#mechaposting

I took some more!

Elves who insist in a fully immersion vr method of piloting because they'll be dammed if those hundreds of years training with a bow go wasted

Dwarves who take a distressing amount of joy in being the biggest for once, hitting the enemy with a gun bigger than the mech

Werewolves who are raised from birth by the company and controlled via the family bonds

Centaurs piloting the spider tank™️ because they are used to a much more stable platform

Gargoyles used to having thicker skin than everyone else suddenly becoming snipers and ambushers out of fear

That hell hound who's immune to fire taking full advantage of this and detonating their mech every other mission, much to mission controls annoyance.

Is this anything?

Over time she grows more and more distressed when outside her mech though. Her limbs don't feel quite correct anymore, her eyes see the world in strange and unnatural ways. It's wrong and weird and she spends more and more time in her mech, just sitting inside the cockpit feeling comfortable in her correct body.

Her beloved handler notices of course, and brings her in for more and more body modifications to correct what feels so wrong. Better eyes, multiple new arms, just more and more to make her feel better.

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.

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.