[h3]Escape[/h3]
[b]Teodor[/b]

Teodor Grenzer's own reflection stared him somberly in the face as Annesport passed through his bus window. Grey blue eyes flitted here and there as the city went by, occasionally returning to regard the mirage reflection looking back at him. Teodor's was a thin, mousey visage; a short, upturned nose and mouth framed with short, thin lips lent to him a demure appearance. With every pothole-induced jolt of the bus, a modest suitcase bounced about on his lap. Scuffed and worn from use, it was stuffed with several changes of the outfit he wore now: a navy blue button-up and matching slacks, with a black short-sleeve undershirt and beret-style sailor's cap embossed with the Noravean coat positioned before a golden anchor.

The bus continued its crawl out of Annesport's residential districts, block after identical block of drab, brutalistic concrete high-rises. These tenement buildings formed a ring around the taller, more developed downtown core of the city situated neatly on the coast. Nearly all of the city's residents lived in a tenement flat housed within one of these structures. Products of Grey's planned government, these housing complexes were all constructed in a uniformly shoddy and drab fashion. Teodor's wife did what she could to spruce their flat up. Soft, richly colored rugs on the cold tile floors did much to make the entry and bedrooms more inviting spaces, velveteen curtains around the windows somehow made their 8th story view of the tenement forest more inviting and less dystopian. Framed prints of Laurentian impressionist works drew the eye away from the white cinderblock walls and the government-issued portrait of Crimson Grey that Teodor insisted be displayed prominently in the entry room. Each time he went on deployments, his wife would take down the printed painting of a young, handsome Grey clad in full military regalia and hide it behind a dresser, only for Teodor to replace it within an hour of returning home. Teodor wasn't sure if she did this because she truly found the portrait ugly and out of place, or if it was her way of protesting against the Regime for taking Teodor from her and the children for months at a time.

Teodor watched a street cleaner brush refuse off the sidewalks into a filthy gutter running alongside the street, clearing the streets in preparation for the rush of morning commuters. Surely there were worse means of employment, could his wife not see that? To be sure, six-month deployments were brutal to a family man. He had missed many anniversaries, birthdays, and milestones in the line of duty. While his daughter Yulia was being delivered, Teador was somewhere under the Eastern Sea, monitoring the reactor gauges, aware that his child was due to be born any day. But for the difficulties, the Regime had rewarded him and his family well. He could afford to house, feed, and clothe the family on his salary alone, allowing his wife to maintain the home and care for Ulrich and Yulia. With the country's current [i]situation[/i], that was work enough.

Cars and trucks skirted about and weaved around the bus as it trundled out of the residential neighborhoods into the fringes of downtown Annesport, many more than were typically on the road at quarter to six. The city architecture here had more character, red brick high rises housed department stores and offices, arcades of century-old beech trees shaded the streets, the weathered spires of a gothic-style church peered over its neighbors. This was Old Annesport, what remained after Grey's Regime had mowed down much of the original city to build a modern city worthy of serving as the headquarters of the Noravean Armada.

In the shade of the beech trees, vagrants nestled around the trunks in clusters, some panhandling the pedestrians, others still laying asleep on bedrolls, strips of cardboard, and whatever else they could find to keep themselves off the cold concrete. These were refugees, thousands of them had been converging upon Annesport. In the past four weeks, as the country's situation sharply worsened, the towns and countryside had become dangerous, and people were seeking safety in the cities where the Regime still exercised control. At dinner, after the children had excused themselves, Teodor's wife would often recount rumors she had heard from his neighbor's wives. She'd report on paramilitaries and rebels going openly about the countryside, how police were being shot in broad daylight - As the crackdown wore on, and their dinners become more and more meager, his wife began voicing her desire to leave the country.

"I'll write my cousin in Neukirchen," she'd suggest. "The children and I can stay with her, then we can move to the West once we get our papers in order. Her daughter did that and cleans hotel rooms now. She makes nearly as much as you do! Why, she even saved up and bought a cellular telephone!" Teodor would have no more of such talk. He would not have his dear wife scrubbing foreigner shit out of hotel commodes - not for any amount of money.

At least not until Ulrich fell sick.

As food prices went up during the situation, Teodor's salary bought less and less food. Yulia and Ulrich both had been losing weight for the past two months. Two weeks into the crackdown, Ulrich came down with a severe case of influenza. And if food had become scarce, medicine was almost impossible to get. When his wife came home late one night with a bottle of pills clutched in white-knuckled fists and a deep purple black eye, Teodor at last realized the gravity of the political situation. No amount of state television figures or regime propaganda could allow him to return a blind eye to the crisis at hand. This was not just another cycle of turbulence that came once every ten or so years. The days of the Grey Regime were numbered, and multitudes would die with him.

"I want you to go to your cousin in Wilhelmsland," Teodor asked of his wife as he packed the suitcase that morning. "Don't wait for a letter to return, just take the children and go." She nodded in tacit, solemn agreement, fully aware of the gravity of his request. The family of a military member fleeing the country would be a grave disgrace to Teador's character. The Red Guard had "erased" people for less than that. But if half of the rumors his wife had told were true, then it could very well be that there would not be a Red Guard for much longer.

A pair of camouflage-painted military trucks drove by on Teodor's side, each carrying six armed soldiers standing in the truck bed. They seemed to be patrolling the refugees, keeping them from passing the threshold between Old Annesport and the harbor district. The bus passed through a series of intersections that marked the boundary between the two districts and the massive, concrete edifices returned. Smokestacks, radiotowers, and shipping cranes dominated the skyline of the waterfront districts of the city. Blocky factories and plants that should have been spewing pillowy clouds of exhaust high into the crisp morning air through towering smokestacks were idle, wharves that could unload massive cargo ships in the space of an hour were all but vacant. The allied sanctions had induced cardiac arrest upon Annesport's industrial heart.

Jutting out of a coast of wharves and jetties, a massive edifice build upon a concrete peninsula constructed in the brutal, blocky motif of the Regime overlooked an enclosed harbor ringed by seawalls and concrete wavebreakers. Tall fences crowned in barbwire composed the inland-facing perimeter. This was the Anchorage of the Noravean Armada, the bus stopped on the waterfront road just in front of the perimeter fencing, Teodor stood up from his seat and disembarked the bus with his battered old suitcase bouncing and clicking with each step. This was his stop.

His bus had to swerve around a crowd of people that had gathered around the perimeter gatehouse and extended beyond the sidewalk well into the road, much to the chagrin of irritated motorists who vocalized their annoyance in bursts of honks. Some of these people appeared to the same rural refugees he had seen camped in the old city, many others had a tougher, more muscular appearance - stevedores and dockworkers who had been let go by their employers.

"C'mon, just for a day. I'll do whatever needs done. I got kids to feed." One pleaded.

"Scrub the floors? Chip paint off the boats? You name it, I'll do it."

"Hey! No cutting, motherfucker!"

Teodor shoved his way through the teeming crowd of unemployed, slinking through the masses until he reached a pair of armed guards guarding the turnstile gate.

"The Armada has no hiring process, leave!" One of the guards recited to Teodor as he approached, ready to bear a baton against his head. Before the cudgel could reach his head, Teodor produced a laminated identification card from his pocket and presented it to the guards.

"Let him in," the guard crowed, failing to apologize for nearly clubbing Teador in the head. Teador pressed his weight against the heavy mass of revolving metal and proceeded down the way to the anchorage once inside the perimeter. Angry yelling flared up from the crowd as he made his way to his post.

The crisis was getting out of hand, people were getting desperate indeed to try to solicit the Armada for work. Teodor had heard of mobs of famished citizens in other parts of the country rushing police forces. Some versions of the stories said the police were guarding a grocery store, another retelling held that the rioters were simply annoyed with the police's indifference and took their anger out on them. In such a volatile environment, it would take only a spark to instigate a crackdown worse still than what his peers had been calling the "Crimson Weeks". Little wonder then that the order to mobilize for deployment had been made; what made Teodor wonder was how suddenly the order had come down. The bellicose rhetoric of the Allied Nations notwithstanding, a snap mobilization for a submarine crew was a startling development. Had the Armada finally decided to prepare itself for the possibility that the allies' ultimatum was not actually a bluff?

In any case, Teodor Grenzer fell into line with the other deckhands gathering at a metal gangplank bridging the gulf between a concrete pier jutting into the harbor and the smooth, black form of the ANS Lupine. There, he and his countrymen stood in rigid silence, preparing mentally for what could very well be a combat tour.


[hider=Summary]Haha, no.[/hider]