#the mechs fictions

[thesteamhunk]

Obscure UDAD character art but also I am in AWE that I drew these only months apart. I am so happy with my art now and being able to work to this point makes me so happy.

[p2ii]

real talk tho why was angel barefoot while performing in a "dark seedy bar"

GIRL THERE ARE EMPTY BOTTLES BEHIND YOU. YOU ARE GOING TO CATCH SOMETHING

[zhjake]

finally got around to playing the titanfall 2 campaign, always loved their look and feel for a more grounded conventional mech. bt was cute. i will never forgive apex legends.

[lil-tachyon]

The Lagrange Heavy Industries "Journeyman" utility frame was, for decades, a worksite staple. Its low price point, reliability and ease-of-modification made it wildly popular in various industries. Extensive use by insurgent groups, however, severely damaged its reputation. Eventually, its perception as a potential weapon of terror by LHI's clients forced the model's quiet retirement. Successor frames were purpose-built, more difficult to modify, and were often sold with software overrides that allowed corporate agents to shut down frames remotely.

The frame pictured bears the emblem of the radical Earth Orbit Shipbreakers Union, which at one point occupied and collectivized several industrial habitat cylinders before being forcibly broken up by Intrasystem Commerce Authority forces. Although the action failed, it inspired more successful occupations in the further-out belt mining habitats. Journeyman frames featured prominently in both struggles.

[shyaringan]

you are so right!!!!!!!!!

[partikron]

I keep thinking about the Dafeng test pilot that you take down in the first chapter of Armored Core VI.

In any other mech storyline, this kid would have been the protagonist. Bright-eyed and hopeful, he would have been the poster child for youthful determination in the face of corporate war profiteering, either finding a cool trick to defeat 621, or being saved by the sudden arrival of other plucky young pilots.

But we both know that no one comes to save him.

The universe of Armored Core is fantastical by any definition, but in this one moment it is at it's most brutally realistic.

"I'm...keeping up with a real merc!" he says, "My training is paying off!"

Reality sets in as the tide turns abruptly in your favor. He is outmaneuvered, outgunned and outfought by the "merc who only kills for credits".

"I can't die like this!"

But he does. All the tenacity of youth couldn't save him from you, and he dies alone and afraid, lamenting his little dream of having his own callsign, his life amounting to the meager credits transferred to your account after the mission.

He would have been the protagonist anywhere else, but here on Rubicon he is a reminder that, in a warzone, no one comes to save little boys.

[curatorofthisdigitalmorass]

Hajime Sorayama

[this-is-cool]

The awesome sci-fi mech designs of Longque Chen - https://www.this-is-cool.co.uk/the-awesome-sci-fi-mech-designs-of-longque-chen/

[dragonkid11]

No one, not a single soul, absolutely nobody:

Me: What if, a mech with a big ass rifle that can stab it into the ground with its bayonet and use it as a monopod to stabilize its even bigger shoulder cannon.

[super-ion]

The Engineer

Part 3

(Part 1 | Part 2)

I had jacked in. Unauthorized. Unbidden.

When I finally disconnected from Morrigan's tender embrace, the reality of my situation had come slamming into me.

I had used my access to a multi billion dollar war machine for my own personal ends. I had risked my job, my career, my fucking life maybe... and for what? A bad dream?

I returned to my quarters, mechanically showered and ate breakfast and reported to my station, all but certain that security would arrive at any minute to quietly escort me out of the facility to a hole somewhere no one would ever see me again.

But they never came.

Despite the anomalous access logs, they never came.

Burning the midnight oil? one of the techs had asked jokingly.

Fuck.

They all fucking knew I had been there, but it never crossed any of their minds what I was really doing.

Once that initial panic abated, a whole new kind of terror set in.

Command might be fooled. Security and the techs might be fooled. But there's one person who knows. There's one other person who has the kind of access to Morrigan that I do.

Fuck fuck fuck.

No. She doesn't have the same access I do. I'm the fucking interloper here. It's her fucking machine. She has deeper access than I ever could. Morrigan was tailor made for her pilot. All the while, the pilot was broken and remade to forge connections I could only ever dream of. They're two halves of a whole. They can't hide anything from each other even if they wanted to.

It takes three days before the moment I have been dreading finally crystallizes into sharp reality.

I sit alone in a corner of the cafeteria, as I always do. I poke listlessly at something that I think is supposed to be fruit cocktail. I have read the same paragraph on my datapad three times already. I have just started on my fourth attempt when a figure slides onto the bench across from me.

I know exactly who it is before I glance halfway up to see the long slender fingers, one hand tapping restlessly, the other clenching a spoon as she surveys the mess of nutrient gel that they serve pilots. The sleeves of her sweatshirt are rolled up, revealing the skinsuit over skeletal arms.

I can't bring myself to do more than that quick glance at her hands.

I remember those piercing ice blue eyes… jesus fuck, it's only been three weeks since that moment we passed in the access corridor, when those eyes had pinned me in place.

I imagine those eyes boring into me now.

I know she's been to see Morrigan. The two of them had a training sim yesterday. They have another one in a couple of hours.

Her spoon scrapes against the cheap plastic of the bowl. The nutrient paste makes a sickening wet sound as it rises.

I am frozen in place. I can't leave. I can't read my datapad. I can't even pretend to eat any more.

The thing they never reveal in the propaganda vids is just how frail pilots are. The training, the conditioning, the hours and hours jacked into the machine being pumped full of a cocktail of artificial stress and reward hormones, they all ravage the body. The figure seated across from me can't be more than half my weight. In a stand up fight, I could probably break her in half.

I'm fucking terrified of her. I can barely breath as she takes another spoonful of gel.

The skin around the ports on my rig itch. Like my rig itself knows how inadequate it is in comparison to hers.

The spoon comes to rest on the tray alongside her bowl. She says nothing. Even in silence, she's a creature of action, unable to remain still. Her leg bounces just slightly. Her fingers tap out a complicated rhythm.

I force myself to look up, to meet her gaze.

The eyes are sharp. Sharper and clearer than I remembered when they wheeled her past me. But it is that same intensity that I remember.

She isn't smiling. She isn't frowning either. Her expression isn't doing much of anything, like she's forgotten how to express like a human being. Beneath the restless energy, she looks tired, all sunken cheeks and shadowed eyes, with a sickly pallor to her skin.

She looks like a pilot. If I hadn't broken, if I hadn't washed out, it is what I would have looked like.

An image flashes through my mind unbidden. I see us swapped. Me: hard, broken, tired. Her: soft, muscular, healthy… lonely.

The feeling washes over me, that horrible familiar, desperate loneliness.

She twitches, head cocking slightly as she sees something in my expression.

Oh… oh fuck.

She knows.

I had been so fucking scared of being caught out that I never considered how much had actually been revealed, how much of my aching soul left its mark in that cockpit like so many greasy fingerprints.

I have dreamed Morrigan's dreams. I have caught myself humming snatches of her song.

Neural bleed.

It always comes back to fucking neural bleed. Limited as my rig is, Morrigan has been in my head just as I have been in hers… and Morrigan is half of a whole.

The woman sitting across from me doesn't just recognize my face, she has seen the very core of me.

I let out a ragged breath that I hadn't realized I had been holding.

When she finally does speak, her voice is husky murmur, hoarse from disuse.

“We should talk,” she says.

I nod weakly.

[laricnoli]

Blueprints of the Aurora

(click for better quality, tumblr compression why must you do this)

[casside-sionnach]

[p2ii]

just read both the udad!Orpheus centric fictions

some highlights I really enjoyed

[zhjake]

another1

[wealmostaneckbeard]

The politics in Lancer the mech pilot TTRPG seems center left to me. A good way to explain what's going on in that game's universe is with this overly long metaphor:

Imagine an alternate history where Nixon somehow beat JFK Jr to the white house, and once in office he lets Kissinger go nuts setting fascists up on an accelerated schedule. That's what Union's Second Committee was like. Then Tricky Dick procedes to nuke Vietnam a couple times. That's the Hercynia Crisis and that FTL Piston weapon launch. JFK and company ride the shock and horror of approaching nuclear war into office on the promise of de-escalation and enforcing civil rights, and they deliver. That's the coup that formed Union's Third Committee. Kissinger, Nixon, and the entire pentagon/raytheon corp take over NASA in Cape Canaveral, Florida where they form a tolerated corporatocracy in exile. That's basically Harrison Armory on the planet Ras Shamra. Now a United liberal-leftist front of America is actively trying to tear down dictatorships around the world that Kissinger set up (he got assassinated at some point in this time line) and replace them with socialist democracies. That is Union's Justice/Human-Rights Department and a few other government branches. So far they've had some success although people are pointing out that it's a bit hypocritical that the liberators are using weapons from corporate conservative states where civil rights are discretely curtailed. That's what's driving political discourse in 5016u in Union's legislative body, the Central Committee and it's myriad political parties.

So yeah Lancer's political intergalactic landscape is a bit like modern day? Except also cthulhu is giving out reality-breaking tech to militant civil rights advocates and random civilians? That's what HORUS basically is, btw.

Now that I've written this out, it would make for a good american alt-history with mechs campaign in Lancer...

[dianeramic]

For today's inktober I have a mech my pilot runs and designed in my Lancer TTRPG game! Its name is Stolidus, and it's a weird quadrupedal flightless mosquito thing that specializes in e-warfare and scanning enemy mechs. This is what it looks like all folded up in the hangar!