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<span class="mu-s">A few minutes later.</span>
You walk forward in near total darkness, tightly blindfolded and instructed to maintain silence, guided along by the hand of the girl responsible for doing this to you. Elena keeps breaking out into fits of excited giggling, trying and failing to stifle them as they come up, an almost electric energy running up from her hand and through your arm, a slow suspense building throughout your entire being. Other than the sound of your shoes now walking across something hard, probably concrete, you have no idea where you are. Perhaps it’s one of the hangar-like prefabricated metal barns, perhaps it’s some hidden nook or cranny you missed earlier while distracted by the mountains of junk, or a secret extension to the house, or a forgotten tunnel beneath Von Braun’s lowest level… your mind races with possibilities.
A final door opens and you feel a rush of cold air hit you, and immediately smell the oil and grease of a working area; vehicles have been disassembled here, and it sounds like a generator for a fuel pump is running, or some equivalent machine…
“Almost there.” Elena’s giggling whisper caresses your ear, sending a strangely pleasurable tingle rushing across your body, as relaxing as it is exciting.
Her hand tugs you gently to a stop as you carry forward half a step too far, and you can smell a faint but familiar aroma, catching just the slightest whiff of the cryogenically cooled fuel used to power higher performance spacecraft - Fighters, race craft, even mobile suits. The reasons are different for each, mobile suits need it to help cool their fusion reactors, but it’s unmistakable.
You feel Elena steps behind you, a slight movement in the air, a few silent footsteps, and soon her hands are working at untying the knot at the rear of your blindfold. After a final few suspense filled moments the blindfold slips away, and you’re immediately blinded again by glaring white, blinking and holding up a hand to shield your eyes from the bright overhead work lights. After a moment the new images before you begin to clear and sharpen, the glare of the lights dying away as your eyes adjust.
Sleek as an arrow, its titanium skin painted a glossy abyssal black and swelling with diaphanous motes of light, a custom painted FF-4 Toriares sits before you. Its glass canopy is wide and undisturbed by bracing, the dark star fields painted across its slightly bulged fuselage reminding you of the mirrored horses you’ve so often seen in Elena’s art. In flowing white cursive, painted just ahead of the cockpit, the words ‘Moonlight Mustang’ are written; the name of the space fighter.
A space fighter.
Elena got you a space fighter.
<span class="mu-i">How?</span>
You ask the question aloud, shocked nearly into silence, torn between the urge to rush toward the beautiful spacecraft and to kiss Elena.
