Chapter Text
The chief’s office is a deceptively orderly room. At first, most people see only a jumbled mess of papers, devices and cabinets, but after a year under her command you’ve started to notice some patterns in the chaos.
She keeps important documents close to her computer monitor and away from her coffee, using any discarded ones, scraps or ones she deems “dumb and annoying” as coasters to protect the mahogany wood below. On the desk, there are several carefully stacked piles for documents and forms in various stages of completion and priority. Each document in the stack is rotated so that all the titles are readable from her chair, and no pile ever exceeds the height of her mug. From a pile about two-thirds from her mug to her computer monitor, she pulls the complete repair report for PL-2832, looking it over carefully. After some consideration and a sip from the coffee mug currently resting on some work experience evaluation form, she begins, standing up and slowly making her way towards you for, you suppose, dramatic effect.
“Great job on these upgrades, Sinclair. I’m honestly surprised such an involved retrofit was even possible with the supplies I was able to provide, but then again,”
She gives you a supportive whack on the shoulder, nearly sending you airborne.
“I really should be used to that feeling by now, with you around. The Militia could really use more mechanics like you.”
Her office chair squeaks ever so slightly as she drops herself back into its comfort.
“That being said, Maddock – PL-2832’s pilot – should be out of the infirmary and ready for duty tomorrow morning. Make sure it’s ready, too.”
“Yes, sir.”
With that, she gestures you out of her office. On the threshold, however, your name is called once more.
“Oh, and… Sinclair?” she says, like a lecturer reminding her students about an upcoming exam, “remember, they’re just tools.”
You nod, and definitively leave the office behind for the day.
It’s 21:05 local time, and the extent of your lunch was a banana you used while calibrating the pink vanguard’s feet. Technically, according to protocol, you’re supposed to call them pedes.
“Potato Tomato?”
“Yup.”
“A potato tomato sandwich?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Truly.”
“Hm. I’ve never tried one.”
“You’ve been here for a full month, and you haven’t even tried all the sandwich options the cafetaria has to offer?”
“I’m just fine with my egg salad and tuna sandwich.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“Look, if I let you enjoy yours, will you let me enjoy mine?”
You find this back-and-forth between the Chief and a rookie mechanic rather enjoyable to listen to. This one is probably already considering resigning, and the Chief is desperately trying to find some kind of grasp on him – something to convince him to stay. He strikes you as an uncompromising realist, perhaps even a bit cynical. When you’d first given him, as was tradition, a titan to repair – an old sword-wielding Ronin chassis – he had immediately caught on to the infeasibility of the task. Most surprisingly, though, he hadn’t refused the job outright, instead formulating an exact plan of action to get the titan back in working order as well as estimates for the time and resources needed. It’s safe to say, though, that there was tangible disappointment in the lounge when he’d returned from an engineering job with a god-damned pile of paperwork.
There isn’t much you’ve learned about the rookie. He’s reserved, but not timid by any stretch of the imagination. He’ll open his mouth any time he feels like it and even, occasionally, says something helpful when he does. Inexperienced as he is with working on sentient machines, he picked up on the procedures quicker than anyone else before him and, despite his apparent love for paperwork, knows when to bend the rules a little.
The chief has been telling the story of her first foray into the battlefield as a recovery hand. Her demeanour has shifted slightly as she does so, holding her hands closer to her waist than usual, less emotion seeping through the cracks. It wasn’t a particularly gnarly battle, in fact it was rather tame compared to most, from the other accounts you’d heard.
Even so, it takes a lot of corpses to forget the first time you’ve seen one.
At least, that’s what you’ve heard people say.
You don’t envy the Pilots, not for their heroic endeavours into gun-hell and not for the loss they have to contend with so often. It’s easy enough to distance yourself from the people in the machines when you only ever see the machines. It’s easy enough to pretend that the red stains on the exterior and interior are simply motor oil.
“So, Sinclair. Have you ever been?”
The attention of the table has turned to you and the rookie’s inquiry caught you quite severely off-guard.
“Have I ever been where?” you ask.
“To the battlefield.”
You can’t quite place the expression on the chief’s face. She looks like she thinks she knows more about you than you think she really does, so you raise a dismissive eyebrow at her before quickly answering the question.
“No. Never.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Didn’t feel like going.”
You sneak in a large swig of your tea to prevent any further inquiry. The chief jumps to the rescue:
“Mechanic Sinclair here had already displayed quite enough excellence in the hazing ritual to be exempt from mandatory recovery duty.”
“Really? Were you really that impressive?”
The rookie’s face is filled with poorly hidden disbelief and eager curiosity, begging for some clarification.
“Certainly, let me tell you-”
The chief begins telling a story you should be telling, so you unceremoniously interrupt her.
“Well how about I tell you instead.”
“Rude.”
“ It was my first day on duty. At the time, we were landed on an earth-like planet not far from here, terribly rainy weather it had. It was a calm day, nothing exciting but the occasional flash and roll of thunder. So I lean back, read up on some protocol and what do you know? Five hours into my first ever shift as a mechanic, this Northstar stumbles into the hangar bay, truly a sight capable of blinding the blind all over again. The canopy had nearly come off, one of its arms was dangling by its side and from the way she was moving I could tell that her entire sensor-grid had gone offline. Turns out an ancient pine got struck by lightning and fell right onto the poor Titan. The pilot got out unharmed, but the titan was certainly not. And, you guessed it, I was tasked with fixing it, with not a MRVN in sight.
So, without hesitation I get to work.”
The chief interjects: “As this was happening, we were in the scrapheap looking for a nice dummy titan to give to Sinclair, with not a clue of what was happening upstairs.”
She’s immediately back to her usual, very slightly theatrical self as she turns to you.
“When we reached the hangar and saw the state of that thing, most of us started betting. ‘That rookie won’t last an hour with a task like that,’ ‘I’ll give that Sinclair two hours tops.’ I don’t laugh often but I certainly did then.”
“And right you were to do so,” you say, taking back control of the narrative.
“We had spare canopies lying around, and it turns out the sensor grid was easy enough to fix as well, since I only had to flip the wiring on the engaging circuits and force a half-system reset. Once all that was online I could finally begin assessing the damage properly.”
The rookie’s jaw is open and you can’t quite tell whether it’s because of the sandwich he’s holding still, about to bite, or because you said something strange.
“Basically every single servo in that titan was hanging on by a thread. Now that sounds bad – and it is – but that also meant that I didn’t have to test any of them and could simply replace them all from top to bottom.”
“That in and of itself already took eighteen hours, and by that time some of us were growing genuinely concerned for your well-being. Six hours later, you were barely standing on your own feet, even using the titan’s arms to move around instead of using the ladders.
Once you started tripping, we ran in to rescue you and told you to call it a day – you’d already lost most of our engineers here quite a bit of cash.”
The chief laughs at the memory of her colleagues’ fiscal losses, and the rookie looks at you with more questions than answers in his eyes.
Drawing the story to a close, you say: “And I haven’t slept as comfortably since.”
“You’ve got to show me how to do that.”
“How to do what?”
“That half-reverse power cycle. I thought it might be possible in theory but I didn’t know anyone could actually do it?”
Lighting up at the rookie’s infectious enthusiasm, you can’t help but agree.
“Sure. I’ll show you when I have time. You know where I work!”
The rookie has finished his lunch by now and gets up, one could say a bit more energetic than before.
After he’s completely out of sight, the chief turns to you and commends your efforts for the greater good.
“I think that might just have won him over, nicely done! Though, I couldn’t help but notice you omitted the part where you set the titan’s leg on fire...”
You give her the most piercing death-stare you can muster. “I thought it was accurate enough. I told all of the important parts, at least.”