A damn glorified pirate with a research lab. A sociopath who thinks he’s an ubermensch. A mass murdering psychopath with a long history of mental disorders. A madman obsessed with Norse icons who leads a cult of personality. A nomadic lunatic with floral-decorated body armour. An overgrown biker gang with shotguns and no common sense. An American homegrown terrorist who sprayed down ponies hiding in a bank vault with an SMG. These are the people who think they’ll save humanity? Not the people with near-bottomless funding, the best and brightest of humanity and ponykind, and the backing of every government on the planet?
First Lieutenant Yael Ze’ev.

They’re nuts.
Captain Spitfire, when asked her opinion of the HLF.

Lots of people say I’m crazy. And you know what? They’re right. A sane man doesn’t carry a hammer into battle. A sane man doesn’t lead warriors calling themselves ‘Reavers’. A sane man doesn’t scream out to the Gods of Valhalla to protect him in battle. A sane man doesn’t blood-eagle rapists and traitors. I’m almost certainly not sane, not by the old definition.

And I never pretended to be.

This war’s the end, one way or another. If we win, it’s the end of the old world, and the old ways of thinking. No way we go back to what we had. If we lose, you know as well as I do what the fucking end is.

Yeah, I’m crazy. But I’m not alone. Maybe I’m the right brand of crazy. Maybe crazy’s just what some people need when the only other thing they have is despair. ‘Cause guess what? You look at my people, my Reavers, and you’ll see anger, you’ll see fanaticism… but you won’t see anyone quitting, anyone giving in to fate. We fight, we cry, we rage as much as anyone else. But we never give up.

We will ride the road, wherever it leads, until the road ends. And after that… who the fuck knows. But we’re getting there on our damn feet. Or in heavily armed attack jeeps, which, let’s face it, makes for one fucking brilliant entrance.
Commander Maximilian Yarrow, Head of the ‘Loyalist’ HLF, Commander of the Reavers.

Everyone knows the kind of kontgesig I am. Even me. It took time, effort, getting burned, stabbed, crippled, insulted, humiliated, impoverished, nearly drowning, threatened, and nearly dying about three times to get there. But while all that was happening, I went… traveling. I saw people turn into monsters, I saw people who had no reason to possibly work together joining forces, I had to… fok. You wouldn’t believe what I had to do.

And it was right fokkin’ depressing. This?!

This is one of the last fokkin’ safe places in the world - Well, relatively safe - and we fight over the scraps! That has to end. Or else we all die.

I don’t know who we join with. Not the PER, obviously, but definitely not Carter. Everything I was? They’re going to get much fokkin’ worse. For the love of God, do not trust these people. I did - I was one of them - and look where it got me. Look at Lovikov’s manifesto. They’re desperate, and the thought of what they’d do during Barrierfall are terrifying.

Join the PHL if you can, they’re our best bet for something that can stop the Barrier, for fighting the Solar Empire on equal footing. Join the Spader side of the split if you can’t do that. I’ve mixed feelings about both, but you can’t trust anyone else here.
Viktor Kraber, infamous HLF defector

My experience of the Split? Huh, odd question. We in Ex Astris Victoria don’t tend to see much action groundside, and the other side of the split isn’t running anything bigger than a tug. The Challenger is a warship: we’re the fourth of an elite class of vessel, with some of the best weapons you could ask for. We’re mandated to run combined combat and research. Hell, we’ve got ponies on this ship - look at my XO!

So my experience of the Split? The other side are running tugs, they kill ponies instead of using the talent they’ve got, and they have guns with rifling that craps out after a few bullets, and ends up spitting out bullets - some of which don’t even fire - out the muzzle. They’re fucking idiots. When the war’s over, Romero and Yarrow’ll be the names people look back on and say ‘those guys did right by the HLF, those guys did right by humanity’. Lovikov, Aeron whatever the fuck he’s called? They won’t even be massive, glorious failures - even now, nobody really talks about what Lovikov had in mind after Montreal. I mean, they talk - but they don’t talk about it seriously. They’ll be footnotes. They’ll be seen even worse than Kraber. And I bet they’ll spell Lovikov’s name wrong, too.
Captain Rachel Brooke, CO, HLS Challenger.

Why would anyone sane fight for the HLF? Whatever they’re supposed to represent, all they are is a hot mess of different groups, most of whom aren’t even trying to be organised anymore. What’s the fucking point?
Vinyl Scratch.

Most ponies on the Columbia joined up because they were asked to: they were refugees or dispossessed, or they got saved from PER or the damn rogues. Not me, though. Before the PHL got their act together, before the UNAC had real gear for ponies, I knew that I had to help, and I thought - y’know what? The HLF will want help. I went to one of those adhoc little recruitment things they did in a hired out building, and I got directed to Captain Romero.

Captain Romero… damn, he’s weird, sometimes. One minute he’ll happily chat away about the latest update to Overwatch or how he misses playing Mass Effect, and the next minute he’ll be discussing curing the potion or figuring out how to make a viable space-worthy airship. Man’s got ideas on top of ideas, too many to count, and unlike any of the rogues - or hell, even a couple of the more conservative Spader unit’s - Romero’s willing to do anything, use anything, get the help of anyone or anypony, if by doing so he wins the war and saves us all. And not just humans: I swear, he’s as interested in saving Equestria as he is anything else. The man’s crazy. Good crazy, but… really, really crazy.
Officer Lucky Strike, Security Chief, HLS Columbia.

Lots of people I work for ask me the same question. ‘Why do you fight for the HLF, Sam?’ They cite people like Aeron Grant - or whatever the hell he calls himself now - or Leonid Lovikov, or Viktor Kraber. And I always answer with the same thing.

The HLF is a dream, a vision. The HLF is an ideal. And that ideal isn’t unique to us, but it’s one that’s at the core of us, more important than hating ponies, more important than killing PER.

The HLF says, ‘we are human, and that is the most important thing’. A lot of people conflate us with the old right-wing lunatics, but we’re not. No one has ever been turned away from any HLF group for their sex, their class, their colour, their creed. Even groups like the Christian Marines on Carter’s side of the split have gays, Muslims, atheists, trans people fighting in their ranks.

The HLF is proof that humanity can come together, no matter what divides it, and join in common cause. Not against each other, but against the threats of a wider world, a wider universe. Heck, I guess a wider multiverse, since Equestria’s from another dimension.

That dream says ‘we do not need a nation’s flag or a religious creed to fight, we do not bicker over boundaries of race or gender. We are all of us human, and in that humanity is a common blood, a common cause, a common love.’

That dream is one worth protecting. It’s one worth fighting for. Fighting under the banner of. When we’re done winning the war – and make no mistake, when the war is won, the HLF will be there helping carry the day – the HLF will help be the foundation of a new world, a better world.
Officer Samantha Yarrow, former PHL liaison to the HLF 1st Skirmishers, later a member of the Reavers.

You know what gets me? Romero. He’s got two Thunderchild-class ships. Two. We only built four of the bastards, and one of them got sunk! How the fuck does that man have those kind of connections?! The guy’s either a criminal mastermind or the most charismatic son of a bitch in the world. But I’ll tell you this: any guy who’s got two fucking Thunderchild-class ships is a guy you want to seriously worry about, because there’s a lot he could do, and not a lot stopping him.
Captain Rebecca Kleiner, the Stampede Fleet, USS Lyra Heartstrings.

Blackmail, extortion, downright theft… God only knows where he got those ships, but one day, we’ll get them back. Then Romero gets to see what a real soldier can do, up close and personal.
Robert Gardner, late of the adhoc UN anti-HLF Taskforce.

Some people say I operate outside the boundaries of the law. I’d say they’re not wrong about that. But to anyone spending more time worrying about where I got my toys and how I choose to use them than they are thinking about the PER or the Solar Empire, I say this.

We are losing this war.

If you think otherwise, you’re lying to yourself. Look at the world. Europe, a cultural heartland and the source of much of the innovation that shaped the world we built, is gone. Britain, one of the key founders of NATO, is gone. Millions of people are dead or converted.

In a few short years, America will follow – if the damn PER haven’t already claimed every damn town that isn’t a fortress-city by then. The PHL don’t have the manpower to police one city in America, let alone the rest of the country, or dare I say the world. The UNAC isn’t much better off – their recruits are being thrown into positions too young, too untrained, and getting themselves killed or ponified. The HLF is fractured between Carter’s rogues and the Loyalists, with most of the grunt HLF militiamen on the ground being manipulated by whichever Commander happens to get there first.

The resources to win aren’t in our grasp, yet, and too much time is being focused on the HLF’s rogue elements.

I’m not saying this as an HLF Captain, I’m saying this as someone with common sense: there are officers and commanders in the UNAC who want to kill or capture every HLF man, whether they’re part of the Loyalists, part of Carter’s ‘True’ HLF or just some guy with a gun who’s affiliated with us as a way of keeping his town safe. They’re idiots. Not only are they wasting men and resources on a pointless mission, but they’re worsening the fracture. How the hell is Yarrow meant to tell HLF militiamen that they’re not being persecuted and they’re not being targeted when they are, and the evidence is right in front of them every time a crackdown happens? How the hell is our side of the Split meant to hold the advantage when we are being targeted and undermined? I’d almost think there was a deliberate effort from within UNAC command to split us further and reduce the Loyalist’s support.

And worse, their focus on the fracture is blinding them to the true threat. The Empire isn’t sitting idle behind that Barrier. Even if they could, they’re not. They’re planning something.

You wanna turn to me and go ‘you’re doing illegal things’? Sure I am. In times of war, laws fall silent for a reason. In the fight against extermination, rigid, inflexible laws are for lackeys and the blinkered. Those with vision? They choose the path I walk. They seek the answers I seek.

In the right context… anything is possible. In the right context, even a pirate can become a kingmaker. Or a king.
Captain Daniel Romero, Ex Astris Victoria

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