The concrete slab was just that: a physical object made from a mixture of cement, granite and other various materials. It wasn't a house that could provide a shelter as well as protect its inhabitants. In fact, it wasn't built to have any useful purpose except one: it served as a reminder to its visitors. And to one of them, it was the reason why he was there. If asked, he would have admitted that he really hated that place but yet, he wouldn't hesitate to admit that he went there whenever he had a chance.
"Damn," the visitor, a young man with jet black hair muttered as he rubbed his moist eyes, not really caring that there would be anyone to see the tears; he was alone at the monument.
The young man no longer carried a pink-colored mobile phone by his side like he did in the second war, something that struck people who didn't know him as odd. But he didn't care about their opinion as the phone was a good luck talisman of sorts to him apart from reminding him about what had happened to his family in the first war. He no longer carried the phone because he threw it into somewhere in ORB's water a year ago as a pledge to protect the country. It was rather ironic, really, since in the first war, he had lost his family due to Nuzumi's rather cowardly reaction to Alliance only to return to attack ORB in the second war as part of the ZAFT's punitive fleet.
It was fortunate that ZAFT had lost due to Yamato-led intervention; otherwise he would never have learned that what he did was a big mistake and he would never had a chance to at least make some amends.
When he thought about it, the attack by ZAFT on ORB was probably the trigger to the widespread changes that engulfed Earthsphere. Among the crumbling Alliance, a new Confederation of Independent Countries had emerged, consisting of countries from both Atlantic and Eurasian Federation. Within a very short span, the Confederation had spread its influence to other countries in Northern region while at the same time cutting off support for Blue Cosmos and its master LOGOS.
At the same time, ZAFT's or rather Gilbert's efforts to get Earth population to accept his proposed Destiny Plan was being hampered by ORB's covert and subversive actions to create suspicions about it. The unexpected reappearance of Lacus to discredit Gilbert was the nail in the coffin for the plan.
As a result of those events, both LOGOS and ZAFT had been weakened to the extent that the world was finally ready for a very much needed change for the better. Gilbert had proposed for a world summit where all leaders would meet to discuss peace treaty, including Djibril himself. However, Djibril seized that opportunity to launch a surprise attack that killed the ZAFT Chairman and at the same time destroyed Aprilius One.
Forced to take the reign of a chaotic ZAFT, Lacus Clyne had managed to bring order to PLANTs and together with ORB and Confederation space fleet, had launched a direct attack to destroy Requiem as well as the moon base where the LOGOS sympathizers were hiding. Piloting Destiny, he was in charge of protecting the main ZAFT fleet from counterattack while it bombarded the base. At the same time, his former mentor Athrun Zala and that man whom he dislike greatly moved in to destroy the Requiem's generators.
It would have counted as a great victory for the combined force if not for the fact that they were ambushed by a super fortress commandeered by those loyal to Gilbert's vision. He had surmised that the same ship had killed Rey Za Burrel earlier when the blonde went to investigate a strange occurrence. However, he would never find out the truth about the mastermind behind the attack.
And there he was, back in the country.
"Have a lot of things on your mind?" a female voice startled him from his thoughts.
He turned toward the person. The woman reminded him of the Hawkes sisters, except that that she was a brunette. Talking about the two sisters, he wondered about what happened to them. He had received an invitation to Lunamaria's wedding a year before but due to the rather hectic nature of his work, he couldn't come. As for Meyrin, he had heard somewhere that she opened a little restaurant in her home. "Yeah, I guess."
"This is the first time I came here."
"You're not from here?" He asked. She had to be a foreigner as the woman would have visited the place often if she was a local.
"I'm from Confederation."
"I see." There's a chance that she came from the former Atlantic Federation and thus be more sympathetic to Atlantic's action in the first war.
"It's a beautiful structure."
He whipped his head in her direction. "What do you mean by beautiful?"
"This and the whole park. The designers and builders probably spent a lot of time planning for their construction."
"How could you say a park that served as a memorial to the wars as beautiful? When people come here, they come to mourn."
"So you're here to mourn?"
"YES!" he said, unconsciously raising his voice. "They build it as a place to mourn."
"You're wrong," she said in a small voice but full of conviction.
"Huh?"
"It's just a place for you to remember them, no matter whether the memories that you have of them are happy or sad. It's you who makes the choice whether to recall which memory."
He widened his eyes as he had never thought in that way.
The woman continued. "Call me ignorant or naïve, but I always try to remember happy times with my family when they were still alive, rather than the situations that led to their deaths."
"What happened to them?" he asked curiously.
"What happened to yours?" the woman asked while looking forward and thus missed seeing him tensing up his body.
They continued with their respective thoughts in silence after that.
However, days later, when he was inside an open cockpit, checking their status, he could help but think about her statement. Was it wrong what he did, remembering only sad memories of his family and Stellar? Should he change his ways then?
"Boy, check the ECS."
He did as commanded and flicked a switch that performed a diagnostic for that function, ignoring the numerous wires linking the consoles to the outside. "I have a name, you know," he grumbled.
"Look, it's just me but I couldn't really feel comfortable calling you Shinn. You know, the guys would have problem when someone says 'he socked my shin', because then they don't know whether he's referring to you or his face. If the latter, it's okay, but if they think that the man is referring to you…"
Shinn groaned; he remembered some misunderstanding occurred when Athrun helped to clear his eye when they were stationed at Minerva but to have the same kind of problem in ORB; it's unbelievable. He didn't carry the pink phone anymore, for god's sake. "Kojiro-san," he said, referring him using proper Japanese suffix as the man was a half-Japanese, "you can just call me Asuka."
"Or I can call you 'boy'. Good, I'm getting a reading. Now, tell me can you see reserve power indicator? Is it functioning?"
"Yes."
"Next, we'll…," Kojiro Murdoch stopped.
"We'll what?" Shinn asked.
"Get out of the cockpit now!" the man said gruffly.
Following the terse command, the former ZAFT pilot got down and went to the other man only to see him together with the rest of the staff. "So…"
"So we wait here to welcome the arrival 'Ojou-chan'," Kojiro answered.
"Little Missy?" Understanding dawned on the young man when he saw a blonde in a fuchsia colored suit walking toward them. "Oh…" He didn't expect that Attha would visit the site personally; wasn't she was supposed to busy somewhere else? Either way, he can safely say that his day was ruined.
"At ease," the representative ordered before everyone could salute her. "I'm just here to see the progress of the prototype." Truth be told, Cagalli didn't really want to be at the base since she still had a lot of documents waiting for her back at her office. However, Kisaka had insisted that she visited the Morgenroete base to boost the moral of the testing team. Reluctantly, she had to agree. A lot of things were riding on Morgenroete's success in achieving the first place in the Rimane Project.
Rimane Next Generation Mobile Suit Project: a contest to select the next generation mass-produced mobile suit for the newly-formed UNITY military. In order to be successful, a prototype must fulfill certain conditions such as able to function on space and earth, can be maintain as well as upgraded easily and cheaply as well operable by both Coordinators and Naturals. There was also another important clause: it must be battery powered as the previous wars had shown that nuclear mobile suits can be dangerous in the hands of terrorists.
Besides Morgenroete, there were another three contenders. One of them was the Integrated Design Bureau, the mobile suit research arm of PLANTs while the other was Alliance of Nascent Defense Engineering Sector, or in short, ANDES, formed by the remnants of Adukav Mechano-Industries, Propulsion & Machinery Progress and Acteon Industries after the Confederation had purged all LOGOS influence from them. Being key players in the defense industries, it wasn't hard to get some background information on them. However, one smaller entrant piqued her interest: Shauzer Technology Incorporated.
While a relatively new player in the defense sector, the lead designer, Terrence Shauzer had contributed to various ZAFT mobile suit designs, including ZGMF-X09 Justice and ZGMF-X10 Freedom. He was also the one who built the iconic ZGMF-X16X Fallen also referred to Phoenix by veterans who had survived the final battle because its third-stage propulsion resembled a gigantic pair of wings.
When she thought about it, all four contenders were very strong and stood a similar chance of securing the contract.
If she wasn't already worried about that, Cagalli also had to contend with her younger brother's disappearance. Rather than wait until he's sixty years old with a lot of medals on his uniform, the young general had applied for an early discharge, citing the need for time and space to solve his personal issues. At first, she thought that he wanted to be with Lacus akin to what Athrun did for her after the first war but to her surprise, Lacus had contacted her asking about his wellbeing. Apparently, the young heiress was a bit distressed with him not contacting her.
Cagalli tried to contact him herself and found out that his number wasn't in service anymore.
If the first war had caused Kira to mentally age prematurely, the second war caused him to become, she wasn't sure whether it was correct, a man. An annoyingly childish man for that matter, seeing that he decided to disappear to god knows where.
That led her to the man whose guarded face she regarded with one of her own. Shinn Asuka. The poster boy that represented what some people called as 'Emo'. Sure, that 'bad boy' attitude did seem a bit attractive to someone like her who didn't exactly fit in the normal mold herself but one could only stand so much of that behavior. At least, when they met again after the war, with Erica introducing him to her as the test pilot for their prototype mobile suit, the two of them managed to reach some kind of an agreement.
He thought that her father, Nuzumi Attha was the biggest jackass in the world; she thought that he was the biggest asshole in the world.
Unfortunately, they were very professional in regards to their work and they grudgingly worked together. As flawed as his personality was, Cagalli couldn't deny the fact that he, together with Athrun, had managed to defeat Kira. Of course, Kira had been defeated in Berlin by someone else but that was beside the point altogether.
There weren't many veteran ORB pilots left after the war and whatever few that it had, were being assigned other important tasks. Athrun, being the stick-in-the-mud that he was, turned down her offer to join Morgenroete, citing that it wouldn't be fair to the Integrated Design Bureau whose offer he had rejected earlier on. However Cagalli knew the real reason; he had accepted another offer to become an overseer of sorts to the competition. Hence, she approved Shinn's appointment reluctantly.
"Is there something on my face?" Shinn's sudden question interrupted her train of thought.
She didn't mean to stare at him. Cagalli sighed. Why was she at the base again? "Don't worry, nothing that an ape doesn't have," she remarked.
There was a twinge of annoyance on him before he schooled his feature. "Gee, I never would've thought that you use yourself as a benchmark for the comparison. I'm certainly honored, Lady Attha"
Cagalli narrowed her eyes dangerously, mentally shifting through ways to inflict pain on him. Unfortunately, doing so will certainly affect his piloting ability; he could even claim that her pulling his hair disrupted his cognitive process though Cagalli wondered how much processing really went on behind that ever angry scowl.
She wished that she was back in her office, being swamped by the paperwork rather than be there near him.
Mirriallia squeezed the rubber blower, watching intently as the tiny dust specks that had ruined her earlier shots got blown off from the sensor of her camera. Then, she meticulously brushed the sensor with a cleaning brush, applying very small pressure to prevent accidentally scratching it. Then, with a tenderness normally reserved to a mother who was handling her newborn, she assembled the whole camera once more; snapping a picture of the pond in front of her after that.
The picture was a perfect one.
But the camera's clean state didn't last when a gush of wind blew dust around the camera and its owner. Startled, Mir instinctively looked up to see an unknown mobile suit was being chased by three Murasames. She recognized the Murasames's marking denoting that they are part of UNITY's military or the Peacekeepers. She widened her eyes when she realized that whatever the mobile suit was, it wasn't a friendly. Despite that, she quickly aimed her camera at it and pressed the capture buttons as much as she could before the mobile suit left the place. The professional photographer didn't have to be worried as it reduced its speed to swipe something against the leading Murasame's left wing and kicked the second one to the remaining Murasame, causing the two to crash together.
Mir could only watch as the lone mobile suit brought out its gun and carefully aimed at the lead Murasame. Fortunately six more mobile suits arrived at the scene, all of them were UNITY's Daggers equipped with some striker packs she had seen Morgenroete developed right after the war. Seemingly realizing that it was outnumbered and outgunned, the hostile mobile suit quickly left, all the while firing beam shots to deter pursuers.
As it disappeared over the horizon, Mir couldn't believe her luck being at a right time and a right place to be able to see such a dogfight. She was certain that UNITY would disavow the event.
When she reached her lodging five hours later, she was in such a good mood that she didn't notice her room being slowly filled with a gas and instead attributed her sleepiness with the long trek home. Even without changing her clothes, she landed on the bed and succumbed to the sleep. From the shadows, four people emerged and went through her belongings. One of them brought out a small laptop and connected it to her camera to view the pictures she had taken for the day.
Once Mirriallia woke up five hours later, she would quickly examine her camera and was relieved when the contents were intact. She would ignore the rather bizarre situation that had occurred and instead attributing it to something that she had eaten or jetlag. She wouldn't even notice that the pictures had been changed, especially those that featured the unknown mobile suit. In time, her memory would change and if asked to describe the mobile suit, she would detail out the characteristics of the one in the pictures, rather than the real one she saw. Such was the fallibility of human memory; even memory that one perceived as 'the truth' could be something manipulated by other people.
"Gobi," Erica Simpsons's face stated the word simply.
"Huh?" Shinn asked back.
"The next simulation battle will be held in the Gobi desert to gauge the combat readiness of the prototypes in the extreme. Today you'll be fighting against Vanguard."
"The big guy with two even bigger big guns…" Shinn mused. "To tell you honestly, STI's prototype wouldn't be a serious contender to the whole competition."
Erica nodded. "I didn't tell Lady Attha about this because I'm worried why a fire support mobile suit was even selected for this competition. Ah, that reminds me, the beam weapons have been adjusted so that they're safe but we can't do the same with the beam saber."
"Let me guess, that's why you loaded Skyknight with two toy swords weighing 1320 kilos?"
"The combat will be limited to ground base only, so not to worry. Besides, this is to test Skyknight's capability to take off with full load."
"Right, there's no need to even test that."
"FOCAL, Shinn."
"Shit."
Fllaga's Original Cool and Awesome Liftoff. There was no need to guess who invented the name of the technique that was first used in the Second War.
"Just because Skyknight…"
"The capability will be one of our advantages."
Shinn rolled his eyes. "Don't blame me if I crash Skyknight."
"That kind of joke is not really needed, Asuka." Erica looked around. "It was fortunate that Lady Attha had just left to receive a call. I can't imagine her reaction if she heard that."
"Heh, just like I care for her opinion."
"Look, if you feel that you can't do it, I'll contact Fllaga to do the test."
"Okay, okay, don't get uptight. I'll do it."
"I really mean what I said."
"I'll do it," he insisted.
"The prototype is very expensive to make and I can't have it destroyed."
"I really feel appreciated by that comment." He watched as the door to the hangar opened slowly. "The length of FOCAL?"
"Forty meters and you're cleared for launch any time now."
"Roger." Shinn increased the throttle and his mobile suit began moving; its speed increasing and increasing with every step until at the state that it was running along the runaway. When it had moved thirty meters from its original position, its achieved sufficient speed and executed a jump. While in the middle of its jump, Skyknight reconfigured into a mobile armour and immediately opened full thrust. The mobile armour lost some height before it managed to achieve enough power to fly away.
The technique reduced one of the most glaring problems faced by mobile suits when launching on Earth; they were very vulnerable in the first ten seconds after they had launched as they would be confined to a straight vector. Of course, in most cases, they launched from a relatively safe distance from any hostile but the attack on Armoury One and numerous conflicts had shown the enemy wouldn't be so cavalier to wait.
FOCAL circumvent that by getting a mobile suit to run to gain sufficient speed and hence momentum before jumping and applying full thrust. Since it can easily change the direction of the stride if needed, it would more difficult for its enemy to aim at it as opposed to a mobile armour trying to get off from a normal runaway or a mobile suit taking off from a static position. Fllaga had also shown that it was possible for a mobile suit to increase its running speed by applying additional thrust. Of course, beginners, be it Naturals and Coordinators would have problem executing the basic maneuver so only veterans were authorized to practice the more advance version.
Inside the cockpit, the young test pilot let out a relieved breath as he managed to execute the technique safely. He thought about the man who invented the crazy move. Mwu La Fllaga, or known as Neo, the infamous Phantom Pain's colonel. When he had found out, Shinn had tried to give the man a 'wrongitive' surgery to his face. Of course, Athrun had to be there to pin him to the floor while the other man explain everything.
Fllaga's explanation and the underlying guilty tone behind it caused Shinn to stop struggling against Athrun's hold.
Even though the other man had promised Shinn that he would take Stellar away from the warfare, he couldn't do so, not without letting the girl die. Upon demand, Mwu revealed that Stellar had been dosed with Gamma Gleptin, a performance-enhancing drug. While the drug had been enhanced to a certain degree where the people taking it wouldn't be severely affected unlike the first batch in the first war, it was still addictive and required gradual withdrawal; going cold turkey wouldn't cut it.
When Shinn screamed asking why the other man didn't try to wean her off the drug, he replied that he did. In order to get the drug, he had to get her to the Extended facility. Of course, doing so would cause Djibril to be informed of her escape from ZAFT and would lead the LOGOS leader to demand that she be put to a good use. That meant she was required to participate in combat.
Fllaga had chosen her, out of all people, to pilot Destroy because of few reasons. Firstly, Destroy was perceived to be the safest place she could be on the battlefield. Second, unlike any other Extended pilot who would have quickly plough through the cities like an eager child trying to destroy the anthill, Stellar would only retaliate against anything that attack her mobile suit; most of the time she would just move Destroy through the buildings. Fllaga figured that it would allow some of the inhabitants to get away. That plan failed when ZAFT had garrisoned a lot of troops in the cities;
Stellar blasted them away faster than any other Extended could have.
Shinn neither need to be told the rest of the story nor be reminded about what happened next. Stellar was killed by Kira. Looking back at Fllaga's actions, he could understand Fllaga's reason for doing what he did; the man, after all tried to save Stellar despite going about the wrong way to do it.
"You almost reached the simulation area," Erica announced, causing him to refocus his attention.
"Speaking of the devil…," Shinn said as his reflex took over and led him to perform a role to escape beam shots aimed at him. Even as Skyknight turned and turned, he caught hold of the attacker. Vanguard was waiting for him. A towering 23 meters high mobile suit, each hand holding a cannon-size blaster with four beam barrels could be seen protruding from it; each one firing alternately. The result of that was that Shinn was constantly being attacked and didn't have any time to regroup. At the very least the other mobile suit could function as portable CIWS unit.
"They haven't say start yet, dammnit!" Shinn cursed as Skyknight dove toward the attacker. At the same time, the heavy training swords disengaged from their pylons and began their descent. Without the cumbersome dead weights, the mobile armou was more maneuverable and allowed it to twist and turn while firing its own beam weapons.
The bigger mobile suit didn't even move from its, blocking the shots before resuming its own firing.
"Dumb ape," Shinn cursed as Skyknight, just few meters from the ground, reconfigure into mobile suit, plucked the two training swords from the air and slashed at the offender which also dropped one of its blasters to bring out its own sword. However, the maneuver performed by Shinn allowed him to increase Skyknight's momentum and try to overpower Vanguard.
However, the other mobile suit seemed to realize that as well and rather than meeting the slash head on, it parried and redirected the force of the attack to the ground next to it. That led Skyknight to stumble and Vanguard intend to capitalize on that by trying to kick it but the more agile mobile suit had back-flipped out of the way.
"I wouldn't have imagined such a heavy mobile suit pulling a stunt like that," Shinn muttered in reluctant awe. He then resumed his attack, feigning a stab only to jump over at the very last minute and aimed a kick at Vanguard's head. It didn't succeed as the latter turned and raised its shield to block the attack that would have knocked it down on the floor. Vanguard then fired the remaining blaster but Skyknight had already moved out of the way.
Their exchange lasted several minutes with neither gaining an upper hand over the other and it was almost ten minutes later a siren chimed in Skyknight's cockpit. The mobile suit's heat was already pass the normal limit and was slowly inching toward the dangerous level. Retreating out of Vanguard's range to get a better reading, Shinn was surprised to see that his mobile suit had lost a bit of its nimbleness.
Examining the situation, Shinn had discovered a small flaw in Skyknight; desert engagement wasn't really factored in the mobile suit design. That was to be expected since Morgenroete was based in Atlantic Ocean and there the main worry was to prevent rust due to the damp condition rather than solving problem of sands obstructing cooling vents and getting in the joints.
Sure, Strike had some missions in the desert few times, as can be seen from Archangel's archive and Shinn also had few of his own. However, those missions took place at calmer time, not the current windy situation he was in.
At the same time, he couldn't see that the adverse environment had affected Vanguard's performance and the mobile suit was still as dangerous as it was in the beginning. That meant the longer the battle progressed, the more disadvantaged it would be for Skyknight. Some way or another, he had to end the battle as fast as he could.
Skyknight reconfigured into mobile armour and zoomed toward Vanguard, keeping its NOE or nap of earth as close as possible. Besides using the terrain to prevent easy targeting, it also caused a lot of sands to be thrown into air, obscuring it from Vanguard's view. As expected, the latter counterattacked using its beam blaster. It wasn't really hard for Shinn to evade the beams though. Once his mobile suit got close enough, it reconfigured into mobile suit and slid on the ground in front of Vanguard, while at the same bringing out its beam rifle.
Shinn smiled as he saw that Vanguard was slow to aim down its beam blaster. As Skyknight stopped just two meters away from the mobile suit, its beam rifle aimed at what was presumed to be the mobile suit's cockpit, he couldn't prevent a smile from creasing his lips. "Looks like it's my win, today," he announced over the communication net. "Your mobile suit is very powerful. However, that power comes with a severe disadvantage: its reaction is quite slow."
"I believe it's a tie, Asuka," an unexpected voice answered him.
It was then Shinn noticed the real reason why Vanguard had used one blaster. Aimed at its own cockpit was the other blaster. Vanguard's pilot had predicted his move well and purposely left it open in order to goad Shinn to attack.
Shinn sighed as he let himself relax as the battle was already over and like the other pilot said, it was an unfortunate tie.
"So, can you suggest what I'm going to tell your tomboyish sister about meeting you here, Yamato?"
1
Author's note (25th July 2008)
1. It seemed that I continued with a chapter. Oh well, we'll see how it goes. The future chapters, if there any, will be as self contained as this one.
2. Um, for those who haven't realized it, this story takes place in an AU setting. (in fact, most fanfictions can be considered as AUs). Of course, for those who had read Fallen Angel, you will notice that this story is linked with it. Yes, it's a dual mode story, with I aiming to make this story readable by its entirety while at the same time but can be considered as a bridging story for the events in the last chapter of Fallen Angel. I also would like to confirm that there will be no sequel after the final event in Fallen Angel (unless someone else would like to help write)
