A/N: I do not own Muv-Luv. In fact I have never and never intend to play it. I just saw a crossover with SupCom listed on SpaceBattles and got a headache from how grossly underpowered the Coalition was shown as.

Oh, and I don't buy that Meiya and Yuuhi can have drastically different hair colours while otherwise being identical twins. I'll tone it down to a few shades of difference, as in the difference of violet (e.g. more bluish) and purple (more reddish), for randomly differing expressivity of the pigment genes.


Chapter 2: Vacation Loop?

0800-0820, October 22, 2001, Muv-Luv Earth

"Hello there," Takeru Shirogane's eyes snapped open at the voice that sounded mildly like his own, a voice that was more than completely unexpected after his second loop… "Alternative", as he referred to it in his mind… or maybe "PTSD Simulator" might be more appropriate given he could still feel the squelching of chunks of Marimo-chan between his hands as his mind cracked… "FOCUS!" That random yell from the voice jolted him back away from that old memory. "So, you're my counterpart from this universe. I don't know how you reset yourself into the cot in the back of my ACU's cockpit when I gated in, but I had to restrain you a little just in case." Well Takeru sure couldn't feel any restraints as he sat up "You'll be free to go once my ACU can afford to be idle long enough to let you out, since I know it takes a while in canon for you to get to Yokohama Base, either in the Unlimited or Alternative storylines. From your apparent PTSD, you're most likely from or after the Alternative storyline."

Takeru surveyed his surroundings while listening. His surroundings looked like a room dominated by grey and blue, with a few photographs hung up of women who looked mostly like Sumika and Meiya… other than the fact that each was at least half a head taller than the man between them, who looked somewhat like Takeru himself. There were also more worn-looking photos of the man with the Sumika look-alike, where he was growing up between images from a young boy to a man, including a photo of them laughing in red and black armour. While the boy became a man, the redheaded woman stayed the same apparent age between images, though she got rid of the excessively Sumika-like yellow bow after the first few images. He was basically certain that the seat on the other end of the room from the bunk held the man who looked much like himself.

"You got your counterpart appearing in the back of your ACU ten minutes after you gated in, instead of where he's canonically supposed to reset to, his bed. I guess that tells us the local date." That voice sounded too much like Sumika… "October 22, 2001, am I right? Nice coincidence with the name by the way, Captain Steele."

"Laugh it up all you want, Mica." White grumbled.

"Sumika?" Shirogane ventured, because the name and face were too close.

"We're counterparts coming in from another universe to help you guys fix your planet, ram your civilization face-first into post-Scarcity, destroy the current world order, and exterminate an interstellar disease." The grinning redhead explained. "The name's Mica84 Gamma, Maya and I aren't on site yet, we're just communicating so that Steele can focus on getting the base up and establishing a Quantum Gate Complex so that we can come in. Inter-universal travel really gives off a big Quantum Wake without a receiving gate, so waiting for the wake to settle would take too long and any other location would be too risky." Plus they could come in with fully loaded-out ACUs this way instead of just the bare basics like Steele had.

Mica84 chuckled as she saw Steele's counterpart walk straight into the barrier separating the actual pilot station from the rarely-used living area of the cockpit. "How many loops have you been through? I know you started off in Extra, then got dragged into this timeline by my counterpart's desperate desire for you… don't know why given I'm not the one with active Psionics on the squad." Unless directing her nanites with just her mind counted. "Maya's still fuming over her counterpart being separated from Yui's out of, and I quote, 'retarded superstitious tradition' and is already trying to rename this operation to 'Downfall' for some reason."

Takeru's eyes widened at that name, and began feeling around the invisible barrier even while he watched the helmeted man in the seat in front of him work quietly and efficiently.

"Kid, and I can call you that if you've been through less than about a dozen loops without feeling awkward thanks to my age compared to yours, I'm sorry. We are about to make all the work you've done in all these loops rather pointless by dealing with the problem for you… Due to the lack of Internet, it looks like those silicon fools are going to be completely extinct by the time we're done with them, because the lack of Internet is unforgivable. You play those games I had set up for you back there and tell me if they're anywhere near accurate, while I get my base up to the basic requirements and bring in the rest of my team. It'll give us a good handle on how much of our knowledge is valid and how much of our deck actually needs to be shown to cow the wannabe rebels into submission before they go pants on head retarded while we burn one infestation after another."

"Steele, Arnold says that he's found more commanders that will join us in this mission after we have established a beachhead. They were located by general description, though a lot of the names still have the analysts scratching their heads over how they can be associated." Mica84 informed him, while a slew of curses and hysterical laughter floated over the channel in what Takeru heard as Meiya's voice.

"Got it, how many and of which factions?" Steele answered, still focused on the screens before him.

"From the United Earth Federation, Khaki Zorro, Cattleya Mitchell, Yuri Cotto, Michelle Izumi, Hasta Waters, and Gale Tokarev. Maus Mitchell wanted to come too, but Arnold apparently turned him down based on letting the youngsters have something to do instead." Translation: Arnold didn't want any fathers to be present to help keep Steele from being rent limb from limb by all these women. "Then there was Dinah Ni, who got turned down because Keyes would probably sic a mob of Soul Rippers on him for letting her mother take responsibility for his fuck-up."

"From the Cybran Nation, Amide Keyes, Solana Akagi, Manacle Luna and her three trainees" Said trainees had only been liberated from the United Earth Federation during the Great Slaver Purge when the Coalition formed "But what's really got me in a tizzy is how 02Hero is coming with us!" She looked past Steele's seat and noticed how Shirogane looked completely puzzled "she is one of the first living sex dolls ever made after the Symbiont Program was finalized, and one of the first to be liberated!" They couldn't be sure if she was really a Generation Zero unit, but she'd been recovered in black box form (due to taxidermy and stasis of her remains) from an Order of the Illuminate museum and reactivated. If she really was 02Hero (she herself was unsure), then she was certainly, even just counting time alive, one of the older Cybran commanders (though not even really close to the longest serving) alive. She was a bit behind the curve compared to more modern Cybrans, but retrieving her had been a huge morale victory during the Seraphim War, and crafty experience generally beat youthful energy anyhow.

"Anyone else from the Cybrans?" He ground out, having a very bad feeling that was vindicated as he glanced through the screen of the data she was shoving at him. They were all female, and he was probably going to be one of the very few males within range of a quickie. This had the potential to be exceedingly painful for his back and hips. The other bits that might hurt should thankfully fall off from overuse in relatively short order, before they were forcibly reinstalled by automated medical devices or gradually regenerated, real joy there, ugh…

"No, that was quite enough for them and the UEF. From the Aeon Illuminate we can expect Wu Bai, Kana Frost, May Frost, Elena Piatif, Iconia Mesa and Gateau Brown, the latter is coming just in case we have to evacuate lots of civilians somewhere."

"…No hideously obvious counterpart for Miss Marimo or Professor Yuuko?" Steele asked, thinking about the other important character that was missed… They couldn't possibly…

The communication screen shifted from a woman who looked to Takeru like similar to Sumika in the broad strokes to someone who looked like Meiya in the broad strokes, with slightly less over-styled hair. She stated "The cool big sis type is not abundant in ACU pilots, the closest we could find is Hannah Shepard and she'd probably kill the aliens by sheer volume and velocity of ocular eruption on seeing the average bust size over there if the game is anywhere close to realistic." Tamase Miki, the loli among the Muv-Luv cast, was most likely more gifted in the chest than that ACU pilot "And there was no way in hell we were going to let Doctor Brackman go full out wanderlust on us to parallel Yuuko."

"How is Gateau Brown some obvious counterpart in any way to someone I might know?" Takeru questioned while staring at the game he was working through relatively quickly. The others, after some thinking, were at least somewhat not nonsense…

"Ichimonji Takahashi was Meiya's chauffeur in a peaceful timeline, no? One gate, if my vague comprehension of Japanese is remotely correct, so Gateau. And then there's hash… browns… I know, it sounds ridiculous, but he more or less fits the bill… although I'd appreciate if he WASN'T THE ONLY OTHER MAN ON THIS MISSION! I know Arnold probably gave you guys a secret message saying you should get me and Brown thoroughly laid. I remember the order Hiraga got on that mission to reinforce our presence in the Stargate universe when he landed on some random backwater world with Psionic Retardation and was ordered to defend the planet while studying the locals' use of Psionics. Sill, twenty-two commanders with only two men? REALLY?"

Takeru was beginning to seriously doubt the manliness of his apparent other-universal counterpart if he was having a freak-out over being assigned too many female coworkers.

"You do realize one of the leading reasons for Early Colony Crisis events in the early Earth Empire was due to males committing suicide in a cascade reaction because they would usually stack the stored engineered eggs as a hundred males to nine hundred females? The men were constantly fucked to exhaustion, to the point of intentionally ceasing to live, just because cloning more men would take far too long to save them, and as the number of men dwindled the rest were in even more demand! Well, I'm not going to be leaving my ACU for this whole mission, it seems. You do remember the last time Fran set foot outside after a live in-person press conference, right?" Steele sounded almost hysterical, even though he was still building up his base with full efficiency.

The… tsunami was probably the best word… of Fran-girls had been formed in under ten seconds by the mob of fans piling up over each other. Psionics was good for a lot of things, forming a hundred-meter-tall blob of fan-girls and then crashing said blob against a building with no one risking injury hurt was one of them. One of the oldest Aeon ACU pilots had fled back into the theatre he'd held the conference in… just before the collective Psionic discharge of said mob slagged half of the front end of said building since that part hadn't been built with structural fields, in symbolism about the end of the Infinite War. Some of the damage may have been from the massive sonic blast of the squealing and rally cry to "fix his mind from being fucked up enough to date a flat-chested Cybran"…

It was around this point in the yell that Fran struck back once the momentum of the fans' advance was broken. It was also around this point that Fran discovered, to his dismay, that a significant proportion of his fans were masochistic insofar as being half-deafened and sent flying by his (proportionate, given they had launched a literal human wave attack) response to their anti-Cybran slurs went. He might be nowhere next to Princess Burke's power level, but pushing a 300-plus-year veteran of the Infinite War into a one-versus-N psionic showdown is still… dazzling. Justice is, unfortunately, still selective and favours the powerful over the little people. For example, ACU pilots can get away with things that most citizens would get fined for, such as punishing hate speech by basically mentally throwing the whole mob off the building.

Oh, and the fan mobs were suspected to be the main reason why former Avatar of War Jaran Marxon never got the standard Aeon Rejuvenation Therapy during his tenure. This was why he actually looked weary and aged despite being far younger than Fran, his still youthful-looking mentor. On the other hand, he later got treatments just to avoid Burke's promise of "every time I see you and catch you without using psionic means, I will give you a beating." He had been the one to incapacitate Evaluator Toth, who Burke thought of as a grandmother, and leave her vulnerable to the Order who came through later, so Rhianne really "didn't like him very much".

While Steele was shivering from the memory of the recordings of that event, Takeru was re-evaluating his thoughts on his counterpart's manliness. It was better than he'd thought, as he too doubted he could take being handed around and used until his dick fell off, for the indefinite future.

Mica84 just laughed at him and his concerns "Hurry up with the Gate, Steele, we're already decked out and ready to come through." then she hung up. There had been a hint of a giggle from the other side of the connection before it ended leading to a sense of dread coiling deep in White's belly, but he pushed this aside for now.

"Kid, I hope I can get your permission to clone you, because if you have nearly as many girls interested in you as the number of counterparts I'm getting shoved into the same mission as me, you are laughably beyond completely fucked up, down, sideways, and so on. And I'm sticking to that line even if they are baseline humans with a mere fraction of the post-Quantum Age female libido." Steele muttered as he began building the Quantum Gate Complex he'd been ordered to put up, reclaiming the ruined buildings of the nearby town to supply the Mass required for the large construction project. "Oh, and we're going to give your maybe-girlfriend a body back without killing her by making a copy this time. Mica84 and 02Hero would force the issue no matter what just due to their natures… though the Zero Unit will definitely still get built. We got 02Hero assigned here and she'd be VERY interested in collecting data on how a civilization who can't even freely convert mass and energy for construction purposes, nor have a planetary data net, might come up with a real, working synthetic human."

"Is that what you are doing, building that so quickly?" Shirogane looked at the screen where a building was depicted as being constructed by a large humanoid machine, well over twice as tall as any TSF and bulky to boot. "You know the BETA can rip apart heavily armoured vehicles easily if they catch them with anything but the most basic strains?"

"Your definition and mine of protected vehicles are different, kid. Structural integrity fields are completely immune to the sort of melee attack you are likely thinking of if these BETA are anything like the games of the Muv-Luv series show. Skip the Extra section, that's before you showed up here from your own universe. Just go through Ultimate and Alternative, and tell me how well it matches up to your reality. Thirty-ninth century technology isn't even close to comparable to late twentieth century after all. And they can't catch my units worth a damn either. Takeru, do your forces actually use 36mm automatic guns for light targets and 120mm smoothbore cannon for heavy targets? Is the top speed of the fastest BETA strain, the Destroyer strain, actually 170 km per hour, and is it killable by autocannons from any direction but forward?

"Yes to all three." Shirogane had a good feeling about that answer, and sure enough…

"The Snoop Tier 1 Land Scout, literally the lightest unit I can field without accessing the Tier U Urban Combat schematics for infantry equivalents, fires a 200mm… well, we call them high explosive squash head slugs, but it's only similar in effect, not so much in tech. It fires one every single second in its current iteration." The actual technology was much more complex than that and cost far less mass generated by internal fabricators per slug.

"That's 2 damage per second against structural integrity fields by our scale, most likely enough to kill anything here just by concussive force other than a Fort Strain. A Snoop can move at 90 meters a second, or 324 kilometers per hour. A Mech Marine, the lightest combat unit, runs around at 80 meters a second and slings three 375mm explosive shells per second, with shorter range due to stealth reasons. As far as I know, your enemies can't sense us worth a damned thing unless they basically pile onto us to feel us out, or run algorithms based on what things get hit and what doesn't. I have the sensors to see a one meter tall cactus fall over from over a hundred kilometers away through the horizon. I can't detect a 120-meter-tall walker massing nearly or over forty thousand tons as even an unidentified land unit until it comes within four kilometers of an Omni installation." He was speaking of course about the Monkeylord "Stealth and counter-stealth were our lifeblood during the Infinite War, so these BETA got NOTHING on us in that sense. I could probably clean house with just Tier 2 units, and even that's just to be able to laugh off the lasers the enemy can fire by using mobile shield generators. So they can't see us, can't catch us, and most likely can't hurt us as much as they'd like. They provoked humanity, now humanity from somewhere else is going to help out in exterminating them and their masters, wherever they might have come from."

When Mica84 and Maya's ACUs came in through the Quantum Gate Complex, White finally looked around at the young man in the back of his cockpit, who was staring hungrily at the screens that held the power to save his world and his mind. "Well, young man, enjoy the unforeseen vacation loop to end all loops. Oh, and you will really need to go talk things out with Marimo once we come into the open and reveal everything in that pile of games and manga to the world at large. Someone somewhere perceived your universe's future call for help, and created that series with what came to mind. We followed it in our Mythical World Project, and found it true. You'll need to help Marimo recover from the shock and she'll need to help you overcome the matter. The rest of your harem will understand. Now, read the summaries of the plots of the games, and get ready to get dropped off at Yokohama Base. It's either that or I use time dilation inside the bunk to let you actually play the games, and that's considered unhealthy for living tissue even by coalition resilience standards. I don't want to accidentally do something horrible to you when trying to check up on facts. We will contact you once we are done cleansing the Solar System. It will be too fast for the United Nations to react and disband Alternative IV, so we will ensure the security of Sumika and Professor Yuuko. And if the UN decides to whine about it…"

"White, you know better than to try to steal my favourite line!" She puffed her cheeks up and pouted, just for fun, while her subroutines handled deploying a base once she boarded the Continental that had been prepared for her.

The man chuckled "Ah, sorry Mica."

"It's alright, Steele. Takeru, just so you know, I am a liberated former 84th generation living sex doll of the Sumika Kagami line, hence the name I chose for myself, Mica84 Gamma!" She did not mention how White, as a child, and his mother, a similarly liberated living sex doll, had helped her learn to be human, and how he'd helped her formulate that name. She didn't want to think about what he'd done to her after that. "I was going to say that they can sue me and my robotic army!" She grinned a wide, fake, super-chipper grin. Shirogane buried his face in his hands at the incredibly bad pun considering her origins, which were little better than the fate he learnt befell Sumika in the timelines where the BETA invaded.

White just smiled comfortably at her, and her smile disappeared at that, as she focused all her subroutines once more on building a base in the site White had secured for her near his own base, turning over four UEF Tier 3 Mass Extractors and two Tier 3 Power Plants under a shield for her use. He was doing the same for Maya at another nearby base location. Why does he still look at me like that, after what he did to me? How can he still smile at me like nothing ever changed when he… She suppressed that thought.

There was work to be done, and if Cybrans were good at one thing, it was doing what needed to be done, and ignoring things that were irrelevant to the mission, such as personal feelings.


Meanwhile, back where they came from, General Arnold, Elite Commander Dostya and Avatar of War Rhiza were having a good laugh together for managing to offload the most angst-ridden or drama-infested among the younger ACU pilots into various other universes where they could hash their problems out.


A/N: In case it's NOT obvious enough, the commanders are parallels of:

UNITED EARTH FEDERATION TASK FORCE:

White Steele = Shirogane Takeru, Shirogane translates to white steel.

Khaki Zorro = Sakaki Chizuru, the best direct match in English I could come up with for Chizuru was Zorro… which sure as hell made for a hilarious last name… but would definitely not work for a female first name.

Cattleya Mitchell = Tamase Miki, CAT, and Mickey to Mitchell, Father is mentioned as Maus Mitchell originally for a Mickey Mouse play, but then the last name changed to a more reasonable one…

Yuri Cotto = Yoroi Mikoto, Ambiguity, ambiguity EVERYWHERE…

Michelle Izumi = Isumi Michiru, because Japanese last names are NOT in fact extinct in the Coalition (see Michelle Aiko for example).

Hasta Waters = Hayase Mitsuki, her name has speed in it and the short spear that gave the Hastati their name was the first speed related thing I thought of that sounded like haste and ended in a vowel as per most female names, and waters is for her first name (literally water moon)…

Gale Tokarev = Kazama Touko, between winds gives us a gale, the only wind name I could think of that's simple and female, and I kept thinking of Tokarev pistol rounds a la PPSh-41 submachine gun when it came to counterparts to Touko.

CYBRAN NATION TASK FORCE:

Mica84 Gamma = Kagami Sumika, Given the characters of Shirogane's age were all supposed to have been born in 1984…

Amide Keyes = Ayamine Kei. Anyone who has done organic chemistry knows amines and amides. She hates UEF Commander Dinah Ni for an unspecified screw-up he blamed on her mother back when the Symbiont family was living under the Loyalty Program. And if anyone wonders why Sagiri Naoya became that… Sagiri reminded me of Onigiri, so a meal-like name, and Naoya made me think of "Now you", so Chinese for You is… Ni in Pinyin. This SupCom setting has English and Chinese as the two main surviving languages due to the populations involved and the desire to keep a language that was better for artistic and calligraphy than English, with all the others being kept alive only by limited numbers of enthusiasts. Given the Coalition has trillions of people, this often means a few hundred million to a few billion speakers.

Manacle Luna and trainees (see following 3) = Tsukuyomi Mana, the Cybran Nation has the best stealth tech for the four ninjas, and also almost all the freed, bitter slaves.

Kumasi Fisher = Tomoe Yukino, Tomoe is comma-like, made me think of Coomassie Blue, used for staining proteins in biochemistry, and Yuki is snow, so NO snow would be warmth… Thermo-Fisher Scientific anyone?

Hedy Warden = Ebisu Minagi, Minagi made me think of mini Naga, as in the Indian counterpart of Lamias. Snake in Japanese is Hebi, so made me think of Hedy Lamarr. And the last name of Ebisu is in kanji the same character as Chinese for guard, as in border guard, so… Warden it is!

Davina Weaver = Kamiyo Tatsumi, Kamiyo became "hello god" in my twisted mind, which became Divinitus due to me having played Rome: Total War and liking the song of that name… and Weaver is obvious for a name that is similar to TATAMI!

Solana Akagi = Kashiwagi Haruko, another example of a surviving Japanese last name, still wood-related, and something that unless I'm very wrong relates to sunniness for a first name…

02Hero = 00 Unit, this should be damned obvious because it's literally written Zero to Hero (read as Oh-Two-Hero, or Hero for short). More alarmingly though, it is also something else (see Chapter 1 of "CMDR Taylor Herbert").

AEON ILLUMINATE TASK FORCE:

Maya Corbin = Meiya Mitsurugi, because screw the last name crap her counterpart has to deal with. Maya has no problem shoving all of Japan into comfortable nanolathed mass housing to pull the pole out of the asses of the Japanese. The alternative is to get rid of all the old people to dismantle tradition (WARNING: CZARs and Restorers ahead, proceed at own risk).

Wu Bai = Yashiro Kasumi, this is literally Pinyin for "White Fog" if written in Asian family-name-first convention.

Kana Frost = Suzumiya Akane, unless the Japanese didn't take the Chinese character for palace and also apply it to the womb, I'm not suggesting "cold palace" necessarily translates to "ice queen" or frigidity, but the only last name I could come up with that matched reasonably well was, uh…

May Frost = Suzumiya Haruka, anyone played/watched Pokémon Hoenn for the first name reference?

Elena Piatif = Fixed the really badly anglicized, totally Russian name to actually be Polish, at least according to the comments on the wiki page

Iconia Mesa = Munakata Misae, given her last name can be taken to mean figurine or idol (as in idolatry), it's awfully iconic…

Gateau Brown = Ichimonji Takahashi, as explained earlier, the last name can possibly be horribly misinterpreted as "one gate uncle" (this evacuation specialist makes Quantum Gates cry Uncle!), and hash browns ensued. He is the only man in the whole Coalition task force other than Steele.

The boot is about to come down on the stupid bugs…

Some things about Mica84 and White's backstories do not quite add up, as I'm sure you noticed. That (and Maya's exasperated interference) will be some drama in this story. So will the general theme of everything from "Oh, right, baseline humans can't survive primary brain removal" to "What do you mean baseline humans react as badly to resurrection as post-Quantum Age humans? There's a lot less psionic waveform to cram in there, you know!" Then there's the clash of counterparts. But the biggest source of drama by far in this fic is *REDACTED*