The lights flickered on, even as she shuffled into her apartment, the day's events having finally caught up with her.
Despite Misae's reassurances that things would work out, her first day at a new job, in a new city, hadn't been at all what she'd expected. Then had come dinner, which was hardly better and in some cases worse, and a destroyed restaurant followed by almost getting herself killed more times than she cared to remember capped the whole affair off.
So she grumbled, and groused, shucked her shoes, and cursed infuriating bikers, and soulless supervisors, and lecherous coworkers as she headed past the tiny living room, barely pausing to dump her jacket haphazardly onto the couch and nearly miss a figure in motorcycle leathers sprawled thereon, to finally end up in the kitchen and reaching for the freezer and that chocolate-chip ice cream she'd picked up before the day had gone all the way to heck.
Wait, what was that about a ... ?!
"Yeah, I was wondering when you'd notice," said the other occupant of the apartment, who most definitely should not have been there. At all.
She was maybe Linna's own age, maybe a few years younger, her hair long and straight and midnight, wearing shades of black with red trim here and there.
Linna's brain fizzled when it tried to evoke a response of alarm, and decided to go past that and into exasperation instead. "I've been having a really, really bad day, so if you're here to steal something, just get done quietly and get gone, alright?"
"Actually, it's the other way around," the stranger chuckled, sitting up and stretching. A few telling pops could be heard, making it obvious that she'd been there for a while. "I'm here to give you something."
She placed a sort of disc-shape, that even in full lighting seemed unable to decide whether it wanted to look metallic or organic, on the banged up coffee table.
"And now that that's done, I'll just show myself out."
Which she did, leaving a still mostly befuddled, but now vaguely curious Linna Yamazaki standing there, wondering what the hell had just happened.
Then her attention went back to the ... thing ... on her table, looking for all the world like an attempt at a novelty paperweight gone horribly wrong.
She peered at it.
If it weren't for the creeping fatigue that had been slowly but surely wrapping itself around her consciousness for the past hour or so, she would have been alarmed, concerned, or shown any number of other possible reactions. None of those being actually picking the thing up so that she could make out what one particular bit of it, which looked hastily soldered onto the whole thing in post-production, spelled out.
Oddly enough, in romanji.
"Guyver?"
Surprise didn't even register until the following morning, when she came back to, lying on the couch and with clear recollection of the 'disc' literally leaping up from her hand and heading for her face.
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm