We rumble on, and try Flesh out the Sabers as people.
Voomer cores ... Anyone who's seen episode 15/16 of Tokyo 2040 has half an idea. And consider how Mackie came about. They're an accident someone figured out how to replicate and control. (At least that was the original story idea) . A good reason to search out people who matched the original Sabers.... the hardsuits work best with people who match the template.
Yes, I was reading one of the books in *that* series at the time, when coming up with Ford's origin story.
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Voomer cores ... Anyone who's seen episode 15/16 of Tokyo 2040 has half an idea. And consider how Mackie came about. They're an accident someone figured out how to replicate and control. (At least that was the original story idea) . A good reason to search out people who matched the original Sabers.... the hardsuits work best with people who match the template.
Yes, I was reading one of the books in *that* series at the time, when coming up with Ford's origin story.
Quote:Maico was dry again, and back in her clothes. A half-hour had been enough to make her feel better, even if she was still subject to the occasional wash of dizzyness. It was beginning to fade.________________________________
The room she’d commandeered might’ve been intended to become a bedroom, but she doubted anyone had ever slept in that bed. Still, with a pair of chairs and a notepad, it was as good a place as any, and private enough to work without being interrupted.
“I am Cosmic Senshi Daryl Haur of the Sailors Armed Militia,” Daryl introduced herself. “And a former Grade OF-5 troubleshooter with Great Justice,”
Her green-grey eyes had a coldness behind them. She didn’t want to be there, not one bit. Maico swallowed. Daryl had dressed herself in her fuku uniform, blue skirt and red ribbon colours announcing herself as a Senshi from Tokyo itself. It was a deliberate statement.
“And you’re also the Blue Knight Saber?”
“Yes,”
Maico didn’t blame her for the sour demeanour. She was keeping the woman from her well earned soak in that wonderful hot tub.
“How were you recruited?”
“Maybe I should start from a little before that,” She forced herself to sigh. “Jet told me to tell the whole story, because some things about the Sabers wouldn’t make sense otherwise,”
In other words, I’m not opening up to you because I want to.
“Please do,”
“Alright,” she recrossed her legs, easing back into her chair. “I came up with my parents right after that war ended, back when I was still a kid. They weren’t even fendanes; my father had gotten a job working with the Crystal Sapporo breweries, and we moved up solely because the economy down in the EU was grinding to a halt.” A small smile crept across her face, a warming of her features as she thought of her family.“Naturally, I fell in with the Senshi mythos, even if my brother hated it.”
“I can imagine,”
“He left for Kandor when he could, while I went to the academy on Crystal Tokyo. That was where I met Ranka Mill. We graduated together, and he was my troubleshooting partner, both of us OF-5’s. We both got the Usagi medal for busting broadleaf runners. ”
It was shining on her chest. Her expression fell. Maico watched her eyes drop to the floor, the warm light behind her eyes going out.
“His sister got kidnapped by some Zwilnik who didn’t appreciate our efforts. We went hell for leather to rescue her. When we found her, she’d gone through a catgirling machine... or some sort of catgirl biomod”
“I’m sorry,” Maico said, on reflex. “I didn’t know.”
“S’alright.” Daryl assured her, with a wan smile that showed she was at least grateful for the gesture. “But that’s really not the worst part. We got her back and we thought she was still together. We thought she still had her mind but...” She drew a long breath through thin lips. “... it was a fake. The catgirl murdered Ranka, and tried to kill me. I tried to go after the shit was responsible.”
Maico waited, feeling a cool tension spread through her body. Is this what Jet was talking about?
“Great Justice took me off the case. Apparently Grade-5’s aren’t allowed to work cases which they have a personal involvement in,” Her voice oozed scorn, that grey coldness returning to her eyes once more. She leant forward just a little. Maico drew back a little more. “That’s such bullshit!”
Daryl’s finger put a point in it.
“Did they catch the person responsible?” Maico enquired, after waiting for her to ease back down.
“He got away,” Daryl told her, folding her arms. “A few days later, I get a knock on my apartment door. Guess who it was?”
“Jet Jaguar?”
“No,” Daryl shook her head, “It was Sylia Stingray.... or Jet’s puppet with a bad disguise going on. She told me about this thing she was putting together, and, being familiar enough with the source material....” Maico waited. “I called her an absolute lunatic. I thought she was an escaped AI gone a little screwball, but when she showed me a sample of her hardware... and quietly suggested I’d get my chance at revenge. I jumped at it. I turned in my warrant card, then hitched a ride out here.”
There was a savage gleam in her eyes.
“Did you get your revenge?”
“No,” Daryl shook her head again, “Someone else beat me to it. Someone who didn’t appreciate him screwing up on Venus. He got the LaFFeM treatment,”
LaFFeM, being a phonetic pronunciation of an unflattering nickname for a blanked catgirl. Somehow, Maico figured her only regret was that she didn’t get the chance to do it herself. It was written across the blonde woman’s face.
“How do you feel about the Knight Sabers?”
“Honestly? It’s a decent, paying job, and it’s good fun.” Her smile returned, tentatively. “A bit of a guilty pleasure. It’s nice to slip into the role a little.” She laughed, a harsh bark. “I used to hate riding motorcycles, but now I’ve got myself a Ninja on order,”
“And your opinion of Jet?”
It took her a lot longer to
“I don’t understand what Ford sees in her, but she was willing to renounce her manhood before the Court of Venus for the good of the team.” Her expression turned mischievous, “That was a fun night.” The light of good humour returned to her eyes “And now that I know why exactly she hired us, I don’t think she’s quite as crazy as I used to.” A beat. “Even if she’s a bit obsessive, but that’s nothing new,”
Maico moved on.
“Why did she hire you specifically?”
“Because I’ve got a personality and attitude similar to Priss, the original blue Saber” Daryl answered with a shrug, as if it was the most obvious answer. “Except I can’t sing, I’m not a lesbian, and I don’t always say hello to androids with my knuckles,”
Maico felt herself laughing
“It’s true,”
------
“It sounded like good money,” said Kotono, utterly unashamed. “An equal share of the profits from the Sabers, and a partnership in Survival Shot. It’s been very good money,”
Her eyes had an avaricious gleam to them as she leant back in her chair. Her shorts emphasised her taut, athletic legs, wrapped up in striped leg-warmers.
“So you’re in it just for the money,”
“At first. But at the same time, I can see that we’re doing a lot of good. We’re able to make a difference.”
Something about that sounded just a little canned, Maico noted. “Do you know why Jet recruited you?”
“Because I’m pretty close to Linna Yamazaki, both psychologically and in my fighting style.” She stretched to show off her body. “We’re both from a gymnastic and an athletic background so we both move in the same way. And we have similar attitudes.”
I don’t doubt that, Maico didn’t say. “You don’t find it a bit odd? You don’t find it strange that she’s gone to all this effort to recreate her own personal Knight Sabers, from a fictional show.”
“This is Fenspace.” said Kotono, with a gallic shrug, “I lived on Kandor, imitating heroes is nothing new to me. The only difference with the Sabers is that we have reasons beyond the obsession factor.”
“Oh?”
She leaned forward.
“The hardsuits need it to work right. You’ll have to ask Jet about it,”
“I will,” said Maico, “But what do you know?”
The gymnast sighed a little. “Not that much.” She began to twirl her hair through her fingers. “I never really paid attention to the tech stuff, since I just don’t have a head for it. The way I understand it is, it’s the Voomer core in the hardsuit itself,”
“Voomer core?”
“Yeah. The better you can synchronise with that through the helmet, the better the hardsuit works. The closer you are to the template, the better you can synchronise. And Jet’s only able to make templates for Linna, Priss, Nene and Sylia, so that meant she had to find people like them.”
Maico grimaced, her own pains returning with a bang as soon as she was reminded they existed. Her skull was bulging. It was pulsing inside her temples trying to burst out.
Kotono leaned forward, a genuine picture of concern on her face. She placed a soft hand on Maico’s shoulder. “Are your sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, yes,” Maico shrugged her off.
“I mean really, I can take you to a bigger station in Zuikaku, somewhere they have a doctor.” Hazel eyes broadcast compassion. “I may not be a doctor, but I have enough training to know this is a problem.”
Maico forced herself to smile, despite the temptation, “I’m alright, thank you. I’ll get some rest when we’re finished.”
Truthfully, she didn’t think she’d get a chance like this again.
------
Anika was eating muffins, sitting in the same ‘uniform’ she’d worn during the exercise earlier. Cute, but official looking.
“I designed it myself,” she bragged, “Since we’re hiring actual staff, we need something for them to wear ‘on duty’. I even did the Belkan airforce uniforms for the pilots we get them. We have to appear professional you know,”
She took another massive bite out of a muffin. Half of it went in one mouthful. Maico felt her stomach lurch. The last thing she wanted to deal with was the rich smell of bitter chocolate and fatty cream.
“How did you join the Sabers?” Maico asked, swallowing that lump.
Anika stopped eating, shrinking back into her chair. “You promise not to tell anyone about this?”
“Can you tell me why?”
“I’m...” she starting to wring her hands a little bit. “I don’t like people knowing I’m not human,” she said, her voice shrinking back, hiding in her mouth,”I really don’t like it,”
Maico’s curiousity was piqued. “And why is that?”
Anika leant forward onto her elbows, her eyes wide and pleading. “You promise not to tell anyone?”
“I promise.” It was hard not to.
“Alright well....” she brushed a lock of orange hair off her forehead. “Um.... I.... I think,” Her eyes scanned for a way out. “I was created by someone named William Flint. He was a bit of.... he was a weapons guy. He built mechs.”
A bell of recollection rang inside Maico’s skull, answered by a throbbing echo in her temples.She’d heard that name before and she knew it.
She knew it’d gone up in smoke along with the chip in her headset.
“He built me to act as a ‘sapiency driver’ for a duplex drive battroid. He wanted me to be the removeable core of a series of weapons systems. He...” she stopped, searching for the right word for a second. “He treated me like a machine. He wiped me at least once, and I suspected he was doing it more times than that, because I left evidence for myself to find,”
Anika’s good humour dissolved.
“I escaped by hacking his security system and stealing the battroid, He hired the Knight Sabers to chase me down and recover the battroid. There was only three of them then, since their first choice for Pink didn’t want to move out to Frigga.”
“What happened?” Maico pushed, keeping her voice as gentle as possible.
“They thought I was his girlfriend. I thought they were trying to take me back to Flint, so I turned the battroid on them.” She blushed just a little bit. “Fortunately, my combat programs were never installed, so I was a bit....crap. They disabled me pretty quickly.”
“And you told them the truth?”
“Not right away,” Anika answered, cautiously. “I was terrified of them. It was Ford Sierra who got me to finally tell her what I really was. She told me what Jet was, and that her brother was a CI too, so it’d be safe.”
“So what did they do then?”
“They told Flint I’d been killed recovering the battroid. Needless to say he didn’t care, he could just build another. The Sabers took their payment, then quietly encouraged me to go to the Space Patrol, because they knew he’d try it again. He was arrested soon afterwards,” And she swelled with pride on that one. “He got a year at Azkhaban for AI slavery, and his assets were confiscated and awarded to me as compensation.”
And rightful deserved too, she obviously felt. There was a fire behind her now. The evil one was rightfully punished and good prevailed.
“Then they offered you the chance to join?”
Anika nodded. “Survival Shot needed a sysop, and I had nowhere else to go. And because my hardware was designed specifically to interface with things, I became the Pink Saber.” She giggled. “Even if getting fitted for my hardsuit was tough..... I still don’t like being around mads, and all the interfaces were beyond Jet’s ability.”
“So they weren’t built here?”
A supplier?
“Uh.... I’m not sure if I can talk about that....” she blushed again, just a little bit. “We do as much as we can, and try to do more and more,”
“But of course...”
“And before you suggest otherwise. I work here because I like it. I’m useful. I’m treated like a person. I get a full share just like everyone else. Ford even takes me bounty hunting. I earned enough to buy my own personal spacecraft!”
And that, she was proud of. A bitter stab of jealousy cut Maico to the core. She swallowed it
“You go bounty hunting?”
Anika beamed. “It’s fun!”
“So, if you’re Frigga’s sysop, and the Pink Saber, I assume you’re involved with the Underspace?”
“I’d rather not say,” she said quietly. “It’s not that it’s a secret, it’s just that I’d rather not make trouble for people ”
“Trouble?” Maico’s eyebrow rose.
“There’re people who’re going through a lot of trouble to teach me how to do this stuff, and I don’t want them to have to deal with the trouble being linked to the Knight Sabers.”
“But of course...” Maico mumbled.
“Anyway,” Anika giggled. “I just think it’s fascinating. It’s so much fun and exciting, to learn wizardry from the wizards. I just have to be careful I don’t overheat myself.”
“Overheat, like on the ship?”
Anika cringed. “It’s a misfeature Flint built in to stop me going rogue. The battroid had a coolant supply which he could cut off, so I’d overheat and shut down in a few seconds.” She giggled again, “It didn’t work. I figured out how to escape without pushing my clock speed,”
Maico smirked just a little. “So that’s why your hardsuit has such advanced cooling?”
“Only partly. The battroid’s cooling system was horrible and I really don’t want to go through that again.”
Just thinking about it had made Anika’s face go deathly pale.
-----
“Because a long time ago, someone told me that I should really follow seven laws when messing with handwavium.... just to be safe.” Ford smiled warmly at her, “Of course this was way back when handwavium was new.”
“So you’re first fen?”
“Yepperoni!” she boasted. “I launched off the 95th Street Bridge, because an uncertain future in a vast and empty space was a hell of a lot better than rotting for ten years in a federal penitentiary.... even if I did miss out on learning the true nature of handwavium.”
Maico’s eyebrow went up.
“This weirdo at the garage I worked in kept bringing in his beater bug,.. Mick used to give it to me to fix because it was good training. Eventually I got sick of fixing the same things over and over again, so I slipped some ‘wave into the trunk of my car and waved the thing’s engine. Two weeks later he comes back and tells me it hasn’t missed a beat since.... and asks me what I did to it.” she chuckled inside her own throat. “I made the mistake of calling it magic, and then weird shit happened, something burned down and I ended up running from the cops with wave in the trunk of my car at over a hundred miles an hour and the bridge just raises up in front of me....” She mimed it with her hands, “ so I gun it and hang on and boom,” she clapped her hands together, “here I am fourteen years later”
Maico noted it down, trying her best not to move her head too much. “And you met Jet when?”
“A few years later, during the war. I picked up some wreckage that looked good to tow back to Mars... turns out the wreckage was booby-trapped and my car got wrecked. Sent out a distress call, and Jet answered.” Ford glared. “It was not love at first sight or anything dumb like that,”
Maico felt herself chuckle,
“No really,” Ford assured her. “We both got picked up. Had a drink, then went our seperate ways. We met again on the Forge. Both of us needed repair.” she patted on her arm. “And started arranging to meet again after that when it suited our schedules. Just friends sort of thing. It wasn’t until after SerenityCon that we realised there was more going on,” her eyes went down to the floor, “A lot of things changed then,”
“So you knew Jet best during and after the Boskone war?”
“Of course I did,”
“What effect did it have on her?”
Fords expression hardened just a little. “I promised her a long time that I wouldn’t talk about it with anyone else. It’s something that’s just between me, and Jet.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m sorry, but I made a promise,”
Maico gave her a frustrated grimace. “But of course,”
She made some notes on her pad. Boskone War. Possible influence on Jet’s decision. Not talking about it. Broadleaf Tea.... some odd obsessions. Escapism.
“And don’t ask her about it,” Ford warned. By the tone of her voice, it couldn’t have been anything else.
Maico intended to ignore it.
“Alright,” she closed her eyes. The room was slowly rotating around her again, enough to cause her to lean over in her chair slightly. “Maybe, you can tell me when Jet first mentioned the idea yo you. What did you think of it?”
Ford’s demeanour warmed right up.
“February 2015.... and I thought she was just a little bit.... overambitious.” And that word was carefully picked. Fucking nuts, was what Maico suspected she wanted to say.
“2015?” Maico gaped a little, caught off guard.
Ford confirmed with a nod and a wry smile
“That’s over seven years? She’s been planning this for seven years? How did....” Maico waited a moment to let her mind catch up, “How did she even come up with the idea?”
“I don’t know really,” Ford responded. “She’d just agreed to take some leave, but wasn’t sure what to do, so I just asked her what she wanted to do?”
“And?” Maico edged forward.
“Jet went quiet, a bit like one of those old Apple computers with the spinning beachball going on behind her eyes and then she just turns to me with a sort of rigid certainty on her face and said ‘I want to be a Knight Saber.”
“So that’s when it started?”
“No,” Ford shook her head. “She wanted to do it ‘right’, and three months wasn’t long enough. So what we ended up doing instead was making a land speed record attempt. But yeah,” Ford admitted “.... this has been on her plate for a long time.”
For one brief moment, Maico swore Ford was worried about something. There was a certain distance to her eyes that suggested she might’ve just been reminded of something.... uncomfortable.
-----
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?