Winter Cam-dle

Agent Broadside is one of the most-renowned Frame pilots of the Defense Unit, as well as one of its handiest engineers. She tends to brighten up any situation she's in, either through that chipper demeanor of hers, or through example as a squad's point defense, ensuring those under her protection are kept safe. She's not keen on talking about how she lost the hand, but she does admit it feels almost more responsive than her fleshy one.

Broadside's Frame, simply codenamed "Mountain," is a custom variant of the standard Vanguard frame, built with denser materials and unique paint to match her armor. The right pauldron is capable of projecting a full energy shield around her, or flat barrier to cover more space around her at the cost of more power usage. Though Mountain has no greater sentience to its onboard AI, merely being a series of automation subroutines for ease of control, Broadside speaks of her as fondly as a sturdy hunting dog. And with an assortment of secondary weapons hidden in Mountain's arms to augment the array of handheld weapons she can wield, there's little doubt that she can hold her own in a fight.

That isn't to discount Broadside on her own, however. Every capability the Frame has, was custom built to match its pilot's own fighting style. If confronted at ground-level, Broadside has been known to be an immovable wall all her own.

Agent Wildside makes his niche in the far-flung future of his homeworld, acting as a scouting pilot for a group of futuristic demon hunters. A sarcastic and matter-of-fact individual, he's not one for mincing words or being particularly flashy in how he deals with a situation. His reputation as a typical fighter pilot, for many, seemed to make crashing or being shot down part of his most infamous gambits, as it gave him the ability to make a grand entrance for ground-level combat.
However, these maneuvers ended with the maintenance team in charge of his equipment offering an ultimatum: either start paying for his crashed vessels out of his own hide, or experiment with a new model of adaptive frame that he'd never have to crash again. Begrudgingly accepting the deal, he was then put into the pilot seat of the 01i Bluebird, a turbine-based fighter jet with an onboard artificial intelligence.

The idea was that the AI on its own and Wildside were both too self-sacrificing to stay in the air, the AI seeing itself as expendable and Wildside having the ability to rebound from pretty much any crash within at most two weeks. So putting them together would force the AI to consider Wildside's safety and thus its own, while paying attention to his own calls in active combat to ensure that they were still effective. In addition, the AI had a quartet of drones it was able to use to augment the two's strategies, and a composite form to provide additional shielding and options when forced into a battle with larger-scale threats.

After a couple test flights, the two took to eachother to a degree that made the engineers fear for the future of society if this form of AI bonding became widespread. Wildside's crashes were replaced with screeching divebombs and near-misses. The AI's curt, reserved and combat-capable nature gave way to one that craved battle with greater threats, and any time Wildside took the field it became clear that they had created some kind of monster and were just glad it was on their side.