First Cause: Homecoming is under construction–stay tuned! In the meantime, a brief First Cause snippet:
After hanging up the phone, Angela wandered to the chosen meeting place to wait for Adam. She sat on a bench, knowing she had a bit of time to kill, and buried her head in her hands. She wondered if she was doing the right thing.
Since birth, Angela and hundreds of thousands of fellow Luceri–collectively known as Terranauts–had been raised on a secluded compound on their home planet of Lucero, as part of an intricate long-range plan called the Terra Project. Representing a generation and a half of highly disciplined warriors, the Terranauts were schooled heavily in selected areas of human history as well as a myriad of combat and survival techniques; the stated purpose of the Project was the repatriation of the Luceri people to Earth, their original home planet. Angela was one of a relatively small number of Terranauts who had been sent to Earth’s industrial centers as advance scouts.
As part of their schooling, Terranauts were repeatedly reminded that they were on the front end of a new era in Luceri civilization, and that theirs was a vital role in the future of the human species. They were sworn to secrecy–a level of secrecy that would have alarmed the average Luceri–about the precise details of their training; in fact, the vast majority of Luceri were unaware of their existence. The average Luceri, Terranauts were told, was not sufficiently informed in certain areas of terrestrial and Luceri history to properly grasp the Project’s context and objectives. As such, Angela and her fellow Terranauts were taught to be proud of their birth into this most select of groups, and to regard terrestrials as kin, but also to use force if it was necessary to make them understand the necessity and inevitability of this next stage in history. Angela had absorbed this instruction as might anyone indoctrinated from birth to the exclusion of opposing viewpoints, and though she had been something of an independent thinker compared with her fellow trainees, her mental acuity combined with what she had been told about the terrestrials to reinforce a guiltless superiority complex.
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