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The dust clears away further as the teen moves past the site of her initial impact, revealing…

"Oh… god," Assault mutters to himself, pulling back out of his ready position.

Hannah can't help but feel the same way, now that the weirdly smoking crater isn't hiding the majority of the limp, stooped over, teen's body. She's… mutilated, to say the least. Her entire body seems to be streaked with blood and what looks like motor oil, the black dress over her frame is tattered and frayed and burned, she has four hands, two of which are robotic in nature, and her entire body seems to be filled with advanced Tinker prosthetics throughout.

… She also doesn't have a nose, but considering that her eyes are giant pits stretched over what seems to be pitch black glass with two yellow Xs in place of pupils, the lack of an olfactory receptor seems pretty fucking minor.

In the background, she's pretty sure she just heard someone throw up. She really doesn't blame them.

Especially when the girl takes a limping step forward- "Hesitant shuffle." - and her leg snaps at the ankle and shin to the point that the limb curves until she takes another step and it rights itself with an unholy squelch.

…

"Unidentified parahuman, do you require medical assistance?" Armsmaster barks out after a moment, having lowered his halberd halfway from its ready position, instead taking the time to silently radio backup in the form of, probably, a medical transport.

"Searching. Patting. Poking." The girl narrates slowly, vaguely poking and prodding her own body and gingerly touching the parts of her body where flesh seemingly fuses with metal, rips in her skin showing just… far too much segmented metal for comfort. "... I am. F-f-f-fine. I think. There is. No-o-o-o pain-n. Mostly."

And just to prove herself wrong, the still unnamed girl steps forward… and then falls flat on her face.

"Annoyed. Grumble. Dot MP3."

… Did she just play a sound file of the Sideshow Bob grumble?

"That's not worrying at all," Assault deadpans, then looks over at Armsmaster with a snort to hide his general discomfort at seeing a mutilated teenager who, by all rights, looks more like she should be in the morgue than trying and failing to stand up straight. "How about we uhhh… call that ambulance, eh boss?"

"Already on their way," Armsmaster answers, then walks forward cautiously- even without any sign of hostility, it's best to be cautious around what seems to be a fresh Trigger. Whatever ability she had, it seems to be at least enough to keep her alive even with all of the metal replacing her… fuck, probably everything (or is it the metal keeping what's left of her flesh alive?). Being too careless in this situation might spell a disaster, especially if she's more fragile, more hostile, or more out of control than she looks.

"Do you have a name?" Armsmaster finally asks after a moment, and the girl shifts, before twisting her entire head around , causing him to rear up as she stands up almost like the girl from The Exorcist, head coming up last as she unstably stands with a horrific series of godawful crunching sounds, and then hunches over.

"My designation is. Cy-y-y-yn. Tessa. Cyn? Tessa?" She pauses, the horribly mutilated skin around her eyes narrowing slightly. "... Callba-a-a-ack erro-o-or."

She blinks. "... Skyn."

"Absolutely not," Assault shakes his head, grimacing and waving his hands in a negative. "Do not call yourself that."

Turning, and holding her hands like a T-rex now, Sin looks at Assault with a tilted head, before almost falling over and having to push herself back up. Still unnerving, considering just how quickly her neck could snap , but less so now. "Why?"

The mechanical warbling tone of the girl just paints an even worse picture the longer that they speak, and Hannah's wondering just who the hell did all of this. Especially since apparently Sin doesn't know herself, and it was likely done when she was younger.

Still, taking pity on Assault, or just feeling horrified herself, Battery interjects and points out the medical transport that's just arrived. "It could confuse the doctors that arrived in the ambulance."

Sin turns, looking at Battery curiously, before staring at the ambulance. "Curious stare. What could. You mean. By that?"

Hannah, silently, is very glad that Sin hasn't made any overt moves, because this entire event is a PR shitshow in the making, and there's probably way too many people posting about this on PHO already. Their info guys are gonna have a field day for this…

"Tap. Tapping. Get tapped upon." Watching Sin curiously play with all the monitoring equipment on her body, Colin frowns. There's a level of self improvement most Tinkers would understand in her body, of course. Augmented or replaced muscles, eyes that don't contract in low or heavy light, multiple hands. All of those make sense .

The level of mutilation, of not removing the original hands afterwards, the very obvious surgical scars, the OIL leaking out with blood, however, are all very much not something that makes sense.

He'd think she was a robot except that her chest cavity, after a quick use of a tinkertech medical scanner when the normal X-ray didn't work, was very much flesh and bone as well as metal.

The fusion of flesh and metal is a horrifyingly familiar artwork that reminds him far, far too much of a certain infamous blonde girl and her current companion in their little group of murder hobos, but the way it all somehow holds together without medical sutures or obvious grafting points or any of the actual hallmarks of Bonesaw's or Mannequin's tech points to some different source. Someone related, maybe. An unknown Tinker? It's not likely that Sin is the Tinker in question, considering that, as he moves the scanner over her head, it registers that she doesn't have a brain, and that, instead, she simply has… electronics.

Optical sensor arrays, audio receptors, haptic nodes, LED light screen where the eyes would be, internal armor plating, sure, but those are just the hallmarks of any humanoid robot. Frankly, it's starting to look like that extremely electrically active thing in the center of her chest is what's doing all of the heavy lifting in her body, considering the lack of any appreciable computational hardware of the mechanical or organic kind found anywhere in her form.

She doesn't even have organs beyond what one would find in a robot- coolant lines, lubrication pathways, wiring, servos, so on and so forth. Just… flesh. Vaguely spongy, bruised, somehow still living flesh. Like someone 3d printed undifferentiated human goo into human shape, then filled it with blood vessels.

And he'd assume she were just an advanced robot, wearing the skin of an unfortunate victim, if it weren't for the fact that all of the flesh, inside and out is connected together by that horrifying network of blood vessels, nerves, connective tissue, and bones. So. Not just a robot stuffing itself with meat and wearing a flayed skin. Again. Because the meat is still alive and somehow pumping. Because it's connected to the internal cooling pumps.

"Oops." He blinks before staring in shock at the scalpel now embedded in the glass. Going over his camera, he notes that she never actually touched it . Instead, a yellow glyph appeared over her hand. She was trying to bring it closer, before jerking in place and having to catch her head, which resulted in the knife being embedded in the glass window. The bulletproof glass window. The bulletproof glass window that was specially treated to barely fracture even against .50 BMG rounds.

He ignores the general panic around him, the men and women of the PRT's Observation and Medical Team likely terrified of the scalpel now embedded in the window, but he instead is fascinated.

There shouldn't have been a way for her to output this level of force without shattering the window, and she seems to have done it by accident. And is now in the process of trying to wriggle the medical tool out , to little effect.

Is this down to a Parahuman ability, or the cybernetics making up most of her body? He will need to go over more of his footage when he has the time. Perhaps he will consult Dragon. Still, for now, he leans forward and presses the intercom. "Sin, please avoid launching steel through the observation window."

"Sheepish chuckle. I am. Sorry." Sin rubs the back of her head with one of her flesh hands, and he wonders just how it still manages to move despite the fact it should be completely mangled by the metal underneath. If he managed to understand a breakthrough observing her, he might reconsider his stance on self modification.

Ideally he'd have another Tinker on hand to assist him, of course. That level of vulnerability would need absolute trust, and someone willing to do it. He could trust Dragon, but she would likely refuse. As for who would be willing, that list is far, far too long.

His left arm for some competent help that isn't a child. And he can't demand Dragon assist him, as she's beholden to too many different overseers to her work.

Still, back to the observations. "Sin. Do you have any other abilities we should know about?"

"Nervous expression. I am. Unsure. I do not know how I did. That. In the first place." Sin answers slowly, looking down at her hands even as she continues to try and pull the scalpel free of the window with gentle tugs from the glyph in her hand. Now that he looks at it, though, it seems to be… code? There seem to be ephemeral windows popping up around each glyph being formed, each one scrolling with lines of text that he can't make out even with his helmet's in-built sensor array. What little he does make out is written in a format not known to any programming language he's aware of (not even the joke languages, even), and-

"Liiiick."

"... Sin. Why did you just lick your eye… screen?"

"It was. Dusty. And. It is. An ability that humans. Do not possess." Sin answers, then smiles somewhat awkwardly. "Sheepish giggle. I am so naughty."

Sighing explosively, he adds that to the psych profile. General detachment from thought of being human. Possible reasons including isolation, rejection, or mental damage to br-... core?

Frowning, he realizes that's another puzzle. Sin is very much capable of thinking, breathing, eating (and in that case, things that humans shouldn't eat without reason even if she was quite happy with the oil), but she doesn't have a conventional brain or even a cerebral cortex attached to the steel spine she does have.

Just that core surrounded by the flesh of her heart. Or built into it.

Psych evaluations will likely be difficult. They don't even know if she has the same chemical system. There's no baseline to go off of.

Whoever did this likely did it on a whim. And that's the worst part of this whole mess. If it were targeted, the flesh would likely be non-existent outside of her body. Instead, Sin's in a half state, flesh and metal fused in a way that would be painful with a normal nervous system. Likely was incredibly painful when Sin had a nervous system.

But now, she only registers current pain. Horrific, inefficient, stupid .

Not her fault.

Still, without a baseline to go from, they'll just need to monitor her moods and exclamations. The silver lining is that, thankfully, Sin self-narrates. So understanding her is very easy, even for him.

Brandish is, unfortunately, dragging her feet when it comes to bringing in Panacea. Something about needing assurances that her daughter won't be harmed by an as of yet unknown Parahuman with no known affiliations. He'll have to get a psych report to her once they get an initial observation drafted.

Speaking of. He needs to give a report on his preliminary findings of Sin's current medical state- one copy to the onsite med-techs and the other to Director Piggot.

Who knows. Maybe she'll let Sin be a Ward in a few months time.

Yeah right.

Even he knows that the PRT wouldn't field a Ward who looks like the flayed skin of a teenager stretched over a robot frame.

"... I'm not dealing with this." Director Piggot's response is firm, unyielding, and so full of immediate exasperation and exhaustion that it almost makes her look twice her age in a mere instant. "Armsmaster. I say this with full confidentiality and respect for both of our positions… What the fuck."

"I do not know." The Tinker flatly states, but despite his attempt at his usual flat tone, she can still tell this has rattled him just as fiercely as everyone else. "If it were a new villain making her grand entrance, I could speculate, but all that Sin has done so far indicates that these modifications were traumatic, and likely non-consensual."

"Considering that she named herself Sin," Director Piggot deadpans, rolling her eyes sarcastically. "Gee. Who could have thought that the teenage girl who looks like a flayed corpse stretched over a robot would have gotten those modifications against her will? Regardless of her circumstance, there's no way in hell I'm dealing with this. The Youth Guard could spare a counselor, probably, but I refuse to let someone like that into the Wards. The optics would be horrendous, and there's no telling how unstable she really is. She's the Protectorate's problem for the time being. If she ever ends up looking less like a walking corpse, maybe I'll let her in. Until then, the most we're willing to cover is housing and supervision if she's ever cleared to go back to civilian life."

"We do not know if Sin is her name or just what she's been called during her… initial ordeal, and it was noted that she also tried to name herself Tessa. Before calling herself Skin. Likely on account of her current state." Armsmaster's jaw flexes beneath his helmet, and she wonders, as usual, just what's happening behind that visor of his. "Most of what we do have on her is conjecture, or observation. Regardless, I do not think she would be a good fit for the Wards in general. Sin is too literal, and keeping her identity hidden would be an exercise in futility. I also do not believe that the Youth Guard would be able to rebrand her current image into something 'family friendly'."

She snorts at that, rolling her eyes for all the good it does. Still. She shuffles her papers after a moment, her mood continuing to drop as she reads through the dry, utterly banal, and yet somehow horrifying account of the sheer extent of the modifications done to a girl who's seemingly anywhere from fourteen to eighteen. Her lip curls nastily as she puts down the report, looking up at Armsmaster with a heavy sigh. "Wonderful. So we have an amnesiac Cyborg, and I'm still not entirely convinced she used to be human, regardless of your findings. Is there any good news?"

"She's neither hostile nor immediately insane to the point of requiring confinement in an asylum, and she's largely agreeable to staying in the Rig's on-site infirmary at the moment," Armsmaster answers, steely and stiff as always. "That is, just about, the only good news we have at the moment."

"And what about that hellhole of a forum that all of our secrets inevitably seem to get leaked onto?" Emily deadpans, and feels a small curl of delight at seeing Armsmaster shift uncomfortably.

He clears his throat. "... Well…"