You wake up feeling groggy, thirsty and hungry. Your v-trodes are on and a few seconds after you wake up a virtual simulation starts playing.  You are dimly aware that Minerva is asleep in her gaming chair in front of the desk.

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Once you've looked over the training sim and game details you can appeal the decision as to which evolved type you got.  I may not change it, but I'll listen.  If/when you are satisfied, please post a description of waking up and running through the sim based on what others may see as they do their own.  Take cues frm the what's in the book, but feel free to modify it.

Shin-Ji had changed. He looked about 20 pounds heavier: not more muscular, just bigger and broader over all. He'd gone from a thin-athletic build to a thick athletic build, just larger and broader over all. His arms, stupidly visible, were now a black and silver appearence. Anything he touched as he moved was smeared by an oily gunk as he walked.

The decision to go ripped gi for his arms was one he'd quickly regret as soon after he woke, he had to bite back a scream and replace it with a stream of sucked in cursing in juvespeak, Korean and Russian swearwords. It was just too much.

He stopped himself as he began to hyperventilate, taking control of his own breathing and trying to think. It was not easy: his arms FELT like his arms, but they looked like some kind of really fancy corp-grade custom ware. His sensei had been augmented with polymer muscle and wired reflexse, but NOTHING like this.

"Congrats!" Thought Shin-Ji. "You got the augments you were debating getting, and it only cost you two arms and two legs!" Of course, that just reminded him that his sensei was dead.

It took him about five minutes of patient breathing and running mental koans before he was able to start the sim. He had to take a break when he heard "That oily gunk you just wiped away? That's your old skin and muscle" to center himself again: though this only took a few seconds. He paused and looked at his ankles: they were the same weird black metal his arms were. He'd get spotted in a second if he didn't cover his arms and legs entirely. At least his body seemed to be normal, uptowards the torso end.

He had to pause and try squeezing an empty energy drink he'd nabbed: it didn't didn't crush (anyone could have done that) so much as deform into a steel ball. " Preem" is all he could let out there as he resumed the v-sim.

The crazy stuff started a few minutes later as Shin-Ji listened twice, repeating the section out of sheer disbelief that he simply must have disheard. He shook his head as he spent the next 10 minutes or so concentrating on his hands.. until his left one slowly formed into a single, lengthy knife edge. It wasn't like a spur, where the blade might pop out of a concealed holster, or one of the fancier mechanical reconfiguring limbs: his arm seemed to mold like liquid, naturally, until his entire forearm was an elongated blade. He couldn't do anything but stare and gawk at it.


"Am I still in a fever dream? This can't be real."

His sim was smart enough to respond to that, affirming he wasn't dreaming.

Numb, and used to following weird orders in the name of physical laerning, he spent the next 10 minutes reconfiruging his fingers into a variety of simple tools, and eventually working out how to pull armor "over" his skin. That was weird, and very difficult, taking Shin-Ji nearly a half an hour.

Concluding the V-sim, he made his way over to a table and numbly began munching some of the ration bars he'd been eating. How did you even begin to process this?

Jai slowly came back to consciousness, wiping silver sweat from his brow. The message he was hearing was crisp, like he was thinking it. Better than his cut-rate trodes. When he noticed that he'd knocked one of the contacts off of his skin when he woke up, the seriously crazy shit the voice was saying started to make more sense.

For a second, he extended his senses. Even past the bunker walls, ancient echoes of Russian military weather reports and yesterday's radio adverts for laundry soap in Bengali threatened to creep into his stream of thought before he was able to tune them out. Apparently quite literally.

That's when the voice told him something truly insane. Reaching up to the hideout's light system, he snapped a finger while thinking "off."

"Uh, my bad. One sec."

Another snap, and they hummed back to life. The exhilaration sent a strange jolt through his spine, and for a long moment, he felt like his brain was on fire. That's when he noticed that the street fighter was snacking on a ration bar in damn near freeze frame. Taking a deep breath, he tried to relax and his perception sluggishly compressed back to normal. Well, something like normal. If anything was, anymore.

"This is insane. Scivid stuff. I take it the rest of you are on an entirely different trip, because I've never punched deck in my life, and this femme just told me I -am- one."

Tailgate woke up, and he really wanted to eat or drink something, but he felt weird. He was covered in sweat, most of it dry by then. His ears and his throat hurt, like he'd been at a concert and yelling a lot.

And he started to panick for a moment, as he couldn't SEE ANYTHING! He opened his mouth several times, but no sound came out, at least nothing any one in the area could hear. He thrashed around for a moment.

Then the training sim kicked in and information started to flow - too loud! He clapped hands over his ears at the volume, and they...what happened to his EARS?? Why couldn't he see? Why couldn't he talk??

He had to fight to remain calm and to pay attention to the sim, to the information. But he did, out of desparation, and to focus on something else other than himself for a moment - though, since it was describing what had happened to him, that was less comforting.

After several minutes, he finally came to himself once more. He wiped the silver goo from around his ears and mouth. He slowed his breathing down and tried talking again, concentrating on it like he hadn't had to do in a long time. His voice sounded...a little weird for a second, then normalized. "This is...fraggin' nuts."