Aki Saitani

"Let's go, let's go! I'll show you what this thing can do!"

Pilot of the Tesla Leicht's latest experimental mech - an attempt to fold the technology of the Twin Tesla Drives into a more versatile design - Aki Saitani is a corporate test pilot who did not expect nor is particularly trained to be thrown into a military situation. Naive about both local conflicts and her own place within them, the requisitioning of the TL-XBPR-004 by A-LAWS has left her in a world where she seems very out of place. Fortunately, she isn't about to let that stop her; instead, she throws herself into her new job with emphasis and gusto, determined to demonstrate to her superiors what she, and more importantly her machine, are capable of.

Background Information
For as long as she can remember, Aki Saitani has been around machines. The middle sibling of three born from a Japanese mech pilot and an American mother, within a family split neatly between military service and private mechanic firms that now sprawl across the Midwest United States, Aki's early life was filled with no end of opportunity to learn about just what made robots tick. It's always hard to be the kid in the middle, especially when your father disappears off on tour for long periods, but the lack of attention paid to her by her immediate family left her free to soak up whatever she was willing to learn. Whether it was her nose stuck in design documents, her arms stuck up to their elbows in a drive shaft, or her eyes stuck to scraps of news footage as the One Year War raged, she eagerly soaked up an eclectic range of scientific and engineering knowledge.

From those beginnings, thoughts of higher education never really began to cross her mind. Aki almost took it as read that she'd be following in her father's footsteps, or at least sticking close to them, and it was with only a token note of protest from her mother that at the age of sixteen she left school and booked herself into an EFA Youth Cadet program. It was a shock - she was mentally prepared and performed admirably on written tests, but wasn't prepared for the rigours of personal training. Her confidence badly shaken, it took her months to get up anywhere close to par; thankfully, in the interim, her array of mechanics knowledge lent her enough credence - and thanks to staying up late fixing other people's mistakes, enough goodwill - to scrape by. She became known amongst the cadets as a skilled pilot and a solid jack-of-all-trades... but also a soft touch, and an easy mark when you needed some work done.

When a placement was announced for a test pilot at the Tesla Leicht Institute, she almost didn't apply. It was only a last minute decision that saved her, and she will forever chalk up her winning the position to sheer blind luck. In truth, it wasn't; her superiors weren't as oblivious as she or her squadmates thought, and her career had already been considered well before she ever handed in her own version of the application. Her reassignment would get the Youth Cadets some recognition, her out of their hair, and her classmates into having to work for themselves; this politics hardly mattered to Aki, who was suddenly finding herself well and truly on cloud nine. Assigned to the testing and research team for a new experimental mech that aimed to harness the power of the Twin Tesla Drive for more commercial or humanitarian applications, she was well and truly in her element and loving every second of it.

She spent the next two years immersing herself in the development and production of the TL-XBPR-004 and became a fixture of the base, putting her all behind the project like a small, possessive whirlwind of energy that managed to gain some measure of notoriety around the base for her eccentricity. Above all, she learned - learned about the mech, about the combat principles that guided it, about the day-by-day current events of the world outside. Even the Balmarian assault on the Institute could not dent her now-rejuvenated spirit - it was all that the guard staff could do to hold her back as the base went into emergency lockdown, her pleas that she could go join the defence falling on deaf ears and her claims that that XBPR was finished and ready to /just go help/ demonstrably false.

Her fervent wish to fly 'her' machine in active duty rather than endless batteries of tests took over a year to be realised, and even then it was from an unexpected direction. She wasn't even aware that pressure was being applied to Leicht administration until the reassignment came through and landed in her lap - the XBPR was to be requisitioned by the A-LAWS as a recoupment of their investment in the institute, and as a trained officer with the most experience in actually flying the thing, she was going with it. It seemed there was nothing to do but accept - not that Aki minded. Here was the chance she'd been seeking to prove that the mech was viable, and she wasn't about to let the hard work of everyone on the team go to waste.

Personality Traits
Loud and proud, Aki is very much the sort to wear her heart firmly attached to her sleeve. What you see is almost entirely what you get, and what you /get/ is a forthright and affable young woman who is extremely comfortable with herself and her place in the world and who, from that, remains in an almost unshakable good mood. Though she would be the first to admit that she's made mistakes or had what has occasionally been a hard or unfocused life, she actively shrugs away any thoughts of moping in favour either of finding a new distraction to while the time away or just getting the hell back onto her feet and carrying on with things. She approaches life in general with a bull-headed assurance that if she tries, everything will work out just fine, and usually tackles obstacles in her path in an extremely direct fashion as a natural continuation of this logic. Rarely does she get unhappy when she could get proactive instead; even then, it takes a major and concerted effort to get her to a state of true anger compared to a standard gung-ho-let's-go perspective.

This can make her seem simple or unfocused, and though that isn't entirely untrue, she is at least smarter than she looks at first glance. Having spent most of her life up to present day either left to her own devices or else in situations where there wasn't a whole lot to do but learn, her unsupervised meandering through whatever subjects took her fancy on a given day has left her with a shallow but very broad knowledge base, and she's capable of some impressive jumps of intuitive reasoning as long as she doesn't have to think through the details too hard. Weak to interesting tangents, both in her own thought patterns and in her general study habits, she's good at setting herself goals and targets but bad at actually staying on course for them when presented with a range of other topics unless deeply invested in what she's doing. She remains a skilled mechanic and a technically skilled pilot, but neither skillset has been tested under much in the way of duress; simply put, she's raw and inexperienced when it comes to actual combat situations.

To the consternation of many, Aki can sometimes be a little /too/ warm and affectionate. As much as she might have been an enlisted officer in the past, two years of working with a small corporate team in close proximity tends to remove the cold efficiency of military, and Aki never exactly had much truck with standoffishness anyway. She has little in the way of worry about trifling things such as other people's personal space or their sense of embarrassment, and usually tends to express herself via or alongside contact - patting people on the head, poking at their hair or clothing, hanging off them, generally being a constant and low-level personal nuisance. She never means to offend, though, and telling her to back off will produce the desired results with a minimum of fuss on her part... at least, until she forgets herself and suddenly she's doing it all over again. Most of all, Aki likes the idea of everyone being happy; having one of 'her people' upset is a surefire cue to get her hanging around their feet, giving them a surplus of attention whether they want it or not.

Her transfer to A-LAWS has reinforced her drive and left her perhaps a little too determined to make a good impression; she is adamantly overconfident about the Brynhildr and its abilities, and will defend its qualities voraciously to the point of blinkeredness. It can be chalked up partially to pride and partially out of some measure of false bravado - her way of coping with a sudden shift in both her job description and living situation. To put it mildly, she's feeling some culture shock.

Talents & Abilities
Aki's fighting style closely matches her personality - she is forward and aggressive, caring little for defence as she boldly throws her machine at anything in her path. This directness suits her as a pilot; though she has trained in ranged weaponry alongside every other cadet in the world, she simply can't seem to ever really get into it. If asked, she'll vaguely explain that it feels distant and impersonal compared to fighting up close, implying strongly that she feels ranged combat doesn't feel right or is somehow 'cheating'. Having trained exclusively with a light mech whose power and controls are both very sensitive, she's trained in quick evasive maneuvers and has a good eye for angling her attack towards weak points and unconventional solutions to problems. Inexperience in battle and overconfidence means that she's easy to goad and can very quickly get carried away; adversity often only serves to hasten this process along.

Cutscenes
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Logs
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