#spartan-ii program

We have Musa, who is wheelchair bound and to the best of my knowledge, also suffers chronic pain.

And we have Sorin, whose body and bones were mangled and broken, and who suffered chronic pain.

Others were mentioned as well, but again, all I can recall is that thier bodies were twisted and mangled, and that they were in constant pain.

But what if.

What if there is a Spartan II washout who is blind? All of the augs took, except the vision. Thier retinas scarred, and thier optic nerve was damaged beyond repair. They are otherwise completely functional and healthy.

Or a washout whose mental/neural augs cause them to be locked insde thier own head? They are just as intelligent and strong as thier siblings, but no matter what, they can't fully interact with the world around them, and spend thier days appearing mostly catatonic to thier carers.

Or a washout whose thyroid implant went haywire, and they ended up with extreme hypo- or hyperthyroidism?

So, along with Halo: The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund, I’m now officially putting Halo: First Strike by the same author on the List of Halo Books You Should Read. It’s a direct follow up to the events of the first Halo game and looks to explain some things (and just in general show that Kelly is a total badass ngl she’s incredible) like how Sgt Johnson survived the Flood, how Chief and Cortana got away from the destroyed ring, and how Halsey and the handful of S2s left survived the apparent glassing of Reach.

Nylund writes Halo characters really well. I wish he wrote more than just Fall of Reach, First Strike and Ghosts of Onyx (that’s also a good one! Makes the S3 program even more heartbreaking), but damn if he doesn’t just nail the characterization. 

Still working on that custom Halo Spartan-II poster. If anyone is interested in making a background I’d love that. I’m not making this to sell or anything and don’t want anyone selling it, as I’m using edited images from various sources (which I make sure to list whenever I show this to give credit) and I’m not able to pay for anything but I’d be happy to share the final product to whoever would make a background. Not expecting anything though! I’ve sort of got an idea of my own but the grey of the mains is messing with it a bit.

Once again the top left image is my own altered version of the Spartan standing over the child in Halsey’s Journal, at the “Begin with innocence” quote. 

The upper right is the UNSC Covenant War insignia, with the Spartan-II unit emblem in place of the standard bird of the logo. 

I don’t have a ‘hardships’ image yet. 

the SPARTAN-II project got the green light by the top brass within the Office of Naval Intelligence, who concluded that the lives that could be saved far outweighed the risks involved. The project was initially granted funding for 300 candidates, though funding was later reduced to half this number. By 2517, 150 suitable candidates had been identified through DNA gathered from the CAA's Outer Colony vaccination program, but funding was further reduced to support again, only half that number. 

A grand total of 75 children, five or six years old and of both genders, were kidnapped by ONI recruiters. In order to preserve the program's secrecy, the children were replaced by flash clones which would perish soon thereafter due to numerous medical complications associated with flash-cloning a human being.

[ Flash cloning is a medical process performed in human medicine in the 26th century. It is a more advantageous form of cloning where organs or other body parts go through accelerated ageing to match the age of the donor. The biggest fault by far in flash-cloning of humans is metabolic cascade failure, a syndrome characterized by degeneration of the body. Due to the sheer complexity of cloning an entire human, a series of defects show themselves within months. As they accumulate, the clone inevitably dies from degenerative disorders potentially in every organ as the body essentially collapses. Their deaths from this syndrome are inevitable, and many die within a year. With medical assistance life can be extended further.  ]

At the age of fourteen, the children would go through the toughest part of their training: the biological augmentation procedures, which would kill 30 of the 75 conscripted children and render 12 more, who would "wash out" of the SPARTAN-II program, paralysed. Additionally, while the procedures were taking place the subjects were unconscious, a state where they should have felt no pain, the Spartans felt enormous pain throughout the process, with each augmentation having its own type of pain. 

Subsequently, some of those which were adversely affected by the augmentation process went on to join the Office of Naval Intelligence, while others were given an honorable or medical discharge; aside from the 33 which survived the procedures with no physiological deformities. The bodies of those candidates who died were placed in cryo-suspension, in the hope that they could some day be resuscitated. At least some of the candidates who were crippled were eventually rehabilitated.