Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who wants you to relax. They're just prototyping
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing," Lotus says, with seventeen densely populated workspaces open around them, filled with spreadsheets and simulations and constraint solvers, genetic algorithm testbeds, public records data.
Delphinium Staccato leans on the back of Lotus' chair, dreadlocks falling around them. "That's some weirdly specific nothing," she says. "Like you're trying to find novel solutions that maximise tactical impact while staying exactly inside your public macrofab allowance, use all civilian-printable parts, and have better-than-allowed-for effectiveness against corporate security on a target site which—"
Lotus twitches a command chord, collapsing one of the windows to a colour-coded polka dot hovering over the back of their hand.
"It wouldn't make you feel better, even if it worked," Delphinium says,
"It's just recreational data exploration."
"It's not making you feel better," Delphinium says.
"I'm f—" Lotus starts, and twitches, trailing off into a lip-bitten hiss as Delphinium lightly digs the pad of her thumb into a knot in Lotus' tense shoulders.
"Lotus."
"I'm just wargaming," Lotus says, through their teeth. "I'm going to think about it either way, and doing nothing and just thinking is worse."
"I have tried to do something about the sitting and doing nothing and thinking," Delphinium says. "You want to sit and do nothing and think. Making yourself crazy is an excuse to do something about it instead. And it's just theory is an excuse for planning. And then having a plan is an excuse—"
Lotus collapses all the windows, and scrapes the placeholders off their hand into the chair's cupholder for later. "What, then," they say flatly. "What do you want me to think about instead of thinking about how corporations treat political prisoners—"
"Tonight, personally, I'm making gyoza," Delphinium says, with a hard little edge that says you do not get to be self-righteous, you do not get to act like you're the only one. "You're better at wrapping them. You could come and do something, instead of plotting a futile single-handed war that'll get another of us taken."
"How," Lotus says, and closes their eyes for a second. "How do I — keep on. Cook and eat and sleep and wake up and live and feel everyday pleasures. While they're—there."
"If you insist on being dramatic and grim about it," Delphinium says, and her thumb finds the knot of tension again, working it slightly more gently, "it's self-maintenance. The soft animal of your body needs to be sustained, whether you want to or not, for you to be angry when it's productively angry time."
"I am not," Lotus whispers, "seriously planning a frontal assault on a corpclave."
"Then your brainstorming to unconventionally maximise the impact of a frontal assault," Delphinium whispers back, "can wait until you've helped make dumplings."
"I don't want you to worry that I'll go off half-cocked."
"Oh," Delphinium says, "that's not the worry. I can see you're entirely bent on full-cocked."
"Just prototyping," Lotus says, but it weighs like guilt to say it. "I'm just prototyping."