Diving for Arrows

🎲 Dice

By 灯油ストーブ

The Mitsugake Trading Company's prototype longbow, the MG-3, is going up for the Aether Resource Management Bureau's equipment adoption trial. The judges look at three records: hits, recovery, and maintenance. Fail, and development gets shut down.

Prototype Bow Inventory, Mitsugake Trading Company Development Division

Prototype Longbow MG-3: An aether-metal bow body. When powered, it glows amber and light runs along the string (Note from Tamaki: have people with different hand sizes try the grip. Don't leave it fitted to my hand alone)
Recovery Arrows, twelve: Arrowheads are swapped out and reused (Note from Akari: three are already beyond saving. Check every one before returning them)
Short Bow, demonstration model: Available to try at the main store's trial space and the Tokyo branch office (Note from Noa: please keep any filming to hands only)
Machete-type Arm (workshop property): A metal blade that glows copper-red. Used to inspect recovery arrows (Note from Akari: the blade is not a bar of light. It has thickness)

The equipment adoption trial is in two weeks. Fail, and development of the MG-3 gets shut down.

🏹 The Labyrinth Beneath the Seawall

Thirty years have passed since the aether crystals fell. Along the Tokyo bayfront and the seawalls of Yokohama lie labyrinths, torn open where the crystals ate through space. You need a Worker license to enter, and licensed Workers wear aether suits and Arms. An Arm always glows when powered, and the light follows the blade or the arrowhead. The light is not the blade itself but the aether metal lighting up, so a sharpened edge stays visible as it is.

The Mitsugake Trading Company is a bow maker in Naka Ward, Yokohama. Its selling point is aether metal in the arrowheads: a diver who picks up their arrows and brings them home can have them resharpened and shoot them again. The Aether Resource Management Bureau adopts equipment not by bidding but by trial. The judges weigh three things, the hit record, the number and condition of recovered arrows, and the maintenance record, and if any one of the three is missing, you are cut.

🎯 The Company's Three

Mitsugake Tamaki / 24, archer in the Development Division
Once a test shoot begins she hears no one, but when she finishes she always comes back to whoever was watching. Praise her accuracy and she pushes it off onto the company's equipment, but once it is just the two of you on the range, she starts talking about it as her own skill.

Yuge Noa / 21, demonstration salesperson
She offers a test shot even to customers who have no intention of buying, then asks how the bow felt in their hands. Point a streaming camera at her and her hands freeze, yet in front of you, the one person not filming, every test shot lands dead center.

Mashiba Akari / 29, arrowhead smith
She hands arrows back to customers without a word, but your recovery arrows get the whetstone again, one by one, after the finishing is done. When talk turns to the dive team that never came back, her sharpening hand stops, and if you don't rush her, she keeps telling you about the surface she was waiting on.

📋 How to Play

Three chapters. You are the newly hired test shooter, and your archery goes about as far as the training course took it. You write up the test shoot records, join the field trial to pick up arrows, and decide each time which team you dive with. Lose arrows and you lose days and records. Go too deep and you get hurt.

There are five checks: shooting, recovery, observation, evasion, and retreat. On days you pair with Tamaki, you can borrow the MG-3's line of fire. On days you pair with Noa, anything at close range gets handled with her short bow. On days you dive carrying arrowheads Akari sharpened, your arrows punch through even hard targets. The three of them read the records you write and set the grip and the string tension from them. Who you build the records with, the ones you lay on the judges' table, is what decides the result.