Campaign:Camlann/α-A

“…a!”

It was weird. The feeling of …well not feeling anything at all if that in itself made any sense. It was though his mind was just a quiet little observer witnessing a play with no actors or a stage. Just a story…nothing else.
There was just darkness and a single voice calling out to him from the beyond. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t feel but he most certainly could hear. It was the only sense still under his control. He wanted to breath. He wanted to take air into his body. Remind himself that he was alive through the most basic of needs. He couldn’t though, try as he might he couldn’t gasp or gulp down anything.

“…sha!”

He focused on one other thing he could hear, a heartbeat, tried to soothe his fear of the unknown by listening to that one significant sign of life. He reached out with his mind to try and feel, to taste, to see. Yet all he got back was his entire body screaming at him to breath, something in his throat, something there.

“VASHA!”

He dug deep, drawing energy from the primal force that is life, the sound of that heartbeat resounding in his head. He tried to roar, roar out to the unknown that he still lived. Instead of a defiant roar however passing by his lips a gurgled cough escaped his lungs. Senses returned to his mind with a jolt, along with the taste of a salty solution in his mouth and the feeling of a viscous liquid running down his cheeks. Then came the near crippling feeling of pain tearing through the entirety of his body.

Episode α-A
"Who We Were"

“That’s it buddy! Breath! Come on!”

It felt as though a hundreds drums were tapping away gently in his mind, individually soothing but with so many in such a random choir of calamity it ripped though his mind. The cold damp air that could be felt on his face was almost comforting if it wasn’t for this damn pain and this freezing hard floor he was laying upon. His eyes flickered open, find something else to focus on, find wherever that voice was coming from.
There was an obscured figure, kneeling over him, hands pressed against his own torso. Vision blurred, unsteady, he couldn’t focus, it was dark, almost pitch black but as long as he could make out the outline he could use it as an anchor. An anchor to remember everything.
An involuntary response in the back of his mind kicks in, unclear vision switches to that of abnormal Nazzadi night vision. The world of pitch black suddenly becomes a painting of whites and various tones of grays and everything falls back into focus. It’s night or at least it seems it down here in what could be made out as an enclosed space of rounded walls and ceiling. Were they in some sort of tunnel?
The figure huddled over him removes it’s hands from his torso and begins to hurriedly check through a number of pouches that made up a sort of belt on it’s person. They were heavily kitted out, head to toe in heavy form fitting armored plating, some sort of full body suit military grade armor, unmarked by any official markings. However a helmet was entirely obscuring the figure’s face. Though as he stared at him the memories began to flood back as a single word pops into his head, ‘Torsha’.

“I-I’m good Torsha, just needed a moment.”

He manages to mouth off in-between his heavy labored breathing, reaching out for his friend’s shoulder, squeezing it tightly in a form of thanks. Eventually the heavily armored Nazzadi trooper removes something from one of his pouches. The injured man recognized it as a quick injector, loaded with high strength painkillers.

“Stop it with the bravado, Vasha,”

Torsha replies in Nazzadi tongue as he places the injector up against the side of the injured man’s neck injecting the stuff into his buddy’s body. It acts quickly and suppresses the pain in Vasha’s body to a point where it’s as though it was never there at all, though the dulled and now sombre senses are a reminder of it’s former residence.

“You almost died out there-“

“He did die out there.”

Another voice interrupts Tosh’s, this time a disembodied female voice with the same distinct Nazzadi accent to it. It came from seemingly nowhere but the audible radio static mixed in with the short sentence was a clear sign of it’s origin, the little communication micro bead placed into his left ear.

“We lost vitals for a minuet or two.”

The voice continued. The voice of operations command, a communication officer assigned to ensuring the flow of correct information reached him and any important relation from them was relayed back to command.

“You should see how often I loose the keys to my ride,”

Vasha replies back in Nazzadi, a wry smirk on his lips.

“Sit-rep?”

Torsha set about tending to the wounds of his buddy as the female communications officer started to run down a list of what was going on and what had just happened.

“Cleansing operation is going as expected. Surface cleansing proceeding as planned but during seismic scans of the settlement we located several underground tunnels we weren’t informed of. Too small for power armor. Seemed ideal for loyalists to entrench in to avoid the operation. You two volunteered to go in via boots on the ground to smoke them out-"

“But then one of those dogs tried and take us both out with a suicide grenade.”

Torsha interrupted in a pissed off tone of voice as he set about patching up Vasha’s armor with material cut into segments that seemed to go from soft and malleable to incredibly hard in a near instant.

“Always happy to see us.”

Vash remarked.

“As I was saying. The resulting explosion of the ‘surrendering’ loyalist resulted in the tunnel structure you were in collapsing. The floor way just collapsed beneath your feet as you were caught in the explosion. You fell down into a second tunnel network about forty feet down from street level. We lost your vitals, Torsha went crazy and jumped down into the second network feet first. The rest of the team are still on the surface.”

“I wasn’t going to leave him for dead. We’ve gotten through shit loads worse.”

Torsha adds as he finishes up what he was doing. The formerly dead Nazzadi’s armor was fully patched up, anywhere where shrapnel had pierced was now covered over with temporarily hardened patches and it felt as though his entire chest was bandaged together rather tightly.

“I owe you one, buddy.”

Vasha expressed as he nodded to his savior. He stretched out his muscles to learn his current limitations in his battered body keeping in mind the painkillers would suppress any pain he would feel thus limit his ability to asses what damage was caused.

“Easy now, Vasha, I’m no field surgeon.”

Torsha helped him back onto his feet by cradling an arm over his shoulders. Careful not to upset the pride of his buddy, Torsha eventually lets go and gives him a few moments to find his footing and stand via his own strength.

“You’ll do in a pinch,”

Vasha responded, checking out the state of the rest of his equipment. His side arm was fine, a standard issue UT-7 Hornet, a small, lightweight, compact low caliber pistol. Perfect for anyone cramped up in a tight power armor mecha unit. As he checked all over however he did find his primary personal defense weapon, a light carbine assault rifle was utterly totaled, several pieces of shrapnel embedded into the actual side of the weapon.

“You’re one lucky bastard. That thing was in between your heart and the blast. Don’t think I could of have saved you if shrapnel pierced your ticker.”

His squad mate quipped, seemingly to punctuate the fact that he was pretty much on Death’s door just moments ago and debatabley still was.

“Control, please advise on next objective,”

He pulled back on the safety of his side arm readying it for combat as he tried to see if there was anything left he could possibly salvage.

“We still have some blood-traitors to tend to.”

There was a few uneasy moments of silence as nothing came in for a moment, the sound of Torsha pulling back on the safety of his own weapon, a small submachine gun, being the only other sound in the tunnel. The scope on the useless assault rifle was still intact, barely scratched by the suicide attack. Vash removed it from the rails on the weapon before the female communication’s officer chimed in.

“I’d recommend trying to get back to the surface. We’re reading several life signals other than your own in this new tunnel section-“

“You sure you don’t want us to tend to the rats, control?”

Vasha questioned, even in his current state he wouldn’t of minded search and destroy orders as long as loyalists were concerned.

“Major Sereda’s planning on venting the tunnels with SG-11 nerve gas. Too much trouble hunting loyalists in the maze of structures down there so we’re switching over to the easy opti-“

The comms officer’s voice simply stops. Instead it sounded as if there was an exchange of words going on in the far off background of the communication’s line. It was only for a few short seconds before her voice returned back to the airwaves.

“Team 4 just deployed your armor units to a building nearby the surface exit of this new tunnel section. Old abandoned warehouse in the settlement ruins, you’ll see it when you get out. Good idea to head there and re-suit up. SG-11 is being dispatched to the combat zone now. I’d recommend putting on your environmental helmets on if you don’t want to die…again.”

“Once is quite enough for me, Control. Roger and out.”

Vasha smirked as he picked his fully enclosed helmet up off the floor. He wagged the recovered scope at his friend before placing it into an upper pocket on his equipment webbing.

“Told you it was lucky.”

Then he placed his helmet over his head fully securing the controlled environment in his armor. A number of electronic almost holographic heads up displays appeared on the inside of his helmet visor barraging him with information, which way was north, how deep down they were, communication signal strength, the list went on.

“Lucky? Sure, as long as we’re not talking about your marksmanship,”

Torsha laughed over the local comms channel established between the two.

“But damn, the Major’s really sucking all the fun out of this. Those loyalist dogs better die like the animals they are.”

The unscathed Nazzadi patted Vasha on the shoulder as he walked past him intending on taking point for his injured buddy, checking the way ahead with his submachine gun.

“You sure you can move alright? I was going to carry your lazy corpse out of here if I had to.”

“My hero,”

Was Vasha’s reply with a voice richly coated in sarcasm.

“One way or the other the dogs are going to be put down. We better get back to our units, make sure none of the dogs slip though somewhere. I trust control, but I trust a power suit’s rifle just a little bit more.”

Vasha looked upwards as he started to back-pedal a few steps, definitely far too high to even think about climbing back up with the right equipment or not. He turns around and files in behind his buddy. With a bit more luck this tunnel section shouldn’t be very far from the exit.

The two Nazzadi troopers spent the next five minuets or so traversing the winding concrete tunnels following the direction of the female communications officer. The seismic scans of the area seemed to be accurate and none of the directions were incorrect in anyway, in fact they were precise to the yard. The tunnels themselves were…well…rather plain. They were gray concrete all over, no unique little markings, no awesome little oddly placed pipes just all rather boring and uniform with dimly light electric lights every 50 or so paces barely lighting the way. Staying on edge was difficult in such scenery fortunately the voices of his fellow Nazzadi soldiers over the comms channels clearing up the surface, reporting in kill counts and going through lists of areas that had been ‘cleansed’ were providing a form of morbid entertainment. Loyalist dogs were dying in droves. Oh well. Their fault for picking the wrong side.

“Caution.”

The female back at headquarters threw out a warning their way.