#pilot/handler

[acerby]

I'm pilot/handler posting again.

[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.

[rory-flynn]

I had and idea about oxygen mask/muzzles

[the-foolish-fool-who-gets-fooled]

For all the hounds out there :P

Code is GTHTU312N6KS

[ori-anna-v-58008]

It's so, so cold at the foot of Handler's bed. It's cold everywhere; a pilot unplugged from its mech naturally feels uncovered, unprotected. The air digs at your mostly synthetic skin like a thousand tiny needles. You had gotten so used to your cockpit, so accustomed to the invincible feeling of metal and weaponry, that being outside of it felt so vulnerable it hurt. You hadn't been permitted clothes in your Handler's quarters; you love that she knows what she wants, that she tells you exactly what to do. A construct like yourself isn't supposed to have need for them anyway. The fact that you are cold is itself a failure for a mechanic to inspect.

It's bad today. Everything is so much more difficult without input from Handler. She isn't telling you to sit still, to stop squirming, to stop picking at your skin with the hope of seeing the metal underneath it again. Tugging on it hurts, but the way it hurts makes it harder to pay attention to the stinging cold air.

Handler hates it when you do that. You know she does. It had all but been burned directly into your Personality Matrix that she does. And yet, whenever you're without command, you revert to such basic, primal processes.

You need her. You need command. You pull at the synthetic flesh on your arm again, feeling it easily tear beneath fragile claws. You are not permitted to scream while Handler sleeps. You wonder why that permission had been set, and yet the habit which causes it had not been prevented.

[ERROR. HANDLER'S DECISIONS ARE CORRECT.]

You are malfunctioning. Handler must sleep.

[saphig-iawn]

Hello ma'am,

How do you feel about the hound/handler dynamic? A former person, whittled down to their barest instincts, living only to hear "good boy/girl" and "Thats my little monster" from their handler.

The handler happily aiming their hound at anything that needs destroyed, hearing their loyal beast gleefully ripping and tearing apart anything in their path.

All to hear those sweet words

Good dog

...Just curious...of course...

I adore it. In fact, it was mech pilot/handler erotica that inspired me to pursue drone play and dronification.

I've even had a group of dolls become excellent Helldolls, all keen and sharpened blades, excising the rot from the galaxy.

Thank you for bringing this to me, that's a good dog.

[myna33]

Myna. Not sure what it feels like on your end but we're seeing critical split end levels. Overall bob integrity sitting at 33%. Report to base for trimming immediately.

I'll be fine. I've been applying leave-in. Holding okay so far.

Not this time. You're beyond informal repairs. Report now.

I-I can DO this

[wordpress-blaze-237825975]

One Quarter of the World Is Off-Limits

It saddens us that the U.S. State Department currently advises against travel to 21 countries with a Level 4 "Do Not Travel" advisory. This is due to high levels of risk, including armed conflict, terrorism, and other dangers. The State Department also advises "Reconsider Travel" for 23 countries, indicating a more moderate level of risk. So out of the 195 countries in the world it is NOT considered safe to travel to 44 or about 25% of them. 🌎🗺️🚫😞 Before traveling you should always check the travel advisories of the US State Department. Some of these countries will be off limits to us in our lifetime and this is very concerning to Debbie Jamison Horres and I. So go to the countries you really want to visit as soon as you can because, who knows, they may find their way onto this list before you can travel to them.

Source: One Quarter of the World Is Off-Limits

[acerby]

Beware the Pipeline

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

[dragonsarecats38]

“𝒀𝒐𝒖’𝒓𝒆 𝒂 𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒉𝒐 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔𝒏’𝒕 𝒌𝒏𝒐𝒘 𝒉𝒐𝒘 𝒕𝒐 𝒔𝒊𝒕, 𝒉𝒐𝒘 𝒕𝒐 𝒉𝒆𝒆𝒍."

It's one of those scenes I cannot get out of my head, followed up by the consequences of that action, I just had to draw. One comment describe it as an Icarus moment and they are absolutely right! I cannot wait to bring you more! https://archiveofourown.org/works/60985282/chapters/155794648

[rory-flynn]

really slow work on this but I like how the muzzle looks

inspired by WARHOUND

[the-foolish-fool-who-gets-fooled]

Realizing the handler/pilot thing im writing has a pretty much identical plot to those horse girl movies where the protagonist is the only one who can make the "unruly" horse race good, fml ig

[ori-anna-v-58008]

Pilot on Probation

cw: abuse, pain

--

[MOVEMENT PARAMETERS ESTABLISHED.]

Every morning, the same dossier. Your body is viciously still; you haven't been given the go ahead to move. Or to hear. Or to see. But god, you can feel. Laying on the floor straight as a bone all night is fine for a machine; they don't have to feel the soreness in their limbs. Even as more of you seems to become mechanical by the day, they never take away your feeling.

[LIMIT: WITHIN 5 FEET OF HANDLER AT ALL TIMES.]

Shit. Your Handler's on the other side of the station right now. You'd have to be quick. You try to move, get a head start.

[MOVEMENT PERMISSIONS DISABLED.]

[PROBATION PERIOD EXTENDED. CURRENT DURATION: 9 DAYS.]

What? Why? You had hardly done anything at all yesterday - beyond acting like a little maid for your Handler, getting her drinks and lighting her cigarettes, you couldn't think of a single thing that warranted that. You tried to space out of the dossier, think about the comfort of the cockpit, but it felt so far away now. It had been almost two weeks since "The Inciting Incident". You could track the exact amount of time it had been since your probation started and your mech started rejecting you like a body given the wrong blood type. But you didn't like doing it.

[TIME SINCE LAST DEPARTURE: 13 DAYS, 9 HOURS, 5 MINUTES.] [FIELD PARAMETERS ESTABLISHED.] [PERMISSION GRANTED FOR ACCESS TO THE FOLLOWING AREAS: HANDLER'S QUARTERS. HALL A367-B.]

There's supposed to be one more location on the list. Where the fuck is it? She didn't give you permissions for your own goddamn cell?

[ACCESS TO HOLDING FACILITY DENIED. EXECUTING REJECTION PROTOCOL. PLEASE LEAVE THE AREA.] [MOVEMENT PERMISSIONS DISABLED.] [MOVEMENT PERMISSIONS DISABLED.] [MOVEMENT PERMISSIONS DISABLED.] [OUT OF RANGE OF HANDLER. SENDING LOCATION DATA…] [MOVEMENT PERMISSIONS DISABLED.]

All of the metal in your body feels like it's freezing over. You'd say it was like not having a body at all - you could send all the impulses you liked, nothing was moving. But if you didn't have a body, you wouldn't feel the awful feeling of being in a room you weren't allowed to be in.

[MOVEMENT PERMISSIONS DISABLED.]

It's becoming unbearable. The weight of your ratty shirt on your chest alone feels crushing. You don't need to breathe, yet you feel suffocated.

[PLEASE LEAVE THE AREA.] [SPEECH PERMISSIONS DISABLED - DECIBEL COUNT EXCEEDS ALLOWED LEVELS.] [INPUT FROM HANDLER: "It took you too long to find that lighter yesterday. Maybe now you'll learn to move a little faster."]

[MOVEMENT PERMISSIONS ENABLED.]

You scramble out of the room like the terrified little animal you are.

[transfem-tomgirl]

Thanks to inovations in traumakink technology, now even the Handler gets to wear the skin tight latex pilot suit with neural relays.

[err-iz-da-man]

A hound who pilots a rescue mech rather than a combat one. Their handler demands they abort a pilot retrieval mission and the hound ignores their first ever order:

"Abort. I repeat, abort."

-Negative- Her screen read

"What?" Charlotte said as she thought the same thing. He's never disobeyed an order.

Words flashed across her terminal once more

-Asset in sight-

-Retrieval in progress-

Charlotte snatched the mic from her desk and practically snarled the next words:

"What are you DOING, EPSILON?!"

Charlotte's earpiece crackled as Epsilons voice came through, echoing off of the claustrophobic panels of the Øcto-1, a multi-armed medical vehicle designed to withstand the immense pressures of the deep sea.

"Retreiving the asset, they're one of ours"

Epsilon said, a twinge of attitude just under their breath.

"I told you to Abort. I give an order, and you follow, remember?" Charlotte said, reaffirming her status as the handler.

"Yes, howe-" Epsilon was cut off

"STOP." Said Charlotte

"Stabilize the asset, return to base. And then we will deal with this little...insubordination." she finished.

Epsilon grunted in response, and began the journey back with the injured pilot in tow.

-Back at base-

Charlotte was waiting for her hound at the docking bay. She watched, silently, as the pilot was transferred to the med staff. Then, her icy gaze found a home, boring directly into the eyes of her hound. Her hound that had disobeyed a direct order.

Her hound that needed to be reminded who's in charge.

And what better tool for an unruly hound, than a leash. Charlotte produced the leash and waved a finger, signaling epsilon to come closer.

Epsilon followed without question, kneeling down at his handlers' feet, not rising until he feels the leash click into place on his harness.

"My chambers, now." Charlotte pointed down the hall, and epsilon began to follow her lead.

"You're in need of training. And I plan to work with you all night."

[butch-pilot]

Yeah lol I was asking about the dynamic of pilot/handler. I would appreciate your explanation!

ok cool, sorry for misunderstanding! I think the dynamic originated with the game armoured core 6 but I’m not sure, however I do know it was developed in the story Warhound on AO3 (and all associated works) and I think that’s what a lot of it is based on

basically it’s focused on the power imbalance between an imperial handler and the mech pilot they have been tasked with brainwashing and controlling

it's definitely not for everyone, and people can interpret the dynamic in a lot of different ways, but what it comes down to is obeying the pretty voice in your ear that gives you the command to fire at the enemy mech on the battlefield, and hopefully being rewarded for it later

[acerby]

Made a sequal to my shitpost