Aircraft Design Company- Matsura's Planes Are Always Fastest!

When you sat down to write Yachi a letter, you wanted to be restrained. To try not to upset him any more, to just make sure he knew you were thinking about him, to know you wanted him home safe.

That's not the letter you ended up sending.

You poured your heart into it. You told him his letters were scaring you, their brevity and impersonal nature making you fear the worst. You told him of Izuhara's death and how scared you were that he would do the same.

The month seemed packed, if only because the Zeppelin service had started carrying shipments of newspapers, meaning you were getting fourteen new papers every Monday with news from Europa at only six days delay, which seemed to magnify the amount of things happening. They'd finally released what was left of the captured Caspian machines to Ohara, and you were studying them every day. One of your old chemistry professors had died of old age on the 15th, as had an aircraft designer you'd admired, Matthias Vannier, the next day. You'd written to Matthais' sister Irene: you'd never met or interacted, but somehow you felt like you knew them.

There was a media controversy about a young girl, just 9 years old, who had died in the care of a Latitudinarian church after she was taken from her parents: they hadn't even informed her parents. It had resulted in riots in the streets and at least two churches being burnt. A man in New Alleghany was attempting to fly from one side of the continent to the other and breaking down every other day to win some kind of cash prize: he'd be done by now if he had one of your machines.

The war had taken a strange turn. There had been some upheaval in Caspia, and the foreign press was reporting that it was a series of assassinations: a pair of leftist revolutionaries had shot half the cabinet of the Caspian government at an opera. The Czar was ruling the country directly as the Duma attempted to figure out who would next be in charge. You were hoping this would force them to concede the war, but you were not optimistic.

A Gallian battleship had exploded at anchor from a spark in the magazine. An Akitsukuni submarine had sunk the first of the Caspian icebreakers. General strikes in western Europa, a new double-decker train running in Otrusia, the launch of three new Zeppelins. War had broken out between Otrusia and the Antatolian Sultanate: they'd flown planes into combat on the very first day of the war, little repurposed racing monoplanes throwing hand bombs onto Sultanate ships within hours of the war being declared.

A letter from Uyeno to the team: you'd learned she'd brought her girlfriend of three months on the journey, a person you didn't know existed, and they'd seen beautiful fjords while sightseeing in the days leading up to her surgery. Apparently, there had been some complications, but she'd pulled through.

At the office, the team had settled on some basics. It was decided that the best option was likely to be two Hobgoblin engines, and the weapon ought to be the 25mm rotary gun. Every day there were new proposed designs and tweaks to old ones.

It was September 29th when you got your response from Yachi. It came in a thick brown envelop instead of a standard Army one, and it hadn't been opened by a censor. You cut it open and read it while you ironed your papers, and ended up burning a hole through that day's Dawn Star as you became engrossed by it.


You read and reread it a dozen times. By the time you got a grip of yourself, you realized you were already late for work.

You looked to your writing desk. Perhaps you could afford to be a little later.