Finished! [hider=Dr Isaac Braun][center][hr] [color=Gold][h2][b]Isaac Braun[/b][/h2][/color] [img]https://i.imgur.com/1ivHOxx.jpg[/img] [color=silver][h3]"My patients, my colleagues, my duty, my self. That's the order and it never changes."[/h3][/color][/center] [hr] [color=Gold][b]Species[/b][/color] [color=Silver]Human[/color] [color=Gold][b]Age[/b][/color] [color=Silver]83[/color] [color=Gold][b]Sexuality[/b][/color] [color=Silver]Straight[/color] [color=Gold][b]Birth[/b][/color] [color=Silver]Born and raised on a terraforming colony in the Sigma Draconis system, left at 16 to pursue an academic career in the core territories.[/color] [hr] [color=Gold][b]Appearance[/b][/color] [color=Silver]Isaac Braun is a man of moderate stature, with broad shoulders and a wide, lean waist. His skin is wrinkled, creased with frowning - not by laughing - and marked by the sun. His hair is washed grey and silver by age. His eyes are hard and cold most of the time, brown and dull with only the faint outline of minimalist, function-oriented retinal enhancements and augmentation visible, and his lips are thin and unfriendly. Under his clothes, his entire left side bears the uneven patchwork of fragmentation grenade scarring, a battle fought upon flesh. His stomach bears the pinpoint scars of laparoscopic surgery and his legs and arms bear older scars from more invasive operations. He is a handsome man with an unpleasant sort of disposition and the general feeling that if you got him drunk, he'd be better company. Both his arms have been replaced from the shoulder with matte grey military issue cybernetics, boasting the improved strength and dexterity that the army loves to brag about so much. To support this, parts of his skeleton have been augmented with organic tissue meshed titanium supports, affecting his appearance only so far as the occasional slightly larger supporting muscle to account for the additional weight, which anyone with similar augments would likely also have. His eyes have also been replaced, now being clear and clean grey rather than the blue he was born with, but otherwise organic seeming - though occasionally, given the right angle of light, iridescent rings of implanted micromachinery can sometimes be seen.[/color] [color=Gold][b]Height[/b][/color] [color=Silver]6"1[/color] [color=Gold][b]Personality[/b][/color] [color=Silver] Isaac Braun was once an idealistic, wide eyed, charming young man. He had this roguish smile and this passionate heart that made him incredibly easy to like. Whenever he spoke about those things he loved and cared about, it was like listening to music in the shape of a man. He was charismatic, magnetic, and attractive. As he grew older and more experienced with this world, these things began to change, in the way that they do. His time in the military sharpened him in some ways, tempered him In others, and made him colder. His tone of voice changed, his mode of speech grew harder and more direct, and he stopped talking so much about things and people he loved. The sheer amount and scale of the suffering his work brought him to, and the rigid military structure he’s now spent most of his life under have both changed him. He’s different now, authoritarian and frigid inside. When he was 60 was the first time in his life that doubt was cast on why he does what he does – out of love for life, altruism, and good will, or in the name of duty, following orders, and a perverse sense of purpose. This question remains unanswered, but regardless of his reasons he is undoubtedly selfless and unflinching in his performance – indeed, it must seem like very little scares him at all. He is intelligent, insightful, perceptive, and works very well under stress.[/color] [hr] [color=Gold][b]Role[/b][/color] [color=Silver]Field and Combat Medicine, Disaster Relief and Planning[/color] [color=Gold][b]Equipment[/b][/color] [list] [*][color=silver]Field Gear[/color] [list] [*][color=silver] UAF Adv. Field Medical Kit[/color] [*][color=silver] UAF Adv. Field Surgical Kit[/color] [*][color=silver] UAF Standard Issue Valkyrie Handgun – Regular carry[/color] [hider=Valkyrie][img] https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/546802855076429824/616439187138150400/unknown.png[/img][/hider] [*][color=silver] UAFIMC Issue SDW-44 ‘Pantalaimon’ pattern Personal Defence Weapon – Active Duty[/color] [hider=Pantalaimon][img] https://i.imgur.com/rJ99eT2.jpg[/img][/hider] [*][color=silver] UAFIMC Issue Asclepius-1 pattern body armour[/color] [/list] [*][color=silver] Daily gear [/color] [list] [*][color=silver] UAF Standard Issue Valkyrie Handgun – Regular carry[/color] [hider=Valkyrie][img] https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/546802855076429824/616439187138150400/unknown.png[/img][/hider] [*][color=silver] Personal digital stethoscope[/color] [*][color=silver] Personal handheld ultrasound device [/color] [*][color=silver] UAF Clinical Dress - black combat-capable trousers, pale grey shirt, ID tag. Bare below the elbow, always. [/color] [/list] [*][color=silver]Augmentations:[/color] [list] [*][color=silver]Hippocrates-Titan IMC Issue Cyberarm X 2; Improved dexterity and strength, with emphasis on dexterity. The forearm and palm are covered with soft, sensory material, not designed to mimic human flesh so as not to risk the uncanny valley, and the arm itself contains - aside from the mechanical workings - the processing capability to monitor the medical data received by the hands.[/color] [hider][img]https://images.medicaldaily.com/sites/medicaldaily.com/files/styles/full_breakpoints_theme_medicaldaily_desktop_1x/public/2014/03/04/robotic-arm.jpg[/img][/hider] [*][color=silver]Titanium-Organic Skeletal Support Implants; a prerequisite for significantly enhanced strength in any cyberlimb, lest the limb simply break your own bones whenever you lift something heavy.[/color] [*][color=silver]Ikon-4-M Military Issue Cyber Eyes; with wired (via a jack discreetly implanted beneath Braun's right ear) or wireless (which can be turned off, for obvious reasons) connectivity to tactical processing units, medical equipment, smartgun systems, etc, and friend-or-foe node reception capability. These eyes also come with vision magnification, enhancement, and light amplification capabilities. As a trade off, instead of the standard ballistic glass protective cover, these eyes have a ballistic polymer cover instead, and use the extra space and manufacturing space to add thermal vision up to 15m instead - it's primarily intended for patient examination, but can be handy for other things as well.[/color] [/list] [/list] [color=Gold][b]Previous Branch[/b][/color] [color=Silver] UAF Interstellar Medical Corps, including close work with the Institut de Medécins Galactique, an NGO charity dedicated to healthcare and emergency support on an interstellar basis. His role with the IdMG was technically an advisory one and he never worked for the organisation directly, but the UAFIMC maintained a good relationship with the IdMG and provided logistic and staff support routinely.[/color] [hr] [color=Gold][b]Biography[/b][/color] [color=Silver]Isaac Braun was born on the 1st of September, 2220, on a terraforming colony known to the UGC as TF-O-UGC014671, but known to the locals as Platin-7. Platin-7 was a largely barren frozen world that the UGC's Habitability Committee had decided was a reasonable candidate for transformation into an ocean world, fit for sapient habitation, and their judgement had been just about right - using greenhouse gases, stellar mirrors, and lithospheric perforation techniques, progress was being swiftly made at the time; the only real shortcomings and shortfalls were due to manpower restrictions, and those were ultimately circumvented by, in essence, cloning. Isaac and his contemporaries were all either twins or triplets thanks to in-vitro manipulation techniques being employed to artificially boost the population growth rate. Isaac to this day has two identical brothers, Josef and Lauri, one of whom is now a local official in the same colony they were born in, and the other of whom is some sort of banker or something. Isaac never paid much attention to the admittedly questionable tactics employed by the local government for workforce inflation - he was too busy thinking how cool it was, and how cool the science behind it was. It was actually what got him interested in medical science to begin with. His childhood was not uneventful but far from exceptional - the terraformers lived planetside in pressurised habitats for the most part, as anywhere above the theoretical sea level lacked any meaningful atmosphere, and decompressive episodes meant that emergency was a well known word amongst the colonists - and he left his homeworld at age 16 to pursue education in the core sector. After some further years in regular education he earned a place in a prestigious medical school. Isaac took unusually strongly to the ideology proposed by one of the medical ethics doctors at his particular school - the idea that all people, everywhere, should be free from involuntary suffering, and that doctors had thousands of years of history behind them as the enemies of such suffering. It was the kind of idea that young men with big hearts grab onto and sing about, and the young Isaac Braun was a perfect example of precisely this. His regimented and authoritarian life in the hab-blocks of Platin-7 had left him in grave need of purpose and authority, his compulsion to seek progress for his society - something the terraformers were understandably big on - had left him in need of a cause to fight for, and his ethics doctor had given him these things. Conveniently, his ethics lecturer was also a captain serving with the UAF Interstellar Medical Corps, on assignment to the medical school through the local University Officers Training Corps. Isaac joined after the third lecture, and began his career with the IMC early. It wasn't all business though. When he wasn't studying or busy being one of the few members of the UOTC taking the corps seriously, he was, in fact, drinking with his mates. Pretty much all the time. He was very well liked by his colleagues and his friends, and spent a lot of time with them. It was a good time, and a lot of it went by in a blur, but he stayed away from drugs, didn't sleep around too much, and kept his reputation largely intact. Before he graduated, the UAF welcomed the then-Officer Cadet Isaac Braun with open, grinning arms. As is standard practice, he went into his foundation training at army hospitals in the core territories, and then on to the officership selection process on Earth. He was accepted, his established relationship with the military playing heavily into his favour, and went on to the next step of training - the same shit basic infantry go through. In the UAF, you're all soldiers. From the bright warmth of Sol to the darkest, coldest depths of deep space, from the metropolii of Mars to the jungles of Sirius Prime, from the grunt to the top brass, you've all used the same guns, dug the same trenches, and been called the same names by the drill sergeant. Isaac Braun spent six months in basic training, assigned as Cadet Lieutenant to a squad of men and women who'd had very different lives to him, learning just what being in the military meant. It was gruelling, exhausting, and didn't have a middle ground between exciting and boring. You were either running manhunt simulations, tracking or getting tracked by your brothers in arms with simmunition aplenty, or you were doing precisely fuck all but polish your boots and wait for orders. For the first time since his final exams in med school, Isaac found himself being properly challenged again; he had nothing in common with his platoon or his squad, the cadet he was 2ic to was an asshole who seemed intent on washing the entire group out... and he missed home. Not the terraforming colony. His real home. He missed school, going out and getting blasted with his mates, pulling in the club, winning drinking contests with the fucking dental students, losing his mind studying at 3am in the library, procrastinating in the VR anatomy labs with the illicit table tennis program his flatmate was working on, [i]losing[/i] drinking contests to the fucking dental students... He considered giving up. Strongly. He became [i]intent[/i] on it. Wrote up a letter of resignation and everything. He had it in his pocket when the traitorous dogs of Siphon's Fist finally got three suicide bombers into the military academy and gave all of the men and women of the military academy something in common. He had been twenty five metres exactly from the blast in the main courtyard. It knocked him flat on his side, his entire left side peppered with - thankfully - the smallest and least aerodynamic pieces of shrapnel his surgeon had ever seen, including at least three fragments of Rateian bone. He was still in fighting shape when the next two blasts went off and killed a significant chunk of the immediately available leadership, and his calm and considerate conduct under fire is a part of what led to his promotion to Cadet Captain. That and the fact that the idiot who'd formerly held the job had been about to shake the first bomber's hand when it went off. His letter of resignation wasn't destroyed in the explosion, but it went up in flames before it got to see another sunrise. There were another three months of training after that and the squad never needed another lesson in unity again. After his specialisation in trauma and battlefield medical support, Captain Braun was deployed as part of a Battlefield Aid Station, and with the gradual increase in scale of hostilities against the threat of Rateian separatism was responsible for Care Under Fire more often than anyone ought to have been comfortable - but Braun was a clone. Raised as an individual and born naturally, but in a society where there were three of everyone, where no matter how unique you seemed it was like you always had a replacement ready. His fear of death fell in the face of his duty to his brothers and sisters. His first combat wound came at age 25 during the counterinsurgency operation in Papieri City, on the planet Kasanueva. A separatist radical got a lucky few shots in while his BAS team were distracted with a new casualty, using an improvised rifle reliant on chemical propellant. He was kneeling at the time, trying to wrap a combat application tourniquet around the stump of his patient's leg, when two of the wild burst perforated his right calf. It was the most painful sensation he'd ever felt - but it was a flesh wound and no more. One of his comrades returned fire while they saw about getting the casualty out of there, and his wound was made to shut up and wait its turn while they did so. The advances in medical science since the twenty first century accelerated his recovery and he was back in action in about a week. He was shot again in the side, and knifed twice during that tour. Of the casualties he was responsible for treating, there were no mortalities. He was awarded a Commendation for Bravery and was promoted at the end of his tour. He would remain in command of a BAS as part of the Solar 205 Medical Regiment during his time as a Major until a shift in both hostilities and the makeup of the officership of the regiment saw him transferred to the Field Hospital proper as a trauma specialist. It was during his assignment here that he met the first woman he ever loved. Captain María Míra Fernandez de Silva san Salvador was not, as you might have expected, a member of the medical corps. She wouldn't have been able to tell you the difference between your spleen and your liver if you'd asked her - no, she was a sapper. She was a combat engineer with a matte khaki cybernetic arm, olive skin, black hair, and this absolutely stunning smile. When she gave you the grin, and it really was [i]the grin[/i], it was like you were in on the joke when there wasn't even a joke, it was like she was sharing something with you that you weren't meant to have, like a high all of its own. She had this unique smell that followed her around - like gun oil, and... roses? Braun thought it was perfume and about half of it actually was. The first time he saw her was during a consultation for a nervous tic that had developed in her cyber arm. It was the result of an attempt to modify it herself, and while cybernetics was hardly Dr Braun's specialty it was ultimately being caused by a mismatch between threshold potential in one of the motor units of the arm and the amplitude of normal human nervous system action impulses. It just needed to be reversed. She asked him out for drinks. He said no. It would be unprofessional to engage in that kind of relationship with one of his patients. "What if I wasn't your patient?" That question... it really tried him. Tried him hard enough that he gave in. The relationship lasted six years and might have been the happiest he'd ever been in his life. She was exciting and liberating, and did some really weird shit in bed. María was hardly the first woman he'd ever had feelings for, but she was just [i]different[/i]. She tasted like freedom when you kissed her. On leave they spent all their time together. They drank hard, they got into a couple of fistfights - at least one of which was probably with eachother, but Braun doesn't actually remember since she knocked him out cold whether she'd meant to or not - and they decided they were probably going to move in together at the end of their next tour of duty. They booked a holiday to Caprica-6, this sunny resort world where the days were 36 hours long and you weren't expected to be awake for more than two thirds of it. They saw eachother's parents, Isaac's back on Platin-7 and hers on Hailey's World in a sector closer to the Rateian homeworld. Her father was the kind of catholic that really stressed his daughters' boyfriends out, but Braun got on with him surprisingly well and - surprise surprise - they all got drunk together, again. The military didn't necessarily approve of the relationship, but they were both senior ranks by this point and separated from each other's chain of command; as long as he didn't try to stay her doctor, they'd essentially just have an eye kept on them. They even got deployed together on humanitarian missions sometimes - the beginning of Dr Braun's relationship with the Institut de Medecins Galactique. She was his whole world. He loved her. He wanted to marry her and never spend a day away from her. The last words he ever said to her were the worst lie he has ever told. "You're going to be ok." Siphon's Fist had never played by the rules. They were a pack of filthy cowards and vicious dogs that blew up hospitals and tortured prisoners with reckless abandon and wild glee. Suicide bombers weren't necessarily a part of their usual tactics but Isaac Braun already knew well enough that they were willing to use them too, and the scars he still had from his time as an Officer Cadet weren't the last a suicide bomber would leave him with. They had been working to set up the field hospital after being relocated in conjunction with changing lines of engagement when María had stopped, frozen, and then taken off sprinting. "IED!" She'd called. Less than ten seconds later there was an explosion, before Isaac had even had time to swear, and it had all but engulfed her. It would later turn out that she'd managed to identify one such bomber, disguised as a UAF Private, who had been on her way to the fuel depot with a dead man's switch and a vest full of plastique. María tackled her before she got there and had tried to make distance between them once the bomber was down, but she hadn't gotten far enough. Both her legs were completely destroyed, her abdominal cavity torn open and exposed to the air, ruptured intestines strewn about the scene and her blood was everywhere. The pressure wave produced by the explosion had burst one of her eyes and both her eardrums. Her lungs were rapidly collapsing, and if it weren't for the abolition of the pressure gradient between her insides and her outsides she would have been coughing up blood; instead it was just leaking out of her mouth and her nose. Isaac Braun will never forget how he lied to her. "You're going to be ok." She probably knew she was going to die. She was a stunningly intelligent woman, she must have known, even if she didn't know a ton about the human body. "You're going to be ok." He kept repeating it as he started panickedly tending to her wounds - and to his and the rest of his medical team's credit, she lived for another two hours - but the problem with the biofoams they were using was that if the flow of blood is too fast, they don't take hold properly and they end up getting washed out of the wound like dirt, and these wounds weren't the kind you could just use a tourniquet for. With a lot of clamps and more than one blood transfusion they were beginning to make progress, but it had simply come too late and too little. Maj. Isaac Braun's immediate suboordinate, Capt. Saro Rettan - a Rateian doctor - was charged with declaring and recording the death. Braun was inconsolable and temporarily relieved of duty shortly thereafter. Captain María Míra Fernandez de Silva san Salvador was posthumously awarded the Order of Mars, the highest commendation awarded by the UGC to members of the UAF, for outstanding bravery and courage in the face of the enemy even unto death. Major Braun was present at the ceremony as her registered next of kin, and he couldn't get the words 'bravery and courage' out of his head for an entire year. She'd been so scared. She was almost never scared, but the few times she had been, he had been there for her - like she was there for him. She'd laid there, writhing in agony, scared out of her mind, so scared she was crying; he saw it in the one eye she had left - which was the other image he could never forget. He took two years of leave, taking up work with IdMG in the mean time - but he couldn't just leave the UAF behind. He was 32 and had given his best years to the forces, there wasn't a benefits package in the world that would persuade him to just drop the life he'd left there. His friends from medical school were either in civilian work or still in the IMC, and the squad he had trained with in basic were still serving too for the most part - that or dead, and he wasn't dead. Losing María changed him and not necessarily for the better, but his service overall was still outstanding during his deployment. This time he was part of a bloc of manpower rationalised into the Sirius 22nd Medical Regiment, responsible for the deployment and maintenance of a combat support hospital rendering aid to both the civilian and military populations of the planet Tenex, in the Souxam system. The things he saw here were unbelievable, the augmentations these people had been made to undergo at the hands of the Evolved were beyond the pale - better still was the fact that there had been discreet advice from the local planetary guard that army personnel ought not to allow themselves to be taken alive. Dr Braun had never exactly been the kind of person to seriously consider death before defeat out of the sheer pragmatism, but what he was seeing in the hospital made him think twice on that front. On top of their bizarre and cruel experimentation, the evolved were terrifying individual combatants with highly unusual tactics, and their overall strategy didn't seem to make too much sense either from what was gathering at officers briefings. They were striking residential areas, abducting civilians for use in their sick projects, leaving what they deemed to be failures out in the open come the first dawn of the next week and keeping the rest. No pattern was forthcoming in the subjects they chose to keep, no matter how hard military intelligence tried to find one from the victims' social profiles, financial backgrounds, known contacts, or in a surprisingly large number of cases, military records. It was baffling; they were simply disappearing from their lives without a trace, almost on a weekly basis at the peak of Evolved activity, and as far as anyone knew they weren't being taken offworld - the navy had instituted a blockade around the planet after the second wave of abductions, pending attendance by COVSPEC operatives to investigate the disappearances, a disturbing aberrance in Evolved tactics itself. A pattern was eventually discovered with the cooperation of the local field hospital and their medical staff's ability to access local medical records; all of the abducted subjects who had not later been returned had histories of mental illness. The final connection came when the missing persons returned. To cut a thus-far long story short, the Evolved had been selecting experimentation subjects with long histories of delusional mental illnesses because this particular Evolved cell had a agent with a unique nanite augmentation capable of causing the already-delusional to become further divorced from reality, enslaved to the perceptions of their controller. This became apparent when all 16 of the captured and victimised psychiatric patients, some of whom had military training already, showed up at the field hospital with a variety of subtly terrifying cheaply militarised cybernetics implanted and started killing staff and civilians alike. The then-Major Braun was among the casualties taken by the defenders - as the major tenet of the medical profession and the army doctor 'do no harm' does not take precedence over 'defend thy patient' - and lost his left arm in the process, crushed in the steel vice grip of a woman who firmly believed they were all the devil. Having expected Utarah, they had been caught almost entirely unawares. It was a sentry failure that led to an inquest by the UAF High Command and more than one court martial. Officers and enlisted men alike were cut down by people they had mistaken for patients, people who had been victims of the Evolved's monstrous experimentation policy like so many before them, which itself had been the dust kicked up to hide the coming strike. An additional inquest was held, briefly, after the eventual capture of the Utarah with the unique augmentation responsible had ended with his primary augments publicly disassembled and his core body set on fire by a group of masked soldiers wearing neither rank patches nor regimental badges - the inquest turned up nothing and was quickly disbanded. For his part in the defense of the hospital and his cooperative elimination - with Captain Rettan - of one of the 'Unwilling Hostile Agents' as they had been called in official reports, Major Braun was awarded a further Commendation for Bravery - now meriting him one for both of his campaign ribbons - and an additional Heart of Iron medal, for 'stalwart courage and immense sacrifice in the name of defending another'. Of all the awards he ever merited, this is the one he actually cares about - it's also something that seems almost customary for soldiers who then go back into service with cyberware to make up for the material loss, and on top of that he associates it with his subsequent promotion to Lt. Colonel. While still a Major, Isaac Braun also saw to it that his suboordinates involved in the defense of the hospital saw the recognition the deserved; Capt. Rettan was awarded a commendation for bravery, and six other enlisted men were mentioned in dispatches as well, at Maj. Braun's behest. On his redeployment - after a few months of physical therapy for the new, not-shiny, grey gunmetal cyber arm - he was sent into a true warzone. Siphon's Fist had been changing tactics while the Evolved had captured the attention of the UAF momentarily, and by now had taken a page from the book of revolutionaries and occupying forces both, some of which was knowledge from before even the days of Unification on Earth. Hearts and Minds. All of a sudden, the enemy had proper support amongst the populace. Separatism had gone from vile sedition associated only with the terrorist faction Siphon's Fist to a legitimate political standpoint that a person could hold without being subject to surveillance. UGC taxation had increased in the previous year, and thanks to some serious Rateian local government corruption and subsector mismanagement these taxes were driving poorer communities underground with debts, lending only further fuel to the fire. Any idiot could tell you that an underclass formed primarily from one particular ethnicity with at this point a mounting sense of alienation from the central government and a lack of legal means to act on that is going to lead to those communities becoming hotbeds for radicalism. The short sight of the Rateia was, in the immediate, responsible for this upsurgence in Fist activity. It's worth noting that not all of the separatists advocated the use of violence to achieve their goals, but the UGC lacks clear provisions for secession law and democracy had thus far failed them anyway, so these people were truly in the minority; this eventually led to a long series of smaller, individual wars of secession. Lt Col Braun was deployed to one and placed in command of a combat support hospital - from where he was eventually captured by Siphon's Fist. The extent of fifth column activity on the secessionist world had made securing a base of operations very difficult, and when combined with the oaths taken by IMC medical personnel to deny treatment to nobody, made the security of the field hospital itself a dicey thing indeed. The now Major Rettan had been part of a combat lifesaver unit attached to the field hospital Lt. Col Braun was commanding, and had gone missing along with two other members of his unit when ambushed by Siphon's Fist en-route to a mass casualty incident after an unidentified IED went off under the tire of a mechanised infantry unit's lead vehicle on a crowded street. Command had suspected that the Fist was trying to pull false flags on the civilian population to radicalise greater and greater segments of the population and this was yet another incident in that vein - which naturally meant that Siphon's Fist had to intercept UAF medics too, lest it seem like the UGC actually gave a shit about anyone on the planet. After the capture of Major Rettan, and then another four separate squad leaders, military intelligence identified yet another pattern; while it was not the primary objective of their presence on the planet, Siphon's Fist had been identifying and capturing officers both commissioned and not. The acknowledgement of this pattern, however, did not supercede the oft-considered holy oaths taken by war doctors, nor the adherence to them by the field hospital. Since the inquest held in light of the previous attack on the Sirius 22nd's Field Hospital, new screening procedures were in place for admittance to army hospitals, and the sentries had long since received vastly updated training and standing orders. Siphon's Fist, the Evolved, or any other paltry terror group, were simply not going to get into the hospital with any degree of subtlety - and they hardly had the resources to take the UAF using conventional warfare, at the very least not in a position where the UAF had been set up and entrenched for any measure of time. Knowing this, the forces of Siphon's Fist decided to employ yet another of the oldest strategems in the book. [i]Lure the tiger from the mountain den, deceive the heavens to cross the sea.[/i] Early one morning a round of six explosions rocked the city, killing and wounding hundreds. To mask the true purpose of the attack, they were distributed fairly evenly throughout the city, but one of them was nearby the army hospital - specifically, near enough that the oaths taken would compel the IMC medical staff to render aid immediately, emergency doctors leaving the hospital to do so and Lt. Col Braun going with them to coordinate. There was consternation from the sentries regarding the wisdom of leaving the hospital to head into a conflict zone to render aid, but they were swiftly overruled on the grounds that army medical staff can in fact defend themselves, and that they had all signed on for this in the first place: the defense of health, life, and wellbeing in the face of adversity and danger, even unto the sacrifice of self in the line of duty. Had they recognised the incoming ambush, they may well have acted differently - but with the fire service overwhelmed and casevac limited by the intensity and sudden nature of the attacks, their choices were not plentiful to begin with. Isaac Braun killed three agents of Siphon's Fist when it became apparent that a third of the casualties were faking their wounds and carrying weapons, and the rest of the medical corps put up a good fight as they withdrew, giving as good as they got and showing the world that a soldier of the Sirius 22nd was as much a rifleman as anyone else - but three of their number had been isolated and captured in spite of their best efforts. Braun was among them. A rescue operation was put together by COVSPEC - involving Kiviere Panthera as a field operative - but rapid progress often isn't rapid enough when you're dealing with torturous political radicals. In the three days before their rescue, three of the seven captured officers had been summarily executed after drumhead trials broadcast on pirate video stations, and the survivors had their eyes put out and limbs amputated and cauterised - the goal having been to cause enough nerve damage to render implantation of cybernetic prostheses impossible, with two of the surviving prisoners having been damaged enough that this did indeed become impossible. Lt Colonel Braun was not among them, and received additional prosthesis upon recovery from captivity, which he wears to this day. Major Rettan also survived, and credits the 'immutable bond shared by all officers of the UAF' for the strength to survive it - though he retired from service shortly after his return to the Rateian home sector, turning in his military grade cybernetics for civilian strength replacements. In fact, of all the captives rescued during what later became known as Operation Hippocrates, Lt Col Braun was the only officer who remained in the service. For long enough that he saw another promotion. His last, to Colonel. This one was nothing to do with sacrifice, injury, or heroism - it was nothing more than recognition of his skill in commanding a field hospital, and his ability to inspire the best from those under in service there even if they disliked him. Especially if they disliked him. From this point onwards he began rotating between tour and home duty, managing relationships between veterans hospitals and the public health service, training recruits for the IMC at Officer School, and liasing with IdMG again. It was interesting work and for a good cause, of course... ... but men who live all their lives and know only the stress of war, they can come to depend upon it. It wasn't so much thrillseeking as it was his compulsive need for challenge and the simple complexity of combat medical detail - that is to say, simplicity of purpose, complexity of task - that kept bringing Isaac Braun back into contact with those hottest and direst of places in the galaxy, where war is the only god a man can know, and where strife and death are that god's archangels alone. He had been counting the names and the numbers, and he knew now that he was the final member of his class from the academy left alive, if not whole. His friends from medical school had gone into civilian specialties and even they weren't all alive any more - outbreaks of disease, civilian violence, and simple suicide had taken care of that. He wasn't depressed as much as he was accepting - but if it hadn't been for the IMC sequestering him as a valuable asset for what he was surprised to find out was a private project - the [i]Andromeda[/i] project, at that - then he would likely have died in the field the next time something went catastrophically wrong, as his career had a tendency to have happen. He had little left to keep him in the Milky Way apart from duty, after all, so when they told him that Duty had set sail for Andromeda... Well. He had never been one to refuse orders. [/color] [color=Gold][b]Affiliations[/b][/color] [color=Silver]María - His fiancée from years ago. Some men might have forgotten, but he has not. Lauri - His identical brother, a banker of good public repute. They were never close, as Lauri knew little of purpose or ethics. Josef - The other identical brother, whom he got on better with. He was a politican, about as honest as the dishonest profession can be, but still good at heart. Maj. Rettan - The Rateian he actually respected, a talented doctor and a brave soldier.[/color] [color=Gold][b]Relationships [Optional][/b][/color] [color=Silver]This is how they view other characters throughout the story. This will be updated as major changes in their involvement and view of one another is expanded. Most changes will be listed from experiences out of combat, but some can occur from within their combat positioning out in the field. They can become rivals, hating on one another, romantic couples or simply comrades in arms.[/color] [center][color=Gold][b]Character Theme[/b][/color] [youtube]https://youtu.be/mPTCq3LiZSE[/youtube][/center] [/hider]