//------------------------------//
// The Path 
// Story: Melody of the Future 
// by Tatsurou 
//------------------------------//

	Octavia sighed to herself as she went through her Maverick Hunter paperwork.  It was a rather busy day for her today.  There were proposals to look over, sightings of Sigma and/or Vile to verify or dismiss, lower ranked Hunters to review for either promotion or discipline...  It was almost enough to make her wish for a Maverick incident just so she could fob all this paperwork off on someone else so she could run off and fight instead of filling out form after form after form.

The worst part was that it wasn't just her paperwork she was going through.  She was also taking care of her Uncle Zero's paperwork, since he had taken a month off to help Iris with their first born son, a silver-haired red-eyed boy named Omega.  He was an adorable youngster with his mother's sweet disposition, his father's temper...and a body so perfectly adapted to the Ether that gave Zero his alternate empowered form that the tyke was already generating it in huge quantities.  CiCi was one of the only ones who could reign him in forcefully if it became necessary, leaving her to debate if she did more good as Navigator or babysitter.

Meanwhile, Octavia's new siblings were rapidly growing into their own, and each had picked up a nickname.  Harpuia was already showing signs of growing into an effeminate pretty boy, much to his chagrin.  Between being frequently mistaken for a girl when with his siblings and the temper tantrums he threw over that, he'd earned himself the nickname Harpy.  Fafnir had already developed a tendency to break things around him, and was apparently Piano's favorite, leading to the canine support unit frequently carrying the red-headed child around in his jaws by the scruff of his neck.  This had earned Fafnir the nickname 'Puppy'.

Leviathan, for her part, hadn't really shown much behavior to distinguish herself yet, save a marked preference for being in the water.  In the water, however, she was already fast and skilled enough to swim circles around some of the aquatic Maverick Hunters, as well as sneaking past any security to keep her out of the aquatic obstacle courses.  This and her leanings towards the intellectual - if she wasn't in the water, she could be found in the library reading her way through shelf by shelf - had earned her the nickname Maka, since Mako didn't feel feminine enough.  As for Phantom, he was rarely seen, and when he was trouble seemed to follow in his wake.  He also rarely spoke, preferring to keep his own council, earning him the nickname Shadow.

Setting aside thoughts of her siblings and cousin for the moment, Octavia turned her mind to more pressing issues.  Further attempts at matchmaking for Axl had proven...less than successful.  She had attempted gently nudging Palette towards modifying her behavior such that she might be more appealing to Axl - since she seemed desperate to catch his interest as more than a Navigator - but that had backfired horribly as her excessive enthusiasm proved to infect everything she did.  The less said about her attempt to give Axl a 'deep tissue massage' to show how 'supportive' she could be, the better.

Do Reploids in general - or Axl in particular - even have 'deep tissue' to be massaged? Octavia found herself wondering, not for the first time since witnessing that event.  Poor Axl was still in traction, and Octavia hadn't even known he'd need that.

As she let her mind wander, she came across a report that seemed innocuous at first, but for some reason set alarm bells ringing in her mind.  Frowning, she investigated it a bit deeper.

Apparently, a Pre-End Times facility had been spotted on the Moon through a visual telescope.  It had been proposed that the facility be investigated as a possible evacuation shelter for civilians should Sigma create a disaster on the scale of the Eurasia incident, and that an orbital tower be constructed to allow both exploration and mass evacuation should it prove necessary.  It was suggested this work be done by the 'New-Type' Reploids recently developed based on the technology in Axl's A-Trans chip, which would allow them to adapt their bodies to changing conditions in construction on a moment to moment basis.  This was also meant to be a test run for the adapted technology itself, with the end goal of making it available as a mod for all Reploids.

On the surface, this proposal seemed perfectly reasonable.  A pre-End Times facility, like where X and Octavia had been found.  Such places always held treasure troves of valuable data, historical or otherwise, when they were found.  Not only that, but facilities that had survived from then in good condition tended to be sturdier than anything modern tech could build.  That made the exploration and evaluation of such a facility on the Moon the highest priority for any branch of the government.  The only reason it came across the Maverick Hunter desks for investigation was because - apparently - the facility had become visible from one moment to the next, as though a cloaking device had failed...or been shut down.  That meant Hunter personnel would be the first dispatched to the facility...in case it was still active.  While existing functional security would prove problematic as far as investigation, it was a positive sign as far as the facility being viable as an evacuation shelter if it could be investigated and pacified with minimal collateral damage.

Beyond that, having seen what Axl was capable of with his A-Trans, Octavia knew further research into it would be invaluable.  If these new 'Change Circuits' proved as viable as reports claimed and could be made into a mod, it would mean huge leaps forward in terms of both Reploid science and exploration of the solar system.  After all, how much easier is it to explore a planet if you can redesign your body on the fly to adapt to the environment you're faced with?  This was just further research along the lines of Gate's, the same research that had resulted in the new beings who were somewhere between human and Reploid, now called Terrans.

But if all this was true...why did just looking at the header for the proposal - The Jakob Project - fill her with such nameless dread?