Transforming mechs are all the rage these days. Personally, I’ve never seen the point - why have one mech that does two things badly, when you could have three mechs that do three things badly? I don’t need to waste any time on nonsense like compactible mechanisms, lightweight alloys, or regulating heat output to keep all those scrunched-together subsystems from frying each other. In fact, being able to swap into a completely different mech, ideally with completely different insignia and ownership records, can be life-saving after a mission runs a little too hot.
But anyway, transforming mechs. Everybody wants one, and manufacturers can get away with charging twice as high of a markup. It’s an absolute racket, and I want in. And really, at the end of the day, a transforming mech is just a mech where some of the parts shift around or fall off. When you look at it that way, I’ve built dozens of transforming mechs already. That Carrigan-Zanjani Leap unit I welded fighter-jet wings onto to boost its airtime? Sure, the wings sheared off after a couple consecutive jumps, but that’s just the Safetyswitch Nighthawk converting from Aerial Mode to Terrain Mode. The Parallax Swing that kept shredding open its own chassis after I reinforced and overclocked the muscle actuators? That’s the Safetyswitch Echidna activating its Razor Spines. All I had to do was file off the serial numbers and slap on new coats of shiny red paint, and I had self-styled “ace pilots” getting in fistfights outside my Atelier. (Pro tip, put a sign on your scrap hangar that says “Atelier”, and you can instantly get away with charging double for everything.)
Of course, all good things must come to an end, and after a few lucrative sales, the Man came to shut me down. The horde of military police, corporate lawyers, and vehicular safety inspectors pounding on my door were utterly unswayed by my appeals to the importance of supporting small local businesses, and kept throwing around hurtful words like “fraud” and “criminal negligence”. Luckily, I had one last trick up my sleeve: my Atelier could transform too. Specifically, it transformed into the midsize interstellar ship I’d blown half of my earnings on, which crashed out through the roof and rocketed away to an undisclosed location. This isn’t even its final form - it can do a second transformation if needed, where I toss the vehicle identity transponder out the airlock, and install the replacement transponder I got for cheap from my pal Skate at the DSV. That’s just the kind of innovative problem-solving we practice every day here at Atelier Safetyswitch.