"Trainees!"

Erikal Slin's voice rang through the early morning light, the recognizable figure of the division Commander walking in his easy stride along the front lines of the assembled recruits for the inaugural class of the Mecha Carta Institute. It was cold outside, but in the heated and glassed-in courtyard of the Institute, it was comfortable enough for the students to be wearing t-shirts and shorts. Most of the soldiers currently on the field only barely knew how to drive a mech, much less fight in one--but with any luck, the far more rigorous, MECH-focused combat training the new trainees would undergo at the Institute would translate to a higher amount of competence on the battlefield. He stopped, turning to them.

"I'm not one for speeches, so I'll keep this brief. Whatever previous accolades or background you might have, no matter where you came from or what caused you to enter Institute... None of you can dwell on your histories here, I won't accept it. Resting on your laurels won't help anyone, and it sure as hell won't make me happy."

One hand rose, in a jabbing point at the students, his elbow slightly bent. "Whether you like it or not, this is a clean slate for all of you. Show me what you can do, and how great of a pilot you are. I don't give a damn about what people you were."

Commander Slin paused, straightening, and dropped his hand to his side, hoping his grimace wasn't too visible. They were all so green, only one person with actual military experience... But they didn't have options, they didn't have time.

He raised his voice again. "Welcome to hell, kids. The job starts tomorrow, 9 AM sharp, unless some of you want to go look at each other's MECHs in the hanger. For now, have some fun. Those of you with MECHs provided by the government will need to see me before class tomorrow morning."

He turned and walked away, leaving them to get to know each other and the Institute. He couldn't instill them with loyalty to their comrades. They'd have to do that on their own.

Sophia Pax stood properly as the Division Commander walked past her. She took in the words of her commander and smiled. This man did not care about the past. Or at least the personal pasts of the cadets. That was more than fine for her. She did not need to be treated like a noble. Sophia smiled darkly as she spoke aloud just enough for those around her, "I am fine with that. Not like my father would take me back anyways. The only thing left for me is Glory, death, or ruin."

Sophia turned slowly and left the formation. A ghostly black raven could be seen resting on her left shoulder, but only by those who were true soldiers. Sophia left the courtyard of the institute and went to the hanger. Sophia stopped before her black and red Mech and looked up. She straightened up her uniform and smiled darkly, "The House of Pax will go to war once more..."

Anyone who hated being in school could tell you that the quickest way out of an assembly was to stand in the back row, closest to the doors. Last in, first out. Pretty basic principle. In fact, if you were really clever, you could stick some paper in the door and slip out silently partway through the assembly. Which, normally, Evangeline would've done. Buuuuut given that this was the first assembly at the Mecha Carta Institute, given by the Division Commander himself, she figured she should give it her full attention. Not that what he said mattered much to her, pretty standard Commander stuff. Stuff they all already knew, too. But best to get off on the right foot, right? Pretend she fit in with the rest here? All that good stuff?

Yeah. Yeah that was best.

No reason to stick around when Erikal was done, though, right?

Which is exactly why she was back in her work clothes and back in the hangar less than five minutes after the Commander stopped talking. The Titan still needed fine tuning, and her pilot was halfway into the repair hatch on its back tinkering with the inner servos by the time anyone else made it into the hangar. She'd come a long way since her scrapyard Frankenstein days, but inside, she was still pretty close to the original. Some refinement here and there, but she was still there. The machine she'd trusted her life to Day One.

Sentiment?

"Pretty much." Evan answered the 'question', glancing briefly at the amorphous fog outside the repair hatch. She still wasn't sure what it said was really words or she just heard them like it, but she knew what it meant. "'Sides, you got her working, remember?"

That sounded a lot like a shrug. So she shrugged herself, and turned back to the Titan's power relays. Couldn't be careful enough with those. Be pretty shitty if a core overloaded day one because she didn't pay attention.

John's head spun the moment the Commander mentioned clean slates. The mobile communicator in his right pocket had been vibrating almost non-stop since the word 'histories'. He simply ignored it and continued listening to the Commander's brief yet useful address.

He sighed internally as Erikal walked off, and turned carefully to the nearest isle in an attempt to leave when his efforts were stopped short by a young woman hardly 5 years senior to him, talking apparently to no one in particular, remained in his way. After painfully extracting himself from behind her slow pace he positioned himself near the corner of his own MECH's hangar, where he still had full view of the courtyard and vice-versa, and relieved himself of the communicator that was burning a hole in his pocket. I attached the device to his ear, guarded mic extending to his mouth, and spoke simply,"Go."

Have some fun.

Yes.

Fun.

That oldest, most abstract of concepts, fun, which could be had in spades without regret until the moment that 8:45 AM rolled around and you were still drooling into some foreign pillow with a clock-shaped hole in your episodic memory. Sixteen hours until they began the first morning of the rest of their lives - until they began an unprecedented training course for the usage of spirits and MECHs against a demonic horde bent on human extinction, but sure. There was always time to turn up.

Or, as so many other students were doing, turning around to go and make moon eyes over each others MECHs. Cry Havoc needed no such adoration; she simply got the job done, and Jericho with it. He would have loved nothing more than to seek out his dorm, or perhaps a good library, perhaps one with information on Seal Judgment. Almost as he was halfway through the idea, the right hand he was keeping shoved in the pocket of his black jeans began to chill slightly, as though dipped in a basin of water. When he withdrew it, a thin black layer of soft metal had coalesced over it, more like leather than an actual piece of armor.

"Good boy," Jericho said wryly.

The gauntlet tightened reflexively; he felt a tiny sting against a bone in his wrist as a small spike came to life, extended into his flesh, and then drew back into the inner surface of Judgment so quickly that he wasn't even sure blood was flowing from the pinprick. Piper rolled his eyes, both at his spirit and at the situation.

He would have loved to buck a good trend right now and paddle opposite the flow of shit's creek, towards a library instead of the hangar. Unfortunately, he had left his treatise on the kingdom's artifacts with his bag. His bag...which was currently nestled snugly near Cry Havoc's ankle.

Blugh.

"Following the herd after all, Judgment," Jericho muttered under his breath, putting the hand back in his pocket save for a thumb, which he cocked on the outside of his pocket as he began the walk to the hangar. "Unless there's something in my treatise you'd like to break the news on ahead of time."

There was no prick this time...well, not unless you counted the spirit as a whole.

But that was something Jericho had learned not to hold against it.

Grab the treatise.

The hair on Jericho's right arm stiffened, as it always did when he felt the familiar ideas from nowhere creep from the back of his head.

Head to the library.

...

"Perhaps not such a bad idea."

She had to admit, the building was impressive. In her mercenary days, her 2S3 artillery piece was as much her tool as it was home. With the necessity to be on the move at all times, the merc band operated out of a mobile command center and their respective vehicles. And now, indoors arena. Enough said. She just hoped the military food has gotten better since her cadet days. Her thoughts were broken off when the commander started his speech.

What? No shiny until tomorrow? No no no no no, must have. Give now! Kat thought as the assembly started to disintegrate into what seemed like a bunch of gloomy introverted individuals, not one saying as much as a hello to someone else. Compared to the semi-drunken friendly atmosphere of the mercenary company, she felt the military would be boring. Which would be perfectly acceptable since she would have brand new prototype gadgets to work with, except - she didn't.

Following after the commander, she twisted out of the way of some lower level brass walking against her with a quick salute - bah, she almost forgot how to do that - and caught up with him: "Umm, sir, if I may? I'd like to get familiar with the government-issue right away. I'm being given one of the 2nd gen prototypes?" she said, just in case he had too much on his plate to remember. She didn't yet have as much as a glimpse on blueprints, and she didn't like the idea of just being jammed into the seat and sent out without going over every square millimeter of it to make sure something won't break down in the first minute.

@Kaithas

"The fuck do these goddamn KAD engineers think they're-"

CLANG.

The offending piece of metal, officially referred to as a "power conservation device", was designed to cut down on the use of power when the magic reactor hit a designated low power state. It was also installed by some idiotic white collar elite who didn't know that any mechanic worth their salt would have ripped it out, not installed it behind the pilot's back to fit arbitrary-

Deep breaths. Didn't matter, it was already over there, shattered on the hangar floor. Where it belonged.

The small-town mechanic herself had barely pulled her head out of the repair hatch when she threw it away, and she was elbow deep in the Titan's mechanisms again. Mostly making sure the inspecting engineer hadn't changed anything else when she wasn't looking. She hated when people messed with her specs. She had everything tuned exactly her way for her own maximum performance, whether it was 'proper' or not.

...

You know, the part didn't hit anyone, but it might've been close. Maybe don't throw things in the big government hangar.

CLANG

John cursed silently and ducked back through the entryway. Never enter a room with females in it without knocking first! The actual hell as he thinking!

He took a deep breath and knocked first this time, stepping halfway around the corner and then fully to find-

Evangeline Starr

the one Harv called him about. Smug bastard must've read John's public class manife- but that wasn't important.

John approached Evan, who was still elbow deep in a MECH, glancing at the broken hardware previously thrown in his general direction.

"If you're going to stand there, hand me the torque wrench on the barrel." Evangeline didn't actually look away from her work, but after a few minutes, she did hold out a hand to accept the wrench. The other was busy checking for breaches in the sheathing for the primary power cables, after removing the invasive regulation device. It was fortunate the Titan was off and staying that way, because the results otherwise wouldn't be pretty. Lots of sparks. Lots of fires. Very, very singed mechanic. Not fun times. "C'mon, make yourself useful."

"Unless you want me to divide my attention, then we can take our chances the next time I fire her up."

John allowed himself a smile at that last comment and reached up, handing her the torque wrench. He was admittedly no mechanic or otherwise, but he could find his way around any standard workshop just fine. He continued to say nothing, allowing Evan to continue her evidently passionate work while examining her MECH himself.

Titan, of course, looked nothing like the CX-66. John mentally chided himself for allowing himself to truly believe that it might. CX-66 was, after all, unique, its only sister suit... damn.

In any case, the Starr family name was not one to be ignored in these times. Any viable skilled engineers were not to be ignored in these times.

In fact, any viable engineers were to be encouraged by any means necessary.

John's eyes found the MECH's longsword and carbine in that order. Titan's firepower was respectable, but CX-66 certainly had a far superior edge in mobility... at least with weapons stowed.

"So." The mechanic tightened up the conduits running through where the excised machinery had been, sealing up the power flow's route as far as she could tell. Have to do some voltage testing to make sure, but it should be fine. Which meant taking a break to deal with whoever it was who decided to visit, then finish her inspection.

"What can I do for you?"

"Pardon my interruption, Ms. Starr," John began, attention settling back on the mechanic," I am Johnathan Centuria, sole heir to the Centuria household. For business' sake I shall keep this to the point," he dug his communicator from his pocket and pulled up a display on the screen," Are you familiar with this... apparatus?"

The display presented less like a screen and more like a raised platform hovering an inch above a lense in the communicator. It was a very complex schematic outlining the second most important part of the CX-66, the pattern buffer stationed below the core. The mathematics alone had taken weeks for John himself to compute, leading to the few advancements he is on the machine. Other than the physical nuts and bolts, this device was far beyond him and even some graduated engineers. He had dedicated much of his personal resources to his efforts, and revealed an interesting piece in the actual hard copy of the scheme-

'M. Starr'

A signature in quaint cursive dwarfed by the most undeniably complex equation on the paper, so dwarfed, in fact, that the computer scanning the document mistook it for part of the equation.

John had the equations he had yet to figure, and the signature, highlighted or otherwise. He handed the display to Evan.

The small-town mechanic looked over the display critically, eyes narrowing faintly while she mulled over what she was seeing. Every now and again she tilted the device to look at it from a different angle, or look more closely at one detail. Whatever the device she was looking at was, it was a far cry from the farm equipment she was used to. Or the refinement she'd been doing to the Titan. She could identify small pieces, even see how some of them worked together, but she still couldn't seem to see the whole. It clearly was designed to accept something, and then do something with it, but there was something she was missing...

Magic? The 'voice' helpfully offered, the amorphous mist drifting over her shoulder. Evan's eyes narrowed again as she gave it a faint nod, eyes briefly flitting over the name at the bottom of the schematics.

"I'm not familiar with it. From what I can tell, it's a device meant to assist with a magical effect when given a physical item. What it does, I couldn't say. I don't know an M. Starr off the top of my head, either. If we're related, I never met them." A pause. "This would've been beyond my Dad, probably my Granddad, too. But I don't know the rest of my family too well."

John silently let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. Harv mentioned the Starrs came from a small town, small family. He couldn't hold everyone to his standard on familial knowledge, after all.

"Thank you, but it never hurts to hope," John said, barley managing a smile to show his sincerity,"If you do ever hear of an 'M. Starr', I might still be very interested in making their..." He searched for words. "Aquaintance."

This certainly put a damper on his mood. No known engineer to at least repair the buffer meant that he could never truly risk moderate damage to the CX-66. Hell, if he stressed it too much it may as well implode on him as it was, he hadn't nailed down the exact power coefficient for mass transfer.

John felt the hopes he had tried not to hold crash on him reguardless. This mood change provoked his spirit, the Lone Grey Wolf, to present. It manifested next to him, its ears at perfect scratching height, and John began to do so absentmindedly.The Wolf looked up at Evangeline and tilted its head slightly.

"I'll ask my Dad next time I talk to him, he might know if we've got an M. Starr on the family tree. But frankly..." The mechanic paused a second, idly glancing at the Wolf. She noticed United shifting a little more quickly next to her, and heard its faint whispers intensify just a little. "In the real world, Mr. Centuria, family names don't mean shit. Nobles keep track of their fancy titles and holdings. No one else cares. All we keep track of is who takes over the family business when we get old. We've been running the same shop for three or four generations."

Evan shrugged, setting the wrench back down on the floor behind her. "I can take a look at it if you ever need it fixed. You've got the schematics, so I can probably put it right, but that's the extent of it. Even if I understood exactly how the magic works, magic isn't in my wheelhouse. My... Adviser on the matter, isn't always that forthcoming."

"But I'll let you know if I find who built it. First piece of tech I've seen since I got here that wasn't a piece of shit. Still over-engineered, though. Anything that delicate's got no place on a machine til it's sturdier."

The Wolf growled and jumped slightly when Evan evidently read John's mind, then looked to John himself.

John's expression darkend sourly. He recalled his Father's blue eyes and Mother's green looking back at him. He recalled his cousin playfully teasing him. And Susana's smile...

No. There were other reasons to remember family names and titles besides petty, societal worth.

He again re-envisioned the flames.

"I... will always... look back..." John stated through gritted teeth.

"Thank you, Ms. Starr," John said after a small silence, then he turned and walked back to the entryway.

"Riiiight. Gonna have plenty of those here..." Evangeline never understood people and their fixation on the past, or status. Probably because she didn't have status, but still. Status didn't matter in here, anyway, Erikal made that perfectly clear. She really hoped that other people were more grounded. Down to Earth. Speaking of down to Earth..."

Sealing up the repair hatch, the mechanic slid down the ladder from her catwalk to reach the floor below. Wasn't much more fine tuning she could do before tomorrow. So best to get to know the other people.

And see their MECHs.

That too.

"...provided by the government will need to see me before class tomorrow morning."

As the last words slipped from Commander Slin's mouth, Rose watched quietly as the group of students departed, nearly hidden behind one of the Institute's support pillars. Everyone here is so young, she thought. Discerning pilot from mage was of little challenge; The pilots carried themselves differently from the mages. Cocky, arrogant to some; there was something about a pilot that was divergent, so young yet they carried themselves like they were ready to take on the world, not stopping to think about the repercussions. A dangerous way to live.

Gazing at the empty courtyard; minus a few lingering conversations, the pale girl halted for a moment to take in the Institute. It seemed like just yesterday she had left home. She could still hear the simmering of stew, feel the heat of the heart, bask in intoxicating smell of lamb and barley permeating the air. The Mecha Carta was... different. The floors were polished to the point of reflection. The air was sterile and without dust or pollen. There was no crows calling off in the distance, just the gentle humming of incandescent bulbs overhead. The sensation was overwhelming, yet Rose did not mind. Something about the calm and order of the situation granted her much needed rest from the transient life. Best capitalize on it while it lasts, Rose mused, turning to head for the library.

Rose drifted through the halls of the library. The library was a strange mix between old and new; some rows lined with old books, others with cases, filled with receptacles for data chits for use in hand held readers. I should probably study some casting articulation techniques... Rose debated, ...but a good cook book sounds appealing. Floating through the halls on her leather shoes, Rose rounded the corner of a towering bookcase, nearly colliding with a man clad in denim and leather, a peculiar black object on his arm outstretched for a book. Panicked, Rose attempted to flee, stumbling backwards into a waist high marble column, knocking off an ornate vase.

No! Rose's mind scrambled as the vase raced towards the floor. Instinctively her slim hand extended, her mangled fingers extended towards the floor as if she was signaling for a small animal to halt. Instantaneously the floor of the library fissured, a strange swirling void appearing from the polished granite. Into the void the vase vanished, appearing less than a moment later in Rose's raised hand, another dimensional anomaly resting less than a meter above her leather glove. Swiftly Rose shifted her stance, setting the vase down on the pillar before sliding in an elegantly panicked fashion to the next isle of books, pressing her back up against the end on the shelving. Maybe he didn't see me, she hoped, frozen in the isle, her pale face flushed with embarrassment.

[@Plank Sinatra]

Chimere continued standing in the courtyard for some time after the largest swarm of trainees left. Her eyes glanced down to a small piece of paper in her hands. A pamphlet with a map. She stared at it for some time with her consternation shown mostly by a twitch of the upper lip.

Sometime later: Nope, that's the hospital. The fact that they have a mini-hospital on hand is... Huuuuuh.

Sometime later: Nope, that's a big open room with too many chairs.

Sometime later: Nope, that's a room of shelves and books. Quiet, but still a few people.

Sometime later: Nope, that's a restroom.

Sometime later: Nope, that's a big garage. Huh, busy. Avoid.

Chimere finally reached her intended destination. The dormitories. A deep breath was taken as she examined her room number, and attempted to locate it.

Sometime later: Nope, this is the guy's area.

Sometime later: Maybe? Nope.

And then, it was done, Chimere stood triumphant, comparing her ticket to the sign and feeling pretty good about herself. No one else is here yet. Guess it's just mine.

Huuh.

She sat down hesitantly on her bed. Her body suddenly overcorrected back up and forward, upon sinking down into it further than expected.

Slower.

Chimere slowly leaned into the bed this time, eyes on the alert, scouring the room. Then, leaning back, she rested on it, finalyl stopped scanning the room.

Weird. Squishy but bouncy. She blankly at what was above her, hands restlessly gripping the frame. Now what?

"Calm down, Judgment. It was another patron." Jericho sounded like he was trying to repress a small laugh. "Yes, the problems you face inside a school library must be truly legion. Now quit being a baby and relax. You're making my arm uncomfortable. ...Well, that I won't even pretend is dignified enough to reply to."

Jericho walked out from the aisle he had been traversing with two books gripped in his right hand. He was clutching them with his fingers tenuously, as though he were scared of damaging them somehow, but after a second or two he raised his arm up and shifted his grip to better get a hold of both his tomes of interest. He spared an odd look at the vase on his way out, but walked over to a table and set both his books down nonetheless.

There was a flash of white in the corner of his vision. The right side. Bright white.

Unnatural.

"Don't be crude," he said calmly, still standing and turning to face the pale woman. She had pressed herself tightly against the end of the shelf, with ramrod posture and a stricken face. She was clearly uncomfortable with the thought of his approach, so he waved slightly with his uncovered hand and didn't take a step towards her. From his chosen table to her, there was a distance of ten, perhaps fifteen feet. Plenty of distance for both parties to stay aloof.

"Sorry to startle you. That must have been quite the catch."