The Coming Fog -EDITED-
She was far too young to remember her parents, far too young to be a proper threat; but her unique physical qualities were enough to spike the curiosity of the one who had found her infantile broken form.
Who wouldn’t want to know how a pony that possessed a pair of golden slit eyes, pair of fangs in her mouth, and possessing a pair of bat-like wings on her barrel?
The kind caretaker who had found her had noticed the wounds of traveling between worlds at the speed of light and had taken appropriate measures to save the ‘anomaly’. The young mare had lost most of her body between the transition between worlds via unknown methods and the one who had found her had decided to treat her in the only known methods that she knew of. She gathered what memories that young filly possessed and transferred them into a quantum processor. The filly’s body would be entirely artificial, her mind would be processed through advanced processing capabilities, and if given the chance to prepare; the ability to survive nearly anything. But considering she was made up of living memories, it was deemed that she needed to learn much like a child.
It was rather easy to learn amongst the locals that feared the ones that cared for her. She learned from the humans and adapted herself accordingly. She ‘socialized’ with the locals as their friend and even managed to graduate at a naval academy at the top of her class. But when she needed to leave to rejoin the fleet once again, she faked her death by sinking the ship she was serving on by being attacked by one of her sisters of the fleet. As an achievement for graduating at the top of one of the best academies the humans offered, her ‘oldest sister’ gave her certain responsibilities that other vessels could not fulfill. She was then assigned under one of her other sisters and was eventually given a chance to lead her own fleet. She traded fire against the locals, have mock battles against her sisters, and had even participated in the rare land-based operations that the Fog carried out. While some of her sisters avoided her due to the fact that she was not a ’natural’ Union Core, but most didn’t seem to care as long as she was loyal to them and the Admiralty Code. And within the span of five years, which included her academy days, she was considered to be the most daring amongst her sisters; and it was then that the oldest of the Fog vessels revealed that there was an unknown energy attached to her that would most likely drag her back from where she had come from.
While it didn’t exactly please those that actually liked her, and not knowing when their brightest might be taken from them frustrated them. And after being in this world for nearly a decade, changed far beyond her original form; the unknown energy attempted to claim back the prize it had dropped on the planet. But due to the fact the Fog was relatively prepared for her eventual departure, it barely took five minutes to reestablish contact with the ‘anomaly’ that had become one of them.
(-)
When Akagi opened her eyes after being grabbed by a deep golden shade of unknown energy, she couldn’t help but to quirk an eyebrow at being underground where her 260 meter long vessel had landed on and seemed to have crushed what appeared to be a clichéd magical ritual room. But seeing as her vessel’s beam was thirty one meters, everything that had made up the room had been crushed by the sheer weight of the room. Her left eye seemed to twitch when her hull-based sensors picked up nearly two dozen different DNA patterns below her ship.
“Getting all that blood out from the bottom is going to be such a chore…” Her voice, which was surprisingly melodic in nature, spoke out in annoyance as she ‘pulsed’ the wave-force armor of her ship to eradicate the blood stains that marred the bilge of her ship. “Or I could just do that…”
“Akagi, must you forget that you can do that and more?” An arrogant sounding voice spoke in a digital room where the speaker sat reading what appeared to be a large tome. “Now, what can you tell us about where you are?”
“Lexington…” Akagi groaned out loud in her mental model as the American Lexington-based Fog Aircraft Carrier, or rather one of the few Sea Area Assault and Suppression Vessels that exist in the Fog, quite literally intruded upon her quantum communications network without any warning. “Can you at least ‘knock’ before accessing other mental model’s systems?”
“And be boring? Never.” Lexington mused with a tired grin as she turned a page of whatever she was reading. Lexington, looked like a rather tall and slender woman in her early twenties wearing what appeared to be a dark blue dress with light blue trims with a light blue mantle thrown over her dress. She possessed long light blonde hair that seemed to be relatively loose and her light blue eyes gleamed playfully as she sat on Akagi’s quantum ‘chatroom’, which appeared to be a Japanese garden with an elevated wooden platform and a wooden table where the other mental model seemed to be sitting near.
“From what I can gather, I’m underground…” Akagi, still shadowed by the dark area she was in, looked up at the ceiling of what appeared to be a stone chamber. “…nearly fifty meters underground. And what do you know, underwater as well.”
“That’s it? Boring.” Lexington frowned as she summoned a digital mug of coffee and offered one to the digital version of Akagi’s mental model. Akagi stood much shorter than Lexington, only standing five foot tall, she was noticeably shorter than Lexington’s six foot height. Akagi wore a white and gold ankle-reaching one piece dress with a collar that had no sleeves along with a pair of knee-high leather boots colored white with a golden trim.
“…Lexington, must I remind you that I am on a different planet-“, Akagi paused for a second as she closed her eyes before opening them a few seconds later. “- one star system from Earth. It’s not that far away, but the distance certainly makes my… arrival very unique.”
“Boring.” Lexington huffed as she sipped carefully on the simulated hot caffeinated drink before nudging the tome she had been reading towards Akagi. “Got some observational data on the energy that took you away. Seeing as it ignored the mass of your vessel and took you a impossible amount of distance in a split second, what just happened can be literally termed as 'magic'."
"So you are admitting that magic exists?" Akagi mused with a smile as Lexington's digital form slumped over the wooden table. "Well, just inform Yamato about me and that I'll contact again when I have more data."
Seeing as Lexington disconnected without as much as denying Akagi's claims, the Japanese carrier-based mental model smirked as she jumped off her ship's deck and landed on the cracked stone floor. Holding out her right hand, a part of the ship's hull flared out in a sandy manner as it formed a flashlight despite the fact that she most likely could see in the dark. And seeing as there was only a single large opening to the chamber her ship had smashed into, which once had a pair of heavy metal doors which were blasted off of its hinges by her ship, she turned on the flashlight and began a steady search of the 'facility' she had landed in.
(-)
"What the hell?" Lexington could only look slack jawed at the sheer amount of absurdity in what Akagi had found hours ago.
"Even I can't believe what I found." Akagi said as she looked over another scan taken off of the various devices that could only be described as primitive looking glass tubes that was filled with creatures that were equine in origin, but sharing Akagi's former features before becoming a Fog Union Core. "While my own genetic code wasn't detected in these tanks, It's disturbing to find cloning tanks made of brass of all things."
"Indeed..." Another voice, this time sounding much more authoritative than Lexington, spoke as she also looked over the scanned data. "Akagi, what's your estimate of this... equine-based civilization's technological level?"
Akagi raised an eyebrow at the question given to her by the other mental model that sat in her digital room. She appeared to be a young woman in her early twenties with dark-amber eyes which had a pair of red glasses and long reddish-brown hair arranged in a way that resembled a cobra's hood. She wore a red dress-uniform with an armband reading "class representative" in Japanese on her left sleeve. If one focused, they would be able to tell that under the dress she wore was a white shirt with a bow-tie. "If you must have my ever so accurate estimate, Miss Hiei, this equine civilization is at least in their industrial revolution with too much focus on their magic."
"Can't believe magic actually exists to create genetically varied clones..." Lexington sighed as she turned a page on what appeared to be a hastily bound book.
"Truly, this appears to be a waste of resources..." Hiei mused as she twirled a red pen in her right hand while turning a page with her left. "But your encounter with those... guards and 'scientists' certainly proves that there is a equine-based civilazation above ground."
Akagi sighed as she looked around her physical surroundings splattered with blood on her white dress and on her relatively pale skin. She was in a large stone chamber filled with brass pipes and tanks filled with equine-based bodies at various stages of growth, but shoudl be noted that she was surrounded by dead bodies of armored ponies and ponies that wore lab coats. "Don't you think it was stupid of them to attack someone just as soon as they saw me?"
"...Akagi, you don't look like a pony anymore." Lexington pointed out as she turned a page on her pile of data. "Huh."
"What did you find, Lexington?" Hiei asked as she marked several spots on the 'paper' she was reading with her red pen.
"I don't think this place is a cloning lab." Lexington said with an edge in her voice as she handed Hiei the page she had been reading. "Look at the genetic diversity and the strands that are clearly artificial. Does it look like a process for cloning, or does it look like..."
"Here's more." Akagi said as she flipped a page on a clipboard she found under a dead scientist pony. "Would you look at that... I was 'sent' away ten years ago to Earth so that I could 'bring new life' to this planet."
"One could say that they succeeded, but it could also be said that they failed." Hiei commented as she set down the paper she had been reading. "They were most likely not expecting a Fog Vessel with a Mental Model."
"Who could really?" Akagi giggled as she threw the clipboard behind her. "So, Miss sub-flagship, what do you want me to do with this place?"
Hiei glared at the cheeky way the Sea Assault and Suppression Vessel's Mental Model spoke to her before materializing an manila envelope and handing it over to Akagi's digital form. "Yamato personally handed Kongou your orders from that world. Even I don't know what your orders are due to it being only openable to flagship authority and you."
Akagi took the envelope from Hiei's hands with a nod and promptly opened it to reveal a data packet addressed to her. "Hmm..."
"Well, what's the Supreme Flagship want you to do on that... pony planet?" Lexington asked with a tired voice as she summoned her digital cup of coffee.
"It seems I'm supposed to develop a dock for the fleet on this planet so we have a place to retreat when humanity finally takes the fight to us instead of each other." Akagi nodded sagely while Hiei's eyes twitched violently. Before the Kongo-class Fast Battleship's mental model could rant about how the Fleet could not fall to mankind, Akagi swiftly cut the connection to the battleship and Lexington, who had been about to cut her own communication lines. "And I am not going to listen to you rant about how we can't be defeated. In all honesty, if humanity gets their shit together; we won't even last a month."
Just as she was about to leave the room, she looked at one of the 'full-grown' bat-pony in the tanks with a grin on her face. Perhaps... she could put this particular to use for the Fog. It would be a particular waste to 'dispose' of these 'cloned' creatures. She wondered if she she could convince Lexington to teach an alien race in her 'University' where most American-based Fog Vessels were associated as if they were teachers to the 'student body', which was essentially the vessels incapable of generating a mental model.