Just One Step
Four grey walls, buzzing fluorescents, and a pair of shoddy desks crammed into one hundred square feet: This little room three hundred feet beneath Cheyenne Mountain had been your office, once, as a lieutenant fresh to your bars and the murky realm of black operations.
Now, you have returned nearly thirty years later, on the cusp of your retirement, with a pair of stars on your shoulder and a life filled with secrets. You only have one left to yourself, kept close to your chest, yet to come and long into the past. These days, your office, down another eleven sublevels, is one hundred and fifty luxurious square feet of hard cement featuring a single desk of polished mahogany, a cushy leather chair, and your very own aide.
How things have changed.
When the opportunity had come up to oversee the decommissioning of the old Titan Command Facility-00, you had jumped on it. Your own retirement was imminent, and with Ellen's death so very fresh, you felt the time had come. It would be fitting, you thought, to retire two old remnants of the Cold War into the redacted annals of history.
As it was, you had a year of paperwork and the aging and mediocre dregs of the Air Force to look forward to. One wasn't posted to a decommissioning base unless age or slow wits had kept you out of everywhere else.
The exception to that rule was your XO, Colonel Richard Gote. You'd mentored him at the start of his own career as a fresh faced lieutenant. Now, as a weather-beaten man in his forties with white peppering black hair, he'd called you up to volunteer himself for the post and be the one to finally kick you out the door. Though, God's honest truth, it had to be the long years of friendship keeping him here. If the reports you'd received back in Washington had any truth to them, West had left some skeletons in the closets of Cheyenne Mountain.
"Sir!"
You turn at the sound, and there, as if summoned by your wandering thoughts, is your XO at a crisp attention, hand raised in salute. You return it with a smile. "Mornin' Dick."
"George." His brows curl down in a slightly perturbed look. "When did you get in? I was sure I'd had the chief straighten out the SF's-"
"Ah," you interrupt and wave him down, "don't go tearing 'em a new one, Dick. Told the boys on watch not to go rustlin' you up and that I wanted a look around myself. Just a bit of nostalgia," you say with a smile before gesturing him to follow you back to the elevator. "What's the skinny, Dick?"
"Well, I only got in last week, so you've mostly got everything in that report I sent on to the Pentagon," he says as he flips through the thick stack of files in his hands before passing you one. "But, I've got some more inventories here for you, a few disciplinary and incident reports, and best of all,
security leaks."
You huff a laugh as you open the file. "How bad?" You ask as you skim the title of each report.
"A little beer fuelled shit-slinging about secret bases and secret missions," he says with a shrug as you both turn the corner to the elevator, "but nothing about Giza, gods, and giant rings."
"I imagine Chief Hayworth has been blowin' some steam," you say and swipe your shiny new ID on the elevator.
He slaps the down arrow and nods. "One of those leaks," he says in a long-suffering tone, "was a NORAD officer that was treated to one of the Chief's lectures on appropriate bedroom talk through a poorly placed A/C vent." He flashes a quick grin as the elevator doors open and you both step inside. "Fifteen hundred washouts from every branch of the Air Force against a pair of aging officers. Just like old times."
"Just like old times," you echo as the doors close and the elevator drops into the bowels of Cheyenne Mountain.
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[][STAT] Martial: You are a Major General in the United States Air Force and you started as a farm boy from Texas; you hold your rank through your strategic acumen, tactical mind, and dead-eye with a rifle. You dropped bombs on Vietnam and were dropped into Russia. You have dyed your hands red and your book black for the sake of your nation and it shows in the skill of your leadership and the shrewd cunning that laces your strategy. When it comes down to the wire, you will fight for your country, your people, and your ideals to the very last. Any place. Any time. Anywhere.
And so I rest on my laurels.
[][STAT] Diplomacy: The written word is your chief weapon of war. Before all else, you are a man of culture and diplomacy.
We the People of the United States, says the Declaration; a tool forged in the heat of the mind, it began a revolution and built a nation. That is the ideal you strive to live by. You have always been the moderating hand to the warhawks of black operations and your specialty was always negotiation. Agreements with Kurds and Russian Mafia, African Warlords and East German Gangs have filled your history.
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
[][STAT] Stewardship: A good commander knows his unit backwards and forwards. He knows every man, every gun, every MRE. He knows where and when everything comes from, and where it will all have to go. After all, "an army marches on its stomach," or so they say, and a gun ain't much without a bullet in the chamber. Over the long course of your career, from your days as a lieutenant in this very mountain to the desolate heartlands of the Middle East, you have known your supply chain inside and out, and that has not changed. You know who to talk to and the man to see for every need you and your command could possibly require.
Simple man with simple wants and simple needs.
[][STAT] Intrigue: You're Hammond, George Hammond. Your career didn't start with the Air Force. Not truly. With a gift for languages and a mind for detail, the CIA had snapped you up the moment you'd graduated high school and so you became Agent Hammond, Analyst. For four years you'd teased out plot and counterplot amid the shuffle of paper, cigarette smoke, and the whirr of spinning tapes. What you'd found in the morass of information that flooded into the agency had changed you. Darkened and hardened you before your time. Your secondment to the Air Force for training and field duty had been a relief at first, before the red-stained reality came into focus.
I'm an old man, filled with regret.
[][STAT] Learning: "
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard[...]" On September 12, 1962 you listened to John F. Kennedy deliver his iconic speech from a seat high up in Rice Stadium, your father on one side and your mother on the other. On that sunny day, you, along with every other American, had found a dream, a vision. Three years later you found yourself in your advisory meeting at the Academy saying: "I want to help us get there." So you did, in as much as any academy student could, and four years later you watched from the side of your father's deathbed as a craft you had helped refine touched the surface of the Moon.
The dream is still alive.
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There will be no moratorium on this vote.
For the current vote, please use a ranked voting system for each stat in order of priority. The higher ranked a stat is, the more weight I will give to it when I divide up the stat points. Keep in mind, that these stats will also determine how your General thinks about and approaches situations.
Martial will be at rank 1 or 2, regardless of the vote. If it is at rank one or two at the end of the vote, it will remain there, if it is below rank two, it will move up to rank two and displace everything else down.
EX:
[1][STAT] Diplomacy
[2][STAT] Martial
[4][STAT] Intrigue
[5][STAT] Learning
[3][STAT] Stewardship
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Just One Step is a Stargate AU CKII quest that generally follows the CKII quest model used in
@PoptartProdigy 's "Terminus Quest," and torrar's "Warhammer Fantasy: A Dynasty of Dynamic Alcoholism."
Here you will control the Stargate program as its commanding general. Your mandate: To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and her People, and to seek out and obtain alien knowledge and technology for the advancement and defense of the United States and humanity.
This is going to be a lot of fun, I think.
See the rules post below for the mechanics and AU changes.
So! I'm back from gradschool for a month, so I'm getting this started agian. The reboot is due to some rule changes and the first quest never really having gotten off the ground.