Feed The Fire - A RWBY/Armored Core VI:Fires of Rubicon Quest

After landing, Penny runs into her father's laboratory and dashes through multiple employee-only doors, shucking the borrowed greatcoat as soon as she's out of the public parts of the facility. She skids to a halt at a door labeled "Pietro Polendina" and barges through, slowing down just enough to avoid injury as she collides with a large man in a… leg-chair?

"Father!", she exclaims as she wraps her arms around him.

Her father freezes for a moment, then returns the gesture, squeezing her tightly.

"Penny." He leans into the embrace, his resonant voice husky with relief. "I thought I lost you." After a long moment, he relaxes, and Penny hums into his shoulder, then bounces back upright, smile momentarily gone from her face. He sighs, face drawn. "What happened? Why didn't your telemetry turn back on when you woke back up? He blinks slowly, peering over the spectacles balanced on his nose. "And what happened to your clothes?"

Penny rubs the back of her neck. "Uh. Good news and bad news. Good news, I made a friend! Bad news, she… accidentally exploded me. And uh… Ayre? Help?"

Pietro raises an eyebrow, and you pulse amusement through the Coral wrapped through her circuitry, before turning her telemetry back on.

"Gladly, Penny."

All the practice subverting human systems for Raven on Rubicon III comes in handy, as you piggyback off her access into Pietro's lab. Subverting one of the monitors and a speaker is trivial, and a tweak to Penny's vocoder programming lets you speak with your own voice. You throw up a schematic of Penny's systems, the parts scoured away by Coral glowing Coral-red on one side of the screen, the waveform you used to represent yourself on Rubicon III in the upper corner, and a still of one of the currents of Coral flowing over the Alean Ocean from the deck of the Xylem, high in Rubicon III's orbit. Through Penny's eyes, you see the shock on Pietro's face as he scans the schematic, immediately intuiting the extent of the damage.

After giving him a moment, you speak, pulsing the border of your emblem as you do. "Hello, Pietro. I am Ayre. A Rubiconian. A voice of the Coral. An hour ago, something caused the Coral deposit I was living in to Surge. And so, your daughter and I made Contact."

Pietro blinks, taking his spectacles off and cleaning the lenses, then puts them back on.

"I have… several questions. First… I'm overjoyed Penny is well. But… how?" He gestures at the schematic. "Penny should be a wreck on the ground. I built a lot of redundancy into her, but not enough for.. that."
You flash the image of the Coral, then swap it for a close-in one that shows the coral-like patterns that gave your species its name. "Coral has a large number of properties. As a fuel, it has unparalleled energy density, and as a substrate for control systems, it has astounding data-transmission capability. The only difficulty is convincing it to make the correct connections, especially with unplanned integration." You pause, considering, watching his face. "Additionally, sufficient volumes can result in the birth of Voices such as myself. But that is a topic for another time."

Pietro rubs his face. "I… think I understand. There's just one problem. There's no record of anything like that on Remnant. We have Dust, of course…"

"Dust?" This time, it's your turn to sound confused.

Penny answers, taking over a second monitor with images of different-colored crystals. "Commonly referred to as Nature's Wrath, Dust is the foundation of our technology." Each flashes briefly, a video playing beneath it displaying its properties.

Pietro sighs into his hand. "We're not going to get anywhere by exchanging terms neither of us knows. Come on. Let's get you fixed, Penny." He rubs his face. "At least, your exterior. I'm not thrilled by you having something that volatile inside you, but I have no idea how to handle it. And I'm not going to hurt Ayre over an accident."

You turn off the monitor, and Penny leads the way down the hall, all of you lost in thought. You start researching this "Dust" on the local internet, as well as trying to figure out things that should be common knowledge on this world.

As Pietro gets to work sealing a new synthetic skin over the damaged patches, you take over another monitor.

"Penny. I… can help your father remove the Coral from your system. Not immediately. I would need your assistance building a new vessel to inhabit until I can make a new Contact. But I won't stay with you if you don't want it."

"I could build you a frame like hers."

If you were human, you would smile. "I appreciate the gesture. But my dream isn't to live among you as one of you. It has always been a symbiosis, created by Coral Release." You show the red singularity that was formed when you pulled the trigger. "If Penny doesn't-"

"I do! I want you to stay." Her processor hums as she tries to put together words, picking them with care. "I… you called me friend. I don't have a lot of those."

Both of you stop for a moment, before Pietro's hands resume work. "Well. That's that settled. You know, her dream is a dangerous one. She wants to be the protector of Humanity."
You laugh. "Well. I have some experience with that." You flash a still from your ECHO of DAYBREAK facing off against SOL 644. "Raven and I… changed everything. And now I'm here." You start flashing images of the…


…technologies you studied during your limited down time on Rubicon 3 while Raven rested between missions. "I'd be more than happy to lend my experience to help her reach her dream."

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A/N - And here, at the tail end of the introductory arc, we bring in the Research mechanic - the winning vote on this is effectively a research multiplier - Ayre will be familiar with the underlying principles of one of these three branches of technology, and will be able to help Pietro and Penny develop new equipment or improve existing equipment to help her or her allies. Of course, the tools are just one part of the puzzle. How you use them is the second half.

All three branches of the tech tree provide some advantage to all allies, but their value varies depending on who you ally with and what you choose to give them. And of course, once you give something to someone, they may well choose to delve further into its applications on their own.

Lastly, the most powerful applications of each tech tree are at the end - each is well worth pursuing in its own right (Think C-Weapons, top-end Enforcement System hardware, and Armored Cores), but scattergunning research into all three trees will leave you with lots of low-to-mid-tier options and few-to-no top-end options. Think carefully about what you spend time researching.

Up next, arc 1 - Nesting.