Corporal

A curled strand of black hair falling over the forehead was Corporal's most recognizable feature. He was short, wore round glasses over black eyes, and had a small nose set beneath thin eyebrows. As a soldier of Westalis he dressed in the army's standard kit: a side cap, grayish-green military jacket, white dress shirt, brown belt, and black boots.

Calm by nature, Corporal played peacemaker within his circle of friends, stepping in whenever General teased young Loid and taking the smaller boy's side. That gentleness endured into adulthood; on discovering that Loid had survived the bombing of their hometown, he wept openly out of relief and joy.

Corporal was raised with his family in Luwen, in eastern Westalis, where he fell in with three boys who shared his ambition of joining Westalis's army one day. The four adopted military-flavored code names, Advisor for the future Loid Forger plus General and Major, and turned an old army storage depot Loid had found into their secret base, filling it with card games and staged battles pitting Ostania against Westalis. Usually fighting on the Westalis side as Loid's teammate, Corporal tended to win thanks to his friend's tactical instincts.

In the days leading up to the town festival in Luwen, the boys pitched in with the preparations in exchange for candy. At their next hangout Loid abruptly ran off to help with the festival again, and as his puzzled friends chased after him, a bomb struck the depot, and with it the Second East-West War of Unification began. The friends searched for Loid without ever finding him.

Years later Corporal enlisted as a private along with General and Major, and while stationed away from the front the trio unexpectedly ran into Loid alive. They planned a weekend reunion at a restaurant, but deployment orders for the Roberts Campaign arrived that very night. The rushed, poorly conceived operation killed all three friends, and only their dog tags made it back to Loid. Their loss stayed with him through his recruitment into Westalian intelligence, feeding his vow to build a world where no child has to cry because of war.