NSS Inquiry
Power Armor Bay
Stella's heart thumped in her throat as she prepped for launch out of the Inquiry's hangar. She looked over to her winged companion for this journey over Polup and smiled hesitantly before donning her helmet.
"Ready to jump?" asked a brusque Nepleslian woman that walked forward, looking to the two. They were being granted a fucking hell of a lot of autonomy.
"Yep!" replied Thalia, entirely too excited - and practically vibrating with enthusiasm - at the chance to finally
do something after having spent the past four weeks cooped up onboard the starship. Sure, there'd been plenty of the new big people to meet and do things with - but the confines of the
Inquiry were just so cramped when compared to the open sky of Fort Victory.
Stella Glass, the clerk of the Star Army working under the umbrella of DIoN alongside Thalia, said much of the same, "Yes we are!" She looked to Thalia and extended her hand for the other SAoY personnel to hold as she walked to the lip of the hangar.
The Caelisolan accepted the offered hand - "Oh my, I've never been with another girl before~~~" - and cheerfully kept alongside Stella, humming to herself as she half-skipped in order to keep from straying too far ahead of her shorter companion.
Never been with a guy, either, but oh wells - I might change that soon if they're as, ehm, as "big" as they claim...
Unaware of the beautiful Elysian's inner thoughts, Stella stepped off the hangar door and they were descending through the atmosphere towards where the Inquiry's away team scouted from the ground.
So distracted was she with the increasingly-detailed scene taking place within her mind that Thalia didn't even notice she was about to depart from the
Inquiry - that is, until she attempted to walk out onto the emptiness of space. Her finely-tuned kinesthetic senses were, fortunately, able to transform an awkward stuble into a graceful fall; said senses, however, could do nothing for the adrenaline-fueled flash of panic that jolted through the Elysian's mind.
OHGODWHATISHAPP-oh, hey, I'm falling-or am I free-falli-wow, that's a really, really, really, really beautiful planet. Which one was it again? Polygon? Pollen? Poliwag-oh, yeah! Polup! Heyos, Polup! "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
"Heeehee," Stella half giggled as she went down with the Caelisolan and then soon they were bursting through a cold front and then a swirling spike of heat that pushed their suits up a marginal degree.
Polup
After a good many minutes of regaining control of the altitude they were working in, Stella said, "I'm seeing the landing zone... What do you make out?"
The Caelisolan, who'd been taking in the gorgeous moonlit vista before her - having never before experienced such beauty due to growing up in suburbs -
hmmmmmmmed as she squinted, eyes scanning the
AIES-magnified landscape before her.
Tree, grass, grass, rock, green shuttle-thingie, tree, white beam, person shooting white beam, tree, green person runni-hey!
"Ita, Glass-sa-oops, Glass-Hei, I see a baddie in armor shooting at one of the peoples in green armor! Can I engage him please?" Thalia said.
Stella looked intently at the forest scape to their West just South of where the shuttle had landed. The power armored Elefirn approached from just North of the shuttle. A bit of foliage was cover for some Nepleslian power armor-clad Marines. She took it all in, as well as the white blasts the same ivory color as her uniform’s panels.
“I’ll relay the enemy position to the other away team while we go North of the hostiles position to scout their position. Engage on my command only,” Stella said, looking at Thalia, then added with a look to her in the air while they encroached on Stein’s position on the cliff.
“This is Santô Hei Stella Glass for—”
Before she could continue, Cadence cut her off, “Oh fuck!” Rank Cadence Newborn shot out her own weaponry to take the opponent down and when they ducked into cover, she shouted into comms, “Private Corbin, get that sonabitch!” To all of the team as well as the Mindy-clad girls, she said, “We have friendlies. Forgot to warn you…” In all honesty, she wondered what some members of the squad would have to say and didn’t want to hear it before the assault. “We probably have another five before Inquiry is going to start breathing down our necks!”
Stella called out to Cadence, “Agreed, Second Lieutenant! If alright with you, we’ll scout the North?” Telepathically, she asked, “Thalia, how’s it coming?”
Cadence gruffly replied, “Do it.”
Nothing so f-” the Hei began to reply, only to freeze in disbelief as she noticed a series of flashes - about fifty or so pinpricks of white light against the murky darkness of the night - in the plains beyond.
N-
For a moment - that indescribable span between seconds - Thalia wasn't a soldier on Polup.
She was a ten-year-old child on Elysia Novus watching those flashes become the pillars of white light that vaporized her family's
floating manor, three of her sisters, and her mother during the
Battle of Elysia.
No.
She was a fourteen-year-old teenager watching those flashes become the beams of white light that vaporized her family's house on the outskirts of
Kyoto, her father, and her four remaining sisters during the
Battle of Yamatai.
You.
Now, though, she wasn't a helpless child or a teenager paralyzed by fear - she was a soldier of the Star Army of Yamatai, clad in the most advanced power armor ever created. She was a soldier - and there was no way in Hell she was going to let the enemy destroy the only family she had left.
DON'T!
With a muzzle velocity of six times the speed of sound, the fifty-six pinpricks of light - slowly-moving packets of aether energy encapsulated in and guided by extremely weak scalar fields - took approximately 2.145 seconds to cover the 4.417 kilometers that lay between them and the individual known as Thalia Licina. After spending roughly half a second chasing rabbits through the meadows of the past, said individual spent another second locking up each packet with the AIES - a task it wasn't exactly designed for, but capable of performing nonetheless thanks to the white-hot thermal signatures of the aforementioned packets - and firing three ten-missile salvos from each of her armor's
shoulder-mounted missile pods as the flashes rapidly grew into fist-sized bolts of death and destruction.
"What do you see, Thalia?!” Stella shouted into comms.
The Caelisolan's response was delivered in the form of fifty-six explosions of light as each mini-missile flew straight into the artillery shells. They disintegrated, and disrupted the scalar field keeping the aether packets contained that were flying through the air- thus causing them to explode as well in a series of even brighter secondary explosions.
Stella was on top of the sight she was seeing through Thalia’s HUD and her Mindy sent out its own volleys, then relayed the coordinates of the location the aether had spit from in the forest to the North of the squad’s position.
“We have company, Inquiry team! Rendezvousing to your position!” Stella said over comms. “Thalia, pull back to the squad with me!”
Cadence called out to her, "We took down the eight power armor that encroached on our position, now we encroach on there positions! I want Stein and Edison up in the air scouting our flanks while Corbin and Nelson check our rear. Rest of you are going with me! Wait for the cats to get their fucking tails here to make sure we're all on the same page. Form up on my position if you're going with me. Now!"
