News: PlanetSide 2 COMM-LINK 003 Intro to Backstory

[Traak]

A take on the beginning. Let's see how close their version comes to mine. Or vice versa.

I was a miner working the mines for the Terran Republic. The deeper we went, the stranger it became. At 50,000 feet deep, we ceased needing lights in the mine. There was this kind of glow. The element was Auraxium. Tough stuff to process, but, man, it was awesome stuff for making pretty well anything you wanted to.

Our overlords wouldn't let off the pace, no matter how many "heat-related deaths" we had. They wanted their frickin' Auraxium, and we had to mine it. And they got it, but it wouldn't continue forever.

At 100,000 feet, we struck a nerve. Not with the TR, but with the planet. A miner found a vein in the rock that was glowing a different color than the Auraxium. He took a swing at it with his pick, and the... stuff started climbing up his pick. He tried to wrest it loose, but the stuff just kept coming, and enveloped him. He disappeared in a kind of green floating cloud or something. Gone. Vanished.

That was sad. Tragic. Put the whole mine on a grumble that day. Until he showed up in the showers the next day. Same guy. No injuries. Same outfit. But, there he was. When news spread, the Terrans (most of the miners had been born on Auraxis) dragged him out of the barracks and tossed him into a transport.

Evidently, they weren't too kind about their interrogation techniques, and he died. Or, as the scuttlebutt had it, disappeared again. This time, he was smart enough not to make himself known. He "respawned" at around three A.M. In the mine, near a drill that had hit the same substance.

We kept him secret, kept him hidden. We all took turns at the vein in the rock.

And, you know what? We all started feeling a lot less worried about dying. A few accidents happened, as happens in mines, and people just... vaporized, or whatever you call it. Then they came back.

Soon, we realized the Terrans couldn't possibly hold us down. What were they gonna do? Kill us?

We started turning our requests into demands. Then we started turning them into threats. As the news spread among the mines, the hunt for similar veins was on, and people started finding them, and continuing to hide them from the Terrans.

We called ourselves the New Conglomerate. Conglomerate is a type of rock containing disparate types of rock, and it just seemed fitting. We made our plans. We started fashioning weapons. Then, on C-day, we rose up. The Terrans seemed to be winning for the first day. Little did they know that those of us who died, well, we weren't gone for long.

We overwhelmed them with sheer numbers. The kill ratio of TR to NC started at 1:10, what with their heavy vehicular weapons. But, as we used kamikaze techniques to keep killing them, destroying their weapons, and overwhelming their defenses by sheer human-wave tactics, the kill ratio started to fall. When they finally woke up to the fact that they weren't winning, they surrendered. There was a new sheriff in town, and his uniform was blue and yellow, the colors of the first vein we struck, and an alloy of auraxium.

The TR did not stay docile for long, however. As luck would have it, they, too discovered the secret of the respawn. However, by that time, we were evenly matched. We had our own vehicles, our own weapons, and similar numbers. They couldn't turn one person into two, so the war was on.