Mecha, giant robotic weapons of war, fly among the stars and stride across battlefields controlled by pilots – brave, terrified, determined, desperate – who will write the history books with beam fire and missile barrages. That is not my role.

My name is Armand Schole, and I’m the Chief Mechanic aboard the CHS Bern. It’s my job to repair, maintain, and maybe even upgrade a Mecha in-between missions. In doing so, I keep the Mecha in the fight. In doing so, I keep the Pilot alive. At least, that’s the goal.

In reality the supplies are never as plentiful as they should be, the allies not as dependable. I know better than anyone how fragile a Mecha can be. I know that the Pilot is not yet a legend, but an all-too fallible human being. I’ll do the best I can, it’s my job after all, but I’m  all too aware how likely it is that when it comes to this weapon of war I’ll be…

The Cog That Remains.

First time I met the kid is when they were stealing the Legionnaire. The colony where we were based was under attack, the hull had been breached, an evacuation had been ordered. Ens. Pearson was nowhere to be seen – I found out afterward he got sucked into space when the first missiles hit – and I was about to order everyone to abandon the hangar when there she was, this civilian teenager hopping in. Said she’d controlled civilian models, that she had to protect her family while they were being evacuated. It was that or let the mecha just sit there as the galaxy’s biggest paperweight, so I gave her the startup instructions and then ordered everyone else to run for it. To be honest, I just thought she’d buy us some time before dying.

I got chewed out, no surprise there. Brevet Ensign Kylie Jast got drafted. Plenty of surprises there.

It wasn’t too long after that, on the Bern after we evacuated the colony, that I couldn’t sleep. Captain was dead, the crew was a skeleton, and the only pilot we had with any training – civilian or otherwise – was Jast. I wandered down to the hangar to do some maintenance, and Kylie was sitting up on the Legionnaire’s shoulder.

We talked, intermittently, for a few hours. She confessed how scared she was, how much she didn’t want to be here – a strong contrast to the front she’d put up in front of Lt. Soral. I promised her I’d take care of her, as best I could, that she’d see her mom and dad and baby sister again soon. Promises I’d never make in the harsh light of day, even the shipboard kind.

She ended up being quite the big help in those early days, actually. The Legionnaire was meant to be a generalist mecha, but since it was the only one we had it was going to be tough. She came to me with some ideas for modular packs that would make it better at melee, or ship-killing, or sniping. We had plenty of spare parts, so we started to put them together.

She didn’t get along with everybody, though. The ship’s acting second-in-command was Ens. Averre, and the two did not like each other. Averre was only two years older than Jast and was… not as okay with Soral’s decision to draft her as I was. Kylie thought she was stuck up, not grateful enough for what Kylie was doing in sticking around. They got into, of all things, a food fight in the galley. Still not sure who started it, but by the time I waded in they were starting to throw bowels and trays instead of mashed potatoes. I pulled them apart, got covered in gravy for my troubles, and Averre was muttering about throwing Jast out an airlock at the earliest opportunity.

I tried to stay out of the bickering between the Lieutenant and the Ensign that resulted. The Legionnaire was really designed as a ground-based machine, and had had to be modified to work in space. It had balance issues out the yazoo in zero gravity, and I was able to hide away pretty effectively by trying to fix them. Which was great, except that I wasn’t actually making much progress.

–

Turns out we had a stowaway, though. I was so frustrated with the balance issues that I ran a full, factory quality assurance-grade test of everything, and I found that the thruster fuel lines had been crossed. If Kylie had ever gone for a full burn for more than three seconds, the whole thing would’ve exploded. I got it fixed, and eventually Averre found the enemy soldier who had been hiding in our mechanics shop. He didn’t make it to the brig. But there still wasn’t any solution to the balance issues, so I was never sure that the enemy hadn’t slipped something else in.

It certainly had me wondering when the transponder in the Legionnaire failed during pre-launch checks right as we were getting ready to send it out for its next fight. It didn’t just fail, it was causing power surges that were disrupting a bunch of other systems. Jackson proposed just yanking it out, and I agreed. After all, it’s not like we had any other friendly mecha to worry about! Sure, except Kylie nearly got killed twice by the Bern‘s own guns. “Difficulty discerning the Legionnaire from the sensor static,” we got told. By Averre, who’s in charge of the CIC and the guns.

When we finally reached Bulkhead Station, General Campbell was there, and she immediately came aboard to inspect the ship. She cornered me at one point, and around that much brass I was pretty inclined to clam up, but she looked across the hangar and mentioned how she had a son about Kylie’s age. I told her about how Kylie had kept us all alive so far, how we were all trying our best to support her. The General said she couldn’t do much, we were short on bodies all over, but she’d be watching Ensign Jast’s career with great interest.

And when she left, our stocks of supplies and spare parts had been filled to bursting.

–

Confed broadcast got intercepted by the comms people, and we decided to watch it in the galley. It’s usually good for a laugh, mocking all the propaganda and lies they come up with. Nobody was laughing this time. They were blaming Kylie for the evacuation ships that were shot down at the colony. They’d even cut some footage that made it look plausible. Kylie went to her quarters and hid there for the rest of the day. The rest of us, well, we couldn’t figure out any way to help her. We felt useless.

–

It came as a surprise when an enemy commander contacted us and offered a truce. Commander Orden had apparently found out that we’d been carrying a small population of civilian refugees – we hadn’t been able to offload them at Bulkhead. He offered to cover us long enough for a shuttle to take the civilians down to the surface. Averre suggested Kylie should go with them, but Kylie shut that down. We still didn’t have any better options for a pilot.

Orden kept his word, and the civilians got to safety, but before we could pull out Commander Hoshi‘s squadron showed up, and it turns out Orden wasn’t willing to throw down with his own side just to let a military target get to safety. We were back at it right away.

We had the gravity well and the atmosphere to our back, so we were desperate. One of the things that had gotten dropped off at Bulkhead was this Ion Emitter. Supposed to fire energy that’ll jump from target to target, fry the mecha and its pilot both, but the problem was that the Legionnaire was as likely to fry itself when it fired it. We’d kept the thing in storage, but we broke it out for this and installed as many extra breakers as we could. Kylie kept worrying about all the smoke in the cockpit.

Hoshi took the field personally, and was the only enemy pilot that Kylie didn’t fry that day. He had a few tricks of his own, and I recognized the plasma launcher he was firing – good ol’ Hauber loved building those things, and the last I’d heard of him he went over to the other side. Sucks to be working against a former friend colleague, even through intermediaries. Hoshi swore vengeance for his fallen pilots. Kyle called him an old fart. So. There’s that.

–

When we finally made it to the surface ourselves we ended up in the desert, and the first time Kyle launched the Legionnaire toppled over in the sand. Then Hoshi did an orbital combat drop right on top of us. He was determined, I’ll give him that. I ended up kitbashing together these hover skids for the Legionnaire’s feet; Kylie nearly plowed into a sand dune or two, but it beat toppling over all the time, and the speed was handy.

By then the original green and tan paintjob on the Legionnaire was, uh, gone. Quite literally sandblasted, in places, and boiled away by Hauber’s damn plasma launcher in others. My pride couldn’t let me keep sending out a machine in factory grey and battle damage black, so we repainted it. By some wild twist, a merchant in this trade town we stopped by had tanks of the stuff in purple and gold. The colors of the technical college that Kylie would have attended if she wasn’t with us.

That town was the last respite we had for a continent and a half. Hoshi gathered up what was left of the forces we’d fought in the dessert and the squad that had come down with him and just… hounded us. I didn’t leave the hangar for two weeks – we set up hammocks in the empty mecha berths – and Kylie got me hooked on these energy drinks that she said she’d used to cram for entrance exams. They made my teeth feel like they were full of ferrets, and one time we loaded the batteries into the Ion Emitter backwards, but we managed to stay alive.

When we finally shook Hoshi, that’s when it felt like the tide was being turned in our favor. He’d called ahead and had a naval squadron intercept us while his forces came at us from behind. Kylie and the Legionnaire tore through the naval squadron like it was made of paper, using the flight pack that she’d drawn up and that me and my crew had scratch-built. Hoshi had to stop to pull pilots and sailors out of the water, and we left him in our wake.

We all slept in our quarters again that night.

–

It turns out, though, that the Legionnaire had just had enough. We tried to start it up for routine tests now that we were finally at a friendly base, and every breaker in the thing – including all the extra ones – blew at once. Now it really was the paperweight that it would have been back on the colony.

Luckily, there was a brand new Centurion available, and without much in the way of fuss it was delivered to the Bern already painted in Kylie’s colors. I suspected the hand of General Campbell in this, to be honest. What was interesting was that it come with a lot of the ideas from Kylie’s equipment packs already included as base features, which made our lives a lot easier if it came to getting it ready in a rush, and a lot harder in that there was so much more going on underneath the armor.

More than a new machine, we also got new people. McSweeney was a transfer from the Etruria, which had just made its own odyssey back to friendly territory. Their own lead pilot had gone down in the ocean covering their escape, however, and McSweeney blamed themselves for it. “Not enough prep, not enough redundancies,” he said. I didn’t have much for him other than pointing out how many redundancies we built into our day-to-day.

We also, finally, got more pilots and more mecha. Lt. Spade and Ens. Ennis came with their own Legionnaires . Spade was an old hand, he’d first been flying jet fighters, and it turns out Ennis had been one of Kylie’s schoolmates who had enlisted – voluntarily – once he’d heard what had happened to her. Kylie didn’t seem to know what to do with either of them, and to be honest getting two other teams of mechanics under my wing was more than a little jarring for me too. We’d gotten too used to being on our own.

So had Hoshi, though. When he attacked the base Kylie and her new wingmates went out to meet him, and he didn’t live to fight another day again. Good riddance. And I hope Hauber’s plasma launcher project gets shelved for good this time, too.

–

They started calling Kylie the Sea Sprite, after that. Kind of a funny name for someone born in space, and whose first terrestrial combat was in a desert, but there it was – her biggest wins had all been above the waves, either deep ocean or temporarily unsafe harbor. I painted an image of a blue fairy carrying the Ion Emitter, bracketed by lightning bolts on the the Centurion’s shoulder armor. Kylie said she was embarrassed by it all, but she smiled when she said it.

Problem was that Kylie still thought she was the only one keeping the ship alive, and kept throwing herself into the nastiest parts of every fight. It took me ambushing her with both Spade and Ennis in tow, and honestly yelling until I ran out of breath about how she had allies who were worth a damn now, for her to start reigning it in.

None too soon either. The Confederacy tried out an Ion Emitter of their own. If Spade hadn’t caught the Centurion while Ennis provided covering fire, then Kylie would have dug her own grave when she hit the ground. She ended up in the infirmary – and so did McSweeney, Jackson, and I when we tried to rewire the entire machine. I didn’t really need to know what Lichtenberg figures look like on my own skin, but McSweeney was joking about getting tattoos.

Not even the worst thing to happen to me that week. I got out before Kylie was healed up, so of course the Confed hit us again when we were in port. Spade ordered me to move the Centurion onto the deck and provide covering fire.

I always appreciated what Kylie had done for us, but after that…  I winged one Ogo with the Emitter and otherwise spent the whole time lobbing lightning into thin air, but Spade thanked me afterwards so maybe that was enough. I never want to do that again; I’ve stopped runaway reactor cores and I was sweating less then.

Captain Soral ordered us out of port during the raid, and we ended up leaving our resupply on the docks. The times of plenty and three layers of replacement parts were over.

–

Kyle broke both doctor’s and the Captain’s orders when she next sortied. Word had somehow reached her that the Confed were attacking a civilian border crossing nearby, and I’m not sure she was even capable of ignoring something like that, orders be damned. So, I helped get her prepped, of course. She made it back before the Legionnaires were even able to scramble to go after her, and Averre made sure that the pair of us were confined to quarters.

There was some rumbling from higher up, which Averre was only too happy to gossip about, that the Sea Sprite was too loose of a cannon, and how ‘carefully expending resources’ might be the solution. Just as fast as those rumors hit, though, was word that General Campbell had caught wind of it and squashed the idea.

While she was in her quarters, though, Kylie took the initiative and drew up a plan of her own. It was a punitive strike at a Confed base that those border crossing attacks had been based out of. I told her she should’ve talked to Spade, but she insisted that she wanted me to go over it with her first. It seemed solid enough, although I made a few changes to the inbound route so she’d have some extra fuel once she was actually at the target.

The Captain even got an intelligence report for us to help improve the plan… except it was mostly just black ink. About the only detail worthwhile that hadn’t been redacted was an estimate of how many mecha would be there. That was handy, admittedly. Of course, it would’ve been better to know that the base had a self destruct system, and that the base commander was such a fanatic that they’d blow the whole thing once they saw they were going to lose just to try and kill Kylie.

We replaced a lot of armor plates after that one.

–

That base going up in smoke was a big win, but it had been a close call and a rough time leading up to it. Plus, you know. Kylie was still a kid, although I was long past the point of calling her that to her face. She’d never planned for any of this, and I kept catching her just sitting in the cockpit at night, staring at the dead screens. So, I sat with her. Talked with her. Said I’d write her the recommendations for any technical school or job she wanted after the war, encouraged her to talk about her civilian mecha designs.

It seemed to help.

We also kept busy. We’d reinforced the Legionnaire a lot to stand up to the kickback on the Ion Emitter, but while the Centurion was better overall it wasn’t as modular. The right shoulder joint just kept locking up. There wasn’t much to do about it except to keep swapping out parts, and that was starting to become a problem, but it gave Kylie and I something to do when she couldn’t sleep and the words just didn’t seem to come.

So of course the next time we were in a port Averre busted yet another spy. Not a stowaway this time at least, but he transmitted a message before she plugged him. No points for guessing why Confed pilots started to traverse to the Centurion’s right all the damn  time.

–

We started to notice, though, that the missions coming down from on high were getting riskier and riskier. The size of enemy units we were being sent to attack seemed to get larger every time, and further and further away from backup and logistical support. It was like back when we were being chased by Hoshi. We were practically spending all our time punching through enemy lines and then staying behind them until we were at the breaking point. I had to start kitbashing with Legionnaire parts to keep the Centurion running. It felt like we were getting used up to keep the Confed busy.

When we first got it the Centurion was top of the line. Slowly, though, it was starting to get outmatched. Newer Confed models were cutting back on armor and increasing thruster power, and while it wasn’t specifically meant to counter Kylie – weapons had started to overwhelm armor in general – it made it a lot harder for her. The Ion Emitter had never cared about armor in the first place, but it did care about actually landing that first hit. There were rumors about the Legate being rolled out soon to even the playing field, but rumors weren’t doing us much good when we were so deep into Confed territory we could barely call home.

–

Kylie’s dead.

A beam weapon shot took the Centurion right in the cockpit. She was still talking to me over the comms when it hit, letting me know that we’d need to address a flutter in the right thruster when she got back. She made a joke about overtime pay, and we laughed, and then… silence.

Ennis was screaming, but Spade reported that the Centurion was still mostly intact. Captain Soral ordered me to take a lift carrier out and try to retrieve it. It was scarier than when I’d had to use the Centurion as a turret, just waiting for enemy fire to kill me and my entire team as we raced for the wreck. For Kylie’s coffin.

The Confed recovery teams beat us to her.

I don’t have any words for what it felt like to land at the crash site and watch the enemy lift carrier fly off into the distance, carrying whatever remained of my mecha and my pilot away forever, while our Legionnaires tried and failed to break through and intercept it.

I just don’t.

Final Report

Our Centurion performed admirably considering its length of service, the Confederacy’s advancements, and the unusual strains placed upon it. While the Centurion model may need to be replaced, the lessons learned while fielding it are invaluable.

I would like to counter the report filed by Lt. Averre. At no point did myself or my team shy away from the danger of trying to recover the Centurion. More importantly, at no point did Ensign Kylie Jast flinch from the danger involved in protecting her ship or her wingmates. Quite the opposite, and if Ensign Jast does not receive posthumous promotion and commendation it will be an abject failure of our military to pay credit where it is due.

I am also formally requesting a transfer. Let me train new mechanics, or let me take the ideas that Jast and I worked on together and help with R&D. Let someone else feed machines and pilots right into the furnace.

The kid deserved better.

CPO Armand Schole

---

Alright so I didn’t get much done around here back in November. I was a little busy slaying a demon. Currently I’m in the throes of reading a small library of games acquired at PAX Unplugged, and I’d already hammered out Armand’s story for playtesting purposes, so I figured: why not Solitaire it to buy some time?

The Cog That Remains is a Wretched & Alone game of a mecha mechanic trying to keep their machine intact and the pilot alive – the odds of them succeeding are piteously low. It’s the third (and last, I think) game in my increasingly unplanned ‘trilogy’ of solo or solo-adjacent mecha TTRPGs; Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage centered on the pilot, Tales from the Cockpit puts the mecha center stage, but with Cog I wanted to close the gap by focusing on the people who keep the giant, usually bi-pedal war machines working. CHVLR and I Have No Railgun And I Must Scream can thus be considered pretty direct inspirations. First, both are excellent. Second, CHVLR is itself a solid example of a W&A mecha game, and Railgun has some of that same DNA within its card-based play but  focusing on someone other than the mecha pilot.

One of the joys of writing about games while also writing entire games is getting exposed to or understanding ideas while doing one of those that can then be applied to the other side of the coin. In this case, it was the physicality of all those Wretched and Alone games I’ve looked at that hooked into the idea for TCTR. Railgun and at least one other W&A game I’d come across had their main character survive regardless of the end state, In the main, TCTR is pretty standard for its mechanics. By default you’ve got a block tower – if it falls during play, the Mecha is destroyed and the Pilot is killed. The deck of cards provides prompts and instructions, including pulling from the tower, and the only way to ‘succeed’ is to draw the Ace of Hearts and then get lucky on a d6 ten times to remove tokens from play.

Under the hood I did try what I thought might be some interesting things when it came to the cards, and luckily for me Armand and Kylie gave me the chance to try out the majority of them. Hoshi, spawned by the Jack of Spades, introduced a need to roll a d6 every time I was prompted to pull from the tower, and a bad roll would make me pull twice. which I then did for every pull for several turns. The Black Joker (yes, I included the jokers, it’s my toxic trait when it comes to designing games that use playing cards) covered getting a new mecha, resetting the tower with only d6 blocks pulled from it; the Jack of Diamonds, which added Spade and Ennis, took out Hoshi and then let me roll to see if I could skip pulling from the tower. That one didn’t activate as often, but it did twice towards the end, which probably kept Kylie alive long enough for the final unique mechanic to kick off.

My final turn drew only two cards, and the first one was the Red Joker, which sees the Pilot killed but leaves the Mecha salvageable and reassigned to a new Pilot. The second was the King of Spades, the  final King needed for triggering the failure condition that occurs in W&A games when all four Kings are drawn. The King of Spades’s narrative impact is the Mecha getting stolen, so rather than sticking Ennis into the Centurion for two seconds I tied it together with Armand’s effort to salvage the machine to create the last entry before the Final Report.

The only mechanic that didn’t really get stress tested was Armand becoming a Veteran Mechanic and playing multiple games of The Cog That Remains as he is assigned to new Mecha and new Pilots, gradually improving the odds. That being an option was inspired by and building off of Hope Is Not A Plan, that other W&A game I mentioned that sees the character persist after the game concludes, but I thought Armand’s story had already come to a close, so I didn’t dive into it this time. I’ve also gotten some feedback that it needs more narrative heft, so overall it’s a definite point of ‘needs more time in the oven.’

So, there you have The Cog That Remains! It’s currently available at itch.io at a discount from the eventual final price as I get it tested more, get more eyeballs to give it a critical treatment, and otherwise work towards a final (and print) version. It’s also technically itchfunding to cover the art costs, and if it does well enough I may even get to add more JJ Ariosa art. Finally, it’s part of the Ind of the Year Bundle until 12/31/24, so if you want to get another 49 games in the bargain that’s an option as well.

TCTR gave me a story that I genuinely liked writing out, but of course it was a story I wanted to enable the telling of. So, I can only hope it does the same for you. Now get to work, Chief.