#garrison

This place could be called plenty of things.

The disaster of Tallahassee could be one. The Haunt of Tallahassee. The tragedy of Tallahassee.

To Garrison, it was his home. His real home.

He had his ways of making ends meet out here. He’d hide his face, clean up his clothes from time to time. Civilians never seemed to know the difference between a poor man on the street and himself, which made it easier for him to get essentials when the time called for it.

They’d never know he was the haunt at that old warehouse that crumbled all those years ago. The reason that every time some young college kids would run up there, they’d go missing. No trace of their existence.

The tragedy was hard on everyone. 30 soldiers having been buried and burned under the rubble. Reports say they could only recover 5 of the bodies, and only 2 could be properly identified. The families were destroyed. They’d never recover.

But Garrison.

Garrison was doing just fine.

Amongst the rubble, he had 25 men to protect and watch over. Maybe they were some lazy assholes who laid around all day.. but they were his. His troop. His people.

And so when you came.. just to poke your head around and see the wreckage.

Garrison Landing: Thirty-Eight Years Apart

Once again we are following New York Central's Water Level Route; the cement milepost tells us we are precisely fifty miles from Grand Central Terminal, in Garrison, New York.

In the contemporary image above we see a northbound Amtrak train (going away from us, with an additional locomotive on the tail end) after having sped through Garrison Landing.

The vintage photograph has a city-bound commuter train of Metro North (coming toward us) approaching Garrison through the short tunnel there just north of the station. The engineer is sitting in the end of the passenger car (or cab-car) on the south end of the train.

Metro North runs all trains to Grand Central Terminal with locomotives on the north end of their consists, so it's not always easy to tell which direction these trains are moving in still images. Additionally: Amtrak trains sometimes have locomotives on each end (as is the case above), which can further cloud how a viewer might perceive the direction of travel of their movements.

On the re-photography aspect: I couldn't match the angle here as the bridge on which I was standing had been moved significantly: to the north and higher as well.

The Garrison in canon is... a lot of a mess. It's a military base, a space exploration program, and also seemingly a specialized boarding school for *checks notes* 14-18 year olds.

In Cosmic Dust it has more of a structure, the Galaxy Garrison is a research facility and a training facility for teens hoping to go into various fields for NASA. Because it is a subsect of NASA, shocking I know. All the kids, yes including the pilots, are absolute nerds. They study astronomy, physics, astrophysics, aerodynamics, all that fun stuff.

Then of course are the pathways students could take, the ones the story's mostly concerned with (because of the paladins) being communications technicians, engineers, cargo pilots, and fighter pilots.

Cargo and fighter are holdover labels from when the world still had Wars happening frequently (the way canon ignores exploring how a society who thinks they've finally gotten rid of war would react to being invaded and instead goes "teehee usual military stuff!" is lowkey infuriating), but have taken on a less battle-focused meaning instead.

Fighter pilots are the ones piloting spaceships and aircrafts that need to be nimble. They're most used to low-weight, low-capacity ships. On Earth their jobs are less shooting things and more investigative, they run scans of the earth, collect samples, "smaller" things that can realistically run with only three crewmates. On space missions, they're the first ships to go anywhere. They scout out, get small samples and readings of what we're dealing with, and are usually the first to see any new discoveries.

Cargo pilots are the ones piloting spaceships and aircrafts that are high-weight and high-capacity. They (along with their crew) are the resource gatherers, the ones who stay on planets for research and testing, never the first to be sent out but usually the ones to stay the longest. They're distinctly not considered a "second class pilot", just a different specialty. On Earth their jobs tend to be porting resources that would be too difficult to travel by land from one base to the other. Most Cargo ships need a large crew to make sure everything is operating correctly.

Students are dormed two to a dorm, and most teachers live on-campus.

The Garrison only returns to being a military base when the Galra invade earth, before that it was decades of a space exploration base. It had remnants of the military in it, but its ultimate purpose was created for space exploration.

When Nana asks a favor of Lily, the two end up getting into more than they bargained for, and trying to stop the bratty Tushy Trooper's father from making a grave mistake.

Chapter written by OC_Defense_Squad!

Art by Gairon on Deviantart!