[center] [color=4682b4] [h1]Ines Levesque[/h1] [/color] [hr] [/center] If Ines was anyone else, she should have - and would have - been home by now. If she weren't such a headstrong Darcsen with a bad reputation and a peculiar gift at narrowly avoiding death twenty times a day, she'd be halfway to General by now. But all the higher ups had for her were slim escapes from disaster at the brink of utter annihilation. When you're a Darcsen, you don't expect a promotion. Ines certainly didn't. She expected the worst to come of anything, and because of that, she surprised herself a lot. Look at it this way; when even the slightest shift of the fragile, temperamental mindset of a lighthead is what determines life or death on the daily for a Darcsen, you get to know them pretty well. Ines knew she wasn't going to be winning any Silver Crosses or Iron Crowns for...anything, actually. She might get a stripe, someday, but she wasn't hopeful. It was moreso a miracle she had gotten to where she was now, even, and that somewhere was boarded towards another deathtrip destined to another deathshed in No Man's Land. Couldn't be worse than a Ostend Riot. Oceanians were supposed to be tough, capable. Rugged and forged from rocks and desert. What she got instead of a bunch of mountain men were kids barely younger than herself getting giddy on being shoved onto a meat locker. [i]"The Imps couldn't last a day in the outback"[/i], she heard. [i]"Imps aren't anything but a bunch of old coots playing pretend on some knighthood dream."[/i] Spoken like someone who'd never seen a battle before. Should she have told something? Did she have doubts about them? Of course. But they weren't going to listen to some stone-faced bitch go on about how they're setting themselves up to get killed. Nobody listens to a Darcsen until it comes to bite them in the ass. If she was supposed to be cramped back in with some group of hillbillies from a backwater town with 50,000 people and 3 last names, she was in for another ride. At least she could tell which ones had seen combat. If they talked to you, they were green as grass. If they talked to you about being a Darcsen, it's 50/50. Talked about kicking Imp ass in a giddy kid-at-the-candy-shop voice? Never seen a gun before they went to basic training. Word to the wise; don't try to chat up the Darcsen with a resting bitch face that makes it seem like she's on her fifth tour and she's the last of the 500 draftees in her pool. Most of the new guys around here got that. Most. Still, even off the train, Ines had new orders. She didn't bother really taking a deep look into them; Without opening them, she knew what it was going to be. Who she'd be under, what band she'd hang around with, who'd be telling her to do what for how long. Out from her coat pocket came the tiny folded letter, stamped in cheap black tar that still smelled like steamship exhaust. [hr] [center] [i]Private Ines Levesque, You are hereby commanded to be transferred under the command of the 15th Atlantic Rifles, Squad 1. You will report to Corporal Jean Robin-Charpentier as your squad leader, and you are instructed to remain in the company until further notice. You will report to your new CO, Captain Middleton. Show this letter to your squad leader for confirmation and to receive orders. - 1st Lieutenant Pierre St Martin [/i][/center] [hr] [color=4682b4][i]Not even an in-person briefing?[/i][/color] Ines wondered. She was surprised, is what; they typically didn't bother too much with the letters if you weren't an officer. St Martin was a weird one, Ines knew. Dammit, she was starting to like him. Everyone got into their positions for the speech, all huddled together and packed like a meat tin. Ines found herself wishing she'd done the smart thing and found a place to hole up. Now she's out here listening to some lines of drivel from Captain Middle-Child-Syndrome. Names here, some ranks there, he's the captain and we're not; Ines wasn't too keen on taking notes on his little speech. Ines got to know a lot of Middletons in both of her careers; She walked their graves every day. If you give some upper-class twit drunk off power and a uniform with 'special' written on it, eventually someone's going to decide they aren't that special. People like Middleton always had bark, some bite, maybe a bit of brains, and no balls. Middleton was going to put every man, woman, child, dog, cat, and living being between him and some Imp looking for his first officer kill. None of them ever thought long-term, nor did any of them have bite to match when the push came to shove. Always in the back, always the first one to shoot a deserter and the first one to retreat. He could have his pride on killing four men in hand-to-hand combat. For a Shocktrooper, that was called "Tuesday." [color=4682b4][i]Fuck, I wish I still had my pistol...[/i][/color] she thought. Left it behind when she got signed on. Her mother had to have something to keep herself safe - as safe as she could be in that shithole of a city - though it was more of a gesture of security than a measure to protect her. Real thing of beauty that thing was, too; Archambault Model 1907 Naval, blued finish, 10 rounds of 8mm on tap. Would have been great to have around the trenches - those things were always appreciated for close encounters. The emptiness of her holster bothered her, too. Felt like she was supposed to have something there. Or because something used to be there. If there was a feeling worse than a missing pistol, it came when Ines looked up and saw a band of horsemen, given rifles in a perfect line. They all had smiles on their faces, each and every one. [color=4682b4][i]Oh no...don't tell me...[/i][/color] What do you do when you know someone's about to die, but you can't do anything to help them? Where they were, she could yell all she wanted, sure, but orders were orders to them. Either they went to the lines or went home in boxes, courtesy of the Court Marshall. It was so eerie, too. Did she have any doubts, any traitorous grievances against sending people to their deaths? Sure. But she kept them to herself; Not out of fear of reprisal, no, but out of futility. Out of the fact she knew they were in whatever God even gave a fuck by now's hands. How they sung, all in unison, almost like the procession to the funeral-goers. Like they were singing the incantation to their death warrants. It wasn't a war song. It was more like a hex. A steady, wavering, undulating chant. And they raised their swords, high as could be, like sacrificial daggers to a horrific cult, and they went on their way. There was that bark of machine gun fire Ines was too familiar with. She could almost feel how the bullets rippled and whistled as they passed from hundreds of meters away. What they were doing wasn't too dissimilar to what she did, really. They made bigger targets, and they had none of the training, none of the instincts to duck or weave or dive behind the hill. No grenades or smoke or covering fire. [color=4682b4][i]Pure fucking lambs to the slaughter.[/i][/color] No tactics. No sense behind it. Not a single fuck given. Dozens - hundreds, even - of men and women on horses, just wasted like that. May as well have just shot them right at camp. And it was that disregard, that apathy, that festering sense of [i]fucking stupidity[/i] that drove Ines. It drove her straight to her stomach in sickness. She didn't weep nor cry, nor shed a single tear. She scowled, long and hard, and finished it in a disgruntled scoff. [color=4682b4][i]Way to go, Captain Moron.[/i][/color] Ines thought, [color=4682b4][i]You just fucking killed a hundred people for no good reason. You've really outdone yourself. Your mother must be so proud of you.[/i][/color] [color=4682b4]"Did they teach him that at officer training, or did he come up with that himself..."[/color] she scoffed, blankly staring out to the field of corpses. Eyes from all directions turned their attention, but with how they turned their heads - their eyes all wide and canted - they didn't dare disagree. Not to a truant. Not to a traitor. Not even to a Darcsen. You never got far out here without a dark, morbid, really just fucked-up sense of humor. It was one of the only things that kept you something close to sane. All that was left to do was to put it past her. Detachment was key. She felt bad - you had to feel bad, for them, for knowing it could have been you, for not doing something to stop it - but there wasn't any chance in Hell she was going to save any one of them now. Wherever those cavaliers were now, it was a long ways from here...and more than likely, somewhere better than this Hell on Earth. She especially felt for the few who'd live through this. That's something she knew they were going to have to carry with them. That wasn't leaving them anytime soon, having their horses collapse under them, their friends blow into bits. And they weren't getting any medals for their valiance, either. They were getting told to suck it up and keep on marching like good little soldiers. And they wonder why desertion's such a popular way to go. Corporal Jean Robin-Charpentier. Darcsen guy. Should be an improvement over the past few squad leaders she's had. Not to get her hopes up, of course - Ines knew better than that - but it would beat farmboys who only got promoted because they kept their heads down longer than the sucker in front of them. [color=4682b4][i]Look for the guy with blue hair and a chevron. Can't be hard.[/i][/color] [hr] Those cigarettes from Vinland people passed as currency around here weren't worth shit if you knew anything about having taste buds that worked. That cheap, dry shit should have been tossed out as mulch, not sold to people at premium. You may as well roll up ration wrapping paper and smoke it. She didn't bother taking a drag from cigarettes now, just the good stuff. That Kandahar Kush. Stuff from the southern mountains, just beyond the Imperial border in the east. Once you had that stuff, there was no going back to tobacco. It wasn't like it grew on the ground where you walked, but it wasn't something some craftiness couldn't get around. Ines would gladly fork over a whole carton of cigs just to get a few nips of that stuff. And in her case, she still had a decent set to go off of, if she played it conservatively. Striking a match alongside the rigid, charred side, Ines held her breath, lighting the end of her cig to take a lighting puff. A steady stream of puffy smoke exhumed through her mouth, still chomping away at her roll. And just through that smoke, there was the man of the hour; The Darcsen himself. [hr] From where Jean was standing, it seemed like Ines was some sort of veteran of ten thousand campaigns, walking toward the squad like she knew better than them. Bright blue eyes came around, locked onto him with a sheer determination a woman with something on her mind had a monopoly on providing. And boy, by the way she was puffing on her light, that woman really did know a lot. Didn't help that she didn't bother smiling the whole way while she walked. Instead, she was dead-locked on Jean, and she wasn't giving him any wiggle room to divert his attention elsewhere. The left sleeve of her jacket - still an old iteration - showed its faint scarring of patches sewn and ripped, several times, as unfinished stitching lined the vague bright shadow of what used to be a patch...or even series of them. Ines' face didn't seem much easier on the eyes, either. She gave him the eyes that looked like she'd killed more people than he'd ever met. Clearly she'd been through a lot, even for a Darcsen. Being a Darcsen was probably just the icing on the cake for her. Someone could imagine that woman talking via her choleric demeanor, demanding someone take the initiative to ask her to put out her smoke. [color=4682b4]Go on. Ask me to put it out. Make my day. Talk to me, and you're a dead man. Don't waste my time. What the fuck do you want? You think you're hot shit because you have a little arrow on your sleeve? [/color] The list went on and on. That face said it all for her. But, as she puffed through her sweet, short drag, her eyes narrowed, eyebrows raised, and shoulders rolled in preparation for her first words for Jean. [color=4682b4]"'Sup."[/color] Two fingers plucked her cig out of her mouth, lowering it to just above her waistline, almost out of courtesy to her new superior. Her shoulders lowered, relaxing, and her upper body almost exhaling tension into a relaxed posture. Those eyes were stern as ever, of course - sharp as knives and so keen you felt her glare - but the way her mouth rolled into a slight slope expressed her sympathies. [color=4682b4]"Levesque. You must be Charpentier."[/color] Ines greeted. Her right hand stuck out, almost jabbing toward his abs like an arrowhead, yet stopped in slightly splayed openness. [color=4682b4]"I'll be part of your squad from here on out."[/color] [@LetMeDoStuff]