trans_9 | It's.... It's several Gundams?! [OPEN]

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It's.... It's several Gundams?! [OPEN]

Setsuna didn't stay long at the Meet n' Greet. He mostly milled about in the background, listening to a handful of conversations here and there. He wasn't sure what to make of the whole spiel about worlds having been destroyed, but he'd discover the truth about that in time. He had more important things to worry about.

Eventually, he managed to pick up several key words, being "Hangar" and "Suits", and he figured he'd find his Gundam there, or some clue about where they took it.

He rushed there, finding it open for anyone to access. He wandered through, looking around at the various vehicles, planes, and craft. He eventually spotted something that made his jaw drop, though.

Exia was there, fully repaired, but lacking a GN drive to power it. Not surprising, considering that the 00 Gundam was right next to it (which contained both Exia's and 0 Gundam's GN Drives), complete with the 0-Raiser already docked to it. But what was shocking was the number of similar yet different mobile suits surrounding both of his.

"...other... Gundams?"

For someone who practically worshiped his mobile suit, and knew there were only a mere handful even remotely like it, this was definitely a shock. Though, upon a slightly closer inspection, he noticed that none of the others had GN Drives of their own. Were these true Gundams from other worlds? Or were those mere knock offs of his own?

"How is this possible?"

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Kira stepped into the little mechanized loop that lowered him down from the cockpit to the ground, and then noticed the other figure. He seemed younger than the two of them - as old as Kira had been in the first war? Maybe - and the Strike Freedom pilot offered him a glance.

"Ah... do you pilot, too?"

Duo's head tipped back to glance at Kira, and he greeted the other pilot with a friendly smile. "You could say that. This one is yours, huh?" The guy seemed softspoken and friendly enough, but Duo knew better than to let something like that speak for itself.

His glance instead flicked back to the suit, from the beam sabers at the suit's hips over its wings, folded up. "Armed to the teeth, huh. Whatsit called?"

A nod, and Kira returned Duo's smile with a muted one of his own. "I fly it, yes," he confirmed. Of the two, he seemed much friendlier - in a way, he almost reminded Kira of a young Mwu.

"It's the ZGMF-X20A - the Strike Freedom." And even if its armor was all gray at the moment and lacking the characteristic whites and reds, he was as fond of it as he could be of any mobile suit. "Which one is yours?"

"Strike Freedom..." He glances it over some more, noting some of the design similarities to other suits in the hangar. Then, were most of these from this guy's world....?

Duo nods his head towards the darkest Gundam in the hangar- the Deathscythe Hell stood in operative form, wings folded over itself to hide most of its body. "Deathscythe Hell," he replied succinctly. "Hate to have to ask this right off the bat, but how much are my buddy an' I gonna be fightin' here? I take it you've been here for awhile, don't got the 'confused and lost' look about you."

Kira followed his gaze - sure enough, it wasn't any machine he knew, but it certainly looked enough like a G-series unit for his sake. He wondered whether the name 'Deathscythe Hell' had preceded its dark appearance or vice versa.

Kira glanced over at the younger pilot, his face becoming more somber. "I've been here for about half a year. We had our first battle three or four months ago... but it was a large one."

"So they're not frequent?" He grimaced all the same. It wasn't necessarily that he doubted the whole bit he'd been fed about this ship, its mission, his new mission- but all of it still seemed too surreal to let it sink in just yet.

"And here I thought I'd be able to kick back and retire! Yeah, sure figures." Duo shook his head and ran a hand through his bangs, turning his back to Kira to look Deathscythe over again.

If Kira was paying close enough attention, he might have heard the soft mutter under Duo's breath. "How many times do I gotta become Shinigami....? Tch."

Turning back to Kira, Duo stretched his arms behind his head. "Well, guess I better get used to it real quick, huh? Duo Maxwell's the name. If this's what's gotta be done for peace, might as well be us doin' it, huh?" He cracked a surprisingly cheerful grin.

"No, they aren't," he shook his head. "We've been on more than a few missions, but this was the only one where we met them directly. We weren't even close to prepared."

His expression softened. "I'm sorry, but... we might all have to fight here, if we have the strength to do so." He understood the desire to retire from warfare more than you knew, Duo.

"Kira Yamato. It's good to meet you, even under these circumstances... At least with our mobile suits, we stand a chance at being able to make a difference, right?"

"That bad, huh..." Duo's mouth set in a grim line. He didn't expect when he'd gotten the whole rundown from the Meet N Greet that he'd just be sitting back here sipping soda. It never seemed to be that way, anyway.

He returned Kira's smile. "Guess when they said 'world destroying' they weren't kidding. So what are these things like? If me an' 'scythe can help, you bet we'll be willing."

"There should be a guide about the different types of them on the network," Kira informed the boy. "The ones we saw in person... there were fighter-types that were very fast but not very well-armored, and gigantic carrier-class ships that we couldn't damage no matter what we tried."

"There were more of them on the planet's surface, though."

Duo folded his arms across his chest, brow furrowed and mouth tilted in thought. "Then there's at least good data on them. Were they in the midst of attacking the planet when you encountered them, or did they ambush it?"

He glances at Deathscythe's armaments. He had been in the process of disarming him, since they were going to be sent into the sun- and he hadn't even bothered to rearm him too much for the Mariemaia incident, since the beam saber was enough to deal with the Serpents- but now he had a feeling he'd be needing the buster shield.

"What do you guys do when you need to reload missiles and fix armor? I take it you don't just have raw, processed gundanium alloy lying around."

"We were there on shore leave," Kira said after a moment's thought. "They attacked the planet without warning... but it didn't seem like they knew we were there at first."

He quirked an eyebrow at Duo at the pilot's question. "Stacy has some things stockpiled, and we were able to resupply before the attack, but..."

"...what's gundanium alloy?"

"Do they know about us? --Well, dumb question, they do now. Did they know about you guys then?" If they hadn't, well, there went their chances of guerrilla attacks...

Duo quirked a brow. "What, you mean your suit's not a Gundam? Sure looks like one- at least, the basic design is the same as the one all the old kooks used, so I figured..."

"I don't know," Kira admitted. "If they knew that we existed, they didn't know we were there at the time."

Kira looked back up at the Freedom. "A Gundam," he repeated. "...where I'm from, that's just a nickname I gave it based on the acronym for the OS it used. Nobody else calls them that."

"The OS, huh? Where I come from it's for the armor- any MS made from gundanium alloy is called a Gundanium Mobile Suit, or Gundam for short." Duo rubbed the back of his head. Weird coincidences.. and only getting weirder. "Then your armor's just titanium alloy?"

The OS... Something occurred to Duo for a moment, but he didn't feel up to asking. If he was wrong, it would be too much to give away, anyway. "What's the OS?" he asked instead.

"It's Phase Shift armor overlaid on a titanium-based alloy, yes," the pilot acknowledged. So that was why they were called Gundams in this other boy's world, was it? Was the name "Gundam" that common, then? Was he the odd one out here?

"The OS? It's the Operation System - the computer that translates the motions of the pilot to the actions of the mobile suit. Or... did you mean something else?"

Duo chuckled. "I was thinkin' a little more specifically. I've seen some.... funky OS's out there, let's just say. Is there a specific reason it's got its own name?"

"Phase Shift armor...? That's a new one. What's that?"

He paused for a moment. "The variation that the Freedom uses stands for Generation Unsubdued Nuclear Drive Assault Module - that's the one used by generation of nuclear-powered mobile suits." It had always sounded like a silly name to him, but he hadn't been the one to name it.

"With PS armor, an electric current runs through the entire suit providing a molecules-thin shield above the physical armor to protect it. A strong enough hit can overpower the shield, but otherwise minor blows will just drain the battery."

"That's why it looks so gray and colorless right now; the PS isn't enabled," Kira explained.

"Huhn. And it's the basic OS for these suits...." To Duo, it seemed bizarre that a mobile suit would be powered by anything but a compact fusion reactor.

Duo began circling around Freedom again, getting into all the tech-talk. "--Then, it's a beam deflector?" Duo grinned. Sounded familiar- but then, all Gundanium alloy suits had some degree of beam particle deflection... This must have been their answer to that.

"You mean, you don't have a paintjob on it?"

"Not all of them," Kira corrected. "Only the ones that have an NJC-equipped compact reactor instead of a battery."

Kira walked with him, looking up at the familiar figure. "Not exactly. It works better against kinetic weaponry than it does beam weaponry; it makes it easier to take minor or glancing hits without wearing down the internal systems over time."

"And no, we don't. PS armor changes the suit's appearance depending on the frequency of the electrical current. You could call it a temporary paint job, if you wanted."

"Huh. Nifty," Duo mumbled eloquently, apparently too intent on looking the machine over to come up with much else to say about that.

"Are those wings for the output of multiple vernier thrusters, or issit something else?" Duo asked, gesturing to the folded forms of the wings. 'scythe's were more like shields than wings, Wing ZERO's were full of verniers... but these didn't quite look like either.

"Ah... it's something else," Kira offered. "They're actually DRAGOONs... remote-controlled attack drones equipped with beam cannons. They aren't usable inside atmosphere, though - then, they help increase aerial maneuverability when deployed."

"Attack drones? Are they pilot-controlled, or AI-controlled?" Duo had never had a good experience with AI mobile weapons, but he'd never heard of remote controlled beam cannons, either.

As if suddenly becoming more self-aware, Duo chuckled. "Sorry if I'm askin' too many questions. Feel free to shut me up any time."

"It's all right," the pilot shook his head with a reserved smile. "We're on the same side, aren't we? It's important to know what we're all capable of."

"I guess I'd say that it's a bit of both? Ultimately, the pilot gives them orders, but the AI helps, and it makes it easier to split your focus in the middle of a battle."

"Heh, guess so." Boy, it sure did feel good to have someone around that wasn't a total jerkwad. Well, aside from Quatre.

"Then they're programmable.. What's their power output like? Beam rifle? More, less?"

That's what you get for being friends with Heero and Wufei, Duo. "Around that, yes - maybe a bit less, but not by much. They're more than capable of taking out a target on their own." And with eight of them, that's a lot of targets to take out.

It's.... It's several Gundams?! [OPEN]

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