Sei Iori arrived in Japan on a rainy afternoon.
Not the Japan he knew.
The skyline was wrong—too sharp, too militarized. White-gray structures rose like ribs from the earth, angular and utilitarian. No colorful billboards. No hobby shops packed with Gunpla boxes. Just warning signs, ration lines, and the distant hum of air-raid sirens that never fully stopped.
For several long seconds, Sei didn't move.
He stood on the cracked pavement beneath an overpass, rain soaking into his jacket, plastic runners still inexplicably stuffed in his pocket like a bad joke from the universe. His breath fogged in the cold air.
"This… isn't Tokyo," he muttered.
A military convoy roared past the far end of the street. Green trucks. Earth Federation markings. Soldiers with real rifles—not props, not replicas. Their faces were tired, hollow, focused only on the road ahead.
Sei's heart sank.
This wasn't just another timeline.
This was war.
---
The first day was pure disorientation.
He wandered through evacuated neighborhoods where windows were boarded up and public screens replayed the same news loop: Solomon has fallen. Zeon forces retreating. Federation advances.
Names flashed by—Revil, Tianem, A Baoa Qu.
Names Sei recognized far too well.
At night, he hid in the remains of an old community center. Dusty posters still clung to the walls—evacuation routes, ration schedules, civil defense instructions. The electricity flickered, powered by emergency grids.
Sei sat on the floor, back against the wall, hugging his knees.
"This is real," he whispered. "They're really fighting…"
He thought about his father. About their shop. About Gunpla Battles that ended with laughter and applause.
Here, mobile suits ended with funerals.
---
On the second day, he heard it.
The sound of metal screaming.
He followed it cautiously, keeping low, until he reached the outskirts of a Federation maintenance depot hastily set up in what used to be an industrial park. Tarps covered half-disassembled mobile suits. Mechanics shouted over one another, arguing about parts shortages and impossible repair schedules.
And there—lying on its side like a wounded animal—was a GM.
Its left leg had been twisted beyond operational tolerance. The knee joint was cracked. The ankle actuator hung loose, useless.
The mechanics cursed it.
"Scrap it," one said. "Not worth fixing before A Baoa Qu."
Sei stared.
Not at the damage.
At the design.
He stepped closer without realizing it, eyes tracing the frame, the joint ratios, the load-bearing angles. His mind switched modes automatically, like flipping a familiar breaker.
"The stress distribution's wrong," he murmured.
A mechanic snapped at him. "Hey! Civilians aren't allowed—"
Sei flinched, then bowed instinctively. "S-sorry! I was just—"
He stopped himself.
No. This isn't Build Fighters. Think.
He pointed hesitantly at the knee joint. "The torque from the thrusters transfers straight into the joint under landing load. If the pilot compensates late, it snaps."
The mechanic froze.
"…What did you say?"
Sei swallowed. "If the actuator housing were rotated twelve degrees inward and the piston shortened, the force would redirect into the thigh frame instead. It wouldn't break like this."
Silence.
Another mechanic leaned in, frowning. "That would… lower maintenance time."
"And reduce pilot casualties," Sei added quietly.
They stared at him like he'd spoken another language.
In a way, he had.
---
That night, Sei couldn't sleep.
He borrowed a datapad—borrowed, not stole; he was still Sei Iori—and began sketching. Not Gundams. Not hero machines.
Simplifications.
Standardized joints. Modular armor. Easier repairs. Less strain on inexperienced pilots.
He designed a machine not meant to win wars.
Just to let people come home.
By the fourth day, copies of his sketches were circulating anonymously among Federation engineers in Japan.
By the sixth day, Shinomiya Corporation's Earth-based R&D division flagged the designs as statistically impossible for a civilian.
By the seventh day, Sei Iori received a formal summons.
---
He stood in the waiting room of a Shinomiya Corporation facility, hands clenched tightly in his lap.
He still smelled faintly of oil and rain.
I just like building Gunpla, he thought nervously. How did it turn into this?
When the door opened, a young woman with sharp eyes and flawless posture stepped inside.
Kaguya Shinomiya looked at Sei Iori not as a child, not as a soldier—
—but as an asset.
"Sei Iori," she said calmly. "You say you design this Flag Union one week ago. In that time, you too redesigned a frontline mobile suit frame using incomplete data and no access to classified materials."
She folded her hands.
"Tell me," she continued, eyes narrowing with interest, "how does a civilian hobbyist understand war machines better than the people who built them?"
Sei hesitated.
Then answered honestly.
"…Because I've been imagining them my whole life."
Outside, the war continued.
Inside that room, something else began—quietly, dangerously.
The birth of a designer who would change how mobile suits were built forever.
Hiroto arrived alone.
No explosion. No dramatic fall through space-time. Just a sudden, suffocating stillness—followed by the low hum of machinery and the smell of recycled air.
He was standing inside a half-abandoned underground shelter, emergency lights flickering weakly above him. Dust hung in the air, disturbed only by his own breathing.
"…Not Earth," he said quietly.
Not his Earth, at least.
Hiroto Kuga—planner, builder, survivor—did not panic. Panic was for people without options. He checked his surroundings first, then himself. No injuries. His tablet was gone. His tools were gone.
But his mind was intact.
And that, Hiroto knew, was enough.
---
He learned where—and when—he was within two days.
Federation broadcasts were unavoidable. The names were familiar, painfully so: Zeon, Solomon, Gundam. But the context was wrong. Too raw. Too lethal. This wasn't a story or a simulation.
This was the Universal Century.
A timeline where mobile suits were not symbols, but coffins.
Hiroto listened. Observed. He never spoke more than necessary. He worked small jobs—repairing generators, reinforcing shelters—earning food and access to public terminals. Every night, he absorbed data: Federation and Zeon suit specs, combat reports, pilot mortality rates.
And every night, the same conclusion formed.
These machines are incomplete.
They were powerful, yes. But rigid. Linear. Designed around doctrine, not adaptability.
Hiroto disliked rigidity.
---
The idea came to him while watching Zeon combat footage smuggled through a black-market channel.
A Gelgoog unit was ambushed by multiple GMs. The pilot attempted to retreat, thrusters flaring—but the terrain changed, debris cutting off vectors. The suit hesitated. A fraction of a second.
That hesitation killed him.
Hiroto paused the frame.
"…You needed another form," he murmured. "Not a better weapon. A better option."
Transformation.
Not for spectacle. For survival.
He began sketching the same night, using a borrowed stylus and a cracked civilian pad. He avoided anything too recognizable—no V-fin silhouettes, no iconic layouts. If this world saw the design, it needed to look native.
But the core philosophy was his.
A mobile suit capable of shifting combat paradigms instantly:
Mobile suit mode for standard engagements.
Mobile armor–like configuration for high-speed pursuit and breakthrough.
A quadrupedal assault form for unstable terrain and ambush tactics.
Not flashy. Ruthless. Efficient.
He named it simply in his files:
Project: Gaia
---
Hiroto was careful.
He did not reference Phase Shift. He did not reference ZAFT doctrine. He stripped away every trace that could link the design to its origin.
At least that he believe in.
What remained was a principle, not a copy.
Hiroto took that as confirmation he was doing something right.
He refined the leg articulation, ensuring the transformation didn't over-stress the frame. He designed modular armor plates that could reorient during mode shifts. The power system was conventional—no exotic reactors—but optimized to reroute energy dynamically.
This world lacked some technologies.
So Hiroto compensated with design intelligence.
---
By the fifth day, he had a full blueprint.
By the sixth, a scale test model assembled from scrap alloys and mock actuators.
On the seventh day, Shinomiya Corporation noticed.
Not because of the machine itself—but because of how it was designed.
No wasted lines. No unnecessary redundancies. Every component justified by battlefield data.
It was the work of someone who had never fought—but understood fighting better than most soldiers.
---
When Kaguya Shinomiya finally reviewed the Gaia Gundam blueprint, she paused longer than she intended.
"This unit…" she murmured. "It's adaptable beyond doctrine."
Her aide hesitated. "The designer is… difficult to trace. No corporate background. No military record."
Kaguya's eyes sharpened. "Bring him in."
---
Hiroto stood in the Shinomiya facility's briefing room days later, calm but guarded.
Kaguya studied him carefully. "You designed a transforming mobile suit without access to classified transformation research."
"I designed a solution," Hiroto replied evenly. "Transformation was just the most efficient answer."
She tapped the projection. The Gaia Gundam rotated slowly in midair.
"You're aware," she said, "that this kind of machine will change how wars are fought."
Hiroto met her gaze.
"I'm counting on it."
Inside, unspoken, was a deeper truth:
If this world is going to burn, then at least let it burn with machines that give people a chance to survive.
No one in that room knew.
No one would ever know.
That the Gaia Gundam had been born once before—in another universe, another war.
Here, it was simply the product of a quiet genius who refused to let reality dictate the limits of design.
Masaki Shido understood one thing very early after arriving in this world:
The Federation would never build what actually won wars.
He arrived in orbit above Earth by accident—or coincidence, if one believed in kinder words. A civilian cargo dock, half-automated, half-forgotten. No alarms. No fanfare. Just the cold glow of Earth below and a data terminal that still worked.
He spent the first night watching battle reports from Solomon.
Mobile suits clashing like insects. Pilots dying by the thousands. Commanders celebrating marginal gains while entire fleets vanished.
Masaki didn't flinch.
He frowned.
"…Inefficient," he muttered.
---
Masaki was not a mobile suit designer in the traditional sense.
He was an engineer of dominance.
Where others obsessed over humanoid frames, he saw a limitation: too many joints, too much pilot dependency, too much wasted reaction time. The Universal Century worshipped mobile suits because they were versatile—but Masaki saw the flaw immediately.
Versatility came at the cost of overexposure.
Big targets. Predictable vectors. Pilots forced to think while under fire.
So he went the opposite direction.
He didn't design a Gundam.
He designed a harvester.
---
He studied Zeon's Mobile Armors first include future event he remember from old antique Series: Zakrello, Big Zam, Neue Ziel. Powerhouses—but all crippled by either ego or logistics. Big Zam required multiple pilots and obscene resources. Neue Ziel was excellent, but still shackled to doctrine.
Masaki sketched something else.
A stationary-dominant Mobile Armor capable of area denial so absolute that fleets would be forced to reroute—or die.
Tentacles.
Not decorative. Not monstrous. Functional.
Each one independently controlled. Each one a weapon platform, sensor array, or capture unit. A machine that did not chase enemies—but claimed space and made it uninhabitable.
He named it without ceremony:
Rafflesia.
---
The design philosophy was brutally simple:
Central armored core housing pilot and reactor
Distributed weapon limbs acting as autonomous kill-zones
Beam cannons optimized for sustained suppression, not bursts
Anti-MS capture systems for live retrieval or execution
Minimal reliance on pilot reflex; maximum reliance on pre-programmed annihilation patterns
Masaki knew exactly what the Federation would say if they saw it.
Too expensive. Too immoral. Too specialized. Too reminiscent of Zeon excess.
They would commission three committees, water it down, strip its purpose, and then scrap it when the war shifted.
He didn't even bother submitting it.
Instead, he watched Federation procurement meetings from public channels and laughed quietly when GM variants were praised as "cost-effective."
"Cost-effective at dying," he said flatly.
---
Shinomiya Corporation was different.
They weren't bound by Federation doctrine. They weren't chasing Zeon's ideology. They chased leverage.
Masaki noticed the pattern quickly:
Independent funding
Quiet recruitment
Willingness to bankroll unconventional research
More importantly—they listened.
So Masaki prepared his pitch not as a weapon…
…but as a deterrent platform.
A Mobile Armor that could lock down space corridors, orbital facilities, or asteroid approaches with minimal crew risk.
Something corporations understood very well.
---
When Shinomiya Kaguya reviewed the Rafflesia blueprint, her expression didn't change—but her silence lasted longer than usual.
"This isn't meant for mobile suit combat," she said finally.
"No," Masaki replied calmly. "It's meant to end it."
Her advisors shifted uncomfortably.
"This would be controversial," one said. "The Federation—"
"The Federation," Masaki interrupted, voice level, "is wasting pilots to preserve appearances."
Kaguya raised a hand. Silence returned.
She studied him carefully. "You're certain the Federation would reject this?"
Masaki didn't hesitate.
"They'll call it a resource sink," he said. "Then they'll lose another fleet and pretend it was unavoidable."
Kaguya leaned back.
"And you believe we won't?"
Masaki met her gaze without fear.
"I believe Shinomiya Corporation doesn't invest in morality. It invests in inevitability."
For the first time, Kaguya smiled—just slightly.
---
Masaki left the room knowing he had chosen correctly.
Behind him, the hologram of Rafflesia rotated slowly, its weapon-limbs unfolding like a mechanical flower.
A machine the Federation would never dare to build.
Which was precisely why it would one day decide the fate of battles they thought they controlled.