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The year is 3029 and Lizzie Dusk is robbing a bank. It's also kind of a mailroom but that part isn't important. She snuck in through the window about two seconds ago, having shot through the security cameras using some auxiliary drones beforehand. Now, she's crouching on the ground, waiting for the bot guards to finish their automated rotations so she can get in through to the storage room. Lizzie doesn't have to worry about them once she gets inside — the place had gone low-tech as a security method. In fact, the bots didn't even have the storage room or autonomous pathfinding programmed into their maps, so in the case that they were hacked, the hijacker couldn't just send them to grab the money.
According to Scar, this branch's main guard is a human, one with a history of time in the HoldLife fighting games. This wouldn't be a big problem for Lizzie normally — everyone from her neck of the woods has gone a round or two in that brain-melting hellhole — but Scar's sources tell her this guy actually managed to win. And he's a human. Terrible. Her own species bore enough similarity to them visually that Lizzie could exploit this for profit and intimidation, but if you tied an Elfin's wings to their back and stuck 'em in a room with a human, the human could crush their subskeleton and come out unscathed nine times out of ten. Lizzie likes to think she's in the ten percent group, but 'likes to think' and 'believes' are two very different categories.
Plus, Scar been extra affectionate with her these past few days: kissing her on the hand, not stealing food off her plate, so Lizzie knew he was worried. Jimmy, her other partner, pings her from outside the banking station. She pings back.
At that moment, the bots let out a quiet whirring noise, a signal that they were going to shift for charging. Lizzie lifts two of her three bonding pendants — one wing molt shred from Jimmy and one from Scar — and kisses the alloy-glass they were preserved in for good luck. Then, mostly because Lizzie is very nervous, she kisses the third.
This pendant has no wing molt piece inside, but instead a lock of brown hair, with a single strand of green. The glass is different too — a little more misshapen. Scar, Jimmy, and her had their pendants done professionally, at their home planet, but Lizzie had made the third by hand, in the middle of a HoldLife game. Somewhere out in the galaxy, a human named Joel Beans has a piece of her wing cast-off, still shiny with molt fluid. Hopefully, anyway. She lost track of him a few months ago.
Nerves re-steeled, Lizzie darts out of her hiding place and between the sightlines of the bot guards, using her wings to help propel herself down the hallway. At the same time, she pulls the melt gun out of her belt (thank you Jimmy) and fires it at the hinges of the storage room door. Heated globs of…some kind of acid…shoot out and stick onto her targets quietly, sizzling as they dissolve the material of the screws and glue.
Lizzie rams into the metal with her shoulder and the door falls inward, revealing one very startled human and wall to wall shelves of credit sinks. She lifts the gun again, pointing it at the human. "Wipe the trackers off those credits and give them to me," she commands. "Or die, and I'll do this in a slightly more inconvenient way."
The human is dressed in body armor that covers them head to toe. Lizzie is actually a little unsure of whether or not the acid gun will stop them in one blow or not. They seem to pick up on this, because, after a minute of silence, they vault themself over the desk and charge.
Lizzie screams and launches herself into the air, firing at their center mass. Stupid fucking human skin — the acid melts through the armor just fine but doesn't seem to do anything to their body. At the same time, the human's helmet pulls back, revealing augmented canines.
For a moment, Lizzie thinks she might actually get killed and eaten but then she remembers this one time Joel and her went hunting. They generally prefer to cook their food and — hey. The bottom of that human's face looks really familiar.
"Joel?" Lizzie tries. She holsters her gun as a show of ceasefire, deactivating her own helmet.
“Wait,” the human’s voice is muffled underneath the helmet, until they too pull it off. “Oh my gosh,” Joel says. “Lizzie?”
She flies down into his arms and they embrace passionately, but awkwardly around each member’s respective body armor. Lizzie forgot how fun humans mouths could taste, sensorily speaking. All those pre-digestive enzymes…
Eventually, they have to separate. Joel’s got this position, though he’s secretly embezzling funds to bankroll this new weird ship-based group he’s founded with another member of their old game circle — Gem. This robbery will actually help him disguise that, in fact.
They exchange call IDs, and Lizzie returns to Jimmy with a lighter heart and an armload of cash.