#ive been thinking abt ashei as the backup but idk since i dont know much abt her

[waywardsalt]

basic story idea now that ive done even more brainstorming:

while the leaderships and mecha groups of the different races of hyrule have started working together to combat the rising monster threat, link is, instead of being some son of a knight or whatever, just a farmboy living close enough to a mech facility to have been able to enlist as a citizen militia member, sometimes being called in to pilot a civilian mech to fight off smaller monsters. (rather than knights or anything the equivalent are mech pilots. there are still normal soldiers for normal size monsters but the mechs are the focus now that they exist and due to the rise in larger monsters)

after his skill with piloting mechs becomes more well-known, queen zelda travels to his village to watch him fight, then offers to hire him as an official pilot, with his own mech and crew, not entirely mentioning that she is short on knights and the situation is dire enough for her to be scouting farm boys, and that she is technically lying about the crew part, and she is also looking for a new crew as the hylian mech group is actually pretty poorly-staffed by the time the story starts. zelda herself is a mech pilot, considered the best in the hylian branch, with relatively average empathy, which means that while she feels the same pain as her mech, she doesn’t retain any actual injuries. link is worth hiring due to his potential and standing as a high-empathy pilot, which gives him a great deal of control over his mech and awareness whilst piloting it.

while link is brought to hyrule castle (the main base for hylian mech stuff) and put through some tests, the rest of the people who end up being his crew are found, and discounting link, his crew consists of four other people: a backup pilot who is usually deployed to either support him in battle or to take over if link were to become too injured or incapacitated, a pair of engineers in charge of handling and directing mech upkeep and repairs and anything else related to the technology provided to the crew, and a crew captain, technically the leader of the bunch and the one to issue orders and directions and keep an eye on the mechs and pilots in battle. link and his crew are provided a basic mech and resources, and it is up to them to work on a unique mech for link as they figure out what suits him and the situations he finds himself in, and the five of them generally get time to bond as they learn to properly operate as a team.

all of the members in link’s crew are people without much connections or are people whom are generally considered untrustworthy, but have the skills and the drive to be a worthwhile crew, so they are also under the pressure to work well as they are constantly under the implied threat of being dismissed.

in the world as a whole, mechs are built using a mixture of magic and technology, and were initially created with cooperation from every race, and each race, asides from the unique functions, also have unique designs tied to their mechs. link ends up with a unique mech in his own right, due to it being designed solely by his crew. each race has their own champion mech pilot, considered the best of the race, and the more high-end mechs are rare and reserved for the best pilots.

being creations of both technology and magic, the mechs are generally durable, but the ones built to house the power of spirits or magical artifacts, though especially powerful, have many unknowns to them, as they often come with unknown dangers. an especially famous incident that takes place a few years before the story was the death of a very skilled zora pilot, and though it was known to be a horribly tragic accident, very little about the circumstances is actually known, and other strange incidents involving mechs with ties to powerful magic have limited information surrounding them.

link and his crew aren’t trusted by the leaderships of each race, but are given the chance to prove themselves through helping fight back the attacking monsters, and even decide to commence their own investigation into the source of the monsters.

goddamnit evangelion stuck me with the visceral desire to work on a mecha loz au