Jaakko takes a train to travel to his home town of Odesza, a small town built around an enormous steel mill. The dogs travel with him, and do well on the train.
The town is very small, and was nothing more than a hamlet in the frozen north before the mill moved in. The area is covered by blocks and blocks of cookie-cutter apartments for the steel mill workers, artifacts from before Jaakko's time, though the town had filled out by the time he was born with stores and restaurants. It had a single school system for the entire town as well, which Jaakko learned had recently knocked down it's old buildings in favor of new ones.
The train moved slowly into town. Jaakko could see from his window the colossal rusting architecture of the mill, which dominated the town's landscape. Through the hard falling wet snow and the dying sunlight he could see the glow of the mill's lights, which broadcast the mill's presence to the area for many miles, especially on cloudy nights when the mill lit up the overcast skies above it. It released in to the air smoke and ash, which easily mixed with the snow and turned it a gray color.
The train ground its way to a halt and Jaakko stepped on to the platform, dogs by his side. He had little more than a cheap backpack with a few extra clothes with him. The nearby mill made its existence audible with an ever-present hum, and a few trains waited to depart from a cargo dock at the nearby station. Jaakko arrived late evening, and took the last buses to the outskirts of the town to where his mother lived. He passed the apartment building he used to live in, which looked more or less the same, minus some new paint and aesthetic touch-ups. His mother had moved to a small house after Jaakko left for college.
The next two weeks would be eventful, with Jaakko and his mother catching up on news and Jaakko's antics. He couldn't bring himself to tell her about losing half the squadron though. His mother's two
North Aesthian Ovcharkas, Rekku and Musti and Jaakko's squadron dogs learn to get along and play.
He and his mother spend the first few days waiting for the snowstorm to die down.
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