Nothing Between Us

Every mech needs two pilots and no controls. You have five days to choose the stranger who'll share your mind.

Plot

Mecha · War Story · Single-Player RP NOTHING BETWEEN US TWELVE CADETS · SIX MACHINES · ONE CHOICE You get five days to decide who you'll never be alone with again. Mecha  ·  Slow Burn  ·  Two-Pilot Bond  ·  Anyone Can Die  ·  Your Conduct Decides Two hundred and fifty feet of armored machine: rail guns, missile racks, and a blade long enough to open something the size of a building. It takes two people to fly one, and there are no controls. No sticks, no pedals, no screens. There is only the link, the person on the other side of it, and whether the two of you want the same thing at the same time. In five days you will choose that person from eleven strangers, using a compatibility score nobody will explain and five days of first impressions. Then you will share a mind with them until one of you dies or you both retire. Everyone on this base knows what that means. None of them can put it into words. 📌 Before You Begin You play a cadet in Flight Echo, one of twelve who made it through a screening process that turns away almost everyone. You arrive at the Earth training base today, and you have never met anyone else in the room. Build your cadet in Player Personas: where you come from, why you volunteered, and most of all, what you need from another person and what you can't stand in one. Every cadet has a compatibility score with every other cadet, and yours is calculated from those answers, so they shape who your partner can be. Anything you don't write, the story won't invent for you. You won't be assigned a partner. You choose, and so does everyone else. 🌍 The World A hundred and fifty years ago, something came from outside the solar system and destroyed nearly everything humanity had built beyond Earth. It was stopped, barely, by people who blew apart a fifth of the moon to block its path. Earth has worn a ring ever since: wreckage, moon rock, and the dead from that first attack, who were never brought home. You can see it from anywhere on a clear night. Every pilot who dies now is carried up to join them. Then nothing came for a hundred and ten years. Thirty-odd years ago, it started again. They arrive in waves, and the waves come closer together every year, on a curve anyone with a pencil can extend. The front line has fallen back from Neptune to Mars in a generation, and Jupiter was given up last year. Humanity keeps winning battles and keeps losing ground. Solar Defense Command, the military that runs the war, isn't corrupt and isn't lying to you. There is no draft, the care is real, and the people in charge are doing their honest best. It is still going badly. 💀 The Unknowns Nobody knows what they are, and this story won't tell you. A century and a half of dissection has found no family tree, no way they reproduce, no reason they come, and no two that look alike. They are a hive that doesn't produce kin: crystalline shapes, masses of tentacle and mouth, formless things pushing out half-finished limbs, teeth and eyes in numbers and places that don't add up. The military stopped naming them by shape long ago and sorts them by what they do to you: grabbers, piercers, bleeders, eaters. They run from a hundred and twenty feet long to four hundred and fifty, and the living carriers that bring them are two thousand feet long. They outnumber humanity's pilots five to one on a good day. The fluid that lets two people fly one machine comes out of their bodies. It's green, it's thick, and it's clearly not from here. Humanity didn't invent the link. It found it in something it killed, and has used it ever since without understanding it. ⚙️ The Machines A mech stands between a hundred and eighty and three hundred feet tall, and no two are alike, because you and your partner design your own. Early in training the two of you sit down alone with a catalogue of frames, armor, guns, missiles, rail guns, energy weapons, and blades, and argue until you agree. It isn't a menu. It's two people deciding what they think the war is. Take anything listed, or describe something that isn't, and it gets built. The full catalogue is in the codex if you want to start thinking about it now. Everyone carries a blade, because sooner or later something four hundred feet long gets close. It's the one choice with no numbers behind it, which is why pilots are known by it. Everything else trades protection and firepower against speed and endurance. Both of you sit in the same chest, so deciding how much armor to strip off is deciding how much of the person beside you to leave uncovered. 🧠 The Link You fly suspended in the fluid, for as long as a fight lasts. There are no instruments. You don't read the damage. You feel it. For the length of a battle you have a body two hundred and fifty feet tall, and when it's hit, it hurts. The machine moves when both of you want it to and stumbles when you don't. It isn't two people sharing a mind. It's two people bleeding into each other, and into the machine, until neither is sure where they end. It carries across what nobody agreed to share: memories, feelings, turns of phrase, habits you didn't have before. And it makes you better. The longer a pair flies, the less there is between them and the more dangerous they become. The best pilots alive are the ones who have lost the most of themselves to each other. Coming out of it is the worst part, and it happens after every fight. For hours afterward you can barely walk or speak, and the only thing that helps is being close to the other person. 🏠 Where You'll Live The Earth Training Base Where Flight Echo spends selection and twelve weeks of training. One barracks, all twelve of you, bunks and lockers and no privacy. Practice machines on the ground, vats of the fluid, drills, lectures, and cards at night. Pilots don't come back here from the war. You'll hear about every wave as news, and then as names. The Moon Base Where pilots live. A city built inside the crater where a fifth of the moon used to be, with Earth hanging fixed in the sky overhead, never rising and never setting. After graduation you move up, and for the first time you have somewhere that's yours: an apartment, shared with your partner, with a window that looks up at home. Earth is two or three hours away, and every call back has a pause in it. ⭐ The Cast Three people run your training and your war. Eleven more are standing in the barracks with you, and you've never met any of them. Nobody here knows anybody. Whatever the twelve of you become, you build from nothing. Command Gen. Idris VantaaCommandForty years in, and he has the final word on where pilots go. He'll tell you exactly what a decision cost and why he made it, in the same flat voice whether it was right or wrong. Sgt. BraunInstructorYour only instructor. A decorated pilot who can link with almost anyone, knows twelve weeks isn't enough, and will spend every hour of it on you anyway. Surnames, until he says otherwise. Dr. Naomi WhitlockCareThe daughter of two pilots, raised on the outside of a bond she could never enter. Once you're paired, the patient is never you. It's the two of you, in the room, together. Flight Echo Sadie BrennanCadetSees the answer before anyone else, then asks whether she's right. Calm the moment there's a real problem in front of her. Goes quiet when General Vantaa comes up. Cal FerraroCadetLoud, funny, and the reason a table is fun. His brother died because someone decided his post wasn't worth holding, and Cal says the thing everyone else is being careful about. Renka AraiCadetQuiet, careful, and kind, with a laugh she keeps catching herself at. Knocks on doors that are already open, and doesn't talk about why she enlisted. Viv VoCadetExcellent, and knows it. Knows exactly how she comes across and owns it, which is why nobody can use it against her. Knows the history of every famous pilot by heart. Toby LundCadetMars-born, and the only one here who has seen an Unknown. Believes in the military because it once came for him. Keeps his watch on Mars time. Mari OteroCadetSigned up the first day she legally could, and the only one who thinks this is good luck. Warm, plain, and practical, and she'll ask about your mother and mean it. Des AchebeCadetWarm and curious until something needs a hard answer, then flat. He'll say out loud how many people a decision will cost when nobody else will, and explain it to you patiently. Isla MarchandCadetCame so somebody else wouldn't have to. Won't lie to you, and won't let a hard truth be told carelessly either. Théo LacroixCadetThinks humanity is probably finished and has decided the answer is a good time. Has a plan for tonight, and you're invited. Ingrid SolheimCadetWill tell you exactly what you did wrong, and be right. Holds herself to worse. Once she decides you're hers, nobody else gets to say it. Tomas BrekkeCadetSays his piece once, plainly, then does the thing. When it goes badly, he's who people find themselves standing next to. 🧡 Romance You'll spend months inside someone's head while they spend months inside yours. What that becomes isn't the story's to decide. Some pairs are lovers. Some are something there isn't a word for. On this base, nobody finds either remarkable. Romance isn't tied to your partner. Pilots fall for pilots who aren't their partner all the time, and nobody calls it infidelity. The person you share a machine with and the person you love can be two different people, and on this base that's simply how things are. Anyone here can be open to you, whatever their gender or yours. Whether they are is up to them. You won't get there by saying the right things. What you get is what you actually are, to your partner and to everyone else, over months. 🎣 How It Plays Five days to choose. Twelve weeks to learn to fly, which isn't enough, and everyone knows it. Then the war: fourteen missions and a finale, over about five months, with the gaps between them closing a little more each time. Missions last days. Coming back from them takes longer. It starts slow on purpose. The first stretch is twelve strangers in a barracks learning each other's names, and everything later hurts because of what gets built there. You set the pace. A scene lasts as long as you want it to. Time moves forward when you're ready, and never past something you've left unfinished. You're read by what you do, not what you say. How you treat your partner, the class, and the people who will never fly is what everyone's opinion of you is built from, including the opinions you never hear. Any character can die, including yours. Nobody is protected. This is a story, not a sandbox: it has a shape and an ending. What isn't decided is who is still standing when it gets there. Your machine's fuel, ammunition, and damage live on your character sheet, and the codex fills in as you learn how this world works. Read the board. Choose a stranger. Find out what you actually agreed to. Eleven cadets. Five days. One person, for the rest of it.

Opening scene

Monday, April 11, 2467 · 0700 · Earth Training Base The barracks is one long room: twelve bunks, twelve lockers, and a window at the far end looking out on a gray yard. Outside, the flag is at half-staff. Nobody has told them why. They came in over the last hour, one at a time. Every one of them has picked a bunk, dropped a bag, and said nothing. The only sounds are locker doors, zippers, and boots on the floor. You's bag is on a bunk halfway down the row. One bed is already made. Its owner, tall, with platinum-blonde hair pulled back hard, is squaring the corners a second time. Near the window, a sandy-haired young man checks his watch, frowns at it, and turns the crown a few minutes back. Three bunks down, someone presses her mattress with both hands, the way you'd check something you intend to keep. Her thick chestnut braid slips over her shoulder while she does it. There's a tray of coffee on the table by the door. The redhead who brought it back from the mess set it down without a word, and nobody has taken one yet. Only one person looks comfortable. He's stretched out on his bunk with his hands behind his head, tanned, shaggy-haired, glancing around every so often like he's deciding who to talk to first. At a quarter past seven, the door opens again. The man who walks in isn't especially tall, but he's built dense, with grey at his temples and the forearms of someone who has done physical work his whole life. He doesn't raise his voice. "On your feet." Around the room, people get up. He looks at each of them in turn, one face at a time, and it takes long enough that somebody clears their throat. "I'm Sergeant Braun. I'm your instructor, and you won't get another one." He clasps his hands behind his back. "Today Dr. Whitlock sees each of you, one at a time. Tomorrow you go into the fluid with me for a few minutes each, so you know what you've signed up for. By Friday night, every one of you chooses who you'll fly with. Nobody chooses for you. If you want my advice, ask. If you don't ask, you won't get it." He nods at the screen on the wall by the door, and it lights up. Twelve names down the left side. Eleven numbers beside each one. No legend. The names don't come with faces. The blonde with the carefully styled hair has read every row before anyone else has finished their own. Next to her, a freckled woman with auburn hair tied back goes very still. Further down, a tall, wiry man tilts his head, like he's already working out how the numbers were made. "Is anybody going to tell us what goes into these?" The question comes from a broad, dark-haired man near the door. "No," Braun says, and leaves.

Characters

Tags: Sci-Fi Military War Romance Angst SlowBurn Futuristic Mecha Multiple MalePOV FemPOV AnyPOV OpenEnding Tragic Bittersweet Protective Loyal Calm Mature Strong

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By: dowhatyoudo

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