When you’re lying in a hospital bed, you have a lot of time to reflect on your mistakes. Or on other people’s mistakes. In my case, I was reflecting on the mistakes of the dipshit design engineer at Red Planet Mechtronics who decided it was a good idea to put a high-current flash capacitor right next to one of the screws holding the main laser amplifier assembly in place inside the RPM 3730-LL’s arm module.
As we all know, one of the best parts of going out on a sortie is getting to “salvage” interesting components from downed enemy mechs after the fight. And from downed allied mechs. And from still-functioning allied mechs while the pilots take smoke breaks. “Oh, you’re missing your multifrequency blade antenna? Damn, must’ve gotten knocked off during the fight.” It’s surprisingly easy to pull off, as long as we’re not teamed up with the same squad for too many joint missions in a row.
Thing is, disassembling a mech can be difficult and even dangerous if you don’t know your way around its insides, especially if you’re rushing to finish up before the pilot gets back from the bathroom. I’ve memorized the schematics for a lot of the more common models out there, and I usually have a pretty good intuition for how mechs are put together regardless. But it’s precisely the rare discontinued niche models that are the most exciting to dig into, and that give me the most interesting hauls – assuming, that is, that I don’t get electrocuted because some schmuck couldn’t be bothered to add warning labels to the silkscreen. Not again, I decided. From now on, I was going to bring my complete collection of schematics and service manuals with me on every mission.
I’ve spent years amassing manuals for every mechsuit model out there, leaving a long trail of outbid military nerds and angry librarians in my wake. Thing is, a lot of the more rare and interesting ones are only on paper, and I am no longer allowed to use the document scanner on base. My Volantis’ expanded cargo area absolutely had space for my full library, but as soon as anyone else saw it, a lot of my usual excuses would suddenly sound way less convincing.
Then, it hit me: all I needed was some camouflage. I went through abandoned break rooms, open lockers, and retail kiosks with easily-distracted shopkeepers, grabbing every single porno mag I could find. Carefully remove the covers, attach them to the schematics, and instantly my collection looked much less incriminating. Anyone who saw it could come to their own conclusions, and nobody would ask any followup questions.
Nobody, that is, except for Melloc Prangle from Squad 5. As word quietly got around about my incredibly wide-ranging porn stash, Melloc, delighted to have discovered a fellow aficionado of tentacle cumflation yuri, started asking if he could borrow some of my library. If I blew him off altogether, he might start trying to get the higher-ups on my case, and the whole ruse could fall apart. I did my best to stall and dodge for as long as I could, trying not to make waves or attract suspicion, but I’d have to lend him something sooner or later.
Luckily, I managed to come up with a solution. I took the discarded insides of Pseudopods Illustrated Monthly #04, and sloppily attached the discarded cover of a 0078 Morningstar Redsky service manual. For camouflage, wink wink. My story was intact, and Melloc was thrilled. I did have to smile and nod enthusiastically through a lot of conversations about the stylistic choices of x-ray shots, but at the end of the day, I think we’re all perverts in our own way, so we might as well help each other out. For example, Melloc was grateful enough that I even got him to run interference during my “salvage operations” now and then. What else are friends for?