User:Distant Tide/Sandbox 3

{|style="width:100%;" "The Spartans gave me a purpose in life, I was nobody before they recruited me. Nobody. Just another war orphan after my dad offed himself. They gave me a new start. They gave me a family. They gave me everything I have."

- Andra-D054 to Cassandra-G006.

Andra-D054, also known as Andra Kearsarge by personal preference, is a Delta Company commando with a standing reputation as a temperamental subordinate with ongoing traumatic and fraternization concerns. She was the protege to late SPARTAN-III, Joshua-G024, and partner and significant other of fellow Spartan Merlin-D032. Originally assigned to Spartan Team Boson, she served as the unit's designated marksman and bomb technician; recent performance reviews have encouraged the Spartan Headhunter community to pursue her recruitment.

Born too late to participate in the, Andra graduated from initial Spartan training before becoming a. Stationed on in support of Internal Investigations Unit 419, she participated in several high-profile missions in North and South America. Following two team desertions and Team Boson's reorganization, Andra-D054 was attached to the assassination unit, VIOLET-III, during the border war with the Imperium of Clarity and subsequent ONI frontier investigations.

During the, Andra was acquired by Task Force Phoenix following a squabble between superior officers and deployed on missions to neutralize key support structures, particularly the Iskander Syndicate.

Military Daughter
"My dad was in Signals Intelligence. My mom served in the Army as a combat medic. I think our family went back several generations on 'Octanus-Four' but I don't know much beyond that."

- Andra-D054 reflecting on her past, using colonial slang to refer to her birthplace.

On, Andra Bradford was born to her parents, Sergeant Viktoria K. Bradford and Lieutenant Neville Bradford. A combat medic with the, Andra's mother was incapable of staying beyond the duration of her maternal leave as the continued in its ferocity. After guaranteeing her daughter's stable health, she rejoined with her Army garrison, leaving her husband to raise their only child on his own.

Andra spent her formative years in the care of her doting father who could work close to home due to his employment with ONI Signals Intelligence as a UNSC naval officer and communications analyst. While he often traveled to and, Neville managed to be a constant presence in his daughter's life, only leaving home for a few days at a time. During those business trips, Andra's favorite nanny took care of her.

Because was a, Andra was able to live a fairly regular childhood in her home city of , far from the invading and genocidal. Through her father, she learned how to swim from an early age, developed an early appreciation for guns, participated in her preschool choir, and paid visits to the amusement park and several of Sigma Octanus IV's widely-famous museums.

She started school early in as part of an accelerated colonial education program and was appreciated by teachers for her love of mathematics and history but was described as aggressively-tomboyish due to her father's childrearing. Andra had a competitive streak that outstripped many of her classmates leading to disciplinary issues regarding roughhousing and the occasional injury from trying to participate in aggressive schoolyard games like.

The good times could not last however as the Covenant War finally hit home for Andra on December 11, 2550. Andra's mother made occasional visits home every couple of years, however, on that December evening, two Army officers arrived on the Bradford family's doorstep to deliver grave news to her father. His wife was dead, killed alongside the rest of her unit during the defense of.

Seeing her father collapse in shock, Andra tried to hurt an officer in confusion but turned to cry into the man's shirt after learning of her mother's death. Andra was left at home while her father attended the brief funeral service. He did not return until the next afternoon, drunk and leaning on the shoulder of a family friend,. From that day onward, Andra avoided discussing her mother with her father at her babysitter's recommendation.

In the days that followed his wife's demise, Neville Bradford threw himself into his Naval Intelligence work to avoid the onset of depression and grief. Pouring through intercepted Covenant transmissions and increasing reports of Covenant attacks only furthered his spiral into insomnia, staying at the office overnight and not coming home. It reached a point where returning to the house left Neville feeling a deep sense of anxiety and agitation and his daughter and her caretaker learned quickly to make themselves sparse around him.

For Andra, she found difficulty understanding the loss of her mother – a woman she only met twice in her youth, someone she barely knew. Instead of feeling the same sense of grief as her father, she instead became the center of attention at school with classmates and teachers treading carefully around her for fear of setting off Andra's supposed grief, of which little actually existed. She missed her mother, but more so the idea of the mother she never had.

Andra's father, however, grew more emotionally-volatile as time passed into the new year. Experiments with alcohol, sleep medicine, and psychoactive substances were taking their toll, becoming detrimental to his mental and social health. At home, he was emotionally high-strung, developing into fits of blind rage and thrown glassware, a few hitting Andra on occasion, leaving cuts and bruises. At work, his job performance deteriorated to the point that he was put under investigation for work misconduct and stripped of his job position until inquiries could be performed.

On the outs with the, Neville Bradford sent his daughter to school on , and returned home, high on his mind-altering substance dependency. His depressive mix finally got the best of him and in a drunken stupor, collected his from its closeted lockbox and attempted suicide. Andra returned home later that day to find neighbors and emergency services crowded around her house as they removed her father's corpse from the premises. By committing suicide, Andra's father had turned his only child into a war orphan.

Jade Hope Orphanage
"You were selected for a reason, Andra. You may not think yourself strong, but I do. I know you are. You just don't see it yet. Let me show you – join my program."

- Doctor Reyna Zhou-Romero recruiting Andra into the SPARTAN-III Program.

Following Neville Bradford's death, Andra was acquired by Child Protection Services and transferred to the Jape Hope Youth Treatment Center in Sigma Octanus IV's capital city of. Because Andra's family lived outside military base premises and due to the backflow of new orphan cases, she was marked as a civilian case, leaving her outside the few benefits warranted to some military-raised war orphans. The move was orderly and swift, the local government seized and liquidated the family's assets in accordance with wartime law, Andra was only able to salvage a few personal belongings that fit in a backpack and duffel bag before being shipped out from Enfield.

As one last favor to Andra's parents, Naiya Ray went with the girl to Caracas to see her off. Before leaving the girl to her new accommodations, she promised her friend's daughter she would come back to visit when she got the chance, maybe even adopt the orphan girl. She would never get the chance.

All Andra had left now were the memories of her childhood and the horrors of her father's abuse and suicide. At Jade Hope YTC, she failed to fit in and came to know a lifestyle worse than the one she left. The Covenant War sapped resources and finances from society and the orphanage was taking a hit with food shortages and cheap amenities. By the end of her first month there, she was just another new resident orphan among a sea of war orphans. Most of the children that came to Jade Hope were off-worlders, children who lost their families as the colonies were. The lack of common trauma between Andra and the other orphans made her feel isolated.

Reverting to her defense mechanism of hostility, Andra pushed the other children away and found content in drawing pictures by herself in the courtyard behind the orphanage under a tree while the other children went on to play active games like kickball, basketball, and "Kill the Split-Jaw". The only time adults tried to encourage Andra to participate with the other children ended with her sending six boys to the nurse's office because they made her the Split-Jaw in their courtyard game.

Andra's disregard for others chased away potential friends and five different foster parent prospects; her only acquaintance was the nine-year-old boy sleeping in the bunk above her, nicknamed "Legs" for heeling her forehead in the mornings. She was confined to the part-tent, part-cabin dormitories for a full year until, when an ONI acquisition team led by Doctor Reyna Zhou-Romero approached Andra with a life-altering proposition.

Independent of her parents' prior military affiliations, Andra had caught the attention of the as SPARTAN-III Gamma Company approached their graduation. A civilian consultant and recruiter for the program, Doctor Romero informed the owners of Jade Hope she was part of a government policy to check-in on children of deceased ONI personnel. In private, she informed Andra of an opportunity to join the next recruitment pool for the SPARTAN-III Program, much to the girl's shock.

Apprehensive and shy, Andra's response was slow and reluctant but she eventually agreed after deliberating on the offer and a few choice words that shook her deeply, particularly the part where the recruiter admitted she believed in Andra. After a year of isolation and depression, the concept of someone caring for her motivated her into action. Doctor Romero left the orphanage on a positive note, promising to return soon.

Driven by the promised brighter future, Andra jumped into her assigned chores and began participating in courtyard games without telling anyone about why she changed. On April 24, 2552, ONI agents led by Lieutenant Commander Jefferson Korn arrived at Jade Hope YTC to retrieve Andra. Under the guise of joining an early beginner officer cadet program, she was shipped off-world in to a classified ONI holding facility until SPARTAN-III Gamma Company completed training.

The, the SPARTAN-III training colony, in November 2552 nearly ended the program and Andra's prospects as a Spartan until alternative means of continuation was established.

The First Batch
"Welcome to Camp Ambrose, trainees. This is your new home."

- Sergeant Francis Dellend greeting his new trainees.

Upon exiting Slipspace on, the UNSC freighter Give Me More entered the Argus star system near Argus V, the SPARTAN-III Program's new training colony world. Onboard was the nicknamed "First Batch", the first 150 hibernating candidates for SPARTAN-III Delta Company, including Andra. Awoken from cryostasis for the first time, she received the consequence of the new experience and puked her thawing stomach innards inside her.

Alongside Andra, another twenty war orphans awoke in the nude with feelings of confusion and embarrassment on top of upset stomachs. The presence of strangers frightened the girl, reactivated latent antisocial habits, causing her to curl up and retreat into a dark corner. Few noticed; soon after, a pair of UNSC drill instructors arrived to greet the new arrivals, providing them with cheap, uniform workout attire and tasteless protein bars for breakfast which many promptly threw up again. They were then led to the freighter's crowded observation deck to meet their new classmates, get a look at Argus V from orbit, and meet Sergeant Francis Dellend.

Once the crowd of children settled down, they were strapped into cushion chairs for the reentry descent into Argus V's atmosphere, landing hours later on the outskirts of the incomplete Camp Ambrose, the new Spartan training installation named for deceased SPARTAN-III trainer.

Andra and other children were gathered in the Camp cafeteria for initial processing, receiving laundry and toiletry items for their extended stay along with Spartan tags to designate them as military property. Due to trauma inflicted by her father, Andra reveled in the loss of her old last name, becoming "Andra-D054." Fed dinner and sent off to the dormitories, Andra and other trainees with numbers D050 through D059 settled into Cabin 005 for the night and the immediate future.

Pre-conditioning training was far from easy for Andra but she made herself at home on Argus V adequately, participating in exercise and advanced education courses and reacquiring her love for learning. She took her drill instructors' warnings of future intensification seriously though floundered under their intense verbal assaults. Doctor Romero continued to show interest in Andra's early development, assigning the girl as her office helper much to Andra's delight and the doctor's further words of encouragement kept her engaged.

The office work also distracted and distanced Andra from her fellow trainees, giving her rare moments of privacy and comfort away from the trainers, trainees, and the occasional, new arrivals. She didn't have an interest in making friends and often stayed to the sidelines, avoiding the drama spotlight.

That changed when Merlin-D032 decided to approach her a couple of weeks into March. Amicable towards his cabinmates, Merlin was well-liked for a boy on the quiet side. He and Andra previously shared the same hibernation chamber and it was from her standoffish behavior during outdoor activities that he recognized her hiding again, drawing stick pictures in the mud. Approaching her shady spot beneath a high-security wall, Merlin attempted to talk to her only to get ignored until he started talking about his parents and asking about hers. The sore topic reached a boiling point and Andra proceeded to jump the irritating boy, delving into a mud wrestling match.

Exhausting one another, Merlin narrowly claimed victory, restraining the enraged-crying girl. The two were soon pulled apart by drill instructors and chewed out for dirtying their uniforms and fighting leading to punishment. It was the first time either trainee received demerits and would set up Merlin and Andra as cold strangers early into training.