#mech handler

[corsair-mercenary-companies]

People interested in becoming Handlers, those about to be handlers, and those who just became handlers listen up.

You're gonna need this to get through Boots on the Ground after Boots on the Ground.

1. You're going to see everything your pilots see. You're going to see the unfiltered nightmare of the field. Make sure you've got a vice of choice that you can stay steady. Avoid booze. You need to be clear.

2. You're their guardian no matter how much they think they're bulletproof out there you're the one making sure they're actually bulletproof. The information you send them is what makes sure they don't die.

3. They will die. One of your pilots will die. You can't stop it. It doesn't get easier.

4. When they get back to base your job isn't done. You finish the after action report. You make sure your pilots get what they need. Only once they're settled is your job done for the night.

5. One day they're going to ignore an order. You have a choice. Keep yelling at them to try (and fail) to get them on track. Or you can buck command as well and make sure they survive.

6. You are not the pilot's friend. You're their handler. You point the weapon they are. The second they're inside their mech and you're in your chair talking to them on comms they're your ward.

7. Never celebrate right after a battle.

8. Never get comfortable in the chair. No mission is ever as simple as the briefing makes it.

9. Your pilot will prove you wrong.

10. Break all these rules the second it feels right. You're a handler, you manage pilots, the bastards fueled by willpower and spite. You've got to have more will than they do.

//Signal\\

[morgantheblue]

Some Mechposting Dynamics that Aren't "Sub Pilot/Dom Handler..."

Half-Feral Domme Pilot/Submissive Mech Repair Crewmember

Bed breaking hate-sex between rival pilots.

Psychosexual Relationship between a Pilot and their Mech's AI

Tender mutual unspoken understanding between Handlers and Pilots, both being the only people to truly know what the other is going through.

Dom Pilot/Sub Handler "You sent me into an ambush, I'm gonna fucking break you." (Bonus points for Bratty Handler)

Sub Pilot/Dom Implant Surgeon.

Feel free to add your own!

(And to be clear, nothing wrong with Sub Pilot/Dom Handler stuff, just thinking about other dymanics I'd find fun to write.)

[chaosmagetwin]

Here’s a take

All ghosts from the StarCraft universe are on estrogen :) all of them. Yes, even Nova and Kerrigan. Some don’t even change their pronouns, and keep using he/him, but some use it/its and they /them, but they’re ALL on estrogen. They’re the mech pilots of their era.

[dollvoid0000]

The eroticism between a Handler and their doll. A doll built to be so powerful, to be such a raw force for violence that it needs a Handler.

The Handler's pilot is a conditioned, slobbering mess. It gets off on getting kicked in the stomach and making out with its rifle.

The Handler's doll is purpose-built, relentlessly and gracefully and wishlessly. To be wielded by its Handler.

Sometimes the Handler uses their doll to keep their pilot's spirits up.

[foxgirl-mech]

tripping pilots is easy.

they don't walk the same after they start training, what with mech bodies being as different from humans as they are. it's like, what is it, something like horse legs or some shit? i don't pay much attention to the mechs' designs, but they've got more joints than human legs, or their knee is actually their ankle and they walk on their toes, not their feet. look, i'm just the handler, it's the mechanics who are supposed to actually know how their mechs fuck up the pilots we manage.

the solution for it is pretty easy though, cause all the pilots just get special shoes to help them out. keeps them from fucking up their bodies trying to do shit they aren't made to do. they're like those platform high heel things, but without the heel- weirder angle too, but the damn things move more gracefully with them on than they do without, so i guess it doesn't bother them. and they're long too, probably at least a foot of extra height. maybe being taller helps them stay out of their cockpits for longer without losing their minds? makes them tower over me, damn.

point is, for all that they can still move around like nothing's a fucking issue, they forget that they don't actually have the heavy armored legs of a mech. it's kinda pathetic how easy their balance is to fuck up. sure, they can manage to hop up stairs no problem, but you trip them up even the slightest bit and they'll crumple to the ground. it also doesn't come with the thrusters of a mech, so the weak ones will be fucking helpless when it comes to picking themselves back up. why they can't figure it out for themselves, i don't know, but no one's about to ruin the experience and help them. not our fault they forget what having a fucking human body is like.

cause yeah, technically as their handler it's your job to haul them up and get them back on their feet. but also, when you're their handler, no one's going to say anything if you want to let them stay down for a little while. we all do it. you just have to make sure they make it to their next sortie on time; so long as that's taken care of, you can treat your pilot however you want.

[acerby]

Beware the Pipeline

Whether it is a teacher or a handler you want to be praised and told “Good Job”.

[corsair-mercenary-companies]

One day the pilot will die. One day the reaper takes its toll

We tell them they're bulletproof, that stress is a resource. We laugh and joke about how unbreakable our pilots are.

But one day they will die.

One day they'll push the reactor too far. Get in the line of fire just long enough. Not react fast enough.

The pilot will die.

There are three cases.

The mech dies.

The pilot and mech die.

Or just the pilot.

Some say the mech remembers. Some say the pilot remembers the control of the mech.

But every boots on the ground is a risk. A risk we all live with.

//Broadband\\

[rory-flynn]

'rebel hound helmets that look like the shit that killed shinzo abe'

[morgantheblue]

Tbh I don't tend to write Dom Handler/Sub Pilot but I think the idea of "Pilots as Spare Parts" is a delightfully fucked up spin on the trope. Included on the manifest of the Handler's ship alongside racks of missiles, barrels of coolant, pallets of miscellaneous parts.

Pilots as just something else the repair crews have to swap out every now and then. Parts that can be bodged back together in a pinch. Parts that can be bent out of shape, held together with staples and tape.

Disposable.

Replaceable.

i do think the whole “mech pilot is a dog” trope is slightly overdone but i really can’t come up with a better, similarly sexually-charged metaphor

[bittsandpieces]

i really like horny mech stuff conceptually but whenever i seek out content for it it's all just a little too brainwash-y for my particular tastes. i want a pilot who's like a borderline feral hunting dog on a leash, a handler who's only slightly more sane than their pilot, just enough to keep the higher ups out of their business. i want collateral damage as a love language, destruction as foreplay, a relationship born and bred out of violence and devotion, rather than control. are you listening. is this thing on

[anaktoria-of-the-moon]

As an addendum to my last handler/pilot dynamic post, consider the found family dynamic:

You became a handler to find your baby sister, whom you know only was taken from your arms twelve years ago by a man bearing the Collective’s red-winged eagle on his shoulder, whom you’ve never seen again. (That is the way it goes with children who show promise for the pilot program - some call it destiny, others law, still others stealing; you don’t care to put a word to it, but you won’t rest till you’ve seen it undone.)

Your first pilot dies in a day, your second in a week. This too is the way it goes. Not every promising child becomes a proven soldier. Some blades shatter in the tempering: metal too poor, fire too hot.

You say the lines: Hunt there, Go north, Well done, Not yet, Wait here, Go home, Glory to the Collective - a litany in which you don’t believe. Now your pilots last longer before they die (missile strikes, overtaxed reactors, and each time you hurt a little less, and whisper thanks that they are not your sister, at least). Weeks before the next, then months, then years - how many? - you’ve long since stopped counting the days, for each that passes without finding what you seek is one that may as well not have come at all.

Then one day as you murmur the lines in your loyal hound’s ear a shriek pierces the sterile peace of your ivory tower, and your world erupts in flame. They’ve found where you direct from through some trick of triangulation; they’ve brought down an orbital strike, right upon you.

You wake amid the ruins to the screech of missiles, the groan of metal and shattering ceramic plating. And in your ear the first sound your pilot has ever made: a long, unbroken scream.

You watch her pick up the enemy and tear it in half, in a burst of steel and sparks, and then you are gone again.

When you wake next she is carrying you, strangely, gingerly, balanced atop her gun arm and held in place with her machete. You struggle upright and she grinds to a halt. They taught you early on how to work the emergency hatch from the outside; you do, now, and see to your shock that the pilot is just a scrap, a red-eyed white-bleached little thing tangled in too many strangling black cords, crying piteously, starved.

You needed her then. She needs you now.

So you unwrap her from the coffin of synthetics and wiring and carry her, cumbersome, down from the cockpit. While she thrashes in your arms (not used to the touch of mortal flesh, doubtless, not used to being so small and soft and terribly mortal at all), you reach into your still-intact coat and fish for the last snack there and feed it to her (gently, gently, she isn’t used to much besides intubated protein slop) and wait for the flutter of her chest to slow a little before you go on.

The sound of running water nets you a quiet pool to bathe in. She struggles too when you unzip her suit - she is like a wild animal, kicking and biting and scratching - you repeat the same soft assurances from your radio, Wait here, Easy, Don’t shoot yet, and she stills, and though there is a little blood on you you feel it’s a triumph. You guide her to the pool and then turn and walk five paces away, just far enough to know you can run back in case you hear her start to flail too much - or not at all.

It takes a few tries, getting her to figure out how to bathe. But by the fourth night she at least comes out free of that old coating of sweat and tears and machine lubricants, smelling no longer of grease and oil, and by the tenth night she sits and lets you untangle the long fall of her hair.

It is an ugly meager white, this hair, like the rest of her, skin and all, only her eyes that same strange red. This is how you think you know she is not your sister, who had the same rich loam brown skin you do - or perhaps this is just how pilots look; perhaps they are all bleached by their cockpits like plants in lightless winter.

She doesn’t speak, your pilot, they never do, they only ever growl or shriek or hiss or groan. They did not need to speak in the cockpit; you understand that somehow they and the mechs speak without talking, that it must be part of the dullness in her eyes that she has lost that way of speaking, for her mech has run out of fuel after a fortnight and, though you have worked out how to articulate its legs by sheer force and a bit of cleverly tied wire (so that you can walk it alongside the two of you as you go), you cannot manage to get it to wake again. So in the long hungry evening you try to teach her another way of speaking, with her hands and not her mouth.

You speak to her still, of course, as you always have, using the same soft key-in phrases you’ve always done (throwing in new words here and there, signing them at the same time). You understand now that you were never really talking to her to talk, but to soothe, the way you lull babies in the cradle. It is slow going, even so. At first you do not think she even listens. She does not look at your hands. She stares somewhere past you, out at the stars, or the next ridge, and does not move at all.

But on the hundredth day that changes. She looks suddenly, sharply, at you while you roast your catch over the fire, and she signs, Sun.

Sun? you sign back, heart racing.

Sun, she says. Sun rabbit. Sun rabbit food.

Another forty days and you find out Rabbit is the name of her mech.

In winter you come across the burned-out remains of an enemy outpost. Your pilot is off like a shot, and against your instinct you do not call out to her or give chase. Sure enough, she comes back, arms full of thin sheets that glitter like obsidian.

Sun food! she signs, hands shaky (she still is not used to such delicate gestures - in her mech, all her movements were big and sharp and final). Rabbit food!

The next days are spent swaddling Rabbit in the salvaged panels, and then, on the seventh day after you arrive at the ruins - in the midst of the coldest night yet - something inside the mech’s infernal innards chirps, and beeps, and comes to life.

That isn’t the only thing that wakes. Turns out dormant drones in this outpost have sensors tuned to mech handshakes.

It’s too late to run. You yell, RABBIT!, and you throw yourself over your pilot in the middle of her still-open cockpit, right as the drones converge upon you, and your world becomes day-bright.

You wake to find it is still night. Your leg aches. In the light of smoldering embers, your pilot shakes you. Tears glitter on her face like ice. Behind her you see Rabbit - the smoking hulk, having awoken just enough to sync with her pilot and turn and shield you both.

Your pilot signs, You not dead.

I’m not dead, you sign back, and now you begin to cry too, for the first time in twelve years. I’m not dead.

Rabbit dead, she signs. And you cling to each other and her little body (so stunted it is the size of a girl some twelve years old, despite that you know pilots are only enlisted at fifteen) wracks with sobs, over and over.

But in the morning, once her crying has subsided enough for her to fall asleep, you untangle yourself from her and go limping down into the ruins and wrap up your leg, and then you find yourself something approximating a screwdriver.

She finds you deep in the corpse of Rabbit. She is angry, maybe, by the look on her face - maybe she thinks you are desecrating the grave. Hastily you hold up your prize, and she falters - doesn’t recognize it.

Rabbit, you sign. Rabbit head. Rabbit - Rabbit soul.

Soul? She clearly doesn’t know the word. Nobody has ever told it to her. Of course.

You shake your head in frustration and gesture her over, and she comes, haltingly.

You carefully part the hair at the base of her neck. You slip the little black disc into the waiting slot.

It takes a moment. Then - oh then -

She nearly collapses into you. Her sobbing is louder than ever before, and her fingers are a shuddering outburst, over and over, Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit.

You don’t wander anymore. The ruins where you found the solar panels have cans and cans of preserved food hidden in some abandoned Doomsday bunker, turns out, and when those run out there are many animals you know you’ll be able to hunt here - you see their burrows and footprints in the thawing snow already. And as the sun grows stronger, you have noticed a little streak of black in your pilot’s white braid.

She chatters to Rabbit all day, every day. At least you think so - you see nothing, hear nothing, but she wanders the grounds with you (your limp growing ever more sure, thanks to a splint you made in the aftermath of the drones) and she helps you festoon the little makeshift hut you’re putting together with solar panels, and by turns she smiles, or frowns, or laughs suddenly, a bright peal undimmed by the closeness of any cockpit. Down in the middle of the village the old body of Rabbit lies still and steady, a little majestic in a forlorn way, you think.

Come spring you find yourself settling between the legs of Old Rabbit, New Rabbit and Beetle (thus your pilot has named herself, after her other favorite sort of animal) tucked happily against your arm; she has filled out much since you first pulled her from her cockpit and now eats the fish you roast for her with great enjoyment, smacking her lips and humming. When you are done she turns to look up at you.

Yes, Beetle? you ask her, aloud and with hands.

Will they find us? she asks you.

No, you tell her honestly. You lost your trackers that day in the fire, burned out of the tower in which you sat; to the Collective you are as good as dead. So is Rabbit now that her body has been torn apart, her disc removed. And the Collective doesn’t come back for expendables, for rusted blades they can no longer use. (Above you, flowers sway in the hollows of Rabbit’s arm cannons.)

Will you leave me? she asks you next.

You pause. You say, Do you want me to?

This is not in pilot vocabulary, to be asked a question. She has to pause also to take in what you’ve just done.

Then she says, No, never, and, If you do, I’ll go looking for you.

Like you went looking all those years ago, no? When did it change? You told yourself then: She’s lost out there somewhere; I must find her, or die trying. Now you look at the little girl beside you and you think, Maybe you were the lost one all along. Maybe you’ve found each other.

You ask her, Why do you say you’d look for me?

She considers this. After a long moment, she says, You had an order for me. At the end of every hunt. Told me where to go. I could not ever stop going until I got there, and I am there now, and if it goes away from me then I will have to go looking for it again.

She looks at you straight on, now, with eyes that reflect the night sky. It occurs to you that maybe this is her way of, at last, trying to give you a name; you forgot yours the moment you joined the force, for you weren’t interested in personalizing yourself to anyone, especially not the short-lived pilots, who didn’t need your name anyway, only your title, Handler.

You say, What do you mean?

She smiles. It’s you, she says. This place. The place is you.

You know now, but you need her to say it, the way she needed you to say those things back then, to keep her going, to keep her from going mad. So you ask her, What is the place?

She smiles again. In the darkness, an owl hoots.

She says, Home.

[skullman2033]

Mecha pilot who responds to the attempts at establishing a toxic psychosexual relationship by their handler by efficiently and without any fanfare fragging them the second they get the chance.

They’re up to six now. The kill tally on the mech is exclusively reserved for handlers who decided they wanna get freaky

[trannydykepuppybot]

Cockpit suspension fluid slimegirl, holding her pilot in the pod, absorbing shock, hardening around the holographic controls projected into her to add a tactile component and serve as a copilot. She also quietly stimulates her pilot's crotch with every kill, helping make it the perfect weapon

@puppygirllaika

[ladyzogs]

cant stop thinking about a hobbyist handler forum where they share combat stim recipes and get in arguments over what conditioning method works best

[ghostbeam]

Mech pilot yuuta and his mech that’s incredibly possessive over him. He takes to you as a handler almost immediately, excited for the help after his last few handlers were scared off. You’re not allowed inside, your constantly dodging malfunctioning limbs and faulty wires, but you’re not one to back down, and gaining her trust is just as important as gaining his.

Rika only realizes how important you are to Yuuta the day after you spend the night with him, and he’s left alone in the morning with an empty bed and a broken heart. You’re his handler. You’re not supposed to leave him. Not ever.

She lures you into her chest one night, faking some sort of lighting malfunction and allowing you inside for the first time. She keeps you inside all night, enduring all your yelling and banging on her insides to be let out, a nice gift for Yuuta.

[acerby]

Made a sequal to my shitpost