"Oh..." she yawns, "looks like I've already won again."

Having already inserted her coin into the cabinet on a lark, she has tallied up 87 perfect games without losing even once.

"Hey, you."

Looking back at the crowd standing behind her, Nagase's gaze fixes on a geeky tall kid. She's never see him before, but her choice of words leave something to be desire and the kid Nagase calls is taken aback at having her attention focused on him.

"—I'm talking to you, the big geek with the beedy eyes over there!"

Nagase is now letting her opponent do all the attacking, but just when all looks lost, she comes from bheind to wind her 88th game in a row. Having arrived at a good number to quit and having her fill of boring battles with a bunch of pushovers, she finally gets up.

"It's all yours, stretch."
"Huh...?"
"Show everyone what you got."

Tapping the kid with the dumbfounded look on his face, Nagase cuts her way through the crowd and leaves the arcade. "Kids these days sure don't have that fighting spirit anymore, do they?"

Leaving the din of the electronic noise that flooded the game arcade, Nagase looks back at the unrewarding battles of theday and stretches her body dramatically. Had she kept on playing for 88 times, 100 times, even 200 times, it still would have been impossible for Nagase to lose. Eyes able to register every frame of movement, hands that produced more joystick moves more accurate than a machine, and astoundingly speedy reflexes far above the normal humans—Nagase had all this and more.

Considering these 'specs' of hers, Nagase's perfect record was a foregone conclusion.

These Chinese characters stand for 'Shooting Star' but are read 'Nagase'. But her moniker doesn't necessarily make her Japanese, nor is it proof that she's Chinese. Her name is no more than a convenient nickname with which she's been labled.

"Man, that's bitter..." Nagase retorts as she bites the tablet with her pearly white front teeth and gulps it down sans H20. She swallows the nutrient supplement which was prescribed and told to take once every day without fail and makes a face as if she has just chewed on bitterness itself.

"If I got to drink this after all, it would be nice if they could make it sweeter. Our development department is so in the box in it's thinking."

Squatting down in the street against a lamp post and surverying the stream of people with a sullen look, Nagase blends into the background of this city with a constant potential for chaos. Yet in spite of this, the stares of the passer-bys on the street may be due to those devilish eyes—those eyes with a charm containting a poison that bring an impudent glow to them.

At that moment, a small point of light blinks on the surface of Nagase's sunglasses, and the low voice of a man echoes in her ear.

"Have you finished play time yet?"
"Yeah, I guess." Nagase nodes unfazed. No one notices this conversation. The voice on the other end is so faint as are Nagase's responses to him that the conversation is nearly inaudible to the average person.

As the day turns to dusk, Nagase claps her hands to her knees, gets up, and stretches exaggeratedly and heads for a gloomy, disheveled alley to get away from the throng of people.

"Well then, since playtime is over, how about getting back to your mission?"

A black limousine that sticks out like a sore thumb in this street of eletronic shops quietly pulls up as if to block Nagase's way.

"First, I want you to get your new equipment."
"All rightey."

A man dressed in black exits the limousine from the passenger seat and holds out a thin, long metal case in Nagase's direction.

"It's not that big of a deal, but couldn't you have made this stuff a little lighter?" Nagase takes the case as she looks up at the well built man in black to voice her complaint. But unlike the mysterious voice emanating from elsewhere, the man in black stays silent and, having foisted the case on Nagase, returns to the car without saying a word, and the vehicle drives away to an unknown destination.

"So what's with that attitude?"
"You scare the begeebies out of those guys," Nagase grumbles as she opens the case and hears the voice of the man once again.

"—But enough idle chat. I thought you hated loquacious men anyway, didn't you?"

"I guess you're right."

Packed into the case are the following: one red and one white rod, and a disk with a fluorescent glow into it.

Pling—
The faint sound of metal grinding against metal is heard as the armor covering her ribbed combat glove is deployed. Nagase, inserting the disk into the narrow slit in the glove, shoulders the two rods onto her back and gently connects them to the frames of her sunglasses. Once again a thin light flashes on the surface of her sunglass lenses and detailed figures begin to flow like a narrow river. It seems Nagase's glasses act as a kind of monitor.

"I'll warn you again-this time is no game." The disembodied male voice whispers to Nagase, who rhythmically taps the frames to scroll through the rows of numbers displayed in the lenses, "This is the 'real thing'."

"You may say that, but everything's a game in the end, isn't it?" Nagase retorts audaciously as she pushes up her sunglasses. She flings the empty case aside, slowly clasps her hands together and them opens them again. It's as if she's checking whether her own body will respond to her commands. After finished a short set of 'preparation exercises', the voice once again speaks to her.

"—You'll prove the the superiority of your specs in battles, and I'm you'll weed out all but the strongest."

"Hmph. Who are you to tell me what to do?"

The vivid sillhouette of Nagase retorting haughtily suddenly disappears from this city alley. But no one notices, and all the registers in the eye are the flashes of tacky neon signs and a darkening night sky with a smattering of visible stars.