So. Much. Yelling. Don't go to orbit! You're needed at home Andie! The Dominion are unbeatable!

Unbeatable my ass.

We may have lost the War in Heaven, but we proved that they bleed like we do.

It was a unanimous vote by the advisory council to keep me from going, but free will exists.

Listen, I've watched my family die around me, I've seen a tyrant run my country into the ground, and I've killed a man... er, woman. I watched seventeen men die around me to keep me safe once. It's pretty fucked up shit for a girl who grew up in Seattle, so when I say Orbit was bad. It was bad.

The bravery I saw in the skies that day is the reason I know we will win. The reason we have to - they didn't die in vain. That's also why I'm on a plane to the middle-of-buttfuck-nowhere Nebraska. The War in Heaven has come to Earth, and believe me when I say I will not send the sons and daughters of Cascadia off to fight the alien menace while I lounge around in Olympia eating caramel.

Fuck, caramel sounds good right now. Wonder if they have it in Nebraska...

~ The Ponderings of Andromeda Mei, A Diary

I stepped out of the plane in Grand Island in a line of some three dozen other soldiers. The sun shone brightly, and a blistering heat accompanied it. I would get to know the thirty-five degree summer sun in these parts quite well.

"In the trucks! Let's get moving! We've got more than you jackasses comin' in today!" some angry Nebraskan yelled. His uniform suggested that he was a General. On Nebraskan soil, however, I did not outrank him, and thus could not yell back in his face.

Given my private and makeshift training in a Hong Kong Apartment, as well as the relaxed culture of Cascadia, I was unused to the formality on display. Men from all over the continent were converging on the state that had been so irrelevant to the struggles of history until now.

There were two arrival points: Omaha (Jokingly referred to as Omaha Beach) and Grand Island. These two points were on either side of the Dominion fleet that had landed and massacred the small town of Kearny. Coming from the west, we had landed in Grand Island.

I tripped on the uneven pavement and fell flat on my face. It was so warm I nearly burned my tongue.

"Move along, flatface," the General called at me.

I was about to say Listen here you little shit... when a small woman dragged me up from the pavement and shook her head.

"Jesus, get a room you two!" the General yelled, laughing as he walked away towards the next arriving plane.

"Thanks..." I managed to say. The other girl remained silent.

We were loaded onto a truck that reeked of the archaic gasoline it must have been using for fuel. The twentieth century beast made its way along the abandoned streets of what Nebraska called a city. Grand Island was a decent sized town, but easily outnumbered in population by the smaller suburbs of the Sound.

In a surprisingly short amount of time, the 'city' transformed into farmland. Endless fields of prematurely harvested corn awaited us in the Nebraskan 'wilderness'. Soon enough, we reached a large encampment. The flags of the Empire and the State flew high above one of the few solid buildings, a wooden central building.

The truck dropped us off at the entrance before returning back to the airport to repeat the trip. The forty or so of us started up and down the rows of tents, searching for the ones with our names on them.

"You're in the central HQ," some Nebraskan official bothered telling me at some point. His accent reminded me of someone who sided with the losing side of the American Civil War.

"Yeah, fuck that," I replied. He looked at me, flabbergasted. Ignoring him, I waltzed into the next tent I saw and laid claim to the empty bed. Lucky for me, the occupant was MIA. Well, not so lucky for him.

"Hello!" I greeted my fellow tentmates. The tents were relatively large, hosting two bunk beds, a drawer, and some empty space for the luggage that would show up eventually. They were sat on their beds, talking.

"Who the hell ar- shit, sorry," one of the men. He was dark-skinned, tall, and in his early twenties.

"I don't care, be honest," I replied.

The other man, sitting on the bunk below his, spoke up.

"What I think my dear friend Terrance here is trying to say is Welcome to Tent 57!"

"Introduce yourselves, please," I requested.

"Terrance Silver, Tacoma."

"Dick Walters, Bend. Make a dick joke and you're dead, proconsul or not," the other man said in a surprisingly salty attitude.

"Jesus, no need to be such a dick about it," Terrance said, before laughing himself into a fit. Dick stood up and tried punching Terrance, who rolled off the bunk and fell two meters to the ground.

"You dick!" he called out, laughing some more. I lost my shit at that point, as did the girl on the bottom bunk opposite to theirs. It took us nearly a full minute to stop laughing.

"So, where were we?" I asked.

"Introductions," said Dick. "Shy girl here's named Miriam, managed to get that much out of her."

"You know, I'm not that quiet," she protested. I recognized her as the girl who had stopped me from kicking the General's ass back at the airport.

"Took you twenty minutes the first time," Terrance said, agreeing with his older compatriot.

She sighed, returning back into the pensive state I assumed she was in before my arrival.

"Well, nice to meet you all."

Then the sirens went off.

[Meta] Mod needed to retag to 'Old WP', will pay in something maybe.