[1-200] THE MECH TOUCH

Chapter 14: Fiddling

"Do you remember a life before the System gifted you to me?"

The gem cat meowed with a puzzled tone as he explored the nearby bushes.

"Don't know, huh?" Ves said as he stretched his arms and raised his head to look at the wispy colorful sky. "This is my home planet. I lived her for almost my entire life. The only time I left was when I went to college in the capital."

The planet Rittersberg seated the government of the Bright Republic. They heavily controlled the climate in order to make it optimal for human to live there. Sprawling cities, fancy villas and vast stretches of Terran and indigenous wildlife turned it into a paradise, an expensive one, but idyllic nonetheless.

Still, Ves vastly preferred the rugged and untamed lands of Cloudy Curtain. The terraforming corporations who transformed the ball of rock into a live-sustaining planet only stuck around to do the bare minimum. They left with their fat paychecks even as incongruities popped up. The local air smelled different than the standard Terran norm. The summers never lasted long and it was cloudy pretty much every day.

This was his home. He was an inhabitant of Cloudy Curtain first, and a citizen of the Bright Republic next. Few woes occurring in the rest of the galaxy concerned him here on this quiet planet. This corner of the galaxy was on the outskirts of civilized territory. It held few stars, not much exotic resources and only a few small alien polities shared the Bright Republic's rimward borders.

Mech battles only happened occasionally. Besides the wars between the Republic and the aggressive Vesia Kingdom, the most the Mech Corps had to handle were lone criminals and small bandit groups too weak to prey in the bigger neighborhoods.

This led to a life of peace and stability, an enviable state of affairs for some people. His father purposely left the livelier planets of Rittersberg and Bentheim in order to make his home in snoozy Cloudy Curtain. When Ves grew up on this planet, he felt no different from his classmates and other people around him. Only when he studied at Rittersberg did he realize that the rest of the galaxy moved in different speeds.

It both scared and excited him.

Eventually, Ves firmly entered this complicated, murky world in order to fulfill his dream to become a mech designer. Just this decision alone brought him into contact with the government, trade associations, suppliers and more. He felt connected to the galaxy, as if anything he did affected the rest of human civilization. Only a little, but it felt as if his existence mattered.

"Hm, what kind of crap am I thinking? I should go back to work." Ves decided, and led Lucky back to the workshop.

In the meantime, he made a call to Melinda.

"Hi cousin."

"Hey Ves, I was about to mail you back this weekend."

"So do you have any results you can share with me?"

Melinda sent a few documents over the interplanetary comm. "The Caesar Augustus is a rare beast, so the Mech Corps never officially purchased any of its models. However, it did come into contact with a few models piloted by pirates fleeing the authorities of the bigger empires. They even captured one intact, more or less."

"Did they do anything with it?"

"The Mech Corps may be penny pinchers sometimes, but they won't throw away a functional mech. An ace pilot took it over and piloted it for a few years before it got embroiled in a border skirmish with the Vesians. It lost its left leg and a chunk of its waist. When it came back to the hangar, the Corps decided it was more trouble than it was worse trying to fix it up again, so they sold the rest for scrap."