Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Cadet with hair standing up on the back of their neck, snarling: “what do you mean I could never hurt anyone?”
"Megan, Megan, you gotta come downstairs — Lifer's starting a fight—"
"For the love of—"
Megan clatters to the downstairs bar, where a brawny cadet is squared up to Lifer, bent down to bawl flecks of spit over her glossy black face. At least this time it's one of theirs, not a fucking fighter pilot on shore leave alongside them or something.
The kid with the minmaxed brawl to braincell ratio is bellowing some slighted-valour bullshit about his perfect conformance to warrior culture, with fewer syllables and more testosterone-as-magic-violence-fuel thinking.
"Baby," Lifer says back. "Kitten. Haven't been made more capable of violence against people, just had your people-recognition detuned. One day you accidentally clock the moving object in your gunsights as human, instant auto-casualty, structurally collapse your unit around you. Time bomb."
Megan inserts herself between them, with elbows, and glowers into Lifer's shiny blank face. "Again?" she says. "The fish is half drunk and still high off the attainable approval of Training Sergeant Replacement Daddy, what's your excuse?"
"Socially dysfunctional robot," Lifer says, so Megan socks her in the shoulder.
"Not a robot!" she says, annoyed. "Three times this shore leave I get dragged to break up your bullshit—"
"So say no," Lifer says.
"Oh." Megan narrows her eyes. "For my benefit. Because not your friend."
("Who do we call if Megan fights Lifer?" Joystick says plaintively, in the background.)
"Not your friend," Lifer says. "No target compunction."
"Oh, yeah," Megan says. "Because you're a robot—" and she socks Lifer's shoulder again— "who hates—" sock— "babies and kittens—"
"Drunk," Lifer says, and turns her back on Megan.
"What, too much target compunction to hurt a drunk girl's feelings—" Megan says, then yells a lot as Joystick and Hopalong pick her up by the arms and carry her outside.