About me:
As early as Konnor could remember, he wanted to be a hero. Who didn’t? Traveling from planet to planet, galaxy to galaxy, vanquishing evil wherever it sprung up. It was every kid’s dream. He remembered reading all the fantastical tales about the sentinels. Of their daring adventures and close encounters with hostile alien armies, intergalactic monsters, and horrors from the depths of space whose mere descriptions dwarfed anything a young boy’s imagination could ever hope to cook up. Sure, the stories were probably embellished to the point of fantasy, but he didn’t care, it was his childhood.
So it wasn’t a surprise when he made the life changing decision to enlist into the Nebula Corps as soon as he hit sixteen. Sure, he might’ve lied about his age in his enlistment forms, but the corps always needed more sentinels, especially with the high mortality rate that they often faced. In truth, becoming a sentinel was the most harrowing sacrifice an intelligent life form could make. Something he didn’t realize until after joining. The dangers they faced were so overwhelming and beyond the scope of what a single individual should rationally face, that certain species referred to them as “suicide soldiers” in their native tongues. In fact, when one finally became a sentinel, their funeral was held right then and there, to spare their families from the sorrow of what was surely the inevitable.
His training was harsh and unforgiving, with sessions and drills usually taking place in environments where the gravity was ten times stronger than the norm. Day in and day out was filled with torturous exercises, the kind of intensity that very commonly killed a myriad of recruits with the nigh impossible nature that they presented. The only way one could truly make it through training with their sanity intact was to simply turn their brain off, to stop thinking entirely. Once he figured out that one secret, everything else became easy. Three years of nonstop hell forged him into the peak of what a human could achieve, both mentally and physically. After all, the corps only forged the sharpest knives, and only the most refined of blades could properly enforce their will and bring peace to the ever infinite universe. So in a way, Konnor had achieved his goal of becoming a hero, but he wasn’t the kind of hero he dreamed about as a child. War, death, violence, suffering, that’s what he became. An uncompromising trooper whose only goal was to annihilate those that posed a threat to any system. There was no gravitas, no grand standing, no banter between enemies or jokes shared with comrades like how the comics portrayed. No, there was only the mission, and the limitless threats that popped up on a daily basis. Defending the universe meant he had to let go of the one thing he had left, his humanity. Being a sentinel was akin to being a machine, there was no room for emotions, personality, or fanfare, only cold hard logic that benefited the battle at hand. In the end, he was proud to fight on behalf of the trillions of species who couldn’t do it themselves, even if he felt absolutely nothing while doing it.
