2022-09-29: Rush Job

• Log: 2022-09-29: Rush Job
• Cast: Sayla Mass, Mana
• Where: A Freighter on the Pacific Ocean
• OOC - IC Date: September 29, 0096
• Summary: Having finally cleared and gotten the Saint Lance's starting to reflash, Sayla calls a specialist for repairs. She and Mana talk about lucky paint jobs as Mana assesses the damage.

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<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.

        Heart-2 had retreated separately from the rest of the Shuffle Forces during Akane's attack on... everyone, it seems like. But where had been a mystery, citing a system intrusion.

        Where turns out to have been a mid-sized freighter out to sea, while she had completely wiped the Saint Lance's system, while she waited for a transport with parts to arrive. As she was fully aware the Saint Lance was running out, she'd called in a specialist at doing the best with not enough.

        The armour is badly scored, the right arm is gone- with the rifle. The grenade launcher on the left arm is destroyed, smashed by an impact on the shield. The shield itself has some scratched paint, but is otherwise fine. The joints in the nutter's legs have been struggling for a while now- as Mecha-Ghoulgilas completely removed the legs on the replacement. It's not a great situation.

        Right now, though, Sayla is deep in the cockpit, reloading the IFF and her personal tweaks. This would be easier with Job John, or Captain Testarossa. But she doesn't have them. At least it looks a bit like a gundam, since Sayla hasn't given Mana an easy job.

<Pose Tracker> Mana has posed.

If you need someone to work with scraps, salvage, and insufficient parts, you could do worse than call Mana. That's how she makes herself useful to the Shuffles, after all - she wants to work on machines, and they can give her half-scrapped machines to work on or break down for parts. It's win-win.

Though Mana has never been called to the middle of the ocean to do a job. Usually she prefers to work on dry land, or on a carrier like the Freedan where she already spends time. It doesn't *bother* her. It's just new.

"Wow, you really made a mess of it, huh?"

Mana, carrying *several* sets of tools - a box in her hands, a satchel over her shoulder, some more small ones shoved in the ever-present pockets of her ever-present cargo pants - looks up at the machine. "Poor mobile suit... nobody ever thinks about how you feel about this." She pats the flank of the machine before she starts to climb up, completely unafraid of heights. She cuts down to just the smaller toolbox when she does, too.

"Parts delivery~" Mana raises her voice, sing-song, as she ascends toward the cockpit so that Sayla can hear her. She has no fear of heights. "They're coming in! Well, what we could find. I wanted to see what I was working on though." She pats the side of the mobile suit again.

<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.

        Sayla hears Mana's incredibly cheery arrival, and pokes her head out. She's clearly tired, and she's slipped out of her pilot suit to wear a light tee and jeans while working. Still, help is much needed at this point. "Thanks for coming on such short notice, Mana."

        Sayla sighs. "In this case this BioNet did a number on it." She looks at the Saint Lance. "I guess Anaheim are cheaping out on their secret reworked Neo-Zeon suits." She leans back. "I've almost finished set up, but I don't have the mechanical skills or knowledge to get it functional again."

        She hauls herself fully out of the cockpit. "So, what's your assessment? How long to get it working, and how much longer has it got?"

<Pose Tracker> Mana has posed.

Mana is dressed the way she always does. Which doesn't necessarily seem like the most practical thing to wear while you're working on a mobile suit, but it seems to work out for her. Maybe she has an apron in one of those bags she brought in.

She sure is cheerful, though. "Well, at least you painted it Gundam colours! They're lucky, you know," Mana says, almost serious for the moment. She ends up at the edge of the cockpit, dangling herself at an angle that looks more precarious than it is; she is mostly looking down at Sayla from there, even with her at the edge.

"Anaheim," Mana says, dismissively. "They build nice things but they never make the upkeep any easier. Anyway, I took a look at the parts while we were loading them, and I double-checked some of the other stuff."

"I can get it *running* pretty quick, but not, like... one hundred percent, no matter how much I want to. I can't make things like the joint mechanisms from nothing! And there's not exactly any Saint Lance salvage. You can get away with using Bawoo parts for some of it, and I hear there's a new-model Bawoo too but I've never gotten my hands on any of them, but either way it's not *quite* the same... so it won't work quite the same, either, without tuning."

She waves her arm at the left MS arm. "Plus, you know, that. I'll have to clean all the junk out of the joints, the missing one too, then get the new one on, and we didn't have all of the right size armour plates so I'm going to have to cut and shape some new ones, and even with all the extra tools you guys have, that's not something you can use parts for that aren't at least close. At least the weapons are easy. The grenade launcher I've got a good replacement for... especially if you don't mind three tubes instead of four."

"So I can fix it. I can even get it back to one hundred percent this time with a bit more time. But if you keep breaking it like this I'm not gonna be able to many more times unless you can get me some new parts! Or, I'll have to revamp it with something else. Use a different kind of arm and leg, something that'll still work with the transformation, those are always fussy." Mana shakes her head. "Sorry! I could turn it into a salvage, patchwork suit any time, but I don't think that's what you want. You want original specs, and that's a lot fussier. ESPECIALLY for things they don't make many of. Do you know how much you could get for this black-market?"

<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.

        "The colours weren't my idea, that's how it came when our friends at Mithril delivered it. Someone involved must have a sick sense of humour." Her expression sours, huh. "Having piloted the original, I wouldn't call those colours lucky." She sighs. "Though I guess most of us got out of A Baoa Qu alive. So that's lucky." Right now, though, it reminds her of people a part of her wishes she could forget.

        Sayla listens to Mana's appraisal and while she doesn't like it, it's about what she expected to hear. "That's... Hm. Well, any MS has a limited lifespan." She sighs. "Alright, we'll have to... I think replacing the arm is the highest priority. Focus toward functional first, I think. I'll see if I can get something from what we've got in storage in the meantime..."

        Sayla sighs, leaning on the edge of the cockpit. "I'm gonna get some coffee first, though. I've got time until installation finishes." She starts clambering out, before looking to Mana. "High sevens, low eights?" Figures. "We considered it but we're doing well enough for cash so we thought a 'cutting edge' suit would be more useful. Maybe it just needed a better pilot."

<Pose Tracker> Mana has posed.

"Well, *I* think they're lucky. There's more than just the original these days, after all!" Mana runs her gloved fingers down the side of the cockpit. "And it was inspiring to a lot of people. It's what made me want to get involved in mechanics!"

Mana is not old enough to have seen the original One Year War. She's, what, sixteen? Seventeen? If she was born at all, she certainly doesn't remember it.

"But, I guess you'd know better about the original. I never even got to see it in person." Mana swings herself across and around, pulling herself on the half-arm's shoulder in a practiced crouch. It gives Sayla extra room to climb out without Mana crowding her. "I would have liked to.

She brightens. "Functional it is! I can definitely get it running. That's no problem this time, we've got enough if I make do a bit. It's the exotic parts that are hard to replace. It would really help if one of us salvaged a Bawoo or a Rebawoo or something, so we could get a replacement splitting system... I've never made one from scratch and I don't think we have enough of the metalworking gear."

Mana's thinking. She taps her fingers while she does. "Enough that we could buy a *whole* other suit, probably. Or we could have before it got quite so bashed up. Even if I fix it it's not exactly mint condition. Or original parts. I could start talking to some of the Vulture buyers and sellers if you wanted..." She is *just* aware enough to not comment on the 'better pilot' part. Sayla's certainly better at it than she is.

<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.

        Sayla looks thoughtfully towards Mana, as she makes cheap, shitty instant coffee. The freighter is a hire job. "...Maybe. We didn't really have time to see it as inspiring- we were too busy surviving." She sighs. "It certainly changed the course of history for better or worse." She pauses.

        "I only piloted it twice. Once without orders, once after Amuro had gone AWOL. After that I mainly piloted the Core Booster. Kai had the Guncannon and..." She looks down. "The Guntank's pilots are no longer with us." And at least one of those is explicitly her fault.

        She picks up her coffee, and takes a sip, cringes at the taste and takes another sip. "...Renais has absolutely spoiled me." She sips again. "I can understand why, but by the end of the war we were lucky to be out at all. "The suits, the Core Boosters, the White Base itself... Maybe it would be better to move on from these things and leave them in the past." Like Sayla has so clearly done.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgbURB7-Ymc

        She drops the coffee cup, and it smashes on the floor. Her hands are shaking. "No... There's no way..." Eyes wide, she whips back to Mana. "I need this combat ready as soon as possible, at whatever functionality you can get. After that, you can have whatever's left and a bonus. I don't know how much time we have but it's not enough." She makes a run towards the comm station. "I need to radio for assistance, and get this thing changing course. I don't care how you do it, just do it." She pauses. "And make *damned* sure the ejection mechanism works. If this is what I think it is, I might need it."

<Pose Tracker> Mana has posed.

Sayla goes down to get coffee. Mana...

...dangles upside down off the arm of the Saint Lance. That is *definitely* not a way she should be sitting on that robot safely, nor should she really be doing it anywhere in that shirt. It's precarious. (Disaster does not strike this time. Mana doesn't fall off and break her head and everything stays where it should.)

"Well," Mana says, without a good easy response. She swings forward and back slightly while she speaks. "I guess it's a little different looking back. But to *me* it's a big deal, too. Just not the same way. Plus, you know... it saved a lot of people. Not everybody, but nothing ever does. You gotta take what you can!"

Mana lived around the ruins of war; she's from the Britannian central territories, the 'wasteland'. Her parents died somewhat later, in New Yark. Death happens. *Not* dying is worth celebrating, but you can't expect nobody will die. It never works out.

But then Sayla drops a cup, and Mana almost *does* fall. Instead she manages to twist around so she's got a hand back on it and pulls herself up. She has no idea what Sayla saw, but she's being offered money to do something she wanted to do anyway and that, at least, is a no-brainer. "You got it! ...As long as you're sure you're okay. Did you faint? Please don't faint, I don't know how to fix people."

Then Mana hikes herself up, hiking up her cargo pants and the tool satchel she's still got. "HEY," she bellows, not at Sayla but to get the attention of other hangar crew. "Time to get to work! I'm going to need all the parts we moved in here and access to all the cranes and arms!" Pause. "And some soda!"