Setting:Halo

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UNSC Army Infantryman

Halo is a videogame series exclusively released for the Xbox, Xbox 360, and PC. The series was developed by Bungie and eventually sold to Microsoft's 343 Industries, an offshoot of Bungie to continue the series. The Halo universe is incredibly large, spanning over video games, comic books, graphic novels, action figures, tons of books, an anime, and even a movie. The first Halo game is famous for saving the FPS genre from slowly rotting itself from the inside by introducing newer graphics, gameplay types, and immense stories. Halo is especially know for its large universal story that includes an Empire of overtly religious alien species, a strange secret of Humanity, and an assortment of memorable characters.

Setting

The Halo universe takes place in the 26th century. Mankind, led by the United Nations Space Command (UNSC), has developed its own crude faster-than-light drive (the Shaw-Fujiwara Drive) and finally colonized other worlds. At its height, human civilization occupies nearly 800 planets, forming a ring of outer colonies and rings of inner colonies with Earth as its capital. This is not what they're talking about when they say Halo, mind you.

Sometime in the year 2525 (believed to be roughly half past three), an agricultural world in the outer colonies, creatively named Harvest, is attacked by an unknown force. In the succeeding months, all attempts to make contact, or even defend against the alien forces are met with swift destruction. It is not long before more colonies are wiped out.

The unknown menace finally identifies itself as the Covenant, a coalition of several alien races bent on destroying humanity. At first they seem to be doing this because that's just what aliens do, but later on, it is discovered that the story is somewhat deeper. Apparently humans are the descendants of an ancient super-advanced alien race called the Forerunners.

This made the Covenant kinda jealous, because it was them who first discovered the Forerunner technology, adapted it to their own, and finally started worshipping the Forerunners. Apparently, knowing that your gods had a favorite, finding out that it isn't you, and finding out that it's instead the species that invented truck balls upset them just a little. So, back to glassing. It's not long before the UNSC military, and humanity itself, finds out that it is being pwned. Clearly the only solution to this would be a ridiculously tiny unit of infantry in clever armour with a name in allcaps. This leads to the Spartan-II program, humanity's last hope.

The Spartan-II program

Master Chief Petty Officer - John 117 of the Spartan II Program.

In the years following the deactivation of the ORION Project in 2506 the effectiveness of small special forces combating the insurrectionists became too large for the UNSC to manage. As insurrectionist forces become more effective and the military's responses consequently become more forceful, the need for large scale military campaigns became more and more obvious. In 2517 the Office of Naval Intelligence began to reexamine the Carver Findings, which had warned of instability in the Outer Colonies years earlier. The report rationalized that the instability would continue to escalate, and unless drastic military measures were taken, would result in a massive war between the inner colonies and the outer colonies. ONI's own projections at that time and up to 2525 concluded the same as Dr. Carver's findings. The SPARTAN-II project was conceived by Dr. Catherine Halsey of ONI Section III's Special Projects Division as the successor to the ORION Project and the best possible solution to end the widespread insurgency that raged throughout UNSC space. The project was created with several goals in mind. The first goal was to create a group of elite soldiers meant to subdue insurrections in their infancy, without substantial military casualties. The second goal was to minimize civilian casualties and avert civil war. The third goal was to substantially reduce the cost of conventional means of pacification.

Halsey's proposal for the project detailed radical changes in many different fields. The first and most controversial was the subjects themselves, who were selected by a gene-candidate pool, and must fit into a certain age restriction protocol. They must also have possessed superior physical and mental attributes. The trainees must be instilled with military value, and the understanding of war; something that cannot be taught to enlisted soldiers. This narrowed the candidates down to children who would be raised and taught in the art of warfare and military values, from a young age. Using such controversial means of creating a soldier meant that the project would have to be carried out in the highest form of secrecy.

Though conventional body armor had protected soldiers for centuries, the SPARTAN-II project's second radical change involved integrating the subject with a new powered exoskeleton device, designed to help keep its user safe and provide a powerful means of combating enemy forces. The drawback of this new armor is its requirement for augmenting the subject, effectively turning the SPARTANs into human guinea pigs.

Despite the tremendous risk and the unethical means of creating new soldiers, the SPARTAN-II project was greenlit by the top brass within the Office of Naval Intelligence, who concluded that the lives that could be saved far outweighed the risks involved. The project was initially granted funding for 300 candidates, though funding was later reduced to half this number. By 2517, 150 suitable candidates had been identified through DNA gathered from the UNSC's Outer Colony vaccination program, though funding had been further reduced to support only half that number. Seventy-five children, all six years old and of both sexes, were kidnapped. In order to preserve the program's secrecy, the children were replaced by flash clones, which would die soon thereafter due to numerous medical complications associated with flash-cloning an entire human being.

Dr. Halsey's use of cloning, following the dissemination of information on the SPARTAN-II project to the rest of ONI, came to be regarded one of the most controversial decisions involved with the program. In particular, the decision drew the anger of Margaret O. Parangosky, who interrogated Halsey after her capture and demanded to know her reasoning for the use of flash clones. According to Halsey herself, she was entirely unaware that the flash-cloning process would result in clones with reduced lifespans, and thus claimed to have no responsibility for the suffering endured by the families of the candidates. However, this explanation fails to clarify why Halsey did not simply use the flash clones in the program instead of the candidates themselves, given that she did not foresee any health complications. It appears far more likely that Halsey replaced the abductees with clones for personal, moral reasons, believing that she was giving the families closure and thus easing her own conscience.

Halsey was not satisfied with the original name of "ORION Project, Generation II"; thus, she renamed it out of personal preference, as well as to distance the project from the failures of ORION in the minds of the politico and military bureaucrats who controlled the project's budget. In order to pay homage to the sacrifice of the ORION project, she chose to call the project SPARTAN-II. She considered several other "bellicose" names, including Praetorians, Landsknecht, Immortals, Minutemen, Titans, Argonauts, Odysseus, Olympians, Zulu, Kronos, Promethean, Armor, Nemesis, Daedalus, Hercules, Viking, and Hyperion; the latter two were quickly excluded.

USNC Marines

These are your everyday cannon-fodder from the UNSC who in fluff meet fates similar of the mobile infantry in the first Starship Troopers movie or your typical Imperial Guardsman. In crunch, they vary from scripted death-by-anything to being able to laugh off multiple Fuel Rod Gun hits.

The Covenant

The Covenant are a coalition of religious alien civilizations. They venerate and worship the Forerunners and are known to utilize some Forerunner technology for their own means, giving them a colossal fleet of ships that outmatches the UNSC Navy. They are composed of the following:

• Grunts: Ewoks wearing giant seashells with technicolour blood. Typically shout "he's unstoppable!" in their helium voice and then die.

• Jackals: Irritating bastard-creatures with space shields who like to throw grenades at you shoot your stupid ass, sometimes with particle rifles.

• Elites: De-tailed lizardmen IIIIIINNNN SPAAAAAACE! They have the same shields as a Spartan, and are a bit tougher than the lower-ranked enemies. Some are Arbiters, equipped with laser swords with which they Arbitrarily kill you. Eventually join the humans due to the plot.

• Hunters: Some odd combination of worm/alien/giant thingy. They stand nearly 10 feet tall, but are actually a hive collection of worm-like aliens fusing together to form 1 giant thing, and usually come in pairs. A single hunter is armored from head to toe in overlapping tank-class plate armor, vulnerable only to fire from heavy weapons and handguns. They are armed with powerful Fuel Rod Guns that can take out anything up to light armored vehicles in fluff and can deal anything up to minor damage to NPC Marines in the game. Basically terminators that don't get shit done.

• Brutes: Slightly intelligent Yeti/Cave Troll/Gorilla-like creatures......IIIIIINNN SPAAAAACE! Reputedly, they are the only race in the Covenant that had developed super advanced technology through constant warfare - namely, nukes - then became a space-faring race, then nuked their own civilization back to the stone age, only to claw their way back up to space-faring again...and learned nothing from the experience. They later replace the Elites as the go-to force of the Covenant, and bodyguards of the Prophets, forcing the Elites into exile. This makes sense somehow.

• The Prophets: They form the leadership cadre of the Covenant, claiming that they alone know the true purpose the Forerunners had for them, leading the Covenant in a spiritual-militaristic philosophy called "The Great Journey." It was the Prophets whom discovered that Humanity was the genetic descendants of the Forerunners, and declared humans as a threat to The Great Journey.

The Covenant actually think that tinkering with the advanced technology they dug up from the olden days is HERESY, meaning most of their stuff kinda sucks and they don't know much more about how it works than humans do.

Battles with the Covenant by the humans have often resulted in catastrophic losses on the human side. On the ground, UNSC Marines, armored divisions, and Spartans can hold their own against their foe, but it is a different story in space. Naval engagements almost always results in the obliteration of all human ships. The weapons of the Covenant ships are able to melt right through the meter-thick battle-plating of human warships. The only chance the human Navy has are nukes and massive slow-firing coilguns called MACs (Magnetic Accelerator Cannons) that fling 600-ton rounds, able to break Covenant ships in half.

The Flood

The other antagonists are "The Flood". A race of silly bouncing potatoes that exist only to infest other lifeforms and OMNOMNOMNOM them. They are more or less a viral form of the Star Trek Borg, and make you sprout gross stuff and serve their hive mind if they touch you. They were the ancient enemy of the Forerunners and why the Forerunners built the Halo devices. Battles with The Flood destroyed the Forerunner civilization, as The Flood could infest their own people and technology to use against them.

Previous to the Flood - Forerunner war, an advanced AI named Mendicant Bias was interrogating a creatively named being, The Captive. This captive later turned out to be a Gravemind and convinced Mendicant Bias to join The Flood. Originally designed to operate Forerunner defenses, and in emergencies their fleet, Mendicant Bias assaulted the Forerunner homeworld using said fleet. In response to this the Forerunners created a second AI, Offensive Bias, to lead the remnants of their fleets against The Flood, seeing as an AI fleet-master worked so well the first time.

Finally, with all their massive fleets defeated and all their soldiers massacred, the Forerunners committed mass suicide on a galactic scale to prevent more of their people and other fledgling civilizations from falling prey to The Flood, depriving The Flood of its essential hosts and food sources. The Flood finally died off due to starvation and were defeated...sorta. Small pockets of them hid themselves in the Halo devices waiting for the day the new civilizations would rise so that they might feed again, in the meantime surviving on copious supplies of yoghurt or something.

This shows the Forerunners were completely incompetent and if The Flood hadn't come along they'd probably have been eaten by a swarm of space rats or fallen down some space stairs eventually anyway.

The Halos

The Halo Array, known individually as Halos or Halo Rings, referred to by the Covenant as the Sacred Rings, and labeled Fortress Worlds and Installations by the Forerunners and Monitors, is a system of colossal ring-shaped superweapons. The first Halos were constructed by order of Master Builder Faber circa 101,000 BCE with the intent of being an ultimate weapon, one that would secure the pre-eminence of the Builder rate in Forerunner society. Eventually, eleven were destroyed and/or lost while the remaining seven were used by the Forerunners as a last resort when combating the parasitic Flood. All sentient beings in the galaxy were killed, robbing the Flood of hosts and starving it to death. In addition to serving as weapons of last resort, Halo installations are also research facilities dedicated to containing and studying many different kinds of life forms. The life forms that were hand-selected by the Librarian included marine life, fauna, and land vertebrates. With the Master Builder's permission, the Librarian would research each animal to detect if their bodies reacted to Flood infection. The research on the animals would be more deeply analyzed if they did become infected. The Librarian's studies also helped determine if the rings could be used to repopulate the galaxy.