Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Pawn

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The Footman is the standard infantry of the Grey Steel Order. Planned to be voiced by.

Overview
* TBA*

History
"So this is where our missing MG teams went..."

-Harold G. Moore

Throughout the centuries, whenever the Order has a task that requires military force to be accomplished, their preferred method is to get someone else to do it. There are many reasons for this. One of the reasons is that manipulating someone else into doing it is far less likely to expose the Order's existence than if they were to send in Order troops. Another is that the Order doesn't need to risk the lives of their own men.

This method continues to be used today. While the soldiers duped into fighting for the Order no longer fight with swords and arrows as they did in earlier centuries, they still bear the same name: Pawns. Pawns are, as the name implies, unwitting pawns, soldiers of local militaries, completely unaware of whose purposes they are fulfilling. They are tricked into fighting on the Order's side by Grey Steel sympathetic superior officers, falsified orders, or various other means, and help to provide mass to Order forces. Pawns are kept in the dark about the strange forces they fight alongside, often explained away as secretive branches of whatever country's military they serve in. The Order have no need to train and arm them, meaning there is little no cost to deploy them in a battle.

In right time and right place, anyone could become an unwitting Pawn: an Erune Warrior thinking she's cooperating with Allies, a Spy tasked to investigate bizarre cult activities in the Balkans, a Leech Walker pilot desperately trying to fawn on his new "comrade commander". But the most utilized and consumed type of all Pawns, to the point they are now rarely seen among their own ranks, is heavy machine gun teams.

Given their superb performance in the GVAW, HMG teams were kept in every major power's army throughout the Cold War. However, World War III is very different from the last one, while HMG teams are not. With a forward firing arc, they can now easily be flanked and destroyed by anti-infantry vehicles, which are much faster thanks to engine improvements. Tactical artilleries have become more agile and accurate too, making the long setup/teardown time a death sentence for MG crews. Having suffered huge casualties, HMG teams were soon pulled from the front lines and benched to AA guard duties, which they did with mediocre efficiency because their weapons can do little damage to thick-skinned airships like Kirov, while thin-skinned jets are too fast to manually aim at. Gradually most commanders largely ignored their existence and wouldn't take a second look at an order requesting their transfer to another command. On the other hand, the Order is in constant need of AA capability to engage the increasingly annoying Syndicate helicopters. No wonder HMG teams have become the most iconic one among all kinds of Pawns manipulated by the Order. For similar reasons, foot-mobile anti-tank guns along with their crews could be easily "acquired" and allocated to the most heated battles.

Pawns, no matter which kind of them, are generally considered cannon fodders and not given support or medical attention by Order forces. They usually aren't expected to survive a single battle, and those who do are often killed off in order to preserve the secrecy of the Order, who are okay with letting others die in place of their own elite, highly trained troops. A small portion of survivors will be given the opportunity to join the Order if they're deemed worthy enough, of course refusal will be met by death.