Lodestone TLR-99

"I lost you today."

Being ordered to report anywhere wasn't unusual for Mehr, let alone urgently. The Colonel seemed pretty insistent, more than was usual even for him. "Tech Sergeant Sherazi," he'd said, "get your ass to the repair bay. Double time. No, triple time!" Mehr hadn't even thought about how strange it was to be ordered to the repair bay, let alone that "triple time" wasn't really a thing. Was he upset about something?

No, Mehr realized as soon as the door opened. The Colonel wasn't the one who was really upset.

That would have been the short, tanned, dirty-blonde figure standing on the third-tier balcony, with her hands folded behind her back, opposite what could be generously described as a wreck.

Mehr plotted a course through the serpentine catwalks and staircases and marched, doing her best not to get turned around somewhere, like she had the last couple of times. No such issues today, at least, with Kath as her (albeit dimmer than usual) homing beacon. She stopped, about ten feet away from her co-pilot - but Kath had already noticed.

She didn't even turn to look, but Kath clearly knew who was there. "I need time."

"Time for what?"

"Grief," was all she said.

"I'm still here, you know. What happened today... reminds us why we do what we do, the way we do."

"Shut up." Kath's eyes squinted a bit, her brow furrowing in a way that really didn't suit her. "I lost you today."

"But I'm--"

"I don't care if you're still alive. Even if you weren't really out there with me, losing you out there still hurt." Kath looked at the damage to her Lodestone. The ablative plating was charred but largely intact. What was not intact, in any form, was the head assembly, where all the remote cameras and virtual control systems were located. Lodestone stood there, trussed in catwalks and lift cables, decapitated. A part of the cockpit in the torso was exposed by the sizeable hole left above it, where the head had been ripped off by Red Baron's flying fist.

Mehr took a step forward. It felt like she was wading through a swamp of guilt, through waves of someone else's regrets and insecurities. Like all it'd take was one misstep, and she'd be knocked off her feet and shoved back ashore.

"Maybe you don't fully appreciate what happened, because you don't fear what happens when you die."

"That's not true," Mehr protested.

"All it took was one bad hit. A few grenades, a burst of flame? I can take that. We can take that. But because I let that one punch get around me...there you went."

Mehr couldn't forget that moment. For all she was doing in keeping the waves of aerial attack weapons at bay with the Lodestone's machine gun turrets, the massive red metal fist zooming towards her face had caught her off guard. She remembered screaming. Maybe Kath had even heard a small portion of said scream before she'd been severed from the Lodestone's mechakinetic spine. Mehr's reflex had been to raise her own arms, inside her virtual cockpit. She'd forgotten where she was. She was not out there, in the sands outside the city of Mimisbrunnr. And while she could still observe the fight, there was no longer anything she could do to influence it. Maybe this was what it was like to die. Maybe Kath was right to grieve.

These were feelings Mehr chose not to air today. Her face stuck in a solemn expression of no expression at all. She leaned on the railing now, too, and observed what was, effectively, her own second mortality.

When she next turned to look at Kath, she was now sitting down on the catwalk, letting her legs dangle through the guard railing. "Hey..." she said quietly, straight ahead. "Maybe don't go back right away."

There was no such plan in Mehr's agenda right now. She just stared at the ruined Lodestone as the fifteen or so repair techs stood around it, taking notes, riding lifts up and down, bolting and unbolting armor panels, cutting away damaged joints and parts. It was like watching a surgery in progress. Even knowing that these people were professionals, and that they knew more about how the Lodestone worked than even she did, she still wondered if the poor thing would be okay.

Mehr sat down, herself, and dangled her own legs off the catwalk.

"Next time, Mehr," Kath began. "Next time I'm not gonna fail you the way I did today."

"You take care of your own self. You're the one that can actually die out there."