A Loli’s Space Odyssey

Role playing Kizuna feels really natural to me. After all, everyone knows that MMORPG stands for Many Men Online Role Playing as Girls. I guess mostly because I wrote her personality based on my deep desires and how I would ideally like to act, it's easy for me to act this way. This makes me sound like a villain though, but screw that.

"Stella, be a dear and loot the wreckage. Retrieve any data and supplies."

"Yes, ojou-sama. Lisa, can you make yourself useful and engage the tractor beam?"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm on it."

I disable the master control. The captain's cockpit is the only place where you literally have access to all the ship's systems at the same time. And I am the only one capable of handling everything at the same time. Since the danger passed, I handed over the controls to my girls.

In Fraxinus Online, you could plunder the wreckage of the pirate ships you destroyed for supplies and data caches. You usually won’t get a lot of money, but there were surprising finds sometimes.

By analyzing the data caches, it’s possible to obtain info about the surrounding space sector. If you’re lucky, you might even get to obtain the coordinates of the pirate’s main base.

Once you obtain the coordinates of the pirate base, you could initiate an attack and destroy them in order to plunder all the treasures they’ve managed to save up. Alternatively, you can sell the info to the military stationed in the system in exchange for a hefty reward. Both are quite profitable prospects.

Stella steered Ava and stripped away all supplies, data caches and relatively undamaged weaponry from the pirate shipwrecks.

“There’s nothing particularly valuable huh.”

The pirate’s supplies mainly consisted of low-quality junk food and brewed liquor. Although brewed liquor sells at a reasonable value, depending on the local space empire governing the star system, there were times when they were deemed illegal goods. This item was quite the hot-potato.

“Oh.”

The data cache was a hit. In addition to the coordinates of the main space stations in this star system, I also got the location of the pirate base. Even if I just decided to sell this info, it’ll net me a considerable amount more than the total bounty of those three pirate ships I shot down earlier.

Apparently, there were no habitable planets in this particular star system based on the data I’ve obtained. There seem to be a lot of asteroid belts rich in mineral resources, and it looks like mining bases and space prisons (where they force prisoners to mine in a harsh environment) and trading colonies were scattered throughout the system instead.

“There’s no data for the other neighboring star systems huh…”

Unfortunately, only the data for this particular star system was available, and I couldn’t find any map data for the ones surrounding it. Normally I would want to go to my own planet. In case you didn't know, players could buy their own planets as well. The cheapest ones resemble King Kai's planet from Dragon Ball.

Of course, Kizuna… I mean me, should have her own planet. I designed it after all. But since it wasn't included in the game at that time… it makes sense to not have any coordinates.

"Girls, take over the controls. For the time being let's head to the nearest trade colony."

"Yes, ojou-sama!"

They set the main generator output to cruise mode and pointed the bow towards the direction of the trading colony. The throttle gradually increased, and after sufficient acceleration was reached, the Hyperspeed Drive was activated.

The scenery before my eyes suddenly stretched out, and the stars, which looked like spots of light earlier, turned into shining lines that flowed backward. I wasn’t knowledgeable about the technical details regarding the Hyperspeed Drive, and Fraxinus Online also didn’t elaborate on it much, but this function was mainly used for traveling between distant coordinates within star systems.

By the way, Avalanche is also equipped with the function to navigate between different star systems themselves. It’s called Hyperdrive, and it makes use of a subspace corridor as a shortcut to travel at speeds much faster than light in order to reach other star systems. Of course, I have no idea about the theories involved either.

It’s important for both the game and the players to have a method to travel between different star systems, so don’t ask about how it works cause it just does dude! It was that kind of thing. I don’t really care either way since I’m not a Sci-fi otaku or anything…

What’s needed to be prioritized right now was not sightseeing, but reaching the trading colony within a safe zone as soon as possible.

While I was busy mulling over my feelings towards the greater universe, Ava’s support AI informed me that we were nearing the trading colony. 

I tried to brace myself for the moment when the Hyperspeed Drive gets deactivated, but it went smoother than expected. What about the effects of inertia? Perhaps the ship is equipped with a system that effectively nullifies it or something.

I operated the cockpit’s side display like usual and sent a docking request to the hangar bay of the trading colony.

[This is the Port Administration Department of Colony – Ragnar. We’ve received your docking request. Um, Captain…? I’m sorry, but the data about your identification seems to be corrupted.]

“Eh? Ah… this ship’s official designation is the Avalanche. As for myself, you are in the presence of the great Queen Kizuna Amun Ra. Feel honored that I decided to dock here.”

I guess this could be considered the start of my new life.