_______________________________________________________________
Louisa followed the group of Pilots into the hanger, stepping through the airlock doors into a familiar but no-less noxious space of cold air, bright lights and the noise of industry and battle preparations. She sometimes wished the whole thing could be conducted with a little more peace and ceremony. She remembered watching some lame American samurai movie back when she was a kid, where prior to battle they would be quietly dressed by an attendant and drink tea and read poetry or something. She figured the historical accuracy of that was dubious at best, but with a budget as large as the one afforded to the Chi-Mechframe programme... couldn't someone pull a few strings? How about at least burning some essential oil or installing some mood lighting? Wouldn't that be a better idea? As she pulled on her sleek sea-gray combat leotard (her third outfit change of the day), she made a mental note to put that in the hypothetical
Horizon suggestion box.
Heading over to the armoury area, she hefted up her mechframe core. It was a sort of choker that clamped around her neck, but it hang as a plate over her breast. Compared to the armour plating in the mechframe itself, it was far lighter, but the thing still weighted a few kilos. She felt the heavy presence of it pressing down on her body, and walked over to her deployment area. She ran the briefing through her mind one last time, squared her shoulders, exhaled deeply... and hammered the central activation unit on the core with her fist.
"Grendel, breach!"A layer of opaque shimmering film appeared over her body, ethereal and bright, taking the form of a tight mesh covering her limbs, head, neck and torso. It extended to thin blade-like projections skirting her lower body, and in her right hand a long and graceful blade materialized. The light grew brighter, until suddenly it reached some critical point, and piece by piece each part of the ethereal mesh began to darken and condense into itself with brutal force. Across her body it tightened into carapace armour, the blade-like projections snapped into a palisade-skirt hybrid that hung menacingly at her waist, and the graceful blade twisted and lashed into a strange and jagged glaive. Finally, the ethereal light crowning her head clamped shut into a long beak-like visor akin to an old European knight.
Feeling her psuedo-Warped body react and adjust to the inhuman weight of the condensed mechframe, she tentatively raised a foot and stomped it down, sending a screaming shudder of protest through the reinforced hanger floor.
Satisfied, she signalled to a member of the hangar crew to bring over her 'R2D2' (Rapid Retroburn Deployment Device) -
a dumb name, she thought, and made another mental note to put that in the suggestion box too - and connected it to her 'frame. Owing to its high mass, conventional flight and gliding capabilities were not practical for Grendel, and the R&D team were still experimenting with solving the deployment issue. The 'R2D2' device was essentially experimental aeronautics tech developed by some abandoned pre-Warped space programme designed for use on self-landing drone shuttles, able to deliver a large amount of reverse thrust with high control and all in a very small package. In other words, it was basically a jetpack that would turn a regular human operator into jelly given the massive deceleration, but worked surprisingly well when operated by Grendel.
She glanced to her side, and caught the lithe form of
Teodora soar out of the launch bay. That was her cue.
"Grendel, launching!" she yelled over comms, and with two earth-shuddering bounds she leaped out of the hangar.
Izurich