Mecha Design Quest

Sitting on the swaying quadrupedal fifteen-tonner, you considered your life choices that lead to this point, while your appointed Legionnaire sat there with a shotgun, a cigarette, and a perennial glare. To be fair, this should have only been an hour, if your 'mech transport hadn't been hijacked by the governor for… something. As such, your small party- consisting of three Legionnaires, your eldest son, and six engineers with their foreign girlfriends- had contracted out one of the academic wagons. As such, you were bouncing around in jump seats, and your son Claude was eagerly talking up the driver, trying to let the man let him behind the saunters. It was unlikely he could provide a rougher ride, to be honest: this jostling would have taken your teeth from your mouth had the Legionnaire protecting you not given a wad of chewing tobacco for the trip. Placed between the teeth, it made a reasonable shock absorber, even if the taste was foul and you had to spew the juices out frequently.

Still, on arrival, Chichen Itza was not what you expected. Instead of a proud Aztec- or Mayan, as the translator testily corrected you- pyramid, you instead had a titanic hill on your hands, one being swarmed over with Americans and local laborers of various stripes. Fortunately, enough of the individuals from the Carnegie Institute of Science working on the project spoke French, and could explain to you the current state of affairs. Currently, they were working on unburrying the main pyramid, what the Spanish had dubbed "El Castillo" back when they owned it. While work was preceding apace, you started rubbing shoulders with people, and getting some of the local black earth on your hands and knees.

Honestly speaking, the dig site was both more entertaining and less than you'd expected. They had a small mecha shop in the area, and the team there was working overtime re-equiping the Mulos service mechs with hauling or excavation gear. Men with shovels might have done most of the fine-work, but there was quite a bit of money being thrown at this, meaning there was enough mechanization to make the majority of this light work.

While you were there at the mecha shop, though, you noticed something curious. There was always a priority order to mecha repairs- nothing unusual there- but here there was an order to the teams doing the work as well as the bays doing the working. While each work crew could work on any old mecha, there was a sort of symbology they used- mecha decorated with a stag would go to the stag bay, the dog to the dog's bay, so on and so forth. While the shop director didn't really want to talk to you about it, the foreman were perfectly willing to engage.

Apparently, every mecha was blessed according to some local beliefs, which had been flourishing in the aftermath of the Porfiriato. Each shop had totemic and ritual associated with it, and each mecha had the same applied to it as well. The effect was both real and staggering, when you saw it in action- the same 'mech was refit thrice as fast in workshops when it matched the totemic animal. Certainly, some of this could be explained by division of labor, familiarity with the mecha, and other factors, but not all of it. Certainly not all of it!

Of course, that's when Claude came to talk to you about the digging. Apparently, he was quite interested in the excavation team's work, and as he dragged you over to one of the hazardous terrain striders- really just a bucket seat on chicken legs with cable drums on the back for line-laying- you quickly discovered this job site was far more regimented than you thought. Each one of the totems was excavating one side of the pyramid, but each one was doing it slightly differently. The dog totem was doing the sensible top-down approach, filling mule mecha with their shovels to bring down to the bottom and dump. Meanwhile, the deer totem was working with a winch-mule to send sleds of dirt down to the bottom, where work teams and hauler-mecha dragged the fill of to the dumps.

On the opposite side of the pyramid, the opossum totem was being the cleverest, working with a fixed dump pile on the pyramid, which a dedicated filler-mule then put in hauler-mules towing sleds. Finally, the monkey totem was working swiftly and carefully, a team of workers with hand tools meticulously freeing each step of the pyramid, while the actual mecha served more as bulk movers, with only a handful of actual digging mecha to be seen.

While the diggers dug, you spent more time talking with the management of the dig. The money was flowing in, thanks to the powers of good publicity and generous grants by the Mexican and American sectors, mostly designed at keeping the British well out of there. While they hadn't been able to steal the entirety of the Giza pyramids due to the scale, the local foreman explained, the British Museum of Natural History would have far fewer problems here, able to parts out the smaller pyramids and haul them over in the dead of night.

You laughed, the foreman laughed, the archeologists from America laughed, someone from Belize did a runner from the job site, the guards laughed while they shot him. It was a bit of black comedy, until they found a mess of shillings in his wallet, and started digging through his tent, where they found documentation about acquiring any portable relics from the job.

Needless to say, you were politely recommended to leave on the next caravan out, and did so. Still, the thought of being able to get your hands on those totems ate at you- you could study this, perhaps duplicate their effects, and bring up more power to your mecha manufacturing, or even the mecha you started taking into the field. The question was how- and more importantly, how to do it without arousing suspicion you were going to try and steal their artifacts.

You'd need to sleep on it.

VOTES
[] Get a business stake in the diggers/mech shop and start rotating them back to France to pick their brains (+Exotics, +civil mecha)
[] Personally contribute to the dig through funding and appointing a team from your people to do some long-term job site support. (+Exotics, +money)
[] Take a week to provide a personal contribution of support- your people can easily spin these people some upgrades for their work, and you can personally see what's so special here (++Exotics)