[center][h1][color=LightPink]Rose[/color][/h1][/center]

Rose entered the ladies changing room with just enough time to spare, and proceeded through her changing with regimented efficiency. Casual wear was tossed off, exposing biology that was considerably more alien than it had first appeared when covered in clothing. It also exposed a body worn by time and injury. Ironically the major signifiers of the latter were patches of skin considerably less scarred by the former, where skin grafts had replaced scars and burns.  

After that she pulled on a Rosnian made pilot suit, armored plating covering her extremities, while lighter Nanoweave hugged closer to the alien’s hyper-dense muscles, trading increased vulnerability for increased flexibility. Nothing unusual there. What was perhaps unusual was the last items she donned, namely a pair of laser-handguns that she magnetized to her hips. They were unloaded, if the digital ammo counters on the back were to be believed, but the presence of several small cartridge shaped batteries attached to the armor above the handguns indicated that they were not ceremonial in nature in the slightest.

What was not clear from the outside was the multipurpose nature of the weapons. More than a weapon of last resort to prevent, one way or the other, capture by the enemy, they were also to be used as cutting tools to help a pilot escape the wreck of their vehicle, as well as as additional thrusters for navigating zero-G environments. 

Thus prepared, the veteran pilot stepped out of the changing room, and headed out to see if this VR setup they had really would feel like the real thing.

[hr]

The first thing Rose did upon entering the virtual cockpit was reach up to and pull down what looked like a blindfold from the ceiling of her cockpit, and slipped it over her third eye. Her ears shivered with discomfort for a moment as the blindfold tightened around her head, the front bulging as it pressed right up against the eye beneath it, before she re-acclimatized to the feeling. 

Only then did she fire up the engine using a triangular key, causing patterns then lit up on the front of the blindfold, stylized to look like a symbolic depiction of an even larger eye, one that tracked the movements of the one below. Around her, conventional screens lit up, revealing the forest of greens and browns. That quickly changed, as with an intonation of “[i]Testing, 1, 2, 3[/i]” the view switched from optical to RADAR, LADAR, Infrared and then back to optical again, basking the interior briefly in cold and then warm hues.

Ears flicked in please affirmation at this, before she switched to the command channel and said “Concerned warning: if you have an aversion to flashing lights, don’t look at my secondary feed!” cheerful sounding as ever, before testing the different settings of her Multiple Fire Control System once more. The mains screens did not change, but the smaller one inside the blindfold that her third eye was pressed against did, flicking first though each in turn as a test, only for some kind of debug console to pop up, Rose to type in a string of Rosnian glyphs, which caused the flicking between view modes to rapidly increase in speed till it was doing so at epileptic seizure inducing speed.

It should have resulted in a completely incomprehensible blur, and indeed to anyone looking over her figurative shoulder it did, but veteran Rosnain pilots swore that their third eyes were able to enter a zen state where all the feeds blurred together, where they could spot the unseen with ease. 

Of course, they then had to work out what feed the independently operating eye had spotted something on, and hope that what it had spotted wasn’t just something that looked a bit too much like the shape of a Homeworld predator, but still, they swore by it, and as one of them, as perhaps one of their exemplars at this point, so too did Rose.

Once her hack was set in place, Rose set about making use of the MFCS’s actual intended functions, opening up the shared communication channel and saying [color=LightPink]“Informative: sending sensor data gifts to you!”[/color] before doing a test of pinging the other framewerks with data packets containing (fortunately non strobing) sets her visual feeds so they could get an example of what those were like to receive, and adapt their own interfaces to handle them accordingly. 

Once that was confirmed to be working, she then directly asked Elora [color=LightPink]“Polite query: Does this help with your maps!”[/color] assuming that their two data gathering systems had been configured to work together in preparation for them working together, but making sure to double check.

With the data feeds all set up, she then did a quick test of the other systems. 

The Stargazer test was simple for all that it was an incredibly complex device: she made a falling leaf dance to her tune right before her framewerk’s primary sensor. 

The actual motion of the mech meanwhile was a slightly more involved process, the Ronsian flexing her fingers, making each of her framewerk’s tendrils flick and squirm to test their dexterity and responsiveness, before doing a few steps to ensure the three legs were all working properly, the limbs tracking off her own 2 and the nerve impulses of a residual tail her kind had. 

It was an unorthodox setup by human standards, but was actually a rather mature Rosnain technology. Their low gravity incredibly vertical homeworld had never been very suited for roads, its trees, mountains and cities all reaching far higher into the sky than they did on Earth. As such something that could navigate that difficult terrain had been a much higher priority than it had been on the human homeworld, and the reduced gravity had also reduced the material science requirements needed to make something that would not be at the mercy of the square cube law. 

The original designs Senko-San was a distant descendant too had used the brain of a native beast of burden to bypass the need for complex AI, but obviously they were far past such things these days.

Obviously.

The setup had then followed them to the stars, be it as landing legs on shuttles or as vehicles to explore low-G frontier worlds. They had even found use even on Rose’s much higher gravity world, the most ubiquitous use being that of an amphibious craft that worked around and under the floating cities dotting its globe spanning ocean. It was that, she thought, which gave the vessel such a nostalgic feeling, one that reminded her of happier days before she had lost so much.

A pinging sound caused the Rose to blink all three eyes, the woman having been briefly lost in a memory of watching a vast migration of native sea life from within those vessels alongside her lost loves, and returned to the present. A glance at the cause of the noise, a report that all three of her Framewerk’s weapon systems had passed the automated diagnostic tests she’d initiated, firmly anchored her back in it.

With that, all the systems were good to go, and so after reporting as such, there was little to do but hurry up and wait for the mission to begin.