[><] This Boss Fight's Ending Was Gonna Be Epic But Y'All Rolled A 1 And The Boss Rolled A Crit
The kraken continues to wail its chest-shattering cry of agony as you zip around it, directing your squadron to take shots at the tentacles, chopping them off shot by grisly shot. You linger here and there, adding your own gunfire (or a few flung spells) to help, but the progress has slowed down a bit, the kraken getting more wary. As it dives
again, this time going for the front of the American battle line, you suspect you may have to change tactics soon. Taking out its tentacles works well enough, but it's taking a while, and the kraken is spending that while swatting its tentacles at anything it can reach. The good news is that in its range, it's getting a lot less picky about what side those things are on.
You spot an IJN witch you've seen a few times before. A real pain in the ass, this one, with short brown hair that's long in front. You neither know nor care about her name, so she's just Brown Hair to you. She breaks formation for just a moment. Just long enough for you to lock onto her tail like white on rice, chasing her away from her squadron and towards the cracking of anti-air shells where the kraken's tentacles are at their least bendy.
You have just enough time to realize you've been had when the squid whips one of its tentacles all the way around its body to swat you aside.
You don't even feel it at first. Not when your broom is smashed to splinters, when your sword flies out of your hand - stuck in the tentacle - with enough force to break fingers, not even when you slam into the
Yorktown's island with enough force to dent the metal. And your ribcage.
It's only as the sudden exhaustion sinks in and you idly note how quiet cannons can be when you're tired enough that you feel the pain - an all-over ache, of the sort that makes you decide you now know what getting hit by an Espee locomotive feels like.
Blearily you blink up and see Brown Hair join up with another witch. One who looks oddly... familiar.
But that's impossible.
Right?
You don't have time to answer your mind's question before the darkness seizes you.
. . . . . . . . . .
June 19, 1942, Melbourne
12:34 PM
You wake a few days later, sore as hell. As your eyes open, you quickly decide "waking" is a grandiose term for regaining consciousness. You're in a hospital bed, you know that much, and you have a few bandages still on you. Your eyes are open, you can see, and you're not a Johnny that has gone and gotten his gun, but your limbs feel like they weigh several thousand kilos, and moving your arm to shield your eyes from the tropical noonday sun is an effort.
Still, you don't
think you have any broken bones anymore, which makes it clear what happened. You were healed, most likely by a fellow witch with a great deal of experience in healing. Healing is a fiendishly complex discipline in any magical system, but the more common methods simply accelerate the body's natural healing, at a very dear cost of stamina: Inexpert healers can kill by asking too much of the patient's metabolism.
The most skilled healing witches can kill the same way, if the explosive cell growth doesn't get them first.
Sitting in the room with you are the secretary and the Army colonel from when you went to Melbourne the first time. He has something in his lap, but with the chairs in the direction of the foot of the bed, you can't see what it is.
"She's up," the secretary says.
You try to pull yourself up into a sitting position, and just barely manage to do it without going dizzy.
"Should she be moving around so much?" the colonel asks.
You try to say something along the lines of "She's right here" but it just comes out as another pained groan in a longstanding radio series of pained groans your body has been putting on. The two ignore you for a moment more, and the secretary gets up and reads the medical placard at the foot of your bed. She lifts it up, then sits back down and nods to the colonel.
"H-how... long..." you force out.
"It's a little after 1230 on the 19th. You're in Melbourne," the colonel says. "We could have sent you to Calcutta right away, but sending someone through a portal unconscious and healing is poor manners at best and poor for health at worse." He shakes his head. "And we had to wait for all signs of bleeding to stop, either way."
You nod at that. Going through a portal merely asleep was never a good idea - it could cause some truly awful nightmares - but going through a portal
bleeding? You shudder involuntarily. The movement strains something and you wince.
The colonel stares for a fraction of a second, but doesn't comment. Instead, he stands up and hands you a trio of clipboards and a pen. You look down at them and frown. Transfer orders.
"You're staying in SHADOCOM and in the hemisphere," the colonel says before you can ask the question at the front of your mind. "You'll be back on active duty by the end of the month, mid-July at the latest. What you did at Midway clearly convinced enough people to put the question of your loyalty to bed... for now."
He shakes his head. "But bureaucracy waits for no man, and your old squadron is staying in Europe. SHADOCOM needs you in a different squadron, and the War Office agreed. The Army, of course, got first claim, but it seems the Navy was very impressed with what you did, and they've decided to try and poach you... as much as they can get away with, anyway."
You raise an eyebrow. "You wat me to be a squid?"
"
They want you to be a squid," he replies. "I frankly don't care either way, so long as you keep up what you've been doing. They just wanted to give you their offers."
This vote is partially for story, but mostly for an intermission story that I'll start writing after I lock votes. Specifically, where it is, and/or what battle it covers.
Transfer to:
The Hump (India-China Ferry):
[ ] Army Air Corps, 74th Fighter Squadron (Flying Tigers): The "original" Flying Tigers on paper, though in reality very few of the AVG pilots (or witches, as per 1940) remain, leaving the squadron mostly a blank slate. Based out of Kunming, China. One of the first true "multirole" squadrons, the 74th (and the 23rd FG it is part of) is a troubleshooter squadron - the Army Air Corps tells you there's trouble and you shoot it, or occasionally recon it so others can shoot it.
[ ] Army Air Corps, 25th Fighter Squadron (Assam Draggins): The most active squadron of the 51st Fighter Group in the war. Currently based out of Karachi, but by October it will move to Dinjan Airfield in northeastern Assam. A Warhawk squadron, like the 74th, but will eventually get a mix of Lightnings and Mustangs. Its primary role is to protect the southern end of the China-India air route, but it will also operate in northern Burma.
Buna-Gona Campaign:
[ ] Army Air Corps, 8th Fighter Squadron (Black Sheep): No, not those Black Sheep - Boyington's Bastards are a Marine squadron, and they don't quite exist yet. A Warhawk squadron, it is currently based in Australia but will eventually be moved to Port Moresby, primarily engaging in air defense and bomber escort - but P-40s are useful for a variety of things, so you can expect to see all kinds of action as a witch assigned to such a squadron.
[ ] Army Air Corps, 80th Fighter Squadron (Headhunters): The "Headhunters" fly the rather odd-looking (in your mind) Bell P-39. Ostensibly, its role is to escort bombers in low-flying missions. In practice, the the shells from the M4 cannon in its nose are just too damned slow (without witch help) to be good except at knife fight ranges. That said, it will soon get the far more glamorous Lightnings.
Guadalcanal:
[ ] Army Air Corps, 67th Fighter Squadron (Fighting Cocks): Another P-39/P-400 squadron, Henderson Field is what (part of) it will call home until next May (that is, after it arrives there in August.) With no Japanese air cover to seriously worry about, when on missions with your squadron you'll mostly be focusing on ground assault, something the Airacobra truly excels at.
[ ] Naval Air Corps VF-10 (Grim Reapers): Assigned first to the USS Enterprise, it will arrive in the South Pacific in October, where it will immediately cut its teeth in the Santa Cruz Islands, and then again in Guadalcanal itself after a brief reprieve in New Caledonia to repair its home ship. An F4F squadron, it's your typical Navy fighter squadron.
[ ] Marine Corps Aviation, VMF-121: The squadron that will one day be called the Green Knights and prove to be one of the best Marine Corps squadrons of the war has no nickname yet. It doesn't even have a Green Knight logo yet - instead, its logo is Bugs Bunny with a pilot's cap, belt, and boxing gloves. But it will have Wildcats (later Corsairs), and it will be at Henderson Field, as one of the Cactus Air Force squadrons, and here its legend will begin.
Some of the transfer dates are... quite some time away, but all of the transfers where that's the case also have you put in the "recruitment pool." You sigh, which turns into a yawn.
"You have a week to decide," the colonel states, as the secretary hands him a trio of thin black boxes.
"Odd for the military to give me options," you mutter as you look the clipboards over in more detail.
"SHADOCOM has the authority and capability to pull you at any time, and your missions there are of higher priority than your regular military missions." He walks over and hands you the boxes. The first one comes with papers folded up beneath it - you're being promoted to Captain, apparently.
"Is that why the first clipboard is for units in the CBI theater?"
He nods. The second box is a Purple Heart. You expected as much eventually, and you suppose getting knocked out while fighting a kraken is a good enough time as any to get one. It's the third that makes your eyes widen in shock, even as sleep starts to come after you yet again.
It's a Silver Star.
