Pretty Magic Stompy Robots!
Chapter One
Waking Up in a New Universe
by Jared Ornstead
aka Skysaber
aka Perfect Lionheart
OoOoO
In which I take Battletech, and turn it into a magical girl setting. Because, why not?
Starring my dimension-hopping, superspy self-insert, because I have a ton of fun writing him, that's why!
OoOoO
Jared woke to an annoying buzzing sound, to find he was in bed in a room he did not remember, cuddling a bright orange traffic cone to his chest. Sun shining in the window proved it was day, wherever he was; a strong, clear sunlight that strongly implied midday.
The room was... well, it was a motel room... no, scratch that, it was a dorm room. People generally did not have time to make messes this large in simple motel rooms. But the cheap, easily replaced furnishings built into the walls and floor, generic paint and soulless decor pretty much nailed it down as something no individual claimed long-term.
Definitely a dorm room, he realized, as there was two of everything: two beds, two desks, two lamps, two completely inadequate sets of drawers, and the mess on each side of the room had a distinctly different character. On his side, there was a small library's worth of books, interspersed with what looked like articles of military surplus, and far too much anime to be remotely healthy.
Yeah, he admitted, he probably had to own that, as minus certain things like the traffic cone, this was definitely the type of mess he'd create when shoved in too small of a living space.
On the other side there were posters of girls, rock bands, and also a surprising amount of giant robots. But the piles of clothing, overstuffed garbage, and presence of discarded food wrappers all added up to a distinctly un-Jared type of mess.
You don't put a used cheeseburger wrapper on top of a book. That type of thing would sooner or later drip out some grease and damage the books, and you just don't do that.
And all of it, from the girls to the clothes, had a distinctly Ancient-Egypt theme. Yes, even the giant robots. No, make that especially the giant robots.
The annoying buzzing sounded off again.
Sitting up, and realizing that he'd been wearing a strange cloth cap on his head during his nap, or whatever it was, the redhead searched around as he realized that was not an alarm clock, but rather a phone was ringing somewhere.
Following the sound, he reached under a pile of magazines and periodicals all depicting various mecha, nearly dislodging the pile onto a die-cast model of what looked like a VF-1A Veritech in Guardian configuration, although with different markings and without its famous gun pod.
Finding the noisemaking device, Jared almost didn't recognize it as a phone. It was some sort of blocky, retro-tech communications thingy that might fit in well for military cosplay, but indicated a tech level where the average cellphone had much in common with the average brick, being about the same general size, shape and weight of one.
No screen, just buttons. It wasn't hard to find the 'on' one as that was oversized and clearly labeled, as if whoever had built this thing had wanted it to be simple enough that a chimpanzee could operate it. That was actually good thinking. The military did things that way because no one wanted to be struggling to find the right button in the dark when bombs and bullets were flying, so military cosplay had to match.
No sooner had the interdimensional superspy pushed the button and raised the thick chunk of technology to his ear, having adjusted the cloth headpiece still wrapped around his head to do so, than someone was already speaking, not even waiting for his 'hello'.
"Jared Saotome?" the voice asked. Then, when he'd made an agreeing noise, followed up with, "You are required to present yourself before the Royal Court to petition the Great Court of Elders at 8 AM tomorrow morning, where Pharaoh Hanse will pass judgement concerning your inheritance. Failure to attend will be punished severely. Salute the Falcon."
The voice had been bored, perfunctory, and sounded like the person on the other end had done this at least a thousand times before, to where even the threat near the end sounded soulless and rote, exactly like you'd expect a minor bureaucrat doing a job they no longer found interesting.
Whoever was on the other end had also hung up as soon as they'd given that odd salute, without waiting for a reply.
Pharaoh?
Suddenly the Egyptian-themed clothes and well, everything, seemed to make so much more sense. To be sure, he even checked. Costume pieces are routinely made to a different, cheaper standard than ordinary clothes, so were usually easy to tell apart.
The clothes scattered around the other half of the dorm room were not cosplay.
Jared even swept the cloth wrap from off his head, revealing it was blue and gold striped, like you see in famous tomb paintings out of ancient Egypt. It was even held in place by a metal circlet acting as a headband, only instead of the rearing serpent you'd usually see on the front when pharaohs wore this style of headdress, it was a badge.
A policeman's badge.
One that did not have Jared's name or image cast on it, but instead someone else's.
So he was in a place styled after Ancient Egypt, had an appointment that sounded like 'show up or die' at the royal courts tomorrow, and all this while he'd been wearing a stolen policeman's hat.
Things did not look good.
Casting around for more sources of information on his present environment, the redhaired boy saw a whiteboard on the wall, the type on which students in the days before easily available smartphones would often write out their class schedules to remind them. This one had been poorly wiped clean of classes, but the big word "Graduation!" written in celebratory style and underlined several times overlay the permanent grid of weekdays built into the calender.
From there, he found on his desk a packet of school papers, it was plainly a graduation packet but strangely lacking a diploma. Anyway, it was possible to puzzle out. It seems his native self had gone ambitious and secured a triple major in Business, Engineering, and Aerospace Piloting.
Ok, that was another outlier, as 'aerospace' anything did not fit with the attempted "Egypt never fell" vibe he'd been catching from the rest of this place.
Then again, nor did the giant robot posters, either.
And while he was on the subject of things that did not make any sense, unless someone changed something while he wasn't looking, Pharaoh was the title of the ruler of a country. What was the local monarch doing judging a simple matter of a civilian's inheritance? Nothing that Jared possessed in this dorm room indicated any wealth, quite the opposite, in fact.
So what was going on?
Also Pharaoh HANSE? Wasn't Hanse a Germanic name? Combining the two was about as out-of-place as having a family of Appalachian hillbillies serving as a ninja clan during the Shogunate era! None of this was adding up to any environment, factual or fictional, that he'd ever heard about!
Well, Jared had a dire sounding 'severe punishment' hanging over his head if he did not attend, so unless he found very good reason not to, he was going, which brought up how he was going to get there, and for that matter, where 'there' even was.
There were what looked at first like a couple local computers in the room, but they were just dumb terminals. No internet, and the campus mainframe they connected to had less power than desktop machines that were being thrown out as garbage in the late 1980's. In fact, he'd owned better before entering puberty.
It had been a long time since computers like this were seen anyplace outside of museums, just as much bricks as the local phone he'd found under those periodicals.
So the computers of this era, or whatever place he'd gotten in, were no help. It was a good thing he knew how to read a paper map. Fortunate, as they seemed to fit the environment. Luckily, his dorm partner had a small pile of paper maps dumped out over the covers of his bed among some other garbage where he'd obviously repacked some luggage, and not bothered to clean up after himself after doing so.
Of course, no sooner had he found maps than he needed one more thing to use them: a starting point, something that computers and GPS smartphones would easily calculate for you. But that was no problem, as this apartment had a mail slot in the front door, and there were several letters lying on the floor inside of it.
Picking up the one on top, which turned out to be an actual telegram (something the youth had not seen in ages) addressed to him. Opening it in curiosity, he found that it appeared to be from his absent dorm-mate.
It read, "Salut!
"Oh, my overachieving friend, how good it was to see you sleeping so soundly on my departure. I'll have you know it took five times the normal dosage of the drug to affect you! And what a riot you were until you collapsed after two more doses! Well worth the effort of slipping them into your orange juice, I assure you. That policeman will never be the same.
"But I digress. I will have you know this was your own fault. After seeing the life you had built for yourself, how could I not steal it? No doubt you have already found out that your wallet, cash, and all identity documents are missing. I took them, along with your diploma. Together they were enough to prove me as you to the recruiter. I was no slouch in school, my friend, but it was not I who put himself through school by becoming a legend on Solaris! Oh! What a contract I signed! The benefits are outrageous! Surely, you would have loved them. Before you ask, did I also steal your mech, your truck, and your power armor? But of course, my friend, how could I not? Who would have believed me that I was you without them? Besides, they were so delicious after all your fine-tuning, how could I resist?
"I would tell you something of the unit I signed on with, but then you would have clues on how to find me, and we cannot have that. If you could prove I was not you, I would lose my beloved contract, and you might even reclaim some of these pretties I stole from you. I would leave you my own mech and car, but have already sold them.
"Desole, mais je dois filer!"
...
Well, at least the address on the envelope told the redhead where he was on the map, so at least he could find the starting point for his journey to court tomorrow...
... if he could get there without a car...
... or sidestep the fact that governments that were in the habit of issuing identity papers were also in the habit of *checking* said papers virtually any time people interacted with them - and this held especially true over important stuff like court cases...
... to say nothing of meeting heads of state like, oh, say, The Pharaoh! ...
...
...
Funny, you know, usually this would be right around the point where his local memories would kick in to provide a helpful solution. But so far he had nothing.
He still had truly phenomenal forgery skills left over from previous worlds. But that type of thing was very setting-specific. The sorts of technologies available strongly influenced the security measures they used to prevent forgery from being effective. So while his current skills would give him the broad strokes just fine, it would take months of research and practice to nail down the fine details - and the fine details were exactly how this kind of thing got caught. So if he was expected to be in court tomorrow, there was no chance of forging anything that might remotely pass inspection.
He could not even go to the underworld to look for a local expert, because black markets were always hard to find; as if they weren't, they got shut down too easily by the cops. So, having no local knowledge, he wasn't going to find anything other than the traps set by police to catch the gullible and uninformed looking for illegal services.
On the other hand, he'd have a much better chance of just walking in and saying, "Someone stole my ID." He could even present the telegram as evidence.
That still left him needing a car, as the address revealed was the Falcon Academy of Military Excellence, which he had never heard of, so presumed was a second-rate school nowhere near as prestigious or important as the big names, and consequently much father away from the capital city.
Let's see, the maps were plainly marked. New Avalon was the name of the planet (which, Interplanetary Egypt? He was sure he'd never dealt with a setting like *that* before!) and there was this nice place near the center of the map called Avalon City, which jogged some hint of memory, and so he assumed must be the capital.
With a name like that, it seemed probable, anyway. There was even a New Avalon Military Academy right nearby it, suiting his assumption of having gone to a less prestigious, second-rate academy out in the boonies.
A quick look over at the scale of the map let him know where he had to go was too far away to walk in the time allowed. He could cross a thousand miles of plains on foot when he had to. Ordinary people could do it in about a month, given a bit of support. He could do it much faster, thanks to superspy abilities and past training, but to be there by morning was impossible even for him without a form of transport more advanced than what nature had provided.
Trouble was, renting a car required both money *and* ID, and his mysterious vanishing roommate had robbed him of both.
That left the option of borrowing one. That led Jared to leave the dorm room and venture out, looking for people; but that quickly proved to be a dead end. Every room he found had its door open, and personal belongings gone. He did find, however, a student lounge with a bulletin board that had not yet been cleared. On it was an official-seeming notice declaring, "Remember, the LAST BUS leaves on FRIDAY!"
That message was double underlined, and armed with several exclamation points. Also, beside it was a paper calender someone had left behind, with all of the dates up to and including Friday's marked off.
That calendar was for the year 2,999, and was on the month of December, with Christmas having been marked off as last Wednesday, but that was far from the weirdest thing Jared had experienced, even if you just counted this trip so far.
One glance outside each window he passed revealed that the campus cleaning and maintenance staff was out in force. So, presuming that whoever had been marking off days left on Friday with the rest, all he could really assume from it was that Friday had come and gone, and with it the students he might have borrowed a car from.
Also, it was plain everywhere he went that, true to the name, this was some kind of military academy. Since he could assume he had just graduated, he could only hope that some unit somewhere was not counting him AWOL.
Facing the possibility of not just an angry government threatening 'severe punishment' for something he was finding it increasingly hard to do, but an angry drill sergeant determined to make an example of him? Not fun.
That would be just the peach to top off his current difficulties, wouldn't it?
However, increasingly he was finding himself out of options, so it was time to start looking into hopefully finding an abandoned car and jump-starting it, or worst-case updating his forgery skill so he could prepare an alternate identify for himself and use that to disappear.
Both of those required him to know local technology so he could properly circumvent whatever security there was against such things.
Fortunately, being an Interdimensional Superspy Adventurer had its advantages, among them certain items and abilities that were nearly always with him.
Seating himself on a couch in the lounge lest he fall down, and choosing a spot where he could look out the window as if in contemplation, Jared took hold of his watch, now more of a copper bracelet to fit in with the local culture, and with a quick manipulation popped open a panel which revealed the familiar interface confirming this was the superspy tool he called the One True Watch.
Sliding the narrow headband that was his Synaptic Teacher onto his brow, noting it too now had somewhat of an Egyptian theme, completely expected as his superspy tools always disguised themselves to fit the local environment, Jared sat well back in his seat and, lifting the One True Watch to his lips, spoke clearly and distinctly, "I need an emergency tech download, to be completed before the end of the day."
Jared winced as the sudden, massive rush of information filled his brain. It was distinctly uncomfortable, but after long experience it was manageable, and he knew it would fade.
Of course, that turned out to be the exact moment that his local memories hit.
Oddly, that turned out to make the assimilation grow easier instead of the reverse, like anticipated. First, and most important, this was officially a Battletech universe. That meant life literally revolved around big, stompy robots. Those who had them were significant, those who did not weren't. A very feudal environment, with a bit of a 'Mad Max' air to it, as the grand days of production were long ago, and it was very much a scavenger setting where spare parts were worth more than their weight in gold, and consequently nearly everything was kludged together and nothing worked quite right.
Fair enough. That did nothing to explain all of the Egyptian influence he'd been finding; but he could figure that out later. However, as Jared absorbed his new past-self's memories that old phrase 'History repeats itself' came to mind, as it bore a startling resemblance to the upbringing of one Ranma Saotome in the Ranma One-Half universe.
It was even a local mirror of Genma Saotome, Ranma's father, doing the training. One might even think they were the same man, except where the original Genma was bald as an egg, the local ripoff was hairier than a grizzly bear, and while original-Genma needed glasses (that did not seem to hamper him at all), the local variant had a club foot (which again, did not seem to hamper him at all).
But as for their teaching style and training methods? That was spot-on.
And it started the exact same way, with the terrible tragic story of a guy who took his sons (local-Genma had three sons, whereas the original had only one) from home on short trips starting in infancy to teach them the family trade. Then a full-on, ten-year training journey began at age six.
The family trade in this case being that of Scout, which hereabouts worked out to a job somewhere between Force Recon and a spy, men who were used to gather intelligence for future invasions... and the local Genma, in a remarkable display of stupidity just like the original, somehow surpassed all bounds of sanity for the sake of his sons' training.
Let's just say, part of the training had involved selling the children off at times to organized crime and ninja clans (yes, they had those in space), with the occasional bought of child slavery - which the boy being sold was told it was part of his training to escape from.
A substantial chunk of Jared's local self's training had actually come about because he'd *failed* to escape the techno-ninja clan local-Genma had sold him to at an early age, and he had actually learned a great deal concerning computer hacking, forgery, security systems, and all of that stuff - enough to say he had a comfortable grasp of all of the basics, which considering his age was actually somewhat impressive. But no sooner had he learned enough to make for a competent field agent than local-Genma stole him back again.
However, those basics learned were exactly what the superspy version of Jared needed to let his skills honed by countless adventures adapt to the local conditions.
His local self had even awakened his Battle Aura there - and yes, it turned out this universe had chi powers.
Good. It had been a while since he'd been in a universe where those were available, and it was always easier to expand his own when confronted by new abilities to study, so he hoped the natives had been creative.
Chi was useful.
Besides, shortly after beginning his multiversal adventures, Jared had discovered that he had an upper limit on the amount of personal power he could bring into a universe from outside. Since that upper limit was variable, what he preferred to do after entering was get the lay of the land for a while, to get a sense for not just what was needed, but also for cost, as it was not just the upper limiter that was variable. His own powers cost more or less, depending on the setting. One factor in that appeared to be: if the natives had no way they could do something, a way to do that thing cost more to import. But if the natives could do it, even if he had a method that did it a different way, that ability cost less for him to import.
So he really liked to scout a setting for a little while before bringing any abilities in.
After all, there was no sense bringing in a useless tool when you were on a limited budget, and if he overspent and got himself tapped out too early, he lost opportunity. And some powers acted like trump cards in certain settings, able to resolve vast problems at minimal expense.
So, having a set of core abilities that were always with him and generally kept him safe, he preferred to coast on those for a while after entering each new setting.
Also, there did not seem to be any limit on the amount of power he was able to acquire in-setting.
Anyway, his local self's training journey had, like Ranma's, involved a life constantly on the move, filled with petty thievery, child abuse in the name of 'The Art', some truly grand acts of idiocy, extreme conditioning that would have veteran drill sergeants passing out within moments, and ended, against all odds, with a student who was truly the best at what he did - and completely naive about everything else.
In both cases, Ranma's and here, it was a miracle the father did not destroy his son's sanity during the trip. But like Ranma, despite all of the social isolation and pressure to focus on training, often to the exclusion of all else, Jared's local self had somehow, mysteriously, still turned out to be a nice kid.
However, it was a bit chilling that Jared's past self had lost track of his two brothers, and that local-Genma never answered any questions as to what had become of them.
Anyway, as if the universe could not have enough of irony, the training trip concluded when his local self hit age 16, and local-Genma had taken local-Jared to meet a small family of Japanese-language-and-culture Caucasians to complete an arrangement between their two families.
It was hard not comparing them to the Tendo family of Ranma's universe, as it had been a man with three daughters - one daughter of an age with each boy local-Genma started out with. The local-Tendos were a former mechwarrior line that had since been dispossessed - meaning they did not own a giant robot anymore.
That was when it turned out that local-Genma had financed the long trip, and countless drinking binges, by stealing and selling the mechs of other families - almost exclusively under the guise of engaging his son to a daughter of those families, then taking the machine as her dowry; like original-Genma had done to Ukyo, the Amazons, and others in the original setting. And those robbery victims came around to collect once they'd learned that the man and his son were staying with the local-Tendos.
Nor had those victims been few in number. While he had not sunk to the depths of original-Genma in selling his boy for a bowl of rice and two pickles, the local variant had not been far off it, either. There were several dozen cases of girls showing up whose battlemechs the elderly scout had taken, with those girls expecting to get a young husband out of the deal. An equal number of girls showed up with tales of non-mech dowries, as well.
The mess was, like Ranma's, more or less completely unsolvable. If people had been willing to talk, to reason things out, then maybe something could have been done to satisfy everyone. But sadly, every attempt had devolved into fighting.
Not the 'angry and shouting' level of fighting most people are familiar with, but 'the weapons come out and people are swinging at each other with real intent to harm and destroying their surroundings when they miss' kind of fighting.
And of course, local-Genma and his friend Soun, the patriarch of the local-Tendo family had chosen the worst girl of the lot, the most violent, least-sane, and completely unmarriageable harridan for the girl they wanted to back.
How did Jared know to call her unmarriageable? Because an Apostle of Christ had said so. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Church of Jesus Christ had said, "I would not have you spend five minutes with someone who belittles you, who is constantly critical of you, who is cruel at your expense and may even call it humor. Life is tough enough without having the person who is supposed to love you leading the assault on your self-esteem, your sense of dignity, your confidence, and your joy. In this person's care you deserve to feel physically safe and emotionally secure.
"If you are just going out for a pizza or to play a set of tennis, go with anyone who will provide good, clean fun. But if you are serious, or planning to be serious, please find someone who brings out the best in you and is not envious of your success. Find someone who suffers when you suffer and who finds his or her happiness in your own."
Jared would gladly take on a suicide mission sooner than marry that bitch shoved at him by local-Genma, who was the living embodiment of everything that apostle's advice said to avoid. Twice in his life he'd witnessed good men destroyed by marrying women not even as bad as her. But naturally Genma and his buddy Soun would actively interfere with any resolution to Jared's problems that did not count as a total win for their chosen uber-bitch.
With their active interference, nothing could ever be truly resolved. No, in fact things got worse the longer that mess continued.
Worse, the fiancee mess had been only part of the problems written into Jared's new local past. One of the bigger contributors had been things surfacing that local-Genma had done, each of which were contenders for the prize of 'most insane stunt ever'.
And, naturally, the one to pay the price for each of those had to have been Jared.
Local-Genma'd even sold off the family mech of the woman he'd married, who it turned out was minor nobility with her own family mech he'd been supposed to train their children on, but never did. This had amazed local-Jared when he'd learned it, as he had understood they'd paid for their trip by performing odd jobs as traveling technicians and doctors, doing work, sometimes small, frequently heroic, as local-Genma could not be troubled to actually learn the details of a job before he'd commit his son to do it.
So Jared's local, past self had been doing cybernetic surgery, and doing key parts rebuilds for refurbishing aging and ailing factories when he was only nine years old! Basically, there was no job local-Genma would not hire out his son to perform, no matter how ridiculously unqualified that boy was to do it.
It was amazing there had not been more than a few spectacular failures, or that he'd scraped through without killing anyone, actually.
It had its benefits, however. Constantly pushing yourself past all rational boundaries to learn how to do something way over your head in no time at all at least had taught him how to learn quickly. Then, with the pressure kept up through a decade of this treatment, his local-self's skills had skyrocketed in all sorts of fields. No one he knew of could, had, and did, break down and rebuild a fusion engine using only hand tools while blindfolded - at age eleven!
Of course, doing stunts like that had impressed people, and been what allowed the old Scout to engage his son to so many girls. Not that the old fart told anyone that he'd been doing it, naturally. Local-Jared had been shocked when the first girls started showing up, and each of them in turn had been shocked there'd been more than one engagement, as well.
What a fat, hairy mess THAT had been!
Staying with the Tendos was also the first time local-Jared had ever heard that he was supposed to have been raised as a mechwarrior - as that was most definitely NOT something local-Genma had ever spared any training time on!
So having a local history that was a near-perfect mirror of Ranma's, slightly modified to adjust for setting, at least gave the advantage of familiarity, as Jared had been adopted by the Saotomes in the Ranma universe, and put through something very similar before. So rather than an extra burden, recovering those local memories served as a rock that helped anchor him so he could absorb the tech download more completely, already having a Rosetta Stone, as it were to help translate them across.
Of course, his local history did eventually depart from Ranma's.
After nearly a year of putting up with all of the troubles brought about by that screwed up situation, Jared's local, past self had at last used his ninja skills to escape it, getting on a dropship headed who-knows-where and not even caring about the destination, only that he left no tracks - not on that spaceship, or the next one, or the next one.
When at last he'd finally judged his path to be sufficiently muddied, he'd found himself on a planet called New Avalon, and enrolled himself in one of their less prestigious universities, spending the next three years getting all of the training that his pops had neglected. At first he'd used his computer skills to hack the system to gain admission and scholarships to pay for everything; then he'd been taken aside by a nice gentleman who introduced himself as Baron Foirie, the Dean of Students, and he explained that, while he would let the admission stand since he was impressed with the young man's computer ability, it was not nice to take scholarships meant for others, so he'd have to give them back.
This nice gentleman had continued explaining that he'd been so impressed by the effort made to get in that he offered on the spot to sponsor the young man personally.
Not exactly trusting the 'nice gentleman', Jared's local self had decided to support himself, and done so by taking his summer breaks and doing arena fighting in a mech he'd built himself out of spare parts - parts so far gone only an elite tech like him would have considered them anything but garbage, and that he had laboriously refurbished by hand.
Then, since only victory paid enough, Jared's local self been forced to seek tutors to show him how to fight a mech on top of everything else, and only the same insane capacity for learning developed under local-Genma had let him keep up with the full course load.
But the 'nice gentleman' had stayed in contact, and after two years they had finally been reconciled that each really meant no harm to the other, or anything the other protected, and finally they became friends. The man had to be over sixty, had a competent staff, so had a lot of free time. The Baron had smoothly taken over as local-Jared's mech tutor, saying that he saw potential in the young lad, and taught him much. He'd even helped Jared find better parts for his custom mech, and finally offered to adopt him late the previous year.
The way he had explained it, after two years of keeping an eye on the other transformed into doing things together, it had left the nice gentleman much closer to Jared than his own two sons, who had pursued other interests and had not spent nearly as much time with him. Jared's local self had accepted, and viewed it as the start of a new life away from the troubles of his old one.
Only for everything to come crashing down once he received news that his adopted father had died just the day after Christmas. News had come right after Jared had received the old man's Christmas gift, in fact, which had been delayed.
Ok, so that explained the call about an inheritance, but why was he invited? His adopted dad had never promised him anything. And why was it being adjucated in the Pharaoh's court?
Well, he'd find out soon enough. One thing that definitely helped was that his transportation problem had been solved. No need to go hotwiring a car, as his adoptive dad had given him one for Christmas.
Being a baron had its perks, too, and one of them was giving expensive gifts.
Since local-Jared hadn't even had a chance to drive it yet, his roommate ought not to have known about that Christmas gift, so it should still be where it had been delivered.
A loud cough drew Jared back out of himself and the spiral of memory he had been lost in, a quick glance around showing him a veteran sergeant standing before him, having just faked a cough to grab his attention. Seeing he had it, the man held forth a clipboard with a paper and a pen on it.
"Lieutenant Saotome? We've finished packing up your room. If you'll just sign here and indicate where you want those boxes shipped...?"
Jared could not help but smile at the 'Senior NCO getting the wet-behind-the-ears officer pointed in the right direction so the men can get on with their business' routine. He took the clipboard and signed it, with an address he remembered that would be suitable.
The sergeant took it and was about to vanish after a brief salute when Jared stopped him, holding out the telegram, "Sergeant, I appear to have been robbed by my roommate. This telegram is a confession. If you could take care of it?"
Another salute. "I'll have the MPs in at once, sir."
OoOoO
It was late evening before the Military Police concluded interviewing him, and they only let him go on him stating that he was required at the Royal Courts in the morning. Being campus police, they could not even drive him out of the city their school was in, although at least the investigation did seem to be leaning in the direction of, 'Yes, you have been robbed, poor sucker.'
Better than blaming him. You never knew about the law enforcement of a new world until you had encountered it. But quite a lot of places out there took on the habit of blaming the victim, because it was easer than doing an investigation.
He called those places 'Hellholes', but they existed.
Jared waved goodbye to the cop that had been nice enough to drop him off at the part of campus to the small, two car enclosed garage where his car had been parked. Since they taught how to pilot battlemechs and aerospace fighters, the campus was by necessity huge; and cars were a common way to get around, so parking was available everywhere, most of it just like commercial parking structures, but there were quite a few small, private garages with adequate security available for rent by those who had more valuable vehicles.
Jared had this spot rented out until the end of the month, as part of the gift that came in it. And he hadn't checked, but the vehicle within was probably more than valuable enough to warrant a little security. As a Christmas present from his adoptive father, the baron, the car was sleek and sporty, perfect for a fighter pilot. But cars like that did tend to have enormous price tags attached, for both their looks and their performance.
He loved the old man for it.
Climbing in to the driver's seat of his new auto, the interdimensional superspy reflected that at least the encounter with the authorities gave him a temporary form of ID to show at court, with a reference to the case number as an excuse as to why he did not have the real ID documents normally required.
They'd even told him what day it was: Sunday, and so the court appointment was for the first thing Monday morning, and seeing as his roommate must have drugged him on Friday, that meant he'd spent about two days sleeping it off - which was in all very useful information to have, and he was grateful for it.
For cops they had been, all in all, about as generous as their job allowed them to be. But now he had only ten hours to make over a thousand miles, and the hundred miles per hour he'd be forced to average was about twice what the locals around here considered 'fast'.
While the machine could handle it, the natives were another matter. He'd be dodging traffic cops all night, and probably be forced to go one-sixty for hours just to cover for those times when he'd be forced to go forty.
So it was promising to be a wild night, and it was barely even started yet.
Then his stomach growled to remind him that he had not eaten, certainly not all day and presumably not since his roommate had drugged his orange juice.
Well, Jared concluded as he put the car into gear and pulled out, while eating in a car was never his favorite form of dining, at least, being a college campus, the immediate area was well supplied with fast food restaurants...
... if he had any money, which he still didn't.
Resigning himself to a long and hungry drive, the redhead pulled out, headed for the freeway. At least the gas gauge read full, and he had a few hours to figure out what to do when it didn't.
Who knew? His past self in this universe had made a living off of finding odd jobs, so he might run into something part-way that he could do for a few dollars, or a fresh tank of gas. That would be best case. A worse one, he might just run out and be forced to abandon his car by the side of the road, only to catch a ride for the rest of the way.
But, sometimes you just had to have the faith enough to try.
OoOoO
Five hours on the road, tank near empty.
Fortunately, late nights on long highways through territory all of the important people simply flew over, generally tended to be fairly quiet. That it was also right in between Christmas and New Years and most holiday travelers had already reached their destinations, and would not be headed back on their return trips for a couple of days yet, tended to leave the roads as clear as they ever would be.
That meant it was long, and dark and quiet, with generally very few other cars. That made it ideal conditions to go super fast and pray very quietly that all of the traffic cops had found better things to do with their time than hang out in the middle of nowhere waiting to give a ticket.
He had to go slower when the road passed by or through towns, with a cushion of space before entering and after leaving because cops are lazy and that's generally the best kind of place to catch impatient speeders; and those zones of caution cost him, as they lowered his overall speed, which meant to keep the average up he had to make it up by going even faster in the dead zones far between towns, which raised the overall risk significantly.
So Jared was going about two hundred miles per hour in the dead of night out in the middle of nowhere when a blur of pink dashed out of the seamless black onto the road.
People like to say things like "there was no time" or "it all happened so fast", but for people who are able to drive at those speeds it's something like a Zen state; your senses become highly acute, and the degree of focus... well, professional race car drivers have been documented reacting to changes in road conditions before it was possible for the driver to have been aware of them.
Scientists can't explain it. So they don't talk about it much, but it was real.
Call it a sixth sense if you want to.
At the first flicker of anything but an unchanging tunnel of headlights through the black Jared's foot was off the accelerator and onto the brake, and while it was yet in motion when that flicker resolved into anything other than "More road, no concern", he had begun dumping speed just as quickly as the braking system could allow without losing control. When that flicker of pink took shape as something in his lane he eased off the brakes just enough to gain the steering control needed to shift lanes, and when the motion of pink continued on across the road into his new lane he aborted that shift and was already shifting back into his original one while still dumping speed just as fast as the braking system could handle without flipping the car.
All of that took place in under one second.
In the instant before having passed her by, the pink shape had resolved into a girl in a dress fleeing across the road from one side to the other. Successful at having missed her, Jared had barely enough time to notice that a large, black shape was chasing her, getting right in front of him, and flood his body with chi before impact.
The sleek sports car hit that shape like a brick still going not quite four times the legal limit on that section of road.
Not even remotely built for that, the car naturally disintegrated. Hollywood would have been very pleased over the plume of fire that erupted from the near empty gas tank as fumes hit hot metal and ignited. It was not an explosion, but certainly looked dramatic.
But something hit by a marshmallow going that fast is going to feel it, and the disintegrating car punched right through the dark shape that had lunged out in front of it.
The creature, for it was a creature that car had struck, one about the size of a delivery truck and armed with insectile features, curled up and died, body dissolving into black dust, blowing away like flakes of ash in the slight wind.
On the ground, Jared moaned in pain. His body was blasted and bruised, scraped up and smudged with soot and other substances. His limbs were locked up in an uncomfortable, but not broken, condition and trembling because of the aftereffects of what he'd been through.
But he was alive.
He had survived worse than this before, but it was never very fun. One of the benefits that never left him was that Jared had trained beside the title character in a Ranma 1/2 universe and Ranma had been a world class martial artist in a world where martial arts were able to make a man plainly superhuman, a place where martial artists were expected to survive extreme forces, just shake it off, and fight on. Getting knocked by blows up into Lower Earth Orbit, then crashing down again and cratering the concrete covered ground you'd struck was one of the standard dangers you had to learn to survive there.
It still hurt, though. And that had been quite the crash, so bouncing back was proving harder.
The night, now lit only by flickers of the rapidly dying gas-fume fire, looked to be swallowed by darkness entire when a candy apple red iguana wearing a brown fez on its head hopped on top of a convenient perch of twisted metal. For a moment, Jared's dazed brain wondered if it was a new type of Pokemon. Then it spoke.
"Igig! Lost another one! Oh well, you'll do for her replacement!"
~Igig?~ Jared's muddled thoughts filled with puzzlement. ~Oh yeah, it was common for magical creatures to have a nonsense phrase, one they repeated as a kind of verbal tic.~
Then his mind caught up with that observation. ~Wait a minute! MAGICAL? I thought I was in a Battletech universe!~ Although, a sly part of his consciousness admitted that he'd still not explained any of the Egyptian influences.
There came a jingling, as of coins being dropped to the ground beside Jared's head, but it was impossible in the dark to see any details.
He struggled to move. His chi was already at work on healing him, but it was too late. The bright red lizard had already unfurled its peppermint swirl tail and pointed it at the prone superspy, sundering the darkness by a magical surge that illuminated a patch visible for miles on that lonely night, catching Jared right at the center of a near thermonuclear glow that stripped things down to the molecular level, then began to rebuild them differently.
OoOoO
Author's Notes:
The French portions of the letter are supposed to read, "Hi!" and "Sorry, gotta go!" in a friendly way, that ought to match the jovial, mocking tone of the rest of the telegram.
For those of you who are aware of them, yes this is a response to two different writing prompts that have been circulating around: the Battletech CYOA, where you inherit a whole lot of giant, stompy robots in among interstellar civilizations at war, and the Accidental Magical Girl CYOA, where having struck a magical girl with your car, her magical mascot decides you'll have to take her place.
No, they don't go together at all, which is naturally what makes this interesting.
There being multiple versions of both prompts, I do mix and match a little between them.
OoOoO
More Notes:
Hi, I had intended this as a fun story to post in thanks to those who have said such kind things to me in regards to the passing of my brother Enoch.
I had intended to post something later the same week as I made my last story post. But it has been months instead.
The reason for that delay is that I was spending all of my spare time taking care of my ailing mother, who has just died. She passed in May 2019, the day I write this message.
I have lost two brothers, each of whom I loved very much. But taking both of those experiences together does not bear a candle to losing my mother. She was the rock on which our family was built. She had many friends who cared for her deeply, and I benefited to some degree just being around that social circle.
She will be sorely missed.
But I can think of no better way to honor her memory than do what I can to bring joy and gladness to others. So I will do what I can to return to writing regularly.