PDF International

Game Master The Wyrm Ouroboros

Saturday, 25/09/2077
Movement Assignment: Chicago, IL, USA
en route
Arrival ETA: 1 h 35 m

So here you are - arriving in the decade-old destruction of Chicago, on a military bus with perhaps one or two other Threaded UN PDF Trainees and about thirty UNPDF Marines. Their guns - and since you're on duty just as much as they are, your own Sabordo 10mm Carbine, with your load-standard one-and-three clips - are secured, the bolt-block in-place in the open breech, racked muzzle-down on the back of the seat in front of you. You are under their Second Lieutenant's command during your movement to the bombarded city; he (or rather, the nearest Marine) will be giving you orders should the crap hit the turbine and a Thunder attack roll in on you and the other busses in your convoy.

Beginning a next stage of your life, it is only natural to think about what's come before ...

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Officially, UNPDF Trainee Boot Camp is eleven weeks long, but it can take up to thirteen weeks worth of you in the hands of the good men and women who are charged to take the mass of your raw wannabe selves and decant a focused, driven Cadet out the other side. 'Receiving' starts when you apply (usually online), your parents' electronic signatures attached. It continues through the psychological testing, a thousand questions (most multiple-choice, but a few that are 'open-ended') that you have to answer within 24 hours of your application. Within 24 hours after finishing that, you receive orders to arrive in-person at a specific time at the most convenient UN PDF Trainee Military Entry Processing Station; these orders account for your parents' capability (or lack of it) to get you there, arranging for transport if necessary for you and one parent or guardian (with total strangers who just happen to be planning a trip in that direction, sometimes) and allowing sufficient time for the 'movement'. Then comes the interview. Or rather, The Interview.

The Interview is two psychologists, one local, one from the PDF, who take five minutes of your parents' time to give them one last chance to say 'hell no' (it isn't often that that happens); they then get sent back out to the front for cake and grief counselling There's never any cake left; it's always all just been eaten. That means you get left alone with those two brain-benders for up to two hours' worth of brow-beating, scorn, contempt, spite, disdain, disgust, bile, and every other invention of humanity to strip-mine your personality down to make sure what answers you put into your questions is what you really are - and that you really, honestly, by-your-own-choice-and-no-others want to be there. Fortunately for you ... you did. Those who fail get sent home, or worse.

Since you passed the Interview, they send you down the hall to a battery of tests - basic physical motions, strength and endurance baselines, genetic-sample-taking (four vials' worth!), and the implant of a pinhead-sized short-range-transmitting biomonitor just where the back of your skull meets your spine. If you brought luggage, great - you get to move your stuff from whatever you brought it in into a standardized locker, 1m x 1m x 2m, that gets sealed and sent along with you. Kiss Mom and Dad goodbye, kiddo, because you're off to Trainee Boot Camp on the spot. Fortunately, you knew this would happen before you ever submitted your application less than four days ago. And off you go to one of only seventy-four boot camp locations in North America.

For the rest of 'Receiving' the four training platoons form up - each of them with sixty boys or girls all between 12 and 14 years of age, determined to give it their all and earn the chance to be Injected and, with luck, be one of the less-than-five-percent (2.88% average in North America) who are compatable - and the one percent of those who Thread fully and successfully. 'Receiving' and 'Forming' (the week that follows, which is still not considered part of Trainee Boot Camp) are basically about getting you out of your civilian mindset and into the mindset of a PDF Trainee. You are, after all, only 13 (well, usually), and very, very few of you or your compatriots in Boot are of the military mindset when you go in.

You sure as heck are when you come out, however.

The PDF, they say, is one of the toughest basic-training courses to go through, because they're not just forming your body and esprit de corps, they're also purging all of the prejudice from your brain to make a PDF soldier or sailor. It is said that in the Middle East, in the fighting along the Palestinian Coast, that Muslims and Jews who fought each other fifteen years ago in the Thirty-Six-Hour War fight side-by-side against the Thunder. Humanity is the only thing that matters, now. The PDF does not want anyone who does not want to be there; if you give up, you head back into your local military forces. One out of four who enter give up or are tossed out 'for cause', whether physical (remember the biomonitor?) or sociopsychological.

The PDF Trainee Program is almost as tough - slightly less so on the body, slightly moreso on the mind. The North American drop-out rate isn't quite as bad as the adult boot camp drop rate; 'only' 1 out of 5 will withdraw, their enlistment delayed until after their eighteenth birthday, when they will be reactivated and ordered to report to a national-level military service center for boot camp. Once you volunteer to fight for humanity's survival, they aren't going to let you back out, after all.

Unlike one out of five of your squadmates, though, you stuck with it - by gum, you did. Twelve-plus weeks of body-exhausting, mind-stunning, book-learning, order-following, Drill-Instructor-shouting, back-of-the-head-smacking, seat-of-the-pants-kicking, bitten-by-something-itching, firing-your-weapon-so-much-your-hands-are-tingling, and most importantly self-forming determination, drive, and refusal to give up. You marched in the Commandant's review on that last day, head held high. You threw your cover (that's your hat, you philistine) into the air like everyone else when she or he addressed you graduates as Cadets, not Trainees for the very first time. Heck, your loved ones might've even been there.

Afterwards, depending on when you first volunteered, you may wind up spending another thirteen weeks waiting for Injection. The time isn't wasted; you and the rest of the graduates of your training platoon continue to refine and expand the skills learned in Boot, and as more platoons arrive the Sergeants in charge do the same thing the Drill Instructors did at Boot - get you into competitions. Victory, after all, is worth it, whether that's an extra dessert or a vidcom home - or just the pride of triumph. Then came 27/08/2077: Injection.

And you thought the Interview and Boot were tough.

In every interview over the last thirteen years, PDF Commander Toliver Fisk - the first individual to successfully Thread to any degree - has stated that the Injection was the greatest and most prolonged pain he has ever experienced, before or after. Professor Karl Schein, the scientist who invented the KS Serum, has made no apology about the fact that The Injection hurts so much, stating that when the potential for such deep-seated alterations is being introduced, an organism must of course experience pain. Across one day, in hundreds of rooms beneath the Injection facility, twenty-five hundred teens experience two hours of mind-shattering pain as the chemicals and retrovirii slowly drip into their veins. Blood and nerves on fire, muscles stressed in endless minutes of agony, internal organs twisting inside you as they refuse to cope with the torment, your last year's worth of meals striving to expel themselves from your body ... Only one in ten thousand teens actually dies from the Injection itself; it's just that all the rest of you wish you could.

Then comes the waiting. A full week passes as the serum works its way through every crevice of your body, silent and subtle, sliding into your cells with every beat of your heart, every movement of your muscle, contemplating your body chemistry and your genetics and deciding whether or not it should affect you. The earliest anyone Threads is eight days in, the latest is twenty-three - a sixteen-day bell-curve that starts on 03-09-2077 and ends on 18-09-2077. For those days, it's constant push-push-push, physical activity of all sorts, everything from the confidence courses to the rappelling tower to the running tracks to the Olympic-sized pool. Every movement you make, every step you take, is watched like a hawk by combat-armed, -armored, locked-and-loaded soldiers, keeping pace no more than thirty but no less than twenty meters distant, or behind rifles in towers overlooking the base's entire outdoor zone. At each of the 75 injection facilities in the North American region, and out of the approximately 2500 - more in the States and Canada, but by no more than a hundred - per site, only about a hundred and fifty are reactive. Which means on Day 3, someone reacts.

Usually it's something mild - very mild. Someone feels subtly better, improves their two-mile-run time by half a minute, stays underwater for an extra fifteen seconds. Sometimes it's something more significant - a sudden surge of power on their side of the squad-versus-squad tug-of-war. The biomonitor implant keeps a close watch on each person's endocrine and neurotransmitter productions, and can tell when someone's Threaded.

And then people start dying. A girl projectile-vomits at breakfast - first her food, then her internal organs. A boy seizes during a run, in such contortions you can hear his bones snapping. Another youth starts to rappel off the side of the tower, only to go completely slack and fall three stories straight to the ground - dead before he even started to fall. Forty, fifty of them, kids you've come to know - on average, at least one that you'd been through boot with, often two or three.

Even worse are the ones, one in ten, who are ... well, unnerving. They start to run faster than is possible, or leap without a rope from the tower, or dive into the water with a full load and yet swim an Olympic time. And they do not stop. Orders slough off them, despite boot camp training; most of them laugh maniacally. Some grow violent, lashing out at the nearest noncoms, covering the twenty-meter distance in less than a handful of heartbeats before crushing a 23-year-old corporal's ribcage with a massive punch.

All of them must be put down by gunfire - the first combat deaths you witness as members of the United Nations Planetary Defense Force, for make no mistake, they are combat deaths, and are treated as such.

Then there's those who Thread just as fully as those one-in-ten, but don't lose control. The one in a hundred who react to the KS Serum; the 1 in 2800 who graduate training. The 1 in 3500 who volunteer for the PDF; the 1 in 340,000 kids of your age group.

You Thread, and keep control. You're going to have the chance to become a superhero.

After Day 23, for all of you who survive, assignments are passed out, and movement orders are cut. Some Cadets are headed to PDF Marine training; the others are headed to PDF Naval training. Both are middle- and high-school combined with continual physical training to turn them into truly superior soldiers, ready for promotion beyond their initial rank of Private or Seaman First Class, or to go on to two more years of Officer Candidate School. They will frequently intermingle with each other, spending one quarter of each year at the other school so as to understand their counterparts and work efficiently in the field.

You, however, receive your assignment, and a rare one it is - one of only seventy-two this quarter. Movement orders are cut for you to head in military convoy to Chicago, for your assignment is PDF International, the North American Branch of the superpowered school for the Threaded. For four out of five years you will learn to harness your new powers, expand them, control and use them to destroy the Thunder. The first nine months of your fourth year, you will spend in intensive training for the final three of that year - a field assignment as an E-4 (Specialist) embedded in a company of PDF Marines or, more rarely, a PDF warship. Unlike the others of your training platoon to whom you've said goodbye, you will see real combat against the real enemy.

And there's a very real chance that you might really die ... but that's almost four years away. Now? Now you just have to make sure you can figure out how your new assignment works ... not to mention your powers!!

Sebastian is printing, doing the obstacle course for the second time today. He's been extra focused on beating his record.

At least this one's relatively fun. Feel bad for the ones stuck doing push ups and swimming laps all day.

He breezes past the other obstacles, finally coming to the climbing wall. Without stopping, he gives a little hop to give him a slight momentum boost.

Or, at least, that's what he intends to do. In reality, he sails almost completely over the nearly fifty foot wall, clipping his ankles on the ascent and flipping end over end. He crashes face first into the ground on the other side, wind knocked out of him.

He comes to his senses just in time to comply with his orders to put his hands on his head, whole body aching.

Wonder if they'd have shot me just to be safe if I'd managed to knock myself unconscious. he wonders.

Bruce is running a few laps his natural athleticism allows him to almost casually run very fast. His friend Allan Stinson as always is keeping up, but he is struggling as he always does but he doesn't stop he keeps striving and struggling trying to beat Bruce.

All of a sudden Bruce hears a exhultative "HaHahaha" from behind, then beside and then in front as Allan streaks ahead of him

"Threading alert.. track and field, subject Allan Stinson" blares out over loudspeakers

Allan does not stop

Bruce musters everything he has and races after Allan and he somehow manages to get close "Allan, you have to stop, they need to examine you, you've threaded"

"I'm the fastest.. not you" Allan throws a punch faster than Bruce can react to but suddenly Bruce is not there,he is several feet away.

Then Bruce was surrounded by guards with guns pointed at him and he acted as he had been trained and laid on the ground with his hands behind his back. From somewhere far off he heard more laughter and then gunfire.

"Threading alert.. track and field, subject Bruce Walker" blares out over loudspeakers

Jodie's experience of threading is a surprise. Only a couple of other recruits have successfully threaded when it happens, although others have died in various hideous ways. One, a girl who shared her love of soccer had, during a run, collapsed on the track, blood streaming from her eyes, ears and nose. Another, a cute boy who she'd had a crush on since arriving, had experienced even worse when he had frozen during dinner, apparently catatonic for several seconds and had then, without any apparent emotion, used his fork to stab the recruit next to him through the eye. It'd taken four of the guards to take him down, his body still moving and twitching even after he'd been peppered with bullets.

Jodie's threading happened whilst she'd been waiting her turn to rappel down the sheer face of the tower. One of the other recruits had slowly started giggling, a laugh that sent shivers of fear through the recruits surrounding him who were, by now, familiar with the warning signs. He'd picked up the trainer and thrown him straight at Jodie. The two had tumbled of the side of the tower without their safety harnesses and Jodie had fallen, thinking that she would die as she plummeted towards the ground. She hadn't died though. Instead she had,.... stopped, hovering, somehow, only inches above the ground. The terror of her broken by sudden wonder and then renewed terror as the guards began barking orders at her. She'd dropped to the ground then alright! And then when the guards were sure she was under control, she'd been cuffed and lead off. Her mind swirling with just one thought,... that she had, somehow, survived.

Bill had spent the morning on the rifle range. He had been doing well since boot camp. Turns out professionally trained marksmanship instructors had a lot more to teach him than his father's half forgotten training. He finished a round of rapid fire, after which his group was scheduled to move on to urban tactics training. Instead, a range official dropped off three full clips at each station. The variation from the schedule was enough to start his group muttering to each other. Halfway through his second clip, the range NCO tapped him on the shoulder and told him to clear his weapon and stand.

Doing as he was told, Bill rose to find himself surrounded by armed and action ready Marines. His C/O stood before him.

"Cadet Younger, come with me."

Confused and a bit nervous, he followed. He looked around to see each of the men and women surrounding him staring intently.

He cleared his throat. "What's this about sir?"

The officer looked over his shoulder at the cadet: tall and broad, but by no means a man.

"You've Threaded, son."

Jerrold turned back to the track after watching the kid who almost jumped over the wall by the obstacle course across the field be lead away by his guards.

"At least this one wasn't a freak out" he thought, as he started jogging again. The last few days had been the weirdest of all, with the Threading starting to manifest in all the kids. Through everything - the interviews, the training, even the injections - it hadn't really sunk all the way in, that this was for real... not until the stuff that started happening the last few days. And the guards that followed them everywhere, ready to kill them...

If Jerrold hadn't been jogging, he might have shivered.

But, running always eased him, let him calm down - the rhythm of his pace, the "Cadet Kingsley put your face on the ground or we WILL FIRE!" suddenly cut across whatever he was thinking, and he stumbled to a halt. Looking around wildly, he saw his guard detail behind him - too far behind him - rushing forward, with their guns at ready, shouting at him to get down or be shot.

He stood for a second, then collapsed to the ground and froze with his hands behind his neck, thinking with relief, "It's happening...whatever I did."

At first Dakota was excited for the opportunity to follow in her brothers footsteps, not even the questionnaire she had spent all night filling out could get in the way of that. It wasn't until she got to the entry processing station and took part in her interview that she realized exactly how serious it really was. The girl had always been clever, clever enough that she wasn't used to talking to people who were actually smarter than her, so of course she didn't take it seriously at first. Instead of seriously answering the examiners questions she would give them leading answers to try and get a lead on them. That went on for about an hour till one of the two stopped her and gave her a scarily accurate synopsis of her thought process with a sneer. That simple action scared her to the bone, and by the end of the next hour she was of the opinion that if we could just fought the war with psychology instead of guns, there would be no losing.

Eventually that was all over though, and somehow the girl had managed to redeem herself in the second hour. After a relatively quick battery of tests showing that other than being a shrimp she was in perfect health, her devices and other belongings were sealed away in a box and she was given the chance to say goodbye to her mother. Next up was boot camp, or as Dakota liked to refer to it, the second layer of hell.

Where the last was the hell of emotions, this was truly the hell of physical fitness. Somewhere along the way Dakota had heard that the mental portion of training would be the worst, her pleading muscles would have begged to differ after the first day. More than once she thought about dropping out, and even once she heard some of the larger trainees making bets on if Dakota would end up getting kicked out or leaving on her own. Fortunately she had a goal, something she could turn to whenever those defeatist thoughts popped up.

Boot camp wasn't all bad though, Dakota quickly fell in love with the firing range. While practicing marksmanship she found she could just focus entirely on the task at hand and let her worries fade away, it helped that she was actually fairly decent at it too. Eventually she even made a game of it, trying to create rorschach-esque patterns in her target, the symmetry making it that much harder. Of course her success (to those who actually noticed it) coupled with an increasingly distant demeanor didn't endear her much to the other trainees.

One thing was certain by the end of boot camp, Dakota wasn't the same naive girl who wandered in thirteen weeks before. Where once there was an excitable girl who wasn't afraid to point out when her teachers were wrong and would constantly skirt the rules by virtue of her intelligence just to get a couple more minutes of surfing forums, now there was a much more disciplined cadet, someone who knew that sometimes it was better to think before opening their mouth and who had probably built up a fairly decent poker face. That was the kind of girl that made it to the third layer of hell, the hell of ten thousand bees, better known as the injection.

When later asked about the injection, Dakota would reply that she couldn't remember much of the actual procedure, that apparently the pain was so great that she had passed out within the first fifteen minutes. She would then of course shudder at the thought of the nightmares she experienced in the meantime. The first thing she felt when awoken after the procedure, other than residual pain, was a profound sense of wrongness, like something violated her on a fundamental level. It was more the fact that she knew the serum was there and it was working it's way through her body that brought this on than any actual prophetic feeling, just the fact that something was supposed to happen was enough to fray her nerves. Things only got worse when cadets started falling, she would hear about one or two keeling over or just up and tearing at their eyes and screaming in other sections of the facility.

It was only a matter of time till Dakota experienced one of these situations first hand, and not even one of the normal ones either. One morning during shower time she had walked into the steamy room to the drip drip drip of a leaky faucet and a soft grunting from deeper in. Rounding the corner revealed a truly gruesome scene though, two girls throwing bone shattering punches while staring at each other in dead silence. Around the wrecked room the bodies of three guards who were supposed to be on duty, apparently the enclosed space didn't give them enough time to react to the pair of overly reactive girls. After that several more soldiers had rushed past Dakota and gunned the two girls down. The entire scene was definitely traumatizing, not so much due to the death and violence as the fact that the two girls had lost their minds, something that quickly became the girls deepest fear. Sure death was scary, but ceasing to mentally exist was worse.

Time marched on without Dakota's. All around her cadets were changing, some to their death, some only a minor degree, and very few actually pulling it off, none of this helped the girls peace of mind though. Each day would just add more stress, each death, each successful cadet and especially each evil transformation weighed down on her and caused her to draw further into herself. Roughly fifteen days in she was almost convinced that something went wrong and she would end up cold on the floor, or with her teeth around someones throat, and then cold on the floor. Each time thoughts like this popped up Dakota would go through a series of mental gymnastics, running through the specs of some of her favourite new and old pieces of tech, reminding herself of her goal, and most importantly whispering the mantra 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' to herself in hopes that if she did turn evil she would at least direct her mania or hatred towards the right enemy, if not remind whatever entity took over when she was gone to take a moment and think about what it was about to do before asking for an assisted suicide. She had the brains to spare after all, if she were to disappear hopefully someone could benefit from them.

One morning Dakota awoke in an isolation chamber instead of her regular bunk. She screamed as she cowered in a corner, her overactive imagination jumping to the conclusion that she had gone to the dark side and was now a prisoner in her own mind. That was silly of course, a speaker on the wall explained that she had threaded in the middle of the night, hovering a foot off her bed and everything, and the facilities personnel decided it would be safer to stick her in isolation to see how she turned out rather than waking her up in the middle of the dorm. After it was pronounced that she was not evil, Dakota spent tens of minutes alternating between laughter and tears of joy. She survived, would go on where so many others died and even more failed. There was still a dark part of her mind, way in the back, harboring doubt that she wasn't actually mentally someone else who had replaced her original self but was able to function for now due to her mantra.

Bill stopped in his tracks and blinked at the back of the Captain's head. All around him was the sound of rifles being snapped up into shoulders in unison. He looked around, and saw that the Marines were now pointing their weapons at him. One or two were nervous, but the other four had the cool demeanor of combat veterans.

"What?"

The C/O turned and regarded him for a moment, then walked back several steps to stand directly in front of the teenager. He spoke with a measured tone of eerie calmness.

"Are you refusing an order, Cadet?"

"What? No! N-no sir! It's that I don't... I haven't... Nothing happened sir."

The officer sighed softly, and placed his hands behind his back, squaring off in front of Bill.

"Look down, Cadet Younger."

The young cadet looked down, then up again at the captain, uncomprehending.

The officer allowed himself a slight smile. You're hovering, Younger. You've been floating an inch off the ground since 0930 this morning."

Bill stared at the man, mouth agape, for several seconds. He looked down, and suddenly felt the lack of the ground's firmness beneath him. He yelped and spindled his arms as he fell two inches to the ground, spreading his feet to retain his balance. Several of the Marines chuckled at this, but a stern look from the C/O silenced them.

"Any more questions, Cadet, or may we continue?"

"No sir! Yes sir!"

The officer nodded curtly and said "Good." before turning and leading the way to sickbay.

Honor and Duty. These were the words that had defined his life.

Cadet Talmadge, because for most of his waking life is who he was, simply dropped face first onto the ground, assuming the proper position almost instantly after hearing the command.

His hands smapped into position at the back of his neck, his fingers immediately interlacing, his response crisp and clear, "Sir, yes sir!" spoken in a near shout as he lay on the ground awaiting the handcuffs he knew were coming to secure him.

"Cadet Talmadge, you've Threaded. Remain in position."

"Sir, yes sir!"

He almost relaxed as he again found himself where he should be, where his orders told him to be. Corwin was deeply happy to have passed this part of the Threading without drama.

Somewhere, he knew his father or another family member was watching to make sure that he continued to live and serve according to the family code.

He was a Talmadge, failure of any kind was unacceptable, unecessary drama was unacceptable, only compliance, achievement, and success were acceptable.

"Carefully stand up Cadet Talmadge, we will assist you if necessary."

"Sir, yes sir!"

Still cuffed, Cadet Talmadge allowed himself a small smile as he was stood up and escorted to the next phase of his life of duty and honor.

Mei's Threading was a very close call. It happened while she was sleeping. During a nightmare, to be more precise.

Mei opened her eyes and was shocked to find herself high in the air above of the rows of beds in the girls dormitory in which she had been sleeping, her hands clasped in a death grip on the sprinkler pipes crisscrossing the ceiling. Pandemonium had broken out; girls were running for the exits helter-skelter as the female gunnery sergeant acting as dorm monitor tried to take control of the situation and bring in help.

Mei was lucky that the chaos prevented the incoming Marines from having a clear field of fire on her as she gathered her wits about her. They are going to think I'm one one of the crazy ones and kill me if I don't get myself under control immediately!

Mei dropped to the floor, cat-like, and lay face down with her hands behind her head and waited for the Marines to take her, hoping for the best. Fortunately for her, the Gunny was very experienced, and though it was extremely rare, had seen a successful Threading occur during sleep before. As a squad of Marines covered her approach, the Gunny put the cuffs on Mei and led her out of the dorm.

Jackie had entered a nightmare. She had expected it to be bad... the sheer emotional abuse of the interview, the brutalness of the boot camp. All of this was what she had thought it would be... and more. It was so much worse.

And that wasn't the true worst of it. They were all kids... 'civilian' was in the definition. Even those that thought they were hardly military material... what does a kid know, really? But all the questions, all the forethought... it didn't help Jackie.

The deaths were the worst. The sight of someone, someone who was, who could have been a real friend, puking out their own guts. Of the sudden deaths, inexplicable. Of waiting to suddenly be torn in half by gods know what.

Even the other students were no refuge. If she befriended someone, would she see their face melt off onto the floor? If she was closer to someone, would she find them attacking her, turning mad and needing to be shot?

And what was going to happen to her? It was the waiting, not knowing.

------

Swimming was distracting. It felt safe. Thrusting and kicking through the water, everyone and everything far away. Maybe if something mis-worked in her Threading, it wouldn't just kill her if she was in the water. Or maybe she just wouldn't leave behind a mess.
Swimming slowly. Feeling frustrated, she dove below. Breathing in. She swum. Hard, fast, as hard as she could. Gliding through the water. Easily. She almost forgot her troubles like this. She certainly didn't see the other end of the pool.

CRAK.

"glbhfsvck!" She shot up slowly, crawling up the side, fumbling at the edge of the pool, blood from her broken nose making a mess of her face. She heard shouting. She certainly had the self-control to lay there, a half-drowned-brunette rat coughing and sputtering, the world dizzy. It was obviously the world that was dizzy. It was grabbing her, grabbing her wrists. Unfair. She couldn't get hair out of her face, or stop heaving and trying to lose a lung of air.

Staying still, horking, miserable and still even if she wasn't miserable. Hacking, trying to toss up the water she swallowed. She didn't care to fight, wouldn't have to begin with. It felt good for all of a quarter second until her face met tile. She'd have settled for a victory cake.

Sebastian Stein, having hurled over the combination skyscraper-slash-rappelling tower, realizes that while his body hurts where he slammed inelegantly into the ground, his feet and ankles don't hurt from how he clobbered them against the edge of the skyscraper ...

... Bruce Walker hears an order to stop and drop - which, after more than thirteen weeks worth of receiving orders, he and 99.9% of the rest of the cadets on the field obey instinctively, only for Bruce to hear rapid carbine fire taking out his racing friend ...

... Jodie Price, on her way to the ground and her death, hears a single crisp authoritative bark which she only later recognizes as the report of the weapon that ended the manic cadet's life, which couples oddly with the fact that her comparatively weak and petite form should NOT have been able to hold onto the leanly muscled PDF Marine Gunnery Sergeant during that fifty-foot plunge, much less saved his life ...

... on his way to the post-Threading exam, Bill Younger realizes with a chill that the only reason the Staff Sergeant would have stepped that close to him is if someone he trusted had an absolute dead-eye shot lined up on him, with barely a sliver more of tension to pull to make the shot that would have ended his life if he'd kept being stupid for two more seconds - and that the 'laughter' of the adult soldiers was humor more ghoulish than comradely ...

... Jerrold Kingsley soon comes to understand that the skills he's gained, all the Thunder's destruction he's seen up close and personal while helping in his grandfather's salvage operations, he's going to get the chance - far sooner than most - to put that knowledge to use in a military context ...

... Dakota Lannings hopes in the midst of her laughter and tears that she's a step closer to finding out what happened to her brother, who she last heard from only a few days after having received the Injection himself -- and later notices that the armed, still-alert guards seem to be paying close attention to her mental stability in particular, and someone always has their hand on their weapon ...

... Corwin Talmadge, more in-the-know than most of the cadets in his group, remembers the dark statistic that there's still about a one-in-three chance he dies before entering even the most limited combat service as a Threaded - and an almost exactly one-in-two chance he dies before graduation, which is not exactly encouraging to the Talmadge honor ...

... with a deepening dread, Mei Cartwright starts to wonder if her nightmares, now with the capacity of a Threaded behind them, are going to make her more of a danger to her allies than to the enemy ...

... and Jacqueline Marshall begins to really understand that the minute her stubbornness with her parents succeeded, she - like the 'kids' around her, all volunteers, all driven enough to stick out the hellish Interview as well as the thirteen punishing weeks of Boot, when 'you can quit at any time' was practically tattooed on the inside of everyone's eyelids - was no longer really a 'civilian', and she'd better stop thinking that way before it gets her killed.

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Like everyone else at the numerous Injection and Threading facilities, you finally received the two bar-coded 2m x 1m x 1m (externally-measured) ultra-light and ultra-durable universal containers that had been shipped from home containing whatever civilian personal effects either you or your parents (or both) decided should accompany you through the next five years. You'd received one during boot which was, given appropriate inserts, put to use as a footlocker; functional in either vertical or horizontal modes, it currently contains everything from boot camp - shirts, boots, belts, buckles, pants, underwear, toiletries, PDF-issued reference books, the whole nine yards (or, rather, slightly under two cubic meters of space) of your military gear.

The containers, you know quite well by now, have multiple attachment points - any meter-square face can be mated to any other such face - and one of the crazy things the 'third hat' Drill Instructor at Boot is to sketch out a complicated construct for teams of eight to sixteen trainees to latch their footlockers into, the winner being the ones who get it done right and done most quickly - not-right being, of course, not-done. (Locker inspection was almost always held immediately after taking the tinker-toy constructs apart, so having your gear packed in properly was a top priority that, well, nobody could really do, because there wasn't a way to do it and obey the laws of physics.)

On the trip from whichever of the seventy-five facilities you were in, you'll have noticed that the transports - whether lightly-armored buses or more heavily-armored trains, most of the former and many of the latter being electric like 85+% of ground transportation these days - have attachment points for the shipping containers on their sides and tops. While they serve as locations to load on shipping containers full of whatever needs to be moved - from fresh vegetables to grain to water to parts needed at the front - they also serve the more grim function of being ablative armor, able to soak up enemy shots at the expense of their contents in order to give the people inside time to react.

Those who rode long distance on trains are moved to buses for the last 45-60 minutes worth of the trip, transferring from passenger car to bus at the New Joliet railyard. It is perhaps of interest that your PDF-issued 'footlocker' is being carried inside the belly of the bus, while your pair of civilian containers are latched to the outside ...

By this point, there is always at least one other on the bus with you, usually two, but never more than a total of four Threaded to a bus. The PDF Marines in 'movement' with you keep an eye on you, grouped together at the center of the bus, and some are willing to engage in conversation; most of them, however, are busy catching up on the sleep they missed out on during their own boot camp lo these many years ago. You, yourself, might have snoozed half the trip away too, except that there's a subtle, steady pulse of energy in your veins and nerves now. With weapons ready to hand and needing only a half-dozen known and practiced moves, everyone on the bus is ready to fight if the Thunder come knocking, everyone wearing their PDF battle-dress uniform (BDUs); unless specifically directed, standard operating practice is urban camo.

Which makes especial sense, rolling slowly through the battered, damaged streets of what used to be Chicago. Oh, technically it still is. The city these days does actually have a population, but its metropolitan area, over eight thousand square kilometers once holding fifteen million people, might scrape up a percent and a half of that now. The center of the city, however, is where you are headed: the ruins of the famous Union Station. The Chicago River is only a block away, visible from the bus windows as you pull up nose-to-tail with other buses in the middle of structures shattered a decade ago in the Night of Fire. Building skeletons rise ten, twenty, thirty and more stories above the street, but the sounds of combat can be heard coming from across the river to the east - gunfire and stranger sounds in the impossible tangle of concrete, glass, and steel that was once known as the Chicago Loop.

You aren't the only ones looking in that direction with your hands ready to reach for the carbine on the seat in front of you; most of the Marines travelling with you have seen combat against the Thunder, and habits acquired in pursuit of survival die hard. Only a minute or two after the bus stops, however, the front door opens, the lieutenant or noncom in charge stands and steps down, and a conversation is had. Immediately afterwards, a PDF sergeant steps up the stairs and starts bellowing.

"PDF CADETS!! ON YOUR FEET, FRONT AND CENTER!!  MOVE IT, MOVE IT, MOVE IT, YOU'RE HOLDIN' UP THE MARINES!!  FIND YOUR FOOTLOCKER AND GET A MOVE ON, WE GOT A TRAIN TO CATCH AND NO MINCE-FOOTED PRINCESS IS GONNA MAKE ME MISS MY G0DD@MN TRAIN!!"

Nobody with even half a brain  - certainly nobody who made it through Trainee Boot Camp - is going to fail to respond to that sort of language.  Around you, the PDF Marines with whom you've ridden murmur encouragement, good luck with your first real assignment and that sort of thing, and then you're tumbling down the stairs and off the bus, with the bellies of the heavy motors open and a kid not more than a couple years older than you checking a scanner against the list the bus driver has given to her, directing two or three others into extracting your footlockers from the belly, sides, and top of the beast. You get turned over to the kid checking the list, quickly identified by your recently-rank-awakened eyes as a sergeant - cadet sergeant, actually - who directs you to retrieve your PDF Cadet footlocker from the cadet corporals doing the unlatching. They, it seems, will be taking your civilian lockers back to --

"YOWLP!!"

"WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING, CADET??  WHO THE THUNDERING HELL EVER TOLD YOU YOU COULD BRING YOUR PUSSYCAT TO THE ACADEMY??"

"YOWLP!!"

"YOU WANNA TAKE YOUR LITTLE KITTY OFF TO WAR WITH YOU??  YOU THINK THE THUNDER ARE GONNA GO 'AWWW IT'S A PUSSYCAT' AND COME OVER TO RUB ITS BELLY, CADET??"

"YOWLP!!"

"I DON'T CARE IF YOUR MOMMA CALLED IN A FAVOR FROM THE PRESIDENT TO GET YOUR SWEET CUTIEPIE SENT TO YOU, CADET, THIS AIN'T A KNITTING CIRCLE, THIS IS THE INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY AND PUSSYCATS DO NOT BELONG AT MY ACADEMY!!"

"YOWLP!!"

"FINE, BRING YOUR PUSSYCAT ALONG, BUT SO HELP ME, CADET, IF I SMELL EVEN A BREATH OF CAT PISS YOU ARE GONNA BE SCRUBBING TOILETS WITH YOUR VERY OWN TOOTHBRUSH FOR THE REST OF YOUR G0DD@MN UNNATURAL LIFE, YOU GET ME??"

"YOWLP!!"

"I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER YOUR PRETTY PUSSYCAT, CADET, AND YOU'RE MAKING ME MISS MY G0DD@MN TRAIN!!  DO YOU GET ME, CADET, OR AM I GONNA SPEND MY DAYS MAKING YOURS A LIVING HELL AND MY NIGHTS PLANNING ON HOW TO PISS IN YOUR CORNFLAKES IN THE MORNING??"

"YO-I GET YOU, STAFF SERGEANT!!"

"AT LEAST YOU GOT ALMOST AS MUCH BRAIN AS MISS PUSSYCAT, CADET!!  NOW GET YOUR LOCKER AND MOVE YOUR ASS!!  WHAT THE THUNDERING HELL ARE THE REST OF YOU LOOKING AT??  EYES TO THE BUS FRONT, ON THE BOUNCE, DOUBLE-TIME, MOVE IT!!  YOU'RE GONNA MAKE ME MISS MY G0DD@MN TRAIN!!  ONE, TWO, ONE, TWO, ONE, TWO, YOU PISSANT CADETS HAD BETTER BE ABLE TO COUNT TO TWO, BECAUSE THAT'S HOW MANY OF MY BOOTS ARE GONNA BE KICKED UP YOUR -"

... you know, it's ... almost homey, now. Strange to think that you're weeks already out of boot camp ... and that Boot is no longer the worst thing you've ever been through.

And really, things have been strange for the last few days or couple-three weeks. Ignoring the fact that you can move in ways that no normal human can move, you don't get as tired as quickly, your reflexes are faster and more accurate, and your lifting capacity has roughly doubled. Moving a fully-loaded footlocker is no longer about weight, it's about balance, and it's something you are starting to get used to as the staff sergeant - whom you expect to be the 'third hat', the lowest of the three or four sergeants likely in charge of you - harries up and down the reflexively-straight line of the seventy-plus of you headed into the partially-restored Union Station.

It's a legendary building, and you get to go down the famous-in-film 'Shootout Staircase'; it's about the only reasonably intact part of the old building, though, as the route you take leads you from the 1920's building into new space excavated and constructed within - beneath - the shell of the old building. Ignoring the bank of over a dozen elevators, you forge ahead down the flight of stairs. This consists of two sets of ten-step flights (broken by four paces worth of landing) before you reach a ninety-degree turn.  You are passed now and then by other teens, armed with the Sabordo 10mm carbines and wearing the same uniforms as yourself - the now-famous PDF colors (blue and green with tan accents) - and wearing either the tabs of cadet-corporals or, more rarely, the tabs of an active-duty E-4 Specialist. The fifteen-year-old cadet-corporals are returning from their end-of-second-year home-leave; the seventeen-year-old specialists are returning from their field duty. Like you, both types are carrying lockers with them, though they carry the full quad with the ease of experience. The cadet-corporals look buoyant.

All of the specialists look ... haunted.

"ON THE OUTSIDE, ON THE OUTSIDE, KEEP IT MOVING, CADET, YOU'RE GONNA MAKE ME MISS MY G0DD@MN TRAIN!!"

This goes on for a long, long 600 steps down into the earth before the last double-flight spills you out onto a long loading platform.  Soft conversation fills the enormously large hall, low and wide, a space big enough to play a major-league football game in.  Easily a hundred meters long, it's roughly fifty meters wide.  The real reason for the space, besides the growing number of older cadets, the assortment of visiting military personnel in a number of different uniforms, and the scattering of civilian adults (often with a cadet) are the clefts that run along the outsides of the space, wherein sit one wide monorail track each.

"LINE UP ALONG THE BACK WALL, CADETS" -- and the more perceptive of you will notice that more than a few of those teens, cadet-corporals and specialists both, have the knee-jerk reaction of taking a step or two towards the bare wall opposite the stairs before they stop themselves -- "AND SETTLE YOURSELVES DOWN.  LOOKS LIKE YOU DIDN'T MANAGE TO MAKE ME MISS MY G0DD@MN TRAIN.  THAT WAS ALMOST AN ACCEPTABLE JOB OF WALKING, JUST A FEW MORE WEEKS AND MAYBE YOU WON'T HAVE TO HOLD ON TO YOUR MOMMA'S APRON STRINGS TO DO IT ANY MORE!!"

"YOWLP!!"

"LISTEN TO THAT, CADETS, EVEN MISS PUSSYCAT THINKS YOU ALMOST GOT IT RIGHT!!"

"YOWLP!!"

The sound penetrates and echoes throughout the entire cavern.

Bill sets his locker down and sits upon it, taking off his cover and scratching the short bristles of his hair.

"Man, I would not want to see the inside of the locker that cat was shipped in..." he says to everyone and no one in particular.

"I would. Think it clawed or scuffed anything important?"

"Wonder if they Injected the cat too?"

Bill laughs. "You put a cat through that kind of pain, you can rest assured it will piss on everything you own, whenever it can, for as long as it lives."

He pauses a moment "Can animals even Thread?"

Imagine Hugh Jackman speaking, he has the most standard Australian Accent I can think of

Bruce also sits down on his locker, not noticing the conversation about the cat, he's kinda looking around in a bit of a daze.

Wow! this place is amazing, doesn't look like anyone else is using their powers, so I suppose we shouldn't show off

He kinda looks at everyone, like he's trying to divine information about them until he gives up

So what can we all do? I can teleport short distances say 10 metres

Bill shifts uncomfortably, unsure of what he is allowed to say. Besides: he doesn't know all that much about his abilities other than being a little faster and a little stronger.

That, and the flying, or course.

He takes a water bottle from his cargo pocket and drinks half of it in one go.

"Apparently, I have the power of super face-planting."

Jodie cranes her neck, trying to get a look at the cat. "How did anyone manage to bring a pet?" she says to the girl next to her (Dakota)." I hope its owner is a girl. It'd be awesome to have a pet in our barracks! I'm Jodie, by the way."

Ever since her emotional outburst it had felt to Dakota like more eyes were on her. In a way it made sense considering she was threaded now and pretty much guarunteed to be famous by adulthood, but it didn't just feel like that. It didn't help that the guards always seemed to pay a little more attention to her, and that she would occasionally spot one with a hand suspiciously close to their sidearm. Hopefully she was just being paranoid on account of her doubt, but if not she would just need to prove herself. Either way, maybe things would be different now that she was away from boot.

It would be a lie to say that Dakota wasn't excited to be heading to International. In part because they would probably have records she could (hopefully) access to find out what became of her brother, but also because this was the first thing she had really done herself. Sure, she was smart enough that she could have done something to get her name known before now, one of her teachers had even suggested she get her 'genius' certified (although she thought that might be pushing it a bit, she didn't think she was that smart.) In the end though she hadn't done much more than posting on a few tech forums and learning a few things by virtue of being a child of the web, so this was her first real accomplishment.

She wasn't the only one excited either, the air was positively electric. Conversations had cropped up between cadets all over, but the shrimp of a girl hadn't really expected anyone to actually want to talk to her, which is why she almost missed it when the girl next to her began speaking. After giving the other girl an appraising glance, Dakota replied. "More importantly did they bring it through boot with them?" She lets off an involuntary shudder at the thought of a cat tough enough to get through boot. "I'm Dakota, and I've never really had a pet, so I don't really know what it would be like. Moved around too much for one."

Mei spent most of the bus trip from New Joliet to Chicago observing the wreckage left in the wake of the Night of Fire. So many souls extinguished in such a short span of time. It makes one wonder why any of us are still alive. Humanity must have some part left to play in the Thunder's plans. She wondered if such sights and thoughts might trigger another nightmare like the one she experienced the night she Threaded. The bus lurched to a stop shaking Mei out of her reverie.

"PDF CADETS!! ON YOUR FEET, FRONT AND CENTER!! MOVE IT, MOVE IT, MOVE IT, YOU'RE HOLDIN' UP THE MARINES!! FIND YOUR FOOTLOCKER AND GET A MOVE ON, WE GOT A TRAIN TO CATCH AND NO MINCE-FOOTED PRINCESS IS GONNA MAKE ME MISS MY G0DD@MN TRAIN!!"

Mei snapped to her feet at the sergeant's command, her training taking over. She filed into place to exit the bus, nodding her appreciation to the Marines who wish her well on the way.

She was gathering up her footlocker when...

"YOWLP!!"

"WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING, CADET?? WHO THE THUNDERING HELL EVER TOLD YOU YOU COULD BRING YOUR PUSSYCAT TO THE ACADEMY??"

Mei focused on the task at hand as the sergeant berated the unseen Cadet with the cat. After getting her footlocker from the Cadet Corporal who unloaded it from the bus, she found her way into line and focused on keeping her load under control as she made her way down the many steps to the train platform far below.

Many cadets are talking about the Cadet with the cat on the way down, but Mei doesn't join their conjecture. At the bottom of the platform, she finds an appropriate spot and sets down her footlocker and stands at ease to wait for the train. As she waits, she gives consideration to the matter of the pussycat.

It must take significant clout to get a special exception like a having a pet at PDF International. The owner must be a scion of one of the old power dynasties that have influence with the PDF. I have to admire the courage of someone with that kind of background choosing the risk of undergoing Injection with the KS Serum and devoting themselves to the service of humanity. Every option available to a human being in this world lay before that cadet and this was the path they took. I hope I get to meet him or her... and the cat, of course.

Jackie... was adjusting. Then again, what kid could adjust to the violent hell and the unknown threat of the Threading? Maybe she was the most stable one.

No, that wasn't true. She was just the slowest to cope with this... the reality of the threading itself. Compared to that, the boot camp? Jackie grinned grimly. That was the dragon. A monster they, she, couldn't fight. The boot camp at least she could do... the threading, they could only wait.

Water didn't taste like victory. At first, she honestly wasn't sure what happened. But she heard the shouts, and reminded herself to stay still. Getting up, spitting water and stumbling about, it was not going to help her odds.

-------------------------------------------------------

Has she survived? Some of it. Halfway. Halfway to the beginning. Halfway to the REAL threat, the things out there. If any of this worked out. She wasn't going to run, taking the injection was pretty much that stubbornness to the tee.

Constant worry was becoming an old friend now. You just couldn't really care. You were waiting for the shoe to drop, at the same time you weren't. It was just another day. She eyed the outside, waiting. Waiting was good. Hunting was a game of patience... not that she hunted, she farmed. But she knew.

She inclines her head in a grateful nod at the PDF Marines as they get out...

And be greeted by cat. Jackie fought to stay, to avoid oggling the cat. She could do that. There was plenty of time to look at it later. Instead, she oggled the boxes, taking a bare moment to eye the footlocker before beginning to lift it. A touch slow, but she had it firm in hand, watching where she turned it and where they were going. She wanted to learn things the first time, not the second or third. There was time enough for mistakes now, barely any later.

Still, she couldn't help but look over the specialists. They were all so capable... yet things looked so bad. Why? She wanted to ask, but there were no words to ask. Honestly she wanted to know what was up with them more than the cat.

But not by much.

"I think they could if they would. How would you keep control of it though?" Animals, threading. She looked over to Dakota, and then Mei. Most of the talk was just on the periphery of her thoughts, but she had spoken anyway.

Jackie kept a hand on her locker, more out of habit than anything. "If you had a dog, maybe?" She directed her question half towards whoever was nearest, mostly towards Dakota.

The normally tired looking girl's demeanor shifted in an instant. A glint in her eye and an almost manic grin on her face. "If it's just control you could implant a microchip that overrides it's sensory input. They did it with roaches way back in the tens, could steer them remotely and everything..." She pauses to glance at the other girls before sheepishly continuing. "Err.. I think that might defeat the purpose of having a pet though... And might be a little unethical.."

Dakota practically collapsed in on herself at that point, just knowing that she had screwed up any chance of creating a lasting connection with these girls. Who really talks about lobotomizing animals right off the bat anyways? Apparently she did.

After letting the silence stew for a moment Dakota tried to recover her standing with a murmur. "I did have a virtual pet for a little while once. It ate browser cookies."

Bill laughed from a few feet away. "I had one of those! It was a cartoon dog, but then turned into a toothy monster when it ate the cookies!"

He stood up, stretching and cracking his knuckles over his head. He stands nearly six feet, with broad shoulders and large hands and feet that promise more growth, but with a softness in the eyes that betrays his youth.

"Ugh, that freaking bus ride. And now the train!" As he speaks, he squats down on his haunches and bounces before popping back up.

"Do you guys think there will be any tech training, or will it all be combat and conditioning? I don't like the idea of just being a superpowered meathead."

"We're supposed to be soldiers, aren't we? Why would they bother teaching us anything that doesn't make us better at it?"

Bruce stood up at Bills and Bas comments

"I hope there's some tech training mate, i'm a wiz at that sort of thing and as far as I can tell, we all move faster and have no boom abilities that i've seen, great for infiltration and thus use of tech skills."

Bill Looks from Bas to Bruce and back again. "There's more to being a soldier than just fighting, even when you have... whatever abilities we'll develop."

Dakota smiled softly when one of the boys popped up and drew the conversation away from her faux pas and especially when he mentioned her favourite word. Then one of the other boys had to go and ruin her mood by implying tech wasn't worth learning. She glared at Bas. "Of course we will be learning tech, any countries military has always had a higher level of technology than their civilian counterparts. They say necessity is the mother of invention after all, and what's more necessary than winning a war for survival?"

"We have eggheads for that. Engineers and scientists. They can make the gear, we can use it. I just don't see why we need to know anything more than maintaining and operating the tech."

"Well if we get good enough, we can make our own tech or maybe even use the tech of the enemy as we run across it."

Bill nods. "It'd be better to have the skills and nod need them than to need the skills and not have them, don't you think?"

Mei listens to the conversations going on around her but does not join in. She did notice with interest that one of the boys had a foreign accent to his speech. British or Australian...? she wondered. She'd not had enough exposure to such things to be able to tell the difference. She found his optimism charming, and her interest overcame her reticence.

She turns toward the blonde haired boy with the accent and opens her mouth to speak, then closes it momentarily, sheepishly hugging her arms across her torso under her breasts (which are surprisingly ample for her age). Then she manages to ask him, "umm, where are you from if you don't mind me asking?" She ducks her head down shyly and averts her eyes.

At Mei's question Bruce turns to her.

"Chicago area, but I was born in Australia and I grew up with my parents accents, so I have a bit of it myself. Where are you from?"

"I think they'll give us at least a bit of tech training" Jodie pipes up, giving Bas a sideways glance "I know I'd prefer to have someone who knows how things actually work with me in the field. I think that kind of knowledge would make anyone a better soldier! I mean, what happens if something gets damaged? Wouldn't it be good to have someone around who could fix it?"

"Exactly!" Bill said, gesturing at Jodie. "Who knows what gear we might need to use on missions, or what alien tech we might come up against?"

'Good god.' Jackie didn't want to think about Dakota's 'idea', not a bit of it. Taken aback, she watches more of this group of trainees filter in.

'And we are all 'trainees'...' She wondered how the others felt. Being able to lift large lockers like these, to be more capable than the others on the base. 'Don't fall for that trap, Marshall.' She reminded herself, stubbornly hammering at the thought. 'Reality's going to hit us, sooner or later. Don't forget that.'

But she might as well enjoy what moment they had. "I haven't heard anything about 'alien tech'... I thought we were pretty much 'it'."

Dakota glowered at Bas's latest statement and looked as if she was about to argue back till some of the other children spoke up with opinions similar to hers. The girl took a step away from the conversation to take a calming breath. she quickly decided she got way too worked up over a single cadet's opinion which was completely unacceptable (even if she thought it was for a good reason.) If she had been right before and she was being watched more closely than the other cadets then she would need to keep a lot closer leash on what she showed.

Corwin had remained silent for most of the transition from transports to the platforms here, except of course when called to respond by the Staff Sargent.

Standing at ease as if he was born to it, he and his footlocker were exactly evenly spaced between the two cadets to either side of him. His mannerisms suggested that he was actually comfortable here, as if he had been born to the military life.

He looked around at his environment, noting the cadets closest to him and listening to the conversations around him.

He quietly shook his head as he heard the other cadets attempting to determine why or how the one cadet had managed to get a feline allowed to accompany them during this process. The answer to him was obvious, since their superiors made sure to minimize or eliminate those things necessary to their training, it followed that some how the feline was necessary.

He listened a little longer and again quietly shook his head as their conversation drifted into a discussion about possibly receiving some kind of tech training. What Cadet Stein said made perfectly logical sense and had been the standing OP for most of the military history Corwin was familiar with.

Bas shrugs and says no more on he subject, but gives every outward sign the others' words had done absolutely nothing to change his mind.

The conversation having stalled, Bill sits on his locker, drumming his fingers on the lid absently.

"Chicago area, but I was born in Australia and I grew up with my parent's accents, so I have a bit of it myself. Where are you from?"

Mei looks at the boy when he responds, then replies, "I was born in Japan, but mostly grew up in Jacksonville Florida. You know...since Japan isn't there anymore. My Dad was a U.S. Marine so they got us out before the end."

"My name is Mei Cartwright."

Bill perks up. "My dad was a Marine too, but he got out fifteen years before the Thunder. Shrapnel in his back.". He chuckles. "The Hymn was a lullaby in our family."

"Dad signed up after the Thunder struck, but didn't make it far. Guess that makes me an Army brat, if only technically."

"Everyone here have military run in the family?"

"Yeah. My brother is. Not sure where he is at the moment so I need to keep an eye out. He could even be around here somewhere. Sometimes we don't hear from him for ages but its always great when we do. I hope I get to see him soon! I wonder what he'l say when he hears I threaded? He tried to hide it, but he was really worried. Ohh, and my name's Jodie. Jodie Price"

With quiet pride Corwin replies, "Cadet Talmadge here. You could say the military runs in my family as one or more of my familiy members have served with honor and distinction in every American military conflict since the Revolutionary War in 1775. In fact, many of my family continue to serve today in both the American armed forces and the PDF."

"Nope none of mine, i'm the first, dads a water well engineer and mums a veterinarian"

Since Japan wasn't there anymore... Jackie felt a pang nausea at the thought. I'm gonna be nicer to that girl. Leaning over, Jackie spoke lowly to Mei, offering a hand. Nice to meet you Mei. I'm Jackie.

After greetings with Mei, Jackie caught herself up on the conversation. She was still looking around, slowly finding a balance between watching and listening... and occasionally talking.

My Aunt serves. She's cool. Jackie was looking over at Corwin and Bill. I guess that's why they are so stiff. Are they going to be okay? Well, it wasn't Jackie's place to worry about that. This was what the PDF was for... and they watched the kids like hawks. Big hawks.

A vet? Cats, dogs? Horses? We're quiet a weird group, aren't we. Takes all sorts.

Leaning over, Jackie spoke slowly to Mei, offering a hand. Nice to meet you, Mei. I'm Jackie.

Mei took Jackie's hand and shook it vigorously, grateful that she stepped in to save her from embarrassment. She nodded wordlessly in thanks, with a slight smile.

While the cadets talk amongst themselves, "YOWLP!!" goes the cat, and its voice echoes through the space - "... owlp ...owlp ...owlp ..." Though a sergeant gets into the face of the girl with the cat at the first occurrence, the girl and the cat (and the sergeant, initially) keep it down to a dull roar.  The cat goes "YOWLP!!" only a couple more times, with the sound penetrating through the vast low cavern; each time it does, people look that way before returning to their conversation; fortunately, perhaps, the cat soon stops yowlping.

As you sit (or stand, as your preference happens to be) and watch those watching you, you can see the cadet corporals and cadet sergeants from the bus descending the stairs; seems that ONLY cadets use the stairs, but also that cadets ALWAYS use the stairs, perhaps? Six hundred steps, almost a hundred meters down, it'd make sense that the ... more normal people ... would take the elevators. But they, certainly, do not seem prohibited from using their powers; a good dozen of them fly down, while others are bounding from steps to steps, and still others race down on very fast feet. All of them move more quickly and more adeptly than any of you have yet managed to do. In addition, they are all each carrying at least four, and usually six or more, of the footlocker-cases latched together.

They organize themselves in a column in the center of the room; after a rapid survey and a nod from the cadet-sergeant further up the line, the closest of the junior-year cadet-sergeants moves, quickly but at a reduced, near-human speed, through the crowd and up to the Gunnery Sergeant in charge - who is, incidentally, walking slowly down the line of the seventy-odd new cadets at a dozen or so feet distance, eyeing each of you in turn. The noncom stops as the cadet-sergeant comes up to him, halts to attention, salutes, and states, "Cargo extraction complete, Gunny Hudson."

"Good. Who's your detail commander, Drake?" the Gunnery Sergeant asks, giving the later-year students in the center of the underground chamber a critical glance before looking back at the group he's in front of - the bunch of you.

"Cadet-Sergeant Ramirez, sir."

"My compliments to the Cadet-Sergeant, but his stacking's inefficient. Inform him that he's got by my count just over four minutes to get those cadet-corporals organized, and that the rest of you have explanatory duties - hop to it."

"Sir!!" Drake races back to his group of students at a slightly faster pace, and in under thirty seconds he and the rest of the cadet-sergeants, seven in all, are moving - or rather, Moving - back over to spread out and talk to you new cadets, about one per ten.

The one who approaches the nine of you is a lanky sandy-haired girl bearing a cadet-corporal badge - on a red-ringed tan patch, three green chevrons pointing up. "At ease," she says with a semi-Southern sort of accent, but gestures 'come in' to those of you who are furthest out. Going to one knee, she introduces herself. "I'm Cadet-Sergeant Sandra Costas. Welcome to PDF International. As new cadet-private-jigs, you guys need to know a few of the ground rules. First, unless you're authorized by a non-cadet noncom or warrant officer, you don't use any powers you have - flying, fast running, teleport, nothing. Second, this is a lot like boot - unless you're in quarters, you stick together - meals, classes, everything. One of you forgot something and has to go back to get it, everyone has to go back. Third, y'all are low-man on the totem pole, so a higher-ranked cadet orders you to do something, you do it - unless it violates one of the other orders. Lot of just-turned-cadet-privates and cadet-private-first-classes are going to try to get you to break the rules by ordering you to go do something on your own, or to use your powers to do it; that's why cadet-private senior-grades are nicknamed 'Heils' - you know, 'sieg heil'? - and cadet-private-first-classes are nicknamed 'Pissys'. Someone does that to you, you eyeball their name, then give them your best 'yes-drill-instructor-sir' salute and straight out inform them that Cadet-Sergeant Costas ordered you to tell them to suck Thunder slime, and you must respectfully decline following their order as it violates a standing general order for your rank." She smirks in satisfaction at that idea.

"Okay, so we got about three minutes 'fore the monoshot shows up. It stops, everyone else gets on, then we all march down and around and line up next to it. Order comes, you step inside, make room, and get yourself secure; there're docking clamps for your lockers on the inside walls, next to the floor. Any questions?"

"How long is the trip, Cadet-Sergeant?"