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luna-wing-cns274 · 4 months ago

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Receiving video feed. Source: COMP/CON “Fox_3,” registered operator CNS274-L3HK.

Streaming…

___

Centered in the camera view, dressed in scarlet and pink, sits a figure which could only be a virtual avatar. An anthropomorphic Shikoku dog, seated with legs crossed on a boulder with a clear blue sky behind. Her triangular ears are trained forward to face the camera. The pattern of her fur divides her body into sharp, geometric sections of color: cream, beige, and black.

She smiles, raising a hand in greeting. Sections of her palm and the tips of her fingers are padded, and her claws are neatly filed back. When she speaks, the points of her fangs occasionally appear from behind her cheeks.

"Hey! It’s me again. Thought I’d try something different today."

"First, let me get this out of the way: I’m a bit worried. Can’t say much now, but my team might get called up for some actual sorties here before long. It’s never a welcome prospect, but there it is. "

"I have some other concerns, too, mostly related to my—position, but it can wait. I’m not trying to dump on anybody, just give you a sense of where I’m coming from."

"So, with that in mind, I thought maybe it’s time to inaugurate this little Omni page properly. Do something fun, try to enjoy what I do for a bit, and let the time for dread be later."

Hachiko leans forward and claps her hands together.

"First, let me show you around."

The camera floats upward a few meters and begins to pan in a 360° arc, revealing a sprawling landscape from the peak of a mountain. Visibility is almost perfect; the rocky slopes descend to valleys lush with forests, meadows filled with wildflowers and crisscrossed with clear alpine streams. In the distance, snow-capped peaks rise above turquoise lakes.

There are odd landmarks scattered around the environment. The ruins of a temple perched in the foothills, marble columns coated with ivy and moss. Bizarre, curving stoneworks of carved granite rising from the meadows, inlaid with circuitry and gold. Perhaps most jarringly, the wreck of a Purview destroyer lays at the foot of a mountain, settled into a trough in the landscape carved out by the vessel’s hull when it first crashed there. The ship is surrounded by pristine trees, and is half-overgrown with moss and vines. Birds can be seen roosting among the ruined laser batteries and torpedo tubes along its hull.

The camera completes its rotation, returning to a view of Hachiko seated at the top of the mountain. Beaming, she spreads her arms wide.

"This is my home! A variable-realism virtual environment, mostly constructed by my siblings and I. This is only part of it; if you keep going, say, that way for a couple hundred klicks—"

Hachiko points across the landscape towards a plateau in the distance.

"—and you don’t happen to be traveling at nearlight speed, the next section gets loaded in seamlessly, and so on. The computing power required to sustain the simulation increases with higher realism settings and larger loaded area, of course. By default, we prefer to keep a relatively small area loaded at high settings. Right now we’re docked at our home corvette, so between our fighters and onboard systems, we’ve got more than enough power at our disposal to keep things running smoothly."

"We tried to think of a fitting name for this place, but to us, it’s just home."

Hachiko hops down from the boulder, her claws rattling against the stone underfoot, and stretches her back. As she does so, her ears swivel back and lay flat, popping back up again as she sighs and stands straight, arms swinging at her sides. Bouncing on her toes, she turns to face the camera. A faint roar can be heard in the distance, echoing through the mountain range.

"Now for the fun stuff! Remember that I said this is a variable-realism environment? That means that we can turn this place into a milspec simulator on demand, one fit for conducting combat exercises."

Turning from the camera, Hachiko scans the horizon. The roar grows louder.

"This is, by the way, the only context in which I would describe combat as 'fun.' Don’t get the wrong idea. Here, combat isn’t actually combat. It’s a game which, no matter how realistic, only superficially resembles combat. And a game can be fun."

"So then, for your consideration, L1 and I would like to offer a little demonstration."

A metallic streak flashes through the sky only a few meters above Hachiko’s head, leaving a pair of contrails in its wake. An instant after it passes, a deafening sonic boom and a blast of wind rolls over her, billowing the loose fabric of her clothes.

Grinning, Hachiko sprints after the passing aircraft and dives from a cliff, the camera trailing her. As she falls, the shape of her Qilin fighter materializes around her avatar. Her fighter’s four atmospheric wings, retracted into the hull of the craft, snap out into position as its fusion drives scream to life.

A low voice comes over the radio. “Hello, Hachi.”

“Hi, Grey! Tagalongs should be receiving.”

“Excellent. Let’s get altitude before we begin. And viewers, welcome. I hope this exercise will prove informative. Or, at the very least, entertaining.”

___

The camera maintains a fixed position relative to Hachiko’s fighter as she pitches up to a 45° climb. Violet plasma flows from the fighter’s vectored thrust nozzles, fading to orange, then to a contrail of superheated air in her wake.

HUD elements appear onscreen, tagging a distant speck high off her right wing as L1 Grey. The altimeter rises continuously.

“So! We’re on L1’s ass right now,” says Hachiko. “Pretty far to the left off their ass, actually. Aspect angle 53°L, range 4.6 klicks, angels 6.2 to their 7.6, same heading, speed matched at mach 1.2. They’ve got the altitude advantage, meaning more potential energy to expend for maneuvers, which might be a problem in a bit.”

“Now, those of you experienced with missiles might be wondering why I don’t just smack Grey right now. Two reasons. Reason the first: if I turn to put my nose on them, I’m going to lose speed and my rate of ascent is going to suffer, heightening their altitude advantage. But that won’t matter if I kill them, right? So, let’s go for it.”

Hachiko’s fighter makes a quick roll to the right, HUD elements tracking the motion. The horizon slants around her fuselage, then begins to drift to one side as she pulls up. Highlighted in a hexagon of green light, the shape of L1’s fighter drifts toward the center of Hachiko’s reticle.

A low-pitched tone sounds—the reticle indicates radar lock.

“Demonstration shot, Grey. Luna 3, missile away.”

“Acknowledged. Luna 1, defending.”

A missile drops from the central bay of Hachiko’s fighter. An instant later, its engine ignites and it streaks out ahead of her, closing on Grey. It flies for a few seconds, then detonates in an orange flash before it can reach its target. A muted thud reaches the camera a moment later.

“There’s the other reason.” Hachiko says. “L1 is packing a set of LINTERs, laser interception systems. For you mech jockeys, think of it like an auxiliary weapon. The additional omnidirectional sensors take up a fair bit of systems load, and it generates an annoying amount of heat, but it’s a versatile defensive tool. Doesn’t hit much harder than an infantry-scale laser, but it’s designed for high performance at much, much longer range, to the detriment of all else.”

“That being the case, unless my missiles have enough ablative shielding to tank the incoming fire, they’re probably not going to work unless I fire enough of them at once to overwhelm either Grey’s aim, their maneuvering capability, or their heat sinks.”

“I have my primary railgun and thruster-steered kinetics, but that’s really more for space combat. Since we’re in atmosphere, range is extremely short, so for our purposes it's just a particularly nasty coaxial cannon. Downsides of this particular class of fighter. Just because we’re capable of operating in atmosphere doesn’t mean we’re optimized for it. There are dedicated atmospheric fighter craft out there that could run circles around us in this environment. The quadwings we’re using for lift and control-surface maneuvering right now are actually modular systems—very heavy ones. The same way you might put an EVA module on a mech if you’re expecting to go up, we put wings on our fighters if we’re expecting to come down.”

“Space combat is a very different beast, but it’s the niche that NHPs like us live in. We’ll save all that for another day.”

“So, everything boils down to this: no matter what weapon I use, it’ll be difficult to land a hit. Grey will do everything in their power to make it harder, but they can’t make it impossible. Our loadouts are symmetrical, our aircraft are identical, and we can’t kill each other immediately, so it’s down to an old-fashioned dogfight. Ready, Grey?”

“Ready. Come at me.”

Rolling hard to the left, Hachiko’s fighter orients itself perpendicular to the horizon. An ephemeral field of vapor forms above the wings as control surfaces drive her into a hard turn.

Overhead, Grey’s fighter inverts and pulls down, dropping altitude as it enters a spiraling descent.

Sky and land make dizzying revolutions around Hachiko’s fighter as she executes a series of quick maneuvers. Below, the sun sails past, and above, mountaintops blur together. Bursts of laser fire snap out from a pair of optical globes mounted on the dorsal and ventral hull of her fighter. Each burst is accompanied, a few moments later, by the thud of warheads detonating in the distance.

“Good exchanges so far. Position’s tenable, took heat, no sweat. Playing defense, but they’re still trying to bring their nose around. Lemme just—”

The world stops spinning. Hachiko aims her nose high above the horizon, and a torrential burst of plasma spews from her engines.

“—get a little bit of altitude. Okay, they’re on my ass now. Rude. They’re flying lead pursuit, aiming their nose a little ahead of me. Means they’re trying to line up their railgun. Matter of timing…there!”

Cutting her engines and sweeping her wings back, Hachiko dives. A deafening shockwave sounds as a railgun round soars past, followed by another. Her fighter yaws hard about, and the engines roar back to full thrust.

On the HUD, the hexagon indicating Grey’s fighter comes back into view, halting at equal altitude near the center of Hachiko’s reticle. Her radar lock tone sounds off.

“Good! A little close,” says Grey.

“Okay. Missiles away.”

One missile streaks away from Hachiko’s fighter, then a second. Magnified in the reticle, Grey’s fighter can be seen as it inverts and enters a steep dive. Its wings snap back into its hull, and it enters freefall. Both missiles swerve to follow.

“Huh. Alright,” Hachiko says.

Spacecraft maneuvering thrusters fire along the forward ventral hull of Grey’s fighter. Far below, it pivots to face Hachiko as the missiles close in.

“Oh, fuckfuckfuck—“

There’s a flash of blue from the nose of Grey’s fighter as their railgun discharges.

A plume of debris erupts from the center of Hachiko’s fighter. Both right wings are shorn away with a screech of tearing metal.

As her fighter begins to tumble, breaking apart, Hachiko’s avatar emerges from the wreckage. Swinging her arms and kicking out, she orients herself as she falls. The camera takes up position beside her, focusing on the view of her fighter as it disintegrates.

Moments later, the camera feed flashes white. As the light fades, a view of a distant fireball emerges. Off to one side of the frame, Hachiko can be seen shading her eyes with one hand.

“There goes the reactor,” Hachiko says. “It wouldn’t do that in reality, not under normal circumstances. Just for fun.”

“Good match, Hachi.”

“Good match! I know you took at least one of my shots to score a hit, I'm sure of it. You put the missiles inside your LINTER blind, angle of approach was dead-on.”

“Correct. One hit,” Grey says. “Significant structural damage, but no kill.”

“Call it Pyrrhic, then?”

“A Pyrrhic victory it is. See you on the ground.”

___

Hachiko lands softly in the grass of an alpine meadow.

Clouds of gnats swirl above a nearby stream, and dragonflies perch on reeds. Afternoon sunlight slants down over a ridge between mountains, lighting ranks of coniferous trees from behind. There is no debris, no wreckage raining from the sky.

Breathing deeply, Hachiko sits in the grass. The camera descends with her. She sets her chin on one hand and smiles.

"Well, I think that just about wraps it up for what I had planned. Like Grey said, I hope it was…enjoyable? Informative? Something positive. In any case, I appreciate you watching."

"Something else I wanted to mention: this place is accessible remotely. If you’ve got an omni connection with decent bandwidth, we’d welcome visitors every now and then. We don’t get much company, unfortunately. For humans, I’d recommend an enhanced subjectivity suite to get the full experience, but you don’t need one. A headset or screen will still give you eyes and ears in here."

"If you’d be interested in a simulator skirmish, let me know. I’m aware that most of you out there are mech pilots—chassis aren’t our area of expertise, but all four of us do have the basics, and we’d like to learn more. Conversely, if you’d be interested in trying your hand at a fighter, I can show you the ropes."

"On the other hand, we can also offer a little peace and quiet, too. Our little world here is nice for that. Honestly, it seems like a lot of people out there could use a little tranquility right now. Come take a hike with me, I’ll show you around."

Above, the sun sinks behind the ridge. In the distance, an enormous grey wolf can be seen striding through the grass, flanked by a coyote.

"That’s Grey and Ma’ii. I’d better go; we do need to talk a bit about things coming up. This is Hachiko, signing off. Be safe out there."

___

OOC: this one took a good minute, but it feels like a good starting point. Thanks for reading!

#lancer rp #lancer rpg #lancer ttrpg #oc rp #L3 Hachiko #L1 Grey #Luna Wing #I know nothing about aviation - I just chucked out some numbers and jargon for fun lol #also it may bear mentioning that I despise real-world weapon manufacturers and the incalculable human suffering they cause

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