[center][h2][u][b]A Legend's Rise[/b][/u][/h2] [b]Six Months Ago[/b][/center] A lonely vessel sailed towards the Meeting Place. Aboard, military and medical staff mingled, all attention focused on a single hospital bed, rigged up to over a dozen different machines that beeped, whirred and chugged. A jungle of wires and lines snaked about to keep the various different apparatuses working smoothly throughout the transition, the craft touching against the Meeting Place. Zetans and Matuvistans met in the airlocks, medics explaining each and every issue with their patient as they carefully wheeled them through the hallways of the Zetan section, towards their medical bay. Marines flanked the comatose woman as they made their way through to the operating theatre, the soldiers finishing their watch by crisply saluting the warforms that stood guard here. The warforms responded with their own salutes, the two soldiers briefly sharing a moment of comradery, and then the marines departed, leaving only a small handful of Matuvistan doctors and two mathetes left to watch over the patrician. Zetan surgeons filtered into the room, and a furious discussion commenced, both sides coming to mutual agreement with surprising celerity. Then, the surgeons set to work. It was a long and difficult operation. A destroyed arm was severed at the shoulder, the joint drilled out and prosthetic plugs put in its place. The chest was opened up, organs were repaired or replaced, and lastly the face was cut, modified, replaced and built up anew. Nanomachines surged through the patient's body, and ruined flesh was, inch by inch, replaced with steel. One by one, life support was withdrawn, until at last the patient lay, sleeping, not comatose, on the bed. It had taken eighteen hours. Three hours after that, Isabella de Lobasla's eyes fluttered once, twice, and then flicked open, and she returned to life. [hr] [center][b]Three Months Ago[/b][/center] So much had been lost. Her body still ached in half a dozen different places, and her new limbs felt anything but natural to her, but Isabella, slowly but surely, returned to functionality. She had received a troubling amount of brain damage that the Zetan nanomachines had had to struggle to repair, and although they had done their job as best as they could, her new cyborg brain still had its moments of fuzziness and haziness. Luckily, the doctors had said that this was not career ending- they couldn't predict if it would take weeks or years, but she [i]would[/i] fly on her jetbike again. That idea gave her some amount of strength. She was not crippled. She was not invalid. She. Would. Persevere. Moving deliberately from her bed to her bathroom, she gazed into the mirror, and, as she often did, examined her new body. It was [i]almost[/i] the same. She had to admit, the Zetans had done an extraordinary job. They had gone with the most realistic prosthetics they had, still obviously metal, but they appeared sleek and realistic, a sculpted masterpiece, rather than the sometimes deliberately clanky and industrial styles Zetans could go with. It was not necessarily an unappealing look, she had to admit. When she pulled her sleeping gown off, her still-human fingers played along the boundary of woman and machine as they almost seamlessly slotted together. She flexed her left arm, watching as microservos and fleximetal shifted and rippled, then repeated the process with her right arm, scrutinising her own flesh. The one area in which she had disagreed with the Zetans was with her eye. They had given her a standard bionic eye, which, to the outside observer, looked near-identical to the real ones. She had overridden them after she had awoken however, entering the operating theatre for a brief second appointment to have a sophisticated 'eyepatch' implanted. Despite hiding the optics underneath from anyone seeing through, she could see through the eyepatch clearly, and, in fact, it offered her greater vision than she had ever had before. Initially, it had been quite distracting for one eye to suddenly be magnified whilst the other remained the same, the fact her brain had also been bionicised helped immensely. Slowly, she dressed herself. She was aboard the newly constructed Gran Republic section of the Meeting Place, inaugurated shortly before the S.U.N had come into existence. Once she had pulled on enough clothes to make herself decent, she picked up a packet of cigarillos from next to her bed and slowly but surely made her way to one of several smoking areas dotted about this part of the station. Nobody else was here. She took the opportunity to sit down on a provided booth and practice with her new arm. Raise the cigarillo to your lips. Take the lighter. Hold it. Grip it gently. Not too hard now. Apply the right pressure to the button. Like most Patricians, her lighter was almost comically overdesigned- inside it, tiny natural lodestones whirred to life and funnelled a jet of plasma up and out the spout. She touched the plasma to the end of her cigarillo, then let go of the button and returned it to her pocket. It infuriated her. This was not a difficult process... And yet still, she struggled to do it. The infuriating portion was that it was not a physical issue at all- her arm had no malfunction or error that would cause it to jitter and her muscles had bonded strongly. The quakes in her hand were all a product of her mind. She groaned as the smoke entered her mouth, swirling it around slowly. Inhaling it as she had sometimes done in the past was pointless now. She had two metal lungs with advanced protections against biological and chemical agents that filtered out smoke from entering her system. Tapping off the ash at the tip of the cigarillo, she continued to move her arm about, lifting it, curling it, twisting it this way and that. The more she used her arm, the doctors had told her, the more she would feel that it was [i]hers[/i] and the quakes would stop. [hr] [center][b]One Month Ago[/b][/center] Isabella’s fingers set to work on the buttons of her shirt, pausing occasionally when the when her fingers quivered a little too much for comfort. The shakes had calmed down significantly, but hadn’t fully stopped. When her shirt was on, she continued with her trousers, then her boots, the patrician able to see their re-constructed face in the polished surface of the leather. She gave the laces a final tug, then straightened her back and fixed her scabbard to her waist. She was almost complete. The rest of her uniform was eased into slowly, the patrician settling a bicorne onto her head and brushing down her left breast, where her medals would sit once she arrived back to Matuvista. Of course, that implied that she intended on returning to her home nation the way they believed she would. Now properly dressed, sword and pistol at her hips, she donned a pair of gloves to cover her metallic hand and gave her eyepatch a quick reconfiguration. It was time to begin her return. [hr] [center][b]Current Day[/b][/center] Every patrician had the right to be heard in the Lower Senate. Oftentimes, this meant that they would merely wait for the current issues that were being debated on during the day to wind down, then make their speeches and propositions, but it was not unheard of for a patrician to request a formal speech slot earlier on in the day, when more of their fellows would be in the Lower Senate and the discussion would be livelier. The Speaker of the Senate had the right of veto to ensure that such a tool would not be abused, but such requests were rare in and of themselves, and the veto being applied rarer still. So it was that when a request came though from [i]Il Duque[/i] himself, none so much as questioned it. There were many, many reasons for such a venerable individual to want to address the Lower Senate, and his request was expediated through the usual red tape. Shortly before the allotted time for the speech, a small surface-to-orbit craft touched down near the senate’s spaceport. A collection of patricians and an escort of plebians filtered out of the craft, the blazing suns overhead beating down unrelentingly. They quickly moved from the spaceport to a shuttle, and from the shuttle towards the [i]Cortes General.[/i] At last, everything was ready. The allotted time for the speech was ready, and the doors to the Lower Senate swung open. The individual standing behind the doors was not [i]Il Duque.[/i] Immediately, a quiet hubbub broke out among not only the Lower Senate, but also those who had met in the Upper Senate to watch [i]Il Duque’s[/i] speech. Isabella strode forwards, cape fluttering out behind her as she did so. She moved up towards the podium, straightening her back and clearing her throat to ensure the microphones were working as intended, then began. [b]”Friends. Patricians. Matuvistans. Lend me your ears.[/b] [i]Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2.[/i] It was a speech opening burnt into the Matuvistan consciousness as some of the finest rhetoric of the old world, and it had become somewhat of a tradition for those who desired to make a grand impact to draw upon the speech. Of course, if one fell flat when using it…. Best not to dwell on that. [b]"I have come here today to speak of my most [i]serious[/i] disquietude with the conduct of this Senate, and of the maltreatment of the plebians who lay down their lives in the defence of this most magnificent of Republics."[/b] Her eyepatch scoured the hall to see if any would speak up and try to contradict her. None did. [b]"I was given the honour of leading the Gran Republic's first ever international military expedition, to assist what we hoped would be a newfound alliance, after personally making headway with one of their ambassadors aboard the [i]Santa De Angelo.[/i] Despite this, and despite how crucial my efforts were in securing Matuvista's international standing, I found myself hamstrung, no, [i]betrayed,[/i] by the individuals in this venerated building."[/b] Her fingers swept across the chamber, then up, towards where the Upper Senate sat. [b]”No enemy hath vanquished the expeditionary force, instead, she was killed only by the cowardice and refusal to hold fast in the face of diplomatic troubles that ran freely through this venerable building.”[/b] Her lips tightened into a sneer. [b]”There are those who, even now, will begin to criticise me and degrade me. They will seek to deny me the honours and votes I am justly due for the struggle and sacrifice made by both myself and my men. Listen not to them. Understand that the Gran Republic, if it is truly to be a great nation, standing tall among the stars, must stiffen its spine, steel its sinews, and prepare to be a wall that its enemies can neither circumvent nor penetrate. This is the Gran Republic that shall be known and respected. This will be the Gran Republic I shall forever onwards push for.”[/b] It was time for the coup de grâce. [b]”I hereby announce that I will be running for the position of [i]Chancellor of Matuvista[/i] in the next Upper Senate electoral cycle. Viva Matuvista. Viva la República. [i]Muchas gracias.[/i]”[/b] She left the Lower Senate to uproar.