When I was little, I loved my mother with all my heart. Her face was scarred, but your mother is your mother. When I was a bit older, Dad would take me fishing and teach me how to tie on a hook, and how to cast, and how to put on your own bait. It was icky, but a man has to do icky things. Dad had squinty eyes and wore sunglasses a lot, and Hawaiian shirts. Dad used to say "To Work Is To Lose" and then he would laugh, and mom would laugh, and I'd laugh because we were all laughing. Mom and Dad met in the War, far from where we lived in Thailand. Our home was a little paradise, with my uncles living in the compound, along with their own wives and children. They weren't really uncles, but they did whatever Mommy said and called her Major, or sometimes Balalaika. Mommy taught me how to shoot rifles when I was about 7 years old. And Daddy taught me how to shoot and move and not get shot. He always looked angry when he was doing that, or bored and frustrated. I don't think Daddy liked the war very much. Mommy taught me how to speak Russian. Daddy taught me to speak Japanese. We went on vacation there, to Japan. It was very very safe there. Daddy only had to kill a few gangsters, and Mommy bribed some officials. Mommy and Daddy are good at business.
My name is Sousuke. Daddy says his last name had to be changed to prevent a paradox. So our secret last name, when we go on vacation, is Sagara. Daddy told me something really important and he made me promise to remember. He said that once upon a time he was walking up the stairs at his school and opened the door to the roof and instead of the roof of the school he found himself in Afghanistan 25 years in the past. That's where he met mommy.
He said that someday this might happen to me, that I might open a door and end up somewhere else. And if I'm not ready to stay alive I might die there, so I must be prepared no matter what. After that Daddy and Mommy and uncles trained me how to survive, how to duck and sneak and evade pursuit and how to set bombs and disarm them.
And so it was, when I was eleven years old, that I went to use the bathroom while flying on a plane between Thailand and UAE for vacation with my family and when I stepped out, all the passengers were different, the color of the upholstery was different, the engines were louder, and my seat was occupied by a fat woman. Mom and Dad were not there. I found an open seat and strapped in, trying not to panic. The engine trouble and forced landing and failure of the landing gear meant we crashed, but it was a crash I walked away from.
Unfortunately, the world seems to have it in for us Sagaras, because the plane ended up in Afghanistan, and the Mujahedeen kidnapped the passengers, including me. I had learned Farsi and Arabic from Dad. Not good, but enough to explain I would rather fight than be a hostage because nobody could pay a ransom for me. I think I ended up better off than many of the other plane's passengers. Anybody who complained too loud was killed.
The Mujahedeen forced me to fight their war against the Russians. They called me Kashim. Only, I don't think this was the same world as home. It was 2005, and the original war between the Russians and Afghans ended in 1990. The other thing is the Russians had big five meter tall bipedal tanks they called "arm slaves". The pilot operated the tank from a seat in the armored chest, and the computer systems let it move like a person, only really big. We were up against these tanks with their huge guns and grenade launchers which could blow up a whole house or take out an older tank with one shot, and all we had were RPGs and AK-74's and our wits. My skills from training with my parents and my uncles, who I had since come to realize were Afghan War veterans saved my life many times. It was during these frequent ambushes I earned my scars, including the ones on my face, in two different events. Eventually I was captured by the Russians and during interrogation they discovered I wasn't an Afghan but a Thai citizen. To buy my freedom I was told to work for a Russian officer named Kalinin. We were hunting a mercenary who was working for the KGB as an assassin. One day we found a village that had been slaughtered to the last woman and child by two RK-92s, one of them piloted by Gauron, the mercenary. We swore vengeance and hunted him. I was able to spot the guy after weeks of effort trailing him and shot him in the head. We exfiltrated rather than be captured by the KGB.
Kalinin wanted to recruit me into his team and I ended up following him to Mithril, a global PMC with some very high technology weapons systems. And I finally got clean enough and calm enough to sleep properly.
I went on many missions. I rescued kidnapped Whispered, usually girls or women who were cursed with memetic dreams of lost technology, technology that nations fought over, and used in war.
One day, a few years later when I was 16, I was told I had an undercover mission to protect a Japanese high school girl. But that's another story.
I still like to go fishing. It reminds me of my Dad.