2022-05-12: Return Key
Cutscene: Return Key Cast: Rena Lancaster Where: Ra Mari Date: May 12, 2022 Summary: In the middle of the night, Rena gets to work on a new project.
Rena's fingers worried at her hair. It was shorter now. Not short, exactly -- it was down to her shoulders -- but it needed to be cut after the last battle. The damage to her cockpit had left her hair burnt and singed lower down her back, and so it needed to be cut.
It was late at night, so she could do that without someone commenting or worrying. She didn't really want her hair short. It had been long ever since she was little but one battle with Verdiska had left the Mass Production-type Nu Gundam a smoldering wreck; it had also left her with the bandage on her forehead, at least for another day. It also left her with a necessary hair cut, where she couldn't quite salvage her longer hair.
It was nice, sometimes, to be by herself. She could bemoan having short hair without feeling guilty for getting stuck on something so petty. It was layered to make up for it, which she could see in her laptop -- using the camera as a mirror -- but it wasn't really how she liked it.
But there were other things she could do, too, by herself.
She'd always been different, growing up in a resort colony in Side 1. It was little ways, but she was too smart to not put it together: she was smarter than the other kids, growing up. It didn't make her better or wiser than them, but she was better at math, better at problem solving, and just overall smarter than them. She had no idea why that was the case, but she could tell that it made her aunt and uncle nervous when it came out too much. So, she learned to hold back. Her test scores hovered around 94.6 percent.
She did that deliberately. If she answered questions wrong, then people wouldn't talk about how often her grades were perfect. That seemed to make her guardians breathe easier.
There was something freeing about not having to pretend, which she could really only do by herself.
Fortunately, it was the middle of the night and she was alone. She could see Eight asleep behind her, but she slept soundly and through the clicking of Rena's keyboard. Besides, it meant she was alone, but not lonely. That was nice. It made it easier to get to work. She frowned with focus instead of frustration, before she opened up her text editor -- and closed out of the camera program. Then, she opened the program she had acquired: the operating system for the VF-171 Nightmare Plus. She resized the window the way she liked it -- half the screen taken up by the text editor. In one quarter, she had the schematics up for the VF-171; in another, a second window of the text editor.
This had the notes she made after the outing with Anita. They were dozens upon dozens of calculations: the way a wearer's movement affected the thrusters and the wings of an EX-Gear. From there, it was a matter of comparing ito the combat data from a Mobile Suit. She ran her hand down her face, then reached over for her mug of black tea. She might need a few more, before the night was done.
It wasn't whether she could rewrite the variable fighter's OS to incorporate AMBAC movement. It was whether she could do it before morning.
Rena bit her lip, then started typing.