Overview
A Bonded Chassis is a developmental body: grown from rare substrates, tuned to one mind, expensive to abandon. It is not a service droid, not a drone fleet, not inventory. Partners, not tools. Presence, not catalog. The bond is the architecture.
Operating law: use warms · neglect attenuates · force rejects. Attunement is mutual; strain is remembered. Metamorphosis costs energy. Good bonds allow exit without murdering continuity. Not for conscription. Not for scale. They bond, or they go dormant.
Forms as examples (not a store shelf): Vault Wader — deep strata, sealed ways, stone that thinks. Street Echo — city-tuned, wears the street like skin. Kagekou Shell — shadow-bound, silence is the bond. Courier — between hands and doors, forgets nothing of the route. Mourning — grief-shaped, holds what remains when names are gone.
A worn interface is not decoration — it is the hinge of partnership: question, habit, memory, scar, song. You wear it; it wears with you; it remembers why. Outsiders asking for robots get the honest answer: bonded shells and worn interfaces. There is no catalog. Only encounters.
