#cohost

“No, she shouldn’t! Don’t listen to her, Tomoe.”

“C’mon Tomoe, you gotta shoot your shot!”

“You really think I should, Touka?”

“Touka no! What would Tomoe even say to her? ‘Hi, I’m the magical girl who held you hostage the other day, wanna get coffee?’”

“I’m just saying, she looked like she was kinda into it!”

“WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK, pyon?!”

“Damn, I didn’t know mascots could swear.”

“Shut the fuck up, pyon! You tell me you’re not convening this weekend, Maki leaves me at home to ‘run some errands’, and the next thing I know, every channel is playing live footage of you all BLOWING UP A FUCKING OFFICE TOWER, pyon?! The Miracle Bunny Pretty Defenders are supposed to protect the world in the name of love and justice, not destroy it, pyon!”

“Sorabank have spent half a century using their hoarded wealth to exploit workers and pollute the planet, I’d say blowing up their HQ is absolutely in line with our mission.”

“Plus we used the massive magical power spike to one-shot The Night Unending on our way home, you should be over the moon!”

“Also, we’re the Miracle Bunny Liberation Front now. It’s like you didn’t even watch the video we released, sheesh.”

“What the fuck does that even mean, pyon?! If you’re going to use your Miracle Crystals to murder people, then I need to take them back for the good of the world, pyon!”

“We all know you’re bullshitting, Pyonpii. Remember when Tomoe was in tears, begging you to let her quit? And you helpfully explained how our Miracle Crystals are permanently bound to our spirits, and can never be given up or taken away? Which, by the way, was conveniently absent from your whole pitch when you were handing these out in the first place…”

“Anyway, we’re keeping civilian casualties to a minimum! We went through firing warning shots to get everyone out of the building before we set off the thermite!”

“Look, I’m sorry, but the skimpy outfits are absolutely vital, pyon! Magical power is fundamentally derived from the attention and strong emotions of other people, right? When you’re up against small-fry demons, you can get by with just a group of friends who care and believe in you, but we’re in the big leagues here, pyon! If you girls want to stand a chance against The Night Unending, widespread parasocial attachment rooted in sex appeal is your only option, pyon!”

“What about Sparkling Duet Revolution Hearts? They take down powerful demons all the time, without a single panty flash!”

“Those two are top idols, pyon! I’ve heard you singing karaoke, none of you should be quitting your day jobs, pyon.”

“… So basically, we need as many people as possible to be thinking about us and having strong feelings about us, right?”

“That’s right, pyon!”

“Cool. Hey girls, who wants to start a terrorist group?”

Now sing, o Muse, of golden-braided Yumika, bold vanquisher of Yomi’s vast and ravening hordes, defender of this world with scepter and with bow, whose swift-flown shafts of sacred light rebuke the dark. Though long beset by countless trials of love and war, fair Yumika, with friendship as her guiding star, returned to gird again for battle with her foes.

“I think there’s something wrong with my narration, Mai”, the warrior of light confided in her friend. “It didn’t used to be in meter, did it?”

“No,” responded Mai, of crimson flaming scimitar. “I’m hearing it as well. It’s weirdly catchy, too.”

“Remember that strange omen we received last week?” asked emerald-skirted Yuki, quick of word and wit. “We were all warned that Eris would arrive quite soon, and try to throw the mortal world in disarray. So maybe she’s to blame.”

“I fucking hate this shit,” moaned sullen-tempered Tokiko of raven garb. “Why can’t we ever fight a normal villain, huh?”

I tried this for a while, the chemistry’s pretty straightforward, but it ended up being more trouble than it was worth. In order to get an optimal energy yield, without a couple years of lead time or buying the kind of equipment that gets the serious government investigators asking questions, your only real option is the CALAx Process. I thought the warning signs I put up were extremely clear, but some schmuck opened the door and exposed my batch to outside light during the CLE_vi subcritical titration phase, and it took a couple weeks before it was even deemed safe enough for Facilities to go in and start cleaning up the damage. Everyone kept saying it was my fault for setting up volatile chemical reactions in the squad kitchen, but I needed a space with several burners and good ventilation, and there were other perfectly usable kitchens right there in the adjacent wings! How was I supposed to know Kitchen 4 was the only one that had Colander’s favorite snacks?

Anyway, after that, I went back to my usual strategy of carrying a couple empty fuel drums and a siphon on missions. All in all, it’s just simpler, and the cost-performance can’t be beat.

There are a lot of advantages to customizing your mech. You can mix and match components to your exact specifications, and build a machine that’s perfectly suited for the way you like to operate! You can express yourself through your vehicle’s design, and show off your individuality and creativity! You can remove those annoying legally-mandated power throughput limiters on your beam weapons, and imagine the looks on enemy pilots’ faces when you blast right through the 6-foot-thick concrete wall they thought they were taking cover behind! (Just slap on a couple more heatsinks, it’ll be fine, all these off-the-shelf units are overdesigned anyways.)

The biggest disadvantage to customizing your mech is that sooner or later, some dumbass kid is gonna decide you’re their Fated Rival or some crap like that. They recognize your mech after a couple consecutive battles, start going out of their way to pick fights with you, shout angsty bullshit over short-range comms and expect you to respond with something dramatic - it’s a pain in the ass, and the little bastards are almost impossible to shake off.

I used to think this sort of thing was only a problem for the kinds of smug assholes who give themselves stupid nicknames and pilot flashy overpriced mechs, painted Shoot-Me-First Red and freshly polished before and after every mission. My current custom model is scrapped together from a rusted-out Octavo, armor plating I tore off a New Dawn Bishop when nobody was paying attention, and a Heracles servo array with the input cables awkwardly soldered to connect to a Blackstone tritium power converter. Most people mistake it for an abandoned wreck, right up until it’s taking them down with a jet-boosted leg sweep. And yet, somehow I ran into the one dumbass melodramatic enough and desperate enough to want an epic confrontation with me and my custom-built shitbox.

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?

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.

A few years ago, in some sort of misguided effort to promote “squad cohesion”, the higher-ups announced that we’d all be given the same timeslot of maintenance bay access to fix up our mechs after missions. Working side by side as a team, sharing technical know-how, finishing up and hitting the showers together to wash off the sweat and grease - sounds great in theory, I guess.

In reality, before we even made it through the maintenance bay door, squad cohesion was plummeting faster than a Schiaparelli Peregrin with misaligned antigravs. Everyone looked at me funny when I started handing out the radiation dosimeter badges, so I explained the process of disconnecting and inverting an overcharged N2 core, and how the standard 30-minute safety window is drastically reduced once the operating lifetime passes 10000 hours. N2 cores are technically illegal for sale or purchase in the Earth Sphere, so I had to “salvage” mine off a 0063 Morningstar destroyed in a joint operation with a Venusian squad, and I don’t know how many hours it had on it when I got it.