Quoted By:
5 hours, 32 minutes after shutdown.
You Are, again. Prepared for combat hastily, sent out the hangar doors with Thea, after she storms in with a small data packet about the next mission.
Time to move.
Getting a detailed layout of your target location, Camp Nagita: Great.
Knowing the potential enemy Opfor: Excellent.
Command putting a priority on getting your frame back to peak condition, and recovering at least one of your sisters: Amazing.
Having orders to refrain from jamming: Frustrating.
Experiencing the inadequacies of a hastily installed arm from an entirely different mech model: maddening.
Sometimes you wished you had more input on the planning process.
Being tied to a larger, slower force of walkers and vehicles also drives home the point that you are considered a supplementary aide to the main attack, rather than an actual independent operator. It is not to your taste.
Your role is to hold back with the longer-range bombardment mechs and vehicles, defending them from flanking forces that would sally out in response to being under attack. And to stay there, unless the main force calls for you. Along with logistics vehicles, to bring back valuable supplies, ammunition, and mech parts.
Thea’s clearly operating on a less than optimal amount of rest time, but her Sync is unaffected while you trudge in the wake of slower-moving mechs.
The link seethes with her annoyance and frustration. And she’s taken to infrequently complaining at you about ‘Bloodhound’, the leader of the artillery company that you’ve been attached to.
Even though whenever you actually offer to patch her (quite reasonable) requests through, she declines.
You have your own issues with the arm, but it’s nothing Bloodhound or Thea would be able to fix right now.
So silence is your go-to, during transit.
Especially when Thea’s complaining tapers off to nothing, matching your silence.
But it’s Hours of just walking. And walking. And it’s so Slow, the pace of the artillery being the limiting factor.
So you eventually seek some sort of stimulation. Though you’re strictly forbidden from putting out signals or jamming, which does limit what fun you could have.
Vote:
>Request information from Thea on (Pick one)
-Sophie. Her status.
-The ongoing fighting. Who’s winning?
-The Empress. Why does everyone keep flip-flopping on IFFs?
-Something else?
>Tinker with Thea’s cybernetics and VDNI. Surely she could use some improvements, right?
>Look inwards, going over your memory banks with a fine-toothed comb to find and recover sealed or corrupted memories. Not destroyed, just hidden.
(Random memory unlock)
>Go over your opposition again. Look at the plan, try to make some sort of improvement.
>Write-in.
A/N
The hardest part of writing sometimes is just getting started again.
