White Noise

Mech Pilot who just has to hold it together for the last hour of the shift

Mech Pilot who delivers the mail.

Nomad is still figuring out how she feels about mountains. Her homeworld didn't have any, on account of it being a largely geologically inert. She'd grown up among continent-sized fields of tall razorgrass, following the clan's herds across flat plains and gentle rolling hills. This place, though. This place has fucking biomes. Forests and mountains and deserts and taigas and all manner of other things that she'd only seen in movies. Kingfisher had laughed, just a little, when they'd reached the foothills and she'd assumed they were the mountains. Then she saw the real mountains, and started to understand why ancient Earthlings used to believe they were the homes of the gods.

Starship pilot who has a workout regimen that would make any space marine blush

See, the thing nobody warns you about on a starship is the gravity, or rather, the lack thereof. Everyone assumes that because we know how to generate artificial gravity means that we do it everywhere. Problem is, the generators are big, expensive, and inefficient. Even on stations, only a small portion of it actually has gravity, and even less on a ship. It's only really a concern if you're transporting living cargo or passengers. Basically everything else you can just strap down so it doesn't float away and you're good. Even then, it's probably only the passenger bays that have gravity. Any ship that doesn't move live goods doesn't bother with grav. Yes, even the navy. Especially the navy.

So, you're stuck in micrograv at best for years at a time, and as a result your body starts to pull itself apart very slowly until you can't actually do anything. There's basically nothing you can do to stop this if you're stuck doing this for a living, but you can at least slow it down with exercise. Lots, and lots, and lots of exercise. Minimum three hours every day, mostly intensive strength training and cardio. Again, that's not building muscle, that's reducing atrophy. Everybody gets off a spaceship skinnier than they were when they got on, there's no getting around it. Hell, I've heard some folks can't even go back planetside after doing this long enough, too much stress on the joints and organs after decades in zero-g.

But sure, tell me how rough basic was.

Mech Pilot who has married into the Royal Family but is not prepared to pilot the Ancestral Mech.

Jozefina doesn't even make it out of bed before she vomits all over herself. She falls onto the floor, groaning and wondering why she feels like death. Her whole body hurts, especially her head. The light hurts her eyes, and they itch so bad it takes all her willpower to not claw them out of her skull. Her knees buckle when she tries to stand, so she crawls to the vanity and uses it to pull herself up. In the dim early morning light, she can clearly see the faint glowing lines growing from her pupils and out across her eyes.

She'll be told later that this is normal, that it's something every vestige pilot goes through. The great war machines weren't built for humans, and so they need to make changes to their pilots to make them compatible. Her anatomy will continue to shift until she is undeniably something other than human. She will have to spend more and more time inside the vestige as her body morphs in ways that make it incompatible with survival on the planet's surface. One day, she will be entombed within the great alien machine, functionally immortal as it keeps its pilot alive. She will be kept in that limbo until the day she is struck down.

These are all things Jozefina will learn later, however. In this moment, all she can do is heave again and pass out on the floor of her room.