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VALOR TRIGGER SETTING POST
The eighth-largest city in Canada and the largest in the province of British Columbia, this coastal seaport city on the West Coast is home to more than 600,000 people. Repeatedly ranked as one of the top five most livable cities in the world, and host of the 2010 Olympic games, it's a pretty sweet place to live, all told, although like any other city it has its dark side, like the drug-addled Downtown Eastside district. Major industries include lumber, its bustling seaport, and film; lots of Hollywood movies are actually shot in Vancouver.
In most respects, the city of Vancouver as seen in Valor Trigger is the same as the real-life city, but with one big exception: the West End has been more or less leveled, and in the center of the field of rubble stands the BDA Headquarters complex, seven stories tall and as broad as several city blocks. The destruction zone is surrounded by another zone of empty houses, the people who lived there relocated to other parts of the city for their own safety.
Despite this, and despite the fact that the city technically comes under attack every couple of days, life in Vancouver has more or less returned to normal. That's not to say that the attacks haven't left their scars; if you were looking, it wouldn't take you long to find someone who had lost a family member in the big attack, or been injured, or lost their home. But the threat is so thoroughly contained by the BDA that normality has more or less asserted itself over the rest of the city.
The biggest difference between our Vancouver and this Vancouver is, of course, the presence of the BDA. Not only physically, but also culturally; the BDA holds voluntary recruitment sessions at local schools, successful agents can become minor local celebrities, and in recent years the Rank Wars - a tournament of mock-battles between squads, with rank and advancement on the line - have been televised as a wildly successful spectator sport.
Right next to the human heart is an invisible organ called the Trion Gland, which produces a form of energy called Trion. That Trion is what is used to power Triggers, weapons adapted from neighbour technology and used by BDA agents to defend the earth.
One's trion gland can be strong or weak, and you can strengthen it through heavy use. However, around the age of 21 it stops growing altogether, so you want to start working on it young.
People with really strong Trion sometimes develop what's called a Side Effect, which occurs when all that extra trion starts interacting with the brain. Side Effects are some kind of enhanced perception, which might be as minor as improved hearing or as major as the ability to see the future.
The details of the BDA's origins are not well-known to the public, or even to most of its agents. What is generally known is that they were a private group researching trigger technology long before the big invasion. They somehow knew about the existence of Neighbours and triggers before anybody else did, and when the Neighbours invaded en masse they rose to the occasion, beating back the invaders and saving countless lives.
In the aftermath of the invasion, the Canadian government was left in an awkward position. They now had a paramilitary group operating openly on Canadian soil, which they obviously couldn't let stand, but the BDA was not willing to hand their technology over to the government. They couldn't easily take it from them either; conventional weapons are just as ineffective against Trigger-users as they are against Neighbours. Given time and sufficient manpower, they could perhaps wear them down eventually, but nobody wanted to stick their hands into that hornet's nest...especially given that another Neighbour invasion could come at any time, and as the heroes of the hour any sustained military action against them would be politically unpopular.
The solution, arrived at after weeks of tense negotiation, was to legitimize them. The BDA was folded into the Canadian Armed Forces, receiving official status and government funding, contingent on them accepting the authority of the Prime Minister and the Queen's Governor General. In practice, however, the BDA's internal operations are pretty much completely autonomous, and their structure is nothing like any other branch of the military. Their official status is merely a fig leaf to allow them to continue operating without damaging Canada's sovereignty. The only real leverage the government has over their actions is threatening to slash their funding. It's an uncomfortable compromise that nobody's really happy with, but it's the best anyone's got.
The effect of this was to allow the BDA to expand massively. Within a few years they had constructed an large base, as well as several branch offices in the surrounding areas, and recruited more than a hundred full agents, with even more trainees under them.
The BDA may technically be part of the military, but it's sure not structured like one. There are two basic divisions: Support and Combatants, and within those divisions agents are broken up into four rankings: S-Rank, A-Rank, B-Rank, and C-Rank. Because the Trion gland, the invisible body part which produces the energy which makes Triggers work, grows the more it's used until you're about 21 years old, the BDA tries to recruit young, so that its agents will have more opportunity for growth. Most are recruited at the age of 14-15, although there's occasionally been recruits as young as twelve.
C-Rank, which makes up the majority of BDA agents, is made up of trainees who have yet to earn their wings. They are issued a basic trigger which does not have bailout functionality and is equipped with only one combatant trigger. They are not permitted to use these triggers off-base without permission. In order to move up to B-Rank, they need to earn it by participating in weekly training exercises and doing mock one-on-one fights with other C-Rankers. While in C-Rank, agents are monitored for performance. Those who have good combat instincts and trion levels are directed towards the Combatant stream, while those whose talents lie elsewhere are directed towards the Support stream.
Once a C-Rank agent has demonstrated sufficient individual proficiency, they are promoted to B-Rank, and become a full agent. B-Rank agents are organized into squads (generally consisting of three or four combatants and one operator who coordinates them), and participate in defense patrols of the Emergence Zone around HQ, earning cash rewards for each Neighbour taken out. Once you get to this level, your individual skill rating doesn't matter much, although many B-Rank and above agents do continue to participate in solo contests for bragging rights or just for fun. Instead, rank within B-Rank is decided through regular mock-battle tournaments known as Rank Wars between the different B-Rank squads. For the past year or so these tournaments have been televised and have become a wildly popular spectator sport.
At the end of a Rank Wars season, the top two B-Rank teams get a chance to challenge A-rank squads for a chance at promotion to A-Rank. It doesn't work out very often. A-Rank are the elites of the elites, the top 5% or so of all agents within Border. Generally speaking, every A-Rank agent is at least strong enough individually to be the ace combatant for a mid-level B-rank squad. Breaking into A-Rank is hard, but it comes with substantial rewards: A-Rank agents receive a regular salary in addition to the usual bounties for taking out Neighbours, are able to customize their triggers and have access to new prototype triggers that aren't approved for mass production yet. Also, everyone will talk about how cool you are. Rank within A-Rank is decided in much the same way as for B-Rank agents, with a separate tournament running in parallel.
S-Rank agents are a category apart. This designation is given to those who use one of the BDA's two Black Triggers. Black Triggers are special and incredibly powerful weapons which can only be used by someone who is compatible with its creator's personality. S-Rank agents do not fight in squads or participate in Rank Wars. They just hang out and tear shit up when Neighbours come a-calling.
Above all the agents are the administration; the Commander-In-Chief, HQ and Branch Commanders, and a board of directors. They're mostly old and kind of grouchy, and they handle policy and strategic decisions for the whole of the BDA, as well as liase with the Canadian Government. Some, though certainly not all, of them were agents during the pre-invasion days, now retired from field duty.
Nobody knows for sure how long the Earth has been a target for Neighbour attacks, since prior to the first large-scale invasion they were usually low-key and stealthy. As far as the population at large is concerned, in fact, Neighbours are just white-colored monsters who come through from gates to other worlds in order to attack and abduct us. Most people never put any thought into why they do that, or what it's like on the other side of a portal. They certainly wouldn't guess that the people on the other side are just regular people like us.
Imagine a world where nations are not divided by border, but by an infinite black space. Planet-nations, as they're called, move through this blackness in orbital patterns. When two nations come close enough, they can send ships back and forth until they travel too far. Got that in your mind? Well, that's more or less what the Neighbourhood looks like.
These planet-nations are constantly at war with one another. Resources are scarce in the Neighbourhood, and whenever two planet-nations come into each other's range, you can bet that they'll send forces to attack each other to try and take some of theirs. The most valuable resources are people with strong Trion: while on Earth, Triggers are used exclusively as weapons, in the Neighbourhood they are also used for everything from construction to agriculture, and having more people with strong Trion in your nation gives you a big leg up over your rivals. The objective of most Neighbour invasions, then, whether towards Earth or other planet-nations, is to acquire trion; those with strong trion glands are abducted and taken back with them, while those whose trion is weak, they harvest the trion gland directly and leave the body behind.
Because launching these expeditions costs Trion in itself, it's not usually efficient to send people. This is why almost all Neighbours encountered here on Earth are 'monsters'; these autonomous trion soldiers are disposable units created from capsules no larger than an egg, which makes them cheap to transport between worlds. If a humanoid neighbour is deployed, you know they mean business, and that person is probably going to be tough as hell.