[color=7b8973][h3]W.O. "Mikey" Rangel[/h3][hr][b]Refugee Camp, North of Manila - 12/3/2022, 10:53, UTC+8[/b][/color][hr]
"You're welcome!" Mikey gave the man what her mother would have called her thousand-watt smile as he took the bag of rice from her hands. As soon as he took it, she let out a puff of breath and wiped at her forehead with a hand, trying her best to dry her forehead. The temperature really wasn't that bad--it was in the low 80s--but she had yet to get used to the humidity. She had been raised in southern California, where they were lucky to get more than a foot of rain in a year; from what she had been told, Manila got more than that in a month during the summer. [color=7b8973][i]Ugh. Think I'd just melt.[/i][/color]

She popped the lid on her canteen and sipped ice-cold water, closing her eyes to savor it. At least she wasn't on some godforsaken march to nowhere, sweating her ass off purely because the CO thought she was getting "soft". She had been skeptical when the call went out in TFO for people to help hand out food to the refugees. She didn't think she was too good for the work, but that was the kind of thing she had expected the task force's newly designated leader to think. Apparently she'd been wrong, and Mikey had jumped at the opportunity for a distraction. Training and prep for the coming mission could burn a lot of her spare time, but the downside of it was that by the nature of the activity, it didn't exactly help distract her from the fact that it would be all too soon before she was in her first shooting engagement.

Still, the scene here wasn't that much better. Utilitarian tents had been pitched in a line, serving long lines of displaced refugees with packaged water and staple foods; the refugees themselves all looked tired but determined as they waited for the chance to get their allotments. It reminded her of when she was very young, and her family had evacuated ahead of a wildfire that had thankfully ended up not reaching their house--except they and the other people in the shelter had been able to go back home the next day. These people weren't so lucky; some of them were less than a hundred miles from their homes, but they might as well have been across the ocean--at least until the so-called "Continuation Government" finally put down their guns.

Well, in any case, it felt good to be doing something to help--especially something that didn't involve fighting.

Mikey sighed, then turned to one of her fellow Arms Masters putting their own dent in the pallet of rice and offered them the canteen. [color=7b8973]"Hydrate or die-drate,"[/color] she chirped, trying to sound flippant.