#mechaposting

[hero-ward-blog]

Writing Woes (Pt. 1 of Many)

So I’ve been trying to plan out my own original mecha story and it’s made me realize something:

Contriving a scenario where a character Falls into the Cockpit is harder than it sounds!

I mean, you can only have an Ordinary Teenager/Young Adult get in/steal an unattended giant robot so many times before it starts getting stupid

[acerby]

I'm pilot/handler posting again.

[serenehells]

I have finally beaten the final story path of armored core 6 and holy shit. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more catharsis beating a game in my entire life. ALLMIND was a really cool villain even if I knew the twist before the end, but it is still just as good even knowing it going in, and that is not even to say Iguazu. How much hate there is to just get one more shot at killing the person who seems to be everything you aren’t, and even with the power of a super intelligent AI, you still lose to “world’s okayest lobotomite” Raven and her incorporeal coral girlfriend Ayre. It is just, so good. And cements AC6 as easily my favorite game of this year.

[yogurtbluesideas]

The Acheron was made specifically for the planet tytos, due to the brutal winds and rough terrain, the most efficient way of transporting goods is with a specially designed mech unit.

The Acheron’s main stay is its massive interior and backpack, with the pilot cabin having room for two-three to live comfortably inside, coming with a septic system, two full sized bunk beds, booth and small kitchen with small oven and microwave, and a radio set.

The cargo bay of the Acheron is capable of holding 5 shipping containers at a time, with them being encased in a steel shell on its back to hold heat in, gaining the name “the traders backpack” among the common people.

It is equipped with very few combat functions, as most were cut out to save weight and with combat being scarce for these machines, however they do have a large piston on their hip and two trekking poles with flared ends to work as a mace should worse come to worse, better to break an expendable piece of equipment than to be left in the cold with a shut down mech.

Most pilots take to the solitude easily, it’s very simple work that pays well due to the dangers and monotony. However it has become a reverse goldilocks zone of talent where regular truckers find it too dangerous while capable pilots join the military. Giving Acheron pilots a very nice and easy niche to slide into for work. Many pilots form internal communities with their on board communications allowing them to talk to eachother during their work, often going into “mountain caravans” where a group of these mechs go from town to town at the same time, delivering everything at once in a timely manner.

@acerby made a blog post about a cabin mech and i decided to”yeah sure that sounds pretty cool”

[rotglass]

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

so cool,,

[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)

[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.

[ghost-of-tk]

me, a mecha pilot (college student), overclocking my battered and damaged war machine (ignoring sleep schedule) and risking total power loss (eepy tomorrow) to blindly rush the enemy (procrastinated homework) and deal the killing blow (circle answers)

[dragonessmiralis]

Mecha Musume Mechsploitation

[lnfopl]

Metro Kidd from Lancer

[dragonsarecats38]

Hounds get too use to advanced mechs.

Really. Sometimes Handlers just need to throw their hounds back in the tin can with jets and a machine gun. The hounds will still do as their told. Any disassociation with not feeling their usual neural interface is just a skill issue...

~My Loyal Hound / Chapter excerpt~ https://archiveofourown.org/works/60985282/chapters/155794648

===============================================

The Jester-Class may have been slower, but it had its advantages. Caitlyn aimed, then pressed the trigger. The side-mounted machine gun roared to life, sending rounds into the Zephyr's frame. The mech exploded in a burst of fire and debris, disintegrating almost instantly. 

A void started to pull at Caitlyn’s chest. Where she could once feel the powerful push of Lysithia’s thrusters though her muscles, now there was only emptiness. There was no light pulse flowing under her from the power core and warmth through her arms after firing never came. Just a phantom of what should've been Lysithia and the migraine that now pained her head.

“First one down,” Caitlyn murmured, her eyes already searching for the next target. She could hear Handler Crane’s approving silence over the comms, but Caitlyn knew better than to expect praise. “Nice shot. Keep moving. The Titans are on their way.” She lingered through statics on the comms for a moment. “X38, status report. I’m seeing fluctuations in brain activity from your suit… Migraines again?”

She could only let out a muffled grunt in response, her head was throbbing as she pushed the Jester-Class forward, its heavy footsteps causing the ground to tremble slightly.

================================================

[acerby]

Beware the Pipeline

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

[coralkitsune]

I need to get put in the cockpit of an Armored Core and be told to fuckin send it. Just let it rip at full speed. Redline the generator so hard it makes the whole thing shake. I want the servos screaming as I take corners at speeds beyond mortal scale. There's gotta be electropop or djent-ass metal blasting the whole time. probably both.

[skullman2033]

Mecha pilot who responds to the attempts at establishing a toxic psychosexual relationship by their handler by efficiently and without any fanfare fragging them the second they get the chance.

They’re up to six now. The kill tally on the mech is exclusively reserved for handlers who decided they wanna get freaky

[rotglass]

[rosery-doll]

When the dolls first joined the rebels, it was met with suspicion. Every rebel knew what the dolls did for the Empire, knew that they were the assassins of those gilded bastards. But they took the dirty work. Everything the rebels asked of them, the dolls performed to the best of their abilities. Cleaned the mechs, made the hole in the ground barracks livable. But every day, they asked to be put on the battlefield. Leadership was hesitant, but rebels aren’t well known for having a lot of deployable troops. And leadership got scared. The dolls had left their golden cages, most of them very violently. Showing up to rebel bases with the heads of some of the Founding Families was one reason they got in. If this was someone insidious trap, the Empire had been willing to lay some serious cover, because as good as medicine had become, it couldn’t fix missing heads. 

Finally, the dolls got their chance, when a base was raided without warning. The dolls rolled out alongside the mechs. The goal was to slow the advance long enough for the base to be evacuated. The result was a total rout of Imperial forces. Mechs are big, badass pieces of tech that can level cities, but big things have big weaknesses. Dolls, most topping out at a heighty 165 cm, abused the blindspots of the Empire’s mechs. They also enjoyed it. The dolls handled all the tasks the rebels had given them because that was a doll’s duties. Taking out thirty meter tall mechs with slug guns and chain weapons was something new. But it was also what a doll did. They removed the stains and took out the trash.

After the fight, the mech pilots and dolls got on like a house on fire. Which wasn’t a good thing for their enemies, because the house on fire was usually theirs. 

One day, a technician, reattaching a doll’s leg, asked something no one else had. Why, why did the dolls defect. They were made to be the perfect servant, but in the end, they turned against their masters.

“You whip a dog enough, even the most faithful hound will bite it’s master.”