Who: Civilian, Open
Where: Just outside of HQ
When: Late Morning - end of June
What: Civy goes through his mail and finds something rather disheartening. People can then poke at him.


So far removed from any major city, and with carriers often prevented from delivering due to sudden onsets of highly inconvenient robot attacks, the mail did not always arrive to the mercenaries in Coal Town with any great regularity. When it did come, the Civilian was always quite eager to greet it, standing with a cordial smile on his face as the driver, nervously gripping their steering wheel on the approach to their base while their eyes frantically searched for anything metallic and mobile, came rumbling along down the bumpy dirty road. The mail was often a welcome diversion, a healthy source of news from the rest of the world, and perhaps most importantly, it was a primary line of communication for Civy and his job.

( On this particular day... )

Who: Civilian, Open
Where: Upgrade Station Central
When: Sundown, early April-ish
What: Work's all done for the day, and no robots in sight. Civy spends a few moments being Civy.


There came a moment late one day, when the sun had grown as red as clay and started to melt slowly away beyond the horizon, when the Civilian remarked silently to himself that this area really was not so awful. Seated up on the roof of his little 'office' building, his long legs messily draped over the edge, his thoughts turned towards the natural beauty of the desert scene just beyond the outskirts of the town - from his lofty perch, he could see it quite well. With the glare of the day steadily falling, it was easier then to take it all in, but still utterly impossible to truly capture its essence with ordinary eyes. How it captured his imagination with its unspoiled and unblemished allure, the rising columns of crimson stone and the coarse, golden sea that stretched endlessly. How the sense of admiration took hold of him, with its untamed and raw spirit; one needed to be of sterner stuff to peacefully coexist with such unforgiving lands, and there existed a strange, almost heroic sense to the idea. So far removed from the luxuries and activity of the city, surrounded on all sides by a world that needed to be bended and shaped by force, he could not help but laud the men and women who had taken up this challenge in decades prior. As the chill of dusk just began to emerge, there existed a fleeting moment in time in which the sun, making one last grasp at the world, washed across every natural feature and stretched each shadow out to its fullest, and it was at that moment that the Civilian musingly thought that this might not be such a terrible place to settle one day, if his roots never dug in elsewhere.

Of course, it was in the moment directly following that one that he realized how anyone else would likely call him crazy should he ever admit to having such thoughts. It should never be spoken aloud to anyone, ever, he decided promptly.

Others might have thought it equally strange, under normal circumstances, that the Civilian would have such idle time on his hands. That day was different, however, as the base was fully repaired, and there had not been an attack all day - or even across the past few days, in fact. As if the mechanized Grey army was elsewhere occupied, Coaltown had not seen a single enemy for the entire stretch of time; not even the occasional robo-Scout that had gotten separated during a previous battle and wandered through.

And so the Civilian had been allowed enough time to pursue other things. To catch up on his reading, to straighten up the Upgrade Station, and even to do a little amateurish painting inside his office, splattering a bit of color on a canvas until a crude image took the shape of a desert landscape thereon. He even had time to spare for the other mercenaries...should they ever happen by.