' Wrote:The frail old man waited in a small, cramped room not unlike those precursor to doctor visits. Over the course of several hours, he had waited more or less patiently, drifting in and out of a light sleep. Whenever his back pain worsened, a few pain pills washed down with a strange, purple liquid in a flask on his leg would provide some relief.
The other men and women in the room, few as they are, eyed him with curiosity. Old as he was, he made for a rather rare eyesore in any military organization. They saw him as one with the wreath of death wrapped around his neck; the Commissar's weapon already smoking over his crumpled body. As time passed, each of them was summoned, and seen no more. Sometimes they would vanish from the room only to be followed by the sound of a gunshot. Some fared better, and made their way elsewhere to a future of glorious service.
After the quantity of applicants had dwindled, the man looked down at his old, gnarled hands wryly. He turned the ring on his finger, eyes twinkling, recalling some distant chain of events with a soft smile. Turning his eyes to the door, he pondered his reasons for being here. Perhaps, if the Commissar was young and rash, he would be killed for his age alone. His life flashed, as it had so many times in the past, before his eyes. Shaking his head, however, he dismissed the notion. What would happen would happen, when the time came.
Silence - as much could be expected.
The fans thrummed quietly as they had for hours.
The man across the room shifted nervously for the fifteenth time in the last hour.
Hearbeat in your ears, as it had been as long as you had been in this purgatory - forever, memory indicated. The past was a haze, occluded by the oppressive nothingness here that left one alone with his self.
Then, a break in it.
A steady clack of boots on an unseen hallway.
Coming closer. Stop, with a click. The swoosh of a cloak, or coat.
A foot moved.
The door suddenly opened in front the small old man, who glanced up at the sudden noise.
A comparably aged man stepped into the room, heading straight for the applicant, ignoring the others sitting around. He was old, yes, but his body was still lean and hard, and his preservation belied a life of hard military service and other difficult times, like he was tempered iron - and looked just as cold as well. He wore a long grey coat of the Coalition, trimmed with an odd blue that was not familiar. He had a tall, thin face, almost caricatured in appearance. A narrow pair of glasses perched atop his nose, disrupting the sharp glare of his eyes with their thin lenses as he looked down dryly at the shrivelled husk of man that sat before him, looking up at him.
He crossed his arms across his chest for a moment, and then looked down to adjust his glasses with one hand, that he promptly locked back in place.
"I will not ask you your name, as it is entirely unimportant, and I already know it... and your age is more evident than you would think." He bent down a little bit, closer to the man. His mouth was almost entirely expressionless, with just a hint of exasperation on it. "These simple questions do not matter. What matters is the single question I have for you now. What makes you so special that you would seek to join the Coalition?"
