“ZERO POINT FUCKING EIGHT?!” Cameron yelled, his eyes wide disbelief.
“Can you stop yelling? Your voice is annoying enough without it being blasted directly into my ears,” Aurora said, voice neutral and nonplussed.
“How can you be so calm about this?!” He shouted again, slightly lowering his volume, but it still earned him a hard smack to the back of his head from the young mechanic.
“I tired to be nice, dumbass now I’m telling you, calm the fuck down,” She growled, blinking slowly before speaking again through clenched teeth, “And I’m calm, because I told you this was bad idea. But instead you got a hard on for a souped up mech with a big sword and flashy paint job and just had to have it! Well congratulations, you have it now. Have fun dodging missile fire, because that shit-ass chassis can barely stop a rail cannon shot! MAYBE!”
“… Can you stop yelling?”
“I will rip those fucking threads out Cam!”
“Alright, enough!” Logan shouted above his bickering employees, grabbing their attention as the both turned to look at him, faces relaying everything they wanted to say without actually having to say it. Cameron’s wide eyes and grinding teeth was his way of asking ‘What do I do?” while Aurora’s raised eyebrow and scrunched up nosed simply said, ‘I told you so.’
Logan sighed heavily, rubbing his temples with his eyes closed as he tried to think. After a few moments he was finally able to think of a plan, turning to look at Cameron.
“So even though you quote unquote ‘need to pilot this thing’, the fact that it lacks armor scares you doesn’t it?”
“Yeah?” Cameron said, making a face as if to say, of course his concerns were validated, “Like yeah I know I can pilot this thing, hell, I can fucking feel it. But I’m not an idiot. Not only will this be my first time piloting a mech using my actual body, but on top of that, it’s a mech that can be called at the very least ‘twitchy’. Like… is it going to actually be possible for me to learn how to pilot it?”
“It better be,” Logan said, not breaking eye contact with the kid, “If I’m buying this fucking thing, I better get some value out of it.”
“So what do you suggest I do then Logan?” Cameron said, throwing his arms up in frustration, “It’s not like there’s some fucking training simulation we can put our mechs in that’ll virtually create an environment for me to learn how to walk in an A.R.M.S. unit!”
Logan flashed a wry smile at this, “There isn’t?”
He turned then and gave Aurora a look, which caused her to drag her hand down her face as she groaned in frustration, marching off away from the two of them while calling over her shoulder, “I’ll go extend our reservation and get Crusader loaded up,”
Cameron watched her go for a moment, looking between Aurora and Logan, before turning back to his mentor, raising an eyebrow and throwing a thumb back to where she was walking, “… What was that all about?”
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Logan simply shrugged, his grin going wider, “Call it… a good guess on your part.”
“Why don’t I like the sound of that?”
“You shouldn’t”
***
A couple of hours later, Cameron found himself in the bowels of Arsius station, standing on top of a platform at the foot of the Headsman, as Aurora attached a litany of cables to what looked to be a cushioned metal recliner.
“So… what is this again?” He asked, watching her work and curse, not bothering to look up and meet his gaze.
“For the last time, it’s a Physilight Projection System.” She said, growling out another expletive before hooking the final cable into the chair before standing up and clapping her hands together in an attempt to wipe away the oil stains.
“You sit in the chair, I through the switch, your body goes unconscious and your actual consciousness is lasered onto a biochip that is then inserted into a physilight proxy emitter. The system then projects that image as a copy of your mech onto that field.” She finished, pointing out to a field around five hundred yards in length and a thousand yards in width.
“It copies everything about your machine and is the closest thing you can get to a real-world scenario. You’ll feel pain, adrenaline, the works. For you, this is how you’re going to learn to pilot. The system has an imprinting affect and, just like the real world, with enough repetition, you’re going to learn how to pilot. Any other stupid questions?”
Cameron opened his mouth, attempting to think of a snappy quip or smartass remark, but words were failing him at this moment, so he just settled for the obvious, “Why didn’t we do this before, when I was learning to pilot a squire?”
She scoffed and rolled her eyes, almost offended at his question, “Because squires are a dime a dozen and this system costs the equivalent of two EarthGov worlds. No one’s gonna waste time putting a squire in here.”
“Oh…” He said, the fact of the obvious causing him to blush sheepishly.
“Yeah,” She said, in agreement with his ignorance, “Now… get in the fucking chair so we can get this shit show underway.”
She motioned for Cameron to sit, which he obeyed, and could barely adjust himself, before Aurora shoved a helmet on his head. It was big and bulky with a long tale snaking down his back, just long enough to pressed into his Synaptic Uplink at the nape of his neck, which Aurora obliged, snapping it into place with a firm ‘click’.
“Alright,” She said, taking a step back to admire her work, before stepping off the platform and making her way to a large level bolted onto a non-descript white pillar. She gripped the handle and turned to him with a raised eyebrow.
“You ready?” She asked.
“Almost he said, anxiety settling into the back of his mind as he looked at her, “Is it going to hurt?”
“God I hope so,” She said, throwing the switch without another word, and sending Cameron’s mind plummeting in an etheral void of nothingness.