I'm gonna close voting early because I pre-wrote this and want to go to bed.
Scheduled vote count started by Nerdorama on Feb 4, 2024 at 2:00 AM, finished with 15 posts and 9 votes.
[X] Plan: Two for Two
- [X] Ask Seina for an overview of A21's origins and objectives in Japan - no specifics, but enough to stay out of their way, or know which terrible things happening here are righteous rebellions against imperialism and which ones are just space monsters.
- [X] Ask Seina about her backers - Silver, Gold, Iron, etc. You want to make inroads with this organization and see if they can help where the states of Earth won't. Even a name you could take back to Lee and demand answers about might help.
-[X] Tell Seina as much as you can about Gjallarhorn - the sheer volume of your intel on how they operated on Mars and are currently operating in space is enough to make up for the fact that they're not supposed to screw around on Earth's surface (they definitely will if it benefits them).
- [X] Tell Seina about GGG - their mission statement and the fact that they can be expected to deploy against alien monsters. You don't know enough about their tech to leak anything useful and not just sound like a lunatic, and you'd frankly rather die than dox a little kid to terrorists, even friendly ones.
[X] Plan: One for One
-[X] Ask Seina for intelligence on opposition she expects to face in Japan - you can get the Union oppo for yourself pretty easily, but there's clearly more going on here, between GGG, those mystery Arm Slaves, and the various monster attacks.
-[X] Tell Seina as much as you can about Gjallarhorn - the sheer volume of your intel on how they operated on Mars and are currently operating in space is enough to make up for the fact that they're not supposed to screw around on Earth's surface (they definitely will if it benefits them).
[X] Ask Seina for intelligence on opposition she expects to face in Japan - you can get the Union oppo for yourself pretty easily, but there's clearly more going on here, between GGG, those mystery Arm Slaves, and the various monster attacks.
[x] Seina's right. It's best to shake hands and part, for now. Anything she reveals to you could theoretically get back to the Union and compromise her.
You're not going to pass this opportunity up. Not when you've got a chance to get your foot in the door instead of spinning your rotors.
"Wait, how about this: data for data. Nothing either of us cares about getting leaked, but we scratch each other's backs as we can," you suggest.
Seina considers this, and nods.
What follows from your end is a fairly thorough debriefing on Gjallarhorn - their organization, their methods of control, their mobile suits, even if Seina insists that Japan is so densely populated that no one's going to use Minovsky-Ahab suits anywhere she ever plans to go - and what you suspect they may be up to in the near future.
"You think Frontier 4 was a Gjallarhorn coup, huh?" she asks. "You really think they'd try that on Earth?"
"I wouldn't put anything past them, and honestly, if someone destabilizes a satellite like Japan enough..."
She thinks on this. "So...you want to know about A21, then. Obviously I'm not going to monologue our plan at you, but...you ever heard of Seiji Takechi? He was big in the PMC Trust a generation ago."
"A generation ago I was busy getting left on a doorstep on Mars, Seina."
"Right. Well. Big name mercenary. Old-school, do everything, real MSF type. Killed a lot of people in the Solar Power Wars and ended up feeling bad enough about it he retired back to Japan and started a charity."
"Mercenary philanthropist?" you ask. "Sounds like some friends of mine. Or how they would be if they had any money."
She nods. "His charity wasn't so much about money, though. He bought an island out in the Izu archipelago and took in kids with nowhere else to turn - ones in serious trouble with criminal records for things like murder. It was pretty controversial, but he taught us things. Survival techniques. Job skills. More importantly, confidence and self-respect."
You listen dutifully, wondering what it would be like
"Naturally, the media, Japan, and the Union couldn't believe something so innocent of an old dog of war. Investigators came, auditors came...they found nothing. Then the media came, and some poor bastard had an accident. Naturally, one dead cameraman was enough to tar the whole organization as a terrorist boot camp. It was disbanded, and all our pasts were sent out in neat little video exposés for the whole solar system to see. Takechi, naturally, old samurai that he was, took his own life."
Seina had been holding an empty soda can. She's now holding damn near close to a solid cube of aluminum.
"I'm not gonna tell you what we're doing, Lilia, but suffice to say, we're going to make some people at the top pay for what they did to us. To Takechi."
She straightens up, and brings her tone back to conversational lightness. "And if that helps you do whatever it is you want to the Union, more power to you. But we're not going to be changing from that goal."
Ruminating on this, you add: "Alright. One more. I've spoken to that UN black ops group you're so worried about, and..."
Seina mostly looks incredulous as you spin your sketchy tale of alien monsters and the cyborgs fighting them, but she takes it in anyway.
"Is anyone not screwing around with alien supertech...," she muses. "Well, we'll stay out of those guys' way. None of us want to get eaten by a moving garbage pile either."
"Both the monsters they've fought came out of Tokyo Bay," you observe. "Must've been pretty awkward if that's where you're parked."
"Nice try. Why don't you ask me a real question, since we're exchanging info," she replies.
"Alright. Cards on the table...I don't know anything about the guys who are handling Lee or, apparently, you and me," you admit. "So who are Mr. Gold and Mr. Silver?"
She sighs at that. "Well, you spend enough time in the shadows on Earth, you'll hear about them eventually. The shady conspiracy behind every act of terrorism, revenge, and extortion in Earth's gravity well, supposedly. They call themselves AMALGAM."
"Oh, I get it," you say.
"Huh?"
"Mercury. It's a joke because alloys of mercury are called...amalgams," you say.
"Lilia, my high school chem class was learning how to desalinate ocean water from a soldier of fortune."
"Fair enough, mine was making fertilizer bombs. I don't even know where I picked that up."
"Anyway," Seina continued, "they're a very anonymous, hush-hush organization, but they are happy to shuffle money and technology toward anyone who's looking to cause trouble. Specifically, Mr. Gold, my contact, is the slush fund man. I don't know why he's funding us, and I don't care, but he's who you want to go to for a paycheck."
"And Mr. Silver?"
"I haven't spoken to him, but I think he's the mad scientist," she admits. "I know for a fact that Lee Fowler is a direct report to him, so if he's keeping tabs on you, he's probably trying to figure out what makes that space doll of yours tick...or he knows already and wants to keep an eye on it."
"Fascinating," you say, "I'm gonna hang Lee upside-down from the railing for all this spy shit."
"Well, that'd probably get you an introduction to AMALGAM, or at least some of their goons with guns." She leans in. "Be careful, Lilia. No one throws around money and tech like these guys without having much worse stuff for their own personal use. They want to play stupid games where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, that's their prerogative."
You're going to have to mull this one over. You're coming to realize that 'useful' and 'dangerous' are pretty much in direct correlation here, but at least you have some ideas on how to move up the food chain with these guys. Maybe.
"Well, it's been fun," you say as you start departing the ship, and then square up with the corridor's wall to give it a pair of painful, knuckle-braising punches.
Seina looks at you, alarmed, just in time for you to turn to her and ask her to sock you in the jaw.
Shrugging, realization apparently dawning, she complies. You note she didn't hit anything that would break, but you're still seeing stars when they blindfold you again to take you off the ship.
"The hell happened to you?" Shin asks as you drag your bruised face back into the pilot accommodations aboard the Asuka.
"Mugging. They lost."
[X] Plan: The Devil You Know -[X] Get to Know Theletos, part 2
-[X] Top Gunnery
-[X] The Slumbering Behemoth
-[X] Current Events
A couple of ice packs and falsified incident reports later, and the situation with Seina is put behind you for now. At least you're fairly certain that no one is the wiser, although you're not sure that it's a coincidence that you haven't been able to find Lee this week, either. He's going to owe you some answers once you do catch up to him.
For now, though, you're helping Skull Squadron put their VF-0s through their paces, swapping Theletos's fusion cannon for a carefully-designed targeting laser and playing OPFOR as they make the strange transforming machines dance through the sky. It's amazing the kind of maneuverability they can manage in a gravity well with a combination of thrust-vectoring, plunging dives, and incessant radio shit-talk.
"Yeah, you can tell that Roy's piloting experience is all historical re-enactment because he has Kenny Loggins and AC/DC playing in his cockpit," Randy observes.
"Who?" Shin asks, putting his Phoenix into an expert aileron roll to stop you drawing a bead on him.
"Nah, that's someone else."
Roy contributes to the conversation by singing unintelligibly along with whatever classical artists they're talking about and painting several surface targets with successful missile locks despite flying upside-down.
"Is every last one of you a cowboy?" Tachibana asks, exasperated.
Skull Squadron: +1 EVA
[X] Rise Up! God or Devil!
September 27, NCE 0122
Part of the training cruise for the VF-0 folks involves some touring around and, more specifically, giving some face time at the city of Atami, a coastal town a couple of peninsulas southwest of Tokyo. Your vague knowledge of the area indicates it's mostly a tourist trap famous for hot springs and reclaimed beachfront, but Tachibana is able to shed some light on the Union's actual interest in the area before you're formally briefed.
"Atami's the model city for one of Japan's energy independence projects, the Photon Power Lab," she explains. "There's a big political movement to decrease dependence on the Union solar grid, and Photon Power is one of the more practical-looking ones, at least as far as the Diet's concerned."
"That's some pretty specific details," you point out.
Tachibana shrugs. "My father's a scientist in the same circles, so it's hard not to overhear things. Even harder not to overhear Union brass complaining about their nice little satellite looking for more autonomy."
"Yeesh, Earth politics are complicated," you say, filing all that information away for later.
"There's a couple other things they want us on the lookout for too," Roy says, sweeping in to a conversation like he was always part of it as per usual. "That tanker you and our UN friends vaporized had a couple million tons of compressed Helium-3 aboard, and the higher-ups are worried about a pattern of things attacking energy sources. Also, we've got notice to look out for a fugitive."
"A fugitive?" you ask. "We're the army, why are we looking for a criminal?"
"Because he killed a couple of military inspectors - specifically, Gjallarhorn's."
You try not to freeze up at that, and Roy continues. "Seems he had a spat with customs and killed a whole patrol boat crew stone dead. He may or may not be in possession of a mobile weapon, but he was spotted fleeing Tokyo in this direction last week, so we're meant to help the ICPO with the case if he comes out in a robot or something. Honestly, it's mostly political backscratching, but..."
"What's the guy's name?" you ask.
"Hang on, I'll pull up the notice..."
James Links
Has apparently killed more Gjallarhorn than you
Oh.
You know that guy.
That's probably very bad.
Since I didn't credit it last time, Seina, A21, that whole mess, and AMALGAM are from Full Metal Panic! and the lady what wants to kill you is, as identified, from Macross Zero. Most of the rest of this update is from Shin Mazinger Impact, Z-Chapter or however we're translating that chapter, and Jimmy there had a cameo like a year ago.
Proper mission briefing will happen next time, but there was a lot of exposition to cover in this one. Also I'm still rolling mechanical changes around in my head so we'll see how that goes.
This raises the question of how & why we apparently knew BAHRAM's chief weapon designer fairly well. At least well enough to know she was married, who she was married to, that she wanted to retire, and what she wanted to do after retiring.
Re-reading the story, yeah, we haven't talked about knowing his wife while he delivered us to Earth, and we, indeed, have no need to talk about suspicious past right now, but we can talk about "He was my ride to Earth. His wife died on Mars in Jovian invasion. He was drunk and devastated. Babbled a lot about his two kids being in Tokyo U. How the hell a man like that breaks whole Gjallhorn patrol boat?"
That'll probably come up incidentally if you run into him. Not that you probably will, I mean, this is probably just flavor text and not me combining subplots with superficially similar characters that I think would provide an amusing sense of urgency and an excuse to introduce another plot during an already chaotic first episode scenario.
I haven't watched relevant anime, so I don't know if James got Dolores with a message from Dr. Rachel or not, but if we encounter him and he's rants our way that he want just wants to get to his wife, very surprised "She's survived?" may be a way Lilia breaks her cover.
I know all I know about Z.O.E from one LP and series retrospective...
Hope the two dead Gjallarhorn agents weren't the two I'm thinking of. If for no other reason than that's a really big curveball and makes predictions for the future real muddy.
Yeah, even if he fled in this direction that's a wide angle for him to go. I mean, what are the odds we run into this one guy while he's presumably trying to keep a low profile ha ha ha…
In the middle of a reread, and I have some speculation...
Given that Lilia had flashbacks to memories that clearly didn't happen to her, in addition to Sophia's hints, I have two guesses:
1. Lilia is a reincarnation of an ace pilot from either the Calamity War or an ancient conflict that predates known history. Sophia is the twin sister of Lilia's original self.
2. Lilia is a clone of an ace pilot from the same above. Sophia is the twin sister of Lilia's original self.
I originally had a third guess where Lilia was an ace pilot from the same circumstances as above thawed from cryostasis, but given that she accidentally Boson Jumped into the cockpit of Theletos, which requires that one be exposed to the terraforming nanomachines from Nadesico on Mars at a young age, it wouldn't make any sense. Also saying Sophia is Lilia's twin in some context because there's not a lot of ways to interpret someone calling themselves 'your other half'.
Anyway, this is just hare-brained speculation to tide myself over while I wait for the update.
I mean. There's the romantic one.
Edit: And, I mean, she called herself the Venus to Lilia's Mars, and mythically speaking that those two were doing the do is a big thing.
Well, we were told this crossover includes content from:
Full Metal Panic!
Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu
Getter Robo
King of Braves GaoGaiGar
Macross Zero
Martian Successor Nadesico
Mazinger Edition Z: The Impact!
Mobile Suit Gundam F91
Mobile Suit Gundam 00
Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
Zone of the Enders
Zone of the Enders: 2167 IDOLO
Zone of the Enders: Dolores, i
And we were also told that these were considered but left out of the crossover:
Code Geass
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Gundam SEED
Gundam Wing
UC Gundam (0079-Hathaway)
Macross (Plus-Delta)
Cowboy Bebop
Gunbuster
Diebuster
Aldnoah Zero
So, the obvious stuff with Esoteric Metaphysics that I'd first look to in order to and figure out whats going on with Sophie aren't here. And while I doubt that Mazinger or Getter Robo are behind Sophie, I'm not familiar enough with ZoE, GaoGaiGar or Full Metal Panic to have any idea whether they could be the culprit.
And, of course, there's always the likely possibility that whatever's going on with Sophie is a completely original plot element rather than something based on an existing series.
And, of course, there's always the likely possibility that whatever's going on with Sophie is a completely original plot element rather than something based on an existing series.
If I understand mixed worldbuilding, in framework of this quest, you can do Ahab-Minkovsky fusion reactor or you can do fusion-enabled Super Dimensional Power Tap, and VF-1s are stated to have that (but masquerading as fusion turbines)
It came up in a throwaway line a while ago, but the VF-1's "nuclear jet engines" (actually Superdimensional bullshit) haven't passed the regulator process yet - partly because Gjallarhorn stuck their nose in, since it's adjacent to fusion reactors. The VF-0 Phoenix uses turbojets (sauced up on futuristic electric motors to keep things vaguely on the same tech level on this setting), which means you won't be seeing them in use in space missions the way you eventually will Valkyries.
You know, I wonder if mad lads in Amalgam are trying to reproduce G-Stone in some homebrew analogue of J-Jewel, calling it, say, T-Gem.
Because of all methods of energy independence currently being researched in Japan it's both most stable and most accessible. Mazinger's Photon Power? No one is letting that out of the lab yet. Getter Rays? Almost the same. G-Stone? GGG spread the tech across the globe, there's a lab right in HRL that got samples and is trying to make their own Super AIs with GS-Ride. And we know it's mass-produceable.
Plop that TS-Ride into some throw-away custom Arm Slave and use some throw-away rebel that is courageously, determinedly fighting against neo-Colonialism (like Seina) and you can get some sweet combat data and do some sweet damage.
You know, I wonder if mad lads in Amalgam are trying to reproduce G-Stone in some homebrew analogue of J-Jewel, calling it, say, T-Gem.
Because of all methods of energy independence currently being researched in Japan it's both most stable and most accessible. Mazinger's Photon Power? No one is letting that out of the lab yet. Getter Rays? Almost the same. G-Stone? GGG spread the tech across the globe, there's a lab right in HRL that got samples and is trying to make their own Super AIs with GS-Ride. And we know it's mass-produceable.
Plop that TS-Ride into some throw-away custom Arm Slave and use some throw-away rebel that is courageously, determinedly fighting against neo-Colonialism (like Seina) and you can get some sweet combat data and do some sweet damage.
There are many things to call that thing, T-Gem was just placeholder name in G-Stone and J-Jewel (and C-Crystal from different story) mold.
Look, I just hope that AMALGAM aren't bugnuts to made Zonder Metal derivatives. Because if possible, they would absolutely stuff nanite regeneration system into whatever they are controlling, for good or bad.
And I can't wait to see what they are doing.
Someone kidnaps Mikoto. Zonuda partially activates. Mikoto is only survivor, but she has no idea what happened