Raptor On A Bicycle

“So, uh, what made you want to join the Korps?”

An ibex in a dashing navy blazer and a comically short matching pencil skirt asked the adorably chunky androgynous leopard gecko sitting across her desk.

“Someone on the hellsite said that you were the ones making all those glasses for, I think he said, uh ‘global sissy bimbo dronification’ and I think that sounds rad as fuck.”

The gecko smiled and blinked, slowly.

“Uhh, sure. Do you have any powers.”
“Last week I realized that if I keep adding water, and salt, and pepper, and veggies, and stuff to a stew, I can keep it going forever!”

The ibex blinked. She was pretty sure that she’d read about that one before. And it didn’t sound like a thing that demanded any sort of superpower. But… that lizard was being illegally cute. And the site was down a cook after he moved to Toronto…

“…alright, uh, sure, sign here, and there, and read this…”

This was going to be a long week.

We LOVE casting spells.
This crime is sponsored by the
SHADOW GOVERNMENT

• Lupi (dragon) doesn't really have a canon, she just kinda exists. Or doesn't. Nobody's ever figured that out. She's the one in my banner with the fishbowl helmet and the MMU.
  She's probbably been to space, if that picture is proof. She's also the mascot of my Kerbal save, so she's been to space if you count her visage being emblazoned on spacecraft and planted as flags across the Kerbol system.

• Marion (cow) has been Fucked Up By Space in a cosmic sense as the cosmos opened up and caused Supernatural Things to occur to them, and they are a bit of a cosmic nomad.
  They've been to space, but space has also been to them, and none of it follows sensible sense or reason.

• Aluria (secret third sona, anthro dragon) is my Korps OC these days, and in that setting she's one of the admin staff of KADET, the Korps' stealth space program that operates under the cover of a handful of "NewSpace companies" they formed in the late 2000s to hide villainous spaceflight capability in plain sight, piggybacking on the NewSpace revolution that occured in our timeline with companies like SpaceX and RocketLab and so on. One of those front companies started out as her last-ditch startup to get out of the traditional aerospace industry (with all its issues), that the Korps stealthily "invested in" though shell companies and so on.
  I don't actually know if she's been to space, a lot of that lore is still being written, and a lot of it is under wraps for the time being. Stuff she's made, or had a hand in making has been to space, but I don't know if she personally has followed it there.

Okay but as a Person Who’s Autistic About Space, this got me thinking. I’m picturing a stack of solid and storable rocket stages (a Minotaur IV, or something like it) being shoved out the back of a large cargo aircraft over the middle of the ocean, with a small, tinker made, one-person lifting body (like the unbuilt DARPA STAR, pictured) on top of it.

Ready to go, from any airport, to any orbit, at as close to a moment’s notice as these things get, while looking for all the world like just another delivery of outsized cargo.