Petals of Carbon Steel -- You're a Pilot, Not an Ace. Try your best.

Successfully disentangled from your bed, you dress quickly, finishing off with the grey jacket emblazoned with the red AIJ emblem. The jacket is, in a sense, the sum total of your uniform — what you wear underneath, your superiors are less fussy about as long as it's at least presentable. Your cabin, in typical spaceship style, is tiny. Enough room to sleep and have a moment to yourself is a luxury you're keen to appreciate, compared to what the crews of smaller ships have to endure.

Lacking the time for a real breakfast, you snatch up a meal bar — dubiously labelled as egg-flavoured — and tear it open even as to push out into the common area of your residential module. Wedge-shaped like most of the Esther Strova's modular compartments, the common room is a small leisure area you share with your fellow pilots, lined with cabin doors, the hatch out into the main shaft built into its narrowest face. Today, the communal workstation is empty, and the magnetic surface that passes for a table is equally vacant. That doesn't mean the compartment is entirely empty, however.

"Hey, great. I definitely won't be the last one." A young, dark-haired woman pauses on her way out of the module at your approach, shooting you a characteristically laid back smile. She's wearing a jacket identical to yours, complete with pilot markings — Azara Black, one of your squadmates.

"I'm not late," you insist. Pushing off from the doorframe of your cabin, you float across the room, catching a handhold near to Azara's position. Navigating in zero-gravity is second nature to both of you by this point.

"Good, because that means neither am I." Azara swiped open the hatch, revealing the familiar sight of the main shaft beyond.

The Esther Strova is like most of the people it carries, in a way: The ship wasn't born a rebel. In her past life, she had been a cargo vessel. A reliable, old Master Class. But piece by piece, refit by refit, the AIJ had transformed her from a light transport into something that approaches the neighbourhood of a warship. Hull armour, advanced sensor suites, weapons modules, mecha hangars... Esther might not have so much room for cargo these days, but that's not her job anymore.

The Master Class's famous design is built around a large, sturdy central shaft: Bridge and crew quarters on one end, engineering at the back. Everything in between lined with wedge-shaped, modifiable modules for cargo and additional systems, three modules to a docking ring, each orientated in a different direction according to where it's been bolted on. This is space, and there's no reason to design things as if this ship will ever enter a real gravity well — a stark contrast to the rigid engineering standards of proper Navy hulls, where the whole ship is almost as easy to navigate through in Ganymede gravity as it is in none at all.

The two of you grab handholds on the far side of the hatch, and pull yourselves through almost as soon as it slides open. Briefly, you're orientated perpendicular to the shaft, turning it into a broad, rounded tunnel that you and Azara are floating in the middle of. This changes as you get underway, rotating and pushing off in order to "fall" down its length head-first, moving toward the rear modules.

The familiar faces of the Esther Strova's crew run a spectrum from tense to excited, and you both exchange brief greetings with them as you float past. The worn, off-white panelling of the tunnels, interspaced at precise intervals with the module rings, still gives you an almost hypnotic feeling when you move along it at any kind of speed, the lighting strips on each surface dim enough not to cause eye-strain.

There are no windows: This isn't a pleasure yacht.

The hangar modules are very close to the back of the ship, where their bulk won't interfere with any of the others. Azara pulls herself to a gentle stop at the right module ring, swiping open the relevant hatch without bothering to check the number. You both know exactly where you're going — this isn't your first day.

"It's been ages since we've gotten to do anything," Azara says, voice excited as you join her in the interior airlock that separates the hangar from the rest of the ship. The other modules have failsafes, of course, but something about the hangar having an airlock large enough to admit a full-sized mecha makes people a little more nervous about safety. "I'm 500% ready for this. I'm as ready as five normal Azaras!"

"As soon as we get through the briefing," you point out. There shaft-side hatch slams shut behind you, and there's a brief delay before its hangar-side counterpart — reinforced with heavy armour — opens. The two of you are left in the tight, echoey confines of the airlock with nothing but the hum of the air exchanger.

"Well, yeah," Azara admits. "But—" as the doors swing open, she lets what she'd been about to say trail off, distracted by the sound of raised voices.

"Why is he going with you at all?" The voice is cold, flat with fury, tinged with a working-class Jovian accent.

"Because I'm filling in for you, of course." This one is anything but — smooth, cultured, pleased with itself: Accent not quite Earth, but definitely some kind of Inner System dialect.

Azara grimaces. "Oh, good. Those two again." The hangar is suitably large, rows of sleeping mecha held fast to two different surfaces. Their giant, humanoid frames curled in something like a fetal position for storage. You recognise your Pennant right away among the others, but that's not what you're here for yet. You take a left turn, hugging the wall, heading toward the briefing room in one corner. And the two voices.

Neither of you are surprised at the two men you find facing each other outside of the briefing room door. The shorter of the two is slight and narrow-shouldered. What he lacks in size, though, he makes up for in presence. Despite obvious Southeast Asian features, his short-cropped hair is fair enough as to seem unnatural, looking nearly stark white in this lighting. Metallic induction plates, embedded into his flesh and bone, gleam at his temples and along his neck, until obscured by the collar of his AIJ jacket. The set of his mouth is calm, but the glare he's giving the other man could have peeled paint. Jay Tham, another of your fellow pilots.

The target of this ire, impressively unphased, is middlingly tall and strikingly good looking. His own heritage is harder to pin down at a glance, but you're reasonably sure he's of heavily mixed African and European ancestry. His looks aren't the only reason he sticks out like a sore thumb on the Esther Strova: He's wearing a United Solar Empire uniform in green and silver, shoulder patch on his jacket graced by an eye staring out of a stylised solar eclipse. Commander Milo Owusu. 'Special liaison' from the USE's infamous Special Reconnaissance & Intelligence. Come all the way from Saturn to 'help'. In the face of Jay's barely restrained dislike, he's smiling in a way that verges on cocky.

Jay briefly looks as if he'd like to throw Owusu out of the main airlock. Then, ignoring the SRI man, he turns on the woman in AIJ colours trying to physically interpose between the two of them. "Sails, you can't be serious about going into actual combat with him!"

Commander Sails gives Jay a frown. Her voice is tight and disapproving. "With your Hecate half taken apart, we're short-handed. He offered."

Jay shakes his head in a savagely abbreviated gesture. "Why would he even make that offer? He tried to talk us out of this operation to begin with, now he wants to jump in a mecha and lend a hand?"

Owusu answers for her. "I don't trust information from sources I can't verify. And your mysterious source is the definition of unverifiable. But, since you're ignoring my advice and going out here anyway..." He spreads his hands, letting himself float freely for a moment for the sake of the gesture. "... I'm a man of many talents. Piloting is one of them."

Jay looks between Sails and the SRI officer, jaw clenched. "Fine," he says, still to Sails, not Owusu. "You've made up your mind. But trusting these snakes in green?" he points sharply in Owusu's direction. "That's a mistake. Believe me, I know." With that, he twists himself around, pushing off in the direction of the waiting mecha, rather than the briefing room.

"Where do you think you're going?" Commander Sails demands.

"To work on my unit," Jay says, not even bothering to twist around to say it. "Better use of my time, since I'm not going out anyway. And like you said, it's 'half taken apart'."

"That's not—" Sails trails off, growling in frustration: he's already gone. She sighs, one hand going through her greying hair. Then she turns to regard you and Azara. "Good, that's everyone here but Cam," she says. Presumably, the other pilots are already in the briefing room. "This operation shouldn't be much trouble, but I'll feel better once everyone's clear on the details."

"'Shouldn't be much trouble' is a highly theoretical state of affairs, in my experience," Owusu says. He flashes the two of you a smile that you suppose is meant to be friendly.

You don't know much about the SRI — only the rumours, and some of the rumours are exactly the kind of bad you'd expect from a spy agency with a militaristic bent. They haven't been a factor for your adult lifetime, replaced by equivalent Holy Solar Empire organisations: Matching the general trend, the HSE's Imperial Investigation Service is, by all accounts worse.

It had been tempting for many Jovians to shrug when the USE had been pushed out of the system, replaced by the HSE. It had seen an end to the Civil War's endless bloodshed, but did it really matter what colour the Imperial boot that was stamping on your face was? Very quickly, they'd realised that yes, it could matter a great deal. The HSE is more brutal and less permissive than the USE had been even at its worst, to say nothing of the genuinely terrifying religious zeal some of its true believers show. Hence why the AIJ is at the point of accepting help from people like Owusu.

"It's good we have you onboard for this," Sails says, directly to you. "Your background will probably be relevant — if you have anything to contribute during the briefing, speak up."

What does she mean?

/////PoCS/////

Let's get a few things out of the way!

Gender

You go by...

[ ] He
[ ] She
[ ] They

History

You are...

[ ] Ex Divine Navy
Like many in the cause, you were trained by the enemy. Once a pilot serving in the Holy Empire's Divine Navy of Correction, through pain or trauma or a surge of conscience, you found the opportunity to desert.

• Formal military training
• Lingering connections in the Holy Empire
• You have seen bad things. You have done bad things.

[ ] Born to the cause
Your parents were fighters for Jovian independence from the very beginning. You have been raised to this life, and you have training and experience in many things, piloting included, from a young age.

• Eclectic but consistent training
• Your family name carries respect within the movement
• You have trouble understanding people raised outside your ideological bubble

[ ] A Reformed pirate
You once piloted mecha as part of a gang of thieves ambushing vulnerable shipping. This often involved less outright murder than threats and intimidation, but you still know how to operate in combat.

• Ad hoc, informal training
• Underworld connections
• Checkered past

Personality

People find you...

[ ] Determined
[ ] Practical
[ ] Compassionate
[ ] Clever

But...

[ ] Scatterbrained
[ ] Severe
[ ] Brittle
[ ] Conniving

Gender will be counted in a seperate line. History and the two personality votes will be counted together, in plan format (something that asking for would have made my life a lot easier in the last quest, with a number of votes). You must vote for something from all three lists. If another plan is identical to yours, use that one instead of making up a new one, please.

Roughly something like this:

[ ] They

[ ] Plan: [PLANNAME]
-[ ] Ex Divine Navy
-[ ] Clever
-[ ] Brittle