Soulslike Boss Fight Against A Dude With A Dynastic Title Of Some Sort, Like "Lord Of The Onyx Throne"

Someone told me to look up this thing called yaoi. Thing is, they have tricked me into searching up things I would rather not have seen before, so I’m just a bit nervous.

In other words, to anybody who knows what yaoi is: how badly do I not want to see it?

Ok so we've talked about mech dysphoria and dysmorphia before yeah? Your body doesn't feel the same when you climb out of a mech, doesn't feel 'right' anymore.

Too few limbs, not enough sensors, everything feels too big, now that you're not? There's no more combat stims and pleasure chemicals either, you're down to just your stock standard dopamine, which you have a clinical deficiency of now, btw. You struggle to pick objects up, your hands an unfamiliar shape, with not enough strength. You struggle to get out of bed sometimes because you can't tell what proportions things should be anymore?

Yeah, all that has been discussed to death.

What about communication?

What about pilots who, just, can't talk outside of their mech? Become socially inept without all the assistant systems they plug themselves into within the cockpit?

Think about it, mech combat becomes very disorganised very fast if it's allowed to. We are talking clashes of potentially dozens of war machines, the size of buildings, with enough guns to level cities. Orders need to be direct, easily understandable, followed immediately, actually projected onto the pilot's vision.

Every order, every report, every sentence, is punctuated by hundreds of layers of feedback. Tactical simulations and overlays, attachments for battlefield plans, every order having many implied conditions transmitted to the pilot through code and dictionary references to make sure a pilot cannot POSSIBLY misinterpret it in the few seconds before the command should be executed. On top of that, each order can also be wired to project a different cocktail of stim/pleasure chems/whatever have you, ensuring a pilot knows exactly what to feel about the order, establishing the priority of it through the pilots own brain chemistry.

And the same can be true about communications between squad mates! So much of it would be sending those same simulations around as sit reps, or enormous data packets containing not just the words the pilot is trying to say, but also links to relevant information and mountains of meta data, establishing tone, intention, context. Within the cockpit, a portion of the onboard AI is delegated to parsing this metadata, projecting it into the pilots consciousness, speeding up the process of understanding these mountains of digital documents to mere moments.

Now put a person used to that in a social setting. Where they are not made instantly aware of what someone is talking about or referring to. Where they cannot just query an AI and receive every piece of relevant info at once. Where they have to understand the subtext of what that person is saying without any metadata to indicate sarcasm, annoyance, disinterest. Where they are unable to understand the many nuances of communication and body language and expression without the helpful hand of their mech's processors. Hell, where they don't know how hearing certain things should make them feel without the presence of the chemicals to guide their response. Imagine them seeming lost outside of their mech, unable to talk or connect anymore, the social, human part of their brain having atrophied from disuse much like their neurotransmitter production. Imagine them scurrying back to the safety of their mech where, in the digitally overlaid world, everything is so much clearer and understandable and-

HAS THIS BECOME AN AUTISM METAPHOR???

no i don't want you to redirect me to your app i want to look at recipe

mech pilot who got separated from their mecha when their civilisation was domestication and their military got dissolved. despite all attempts to help them, they still have persistent phantom sensation from the limbs that they used to have but no longer do; constantly missing the feeling of a rifle in hands that don't feel the right size, feeling blind and deaf without all of the enhanced feedback from sensors capable of a hundred times greater acuity than their own body

eventually, however, one particular affini reads their medical file and comes up with an idea. she files a notice of intent on the pilot, then swiftly heads over to their hab and whisks them away the next morning. they don't even bother resisting; having long since given up hope that things will get better, and unable to imagine any way they could get worse

the affini takes them home and lays them down on a surgery table, promising them that soon, everything is going to feel right again. they expect nothing, presuming her to be lying to them, but they feel a great weight behind their eyes, and a moment later, they fall closed.

it feels like they've only blinked, but when they reopen them, everything is different. every sense that was missing is suddenly there again. they look down at their arms to find them just the right size; their body no longer one of flesh, but of gleaming white metal plates, pulsating with thin green lines of a material they don't recognise. it takes them a moment to realise what it is: under their metal skin are muscles and tendons made out of vines, their former optical sensors replaced with sight blossoms, and their rifle woven back together from a mixture of bark, chambered with rounds made of amber

most of all, they are no longer alone. they could feel their mech before, but it's different this time; as if the sensation surrounding them isn't quite their own, but a body that is both theirs and not. a faint, slow pulsing that shifts in time with every movement, guiding them to know exactly where to look, and what to do. moments later, they hear a voice whispering- not into their ear, but directly into their mind, just like their onboard AI used to:

"Good morning, my precious little Pilot."

[smug grin, putting my paws on my hips] Ok AskJeeves. If you claim to know so much then tell me this. Whats wrong with me,

TODAY'S TOP HEADLINE:

News Network 'Times New Union' Isn't Dead, Actually

In unrelated news, TNU has recently expressed thanks to its local necromancer Lich pilot.

who keeps giving her these things

fire emblem mod that changes the player phase animation to say “FUCK AROUND” and the enemy phase one to say “FIND OUT”. is this anything

yall im at the arcadecommons workshop im so fucking excited im vibrating