Essence of theMecha Musume

The contents of this straw-bearing can (looking suspiciously like WD-40) taste like hard work, sweat, and metal, and leave a sensation like licking a battery. Drinking it grants you the following:

• A strategic and tactical genius that would let you comfortably hold the position the likes of an Admiral or Commander, with a focus on combined operations involving shipgirls, planegirls, tankgirls, gungirls, so on and so forth.

• The ability to grant human (or at least humanoid) forms to pieces of technology that serve as military vehicles or are weapons. While most often stunningly attractive women, their exact forms are up to you. Want your submarine to be a boy? Go ahead. Want your stealth bomber to look more plane than girl? Knock yourself out. They don’t necessarily need to be military/weapons in origin, either. Please fanwank responsibly when deciding what counts.

• This ability takes a few forms:

  • Firstly, summoning rituals, which allow you to sacrifice resources and time to receive girls from potentially any setting or period, with less time and resources = less specificity and lower ‘tier’ girls. Obtaining girls from settings you haven’t visited takes more of both. You can still direct it for a category of girl, though, such as aiming for sea-based, air-based, land-based, space-based, or even man-portable-based girls. This is the more “gacha” method.

  • Secondly, conversion rituals, which tend to take more time but use existing machines instead of other payments and convert them into their mecha musume forms instead of blindly bringing in new ones. They will maintain any upgrades or abilities you might have given the original machine. This is less gacha, more of a method of upgrading and granting life.

• Your first conversion is completely free, and your first summon is strongly discounted.

• They either possess ‘spirits’ of their crew to handwave internal operations or control themselves as though a human would control their own body. This is more of an aesthetic choice than anything else, as they’re guaranteed to be able to control all their own functions regardless.

• They can summon ‘rigging’, chibi/mini versions of their original features to utilize their original capabilities. Example: Boats have smaller versions of their guns (or runways for aircraft carriers) with projectiles that become full-sized mid flight, planes have wings that extend from their back or legs and engines attached in similar ways, man-portable guns carry infinitely summonable copies of themselves and have obscenely high amounts of ammo they can use. The exact way they appear is up to you.

• All of your girls can take human food in the place of conventional rearming or refueling, and massages, spas, baths, etc. will make for suitable replacements for other forms of maintenance. They can also take conventional upgrades or additions, with some surreal space-time nonsense going on that allows them to be both a girl and a machine (‘hull’) simultaneously, with the benefits wherever possible of both. Upgrades take the same amount of resources they would to be added to the original machine. Note that they may have unusual physical responses or effects on certain things because of this, and that they need either a LOT more food than a human or specially (perhaps magically) prepared food if you’re not rearming them conventionally.

• Your girls need no crewing if they’re vehicles, but you and others can still do so if your girls take their ‘hull’ forms.

• Every 24 hours, you may change the weapon composition of your girls to any they could have possessed reasonably throughout their operational history. If something was specific to a single instance in their “class”, she’ll still need to be that one unique instance, unless you built the upgrade yourself.

• Your girls are unflinchingly loyal to you, but still capable of making their own decisions when necessary, and will never be totally suicidally ambitious because of this unless you give direct orders. They are immune to mind control and extremely resistant to other forms of subversion.

• Keeping a growing armada of pint-sized war machines happy can be a difficult affair, so you are… ahem, extremely talented at pleasing and providing for your girls. Yes, this can be taken to mean exactly what you think it can be taken to mean. You are essentially a harem protagonist now, although you don’t have to go that route.

• Because of the aforementioned logistical and social issues, you may choose to gain ownership of a large base of operations, complete with support staff and specialized facilities including cafeterias, bathhouses, and scaling training facilities. Even if you’ve got a Death Star wandering around the base, they’ll be able to support her and let her do live fire at the ranges. No, you can’t cheese this and camp out inside your shooting range just because it’s capable of surviving planet-cracking blows. The exact form of the base and its facilities is up to you, but it will follow if you jump to new universes. The base regenerates all necessary resources over time, and expands to accommodate new girls.

• Any human staff and forces on the base have the same kind of loyalty as your girls, and won’t question their existence at all. They cannot be taken from your control, reappear over the course of a month if killed somehow, and will repair any damage done to the base in the same time. They’re no more skilled than a conventional human in their equivalent positions, and function as, forgive the language, NPCs more than anything else.

• You are a master helmsman, pilot, driver, wielder, or any other form of controller of your girls if operating them in their ‘hull’ forms.

• You may raise any girl you choose to the level of personal vehicle, personal weapon, or a similar honor. This process is much like marriage, but like Summoning also requires a bit of theatrics and resources. This can be done with as many girls as you want, but you must have made a truly strong connection to each other, and it has a three-month cooldown. Any girls elevated in this way will receive a part of any of your current and future abilities, including essences, and they may share some of their powers as MMs with you. The amount of power shared grows with intimacy and connection.

• Reminder: all usage of female pronouns in the above content is 100% optional. Have your shipboy harem or co-ed armada, nobody will judge.

• At the time of taking this essence, you may also turn yourself into a mecha musume following the same points above, with all benefits that entails. This will be free, and you can pick any weapon or vehicle you want. Choose wisely and, again, responsibly.

• Of course, this is all toggleable, or a sliding scale, adjusting to your liking.

• Optionally, be inserted into a specific or generic mecha musume setting.