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Blighted Earth – The Sergeant

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Last post, I talked about the setting for Blighted Earth. Now I’m going to record some thoughts on some characters.

“Soldier” by Patryk on deviantART

This is going to be a story about a military team sent out to find a traitor who had once been their commanding officer. The threat the traitor represents is one of the security of the bastions against the chaotic forces in the Blight, who may be coalescing into an army. Should the bastions fall, each city-state would find itself under threat.

It is this possibility that leads the main character to accept the mission. The main character was a colour sergeant/first sergeant/warrant officer (don’t know if I’m going to use UK, US or Canadian ranks structure) with a patrol pathfinder/force recon platoon. He’s retired, married, and has children. His wife is an important figure in a city-state, and the sergeant has become a kind of artisanal farmer. The wars are over, the federation is secure, and he’s happy to done with it – kind of a Cincinnatus character, but lacking the level of important of that Roman figure.

The threat to the bastions and therefore the city-states provides the motivator for the sergeant. He needs to reassemble his core force – there will be six, including the sergeant and a young lieutenant foisted upon him (there has to be one of those!) – and go find the traitor, hopefully learning the traitor’s plans in the process.

The sergeant is a moral individual, however he accepts the mission before all else. I intend there to be a scene in which he has to make the decision to not help innocents due to the possibility of threatening the mission. These were the kinds of decisions he made during the wars, and they haunt him, but he believes they are necessary. He is intensely loyal to his men, though that is now tested against the loyalty he feels to his family. When the two are in conflict, his men will always lose. They know this and accept this, though the lieutenant will learn this.

The sergeant is going to be the main protagonist, though I think, were I to pursue this, I’d use either multiple points-of-view in a limited third person, or an extremely limited third person – basically the idea of narrator as movie camera.

You can find more information on Cincinnatus here.

You can find more information on the Blighted Earth here.

Art by Patryk.