#mechaposting

[bios-0307]

Almost all pilots fall apart in training. It's part of the objective of it, to smash their egos into beautiful, useless shards before melting them down into something new and useful. All those pesky pre-training memories, their original personality, beaten down and flattened into a fresh slate to make a new killing machine out of in the simulators.

Sometimes though, a pilot doesn't break that way. It's rare, but there are a handful who take to the training well, who need less beating to follow orders, who come out with their mind intact.

She's one of them. The only one in her squad - in fact, in the whole base. The others cling to their handler or mech like a lost child when they're off the battlefield, all quaking limbs and puppy dog eyes, desperately waiting for the moment they can plug back in for their next hit of combat stims and dopamine rewards. Not her though.

When she gets back to base, after recovering from the neural de-linking, she climbs out of the cockpit under her own power. She doesn't need someone else to clean her, and she's never found trying to sneak into her handler's bed at night. In briefings, she not only pays attention, she asks for clarification on mission-critical details.

And her handler hates it all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A lone handler stands over the holo-map table, surrounded by her analysis support crew and a dozen telemetry feeds. Despite the chaos of the battlefield, the control room is largely quiet, the muffled sounds of combat feeds playing over one-ear headsets and quiet humming from the plethora of embedded computers punctuated by callouts and the handler's enthusiastic praise toward her squad.

On the table, a barrage of translucent blue missiles silently splash against an enemy bunker, and the handler contacts the pilot that fired them to shoot off a quick "Good girl" as the mech delivers a dopamine reward, her way of reinforcing the reward mechanism to make controlling the pilots outside their mechs easier.

She spots another unit in the squad bisecting an enemy mech with its pulse blade and radios to it, the words "Well done, hound," quietly slipping from her lips.

"Ma'am, I told you to stop calling me that. I have a name and a pilot ID number that both work perfectly fine for professional communications," comes an exasperated response over the line, causing the handler's face to pull back into a sneer.

"Pilot, I will call you whatever I deem appropriate. As we've been over, you belong to the military, and therefore me, as your CO, for the duration of your service."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just drop the sexual harassment and I'll stop talking back." The mech's miniature counterpart spins around and gouges out the core module of a rushing enemy unit, as if to punctuate its pilot's demand.

Members of the support crew glance at the handler and each other as she mutes her side of the radio again, her knuckles white around the hand microphone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear, your little 'outburst' earlier may not have been the brightest idea. Maintenance crew reports that your handler is waiting at our bay in the hangar.

The pilot groans at that report from her mech. Looking through its eyes as they approach base, she contemplates staying out longer just to avoid the coming confrontation.

That would simply make things worse. I recommend taking a head-on approach. If you would like, I can keep the core module sealed until you have recovered from disconnecting.

"Urgh, it's still weird that you can do that over the neural link. That would be good though, I don't want to deal with her while I'm still nauseous." The pilot pauses for a moment. "Do you think she figured out we asked for the reward systems to be tweaked down?"

Querying maintenance crew... no.

She lets out a relieved breath and begins maneuvering into the hangar. Once the mech is situated in the docking clamps, the cables wired into her back pop out with a series of clicks, sensory input and systems feedback from the mech going dizzyingly black with each thump of the thick wire bundles landing on the floor of the cockpit.

From outside comes the faint hydraulic hissing of the embarkment bridge extending, followed shortly by a series of clanging sounds. The pilots wobblily raises her head to look into the mech's sole internal camera, and its soothing voice comes over the wireless link alongside a low-quality video feed showing their handler on the bridge, flanked by a pair of technicians.

Take your time, love. I'll keep her out for now.

The pilot faintly registers the sound of the mech's voice coming through its external speakers, saying something about locked joints and pistons, as she clumsily shakes her limbs to get used to moving them again and tries to clear the spinning in her head from the disconnect.

Eventually, she pulls herself up from the pilot's cradle and the cockpit door thumps and whirs open to reveal her handler's disgruntled face, which quickly morphs into a facsimile of gentleness. Underneath it, the furrowed brow and half-smile betray her real feelings.

"Welcome back, my loyal dog," she says, reaching down to try to lift the pilot from the cockpit.

Ew. "Is that all you're here to say? I can walk on my own, so move. Or is this some kind of power play, trying to block me in here until I let you play out your weird petplay fantasy on me?"

The handler recoils. "You should be grateful that I'm even here to greet you!" she shrieks. "Not every dog has a handler so caring!"

The pilot steps up onto the bridge and roughly shoves her aside, striding across the bridge followed by a hail of obscenities. She breaks into a run just outside the hanger door, rushing out a checkpoint into the cool outside air of the base's grounds. In a minute she's past another checkpoint, into the on-base housing, slowing to a walk as she heads for the multiple-occupancy units.

Most of the pilots are assigned to special bunks near the hangar, but she has a special exception. It's a nice spot on base to live, since most of the units belong to non-combat personnel with families, and they're by and large nice neighbors.

Even if I can't read your thoughts over the wireless link, I can still see where you are, dear. You're supposed to be going for a debriefing.

"They can debrief me tomorrow, and you know pilots are only supposed to get those as a formality. They're more than happy to cancel them for the others."

The others can't respond to a yes or no question. You can.

"Tomorrow. I'm not dealing with my handler again today."

She jogs up the few stairs in front of one of the houses, pulls a key from a chain around her neck, and opens the door. Inside, the lights are already on. She walks past the living room into the kitchen and calls out a gentle "I'm home!" to the person asleep at the table, before laying a hand on her shoulder and gently shaking her awake.

She groggily opens her eyes and looks up, then all traces of exhaustion disappears as she bolts up excitedly and wraps her arms around the pilot.

"You're back!" she exclaims, holding her tight. "I didn't think you'd be done tonight!"

"Ah. Op went quick this time. It's good to be back, babe," the pilot replies, returning the hug and basking in the smell of her strawberry shampoo.

"Eugh. You smell like sweat and oil. Go take a shower, I'll throw something together for you to eat. If you don't want anything in particular I'm just going to heat up leftovers."

"Leftovers sound really good right now honestly. You're the best, babe." The pilot releases her wife and heads off to to the bathroom, but pauses for a moment. She checks the indicator on her implants to make sure her mech will hear her, then takes a deep breath.

"I'm going to talk to the base HR office tomorrow, see if they can do something about my handler."

Trying to start some toxic yuri shit with this mech pilot, but she's well adjusted and happily married. I called her my loyal dog and she filed an HR report fuuuuuuuuck

[rotglass]

some of my favorite mecha gifs ive saved recently,, hehe

so cool,,

[lnfopl]

Lego Goblin

[rosexjustice]

"Pilot, we have been spending a lot of time together. I believe it to be most efficient to bind ourselves further. It is understood to me that you would also receive tax benefits" The mech then gets down on one knee and pulls out a very tiny ring box just for you.

[acerby]

Beware the Pipeline

Whether it is a teacher or a handler you want to be praised and told “Good Job”.

[obliviasart]

Mech AI who has an intravenous neurotransmitter monitoring/emergency transfusion system installed to better balance its pilot's combat stim packages and develops a taste for its pilot's blood.

The pilot swears she hears it purring every time she's hooked in and growling every time she's released.

AIs aren't supposed to sound so excited to have their pilots safely entombed in them again.

AIs aren't supposed to insist on keeping such a large sample for "post-combat analytics".

AIs aren't supposed to call their pilots "sweetie". And they're definitely not supposed to call them "morsel".

But the feedback loop in their neuralink with every stim delivered has her howling, almost loud enough to drown out her rabid pulse. She hears her AI singing along to its beat sometimes. She can't be sure it's real or if it's the adrenaline talking. She isn't sure the difference matters.

And who is she to complain if she's a little extra pale and spacey and wobbly every time she slides out, slick with fluids she'd rather not identify? She's hardly a remarkable departure from the other hounds.

And her statistics speak for themselves. The two of them have never been more in sync.

It was so nice of her AI to assign that dietary protein boost directly to her file. Maybe it'll recommend a feeding tube next.

It was so nice of her AI to recommend the new nerve mesh around her analytics port.

She can almost feel Her teeth now.

She can't wait to hear Her sing again.

(crosspost from bsky)

[viperneko]

Neuro-Linking is such an interesting thing, and what the consequences it can cause are so interesting and are expanded upon frequently. But there never sees to be any treatment for the symptoms. So, some random thoughts:

Lancer with extra robotic limbs to help with the sudden lose of a pair of limbs. Lancer who gets body mods (biological or cybernetic) to make their legs and arms shaped and move in the same way.

Lancer with a Subjectivity Enchantment Suite, not necessarily for hacking purposes, but to help manage the sudden lose of e warfare and other electronic systems upon disconnecting from their frame.

Lancer uses the system on an isolated channel to spam 'pings' as some sort of stress toy, especially when someone does a horrible job or commits to a terrible idea.

Lancer who uses the suite to hook themselves up better to their frame; leading to some symptoms worsening. Lancer whose hooking up to their frame leads into a deeper connection to their NHP.

NHP who also gets symptoms from experiencing human senses through this link; manifesting as increased Cycling Windows and stronger desires to have their own proper body.

Lancer and NHP who blends into 'one', not a gestalt per say but they have done this for so long that once linked they become essentially a separate entity. Bonus points if this is the NHP gained from the Technophile.

NHP and Lancer who tries to slim down their frame to the size of a dusk wing or Atlas so they can wear it more often. Lancer who tries to make their frame increasing more biological, or make themselves increasing more cybernetic.

[frostfangalphabitch]

The rest of the base has gone to sleep, but you don't sleep anymore. You don't join them in the mess hall anymore, either. You barely eat organic food at all these days, and when you do, it's mainly for pleasure. You can take the organics out of the pilot, but you can't take the love of sweets and pizza out of the organics, you guess. Despite that, you're so far removed from your humanity that it's gotten difficult to relate to most of them. It's not like anyone else is sharing your meals of titanium and copper.

The other pilots look at you with fear and disgust, knowing their inevitable fates if they're ever pitted against you. The mechanics see you as an oddity, a fascination, and heap praise and adoration upon you, but it's hollow in your eyes. It feels more like they're ogling a rare car rather than talking to a pilot. The corps see you as nothing more than a weapon to be pointed at their enemies, or whoever has less money than them that week.

The only person who still respects you as an autonomous individual is your handler. You adore her just as she loves you. Certainly, you're still a weapon - that's what the relationship started as after all - but you think she might be the only human in the base, including the mechanics, who could truly love a weapon of any kind. She's been so good to you through all of this, taking each stage of your radical transformation in stride as naturally as a lover watching her partner go through a more mundane transition. She's only gotten more attracted to you as you've grown into your new form and become more comfortable and confident with yourself. You'd burn the whole world down just to make her happy.

There's one other who respects you for who you are, though: your girl. Your beloved Wolfrun Mk.X, heart of Coral, veins of electricity, and arms of 5 ton power-guzzling metal-shredding AC-devouring WB-0010 Double Trouble carnage. Before all this started, you always thought of her like a weapon, just as the others see you now. Then she started changing you. The Coral in your augments connected with the Coral in her systems, and something changed in both of you. At first, it was just a whisper. Something brushing over your psyche, speaking just on the edge of hearing, incomprehensible but unmistakable.

Then your body started following suit. Your teeth, jaw, and digestive tract were the first things to change, presumably to allow you to consume and digest - you're not even sure if that's the correct term - the materials your girl needed to keep changing you. After your first meal, the tastiest 20 pounds of scrap you've ever eaten, your skin started changing too. The docs couldn't give you injections anymore. Their needles bent or broke when they tried to push them into your skin. You figured out why a few weeks later when what was left of your epidermis sloughed off and revealed armored plating underneath. They had to take an angle grinder to your arm in order to access your veins. You didn't feel any pain when they did. At the time, you thought that should have disturbed you a lot more than it did.

By that point, you'd been noticing Wolfrun's thoughts coming in a little clearer. In transit to your jobs, it was feelings of curiosity, probing, and wonder. In combat, it was a spark in your vision when you needed to dodge, a wordless warning about approaching enemies. In the base... still nothing but a whisper. That's when you started feeling lonely: when you couldn't feel her presence anymore.

As you became more and more monstrous, more and more like her, you began to visit her night after night. Maybe it was because you sensed an intelligence within her 65 ton body, or maybe it was simply because being near her drowned out the silence. You had no way of verifying this, but you felt like she relaxed as well when you were around. She was shut down in the hangar, of course, and there was no way any part of her could still be engaged, or so you thought. But as time went on, the whispers got louder, the words - feelings and thoughts, really - more comprehensible. And all the while, your body changed.

The 5'6" chubby trans gal who went into debt and subsequently under the knife to get a hand-me-down set of 4th gen augments all those years ago is long gone now. The thing you've become, whose claws clanged against the metal of the hangar's floor, had long since cast off that form. Where once was skin had become plated metal. Despite having no screws or rivets to speak of, it stayed firmly in place no matter how much the techs tried to pry it off. The augments which before had stuck partially out of the left side of your skull had seamlessly integrated themselves into the sleek plating that had cropped up on your head, looking far more natural than they ever had before. Your hair had fallen away, and the metal around your skull became angled and sleek, looking more bulwark than biological and with aerodynamic fins sprouting from it.

A sleek black plate had formed where your eyes once were. The day you woke up with that, you thought you had gone blind. You panicked, begging for help, afraid they wouldn't ever let you pilot her again. You had been moved into your new warehouse home at that point, and it took time for the maintenance techs to find you. Before they did, though, you felt someone - your girl, you realized - beckoning to you. She could help you. When the techs finally got there, you begged them to put you in her cockpit. It took them a while to figure out who you meant by "her", but your handler, who had come running the moment she heard the news, was on top of it. She barked at them to get you to Wolfrun, and with great difficulty, the three of them helped you get your then-8 foot form into her. You spent the next week inside her cockpit, refusing to get out except to eat and drink. She was there with you, and she let you see through her eyes. The world as she saw it was far more vivid than human eyes could ever see, infrared, ultraviolet, gamma, magnetic, smells, sounds, vibrations, on top of the visual spectrum you were used to. And when the delicate sensor plate where your eyes once were finally engaged at the end of that week, that's how you saw the world, too.

When you finally left her cockpit, you realized you could still hear her. From then on, she was with you always. That made you happy. It made her happy, too. You started letting her choose her own parts, and she was happy to. She still insisted you choose some too, though, since according to her, it was your body just as much as it was hers. True enough, whatever force was altering your body changed you to match her. When you tried out digitigrade legs, you stumbled getting out of bed the next morning after yours had reconfigured themselves to match. When you got her bulky, high capacity arms, your arms - fully synthetic by then - had bulked up considerably.

Even cosmetic changes started to affect you. You painted menacing, sharp teeth onto her head over the sensor plate with mechanical precision, and you found your own mouth elongating and becoming more of a muzzle as a result. You'd have thought being so malleable would have unsettled you, but you found you were more excited about the possibilities instead. It felt more like becoming who you were meant to be. Besides, it made wolfing down your metal meals easier. You figure intention, either yours or hers, or both, affected how you changed, but no one else had any satisfactory explanation for any of this. You'd stopped caring long ago in any case.

What you and Wolfrun ended up settling on for her, after earning a mountain of COAM for you and your handler with your unbeatable, utterly synchronized performance, was a mid-lightweight build focused on tearing apart the battlefield as quickly as possible with heavy machinery. What you became in response was anything but lightweight, at least compared to the humans around you. The finned bulwark and the black sensor on your head never really changed, but the rest of you seemed plenty mutable. Your arms grew long and powerful, your shoulders tipped with decorative spires. Your waist grew slender, tapering inorganically in nested panels to allow for plenty of articulation. Your torso got wider, too, though for whatever reason, the outline of breasts remained constant on your new chassis. You kept the digitigrade legs. Over time, hydraulic supports seemed to have formed on yours. The snout stayed, too. You were too proud of that paint job to ever take it off even with the changes to your own body. BECAUSE of the changes. You might be more machine than woman at this point, by you're still you, pride and all.

The techs estimate that only about 5% of your body is still organic. Probably most of your brain and maybe some other systems, plus a few symmetrical patches of skin. They suspect that you had either some kind of sympathetic Coral connection to your AC that rearranged your augments and allowed the changes to start, or that somehow repair nanites adapted to your form and began "fixing" you. In any case, they think the bulk of your changes are done with at this point. You're a little disappointed by that. Wolfrun likes the new you, though. She's happy for your connection and to be able to get even closer to you. Your handler appreciates your new form just as much. She doesn't even bat an eyelid when you tell her that you've been talking to Wolfrun. If anything, she seems a little sad that she can't talk to her directly. As for your relationship with your handler, you might be nearly twice her height, standing at a hulking 10 feet tall, but that doesn't stop her from loving you, or from jamming her fingers lovingly between your legs after missions.

But she's sleeping now. It's late, but you're still lonely. There's only one entity up at this time of night you'd care to talk to, so you climb the catwalks to meet her, claws clanging against the metal of the hangar. You smile your toothy, metal smile as she greets you, opening her cockpit so you can crawl inside and be one with her for a few more hours before your next mission.

[rory-flynn]

I had and idea about oxygen mask/muzzles

[tobinatorr]

[digitalsymbiote]

Excerpt from "The Dangers of Disconnect Syndrome"

"There is a reason that 8 hours is the maximum recommended time for a pilot to be deployed in the field. The pilot selection process already trends heavily towards individuals with high neuroplasticity, and extended time spent in neural sync only exacerbates this issue.

A pilots brain is molded to maximize efficiency, both through training and chemical cocktails, in order to handle the processing load of actually controlling a mech. IMPs help with this, of course, handling calculations and translating impulses into commands.

However, should a pilot spend more than 8 hours at a time in neural sync, this enhanced neuroplasticity starts to have more dangerous side effects. Past 8 hours, a pilots brain will start to form neural shortcuts to operate more efficiently. Many pilots have reported this to feel like their machines are suddenly running more smoothly, and responding faster to their neural commands.

The drawbacks of this process are not seen until the pilot returns to base and disconnects from their mech, at which point we start to see the typical symptoms of Disconnect syndrome. This is because the pilots brain is bypassing the already built pathways for controlling their actual flesh and blood body in order to more efficiently interface with the neural link. The technology behind the neural link is programmed to translate mental impulses for things like moving limbs or twisting our body into the corresponding commands for a mechanized suit. This translation is obviously not perfect. That's why IMPs exist and are trained on a pilots neural pattern from the moment that pilot enters the program.

After a long enough time in sync, however, a pilots brain learns to bypass that translation altogether and send the distinct input signals required to activate the various parts of their machine. In short, their brain learns to better control the mech by bypassing their own motor functions."

-- Lecture given by Dr. Eva Tyomkin, Head of Neural Research at SHI. Conference for Mechanized Innovation, 2145.

[rotglass]

actually one of The Best features in the whole of MechWarrior 5: Mercs is just being able to walk around in the hangar while these titans are getting worked on

its sooo neat being able to walk on the high rafters at eye level with them. scale in video games is some of the best

also got a new VINDICATOR unit during my travels and i really like her! named her 'Voracity'

[lnfopl]

Metro Kidd from Lancer

[destiny2paladin]

Pilots that don't handle overstimulation well, and devolve when they're stressed. The handler knows this and forces it every mission. The pilot gets pushed to the edge of overstimulation by the constant data feeds and responsive controls so that the moment a fight starts they get overwhelmed... and lash out. Whatever just took a shot at them has pissed them off and by God they're going to erase it.

Pilots that turn into ruthless hunters that tear through enemy mechs like a child unwrapping a gift for their birthday. The handler watches the feed with smug satisfaction, every threat no more than a smoldering crater by the end. The pilot is drained, exhausted, and utterly spent.

They're pulled from the cockpit with a glassy look, a blank stare. They're fried psychologically, and the handler takes advantage of this. Soft words, gentle reassurance. "You were so brave. I was worried." Lies. The handler wanted a ruthless attack dog, and they turned a loyal hound into a fractured mess to get it.

[acerby]

I'm pilot/handler posting again.

[faehoundnell]

I want to see a Handler whose in charge of 5 adopted Hound pilots. Get me the Handler who sees the lone wolf, obedient Hound and her domineering Handler and goes, "oh let me introduce you to my girls." And it's just a bunch of happy, tail wagging murder machines who are just the sweetest pilots you've ever met. They form a pack, this tight knit family that cares for each other. Give me happy polycule vibes while these hounds dote and love on their quiet and meek handler. Give me a Handler who is unassuming at first glance, but leads her team of Hounds in missions with such ferocity and success that the higher ups have no choice but accept her request when she sees a recently abandoned pilot receding into their own head and goes, "That one, they're coming home with me."