As usual, Hangar 13 was busy with work. Grease monkeys, grease apes and all kinds of grease primates were walking, driving or running in all directions, each singularly focused on their duties, keeping up with the maintenance, repair or straight up re building of the REM collection belonging to the real Lt.Cuddles, whoever that may be.

Ever since the Hypatian blockade first started every deployment by the Peacemaker corps had always included a peacemaker Remote for some reason, possibly marketing, and those bots never outlived second turn.

If that wasn’t enough, “the real Lt.Cuddles” had rolled out a “save cubes” policy, increasing the number of remotes deployed per mission, in turn doubling the amount of damage those took. The past two weeks at Hangar 13 had been all-hands-on-deck-10-hour-shifts days, if you counted the nights as days as well.

Julie didn’t mind the work though. She didn’t really like taking up the mantle of “Lt.Cuddles” during deployments and actually enjoyed returning to her engineering roots during downtime. Her skills were lackluster in comparison to the “real” engineers, but this somehow made the work much more fun to her, every day a chanche to steal a little bit of experience or learn a little something new.

She did not know, for instance, that you could quickfix damaged Auxbots by skipping the part where you substitute the damaged fire control boards and just wire the main movement controls to the flamethrower trigger directly, so that the bot shoots automatically whenever the movement rig triggers “combat speed”.

She closed the bot’s hatch and wrote “PREMATURE EJACUFLAMER” with a permanent marker on it, a warning that had saved no less than three lives the past week only.

With a timing that could only be achieved where monstruckers worked, the recaf machine sang its “recaf is made” jingle, which was, of course, not the machine’s original one, exactly at the same time as the shift ended. By the time the jingle (a recording of that one time Fiddler went into an ANGRY rant about the correct size of allen keys) had finished, Julie had her cup filled, her face and hands summarily rinsed, and her lunchbag out.

She sat with a couple other brawlers on the railing of bridge crane number 3, dedicated to the Anaconda Suit, which meant it was never used. It was the best lunch break spot of the whole place: it overlooked both the hangar inside and the docks outside, it was far away from the strongest smells in the workspace and even came with good company, which is to say a pigeon made its nest on it. Well mostly a pigeon. Kind of a pigeon? Probably a pigeon. The pink tentacles under the bat-like wings were a tad strange.

“Coo” it said, angling at the workers’ sandwiches.

“Coo” mimicked Julie, moving her gaze downwards, to crane 2, where a legendary Ramhead Suit was hanging. The Scarface himself was sleeping in the cockpit, while his sister, Cordelia, was very carefully maneuvering a pinch-lift holding what looked like a very thin, very shiny mirror, she shape and size of a surfboard.

“I did’t know they made Monofilament blades that big” said Marcel (Brawler engineer, the youngest here, covered with the scars of tattoo removals from his past life as an online rapper) chewing through his lunch while speaking “Wouldn’t it shatter at the first hit?”

“Well the TAG can certainly handle it with enough precision to avoid tangential stresses” answered Fei-Fong (Monstrucker, Ex Yuan corsair who saw the light of redemption in the Roark’s formulas for stress and strain and changed her life to follow her new creed)

Julie was about to interject, she never remembered the correct formulas, so she always took the chanche to egg Fei-Fong on, in order to have a good review lesson, but she was interrupted by her own pad ringing the priority-message tone (she set it to a recording of that famous monologue from Full Metal Jacket)