FTdotG

Shiny

Being the guy in charge has its upsides and downsides. There’s the responsibility of command – also known as: It’s Always Your Fault When Things Go Wrong, but you get to skip the queue for the cafeteria and get the fresh bacon on your breakfast sandwich. Day’s off aren’t really a thing neither; you can’t pull a sickie after a night of too many beers, I know because I’ve tried… no, you just get a very confused dragon giving you a head tilt with the words, “you’re not dead general, what seems to be the problem here?” and have no choice but to slink off to your desk nursing a sore head. Or worse, have to listen to Sgt. Raz while nursing a sore head, in which case you wish you actually had died and could be spared the inhumane torture. I have learned some important life lessons this way. 1: never do shots on a work night and 2: noise-cancelling ear buds make everything better.

You do get to make your own fun, though, when there’s nobody above you to say no.

It’s no secret that life out here in the weird corner of the galaxy that I currently reside in is very, very different to the Earth I left behind; nobody here knows what reality television is, or who the Foo Fighters are, or basically any of the references that I make about pop culture. A surprise assault named ‘Operation Spanish inquisition’ is not questioned. Calling every skaven you meet Roland until you learn their name isn’t frowned upon. Telling the men that today’s dinner is made with Scary Spice/Baby spice etc gets a suspicious reaction every time and is hilarious. I even convinced one high-ranking public official to make their civil department’s motto: ‘Life. Liberty. Fruit of the loom’. Heck I made ours: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough charge extra’, which is a slight change of the original song lyrics to fit our attitude aptly but nobody has a clue.

One of my little flairs are medals. Every military has them; shiny, dangly pieces of metal attached to colourful ribbon that show off all your achievements and clank nicely when you walk to remind you how important you are. After all, it’s nice to feel important; I never had the opportunity to be Head Boy at my school or to be Hall Monitor, not even a badge for running cross-country in the set time. That’s because I was too busy being cool. Having to wear a Head Boy tie-pin was for dweebs, telling your fellow pupils to clean their lunch tables and keep the fighting outside the dinner hall was lame and I never ran cross-country because I always came down with the one-day flu when it was going to happen. I’m older now, I’ve matured (against my will, it must be said, if you know about the small-print from my old Hell contract) which has resulted in me embracing the idea of authority and importance as long as it’s my own.

Working for a dragon is not like working for a nation’s defence; there’s no King or Queen to pin medals on you in return for nearly getting your head blown off, you’ve got to do it yourself. This is, on the whole, a thankless job. The people we help are all down on their luck, refugees or simply desperate. They’d have to be, wouldn’t they? We’re a ragtag bunch of monsters at the end of the day. Troublemakers at best and Bad Guys at worst. I call myself an Intergalactic Hero because, again, I can and nobody can stop me.

It all started with my fancy jacket; every great military leader had an iconic look – Napoleon with his taco hat and his hand stuck up his armpit, Julius Caesar with his twigs on his bald head and Hannibal who could have been a cannibal with a leather mouth-cage unless I’m getting confused…

Anyway, I am very fond of my officer’s jacket. It is matte black linen (we’re based in an alien desert, because I loved the heat of Hell so much), and has a wide, red satin trim to the collar and cuffs which is all shiny and great, two big pockets at the bottom to keep my important bits and bobs in like Polo mints, a Tamagotchi which has been resting in peace for the past twenty years, and change for the vending machine, it has five round gold buttons that I rarely fasten up (again, desert) and big epaulettes upon the shoulders for my three gold stars. I would have more, but they would have to be smaller stars and I wasn’t having that! Three-star general would do me nicely. I was making it all up anyway. The inside silk lining is a vibrant blue: the colour of my magic. Not many people see it, but I know it’s there - just like my magic, in fact!

You can’t be a general without medals, though, can you? And as I say, nobody was going to give me any, not even the dragon I work for. Dragons are a funny bunch, aren’t they? Hoarding wealth and collecting stuff all the time, but not wanting to give you much in return for your work. I had to explain pensions to him once. The idea of paying someone who wasn’t working any more really scrambled his lizard brain, I can tell you. Not that we have to worry too much about our men retiring, they don’t live long enough.

So, I jotted down some ideas while I was in calls, for what I could have dangling on my jacket’s upper breast bit. Obviously I had to have a medal for bravery; it takes a fierce warrior to stand strong in the face of the utter insanity I’m in charge of. There’s a reason we’re called the Kaos Army. It’s bedlam here. Most war medals have a head on them of the Royalty or leader you serve, so I had a dragon’s head on mine. On the reverse is engraved: ‘I didn’t die today’. I then followed this up with another of a gold star that says ‘I dressed myself’. I mean, it’s true, I did! Go me. There are also medals for being wounded in action and I cut myself with a stray staple in the office once so I had to have one of those, too. It’s a depiction of a sticky plaster and the word OUCH on the back. Again, nobody pays too much attention to all this, it just looks impressive at a distance.

Proper military officers have so many medals that they forego the metal parts and have a bunch of colourful squares on their top pocket instead to denote them. I have one of these. I have colours not for medals but for my friends: bright green for Rap and Rave the raptors, dark green for the orcs, brown for the skaven, white for the elves, red for the dragon, blue for the suit that my demon pal Crispin always wore in the Underworld, black for Destroyer and grey for my uncle Mortimer. I can be a sentimental soul sometimes.

The idea caught on, shiny things are popular with the curious races on this planet and so I pulled together a committee to decide what medals we could give to our brave troops in return for their asses being on the line on the regular. The orcs are obsessed with all things morbid and macabre so skulls it was. And guns. They love those. High hit counts were rewarded with medals of ‘Badassery’ (it’s probably not even a word. I couldn’t care less. I don’t have to wear one), and breaking your weapon through overuse earned you the ‘Docked From Your Pay’ decoration which gloriously backfired on me when they all went out of their way to get the damn thing.

Our elves are more fancy, preferring elegant designs of white and gold enamel in natural shapes of leaves and flowers. Trust me, they’re the most dangerous hippies I’ve ever laid eyes on. They place value in skill, so we award them for long-range shots: ‘They Didn’t See It Coming’ is a beautiful crimson lotus blossom, and a high kill count for our fairest race earns them a lovely leaf that actually belongs to the hemlock plant. Carrying a weapon that weighs as much as they do can get them the ‘Weebles Wobble’. No takers yet.

Everyone gets a medal for making it through basic training – surviving the daily rants of our dear Cpl. Rave deserves nothing less (I am aware he is overdue a promotion… he’s just such a bastard that I can’t do it. He’d enjoy it too much), this medal has a depiction of his terrible swagger stick upon its circular bronze face and ‘Not Today, Sunshine’ upon the back. Receiving it brings even the mightiest orcs to tears. All those fond memories, I’m sure. Still, all the girls like scars on a man, don’t they?

Surviving your first active duty gives you the ‘Baby’s First Combat’ medal in brass with a number 1 and a balloon on it, much like a birthday badge. They hide that one behind all the others.

Rewarding length of service is essential – I can’t have them all dying off too soon, can I? This is the ‘You Missed!’ medal for 12 months in service going up to the 10-year-service’s ‘1337’ which nobody understands but everyone wants and is in the shape of a lime green Space Invader from the old arcade game.

As with all good fun, though, it must come to an end and I find myself seeking new ways to entertain myself. I have already started spreading some terrible rumours of a deadly invasion of Furbies that has earned us some new security work around the continent as officials have been put on high alert. These deceptively cute, slow-blinking large-eyed furry beasts watch you as you sleep. They are always waiting, their mournful cries of ‘do-wah!’ drifting eerily along the breeze from out of their hard, clacking jaws. Nobody is safe. They are coming for you. Unless you’re brave enough to remove the batteries, that is.

I love my job.