----- 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."
