It never felt entirely real.  More than once, she had let herself begin to believe she’d died, that she’d taken that step forward and never made it out of the forest.

I suppose it’d feel like a good afterlife compared to the hell she lived it.

She had made mistakes when she let herself think that way, had put herself in too much danger, back in her earliest years as a hero.

Naturally, most mythologies without rebirth don’t let you die again in the afterlife.

Now, when she found herself slipping into that mindset, she often tried to sleep.  Her memories as she slept were perfect, unblemished, almost more real than real life, which was why she never did it too often.  Ironic, given how necessary it often was, to keep her grounded in reality.

Some sleep to escape reality. It’s the other way around for Hannah.

Wait, no, the forest was specifically implied to have been there when the war started. Either it had other trees too or the parahuman joke theory doesn’t work.

Bright lights and conveniences and wanting for nothing and televisions and sports cars and capped teeth and chocolate and the list went on…  It had taken her the better part of a decade to even start getting used to it, and everything moved so fast that any time she thought she was getting a grasp on it, there was something new, something she was supposed to know or understand.

Am I gonna have to break out that one ICP quote I did again?

She’d accepted without complaint when her adoptive parents told her to start writing her name in the more American ‘Hannah’.

I suppose it might help avoid some racists, and also make it easier to tell people how to write her name.

She’d agreed and signed the papers when they took the last name her parents had given her and replaced it with their own.

That said, I feel like things like this should be entirely the child’s choice, if they’re old enough to make a choice.

Small things, so minor, compared to what she had seen and done.  It didn’t bear complaining about.

Yeah, fair.

Everyone praised her for how dutiful she was in school and her training.  She never gave up, never quit.  Why should she?  This was nothing compared to those hours she spent in that forest.

Those hours when each step or lack of one could lead to her death, or that of another.

So hard to believe that the events from her dream had occurred just twenty six years ago.

Hm, so that puts a bit of a time frame on things. The events of the dreams would’ve happened in 1985, then, assuming present day is 2011. The war had lasted for seven years… which identifies it on the list of wars involving Turkey as the Kurdish conflict (known on the list as the Turkey-PKK Conflict), which started in 1978 and is still ongoing.

I guess Wildbow really didn’t check if there were pine trees in Kurdistan, just in Turkey. Fair enough.

Or, for a more fun explanation: There was a parahuman in Kurdistan whose power was causing pine trees to grow randomly within a large radius.

She regretted the deaths, that went without saying, but she didn’t feel guilty about it.  Of the ten of them, seven had made it back, because of her and her gift.

Nice.

They had returned to their village, moved the bodies out of sight, and did what they could to conserve their food until the guerrilla fighters came through once again.

A village populated only by seven hungry children.

Hana had made the others swear a promise, to not speak of her gift.  She knew the guerrilla fighters would recruit her, use her, if they knew.  Whatever this power was that she had received, she didn’t feel it was for that.

Is that why she left for America before she became a heroine?

When the fighters had returned, they saw the state of the children and elected to evacuate them.  The fighters took them to a city, and a man there saw that Hana and the others were shipped off to the United Kingdom, where many other refugees were going.

Ah, not directly to the U.S.

Fair enough.

They were split up, and the others were sent one by one to homes for orphans and other troubled children.  Hana’s turn came late, nearly last, and she was taken to fly on another airplane to her own new home.  It was there she ran into difficulty.  She’d moved through the archway – what she would later learn was a metal detector – and it sounded an alarm.

Hah! Part of her psyche is metallic now…

Guards had found the weapon she couldn’t drop or leave behind, and Hana was carried off to another place.

Yeaah, weapons are not something airplane authorities like. Right.

Interrogated, asked many questions.  She was taken to the bathroom, patted down on her re-entry to the interrogation room, and they found the same gun on her that they’d taken away just half an hour ago.

I take it the weapons return to her, then. Probably a good thing – don’t want part of your psyche getting lost.

Everything else had happened very fast, after that.  It was an American in a military uniform that rescued her.  He took her to America, saw that she was put with a family there.  When the first three Wards teams were established, she was enlisted.

Nice.

She barely knew a hundred words of English, her numbers and the alphabet, when she first went out in costume.

Y’know, out of all the known characters, Miss Militia was one of those I least expected to be an immigrant, other than those confirmed not to be.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying immigrants can’t be patriotic for the country they come to, even more so than their country of origin. It just came as a surprise given the intensity of her American branding.

And I’m definitely not complaining. 🙂

And she would never speak of it to anyone.

She’d killed the soldiers that held the other children of her village hostage.

Nice work. Not sure how you pulled it off, honestly.

After the first, she had feigned fear, pretended the guerrilla fighters were in the woods.  Then she had waited for the moment they were too busy watching the woods and mowed the rest of the men down with an assault rifle.

Oh, that’s how. But why did they trust you after you shot at one of them?

She didn’t even feel bad about it, nor did she lose much sleep that one of the children, Behar, had been shot in the skirmish.

Rest in peace, Behar.

…also it’s not like she has much sleep to lose in the first place, is it?

But she remembered.  She touched the combat knife that was sheathed at her hip, as if to remind herself it was there.  She harbored her suspicions about her gift: her powers had taken a part of her psyche and given it concrete form.

Hm. So her weapon is pretty much a part of her, then.

The angriest parts of her, the most childish parts, the parts of her that dreamed, and those that forgot.  The knife at her hip slept for her and dreamed for her, she imagined.

She said earlier that she doesn’t usually sleep. Sounds like that was to be taken literally.

She had gone nearly a year at a time without needing to stop and put her head to rest on a pillow.

Damn.

When she closed her eyes and let herself drift off, it was because she felt it was something she ought to do, not because she had to.  Even then, she never dreamed.

So you’re saying she’s a D&D elf, then.

She remembered, instead, her mind replaying past events in perfect detail.

That explains why it was so vivid. The “dream” sequence wasn’t dreamlike at all.

And through some chance of fate, this meant she remembered the entity, and she remembered forgetting it, as paradoxical as that was.

That was the weirdest part of finding out it was a “dream”, to be honest.

She was still wearing her costume, she noted, as she rose from her bed and walked to the bathroom.  At least she’d had the sense to remove her scarf so she didn’t strangle while she rested.

A scarf with the American flag, perhaps, also known as the defining feature of Miss Militia’s costume?

She was the only one who remembered.  Everyone else forgot that impossibly huge being, if they were even graced with a glimpse of it.  She couldn’t be sure.

Who knows. My standing theory is that it existed only in the mindscape of those it chose to exist for.

If any others saw it, they would inevitably forget it before they could gather their thoughts enough to speak of it.  Like she was supposed to.

Evidently things went the other way for Hannah, but why?

A gun, polished gray steel.  Somehow familiar.  Identical to the smallest guns she had seen the guerrilla fighters carrying.

Alrighty, then! Maybe this sort of blur is what powers bags of necessity, or Wander’s hat in Wander Over Yonder…

I don’t know how useful this might be to Hana. She doesn’t sound like she had any more experience with guns than the rest of her family, and it’s her against at least seven trained soldiers with weapons of their own and hostages.

Then again, I was already thinking Hana might’ve developed a power even before she was visited by the apparently benevolent(???) Karahindiba.

I can’t use this.  The thought was cold in her mind.  If I use this, they’ll kill the others the second I fire.

Exactly.

The gun shimmered, became that blur of green and black, then settled into a new shape.  She’d seen this, too.

Hm. This seems similar to Miss Militia’s power.

One of the fighters had been talking to Hana, showing her his English gun magazine, in an effort to get in good graces with her older sister.  This was similar to the gun she’d just had in her hand, but there was a metal tube on the front, nearly doubling the gun’s length.  The tube, she knew, made guns quieter.

Maybe I was wrong about this being set in the present, and this is Miss Militia’s backstory? Seems like an odd choice, especially with how thoroughly American her design is.

Or maybe this is set in the present, and the same thing with Karahindiba happened to Miss Militia in the past?

The rest of the children and the other soldiers were far behind.  It was still nearly impossible, but-

<Walk!> the soldier behind her shouted.  <Walk or->

Oh right, I forgot to comment on the gun. Specifically the silencer – it might help her gain at least some additional element of surprise, but I’m not sure just how much quieter they make the guns.

She wheeled around, holding the gun in both hands.  She took a second to steady her aim, and the Turkish soldier’s surprise bought her just enough time to pull the trigger.

Well. This kind of ruins what I was talking about – namely hiding the gun a bit, making them confused about where the bullet came from – but I’m not sure it would work anyway.

Hannah’s eyes snapped open.

This is why I don’t sleep.

…alright. So all that was a dream, had by a Hannah with a far more American way to spell it. For now, I’m guessing that Hana made it out of whichever country she was in and is now having nightmares about the day she got her power.

Also, that places the event firmly in the past. Maybe Hannah is Miss Militia after all?

Oh, and I suppose she’s about to hear the air raid sirens, too, taking her morning from bad to worse.