"The misty rain and polar night snapped his calf into place, as he jumped down the subway hole—a stone vault as big as a cave archive—and rode the Metro-South down to the Park-n-Ride. Caught an algorithmic pod back to Reston, which meant it was shared; must’ve been a server re-route, because the pod was empty.

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As soon as he heard clawing behind the vehicle, he knew he wasn't alone; matched eyes caught his with a yellow glare, only the others were the jaundiced pupils of a cybernetic jaguar. He panicked silently. Thing was vicious, saliva dripping from its steel muzzle. DARPA prototype, he muttered to himself, must've been set out for a test run. The creature jumped off once they hit the Virginia border, using locate algorithms to find its master, somewhere in the Alexandria high-rise district. Before he could decipher its tag, the jaguar disappeared into the night, its velvet coat and musculature camouflaging with the deep violet sky."

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Waves of uncertainty and relief washed over him. He was relieved to be back in RF Transmission, and not Human 7.0, the eerie surgical lab headed by Herr H. himself, who had suffered a torqued amputation climbing the Matterhorn some years ago. The accident haunted him, and one day he decided on a newfound purpose in life: fusing aerodynamic mammalian bodies with vehicle chassis. Hope was that he could transform combat vets into their former selves, optimizing them to be more perfect and godly than they were pre-amputation. So the legend goes. Herr H. always gave Aero the chills, ever since he was recruited for one of his crash courses back at the Institute. "

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-excerpt from Aerology