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

Rin looked to Tom for a moment, wondering what it is he was talking about before she realized. "Oh, etto, hai. Being busy has helped." Now that was brought up again, the gruesome memories of various bits and pieces of people, as well as gore, were trying to creep back up into the front of her mind. The sprite winced as she tried not to think about it.

"Being busy keeps us distracted," Tom agreed with a nod as he walked ahead of the sprite. "But that's no good if we dwell on things as soon as those distractions end. You did a good job on the mission, Rin, and you should be proud of yourself."

Tsuya skidded backwards across the floor, the armor dropping onto its rear with a crash almost as deafening as the grenade explosion. Nearly every part of her armor now displayed yellow or orange. The clumsy neko was quite glad for the lack of pain in the sim. She managed to pick herself up before Yukari spoke, though, almost cutting her superior off with a "...Mindy eliminated, Shosa!"

Her ears perked inside the armor as she heard Yukari's voice speak over the private channel, then she felt the hot flush of shame - she'd disappointed her again. "Hai, Shosa," she responded in barely more than a mumble, in the same channel, before stomping off to the armory in order to make herself useful again.

"Hai, Shosa." Kyou moved forward, and moved into the room quickly, leveling her LASR as she went. She also readied her forearm shield before going through the doorway, just in case. The LSP had read only four targets, but there was no need to be careless with anyone's lives. "Shosa? It looks like all targets in this room are down."

"H- hai. Arigatou gozaimasu Freeman-Juni," Rin responded obviously uncertain that she deserved any of such praise. She hadn't done anything particularly helpful, so why was she being complimented. It wasn't as if she had done something anyone of a dozen other people could've done just as easily.

She meekly followed behind the head engineer.

"Not on me, no, but I might have a few in my room. Certainly I have a few drawings, mostly scribblings but there are a couple landscapes." Kai smiled as he tried to think of what pictures, if any, he had of Tami, and why she would be so interested in them. "What, you having a hard time imagining it all? I thought Neko were supposed to have superior brains?" he chuckled, knowing that she had probably never bothered to find out what a forest or a tree looked like, or even what kind of planet Tami was. "I think we should probably finish up with these before we go look at pictures though. I don't know about you but handling photographs while in this state of 'cleanliness' doesn't sound like the best of ideas to me. Perhaps we should just clean up as much as we can if you simply cannot wait."

"I'm serious," Tom said, picking up on the hesitation in the sprite's voice. "My first time in combat was a mess. I know how hard it is to keep composed with all that pressure on you. Plus, your management of that canceller device was essential to the mission's success. Do you think Kai could have done that? Nope. You were the only one there that could've and you pulled through."

He turned around and floated backwards with a light smile on his face.

"So, yeah. Bask in the success a little. I still owe you a meal for your services as well. What did you have in mind to eat?"

Yukari "shook off" the lasting effects of the blast and entered the room with Kyo. "What is left of the targets ... " she muttered.

The Black Mindy armor with its new Airflow head rested lifelessly against the scorched floor. It had an extra Zesuaium vest over its armor, a testament to Masako's sadism and Tsuya's incredible luck. The aether weapon it had was a modern SMG type, the kind given only to Mindy 1H units. It rested at the back of the room, and was possibly still useful.

A series of shallow craters across the room provided the only evidence of the Nekomachina.

"Gunshin-Hei, disarm your LASR and take the aether SMG. It should have enough ammunition left to be of some use. The point is now yours. Nagamira, Yamada, form on me and let us go."

Rin gave a shy smile, rather enjoying the compliments. It made her feel just a little bit giddy, especially with Tom condoning it. But, she tried to hide it, wanting to remain modest. "Arigatou gozaimasu..." she repeated.

She wasn't even particularly sure what that canceller had done to help. All she could remember was that Tom had basically yelled at her to increase the concentration again because it was helping due something. Oh well.

"Etto, a meal.... I really don't know, Freeman-Juni. Whatever you want to cook is fine."

Eventually, Tsuya returned from the armory, refitted with gear identical to what she'd managed to blow up previously. She took up a position at Yukari's left side.

Outside the VR room, Masako frowned at how the simulation was progressing. Yukari was taking the lead, but there was very little activity over all (other than Tsuya's rather reckless performance). Scratching the tip of her left ear in thought, the Warrant Officer sat down and began to reprogram her simulation on the fly.

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As three out of the four team members began to enter the hallway to survey and salvage, Yukari would note two more signal appearing from the port side Multifunction Bay. They would appear from the shuttle itself, but would give the Executive Officer very little time to warn her subordinates.

The two signals denoted Powered Armor floating through the ship and into the hallway. What appeared before the trio would be another Black Mindy armed in the same way as the previous one and a rather nasty surprise. The second Powered Armor was identified as a Mindy II in Balanced gear. Along with its usual equipment, it also seemed to have donned a Zesuaium Vest and an Atmospheric Plasma Rifle.

Both Armors would open up on the trio at the same time, the Black Mindy with its Aether SMG and the Mindy II with it's Plasma Rifle. The hallway would become a dangerous corridor of plasma and aether, just as Tsuya arrive at Yukari's side.

The signals came up too late. Moving too fast. Yukari did not have a lot of time.

Her sensor data was almost instantly transferred to the others, but that would not stop the rounds coming their way. She had no shot with Kaida and Kyou in the way. A silent command made the doors to Hoshi's engine rooms open on either side of her.

Yukari made herself parallel with the ceiling and about a meter above the ground as she slid fast into one of the engine rooms, but not before firing a single blast from her SMG at the Black Mindy. The shot zipped through the gap between Kaida and the wall.

Fred said:

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."

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"Thank you." Miyoko glanced from sprite to sprite, trying to memorize their faces--she was thiiiis far from asking Miharu for a field hunter's guide to sprites. She flopped down at one of the consoles and inspected the display on it. "Have you established a data connection to the core yet, or just been setting up? I'm also curious what precautions you've taken with the core itself." Ever fond of not getting blown up, Miyoko was rather reluctant to do anything to the core until she'd been told that it was at least mostly safe.

What looked like the leader of the sprite team (Junko, in fact), turned to address them. "Everything's connected as per Miharu's instruction. As for precautions... well, we've handled it very delicately?"

Another sprite gestured to the two consoles. "These are proxies for the MEGAMI. The connection to the ship's main computer will grant you its processing power for operations. If the safeguards for the datacore are similar to ours, detected tampering will result in a memory wipe. The rest - accessing and retrieving the data - is really your job to do."

Miyoko nodded and turned to Takuma. "Well, you know more on the subject than I do... do you have any suggestions how to start?" She didn't touch her console yet, waiting for his input before beginning to do anything.

Kyou had just stowed her now locked LASR and knelt to pick up the fallen Mindy's Aether SMG when the second wave came in. Barely even pausing to check her grip on the new-found weapon, she automatically rolled in the opposite direction from Yukari's movement. During the roll, she activated her Barrier Shield module, hoping that it would take the brunt of any attack that managed to hit her anyway.

"Etto, a meal.... I really don't know, Freeman-Juni. Whatever you want to cook is fine."

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"When I cook for everybody, it's usually pretty good," Tom said. "But when I cook for specific people, it's special."

He landed gently on his feet and turned away from the sprite to continue his walk.

"So, if you wouldn't mind, give me some basics to work with. Light or heavy? Sweet or Sour? Meat or vegetable? Anything is helpful unless you want a Raltean surprise."

Takuma walked over towards the station and leaned on the back of his chair with his hand.

"Since you mentioned our datacore being similar tamper-wise, where lies the trigger to erase memory in our system? Do we have a chip or something similar that checks an encryption key passed to the datacore every time and freezes the memory on a failed authentication? Or does it only trigger when sensitive files are tampered with? Or does it check the location of the request and deny access if it is not from a certified terminal? Just to leave no rock unturned, I'm willing to guess we cannot detach any memory chips from the core without triggering any heat, light, pressure, or other sensors. We also have the password from opening the door, but it's highly unlikely that will do us any good."

"What I'm think is if we could use the MEGAMI's processing power to out maneuver or stall the wiping program, we can copy the files. But before we speculate, could you tell me what we expect to be dealing with or just pull up a page on the specs of our datacore please?"

The sprites looked a little uncertain. Junko finally eyerolled and suggested: "Okaa-san?"

There was a pause before Miharu's AI replied - it almost felt like a sigh. "If we take for example Soul Savior Pods, it typically takes the superior PANTHEON priviledges of a MEGAMI or a KAMI integrated electronic suite to access the data safely. If the data access is made by a computer suite with a recognized IFF, then there's generally no problem."

"Then, we can just use the computer identity of the Meng Po's MEGAMI!" Junko blurted out enthusiastically.

"That'd might have had worked two years ago, but Princess Hanako convinced elements of Black Spiral to defect from the Daughters of Eve since then; it'd be expected for the remaining computer systems to alter their IFF identifications. Any updated IFF registries we could get would probably be under lock and key, within that datacore. Not to mention this was part of a KAMI computer suite, so it's a rather tough nut for me to crack too."

Miyoko crossed her arms and looked at the screen laid out for her skeptically. "So, essentially, we can't access the datacore without a current IFF flag, which we can't get without accessing a datacore. Practically a classic Catch-22." She stopped and considered the situation for a few moments before adding, "But if they can update the registry, that means that there's some way to change it. It might require an intercepted IFF update command, which would probably be heavily encrypted, but that would still likely be easier to break than a probably equally-encrypted datacore.

"Of course, our chances of intercepting and decrypting one of those still aren't that great. So, ruling out us abruptly capturing a vessel from the Daughters of Eve..." Miyoko stopped and sighed, "Is our best bet to try disabling the core entirely to prevent a wipe, then reading the raw data externally as best we can?"