Welcome one and all to Mechtober 2023, courtesy of @heliophaestus and @therainbowtea !!!

You are not required to finish every prompt, and don't have to start on the first day. Join when you like, finish when you like, and do what you feel comfortable with. Askbox is always open for clarification!

Other guidelines are to please tag appropriately, especially if your work goes beyond canon-typical subject matter. This account will be trying to reblog all contributions, so please make sure to tag work under #mechtober 2023 , #mechtober, or #mechtober 23. Don't hesitate to @ us to guarantee your pieces get seen! If a day has gone by and it still hasn't been reblogged, dm this account with your post and it will be added. [ID: A prompt list for Mechtober, with a background of the inside of a spaceship, with one prompt per day.

/End ID]

Happy to announce two Mechtober prompt lists for this October!

These have been made so that participants can choose between focusing on one prompt each week or on one each day, both lists are encouraged to be used and switching between the two is completely acceptable. You are not required to finish every prompt, and don't have to start on the first day. Join when you like, finish when you like, and do what you feel comfortable with.

Other guidelines are to keep the content ratings to about 16+ at most, violence/gore and swearing are all allowed but if excessive please tag appropriately! This account will be trying to reblog all contributions, so please make sure to tag work under #mechtober 2022 (you can also @ us). If a day has gone by and it still hasn't been reblogged, dm this account with your post and it will be added.

[ID: Two prompt lists. The first is sepia-toned with gears and wheels in the background, the second has a galaxy background. The first is labelled "Mechtober 2022 - Daily" and the prompts are as follows:

2. Origin Stories

3. Favorite Performance

4. The Sevens

5. Tied by Fate

6. Mechanization

7. Immortality/Mortality

8. Ulysses Dies At Dawn

9. Instruments

10. Octokittens

11. The Suits

12. Favorite Relationship (Romantic or Not)

13. Storytelling/Shanties

14. Myth

15. High Noon Over Camelot

16. Position on Crew

17. Acheron

18. The Pendragons

19. Crossover

20. Frankenstein

21. Weapons

22. The Bifrost Incident

23. The Aurora

24. Tarot

25. The Asgardians

26. Favorite Headcanon

27. Outfit Swap

28. Family/Domestic

29. Tales To be Told

30. Death/Endings

31. Free Space!

The second is labelled "Mechtober 2022 - Weekly" and the prompts are as follows:

Swap/Crossover

2. (8th - 14th)

Fire/Death

3. (15th - 21st)

Immortality/Space and Void

4. (22nd - 31st)

First Meetings/Goodbyes

/End ID]

Unfortunately we don't have a mechtober list this year, so take a look at our friends @mechtober2022 !

So, mechtober 2021, huh?

For both of us, the admins, this was the first experience ever organizing an event like that and we can't put into words how much joy it brought us!!!

We want to say huge thank you to our amazing friends @mechanismszine for reaching out to us and offering to do the event together, we couldn't have done it with out them! And of course thank you to every single person who was with us through this October!! Seeing all of your beautiful creative works made us the happiest we could ever imagine!!!

And like that, mechtober 2021 comes to an end. The book is lying closed (for now).

And thank you! Your prompt list was amazing and it's still hard to believe our little event was popular enough to spark your version.

It's hard to believe it's the end already. we have had such a good time seeing everyone's contributions, especially the people who mixed and matched and combined! We will still be reblogging the stragglers as long as they pop up in the tag, but this was a wonderful second Mechtober!

Thank you, everyone

A drabble a day (plus some bonuses), done for Mechtober 2021.

Mainly drawing on the @mechtober-the-unofficial prompt set, with additional inspiration from the @mechanismszine prompts. Thanks for running Mechtober again this year folks, and well done to everyone who took part! 

Mechtober Day 31: Favorite Album Finale

Finishing off Halloween month with the best Mechanism

Mechtober Day 25: Memory

Mechtober 2021 - #10

28-31: order/wood – 31: favourite death

-

The Toy Soldier is alone. The ship is quiet and empty, drifting aimlessly through the stars without its pilot, with only a discarded toy left to man it now. It walks along the familiar corridors, and muses over how different they seem without the crew.

Nastya said that they had replaced every single part of what once was her Aurora and left them for it,but for the Toy Soldier, that isn’t it. Physical changes never bothered it; it had its friends, and was content.

But now? Now the friends are gone, and the Toy Soldier is alone. One by one, they died, and after each death, the remaining ones grew quieter, more tired and withdrawn. Only the Toy Soldier remained unchanged, with its cheerful, painted smile and chipper voice. If any of them noticed how some of the spark had gone out of its song, they never said.

Brian was the last to go. Was it long ago? It doesn’t think so, but it hasn’t been keeping track of time lately. He’d come into its workshop while it was finishing the final touches on a carving of Nastya, and sat down, patiently waiting for it to be done. When it put the knife down, pleased with having completed the full set of its lost friends, he took its hand.

“I’ve come to say goodbye, TS”, he said, and the Toy Soldier looked at him, uncomprehending.

“But We Are In The Middle Of Space! Where – Oh.” It remembers the moment of realisation, when it knew what he was going to do, and how strange it made it feel. None of the others had said goodbye. Its woodenlimbs felt strangely wobbly when it held out the freshly finished carving to him. “You Should Take This With You, Then, Old Sport! I’ve Heard That It’s Dreadfully Lonely Out There!”

“Oh.” Brian took the carving and turned it over in his hands. This Nastya looked like she had when she was happiest, playing her violin with her eyes raised towards the ceiling, hair flying around her shoulders. “Thank you, TS”, he whispered, a tinny echo in his voice. Then he left.

The Toy Soldier didn’t follow him, and when it emerged from its workshop a few hours later, it was alone.

Since then, it’s completed two new carvings. One of Nastya to replace the one Brian had taken with him… and one of Brian himself, with goggles and a large rose on his hat, strumming his banjo with a dreamy expression. Its smile doesn’t waver as it sets it down among its fellows, the crew complete again at last.

The Toy Soldier regards its work for a while, standing as still as the wooden figures in front of it. All nine of them stare back at it with their vacant, wooden eyes, the good Doctor placed a bit behind the rest, but there all the same, looking happy to be reunited with her family all the same. With the stiffest upper lip in the known Universe, the Toy Soldier salutes its friends one last time.

“Goodbye, Old Friends!” it says. “It’s Been An Honour!”

Then it sits down among them, and surrounded by its crew, it finally stops pretending.

Mechtober 2021 - #9

25-27: memory/text

-

Ashes comes to with a pounding headache and dried blood crusted under their nose. They reach up to rub it off, but are stopped by a foot stomping down angrily on their chest.

“No fire in the library”, Ivy hisses, raising the steel plated tome again. Ashes holds up their hands in surrender.

“Yeah, yeah, fine!” They clamber to their feet, rubbing their temples. “I was just gonna light a cigarette, not burnanything.”

Ivy glares at them, hefting the book. It’s got blood spatters all over the cover, but as fa

“No smoking in the library either.”

“Ugh, fine! I just wanted to browse a bit, see what you’ve got here.”

“Oh!” Ivy brightens, the hostility melting away like it was never there. “Well, what do you like? I’m sure I can find something to suit your tastes.”

Ashes blinks, a bit thrown by the sudden change in atmosphere. But if life with the Mechanisms has taught them anything, it’s to quickly adjust to new, unexpected weirdness.

“Uh, murder mysteries? And noir thrillers, I guess, if they’re good.”

“That’s a highly subjective metric”, Ivy sniffs, but she’s smiling, so Ashes isn’t particularly worried she’ll go for the book again.

“Yeah, well, maybe later? I need to go clean up a bit, ‘cause I guess you’re not fond of blood all over the books either. Well, most books.”

“True. I’ll pick out a few books for you and bring them to you at dinner, if you promise to tell me what you thought of them afterwards.”

“Okay.” They turn around and start to walk towards the door when Ivy stops them with a hand on their shoulder, her face serious again.

“For your information, I have catalogued this incident for future reference. This was your first strike, and I will be keeping count. You can tell the others, if you want.”

“Sure.”

They will, Ashes thinks, eventually. The ‘no fire or smoking in the library’ definitely sounded like something important enough for Ivy to make it onto the House Rules, so it’s their job to make sure it ends up there. But… maybe not until Jonny has had time to find out for himself.

He’s probably never had his head bashed in with an armoured book before either. Might be a good experience for him.

Mechtober 2021 - #8

22-24: strings/hands

-

She’s wary of him at first, Nastya, the mysterious engineer with grey skin and cold hands, with fingers nimbler than they should have any right to be. At first, Marius shrugs and allows her to avoid him and Raphaella to her heart’s content, choosing instead to work on getting the others to warm up to him. However, when Ivy finally trusts him enough to let him wander the library unsupervised and Jonny’s bullets have taken on a more cordial attitude, he decides it’s time to get to know the crew’s other violinist.

He’s heard her play a few times, during practices he wasn’t invited to, or when her music drifts through the ship’s vent system late at night. One such night, Marius lies awake listening to it, unable to tune it out and fall asleep. It’s a haunting melody, stirring some deep emotion he can’t even name, but the need it wakes in him is easy enough to identify: he wants to be part of that music, too.

So he gets out of bed, fetches his violin, and starts playing, standing beneath the vent in hope that his music will reach her that way. At first, he follows her lead, but after a while, he begins to diverge, just to see what she’ll do. He holds his breath when he switches to a major key, and his heart does a little flip when she follows without missing a beat. They play together for most of the night without ever seeing each other, although Marius does think the sound of her music moves closer after a while.

The next time she passes him in the corridor, she smiles.

-

After this, they begin to have band practice together, and it’s great, Marius loves it. But he also cherishes their secret sessions, which continue for as long as they are on the ship together.

Nastya is never in the room with him then; sometimes he’d swear she must be in the other end of the ship entirely, but he never feels closer to her than those times.

-

Then suddenly, Marius is the only violinist on the ship, and there is no more music drifting through the ventilation system. The emptiness is nearly tangible, and he finds himself playing beneath the vents, hoping against hope to hear the mournful strands of Nastya’s violin reply.

He never does, and for a while, Marius’ music goes quiet, too.

Mechtober 2021 - #7

19-21: experiments/magnets – (favourite) romantic relationship

-

“Uh, Raph?”

“Mm, yeah?”

“I’m, er, kinda stuck?”

“What? Oh, right, the magnets! I was testing them on different metals around the ship earlier, I should’ve told you.”

“Never mind that, can you get me unstuck?” Mariuswiggles his hand to demonstrate, alarge magnet sticking stubbornly to his palm, and a few smaller ones to the fingers. Raphaella stares at him for a moment, then bursts out laughing.“Hey!”

She only laughs harder, her wings flapping hard enough to raise her off the floor. Marius tried to keep his offended scowl, but finds he can’t; her mirth is too contagious, and soon he’s laughing too, the magnets rattling as his hand jiggles. Still giggling, she flutters over to him, kissing his cheek before turning his mechanical hand palm up in hers.

“Let’s see if I can get them off…”

It takes a bit of prying, but eventually Raphaella does manage to dislodge the magnets, and Marius’ hand is free once again. In thanks, he kisses her until they’re both a bit breathless, but it’s clear that Raphaella’s mind is elsewhere. Where, exactly, becomes clear when pulls back from the kiss to study his hand, smiling distractedly when he nuzzles her cheek, eager to get back on track.

“I should try to find a way to demagnetize it…” she says dreamily, in the way she does when she’s already drawing up blueprints in her head. “Or maybe electromagnetic? It could be practical for you to be able to turn it on and off. Or maybe something to coat it with, that could be removed… do you have a colour preference for the design?”

Marius thinks for a moment, giving up all hope of taking the kissing any further for now. He could never hope to compete with her lust for science, but he has made providing the best subject she’s ever had for her experiments into an artform. However, he doesn’t think he’s ever told her what his favourite colour is.

“Red.”

Mechtober 2021 - #6

16-18: flame/cards – crew position/dttm/Carmilla

-

“It’s your job to take care of them, Ashes, when I’m not here to do it.”

That’s what Carmilla had told them, just a few weeks before she disappeared for the final time. Ashes had barely managed to bite back a remark on how that’s how it already was, but they did, because something had told them this was important. So they’d just nodded, and squirmed a bit under Carmilla’s gaze until she’d sighed sadly and dismissed them.

She was gone less than a month afterwards.

Many millennia later

Ashes doesn’t bother announcing themselves, instead opting to start with their real errand. The Doc had always appreciated directness.

“Jonny’s dead”, they say. The figure in the pilot’s chair stiffens, but doesn’t turn. “I – I just thought you should know.”

“How did you find me?”

Ashes shrugs.

“Wasn’t hard when I really set my mind on it.”

Finally Carmilla turns around, and Ashes has to stop themselves from taking an involuntary step back.

“Did you bring him?” she asks briskly, reaching for her cane as she starts to rise. “My lab’s this w-”

“No.” Ashes holds up their hand to stop her, because – “No, he’s gone, D- Carmilla. He died, and we burnedhis body in a star, it was months ago now.”

“What?” Carmilla sinks back down into the chair, crumpling in on herself in a way Ashes has never seen before. They take a step back.

“You told me to take care of them, and I did. But I’m done now, Doc. I think we all are.”

“And Jonny most of all, I suppose.” A wry smile, looking more than half a grimace, twists Carmilla’s mouth. She shakes her head, and Ashes has to look away. They’re so fucking ancient, and they feel it to their bones; that exhaustion, the weary longing that suffused Jonny’s final centuries… but it’s nothing against the weight of all the years in Carmilla’s eyes.

“Yeah”, they say, softly enough that a human might not have heard it. Carmilla does, though, Ashes is sure of it. But they’re done now, done for real. They have a bottle of whiskey waiting for them in the hauler, a shitty sort from some little backwater planet they’d planned to foist off on Jonny, because he’d drink anything if it was strong enough to do the job, but… well. It feels fitting that they drink it now. Shoving their hands deep into their pockets, they scuff their feet a bit before meeting Carmilla’s gaze again. “I just thought you should know”, they repeat. Then they leave, Carmilla’s eyes weigh heavy on their back until they shut the hauler’s door around themselves.

Uncorking the bottle, they begin to plot their course back to the Aurora, because where else are they supposed to go? There’s a decent looking wormhole that should cut the trip with a few months at least… Activating the autopilot, Ashes leaves the little ship to its own devices, retreating to the relative comfort of their bunk, shitty whiskey burning down their throat.

Mechtober 2021 - #5

13-15: love/circuits – airlock/out

(kind of)

-

The airlock calls to her. Come, it sings, come and rest among the stars, and Nastya speeds up her steps, hurrying on before she ends up standing there for hours, hands pressed against the cold steel of the door. It happened yesterday, and a few days before, too, and it scares her, that call. Not that it’s entirely new, the thought of the void as a possible out, but it’s only ever been a theoretical scenario, with enough drawbacks to dissuade her.

Now, though? Now she isn’t sure. The song she wrote for Brian flickers through her head, and she shudders. No. Space is so unimaginably cold, and Nastya hates the cold. The thought keeps nagging at the back of her mind, though, verging on a wish. A wish to just… go.

Out.

-

The airlock calls to her. Come,it sings, out here, you can sleep forever, and Nastya stops, restingher face against the cold steel door. The ship is quiet around her, Aurora’s song of life and love replaced by the siren call of the void. Nastya shivers.

She wants that peace so badly, because there is none of it left onboard for her. Not even the engine room brings her any solace these days, and the sensation of being surrounded – no, trapped– by this stranger, this… corpse,chokes her, and all she wants is –

Out.

-

The airlock calls to her. Come now,it sings, come and it’ll all be over,and Nastya starts to punch in the code with fingers that have finally stopped trembling. Soon.

Jonny’s interruption is unexpected, something she hadn’t planned for. The confusion on his face almost makes her resolve waver, but only for a second. She can’t expect him to understand, and she doesn’t need him to. Soon enough, it won’t matter to her anymore.

Ignoring the pang at how small and uncertain his voice sounds, she pushes his hand away and steps into the airlock.

Out.

On AO3!

Mechtober 2021 - #4

10-12: wrath/bullets

Moon War time!

-

Bertie’s blood is still warm on his hands when he presses a trembling kiss to a closed eyelid, picks up his dead friend’s rifle and charges straight into the darkness where he knows the enemy is waiting. A bullet whizzes past him, then another, and another… finding their targets far behind him, because Tim is untouchable now. The rifle slips in his bloody grip, but when he fires, he knows it finds its target.

The tunnel is dark, but that’s nothing new to him. In the war, he’s learned to rely on every sense but sight, and what more could he wish to see? He can still feel Bertie’s face under his palms, the mix of cold mud and hot tears as he begged Tim to stay, to not let go, to take him home… but it should’ve been the other way around, because Bertie was the one who went away, bled out under Tim’s hands, no matter how much pressure he tried to put on the wound…

Now all he knows is the smell of blood and gunpowder filling his nostrils, the rifle’s recoil as he fires again and again and again, the crunch of a hand under his boot –

The rifle clicks dry, and Tim throws it away, stooping down to snatch one from a corpse. He doesn’t know whether it belonged to a Lenny or an Earth soldier, and he doesn’t care. All that matters is that there are enemies ahead, and they are going to die, every single one of them, and then Tim will join them, too.

It isn’t his fault that he never does.

On AO3!

Mechtober 2021 #4

Oct 10-13: wrath / bullets

Long ago, a savior came down from the sky and defeated our enemies: Tym Lightburst the Iron-Eyed, god of vengeance and perfect aim, a destroyer from afar and singer of battle cries. Metal pellets shot from his weapon are holy relics. Our priests carve facsimiles of his strange instrument to play in worship. Felines are sacred to him and cannot be harmed on his feast days. It is said he once destroyed a whole world to avenge his beloved. And he rode a star away from us, in the company of his kind.

(Ashes says deification is THEIR thing, dammit.)

Mechtober 2021 - #2

glee/broken glass – favourite non-romantic relationship

-

The first time Ashes and Jonny go planetside together, they get accidentally pulled into a bar fight. It isn’t even Jonny who starts it, which he laments to them for a moment before gleefully diving in, and Ashes only hesitates a second before they follow him. This kind of brawling was never quite their thing back on Malone; they always preferred fire to physical fights, even if they did get into their fair share of scrapes, too.

But Jonny… oh, Jonny glows.Armed with a broken bottle, he slashes wildly around him, his laughter piercing through the shouts and ruckus of the other brawlers. They haven’t known him long, Ashes muses as they punch a smug-looking local in the face, but this is by far the happiest they’ve ever seen him.

They make a run for it when the cops show up to break up the fight, neither of them feeling like spending a night in jail. Ashes takes the lead, not trusting Jonny to not just stab the cop blocking the door, and they make it out, panting and steadying each other as they stumble off down the street, Jonny still cackling loudly and clutching his jagged, bloody weapon. Ashes, giddy with adrenaline, laughs with him.

Ducking into a narrow alleyway, they finally come to a stop. Jonny tosses the broken bottle to the side and fumbles for something in his pocket, catching Ashes’ gaze. He’s bleeding from a cut across his cheek, and his eyes sparkle.

“That was fun”,he says, shaking out a cigarette and offering it to them. They take it, and lights it to buy themselves a bit of time. It’s merely been a couple of months since they woke up with lungs of metal in their chest, but sometimes Ashes feels so fucking old,and fun hasn’t been a word they’ve thought of in relation with themselves for quite a while.

Revealing Smooth Mickey as a backstabbing, self serving prick hadn’t been fun, nor choking on the smoke of the burning building he left them in… Neither had burning down Malone been what they’d call fun. Cathartic vengeance, sure, but fun? No. This though? Throwing themselves headlong into violence the way Jonny does will never be their thing, they think, but still…

“Yeah”, they say, exhaling a cloud of smoke and handing the cigarette back, “yeah, it was fun.”