The walk from the elevator to Za Bay Pizza was a march to the gallows. I was wearing the Lilith's Lesson shirt that I'd slept in - although it seemed like it shrunk in my sleep - and the black micro-mini skirt that was just barely holding onto my hips. Since Yuna hadn't bothered doing laundry, I had no panties and each step felt like a losing wager with physics.

  "Just act natural," Yuna said, keeping pace with me. She'd left her tech behind for once, looking more like a concerned friend than a producer or manager. "Sora is a scholar of the arts like us, but she's a business owner first. She doesn't care about your rank or your looks, just that the pizza stays hot and gets where it needs to."

  We stepped into Za Bay Pizza. The shop was a neon-drenched temple of grease and dough. Behind the counter, an older woman with a sharp black bob and a neon-green streak through her hair was wrestling a tray of dough. She looked up, her gaze sliding over me with brutal, professional efficiency.

  "Yuna," she said, her voice a flat, husky alto. "I said I needed a delivery driver, not a high-end escort. She can barely walk in those heels."

  "She's reliable, Sora," Yuna countered, taking a seat and helping herself to a soda. "And she's faster than she looks. She's new in town, needs a little help - needs the credits for ... well, for clothes that actually fit."

  Sora paused, her eyes narrowing as they roamed over my violet hair and the way the succubus on my chest was being stretched by my nervous breathing. "Fine. I've got a catering order for a tech firm in the Diamond District. If you can get the pizzas there by lunch without screwing anything up, you can keep the job. Keys are on the counter - it's the Thunder-Bolt 3000. It's an electric scooter - a bit on the old side, but she still works well. Not the fastest."

  I took the keys and the warming bag stacked with pizzas, stepping into the alley. The moped was an older, slightly clunky, electric model and I carefully strapped the pizzas to the back. As I looked at the moped's seat, a wave of mortification hit me.

  I have ... I have to sit on that?

  Normally, I'm guessing that a woman would sit on her skirt when she rode a moped like this - although mini-skirts were clearly not a good outfit choice even on the best day. But with how short this skirt was, there wasn't even a single shred of fabric that I could sit on. My face a beet red, I slowly lowered myself onto the moped. The sensation was catastrophic. The cool, slightly textured vinyl of the seat against my bare, sensitive skin sent a jolt of pure wrongness to my brain. It was a physical intimacy I wasn't prepared for; a reminder that I wasn't just playing a girl's body in a game - I was a girl right now. With everything that implied.

  I ignored the heat on my face, plugged in my phone to provide directions, and headed for the Diamond District. Each bump in the road, however, sent a surge of heat through my loins; the moped's seat grew wetter beneath me, my body traitorously eager for more new experiences.

  The delivery was its own brand of hell. I parked the moped on the street, retrieving the warming bag, and strode in - still wobbling unsteadily on the four-inch heels. A receptionist a few years older than my apparent age gave me a scowl as she waved me through into the building, giving me directions to take the pizza to the fourth floor.

  A room full of young men in suits stopped their meeting to stare as I clicked in, carefully not bending my body as I tried to unload the warming bag and set out the pizzas for them. I was hyper-aware of every set of eyes in the room. It wasn't just a gaze; it felt like a physical weight pressing against my skin. As I reached the third box, I felt my skirt ride up another inch. I froze, keeping my knees locked tight, sweating under the fluorescent lights.

  "Need a hand with that, sweetheart?," one of the suits asked. He didn't wait for an answer. He stepped up beside me, ostensibly to help with the box, but I felt his palm slide firmly across my lower back, his fingers dipping just an inch below the waistband of my skirt.

  The contact was like a match dropped into a bucket of gasoline.

  The vibrations under my skin didn't just start, they slammed into high gear. A sharp, audible *SNAP* of purple static jumped from my skin to his hand. He yelped, pulling back and shaking his fingers, but the damage was done. I could feel my bones humming and the indigo ink starting to emerge through my pores, the strange circuit designs beginning to glow through the white fabric of the t-shirt.

  "Here's your tip, gorgeous," another guy chuckled, reaching out to tuck a five-credit bill into the top of my t-shirt. His knuckles brushed against the swell of my breast, and I felt a surge of white-hot power pulse behind my eyes.

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  "I ... I have to go," I panted, my voice sounding metallic and strange to my own ears.

  I didn't wait for them to sign a receipt, I just grabbed the empty warming bag and practically sprinted for the door, my heels clicking like machine-gun fire on the marble floor. Inside the elevator, I slumped against the mirrored wall, gasping for air. The vibration was so intense that the elevator's lights flickered and dimmed as I passed the third floor. Was I going to get stuck? Why did I take the elevator? My skin was prickling with a mixture of exhilaration and soul-crushing shame.

  I'm a thirty-two year old man, I told myself, clutching the warming bag to my chest. I shouldn't be ... shouldn't be feeling horny when a bunch of guys stare at me. You're disgusting, Kenji. But I didn't feel like Kenji anymore. And my body wasn't even remotely upset at the stares.

  I made it back to the moped without getting myself trapped in the elevator, although the car's lights seemed to have mysteriously blown out, leaving me shrouded in darkness. I practically fell onto the seat, the cool vinyl providing a brief, shocking moment of grounding. I twisted the throttle, desperate to get back to the safety of the pizza shop, and took a sharp turn down an alley in Sector 4 to avoid the traffic ahead.

  That was a mistake.

  The cloying, sweet scent of rotting lilies hit me before I even saw them. My head swam and my vision began to tunnel, and the moped drifted toward a stack of pallets as I let off the throttle.

  "Who ... what?" I gasped, my tongue feeling twice its normal size.

  Two men stepped from the shadows of a loading dock, advancing toward me. One was a scrawny guy in a filthy hoodie, a sickly green vapor curling off his skin like exhaust. Beside him was a man with thick, calloused hands and a predatory sneer.

  "I'm the Pheromone Punk, princess," the hoodie guy chuckled, his voice echoing in my drugged mind. "And my buddy here is the Panty Ripper. You look a little ... overdressed for this neighborhood."

  The Ripper didn't move toward me; he just lifted his hands and made a sharp, tearing motion in the air.

  *R-RIP*.

  The seam of my borrowed Lilith shirt gave way with a sharp snap, exposing a pale, shimmering shoulder and the top of my right breast. I felt a violent, invisible tug at my waist. My micro-skirt lurched, the elastic straining as he tried to telekinetically peel it away from my body.

  "Oh, look at that," the Ripper laughed, his eyes fixed on the gap between the skirt and my bare hip. "I've never seen toppings like that when I order pizza. Let's see what else we can uncover."

  The fear of being stripped naked here in a Sector 4 alleyway acted like a lightning rod. The humming in my bones - the shame, the anger, the vibration that had built up at the pizza delivery when those guys had ogled me, touched me - suddenly funneled into a single point of focus. I didn't have a plan on how to use it, I just had a body that was acting like a live wire.

  "Don't touch me," I hissed at them.

  *CRACK*.

  A massive, jagged bolt of indigo lightning arced from top of my exposed breast, snapping through the air and hitting the Pheromone Punk square in the chest. He was thrown backward, his hoodie smoking as he hit a dumpster. The Ripper's eyes went wide. He made a desperate, two-handed tearing motion at my skirt, but my body was already vibrating too fast for his power to lock on and he only slid it down my thighs instead of ripping it clean off.

  I lunged off the moped, the silver heels becoming lethal weapons. Subconsciously, my body moved into a stance I'd seen a thousand times before - although only through a television screen. I pivoted on my left heel, my body dropping low as my right leg whipped around in a perfect rising arc. Kasumi was my favorite character in the Dead or Alive franchise and I'd memorized all of her moves - but never expected to do any of them.

  The move was devastatingly elegant and completely inappropriate for my wardrobe. As my leg swept upward, the micro-skirt stood no chance; it flared out completely, leaving me totally exposed to the alley's air as my heel connected with the Ripper's jaw.

  As the metal stiletto hit bone, a pulse of indigo electricity followed the impact, discharging with the force of a flashbang. The Ripper didn't just fall; he was launched sideways, his body skipping across the pavement like a stone skipped across a calm river before he hit a brick wall fifty feet away and went limp.

  I landed in a crouch, one hand on the ground to steady myself, feeling my hair drifting up around me in a cloud of static electricity. My skin was etched with glowing indigo circuits that pulsed in time with my racing heartbeat. I was panting, my chest heaving, the Lilith shirt hanging off my shoulder.

  I looked up and saw three teenagers standing at the end of the alley, their phones held high.

  "Holy shit!," one of them yelled, his voice cracking. "Did you see that? It's her, the new Super! Voltana! She just kicked the shit out of those two D-Rank creeps with a nearly-frame-perfect high kick!"

  Another yelled to the third, "Get the camera closer! Look at her glow!"

  I froze, staring at them - forty feet away and getting closer. Well, I guess the Voltana name is official now. And thanks to that kick, so was my no-panties status to at least three teenage boys. Teenage boys with smart phones and high speed Internet.

  Blushing - and panicking - I hopped back onto the moped, barely noticing as I ground myself into the seat, and twisted the throttle. The little moped roared, drawing power directly from my skin, and launched me out of the alley and into traffic at a speed that definitely wasn't street legal.