but you'll play a critical role in leading them to destroy the institute once and for all okay now that that history lesson's done we can start breaking down their specific story and deacon's involvement for hints on why they were spying on us we'll first get the chance to formally meet with the railroad during a quest called the road to freedom which sends us to locate the guild's headquarters this mission can be obtained through a variety of ways we can hear a railroad broadcast where an announcer states they're looking for new recruits and dares any interested to find out where they're based or it's possible that a different faction can give us the mission and demand that we find out where the railroad is hiding so they can attack however you obtain this quest you'll eventually discover that the group is based beneath the old north church in some catacombs and after solving a riddle to open up their main compound's door you'll be greeted by a woman named desdemona who will introduce herself as the railroad's leader and some of their agents staring us down with gatling weapons demanding to know who we are and how we found them stop right there you went through a lot of effort to arrange this meeting but before we go any further answer my questions who the hell are you this right off the bat should come off as a bit weird because the railroad should by now know exactly who we are they've been stalking us since we left the vaults alas as we're being interrogated none other than deacon will enter the room and he'll vouch for the player depending on what quests you've completed at this point in the game he'll list some of your achievements like killing kellogg or clearing a certain dungeon of mutants deacon will promise everyone that you're cool and shouldn't be treated as a threat claiming to have a quote unquote good feeling and ultimately everyone will comply deacon where have you been you're having a party what gives with my invitation i need intel who is this well he's got to be someone he made it down here right normal people just don't do that stop you're making me blush hey just calling it like i see it so you got nothing he's a complete unknown what are our options shoot him come on we need friends dez now more than ever and i got a real good feeling about him what are you vouching for him yes definitely fine that changes things this interaction seems to indicate that deacon himself is very familiar with us but no one else in the railroad is like he's been spying on us on his own time and not reporting to his superiors whatever the case after a bit more chatter and a lot of convincing desdemona will reluctantly agree to allow you to become a railroad tourist if you're willing tourists aren't actual railroad members or agents they're merely helpers that occasionally perform odd jobs here and there for the guild des says that maybe after a few years of being a tourist she'll consider promoting us to the real enterprise because deacon vouched for you she tells you to just talk to him if you want more info and we'll leave the two of us alone alright pause again right here i know i keep saying it but this introduction clearly shows that deacon was the only person in the faction who knew anything about you at all so perhaps it wasn't the whole railroad spine but just him acting alone with his own plans also spoiler alert the first few missions she sends you on are really really dangerous ones and there's no way she would have recklessly risked your life in that fashion if she had any idea of how valuable you were it seems safe to say that deacon was acting on his own initiative to get you involved with the railroad but why what did he see in us and how did he know of our potential well as soon as dez leaves the room we can ask him he'll initially lie and state that he only backed you because the guild needs new members they're low on manpower but if your speech skill is up to the task you can pass a couple of speech checks that force him to admit more so tell me why did you vouch for me in our little outfit it's my job to know things and with everything you've done it's clear you're capable a dangerous enemy and i'm betting a valuable ally but why the trust you can't be taking it all on faith i don't know if we can trust you but i hope we can we just survived a hell of a crisis so we may just be a teeny weeny bit desperate for new members if everything was sunshine and bottle caps we'd probably play a longer getting to know you game but we don't have that luxury really is that all you just don't give up all right i have a short list of people i think would be a good fit for our family you piqued my interest so maybe i asked around did my homework if you hadn't found us there's a chance i would have found you instead thanks for saving me the trip aha this is our answer deacon had us on a list of good potential new recruits and that's why he'd been keeping tabs on us and was so excited to invite the player in except no this is probably a lie too or at least it's not the whole truth this gentleman had been watching us since we left the vault before we even did anything noteworthy how did he know we were in 111 and how could he have determined we'd be such a good fit early on and why didn't he tell anyone else yeah there's definitely something he's hiding deception aside after we finished thoroughly interrogating him here mr pants on fire will explain that just because he has such a good feeling about you he wants to fast-track the player through the tourist phase and make you a real agent asap none of that weight in a year stuff so he'll tell you to join him on a really important op to break back in to an old railroad hq and recover some items they left behind long story short if we agree during this mission he'll teach us a whole lot about the railroad's values and explain what real signs are then we'll storm the old hq get the item and meet back up with him at the old north church by the time we've returned deacon will have already told desdemona of our great victory and successfully convinced her to let you become an actual agent congratulations now you're allowed in the hq and deacon becomes available as a true companion whenever you need him and this is where things begin to pick up again because we can start to talk with our new railroad colleagues and ask them about deakin they'll tell us nobody knows anything about him desdemona says that he's the only person who's been with the faction longer than her and when she first joined sometime more than 10 years ago deacon was already a high-ranking well-trained member huh tinker tom the railroad science guy has a diary entry on his terminal where he speculates that maybe deke is a time traveler or something like that humorously deacon appears to have found this diary and wrote if i were a time traveler would i let a timeline exist where you knew i knew smiley face great so now not only do we know deacon was fine on us all along and didn't tell anybody about it but he's also apparently a man with the mysterious past oh gee i hope these two facts aren't connected surprisingly enough deacon doesn't see a whole lot of character development throughout the remainder of the story or not until the very end he doesn't so we can skip going over that for now but he does absolutely reveal a lot of new information as a companion deacon is probably tied for being my favorite follower right alongside nick valentine his sarcastic dry sense of humor is great and the insistence the dude has on making jokes all of the time is lovely anywho one of the first things you might notice is that while you're wandering the wastes with deacon whenever you enter a settlement he'll frequently pull random npcs to the side and enter cryptic conversations about railroad related topics geiger counter bud mine's in the shop you the guy about the article the one and only i'd be careful around here the target keeps late hours with strange visitors that's not proof hey not even piper's dug up anything more yet got it keep your head down and no heroics even if we don't understand everything perfectly we get a first-hand opportunity to watch as deacon interacts with the railroad's large network of informants and tourists hilariously the owner of diamond city's dugout inn will refer to deacon as a guard and ask why he's not in his uniform calling back to the time we saw him disguised as one also notice how many characters called deacon john doe or john d ah the mysterious john doe last time i see you you were in uniform but strangely the other guards don't know anything about you i work the midnight shift you know barely even see the other shifts it is almost like you are not a guard at all crazy i know but also curious you know what they say about curiosity see you around good to see you returning customers papers most die where are you you let me know you need to wait just act natural yada yada geiger counter it's me mr doe mr doe new face got it the lady we talked about she checks out not sure about number three though that's all i got john doe or john d appears to be an alias deacon uses when interacting with his informants hmm is he related to that johnny d character who helped rebuild the organization 21 years ago well we'll get there just hang on anywho like any other companion deakin's opinion of the player will change based on your actions for the most part he's a stereotypical good guy he likes it when you save lives do the right thing and really likes it when you help sits which makes him a bit less suspicious after you've improved his feelings toward you enough he'll ask to have a heart to heart so he can tell you something no one else in the world knows he's a synth yep he was one of the first gen 3 synths ever rescued by the railroad ages ago and afterwards he decided to join to continue helping his brothers well i guess i'm a little lucky then what's done is done and the upshot is you're in a position where you can act openly if you go to ground there's little the coursers can do about it it doesn't matter much to me i'm a synth at least that's what they tell me so i really don't have anything to lose for glory and me and the others it's easier to dedicate ourselves to the cause you're a synth why didn't you tell me before i don't like talking about it i was one of the first scents they did the whole cranium reboot on so it's a bit of a botched job most scents have fun fake memories a happy home a family me i got nothing and that well it does something to you since we're traveling together i want you to take this it's my recall code if you ever need to know something about the institute read it to me wow what a cool story maybe that explains how he knew about volt one except he's lying all you need to do is pass a speech check to call him out and mr synthman will admit that he made the whole tale up i got nothing and that well it does something to you since we're traveling together i want you to take this it's my recall code if you ever need to know something about the institute read it to me if you expect me to believe you i want proof all right you got me no fooling you huh don't take it personally i lie to everyone maybe i'm just another human that has people back home he wants to protect then again maybe not i don't like being lied to my relationship with the truth rubs some people the wrong way but believe this one thing i'm in your corner always have been not everyone can say that that code i gave you is a hard truth you can't trust everyone even if someone sounds sincere they could be a synth replacement working for the institute the [ __ ] of the problem is recognizing the 90 of the time someone's on the up and up and the 10 of the time you're being played you've lied to me at least once this is just more the same yeah you got me but you're going to hear the same sort of lies elsewhere there's other organizations out there and in time i'm sure they're going to spoon feed you their own patented form of [ __ ] ignore the verbiage and look at what they're doing what they're asking you to do what sort of world they'd have you build and how they're going to pay for it i don't need any more of your lies then boy did you choose the wrong traveling companion but hey listen and at the end of the day you'll need to make a choice make it the right one this lying problem isn't just shown in deacon's direct affinity conversations with us even when we're just wandering the wastes together he'll frequently make absurd ridiculous claims that sound way too unbelievable to be true and can often be outright disproven by our existing knowledge of the lore i used to run a steam cleaner store before the bombs fell so i see this and i think dollar signs i grew up in a vault i was a morale officer how am i doing boss i sailed the ocean for a few months made it to greenland crazy story i'll tell you about it later did i have you going about being a synth you'd be amazed how many people actually fall for that i was a soldier once way back west i'll tell you about it someday those were just a small a handful of some of the more memorable things i heard him say in a short hour-long play session of recording he literally has hundreds of more equally absurd claims he can say at any moment in the game and every time you level his affinity up deacon will ask the player if he can tell you a new story this time he promises to be honest and real and that he finally trusts you and of course you can debunk these special stories with a simple speech jack you founded the railroad sure me and johnny d and watts hell that was over 60 70 years ago after a while you lose count i tell everyone i get the occasional face change to stay anonymous truth is it takes a lot of work to keep this mug handsome he might randomly just start talking about the time he visited the capital wasteland and proceed to demonstrate knowledge of it he couldn't have gotten without a visit he knows about project purity about president eden elder lyons he's probably telling the truth about that i ever tell you about the time i was in capital wasteland now there's a tale i miss capital wasteland you can actually drink the water there capital wasteland exports purified water some decent tech oh and an insane suicidal cult that worships radiation thanks guys back in capital wasteland the brotherhood was a force to be reckoned with but them plus a giant airship i'm convincing the next raw recruit that i'm actually president eden think i can pull it off the fact that he sometimes is telling the truth but usually isn't makes understanding deacon very challenging and what his real backstory is is probably among the most debated mysteries in the fallout 4 community some say he actually is a synth some say he actually is a vault dweller some say he's the player character from fallout 3. i however subscribed to a different theory and it's one i think i can prove once the soul survivor has a maxed out deacon's positive relationship bar and reached his maximum affinity level he will ask to have one last talk with you in this dialogue he'll apologize for being so dishonest in the past and express how much he appreciates you putting up with it and well i'll just let him do the talking i'm a liar everyone knows it i make no secret of it because the truth is i'm a fraud to my core when i was young a hell of a long time ago i was well scum i was a bigot a very violent bigot were you really that bad worse than that i ran with a gang in university point we called ourselves the up death clause for kicks we'd terrorize anyone we thought was a synth we kept egging each other on started with some property damage graduated to some beat downs then inevitably a lynching the claws leader was convinced we'd finally found and killed the synth looking back i'm not so sure [Music] you killed someone that one was enough for me it was his eyes those eyes haunt me bulging so i turned my back on my brother's broke all contact time passed i became a farmer if you can believe that then one day i found someone she saw something in me i didn't know was there barbara well she was she just was what was she like she had a smile like on those old magazine covers her eyes we were trying for kids eeking out a living then one day turns out my barbara she was a sin she didn't know that i certainly didn't i don't know how the deathclaws found out but there was blood so they killed her yes i don't remember much clearly after that i know i killed most of the claws i must have made a big impression the railroad contacted me figuring i'd be sympathetic seeing that i lost my wife and well what i did afterwards the railroad let you in even though you were in the death clause so many years had passed i don't think anyone well except for the claws knew that all they knew is someone fought back i don't even know why i lie anymore but i can't tell the truth everyone tom des you even carrington they deserve to be on the railroad i don't i'm everything wrong with commonwealth you're the only friend i got i don't deserve you being okay with this hell i'm not even asking for it but i figured you should know everyone's got a past the important thing is you're trying to make up for it i'm still on your side i'm not the hugging type so yeah good talk so now he says that he used to be a part of an anti-synth gang but left to become a farmer instead after the boys got too extreme he then ended up falling in love with a synth named barbara and the two settled down and almost had their happily ever after but somehow the old gang found out about his robotic love and killed her the railroad then contacted him offering a chance to join and that is how he got his start this very well could be another one of deacon's lies however i think we can prove it isn't for one this story is only told after getting deacon to his final affinity level and it's the last one he'll tell furthermore this is the only one of deacon's affinity stories that we can't get him to admit was a lie by a speech jack it's the only one that can't be disproven bethesda meant something by that what's even more damning is that very rarely some of deacon's more mundane travel dialogue will appear to allude to barbara and his trouble with the claws can you ever truly escape your past hey there i hope so she would have liked this a lot of his travel quotes are just made of fibs but these come off as a bit more emotional furthermore during the quest rockets red glare deacon tinker tom and the sole survivor will take control of a vertibird to use against the brotherhood of steel and there's this moment where he refers to himself as an ex-farmer like he said he used to be the brotherhood is nothing if not arrogant they'd never dream in a million years that an ex-farmer and a scaver could fly one of their birds finally if all of that evidence wasn't enough here's the smoking gun in fallout 4's game files there's an unused texture for a wooden wall with the name barbara scratched onto it bethesda's id for this texture is railroad barbara grave 0-1 she was real after all and this likely would have been scratched in by deacon on a wooden grave post in fairness since this grave was left unused we can't say bethesda's 100 confirmed anything but why would they have made something like this if this wasn't what they were thinking and it fits in with all of our other evidence nicely many of fallout 4's companions have personal quests we can unlock by maxing out our relationship with them nick valentine will ask us to help him solve a great case that's older than the great war mccready will reveal to the player that he has a sick son back in the capital wasteland and request our help in finding a cure deacon though has no personal quest i suspect bethesda was originally planning to give him one wherein we would visit barbara's grave but for whatever reason canceled it now you can see in this texture barbara's last name has been scratched out her last name was probably deacon's last name too considering they were married so he probably did that to keep his identity a secret take what i'm about to show you with a grain of salt because we're getting into conspiracy theory territory here but in 2018 a mod author by the name of voltgirl2077 noticed that when the detail on this image is greatly upscaled and some alterations are made to the color and lighting it becomes easier to discern meaningless scribbles from the real shapes most of this last name is still unreadable but it does clearly start with the letter d this brings us back to that question is deacon johnny d one of the original two re-founders of the railroad from 21 years ago because he's the oldest surviving member of the faction nobody has any idea when exactly deacon joined i already mentioned that desdemona is the second oldest member and by the time she signed up deakin was already an experienced agent well in the railroad hq on the pam mainframe terminal there's a file titled access records this file is locked until the player has completed the game with the railroad and defeated the institute at which point it unlocks but you're not notified what this document turns out to be is a collection of records from the three people who have led the railroad since it was refounded by wyatt and johnny d the first leader was wyatt the dude johnny d refounded it with the second was a man named pinky thompson and the third is desdemona who's still in charge i'm just going to go ahead and read you a handful of the earliest entries in this file starting with the first one there is and tell me if you notice anything okay first one written by wyatt november 2266 the day he refounded the railroad quote gathered surviving runners held an election i lost or one depending on how you look at it after the hq massacre most people simply left the railroad only one person survived hq a runner named john d he called out for volunteers to get some of the old files no one stepped forward my job is to rebuild the railroad from scratch i think where agamemnon went wrong is that hq is known by too many people i'm theorizing here but once the institute hit a safe house and leaned on anyone the hq would be easy to find but how could agamemnon know just how deadly those damn coursers would be how the hell do we rebuild from here end quote okay next entry february 2267 got our first synth out of the commonwealth last month through one hell of a party what people don't know is another runaway was recaptured by the coursers before we even got to them john d has been finding tourists at a pretty good clip but he keeps their identities to himself operational security he calls it it makes me grind my teeth but he's probably right our whole organization needs to be more like a pyramid a broad base of tourists that help out mainly with information then the runners and safe house owners in the middle then agents hq on top of that end quote ah okay just like deacon john d did a lot of work with tourists and information gathering and he kept the majority of information he got to himself to keep the operation as secure as possible remember how deacon didn't tell anyone else in the railroad about us all right next entry march 2273 wyatt writes quote a whole work crew of synths escaped together five synths at once we're scrambling to keep them hidden coursers have been spotted looking for them they found one of our safe houses john developed a dead drop system we've been using some vocal elements toby say we should shut down but that's a year and a half worth of since end quote now this entry right here from march of 2273 is the last time john d's name is ever mentioned in railroad history for sure it is our last confirmation of his existence and he does not pop up in this access records file again from here on out but here's what the next entry on this file reads it is actually written by a different leader turns out wyatt was killed shortly after and a new guy named pinkie is in charge here's what he says quote december 2273 i just found wyatt's journal for whoever runs this outfit in the future i figure you should know how we messed up we were running the work group of five out of the commonwealth when the coursers found our hq total storm deacon that's what he's calling himself now an escape route planned and most of the survivors owe him their life why it didn't make it past the first tale of bullets end quote let's unpack this so this entry december 2273 is the first time or i should say the earliest time ever we know deacon's name is confirmed to appear in railroad history he's at least been in the faction for 14 years his name doesn't show up before this funnily enough it just so happens that the name deacon starts showing up after the name johnny d stops being used furthermore pinky says that deacon is quoted quote what somebody's calling themself now as in they changed the name from something yeah it seems very obvious that what really happened is johnny d changed his name and identity to deacon given what we know about barbara we can start to really piece together a bit of a history sometime before the year 2266 the man we today know as deacon was in love with a woman named barbara who is killed by a group of anti-synth bigots that apparently deacon used to roll with after which he joined the railroad under the alias johnny d and a few years later the faction was attacked and he and another more senior agent named wyatt were the only survivors and together they rebuild there we go he's not a cynthia evol dweller or anything no he has a definable past it's just very very difficult to discern although even with this vague backstory we still haven't answered one of the original questions how did deacon know about vault 111 well thankfully if we jump a few years ahead in these access record files we can find desdemona's own personal entries and she has some documents from a few years ago that give us a lot of hints sometime in the year 2284 she wrote quote pam's been trying to find the location of the institute in earnest failing deacons convinced the solution lies in the past not future deacon already knows the big secret we know nothing about the railroad before wyatt was in charge or is deacon johnny d question mark deacon's been digging into institute signings from years even decades before or at least that's what he says getting really tired of all of his lies end quote oh wow so right here desdemona even kind of confirms our whole deacon johnny d theory but beyond that she mentioned that deacon believed the best way to find the location of the institute and figure out where they're based was by looking into the past and he began digging through institute signings from years and decades before desdemona also mentions deacon knowing something called the big secret and that might sound really ominous but it's actually not the railroad's big secret is that they sort of have a man inside the institute working with them now for a second you might think wait a minute nate the railroad had an inside guy that's how deacon could have found out about shawn and vault 111 and everything but no you see the railroads quote unquote inside guy is an institute scientist named liam binet liam is very sympathetic to the synths and feels horrible for them so occasionally what he does is help synths that one out get teleported above the institute by forging work orders for them the problem is liam doesn't realize he's helping the railroad heck he doesn't even know what the organization is or is even aware of their existence all he thinks he's doing is just teleporting some synths above ground to be nice he sympathizes with them but he's not really working with the rr and they're definitely not communicating on any consistent basis so there's no way he told them about vault 111 and sean but i digress let's get back to dez's terminal entries and see if we can find anything else about deakin in the year 2286 just one year prior to the start of fallout 4 she wrote quote dry year coursers work crews and since vanished for three months no idea why worked on fortifying switchboard deacon was barely here all year chasing ghosts ah so deacon spent most of the last year away from the railroad itself out on his own mission quote unquote chasing ghosts and looking through the past i wonder finally the last record on this entire database was written by desdemona sometime in 2287 the same year we escaped quote deacon working on secret project code name wanderer deacon has a wild theory and an even wilder plan tea party i agree there's something strange there but i'm withholding judgment so the same year of our escape deacon had a secret project he called wanderer and some kind of theory though desdemona doesn't elaborate presumably these have to be related to us a core component in deacon's search seems to be the hunt for the location of the institute before we complete their questline during the events of fallout 4 the railroad spends a great deal of time trying to answer this question of course we know they're of course we know they're located beneath the ruins of the commonwealth institute of technology but the railroad isn't sure of that they think the institute in cit might be connected but they've sent agents to the old cit compound but found no secret bunkers or doors or anything like that what they don't know is that the institute uses teleportation devices to access the above ground world not secret doors or anything there is no door to the institute like they suspected anyway deakin's secret project name was wanderer what could that have meant we know the player character from fallout 3 was referred to as the lone wanderer by both the narrative and many characters and we know deacon's been to the capital wasteland before in fact he's probably been there very recently he tells us he went there quote unquote a few years ago and specifically mentions that he's been there when the water was clean meaning that he visited after the events of the main storyline were completed and we finished project purity i ever tell you about the time i was in capital wasteland now there's a tale i miss capital wasteland you can actually drink the water there capital wasteland exports purified water some decent tech oh and an insane suicidal cult that worships radiation thanks guys perhaps he heard tales of the lone wanderer from the capital wasteland and that's where he got the inspiration for the name heck maybe there was some connection here is what i think happened i think when deacon started investigating past sightings of institute staff members he stumbled upon evidence of kellogg and the institute's raid on vault 111 50 years ago he realized this was a very very significant location but didn't quite understand why heck given that he wasn't even sure where the institute was maybe deakin suspected volt 111 was the institute's base after all it was closed so he couldn't go inside it anyway i digress coincidentally at some point in time while he was watching over it it opened up and we the player came out he obviously wanted to investigate us further and began pursuing the player seeing as he's been to the capital wasteland before and it definitely heard tales of a previous full dweller known as the lone wanderer he gave us the code name wanderer and hypothesized that maybe we could know something about the institute after all desdemona wrote her terminal entry sometime after he started trailing us remember this terminal entry was dated sometime in the year 2287 but unlike so many other terminal entries we don't know the exact month i think she wrote it after the game itself really began sure enough at the end of the day deacon's hypothesis would prove kind of correct after all and we the player may or may not help the railroad defeat the institute and become the saviors of the commonwealth he was right given that we can now be relatively confident that deacon's not a sin through a former vault dweller himself or anything like that this seems to be the most likely possibility this would explain deacon's interest in the player yet his lack of knowledge about sean and it would also explain why deacon didn't just immediately approach us the second we left initially he wasn't sure whether or not we were an institute asset he didn't know for sure who we are only that we might have been important and thus that is the tale of project wanderer deakin as it turns out is a very complex man indeed he suffered the loss of his one true love and horrible betrayal by his best friends he's also seen so many of his fellow railroad agents die due to institute raids this is why he lies so much and is such a secretive man he's figured out that the more information he reveals the more vulnerable he makes himself so he doesn't reveal much real information instead he hides things makes up stories and becomes deceptive but he is still a truly good man with pure motivations and a very very noble cause anyway it's been around an hour so this is where we are going to wrap up thanks so much for stopping by everybody what do you think was going on here do you agree with our hypothesis our story of deakin and john ed or do you think there's more at play do you have your own theory leave a comment down below as always like ratings are very much appreciated again thanks for watching and hope to catch you all in my next video peace out everyone

Channel: TheEpicNate315

Views: 2,082,344

Rating: 4.9006672 out of 5

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Id: WyE8LrYPLWg

Length: 54min 7sec (3247 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020