AN: A new story involving my OC school, Shamrock School for Girls. Check out their other stories and artwork if you haven't done so already. A big thanks to BlokeOnTheKeyboard for his help and ideas in creating Shamrock's opponents. Also my thanks to Rihnoswirl and CrabbyCakes for their help.
"LADIES!" bellowed Shannon, the short, redheaded commander of the Shamrock School for Girls' Sensha-do team. "We have ourselves a match! Here's our official invitation!"
As she yelled this to the assembled company of green-clad girls who made up the team, she held aloft what looked like a cream-coloured piece of card with some fancy, possibly Gothic, writing on it.
There was stunned silence for a moment, then all the girls rushed at once to try to see what clues the piece of card might give about their potential opponents. Shannon, however, quickly handed it to Clare, her vice-commander, who stood on tiptoes and held it high in the air. As Clare was one of the tallest girls on the team, this meant that the card was out of reach of everyone else.
"Stop it, stop it!" Shannon yelled, physically pushing some of the girls away. "That's going on our Wall of Fame and I don't want your grubby thumbs all over it!"
"Do we have a Wall of Fame?" asked Erne, a spirited girl with fiery hair that was even redder than Shannon's.
"We're getting one," Shannon said with a dismissive wave of her hand.
"Who's the match against!?" several girls yelled at once.
Shannon looked down at the invitation again. The school's name appeared to be very long, but the words 'Imperial' and 'Royal' stood out prominently, and so that was how she named the school to her teammates.
"Who are they?" a few girls asked each other.
"A very worthy opponent!" Shannon confirmed
"Probably," Clare muttered under her breath.
"So, ladies, we're going to give our all in the training for the next week, aren't we!?" Shannon shouted, pumping her fist in the air.
"Hai!" came the resounding shout from the crowd.
"Which brings me to today's lesson," Shannon said, once again physically pushing girls towards the twin row of benches that faced a whiteboard in the corner of the hanger. There were some groans, as no one really liked Shannon's lectures, but perhaps less so than usual as the team were excited by the prospect of a match.
"Today, we are going to learn about reconnaissance," Shannon said once they had settled down on the benches.
"Reck-on-a-what?" asked Laune, the dim-witted girl with apricot-coloured hair.
"Rec-onn-ai-ssance," Shannon repeated, slower this time.
"What's that?" Laune inquired.
"It's what I'm going to tell you about, so shut up!" Shannon squawked. "In Sensha-do terms, it's when you go out; look at the enemy; then report back to your main force about what the enemy is, where they are and what they are doing," Shannon explained.
"So… kinda like when you sneak a peek through a pub window to check there isn't a fight going on in there before you go in?" Erne asked.
"Precisely!" Shannon shot back, pointing an enthusiastic finger at Erne. "And it turns out that our L-60 tanks are the perfect ones for this sort of task!" There were whoops and cheers that greeted this statement, although it was not clear why.
"So, let's practice this today with the L-60s," Shannon said to more cheers. Once they had died down a bit, Annalee, the team's fiddler, raised her hand.
"Please commander, what happens if the other team does reconnaissance on us?" she asked.
"Ah, now this is a very good question," Shannon replied. There were sage nods of appreciation at Annalee's clever questioning. "It's important to be on the lookout for the other team's reconnaissance. If our main force thinks the enemy has discovered it when we don't want them to, it is important to move. So when the enemy main force arrives in the place where we're not, we can fire on them from the place where we are. Make sense?"
There were some nods but also some scratching of heads.
Erne spoke up again. "So, that's like letting your mates know that there's some people looking for a fight heading to the pub, so you can all jump them in an alley and give them a good kicking before they get there?"
"Er, yeah… kind of," Shannon agreed, wondering wherever Erne could get such a comparison from.
"So…" she said, addressing the wider team. "Let's put this into practice. The L-60s will perform reconnaissance and report back to the main force," she instructed.
"Who's the enemy?" asked a girl called Finn. "We only have three tanks."
"Ah," Shannon said. She hadn't thought this through, but wasn't going to let the team know that. "I tell you what - I'll be the enemy!" she said. "Clare will take one of the other vehicles and act as our main force, but she won't need to do much as we're only practicing the reconnaissance part of things today. Okay? So, we'll change round quite often, but first crews will be…" Shannon assigned the members of the team to the three tanks, choosing them at random as was Shamrock's way. The actual roles within the tanks were for the crew to decide, using whatever method they saw fit, including 'rock, paper, scissors'.
In a short while they were ready, with Shannon commanding the Mk D and acting as the enemy. She had found a top hat from somewhere and was wearing it along with a piece of dark material as a cloak in an attempt to look more villainous.
Clare had also excelled herself. She had brought one of the team's more unusual vehicles out of the garage. It was a Leyland armoured car; a chunky, slab-sided, six-wheeled thing with the turret of an L-60. She had also affixed some opened-out cardboard boxes to the side, partially covering the rear road wheels, and had written 'TANK' in large letters on them so there could be no doubt about what this vehicle was supposed to be.
Practice, in the main, went well. They stopped regularly to rotate the crews so everyone who wanted to got a turn of commanding one of the L-60s. Most were able to scout out Shannon, in her capacity as the enemy, although when it was Laune's turn she spent 20 minutes stalking a bush and waiting for it to move. There was also an embarrassing moment when Maigue, who was driving the Mk D at the time, reversed it between two trees that were growing close together and got it wedged.
The obligatory washing of the tanks, a rough-and-tumble and an evening of relaxing and merriment in 'The Harp' followed the training session, so it wasn't until the next morning that Clare and Shannon were able to look again at the invitation they had received.
They were both crammed into the cupboard that Shannon called her office when Clare picked up the very expensive-looking envelope that the invite had been delivered in and peered inside. There were some other pieces of paper in there which she fished out and studied.
"Have you looked at these?" she asked her commander.
"Yes," Shannon replied, even though she had really only glanced at them.
"There's a programme, like a timetable of sorts, for the match. Welcome; tea and coffee; speeches; then the match. Did you know about this?" Clare asked.
"Sure," answered Shannon. "What of it? It sounds nice, if a bit unnecessary."
"It says 'speeches from both commanders' here," Clare pointed out.
Shannon shrugged. "So, I'll write a speech. It'll be fine!" she said, spreading her hands. "A speech is just something you've written down before you say it. How hard can it be?"