The Mech Touch novel Chapter 240

For his upcoming original design, Ves already chose the Phoenix as its totem animal. He envisioned designing a durable knight that should be resilient enough to last a lengthy war.

However, a great design should accomplish more than mere survival. Ves forgot about the drive to succeed. No one wanted to lose. Planning for the worst was fine and all, but sometimes you’ve gotta risk it all in order to achieve a win.

"Avoiding a loss is not a sufficient goal. A mech should be designed to accomplish a specific objective."

He sketched out a possible character he could utilize as the human myth component of his Triple Division Technique. While he hadn’t fixed a specific image in mind, he felt determined to include some ambition and the need to win in the list of possible traits.

As the Sea Crown Tournament wound down, Ves guided his floating room away from the morbid arena dome and the restless crowd. A lot of security bots appeared to keep the defiant supporters of the Velton Myrmidons in line. They were one step away from rioting over the heartless killing of Jackknife Jake.

Even though the competition came to an unfortunate end, Ves did not regret attending it. The collective emotions of the spectators and the dramatic turn of events in the ring had revitalized his drive to design an original mech.

In a sense, he reacquainted himself with the raison d’être of mechs.

For all their higher ideals, humanity ceaselessly sought to expand their rule over the galaxy. They began their conquest of the stars with the advent of interstellar warships. They consolidated their gains by establishing a flourishing mech culture.

Ves, Raella and Lucky stayed at an exclusive hotel next to the arena and spent the night there.

As he slumbered, Ves dreamt of the fantasies had in his youth and blended them with the harsh realities he learned in his adulthood. Designing an original mech was tough, but Ves never thought he would have an easy ride.

As he woke up the next morning, Ves left the arena domes behind and visited the cultural districts of Cava City. He toured the museums and art galleries for ancient monuments of fallen alien species and contemporary art alike.

Each individual piece carried a message. The best works of art came with rich flavours of X-Factor that had been imbued by their creators.

"What do you see in this piece of junk?" Raella complained as she crossed her arms. "It’s just a barstool, Ves! You call this art?"

"I can tell the artists here are sincere. Can’t you feel the emotions in the pieces?"

"My tummy is feeling hungry. When are we eating lunch?"

"Soon. Let me take in the sights first."

The art gallery put this particular ensemble in a notable position. The room they stood in had been converted into a metallic interior reminiscent of the insides of a spaceship. Rents and molten marks on the walls evoked the image of a desperate battle.

Devastation formed the theme of this exhibition. An artist collective called the Epitaph Among The Stars recovered several mundane pieces of space wreckage and turned them into display pieces.

Even though the artworks didn’t look too remarkable, they resonated very strongly with his sixth sense. The emotions put in their compositions spoke of the dedication of the artists that made it their mission to remember the fallen from the void of space.

The other exhibitions never came close to matching their exquisiteness. Half of the art pieces he encountered in the gallery came with an empty void that spoke of two possibilities. Either they were fake, or the artists left the composition to a bot.

Either way, Ves found it rather disappointing that the curators valued such pieces. What would happen if materialization became mainstream in the art world? Would every piece of art become husks that were too detached from their creators?

From the way the museums and art galleries couldn’t distinguish between real or fake, Ves held low expectations of the future.

Besides witnessing how other people unconsciously imparted the X-Factor in their works, Ves also received a lot of inspiration for his upcoming project. After the brutality he witnessed last night, the distraction pulled him back from the brink.

"Violence and civilization goes hand-in-hand, but it’s not a good idea to lean too far in a single direction."

The industry generally abhorred mechs that catered to the darker nature of humanity. Designs that emphasized their ability to evoke terror and inflict mass casualties even received censure from the MTA. _{frёewebηovel.cѳm}

Mechs should never be employed as a weapon of terror. While plenty of people outright made a mockery out of that rule, normally the market favored noble mechs.

Even a heavy striker armed with heavy-duty flamethrowers could be considered heroic as long as its design emphasized its role as a defender. Perception and reality didn’t always have to match.

Ves absorbed this lesson slowly as he visited many different art galleries in the next two days. The way the artists played at the perception of their audience really inspired his creativity.

Some of the most impressive works of contemporary art consisted of four-dimensional displays that changed their form over time in a dynamic fashion. The artists accomplished these effects through the use of modern technology and a small amount of exotics.

Ves spent the rest of his allotted time in Cava City by attending a silly play. The performance centered around a setting where humanity and aliens struck a friendly accord. The play made fun of the diverse aliens humanity had befriended.

The performance made use of advanced projection technology to capture the speech and movements of an isolated actor and project them into a life-like alien characters. From upright horses with twelve limbs to a floating brain that manipulated its surroundings with tentacles, their antics roiled the audience in a flood of laughter.

"Why are you speaking to my waste channel? My nostrils are down here!"

"My apologies. My exhaustive lessons in human culture and etiquette has taught me that I should always start undressing myself after exchanging a couple of words!"

"By the Seven Three-Horned Gods! Humans are disgusting! They douse themselves in the foul and smelly liquid known as water for up to two times a day! Imagine the horror known as hygiene! We must declare war against this race to teach them the value of going without a bath for years at a time!"

What Ves enjoyed the most was how the play obliquely parodied aspects of society that they all took for granted. For example, while humanity universally maintained hostile relationships with aliens, why should they be locked in a constant struggle for dominance in the galaxy?

Space was vast, with billions of stars in the Milky Way alone. Not even the most prolific races had grown to the point where they ran out of space. Even if most star systems lacked deposits of exotic minerals, that didn’t mean they were useless.

Humanity constantly hungered for exotics to fuel their ceaseless struggle for territory against the aliens and themselves. The play Ves and Raella attended presented a scenario where humans never resorted to war as the first option. While they maintained a decent amount of war assets, they mainly served as a deterrent rather than a prelude to a full-fledged invasion.

In this possible setting, the playwright envisioned that the lack of constant warring diminished the hunger for exotics, thereby placing less importance on securing star systems with deposits of these valuable resources.

With peace as the prevailing condition, human society occupied a smaller but more densely populated slice of the galaxy. The lack of competition even allowed their race to unite in a single common union that maintained the same set of laws and customs throughout their entire territory.

Such a silly future could never exist. Ves had a good laugh along with the rest of the crowd when the play made a mockery of this presumptuous vision.

"Humans are a greedy, jealous race that always takes away what other races possess." He reminded to himself. He spoke those words with prime.

At the end, Ves left the theater in a tired but satiated mood. All the ups and downs he experienced in the last couple of days had refreshed his mind even as it took a toll on it. In any case, he experienced a lot on this planet and gained a lot of inspiration on his upcoming project.

His holiday on Moira’s Paradise had given him a lot of food for thought. While he didn’t get to relax all that often, the mental stimulation he received should be sufficient to flesh out a draft design for the mech of his dreams.