Little bit late...

> Let's get your aircraft tied up and I'll take you there.

The kind of mistake that you only make once, assuredly.

> He had only recently come to his flag rank; before that he had been captain of the battleship Yamato, and before that of the carrier Akagi.

*whistles* Some prestigious postings, there.

> With all due respect to the Academy, sir, I'm ten times the witch now that I would be if I'd gone back there instead of staying with the 501st.

(And in a different series, it'd be perhaps time to consider raiding the 501st for a training cadre.)

> Often, when they're finally discovered, they turn out to be some of our best people.

But still kicked out of a combat role afterwards?

> Her eyes—an unusual shade of dark green, he noticed—went wide. "You're... are you the rocket man? I've heard of you."

Perhaps not quite how/where he would want to be known, but cat's out of the bag at this point, it seems.

> Yoshika explained, "The day you punched a boy from Karlsland... at a gathering of people from all over the world... while wishing His Majesty a 10,000-year reign."

PFFFFT. Yeah, that's a surprising sense of humor.

> That means the engines we build for her need to work the same way.

"Back in my day, we didn't have no fancy summoning rituals, and we had to build our own rigging! (In a cave with only a box of scraps!)"

> Those few base personnel who did take a closer look, though, may well have taken a second, because it was less usual to see a Shiden-kai operator with a copilot aboard, and Mio Sakamoto had one. Slung on her back in a caddy adapted from a U.S. Army rucksack, sporting a most aviatorly leather-helmet-and-goggles combo, Wolfgang Amadeus Beagle surveyed the scene with a sort of lordly detachment, his jaunty silk aviator's scarf flapping gaily in the slipstream as the white-coated witch came in to land.

I so wish there was art of this.

> Gryphon liked the atmosphere of the Compasses as soon as they arrived: it was the kind of local he'd always enjoyed in his experience of wartime Britannia

FWIW, I usually see this as locale. I can't remember offhand if local is also correct for this usage.

> no amount of raised eyebrows would have induced a newly-commissioned Shizuka Hattori to start singing "Umi Yukaba" in a public place

We'll have to wait for the Character CD for that.

> "Not just these—none of us could sling our weapons," von Hammer replied. "Remember, we carried our magic engines on our backs. A rifle sling could have interfered with the rigging."

Oof. Can't help but wonder if there was a way, though, to still sling it. Well, perhaps with the weight of that thing it might be a little impractical anyway...

> "Make a note."

*snicker* Still, progress!