The New Generation 4

First off, no, you probably aren’t missing anything. (Actually I posted the wrong chapter so I’m just gonna fix that and… done, now this is the right one. I just changed the chapter number. Am stupid.) This is the title for the second HaM story, some time I’ll get around to changing all the “HaM 2” to The New Generation. Yes I’ll be accronyming it as TNG. I know it’s been a long while since I’ve posted and I apologize, no I’ve not given up on it, I’ve actually been writing a lot, I just write it down in a journal first and later I type it up. So you probably figured out I’ve not been typing it, and you’re right. I’ve just been busy out the ass, not much time to myself anymore. I hope everyone is doing well with this hell-hole year, I wish y’all good luck and fortune. Anyways, without any more delay (until you finish reading this chapter and have to wait for the next) I present TNG 4:

Enjoy.

Chapter 4

Hannah sorted through her tool chests to find the slot she missed. Holding an oddly shaped wrench-crowbar device for maintenance on her treads, she scoured over the drawers for where it belongs. Hansel had filled the drawers with foam and cut out slots where all the tools go for her, yet she couldn’t seem to find where it went. She’d gone through everything four times over and gave up, setting it down on top of one of the chests. She looked around her new home at the museum, a shabby old maintenance garage with drab and spotty white paint for the walls and evidence of rust staining along the rafters for the ceiling. The lights were harsh and bright, the floor was cold, bare, and showed evidence of cracking and terrific impacts. At least it was a comfortable size for Hannah and she had all her stuff. She ‘propped’ her gun mantle on a hand and rubbed it like her father would his chin. There was a knocking at her door, her little home had two, one large garage door for her, and to her left was a small door for humans.
“Come in!” She answered. The wooden door slowly and silently opened enough for a man with short curly black hair, green eyes, and a tall, slender head to poke through.
“Hey! I’m Austin, thought I’d stop by and welcome you to the museum.”
“Thank you.” Hannah replied as she dusted her hands off, “I’m Hannah, nice to meet you, Austin.” Austin stepped in and looked around the room as he closed the door.
“So,” he started before he looked back at Hannah, “as frank as you can be, how do you feel about your new place?” Hannah raised her metal eyebrows as much as she could, gandering around the room.
“It’s pretty bad, honestly.” Austin gently nodded along and crossed his arms as Hannah went down the laundry list of complaints.
“Yeah, I figured,” he admitted as he scratched his head, “I wouldn’t want to live here, we didn’t have muh notice before you were supposed to arrive. Me and the boys tried and made huge improvements, if you can believe that.” She nodded.
“Oh I saw the other shop, this is so much better.”
“Yeah, well, I know you’re not the most nimble one,” he leaned in and air quoted her agility, “so I thought it’d be nice if we helped finish the place, at least.” Hannah smiled at the jab.
“You’d be surprised at how agile I really am, I could do it myself but I’d love the help. I’m guessing you’re one of the mechanics?” He closed his eyes and nodded slowly.
“I am. I thought helping you spruce up the place would be a good way to get comfortable with everyone before things have to get… intimately awkward.” He seethed through his teeth, thinking of all the ‘turn your head and cough’ moments ahead of them.
“Ah-” Hannah thought of those moments, too. “-yes, good call.”
“We don’t have many German panzers here, so we son’t be as good as your old mechanics from the forties.”
“Oh, Austin, I’m not from the war.” Austin was taken aback.
“My mom is, I’m not.” Austin’s face lit up and he started nodding.
“Oh, okay. That’s cool, I didn’t know that. So,” he was trying to formulate a way that two seventy ton tanks would make a baby, nothing was looking practical-or healthy. “…how…” he gestured at her with open hands, still thinking.
“Did I happen?” She asked with a brow raised and half a smile.
“…Yes?” He wasn’t sure if he wanted an answer. Hannah smiled, she liked teaching.
“The same way you happened, the birds and the bees.”
“Huh,” he was relieved that she didn’t explain everything in explicit detail, but confirmed that she was made the natural(???) way, “I didn’t know tanks could do that.” Hannah realized he thinks both her parents are King Tiger tanks. Her face turned devious.
“Did you know that a man could do it, to?” His face scrunched up.
“Well, yeah, it takes a man and a woman, so-”
“No, no, a human.” His jaw dropped. Hannah started laughing. “Only my mom is the tank, in this marriage!” Austin shook his head, still bewildered, and scratched his ear.
“WHAT?” Hannah laughed harder, pulling a family picture off her desk.
“Yes! Here, look!” Austin took the picture from her and examined it closely.
“Uh, which one is you?”
“I’m in the middle. Mom and dad are on the left, my younger brother is to the right, and sitting on top of him is my youngest sister on my brother.” He felt really racist not being able to tell the tanks apart. Her little sister looked really young, though.
“Hey, how old is this picture?”
“A year.”
“How old are you?”
“What if I told you my younger brother served in the Vietnam war?” His eyes went wide.
“What the fu-!?’
“I was born in nineteen-fifty.”
“HOLY-” He looked to her and back. “You’re older than my grandparents!” She smiled. “How old is-”
“Thirteen in that picture, my little sis is fourteen now.” He almost dropped the picture at that point.
“What the fuck?”
“We think mom could still crank out kids, we aren’t sure.” Austin needed a moment. “Would you like to sit down, Austin?”
“Yes…” He wasn’t feeling very good, “My head is spinning.”
“Your head can’t spin, but mine can!”
“STOP!” He commanded, he weakly struggled over to her bow and leaned on her glacis plate. She spun him around and sat him on the bow.
“This doesn’t bother me, just recompose yourself. Take your time.” After a while he started feeling better and asked some more questions.
“Do you have any traits from your dad?”
“Mmm, not much. I’ll explain why another time, but I have his eyes. Unlike my mom, though, I have more human traits, like a belly button, a more human like mouth, and hands.”
“Your mom doesn’t have hands?”
“She does, just not like mine. Here.” Hannah extended her arm and showed him her hand, it was as big as his head and looked like anywhere that didn’t bend was a big fat calyst. “My mom doesn’t have skin, her hand is made of plating. You can kind of see it here, like here, and here, but my brother’s hands are even more like dad’s. Almost no evidence of plating.”
“Can I?” Austin reached for her hand.
“Yes, go ahead.” He grabbed her hand and felt it, she was warm, firm, and definitely metallic. But he also felt the skin, the familiar grip and texture of skin but much thicker, he could compare it to rubber gaskets, or thick leather. He held her hand like it was a book as she flexed it for him. His fingertips slipped into the skin-like portions and he felt no bones.
“Do you have bones?” His fingers writhered around searching for a structure inside her hand.
“No. I don’t have bones, I don’t think my brother does, either, but my sister does.” His eyes trailed to her wrist, a large knob covering a ball socket joint, then up her arm. He turned her hand over to the back of it, examining the finger joints. The best way he could describe it would be a knight’s gauntlet, just metal fingers that overlap each other.
“Your hand is huge.” He pressed his hand against hers and noted the disparity.
“Compared to you, sure, but to me, not so much. Here, look at these hands.” He heard very apparent metal manipulation noises around her corners. He got up and peeked around her right side to see a portion of her metal skirt lifted up over a very large version of the hand he was just shown. This hand, however, didn’t bare nearly as much resemblance to a human hand. This arm was maybe six inches wide and two inches thick, much beefier, and held up a hand that was more akin to a transformer’s hand than a human’s. “Mom never had to really use hers until she had us, so dad didn’t actually know these existed until then. I have two pairs of these, like mom, one pair here, towards my front, and another pair more towards my rear. Both anchor above the wheels on the underside of the sponson. They were very useful when fighting my brother way back when.”
“Holy shit.” His fascination was overtaking him. “So when you overcome the initial shock of everything this is really, really cool.” He looked up to her face, she was smiling wide, showing off a flat row of humanlike teeth, and her eyes sparkled with glee. It caught his eye. “So, how do your eyes work?”
“Oh that,” She really smiled now, “this was super hard to research, but I found it! You should sit down again, it’s a really long story.” He sat down on a tool chest behind him, to Hannah’s right. “My eyes and my mom’s eyes are different, like our mouths, too, as well as most of our organs. My mouth takes up a good bit of space in the cabin, as well as my eyes, which is why I can’t raise my gun as high as my mom can, and my gun just barely fits between my eyes when I lower it. Anyways, my eyes are just like yours, my mouth is comparatively condensed, but more or less the same as yours. Man-made machine eyes are very different. Way long ago, in the twenties, the idea came up to dope glass with the metal that allows me to live, one-fourteen. They found that this let machines react to visuals around them, eventually it was used in plastics and resins, as well, it just needs to be thin enough for the light to pass through-whatever. So my mom’s eyes are thin sheets of the metal and resin layered over each other just enough to be a physical, sturdy structure and let light pass. So, that let the makers imprint an eye into my mom’s socket, but if you watch our eyes you’ll see that my eyes follow you and roll, her eyes slide to follow you. Her eyes are on a pane, mine are in a ball. One neat thing is that if you can see through the glass or resin or whatever it is, there’s actually not an eye there, it’s projected onto the glass. They can see through the glass-like, it’s still their eye, there just isn’t a pupil.”
“Huh.” Austin was intrigued, it was thought provoking. “So your mom’s eye isn’t real, then?”
“Her eye is real. You can’t see through the resin, for her pupils they’re there.”
“So, how did machine people see before?”
“Machine people are called colonials, and before eyes were made, we didn’t.”
“Colonials?”
“Yes! Our organic makeup is best described as a fungus parasite. One-fourteen is like the carbon for metals, it latches on and bonds with metals easily, carries the energy that sustains our life, and is cellular enough to where we don’t need organs but complex enough to allow advanced thought and consciousness.”
“So, like plants and animals?”
“Yes, scientifically we are our own kingdom.”
“That’s… woah, this is cool” He had a smile on his face, he enjoyed this conversation a lot. He looked down at his watch, it was late in the evening. “Well, Hannah, thanks for your hospitality, but I need to get going.”
“Oh, no worries, Austin, thanks for stopping by, it was great meeting you.”
“You, too, I’ll see you again sometime.”
“Stop by anytime, I’ll be here!” They giggled a bit.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that, Hannah.”
“When this is how you lived your whole life you get used to it.”
“I’d definitely take you out if I could, you see like great fun.”
“Oh.” Hannah’s engine turned a stroke, a chill shot down her hull. Was it really that fast? “Oh, well, maybe one day.”
“Yeah, maybe one day. Goodnight, Hannah.”
“Goodnight, Austin!” As he left Hannah noticed a gold band on his ring finger. As quickly as her hopes soared, they were crushed.

Fin Chapter 4

I hope that was satisfying, I’m sure for such a long wait there should be oodles of content, but, sadly, more waiting. Sorry about that, I’ll try getting some out sooner than later.

No I don’t follow Ratbat’s cannon. We’ve certainly bounced ideas, but our lores are separate.