Padishah Mehmet II

IC: Roland Hamilton

"Alright. Souper, I'm Roland. New guy, apparently. Can you make me... I don't even know, a hamburger?"

IC: Roland Hamilton

"Uh, alright. So if I want to eat, I just ask xir to make something?"

IC: Roland Hamilton

I can't say I really even noticed when I ended up at the mess hall. Everything happened so disturbingly fast.

I was incredibly glad to stand on solid ground again when I did, though.

IC: Roland Hamilton

"God, yes. Please. I'm starving."

IC: Roland Hamilton

I think my eyes grew three sizes at the kindness in the greeting. That was a quick and very welcomed change. Certainly an excellent change from the typical demeanours varying from open hostility to professionalistic coldness.

"Hi, Ashley. I'm Roland Hamilton, and I'm glad to, well, be here. I suppose. This is as good a place as any. I understand you're to show me around?"

IC: Roland Hamilton

"It's not a topic I think I'd particularly enjoy either. Even if for completely opposite, just as personal, reasons," I said, trying to say that in the most conciliatory tone possible. "That said, bygones is bygones. Can someone show me around? I don't have a lot of personal effects to put where I'll be sleeping, but I'd like to know where I'll be sleeping regardless. Also eating, thinking, and working, as well as other mandatory bodily functions."

IC: Roland Hamilton

"Seems fair enough. Is there anything else I should know?"

IC: Roland Hamilton

"It's always lovely to hear I'm not the only new recruit found just lying around in space discarded. What's the main task of our mission? I know 'fighting the Mantis', but other than that?"

IC: Roland Hamilton

"Aye, I suppose," Roland replied as he took a gulp of water. "Federation member species. Have the peculiar habit of generating energy as if they were, I don't even know a suitable comparison, walking nuclear plants? Very mysterious, too. We know comparatively little about them. All the things they teach at school, really, I know. So what about them, Colonel..?"

IC: Roland Hamilton

"You said it yourself. The war is over. There are no enemies."

I wasn't sure what prompted me to say that. Maybe the lack of a goal in my newly reborn life. Maybe the dangerous pathological need to defy the clearly hostile aura radiating from that girl whose wrist was held tight by that other, pink-haired gal. Maybe no reason at all. Maybe just sheer dumb gratitude for finally getting water.

"As long as I finally am told the names of my new superior and, well, everyone else, I'll be glad to join. You did drag me off that derelict wreck, after all. There's a debt of gratitude I've to fill."

IC: Roland Hamilton

"Helping my case is not what I care about. I wanted to make sure you know the context. That said, I'm glad with your decision. Now can I please - seriously, please - get some water. For reals. It's been five long years without water."

IC: Roland Hamilton

"I might have just been doing my duty, aye," I replied, some devil spurring on my tongue despite it perhaps being wiser to stay a bit more quiet. "But it doesn't irk you at all that I did it eagerly? Not the killing, that is. But I didn't fight on the rebels' side due to an order. I fought as a volunteer. I willingly joined the rebellion and I willingly fought for my planet's independence. Somewhat incompetently, as you say, but I did believe in what I was fighting for and I still believe now. Are you so tolerant as to forgive not just duty, but also conviction?"

IC: Roland Hamilton

"Look," I began, knowing that this might well possibly be my last public speech, so I had to make it a good one. "I know how you military types work, and I'm going to appeal to your better nature despite that. Please don't space me. Like, even if you decide to execute me, Cardea is just a system away and my soul in Heaven or maybe worse than that or wherever would be eternally grateful if you'd let me die on my own land. Failing that, shoot me and store me in the cargo bay and just sort of drop my body off to my parents, assuming they're still alive. They've thought I've been dead for so long. I'd prefer they know there's at least something physical left of me."

IC: Roland Hamilton

"Al-righty, I suppose that drink's called off, then."

I straightened myself. Celebrating was clearly out of the question in the conditions I was in. Fair enough. Understandable, I suppose. This was a Federation vessel rather than one back on Cardea, after all. Once I got back... no, if I got back, now that's what mattered, there could be all the celebrations I'd want.

"Fair enough, Ms. We Saved You," I addressed the seeming captain of this ship, trying my best not to smile. It didn't seem like a good time to smile. I wanted to live, after all. "I'm sure I'd love to argue with you about how you oughtn't have saved us if we caused you so much trouble. I'm sure I'd love to argue about the means, reasons, and causes of that uprising. But I won't bother and instead I'll answer your question. Four. I've killed four men, with my own hands. The first one was a friend in the ditches of New Istanbul during our rising. He was gravely wounded and medical help was not coming. He asked for his pocketknife. I didn't mean to think of what he would do with it."

I sat silent. And coughed.

"Medical help arrived literally two minutes later. He would've made it. I handed him the knife. It was his blood on my hands."

"The next two were soldiers. There's no heartrending story behind it. We were in a battle. I murdered. They murdered. I happened to murder them."

"Then there was Kaina. A friend, a fellow mechanic, for that matter. We were on that last ship, the Red Knife, the one you recovered us from. We were being bombarded, and things were looking grim. I wasn't thinking. I..."

I coughed. It might've been an illusion, but I kind of thought I coughed just a bit of blood.

"One wrong button pressed, and a door is sealed. I thought she had gotten through with us to the med bay, but... no, she was left behind. Behind a sealed door. Again, someone dear to me had been killed by my own hands. So that's the fourth person I've killed. Take that as you will."

IC: Roland Hamilton

I blinked.

"Wait, you mean to tell me... we kind of won? Wow. This is... I don't even know. Is that water on its way so I can have a celebratory drink?"

IC: Roland Hamilton

"Well darn. It's been five years of my parents thinking I'm dead. How fun."

IC: Roland Hamilton

"You're welcome, Ms. Person Vaguely Connected In A More Or Less Positive Way To The State," I replied, wearing the straightest expression ever, to the first voice, the image of whose owner slowly settled in my line of sight as my vision got clearer. Then I turned to the pink-haired girl next to her, and grinned, having to say my name again for the first time in... honestly, I had no idea how long:

"I'm Roland. Roland Hamilton. Son of Eric and Alyx Hamilton. No rank. In the Cardean Planetary Forces, we had no ranks. We didn't last long enough to make them. I was the rough equivalent of a land forces captain in the planetary uprising, and the more or less primary mechanic of the rebel flagship in the space battles."

I sat with my mouth opened, as if I had something to say, for about five seconds, and then spoke again:

"What did you say this year was, again?"

IC: Roland Hamilton

I laughed.

Not for any particular reason. I just wanted to make sure I can still do that after the n days I've been in stasis. It would have been disappointing had I forgotten how that's done; and being dumped and locked in some primitive torture/interrogation tool wasn't gonna stop me.

"Alright," I heard my own voice echo in the room as my senses were fading slowly in and becoming clearer, "I know how this is done. I'll talk. Tell you everything you want. With just a single condition, pee-ell-ess. I just want some water."

IC: Roland Hamilton

It's not a pleasant sensation, waking up from stasis, let me tell you that. One might even say it's kinda... what's the word... irritating.

Now, I'm not asking you, the reader, much: just imagine, for a moment, that you are veritably probably about to die. Your friends are nearly all dead. Yourself, you're reaching for a desperate last attempt at survival, by rushing with the few remaining members of the ship's crew towards the stasis pod chamber, where you do your best to help your last pals get into the pods, help press the eject button that loads them into the escape shuttles that will bring them more or less perhaps theoretically safely to the nearest planet. Now, as for yourself, you find yourself in the extremely awkward situation of... not really having anyone to press that button for you.

So out of desperation, you close yourself in the pod. And in the blink of an eye, you find yourself in a far different spaceship, presumably having just been beamed aboard, a sense of numbness like no other in your limbs. Even a single step takes effort. And your eyes... let's not even begin about your eyes. They weigh with the shadow of a million-year-old sleep.

The bright side is, you feel as if you've slept like a baby. Practically better than ever before. That, however, is heavily outweighed by the fact that almost immediately someone who wants to "escort you to the captain" and who owns a gun shows up. Every freaking time.

It was only natural that my reaction to this experience was to yawn, stretch my arms, and sigh deeply before asking the highly aggressive people in front of me:

"Is there any food on this flight?"

I think I became a better man when I read this.

Thank you.

-Dovydas

Name: Roland Hamilton
Gender: Male

Age: 24
Species: Human
Profession: Dunna. Regularly shoot people/fix engines on request?
Skills: advanced computer skills, decent enough with a gun, and arguably one of the best engine mechanics on planet Cardea (no matter how little that might mean)
Items: Don't really get to retain a lot when you're left for dead on a spaceship.
Appearance: Relatively tall, somewhat slender and thin. A mop of dark, pathologically dirty hair. His skin, whether on his face, hands or feet, weathered by the harsh winds of planet Cardea. A rather short nose, almond-shaped green eyes, a five o'clock shadow all mark his physiognomy. He usually wears a black leather jacket over a blue t-shirt, as well as a silver chain that hangs around his neck.
Personality: Roland is a relatively cynical, snarkish kind of dude with a strong tendency towards very contradictory behaviour. He can stab a man and drink with him on the same day, so long as he sees a purpose in it; not a use per se, but just a purpose. To say that he is selfish or has no principles would be, however, nothing at all similar to the truth. He is, simply put, just pragmatic. Perhaps his philosophy is best described in Roland's own words: "There is no place for principles in the underworld. So it's best not to go there at all."

He has a high level of empathy for people who have it far worse than him, and will seek to do what he can to help them; again, assuming that does not involve death. Death is not cool.
Biography: Growing up in the Terran Confederacy colony of Cardea (pop. 2,798,136), a relatively impoverished agrarian world in the outer territories of the Confederacy as the son of a pair of relatively poor organic farmers, Roland from an early age found himself thoroughly fascinated by two main subjects that the world never had enough of - computers and engines. Upon finishing school, Roland found employment at the local spaceport as an apprentice mechanic; it was here that on one summer day four years ago, as Roland was listening to music and messing around with the engine of a small long obsolete starfighter, that the recruiters for a radical revolutionary group, the Break, found him.

The Break pitched to him a lovely vision of a Cardea liberated from Terran control. Of a Cardea that looked to care for its people first, of a Cardea in the hands of its people, of a Cardea that does not give food to a distant supposed homeworld without anything in recompense like a serf. They asked him to join them and even promised him a command. Naturally, Roland agreed.

For the next two years, Roland worked in secret with the Break, the group aiming, and succeeding, at building up a network of relatively solid support among the populace. Everything culminated in a full scale uprising on the planet, a group of insurrectionaries seizing the largest spaceport on Cardea, New Istanbul Spaceport, as the aftermath to a series of complicated accidents and miscommunications between Terran Confederacy officials and a month of hunger-caused riots in the streets of New Istanbul and other Cardean towns. This group of rebels was only partially composed of Breakers and was a motley, spur-of-the-moment crew of various revolutionaries, radical autonomists and independentists; nevertheless, the Break saw it as an opportunity to kick the rebellion into effect. As the Cardean garrison, over the next days, attempted to reclaim control of the spaceport by setting up a perimeter around it and sending nearly all their forces to deal with the threat, the Break went public, ransacking the garrison's military base.

Things escalated quickly. With vast amounts of rioters and a small group of Breakers now armed with their own weapons assaulting the perimeters of the military garrison, it was ordered to withdraw to their base and avoid confrontation, awaiting reinforcements and protecting the base from further violation; this, however, turned out to be a mistake, with the rebels, with no small contribution from Roland and other talented local mechanics, transforming even ordinary transport ships at the spaceport into machines of war, even if rather makeshift. The rebellion spread, and within weeks the Break and members of other revolutionary groups were able to gather in the first Cardean town completely devoid of Terran forces, Promised Hill, to sign a hastily drafted declaration of independence as the rebels' first handful of fighters engaged Confederacy forces in the skies.

Cardea's self-declared independence was not to last, however. Promised Hill, the place of its declaration, was retaken by Confederate reinforcements in a week after the signing; New Istanbul was forced into months-long fighting in the streets. Roland himself was in the skies, helping a small force of makeshift and stolen starships in evading the deadly bombardment of a Confederate dreadnought. On the eve of the one-year anniversary of the rebellion, the flagship of Roland's commander Alan Craig, The Red Knife, hidden on the dark side of one of Cardea's two moons, received their last message from Breaker headquarters: "Pull out of the system right now." And so Craig did, in the last hours of the planet's defiance, only to be pursued by a whole detachment of Confederate forces.

As far as the Terran Confederacy was concerned, Alan Craig's next steps were fatal for the rebellion. Although he made it to a neighbouring star system, he found that he had been pursued all the way there; so he ordered several small-sized starfigthers to detach and aim for one of the planets in the system, more specifically one of the moons. God alone knows how he intended to do it, but Craig planned to somehow distract the Terran navy's attention, then return to pick the pilots of the starfighters up for an FTL jump. One way or another, it did not work. Or rather, it did, in a way. The Confederates were indeed distracted - enough to aim their fire at the fighters rather than Craig's starship. For about ten minutes.

As far as the Terran Confederacy was concerned, there were no survivors of the following battle, not a one. Well, put simply, they were wrong.

The ship that Craig was using was a retrofitted and upgraded former medicine ship, and was equipped with its very own handful of stasis pods. When all heck broke loose, Roland and a handful of others made their way towards the pods with great haste.

It was traumatic, to say the least, for Roland to find out, five years in a pod later, that his was the last to remain on the drifting wreckage of the Red Knife.

Name: Viktor Esteban Mária Los Santos de Wassermiller of the House of Yanuk (or just Viktor)
Sex: Potato.
Species: Potato. He's a potato with legs. More specifically he's the ghost of a dead Great Spirit inside a potato with small mechanical legs.
Powers: He has the ability to duplicate his body an infinite amount of times. The thing is, he can only control one of those bodies; the clones lose sentience within moments of appearing and remain nothing but, well, food.
Skills: Yes.
Equipment: Yes.
Appearance: Something like this: http://barringtonstageco.org/media/potato.jpg
Personality: Utterly evil. Look, I hate writing personality descriptions and I prefer to develop them on the spot, so you'll just have to /shaaaades/ deal with it.
History:

"burned down three protesting fleas and dispersed a strike in the kitchen. #swag #yolo #plebs"

- Viktor, during his last sighting two days ago in the middle of a kugel cooking session gone wrong

One day, a Matoran referred to in the annals of history only as Valdis the La'Vian arrived in the city, carrying only what seemed like a simple potato. Foolish mortals. They have no idea how wrong they were. For it was not a simple potato, but the god of the seven realms, Viktor Esteban Mária Los Santos de Wassermiller, cast from his throne as the great spirit of a distant universe to this lowly status as a potato after being found guilty in a court of law on charges of abuse of power and eating too much fried bacon. But Esteban the Negative Third will rise yet, and will teach those fools what he can do. From this shallow and mildly embarrassing body will be born a fire that will light up the... the...

...

######, davis, do you still have the script?

what do you mean you sold it to that Vortixx for a cookie

you fool viktor will have our heads for this

...

hahahahaha no of course he won't

I'm going to go further than any of you. Given the distance, and the slowarse supply speeds that come from that, the success rate for any potential Dasaka invasion of Mata Nui approximates 0.0002%. With a lot of godmodding and abuse of power, it could perhaps reach as high a level as 2%. But not more. Not even RAINING METEORS would help you. We have hiding in the Onu-Koro tunnels for that.

My claim to professionalism in estimating these odds is that my cousin is a bookie.

(And yes, I'm still watching all of you. From the shadows.)

-Dovydas

No.

-Dovydas

Any military historical narrative, especially involving wars like Korea, Vietnam, WWII, etc. You might be able to add them as nurses or another historically appropriate role, but if you're talking about the actual blood & guts fighting, than females are out.

 

I'm not sure if you've heard of this Jeanne d'Arc person. She kind of saved France. In a war.

Yeah.

-Dovydas