The dress was worn over a turtleneck, which went with a ski mask that covered eye sockets, nose, ears, and chin. In effect, fabric covered her from just below her eye level to the ground. Yellow-orange eye makeup, bold slashes of black for the eyebrows and nicely done black hair completed the look.

The guy was the tinker of the group, it looked like—and it was good they had one, given the ‘malfunction’ part of the group’s name. He would have been between the two girls in height, except for his suit. I hesitated to call it power armor, exactly. Power armor implied armor that was heavy enough that it needed machine power to move—remove that power and the tinker was stuck. The stuck part probably held true, but this guy had no armor.

No, if I had to come up with a term for this guy, I would have called it an agility frame. It didn’t thicken his body, but stretched it out, with an mechanical extension adding two feet to his legs, long mechanical gloves that started at his wrists extending the arms much the same way, and a lightweight set of bars and discs providing the bare minimum of strength to hoist what looked like a syringe filled with maybe ten gallons of pink fluid. The syringe’s needle wasn’t the only mount at the front of the fluid’s case, and various other tools or attachments surrounded the front end of the cylinder, all in metal of varying shades, glosses, and textures.

The frame was made on a budget, given how the spray paint had settled on different pieces in different ways, and it was almost buckling between the guy’s lean weight and the weight of the cylinder, to the point that the line of mechanical foot to calf to thigh formed a curve, not a straight line. His mask was a simple one, a circular plate of metal with eyeholes cut out, worn over a hood of something rubbery that clung to his head. The eyes glowed pink.

The girl with the dress so narrow it seemed to bind her ankles together and the frame that threatened to snap explosively under its own weight made me anxious. The third member of the group, at least, seemed a little bit more sane. She wore a flat-top cap with a brim that overshadowed a simple domino mask, her auburn hair was wild, and her costume was a cute variation on a military outfit, all in glittery baby blue and a fabric with some stretch. I suspected it was something like a dance uniform for a particular number or event that had then been claimed from thrift. A stylized music note sat on her breast and the front of her cap where badges or medals might otherwise be.