Ok she can do this. They'll probably end up talking about... stuff but she can ease into it.

"So Cha" she glances around to make sure they're alone, "Casval."

"Did you hear we have comms to Pluto back up? They think it will be ten months, maybe more, to get more supplies and at least 14 months to fix the relay."

"Oh and also Friedrich, one of the defectors who helped us take Pluto, said he was disappointed he didn't get a chance to meet you."

“Artesia, I’m glad we can finally talk. I haven’t been able to catch a hold of you this whole trip. Captain Bright must be keeping you very busy.

It’s a relief we will get supplies relatively soon in case the agriculture plans don’t work, and that we can call home and get information.”

He doesn’t really know how to act around her, last he really got to talk with her was when she was still a little girl, the pleas to defect during the war didn’t really count as conversations. Now she was a young woman with much more serious eyes and a force of personality he wouldn't have expected that little girl to grow up having.

”I’m glad it wasn’t just my squad on the Zeon side that saw that the destruction of the Earth isn’t something you can allow to happen. I suppose once the Pluto team is relieved by the Federation repair team they will be sending, they can rejoin us here and I’ll be glad to meet him, otherwise if he is staying there he will have to wait for the relay to be fixed.”

Ok he missed the hint but she tried and they do have a lot to talk about.

"I don't think they have craft to send people through now but it wouldn't surprise me if he comes through with the supplies. I'm not sure anyone's shown you the models yet but he was pretty good at them. You should try making one if we have any left."

"Anyway I've mostly been helping Amuro, and trying to get a feel for how the rest of the crew is reacting to you. I think they've calmed down for now.

“We are heading to an alien world, and somebody must have made those relays. Who knows what threats are out there. It would be foolish to fight amongst each other right now, and we might need every man we can get in case something goes wrong or something attacks us.

And if I get chased off, my men would leave with me, depriving you of 5 mobile suit pilots and mobile suits. The fact that my mens mobile suits have been resupplied shows your captain understands the situation.”

Char had a good deal of respect for Bright Noa, His tactics were adaptable. He survived clashes with foes (some of whom Char sent his way) that would have crushed most older and more experienced captains. That Bright seemed level headed enough to also understand It was pointless to fight right now, just cemented that respect in Char’s mind.

"Bright did a lot of the calming people down. It really helped that you killed so many of the Zabis." She allows herself a tiny smile at this. She didn't approve of the cost he was willing to pay for revenge, but she is still happy to have it. "Besides sticking together in a new world is just common sense."

"Not that I really expect 5 suits to make the difference against anything that could build an array like that and just leave it arround. But there could be other threats or things where we need the manpower for colony building."

She breaks into the first actually sisterly smile she's done in a long time, almost an actual laugh.
"After all what if we need to someone to check if we can eat the space mushrooms."

Artesia had changed a lot, but that smile he recognised. He allows himself to smile back at her.

“I am absolutely not the one who will be trying the local flora!  I made that mistake on earth and that was with plants we evolved alongside. Never again am I trusting a trooper who says any kind of wild mushroom is edible and that their grandad totally taught them which ones were safe. I was in bed for a week!” He recounts the story fondly however. Even during his revenge quest against the Zabis, he couldn't help becoming fond of the men under his command. Even when they accidentally gave him food poisoning.

He wondered if Artesia had made friends like that here on the White Base. She had always been shy as a child but she was so different now.

Thinking of the White Base crew had reminded Char of something.

”Ah... Artesia... Amuro guessed we were related when he saw my face... I should have thought of that before doing so, but he demanded to know my reasons and identifying myself seemed the easiest way to explain. He at least deserved to know who I was, after everything that happened.”

He hadn’t wanted to cause trouble for his sister, he knew she had feelings for Amuro.

”I hope this has not interfered with your relationship. I dislike the boy but I wouldn't want to interfere in your personal life like that.”

It kinda did but she doesn't want to be a dick about it.

"Well I'd been looking for an opprotunity to talk to him about my past anyway..."

She doesn't actually look happy about this.

Char has never had an actual relationship either, some one night flings, but no real relationships. So, he doesn’t have much advice to give besides vague impressions he got hearing about other peoples relationships. As the older brother however, he should seem confident when giving advice.

”If he is worthy of you he won’t hold your past against you. As far as I know you’ve been loyal to the federation since our escape from side 3. If he holds the circumstances of your birth against you, or who you happen to be related to, then you deserve better.”

Char doesn’t even like Amuro, but Artesia clearly does, so he feels like he needs to help somehow.

”Maybe get more involved in his hobbies? The boy looks at mobile suits worshipfully, the way a soldier looks up to a war hero, or the way a husband might look at his long time wife.”

He's not wrong per se. but.

"Thats actually most of how we got to know each other. I fly the G-Fighter and have been making models with him."

"Thats... Nice I suppose. I worry he might still be getting over the death of Lalah. Even without a physical relationship I could tell those two had an intense newtype connection. And those feelings are easily confused as romantic ones."

It feeling romantic was true for himself as well. He still didn't really know how he had felt about Lalah, she had feelings for him and their newtype connection was strong, so maybe he had just been reflecting the feelings he felt from her through that. He wasn't the type to fall in love but it felt like something had been there between them. But then Amuro and Lalah had connected so strongly during that fateful battle that even he could sense it, and if all it took was a strong newtype connection for Amuro to feel like that, then were his own feelings even real?

But Artesia didn't need to know about his own relationship troubles, just how things might have affected her own target of affections.

Who? Wait not she can't just admit to not knowing any of this.

"He really still isn't over the war as a whole."

"The war started much earlier for me, and It's been such a big part of my life for so long. Honestly now it's all over I didn't really know what to do with myself, nothing seemed worthwile anymore. But an alien world! that seems livable! A way to travel through the deep dark of space and explore distant stars! That is something exciting, that is something I can structure my life around again.

I think Amuro will also pick up now he has something to strive for."

Maybe he gave away too much about himself there, but it was Artesia, if there was one person he should be able to trust it would be his sister.

"Probably... I'll see you around."

Char puts his mask back on. "It was nice to talk to you for longer than a sentence in the middle of a battle, You've changed a lot but I think it will be nice to get to know the new you."

He might have said father would be proud, but Char wasn't sure that was much of a compliment with what a complicated figure their father was.

"Yeah, it was nice."

The White Base somehow manages to avoid hosting significantly more drama before reaching orbit. Mostly because it was such a short trip.

As the ship gets close enough to orbit, the cameras are able to pick up a lot of detail. No obvious buildings or cities or anything resembling civilisation, which matches the complete radio silence and lack of the other signs of technology they scanned for earlier.

The plant life looks planty, even if the leaves are more a blue-y green rather than the normal leafy green of earth plants. The coasts seem to almost exclusively have what looks like mangrove forests. Very few places that you could call an actual beach exist, because of all these coastal plants. There is large animal life that can be picked up on camera that look like what you would expect animals to look like. The details are a bit fuzzy but the ones they can spot have legs and bodies and heads.

Many a soldier loses a bet about it all being tentacled monsters or giant insects or ooze monsters. 

There are plains that are either covered in a grass equivalent, or moss, or something else planty that is short enough to make areas look like a plain, there really is not enough resolution to tell from orbit. Mountains are rare, and the ones that do exist are all clustured and look like severe tectonic shear at work. The foresty/jungly areas have extremely dense tree cover, there are no forests with spread out trees like you might find on earth. There are a chain of active volcanic islands making an incredibly obvious tectonic boundary line in the oceans, a neater line of islands you could not wish for.

The atmosphere is confirmed to be a nitrogen/oxygen mix perfectly breathable by humans, if a smidge higher in oxygen than was normal on earth, but not high enough to be health threatening even with long term exposure. The volcanoes are spewing enough sulfur gas to choke out humans on many of the volcanic islands. The cameras can see huge cyclonic storms building over the oceans, something to be mindful of when picking a landing site. 

Ok so probably not on the shore, though its worth sending a scouting team to check the mangroves. Particularly if there are regular enough prevailing winds to predict where storms are likely to land.

The forests might be suitable for slash and burn, but they look intimating and the crews knowledge of slash and burn is having heard of the term plus a few paragraphs in the the ships encyclopedia.

The plains sound like the best choice preferably nearish to a river and in a fairly tropical region. That basically fits their slight knowledge of potato framing. If the weather on the planet were less of an unknown or everything was being built by hand then being right next to a river would be ideal. As it is doing some mobile suit assisted irrigation sounds like a better plan than building in a potential flood-zone.

Bonus points for a site near enough to the transition(s) between biomes that they can access them all by buggy. That way they can plant at multiple sites to hedge their bets. Also, with the planned rescue timeline they'll stick to their existing building materials and using modern tech for light and heat, but if things stretch on they'll want access to lumber.

Bright will order a landing at the point best fitting that description.

Char is against any idea involvling mass environmental damage like slashing and burning, and is glad they picked a relatively empty looking area to land and set up in.

There is a point on one of the relatively larger landmasses that fits that description. Even though it is a larger landmass for this planet, it is barely bigger than Italy, and much less mountainous than italy. No Alps here, because no land continents are smashing into each other. An area near one of its craggier peaks has a decently sized plain, with a river coming out of a spring heading down the mountain and cutting through the plains. The river continues to cut through a forested area and then finally reaches the sea. Following the river it would take about an hour to get to the sea by buggy (assuming a path was cleared).

It is much easier to chart a path to the surface than on earth, with the utter lack of space junk and lack of interference meddling with scanners. Descent goes as well as it possibly could since it is a calm sunny day over the landing site. Though landing during one of the storms raging over other parts of the planet seems like it would be very difficult.

Mira is actually still pretty new at deorbiting as opposed to docking or flying through space-lanes, but given that she managed to do it right under fire when she had barely started piloting the White Base this is easy by comparison. 

She makes sure to bring them to a hover then do an air to ground landing with a nice little fly over of the area they're landing in.

Char is worried about contaminating the local bioshpere, or being contiminated in turn by the local biosphere, but reentry would have burned off any stubborn bacteria on the outside of the ship, and there are quarantine protocols meant for visiting space stations with a pandemic that should suffice for exiting the ship without taking out or bringing in anything dangerous.

The place the ship lands is nicely flat, covered in a blue-green grass analogue. None of the animal herds seen from orbit are nearby. The river is not too far away. If it wasn't for the wrong colour of the grass this could be easily mistaken for a field on earth.

Bright will make sure everyone follows the protocols at least long enough for them to have the medical lab analyze things. Now to come up with a name.

Kai will rush to be the first one to technically set foot on what he dubs New Shidenland.