Saruta2

Microfanfic based on discussion here.

Good evening Lee-san, I hope you liked our concert.

Yeah, not a lot of fans around this cluster but hope dies last, you know! We do have great competition, yes, indeed. That's kinda related to what I wanted to ask you...

Could you please tell me of that time when you suddenly had a baby sister?

(I am the user "Saruta", I lost my old account).

So, in 2014 I wrote a 15k word Macross fic in Russian. It was a rather condensed text (it was for a contest with a time limit), an attempt at an epic story of "been there made history" and also a homage to the controversial figure of Carl Macek, who was kinda the prototype of the protagonist Kenneth Macer. And a Vocaloid crossover to top it all. It had few readers in the small Russian fandom, I never found the motivation to do an English version, and I thought the story would just be invalidated by the next instalment (which happened to be De lta).

So now I finally watched Zettai Live and... instead of "invalidated", the story seems to be nearly confirmed? At least it would actually explain the stuff going on and provide a possible identity of Lady M? Nothing to do with the protagonist - it's what I did with the Megaroad. So I decided to outline it here to see if there might be a reason to revive and rewrite in English.

In my story, Misa Hayase is actually a Protoculture agent. The real Misa Hayase, then Second Lieutenant, was critically injured in an ambush, and would be a "died a hero" case if this did not happen around the far side of the moon - where a small Protoculture observation outpost was located. She was rescued by the Protoculture and eventually died anyway, but not before a Protoculture member ... mind-melded with her? Wrong continuity for that term, but anyway she absorbed Misa's memories and genetics (and therefore looks) while also preserving her own. 

The returned Misa, who got a promotion to First Lieutenant for her bravery in that ambush, was not exacty the real one. She conveniently did not spend a lot of time with her father, and nobody else could ever tell the difference because of the meld.

Miss Macross was Misa's idea because she knew that a singer might have the necessary properties. I did not get into the details of how an agent like that fell in love with Ichijou Hikaru, but as I think of it now, maybe Max/Milia was the trigger, showing interplanetary love as a possibility.

As Captain of the Megaroad, Misa Hayase steered it right into a trap. Namely, to one of the very few remaining Protoculture worlds, which are all strongly hidden (I did not use the term "subspace" but that would be about right). That civilization, whihe technologically extremely advanced, is way past "decline" into "dying", and the emigrant fleet was to provide the much-needed "fresh blood" - so everyione on board was welcomed, with the only requirement being accepting some basic terms. Nothing too hard but it did include not attempting to escape or communicate with the outside world.

My protagonist, Macer, refused and stayed on the Megaroad, eventually a Protoculture girl caught up with him there and their daughter was Ranshe Mei (yup, convenient canon name). Her music teacher was Lynn Minmay, who in fact enthusiastically accepted the new place and set about studying its rich musical heritage (which, I'd add now, finally helped her make sense of her own story and whatever powers she had).

Macer's life was extended by Protoculture tech, but he still never signed - and, assigned to some fold crystal research, sought to use some simple Morse code.  Meanwhile on Frontier, Bilrer got hold of the chip that powered Sharon Apple (seen preserved at the end of Plus - an unused sequel hook is a gift to fanfic authors I guess). Wanting to research fold singers, he got an android body made in the image of Ranka as a support system for her that would learn from her; a massive projection system was put in, to justify this system to Ranka. (And we conveniently see "two Rankas" and A LOT of targeted "holographic" projection in Niji Iro Kuma Kuma).Bilrer's corp, of course, added some restrictions that prevented General Universal Music Interface ("GUMI") from remembering her past as Sharon and doing "that stuff".

GUMI got captured alongside Ranka and the massive projection of Ranka into space was the bad guys using her devices to abuse her, by that time, beloved teacher, which shocked her so much she burned off the restrictions. But Ranka's influence is so huge by this time that, while getting back her hacking abilities, she does not go evil again for lack of motive. (Originally she trained off Myung, a much darker personality apparently).

Combining the fold manipulation insticts she learned from Ranka and the lder memories gives Gumi/Sharon such a handle on fold space that she gets that Morse transmission - and, just to investigate in a momentary detour, rescues Macer, landing him on to the newfound planet.

The remaining story is about Macer meeting his granddaughter and the team going to Earth to explore the origins of her paternal family, whose real name is Sterne (Grace never bothered with a fake name, why would she?) or, in a more typical Western rendering, Stern. Which leads to an old secret Soviet facility where the first Vajra were encountered; Pavel Shtern [the Russian rendering of this same name], a researcher, died of fold bacteria disease, but an outbreak was prevented by suppression.  Then Macer, ailing for lack of access to that life-extending tech, meets Basara and Sibyl (who are kinda a symbiotic being by this time and just got curious about this entire thing but also drop him the key missing documents), hears them sing and dies in the process (a reference to Macek's death happening after \ party in some accounts), but that's not the reason I remembered this.

It's the Megaroad being in subspace in a Protoculture world, so exactly the place that has all the knowlege about ruins and fold singers. And also Sharon, after a redemption arc, being able to traverse between regular space and that location. With stuff from my fic, Lady M is likely Misa, who is Protoculture and would have both the expertise and the motive. But also her courier is Sharon, so Cromwell is not too wrong and definitely not lying (he just thinks Sharon is Lady M herself).

So, given how I had some nice guesses in lore, should I attempt a revival/rewrite in English?

(There is of course much more to that text that I did not go over right now, basically I try to add another dimension through the protagonists' eyes to most of the major events in Macross. For example, Macer, a rather reckless journalist, gets a Zentradi GF shortly after the First Space War; she quietly disappears, then he encounters her, now in maclone form, in the wreck of Quamzin's ship, dying but happy. I could probably add new things, such as a very young girl attempting to hack into Sharon/Gumi as she hacks into Earth's networks to gather information; Sharon's reaction is "tee her that tickles, cute!" and the girl is Reina).