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Description
We have Gina Johnson (who totally isn't Attacker Six ), her girlfriend Melissa Berhardt (who is definitely the Transformed's Liss , Attacker Six's girlfriend, and a mid-tier Muscle Brigade survivor), the powerful psychic Steven Choi aka the Couch Surfer (and more than mild agoraphobe, but he's working on it), and Steven's new maybe, Kesean Austin (Ward Omicron). They've had five dates together, thus far; Gina actually introduced them, since he helped Attacker Six out with a problem they'd both prefer to remain anonymous. His story is below.

Liss isn't actually as bored as she looks. She's mostly trying to deal with how-- well, she has high-end supersenses, and hence, like most members of the Brigade, prefers being naked. That and it's become a sort of statement-- only Rocket Johnson wears a uniform, and that's because she went back to active duty. Otherwise, Brigaders only wear clothes when they have to, like Liss here; she's wearing a hologram on top of what amounts to a simple croptop, hotpants, and a cockpouch.

It's a situation like, and unlike itching, and like a lot that has come out of the hormonal changes the Muscle Brigade Process, has a sexual stimulation side effect. One of the biggest problems Liss has outside the Brigade is that she's still instinctively sexually aggressive. But that she tries to deal with just for her own hardcore beliefs about consent and care.

The clothes, now, even so few-- that's just for Gina, and Gina knows it; she has plans on rewarding Liss after the double date is over.

---

2

Kesean was a naval cyberwarfare expert with a master's in computer engineering. An on-deck explosion destroyed most of his legs (and left the rest unrecoverable), highly damaged his legs, face, and skull. As an active-duty officer, he was given normal, prosthetic rebuilds, but that would have seen him reduced to shoreside work only-- security concerns if there isn't full, combat-grade cyberwarfare programs and dedicated devices onboard, and security concerns handing those out to just anyone.

It shouldn't have taken thirty-eight berserk military supersoldier-cyborgs to get them to stop cramming every officer, NCO, and enlisted soldier into the full-on combat 'borg rigs, but it did. Better record than the army, worse than the marines. The air force has different problems, mainly with lawsuits from and on behalf of "NAIs"-- near artificial intelligences-- that they kept somehow "forgetting" the N for. That, and getting sued when their actual-NAI or actually-AI drones go berserk, but that happens less often than cyborgs; AIs not designed by total sociopaths, even bigots, have a proven track record of spontaneously developing their philosophy-of-mind based on the Prisoner's Dilemma and moving outward. Cyborgs, on the other hand, are used to a human (or whatever) body and human (or whatever)-style senses. get that wrong even a bit, and you get much worse than phantom limb sensations and body dysphoria.

(There are reasons S.W.O.L.E. itself, though fairly progressive, has also been very popular with the military-- their insistence on going to the mats for vets and active servicemembers helps, but so does the patchwork schema of meta-tier approaches prior)

SWOLE Earth trivia fact: Most of the suits against the military by the AI/reps made it to the Supreme Court during the Warren Court. They were used to establish definitive rights for sapients, regardless of how those sapients are created, qualified under the 14th amendment as "persons." Given that the '89 Congress included a catboy, an exiled faerie viscount, and the genius loci of the Bronx (sadly deceased, killed defending itself and its citizens against Nealtanean paraurban invaders), you wouldn't think that it would take that long to include AIs, but then again, looking at the rest of US history...

Anyway. Kesean went through six months of retraining, physical therapy, and psychological testing. Though he doesn't regret later becoming a part of the superhero community, he still feels that instead of helping him draw down to a more civilian-lite life, the second his psych and dysphoria tests came back, they began pushing him to take the full combat rig. Eventually, then, not even realizing he'd been manipulated, Kesean accepted the terms and joined the SEAL cybernetic unit as a new cyber warfare/personal infiltration expert.

He only did the first tour (ten years-- metahuman/meta-tier soldiers have half the usual retirement length due to psych concerns and the costs of implant/cybernetic upgrades), before ultimately becoming unsatisfied with the way that the army was being used. The SWOLE revelations were the final straw for him, coming so close to the end of his tour.

As per normal, the military-grade enhancements were decommissioned or removed, except for the basic structure and the chest/spinal anchor points and similar parts that couldn't be removed. Much as expected, Kesean performed bootleg recommissioning and made some personally-engineered substitutions for utilities (and defense) he missed-- not to mention because he'd already been customizing his hardware and has a curious, active mind. The former is actually more or less expected it's an open secret at this point, but the brass has quietly ignored it-- it means that the servicemember is easier to recall to active duty and may be (hopefully) actively training. S.W.O.L.E. has bigger fish to fry, but does keep an eye on them.

That's been aided both by the better state of national healthcare, and by reforms in veteran's care on SWOLE Earth that had been a long time coming and was considered to be of paramount importance after the (first) Muscle Brigade incident. Like all soldiers, but especially the augmented, he had better psychiatric care, and hasn't been fighting mandatory intermittent psych testing afterwards. There are ways to get a waiver to those, but he hasn't bothered, and as long as he seems to be staying stable and adjusting, S.W.O.L.E. feels that he lives in a dangerous world and some protections aren't bad.

Eventually, the boredom got the better of him, and he went past mere personal-security features. S.W.O.L.E. Earth's Second Amendment isn't quite the same as it is on our Earth-- they had superhumans even in the 1700s (even in 1700 BCE or ten times that...)-- but I'm not smart enough to write it out to fit the tension between comic book life, muscle growth kink life, similar issues, and having a safer country that I want for SWOLE Earth. So let's just say that he did have to stay within certain parameters before eventually deciding to go a different way and built up power armor.

He maintained personal utility and security augmentations; upgrading them, especially the utility equipment, for emergency, parkour, and, well, "utility belt" style stuff, but that's about it-- except for the interface enhancements. SEAL partial cyborgs (and full conversion, of course, but in different ways) have bodies designed to link into immensely pressurized power armor that serves both for depth protection and transportation, alongside the obvious combat enhancements, and Kesean turned them back on, of course, just as he did the pressurization and NBC/Enviro-protections; the oxygen extractors, reserve tank, and recirculators were never touched. And of course, like everything else, his interest in tweaking was proportional to the amount of computer-related fun he could have with it.

But when he decided to try to go for a full time (Class G, at the time, but they use a different licensing structure after the '21 efficiency reorg) superhero license, with full/isolated privacy, he decided it would be easier to avoid being trackbacked to his private life by avoiding fully weaponizing his rig. Already experienced with maintaining (and personalizing) his own armor, and with good reasons to be investigating robotics/related engineering, he decided to scratch-build a new armor-- the Ward Omicron suit.

(They never got past a Delta variant in his world, and even that didn't last long, so the name isn't particularly Suspicious on SWOLE Earth)

The suit is fully environmentally sealed-- it's not just capable of going down to the Mariana Trench like his SEAL armor; it's deliberately space-capable and can withstand hypercorrosive environments of a number of kinds, and uses stealth-capable gravitic propulsion rather than the Navy's preferred three-phase drives. But it's not in any kind of military branch colors (he likes purple and blue equally), and looks far closer to the power armor used for asteroid miner escort, rescue, and exploration troops.

Kesean did some research, and, while working on the adaptive-response distortion/invisibility systems, discovered a fairly innovative spacefolding system (which was registered along with his Class G and converted over) that both let him perform occasional long-distance teleportation and nearly constant "hop" defensive/offensive-pattern 'ports, and let him store weapons "around" his armor. Out of sheer paranoia, he made the projection of the energy/Molly's Birthday Wrapper combat claws' extrusion, making them look like similarly teleported weapons, and not an integral part of the suit. He's been doing actual superhero work for about six months and has a decent following.

All of that is just history, and though it does make for interesting conversations, Kesean is a very well-adjusted man for his history (or anyone's, really). Steven thinks his mind is beautiful, his body-- cyber and all-- is gorgeous, and they have a lot of interests in common. So far, their friends are really hoping it works out; Steven's agoraphobia and isolation issues, as well as raw power/enemies, have made it hard for him to date. That, and having a bunch of heavily-muscled, gorgeous women and a tall, even-more-brawny, constantly naked futa around does sometimes give dudes the wrong impression as to his sexuality or availability.

-- --

Anyway, I should do Kesean standing up in both costume and civvie, but I have soooOoo much work to do.

Description
We have Gina Johnson (who totally isn't Attacker Six ), her girlfriend Melissa Berhardt (who is definitely the Transformed's Liss , Attacker Six's girlfriend, and a mid-tier Muscle Brigade survivor), the powerful psychic Steven Choi aka the Couch Surfer (and more than mild agoraphobe, but he's working on it), and Steven's new maybe, Kesean Austin (Ward Omicron). They've had five dates together, thus far; Gina actually introduced them, since he helped Attacker Six out with a problem they'd both prefer to remain anonymous. His story is below.

Liss isn't actually as bored as she looks. She's mostly trying to deal with how-- well, she has high-end supersenses, and hence, like most members of the Brigade, prefers being naked. That and it's become a sort of statement-- only Rocket Johnson wears a uniform, and that's because she went back to active duty. Otherwise, Brigaders only wear clothes when they have to, like Liss here; she's wearing a hologram on top of what amounts to a simple croptop, hotpants, and a cockpouch.

It's a situation like, and unlike itching, and like a lot that has come out of the hormonal changes the Muscle Brigade Process, has a sexual stimulation side effect. One of the biggest problems Liss has outside the Brigade is that she's still instinctively sexually aggressive. But that she tries to deal with just for her own hardcore beliefs about consent and care.

The clothes, now, even so few-- that's just for Gina, and Gina knows it; she has plans on rewarding Liss after the double date is over.

---

2

Kesean was a naval cyberwarfare expert with a master's in computer engineering. An on-deck explosion destroyed most of his legs (and left the rest unrecoverable), highly damaged his legs, face, and skull. As an active-duty officer, he was given normal, prosthetic rebuilds, but that would have seen him reduced to shoreside work only-- security concerns if there isn't full, combat-grade cyberwarfare programs and dedicated devices onboard, and security concerns handing those out to just anyone.

It shouldn't have taken thirty-eight berserk military supersoldier-cyborgs to get them to stop cramming every officer, NCO, and enlisted soldier into the full-on combat 'borg rigs, but it did. Better record than the army, worse than the marines. The air force has different problems, mainly with lawsuits from and on behalf of "NAIs"-- near artificial intelligences-- that they kept somehow "forgetting" the N for. That, and getting sued when their actual-NAI or actually-AI drones go berserk, but that happens less often than cyborgs; AIs not designed by total sociopaths, even bigots, have a proven track record of spontaneously developing their philosophy-of-mind based on the Prisoner's Dilemma and moving outward. Cyborgs, on the other hand, are used to a human (or whatever) body and human (or whatever)-style senses. get that wrong even a bit, and you get much worse than phantom limb sensations and body dysphoria.

(There are reasons S.W.O.L.E. itself, though fairly progressive, has also been very popular with the military-- their insistence on going to the mats for vets and active servicemembers helps, but so does the patchwork schema of meta-tier approaches prior)

SWOLE Earth trivia fact: Most of the suits against the military by the AI/reps made it to the Supreme Court during the Warren Court. They were used to establish definitive rights for sapients, regardless of how those sapients are created, qualified under the 14th amendment as "persons." Given that the '89 Congress included a catboy, an exiled faerie viscount, and the genius loci of the Bronx (sadly deceased, killed defending itself and its citizens against Nealtanean paraurban invaders), you wouldn't think that it would take that long to include AIs, but then again, looking at the rest of US history...

Anyway. Kesean went through six months of retraining, physical therapy, and psychological testing. Though he doesn't regret later becoming a part of the superhero community, he still feels that instead of helping him draw down to a more civilian-lite life, the second his psych and dysphoria tests came back, they began pushing him to take the full combat rig. Eventually, then, not even realizing he'd been manipulated, Kesean accepted the terms and joined the SEAL cybernetic unit as a new cyber warfare/personal infiltration expert.

He only did the first tour (ten years-- metahuman/meta-tier soldiers have half the usual retirement length due to psych concerns and the costs of implant/cybernetic upgrades), before ultimately becoming unsatisfied with the way that the army was being used. The SWOLE revelations were the final straw for him, coming so close to the end of his tour.

As per normal, the military-grade enhancements were decommissioned or removed, except for the basic structure and the chest/spinal anchor points and similar parts that couldn't be removed. Much as expected, Kesean performed bootleg recommissioning and made some personally-engineered substitutions for utilities (and defense) he missed-- not to mention because he'd already been customizing his hardware and has a curious, active mind. The former is actually more or less expected it's an open secret at this point, but the brass has quietly ignored it-- it means that the servicemember is easier to recall to active duty and may be (hopefully) actively training. S.W.O.L.E. has bigger fish to fry, but does keep an eye on them.

That's been aided both by the better state of national healthcare, and by reforms in veteran's care on SWOLE Earth that had been a long time coming and was considered to be of paramount importance after the (first) Muscle Brigade incident. Like all soldiers, but especially the augmented, he had better psychiatric care, and hasn't been fighting mandatory intermittent psych testing afterwards. There are ways to get a waiver to those, but he hasn't bothered, and as long as he seems to be staying stable and adjusting, S.W.O.L.E. feels that he lives in a dangerous world and some protections aren't bad.

Eventually, the boredom got the better of him, and he went past mere personal-security features. S.W.O.L.E. Earth's Second Amendment isn't quite the same as it is on our Earth-- they had superhumans even in the 1700s (even in 1700 BCE or ten times that...)-- but I'm not smart enough to write it out to fit the tension between comic book life, muscle growth kink life, similar issues, and having a safer country that I want for SWOLE Earth. So let's just say that he did have to stay within certain parameters before eventually deciding to go a different way and built up power armor.

He maintained personal utility and security augmentations; upgrading them, especially the utility equipment, for emergency, parkour, and, well, "utility belt" style stuff, but that's about it-- except for the interface enhancements. SEAL partial cyborgs (and full conversion, of course, but in different ways) have bodies designed to link into immensely pressurized power armor that serves both for depth protection and transportation, alongside the obvious combat enhancements, and Kesean turned them back on, of course, just as he did the pressurization and NBC/Enviro-protections; the oxygen extractors, reserve tank, and recirculators were never touched. And of course, like everything else, his interest in tweaking was proportional to the amount of computer-related fun he could have with it.

But when he decided to try to go for a full time (Class G, at the time, but they use a different licensing structure after the '21 efficiency reorg) superhero license, with full/isolated privacy, he decided it would be easier to avoid being trackbacked to his private life by avoiding fully weaponizing his rig. Already experienced with maintaining (and personalizing) his own armor, and with good reasons to be investigating robotics/related engineering, he decided to scratch-build a new armor-- the Ward Omicron suit.

(They never got past a Delta variant in his world, and even that didn't last long, so the name isn't particularly Suspicious on SWOLE Earth)

The suit is fully environmentally sealed-- it's not just capable of going down to the Mariana Trench like his SEAL armor; it's deliberately space-capable and can withstand hypercorrosive environments of a number of kinds, and uses stealth-capable gravitic propulsion rather than the Navy's preferred three-phase drives. But it's not in any kind of military branch colors (he likes purple and blue equally), and looks far closer to the power armor used for asteroid miner escort, rescue, and exploration troops.

Kesean did some research, and, while working on the adaptive-response distortion/invisibility systems, discovered a fairly innovative spacefolding system (which was registered along with his Class G and converted over) that both let him perform occasional long-distance teleportation and nearly constant "hop" defensive/offensive-pattern 'ports, and let him store weapons "around" his armor. Out of sheer paranoia, he made the projection of the energy/Molly's Birthday Wrapper combat claws' extrusion, making them look like similarly teleported weapons, and not an integral part of the suit. He's been doing actual superhero work for about six months and has a decent following.

All of that is just history, and though it does make for interesting conversations, Kesean is a very well-adjusted man for his history (or anyone's, really). Steven thinks his mind is beautiful, his body-- cyber and all-- is gorgeous, and they have a lot of interests in common. So far, their friends are really hoping it works out; Steven's agoraphobia and isolation issues, as well as raw power/enemies, have made it hard for him to date. That, and having a bunch of heavily-muscled, gorgeous women and a tall, even-more-brawny, constantly naked futa around does sometimes give dudes the wrong impression as to his sexuality or availability.

-- --

Anyway, I should do Kesean standing up in both costume and civvie, but I have soooOoo much work to do.