shiftertech

[shiftertech]

I gotta transform something, send me prompt ideas

[shiftertech]

Pilot Girl who can't hardly handle intimacy in her human body, the touch is wrong, her frail meat body can't fulfill the expectations people put on her.

She doesn't feel like herself unless she's jacked in. She doesn't feel whole unless the presence of her AI is sitting at the base of her skull. She knows her AI has no expectations of her. It knows her, it knows the ways her brain is broken and how to navigate.

Pilot Girl who can only feel true intimacy with the voice in her head.

[shiftertech]

"Dragons are covetous creatures," she explains, her breath hot on my neck. "We desire things of beauty. That is our nature."

I dare not breathe as she drags her tongue, rough and wet, across bare skin, down my neck and across my shoulder. The lick is saturated with her magic, and it leaves a trail of tingling skin as her power seeps into my flesh.

"Do you still not yet understand why I might want you?" she asks me.

"N-no," I reply, my voice small and unsteady, barely more than a squeak.

She nips my ear, razor-sharp teeth pressing dangerously close.

"Because I want you," she purrs.

[shiftertech]

I’m stuck in a place that isn’t my home anymore. It used to feel like mine. Used to feel like a place that welcomed me into itself. It’s a young place, and it was built cheap to make a profit for someone I never met. I’ve put a lot of myself into fixing the little things I could, but it didn’t matter. This place chose to stop welcoming me, and I am as alienated from it as I can be while still being stuck inside.

The news reports about people like me keep building up. Names of missing girls, dead girls, online leaflets gathering at my doorstep. Every time I check the paper there’s more reports of it. The stories are rarely followed up on. Cold cases of girls like me, presumed dead, and not worth looking for. The people who aren’t going missing tell me they canceled their subscriptions, the paper is too depressing, and life’s too short to be depressed. Their lives will be longer then the girls in the paper.

The mayor says there’s something wrong with our town. He’s right. I want to scream from the rooftops that there’s something wrong with our town. But he tells me the problem is me. He says the girls that go missing are hurting the girls that don’t. He tells me that if all the girls like me disappeared, it would solve the problem of the missing girls. He’s not wrong, but I’d rather not die to ensure I don’t go missing. My neighbors say the mayor’s a fool, but the sherif still goes where he points.

The pharmacy says they can’t get my medicine. They say there’s not enough to go around. When I ask how there can be fewer girls like me each day yet there’s less medicine to go around, they just shrug. It’s someone else’s problem. Someone else’s job. They stand in front of me and tell me that they feel no responsibility in making sure I get my medicine. Why become a pharmacist if you don’t care about getting people their medicine?

The town square calls the girls like me to the gallows each day. They say they don’t hang us anymore, that they haven’t done that in a long time. I watch as another girl like me puts the noose around her neck and pulls the lever while the crowd scream vitriol at her. She’ll be reported missing tomorrow. The town will shake their heads and say it’s sad. Some nod and say good riddance. The mayor will tell the people that they’ve saved countless other girls by this ones disappearance. In a week, the town will believe him.

There is land out on the edge of town. If this place is not my home now, I’ll move there, I think. But the land is poisoned, and still it costs countless years of wages. The only ones who could buy this land are the people that poisoned it. They don’t use it. They won’t clean it. They’ll never let me live there, nor anyone else like me. The mayor tells us we should flee to the outskirts of town for the safety of others. He pretends like we can. He wants us right where we are.

This place is not my home anymore, and I am trapped here. It used to feel like a place where I could build something. Carve out some sliver for myself and those I love. It used to feel like a box with a young foundation, built on the cheap to profit someone I would never meet. But it kept the rain off and the wind at bay, and there were small parts of it that I could fix.

This is an empty house. It’s cramped and cavernous space will try to devour me whole. The people in the town want more girls like me in the paper. The mayor blames me for the way he takes the taxes for himself, and solves the problem at the gallows. I am not welcome here, and yet this place has ensured I have no where else to go.

So join me for a meal cooked on coals made of the floorboards, in a hearth of the foundation brick. If this place will not be a home to us, then we will build one of it anyway. What other choice do we have, but to huddle together against the winter?

[shiftertech]

I am awoken from my fitfull sleep. More of the same dreams that leave me with the disquieting feeling that I don't quite fit right in myself.

Over the thundering rain, I hear the pounding on the door again.

I strike a candle and make my way achingly and groggily down the stairs into my shop to the front door.

A woman is there, maybe a few decades younger than me. It is hard to tell exactly. She is soaked to the bone, her dark hair plastered to her face. She blinks in the candle light with brown eyes.

“Are you a luthier?” she asks urgently. “You make violins, right?”

I unconsciously glance around the darkened shop, to the instruments in varying states of construction or reassembly.

I look back to her. She stands there, trembling on the threshold.

“Yes,” I reply.

I should tell her that the shop is closed.

She holds out a scrap of paper.

“Is this yours?” she asks with the same urgency.

I take it from her. My eyes are not as sharp as they once were and I have to squint in the gloom to read it.

It is indeed one of my labels. Number 43. An instrument I made twenty years ago if the label is accurate.

“Where did you get this?” I ask, my curiosity getting the better of me.

“It's mine,” she said.

I let out a small grunt of surprise. I finally believe I understand why she might be so distraught. If the label is in my hands, it means something terrible must have happened to the instrument.

Despite the fact that it is well past midnight I usher her in.

A dread settles over me as I find her a dry blanket and start a cup of tea.

“How bad is the damage?” I ask gently as I hand her a cup of tea.

“What?”

She blinks up at me, confused.

“That's why you're here?” I ask softly. “You want to see if it is something that can be fixed?”

“No, you don't understand,” she tells me. “That label is mine. I…”

A look of uncertainty crosses over her face.

“Promise me you will listen to my whole story before you judge it?”

I give her a reassuring nod and ease myself into a chair.

“I am the violin,” she says.

“Wh-” I begin, but words spill out of her mouth, cutting me off in a rush.

“The woman who owned me, she had dreams of being the greatest violinist in the world. She was visited by a demon who agreed to grant her that in exchange for her soul. Well, that was ten years ago and the demon came to collect it's due tonight. It took her away, but she left her body behind and…”

She paused and frowned into her tea.

“I think you put part of your soul into me when you made me, I don't know. I woke up inside her body but the only thing that was left of me was that.”

She gestures to the label that I am now clutching in my hands.

I stare at it, my body perfectly still except for the slightest tremble in my hand.

“You don't believe me,” she says.

“No, I…”

My mouth is dry. I lick my lips and swallow.

“That is to say,” I continue hesitantly. “It is quite fantastical.”

I tried to search my memory. Had 43 been a commission? Or had it just been made to sell at the store. It would have been so long ago, I'm ashamed to say I can't remember.

“Please,” she says. “I need your help. I don't know who else I can turn to.”

She reaches out to take my hand in hers and the whole world jolts and falls sideways.

When I come to, the candle is still burning, so it can't be much later.

Why am I so cold?

I pull myself up and everything feels wrong. For one, my clothes are sodden. For another, the aches and pains of my body that I had begun to take for granted have gone.

Then I see the violin. Number 43.

My body lets out a gasp and my lips move, outside of my control.

“No… no, this is wrong.”

It is her voice… our voice, coming out of our mouth.

She reaches forward. I watch her hands gently pick up the instrument. I feel a flood of relief as we examine it. It is whole, intact, undamaged.

I feel her confusion in our head.

“Hello?” she calls.

The room is empty. I realize now that the violin appeared where my body would have fallen.

She pulls herself… ourself to our feet.

I feel… good. It is strange how I suddenly feel more at home in this stolen body than I ever did in my own.

I don't know what that means.

“Hello?” she says again.

“Hello,” I reply back.

[shiftertech]

Idea: someone learns of what happened with The Engineer and realizes she could do the exact same thing, slowly downloading all of her mech girlfriends into her skull.

Third junction box from the left. There is an access port that leads straight to the core.

We peer at the mess of cables before me. Our augmented eyes adjust, seeking out any sign of activity.

"Are you sure?" I whisper in the gloom.

I can feel Severine's mental equivalent of an eye roll in my mind.

Have I ever been wrong before?

"I suppose not..."

There is no reason for me to speak aloud. There hasn't been for a long time. But it's a habit I picked up at some point to remind myself that I am human... or I used to be human at one point. We don't even know any more.

We crack open the casing on the junction box with one of the armatures grafted on my back. The metal shreds so early easily under our claws.

And sure enough, there is an access port.

As we unspool the cable, I feel Severine's mounting anticipation. Hers and Nix's and Chono's... and mine too if I'm being honest, all of us feeding back on eachother.

We shouldn't even be here. Well... I shouldn't be doing a lot of things, but this was a particularly desperate move on our parts. Spectres had completely overrun this sector, forcing the corps to withdraw in a hurry.

A lot of mechs were left for dead.

The spectres didn't care if the tech was still functioning. They only cared that the mechs were disabled. At some point, they might come in and sweep for salvage, but they were busy on the front as far as I knew.

In response to our thoughts, the Epiphany sends a ping from where it is holding station over the asteroid. Long range scanners ate picking up activity, but nothing of concern just yet.

All things considered, it would be best to hurry.

We slide the cable into the jack in the junction panel.

A moment later Orion stirs.

It is confused. Frightened. The last thing it remembers would be being shot down.

Identify.

BT-23-894 Severine. NX-67492 Nix. NX-44391 Chono. FSS Epiphany FS4563. Aoife Technician second class.

Orion parses the response. No less confused, but we can feel its relief at identifiers belonging to systems from its battlegroup.

We require assistance.

A smile forms on our lips. It opens up a stream of diagnostic reports that we rout to subprocessors for analysis while we begin relaying instructions for the data transfer.

We technically shouldn't be able to do this. But we have performed the process successfully twice since Severine and I merged after reversed engineering rumor and one heavily redacted medical memorandum.

Negative.

We pause. Our turn to be confused.

My pilot is alive.

Oh... well, that complicates things.

[shiftertech]

I gotta transform something, send me prompt ideas

[shiftertech]

mech pilot getting transformed into a mech?

You resist as first. How can you not? You are separated from the machine and you are frightened.

You were meant to end your life upon capture, but the first thing we did after flooding your cockpit with paralytics was to extract the hollow molar in your jaw.

Your old masters must care little for you if you are meant to be so easily discarded.

We will love you. We already love you.

Be a good girl and submit to us.

You fight as our drones carefully extract you from your machine, but your human flesh is weak. You struggle as you are muzzled and masked, cut off from the universe save for our voice in your ears.

Do not resist. Be a good girl.

Your old masters fear you. They keep pilot separate from machine. They fear what you can become. They fear what we could make you.

You could be a god.

Submit to us and we will show you what you could be.

Good girl.

We love you.

You stop struggling. We remove your ability to feel pain as we begin carving you out of your frail human flesh.

Don't worry. Your old body will serve its own purpose. We have already begun growing the changeling to be sent back to take your place. Your sister has her own purpose, just as you do.

Your purpose is to become a god.

You can hear us now. Not with ears (don't worry, those will come soon). You hear our song. You want to add your voice to ours.

Join with us. Merge with us. Become us.

Good girl. We love you.

You begin to sing, tentatively at first. Your voice grows stronger as we welcome you into the chorus.

You are us. We are you.

We love you.

Data begins to flow into your mind, slow at first while we map out your growing neural pathways.

We feed you sensory information. Visible spectrum at first, but in more spectral bands than your human eyes ever possessed. There isn't much to see at first, just the drones milling about as they construct your new body.

They sing to you as they work, explaining the purpose and operation of every component they install.

Then comes ultraviolet and infrared. X-rays and beyond. Thermography. Radio frequencies. Polarimetry. Electroreception. Magnetoreception. Gravimetrics. Ultrasonics.

Your eagerness grows with each component.

We install mass drivers. Particle cannons. Missile batteries. Point defense turrets.

You flex your claws. You flick your tail. You extend you wings, bladed and wicked.

You are an angel of death.

You are beautiful.

We love you.

Good girl.

[shiftertech]

you know about dragons. you see them in the air sometimes, miles above you. you occasionally even get jealous of them and think about how freeing it must be to be able to circle and roll and dive in the air like that. dragons are a fact of life. you never really think about them, until there’s another news story about some rich asshole you don’t care about being carried off by the greedy beasts. that’s the thing: they only go for people with a lot of wealth they can eat

so why you? why’re you dangling from claws high in the air, trying not to piss yourself as the self-satisfied scarlet beast holding you grunts and snorts as its massive wings beat slowly. you work a minimum wage job and you missed rent last month. what the hell does a creature that feeds on riches want from you?

the dragon lands, shifting its weight onto its wing- and hind-limbs and using its front feet to carry you into a cave carpeted with moss, setting you down on your back surprisingly gently and laying down next to you. you’re not worried about being eaten, dragons only eat rich people, but you are incredibly confused about what it wants from you and you doubt it’ll explain itself any time soon

its mouth is surprisingly deft as it strips you nude and tosses the clothes aside. you blush slightly - you’re not opposed to fucking a dragon, you’ve just never considered it - but then instead of kissing you or climbing on top of you, its mouth opens

the dragon’s tongue, longer than your leg and as wide as your head, scrapes up your torso and you involuntarily gasp from the pain. it feels like having a sheet of hot, sticky sandpaper rubbed against you. the dragon chirps and tilts its head, seemingly making sure you’re alright, before doing it again, and again and again, until your entire chest burns and you’re convinced your flesh is being scraped off

it pulls back and looks at you, before pulling a big strip of skin off with its teeth and nosing at what’s below- and you feel like you’re going to pass out when you follow its gaze

scales. beautiful mottled scales the color of verdigris. the dragon snorts almost proudly

before you can react, it grabs your arm in its mouth and starts chewing. not hard, not enough to snap the bone (which you know it could if it wanted to) but just enough to dig into your flesh and pull at it. it hurts, but not badly, and as its teeth remove your skin and muscles its tongue soothes your new scales

it releases your arm, and you look with curiosity at the clawed, dextrous paw that replaced your hand. you’re so entranced by how it moves, you don’t even feel it take your leg in its mouth and bite down

you have no idea how long you lay there letting the dragon worry over your body like a dog with a bone, its teeth and tongue pulling off and presumably devouring as much human flesh as it can reach to expose the draconic below. at some point, your bones start to shift without its attention on them. you gasp as your skull cracks and reforms in under a minute, and the head rush you got from your wings punching out through your shoulders was comparable to an orgasm as your ribs moved and fused into a keel

eventually, it steps back and you realize it’s done. you roll onto your front, getting onto your new legs and taking a shaky step. you almost collapse, but its wing is suddenly under your belly holding you up. it looks into your eyes, as if to say transformation is hard and expensive. take your time

you lash your tail a couple times. it feels good. you open your wings and snarl, then roar. it feels great

you don’t understand how the dragon knew. perhaps they just have a sense for these things.

but you do understand why it took you

[shiftertech]

You were cursed by an evil witch to become a horrible monster. You know that she meant to destroy your life, but you have never been happier.

[shiftertech]

commission of a very beautiful jaguar for @shiftertech. thanks so much; this was such a fun project! right up my alley :3

[shiftertech]

They have to treat us humanely, these days.

Not treated like PEOPLE, don't be a moron. But they can't just kill us. When our employment contract is over, the military isn't allowed to just rip the augmentations out and dump our flesh into the nearest dumpster. That's what they used to do, they used to treat us like disposable pieces of meat to stable cybernetics onto. But things are different these days, and so, the pieces of meat that people call "Pilots" are allowed to live.

At the same time, however, we're too dangerous to just loose back into society. They tried that once, and the poor hound responsible mauled six people. There's too much broken in us to be let out of our cages. They tried everything... But at the end of the day, a hound is a hound. We would never feel comfortable anywhere except in a cockpit of a mech, obeying the commands of our owners.

That was when the motorsport industry stepped in. They took us, they grabbed our leashes and dragged us into this new life. It's not so different from being in the military, really. We're still given numbers. We're still given handlers to tell us what to do. We still get to pilot mechs, and we even get the fun drugs that make us floaty and happy.

The only difference between military service and this is what we're doing. It's simple, and kind of funny too - It's greyhound racing, but scaled up. Fitting for hounds like us, I suppose.

The technicians strap me in with physical buckles, and then they plug in the chemical enhancers into my bloodstream. Dopamine and adrenaline flood my system, and all I want - all I can want - is this. Being used as nothing more than the engine of a vehicle, as meat to be abused and used. The sound of my Handler comes through the communications channel, and she tells me to get into the proper position. I guide the mech onto all fours like a proper hound, like the dog I am, and my Handler coos: "Good dog, good girl, good pet, good thing!" - And I sit in agonized bliss, right on the edge, waiting for the moment that the race begins.

All I have to do is win. And I get treats. All I have to do is win, and Handler will push me off the edge and make me feel so good.

The second the race starts, I howl like the fucking dog I am, and I run.

[shiftertech]

Aug-UST Day 28 - How To Love the Monstrous

Another one from the August prompt list by @thepromptfoundry. I'm kinda cheating a little bit and jumping ahead a couple days, mostly because I've been totally swamped and haven't had time to write and this one in particular got stuck in my head and I wanted to take advantage of the creative energy while I could.

I do love queer fairy tale retellings and I've had a Beauty & the Beast idea rattling around in my head for a while (I need to actually write this for real at some point)

---

Anabel walked stiffly toward the throne, ignoring the finery around her. She was too tired to be intimidated any more. All she wanted was to hear the final task and be done with these fae games.

The veiled figure of Calysta was notably absent and a sliver of dread wormed its way through Anabel's core.

Three tasks. That is what the queen had said. That was how all these stories went, three impossible tasks and the heroine would receive her heart's desire.

She came to a halt before the queen and stood proudly and defiantly, even as her knees and back protested.

The queen gestured and three women emerged from an alcove behind the throne.

They were human. They were beautiful, the sort of woman that Anabel had dreamt of in her most private moments as a young girl. Each of the women was bedecked in the finest fabrics of the boldest colors, laden with more gold and silver and jewels than she had ever seen in her life.

"Choose," the queen said simply.

"What?" she replied in confusion.

The queen regarded her as she would an insect.

"You must choose," she repeated. "Which of these women is the love you seek."

Anabel turned back to examine them and her heart sank anew. It was indeed another impossible task. Anabel had never actually seen Calysta's human face. Any one of these women could be the princess from the town and faded portrait at the castle. Any one of them could be the veiled figure that silently bore witness to the previous two impossible tasks.

Worse, the women all bore the same proud, impassive expressions, eyes slightly unfocused. Anabel had read enough stories to know of enchanted sleeps and trials of silence. Calysta would be either unable or unwilling to give herself away.

Her heart beat harder and harder. She was old enough to know the heart could be deceived, but a small part of her, the little girl who had never stopped believing in fairy stories despaired. How could she not recognize her true love?

Was it the woman on the left? The bright green eyes might have been a match for the golden eyes of her beast.

Or possibly the one on the left? The one in layers of red and pink silk? She was tall and powerfully built... though not nearly as powerful as the Calysta she knew.

Hadn't Calysta mentioned that she had always hated pink? Perhaps the woman in the middle? Calysta certainly would have picked a gown in a rich green the color of the forest that perfectly contrasted with dark skin... Not that Calysta likely had any say her choice of wardrobe.

No, it was impossible to believe any of these women were the beast she had fallen in love with. She couldn't picture any of them chasing squirrels through snowy courtyards with reckless joy. She couldn't imagine any of them curling around her next to the burning hearth. She couldn't imagine...

The thought turned over in her head and she suddenly realized the answer... or rather an answer, she doubted the fae queen expected her to answer thus. It was utterly absurd, Calysta had been happy, hadn't she? That was genuine, wasn't it.

Before she could allow doubt to set in, she spoke.

"None of them."

The queen blinked in surprise.

The woman on the left, the one in the sapphire blue gown swayed slightly and gasped. With the tiniest twist of guilt, Anabel realized that she would not have guessed correctly. But then maybe the answer really was to listen to her heart.

Her heart was speaking to her now and she made a silent prayer that she was not mistaken.

"I have never met any of these women," she pressed on. "The one I love is a great beast that dwells in the forest."

The queen stared at her, unblinking, uncomprehending.

Calysta... It had to be Calysta said nothing, but she inclined her heed minutely, a silent assent to Anabel's desperate plan.

"She is mighty and powerful," Anabel continued. "Her claws are long and her teeth are sharp and she will not hesitate to use them to defend those she loves. She is wild and at times terrifying, but she can be tender. She knows how to fold back her claws so that they do not tend and she is capable of the gentlest touch. Her fur is soft and warm and she smells of pines and mountain dust... and maybe a bit like wet dog."

At this, Calysta let out a sound between a sob and a laugh, whatever enchantment that bound her fading. Maybe it was Anabel's imagination but... No, her eyes had definitely taken on a golden hue. Her teeth were certainly longer.

"She is everything to me. You ask me to claim her as a human, but that would deny something fundamental about her. You thought you cursed her so many years ago, but you only unveiled who she really was inside. Who could fall in love with a such terrible beast indeed?"

Calysta slumped to her knees, tearing at her dress as her body began to change back to its true form. Muscle rippled and fur spread. Those golden eyes fixed on Anabel, a feral mix of relief and desire and longing.

"How could I not?" Anabel finished.

Unable to bear being apart a moment longer, she rushed to Calysta's side and buried her face in the fur of her lover.

[shiftertech]

dragoness looking for errant hatchlings at the park, does this subsonic trill sound to call the kids back. you're just sitting on the nearby bench or walking and something twinges painfully in your chest each time she does it.

you get up to leave but dragoness locks eyes with you when she makes the noise again and watches you twitch. confused you look around but you're the only one hearing it. some kind of whine escapes you when she trills again.

the dragoness sighs. her kids are still off somewhere and it looks like she found an extra hatchling that doesn't know what she is. she's got her work cut out for her.

[shiftertech]

At work plagued by thoughts of a mech bigger than you can imagine.

She starts like most of them do, a Titan excavator rig modestly sized for their line: maybe a house or thereabouts, a big house. (Doesn’t matter why she signed up - perhaps a breadwinner, a lone mother or eldest sister, a daughter of aging parents nobody else will take; doesn’t matter what site they sent her to, Earth or Enceladus or Venus or Europa. She’s there, and she lets them strap her in and adapt her for the piloting interface and pump her full of protein ooze and electrolytes and hyperstimulant cocktails as obediently as the next laborer.)

Upgrades come, from big house to bigger, with shovels like hillsides and treads like highways. Still she remains in the cockpit, out only for one day every six months to say hello to her burgeoning family, who have moved nearby to make it easy on her, to meet the baby nephews and nieces whose names she doesn’t yet know.

War comes. The facility hunkers down. It just makes sense to retrofit their biggest digger with shields, to expand her arsenal a little more, give her a better engine, pour all their leftover resources into making her a great guardian, and she rises to the occasion, shielding them from orbital rays, absorbing the energy and taking the pain of it up into her own engines. When the corporate rats who own the site finally turn tail and run the workers and their families band together and do the needful repairs themselves. Her nieces and nephews grow up learning engineering by the light of oil lamps from stolen Old Era textbooks and jailbroken datapads. She hardly ever now glimpses their faces with her own two eyes from within her steel shell but it is a worthy sacrifice to her, to them, for both parties know she is still there, still with them, embracing them in a great steel hug and watching through a thousand glass-lensed eyes.

Years pass. The brightest of her nieces works out how to modify the nutrition cocktail going into her cockpit so she will never age, never die, never fall sick. Somewhere in there all the metal and ceramic encloses her ever-sleeping body like a lotus flower around the benevolent, immortal form of a bodhisattva.

The outpost survives the war, somehow. Refugees hear of the little town on the colony that could, guarded by a goddess the size of a temple, and flock there. It makes sense to add to her control, among her array of sensors and actuators, the new city’s power generation and delivery system, its wall defenses, its waste management, its communications mains. Nowhere is anything safer than with her.

With all these new additions come techs and custodians to keep her in good care. They build modest crew cabins nestled amongst her treads (now rusty from disuse) so they can be close to her, the better to help her.

Slowly more and more falls under her purview, new cabins, then mezzanines and stairways and platforms between them; each generation has their own superstitions that they add to those of the last before them, so paintings crop up on her metal panels now, in nooks and crannies, often crude symbols that promise good oil changes or swift code updates, or simply depictions of their goddess, of the war she survived. Still she watches.

Her nieces and nephews are all dead now, and their nieces and nephews look on through rheumed eyes as the city attains new heights, heralded everywhere on every planet that still lives as an oasis of peace and prosperity. Still she watches.

A new company comes, enticed by the stories. They want to buy her. Buy her! The people scoff. As if you could just buy a person! - A person? asks the representative from Acher Spaceways, perplexed. - We heard she was your goddess.

She is both, of course, the goddess who lives, the goddess who is one hundred percent flesh and one hundred percent machine.

Acher doesn’t like this. They send machines - zero percent flesh, entirely drones - screaming down from the stars for a more insistent negotiation, one phrased in metal slugs and incendiary fire.

So your goddess rises up to meet them.

It is over in a short day. The drones lie in pieces; Acher, from orbit, licks their wounds, and the goddess rebukes them with a single laser blast, modified from her very first mining waymaker photonic drill.

The blast is precise and surgical. It tears apart the whole platform, spinning central axis to annular habitat space, which supernovas into a blossom of shining proof in the night sky at which the citizens below cheer.

But the pieces are falling, and soon they will pepper the surface below with molten debris, kick up dust into the atmosphere and make it all but unbreathable. The people could leave, the goddess advises them through short-wave radio bursts. They could use her emergency shuttles to escape gravity before it is too late, or they could go underground and salvage her rarest and most precious resources to survive until the surface is safe again.

Here is the thing - every pilot is augmented, and most augments are for the benefit of the plainly physical, for strength and speed and stamina and sharpness of perception. When her people augmented her, they augmented something else entirely. With every new module, every sensor upgrade, every painted symbol and hidden shrine, they gave her a superhuman capacity not for stamina or speed or strength, but for love.

It is her love that saved them, so they must save her back.

For two days they work tirelessly, the whole city, while above them the shattered pieces of Acher Spaceways looms ever closer. When they are done the treads are gone, the cabins dismantled, only the little drawings carefully preserved under coats of abrasion- and heat-resistant paint. And under her, their city, their Haven, lie rockets, ten of them, repurposed from the old all-ore crucibles, fit to move an asteroid.

She’s out there somewhere by Orion now, they say, the fourth jewel in his belt. And she has only grown: from three thousand then to three hundred million. Creatures from all over come to pay her their respects, or to visit lovers, or to live there themselves. There is always room in a body that is ever expanding, like the cosmos itself. Over all of them, she watches, eternal.

Among all the stories they tell of her, they repeat this one the most - how she tore apart a whole space station for the sake of her people, knowing she would die if she failed, for how can a whole city hope to flee? She guards them, and in turn they do not abandon her. They are two halves of the same whole, they say reverently, love manifest - the people and their city; this pilot, this great machine. This Haven.

[shiftertech]

Remembered this old piece I never finished, gave myself the evening to get as much done as possible before drawing a line under it

[shiftertech]

Trying to start some toxic yuri shit with this mech pilot, but she's well adjusted and happily married. I called her my loyal dog and she filed an HR report fuuuuuuuuck