In the er of her vision, no more than a few hundred meters up this revolution of the city’s spiral yout, she spotted a t structure reag all the way to the surface - aor, obviously put here by whoever had hauled all that b equipment into an aemple. She tio follow the bck hose, even though it went deeper into the city, passing by spine-chillingly anic buildings, the taller among them dispying dht phallic designs. A short distance down the way, she found her goal: A fountain in the middle of a small square, surrounded by the yawning mouths and dark windows of empty buildings. The fountain somehow still bubbled with crystal-clear water, the hose having fallen out of the basiher this pce hadn’t been abandoned all that long ago, or that b’s owners had brought the fountain bat order.

  Krahe took to ing herself in the fountain, finding that the water was just as horribly cold as everything else. She realized she had been unsciously trying to avoid seeing her own refle in any of the b’s gss-fronted ets. It was like… Looking back at her younger self from twenty-five years ago, possessed of long, fluffy bck hair and covered in scars from stant fighting. The bck of her hair was broken up by an untoward streak of white just to the left of her face. She was wearing about as much as she had worn back then, too - at least in terms of how much skin her outfit covered. Rather than a getup made from far too many far too small pieces, however, Krahe’s body was encapsuted in a glistening, bck leotard, one which rode high up on her hips whilst simultaneously c most of her neck. Its cold-ste packaging had cimed it to be an anic, semi-amorphous body armor undersuit, capable of stopping high-caliber pistol rounds, self-repair and self-adjustment. She’d stolen it only days before her death. Its material felt more like a dense, highly flexible gel than any fabric.

  The burn of her arm spread up her neck, the side of her face, and all the way to a part of her scalp, evidenced by that streak of white hair.

  Krahe muttered: “Hope all that shit wasn’t false advertisement, ‘cause I don’t see a zipper anywhere…”

  She hooked a finger behind the colr of her bodysuit, pulling down. Its glossy, bck material split with minimal resistance, allowio pull it aside to get a good look. To her relief, the charring which spread from her left arm ended ihe bodysuit, not having spread onto her chest.

  Her gaze wandered across her own skin, searg for any evidence of cyberics or their removal. No ports, no seam lines, nothing. She eventually reached her own face, and for the first time in a long while looked into her own eyes. Green. At first, she didn’t quite reize herself - it truly felt like her younger self staring at her through the water.

  “Let’s not fuck it up this go round,” she said to herself. Though she didn’t move her head, the spshing of the water made it look as though her own refle nodded back at her. The feeling of looking at a stranger faded away.

  As she thhly examined her new gun with its clips id out at the basin’s edge, her mind finally strayed towards that menu.

  [NAME: Brunhilde Krahe]

  [ARCHETYPE: N/A]

  [TITLE: N/A]

  [RACE: Human]

  [SEX: Female]

  [AGE: 43/0]

  [MIGHT: E1]

  [TROL: E2]

  [ATHLETICISM: E2]

  [DURABILITY: E1]

  [THAUMIC THROUGHPUT: F1]

  [ENTROPY TOLERANCE: E3]

  [ENTROPY DISSIPATION: F3]

  [BOONS]

  [FLESHGRAFTS]

  [EIDOLON VAULTS]

  [THAUMATURGIES]

  [STE]

  [OTHER]

  Once again, she felt her mind’s eye gze over at the sudden deluge of information. First, she noticed that the Archetype and Title fields were empty. Sed came the fact that her age readout had two numbers, which she assumed reted to her total age and her age as of her rebirth in this world. Thirdly, she made some degree of sense of the ratings attached to her attributes.

  “But is a higher number better or worse?” she thought. No ve answer came.

  Krahe didn’t get the opportunity to slowly go down the list and exami in peace; something scuttled across the doorway of a nearby building. Her eyes shot open and she gripped the gun, sliding two spare clips under her bodysuit’s edge oomach, just within reach. Slowly, she backed away from the fountain while keeping an eye on both that doorway and those of the other buildings.

  A two-limbed thing suddenly bolted out from the dark, slither-crawling across the tilework before leaping at her. Just from a momentary g looked like a vaguely humanoid upper body, without any skin ans and horribly deformed. One shot threw it off course. The sed sent it careening to the ground, spraying blood. A long, bulb-eendril that she chose to interpret as a tail writhed from its lower end as it kept trying to crawl towards her, dragging itself with cwed hands at the ends of unnaturally long arms. Vestigial flipper-like feet twitched uselessly to either side of its “tail”.

  Its head had no lower jaw, a long torailed across the ground while its open ribcage gnashed like some sort of vertical maw, individual ribs ending in needle-like points. It had nans; not is false chest cavity, anyway. Instead, it had a pulsating hump on its back, one of whose partments had been burst open by a gunshot, its tents now f a puddle on the grouh the creature.

  Krahe shot it in the head; its brain spttered on the ground. The thing stopped moving at st. A forward-back motion of the lever. A hot g flew past her face. Three shots left.

  A sed torso-thing darted out of that same doorway, clearly trying to encircle her. A half-sed ter, a third emerged from the doorway to the right, and a fourth leapt from a windht behind her. Five. Six. What had been a single monster was noack, and they had her surrounded.

  She wondered: “Did one of you bastards pull the hose out of the fountain to set a trap?”

  Akaso