[b][color=00a651]Fuka Nakano[/color][/b] [quote=@Finetales] [color=lightcoral]"Peacenik, Brightspark: I'm tangled with two MiGs, got them off your trail. There are more though, watch your back!"[/color][/quote] Well Calico was certainly [i]eager[/i], Fuka would give her that. Breaking off unbidden from the flight to smash into two bandits while more were coming in hot was...unorthodox, certainly, and potentially a lethal mistake. But high risk sometimes meant high reward, and Peacenik was more willing to trust the Singaporean ace's mad dog instincts than she was the Chinese mercenary's...or the Filipino child's, or the German air force transfer or the Swedish traitor or the English torture victim's... [color=00a651]"Roger Calico, I see them. Sparrow, I'm continuing ground attack for now. Peel off and help Cobalt 5, but stay loose. You might have to help both of us." [/color] She had always been solitary, even as a little girl. One time, her mother, exhausted after a long day of work and then a night of glad-handing the upper crust of the political world at some charity event, had seen her coldly brush off the attempts of some of the other young guests to make friends. She had taken her aside and, calmly but firmly, told her: [i]"You're going to need to learn to like people, because they're everywhere. You will be working and living with them forever, and it's easier if they're your friends." [/i] The memory stuck but not the lesson. Fuka remained distant; She was never anyone's best friend. No one thought to put her as an emergency contact, she had never been a bridesmaid, and not even her own siblings asked her to be godmother to their children. She stood apart from people by design-she could laugh and joke as required, of course, but that was in and of itself usually a performance, enough of a show to allow her to disappear. Those who got close to her found that she wasn't someone you could build a tight bond with and that she wasn't worth the effort anyway. She loved her family, but it was a distant and often somewhat obligatory love from both ends. [color=00a651]"That far hangar's got some gear in it, gonna handle it. Rifle out."[/color] A SLAM-ER lived up to its name, slicing through the aluminum frame and detonating inside. The fuel or ammo stores within went up all at once, flames pouring through the gash in the roof. Fuka tilted away, already searching for targets with her Litening pod. Sitting in her glass bubble high above the carnage on the ground, Fuka could remember a time when she had seriously wondered whether she was a psychopath. The thought had occurred to her in high school, and then later in the Army when she clamored for combat. It wasn't uncommon for super-grunts to want to see action (that was the whole point of being a Ranger) but where others wanted to fight because they hated the enemy or loved the people they were protecting or simply needed the rush to feel alive, her enjoyment of it was cold, clinical. It satisfied her in the same way as troubleshooting a car or patching a hole in the wall. She looked at a problem and the tools on hand and figured out what to do, and she could tell immediately whether she made the wrong move. Case in point, the RWR was beeping again. [color=00a651]"Got eyes on another mobile SAM. Guns."[/color] The Black Bunny dipped its nose and spat, a burst of cannon shells ripping apart the truck-mounted missile launcher before it could try and hit a second target. The RWR fell silent. Problem solved. Was she a psychopath? The fact that she was more curious than concerned was a mark of evidence in the Yes column, and her lack of emotional care for most people was another. She [i]probably [/i] wasn't, but she was certainly not going to the shrink to find out. All that mattered was that she could do her job and her team could do theirs. Affection, trust, friendship, they would come on their own or not all and didn't matter anyway. One cog in the machine didn't [i]trust [/i] another to move, it simply did its job and assumed the others would as well. If that wasn't the case, well... She'd adjust. [color=00a651]"Cobalt 5, I have no visual on you at the moment. Assuming you're not dead, continue to strafe. We're going to-Hold that thought."[/color] The RWR was one of the very few friends she had. It bleeted, it blathered, it hurt her ears with its atonal shrieks and robotic voice, but it only spoke when it had something important to say. It beeped in warning, pulling up the concentric rings used to indicate thread direction on her instrument panel. This most recent scan was from somewhere above. She glanced upwards, squinting into the dark- Her self-control slipped. [color=00a651]"Godamnit."[/color] That half-instant of anger was a secret shared between only her and the RWR and the plane itself. She hadn't even raised her voice nor make any gesture outside of a squint. It was the closest she ever got to rage, and with that moment of weakness out of the way, she could set about doing something about it. Fuka flipped the comms on and broadcast to all friendlies, no longer just addressing her own flight.[color=00a651]"Be advised, there are more bandits. I repeat, more bandits."[/color] Peacenik glanced back at the intruders, lips moving as she counted silently. [color=00a651]"A minimum of four heavily modified F-15s. I repeat, MINIMUM of four."[/color] They had come up quick and quiet and professionally, the sort of approach Fuka preferred. Strike Eagles, like she said, but the fact that she was only aware of them now meant they had stealth capabilities. Fancy stuff, not the sort of thing the Libyans would have got their hands on before the world collapsed. Another PMC. Fuka drummed her mechanical fingers against the instrument panel as she hit the throttle, pushing power to the thrusters as she pulled into a basic [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandelle]chandelle.[/url] The number of knots per hour on the airspeed displayed crept up in unison with her altitude, the Black Bunny pulling up and to the left in a turn that would have been far too fast had she been trying to get her FAA license, but was just fast enough when peeling out of gunsight. She'd be moving too quickly to aim a cannon at but slow enough that any missiles would overshoot her, and with her taking the turn first, she had the advantage when it came to chasing each other's tails. [color=00a651]"Ladies and gentleman of Flight 2: Give 'em hell."[/color] [@Letter Bee] [@Finetales]