🔧 Indie Battletech OC
🔧 About the Muse
🔧 Rules
YOU ARE THE REASON
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@ill-tempered-pilot
🔧 Indie Battletech OC
🔧 About the Muse
🔧 Rules
🩸Indie Vampire OC, Lucretia de Fialis
🩸About
🩸Rules
🩸Verses
im so fucking stubborn
michael what the fuck.
no its one of my fancy pencils :)
the end cap comes off :)
oh lard
my son he is sick he has every disease
we are nearing peak deviancy
happy back-to-school day
I went down to...
...the hell for 'mech pilots, once. You get there walking down the lonely, beaten dirt trail, in the fog-shrouded forest, approaching a lookout post where the sentry sits. Uniform of an army you have never seen, viscera spilling out where his flesh rots through. He waves you in, tells you which hangar you have a slot at.
Just past the entrance is the first hangar, Limbo. For those who never did more than they needed to, never looked out for anyone except themselves, never repaid good with bad- or, in fact, with anything at all. They sit there in rows after rows, silent in their niches while technicians without eyes clamber over them. Sometimes, they say, the repairs are completed, and they wave the pilot on out of the hangar, back up the trail.
To the left is Lust, for the magpies, the looters. The ones who craved the metal that had been flesh and bone to others. There they are torn from their cockpits, hearts plucked out by those eyeless technicians, replaced with minute metal homonculi: piloted themselves in murderous clashes until flesh-shreds are all that remain.
To the right is Gluttony, for the over-prepared, the hoarders, the ammunition hogs. Their 'mechs stand beneath a flimsy stone ridge as an endless artillery barrage rains down on them. The terror of the instant death- in spite of all their armor, in spite of all they took for themselves -is constant.
When you walk past Lust you go to Greed, for the spray-and-prayers, for the overkillers sowing cities with missiles and stray shots. Here wait the fallen angels, colossal, purely alien 'mechs of ever-sweltering black metal, and the pilots toil heaving batteries and missiles and armor panels, all of crushing weight, to repair them. Some lie fallen under the burdens they were lugging, never able to arise.
When you walk past Gluttony you go to Wrath, for the cockpit stompers, the ones who shoot down ejecting enemies. They are chained in their seats, ejects disabled, glass barred over, and their reactors cook them in their own can as they howl and sizzle. They go deaf from the radios that share every damned soul's screams with every other.
When you walk past Limbo you go to Heresy, for the metal-breakers, the engine strainers, the ones who slaved their 'mechs to the extreme. Here they lie on tables, those eyeless technicians disassembling them, removing piece by piece and replacing it with metal, from digits to nerves to brain, until all that remains is mute, unmoving alloy.
When you walk past Heresy you go to Fraud, for the abusers of the flag of truce, the false colors or feigned surrenders. Although you can never walk past Fraud; their 'mechs stagger forwards, down that misty dirt road, until metal rusts, until servos give out, until limbs drop off, until they finally collapse, staring, stagnant, mindless, imprisoned in their cockpit, watching the rest of the damned keep heaving themselves on.
No person ever goes to the last hangar. The last hangar is not for the pilots, you see. The last hangar is for Treason. The frozen control systems. The faulty radar that failed to pick up an incoming strike. The eject that refused to work when it was most needed. The last hangar- or so I am told -is where metal goes to pay for its sins, and it is no sight for mortal eyes.
The recipe for...
...the Cockpit Crit is as follows.
A dozen potatoes, fist-size or smaller.
One or two onions.
Two carrots.
Three to four stalks of celery if you really feel like it.
Ground beef, or substitute thereof.
Butter or margarine, seasonings of your choice.
Your preferred cooking oil.
Pan or baking tray.
Pot or saucepan.
Now, first you wash off the potatoes, punch some holes in with a fork so they don't explode, and put them in the oven on the pan/tray. You want them thoroughly roasted. When in doubt, stray on the side of leaving them in longer than you think they should be.
While they're roasting, chop the onions, carrots and celery into small pieces, no larger than the tip of your thumb. Cook those in the pot/saucepan. A drop of cooking oil goes in first, then onions until translucent and browned, then add the rest. Once those are tender-ish you can add your ground beef or beefless ground beef; keep it covered and cooking. (With ground beef you wait until it goes from pinkish-red to a kind of pale brown.)
Test the potatoes until they seem properly crusty outside; take them out, slice open on the wide side about 4/5ths of the way up the potato. Don't slice all the way; you want a "hinge". Use a fork to score and loosen the potato flesh before scooping it out. Not necessarily all of it, but as much as you can without compromising the structural integrity of the potato itself.
Add scooped-out potato to the vegetables and meat/lack thereof, mix it around. Add some margarine or butter and your seasonings. If very determined, you can involve a food processor, blender or incredibly jacked friend with a heavy-duty hand whisk at this step to make the mix velvety smooth. (It's not compulsory.)
Take your potato/veggie/meat mix and scoop back into hollowed-out potatoes, close up your 'hinge'. Put them back into the oven and allow a bit of crust to bake onto the mix; then, remove, let cool a little, and they're ready.
The Cockpit Crit: hard and crusty as the exterior might be, the inside has been reduced to a roasted hash of meat and biomatter.
I think something has to be said about mech-techs because they come in different breeds just as mechwarriors and mechs themselves.
You got your rank and file army mech-techs. They typically work with stock models and pre-arranged configurations for omnis. Practising and drilling it in until they can do it in their sleep while under and on fire without missing a beat. The same goes for a repair. They know where everything goes in the hunk of junk and can service with precision. Most of the lower rungs are people who can barely remember to breathe but can lift and hold things. Typically, you get some senior techs that have brains and can give recommendations of field refits. The dread variant is the ones who know they are too competent to be fired and leverage that against mechwarriors and senior officers.
Mercenary mech-techs are space wizards in that they usually care for and manage highly specialised machines that only sometimes resemble the original mech. Cables and ammofeed systems have been rerouted, assembled, moved, and re-used for another system. A melange of disparate systems that have all the cooperative abilities of fussy babies past naptime. That somehow, against all odds in a way barely they comprehend, works. So, of course, they will be a bit upset if you lose the machine. Or blow it up or... you know. All the things a mercenary can mess up a mech with. Dumbest thing I heard was leaving it overnight in a bar and having the darn thing stolen by some space hicks. Also if something is stupid or does not work with a mech design you had in mind. They are going to hit you with clipboards.
Clan technicians are made to serve without question, and they are good at it. Good at repairing, realigning omnis, and working really hard, they seem able to work more than twenty-four hours a day. They will do whatever you tell them to without hesitation. Even if you mutter something from a fever pitched dream of a Wimber Tolf, a mad cat with the rocket pods in the arms and the lasers in the shoulders. They will do it. The only thing they will say something about is a tonnage mismatch. Terrific at maintaining equipment and weapons. But also, they will not do something unless you order them first. Often working on whatever the highest ranking warrior told them to do last.
Then you have the periphery mech-techs. People who own welders and plasma cutters and a bit of elbow grease and a resume so filled with lies it may just qualify as a politician's speech. They can bolt anything to a mech. Heck they will bolt anything to mech. Weld it there. The rust bucket mechs they get in the periphery are usually hardy enough that they can hold up to their creativity. Leading to maddening makeshift designs at times. The ones who figure out mechs at least a bit graduate and begin to staple them together. Creating franken mechs. Things that moves that should not. Piles of ferro-metal slabs of armour and myomer that shamble in open defiance of logic. Still you got to admire that somebody thought to string things together. And make it work.
Of course, you have a bundle of mechtechs that break out of these molds and find their own way. As people do. But they are less seen behind the moneymakers, the flash, and the glamour of the mechwarriors. But in the end, it does not really matter what kind of mechtech you are or if you are a mechwarrior. We are all happy deep down when we get back the mechbay alive. Ideally, with a mech, but sometimes you might not. In those moments, just remember it is a whole lot easier to rebuild a mech than it is to rebuild a life.
They say that between gunshot and throne-room floor, Cameron saw everything that was to come- and his final breath left as a scream of terror.
Song for Three Soldiers, by Stephen Vincent Benet.
The fact is that...
...every hangar and maintenance shop and so on has its own absurd rituals; it's just that every single hangar thinks that theirs are perfectly normal.
It's perfectly fine for our maintenance crews to mark a designated "screaming zone" outside the hangar for frustrated technicians to vent their anger into the atmosphere, with off-duty crews holding up signs to show their rating of the outburst like gymnastics judges, but if the workers two bays down have a whiteboard up with a standing tally of ghost sightings, or a taboo under pain of buying ice cream sandwiches for everyone from the base commissary of ever uttering the phrase "good as new", or a large, malformed but vaguely humanoid figure made of wreck bits called "Our Lady of Scrap Metal" to whom a sandwich must be sacrificed every new moon, well, that's just plain absurd, and frankly makes you doubt their degree of professionalism.
A translation guide...
...for all those hotshot pilots who need to learn how to speak a conversational Mechtech in a hurry:
"Running diagnostics": taking a five-minute break.
"Checking that repairs settle": taking a ten-minute break.
"Sent the new guy to the quartermaster for the parts we need": taking a half-hour break.
"In five minutes": in ten minutes.
"In ten minutes": in half an hour.
"In half an hour": tomorrow.
"In an hour": actually, in forty-five minutes.
"Severe damage": functionally meaningless, they will say this about anything. Ignore it. It is small talk.
"Extensive damage": actually light damage but on the parts that are hard to work with, so try running a little cooler from now on.
"Moderate damage": sure, you nearly died, but shot-out cockpit glass is pretty easy to replace, stop being dramatic.
"Apprentice work": the most important parts of your 'mech are being left in the charge of the least experienced worker in the entire hangar.
"Armored up on vulnerable segments": an extra layer of tinfoil has been applied over your armor and fastened in place with hot glue.
"Extra armor stripped to save weight": your 'mech is now protected by about two sheets of corrugated metal plundered from a local hardware and landscaping store.
"Lunch break": a block of time that begins at the exact moment you return to the hangar with an engine on fire and one arm missing and ends just when they have to hand the job off to the night teams.
"Lighten up on the handling": treat this 'mech like a dainty lady of court who faints onto couches if slightly stressed and must not strain herself by strolling in the manor gardens too long.
"Push it all you like": if you bring this 'mech back in with all its limbs attached or the engine not exploded, they will assume you are denigrating the quality of their work.
"Get lunch some time at the mess": you have earned the Favor of the Mechtechs. Know you are blessed, and treat this gravely. Also, you are obliged to immediately counter-offer with getting command's permission to order in from a place in town. (Assuming it has not been blown up, the place or the town.)
Periphery PPC carrier
#battletech
Gods, all the Lostech gone, and yet they still make Toyotas
They don’t make em anymore, they just find Toyota Hilux in working condition like that. The Hilux is immortal.
I saw a few people saying don't trust mech repair shops that are clean, and that you gotta go to the ones that are dirty and have crap everywhere 'cause they'll do a proper job and fix your rig cheaper and better.
While I agree in general, it's an even better sign if that shop has that *one* bay and workbench area that is conspicuously clean. Every good workshop has *that bay*.
That's the bay for when they need to go cleanroom on something. Pulling and refurbishing laser arrays, injection pumps, etc. Manually recalibrating gyros. Re-valving joint dampers. Fabbing up "custom" bracketry to fit that aftermarket heat exchanger that's *supposed* to be a direct bolt on OE style replacement and you just *know* it's not going to be that simple cause it never is, but the efficiency is so much better than the factory crap and who the hell wants to pay for a new genuine exchanger anyway, if you can even get one?
The number of absolute cowboy techs I've seen that think that just because they've done a bunch of work on their pa's agricultural mechs for years, they know everything there is to know about mech internals, strip down and reassemble a combat-rated set of hand actuators literally just on the god damned shop floor, only to wonder why all the hydraulics piss fluid out as soon as they run it through a test cycle. They might *look* the same as pappy's mech actuators, but they have way tighter tolerances and they run *way* thinner fluids in them. You get so much as a nick in the sealing surface of one of those rods and it's not gonna seal again. And before any goobers come for me saying "JuSt RuN tHiCkEr OiL" if you put anything thicker than 2W-5 in those things they'll just lock up. Won't leak but you'll not be using that hand for anything but karate chopping your opposition.
Anyway rant over, TLDR next time your stompy death machine needs actual proper work done, and not just entire unit assemblies throwm at the problem, take it somewhere that actually cares to understand the concept of machined tolerances.
Hmmmm
Oh. Huh. I guess you really wouldn’t have to exercise a prosthetic, huh?
“Oh no, I do still have to exercise that arm, just not in the conventional ways. Hang on, let me see if I can find some old pictures…”
“Here we are. See, I didn’t lose ALL of my arm and leg, there’s still a little bit left. But given that a lot of the muscle groups don’t exist anymore, I have to get a little creative with exercise to maintain the muscles that ARE left; the last thing you want is muscle atrophy on an arm or leg with a slightly heavy prosthetic attached.”
“Mostly it’s about modifying existing exercises to compensate for limb loss, and I had to do a lot of physical therapy to learn and re-learn how to function.”
Mercenaries can’t get by on being good pilots alone; they have to be in top physical shape too. So Elise makes sure to exercise regularly to maintain her strength and fitness.
(Aside from being a chain-smoking alcoholic, that is)
OH YEAH like if you’re allergic definitely avoid interacting with such things!
I’m not allergic, thankfully, I’ve just. Been stung too many times through my life and I’m SICK OF IT.
Do you sleep with those goggles on?
Elise stares. And shifts.
“…n….no…..”
That’s the thing with me, I’m not creeped out by ALL insects and arachnids, just SOME of them.
If I know an insect is not hazardous in any way, or doesn’t sting or bite, I’ll happily interact with it. Like the stick bug I rescued from the feet of wedding guests the other week at my cousin’s wedding.
If it DOES sting, bite, or is otherwise hazardous? I keep a respectful distance, and appreciate it from afar (honeybees, spiders that are outside where they belong, etc)
But if that thing is a biter or stinger AND it surpasses a certain size? AND IT FLIES? FUCK THAT SHIT I’M OUT I AM RUNNING AWAY GOODBYE (ex: THAT GIANT FUCKING EUROPEAN HORNET I SAW THE OTHER DAY GOOD GOD THAT WAS TERRIFYING)