Bright and early the morning after a battle, the ship was always a bustle of commotion as soldiers traded stories of heroism, stupidity, death, and survival. Comradery and mischief abounded. Those who survived filled in those who’d been reborn sans any memories of their unfortunate demise. The survivors traded looks at their new scars and battle wounds. Officers tended to stay out of it all. The grunts needed their time to unwind. War was a dirty business after all. 

Tria’s survival mornings always started with the blaring of old rock music. Something about it always made her feel ten feet tall. The music brought her from the deepest sleeps straight into the black consciousness that was her natural lack of vision. See Tria was born completely blind. Others told her that her natural eyes were a pleasant, uniquely light green in color, but she’d never really seen color anyways. Her hand reached out and patted along the surface of the table next to her bed until they found her visor. It wasn’t the best model… a little big and bulky, more like goggles than glasses, but they worked. She slid it in to place over her eyes and clicked the fasteners on the sides in to place. Without her goggles, she would have never become a sniper really. What these goggles lacked in style and flare, they made up for in functionality… long range scanning, the ability to scan through most typical barriers, analysis of the thickness and composition of barriers… everything was the same color… light versus darkness, but she couldn’t really miss something she’d never had right? 

She sat up, her back a bit stiff and sore from all that… sitting still that she does in battles. Tria had one of the best survival records on the ship. Her visor was to thank for that mostly… it allowed her to stay far away from any actual fighting, picking off enemies from such a distance that the biggest threat to her was that she might miss extraction. She swung her legs off the bed and massaged her knees gingerly for a moment. Tria was, by most standards… tiny. She only stood 4’10” … 11” if she really tried to stretch. She didn’t weigh more than 95lbs soaking wet and well fed. While some might see this as a disadvantage, Tria had developed quite a comfortable position as the battalion’s “little sister” of sorts. Standing up from her cot, she stretched with a yawn before setting to it. 

Within an hour of wake up, the mess hall was a roar of chatter. Tria waltzed in fashionably late, clad in her trousers and a simple black t-shirt with her chestnut brown hair hanging free to her shoulders. A couple of days of lax rules about appearance were always helpful for morale. The men and women around the room were broken up into their usual clicks, recounting and entertaining themselves. Tria hardly glanced around the room on her way straight to the serving station. She snatched a tray off the pile and slapped it on down on the chute before she began plucking options off the line… some yellowish mush they named “egg substitute”. Strips of meat labeled “bacon” that everyone was pretty sure had never met a pig’s ass in history… fake fruit… maybe real bread. Tria was always gifted with the ability to eat much more than seemed reasonable for her size. When she’d filled her tray with the limits of what she was allowed to take, she scooped it up along with a mug of black tar “coffee” and turned to survey the tables for an empty seat.