Tiddalik Artillery

## Tactical Analysis

* **The thirst is real:** Serving as the main artillery vehicle for the Contingent, the Tiddalik lives up to its name, using its gravity manipulation device to reorient the flow of gravity in a local area, pulling out the nails and rivets that hold the building together before parts of it themselves, rapidly weakening its structural integrity and leaving it to collapse in itself, while said material is used to repair the Tiddalik.

* **Extreme omnivore:** Vehicles and infantry are not safe from the Tiddalik's immense thirst for metal (and flesh), as they can be pulled in range of friendlies by a simple switch of the device's configuration, which also gives it a much bigger range boost.

* **Regurgitated:** The Tiddalik can only pull building parts and enemy units to itself, and nothing else. It’s attack range is pathetically short, as in basic base defense can shoot back at it, and aircraft are far out of its reach.

* **Choking hazard:** With enough time and some fine tuning Tiddalik operators have found how to focus the gravity projector’s beam, giving it more range and allowing it to slowly crush anything being pulled towards it. And would use the surplus materials they invariably gather to repair nearby vehicles.

## Background

*"Ribbit. Ribbit."*

- A cheeky Tiddalik operator
Aboriginal mythology narrates the account of *Tiddalik*, a water-holding frog who once drank from the world's oceans and seas to quench his extreme thirst, draining them until they were wholly consumed. Content at last, Tiddalik grew into a bloated, mountainous creature filled with water, while other creatures and plant life began to dehydrate and die due to the lack of sustenance that can be gained from it. Devising a plan to make him release the water inside him, the animals had Nabunum the eel tie himself in comical shapes in an attempt to make the water-holding frog laugh. And when Tiddalik did laugh, the water rushed out of him, flooding and replenishing the lakes, swamps and rivers.

In another thought, the team responsible for the creation of the Tiddalik Artillery might have chuckled at themselves that day, thinking they've just made a clever reference to a piece of mythology that has been the subject of popular Australian children's books.

Clever they think their reference is, what's more clever is their applications of one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Thanks to Dr. Payne-Scott's research, the Contingent's considerable monopoly on gravity allows them to utilize it for a myriad of purposes. Through the manipulation of gravitons, its simplest application of forcefully sucking material from one area to the area of the device itself has become the Tiddalik's guiding principle.

This entire idea came about in the middle of WWIII in the Australian theater, when it was evident that the Imperial occupants were swallowing up too much territory due to their hyper-mobile nanocores unfurling into their bases. At the end of a heated battle which ended when the local Japanese garrison was abandoned due to a clutter of funnel web spiders, a group of material scientists discovered that those buildings weren't only paper-thin as they were generally thought to be, but in fact were made up of over a billion 'nanites' converging into one structure. Combined with the mecha squadrons' tendency to harass them before speedily running off, the Contingent needed a way to close the gap quickly - and punch through enemy structures easier.

A crack team of military engineers conceived an outrageous idea; why close the gap by making vehicles that can dart to the mecha, when it can be closed by pulling the *other* side towards them? Dusting off a functioning prototype for a shelved Allied anti-gravity device and installing it into a rusted, rectangular vehicle chassis, the newly-christened **Tiddalik** artillery vehicle lived up to its eponym, forcing mecha squads out of formation by catching them and sending them to the tip of the Contingent glacier ready to run through them. Japanese buildings weren't safe either from the frog's collective thirst, as they were disassembled slowly, nanite glop after nanite glop flying out of their structural compositions into the Tiddalik's 'mouth' itself, which it then uses to repair itself.

Post-War, Tiddaliks are becoming known just as much more for their capacity to release rejuvenating streams of water as they were for drinking up the beneficial water that gave the Imperials foothold in the continent. In the reconstruction efforts, thanks to their constant shifts in gravitic alignment, building parts can levitate and arrange themselves to their desired form, without the need for manual labor, although the areas themselves are to be under surveillance for gravitic singularities to result.