Disclaimer and Notes of Ownership: I do not own the Gundam Franchise, or any of the characters from said franchise. If I did, I would probably use the massive fortunes resulting from that to develop real-life mobile suits and conquer the world, with a corresponding level of glee and madness.
("He actually drew up plans for it too.")
I do however, own all the technical designs labeled with PGAT, XHMA, MMA, XSBF, XABF, PMU, MLWS, CI, CPH and SDDGN in their alphanumeric designations, along with a portion of those labeled XGAT. I own Jack Kagizaki's mind, body and soul, as well as those of Captain Gary Shimizu and his Shoki Team. Along with that goes the Abaddons, the Grigori, and good ol' David Sariel. Drake too. If anyone should use any of these without my permission...well, I'll mope. And then I'll find you and crush you underneath a tank. Filled with high-explosives. And all the mopey, whiny Gundam protagonists that didn't grow something resembling a spine.
Similarly, Velshard has dibs on almost the entire line of replacement units for ZAFT, excluding one. He has administrative privileges over the Noctoraptor (Enhanced), Ferox, and Verin Gundams. He also has ownage over the horrifying abomination or deification (depends on your point of view) of all that's good and pure in this universe, otherwise called the Tetsujin. The beings of Andrew Victor Payne, Karlton William Hertz, and the Van Dalygon family are belong to him.
The Megalodon design belongs to...well Kojiro Kun gave me the idea.
The ZONGS design belongs to animefan29.
00virtuezero's contributions include the Gundams Repulse and Outlaw, and his OCs Wesley Mercis, and Michael Archer.
Gundam Seed: Killer's Realm
Phase 29: Civility, Part 1
JOSH-A, Alaska
March 29, 71 CE
5:29 AM (Local Time)
David Sariel, second-in-command of the Watcher Special Operations Group, expert intelligence officer and overall master of hand-to-hand combat, was currently dressed in an athletic undershirt and combat pants, both liberally soaked in sweat. This was due to the sparring match he found himself in, against his friend and superior's daughter, Lena Abaddon.
Most other such military friendships would see the officer kindly and cautiously tutoring his friend's offspring in order to teach her how to defend herself.
Sariel, however, found himself desperately fighting to keep ahead of Lena, which considering the fact that she was a product of the Extended Natural Research Division that modified humans to be more effective in combat against Coordinators, only made sense. It made even more sense considering that, really, she was a Coordinator as well.
It still irked him that he was being worked over by a teenage girl.
Out of nowhere, Lena launched a haymaker at his face with speed beyond his, and would most likely have smashed his nose against his face if not for David's startled duck, which he followed by snapping a kick at Lena's elbow. Quicker than vipers, the girl pulled her arm back and launched a spinning kick at David, the latter ducking under the blow and darting forward to strike as she landed back on her feet.
Muruta Azrael, walking through the door with full intentions to talk to the elder Abaddon, was startled when Sariel flew through the air to slam with a sickening crunch into the wall next to him. The tycoon stared as, with a sound like a squeaky toy, the highly experienced and skilled intelligence officer was peeled off of the wall by gravity to fall onto the ground. After a second, Azrael decided to ignore the spectacle, instead walking past Sariel and Lena without another glance, to Edward, who'd been watching the two from the benches.
The Vice-Admiral regarded his unofficial superior with a calculatingly blank stare, dark blue eyes boring into the blond-headed leader of Blue Cosmos.
"I have a mission for you Abaddon." Muruta said cooly, proffering a file. "ZAFT is set to attack here soon." Abaddon's mask dissolved as he frowned, swiftly recalling the intelligence reports he and Sariel, along with his daughter and Thatcher, had read. Most of the reports, made by various agents placed in the PLANTS, had pinpointed Panama and the Mass Driver there as the target. It made sense, as ZAFT would likely want to prevent the OMNI Space Forces from getting reinforcements and such from the surface, allowing ZAFT to leisurely smash the Fleets into so much orbiting debris.
"They played us." Sariel growled from his position on the floor, only for the sound to turn into a 'meep' when Lena poked him in the side with her boot.
"Most certainly." Abaddon said as he took the file and began flipping through the pages. As he went, his brow furrowed deeper and deeper. "It doesn't have anything on the source."
"Need-to-know, Vice-Admiral." The blond-headed leader of Blue Cosmos said. "Suffice it to say that the Joint Chiefs are satisfied by the veracity of the information." As he exited the room, Azrael could almost feel the chill of the three glares directed at his back.
Alone now, the three Watchers commanders huddled around the file as Edward paged through it, each one scanning it thoroughly, regardless of their orientation to it. After a few minutes, David straightened, a scowl on his face.
"Something's not kosher here." He hissed, eyes darting back and forth. Edward recognized this as one of Sariel's infamous 'bad feelings'. "They want us to stick around and help defend the base while they evacuate equipment and personnel? It's at least two weeks until the attack. Why not just abandon it period?"
"And look at the force allotments." Lena said, jabbing a finger at a section. "They're all Eurasians."
"We're to retreat at a signal?" Abaddon read out loud. He frowned then, as the entire situation gave him a profound sense of deja vu.
- Quis est a Iuguolo nisi a Iuguolo? -
Pilot's Quarters, Grigori, JOSH-A
It took a few weeks, but Michael Archer, one of two recent additions to the Watchers and G-Project pilot was happy to say that his pinky had healed remarkably well, and his ankle was back in tip-top shape. Of course, he still had to deal with his room-mate...
"That's what you get for flirting with disaster Archer." Wesley Mercis said from his seat at his desk. "Not only is she the Vice-Admiral's daughter, but you said you got the feeling that he wanted to rip off your arm a few weeks ago. It would probably be prudent to listen to that sixth sense of yours every once in a while."
"You, my spiky-haired friend, need to get laid. BIG TIME." That elicited a harsh glare from Wes, to Micheal's grinning pleasure. "Besides, we're in the big leagues here. Sure, I may suffer broken bones and such, but it'll be worth it in the end. Special Forces rules are extremely lax after all."
"I'll be sure to leave flowers at your grave." Wes shot back.
"Ensigns!" Came the decidedly feminine, yet somehow frightening, voice of Lena Abaddon. They both digested the sound for a second before instinctively darting of the bed, out of the chair, and out the door to form up in their civvie clothes before their Commander. The moment they saw her, Wes could tell there was going to be more trouble. The BCPU Pilot uniform, while basically a variation on the standard piloting uniform OMNI mobile armor pilots used, was a bit more body-conforming, primarily due to the fact that some of the augmentations made BCPU's tougher than the average Natural, allowing a lessening of padding.
Thus, Lena's curvaceous figure and assets were... well apparent to the two Ensigns.
Wes shuddered at the thoughts of what his partner might do. And then he saw how Lena looked at the two of them.
"Today, we are going to have some fun." Commander Lena Abaddon said, with quite a venomous grin and the tone of a rapist. "The schedule is a training simulator course against the combat data we have of the Augury, with Kira Yamato as its pilot. You two are going in on your G-Units."
For a while, the assignment of the day seemed great. Simple simulator courses? Both Wes and Michael ate those for breakfast.
They did, however, vastly underestimate the abilities of even a simulated Augury pieced together from combat recordings.
Simulator Room, Simulation A-779C-10
"Wes, dodge left, dodge left, he's got that cannon aimed right at you!" This was followed by the supersonic screech of more than half a metric ton of hyper-accelerated shell passing by a mobile suit's audio-receivers, as the simulated Augury's linear shot just scraped by the simulated Repulse's torso armor.
In his simulator cockpit, Wes swore to heaven above and hell below as he struggled with the standardized controls to bring his Gundam's Ares Beam Cannon up, trying to target the fast-moving prototype Gundam. This specific version of the Augury was the black winged one that Commander Abaddon had disposed of. Originally, neither of the two friends and comrades had thought much of this feat.
Now though, confronted with the cycling plasma blade of its sword and the ridiculous muzzle velocity of its shield-mounted linear cannon, they actually appreciated their commander's feat, and was now glad Lena had destroyed it and its pilot.
This did not make them feel better about facing it in simulations, especially considering the fact that these simulator cockpits did their very best to perfectly copy what the pilot actually felt during real battle. The construct was mounted on a giant arm that jerked to and from to approximate the rapid movement changes and physical hits, and a rapidly changing temperature control unit to simulate heat one would feel from near misses from beam weapons.
For this simulation, both Wesley and Michael were piloting data-reconstructed versions of their Gundams, the XGAT-117 Repulse and the XGAT-123 Outlaw, respectively. The Repulse was a unit with aerodynamic-designed curved armor, with feather-like plates of Chobham armor on its shoulders and a birdlike sensor crest on its head. Its limbs and head were painted silver, while chest and shoulders were navy-blue trimmed with black. A large attachment to its backpack added twin enormous SCRamjet Boosters, as well as four extra electrostatic ion thrusters and an experimental magnetic field repulsor.
The Outlaw was blockier than the Repulse, with thicker leg structure, angular armor, and a head that incorporated a telephoto multispectrum camera into the crux of the V-fin sensors. The coloring scheme was similar to the Repulse, only with white limbs and faceplate while the head, torso, and shoulders were black, with the chest and waist trimmed with red.
Muttering lowly in his helmet, Wes fired off a beam from the Ares, the Hyper-Impulse plasma projectile lancing through the air to intercept the Augury. Or, actually its shield. Then the beast accelerated and smashed right into the Repulse. In the next instant, the Augury's enormous beam-saw sword was raised high and sliced down, set to bisect the new Gundam. Only the timely interception of the blade with a beam saber saved Wes from an ignominious, simulated end.
Which still had a large chance of happening, as the cycled magnetic fields of the Black Augury's sword ever so slowly consumed the plasma of the Repulse's beam saber and incorporated it into its own beam blade, making the edge denser, hotter, and more destructive, and pushing both beams closer to the Repulse.
Michael, in his Outlaw Gundam, about a kilometer away from the air-dueling G-Units, readied the 95mm High-Energy Beam Gun mounted on the left side of its backpack, the long-barreled weapon extending out for a total of five meters. The plasma charge built up, until Michael pulled the trigger, firing a turquoise-colored beam that trailed electricity in its ionized path. The projectile struck one of the Augury's propulsion wings head on, melting through the already heated alloys and releasing a large amount of plasma into the air as the fuel lines ruptured and spewed clouds of ions and free electrons.
Smartly, the computer-controlled Gundam released the Repulse from its blade-lock, instead choosing to fall towards the land below. On the way down, the Augury ejected both thruster-wings, keeping the main backpack, and landed heavily on its feet. The area the simulation took place in was a large and dense forest in Eastern Europe, with trees bigger than Mobile Suits in some cases, which provided heavy cover, even for a Gundam. And it was dark.
So, when the Augury moved into a crouched run, it was difficult to tell where the Gundam was, even with the sounds of it felling trees and crushing tree trunks. Michael paced the Outlaw along the forest's edge, while Wes and the Repulse kept above, looking down with the Ares ready. After about two minutes, Michael unfolded the weapon on the Outlaw's other shoulder, a 350mm gunlauncher.
"Linking my feed over to you." Wes reported. The sensor 'crest' of the Repulse was a general all-type suite, capable of gathering information through sonic vibration, radar, and other types of fairly mundane sensory systems. Not quite the most powerful of such systems, the sensor crest still had much in the way of short-range detection. Combined with the rather more powerful sensors of the Outlaw though, they were plenty to track and target the Augury.
"Yes!" Michael crowed as the outline of the Augury appeared on the Outlaw's sensor screen, moving at a brisk pace of approximately 57 kilometers per hour. "Eat ionized napalm!" A single pull of the trigger fired the shell, launching it in a ballistic arc to impact on its target over a kilometer away. The impact-detonator in the shell's tip ignited a mix of various highly-flammable gases and chemicals, along with napalm and magnesium. A brief, secondary layer of heat-resistant and reinforced material kept the resultant thermal energy contained long enough to convert the mixture into a high-temperature plasma, which exploded outward, setting the forest aflame, and practically disintegrated most of the matter at its impact point. Which, in fact, was the left shoulder of the Augury.
Both of the Ensigns grinned as the simulation portrayed a likely scenario of the napalm/plasma melting through the Gundam's torso to its energy and propulsive systems, including plasma conversion chambers and magnetic acceleration systems, causing much of the Augury to expand, explode, and a few other words that begin with 'ex-'.
"Hmph. Good work you two." Lena's voice came in over the simulator speakers, bringing a grin to Michaal's face and a smile to Wes's. "Now, let's see how you deal with this." The Augury reappeared, again with the black-colored winged pack that made it so infamous in its latter period of existence. And then, another one, this time equipped with the melee-based Cavalier pack resolved into existence. Then the heavy armaments Juggernaut pack showed up, equipped on yet a third one.
"Oh no..." Wesley said, resolving this enhanced training situation with his earlier feeling. Out of nowhere, he in the Repulse was smashed out of the sky by a winged blur of an Augury blitzing about with the Angelos pack. As the Repulse fell, entire platoons of Augurys shimmered into the simulation, swarming around either of the two Gundams.
"Crap."
- Quis est a Iuguolo nisi a Iuguolo? -
189 Kilometers North of JOSH-A, Alaska
1 Hour Later
"I'm not in the mood for your pathetically stale excuses! I told you I wanted the system brought up to my specifications now!" Azrael growled, appearing somewhat like a rampaging teenager in mood.
"And I told you that it would take time to compile the data and rewrite the programs to compensate for the gross differences in mass and energy, as well as to modify the control programs to accommodate the different armaments." Drake's voice hissed, gas mask laboring to extract as much recyclable gas from his exhalations.
The two were in Drake's complex, specifically a room dug as deep under the permafrost as could in the three years since Drake had joined Blue Cosmos. It served as his home and office, a stuffy and warm room about fifty meters square, with four enormous display screens serving as walls, with twenty-five column-like data caches and computer interfaces rising from the floor to the ceiling, where they connected to and controlled every piece of electronics in the base. In the center was the pillar serving as the elevator shaft connecting the room to the rest of the complex. The south-eastern quadrant was sectioned off from the rest by thickened titanium bars, with a single solid door in the western part of this 'cage'. The lights in that area were dimmed.
"Well hurry it up! The Mephistopheles must be ready for Operation Retribution! On Earth Orb is a pathetically small island nation, it's only claim to fame being its technological advancement! In space it's a juggernaut of industrial power! We need the Mephistopheles to crush it!" Muruta fairly growled. The pair were in the northern part of the room, Drake facing the screen and Azrael facing him. At the moment, the screen was scrolling through enormous amounts of binary computer code, the alterations appearing too swiftly to see before the screen switched to another segment of the system Drake was working on.
"Azrael, when you practically triple the mass and energy consumption of a warship, and then switch a large portion of its armaments over to a technology only recently completed, that hasn't even been prototyped, caution must be taken in order to ensure that nothing unfortunate - like, say, the overloading of the reactor in trying to provide enough energy- happens."
"You made that technology!"
"And when utilizing a completely new propulsion technology - or rather, an old propulsion technology brought back to stunning life, one must carefully simulate the effects of it before programming a system to modulate it's output! And while on this subject, I must note the sheer insanity of deriving this technology straight from these specific plans rather than going back through national data banks for the original project plans and developing straight through those." Drake continued, ignoring Azrael's growing protests and complaints. "Still, I assure you, the Mephistopheles' operation system will be finished, downloaded onto a heavily secured data storage unit, and delivered into orbit long before Operation Retribution launches. And if you would please, leave me to my work."
The businessman/terrorist stood there for a moment, staring at Drake and making subtle throttling motions behind the engineer, before he retreated to the elevator, fuming. As he drew closer to the shaft, and the enormous cage, a sound that seemed like the even mixture of a crocodile's hiss and a wolf's growl, emanated from the area, and almost stopped Muruta short, before the head Blue Cosmonaut powered past the fear the sound inspired and entered the elevator, hitting the button that would start him on his extended journey back to the surface, through a varied array of elevator shafts and other passive defenses.
The growling/hissing continued, until Drake motioned toward the beast in the cage calmingly. Then, the viewscreen blacked out, the program code disappearing, before reactivating to show a face.
"That's good. He doesn't seem to suspect you." The man spoke.
"An irony, Mr. Bogeyman. They need me too much to think about how true my reasons for aiding them may be." Drake replied. He moved away from the terminal to the door of the cage, the tattered fragments of his clothes trailing from the belts and buckles. "In the end, if they should decide that they do not need me after I provide them with the Mephistopheles' programs, they may begin to suspect. But it's too late now."
- Quis est a Iuguolo nisi a Iuguolo? -
A/N: I'm back!
("Let me guess: You took an extra week because you couldn't remember the japanese version?")
Of course not!
("For future reference, it's tadaima")
Whatever. So anyway, a lot happening here in this Phase. Abaddons' are getting antsy, and Sariel is getting his 'feelings'. The Watcher's training is stepping up a notch, and foreshadowing occurs in the den of the Dragon.
("Every vacation you take, you come back trying to sound like one of those professional authors. Or, failing that, those guys on TV shows who go 'last time, on such-such")
In any event, after the end of this arc, we should be dropping back into the war full-on.
("Weren't you going to mention why you took a week off?")
Ah yes. My birthday present to myself. I can now buy the more entertaining video games without an adult accompanying me...as soon as I acquire an ID or driver's license.
Now, onto replies.
G. Wagers: I don't suppose this is considered plot advancement, is it?
Velshard: Why Sariel, specifically?
00virtuezero: I hate to say it, but I think Michael and Wesley are devolving more into the comedy of the Watchers. Also, if you don't mind, I'd like to modify the Repulse and Outlaw more.
As for Abaddon's sister, that's going to be a good story in the future.
OK.
Ah yes...The two Jacks. Well, imagine how much more battlefield humor we'll have, huh?
You're gonna have to be more specific. There's a lot of dead folks in that family.
Alex Yamato: He promises more, and he promises more awesomesauce lathered on top.
You have to understand how frustrating it can be for programmer most computer companies would kill to possess when one of what promises to be a work on the scale of Leonardo Da Vinci starts to break down for what would appear to you to be no apparent reason.
hahahaha: Technically, they're seperate for each model, but yeah, I thought it was funny.
Huheh: Thank you.
Knightmare Gundam of Ni