You slam the bolt forward and swing it closed before handing the skeleton of a prototype rifle back to Shiragiku. He grips it casually by the cloth around the barrel and the bar of steel sketching out the stock shape.
"It's a bit… rough, isn't it?" You say, tremulously.
Shiragiku looks unphased: "Oh, it's not as nice as the Type 14, no. That's a consequence of the front locking lugs, it's nothing we can change. Even next to a Ritterin design you'd barely notice."
"Seems fine to me." volunteers Kashiwa.
"Ichiro," Kusunoki grins, "I have seen you wreck a rifle by squeezing a spent casing down the barrel while trying to chamber a new round. I don't think you get an opinion."
Kashiwa's rumbling laughter fills the room for a moment.
"I've had a good idea for the testing, Tachibana!" says Yadake, "We fire the gun as it is, then we put a small lead weight on it and fire it again and we keep doing that until the felt recoil is comfortable."
You think about this for a moment and a vision of that famous Albian scientist with the three laws manifests, reminding you of what a lot of force does to very light objects. Like you.
"Would it not be more sensible to put all the weights on and reduce the weight until the recoil is uncomfortable?"
Yadake freezes for a full second before responding: "Either way would work," he says, attempting diffidence. He troops out to the firing range, accompanied by Shiragiku with the rifle and Kusunoki with the prized differential manometer.
You look around the workshop, momentarily at a loose end, and notice the calendar above Kusunoki's desk. Was that there before? You might be a girl who likes silk, but the pose that Miss April is in is just... it's like she's not even a person anymore, just a thing for others to ogle! You reach out to take it down to put it in Kusunoki's drawers. The next time you see them you should ask them to take it home. You don't really want to touch it, but you leaf through some of the months to see if Miss April was just a one-off: You needn't have bothered, the rest of the women look just the same. The men aren't as badly depicted, though you feel like Mister August would have better luck picking up that towel if he bent at the knees. Or looked at it.
---
Ikeda bustles in, dropping a stack of magazines on Shiragiku's desk. "Trade publications are here. Get them while they're only six months out of date."
You turn through the pile, sorting out Kusunoki's
Proceedings In Materials Science from Yadake's thing in Dyske about handloading Europan hunting cartridges and Shiragiku's
Le Machiniste Moderne. Near the bottom you find a special edition of
Alleghenian Riflewoman:
Rifle Marksmanship From the Quarter-Mile to the Half-Mile. That sounds relevant! You take it back to your desk and flip it open surreptitiously. Ikeda has excelled herself again and your copy of
Alleghenian Rifleman, with
Rifle Marksmanship From the Quarter-Mile to the Half-Mile, is tucked inside. They're not
usually very different except the pronouns and the adverts, but it pays to check.
The first few pages are given over to the writer's own qualifications and a lengthy anecdote about growing up in Bethel that you don't really think you're being paid to read. You flip back to the table of contents and find a more relevant-sounding headline, then cut the corresponding pages open.
By the time the lunch you skipped is over, the only pages left uncut are the rest of the anecdote and the index. Even though the chapter on non-telescopic sights is
exhaustive, it's obvious that the performance of shooters at long range is massively improved by a telescope, and you certainly wouldn't want Her Majesty to perform badly with her gun. Further it seems what you thought of at first, a regular Austrasian telescope with an open lens at either end of the rifle, isn't the be-all and end-all technology. The benefits include accounting for barrel drop, but even the woman writing the article considers them unnecessarily fiddly. In the end she narrows it down to a few options, and when you exclude the ones from companies with no presence in Akitsukuni, you're left with just two: a Dyskelandic telescope built by Bilz Precision Instruments with a 3x magnification and a multitude of adjustment options and an Alleghenian telescope made by Bates, the gun company, with a 5x magnification and more limited adjustments. Unusually, the
Rifleman and
Riflewoman differ, with the author drawing on her experience with the windage adjustment in shooting at around the 900 yard range to recommend the Bilz in
Riflewoman but talking about a shot she made at an incredible 1546 yards to recommend the Bates in
Rifleman.
They're all
foreign, though, and you're giving this to Her Majesty the Empress of
Akitsukuni. Maybe you should go with a normal diopter sight, or at least one of the Austrasian telescopes: Austrasian merchants have sold those for over three hundred years. Indeed, you're pretty sure there's a shop out in the suburbs that makes Akitsukuni telescopes, maybe they could do you a special job...
---
What sort of sight system will you fit to the rifle?
[ ] Buy a 3x Bilz (better for extremely accurate shooting at moderate ranges)
[ ] Buy a 5x Bates (better for accurate shooting at exceptional ranges)
[ ] Contract for the first rifle-telescope system ever built in Akitsukuni (inferior quality but patriotic)
[ ] Ignore the telescopes and build a really good diopter system (doesn't increase accuracy, but you can't be criticised for it)
---
You're the second person into the office on Wednesday, courtesy of an unusually fast streetcar ride, and find Yadake as hard at work as always.
"It's comfortable enough for me, but, ah, I'm not exactly Her Imperial Majesty…" Yadake says, as you're both standing over the prototype. Several of the lead weights are gone, but there's still plenty left, giving the rifle a hefty weight.
"Yeah yeah, Kusunoki and I can take it from here," you say, "tell them when they come in? The sight mounting is keeping me busy."
Kusunoki arrives maybe fifteen minutes later, a sudden baritone to their voice pulling you away from your technical drafts:
"...doesn't make sense, I'm nothing like the Empress."
You wander out from your officette to see what's going on, and Kusunoki wheels towards you, taking a half step back.
"Tell him Tachibana, you meant that you'd shoot and I'd assist you, right?" they say, although it's not really a question.
"Uh…" you manage "I had been thinking we'd both do firings. We're the two shortest--"
Kusunoki cuts across you: "I'm not like you! I'm not like the Empress!"
While you're trying to think of a reply they storm off in the direction of their desk. They flick through their drawers, pull the calendar back out, and spread Miss April back onto the wall.
You glance towards Yadake, whose face is that impassive, slightly smug look you associate with men when they can dismiss something that concerns women as not their business. Which doesn't make any sense because… oh. Is
that what this is about.
You should probably talk to Kusunoki. At some point.
It gnaws at you for a bit, but after a couple of hours of finding exactly how much the prototype rifle needs to weigh to almost but not quite dislocate your shoulder it doesn't seem like such a big deal: it's not your job to handle Kusunoki's personal problems. This is a workplace, and you all have to be professional.
They seem to have come to the same conclusion. When you get back into the office after lunch they give you a polite nod and then call you over to look at magazine options.
"You see, Miss Tachibana, I need to know now so that I can order the magazine spring material as soon as possible. There's a supplier issue. What have you been thinking?"
You open your mouth to respond:
---
What do you say?
[ ] 3 round magazine
[ ] 5 round magazine
[ ] 10 round magazine
[ ] You know what, hang the magazine. This thing with Kusunoki can't continue. (+2 Stress)
REMINDER: THERE ARE TWO VOTES FOR THIS ONE, THE OPTIC AND THE MAGAZINE.
