Jim Raynor sat silently in the Confederate transport, looking out the window. He was being relocated to a Confederate “Rehab/Counseling Facility”, which he was fairly certain was not what the complex was really used for. He had heard rumors on his journey, and even before he had left the prison, that this place was nothing more than a giant torture chamber. He looked around him, at the many other criminals, all looking very nervous and scared. Apparently they had heard similar rumors. Most wore manacles and were pinned to the walls of the transport. Jim was not one of them.
The transport stopped outside what looked to be the main entrance. An irritated looking guard started shoving all the people that were not chained down outside of the transport towards the entrance of the building. Jim was among them.
“Come on, already! I ain’t got all day!” he screamed in the direction of Jim. Jim glowered at him. He was not a big fan of angry guards.
“Move it, you assholes! This is like watching grass grow!” Jim had no idea what the guard was talking about; he had never seen grass in his life. It didn’t grow where he came form. And this only infuriated Jim more. He hated to think that he was missing something. On his way out of the transport, he deliberately tripped and slammed into the guard.
“Oops. Didn’t mean for that to happen, sir. These bastards were pushing me…” Jim apologized, smirking.
“Like hell they were!” the guard shouted. He proceeded to bash Jim several times with a metal pipe that he kept with him. Jim winced and kept moving. It felt like his shoulder was dislocated. He turned behind him once he was safely away from the guard, and saw him administering the same treatment to others as well.
Yet another guard ushered them into a waiting room. There were guards everywhere, most of them armed- the place was crawling with them.
“Form a line, damn it,” one of them snarled over the noise. “You gotta sign some crap before you can go anywhere.” Obediently, everybody started making a line.
Some fat official came up to the front of the line and handed the first person a clipboard and a pen. Jim was near the back of the line, so it took awhile for the clipboard to get back to him. When it finally did, he saw it was merely a list:
He signed his name, but was at a loss as how to determine his number.
“Buddy, hurry up. We all gotta sign it too, you know.” It was the man behind him.
“I, uh, don’t know my number.” Jim muttered.
The man sighed. “Its on your sheet, man. You know, the one where the judges told you you were gonna go here? That one.” Jim dug the sheet out of his pocket, and looked at his number: 009-17-467-12C. He quickly scribbled it down, and then passed the form on to the man behind him.
He was bewildered as to what he was supposed to do next, but the fat official beckoned to him, ending his confusion abruptly.
“You, boy. Come here, now. You’re an R, right?” Jim once again had no idea what was going on, and the man, seeing his obvious uncertainty, sighed. “Your last name starts with a R, don’t it?”
Jim nodded.
“That’s what I thought. You’re Raynor. From now on, that’s your name: Raynor. Just Raynor.”
Jim shrugged. The way he thought of it, it didn’t really matter what the Confederates called him; he would always know his own name. The official told Jim to follow him to where he would be quartered. He looked around him along the way, and came up with only one conclusion: “This place,” Jim said to himself, “must be big as hell.”
He was right. They walked for a good half-hour before the fat official got tired and summoned one of the indoor transports that kept navigating around them and other slower-moving people and machines. After that, they still rode for another fifteen minutes, until they got to where they were going.
The official, still wheezing from their previous walk, got off the transport, followed by Jim while a guard watched them with a big grin on his face. Jim was smiling too, mainly because the official looked so hilarious walking like he did: the man almost waddled; he was that obese. The official seemed ignorant to it all.
He led Jim to a large series of rooms, which looked like living quarters.
“This,” he said, angrily (Jim realized that maybe he had known that Jim and the guard had been laughing at him.) “is where you will stay for the next five months. You will never leave these four rooms, namely, a bedroom, bathroom, dining room, and a common room, which you share with othersm, for the whole time unless you are summoned to meet with me or other Confederate officials, which will be often.”
“Uhh, a few questions, man. Who are these others? And why will I be talking with Confederates so often?” Jim inquired.
The man sighed. “First of all, Raynor,” (here Jim gritted his teeth) “you are a Confederate, just like every one else here. We are all Confederates, whether we work for them, or we are civilians. It’s just like you’re a human. Everybody is human. And another thing, show some respect: I’m not ‘man’; I’m a high-ranking Confederate official, by the name of Gregory Nuron. You could at least address me by my title.” He pointed at his nametag, which Jim read.
“Wow. ‘Confederate Minister of Domestic Disorder Reparations and Military Re-organization.’ Big title. Impresses me all to hell. Bet your momma’s proud of you.” Jim smirked.
The man turned a shade of bright red. “Don’t start on me, boy. I know what happened to your mother.” Jim started for him, and the fat official backed away and started sweating.
Jim grabbed the much larger man by the neck. “Boy? Boy? Hah. I ain’t the one sitting here shaking and sweating like a stuck pig. And don’t even mention my mother because, God help me, I’ll kill you and you’ll wish you’d never been born.”
Jim didn’t get to continue, because the official had pushed a small emergency button on his belt a moment before. Guards rushed in and restrained Jim, helping the collapsed official to his feet, who claimed that Jim had ‘suddenly rushed him for no reason, threatening to kill him.’ Jim laughed and spit in the official’s face, which only got him more cuffs from the guards.
He was locked in his ‘bedroom’, which consisted of a hard cot shoved against the wall, in a space not big enough for a large dog to live in. Jim could barely move, and had only enough room to slide his legs off the side of the bed before they bumped into a wall.
The next day, shortly after he awoke, a transmission came over the small computer mounted in the wall in Jim’s bedroom. It was the official.
“Raynor, are you awake?”
“You dumb ass. Does it look like I’m asleep or something?” he shouted.
“Ok, ok, just checking. Now, Raynor, I want to talk.”
“That’s evident.” Jim smirked. “I’m not as stupid as you are, so you don’t have to point out the obvious to me, despite what your mommy might have taught you.”
The official gritted his teeth and muttered a few curses under his breath.
“Lets try and keep this civil, Raynor. I’ll follow the rules, and you make an attempt, all right? Ok, good. Now, Raynor, I hate to admit it to you, you’ll just get a bloated head, but we need you… you see, the Confederacy is kinda lacking in good military officers at this point. And after the tests we ran on your information, we decided that you show good possibilities for advancement. Now, there is an alternative, see… I happen to have a list of guards across the Confederacy that ain’t exactly your best friends, if you know what I’m saying.”
“I get it.” Jim snarled. “So pretty much, if I don’t join your little club, you get angry guards to perform various methods of torture on me?”
“Yep.”
“Ok, then, I guess I’ve made my decision… I’ll go with your plan.”
“You’re right, Raynor, you are smarter than I thought.” The official said with a big grin.
“And you’re a lot braver when there’s some walls in between us.”
The officials face got ugly. “Lets put it this way, Raynor: You won’t be happy, but neither will we. But we both need each other. Understand? Good.”
The transmission image faded out, and Raynor sat back in bed, waiting for the summons he knew would come.
And so Jim Raynor was ‘persuaded’ to join the Confederates, but it was a nervous alliance. He spent the rest of his five-month sentence in training at the facility. However, the Confederacy held all the cards, so Jim had little to hope for but to spend the rest of his life as a Confederate soldier. Maybe, Jim thought, he would become resigned to his fate. It wasn’t likely.
