Discovering Humanity

Today, on the 22nd of March YC 116, marks the one year anniversary of the Battle for Caldari Prime, it marked a historic time in New Eden where the Gallente and Caldari signed a peace treaty over Caldari Prime. To honor the ones who fought there, both in stars and on the ground, and the ones who lost their lives during the conflict, an event has been set up which has already started. Sadly I will be unable to participate, but I will honor the day in my own way, by describing my own experiences of it. As the blog title explains, my story is mostly about discovering myself.

As you may remember from my previous entry, the first few months of my career as a clone soldier were quite hectic and careless. I burnt through bodies faster than I could count, and I was laughing maniacally throughout it all, thinking I was truly immortal. Tibus Heth's attack on our enclaves knocked some sense to me, but I was still not really taking my whole career as seriously as I feel I should have.

Back then I was also fiercely loyal to the Gallente, and when the call to fight on the ground came, I instantly supported the Gallente. Sometimes I even joined the Caldari side to deliberately sabotage their efforts and drain their clone counts(I doubt I was the only one, but despite all this they still managed to emerge victorious on the ground, all the credit to them). I'll describe a certain contract I was deploying on the Caldari side for:

It was just like any other sabotage deployment I did for the Gallente. Spawn at the MCC, get some locus grenades and cook them until I disintegrated, I didn't even care what part of Caldari Prime I was deployed on, I was only ever going to be at the MCC. It was kind of humorous to me in a way, when I saw the other mercenaries looking at me funny as I exploded before they just kept moving, leaving me to my sabotaging.

As I stood there with a grenade ticking away in my hand, I had my thoughts wander off slightly. I don't remember what I was thinking exactly, but it went along the lines of:

"Heh, this will show those Caldari bastards their place! The stupid facist pigs deserve what they got for attacking our land. Why are they attacking anyway? Why is Caldari Prime part of Federation territory? What started this entire conflict?"

I kept going down that train of though, until the point where I just stopped killing myself. I jumped down from the MCC and hung around our base, watching the others fight and thinking why they were doing it. I glanced up at the sky,  the wreck of the CN Shiigeru was crashing down into the ground as a massive ball of fire. I could see massive explosions and massive hulks being torn into pieces through the cracks in the cloudy sky.

Right as the battles was going to be finished, the wreck made contact with the planet, sending massive shockwaves kilometers from the impact point and causing massive amounts of damage. Our clones were cut off before we could feel or observe all the effects of the crash, and by the time I got into the next contract the dust had already settled, with the wreck of the Shiigeru burning in the horizon. The civilian casualties caused by the crash were countless.

This sight was quite shaking when you first saw it.

After that contract, I spent the next few hours on my Neocom, browsing through various articles about the Caldari and Gallente history, what started their hostilities and war, and information about the reasons of this current conflict. What I discovered, shook me quite a bit. Looking back at my fierce loyalty to the Gallente, I felt kind of embarrassed, I was so ignorant of what was actually happening behind the conflict.

Throughout the rest of the conflict, I stopped picking sides. I just went for whichever side the contract system would put me in, and do my best on that side. When the firing ceased and Caldari emerged victorious of the ground battle, I went upon the mercenary message boards as usual. There was a thread about Caldari Prime made by a Gallente loyalist, congratulating other Gallente for successfully beating the fascists.

I promptly began writing how the entire conflict was foolish, for both Gallente and the Caldari, and I spent the next few hours debating about it on that thread. For once, I cared about the humanitarian aspect of the conflict, about the lives lost, about the senseless hatred between both sides, the endless amounts of ignorance both sides showed towards the other. Throughout the next few months, I started to be more aware of the state my homeworld Intaki was in, which eventually led me to this moment, as part of the Intaki Liberation Front.

The Battle for Caldari Prime was a long and painful conflict for both sides, with many unnecessary lives lost and massive damage done to the planet's atmosphere, but in the end a truce was made, which made peaceful relations between Caldari and Gallente possible after centuries of hatred and distrust. While cooperation is most likely something that will never realistically happen due to how distinctly different both empires are in politics and culture, peaceful coexistence is something that I would be looking forward to.

To those who were there on the ground and in the stars during the battle, both military and civilian, I wish you the best of luck. I truly hope coexistence can happen on the planet.

ཟར༴ཐ٦ཡཐ༴ འཤན༴བ བ༴ཏ༴མ༴ར٦ ٦ནད༴བ٦ ༴འ٦٦ད ན٦བ༴༴ٲ

Beginnings

From the start of my blog to this point, I have focused on factual, essay-like writings analyzing the various different aspects of the life of a mercenary like me. However, I have kind of ran out of things to analyze for now, so after a suggestion from a friend, I have decided to switch to more personal entries, detailing my history as a mercenary. What better way there is to start this than to talk about my first weeks and months as a clone?

The first day I was officially a clone soldier was in December 1st YC 114, as a generation two clone. The weeks and months before that were spent training me to handle the mental strain of the implants installed on me. Like many other clone soldiers, I was confused and shoved roughly into the world of endless dying and war to figure things out by myself. Like many others, the first few contracts I did involved nothing but constant dying and discomfort. I already had training to cope with death and rapid transfers of clones, but no training could really prepare me for the real battle, and it was painful. I tried to utilize my previous experience as a sniper and marksman with the use of sniper rifles, but the device was so alien to me I had no clue how to operate it.

Fortunately I found a few people to help get me started,o ne of these mercenaries being Lorilai Libertas, a scout. He was ultimately my influence into focusing in Gallente scout suits, and he helped me decide what to use with the suit, but he did stress however that you can only get good with experience, which meant dying a lot still.

What happened the next following months are unclear in my memory, but reading the few records that were of me during that time, I seemed to have just, lost it. There was a story of me written in a fairly humorous format about me dodging my way towards a sniper, then jumping right on his face and blasting him full of shotgun pellets, and some, obscene things to the dead body. I also had several cases where I talked to enemy soldiers even though they could never hear me, just for the fun of it and a few cheap laughs from my squad mates.

The first three or so months I didn't at all about my deaths, talked to enemy soldiers even though they could never hear me and generally treating my career as a game, nothing real with no regard to the actual impact my actions had. However this started to change when a series of events happened, which were later collectively dubbed as The Uprising.

Before the Uprising, clone soldiers were still a small and relatively unknown force. After the Uprising however, we started gaining cluster-wide recognition, being involved in empire politics and being key to throw Tibus Heth out of power. It all started with the Templis Dragonaurs attack on Autama IV, Tibus Heth was targeting clone enclaves in an effort to wipe out the clone soldiers. Mordu's Legion came in to stop this, and contracts were opened for both sides of the conflict for us to join.

That was really the point when I started to really think about my life as a clone soldier, and what would happen if Tibus Heth succeeded in his goal. So with a still lighthearted mind and a huge load of locus grenades, I deployed into battle for the Templis Dragonaur side, and began killing myself in order to ensure they would lose. This was so widespread within the mercenary community that there were even competitions on who could kill themselves the most while fighting for the Dragonaurs. A few days later, the Dragonaurs retreated and Mordu's Legion extracted personnel from Autama IV, job well done.

Many more events where clone soldiers were significantly involved also happened afterwards, for instance the historic first gathering of the Tribal Council and damaging Intaki atmosphere in the Imperfects-run orbital strike tournament, and these all made me consider more and more about what my actions meant for the cluster at wide. This series of events eventually peaked at the Battle for Caldari Prime, which will have its one year anniversary coming next Saturday on 22nd of March.

What happened to me after the battle, I will discuss on the next entry. I hope you enjoyed this, and be sure to watch for another entry on the 22nd.

ཟར༴ཐ٦ཡཐ༴ འཤན༴བ བ༴ཏ༴མ༴ར٦ ٦ནད༴བ٦ ༴འ٦٦ད ན٦བ༴༴ٲ  

Silence

Been nearly a month from my latest entry, woah. I really apologize for the sudden silence and dropping off the radar, the mercenary front has been quiet and I've had a severe lack of ideas and inspiration to write anything. There has been some rumors about new equipment and weaponry being released in the upcoming weeks, which I will be following and hopefully can make an entry out of. The rumored cloaking device seems like something I can use as material for an entry.

I'll try to always have at least one entry out each month from now on, depending how much material I have to work on and how active the mercenary front is. Other than that, feel free to read my older entries in the meanwhile.

ཟར༴ཐ٦ཡཐ༴ འཤན༴བ བ༴ཏ༴མ༴ར٦ ٦ནད༴བ٦ ༴འ٦٦ད ན٦བ༴༴ٲ