Molly's - Chapter 13 [Tankiverse Fanfic]

[Hippin_in_Hawaii 639]

Molly’s - Chapter 13
Fanfic in the Tankiverse by Hippin_in_Hawaii

Molly had grown up playing in, and helping out around, Molly’s. Her own parents had owned it; her mother had been chief mechanic, and her father ran the business side. They had inherited it from her parents, and so on up the line for five generations! Or is it six? I get confused.

Anyway, Molly can trace her ancestry back to the Peace Broker herself! Seriously, Nienna Muñoz is Molly’s great-great-great-great (I think that’s the right number of greats) grandmother. Muñoz’s third child, Georgina, founded the business after retiring from a very successful career doing reparation work for what was then the Federated States. She named the business after her first-born, Molly.

Molly, my Molly, is only the second Molly to own Molly’s. There have been several other Mollys in her family tree, to be sure! Apparently it’s a family name, only slightly less popular than those of the Great Loyalists. I’m sure there’s a story to be told about how the name Molly became included, but so far, it’s not a story that anyone has shared with me.

Great-great-great grandmother Georgina founded Molly’s as a way to continue reparations after the Last War. Most of the materials she trafficked in were either military hardware or construction debris. There were lots of both lying around at the time. As this was pre-Tanki, most of her clients were either government or municipal; there wasn’t any market for private armor, and not too many individuals needed recycled steel or bulk rubble.

Molly (the first of her name) oversaw a transition to include archaic vehicles. She had the good fortune to be in charge as the world abandoned fossil fuels en masse. She was farsighted enough to realize that a future market was bound to exist, for collectors and special applications, and leveraged (whatever that means) all her money to gather gas-powered cars, trucks, tractors, airplanes, and whatevers; all that she could afford.

Great-grandmother Nancy apparently almost lost the business. Molly’s investment in internal combustion never paid off like she anticipated (which explains the mountains of cars on the property today!) Were it not for the first annual Unification Games, and the initial trials of armored re-enactment games, likely Molly’s would have failed. Suddenly, there was a blossoming market for archaic armor, something G^3 Georgina had stockpiled a lot of.

The Unification Games were the start. Suddenly, everybody had a national history to celebrate, or an axe to grind, or a point to prove. Armored leagues exploded (see what I did there?) across the continent and the world. Molly’s was a unique place then; there were very few places where old armor was sitting around waiting to be remade. As great-grandmother Nancy handed the business over to grandfather Fred (the only male owner), business took an all-new direction.

I wonder if Fred blew it. I mean, with this new sport growing so rapidly, and Molly’s being one of the only places to supply the demand, why isn’t Molly’s the biggest? Why is it that everyone who follows Tanki knows the name Performance Armour, a company that’s barely forty years old, but nobody knows Molly’s, who was there at the beginning? That’s another thing I mean to follow-up on, the next time my Molly is in a talkative mood. Which is about never.

Anyway, during grandfather Fred’s watch, Molly’s became about what it is today. The various armored leagues expanded, collapsed, merged, split, evolved, devolved, and shifted about until Tanki won out as The League, at least in this part of the world.

Fred’s daughter Nancy was actually a Tanki competitor, a famous duelist. The two tanks parked outside, the ones in operating shape, are from earlier in her career when she participated in team sports. Once she got accepted to the unlimited solo events, she built her own tank right here.

Remember when I stuck that black pin in the map on my bedroom wall? It had been a reference to her tank that brought me to Molly’s!

She did pretty well throughout her Tanki career. She survived three seasons of duels before having her tank destroyed; after that, she retired from Tanki and focused on Molly’s. When her first (and only) daughter was born, she named her Molly, and weaned her on axle grease and bore solvent (Ok, I heard Olaf say that once. I didn’t make it up).

There are pictures of Nancy’s tank all over the warehouse. They even have the original plans. Nancy made some pretty bold choices in its design. The chassis was far wider than it needed to be for its weight, but she took advantage of that extra volume to lower the overall profile. It was short and fat, which is to say, it was pretty stable. She engineered a custom recoil system that allowed her to mount a Shaft in a low-profile turret, then she offset the turret towards the front left corner of the tank. She used an offset engine mount to counterbalance the load and put in ridiculously heavy-duty suspension. In an arena with cover, she could blaze away with that canon while presenting less than 15% of her tank as a target!

While it may have been hard to hit from the ground, it was a pretty tempting target for attack from above. When she got taken down, it was by a skilled pilot with a Magnum, lobbing hundred-kilo high-explosives onto her fat tank’s top. It took them nearly a day to cut her pilot’s capsule free from what was left. To hear her tell it, the worst part of the whole ordeal was that she ended up peeing herself while waiting to be rescued.

Yes, Nancy is still alive, and is probably the toughest person I’ve ever met. She visits once a month on Wednesdays (We don’t get much work done on those days). She still has some pretty radical ideas about tank design! I could listen to her talk for hours! Ok, actually, I do listen to her talk for hours. I’m collecting ideas for when I design my first tank.

Anyway, that’s Molly’s. It started as a reclamation facility (junkyard) in the middle of nowhere. As the world changed around it and a town grew to swallow it, Molly’s evolved.

Molly, my Molly, has no children. I wonder what the next stage of evolution will be?

Mahalo (thank you) for reading; I hope you enjoyed! This story is part of a series. Information on the series, and links to the other stories, can be found here.

 

[Flexoo 6,980]

Approved.

 

The quality speaks for itself, nothing needs to be added.

[TankiNoob2000 231]

Another one :) Put chapter 14 as a Halloween special

[thethiefofvictory 339]

Nienna Muñoz? So now we can connect this to Tanker Fred... let me see, how long is six or seven generations? Whatever.

 

Good job again!

[Hippin_in_Hawaii 639]

Nienna Muñoz? So now we can connect this to Tanker Fred... let me see, how long is six or seven generations? Whatever.

 

Good job again!

So glad these little tie-ins get noticed!