White Scars - Pre-Heresy: According to ancient White Scars records, the Terrans who at first made up the Vth Legion, originally nicknamed the "Star Hunters," possessed diverse origins, with "some having flesh the colour of charred firewood, for others it was as pale as our armour."By the time of the Great Crusade, Terran Aspirants for the Legion were brought to the training centres of Imamdo on Terra. Here they underwent the selection process, and if chosen, the physical conditioning necessary to determine whether or not they were fit to become Space Marine Legionaries.Each cadre was chosen by a prospective Space Marine Legion. If an Aspirant showed extreme promise they were often selected by the vaunted XVIth Legion (the Luna Wolves), but more often than not they would be reassigned to a Space Marine Legion based on the individual Legion's needs because of the ongoing Great Crusade.Those Aspirants who were reassigned would be transported to a training facility on Luna, where they would continue their training and study for another solar decade, until they were deemed worthy of becoming a fully-fledged battle-brother of their newly assigned Legion. Once transported to their new Legion, they would continue undergoing gene-therapy, psycho-conditioning, and then, finally, the gene-seed implants that would make them one with their new Legion.In the days after the rediscovery of the White Scars Primarch Jaghatai Khan on the world of Chogoris and his decision to rename the Legion, Aspirants to service in the Vth Legion still began their initial orientation in the Sol System. Then they would be moved out with the others to various off-world training facilities such as a decommissioned Imperial Battleship over Vhomarl, a Jetbike squadron billeted temporarily on the lead-hard plains of Yyem, specialist combat units deployed on the Ocean World of Kail IX or the gas giant Revelet Taredes.For those who performed well throughout, the Chogorian instructors were fulsome in their praise, unlike the grudging hard-men of the Luna Wolves who conducted their Space Marine Initiates' training back on Terra. The physical changes the Aspirants underwent were hard, and the surgeries often painful. For those selected to join the mystic savages of the Vth Legion the cultural ways of the barbarians of Chogoris were too different to be absorbed readily.These Aspirants had to learn Khorchin, the strange language of Chogoris. This alone tested many Aspirants -- despite their improved recall and mental agility, getting their tongue around such alien sounds remained a challenge. It was not just a matter of vocabulary and grammar; Khorchin had inflections and subtleties not shared by any Terran language.Their tutors had developed their own theory on the origin of the differences; the Chogorians were a poetic people. Their homeworld was an empty place. It loosened their imagination, so they filled their minds with words. They were prolix, and they did not learn Imperial Gothic well, hence all the fuss of learning their native language.The Aspirants eventually mastered the speech in the end, just like all the other Terrans who had been inducted into the Legion. The inductees studied together, poring over curved character-clusters and diacritics, rolling their eyes at the complexities and cementing friendships in the face of adversity.Though initially most Legions took prospective Aspirants from the various geographic origins on Terra or other worlds, by the time the Great Crusade was in full-swing, many of the Aspirants of the Vth Legion were taken solely from the Asiatic hive clusters on Terra.Those Aspirants of various other stocks disapproved of this practice. After Unity was achieved on Terra, the Imperium was meant to have moved beyond racial and ethnic stereotyping, so the fact that the Vth Legion remained mired in the physiognomic traits of the peoples found on their backwater world was an irritant to the other Legions.Much else about them was an irritant: their archaic customs, their introversion, their exceptionalism. They placed enormous importance on speed -- on being the first into combat, on being the first out, on movement, on shams and counterfeits. This was counter-intuitive to the mantra drilled into Space Marine Aspirants' heads on Terra, "No backward step."The Chogorian instructors instead drilled into them "Withdraw, then return" over and over again. When at last Ascension arrived, and the Aspirants were deemed worthy to become fully-fledged battle-brothers of the Vth Legion, their old life was no more. They would give up their old names and choose a new one from the Chogorian Talskar tribe's mythology or from one of the many Khorchin almanacs and lexicons.