Lycanthromancer
The Arcane Fuzz
- Location
- USA
No, that's fungal infection.
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Project Gamer: Anime Adjacent
- Thread starter Mister Ficser
- Start date
Japanese wordplay epiphany: they named their iseikai protagonist "isei". 
NOw i'm imagining him trying to stop Lupin from stealing something of his. It seems like it could be trivial but I could see Lupin finding a way
and Unown too right?
If Giritina has time to stalk you he has time to tutor your pokemon
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If they really have part of the blessing of Bahamu I wonder of the reactions to Tannin.
Similar to the last of us.
Similar to the last of us.
I wonder if someone else got the internal alchemy portion of that knowledge, the kind of thing you see in the Drunken Master Prestige Class.
- Pronouns
- Mrpinkfrosteddonut
you can do anything with unown, but you need thousands
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Japanese wordplay epiphany: they named their iseikai protagonist "isei".
Issei is (mostly non-arguably) not an isekai protag.
AClockworkAbyss
*Tick*...*Tick*...*Tick*...*Crit*
That- that right there would be a thing of beauty.
Indeed, through most of the series, he still lives with his parents. That definitely flies into the face of "swept off to another world for adventures". He does occasionally visit other places, but that's more along the lines of characters in a slice of life anime vacationing at the beach or hot-springs for a few episodes.
- Location
- Paradise, Hawaii
If Issei is not 'Gettin it ON!' WIth Rias. Does that mean he defaults to Irina or Asia?
Who is the RL names of those on the chat?
I admit I want the logic reason why the 3 showed up to get a Beatdown. Dragons like fights but why try to gank an unknown who got past Red?
Admittedly that is a reason... but where is he now?
If Canon is off the rails, did the cast Rias had get rescued? Rias did it for love or care.
Who is the RL names of those on the chat?
I admit I want the logic reason why the 3 showed up to get a Beatdown. Dragons like fights but why try to gank an unknown who got past Red?
Admittedly that is a reason... but where is he now?
If Canon is off the rails, did the cast Rias had get rescued? Rias did it for love or care.
Lordamnesia
What are we doing again?
To answer at least some of your questions:
1) This is set before the cannon start so neither Irina nor Asia are even in Japan.
2) The chatroom names are related to what they think their Sacred Gear is, but I'm pretty sure Lineeater is his yearmate that joins Sona in cannon.
3) Eldritch Abominations are bad, m'kay? Of course the big 3 are going to go try and kick whatever invaded Earth back into the Astral Sea. And Al is very much an abomination, that's pretty much the type of dragon he is.
4) I don't see why Rias wouldn't have her original group, but who knows what butterflies got turned into fey abominations because Al was briefly in universe.
- Location
- Oklahoma
I spat my drink out and almost choked because of the bluntness of this statement and the complete and total faith behind it.
Mostly this feels like an 'In Name Only' character swap. I just don't see Issee in this character. The setting involves flooding most of the Atlantic and it should just be a generic win for the authoritarian states by proximity. Horrible place to live. Also Alchemist seems to have been either punted from the universe or sealed away in some rando.
Also if that was Meteor it was a tiny impact... or the generic 'In Name Only' managed severely understated how bad thing were. Also using Meteor on a pile of teleporters with that much range seems rather stupid... or sacrificial of Alchemist. I mean this setting basically is a villains victorious setting where they didn't actually have to do much of anything. Except some words in ears stuff.
Never mind that stray devils seem to be legion... and no one devil side cares to deal with them anymore judging by the In Name Only's words. Though that could just be him being treated as a conspiracy theorist as a cover. Different type of pariah then. Sona wasting his time wit AA and other nonsense says its a worse, grimmer world for reasons.. or that the local Satans came off the worst in that fight and while I doubt they died judging by fact at least one of them is Earth side, I can't really find must interest in the loud GRIMDARK chorus playing in the background.
Also if that was Meteor it was a tiny impact... or the generic 'In Name Only' managed severely understated how bad thing were. Also using Meteor on a pile of teleporters with that much range seems rather stupid... or sacrificial of Alchemist. I mean this setting basically is a villains victorious setting where they didn't actually have to do much of anything. Except some words in ears stuff.
Never mind that stray devils seem to be legion... and no one devil side cares to deal with them anymore judging by the In Name Only's words. Though that could just be him being treated as a conspiracy theorist as a cover. Different type of pariah then. Sona wasting his time wit AA and other nonsense says its a worse, grimmer world for reasons.. or that the local Satans came off the worst in that fight and while I doubt they died judging by fact at least one of them is Earth side, I can't really find must interest in the loud GRIMDARK chorus playing in the background.
Anime Adjacent: Edgerunners 01-04
Project: Gamer Ver. Anime Adjacent: Edgerunners
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
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Waking up to the roar of gunfire was one of the most jarring, unpleasant ways to wake up imaginable.
Waking up to such a sound after spinal surgery without anesthesia is infinitely worse.
David Martinez, recently orphaned, freshly chipped didn't know what was going on- Only that he'd woken up suddenly and the last thing he remembered...
Pain.
Fire.
Cold...
Wrong!
He didn't remember passing out, just the feeling of his teeth cracking against the bite bar as he tried to keep from screaming too loudly as his spine was removed.
David struggled, his arms fighting against every motion, to push against the table he was splayed out on but he did manage, with far too much fire in his veins, to push himself up.
"Shit, kid." And heard an unfamiliar voice behind him. David blinked as he got the person in sight. "Here I'd thought you died when the screaming stopped."
The person, a man David decided after he finally got a decent look at them, was... Actually a little on the short side. Probably not even a proper two meters. Aside from that, the two things that stood out was the old fashioned netglasses and the bulky net-deck on the guys wrist.
"Who..." David's mouth felt like it was stuffed full of fabric, like he'd been chewing on a pillow or something. "Who're you?"
"...Alec." The man pursed his lips and looked down, a direction David's eyes followed.
Oh.
The gun shot- The doctor!
"What'd you-" David tried to yell but bent over, hacking and wheezing as his back exploded in pain. "What did- What- You?!"
"Choom!" The man stepped over the corpse on the floor. "Take a breath- Calm down, have a seat. Just... Take a deep breath, alright? Don't put too much stress on that botch job, alright?"
"Botch? What?" David's hand scrambled behind him, trying to grab the edge of the table he'd woken up on. "You... You killed the doctor?"
"...Yeah." The man, Alec, admitted as he crouched down and began to expertly strip the doctor- The body of everything. Including removing the credit chip from the port just behind the doctor's ventilated ear. "Any rippers working with the Scavs, I've been gunning for 'em."
"...Scavs?" David's head was swimming, the boy was struggling just to keep his eyes open. "I thought he just..."
David... Wasn't sure what he thought the doctor's connections had been.
Scavs, though? The 'Gang' of murderers that would kidnap folks off the streets and rip out their cyberware to make a quick buck? It... Made more sense than David wanted to admit.
"...Kid." Alec stood up and David could see his eyes going up and down his body, leaning awkwardly against the table he'd just been cut apart on. "Let's... Get you out of here. I know a Ripper up in Watson. Does good work. Here."
The man stepped up to David and leaned down, letting the boy put an arm over his neck and began to shuffle awkwardly out of the cramped, disgusting room.
"M' mom." David slurred, stopping abruptly and nearly knocking the both of them over. "Her jacket. Need t' get her jacket."
"I'll get it." Alec agreed. "Let me just get you to my car first, alright. Get you sitting down."
Stepping out into the light of day was one of the most painful things David had ever experienced... Barring the removal of his spine. Together the two of them began to slowly walk towards a brown Mahir Supron, the left rear corner panel of which David could see was clearly caved in from what was probably a hit and run.
"Alright." The man reached across his body and pressed a button on his cyberdeck, opening the front passenger side door. "Have a seat and get comfy. There's some food under the seat- I always lose my appetite after some wet-work. I'll go and start collecting things, I'll make sure to get your mom's jacket."
David just blearily nodded at the man as he sat down and then watched as he walked back to the Doc's 'Clinic'.
What... What the Hell had he been thinking? David had outright asked a shady back-alley ripperdoc to install something as serious as a military grade Sandestivan. As his first piece of real chrome?!
He leaned forward, his head pressed against the dashboard as everything- The desperation, the hollow ache in his chest where his mom used to be, the pain- It all hit him all at once!
And to top it off, he was chilling in some weird-ass retro-stranger's car while he...
David looked up, watching as Alec carted an armload of chrome out of the doc's clinic with his mom's Trauma Team coat on top.
...While some scab came and looted the back alley ripper's clinic.
David barely had the wherewithal to look up when Alec sat down in the driver's seat.
"You're looking pretty rough, kid." Alec said, his eyes scanning the boy's face. "Get some water in you. Think you can hold out 'till we get to my doc or do you want me to find someone closer?"
"...Cheaper?" David finally asked, his tongue felt like lead in his mouth. "I got- My mom's... I'm broke."
"Here, kid." The man slid over a shard, the one he'd taken from the doc's body. "My fee is in the back seat. You can call that compensation for lettin' him cut into you before I got there."
It took David a few tries to slot the shard into an open port, his hands kept shaking too much. When he did, though?
Fifteen thousand eddies. Just... Given away?
"This is a lot of money." David said as he reached down under the seat, pulling up a bag with a sandwich in it and a can of Real Water (Still).
"Probably." The driver agreed as he started the engine in the tiny economy van. "Guess where it came from, though."
...Scavs.
"Oh." David didn't know what else to say to that. Instead he chose to listen to something other than the weird music the guy was playing on his radio.
Like David's stomach.
He bit into his sandwich, some kind of brown SCOP in between two slices of the weirdest synth-bread he'd ever felt. It was... Really sweet. He couldn't place the flavor at all, though.
"Why are you hunting Scavs?" David asked in between bites. The food actually tasted really good, even though it seemed pretty simple. "Or, uh, the businesses that work with 'em?"
"Well, a few reasons." The murderer admitted. "The first? The harder it is for them to move product, the slower they'll work on getting it. Second? People realize there's risk in dealing with them, they'll be less likely to do it. At least for cheap. Finally? They offend me."
David snorted at that last answer and got an electric jolt of pain that stopped dead halfway down his legs.
Curious and more than a little concerned, he reached down and felt along his thigh, which seemed normal, then his calves.
He couldn't feel anything midway down his calves.
"I can't-" The food he'd been eating suddenly felt like a lead weight in his stomach.
"Kid?" Alec turned slightly, enough to see David in his peripheral vision. "Kid, you still with me?"
"I-I can't feel my feet." David managed to mumble, stuttering as his brain mis-fired.
Had the doctor- Had he screwed up? By accident? On purpose?
"...Yeah, that's no good." Alec mumbled as they stopped at a red light. "Kid? Kid!"
David snapped out of a brief, panic-induced fugue state and turned to look at the murderer in the driver seat. His breathing was almost out of control and he could feel liquid fire pouring into his veins from his back.
"Just breathe, alright." The man inhaled slowly, then exhaled slowly. Both loud and obvious. After a second David caught on and began to try and match him. "Good, good! Breathe with me, alright? Just focus on that, just focus on breathing. Close your eyes, count to ten, do what you got to but just keep breathing."
David... Did exactly that. He closed his eyes and he just breathed. For the rest of the drive, he just focused on existing.
He didn't know if it was ten minutes, twenty minutes or half an hour before they finally came to a full stop. Opening his eyes, David... Did not recognize where they were.
"C'mon." Alec said as he stepped out of the car. "Let's get you to an actual doctor and get things looked at."
David waited until the man had stepped around to the side of the tiny van before he opened the door, then let him help David get out. He was feeling tingling in his feet and couldn't tell if that was good or bad.
It was awkward. It was embarrassing. David honestly felt ashamed as the stranger helped him down a set of stairs and then around a bunch of stalls. All around them were people wearing Tyger Claw paraphernalia. And at the very back of the hidden market?
There was a legitimate Ripperdoc!
"Hey, Rainwater." Alec greeted the man like he was an old friend. "Kid here had a run-in with a Scav doc. Think you could give him a look over?"
The Ripperdoc was a huge man, one with no visible chrome that David could see. He'd never heard of someone that was fully ganic doing that kind of work.
"...How bad?" The man, Rainwater asked, a barely detectable Chinese accent in his voice.
"Dirty knives, place was full of third-hand chrome, creep had an autojacker next to his operating table." Alec fired off without a second of hesitation. "Kid here had some major work done on his spine and now he can't feel his feet."
"...The hell did you hunt down, Choom? Doctor Borg?" The ripper shook his head and motioned for them to come back into his operating room.
"...Yeah." David answered after a moment. "How'd you know?"
"...God damnit." Rainwater cursed as he pushed aside his plastic curtains. "Get him on the table! I'll get the anesthetic! And you!"
Alec paused briefly as Rainwater pushed a thick finger into his chest, but continued to help David on to the table anyway.
"I'm getting a full explanation when I'm done!"
Compared to the near-paralyzing agony in his back? David barely felt the needle go into his arm.
Less than a minute later, once the doctor started pulling the staples out of his back? David didn't feel anything at all.
-----
Waking up after getting surgery done twice in one day is the strangest feeling.
David's mouth tasted like the underside of a toilet and his brain felt fuzzy.
His back wasn't hurting, though, so that was nice.
He tried to open his eyes and it took a bit of effort. More than he was used to. Once he succeeded, though, it still took him a few moments to piece his situation together.
He was sitting in the doctor's operating chair, upright instead of on his belly. He was comfortably numb, things had stopped hurting but now he could feel an odd tingling in his everything.
"Ah, good. You're awake." The doctor, Rain... Something said to him once the man had finished washing his hands at a nearby sink. "Things were a bit touch and go for a moment there."
"Whu-Whu happen'?" David tried to ask around his thick, fuzzy tongue.
"What happened? Kid, I don't even know." The doctor shook his head and sat down in front of David. "That thing in your back? I ain't ever seen something like it. Borg just left live wires sittin' on your muscles. I had to put in a lot of guesswork to hook that Sandestivan in properly. Had you split open on my table a lot longer than I was happy with."
"Good news and bad news, though." The doc put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. "The bad news is that whatever model that bastard is, it's replacing nearly a third of your spine. She's hardwired into your nervous system so any replacements are going to be a bitch and a half to do, so you better take good care of it. Got it?"
David nodded numbly and the doctor continued. "Good news, for a certain measure of good. Getting you opened up I had a chance to disinfect the ever loving hell out of everything. Your chances of dying without antibiotics went down. Significantly."
"I... I feel a lot better." David admitted, looking down as he curled his toes. "No random pain."
Stretching his arms out, David curled his hands into fists and then stood up. He wobbled slightly but didn't feel like he was about to fall over.
"That's what I want to hear." The doctor smiled at him, a rough expression on what was typically a very stoic face. "Now, normally a major tune up like that would have a pretty hefty price tag on it."
"How hefty?" David asked, wincing at the thought.
"Covered." The doc waved him off. "That gonk Solo that brought you in paid up in advance."
"What?!" David almost shouted, only just keeping his voice to a tolerable level. "Why would he- I don't need anyone's pity!"
"Yeah, kid. You did." The doc stared directly into David's eyes until the teen had sat back in his chair and looked away. "The job that got pulled on your install? By any other metric aside from working? It'd be a failure. If you'd a survived more than a month it would've been a medical miracle."
"...Oh." Well, there wasn't much more for David to say about that.
"Yeah. 'Oh'." The doc rolled his little wheelie stool over to a cabinet and pulled a few things out. A couple of bottles full of pills and a few inhalers before rolling back. "Now, you got a big install there, kid. Don't know how friendly it'll be with your system, so we're going to be playing it safe."
"This here is for the nerves. Those don't like being handled on a good day and you got cut open twice on a bad one. One pill in the morning and one at night before bed for the next two weeks." The doc set a small bottle down in front of David before moving to the next one, which had larger pills in it. "These cover cyberware rejection. You feel any itching or burning through your back that won't go away, you take one of these. If it persists for more than twelve hours, you call me or you get your ass to a Ryder clinic, you understand?"
David nodded silently, staring as things were laid out before him.
The most he'd ever heard about were the immunosuppresants that Borg would hand out like candy to patients that never... Returned...
"Now, this-" The doc held up an inhaler. "-is a MaxDoc. It's just a booster, get you through the next day or so. One puff in two hours, then another around lunch tomorrow. I've gone ahead and sent a notice to your school- Congrats on having the grades to get into Arasaka, by the way- and you'll be out for the next week to adjust."
"That, uh, that's a lot of time." David argued. "I feel loads better- Great, even! I could totally go back tomorrow!"
"Kid." The doc's calm voice did more to silence David than any yelling could. "It's not about how you feel now. That's a big chunk of hardware and it's hooked straight into your nervous system. Moodswings and nausea are pretty normal for the first four or five days. Take the time, get your head on straight."
"...Alright." David didn't want to agree. He wanted to go back to the academy and use his new chrome to beat the ever loving snot out of his bully.
But he wasn't the doctor.
And maybe he was on to something since, before his mom's death and the Sandy he really hadn't been -that- violent. Sure, he watched a pretty nasty brain dance here and there but that wasn't the same thing.
Was it?
"...What happened to the guy that brought me in?" David asked the doctor. Rainwater, he thought.
"That gonk?" The ripperdoc chuckled, shaking his head as he did so.
"Never sits still for too long. Mentioned needing to get some work done on some Fingers."
----- Edgerunners 02
The week of downtime left David feeling like he'd missed a cue. Like there'd been something he was supposed to have done, but forgot about. As though he'd missed the NCART to school and now he was going to fail a test.
He couldn't explain it, at all.
The week itself had been... Rough. Even without worrying about cash? He'd been stuck sitting at home, adjusting. Sometimes the cyberware would twinge, time would slow down. Only for a second at a time, but it had been so weird to adjust to! He'd usually trip or drop whatever he'd been holding when it happened.
At least it would send a notice to his optics. The last one, a few days back, had said 'Integration completed successfully!' and he hadn't had any more issues.
The worst part? Honestly?
"Guess it's a good thing you died in a clinic when you did, mom." He'd been going stir crazy, talking to his mom's ashes. The last few days, vegging out on a couch and staring at the T.V. had been a mix of bad and worse.
Like the fact that he was getting constant news alerts that some psycho was going around, gunning up clinics and ripperdocs. NCPD's announcements about being close to catching the cyberpsycho kept getting proven wrong when the news was showing off videos of the before and aftermath. People with holes in their skulls and patients that had limbs and organs missing.
Whatever nutjob was out there? They were a real piece of work. Even for Night City.
A few days into his convalescence he'd tried going back to school. Get back into routine.
Have something to do.
He'd been turned away at the door by security. They'd been uncompromising- He wasn't allowed back in for a few more days. Even threatened to have him dragged out by NCPD if he didn't leave.
So... He left. Sat down in the NCART and just rode the rails until it had gone around and around and around. He'd gotten off as the sun was setting after spending a day just stuck in his head.
He hadn't been the only one missing school that day, at least. Across from him had been some little girl, blood red optics and her skin all chromed over in some cheap gray dye job. She'd only been on the mass transit monorail for about twenty minutes but that kind of appearance was hard to forget.
Yesterday, David had tried to see about tracking down the Solo that had pulled him out of the Doc's clinic. The teen had barely known where to start with that kind of thing, though. He only knew of one common contact that the two had.
Doctor Robert Rainwater, a ripperdoc in the Watson district of Night City. The man had actually been pretty happy to see David up and about.
Something about how most folks would sit around doing nothing after getting something chipped in, which was bad for the body and ended up being bad for the chrome.
David was going back again today. The noodle joints in Watson beat the burrito vending machine down the hall by a landslide. No contest.
Getting off the NCART, barely stepping around a giant amazon with white hair and more chrome than meat, it really struck him how different this part of the city was to his own. It was still poor. Still run down. But it was cleaner and the people had more energy to them than the residents of the Santa Domingo district did.
He was almost to the Ripper Clinic when something to the side, a reflection caught his eye. Looking over, David saw something he hadn't been expecting. The man he'd been looking for, Alec, was sitting at one of the little noodle bars. His glasses were pulled up and into his short, wavy brown hair and he was just watching a television in the corner as he ate.
David hesitated for a long moment but still took a seat. He had a lot of questions he needed to ask.
"Hey... Alec?" David felt nervous as he spoke up. He knew the man was a cold-blooded killer. He'd put a bullet clean through the Ripper that David had occasionally worked for.
"Hmm... Yeah?" The man looked to him and, without the tinted net-glasses obscuring them, David could see the guy had yellow optics. "Kid? You're looking a lot better!"
"Thanks. I'm- Uh, one bowl of the beef? Real Water, please?- I'm feeling a lot better." David struggled for a moment with the interruption by the cook but he thought he was doing alright. "I, uh, I wanted to talk to you about some stuff."
The guy took a long moment to slurp some noodles, some kinda white SCOP clinging to 'em, before answering. "I figured as much. I mean, you sat down and started talking to me. What'ya need kid?"
"David." The boy responded, thumping himself in the chest with a thumb. "Call me David. That was... That was a pretty solid payday from the, uh, thing. Earlier. I kinda got to earn my own scratch now so I was wondering... I mean, you're a Solo, right?"
"You want me to teach you? Or do you want to run with me?" The man put his noodles on the bar and turned to the kid, giving him his full attention. One thing in particular that David noticed was the lack of ports on Alec's neck. "Got to warn you, kid. I'm one of the more boring mercs in the business."
"Either? Both?" David paused for a moment to accept his own bowl of noodles. "Just... Explain it to me? Please?"
"...Alright." The guy sat up a bit straighter and pulled his glasses down over his eyes. "There's a bunch of specializations in the business, David. Some of 'em you'll need some serious hardware to pull off."
"Starting off, you get a jack of all trades like me. I'm not going to go in hot and heavy anywhere, my body don't take to chrome too well. I make up for that with preparation, observation and planning." The man tapped the netdeck on his belt before continuing. "Though I can do a bit of work as a netrunner. Folks like me get called 'Crystaljocks', the ones that use external hardware and pre-built programs. Not as fast as a genuine 'runner but I can still pull off most of the same things using macros. Also a lot easier to upgrade my gear since I don't need a ripper to slot anything into place."
"After that you get your heavies. Folks that either bulk up with muscle or chrome. Fellas that can rip open a locked door or handle a heavy machine gun." Alec tapped at his arms before shaking his head. "You get into a team, you'll want one of those on it. Expensive though, gotta keep 'em fed or maintained. Lot of chrome junkies go that route."
"After that you get your techies. Smart ones know a good bit of medicine. If they don't know how to tie a tourniquet? Then they have a habit of being a liability in the field." Again, Alec tapped at the net-deck on his belt. "Never hurts to know how your own gear works, kiddo. Buying a brush set and some gun oil will save you a lot of money in the long run over having to shell out eddies every time your gun jams. Assuming you don't get shot."
"Third are your drivers. Most of the good ones are Nomads, not all though. Truth is, you don't need fast and flashy to make solid cash as a driver." David nodded at the Solo's words, remembering the shit-brown minivan he'd driven. "You get from point A to point B without damaging cargo, you've got a promising future. If you can lose a tail? Then you're looking at real solid money."
"Fourth, finally, you got your netrunners. Freezer meat. Don't ever take 'em lightly 'cuz they can make or break an operation. That said? If you actually see a netrunner on the other side of an op, odds are they're a shit 'runner." Alec paused for a moment to take a sip off a can of Nicola before continuing. "You don't see good ones in the field. Period. I've got a Columbus Freight I've used a few times to ferry around a friend of mine while she was in an ice bath. Wrecked a Maelstrom outpost up north while we were sitting pretty in the city center."
"It sounds kind of exciting." David felt a little giddy at the thought, truth be told. "Is the money good?"
"If it's exciting then you messed up, kid." Alec shook his head and slurped up some more noodles. "...Loud is cheap, at least in this work. You get what your fixer sent you after? Without anyone else knowing you got it? Shit's hard work but the pay is preem."
"...Huh." David needed a moment to process that so he chose to eat. The synth-loin in his noodles may have been cheap and chewy but it still beat the hell out of the burritos in the vending machines back home. Cost about the same, too. "How would I go and do something like that?"
"Well, the first step is knowing what you've got and what you can do." Alec put his empty bowl on the counter and focused his gaze on David. "So. What do you have and what can you do?"
"Well..." What... Did he have? David wasn't big or strong. He didn't know how to drive. He'd never learned anything about taking stuff apart or putting them back together. He didn't even have an actual cyberdeck, just the integrated model that was connected to his optics! "I've got a Sandy?"
"...Not the worst place to start, I guess." Alec sighed and looked up and down David's body. "Current models don't play well with a cyberdeck but I suppose I can give you my last net-deck. An Owl Mark 8, might be a generation out of date but the stealth capabilities should hold up. Everything is geared up for hunting netrunners with a net presence, external decks aren't even an afterthought these days. Too slow. Should be able to link it up with your optics, I suppose."
Alec placed a roll of eddies on the counter and leaned back in his seat, nursing his Nicola. "Eat up, David. We'll get you a crash course on how to use that Sandy and let you look in on an operation I got planned here in a bit."
"...If you got Cyberware Sensitivity, how do you know how to use a Sandestivan?" That wasn't the only question on David's mind as he started piecing some of the oddities together. Like the guy's eyes. He'd never heard of ganic eyes that were bright yellow.
"...I've flatlined a lot of gonks that thought moving fast made up for a lack of skill, kid." Alec put his can on the bar and looked David in the eye. "Either outlast 'em until the speed they're trying to move fries their joints, they try to hit that speed too many times and it fries their brains, or you trip 'em and they still fall at the same speed as anyone else. Lots of bad ways to use that tech."
"The smart ways, choom? There's a reason Blackhand is still around today and it wasn't because he wasted his time on crazy ninja shit when a bullet to the chrome-dome would do the job."
-----
Once upon a time, David's mother had told him not to get into the car with any strangers.
Always sound advice and infinitely more important in Night City, one of the Corporate Capitals of the world with a Scav population to match.
That said? The stranger in the driver seat of the little brown minivan had taken David at his worst and taken him to get actual, medical assistance. In Night City that made Alec something akin to a saint.
The saint of slow drivers!
"How long does it take to get out of the city?" David asked, his cheek pressed against the window as he stared at the passing cars while they sat at a red light.
"Depends on how the city is feeling." Alec told him, one hand tapping away at the steering wheel in tune with some ancient rock song about being closer to right. "She doesn't like letting go of people before she's made her mark."
"...That doesn't make any sense." David was having second thoughts on asking the Solo to teach him. And third thoughts.
Not that he was going to act on any of them. The two of them were at the northern limits of the city, heading out to the oil fields where Alec promised to teach him how to shoot and figure out how to use the external cyberdeck he'd offered the boy.
Finally the light turned green and the duo passed by a tricked out yellow and black Chevillon Emperor that definitely caught David's eye.
He wanted to know how much he'd have to earn, how much work he'd have to do so he could get something like that... Rather than a dinky little Indian minivan like Alec was driving.
"'Course it don't." Alec agreed as they began to pass by the ruins of oil wells beyond the walls of the city. "You're a native. You don't really feel it when the City is watching you, planning out which way it'll kill ya. Trap ya. Ain't the first time I've been somewhere rotten and hateful, down to the core. If the merc life suits ya, you'll get out from time to time, make some scratch somewhere that ain't so hostile and you'll really feel it when you come back."
David... Honestly couldn't tell if the guy was talking about the atmosphere of the city or if he really believed in the kinda spiritual hoo-doo.
Giving up on worrying about it as crazy people with crazy opinions, he chose instead to focus on where they were and what they were doing.
Specifically in the destroyed oil fields north of the city and Alec was parking his little junker. Getting out of the cramped hunk of junk, he followed Alec to the back and barely kept his jaw from dropping when he saw what the man had hidden behind the closed doors.
Guns! Bullets! A laptop computer?!
"Whoa!" David exclaimed, reaching out to try and grab one of the pistols only to have his hand slapped away by Alec, the Solo offering him an unimpressed glare.
"Chill, Dave. Got things to go over before you start blastin' shit." The man extracted two identical pistols and handed one over to the boy. "This here is a Liberty. Solid pistol, standard magazines have fourteen rounds in 'em. It's a Power weapon, means it can link up with a Ballistic Coprocessor and show you where things'll go. Heard there's some new mods that the corpos are playing with to skip that part, though."
David flipped the weapon over in his hands, noting the weight, the length of the barrel, the buttons on the side of the gun...
"What do these things do?" He ended up asking as he flicked one of the buttons and noted that it made another one pop out on the opposite side of the gun.
"Good, you already found the safety." Alec held his gun sideways, fingers conspicuously away from the trigger, and pointed at the parts David had asked about. "That's basically a physical lock inside your gun. It stops you from squeezing the trigger when it's active. The other button releases the mechanism locking the magazine in place, lets it drop out. You'll get real familiar with both of those, real quick."
The next thing Alec extracted from his van was a box of bullets. 9mm, fifty in a box.
"Gonna teach you to load up while we go over some safety basics. Guns are damned good weapons, David, but they don't care what's in front of the barrel. That's gonna be on you, that's gonna be on me. Ain't about to tell you not to shoot a person, Night City ain't gonna give you that kinda luxury. I am gonna tell you to be real sure you only point it at people you want dead." Alec explained as he showed David how to load ammo into the magazines. "You feel you gotta make threats, you make 'em. Don't go pulling a gun though, not unless you plan to use it. Also, don't be a gonk and keep your finger off the trigger unless you plan on pulling it. You get spooked, you pull a fist, that's an accidental gunshot. Might'a shot a friend. Might'a gave away your position. All bad shit."
David nodded as the expert spoke, making sure to pay attention. This wasn't some kind of game. If he messed up, he might not get to go home.
"So, what, I keep the safety on when I'm not using it?" David asked, getting a nod in return as he mimicked Alec on loading the magazine into the gun. Pulling the slide back slowly, the Arasaka student watched as the mechanism loaded a bullet into place. "And I don't point it at things I don't want to shoot. And, uh, keep my fingers off the trigger when I'm not shooting? Is that it?"
"Almost." Alec nodded to him as the orphan paraphrased his instructions. "Bullets don't stop just 'cuz they hit somethin'. So try and stay aware of your surroundings when you start shooting. You put a bullet through some Maelstrom metal-head? That's great! The bullet kept going and hits whatever you went to extract? That's not so great. Hate failing an op on stupid shit like that, but it happens and it'll keep happening. These rules are to minimize risks, we can't really get rid of 'em."
After that, things went pretty smooth. They spent the better part of an hour just shooting at scrap metal. David had even found some antique prosthetic left arm, rusted chrome, that they'd propped up to shoot at for a bit until it was nothing more than twisted scrap.
Back when Gloria had been alive, they'd never been able to do that kind of thing. She and David never had the money. Never had the time. She'd worked, tirelessly, just to put him through the best school in the city.
And David saw three months of her take home wages when a random Solo had gone and flatlined a skeevy ripperdoc and given the boy the leftovers.
Eventually the two moved on to figuring out how to configure the external cyberdeck to David's implants. That one...
"Swear to god, hate messing with this stuff..." Alec grumbled, text scrolling visibly down his glasses as the two of them were connected to the old Owl unit. "If it weren't so useful, I'd just stick to creepin' round the shadows."
"...Think I found the permissions." David spoke up, letters and numbers dancing across his own eyes. "Yeah! Just got to set myself as a registered user and... Done!"
"Fantastic!" Alec disconnected the hardwire that was hooked into the side of his glasses. "That thing'll run as fast as you can think at it. Me? Gotta use a keyboard and some macro buttons sewn into my gloves. Still, works fine for breachin' most things and slinging quickhacks. Speakin' of..."
David got a very, very brief warning flash before he lost all feeling in his limbs and he dropped to the ground, his vision went dark. He wouldn't lie, he started screaming then and there.
The 'Rebooting!' message flashing across his optics only helped a little to calm his panic.
"...What the hell was that?!" David screeched after he got his breathing back under control. "The hell did you do to me?!"
"Cyberware Reboot." His vision was grainy when it came back, his optics going through a boot up sequence that was downright unpleasant. "Not exactly a common quickhack, there are better ones out there for its cost. Like System Reset, that one straight up knocks someone out."
"Why can't I feel my limbs?!" David was still panicking. He just did a solid job of listening while he did so.
"That Sandy of yours." Alec stated, pointing at David's chest. "Made that the key to your whole nervous system. That thing has to boot back up? You're outta commission. In the field? That means you're dead."
"But-but it's, like, some kinda top secret military prototype! Shouldn't it, like, have some major ICE or something?!" A new bar had appeared in David's vision, in the middle where it blocked his view.
It said 'Sandevistan: Loading...'.
"Kid... If it's some military model, this is gonna be a sad reality check. Military gear is made to be as cheap, fast and replaceable as they can make it. And experimental prototypes can be even worse." David's vision fully returned, as well as his sense of touch. "You don't know what the thing they were testing, is. Did they want to see how well it would work without safeties in it? They trying to cut down the reset timer? You got some new part or mod hooked in there? Thing like that, security'd be minimal on purpose just so they can jack in and check it out without having to go through a mess of authentication every single time."
David managed to get his breathing under control after a few more moments, then he finally managed to stand up.
He really didn't want to admit that Alec made sense. He wanted to think his gear was special, that it was better than what other people had. Being told otherwise... Hurt.
"I'm... Good. I'm good." David said, shaking his head and patting himself down, checking the gun strapped to his hip. "What can I do about that?"
"That? That I don't know." Alec admitted as he began walking back to his car. "Should be some way to limit the number of devices that can access it. Lock down its network so only trusted devices can connect to it. You'll have to talk to an actual expert on that front- Never had to learn, myself."
Right. Cyberware sensitivity. The guy was practically a cripple on that front.
Great.
David spent a long moment thinking about that issue as the guy set up a handful of targets before turning to the boy.
"So." Alec waved to the fourteen targets spread out around the area. "A Sandevistan. Those things speed up your perception of time. Recent models can even get the whole body moving at stupid fast speeds. You're looking at a whole lot of give and take, there. Be smart about it, though, and you can see a whole lotta use out of it."
Fourteen targets. The same number of bullets in his gun.
"You said I could be real dangerous if I used it smart, but using it dumb would... You mentioned people blowing out their joints?" David knew he'd said something like that over at the noodle stand.
"Yeah." Alec extracted the magazine of his gun and checked the side, silently counting out how many bullets he had before he moved to top it off. "Even cyber-limbs have a tolerance to how fast they're supposed to move. Exceed that and you start putting a lot of wear and tear on the joints. For you, that'd mean a lot of pain. For a borg? Sudden cyberware failure. Friggen hilarious when they're trying to ram a mantis blade through you and their arm freezes midway."
"So... How do I fix that?" That actually sounded kind of horrifying. David had already gotten to experience sudden limb failure today. He didn't want to go through that again!
"Short answer? Don't use the Sandy to move, at least not a whole lot." Alec brought his gun up to aim at the targets. "It's a reflex booster... But more importantly, it gives you time to think. Gives you time to make a dozen small movements where normal folks only get to make one."
Squaring up, Alec took aim at the first target. David activated his Sandevistan when he saw the man squeeze the trigger the first time.
In slow motion, he watched the man fire off all fourteen shots. Each time he moved as little as he could, adjusting his hands and the tilt of his head more than he did his body. In a corner of David's vision, he could see a timer slowly ticking up.
By the time eight seconds had passed, Alec had put a bullet through each target. Not headshots, no, but he'd still hit center-mass fourteen times out of fourteen. At ten seconds, David cut the Sandy off and time resumed. For David, those ten seconds had felt like minutes.
"Fancy shit looks cool, really impressive. Problem is? Takes more effort and focus." Alec explained as he checked his gun and confirmed it was empty. "So while you're puttin' in the effort to line up a row of headshots? Someone else is puttin' in the same for you. Hit a gonk in the center of mass and drop 'em, then put a second shot in the dome. Bullets are cheap, unless it's in you."
David swallowed thickly at that, remembering how much... How much blood had come out of his mom. The price he'd been charged just to stabilize her.
The gnawing hole in his chest where she used to be.
"Come on." Alec's voice broke David out of his thoughts, the heavy hand on his shoulder oddly comforting as the memories made everything feel cold. "Let's pack it in then I'll let you shadow me on my next job. If it's something you don't want to do? This'll be the place to learn it."
They put things away silently. Alec seemed to be focused on the task at hand whilst David was looking at what he'd been shown, been told and had to think if it was something he genuinely wanted to do.
Maybe he could apply for a scholarship? Move into the students dorm, put the few mementos and physical memories of his mom and home into a storage unit. It'd be cheaper than trying to rent an apartment.
His thoughts drifted from one painful topic to the next as Alec drove his dinky little minivan through Night City, the filthy streets and neon lights welcoming them back into their rotten embrace like an abusive lover.
The city... David saw more crime, violence and drugs and prostitution in the forty minutes it took to get across town than he'd ever paid attention to before. Corpos buying drugs off back alley dealers, NCPD talking to Scavs and pointing them towards an enclave of the homeless...
He'd never noticed it before. Never paid attention to it before.
But right then, right there, his choices involved either looking within or looking out. It hurt less to look out.
"Wait..." David pressed a hand against the tinted glass of the side window and leaned forward to stare at a building down the block from where they'd parked. "I know that place!"
"The hell?" Alec turned to look at him, curiosity plain in his expression. "I've been watching that place for a few days. How do you know about it?"
"It... It's the place where I took my mom." The building was a run-down clinic, a place for the poor to get basic, life-extending surgeries. At a price they really couldn't afford. "She- she died, there."
"You know, I'm starting to get a little worried how often you get mixed up in my shit, kid." Alec shook his head and reached into the back seat, grabbing his laptop. "Spiky-ass hair, 'Special Implant' put in by some back alley whackjob. You gettin' bullied in school, too?"
"...Yeah?" What the heck was the guy getting at? He was the one getting mixed up in David's business!
"Found myself a goddamn protagonist. Great." Alec sighed heavily and side-eyed the young man. "You know what? No. Not dealin' with that shit right now. Got an op planned, I'll talk you through what I'll be doing. You feel like jumping in, saving some girl or handlin' some Scav that's about to pop me in the six? Don't."
Opening the laptop, the guy connected a data cable to it from the cyberdeck attached to his belt. One quick loading bar later and David could see through every camera in the building!
"Now, kid. Did you get the money-back guarantee from these butchers before they figured you couldn't pay 'em more than their buyers could for your mom's chrome?" Alec didn't even bother looking at David as he asked him that question. Instead he was busy loading several gun magazines for his pistol. Pistols.
He'd pulled a second one out from behind his back, though it looked significantly different from the Liberty he'd taught David how to handle. Some kind of rail-gun Tech pistol from the looks of it.
"They don't have a money-back guarantee." David said dumbly as his eyes were glued on the screen. As he watched the surgeon that said his mom had been stabilized was ripping the limbs off of a man that was still alive.
"Sure they do." Alec said, attaching a silencer to his Liberty. "You just gotta know the right language to ask for it. Me?"
The grin that came over the Solo's face was cold.
"I'm fluent in lead."
-----
David felt bored out of his skull as the hours ticked on and on.
Alec, the solo with him, hadn't gone in guns blazing. Hadn't strapped half a dozen knives to his sides. Didn't seem to be doing a whole helluva lot at all, really.
Just got the laptop from the back of the van, popped it open on the tiny space between his seat and David's and he'd just been clicking away. David had been watching the screen for a while and it was interesting, at first, how the guy had broken the ICE on the building's security and was watching everything through the cameras.
And for whatever reason, every ten minutes on the dot he would crack open one of the back windows. Hooked into the system, David watched as Alec compiled an error report and sent it off to the netrunner in charge of things.
Then the netrunner in the building would send off a message to whichever gonk was nearby and tell them to go manually close it because Alec had somehow disconnected the shutters, or assumed administrator control or something and made it look like they just weren't responding to digital commands.
On the fifteenth time, two and a half hours into surveilling the building, one of the Scavs inside finally cracked.
'Leave it the hell alone!' The text message shot back from a Scav doc back to the shit-tier netrunner. 'I'm too busy to deal with some goddamn window!'
"Alright." Alec said aloud after he took a slow sip from a bottle of water. Putting that down, David watched as his hands flew across the keys and he started executing scripts. "That's the chip. Here, watch this."
David watched in confusion as the man loaded up a Ping but quickly saw the digital trails spread throughout the on-screen display. Over each outline of a person through the walls, their positions reported by the dozens of connected devices, was a twelve-character string identifying each and every person.
That... Was a lot more than he'd ever been told the Quickhack would do.
"Now, fun little trick here..." Alec began to explain to David as he manually typed in one set of characters, the code identifying the netrunner. "There's a quickhack out there called 'Reset Optics'. Doesn't do anything too complicated, kid. It just causes someone's optics to reboot and everyone, I mean everyone that can at least, has got some chrome optics."
The solo hit Enter on the keyboard and a progress bar appeared over the netrunner's figure, slowly filling in.
"Well, the ICE between your optics and the rest of your system is pretty weak. Has to be, all the shit folks put into 'em like news feeds and money-management systems. But here's the question- What's the big difference between someone's optics and the rest of their cyberware?"
"...I don't know?" David eventually said after a moment of thinking, his eyes locked on the loading bar. "I mean, an eye's an eye and an arm's an arm?"
"On our end of things, yeah." The older man agreed, swapping to a different screen when the netrunner started having a seizure. "But to the system itself, they're all just extensions. Slave One, Slave Two, Slave Three... Modifying 'Reset Optics' to use a universal targeting code instead of a specific one and it hits all of the cyberware inside of someone. I call it 'Cyberware Reboot'. Not at the top of my list of tricks, 'Cyberware Reformat' is my real baby but it's a bit slow for this kind of job."
"...Y'know, that doesn't sound that scary." David admitted, watching as Alec tracked down the doctor who'd complained about being sent to close the window over and over again, then began to upload a low-level Short Circuit. The man jerked and jolted in pain for a moment before he grabbed a scalpel and stormed out of the room.
"Imagine getting knocked out for a second because your cyberware all shuts off for half a minute and then it comes back on and doesn't know who you are." Alec told him, panning through the camera feeds to follow the very angry butcher. "No preferences are saved, all of the small machine-learning algorithms have been wiped out, any commands or settings are reset to factory standard. Hit a borg with it and all of the work that went into teaching their body how to work with the little bit of brain they got left won't be there."
David thought about it as the shocked doctor stormed into the office the netrunner operated out of and, as the man was still groggy and not quite paying attention, ripped his throat out with the scalpel. Blood sprayed everywhere, coating the doctor as the netrunner tried to stymie the flow with his hands.
'jon gon sycho!!!11!1' Was fired off through the network, a last message from the netrunner before the doctor, apparently named John, slammed the small blade through his victim's eye.
A small window showing the view from a different camera saw a trio of large men running towards the office, each one carrying a piece of iron. They quickly came on to the scene as the doctor was cleaning himself up in the same room as the fresh corpse.
They fired on the doctor. Alec, putting down his bottle of water, activated a series of macros that saw quickhacks being uploaded to each of the gunmen. Costly, powerful versions of Contagion, Overheat and Short Circuit.
"Alrighty then." Alec checked his gun and then opened the door as the security personnel on-screen dropped to the ground, their screams cutting short as their own chrome killed them. "I'll be back in a few minutes."
David stared in shock as the Solo walked, casually, up to the building that David's mom had died in and just climbed right through the window he'd used to set that whole string of events into motion.
He felt... Something, as the man just walked through the mostly empty halls, clicking his finger and his thumb from time to time to apparently activate Ping with his external deck. The remaining people inside, another 'Doctor' and the secretary, hadn't paid any attention to the message about the psycho. They weren't aware at all of the deaths of the five other people that had been in the building.
The other doctor didn't turn around to acknowledge the door opening behind him, rather focused on trying to remove a set of arms off of a corpse, when Alec stepped up behind him and put a bullet through the back of his skull.
The secretary was focused entirely on playing some kind of game, some retro hand-held thing that looked like a guy on a horse, when Alec did the same thing to her.
'Alright, David. That's this building cleared. I'm calling in my Columbus. You want to help me start looting while I hunt down the building logs and anything the 'runner left in the system?' Flashed across David's eyes while Alec was huddled over the digital display on his left wrist, his right hand tapping at the screen.
'Yeah. I'll be right in.' David sent back, opening to door on his own side of the tiny little vehicle.
That hadn't been exciting. David had been expecting gunfights, watching as the Solo dodged around cover and expertly picked off each target one by one.
Instead... Instead David had watched as the majority of the Scavs were taken out remotely, pitted against each other and then killed when they were at their most vulnerable.
It wasn't like in the XBDs he'd watched. At all. It was methodical and precise, it had been all about control, thinning down the opposition and weakening them before cleaning up the leftovers.
David... Wanted that.
He wanted to have that kind of power. He wanted to have that kind of control.
He'd always followed what his mom wanted, and he still wanted to make her proud but... He wanted to have the power to control his own life.
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
_________________________________________________________________________
Waking up to the roar of gunfire was one of the most jarring, unpleasant ways to wake up imaginable.
Waking up to such a sound after spinal surgery without anesthesia is infinitely worse.
David Martinez, recently orphaned, freshly chipped didn't know what was going on- Only that he'd woken up suddenly and the last thing he remembered...
Pain.
Fire.
Cold...
Wrong!
He didn't remember passing out, just the feeling of his teeth cracking against the bite bar as he tried to keep from screaming too loudly as his spine was removed.
David struggled, his arms fighting against every motion, to push against the table he was splayed out on but he did manage, with far too much fire in his veins, to push himself up.
"Shit, kid." And heard an unfamiliar voice behind him. David blinked as he got the person in sight. "Here I'd thought you died when the screaming stopped."
The person, a man David decided after he finally got a decent look at them, was... Actually a little on the short side. Probably not even a proper two meters. Aside from that, the two things that stood out was the old fashioned netglasses and the bulky net-deck on the guys wrist.
"Who..." David's mouth felt like it was stuffed full of fabric, like he'd been chewing on a pillow or something. "Who're you?"
"...Alec." The man pursed his lips and looked down, a direction David's eyes followed.
Oh.
The gun shot- The doctor!
"What'd you-" David tried to yell but bent over, hacking and wheezing as his back exploded in pain. "What did- What- You?!"
"Choom!" The man stepped over the corpse on the floor. "Take a breath- Calm down, have a seat. Just... Take a deep breath, alright? Don't put too much stress on that botch job, alright?"
"Botch? What?" David's hand scrambled behind him, trying to grab the edge of the table he'd woken up on. "You... You killed the doctor?"
"...Yeah." The man, Alec, admitted as he crouched down and began to expertly strip the doctor- The body of everything. Including removing the credit chip from the port just behind the doctor's ventilated ear. "Any rippers working with the Scavs, I've been gunning for 'em."
"...Scavs?" David's head was swimming, the boy was struggling just to keep his eyes open. "I thought he just..."
David... Wasn't sure what he thought the doctor's connections had been.
Scavs, though? The 'Gang' of murderers that would kidnap folks off the streets and rip out their cyberware to make a quick buck? It... Made more sense than David wanted to admit.
"...Kid." Alec stood up and David could see his eyes going up and down his body, leaning awkwardly against the table he'd just been cut apart on. "Let's... Get you out of here. I know a Ripper up in Watson. Does good work. Here."
The man stepped up to David and leaned down, letting the boy put an arm over his neck and began to shuffle awkwardly out of the cramped, disgusting room.
"M' mom." David slurred, stopping abruptly and nearly knocking the both of them over. "Her jacket. Need t' get her jacket."
"I'll get it." Alec agreed. "Let me just get you to my car first, alright. Get you sitting down."
Stepping out into the light of day was one of the most painful things David had ever experienced... Barring the removal of his spine. Together the two of them began to slowly walk towards a brown Mahir Supron, the left rear corner panel of which David could see was clearly caved in from what was probably a hit and run.
"Alright." The man reached across his body and pressed a button on his cyberdeck, opening the front passenger side door. "Have a seat and get comfy. There's some food under the seat- I always lose my appetite after some wet-work. I'll go and start collecting things, I'll make sure to get your mom's jacket."
David just blearily nodded at the man as he sat down and then watched as he walked back to the Doc's 'Clinic'.
What... What the Hell had he been thinking? David had outright asked a shady back-alley ripperdoc to install something as serious as a military grade Sandestivan. As his first piece of real chrome?!
He leaned forward, his head pressed against the dashboard as everything- The desperation, the hollow ache in his chest where his mom used to be, the pain- It all hit him all at once!
And to top it off, he was chilling in some weird-ass retro-stranger's car while he...
David looked up, watching as Alec carted an armload of chrome out of the doc's clinic with his mom's Trauma Team coat on top.
...While some scab came and looted the back alley ripper's clinic.
David barely had the wherewithal to look up when Alec sat down in the driver's seat.
"You're looking pretty rough, kid." Alec said, his eyes scanning the boy's face. "Get some water in you. Think you can hold out 'till we get to my doc or do you want me to find someone closer?"
"...Cheaper?" David finally asked, his tongue felt like lead in his mouth. "I got- My mom's... I'm broke."
"Here, kid." The man slid over a shard, the one he'd taken from the doc's body. "My fee is in the back seat. You can call that compensation for lettin' him cut into you before I got there."
It took David a few tries to slot the shard into an open port, his hands kept shaking too much. When he did, though?
Fifteen thousand eddies. Just... Given away?
"This is a lot of money." David said as he reached down under the seat, pulling up a bag with a sandwich in it and a can of Real Water (Still).
"Probably." The driver agreed as he started the engine in the tiny economy van. "Guess where it came from, though."
...Scavs.
"Oh." David didn't know what else to say to that. Instead he chose to listen to something other than the weird music the guy was playing on his radio.
Like David's stomach.
He bit into his sandwich, some kind of brown SCOP in between two slices of the weirdest synth-bread he'd ever felt. It was... Really sweet. He couldn't place the flavor at all, though.
"Why are you hunting Scavs?" David asked in between bites. The food actually tasted really good, even though it seemed pretty simple. "Or, uh, the businesses that work with 'em?"
"Well, a few reasons." The murderer admitted. "The first? The harder it is for them to move product, the slower they'll work on getting it. Second? People realize there's risk in dealing with them, they'll be less likely to do it. At least for cheap. Finally? They offend me."
David snorted at that last answer and got an electric jolt of pain that stopped dead halfway down his legs.
Curious and more than a little concerned, he reached down and felt along his thigh, which seemed normal, then his calves.
He couldn't feel anything midway down his calves.
"I can't-" The food he'd been eating suddenly felt like a lead weight in his stomach.
"Kid?" Alec turned slightly, enough to see David in his peripheral vision. "Kid, you still with me?"
"I-I can't feel my feet." David managed to mumble, stuttering as his brain mis-fired.
Had the doctor- Had he screwed up? By accident? On purpose?
"...Yeah, that's no good." Alec mumbled as they stopped at a red light. "Kid? Kid!"
David snapped out of a brief, panic-induced fugue state and turned to look at the murderer in the driver seat. His breathing was almost out of control and he could feel liquid fire pouring into his veins from his back.
"Just breathe, alright." The man inhaled slowly, then exhaled slowly. Both loud and obvious. After a second David caught on and began to try and match him. "Good, good! Breathe with me, alright? Just focus on that, just focus on breathing. Close your eyes, count to ten, do what you got to but just keep breathing."
David... Did exactly that. He closed his eyes and he just breathed. For the rest of the drive, he just focused on existing.
He didn't know if it was ten minutes, twenty minutes or half an hour before they finally came to a full stop. Opening his eyes, David... Did not recognize where they were.
"C'mon." Alec said as he stepped out of the car. "Let's get you to an actual doctor and get things looked at."
David waited until the man had stepped around to the side of the tiny van before he opened the door, then let him help David get out. He was feeling tingling in his feet and couldn't tell if that was good or bad.
It was awkward. It was embarrassing. David honestly felt ashamed as the stranger helped him down a set of stairs and then around a bunch of stalls. All around them were people wearing Tyger Claw paraphernalia. And at the very back of the hidden market?
There was a legitimate Ripperdoc!
"Hey, Rainwater." Alec greeted the man like he was an old friend. "Kid here had a run-in with a Scav doc. Think you could give him a look over?"
The Ripperdoc was a huge man, one with no visible chrome that David could see. He'd never heard of someone that was fully ganic doing that kind of work.
"...How bad?" The man, Rainwater asked, a barely detectable Chinese accent in his voice.
"Dirty knives, place was full of third-hand chrome, creep had an autojacker next to his operating table." Alec fired off without a second of hesitation. "Kid here had some major work done on his spine and now he can't feel his feet."
"...The hell did you hunt down, Choom? Doctor Borg?" The ripper shook his head and motioned for them to come back into his operating room.
"...Yeah." David answered after a moment. "How'd you know?"
"...God damnit." Rainwater cursed as he pushed aside his plastic curtains. "Get him on the table! I'll get the anesthetic! And you!"
Alec paused briefly as Rainwater pushed a thick finger into his chest, but continued to help David on to the table anyway.
"I'm getting a full explanation when I'm done!"
Compared to the near-paralyzing agony in his back? David barely felt the needle go into his arm.
Less than a minute later, once the doctor started pulling the staples out of his back? David didn't feel anything at all.
-----
Waking up after getting surgery done twice in one day is the strangest feeling.
David's mouth tasted like the underside of a toilet and his brain felt fuzzy.
His back wasn't hurting, though, so that was nice.
He tried to open his eyes and it took a bit of effort. More than he was used to. Once he succeeded, though, it still took him a few moments to piece his situation together.
He was sitting in the doctor's operating chair, upright instead of on his belly. He was comfortably numb, things had stopped hurting but now he could feel an odd tingling in his everything.
"Ah, good. You're awake." The doctor, Rain... Something said to him once the man had finished washing his hands at a nearby sink. "Things were a bit touch and go for a moment there."
"Whu-Whu happen'?" David tried to ask around his thick, fuzzy tongue.
"What happened? Kid, I don't even know." The doctor shook his head and sat down in front of David. "That thing in your back? I ain't ever seen something like it. Borg just left live wires sittin' on your muscles. I had to put in a lot of guesswork to hook that Sandestivan in properly. Had you split open on my table a lot longer than I was happy with."
"Good news and bad news, though." The doc put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. "The bad news is that whatever model that bastard is, it's replacing nearly a third of your spine. She's hardwired into your nervous system so any replacements are going to be a bitch and a half to do, so you better take good care of it. Got it?"
David nodded numbly and the doctor continued. "Good news, for a certain measure of good. Getting you opened up I had a chance to disinfect the ever loving hell out of everything. Your chances of dying without antibiotics went down. Significantly."
"I... I feel a lot better." David admitted, looking down as he curled his toes. "No random pain."
Stretching his arms out, David curled his hands into fists and then stood up. He wobbled slightly but didn't feel like he was about to fall over.
"That's what I want to hear." The doctor smiled at him, a rough expression on what was typically a very stoic face. "Now, normally a major tune up like that would have a pretty hefty price tag on it."
"How hefty?" David asked, wincing at the thought.
"Covered." The doc waved him off. "That gonk Solo that brought you in paid up in advance."
"What?!" David almost shouted, only just keeping his voice to a tolerable level. "Why would he- I don't need anyone's pity!"
"Yeah, kid. You did." The doc stared directly into David's eyes until the teen had sat back in his chair and looked away. "The job that got pulled on your install? By any other metric aside from working? It'd be a failure. If you'd a survived more than a month it would've been a medical miracle."
"...Oh." Well, there wasn't much more for David to say about that.
"Yeah. 'Oh'." The doc rolled his little wheelie stool over to a cabinet and pulled a few things out. A couple of bottles full of pills and a few inhalers before rolling back. "Now, you got a big install there, kid. Don't know how friendly it'll be with your system, so we're going to be playing it safe."
"This here is for the nerves. Those don't like being handled on a good day and you got cut open twice on a bad one. One pill in the morning and one at night before bed for the next two weeks." The doc set a small bottle down in front of David before moving to the next one, which had larger pills in it. "These cover cyberware rejection. You feel any itching or burning through your back that won't go away, you take one of these. If it persists for more than twelve hours, you call me or you get your ass to a Ryder clinic, you understand?"
David nodded silently, staring as things were laid out before him.
The most he'd ever heard about were the immunosuppresants that Borg would hand out like candy to patients that never... Returned...
"Now, this-" The doc held up an inhaler. "-is a MaxDoc. It's just a booster, get you through the next day or so. One puff in two hours, then another around lunch tomorrow. I've gone ahead and sent a notice to your school- Congrats on having the grades to get into Arasaka, by the way- and you'll be out for the next week to adjust."
"That, uh, that's a lot of time." David argued. "I feel loads better- Great, even! I could totally go back tomorrow!"
"Kid." The doc's calm voice did more to silence David than any yelling could. "It's not about how you feel now. That's a big chunk of hardware and it's hooked straight into your nervous system. Moodswings and nausea are pretty normal for the first four or five days. Take the time, get your head on straight."
"...Alright." David didn't want to agree. He wanted to go back to the academy and use his new chrome to beat the ever loving snot out of his bully.
But he wasn't the doctor.
And maybe he was on to something since, before his mom's death and the Sandy he really hadn't been -that- violent. Sure, he watched a pretty nasty brain dance here and there but that wasn't the same thing.
Was it?
"...What happened to the guy that brought me in?" David asked the doctor. Rainwater, he thought.
"That gonk?" The ripperdoc chuckled, shaking his head as he did so.
"Never sits still for too long. Mentioned needing to get some work done on some Fingers."
----- Edgerunners 02
The week of downtime left David feeling like he'd missed a cue. Like there'd been something he was supposed to have done, but forgot about. As though he'd missed the NCART to school and now he was going to fail a test.
He couldn't explain it, at all.
The week itself had been... Rough. Even without worrying about cash? He'd been stuck sitting at home, adjusting. Sometimes the cyberware would twinge, time would slow down. Only for a second at a time, but it had been so weird to adjust to! He'd usually trip or drop whatever he'd been holding when it happened.
At least it would send a notice to his optics. The last one, a few days back, had said 'Integration completed successfully!' and he hadn't had any more issues.
The worst part? Honestly?
"Guess it's a good thing you died in a clinic when you did, mom." He'd been going stir crazy, talking to his mom's ashes. The last few days, vegging out on a couch and staring at the T.V. had been a mix of bad and worse.
Like the fact that he was getting constant news alerts that some psycho was going around, gunning up clinics and ripperdocs. NCPD's announcements about being close to catching the cyberpsycho kept getting proven wrong when the news was showing off videos of the before and aftermath. People with holes in their skulls and patients that had limbs and organs missing.
Whatever nutjob was out there? They were a real piece of work. Even for Night City.
A few days into his convalescence he'd tried going back to school. Get back into routine.
Have something to do.
He'd been turned away at the door by security. They'd been uncompromising- He wasn't allowed back in for a few more days. Even threatened to have him dragged out by NCPD if he didn't leave.
So... He left. Sat down in the NCART and just rode the rails until it had gone around and around and around. He'd gotten off as the sun was setting after spending a day just stuck in his head.
He hadn't been the only one missing school that day, at least. Across from him had been some little girl, blood red optics and her skin all chromed over in some cheap gray dye job. She'd only been on the mass transit monorail for about twenty minutes but that kind of appearance was hard to forget.
Yesterday, David had tried to see about tracking down the Solo that had pulled him out of the Doc's clinic. The teen had barely known where to start with that kind of thing, though. He only knew of one common contact that the two had.
Doctor Robert Rainwater, a ripperdoc in the Watson district of Night City. The man had actually been pretty happy to see David up and about.
Something about how most folks would sit around doing nothing after getting something chipped in, which was bad for the body and ended up being bad for the chrome.
David was going back again today. The noodle joints in Watson beat the burrito vending machine down the hall by a landslide. No contest.
Getting off the NCART, barely stepping around a giant amazon with white hair and more chrome than meat, it really struck him how different this part of the city was to his own. It was still poor. Still run down. But it was cleaner and the people had more energy to them than the residents of the Santa Domingo district did.
He was almost to the Ripper Clinic when something to the side, a reflection caught his eye. Looking over, David saw something he hadn't been expecting. The man he'd been looking for, Alec, was sitting at one of the little noodle bars. His glasses were pulled up and into his short, wavy brown hair and he was just watching a television in the corner as he ate.
David hesitated for a long moment but still took a seat. He had a lot of questions he needed to ask.
"Hey... Alec?" David felt nervous as he spoke up. He knew the man was a cold-blooded killer. He'd put a bullet clean through the Ripper that David had occasionally worked for.
"Hmm... Yeah?" The man looked to him and, without the tinted net-glasses obscuring them, David could see the guy had yellow optics. "Kid? You're looking a lot better!"
"Thanks. I'm- Uh, one bowl of the beef? Real Water, please?- I'm feeling a lot better." David struggled for a moment with the interruption by the cook but he thought he was doing alright. "I, uh, I wanted to talk to you about some stuff."
The guy took a long moment to slurp some noodles, some kinda white SCOP clinging to 'em, before answering. "I figured as much. I mean, you sat down and started talking to me. What'ya need kid?"
"David." The boy responded, thumping himself in the chest with a thumb. "Call me David. That was... That was a pretty solid payday from the, uh, thing. Earlier. I kinda got to earn my own scratch now so I was wondering... I mean, you're a Solo, right?"
"You want me to teach you? Or do you want to run with me?" The man put his noodles on the bar and turned to the kid, giving him his full attention. One thing in particular that David noticed was the lack of ports on Alec's neck. "Got to warn you, kid. I'm one of the more boring mercs in the business."
"Either? Both?" David paused for a moment to accept his own bowl of noodles. "Just... Explain it to me? Please?"
"...Alright." The guy sat up a bit straighter and pulled his glasses down over his eyes. "There's a bunch of specializations in the business, David. Some of 'em you'll need some serious hardware to pull off."
"Starting off, you get a jack of all trades like me. I'm not going to go in hot and heavy anywhere, my body don't take to chrome too well. I make up for that with preparation, observation and planning." The man tapped the netdeck on his belt before continuing. "Though I can do a bit of work as a netrunner. Folks like me get called 'Crystaljocks', the ones that use external hardware and pre-built programs. Not as fast as a genuine 'runner but I can still pull off most of the same things using macros. Also a lot easier to upgrade my gear since I don't need a ripper to slot anything into place."
"After that you get your heavies. Folks that either bulk up with muscle or chrome. Fellas that can rip open a locked door or handle a heavy machine gun." Alec tapped at his arms before shaking his head. "You get into a team, you'll want one of those on it. Expensive though, gotta keep 'em fed or maintained. Lot of chrome junkies go that route."
"After that you get your techies. Smart ones know a good bit of medicine. If they don't know how to tie a tourniquet? Then they have a habit of being a liability in the field." Again, Alec tapped at the net-deck on his belt. "Never hurts to know how your own gear works, kiddo. Buying a brush set and some gun oil will save you a lot of money in the long run over having to shell out eddies every time your gun jams. Assuming you don't get shot."
"Third are your drivers. Most of the good ones are Nomads, not all though. Truth is, you don't need fast and flashy to make solid cash as a driver." David nodded at the Solo's words, remembering the shit-brown minivan he'd driven. "You get from point A to point B without damaging cargo, you've got a promising future. If you can lose a tail? Then you're looking at real solid money."
"Fourth, finally, you got your netrunners. Freezer meat. Don't ever take 'em lightly 'cuz they can make or break an operation. That said? If you actually see a netrunner on the other side of an op, odds are they're a shit 'runner." Alec paused for a moment to take a sip off a can of Nicola before continuing. "You don't see good ones in the field. Period. I've got a Columbus Freight I've used a few times to ferry around a friend of mine while she was in an ice bath. Wrecked a Maelstrom outpost up north while we were sitting pretty in the city center."
"It sounds kind of exciting." David felt a little giddy at the thought, truth be told. "Is the money good?"
"If it's exciting then you messed up, kid." Alec shook his head and slurped up some more noodles. "...Loud is cheap, at least in this work. You get what your fixer sent you after? Without anyone else knowing you got it? Shit's hard work but the pay is preem."
"...Huh." David needed a moment to process that so he chose to eat. The synth-loin in his noodles may have been cheap and chewy but it still beat the hell out of the burritos in the vending machines back home. Cost about the same, too. "How would I go and do something like that?"
"Well, the first step is knowing what you've got and what you can do." Alec put his empty bowl on the counter and focused his gaze on David. "So. What do you have and what can you do?"
"Well..." What... Did he have? David wasn't big or strong. He didn't know how to drive. He'd never learned anything about taking stuff apart or putting them back together. He didn't even have an actual cyberdeck, just the integrated model that was connected to his optics! "I've got a Sandy?"
"...Not the worst place to start, I guess." Alec sighed and looked up and down David's body. "Current models don't play well with a cyberdeck but I suppose I can give you my last net-deck. An Owl Mark 8, might be a generation out of date but the stealth capabilities should hold up. Everything is geared up for hunting netrunners with a net presence, external decks aren't even an afterthought these days. Too slow. Should be able to link it up with your optics, I suppose."
Alec placed a roll of eddies on the counter and leaned back in his seat, nursing his Nicola. "Eat up, David. We'll get you a crash course on how to use that Sandy and let you look in on an operation I got planned here in a bit."
"...If you got Cyberware Sensitivity, how do you know how to use a Sandestivan?" That wasn't the only question on David's mind as he started piecing some of the oddities together. Like the guy's eyes. He'd never heard of ganic eyes that were bright yellow.
"...I've flatlined a lot of gonks that thought moving fast made up for a lack of skill, kid." Alec put his can on the bar and looked David in the eye. "Either outlast 'em until the speed they're trying to move fries their joints, they try to hit that speed too many times and it fries their brains, or you trip 'em and they still fall at the same speed as anyone else. Lots of bad ways to use that tech."
"The smart ways, choom? There's a reason Blackhand is still around today and it wasn't because he wasted his time on crazy ninja shit when a bullet to the chrome-dome would do the job."
-----
Once upon a time, David's mother had told him not to get into the car with any strangers.
Always sound advice and infinitely more important in Night City, one of the Corporate Capitals of the world with a Scav population to match.
That said? The stranger in the driver seat of the little brown minivan had taken David at his worst and taken him to get actual, medical assistance. In Night City that made Alec something akin to a saint.
The saint of slow drivers!
"How long does it take to get out of the city?" David asked, his cheek pressed against the window as he stared at the passing cars while they sat at a red light.
"Depends on how the city is feeling." Alec told him, one hand tapping away at the steering wheel in tune with some ancient rock song about being closer to right. "She doesn't like letting go of people before she's made her mark."
"...That doesn't make any sense." David was having second thoughts on asking the Solo to teach him. And third thoughts.
Not that he was going to act on any of them. The two of them were at the northern limits of the city, heading out to the oil fields where Alec promised to teach him how to shoot and figure out how to use the external cyberdeck he'd offered the boy.
Finally the light turned green and the duo passed by a tricked out yellow and black Chevillon Emperor that definitely caught David's eye.
He wanted to know how much he'd have to earn, how much work he'd have to do so he could get something like that... Rather than a dinky little Indian minivan like Alec was driving.
"'Course it don't." Alec agreed as they began to pass by the ruins of oil wells beyond the walls of the city. "You're a native. You don't really feel it when the City is watching you, planning out which way it'll kill ya. Trap ya. Ain't the first time I've been somewhere rotten and hateful, down to the core. If the merc life suits ya, you'll get out from time to time, make some scratch somewhere that ain't so hostile and you'll really feel it when you come back."
David... Honestly couldn't tell if the guy was talking about the atmosphere of the city or if he really believed in the kinda spiritual hoo-doo.
Giving up on worrying about it as crazy people with crazy opinions, he chose instead to focus on where they were and what they were doing.
Specifically in the destroyed oil fields north of the city and Alec was parking his little junker. Getting out of the cramped hunk of junk, he followed Alec to the back and barely kept his jaw from dropping when he saw what the man had hidden behind the closed doors.
Guns! Bullets! A laptop computer?!
"Whoa!" David exclaimed, reaching out to try and grab one of the pistols only to have his hand slapped away by Alec, the Solo offering him an unimpressed glare.
"Chill, Dave. Got things to go over before you start blastin' shit." The man extracted two identical pistols and handed one over to the boy. "This here is a Liberty. Solid pistol, standard magazines have fourteen rounds in 'em. It's a Power weapon, means it can link up with a Ballistic Coprocessor and show you where things'll go. Heard there's some new mods that the corpos are playing with to skip that part, though."
David flipped the weapon over in his hands, noting the weight, the length of the barrel, the buttons on the side of the gun...
"What do these things do?" He ended up asking as he flicked one of the buttons and noted that it made another one pop out on the opposite side of the gun.
"Good, you already found the safety." Alec held his gun sideways, fingers conspicuously away from the trigger, and pointed at the parts David had asked about. "That's basically a physical lock inside your gun. It stops you from squeezing the trigger when it's active. The other button releases the mechanism locking the magazine in place, lets it drop out. You'll get real familiar with both of those, real quick."
The next thing Alec extracted from his van was a box of bullets. 9mm, fifty in a box.
"Gonna teach you to load up while we go over some safety basics. Guns are damned good weapons, David, but they don't care what's in front of the barrel. That's gonna be on you, that's gonna be on me. Ain't about to tell you not to shoot a person, Night City ain't gonna give you that kinda luxury. I am gonna tell you to be real sure you only point it at people you want dead." Alec explained as he showed David how to load ammo into the magazines. "You feel you gotta make threats, you make 'em. Don't go pulling a gun though, not unless you plan to use it. Also, don't be a gonk and keep your finger off the trigger unless you plan on pulling it. You get spooked, you pull a fist, that's an accidental gunshot. Might'a shot a friend. Might'a gave away your position. All bad shit."
David nodded as the expert spoke, making sure to pay attention. This wasn't some kind of game. If he messed up, he might not get to go home.
"So, what, I keep the safety on when I'm not using it?" David asked, getting a nod in return as he mimicked Alec on loading the magazine into the gun. Pulling the slide back slowly, the Arasaka student watched as the mechanism loaded a bullet into place. "And I don't point it at things I don't want to shoot. And, uh, keep my fingers off the trigger when I'm not shooting? Is that it?"
"Almost." Alec nodded to him as the orphan paraphrased his instructions. "Bullets don't stop just 'cuz they hit somethin'. So try and stay aware of your surroundings when you start shooting. You put a bullet through some Maelstrom metal-head? That's great! The bullet kept going and hits whatever you went to extract? That's not so great. Hate failing an op on stupid shit like that, but it happens and it'll keep happening. These rules are to minimize risks, we can't really get rid of 'em."
After that, things went pretty smooth. They spent the better part of an hour just shooting at scrap metal. David had even found some antique prosthetic left arm, rusted chrome, that they'd propped up to shoot at for a bit until it was nothing more than twisted scrap.
Back when Gloria had been alive, they'd never been able to do that kind of thing. She and David never had the money. Never had the time. She'd worked, tirelessly, just to put him through the best school in the city.
And David saw three months of her take home wages when a random Solo had gone and flatlined a skeevy ripperdoc and given the boy the leftovers.
Eventually the two moved on to figuring out how to configure the external cyberdeck to David's implants. That one...
"Swear to god, hate messing with this stuff..." Alec grumbled, text scrolling visibly down his glasses as the two of them were connected to the old Owl unit. "If it weren't so useful, I'd just stick to creepin' round the shadows."
"...Think I found the permissions." David spoke up, letters and numbers dancing across his own eyes. "Yeah! Just got to set myself as a registered user and... Done!"
"Fantastic!" Alec disconnected the hardwire that was hooked into the side of his glasses. "That thing'll run as fast as you can think at it. Me? Gotta use a keyboard and some macro buttons sewn into my gloves. Still, works fine for breachin' most things and slinging quickhacks. Speakin' of..."
David got a very, very brief warning flash before he lost all feeling in his limbs and he dropped to the ground, his vision went dark. He wouldn't lie, he started screaming then and there.
The 'Rebooting!' message flashing across his optics only helped a little to calm his panic.
"...What the hell was that?!" David screeched after he got his breathing back under control. "The hell did you do to me?!"
"Cyberware Reboot." His vision was grainy when it came back, his optics going through a boot up sequence that was downright unpleasant. "Not exactly a common quickhack, there are better ones out there for its cost. Like System Reset, that one straight up knocks someone out."
"Why can't I feel my limbs?!" David was still panicking. He just did a solid job of listening while he did so.
"That Sandy of yours." Alec stated, pointing at David's chest. "Made that the key to your whole nervous system. That thing has to boot back up? You're outta commission. In the field? That means you're dead."
"But-but it's, like, some kinda top secret military prototype! Shouldn't it, like, have some major ICE or something?!" A new bar had appeared in David's vision, in the middle where it blocked his view.
It said 'Sandevistan: Loading...'.
"Kid... If it's some military model, this is gonna be a sad reality check. Military gear is made to be as cheap, fast and replaceable as they can make it. And experimental prototypes can be even worse." David's vision fully returned, as well as his sense of touch. "You don't know what the thing they were testing, is. Did they want to see how well it would work without safeties in it? They trying to cut down the reset timer? You got some new part or mod hooked in there? Thing like that, security'd be minimal on purpose just so they can jack in and check it out without having to go through a mess of authentication every single time."
David managed to get his breathing under control after a few more moments, then he finally managed to stand up.
He really didn't want to admit that Alec made sense. He wanted to think his gear was special, that it was better than what other people had. Being told otherwise... Hurt.
"I'm... Good. I'm good." David said, shaking his head and patting himself down, checking the gun strapped to his hip. "What can I do about that?"
"That? That I don't know." Alec admitted as he began walking back to his car. "Should be some way to limit the number of devices that can access it. Lock down its network so only trusted devices can connect to it. You'll have to talk to an actual expert on that front- Never had to learn, myself."
Right. Cyberware sensitivity. The guy was practically a cripple on that front.
Great.
David spent a long moment thinking about that issue as the guy set up a handful of targets before turning to the boy.
"So." Alec waved to the fourteen targets spread out around the area. "A Sandevistan. Those things speed up your perception of time. Recent models can even get the whole body moving at stupid fast speeds. You're looking at a whole lot of give and take, there. Be smart about it, though, and you can see a whole lotta use out of it."
Fourteen targets. The same number of bullets in his gun.
"You said I could be real dangerous if I used it smart, but using it dumb would... You mentioned people blowing out their joints?" David knew he'd said something like that over at the noodle stand.
"Yeah." Alec extracted the magazine of his gun and checked the side, silently counting out how many bullets he had before he moved to top it off. "Even cyber-limbs have a tolerance to how fast they're supposed to move. Exceed that and you start putting a lot of wear and tear on the joints. For you, that'd mean a lot of pain. For a borg? Sudden cyberware failure. Friggen hilarious when they're trying to ram a mantis blade through you and their arm freezes midway."
"So... How do I fix that?" That actually sounded kind of horrifying. David had already gotten to experience sudden limb failure today. He didn't want to go through that again!
"Short answer? Don't use the Sandy to move, at least not a whole lot." Alec brought his gun up to aim at the targets. "It's a reflex booster... But more importantly, it gives you time to think. Gives you time to make a dozen small movements where normal folks only get to make one."
Squaring up, Alec took aim at the first target. David activated his Sandevistan when he saw the man squeeze the trigger the first time.
In slow motion, he watched the man fire off all fourteen shots. Each time he moved as little as he could, adjusting his hands and the tilt of his head more than he did his body. In a corner of David's vision, he could see a timer slowly ticking up.
By the time eight seconds had passed, Alec had put a bullet through each target. Not headshots, no, but he'd still hit center-mass fourteen times out of fourteen. At ten seconds, David cut the Sandy off and time resumed. For David, those ten seconds had felt like minutes.
"Fancy shit looks cool, really impressive. Problem is? Takes more effort and focus." Alec explained as he checked his gun and confirmed it was empty. "So while you're puttin' in the effort to line up a row of headshots? Someone else is puttin' in the same for you. Hit a gonk in the center of mass and drop 'em, then put a second shot in the dome. Bullets are cheap, unless it's in you."
David swallowed thickly at that, remembering how much... How much blood had come out of his mom. The price he'd been charged just to stabilize her.
The gnawing hole in his chest where she used to be.
"Come on." Alec's voice broke David out of his thoughts, the heavy hand on his shoulder oddly comforting as the memories made everything feel cold. "Let's pack it in then I'll let you shadow me on my next job. If it's something you don't want to do? This'll be the place to learn it."
They put things away silently. Alec seemed to be focused on the task at hand whilst David was looking at what he'd been shown, been told and had to think if it was something he genuinely wanted to do.
Maybe he could apply for a scholarship? Move into the students dorm, put the few mementos and physical memories of his mom and home into a storage unit. It'd be cheaper than trying to rent an apartment.
His thoughts drifted from one painful topic to the next as Alec drove his dinky little minivan through Night City, the filthy streets and neon lights welcoming them back into their rotten embrace like an abusive lover.
The city... David saw more crime, violence and drugs and prostitution in the forty minutes it took to get across town than he'd ever paid attention to before. Corpos buying drugs off back alley dealers, NCPD talking to Scavs and pointing them towards an enclave of the homeless...
He'd never noticed it before. Never paid attention to it before.
But right then, right there, his choices involved either looking within or looking out. It hurt less to look out.
"Wait..." David pressed a hand against the tinted glass of the side window and leaned forward to stare at a building down the block from where they'd parked. "I know that place!"
"The hell?" Alec turned to look at him, curiosity plain in his expression. "I've been watching that place for a few days. How do you know about it?"
"It... It's the place where I took my mom." The building was a run-down clinic, a place for the poor to get basic, life-extending surgeries. At a price they really couldn't afford. "She- she died, there."
"You know, I'm starting to get a little worried how often you get mixed up in my shit, kid." Alec shook his head and reached into the back seat, grabbing his laptop. "Spiky-ass hair, 'Special Implant' put in by some back alley whackjob. You gettin' bullied in school, too?"
"...Yeah?" What the heck was the guy getting at? He was the one getting mixed up in David's business!
"Found myself a goddamn protagonist. Great." Alec sighed heavily and side-eyed the young man. "You know what? No. Not dealin' with that shit right now. Got an op planned, I'll talk you through what I'll be doing. You feel like jumping in, saving some girl or handlin' some Scav that's about to pop me in the six? Don't."
Opening the laptop, the guy connected a data cable to it from the cyberdeck attached to his belt. One quick loading bar later and David could see through every camera in the building!
"Now, kid. Did you get the money-back guarantee from these butchers before they figured you couldn't pay 'em more than their buyers could for your mom's chrome?" Alec didn't even bother looking at David as he asked him that question. Instead he was busy loading several gun magazines for his pistol. Pistols.
He'd pulled a second one out from behind his back, though it looked significantly different from the Liberty he'd taught David how to handle. Some kind of rail-gun Tech pistol from the looks of it.
"They don't have a money-back guarantee." David said dumbly as his eyes were glued on the screen. As he watched the surgeon that said his mom had been stabilized was ripping the limbs off of a man that was still alive.
"Sure they do." Alec said, attaching a silencer to his Liberty. "You just gotta know the right language to ask for it. Me?"
The grin that came over the Solo's face was cold.
"I'm fluent in lead."
-----
David felt bored out of his skull as the hours ticked on and on.
Alec, the solo with him, hadn't gone in guns blazing. Hadn't strapped half a dozen knives to his sides. Didn't seem to be doing a whole helluva lot at all, really.
Just got the laptop from the back of the van, popped it open on the tiny space between his seat and David's and he'd just been clicking away. David had been watching the screen for a while and it was interesting, at first, how the guy had broken the ICE on the building's security and was watching everything through the cameras.
And for whatever reason, every ten minutes on the dot he would crack open one of the back windows. Hooked into the system, David watched as Alec compiled an error report and sent it off to the netrunner in charge of things.
Then the netrunner in the building would send off a message to whichever gonk was nearby and tell them to go manually close it because Alec had somehow disconnected the shutters, or assumed administrator control or something and made it look like they just weren't responding to digital commands.
On the fifteenth time, two and a half hours into surveilling the building, one of the Scavs inside finally cracked.
'Leave it the hell alone!' The text message shot back from a Scav doc back to the shit-tier netrunner. 'I'm too busy to deal with some goddamn window!'
"Alright." Alec said aloud after he took a slow sip from a bottle of water. Putting that down, David watched as his hands flew across the keys and he started executing scripts. "That's the chip. Here, watch this."
David watched in confusion as the man loaded up a Ping but quickly saw the digital trails spread throughout the on-screen display. Over each outline of a person through the walls, their positions reported by the dozens of connected devices, was a twelve-character string identifying each and every person.
That... Was a lot more than he'd ever been told the Quickhack would do.
"Now, fun little trick here..." Alec began to explain to David as he manually typed in one set of characters, the code identifying the netrunner. "There's a quickhack out there called 'Reset Optics'. Doesn't do anything too complicated, kid. It just causes someone's optics to reboot and everyone, I mean everyone that can at least, has got some chrome optics."
The solo hit Enter on the keyboard and a progress bar appeared over the netrunner's figure, slowly filling in.
"Well, the ICE between your optics and the rest of your system is pretty weak. Has to be, all the shit folks put into 'em like news feeds and money-management systems. But here's the question- What's the big difference between someone's optics and the rest of their cyberware?"
"...I don't know?" David eventually said after a moment of thinking, his eyes locked on the loading bar. "I mean, an eye's an eye and an arm's an arm?"
"On our end of things, yeah." The older man agreed, swapping to a different screen when the netrunner started having a seizure. "But to the system itself, they're all just extensions. Slave One, Slave Two, Slave Three... Modifying 'Reset Optics' to use a universal targeting code instead of a specific one and it hits all of the cyberware inside of someone. I call it 'Cyberware Reboot'. Not at the top of my list of tricks, 'Cyberware Reformat' is my real baby but it's a bit slow for this kind of job."
"...Y'know, that doesn't sound that scary." David admitted, watching as Alec tracked down the doctor who'd complained about being sent to close the window over and over again, then began to upload a low-level Short Circuit. The man jerked and jolted in pain for a moment before he grabbed a scalpel and stormed out of the room.
"Imagine getting knocked out for a second because your cyberware all shuts off for half a minute and then it comes back on and doesn't know who you are." Alec told him, panning through the camera feeds to follow the very angry butcher. "No preferences are saved, all of the small machine-learning algorithms have been wiped out, any commands or settings are reset to factory standard. Hit a borg with it and all of the work that went into teaching their body how to work with the little bit of brain they got left won't be there."
David thought about it as the shocked doctor stormed into the office the netrunner operated out of and, as the man was still groggy and not quite paying attention, ripped his throat out with the scalpel. Blood sprayed everywhere, coating the doctor as the netrunner tried to stymie the flow with his hands.
'jon gon sycho!!!11!1' Was fired off through the network, a last message from the netrunner before the doctor, apparently named John, slammed the small blade through his victim's eye.
A small window showing the view from a different camera saw a trio of large men running towards the office, each one carrying a piece of iron. They quickly came on to the scene as the doctor was cleaning himself up in the same room as the fresh corpse.
They fired on the doctor. Alec, putting down his bottle of water, activated a series of macros that saw quickhacks being uploaded to each of the gunmen. Costly, powerful versions of Contagion, Overheat and Short Circuit.
"Alrighty then." Alec checked his gun and then opened the door as the security personnel on-screen dropped to the ground, their screams cutting short as their own chrome killed them. "I'll be back in a few minutes."
David stared in shock as the Solo walked, casually, up to the building that David's mom had died in and just climbed right through the window he'd used to set that whole string of events into motion.
He felt... Something, as the man just walked through the mostly empty halls, clicking his finger and his thumb from time to time to apparently activate Ping with his external deck. The remaining people inside, another 'Doctor' and the secretary, hadn't paid any attention to the message about the psycho. They weren't aware at all of the deaths of the five other people that had been in the building.
The other doctor didn't turn around to acknowledge the door opening behind him, rather focused on trying to remove a set of arms off of a corpse, when Alec stepped up behind him and put a bullet through the back of his skull.
The secretary was focused entirely on playing some kind of game, some retro hand-held thing that looked like a guy on a horse, when Alec did the same thing to her.
'Alright, David. That's this building cleared. I'm calling in my Columbus. You want to help me start looting while I hunt down the building logs and anything the 'runner left in the system?' Flashed across David's eyes while Alec was huddled over the digital display on his left wrist, his right hand tapping at the screen.
'Yeah. I'll be right in.' David sent back, opening to door on his own side of the tiny little vehicle.
That hadn't been exciting. David had been expecting gunfights, watching as the Solo dodged around cover and expertly picked off each target one by one.
Instead... Instead David had watched as the majority of the Scavs were taken out remotely, pitted against each other and then killed when they were at their most vulnerable.
It wasn't like in the XBDs he'd watched. At all. It was methodical and precise, it had been all about control, thinning down the opposition and weakening them before cleaning up the leftovers.
David... Wanted that.
He wanted to have that kind of power. He wanted to have that kind of control.
He'd always followed what his mom wanted, and he still wanted to make her proud but... He wanted to have the power to control his own life.
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- Location
- Here
If you map out the story and all the sub stories within it, I'm pretty sure you'll end up drawing a really complicated picture of an octopus.
- Location
- RS,brasil
- Location
- California
Does he mean spiritually, metaphorically with all the Internet Ghosts, or both?
- Location
- Somewhere, Out There
Now send the void dragon to shadowrun XD Hope to see more of the edgerunners fleshed out seems like it would be really good. Interested in how his systems working with the world. The dxd one in interesting too and i would be down to read it too if you felt like writing more of it
- Location
- miami
Damn… that chapter really drew me in it was awesome thanks for the update.
Been loving how cyberpunk story's like this have been snowing up more often the game pushed it a bit but with the horrible launch and everything not so much. But the show has really drawn people in to this setting so it's nice seeing more story's based in it. And some damn good examples of edgerunner. Hope we get more of this.
Been loving how cyberpunk story's like this have been snowing up more often the game pushed it a bit but with the horrible launch and everything not so much. But the show has really drawn people in to this setting so it's nice seeing more story's based in it. And some damn good examples of edgerunner. Hope we get more of this.
Ralyx
Seeking Balance
- Location
- The Realm Between
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The most powerful magic of all: friendship!
Alexander Snow
Mad Artificer
And the guns he found
that's what the red thread and pinboard is for