ASO Chpt 1

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==ExpeditionChapter 1 - Aurigan Sentinels (BattleTech CYOA)==
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===Recounting Then and Now===
Cordia City, Coromodir
Aurigan Reach, Aurigan Coalition
1st January, 3020
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My father had been hit by a hover truck literally and I had been hit by one metaphorically. Though Tamati Kalani had technically been my stepfather, he was the man who raised me and so I considered him my father. He had raised myself and the half-siblings that I had grown up with and no offense to my other father, but Tamati Kalani had more claim to the title of my father than anyone else even if I preferred the more informal Dad for him.
 
Or did he? I’m Elizabeth Nora, right? I remember being her, but I remember being someone else at the same time. Did I go crazy in my sleep and wake up insane? Given that I now remember two contradictory lifetimes, quite probably. Pushing aside both grief for one of my fathers and confusion from two sets of conflicting memories, I grope around in the dark for the light before switching my bedside lamp on.
 
Blinking at the sudden light, I fumble about reaching for my wallet and pulling out my id. Elizabeth Nora, female, born on the first of January at the very turn of the current century, no, the current millennia. That answers some very immediate questions about who I am, but raises several more. Like why can I remember a lifetime in the twenty-first century where the thirty-first century I am currently in is the basis for a gaming franchise?
 
Wait, thirty-twenty? Not thirty-fifteen? That’s five years later than the usual for that self-insertion CYOA where as the illegitimate child of a noble, you inherit a combined arms regiment worth of hardware plus some ships to transport them from your late biological father. The date combined with the lack of a phone call from a lawyer are signs that I’m not in the scenario.
 
Not to mention that the man who got my mother pregnant is both alive and well. Even though I have never met him due to his obligations in the FWLM, General Aaron Herman has been involved in my life via long-distance communications. I've even been in contact with Adam, Italia, and Ava with Ava even discussing coming to visit me once she hits eighteen though her father makes it difficult.
No, the person who died is my stepfather not my birth father and that leaves me at loss in figuring this out. Have I inherited any hardware? No, Moana got the family Locust when she started training to be a MechWarrior so she could join the ACM and she officially became the new owner when Dad died. Not to mention that the family title and landholding went to Moana as the eldest biological child of Dad.
His ownership of the Kalani Meats & Meals was split between all four of us with the majority of the shares going to Malia as my little sister is halfway through university, studying business courses so she could take over from Dad one day. None of us expected it to be so soon. Still, Melika and I got enough shares to live comfortably for the rest of our lives so long as the business doesn’t go pear-shaped. Four thousand C-Bills a month isn’t close to what a noble can make, but it is enough to have a comfortable life if you live on a developed and civilized world.
And if I want something more luxurious and enriching in life, I have that invitation to join the NAIS that I received after graduating college. I’m apparently good enough with a sufficiently clear background that House Davion would like me working for them. The job details aren’t to be revealed until I am in a sufficiently secure location by MIIO’s standards, but if I was willing to leave my family and home behind, a job at the NAIS would set me up for life.
 
Wait, the expedition! Not one that happened before Dad’s death, but one…oh crap, I’m leaving today. Crap, crap, crappity crap, I need to finish the last minute preparations for that. The Starclaimed Spinner is setting off to the Nadir Jump Point to meet up with the Cardenia Claremont, which will be jumping into the system in a couple of days time.
 
Dad was a casual LosTech prospector, spending some of his free time looking up old records for clues as a hobby. Then a few months back he started to make some serious progress before making his big breakthrough just a couple of months ago. God, he was so happy to finally discover an actual SLDF facility, one that was still secret and had yet to be looted.
Goddamn truck driver. He killed a good man and I really hope that Moana and Mum make whoever is at fault pay. Accident, my arse. Even if the driver isn’t personally responsible for what went wrong, there has to be some human at fault along the line. Hover trucks don’t just run people over for no reason. 
 
Anyway, Dad spent the month between his discovery and his death putting together the expedition. The Starclaimed Spinner and Cardenia Claremont are reliable ships whose captains and crews can be trusted to be discreet according to Dad and he didn’t stop there, assembling a not so small crew of trustworthy individuals to form the nucleus of a house guard or mercenary unit.
 
A lance of Dispossessed MechWarriors, a squadron and a half of Dispossessed ASF pilots, a lance’s worth of tankers, a company of rookie infantry, a platoon of experienced marines and, wow, a former MIM ARC team who got on the wrong side of the Magestrix. What was old me thinking when she decided not to look into that more? Stupid, Elizabeth, stupid.
 
Who else? A bunch of support staff. Techs, accountants, lawyers, doctors and everything else needed to keep a private military unit running between battlefields. The range of experience is varied, leaning towards newcomers and professionals with a handful of gems sprinkled into the mix. Finally, wow, over three hundred spacers, a mixture of DropShip and JumpShip crew. Where did Dad find all of them?
 
Either way, it isn’t my problem to solve right now. The DropShip is leaving today and I need to make sure I’m aboard. Sorting everything out and looking into things can be done along the trip. It isn’t a perfect solution, but it is the best that I can do under the circumstances. The tight schedule is quite the limiter, but at least it gives me something to do aboard the DropShip.
 
In the meantime, there are some things from the other me’s knowledge that I need to address. Like the fact that in two years time, House Espinosa overthrows House Arano and transforms the Coalition into a tyrannical dictatorship. And I’m not sure how to prevent that. I can’t accuse Lord Espinosa of being a goddamn traitor without a shred of evidence, but at the same time, what other me remembers is that he got set in his current path after the talks with the Taurians broke down. Something which happened a few years back.
 
There are other things of great importance too, but none of them either directly affect the Coalition or have such a short timeframe to deal with them. Helm doesn’t happen until the later half of the decade, giving me several years to get to it first. The Clan Invasion doesn’t happen until thirty-fifty and even if it happens earlier, we should still have at least another decade and it will happen on the other side of the Inner Sphere to the Reach. The FedCom Accords will be signed in two years, but it doesn’t affect the Coalition except maybe making it easier to get Lyran goods. The Trinity Alliance and the New Colony Region are the opposite as while they happen in our region of space, they don’t happen until years after the Clan Invasion.
 
So avoiding or stopping the Espinosa coup in two years’ time is the big priority. Actually, no, it will be my biggest priority once I get back. Successfully completing or at least surviving this expedition will be my first and foremost priority for the immediate future.
 
The spaceport isn’t that far from where I live and the launch won’t happen until the afternoon. That gives me some time to get things done. Like writing down what I can remember of that…thing before other me’s memories dull or fade.
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===Future Plans===
I exist in a universe that may or may not be fictional, but putting that bit of existential horror aside, I have been blursed with meta-knowledge about my reality, my universe or whatever you want to call it because my comprehension of existence has been turned on its head.
 
In any case, I make the decision to write down what I can remember of the LosTech sites. Thank you SpaceBattles for putting together that list of LosTech locations because I doubt that other me would have known about half of them without it.
Places with clear directions to find them are the first things I put to paper, starting with Helm of course. Then New Dallas followed by the Argo and Castle Nautilus. Tarragona, Bristol, Epsilon Eridani, Antares and finally Odessa. The second list is locations where I know the planet or equivalent, but lack further knowledge to narrow down the exact locations. Places like Hoff, Volders, Phecda, Rigil Kentaurus and even Kwangjong-ni, having remembered enough of that last one to recognize it when I looked it up in a list of Lyran Commonwealth worlds starting with the letter K. I even throw in possible locations like Herotitus or Kimi that might be, due to the dubious canonicity of their sources.
 
And then I write down what I know about ComStar and the Clans because those two things may potentially be existential threats no matter how ridiculous that might sound. They are then followed by some details on the major houses of the Inner Sphere and Periphery as they might be useful in the future even if most of it has already happened or has yet to occur.
 
Still, all of those are future-me’s problems. I’m just writing them down now to get some sense of clarity and to get down to the details while they are still fresh in my head and I haven’t forgotten anything. A list of potential treasure troves wrapped up with the existential horror of just how I know about them and the implications of that.
 
With all of that out of the way, I go back to worrying about the dog’s dinner that is the Espinosa Coup that happens in two years, the two to three years of tyranny and oppression that follow it before the civil war known as the Arano Restoration sees the return of the Aurigan Coalition. At least for a little bit as according to the otherworldly memories, my people never recover from that as they never appear in any maps after the thirty-twenties.
 
Part of me understands why that is the case in that reality, but I’m living in the real world now and that means dealing with what happens to war-torn states on the verge of collapse that suddenly drop off the map. Forget the Clans, ComStar, and the Succession Wars, I’ll settle for just keeping the Aurigan Coalition from collapsing.
 
Unfortunately, that is far from easy. The idea that House Espinosa could turn on House Arano is just preposterous, but I can remember very vividly the events of how things played out in that timeline. Lord Santiago Espinosa coups his niece during her coronation and goes on to become a tyrant in the name of saving the Aurigan Reach from irrelevance. High Lady Kamea Arano goes into hiding before returning to overthrow her uncle and restore the Aurigan Directorate into the Aurigan Coalition.
 
Two to three years of tyranny as the social order is upended and the border worlds are made to suffer so the capital can be strengthened. And it was all for nothing as it didn’t strengthen the Aurigan Reach and ultimately caused a civil war. The only saving grace is that most of the Aurigan worlds don’t get claimed by any other power in the future maps and it is possible that the Coalition lives on as an obscure power that is too insignificant to even be put on the maps.
 
I don’t blame Kamea Arano for the Arano Restoration or the version of her who does that in the future. Or did it in an alternative timeline. God, this is confusing to keep straight. Anyway, from what I can remember of the Aurigan Directorate, it was a bad thing for anyone who didn’t live in the Coromodir system. It might have been too much for the Aurigan Coalition to recover in the end, but it was a necessary thing given the actions of her uncle and she was doing it for the right reasons in the end.
 
Speaking of which, what am I to do about Lord Espinosa? The man might be evil in the future, but he probably isn’t evil right now. He is the loyal right hand of High Lord Arano and I can’t do something to him based on what he might do. Like I could even do anything to the man in the first place and even if I could, I would be burning my bridges not only with House Espinosa, but also House Arano, the rest of the Founding Council and the Aurigan Coalition.
 
Hopefully, Dad’s discovery won’t turn out to be a bust and whatever I bring home will be enough to give me some power and influence. The millions of C-Bills that I inherited won’t be enough on their own, but that can be turned into military power and military power can be used to unearth LosTech sites. And LosTech sites can be used to strengthen the Aurigan Coalition and improve my standing.
 
Regardless of what the expedition brings and what options it opens up for me, there is still one thing in my newfound knowledge that I can directly use. Getting out a pen and some paper, I begin to dot down what the not-Elizabeth me remembers about battle armour, especially how they went from industrial exoskeletons to, well, battle armor.
 
Which isn’t much and that other me doesn’t really understand much of it at all, but as Elizabeth Nora, I covered exoskeletons during my college years. I even designed one as my engineering course just to prove that I could, which was certainly possible with my smarts. Nothing special, just another cargo-loader as proof of my intelligence and knowledge that remains nothing more than a theoretical design. You see, exoskeletons are expensive to make and even just a prototype would have cost tens of thousands of C-Bills to produce, perhaps even more than a hundred thousand if I ran into production problems.
 
Huh, maybe I will be able to make a working model of the design with my inheritance. If I’m lucky, I’ll have the C-Bills to do it and I always wanted to see my design turned into something real. Even if it is just a single functional prototype and nothing more.
 
In any case, I am getting off-topic. As Elizabeth Nora, I have a pretty good amount of engineering knowledge when it comes to exoskeletons. As the other guy, I have some insight on how to fix a major engineering problem when it comes to weaponizing exoskeletons. Specifically, the myomers] being too small to give the exoskeleton enough motion to avoid being too slow and chunky on the battlefield. Now, this otherworldly knowledge might be a load of bunk, but with the Elemental cutaway, the mention of the Clans giving their myomers a pseudo-length twice their actual length and Jackson Watt’s solution, I do believe that I might have a solution in mind.
 
But as much as I would love to get started on that project, I do need to get ready to ship out this afternoon for both my first time leaving the planet and my first time going to a different system.
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==Author's Chapter Notes==
;Word from the Author: As you might have noticed, I am rebooting Aurigan Dreams because I have greater knowledge of the setting now and I didn’t have a good plan for where I was going with the first story. For this reboot, I have a plan what Elizabeth will be doing instead of mostly making it up as I go along and I am going to keep it more grounded rather than have her aim to fix everything. I don’t want to give spoilers, but I aim to keep things more focused on the Aurigan Coalition and the Rimward Periphery. The Inner Sphere will be more of a “Here Be Dragons” place where Elizabeth is trying to keep her head down to avoid the bigger fish and get herself and/or the Coalition dragged into the crab bucket.As you might have also noticed, Elizabeth’s family and background is a bit different this time around. This is because I am using this Create Your Own Adventure (BattleTech Themed) because I want to use the new BattleTech CYOA. Because of this, Elizabeth has a differing background as she is born five years later in the timeline and rather than inheriting the results of her birth father’s convoy finds, Elizabeth will be the one doing the finding. I also won’t be using the crew requirement for the Spacer squads in it because it doesn’t match up with the lore at all and I’ll be using canon crew requirements instead.Incidentally, I’m not going to try and be purely realistic. BattleTech is a setting that just as often runs on the rule of cool as much as it tries to be hard science. I’m going to be silly about things, but I’m more interested in plausible than probable.
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