[b]Solarel[/b]

You’ve won the match. Tactical superiority carried the day. The Barn Owl cannot move. It has no ammo, it cannot strike you. Angela concedes and screens come on declaring you the victor. The Boatman of Styx have a congratulatory message waiting for you if or when you care to give them the time of day. 

Can you say that Angela has won your understanding? You did not draw your blade upon her, never gave her the satisfaction. To the very end she was denied and her loss was impetuousness in the face of denial. It’s a mistake she won’t repeat twice.

Angela cannot stand, the legs of the Barn Owl are ruined beyond repair, they’ll need to be completely replaced before her next match. She signals to you for a tow to the hangar now that the match is over. 

She’s broadcasting out loud as well, a message for you and everyone watching. She’s laughing. “Two losses because I was a fool chasing my last phantom. A hidden weapon like this would have easily caught an over-arrogant goddess. But for you, Solarel, I needed precautions, defenses, and unending vigilance. Ay ay me, I am stupid. I challenged your honor and you dropped a mine at my feet. Ha! Haha! This is no less than I deserve. I know not if we shall meet again, I think you less engaged in the antics of our strange lifestyle between fights than the cats. But I shall watch your fights with interest. And the fights of your former comrades in arms.”

You hear the brief sound of her perusing the match channels from her cockpit, a short electronic beep as she passes through each set. “Hmm, appears that one of your knights surrendered honorably to a Terenian. Isabelle Maria Lozano de la Estrella. Do you know her?”

She knows you won’t answer, but she asks anyway. Terenians are a strange sort. 

***

[b]Dolly[/b]

Erys Bander loves to pose and show off. There’s a moment, you’re on the ground and not moving, but the match hasn’t ended yet. She has to do her finisher. She has come in and put a foot on you and then make her mark upon Jade. You know it well, Jade’s got the same instinct and the Red Band are famous for this. It’s their calling card to mark their conquests and Erys is, if anything, the stereotype of these pirates. Strong, brash, proud and full of life. 

You kick, there’s a muffled clang of metal upon metal. She staggers and you’re upon her. In your hands are the binding chords, Jade’s last weapon. You wrap them about the neck of the [Grip of Dishai] and you pull as tight as you can, the whole of your weight hanging upon her. 

Here, in this moment, you can think for just a second that you could win the match. If you could but hold, if Jade had all her strength, this would be a victory, a surprise reversal of a reversal to clinch the victory and remain undefeated. 

But Jade is not there. She departs like a firefly. The lights within the cockpit flicker and dim. The eyes of the idol dim too and the screens all go out. You disconnect from your neural interface. Within the cockpit, you rest in darkness. No torches burn, no visions show you dancing and whirling in the starlight and no hands lift you up or press upon you to reward you for your victory. 

But neither does the fist of Dishai crush you to oblivion. Even without any direction for the motivating force of your drive, you’ve locked arms tight holding the chords in place and Erys cannot move without tearing her own head from her neck. She growls over the comms. She rages in perfect stillness, and at last she disconnects her own neural interface. 

The match is a draw, both pilots were rendered incapable of combat at the same time. 

You can both withdraw from the field after, though it’s a tangled affair. Erys can’t move until you can, and without any sort of assistive piloting interface, you need to open your cockpit for vision and manually control the idol in a very slow and awkward process that requires you to put each movement into a physical backup interface that can operate without any sort of AI assistance (you can’t imagine anyone choosing to pilot their mecha this way normally, they would have to be some kind of savant). 

You’ll need to slowly release the arms and undo the chords before you can let yourself down and let her power back up. Erys will, of course, offer taunts the whole time. After all, you just can’t let her go, can you?

[b]Jade[/b]

Do goddesses dream?

***

[b]Mirror[/b]

He’s laughing. Still laughing. Not just laughing, he’s shouting, whooping. You can hear the absolute joy he’s feeling. 

“Ahahaha, I’ve never felt anything like that. Incredible, incredible!!!” 

From out of the smoke, he comes. Shield discarded, armor melted off, shield generators overloaded and discarded. He’s faster than he’s ever been. Of course he is, it’s basic science. The same power source moving half the weight will accelerate twice as quickly. It’s the most fundamental fact of interstellar travel, the basis for every technological leap that made possible a galactic civilization of catgirls. 

But he’s not faster than your reaction time, Mirror. You might have thought the fight over, and that attack was surely spectacular. Your new energy algorithm agrees. The display is making a low but pleasant humming sound like something that might come from a stringed instrument, the bar’s sitting at full, and tail nine is lit up and ready to go. 

You have to choose. You’ll win the fight no matter what, but with the speed he’s given himself, your other tails won’t be able to stop him from impacting you. Only an overwhelming attack will arrest his momentum in time. Are you prepared to unleash the power you’ve been saving?

***

[b]Isabelle[/b]

“Dios mio!” the shout greets you as you disembark from the hangar. You’ve brought the Lightning Chaser as well as your own novasurge all the way to your berth. What else were you going to do with it at that point? You could hardly unceremoniously dump it halfway there once you’d started carrying it like you were in [i]Star Raiders 2[/i], the news would have been all over it if Isabelle Lozano were that much of an ass. And she was your prisoner, so if you’d tried to drop her at her berth instead, that would have been weird and confused Quar completely.

So now you’re back, you’re still in your mecha carrying another pretty beat up mecha and right there on the walkway at cockpit level is your mother with her staff and the entire cadre of siblings following along as she exclaims. 

“Isabelle Maria Lozano de la Estrella, what in the stars were you thinking? Have you seen these fiends fight? The one in the other match dropped a mine on her unsuspecting opponent and you accept a wordless surrender?! You drag her here?! The news will think you mean to ravish her, and it’s a miracle she didn’t shoot you in the back the second you lowered her guard! What a hopeless daughter. You execute on everything perfectly and then only blind luck brings you to the finish.”

How do you even start with her? How do you tell her that when you touched the mecha and shared those nanites that you felt a connection, that you knew you could trust her? How do you tell her that you’ve inherited a strange power from a long-dead precursor civilization? How do you tell her that she’s right and this all relied on your own sense of honor and luck [i]before[/i] you got any of those mystical insights? 

[Mark Heir to a Mystic Power for your next dealings with or about Quar.]