'Solstice' - History

< Background >

Born in 1996 to a struggling Cajun-French family on the southern outskirts of Baton Rouge, Kara Laurent lived a childhood within southern humidity and quiet desperation. Her parents, though hard-working, barely kept a roof over their heads. When she was fourteen, watching her younger siblings go to bed hungry and the lights go out from time to time from unpaid bills, Kara made a decision. She turned to petty crime. Small pawn shops and corner stores became her way of making money. Fast and careful, she developed a skill in stealing. But the adrenaline that came with stealing to feed your family was always borrowed time.

On her seventeenth birthday, the authorities caught on. A warrant was issued, and the net began closing around her. Knowing her options were jail or exile, she disappeared, fleeing to France under a false identity and enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. It was the only group that didn’t ask too many questions about your past, only what you were willing to do for the present. She was enlisted into the 144th Legionnaire Mobilized Infantry.

She served five and a half years, developing her mind and making her more keen to survival instead of being social. It was in 2018, near the tail end of her service, that she found herself deployed to the rugged, volatile border between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, close to Dushanbe. Unbeknownst to her, she’d soon be caught in a three-way firefight between the Global Occult Coalition, the Chaos Insurgency, and a loose anomaly.

Her unit was burnt up in minutes. GOC air support, misidentifying the Legionnaires as hostiles, rained missiles with complete disregard. Over sixty soldiers died. FFL command offered no explanation, and no support came. Nobody came to come get the 144th.

Kara and four others, Adjudant Rejnik Petovich, Legionnaire-Classe Walter Smithson, Caporal Wilson Lelleun, and a young medic named Rivera barely survived. At night, as the fighting wore on, they slipped away through mountain ravines under scattered gunfire. The terrain was merciless. By dawn, Rivera was dead, killed by fire as they fled. No one ever knew whose side they were on.

For ten hours they climbed toward the Zafarshan mountain range, sick and wounded. A small herder village, tucked among goat pastures and flocks, offered them unexpected shelter. The villagers gave them refuge and food, removing their tattered uniforms and giving them clean clothes.

Insurgent scouts, disguised as Tajik rebels, had been tailing them. On the third day, they found the village. Lelleun succumbed to his wounds in the morning. Now down to three, Kara, ill and exhausted, hid in a farmhouse under a scratchy wool blanket, clothed in a hijab. The men wore tunics.

The “rebels” came asking questions. Petovich resisted. Drawing a hidden sidearm, he shot and wounded one before being tackled and dragged away. Smithson managed to escape in the confusion, stealing a truck and barreling down the mountain road.

Kara remained, alone, watching the pasture beyond the farmhouse through blurred vision. When the door burst open, she ran, but a leg injury stopped her. Instead of dragging her away, the “rebels” gently urged her into their truck. That drive, frigid and silent, changed everything.

They revealed who they truly were. Not rebels, but members of the Chaos Insurgency. Not terrorists, in their words, but “opposition.” The same people that fought the GOC who had left her unit to die. People who, at least for now, weren’t shooting at her.

They brought her to a remote encampment Cell-7291, an operational outpost built into the mountain slope. There, Solstice was born. Kara Laurent, Legionnaire and fugitive, died in that farmhouse.

She stayed. Joined. Trained.

In 2021, she was transferred to SUBCELL-CHAYENNE in the French countryside, tasked with sabotaging Global Occult Coalition and Foundation convoys. Operations varied. Roadside IEDs, interception of medical shipments, simple bombings of outposts.

Now, Solstice is stationed at CELL-OMEGA-2. A general operative trusted for her adaptability.

But she has lived too many lives in too short a time to be surprised by war.