wyrmraker wrote:Another chunk has been written. During the week I can hammer a lot of the details while I'm at work, but I can't really write until the weekends.
********
Staff Sergeant Geffen, on temporary assingment to the UEsG, smiled behind his faceplate. These troops had the right idea, proper attitude, and good equipment. They tended to rely more heavily on mass combat rushing tactics, but at least the ground troops were doing things right.
Even as he threw plasma grenades at the NERV group down the ramps, he was on his own radio. "Sierra Zero One Zero, you'll need to go around them; unknown if their deflection fields cover the whole body."
"Negative on that, Mal," came the calm, female voice. "Devereaux says she's going to do the best thing you can do without being arrested."
"Damn. Roger that, Sierra-010. Hunkering now." Cutting to the Team Charlie circuit, he shouted, "Everyone down! Dev's getting freaky!"
ODST Group Seven grabbed the upright members of Charlie Team, dropping them to the ground even as they covered the wounded with their own bodies. Four seconds later, they saw the Pelican dropship swing around the girders, launching strange, green missiles which evaporated huge swathes of platforms. The missiles didn't seem to penetrate the AT-Fields, but then the NERV personnel dropped hundreds of feet now that their support had dissolved. Then the Pelican swung around and started dancing back and forth as the 70mm nose-mounted gatling cannon sprayed the other NERV security force, slamming into their AT-Fields and kicking them off the walkways.
As the Pelican rotated, the rear hatch opened to reveal a tall figure in iridiscent green armor. A female voice shouted out, "Team Charlie, your evac is here. Get your wounded on the bird, the mission-capable personnel will join forces with Group Seven and continue the assignment." As the wounded were loaded into the bay, the armored figure stepped out, shouldering a Covenant Carbine. A shimmer flickered across the armored plates in the dusty air as she turned to Geffen. "Mal?"
"That guy called it. Energy blasters and force fields. Osman's gonna love this. Do we have any new orders, Naomi?"
Mal could hear the smile in the voice, and saw the amused body language in his Spartan friend's pose. "The usual. Get intel, steal samples, and so on. I swear, ever since the UEsG crossed over to our universe things have gotten bizarre. And now that Parangosky's gotten that wierd life-extending treatment, Osman's been getting a lot more field duty."
"Tell me about it. Any idea what Vaz is up to?"
The Spartan's body language shifted slightly to uncertainty. "Not really. He's still stuck at the Gate running comms for Osman. Relaying secret orders and the like."
"Figures. Vaz's gotta be going nuts on desk duty. I need to get him out here doing this stuff. We're ODSTs, not desk jockeys."
"True. Although the advancements offered by the UEsG leaders are getting even more interesting than we'd thought. Did you know they found John? He's now the bodyguard for Captain Ayanami-Hunter. He sent me a message saying that he's never had a tougher job."
"If the Master Chief is saying that, then that Captain's gotta be fun. What about you, Naomi? Did they offer you anything?"
Naomi-010's body language drastically altered, going from uncertainty to outright nervousness. "Yeah, they offered to help correct some of the damage to all of the Spartan-II's due to the augmentation process."
"Huh. Really? Interesting," Mal mused aloud, running the options through his head as the last of the wounded were loaded onto the Pelican. Vazily Beloi, or Vaz, knew quite a bit about the Spartan's thanks to his reading of Naomi's file. He'd have to have a chat with Vaz or Black-Box over some of this 'damage'.
Turning, he addressed Unit Seven (plus the remainder of charlie Team). "Alright folks, we have a command center to take. You find any enemy tech, you take 'em and we keep moving. Two by two, let's go!"
Unit Seven began advancing along the girders, keeping an eye out of NERV combat troops.
***
"What does C&C say?"
"Captain, Command and Control are reading thirty-seven enemy units airborne. It seems that Unit-01 has a fighter escort. Small craft, barely larger than a Lancer Space Fighter, sir."
"It just keeps getting stranger," Captain Stovesh mused aloud. "Any readings on ground weaponry?"
"Nothing that would threaten us, sir. Maximum range on the weapons we can read is Low Earth Orbit."
"Very good. Deploy the Ghost Fighter drones."
"Sir? SOP states that we send fighter escort and Evas."
"I know that, but this situation is bizarre. I want to see what's going on before I send in my men."
"Understood sir. QF-Series fighters lining up for launch. Also, Team Urzu is away, as is Aleph-7's command. They will be groundside in two minutes."
"At least the ground side of the battle seems to be in good hands."
"Sort of, sir. Aleph Group is in some sort of new equipment that Sergeant Sagara broght with him. It filled a Horizont bay."
"New equipment? What kind?"
"Unknown, sir. Classified as 'Experimental'."
"Dammit. How am I supposed to do my job when even I don't know all my resources..."
"QF Series is lined up, IFF protocols updated. Ready for launch."
"Launch the fighter drones, Ensign. Let's see what we can see."
***
At a height of 250,000 feet, Unit-01 was waiting to see this new response. They definitely were not Angels this time around, but NERV's sensors weren't exactly top of the line. Shinji still had to use most of the old sensor arrays from when he was fourteen.
The ground troops were some of the best he could find from around the world. A mix of former Israeli Defense Force, American Navy Seals, French Foreign Legion, Spetznaz, and even former members of the FARC. Once differences had been ironed out and training had commenced, he'd outfitted them with heavy handguns made from the research on Zeruel's energy blast, as well as miniaturized AT-Field generators. The generators were dumb ones, nowhere near as useful as the real thing, but they were useful.
And now these intruders in armor were interrupting his carefully planned Scenario. Shinji was actually not really that angry. More confused, because whoever these guys were, they were completely unexpected. High grade armor, energy weapons, a starship in the L2 point that was firing out pods with high-grade EM-jamming units. He knew that he was relying on his ground forces to deal with all of that stuff (that's their job), while he was going after the starship. He'd already been on comms to the UN, and had gotten permission to deal with the alien invaders. At least he'd had enough foresight to equip Unit-01 with a laser communications array; the invaders' jamming technologies were far above and beyond anything he'd heard of outside of science fiction books.
And now the starship was launching... Sensors said 'unknowns', but the visuals looked like fighter craft of some sort. Neural commands reached out, linking with his own fighter escort as they lunged forward at the selected enemies.
Seele never truly knew what they had created as support for the Production Evangelions. Never realized their true potential. Shinji, as a combat pilot, had done his research. The old men would never have thought about using the Dummy Plug project like this...
***
"Sir, Ghost Wing has engaged the enemy."
"Progress?"
"What the... Sir? Ghost Seven through Twelve are gone. The enemy fighter escort blew through them!"
"What? How? Their PPAT-Field generators should have worked!"
The Science Station called over, "Captain, I am reading inversions along the phase state of all of the enemy units' AT-Fields. All of the enemy fighter crafts are reading like our Longinus missiles. Unit-01 has unknown variations in it's AT-Field, but I'm willing to bet it has the same capability."
"Son of a... Fire the main cannon at Unit-01 as soon as it gets in range. Fire ECS jamming pods at all enemy fighters, and scramble the two Fire Angel Evanagelion units."
Tactical piped up again. "Sir, Aleph-7 recommended we send out Urzu squad to deal with Unit-01. Something about how the Leavatein's special equipment should make a significant difference."
"Oh yeah... I forgot about that. Argh, this multidimensional TOE is really messing with my head. Fine, go ahead and fire the ECS jammers, and tell Urzu Squad to engage the enemy. Communications, is there any word from the Gate?"
"Sort of, sir. No word yet from UEsG Command, but Sergeant Beloi reports that the UNSC can have a troopship through their Gate and here within thirty minutes."
"It's got to be better than what I'm dealing with here. Inform Sergeant Beloi that we would appreciate backup fom the Office of Naval Intelligence."
"Yes, sir." There was a pause, and then, "Sir, Beloi says that thanks to our new alliance treaties, he can confirm that the Ascendant Retribution is en route. ETA is twelve minutes, and they have a full compliment."
"Understood. So all we have to do is delay the enemy until reinforcements arrive. We can do that. Any word from the ground troops?"
"Sir. ODST Group 7 has finished gathering up wounded, and has broken into a number of teams to reinforce the teams that were already on the ground. They are renewing the ground assault. Aleph Group has landed and is taking the fight into the NERV catacombs. Major Kusanagi is running C&C from her postion."
"And Darkraven?"
"Unknown, sir. He went radio silent twenty minutes ago. Also, Major Kusanagi hasn't seen him since he entered the command center of NERV."
"Gods, I hate that guy," Stovesh muttered. "Keep me updated as needed."
I'm REALLY loving this! Please keep it coming!
wyrmraker wrote:A little bit of explanation. Shinji's fighter escort actually consists of the Lance of Longinus copies that were used by the Production Evangelions in End of Evangelion. He found the research, and then started making all new dummy plugs for fighters that were made entirely of the copies Lances. Odds are pretty good that, while the UEsG has considerable experience with AT-Fields, they would have serious lackings in dealing with Shinji's anti-AT-Field.
Thanks for the expo!
wyrmraker wrote:Still going.
*******
Deep in the guts of NERV headquarters, twenty figures marched in the smoky haze. The soldiers had already dropped tear gas grenades, and were moving room by room, tossing in flashbangs and putting down anything that moved with riot control ammunition. Anyone they caught was immediately trussed up and laid in the hallways for later pickup and interrogation.
Hand signs flashed, a necessity with so much ordinance going off. Aleph Squad moved forward, relentless in their advance, mowing down anyone who didn't register on their IFF units.
One of the NERV guards peeked around the corner, seeing the figures. Nervously, but still confident he was hidden by the invaders' own smoke, he took aim at the lead figure.
The energy cannon kicked hard, but the beam flew straight and true only to difract off of some sort of energy shields, lighting up the tear gas. The figure rushed forward, nearly flying out of the smoke.
The last thought the guard had before he was stabbed in the head was, "Teddy bears?"
That bring back funny memeries!
taalismn wrote:It is the middle of the night, in a dark, quiet house, in a quiet town, on an prepossessing planet of idyllic serenity in a decidedly quiet sector of the galaxy. In an upstairs bedroom, a lone young girl on the cusp of womanhood sleeps, a small smile upon her lips. Beside her, a small bat-eared feline curls up in sleep. An antique pendulum clock in the corner of the room softly ticks away the passing of the hours into the night. She is only vaguely aware of it in the blessed stupor of sleep. She is comfortable with it.
She also knows she will not live to see the morning, nor see her eighteenth birthday. Her fate is written in her blood. But she is content; she has lived her last days here as she would have liked to had her life been different. She is at peace with what is to come.
She does not see the moonlight momentarily eclipsed as something settles in the darkness outside. Nor does she see the shadows subsequently move closer, her windows and doors pushed in as if by the breeze. She is oblivious, in whatever dreams comfort her.
The clock strikes midnight.
Two small shadows pounce on the feline, who awakens for a moment with a shocked squalling before suddenly falling quiet. Beside it, on the bed, larger shadows engulf the girl. Moonlight flashes on instruments, there is a hiss and the humming of power.
When the shadows withdraw sometime later, there is nothing on the bed but disturbed sheets that may as well have been ruffled by the wind.
There is a moment between life and death, a moment between the ticks of the clock, a perfect moment of possibility, a magical moment traditionally only the gods have had access to. But if the need is great enough, if mortals are clever enough, if the gods are lenient enough, or if some convergence of all of them happens, then that moment may be accessed at will, predestination altered, fate rewritten.
The woman looks young, but she is older than she looks, and she has a very good LONG memory. She remembers a certain young girl very well.
The girl known as Meifon Li may not remember her; she is just one of many clients the Angel Links agency has had over the years, and even for such an organization there are those who fall into obscurity in the passing acquaintance of business transactions and contract fulfillments. But the woman remembers the girl well, and though the circumstances of their meeting were brief, and though the girl might have considered the incident business as usual, the woman felt that a great debt had been incurred. A very special debt that could only be repaid in a very special way. To that end she bent the resources available to her to find out more about her unassuming benefactor, to make the repayment all the more special. When she was unsatisfied with what the initial inquiries had turned up, sensing there had to be more, she had her agents dig deeper, even to the point of what might be considered blatant invasions of privacy, had they been discovered. The digger they dug, the greater the mystery surrounding a certain young woman, and the more the woman realized the great potential and the greater danger in what they were discovering. But she persisted, ignoring what business commonsense said was unwise; life debts rarely had anything to do with commonsense, and if her hard-earned instincts were correct...
As she looks around the laboratory bustling with scientists, technicians, and doctors, she blesses her persistance, and the timing of her agents. A tick later and her life-debt would never been repaid, but now...
Her gaze returns to the center of the room. Meifon Li floats there, insensate, suspended between the ticks of the clock, immersed in a solution of exotic substances, at the focus of equally exotic machines, peering deep inside her, altering and affecting at the direction of the scientific staff assembled at the woman’s command. Some of the girl’s physiology is decidedly alien, yes, which causes some problems without access to the original alien ship Meifon’s grandfather discovered, but if it was familiar enough for a man of that pirate Chenho Li’s resources to be able to remake and reprogram, then her own people and contacts should be able to crack the problem, especially after hunting down the survivors of Li’s original black science staff and Goryu’s organization, and ‘secured’ their cooperation. Of course, it helps that she has her own special friends and resources.
The chatter around her is nearly incomprehensible to the layperson, but she has been around men of decidedly exotic science long enough to recognize a few phrases, some more familiar than others. Talk of genetic resequencing, of nanotechnological surgical restructuring, and potential psychic energy infusion fills the room, as specifics are worked out. The woman takes note of the decidedly POSITIVE tone of the talk. Then the word ‘protoculture’ comes up, and she cannot help a grin. We’re bringing out the big guns, are we?
The woman’s gaze returns to the young girl on the cusp of her seventeenth birthday, and knows she will live to see that birthday, and the next. The woman pats the casing of a smaller stasis container next to the larger one, as if by touch she can convey a message of affirmative comfort to the small felinoid slumbering inside. Soon...soon you’ll be reunited with your mistress, for as many more years as she has now ahead of her.
The woman once known as Lynn Minmei patiently awaits the latest update from her employees, and the time when she can tell her young benefactor face to face how she has repaid her debt to her.
Wow..., VERY good. Great even. Never liked the end of that anime. Also, could have been better, never was as good as the original.
taalismn wrote:Angel Links; it's a finite-run series that can be considered a sorta-sequel to Outlaw Star, since three characters from it show up and many common setting elements.
It's essentially about a 16-year-old girl charged with her rich and dying grandfather to run an organization dedicated to destroying space pirates. Then, towards the end of the series, she discovers she's an android created by her insane grandpapa to kill the pirate(and ex-business partner) that killed grandpa's family and his REAL granddaughter. And just to make sure the bad guy has to come out of hiding to get his hands on her technology, grandpa programmed in a finite lifespan for the girl; she dies when she turns seventeen.
That's where the series ends and the xover-snippet begins.
As for Minmei...
Yeah, I’ve decided that in the UEsG universes, baseline Lynn Minmei has recovered from the Edwards ordeal, and settled down, ultimately married a Tirolian patrician, has established herself as a patron of the arts, and has become well-to-do, dabbling in business and other efforts as a venture-capitalist, even in other universes. Ironically, like a number of other characters in the Angel Links anime, she’s re-invented herself and has become virtually unrecognizable to those more familiar with the self-centered brat, or the washed-up former child-star of her earlier years. Of course, the fact that UEsG citizens now have lifespans arguably lasting CENTURIES has given her plenty of time to mature, and her early self-absorption has been channeled into other personality characteristics, such as what could be seen as an obsessive sense of her word. It also helps that outside the core UEsG worlds, she’s a virtual unknown, so she can travel and dabble in other ventures without any attendant celebrity baggage.
I'm a bit more sympathetic toward Minmei than many people...just as Rick is no longer the feckless callow youth he starts out as, and Lisa the self-pitying stuck-up military wind-up, characters can change and mature. This thread has seen a number of alternate Minmeis for my part who HAVEN'T been defined solely by their pasts, and when you meddle with the past, then Minmei can change as well...
Agree.
Chronicler wrote:taalismn wrote:Angel Links; it's a finite-run series that can be considered a sorta-sequel to Outlaw Star, since three characters from it show up and many common setting elements.
It's essentially about a 16-year-old girl charged with her rich and dying grandfather to run an organization dedicated to destroying space pirates. Then, towards the end of the series, she discovers she's an android created by her insane grandpapa to kill the pirate(and ex-business partner) that killed grandpa's family and his REAL granddaughter. And just to make sure the bad guy has to come out of hiding to get his hands on her technology, grandpa programmed in a finite lifespan for the girl; she dies when she turns seventeen.
That's where the series ends and the xover-snippet begins.
As for Minmei...
Yeah, I’ve decided that in the UEsG universes, baseline Lynn Minmei has recovered from the Edwards ordeal, and settled down, ultimately married a Tirolian patrician, has established herself as a patron of the arts, and has become well-to-do, dabbling in business and other efforts as a venture-capitalist, even in other universes. Ironically, like a number of other characters in the Angel Links anime, she’s re-invented herself and has become virtually unrecognizable to those more familiar with the self-centered brat, or the washed-up former child-star of her earlier years. Of course, the fact that UEsG citizens now have lifespans arguably lasting CENTURIES has given her plenty of time to mature, and her early self-absorption has been channeled into other personality characteristics, such as what could be seen as an obsessive sense of her word. It also helps that outside the core UEsG worlds, she’s a virtual unknown, so she can travel and dabble in other ventures without any attendant celebrity baggage.
I'm a bit more sympathetic toward Minmei than many people...just as Rick is no longer the feckless callow youth he starts out as, and Lisa the self-pitying stuck-up military wind-up, characters can change and mature. This thread has seen a number of alternate Minmeis for my part who HAVEN'T been defined solely by their pasts, and when you meddle with the past, then Minmei can change as well...
I thought I was the only one too for characters like her. I mean look what I did with Edwards of all people
What did you do to him? Make him good?