There's a brutal sort of beauty to your mask: all sheer, sleek, lines and harsh angles. A solid wedge, an anvil-head, sweeping up along your cheekbones and over your nose, clamped just below your hairline. The impression of fangs in the negative space along the lower lip, the missing pieces cut to leave your mouth free. Articulated arms anchoring into the edges, jointed things running above your ears and hooking just below the lobes. Twin sets of actuators running to the segmented, sectioned half-collar clinging to the back of your neck, the base of your skull. Its nothing like Nyx's visor with its weird, almost delicate construction. Like origami paper creased and folded and bonded to crystalline composite. Nah, yours is predatory. One part fighter pilot to two parts raptor. Blood red rimmed in black rubber seals.
Breathe in, breathe out, let the distance soothe you, let it slow the steady hammering in your chest. The world beyond the visor is muted, softened into shades of scarlet and smudges of charcoal. The edge of the balcony just a blur of shadow. It's safer this way. You're safer this way. Tug the second half of your mask down over your head, roll the gauzy cloth over your mouth, your chin, your throat. Stitched in skeletal jaws patterned over your teeth, stretching as you work your jaw, as the comm suite boots up. Pluck up the edges, setting them flush to the helm.
You're not a kid anymore and you're not hiding beneath a blanket but it's the same principle.
The Baekho Armory logo flashes across your field of view. Streams of silver white slithering from the edges of your vision, twisting into a stylized, snarling tiger. The company name stamped below in Hangul, the characters glitching, converting to English as a tone plays. It fades out and Dust swims back into crystalline clarity, rain drops striking your mask one by one, a gentle plink, a barely audible patter. They quirk and squirming away from the hydrophobic material suspended a fraction of an inch from your face. Dripping down to the cloth warmer. Beading on your ears.
Startup finishes, finalizes, a set of names scrolling up past your right eye in stutters and starts as they come online one by one. Fenrir, Nyx, Jiaolong after a second. Folding, collapsing back into the nest of menus and applications hovering just offscreen, waiting to be called back up.
[...]
Wind plays over your bare chest, flowing over your skin with freezing fingers. Pale flesh tightening, goosebumps rippling out but you don't really feel it, it's just a false reaction, an imitation response. Rain sizzles against your shoulders as you draw on those long, loose sleeves, loop between your thumbs and the rest of your fingers, sitting snug across your palm. You flex as the smart-mesh activates and it draws tight. Fabric textured to match the major muscle groups below, clinging so close it could be painted on, accentuating the definition. Like you dipped your limbs in a vat of crude up to the shoulder. The angled plates run in ridges down the outside of your arms, clinking softly as you test your range. Smoke grey hovering over an oil slick. Red lines kindle to life, forking and flowing down to your wrist; raw arteries and bloody tendons.
