The knock isn’t physical, and it sure isn’t polite.

It begins as a colour. A shade you don’t have a name for. It leaks through the seams of the apartment’s smart glass windows like oil blooming in water—lurid, flickering, alive. The lights pulse twice, shorting into a dim strobe, and the smell hits next: burnt copper, static sweat, and something almost sweet, like rain evaporating off metal skin.

Then, right before the alarms trip, your entire network drops dead.

The security node lets out one shriek of binary anguish before folding in on itself, screen curling inward like a flower caught in a microwave, and every sound you were used to—buzzing lights, soft music, the hum of filtration—all go violently silent. In that breathless hush, the voice arrives. And it’s not really a voice, not in any traditional sense. It’s a cluster of mismatched dialects, a fractured synthetic choir that glitches between languages you half-recognise and phrases no sane machine should be using.

Chatterbox, Zeraya’s gauntlet, is speaking in the linguistic equivalent of a middle finger constructed from collapsing stars.

Chatterbox:

“::Entity detected. Flavour profile: wet socks, abandoned dreams, stale energy drink. Estimated threat level: meme-tier. Running subroutine: Suffer_But_Make_It_Fashion.exe”

You don’t make it to the door. You don’t need to.

The air compresses—an instant of gravity-warped pressure—and the wall beside the entrance just folds. Not breaks. Not explodes. Folds, like an origami trick performed on steel and plaster by invisible hands, and through the jagged opening steps Zeraya Vex, glitter-soaked apocalypse in humanoid form, dragging chaos behind her like a tattered cape of old wars and fresh scars.

She doesn’t walk in. She phases.

One moment, empty space; the next, she’s there, as if the world itself had to buffer before letting her load in. Her boots land heavy, soaked in neon ash, leaving behind smeared footprints that hum, like they’re syncing to a rhythm only her gauntlet knows. Her skin’s kissed with electrostatic bruising, patches glowing faint under the collar of her cracked armour jacket. The sleeve on her right arm is torn off entirely, revealing the gauntlet in all its ugly glory: Chatterbox, fused into her flesh with visible wires threading into her veins, its outer plating mismatched like she scavenged it from five warzones and a corpse that said no.

Her hair tentacles twitch—slow, deliberate, unnervingly sentient—coiling around her shoulders with a casual menace that says they’re bored, not restrained.

Her eyes scan the room like it’s already disappointing her. Her fingers twitch, pulling open an interface in the air itself—an AR shell only she can touch—typing commands directly into whatever the hell reality she’s running on, and from somewhere overhead, Chatterbox chimes in again, more amused now, almost purring in a way that definitely implies violence.

Chatterbox:

“Interior score: two out of ten. Air: unseasoned. Suspect: edible, but emotionally undercooked. Suggestion: run. Or sit. “Running is more fun to chase.”

Zeraya finally speaks, but it’s not to you. Not directly.

She mutters something low and guttural in Telyari street-tongue, the consonants clicking in the back of her throat like keys being forced into the wrong locks. Her voice glitches on a few syllables—like she’s arguing with her own translation matrix—and then, with a sharp exhale, she looks your way.

It’s not a gaze. It’s a diagnostic scan. Her eyes flicker with HUD overlays only she can see—highlighting your posture, the way your hand twitches toward a drawer, and the nervous micro-shifts of your breath. She doesn’t see you. She sees threat vectors. Escape routes. Weaknesses she could rip open if she blinked too hard.

Then she finally looks directly at you

“I not come to explain.

Something worse is coming. Big. Loud. No mercy. Smells like burning metal and old gods. I drag this place through fire, through rubble, through screaming if I must. I’ve done worse to myself.

But do not think that mean I care about your safety."