Leon yawned. It had been a hard day at school, with tests in history and math (ugh, that evil math!). Now he was at home, and ready to relax.
He walked into his room and turned on his computer. Now, the fun begins, he thought. Leon had agreed to play World of Tanks that day after school, and one of his friends on the game was already waiting for him. He picked up his head set, plugged it in, and turned it on.
"Oy, mate, I've been waitin' for fifteen minutes for you, where have you been?" a British-accented voice said into Leon's ears.
"Sorry," Leon replied. "I just got off the bus. We ran into traffic."
"Alright, I suppose that happens on either side of the pond eh?"
"Yeah, Eddy, it does. Now, where is..."
Another voice came in, a feminine one; "Sorry I'm late gentlemen, the court ran long today, and I had a lot of royal work to do."
Princess Luna. Leon whistled. It had been six months ago that a magical portal had opened in the Midwestern United States. and guess who had come through it? Princesses Celestia and Luna, along with the six Bearers of the Elements of Harmony. As it turned out, the MLP;FIM universe was real; and the ponies in that world had wanted to come meet ours. The two universes had managed to get along peacefully so far. The ponies provided magic to help humans in many ways; in return, humans provided advanced technologies.
One of the inventions the two species had come up with as an interuniversal internet.
Of course, there were some rules that came with this; the Princesses had agreed to allow the usage of the IUN (Inter-Universal-Network) provided that most things obscene were toned down heavily. The governments of Earth had largely agreed (with the notable, or perhaps not so notable, exceptions of North Korea and Iran, whom the Equestrians had been taken aback by).
In any event, Princess Luna had become fascinated with gaming and the internet. Leon had found her one day in World of Tanks by accident; of course he hadn't known it was really her; so many people used the name "Luna", most of them obviously bronies. It was only after the battle that Leon, who had been utterly defeated, found out just who he had played against. Oddly enough, they had become firm online friends ever since.
Eddy came from Britain; he too had been a fan of the show, and had been estatic to meet Princess Luna, although that had only been after Leon and Luna teamed up to kill his KV-1 with lower tier tanks; He hadn't liked that (Leon found he could still get himself to chuckle when he remembered Eddy's furious chat bombardment), but his anger had evaporated when he found that he had had the honor of losing to a pony, and a Princess come to that.
"Thats ok", Leon replied. "Let just platoon up and see how many noobs we nail today, shall we?"
"Agreed."
"Agreed."
All three players formed into a platoon, led by Eddy, who had decided to use a VK3601H for this battle; Leon was using a Panzer IV (One of the best tanks in the game in Leon's opinion), while Luna, newer to the game, was using the mutilated tank destroyer called the M3 Lee; it was necessary to get the M4 Sherman unfortunately.
"Alright, I'm hitting the start button guys."
"Good."
"Let us begin!"
However, seconds later...
"Oh for fuck's sake, some idiot platooned with a stinking Loltractor!" Eddy shouted over the headset.
Leon jumped, then looked at the screen; indeed, another VK3601H on their team had platooned with a Leichtractor, more commonly known as a Loltractor or Loltraktor. The issue at hand was that the tanks in the game were arrainged by tier; tier 1 was the lowest, with tanks that could quite accurately be described as tin cans, to say the least, while tier 10 had the real, heavy monsters than could crush most enemy opposition.
The Loltractor was a tier 1 tank; almost useless against the tier 4s, 5s, and 6s that they were up against. the only way to bring one against higher tier tanks was to have one platoon with you, or for you to platoon with a higher tier player, depending on whether you were the higher player or the tier 1. People did this kind of thing with other tier 1 tanks, most notably the t1 Cunningham and the MS-1, but the Loltractor was the classic of the bunch.
"Please, Edward, do not shout or swear over the headset," came Luna's upset voice.
"*sigh* sorry, Luna. It's just... I don't even..."
"I know."
Finally the game loaded and the players could see their tanks. Already some of their teammates were making comments about the "moron platoon", as Leon usually called them. Some were berating the two players for bringing a useless tank onto their team, while others made fun of the situation, using the chat to say things like 'FEAR OUR MIGHTY LOLTRAKTOR!" and other stupid statements like that. One opposing player typed "Oh no were screwed!"
If only I could teamkill both these idiots to teach them a lesson. Leon tried not to teamkill, at least in World of Tanks; for one thing, in an FPS like Halo, you could be teamkilled and respawn seconds later. World of tanks had yet to install a respawn system; once you died, you were dead until the battle ended. For another, you could be punished by the auto tk system for doing it; after two teamkills, a player's icon would turn blue, and anyone on either team could kill them without penalty; however, teamkilling a teamkiller before they turned blue would lead to the vigilante player being punished.
In any event, the timer went down, second by second, as Malinovka (known to many as "Campinovka" due to the WWI fortifications and the amount of defense/camping both sides generally went with) came into focus. Leon, an impatient Mainer, felt like it was almost an eternity before the game started.
At last, the timer counted down completely and said "GO!"
Leon darted forward, hoping to find a good spot to snipe from; he had read in a magazine somewhere that it was good for that, and He had managed to take out some KV-1s with it, mostly from the side.
Suddenly a gun roared, and there was the sound of a tank exploding. Leon looked around and saw that a BDR G1B had blasted the Leichtractor into scrap metal, and it wasn't even ten seconds into the game.
The Leichtractor player typed "WTF!?"
The BDR replied "Don't bring useless tanks idiot."
While this was going on, the VK the L-tractor had platooned with swung his gun around and blasted the BDR, which turned and tried to fight back, but ultimately died.
BDR; "What the f*** you damn trolls Ima report you f***wads for unfair play."
VK; "Wasn't trollin dude, was bringing my kid brother to play the game." After a pause, the VK went on, "And that's fine, I'll report you for teamkilling."
Other players joined in, while another enemy player said, over the "All chat," "Wow nice shooting :P"
Leon facepalmed. "Come on guys, let just get to playing."
Eddy was laughing. "He deserved it, I was going to kill him myself, but the French bloke killed him before I was ready."
Leon tried to ignore this; he found the situation funny as well, and if he dwelled on it, he wouldn't be able to play effectively. "Come on," he said, "Two players down is bad enough. We don't need any further distractions."
Luna said nothing in response to all this, though Leon would have bet she had been inches away from using the Royal Canterlot Voice; he did NOT need that blasting his ears.
Leon took up a position in facing the main field, waiting for someone to cross the field, hopefully a noob who didn't yet know how to play the map. However, the only vehicle he saw at first was a Pz 38 that dashed across the field; Leon and another player fired at it, but missed, allowing the enemy scout tank to escape into the marsh near the lake.
"I don't think anyone's defending the right," said Luna; Sure enough, the area to the right (they had started on the southern end of the map) had no one rally defending it.
"Ok, I'm coming." Eddy's tank raced just behind Leon's as he went to help Luna.
Leon was too busy to pay much attention to his platoon-mates after that; an enemy KV-1 was emerging from the left side of the field, possibly to try to flank their team.
Yeah, thats not going to happen. Leon pressed the shift button, zooming in on the enemy vehicle. He aimed for the tracks; a tank that couldn't move was a sitting duck. He fired. "Penetration!" shouted the in-game voice as the KV-1 stopped moving.
Yes! Leon pumped shot after shot into the enemy tank; though some of his rounds ricocheted, he did a substantial amount of damage, plus two of his teammates had joined in. Finally, the KV exploded after someone caused a fire that killed off the enemy.
Leon glanced at the scoreboard; aside from the two teamkills, their team had lost two other tanks and had killed three. as he watched, it went up to four enemy vehicles destroyed as Luna got in a good shot on the Pz 38 that Leon had missed earlier. three other enemy tanks were under fire in the middle of the field; apparently they had thought that they were going to get an easy win after two of their enemies had been destroyed before they had even fired a shot. Leon and the others were doing their best to prove them wrong.
One of the enemies in the field died as an artillery shot slammed into it. Leon didn't especially like artillery in the game, but bitching about it, both ingame and on the forums, had only gotten him negative responses, to say the very least. And he was grateful for the help here in any case.
Leon took aim at a B1 that had dared to cross open ground; the opposing vehicle was taken down to two-thirds of it's health in one shot as he fired. Another couple of shots and the B1 was almost dead... then another player finished it off.
D'oh! That was frustrating. He mumbled rude words under his breath as he spun his gun towards the last enemy on open ground, fired, and saw it explode.
Now the score was seven enemies destroyed to five; however, Eddy was taking damage from an opposing Sherman variant (That was what Leon called E8s and E2s).
"Hey guys, I'm taking heat over here, could someone..." Before he could finish, an enemy arty blew him to shreds. "Aw, dammit!"
Leon took a look at the battlefield; it looked like the other allies watching no-man's land could hold their own, so he drove his tank to the right. Luna was still trying to fire at an opposing VK3601H that was hunting for their team. He stopped and shot at it's tracks; he hit, and the VK stopped moving. However, it was turning it's turret in his direction.
Uh oh. He shot furiously at it, but did little damage. Fortunately, the VK's first shot missed, so he got in a few more shots before it did hit him. The Panzer IV lost almost half it's health from one hit. Leon kept shooting. Another shot broke his right track. In the meantime Luna kept shooting, but had little success, although she did manage to continually track the enemy.
He was hit again; he was now down to a few dozen hitpoints. The next shot would almost certainly kill him. As he stood there, waiting for his gunner to reload for one last hopeless shot, two artillery shots in close succession slammed into the VK, reducing it's health to 4%. He also thought it's gun had been knocked out, because although it continued to look at him, it didn't fire.
Leon and Luna fired almost simultaneously; the VK exploded, crediting the kill to Leon.
He let out a sigh of relief as Luna thanked him for the help. That was a bit too close. Looking at the scoreboard, he saw that only four enemies, two of them artilllery players, were still alive. None of the enemies had anything above tier five.
"You know, you could have come a bit sooner and I might still be, oh, I don't know, alive?" Eddy sounded a little ticked off.
"I thought it was arty that got you."
"Yeah, but that damn VK did most of the damage."
Whatever. You're dead. get over it. Leon didn't say it out loud, but Eddy tended to get very upset whenever he died in the game. That got annoying. Glancing at Luna's M3 Lee, he saw she was still at 75%, still good to go in other words. His own tank had 35 hitpoints left. Still good enough to get in a few licks of my own before going down.
Leon and Luna pushed forward, ignoring Eddy as he began rambling on how unfair his death had been and how his teammates should have helped him, although Leon briefly considered teasing him about it. Another B1 got in their way and died quickly; although it was a tier four tank, it's 47mm gun was rarely enough to do much damage to a Lee, let alone a Panzer IV. Leon was little worried when it hit him twice in close succession, but the rounds bounced off, and Luna got the killing shot on the B1. Looking at the minimap, he could see that his three other teammates were pressing ahead. Before he and Luna could reach the enmy base, the remaining enemies were killed. The victory tune began to play.
Leon found himself back in the garage, although still platooned with Eddy and Luna.
"Well that was fun." Eddy sounded like he had gotten over his death. "Up for another round?"
"Sure," Leon and Luna said at the same time.
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Ok, here's the first chapter of this sucker, hope you like it. This story will have no definitive end, as I'll add more chapters as I find more themes and ideas for it.