[center][h1][b][color=FFE4B5]The United Republic of Arhas[/color][/b][/h1]

[sub][i]Private Booth, "The Upper Crust" Bar, Capital City of Eosia[/i][/sub][/center]

....They had known about the potential for some time, all of them, and yet today the grand display screens of the underground city were all displaying the same news feed. The same [u]live[/u] new feed, coming directly in from a media spacecraft sitting out there staring down the biggest possible event of the last three centuries. Bigger than the uniffication of the planet, the rebels, any of it. Because now it wasn't just about them anymore, about the local matters and issues and concerns and all of the other drivel below that. 

"Mayor Varten, is that-...could it really be?"

A woman in a slim but form-fitting wine red dress, adorned in jewelry, would pipe up to break the silence with a voice filled with shock and near-disbelief at it all from where she sat. It could be seen as a representation, perhaps, of how the rest of the Mayor's party guests felt as their eyes were drawn to the windows more and more as well. Many had even begun to push and shove to get to the windows of the room, looking down from the bar's position near the top of the vast underground city and at the large display screens placed at higher and lower levels. Excited whispers, complaints of those being pushed out of the way, and the like could be heard...but all in a hushed manner as all seemed to regard what they were seeing with some general sense of awe at least. Indeed, it didn't much matter which screen or screens they looked at, because in the end it was all the same thing. 

The woman who had spoken up saw a hand come up, cutting her off gently in this instance as she softly fell silent once more from where she felt stuck in her seat from shock. The one who had put up the gently silencing hand himself was likewise sitting there, adorned in a dark blue suit, white button-up shirt, formal red tie, four rings worns across his two hands (one of them being a wedding ring), and fancy black shoes amonng other small trinkets such as a gold watch. His face, despite his age of forty five, was the sort of chiseled, refined, smoooth, and well-shaped just like the rest of his figure...frankly like an ancient Old Earth roman statue formed from the finest marble, among those who knew of ancient history. Even so, it was still the manufactured look of one of the "Purified" who had partaken of the refinement and purification of the human genome. 

Soon, however, the man himself would speak as well as his eyes turned to the woman as his tone became noticably somber. 

[color=silver]"Yes. Yes it is, Delilah. The very thing everyone's been talking about for the past few months at that, which our ancestors thought would never come back again... 

...and we're here to witness this very day with our own two eyes."[/color]

[hr]

[center][sub][i]Third Common Room, Northside Ruins, Rural Town of Cibara[/i][/sub][/center]


To say the rebel base at her location was anything but dismal in shape and condition was an understatement. They had people working day and night to keep it held together by whatever they could muster, even placing broken or obsolete frames in position to hold up some portions. Soldiers and even herself as their local officer slept on old-style cots and sleeping bags placed on the concrete floors, cooked food in communal fire pits, used basic curtains and hand-washed sheets to care for the wounded alongside stolen or self-produced medical supplies, and in the end basically scavenged for anything they could use to make use of the parts of among the ruin and wreckage of the former periphery construction site they'd procued here in the more rural-type underground town of Cibara. A place far from the capital, hidden from the hostile planet above, and located near a smaller underground sea from which it fished alongside its local farming community...as well as having ruins to its north from a large-scale but ultimately failed expansion project meant to encourage more people to live in the area. It was in these ruins that her section of the PCM had set up shop, trying to lay low after what had been a disasterous combined defeat with the operations of two other officers back near the capital some months ago. 

They had attempted a push to cripple one of the government facilities of the tyrants that ruled over the planet of Arhas, the first major push close to the capital in a long time that they had been able to amass the sufficient forces to try. A major armed forces facility, from which their cruel and violent 'military police' operated out of and were organized...a place that was better off left in ruin, for all she cared about it. Better to make it a ruin and reminder of a thing she and her comrades desired be destroyed one day, for which they and many others had fought and bled and died for. 

And yet? So many were becoming more and more complacment and accepting with the status quo and existing 'government' and so forth, more so now than ever before. More and more they gave way to the stupid propoganda that denied them their freedoms as human beings. More and more they let themselves be stomped over and subdued by those who had taken the world over by bloody and raw force. Long gone were the far less oppressive days of independent cities and towns forging their own path, uniting in trade or the like at times to see their interests made manifest, but autocratic and facist tyrants had managed to take it all away and place it under their ironclad grip. 

Of what use was this 'government'? A republic? No, a regime was what it was at best. What had they done when her mother was killed, after being in the wrong place at the wrong time during a government sting against the Cartel as she'd been coming home from work? Their people had been the ones to put the bullet in her in the first place! Then when her father had sued for justice, and pressed for something to be done to help them without that second income in the family in their lowest-levels home in the capital, they'd been given a simple lump sum and a 'letter of apology' and command to stay silent about the matter in their emails before the government went silent on them. Money, a half-hearted apology, and a demand for 'silence' for an operation that shouldn't have taken innocent lives in the first place! It had been the point from which she and her father had begun to support the cause for freedom, to eventually come into contact withh it before he disappeared and she'd been forced to flee her home and into the arms of the PCM as a teenager. 

Now? Now she wasn't that little girl who couldn't to a thing against the system that had screwed her and her family over. She was a proud officer of the PCM, having been hand-selected by one of the Council of Six as one of their officers after the prior one had died five years ago. She was also a leader. A soldier. A freedom fighter. A logistician. Someone who had proven herself capable enough in the field under her group's former officers over the years, all as she'd learned the ropes of life under the radar on how to operate as part of the group.

"Commander! We sent someone to call you in here, but....can you believe it?"

Today, however, she was just as floored as the other member of her area after being brought in by a seemingly excited but equally as panicked messenger who had been sent to her office. The request to come to one of the common rooms, where her soldiers relaxed and rested outside of combat, had been not entirely an odd one. On certain occasions she went to break up overly-heated arguments or the like, that much was a given in her position's day to day, but after the installation of screens to covertly pirate and watch selective 'republican' news and media feeds to their own advantage or entertainment respectively she'd hoped the soldiers and supporting staff would be better distracted than they'd been like before. In fact she'd been in the middle of sending a report back to the Council of the month's operations and gains and losses, veins in her head pounding from it all before she'd been called away so suddenly. 

...Despite suspicions of another issue to handle, which had left her almost barking at the poor underling who'd been sent to get her at a time like this, she'd ultimately held her tongue and followed them to the third common room instead. Wasn't worth taking her headache out on others, and really she'd hoped whatever the problem was would take her mind off of the pain of her beauracratic work back in the office for a moment. Give her a moment to switch gears and all as she walked into the room, people parting before her as-

...

...

...

[color=gold]"By the cities-!!!"[/color]

After a moment of her mouth silently moving, yet failing to find words, finally something found purchase as it came out of her mouth in a semi-hushed almost-shout. Even the other soldiers that had been there, and others who had seemiungly croweded into the room to boot, could not help but silently stare at the display screen hanging and displaying images in four different directions from its mounted position on the room's reinforced concreete cieling. 

The impossible. The incredible. Something her own mother had joking talked about in the past, and which even her people had been mumbling about after the last few months of Gateway-area activity out there hit the tyrants' own airways and media channels. 

[hr]

[center][sub][i]Live Transmittion from the Keldek News Vessel #7, Mid-System Space, Eos System[/i][/sub][/center]

[i]"This is Reporter Adrian Sores, from Keldek News Vessel Number 7, coming to you first and [b]live[/b] with the biggest news story of the last three centuries.

For over three hundred years, we've been involved in our own matters and politics and internal operations for the most part. Our world uniting under one banner and ending an era of bloodshed, the decades of chaos that followed prior to that, none of this compares to what we are seeing here today from this news vessel. Upgrounders, lowgrounders, wherever you live I would dare say that this is something that will come to affect us all in one way or another. Months of rumors, speculation, and whispers about what could come to pass will finally be put to the test, now, as the advent of a new age opens before our very eyes. 

...This, ladies and gentlemen, upgrounders and lowgrounders and spaceborne settlers alike, [u][b]is our own, and newly reopened, Gateway to the stars[/b][/u]."[/i]