Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Demons — Demon who is the power source for your mech's reactor, and must be considered as dangerous as your enemies
The shipyards of the Old Blue stamp out battlecruisers as quick and rough as if they're penny sweets, ugly flying bricks with a crew of a hundred dwarves apiece, bristling with guns. The state Communikat drones endlessly that there is no war, that nothing is happening that warrants the name war, that the word would refer to a clash of equals and the Old Blue is merely performing some provincial attitude adjustments.
Henley watches the shipyard and its assembly-line payload of death, and stews. The Power Factory is the obvious target, of course; the great occult atrocity-hall where they summon gigantic elemental spirits and bind them into the spines of the ships, their endless torment powering each vessel. If they lost control of even one mountain-sized fire-spirit—
But they know that. Security is tight. Security was tight even before the latest round of desperate changes to procedure. Ships have been powered by fire-spirits since the Diaspora, since the ecopocalypse of the Old Blue Planet itself, since dwarvenkind slapped together the synthesis of technologies to survive it and conquered the galaxy. But now, what's happening on the edges of the empire has them scared, and feverish innovation is barging its too-hurried way into the new classes of ship: hulls empowered by colossal electrical elementals, gravity djinns, stranger spirits. War isn't just here; the Old Blue are fighting it, and they're not winning, and they're risking arcane ship disasters on an appalling scale to gain any edge.
Which makes it the ripest time it's even been to breach the Power Factory and watch the shipyard, the weaponsmithy of Cosmoi might, fucking burn.
Henley just has to make it from the fence to the building, into the building, and break the summoning seals; without setting off any alert until a summoning is underway enough that they can't stop, and busting open the wards before they finish.
Henley's weapon is built from smuggled-out and scavenged Cosmoi drop-marine mech parts, its basic load-bearing frame and powerful limbs and pilot-shielding armour capsule. But those are the same machines she'll be facing in number, once she's over the fence; and so she turned, too, to desperate innovation. Ill-advised innovation. She's built a machine the likes of which Should Not Be, for the one suicide mission it needs to last for, and damn the consequences.
Shackled decrussate within the frame, the demon lies relaxed and smiling, despite its captivity. It knows what she's about. It's a succubus, by necessity; any demon's infernal vitality will power the frame, running hot enough to overclock it, but it needs to be a succubus. It needs the sweet, coercive psychic union; the demon made technologically one with the machine, and then using its natural powers to become one with the operator, an arcane unity of pilot and device offering unparalleled power and precision, speed and reflexes, superior in every way to the mere lever-pulling machine-operators of the Cosmoi marines. Save, of course, that she's going to die, and then probably have her soul dragged howling into the nether afterlives to suffer for her angry anarchist hubris.
Henley broods once more over the table-sized shipyard map, the guard routes pencilled onto it, their times and routines and numbers and ordnance. The summoning schedule. She knows it all by heart. She's just waiting, in the rusting warehouse outside the shipyard walls, for the factory whistle.
"Come in here with me and keep warm while we wait," the succubus purrs behind her, inside the unnaturally warm machine, while Henley's breath steams in the dusky autumn air. "Come on. Get in." Strap into the skeleton of the pilot's seat, with its tight new seatbelt to keep Henley pressed back against the demon's naked flesh, for the sake of optimum psychic connectivity. She will have to pilot shirtless; until the time comes, she is obstinately dressed in four layers of clothes. Because it's cold, of course; no other reason. It's cold.
"Come on, Henley," the demon wheedles, grinning all over its stupid face. "Get in the robot."