And the story of the Special Photography And Intelligence Scouts
So we here in FAN have been watchin' the fireworks lately and saving cash grande on our electricity bill by turning off the nightlights (since everything glows in the dark nowadays). Went through a few storerooms of cheap booze... Gave some local Dung Beetles a hand with clearing out the waste... Polished a few nukes and added some love notes to the other side on the nosecones... Then we went back to watching the canned sunshine get opened.
Then the nuke show just seemed to kind of... slow down. Kinda like Pickle walking past a group of midgets.
First thing that came to mind was to bust out the radio gear and start seein' who was talking.
MK was making some puppet jokes. NpO was making some quips about 'New Pilate Order'. TOP was broadcasting some kind of numbers station (or doing their super-advanced economic calculations, couldn't tell), and Fark apparently left the mic on while they started looking at Boobies threads.
Then we pointed the antenna towards Pacifica and tuned the scanner...
...nothin.
Which is weird. Because most of the time we have to filter that entire band because they won't shut up. I mean seriously won't. Shut. Up. Announcement after announcement after hail storm after 'Francoism' treatise, they keep it going 24/7. Talk about signal pollution.
Goes without sayin', the sudden dead zone in Pacifican airwaves kind of left us a might spooked. It got really creepy when we checked the lower freqs, and found a looping broadcast that didn't take long to de-scramble.
"Bradzva, Silla, ei Mujdesva, pasz radis Noyd Nochey. Vox Populi."
Which apparently, according to our dusty copy of 'Insta-English', means "Brotherhood, Strength, Fortitude - in the face of the Angry Night. Vox Populi". We could have sworn that last part was Latin of some kind, but apparently it just sounds like it.
Now we're definitely giving the radio gear a major 'WTF?' look by that point. Around that time, the Servers handed some Kool-Aid around and made an declaration. Usually they just make decisions and NPO makes all the 'Declarations', but I guess they wanted to help make things seem more normal. And thus it was declared:
"It's gotta be a friggin' trap. Pass the Jaegermeister."
But it is us, and 'us' is FAN, so we had to find out exactly what kind of trap. There was pretty much one unit in FAN that could satisfy our curiosity, and so deep into the Pacifican Targeting Area, we sent the SPAIS - the Special Photography And Intelligence Scouts.
This is their story.
Day 1[]
Dung Beetles are overworked. Need to cut down on foreign waste. Suggest napalm. Lots of napalm.
Day 15[]
Passed the outlying borders of the Mushroom Kingdom. Talked briefly to some guys from one of their Silo clusters about the fighting. Lots of long rows of crossed-out Franco Stars stenciled on the side of one of their C3 bunkers... very short row of shrooms with sad faces painted underneath. They already have the one direct hit on their firebase patched up, even after all the tonnage exchanged... impressive discipline. The MK troops mentioned a few worn out-lookin' individuals with Francoist accents had wandered through the area, kept talking to themselves about "too many mushrooms" and needin' wheat. Wasn't a pretty sight, from the description he gave us - if there's such a thing as 'so pathetic it's scary', they were it, from the sound of it.
Feel like portabellos with dinner tonight.
Day 28[]
Saw some shambling corpses. Picked them off from a distance with equal amounts both 9mm and .45 to preserve cosmic balance.
Day 39[]
Reached the outlying areas just beyond the Pacifican Targeting Area borders. Saw lots of 'V' symbols painted on burned out NPO vehicles and buildings, plus a bunch of graffiti that says 'Vote for Kingzog' on top of every Imperial Officer portrait you can reach from the ground.
Also discovered a bunch of air-dropped leaflets warning that not voting for approved NPO region senators would lead to roving marauders, societal instability, disruption of services and commerce, no dessert after dinner, arrest, indefinite detention, torture, forced labor, execution, double-secret probation, and cancellation of "Dilber's No-Pants Happy Fun Show Marathon Extravaganza Adventure In Space" from Pacifican TV. Last one on the list there sounds like an improvement. Also makes it easy to see why NPO had to drop threatening leaflets on their own cities to scare their citizens into voting the way the IOs wanted.
I dunno who this Kingzog guy is, or who Vox Populi is, but they get stuff done and from what I can see they got style. I like.
Day 44[]
Not finding much food besides irradiated mushrooms in the abandoned urban areas. Starting to wonder if everybody fled because they couldn't take any more glowing shrooms.
Day 46[]
Found some kind of NPO battle standard we haven't encountered before in any actual warzone... Thought we'd amuse ourselves by tying it onto the radio antenna under the Minuteman.
...Looks dumb, but maybe it'll attract some sheep so we can have lamb skewers with our shrooms.
Day 52[]
Still no sign or sound of any Pacifican civilians. Way too many shrooms around here to do anything except get wasted or leave. Large piles of glowing shrooms in the streets are slowing us down some.
Day 58[]
I think we've found what happened. INTEL Obj. 87-106-9-45 attached:
All the wheat looks like this. We did some quick recon, ran the numbers against the last global intel we had with us, and the results are pretty grim.
Average Wheat resource distribution per region on Plant Bob is, roughly, a generous 14%. Last Global Condor overflights by orbital FAN recon assets showed NPO territory with noticably less, but no definitive numbers. Our quick survey now is showing them with 2% Wheat resource for 944 known nations... 7 times less than average distribution.
We knew they were having trouble with their Wheat harvests, but damn. Communism and wheat just never seem to go together well, I suppose. And now what they had is all nuked and dead. That's gotta suck bigtime.
No wonder we haven't heard anything from them. The ones who didn't run either got nuked or starved to death.
I'm going to terminate the op here and call it done. There's nothing to eat or find any further in, and Mooville is hundreds of miles deeper into their borders.
Declaring op complete and terminated, Day 58, Zulu time 14:38.
Recommend that signs be posted outside Pacifican Targeting Area, warning of extreme shroom innundation and nuclear dead zone.
SPAIS-Alpha log ends.
Broadcasting[]
Pacifican citizens, we'll post this here, just in case some of y'all have radios, but we'll start broadcasting it on the old Imperial Announcement frequencies, too.
"We are the Federation of Armed Nations. We have survived the nuclear war and are living in installations in the Yellow Desert. We are broadcasting on all AM frequencies. We will conduct patrols along the southwestern Pacifican border, in the plains, every day at mid-day, when the sun is highest in the sky. If you are out there, in the Pacifican dead zone... if anyone is still alive out there... we can provide food, we can provide shelter, we can provide security. If there's anybody out there... anybody... please. You are not alone."
I suppose what we should have said a while ago is... even though you and us are mortal enemies, Pacifica, and we knew you were havin' some troubles, we had no idea how bad it really was. Nobody should suffer tha - ok, some of ya folks have earned it, but not all of you.
Y'know, if you needed some wheat, all you had to do was ask. Why didn't you tell us your Wheat crop was failing? So much tragedy could have been averted. Or at least we coulda sold tickets.
Also, can you put us in touch with that Kingzog guy? He and this Vox Populi crew have a style that kinda does it for us, and they're thrivin' in a nuclear dead zone too, which takes a pair of giant lead ones (cause brass doesn't stop gamma rays). Gotta admit, we've got the start of a man-crush goin' and would like to meet up for some Dos Equis and some hot wings. Our treat.
SUMMARY:[]
FAN, in its first humanitarian operation, is offering most Pacifican refugees and surrendered Pacificans some Wheat. Not all, but most. Our discretion.