VIII. Enthusigasm
Flight Commander's Cabin
In the wreck of the Istry Lochran
Cordelia leaned back against the bulkhead at the base of the floatway, watching Twilight, bright-eyed, grinning, and bouncing gently in place as she stared around the room.
The cabin was large, and quite decadently plush, the pale light of the same inset globes illuminating walls paneled in pale wood and thick carpeting in a deep shade of indigo; only a few badges set into the walls were a reminder that this was part of a starship. They stood at the nadir of the gravity wheel's curve, the floor curving upward and out of sight to left and right. Nearby, a pair of delightfully comfortable-looking chaises longue flanked the floatway they'd just descended, mirroring each other and angled towards a large, mirror-smooth sheet of smoky glass hanging on the far wall. A cabinet nearby held crystal decanters and drinking-bulbs, each nestled into a felt-lined hollow and held in place with buttoned straps, and atop which rested an antique brass sextant.
Looking back, paintings hung on either side of the floatway caught Twilight's eye. The first depicted a forest mansion, at second glance set among the branches of an improbably large tree, reddish walls of living wood wandering in and out among the foliage and melding with the larger, seemingly hollow trunks. The leaves themselves were rose-gold; not dying autumnal leaves, but a healthy, plump rose of spring, veined with yellow gold. Above one shaded window, an immense droplet of amber sap had been captured as it rolled down the trunk, dividing around the high, peaked canopy which was there, she realized, for that exact purpose.
The other depicted a shady garden, one built - from the details she could make out in the background - in some balcony courtyard of that mansion, or one like it. Flowers, both familiar and unfamiliar to the unicorn, sat in wooden tubs scattered around a central lawn, whose grass was mottled green and a curious pale blue, but her attention was drawn to the group standing at its center. Moongleam herself stood in the middle of the group, but --
"Is that your family?"
"Mm?" Cordelia looked up from the Least Useful Book, saw where Twilight was looking, and smiled. "Yes, that's them. My parents, Merété Idolos and Valéran Vintar," indicating the couple standing behind her in the painting, a tall blonde woman with coppery skin, and a pale man with hair red as Cordelia's own, touched with silver at the temples - although, Twilight thought, in other ways they looked no older than she did (1). "And that's my little sister, Filia, leaning on Rhúas, our bandal (2)."
Filia, caught by the painter laughing at some unheard remark, Twilight noted, was in many ways a miniature version of her older sister. But the creature - the bandal - she was leaning on was familiar, in almost every way but one.
1. She may be 126, but in human terms, looks no more than 25 or so. Human terms are probably unhelpful.
2. Picture an Australian Shepherd. Now picture one whose ancestry is as much dire wolf as gray wolf - i.e., a couple of hundred pounds of muscle, maybe 2' 6" at the withers, and, given the size references for this 'verse, hypothetically almost able to look Twilight (3' at the eye-line) in the eye. That's a bandal, or more specifically, an Alatian Upland Herder, which this one happens to be.
"Those creatures, the bandal - are they all that big?"
"Rhúas is fairly average, for his race. Why do you ask?"
"There are similar animals here. We call them dogs. Your Rhúas looks very like Winona, my friend Applejack's - you'll meet her tonight - herd dog. But she's" - Twilight gestured with a hoof, about a foot and a half off the floor - "and he's" - a rather higher hoof-wave.
"Hm." Cordelia thought a moment. "Interesting. Some lifeforms almost identical, others different. Maybe some comparative genetic testing, see if we can establish a point of divergence. What's the variation li-- ah, yes?"
But Twilight was distracted, having caught sight of what hung above the entrance to the floatway: a carved and painted ceramic crest, a shield, depicting Istry Lochran in flight, superimposed over a yellow-green ringed planet. A scroll surrounded the base of the shield, holding a short phrase written in unfamiliar flame-like letters, and on either side it was supported by -
Well, on the left, it was supported by some strange flying creature (3), a diamond of smooth leathery wings dwarfing a tiny, otherwise-limbless body, but on the right -
3. An airthia, if you were wondering, which rather resembles a giant airborne manta ray.
"A unicorn?", Twilight gasped.
Cordelia twisted to follow her gaze, then chuckle-sighed. "A sevdra," she replied. "Which are believed to be entirely mythological. Symbols of the perfect marriage between power, beauty, and wonder in the despite of Entropy, don'ch'know, as found in ancient legends, less ancient alchemy texts, and improving stories for young ladies, certainly not a creature that actually existed. Although -" she tilted her head, studying the carved sevdra's smaller eyes, more pronounced muzzle, and differing proportions compared to the actual unicorn in the room "- I have to admit, the family resemblance is striking. Between that, 'dogs', and breakfast, maybe I'd better start saying probably mythological."
"I don't," Twilight said wryly, "feel very mythological."
"That's... probably a good thing. On the other hand - would you know offhand if there are any ancient unicorn fossils that looked, well, more like that?"
"I don't. We could check the Canterlot Archives," and Cordelia could almost hear the sound of items being added to a mental checklist, "and the Museum of Natural History. And Professor Pot Sherd at the School for Gifted Unicorns might know. I'll send him a letter. But for now..."
"But for now," Cordelia agreed, and they shared a glance of perfect understanding, "...best get packing."
"What's first?"
"Well, hm," Cordelia thumbed back a few pages in the book, "Most of the start of this is taking hull panels off to use for construction, and it's getting a bit late in the day to start with that -"
"You've got somewhere to stay," Twilight interrupted, "and there's probably even room for your equipment. The library has a big basement - I use some of it for a lab, but a lot of it's empty right now after, well... (4)" She trailed off, then rallied. "Anyway. There's lots of space, and I'd be close to hand if you needed anything."
"And I'd be close enough to keep an eye on?" Cordelia chuckled, and Twilight grew slightly purpler. "It sounds like an excellent idea. So, let's flip forward to the equipment checklists," she continued, suiting the action to the word. "Here we go."
4. "Why is so much of our magic dangerous? Why not marry safe magic if you love it so much! I'm Twilight Sparkle. We're done here."
"Okay," Cordelia continued. "First up: field kits. Good for all circumstances." She knelt by the bottom of the floatway, and pulled open a cupboard built into the panels at its base, then dragged a heavy-looking gray bag out of it, marked with the Exploratory Service's brass sextant-and-star. "Survey kit. Port-a-lab, sample jars, hand scanners, test kits, everything you need to do a groundside survey. Or at least a small one."
"I thought you weren't expecting to land?", Twilight queried.
"I wasn't. But I wasn't expecting what I was expecting, either."
"That makes no sense."
"You're right, it doesn't. But you get used to that."
As she spoke, Cordelia dragged another, matching, bag - save for the yellow sun replacing the sextant-and-star - out to sit next to it. "And the medical kit. Synthskin patches, sprays, drugs, tools, everything you might need to stay alive until you can get back to the vat."
"Vat?"
"...it's a bit further down the checklist."
✓ field survey kit
✓ field medical kit
Standing up again, Cordelia gazed up the height of the floatway, then back at the bags. "There's some cable in storage. I can rig a hoist..."
With a quick flare of light from Twilight's horn, both bags disappeared in a flash of pale purple light. The unicorn looked at Cordelia, and shrugged.
"...you don't have to go along with them. Huh. Well, that's going to make this a lot easier." She clicked her tongue. "And then there's the screen, here, that could be useful."
"And we should take these paintings, too," Twilight said. "It gets damp out here at night."
"Good thought - and I have an idea. Let's test something. Can you... feel this?" Cordelia's psychokinesis flared to life, wrapping the smoky-glass wall-screen in a blue glow, gently easing it off the wall, and leaving it propped on one of the chaises.
"Yes," Twilight agreed. "Just like with the rocks, outside. Why?"
"One more thing first - can you try it with the paintings? Just pull them gently but firmly away from the wall; they should come loose."
Twilight, in turn, enwrapped both of the paintings in her lavender field, then tugged - and in turn again, they slipped free, and were left propped next to the screen. "So what does that prove?"
"The grip pads that held them to the wall? They're programmed to respond to eldrae-style psychokinesis, to slip free when that takes hold of the painting. That it also responds to your, ah, magic is interesting in all kinds of ways, about which I mostly have no idea."
✓ wall screen
✓ paintings
Further along the cabin, the two of them now stood in front of Cordelia's giant (by Twilight's standards, at least) bed, a sturdy frame of that same pale wood used to panel the walls, with plush quilts held down by straps; or rather, a frowning Twilight did, behind the blue-and-gold patterned folding screen that concealed it from the rest of the cabin. Cordelia, meanwhile, had crawled mostly underneath it with a bolt key (5) taken from the survey kit, and was unfastening it from the deck.
5. For those not familiar with the term, this is genuine NASA jargon for "electrical spanner that can operate in microgravity".
"You seem" - the bolt key whirred intermittently - "a little disappointed, Twilight Sparkle. Is anything wrong?"
"I'm sorry. It's just that this isn't what I expected a sky-ship - a starship - to look like. I've read stories about them - Coldback, "Dynamite" Smith, Heinrein, Vanner - and they all imagined them as sleek and minimalist, all machinery and scientific instruments, stripped down to save weight. This looks more like one of the guest suites in Canterlot Palace! If I hadn't seen it from outside, I wouldn't know I was aboard a starship. Except for the curve in the floor."
"They used to be," Cordelia replied. "Back when we first went into space. And a lot of the other - more functional - rooms of this one are still built to that style, but we've been out there a long time, now, and have much better drives than we had back then. And when you're sending people out in these ships for months at a time, it's worth the mass to keep them comfortable. But also..."
The bolt key whirr-clacked a final time, and fell silent.
"...try lifting the bed."
Twilight's field reached out, encompassed the bed - then flickered out briefly as it shot ceilingward, before catching it again and stopping it before it bounced off the deckhead.
"Whoa!"
"I should have warned you," Cordelia said, standing and dusting herself off. "But that's, its strength and lightness is, why we use that particular wood, even when building luxury in. The need may be less, but the tradition remains: every grain counts."
✓ furniture: bed
Two tall cupboards near the bed held Cordelia's wardrobe, laid out neatly on two standing mannequins. On the left was her dress uniform; a single-breasted, buttonless jacket of twilight-sky blue trimmed in brass over a black silk shirt, with matching trousers of heavy wool with brass piping. Four thin gold rings wrapped the sleeves, while a planetary knot in gold cord, surmounted by a silver rocket pin with a single wing, adorned the left breast of the jacket, mirrored by a thin strip of colored ribbons on the right. An embroidered badge of the ship's crest rested on each shoulder. A matching tricorne completed the ensemble, with the sextant-and-star circled by a cockade, and a long feather tucked into the band, shimmering white touched with crimson at the tip, while a dress sword, a cutlass, hung by the mannequin's side.
Cordelia stooped, and began pulling off the slippers Rarity had made, exchanging them for the low black boots that came with her uniform. To Twilight she explained, "They're space-boots. The soles interlock with the floor gratings, and hold on magnetically. They'll be handy once we get into the more angled compartments --"
✓ uniform
Twilight, though, was distracted by the armor (6) stored in the right-hand cupboard, an intricate mesh of interlocking, body-hugging plates, down to the tiny scales of its gloves, topped with a teardrop helmet, all in a shifting pattern of mist grays - or, more accurately, by the cloak that half covered it, once more in the twilight-sky blue of her uniform, but with an endlessly shifting pattern of tiny stars, nebulae, and even whole galaxies floating, by some optical trickery, within its surface.
"Oh, my," Cordelia interrupted herself. "That's going to be an interesting coincidence for a formal occasion, isn't it?"
6. That would be the N45e Réyneri scout armor, for those interested in the technical details.
✓ scout armor
"Let's see now," Cordelia said, rummaging through the drawers of what looked like a heavy, but obviously was not, wooden desk, with an inlaid surface, further down the cabin. Basics -"
In turn, she pulled out a gauntlet the length of her arm, fashioned from twisting arabesques of intertwined colored metal, strung with gleaming gem-like nodes; another slab of the smoky glass, the size of a book but much thinner; and a pale white sphere the size of a hoof, with a single golden lens and a pattern of silvery lines radiating from it. She pressed her arm into the gauntlet, and watched the mesh shrink until it hugged her arm and the back of her hand perfectly, concealing itself in the fabric of her tunic. A brief flash of bright lines outlining it hovered in the air for a moment, before vanishing just as quickly, and a previously invisible tension seemed to flow out of the eldrae.
✓ nanolathe
Twilight tapped her hoof on the deck, and tilted her head in obvious query.
"Sorry," Cordelia said. "This -" she held up her be-gauntleted arm, "is what we call a nanolathe. It's sort of a universal tool - fabricator - sensor - calculator - and a dozen or so other things all in one. I've been feeling quite naked, metaphorically speaking, not having one. Much as I suppose you'd feel if you somehow had to go out without a horn."
Twilight shivered, having a rather clearer idea of what that was like than Cordelia could know.
"But, wait," she said. "Outside, and earlier, you could move things --"
"But that's close to all I - or any eldrae - can do barebrained," Cordelia replied. "A little farspeech," she tapped her forehead, "with compatible minds, and light psychokinesis. Anything else, we need tools for. It makes us a little twitchy when we don't have them. Anyway, this," she now held up the glass slab, "is for you."
Twilight took it in her field. "What is it?"
"That's a slate. It's a... portable computing device. It's got a lot of functions, but I dare say the first one you'll want to know about is that - once some of the other stuff here is set up - you can use it to call up any book in the on-board library, any time you like. Or image, music, watchvid -- uh, film, simulation, anything."
"Any book? That's amazing! How many books are there on board?"
"Um." Cordelia calculated briefly. "About twelve..."
Twilight's face fell.
"...grand dodeciad (7)."
7. That would be just under 36 million in base 10. When data storage is cheap enough, and you aren't sure what books might be needed, it's easiest to just send along a copy of the Repository of All Knowledge's main collection and have done with it.
The ensuing squee could be heard in Ponyville. (Meanwhile, correctly assuming that this would take a while, Cordelia quietly slipped the sphere into her pocket.)
✓ slate
✓ bytegeist
"I don't think we can get this 'cornucopia' today," a now-calm Twilight said, looking around at the next item, a fat cube of machinery with cut-off corners mostly hidden beneath a long counter. "Especially if it needs that much disconnection. It's getting close to time for the party, and you never want to be late to a Pinkie party. Ever. How badly do you need it?"
"Now I have this," Cordelia patted her nanolathe, "it can wait. A night or two out here won't hurt it any. That or the healing vat. And then," she shuffled through the book, "I need to grab one of the auxiliary reactors to power all this stuff, too, but that's heavy - and the way the ship's lying, hanging from the ceiling. I know I don't have the strength to bring it down safely, and teleporting it... the book suggests using it where it lies, but we're a long way from the library."
"How heavy is heavy?"
"Units," Cordelia shrugged. "I'd say around 35 slabweight, but what that is in your measurements -"
"Is it as heavy as a house? One of the ones you saw in Ponyville?," Twilight asked.
"I wouldn't think so, no. Why?"
"Big Mac!," Twilight clapped her forehooves together. "Applejack's brother. He dragged an entire house across town last spring. I'll ask her tonight if they can help us move them. I'm sure they'd be willing to help."
✗ cornucopia
✗ healing vat
✗ thorium reactor
"Then we'll call that a plan. We surely can't move them on our own tonight, anyway. So - let's just get the library and a couple of other widgets blinked out of here, and we can be on our way."
Computational/Avionics Compartment
In the wreck of the Istry Lochran
As they clambered up the steepening slope to the entrance to the next compartment, and levered the door to what would be their final stop open, the dreadful acrid scent (8) of charred nanocirc came wafting out, borne on a mist of thin bluish smoke. Two noses wrinkled as one.
"That's not a good smell," Cordelia muttered. "Something must have overloaded when she crashed. Still. Most of the equipment in here is just needed to interface with the ship. With luck, what we actually need will be intact."
8. If you've done some electronics - mix the scent of a popped electrolytic capacitor and the magic smoke coming out of a failed IC, then turn it up a bit. If you haven't... it's like the smell of a PC power supply that died in a power surge, only more so, and if that reference fails, well, best ask someone who has had the experience. It's a very distinct smellsation.
Waving the smoke inside, she stepped through the doorway, boots clacking as the magnets hooked the grating beneath her feet. This compartment, Twilight thought, was much more like the starships in the novels: racks of equipment from floor to ceiling; mysterious boxes with a few scattered, blinking lights, emitting a quiet hum; neat bundles of cable and the occasional pipe running along the deckhead and down into the racks. Cordelia prowled along the racks, checking codings printed on the boxes against the book, then stopped, clicked aside clamps at its edge, and pulled one fat gray box smoothly from the rack nearest her.
"One information furnace," she said, "complete with library database." She tapped the end of a thick rod protruding millimetrically from a port in its front panel. "Looks intact to me. And next -"
✓ library
She repeated the action with the clamps, and pulled another box from the rack, steel-blue this time.
"- and this is the ship's brain. Its cogence core, as we call it. So that's the two most vital parts, and then to make your slate work, we just need -"
✓ cogence core
"-this!," she finished, pulling a slim white hemisphere from the side of the rack. "One wireless microcell router, coming up."
✓ microcell
"You are," Twilight said, "going to explain this all to me at some point?"
"I'd be purely delighted to, my word on it," Cordelia replied. "But really, it's going to be a lot easier to do that when we're setting it back up, than when we're taking it down."
Moving closer to the far end of the room as she spoke, Cordelia suddenly yanked a small flat module from one of the machines, crying, "A-ha! Found it!". The thin smoke eddied around the module as she gestured with it. "Here's the failed one. Nothing too vital, I don't think, it's just the -- oh, waste heat. It's the tangle channel. That could be a problem."
"The what now?"
"Tangle channel - it's the communications device that lets me send in my reports and so forth. Trouble is, Istry also uses it to send routine updates automatically, and by now he'll have missed one. If another two are missed, they'll assume something's happened to me, declare me overdue, and send a recovery expedition. I don't know what - Princess Luna? - would think about having one of those stomping about, especially since our civilizations have barely met. Could you, ah, let her know and find out? If she'd rather not, I might be able to send a signal waving them off."
"You'd do that?" Twilight asked. "You don't want to be rescued?"
Unicorn and eldrae, this time, shared the precise opposite glance.
"Well, eventually, I'd like to go home. But, Twilight Sparkle, this is what I do. And since I've arrived on this planet I've discovered two entirely new sophont species - and heard of an unprecedented seven more - and seen at least that many novel technologies, at least one of which definitely has the potential to revolutionize physics as we know it, just while walking down the street (9). That's before we even mention the highly unusual sun you have here, or the increasingly likely possibility that you and I might be distant cousins. Not that first contact isn't already a big deal, but even one of those makes it a lot... bigger."
9. Well, in a manner of speaking.
"And all of them?"
"All of them? Well, if we make everything go well, you and I, they're going to need to invent brand-new extra-awesome titles to put on the plaques underneath the statues they're going to build to us, and then underneath the statues they're going to build to our statues. It's not so much 'names on scientific papers', it's 'names on entire multi-volume encyclopedias', with whole conferences just to hear us speak," Cordelia elaborated on her theme, happily sweeping Twilight up in this burst of assumed collaboration, "and then more conferences to discuss those conferences. Entrées (10) to the Court of Courts, almost certainly, and I wouldn't be surprised if the patents of a lathlé (11) came along with them! Scientific immortality!"
10. Also entrées at the Court of Courts (i.e., the court of Their Divine Majesties themselves), but that goes without saying.
11. lit. "holder of special privileges"; an exultant title roughly the equivalent of a knighthood.
She coughed, then blushed faintly blue at Twilight's somewhat alarmed expression in the face of this sudden outwash of enthusiasm.
"Well. It's the knowledge that's the important thing, of course. But to answer your question more directly, even if it wasn't for all of that, I'm a first-in scout. Discovering new civilizations, learning and sharing - this is what I live for. The odd... inconvenience along the way is nothing. But when you do take all of that into account as well, the sheer magnitude of it - there's not a lever in the galaxy big enough to pry me off this planet. Short of your people deciding that you want me to leave and ordering me off it, at least, but apart from that, nothing."
Twilight thought.
"I'll ask them. But you should send a message either way, to let your people and your family know what happened." She paused. "How are you going to send it? If that," she pointed with her horn at the still-smoking tangle channel in Cordelia's hand, "doesn't work?"
"Under ordinary circumstances, there's a communications laser on top of the ship I can point at the stargate and use to send a message. These," she waved the module, "are limited-use, so that's the main signaler, but it won't work through this much air, even if I could point it right and power it. But I've got some signal buoys in storage that can orient themselves and resend a recorded message, if I can get them high enough - almost out of the atmosphere."
"And you're going to do that how?"
Cordelia grinned widely.
"I may have an idea, if you and your friends could lend me a little assistance, and depending on the answer to one question. Namely... what is the operational ceiling of a pegasus, anyway?"
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This is a nice story. I do rather like the interplay between two cultures trying to figure each other out.
Not many people do this anymore as everything always seems to end up with action and adventure as the focus, so this was a refreshing find.
Elsewhere:
Guys, have you seen my nanolathe anywhere?
Central Consciousness wants me to build a geothermal plant on that vent over there, but it's missing.
How can it be missing!? It's built right into my chassis!
If I can build anything I'm useless, and if I'm useless I'll be reclaimed. I don't want to be recliamed.
Guys, come back. Don't leave me.... Oh scrap.
This is literally almost perfect (taking into account that the closer one is to being perfect, the harder it is to improve). Smooth writing, sharp humor, and an interesting OC with reasonable interactions with the regular cast...
I'm not going to apologize about any suspicious bite marks on the story itself. It's just too tasty.
Pretty sure noone will notice most of the nibbles though.
Found this out a couple hours ago. Read it. I find the lack of more chapters disturbing
More when?
Today, we have Geek Shopping.
Some nice bits and pieces there, wonder what things Twilight can match up with them, if Gems come in different styles, as in Mineralised, Commestible, Magical etc, or if gems themselves are less specialised and more generalised and so not like heliocentric gems possibly due to th dense magical field?
Given how small the Tangle Unit is, there should be a couple spare in the AWE35 storage because of course, scouts? Then again, the reason it burnt ou is due to a serious mismatch between heliocentric and geocentric spacetime metrics, so any other plugged in would immediately get an infinite SWR mismatch and burn out as well?
So many fun things for the CMC and Pinkie to get mixed up with. I mean, that Industrial Air Dryer they purchased is almost powerful enough to lift the Scout itself?
As for getting the transponder into vaccuum, it depends on values previously given, but if its close to Terrestrial, then Spaceship One in Ballistic flight, starting at Mach 3, goes over the 100 km limit classed as Spaaaace. The biggest problem for Rainbow isnt the speed, she can reach 400khooves in balistic even minimum, its the vaccuum. Or, does her magic field work on subspace fabric and so she doesnt need an atmosphere, even to breath, because supersonically she couldnt breath anyway due to shock temperature and ram effects?
With how often Ponyville gets rebuilt, there should be various heavy haulage companies in town, more than the medium removal crews with light pegasi haul for home contents, good to a couple ton? Heavy haulage as in those tons of logs, stone, thatch etc?
Couldnt the biggest Canterlot Telescope be used to aim and collimate the comm laser so it can reach further? After all, would be slightly more realistic than having Pinkie pop into The Court in order to drop off The Invitation.
So is the nanolathe supposed to resemble an Omnitool from Mass Effect?
7734191
Please note caption here: https://eldraeverse.com/2013/05/11/trope-a-day-every-device-is-a-swiss-army-knife-magic-tool/
(...but, yeah, it's basically the omnitool that Rarity would have designed.)
This chapter is great, but I can't find the 4th footnote in the story. Where did Cordelia ask about dangerous magic?
7734938
Sorry 'bout that. (I'm fixing the footnote format so this will be less likely to happen in future.) Anyway, it's in this paragraph:
...some experiments go better than others for our favorite magical-science prodigy.
With that, this story has somehow become more perfect.
Just one small thing, would you mind if you wrote the foot note indicators in-text as say, 5]? Same for the actual footnote. It would make ctrl+f a bit easier.
7854011
I've decided to start using boxed footnotes to eliminate the scrolling problem, so hopefully that format change (which I've retrofitted to the existing chapters) will work better for you.
Not only do we have Daring Do, it's now canon that Shining Armor was a huge sci-fi geek. (Not sure if it was out when this chapter was written, but Twi totally got him a poster of a pulp SF hero whose name I can't recall in "The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows".)
And speaking of time, it appears that I can safely rule out Season 1 as the timeframe this fic takes place.
Um... Wouldn't Twilight be able to pick it up herself? Heck, though I'm not sure she could pick up the WHOLE ship, she could probably move a decent chunk of it as needed, let alone a small thorium reactor. Big Mac can drag a house, which is no doubt impressive, but I imagine Twilight can juggle a couple herself.
*head tilt* But it does make sense.
You were expecting the possibility that things would not go as expected in any way, shape, or form.
Hence a broad selection of seemingly random utility kits that had no conceivable use for your expected mission, to cover needs that might arise from a broad range of unexpectable circumstances. Hopefully.
...maybe I've been reading about Pinkie and Discord too much? It still seems perfectly sensible to me!
One division-grade Chekhov's Arsenel, locked and loaded, ready for deployment, sir!
✓ field survey kit
✓ field medical kit
I think some of your formatting went weird since this was written. I don't think those are supposed to be... are those headphones...?