(Story Extract)

“You… we… R&G Manufacturing, I… sweet Celestia, this thing has been here the whole time!? And it still works?!” Marigold paused for just a moment, before charging forth towards the now-visible bomber that Aerith was dragging the cable over to. Contrail, for his part, only seemed to let his flanks hit the snow and continue staring at the massive jet. Oh, c’mon, it’s not that much more impressive than the Dragon Mare… well, than the Dragon Mare was, anyways. Trotting over to meet with Marigold, I found her staring wide-eyed into one of the engine intakes, before climbing herself atop the wing and looking down into the cockpit from above. “This is… that’s a Mark 27 Weapons Control maneframe, they only used those on Raptors… twin-linked tesla cannons in a full-traverse turret, too? And those have got to be MWT Bofors in the cheeks by that barrel size…” Her attention turned towards me, eyes wide as she looked down from the right-side wing. “Why didn’t you say something about this sooner!? This thing is amazing!”

“You think the outside’s amazing, wait till you’ve seen what this baby has on the inside. We kinda… caused an Empty Quiver alert to trigger when we first arrived, heh.” The access door opened with a small hiss as Static and Aerith headed for the underbelly of the Valkyrie with the cable, Marigold hopping down from the wing and Contrail finally pulling his brain back together and trotting over for a closer look. Climbing up the small stairway the door created, I brought myself back into the cockpit, taking a deep sniff of the frigid, stale air and exhaling it in a breath, flopping into the pilot seat. Alright, that little stop-over at the Vanhoover Air Base at least made a few of these things a little easier to understand… how was I supposed to know that ‘flaps’ on flying machines means things that come out of the wings to provide more lift at takeoff? Like, they could’ve used some other word for them… ‘up-goer thingies’, maybe.