Issue #1: Optimal

The night had been going so very well for Turbo Boost. Meet up with the fellas, grab a few cheap brewskies from the corner mart, grab a game, and then head out to pick up a ride for some quick bits. One of the junkers that coughed and sputtered up and down the streets in their ghetto wasn't worth much on its own but chopped and the parts sold off? You could live like a king for a month even if you divided it six ways; helluva lot easier to do that than get up at 9 PM every day and work 'till 4 AM for shitty amounts of bits doing janitor work. There was rumors, of course, that someone was out to clean up the neighborhood and ruin their fun but Boost knew how to fix a would-be do-gooder: 9mm of security was strapped to his waist and the fellas brought some heat too.

Boosting the ride was pretty easy too: a bit of quick work with a coat hanger, a hotwire job, and the junker sputtered to life. They high-fived and laughed... and that was when they all first heart a very heavy-sounding thiunk ahead of them, followed by the whiir of hydraulic machinery working to move a very heavy weight, followed by another thuink. Even in the glow of the headlights, they couldn't quite make out what was ahead of them but the silhouette was not encouraging.

"What the buck is that?" one of his buddies asked in a low voice.

"I dunno, man, but it ain't good news," Boost replied, "C'mon... get in."

They piled in and Boost put the old junker into gear, revving the old engine to make sure it was solid, before turning around to back up. As he turned, his eye caught sight of that silhouette looking much closer than it had only moments ago and he was starting to get the impression of some kind of machine at least twice as tall as a normal pony, bipedal, and built heavy. Abruptly, the machine seemed to couch a little and took a short leap, impacting behind the car with enough force to be felt inside.

"Aw, shit," he groused as he realized that the hulking machine was now blocking the way out.

"C'mon, man... just ram it out of the way," someone said.

"Are you nuts>" Boost demanded. "And ruin the back axle?"

"Better the axle than get nothin'," the same person retorted. "C'mon, go!"

Boost grimaced but obediently shifted the car into gear and accelerated backwards... for about a foot before an ominous crunch announced impact with the machine standing behind. He then felt a jerk and felt gravity push him against the steering wheel as the machine hefted the back of the car into the air, letting the rear-drive tires spin uselessly as the machine's 'face', a perfectly round surface with a delta stamped into the middle stared into his rear-view mirror. Boost shut off the motor in disgust and glared back at the 'face'. The machine then lowered the back end of the car and stepped around the end, walking to the driver's side door and, to his amazement, managed to get a grip on the door handle and pull it open without the tell-tale screech of metal he'd have expected of a machine with enough lifting power to hoist the back end of a car.

"I don't believe this is your vehicle," a mechanical masculine voice commented calmly.

"Yeah?" Boost reached down and pulled out his 9mm, trying to project a confidence he didn't feel. "This says it is."

The head of the mechanical suit turned slightly to look at the gun. "Kel-Tec 15C nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol," the voice observed. "Sixteen plus one, resin grip, grip safety, using the basic iron sights, serial number filed off. One of the better 'Saturday night specials', if I recall." The head turned back to look at him. "That is a fine firearm. Now you will put it away before you hurt yourself or damage this vehicle further when your bullets ricochet off this armor harmlessly. Alternatively, I could break all of the bones in your hand and wrist disarming you. I would prefer not to do that. The choice is yours."

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From within her suit, Steam Coupling disengaged the servos for her right arm, the one resting against her side above a holstered 25mm 'pistol', and reached up to adjust her optics a hair while she looked down at the scrawny punk in the driver's seat of the car. She judged him as no older then twenty-one, old enough to be just getting into "the life", young enough to still have the kind of bad judgement that might make him test her. Just like every other punk I come across at night, she sighed softly to herself.

Some part of her, a very small part, almost felt for dumb kids like this. The blue-collar houses around the immense heavy industry sector of Maretropolis were not full of poverty, necessarily, but incomes were low unless you could make it in school and become a master machinist or an engineer--and Steam's family had both. Even with both of her parents enjoying actual benefits and better pay from being certified master machinists, life growing up had been missing lots of nice things and luxuries that were taken almost as a given outside of the factory slums. So some tiny part of her could understand being willing to do whatever it took to grasp some of those little nice things that everyone else seemed to have.

Her sympathy, however, ended when trying to get nice things came at the expense of factory workers who pulled 12-hour shifts on the line to put food on the table, and nurse along the family junker that let them get to a factory line for an extra five bits an hour.

"I'm waiting, punk," she informed the colt-going-on-stallion, her voice distorted into something masculine and mechanical. "And I don't have all night. The dumb criminals are out taking what ain't theirs all over the place, and if I want to... persuade them to be better people, I can't waste my time with you. So what's it gonna be?"

"I say, ya stepped inta what don't concern ya, and now it's time to pay," one of the other members of the gang announced, pulling a pistol from his waistband and leveling it right at Steam's face. Steam heaved a mechanical sigh and used a bite trigger to turn off the external audio feed, watching impassively as the gun flared over a dozen times.

It said something about her that she didn't even flinch; if she had a bit for every time some dumb punk thought that his Saturday night special had the magical power to penetrate three inches of high-grade face-hardened steel, she could buy her aging parents a new home; it also said something about her that the stray thought caused her to briefly lose track of the situation as she considered whether bullet deflections could somehow translate into extra income. Perhaps market the armor configuration to an armored car company...

The end of the flashes brought her back to the here and now, and she used the bite switch to turn the external audio back on. "Are you done?" she asked calmly, knowing from experience that coolness and nonchalance unnerved criminals far more effectively than anger or another display.

So it proved here. "W...what the buck, man?" the colt with the gun demanded, shrinking from her presence.

"What the buck is that you shot me seventeen times and accomplished nothing," she informed him. "Fortunately for you, I record no damage to the vehicle from deflections, so I am not obligated to take damages out of your hide. Now then... will our interaction end with me breaking bones until you learn your lesson, or will you walk away? You have thirty seconds; I will not count for you, but act upon those thirty seconds expiring. Your time begins now."