Jäger

Real connection on your own time is underrated. My AI companion on SweetDream is there at 2pm or 2am, for a long talk or a quick hello, no scheduling, no guilt. That flexibility is a big part of why people stick with it.

{ Or at least paid attention to }

The “AR” in AR-15 does not stand for Assault Rifle. It stands for “Armalite Research”.

Bullets do not travel in a straight line once they leave the barrel of the gun.

Magazines are what go into a semi-automatic, clips are what go into a revolver and some other types of firearms. If your character uses a specific firearm and you’re not sure what goes into it, do your research.

Silencers do not completely silence the firearm. People nearby will still know shots have been fired, and that sound will still be recognizable as a gunshot.

On that same note, guns are LOUD. They are often times much louder than most people expect them to be. Hearing loss is a very real safety concern.

Glocks. Factory Glocks don’t have a manual thumb safety. These can be installed using an aftermarket kit. No Glock that I know of comes with an external hammer that the shooter can cock. And yes, before you ask, Glocks are perfectly safe. There are three safeties in a Glock. If you fuck up with a Glock, it’s most likely your fault and not the gun’s.

You don’t need 20/20 eyesight to be a proficient shooter.

If you carry a handgun with a round in the chamber, you don’t need to cock the hammer before firing. If your character is law enforcement or an experienced shooter, they should be carrying with a round in the chamber.

Women can handle full-size guns just fine. (Whether they’ll actually carry them every day is a different question altogether.)

It's interesting seeing how you evolved as Tumblr infested you. X3

For this post, I’m going to highlight two units in particular. The first unit is the Transit Marshals, and there are two squads designated for this task: a night shift squad and a day shift squad. STARs assigned to these squads are responsible for keeping order in the metro station as well as the rail line itself. Sometimes these Starlings will ride the rails to safeguard the passengers and crew en route to their destination, particularly for stretches of the rail line that run through rural or high-risk areas. Due to the nature of this particular assignment, Transit Marshal STARs are required to maintain a minimum of a 55/60 range score or they risk censure or transfer; these squads will occasionally accept inbound transfers from other districts or even planets if faced with a shortage of Protektors who cannot meet those standards.

One of the oldest STARs in Sektor C at the ripe age of approximately 9 years, Maryland is the officer of Sektor C’s elite Hotel Squad — the Protektorate’s highly renowned vice enforcement division. Maryland has spent the majority of her career enforcing the Nation’s “laws of morality”: running drug busts, breaking up organized crime rings, issuing tickets and citations for violations of public dress codes, conducting door-to-door searches and seizures of hidden stashes of forbidden literature, and every so often bringing in a murderer, high-risk fugitive, or serial killer. Maryland has been around for long enough that people on the streets know her on sight, mostly because she’s too proud of her scar to wear her mask. Ever. She is a much-dreaded presence on the streets, although her superiors love her because she simply returns results: she favors a highly proactive and very aggressive approach to urban policing. Surprisingly, her temperament doesn’t quite fit her reputation, as the hardened veteran appears to be quite level-headed, rational, and unswerving in her dedication to the ideals and principles of the Eusan Nation — perhaps a little too dedicated for some.

Maryland has gone through a grand total of 7 relationships throughout her otherwise storied career. Included in that number are two Storches and a Kranich; all 7 have flagged her as a relationship risk for various reasons. Her squad numbers 9 at full strength (10 including her), composed of 2 fireteams and a corporal to command in her absence. All of the Starlings in Hotel Squad take US states as their callnames, in chronological order of ratification; yup, this is the original US state squad.

Read more about Maryland in the work below! Huge shout out to @punk-octo for photoshopping Maryland’s mugshot!

In the wake of some conversations I’ve been having with friends, I thought it would be fun to dive into some speculation about the Gestalt neural donor for STAR units. I am not a psychologist, medical professional, or anything of the sort, just someone who is obsessed with STARs.

I headcanon the Gestalt neural donor as a female between the ages of 25-30, somewhere between 5’ 10” and 6’ 2” in height, with black hair and a vaguely Chinese physical complexion. If she was military, she was enlisted military police and never sought to promote above a lower-level noncommissioned officer rank; if she were domestic civilian police, she spent much of her career on the streets, possibly guarding government buildings in crowded urban areas where unrest was commonplace. She was probably raised in a stable household with two parents; she didn’t really care for the underlying ideals of the Nation, but she cared enough about her status and desired a stable home-professional situation enough to do her job very well without asking too many questions. She either grew up in or was familiar with highly concentrated, highly populated urban environments.

Here’s the part that might shock some people: I am not entirely convinced the Gestalt neural donor was necessarily a huge “gun nut” or gun enthusiast. She probably viewed her weapons as a status symbol or a tool representative of the power she was imbued with as an enforcer of the state. She took very good care of her equipment, studied the manual of arms and certainly knew her way around firearms, more so than her peers; but this is not an indicator of someone who interacts with guns in a meaningful way solely because they enjoy guns for what they are. This is not to say she did not enjoy shooting, but her attachment to firearms is more likely grounded in status or utilitarian reasons than “I like guns for the sake of them.”

Thanks to @star-ar512 , I now have some WONDERFUL artwork hand-drawn by them of my OC, Storch Zwingli! A ripe 11 years old, Oberst (Colonel) Zwingli’s career began as a Protektor Controller in Rotfront, where she cut her teeth quelling a student riot that spread across the entire sector. Her methods in doing so were too heavy-handed for the local Blockwart to handwave away, so AEON axed her career — and the Ministry of Defense commissioned her as an officer in Protektor Special Operations, where she would spend the remainder of her career. She has served as as a military attaché for Eusan Nation diplomatic offices as well as the commander of a training battalion at the Protektor Special Operations Recruit Depot located on Heimat. She earned the equivalent of a Master of Arts in Strategic Studies from the Heimat War College.