Fighting Land: Costa Luna

Criminals

Fighting Land: Costa Luna
Chapter One: Criminals

Isla de los Penitentes Royal Penitentiary
Isla de los Penitentes, Santa Corazon, Costa Luna
18 September 2012
1620 Costa Luna time

Isla de los Penitentes was a small, unimportant rock-and-coral island just three miles away from the land surrounding Santa Corazon Bay. When it was first sighted by Spanish explorers in the 1560s, they didn't even bother claiming it for Spain before heading for the more promising interior of Costa Luna Island. It didn't even have a name until the late 19th century, when Queen Anna ordered a catalog of all the territories of the Kingdom of Costa Luna. Later on, her successor, King Juan X, ordered the construction of a new prison on the island to house the kingdom's growing number of criminals and delinquents. The island, now named Isla de los Penitentes, became a place for criminals to contemplate and repent for their sins; that is, become penitent.

Isla de los Penitentes Royal Penitentiary was modeled after infamous Alcatraz in the United States, and had housed its fair share of famous—and infamous—inmates like Juarez Perez Xicarramba, the so-called "Costa Lunan Jack the Ripper," who mutilated seven prostitutes in Santa Corazon before being captured by the police; the gangster Alberto Alcaraz Soreza, who smuggled alcohol-laced beverages into Prohibitionist America before being injured and captured after a shootout with rival gangs; and Communist spies Tomas and Ariana Testigo, who were imprisoned on the island before being hanged for treason.

More recent inmates included Martin Robles Ursino, whose method of murdering his sixteen victims was so much like the infamous Zodiac killer that many people suspected that he was the Zodiac killer; Jacinto Selucio de Dios, the infamous Rojas Boulevard Sniper that killed four people including a cop during his rampage of terror; and the four leaders of the Youth Revolutionaries.

There was also one inmate of the penitentiary that deserved a special mention. The atrocities he committed throughout his reign of terror made the ethnic killings in the former Yugoslavia look like ordinary killings. He was responsible for the deaths of at least 25,000 ethnic Costa Lunans in his native Costa Estrella. He approved of the executions of prisoners-of-war taken during the Costa Luna-Costa Estrella War of 1984, in direct violation of numerous international laws and treaties, chief among them the Geneva Convention. He was also the architect of the devastating Costa Luna Civil War, which claimed at least 10,000 lives on both sides of the conflict. Because of the magnitude of his crimes, he was sentenced to 35,000 years behind bars by the Royal Supreme Court; one year for every life lost by his hand.

Inside the penitentiary, he was just Prisoner 116727. In his file at the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology, he was listed as Juan Marcos Domingo Estrada y Dragovich. But to the rest of the world, he was General Magnus Kane.

Kane's cell was at the far end of the solitary confinement row. Only a single guard was assigned to him, and he was rarely allowed out of his cell, if at all. In the rare instances that he was allowed out, his guard was on him at all times, and he was not allowed to talk with any of the other inmates. He was allowed visitors, but the only ones that visited him were his mother, Elena Dragovich de Estrada, and his daughter, Juana Maria Cristina Estrada.

It was just another day at Isla de los Penitentes. Kane woke up at exactly nine in the morning, as he had been doing his whole adult life. He did some stretching exercises, and then he took the tray of food sitting on his cell door. It consisted of a single chicken drumstick, a cup of rice, and a glass of what tasted like a mix of water and cola. At least the food is getting better, he thought as he ate his food with his hands, preferring them over the utensils provided.

When he was finished eating, he placed the tray back on its place on the door, where the guard took it away through a cat flap. As Kane sat back down on his bed, he heard a sharp rapping on his door.