And now we get to part of why I was thinking of Tom and Melissa recently...

So, the theme for FE 2020 was originally scheduled to be 'Retro Rewind', with a bit of an 80s focus; while the con had to be postponed, the conbooks were already printed up (the rules closing large events happened only a week or so before the convention was supposed to happen), along with much of the artwork for door displays and the like, so obviously they kept the theme for when the convention actually happened two years later. And since the 80s was really when cyberpunk and the main 'anime invasion' happened, I had ideas...

As I've mentioned before, I used to be in a Mekton Zeta campaign; the name of the campaign was ABCD, or 'Armoured Beast Crusher Daioh', and it was set a couple of centuries in the future with Roadstriker-scale meks. I joined after the campaign had already started, and brought in a version of Tom as my character, with a transformable flying motorcycle that turned into an oversized suit of armour. This meant that my American skunk character recently arrived in Japan had a smaller vehicle than any of the Japanese characters, which was just such a disillusionment to some of them.  Hiker played Sandy, a typical 'anime hotblood' half-Japanese half-American wolf who drove the 'Howling Wolf', a vehicle that practically ran on plot created by the missing famous Mek designer who was also the father of one of the other characters. It was a really fun campaign, and I'm still somewhat sad that it ended.

In any case, this story is set after the game would have ended, where Sandy comes visiting the Watterson family to catch up on how things have been, and gets convinced to play a ported version of a game that a younger Sandy had really liked. Sandy by  Hiker (and used with permission); Tom, Sara, and Melissa Watterson as well as story by me.