MEDIC! - Trauma-Team Quest: A Cyberpunk 2020 MedTech Adventure

"...Yes," You tell Osiris, when he asks about your family. You take some time to think on it. Mom, Dad, were halfway to flatlined when you left. But everyone? No.

"Sometimes I wonder about my brother."

Twenty-Eight Years Ago - Somewhere in California

Your feet burn slightly through the faded soles of your sneakers. The suburban tarmac bakes up through the thin, scraped down plastic, an unbearably hot stovetop in the light of the sun. Next to you, your brother squats in the shade of the old pharmacy. The kindly owner moved back to Florida, to be with family an indeterminable time ago. Now all that's left of the place is the sign - "Phar-Ma-Cy." At night it still lights up. You and Harry are here on a mission though, and there isn't much else in the world that matters right now. His eyes are the picture of focus, a steely gaze on the electronic keypad - and the home-made intrusion device in his hand. It's an old calculator with parts from a cyberdeck someone had dumped by the side of the road last week, wrapped in the casing scavenged from a discarded Speak With Me Tandy™️ - On the back is the crown jewel of his techie fixation, a label christening the device "Fuxstix". He chews his lip as he works, messy brown bangs flopping in front of his eyes only to be batted away. You stand out in the scorching heat and keep watch.

His eyes light up as the keypad clicks audibly, jumping you out of your thoughts. "Nova! We're in!" he cheers, and you pull on the door to test it. It creaks open with an audible whine, but nobody's around to hear it. You return his proud grin with one of your own. Preem. Just as planned.

The inside of the pharmacy is dark and dusty. Owner never bothered to put up storm shutters when he left, and fine desert sand collected in drifts at the corners of the room, swallowing sound. Every step kicks up billowing clouds of grit, making Henry sneeze. You've already masked up, but he only steps out and shoves his over his mouth now.

"Fuck!" he mutters,"It's dustier in here than outside!"

You just snort at that.

"It's your own fault, dweeb. Now…"

You pull out your torch and click it on, letting the room light up. Old shelves still line the building, mostly emptied save for a few boxes of expired cough medicine. Anything that could've moved on, has been. But the pharmacist didn't keep his deliveries upstairs. Your eyes move behind the counter, to the stairs marked "Dispensary".

"Sure we'll even find what we're looking for here?" Your brother tries to play the cynic, but you can hear the hopeful excitement in his voice.
"Place has power. With luck, that means fridge locks are still on. If we can get in there, we're golden."
"Amazed no one's thought of hitting this place til now."
"Gotta be a reason, right?"

Your voices are swallowed by the Empty around you, falling leaden to the dusty linoleum under the weight of the silence. Your boots crunch on shattered glass and old SoySnack wrappers. You creep past long-empty shelves, towards your target. The store room. The halogen lights flicker overhead as the two of you make your way to the back. It's silent, aside from your muffled breathing and the humm of the ancient power hookup.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. The stairs make a creaking thump as you step down the stairs, the old floorboard giving out to your weight. Your brother pulls out his own flashlight as you descend together. "What if we find anyone?" He asks, a little uncertain. "If Mom or Dad find out, it's not gonna end well…"

"Who's gonna find out?" You ask. "It's not like the doors were open - you needed that box to get through the door. The windows were reinforced!"

"Yeah but-"

"But nothin'!" you declare. "If anyone else knows about it, they'll steal the score for themselves. It's as good as ours, all we gotta do is take it!"

The basement is blissfully cool. The refrigerator is definitely working - and this is where he kept most of the temperature controlled meds. You descend the stairs together, the floor of the basement a smooth and solid concrete, dusty from months of abandonment, pocked with stacks of discarded boxes and thick metal storage shelves. The two of you shiver in the frigid air. Once, according to Mom, every house was kept this cool. It's hard to imagine. You've never been this cold in your life.

"Alright," Harry shrugs, "all that's left is to-" A high pitched beep and whir interrupts his train of thought, and by the far corner of an active refrigerator it appears. A Milltech Bastille Defence Turret, battered and old - a relic of the 2020s. But its laser locks onto your brother.

You dive at him, knocking you both into cover of one of the disused metal hulks, the bullets pinging off of the metal. It's not penetrating, but is it using the non-lethal stuff? "Whoa!" Your brother yells. "The old gonk was sure as hell not fucking around, huh?!"

After a few, futile moments of sustained fire, the scene goes silent, the soft whirring of motors the only sound besides the panicked breathing of two teenagers.

"What's the plan, Jeanne?"

Your mind races. A fucking turret? You're not really equipped for that. Poking your head out slowly, the turret has started a patrol arc. It doesn't see you right now, and it takes a second to fire when you do. You reach behind you and hand him the emergency crowbar.

"You're going to go around the other side, hit it as hard as you can. I'm going to distract it okay? When you hear the beep, sprint." He looks at you like you've suggested that Christ has returned in the form of an alien, but takes the crowbar and nods.

You have a few seconds to run over to the next freezer. You inhale slowly, then exhale.

Thus begins the scariest game of tag in your young life. You set off quickly to the next freezer, and the sharp beep beep of the Bastille tells you that you've been spotted. The bullets whiz past your ankles as you dash, embedding into the freezers as they skim past your ankles.. You hear a yelp from your brother and then a sharp CRACK. There's a crash and smash, the sparking of wires.

You peek out at the scene.

Your brother is standing over the corpse of the turret, having ripped the ceiling away with the turret and watched it fall. Spent and unspent casings litter the floor as the machine sparks. He grins, lifting the crowbar over his shoulders in victory. "I did it!" he yells.

"You did!" you reply.

You let your victory sit for a couple of seconds as you catch your breath, grinning like gangoons at each other, then focus on your reward. In the unit behind the turret, you find the fruits of your labours. A collection of cardboard tubs, differently colored in lids. On the cover - "Original Style Ice Cream".

You both grin. Today is a good day.

---

"Why did you leave?"

"I was tired, I think. Tired of seeing the faces of those I couldn't save. Either because we couldn't get there fast enough, or because we weren't paid to do so."

The two of you sit in silence for a somber moment while you order your thoughts. You're not comfortable being wholly honest with this reporter, not yet. And there are all the old rules and training tripping up your tongue. But you feel like you should at least try to set the record straight.

"I won't say I had the worst of it. We never flew a combat car into the CZ, not every day like some did. We didn't work ground level. Only two of my patients ever truly flatlined on me, and we still managed to pull them through. I won't play the trauma dick-measuring game - TT is a tough gig and everyone who gets up everyday to do it is someone who has my respect."

"I think about the people around us. We come down from the sky like angels from heaven in our green and white, like a comet, roaring down to earth. We flatline anything in our way, we get our patient, and then we're just... gone. We clean up the DNA when we leave. Only traces we ever leave are bullet casings and plasma scars."

"I guess I wanted to start leaving other things behind."

---

Widget was never what her beloved Jeanne would call "Cool under Pressure." She was nervous, and shy. The words - they took up too much space in her brain most days, and when they spilled out it was all at once, like water from a drainpipe. Not too good with words, but with Jeanne she didn't need to be. Most of the time.

The air the following morning was decently clear and cool (no need for a respirator), so she steps out to meet the day with a yawn. She hadn't slept well, which was better than Jeanne, who had barely slept at all. Snuggling down into a hoodie, Widget debated having mercy on her wife and fetching coffee on her way back from the breakfast run. Her fingers tapped inside her pockets at the words snarled up inside, and she decided to stick to her guns. She worries about Jeanne, in truth. The clinic was supposed to be less stressful than running a Car, and the first few months in business they're drowned in bodies from those bomber jackasses ruining everything.

Where would it stop? She's not foolish enough to think Jeanne has the temperament to ever "settle down" - she could only be so lucky - but something about the events of the past few nights have set her teeth on edge. Like it wasn't going to just end here, with the last of the bombing patients being discharged. And either way, she and Jeanne were going to have to talk about it, and... well. They'd have to talk about it.

She jogs up a block or two, chewing on her thoughts, and letting the words bubble and stew.

Studio City's restaurants open early, supporting the actors and net-techs out on their early morning set calls, or leaving late night commercial shoots. Bruno's does the best breakfast wraps. Some people say it's Salvo Sal's, but those people think that bacon should be so crispy it might as well not exist, so there! The cashier behind the little kiosk knows her order now, is that good? Widget thinks it's good. He goes to smile and chatter with her, but the words get stuck so she just waves instead. When nobody's looking, she sticks a sticker on the tip-jar, a smooth motion with practiced precision. It's a silver cyberarm outstretched in devil horns proclaiming "Rock your world!"

The grin creeps up on her as she hustles away, prank unnoticed. Maybe it'll make someone else smile today. City could always use more cheer.

It's later in the day when she finds Kai, plugged into a network node, one of the broken diagnostic tools stripped, laid out and knolled. He's got one of the boards in hand, stripping away the grime with a cotton bud, squinting with his one good eye. She clears her throat softly and he looks up like he's been caught with a hand in the cookie jar.

"Miss Baudai-" Her gaze hardens a little bit, and the teen stammers "-ah Widget. I was just- i noticed you trying to fix this, earlier and I found out the error code was to do with the internals! I thought I'd fix it but you weren't around and then..."

Widget can't help but smile a little bit. He's clearly used to this kind of tune up. You don't carry around cotton buds with abrasive unless you're used to frequent field repairs.

And if there's one kind of talk she could be good at, it's shop talk.

"You know your way around gear."

She squats down next to him, and he flushes. "You're not mad?"

She shakes her head. "Just curious." She takes the diagnostic back from him, puts it through the normal boot up. Then, because Jeanne would say so: "...But you should be resting."

"Oh. Well. I know my way around tech. Fix appliances for the people in my building, help out the super. That sorta thing."

"That's all?"

He fidgets, the diagnostic coming back clean. He seems uncomfortable, and for a minute Widget can't place why. He fixed the machine! It was good work! Was it because she chastised him? To make a point, she hucks a sticker on the casing, smoothing it flat with her thumb. Nicky Nighthawk, the mascot of the Night City Nighthawks - the world's premier action league team- gives his and Widget's approval to the work.

"I… do work for the Valentinos sometimes too. Fixing gear and ware and stuff." Kai's voice is small. Quiet.

Oh. He was embarrassed. Because of the gang connection. That makes more sense.

Widget shrugs amicably, to show that it doesn't bother her. "You know your way around ware, then?"

"Um. Yeah, guess so."

"Wanna help me check the newest shipment of cybereyes?"

"…Sure. Thanks."

---

The days following Osiris' interview were almost surreal, and worrying. You dredged up thoughts and feelings that scraped you raw and left you aching. Osiris sent you a copy of the profile, as requested, and looking at yourself from an outsiders eyes...

Wonder what the kid on the roof thought you looked like, before Lance shot him? With that corpo ghoul giggling in the background?

On bad days you don't feel much like the "Saint of Little China."

The media's profile was intimate, searching. It didn't shy away from the work you did for Trauma, what little you decided to talk about. And it mentions your family, in oblique enough terms you were comfortable with. And he had some bits you never mentioned at all - Mano knew how to dig, it seemed. Ultimately, it was touching, raw, uplifting and just the right amount of cynical to satisfy you.

Shame that wasn't what finally hit the scream-sheets.

"FREELANCE DOCTOR SAVES HUNDREDS WITH QUICK THINKING" is the headline plastered across the city in the days immediately following. Osiris's article has been butchered to ribbons, your actions that night turned into a hardboiled drama - A hard-as-nails Ex-Trauma Team Medic shouting down her old employers because no one else was going to stand up for the little people, and only she could. Your CBRN alert gets a lot of airplay on the local news networks. Your decision to work outside the system is covered, you still wind up looking good, you guess, but it's not what he sent you. Still, your name, and the name of the clinic, are everywhere. (Action City News Reward: +1 Rep In [Little China], [MedCenter], [CorpoCenter])

It's not all bad, though. Your sudden surge in publicity and your well-handling of the bombing has made waves. In the coming days, what are the after effects?

VOTE - Choose One:
[Reward] Cash - You were the first one to recognize Serket's Vengeance, so the story goes. Survivors and their families (some of whom were quite wealthy) have taken up a collection to show their appreciation. You're not sure how to respond. +4 Clinic Funding

[Reward] Karma - The story goes about as viral as it can be, and then some. For a few glittering weeks, everyone in the city knows your name, and many more will remember it. +1 Rep to All City Districts

You'd be angry at Osiris if he didn't text you after the second missed call. "Editorial got its grubby hands on it. Working on it." Seems he got scraped raw off of this too, and not just being second billing to a generative text AI. You leave him to it then, back to processing the reams of paperwork brought about by the bombing. And the other, smaller crises.

---

"Fuck you, Holland, we had a fucking deal! You can't just leave her here."
Yelling is useless here. You know it. But you're angry enough to spit nails, and you have to do something with that anger or you might literally blow a gasket.

"Jeanne, without an active policy to defray the costs, having the AV transfer her to another hospital would literally bankrupt her! If the work you did to patch her up hasn't already."

This? This right here is why you quit.

T. Morrigan, formerly Silver+ (Full Body Coverage), lies insensate between you and Holland as you argue.

"I'm not running a long term care facility, Holland." You snarl, fingers curling helplessly in the air.
"I know. Nothing we can do."
"Why'd she get dropped, anyway? Insurance give a reason?"
"It's in her contract. Insurance asked for a picture of the injuries. Dropped her once they got them."

Empathy 10 Trigger!
Cool 10 Trigger! - My House, My Rules

Your voice could freeze flames, and makes the other medic flinch. "Emergency Number. Now."

"I-"

"Holland if you do not give me the policy holder's emergency contact information we are going to have a problem. You put down, you brought her here, I don't care what your procedure's are, I will make you responsible if I have to. You owe me. Number is the least you can do."

"…Fine. But that's all I can do, Baudin. I wanna keep my job, and I've bent enough regs in the past couple days as is." They send over the commcode and you try not to

You try not to scream as the AV takes off, leaving scorch marks on your new roof. That never really bothered you from the other side, but now it's just one more thing.

When the emergency contact you call sends you straight to voicemail, though, you really do want to break something.