HOMEWORLD: The Sword of Caaliburnous (She-Ra/Homeworld crossover)

Ajora wet her lips, subtly. Her hands clasped behind her back and she squared her shoulders, lifting her chin. She knew this skirted close to insubordination, but...but...well, she had read a great deal about the long interactions between the Empire and the Turani people. There had been bloodshed, yes, but also some very striking and stirring alliances. The Turani trusted in people more than hard currency, and in ships more than people. They'd be more willing to do something dangerous if you put yourself forward...

With that in mind, she said: "Sir, respectfully-"

Commodore Hajiak turned slowly away from the main CIC display to fix her with a withering stare - but Ajora soldiered on, a stone in her stomach forming, growing, sinking like she had been dropped into a well. She squared her shoulders as she spoke, and tried to sound like she was being very, very respectful. "T-The, uh, the Turani might be more inclined to enter the anomaly with s-some Taiidani ships with them." Her voice trailed off as Hajiak frowned at her.

"Is that so," he said, quietly.

"Y-yes sir," she said, nodding.

"An interesting suggestion, lieutenant," Hajiak said. "But as I am the commander of this carrier group, I believe that I will dispose of my formation as I see fit." He frowned. Hard. "Get to your corvette."

"Yes sir!" Ajora said, then turned and walked out, her back so stiff that she was pretty sure that everyone on the bridge could hear her spine clicking and creaking. As the door shut behind her, she put her hands over her face and groaned. "Stupid, Ajora, stupid!"

On the bridge, Brejik frowned. "Haj, she was right, you know?"

"I know," Hajiak said, quietly. "But if this telemetry is right, we'll need a noble's grace around us - not running around with Raiders - to have any chance of surviving the next few weeks." He rubbed his hand against his face, thumb trying to push grit from his eyes. "Hells...why did it have to be this ship?"

"We don't have much choice, do we?" Brejik said, shaking his head.

"That is most certainly the case..."

The two turned back to the main screen - and it flicked to the long scope view of a desert planet, bracketed by red and black lines done in hazy colors to indicate their various levels of probability.

Attack vectors.

Ajora came to the corvette in question after she had mastered her expression and squared her shoulders and gotten back to some kind of reasonable facsimile of being an Imperial officer. The Imperial Corvette Corps was...an odd man out in the navy. Fighters were single-person officer driven strike craft, which held all the honor and the glory. Frigates were the smallest ships that could be dispatched independently and either in small wolfpacks or in their own patrols, a frigate captain could win honor, fame and no small amount of money for themselves by some quick, decisive actions.

Corvettes?

They were bigger than a fighter by nearly thirty, forty meters, and had turreted guns that gave them unparalleled fields of fire compared to a fighter. But they were also, by requirement, more complicated to fly and needed more people to fly them. Those people were usually enlisted sailors and technical non-coms, and since corvettes were neither dashing nor independent, they tended to be seen as disposable and lower class.

So, Ajora was pretty ready for surliness. Insubordination. Maybe even some playful ribbing. What she wasn't ready for was stopping dead in her tracks, and exclaiming: "Loniie!?"

Loniie glanced over from where she was checking out some of the RCS thruster manifolds on the lower right wing the corvette, her grease stained coveralls showing that she was definitely not an officer. Her brow furrowed and her eyes widened as she gaped at Ajora. "Well, fuck me," she said, laughing softly. "It's prissy miss noble pants. Hey! Roj! Kyle! It's Ajora!"

A sandy colored Taiidani stuck his head out of one of the side airlock, then laughed. "Ajora!" he said, looking pretty much exactly as Ajora had remembered him before...well...uh...he came up short of hugging her, then scrambled to salute her quickly. "I mean, uh, Ajora! Er, Sirjora! Er, Sir! Ma'ma!"

"Goddamn it Kyle..." Loniie muttered.

"I thought...um..." Ajora realized that saying you all flunked out was...not the best way to open up this reunion.

"We flunked out, yeah, but there's nothing for any of us back home," Loniie said, her voice a bit edged as she swung the panel she had been working on back shut with a squeal and a thump. "So, we enlisted instead. While you were having it all soft and easy back on Hiigara, we were actually doing real work."

"Mostly just patrols," Kyle said.

Ajora noticed the third of her former five classmates - and remembering that full number made her heart clench. She missed Kaja. She missed her a lot. Roj looked just as he always had: Bigger than you could imagine, broad shouldered, and mute from a childhood hovercar accident, the scar still prominently visible on his throat. He gave her a quick nod.

"You all serve on the same corvette?" Ajora asked.

"Yeah," Kyle said, proudly.

"This is our fourth," Loniie muttered.

"But it's the same class," Kyle said, nodding. "Though, we're going to be painting it white."

"For ambassadorial duties, right," Ajora said, rubbing her hand along the familiar yellowjacket paint job of the ship, looking at the forward guns. "Uh, are you allowed to use a white ship that has guns?"

"I mean we're in the Rim, right?" Kyle looked nervous.

Technically speaking, a white painted ambassadorial ship was required, by Council law, to be unarmed. An all white paint job on any ship with weapons would be in violation of the Council, and might lead to the race or government in question being censured if it was an official thing and not some pirates pulling a conjob. Of course, a Galactic Council censure could take decades, if not centuries, to finally come about thanks to their grindingly slow bureaucratic inertia. Still...

It felt a bit like cheating.

"So, do you know why we're heading out to the back of beyond to talk to some Raiders?" Loniie asked, frowning. "The whole fleet's been mum. And everyone seems on edge. Especially the higher ranked assholes."

Ajora nodded, waiting for the 'no offense' or 'present company excluded' and...didn't get any. She frowned, slightly.

She hadn't noticed anyone being on edge.

Of course...

Her hand went to her chest, and the still painful knot of scar tissue there throbbed, reminding her that she had been out of the social scene for a while. And you were always a big fucking dork, she thought, ruefully. For some reason, it sounded like Kaja's voice.

---
Okay! System wise, the base mechanic of HEAT is very simple: Your skill + modifiers is compared to a difficulty. If you are under the diff, then you can gain Heat to succeed! If your heat exceeds 6, you overheat - the higher you overheat, the more likely you are to die. At 13 heat, you definitely 100% die. To lose heat, you need to either take an hour's rest OR you need to fail a check (in combat, you can also end your turn or use powers to "vent" heat.)

Your social check with the Commodore was a very high diff with several penalties, so you could either overheat and succeed at cost, or you could fail. I capriciously chose fail to have an excuse to just set you at 0 heat for the start of a new quest!

So!

CURRENT HEAT: 0/6
[ ] Tell your enlisted buddies your mission objectives and orders - no harm, since they're going to be doing it. (Diff 1 Leadership test)
[ ] You don't want to piss the Commodore off anymore than you already have...if they haven't been told, it's cause they don't need to know. Tell them to just trust you. (Diff 3 leadership test)
[ ] Write In

Ajora glanced over her shoulder at the large expanse of the hanger bay. Sparks hissed and sprayed around a Triikdor in maintenence, and a few techs were at work at a fabrication unit. She turned back to her old comrades - at the Academy, during the brutal first years examinations, she had hoped that each of them would make officer. Seeing them again felt good. Even if it was making her miss Kaja even more. "The old man wants us to send the Turani into some region of space that's very..." Ajora paused, searching for a word that didn't sound like haunted.

"Haunted?" Loniie asked.

"...yeah, a little," Ajora said. "There's a big blank spot where hyperspace just stops working. Ships have been vanishing out here for ages - far rim traders, explorers, brigands, that kind of thing. THe Turani are leery about checking it out. But...there's also that derelict I..."

"Ran into?" Kyle asked, chuckling.

"I didn't run into the derelict, crewman," Ajora says, frowning - before flashing him the slightest of smiles before he literally fainted dead away from fright. "But...the sword I picked up..." She shot a look at Loniie before she said something that went from the edge of insubordination to right over it like with your chest or something. "...it's HIigaran."

The three of them looked at her.

"It's what?" Loniie asked.

"Oh my-" Ajora shook her head. "The people who glassed Taii?"

"Oh, them," Loniie said.

"Aren't they all dead?" Kyle asked.

"Oh them!?" Ajora hissed, throwing up her hands. "Didn't you three pay any attention during history class?"

Roj pointed at himself and signed quickly. Ajora was fairly sure he was saying something like 'hey, I was paying attention.' She sighed and shook her head. "If...this is where they were exiled, well, we're all going to have to be careful." She had to admit, she wasn't even that shocked that Loniie and Kyle were fairly blasé about the idea. They were commoners. It was in the noble halls where the old memory of Taii was kept. Five thousand years were a very, very, very long time...and...moreover...

For most commoners, Old Tai was just a curious news story that cropped up now and again when some new terraforming breakthrough managed to reclaim another chunk of the planet from the gray glassy death that still hung over it all. It wasn't the bleeding sore that it was in Ajora's own household - she remembered, vividly, her mother showing her the maps of lands that their house had owned. Land that now shone from orbit like reflective mirrors, baked through with the ashen bodies of their old subjects.

She tried to hold onto that old memory of anger, but it felt like it was slipping through her fingers like sand. She had to focus on the here and now. She squared her shoulders. "So. Lets get this 'vett ready to go. We got a ride waiting for us out there." At their looks, she added. "It's RC-09."

The three corvette crewmen all groaned.

"I hate flying RC," Loniie muttered as she swung herself to her feet.

Roj signed.

Kyle scowled. "Of course it's not bad for you! You're not near any windows!"

Ajora stood behind Loniie as she flew the corvette out of the carrier. She watched through the thick screen that curved through the narrow cockpit as the fleet twirled around them, the corvette's relatively modest agrav systems keeping her glued to the deck with only a mild lurch in her belly.

"RC-09, this is ambassadorial corvette," Loniie said, her voice firm. "Coming in for dock."

"Rodger, AC-01. Locks clear. Fuel shunts clear. We're good for this." The crackling buzz of RC-09's controller came through thick and heavy with static, even as Loniie smoothly swung the 'vette's belly around to face the flat spar that served as the corvette docking port. Magnetic clamps thumped home through the floor, reverberating loudly.

"Should I have the autoloaders prepped?" Kyle asked. He was perched in a seat that overlooked the cockpit like a bed in a cheap flat, his body webbed in with crash-belts and his head nestled into a targeting helmet, his hands gripping a pair of heavy controls. One finger hung over a large, prominent looking red toggle.

"No," Ajora said. Then. "What ammo do we have in the hoppers?"

"Uhhh, standard anti-strike rounds. Just...you know, solid slugs, nothing fancy," Kyle said as the hyperspace countdown started in the background. Ajora's hand dropped to the hilt of her sword as she turned her head back and watched the screen as the rectangle of the quantum waveform snapped open...swept forward...and the stars beyond were shifted, subtly. It had been a single short jump - that was all that it had taken to bring them into the range of the Turani...entente.

Turanic Raiders made the distinction between family groups, mercenary bands, and carrier squadrons all very blurry. The term they used was 'entente' - it referred to everything from a single captaincy and their frigate, to a small squadron of ships. In this case, the entente was a fairly serious looking array of ships: A boxy, heavy duty Lord class combat carrier, several spindly and deadly looking ion array frigates, and several wings of fighter squadrons - a motely collection of Bandits and Brigand class strike craft that...

Honestly.

Ajora was not very happy to be the only Taiidani ship out here. She forced the nerves down as she touched her com. "Turanic entente..." She tried to sound natural. "Crimson Wastrels. This is Lieutenant Ajora, I've been sent to finalize negotiation with your...uh...mission."

The voice that came over the line was female and strong and wry and made Ajora feel a very confusing lurch in her belly, her cheeks heating brightly as she tried to actually listen to the words and not just imagine what the Turani might look like on the other end of the line. "Hello there, Lieutenant. Was kind of hoping that my very serious little fleet here might warrant something more than just a kid fresh out of flight school and some enlisted pukes. Especially considering what intel I managed to...borrow from Entente Sudden Death."

Ajora put her hand to her burning cheek. She frowned. The Commodore had said that the Entente Captain had been a mule...he hadn't mentioned how many Ententes they had roped in. Since an Entente ranged in size from, well, the battlegroup she was looking at right now to a single ship, it was entirely possible that the Commodore had hired multiple Ententes. Hell, he might not even know he had hired multiple Ententes, it wasn't like allied Ententes had to be honest about being a composite entity.

Still easier to handle than the court, she thought, before...

---
CURRENT HEAT: 0/6
What do you say?
[ ] "Maybe I wasn't clear enough - this is Lieutenant Ajora of the Taiidani Imperial Navy, with the requisite resources to hire your entire flotilla. I'm more than happy to accept whatever intelligence you have - but remember what our position is here." (Diff 4 Leadership)
[ ] "I'm very interested in this intelligence. Maybe weshould meet face to face on that nice carrier of yours, Entente-Captain. You can show me the intelligence, and we can finalize your mission objectives." (Diff 2 charm)
[ ] Swallow your pride: "...technically, he didn't just send a Lieutenant. I am also Princess Ajora Eytapea, and I speak with the full authority of my House and my estate. Now, the intelligence?" (Diff 1 Leadership - however, the pirates may be tempted to kidnap you. You can hold this off by creating an Oomph I shall call "imperial intimidation" which will check their impulses...for as long as they last. If you vote for this, vote for how much additional heat you want to spend on the check to create that oomph.)
[ ] Write in!