Gate was quickly lost in the crowd again, and carried on its current towards the administrative personnel. Amidst all the chaos and noise, Gate was most struck when the official asked him his name along with other demographic details. His [i]name[/i]. When you were a prisoner, you lost your name unless you made an effort to hang onto it. All you needed was an ID. It communicated everything that needed to be said about someone with no rights, no future and no purpose. But as a soldier, you earned a [i]name[/i]. Even soldiers couldn't just be numbers -
 they had a function, they had responsibilities, they had a [i]life[/i]. It felt profoundly odd to hear another person say it to him once more.

The following shower in the water like ice washed this uplifting feeling out of him for the time being, along with the distraction of seeing a naked woman for the first time in years - another uplifting feeling somewhat mitigated by the cold water.

The next events passed as a blur. The weight of a flak jacket over his chest, bulking out his malnourished torso into something resembling its old girth. The collar on his neck; he hated that, it felt like an anchor weighing him down from being taken seriously as a man of better society. The lascarbine in his hands, unfamiliar and--

[b][i]BOOM![/i][/b]

... unfamiliar and possessed with the power to permanently end this opportunity for escape, as it just had for whatever fool blew up at the front of the line. He hoped he wouldn't have to see that mess. He kept the lascarbine pointed firmly at the floor.

Before he knew it, he was stood amongst the assembled legionnaires being reviewed by the officers. He was alarmed but elated to see that the legion was being commanded by Arbites officials - something he had not considered until now. Whilst he knew Arbites officers hated nothing more than disgraced rats from Enforcer cadres, he also knew how they thought and could play that to his advantage. Indeed, even when the officer in white passed him and read out his name and past with obvious contempt, he knew that he had at least earned the officer's interest in a way the rank-and-file penal scum would not.

To his left, a group of convicts made noise in the ranks as two of them seemed to collapse, and a third offered aid. It made him feel a malicious sort of glee, and he thought to himself; [i]"I feel sorry for whoever gets stuck fighting with those fools."[/i]