Ethics is not happy.

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Ethics is not happy.
It must be terrifying to be a normal soldier or even a regular starship pilot in a world where mechs exist. Imagine charging into battle when suddenly a hunk of metal the size of a building lands in the middle of your unit, stomping most of them under its foot. Imagine flying in formation when something bigger but way faster than you swats you out of the sky with its hand. It would be terrifying and I would love to see more stories written in this kind of setting but not from a pilot's perspective.
the character of all time
You're a mech pilot. You've been one basically all your life. The surgeries and training is so extensive that you basically have to start around age ten to be a mech pilot by the time you're an adult.
When you started out as a kid it made you feel so mature. You got to brag to all the other kids about how you were getting special training, and already learning all these cool adult things, and given so much power, meanwhile they were still so clearly living the lives of children. Everyone was always so impressed with you at that age, you felt like you got to enter the adult world so early.
Now that you're actually an adult it feels the other way around, like you're so small and infantalized. You're really only in the mech for a few weeks out of every year now that you're done with training. And the physical toll it's taken on you, combined with your inability to complete college, means you're basically unable to have any real adult job, or even any real adult experiences. You can't even live alone in your condition, or really contribute to taking care of your home in any meaningful way. You spend most of your days just laying around, watching shows and going on your computer, just like you would have as a kid. There's nothing else you can do, basically every adult experience is cut off from a being in your condition.
You keep going to new planets for your work, it's part of why it's so hard for you to keep normal relationships. It feels like you're always seeing these places but like you aren't actually someone whose lived in any of them. You get to experience walking through new cities and new worlds, eating their food, hearing their songs. But you do so little there other then go into a mech and stay in your hotel that it feels like these aren't places you ever truly know, just pretty things you get to see out of your window and get to wonder about. You don't know anyone from the places you lives, and you haven't done the things anyone whose really been there would have done. You just see things, and seeing them makes you happy at least.
Most of your friendships are entirely over the internet. It's the only way you can actually keep in contact with people, even if you have gotten a chance to see them in person. It's strange talking to people the same age as you, when they so clearly have the lives of actual adults and you don't. You're an adult in the intellectual sense, you can talk about art and philosophy as an adult would, but if they mention experiences with jobs, and romance, and going out to bars, and owning their own homes, you're reminded that that will never be you. You're aware of this divide between them and you, even more then they are. It's so clear that the lives that you live just aren't the same, that they have all these things that have been forcibly cut out from you.
On the subject of things forcibly cut out from you, you weren't allowed to go through puberty. Either sex hormone is bad for a mech pilot to have, and the benefits they do have can be given by other means. You went on meds that prevented puberty when you were young, and at eighteen surgery made it permanent. It's another thing that makes you feel like so much less of a full adult, there are all these sensations and body parts that you'll just never get to have, in this permanently sexless, childlike body. You sometimes look at footage of sex, or of adult bodies moving while naked, just because you want to think about what it would be like to have a body like that. You can't enjoy seeing such things the way most adults do of course. But you gain enjoyment just from imagining what it would be like to have a sexually mature body. Because you're also rather skinny from what your body has been through a lot of people think of you as childlike and pure. It's especially rough with how innocent your family seems to want you to be. But you're not innocent. You're an adult with an adult understanding of sex. You just had your ability to personally engage with that permanently removed.
When you're inside the mech everything is comfortable and understandable. You know that some pilots think it's like becoming the mech, but to you it's like becoming an organ in a much larger creature. You don't have to worry about being a person, you're just one part, fulfilling one function. When everything surrounds you on every side, and you can't move your body at all, and all these various things are plugged into you, you can finally be comfortable not feeling like anyone at all. Sometimes when you're talking with online freinds it's the other way around, and everything is ok because of how much you're like a person, but when you're in your mech it's ok because of how little of a person you are. You're just this soft little thing, that's surrounded on all sides, and you don't have to move at all, or even really see the world, like a weighted blanked combined with a dreamless sleep, combined with returning to the womb.
They say the only reason why mech pilots exist is to avoid building sentient mechs. Because if you offload the smart part of a massive robot onto a human, that's way easier to control and command then a sentient ai. They say that when you die they're just going to put a fresh body into the mech. You're ok with that just like how you hope your organs would be ok with getting a transplant. Your family is so proud of you, they're so happy you got to become what you are today, they don't see it as sad at all, don't understand why you would be sad about it. Maybe you don't know why you're sad either.
Imperial Ace who is obsessed with being at the top of the killboard getting frustrated at being outscored by hounds. Storming up to the Handler's office and demanding to be treated. So desperate to reclaim the top spot that she willingly offers herself up to be carved and reshaped into Her perfect weapon. She doesn't care that her former squadmates look at her with revulsion and lust now instead of awe and admiration. She doesn't even notice that her quarters no longer have a bed, that her meals are brought to her, that she only leaves her kennel when she has a mission. All that matters is that she is the best hunter in the pack so Handler is proud of her
Brian and Tim’s ship name is Guns&Roses. Send post.
TERFs can’t understand the wonders of mecha, and honestly that’s sad.
Zero Angels is a TTRPG actual play podcast using the Girl Frame system by AnxiousMimic Games presented by @badrepproductions and hosted by the Bard Rock Network.
Set in the world of 2235, 75 years after the beings known as the Gorgons killed over 6 billion people, Zero Angels follows the mech pilots of the 92nd Cadre as they face off against the Gorgon menace that threatens humanity.
Coming July 3rd, 2026 wherever you get podcasts!
Learn more about the world of Zero Angels at ZeroAngels.com
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This podcast is intended for adult audiences only!