solas_ion | ☘ 062; [video]

☘ 062; [video]

Hey. You.

[Leaning his head on one hand with a bored look on his face, Lancer pointed lazily at the Pokegear's camera with the other.]

Yeah, you. If you're listening to this, I wanna hear about what kinda legends and stories your world has. I'm bored out of my damn mind and could use somethin' interesting to talk about.

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...Do unpleasant history lessons count as legend and stories, if they're old enough? Or would that just worsen your boredom?

Sometimes that's exactly what legends are. You feel like tellin' me, I'll listen.

Well, then.

[He clears his throat exaggeratedly, like some sort of old professor.]

A long, long time ago, by which I mean about two hundred years ago, the Earth was becoming too polluted and running out of natural resources. People both on the planet and in the colonies were suffering, for the first time since the Colony Wars. The Earth Federation had to do something, anything, to reduce the burden humanity caused, or else billions would have died.

So, of course, they decided to colonize Mars.

...What, so they just...

[he has a little trouble grasping space travel, okay.]

How far off is that?

Anywhere between 55 and 400 million kilometres away from Earth, depending on the time of the year. Getting there still takes weeks at best, and that's with two hundred years of technological advances.

...Okay, sure. Sounds like a plan.

[It didn't, but he'd play along.]

So what happened then?

The usual. They built colonies, built ships, sent millions of people there to settle and get some industries started, prepare the initial supply lines... And they realized that they'd completely forgotten to take the differences between the Earth's and Mars' magnetic fields into account.

Turns out there are diseases out there that can kill a fifth of a population in less than a decade, if said population is not adequately protected from the elements. Who knew?

Damn. They really didn't plan too well for that one, huh?

Not one bit. But at least they learned from their mistake: they publicly apologized to everyone who had been moved, they paid all the expenses necessary to bring them back home, and they set up a fund to pay for all their medical bills in perpetuity.

...Or maybe they just decided to pretend it had never happened, erased all traces of the Mars' Birthday plan, and acted as though everyone still stuck there had just disappeared somehow. Doesn't that sound more like regular government policies to you?

Wouldn't know, honestly.

[is a government something you eat]

But the second one sounds a hell of a lot more likely.

Edited 2016-03-20 01:46 (UTC)

Likely enough to have actually happened, at any rate. Thus life continued on in the Earth Sphere, with the population growing to replace its missing numbers and colonies getting built to accommodate them. The world was untouched by war, free to develop its arts and peaceful technologies for decades.

Until the year A.G. 101 came, and the Angel was destroyed by an Unknown Enemy within hours, without a single warning.

Yeah, that ain't ominous at all. Somebody left on Mars get really pissed off and come back looking to kick the shit out of somebody?

[Because, you know. he's pretty sure that's warranted.]

Hey, no spoiling the story before you've even heard it.

[Anytime after is fair game, though.]

Angel's destruction was only the beginning. The UE spent the next fourteen years destroying any colony that struck their fancy and capturing any vessel they met. They were unstoppable; their technology was beyond anything the Earth Federation Forces could create, and their tactics were flawless. Whatever fight they started, they won.

Until they decided to attack Nora.

Nora's another colony, I'm guessing. Where was that one, parked somewhere in the vicinity of the sun?

No, it was just as close to the earth as the others. What it had, though, was a survivor from Ovan. The genius heir to an great family of talented engineers, who possessed heirlooms filled with ancient forbidden blueprints that the military intended to use to turn the tide of the war. He'd been working with them to build superior weapons for years.

...The kid was fourteen, by the way.

...Holy shit. I pulled some crazy shit myself at fourteen, but I'm thinkin' this is way past that. Don't tell me, he hopped in a tank or somethin' and took on the other guy himself?

[...it's what he'd do.]

It was a mobile suit, actually. His mobile suit, the only he'd spent years developping. Piloting it, he managed what humanity believed impossible: he took down one of the UE. Pretty much by himself.

Sounds like a tough kid, to say the least. That's pretty damn impressive.

That it was. Impressive enough that the rest of the UE present freaked out, incinerated the remains of their fallen ally, and immediately exited the colony to begin destroying it from outside.

They managed to evacuate the civilians before it exploded, but it was a close thing.

And after all that, they couldn't even find out what was trying to kill them? Damn, that's annoying.

The most popular theory at the time was aliens. Which isn't all that farfetched, considering the information available to the public at the time and even now. If the world's leaders knew more, they kept their mouths shut.

Guess when you're tryin' to move everybody to another planet, the idea that you might've pissed off aliens ain't that weird.

[It's a little weird.]

Even weirdness wouldn't have stopped a good alien conspiracy theory. If anything, it would have been a bonus.

[Many where quite disappointed when the truth was revealed, he knows.]

Besides, in their defense, up until then the survival rate during attacks had been extremely low.

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