RP: YSS Miharu Mission 4: The Fame and the Fury

Kai smiled, amused, at the Sprite's attempts to make herself sound special, and important. It wasn't that she wasn't special, it's just that she felt she had to try so hard. sure, the circumstances of the two were different, but at the heart of it, Yuzuki had done something very important, and, through it all, had proved herself a vital part of the crew. He did not know all the details of everything, but he had heard that Yuzuki had practically kept the ship together through sheer willpower during the last mission, and, having noticed the lack of spare parts might have helped them stay alive.

The Yamataian stretched slightly from his spot on the ground, thinking of how to answer Yuzuki's question. "Space is Serene, and peaceful. it's quiet, by virtue of it's properties. It is breathtakingly beautiful, but also lonely, and desolate. there is no natural life out in space; just things that people have flung into it." He paused for a second, before continuing. "I prefer the forest. The Trees. Growing, living things are much nicer. Trees, thousands of years old, laughing at our silly wars as they live longer than we could ever hope to, seeing the rise and fall of empires while they grow stronger and taller. They hold in them a peace and wisdom that the cosmos cannot compete with." He stopped, catching himself going off on a tangent, and fell silent for a moment, possibly embarrassed, but his face would never show it.

"Thank you, for making sure Miharu survived, for caring about her, Yuzuki." Kai suddenly said. "Everyone else was too concerned about themselves to bother about the thing their lives depended on, except you." He smiled again, looking into the sprites eyes for a moment before going back to his Power Armor (or at least the pile of spread out parts that made it up when assembled)

*****

Yuzuki went doe-eyed at the mention of trees. Although for some reason she remembered a little of what they would look like, she had never actually seen any before. The mental image she conjured from the description that Kai gave her was solitary. Some proud, tall wooden thing, with plank branches and green things hanging off it. She tried to imagine an area that was full of them. It took a lot of effort, but she tried.

Space was easier to visualize.

"Thank you, for making sure Miharu survived, for caring about her, Yuzuki." Kai suddenly said. "Everyone else was too concerned about themselves to bother about the thing their lives depended on, except you."

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Caught off-guard by the look, Yuzuki paused, considering for a moment, and then nodded uncomfortable acknowledgment. That look reminded her, for some reason, of the Captain when she had come to the medical lab.
Yuzuki could sense something deeper behind it - some meaning she just couldn't pinpoint beneath the surface of words. It was different in tone, different in spirit, but it was there all the same. Was it respect?

"I don't know what else I would do," she ventured, not sure exactly how to respond, "A lot of people did a lot of other things, too."

"Ah, uh, hai Juni," Rin replied, nodding. She briefly wondered why she was the one picked for the task and not someone more experienced. But, it was up to the Juni, so she wasn't about to question it. She waited for Tom to lead her to the armors.

Abwehran Commander said:

"All right, everything checks out," she told the participants over the intercom. "Since it looks like everyone is chosing the Mark III Mindy, we will make this a certification simulation as well. "Simulation Set-up is complete, loading Virtual environment now," the Warrant Officer reported as the four would find themselves in the Power Armor Bay, already in their power armor.

"If everyone is ready, we will begin the simulation in three, two, one..." the raven-haired Neko counted down as the simulator was suddenly filled with the sounds of distant combat. "Alert, enemy intruders detected," the Miharu warned the four armored individuals. "Numbers and composition are unavailable due to damage to internal sensor network. Currently, Engineering is under attack, the Bridge and MEGAMI are currently secure."

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Yukari heard the question Kyou posed to Masako. However, the time to ask Masako questions was over. It was not what she preferred, but Yukari reasoned that as the highest ranking person among the group, she had to take charge.

That first involved activating her Support Pack, hopefully bringing about some inkling of what they were facing. The sensor suite it contained was their best weapon at that moment. Engineering wasn't far away, and according to Miharu the enemy likely had not come up through the central corridor, as the bridge and MEGAMI were secure.

Attack or defend? Yukari was unsure. She needed more information, but she would get people in position first.

"Nagamira, position yourself at the top of the central corridor and cover it. We will wait for sensor information before descending into Engineering. Yamada will take point with her flamethrower and gauss cannons. Gunshin, bring up the aft."

The one benefit of power armor was the ease with which it floated. Yukari's feet were parallel with the black floor of the armor bay, but above it by a few inches as she slid across it, knees slightly bent, plasma SMG held across her body so she could bring it to bear if need be. "Use only short-wave radio communication, and keep your PSC on! The enemy could have telepathic attack ability."

Tsuya grinned within her armor as she felt that familiar rush of adrenaline-excitement. The thrill of impending combat danced across her nerves, spiking every time a particularly loud combat sound reached her ears. She readied her flamethrower, finger on the trigger, ready to fire at a moment's notice, and her gauss cannon swivelled in time with the handheld weapon.

"Hai, Shosa!" She began to move forward, at a good clip but not so fast that she would run into any potential enemy's sight without first checking.

Kyou nodded. "Hai, Shosa." She moved up, king sure to keep her gun at the ready. Unlike the others, she didn't have multiple people looking in that direction, so she needed to be proportionally more alert than the others. She checked over her equipment one last time she went, ensuring especially that her Shield Module and Capacitor were both at capacity; that would make working solo much easier.

"True, true," Takuma acknowledged, methodically stroking his chin as if he had a beard and not just a little stubble of hair. "We'll have to make sure we don't let any program left on the core have access to anything with guns on our ship. Or anything other form of escaping, really. I wonder what would happen if something took over our ship's AI..." Takuma pondered, tilting his head slightly in a partially zoned-out thought.

Masako wouldn't be answering any more in order to keep the simulation as real as possible. It would pretty much be the 'Miharu's AI' answering questions from now on. As the Executive Officer began to take charge and power up her Support Equipment, the CIES sensors and QWS began to power up to provide Yukari with a wealth of data. What the eldest Neko of the group would find was three readings on her screen: two located in each of Miharu's Multifunction Bays seemed to indicated enemy Shuttles had forced their way in while a group of 14 signatures were located at the bottom of the Main Passageway. Twelve of the fourteen seemed to be humanoid in shape and size, yet the other two seemed to be smaller and spherical.

A variety of other signals could be seen as well on her screens. Many of them seemed to be simulated crew members on the bridge, in engineering, and in the passage heading towards MEGAMI. Yet several humanoid signatures seemed to be spread throughout the Miharu and Hoshi. Four of them were just outside the Decontamination Room, which was the room the group was about to enter.

"Or more simply, it could just be rigged to explode or just destroy itself if it's activated while not hooked up to one of their ships." Miyoko was ever the optimist. "I can think of about a dozen ways one could rig it to be dangerous to us... we'll have to be damn careful. Chances are, there's nothing odd about it, but still. If we assume it's safe and it's not, it will likely hurt."

As the group approached the door, Yukari queried her Pack to specifically determine what the humanoid shapes were.

"Don't sell yourself short." Kai responded, reaching a fluid and lubricant-covered hand out to pat the sprite gently on the back for a moment, before going back to his work. "Just because it was a team effort doesn't make what the individual did any less important. Like My armor for example, I needed the whole thing to survive, but that doesn't make me any less thankful that the chest plate was able to take most of the damage and keep me from dying." The Yamataian chuckled, picking up the warped, scratched, and torn plate, with its carbonized scars and the spalling on the inside, looking it over. Something that could do this to a Durandium and Yamataium composite would have torn hos own fleshy body to shreds in a time span shorter than Kai could really imagine.

Setting the ruined plate down, Kai continued to further sort the pieces into the relative times it would take them to repair themselves, and just making a pile of all the ones beyond repair, making a mental note in his computerized brain which was which, so he could pull it up later when reassembling the armor. As he worked, Kai asked Yuzuki one more thing. "Do you think you're important? not do other people think you're important, but do you yourself feel that there is something special and important about you?"

*****

"Do you think you're important? not do other people think you're important, but do you yourself feel that there is something special and important about you?"

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The sprite's eyes grew distant for a moment, and she shifted her gaze to the armor beneath her for a little while. "Yea," Yuzuki replied, "I do."

Gradually she began to take up her work again - slowly, at first, and then with more purpose. She did not separate the parts into piles, and did not prioritize them - instead, she simply disassembled haphazardly.
Some part of her knew what was where and why. There was a strange logic to the chaos, however - somehow, the smaller parts like ferrous bolts and locknuts always found their way into clusters.

She had brought no replacement parts, though.

The sensors package of Yukari's Support Pack gleaned what knowledge it could about the relative shape, size and mass of the individual targets located beyond the door. One of them seemed to be the right shape and size for a Mindy armor, making it one of the more dangerous obstacles. The other three seemed to be wearing hardly any armor at all.

Yukari narrowed her eyes at the image in her helmet. She fed the data to everyone's armor, so they could benefit.

"Yamada-Hei, prepare your gauss cannons," Yukari said. "When you enter, be ready to use them on the Mindy-like target."

With that, Yukari tried to open the door, Tsuya right behind her.

After giving a short verbal acknowledgement, Kaida had taken up her assigned position, pausing only a moment once there to examine her modded weapon. The thing had been specifically made to fire the projectile much faster, but that also meant it kicked worse than the most unruly shotgun. However, being a neko and now in a (simulated?) PA, that wasn't an issue. She brought her rifle up from her end of the corridor and aimed it down the corridor, taking care to not put the crosshairs near her teammates.

'Steady, even breaths. Wait till a target presents itself, exhale as you fire...' These were all basic things, but she ran through them in her head anyway.

As the engineer and sprite went to the armor bay, Tom decided to strike up some conversation.

"So, Rin," he said. "How are you doing? Are you feeling better since the end of last mission?"

Miyoko and Takuma arrived to the main passageway and started their descent, but before they could make their entry into the Multi-Function bay a sprite peeked in from the opposite door. "Actually, we've set up at the MEGAMI. Come this way!"

The sprite lead them around the medlab to the armored door behind which Miharu's brain rested. That door was now open, revealing a chamber filled with complex computer instrumentation on the three walls with a blocky central processing hub on the far wall to the door. The room's temperature was a little crisp thanks to the coolant lines that passed through the chamber to keep the powerful quantum computer and its peripherals at nominal temperatures.

The Bowhordia datacore was set up in the middle of the chamber, the connectors Junko's sprite team snaking from the MEGAMI to the databank. Two consoles had been set up next to it, with wheeled swivel chairs, and there were laptop style workstations up with fold-over-keyboard flat display screens.

The sprite that had lead them told them: "We've ghosted the OS of Kimura-Hei's computer on those workstations along with Saito-Heisho's console preferences back at on the bridge so you should have everything you need, along with the MEGAMI's processing power."

"That's something I've heard is difficult for some Nekovalkyrja" Kai muttered, working on his own junk. Once he got everything sorted out, he made a list of what he needed, and walked over to one of the spare parts storage units, and acquired what he needed, returning quickly and pushing the pile of beyond repair parts out of the way. It gave him an idea of something to say.

"I hope we aren't like these parts, simple and easy to replace when we are damaged beyond repair." The Yamataian shook his head, knowing full well that a lot of the empire's former philosophy had been just that; when a Neko was damaged to much it was simply discarded and replaced; either by an ST backup or by a completely new Neko. injuries that would normally be fixed were instead glossed over for a quick ST, mental problems were covered up by shunting the broken ones into menial labor, people who were missed were ignored by the government at large.

But that didn't seem to be how it was now. There were new laws in place, new rules, a new war, that was being fought differently. smaller, more skilled units were in place of the overwhelming, wasteful numbers of yore. Perhaps, those broken parts would be able to be taken somewhere to be refurbished and find a new life in another Daisy, or maybe even cycle back into Kai's own Daisy. "Somehow, I think at one point in time we would have been, but now, it's a new day. Less grim than the last war."

*****

"'Spare parts' is a good way to put it, I think."

The sprite jerked sharply on the armor, freeing what looked like acircuit board. She examined it nominally before discarding it into her pile. When she looked up, Yuzuki bore a surprisingly resigned look and her blue eyes, so often tentative and unsure, took on a deeper aspect.

"But we are not cheap parts," the sprite asserted in a quiet, determined voice, "I think it is because we are different. I think it is because this ship is different. I don't know what happens on other ships, or bigger ships, but this ship has to be different. I know she's special. I can feel it. She's just like m. I'm just like her. She takes care of me, and I take care of her. She made me. I owe her."

The sprite sat back and looked up at the overhead, as if trying to discern the very heart of the ship itself. A lot of things were running through her mind, but somehow that was not unpleasant. She was comfortable with the thoughts. She felt safe. Some people might have thought her attachment pathetic or misguided - how could you love a machine? Could a ship be family?

Yuzuki eventually turned her attention back to Kai, and his pile of parts and jumble of equipment. She lingered over the vision of the armor pilot before idly flicking a bolt at him, just to startle him.

"I like talking with you," she said with her more usual demeanor, "I just want you to know that. So tell me about things. I want to know more about what you've seen, and heard and done." The sprite shifted her heels beneath her, no longer even pretending to be interested in what she was doing to the armor. She sat on the half-disassembled mess, cross-legged, interested and plaintive.

"Anything. Forests or stainballs or school or something. Please?"

"Hai, Shosa!" Tsuya grinned even more widely as her gauss cannon whirred to life, preparing to fire and training on the Mindy-shaped target behind the wall. She stepped in front of her superior officer, taking up a role as a meat shield just as the door opened - as soon as she could, she fired the cannon at the target, spraying into the doorway with her flamethrower as well. Just in case.

As soon as the door opened, Yukari and Tsuya would see the spiked armor of a Black Mindy, the primary Power Armor used by the Daughters of Eve. A very surprised Mindy at that as it immediately took a Gauss round to the helmet, instantly killing the pilot inside. The other three individuals weren't really alive anyway. The trio were mechanized combat drones known as Nekomachina and each seemed to be armed with a SMG. They were also armed with a belt of grenades.

The super-heated plasma from the flamethrower bathed the Nekomachina before they could even turn to fire, melting the emotionless automatons to the deck. That same plasma also contacted the grenades on said drones. The incredible heat from the plasma burned the outer shells of the grenades for a moment, but that was all it took to cause the deadly cylinders to activate.

Tsuya would be faced with the explosive force of eighteen High Explosive Grenades that were meant to break down the strong bulkheads of the ship. The walls surrounding the door bent inward towards the group, but held and thus kept the other two safe from the explosion. Yukari would feel the shockwave push her back from the door and towards the back of the decontamination showers. Tsuya took the full brunt of the explosion. Her flamethrower would take the full force of the attack, but would luckily not break open and cover the poor pilot in plasma. Her gauss would also take damage, leaving the poor Mindy without weaponry. The armor wouldn't take much damage however as Tsuya was propelled back into the room at break-neck speeds, which would not kill her because of the armor.

Yukari cursed after her simulator's viewscreen came back to life. The simulator said she'd suffered a very mild concussion, and her armor's life support was attempting to stabilize her. The simulator waited about 15 seconds before giving her back her ability to "talk" to her teammates.

"Gunshin-Hei, examine the room and clear remaining hostiles! Nagamira, cover her." She switched to a private channel for Tsuya. "Yamada-Hei, be careful when employing your flamethrower. We were very lucky! Go to the armory and collect new weapons."

The armor squad leader got up from the ground and started to slowly walk out of the decontamination showers area.

Kai chuckled, sitting up straighter and pushing a lock of dirty blond hair out of the way with his grime covered hand. "You're funny. But I guess it won't hurt to Humor you." The Yamatain stretched a bit, popping a few joints that had started to become tired as he had worked.

"Tami is a great place to grow up. Like I said before, it's almost all forests. there's only a few small cities, mostly just tiny little colonial villages where people live fairly simple lives, at least compared to those on the huge industrialized planets. Yamatai is a dead planet to me, all man-made and sterile, too many buildings, not enough plants. But Tami, Tami is almost all plants. Trees, shrubs, bushes, vines. And Animals, there are wild animals on Tami, some are neat to just watch, some are good for hunting and eating, and some are dangerous. Luckily not many, and nothing that can't be handled by the ranger service or even the locals.

Growing up there is like growing up in a Kid's paradise. there was always something to do, somewhere to go, some feature to see. Rivers, lakes, ponds, waterfalls, all beautiful, natural things that you can't find on even the most carefully terraformed planet. It's a marvel. I really miss that place, but The miharu is nice. This ship seems a lot more alive than some of the other ones I've been on It almost feels like, home, without the trees. Heh."

Kai scratched his head a little bit and leaned back, relaxing a little and taking a break. he had been working pretty hard, doing something he was only partially trained for. Field repairs and a complete overhaul were two different things, but at least the basics were the same.


-----

Yuzuki smiled a genuinely pleased smile. Honestly, she had no idea where to begin - a flood of questions filled her mind and buzzed around crackling with potential. Her mental eye was painting a vivid and colorful picture. Granted it was all just her imagination - it probably all looked different, real. Still, she enjoyed conjuring it all up from what little she knew. She wasn't sure why - she just did.

Content, she closed her eyes and paused for a few seconds to soak it all in after he was finished. That pause had become a habit already - some part of Yuzuki still needed time to digest what was being said, and create her next questions. And anyway, the quiet lulls in conversation were not unwelcome. She pushed what strands of hair had snuck away from the backs of her ears behind them, again.

Eventually, she opened her eyes and asked, "Do you have pictures?"