The Ultimate Weapon: Refrain

A Demonstration and Plan

9 Nevator 3:359 AF, 1835

Commander Isaac Anderson read over his reports from the upper brass as he sat at the comm. Top secret documents from the cabinet members sat heavily on his lap. His new orders were to take in the rough-around-the-edges mercenaries and turn them into an elite fighting unit. While he wasn't privy to all the details of his fledglings, he thought it better than sitting in some classroom like he had done for the past four years with starry-eyed recruits and soldiers staring at him.

The whole idea had always made him uncomfortable, but now that he was in the field - something that he felt better suited to - he found his hands full trying to consume the copious amounts of information he had been flooded with since the insurgency started. At first, he thought it was a test of the new group, something to prove to the to his bosses that they were capable of joining the ranks of the elite soldiers and magi that were housed in the Citadel. He'd spent most of his own life there and seeing its awe-inspiring spires in shambles was something he thought would never happen.

He had the recruits files laid in front of him as he looked at their profiles and sighed. It wasn't just a ragtag group. These were kids that were barely old enough to buy a drink at the flight lounge, let alone be combat ready. Regardless, the General and the Consortium all agreed with Professor Sera Suresh that this would be a good time to see how the "kids" worked in a real world combat setting. From what he had gleaned from the reports, the only fighting they had ever done was in simulations and small skirmishes against marauder bands that would attack small villages that were in county islands.

Commander Anderson couldn't complain much about the morality of children on the field. He used to be apart of the elite guard that did covert ops when he was in his mid-teens. However, that was a lifetime ago for him. After the events of Thorin Fields, he became the youngest commander of the fighting force.

"Hey asshole!" Shot through his ear piece. He winced at the gratuitous profanity and flipped the switch his comm pad off and tossed the headset on the tabletop. That would be first thing he worked on. It wasn't how a subordinate was to speak to their commanding officer. If they were all like that then it would be an uphill battle for him, but he liked the challenge.

His hands rested on another file before he flipped it open. A small-framed girl with white hair looked back at him from behind a pair of dark sunglasses. She wasn't smiling nor were any of them for that matter. They all had this distant stare that was unsettling. Huge swathes of information had been blacked out. Pages were removed. The entire file could have filled both sides of a pamphlet.

"You shouldn't let it bother you," a woman said as she came up to the desk with a cigarette squeezed between her fingers. "That's just how Jamison is." She let out a sigh and glanced down at him over the rims of her coke-bottle glasses and placed the cigarette to her lips as if she was deep in thought. "Let me correct myself, they are all like that, except, maybe, Lisa and Six isn't necessarily that way, but she's more of a proxy for Daniel, so it's difficult to tell who is the one speaking."

"That's fine, Professor. I'm sure we can work through these little eccentricities in short order," Isaac replied as he continued to look down the profile of the girl named Six. He felt it was a complete waste of time looking at boxes of nothing. The girl was a stranger; he'd figure her out when they met. He looked up at the Professor and furrowed his brow. "If you don't mind my asking, my Lady, why is it that you picked me to lead your kids?"