Read Act I Here.

Mina Lee - An Artificial Human
 
It was a scrap team that eventually found me - the Eisacktali had no mecha construction program of their own, but had started to build up their forces through an aggressive campaign of hijacking and salvaging any machine they could get their hands on. As this meant that their militia was mostly comprised of Berkanans in varying degrees of disrepair they had sought to gain an edge in another way. They lacked the heavy industry to produce mecha from scratch in sufficient numbers or quality, but their life sciences and cybernetics industries could be repurposed.
 
 They got their machines used. Their pilots they made from scratch.
 
 Mina Lee was among the scrap team, brought along to be the pilot of their new salvage - me. Born in a lab (her last name came from the facility) and enhanced primarily through genetic engineering with a few mods installed, she had reflexes that made Mason look slow, probably wouldn't have needed my reactor to survive the fall to the surface, and was situationally hyperaware (to an eerie degree, according to other humans). She alerted the scrap team to incoming Federation and Republic forces before any radar system detected them.
 
 They buried Lyn before we left the crash site. I still appreciate that.
 
Mina was... young, even younger than she looked because her growth had been accelerated. She believed in her purpose of defending the Eisacktali from those who would threaten them, but her awareness of the world around her was so fine-tuned and her lack of social graces so profound that she put most people off quickly. She spent most of her time in my cockpit, actually, hidden away.
 
After several skirmishes against essentially anyone (including a few RRCG-30 Dacars that were in many ways descended from me, unfortunately) who came within weapons range of any settlement we could reach in time - which was most of them, usually - Mina began doing modifications to the control system. She installed an interface that let her connect her neural cybernetics to my computers, hoping to further enhance her reaction times and perception.
 
I'm not sure which of use was more surprised when it turned out that I had a voice.
 
Talking with Mina changed things. I wasn't just the machine, I was a partner, a confidant, and for a long time (I'm sad/happy/proud/privileged to say) her only friend. I wasn’t just reacting to stimuli and sending alerts or going in whatever direction my pilot chose – I was providing options and opinions, working through problems, and in some cases even making decisions. 

It was the same for Mina, in many ways. She stopped simply following orders without question, no longer leaped to every task. She pointed out problems, made suggestions, dictated boundaries. More credit due to the Eisacktali, for the most part they seemed to be relieved. Mina and I both concluded that they had been worried that they had created a monster.

They had, we supposed. But together we were their monster.

Two years after Mina first found me, we were caught up in a four-way battle – Eisacktali, Republic, Federation, and a raider band - over a black research site of some kind. We didn’t even know what kind of research, just that if everyone else wanted it we didn’t want them to have it. It was a mess. The site got vaporized, pretty much everyone but us got shot down (we did most of the shooting down for that matter), and nobody was answering our calls. We got as far away as we could before my thrusters overheated, touching down just outside of a small farming settlement.

Dahvil had only known all the fighting as something that happened on the horizon, too small and hardscrabble for even raiders to bother it, but they welcomed Mina with open arms. They did the same to me, in their own way, once Mina explained. They seemed personally offended that Mina didn’t have a family or home of her own, and everyone chipped in to give her a little something – an article of clothing, a home-cooked meal, an answer to a question, a hug. For me they repaired the roof on an otherwise abandoned barn and gave it to me as a hangar. A day turned into a month turned into six, and we didn’t leave. Every so often we would sortie out, or other Eisacktali mecha would swing by to confer, but the people of Dahvil had shown us what we were actually defending, and we wanted our own part of it.

Mina deserved it.

The other pilots grumbled a bit, but in the end if any of them wanted to force Mina back into compliance they either kept quiet or were dealt with outside of our line of sight. It took another two years for the fighting to wind down, and when it did Mina retired. She admitted that she didn’t want to pilot at all any more so the barn hangar became my resting place, but that was alright. She would still come by to plug in and talk – about the other villagers, about the shop she was helping in, about the girl she was starting to feel something about, about the war orphan who had made their way into town who she had offered a home to.

I spent decades in that barn. Mina wasn’t the only visitor – the village kids made a playground of my frame, climbing all over me, sitting in the cockpit and making plasma repeater and thruster noises. None of them could talk to me like Mina could, but they talked about me plenty. What surprised me the most is when I heard one of their stories, years later, about how I was the Savior of Dahvil – some great battle when the Federation came to destroy the village and Mina and I had stood against an improbable number of mecha, even for us.

It never actually happened. That didn’t seem to stop anyone from believing it.

Of course, by the time I realized that the playground story from the barn had withstood the test of time, I wasn’t in the barn anymore. Mina had passed away from old age – she looked even older than she was because her growth had been accelerated – after a happy life, and I had been more or less left alone when I was stolen away in the night...

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Real life has made it tough when it comes to journaling/creative writing this month, so only the first part of Act II is here so far. However, I think it manages to be a pretty good demonstration of two things about Tales from the Cockpit. First, it's the type of game you can put away for a bit, and come back to when you're ready. Second, the story can get a lot more complex as you move through it! Your Pilots and the things you learn through them begin to build on one another, your mecha starts to gain history and complexity. Act II is also where you first start to run into the Time events, like Lightning Cog here becoming a playground for children.

We're coming to the end of the actual crowdfunding campaign, so if you haven't backed yet then I invite you to do so - nothing in this campaign will be unavailable in the future, but it is available here for cheaper and with a larger impact. If you already have, thank you so much! I'll keep writing Lightning Cog's Tale as the project begins its journey towards fulfillment, and you'll get to tell Tales of your own.

- Seamus