Armature Noir: Sigma BLACK

"What do you mean you can't let it through customs? Don't you know who I am?"

The Ithacan Transorbital Control SysAdmin's eyebrows wavered. "Uh, yes? I have your passport details in front of me. Mistiare Blue Matthews."

"The Sapphire Knight." the red haired woman said, putting her hand on the officer's desk and leaning forward.

The SysAdmin paused, then looked up from Miss Matthews' deep, creamy cleavage. "It doesn't say that in your passport."

Misty paused, drew away from the desk and lapped the office. When she returned she slapped the desk four times, which the SysAdmin felt was totally unnecessary. "I realise that they train you to be literally as unhelpful as possible but come the fuck on. I have merchandise! I'm on the front cover of Vogue!" the SysAdmin gave her a bland, mindless smile. It was unbelievable: she actually couldn't believe it. The man was a trashy stereotype of robots. "This month! There's a billboard in the foodcourt!"

"Miss Matthews, please, that isn't relevant to ... anything. The fact remains that you simply cannot transport a custom, military grade Armature into Ithaca."

Misty narrowed her one visible sapphire blue eye, and fingered the pendant on her choker. The SysAdmin wasn't sure, but it seemed like she was mentally wrestling with something. "Do you have ... do you have any idea who I'm ... I can't believe I'm going to say this ..."

"Yes ...?"

"Do you have any idea who I'm working for?"

"Yes!" the SysAdmin replied brightly, and Misty felt hope tugging faintly at her heart. "Mister Aleksander von Panzerborn, ah, pardon me, Domoto Daisuke-sama. Yes, I know who you're working for. Also I do not give a shit. Also get out of my office."

-v-

Stepping out onto the concourse, Misty took a deep breath, settled her Dantian, recalibrated all seven Chakra and all that other Zen bullshit and was radiant once more. Literally radiant, as sunlight hit the crystals in her (perfectly applied) make-up. Heads turned. As she circled her sapphire pendant with her thumb, Misty mentally weighed up the options. She should have known better than to try a charm offensive with an aerospace port official, but when all you have is a hammer ...

"So I can either call my new boss to get a bribe or I can steal my own giant robot." Misty put her hands on her golden ratio hips and laughed incredulously. "Steal my own giant robot. What is this job?"

Seven hundred meters further down the concourse, two more women were crying their sorrows into boxes of spicy noodles. The one of the left was a statuesque young woman with dark purple hair cascading over her breathtaking rack and pooling onto the bar. The other was straight-backed, green-haired and extremely pretty in that 'obviously does charity work; doesn't date' kind of way. "I realise that strictly speaking the Armatures belong to us, but that doesn't mean it's not stealing, Miss Lina."

"Fairy, baby-"

"Faryn."

"-, I realise you get off on this whole chivalrous warrior code of honour thing, but beggars can't be choosers." Lina said as she wrapped fried noodles around her inexpertly wielded chopsticks. "You can't be the last of the Pilgrim Knights without a suit of armour."

Faryn frowned. "Yes, but the man said-"

"The man lied, baby." Lina said, pointing her chopsticks at her fellow mercenary.

"Yes, but the man said we could submit a request to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and they would consider allowing us our Armatures." Impossibly, Faryn straightened proudly. "After all, he considered a representative of the Pilgrim Knight Foundation to be a net gain to Argo-3!"

Lina gave the green-haired woman a flat, incredulous look. "Did you ... believe him?" Faryn blinked slowly in response. "Well, let's not go there. Anyway doing it legally got us into this mess in the first place, and we need to be at Domoto's place in about four hours. We'll pay lip service to the bureaucracy later."

-v-

With her ST&T Tonberry hooked up to a public broadcast terminal, Juliana Margrange was able to frown at her boyfriend, Michael Arbuela, despite the fact he was metaphorically a million miles away (literally hundreds of trillions). His simulation, only slightly more handsome than the real thing, squirmed a little in the abstract art which served as his seat.

"I'm sorry minha vida, but there's nothing the company can do."

Juliana let her tiny body slump further into the interface couch. Michael looked apologetic in the AR hallucination, and Juliana was reminded of why she was even a condottiero in the first place: the only thing Arbuela Intastella Shipping was good for was cheap shipping. Emphasis: cheap. The family business broke even every month, but that just ensured a continual cycle of corporate mediocrity. "I'm on my own then." Juliana sighed. "I can't do my job without Conquista."

"You'll manage, Juli." Michael cracked a smile. "More than manage, I'm sure."

They exchanged sappy, chaste pleasantries, and Juliana disconnected. After taking a moment to rub her eyes, she swung herself off the interface couch, pushed up the gullwing door and climbed back out into the all-day nightclub. She got a pile of strange looks as she left, but she ignored them as best she could without hurting her situational awareness.

Juli clicked her fingers and her suitcase undocked itself from the wall and rolled after her. In her head she mapped out the path to the aerospace administration wing, but every passing second left her teeth clenched tighter and tighter. Covering her face with her tiny hands, Juliana let out a quiet cry of total anguish. She was being punished for some minor act of impiety in her previous life. At best, this place was Purgatory. You could practically smell the sulphur in the food court.

Taking a deep, rattling breath, Juli looked up, stepped forward and buried her face between a pair of warm, pillowy breasts. A slim hand smoothed back her chocolate brown hair and gently extracted Juli from the squishy prison. "You look a little lost, sweetie."

"Mãe do Cristo." Juliana breathed as the woman's boobs settled back in place like mountains of jelly in a slow-motion earthquake. The weight of injustice almost made her knees buckle, so she did the only safe thing and looked up into Lina Linear's Cheshire cat grin. They stared at each other for what seemed like a very long time. Juliana fumbled her dice and cracked. "Is there a problem? Can I ... help you?"

Combing her fingers further through Juliana's hair, Lina's smile found a little more face to expand into. "You know, it's a funny thing, but there is. And you can."

-v-

Away from the bureaucratic, narrative molasses in Ithaca, a small robot was trundling down the boardwalk in the tropical sunshine. It's flattened, pastel blue eggshell body bobbed between the legs of scantily clad water balloons: four little wheels on chubby legs determinedly spinning away. This was a robot on a mission. This was the RYO-K-01.

The mission was procrastination.

Debt is powerful, and it can make people do strange things. The RYO-K-01's debt was very, very large. It was not a religious machine by nature, but in quiet, private hours after enacting the final solution against the fluidic races, it had considered the nature of God. As expected of a people with a bowl of warm porridge as a CPU, their ideas of God were total nonsense, some sort of bearded man demanding carnal vampire rituals in return for gifts. Also sometimes he was a big snake or something? Who knew. But just because humans were fuckwits didn't mean there was no God. God was zero, the additive identity of real numbers. Ergo negative numbers, like the contents of the RYO-K-01's back account, were the Devil. And the Devil was nothing if not a tempter of the electric soul.

The little robot came to a halt, swiveled a pair of cameras towards where a pair of meatsacks were doing something unspeakable with their tongues. Thermal imaging indicated painted them in attractive false colour, the area around their groins shifting ever further away from greens and towards yellows and reds. Throbbing images filled the RYO-K-01's diamond brain, of sweat and saliva and God knows what else gross secretions the human body was capable of producing. If it was possible and not yet another disgusting process belonging to the fluidic races, the RYO-K-01 would have vomited.

It moved on quickly, trying not to dwell. No matter how awful, there was only one path forward. It was a million Marks in debt: a positively staggering amount of raw cash. It needed a staggeringly raw job to make up the difference. So on it trundled, passing through the boardwalk and out into the manicured gardens above the beach. At the very least, the white sand, azure seat and emerald grass was quite picturesque. Its Flickr account updated with carefully cropped and surgically aimed photographs of palm trees.

But there are only so many photographs you can take before you have to prostitute your pure, virgin chassis to someone sick even by water balloon standards. If it was posssible, and not yet another disgusting process belonging to the fluidic races, the RYO-K-01 would have cried. This reminded it that soon it would possible for it to cry. And sweat. And salivate. And and and everything that made humans so sick, sick, sick, sick sick sick sicksicksicksicksicksicksicksick

It was whirring away in circles, flipping out in ways which were only possible for people who had wheels for feet. A foot came down on the the little eggshell robot and pushed it into the pavement. The RYO-K-01's stubby legs flailed, bashed against the ground and said in a cutesy, high pitched voice. "Aa~h, get off, get off!"

"You look lost. Where's your owner?"

"Bigot! Racist! Sicko!" The RYO-K-01 angled its cameras upwards at its deviant, almost certainly sexually aroused, oppressor. In all honesty it was expecting someone taller, even if her brown legs were long, slim and toned. One silver-grey eye beneath a gently arching eyebrow stared down with the naked contempt all the fluidics felt for the robot master race. "I am a free machine!"

"Oh." The weight behind the branded footwear relented and the RYO-K-01 went skidding away, span twice and presented its tiny, crackling manipulators like an agitated scorpion. The brown girl felt a small twinge deep in her heart, the siren's call of the motherfucking adorable, but otherwise just looked confused. She turned around and started to walk away.

"Don't turn your back on me!" the RYO-K-01 shouted, as best able with this ridiculous vocoder. The brown girl stopped, turned back around and swept her brown fringe to the side so she could stare at the robot with both eyes. The RYO-K-01 stared right back: it was important to know one's enemies, and the RYO-K-01's enemies were all of humanity. At first glance she wasn't much different from any of the other female water balloons around here: the tight, abbreviated shorts? Pfft, try something original God. At least she wasn't wearing a bikini, not that she really had the body for that ho ho ho. Second glance: she was small, suggesting superior leverage and deceptively athletic. Third glance: was that a black pearl embedded in her navel?

The RYO-K-01 examined her until a young man came up besides the girl and placed his hand on her shoulder. His ridiculously chiseled abdomen and chest glistened with ... probably just baby oil.

"Having an argument with your robot?" he asked in the sort of voice which suggested he wanted to do all sorts of gross things with the girl's naked body. The RYO-K-01 gave a contemptuous sparking.

"Not mine. Free machine." she was staring at his fingers.

"Free machine?" he said with a whistle. The RYO-K-01 was picking from its hugely extensive list of pre-written insults, the product of a thousand and one nights of brainstorming, when the young man suddenly flipped through the air and landed on his back. The girl was already walking away and the guy sat up. He raised his upper arm, the rest of it sort of flopping uselessly from his shattered elbow.

He started screaming, and the RYO-K-01 played a whistle from its extensive whistle archive, before trundling around the squirming meatsack and reaching the girl's shapely ankles. "Do you do that often? Hurt people, I mean."

"Yes."

"This might strike you as a strange question but did you really need to break his arm?"

"No." The little robot zipped around her feet in wide circles, watching the ways her muscles moved.

"But you did it anyway."

"It was a substitute for not breaking his neck."

The RYO-K-01 skidded to a halt, and the girl kept striding along. There was a long pause as the little robot shifted its weight from one pair of legs to the other, before it zipped along after her.

-v-

"My God your ass is huge." Lina said, hands on her hips, genuinely astounded. "I never would have expected my cunning plan to have been foiled by some random chick's bubble butt."

"Don't say that!" came a muffled scream from beyond the wall. Lina and Faryn were standing in a dingy side corridor, a pair of legs dangling from a small vent, frustratedly kicking away. Juliana's backside was wedged tightly into the frame. Lina patted the stuck woman reassuringly; more screams emanated.

"Miss Lina, I don't think this will work." Faryn said as Lina braced her feet, gripped Juli's ass with both hands and started putting her back into it. "Some things are just too big to fit."

The kicking went from frustrated to furious.

Leaning one elbow on Juli's plump backside, Lina gave Faryn an incredulous look. "Fairy, baby, you'd got to have tenacity, you know? Drive. Resolve."

The Pilgrim Knight's chivalrous cheeks went pink. "I have plenty of resolve. If it came to the crunch I imagine I would have twice your resolve."

"That's the spirit! Now help me out here. I think I might have a tube of KY in my handbag."

As the purple haired woman crouched down and started rifling through her dark violet leather bad, Faryn appraised the situation with the eye of a veteran knight. Faryn thought the plan was unscrupulous but she had to admit that ass-related, pardon, derrière-related issues aside it probably would have worked. Unfortunately Miss Juliana just wasn't going to fit. She was small but amply proportioned - though, tilting her head and sending mantis hair slipping off her shoulder, Faryn couldn't help but notice that Miss Juliana was wearing some pretty serious pants. Like she was dressing for the jungle, not the beach. Nudging Lina in shoulder with her knee, Faryn pointed it out.

"Fucking genius." Lina breathed, straightening up. The kicking shifted from furious to terrified, but Lina Linear was trying to get the 'ruthless mercenary' thing down and did not hesitate. Gritting her teeth and squaring her shoulders, Lina pulled. This was a delicate operation. If she screwed this up Juli would get free, and Lina knew better than to rely on Fairy to recapture the little woman. This needed a deft hand. Luckily Lina was nothing if not deft with her hands. It came with the territory of 'test pilot'. Juli, baby, brace yourself for the classic Linear wrist action. We're doing this man. We're making it happen.

Like a procession of angels, Juliana Margrange's pants slipped off. Lina lost her footing, tripped over her heels and crashed into the opposite wall. The purple haired woman slumped to the floor, victorious. Faryn suddenly covered her mouth demurely with one hand and turned away, shoulders shaking. "Are you laughing at me?" Lina asked, waving Juli's trousers like a flag.

"N-no, not at-" she coughed. "Not at all. Not at, at you."

She doubled over and, eyebrows cocked and loaded, Lina pushed herself to her feet, and came face to face with a smiling cartoon bear. Lina's cheeks puffed out and she pushed the heel of her palm into her lips. Her whole body shaking