#glassmech

[grassanglass]

Imagine a handler who's too cautious with their hound. Mocking, taunting, yet apologetically patting its head and muttering apologies whenever the training is too harsh or their insults too personal. A handler who constantly scans the room for their hound, then approaches so quietly that the hound jumps a little from being startled for the first few months of training. A handler who trips over their words, whose cruel laughter turns high and genuine. A handler who knocks off things and drops important papers, just for the hound to pick them up. A handler whose hound has to help them stand up from their chair after a long night of debriefing and filing reports. A handler who's too afraid to leave the hound alone. A handler who has to turn away at the sight of the hound's wounds. A handler who quietly cries after the meetings with the higher management, despite being known as stoic and capable.

The handler who wishes to run away. The hound that would follow them.

[grassanglass]

Sounds of bullets and energy beams rattling the earth can be heard in the distance. Before you stands an abandoned office building, its walls are cracked and torn, with wires, cables and construction debris winding up and growing in amount with each passing floor like tree branches.

A particularly big crack in one of the spacious open balconies reveals two mech units, one of them fashionably lean and modern, covered in black resistant resin and pristine sheets of armor, and the other, much older, bigger, but fitting the slick and shady theme with grey somber tones, save for the chaotic splatters of warning paint, historical markings and mismatched parts on the side of the hatch. Brothers of one duty, they hid in the concrete jungle better than anyone ever could.

- It's foul in here, I'm opening the hatch.

The intercom spits out a deep tired yawn and goes silent for just the right amount of time for the pilot to start worrying. She's been assigned to work with one of the freely roaming, 'self-employed' hounds and outsourcing human power always means trouble. Not that these creatures resemble humans, in her opinion. While corporate, government and private military hounds are losing the self and a common face through exploitation, hours of training and behavioral correction, the wild hounds turn to madness differently. Some grow so lonely and detached from society, that they forget any semblance of how people behave, how speech outside of the quiet hum of targeting equipment sounds like, how limbs should be moved outside of the pod, where to look without a visor covering their face. The others become so fond of their mech they become a part of it. Changing bodies for synthetic organ-systems, slowly merging with the machine until there's nothing left but pure desire to break another soul standing in the way of their victory. The works.

Our pilot had not yet seen her independent counterpart and the silence on the other side of the intercom was too heavy to bear.