Well this is my first chapter, Yay! I am hoping that you all like my story and I will try to get out chapters ASAP. Enjoy!
It was a bright Monday morning starting the second week of August. The sun shown dimly into Adelbert's room through the window curtains which made a beam of light that rested just a little bit underneath his chin. The red curtains and rug on Adelbert's floor lit up like fire as the light passed over them, showing off the elegant blue and gold colored designs woven into them. A clock echoed in the corridor five times, Adelbert's usual alarm to wake up. His crystal blue colored eyes opened tiredly as he sat up in his bed, trying to figure out where he was. He yawned and scratched his pale hair as his mind started to reboot. Then his memory flashed back to him; today was the battalion's formation day.
This was the day that the commanders of the army welcomed the new recruits to the castle. Adelbert had been waiting for this day since he was sixteen, since being a royal he automatically got a higher placement in the military. He usually didn't like being given special treatment, having argued for a lower rank to begin with. However, the joy of the day made it impossible for that to bother him. He had been preparing for weeks just so that he would look professional in front of the two hundred and fifty young men that he was placed in charge of training. He put his dress uniform on very carefully while making sure that every decoration he had (which wasn't much) was in the right place, grabbed his hat, put on his uniformal gloves and nearly sprinted down to the dining room to eat his breakfast. He came up to the gold-brown doors of the semi-large dining hall and put his full wait into them, making his entrance awkward as the door handles escaped from his hands, giving that the gloves allowed little to no grip on anything, and making a loud boom as they hit either side of the doorway. His mother Anna, his sister Anneliese and his good friend Adalwolf, who had been named the captain of one of the two one hundred and twenty-five man companies that had been placed under Adelbert's command, were all there. They all looked at him when he entered the room, semi-simultaneously, which made Adelbert double take. After a moment of silence Adalwolf and his sister returned to finishing off what looked like their breakfast, and his mother walked up to him and kissed him affectionately.
His mother's golden-red hair was braided in its usual way, making it look a lot shorter than it really was. She wore a simple green dress which brought out her blue eyes, and looked as though she had walked into the room at the same time he did through the door on the other side of the room. Adalwolf was wearing a dress uniform similar to Adelbert's, with his brown hair looking as tangled and dirty as it could possibly get after an attempt to comb it. Adelbert was thankful that the dress uniform had a black kepi that could cover his friend's head so that he would not become an embarrassment to the army. Then there was his sister Anna. She and Adalwolf were sitting at the table, at a very far distance from each other. Adelbert could only see her blue eyes and golden-red hair with just a little bit of the rusty orange dress that she was wearing over the table, but that was enough to know that she was not happy to be at the same table as his obnoxious friend.
"How are you doing this morning honey?" asked Anna.
She was smiling at him in that amused motherly smirk that she directed at him with whenever he was in uniform.
"I'm doing fine mother." he said.
"Well that is good," Anna said, "there is some sausage on the table for you, and I believe Elsa had the gates open for the new recruits an hour ago. There are a lot of them here already."
Something was wrong; Adelbert woke up when the clock in the corridor near his room struck 5:00 as usual. Either he had a very devoted group of men under his command or he was late.
"Why are the men so early?" he asked.
"Because you slept in!" cracked Adalwolf.
Adelbert was about to panic at the thought that he was late for the formation of his battalion, when Anneliese caught sight of the emotions going across his face and answered what he was inevitably going to ask, standing up and walking away from Adalwolf with haste as she did so.
"Don't worry," she said "the clock in the corridor to your room stopped, it is eight o'clock now, and you still have two hours."
"Thank goodness!" cried Adelbert "I don't know what I would have done if I was late to the battalion's formation!"
"I could have improvised." said Adalwolf.
"And seeing you try to improvise would be the last thing this world needs." said Adelbert.
Adalwolf was about to make one of his snappy comebacks when Queen Elsa came into the room. She was wearing a blue dress with a maroon trim. Her snow white hair was in a long braid that rested on her shoulder and her face was pale as it always was. She noticed Adelbert and Adalwolf and her attention went straight to them.
"There you two are! Are you both ready for the battalion's formation?" she asked.
Before Adelbert made his reply, Adalwolf decided he would answer for him.
"I don't know about sleepy-head here, but I am ready." said Adalwolf
Adelbert, on a normal day, would have made a sarcastic retort to this, but today he decided not to and just let it go.
"Well, you are both supposed to be getting things organized down in the courtyard. Most of the men are there already and General Dietrich needs all of the help he can get for keeping things orderly down there." said Elsa, her tone seemingly scolding but amused at the same time.
"We will leave immediately." said Adelbert.
"Well, before I go shall I steal a kiss from the beautiful princess?" asked Adalwolf hopefully.
The response he received was a slap on the cheek and a very nasty comment about his breath. Adalwolf made a mock insulted expression and sauntered off, grabbing Adelbert by the arm in the process and bidding him to leave with him, both putting on their uniform hats as they did so. The two walked out of the dining room to head out to the courtyard, Adalwolf's face still throbbing.
"Why do you antagonize her like that? I'm beginning to think that you like to get slapped!" said Adelbert.
"I guess in a way I kind of do." said Adalwolf "Your sister is quite attractive!"
Similarly to his sister, Adelbert responded to Adalwolf's rude comments by giving him a firm slap up the back of his head.
The two friends arrived at the courtyard with a frantic General Dietrich to greet them at a little wooden podium in the middle of the courtyard that had been built for the higher ranking officers who were attending this ceremony to make their speeches on. Dietrich, who sounded more like a field mouse now then a field general, bombarded Adelbert with questions about where he had been. Even if Adelbert had been three days early the general would probably be just as frantic and angry at Adelbert as today, seeing that he had a great disliking for men of royal blood who had higher positions to start off with, which was the only thing that the two ever agreed on. It was his way to be frantic all of the time; even when there was nothing to worry about he always had some reason to be nervous. Adelbert hated to think what would happen to this man if he was thrust into commanding the royal army during a war.
"Why are you late? Are you ready to form the battalion? Do you expect the royal army to stand still and wait for you to eat your breakfast?!" shouted Dietrich.
His line of questioning was very out-of-place seeing that technically, Adelbert wasn't late. However, he decided to just go along with the general and answered him in the way that would let his nervous mind have something to pick at.
"The clock in the corridor to my room stopped." he said "I slept in by accident."
"Slept in by accident!" shouted Dietrich "The future leader of our military and country slept in by accident! Some general you will make!"
"We are still on schedule and I can ensure you that it will never happen again." said Adelbert, a little defensive of himself now.
The general looked at him with venomous eyes for a few moments until he remembered why he was angry with him in the first place.
"There is no time for this now, you men go along to Colonel Schmitt and get your instructions!" snapped Dietrich as he stomped off in the other direction.
The two young officers found the elderly Colonel who directed them to the positions that they would be in for the ceremony. Adelbert was placed a few feet away from the dead center of the podium with the hauptfeldweibel and deputy commander of the battalion standing behind him to his left and right, and Adalwolf was placed twelve paces away and to the right of Adelbert, with his company officers standing in positions similarly to the men standing behind Adelbert.
They took their positions and waited for the battalion formation to begin. During his wait, Adelbert looked around the courtyard to get more comfortable with the situation. He saw many young officers and not as young non-commissioned officers standing in areas respective to where their companies would be when formed, waiting like he was for the general to permit them to begin the formation of their units. This of course took another hour to happen as the general was busy trying to make sure that the civilians who were not joining the army were kept at a decent distance from the new recruits; getting in the way of the men he had ordered to do just that in the process. Adelbert saw many young men standing in a massive confused mob at the center of the courtyard. They were just as impatient as Adelbert was with getting the ceremony going, which was apparent by a group of the men taking joy in dunking each other's heads in the water of the courtyard's two fountains. Then Adelbert looked over in the direction that civilians were standing and found his family and several other nobles, including the attractive Countess Carina, watching the event progress. Adelbert stood gazing in the direction of his family for a short amount of time when they all noticed him and waved in his direction. He acknowledged that he saw them and returned his full attention to the task at hand.
After nearly the entire morning went by, the general finally got the ceremony started by introducing himself as Captain General of Arendelle's Royal Army and going through his speech of how proud he was of the men for making such a commitment as to join this great organization's ranks. Dietrich's speech alone could have lasted the entire day, as he had the tendency of going off on tangents. Fortunately his speech only lasted an hour, which was short for him, and he handed the soap box over to Colonel Schmitt, who introduced himself and his deputy commander and informed the men how their lives would be like when they joined the army.
After much time spent on introductions and speeches the colonel handed Adelbert and his company commanders charge of the men. Adelbert then shouted to his subordinates to get company formation started. He wasn't technically supposed to do much at all with the formation of the companies but he was bored so he ran right in there with Adalwolf and helped anyways. It took the small group of officers several hours to get the men settled down, organized into companies, fitted for their uniforms and taken to their newly constructed stone barracks, but eventually Adelbert and his officers pulled it off in record time. It was a long day full of yelling and confusion that pretty much everyone who was involved with it was very glad to see end. It pained Adelbert to think that most of the two months that would be devoted to the men's training would be very similar to this day, as it took so much out of him.
He walked tiredly into his room of the palace, wrinkling the red rug on his floor as he got dressed to go to sleep. He fell on his bed, making a rather impressive thud sound as he did so, and lazily rolled himself into the covers. He gladly accepted sleep after that day, seeing that there was going to be two months of training these soldiers ahead of him, and that sleep was not going to be a permanent privilege for him in those coming weeks.
Please review! I need to know how you guys like this chapter! Oh and for some ranks that sounded a little to modern for the time period, I wrote their german translation down so that it would sound more authentic. So don't think that some words are huge mispellings because they aren't, they are just german military ranks (or ranks loosley based off of the ranking systems of the modern Swiss Army and Imperial German Navy of WWI, and yes I took the time to figure those out for a fan fic, what can I say? I"M A MILITARY BUFF!).