One minute Orta is surrounded by dragonmares, unarmed and cornered. A few moments later she’s high in the air, shooting down enemies from the back of an armoured dragon. Wait a moment, you’re probably thinking - the appearance of the dragon can easily be explained, but what about the gun Orta wields? There were no traces of any handheld weapons in Orta’s prison cell, yet a gun is definitely in her hand at the start of the first episode. At first glance it would seem that we’ve missed out on part of the story, or Smilebit completely forgot to explain the gun’s origins. However, after studying the introduction movie of the game, I would like to entertain what I consider a plausible solution to the mystery of the gun’s sudden appearance.

The following screenshots were taken from the end of the first movie sequence in Panzer Dragoon Orta. I apologise for the less than adequate quality of the close up shots.

With not a second to lose, Orta scrambles onto the back of the dragon, clutching frantically at its armoured back, the dragonmares hot in pursuit. Next to Orta’s left arm, a small stone-like device can be seen, seemingly wedged between the side of the dragon and one of the two horns that rise from either side of its body. At first, one might think that it was just some kind of bump or defect on the dragon’s shell, however the pictures below indicate something else entirely.

Barely a second after Orta has settled on the back of her winged steed, she begins to look at her surroundings. Interestingly, her head turns to the left, right in line with the pointed grey/white object poking out from the dragon’s side. Her eyes seem to be almost directly in contact with the object, suggesting that she has indeed found something of interest.

In the next shot, the camera changes view as it rapidly pans around the dragon and its rider. A red blur that is almost certainly Orta’s arm can be seen stretched out from behind the horn on the dragon’s right hand side. If you look closely at the image above right you’ll see that there is a Frisbee shaped object extending from the end of Orta’s arm. While this could be Orta’s hand (it is, after all, a similar colour) the shape suggests a different possibility: an external item that Orta is now holding.

The object can now been seen relatively plainly in Orta’s hand. It isn’t very big in the screenshots, but the shape is almost unmistakable. From this angle, it is plain that the rounded object is clearly not meant to be Orta’s hand, which lessens the chance of this theory being wrong. What else could Orta be holding besides the gun that would otherwise have had to materialise out of thin air?

I’ve displayed the two images directly above for the purpose of showing the shape and colour of the gun in comparison to the object that Orta is grasping in the screenshots above them. Notice the white, rounded shape of both objects and the fact that Orta’s hands are tiny compared to the gun; the screenshots that show Orta escaping on the back of the dragon use a similar scale. The horn on the left side of the dragon also does not have anything ‘wedged’ against it.

There are still mysteries that need solving when it comes to Orta’s gun. Why did the dragon have the gun wedged against its side in the first place? The dragon itself wouldn’t be able to reach its back, so it couldn’t have put it there. One theory is that Azel, or another person in the Panzer Dragoon world, encountered the dragon before Orta did and placed the gun there so that Orta would have a weapon when the dragon released her. I don’t think it was Edge who placed the gun there (when the dragon left him at the end of Panzer Dragoon Saga) because the gun is clearly a different model than Edge’s. There were no guns in Panzer Dragoon Saga that even closely resembled the gun in Panzer Dragoon Orta, so I don’t believe that he picked the gun up on his travels either.

These are my reasons for thinking that the dragon delivered Orta’s weapon to her, rather than Orta finding it in a story sequence that was not shown. It seems the most probable solution to an otherwise irresolvable mystery, so please take my points into consideration and don’t just regard the origin of Orta’s gun as a plot hole. To be honest, I think Smilebit have been rather clever not making the finding of the gun an obvious event. Rather, they’ve added to the stack of mysteries that make the Panzer Dragoon world so fascinating.