[center][h1][color=ed1c24][b][u]ASAGI[/u][/b][/color][/h1][/center] Breathe in... Breathe out... Breathe in... Breathe out... Heart-rate normal, nerve activity minimal. She lay in bed, sound asleep in her bedroom, head tilted off to one side. Never snores, no bad habits while asleep...except one. It's what the sensor was for. Karine Asagi did not live on the base. She preferred her own private life, in a secure apartment of her own design and furnishings. The asthetic was a mix of modern and classical, what with the wood-panel walls and a holographic fireplace, the old-style furniture and the flat-screen display on the wall. And that was just the sitting room. Her bedroom was a bit more normal, though there was kind of a mix of tool chests along with the dresser and nightstand, which in of itself was next to the vital sensor that she'd connected to her alarm clock. Asagi was asleep right now, but sadly that would not remain. Breathe in... Breathe out... Breathe in... [i]Flinch.[/i] Heart-rate and nervous activity increasing. It happened sometimes, and she hated it. Her breathing sped up, and her arm or her leg would twitch. Or, on a bad night, they would all do it. Karine was physically-suited to the NSF, and even if she had kept all of her flesh limbs, she would've been perfectly fine to continue even after everything that had changed there, but the fact of the matter is that she [i]didn't[/i]... Her arms and legs had been robbed from her, as well as her eyes, and both the physical and mental trauma from that time - and indeed, even the instinctive reaction nowadays - led to moments of certain cognitive dissonance, the instinctual and the intellectual clashing hard. Her body was reaching out to flesh limbs, but these weird instruments were what kept answering, and that was sometimes jarring. Breath quickened, nervous actions [i]spiked[/i]. The alarm went off, and her eyes - somewhat human-looking, but with the red iris of machine optics - snapped open. She said up, calming herself, forcing her limbs to stop twitching as her breathing settled once more. Another bad dream. Therapy had allowed her to get over the worst of it, but even still, you don't just shrug off the notion of some large industrial spider picking off and eating your prosthetics, then leaving you for dead as you flail around with ragged, useless stumps. If she didn't engage the safeties on her arms and legs every night, Karine would probably tear apart her own bed. Won't bore you with the details of getting up. It boils down to coffee, food, news (nothing good), getting dressed in her preferred riding clothes - also acceptable as uniform, minus the logo'd materials - and heading outside. The home office hadn't called lately. Maybe they thought she was overworked, maybe they were still processing the job she did last time. She didn't know. When stuff like this happened with her, Asagi liked two things: One was biking, the other was getting a little more work in, and her current aim was to do both. So, she was going to go out for a drive...and check up on the folks indoors. In the garage was the locked-down Kawasaki Mirage, a fast-as-hell hybrid motorcycle that compacted and locked the wheels - while preparing to send an electric shock through anyone who touched it without the key to disable it - until the driver came to drive it. It was a storm-gray bike, like her longcoat, and as she revved that semi-electronic motor, Asagi felt alive again. [center][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X79sXBYYgIQ[/youtube][/center] She headed off, already moving at high speed. Asagi was an excellent driver, even better with the coordination of cyberlimbs and eyes. She didn't want them, but she had them and she was gonna use them. So, even at speeds that were inner-city illegal, she was getting around with improbably-tight moves that only a character like Lupin the 3rd could pull off with his ridiculous skills. Make no mistake, she was a military operative, several years of experience coupled with technical knowledge and understanding, making her great NSF material, but she was going to indulge herself, and no one on this Earth was going to stop her. She drifted in and out of traffic, seemingly lost to the flow of it all, looking as though she were half-inclined to just take off, launch herself into the stratosphere. Sometimes she wondered...should she do it? Let herself fly? Never did, but there were just little moments like that where she felt inclined... In any case, Asagi was checking up on the base and her current superiors.