Background:

Special Agent Delivery of the Alien Defense Directorate walked the halls of the Ceres Station outpost. Her night patrol was deemed meaningless by those with the authority to declare such things, and so it was conducted in her 'casual attire.' So it meant she was walking on human-looking legs made svelte by the ADD issue rubber jumpsuit, her green-and-grey also concealing the join where synthetic legs mated with synthetic hip-sockets, the twin rows of interface sockets rising parallel on either side of her spine, distorted somewhat by the shoulder couplings that connected her to her hand-made hands and arms, extending up into an open-faced hood to cover the contact-patch link-in plates embedded throughout her skull.

Atop the hood she had a short, pale red wig, in deference to decorum. In deference to the fact that the gesture to decorum had been an explicit order, and in truth she was not presently capable of giving a fuck, it was at a rakish angle.

“Hey, [~#!#~]!” The burst of unintelligible sound was something that Delivery knew meant someone was calling her name. She couldn’t hear her actual name. Couldn’t read it. She could write it, practiced shape of motion in her mind could move a pen on paper and make a shape she couldn’t see, but while it was her name, Delivery knew she wouldn’t hear it again until she found her, heard it again from her lips. “Wait up!”

Protocol demanded that she turn. “Miss Kaprenni. To what do I owe the...” Delivery trailed off briefly before concluding, “interaction?”

“Dammit [~#!#~], I’ve asked you a thousand times to call me Maribel! Anyway, some of the other girls and I are arranging a social for those of us based out of Ceres Station, snacks, drinks, movies, beanbag chairs, that sort of thing. Wanted to know if you wanted to come.”

“I want to hunt, not fraternize.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say.” Maribel Kaprenni withdrew a data drive out of her jacket, “So I also brought you a mission.”

Delivery greedily snatched it from her fingers, “And just like that, Maribel, I’m happy to see you. Was that so hard?”
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Delivery returned to her ship, she had quarters in the station that weren’t in its docks, but they were rarely used, really, only when she was confined to them for upsetting someone important. She dropped the drive into a socket as soon as she got inside her ship, the Chucky’s Last Gasp, and started peeling her way out of the 'outside face' of the uniform, exposing the equally synthetic skin underneath, gasping softly with relief as her ship knowingly brought around the interface armature to align with her spine, the helmet that's grown comfortable from overuse clamping around her head as its tail entered her in two dozen places down her back. With the connections made, the AI receeded, allowing her to spread her senses and control throughout the ship as she walked towards the cockpit. Halfway there, the ship picked her up around the waist, detecting that the small power plant implanted opposite her heart, the pulse of life for the copious parts of her that were no longer flesh and bone, had closed its connection to her limbs in preparation for disassembly. The couplings released, and the legs and arms with which she walked among her co-workers were swiftly tucked aside in their storage to wait until she needed them again.

Delivery herself panted with lust, a massive sexual response to disassembly and reassembly something she had enjoyed being programmed into her, back when she had been "[~#!#~]." Doing all four at once had been a rarity then, either a giddy, chaotic surge of joy at the start of play "to make sure she was in the mood" (not that a lack of being in the mood had ever been a problem during that life except the time she turned out to be allergic to the shellfish native to Tau Pegasi 3b) or a punishing last gasp, wringing one more climax from her and making sure she was truly completely spent. These days, it was how she usually reconfigured herself, the surge of sensation and emotion a reminder that [~#!#~] was still inside her, waiting to be reconnected when the Long Hunt was finally over. Delivery held no delusions of returning to her former life, not with the number of places she'd made enemies while working for the ADD, let alone in her personal endeavours her ADD pay financed. But if she could succeed, then [~#!#~] could live again, some life, somewhere.

In the cockpit, in many ways as the cockpit, hung the splayed open oversized mechanical torso that was the only piece of her combat uniform that never changed. The capsule contained her completely when closed, connecting her to her ship through her nervous system, her skull, her spine, her shoulders and hips, the machinery gingerly entwining with her in every way, the linkages bundled out a pair of umbillicals through ports below the behemoth's shoulders, each carrying the same for redundancy, both bundles of data cabling around the tubes keeping the appropriate life support tanks filled and drained as appropriate, the tubing at the other end of those systems wriggling its customary way into Delivery's body as the padding flooded with the kinetic damping gel that provided the innermost layer of her protections. The last of her fighting-torso's locking bolts latched home, as well as the armour that covered them. With a thought, she reached out to call up the mission details so she could decide how to outfit herself for it. Almost always a couple of weapons explicitly chosen to play rock to what could be known about the enemy's scissors, and one big fucker as the anti-Murphy contingency. But which ones and ensuring utility was important. "Do not fire a bunker-buster artillery piece inside a civillian craft" is a lesson that nobody survives learning the hard way.

She was surprised to find instead a rather stern note that the mission was encrypted, and would only decrypt while her ship’s systems were reporting her to actually be asleep for once. Maybe someday she’d manage to get them to realize that sleeping alone lost all of its meaning when it was just a timered mode one selected from a drop-down menu behind one’s retinas. Delivery didn’t sleep much. Sleep meant spending time in [~#!#~]’s memories.

There weren’t very many large human populations in space. Unless you counted breeding-harems, which Delivery most certainly did not. There were a few large colonies of the descendants of ex-slaves, and scattered small enclaves elsewhere. She’d been born in one of the latter on Ceres Station, a deep space trading outpost, and where what little human community it had was a prime target for pirates and slavers until the ADD established a presence there. Even with the crackdown on unlicensed slaver activities, it was a place where humans were second or third-class citizens at best, and you kept your head down and found something to be VERY good at if you wanted someone to be upset if you went “missing.”

She’d built things. Well enough that the station’s maintenance crews didn’t mind her following them around in the pressurized areas and trying to learn from them. After awhile even to help (as the only one small enough to not feel claustrophobic in some of the crawlspaces).

She’d been wandering the market looking for spare parts and cheap soap when she’d met her. The stall was in the area for temporary traders visiting from off-station, rather than those with a permanent presence, and was indeed selling spare parts. But not like any she’d ever seen before, oh, prosthetics were a need everywhere in the universe, accidents happen, and sometimes, hah, always there’s not enough nanomol to go around. But these... it was normal for a cybernetic limb to advertise the dexterity of its digits, its transmission of sensation, but much much less so for it to advertise an ability to articulate those digits one knuckle at a time in directions that the original it was a replacement for never could have, nor to be able to fluctuate their surface texture. But the real oddity was the woman running it. A human woman, alone in this sector without obvious weapons or someone’s Mark? Insanely brave, insanely stupid... or hiding something.

“You’re staring an awful long time for someone who still has all their original parts.”

The woman was smiling at her, and there was something... knowing there. Like the woman knew something secret about her that she herself didn’t.

“I’m just surprised. And, I guess a little jealous. There’s pride in building things that are needed, but I can’t help but wonder what it feels like to build something that isn’t a necessity, just wanted instead of needed. To build something like this, something for pleasure.”

“Try it, then.”

“What?”

“I’ll give you a want. Build me something. Anything. Surprise me. I’m here for another two weeks before I head out again. Show me what you can do.”

She turned away and fled, filled with shame at being mocked so, but over the next several days, she found herself taking on the challenge, there was always scrap that no one cared about, and she’d cut her teeth playing with it. Collecting it. And now, consuming it.

When she returned to the market, she walked angrily, aggressively, approaching the woman’s stall and thrusting the package at her. A patchwork metal egg, unclasped at the top and springs forced it open, a clockwork ballerina danced for some twenty seconds before the springs ran out.

“Not bad, especially given what you’d have had to work with. You’ve got talent. Wanna ditch this slum?”

“Why do you insist on mocking me?”

“I’m not. I’m offering you a chance, one chance. And all the risk is yours. You come on my ship, you turn out not to be useful, I won’t space you, but I will leave your ass on the docks of wherever I ply my wares next.”

“And being useful means what exactly?”

“You see what I make. I want to expand. I can only have so many hands.”

“Two, I presume.”

“Heh, sure, we’ll say two for now. You’ll learn, and you’ll help. If you help enough that we’re successful in expanding, you’ll even get paid.”

It was a stupid idea. But opportunities were hard to come by on Ceres Station. “You’ve got a deal, Miss?”

“I’m Scarlet. My ship’s the Perpetual Dawn in Bay 43. Help me pack up here then we can grab anything you want to bring on the way. Good to meet you.”

“[~#!#~], good to meet you, too.”

It started as an awkward working relationship, but she learned quickly, and became enthralled with the nature of the business. The philosophy that ‘good enough’ started when a piece was at least somewhat better in every way than what it was replacing was one that she could respect, and Scarlet liked that she did. In short order, the two were friends, and then more than friends. Even inventions dedicated primarily to pleasure needed testing, and most often Scarlet was the tester and she was the test subject. But both of them were happy.

As the Perpetual Dawn contained the workshop and operating theatre where they did all their work, and where Scarlet performed the first of the surgeries that would allow [~#!#~] to start partaking of the fruits of their shared labours, rather than an order being placed and sending off specs for custom work, they went to the client and did things on site. They started being called the “Delivery Girls” as a nickname, and they decided it was enjoyable enough as a name to make official for their “firm.”

While it was far from their preferred field of work, sufficient skill rarely goes unnoticed, and so they paid ‘protection’ of a sort from the larger cybernetics corporations that were keen to annex them by accepting project contracts to design equipment that would then be the corporation’s property to produce and distribute. With regenerative medicine growing more and more common, cybernetics was becoming more and more marginalized between the recreational and the militaristic, between choosing the synthetic freely, and choosing it because it was faster to graft a new arm than have to grow it first.

Perhaps simply for pleasure, perhaps in rebellion against this shift, the Delivery Girls continued to alter and enhance themselves and each other, replacing more and more of their bodies with synthetics of their own invention, eventually culminating in them lying side by side upon the slab, each neuro-operating the machinery responsible for installing the new ‘Second heart’ in the other. Truly, it wasn’t actually very effective as a power plant for the limbs, ‘normalish’ limbs didn’t need that much, high-power sets needed far more, but it was far more important in that it was there to let the two of them communicate ‘heart to heart.’ They still spoke aloud at times, enjoying the feelings of choosing the specific words rather than simply passing wholeformed thoughts and emotions back and forth.

She had become, in both their minds, in both their hearts, Scarlet’s pet as well as lover and business partner. It was something they both enjoyed, and it had been an amusing discovery that her mind worked far more efficiently if she was bound to her work.

They wanted it to last forever. Really, with how regularly they were replacing and upgrading parts of each other, it probably could have.

It didn’t.

They’d been playing when the ship had come into scanning range. It had seemed a safe enough spot, a rendezvous was scheduled there a few days later to get supplies for a corporate project. Finding the FTL jammed when they decided to run from a ship that didn’t answer being hailed made clear that it was definitely not safe.

Scarlet had hidden her in a crate and armed herself with what she could. Closed the connection so they wouldn’t find her. And so all she knew when the crate cracked itself open and spilled her limblessly back on the floor and allowed her to reconnect to the Perpetual Dawn was that Scarlet was gone. They’d made sure not to keep very much on the ship so they wouldn’t be an inviting target for thieves, never having considered that someone would steal them, instead.

The actually planned rendezvous still happened, and while Combine Armament Technologies was there to deliver materials to be used in designing a combat platform for, well, they hadn’t SAID ‘spies and commandos’ but it was pretty clear. They had made the Delivery Girls several offers that had been declined regarding permanent employment, and while she was loathe to do so, her Mistress’s absence left her with little option but to take their new offer. They’d contracted both of them to do the work. So she’d continue to work on the project over a “prolonged period of refinement and testing” until such time as the both of them could finish and deliver it. They even offered to leverage contacts to get her instated with the ADD to further legitimize her activities.
--------------------------

Delivery woke to the mission details streaming across her field of view. Her lips twitched in the echo of a smile around the life support tubing. Some pirates with unusual equipment had been sighted in the Copernicus sector, and she was being transferred to the Antares Base in order to operate from there while hunting them down. They’d been disavowed by all the major groups, and so she was authorized to use whatever sort of force she felt appropriate to... subdue them. Plenty of time on the way to Antares Base to pick out her loadout, probably best if she didn’t until after reporting in, people tended not to like it when she introduced herself to them in the wetwork-body first. As she powered up to leave the dock, Delivery replayed once again the memory of Scarlet pressing her into the crate to hide her as the pirate vessel had violated the sanctuary of the Perpetual Dawn.

< “I love you, Jenny. Be safe.” >

“I love you too, Mistress. I will find you.”
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Name: Jenny

Codename: Delivery

Gender: Female

Age: 56, the synthetically over-enhanced cheat

Place of Birth: Ceres Station

Former Shokushu Student? No.

Nationality: Spacer

Hair Color: Usually none. Wigs are an option.

Eye Color: Usually green, but subject to change.

Ethnicity: of middle-European descent, but 3rd generation spacer.

Skin Tone: Fairly pale.

Pubic Hair: No.

Distinguishing features: You mean aside from the fact that outside of ADD bases she’s most often seen as a 3-6 metre tall combat robot? That all of her limbs come off probably counts.

Height: unequipped: 70centimetres

Weight: unequipped: 27 kilos (remember, just a torso and head)

Bust: usually B-cup, but variable

Waist: 43cm

Hips: depends what legs she’s wearing

Psychological Profile: Extremely aggressive towards pirates and slavers, desperate for any information that could lead her to finding Scarlet, and loathe to form new social connections in a misguided belief that forming any new relationships while on her Long Hunt would be a betrayal of her missing Mistress. Does feel a mild sense of camaraderie with others who refuse to accept a loved one as lost, or hatred of pirates and slavers.

Personality: Outwardly brash, abrasive, violent, vengeful, inwardly hating it all the while, hating what she’s had to become in the progress of her Hunt, and desperately hoping she hasn’t gone too far to be able to go back to being Jenny when the Hunt is over.

Virgin: Technically, as the Perpetual Dawn is in storage secured by the ADD and contains a rather large collection of interchangeable vaginas compatible with her current body frame, probably at least one of them hasn’t been used.

Piercing or Tattoos: Generally not, see above.

Language: Internal electronic translation for most languages for which dictionaries are readily available on interstellar networks, fluent in most languages spoken on Ceres Station.

Weapons of choice: She is significantly more proficient at the ‘point and click interface’ of firearms and artillery than melee, but unless she’s lacking her armour she’s not exactly soft up close.

Equipment: Reconfigurable exo-armour, EVA and NBC capable, but not capable of flight in gravity-bearing environments.

Fighting style: Bring lots of ammo. Use lots of ammo.

Special Attributes: The ‘Second Heart’ is not removable or deactivatible, if ever she manages to by luck or skill get within communication range of Scarlet, they will reconnect.

Capabilities: Extremely technically competent and devoted to her cause, difficult to shake her during combat as she’s not truly fighting, but having a lengthy history writing adaptive combat algorithms for cyborgs/androids, she’s installed and is running such on her own brain, while continuing to refine and improve it.

Weaknesses: It’s a good program, but it IS a program. Deadly at range, but up close someone who spots her pattern with enough time to exploit it before it shifts has her at their mercy. Also, she’s pretty much completely helpless if someone manages to ‘shuck the oyster’ if you will.

Ship/Vehicle: The Chucky’s Last Gasp is essentially a glorified boarding torpedo. Having no true cabin or galley or recreational space, it applies dogfighter design principles to a vehicle large enough to not stick out parked alongside other personal deep-space craft. What would ordinarily be living space instead dedicated in part to storing her arsenal, and the rest to having much more powerful engine and generators than a ship of such scale generally can. Much like a raiding ship, her ship’s weapon loadout is intended to short-circuit and disable enemy ships rather than destroy them, and then for her to find or create an entry point to get the front end of the ship into for the nose to open up and deploy her in all her stompy metal glory to dispense ‘chastisement.’

Cool character, I especially like the interchangeable vaginas