A quick AW:P update, some backstory for the Galacian campaign and a minor character therein. Not quite finished, mostly because I’m not sure where to go with it. :/
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Something unusual was afoot.
It wasn’t anything Marco could put his finger on – there hadn’t been any change to the daily routine, and the flurry of debate and voting that usually preceded a mobilisation hadn’t come. Things just felt… off. All of the higher-ups looked distracted, for one. Marco didn’t know any of them well enough to come out and ask, so he was stuck with trying to sort out the rumours at his own level.
It didn’t help that he was new here – he only knew a handful of the base’s soldiers by name, and of those maybe half were likely to trust him enough to share the kind of information he was after. To make it worse, all of the information he had gathered was borderline contradictory. The man running the mess hall was convinced that Littorand was planning an invasion and all of the conferences amongst the higher-ups were being used to plan defensive strategies. One of the men guarding the barracks Marco had been put up in – Stelvio? – thought that the silence was politically motivated: the top officers were planning on doing something underhanded – an assassination in Bosca, or maybe a midnight raid on one of the empire’s border outposts – and didn’t trust anyone not to blow the whistle.
Kendric, the quartermaster, seemed to think that it was just paranoia about the next month’s budget review. “Everyone always gets frightened that their department will be axed”, he’d said while looking over Marco’s requisition forms. “It’ll all blow over before too long.”
As it turned out, Marco didn’t get time to connect the dots. Two weeks after his transfer, he was summoned to a meeting room – “the commander wants to see you” is all his escort had offered. When he found himself sitting down opposite a lean, deeply tanned woman whose gaze seemed to look right through him, he realised that they hadn’t meant the base commander: he was being interviewed by his boss.
“We’re going into Ferres. It’ll start with a small force, and I want you to act as executive officer.”