We're going to the MOON!

Beta'd by Sesparra

After the relentless rush of everything that had happened since I woke up on Saturday, the fact that no one else had any heavy conversations or deep revelations for me for the rest of the day was a little bit of a relief. Even Lasciel was quiet as I pressed her coin to her page in the Ammonomicon and banished it back to wherever the book lived when it wasn't on hand.

School on Monday was likewise calm, although I knew that this was less reprieve and more preparatory time. I made the best I could of it, which wasn't saying much- there's not a whole lot a middle school child can get up to that would prepare them to stand up to a millennia-old supernatural baddie, even one with the blessing of the Celestial Forge, and that was still further reduced by the fact that I had to work around classmates and teachers. Still, I managed to use my gun magic on the wand that I'd finished yesterday, once I was sure that it had settled into whatever final form it would take after being imbued with Soulfire, and though I hadn't tested it out yet, I knew that it would be something that Nicodemus wouldn't be able to expect.

Or, at least, that was the hope.

To be entirely honest, this kind of situation was well outside my comfort zone even setting aside my last contact with Nicodemus- no workshop access, no proper tools, minimal support or prep time, and just a handful of foci, and the bullshit cheat that was the Celestial Forge required the kind of preparation that I'd never be able to get done before Nicodemus pulled the trigger on whichever scheme he was trying to pull off this time.

I was improvising, and I didn't have half as many of the tools I liked to riff off of when I did so. The fact that Shiro and Sanya were here did help, but they weren't infallible, as my memories of attending their funerals in the future-that-wasn't could testify to.

Still, I couldn't afford to be so negative about things. Last time there had only been one Wizard, and inasmuch as Harry was a hell of a fighter, he was still fairly early on in his career and hadn't really hit his stride as a combat mage in the way he would after he'd been given the Gray Cloak. I'd had nigh on thirty years to his decade-ish, and even though I'd come to rely on enchanted items, I did have more than a few tricks up my sleeves even when empty-handed, plus I understood the Knights of the Blackened Denarius far more than Harry could wheedle out of Bob and whatever minor spirits he could ask for help in the time he'd had to do so.

So, when I went home after school, I went directly to the tree house out back to see what I couldn't squeeze out of the gun form of my new wand.

The magic of the Gungeon (whatever that was) had done a real number on the thing. Before I'd turned it into a gun, it looked more or less like a dowel with runes carved in irregular intervals along the sides (with space for more, naturally). Now, though, it was the envy of any stage magician. The main shaft of the implement was straighter than Euclid's ruler, varnished black enough to pass for pitch, and the runes had been rearranged in a pair of counterclockwise spirals around the shaft, one set of delicate symbols picked out in mother-of-pearl that matched the two white caps at the end while the other gleamed with an inner light like half-solidified obsidian.

I followed some instinct, spinning it almost like a pen, and quicker than I should have been able to see by any right, it split open, components seeming to appear out of thin air and spin around lengths of wood until in my hand I held a long-barreled revolver, the shaft of the wand taking the place of the barrel and the mother-of-pearl end caps serving as a handle. The cylinder gleamed silver as if under the full moon, and the whole implement gave off a mysterious air, as if the true nature of the weapon was unknowable to mortalkind.

Carefully, I raised the pistol in a Weaver stance, pointed it at an empty patch of rocks in the backyard, and pulled the trigger once, then twice.

The first shot streaked out like someone had dropped quicksilver into water, splattering against the ground before pulling itself together into a bead of the liquid metal in a manner not unlike the T1000. The second, in contrast, seemed almost to not have done anything, before I looked closer and saw frost crawling out from a hole right next to the bead of metal.

I spun the pistol back into its wand configuration as the Forge flashed with brilliant light, then staggered as one of the pedestals rose and mushroomed out into a coat rack, with what looked like a lab coat over a blue-gray bodysuit hanging from it. Around it, smaller pedestals rose from the floor, containing all sorts of things- a gun, a boombox, a long boxy shape that I somehow knew was a spaceship, and more.

All of this I registered in hindsight, though, since I was a little bit too busy having first an implanted computer and then a whole bunch of knowledge shoved into my brain.

You'd almost think that the computer living rent-free in my brainwould be the bigger deal, but no, that was just a little bit of synesthesia, a moment of vertigo, and then it was fully integrated. The knowledge, on the other hand… well, getting my brain rewritten to be the equal of legendary polymath Catherine Halsey on top of having the understanding of a solid chunk of everything that went into the UNSC war machine, including the Infinity-class supercarrier was… well, I wouldn't recommend the experience, even if objectively knowing all this stuff was a good thing.

"Fascinating," said Lasciel, earning a mental glare as she scrutinized the ship.

The ship that I recognized as the UNSC Future Witness, the Gladius-class corvette I'd had tasked to me during the war and- wait, no, I'd never served in the military. Had I?

Well, apparently, I had the memories of doing so, and, more importantly, I knew with absolute certainty that it was stationed on the opposite side of the moon for whenever I'd be able to make my way to it.

Now that would be a big ask. NASA didn't have the infrastructure to send a shuttle out that far even if I tried, and I couldn't put together a good enough ship to do so in the near future with all the resources I didn't have, plus I didn't want to imagine how much of a pain in the ass it would be to find a Way to somewhere that I could get to it in a somewhat reasonable timeframe. If only I had access to one of those Forerunner… slipspace… portals…

Well, now that I thought about it, in principle, it wasn't all that far off from opening a Way to the Nevernever, albeit technologically induced, but if I just reframed my mindset like so…

The idea clicked solidly, and while I didn't think I'd be able to get all the way out to the Ark, or even as far as Pluto, the Future Witness should be more than within range of…

I all but flew down the ladder and burst through the back door, catching Sanya in mid-bite of sandwich. "Hey, Sanya, wanna go see a spaceship?"

As was only natural, he jumped at the chance to see the Future Witness, once I explained to him what I was talking about. After reassuring Mom that yes, all my homework was done (I'd managed to slap it together on the bus ride home from school, what I hadn't already done in class), I dragged him out to the back of the house so that I didn't disturb any of the Jawas with the portal.

"Alright, so, ready?"

"To see a legitimate spaceship? Absolutely." Sanya's teeth practically gleamed in the afternoon sunlight.

"Alrighty then. Aparturum!" I slashed my wand at the air, and a spinning vortex of blues and violets appeared in front of us.

Sanya raised an eyebrow, smile shrinking somewhat. "That is… not a normal Way. Where are we going?"

I felt my mouth stretch into a broad grin as one of the most famous lines known to man swam up through the sea of my memories to my mind. "We're taking one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Before he could do more than goggle at me, I seized his hand and dragged him through the slipspace portal and onto the bridge of the Future Witness.

The bridge was just like I remembered seeing it last, albeit without the crew, all hard edges and drab gray, with flickering blue-white screens around the edges of the room and the primary holotable in the middle of the bridge, spooled down in low power mode. As the portal winked closed, with me no longer actively maintaining it, I turned around and looked out the window, taking in the sight of the lunar landscape with something approaching nostalgia for a sight brand new to these eyes, and felt the deck's minute vibrations under my feet, harmonizing with the sound of the reactor's hum.

"Captain on deck," I said, mostly to myself, then jolted as an orchestral theme started up. At first, I thought it was coming from the holotable, and I turned around, but it was still inactive, and after a moment I realized that the source had moved with my head.

Feeling more than a little bit chagrined, I turned my focus inward, and yup, there it was, the boombox was playing.

A moment of focus turned the boombox off, and I took a moment to look through the rest of the items scattered around the primary pillar. The handgun was… a little bit on the nose, since I was checking out the gun my wand had turned into at the time, but the grenade was always going to be helpful, and the Future Witness spoke for itself. Beyond those, the boombox, and the little model of a brain with an implant peeking out of it, I felt like I was still missing something…

As I tried to reach for… whatever I was missing, Lasciel spoke up. "What is it, my host?"

I jolted, but the bodysuit and lab coat flashed blue, a helmet that I remembered seeing as ODST standard issue appearing at the foot of the stand, and I found myself wearing them both, taking an oversized step back and nearly tripping over myself after having changed from sneakers into full-on military-issue combat boots. I managed to recover, planting the other foot and turning so that I could manage to maneuver my leg to not be overextended, but the sound of my boots on the deck still got Sanya to turn around.

The Forge sputtered and failed to call anything up as he gaped. "Bozhe moi! What is that?"

"It's…" I frowned as the computer system in the bodysuit linked up with my implants, projecting a brief rundown of what exactly it could do directly onto my retinas. "Holy shit, this is fancy."

I turned to Sanya. "Right, so, this is a somewhat armored bodysuit and lab coat. The fancy shmancy stuff is that it's specced out for infiltration and recon. Take a gander at this!"

I triggered the active camo systems and grinned as the world dimmed, then re-brightened, VISR sensors on the collar of the bodysuit and coat compensating for the decreased lighting as the more advanced sensors started collecting their data to show me.

Sanya blinked languidly, then tilted his head sideways. "Are you actually not there, or just…" He waved his hand in my general direction. "Invisible?"

"Just invisible, I'm afraid," I said, switching off the active camo and shimmering back into existence. "This suit isn't that advanced, unfortunately." I shrugged. "I mean, if you gave me a team of researchers and a couple decades, maybe, but as it is, I just have to make do with invisible scout style ballistic armor in the bodysuit. Still, I've got plenty of pockets in the coat, and that's also ballistic treated."

"Very nice," he said, nodding appreciatively. "Now, ah, we are… where exactly?"

"Hm? Oh, right, that. We're in geosynchronous- lunasynchronous? orbit on the opposite side of the moon from the Earth. Let me just…" I reached for the holotable and woke it up, sending the hologram of a menu flickering into the air with a soft whine as the projectors warmed up after who knew how long inactive. A few hand gestures and taps later, and I pulled up a projected map of the Earth-Luna system over the top of the table. "Okay, so, see this little speck right here?" I asked, gesturing with my hand in a certain soft command that I'd set up within my first week working on the ship's bridge, and obligingly, the holoprojector turned up the luminosity on a tiny mote of light, almost small enough to mistake as a hovering particle of dust if not for the fact that the bridge was absolutely devoid of dust.

"I take it that's us?" asked Sanya.

"Nailed it," I responded. "I think…" I moved off to the side and pulled up another, smaller menu, then zoomed through two or three interfaces before finding what I was looking for. "Yup, we've got the same kind of reverse-engineered stealth systems on my suit on this ship, and they should be okay to keep the ship concealed to most forms of detection."

He raised an eyebrow. "Most forms?"

"I mean, it's not gonna stop, say, Selene from coming up to the moon and going 'hey, that's weird', or anyone else with Intellectus who really wants to know where we are, and if anyone's pointing, like, a gravitational sensor or neutrino detector at us, they might be able to tell that there's something there, but other than that, I can't think of any kind of spell or piece of tech that we've got on earth that can actually punch through Sangheili active camo plus enough conventional stealth methods to make anything except the old mark one eyeball completely useless," I said, offering him a shrug.

"I will… take it, I suppose?" Sanya looked more than a little bit overwhelmed.

"Good enough," I said. "Now then, time for the tour?"

"Yes, please."

And that's that!

Perks Earned:

Erudition (Halo - UNSC, 600CP): Ever since the rise of Dr. Catherine Halsey, many were on the lookout for who might become the next intellectual prodigy. Someone who was able to perform as well as she could, someone who could help turn the tide of the war. With this, that someone is now you. Your cognitive capabilities are on par with the good doctor now, making you exceptionally well-versed in nearly all modern human sciences while holding specialties in at least a few fields. Of course, thanks to that you are also rather exceptional at reverse-engineering technology, which allows you to do such things like obtain working knowledge of the mechanics behind Covenant technology and even begin to understand the 'hows' behind some of the mundane pieces of Forerunner technology currently littering the galaxy. Perhaps you could eventually reclaim them.

Soundtrack of the Stars (Halo - UNSC, Free): It is one thing to be told that you have to fight a war that appears outright impossible, but to do so with little in the way of morale or confidence boosters is effectively asking you to die. You really need something to help you out on that last part if you want to make it through this whole thing, which is why you have this freebie that allows you to have the entire Halo soundtrack at your disposal. Have appropriate themes playing in your head depending on the situation, or cue something up to feel amazing. This option is able to be toggled.

Standard Neural Interface (Halo - UNSC, Free): As the requirements of war and militarized technology moved forward, the requirements it puts upon its soldiers was likewise changed. This is one such example, being a brain implant that all members of the UNSC obtain upon entering service. It carries a multitude of functions, integrating with armor worn to provide a heads-up display directly into one's optic nerve instead of on the helmet screen while providing an IFF tag for allied soldiers. Such implants are small enough that there is no visible signs outside the body, and sometimes people have forgotten they even had it until its functions come up.

M6C Magnum (Halo - UNSC, Free): Something of a standard issue to the UNSC Marine forces, the M6C is a semi- automatic, recoil-operated, magazine-fed handgun that fires 12.7×40mm (.50 caliber) Semi-Armor- Piercing, High-Penetration rounds. While it does considerable amounts of damage towards flesh-based infantry, Covenant energy shielding might pose a problem and so this weapon is often relegated to a defensive role. If you wish, you may instead trade this for an M6C/SOCOM variant which integrates a sound suppressor, muzzle brake, and a VnSLS/V 6E smart linked 4× scope.

M9 Fragmentation Grenade (Halo - UNSC, Free): When you can't shoot them, blow them up. Coming with a hard metal casing that's meant to break apart upon the explosion, this grenade has a safety feature in that it must hit a hard surface after it has been primed before it can detonate, ensuring that it does not explode in the user's hand. It can also come with a 'spoon' so that it must leave the user's hand before it explodes as well. Either way, a small button on the 'handle' is the method of priming these grenades.

UNSC Marine Corps Battle Dress Uniform (Halo - UNSC, Free): The kind of armor you will generally see on the rank-and-file troopers, this model has seen a great deal of use and has been spotted since the early days of the Insurrection. It comes with a CH252 Helmet that has a basic heads-up display to keep track of ammunition and your targeting reticle along with a flashlight and radio system, strong boots and fatigues to keep one protected from the elements while having quite a few pockets to keep things in, and ballistics armor over the torso, shoulder and shin. Ballistic armor may optionally include thighs, groin, and forearms as well for the cautious types. This armor provides good resistance against ballistic ammunition but does little against Covenant plasma rounds. Perhaps you could become skilled at dodging oncoming fire. This armor comes in any camouflage color scheme of your choice.

Gladius-class Heavy Corvette (Halo - UNSC, Free): While this ship is more meant for patrols and security roles rather than an actual ship of war, the Gladius-class serves its function well. Its armaments are somewhat smaller than most ships as a result, carrying only one small Magnetic Accelerator Cannon and two Archer missile pods with six Rampart point-defense cannons, but it does come with an extensive sensor suite to scan for anomalies and actively track targets for other ships to find and utterly obliterate. Seeing as it's two hundred and forty-three meters in length however, it would be wise to simply retreat from any Covenant space presence. If you wish to purchase this ship a second time, it will cost 100CP.

Hoo boy, that's a lot. The BDU and Future Witness both have other subperks but I'm not putting them here, they're fully available on Spacebattles and Sufficientvelocity as of… probably a while ago since I'm gonna update the perk lists there after I write this (on June 23).

I'm also playing a tad bit fast and loose with the BDU but hey it's my story and it fits the vibe more this way anyways.

If you want to support me as a writer, I got me a Ko (fi) (https (:/) (/) ko (-) fi (/) lucifra) and a Pa tre on (https (:/) pa tre on .com (/) Lucifra), and you can see chapters a week early if you become a patron. (remove spaces and parentheses)

Speaking of which, my thanks to NotableRonin, Mtron, AntaeusTheGiant, Starfall20, Danielle, Ultama Omega, Asuran Fun, KOOLAID, Journeyman_Mike, Josef Haerle, Freddie Capps, James, Darkarma, TheCosyIntrovert, Allen Baker, Bailey Matutine, Mr Phantom, Thomas Vernet, Maleficarum, Conor Cooney and Ember for being patrons!

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That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!