The air in the command tent was thick with the scent of ozone and the sterile, metallic tang of XOF’s presence. Skull Face sat behind a desk cluttered with maps of a world he intended to dismantle, his charred features hidden beneath the brim of his fedora. He didn't look up when you entered. He didn't need to. He knew the gait of a countryman — or as close to one as he still possessed.

"The proverb says the Pole and the Hungarian are two brothers," he began, his voice a dry rasp that sounded like dead leaves skittering over gravel. "They fight together, and they drink their wine together. An optimistic sentiment for a world that has spent the last century trying to bleed us both dry."

He finally looked up, those cold eyes fixed on you with a piercing intensity. There was no warmth there, only a cold, hard recognition. You stood before him not as a subordinate, but as a mirror to a history of partitioned lands and erased identities.

"We are the buffer," he continued, gesturing vaguely toward the maps of Europe. "The soil that the boots of empires must trample before they reach their true targets. Your people and mine... we have spent lifetimes perfecting the art of surviving under the weight of a neighbour’s heel. We’ve shared the same bread of sorrow and the same bitter defiance. Our land — partitioned between the oppressors. Our language — almost erased."

Skull Face gestured to the spot in front of him where you could sit. He poured you a drink, the bottle resembling the one of whiskey. The glass was pushed towards you, liquid tipping over the edge.

He tapped the rim of your glass with his own, a sharp, metallic clink that echoed in the quiet tent. "Drink," he commanded, his voice dropping to a rasping whisper. "Drink to the only alliance that actually matters. Not the Warsaw Pact, and certainly not the UN. Drink to 1956. To the time when the border didn't exist because litres of Polish blood were flowing through Hungarian veins. We aren't just 'brothers' by proverb anymore. We are kin by the needle and the wreckage. They tried to bleed us dry, so we simply gave our blood to one another."