I did however, through a combination of friends in high places and favors owed by various gangsters manage to get my hands on an AI simulacrum of Evil Santa and was sitting in my workshop arguing with it. Or rather, it was arguing with me, belittling my attempts to improve his legacy, the Jottun mecha. I think part of it was that Evil Santa felt obsolete since he was... or at least the original was the result of a person having undergone cybernetic grafting surgically to integrate himself with Forerunner technology... whereas I had gone a newer and more organic route using biological vectors to grow forerunner tissue replacing my human skin.
The Holographic projection of the not-so-jolly old elf nitpicked his way through my equipment choices, saying given the opportunity he would have gone with a different arrangement. Asked himself aloud rhetorically what did I think I knew about how ice weapons worked. I chose to ignore this avatar however and continue tinkering in the hangar. Allowing it to run in the background and look at but not edit my load-out choices. It did pause its criticisms briefly as it got to the cockpit though... and seemed approving of my decision to use a modified version of the Laverty Wildcard. The Laverty Wildcard is a method of linking several stacked Betrus Processors in series so that they can work together to handle battlefield variables interdependently and was first popularized by Death's Joker himself in his Dilophos. See, for this upcoming Faction War my clan has allied itself with the AFF, and they were generous enough to loan me some of their tactical data records to work with. However, I was adapting the wildcard to an ice machine. Since the Jottun is already fairly fast for a mecha its size I decided I would not be utilizing a scoot and shoot build... At this the Little pocket boss AI resumed its picking apart my (as far as it saw) lack of reasoning. I set down my stylus and asked it if it was quite finished yet.
"Hohoho... you think you're ready to use a Jottun? It'll make your blood run cold. Fortunately when I was a cyborg I had my blood replaced with antifreeze."
"Just shut up and watch" I told it, coldly but somewhat amused, as I ran a tactical simulation for it to see. A Max Torque engine, Dark Matter Converter and two Indefinite Singularities combined with Advanced Alloys for the Chassis gives..."Holy cow, +39?!"
"Exactly Nick..." I replied under my breath. "Not done yet though, watch this"
The battery of White Knight ice blasters and three Crystallions provided suppressive fire slowing down my simulated opponent icing him up then two Frost Bosses and a Freezer Burn pulled off a pretty cool devastating finisher where the arms of my Jottun formed then stabbed the opposing mecha through with brinicles.
"Not bad for a neophyte." The AI of Evil Santa admitted in spite of his disposition. Then he regained composure and tried to sweep it under the rug. "Er, I mean, That's not a big deal! You think you're bad?! I'm the reason whole clans came to dread Christmas!" I smiled, letting the pocket boss keep ranting on my table as I continued to tinker with my Jottun Brumal through the night.
Submitted by Mycobacter#712744