002 | [video]

[inwhichwar]

[The feed is staticky and has an annoying old-TV-on-the-fritz roll going on. Maria's sitting on a folded-up blanket with her back to the catacomb wall, bad leg stretched out in front of her. Not the best furniture in the world, but displaced persons can't be choosers.

She's also managed to scrounge up a tiny petroleum campstove and a very battered tin pot, in which she's currently making tea. The sky may be falling in a screwed-up, filthy future that none of them can escape, but THERE WILL BE TEA, DAMN IT. Her expression is meditative.]

In the world I come from there was once a war which wasn't a war. Two great powers running roughshod over little countries to prove how big they were to one another.

[There's a burst of audio static that drowns her out, although she keeps talking while she pulls the tea off the flame and cuts the gas.]

. . . never seemed to me that either one of them cared that much for what became of the little people they were using for their pawns.

I do not consider that the Initiative or the United Earth are any different in that regard. It is not so much that we are caught between good guys and bad guys. Only between two great powers who see us as means to their own respective ends.

[She gazes calmly down at her tea, her body language and her placid delivery very much at odds with how pissed she actually is. She takes it personally when people drop bombs on her, okay?]

Nevertheless. I cannot speak for anyone else. But I intend to find my own best way to show the more brutish of the two great powers just what a very bad decision they made when they decided to fuck with me.

Comments

[Video - Private]

[feel_nevermore]

[Raven likes you already, lady. Which is definitely not something that happens often. But she likes the way you talk. And you like tea.]

I agree with that. Although you should probably avoid saying that on a public feed.

...Granted they've just bombed us, but there's always room for worse.

voice

[kneecaptain]

Yeah, but how d'you figure which— [static burst] brutish?

I've been bombed before. The kidnapping is new.

[boughtabookstore]

Suitably emphatic.

Are you from Earth or somewhere else?

audio

[ofthegrey]

If you can forgive a newcomer his ig-

[There's a long burst of static with only a few syllables interspersed.

-circ-

-do you-

-do?

It's a bit difficult to take action from underground, is it not?

[voice/anonymous]

[loyalism]

[On top of the static, this voice has been further distorted to disguise it. There is no name attached.]

That's all war ever is.

[Power struggles and the pawns that get caught up in them. No such thing as "good" and "bad", or enemies in absolute terms...]

[video]

[peaceinchaos]

Individuals of power running roughshod over everyone else seems to be the basis of most conflict.