ROTOSCOPE

"'No! Get the fuck back! None of us are supposed to be here!'""- Pablecheque breaks down at Hernandez during a psychedelic break."

1975
ROTOSCOPE is the name used for a story that occurred during 1975 in the HANAMI/NEOTOKYO universe. In 1975, a fire-team of four US Marines returning from Vietnam is deployed to a cordoned-off housing-block in St. Louis, Missouri, for what they are told is a routine training-exercise.

In reality, the housing-block has been quarantined following the extensive airborne fumigation of the area with experimental psychedelic aerosols, and the four Marines are being clandestinely-observed by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Throughout the course of the story, the four men are revealed to be extensively traumatized in their own ways, both from their prior combat experience and socioeconomic status in American society, and are forced to confront their demons under increasingly high doses of psychoactive drugs. The pretense of military professionalism and training eventually fades away as their grasp on reality loosens and they begin turning on one another. At the peak of the tension, the four men kill their commanding officer, who they learn lied to them about the nature of the mission and the presence of the chemical contamination.

A government representative shows mercy on the four and lets them go under the condition that they'll be the victim of assassination if they ever speak of the experiment or what happened as a result of it. The remainder of the housing-complex is destroyed shortly afterwards.

1986
In 1986, two of the fire-team members meet in Time Square, New York. One of them has become a street-hustler trying to move counterfeit mink coats and handbags, and the other is an unemployed alcoholic living in a tenement-slum who spends all of his money on a working-girl who is employed by one of the sex-clubs in Time Square. The two agree to try and locate the other two members of their team, both of whom they are uncertain on the whereabouts of.

They discover that the third man had committed suicide some years back and the fourth man was being leaned-on by the cronies of an influential sex-trafficker for protection money. The three remaining Marines, long-since divorced from any governmental ties, topple the smuggling-operation from within, performing an undercover assault on a private-island owned by the kingpin and inadvertently burning him alive in the process. They agree to part ways again, and leave one another to their own devices with the sentiment that their dead team-member would've been proud.

Setting
While ROTOSCOPE is set in the same universe that all other events in the HANAMI/NEOTOKYO continuity take place in, the chronological distance from other events and lack of historical divergence assures that the setting of ROTOSCOPE is one of relative historical accuracy. One of the few differences from reality of note is the presence and nature of the Pruitt and Igoe Apartment Homes complex in 1975. In reality, the complex was largely demolished by that time, while in ROTOSCOPE, it still stands, albeit largely-vacant, as a test-bed for classified experiments being performed in the name of Soviet containment.

Operation LAC was an actual experiment carried out by the United States Army Chemical Corps, though no records show that it ran as far into the future as 1975, and the nature of the experiment was to test dispersal-patterns for nuclear-biological-chemical agents on the citizens of the United States and Canada, not psychedelic ones. Pruitt Igoe was one of many areas sprayed.

'Team 2'

 * Matthew Hernandez - A Mexican immigrant to the United States whose papers were altered to be accepted into the Marine Corps. A victim of severe racial discrimination, Hernandez remained confident in the political and moral integrity of the American nation until the events of ROTOSCOPE.
 * Rodney Carter - An African-American Marine whose past remains largely obfuscated by his own choice, and, like Hernandez, a victim of social/racial inequality in the United States.
 * David Pablecheque - A quiet, artistic soldier by the age of nineteen who keeps the reality of his homosexuality deeply hidden. Pablecheque is particularly ill-suited to the US Marines and is unable to psychologically cope with the traumatic amount of stress impressed upon him.
 * Damon Hughes - A transplant from the US Navy Seals, Hughes initially seems to be the most socially well-adjusted member of the fire-team, though it becomes clear how prone to paranoia and violence he is later into the story. Domestic violence issues make his friendship with Hernandez incredibly strained.

Supporting Characters

 * Stefan Bauer - An aging Austrian chemist with a background in the Waffen SS who was overseeing the surveillance of Team 2 in 1975. Bauer displays mercy when confronted with the choice, though Team 2 never fully forgives him.
 * Alice Dodson - The young working-girl from a punk background who Hernandez becomes attached to in 1986. While they're never intimately involved, she shows some degree of concern for him, and urges him in the direction of caution when applicable.
 * Merrick Harrington - An incredibly promising and bright CIA employee who sees Hernandez as his mentor in many ways. Hernandez sympathizes with Merrick over his nightmarish experience in Grenada.

Universe
Chronologically, ROTOSCOPE is the earliest event in the HANAMI/NEOTOKYO timeline, and therefore displays some of the earliest examples of the concepts that would develop into tangible technological issues in the future.

By the time of MITTAGEISEN, the developmental push for psychological manipulation through atmospheric conditions had largely shifted towards an electromagnetic approach, which would lead to the earliest prototypes of the Force Electromagnetic Area Regulator, which plays an integral role in the conflicts of the future.

Matthew Hernandez and Merrick Harrington both have a presence to varying degrees outside of ROTOSCOPE, especially Merrick, who is arguably the most integral piece of MITTAGEISEN's story.