Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who is happy to let you stare
The ballroom falls utterly silent.
These events are no stranger to the scandalous, the outré, the avant-garde, daring experiments of hair, cosmetic, and garment, the constant helical oneupmanship of fashion. Until now, the room had been abuzz with the daring cut and fabric choices of the ever-mysterious Contessa de la Rosa, but now, now—
The Lady Hampton glows vicious, victorious under every eye, stepping into the room withon a half-sized (merely twelve-foot) replica of one of the Empire's new Dreadnaught Marionettes, currently sweeping the Continent and leaving no battlefield uncrushed. She is suspended within its hollow ribcage, just as a soldier would be in his own device, by means of a harness of straps; her feet free of any surface to rest on, the machine's gleaming brass legs mirroring the airy movements of her own within it. Her modesty is somewhat preserved from the form-fitting indignity of the necessarily skin-tight leather piloting suit by the addition of some measure of ruffled skirts, but functionality has necessarily curtailed the full extent of garmentry which propriety would normally demand.
Atop her head, a large, brutishly triangular wig of powdered horsehair mimics the skull-bolted Sense-Augment baffles of the Marionette Cavalry, altogether tall enough to almost brush even this grandest of ballroom's ceilings.
Murmurs of shock, revulsion, intrigue, titillation run around the room. Lady Hampton preens slyly, fluttering a brass-handled fan in front of her face, as if there were any genuine possibility of shyness, or indeed concealment.
"Well," the Contessa de la Rosa says, smiling behind a crystal flute of cordial, blandly unsurprised. "I hear tell from the front that those contraptions take upward of an hour to mount or dismount, with the aid of a batman and two engineers apiece. One can only admire the Lady Hampton's bold confidence, in declaring such an indifference to spending time with any dancing partner!"