(EP) Preludes: Natalia Soares

[Craig ST]

Natalias eyes fluttered open. The light above her was soft and low, so as to avoid hurting the eyes and her vision was noticeably free of the usual AROs. She breathed in and out, getting used to the rhythm of her new lungs. Resleeving was always a process. After the hour it took for the nanites of the Ego Bridge to rewrite the brain of her new morph there was the adjustment period. Before she had regained consciousness, the medtechs had moved Natalia to a private recovery room, where she could handle the initial readjustment at her own pace.

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With a blink of her eyes, her mesh inserts clicked back on. Welcome back Natalia. Everything is status green. The voice of Erika, her Muse said softly in her head. Fantastic, Natalia said in a hoarse whisper, more to herself than to Erika. She groaned as she sat up, rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck. Reserving a Morph is the way to go if you want to make sure no other ego (and their bad habits) has sleeved into it but Natalia felt like shed been lying in bed for a week.

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Standing, Natalia did a few simple stretching exercises to loosen up her muscles. Sleeving into a new Morph was always a strange and stressful experience But the Fury morph was Natalias favorite and this specific one had been hers for years. She adjusted quickly to the nuance of the Morph, and then prepared herself for the hardest part of resleeving; looking in the mirror. While logically she knew this body, this face was hers; the reality was that shes been sleeved into a male soldier pod for the last month working a contract to protect an Autonomist mining interest against Jovian aggression.

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Natalia stepped in front of the mirror and took a long look at the face in front of her. She closed her eyes and tried to reconcile that face with her own self-image. She opened her eyes again. After an hour of reinforcing her self-image and performing a series of physical exercises to make sure her Morph would respond the way it should, Natalia finally left the resleeving center.

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Natalias preferred resleeving center was just inside the border of the northern bazaar of Extropia. Extropia was a huge beehive style station built inside a massive Asteroid of the Main Belt that housed somewhere around ten million people. There were two ports, one at each pole of the asteroid and its slow spin gave it a gravity that was only around 2% of earths. From the center it only took Natalia 5 minutes to get to her tiny berth-like apartment. She quickly made her way down the twisting, narrow corridor to the Main Drag, a mammoth shaft that traveled from one port to the other, straight through the entire station and from there into her own neighborhood. Natalia? Her Muse queried as they came closer to her unit. I am reading irregularities in the security protocols of home base. It appears someone has broken in. Instructions?

[Natalia Soares]

Despite working out the various different kinks in her muscles, Natalia felt at home again, once she was though the stretches, dressed in her equipment and heading out, she made a quick check on any contracts being offered for her consideration, sometimes folks wanted her personal touch, and sometimes a fork was acceptable, though she had lost a fork in the past because of that, something that still disturbed her to this day.. especially sense it had been an alpha fork, so she was more careful about such contracts then she had been in the past.

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When Erika interupted her musings and investigations, her mind shifted directions to another one, after all, on Extropia there was nothing that could not be had for the right price, something that passed though Natalia's mind even as she responded to her muse. Contact the local security and information brokers that I have on retainer, get as much information about our intruder as possible. Even as she sent that to her muse, she was running though the various combat options available to her, she had a preference for up close and personal in terms of combat, but she was good from a distance as well, and there had been a time or two in the past where this was the way she ended up getting a job offer.. some folks who had wanted a direct feel for her skills before hiring her. She had accepted that particular offer, once the lot of them were conscious again, and it had worked out well for those involved.

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Of course, after the Fall, information and ability was the chief currency of the changed world she continued to think even as she continued toward her flat, slowing down to check her weapons, both the internal ones built into this body, and the heavy pistol that was in its holder on her side.

[Craig ST]

Her weapons check complete Natalia slowed her pace and came to a stop. around the next corner was her unit door. A quick check showed no external guard and the door appeared to be undisturbed.

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Security reports nothing out of the ordinary Natalia; no alerts. None of the brokers have responded yet. Would you like internal video feed of your domicile?

[Natalia Soares]

She frowned slightly even as she responded to her muse That would be most appreciated, please do. It wasn't necessary to be polite to her muse, but Natalia saw Erika as something of a younger sister of sorts, and even without that particular viewpoint, it was good practice to remain polite with people until you reached the point of deliberately desiring to give them a less then polite response.

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Even as she waited for her Muse to give her the video feed, she activated the T-Ray Emitter that she had installed into this morph some time back, which allowed her to attempt to scan the inside of her unit from another direction even as she prepared to look over the video feed.