Part 1: The Innocence of Summer

It's been four long, gruelling years of training and examination. Half of all the trainees had washed out, they themselves having been the top 250 prospects in the nation. You've all been pushed to your limits and even beyond them, reaching heights in your skills you never could have imagined. The fundamentals have all been forced down your throats until they were instinctive. You've had countless simulation hours alongside many more in mechs of your own design. However, today, the results of the most dreaded part of the process for most were released. The mere mention of this stage never failed to make at least several trainees go pale. This section was:

The theory test.

Any second now, messages would come through to any current trainees who were all gathered into a hall barely big enough to fit them all to confirm or deny them graduation, as well as their squads for the trial period as fully instated lancers. A tangible anxious energy filled the room, joined with a few pockets of confidence, bordering on arrogance, caused by the typical, flawless rich kids you get in every school, including the Lancer Program. No system is perfect, despite what the heads of any given institution would tell you, and the worst kept secret about the Program was the bribery to influence the admissions, though it was limited by the quick washing out of anyone not talented enough to be there so the money only afforded the rich kids better living conditions and better resources to give them an advantage in the examinations.

You are among the crowd, nothing special or distinguished yet, though that may well change, especially after events soon to come, ones that no one could have predicted...

Around the room, everyone's standard-issue watches buzzed, alerting everyone in the room to the release of the results and their fate, now contained in a message on the watch. The room's energy switched from anxious anticipation to a myriad of emotions around the room. Excitement, relief, sadness, anger, fear, it was all present.

If you look at your own watches, you will each see that you have passed which might be more surprising than for others. Alongside this good news is your squad for the near future, Squad 12AFT5. For now, it is simply a string of digits but it will surely come to mean more in the future, especially once you earn your name, as all Lancer squads do. Following, instructions to where you should go next are set out. Surprisingly, your fellow squad-mates are not mentioned in the message, leaving that a surprise for when you arrive at the conference room you were assigned.

Many people started filtering out of the hall, successful and unsuccessful alike, which meant that only about half of all people are remaining, creating a lot more space for you all to move about.

The conference room was more akin to a shared office space than the classrooms you'd be accustomed to on this campus. Surprisingly, no one was here. Usually, no one was ever late in the Program, especially if it was through a message on the watch. These were seen as priority, despite this one being relatively mundane. Perhaps they were intending on you getting to know each other first, or perhaps they were simply held up.

The one thing to notice would be that there was a holographic label with the text [12th Section: Advanced Forward Team 5] being projected be a small device that was lying on the table. You'd recognise this as a UDP (Universal Data Port) which, using your watches, could be used to get whatever data was stored on it. It was unclear what could be included in this.

The rest of the room was empty apart from you four, the only furniture in this sparsely decorated room was the table and 5 chairs. That was, again, a big difference to many of the other rooms, which wouldn't leave any wasted space. These rooms would likely be much smaller or have a separate, combined function such as storage or a computer suite.