//------------------------------// // 410. Supply and Command. // Story: Baa-Ram-Ewe! // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// -Equus, Airship Mauled, Arizona- “You got to help me!” I was shaking Jaded fiercely and eventually stopped to watch as her eyes spin in her head before going completely walled, a few blinks later and the taller green haired beige cat eventually came to her sense. “You want help with learning how to take care of children now of all times? Also why did you come to me specifically?” Well for all the chicanery you get away with and in general are a jerk, you were a good friend when it counted Jaded. “I heard how you should never hurt a child in front of an Abyssinian Queen.” Which was one of the things that was well known in Abyssinia, Abyssinians generally had a thing for being protective of their children. “It’s mostly true, but it’s the Toms that you should really be wary of when it comes to Abyssinians, nothing is more dangerous than a truly determined Tom father if you think an Abyssinian Queen sounds scary. Also anyone that hurts a child in front of me is going to have a really bad day starting twenty four hours from the occurrence of said incident, with that in mind, anyone that hurts my little Silvers will be lucky if they even survive the next twenty four hours.” Yikes, think Jaded even meant it to be that threatening, after the whole thing with Stochastic Labor… yeah… wouldn’t want to give Jaded time to plan my demise like that pony did. I remember the attempts on Stochastic’s life with the anvils and pianos. “Honestly the quickest and easiest solution is to let you kitten sit Silvers, I intrinsically trust you Arizona… anything that can get by you to hurt Silvers would have to be ridiculous strong, physically tough, magically powerful and able to survive your general physics breaking shenanigans. Also, since you’re technically family, I’ll give you the chance to state your case should anything go wrong with Silvers… since something highly chaotic happens at least once a week to my family and it’s not always necessarily me that gets the chaos. Discord looked into it and says that my family is enough chaos for this region of Equestria alone without his help or the falling airship curse in the region that only exists because people actually thinks it does.” “Well I’m rightly terrified now… usually the only one that can instill that in me is Paprika when she gets grumpy.” Considering how long it’s been since I’ve actually touched Paprika directly and not just her wool clone, well it’s been a thing. “Not Velvet?” Jaded queried with a gesture of her left claw at me. “The only thing I’m afraid of, as far as Velvet is concerned, is that she won’t get back into fighting shape and continue beating the daylight hours out of me.” It said a lot that I kept getting offers from various visiting lawyers asking about my consensual domestic abuse situation, you don’t see Maries harping on us about how ‘tough love’ is basically the name of my herd. “At least the carpentry business is going really well.” “You’re a basically a shipwright Ari.” Jaded stated flatly arms crossed. “Sure most of the houses I build around here are functional as boats… which can double as airships… but that doesn’t mean I’m a shipwright.” There was a pause as I got a raised brow from Jaded. “As in I don’t have a shipwright license and I have to be legally distinct that I build houses and not ‘boats’ or ‘airships’ as part of my carpentry business.” “Ah, the kind of legal distinction that Maries could help you with eventually if things go wrong, got you. I’ll set up a meeting with them for you.” Jaded nodded to me solemnly with a broad gentle smile. “So how about taking on my Silvers, Gavin and me for the evening?” -Moon Cell Realm, Mare Melum, City of rebooted destiny, Castle Alexander, dining room, Pom- “So… how do we get started on this meeting?” I asked before eating something as Dolly and Dormarch worked through some homemade kibble. I still don’t know what Dolly’s withdrawal symptoms really looked like nor have I noticed them, but this makes her happy at the very least. We were all sitting around a table and Mirage Mew and their Mirage Collective was in attendance. Apparently we only had to surpass one more realm and then we can really begin to stick it to Moon Cell for all the trouble they are causing. Apparently the time difference between reality and the computer realms, as termed by Mirage Mew, was slowly faltering and soon we’d be acting on real time while in the Digital and Moon Cell Realms one to one with actual days passing by. To that end, the entirety of the Ransei continent has come under attack by Moon Cell using Mystery Dungeons as anchors into the world and a good forty five percent of the digital world was being overrun with Moon Cell’s forces. This was Mirage Mew keeping in contact with the outside world, where barely an hour has past and things were slowly speeding up for us as a day in here was more like a few hours outside instead of minutes, we had our work cut out for us by being in a very decent position to give Moon Cell a black eye if not taking out Moon Cell if we aren’t stopped, so Moon Cell would be getting desperate to throw some real curve balls our way. I had to wonder what could be worse than what we just went through and didn’t voice or think about it too hard. We had issues to clear up with our current situation. “I believe that is my cue, let’s start with the information we have on the situation of the two worlds and our current position in the war and go from there.” Jeanne stated as she was sitting at one of the tables and garnered everyone’s attentions. “The entirety of Ransei has come under assault, the only place that is being spared seems to be Nixtorm according to Mirage Mew. An hour has almost passing by in reality as the time between realms is slowly evening out. It’s not looking good.” “I think that’s because I helped destroyed the Mystery Dungeon there with Dolly and Dormarch’s help.” There was some surprise from a few people, but there were no questions. “I’m not surprised, you’re track record as the leader of Team Harmony speaks for itself, considering that was the direction you were coming from when you were targeted by the Enemy Program swarm in Valora. I’ll just assume you dealt with the immortal skeletal dragon beast that was harassing Nixtorm terribly before showing up in Valora.” Jeanne stated before continuing. “Our neighbors the digimon are currently struggling to hold half their world.” “We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think we could do something about that.” Driver stated among the nine Commandramon present that nodded with his statement. “So far I think we’re doing great that half of us aren’t already dead.” “Wait, is it still the same day we left Valora?” Asked one of the Skarmory, he seemed particularly hopeful. “Yes, it’s still on the same day, but things in reality are going slower than they are here. We have time, but not much as, again, things are starting to even out between the realms.” Jeanne D’ Arc was leading this meeting fairly well. “Mirage Mew will at least keep us updated on the efforts our home realms.” “Of course.” Mirage Mew stated cheerfully. Mirage Raikou, Mirage Entei and Mirage Suicune were in attendance as the heads of Mirage Mews forces of the digital Pokémon. “We’re holding the path back out of Moon Cell’s realm open and are making sure they can’t close the taken realms behind us. Plus we’re working on being able to call in more help from Ransei and hopefully the digital realms of Yggdrasil.sys, but that depends on how well they are handling Moon Cell’s siege. Don’t know how you’re going to hold Cape or Mare Melum without us, both respectively in Dike Land and Night Land are definitively holding well thanks to the APs even if they are constantly under attacks from EPs.” The EPs we were being attack by currently were coming from the next realm over, apparently the next realm we had to take ‘Midgar’ was going to have a lot of heavy machinery and tank based EPs. Those were going to be a major problem without some heavy firepower, which Welch was working on, it was going to be brought up in this meeting. So far the Assassin Caerbannog have been sabotaging efforts of the enemy to take back Mare Melum or get a foothold in the realm. “Next order of business, our resources.” There was a sudden silence as we kept eating and Jeanne was making sure nobody had anything to bring up. “Without Castle Alexander I don’t think we would even be here.” Everyone agreed, Castle Alexander was the main part of our offensive against Moon Cell, nobody could say it wasn’t. Unfortunately it’s still quite underpowered, given the power generation wasn’t enough to run all of its functions. We also might need more gun towers than what we had going forward, but we didn’t have enough supplies for all the upgrades to the castle we wanted. “To that end, we’re in a position to upgrade our main offensive platform as the Counter Invasion Force while we still currently have some time to rest before we continue moving forward. We also have a chance to work in any training, rest or other ideas before we move forward onto Midgar while we’re upgrade Castle Alexander for the daunting fight ahead.” A screen showed up as Sami spoke. Showing Midgar, a sprawling city of black towers, long massive streets, red lights at the top of buildings and it was seemingly constantly clouded over and raining. “Midgar, as far as we know is a multiple tiered city consisting of three levels and is likely to be crawling with even more dangerous EPs. Due in part to the chaos caused here, we avoided a massive Moon Cell ambush and even managed to steal some vehicles for Welch’s manufacturing capabilities. So we’ll at least have armored support going into this next fight. The city of Midgar has an underground level which might be our entry point, it has a ground level city and above that an above ground city above the city below it. The surprise of the elite EPs is gone, but we’ll likely need to deal with them from now on to win territory fights. I wouldn’t be surprised if what they throw at us there will be several times worse than what we’ve already faced here in Mare Melum. So that brings us to what are our current upgrade plans for the oncoming battle and should we make any changes to them, who’s currently in charge of that?” Everyone turned to Dormarch who was happily munching away and when he noticed everyone else looking at him, he quickly swallowed his mouthful of food and spoke up. “I guess I am, we can improve Castle Alexander’s towers and make them automatic… but they’ll be a bit slower than if the Commandramon were working them manually. We’re also going to improve the power situation so we can at least run the barrier and the towers outside of Alexander’s defensive fortress mode, the barrier producing wings at least proved crucial in dealing with Moon Cells backup plan to deal with Castle Alexander. The last bit of business is that we’re going to at least be able to activate hover mode to get us somewhat flying, but true flight would require we power down the guns and barriers.” Nobody seemed to have any comments about any changes to make there from what Dormarch said, Cid of the NPCs table seemed to be particularly happy to hear we can get off the ground. “As for the kind of Allied Programs we want to produce now, we will be direly trying to produce Rider APs. The Assassin Caerbannogs are decent with vehicles, but they are better suited to their roles of scouts and ambushers. The Lancer Guardians and the Saber Knights in their base or tower shield variants are not as capable of piloting vehicles, they will remain infantry. If we can figure out how get Riders we can improve our combat capacity exponentially with the recent acquirements of the Skein Flyers via Canard, along with the missile truck and the Magitek Armors that Mom’s group acquired before the city rebooted and the hidden garages full of enemy armor weapons were taken out in said reboot of this realm. We wouldn’t have these things if not for them getting them within Castle Alexander’s territory before the realm rebooted. We’ll have artillery, aerial support and direct action walking tanks for the Riders to pilot. I was responsible for the Assassin Caerbannogs and I don’t think I can create a different type of AP, we’ll need someone else to produce the Riders. We absolutely need fourth type of Allied Programs before we can move forward.” “What about us? We’re technically APs… of a kind.” Pinkpie.exe stated, her and the six Harmony Programs were at least supportive of our efforts. However their PLANTs were not capable of producing armies, though they’ve shown to be exceedingly effective in taking territories by themselves, they were good at generating small groups of support and Moon Cell had no ability to get control of them at least without dealing with the prime Harmony Programs that controlled the PLANTs. “We’ll get to you in a moment... I think I might have the ability to produce Rider type APs given we have the capacity to gain a new AP type.” Sami offered up and held up a familiar bar, the thing that generated motorcycles she used back when we first met. “Don’t know what will come out, but I have created sentient gang of roving motorcycles once already. Creating APs centering on vehicle data will likely have a high chance to produce Riders. Once we have them and know what they are exactly capable of, we can then make plans for how to field them in the attack on Midgar once we get there.” “Our next order of business is to address the elephant in the room… or should I say the hidden servant.” Jeanne had everyone looking in the same direction she was, sitting in a corner was the unusual Caerbannog AP that read as an Elite AP. Apparently Jeanne thought otherwise and just levied her suspicions about it. “Hmph… Servant Assassin, Codename: ‘Hidden Snake’… just call me Snake. I summoned myself through one of your PLANTs so I’m thoroughly on your side if that’s what you’re worried about.” The gruff voiced bipedal rabbit had acted like a normal Assassin Caerbannog AP, but he was clearly more intelligent and was very much different given his green camouflaged patterned fur was unique among the many colorful Caerbannogs who could give off the illusion of looking like normal rabbits to their enemies. That was a rather frightening ability that I think I’ve heard Al-Mi’raj or ‘All Mirage’ rabbits were capable of. “I’m technically in charge of the Assassin Caerbannogs as their elite. Moon Cell won’t notice I have a soul even if I were standing right in front of their optical machine enforcers, The Watchers, I’m just another AP to Moon Cell and you can just treat me as such. War… it hardly ever changes… I initially showed up for Jack Blade Wolf otherwise known as Raiden… he was… somewhat family of mine. I’m in this for the long haul, thanks for helping me free his soul. I’ll likely disappear if defeated in battle or fade away after taking down Moon Cell, I’m not worth the effort to care about as I’m just a ghost of a long forgotten battlefield.” “Can you define what a servant is Snake? We’ve kind of heard a few things already, I just want to be clear on the subject.” I wanted to be certain of it really. “Servants are usually the souls of heroes who fought and bled for something so hard that history can never forget that they existed as a legend, a legend that can be brought back to life as a servant to fight for Moon Cell or whoever figures out how to summons them. Thankfully someone put a kibosh on the necromancy wars throwing heroes at each other for a wish, a wish that was always going to be too good to be true.” Pulling out a cigar and lighting it to start puffing away at it, the rabbit leaned back in his chair and sighed. “That’s not always the case as Moon Cell can fudge things quite a bit and bring to life peoples souls that were never heroes as servants, I’m sure it’s going to do so given how close we are to attacking it directly. It has a lot of tricks left to play. Like my being here, Moon Cell doesn’t exactly have perfect control over all the souls it’s holding under its control… those with strong enough wills can defy it outright… I’m living proof. Just watch out, since anything with a particularly strong legend will have what is called a Noble Phantasm and reality takes a back seat to those. My phantasm, as an Assassin, is of course stealth based and named after me… I was ‘hardly’ ever caught infiltrating places and my legend is my power as it will be there’s. So keep it in mind when you hear their classifications that it’s always in some way related to who they are. If you know their legend, then you’ll know what they are capable of and what they are weak too, as you’ll know how they were ultimately defeated and why. If they… died of old age for instance, then you’re probably out of luck and will have to do things the hard way. Unless you can find a way to age them really quick.” Did you die of old age Snake? How long were you fighting for and what kind of hero were you? “Well at least we know for sure that all the souls being held by Moon Cell need to be freed.” I said with a firm tone and Snake nodded while gesturing to me. “Continuing on… how are our food supplies looking?” Jeanne asked of the NPC Patch Cabbage who seemed to have a constant high morale and tunnel vision focus on bringing down Moon Cell. “I can feed a whole army by myself! Food is not the problem, it’s all your fancy medical berries that are a lot harder to grow, all of you have been blowing through them like crazy.” The insane farmer meant it too, most of his time was spent in hydroponics greenhouse within the bowels of Castle Alexander. “I intend to keep up with the demand though! Working on the Sitrus Berry production, I needed to cross pollinate them with the Oran Berries to keep their effects up… the effects seem to get slightly weaker the more generations constantly farm in the same spot without altering the berry output. Makes it hard to continually harvest fully effective berries in the same place more than three times… but I promise you’ll have some berries for our next battle for all the biologicals here. I’m even working on a digital version that works on digital creatures by filling in damaged coding that will need to be reconfigured a bit by the user.” “That’s similar to how my Cure Liquor combat program works, it’ll help us digital entities that can’t heal quickly by ourselves at least.” Dormarch stated with three wagging tails. Well Patch was going above and beyond for us, he must really be exceedingly disproportionately angry about losing that one cart full of cabbages to Moon Cell. “We’ll keep that in mind, now what of the supplies that are medical that aren’t reproducible?” Jeanne bringing a gaze towards Ocellus and the Gazimon as our Castle Alexander support team. “I kind of wish we had better medical experts on hoof… we’ve already mostly blown through most of the light medical supplies.” Ocellus stated having been one of the ones who was acting as a medical person, Dormarch technically counted except he is mostly following me around to try and keep me alive. “I’m sure Welch can manufacture more, but that might eat up energy we could be using for other things.” After the heavy battling to protect Castle Alexander the Dhelmise, Skarmory and Hakamo-o units were quite tired, one of the Hakamo-o had even evolved into a Kommo-o under the pressures involved. The Pokemon Companions Team was also exhausted, in that vein of thought Dazzle was almost recovered and able to fight. The Digi-bots were a bit restless, with Peppercat and Metabee really wanting to get back into combat. The Digimon fighters were in general alright. Even if they needed some food, a nap and a bathroom break. Sami was used to long hours of horrid conditions before she ever met Canard. Frizzle had handled herself well without Dazzle’s ability to support her evolutions and Dormarch had exhausted himself acquiring and utilizing a new slightly unstable evolution for the first time. The digital-destined Digimon notably outstripped normal digimon in raw power by several degrees. Given that the digivices were said to feed the users emotions to their partners, were my emotions really that powerful? Well I think Dolly helped in the emotional energy department. The Gazimon were going to be training in the use of the Skein Flyers as they had mostly been shot down before The Ray entirely lost the use of its machine cannons and was swiftly destroyed. Thankfully they landed in the castle once their Skein Flyers became incapable of staying in the air and the injuries were minimal in the three crashes that occurred. We had repair and manufacturing capabilities thanks to Welch so it wouldn’t be long before we could get them back in the air. Lit was just so happy to see that Dolly was alright when she crawled out of Driver’s Magitek Armor, I don’t think exhaustion ever truly registered for him once you fed him a few berries and aside from needing some sleep he was good to go. He was probably the most efficient fighter we had here. Speaking of the little guy, Lit was currently cuddling up to Dolly affectionately. Dazzle has recovered from her injuries from the giant serpent battle and we were mostly ready to go for Midgar, giving us a few digital days to get ready. “So does anyone have any pressing matters that aren’t personal to bring up or any questions related to the current topics we’ve brought up thus far?” Glad Jeanne was still on top of things, even if she wasn’t exactly acting like she was in command of the situation or things around here. “If not then we should move onto the business of our Harmony Program allies, who is the spokesperson for your group?” Jeanne was a mass of not very visible bruises and scrapes, being covered in natural armored scales certainly helped with preventing grievous injuries to her person that wasn’t from crushing blows as much as the Pokémon move Iron Defense does turning her already tough scales into something on par with my wool in defensive ability. She was a functional battlefield leader, but a lot of people still thought of me as an overall leader and I really didn’t like the association of being anything more than reliable. “I am, I mean I might not be the brains, but I’m definitely the charisma!” Pinkpie.exe got and moved forward. “So what does your group hope to gain by joining our cause?” Well that was a good question Jeanne, but I’m fairly sure Ocellus had the best idea out of all of us. “To be your friends.” Pinkpie.exe said succinctly without a second thought. “Is that all?” Jeanne asked with a tilt of her head. “You do realize what you are volunteering for here by being our allies right?” “Yep, me and the harmony programs, we’re simple like that.” Pinkepie.exe was at least ridiculously honest. “We’re literally magical personifications of friendship from the planet of Equus that came to life because infectious magic got into a mechanical ostrich and kind of did a thing… we even have the negative aspects of friendship like getting on each other’s nerves!” “Right… what do you suppose you’ll be doing as we move forward?” Continued Jeanne. “We’ll be watching Mare Melum, it even has the word ‘Mare’ in its name… at least in spelling.” Pinkipie.exe was rather exuberant about that fact. “We’ll also be in assistance to you as emergency support and will be working closely with Mirage Mew here to keep the hold these reality marbles you so painstakingly fought for! Also the author has us on contract to not take over the whole story just by existing as functional expy characters of the main six.” “What?” We’re right there with you Jeanne. “Don’t worry about that, Pinkpie.exe says a lot weird things like that all the time and it never amounts to much.” Purpsmart.exe commented dryly as she bit into a digital meat plant, in the digital world growing meat like you grew vegetables was easy and Sami had some seeds for it to give to Patch. “Okay, so anything of note that your group wants to say?” The meeting was fairly quiet considering we all knew what we were doing here, even the Gazimon who were fairly afraid of getting directly into the fighting we’ve been doing. “Not really, just call on us if you need backup!” Stated a rather cheerful sounding Pinkpie.exe and I welcomed the help even if thought she was a little weird with her eyes looking at the nearest wall. (Maybe because she’s reading the text in the story.) “Hey, I’m not doing that!” (Sure you aren’t… after you just outed yourself.) “See she says weird stuff like that all the time.” Purpsmart.exe stated while shaking her head. Pinkpie.exe is now glaring at the nearest wall for some reason and I can’t fathom why she would be doing that. “Because you… ugh… never mind.” Pinkpie.exe crossed her strawberry taffy flavored hooves and pouted while looking away from the wall she had been looking at, this was much to everyone’s confusion. “We’re happy to help and we don’t have any pressing needs for you to worry about.” “Okay, welcome aboard as our backline support. If that is everything that is not a personal issue… and nobody has anything else to bring up, then we’ll finish eating and will all find ways to prepare to attack the Midgar realm over the next few days.” After that Jeanne and everyone kept busy and to themselves with eating and relaxing. -A few hours later, throne room- “Okay, I actually got us the Rider APs we wanted, but… they are a little odd.” It sounded like Sami succeeded in producing what we needed when it came to new AP production, but she seemed rather cagey about it. “How odd are we talking?” I asked as I had been discussing some plans with Jeanne about our continued efforts and would eventually have a talk with Smolder and Dormarch about the issues between them and me and Ocellus. “See for yourself, come in!” What walked in at Sami’s behest was… huh, I was expecting ducks or some kind of bipedal bird like an Ornithian… not this exactly. “Okay, what’s the odd thing about them? Aside from being a tall bipedal thin alien things I mean.” They were tall, glowing eyes, no mouth to speak of and appeared to like wearing limited gold colored armor… it wasn’t electrum even upon second glance. “Apparently this…” Turning Sami brought her rifle out and fired a spray at them only for blue flickering barriers of energy to stop her shots entirely. “They are called Rider Zealots apparently and they all come with energy shields and energy blades… don’t know how the data I used to create them ended up with this as an end result, but they are really good at wielding vehicles.” “So we’ve got a decent unit to field on or off a vehicle?” The answer was less than forthcoming. “Not exactly… their shields only work against ranged assaults, hit them in melee and…” With a simple punch Sami caused a Rider Zealot to falls over and it looked incredibly weak after the attack that even Ocellus could stop without using magic or changing out of her changeling form for combat adaptations… with her bare hooves… Sami really didn’t punch it all that hard in the gut. So this Zealot would be really kind of pathetic in melee battle. “So functionally they are really bad in a close up confrontation.” The generic Saber Knights we fielded would still be a go to for that I’d wager. “On any vehicle their shields increase in power to cover the whole vehicle… it actually gets kind of ridiculous when they are piloting something how much the vehicle in question can take. The more powerful the machine, the more powerful the shields produced, they definitely live up to the Rider classification at the very least.” Sami helped the AP up. “As the ‘zealot’ name suggests, they’ll die for us at the drop of a hat… they seem exceedingly eager to do so more than any other AP that I’m fairly concerned about it. Oh and the shields they make can regenerate as long as they aren’t taking damage.” “Is there anything else about them that I or anyone else should know?” I got this feeling that there was something that Sami wasn’t telling me. “Well…” Sami started only to be cut off. “Cheese house!” One of the Zealots stated waving at me in a friendly manner. “Fore a spoon!” Another stated as he pointed at the silverware. “My life of choir!” Then that one in particular started humming a jaunty tune, at least it was catchy. “I think the reasons why someone tried to remove their mouths, if they previously existed in some form as a factual species like we think other forms of unique APs might have… then it was likely in an attempt to stop them from spouting nonsensical things and they quickly developed the ability to speak with their minds in spite of that.” Well that wasn’t annoying sounding at all Sami. “Must construct additional nylons?” Asked ones of the zealots curiously while looking at the gold wool that took up my entire front right leg and a quarter of my front left. “What if we asked them to not talk?” My question was met with a grimace. “What they are doing isn’t technically talking so…” Sami shrugged and smiled toothily. “Anyway, they’ll be a big help in the coming fighting at least.” I sighed audibly, got up and then went to do some training to refine my abilities. I needed to do so before we get thrown into another meat grinder of a battle. Thankfully Jeanne is taking charge for the time being, she could deal with the headache of our new APs. “What, lamb crawls?” One of the Zealots asked confusedly.