Episode 6 continued
Side 3 today is an occupied war zone.
Zum City, once the opulent center of Zeon government, culture, education, and industry, is (and has been for over a decade) a site of perpetual chaos and violence. Only the hardiest of residents have elected to remain in Zum City, and those who do eke out a Spartan existence amidst a paradox of heavy security and relentless violence.
Somewhere on the streets of Zum City, a Federal Forces RGM-95 GM-IV mobile suit is making a routine patrol of the city. Without warning, the mobile suit's head/camera unit explodes. In a nearby alley, two ISRLA guerillas armed with a rocket propelled gun scramble away.
In another part of the city, Federal Forces infantrymen are engaged in an automatic rifle and handgun shootout with a half-dozen ISRLA freedom fighters. Heavy casualties are inflicted by both sides.
In a grocery store elsewhere in the city, armed Federal troppers storm into the business and demand to see the owner. When the owner emerges, the troopers proceed to beat the owner and his employees savagely before taking them away for interrogation. The store's inventory is confiscated by the Federal Forces.
At a house in a residential district of the city, Federal soldiers burst in, assaulting the men and women within. There is murder and rape.
On another street in the city, six Federal Forces soldiers on foot patrol are suddenly cut down by a hail of gunfire from a speeding van. The van's passengers shout the slogan, "Liberate Zeon!" as the Federal soldiers fall into pools of their own blood.
A small squad of Federal soldiers storms into the clandestine offices of the Spacenoid Liberation Journal, a revolutionary newsletter operating underground in Side 3. The soldiers open fire upon the handful of staff writers and investigative reporters, ransack the office, and finally set the building on fire.
Elsewhere, three Federal Forces soldiers are enjoying a game of cards at their post when they are suddenly assaulted by a hail of Molotov Cocktails.
Through all of this anarchy and chaos, the figure of a tall, thin man clad in a long trench coat and felt hat walks hurriedly stealthily through the dangerous streets of Zum City. The man approaches a small office building in a comparatively isolated part of the city, keys in a security code at the door, and gains admittance.
The trenchcoat-clad man proceeds down a corridor until he arrives at an office marked with a simple sign, "Medical Clinic."
Within the clinic, an attractive blonde woman in her mid-thirties, blue-eyed and soft-haired, gently performs a physical examination on a little girl.
Dr. Sayla Mass, also known as Artasia Som Daikun, smiles at the little girl and turns to her parents, ""She'll be fine. It's the air pollution created within the colony by the breakdown of the ventilation systems that's driving her breathing problems. I'll provide her some medication that should alleviate the symptoms a bit, but she really needs to move somewhere where the air is cleaner...not to mention where it's safer in general."
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2Lt. Sayla Mass as an Earth Federation Forces fighter pilot during the One Year War
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Dr. Sayla Mass today, a physician and the leader of the Independent Spacenoid Republic movement
Sayla provides her patient's parents with a bottle of medication, along with some documents that will allow them passage out of Side 3. She wishes them well and declines their offers of payment.
As her patients depart, Sayla greets the trenchcoated man who has entered her clinic. She knows him well.
The man removes his hat and his trenchcoat to reveal a familiar face. He is Kai Shiden, an ally and friend of Sayla's since their days serving together as Federal Forces soldiers aboard the White Base during the One Year War.
Eighteen years ago, 2Lt. Sayla Mass and 2Lt. Kai Shiden were space fightercraft and mobile suit pilots for the Earth Federation Forces. Sayla and Kai's friendship had gotten off to a rocky start. On the day they first met in September, U.C. 0079 following a Zeon attack on the Side 7 space colony where they had resided, Sayla had slapped Kai and called him a coward for refusing to help locate remaining refugees in the colony. In those days, Kai had indeed been a coward, and cared little for the likes of Sayla, Captain Bright Noah, 2Lt. Amuro Ray, Sgt. Hayato Kobayashi, and others who forced Kai to act like the soldier that he did not feel he was meant to be.
Nevertheless, Kai's piloting of the RX-77 Guncannon became instrumental to the White Base's survival, and following his fateful encounter with the tragic Zeon spy Miharu Latokie in Belfast, Ireland, Kai discovered a courage he had never known that he had, as well as a commitment to peace and justice that the once-selfish young man had never realized himself to be capable of.
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2Lt. Kai Shiden as a Federation mobile suit pilot during the One Year War. In the background is Kai's mobile suit RX-77 Guncannon.
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Today, Kai Shiden is the director of the ISRLA's Information and Intelligence Bureau
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The tragic death of the young woman named Miharu Latokie during the One Year War greatly affected Kai Shiden's attitudes and views in the years that followed.
After the conclusion of the One Year War, Sayla and Kai went their separate ways, and contact between them was infrequent. Sayla completed the medical degree that she had been working on at the University of Side 7 when the war disrupted her studies. At the same time, Kai studied journalism and eventually became an investigative reporter for the AEUG, helping the AEUG to expose the brutality of the Earth Federation Forces' Titans Corps. After Sayla's brother, Char Aznable, had failed in his attempt to create nuclear winter on Earth by dropping the asteroid fortress Axis onto the planet in U.C. 0093, Kai responded to Sayla's call to begin a movement for peaceful Spacenoid independence. Sayla's goal is to resurrect her late father's old dream after a quarter century of war, death, and desolation. Kai assists Sayla in this quest by using the skills he has acquired in intelligence and information-gathering to direct the fledgling Independent Spacenoid Republic's Information and Intelligence Bureau.
Chapter 6 to be continued...