I’ve never really been the romantic type - I’ve tried dating a few times, but it’s just not for me. I met my first partner at university, in a Principles Of Large-Scale Mechanical Engineering course. I caught her eye while I was being dragged out of the lecture hall for “disruptive arguments about auxiliary motor placement”, “insulting the professor’s family”, and “not being enrolled at this school”. We dated for a month or two, but it didn’t really work out. She wanted someone who’d make clever conversation and go to death metal concerts together, and I wanted someone who’d keep an eye out for guards while I dug through scrapyards gathering parts for my latest project. Most of my other relationships have gone pretty similarly.
Still, every now and then I meet someone who makes me feel a spark. Like that mechanic at my last squad - quiet guy, kinda awkward in that endearing way, and damn did he look good in a tight pair of overalls. We’d pass by in the hallway now and then, but never really said more than a couple words to each other. I spent weeks thinking about the best way to ask him out. How could I break the ice? What could I suggest for a date? How could we keep things quiet enough that I wouldn’t get in even more trouble with the higher-ups, especially after the Satellite Incident?
Eventually, I realized that I was overthinking my approach, trying to plan out and strategize everything. I needed to actually open up, allow a moment of genuine connection with another human being, bare my very heart and soul - I needed to let him work on my mech. I always handled all my maintenance on my own, but that week, I brought my Volantis in for repairs during his shift. We got to talking naturally as he opened it up and started working on it, discussing the model and design, talking through the machine’s quirks and customizations I’d made. Once we started, the conversation just kept on going. It got pretty intense, actually. Like I said, quiet guy normally, but before I knew it, we were having a shouting match about gyroscopic stabilizers that ended with us tearing off each other’s clothes inside the gutted-out cockpit.
I did my best to pass off the hickeys as electrical burns (and to be fair, there were a few of those too), but my squadmates saw right through it. Word got around, and eventually I was sitting in the captain’s office getting chewed out. To my surprise, it wasn’t about workplace relationships, or even about occupational safety violations. After a, um, heated disagreement about the merits of quadratic power-response curves for limb actuators, the mechanic had adjusted the gearing and controls on a couple of my squadmates’ mechs “to demonstrate the soundness of the principle”, causing the mechs’ arms to wrench themselves off during a particularly intense battle. Instead of being rightly accoladed for my intellectual and moral victory, I was officially banned from speaking to anyone in the Maintenance Division.
Obviously, I didn’t see much of the mechanic after that. I heard he got fired a month later, after hijacking a design briefing to go on a tirade about beam rifle recoil and joint locking. Rookie mistake. It’s like I learned back in university: what you really want to do is hand out xeroxed pamphlets after the lecture, opening people’s eyes to the truth and gradually undermining the professor’s intellectual authority. Plus, if you leave your contact info inside, sometimes hot bassists ask you out. Just resist the temptation to take apart an amp - audio engineers are absolute wackos.