The boredom was shaken up when you caught sight of the first newspaper with your face on it.
Pravda finally printed a full report of the battle you'd been involved with, and your story was front and center, as was your picture. One of the pictures on your film roll had been a dramatic pose you struck in your uniform while showing off at a local dance hall, and some clever photo artist had taken that pose and transferred it onto a static shot of the east coast airbase you'd served on, in front of an I-16 made up to look like yours before it had crashed. Another showed you lying in bed recovering, and they'd airbrushed out your scar.
That wasn't speculation on your part. They detailed the entire process of photo-editing at the bottom of the page, as usual, though mercifully they left out where they sourced the photos or what they'd airbrushed.
A week later, out and about to get some food and fresh air after being stuck inside, you saw the first posters. There was a sort of rivalry between the deconstructionist and soviet realist styles in political art these days, and you got to see your image rendered in both. One reduced you to three colours, bold shapes for your hair and face, your lips and the star on your uniform, another a carefully rendered piece in soft lightning that made you look like a Greek goddess in flight goggles. Neither of them quite you, but both of them recognizably you.
And people started recognizing you from them.
The first time it happened, you were at a club. In the Berlin style, if you catch my drift, alternating men's and women's nights, the sort of place with a small stage for a singer and a cozy, intimate atmosphere. You weren't up for dancing, of course, but you were old enough to get into such venues now, and you weren't going to wait. You hobbled in on your crutches and found the first open table to sit down and take a breather before going up to the bar: moving on crutches was hard work. You felt like you'd probably be pretty anonymous in your civilian clothes: there were mixed feelings about the military wearing their uniforms off-duty, even if it was normal for all other professions, but you liked dresses! Despite the cold, under your bulky coat you had a
lovely grey and black dress in the latest constructivist style, with a red sash intersecting a vertical stripe running from low, square collar to knee-length hemline. Did it look a little silly while hobbling one-legged with a plaster cast? Of course, but you have to
try, at least.
You did at least pin your medal to it: civilians worn their awards all the time, why shouldn't you?
About thirty seconds after you got your coat and hat off, a waitress swung by the table and dropped a drink off in front of you. You raised an eyebrow.
"Who from?" You asked quietly. You weren't expecting anybody to take notice of you at all with your injury and that horrid scar, nevermind so quickly. The waitress smiled.
"We've had about six people offer to cover your tab so far, Miss Kilesso." She said. "I'm sure any one of them would like to talk to you?"
Sure enough, your little table was soon crowded with admirers, all eager to hear you recount your trip to an alien world. It was charming, if a little frustrating: it was hard to flirt with any one of them when a half-dozen people are trying to get your attention. Then again, you don't have to do much flirting when you're the hero of the hour. Your memory of the evening did devolve a little, in the haze of free drinks and pleasant company, but you remember having help leaving the club, an unfamiliar metro stop, fumbling with the knot of a tie, awkward laughter, warm lips, and perfume.
You were most of the way home the next morning when you realized you never got her name.
---
In November, there was something of a scare. The city had air raid sirens installed at every street corner, and the formation of a particularly nasty storm cell off the Gulf of Finland spread something of a panic. You awake to the alarm being blazed outside your window, and you ended up getting your mother to take you in her car (well, not
her car, but as an important party official managing a large portion of the waterfront, she was afforded a vehicle to get around) to the air base to see if there was any help you could furnish. Not willing to turn you down, you ended up spending fourteen hours out in the snow next to an anti-air artillery cannon with a pair of binoculars, watching the storm creep ever closer.
It was just a snowstorm, but an Army photographer snapped a picture of you, cast propped up and binoculars ready, and it was in the papers the next day. The attention from the Civilian population was actually getting a little unbearable, not to mention the squabbling in your mother's apartment whenever your grandmother came to check on you, so by the month's end you submitted a request for housing on the army base.
---
You got two letters in mid-December. Well, you got a lot of letters, still being the face of the war effort. The storms seemed to have trouble with the cold, so the war had moved away from the shores of the Soviet Union for now. It was still on, though, undeniably, it was simply that the equator was being hit far harder, and Soviet pilots had seen only sporadic action in the last two months. You weren't
the hero of the hour anymore (right now that was a young man who managed to knock two of the invaders from the air over the Black Sea) but you were still on people's minds, and it resulted in a lot of mail now that you were back on an army base instead of in an anonymous apartment.
You had a representative from the People's Commissariat for Communications (the post office) swing by to inform you that you were getting about a hundred letters a day, despite the measures that had been taken to avoid exposing your address to the world, and with your permission they were going through them for useful letters. That boiled it down to about a dozen per day that mattered, plus thank-yous that you tried to go through at the post office every few days. The rest were people trying to get your vote on something, rambling incoherent diatribes, hate mail (one of the posters you were on was aimed specifically at queer youth, given your own orientation, and that summoned forth every bitter, middle-aged reactionary in the Union eager to tell you how your preferences were bourgeoisie affectation), and equally creepy love letters from admirers of all genders.
This letter was different, though. For one thing, it was actually two letters: an original and a translation.
To Miss Lieutenant Kilesso Kristina,
I recently had the honour of being based in a Soviet airfield after action over the Sea of Okhotsk, and I was pleased to see your face on a poster there. I thought you should know that your name and deeds, flying over the Invader's world as you did and returning, are well known in my country as well, and a generation of our pilots strive to live up to your example. I wish we had been able to meet under more pleasant circumstances, or at least to fight side by side when the invaders next threaten our shores.
Kase Shintaro,
Junior Lieutenant, Navy of the Republic of Japan Aviation Wing
PS: This is Amachi Chieko, the radio operator. I'm translating this, and I'm really glad your chin healed without a scar. You look great in the posters girl! (｡♥‿♥｡)
The little drawing with the heart eyes was a cute touch. You wrote back to the both of them, hoping that they could still manage a translation.
The second letter was in English. You'd taken a class in English in high school, hoping to read Wells in the original language, but you'd forgotten literally all of it since. You had to track down a soldier on the base who could read it for you.
The contents of the letter were pretty generic congratulations and concerns, the sort you'd read a hundred times. The more important part was the fact that it had been sent by
Amelia fucking Earhart, who was apparently currently in the middle of reorganizing the American Army Air Force to meet the invader threat.
Amelia Earhart wanted to meet you someday.
Amelia Earhart thought you were cool.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
===
The War will be divided into 4 phases, with a special Nightmare Phase if the aliens start winning. Each phase has a d10 table of missions available. This first phase is called Opening Moves. Generally speaking, you want your tiers to keep pace with your war phases.
The phase will advance based on a War Score. If you accomplish at least half the objectives of a mission, you get War Score for the mission. Fail, the aliens get it. Exact numbers TBH and will likely vary with designed campaign length.
Roll me 1d10 to determine your mission!
- Fighter Interception
- Fighter Interception
- Fighter Interception
- Bomber Interception
- Bomber Interception
- Combat Patrol
- Pathfinder Escort
- Base Defense Scramble
- Forward Base Raid
- Portal Assault
