FurAffinity • Twitter • Art Tumblr • DeviantART • Facebook Page • Blade Under Mask Patreon

After seeing [M.A.N.T.I.S], onom decided to request for his monthly reward, Sayaka in the same cyberpunk AU!

If you read the story Amethystine wrote for M.A.N.T.I.S, you can see that agent Deare is helped by a certain arachnid during her descent... well, here's the woman who oversees her mission: S.C.O.R.P!

Amethystine also wrote a little thing to accompany this, which you can read below!

Also, please take a look at our Patreon and consider supporting us! We're so close to making Blade Under Mask a thing!

Attend -Or- Surveillant ~ by Amethystine

"You're going to need a bionic lip if you keep chewing on your current one like that."

"Don't say 'current one,' that implies it's not permanent," the SCORP said, as calmly as possible, glancing ever so quickly and subtly at her right pedipalp, which gleamed in the dim light of the display before her. The robotic prosthetic that ran alongside her face had buzzed a moment ago, and began again, as further radio transmission came through its internal receiver.

"Well, that just brings me back to my first point of how, if you keep chewing on it--"

"Shut up--" the scorpion stopped herself, course-correcting to: "--sir. Please." She took a moment to centre herself; closed her eyes - the larger, more prominent pair _and_ the four tiny ones, two of which each existed below the bigger set - and breathed deeply. She also calmly reached up in the darkness and closed her artificial hand around the augment-laden pedipalp, muffling the miniature microphone in its tip the old fashioned way, instead of mentally commanding it to shut off.

The old snake would be able to detect such a deactivation, though. She wouldn't want him to think she was keeping things from him.

With her words thusly obscured, she chimed, cheerily, "But mostly shut up, you lecherous leech!" Her comment and her candour contrasted quite considerably. She smiled to herself and opened her eyes, letting go of the diminutive limb that doubled as her communications hub. She was honestly unsure if she spoke in an upbeat manner because she took pleasure in what she said, or in the idea of the 'unblinking eyes and all-hearing ears everywhere' python being bested so easily.. or if it was just an affectation that was meant to be insulting to anyone who would genuinely talk like that. All of the above, she supposed.

In any case, she lowered her hands back to the keyboard, lining up her thumbs with the carefully gouged notch-marks in the laptop's hardcase. She was ready to begin anew. She stretched her fingers on both hands while keeping her palms in place. Her thumbs and two fingers on each hand stretched and then seemed to snap apart into their individual sections, between knuckles, said portions of her digits supported on thin metallic armatures. In another burst of rapid extension, the robotic extremities also subdivided, the small finger-sections splitting seamlessly while the network of fine titanium 'typers' pounced out and poised over the keys in pre-programmed positions, prepared to play across the computer at the merest thought.

What had been perfect approximations of the scorpion's natural appendages - three short, slow, possibly clumsy digits - had transformed into a web of fine-tuned tech, which had nearly tripled the extremities present. Her thumbs had become two typers each; her fingers, three each - a total of sixteen.

The deep green of the woman's eyes locked onto the screen. She did and did not [though mostly did not] like to see the typers moving, even if she liked the sight of them growing outward and branching, and the increase in her abilities. It was distracting if she caught sight of them, and perilous to truly look and imagine moving them in the way one might control their real fingers. Typers just worked, and did whatever you thought. She did not command fingers to do anything, she simply saw operations onscreen that needed to be performed and thought about doing them, and they were thusly accomplished. She looked in a text box and knew she had to enter the command to access the root drive to the local CCTV system she had hardwired into, an hour ago. As soon as she looked at the box, her cursor was there. Some part of what one might call her 'pinkie' (she guessed) had placed her there, and as the memory of what the command line for this type of system was entered her mind as what she needed to input, it was already there, a rapid but subdued clacking echoing around her. It was almost too fast to notice the sound of the typers working, as they had hit enter, the command vanishing it as soon as she acknowledged it having been spun into existence for her.

She hardly noticed the wonder of it, of course. She was entering more commands and more windows were opening.

Her screen blossomed outward. There was no physical movement from the laptop (though she remembered a time when such a thing would have happened to provide more screens); instead, windows just grown into new 'screens', becoming a four-by-four grid of them, as if she had 16 monitors in front of her. In another second, it grew to five-by-five, a quart of a hundred screens or windows or displays, or whatever you care to call them nowadays projected as holograms above the more-or-less flat computer she sat in front of.

The arachnid leaned back and scanned over them. A soft tingle in her cheeks and a pleasant buzz in her brain accompanied the flood of information. She did love this. She was Big Brother. She was Echelon. She was a quantum superposition. She was a goddess. The 'Five Eyes' had invented it, but she did them one better; she had six!

Okay, she was getting ahead of herself, self-aggrandizing. It was just nine city blocks; a 3x3 swath around the target building where the M.A.N.T.I.S was escaping. It still felt empowering when all her eyes began automatically scanning the many screens, taking in the raw data from every available camera, be they security, ATM, or traffic-based, and then compiled it into a three-dimensional representation she viewed and manipulated within her mind. Her eyes were all open an on autopilot, but she saw the city from above, as if she were a ghost hovering above it, free to swoop down almost anywhere.

"Big Sister is here," she announced, switching to local comms. Her typers worked in the background, allowing her to shift movable cameras through antiquated commands merely by willing it, her fingers working on her brain's instructions automatically while she remained within the simulation in her mind.

"Hello Big Sis," came the demure response. "Can you see me?"

"Of course I can," the scorpion said with a hint of pride in her voice, which quickly dropped off so she could add, "--please stop waving. You'll be spotted. You'll be just a Deare in the headlights, then."

"Don't be mean, Big _Bossy_ Sis."

"Make it up to me with a satisfying sit-rep, sweet little bug."

"Greedy Goode's goods gotten ghostily."

"Good. I'll guide you around the patrols and the guards coming outside to find you, rendezvous here at basecamp and we'll get going."

Without actually relaying the directions verbally - which would be, to them, the equivalent of a modern warship using a sextant, a compass and a spyglass instead of XS-GPS - the mantis received a detailed pathing overlay upon her eyes, added into her view of the world around her, created and updated in real time, by the scorpion.

"What would I do without my guardian angel on high?"

"Well, you might come crawling back with need of replacement parts." After a pause, the scorpion asked, "You're never going to call me goddess like I asked on our first time out, are you?"

"~Nope~!" teased the mantis.

~

Dr Goode smiled to himself, listening to the back and forth between his girls. He liked the 'Big Sister' and the thus automatic and unstated default implication of 'Little Sister' relationship they had developed, naturally.

He pondered how the S.C.O.R.P needed a totally different rapport with him and with her 'sister' to be most effective. He knew the playfully antagonistic banter made his preferred basecamp-operator angry, but she required a modicum of malevolence to be most motivated. He monitored every word out of her mouth with redundant receivers in the armoured but clandestine van she sat in, and would back off if she ever began cussing him out off-mic - or what she thought was off-mic - too much.

He also knew that, deep down, she realized it as a charade, though a helpful one.

Nevertheless, the python was pleased to hear how genuine the interactions between the so-called siblings were becoming, even if they had been jokey to begin with. They would grow into a fine team. One he was more than happy to watch, and attend to, as required, and beyond.