Deanna, a small backwater Terran colony generally known as an idyllic tourist-magnet (if watching birds blow up if they flew too high were your kind of thing) had just hit a speed-bump on the highway of Life called the Deannan Un-civil War.

With someone at the Time Saving Agency helping Gary Beck and Cindy-Mei Winter pull a few of the right strings, everything according to the Anals of History (not a typo) was still unfolding more or less as it should—just a bit quicker. Either way, Deanna—the spotted cow of the galaxy, was still in a lot of trouble.

A fascist army was in charge, rounding people up and sending them to a concentration camp, while a loyalist militia rapidly fomented in the Grauffis family's den. But while the numerous collective volunteers and veterans of every war fought by the Terran Empire for the last century re-trained and got back into the swing of things, that was not enough.

Deanna needed a resistance movement—badly.

The daunting task of starting a resistance movement from scratch fell to one Marla De Bris—who despite looking unusually youthful, healthy (and alive) for someone who had nigh on 200 years experience in being a secret vampire—didn’t have terribly much experience in this sort of thing. Guerrilla warfare had never been one of her interests—but oh well, someone had to do it—someone had to buy time for the Militia to prepare to take on the formidable Deannan Republican Army, and to get as many people as possible out of harms' way before the war really got going. It might as well be her.