Birthdate: August 13

Eo smiled, an assiduous thing always chasing closer. His pace was improving, caught by a focus that was steadily drawing away his interest in happenstance and the dusty spread of yesterday. He was present and persistent, keen-eyed wonder on the heels of his now. Before, later—they mattered less and less.

Birthdate: April 19

Kasse was good at covering things up. He was a master. He covered his fear with boisterous pride for years, overcompensated with great precision until he even convinced himself he was unafraid. He covered a soft core with a carapace of bone and braided muscle held together by a vascular net that flexed when he cracked his knuckles, when he shifted to pull his cigarette from his lips between thumb and forefinger.

Birthdate: January 30

Brint's heart was bisected by the two things that were most important to him: one, that uncertain shape of a human being struggling to maintain his corporeality in a world of atomic monstrosity, and two, success in the field, this war he'd dedicated his adult life to, spurned all prospects of respectable career paths or healthy relationships with people who hadn't traipsed through the exact same fields of mutilation he had. Brint's self-awareness was floundering under abstract wants, shirking in the intensity of lustrous prospects so much grander than the luminance of gunfire and grenades. A better man would have started the truck and took them back home.

Brint was not a better man.

Birthdate: October 20

Across the room, the last bloodwright standing was the very picture of her father’s rage but so much quicker, long distance devastating. She was no longer a girl, no longer Riki, replaced by a snarling feral shriek of grief when she laid another cluster of darts so locust plague thick across her sightline that nine of them struck true, no less than five shredding through her target’s thigh. They found bone to attach themselves to, crude projectiles transformed into living barnacles in lapsed time, calcifying tongues flaying muscle from femur, digging into hairline fractures till they could taste the marrow of the sergeant’s bones.

Birthdate: September 08

Dev wore startled well. He was a man of constant appraisal, one who took the time to breathe and to study. Calm, collected. This facet of his nature was responsible for making him skilled at his MOS—talking with people pushed past all their possible edges was useless if the speaker, too, had thrown themselves to the wind.

Birthdate: June 21

He was credited with the destruction of several high level targets with cunningly constructed P4 bombs placed in socially engineered scenarios carefully crafted by a recently deceased member of their prior squad. Naturally, the mad-bomber was destined to fall into Brint’s lap, to fall in line with that unorthodox group of front line soldiers whose reputation for destruction had spread like a virus across ODAs far and wide.

So Adrien St.Croix was bright eyed when he took his first steps into the airport off the sun beaten tarmac, pack slung over his shoulder and jostling to the tempo of his anticipation.

Birthdate: December 19

Skidding to a halt, Locke's usually jovial expression was gone, hardened to an unmitigated gameface screaming fuck this desert silent into Ossa's chilling night. Without explanation, he got out of the car, picked up the first fist-sized rock he found, rounded the vehicle, and beat the literal lights out of the Humvee, one by fucking one. Job complete, Locke dropped his weapon and took his seat, silently throwing the car back in drive to resume their escape to camp.

"I have to use the brakes," he clarified, some thirty seconds after they'd picked up speed. "Not being able to utilize the brakes is a safety hazard. We shouldn't encourage reckless driving habits—we're better than that, guys."