[IC] Steel Dawn - Nightfall

[Skyrte]

Conlan took another bite of his eggs and bacon. Well, it was actually a... He really didn't know. Virtromeat was the answer he got when he asked the cashier what they were. They tasted like eggs and bacon, but they weren't actually eggs and bacon. This unsettled Conlan a little, he was used to the real thing. Just knowing that these weren't made from a pig and chicken was just strange. He'd been defrosted just three days ago and immediately given leave to a colony ship, it was like a huge city, complete with residential and commercial districts. He was also given a room at a 5-Star Hotel, well they were all 5-Star but the thought of it was nice. The whole three days there was a feeling in his gut, command didn't give anyone leave like this, hot food, hot showers, luxury, unless they were going to get the shitty end of the stick.

He took a sip of water. The diner was quiet, thankfully. An all white droid walked over, carrying a small white box. On its chest was a military insignia. It placed the box on the table. Conlan slowly looked at the droid, and then the box. A message from command, he assumed. He grabbed it and popped the top open, inside, on velvet was a badge. A mech pilots 'Legs', as it was often called. Like a paratroopers 'Jump Wings'. And a datapad. He picked it up, seeing that he was being called to the Admiral's ship. He rose an eyebrow.
"Transport has already been arranged." The droid spoke.
Conlan got up, left his payment and the two left the diner.

It was a short ride on the shuttle, a new model that Conlan had never seen before, but the rumble of the engines was still familiar. The droid had followed, and no small talk was exchanged. Did these droids even know about small talk? Droids before Conlan was frozen had no self awareness, and couldn't converse beyond acknowledging orders or providing feedback. But how long was he frozen? As he walked down the halls of the ship, several of the crew had given him stares, others gave him confused looks, some had to look twice at him before returning to their duties. Most of this was responded by with a stare of confusion back. Admirals usually never personally talked to a person like him.

The Admiral was on the bridge of his flagship. When he turned around, the Admirals appearance was very similar to that of Conlans. After a brief moment of silence, the two almost staring each other down, the Admiral spoke first.
"I'm you're nephew." The Admiral stated. Most of the bridge crew halted their duties to look.
"What." Conlan replied plainly.
"Your brother, Joachim, is my father." The Admiral explained,
"Ah. The feminine one who became a house-husband. Well, you didn't defrost me just to say hi did you?"
"Right, onto business. The last Captain of the 1st Vanguard Mechs, an exploration unit, went skydiving and then broke his legs on a botched landing. He retired early. You're getting promoted to take his place."
"Whats the catch?"
"There's only four pilots, the rest was reassigned to fill up the other squadrons."
Conlan was silent.
"You're getting your first assignment today. You'll be given briefing room 2 a deck down, and my assistant will be conducting the briefing." The Admiral said. A young asian man, skinny, wearing glasses stepped forwards. He carried a datapad like a clipboard. The assistant saluted, Conlan did not return the salute.

The two entered Briefing Room 2, finding it empty.
"The rest of your squadron should be arriving shortly." The Assistant assured.
Conlan just sat down on the front row, sighing. "I need a drink." Conlan muttered.
On the display in front of him, a solar system appeared, as well as several mechs. One of which was The Aspis, his, and the others he didn't recognize. The other mechs in his squadron he assumed.

[Guess Who]

Tavin rose from his bed enthusiastically and quickly donned his uniform. He stared at the insignia of Lieutenant Junior Grade with pride. Sure it certainly wasn't a high rank, but considering how many people had told him that his dreams of piloting his very own mech, especially in the famed 1st Vanguard, was merely a pipe dream, Tavin was ecstatic that he had proven all those people wrong. After admiring the stripes on his uniform and recalling the promotion ceremony less than a week ago, he was suddenly brought back to the present by the sound of a notification on his data pad. The young man walked over to his desk where the wondrous piece of technology laid and looked to see what it was that interrupted his day dreaming. "... Transport has already been arranged yadda yadda yadda... Briefing Room 2 blah blah blah... meet rest of squad... Aaaaand, okay. Time to get a move on." Pocketing the pad, Tavin opened the door out of his room and began to make his way to the transport bay where he could get a ride to deck of the ship where Briefing Rooms were located.

When Tavin arrived, he checked to make sure he had arrived at the right room once he saw the lack of activity in the room. After confirming he had arrived at the right location and at the correct time, Tavin took one of the many empty seats of the room. He hadn't recognized the admiral's assistant or his new Commanding Officer and so he ignored any formalities and just sat down in the seat nearest to the door. He looked at the display at the front of the room, analyzing it to see if it held any kind information that would tell him any specifics on what this briefing was about.

[Barioth]

"Sometimes I feel like there is no point to this all, everything just feels meaningless."

"But brother...that's the best part"

With a gasp of breath, Maxim pulled the covers off himself and rolled out of bed. He was covered in a cold sweat and his heart was beating out of his chest. He sat back down on the side of his bed, hand on chest, feeling the rhythm of his heart as he calmed his breath. The same dream had haunted him the night before, the day he had been defrosted and reintroduced to the world. Everything about it seemed surreal, this hotel room with all its' accessories and the peaceful society that lay just past his window for miles. His nerves calmed, Maxim clambered to his feet and peeked out at the colony through his window. A crowd of folk hurriedly bustled about on their ways to their jobs as vehicles made their way through traffic. It was almost shocking to see the recovering humanity he had gone to sleep to had flourished into something he could never had imagined.
"They will never know." he thought to himself as he began to start his morning routine.

A quick breakfast later, Maxim was boarding the shuttle back to the in the clothing he had been given after he had been defrosted, it was a nicely fitting uniform with insignias he barely recognized. In a few minutes he was walking through the halls of the ship towards the room the navigation droid had directed him towards. He stopped a moment to appreciate the view from a small port window. The fleet of ships were spread out almost endlessly throughout the vacuum of space accompanied with the beetle-like colony ships that crawled alongside them. It was almost pretty.

Upon entering Briefing Room 2 he noticed that two of the squad he had been assigned to were already there. With a salute he introduced himself, "Lieutenant Volkov reporting in" His Russian accent was evident but not enough that it obstructed his english. As he dropped the salute, he observed the people present through the corner of his eye. The man with the eye-patch would be his squad leader from the information he had been given. His face was familiar, he looked like one of those faces he saw on Martian propaganda, but that had been such a long time ago that even Maxim barely remembered the details. The other was much younger and gave off an air of confidence, he must not have been one of the sleepers, one of the next generation it seemed. Taking his seat he awaited the briefing.

[ShiningSector]

“Contact right.”

A stream of lasers lit up the darkened virtual world, barely missing Garret’s Ranger. Evaluating the source of the attack, he pushed his Mech into a dive for one on the downed buildings. The simulated Ranger acknowledged his thought patterns and manual control instructions and swiftly leapt forward into cover, pressing against the fallen structure per its pilot’s instinctive desire. The enemy that had engaged him was a poorly AI-maned Avenger and was the last remaining target of this exercise program.

Garret swore that while the Mechs in the simulation operated as they should in reality, the training AIs, more like simple programmed drones with a dull sense of logic, put up a rather uninteresting and predictable fight. If anything, this was more like target practice whereas the targets would try to kill you but end up missing most of the time. Garret deduced the Avenger was roughly fifty meters away from the point of contact; just enough distance to accurately score at least a hit on him. The Allied Jupiter Engineering programmer who organized this world and its mechanics must not have been paid too well.

The Ranger’s sensors picked up the Avenger advancing on his position; the tall Mech was no doubtedly looking to obtain a proper line of sight before engaging Garret once more. While his opponent was much more massive than his own Mech, if not by a whole two meters, it was however slower and somewhat clumsier given the narrow road it show to advance down on. This advantage would be deadly against the Avenger to exploit just as long as the AI was not aware of this fact too; bets were it didn’t.

Positioning himself around the structure’s concrete corner, Garret made the Ranger lean outwards just slightly enough to bring half of his arsenal to bear. His right-most Light Gauss Rifle poked out of cover just enough to hug the rubble whereas the Ranger’s right arm, wielding a Pulse Laser and a small compact Autocannon aimed in on the corner. Sure enough, the Avenger stepped into view but only to be met with Garret’s own ambush. The accelerated cannon discharged a round, cleanly knocking out the Avenger’s left knee servo joint while the combined barrage of energy pulses and ballistic slugs crippled the Mech’s laser arsenal. The Avenger collapsed to one knee in response to the damage but even with the bulky Mech now disabled, the exercise still identified it as a functional combatant.

Taking advantage of the moment, Garret fired all eight of the Ranger’s jump jets, quickly catapulting the Mech into the air. His strategy was simple; position himself behind the Avenger and finish it off with a combined salvo of rockets and accelerated slugs while trapped within the narrow corridor of buildings. But just before he landed behind the Avenger’s rear, Garret became dumbfounded upon the realization that the Avenger was actually pivoting its torso to face him despite the rubble locking the arm into place...No that was not it; in fact, he could see the Avenger’s right arm literally phasing through the debris as if the obstacle’s coding wasn’t even acknowledging the Mech’s chassis!

With the Ranger now dead in the Avenger’s crosshairs, the AI opened up with its 460mm Autocannon. Garret desperately fired his jumps jets to the left, pushing the Ranger out of the way once he knew the Avenger had him trained in. The Ranger’s chassis rocked violently as the enemy Mech blew off its left arm, expressing the moment through Garret’s suit with a stinging shock of electricity. Angered by this technical outrage, Garret returned fire with his planned arsenal of SRM4s and Light Gauss Rifles, blowing away the Avenger’s upper torso with shrapnel exploding in all directions. The barrage continued for a mere few seconds before the simulation confirmed the Avenger’s “pilot” had been killed, quickly ending the exercise as the result of all hostiles being destroyed.

Garret collapsed back into the actual cockpit of his AJE/M-88 Ranger, giving a deep sigh in regards to the stressful and annoying ordeal that had occurred as his scores were tallied. Just as soon as the training program showed him his results from the exercise, Garret’s face contorted into a bright red and rage filled expression when the program graded him with a “C”. What was perhaps more aggravatingly insulting was the program's naïve gull of telling him to not blatantly jump out of cover in front of a fully armed opponent.

“You have got to be fu-“

The maintenance crews and personnel within the hanger that stowed all the Mechs for active duty and repairs suddenly turned to the AJE/M-88 Ranger’s open cockpit once they heard its pilot screaming in anger and flinched upon the virtual training helmet that was quickly chucked out of the Mech meeting the hard ground with a loud crack.

---

A few hours had gone by and Garret had since cooled off after submitting his results to AJE with an angry footnote as well. As he ate his breakfast within the flagship’s rather decorative mess hall, Garret’s PDA suddenly went off, beeping for his attention. As he pulled it from his pocket, he bet it was message from the floor manager for the Mech hanger, asking him not to make a scene again like earlier. What he got instead was much more interesting and puzzling at the same time; a reassignment order.

Garret stared at the small screen for a minute, confused as to why he was being reassigned. What is because of bad behavior? Would have made sense. Low unit count for a particular squadron? Rather unlikely considering all the squadrons to his knowledge should have been properly organized with the right number of Mechs but then again he had been wrong before. His skills needed for some high risk mission? Very unlikely. He saw himself as a good soldier; heck, he was Special Forces of course but he was not that good of Mech pilot; a test pilot no less. Whatever the case may have been the details were vague as always and all he knew was to follow orders. Garret quickly downed his coffee and left for Briefing Room 2.

---

Upon arriving at the appointed meet room, Garret stepped in with the slide door closing securely behind him. He looked up to see the holographic displays showing an unrecognized star system and several different Mechs highlighted on his screen. There were four in total but a fifth Mech; his mech, began flashing onto the display before solidifying soon afterwards with the rest of the units. He assumed that meant he was now a part of this squadron. While there were perhaps a few confused faces to this new development, Garret figured he had no place to question it verbally since he didn’t know what was going on as well, especially being in presence of a commanding officer. Like the rest of his squadmates, he took his seat and relaxed back, lifting the flask from his chest pocket as he timed how long until the briefing would begin.

[The Irish Tree]

"...I guess...I got everything I wanted out of life for now." were the last thoughts of a man of unlikely circumstances within the Mech Ops, a man who's life could have been better at so many points. Not that it was worth thinking about now. Drifting, drifting...softly he felt his body numb with the cold and let the half-century sleep overtake him, more than ready to wake up to a new world.

One where hopefully the music wasn't shit, and they discovered a non-shitty tasting brand of cheap beer.

3 Days After De-Frost

A loud, annoying beeping resounded throughout Lieutenant Oberfield's hotel room, the groggy and disgruntled Human-Popsicle slamming the palm of his hand atop the snooze button, sighing as he rose up, smacking his right hand into his right cheek, dragging it down slowly. "...I need a shave..." he mumbles to himself, stepping shakily from his bed. Sleep had become a rather worrisome process after having done it for 50 years straight. Sometimes he'd sleep so well he'd get scared he'd be out for another 50 years, be a regular Rip Van Winkle. Or dead. Probably dead if he did that outside of a cryopod.

Going about his morning routine of brush, gargle, spit, rinse, gargle, spit, rinse, adding in a decent shave, Oberfield sighed, bored out of his mind in this new time, and already getting sick of whatever crap this vegan not-meat-meat was. Getting dressed in his standard BDU, he buttoned it up until the second top-most, his grey tank-top slightly visible underneath. Not really knowing when anything official would happen, his brown rat's nest of hair simply remained intact, not caring enough to comb it down. Not like it'd matter how good he looked if he ever got deployed anyways.

Unfortunately for him, today it seemed would be that very same day. Much like the past two days, he'd gone to a local "5-Star" eat-in, and as usual was contemplating starting a pig farm just to murder them for bacon when he'd received the memo. Something called a data-pad beeped in his pocket, and, after fumbling with it for a few minutes, he read the memo and promptly left after paying, fake-meat-and-eggs left half-finished on his plate as he made a beeline for the shuttles to head for the ship. Remembering the words of his drunk, lazy, slob of a father, Rodrick couldn't help but dread meeting his new "Stuck-up, pompous, never-had-to-work-a-day-in-his-life-boss". But then again, Dad always was getting fired for being too drunk to work properly. Sighing, Rodrick wondered just how the hell he'd even got here with his track record. He supposed he should thank the UHA Captain...but he was probably an old or dead fart by now. Maybe he'd meet his grandson sometime for coffee.

Regardless, Oberfield entered briefing room 2, somewhat worried since he figured he was the latest arrival. Giving a small salute, he gave a greeting of: "Lieutenant Oberfield present." before taking his seat amongst the others. Smiling a little bit as he saw the mech-specs, he recognized his old-metal-coffin. Good old Daytona. The rest of it looked like technical egg-head jargon, and a couple things just went WAY over his head.

[jordy0403]

"Listen, brother, you're going to quit the program, aren't you?" He said, with two people beside him. "I can't do that, I'm nearly in, please, just don do this! Doesn't everything we've been through mean something to you?" I ask, desperate. "It's everything we've been through that kept me from getting into the program!" He yelled, angrily.

---

I ran into the briefing room. "Sorry I'm late, sir." I said to the person in front. "Last minute assignment and all." I explained without waiting for the question. Although no-one could see it though, my hair was wet from sweat. The nightmares, they would never go away. And they scared me. They reminded me as well, of things that I would rather not be reminded of.

[Skyrte]

As the rest of his squad piled in, he acknowledged them with simple, short nods, waiting for the briefing to start. Just when it was about to, two more mechs appeared on the squadron roster. Zapka narrowed his eyes. His squadron was still being built, and all of them were non-standard mechs, with... interesting additions or origins. So, we're an irregular squadron, he reasoned. With an emphasis towards lights and fast mediums, Zapka being the only heavier mech there for the moment. Not a scout squadron, his very presence crossed that out. Not a combat squadron, too many lights and not enough heavies. This strange combination of mechs confounded him. He sighed. The last two pilots entered the room, and the assistant dimmed the lights and began his briefing.

A hologram of the planet appeared at the front of the briefing room. Already Zapka could see that it was about half made of water. The rest of landmass. Numerous plateaus and mountain ranges would play havoc with the Aspis' maneuverability, but for the rest of his squadron, not so much. What was strange was that he saw no structures of signs of civilization at all, usually briefing maps included the night time lights of cities, or highlighted military bases to aid the pilots with their preliminary judgement, as well as visual aid for the one doing the briefing. However this planet was just blank, as if it were uninhabited. He narrowed his eyes.

The Assistant began.
"This is... What the crews are calling Cryotic 4. All probes sent to this planet has been destroyed, by the natural phenomenon, or other. We do not know what is on this planet, aside from what we have scanned. The planets diameter is only 3,512.1 kilometers, the atmosphere is thin, nitrogen rich, and the landmasses are mostly made of rock. The water is covered by ice. The planet temperature goes from -80*C to +10*C. You will be dropping at Drop Site Bravo."
The hologram rotated, letting Drop Site Bravo face the pilots. The site was highlighted. It was a spot of flatland near a mountain range and lake, with rivers leading to the oceans.
"This will be an extended mission... And that concludes my briefing. Captain Zapka, would you like to say a few words?"

Zapka nodded and walked up to the front. He turned to face his pilots.
"Men. Start thinking about modifying your loadouts to suit an exploration role, free up some tonnage to allow the eggheads to attach whatever active sensors and data gathering modules they want onto you. We're not going into war. But I get the feeling we're not getting the big picture here..." Zapka slowly turned his head to glare at the Assistant. He stayed silent. Zapka turned back to his pilots. "The brass tends to do this to mechheads. Be ready for either an extremely boring deployment, or a strangely action packed one. If you have any questions, ask now, if not, head down to Bay 1, our mechs should be getting prepped there."

[Guess Who]

Exploration? We're exploring? I signed up to kick ass not freeze my own ass off. The frustration was clear on Tavin's face, though one could easily mistake his frustration to be directed toward the assistant's lack of sharing intelligence rather then the irritating realization that they wouldn't be fighting. Besides, how the hell am I to pick up chicks at a bar if all I can say is, "Hey baby, I pilot a huge mech around in the snow all day." No girl's going to go for that.

Letting out a sigh, Tavin raised his hand and decided to ask a question. He was obviously still going to do the mission, but it didn't mean he had to enjoy it. "So what's our actual objective? Wait around until we find out what's taking out our drones? Look around a few days to see if we find some kind of alien life? I'm a bit confused to at what point we'd finally get to say, 'Mission complete. Job well done, boys. Let's pack it up and fly home back where it's warm and we're not freezing our balls off.'"

[Barioth]

Since he had learned of the cut off in communication to Earth, Maxim had had mixed feelings. It was a unique feeling adjusting to life without directives given to him by Wolf Labs, almost a bad feeling. His whole purpose in being was the lab's experiments and the prospect of becoming independent from those was daunting to say the least. He felt lost, if Wolf Labs was truly gone than his purpose for living was gone with it.

As the briefing began, he narrowed his focus and shook off the thought. Worrying about it was useless and dangerous, he couldn't allow his concentration slip lest he end up like the haunting scenes he had seen during his service in the Mars conflicts. The faint image of a burnt infant curled up in the sands of Mars, a casualty of a fire fight that had unfortunately taken place near a small settlement. He remembered stepping out of the cockpit and standing over the body. "Just a roasted peanut.." his brother had said as he stepped over the body. Maxim laughed shakily as he stepped past the body. Just a roasted peanut he had thought as he trailed after his brother.

A cold planet it seemed was the next destination, a place where the Kazak's cockpit would not turn into a large oven. With almost a smirk he rose from his seat, saluted the captain, and exited towards the hangar. The extra details were meaningless, he knew where they were going and what they were doing. 'Why' was above him.

[ShiningSector]

Garret listened to the "briefing" on Cryotic 4 all the while staring at the holographic representation of the planet. The details were as spotty as he assumed they would be and did not provide much information, especially the bit as to why he was re-assigned. Then again that part was less important since he had been unthawed only recently and had not even met his original unit members.

Cryotic 4 was detailed physically on the holo-projector as a more mountainous and rocky world with a visible ocean though given how cold the temperatures were, the waters was were frozen as stated and even more likely was the fact that plenty of snow would also be present too. While most of the Mechs of this squadron were relatively ideal for this environment due to their more mobile feats, there was one Mech however; the Aspis, that did not appear very traversal in comparison. Garret could already admit that the roster was pretty varied and while that was a good thing in some cases, there was the risk towards adaptive efficiency as a whole and clearly this mission was basically sounding like a recon if anything else. Having a siege engine mixed in with nimbler Mechs would no doubt slow the entire unit down and compromise their low profiles.

By all accounts, a full-fledged scout lance would have been much more appropriate to field than this mishmash selection, so why more artillery? In fact, Garret even began to question if Mechs were needed at all. Hell, a platoon of infantry in environmental suits and possibly light vehicles would have proven more discreet than several walking battle tanks. The only reason he could deduce was there was a floating feeling of intentional interference rather than natural causes that are downing the recon drones and thus explaining the need to have people with sizable guns on the field.

Whatever the reason was, Garret was sure he wasn’t going to get it here. Captain Zapka, his new CO, also seemed troubled by this too though whether it was for similar reasons or for something else and the Assistant behind him remained quiet on that same conjecture. Some kid in the same outfit Garret was now a part of raised his concerns rather bluntly and direct on the topic too but if the Captain wasn’t being informed of anything, his squadmate was likely to be met with the same answer. Not wanting to stick around to hear the obvious, Garret rose from his seat and saluted the Captain before making his exit.

[Skyrte]

"So what's our actual objective? Wait around until we find out what's taking out our drones? Look around a few days to see if we find some kind of alien life? I'm a bit confused to at what point we'd finally get to say, 'Mission complete. Job well done, boys. Let's pack it up and fly home back where it's warm and we're not freezing our balls off.'"
"I haven't got a clue. We're done when Command calls us and says we're done, or when we run out of MREs to eat." Zapka explained, "Now, let's get down to the hanger."



The hanger was massive, easily capable of housing two dozen Mechs. A road down the middle of the hanger lead to a launch platform, used by dropships. However, the place was mostly devoid of the warmachines. The ones of 1st Vanguard, and only a few others. The Engineers were not in short supply however. Easily over a hundred, working on various things. Mechs or armored vehicles.
An Engineer handed Zapka a datapad.
"Captain Zapka," The Engineer said with a salute, "I'm the lead Engineer on the Aspis, if you want to change anything, you can swap it out now."
Zapka looked at his mountainous machine, it was still in battle-loadout.
"Here... Let's free up some tonnage." He said, tapping the datapad a few times. "Take off the weapon pods and swap them out for fists and a single large laser module for each arm. Take off those rotary cannons on the shoulders too. That should be enough for the eggheads to install whatever they need to right?"
"Should be. The heaviest things they want to install are a seismic sensor and an atmospheric scanner, just to be clear, that okay with you?"
Zapka nodded and watched the teams of Engineers work on his mech, uninstalling the weapons, installing new ones and new modules would take something like an hour. In the meantime, he could hop into his mech and reacquaint himself with the controls, or monitor the power levels so that nothing would overheat or draw too much power. Instead he opted to just watch, and make sure the rest of his team was moving along smoothly.

[ShiningSector]

By the time Garret got back to the Mech hanger, he found his Ranger crawling with maintenance crews detaching the Mech's more lethal armaments and unneeded armor sections for an array of scientific sensors and equipment. Naturally, and rightly concerned of his mechanical steed and AJE's hardware, Garret walked across the overhead catwalk and leaned over the railing, observing the work in progress. Normally the pilot would be inquired about any technical adjustments that were required to be modified but his own preferences were however nullified with strict instructions from the corporation for engineers to abide by the templated formats necessary to carry out specific operations. It was becoming somewhat clear that staff behind the Ranger seemed like a mixed bag of veterans and mechanics that didn't tend to see eye to eye every time.

Garret then noticed two engineers talking to each other with the Ranger's blue prints in their datapads all the while prodding at the Mech's SRM launchers as if they were seeing if it could be removed. It seemed apparent they didn't exactly agree with the suggested layouts and attempted to figure out the Ranger's external back module, or "backpack" as they called it. One of them eventually noticed Garret observing them.

"Sir? The launcher here, it is a static component right?" asked the engineer.

"Yeah, it's non-modifiable. At least what I've been told anyway." Garret replied.

The two engineers looked at each other and back at the blueprints, making what sounded like grumbling noises from where Garret stood before the same man looked back and thanked the pilot. It was not long until the the modifications were soon complete with mechanics and engineers moving along to their next walking tank to work on. Still leaning over the railings, Garret produced his PDA from his pocket and accessed the news net, skimming through the available articles until his next orders came in.

[Guess Who]

Tavin let out a disgruntled sigh. Well, best to follow orders and get this over with as soon as possible. Rising from his seat, the young mech pilot began to make his way out of the briefing room and toward the hangar bay where his robotic war machine rested. He stopped right at the door out of the briefing room though and looked back at the display before it closed. "Be seeing you soon, buddy," he said to the holographic display of his Raptor.

Down below, Tavin was now sitting in a nearby chair as he watched the engineers take apart his mech. His expression said it all, he wasn't happy. He didn't like people messing with it, his grandfather and father had made it perfect. All these modifications were just going to mess up his maneuvering if they ended up running into trouble. Out of the corner of his eye, Tavin spotted one of the engineers, a tall blonde woman, who was looking back and forth between his mech and the datapad in her hand. At least the view ain't bad. Getting up from his chair and approaching her he said, "Hey there, babe. If you're looking for something to fix, I might have something back at room you can take a look at."

"Come see me again once you've gotten a few years older, kid. The we can talk," she replied before she walked away.

"So you're saying there's a chance?" he yelled back to her over the noise of loud machines.

"No!" She screamed back without even turning around to look at him.

Tavin shrugged. "Eh, was worth a shot."

[Barioth]

Maxim stood below the Kazak and watched as the mechanics fumbled blindly with the unfamiliar machine and parts. "Sir?" One of the mechanics walked up to him, a young man around 20 years old, peachfuzz on his lip and a gap in his teeth. "Sir, we aren't completely sure whether your machine is compatible with any of the armaments we have developed, all we can give you is the weapons and additional arms you came aboard with."

It was understandable, one of the underlying weaknesses of the Kazak was how specific it had been built and how it had never been compatible with weapons developed outside of Wolf Labs. "It is fine, there are weapons I brought with me for this type of mission." He picked up a datapad and with a few swipes of his fingers had found his equipment and had rigged it on a 3D hologram of the Kazak. He handed the datapad to the young man, "There, just add these things located in this storehouse and that will suffice. What was your name?"
"Private Jay, sir" He gave a stiff salute. "Hmm good, get the equipment ready on the double"

The young man hurried off to begin assembling the loadout. Maxim stared at the Kazak in deep thought for a few moments before turning to watch the other mechs in the hangar receive their maintenance.