[color=goldenrod][h3]Awakening[/h3][/color]
Thomas Kensington- K-Ton as most of his fellows knew him, woke up staring into a sterile, white ceiling light. He found himself in a clean, carpeted room, in a nice bed, with nice furniture and immaculately clean. It was, a clear exit from the dusty, olive-green-and-concrete and barracks of questionable quality and shoddy barrack beds in some ex-soviet country. The first thing he noticed was how comfortable the bed was compared to his old bed before he was cajoled awake and told to sort himself out.

Two hours later, K-Ton was guided out to the assembly area with the rest of his fellow contractors. They were met by the boss himself, Colonel Marais. The Colonel ordered the dome above them to retract, and began his speech. A combination of his speech, and the opening dome above them revealed that- as the soldier next to K-Ton had muttered under his breath "We definitely ain’t in Kansas anymore,”. They were in fact in a spaceship, orbiting around some alien planet, working for some alien customers. The pay they were expecting changed from lavish to exorbitant, and they were given the option to get back in the ice and go home.

There was some murmuring, and some quiet arguing. K-Ton himself settled his mind with a light elbow to Danny Shattah- technically his team leader though they were considerably less formal outside of ops and training- and said with a low mutter. [b]"I'm recording this entire tour. We're gonna be millionaires [i]and[/i] fucking movie stars."[/b]

K-Ton was only partially kidding- he had no doubt that they would be banned from sharing any media taken from this tour with their friends or counterparts from, but it didn't mean he wouldn't record it. He'd probably record a video journal, maybe convince one of his squad mates to send it home at the end of the tour if he died- K-Ton wasn't planning on it to come to that, but in the worst case, he'd still like his family taken care of. Maybe he'd start a memoir of their platoon and their tour in Qadah. 

After the few who were unwilling to be rich were filtered out, the Colonel went back to the briefing. He showed them slides of their employers, their employers' allies, their employers' enemies, and their current enemies, the Salvesh. The Salvesh were interstellar mercenaries, they fought in packs, and reminded K-Ton of Brutes from the Halo series- except with an extra eye and pair of arms. They were assigned to protect Qadah's moon, Saina, a purple jungle that was immediately renamed Sauna.
[hr][color=goldenrod][h3]Memoirs from an Alien Planet. Day 8.[/h3][/color][sup]"The squad gathered around and took a group picture today before going out on patrol. 
We all looked so utterly ridiculous that we agreed to delete the picture.
We'll take it again indoors so Sterling can photoshop the picture to not look so goddam pink."
-- Kensington, Thomas.[/sup]

Saina, or Sauna, as the other Contractors liked to call it was all sorts of things, but comfortable wasn't one of them. It was hot, wet, and pink. The humidity of the planet made sweat plentiful yet still feel pointless, and the pink took a long time to get used to. Not to mention, their uniforms was some camouflage pattern based on the pink and purple of the landscape and looked fucking ridiculous. The moon was apparently terraformed for the Pilavians, to use as a psuedo homeworld for the Garthik's worker race- in a sense, Kensington couldn't help but feel like they were in probably the same boat as the Pilavians, a race under the employ of another, given adapted technology to survive. 

At the Operating Base, K-Ton had switched on his GoPro camera and attached it to the front of his helmet, clipped to where the binoculars or NVGs would normally clip. He made a few comments to a few people and made sure the camera was working before they were sent off on a patrol to smoke out the Salvesh who had just began landing on the moon. The pink platoon marched off in a column, kitted up and bodies encased in fatigue, armor, and rebreathers. It was too bad they couldn't bring Krieg with them, but the poor pup couldn't handle the air in the jungle any better than they could, and they didn't have dog sized rebreathers in handy. 

K-Ton followed behind Danny, about 5 meters back and out, sweeping the outer surroundings with one eye, while keeping another on Danny in the lead. It was hot, and K-Ton had sucked a good amount of water out of his camelbak, and kept the straw inside his rebreather with him. He was almost certain he'd sweated all the water he drank out, and was about to make a comment on that when he saw Danny's arm go up. Freezing mid-step, K-Ton slowly dropped to the ground and took a knee, the enemy had been sighted.

Danny's voice picked up through the comms, and K-Ton slowly slung his rifle, swapping it out for his M32 as he stared down the enemy. 10 Salvesh, 50 meters out. Big and ugly, but not like Halo's brutes, no these things were both fluid in movement as well as strong. Everything said to him that no matter what, K-Ton did not want to get into a melee with these fuckers. He fumbled with his camera a bit, hoping that it picked them up too. He patted his MGL with a comforting pat, his gloved finger tracing the scratched on numbers on the cylinder. He leveled it at the Salvesh and peered through his optic, adjusting for distance. All that was left was the tense waiting.

[b]"Weapons free! Weapons free!"[/b] he heard, and K-Ton immediately pulled the trigger once, then twice, then a third time. To their left, he heard the familiar [i]thump![/i] of another grenade launcher, and then a second one. Perhaps overkill, but when faced with aliens of relatively unknown capabilities, you shot first and asked questions later. 

While K-Ton's first and third grenade were of the explosive kind, his second grenade loosed bright yellow marker smoke from the middle of the Salvesh position, letting everyone definitively know where the enemy were. The yellow helped contrast the pink, and they were close enough that the smoke wouldn't obscure the target. As the rest of the platoon open fired, the steady crack of rifles firing filled the air around him, the occasional tracer burning through the air as it flew towards the Salvesh. 

Crouching behind a strange, but sturdy mushroom, K-Ton reacquired his target and dropped another pair of grenades against the enemy location, this time, an airburst grenade set to explode right over the heads of the vast majority of them, and another HE to root out the ones dug in in the back. 

Pulling back behind the mushroom, K-Ton dropped to the ground prone and rolled onto his side, pulling his nearly empty M32 in front of him and pulling out the cylinder. Pulling an EMP grenade out of his front pocket, K-Ton slid that into the first position, before sliding an HE into 2 through 4, and an airburst into 5. Pushing the cylinder back into the weapon, with the second tube set to fire instead of position 1, K-Ton slipped into a semi-prone, with his MGL still pointed forward and his free hand pressing against the dirt, in an awkward half crouch half 1-handed pushup position ready to lift him back up into a firing position should some four grenades plus two others fired by the second squad not be enough.