Skadi smiled her ice cold smile, and brandished a low powered training taser.
“As a line combatant, “Blue Balls” language occasionally backslides to barracks mode, and I have been instructed to administer as gentle reminder when he forgets he is instructing, not simply telling barracks stories”
Sgt Kilgore McSweeny, once “Killer Kilgore” but now forever “Blue Balls McSweeny” eyed Skadi (the White Huntress of Training Command) with ill humor, but resignation. He deserved it, may as well get it over with. Frigging recruits screw up enough daily that if anyone should cut him some slack it would be these green idiots.
“Alright punks” There was a harsh crack and the smell of ozone as a high powered taser blast arced lighting that blasted Kilgore backwards over the lectern. The recruits cried in alarm, but Kilgore dusted himself off with a wary look at the smiling Skadi and rephrased his opening.
“Alright recruits….. here are the basics’ of the cup holder. Cost, sweet frike nothing. I mean honestly, you can roll a drunk in Cogwork port for enough to equip two of these. Use, well that is a funny one, they are rated on average as increasing your precision by 4, and giving you a flat 1% chance of a critical kill.”
“Now, can anyone tell me how they work?”
Dead silence and puzzled looks all around. Kilgore nodded. “Yup, I thought the same. The damned things don’t really do anything, but we do. Pilots boys and girls, we make the world go around, the mechs go bang bang, and we are the makers of sweet shots, and total frack ups. Cup holders don’t fix your mecha, they keep you from stepping on your di… (Skadi tapped the taser on the table at the back of the room, prompting a quick edit of his metaphor) keeping you from screwing up. Screwing up like I did.”
“Clan War XVII is a mother lover. I mean Knockers is losing her mind with the tech crew trying to prep a dozen lineups for every single mecha lance in the Clan, and the pilots are going equally squirlly, as we prep our own mecha, our back up mecha, and six other mecha we haven’t piloted in years, or never piloted at all. I drive a Krampus, I have ganged Betrus Processors to monitor my mecha state, enemy performance and characteristics, monitor my biometrics, and optimize the release of hormones from my implants to battle fatigue and increase focus. Perfectly titrated doses of stimulant and aggression hormones are introduced to keep me in peak performance.” His smile was wistful.
“Then we fought some butt-monkey who defended with Red Ants, and the chief told us to put in our twin cup holders and chassis upgrades, and pick our best weapons for the load out. Now the chassis gear is sweet, really makes the twitchy little mecha dance, and when you level them up enough, the little tin cans look like walking piles of guns. What the hell is the point of putting cup holders in? The damn machine’s too stupid to handle the massive data-flow required for shield analysis, or power flow mapping to detect weaknesses, its AI actually requires keyboard input for questions, and the goofy thing actually needs wipers on the cockpit because it doesn’t have repulsion fields. You get tired, you grab a stim can, you can’t fight any more, you slam a Hatoraide. Don’t get the empties under the foot pedals or you fall on your ass. Who needs frills? You have to open your cockpit to fart in the damned things already, the last thing you need is more gear in there…..so I thought.”
“Anyway, the war’s a real cluster frag, we don’t have one scouting report on the enemy, we have like fifty, because each idiot has a dozen different ways they could be fighting, and we don’t know until the day which one they went with. We spent so much time going over the intel reports and putting our own gear together that we were already functioning on stim packs. I had taped up a hard copy of the lineup the dweeb had we were fighting, but it was getting hard to read. I opened a stim so I could focus, but I got the wrong can, and it was a Hatoraide. That made me mad. Tired as I was I drank half the damned thing before I noticed, and then I just got madder that I screwed up and had no place to put it. I stashed it up on the cockpit windshield above the cockpit and grabbed a stim to wake me up. I was going over the report of our targets weapon specs when the alarm hit, we were in combat!”
I should have been switching from screen to screen, not blocking one half my cockpit with taped hard copy. I should have had my stim secured on my left, Hatoraide on my right as per policy. Instead I caught some trample effect from a bloody (he cursed as Skadi zapped him again for language) Ferrite Storm, when my Hatoraide spilled on my dash, shorting my targeting computer. I went to switch to manual and slapped the override, but did so too hard and spilled the Stim pack into my speakers, so the rest of my comm system sounded like somebody gargling. We won the fight, but I didn’t hit a damned thing, and my mecha required complete nav/comm/targeting tear down even though my armor didn’t breach. There was a cockpit fire and I got a little burned at dash level (he gestured vaguely below his belly button), and the emergency burn cream is made from Smurf berries so turned certain burned parts of me blue-temporarily”
“Having a cup-holder gives you precision 4, 1% critical kill, and the choice of ready stim or Hatoraide. Twin cup-holders give you twice the benefit and more options. No cup-holders gets you nicknamed Blue Balls, and leaves you to confess your screw-ups to a room full of recruit weenies”
Submitted by John T Mainer#28840