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Into the Hulk
Chapter 1: Selection

Chapter 1: Selection

You are Technographer Zarkov Terezna Olegovich, commonly called Tereza Olegovich

You stare at the display terminal in your quarters. It is a transfer command, notifying you of your imminent rotation to a new location of work. You suppose that it was about time for such a command to come down, but it still puzzles you. The standard form of said command would include destination, travel routing, generic work instructions, and the designation of the Adept or Magos to whom you would be beholden. This command has almost none of that, only including which shuttle you are to board for departure, when it will be departing, and a reminder that only essential personal effects may be brought with you.

The 'personal effects only' instruction bothers you not at all. You have seen it before, and have almost nothing worth keeping anyway, given that sentimentality is one of those biological logical fallacies that you are trying to set aside. Quickly, you perform a self-assessment to determine what you have and what you need to bring with yourself.

You turn to the polished metal wall of your quarters, using the surface as an improvised mirror. Your gaunt, pallid grey-skinned form stares back at you with green eyes. Your ginger hair falls lankly out of your red vestments. You are perhaps slightly above average height at 1.800 meters, though your body weighs only 60.000 kilograms (augmetics included) due to your youth in a low-gravity environment. You tilt your head to the side, considering the most obvious of those augmentations: a brass-skinned seamless mask covering your throat and the lower half of your face below the eyes. The small grille of a voxcater pierces your throat, enabling you to speak in a monotone dirge, and a biological nutrient port sits just below that, letting you continue to feed your weak biological flesh. The electrically conductive inlays on your hands and forearms, called 'electoos' by uninitiated biologicals, let you interface freely with most data-points without the need to physically jack in. You can feel the slight tug of the scars left from the implantation of your Cyber Mantle down your spine and about your pelvis, to match the small web of scar tissue on your lower abdomen where you had your useless biological reproductive organs replaced with your Potentia Coil.

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Personal assessment complete, you rapidly inventory your personal effects. You discard most automatically as non-essential, keeping only what you can carry. You don your flack vest, reasoning that it will be easier to carry that way, and fill its pouches with a small glow-lamp, a multi-purpose dataslate,a vial of sacred machine oil, and a double-handful of odds-and-ends spare parts: a small powercell, a few short wires, a few gears. You empty your weapons locker; holstering your knife and laspistol at your belt, slinging your lascarbine across your back on its carrying strap, and taking up your 1421 wrought-aluminum staff. You stuff a powercell for each of your lasweapons into pockets where you can easily get at them, not in the weapons themselves as per safety regulations. Lastly, you attach your coin-pouch with its 157.000 credits securely to your belt.

You have eleven hours left aboard Gibil 2 before your report to the nameless shuttle for your departure. You wonder if there are any other preparations that you would like to make before leaving.