Piper Wright

Piper grew up in a small community on the outskirts of the Commonwealth with Nat and their father, a member of the local militia. After her father was found dead under suspicious circumstances, Piper learned that he had discovered a raider plot to sack the town. His superior, Captain Mayburn, arranged to leave the main gate open and unguarded one night to allow raiders access in exchange for a cut of the loot and had Piper's father murdered to keep him silent.

The local authorities did not believe her claims and refused to investigate. Piper then created and circulated wanted posters featuring the captain and a list of his crimes. The conspicuously public accusation got the attention of the town's mayor, who accepted Piper's evidence. The settlers, outraged by the story, exiled Mayburn. When the raiders eventually showed up expecting the gate to be wide open, they instead encountered prepared defenses by alerted townsfolk and were driven away.

With both of their parents gone and Nat too young to work, Piper relied mainly on kindness and charity to survive, eventually saving enough money to relocate herself and her sister to Diamond City. However, life in the "big city" provided its own share of challenges; at the time of their arrival, Diamond City was plagued by corruption, lax security, and failing infrastructure. Frustrated with this state of affairs and increasingly desperate to enact change, Piper founded the newspaper Publick Occurrences to raise awareness of the city’s problems.

Her career was fraught with danger and intrigue from the outset. Shortly after founding the Publick, an article she wrote exposing the efforts of a caravan cartel to drive up food prices made her the target of a poisoning at the Dugout Inn, which she narrowly survived by chugging Vadim Bobrov's moonshine straight from the still to induce vomiting. In a later incident, an investigation into irradiated drinking water at Bunker Hill led her to be kidnapped by the Church of the Children of Atom, who would have killed her as a human sacrifice had she not faked a vision of Atom and been subsequently initiated into the cult. Piper also regularly fell afoul of Diamond City security during her investigations, to the point that their lockup came to be nicknamed "the Piper Suite" for her frequent stays in it.

Piper’s activism and investigative fervor ultimately bore fruit; whether they agreed with her or not, citizens read her newspaper in droves, and many of the issues she brought to light were addressed. However, this success came at a cost to Piper’s personal life. Following the release of the Publick’s first edition, many in the city who Piper had once considered friends and confidants became distant, and she gained a reputation across the Commonwealth as a “nosy snoop.” Public opinion of the paper slowly but surely soured, with many citizens writing in to complain about the negative tone of its reporting, and Piper began to feel deeply alienated from the community.

This alienation reached its peak with the publication of an article titled "The Synthetic Truth." Though the article largely consisted of a retrospective on the Broken Mask incident of 2229 and an interview with the event’s last surviving eyewitness, Eustace Hawthorne, it also contained thinly-veiled accusations that the city’s mayor, McDonough, was a synth infiltrator acting on behalf of the Institute. Though privately certain in her accusations, Piper lacked any solid evidence for them, and McDonough subsequently had Piper thrown out of the city by security.

Despite her temporary exile, Piper remains steadfast in her determination to protect the city and expose the mayor’s wrongdoings. By the time of the Sole Survivor’s arrival at Diamond City, she can be found at the city’s gate, badgering Danny Sullivan via intercom and demanding to be readmitted to the city, ultimately succeeding by convincing him that the Sole Survivor is a trader from Quincy carrying enough supplies to stock Diamond City Surplus for a month.

Piper is a rather lonely woman who feels isolated in Diamond City. She has a strong drive to better the world and does not want to be complacent, causing her to become a writer in order to try to reduce the corruption within the town. Piper has a rapport with Nick Valentine as they both are investigators. Her tendency to find the latest scoop and the truth can cause others to find her nosy and annoying, however, resulting in her having few friends. She is highly perceptive, however, and was able to deduce the mayor was a synth. She tends to enjoy sarcasm.

Despite multiple death threats and an assassination attempt, finding herself in sticky situations is a point of pride for Piper, who feels getting into trouble is just part of chasing the truth. Adding to her reckless nature, she may also be seen smoking occasionally. She is shown to not be above lying and manipulating others in order to get what she wants, such as when she tried to use the Sole Survivor to regain access to Diamond City after being banned from the town. Ironically, she generally dislikes it when the Sole Survivor lies.

While distrustful of the Institute, Piper is still sympathetic to the plight of synths, especially runaway synths, due to her interactions with Nick. Piper mentions Nick is the only synth she has met that did not seem to have a "screw loose" and at one point, Nick sat down to talk to her about why synths are different than typical robots.

She also has an open dislike for the Brotherhood of Steel due to their self-serving nature, technology hoarding, anti-synth policies, and in her eyes, lousy fashion sense. She despises any pro-Brotherhood choices the Sole Survivor takes.