INCOMING MESSAGE
> FROM: Jack Crawford
> TO: Nome base
> SUBJECT: Request to join
> ENCRYPTION: High
Hey there. My name's Jack Crawford, and as you may have already guessed, this is my application for the Xeno Alliance.
Where to begin? My parents were both small buisnessowners in Manhattan. We owned a little store that sold whatever knick-knacks we could get our hands on. Cheap food, engine parts, you know the drill. Life had its ups and downs, and work was hard, but we generally did alright and my parents always did their best to care for me and my nine siblings.
My father was a veteran of the Liberty Navy. Lost his leg single-handedly fighting off a a whole horde of rogues until help arrived. He even got a medal for it! After the war, he married my mother and life was good for a while.
That is, until those money-grubbing rice eaters from Samura got involved! They had just set up shop in the neighbourhood and they didn't like my old folks cutting into their profits. So they lowered prices so that my parents could no longer compete with them, tried getting 'em sued for obscure breaches of regulations and sent their thugs to threaten us. Well, long story short, we went bankrupt and had to sell our shop.
We were forced to beg to survive! Can you believe it? My father, a hero of Liberty, forced to kneel in the dirt and beg! And did the Navy care? Hell no! He wasn't useful to them anymore, so now he was worse than dirt to them.
After my parents died of pneumonia, their corpses stayed on the street all day. Nobody bothered to even look at them. We eventually had to carry him to the sea ourselves.
Anyway, after the deaths of my parents, we had to do odd jobs to survive. Luckily, helping around in the shop had given us a few useful skills. We had learned to do things like repair busted engines and pawn off stolen goods. We were encouraged to learn and our parents always strived to give us a good education. As we got older, me and my siblings gradually grew apart from each other. Three of them died because of an accident in the factory they were working in, two of them died of the pittsburgh pox, another two were too slow to escape capture by the cops and got sent to Texas, one got shanked by a bunch of drunken junkers and one decided to steal a rhino and try to make it big as an independent trader. I haven't heard from him since.
So I was left alone. I wandered the streets of Manhattan, doing some chores for various people and looking for a purpose in life. I was angry. Angry at the greedy foreigners for killing my parents. Angry at life itself for putting me in this. I had joined various groups and cults trying to find the meaning in life and all of them felt like nothing but scams designed to beat my hard-earned credits out of my pocket.
And then, I met the Xenos.
I had known the Xenos for quite some time, of course, but I had thought of them as nothing but a bunch of gun-crazy redneck loonies. It was only after I read and reread a pro-xeno pamphlet lying on the street that I understood who they really where: they were libertonian patriots who fought to keep the corporations and foreigners in the place where they belonged and bring back the real liberty from before the Age of Greed. The corporations weren't, as the media would want you to believe, champions of free trade that would bring everyone prosperity like the media would want you to believe. No, they were nothing more that a bunch of spoiled children who desperately wanted to wring every credit out of the little man just so that they would have the latest gizmos and toys. They were just criminals in business suits.
I had already been thought some flying skills by my father (he had inherited a starfighter from his brother and sometimes used it to buy stuff at places like Pittsburgh), so I patched up a rusty old ship from a nearby scrapyard, took off from Manhattan and never looked back. I found people like me, people who were sick of Liberty's corporate tyranny and decided to fight back. Long story short: I found Mitch Griffith and his gang and now we're trying to apply with the Xeno Alliance.
