Not exactly

I wouldn’t say that I’m a prisoner,

Exactly;

Just that I have very few choices.

It’s a Trap

It seems that war combined with matchmaking is a winning strategy in turn-based strategy games.

Strange? But the scores of hours that I’ve spent on Fire Emblem in the past month, and the game’s extremely vibrant shipping communities (“shipping” being the practice or pastime of insisting that two particular characters belong together romantically), speak for themselves. Making couples becomes a real obsession!

Now I am wondering why I never imagined a game like this before. Story, strategy, and intricate character design make a veritable cauldron for interpersonal drama! Let’s make some marriages before the next fight!

Plus its great to imagine all the guys who play this game getting swoony or worked up over their favourite couples. Me? I wish that they had the option for same-sex couples, because, man, those Libra x Virion support conversations… Too perfect.

(Virion is a dandy who flirts with every female he meets and Libra is a cleric who looks remarkably female – more than one character comments on his lovely skin. So when Virion first meets Libra and mistakes him for an eminently desirable woman… I could go on at length, but you can probably see where this is headed.)

Soldier, I will be

On October 27^th, —-, a civilian appeared out on the —— dunes where she had no business to be.That day drones tore at the air overhead, with payloads in the dozens of tonnes, and along the ever-shifting frontier mortars reshaped the desert. I sit still and learn this from the forums where people piece together obscure headlines, and surreptitiously hint at what they should not reveal.

The first sign of her in the footage, presumably from a surveillance rover, shows her getting to her feet atop one of the dunes. She brushes herself off meticulously, with her motions slowing until she is merely standing there with her arms at her sides, the wind pulling out her hair. The video is ill-focused and low-quality, but it suddenly conveys a sharp sense of how alone she is, framed against smoke billowing on the horizon. For a moment she is the most beautiful, ordinary thing you could imagine in the midst of such destruction. A girl in a plain white sundress.

Frames click by and clumsily convey her looking upward for a moment, and a tension that had been in her frame all along becomes more obvious. People like to talk of what she might have been looking at, or thinking of, but when I think of the likely truth I can’t bear to listen to speculation.

She looks, and then she lowers her chin again. She is a screen and numberless miles and minutes away, yet you can tell that she has relaxed. Her hands rise from her sides and the video starts to go shaky. The white of her dress seems to glow, or grow, climbing up her arms and blurring, even as the video shudders and cuts out.

Like a white light burnt into my eyes she lingers, and at first I couldn’t believe that that was the end of the clip. The army has stayed silent through the media storm – if they have more footage we don’t know.

Operations in —— were abruptly halted, causing a furor in congress, with stiff statements made on television citing “classified information”. We pulled out. And things had almost died down when the leak happened, releasing documents related to the aborted mission, and the video clip that has now been seen around the world.

What we found out from the leak is that drones fell from the sky on October 27^th. They fell in swathes, like flocks of monstrous black birds, without a single detonation. Mortars landed already dead, to be swallowed by the sand. Communications on all sides went dead. The few fighters that had been on the ground, crouched in sand bulwarks and caves, were found dead, bearing signs of blunt force trauma, their guns nothing but slag.

Rumor has it that ———- were immediately scrambled, but no matter who it was, the girl was certainly “recovered” to be locked down and buried deep. Personal logs among the leaked documents note, again and again, the remarkable expression of peace on her face.

The girl in the white dress has become a sensation everywhere, and it is impossible to escape the fascination, the incessant noise that torments me. We’d been looking for her for two long months – two months between her disappearance and the video. That dress was what she was wearing the last time I saw her. How is it that I had no idea of what she intended?

The least that we can do now is get her back.