Writer's War

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Genkora

Frog blast the vent core!
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This time we shall pour our hearts into it; beware, for the war is not over!

edit - perhaps the next poll should be posted into a board with more views? Not that it would make much sense to put it in general discussion or something, but I think we need more than 5 voters :rolleyes:
 

Monsterous

In the Shadows, Lurking.
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We could corrupt them and bribe them you fool!
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...
Oh damn, i typed the thought part out and thought the loud part.
 

Miz

Administrator
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edit - perhaps the next poll should be posted into a board with more views? Not that it would make much sense to put it in general discussion or something, but I think we need more than 5 voters :rolleyes:

I will see if that will work out. Yes it would be far better if we had more than 5 voters especially now that we have 3 teams.

Which actually does help all of you. Hope you enjoy the challenge, this one I expect a lot of good ideas from you guys so don't disappoint :p
 

Miz

Administrator
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Just to end all confusion, I have to update the Icons for the Battles, (Like the missile, etc.) For they represent more towards point-wise and what happens in the battle then an actual genre/type of challenge (Poetry etc.)

So please do not write a poem, write an autobiography like it says. :eek:
 

Miz

Administrator
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Well I am actually kind of depressed and a tad bit annoyed, I know all of you have had your reasons and all of them, for the most part, are acceptable reasons. I realize that many of you have other lives to deal with, same do I and I also feel that this tournament is going against my own morals.

I do not wish to force people write, this tournament was for people to challenge themselves to new things and make them want to write more and create activity for the forum itself. However, it didn't seem to work out as planned. While I have received a submission from Genkora, he has mentioned how inactive his team is. Which I also see as against my original reasons, the Teams were suppose to help people not just ignore the person writing it all out.

So I post today, closing the Tournament, I plan to give some sort of reward to all of you who participate, it won't be much but a few reputation points is always a lasting reward ;).

I hope to one day to continue this, it was more likely my fault for starting it at the wrong time, instead of the summer. I went for the fall, foolish mistake not realizing that many, like me, have lives...

Genkora's submission will be in the spoiler tags below and for those who wish to continue doing something like this but is less demanding, you can always do Writer's World, or I can make some kind of altered Roleplay which resembles the Writer's War Status...

Thank you to all who participated.

Genkora's Submission (The Freelancer Federation)
My name is Jordan Leonard Strauss, first name after the war hero, last name is my father's, middle name after, well, my mother just liked the way it rang with the rest of it. What's there to say really? I come from a family just like any other, one which looked up the strength and wisdom of the government. I never excelled in school, I never had any exceptional talents or anything. You could say I was destined to be a soldier.

I grew up near the border, my family moved near the capital when the two sides became hostile. I had a girlfriend, well, I was eight years old so maybe I didn't think of her that way then (I put frogs in her shirt), but when I think back on it now I want to say we were an item. She lived on the other side of the border, and things were fine until the government started their propaganda. I began to think maybe she wasn't so great after all; the government had a way with words you see. After I graduated high school I moved to the capital, which is where I learned to hate the other side. It turns out the only reason we weren't all dead already is because of the valiant efforts of the soldiers on the front lines. Imagine it, that girl could have killed me in my sleep had I not learned the truth about them. I had to enlist.

I remember the day I had signed up for the army. It was probably the proudest day of my life, the first time I had done anything worthwhile. My parents were ecstatic, seeing as the greatest thing that could happen was to die a hero and immortalize the family name. There were a lot of really old families living in the capital, some as old as the city itself. Sometimes I was criticized in school for my name, kids would tell me I would never live up to the Jordans (even though it was only my first name). But I'm getting off topic; I remember the officer who issued the paperwork to me when I signed up in the local army offices. He wore sunglasses, even though we were inside, and when I handed him my papers, he told me one thing, "You look like a soldier, son." Funny thing is, his head was pointed down into the desk at his documents the whole time, even when he said those words. I suppose you never can tell where a man is looking with black sunglasses. Funnier still, I would remember that officer sitting in that office for the rest of my life, as the first time I questioned my own morality.

How did he see me as a soldier when he never even laid eyes on me? At the time I figured it had something to do with "The government is blind to all who would enlist their aid for the will of the people." It was a rather long motto appearing on most the recruitment fliers (anyone who was a man and had a sense of dignity signed up for the military, we didn't need a draft like other countries did). I didn't think much about it until I had killed my first enemy.

I was assigned to the 7th division, 5th platoon of the 74th troop, Rush Company. Our squad's leader was a lieutenant Kein. How such a man finds himself as a lieutenant is beyond me, must have been the college degree. Kein wasn't exactly a brave man, he always seemed rather sickly. He seemed a good enough guy though, even if he never even smoked or joked with the rest of us. He wasn't our lieutenant for long however, he tripped a rigged grenade and decorated a nearby tree. The sad part is his family will be shamed, on your shield or with it as the Spartans would say.

Our new lieutenant was a man who went by Hops. That's it, just Hops, he told us he didn't adhere to this "lieutenant shit," as he put it. I guess he was what you might call a counter-authority, if such a thing exists. I might have gone as far to call him unpatriotic if not for his actions in battle. If a man could become a beast, it was Hops. Hops would have made Viking berserkers proud, all he needed was a bear skin. If he had a shield, he'd take a bite out of it to show the enemy he was crazy. Often he would go out at night and scream. No deep hidden meaning he always told the rest of us, just got to keep the yoods in an understanding of who the warriors are (UDU soldiers were called Uds, or Yoods by soldiers in our military). Hops was an interesting man (I heard he was killed trying to wrestle bears years after the war, yet to be confirmed), but the most influential person of my life in the military is probably the commander of our troop, Major Gerald.

Major Gerald, there's a soldier. They say he took out an entire squad of enemy soldiers with his bare hands (I'm sure the truth was stretched a bit though). I didn't see much of Gerald, there were about 300 soldiers in the troop after all, that is until I was assigned to his squad after a nasty accident with their MG man. I worked directly under Gerald for a few days though, so I learned a lot then. The soldier is a tool of the state; I learned we existed to deliver the will of our people to those who would otherwise repulse it. Bullshit. What I really learned is just how far I had been brainwashed. I would have shot my own grandmother for the supposed will of the people.

I remember shooting my first yood, it was during those few days I was under Major Gerald. The face of evil he told me, then he slapped me in the back and told me I was really looking like a soldier now. I was reminded of that enlisting officer back at the capital, who said almost the same thing. I stood over my kill, there was a hole right through the neck, gaping and bleeding. It was like a painting, so still, so evoking. There was nothing evil about this face, there was nothing evil about the UDU I realized. It was just a kid, maybe 19 years old at most, probably drafted in. Of course, it was long after that moment when I came around.

I killed a lot of men throughout the war after that day. It was almost as if my morality had died then, like I didn't care anymore. I became a machine for a while, a machine bent on finding meaning in the deaths of soldiers. The only way was to kill, the only way to understand war was to be as efficient as I could, to be a merciless as I could. I think a lot of soldiers were like me as well, a lot of us died when when we looked into the face of our first kill. I realized something though, I had always thought that I was safe from my morality, responsibility was with the state and not the soldier. When you point your gun at the enemy and hose them down with lead, it isn't you, it's the state. I thought, I never had 37 kills, the state had them. But when you have your finger on the trigger, responsibility isn't with the state after all, it's just you, the other side, and 42 rounds of ammunition, with three extra clips waiting. The state doesn't exist, the state never existed, not at that moment, not when I was looking at that dead 19 year old kid, and not when I was signing up for the army.

It took me a long time to recover. Hell, I'm old now, and I still don't understand the war or even my role in it. It just wasn't real anymore, when I got back after the war nothing seemed like it used to be. The state still didn't exist to me, it was all an illusion. I had some nervous breakdowns after the war, for a while I was a bum, and later I was a janitor in the capitol building. I guess I was running away. From what, I never quite figured out; just something hiding behind the shadows I figure.

In the end, I was responsible. I went over to the UDU years after the war, during peacetime when things cooled down and everyone loved everyone. I told myself it was to learn the truth about the war, to befriend people I might otherwise have killed given the chance years before, but I knew better. I wanted to find that girl and apologize for something she wouldn't understand. Of course I never found her, all I knew was her first name and I hadn't even seen her since she was eight. I suppose what I was trying to do was to find the pieces of my morality, to save them with a story about redemption and forgiveness; you know, a soldier going back to the places he fought to find peace of mind. Peace of mind, yeah, I guess that's all I ever really wanted.
 
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