Lestari

It was a joke. Well, partially a joke. I really don't think Mass Effect lends itself well to a nation-building RP, especially not the way it's done here (ie, not so much RP as slapping together a bunch of shit you read on the internet and calling it military development and then sending off a diplomat for some meaningless diplotalk), but I've definitely seen some pretty excellent Mass Effect character roleplays that didn't succumb to the usual pitfalls of a 'fanfiction' roleplay.

You people fucking baffle me. How can you take a rich universe like Mass Effect, ripe for exploration, a brilliant environment for great character interaction and development, and be like 'lol let's shit all over all of this with some bullshit national RP'. ffs is nothing sacred

Sanguine red against cobalt blue-- two legions in battle, locked in a bitter war of attrition from which only one could emerge the victor, the other to suffer the indignity of defeat, the humiliation of being proven inferior-- to say nothing of the casualties. It was in the eyes of each warrior at the scene of the carnage: neither was willing to offer quarter any more than the other was willing to accept it. This was to the death-- in the name of pride, in the name of honour, in the name of dignity, they fought, knowing not whether they would see the rising of the sun over the horizon come the next morning. In other words, it was your average game of youth football on a lazy Saturday Paráense afternoon. Isabel observed the course of the skirmish closely, acutely aware that the eyes of the spectators spent more time trained on her than they did on the game their children were playing-- but it was to be expected, really. South America had known peace only four years now; the war, the faces and names associated with it, was a fresh wound in the collective consciousness of the continent. Isabel felt no doubt that the time would be long in the coming before she could step foot in public without suffering at the very least the unwelcoming gawking of the masses, but for the moment, she could pretend that inconvenience was of no consequence to her. After all, General Vieira was a busy woman; directing the military campaigns of the rebels had given way to directing the recuperation, the recovery, the rebirth of an entire continent. But she had the time to come and watch her niece play a game of football, for just one moment before the world found yet another thing to tear her away from home and family in order to attend to the vagaries of continental politics: she'd be damned if she was going to let herself fall prey to the distraction of prying eyes, or a particularly... let's say loquacious colleague. Actually, fuck that. Let's say chattier than a goddamn telemarketer. Oh well, Isabel reasoned, as she heard her colleague speak up yet again: there was a reason to this day she enjoyed Fernanda Kaneda's company despite her irksomely friendly inclinations, after all. She wasn't sure what it was, but she assumed it existed. "I gotta say, your kid's a hell of a player, Izzie," the admiral remarked, her eyes tracing along after one particular figure in red as it sprinted up the length of the pitch, the ball close in tow. Alejandra was every bit as conspicuous amongst the players on the field as Isabel, fairly detached though she may have been from the bulk of them, was amongst the throngs of people gathered on either side of the pitch, some seated in plastic or fold-out chairs brought along for the occasion and others merely standing (it was a middle school football game in the wake of reconstruction, for fuck sake, they didn't exactly have a stadium at their disposal). She had not been a particularly imposing child, no more than her father had been a particularly imposing adult, but Isabel was fond of joking with an acidic mordancy that after she had more or less adopted the orphaned child, Alejandra had begun to absorb some of her own stature. She was head and shoulders over the other players in the pitch, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, and it was perhaps that presence that had endowed her with such an aggressive playing style. "My niece," Isabel corrected as Alejandra sent the ball rocketing into the cobalt-clothed team's goal with a violent kick, before shrugging and adding, "I guess she's alright. I don't know the damnedest thing about football, since you know I don't really give a shit about it, so I just assume whoever can kick the ball the hardest is probably the best player." Alejandra, far down the field, turned and looked off at Isabel, a wide-brimming grin splitting her callow features, and Isabel returned the expression unabashedly with a call of "Good shot!" "Don't really give a shit about football?" Kaneda's voice took on a sardonic hint of admonishment. "Best watch yourself there, general. You may be a hero to these people, but the vaguest hint of a slight against the almighty institution of football and any self-respecting Brazilian won't hesitate to have your head for it. But this..." She nodded her head over toward where cheering teammates, their jubilance in the wake of their latest goal mingling with the applause of spectating parents and guardians, massed around Alejandra. "This is talent right here. The religiously zealous football fan in me would weep if she were not planning to make a career out of this." Isabel snorted. "Weep away. The stupid little runt plans on becoming a goddamn soldier." She had not meant the words to come out so bitter, so... so, for lack of a better word, disgusted, but she found she had worn her vehemence just a little too openly than she should have. And of course, far be it for Kaneda to fail to notice, much less neglect to breach the subject. "You disagree with her intentions?" "Hey, you mind?" Isabel grunted, gesturing with a lackadaisical wave of her hand toward the pitch. "I'm tryin' to watch this shit, not have a fuckin' heart to heart with a sailor who loves to hear herself talk." The venom in her words seemed to suffice in quelling Kaneda's curiosity, but the admiral had done the damage-- now Isabel couldn't disentangle herself from the brambles of that bitterness, couldn't just drop a subject that had come up time and time again between herself and Alejandra only to result in resentment and recrimination on both their parts. Normally, when that happened, Isabel had avenues of dispelling all that pent-up frustration with her niece and her professed choice of career: lift some weights, beat the ever-loving shit out of a punching bag, do something generally violent and physically intense. Unfortunately, short of charging into the field and murdering every middle schooler present, she really didn't have any such option available (though she also couldn't say the fantasy wasn't just a little invigorating-- look, they're middle schoolers, and all middle schoolers are basically mini Hitlers, so they've probably got it coming anyway). Her sole option was off-loading all that discontent on Kaneda-- which, shit, Kaneda had probably been planning from the very beginning. And she laments that Alejandra's opting for the wrong career, the general scoffed. Fuckin' sailor shoulda been a psychologist or some shit. With something between a sigh and a grumble of irritation, Isabel turned her head to her colleague, and then tried to convince herself she had only imagined that vague, fleeting hint of triumph to that irksomely beatific little half-smile that appeared to be all but congenital to Kaneda's features. "Of course I disagree with her intentions," she growled in a low voice. "I became a soldier because I had no other option. And I remained a soldier even after had other options. because it was all I knew. But she does have options. She doesn't need to do that to herself." Kaneda's smile took on a certain ruminative quality, and when she spoke, it was slowly, deliberately. "Perhaps," she answered, in the sort of voice that one supposed a zookeeper might use toward a lion whose patience is already long since withered. "She wants to become a soldier for the same reason you remain one." Isabel's brow knotted. "Elabourate," she grunted. Kaneda merely shrugged her shoulders, and Isabel expected a flippant answer, in the admiral's typical manner. But she saw Kaneda's smile diminish just a little bit, take on a hint of sad reminiscence, and when she spoke, her voice was soft and stripped of its omnipresent gaiety. "We were poor, disenfranchised kids," she murmured. "We had no money, no education, no prospects, nowhere to go-- the military was our only way out. But we didn't grow up in war. We didn't know war until long since after we'd made a career out of the military and war became all we know. But she..." Kaneda nodded toward the field, and Isabel diverted her gaze to see Alejandra mid-play, violently shouldering a cobalt player out of her way in her ruthless drive to the objective. "It's already all she knows. It's planted that same seed in her soul. Why do you think she gravitates towards aggressive activities like competitive sports and martial arts?" "Don't be ridiculous," Isabel dismissed the contention with a scowl. "She's a fuckin' kid. Of course she likes that sort of thing." Her gaze narrowed on Alejandra as her niece aimed a kick at the enemy goalpost that fired off with the force of a gunshot. "War took everything from her. It makes no sense that she would want to make a living out of it." "But it did give her something good even after everything it had taken," Kaneda pointed out. "It gave her you. Just like it gave you her." "I'm sure she'd rather have kept her parents than have gotten me," Isabel fired back sardonically, but Kaneda merely smiled again. "You don't think she's happier with you than she was before? And that you aren't happier with her than you were before?" Isabel crossed her arms across her broad chest, as though hoping to shield herself from the onslaught of Kaneda's discerning conversation. Nevertheless, she found herself offering a sincere answer-- something she had not even really permitted herself on the rare occasion that she felt comfortable even considering the subject at all. She shot another glance toward Kaneda, and the admiral's features softened sympathetically. They had known one another since they'd been children, ever since ten year old Kaneda had moved from the Brazilian coast to the slumland of São Paulo-- and in that cutthroat environment of dust and blood, she and Isabel had met. Isabel's recollections of those days were etched into the very scars that lined the rough-hewn contours of her mien-- jagged, faded lines that recalled days of dust and dirt, faces in monochrome and voices faint and gnarled as the voice of God itself these days seemed. She had clung to the urge to rise and pull herself out of the muck then, but she had little of that vehemence left in her now-- she had now, recalling those years, only a silent, timeless wistfulness. A quiet reminiscence-- something contemplative, something not absent of melancholy, something almost forlorn. It was a coarse anamnesis. It was a bitter regret. It was months becoming years, and years becoming eternities. It was faces pressed against a chain link fence between now and the shade of yesterday, cast by blushing leaves swaying in the breeze-- torn between was and is, begging the same old questions. From one's self. Only from one's self... Only for yourself. Everything was different now, of course, but in the end... nothing seemed to change, and only Kaneda had been there to see it all for herself. As people to dump all her woes and issues on went, she supposed she could have done worse than Fernanda. "She's got nobody and I've got nobody," Isabel answered quietly. "When I first took her in... she didn't trust me. I think she even hated me a little bit-- not because I was supposed to be the enemy, but because like every other adult in her life, I was never really there. It's taken me this long to tear down that precedent, and now..." A vague shadow of a smile, unsullied by sarcasm or wryness, tugged at the corners of her lips. "Now, after I come back home after a month of the same old mind-numbingly dull logistics and business around the continent, she's right at the door waiting with dinner ready and all sorts of stories to tell me about what happened while I was gone. Hell, she even asks me to tell her about all the boring shit I did while I was gone, even though I know none of it makes the damnedest whit of sense to her. And I never see her happier than when she knows I'm gonna be able to watch one of her games." "To be honest, Izzie," Kaneda couldn't help but interject, any more than she could help the warmth of the grin on her face. "I don't think I ever see you happier than when you know you're gonna be able to watch one of her games, either." "Why would it be any other way? I wouldn't pass up the opportunity to see that smile she wears after every goal if you paid me for it." "And it's perfectly natural that you would find yourself unable to even consider the idea that someday, you might not see that smile any more." Isabel glanced back at Kaneda, eyebrow raised and smile fading. "The hell do you mean?" Kaneda shrugged her shoulders. "Y'know, for somebody who lambasts me about overcomplicating things, you sure do love to do just that. I mean, you love the kid more than even you realise, it's obvious. And I think in the end the real reason you hate the idea of her becoming a soldier isn't just that you find your own profession despicable, or that you feel she is indignifying herself in practising the trade that took so much from her-- it's that you simply can't stand the idea that someday she will have to leave you." Isabel frowned, and more than a little of that old acid returned to her voice as she retorted, "Well, thanks for the free psychoanalysis, Freud. Next you'll be tellin' me my decision to become a soldier was actually a result of a deep-seated sexual desire for my own mother or some shit." Kaneda merely chuckled. "I'll also have to determine where your nigh-obsessive need to change the subject whenever it gets personal comes from, and whether it's hereditary. Really though..." Her eyes lost just a hint of their light-heartedness. "You'll have to let go of her someday. The fact you find it so difficult, though... that's what makes you a better parent than you realise you are." But the final whistle had already begun to ring out by the time Kaneda's words drew to a close-- sanguine had emerged victorious once again, and the kids, Alejandra prime amongst them, coagulated into one another in a heap of joy and success before clambering back up to their cleat-clad feet and hurtling off towards pride-filled guardians. Alejandra came sprinting off at Isabel, and the general found herself reflecting the very same smile etched across the kid's features-- she could share this joy, even if she knew better than to call herself any sort of parent to Alejandra, much less a good one. She would not indignify Alejandra by calling herself her parent when she had been the one to pull the trigger that had orphaned her. "... and he's always nitpicking every little thing I do to take points off! If I misplace a single comma, I get a whole grade taken off-- and god forbid I'm writing a literary assessment and accidentally spell someone's name wrong. Next thing I know I'm in this @$#hole's office getting a lecture about how I'm everything that's wrong with modern literature." "This is Mr. Roussef, right?" Isabel returned absent-mindedly as she set her plate down on the dinner table, Alejandra close in tow toting along her own. They bore with them as they emerged from the backyard of Isabel's home the scent of the grill, as well as of the food in their hands-- steak marinated in a rich sauce of parsley, garlic, peppers, and red wine vinegar. Alejandra had many reasons to enjoy living with her aunt, but she'd have been lying if she'd said her cooking was not high on the list. "The teacher you tried to start a petition to fire because 'his massive nose is intensely distracting and is not conducive to an appropriate academic environment'?" "... well, it's a pretty grotesquely huge nose," Alejandra grumbled as she walked to the other side of the small circular dining room table and set her plate down on the table mat there. "I mean, you've never had to sit in a class for an hour and a half trying to take a test with that abomination right there in front of you." She gave a theatrical little shudder, not unlike a soldier recalling the horrors of the battlefield, eliciting a hearty laugh from Isabel as she set down the assorted cutlery, as well as a glass of water for Alejandra and a beer for herself, and took her seat. "As long as you're doin' well and bringin' home good marks, that's what's important," Isabel replied, watching Alejandra take her seat as well before she leaned forward almost dangerously. "And you are bringing home good marks, I expect." "Of course!" Alejandra declared, utterly unfased as she began cutting into her steak. "Just yesterday I got a ten on one of my maths exams. I can even show it to you after dinner if you don't believe me." "No no, I believe you," Isabel said with a smile, leaning back in her seat. "Well done. I'm glad that attempting to keep your grades up so you can apply for the Youth Army Reserve is doing you some good." All of a sudden, Alejandra was very much fased. She damn near choked on her cut of steak, and had to grab her cup of water and down its contents just so she could sputter a baffled, "Wh-- you-- how-- ?" "Believe it or not, Alejandra, I am not that much of an idiot." Isabel made a show of pausing to calmly dig her fork into her steak, saw off a modest bite of beef, and place it into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully, before she finished, "Out of nowhere, you're suddenly deeply vested in earning at least 8s in all your classes, you practised day in and day out until you could manage a sub-three minute thousand meter run, and I'm pretty sure I caught you trying on berets one time-- and by the way, you might as well not bother, 'cause I had to wear one of those Youth Army Reserve berets when I was a kid too and believe me you're gonna look goofy as hell in it no matter what you do." "So--" Alejandra stared at her with eyes reddened from nearly choking to death on steak just a moment prior, before hesitantly venturing, "... you're not mad at me, are you?" Isabel shrugged her broad shoulders, setting her fork and knife down for a moment and meeting her niece's uncertain gaze with a calculatedly dispassionate one. "I am a little bit, really-- but looking at it rationally, I didn't offer you much choice except to keep it secret from me. This is an issue we've butted heads over for quite a while now, after all." Alejandra's gaze took on a sceptical tinge. "You're not just gonna say no and then tell me to go do yardwork and go to bed without dinner if I argue?" "The yard looks pretty nice as it is, though if you'd like to go make it look nicer I certainly won't dispute that choice." "Not the point!" Alejandra fired back, though she couldn't help a quirk at the corners of her lips. But Isabel had already decided to get serious again, and she leaned forward towards her niece. "I do not want you to be a soldier," she told her flatly. Alejandra opened her mouth to speak up, but Isabel merely shook her head. "Listen to me and then I'll listen to you. I do not want you to be a soldier. But I've been... imposing my will against your own, without hearing you out, and that's not right of me, as your... as your guardian, to do." Alejandra raised an eyebrow in puzzlement. "What brought upon this change of heart?" "Talkin' with a childhood friend about old times tends to put you in the right place for thinkin' of things from another perspective," Isabel mused. "And yeah, sure-- I wasn't lyin' when I said I don't want you to go into the military because I feel you won't be happy there, or because I feel you can do better things. In the end, above all, I like havin' you here, Alejandra. I like comin' back home after who knows how many weeks in Colombia slummin' it in administration duties to find you there with a hot meal and stories about everything I missed at the ready. I like offering to help you with your homework when I can tell you're strugglin' and hearin' you proudly retort that you don't need it, only to have you come back to me grumblin' about how mathematics is out to get you. Hell, I even like hearin' you complain about your teacher's big nose. You've grown into an intelligent, strong kid, and you're clearly going to grow into an intelligent, strong woman. And, well, it's tough to come to terms with the fact that I will have to let you go someday, sooner or later. But I also gotta understand that it's not just my happiness we're talkin' about here. Your happiness is pretty damn important too, and I've been neglectin' that. So now that you've heard me out... I wanna hear you out." Alejandra gawked. "Did all that actually just come outta your mouth?" she breathed, as though half certain Isabel would respond with 'actually no it didn't, I'm actually from an alien race that intends to enslave the entire human population by taking control of uptight aunts and listening to the concerns of their teenaged nieces, so anyway as you were saying'. Bafflingly enough, Isabel didn't respond with that. She merely smiled, and added, "But make no mistake-- I'm still unequivocally against you throwin' your life into the hands of the military. I just want to hear you tell me exactly why it is you want to do that." Alejandra began to answer, and Isabel quickly interjected, "And no bull$@#!. I'm givin' you honesty, so I expect honesty in return. Try 'n get any shit over me and I will have you out doin' yardwork every day 'til you're of age. Understand?" Alejandra was quick to nod in understanding. "No bull$@#!," she confirmed, before launching immediately into a decisive explanation. "I admire you, Isabel. I admire your strength-- physical and moral-- I admire your firmness, and I admire your discipline. I want to... I want to be somebody like you when I'm older-- somebody you can be proud of, somebody you can be happy to call your child. And if that means enlisting in the military, starting straight from the Youth Reserve... then that's what I'm gonna do." She met her aunt's gaze firmly and uncompromisingly. Isabel scratched at her chin, reached for her beer, took a quick gulp, set it down, and grunted, "Go do yardwork." "What?" Alejandra blurted out. "But-- that was honesty!" "Of a very superficial sort. It's the truth, but only the bare surface of it. I'm askin' you to buff my car and you're comin' at it with a wet paper towel and tryin' to pass it off as the same thing. So go do yardwork." Disappointed but to be frank on the whole unsurprised, Isabel returned to her food, expecting to see Alejandra in her peripherals standing up from the table and trudging off to do as she'd been told. Instead... "Look." Isabel glanced back up, but Alejandra's eyes were downcast, refusing to meet hers. She chewed away that last bite, swallowed, and in her silence conveyed her open ear. "I... " Alejandra's voice was uncharacteristically anxious. "Even now, when I go to bed and close my eyes, it's all I see. Things I haven't seen with my actual eyes since the war ended. Buildings burning, homes collapsing, bodies in the streets, soldiers marching in armour and gas masks... It's all still there. And I still can't make sense of it. I can't understand why people would do that to each other. When I'm on the football field playing a game, or when I'm in the ring sparring with somebody, I feel like I can... well, not that I can understand it. But that it doesn't matter. That I can just bury those memories in raw energy, that I can channel it all into aggression and let it out that way." She fell silent, and Isabel waited for her to speak up-- but it seemed she was wrestling with herself to try and put her own thoughts in order. What could Isabel really say at that moment anyway? She had feared exactly this: that Alejandra would tell her that the root of her professed intentions lay in the traumas of the past, in precisely the things that Isabel... could not fix. How could she? She had not emerged from the war unscathed either-- nobody had-- but... well, she was a soldier. She knew how to destroy another human being, knew it down to a science, and she knew how to lead human beings into destroying other human beings-- hell, she even knew a thing or two of first aid-- but of healing a human being's emotional wounds she knew not the first thing. "... and the military?" she asked, forcing the harsh rasp of her voice into something approaching tenderness. "Where does that come into it?" "Because that isn't enough. It's not enough to just submerge it all in the intense reality of a spar or a football game-- not enough to try and eject it all through physical force. I just..." She bit her lip, and raised her gaze at last to meet Isabel's, revealing hard-set, tearless eyes and the firm line of her mouth. "I need to know that when I lay there choking on poison gas, watching a soldier in a gas mask point their gun at me with intent to kill... that I wasn't seeing the true face of humanity that day." The evening had come creeping inch by inch, minute by minute, into the early hours of the night, and overhead, the stars had already emerged from the thick veil of blackness. This was a sight Isabel often missed: off in the sprawling industrial powerhouses to the west and the south-- Medellin, São Paulo, the like-- one's purview of the stars had long since been snatched away by pollution, by the dense shroud of human muck that lingered in the sky between her eyes and beyond. Back home in Pará, though... well, Pará had always been the Holy American Empire's backyard, a quiet little sanctum far removed from the urban sprawl that characterised much of the rest of the continent, and though that had deprived it of many of the comforts afforded to the upper crust of Imperial society elsewhere... well, at least they had retained this. She turned her gaze down from the sky, and took another drag of the cigarette in one hand, bottle of beer in the other-- her select vices for tonight. She sat out on the steps to the porch of her home (she'd often considered getting a chair out there, but refused on the principle that goddammit she wasn't at that 'chair out on the front porch' age yet), and thought of her niece, back in the house, holed up in her room. Perhaps she was doing homework, or listening to music-- or maybe, just like Isabel (although without the cigarettes and alcohol if she knew what was good for her, you could be damn sure), she was simply thinking. Reflecting. Introspectin'. That kinda shit. They had agreed that Alejandra would seek the help that Isabel, as grudging as she was to admit it, simply could not offer her-- all she could do was be there for the kid, something she hadn't been for the first nine years of Alejandra's life. And if she pursued therapy, then... then, Isabel had forced herself to allow, she could apply for the Youth Army Reserve: Isabel would sign off on it herself. In a sense, she was hoping the therapy would disavow Alejandra of any urge to throw her lot in with the military, but even if it didn't... well, so long as the kid didn't take those images of death and devastation with her to her grave, then it would be enough for Isabel. She won't bear that cross all her life, the general vowed-- a silent compact between two soldiers, one present, the other long gone. Not the way we did.

"excuse me, take a fochin' seat there m8 before u get rekt." - General Ann Razul of the Sakha Federation

Why thank you. Anyhow, the slot's been taken! Sorry to those nations with a surplus of barnyard animals who were thinking they finally had somewhere to send all these goddamn cows and pigs. Just to compensate, our top scientists in Erebus have designed the all new, revolutionary Olfactory Sensation Negation Device! This miraculous invention can be bought en masse so that you, dear leader, can stop having to hear all that whining from your people about how a nation populated primarily by cattle isn't exactly the most fragrant of places. Blueprints for the Olfactory Sensation Negation Device may be found right over [URL=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Clothespin-2459e.jpg]here[/URL].

"Christina? Chr-- Christina!" This was all wrong. This couldn't be right. She was an officer's child. This shouldn't have been happening to her-- this shouldn't have been happening to anybody. They'd said that the war... that the war wouldn't make it this far west. That everybody here would be safe. She'd seen the reports on TV-- they all had, every child in her class-- of the ruination the rebels had wreaked across this once proud and glorious empire, of the scenes of mass carnage and devastation, of the corpses of São Paulo, Santiago, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, great cities reduced to rubble and ash. And who amongst those little children, watching with as much horror as awe, as much dread as fascination, had not found themselves unable to sleep at night, for fear that Cartagena would be the next to fall? Who among their number had not trembled at the prospect of awakening to fire and brimstone, or perhaps to never waking up again at all? They had been told time and time again that the rebels would never reach Colombia, that their war would peter out in the southeast and the empire would be united anew. But then, they had also said before that that the rebels would never make it into Brazil-- before that, that the rebels would never be able to fight on equal terms with the Imperial Army, that they would never be a threat to the divine might of the Emperor-- before that, that the rebels did not exist at all... They had said many things. And Alejandra Valverde knew now that she should have known better than to believe each and every lie. She called out her best friend's name once again, and could barely hear her own voice over the din of distant gunfire throughout the city and cannons from the ships at sea. The soldiers were coming-- she threw herself to the side of the street, into the battered husks of buildings, into the rubble. The violent pounding of her heart in her chest, like a jackhammer struggling to break free of the skin, felt as though it had muted her senses-- her vision swam before her very eyes, and she could not shake the insistent ringing in her ears, vying with the thrashing refrain of her own heartbeat and the harmonies of war all around her. She didn't know where she was running-- she was scrambling across rubble and shattered brick, crunching chunks of broken glass beneath her shoes, coughing and wheezing on smoke-choked air. She knew only that she was running. Only that she was looking. Of course, none of them had taken it seriously when the evacuation had begun and Mr. Meirelles had begun ushering his students from the classroom. Why would they have? Everybody-- the teachers, the parents, the military, the news reporters-- everybody had told them the rebels would never make it this far out west. They'd told them that they were safe, spared the utter annihilation the rest of the continent had been subjected to, and they had clung to that promise even when they heard the unmistakable report of cannons at sea, the augur of the battle's onset. They decided it had to have been something else-- that this was a drill, that the gunfire was perhaps even the imperial navy simulating the sounds of war. They'd made a game of it. They'd been laughing and playing. Somehow-- Alejandra could no longer recall how-- she had managed to find a reason to continue deceiving herself. She was good at that, she realised-- right up until a stray shell had exploded in the very centre of the school, out where the evacuating students had been miming the firing of a gun in time with the cannon shots, and Mr. Meirelles, struggling to coerce his students into obedience, had vanished into the blaze, life snuffed out in a single flash of flame and fury. Alejandra had found herself unable to see or to hear in the moments following the explosion, and so she did not know if those students who yet retained command of those senses had ground to a halt, fallen sharply silent in horror as the reality of the situation dawned upon them, or if they had immediately been seized in the maws of panic. The smile on her lips had not even vanished by the time Mr. Meirelles and the students unfortunate enough to be too near to him had been killed-- Christina's little jokes and jibes as they walked alongside one another and played about as best friends do still fresh in her ears even as all other sounds were conquered by a senseless ringing. She remembered somebody's hand-- Christina's-- clutching at her own, remembered both of them blindly and deafly stumbling away from the scene so jarringly wrenched from mirth into despair, and she remembered feeling the ground shake with another impact, remembered her feet leaving the ground, her fingers, despite her best efforts, losing their grip on the sweaty palm of Christina's hand, remembered hitting the ground a second later. And she remembered the white that dominated her vision slowly fading into reality, the ringing in her ears gradually abating just a little bit, pain wrenching at every fibre of her body-- forcing herself to clamber up to her feet and finding her best friend gone, replaced by corpses strewn about the street, broken husks of buildings, people fleeing frantically in all directions. And then the soldiers. I have to find Christina, she swore once again, stumbling through the scattered remnants of brick and mortar, prowling through the wreckage of homes and townhouses in hopes of avoiding the troops that swarmed the main sections of the streets. Find her, and then... and then get out of here. Go somewhere. Go anywhere but here. Another artillery strike reduced one of the buildings across the road to dust, and Alejandra stumbled at the sudden explosion, a jagged outcropping of steel-- a chunk of this former house's skeleton, all that remained of its substance-- catching her arm as she fell. Its cleft point dug into the flesh of her arm, carved a deep gash for her to remember it by, and she clamped her hand down over the wound and forced herself to choke down a cry of pain. It was nothing, nothing compared to all the nicks and cuts, bruises and contusions she was long since armoured in. Nothing compared to what she'd seen happen to others. And so she staggered, and stumbled, and crawled-- hating the rebels every moment for so suddenly, so jarringly, so simply crushing her life underfoot. Every time she heard a tank or an armoured vehicle growl its way up the streets like a predator on the hunt for its prey, every time she caught through the gunfire and the violence and the shock the sound of boots marching, every time the artillery shells struck too close to home, she ground to a halt, and stood there frozen, skin crawling with sweat and blood, fearing the furious beating of her heart alone would betray her. She wasn't sure if they were rebels or imperials-- and at this point, she was not willing to risk either. But it was for naught in the end. Even as she squirmed and wriggled amidst the ash and the filth of the devastation, she heard the whistle of an impending artillery shell-- closer than any of the ones before. And before she could admit a gasp, some utterance of horror, it struck. She was flung from the rubble, hurled out into the street in a billowing cloud of dust, and she hit the ground amidst shattered chunks of glass and concrete. Their pinprick agony met numb skin, however-- exhaustion, sheer exhaustion, overwhelmed the nine year old girl's nerves, and for the moment, the pain was gone. She lay there for a moment, unable to feel the cold of the ground or the slivers of glass digging into her cheek, unable to even gasp in breath, before she saw a small canister come clattering down beside her. It came to rest just before her eyes-- numbers, letters, arranged in a code she didn't understand, nothing except for the Imperial emblem amidst it all. Alejandra clambered up to her feet, and at last sucked in a heaving breath of air, only to find the air that filtered into her nose and mouth... wasn't right. She stared down at the canister at her feet, but her eyes were already beginning to sting and water as she registered the hissing sound emanating from it. G... gas? she thought numbly through the incipient waves of nausea as they took hold of her, wrenching at her little body. It didn't make sense-- why would they use-- ? She heard voices-- unfamiliar voices, soldiers' voices, loathsome voices-- but found she couldn't turn her head toward them. Her body, she found, was giving up on her: it could do no more, nothing but sink to the ground again, eyes burning, hacking and coughing up the bile rising in her throat. She struggled to lift her eyes upward, and was met with the approaching barrel of a gun trained upon her, the callous mien of a gas mask behind it. Through the film of pain and tears, she could barely make out the Imperial emblem adorning the soldier's shoulders. And behind them, there were others, and none of them... They weren't going to save her. She, an officer's child, and they were... they were going to... ? She couldn't bear consciousness any longer. Her vision began to go blank, even as, just before she blacked out, the soldier in the gas mask also collapsed to the ground, the blank stare of the mask's eyes meeting her own fading gaze. The next she opened her eyes-- or at least, the next she could recall the sharp pang of consciousness-- it was to a peace and tranquility that was worlds away from burning, bleeding, dying Cartagena. She felt beneath her the soft cushion of a mattress, the thin materiel of a hospital gown against her skin and an IV drip feeding into the veins of her arm. The warmth of sunlight streaming through the window beside her draped across her battered, ashen body like the protective aegis of an angel-- and she could hear birdsong, sweet and serene and utterly naive, wafting through the glass from the other side. Alejandra blinked, mind yet weary and overwhelmed by the pressure of consciousness, and heaved a breath to begin pulling herself up to a sitting position. "I would keep still if I were you. You endured quite an ordeal, after all." The hard rasp of the voice was familiar-- very immediately familiar-- and Alejandra's gaze immediately darted upward. There she stood, towering over her: Isabel Moraes Vieira. She was unmistakable, from the steel gaze of her eyes and the hard contours of her face, which had always brought to Alejandra's mind a weathered but resolute stone statue, to the breadth of her shoulders and the immensity of her stature. Alejandra's breath caught in her throat. This woman, her father had stressed, was the enemy-- she was a traitor, an agent of deceit and betrayal working in concert with others no different from her to rend to pieces this immortal empire which the holy Emperor had carved out of South America. This woman was wicked. Untrustworthy. The enemy. "A-- Auntie?" Alejandra breathed. "Oh, good-- you can still recognise a familiar face," Isabel returned dryly. She crossed her arms across her broad chest, and raised an eyebrow as Alejandra glanced around her, at this unfamiliar hospital she'd awoken in, and slowly, almost suspiciously ventured, "... where am I?" "You're in Pará," came the curt answer. Pará, the nexus of the rebels. "I had you brought back here after you were found in the streets of Cartagena in the wake of a nerve gas attack." Isabel fell silent briefly, and Alejandra's gaze flitted back to her just long enough for her to catch some glimpse of a fleeting, foreign sentiment in her expression before it swiftly settled back into the sternness Alejandra had long since come to expect of her aunt. "Frankly, it was impressive enough that you survived at all, but the doctors are telling me you're expected to make a full recovery, which damn near borders on the miraculous." The meaning of it, of course, meant little to a nine year old child who was happy only to have made it out alive, albeit into the enemy's hands. Although... Her brow knotted in vexation. Something was gnawing at the fringes of her mind, something tugging her back to whatever hollowed out carcass of a city Cartagena had been reduced to... "Christina!" Alejandra almost leapt out of bed, and Isabel reacted instantly-- firmly but gently, preventing the girl from overexerting herself with her hand against her chest. Helpless to do anything but settle back into her bed, Alejandra breathed, "Christina-- I was-- I was trying to find her... is she... is she okay?" Isabel's expression did not shift the slightest, but she did turn away from Alejandra and toward one of the other officers, someone Alejandra couldn't see-- a subordinate, perhaps, or a colleague, Alejandra didn't know and it didn't matter. "Say, Kaneda," she grunted. "Can you check to see if there were any bodies from the Rafael Núñez school shelling that were identified as a... uh, Christina?" "Sure," a cool, almost inexplicably easygoing voice replied. There was a moment's silence-- perhaps as Kaneda rifled through files, or scanned for them on a computer-- before she added, this time with what Alejandra firmly decided to be the appropriate level of gravity, "Uh, no. There's a Christina Martinez registered at that school, but she's among three students whose fate remains unconfirmed." "Thanks." Isabel turned back to Alejandra, and scowled; she was about as good at comforting a child in distress as a particularly aggressive rhinoceros, but she felt she had to make at least some vague degree of effort. "I'm... sorry," she managed at last through grit teeth. "Our soldiers are scouring the city for refugees and missing civilians as we speak. We will find her, one way or another." Alejandra sank back into her bed, feeling her eyes burning again-- and this time, not from nerve gas or the dust of a collapsing building. "She was like a sister to me," she said glumly. "She is a sister to me." She didn't know what to do with this grief, with this uncertainty, and so she searched for some familiar means of dealing with it, and arrived at one in short order. Her lips formed a thin, angry line, and she shot a venomous glare up at her aunt, who returned it with a raised eyebrow. "This is your fault," she snapped miserably. "If you and your rebels hadn't attacked our city, we'd... we'd be alright. They'd... They..." She trailed off into a wordless sigh. She didn't have the energy to sustain that sort of vehemence, and instead, her expression eased back into one of resigned unhappiness once again. "They said you would never make it to Cartagena..." Her aunt made a noise torn somewhere between irritation and wryness. "And I imagine they also said we'd never make it to Pará, either?" When Alejandra didn't answer, she growled, "Here. Look at me." She said the words the way she would have given a command to her troops, and it worked: Alejandra was powerless to stop herself looking up and meeting her aunt's inexorable gaze. "They lied to you. They've lied to everybody. They always have. They don't care about you, or Christina, or anybody else-- all they've ever cared about, the Emperor and the slavish lackeys that cling to his every word in hopes of currying favour and prestige, is their own power. Justice means nothing to them. Rights mean nothing to them. Lives mean nothing to them." Alejandra found herself trembling with an indignant, callow rage. "You're the liar!" she snarled, some semblance of that tired but sincere fury taking hold of her once again-- but Isabel interjected before she could stoke those flames any further. "Am I?" Perhaps she was being harsh-- but then, it took this sort of bluntness to divorce an incipient stooge of the state from their propaganda-derived convictions, even one as young as her niece. "The Empire has been bombing its own cities to force us into compromising strategic positions since the war began. We've only ever attacked military and tactical positions of our own volition, but in targeting its own citizens in order to draw us into an engagement, they've been able to paint us as the aggressors. They will gladly sacrifice their own peoples' lives, the very citizens who worship the Emperor as a god incarnate, if it means inflicting more casualties against us." She leaned down toward Alejandra, meeting her fuming, childish glare with her own brutally honest eyes. "Do you understand what I'm saying? The Empire has lied to you. They have abused your trust. They are, more than anybody, responsible for what has happened-- throughout the continent, in Cartagena, and to you." It was too much for the child. Alejandra buried her face in her hands, as though concealing some inexcusable shame from Isabel-- she did not cry, but perhaps that was merely because she was too exhausted to do that. Isabel gazed down at her, and couldn't help some twinge of sympathy; it was easy to distance herself from it, to look up Alejandra, child though she may have been, as merely a zealot who needed to be torn away from the Empire's propaganda even if she had to be yanked off it kicking and screaming. But had she not been much the same, once upon a time-- and had it not been just as difficult, perhaps even more difficult than Alejandra could ever know, to come to terms with the reality of the nation she had once venerated? Her mouth pulled taut. No-- it was best to be blunt about these things, as it was to be about most things. Nothing good would come of prolonging this suffering. She prepared to turn away and at least give the child some time to herself-- she merited at least that little bit-- but she had not taken a step before she was given pause by a muffled sound from Alejandra's hands. "What?" Alejandra dropped her hands, revealing a miserable but tearless face. "I said... my father would never serve a country like that. He's a good soldier. A good person." Isabel bit her lip. "Alejandra..." She would have liked nothing more than to be able to leave this for another day, to hold off on the inevitable just a little while longer-- but it had already been this long, and the Empire had clearly never bothered to tell the child. And... and there was no use prolonging that suffering, either. Not for Alejandra, and not for Isabel herself. "Your father died before the battle for Cartagena." Dead. Another dead... dead, and gone. Perhaps if she had not already lost so much since that first shell had struck in the middle of the schoolyard-- if she had not already endured so much since then-- Alejandra would have had it in her to... to say something. To do something. To shed a tear. But it felt as though the nerve gas had burned from her eyes all the tears she would ever have had to offer, as though every fragment of glass and metal that had embedded itself into her flesh had stung until her nerves would feel no more pain. She had only this strange, sudden emptiness in the pit of her stomach, as though something had been pulled out of her own body, and she could feel its absence in her very gut. It wasn't that she had particularly loved her father-- that he had ever really been there at all, much less that he had been important to her as a person, as an individual. It was merely the knowledge that she had lost another person-- first her mother, and then her sister, and now her father. It was knowing that now, Alejandra Valverde had nobody-- she was completely, utterly, terribly alone in the world. Nobody but her aunt. Her father's sister. The enemy. The traitor. The person who had in the span of five minutes torn down every certainty, every conviction, every reality she had ever known. She was all she had. Perhaps that was why, as Isabel turned again to leave, already halfway to the door of the clinic, Alejandra reached out to her one last time in desperation. "Wait, I--" She needed somebody, even if it was the hard-hearted soldier who turned once again at her beck, expression cold and motionless. And she also needed to be assured that she wouldn't lose even more. "Tell me-- tell me that..." The little girl swallowed anxiously, her mouth quivering in fear and in lamentation, and finally, desperately finished, "Tell me that the war won't come back here again. That I won't see any more of it ever again." Alejandra knew she must have imagined the minute shift in her aunt's expression as she registered the plea-- as much as she must have imagined how Isabel herself swallowed as if in uncertainty, something Alejandra had never seen in the woman. And then, it was gone. "No," Isabel returned shortly and finally. "I will not." And then she turned away one last time, with no intention of turning back. She could not and would not make a promise that she knew would be reduced to rubble time and time again before the year was out. She would not tell Alejandra Valverde that her experience with the horrors of war was over when they both knew it was anything but.

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til rotavele is the first person ever to rp a female character what a trailblazer

That's right: we need disgusting unhygienic barnyard animals, and we want YOURS! We've maintained this TC for quite a while now, but one of our long-term partners has gone inactive-- we've all been there. After mourning the pork-and-beef shaped hole left in our hearts for the appropriate amount of time, we're now looking for somebody to take their place. What will we be putting your pigs and cattle to use for? Namely, for booze, burgers, and construction. That means a reduction to infrastructure cost, a raise in aircraft limit, and a +4 increase in your population's happiness, since all that alcohol and fast food helps your people to forget that they're just peons in a virtual nation simulator in a country called 'Buttsland'. Yeah yeah, I know, you were twelve when you made the nation and you didn't think you'd be sticking with the game this long. We've heard it all before. BUT WAIT! There's more! There actually isn't. I just really wanted to use that phrase. Anyway, anybody who's interested can hit me up right over [URL=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=494529]here[/URL] so I can get you situated in the TC and your people can begin drowning their sorrows away in booze and greasy food!

And I'm sure if nutmeg were violating the IC/OOC line they would be totally forthcoming about it, right?

"I just can't believe you would do something like this to me, Izel." Alex's steps were like the pounding footfalls of Godzilla itself, lumbering off towards Tokyo to unleash its boundless wrath upon the fragile pretense of a civilisation humanity had erected in a thinly-veiled allegory for nuclear war. Hell, nuclear war was probably too soft a term for what the steady, vehement beat of the soles of her boots against the polished linoleum floor was soon to augur. This was... this was fuckin' global catastrophe just waitin' to happen right here. Apocalypse. Armageddon. Annihilation. Lots of synonyms for 'lots of fucked up shit' that Alex Martinez was just plain too pissed off to think of right now. Izel followed closely behind her, and the comparative lightness of her footfalls belied the magnitude of her own discontent. "And I just can't believe you're making such a fuss over it," she fired back, struggling to maintain some semblance of gravitas-- which was difficult when you were scurrying to keep up with the long-legged stride of someone about a foot taller than you. "You shoulda known this would make me upset," Alex growled, refusing to look over her shoulder as she led them along down the hallway, passing by each numbered door until at last they came upon the one that, for the past month or so, had served as their mutual living quarters-- a needlessly verbose means of saying that yes, they'd moved in together. It was not, thus far, proving to be the most perspicacious of decisions. "Look," Izel retorted angrily, before nearly colliding with Alex's broad back as her lover stopped short abruptly at apartment 76-- home sweet home. As Alex shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and rifled about for the keys, Izel recovered her momentum, and finished, "It didn't seem like that big a deal, okay? I was just looking around." "Yeah well, see, that's the fuckin' thing!" Alex unlocked the door and all but hurled it open, stomping off into what would normally have been the welcoming tranquility of their new apartment. "You think that just 'cause my home is your home, my shit is also your shit and you can fuck with it however you like!" She yanked her arms out of the confines of her jacket's sleeves one by one as she led them out into the living room, all but lobbing the poor thing off at the wall as though it had done her some truly unforgivable injustice in the past. It landed with a thunk against the vast window that sprawled across the far wall of the living room, permitting an open view of Guatemala City beneath the dusky vigil of the moon and the stars, a peace, a quietude that the apartment at that moment was sorely wanting for. "Okay-- first of all," Izel matched Alex's fury calculatedly, ensuring she achieved the proper degree of violent hand motions and spittle-to-words ratio to stay toe to toe with the angry titan. She reached a hand out and grabbed Alex's arm, slender fingers clutching at the thick muscle of the former soldier's bicep, and though Alex could have effortlessly shaken her off and gone along her merry way, she merely turned her head sharply to meet Izel's bitter glare. "First of all, this is my home that's now your home, and don't you dare be so quick to forget it. And second of all, again-- I think this is just a little bit of a fucking overreaction, don't you?" "An overreaction?" Alex snarled incredulously, as though she'd never heard anything quite so ridiculous. She turned on her heel, and marched off furiously toward the shelves that lined the walls of the living room, packed to the brim with CDs, and yanked one out of its space before stomping back over to Izel and all but shoving it in her face. "An overreaction? You know Killing On Adrenaline is my favourite Dying Fetus album! It goes first! You do not just take it out and then put it back in after fucking Grotesque Impalement like it's the inferior album!" Izel pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine she was on a nice cool beach somewhere, feeling nice and relaxed, perhaps with a chilled cocktail in one hand and a good book in the other, and not wracked by the urge to strangle any living thing within grasp of her hands. "Well," she managed to grind out between gritted teeth. "You didn't mention that you stacked your CDs not only in alphabetical order, but also in order of favourite album." "Oh, don't give me that bullshit," Alex dismissed the excuse with a callous wave of her hand as she stepped away from Izel and went over to shove the CD back where it belonged (not after goddamn Grotesque Impalement, I'll have you fucking know). "You should've just left it alone. I don't know why you'd even fuck around with my CDs in the first place." "Well, clearly," Izel began, her voice so heavy with sarcasm it was a wonder each word didn't sink to the ground with the weight of it. "I was doing it deliberately, because I knew you'd flip a shit so massive you'd have thought I'd personally murdered your mother and then punted your kitten out the window for good measure, just to spite you." The glare Alex shot her way could have withered the petals off a rose. "Real clever." "Yeah, y'know what..." Izel shook her head and turned away. "I'm just gonna head off to bed. Once you've chilled the fuck out and aren't about to ruin our entire relationship over a goddamn CD, you can join me-- or just sleep on the couch. It doesn't make much difference to me." Alex scowled as Izel squared her shoulders and marched off toward the bedroom, but she raised neither voice nor hand to stop her-- merely watched as she left the living room and then winced as she heard the door slam behind her. With nowhere to go-- or perhaps, for lack of will to sustain it any longer-- all that rage simply dissipated, like vapour over a pot of boiling water, and Alex sighed as she walked away from the shelf, CD still in hand, and sank down onto the couch. She rubbed the palm of her hand over her eyes, and then glanced down at the CD in her hands. Izel had said she'd only taken it out and hadn't opened it or looked inside the case. Perhaps it was for the better she hadn't.... or perhaps Alex found herself wishing she had. Alex cracked it open, and tugged the liner notes out of the case, a small corner of something jammed in between the pages peeking out from it. She pulled the photograph out, gingerly-- it was old, after all, quite old by now-- and looked down at the image of her face-- her true face, her natural face, the one she no longer wore-- smiling beside that of Isabel Vieira. How long ago had this been-- fifteen years? Twenty? Her aunt had been about as old as she was now when this picture had been taken-- in the days before the Hierarchy, before Isabel had forsaken the ideals of democracy and cooperation she had once striven so ardently to uphold throughout South America in favour of cynicism and self-preservation. Those had been the days before everything had begun to go to shit-- just a little after Isabel had established Para, in pursuit of a vision of a land that would act as an example to all of South America, a land that would lead the continent to an age of prosperity and unity. It showed: her aunt's smile was genuine-- one might have almost been compelled to say naive in a certain sense-- and Alex... Alejandra wore a reluctant sort of smile, a grudging but honest upturn of the corners of her lips. The day this picture had been taken, Alejandra Valverde had been promoted to captain and put in command of Para's first and foremost unit of marines; she remembered how she'd felt that day, a motley amalgamation of confidence and uncertainty, as much triumph in the accomplishment as anxiety in it. But she remembered it had also been much easier back in those days, because back then she'd been a creature of impulse, of action. It had been simpler, but then, she'd also never been happy back then. The things it took to be happy were never simple, after all-- love, companionship, family, those sorts of things. The soldier in the photograph in her hands knew nothing of those things, and she was content to remain as such. Wholly, blissfully, fatally ignorant of all the things she would soon come to see, and feel, and do, and run away from. The light had been put out, the book set down shut upon the nightstand when Izel heard the bedroom door crack open timidly, almost ashamedly, and then close shut again in much the same manner-- but she was not asleep. Nevertheless, she didn't budge a muscle, not until Alex sheepishly ventured, "Uh... Izel?" Wearily, the Tikalese engineer willed herself to pull up to a sitting position-- blearily rubbing the tinges of otherwise unattainable sleep from her eyes, she reached over, and clicked the light on, illuminating Alex's downcast, repentant features. "You chilled out now?" "Just a little bit," Alex answered dryly, before nodding her head toward the bed. "May I?" Izel raised a tired eyebrow, but merely managed a shrug of her slender shoulders, and Alex trundled over, lowering herself down to a sitting position on the edge of the mattress with a small grunt. Izel looked at her-- a towering testament of might and muscle, of the human body's defiance in the face of time and aging-- and couldn't help but feel like she'd never seen the woman look so thin and worn down. Her face was turned away from her at that moment, hunched over as though recovering from a war wound, but the silence was ruminative, the sort of silence entertained by somebody wrestling with their words, struggling to make sense of them, struggling to speak. Izel gave her that time, and it was a moment before she finally spoke up, voice hoarse and dry. "I'm gonna get real sappy here, okay? Don't laugh at me or nothin'." "I'll try and restrain myself," Izel returned, managing a wry smile, and Alex returned the expression herself, though it was fleeting. "Look, I... before I met you, I don't think I was ever really happy. When I was growing up, an entire continent was being ripped to shreds by war, and I learned at a very early age that nobody could stay in this world forever. No child should ever have to come to terms with mortality when they're still in the single digits of age, but, well..." She shrugged her broad shoulders listlessly, and sighed. "I came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth being attached to anybody for fear of losing them, so instead, I found other avenues of making myself feel alive-- the very thing that took so much from me as a kid. War, violence, destruction-- I hurled myself headlong into it and didn't look back. Why should I have? This made me feel... well, at all, and that was something precious and important, something to be nurtured, something that couldn't be taken away from me. Violence was a language I could understand, a language I'd been fluent in from the very beginning. And more importantly, it was simple." She ran her tongue across her dry lips. "I guess after fifty years of living my life that way, the loneliness just got to be too much, especially after I had to leave South America entirely and carve out a new life for myself here. I'm not a soldier anymore: I can't take solace in senseless, meaningless violence. I mean... I'm gettin' old, Izel. I don't have too many years left in me. I suppose maybe there was some part of me that didn't want to spend those last few years the way I'd spent the decades that had come before them-- alone, unhappy, angry, and without purpose to boot." "Well then..." Izel reached a hand out and gestured vaguely towards the bedroom door. "What's with all this senseless rage about a misplaced CD?" Alex merely shrugged her shoulders. "I ain't no psychotherapist, that's for sure. But maybe... I dunno. Maybe there's another part of me that still clings to the convictions of my youth-- that still fears that happiness. Maybe that part of me is trying to sabotage what we've built for ourselves, if only to escape the crippling dilemma of love versus loneliness." "Hedgehog's dilemma," Izel spoke up suddenly. Alex turned back to cast a quizzical glance at her, and she explained, "The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer came up with it as a means of explaining why people fear intimacy. It's because people are like hedgehogs, huddling together to escape the cold around them with one another's warmth. But hedgehogs can't come too close to one another without pricking each other with their spines-- and so they must choose between the certainty of solitude and the pinprick pain of intimacy." Alex frowned. "See, this is why I can't fuckin' stand philosophers. They can never just say what's on their mind-- people are scared of intimacy, but they're also scared of loneliness. They gotta start pullin' animals outta the goddamn zoo to make shit more complicated than it's gotta be." "Well, of course they do," Izel answered with a smile. "If philosophers just gave people the straight sell with no fancy talk, they'd never make any money. People don't pay philosophers to actually figure out why things are the way they are-- they just pay 'em to spout off some vaguely meaningful shit so that they can look real highbrow when they repeat it to their friends and pretend they have the slightest clue what it all means." "Didn't know people paid philosophers at all." At that, Izel even gave a dry little chuckle. "You'd be surprised. Even here in Tikal, if you can at least do a good job of acting like what you're saying has the vaguest semblance of relevance, you can make a living." "Well, shit, maybe I oughta reconsider my career," Alex mused. "I'm great at pretending I know what I'm talking about." "And also at changing the subject." Izel pulled herself up onto her knees and clambered over to where Alex sat, wrapping her slender arms gently around her neck from behind. Her chest against Alex's broad back, she felt the former soldier's breath grow sharp and quick. "Since you have so little patience for needless overcomplication... why overcomplicate it? Just ask yourself this: are you happy with me?" Alex's brow furrowed. "Well, I mean, what exactly--?" "No needless overcomplication. Are you happy with me?" "Well," Alex grunted. "Yeah." "Happier than you were before?" "Well," Alex grunted again. "Yeah." "Well then..." Izel leaned her head down, and rested her chin against the crook of Alex's shoulder. "Let your fears be at ease. Because I ain't goin' nowhere anytime soon-- that much, I can promise you with certainty." In spite of herself, Alex couldn't help a smile. "How can you promise anything like that with certainty?" "I'm a scientist, Alex," Izel answered confidently. "A scientist makes no assertion unless they are 100% positive that it's true." "Oh yeah?" Alex retorted sardonically. "Well, oh mighty and pragmatic scientist, where are your case studies, your theoretical proofs, your experimental verification that has been retested and reexamined by third parties and confirmed independently? It's very unscientific to go with your gut feelings, you know." Izel merely smirked as she ran her hands down along the contours of Alex's arm muscles gently. "What can I say?" she whispered softly. "I guess when it comes to you, I'm just not a very good scientist."

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As per [URL=http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?/topic/123762-until-the-light-takes-us/]this DoE[/URL], kindly mark everything east of [URL=http://postimg.org/image/6d7yk9all/]this line[/URL] (excluding those parts which conflict with pre-existing claims, of course-- it's rather haphazard, admittedly) as the Sakha Federation!

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My bad, forgot to update this thread! We found a taker. Thanks for the interest, though, and good luck finding other TCs!

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Still looking! Come on. Do it for the children.

Exactly what it says on the tin. An almost complete trade circle, all we need is your uranium and aluminum to seal the deal. We've maintained the circle for quite a while, and are pretty committed; one of the members is going to be dropping out soon for understandable reasons, and we need a replacement. This TC nets you construction, which reduces infrastructure cost and is mighty useful and all, but mostly, the trade circle gives you booze and hamburgers. I mean, come on now. You're not gonna deny your people booze and hamburgers, are you? What kind of heartless despot are you? Those of you who truly love and cherish your people and believe in freedom and liberty and wish to provide them all the joys of alcohol and horribly unhealthy fast food should shoot me a PM over [URL=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=494529]here[/URL]. Those of you who hate fun and happiness and think Hitler was a pretty cool dude with a cool moustache, by all means, look elsewhere. I'm not judging or anything.

"For the last fucking time, Alex." Izel crossed her arms across her chest and glared resolutely at the door to Excoriari Security CEO Alex Martinez's apartment. "I'm not going to laugh. Now for the love of the eternal sun and the radiant moon and all that lays witness to their glorious light, will you come the fuck out already?" "No," grunted a stiff voice from behind the door. "This is bullshit. I look ridiculous. And I feel like an elephant stuffed into a tracksuit made for something that isn't a goddamn elephant. I have a bunch of other shit I could wear that not only looks vastly superior, but also has the additional benefit of not making me feel like I'm being suffocated every second I'm wearing it--" "You can't go to the Rose fucking River wearing a pair of jeans, your filthy boots-- I don't even wanna know how many bodily fluids and types of dirt and mud those poor things have seen in service to you-- and a shirt that's still adorned with a bit of last night's beer," Izel retorted hotly. There was a brief silence, and then Alex stuffily replied, "Look, I forget to do the laundry just one time--" "You're wearing the suit," Izel stated shortly. There was an audible sigh from the other side of the door-- the sort of sigh that says more than a million words could, given all those words are likely to be variations of a diverse menagerie of profanities. And then, slowly, arduously, with all the reluctance of a great hero who knows she's going to her doom with the awareness that it must be done, because the only other fate involves her door being battered down by a fed-up Tikalese engineer, Alex opened the door, and stepped out. And then Izel tried and distinctly failed to suppress a giggle. "You lying little--!" Izel couldn't help herself; she burst out into peals of open, hearty laughter as Alex, a hapless smile tugging at her own lips, grabbed the little scientist and gently wrestled her into a sort of mock-headlock. "I submit, I submit!" Izel managed to get out between fits of cackling, and she smoothed her coat and skirt down as Alex mercifully released her before looking back up to Alex with a contrite smile. "That was cruel of me." But she had to admit, Alex really did look completely out of her element in that suit-- like one of those dogs whose owners have stuffed them into some kind of shirt, and you can just see in their expression that they're just thinking 'what the fuck is this shit, owner, do I look like a fucking doll to you, are we playing fucking dress up here, you crazy-ass fucktard, I'm not gonna put up with your shit'. But she pulled it off, for what it was worth; she wasn't lookin' too shabby at all, though the suit was very clearly from some budget rental place-- the shoes failed to obscure the fact that they hadn't been shined since the days of the Holy American Empire, and the tie... Izel's brow furrowed. "What's happened to your tie?" "Ah!" Alex immediately raised a hand to stifle any possibility of further discourse on that subject. "I'll not budge an inch on that front. That damn thing felt like I was being constantly, slowly strangled by a really weak midget-- I dunno how you can stand it every work day." "Oh, alright, I'll let the tie go," Izel chuckled, before stepping back and raising her arms outward. "So, how do I look?" She even did a little pirouette so Alex could see it from all angles-- the cobalt blue, thin-fabric trench coat, the cotton lace pencil skirt, the dark blue leggings leading down to a pair of what were either eldritch abominations from beyond time and space that could shatter an ankle with but a single step, or stiletto heels. But Alex hardly even noticed any of that; she had eyes only for the dense curls that fluttered through the air as Izel turned, and the dark, smooth skin of her face, perhaps lightly adorned by make up or perhaps not at all, and the heavy-lidded, black-rimmed eyes that met Alex's expectantly. "Well?" "I think," Alex decided slowly. "that your 'radiant moon' better step aside, 'cause you look about ready to outshine it entirely." An unabashed grin pulled at Izel's lips. "Why, Alex-- that's blasphemy." But Alex merely shrugged her broad shoulders. "I've always said it ain't true love if you're not willing to blaspheme for each other." Of course, Izel made Alex promise not to make any remarks like that in public-- "People take their commitment to our leaders very seriously," she pointed out firmly. "And I would rather not be thrown out of the restaurant because you can't help but... uh, express your true love." Alex had groused under her breath about it the whole way there, muttering lowly about 'entire goddamn nation of fuckin' rocket scientists, no clue how you all managed to end up also being religious fundamentalists, woulda figured if there was any place on this god-forsaken rock of a planet that woulda turned out a bastion of atheism...' Mysteriously enough, this earned her nothing much more than a slap upside the head for her trouble. She reigned it in once they arrived at the restaurant, though-- partially because yes, it would have been vastly preferable if they didn't have their celebration cut unceremoniously short 'cause everybody here was a flaming religious fanatic, and partially because she was too taken aback to continue. "You weren't kiddin'," she grunted as they were ushered into the restaurant by one of the valets, who stepped away to fetch one of the servers to take the pair to their reserved table. "This is high-class shit. I mean-- look, they've even got an actual piano player. Playing an actual piano. If that don't scream high class, I dunno what does." "Sometimes, Alex, I think you must have grown up in a nuclear wasteland," Izel shot back snidely. "Next thing we know you'll be exclaiming 'Edible food! Why, this place ain't just high class, it's downright astronomical class!'" "Hey, I'm a fish outta water here, okay?" "More of a whale out of water." Alex raised an eyebrow. "Am I at least a killer whale? Nobody fucks with killer whales." "Alright, a killer whale out of water, then." Izel smirked, and placed her small hand in the crook of Alex's elbow. "Don't worry, my beloved, hapless orca. I'll guide you through the vagaries of upper crust society." She nodded as one of the servers, dressed every bit as crisply as Alex and looking a damn sight more comfortable about it than she did, approached them, a familiar smile upon his face. "Good evening, Dr. Mérida-- you look absolutely lovely tonight. And..." He turned to face Alex, and to his credit, he managed to restrain the urge to wince at how woefully, how neglectfully she wore that poor suit of hers. "You must be Alex Martinez," he continued, succeeding in maintaining a cordial tone that was only further challenged when Alex replied with, "Uh. Yeah. I must be." Izel next to her looked about ready to die (less from embarrassment and more from sheer amusement), but she too managed to maintain a politely subdued pretense until the server, exchanging a little small talk with Izel and occasionally directing an innocuous remark Alex's way, led them to their table-- a private booth nestled safely away from the bulk of the rest of the none too sparsely populated restaurant. And then, once he'd left, Izel turned to face Alex, and permitted the grin that was just dying to surface cross her lips. "'Uh, yeah, I must be'?" she repeated in great mirth. "Hey, I didn't expect the dude to actually talk to me," Alex retorted defensively. "I don't go to a restaurant to make small talk and introduce myself, I go there to eat and then leave with nothing more said than my order and 'check'." "And to think I defend you whenever Okawara grouses about 'that damn Neanderthal'," Izel mused wryly. "I for one take it as a compliment. I dunno if you know this or not, but the Neanderthals had much larger brains than humans do, so really, Okawara's sayin' I'm smarter than he is." Izel almost choked on the glass of ice water that had been set before her just before the server had gone off to fetch their first course. "Alex, that's not how...." But she seemed to reconsider, and instead, she merely smiled sweetly. "Yeah, how 'bout those Neanderthals, eh?" And so the evening continued. Their conversation meandered as all the best conversations do-- from the brain size of Neanderthals to books they'd been reading recently, to the mobile suit project, to the very thing they were celebrating in the first place, to global politics, to the recent murmurings of a rogue state in its embryonic form coalescing in Baja California, to Rawlsian justice theory, to, inevitably-- as the final course of the night arrived-- Alex's taste in music. Or, as Izel preferred to call it, 'that ear-shattering noise you call music'. "And the names!" Izel shook her head ruefully. "How any sane, self-respecting person can listen to bands called Napalm Death or Suffocation, I'll never know." "Now, whatever happened to the old saying 'don't judge a book by its cover'?" Alex ventured slyly, meriting only a flatly unamused look from Izel. "When the book has chapters with titles like Bathe in Entrails and A Skull Full of Maggots, you're damn right I can judge it by its cover." "Hey, watch it," Alex warned. "Cannibal Corpse is a classic." "No," Izel countered swiftly. "Kinda Blue is a classic. Sidewinder is a classic. Led Zeppelin II is a classic. Mysterious Traveler is a classic. Scream Bloody Gore? Not a goddamn classic." "I lament that you are unable to see past your own prejudices against heavy music to realise the technical intricacies and musical worth inherent to extreme metal," Alex maligned, as though deeply, personally wounded by Izel's animosity to her favourite genre of music, provoking a chuckle from her lover. "All the technical intricacies and musical worth in the world won't make having to hear this noise for the rest of my life any better!" "Well," Alex began firmly. "We'll just have to work our way toward ha-- wait, wha--" Her brain, despite according to Okawara being significantly larger than that of a human, immediately shut down as she sputtered uselessly for a little while, and it was several minutes (and many encouraging repetitions of 'breath, Alex, breathe!' from a clearly rather amused Izel) before she could get her bearings together enough to stammer, "Wait, what the-- what d'you mean the rest of your life?" "Oh, relax, Alex. That was just my way of turning the conversation fluidly toward our relationship. I love talking about bands called Dying Fetus and Aborted as much as the next sane person, but I think I'd rather talk about us, wouldn't you?" "Well, gimme a little warnin' next time you wanna talk about us, will ya?" Alex grunted crossly. "I'm gettin' old, Izel. My heart can't take that shit anymore." Izel smiled calmly. "Would it be so terrible, though? To spend the rest of our lives together, that is. I don't know about you, but at this point I can safely say that I do love you, and right now I can't really picture my life with you out of it." Alex frowned. "Is it typical to be talking about this kinda shit one year into a relationship?" she uttered dubiously, provoking a shrug of Izel's slender shoulders. "Truth be told, this is the first serious relationship I've ever really been in," Izel confessed. "Before now, I was always concerned first and foremost with work. Before that, with school. Before that... well, you get the picture. I was always too busy to really commit to anything more than fleeting, one-off flings for stress relief. But this... well, this is hardly fleeting, is it?" "Well, shit, I don't know," Alex grunted. "You think I know anything more about this relationship shit than you do? You might as well be Casa-goddamn-nova next to me." "Well aren't we a spectacle?" Izel grinned. "Two romantically handicapped people trying to fumble and grope their way through a relationship." Unfortunately, she spared little time for this brief delve into jest, and she grew serious again-- and this time, it was her turn to sputter and stammer. "But really, I... your horrid taste in music aside, I... don't think I would terribly mind spending whatever's left of my life with you. I mean, you're the one person who can take my mind off my work-- shit, you're the one person I enjoy being with more than I enjoy working, which is a first. If that doesn't say 'meant to be' then I don't know what does." Alex was silent for a moment-- and it seemed that she was struggling to think of a meaningful responce. And yet, when she opened her mouth to speak, all that came out was "This is really cliche, you know that?" Izel smirked. "We're goin' pretty heavy on the cheese here, I realise." "And how. This little tangent's cheesier than provolone." "Oh, it is-- almost as cheesy as you deflecting the subject with humour to try and mask just how uncomfortable you are with it." There was a knowing glint to Izel's dark eyes as she leaned in toward Alex. "I've learned this much about you, Alex-- that you intensely fear talking about yourself, whether it be your feelings or your history. But whether you like it or not, this relationship is no longer purely physical. At some point, you're gonna have to be honest with yourself and with me about what we are to each other." "Well, it's obvious, ain't it? Clearly I love you and you love me and we satisfy each other on a physical, emotional, and intellectual level, producing a happy, flourishing relationship that I for one see no reason to end any time soon. Rest of our lives? Maybe. I ain't gettin' any younger-- hell, it won't be long before I'm half a century old, and I'd prefer to be as happy as I can be when that day comes. And if 'happy as I can be' means being with you, then that's the way it is. I've hardly lived the healthiest lifestyle and I don't have the benefit of having grown up with your science-fiction-esque Tikalese healthcare standards, so for all I know, the rest of my life is just a handful of years. Even then, I'll be happy-- not because I get to spend them piloting a big machine of death, not because I get to spend them in a new home with a new life far, far away from the one I sought to escape from, but because I get to spend them with you. That's what we are to each other." Izel stared as though she'd never seen Alex before in her life, and Alex leaned back in her chair, finished off the last of her water, and shot back, "What? Even I can be melodramatic when I feel like it."

ssshhhhhhhhh tbm justinian is a valued and loved member of the axis of evil, and everybody in CNRP2 thinks he's [I]just[/I] as big and scary as triyun and cent

You guys took it too far once you started excluding Justinian from the Axis of Evil. I mean, there's disrespect, and there's just needless cruelty, and you guys straight crossed that line. Unacceptable.

gab dat 2 me mug m8, ill bash ur ead in sware on me mu-- oh, are we not doing this anymore :|