Mule set down her coffee after a tentative sip or two, grateful to get in that much after the briefing came through. The others didn't look like they had much prep to do, though neither did she really. They'd be in the pods and away as swiftly as Retra seemed to want them. She went with some of the others to drop their bags against the wall. First went her backpack, gingerly placed against the wall, but as the operator threw down her duffel bag she knelt and unzipped it. Bright orange fabric and a matte-finished carabiner stared out, the jacket yanked from within and laid beside her. She'd be needing the carrier right off the bat. The vest came out, all open, dirtied pockets crafted in blackened ballistic fabric to complement the eight kilos of ceramic plate hidden in its front and back faces. A hydra of belts and semi-elastic straps hung from the armor like a burnt up squid.

Breathe out. She held it up and lowered it over her head, clicking buckles into place and cinching the vest tight against the snow tone of her sweater. The straps came next, running along the muscles of the arms and legs and creating small points of webbing where they crossed over above and below joints. Low profile rigging for gear she didn't currently have, but also a welcome degree of compression. Breathe in. Compression. She felt heavier, but centered. Mule nodded to herself in approval, clicking the sheath for her axe onto her right thigh and standing up. She toed the empty duffel over to the wall, and threw on her coat. Posture 2 in thirty seconds. In only a week, she'd gotten so sluggish. 

She noted that some of the others had needed even less preparation. Warriors who were at one with their tools, arts users who had no such desire, or whichever in between, it was good to see people so confident. For her part, almost damningly, she was used to more of a briefing and certainly more in the way of equipment. But she'd fight naked, or near-naked if you really wanted to count a hand axe, and secure a weapon if she had to. The group was counting on her to carry her own weight. As she walked to the pod, she downed as much of her coffee as she could. It had a peculiar but not unpleasant tinge, one that made her realize just how thirsty she actually was while she settled into the pod. The lid came down. The awful sensation of losing control crept in. At the onset she braced herself, but at the edge of a last flicker of warning shot through her nerves. Instinctively she revolted, a knee flexing up towards the pod door but making it... not even off the padding as everything swam and darkened. 

Mule swayed in place as the world began to reform, white suddenly dominating the visual landscape as bulkhead gray had gone before it. The others, armed to the teeth now, their charge, and then the false city itself. As grogginess cleared away and she took an account of her surroundings she couldn't help but wonder as to how the others had generated their armaments until she felt the subtle twist along her right arm. The imposingly dark coating of a ballistic shield, and the thin letterbox of clear polymer to look through it, looked up at her from the mounting point along her right forearm. It wasn't the one she'd left behind, that one was worn down and blasted all over and now in an arms locker at Penguin, but conveniently enough it was the same model. A common make, an intermediate shield with enough height to occlude one's upper body, and about torso width for a male. The tapering at the top edges beside the viewport made it simple for an operator to brace a weapon. Her left hand instinctively shot down to her leg. The same story, her service weapon from Penguin. Retra had done their digging or her agent had put forward a much more complete history than she had. Mule's flat face belied her joy as she drew her pistol. The game was no longer survival, it was the demonstration they had been asked to perform, and it all started to make sense.

"Yes, though usually they were a little bit more needy." She smiled back to Vlad and returned her weapon to her side. She stretched out a hand. "Toss that thing over and I'll get it shackled on. We should maybe duck our heads off this street sooner than later. Diver said they don't know about us but..." She looked up. Thousands of empty windows, no visual description of who or [i]what[/i] their adversaries were for the day. It would be foolish to assume a motivated attacker would come without sharpshooters, moreso to assume they would remain idle while they planned their route.

"I don't think that will be true for very long, noise or no. And then," She looked to Strix after Thrones had weighed in. "Yeah, we've all got to come home from this. Splitting our force broadens our front line. We should stay out of aggressive postures. We might have to kill everything we see but we get to pick our fights as slow as we wish for now, so let's all stay together." Internally, she wanted to stay away from the open and skulk off to the shadows right then, but as she spoke she shuffled towards the front of the pack, placing herself between the red beacon and the members of the party she deemed to look less hardy. Protect the direction of travel first, react to contact later... If they were going to be surprised while they talked it over, she resolved to be in the way.