Kay folks, lets do this!
== Cape Bono-Misaki Underground Base, Kyushu ==
Kambei "Pops" Shimada enters the scene at this point, having been tasked to courier the alien artifact from the Moon.
...The UI actually calls him "Pops". For the rest of the game, the UI will call our OC stand in "Pops". :3
The other main character who we didn't choose, is the one looking towards the moon with hope. Chitose, junior grade at the lab section of the Bono-Misaki Base.
Sbe's there to receive the goods from the test pilot playing FedEx delivery.
There's some faffing around about Pop's apparent afro-american 70's look. He's not actually born that way; just that for all of this universe's solar system travel, UV shielding has only been perfected enough to not fry a human on constant exposure - but not beyond that.
Kambei has that skin tone because he's been flying long periods in aerospace fighters that have a glass canopy. Fighter jocks like him regard "The Tan" as a badge of honor (the darker the better of course), the proof of years of flight time.
Chitose is confuzzled as to why a veteran fighter jock is being sent on milk runs. Kambei just /shrugs. As a fit pilot he was expecting to get sent to Pluto, but somehow he was instead relegated to Moonbase.
Not as a test pilot mind, but as defense. There are long periods where there's practically nothing to defend against and nothing to test fly - and now *this*.
Basically, his job isn't good use of manpower; It's just that Moonbase can't leave a guy as experienced as him idle.
Either that, or... replicator material is hard to come by now (especially since a lot of what remains was diverted to Operation M), so food is scarce, and Kambei being on a mission means having one mouth less to feed for a bit.
Even if it means foisting him on the Bono-Misaki Base, which ALSO happens to need all the foodstock it can save. That's just the way things are.
Despite this, Chitose's still optimistic. She means, Earth can't get any worse than this now. She may be a newbie that hasn't really seen combat, but Kambei's glad young'uns like her are still around, in an age that makes young men grow old waaay too fast.
They push the package through the ERS-100's cargo scanner for processing. May want to take note of this specific name. Seems that Chitose is babysitting an AI system of sorts in the lab section.
Chitose asks if Kambei's had a look inside the briefcase with the alien artifact. Hell if he knows what it is, let alone if it would bring hope just as the moonbase jarheads said it would...
Klaxons. The screen shakes and there's a sound of an explosion.
A Gamilan attack! Kambei seems to have been followed on the way from the Moon.
Kambei's first instinct is to try to hop into an aerospace fighter.
The bombing run had unfortunately caved in the hangar, leaving our MC with no access to any aircraft. Chitose offers to guide him to evac - in fact orders him as base admin personnel.
But Kambei goes hell naw to that. He uses a loophole that says he's slated for a month's leave after this mission. Starting now. He makes off for the exit hatch instead, much to Chitose's chagrin.
...by the time he exits the facility tho, its already over. The Gamilans just blitzed once and took off.
Susumu and Shima are there. They were ordered to intercept, but they messed up. When Kambei asks, they point to a Cosmo Zero nearby. What's left of it, that is.
Hoo boy, they gonna get an earful when they waltz back into base.
Shima's halfway through worrying about getting thrown in the brig, when he notices... a shipwreck some distance away. Spent far too much time undergound; didn't notice it before.
Chitose, who's finally caught up, answers - that's old Imperial World War 2 Japan stuff. It's the Yamato, sunk 7th April 1945,
near the very spot that Bono-Misaki base was built.
Thanks to planet nukes vaporizing the seas, shipwrecks like the Yamato's are now perfectly visible. This would be a field day for archeologists and historians if Earth weren't losing an interstellar war.
Now, seeing an ocean its just a sign of the end times...
Earth, NCC 2199. This is the surface - full of plants mutated by gamma radiation. There's very little arable land. No one, not even the Gamilans, could live on this planet.
In the aftermath of the planet bombardment, the scientists who survived it estimated a year before humanity would become extinct. It was also quite apparent that the Gamilans were waiting for exactly THAT to happen, or they'd be landing in droves and rooting out the shelters by now.
It's been half a decade since. While humanity has outlived initial expectations, it was still only a matter of time.
All hope rests beneath a world war 2 shipwreck south of what was formerly Kyushu...
== United Nations Earth Federation HQ ==
It's a week later. A large complement of men are in a hall, wearing brand spanking new naval digs. Everyone's wondering what the special occasion is.
Maybe its the Izumo Plan, the one where Earth sends an armed sleeper ship to fight its way out of the solar system, which then drifts into interstellar space towards the nearest planet that has the highest Earth Similarity Index.
Susumu seems to have got himself a promotion in the meantime. How, I have no freaking idea. Whatever it is, he outranks his bunk-mate Shima now.
Okita appears on podium to address the soldiers. It's obvious that Susumu knows his brother is dead; currently, to him, Okita's just a commander who returned without his forces, as if Operation M isn't already a useless suicide mission.
Anyway, the first thing Okita says here is that contrary to the rumor mill, no, the Izumo Plan isn't, and never was, a colonization plan.
He plays a holovid, the one decrypted from the alien artifact. Yes, the UNEF always have had the tech to decrypt that, for good reason.
Starsha, Queen of Iscandar, appears on screen. So the secret's out - Earth has a ally.
She had taken pity on Earth's plight under the Gamilan assault, and for a couple of years now has set into motion the plans to help Humanity get its solar system back.
Last year, her sister Yurisha snuck in-system to give the UNEF a set of encrypted blueprints. No, we don't know where Yurisha is right now.
Earth has proven itself worthy by deciphering these blueprints, which turned out to be the plans for the Wave Motion Engine (read: warp drive).
And, currently, they've cloned almost all of it.
As a reward, she tells of her home planet Iscandar. They have mastered terraforming. They can manufacture Garden of Eden Creation Kits. Cleaning up the damage done by Planet Nukes is child's play.
Unfortunately, getting anything through the Gamilan blockade is next to impossible, so Starsha did the next best thing: help to tech up the human race.
The idea is that by helping Earthlings become FTL capable, they will be able to make the journey to her home planet on their own.
Her final hand of assistance is her sister Sasha - the cadaver we found in the alien shuttlepod earlier. What she carried is the final piece of the FTL puzzle: The core of the Wave Motion Engine.
She is banking on the fact that a race that outlives its own survival projection would surely know what to do.
Indeed, as Okita confirms after the holovid ends, Earth now has an FTL vessel: The Yamato. That name sounds *VAGUELY* familiar...
Iscandar is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, ~168k LY from Earth.
This is a VERY LONG journey for a race that has never left their own system before. It literally is a journey of a lifetime and more.
Okita states that any man who wants out, is free do leave. No one does.
Lift-off is at 0600 tomorrow morning. Anyone who's not in the ship by then will be locked out...
== Cape Bono-Misaki Underground Base, Kyushu ==
Right next door to the fateful assembly, Kambei's asking Chitose about the ERS-100 system's analysis of the cargo he delivered the other week.
Being excluded from gathering and all, he's really curious now. But Chitose looks crestfallen.
It's to do with the Yamato. Apparently she'd volunteered for Yamato's mission, just like a Main Character would. But she was flatly refused. They can't take trainees on this mission.
Which is a pity - she'd wanted to get on board ever since she was let in on the Izumo Plan. To go to interstellar space.
Why they actually refused the services of a Main Character is beyond me. Do they have no genre savvy people in command staff?
Oh well. At least Chitose gets a frontline seat to see a key point in mankind's remaining history blast off into space.
Kambei does make a token attempt to comfort her. It did visibly cheer her up - yet she jokingly rebuffs the attempt. She doesn't need no semi-retired, second class test pilot jock to tell her what's what.
Chitose leaves the scene, perhaps to go to her viewing area. It takes Kambei about 1 minute to realize that he's just been insulted by his junior.
Kambei smiles. The kid's got moxie. She'll deal.
