Group Chat

by ArrowSMorgan

Summary:

Lucy makes a group chat for the Edgerunners. Hilarity ensues, and things go off the rails; at first in minor ways, but then in massive ways.

(Marathon crossover kicks off in chapter 67; this is a Cyberpunk fic first, and I'm assuming no knowledge of that series on the reader's part.)

Chapter 1: Running in the 90's

Notes:

Cyber talking, cyber sex is on the line
New desire
Take me higher, boost me higher with your mind
Set me on fire

Get the satellite
If you want to see me
Talking on the net
I know the way you like it
Get your credit cards
Because I need no Discord
All I want to get is you, baby

❤LUCY❤ created a group chat.

❤LUCY❤ changed the name of the group chat to "EdgeRunners".

❤LUCY❤ added David to the group chat.

❤LUCY❤ added Rebecca to the group chat.

❤LUCY❤ added Maine to the group chat.

❤LUCY❤ added 🥝 to the group chat.

❤LUCY❤ added Dorio to the group chat.

[00:25] David: oh whoa hey, we have a group chat now?

[00:25] ❤LUCY❤: oh shit, hey david, you're still up?

[00:25] David: yeah couldn't sleep

[00:25] David: where's Pilar?

[00:26] ❤LUCY❤: didn't add him

[00:26] David: why not

[00:26] ❤LUCY❤: do you really have to ask

[00:26] ❤LUCY❤: like, *really*

[00:26] David: oh come on he's a dick but he's part of the team isn't he

[00:27] ❤LUCY❤: ...questionably, yes

[00:27] Rebecca: oh THAT's why my agent keeps blowing up

[00:27] Rebecca: sup chooms

[00:27] Rebecca: we roastin my dumbass gonk brother right now?

[00:28] David: I mean Lucy is anyways

[00:28] ❤LUCY❤: just telling david why i didn't add him

[00:28] ❤LUCY❤: because if i do he's just gonna fucking spam weird hentai pics until i kick him

[00:28] David: ...speaking from experience?

[00:29] ❤LUCY❤: yes

[00:31] Rebecca: wait lucy how did you get your name to look all cool with the hearts and all caps and stuff

[00:31] ❤LUCY❤: mad netrunner skillz ❤

[00:31] ❤LUCY❤: want me to do yours for you?

[00:31] Rebecca: fuck yeah

[00:32] 🤓: LUCY WHAT THE FUCK >:(

[00:32] ❤LUCY❤: heh heh heh

[00:32] ❤LUCY❤: i'll change it, hold on

[00:33] xX_BeccaTheStampede_420_Xx: THAT'S NOT BETTER

[00:33] ❤LUCY❤: really? thought you'd like that one

[00:33] xX_BeccaTheStampede_420_Xx: CHANGE IT BACK

[00:33] Rebecca: thank you

[00:33] Rebecca: jfc

[00:34] 🥝: oh shit lucy made a group chat again?

[00:34] ❤LUCY❤: yup! hey kiwi

[00:34] 🥝: oh thank god pilar's not in this one

[00:34] 🥝: last time lucy made one he got us arrested

[00:35] David: HOW

[00:35] 🥝: legitimately don't want to talk about it

[00:35] 🥝: fuckin gross gonk

[00:36] Rebecca: KIWI

[00:36] 🥝: hi becca

[00:36] Rebecca: HELP ME MAKE MY NAME LOOK COOL LIKE YOURS AND LUCYS

[00:36] 🥝: you at home?

[00:36] Rebecca: yes

[00:36] 🥝: two questions

[00:37] 🥝: one: is pilar at home

[00:37] Rebecca: ...i think

[00:37] Rebecca: lemme check

[00:38] Rebecca: yeah

[00:38] 🥝: two: is pilar awake

[00:38] Rebecca: nah he's passed out on the couch

[00:38] 🥝: ok thank god. i'm coming over

[01:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: hey lucy

[01:30] ❤LUCY❤: what

[01:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: fuckin eat me

[01:30] ❤LUCY❤: 💀💀💀

Notes:

Addendum 12/1/22: If you're here from or because of CD Projekt RED (or the Imaishi AMA), say hi in the comments and the Discord server! There's a fun little community going here, and it's worth getting involved with!

Chapter 2: Cigaro

Notes:

My cock is much bigger than yours!
My cock can walk right through the Discord!

[20:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: hey lucy

[20:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you around?

[20:30] ❤LUCY❤: sup becca

[20:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: so uh, you and david, huh

[20:30] ❤LUCY❤: yep

[20:30] ❤LUCY❤: wait how do you know about that

[20:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: maine got it out of him earlier today lol

[20:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: so uh you gonna give me and kiwi dick deets?

[20:31] ❤LUCY❤: ...why

[20:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: come the fuck on

[20:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: if i can't actually get that dick at least tell me so i can fantasize about it

[20:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: and i know kiwi's been in a hardcore dry spell too

[20:32] 🥝: wasn't gonna say anything, but... not wrong

[20:32] ❤LUCY❤: alright fine

[20:32] ❤LUCY❤: he's all bio down there

[20:32] ❤LUCY❤: no mr studd

[20:32] 🥝: aw, that's disappointing

[20:32] ❤LUCY❤: no, hold on though, that's the thing

[20:33] ❤LUCY❤: dude's hung like a fucking elephant

[20:33] ❤LUCY❤: like christ on a bike it goes up to his nipples

[20:33] 🥝: O_O

[20:33] 🥝: please tell me you two aren't exclusive.

[20:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: SECONDED

[20:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: SECONDED SO FUCKING HARD

[20:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: BECCA WANT

[20:34] ❤LUCY❤: jesus settle down you two

[20:34] ❤LUCY❤: god, are y'all THAT horny?

[20:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: YES

[20:34] 🥝: gonna be completely real here: if a hot dude joins the crew and you tell me his dick is literally half as big as his entire body

[20:34] 🥝: i'm not gonna NOT be interested

[20:34] 🥝: especially when, full disclosure, i haven't gotten any dick in like 2 years

[20:34] ❤LUCY❤: well uh we're not exclusive yet

[20:35] ❤LUCY❤: at least as far as i know

[20:35] ❤LUCY❤: so, uh, shoot your shot, see what happens, i guess?

[20:35] Maine: Oh, god damn it.

[20:35] ❤LUCY❤: hey boss

[20:35] Maine: I don't know what I expected opening this up

[20:35] Maine: Wait, jesus christ, is David really that fucking hung!?

[20:36] ❤LUCY❤: YES

[20:36] ❤LUCY❤: I DON'T KNOW FUCKING HOW

[20:36] Maine: If any of you tell Dorio, you're out of the crew.

[20:36] ❤LUCY❤: little late on that one

[20:36] ❤LUCY❤: check who's in here

[20:36] Maine: OH GOD DAMN IT.

[20:36] ❤LUCY❤: lmao

[20:36] ❤LUCY❤: if it helps i haven't, uh, actually seen her in here

[20:37] ❤LUCY❤: so she might not have seen any of this

[20:37] Dorio: Nope. Saw everything.

[20:37] Dorio: Don't worry, babe, not into young dick anyways. <3

[20:37] Maine: phew <3

[20:37] David: what the fuck did i just walk into

[20:38] David: have you all seriously been talking about my dick for the past like 10 minutes

[20:38] ❤LUCY❤: ...yes?

[20:38] David: oh come on i'm not THAT big

[20:38] ❤LUCY❤: have you, like, looked in a mirror with a boner before

[20:38] ❤LUCY❤: you are like legit fucking porn star gigantic

[20:39] David: oh shit 😳

[20:39] ❤LUCY❤: no no that's a good thing

[20:39] 🌟BECCA!🌟: seconded

[20:39] 🥝: thirded

[20:39] David: i uh

[20:39] David: i'm glad i guess?

[20:42] 🌟BECCA!🌟: so uh, thoughts on letting me get some of that? 😉

[20:42] 🥝: me too

[20:42] David: lucy you cool with this?

[20:42] ❤LUCY❤: ...i mean i'm not NOT cool with it?

[20:43] ❤LUCY❤: up to you, bb

[20:43] ❤LUCY❤: threesome or foursome might be fun 😉

[20:43] David: well uh that settles it then i guess

[20:43] David: i'm not busy tonight if you all aren't

[20:43] 🥝: already on my way

[20:43] 🌟BECCA!🌟: race you to the dick!

[20:44] ❤LUCY❤: yeah i'll be there in like 10

Chapter 3: Daddy

Notes:

I got the timeline slightly off here, on further investigation. Just roll with it.

[23:30] David: hey becca, you still up?

[23:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: sup choom

[23:30] David: you doing ok?

[23:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: pretty sure my cervix is in my fuckin neck now from the other night

[23:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: but otherwise totally fine, why ya ask?

[23:30] David: oh jesus that is NOT why i was asking 😳😳😳😳

[23:31] ❤LUCY❤: LMAO 💀💀💀💀💀

[23:31] ❤LUCY❤: DID I NOT WARN YOU

[23:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: YOU WERE THERE

[23:31] David: no seriously though, like, for real, i meant because like

[23:31] David: y'know, your brother got flatlined earlier tonight?

[23:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh.

[23:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: cmon pilar was a fuckin gonk

[23:32] David: i mean fair but he was your brother

[23:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: technically yes. i prefer to look at him as a tumor that came out of my mom

[23:32] David: o_o jesus you did NOT like that guy

[23:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i was pissed at that psycho in the moment but lowkey

[23:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: dude did the world a favor

[23:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: god pilar fucking sucked

[23:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: dammit now you've got me in a bad mood. come fuck me and make it better

[23:33] ❤LUCY❤: jesus christ becca lmfao

[23:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: what

[23:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: being in a bad mood makes me horny

[23:33] ❤LUCY❤: are you like ever not horny

[23:33] David: fine fine i'm coming over

[23:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yaaaaaaay 💖 i'm already feeling better

[23:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: come fuck the anger out of me daddy 💖

[23:34] ❤LUCY❤: oh my GOD becca

[23:34] ❤LUCY❤: please do not call him daddy

[23:34] ❤LUCY❤: i do not like that

[23:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: but it's hot tho!!!

[23:34] ❤LUCY❤: do it in fuckin private then, jesus becca

[23:34] Maine: Yeah, there's only one of us who gets to be called that.

[23:34] ❤LUCY❤: OH MY GOD IT WAS ONE TIME

[23:35] David: wait you two fucked??

[23:35] ❤LUCY❤: yeah don't ask trust me

[23:35] Maine: Yeah, I got there first, buddy. :D

[23:35] David: i think i get the picture.

[23:35] ❤LUCY❤: yeah. not my proudest moment

[23:35] ❤LUCY❤: not my LEAST proud either, granted

[23:35] David: guessing I really REALLY don't want to know

[23:36] ❤LUCY❤: correct

Chapter 4: Dr. Sy Fly

Notes:

He'll see you now
Diagnose with compound eyes
Multiply the problem
And his name is Dr. Sy Fly

He'll see what's wrong
And he'll be what's wrong
As he twitches his proboscis
And he'll tell you your prognosis

He's going to have to amputate
He's going to chop off all that you got
Yank out the stuff inside of you
After which he'll play nine holes of golf

His phone rings
It's an emergency
Someone needs their Discord replaced with
A potato salad sandwich

[01:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: boooooooooored

[01:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: can't sleep

[01:30] ❤LUCY❤: david's out like a light if that's what you're trying to do here

[01:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh hey luce

[01:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i mean if he was up yeah

[01:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: get daddy to come fuck me to sleep 😋

[01:30] ❤LUCY❤: for the love of god, stop calling him daddy, it's incredibly uncomfortable.

[01:30] ❤LUCY❤: christ you really have no shame do you

[01:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah me and "shame" don't belong in the same country

[01:31] 🥝: oh hey you two are up

[01:31] 🥝: girl talk time i guess?

[01:31] ❤LUCY❤: well two girls and a gremlin

[01:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: HEY >:(

[01:31] ❤LUCY❤: kidding, love ya bex ❤

[01:31] 🥝: how is david anyways

[01:31] 🥝: sandy not fucking him up too bad yet?

[01:31] ❤LUCY❤: little twitchy. i'm worried.

[01:31] 🥝: he still going to that jank ass ripperdoc

[01:31] ❤LUCY❤: yes. jesus christ i hate that guy

[01:31] ❤LUCY❤: i mean you're gonna have a hard time finding a ripperdoc who isn't a little uh

[01:32] ❤LUCY❤: how do i put this nicely

[01:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: a creepy fuckin gonk?

[01:32] ❤LUCY❤: i was gonna be a little more polite than that but yeah

[01:32] ❤LUCY❤: though you probably have some uh, special issues there

[01:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah no shit

[01:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: one of these days i'm gonna full borg myself and make myself like 3 feet taller

[01:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: tower over you bitches

[01:32] 🥝: i legitimately cannot even picture that

[01:33] 🥝: like my brain short circuits when i try

[01:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: gonna be beccazilla >:)

[01:33] ❤LUCY❤: lmao

[01:33] ❤LUCY❤: actually though becca you're pretty chromed out

[01:33] ❤LUCY❤: who do you go to?

[01:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh i just go to the ryder clinics

[01:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: usually the one in downtown, though the real deal in watson did my eye job

[01:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i was gonna say i go to that one guy off jig jig just to fuck with you

[01:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: but honestly

[01:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: not even as a fucking joke

[01:33] ❤LUCY❤: oh damn, you actually, like, care about david as a person and not just as a walking dick?

[01:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i mean yes? >:(

[01:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: jesus just because i'm horny all the time doesn't mean i don't like actually like him

[01:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: but also like you know i used to be a mox right

[01:34] ❤LUCY❤: i mean i kinda figured from your ink, "DICKS" written across your thigh paints a certain picture

[01:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ha ha, very funny

[01:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: anyways

[01:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: that guy off jig jig?

[01:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: he's got a rep for good work, and works cheap, but

[01:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: when the girls would go there, they wouldn't come back

[01:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: at most there'd be an XBD of them getting ripped to pieces a few weeks later

[01:35] ❤LUCY❤: jesus fuck :(

[01:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: so yeah, just play it safe, go to one of the ryder shops

[01:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: real deal's better, but the one downtown is solid too

[01:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: kiwi what's your take?

[01:36] 🥝: i honestly don't have that much chrome, is the funny thing

[01:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i mean you've got that vent on your jaw

[01:36] 🥝: oh that's like 95% aesthetic

[01:36] 🥝: i had pretty bad allergies and also my smile looked really weird

[01:36] 🥝: could've gotten a reconstructed jaw but i kinda like the gas mask look

[01:36] ❤LUCY❤: yeah not gonna lie it's hot

[01:36] 🥝: thank you! ❤ i'm a little self-conscious about it sometimes

[01:36] 🥝: might drop some eddies and get another one i can swap back and forth, so i can idk, eat normally

[01:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: and suck david's dick right? 😋

[01:37] ❤LUCY❤: god DAMN it becca

[01:37] 🥝: ...i mean, sure, but that raises some uh

[01:37] 🥝: logistical concerns, i guess i should call it?

[01:37] 🥝: like how the fuck would you even

[01:37] 🥝: i feel like you'd have to unhinge your fucking jaw like a python

[01:37] ❤LUCY❤: why does every single conversation we have end up being about my boyfriend's cock

Chapter 5: Daddy II

Notes:

...this is north of a thousand views in the space of two days. This has officially done better than anything I have ever written previously, in my entire 30-ish years of life. Holy shit, people, I did NOT realize I was tapping into this much of a demand.

Like, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but... jesus.

[15:41] David: so what's everyone doing tonight anyway

[15:41] ❤LUCY❤: no plans here. maybe afterlife later?

[15:41] ❤LUCY❤: Becca I see you typing, I swear to god if you say "you"

[15:41] 🌟BECCA!🌟: how about you daddy? 😋

[15:41] ❤LUCY❤: god damn it becca I'm going to change your name to the nerd emoji again

[15:41] David: ...this has been a whole ass thing for a minute, hasn't it

[15:41] ❤LUCY❤: YES

[15:41] ❤LUCY❤: SHE WON'T STOP CALLING YOU DADDY

[15:41] ❤LUCY❤: IT'S HORRIFYING

[15:42] 🌟BECCA!🌟: god stop kink-shaming me luce

[15:42] ❤LUCY❤: that's... that's not the problem!

[15:42] ❤LUCY❤: how do you not see what makes this deeply uncomfortable

[15:42] 🌟BECCA!🌟: david i know for a fact you love it when i call you that

[15:42] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i can basically make him nut on command by calling him daddy

[15:42] ❤LUCY❤: OH MY GOD I DID NOT NEED TO KNOW THAT. STOP.

[15:42] David: ...i'm not touching this.

❤LUCY❤ began a private message conversation with David.

[15:42] ❤LUCY❤: so, just so i'm clear, is this like

[15:43] ❤LUCY❤: actually A Thing for you

[15:43] ❤LUCY❤: or is becca just being an ass

[15:43] David: i'm really not 100% i wanna answer that question?

[15:43] ❤LUCY❤: choom you're my boyfriend, if there's kink shit you wanna do

[15:43] ❤LUCY❤: i'm totally on board

[15:43] ❤LUCY❤: just that specific kink with becca kind of produces some Not Great mental images

[15:43] David: yeah she's definitely not lying there.

[15:43] ❤LUCY❤: i can work with this 😈

Chapter 6: Gloria

David began a private message conversation with Maine.

[09:34] David: hey maine, you busy right now? kinda need to talk to you about something

[09:34] Maine: Not super busy, just having a cup of coffee and doing my weekly tune-up on my arm. What's up?

[09:34] David: so uh. you and my mom. did y'all like... KNOW each other or was it just a work thing

[09:34] David: she didn't really talk about you much

[09:34] David: so I don't really have a clue what the relationship was like there

[09:35] Maine: Are you trying to ask what I think you're trying to ask?

[09:35] David: that's the thing, i don't even have enough context here to know what you think i'm asking.

[09:35] Maine: Hoo boy. Gimme a second to collect my thoughts and I'll be back.

[09:35] David: got it, man, no rush.

[09:50] David: you alright there choom?

[09:50] Maine: So uh... your mom? Gloria? She's my ex.

[09:50] David: wait I'm sorry what

[09:50] Maine: Yeah. I, uh, actually kinda thought you knew that.

[09:50] Maine: Jesus, did she not talk about me at all?

[09:50] David: nope. not a peep

[09:51] David: probably wouldn't have grabbed the sandy if she did

[09:51] Maine: Yeah, I was a little hard on you for that one. Sorry about that.

[09:51] David: oh dude, no hard feelings at all. i get it

[09:51] David: shit i'd be pretty pissed too

[09:51] Maine: But yeah, uh... I kinda thought you were about to ask if I'm your dad or not.

[09:51] David: well shit uh, are you?

[09:51] Maine: You want my completely honest answer?

[09:52] David: well don't leave me in suspense

[09:52] Maine: I... don't actually know if I'm your dad or not. I might be. I might not be.

[09:52] Maine: 17 years ago would've been about the time period we broke up.

[09:52] Maine: So it could've been me, or it could've been the guy after me, or God only knows who.

[09:52] David: huh. that actually explains a bit

[09:52] David: why'd you two break up anyhow?

[09:52] Maine: C'mon, do you really need to ask that? We were a weird couple from the jump.

[09:52] Maine: She's... you know, your mom, and I'm a chrome junkie cyberpunk. Wasn't gonna work.

[09:53] Maine: Funny part is, the last straw ended up being that she wanted kids and I didn't.

[09:53] David: that kinda tracks, yeah

[09:53] Maine: I miss Gloria, honestly. Even after we broke up, she was a good friend to have.

[09:53] Maine: But yeah, don't go asking me to get a paternity test with you, because honestly I'm totally fine not knowing.

[09:53] Maine: If you are my boy? You're a good kid and I'm damn glad to have you.

[09:53] Maine: If you're not my boy, though... you're still a good kid and I'm damn glad to have you.

[09:53] Maine: That settle it for ya?

[09:54] David: yeah. thanks, Maine.

[09:54] Maine: No problem, choom. :)

Chapter 7: Emergency

[22:03] Dorio: Hey, David. You holding up okay, choom?

[22:03] David: yeah why

[22:03] Dorio: Figured I'd ask while we've got a minute, given JK went down the way he did.

[22:03] Dorio: Trust me, I know what it's like when someone you're a big fan of gets zeroed.

[22:03] Dorio: I was around for Silverhand.

[22:03] 🌟BECCA!🌟: god you're old lol

[22:03] Dorio: Yeah, yeah, I know. But yeah. I was a huge Samurai fan back in the day. Fuckin' killed me when Silverhand kicked it.

[22:04] David: yeah, I mean... it's okay, but it doesn't feel great, you get me?

[22:04] David: honestly it's kinda less about the dude himself

[22:04] David: having someone hook you up to a torture XBD kinda kills a little of the celebrity mystique

[22:04] David: but, god damn, he did not go in a nice way

[22:04] Dorio: No kidding.

[22:04] ❤LUCY❤: wait, back up love, he hooked you to a fucking torture XBD?

[22:04] ❤LUCY❤: I saw he had you in something, but you never told me what.

[22:04] David: yeah. that was the bit he wanted to do. run me through a bunch of cyberpsycho rampages, edited to make me the cyberpsycho

[22:04] David: and then eventually when i went legit crazy he was gonna just throw me out in the wild and make a new one in the Edgerunners series

[22:04] David: fucking hell, I actually liked those BDs too, asshole pretty much ruined them for me

[22:04] Dorio: Interesting taste.

[22:05] David: hey, sometimes when you have a shitty day, seeing a couple hundred NCPD pigs get flatlined is the perfect cure

[22:05] Dorio: No judgment here. You should see some of the shit Maine's watched.

[22:05] David: ...god i really am his kid, aren't i?

[22:05] Dorio: Oh, did you two talk about that?

[22:05] David: yeah. he told me it's possible, but he doesn't really know for sure and it wouldn't change much either way.

[22:05] ❤LUCY❤: fuck, I should have killed that kurosaki fucker myself right there. 

[22:05] ❤LUCY❤: i'm sorry, david.

[22:05] David: it's alright, love. don't beat yourself up over it.

[22:05] Dorio: You two are so sweet, it kills me.

[22:05] ❤LUCY❤: aw. we try ❤

[22:05] Dorio: But yeah, sounds like Maine pretty much covered it. We don't really know, but, far as I'm concerned, if you are his kid, you're a great stepson to have.

[22:05] David: aw. speaking of, how's he doing over there with you and Kiwi?

[22:06] Dorio: I didn't wanna say anything, but... bad.

[22:06] Dorio: Way too chromed, and his meds aren't really working. I'm doing most of the work keeping an eye on Kiwi because he keeps zoning out.

[22:06] ❤LUCY❤: he's... not gonna go psycho, is he?

[22:06] Dorio: Kinda already is. Just need to hope he stays in the Alzheimer's kind of psycho and not the "murder everybody" kind until we can get him to a ripper and get some of his fucking chrome out.

[22:06] David: want me to talk to him, see if I can keep him on the level for now?

[22:06] Dorio: Hey, worth a shot. Don't know what it'll do, but if you wanna try.

[22:06] Dorio: Fucking speak of the fucking devil he just punched Kiwi out.

[22:07] David: WAIT WHAT THE FUCK

[22:07] David: WHY

[22:07] ❤LUCY❤: WHAT

[22:07] ❤LUCY❤: IS SHE OKAY

[22:07] Dorio: Basically fucking shattered her... jaw implant vent thing

[22:07] Dorio: Falco knocked his gonk-brain ass out so we're okay for now

[22:07] ❤LUCY❤: guessing kiwi's not in any shape to get back in there.

[22:07] Dorio: Come to the main room and we'll plan this out.

[22:07] Dorio: Wait, where the fuck is Rebecca, anyways?

[22:08] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i told you guys i had to go to the damn vet in japantown

[22:08] 🌟BECCA!🌟: butterbean was doing horrible scream-meows all night last night and it turns out he has a urinary blockage

[22:08] 🌟BECCA!🌟: gonna cost me like ten thousand fucking eddies for his surgery, ugh

[22:08] David: there's part of me that wants to be like "aw, poor kitty"

[22:08] David: but seriously this is way past "emergency" and into "OH GOD WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE" territory

[22:08] David: so like unless that cat is going to literally immediately die without you there, we need you to fuckin beeline here ASAP

[22:08] ❤LUCY❤: seconding what david just said, becca, we need all hands on deck

[22:08] 🌟BECCA!🌟: uggggghhhhhhhh fine i'll get there when i get there

Chapter 8: Grief

Notes:

I'm trying something a little different, format-wise, with this chapter. Bear with me on this one.

❤LUCY❤ removed Maine from the group chat.

❤LUCY❤ removed Dorio from the group chat.

[06:33] ❤LUCY❤: rest of us alive and intact?

[06:33] 🥝: 👍

[06:33] 🥝: alive, working on intact

[06:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah.

[06:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: sorry i uh

[06:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: didn't get there in time.

[06:33] ❤LUCY❤: don't beat yourself up over it

[06:33] ❤LUCY❤: if we'd thought everything was gonna go tits up like that

[06:33] ❤LUCY❤: i'd have said something a whole lot fucking earlier

[06:33] ❤LUCY❤: trust me

[06:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: that's uh, good i guess?

[06:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: what the fuck happened anyways? i thought you all were pretty much on downtime

[06:33] ❤LUCY❤: PM me

🌟BECCA!🌟 began a private message conversation with ❤LUCY❤.

[06:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: alright so what the hell happened while i was at the vet

[06:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: how the fuck exactly did we get from "everything's cool, kiwi's gonna dig around in tanaka" to "OH GOD OH FUCK RUN"

[06:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: and why all the secrecy around it anyways

[06:34] ❤LUCY❤: first: i need your word that you're not going to fucking BREATHE about this to David. at all.

[06:34] ❤LUCY❤: not a god damn peep, becca. i'm dead serious.

[06:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh shit are you pregnant

[06:34] ❤LUCY❤: ...what the fuck could that possibly have to do with the Tanaka job

[06:34] ❤LUCY❤: you know what, nevermind

[06:34] ❤LUCY❤: do you promise that everything i say in this conversation stays between us for now

[06:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh shit, you ARE pregnant!

[06:35] ❤LUCY❤: god fucking damn it becca i'm not pregnant

[06:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh. okay, so what's the deal then

[06:35] ❤LUCY❤: so after maine went all mike tyson on kiwi

[06:35] ❤LUCY❤: they had me go digging in tanaka's brain for the data

[06:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: naturally

[06:35] ❤LUCY❤: that data? it's a list of people with unnaturally high aptitude for cyberware.

[06:35] ❤LUCY❤: that arasaka wants to use as test subjects for god only fucking knows what.

[06:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...oh shit

[06:35] ❤LUCY❤: yeah see if you can take a wild guess who showed up on that list. just one guess.

[06:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh for fUCK'S SAKE

[06:35] ❤LUCY❤: YEAH.

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: so uh why aren't you telling david

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i mean idk if i was in his shoes

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i'd probably wanna know if arasaka wanted to make a lab rat out of me

[06:36] ❤LUCY❤: you want me to be completely, 100% honest with you?

[06:36] ❤LUCY❤: i'm worried he's gonna actually be totally cool with that

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...fuck that's actually a good point

[06:36] ❤LUCY❤: and... i know i never really, like, talked about my past to you guys

[06:36] ❤LUCY❤: but i have History with arasaka

[06:36] ❤LUCY❤: if they do catch him it's gonna be a whole fucking lot worse than they make it sound up front

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: do i wanna know the deets

[06:36] ❤LUCY❤: long story short uh, you know how i'm Really Really Good at my job

[06:36] ❤LUCY❤: yeah that's arasaka's fault

[06:36] ❤LUCY❤: there were a few thousand of us from the jump and... i don't actually know how many of us got out alive, but i'm guessing low single digits

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: JESUS

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ok yeah "keep david the fuck away from arasaka" just shot up to priority #1

[06:36] ❤LUCY❤: yeah. i love him and i don't wanna lose him.

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i know i fuck with you a lot, but... that makes two of us, choom.

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: want me to clue kiwi in on this?

[06:36] ❤LUCY❤: she need to know?

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i mean i don't know about you but if i've sat on a guy's face before

[06:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i'm generally not gonna be happy about him being in mortal danger? just a thought?

[06:37] ❤LUCY❤: yeah that's actually a fair point

[06:37] ❤LUCY❤: i'd... argue the GENERAL point, there's definitely been some guys i've fucked who i'd be very okay with this happening to

[06:37] ❤LUCY❤: cough your brother cough

[06:37] ❤LUCY❤: but i get what you're getting at here

[06:37] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you check on david in the GC so it doesn't look sus that i'm not talking, i'll tell kiwi what's up.

[06:37] ❤LUCY❤: on it. you're a real one, bex. ❤

[06:37] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i try, luce. ❤

❤LUCY❤ closed the private message conversation.

[06:38] ❤LUCY❤: david? you alright, bb?

[06:40] ❤LUCY❤: just gimme a heads up that you're, like, still alive at least

[06:41] David: yeah im alive.

[06:41] ❤LUCY❤: you holding up okay?

[06:41] David: no

[06:41] ❤LUCY❤: wanna talk about it?

[06:41] David: not really

[06:41] ❤LUCY❤: you eaten breakfast yet?

[06:41] David: not hungry.

[06:41] ❤LUCY❤: slept at all babe?

[06:41] David: tried to. couldn't.

[06:42] 🥝: hey, we're here for ya, choom.

[06:42] David: thanks.

[06:45] David: god, it's like i grew up with one parent, lost her, and then got a whole other set and IMMEDIATELY lost them too.

[06:45] David: what the fuck is wrong with my life? why does this shit keep happening to me? am i just fucking cursed?

[06:45] ❤LUCY❤: :(

🥝 started a private message conversation with ❤LUCY❤.

🥝 added 🌟BECCA!🌟 to the conversation.

[06:46] 🥝: so uh. what's the plan?

[06:46] ❤LUCY❤: about, what, arasaka coming after his ass?

[06:46] 🥝: no, like... completely setting that aside

[06:46] 🥝: i really don't like seeing him like this.

[06:46] ❤LUCY❤: that makes two of us.

[06:46] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah. same.

[06:46] 🥝: let's table the arasaka thing for now and focus on cheering him up.

[06:46] 🥝: he have groceries at home and such?

[06:46] ❤LUCY❤: think so? probably wouldn't hurt to top him up

[06:46] 🥝: alright. lucy, you drop by the grocery store and handle that.

[06:47] ❤LUCY❤: on it.

[06:47] 🥝: i'll make a liquor store run in 15 when they're open and get him something nice

[06:47] 🥝: maybe a bottle of Blue Grass or Bolshevik or something

[06:47] 🥝: becca, uh

[06:47] 🥝: you got any other ideas?

[06:47] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you know what? i actually do.

[06:47] 🌟BECCA!🌟: it'll take a little explaining, but one of pilar's old buddies owes me a favor

[06:47] 🌟BECCA!🌟: gonna go ahead and call that in

[06:47] ❤LUCY❤: oh no.

[06:47] 🌟BECCA!🌟: luce i know what you're thinking but i think david's gonna like this.

[06:47] 🌟BECCA!🌟: we all meet up at david's place at 8?

[06:48] ❤LUCY❤: sounds good to me. see you all there.

---

David was lying in his bed, fully awake. He was desperately tired, but every time he closed his eyes, all he could see was Maine's death and Dorio's corpse on the makeshift funeral pyre, playing back over and over in his mind.

I should have fucking done something, he thought. I should have noticed he was off sooner. I should have been the one watching Kiwi instead of him. I should have been... literally fucking anybody else and not the useless piece of shit I am right now.

The group chat had been dead for a little over an hour, and as much as David wanted to vent, something inside him told him that he shouldn't bother. That the girls really, really didn't want to hear it. That he was just dragging everyone else down. That, if he didn't have a Sandevistan and a massive dick, nobody he was around would even care about him.

A gentle, rapping knock on the door came from about five feet off the ground, briefly shocking him out of his depressed fugue. He briefly debated whether to answer before realization hit him; he knew a grand total of one person whose knock sounded like that, and it was Becca.

He sluggishly rolled out of bed and lumbered his way to the door; when he opened it, he found all three girls, Becca, Kiwi and Lucy, standing in front of his apartment.

"Oh, hey," he mumbled.

Lucy and Kiwi were holding grocery bags, and while David couldn't quite identify the contents at a glance, he could tell they were full. Kiwi also had a brown paper bag, with the outline of a large liquor bottle visible through it, cradled in one elbow. Becca didn't seem to be carrying anything, but she had a smile on her face that told David something was up.

"All that for me?" he asked, groggy and out of it.

"Yup," Lucy said, pushing past him and setting down the grocery bags, as Kiwi and Becca followed. Becca led him to the couch and lightly pushed him down onto it, as he gave almost no resistance, before sitting down next to him, wrapping a jacketed arm around his lower back, and resting her head on his shoulder. With her other arm, she reached into one of the pockets of her baggy jacket, and fished out a wrinkled plastic bag with ground-up green plant matter in it; she looked over her shoulder.

"Hey, Kiwi," Becca called out. "Fucker didn't give me a pipe or any papers. Bum one of your smokes?"

A cigarette went flying through the air from the kitchen, and Becca awkwardly caught it, almost dropping it in the process. With practiced precision, she rolled it between her fingertips, loosening the tobacco and spilling it out onto the coffee table, before packing the green plant matter into it instead, using the blunt end of a ball-point pen to tighten it.

"What're you doing?" David asked, not entirely sure what he was looking at; it didn't take a genius to put together what Lucy and Kiwi had brought over, but what Becca was doing with the cigarette was an utter mystery to him. She looked up at him.

"Oh, I went and got some cannabis," Becca said. "You know, how people used to get high before BDs and designer drugs and shit."

"Huh," David grunted.

"Maine was an old-head," Becca explained. "Every time I'd ask him if he wanted to do a BD with the rest of us, he'd just be like, 'nah, just gimme some of that nomad weed' like he was born a hundred fuckin' years ago or something. Never actually tried it for myself, but Pilar had a hookup who owed me a favor, so I went and got a bag. Figure it's a good thing to remember the boss by."

David smiled a little, as much as he could come up with.

"Yeah, I guess that makes sense," he said. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Kiwi and Lucy had just finished putting away the groceries; David's fridge and pantry were now full to practically bursting, and a pristine, full bottle of Bolshevik vodka sat on the kitchen counter. As they moved towards the couch themselves, Becca handed the re-engineered cigarette over to David.

"He was your dad," Becca said. "You want first dibs, choom?"

"Sure," David said, picking up a lighter that Lucy had left off the coffee table and sparking it. He inhaled deeply, taking a long drag, and proceeded to hack and cough his lungs out.

"Jesus, you okay there, baby?" Lucy asked.

"Drink," David was able to get out in between coughs. "Need."

"Booze or water?" Kiwi asked, getting up.

"Water, thanks," David sputtered as Kiwi quickly made her way to the kitchen, deftly grabbing a glass out of the pantry, putting some ice in it, and filling it with tap water. "Thanks," he said again, as Kiwi handed him the glass and he took several large sips.

"No problem, choom," Kiwi said, sitting back down as David passed the cigarette to Becca on his left and sank into the couch. Becca took a quick drag, before coughing her own lungs out and stealing a bit of David's drink.

"Shit, this is fucking preem," Becca said. "I get why the boss liked this more than BDs."

As they passed the cigarette around, taking drags off of it, Becca scooted onto David's lap, and Lucy moved to his side where Becca had previously been; Kiwi, for her part, scooted in closer. David was, quite literally, surrounded by people who loved him, and it felt better than he thought he was capable of feeling.

He closed his eyes, and the images of Maine and Dorio's deaths went away long enough for him to start snoring.

Chapter 9: Cat

[14:52] David: hey, lucy, kiwi?

[14:52] ❤LUCY❤: oh hey sweetie. you sleep well?

[14:52] 🥝: ^

[14:52] David: slept great. thanks for that, you two. ❤

[14:52] 🥝: lol is becca still at your place

[14:52] David: yeah she's still asleep

[14:52] David: kinda halfway on my lap and halfway slumped over onto the couch

[14:52] 🥝: aw, cute

[14:52] David: yeah she looks fucking adorable like this, not even gonna lie

[14:52] ❤LUCY❤: you need anything else love?

[14:52] David: think i'm alright. thanks for the groceries and the booze, sweetie.

[14:53] David: honestly, it feels nice knowing you three care about me like that. kinda takes the sting off.

[14:53] ❤LUCY❤: babe of course we care.

[14:53] 🥝: yeah i know i like. don't talk that much and whatnot

[14:53] 🥝: but come on choom that's not because i don't care

[14:53] 🥝: i'm just kinda Like That lol

[14:53] David: i fuckin' love you girls.

[14:53] ❤LUCY❤: we love you too babe. ❤

[14:53] 🥝: 😘

---

David was still slumped back on the couch. Part of him didn't want to move, for fear of waking up Becca, but there was another part of him that really, really needed to get up and take a leak. As if God was listening to his bodily needs, Becca grunted and shifted a little, and opened her technicolor eyes.

"Oh hey, choom," she muttered, half-awake. "You're here?"

"I mean, yeah, this is my apartment," David said, trying not to laugh. Becca's eyes shot open.

"Oh, fuck, I fell asleep at your place!?" Becca said, sitting up with a start. David burst out laughing as he stood up and made his way to the bathroom. "Fuck, I need to go feed Butterbean, he's gonna be fucking screaming at me," she groaned to nobody in particular.

"I still haven't met your cat, have I?" David asked, calling out from the bathroom.

"I don't think you've been to my place at all since Pilar got flatlined," Becca confirmed. "Wanna come with?"

"Yeah, sure," David said, flushing and emerging. Becca was closely eyeing the bag of green plant matter, partially emptied but still containing plenty to fill another cigarette with, on the coffee table, and the cigarette next to it that either Lucy or Kiwi had left.

"You wanna smoke some more first?" Becca asked.

"Damn, you really like that stuff, don't you?" David asked, a smile on his face, and Becca's pale skin blushed bright red.

"Hey, you liked it too, I mean, I brought that over for-" she sputtered. David put a hand on her shoulder and sat down.

"Chill, I'm just fucking with you, choom," David said. "Yeah, I'm down to burn another one." Becca beamed.

---

About an hour and a half later, after a decent amount of walking (some of which Becca spent riding on David's shoulders, much to his chagrin) and a quick mag-lev ride, they arrived at the same apartment where David had first met Becca, where he had dropped off Pilar's new techie hands for Maine. Becca fished in her bra for her key card and swiped it, unlocking the door, before opening it and making way for David.

"Here we are," she said as he walked in and she followed, moving over to the kitchen counter and grabbing a can of Save-A-Buck cat food. She opened the can and started making pspspspsps noises towards Pilar's old room, and right on cue, a tiny orange cat with a short, stubby tail ran out, meowing frantically.

David's heart melted and he started making indescribable noises, interspersed with things like "little baby," as he kneeled down to pet it, causing it to tilt its head up and arch up to meet his hand as it purred and vibrated, and Becca burst out laughing.

"Okay, Kiwi and Luce have gotta see this," she said, recording a quick video of David and Butterbean through her holo-interface.

---

[16:16] 🌟BECCA!🌟: so i think i might have just officially recorded the funniest thing ever

[16:16] 🥝: becca what did you do

[16:17] ❤LUCY❤: oh god am i gonna have to pay your bail

[16:17] 🌟BECCA!🌟: wtf i didn't do anything

[16:17] 🌟BECCA!🌟: david's at my place rn and he just met butterbean

[16:17] ❤LUCY❤: OH MY OGD

[16:17] 🥝: hahahaha ok i gotta see this

[16:17] ❤LUCY❤: SEND. NOW

🌟BECCA!🌟 sent a video.

[Description: David petting an extremely happy, tiny orange cat as it eats out of a can of cat food. David is baby-talking to the cat.]

[16:19] ❤LUCY❤: OH MY GOD

[16:19] 🌟BECCA!🌟: see i'm not the only one who would literally die for that fucking cat

[16:19] ❤LUCY❤: fucking hell david is so goddamn cute when he acts like that tho

[16:19] 🌟BECCA!🌟: christ i know right?

[16:19] 🥝: very much agreed.

[16:19] 🌟BECCA!🌟: if he thinks he's leaving my apartment without getting me off he's wrong

[16:20] 🥝: becca i seriously would not count on the guy who has, in the space of a couple weeks, lost three parents being in the mood to fuck.

[16:20] ❤LUCY❤: yeah, uh... maybe not the time, bex. do you not own a vibrator or anything

[16:20] 🌟BECCA!🌟: funny you ask that, i don't

[16:20] ❤LUCY❤: wait, really

[16:20] 🥝: how do you even survive like that

[16:20] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you do realize i lived in an apartment with pilar and with thin walls.

[16:20] ❤LUCY❤: fucking hell that explains so much

[16:20] ❤LUCY❤: we're going shopping before you break david and he has to get a mr studd

[16:20] ❤LUCY❤: which, ordinarily i'd be cool with that but uh

[16:20] 🥝: yeah that man is blessed between his legs and we should probably try not to abuse that blessing

Notes:

Just in case you haven't figured it out by now: we're not going for the canon ending. I'm just getting it out there right now because it seems to be a pretty common running thing in the comments, and I just want to make it clear as up-front as possible that I'm not trying to hurt my readers.

There's a sort of inherent divergence in the concept of this fic, which is that... everyone's communicating with each other a lot better than they did in canon. This has already had at least one very obvious butterfly effect (David has, instead of an exclusive relationship with Lucy, ended up in a Tenchi Muyo situation with Lucy, Becca and Kiwi). This is going to have many, many more butterfly effects, and there's specific ones I have in mind that basically mean this is gonna work out a whole lot better for everyone than life in Night City is canonically ever allowed to (partly because I think that's kinda dumb and Cyberpunk totally has room for PERSONAL happy endings for the protagonists, as long as you're not having them save the whole damn world- that's what makes it, you know, punk and not just "Cyber," the ability to actually fight back and have some ray of hope that you'll carve out your own space to exist).

Next is: chapter 9.5, which contains explicit content. Sensitive or public readers can feel free to skip to chapter 10 without issue.

Chapter 10: Leadership

Notes:

Welcome back from chapter 9.5 (NSFW).

[09:28] David: so uh

[09:28] David: hate to point out the elephant in the living room but

[09:28] David: who's our leader now that maine's gone, exactly?

[09:28] ❤LUCY❤: kinda figured it was gonna be you? idk

[09:28] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah sounds about right to me choomba

[09:28] 🥝: oh i was thinking i was gonna take over

[09:28] 🥝: kidding. you're in charge now pretty much

[09:28] David: that is... worryingly unanimous

[09:28] David: lucy, becca, i at least get you two, but

[09:28] 🥝: choom, you're pretty much the glue holding us together.

[09:29] 🥝: if one of us three dropped out of the crew? whoever was left would be fine.

[09:29] 🥝: if you bail, crew's done, basically

[09:29] 🥝: that kinda makes you leader by default

[09:29] David: that's... kind of a lot of pressure.

[09:29] 🥝: i wouldn't think of it that way, honestly.

[09:29] 🥝: like i think i can safely speak for lucy and becca on this one

[09:29] 🥝: you're a good solo for your age, but... you're like, what, 18?

[09:29] David: 17

[09:29] 🥝: hahahahah shit

[09:29] 🥝: don't tell the cops

[09:29] David: lmao

[09:30] David: don't worry, my lips are sealed

[09:30] 🥝: anyways, like, for comparison, lucy's 20, becca's 21, i'm 28.

[09:30] 🥝: they've been doing it for a little longer, i've been doing it for a LOT longer.

[09:30] 🥝: when we say you're the leader, that doesn't mean we're like, expecting you to carry us through everything

[09:30] 🥝: it pretty much means two things

[09:30] 🥝: one, if you're not okay with a gig, we're not doing it

[09:30] 🥝: two, if you're in the shit, we've got your back, no matter what

[09:31] David: i... really appreciate hearing that. like that makes me feel a lot better about this

[09:31] 🥝: hey, you should, i'm pretty sure you're basically living every teenage boy's dream right now.

[09:31] 🥝: like come on, you're in a crew with your three hot, badass older girlfriends, kicking ass all over NC

[09:31] David: yeah when you put it that way my life kinda rules right now.

[09:31] 🥝: see? all about perspective

[09:31] David: how are we gonna handle, like... actually getting jobs, though?

[09:31] David: thought that was kinda maine's thing, and i sure as shit don't know any fixers

[09:31] David: i mean i guess i saw that weird guy with the three eyes that one time

[09:31] 🥝: oh, christ, faraday.

[09:31] 🥝: don't worry, i'll handle that business. 

[09:31] 🥝: if they wanna talk to you, i'll patch you into the call or let you know

[09:32] 🥝: but trust me it's really not that complicated.

[09:32] 🥝: that said though? that faraday guy?

[09:32] David: let me guess, he's a dick?

[09:32] 🥝: complete and total fucking dick.

[09:32] 🥝: and also probably better you try to stay away from corpo gigs.

[09:32] David: something going on i need to know about?

[09:32] 🥝: cool if i pm you?

[09:32] David: yeah sure

🥝 started a private message conversation with David.

[09:32] 🥝: need you to promise me off the bat that if lucy or becca asks, we didn't have this conversation.

[09:32] David: ...sure? what's up kiws

[09:32] 🥝: so uh remember when lucy was digging around in tanaka? night maine and dorio died?

[09:32] David: i mean that was two days ago, so... yeah?

[09:33] 🥝: yeah fair enough that's on me

[09:33] 🥝: anyways

[09:33] 🥝: luce uh

[09:33] 🥝: it turned out the data she found was a list of people arasaka was... interested in

[09:33] David: oh god damn it are they coming after me because i knocked katsuo's dumb ass out

[09:33] 🥝: wait hahahaha what you beat up tanaka's kid!?

[09:33] 🥝: ok that fucking rules

[09:33] David: i take it that's not where you're going with this

[09:33] 🥝: actually it might be related, i heard it from becca not lucy so i'm not 100%

[09:33] 🥝: you use the sandy when you did it?

[09:34] David: i mean yeah that was the whole reason i had doc put it in

[09:34] 🥝: o_o you're shitting me

[09:34] 🥝: like, let me just make sure i'm understanding you right

[09:34] 🥝: you had a fucking sandevistan installed so you could go beat up a rich kid

[09:34] David: he insulted my mom. right after she died. i didn't like that.

[09:34] 🥝: i mean yeah fair but

[09:34] 🥝: jesus christ david

[09:34] 🥝: where, exactly, did you go beat him up at

[09:34] David: walked right into the middle of class, ripped my shirt off, and kicked him in the cock

[09:34] 🥝: HAHAHAHAHAHAH

[09:34] David: no that's not even the best part

[09:35] 🥝: wait oh my god that's not all you did!?

[09:35] David: nah, he got up, tried to do some weird fist of the north star shit

[09:35] 🥝: oh, deep pull, nice

[09:35] David: oh shit, you actually know fist of the north star?

[09:35] 🥝: yeah didn't they show that late night on 54 after ziggy q?

[09:35] David: think so? would explain why all i really remember is the guy going ATATATATATATA and punching the shit out of people

[09:35] David: but yeah i just hit the sandy, went around behind his back, and punched the motherfucker so hard he broke a plate glass window on impact

[09:35] 🥝: ...david, i love you, and i love that you did that, but

[09:35] 🥝: you can be really, really stupid sometimes

[09:35] David: oh, god, what did i do.

[09:35] 🥝: the data lucy found you in, was specifically people they were interested in because of their cyberware tolerance.

[09:35] 🥝: y'know, lab rats for some weird ass project or another

[09:35] 🥝: guessing they caught you on security camera using the sandy and now you're Of Interest

[09:35] David: ...so what's with all the secrecy around it, then?

[09:36] 🥝: well uh lucy and becca were kinda worried you'd be on board with it.

[09:36] David: you kidding me? fuck no!

[09:36] 🥝: that's... a genuine relief

[09:36] David: why in fuck's name would... what?

[09:36] 🥝: becca didn't tell me why they were worried about it, exactly.

[09:36] 🥝: my guess, from knowing them and knowing you, is that they think that like

[09:36] 🥝: saka's gonna pitch it as "you get to test new and shiny chrome"

[09:36] 🥝: when the reality is those tests are pretty much guaranteed to either make you go psycho, kill you, or make you go psycho and then kill you

[09:36] David: that... kinda makes sense, yeah.

[09:36] David: trust me, though, even with that sales pitch i would've told them to fuck off

[09:36] David: i know better than to trust corpos when they say they wanna test shit on people

[09:36] 🥝: good to know. i'll let lucy know that we're good as far as you, like, walking directly into it

[09:37] David: guessing that's not the only problem.

[09:37] 🥝: oh fuck no they're not gonna take no for an answer

[09:37] David: how worried do i need to be

[09:37] 🥝: c'mon you've got two of the most preem netrunners in the biz in your crew

[09:37] 🥝: think they'll probably take a hint that you're not the name they wanna pull when a few of their runners' heads pop

[09:37] David: and if not?

[09:37] 🥝: cross that bridge when we get there, alright cutie?

[09:37] 🥝: just uh, don't go punching out any other suits' kids in front of security cameras, and if you do maybe don't use the sandy

[09:37] David: gotcha. side note, where are lucy and becca at, anyways?

[09:37] David: GC's been oddly quiet

[09:37] 🥝: ahahaha you didn't see yesterday did you

[09:38] 🥝: lucy's taking becca shopping for a vibrator

[09:38] 🥝: you're fixing to get a break choom

[09:38] David: hahahahahah

[09:38] David: guessing they're pretty much booked for the day, then?

[09:38] 🥝: idk. i'm down to hang if you're not doing anything

[09:38] 🥝: didn't really have anything planned today myself

[09:38] David: your place or mine?

[09:38] 🥝: let's go with yours, mine's a total fucking mess

[09:38] David: have you seen becca's lol

[09:38] 🥝: oh god, no, is hers bad too

[09:38] David: well until i helped her clean it last night

[09:38] David: but yeah no officially the grossest place i have ever fucked someone

[09:38] 🥝: hahahahah that tracks

[09:39] 🥝: i'll be there in like 15-20

Notes:

Next is: chapter 10.5, which contains explicit content. This chapter contains major plot developments, but those developments are recapped to the best of my ability in future chapters.

Chapter 11: Grief II

Notes:

Welcome back from chapter 10.5 (NSFW).

It was about eleven thirty at night, and David was in his bed. He'd fallen asleep while Kiwi was there, and it was going to be impossible for him to try and keep a normal sleep schedule now, but he felt some obligation to try. Something about trying to keep some semblance of a normal routine, with how wild his life had gotten.

His holo-link pinged with a call, from someone outside his contacts. He groaned in annoyance and answered it, fully expecting a telemarketer or a robo-call about cyberware warranties. Instead, the screen popped up with the same "doctor" who had treated his mother, after the R.E.O. Meatwagon company had scraped her off the pavement; this was not a better outcome for David.

"Fuck's sake, my mom's balance is paid off, you fuckin-" he started, spitting with anger.

"Mr. Martinez, this isn't about your mother," the doctor said.

"Wait, what?" David asked, taken aback out of his rage.

"Did you know a man named..." the doctor started, looking down at a paper, before looking back up. "Cassius Maine?"

"Pretty sure, yeah," David said. "Didn't know his name was Cassius. What, do I need to pay you fuckers for him, too, now?"

"Actually, no," the doctor said. "He had more than enough money in his account to cover the body pickup and cold-storage. Thing is, we ran his file, and he didn't seem to have any living next of kin."

"Let me guess, you ran DNA and it was a match?" David asked.

"Yep. Turns out you're his only biological next of kin. And his life partner..." the doctor looked back down at the sheet of paper. "Fiorenza Dorio?"

"Yeah, I knew Dorio too," David said, sadly.

"Also no living next of kin on file. No unexpected DNA matches, either. She had a will, though, and, after running it by legal, it pretty much boiled down to 'whatever happens to him, happens to me.' So it's your call on her, too," the doctor explained.

"How long do I have to think about it?" David asked.

"As long as he's got eddies to keep the bodies on ice," the doctor said. "I'd say about a week, but... let me put it this way, kid, the quicker you make a call, the more you inherit, you get me? I'd also pretty strongly advise coming to get their stuff as soon as you have time."

"Thanks for letting me know," David said. "Sorry I yelled at you off the bat."

"Mr. Martinez, trust me, you aren't the first person to yell at me in my line of work, and you won't nearly be the last," the doctor said. "If I was sensitive to it, I wouldn't be working for the meatwagons." He hung up the call, and David sighed, getting out of bed and gathering up some clothes to throw back on.

---

[23:41] David: anyone else up right now?

[23:41] ❤LUCY❤: oh hey sweetie!

[23:41] ❤LUCY❤: heheheh check out what becca and i were doing earlier

❤LUCY❤ sent a video.

[Description: CENSORED FOR ALL-AGES VIEWING DUE TO NIGHT CITY OBSCENITY ORDINANCE A-532]

[23:41] David: 😳😳😳 holy shit

[23:41] 🥝: yep that's what i figured was gonna happen with you two

[23:41] ❤LUCY❤: hehehe

[23:41] David: shit i uh actually had something i needed to bring up but that kinda threw me off my train of thought

[23:41] David: meatwagon doc hit me up a minute ago

[23:41] David: turns out i'm maine's only next of kin

[23:41] 🥝: HA I KNEW IT

[23:41] David: yeah i mean everyone pretty much spelled it out for me, i kinda figured, but... still, i guess it's confirmed now

[23:41] David: anyways i was fixing to step out and go pick up his and dorio's stuff. could use the extra hands if either of you are up to it?

[23:41] ❤LUCY❤: lemme wake becca up and send her back home and i'll meet up with ya at your place, bb. gimme like 10?

[23:41] David: kk. kiwi?

[23:41] 🥝: yeah i'll come help cutie

---

It didn't take long before David was met outside his door by all three of his girlfriends; presumably, Lucy sending Becca home had turned into Becca deciding she was going to tag along. Lucy and Kiwi both had cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, and Becca looked a bit sheepish.

"Hey," he said to them, waving lazily.

"Hey, sweetie," Lucy said, taking the smoke out of her mouth, noticing that it was almost burnt to the end, and tossing it to the side as she approached him. She wrapped her arms around him and gave him a deep kiss; he could taste the tobacco on her lips, and while he was pretty sure that it was mostly the association with her that was causing this, he was starting to kinda like it.

Kiwi and Becca both blushed, their points from the preceding day about David and Lucy having been proven in front of them, and then looked at each other for a second, raising an eyebrow slightly, as if to ask "wait, you too?". Hand in hand, David and Lucy started to walk down the stairs, with the other two girls following closely behind.

"So, um..." Becca started.

"Yeah, I know, you and Lucy fucked, it's totally cool," David said, making Kiwi laugh.

"I figured you knew, that wasn't what I was gonna bring up," Becca said as they reached the ground. "Luce and I were kinda talking about some stuff, too, and I figured it's probably better we touch base on it, you know?"

"What's up, choom?" David asked, slowing down a bit.

"So... we're pretty much all in a whole-ass poly relationship with you, right?" Becca asked. She looked around at the other two girls, then back at David. "We all on the same page on that?"

David and Kiwi looked at each other, then back at Becca, and shrugged their shoulders.

"Sounds about right to me, yeah?" David asked. "Actually, really funny you ask that, that's what Kiwi and I were talking about earlier, kinda."

"Somehow I don't buy it was just talking," Becca said, smiling devilishly and making Lucy blush a little. Kiwi held a hand over her mouth, trying not to burst out laughing.

"Send her the video," Kiwi said to David, nudging him a bit, and he shot the video he'd recorded with Kiwi over to Becca. She blushed, harder than David had ever seen in his time knowing her, and had a look of absolute shock on her face.

"Kiwi... how... what... how!?" she sputtered, essentially unable to form sentences, as Lucy absolutely lost it and was nearly doubled over laughing. David scratched the back of his head, and Kiwi gave a satisfied smile.

"Custom job," she said, pointing at her jaw.

"Well, no fucking shit," Becca said. "Jesus, girl." The four kept walking for a minute, and then David spoke up again.

"What, exactly, do you three think Maine and Dorio would've wanted done with their bodies, anyways?" he asked. "Maine apparently didn't leave a will, and Dorio's was pretty non-specific, so I'm a little lost for ideas."

Lucy shrugged.

"What sounds good to you, love?" she asked.

"That's the thing, I kinda don't know," he said. "Part of me wants to just cremate and get a nice urn and let it be that, but I don't know if either of them ever, like, talked to any of you about it."

Becca was trying not to laugh.

"Something on your mind?" he asked her, raising an eyebrow.

"He actually did, but he was pretty drunk, so I'm not sure how much stock you wanna put in this," she said. "Honest to God, he told me that if he got flatlined, he wanted me to just strip his cyberware and throw him in the trash somewhere."

"Don't remember him ever saying that," Kiwi said.

"Little before your time," Becca said. "After the job where we lost Sasha."

The name didn't hold any significance to David, but it lowered Kiwi and Lucy's moods noticeably. He looked around at them.

"Did I miss something? Who was Sasha?" he asked.

"Maine's netrunner before Lucy and I," Kiwi said. "She died on a job they were doing. Went off the rails, tried to take care of some personal business, ended up falling about 20 stories out of a window, as I understand it."

"Yeah, that's pretty much it," Becca said. "Was pretty much just me, Pilar, Maine, Dorio, and her. Losing Sasha like that... it wasn't good for Maine."

David started to connect some dots, and then looked at Becca.

"Holy fuck, you're the only original member of the crew left," he said. Becca was trying her absolute level best to hide it under humor and detachment, but she looked like she was about to start crying. David walked over and hugged her tightly, enveloping her in his yellow jacket, and the floodgates opened as she buried her face in his shirt.

"I didn't want to..." she started sobbing. "I didn't want to say anything, but, this is why I'm always so worried about..." Lucy came up, hugging her from the other side, while Kiwi stood off to the side a bit, red-faced and feeling a bit awkward as she took a drag on a cigarette.

"I get it," David said, running a hand through her lime-green hair. "You've lost too many people to be okay with losing us."

"Yeah, exactly," Becca said, tears still streaming down her face.

"You've still got us, alright, Bex?" Lucy said, her tone reassuring and comforting. "You're not gonna lose any of us, girl, I promise."

"I fucking love you guys," Becca said, burying her face in David's shirt again.

"Love you too, Becca," David said, and the three broke away from each other for a second. "You sure you're okay to help me carry Maine and Dorio's stuff? It's okay if it's gonna be too hard for you."

"Yeah, honestly, I..." Becca started, before pausing for a second. "I wanted to be there to support you, since, y'know, you just found out for sure he was your dad, but this ain't gonna be easy for me. If you're cool with it, I think I'm just gonna take the train back home."

"Yeah, that's totally fine, Becca," David said. "Shoot me a message when you get home, so I know you're safe, alright?"

Becca smiled.

"Will do," she said, walking off towards the MagLev platform, as the remaining three walked towards the Santo Domingo office of R.E.O. Meatwagon. After a few moments, Kiwi stopped dead in her tracks, and had a blank, vaguely horrified expression on her face.

"I... just kind of realized something," she said. David raised an eyebrow.

"You need to bail, too?" he asked.

"No, God, no," Kiwi said, waving it off. "I'm fine. Just, uh... if Maine's definitively your dad, then..." Lucy was starting to put together where Kiwi was going with this, and turned bright red. David noticed this, fit the pieces together himself, and did the same.

"Oh, God, I really don't want to think about that," he said. "Ew."

"Yeah, uh... I... this is probably why he was leaving it up in the air, I'm guessing," Kiwi said, sheepishly.

"Yeah, that's probably a fair assessment," Lucy said. "And, Kiwi, I would really, really appreciate it if you never brought that up again, and we could all just kind of forget that David and his dead dad have both been inside me." Lucy's frank phrasing of the problem made David burst into shocked laughter.

"Yes, please, let's just kinda, uh, pretend that didn't happen," David said, trying to keep walking in the hopes that it would change the subject to literally anything else.

Notes:

Christ, I kept this brick joke in the air for ten whole chapters before it landed. I'm amazed at my restraint.

Also, I've been having a couple of people ask me, in light of the fact that we're not going for full canon, why I didn't have Maine and Dorio stick around, and I feel like I should probably just full-on explain that since it's relevant. There's... kind of two big reasons for this, one in-universe and one out-of-universe.

The in-universe reason, as I view it, is that Maine was just kinda too far down the path to be pulled back. The issues that led to him going cyberpsycho, and led to his death, were not issues that could be simply and easily fixed by him just communicating better with everyone. Maine is, from the jump, a vision of where David's going to end up if he does everything wrong; Maine's not a bad guy, but he's stacked up a lot of bad decisions on top of a lot of other bad decisions, and by the time David's around, the Bad Decision jenga tower is about to fall over, no matter what he or anyone else does (and, due to Dorio's devotion to him, it's inevitably gonna take her out with it).

The out-of-universe reason, meanwhile, is that... honestly, I felt like things were in danger of getting stale fast if I didn't move the plot forwards to the timeskip and get into territory I can actually do more with, and the pre-timeskip stuff just didn't really offer me quite enough room to take things off the rails enough that saving them would pass the smell test. The pre-timeskip stuff was me knocking over small dominoes at the start of the chain that I could get away with; the timeskip is where those domino chains start hitting the bigger and more obvious dominoes, like David knowing about Arasaka pretty much off the bat, and Kiwi actively helping Lucy deal with the netrunners after him.

Chapter 12: Smasher

Notes:

OH MY GOD WE'RE OVER 10K HITS.

Maine and Dorio's personal effects had fit in one medium-sized box that David was able to carry himself, albeit needing both hands to do so. All Dorio had left on her person was her jacket, tattered and charred from her makeshift funeral pyre and not really suitable to wear; Maine, meanwhile, left his clothes, the chip that served as his digital wallet and a key to his and Dorio's apartment, and a small leather wallet that was mostly empty aside from a physical ID card and two small photographs.

One photograph was of himself as a young teen, wearing a runner's uniform on a desert track, covered in sweat and catching his breath; a reminder of why he kept pushing himself as hard as he did. The other was of him and Gloria, smiling, his huge arm wrapped around the latter's back at Turbo.

Tears welled up in David's eyes, but he wiped them away, trying his absolute best to be strong around Kiwi and Lucy, and closed the wallet.

"Mr. Martinez, have you decided what you want us to do with the bodies?" the meatwagon "doctor" asked, over the reception table.

"Cremating them should be fine," he said, his voice quivering.

"Would you like to pay your respects to Mr. Maine, first?" the doctor added. David paused for a second.

"Sure, yeah," he said. "Do I owe you anything for that?"

"Comes out of his account," the doctor said, casually. "Five hundred eddies. Trust me, it's barely a dent. Right this way, we'll pull him out of the freezer for you."

"Wait, what about Dorio?" Lucy asked, confused. The doctor shrugged.

"You wouldn't want to," he said. "Closed-casket job, is the term the techs used when they brought her in. Enough to fill a coffin, but not attached enough that you'd wanna open that coffin."

Lucy's lip quivered a bit, and Kiwi put a hand on her shoulder, comforting her, as the three followed the doctor to the cold storage room. It immediately lived up to its name, and while David and Kiwi didn't notice much of a difference, Lucy started to shiver; David slipped his EMT jacket off and put it on her without a word, over her clothes.

The doctor went up to a panel on the wall, pressing some buttons, and ejected Maine's corpse. There was a heavy, opaque sheet covering most of his body, up to his neck, and the meatwagon techs had seemingly forcibly contorted the grimace he'd died with into an expression of peace, his eyes closed as if asleep. David walked up to the body, taking in the sight.

"Bye, Dad," he said, kneeling down a bit. "Hope whatever comes next works out better for you."

---

The three walked out of the office, David carrying the metal box and Lucy helping him with the urns- a couple's set with on-file photos of both. It had taken about an hour to cremate them, and the doctor had offered to let David come pick the urns up another time, but he'd insisted on getting it out of the way.

"If you two are good to go, I think I'm gonna head back home," Kiwi said.

"Sure," David said, nodding slightly as she walked off in the direction of the MagLev platform. "Night, Kiws." She waved back in response, disappearing into the night.

David and Lucy kept walking for a moment, wordlessly, Lucy still wearing David's jacket.

"Did that... help any, sweetie?" she asked. David stopped.

"Honestly? It did," he said. "It was nice getting to see him one last time. You doing okay, yourself?"

"I'll survive," Lucy said. "I... didn't realize it was that bad, with Dorio." David shrugged, picking up the pace again, albeit slowly.

"Maine gave her the best sendoff he could. Whole Viking funeral deal. Probably would've been more, otherwise," David said. "They were a sweet couple."

"They were," Lucy agreed. "Are you gonna try to sleep when you get home, or are you pretty much up for the night?" David sighed.

"I'm totally awake," he said. "My sleep schedule's been beyond fucked lately." Lucy laughed.

"God, mine too," she said. "Wanna drop this stuff off at your place and grab a couple drinks?"

David smiled.

"Of course, baby," he said.

---

[01:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: made it home safe 🥰

[01:31] David: i'm glad bb!

[01:31] David: you like, done for the night, period? luce and i are fixing to hit up afterlife

[01:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: think that dick bouncer's gonna be there tonight or?

[01:31] David: what the one that thought you were a kid?

[01:31] David: i think they fired that guy

[01:31] ❤LUCY❤: yeah i haven't seen that dude around in a minute

[01:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: fuckin good

[01:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i'm not even that goddamn short i'm like 5 foot 2

[01:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: and i'm covered in ink

[01:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: what kinda fuckin gonk looks at me and thinks "kid"

[01:32] ❤LUCY❤: i mean you do have that whole daddy thing with david.

[01:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: luce, if there are children who know what dd/lg is i desperately do not want to know about it

[01:32] ❤LUCY❤: ...you know what, touché actually, bex

[01:32] David: so uh you coming or

[01:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah, yeah, save a spot for me

---

Afterlife was as dingy and neon-soaked as ever, and at two in the morning, it was fairly packed. Some of the people Claire served up drinks to were cyberpunks who'd just gotten back from gigs, celebrating their victories and lamenting the loss of friends; others were just regulars and NC's assorted wanderers and solos. At the bar, standing out from the crowd in their own way and holding hands under the counter, were David and Lucy, each taking occasional sips from a Broseph Ale out of the bottle.

"You ever try the Johnny Silverhand here?" David asked.

"Never," Lucy said, smiling slightly. "Tequila makes me pukey, and I hate the bathrooms here."

"God, I know, right? I think I slipped in some guy's piss last time I was here," David said, making Lucy laugh. "Speaking of, I gotta run to the john for a second. Save my spot for me?"

"Of course, baby," Lucy said, as David worked his way through the crowd to the restrooms. The men's room was as nasty as it always was, with the same mystery puddle David had just been referring to sitting directly in front of the urinals. Taking up three of the four urinals, there stood a very large full cyborg, with seemingly only the top half of his head recognizable as human; in all other respects, he was more of a walking tank, to the point where it sort of surprised David that he still had to piss. David took up the sole empty urinal at the end, and unzipped.

"Nova fuckin' chrome," he muttered, half to himself. The borg looked to the side and down at him.

"You say something?" he asked, in a deep, sinister voice that was more machine than man. David jumped slightly, his stream going a bit wild, and looked up.

"Oh, I was just saying your chrome is fuckin' preem, choom," he said.

"Arasaka's finest," the borg said, looking back down as his codpiece closed with a hydraulic whirr. He looked back at David. "You're David Martinez, right?" If David had been unsettled before, he was now very, very scared, between those two statements; his expression and general demeanor reflected that, as he finished his stream as quickly as he could and fumbled his zipper back up.

"I... how do you know that? Do you work for them?" he asked, stepping back towards the exit, ready to activate his Sandevistan, grab Lucy, and run if this was an unfriendly interaction.

"Calm down, boy," the borg said. "What, do you think they'd honestly send me to go hunt you down? That'd be a joke. A nuclear bomb to swat a fly. I'm off the clock, and I just asked out of personal interest."

"Yeah, that's me," David said, calming down slightly as he moved to the sink and washed his hands. "Can I ask what makes me so interesting?"

"A seventeen-year-old boy who can handle a Sandevistan isn't the most common thing in the world," the borg explained. "And I never liked the Tanaka boy, anyhow." David burst out laughing, almost completely lowering his guard, and despite the full-borg's frame not being the most expressive, he could tell his conversational partner wasn't here for a fight.

"You here with anybody?" David asked.

"I usually drink alone," the borg said.

"If you want the company, you're welcome to come drink with me and my girlfriend," David said. The borg stood there in the restroom for a moment, considering it.

"I think I'll take you up on that offer," he said, following David out of the restroom.

When Lucy and Becca, who had arrived at the bar in the meantime, looked up, their expressions changed from happiness to absolute, utter shock, as David and the full-borg sat down.

"Made a friend in the restroom," David said. "His name is, uh..."

"Adam," the full-borg said.

"Adam, this is Lucy, and Becca," David added, "Lucy, Becca, this is Adam." Lucy looked at David, then at Adam, and then back at David, trying to hide the mixture of extreme displeasure and abject fear that was coming over her.

"Nice to meet you, Adam," Lucy said, awkwardly and slowly. "Can I talk to my boyfriend, alone, for a sec?"

"I think I need to have a word with David, too," Becca said, taking him by one arm and dragging him towards the door, as far away from Adam's earshot as possible, as Lucy followed. "You know who that is, right?"

"No, and I'm starting to get the vibe I'm supposed to," David said.

"No shit you're supposed to, that's Adam fucking Smasher," Lucy said. "You know, killed Johnny Silverhand Adam Smasher? Survived a nuke Adam Smasher? 'If you fight this guy, you will die' Adam Smasher?"

David blinked for a second.

"Seems weirdly nice," he said.

"Yeah, until you say something that pisses him off and he starts trying to rip the whole fucking bar to pieces," Becca said, dragging him out the door. "Fuck this, we're hitting up Lizzie's, he's banned from there."

"What about our tab!?" David asked, not especially wanting to steal from the bar where solos typically did business.

"We'll pay it next time, babe," Lucy said. "Claire was watching the whole thing go down. They know Smasher, they'll get it."

"If he's this much of a dick, what's he doing at Afterlife?" David asked, still a little confused.

"Him and Rogue have history, so she won't ban him," Becca said. "Only fucking bar in NC that lets that guy in. Everyone else knows better. Jesus, this is why you fuckin' need Lucy; she lets you out of her sight for ten fuckin' goddamn minutes, and you're trying to make friends with Adam fucking Smasher."

"I mean, I get what you're both saying, but..." David started.

"Sweetie, no, you are not going to make friends with Adam Smasher. Even if that's possible, that's a bad idea," Lucy said. "We're not kidding, that dude's body count could fill up a small country."

"Fine," David said, mildly annoyed, as they made their way to Lizzie's Bar to continue their drinking. "God, he had some fucking preem chrome, though."

Notes:

Adam Smasher just sort of existing in the world off the clock is an endlessly funny concept to me, and I'm probably going to go back to this well again.

Chapter 13: Side Gig

[09:41] 🥝: found us a gig on hacknet. you'll like this one becca

[09:48] 🥝: ...hello? figured there'd be a little more fanfare

[09:55] David: oh shit

[09:55] David: sorry, just woke up

[09:55] David: head hurts

[09:55] David: what's the job

[09:55] 🥝: morning cutie. actually you'll probably like this too

[09:56] 🥝: guy over in little china who does kitten torture XBDs. someone posted an open contract to go rough him up and destroy his setup, 10k eddies in exchange for image proof.

[09:56] David: ...kitten torture as in, like, you're torturing the kitten, or as in you are the kitten being tortured

[09:56] 🥝: what

[09:56] 🌟BECCA!🌟: chooms why am i in jail right now

[09:56] 🥝: WHAT

[09:56] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i just woke up and i'm in lockup for some reason??

[09:56] 🌟BECCA!🌟: wait fuck am i supposed to be on a gig right now

[09:56] 🥝: no, but also, what the fuck happened last night after i went home

[09:57] 🌟BECCA!🌟: our favorite himbo tried to make friends with adam smasher, so we had to leave afterlife

[09:57] 🥝: fair, probably smart

[09:57] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ended up at lizzie's instead

[09:57] 🥝: you mean the place where they don't cut you off because you're still connected?

[09:57] 🥝: yeah that tracks

[09:57] David: they tell you what charges you're on yet?

[09:57] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh just DTP. drunk tank ticket. just no clue how i got here

[09:57] ❤LUCY❤: becca you tried to twerk on a cop in uniform

[09:57] ❤LUCY❤: what did you think was gonna happen

[09:57] 🌟BECCA!🌟: how many shots in was i

[09:57] ❤LUCY❤: uh

[09:58] ❤LUCY❤: lost count somewhere around 15?

[09:58] ❤LUCY❤: that's why i said TRIED to twerk

[09:58] ❤LUCY❤: you ended up just kind of falling on your face with your ass in the air

[09:58] David: i don't remember any of this

[09:58] 🥝: wait back up

[09:58] 🥝: becca, when you said david tried to make friends with adam smasher

[09:58] 🌟BECCA!🌟: kiwi i was being one hundred fucking percent literal

[09:58] 🌟BECCA!🌟: THAT adam smasher

[09:58] 🥝: WHAT

[09:58] David: he uh

[09:58] David: he seemed weirdly nice?

[09:58] 🥝: what... what did you say to him, exactly

[09:58] 🥝: or what did he say to you

[09:58] 🥝: or just, like, in general how the actual fuck did you end up in this situation

[09:58] David: lucy and i were at afterlife waiting for becca, went off to go take a piss, he was doing the same thing

[09:58] David: told him his chrome was cool

[09:58] David: apparently he knows me through arasaka or something?

[09:58] ❤LUCY❤: wait what the fuck

[09:59] ❤LUCY❤: oh no

[09:59] ❤LUCY❤: you know about that now?

[09:59] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i didn't say anything

[09:59] 🥝: i told him yesterday.

[09:59] David: yup. wasn't gonna say anything but

[09:59] 🥝: thank you for that, btw

[09:59] ❤LUCY❤: what the fuck kiwi?

[09:59] 🥝: lucy, i get that david can be kinda dumb sometimes and that you want to protect him from himself

[09:59] 🥝: trust me i fully get it

[09:59] David: ow

[09:59] 🥝: (it's cute, don't take that as me roasting you, choom)

[09:59] 🥝: but if he's the one fundamentally keeping us on the same page, he needs to be kept in the loop

[09:59] 🥝: especially when it uh directly involves him

[09:59] ❤LUCY❤: ...i'm not happy you told him, but, i get it, yeah

[09:59] ❤LUCY❤: anyways

[09:59] David: but yeah, he recognized me off the bat. i got kinda freaked out, was ready to just hit the sandy and grab lucy and becca and run for the fuckin hills

[09:59] David: turns out, he was off the clock. only said anything out of... way he put it was "personal interest"

[09:59] David: guess he caught wind of me beating up katsuo with the sandy, thought it was hilarious

[10:00] David: asked him if he wanted to come drink with us, minute he introduced himself lucy and becca dragged me away and told me that was a Very Bad Idea

[10:00] 🥝: i mean i... honestly kind of buy that? tanaka's kid seems like a little asshole

[10:00] 🥝: it kind of tracks that that would get you on smasher's good side, just

[10:00] 🥝: the fact that he HAS a good side is uh

[10:00] ❤LUCY❤: yeah part of me really, really doesn't buy that that's all there is to this, bb

[10:00] 🌟BECCA!🌟: I'M FREEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[10:00] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah i don't buy that smasher was just being friendly

[10:00] 🌟BECCA!🌟: not a good call david

[10:00] 🥝: i dunno. maybe i'm just playing devil's advocate because david's cute when he does dumb things, but

[10:00] 🥝: smasher's a weird dude

[10:01] ❤LUCY❤: yeah that's uh one way to put it

[10:01] 🥝: like absolutely do not get me wrong that man is a total gonk

[10:01] 🥝: but he's... a really, really weird gonk and i think david might've pressed the exact right buttons to make him not act like a jackass?

[10:01] David: riddle for the ages, i guess. we doing this kitten guy job?

[10:01] 🥝: you and becca got it? lucy and i need to do some netrunner hunting

[10:01] 🌟BECCA!🌟: kitten guy job what? i wasn't paying attention sorry

[10:01] David: guy in little china who does kitten torture XBDs

[10:01] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...like, where you ARE the kitten, or where you're torturing the kitten?

[10:01] David: i don't know and it's bothering me

[10:01] ❤LUCY❤: bb does it actually matter at all

[10:01] David: I mean I don't wanna destroy a full-size wreath, and then have it turn out they meant for me to smash a kitty-sized one? i'd feel kinda dumb

[10:01] 🥝: david i didn't think you were going to top "why are your nipples blue" but this is the absolute goofiest thing i have ever seen you get hung up on

Chapter 14: Smasher II

[14:33] David: hey kiwi, lucy, all good with the uh

[14:33] David: netrunner hunting?

[14:33] ❤LUCY❤: yup. one down.

[14:33] 🥝: you and becca get the cat guy taken care of?

[14:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yup, i have another cat now!

[14:33] David: did you... know who that was gonna be

[14:33] 🥝: you knew the gonk?

[14:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: WAIT KIWI DID YOU NOT FUCKING KNOW

[14:34] David: lemme just send the pic, you're not gonna believe us if we just tell you

David sent a picture.

[Description: Katsuo Tanaka, with his face heavily bruised, one eye swollen shut, and a streak of blood running from the corner of his mouth; Rebecca is holding him up by the back of his shirt for the camera, grinning like a maniac. In the background, you can see several braindance wreaths, both human and cat-sized, shattered into pieces of scrap metal.]

[14:34] 🥝: NO FUCKING WAY

[14:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: I GOT TO BEAT UP DAVID'S PIECE OF SHIT BULLY HAHAHAHH

[14:34] ❤LUCY❤: god why do we keep running into these tanaka gonks though

[14:34] David: god i know right, what the fuck is he even doing in little china

[14:34] David: yeah i pretty much just let rebecca deal with him while i smashed up his shit

[14:34] David: beating up katsuo got old after the first time i did it

[14:34] 🥝: shit, guess that was an easy 10k then huh.

[14:34] David: yeah no kidding

[14:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: 10k and a free choom for butterbean!

[14:34] ❤LUCY❤: becca you can't just say that twice and not show us

🌟BECCA!🌟 sent a picture.

[Description: A very fat, large, adult black cat, laying on Becca's lap on her bed and flopping his tail lazily.]

[14:34] ❤LUCY❤: OH MY GOD

[14:35] David: I KNOW RIGHT HE'S SUCH A FAT LITTLE BABY

[14:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i named him pepper 😻

[14:35] 🥝: somehow you've just been attracting the cutest fucking cats

[14:35] David: hey lucy, sidebar, can you PM me? need to ask you a favor

❤LUCY❤ started a private message conversation with David.

[14:35] ❤LUCY❤: what's up love?

[14:35] David: just gonna say in advance, i know i'm a complete idiot for asking this, it's a bad idea, etc etc etc etc

[14:35] ❤LUCY❤: ...oh god, what are you about to ask me for.

[14:35] David: any way you could scrape out adam smasher's contact info?

[14:35] ❤LUCY❤: this is one of those situations where just because i can doesn't mean i should.

[14:35] ❤LUCY❤: can i ask why in christ's name you want his contact info, at least

[14:35] ❤LUCY❤: please tell me you're not about to invite him to the group chat if i do that

[14:35] David: oh holy fucking christ no are you kidding me? i'm pretty sure i'd be buying new pants for everyone

[14:35] David: no i honestly just feel like a dick about leaving him at the bar, just wanted to leave him a message apologizing

[14:36] ❤LUCY❤: you are being way, way, way too nice to a guy whose body count is in the hundreds of thousands, and who no longer identifies as human, but instead considers himself to be one of the new race of machine gods.

[14:36] ❤LUCY❤: like i just want to make absolutely sure you know who you're talking about here. there's a reason why the only place this guy is allowed to drink in NC is the bar owned by the one person he even kinda-sorta openly respects, who also hates him and is willing to kick him out at the slightest provocation, and where everyone's a heavily armed solo.

[14:36] ❤LUCY❤: if i haven't gotten this across yet, it's because this gonk is bad fucking news.

[14:36] David: probably better he's not holding a grudge against us then, no?

[14:38] ❤LUCY❤: fuck

[14:38] David: you ok sweetie?

[14:38] ❤LUCY❤: god damn it david that's a genuinely good point and now i HAVE to do the really stupid thing.

[14:38] ❤LUCY❤: gimme 10

[14:38] ❤LUCY❤: but seriously i hope i've made it clear what kind of fire you're sticking your hand into here

[14:38] David: no, trust me, i get it, this is 100% about tying off the loose end and making sure we don't have an enraged murderborg trying to kill us over our bar tab

[14:39] David: i've gotten the vibe he doesn't have a long fuse and i'm worried we might've lit it last night

[14:39] ❤LUCY❤: yeah that's fair bb

[14:45] ❤LUCY❤: got it

[14:45] David: nova. i'll PM him

[14:45] ❤LUCY❤: don't say or do anything dumb, alright bb?

[14:45] David: i'll try not to. btw, date night tonight?

[14:45] ❤LUCY❤: you 100% owe me after asking me to dig that up lmao

[14:45] David: sweet. love you bb 😘😘😘

[14:45] ❤LUCY❤: i love you too sweetie. 💖

David closed the private message conversation.

---

David began a private message conversation with Adam Smasher.

[14:50] David: hello? uh... mr. smasher?

[14:50] Adam Smasher: ADAM, IF YOU MUST SHORTEN IT.

[14:50] Adam Smasher: HOW DID YOU GET MY CONTACT INFORMATION?

[14:50] David: remember my girlfriend who dragged me away at the bar? good netrunner.

[14:50] Adam Smasher: OH. YOU. THE BOY.

[14:50] Adam Smasher: APOLOGIES. I'M ON THE CLOCK CURRENTLY. ARASAKA IS MOST LIKELY WATCHING.

[14:50] Adam Smasher: ALLOW ME TO FIX THAT.

Adam Smasher encrypted the conversation.

[14:50] Adam Smasher: NOW WE CAN SPEAK MORE FREELY.

[14:50] David: anyways. kinda just wanted to say sorry about ditching you there.

[14:50] Adam Smasher: IT'S FINE. I AM WELL AWARE OF WHAT AND WHO I AM.

[14:50] Adam Smasher: I APPRECIATED THE GESTURE REGARDLESS.

[14:51] David: they didn't make you pay our tab, did they?

[14:51] Adam Smasher: NO MATTER. ARASAKA PAID.

[14:51] David: huh. benefits of a corpo expense account, i guess

[14:51] Adam Smasher: INDEED. WAS THAT ALL YOU WISHED TO SPEAK TO ME ABOUT?

[14:51] David: actually, kind of a dumb side question.

[14:51] David: you seem... oddly nice for your reputation. something i'm missing here, or are my girlfriends just scared shitless of you for nothing?

[14:51] Adam Smasher: THEIR FEAR IS WELL FOUNDED, BUT LARGELY BASED IN OLD STORIES, OF A YOUNGER AND MORE RECKLESS SELF.

[14:51] Adam Smasher: HUMANS HAVE A TENDENCY TO MISTAKE SOMETHING THAT IS DEADLY FOR SOMETHING THAT COMMITS WANTON VIOLENCE.

[14:51] Adam Smasher: I AM, AS FAR AS I AM AWARE, THE DEADLIEST CREATURE ON EARTH. HOWEVER, I DO NOT COMMIT ACTS OF RANDOM VIOLENCE WITHOUT REASON.

[14:52] Adam Smasher: I AM A PROFESSIONAL, WITH A JOB. I DO MY JOB VERY WELL. MY JOB IS NOT TO HARM YOU, OR YOUR... GIRLFRIENDS.

[14:52] Adam Smasher: AS A SIDE NOTE, YOU SEEM TO BE A VERY LUCKY MAN, IF I AM UNDERSTANDING YOU CORRECTLY.

[14:52] David: you don't know the half of it. but yeah, i think i get the picture. in other words, you're not hiding anything.

[14:52] Adam Smasher: WHAT REASON WOULD I HAVE TO LIE? THE BEAUTY OF STRENGTH IS THE ABILITY TO LIVE ONE'S OWN TRUTH IN ITS FULL PURITY.

[14:52] Adam Smasher: IF I WANTED TO KILL YOU, I COULD SIMPLY DO SO. THE FACT THAT YOU STAND ALIVE IS THE TESTAMENT TO MY HONESTY.

[14:52] David: so we're good. cool. all I needed.

Adam Smasher closed the private message conversation.

---

[14:53] David: so uh

[14:53] David: got the whole Adam Smasher thing taken care of. we're all good

[14:53] ❤LUCY❤: wait, really?

[14:53] David: yup. thanks for hooking me up with his info sweetie

[14:53] David: kiwi, you were right, that dude's fucking weird

[14:53] David: talks like he's a bad anime villain all the time

[14:53] David: but we're apparently cool

[14:53] 🌟BECCA!🌟: david i really don't think you get to give people shit for acting like anime characters when you just tried to befriend a fuckin walking murder tank

[14:53] David: yeah fair point honestly

[14:54] 🥝: and apparently pulled it off, too? i'm starting to wonder if we passed into some kind of mirror dimension

[14:54] David: oh come on i'm not buddies with the guy. i get the impression i'm only gonna be able to put up with him yelling about how he's the deadliest creature on earth in capslock in small doses

[14:54] David: but i apologized for ditching him, he accepted it, he said he appreciated me trying, we're cool

[14:54] David: no harm, no foul, no fuckin walking murder tank hunting us down because we didn't get drunk with him

[14:54] David: all good

[14:54] ❤LUCY❤: see, this is the kind of thing that had us unanimously calling you the new boss

[14:54] ❤LUCY❤: you're GOOD at this

[14:54] ❤LUCY❤: like frighteningly fucking good

[14:54] ❤LUCY❤: speaking of things you're good at: my place at 7? 💖

[14:54] David: sounds good to me bb!

[14:54] 🌟BECCA!🌟: god you two are so fucking cute

Notes:

Yes, I'm leaning on the fourth wall a little with David there, you're not imagining that.

Probably gonna be a .5 chapter for this because we're finally out of Depressing Land with all the Maine and Dorio stuff, and I wanna write cute David x Lucy. Stay tuned.

Chapter 15: Ripperdocs II

[12:15] David: so i'm in the market for a new ripperdoc. any suggestions from anyone?

[12:15] ❤LUCY❤: fucking finally

[12:15] David: figured you'd wanna hear that yeah

[12:15] 🥝: you want vik. over in little china

[12:15] ❤LUCY❤: kiwi i don't think he's trying to get better at sucking dick

[12:15] 🥝: ha.

[12:15] 🥝: seriously, though, he does really solid work and isn't a gonk about payment. customs, too.

[12:15] David: honestly my bar is "uses anesthetic and isn't gonna be beating off in full view of the door every time i walk in"

[12:15] David: i'm really not that picky i'm just starting to get really tired of doc's shit

[12:16] ❤LUCY❤: can i just say, as a sidebar

[12:16] ❤LUCY❤: i'm really fucking glad you're not cool with doc doing his weird shit?

[12:16] ❤LUCY❤: like i thought you were totally ok with that and it was kind of unsettling.

[12:16] 🥝: ...david was that a joke

[12:16] ❤LUCY❤: he's not kidding, i've seen way more of that gonk's dick than i ever wanted to

[12:16] 🥝: does your gonk ass doc seriously not use fucking anesthetic when you get new chrome

[12:16] David: why do you think i don't have a mr studd.

[12:16] ❤LUCY❤: wait that's why you're still bio down there? tbh i thought you were worried about losing inches 💀

[12:16] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah whoa uh

[12:16] 🌟BECCA!🌟: we gotta talk about this one choom

[12:16] 🥝: ...i'm with becca on this one, yeah

[12:17] David: becca do you not remember how goddamn sore you were after that fourway

[12:17] David: like i'm legit worried i'm gonna seriously injure one of you three with my dick

[12:17] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i mean, i get it but

[12:17] 🌟BECCA!🌟: c'mon dude

[12:17] 🥝: yeah that's fair, but, like

[12:17] 🥝: i dropped a lot of eddies on that custom jaw and i'm gonna feel kind of stupid if i end up not actually needing it

[12:17] ❤LUCY❤: ...kiwi how much did you spend to be able to blow david?

[12:17] 🥝: uh

[12:17] 🥝: i plead the fifth

[12:17] ❤LUCY❤: seriously how much did that cost, i might look into one

[12:18] 🥝: oh. 80k

[12:18] ❤LUCY❤: WHAT.

[12:18] 🥝: yeah you see why i didn't wanna say anything

[12:18] 🥝: i'm gonna be making payments on this fucking thing for a while

[12:18] ❤LUCY❤: yeah uh nevermind, okay, guess that's just gonna be your thing.

[12:18] David: see why i was thinking about dropping size a little?

[12:18] ❤LUCY❤: honestly, it's up to you. i definitely don't mind you being that big but i'm not really a size queen, that's kinda more bex

[12:18] ❤LUCY❤: it being attached to you is the more important part bb ❤

[12:18] 🌟BECCA!🌟: david i will never fucking forgive you if you get rid of that thing.

[12:18] 🥝: honestly i'm mostly into it for the novelty and the sunk cost

[12:18] 🥝: i'd probably be with lucy on this one if i hadn't dropped that many eddies on getting around the problem

[12:18] 🥝: end of the day though, david, we don't own you

[12:18] 🥝: if you wanna keep your bio dick, nova

[12:18] 🥝: if you don't? we'll live, trust me

[12:19] David: if you're all cool with the possibility of me sending you to the hospital by fucking you too hard, fuck it, i'll keep what i was born with

[12:19] David: but if i actually do seriously injure one of you during sex

[12:19] David: i'm going straight to vik and asking for a robocock that won't do that

[12:19] ❤LUCY❤: yeah that's fair bb.

[12:19] 🌟BECCA!🌟: choom if you managed to send me to the hospital with your dick that would be the highlight of my whole fucking life

[12:19] ❤LUCY❤: jesus christ becca 💀💀💀

Notes:

Yes, I know I said I was going to do 14.5, and that this is not 14.5.

What I did not realize when I said that, was that I'm actually kind of bad at writing... actual romance and dating and such, and when I tried to pivot away from that to do something a little seasonally appropriate as a one-off (one of my comments on the subject alludes to this because I was going to have David get the holy fucking hell beaten out of him over the course of it, Ash Williams style), I realized that while I'm okay at horror, there's basically no way to fit it in this setting with these characters without it being extremely clunky and awkward.

I'm going back to the drawing board on it. I am going to eventually do it because I've been kind of shafting David x Lucy in favor of the weirder pairings and I need to even that balance out, but it's gonna be a minute and it's gonna drop out of order.

Chapter 16: Apartments

[14:41] David: everyone around?

[14:41] ❤LUCY❤: what's up bb?

[14:42] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i'm here what's up

[14:42] 🥝: need something?

[14:42] David: wanted to spitball something, figured it'd be better to just ask all three of you at once

[14:42] David: how's everyone feel about the idea of moving in together?

[14:42] 🌟BECCA!🌟: what, like, all four of us?

[14:42] David: i mean yeah?

[14:42] 🌟BECCA!🌟: sounds nova, i'm in

[14:42] 🥝: ...that was easy.

[14:42] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i'm not gonna lie there's stuff i appreciate about not having pilar around

[14:42] 🌟BECCA!🌟: but even with the cats, this apartment's lonely as fuck without that gonk

[14:42] 🌟BECCA!🌟: why do you think i'm always trying to tag along on shit

[14:43] ❤LUCY❤: ...that makes a lot of sense

[14:43] ❤LUCY❤: i'm on board too D

[14:43] 🥝: i'm a little picky about my living space so i'm not sure

[14:43] 🥝: don't get me wrong, i'm fine living with the three of you, on paper

[14:43] 🥝: but uh

[14:43] ❤LUCY❤: you're worried about not having room for all the old tech in your apartment aren't you

[14:43] David: the wha?

[14:43] ❤LUCY❤: hahah did neither of us ever tell you babe?

[14:43] ❤LUCY❤: yeah kiwi collects old tech stuff. like OLD old. pre corporate war old

[14:43] ❤LUCY❤: place kinda looks like a rat's nest but, not gonna lie to you, some of that stuff's really cool

[14:43] 🥝: yeah, guilty as charged

[14:43] 🥝: actually that's kinda how we ended up being friends

[14:43] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i've never heard this, have you two gonks been holding out on me?

[14:43] 🥝: ...i mean did you ever ask?

[14:43] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah fair

[14:43] 🥝: but yeah. met lucy at... shit, i wanna say lizzie's? night's kinda fuzzy in my memory

[14:43] 🥝: we talked shop for a bit, had a few drinks, ended up heading back to my place

[14:44] 🌟BECCA!🌟: and then you two fucked right

[14:44] ❤LUCY❤: lmao god damn it bex 💀

[14:44] 🥝: ...not that particular night? i don't really do random bar hookups and i didn't know lucy was pan yet, so, yeah, no

[14:44] 🥝: she actually helped me kinda-sorta cable-manage my stuff, and we were up all night chugging down endurodrink and playing video games that are almost a century old

[14:44] 🥝: like don't get me wrong, it's still a rat's nest in there. but at least you can walk around in it now without tripping on anything

[14:44] 🥝: that said, i learned a very important lesson that night: if i'm playing river city ransom with lucy, turn buddy damage off.

[14:44] 🌟BECCA!🌟: neeeeeeeeerds

[14:44] David: oh c'mon that's cute

[14:44] 🌟BECCA!🌟: it is

[14:44] 🌟BECCA!🌟: but still

[14:44] 🌟BECCA!🌟: neeeeeeeeerds

[14:44] ❤LUCY❤: heheh

[14:45] ❤LUCY❤: i miss that tbh kiwi.

[14:45] 🥝: yeah, same. i think i'm pretty on board with this whole moving in together thing.

[14:45] David: hey, i mean, it'll save us on rent, and we'll be less bored when we're not on gigs

[14:45] David: win-win, right?

[14:45] ❤LUCY❤: yeah, i like that idea, sweetie. wanna meet up and go apartment hunting in a bit?

[14:45] David: oh fuck yeah, i'm dying to get out of this apt

[14:45] 🌟BECCA!🌟: cool if i come, chooms?

[14:45] ❤LUCY❤: honestly, figured i didn't need to ask 💀

[14:45] 🌟BECCA!🌟: sweet, i'll meet you two at the maglev stop in 10

[14:45] 🥝: i'm kinda busy, actually, just let me know what kind of square footage we're working with and i'll see if it works

[14:45] 🌟BECCA!🌟: again: neeeeeeeeerd

[14:45] 🥝: yes, becca, i am a nerd. i'm a netrunner. what did you think i was going to be.

[14:45] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...wait a second

[14:45] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you said you two were drinking endurodrink

[14:45] 🌟BECCA!🌟: kiwi was luce fucking breastfeeding off of you???

[14:46] ❤LUCY❤: ...no?

[14:46] ❤LUCY❤: kiwi you didn't even have that implant then, did you

[14:46] 🥝: i think i got it like a month after we met? so yeah no.

[14:46] 🌟BECCA!🌟: is it weird that i kinda can't picture kiwi without the blue nipples

[14:46] David: not weird at all, i can't picture that either

Chapter 17: Evisceration

Notes:

This fic (and all future works by me) now has a Discord!

 

Here's the link to it.

🥝 started a private message conversation with Faraday.

[14:45] 🥝: you here?

[14:45] Faraday: Hello, Kiwi. I would appreciate it if you didn't bother me for non-work-related reasons.

[14:45] 🥝: shut the fuck up. right now, i'm going to talk, and you're going to listen.

[14:45] Faraday: Excuse me?

🥝 muted Faraday.

[14:45] 🥝: again, shut the fuck up.

[14:45] 🥝: the tanaka job wasn't a bust because the data didn't exist. it was a bust because we destroyed it.

[14:45] 🥝: the data concerns one of our crew members, who i happen to care very deeply about.

[14:45] 🥝: actually, pretty much our leader, with maine and dorio flatlined.

[14:45] 🥝: not only that, it concerns arasaka wanting to kidnap him and use him as a guinea pig for experimental cyberware until his head pops.

[14:45] 🥝: there is a grand total of one person in the category of "people i've sat on the face of" who i'd be okay with that happening to, and that's you.

[14:45] 🥝: do not contact us about that job again. do not contact us again, period.

[14:46] 🥝: i am well aware that i am burning this bridge by doing this. this might shock you, but i do not care.

[14:46] 🥝: there are other, better fixers in night city, who aren't my shitty, manipulative ex. we'll survive without you.

[14:46] 🥝: and if you send anyone else after us, or after david martinez, i will personally hunt you down and i will make your fucking mr studd burst into flames.

[14:46] 🥝: am i making myself perfectly clear?

🥝 unmuted Faraday.

[14:46] Faraday: I don't think you fully realize what you're doing here.

[14:46] 🥝: oh? what, exactly, do i not realize, faraday?

[14:46] Faraday: Threatening someone as well-connected as I am is generally not a smart decision, Kiwi.

[14:46] 🥝: go fuck yourself, you fucking gonk.

[14:46] 🥝: "as well-connected as I am"

[14:46] 🥝: don't make me laugh, you're just militech's current bitch-boy.

[14:46] 🥝: do you really think they're gonna go to bat for you?

[14:46] Faraday: Yes, actually. I do.

[14:46] 🥝: then you're even fucking dumber than you look.

[14:46] 🥝: bye. ideally for the rest of our lives, so i don't have to put in the effort of ending yours.

🥝 closed the private message conversation with Faraday.

🥝 blocked Faraday.

Notes:

I thought about putting this at the end of the last chapter, but it felt a little better on its own.

I've been planning this chapter for a hot minute, and we're finally at a point where it feels natural to bring up.

EDIT: I'm getting some immediate questions, and I'm just gonna paraphrase my reply to one of them in this A/N.

Why would Kiwi reveal important info like that to Faraday? Because she knows he can't do a single thing about it, even if he wants to, even setting aside the threat to set his dick on fire.

Keep in mind that, in the grand scheme of things, Faraday ain't shit. Kiwi's reading of him as "Militech's current bitch-boy" is accurate. If he attempts to go to them and tell them what happened, they're going to read the story as "that fucking idiot Faraday lost his entire crew and wants us to clean up his mess," and they're just going to fire him and find someone more reliable to do their jobs (and write off David's crew as The Idiot's Problem). If he attempts to go to Arasaka and double-cross Militech, they're going to note that he has no new information and no leverage, and tell him to go kick rocks.

He thinks he's some mastermind king shit of the universe, but really, like Kiwi said, he's just another fixer. They come and go by the dozens.

Chapter 18: Evisceration II

Notes:

ICYMI: this fic (and all of my future works) has a Discord!

[19:32] 🥝: so militech just contacted me

[19:32] ❤LUCY❤: ...kiwi what did you do, do we need to delta out of NC

[19:32] 🥝: ...i didn't do anything, why would you assume that. they have a gig for us

[19:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: now you know how i always feel lol

[19:33] 🥝: hahah with you it makes a little more sense.

[19:33] ❤LUCY❤: wait. they contacted you directly for a gig?

[19:33] ❤LUCY❤: weird.

[19:33] 🥝: remember that gonk faraday? maine's corpo fixer, dude with three eyes on one side of his head?

[19:33] 🥝: militech's turning on him. scrapping the whole data-hunting job and cleaning up the loose end, and we get to do the honors

[19:33] 🥝: 350k for proof of death, 150k bonus if we bring him in alive

[19:33] David: that's a lot of fucking eddies. what's the catch?

[19:33] ❤LUCY❤: yeah, something doesn't quite smell right about this, kiwi.

[19:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: not to jump on the dogpile, but... choom there's clearly something you're not telling us

 

[19:45] 🥝: alright fine, after you three left to go apartment hunting

[19:45] 🥝: i contacted faraday, let him know that we are very well aware that he was walking us into a trap, and told him to go fuck himself.

[19:45] 🥝: i'm gonna guess he wasn't very happy about me doing that, tried to go complain to daddy, and is now getting spanked for it.

[19:45] 🥝: and based on hiring us to do it, i guess whoever he pissed off has a sense of humor.

[19:45] ❤LUCY❤: what, specifically, did you say.

🥝 sent a text file.

[Description: go read chapter 17.]

[19:45] ❤LUCY❤: HAHAHAHHAHHAHAHAAH

[19:45] David: kiwi, i mean this out of love and respect: remind me to never, ever, ever piss you off.

[19:45] 🌟BECCA!🌟: kiwi this is why we get along so well

[19:45] ❤LUCY❤: god i fucking love you kiwi

[19:45] ❤LUCY❤: that wasn't a conversation, that was a fucking murder

[19:45] ❤LUCY❤: you should just send that to militech and collect the money

[19:45] 🥝: haha thanks i was honestly kind of worried you three were gonna be pissed at me.

[19:45] ❤LUCY❤: why? i mean you basically led into this with "nothing bad came of this and we get to go zero the gonk"

[19:45] David: hey, if you think he's harmless, i trust you on that, kiwi. out of all of us, you're the one who's been around for a while

[19:46] David: how you want to deal with fixers is your call, i'm just the figurehead where that shit's concerned

[19:46] David: it does kinda, uh, explain a little that he's your ex though. if you wanna talk about that, I'm here.

[19:46] 🥝: i've done all the talking to or about faraday that i particularly want to, and i'd really just rather do this gig, zero him, and forget he exists.

[19:46] David: that's fair yeah.

[19:46] 🥝: you three find anything, by the way?

[19:46] David: oh we found a fucking preem three-bedroom in the glen actually

[19:46] 🥝: the glen? no shit? the sketchy part or the clean part?

[19:46] ❤LUCY❤: H3, so kinda right on the edge?

[19:46] David: yeah i wasn't expecting it to be in our price range but, turns out, it's only like 1000 eddies per month more than my place in H4?

[19:46] David: still saves us a lot of money with all 4

[19:46] 🥝: how big is it?

[19:46] David: 2770 square feet

[19:46] 🥝: ok yeah you could fit like 6 of my apartment into that thing, we're good.

[19:46] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah it's fucking huge, i love it

[19:46] ❤LUCY❤: phrasing, bex 💀

Chapter 19: Planning

Notes:

ICYMI: this fic has a Discord!

For some reason, the thing that stuck out most to Falco, as he sat at the dimly-lit table at Afterlife, was that David had gotten a lot more comfortable with drinking.

There was a lot that stuck out to him, otherwise. For one, the fact that all three of the girls were clinging to David like the last handhold on Everest; Rebecca was in his lap, Lucy was lazily resting a head on his shoulder, and Kiwi had an arm around his neck, alternating between running her hand through his hair and scratching the back of Lucy's neck. Clearly, the four had gotten a lot more comfortable while he wasn't in close contact.

There was also the way David seemed to carry himself. There was still a little of that innocent, naive kid Falco had first met, on the first job they'd run together, but there was a confidence to him that hadn't been there before. A crude part of Falco wondered if these things might be connected, but dismissed it; of course David had started to come into his own. The kid had potential, and he'd found the right crew to help him realize that potential.

However, for some reason, the thing that Falco couldn't keep his eye off of was the way David seemed to almost casually be taking sips of the whiskey on the rocks in front of him, instead of coughing on every attempt. The rational part of him knew that one of the girls had almost certainly just taught the kid how to drink properly- exhale, sip, inhale- but the irrational part of him, the part that had a tendency to think of things in terms of superstitions and media clichés, looked at it as the boy he'd first met becoming a man, right before his eyes.

"So, a Militech job, huh?" Falco asked. "Straight from them? No fixer?" Kiwi nodded.

"Kiwi burned Faraday, and they went straight to her," David confirmed.

"How do y'all know it isn't a trap?" Falco asked. David didn't have a good answer to this, so he looked at the girls at his sides, even sneaking Becca a look in case she had something.

"Not how Militech plays the game," Kiwi said, taking the cigarette out of her mouth and blowing smoke gently away from David. "Sacrificing your own pawns is more Arasaka's thing. Whole reason Maine liked working with them; they honor their deals."

Falco stroked his chin, taking stock of the situation.

"What's our intel so far?" he asked, looking at the other four.

"He knows Militech's after him, so this isn't a surprise hit," David said. "We're trying to figure out where he's hiding, but no credible info yet. Kiwi and Lucy have been on that since we got the job."

"Little early to be calling me up, then, isn't it?" Falco asked, raising an eyebrow.

"This isn't a small gig," David said. "We don't have anything concrete yet, but we know we're gonna need transportation and getaway, and... you're the best in the biz."

"Come on, kid," Falco said. "I'm not anywhere close to the best."

"Well, best or not, you were Maine's go-to, so you're my go-to. I trust you," David finished, authoritatively. He extended a hand, past Becca, who shifted slightly out of the way. "Wanna help us zero the fuck that got him killed?" he asked.

Falco grasped the hand firmly, shaking it.

"Of course, kid. What kind of fucking gonk would I be to say no?" he asked in return, smiling. David let go, withdrawing his hand and letting Becca get comfortable again.

"Alright. Good to know we've got you on board, choom," he said, smiling and tossing back the last of his drink. "We've gotta get back on this and figure out where the fuck this asshole went. You wanna tag along?"

"I think I'll stay back here," Falco said, as the four climbed out of the booth surrounding the table and started to leave. He looked up at Kiwi, at the back of the line. "Actually, Kiwi, can I talk to you for a bit?" Kiwi looked over at the other three in response to Falco's question.

"You three able to spare me for a few minutes?" she asked. David shrugged.

"Sure, just don't stay back too long," he said, continuing on with Lucy and Rebecca, his hand entwined with the former's and his arm wrapped around the latter's back. Kiwi sat back down in the booth, checking momentarily to see if her bottle of Broseph Ale had anything left in it and silently cursing when it didn't.

"New jaw implant?" Falco asked.

"Huh?" Kiwi responded.

"You don't have the vent," Falco said.

"Oh. Yeah," Kiwi said. "Got a custom job at Vik's over in LC. That all you wanted to ask me about?"

"Of course not," Falco said. "Honestly, kinda just wanted to get your take on how the crew's doing. Lucy, Becca, David, they're good people, but they're kids compared to us, pretty much." That stung Kiwi for reasons she wasn't sure if she wanted to explicitly note to Falco, and she blushed.

"I..." she started. Falco looked at her, quirking his head to the side a bit.

"Wait a second. You two...?" Falco asked, before mentally adding together everything he'd seen and bursting out laughing, causing Kiwi to reach a new and exciting shade of embarrassed purple as he banged a fist on the table in an attempt to collect himself.

"It's not what it looks like," Kiwi said, weakly. "I promise you, I'm not preying on him or anything." Falco looked up at her, smiling.

"Choomba, I know you well enough to know that's not your style," he said. "However the absolute hell y'all managed to make this happen, I trust you that you didn't do anything wrong here. Just... Christ on a bicycle, kid's got three fucking outputs. Most people in NC are lucky if they get one."

Kiwi burst out laughing at this, too.

"He's definitely something else," she said, once she was able to finally get herself back together. "Crew's doing great. I'd better get back to Lucy's place and see if they need me to tag in. Nice catching up with you, Falco."

"You, too, Kiwi," he said, tipping his drink her way as she stood up and walked off, out into the haze of Night City. He sat there, nursing his drink for a moment, as he contemplated how so much had changed in only a few weeks, and how David had started to come into his own, instead of being the scared child he used to seem like.

As if on cue, lumbering, heavy footsteps started to come down the hallway, their bearer being a full-borg; not a particularly massive or bulky one, and one made in more or less the imitation of a human form, but certainly more technology than flesh. The footsteps stopped near Falco's table, and the borg sat down where Kiwi had, setting a Broseph Lager down and making himself comfortable; Falco noted that the borg was wearing what seemed to be an extremely old Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt.

"Are you Falco?" the borg asked, in a deep, thundering voice that made his identity abundantly clear. Falco simply sipped his drink.

"What do y'all want from me?" Falco asked. "Must have pissed someone at 'Saka off good if they're sending out Adam Smasher in plainclothes."

"I'm not here on Arasaka's behalf," Smasher said, attempting to modulate his tone to one of friendliness as best as he could, and utterly failing. "I've been speaking to your associate, David Martinez. He advised me that I should attempt to make more friends and ease my reputation a bit- or, as he colorfully put it, 'touch grass.'" The mental image of David telling Adam Smasher that nearly sent Falco to the floor, and he started to wonder if he was being pranked by somebody.

"So, lemme guess, he sent you to come talk to me?" Falco asked.

"He advised me that you were the least likely out of the group to react to my presence with abject fear, yes," Smasher said.

Falco cracked a smile. Of course David would be the one to somehow make Adam fucking Smasher, the literal boogeyman of Night City, start trying to come out of his shell a little. Something about that just sort of scanned to him, even as everything about the idea felt horribly wrong and backwards and topsy-turvy. And Falco certainly wasn't about to waste the opportunity to get drunk with a horror movie villain.

"Well, nice to make your acquaintance," he said, extending a hand that was met with mechanical whirrs and a firm grip.

Notes:

You asked for him. Now, he's here.

Chapter 20: Planning II

Notes:

ICYMI: this fic has a Discord server! Come talk about the fic and to other people who like the fic, we've got a fun little community building!

The coolant bath stung Lucy's skin a bit as she disconnected from the deep-dive and returned to the dim grunge of her apartment.

"Anything?" Becca asked her, hoping that she'd gotten some sort of hint as to where Faraday was hiding.

"No location yet," she said. "He's still online, but his encryption's strong as hell. Need to figure out a way to crack it without letting him know we're onto him."

"Need the other resident code jockey to tag in?" Kiwi asked, stubbing out her cigarette and coming back in from the balcony.

"I'd appreciate that," Lucy said to her mentor, as David put a towel and a blanket over her naked shoulders, giving her a kiss on the forehead. She looked at the cigarette butt and frowned a little.

"Need one?" Kiwi asked, looking at her protege as she stripped her clothes off and prepared to get in the coolant bath.

"Christ, yes," Lucy said.

"Pack's in my jacket," Kiwi said, and plugged in, leaving the two lovebirds and the gremlin more or less alone for the moment.

"You two stepping out on the balcony?" Becca asked, looking up at them.

"Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna smoke up my apartment," Lucy said.

"Mind if I pop out too, chooms?" she asked. "Dying for a little fresh air here."

"Sure," Lucy said, opening the balcony door, putting the cigarette in her mouth, and fumbling with the disposable lighter Kiwi had as she leaned over the railing. David caught it just as she was about to drop it several stories down, and lit the cigarette, pocketing the lighter in his own EMT jacket.

"You alright, sweetie?" David asked, as Lucy took a drag and Becca leaned against the railing, looking up at the night sky.

"Nova," Lucy said. "Just adrenaline. Gotta get used to it again."

"That bad in there, huh?" David asked.

"I mean, not really," Lucy said. "I've just kinda got issues with deep-diving. Whole personal thing."

"Wanna talk about it, babe?" David asked, following up. Lucy took another drag, then shook the ashes off the end.

"Not really," Lucy said. Becca gave her a serious look.

"Luce, you should probably tell him," she said to her friend, slash metamour, slash occasional hookup. Lucy sighed, knowing that Becca was correct, but that she wasn't going to have an easy time getting through this. She looked at David.

"I had... a pretty shitty childhood," Lucy said. "I grew up as a test subject for Arasaka. Never knew my parents or anything; I don't know if I was kidnapped or if they sold me. They had us deep-diving into the old net, trying to dig out anything that might be useful to the company, from the time I was maybe seven or eight years old."

David blinked. He'd known Lucy was hiding something dark; her personality might as well have served as a neon sign pointing at her, saying that she had been through some shit. He hadn't figured, however, that it would be anywhere near this level.

"There were... I don't know exactly how many of us, probably a few thousand," Lucy continued. "I was one of the only ones to make it out alive, and only because I escaped."

"Jesus fuck," David said, pulling Lucy into him for a tight hug, as Becca came up and rubbed her back, through the blanket and towel she was still wearing as a crude shawl, with one hand.

"That's why I want to go to the moon so bad," Lucy said, trying to fight back tears. "Furthest possible place from NC. Furthest possible place from those fuckers. Even if we don't move there, just... I wanna see what just one moment, free, away from all of their bullshit is like."

"Remember what I promised, Lucy?" David asked. "I'll take you there." Becca made puppy dog eyes at him.

"What about me, choom?" she asked, half-facetiously. David pulled her into the hug, too, and kissed her on the forehead.

"You too, cutie. And if Kiwi wants in, fuck it, she can come, too," David said. Lucy smiled, the warmth of two of her three favorite people easing the suffering of her past for a moment.

As if on cue, Kiwi slammed the balcony door open, naked as the day she was born, blue drink-dispensing nipples exposed for all of Night City to see, not that she gave even the tiniest shit in the world.

"Found the son of a bitch," she said, prompting yells of celebration from the other three and a high-five from Becca. "David, get in here, you're on heating-pad duty while Lucy's got the blanket," she added, causing David to smile and the other two to blush.

Chapter 21: Planning III

Notes:

ICYMI: this fic has a Discord! Come chat with us!

"He's paying for 6th Street protection, and they've got him at a hideout in the Badlands," Kiwi said, her arm wrapped around David's shirtless body from behind on Lucy's bed as she snuggled into the Sandevistan and used it as an impromptu heating pad. She fiddled with her holo-interface. "Sending the location to everyone... now."

David tried desperately to keep his brain in Work Mode and not get excited, and visibly failed, prompting a smirk from Rebecca and a blush from Lucy.

"Seems like there's only one point of entry," Lucy said, trying to keep everything on task. "Frontal assault or nothing." Rebecca's smirk turned into outright cracking up.

"We know how well-defended?" David asked, picking up the ball that Lucy had fumbled.

"6th Street usually packs pretty heavy chrome and pretty heavy armament," Becca said, managing to put herself together. "Probably gonna face heavy resistance, choom."

"So... we have four people on our team," David said. "I've got my Sandevistan, but if I'm gonna be perfectly honest, I don't think I've got anything else useful. Lucy, you've got the wires and you can quickhack people, so that's something. Becca, uh... what, exactly, are you working with?"

Becca looked surprised.

"Um... guns? Y'know, bang-bang, make chooms go boom?" Becca asked, rhetorically, looking at David as if he was a bit of an idiot.

"No, more specifically," David said. "You had me pretty specifically stay out of your gun closet while I was cleaning up in there a while back, so I honestly don't know what you have in there."

The surprise in Becca's face turned into absolute, abject happiness as she walked over to the bed.

"You beautiful son of a bitch, I am so glad you just said that," she said, pulling David up and away from Kiwi, and causing the latter to pout as the netrunners started to get their things together and follow.

---

Becca had done a surprisingly good job of keeping her apartment clean since David had tidied it up, and it made him smile. A little bit of Gloria was still alive in him, after all.

The four fit themselves through the doorway, slightly awkwardly, and looked around, Lucy and Kiwi somewhat marveling at the fact that Becca's room was no longer a natural disaster. Becca nudged David towards the closet.

"Go on in, check it out," she said.

Hanging on racks on the walls were all sorts of pink-and-green weapons; pistols, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, even a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

"Fucking nova," David said, the shine in his eyes visible from space. "The color scheme's not my thing, but-"

"Check in the cabinets under my personal guns," Becca interjected, and David followed. Doing so revealed even more guns, just absolutely filling the room and making it very clear why only one person could easily walk through the small space.

"Fucking nova!" David yelled, grabbing a pair of Malorian Overture revolvers. "Lucy, Kiwi? You wanna grab something?"

"You sure about those wheelguns, choom? Those kick pretty fuckin' hard," Becca said.

"I'll be alright," David said as he walked out of the closet and gave Lucy space to pick out some firepower. "I'll use the Sandy to mitigate the recoil. No problem."

"About that," Becca said. "You been to Vik's yet?"

"Haven't gotten around to it yet, no," David said, casually. "We should probably hit him up before we do this job, though, some extra chrome would be nice." Becca looked around past him, at Lucy and Kiwi, who had respectively found a Militech Saratoga submachine gun and a Constitutional Arms Unity pistol.

"Guns on the bed for right now," Becca called out to the other two girls. "We're going to Vik's before our favorite himbo goes cyberpsycho on us."

Chapter 22: Sedatives

Notes:

ICYMI: this fic has a Discord!

The first thing that stuck out about the clinic, to David, was that it was clean. Certainly cleaner than Doc's clinic ever was, even on Doc's best days.

The second thing that stuck out about the clinic, even moreso, was that the man himself seemed fully buttoned-up, professional, and was not in the process of masturbating when David and the girls came in. He stood up, walked over to David, and shook his hand, gently but firmly.

"You're David, I take it? Nice to meet you," the ripperdoc said. "Viktor Vektor. My clients tell me I'm the best in NC."

"So I've heard," David said.

"Speaking of," he said, looking over David's shoulder. "Kiwi, any issues with that jaw job I did for you?" Kiwi blushed.

"Fuckin' preem, Vik," Kiwi said. "Still current on payments?"

"Take your time, girl," Vik said. "I do it for the love of the game, not the money. Now, let's get this boy on the operating table and take a look at this Sandevistan. Just a tune-up and installation check for today, right?"

"Should be all I need," David said. "How much do I owe you?"

"See what I just said," Vik said. "On the house this time. Not every day I get a teenager coming in with a military-grade Sandevistan needing to be looked at."

David smiled as he stripped his shirt and jacket off, giving the girls an impressive view of his physique, and got on the operating table, face-down. It was no wonder that Kiwi had recommended this guy so strongly; his bedside manner was polar-opposite to Doc's in just about every regard. Doc had been, above all else, in it for the money; he'd sell his own child for a quick buck, and that came through in the quality of his service. Vik, meanwhile, was in it because he loved cyberware, and he loved how technology interfaced with the human body; that, too, came through in the quality of his service, and David could already feel that.

To his side, Vik filled a syringe from a jar of clear liquid.

"You're gonna feel a pinch, then you're gonna feel amazing, then you're gonna go to sleep for a while," Vik said. "Just trust these three girls here that I'm not gonna do anything sketchy while you're out."

David briefly marveled internally that this ripperdoc was actually putting him under, then he felt the pinch, and then the world started to wobble away as he drifted off into a drug-induced haze.

---

In the dreamscape, David was in the desert.

The sky above him was clear and blue. No smog, no pollution, none of the haze of Night City. The earth around him was dry and cracked, forming spires and mesas in all directions, as far as the eye could see, as the sun beat down on him with its heat.

He saw spectres around him. Running away, chasing whatever dreams they'd left behind. He saw one specter, red-haired, a bit taller than him.

He tried to say her name. Not her actual name, the one his girlfriends had known her by, but the name he'd always called her. The sounds couldn't leave his mouth, in the haze of the dreamscape, and yet the spectre seemed to hear them anyways. It came towards him, reaching out to him, hoping to touch him again.

"I miss you," David was able to say, bringing the spectre more into form. It brought him into a hug, and he felt its warmth, the warmth of the person whose loss had started all of this.

"Are you happy?" the spectre seemed to ask, radiating through all of David's thoughts.

David took his time answering, thinking over everything that had happened. He wasn't at the top of Arasaka Tower, no. It was, objectively, not the kind of happy life she had wanted for him. On top of that, he missed her, with all of his heart.

In spite of that, though, he knew his answer.

"Yes, Mom. I'm happy," David said. With that, the spectre smiled down at him.

"I'm glad, mijo," it said, and dissipated into smoke.

---

David woke up gasping on the operating table, causing the girls to panic slightly.

"He's fine, it's normal," Vik said, moving to his patient's side. "You okay there, buddy?" David caught his breath and coughed, giving Vik a thumbs up.

"So, what's the word?" David asked, the drugs still slurring his speech significantly.

"The word is 'holy shit,' choom," Becca stepped in. "Or, I guess that's two words."

"The girl's right," Vik said. "One, that's probably the best Sandevistan on the market currently. Only person who could possibly match you in terms of sheer speed is Adam fuckin' Smasher himself."

"Guessing that's not the only interesting thing about me?" David asked.

"Well, two, you've got a tolerance for this shit matched by... again, we're talking Adam Smasher," Vik said. "Just going by your age and your build, that thing should already be driving you psycho. Looking at you, though? Your nervous system's got room to spare and then some. You're still operating at almost full capacity."

"Knew I was built different," David muttered woozily.

"No joke," Vik said. "Only reason you were under... well, any strain at all, pretty much, is because the guy you had install that thing botched it. I took it out and did a proper install job, and it should feel a lot more natural to use; don't go too crazy on it, still, but the nosebleeds should be over."

"Thanks, choom," David said, before passing back out and snoring loudly.

Chapter 23: Chrome

Notes:

Obligatory Discord link at the top.

When David awoke again, he felt better than he'd ever felt in his life, and it wasn't just the drugs still working their way out of his system.

His breathing felt easier, less labored. His blood pumped through his body with a vigor he'd never known before. His muscles felt a bit more taut, more toned, stronger. He looked up at Vik.

"What'd ya do to me?" he asked, happy, but confused and groggy.

"Went ahead and gave you a full tune-up and some fresh chrome. Sandevistan's not an implant made to work on its own," Vik explained. "You already had decent lungs, so those, I just tuned up, but your heart was getting ready to pop, and you still had your bio liver and kidneys, so I went ahead and swapped those out for you."

"Thanks," David said.

"Not done yet," Vik said. "I also gave you a synth-muscle job. You were getting that body pretty impressive, kid, but the Sandy just exerts too much force on it for bio-muscles."

"How much do I owe you for all this?" David asked.

"Labor's on the house, parts are going at-cost, so about 50k, total," Vik said. "Lucy filled me in on what you're doing, and I approve."

"You know about Faraday?" David asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Kid, I've been around," Vik said. "Your crew's not the first one he's walked into a trap so that he could give himself a boost. It's gotten to the point where, if some edgerunner walks in saying he's on a job with Faraday, I know the poor gonk's days are numbered and I'm about to lose a client. If that's finally biting that gonk in the ass, I'm proud to be part of the solution."

"Didn't know he was that hated," David said.

"Trust me, I'd be giving you this work for free if I didn't have to pay for the parts," the ripperdoc said. "Lucy and Kiwi are in the waiting room. Did a tune-up on Lucy's eyes, cleaned out their deep-dive ports, but they didn't need or want any surgeries. The other girl... Rebecca, right?"

"Short, tattoos?" David asked, clarifying.

"Yep," Vik said.

"That's Rebecca, yeah," David said.

"She's in the other OR, and should be waking up pretty soon. She went for a similar package to you; new hands that could handle bigger guns," Vik explained. "I also did a tune-up on her synth-muscles and her organs while she was under, just to make sure she'd be able to handle them."

As if on cue, Rebecca stumbled past the door, the drugs still making her woozy. She flopped back, into view of the doorway.

"Oh, Davey-baby! You're awake!" she slurred, holding up her arms as she attempted to charge in for a hug, flopping over on her face. Her arms were bigger and buffer than they previously were, ending in what almost appeared to be large pink-and-green boxing gloves.

"Is she gonna be able to hot-swap those, or am I gonna be feeding her for the rest of her life?" David asked, looking almost defeated.

"Don't worry, they're hot-swappable," Vik said. "Trust me, that's the kind of joke I'd play on someone who didn't have an input, but I'm not making that two people's problem." David burst out laughing as he stood up. He looked down at the hospital gown he'd apparently been changed into while he was unconscious.

"Gimme a sec to get my clothes back on?" he asked the ripperdoc. "I know you've seen all of me there is to see and more, but, I dunno."

"Hey, I get it," Vik said. picking Rebecca up and hoisting her into a fireman's carry. "I'll be keeping the girls from tearing the waiting room up worrying about you."

David smiled. He liked this guy.

---

As the four left Vik's office, David felt like a million eddies, and he knew he wasn't the only one.

"Kiwi, you weren't kidding," Lucy said. "That guy's the best in NC."

Becca was greatly enjoying her new arms; they were strong enough that she could sort of crab-walk using them instead of her legs, and she was already absolutely in love with that joke. For his part, David had to stifle a giggle every time he looked back and saw her doing it. He stopped walking for a second.

"I wanna test something out real quick," he said. "Hold on."

The other three girls stopped and looked at him, and he had his opportunity. Almost like a reflex, the Sandevistan kicked on, and time slowed to an absolute still. He moved, leaving afterimages in blue and green, across the sidewalk, first giving Lucy a deep kiss directly on the lips, then moving to Kiwi and reaching up to do the same to her, and then moving to Rebecca and leaning down to plant one on her.

Before its effect wore off, he carefully moved back past them, easing into his original spot and position, and time resumed. All three of the girls blushed, hard, and smiled.

"Damn, the new doc wasn't kidding," David said. "Feels like a fifth limb now."

"Did you just..." Lucy started.

"David, did you seriously..." Becca interrupted, before being unable to finish herself.

"What the hell?" Kiwi interrupted finally, summing up all three girls' feelings. David grinned like a maniac.

"Hey, that's half the fun of having this thing," David said. "And now, I can use it for goofy shit like that and it won't pop me like a melon."

"Wait, so you did just kiss all three of us at the same time with it?" Becca asked.

"Yep," David said.

"That is the cutest fucking thing you have ever done," Lucy said, grinning and rushing over to David to tackle-hug him. "Fuck, baby, I love you so much."

The other two quickly joined in, muttering their approval similarly, and David blushed. It was really starting to sink in that Smasher was correct- he really was a very, very lucky man.

Chapter 24: Chrome II

Notes:

ICYMI: we have a Discord server!

[13:22] David: this new doc is no fuckin' joke. I feel like a whole new man

[13:22] 🥝: i mean i'd hope so given he basically hollowed you out and stuffed you full of new chrome

[13:22] 🥝: what, exactly, did he tell you about that, anyways?

[13:22] David: sandy wasn't meant to work on its own, my heart was about to pop, blah blah blah ripperdoc stuff

[13:22] ❤LUCY❤: ...

[13:22] 🥝: david you were literally about to die.

[13:22] 🥝: one use of the sandy on this job and we'd have been dropping everything and trying to rush you to the hospital.

[13:22] 🥝: seriously did vik not tell you?

[13:22] David: i mean he wasn't really focusing on it or anything

[13:22] ❤LUCY❤: bb, you REALLY need to pay more attention when you're at the doc.

[13:22] ❤LUCY❤: that's the whole reason i signed off on him doing that while you were out

[13:22] ❤LUCY❤: your first doc fucked up bad by just giving you the sandy, he could've straight up killed you by doing that

[13:22] David: no real surprise there

[13:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...david what do you mean "no real surprise"

[13:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you do realize your ripperdoc trying to kill you isn't, like, normal, right

[13:22] David: when i first brought the sandy in to doc, to get it implanted

[13:22] David: he really, really, really did not want to do it

[13:22] David: tried really hard to convince me to just sell it to him instead

[13:22] David: and when i did talk him into it, he told me that if i came back wanting it gone, it's his, free

[13:23] ❤LUCY❤: oh that fucking son of a bitch that explains so much.

[13:23] 🥝: christ i'm glad we got you to someone with his head outside his ass

[13:23] 🥝: what the fuck would doc have even done with that thing, anyways? jacked off ten times as fast?

[13:23] ❤LUCY❤: lmao

[13:23] ❤LUCY❤: but yeah. i get vik not wanting to scare you or anything, bb, but... if we hadn't done that when we'd done that

[13:23] ❤LUCY❤: we'd have probably lost you

[13:23] ❤LUCY❤: promise me you'll go in and get checked at least every couple weeks so we don't get any other nasty surprises?

[13:23] David: i promise, sweetie. ❤

[13:23] David: what kind of timeframe are we on with the Faraday thing, anyways?

[13:23] 🥝: he's not moving. think we've got a couple days, at least.

[13:23] 🥝: my suggestion is we take advantage of that. you need a little rest anyways.

[13:23] 🥝: you been taking your meds?

[13:23] David: of course. learned my lesson with that one early.

[13:23] 🌟BECCA!🌟: wait did that gonk not give you meds when you had the sandy installed?

[13:23] ❤LUCY❤: I HAD TO GO THREATEN HIM INTO GIVING DAVID MEDS

[13:23] David: see above about doc reaaaaally wanting the sandy for himself

[13:23] 🥝: i say we go flatline him and loot his office after we're done with this gig

Chapter 25: Recovery

Notes:

ICYMI: we have a Discord! Come chat with the author and your fellow readers!

David laid on his couch, an ice pack on his chest, and groaned.

Vik was a very, very good ripperdoc, who could pass as an actual doctor in a pinch, and he'd done a solid job stitching David back up; the surgery wasn't going to leave any scars or seams to an outside observer, and David was going to be fully healed and back in action before too long, especially with the extra meds the good doctor had thrown in to speed that process up. However, his chest was still sore enough where Vik had made the incision that, now that the drugs had fully worn off, he wasn't in any mood to move, and he silently thanked whatever God was watching him that Kiwi had suggested waiting on the Faraday job.

A knock on his door cut through the hum of garbage on the television, and David stood up, grunting as he reached his feet. He lumbered over to his door with all the grace of a drunken elephant, and opened it; standing outside was Lucy, holding a couple of prepack meals from one of the bodegas nearby. She looked worried.

"Hey, cutie," David said.

"Hey, babe," Lucy responded. "You feeling okay? You... don't look great."

"Feel like Smasher sat on me in my sleep," David grunted. "I'll be alright, though. Just... glad I've got the day off. Come in?"

Lucy walked past David, accepting the invitation. David reached to close the door behind her, but she interrupted him, closing it instead.

"I've got it," Lucy said, leading him back towards the couch and sitting him down. "Need me to get you anything?" David fumbled around the couch for the ice pack and put it back on his chest.

"Think I'm alright," David said, leaning back and closing his eyes.

"You eaten anything today, baby?" Lucy asked, the look of worry coming back over her. "Vik give you any painkillers?"

"No, and, yes, but I haven't taken them," David said. "Seen too many junkies around Santo. Don't wanna get into that pill-popping shit." Lucy sighed. Of course David would think like that.

"Babe, you're not gonna get addicted from taking the ones the ripperdoc gives you after you get surgery," Lucy said, taking an almost motherly tone. "If you do, we can handle it, so... you should really take those. I'll get you something to drink and get this food going."

David groaned. There was a part of him that really didn't want to be babied; he was a grown man and he could handle his own shit. In spite of that, though, he appreciated this, and having Lucy there seemed to already make some of the pain go away.

He thought about what he was doing, as he reached over for the bag of assorted medications on the coffee table and fished through it for the small bottle of Biotechnica PseudoContin pills Vik had thrown in. Synthetic opioids were nasty business, and he'd seen PseudoContin in particular send people down some dark paths if they got too far into it, but Vik hadn't given him very many pills, and he trusted Lucy's clear, unclouded judgment in his pained state. He trusted Lucy, in general.

She returned promptly with a can of RealWater from the fridge, ice cold, as he took a pill out of the bottle. He thanked her for the drink, popped the top open with some effort, and took the pill down easily as she sat down next to him and held his hand.

"You were out for most of it, but... I was really worried about you in there, babe," Lucy said.

"Vik had me covered," David said, leaning his head back and closing his eyes again.

"He's a good ripperdoc, but... David, I can't get over the fact that we almost lost you," Lucy went on. David leaned forwards a bit, looked her in the eyes, and cupped her face with both hands, trying to hide a grimace as he moved his arms to do so.

"Sweetie, you didn't lose me, and that's what counts," David said. "My batshit insane luck struck again. We're nova." He pulled her in to kiss her, wrapping his arms around her neck as they locked lips. They stayed like that for a moment, and then Lucy pulled away.

"Also, you owe Becca," Lucy said. "I mean, you really owe Becca."

"Shit, yeah, I kinda do, don't I?" David mused. The pill was starting to kick in, and the pain was starting to go away, replaced by a pleasant haze, as if the world around David was made of fluffy clouds; he sank into the couch, relaxed, and the ice pack slipped off of him.

"Need me to get that?" Lucy asked, raising an eyebrow.

"No, uh, you can put that back in the freezer," David slurred. "Fuck, I see why people get addicted to this. This shit is dangerous." Lucy giggled a bit; while she'd suggested David take the painkillers mostly for his own sake, there was a part of her that honestly thought seeing David get fucked up was adorable.

"No kidding," she said, taking the ice pack back to David's kitchen. After quickly storing it in the freezer, she returned to the couch, by David's side; David nuzzled into her.

"You feel nice," he slurred. Lucy blushed and smiled, leaning into him and wrapping an arm around him, as his head fell into her lap and he kicked his legs up over the arm of the couch.

"Do you wanna move to the bed?" Lucy asked. "You'll probably be more comfortable there, baby." David smiled.

"Yes, please," David said into Lucy's stomach. "Wanna snuggle with my cute little nerd."

"Alright," Lucy said, helping him up into a fireman's carry; with his new organs, he was noticeably a little lighter than before, and Lucy really appreciated that at this moment. She walked him to his bedroom, found her way to his bed, and laid him down on it; she tucked the blanket over him on his side and then crawled in next to him, wrapping an arm around him from behind. She ran a hand over his stomach and chest, carefully trying to avoid the sore spot from the incision, and could feel him getting goosebumps as she touched him.

"That feels nice," he said, in a state of half-consciousness.

"Are you comfortable, sweetie?" Lucy asked.

"Yes, baby," David said. His eyes shot open. "Fuck, what about the food?" he slurred.

"It's prepack, it'll stay warm until I open it," Lucy said. "Worst case scenario, if it's gone bad by the time you wake up, I'll just go get you some ramen or something, babe."

"You're gonna stay here while I'm asleep?" David asked.

"Of course, babe," Lucy said, nuzzling into his ear. "I love you more than anything else in this city. You're my moon. I'll always have your back, no matter what, okay?"

"I love you too, cutie pie," David said. He rolled over to face Lucy, wrapping an arm around her, and nuzzled into her chest. They laid together like that for a few moments, David in a drug-induced state of half-consciousness, and Lucy looked down to notice that tears were running down David's face.

"Is something wrong, love?" she asked, running a hand down his back to comfort him.

"I... I miss Mom," David said, trying not to break into full-on sobbing. "And Dad. And Dorio. I... wasn't there to help any of them when they needed it, and I almost failed you and Becca and Kiwi, too, all because I went to the wrong ripper. I'm an idiot. I don't deserve any of y-"

Lucy interrupted him by cupping his face, the same way he'd done to her on the couch, and pulling him in to kiss him, deeply. She held him in her arms as she did so, pulling him close to her and making sure he could feel as much of her warmth as possible.

"David, don't be a gonk," Lucy said, pulling away. "You deserve the fucking world." He smiled, nuzzling into her chest and wiping his face on her top as she held him close, and drifted off to a peaceful sleep.

Notes:

I don't give David and Lucy enough attention, so here's them getting some attention.

Chapter 26: Drugs

Notes:

We have a Discord server!

[19:14] 🌟BECCA!🌟: hey luce, you still at d's place?

[19:14] ❤LUCY❤: mhm

[19:14] ❤LUCY❤: you holding up ok bex?

[19:14] 🌟BECCA!🌟: all good over here choomba

[19:14] 🌟BECCA!🌟: had to dust the cat hair off of some of pilar's old shit and read some manuals so i can swap my hands back and forth

[19:14] 🌟BECCA!🌟: otherwise? feelin' great

[19:14] 🌟BECCA!🌟: how's our cute little bb doing?

[19:14] 🥝: yeah, is he holding up ok?

[19:14] ❤LUCY❤: still sore as hell, had an ice pack on when i came over

[19:14] ❤LUCY❤: which, i mean, i get it, having your chest cracked open ain't fun

[19:14] 🥝: no kidding.

[19:14] ❤LUCY❤: once i talked him into taking the painkillers vik gave him he was all good, though

[19:15] 🥝: ...what painkillers did vik give him?

[19:15] ❤LUCY❤: pseudocontin

[19:15] 🌟BECCA!🌟: HAHAHAHAHAH HOLY SHIT

[19:15] 🌟BECCA!🌟: damn he's high on the HARD shit

[19:15] 🥝: oh god.

[19:15] 🥝: how many does he have left

[19:15] ❤LUCY❤: lemme see if i can sneak off without waking him up and check the pill bottle

[19:15] 🌟BECCA!🌟: that's not gonna be hard on that shit, trust me

[19:18] ❤LUCY❤: he's got 2 left. vik didn't give him a huge script

[19:18] 🥝: okay thank fuck i was about to get very very worried

[19:18] ❤LUCY❤: shit so he was on to something not wanting to take those?

[19:18] 🥝: shrug

[19:18] 🥝: he'll probably be fine

[19:18] 🌟BECCA!🌟: choom you uh might wanna flush those.

[19:18] 🥝: becca he's not gonna get addicted off of three pills immediately after a surgery.

[19:18] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i have seen some shit with pseudocontin. that shit's a fucking demon. any number greater than "one" is bad news

[19:18] 🥝: becca i've been on pseudocontin in the exact same situation david's in

[19:19] 🥝: the doc who did my tits had me on it for a couple days after

[19:19] 🥝: it was totally fine. david is, similarly, going to be totally fine.

[19:19] 🥝: lucy, do not flush the poor guy's meds.

[19:19] ❤LUCY❤: ...that was never a danger in the first place.

[19:19] 🌟BECCA!🌟: wait kiwi you had a full tit job? how did i never know this

[19:19] 🥝: no, becca, my tits that dispense endurodrink are completely biological.

[19:19] 🥝: i was born with the superpower of being able to milk myself for fruity electrolyte-enhanced beverages.

[19:19] 🌟BECCA!🌟: I THOUGHT THAT WAS JUST YOUR NIPPLES 😭

[19:19] ❤LUCY❤: becca did you think they were just, like, pulling it from a parallel dimension!?

[19:19] 🌟BECCA!🌟: I DON'T KNOW HOW ANY OF THIS SHIT WORKS THAT WAS MY BROTHER'S THING

Chapter 27: Faraday

Notes:

NOTE: IF ITCH IS BROKEN OR OTHER THINGS ARE GOING HORRIBLY WRONG WITH THE CHAPTER, CH. 28 IS A RECAP. YOU WILL NOT MISS ANY IMPORTANT STORY BEATS IF YOU SIMPLY READ THAT INSTEAD.

IF ON PC: ENABLE COOKIES BEFORE YOU READ THIS. TWINE USES THEM TO TRACK YOUR READING POSITION, AND IT WILL BREAK IF YOU HAVE THEM DISABLED. DON'T WORRY, I DON'T HAVE ACCESS TO YOUR DATA AND I WOULDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT IF I DID.

 

This took a long, LONG time to write, and at north of twelve thousand words, this is the longest single chunk of text I have ever dropped.

I'm playing with format on this one, and the particular playing-with-format I'm doing requires me to link offsite. Bear with me on this one, please- I promise I've got something cool for you if you do it.

Use the Itch comments section for bug reports, and use this comments section for story comments, please. I'm not a great programmer, so I'm expecting this to potentially have some issues, and it's untested on mobile (though it in theory should work fine).

Also: if you need me immediately, we have a Discord, keep in mind!

TO READ CHAPTER 27, GO HERE.

 

TO READ CHAPTER 27 WITH NO AUDIO (FOR OLDER DEVICES), GO HERE.

Notes:

As of 10/31/22, back buttons have been added (rejoice!) and there's a no-music version that SHOULD work better on low-power devices.

Music credits:

John Carpenter - Night (planning scene)
John Carpenter - The Shape Hunts Allyson (Smasher vs. corpo goon)
John Carpenter - Weeping Ghost (Smasher + Becca fun times)
Keita Haga - Colliding Souls (David vs. Faraday)
Keita Haga - Ever-Present Feeling (Dorio flashback, ending)
James Harris - Emiya (David yeets Faraday through a wall)
Kensuke Ushio - Akira the Wild (Sandevistan activation)
RAT BOY - Who's Ready For Tomorrow? (hotbox)
ZTS - worldenddominator (Lucy vs. Arasaka operative)

Chapter 28: Faraday Recap (Bird Dojo #1)

Notes:

If you were able to read Chapter 27, don't worry about this chapter.

Due to the format of Chapter 27, there's not really any way I can do it "straight" on AO3. There's also no way I can really fit a recap in-universe naturally, since everyone ended 27 on the same page. This is my attempt at a compromise.

(Something something Discord server. Come talk to other fans of the fic while you wait for a proper new chapter!)

You, the reader, wake up on a beautiful fall day in the year 2022, in your several-million-dollar mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Birds are chirping, the sun is shining, and your expensive bed feels like you're laying on top of clouds. You quickly check Archive of Our Own, as soon as you open your eyes, and let out a growl of annoyance.

"Damn that Arrow S. Morgan," you curse under your breath. "They released a multimedia chapter, and I can't get the damned thing to work." (Substitute any other difficulties as needed.)

You get up, stretching your impressively-toned arms as you go through your morning routine, changing from your Gucci pajamas into ordinary designer clothes as you do. You have a breakfast, prepared by your butler, of a lobster omelet topped with caviar, and decide you're going to go for a walk; you navigate through your maze of a mansion to the front door, opening it to reveal your Rolls-Royce parked in the front, and passing by it into the street.

Out of nowhere, you hear an engine behind you, getting louder and louder; before you have time to react, you feel the force of several hundred tons of metal slamming into your back, as a semi truck sends you flying through the air.

As you fade out of consciousness, you see a logo on the side of the truck: Arrow S. Morgan's Isekai Transportation Company.

---

You wake up gasping for air, sitting at a school desk that feels a little small for you, and absolutely confused. Looking up, you see Kiwi and Becca, and quickly put together that you're in Night City now; however, they're standing in front of a large whiteboard, which only seems to raise further questions.

"Fucking Arrow," Kiwi mutters, taking the cigarette out of her mouth and exhaling a cloud of strawberry-scented smoke.

"I know, right?" Becca grunts, stretching her arms behind her back and making her hoodie flutter outwards a bit. "I put in my fuckin' request for vacation time, I don't know what that fuckin' gonk's thinking calling me in." She looks to the side and her eyes go a little wide as she notices you. "Oh, shit," she says, "you're here."

"It's cool," Kiwi says. "This one's non-canon, fourth wall's down until the next real chapter." Becca blinks, and then looks at Kiwi.

"Wait, so, what are we doing here, then?" Becca asks.

"Explaining the whole Faraday chapter to this gonk," Kiwi says, glancing over to the side and motioning at you to Becca. She looks at you, a slightly worried expression on her face. "Er, sorry, valued member of the audience."

"Oh," Becca says. "Well, uh... you wanna take this?" Kiwi sighs and picks up a marker at the bottom of the whiteboard, drawing a square near the top in black.

"So, at the start of the chapter, David was at his place, and Falco and Lucy came to pick him up and take him to Afterlife to meet with the rest of us," Kiwi said. She draws a line from the bottom of that square down to another square. "When they got there, Falco was a little late to the party, so David went off to get a beer." She draws a line diagonally to the left, leading to another square, and wrote a letter D in it. "If you would've followed him, you would've seen him talking things out with Claire for a minute and getting some life advice, and then Falco showed up. Nothing really important. Becca, you wanna take the other side?" She hands the marker over.

"Meanwhile, if you'd stayed with us," Becca says, drawing a diagonal line to another square and writing US in it, "we got some unexpected company courtesy of Adam Smasher." She draws a line back to a new square in the center, and then connects it to Kiwi's square. "Either way, we planned the gig out: David and Lucy getting the package, me and Smasher raising hell, Kiwi and Falco sitting in the car. By the way, Kiwi, you really need to fuckin' thank Arrow for the easy day's work."

"Trust me, I already did," Kiwi says.

"So anyways, Smasher had his own transportation," Becca explains, continuing the diagram out to two more squares, writing ADAM in one and US in the other. "If you followed Adam, you saw him pitch a guy like a fuckin' baseball out the back of an AV for the crime of asking what he was doing, because it turns out just because Adam's being nice to us doesn't mean he's not fuckin' scary as shit. Meanwhile, if you followed us, we just kinda chit-chatted about whether or not bringing that gonk along was a good idea or not." She connects the two squares back to the center.

"Man, for this whole perspective-fuckery idea Arrow had going on, they sure seem to connect back a lot," Kiwi says.

"Makes Arrow's life easier, and ours too, I guess," Becca says. "You wanna take over?" She hands the marker over to Kiwi.

"Sure," Kiwi says. "So, we met up, David took down a roadblock, yadda yadda, you get the picture." She draws three lines, each with a square connected to them, and writes D/L in one, S/B in another, and K/F in the third. "If you followed me and Falco, we sat there in the car, bored out of our skulls, and smoked a blunt to that one song David likes. If you followed Becca and Smasher, they blasted a bunch of gangoon gonks and cleared out most of Faraday's protection ahead of schedule." She draws lines connecting the K/F and S/B squares to a new one. "And then Falco and I caught up with Becca and Smasher, and we got Adam fuckin' Smasher baked."

"Which I'm kinda surprised didn't get us killed, honestly," Becca says. "Like, I dunno, I kinda like the guy, if only because we vibe pretty hard on guns and explosions, but he's scary as shit."

"Hey, it was your idea," Kiwi says. "You wanna do the David and Lucy path?" She hands the marker back, and the two trade places so that Becca can get closer to the appropriate square, grimacing when she realizes this puts her downwind of Kiwi's cigarette.

"So David and Lucy went in, and Lucy showed off some combat chipware she's got," Becca says. She draws a line down from David and Lucy to another square. "I should probably draw multiple squares for this, but fuck it, the diagram's stupid in this format anyways. Lucy ran into an Arasaka goon with a katana trying to... retrieve her, and told David to go finish the job and find Faraday while she handled it. She took the goon down, but she lost an arm and would've died of blood loss if Smasher hadn't shot her up with military-grade clotting agent, which is a sentence I honestly can't believe I'm fucking saying right now." Kiwi chuckles.

"God, I know, right? Who'd have thought Smasher would be saving anyone's life, let alone someone Arasaka's hunting down? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm glad, but... fuck, David must be made of magic or something," Kiwi says.

"Yeah," Becca said. "But, yeah, if you go with David, he finds Faraday after taking a couple of 6th Street goons down, they have a fight, Faraday kicks David's ass for a minute, then David spits blood in his face and puts him through a concrete wall. Last you left us, David, Lucy and I were stopping at Vik's to get Lucy a new left arm, Kiwi and Falco were making the handoff to get our money. That pretty much get you up to speed?"

You nod. Everything more or less makes sense.

"So, uh... what do I do now?" Kiwi and Becca look at each other and shrug.

"Arrow said they've got it covered," Becca says. "Just go outside."

You do as you're told, navigating through what turns out to be an abandoned building somewhere in Watson, and end up in the middle of the street. Suddenly, you hear engine noises, ramping up towards you.

Oh, God damn it, not again, you think to yourself as a semi truck rams into you; you note the same logo on it as it sends you spiraling through the air like a football, and your consciousness fades out again.

---

You wake up in your bed, just as before, on a beautiful fall morning. You sigh in relief that it was seemingly all just a dream, and check Archive of Our Own; still no new proper canon chapter from Arrow.

You opt to wait patiently, secure in the knowledge that you're going to know what's going on and that the author has you in good hands.

Notes:

If this was really dumb, I'm sorry. Proper canon chapter will happen soon.

Chapter 29: Aftermath

Notes:

As usual, we have a Discord! Come discuss chapters and talk to your fellow readers (and me)!

David stood by Lucy in Vik's sterile, pale-white operating room, holding her right hand as she sat on the table; if she'd still had her left, Becca would have taken it. Instead, she paced around the room anxiously. Lucy's stump was wrapped tightly in a cloth bandage; she winced every time she tried to move it, from the disinfectant that the good ripperdoc had applied, that still burned the flesh on the clean cut. An IV stand feeding blood into Lucy's body, to replace what she'd lost, stood on the left side of the table.

He wasn't a MD, but he was ex-Trauma Team, and there were few better options for an edgerunner in need of emergency care. Lucy was going to make it. It still didn't quite sit well with her, however, that she had Adam Smasher, of all people, to thank for it. It didn't seem to sit well with Vik, either.

"You're kidding," the ripperdoc told David. "Adam fucking Smasher? The Adam Smasher? We're talking the guy who killed Silverhand here?"

"Yep," David said. "Nice enough guy, actually."

Vik blinked, standing stock still.

"I..." he started. "Adam Smasher? Nice enough guy?"

"I know, I sound batshit insane," David said.

"Kid, you sound like you've already fucking gone cyberpsycho and I'm gonna have to call MaxTac," Vik said, absolutely befuddled. "You sure you're not seeing things? Getting all weird and twitchy?"

"I mean, I was getting a little twitchy before you tuned me up, but that's all over with," David said. "Feelin' nova ever since." Vik cocked his head slightly, trying to figure out if David was lying to him.

"He's not lying," Becca chimed in. "Smasher pulled Luce's ass out of the fire. She'd have probably bled out if he hadn't shot her up with that shit from his medkit."

"Guess I'm just making the boogeyman turn over a new leaf," David said.

"Kid, that's a dangerous way to look at it," Vik said. "Like I said to you last time, I've been around. I've heard decades worth of Smasher stories. Back when I was with Trauma, I responded to some calls that were his fault, and... trust me, they're not shit you wanna see. Smasher's dangerous. He might like you now, but the moment he doesn't, you're gonna wanna be on the opposite side of the planet from him."

Becca looked at David, praying that he'd take the advice and stop poking the cybernetic bear. She'd enjoyed working that gig with Smasher, and she'd definitely remember getting him stoned for the rest of her life, but the way Smasher had easily decimated a crowd of gangoons that would've given Becca a decent workout was a solid reminder of just what kind of force of nature they were working with, and she knew his fuse was short.

"And you said it was an Arasaka goon who went after you?" Vik asked Lucy.

"Yeah," Lucy said. "Didn't catch her name or what department, we kinda went straight to trying to kill each other."

Vik looked at David, abject fear in his eyes.

"Do not go anywhere the fuck near Adam Smasher from now on," Vik said. "If Arasaka is after anyone in your crew, Arasaka's number-one weapon knowing who and where you are is very fucking bad news. I buy that he likes you for now, and that'll at least buy you all some time; get to somewhere that he's not gonna know about."

"Good thing we're moving soon," David said. "The three of us and Kiwi are getting a place together in The Glen."

Vik thought for a second, and then seemed to have a glint in his eyes as he came up with an idea.

"Have you signed the lease yet?" Vik asked. David scratched his shoulder blade awkwardly.

"We were... kinda waiting until after this gig to do that," he said.

"Good," Vik said, almost cutting him off. "Don't put her name on it. Just cut her current one off and have her move in under the table." Lucy looked up at David meaningfully, as she flipped through Vik's catalog of prosthetic and cybernetic arms on her holo-interface.

"Yours, either," Lucy said. "They want you, too."

"Fuck, that's a good point," David said. Vik burst out laughing.

"Kid, you have some granite balls if you're wanted by Arasaka and you're trying to make friends with their walking tank, I'll give you that," Vik said, losing his train of thought for a moment. "But yeah. If neither of you are on the lease, that'll drop you from the radar for at least a little while, at least as far as him being able to just look you gonks up is concerned." David raised an eyebrow.

"Do we really need to be this paranoid?" David asked.

"Yes," Vik said, sternly. "If you need to ask that question regarding Smasher, you're not paranoid enough. Gonk's earned the title of NC's boogeyman, and change to spare. If you're on his bad side, you're already dead, and if Arasaka's after you, you're gonna end up on his bad side."

David thought for a second.

"How do I fight the fucker?" he asked. Vik tried not to burst out laughing.

"You don't," Vik said. "You run. And probably die while running, but at least that buys you five minutes, maybe."

"Really?" David asked, incredulous. "Absolutely no way I could end up on an even playing field with the gonk?" Vik lost his composure, visibly embarrassed about it, and started laughing until he could barely breathe, unsettling all three of the edgerunners.

"Kid, you're special as far as your tolerance for chrome, but... let me put it this way, the gap between you and him is the size of the gap between you and most people," Vik explained, finally managing to collect himself. "Sure, I could full-borg you and put you in a combat body that could knock his ass six ways from Sunday. If I did that, though, you'd go cyberpsycho before you even saw the guy again, even with you being... you. You're just not him. Nobody except him is him. Nobody knows how the hell he's him. Your best bet as far as fighting Smasher, is to just not be around the motherfucker at all. Am I making myself clear?"

David looked at Vik, humbled, but unsure if he fully trusted the ripperdoc's word. There clearly had to be something, some Achilles' heel that they could take advantage of if they had to; there was no way that Smasher was just outright invincible.

"Think I found what I want," Lucy said, settling on one page in the holo-catalog. "I'm kinda liking these Kang Tao arms. Good grip strength, monowire support, comes with synthskin instead of the techie look."

"You'd look hot with techie arms, too, sweetie," David said. Lucy blushed.

Chapter 30: Realization

Notes:

WE BROKE 1K KUDOS AAAAAAAAAAAAA

 

come celebrate in discord

[01:22] 🥝: you three ok at vik's? we're heading back that way if any of you need a ride

[01:22] David: totally fine cutie. lucy got new arms. waiting for her to wake up

[01:22] David: vik's fucking scared shitless about smasher knowing about us for some reason

[01:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: "for some reason" as in arasaka's after... at least D and lucy

[01:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: and, y'know, smasher works for arasaka

[01:22] 🥝: ...does smasher really "work for" anybody

[01:22] 🥝: or does he just kinda tolerate them for as long as they give him constant enough violence

[01:22] David: that's kinda what i'm thinking and why i'm not super worried about this?

[01:22] David: like part of me honestly legit thinks that

[01:22] David: idk, if arasaka tries to send smasher after us he's just gonna say no?

[01:22] David: i mean what are they gonna do, fire the guy who can turn arasaka tower into a smoking crater?

[01:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...you're not wrong choomba but do we really wanna risk it

[01:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: like is this a tiger we really need to keep riding or

[01:23] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i don't hate him or anything but we should prob keep a safe distance from the gonk, and we should probably do vik's idea with the lease

[01:23] 🥝: vik's wha?

[01:23] 🥝: fill me in chooms

[01:23] David: vik thinks that, since lucy and i are technically on the run, it should just be you and bex on the lease for the new place.

[01:23] David: meanwhile lucy and i just cancel our current ones and move in under the table. that way we're not in public records, smasher can't just look us up and come stomp our shit

[01:23] 🥝: ...smart, actually.

[01:23] 🥝: i'm good with that

[01:23] 🥝: though i'm also gonna just throw out there, we just did a job for militech, directly, no fixer, and they seem pretty happy with us

[01:23] 🥝: if arasaka's hunting for you and lucy uh

[01:23] David: OH SHIT

[01:23] David: FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

[01:23] 🌟BECCA!🌟: kiwi i really wish you could see the look on d's face right now.

[01:23] 🥝: ...i was actually gonna say we probably don't really need to worry, because we have some level of corpo protection now

[01:23] 🥝: saka's not gonna start the fifth corporate war over... us, of all people

[01:23] 🥝: they're not that dumb, they're just gonna drop it

[01:23] David: what if they are that dumb.

[01:23] 🥝: ...D are they that dumb?

[01:24] David: i mean, i might be a little biased, but i get the strong impression that they are, in fact, that dumb.

[01:24] 🥝: fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

Chapter 31: Moving

Notes:

Something something Discord link, come chat.

David grunted as he lifted the heavy box of old electronics up, and walked it down the stairs leading down from Kiwi's apartment block to Falco's Villefort Columbus; part of him regretted offering to help Kiwi move into the new place.

He'd expected a typical nerd-hovel, closer to Lucy's place, with normal furniture and normal decor and normal... well, anything, just a bit more techie stuff than usual. What he'd gotten was what he imagined walking into the inside of a massive computer to look like. Every wall of her studio apartment was covered floor to ceiling with rack-mounted computers, synthesizers, century-old video hardware, ancient video game consoles and televisions, audio equipment... if you could conceivably find a scav selling it half-broken for parts, Kiwi probably had it in her apartment, hidden somewhere in the absolute mess of technology.

In a way, it had been more frightening than Rebecca's apartment, because Kiwi had somehow managed to maintain this level of absolute, utter disorganization while remaining meticulously clean. There wasn't a flake of dirt or a speck of dust on any of it, and as he loaded the assortment into various boxes, stacking things in an attempt to make as much fit as possible, she carefully shadowed him to make sure he didn't break any of the things she'd spent hours tinkering with. Even now, she followed him, carrying another box.

"Now I get why you were so worried about the square footage," David quipped.

"Yeah, I'm not letting go of any of my babies," Kiwi said.

"You set Faraday's dick on fire like you said you were gonna, by the way?" David asked as he walked up to the back doors of the Columbus. "Didn't get a chance to ask you about that." Kiwi burst out laughing.

"Of fucking course I did," Kiwi said. "The bonus said he had to be alive, didn't say he had to still have his Studd. You give me an opportunity to do that to my shitty ex, I'm not gonna pass it up."

"Remind me not to piss you off, choomba," David said, the color draining from his face. Kiwi smiled.

"David, you can be kind of a gonk sometimes, but you're not even a quarter of the gonk Faraday was," she said, walking up to him and leaning down a bit to give him a kiss on the forehead, before putting her own box in the back of the Columbus and wrapping her arm around his back, as the two doubled back to her apartment. "I mean, come on. You're helping me move. Faraday sure as hell wasn't doing that when I moved in here." David blushed and smiled.

"It's nothing," he said. Kiwi stopped for a second.

"D, if I paid people to do this, we'd be talking a few thousand eddies to get people who won't break all my shit," she said. "Meanwhile, you're just doing it for free, because you're a sweetheart. And you're doing fucking nova, too. It's not nothing."

She resumed walking up the stairs, leading David along with her arm around his back, and reaching down to surreptitiously grab his butt as they got to her door. He jumped with a slight yelp, and she grinned like an idiot as she went into the room to pick up another box.

---

[13:51] David: almost done loading Kiwi's stuff into the van

[13:51] David: lucy, becca, you two pretty much packed and ready?

[13:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: mhm. got everything boxed and/or bagged choom, just roll up when you're ready

[13:51] ❤LUCY❤: tbh pretty much everything i own except furniture fits in a couple bags + one box

[13:51] ❤LUCY❤: so i'm ready whenever

[13:51] David: what do you all wanna do about the furniture anyways

[13:51] ❤LUCY❤: i was kinda thinking we'd just hire movers for that?

[13:51] ❤LUCY❤: prob easier than trying to fit our beds and etc into falco's van

[13:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: plus my bed is heavy as fuck???

[13:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: even with my new hands

[13:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: like god damn

[13:52] David: wait did you already try to lift it

[13:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i mean i wanted to test my new hands out!

[13:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you've seen my place i don't own a weight bench or anything

[13:52] David: ...you didn't hurt yourself or anything did you?

[13:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...and luce wonders where the "daddy" thing came from

[13:52] ❤LUCY❤: oh my god we're back on this?

[13:52] 🥝: i get it, don't worry bex

[13:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...wait are you gonna start calling him that too keys

[13:52] 🥝: becca i'm a decade older than him

[13:52] 🥝: i'm not calling someone that much younger than me "daddy"

[13:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: WAIT ONLY A FUCKIN DECADE?

[13:52] 🥝: ...

[13:52] 🥝: becca i'm 28.

[13:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: OH MY GOD

[13:52] ❤LUCY❤: WAIT BEX HOW OLD DID YOU THINK KIWI WAS

[13:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: I THOUGHT SHE WAS LIKE OLDER THAN MAINE AND DORIO HOLY FUCK

[13:52] 🥝: jesus, do i really look that bad? :(

[13:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: NO OH MY GOD NO

[13:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: like right hand to god my first thought when i met you was

[13:53] 🌟BECCA!🌟: "damn for someone with vibes that old she's really hot"

[13:53] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i thought you just had like really fucking good biosculpt work or something

[13:53] 🥝: hahahah aw. well i appreciate that at least bex.

[13:53] 🥝: ...what do you mean by my vibes being old though?

[13:53] ❤LUCY❤: i think becca is mistaking "being a mature, responsible adult" for "being old" again

[13:53] 🌟BECCA!🌟: hey! 😠

Notes:

Next is: chapter 31.5 by guest author Kaelynn_Laefon, which contains explicit content. Sensitive or public readers can feel free to skip to chapter 32 without issue.

Chapter 32: Rogue

Notes:

Welcome back from chapter 31.5 (NSFW).

 

Obligatory Discord link.

Rogue Amendiares sat at the nearly-empty bar, knocking the ice around in her rocks glass and frowning.

It wasn't really fair to say Afterlife ever closed, as such- the underworld never really truly slept, and in theory, they were open by appointment 24/7, if only as a secure place to do merc business. However, Claire needed sleep, like most people did, and when she went home at 4AM, the taps turned off and most of the patrons followed her. This was usually the point in the night at which Rogue would come down, pour herself a few Johnny Silverhands as a nightcap (or perhaps daycap), and shoo away anyone still remaining who didn't need to be there (the reactions on drunks' faces when they'd wake up staring the Queen of the Afterlife, buzzed and very annoyed, in the face were always priceless).

Tonight, however, was a little odd. There was only one person other than her left in the bar who wasn't doing business, and she wasn't entirely sure what he was here for. Calling him a person, in fact, was being relatively charitable, at least as far as Rogue saw it.

She looked over at Adam Smasher, who seemed to be sitting back in one of the booths, relaxing as he calmly sipped a Broseph Ale. He was in one of his non-combat bodies tonight, which was at least a good sign as far as potential trouble (and meant Rogue didn't have to watch him pour booze into some weird fluid port or another). However, something about seeing the... thing that had killed Johnny in such seemingly high spirits annoyed her.

But, at the same time, there was a part of Rogue that had a strange soft spot for the borg. Johnny was gone, Bartmoss was gone, Morgan Blackhand was... seemingly gone (even if Rogue didn't want to admit it), Sheitan had been off the radar for years; the end of an era and the beginning of a new one was approaching, and she'd developed a strange sort of bond with the thing simply by way of being the last two relics of the old days.

She got up, her back creaking a bit as she did; she made a mental note to get her biosculpt touched up. She walked over to the booth where Smasher was sitting, and sat down roughly on the other side.

"Why are you still here?" she asked.

"Isn't this the only bar I'm allowed in?" Smasher asked.

"Claire's gone. Bar's closed," Rogue said, motioning to the empty bar. "Unless you've got business to conduct here, fuck off back to Arasaka Tower."

"Wanted to talk to you, actually," Smasher said. Rogue sighed. She'd ordinarily repeat what she just said, but she'd been hearing things lately that caught her attention regarding Smasher, and part of her figured she was best off getting his side of the story.

"About the Martinez crew, I'm guessing? Maine's kids?" Rogue asked.

"Tangentially," he said. "I suspect I may have made a horrible mistake, and I may need your help resolving it." Rogue cracked up, trying very, very hard not to burst out into laughter. "Is something the matter?" he asked, prodding further.

"Fucking hell, you did help them with the Militech job, didn't you?" Rogue asked. Smasher sighed.

"Yes, I did," he said, sounding about as sheepish and embarrassed as he was really capable of. "And I've since found out that two out of the five- Lucyna Kushinada and Martinez himself- are wanted by my employers."

"You're worried about a Fifth Corporate War?" Rogue prodded, raising an eyebrow. "Of all people, I'd think you'd be pretty okay with that."

"Generally speaking, yes," Smasher said. "However, I..." He paused, unable to properly find the words for what he was about to say. Rogue blinked in shock for a second.

"Holy shit, you care about these kids?" Rogue asked. Smasher laughed uproariously.

"Rogue, you should know as well as anyone that I am above feelings like that," he said. "I simply think my employers would be better served finding a... less tenuous reason for war, should they choose to go that route. Senseless slaughter has lost its appeal to me over the years; if they should order me to destroy the city, I would prefer it be for something more substantial than retrieving lost children." Rogue sighed and took the last sip of her Johnny Silverhand.

"Guess you're still Smasher after all," Rogue said. "Funny, I'd been hearing some things that made me think you'd been turning over a new leaf."

"I don't change," Smasher said proudly. "I simply become a more perfect form of myself."

"I'll handle the situation with the kids and the corpos," Rogue said, standing up and walking over to the bar to wash her glass. "Go the fuck home already, I need to sleep and you're gonna scare off people who do legitimate business here."

---

David Martinez woke up feeling like he was on clouds of heaven, with warmth radiating from all sides of him as his three girlfriends and Becca's two cats sprawled over him. He grimaced slightly as he realized, upon opening his eyes, that he was staring directly into Butterbean's anus.

They'd moved into their apartment a few days ago, and in theory, Kiwi and Rebecca had their own bedrooms (Lucy and David had opted to share one, neither really owning enough private possessions to necessitate otherwise). However, between David and Lucy's bed, which had formerly been Lucy's, being the most comfortable of the available options and it being large enough to support everyone, they tended to pack into that room.

David shifted and grunted, attempting to free himself from the cuddle-pile, and failed, resigning himself to a face full of cat anus until everyone else woke up. As he laid back, his holo-interface pinged with a new message, from... Rogue Amendiares, the famous Queen of the Afterlife, the city's top fixer.

He blinked for a second, unsure if he was being pranked.

"MEET AT AFTERLIFE. 7PM. URGENT," the message said. He frowned, wondering just what kind of horrendous mess he'd gotten himself into this time, and just how angry the girls were going to be at him for it when they woke up.

Chapter 33: Coffee

Notes:

Obligatory Discord plug.

David sat at the dining room table they'd salvaged from his old apartment, sipping coffee out of a ceramic mug that said "World's Best Mom" on it.

He hadn't kept all of his mother's personal effects; there'd been a decent amount of stuff that she'd left behind that he frankly had no real use for, and moving had necessitated cleaning it all out. Clothes and odds and ends had gone into bags and boxes, and were promptly deposited at the local pawn shop in Santo in exchange for a token payout; furniture had gone out on the curb unless it was coming along to the new apartment. However, there were a few things that David had made sure to keep; the family photo album that had his baby pictures and a lot of old pictures of Gloria (he'd since added the one of her and Maine he'd found in the latter's wallet), the bare-metal urn that held her ashes, and the coffee mug he'd gotten her for her thirty-fifth birthday, when he was thirteen.

There was always a twinge of pain whenever he thought about his mother, but that pain was starting to be overwritten by the happy memories they'd been able to share. He felt a little of her warmth every time he drank from that mug, or wore her old EMT jacket, or flipped through the old photos; it made him not really care about how odd it looked that he was drinking from a mug that declared him to be the world's best mother.

"You're kidding," Kiwi said, taking a sip from her own plain stainless-steel mug. David had put a decent amount of BioTechnica CoffeeMaster "African Vanilla" creamer and a packet of sugar into his coffee; Kiwi, meanwhile, took hers black, and while David grimaced slightly at the thought of how the cheap coffee tasted without any assistance, she seemed to be somehow enjoying it. "Rogue sent you a message? As in, that Rogue?" she asked, breaking David from his navel-gazing observance.

"Either that, or we're being pranked," David said. "At this point, I'd buy either answer pretty easily. Shit, for all I know, it might be Smasher trying to pull a gag." Kiwi chuckled.

"I don't think he's got that good of a sense of humor," Kiwi said. Lucy came down the staircase that led to Becca's room and the master bedroom she shared with David, rubbing her eyes groggily and fumbling her way through the living room to the kitchen and dining area.

"Morning," she grunted, reaching up to the cabinet to fumble for her own coffee mug, a blue-and-white ceramic one. "Rogue apparently needs us at 7 for something."

"Shit, you got a message from her too?" David asked, surprised.

"Not just me, I guess?" Lucy asked, pouring herself a cup and putting a packet of sugar in it with a bit of creamer.

"Yeah, D woke up to a message from her, too," Kiwi said. "Seems like it was just you two, unless Becca has a surprise incoming for us when she wakes up." Pepper walked up, rubbing his inexplicably incredibly fat body on Kiwi's leg and purring; she reached down and petted his head a bit, causing the purrs to increase in volume. David groaned a little.

"Think I can figure out what this is probably about," David said, taking another sip of his coffee.

"I'm gonna guess something to do with us coming dangerously close to starting a corpo war," Lucy said.

"Yeah, that's where my mind was going, too," David said. "Wonder how fucked we are."

"Rogue's cool," Kiwi said. "She comes by her reputation honestly. I think you'll like her, D." David did a slight double-take.

"Wait, you know her?" David asked.

"I'm not secretly close to her or anything," Kiwi said, slightly defensively. "Just... if you hang around Afterlife for a long enough period of time, you meet her eventually, pretty much." Lucy nudged Kiwi in the side gently, as she sat down with her own coffee.

"C'mon, it's actually a funny story," Lucy said, the color returning to her face as the caffeine did its job. "Tell him how you met her." Kiwi sighed, looking unbelievably embarrassed, and David wondered what, exactly, he was about to get into here.

"So, uh... back when I was a little younger, fresh out of high school, I used to go out and party a lot," Kiwi said. David's mind twisted itself in knots, trying to imagine Kiwi around his age as a party-girl, like some sort of taller, nerdier version of Becca, and both of the girls in the room tried not to giggle; he was so cute when his brain wasn't working properly. "One night, I was at Afterlife, and I kinda overdid it and passed out on the table," she went on, opting to just move past it. "Rogue does this thing where she comes down and kicks out all the stragglers when Claire goes home, and I woke up staring her right in the face and damn near crapped myself." David burst out laughing.

"Okay, she sounds pretty cool, if I'm reading this right," David said. "She wasn't, like, pissed or anything?"

"Nah," Kiwi said, taking another sip of her coffee. "She just laughed her ass off and told me to go home and sleep on my real bed, because sleeping slumped over like that fucks up your back. Said she knew from experience. Like I said, she's cool." David sighed in relief.

"Well, shit, that's a load off my shoulders for today," David said. Lucy looked at Kiwi, and then back at David.

"Think she'll be okay with bringing backup, or does she just want the two of us?" Lucy asked. "Part of me feels like this could go pretty south, pretty fast."

"Probably better if only you two go in, but I don't think she'll be pissed if Becca and I are waiting around in the area," Kiwi said as she stood up and deposited her coffee mug in the sink. She gave Lucy a strong pat on the shoulder as she walked by her protege-turned-metamour, stopping to look her in the eyes. "We'll have your back if things go bad, alright?" Lucy blushed and smiled.

"Alright, Key," Lucy said. Kiwi wasn't the type of person to express love loudly and overtly, but Lucy had been close to her mentor for long enough to be able to see it in the little things.

Chapter 34: Meeting

Afterlife generally wasn't busy at this time of the evening, outside of the occasional crew using it as a meeting place; it was a bit too early for things to properly kick off, as David noted, holding Lucy's hand and walking up to the neon-lit bar. Claire walked up to them.

"Hey, you two," the bartender said, in a friendly tone.

"Rogue said she needed us at 7," David said. "You know where she's at?" Claire gestured towards the back of the venue, to a booth where Rogue was sitting with Saburo Arasaka, Adam Smasher, and Lucas Harford, the current CEO of Militech.

"Over there," she said. "Guess you two ended up making some corpo trouble, huh?"

"You could say that," Lucy said, wide-eyed at what was in front of her.

"Well, if you've got Rogue mediating it for you, you've got some friends in pretty high places," the bartender added. "You'll be fine, chooms. Go deal with whatever this is, so we can get the corpos outta here."

The two made their way to the booth, briefly stopping to figure out where to fit themselves in, before deciding that Lucas Harford was likely a safer choice to sit next to than Adam Smasher; he graciously shuffled a bit to the side as the two sat down. Rogue did a slight double-take as she took in their appearances.

"Christ, Smasher wasn't kidding," Rogue said. "You two really are pretty much just kids." The corpos stared at each other across the table in silent anger and disdain, worrying David a little. "You two are David and Lucyna, correct?"

"Just Lucy," the pastel-haired netrunner corrected, gently. "But yeah, that's us."

"Alright," Rogue said. "Now that everyone's here, we can get this little meeting started. So, if I have the facts correct here: Militech just hired you two and your crew to take out your old fixer, and broke the middleman rule. Meanwhile, Arasaka wants to kill one of you for messing with their netrunners, and recruit the other as a lab rat." She opted not to implicate Smasher in anything he hadn't already chosen to, as she looked at the corpos questioningly. "Do I have both of those things correct?"

"That seems like about the size of it, from what I've been told, yeah," Harford said, finally opening his mouth. Saburo nodded, as well.

"Can we all agree that this is a conflict of interest that has historically ended very badly for Night City, as a whole, and that it's coming up in this instance for a very stupid reason?" Rogue asked.

"I can firmly agree with that," Smasher said, in his powerful voice. Saburo glared at him; he was to exist without speaking up, in his capacity as a bodyguard, and show the proper respect. This was a frequent conflict between the two, albeit one Saburo Arasaka knew he would never truly win, for fairly obvious reasons.

"This does seem like a whole lot of trouble over something real damn tiny and stupid," Harford agreed. "No need to nuke the city over kids." Saburo remained silent. Rogue looked at him, and at Harford.

"What kind of arrangement would we need to come to in order to, one, keep this from getting out of control and starting a Fifth Corporate War, and two, ideally let these kids move on with their damn lives?" Rogue asked. Part of both David and Lucy bristled at being treated like children, but the more sensible part of them knew that this was probably saving their lives at the moment, and opted not to press the issue. Harford thought for a moment, scratching his chin and looking at Saburo and the couple.

"If Arasaka is willing to drop their interest in the kids, and they're willing to stop fucking around with Arasaka, I'm willing to take them entirely off the table for Militech hiring," Harford offered. "No direct jobs with the company, nothing from us for their fixers."

"How do we know you won't stab us in the back, no matter what offer we accept?" Saburo spat, finally chiming in. David raised an eyebrow.

"Isn't that more you guys' thing?" David asked, mildly confused; he'd understood Militech as being the relative good guys of the situation, and Arasaka as being the ones who'll promise you riches and then fuck you with a hammer the moment your back's turned. Rogue looked at him, amused at his boldness.

"You have no right to accuse Arasaka of treachery, you failure of a child," Saburo spat at David, looking him in the eyes. "Your mother made a mistake thinking she could raise anything other than a gutter rat." David took deep breaths. Ordinarily, he would've activated the Sandevistan and beaten Saburo senseless the moment the words "your mother" left his mouth, but he knew this was neither the time nor the place, and that Saburo Arasaka was probably not someone he wanted to hospitalize in public lest very serious consequences come down on his head, very quickly.

Rogue, for her part, raised an eyebrow at Saburo, and Harford was about to say something, a look of irritation on his face. Before he could, though, Smasher's servos emitted mechanical whirrs as his neck turned to look at his employer, staring directly at him.

"Do not speak about Martinez's mother that way," Smasher said, anger in his voice. "Insults like that are unbecoming of you." Saburo knew, instinctively, that he did not have his bodyguard's support at this moment and that the numbers at the table were against him, and opted to withdraw.

"Very well," he said, his tone changing. "We're willing to accept the offer laid out to us. Our pursuit of the children will end, and your use of the children will end." Harford sighed.

"Good," he said, as the two Arasaka representatives, Saburo and Smasher, stood up and filed out of the booth. Once they were out of earshot, Harford looked at David and Lucy. "You two mind getting up for a second, so I can get the fuck out of here and on a plane back to Washington?" They obliged him, and Rogue gestured for them to sit back down as he walked out.

"Either of you need a drink? Water, beer, NiCola?" the Queen of the Afterlife asked.

"I'm good," Lucy said. David nodded his head, agreeing.

"You two understand what this means, right? Arasaka's not gunning for you two, but Militech is off the table," Rogue explained. "And, while I'd personally understand it if you wanna keep fucking Arasaka's day up, after that comment Saburo made, you might wanna cover your tracks better if you do."

"Got it," David said. "No working for Militech, Arasaka's probably not an immediate danger, don't go loud if I fuck with Arasaka."

"Smart kid," Rogue said. "No wonder Smasher likes you so much, you're a chrome junkie who can fuckin' listen." Lucy laughed at the comment, and David smiled. "How the hell did that happen, anyways?" the Queen asked.

"Ran into him a little while back in the john here," David said. "I was just kinda like 'nova chrome, choom,' because he's got some cool shit in there, we ended up talking, I invited him to come have a beer with us."

"And then I dragged his gonk ass away before he got us both killed by Literally Adam Smasher," Lucy said, cracking up as they told the story. Rogue, for her part, was also cracking up at the mental image of this kid making small talk with Adam Smasher.

"I kinda like you two," Rogue said. "Tell you what, I'll start giving your crew some decent work from time to time. Make your lives a little easier with the whole no-corpo-jobs deal." David beamed.

"I'd really appreciate that," he said as the two stood up. "Thank you so much for working this out, ma'am." Rogue raised her eyebrows at the affected respect, and Lucy tried not to giggle a bit at how cute and dorky David was being.

"Don't need to thank me," Rogue said in response. "I'm stepping in when anyone risks starting the kind of bullshit you were about to fall into. If you wanna thank anyone, thank Smasher for bringing it to my attention, and keep in mind I'm saying that as someone who's damn well aware that the phrase 'thank Smasher' shouldn't exist in the English language. Go home and celebrate your reprieve, I'll call one of you two when I need you for something."

Lucy nodded, and they walked away from the booth and out of the bar, hand in hand and both very relieved that this hadn't gone very badly.

Chapter 35: Cooking

Notes:

Discord link, as per usual.

The four cyberpunks sat opposite each other on the NCART train in a relaxed mood, as the sun set through the windows, illuminating the skyline beautifully.

"So, no corpo jobs from here on out, then?" Kiwi asked.

"No touching Militech or Arasaka at all, basically," David confirmed. "Rogue managed to not only keep them from fighting each other, but get us entirely off the hook, and all we've gotta do is not poke the bear. Fuckin' nova."

"And we're gonna keep the rent paid by...?" Becca started, hoping David had some answer as to how they were going to get any work if they were blacklisted by two of the biggest corporations active in NC.

"Rogue said she's got work for us," Lucy said, easing Becca's fears. The train came to a stop, the gentle whirring of its maglev engines coming to a pause as it sank to the ground.

"Now disembarking: Congress/MLK," the robotic female voice over the PA system said, indicating that the four were at their stop. They stood up, David taking Lucy and Becca's hands as they made their way to the exit of the train.

"Any of you hungry?" Kiwi asked, her stomach rumbling a bit. "I could eat something." Becca looked back at her.

"Yeah, I'm fuckin' starving, chooms," Becca said. "Wanna just grab some Buck-A-Slice?"

"I kinda wanna cook something, actually," David said. "That omurice you three made me the other day kicked ass." The three of them blushed, Rebecca the hardest.

"Wait, you actually ate mine!?" Kiwi and Lucy asked, almost in unison, before looking at each other, surprised they'd each judged their own as the worst of the three and not the other's. David looked at them both, a little surprised.

"Yeah, both of you did a really good job," David said to them, smiling. "Didn't know the three of you could cook like that, and I kinda wanna pay it back."

---

David rummaged through the pantry in their spacious kitchen, trying to decide what, exactly, he wanted to cook. When he bought groceries, he wasn't generally the type to actively plan out meals, so much as the type to just sort of wander through the aisles and grab stuff on the assumption he'd figure out something to do with it later; there were all sorts of Biotechnica and All Foods-branded canned and dry goods giving him ideas, and he eventually settled on a pack of Japanese curry blocks, Arasaka-branded and "medium hot." Michiko Arasaka's smiling face adorned the box; there had also been a mild variation with Saburo frowning on the box, and a "BLACK XXX-HOT" variation with Adam Smasher, wreathed in cartoon flames, neither of which had looked especially appealing at the grocery store by comparison.

He flipped the box over a couple of times, looking for where it would have English instructions; he could read a little bit of hiragana from his time at Arasaka Academy, but not well enough that trying to follow a recipe in it seemed like a good idea to him. Eventually, he found them, noting that it would make enough for twelve servings; enough to feed the group plus seconds, and then put at least a serving for everybody in the fridge. He looked over the instructions and noted what he would need, pulling out a skillet from the kitchen cabinet, a jug of soybean oil, a large potato and an onion from the counter, and a carrot from the vegetable crisper at the bottom of the fridge. He would also need some sort of meat or SCOP, but he opted to leave the EezyBeef in the fridge for the moment; when it was cooked from cold, it would crisp up nicely, but cooking it from room temperature had a tendency to make it soggy.

He also took a bag of rice out of the pantry, and bent down to pull the household's Arasaka rice cooker out of the cabinet under the sink, setting it on the counter and plugging it in. It was starting to mildly unsettle him how many Arasaka products they owned, given the company had been trying to kill them just a few days prior; as the machine sprang to life, he measured out a cup and a half of dry rice, and a cup and a half of water filtered through the faucet attachment David had brought along in the move.

He contemplated for a moment, as he rummaged for Rebecca's bamboo cutting board (the one that was for fruit, vegetables, and hard cheese only, he'd remembered her insisting) in the cabinet, that there really wasn't all that much separating the rice cooker from Adam Smasher. The rice cooker was smaller, and (David hoped) had a lower body count by far, but both were essentially just pieces of Arasaka-made machinery, at the end of the day.

Just as he was starting to get deeply unsettled by the idea, he felt a hand squeeze his right buttock, and yelped, looking behind him to see Rebecca, smiling devilishly.

"Sorry," she said, not really meaning it. "Whatcha lookin' for, cutie?"

"You know where your cutting board's at?" David asked. "The bamboo one, not the plastic one."

"Should be in the dishwasher," she said, opening that appliance up and pulling the bamboo board out of the bottom tray by its handle. "Whatcha cookin'?" she asked, leaning her elbow on the counter next to the stove and looking over the mise en place.

"Found some curry blocks in the pantry, so I was gonna do a big batch of curry rice," David said. "Good way to use up the EezyBeef before it goes bad."

"You're not using the ones with Smasher on the box, are you?" Becca asked.

"Nah, I got the Michiko ones," David said. "You ever try the Smasher curry?"

"Got it one time back when Pilar was still around," Becca said, frowning. "We both ended up pretty much shitting fire for a week straight. Honest to God, I had to crash at Lucy's place and tape a grocery bag behind me like a fuckin' drag racing parachute for the whole walk between my place and hers, because we couldn't handle trading toilets. I swear, they only make that shit as a sick joke on people." She looked as though she was not exaggerating, and as if this was a memory she really, really wished she could erase. David, meanwhile, was picturing something absolutely horrible, and halfway between looking like he wanted to crack his skull open and pour bleach inside and looking like he was about to burst into shocked laughter.

"Jesus, glad I didn't buy that one, then," David said, attempting to take his mind off the image of Becca's small frame being wildly propelled through the Night City air by a Smasher-curry-induced flaming fecal jet, a plastic All Foods bag waving behind her and barely catching the horror. "Mind peeling the potato while I dice this onion up?" he asked, taking the santoku knife out of Becca's knife block. Becca did a slight double take at him trying to dice the onion manually, and then moved past him, rummaging around in the drawer where they kept their small kitchen gadgets and producing what seemed to be a large, purple sphere.

"Lemme change your life real quick, choomba," she said, taking the paring knife out of her knife block and making a small incision in the top of the onion, before hooking a fingernail into the cut and lifting the onion's skin off entirely in one fell swoop. She then twisted the odd purple sphere, opening it up into its two halves, and putting the peeled onion inside; she snapped the halves back together and twisted, then pressed the small black button at the top. "Pilar got me this for Christmas one year. One of the best gifts he ever got me."

She walked over to the wooden cutting board, moving past David again, and opened the purple sphere back up, dumping out a little pile of perfectly-diced onion bits onto it.

"Fuckin' nova," David said, looking at the device in awe as he reached into the same drawer for the potato peeler. "Shit, I needed that back when I was living with Mom." Becca smiled.

"Oh, is that how you learned to cook? Your mom taught you?" Becca asked, lightly teasing him. The rice cooker played a little jingle as it finished its operations and switched to keep-warm mode.

"Mom never really had time to cook," David said, grabbing the potato and stripping its skin off into the trash. "A lot of the time, she'd be either asleep or at work when I wasn't at school, so I'd kinda have to fend for myself. Usually, all we had was kibble or cheap prepack, but every now and then Mom would get a bonus... I guess when she'd sell stuff to Maine, now that I think about it, and she'd get us some groceries; problem is, she never had time to do anything more work-intensive than prepack, so any time she'd get cloned stuff or ingredients for actually cooking, I'd have to figure it out."

Becca blushed. Every time she thought she'd found an embarrassing little hidden aspect of him, it had turned out to be either really sad or really cute when she scratched at it. This was somewhat both. He didn't seem to notice, as he placed the potato down on the cutting board, took the santoku, and chopped it deftly into one-bite hunks.

"Where are Lucy and Kiwi at, anyways?" David asked, moving onto the carrot and cutting it into slices.

"Oh, they're both in deep-dive," Becca said. "Probably either doing their dailies in Elflines or shitposting on 77chat."

"It really is cute how dorky they are," David said.

"Agreed," Becca said. She paused for a second as David oiled the skillet and heated it up, debating whether or not to tell David just yet that the other girls in the netrunner chat didn't believe he existed, lest he get distracted from dinner. She opted to leave it a mystery for now, as he pulled the EezyBeef out of the fridge and dumped it into the skillet with the vegetables, stirring it around with a spatula to break up the brick of beef-flavored SCOP into tiny pieces that would crisp up properly. After about five minutes of this, he measured out the appropriate amount of filtered water into the large skillet, brought it to a boil, and turned the heat down to simmer, setting the oven timer for fifteen minutes as the box had instructed and putting a large pot cover over it. He stretched his arms out, sighing in relief as he got a moment to relax, and Becca grabbed a NiCola out of the fridge and moved over to the couch, taking the hint that David was a little occupied with cooking to do much else at the moment.

She thought about going over into Kiwi's room and messing with some of the old synthesizers she had; the orphanage where she and Pilar had grown up had given her BD piano lessons as part of her algorithmically-generated personalized educational program, and it was one of the many skills she'd learned during that time period that she found very little use for in her adult life (maybe if she'd hooked up with a rockerboy who liked things old-school, sure, but not in this lifetime).

At least I got something out of the dance lessons, she thought to herself. She turned on the TV, flipping through the program guide that their new, relatively expensive satellite box was equipped with; gone were the days of having to just guess at what was on by flipping around. There was very little on, as usual, and she settled for changing the screen input and turning on her Kang Tao PlayBox 3990 through her holo-interface, her eyes glowing to denote the action as she picked up her controller and prepared to obliterate some fourteen-year-olds in NightFight 2076.

Kiwi stepped out of her room, naked as a jaybird, toweling her bob of blonde hair off; Rebecca noted that both of their hair was starting to get a little long, and made a mental note to ask Key and Luce if they wanted to hit up one of the biosculpt salons in Japantown and get their hair and nails done.

"Oh, shit, is that NightFight?" the older netrunner asked. The television was showing the title screen of the latest iteration in Arasaka's venerable series, half propaganda and half love letter to the nearly-century-old fighting game community, answering her question. "You're not a Smasher main, are you?"

"Oh fuck no," Becca said. "I've labbed him a little, and he's strong, but grapplers aren't really my style. I actually main Johnny." Kiwi's eyes went a little wide; she could see how that made sense, Johnny Silverhand's playstyle was all glass-cannon rushdown and that absolutely tracked for Becca, but he was notoriously low-tier outside of the CPU's hands, as Arasaka wasn't about to make someone they regarded as a notorious terrorist look good (in fact, he was the game's final boss in single-player, and notoriously as overpowered under the AI's control as he was underpowered in the player's).

"You ever try out Blackhand?" Kiwi asked. "I used to main him before they added Alt in 2074."

"Not really a zoner girl," Becca responded.

"He's not really a pure zoner like Alt," Kiwi said, sitting down on the couch next to the teal-haired gremlin. "You mostly use his projectiles like his guns and grenades to break through turtle bullshit, and then use his forward dash and cancel it into one of his launchers while they're in hitstun. Lab him a little, you'll like him."

"You sound like you're pretty good at this shit," Becca said, navigating to online mode and searching for a ranked match, picking her usual Johnny Silverhand (with a customized costume that dressed him in a green-and-pink thong, shutter shades, and gigantic pink clown nose).

"Got second place at Night City Throwdown 2073," Kiwi said, not really thinking anything of it. Becca paused for a second, as the network searched for another player, and gears cranked in her mind.

"Wait. Holy fuck," she said, looking at Kiwi. "You're K48?" The look of shock in her eyes told the whole story; the best of five set that had decided the final round of NC Throwdown 2073's NightFight tournament, between K48 and Elbow, was legendary in the global fighting game community. K48 had lost the first two games to Elbow's Adam Smasher, and was seemingly unable to find an opening; out of nowhere, however, she had managed to do a frame-perfect parry of every hit from Smasher's Rocket Barrage Destroyer super, something that nobody before or since had ever been able to do in a public setting (the conventional strategy was to simply block the super). From there, she turned it around to a tie for the final game of the set, only narrowly losing the tournament to someone who was previously considered one of the greatest players of all time. Nobody in the Night City fighting game community knew K48's identity- well, except her, now- but everyone in the community knew she was a legend. Becca even wondered, for a moment, if that would qualify her for a drink at Afterlife.

Kiwi looked a little taken aback, but nodded.

"I, uh... was," Kiwi said. "Kinda stopped using that handle except when I come out of the woodwork to do FGC stuff."

Becca's expression could only be described as starstruck. As the TV's speakers let out a cartoonish ping to alert Becca that it had found a match, Becca looked at her partner, grinning like a maniac.

"Key, you've gotta let me see you in action," Becca said, handing the controller over and briefly pausing to make sure that Kiwi's hands weren't still wet with coolant.

Notes:

There's multiple ideas at work in this chapter that just had me giggling too hard not to riff on them.

Next: [NSFW] Kaelynn_Laefon - Group Chat, Chapter [35.5].

Chapter 36: Debidio

Notes:

We still have a Discord. It's fun. There's people here. Come talk.

The large wooden crate from Arasaka HomeDelivery stood out on the doorstep of the four edgerunners' apartment like a sore, aching thumb, gleaming slightly in the sunrise. Disconcertingly, it was moving and squeaking, and sounded frightened.

"B, did you order this?" Kiwi asked, looking over at Becca, who was rubbing her eyes groggily, after the knock at the door had woken her up from the couch.

"Uh-uh, choom," she said. "Wasn't expecting anything." Kiwi tried to lift the box, grunting as she hefted it up and dragged it into the apartment, closing the door behind it. David and Lucy, too, came down the stairs, rubbing their eyes and squinting at the box.

"The hell is this?" David asked, looking at it and trying to process what he was seeing.

"You didn't order anything?" Kiwi asked him.

"Nope," David said.

"Well, whatever this is, I'm pretty sure it's living," she said, grabbing a knife out of the kitchen to cut the ropes on the crate with. As she did, the crate fell open, and something walked out that could only be described as a living, three-foot-tall David bobblehead. It stared at David, and then rushed in for a hug.

"Daddy!" it yelled in a high-pitched approximation of David's voice, tackling him.

"What... what the fuck!?" David sputtered as it sent him to the ground, wrapping its tiny little arms around him. By all appearances, the... thing that was created in his image was organic, which only made David want to throw it into an incinerator even more. Becca beamed and rushed over to hug it as well, freeing David from it as it started to inexplicably purr and vibrate.

"It's so cute," she said. "I don't know why it exists, but I love it." David looked at it uneasily; there was something incredibly uncanny about interacting with a mutant action-figure version of himself.

"There's a note here," Kiwi said, crawling into the crate for a second to pull it out. She unfolded it and started reading it. "Oh, god damn it."

"What?" Becca asked. Kiwi handed it to her.

"You see for yourself," Kiwi said. "I'm going back to bed. I'm not dealing with this, this morning."

TO MARTINEZ CREW. ACQUIRED SOME DNA FROM MARTINEZ ON JOB.

HAD ARASAKA MAKE CLONES IN ATTEMPT TO MAKE FRIEND.

CLONES DID NOT COME OUT PROPERLY. LAST ONE IS YOUR PROBLEM NOW.

REMEMBER TO FEED AND BATHE- THE DEAD ONES SMELL BAD.

- AS

"...what the fuck?" Becca muttered to herself, her eyebrows raised, looking between the note and the creature that was clinging to her leg, trying to make some kind of sense of the thought process that would lead Adam Smasher to try and have David cloned into living bobbleheads.

"Me Debidio," it said.

"...Debidio, huh?" Becca asked it. It nodded.

"Can we please burn this thing?" David asked, looking at it in abject horror.

"Daddy?" Debidio asked, clinging to Becca and hiding behind her from David.

"Aw, it thinks you're its dad," Lucy said. "We should keep it."

"I strongly disagree," David said.

"This thing's lifespan can't possibly be that long," Kiwi offered to try and sway David. "Worst case scenario, it's just another pet for Becca to take care of." David sighed and rolled his eyes a little.

"Fine, but if I wake up staring into a tiny version of my own asshole, I'm throwing it in the furnace," he said. He looked over the creature; Debidio was an exact copy of him, just super-deformed, right down to wearing a tiny version of Gloria's EMT jacket (with the same Edgerunners logo spraypainted onto the back) and his exact haircut. "Actually, you know what? I think we might be able to use this little guy," he said, looking at Lucy.

"What've you got on your mind?" Lucy asked.

"Been a while since we've picksocketed anyone, and I'm thinking this guy might be a solid help," David said. "No need to wait for distractions when we've got this little guy." Lucy grinned and scooped up Debidio in her right arm like a toddler.

"Well, morning rush on the NCART isn't gonna last forever," Lucy said, taking the larger David's hand with her free one and pulling him along. "Let's see what the little bastard's got."

Chapter 37: Debidio & Picksocketing

Notes:

Discord link, as usual.

David's hunch had proven correct: Debidio was, most certainly, a distraction. He and Lucy had all eyes on their little group, staring at them as if they'd grown six extra heads apiece, as the NCART maglev whirred its passengers to work in the morning rush.

"Aw, is that your kid?" one unobservant passenger, seemingly a corpo, asked the couple. She was a woman in a grey power-suit with shoulder pads that could be mistaken for a football player's, with cosmetic chrome optics that looked almost like bolted-in fashion sunglasses and jewelry all over; she looked like she worked for one of the big corporations, she looked rich, and that meant that she looked like a solid mark.

"Me Debidio! This Daddy and Lucy!" the David-gremlin chimed in, unprompted.

"He's, uh... he's special," David said, trying to keep the con on the rails. The passenger bent down a little.

"Are you going to daycare today, little guy?" the passenger asked. David nodded to Lucy, as if to say that now was her chance if she wanted to do something; most of the eyes seemed to have narrowed their focus specifically to Debidio, the passenger having helped them sell the illusion that Debidio was their kid, and David prayed to whatever God hated him enough to bring this thing into his life that the little guy was gonna be able to sell it, too.

"Uh-uh! Me going to Arasaka Acamedy!" it said, in its high-pitched David voice. The passenger laughed.

...wait, what? David thought to himself, before deciding that if it was working, he wasn't going to question it. Lucy nodded to give him the signal, and the Sandevistan kicked in right on cue; she ejected the passenger's digital wallet, and David slipstreamed around the passenger to catch it in mid-air, returning to his previous pose before anyone could register anything more than a faint afterimage. He caught his breath as time resumed, the money safely in his pocket. Lucy smiled at David, and down at the little creature.

"Well, I hope you study hard, little guy," the passenger said. "You don't wanna end up a cyberpunk like your parents." David fumed silently, but opted not to say anything, lest he give away the con. It was true, they were a little obvious, what with David's jacket and gold chains and Lucy's whole streetwear getup (he'd been meaning to get her exact size from Kiwi or Becca so he could get her some more clothes). Having a kid with them, or... whatever the hell Debidio was supposed to be (David still wasn't entirely clear), was certainly taking some suspicion off of them, however; in a way, it almost worked a bit like dazzle camo, as they drew so much attention that nobody would suspect they were up to anything.

It was a plan that could only work because they had the Sandy, and because Lucy was good enough at this to hide her tracks. The goon wouldn't notice until she tried to clock in, or tried to buy a coffee on the way into the office, or tried to pay to use the restroom in whatever Corpo Plaza shithole tower she worked in. Nobody else, as a result, would notice at all.

A corpo like that was good for about 40-50K eddies, typically, but they wouldn't know for sure until they could get it back to the apartment and decrypt it. Maybe they'd caught her on a bad day, rent had just come due, she'd just splurged on a new car or something like that, and it'd be next to nothing. Or maybe they'd get lucky and the shithead would have some savings, bring it closer to six digits. Regardless, this was a good take right off the bat; almost good enough to call it a day, under ordinary circumstances, but the two decided to push their luck, and the creature was along for the ride.

Another corpo, this one an older man with a more subtle appearance, walked by, looking to the side at Debidio. He stopped in his tracks for a moment, bending down for a second.

"Well, aren't you a cute little fellow?" the man said. "What's your name?" David looked at Lucy; he wasn't sure about this one, as he didn't look quite as overtly rich, but she nodded at him, as if to say that this was a perfect mark.

"Me Debidio!" the creature introduced itself, yet again. It looked at David and Lucy. "This Daddy and Lucy!"

"He's... special-needs," David said. "You really shouldn't bother him."

"No, it's okay," Lucy said. The older man fished into his jacket pocket and pulled out a lollipop, handing it to Debidio; the gremlin-creature beamed with happiness, letting out a high-pitched chirp. David had to admit to himself that the display was cute, even as he was still getting over his abject hatred of this thing, the experience of looking at it, and everything it represented.

"What do you say to the nice old man, Debidio?" David asked the gremlin, scratching it on the head (and attempting to hide his look of horror as he realized the creature's "hair" was just waxy flesh).

"Thank!" it chirped, and Lucy nodded at David, giving him his signal to hit the Sandevistan again and grab the man's wallet chip. In an instant, the man was robbed of his money, and he didn't even realize as he grinned at Debidio.

As frightening, conceptually, as Debidio was, David had to admit the little fucker was turning out to be useful.

---

"Me want ice cream," Debidio groaned. It was almost noon, and the morning rush was definitely over; all told, they'd scored about twenty or thirty chips, most of them well-off corpos. By the time they were done decrypting them at home, they'd be in pretty good financial shape, all thanks to the strange little thing that had shown up in a wooden crate from Arasaka HomeDelivery. Lucy smiled at the tired little guy.

"You deserve some ice cream, little buddy," she said. "Honestly, I wouldn't mind some, either. Isn't there a SlusheePlace in our building on the ground floor?" She looked at David.

"Yeah, I think there is," David said, giving Debidio a scritch on the head that the gremlin leaned into.

"Now disembarking: Congress/MLK," the PA system's robotic voice chimed in, indicating that they'd looped back around to home. The two humans stood up, Debidio quickly following as its little foot-nubs pitter-pattered behind them, its hands in both of theirs. Lucy slowed down a bit as they exited to the NCART stop, and looked down at it.

"So, uh... Debidio," she said. It looked up at her, smiling sweetly. "Do you remember anything from... before you got to us?" The question was partly an attempt to press for more context on what the hell Debidio was, exactly, but on another level, Lucy wanted to make sure Adam Smasher hadn't horrifically traumatized the little guy beforehand; something about the idea of entrusting Smasher with any living creature, let alone a cute living creature, seemed like it was a recipe for very, very nasty trouble. Debidio stopped dead in its tracks, gears cranking in its head as it tried to conceptualize memories and form abstract thoughts, veins seeming to pop on its forehead as it strained; to David, it almost looked a bit constipated, and he was worried he was about to see whatever this abomination's waste products looked like.

It finished its thought process, and grinned at Lucy, chirping a little.

"Old Daddy kept Debidio in the closet at the big tower! He was bald, and he didn't have any eyes," it said. David cracked up, and Lucy shot him a scolding look, unsure if Debidio was going somewhere cute with this. "At first, there were lots and lots of Debidio in the closet, but then Old Daddy forget to feed Debidio." Lucy was starting to put some things together on why Debidio had ended up in their care.

"Did your... brothers all starve?" Lucy asked. Debidio smiled, unnerving both of them.

"Nope! Me got hungry and ate the other Debidios. Me taste good," it said, rubbing its stomach. "There was some Debidios that didn't belong to Old Daddy, but the suit people threw them in the big glowy door in the very bottom of the big tower when I wasn't hungry anymore." David was starting to feel very, very vindicated on wanting to throw this thing in a furnace. Its attention wandered back to its initial state, and it smiled at him. "Ice cream now! Me was a good boy!" it chirped, jumping up and down in excitement as they walked towards the megabuilding; Lucy made a mental note to follow what Smasher said and keep the damned thing fed at all costs, lest they wake up to it potentially chewing on one of them.

Chapter 38: Young David

Notes:

This was inspired by a conversation over in the Discord server. Come join and chat!

AUGUST 2072

David Martinez stood by the double doors and yawned. It was five-thirty in the morning, and while he was used to being up early for school, being up this early was a little much. Gloria had wanted to make sure he was there on time, though, and didn't fully trust her fourteen-year-old son to navigate the NCART on his own yet; Arasaka Academy didn't have buses like the public schools in Santo Domingo, so that left carpooling, and pushing it any later after she came home from the graveyard shift would've run the risk of her falling asleep on the couch.

As a result of all this, he was going to have to wait next to the locked double doors in the darkness of the polluted night sky for at least an hour and a half. He flipped through 54's on-demand offerings on his holo-interface to try and find something to watch, sighing when he realized he was caught up on all of the assorted anime series he was following, and resigning himself to boredom.

He tapped his foot impatiently, waiting for the sun to rise and at least give him something interesting to look at other than eye-searing neon, and started to hear large, metallic thuds on the concrete, almost in rhythm with him. He looked up and saw fear itself.

He'd heard about cyberpsychos. Every now and then, his mother would have 54 on, and the morning news would be going over the results of some horrific rampage that MaxTac had managed to put down, usually at the cost of hundreds of NCPD officers and innocent civilians. He'd had nightmares about it, sometimes; the thought that, at any moment, he, or his mother, could be caught in a massacre was a lot of existential horror for a fourteen-year-old to navigate. He'd never imagined, however, that he'd actually be in the crosshairs of one.

And yet, here he was, and the adrenaline rush was like he'd never felt before. The thing looking down at David, nearly three times his small size, was more of an artillery piece than a human being; it was clearly a full-borg, and clearly a combat model, with the only part of it still recognizable as human being the bald top of its head. Its cybereyes glowed red, the array of LED dots making them look almost insect-like. If this was, in fact, a cyberpsycho, David knew he was living his final moments.

"Are you supposed to be here?" the borg asked, in a thundering voice, shaking David out of his fear as he realized the borg was not, in fact, a cyberpsycho.

"Yeah, I'm... it's the first day of school, right? I'm new here," David said, stammering. A pin-light turned on in one of the borg's eyes, shining over him and noting his Arasaka Academy uniform, and the borg's body language relaxed.

"My apologies," it said. It started to walk off, passing by David.

"Quiet this morning?" David asked, in an attempt to make small talk. The borg stopped dead and servos whirred, as it turned its head, staring at David in what seemed to be a mix of surprise and confusion.

"Oh. You're still here," it said. "Yeah. Pay attention in class, I don't need idiots giving me orders." It kept walking.

Weirdo, David thought to himself, breathing a sigh of relief that the thing was on Arasaka's side and not a cyberpsycho out to kill him.

Notes:

A short one, I know, but this was too funny of an idea to not do, and we need a break from the creature.

Chapter 39: Simpsons

Notes:

Discord link, as usual.

EDIT 12/1/22 3:24AM CST: HOLY FUCK IMAISHI HAS ADDRESSED GATORADE NIPPLES. RAFAL JAKI TWEETED IT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. THE ONE PIECE IS REAL.

The heat from the kitchen's CHOOH2 stove singed David's eyebrows as the creature sitting in his chef's hat yanked on various sections of his fauxhawk, maneuvering him around like a puppet.

He was at the thing's mercy entirely, in the French kitchen he found himself in, and yet all it seemed to want him to do was cook. It yanked one strand of hair, making him flip the carrots, onions and garlic he was sauteeing in bacon fat with a spatula; with another strand of hair, it swung his arm to catch the vegetables in the Dutch oven. Fried bacon lardons and browned slices of trimmed brisket went into the pot as whatever was controlling him pulled and tugged, followed by salt, pepper, and a bit of flour; it manipulated him through the process of opening a bottle of Merlot and pouring in three cups, with two cups of beef stock to barely cover the meat, and made him toss in various herbs that David couldn't identify in his haze.

The thing on top of his head slithered down from under his chef's hat, poking its head up to his ear.

"We're gonna make some fuckable meat today, boy," it said, in a deep, menacing voice that rang all too familiar to David.

---

David jolted awake, gasping and sweating, in his and Lucy's bed as his alarm went off. The other two had decided to retire to their rooms the previous night, instead of crowding into the nicest bed, so David and Lucy had it all to themselves; the latter shifted as she, too, woke up, her arm having found its way around him from behind in their sleep.

"You okay, sweetie?" Lucy asked, groggily.

"Had the weirdest fucking nightmare," David said. "I was a French chef in some fancy restaurant, and there was a little Adam Smasher on my head forcing me to make beef bourgignon, like, pulling on my hair to puppet me around and shit." Lucy was staring blankly at him, trying not to burst out laughing.

"You're... not kidding," she said, barely keeping her composure. "Sweetie, I love you, but I have no idea what the hell is going on in your head sometimes."

"I don't even know how to make beef bourgignon," he said. "What the fuck even is that? It seemed like some kind of beef stew or something?" He nuzzled back into her embrace.

"I dunno," Lucy said honestly, having never heard of the dish in her life. "You know if the others fed the cats and Debidio yet?" David sighed. He was fine with the cats, and he had to admit the creature was lucrative (their last picksocketing expedition had netted them somewhere in the area of eight hundred thousand eddies, all told), but he still just felt an immediate, visceral dislike every time he looked at the thing.

Between his conduct on the job, and this, David was starting to be a little annoyed with Adam Smasher.

"No idea," he said, getting up from the bed and putting pants on to hide his shame from the world; ordinarily, he wouldn't have cared and would've happily paraded through the house with his cock hanging out, but Debidio liked imitating him, he had no idea what that thing's genitalia were going to look like (or if it even had any), and he frankly really did not want to know. He trudged downstairs, steadying himself with the railing as the haze of sleep slowly left him, and noted that if either of the other two were awake, they were still in their rooms; meanwhile, Debidio was cuddled up with Pepper on the couch, and Butterbean was standing on the kitchen counter, meowing at the cans of Save-A-Buck cat food.

The TV was quietly playing one of the cartoon channels, showing a late-season episode of The Simpsons where Homer was tasked with standing in for Adam Smasher; David thought the show had gone far downhill around season 73 or so, but even a season-85 episode worked for keeping the creature amused, and David chuckled as he caught Homer-as-Smasher taking a beating from Militech goons armed with baseball bats, letting out a "d'oh!" with every strike, on his way to the kitchen.

Butterbean purred when he saw David and flopped over onto his side, melting the man's heart just like always, and Pepper came running too when he opened one of the cat food cans, letting out his own meows that sounded a bit like a deflating balloon. He took a plastic fork and portioned it into the cat food bowls Becca had ordered from NightCorp, one engraved with "BB" and the other engraved with "🌶," and the two cats began lapping at their food hungrily, making adorable slurping and honking noises.

David looked up at Debidio, who was stirring on the couch, and debated whether to open another can of cat food for it, before deciding that Debidio was not a cat and that it should probably eat some human food. This did not, however, mean that David had to put effort into the human food. He retrieved a bowl and some chocolate-flavored extra-sugar breakfast kibble, poured a decent helping in, and added some soya milk so that it would make its own gravy, then added a spoon, and walked over to the couch, where the creature was sitting up giggling at the Simpsons episode.

"Here you go, little guy," David said, handing it the bowl, which it took with its little hands. "Breakfast for ya. Don't make a mess." It smiled at him and started happily digging in, and David breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn't a picky eater. Becca's door opened upstairs, and she came stumbling down the stairs in her underwear, rubbing her eyes. Her hair was down and she was clearly a little hung-over; David had to admit she looked adorable like this.

"Morning, choom," she grunted.

"Morning, cutie," David said, hugging her and giving her a kiss on the forehead, which made her blush. "You sleep well?"

"Like a rock," she said. "You and Luce?"

"I had a nightmare that I was a French chef being piloted around by my hair by a little tiny Smasher under my hat, so not really, no," he said. "Lucy's still asleep, I think." Becca looked over at the TV.

"Oh hey, Simpsons is still going," she said. "Dunno why."

"Yeah, it kinda hasn't really been that funny since, like, season 60," David said. Becca raised an eyebrow at him, still in his embrace.

"Damn, you only like the old-school shit, huh?" Becca asked, playfully. "I kept going up until they did that episode with Us Cracks a few years ago. Just absolute fuckin' trash." Kiwi's door opened, and she walked out, fixing her hair with her hand.

"Morning, lovebirds," Kiwi said, less groggy than the others. "Season 33."

"Huh?" David asked.

"Season 33's when Simpsons got shitty, when Oakley and Weinstein got drafted into the Fourth Corporate War and Al Jean took over. He just didn't get it," Kiwi explained as she moved to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee.

"God, even when you're talking about normie shit, you're a nerd," Becca said, giggling.

"You know you love it," Kiwi said. "So, uh, D, what's this about you having a nightmare about Smasher making you cook?"

"Oh, god, did Lucy tell you?" David asked. Becca did a double-take, having just sort of blown past this when David first brought it up.

"Wait, like in that movie Raccacoonie?" Becca asked.

"Yes, exactly like in fucking Raccacoonie!" David said. "There was a little baby Smasher on my head and it was like, pulling my hair, forcing me to follow some recipe from like a hundred years ago for some fancy French beef stew I forgot the name of."

"Beef bourgignon," Kiwi said. "Yeah, Lucy told me."

"Man, what the fuck is going on in your head sometimes!?" Becca asked, suddenly horrified by the image of a tiny Smasher piloting David by the hair.

Notes:

...if a rat piloting people by the hair is Ratatouille, and a raccoon doing it is Raccacoonie, is a miniature Smasher doing it "Smashasmoonie?"

Chapter 40: Debidio & Eggs

Notes:

Discord link, come chat.

[15:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: uh hey D?

[15:31] David: sup

[15:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: how long are you and lucy gonna be out of the apt for.

[15:31] David: ...what did you do

[15:31] ❤LUCY❤: how wrecked is the apartment b

[15:31] 🥝: uh pretty nasty but it wasn't her

[15:31] 🥝: that thing smasher gave us laid eggs

[15:31] David: ...i'm sorry what

[15:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah i was watching TV with it

[15:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: got up to go drop a deuce

[15:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: when i came back it was projectile vomiting green shit all over a bunch of eggs in the living room

[15:31] David: ...have the eggs hatched yet

[15:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: lemme check

[15:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: no, and it's still puking

[15:35] David: ughhhhhhhh

David started a private message conversation with Adam Smasher.

[15:35] David: yo

[15:35] Adam Smasher: WHAT.

[15:35] David: ...what do you mean "WHAT."

[15:35] Adam Smasher: IN THE MIDDLE OF A SECURITY MEETING. IS THIS IMPORTANT?

[15:35] David: remember when you shipped me a fucked up mutant baby clone of myself?

[15:35] David: apparently, it's laying eggs and spewing what one of my girlfriends described to me as "green shit" all over my living room.

[15:35] David: i'm not even mad. just... what the fuck do i do here?

[15:35] Adam Smasher: ...IT LAYS EGGS?

[15:35] David: great this is completely new to you too. fantastic

[15:35] David: next time you decide to ship me a genetically engineered abomination, please ask for the instruction manual first

David closed the private message conversation.

[15:35] David: well smasher doesn't know jack shit. big shock there

[15:35] ❤LUCY❤: is one of you at least holding it over the toilet or the bathtub or something

[15:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: kiwi's on that

[15:35] 🥝: yep. putting those nipples to good use for once

[15:35] ❤LUCY❤: ok cool, good

[15:35] David: ...wait what, nipples?

[15:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: HAHAHAHA YOU DIDN'T TELL D DID YOU

[15:35] David: oh no

[15:35] 🥝: c'mon did you think the drink dispenser was the only weird thing i put in my boobs?

[15:35] 🥝: they also shoot spiderwebs

[15:35] David: ...you know, that actually tracks?

[15:35] David: like i probably should have figured from the spiderweb tattoos

[15:35] 🥝: yeah i uh. kinda forgot i had that one lol

[15:35] ❤LUCY❤: lol i never figured that would actually be like USEFUL for something

[15:35] 🥝: yeah it was trying to fight me off until i tied it up. it REALLY wants to be puking on those eggs specifically

[15:35] David: how many eggs did that fucking thing lay!?

[15:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: uh looks like a few hundred choom

[15:35] David: ... please burn them before they hatch, for the love of god, one of these things is too goddamn many

[15:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: sure you don't wanna sell em?

[15:35] ❤LUCY❤: becca we JUST got arasaka off our backs, do you really wanna piss them off all over again and go back to square one

Notes:

Let it be known that I work with what I'm given.

Also, just as a blanket response to all the "tired of Debidio" comments: I agree. I'm tired of writing it. Its speech patterns are incredibly annoying to write and don't read well, I'm basically out of jokes for it that don't involve killing it or otherwise removing it from the story, and it actively takes all the air out of the room for more interesting plots, especially the more I use it. The horse has taken its last breaths, and I'm probably best served putting down the baseball bat.

The unfortunate thing is, though, I kind of escalated the weirdness past the point where I can just set it off to the side without any resolution or explanation and forget I did that, so... one more chapter involving him after this and then y'all are free for the remainder of the fic.

Chapter 41: Debidio & Us Cracks

Notes:

Discord link.

[17:21] 🌟BECCA!🌟: hey d, we're out of CleanWipes and mop pads, can you and luce pick some up

[17:21] David: yeah sure, of course

[17:21] David: almost done throwing these eggs into the incinerator

[17:22] ❤LUCY❤: fuckers are HEAVY.

[17:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: maybe you should've asked the person who

[17:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: y'know, has a set of gorilla arms

[17:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: as in me

[17:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you should have asked me to help with that

[17:22] ❤LUCY❤: bex i know for a fact if david brought you along

[17:22] ❤LUCY❤: you would've talked him into trying to sell these

[17:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: debidio's cute tho 👿

[17:22] David: hard disagree

[17:22] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you know some gonks in NC would drop serious eddies on that

[17:22] ❤LUCY❤: i hear you, but like i said a couple hours ago.

[17:22] ❤LUCY❤: we JUST got done with arasaka trying to fuck our day up. we got really, really fucking lucky rogue bailed us out on that.

[17:22] David: and smasher, apparently. can't forget that.

[17:22] David: much as i'm thinking i'd like to.

[17:22] David: speaking of forgetting that and moving on to literally any other topic how's the apt looking?

[17:22] 🥝: 100% less gremlin puke

[17:23] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah what kiwi said. couch has some mystery stains on it

[17:23] 🌟BECCA!🌟: not sure if that was actually debidio though

[17:23] David: kinda on the front of the cushions, near the floor?

[17:23] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...yeah?

[17:23] David: oh yeah no that wasn't it, that stain's been there since i was a little kid

[17:23] 🥝: oh thank fucking god, becca was digging through my shit to see if i had a steam-cleaner lol

[17:23] David: ...wait do you?

[17:23] 🥝: ...i think i do but fuck if i have any idea where.

[17:23] ❤LUCY❤: last egg just went in the incinerator. on our way back

[17:23] 🥝: take your time, i am not in a hurry to see that thing again

---

David looked at Lucy, panting and sweating, as Debidio clung to his pants leg, sobbing and clearly unhappy that its eggs were burning to ashes in the garbage incinerator.

"Well, that sounds like permission to go get a drink," he said, noting Kiwi's message.

"Me want eggs back!" Debidio shrieked at him. He looked down at his mutant pseudo-clone.

"One of you is too many," David said to it. Lucy frowned; she wasn't really especially fond of the thing herself, but David was being a little mean to it. She patted it on its flesh-hair and took its hand.

"Let's get you a drink, little guy," she said, following along with David's idea. She looked up at him. "Afterlife?"

"Yeah, why not?" David asked. "Maybe we can make it Claire or Rogue's problem."

---

When the two humans and the genetic abomination walked up to the front door of Afterlife, after an NCART ride that felt much longer than it actually was due to Debidio's shrieking and sobbing, Emmerick immediately got between them and the door, blocking their entry.

"What the hell, man?" David asked, in no mood to deal with this.

"Can't bring a toddler in here, choom," Emmerick said. "The little girl was pushing it, but this is too much." David looked at Emmerick, cocking his head slightly in an attempt to figure out what in the fuck the bouncer was talking about.

"Huh?" David grunted, after a pause.

"You don't remember? That little girl with the green hair I keep letting you sneak in here?" Emmerick asked. David slapped his forehead, and Lucy covered her mouth to not start cackling with glee; the bouncer looked at her quizzically. "What's so funny?"

"Rebecca's older than I am, choomba," David said, sounding embarrassed that this was even a conversation he had to have. "And... she's not even that short? She's like five-one. Plus, you know, all the Mox ink." Emmerick turned red, the sudden realization of his mistake clearly visible on his face.

"...so, uh, what the fuck is that thing, then?" Emmerick asked, looking at Debidio. "Not your kid, I'm... hoping?" David sighed.

"Long story short, Smasher's a fucking gonk and he probably shouldn't be allowed around scientists," David said, not particularly wanting to fully explain Debidio's existence (and being more than a little baffled, himself). Emmerick blinked.

"That... so, that thing's not human, then?" he asked. David and Lucy looked at each other and shrugged.

"We're as lost as you are," Lucy said. "Smasher pretty much just packed it in a box and shipped it to us, with a note saying it's our problem now." Emmerick burst out laughing.

"Fucking hell, that gonk can actually crack a joke?" Emmerick asked.

"I don't think he meant it as a joke," Lucy said, thinking about the tidal wave of neon-green puke that had met them when they'd arrived back at the apartment. Emmerick stopped for a second, realizing he'd been standing in the way while making conversation, and stepped aside, waving them along.

As they walked up to the bar, passing a couple of groups of solos in booths conducting business, Claire noticed them and waved lazily.

"Hey, you two," she said, looking like she desperately needed sleep.

"Hey, Claire," David said.

"You look like hell," Lucy said, putting Debidio up on one of the bar stools next to them. "You okay?"

"Rogue's been out on business for a couple days, so I had to take a couple appointments for her between shifts," Claire said. "Had to pull an all-nighter for that." David raised an eyebrow.

"She's paying you extra for that, right?" David asked.

"Of course," Claire said, surprised he'd even ask that. "C'mon, this is Rogue we're talking about. I would've quit years ago if she made me do this shit and didn't pay me."

"That's fair, I guess," David said. "Still, sucks, though. I'm sorry."

"So, uh, what can I get..." Claire started, looking up from the highball glasses she was scrubbing out and finally noticing Debidio. "What the fuck is that thing!?"

"Blame Smasher," David said. Claire rolled her eyes.

"Naturally," she said. "So, yeah, drink?"

"I'll just take a Broseph Lager," David said, before looking at Lucy. "You want anything, babe?" She thought for a second.

"Vodka NiCola," she said. "And get the little guy one, too." David looked at her, raising an eyebrow again.

"We really gonna try getting this thing drunk?" he asked. Lucy shrugged.

"I mean, could it possibly get any worse than it laying eggs and puking green shit everywhere?" she asked, as Claire reached down to produce and open a beer bottle for David, then quickly poured two NiColas, and put a shot of vodka from the well in each.

David took a long gulp from his, and it suddenly occurred to him that he was starting to get used to the taste of beer. Carbonated stuff in general, really. He'd always had a weird thing with it; trying to drink NiCola always made his mouth feel like it was burning, for some reason, and the first time he'd had a beer, it had been much the same. With every time he went out to Afterlife or one of the other bars and ordered a Broseph, though, it seemed to get milder and milder, almost as if he was desensitizing himself to it; now that it didn't hurt him to drink, he was starting to enjoy it. Part of him wanted to sneak a sip of Lucy's drink, just to see if it would be any better than NiCola was when he was little, but part of him also knew that even without the burning, it pretty much tasted like cough syrup.

As he put his bottle down, he realized that there was somebody standing behind him.

"Can I help you?" he asked, turning around, only to notice three young-looking women, with red, purple, and blue color schemes respectively, and a burly solo in a corpo suit standing next to them. "Oh, fuck me, you're those girls that do that fucking Ponpon Shit song, aren't you?" he added, a dejected look appearing on his face.

"I'll handle this," the girls' bodyguard said to them, and they walked off to a booth. "Yeah, I'm with Us Cracks. They want the little creature you've got. What's your price?"

David blinked, looked at Debidio, then blinked again.

"What?" he asked.

"Yeah, that thing. I don't get it either, but they think it's cute and they wanna buy it off you," the bodyguard confirmed.

"Not really ours to sell," Lucy said. "Arasaka made it."

"They looking for it at all?" the bodyguard asked. Lucy looked at David.

"Are they?" she asked.

"Shit, not that I know of," David said, shrugging. "Maybe?"

"Then I'd say just take the deal," the bodyguard said. "Look, if they do come looking, it's probably better with us than with you two. Wouldn't be their first rodeo dealing with angry corpos," he added, glancing over at his charges. David did some quick mental math.

"Two point five million," David said. Lucy looked at him, her eyes wide.

"Babe, that's a little... I thought you wanted to get rid of this thing?" she asked.

"That's enough to cover the moon trip for all four of us and then some," David said, and Lucy blushed, hard. "And... c'mon, they're corpo pop, they can totally afford it, babe." The bodyguard laughed.

"You're smarter than you look, kid," he said. "Lemme relay it to them, I'll be back in a sec." As the bodyguard walked over to reconvene with his charges, Debidio looked at David and Lucy.

"Me get new mommies?" Debidio said.

"Uh, yeah, sure," David said. "If you wanna call it that." It beamed with happiness, and David noticed for the first time how sharp its teeth were; he hoped he would never see that again in his life.

The bodyguard jogged back over to the bar, a smile on his face.

"They're good for it," he said, wiring David two and a half million eddies. The girls stood up from their booth, walking back to the bar, and the blue-haired one grabbed Debidio, holding it tightly, as they walked out of the bar.

David and Lucy paused for a second, attempting to process what had just happened. Claire looked up at them.

"Am I hallucinating, or did you two just sell that thing to Us Cracks out of nowhere?" she asked.

"If you're hallucinating, we are too, choom," David said. Claire bust out laughing, and it was infectious enough to get Lucy laughing, too.

Notes:

THE NIGHTMARE IS OVER. IT'S GONE. I NEVER HAVE TO WRITE A SENTENCE USING "ME" AS A FIRST PERSON PRONOUN AGAIN.

Chapter 42: Vacation

Notes:

Obligatory Discord link.

When David and Lucy walked in the door, the first thing that Kiwi noticed, as she sipped a mug of hot tea and half-watched an episode of Attuned In where the host was interviewing Kerry Eurodyne, was that they were grinning like absolute maniacs.

The second thing she noticed was the lack of a vomiting gremlin next to them. Ordinarily, if they'd taken Debidio out for walkies, it would have been running up to her and screeching in happiness and attempting to grip her by her legs in its facsimile of a hug. This time, however, it simply... wasn't there. Kiwi suspected that this was connected to their grinning.

"Alright, what did you two gonks do?" she asked. "Please tell me you didn't leave it in the sewer or something."

"Sold it for two and a half million eddies," Lucy blurted out, and Kiwi nearly spat her tea all over them in surprise.

"Two and a half... what... fuck... who!?" Kiwi stammered, short-circuiting as she tried to comprehend the idea of anyone wanting that thing. A toilet flushed behind the door leading to the downstairs bathroom, followed by the faucet running for a few seconds.

"You know that stupid song on the radio where they say 'ponpon shit' a lot?" David asked. The bathroom door opened, and Becca walked out, sighing in relief.

"Hey Luce, hey D," she said, before doing a mental backspace to process what she'd heard while in the restroom. "Wait, you two sold Debidio!? To fucking Us Cracks!?" David contemplated taking a picture of the look on her face for a moment; it was priceless.

"Yup," Lucy said. "Well, to the solo they had running a bodyguard job, I guess."

"Isn't that human trafficking?" Becca asked.

"Kinda has to be human to be human trafficking," Kiwi said, taking another sip of her tea. "I think this is more like selling an exotic pet. Like the world's nastiest blue-throated macaw." The analogy cracked David and Lucy up, but Becca fumed a bit.

"Doesn't really sit right with me anyways, chooms," she said. "I mean, I dunno, that little fucker could actually talk."

"And every time it does, an infant starves to death somewhere in the world," David said. "So, I dunno, I'm cool with getting two and a half million eddies for the little fucker."

"Wait, back up," Becca said. "Two and a half million fucking eddies? I heard that right the first time!?"

"Enough for all of us to go to the moon and back," Lucy said. "And enough on top that we can actually have some fun while we're there."

"I mean, we already had enough for you two," Kiwi said. "All four of us one-way, but we would've probably had to pull a couple jobs to get back." The other three stopped and looked at her for a second, doing some quick mental math.

"...wait, did we?" Lucy asked. David nodded his agreement, and Becca just kept staring at her, knowing she didn't really have to actively say she wasn't paying attention to their finances beyond if they could pay bills or not; Becca was more used to the "keep a constant flow of work coming in and pray it's enough" style of financial maintenance.

"Am I seriously the only one who ever looks at our bank accounts?" Kiwi asked. "Yeah, between what Maine left David, what we all had going in, what we got for taking out Faraday, and now this, we've got a combined total of around... four point two million. I was actually meaning to drop by Vik's and make a big payment on our tabs with him."

David blinked. It had almost kind of escaped him that bills hadn't been an issue for a while, and it felt a little odd, now that he was thinking about it. Something felt a little immediately backwards about having to worry less about bills "on his own" than he did when he was living with his mother, and it embarrassed him a touch. He scratched the back of his neck awkwardly, and Lucy raised an eyebrow at the sight.

"You okay, D?" she asked. "This is pretty good news."

"Yeah, it is, just..." David started, unable to finish his sentence immediately. "I dunno. I feel like I should've been keeping track of this."

"I'm cool with handling it," Kiwi chimed in. "Just... you three should probably keep a closer eye on things. That could've ended badly."

"So... does that mean we're pretty much retired, chooms?" Becca asked.

"Not if we do this moon vacation, we're not," Kiwi said. "2 million for the round-trip tickets for everyone, and then it's a fucking tourist trap up there, so we'll probably end up burning a lot more. We're not gonna be hurting for eddies, but we're not so rich we can just retire and call it." David's eyes flashed with a message briefly, throwing off his train of thought.

"Shit, Rogue needs us for something," he said. "Said to meet at Afterlife around 11." Becca let out a groan of frustration, and Lucy rolled her eyes slightly.

"Perfect timing," Kiwi said, sarcastically.

Notes:

Sorry it's been so long- it took me a minute to get my bearings for this chapter and figure out what I wanted to do next, and then Christmas was wildly busy for me (and what little free time I had got devoured by Dwarf Fortress and Midnight Fight Express instead of writing).

Chapter 43: Hammerhead [I]

Notes:

Mr. Evrart is helping me find my Discord.

The stairs leading down to Afterlife, Night City's famous merc bar and the crew's frequent watering hole, were as grungy and dark as ever. Torn posters, hastily-tagged graffiti, exposed pipes, and broken vending machines lined the path to the bar's sign, along with the assorted gonks who lacked the street cred to get by Emmerick, smoking dog-end cigarettes and drinking beer out of bottles as they grumbled to themselves and looked at David and his crew with envy.

As the crew passed under the bar's sign and dark gave way to sickly neon green, David waved at Emmerick, and received a wave in return; the bouncer noticed Rebecca, and tried very hard not to say anything in defiance of all of his instincts, remembering the conversation he'd previously had with David. For her part, she gave him a quick glare, as if to communicate the same message herself. The other two simply walked by without comment, as if Emmerick wasn't there. The thumping of bass that was audible from outside the bar finally formed itself into proper music; Rebecca smiled, the recognition of the Cartesian Duelists song immediately improving her mood.

"I'll watch you fall down, I'll drag you face down," the loudspeakers sang over distorted electric guitar. "Everything burns! Everything burns!"

The group kept walking past the bar, Lucy and David each giving Claire a quick wave as they passed under the green glow of the overhead lights, and eventually got to the enclosed booth on the other side where Rogue was sitting. The venerable Queen of the Afterlife set a rocks glass full of whiskey down on the table and looked up; Kiwi scratched the back of her neck awkwardly.

"You needed us for something?" David asked, unsure how to approach this. Rogue shrugged.

"Need a favor, and I remembered you four gonks owe me for bailing you out," she said.

"What's the gig?" Kiwi asked, attempting to take over for David in her usual assumed role. Rogue fished a shard from her pocket, handing it over to Kiwi.

"Slot in the shard and take a look," she said. Kiwi looked at it for a second, unsure whether to trust it, before putting it into the data port on her neck. "I know one of you's gonna really like this one," the fixer added. What Kiwi saw, on the shard, was a projected route for a Biotechnica convoy heading into Night City.

"Is this a klep job or a hit job?" Kiwi asked.

"The former," Rogue said. "There's a crate on the middle truck I've got a buyer lined up for. You four are gonna retrieve it from the convoy, then meet up with one of my people to get it back into NC."

"We've... got our own driver," David said, somewhat awkwardly, not wanting Falco to miss out on the action. Rogue raised an eyebrow. "He's a part-timer, but we can trust him."

"Smuggler's non-negotiable," the fixer said. David cocked his head questioningly, not wanting to outright ask why, but wondering regardless, as Rezodrone gave way to the raspy, slightly muffled scream of Johnny Silverhand asking if the listener can feel it; no clarification was offered by the shouting rockerboy on what "it" is. "You four gonk-brains are fine for the part of the job that doesn't need discretion, but I'm not gonna fully entrust this to people short-circ'd enough that they almost bumblefucked into another Corporate War by inviting Adam Smasher on a fucking Militech job."

"Didn't think about it," David said sheepishly.

"That gets you killed," Rogue said matter-of-factly, looking him in the eyes. "Which is why Panam's gonna be holding all your hands through the part that requires thinking." Becca nudged Kiwi's side lightly and leaned in.

"Wait, who's the target?" Becca whispered, trying to hide the fact that she didn't fully understand what was going on from Rogue; she wasn't usually the one dealing with fixers, and was doing her best to pretend like she was a lot more accustomed to this than she actually was.

"Oh, shit, you three can't see the shard," Kiwi said, embarrassed realization visible in her eyes. "We're hitting Biotechnica." Becca looked at Rogue, her head almost whipping to the side with how fast it moved, determination in her eyes.

"We're in," Becca said, throwing all four of the other people at the table off for a second, before the realization hit Lucy and Kiwi.

"Really? That quick?" Rogue asked, feigning ignorance.

"Biotechnica got one of our people killed," Becca said, her tone of voice lower and more serious than usual. "Never got a chance to fuck them up for it, so we're taking this one."

"Don't even care that there's no eddies in it?" the fixer prodded. "This just makes us square for pulling your asses out of the fire." David, Lucy, and Kiwi all looked shocked by this; Becca, meanwhile, just looked Rogue straight in the eyes, smiling almost viciously.

"We're fine on eddies," Becca said. "This one's personal." Rogue looked at the other three, unsettled.

"That go for the whole group of you, or is our Mox friend planning a solo crusade?" the fixer asked.

"As far as I'm concerned, we're in," David said. Lucy looked at him, visibly worried.

"D, are you saying that because this job's a good idea, or are you just saying that because you don't want Bex to get herself killed?" she asked him. He looked at her somewhat quizzically.

"...both?" he responded. "On the one hand, yeah, I get the impression Becca's taking this job, whether we do or not, and... that's not gonna end well if it's just her. On the other hand, it's also probably good not to owe the Queen of the Afterlife a favor in the long term. So, yeah, both."

"I can go along with that," Kiwi said, liking David's thought process. Lucy nodded her agreement, looking at Rogue.

"Convoy's scheduled to come through a week from tomorrow," the fixer said. "I'll send all four of you Panam's deets, so you can get acquainted, along with the GPS data for the route."

"Sounds great," David said. He stretched his shoulders a bit, yawning, prompting a slight chuckle from Rogue. "We all good here, choom?" he asked.

"Yeah, that covers everything," Rogue confirmed. "Get me that crate, and we'll call it even. Easy as that. And no bringing goddamn Smasher along this time." David burst out laughing.

"Yeah, no danger of that," David said. "You heard he had the labcoats at Saka make a weird-ass fucked up clone of me, right?" Rogue nearly spat her whiskey out all over him.

"Claire told me, but I thought she was fucking with me," Rogue said, stunned. "That gonk actually did that!?"

"I didn't wanna ask, but... do you have any context on why he might have done that?" David asked. "I'm not even really mad at him, we made almost two and a half million eddies off the thing, I just don't really know what... made him want to do that in the first place. Like, he realizes stealing people's DNA to make mutant clones of them isn't normal, right?" Rogue was, at this point, laughing uncontrollably, and the other three were having similar trouble keeping themselves composed; she attempted to collect herself enough to talk.

"I... if I knew what was going on in Adam Smasher's head, trust me, I'd close the bar and get rich off that," Rogue said, barely getting the words out. "Trying to figure him out will make you go cyberpsycho, so my advice is don't."

The group started to stand up and walk away; Rogue looked up at them, as if she realized something she wanted to say at the last second.

"By the way, don't take me giving you four scop too hard. All four of you gonks are pretty much kids, as far as I'm concerned, and... you're good kids, far as I can tell. Trust me, I was short-circ'd too when I was your age; if it weren't for dumb luck and being constantly surrounded by the city's legends, I probably wouldn't have made it this long," she said, a lot more warmth in her voice than before, as if she'd taken off her social mask for a second. "Get this job done, and let me see what you four are really made of."

David nodded, a determined look on his face, and the four continued on, past Emmerick again and into the grime of the entrance.

Notes:

If you notice any discrepancies with past chapters as far as location descriptions, it's because I actually have 2077 handy to go look at things in, rather than having to just pull it out of my ass and hope nobody notices unless the place was heavily used in Edgerunners.

Speaking of, that's also why I took some time off from GC: because I wanted to get 2077 more or less done before I got back on this, and get a general vibe for how everything looks by immersing myself in it for a bit. I hope that's noticeably improved the descriptive writing.

Chapter 44: Hammerhead [II]

Notes:

Seed is sown, I'm chippin' in
Join the Discord, I'm chippin' in

David started a private message conversation with Panam.

[09:53] David: ey choomba

[09:53] Panam: You the guy Rogue's sending on the convoy gig?

[09:53] David: well, the GUY, yes

[09:53] David: my crew's a little... complicated

[09:53] Panam: She told me. Can't say I've ever worked with a crew that's all fucking each other before.

[09:53] David: ouch. lol

[09:53] Panam: No shame in it. Just a new one for me.

[09:53] Panam: Meet in person? I hate doing this over text.

[09:53] David: sure, when and where?

[09:53] Panam: You know the Sunset Motel?

[09:53] David: not off the top.

[09:53] Panam: Head down the highway going east out of Santo and you can't miss it. Not too far from the city. I'll be at the bar on the second floor.

[09:53] David: got it. head over ASAP, then?

[09:53] Panam: Whenever you've got a minute, but yeah, sooner the better.

David ended the private message conversation.

David started a private message conversation with Falco.

[09:55] David: yo, choombatta, you busy?

[09:55] Falco: Not really, no. You got a gig incoming?

[09:55] David: just need a lift for the moment. rogue's got me meeting someone out in the badlands

[09:55] David: NCART doesn't go out that way, the queen of the afterlife was too cheap to get us a delamain pass, and i'm sure as shit not walking that far

[09:55] Falco: Can I ask who she's got you meeting?

[09:55] David: someone named panam. she seems nice

[09:56] Falco: ...wait, Panam's taking gigs?

[09:56] David: you know her?

[09:56] Falco: Haven't seen her in years, but yeah. We grew up together.

[09:56] David: do i need to be worried?

[09:56] Falco: I mean, I don't really know what she's like these days, but she was nice when we were kids.

[09:56] Falco: You at H3 still?

[09:57] David: yeah, i'm home

[09:57] Falco: Be there in ten.

Falco ended the private message conversation.

David started a private message conversation with Panam.

[09:58] David: hey, slight change of plans

[09:58] David: needed a lift out there, and our usual driver says he knows you

[09:58] Panam: Well, that's unsettling.

[09:58] David: you grow up with a guy named Falco, by any chance? big mustache, kinda has a cowboy thing going on?

[09:58] Panam: ...you're fucking kidding me, Falco is in NC too!?

[09:58] David: guess that's a yes.

[09:58] Panam: It is. By all means, bring him along, I could stand to catch up with him.

[09:58] David: alright, cool. was hoping that wasn't gonna be an issue. be there soon as I can.

David ended the private message conversation.

Chapter 45: Hammerhead [III]

Notes:

Discord. Apply directly to the forehead.
Discord. Apply directly to the forehead.
Discord. Apply directly to the forehead.

To Falco, the Sunset Motel was a source of countless memories, the default place where nomads went to talk biz. It was where he had first met Maine, and where he had gotten almost every memorable job in his career. He couldn't help but smile as his Chevillion Emperor pulled into the sun-bleached parking lot.

David, meanwhile, scowled. To someone without any ties to the nomads, it looked more like the type of place you'd see the lowest of the low hole up in if they wanted to have a two-week synthcoke-and-hooker binge. Sure, it was folly to expect Konpeki Plaza out in the Badlands, but David had a feeling in his gut that the accommodations available would make him strongly appreciate his old apartment, and he resolved that this wasn't going to be an overnight stay, no matter how drunk they got.

"Bar's up there, on the second floor," Falco said, taking off his seat belt and opening the driver's side door to leave. David did the same on the other side, and the two started ambling towards the stairs, trying not to look at any of the random people wandering around the parking lot; he quickly noted the number of vending machines scattered around the property, and his stomach grumbled a bit.

"They got anything better than vending machine food here, choomba?" David asked.

"Something wrong with Burrito XXL?" Falco asked, teasingly.

"Nah, they're preem, just..." David started, defensively. "I dunno, I've got the eddies, so I'm wondering if I should save my appetite and get something nice, or just go ahead and grab something while we're out here."

"Should probably wait either way," Falco said. "I dunno, I'm just huscle for you guys, but doing biz with your mouth full of burrito sounds like it'd be a goofy first impression." David stopped in his tracks, and Falco looked at him, mildly worried that he'd offended the successor to his most consistent employer.

"Just huscle, dude?" David asked. "You kidding me? You're like an older brother to me, choomba. Shit, why do you think it was you I sent Smasher over to?" Falco burst out laughing, grabbing the railing of the stairs to support himself.

"Fuck, David, I thought that was... a prank or something," Falco said, trying to catch his breath. "What the hell were you thinking with that?"

"Choom, I was thinking you're the only person I could trust to actually be able to navigate that problem," David said. "I mean, come the fuck on, I love Lucy and Becca and Kiwi with all my heart, but... imagine any of them in that situation. You're the only person I know who I thought would actually be able to keep their shit together, myself included, with the whole 'make Smasher less bored' thing."

"Why the hell do you care if he's bored or not?" Falco asked, grabbing his knee with his other arm and laughing even harder. "He's Adam Smasher! You know, the only guy in Night City who knows what baby meat tastes like?"

"Wait, baby meat?" David asked. "That's... specific."

"Yeah, you don't wanna know how I know that one," Falco said, finally getting himself together and moving up the stairs. "But, yeah... what is it with you and Smasher, anyways? Why even try?"

"I dunno," David said. "It kinda felt like I managed to wake something up in the gonk. Felt like it was probably worth my time to feed that."

"Maybe," Falco said. "I never actually told you how that went, did I?"

"You didn't," David confirmed. "Guessing it went okay, since you're not dead?"

"Yeah, it went alright," Falco said. "Better than it should've, honestly." The nomad opened the door to the bar, gesturing for David to walk in first, and he saw a woman, around Kiwi's age, sitting at the bar that he assumed to be Panam; worryingly, she had two empty beer bottles next to the one she was currently taking large sips from. He didn't have any issues with people drinking, but doing biz drunk was a different story.

"David, right?" the woman said, confirming her identity, and gesturing for him to sit next to her; he complied, as Falco walked in behind him.

"Hey, Panam," Falco said, causing her to jump at the recognition of his voice.

"Falco!? What the hell are you doing in NC?" Panam asked, with a surprised smile on her face that was probably visible from satellite, turning around to hug him.

"Could ask you the same thing," Falco said, wrapping his own arms around her.

"Wasn't happy with how Saul's running things out there," Panam said to her childhood friend. "Guessing you got fed up, too?"

"Yeah, not really a fan of working with the corpos," Falco said. "Thought the whole point was to stay away from that." Panam took a sip of her beer and slammed her fist down on the bar, gesturing at him.

"Fucking thank you," she said. "Thought I was the only one in the whole goddamn camp who hated that. Anyways, David, where's the rest of your crew at?"

"Out shopping," David said.

---

2nd Amendment made a strong impression for itself in the atrium of Megabuilding H10. Not many other stores had their own real storefront, let alone a sign at least twenty feet wide with the name of the store in glowing letters; most of the megabuilding's assorted vendors had to do with a cart, or a sign hung up in an alleyway. To Lucy and Kiwi, it looked a bit tacky and awkward; to Rebecca Flores, it was practically home.

"Wilson, you son of a bitch, you in here?" Rebecca said playfully as she strutted straight into the room. Lucy and Kiwi followed, trying to stay out of the shopkeeper's sightline, and thus out of the conversation.

"Rebecca! My favorite customer!" the portly weapons dealer said, as he looked up and noticed her. "In here looking for some new gear, or is today a repair kind of day?"

"You still got that Mk. 31 I was looking at last time I came in?" Becca asked.

"You kidding? You sure you could even lift that thing? Gun's bigger than you are," Wilson said. Becca lifted up her hands, showing Wilson her gorilla arms through the mesh.

"Got some upgrades since I came in last," she said. "Probably gonna drop by Vik's and get more when I walk out. You got the HMG or no?"

"Yeah, I've still got it," he said. "You want the usual Cerakote on it? Green and pink?"

"Fuck yeah, choomba," Becca said.

"Got it," Wilson said. "Just transfer the eddies over and we're golden." Becca's eyes lit up with her holo-interface, and before long, Wilson had a smile on his face a mile wide. He looked up, noticing Lucy and Kiwi. "While you're in the mood to drop some euro, your buddies over there need anything?" Becca looked over at Lucy and Kiwi, as if to co-sign the question.

"Uh, we're good, I think," Lucy said. She was competent enough to take out random gangoons, especially with the chipware she'd installed for the Faraday job, but she typically preferred her monowires (or simply frying someone's cyberware) over shooting people; Kiwi nodded. The older of the two netrunners was a back-line operator; she could handle herself in a fight if she needed to, but she strongly preferred putting herself in positions where she didn't need to.

"You sure you don't wanna get your own pieces instead of bumming mine?" Becca asked, pressing further. "C'mon, Wilson's the best in the city. We've got the eddies for it, Luce, might as well get something that fits you." Lucy thought for a second, and then looked at Wilson.

"What kind of handguns do you have?" Lucy asked. Wilson squinted at her.

"You looking for wheelguns or semi-auto? Something big with a lot of stopping power, or a pocket pistol?" he asked. "Give me more to work with, here."

"I dunno, maybe just a little semi-auto pocket pistol," Lucy said. "I want it to be able to put someone down, but I don't wanna break my arm doing it, you know?" Wilson sighed, muttering something about idiot customers who don't know what they're looking for under his breath, and rummaged around in his stock, pulling out a Constitutional Arms Unity with an XC-10 Alecto silencer fitted to the barrel.

"Wanna give this a spin at the range?" Wilson said. "Ammo's on you, but it'll let you get a feel for how it fits in your hand, decide if you wanna spend the eddies or not." Lucy nodded, and Wilson came out of the vendor shell around the counter, holding the gun and leading the group towards the range. The portly arms dealer opened the little door that led to the range alcove, and ushered the three young women in.

"I've got you on ammo," Becca said, fishing into her jacket. "Brought a box of everything along, in case either of you two wanted to play around." She pulled out a small box of .45 caliber handgun bullets from one of the large front pockets and set it down on the table in the range booth, as Wilson handed the gun to Lucy ceremoniously.

"You know how to turn the safety off on it, and not be a fuckup with it, right?" Wilson asked.

"Wilson, they're with me, they know how to use a fuckin' gun," Becca said. Wilson laughed, slapping the petite solo on the back in a friendly manner.

"That's why you're one of my favorite customers, Bec," Wilson said. "You actually respect your guns."

"And I spend half my income keeping you in business," Becca added, sighing. Wilson let out another chuckle and released a target.

Lucy aimed down the Handyman red dot sight at the center of the white cross, and squeezed the trigger. She didn't even have any of her combat chipware slotted in, and yet all three bullets planted themselves straight in the center of the target, seemingly without any recoil or resistance. She smiled.

"Perfect," she said.

"Wanna empty the mag and make sure?" Wilson asked. "Don't want you getting buyer's remorse, I put a lot of work in on that gun."

"Choomba, if Luce decides she doesn't like it, you know it's just gonna end up being my piece," Becca chimed in. "Probably gonna end up living in my gun closet anyways."

"Gun... closet?" Wilson asked. Becca shrugged.

"I mean, I'm not fuckin' Kerry Eurodyne, I can't afford a place with an empty room I can turn into an armory," Becca said. "Instead, what I have is a walk-in closet, and I've got my guns hanging up in it, plus a little workbench. Better than just keeping 'em out in the open." Wilson smiled, and looked at Lucy and Kiwi, who were torn between being happy to see this side of Becca again after how terrifying she'd been at Afterlife, and being kind of annoyed at being surrounded by something they very much did not care about.

Something clicked in Kiwi's mind, and she looked slightly embarrassed, made more visible by the fact that she had her full face on.

"Actually, since we're going to Vik's after this, what do you have for smart guns?" she asked, scratching the back of her head.

"Could've said something when I was behind the counter, no?" Wilson asked. "I've got a few things. Gimme a general idea of what you want?"

"Put it this way, I usually stay in the car, and if I'm actually having to shoot at people, things have gone pretty horribly wrong beyond... the usual levels of horribly wrong," Kiwi explained as the arms dealer listened. "I just wanna make sure I can seal the deal, if things do go south that badly. No size requirements, I'm not gonna have to lug it around or anything, just something I can trust to put bullets in heads if I've got the right cyberware chipped."

"Specific where you need to be, but not choosy enough to be a pain in the ass," Wilson said, smiling. "Between that and Rebecca's vouch, I don't think I'd mind repeat business from you, either." He jogged out and back into the shopkeeper's hutch, then quickly returned, holding a Kang Tao A-22B Chao pistol in one hand, an Arasaka TKI-20 Shingen in the other, and a Nokota D5 Sidewinder tucked into his arm.

"Lot of choices," Kiwi said, slightly flabbergasted.

"I mean, it's a pistol, a sub-machine gun, or a rifle," Wilson said. "You're basically trading size for how many bullets you're able to spray, and how big they are. Your use case, I'd maybe suggest the Shingen; you're gonna want compact if you're in a car, but you're gonna want to send a lot of lead out quick." Kiwi nodded intently, listening to the advice, and took the Shingen from his hand, grabbing it lightly by the sight.

"This work if I don't have the smart link chipped in yet?" she asked as she flipped the gun around into her hand. "Figure I should go ahead and test the worst case scenario."

"Should work," Wilson confirmed. "Just won't home in." Kiwi looked at Becca.

"Got ammo for this?" she asked, prompting the petite solo to fish in her jacket for a box of the appropriate bullets. Kiwi loaded them into the magazine, slammed it in, and nodded for Wilson to release a target; she looked down the sight and squeezed the trigger, sending a burst of five bullets flying downrange. Controlling the recoil felt like trying to tame a bucking wild horse, but somehow, even without the assistance of a smart-link, all five bullets seemed to hit the target; two grazed, two hit the corners, and one hit an inch away from the bullseye.

"Not bad," Wilson said. "Even matches your coat."

Kiwi looked down at the Shingen. Wilson had already done a Cerakote job on it, presumably for a previous client who never paid up for the gun; it was a deep red, the same shade as her coat. Lucy walked around her to get a better look at the gun and compare closely, and then burst out laughing.

"It's like that gun was made for you, choom," Lucy said. "Even if you never have to use it, you should get that, just because it looks cute as fuck with your coat." Wilson groaned with aggravation.

"Rebecca Flores, are you really bringing motherfuckers who treat their guns as fashion accessories into my shop?" he asked.

"Says the guy who's doing a neon green and pink Cerakote job on a HMG for me," Becca said, rolling her eyes. "Come on, you're one of the last people left that does custom jobs at all, let alone paint jobs. You've gotta be used to it by now; anyone who's not gonk-brained enough to try using rattlecans is walking in your doors."

"The fuck do you need that much gun for, anyways? You never told me," Wilson said.

"Solo business," Becca said. "Hitting Biotechnica. Rogue called in a favor, and lucky for her, it's one that's personal for me." Wilson stopped to think for a second, and then realized the connection.

"Oh, yeah, the girl with the cat ears, right? You were pretty fucked up over that one," Wilson said. "Finally getting some payback, huh?"

"Yeah, I wanna make sure they all get a closed casket," Becca said. Lucy sighed; the scary Becca from Afterlife was back. It was personal on some level for her, too- she wasn't going to take the loss of any crew member lightly, even one before her time- but there was something about how Becca was acting that worried her, as if she was letting her personal feelings get in the way of the job.

She wanted to remind Becca that this was meant to be a klep job, not a hit job. The kind where, if what she'd picked up from osmosis from previous work was on point, the quickest and safest way to go was always "deal with the huscle, point guns at the drivers until they run away, and grab the shit and delta." The worry about the reaction she might get, however, kept her quiet as Kiwi transferred the eddies for the smart sub-machine gun.

"And you, ma'am?" Wilson asked, looking at Lucy. Lucy's eyes glimmered as she transferred her own eddies over, and Wilson grinned like a maniac.

"When are you gonna have the HMG ready?" Becca asked. "Working on a six-day timeframe."

"Cerakote's drying," Wilson said. "Should be ready in two. Count yourself lucky you always get the same paint job. I'm gonna do some extra tune-ups on it, just to make sure I'm sending you out with the best possible piece." Rebecca smiled.

"Aww," she said, tilting her head onto her hands in a gesture of mock affection. "You really do love me, Wilson."

"Like I said, you're one of my favorite customers, and if you're gonna go fuck a corp's day up, I want you coming back in one piece," the portly man said. "Can't be losing my regulars if I wanna keep the shop open."

"Touche," Becca said. "I'll be back in two days. Gimme a call when it's ready."

The three walked out of the gun shop, and Lucy stayed a few feet behind Becca, trying to stay out of whisper earshot; she motioned to Kiwi to do the same, and the older netrunner followed.

"Something seem... up with Bex lately?" Lucy asked, keeping her voice down.

"Thank God, I'm not going crazy," Kiwi said, doing the same. "Yeah, I'm kinda worried about her." Becca slowed down a bit, catching back up with them.

"You two gonks got something to say?" she said. "Come on, we're not fuckin' teenagers, we're just fucking a teenager." Neither of the other two laughed, and Becca frowned.

"I... we're worried about you, Bex," Lucy said.

"Why?" Becca asked. Kiwi sighed, palming her face.

"Because you're diving head-first into this, and neither of us want to lose you," Lucy said. "Come on, B, it's not just David that loves you. You know that by now." Becca sat down on a covered bench and looked up at the two netrunners.

"I know," she said. "I love you two too. It's not really... about that, you know? Getting revenge for Sasha, it's just one of those things. Like a nagging itch that won't go away and keeps bothering you until you scratch it, except it's an itch to go kill a bunch of corpos and make sure they don't get open caskets. You get me?"

"I think I follow you," Lucy said.

"I mean, she was my partner. Like if we were to lose David," Becca said. "We weren't together for all that long, but she meant the world to me, and... I think getting to chew these motherfuckers up is gonna be a weight off my shoulders."

"Or it might just leave you feeling empty," Kiwi said, frowning. "I've been there, pretty recently, and... wrecking Faraday's shit felt good in the moment, but it didn't just undo everything, you know?"

"What's your point?" Becca asked, her eyebrows furrowing. "You saying we should just let the corpo-rat pieces of shit keep walking?" Kiwi raised her hands defensively.

"Fuck no, not at all," she said. "Just... trying to manage your expectations, you know? You've got more to hang onto than just revenge. I mean, you've got the rest of us."

"And the cats," Lucy chimed in.

"Yeah, can't forget the cats," Kiwi said. Becca chuckled a bit, her mood lightening some.

"You're right, but... I still need this," she said, looking determined.

"What were you planning on getting at Vik's, anyways?" Lucy asked. "Didn't think you were in the market for new chrome."

"Subdermal armor, a Kerenzikov, a pain editor, and I wanna see what he's got as far as Berserk spines," Becca said.

"You sure you can take all that?" Kiwi asked, a worried look on her face.

"See what the good doctor says, I guess," Becca said with a shrug, standing up. "You two ready to keep walking?"

Notes:

This one was a big ol' bastard of a chapter. Sorry for the wait.

If you noticed the chapter titles for the last two chapters changing (and this being marked as part 3 of that): I'm doing a thing where, as we get into 2077 territory, I'm giving the gig-related chapters an "arc title" named in line with the 2077 quests (ie after a song with thematic relevance). I feel like it's a cute touch and the idea seemed well-received by the people I pitched it to, but if it's overly confusing, please let me know.

Chapter 46: Hammerhead [IV]

Notes:

Discord link, as usual.

Vik looked up from the boxing match he was watching at the petite solo who'd just laid out her shopping list to him, who had a hopeful look on her face that he hated having to destroy.

"You're not gonna be able to handle all that," he said, in the tone of a parent telling a kid they couldn't have fifty candy bars at the convenience store. "Subdermal armor, we can do. That won't be too taxing on your neurons, especially since you've already got synth-skin. Pain editor, sure. A Berserk and a Kerenzikov, though... that's hefty chrome, kid."

Becca's hopeful smile turned into a frown, and Kiwi gave her an I-told-you-so look.

"What, you're telling me I'm about to go psycho or something?" she asked. Vik chuckled.

"Not nearly that bad," he said. "With the chrome you've already got, you're fine. Hell, you could even pile a decent amount more on there and still keep your marbles."

"So, what's the issue, then?" Becca asked. Vik sighed.

"Problem's the chrome, more or less," he said. "Berserk gives you an on-demand fight-or-flight adrenaline spike, basically. Increases aggression, pain tolerance, physical strength, that sort of thing. Sounds good on paper, right?" Becca nodded, as if to say that was why she wanted one. "Problem is, well... look at the name. Until it wears off, the beast is taking over, pretty much, and the beast doesn't give a hot damn if what's in front of you is a gangoon pointing a shotgun at you, or if it's one of your chooms trying to talk you down."

"Explains all the cyberpsychos lately," Lucy said.

"You're more right than you think," Vik said. "Anyways, I don't stock the things. Not until they figure out how to tone it down enough that it's not just cyberpsychosis in a box. Let that be a hit to some other ripper's reputation, like Ryder or that creepy son of a bitch who does the Jig Jig girls." On the screen, one of the boxers, the one Vik had been rooting for, took three hard body blows and went down; he looked at it with an annoyed grunt.

"What about the Kerenzikov, choomba?" Becca asked.

"Always-on," Vik said. "Getting one means you've gotta get used to living your whole life in slow-mo. Not something I install in people lightly. On that note, what in hell do you need this kind of chrome for, anyways?"

"Hitting one of the corps for Rogue," Becca said. "Biotechnica's got something she wants on a convoy coming through the Badlands, and I wanna make sure there's no survivors." Vik raised an eyebrow.

"No survivors?" he asked.

"Biotechnica killed one of our crew members," Lucy interjected. "This one's personal for us."

"Yeah, what Luce said," Becca confirmed. "She was my..." Vik raised his hand up, as if to tell her he knew where she was going and she didn't need to say any more; it was a story he'd heard a thousand times, with different players involved, and it was one that still hadn't lost its effect on him.

"I get it," he said, getting up from his chair. "Gimme a few minutes, I'll throw some stuff together. Give you a bundle discount, too." Becca beamed with happiness, as the good doctor paused his boxing rerun and walked off into the back room of the shop to fumble through assorted boxes.

A moment passed, awkwardly, as they heard the thuds of falling boxes and muted swearing from Vik. Kiwi tapped her foot a bit.

"Anyone heard from David since we left?" Lucy asked, looking back and forth between the other two. Kiwi and Becca looked at each other for a second, themselves, and shrugged at her.

---

[16:54] ❤LUCY❤: you doing ok sweetie?

[16:54] David: yeah things are going fine. slow though

[16:54] David: probably should have figured panam and falco knowing each other would make it hard to get actual, you know, biz done

[16:54] ❤LUCY❤: lol

[16:54] ❤LUCY❤: is she cool?

[16:54] David: yeah she seems nice, shouldn't be any issues there

[16:54] 🥝: all you really need to do is figure out where we're meeting her once we get the crate

[16:55] David: ...shit we actually already got that figured out

[16:55] David: falco's our ride to the job. once we deal with the convoy, i'll get panam on the horn, she'll come to us

[16:55] 🥝: perfect. you're learning fast on the whole "leading" thing.

[16:55] 🥝: think your dad would be pretty proud of you, D.

[16:55] ❤LUCY❤: yeah, good job bb. ❤

[16:56] David: how are things going with the whole shopping trip anyways

[16:56] ❤LUCY❤: gun store went great. vik's... still undetermined

[16:56] 🥝: becca's talking to him right now. some of the stuff she wanted to get was way too much

[16:56] David: ...how much is too much? she wasn't about to full borg herself was she

[16:56] 🥝: no thank fuck.

[16:56] ❤LUCY❤: berserk and a kerenzikov were the ones he talked her out of

[16:58] David: thank fucking god we go through vik now, doc would've just given her those no questions asked

[16:58] David: that would've been a headache

[16:59] 🥝: don't get too relieved yet, vik had alternative suggestions and decided to get a little mad-scientist with it

[16:59] 🥝: he's putting her under now

[16:59] David: oh no. he say it's safe, or did he give her a whole lecture about it

[17:00] ❤LUCY❤: says it's safe, but i'm not really sure, looking at it

[17:00] David: that's... worrying. i trust vik, though, if he's vouching for it i think we're good

[17:00] 🥝: easy for you to say when you're not having to watch the surgery, D. lol

Chapter 47: Hammerhead [V]

Notes:

Discord link, as per usual.

2074

"A blind man lost, in the streets," Johnny Silverhand's voice intoned (in a rare clean register) over the bass-heavy speakers of the Afterlife. Becca spun around a whiskey and coke on its coaster anxiously; it had been a few hours since Sasha had left. "A pattern here, I need to see," the singing voice continued.

"She'll be fine," Dorio said, in a tone that sounded like she wasn't entirely sure herself. "Your girl's strong. She'll make it back."

"Feel like if that was the case, Maine would already be back with her," Becca said. The song continued, and Dorio sighed, hoping they were wrong about this.

The short solo made out a tall figure in the crowd of mercenaries and edgerunners, and perked up. Maine. She smiled, hoping to see her lover, her partner right alongside him, safe and sound.

The first hint that something was wrong was that, as he got closer to the table and Becca got a better look, he was frowning. And then, he emerged from the crowd, and Sasha wasn't there.

"Where's-" Becca started.

"She's gone," Maine said. "She went off script. Security got to her." Dorio's mouth hung open, agape.

It took a few seconds for Becca to process what Maine had just said, and then she screamed. The worst case scenario, the exact thing she feared every time Sasha went out on a job for the crew without backup, had happened. A few other mercs at adjacent tables looked over, gawking; Dorio leaned up, over the walls of the booth, and shut them all down with a look, indicating that anyone who was going to start shit was going to have to get through her first. Maine just stood there, looking at Becca, unsure what exactly to do.

"Why didn't you... I should have..." Becca started stammering.

"There wasn't anything I could do," Maine said. "By the time I got there, she was already gone. I'm sorry, Becca." She stood up from the booth, hyperventilating, and threw herself at Maine's torso, wrapping her arms around him and sobbing into his chest.

"I should have been there," Becca said, finally collecting herself enough to form a coherent sentence. "I should have been there, backing her up. I'm a fucking idiot." Maine reached a hand down, awkwardly patting her hair.

"We thought she could handle herself," Maine said. "It's not your fault. Shit, if you wanna blame someone, blame me. I'm the leader, right? My fuckup letting her out on her own." Becca looked up at him, detaching herself from him and wiping some of the tears that continued to stream down her face.

"We're gonna fuck Biotechnica up for this, right?" Becca said. "We're not letting this one go, right?"

"First chance we get," Maine said.

---

MARCH 2076

The Columbarium was no place for the dead, Becca thought.

When you lost a loved one, they deserved to be honored. Becca had heard about how graveyards used to be, back before everything on the planet went to shit, and something about the whole idea appealed to her; getting to put a whole custom carved rock down, or for people who were really loaded, an entire mausoleum or pyramid, seemed distinctly preferable for memorializing someone compared to the endless rows of nondescript grey boxes with various quotes on them.

That wasn't how things were done in Night City, though. Either you give someone a niche, you keep the urn, or you scatter the ashes out in the Badlands and pray the Raffen don't mistake them for dirty synthcoke. And out of those three options, for memorializing Sasha, Becca picked the niche as the least of the evils. The idea of having her urn around was too painful (especially with Pilar's... particular sense of tact), and she couldn't think of anywhere to scatter them that would make any sense, so Sasha Yakovleva's ashes instead sat in a grey box among many other grey boxes, with her name, her short lifespan, and "I miss you, kitty" engraved on the front.

"Still stand by that," Becca said, running her hand on the box. "I miss you, Sasha."

She sighed.

"Crew's got a couple of new netrunners these days," she said. "You would've liked them. One's my age, kinda awkward, other's older than me... us... and just absolutely cool as fuck. They're a good team."

Right as it began to sink in for Becca that she was talking to a dead person's ashes, and that Sasha almost certainly wasn't going to be able to hear her, Pilar came around the corner, lanky and awkward as ever, sticking out like a sore thumb in the otherwise serious atmosphere of the Columbarium.

"You done trying to unlock your psychic powers, sis?" Pilar said, loudly, causing at least one other person in Becca's line of sight to look up angrily. Becca held a finger up to her mouth, pouting, to remind him to keep it down.

"Shut the fuck up, bro," Becca said, in a similar tone but a quieter register. "I... gotta deal with it somehow, you know? You don't know what it's like." Pilar frowned, uncharacteristically.

"Yeah," he said, matching Becca's volume. "I do."

Becca did a double-take, attempting to try and put together what Pilar was talking about.

"Mom and Dad," Pilar added, filling in the blank for her. "What, you think I just come here to jack off and twiddle my thumbs? You were still pretty much a baby, but I was already old enough to remember." Realization dawned on Becca, and she frowned.

"I..." Becca started. "Sorry, bro. I probably should've realized." Pilar smiled.

"Nah, sis, it's fine. I pretty much had to abandon you for a decade so I could get my own shit together. You've got every right to be giving me shit over it," he said. Becca hugged him tightly, her small arms wrapping around her brother's tall, spindly frame.

"You came back as soon as you could," she said, looking up at her brother. "And, come on, the orphanage wasn't that bad. Learned how to play piano there. Maybe I could be a rockergirl with that or something." Pilar chuckled.

"See, this is why I love you, sis," he said.

"Love you too, bro," Becca said. "Let's dip out of here."

---

PRESENT

When Becca came to, the first thing she noticed was that she was in her bedroom, back home. Clearly, Vik had let the others bring her back home once he had her stabilized, so she could recover the rest of the way in her own bed. She appreciated that.

The second thing she noticed was David staring at her, looking extremely worried. She raised her eyebrows.

"You alright? I miss something?" she asked, groggily.

"How are you feeling?" David asked.

"Tired," Becca said. "Most of my body hurts. Vik send me home with any pain meds?"

David reached around for a brown paper bag, and fished through it, muttering to himself as he went through several pill bottles before producing a bottle of PseudoContin and grimacing slightly. The dosage was smaller than what he'd been given, but the thought of Becca essentially turning into a stoned cuddly blob and latching on to him, while ordinarily very appealing, didn't seem conducive to productive job planning.

"Yeah," David said. "Also, about five different kinds of other pills."

"Least I'll be back to a hundred percent before the job," Becca said, smiling weakly. "Gimme one of those."

"Need some water?" David asked.

"Don't wanna wait," she said. "I'll just dry-swallow it." David sighed and handed her a pill.

"If I gotta Heimlich you, I'll be pissed," he said as she popped it into her mouth, grimaced, and gulped it down. "Nevermind."

"See, told you," she said as Lucy walked through the door.

"Afternoon, sleepyhead," the netrunner said to the solo.

"Hey, Luce," Becca said. "Thanks for bringing me home."

"You owe me," Lucy said, smiling. "And Kiwi. Carrying you all the way back wasn't easy."

"Guess I'm a little heavier now with the new chrome," Becca said. "Fuck, this shit kicks in fast."

"Feeling better?" David asked.

"Much better," Becca said, kicking her legs over the side of the bed and standing up, throwing David for an immediate loop. He stood up reflexively, his eyes wide; Becca looked at him, noticing that she was suddenly a bit taller than him. "You get shorter, or am I going crazy?"

Lucy burst out laughing, and David couldn't help but join in.

"No, you gained almost a foot," David said. "Gotta say, when Lucy and Kiwi told me Vik was doing some crazy mad scientist shit, I wasn't expecting he was gonna stretch you out, choomba." Becca took a second to register what David was saying, and then grinned like a maniac.

"The motherfucker actually did it! God, I fucking love Vik," Becca said, exuberantly. "I swear, that gonk deserves a fuckin' statue in his honor."

"So, uh... that all he did?" David asked. "Gotta say, if that's the whole upgrade, that's a little underwhelming." Becca grinned even harder.

"Nowhere close, choom," she said, grabbing him by the hand and leading him out of the room. "Lucy and Kiwi got the nerd version, let's go find some shit to blow up so I can just show you."

"You... you gonna be good testing this shit out right after surgery?" David asked, concerned. Becca stopped in her tracks, thinking for a sec.

"Probably better grab the pain meds," she said, letting go of his hand and throwing her jacket on, then haphazardly shoving the bottle of PseudoContin into one of the front pockets. Lucy smiled at the display.

"Don't hurt yourself, Bex," Lucy said. Becca stopped again, looking at her and smiling.

"Hey, better me than any of you gonks," she said, taking David's hand again and pulling him out of the room.

Notes:

So, uh, elephant in the room: yes, I've been gone for a bit.

Well, not really gone. I've been on Discord. It's not like I vanished or anything. But my mental health was very bad for a bit, plus I got a real job that eats up a lot of my brainspace that I would ordinarily use for writing (some of you are probably here from my Collider stuff, I noticed I started getting AO3 emails again after those articles started going up, but... if you're not, and you like movies, go read my stuff, I got to call Smasher the most iconic video game villain to ever be adapted to film/TV and I managed to sneak a GC reference in my bio past editorial). So I kind of fell off of updating GC.

However, as you might figure from this chapter... existing, it wasn't exactly my intent to fall off of it permanently. Or even, like, long-term. I can't promise we'll be back to regularly scheduled consistent updates, but I can damn well promise this is the last time y'all are gonna have to wait THIS LONG for a chapter where I'm not really, REALLY justifying the wait.

Chapter 48: Hammerhead [VI]

Notes:

Discord link as always.

"You got a piece on you, choomba?" Becca asked David as they walked through the streets of Night City, the former slightly woozy from the pain medication. David raised an eyebrow.

"Am I gonna need it?" David asked. Becca shrugged.

"Depends on what we find," she said. David wasn't sure he liked that answer, in her condition.

"You sure you should be out fighting people while you're doped up on that shit?" David asked. Becca stopped for a second in the alleyway they were walking through, and looked at him; the expression on her face looked more serious than usual.

"D, is everything okay? You're kinda in disappointed dad mode," she said. David tried to hold back a chuckle.

"Thought you liked that," he said. Becca rolled her eyes a little and pouted, as David nearly tripped on a stray can of NiCola.

"Doesn't work as well, now that I'm taller than you, you gonk," she said, causing David to let loose the laughter. His laughter, in turn, made her own expression warm up.

"I am kinda worried, though," he said when he collected himself. "Lucy and Kiwi made it sound like you got some serious chrome. You sure you're gonna be okay long-term?" Becca shrugged.

"Long-term's a problem for long-term," she said. David stopped.

"Rebecca," he said. "You remember what happened to Maine, right?" She stopped in her tracks, too, and turned towards him.

"Yeah. Of course," she said, grimly. David walked up to her and put his hands on her cheeks, the same way he and Lucy always did with each other.

"I just don't want to lose you like that, okay? I've already lost too many people I love," he said. "I don't wanna add another to the list, any more than you do." She smiled slightly and hugged him, putting her head on his shoulders as he wrapped his arms around her.

"Yeah," she said. "I get it. If things start getting fucked up, I'll get rid of the chrome, alright?"

"Alright, cutie," David said, the relief palpable in his voice. Just as the words left his mouth, however, he ran his hand along Becca's back and felt something distinctly unlike a typical spinal column. "That what I think it is?" She grinned.

"It's exactly what you think it is," Becca said. "Kinda wanted to surprise you with it, babe. It's not the same kind of hardware you're rocking, it's just a Zetatech, but Vik did some shit I wanna test out before we go on the job." David frowned.

"Oh, God, what did he do?" David asked. Becca detached from him and stopped, deep in thought for a second, as if she was just now realizing something.

"Wait, do you know how to do netrunner bullshit at all?" she asked.

"...wait, what?" David asked. "No, why would I know that?" Becca raised an eyebrow, attempting to square the circle in her head.

"You went to 'Saka Academy, and they didn't teach you any of that? Really?" she asked, incredulous.

"Nah, choom," he said. "I know just barely enough to not be totally lost when the other girls are talking shop. Do I wanna know why you're asking this?" Becca smiled, and started walking again, motioning for David to pick the pace back up.

"You'll see," she said. "Gotta figure it out on my own anyways, so probably better if I just show ya."

---

[15:22] David: hey uh. lucy? kiwi? either of you two around

[15:22] 🥝: oh god what's she doing.

[15:22] David: did... did she get a fucking cyberdeck.

[15:22] 🥝: i'm sorry did she what

[15:22] David: she's asking me if i know how to do "netrunner bullshit."

[15:22] David: please tell me vik didn't do something unholy and she's just fucked up on pills.

[15:22] ❤LUCY❤: babe i sincerely wish i could tell you that

[15:22] David: YOU TWO KNEW ABOUT THIS

[15:22] ❤LUCY❤: i mean i saw vik doing something weird to her sandy

[15:22] ❤LUCY❤: wait... what... how

[15:23] 🥝: yeah we're all on the same page on this i think.

[15:23] David: HOW THE FUCK DID HE EVEN DO THAT

[15:23] David: YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE BOTH

[15:23] 🥝: i know, right?

[15:23] David: do either of you have his info

[15:23] David: i think i need to figure out what the hell this is

[15:23] ❤LUCY❤: 100% with you. give us 5

[15:23] 🥝: keep her busy so she doesn't do anything really particularly dumb

[15:23] David: that'll be easier said than done, i feel like

[15:24] David: oh no

[15:24] ❤LUCY❤: ???

[15:24] David: shit gotta focus

---

Kirill puffed the cigar he'd just looted off of the mutilated body of his prey, as he and his comrades squatted somewhat awkwardly around the trash can they'd turned into an improvised campfire. The cigar was shit. Tobacco in Night City was always shit, compared to back home.

The money, however... the money was much better. Back in the Soviet territories, hacking a man to pieces, dissecting his body in the middle of a car park and haphazardly ripping out anything made by man rather than God would get you thrown in an asylum, at best. Here, in Night City, it was just another day's work and a decent few thousand eddies.

Initially, it had bothered him that the people he and his fellow scavengers targeted were... people. People, with husbands and wives, children, siblings, parents who would grieve them. It seemed a bit senseless. Then, however, Kirill had an epiphany: it was simply the nature of the city. Night City was a place where humans became something less than, where they were property at best and meat at worst.

Kirill was no criminal, no butcher, in his mind. He was simply acting as one of many arms of the city's will, and getting paid quite well for it. No different from the useless NCPD officers he occasionally had to take pot-shots at while running away, really, except that his judgment was more inherently and fundamentally final.

"You going to share cigar?" Vilis asked, in his usual broken Russian. Kirill hated Vilis. Vilis was abrasive, crude, borderline cyberpsycho, and worst of all, Latvian.

"It's a cigar, not a fucking potato," Kirill said. "You wouldn't know what to do with it, cyka ape."

"You watch fucking word," Vilis said. He was probably pouting, maybe crying a little, but the face camo made it hard to really tell through the glitching blur.

"Shut the fuck up, Kirill," Irine, the lone woman of the group, said. "We don't need two fights in one day. Already had a hard enough time with this cyka." She gestured at the mutilated body that Kirill had looted the cigar from in the first place, looking almost artistic spread out on the concrete.

Arseny, the fourth and last of their small group, looked up at the gate, out of Kirill's line of sight.

"That bitch in the hoodie is looking at us," he said. Kirill respected Arseny. He was quiet; reserved, even; but he was always willing to do the dirtiest work of actually taking apart the bodies, he was always at attention, and he was of good Russian stock like Kirill. He often wondered how a man seemingly as put-together as Arseny had ended up as a scavenger in this city of the damned; Irine, he understood, as devious and foul Georgian women gravitated naturally to a place like this, but Arseny seemed a better man than even Kirill himself.

Kirill looked up to see what, exactly, was catching his trusted comrade's attention, and saw a tall, rather attractive woman with extremely pale skin and greenish hair. Part of him wondered if he was dreaming; it was rather unlike a woman this good-looking to approach him, and he opted to seize the opportunity.

"If I could rearrange alphabet, I put U and I together...and then add F, C, and K," he said, in a capable attempt at English. He had never made a proper effort to learn the language, but it was hard not to pick a little up in Night City, as it was the typical lingua franca of most business. He'd heard that particular line at one of the bars, and it had seemed to work for the chrome-head using it. The woman rolled her eyes.

"Hell would have to freeze over before I fuck a scav," the woman said, in surprisingly good (if accented and rusty) Russian. In the blink of an eye, a second person appeared next to her, a teenage boy a little shorter than her. He was toned, had some decent chrome on him. Clearly a Sandevistan, and presumably a good one, if he'd come from out of line of sight. He'd be a good pull if he didn't know how to use it.

"Becca, come on, don't pick a fight with these guys," the teenage boy said. So Becca was her name, then.

"D, they're scavs. It'll be piss easy, choom," Becca said, switching to English, clearly her more comfortable language. That meant the teenage boy was "D." What on God's green Earth "D" was short for, Kirill didn't know. Presumably he was her boyfriend, with the worry on his face. Knowing Night City, probably one of many. If he was the stronger of the two, and she was this overconfident, they'd be easy pickings. He pulled out the long steel pipe he was using as an improvised club, still wet with blood from the last kill.

"Come and get us, then, bitch!" he yelled, swinging it overhead and hoping to crack her skull in one blow. In an instant, as if he'd been swinging it underwater, Becca's hand was gripping the pipe firmly as he heard a faint whirr from her back. Before he could figure out what was going on, her other hand took leverage and snapped the pipe clean in half, turning it into two jagged steel spears in her hands.

Vilis lifted his shotgun to do the one thing he was any good at doing and pointed at Becca, who was moving towards Arseny. He squeezed the trigger and found the pellets instead hitting Irine, shattering her face through the camo into an unrecognizable red mass, as a blade seemed to shoot out of Becca's right knee, slicing Arseny's torso open with a massive gout of blood.

"C'mon, see if I can figure this shit out," Kirill heard her mutter to herself as she quickly looked over at him. He looked at D, the boy, who was stunned in place, clearly not used to this side of his woman. Clearly inexperienced with the foul folk in general, Kirill thought. He drew his Unity and moved towards the boy, letting Becca distract herself with Vilis for the moment.

As the Latvian brute attempted to break open his shotgun to eject the spent shells, the woman advanced, wielding the jagged metal rods like knives. Before he could manage it with his clumsy, potato-fed hands, she rammed the two rods into his chest, causing him to spit up blood; she opened her palm, pressed it against his face, and Kirill heard what sounded like an explosive charge turn his sacrifice's head into a fine red mist painting the concrete. His headless body stood for a moment, fumbling aimlessly at the rods, and then collapsed, driving them further into the Latvian's torso and impaling him almost completely.

She turned to look at Kirill, who now had his gun pointed at D's head. D was no longer frozen; he was oddly calm, for the situation, and something told Kirill he had just made a horrible mistake as the boy seemingly vanished from within his arms.

"Got it," the beautiful monster said, and all of Kirill's nerves immediately felt as if they were on fire, the quickhack burning out every synapse it could reach. The last thing he could faintly hear, as his organs failed, was her reassuring the boy that they were only scavs, after all.

Night City gives, and it takes.

---

[15:28] David: so, uh, update

[15:28] ❤LUCY❤: ARE YOU TWO OK??? 😨 

[15:28] 🥝: yeah what happened?

[15:28] David: we're totally fine

[15:28] David: turns out vik made becca fucking terrifying

[15:28] 🌟BECCA!🌟: FUCK THE HELL YEAH HE DID

[15:28] 🌟BECCA!🌟: I JUST FUCKED THOSE GONKS UUUUUPPPP

[15:28] 🌟BECCA!🌟: eugh i need a shower tho. and i need to wash this hoodie now.

[15:28] 🌟BECCA!🌟: and i think the pain meds are wearing off

[15:28] David: they're in your pocket ya gonk ❤

[15:28] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh shit. yeah they are

[15:28] 🌟BECCA!🌟: wait why'd you tell me that in the chat i'm standing like 2 feet away from you

[15:28] ❤LUCY❤: hey i appreciate seeing you two be cute ❤

Notes:

See? Told y'all it wasn't gonna be that long.

Chapter 49: Hammerhead [VII]

Notes:

Discord link.

TRIGGER WARNING: This chapter contains a brief, non-graphic description of domestic violence. If you're personally affected by this issue, you're not going to miss any major plot beats by skipping the final heading of this chapter.

David started a private message conversation with Viktor Vektor.

[17:20] David: yo vik

[17:20] David: explain yourself

[17:20] Viktor Vektor: ...huh?

[17:20] Viktor Vektor: Martinez right

[17:20] David: ayup.

[17:20] Viktor Vektor: Explain what exactly

[17:20] David: ...what the hell did you do to rebecca!?

[17:20] Viktor Vektor: Not happy with it? 😔

[17:21] David: i... i don't know what it is. i don't really understand what i'm looking at here

[17:21] Viktor Vektor: Gave her mantis blades (that's actually why I gave in on making her taller, no room in her legs as-is), stronger synth muscles across more of her body, hand cannon

[17:21] Viktor Vektor: Cannon takes 40mm grenades, she'll need techie kit to reload it

[17:21] Viktor Vektor: Subdermal armor too, anything weaker than 762 is just gonna piss your girl off

[17:21] Viktor Vektor: Titanium bones + bionic joints so the muscles are working at their full potential

[17:21] Viktor Vektor: Pain editor, naturally

[17:21] Viktor Vektor: And, the centerpiece of the whole thing, her... sandevisdeck?

[17:21] David: yeah I gathered most of that from seeing her in action (good to know on the cannon and the armor, actually), but seriously what the fuck is that unholy thing

[17:22] David: seriously vik what did you do

[17:22] Viktor Vektor: Wouldn't have taken you for a cyberware purist from what I've heard about your old doc

[17:22] Viktor Vektor: Basically I took a Militech Paraline and a Zetatech sandy. Lightest weight versions of either thing you're gonna get, civilian gear

[17:23] Viktor Vektor: Sliced away everything extraneous from the Paraline until it was bare metal, shoved it into the Zetatech's housing, wired up the Sandy so that it essentially feeds through the Paraline and uses it as a middleman device

[17:23] Viktor Vektor: It takes some work, but turns out you can totally have both without taxing the nervous system too hard as long as they're using the same "highway"

[17:23] Viktor Vektor: You trade some RAM capacity and processing power in the deck for it, but she'll still be able to store a quickhack in there, mess with equipment, that kind of thing

[17:23] David: is it safe for her?

[17:23] Viktor Vektor: That should be, specifically. Like I said, only a little more taxing than either would be on its own because one's piggybacking on the other

[17:23] Viktor Vektor: Whole package... make sure she takes her immunos and keep an eye on her. She's not at the line yet, but the line's more flexible than you'd hope

[17:23] Viktor Vektor: I probably should have asked her but you'll probably be more honest, she do any drugs

[17:24] David: i mean she smokes weed. other than that not that i'm aware of?

[17:25] Viktor Vektor: I wish you could hear the sigh of relief I just breathed right now

[17:25] David: nova

[17:25] Viktor Vektor: By the way how did you get my personal contact info

[17:25] Viktor Vektor: Not mad, just curious

[17:25] David: lucy and kiwi dug it up. they were kind of concerned about the whole thing too

[17:25] Viktor Vektor: You three should really trust me better than that by now 😔

[17:25] David: vik, believe me, i do. at no point did i suspect you were doing anything to deliberately put becca in danger

[17:25] David: you are pretty easily the best ripperdoc in the city and i'll happily take your word that it's safe if you say it is

[17:25] David: but i needed to hear it from you. and i also needed to get some sense of what it is in the first place

[17:25] Viktor Vektor: Anyways, now that you have my info

[17:25] Viktor Vektor: Shoot me a message if anything goes wrong with her chrome

[17:25] Viktor Vektor: I can't come out and do field repairs but I can absolutely walk you through stabilization and clear out the clinic for incoming

[17:26] Viktor Vektor: Believe me I know I'm in uncharted territory with her spine and if things go wrong I'm happy to take full responsibility for it

[17:26] David: happy to hear that, vik. like i said. you're the best.

David closed the private message conversation.

---

Lucy tapped her fingers on her knee as she looked at David, who was sitting on the couch, hunched forward, concentrating on the holographic display of his Agent. The holographic display vanished, and he sighed.

"Well? What's the word?" Lucy asked.

"Vik says the... sandevisdeck, he called it, is safe," David said. "As far as the whole thing, though, she's in the danger zone."

"Think we're gonna be able to talk her into chroming down after this job?" Lucy asked.

"Probably not gonna be able to talk her into going back to being short," David said, smiling weakly.

"Come on, D, this is serious," Lucy said.

"Sorry. I mean, I don't know, honestly. It seems like she just wants to overkill the living fuck out of this Biotechnica convoy, but... I don't know, babe," he said. "I'm worried she's gonna turn out like Dad. Just keep going, and going, and never stop until it destroys her."

The door to Kiwi's bedroom creaked open, and she stepped out, a towel wrapped around her hair; the other two looked at her slightly awkwardly.

"Just got my dailies in Elflines done," Kiwi said. She scanned the room a bit. "Am I interrupting something?" David looked at Lucy and then back at Kiwi, and shrugged.

"Just talked to Vik about Becca," he said.

"Bad news?" Kiwi said, an eyebrow raised in surprise.

"Kinda," David said. "I mean, not about what I figured. The whole Sandy cyberdeck abomination, apparently that's all good, Vik figured out a way to piggyback one on the other. But... she's overchroming, in general."

"Could've told you that," Kiwi said.

"Got any suggestions?" Lucy asked. Kiwi thought for a second, and then started laughing.

"I do, but you two are gonna think I'm joking and you're probably gonna hate me for it," Kiwi said. David shrugged.

"Hey, anything helps," he said.

"Hit her in the daddy kink," Kiwi said.

"Kiwi, for fuck's sake," Lucy said. "This isn't the time, you gonk." Kiwi looked her dead in the eyes.

"Luce, I'm not even kidding," she said. "Come on, you two know Becca. If she has to pick between being a chrome monster who could one-on-one Smasher, versus being David's sweet little baby girl, and she can't have both of those things..." David was visibly trying to hold back laughter, his hand over his mouth in a vain attempt to prevent Lucy from seeing it. He took several deep breaths.

"I hate that you're probably completely right about this," David said, and Lucy sighed.

"I can agree with that," she said.

"Where is she, anyways? Didn't she come home with you, D?" Kiwi asked.

"Yeah, she did," David confirmed. "And then she went upstairs, got naked while slurring something about her hoodie having scav blood on it, and flopped over on my bed and passed out."

"That definitely sounds like Becca," Kiwi said, causing Lucy to burst out laughing.

"Good thing we've got a couple days before we have to deal with the convoy, right?" Lucy asked.

"Since she's not here, uh..." Kiwi started. "I'm not the only one who's kind of unsettled by her being tall now, right? Is that weird to you two?"

"Yes," David said, almost immediately. "Yes, it's very weird, and I hate it. It makes me feel like I got shorter."

"I know, right?" Lucy asked, joining in the cacophony.

"Thank fuck she's passed out right now," David said. "She'd probably want to kill us if she heard us saying all this."

"Yeah, I hate to say it, but... she looks kind of weird tall. She was really cute when she was short, I don't know why she was all gonk-brained about it," Lucy said.

"Don't get me wrong, she's still preem," David said. "It's just... I don't know, I can't get used to it."

"You two eat already?" Kiwi asked.

"Haven't eaten all day, actually," David said, causing Lucy to pout at him.

"You really need to take better care of yourself, sweetie," she said. David sighed a little. "I could eat, too," she added.

"Feel like cooking anything, or wanna just grab some prepack? I could destroy a burrito right now," Kiwi said.

"Burritos sound good," he said, and stood up, walking towards the door and throwing his EMT jacket back over the grey tank top he'd been wearing. "Any preference on flavors?"

"I'll take one of the Rosados," Lucy said, looking over at him. "Thank you, sweetie."

"Wait up and let me throw my jacket on, I'll walk with you," Kiwi said, disappearing back into her room.

---

The Night City air felt oddly heavy, as if the city itself was aware that something big was about to happen.

"Guess this is how Bex feels all the time now," Kiwi said, attempting to lighten the mood.

"Hm?" David grunted.

"I mean, she's almost six feet tall, and always walks around in that hoodie and a bra and panties. I'm six feet tall, and I'm walking around in my jacket and... a bra and panties," she said, causing David to crack up more at the awkward explanation than the joke itself. "Don't even really know why I put those on, jacket's covering everything anyhow. Force of habit, I guess?"

"I guess," David said, not really sure how to respond to that.

"You alright, David?" Kiwi asked, picking up on the anxiety in his voice.

"Just worried about Becca," he said. "And the job. Still don't even know what the hell we're getting for Rogue, except that it's in a crate." Kiwi shrugged.

"That's pretty normal," she said.

"Thought part of why we hated Faraday was because he kept everything need-to-know?" David asked.

"Well, no, I hated Faraday because he was an abusive piece of shit," Kiwi said. "But, to your point, no. Maine's whole issue with that gonk was that he'd leave out stuff we actually needed. If Faraday had given us this job, all we'd have heard was, there's a convoy, go blow them up. He'd have left out the whole part about bringing back a crate, and then he'd get pissed when we show up without the crate, and when we were dating, he'd usually hit me over it that night."

"That's... a lot," David said. "I'm really sorry you went through that, Keys." She shrugged.

"Honestly, at this point, that feels pretty far in the past," she said. "I wouldn't say I'm over it, but... that situation got the ending I wanted when I torched his dick. These days, I've got you and Lucy and Becca. Remembering how I used to have it keeps me centered, reminds me how lucky I am to have the four of us." David hugged her, surprising her, and she awkwardly patted his back with one hand.

"I love you, Keys, and I'm glad this whole situation makes you happy," he said into her jacket. She wrapped both of her arms around his shoulders, pulling him in closer.

"Love you too, David. You basically made me able to trust people again. Wouldn't give that up for a trillion eddies," she said. She looked up and to the right, at the wall of the building, and perked up, letting go of David to walk over to the neon-lit Burrito XXL machine leaning against the concrete. "You know what flavor you want? I'll dial it in for you."

"I just get the regular ones," David said. Kiwi tapped the buttons to order two Rosados (for herself and Lucy), one Turquesa (for Becca) and one plain, as requested; the machine whirred and spat each one out in turn, as the system processed the small transfer of eddies from her Agent. David walked up and began scooping them into his arms, holding the large burritos somewhat awkwardly; Kiwi had a hard time holding back laughter at the sight.

"You need some help with those?" she asked. "I can carry a couple of them, if you want."

"I'd appreciate that," David said, reaching over to her so she could pick two out of his arms.

"See, that's a good reason to get ridiculous chrome. If Becca had come back with two extra arms so she could carry more burritos, I'd probably have just been like, sure, okay," Kiwi said.

"Jesus, seeing her almost a foot taller is unsettling enough to begin with," David said, half-seriously. "That plus a set of extra arms, she'd be living in my nightmares."

Notes:

Calm before the storm.

Next chapter is going to be a Big One. If you liked 27, you're going to make an entire shit in your pants when you see what I have up my sleeve for 50. If you didn't like 27: I listened to the criticisms and 50 is going to be a lot less janky (and the low-power mirror is just going to be the chapter posted on AO3 like usual, since I'm not doing branching paths this time). Regardless, it's gonna be a sec, but updates are gonna be regularly posted in Discord as I work on it.

Following up from the TW: if the way Kiwi describes her relationship with Faraday hits close to home for you, there are resources available to you. If you're in the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 800-799-7233. The UK equivalent is available at 0808 2000 247.

Chapter 50: Hammerhead [VIII]

Notes:

IT'S HERE MOTHERFUCKERS

 

Join the Discord if you haven't already!

CLICK HERE TO READ CHAPTER 50

 

CONTENT WARNING: CONTAINS MUCH MORE BLOOD AND GORE THAN USUAL AND MENTIONS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE.

Notes:

Yes, this is another Twine chapter. No, you don't have to read this one multiple times, I learned my lesson. This one, because it doesn't do branching path fuckery, will have an AO3 mirror for the no-music version as chapter 51; give me a bit to put it up (getting this finished kinda took the wind out of me for a minute).

 

Soundtrack available on Bandcamp.

 

Special thanks to ONI INC for allowing the use of his song "Sandevistan." He seems like a cool dude and his music's pretty good; if you like "trap metal" like Ghostemane, HO99O9, City Morgue, etc, give him a look.

Chapter 51: Hammerhead [VIII] - LITE VERSION

Notes:

If you read chapter 50, you don't need to worry about this one. This is not a proper chapter 51, this is the plaintext AO3 mirror of chapter 50.

 

SAME TRIGGER WARNINGS AS 50 APPLY. THE TEXT IS COMPLETELY UNCHANGED FROM THAT CHAPTER.

 

Join the Discord if you've made it this far without doing so! You'll get progress updates on new chapters, you can talk about it with other readers, it's a fun crowd.

"You know what kind of huscle you're gonna be up against?" Falco asked as the engine of the Chevillion Emperor purred, sending the car moving at a steady clip down the highway south of Night City.

Kiwi took a drag on the cigarette she was hanging out of the passenger side window, and blew it out, away from the others.

"Convoy's two trucks, three APCs, according to the shard Rogue gave us," she said. "Figure the trucks are civilians, the APCs are huscle. Don't know what kind of firepower they've got."

"Nothing smell fishy about this job to you?" he asked. She shrugged, and looked at the other three in the back as if to ask for their input. 

"I mean, it's Rogue," David said. "Figure we can trust any job she throws us. I don't think she'd pull our asses out of the fire like that and then immediately send us on a suicide run, you know?"

"Fair point, I guess," Falco said.

The silence hung awkwardly for a moment.

"You four didn't actually tell me what the plan is, past my part," he said.

"Kiwi's gonna post up on a cliff near the ambush point, be our eyes and ears from above," David started. Kiwi nodded in understanding. "Becca, Lucy and I are gonna handle ground-level. We're gonna try to find cover, disable the vehicles before they spot us, shake the gonks down before they realize what's going on."

"And if they start fighting back?" Falco asked, somewhat concerned. David shrugged.

"We improvise," he said. Falco chuckled.

"Let's hope that doesn't end with me bringing you four gonks home in a garbage bag," he said. The smell of a massive pile of garbage off the side of the road wafted in through the open window, and Kiwi retched slightly, throwing her still-burning smoke out onto the moon-lit desert sand and hastily rolling the window back up. David looked up at her, his eyebrows raised.

"You alright, Keys?" he asked.

"Just not a fan of the odor out here," she said.

"Hey, at least it's nature," Lucy chimed in. Kiwi raised an eyebrow.

"That's... definitely a word for what that smells like," she said. Becca giggled and wrapped an arm around David's shoulder, and he twitched a bit in his seat; it was still odd for him being the small one of the group, now.

The SUV continued to speed down the freeway at a steady 70 miles an hour. Lucy leaned her head onto David's other shoulder as she waited.

If it were any other situation, and they weren't on a job that David had a very bad feeling about, he would've felt relaxed. Instead, he felt a bit suffocated. Lucy picked her head back up, allowing him to take a breath, and looked at Kiwi.

"Got a smoke?" she asked.

"Trust me, you don't wanna let that smell in," Kiwi said.

"You've got me craving one," Lucy said. "Might be my last." Kiwi groaned and fished around in the pocket of her jacket for her pack, and tossed it back into the back seat, where it smacked David directly in the face, causing him to grunt in surprise.

"Fuck, sorry, D," she said, her eyes wide with shock. David smiled, thumbed the pack in his lap for a second, considered taking one to ease his anxiety, and handed it to Lucy, who promptly fished one out.

"You're good," he said.

"Light?" Lucy asked.

"Should be in the pack," Kiwi said, and Lucy fished around in it, producing a miniature lighter from where a few of the cigarettes had previously been.

"Smart," she said as she cracked the window, leaned her head towards it, and lit the Strawberry Fields cigarette.

As she exhaled and the cigarette smoldered between two of her fingers, Lucy looked at the pack and smirked.

"Kinda funny," she said.

"Hm?" Kiwi asked, waiting for her smokes back.

"We're fixing to hit the people who make our smokes," Lucy said. "Hope we're not about to cause a shortage." Kiwi chuckled, as Lucy handed the pack back over with her free hand.

"Hey, good excuse to quit if we do," she said. "Wonder what the Nomads do for smokes."

"Most of us just smoke pot if we gotta have something in our lungs," Falco said.

"I can get behind that," Becca chimed in, smiling. Her hand twitched a little, involuntarily, around David's shoulder, and he jittered a bit in surprise.

"You okay, Becca?" he asked, worried. Becca looked at her hand for a second, confused, and looked back at David.

"Yeah, I'm fine," she said. "Just... still getting used to the new chrome."

"So are the rest of us," Kiwi quipped.

"You bring any bud, by the way, choom?" Becca asked, looking up at Falco. "Could use a little."

"Should be a couple joints in the glove box," Falco said. "Kiwi?" She sighed and opened it, producing a long, skinny, yellowed joint made with rolling papers that had to be at least fifteen years old.

"Hey, you're not holding out on us this time," David said, smiling. "We really are starting to be a family." Falco smiled.

"Hey, could be our last shot," he said, taking the joint and lighter from Kiwi in one hand and sparking it up. He inhaled deeply, then passed it back to Becca, swerving the SUV slightly as he coughed.

She inhaled greedily from the joint, herself, exhaling a cloud of acrid, skunk-like smoke into the interior of the car.

"Good shit, as always, choomba," she said to Falco, who nodded with a smile, still coughing into one forearm as he kept the car steady with the other. She waved it at the other three. "Any of you all want some?"

"I'm alright," Lucy said. Kiwi nodded.

"Gotta stay sharp," she said. "I'm your eyes and ears, right?" David, however, reached for the joint.

"Could use some, choom," he said. "Nerves are shot right now." He took it and took a long puff, exhaling his own cloud.

"Fuck, guess I'm gonna be high anyways, if you three are hotboxing the car," Kiwi said, aggravated as she rolled down the window.

"Sorry," David said, sheepishly.

"It's alright. Just... hope this doesn't go sideways past what we can handle," she said.

---

David started a private message conversation with Viktor Vektor.

[22:20] David: becca's shaky.

[22:20] Viktor Vektor: fuck.

[22:20] Viktor Vektor: are you at home or on the job.

[22:20] David: on the job. heading to the AO.

[22:20] Viktor Vektor: fuck. she sober?

[22:20] David: just took a big drag off a joint

[22:20] Viktor Vektor: should keep her ok. you'll know if things start getting really bad.

[22:20] Viktor Vektor: if they do, get her to me ASAP

[22:20] David: will do bud 👍

---

The SUV rolled to a stop as David's attention turned back to the world around him, the wheels kicking up sand as Falco pulled up to the ambush spot. The cloud hung around the car for a moment before settling back down on the ground; someone on an ARCH Nazaré came tearing past, nearly blinding the group with their headlights and looking back at the group through their helmet as they disappeared towards the city.

"Dickhead bikers," Becca said.

"Not a fan of two wheels?" Falco asked, smiling.

"Gimme four any day," she said.

"I get you," he said. "Anyways, we're here."

Kiwi unbuckled her seat belt and stepped out, stretching her arms and legs and cracking her back as she took in the night sky.

"How long we got to set up?" Becca asked as she stepped out, doing the same.

"Convoy should be coming through in 20," Kiwi said. David and Lucy shuffled out of the car through the back passenger door themselves, and the former looked over at Kiwi.

"Mind if I bum a smoke before you head up, choom?" he asked.

"Sure, babe," Kiwi said, fishing her pack back out of her jacket. "Still feel bad about getting you into these."

"I'm not addicted or anything, just... need to calm my nerves," David said, taking the pack from her. "Something about this job's got me on edge." He fished for a smoke and the lighter, then sparked it and took a puff, handing the pack back to Kiwi.

"We'll be alright," Lucy said. "Should be a milk run. Rogue's just testing us. We've got this."

"Yeah, this shouldn't be a problem. Corpo fucks are harder to deal with than 6th Street, but... ain't by that much," Becca chimed in. David puffed the cigarette again.

"Think they're right on this one, honestly," Kiwi said. "I'll head up to the cliff, get situated where I've got a good view. You three, sit tight until you hear from me." David nodded, and Kiwi walked off into the night, towards the large, cliffed hill at one side of the road.

As Falco drove back towards the city, Becca scanned the area, looking around to see if there was any potential cover.

"Think I should set up the bipod on this baby somewhere? Not sure if I really need it," she said, thinking out loud more than she expected any real input. David shrugged.

"Shouldn't really need that, if everything goes right, choom," he said. "Wouldn't worry about it either way." Becca pouted.

"What the hell are we gonna do to disable them, then?" she asked. David looked at her, an eyebrow raised.

"We have two netrunners, plus you with that thing Vik gave you. Why do it the caveman way?" he asked. "Better to just pop the electronics instead of risking the goods." Lucy smiled.

"That's where I come in," she said. "Spent the last couple of days working on this problem. Kiwi and I ended up putting together a virus that'll knock out the autopilot, make it think it's already at its destination and refuse to accept a new one until we let it. Anyone tries to jack in and break through themselves, they'll get their deck fried." Becca feigned an exaggerated yawn.

"So, we're doing this the easy way," she said.

"I mean, it's a klep job, not a kill job," David said, taking one final puff of his smoke, and then tossing the butt to the ground, stomping it into the sand with his heel. "Not really like with Faraday. Plus, more we kill, more likely it is we end up with Biotechnica up our asses long-term." Becca shrugged.

"Hey, far as I'm concerned, bring it," she said. "Kinda wish I could take the whole company down."

"You're starting to sound like Silverhand," Kiwi said, through their Agents, her voice crackling slightly from the interference caused by the dust. "Careful with that kind of thinking. Remember where he ended up."

"What, most famous rockerboy of all time?" Becca asked.

"Dead, you gonk," Kiwi said, annoyance creeping into her voice. "Anyways, I'm up top. No sign of trouble yet."

"Keys is right," David said. "Kinda don't think that's really how the city works." Becca scoffed.

"Who the fuck are you to tell me how the city works, academy boy?" she said. David sighed.

"Bex, what the hell?" Lucy asked, trying to keep her anger bottled in; she didn't want to escalate the situation, but this needed to be shut down. "David's been through a lot, too."

"Oh? Because the way I see it, every time something happens to the gonk, we all just bounce right the fuck back because of his fucking batshit luck," Becca spat at Lucy. "When I lost Sasha, I didn't have three fucking-"

"Becca," Kiwi said.

"What?" Becca asked.

"Shut the fuck up. I'm sorry, but shut the fuck up." she said, extreme irritation in her voice. "Each and every one of us has been through a lot, okay? It's not exactly  helpful to try and weigh each other's bullshit against each other. Kid's lost three parents. Most people only get two in the first place." Becca's arm twitched, more than previously, jerking the HMG to the side a bit, and Lucy frowned.

Becca looked at David. He was trying his absolute best to hide it and bury his face in the sleeve of his EMT jacket, but he was crying. She frowned and walked over to him.

"D, I'm..." she started. "I'm sorry. This job's got me in a fucked up place, and..."

"You're going cyberpsycho," Lucy said. "Your arm's been twitching." Becca sighed.

"Yeah," she said. "I've been taking my immunos, but... think I overdid it. I'm gonna try and keep my shit together through this job, but soon as we get our pay from Rogue, I need to stop by Vik and get him to rip some of this shit out."

"Honestly, I think we should probably call it," Lucy said.

"And piss Rogue off?" Becca asked. "Bad idea. No. I think I can keep it together through the job."

"D, what's your take?" Lucy asked, looking over at him. He took several deep breaths, regaining his composure.

"I... don't know," he said. "I would say call Falco, have him take Becca to Vik, rest of us handle the job ourselves. Should be fine with the two of us on the ground. But..."

"You know I wouldn't let you do that," Becca said, completing his sentence, and sighed. "Plus, I don't think we have time."

"Correct on that front," Kiwi said. "Convoy incoming."

"Fuck," David said, wiping his eyes with his jacket to try and hide that he'd been crying, as it wasn't exactly the best look for intimidation.

"I got you, D," Lucy said. "Let me take point on this one."

The convoy's headlights loomed, tiny in the distance. Ten of them. Two trucks, three APCs, as promised. Dust began to kick up towards the group as the headlights grew larger.

"Lucy, go-time," Kiwi said.

"On it," Lucy said, and her holo-interface popped up in front of her as she scanned for the lead truck. After a moment of fiddling, she smiled. "Got it."

Just as the truck started to come properly into view, its wheels skidded as its back half launched upwards from the extremely sudden brake.

"Nice one, Luce," Becca said, grinning. Lucy glared at her, and she frowned. The three advanced towards the broken-down truck, David unholstering his revolvers and Lucy taking out her silenced Unity; as they got closer, they could hear angry muttering from the truck, then heard a sizzling noise that caused the anger to turn to alarm. 

Workers in Biotechnica uniforms, some wearing neon yellow hard hats, started to pour out of the truck, as the other vehicles came to a stop behind. There weren't any mercenaries, yet.

"We're here to get a crate you're carrying," Lucy called out. "Don't give us any scop and we won't give any back."

"Oh, fuck, you're Rogue's crew," one of the workers said. "Yeah, go on, take it. We were expecting you guys. Fuck, you didn't need to take our truck out, you could've just flagged us down."

David and Lucy blushed with embarrassment as they holstered their weapons, and Becca groaned.

"Wait, they knew we were coming? This doesn't add up." Kiwi's voice had noticeable concern in it; this was a welcome development, but not one she had prepared for.

"Well?" the worker asked. "It's in the truck, we're not gonna give you any scop," he added. Lucy looked at David and motioned for him to follow her, as Rebecca kept her HMG trained on the crowd of workers.

---

The night was eerily silent as David and Lucy made their way to the back of the truck. A worker, standing by its loading door, gave them a nod, and lifted the door up, giving it a solid shove to push it all the way to the roof; he started to pull a ramp down, but David waved him away and pulled himself up onto the truck, before offering Lucy a hand.

She took it and joined her input, patting dust off of herself as she stood up. The interior of the truck was almost pitch-dark except for small, almost imperceptible lights on some of the crates.

"Should've gotten Kiroshis with low-light," David grumbled to himself.

"Got you covered," Kiwi said over the horn. "Switching over to your optics now."

"How's that gonna help?" he asked. Kiwi sighed, the sound of her voice crackling a bit as she did so.

"I'll give you the techie explanation later if you want it, but short version, I'm just putting a filter over your visual data," she said. "It's in the back, straight ahead of you." David nodded at Lucy and moved towards the back of the truck, into the darkness.

"...Becca, what the fuck!?" Kiwi's voice rang out again after a moment, the worry palpable in it, followed immediately by an ear-splitting burst of heavy machine gun fire from outside the truck.

Fight-or-flight adrenaline kicked in, and David rushed out the back of the truck with the roughly dog-sized crate tucked under his arm, as Lucy quickly followed. An assault rifle bullet whizzed by his head, grazing his cheek slightly and making him wince in pain as a tiny spat of blood followed it.

Taking stock of the situation as he and Lucy rushed for cover, he saw that most of the Biotechnica workers were on the ground in pools of blood, either dead or twitching, several of them effectively crudely chopped to pieces of indistinct meat by gunfire. The two ducked in front of the truck's hood, using it as makeshift cover; Becca, too, was sitting there, cradling her HMG, hyperventilating.

"Becca, what the fuck!?" Kiwi asked again, over the horn.

"One of them was... was going for a gun," she stammered.

"No, he wasn't! He scratched his fucking shoulder, you gonk!" Kiwi asked. There was anger audible in her voice, but the worry and fear overtook it. Becca took several deep breaths; her eyes were bloodshot and her hands were shaking.

David sighed as bullets pounded into the metal of the box truck.

"Kiwi, let it go," he said. "We'll deal with it when we're not taking fire, alright?" He looked Becca in the eyes. "You okay?" he asked.

"No," she said. "No, I'm not."

"Think you can keep it together 'till we're out of this, choom?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. David set the crate down and put his hands on her cheeks, holding her face.

"Just stay here," he said. "I've got this."

"David, what are you about to-" Lucy started, before David seemed to vanish, with only the activation noise of his Sandevistan giving any sign that he had been crouching there.

Time seemed to freeze for the young edgerunner as his cyberware took over, supercharging his reflexes, and he dashed out from in front of the truck, unholstering both of his revolvers. Six in each cylinder.

He scanned the horizon. The APCs had fully unloaded, and the Biotechnica private security were crouched, frozen in place, behind assorted cover; some were using the APCs themselves, others had deployed barriers in the sand. David counted fourteen. Two fireteams of five, one of four. Two bullets short.

He walked through the no man's land separating the truck from the rest of the convoy, stepping over corpses and meat and avoiding bullets that seemed to hang in the air, and made his way behind their cover. Taking his time in the slow motion of his Sandevistan, he lined up shots at each mercenary's head, and pulled the triggers six times each.

Two mercenaries were left unaccounted for. One had a Rostović Kolac marksman rifle propped up on a metal barrier, using it as a makeshift shooting platform as he crouched down, waiting for one of the group to move from in front of the truck. The other was hefting a heavy machine gun of his own, almost identical to Becca's if not for the more muted color scheme.

He walked towards the mercenary with the HMG, put his forearm around the merc's neck, and pulled back as hard as he could while driving his knee into the small of his back. Turning towards the other mercenary once he had applied sufficient force, he walked up behind him and punched him hard, directly in the back of his neck.

The Sandevistan began to wear off, easing David back into reality as each bullet made its way to its target, punching through the mercs' helmets and bursting their heads into a spray of gore. The force of his attacks on the remaining two began to take effect, as well, with the machine-gun-wielding merc seeming to fold back in on himself as his back and neck broke with a sickening, deep crunch, and the merc with the Kolac's skull shattering as if one of the convoy's vehicles had hit him full-force. The latter twitched on the ground for a moment, leaking blood from the bottom of his helmet onto the sand as if to punctuate the action, and then expired, following his comrades.

"All clear," David called out.

"Nice job," Kiwi said, shock in her voice.

"Hey, I always deliver," he said. Lucy stood up first, walking towards the APCs and grimacing at the field of gore in front of her; Becca followed sheepishly, frowning.

"I'm sorry," Becca said. David walked up to her, held her cheeks again, and kissed her on the forehead.

"It's alright," he said. "We made it out of this, right?" Becca smiled weakly as her hand twitched again, jerking her machine gun slightly.

"Not out of the woods yet," Kiwi said.

David raised an eyebrow.

"We're not? I don't see anyone," he said.

"Fourteen down. If they had three fireteams, that's fifteen. We've still got one problem to deal with," Kiwi said.

"You picking up any extra signatures around us?" Lucy asked, much more able to navigate the technical side of the issue than her input.

"Furthest back APC," Kiwi said, confirming it. "If I'm right on what this is, grab the crate and fucking run."

The door to the APC in question, sitting several yards back from the others, slammed open. The group couldn't see who was exiting, but they could hear several large thuds on the sand and asphalt, the steps of someone with serious chrome weighing them down.

---

"Finally, a little fun," a raspy, somewhat high-pitched voice let out as its source emerged from behind the APC. "Shame you three are against me tonight. This kind of carnage, we could've been good friends."

The man was tall, standing easily six foot five, but with a toned, almost rail-skinny body covered head to toe in what seemed like black leather. The exceptions were a single eye, covered or replaced (none of them could quite tell) with what appeared to be an old camera lens shining in the blood-splattered headlights, and the tube of a steel respirator running from his face around to his back.

"Fuck," Kiwi said.

"You know this gonk?" David asked.

"By rep," she said. "Get the crate and get the fuck out. Nightstalker's not someone you wanna get in a fight with."

"Is that a fourth guest to the party, hiding somewhere?" Nightstalker asked, in an almost sing-song voice. A crude, almost visibly bootleg holo-interface appeared in the camera lens. "Found you," he added, speaking over the group's comms; his face was utterly invisible beneath the leather of his bodysuit, but his voice made it very clear he was smiling.

Becca walked ahead of the group, a serious and determined look on her face, the fear seemingly having evaporated from her.

"Becca, we need to fucking delta, what are you doing?" Kiwi asked.

"Keys is right. We need to run," David said. Becca looked back at him and smiled, weakly.

"I'm the gonk that got us into this clusterfuck," she said. "You two, delta. I'll slow the fucker down."

"Bex, you don't need-" Lucy started.

"Luce, if I don't make it, come get my body and make sure I get something nice on my niche," Becca said, before looking back at Nightstalker and taking a fighting stance, digging her right heel into the asphalt behind her and raising her HMG. "And make sure the cats are taken care of, alright?"

"I see the Mox whore has some balls on her," Nightstalker said, amused. "I respect that. Makes it more fun to make you scream and bleed."

"Better not see you two gonks still if I look back," Becca said under her breath, barely loud enough for the comms to pick her up. David and Lucy took the hint, the former scooping the crate up under his arm as they ran into the distance, moving towards Kiwi's vantage point. "Kiwi, give me an advantage?"

"He's got black ICE," she said. "Not gonna work. If I try, he'll fry me."

"Fuck," she said, annoyed.

"Your netrunner's good," the mercenary said. "Maybe I'll go for her next, once I'm done with you. Carve out that good eye of hers."

"You got a thing for nerds?" Becca asked, stalling him.

"Solos like you are a bit too... used to pain. Netrunners are soft and squishy. Easier to break. Easier to have some real fun with," Nightstalker rasped. Becca's lips curled upward in a predatory, almost shark-like facsimile of a smile, taking sick joy in the wrath she was about to bring upon him.

"Well, I better fuckin' beat you, then," she said. 

Nightstalker laughed and drew two long knives from the sheaths at his waist, their slightly rusted blades glistening in the moonlight.

"Let's see you try, cunt," he said.

Becca unloaded a burst from her machine gun, sending shell casings flying and causing her feet to crack the asphalt from the recoil. Nightstalker raised his knives, seemingly slashing the bullets out of the air with them as his arms turned into a blur. The gun clicked as it reached the end of its ammo belt, and she grimaced, tossing it to the side.

"Already out of ammo, whore?" he asked, his raspy sing-song voice already starting to sound like nails on a chalkboard to her.

"Doesn't seem like it matters much," she said, raising her fists. "You have a Sandy?"

"Kerenzikov," he said, grinning under the leather that hid his face. "Means I get to really enjoy everything." Becca noticed a bulge at his crotch that previously hadn't been there, and tried desperately to ignore it.

Fucking sick gonk, she thought to herself.

She was at a disadvantage. Her Mantis Blades were easily a match for his knives, if not surpassing them, but they would be awkward to use in this sort of fight. Trying to kick him would open her up. They were a finisher, not a starter, for situations where she could go in unarmed and conceivably win.

Her hand cannon was similar: if she got in close and got in a good palm strike, she could blow him to pieces with it, but that meant getting in close, and getting in close meant taking injuries.

She noted the irony that, if he had been wielding a gun, she would likely have a much better chance; the Scavs she'd shown her new kit off to David with were all trying to shoot, not stab, and it meant she could simply get in their faces with her Sandevistan and throw them off guard. They had practically been easy meat compared to Nightstalker.

She scanned her surroundings, praying that one of the corpo guards had been wielding something more useful than her HMG. The crossguard and hilt of a katana stuck out from a sheath on one's back; she sighed in immediate relief and turned on her Sandevistan, stuttering time as she flash-stepped over to it, pulling it out of the sheath in one smooth motion.

Becca was no kenjutsu master, but she figured she could fumble through it; she'd seen enough anime and old samurai flicks to pick up the basic stances, and she figured from there it wasn't going to be any different from swinging a bat or a machete, both of which she'd done plenty. She twirled it in her hands, pointing it at a rough 45-degree angle down from her midsection and gripping the hilt in both palms, her right hand leading near the crossguard and her left supporting near the pommel.

The solo crouched down slightly, digging her left foot backwards into the bloody sand surrounding the man's corpse, and Nightstalker laughed.

"I see you've got some tricks up your sleeve, little whore!" he roared. "And here I was, thinking I was just going to carve up a scared little cunt."

"Do you ever shut the fuck up?" Becca asked, gritting her teeth, and dashed forwards, lifting the blade to strike.

Activating her Sandevistan again to throw her opponent off and maximize the force, Becca swung the sword down at her opponent, clashing blades with his knives and sending sparks onto the asphalt with a horrible screech that hurt her ears.

"Too slow," Nightstalker said, slashing at her stomach with his right-hand knife while continuing to block Becca's katana with the left. The knife cut through her subdermal armor as easily as it cut through her jacket, sending pain shooting through her side and a small gout of blood to the asphalt; Vik had set her up to take bullets, not stabs and slashes. 

She grimaced and winced, pushing down harder on the sword and pulling it away, stepping back out of range and holding her wounded side with one hand. Her pain editor blocked the worst of it- he'd cut her liver, and an unaugmented, baseline human would've been on the ground, screaming- but she could still tell she was injured. She cursed Vik for not turning it up to maximum power.

"See? What did I tell you?" Nightstalker asked. "Women who fight don't take pain as well. Not as fun to cut into a well-done steak as one that's raw and bleeding."

"What, are you gonna fuckin' eat me, now?" Becca asked. He laughed.

"You've got too much chrome on you," he said. "Maybe your friends when we're done." Becca gritted her teeth, advanced, and swung the blade again, from the left side.

This time, it hit leather, cutting through the suit at his left thigh and hitting solid metal, sending yet more sparks to the ground. The blade dug in, but failed to draw blood or do any real damage, essentially denting him. Her eyes widened in surprise.

"You're a fucking full-borg," she said.

"Not quite," Nightstalker rasped, before lifting his knife and stabbing it down into Becca's shoulder. She let out a groan of agony as her vision briefly went red, her bright blood splattering across the pavement as Nightstalker pulled the knife back out, sending her to the ground. 

She activated the Sandevistan again on reflex, and with a whirr, she picked herself back up, almost teleporting back to a standing position before Nightstalker's eyes.

"Motherfucker," she grunted, trying to balance the katana. She sighed, tossed it off to the side, and reached into her jacket pocket.

"More tricks up your sleeve? I guess the Mox don't teach you to fight clean," Nightstalker said.

"Yeah, you could say that," Becca grunted through gritted teeth.

---

FIVE YEARS AGO

"Hey, sis, you alright?"

Pilar's voice brought Becca to attention immediately, forcing her out of the daze she'd been in for a second.

"Yeah," she said. "I'm good. Sorry, had a late night last night."

"They still got you bouncing over at Lizzie's?" Pilar asked, smiling.

"Nah. Sent me after someone who decided he'd rather rough his joytoy up than pay," she said, yawning. "So, what's this shit going down at Totentanz?"

"Big metal show," Pilar said, walking down the street and gesturing for her to move along. "Bacillus, Neural Decay, Synthetik Slaughter, GWAR..." Becca's eyes went wide.

"Oh, fuck, we're going to a GWAR show? Got any snow on you? Don't wanna be falling asleep for this shit," Becca said, breaking into a jog and catching up with her brother.

"That's my little sis," Pilar said, smiling. "Don't worry, I got you." He produced a small glass vial of white powder- synthcoke- and tossed it to Becca, who caught it deftly. She popped the rubber cork and held it up to her nose, sniffing deeply, and coughed.

"Alright, I'm awake," she said. "Let's go fuck some shit up."

Four hours later, Becca was slumped in a chair, covered in assorted multi-colored fake fluids, and surrounded by exceptionally loud noise and heavily-chromed revelers drinking and moshing. A half-empty beer in a transparent plastic cup sat on the table in front of her, glowing red in the dim light of the club.

She had already been tired; Pilar's synthcoke had kept the ravages of lack of sleep from taking their toll, on their own, but stacking the physical exertion of jumping into the pit on top meant that, at this particular moment, she really, really did not want to move.

A tall, thin gangoon wearing an Arasaka-emblazoned plate carrier in place of a shirt, and with red-orange LED lights in place of about three-quarters of his face, walked up to her. She recognized him vaguely from when she'd been working Lizzie's; Dip-Dip or Fuck-Fuck or something.

"Hey, Mox girl," the gonk said, in a rough, raspy voice. "You good?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," she said, lazily waving him off. "Tired." He stood there for a second, looking at her.

"Hey, I know you," he said. "Seen you working the front at the BD bar a few times. You're the one who doesn't try to give me any scop for looking my best."

She would've rolled her eyes if they'd been fully open. She wasn't as aggro about other gangs as some of the girls were, but that was more out of a desire to avoid more fights than out of any particular love for Maelstrom.

"Yeah," she said. "That's me." He started reaching into one of the pockets of his plate carrier, pulling out a solid black inhaler, and handed it to her. She looked at it quizzically.

"This'll perk you up, get you back in the pit," the gonk said. "C'mon, have some more fun. Don't worry, I'll keep you safe in there."

Right as Becca was contemplating using whatever mystery drug was in the inhaler, Pilar came back from the restroom with a foul look on his face.

"Hey, fuck off, Dum-Dum," he said. "That's my sis you're trying to hook up with." The thought of fucking this guy made Becca blanch. She figured what Maelstrom gangoons were equipped with downstairs only bore the slightest resemblance to human genitals, and she didn't want to find out any more details than that, given how most of them looked.

"Wasn't trying to hook up with her," Dum-Dum said. "Just paying back a kindness." Pilar looked at the inhaler and came very close to swatting it out of Becca's hand, an alarmed look on his face.

"How in the fuck is giving my sister Black Lace paying her back for anything!? You're gonna make my sis a fucking cyberpsycho," he snapped. She blanched again, realizing what she was holding in her hand.

"Hey, ain't like living with you's any less likely to make that happen," Dum-Dum said.

"The fuck are you doing giving out combat drugs in a Totentanz pit?" Pilar asked. "You're gonna end up making Trauma Team blast the place up because some corpo tourist got his skull cracked."

Combat drugs, Becca thought. Huh. Might come in handy at some point. Under the two men's noses, the 16-year-old solo-to-be slipped the inhaler into her jacket pocket.

---

Back in the present, Becca produced the same black inhaler from her jacket. In the five years since she'd acquired it, she'd stuck an old Mr. Yuk sticker she'd found at a junk dealer onto it, wrapping around the chamber containing its contents, along with a small handwritten label reading "EMERGENCY" in pastel-teal ballpoint pen.

"The fuck is that?" Nightstalker asked, legitimate confusion coming into his voice.

Becca said a quick, silent prayer that the drug was still going to work.

Over the edge. Time to go all in.

She held the inhaler up to her mouth, pressed the button to release its contents, and sucked in acrid smoke, making her eyes go wide and even more bloodshot, almost looking as if the blood vessels were going to burst. She coughed and hacked for a second, and Nightstalker advanced, assuming he was about to get an easy killing blow.

Her mind fractured, and her face adopted a deranged rictus, her mind solely on the blood and carnage she could create using the cyborg serial killer as her canvas of meat.

She was going to beat him at his own game.

"Let's fucking party," she said, activating her Sandevistan and flash-stepping forwards to meet him.

Becca's fist caught Nightstalker in the stomach, making him wheeze air out of his respirator loudly as he stumbled back. He swiped one of his long knives down, hoping to take her right arm off, and cut through flesh; it hit titanium bone, sending its own sparks to the asphalt and burning the surrounding flesh slightly. She grinned even harder, accepting the pain, loving the pain. All there was in the world right now, for her, was pain and blood, and it was a world of beauty.

"That the best you've got, motherfucker!?" she yelled, directly in his face, before spitting in the camera lens and grabbing the knife by the blade with her other hand. It cut through the flesh of her palm, sending more pain through her and trickling bright red blood onto the concrete, glistening in the moonlight. She wrenched it out of his hand, almost sending him to the ground in the process.

"I'm gonna fuck your corpse when I'm done with you," Nightstalker rasped, anger starting to come into his voice.

"You're not gonna have anything to fuck with," Becca snarled, slashing at his uninjured leg with the knife. He attempted to block it with his remaining one, but the force of Becca's synth-muscles caused it to crack against the force and shatter, sending shards of slightly rusted metal scattering across the pavement.

"Fucking cunt! You broke my fucking knife!" he screamed. "I think I'm gonna keep you alive and make you watch while I cut your friends apart. I bet that boy with the Sandy is gonna scream real nice while I'm fucking his ass with my other knife!"

The fucker's getting creative, Becca thought to herself, grinning maniacally. I'm gonna make this piece of shit fucking bleed.

He grabbed her knife with his free hand, exerting every bit of force his cybernetic arm would allow, and barely managed to free it from her grip. He slashed at her wildly, hitting flesh and sending blood shooting to the pavement; rather than slow her down, however, it seemingly energized her, every new wound and every new shock of pain sending her into a blood frenzy.

A large blade shot out from her knee as she delivered a side kick, slicing into his midsection and causing him to scream in pain, a beautiful scream that cut through the night sky and energized her even further. Dark, almost blue-black blood spurted onto the asphalt from the wound as she withdrew the blade and punched him hard in the face, cracking the camera lens and sending him reeling to the ground.

He desperately picked himself back up, panting, and charged at Becca, his own adrenaline blocking the pain. His fist rocketed forwards into her gut, knocking the wind out of her.

"I'm gonna fucking kill you, cunt," he spat. "I'm gonna fucking kill you, and then I'm gonna fuck your dead body, and then I'm gonna find a real fun way to fuck all of your friends up."

She sucked in air, trying desperately to bring herself back to her feet. The injuries were starting to catch up to her. All or nothing.

She activated her Sandevistan and shoved her left hand, palm-first, into his chest, directly over his heart. It let out a hard, slow thump beneath the leather and flesh as time stuttered and sped back up.

"Like fuck you are," she said, and fired her hand cannon, sending the full force of a directed 40mm explosive charge through his body, separating his arms and head from his chest, and turning most of his torso into unrecognizable gore and meat.

Her work of art. Her masterpiece.

Everything went black, and she collapsed, unconscious, as the drug began to wear off and the fight caught up to her.

---

The air was uncomfortable as David, Lucy and Kiwi waited for their ride. An explosion rocked the pavement and set the Earth shaking, where the fight was, worrying David and Lucy.

"Is she..." David started.

"I think she won," Kiwi said, her eyes wide. "I don't have visual data from her anymore, but I'm still getting vitals." David and Lucy grinned.

"Fucking nova!" David shouted, pumping his fist. "Fuck, I knew Becca was gonna pull it off."

"Guess she did," Lucy said, breathing a sigh of palpable relief.

"They're faint, though. He fucked her up pretty bad, and she had to... you two ever see a drug that comes in a black inhaler before?" Kiwi asked, sidetracked by her unfamiliarity with the inhaler Becca had used.

Lucy sort of stared at her quizzically, while David stopped dead in his tracks, his relief replaced with annoyance.

"Black Lace," he grunted. "Fuck. Fucking... idiot!"

"Never heard of it, what's that do?" Lucy asked. "Seemed like it helped Bex out, if she won the fight."

"Hardcore drugs," David said. "Maelstrom shit. Pretty much magical gas that makes you go crazy. If she wasn't already pretty much fucked from the chrome, she is now."

Large headlights from a Nomad-modded pickup truck started speeding towards them, skidding in a 90-degree turn, and a tall, tanned mercenary with her hair in a braided bun stepped out of the driver's seat.

"Hey, David," Panam said. "These your girlfriends?"

"Two of them," he said. "We've got one down. I'm not leaving her behind. You good going back into the AO, or are we gonna have to carry her?"

"All clear down there?" she asked.

"Should be," he said.

"Well, alright then," Panam said. "Get in."

The truck pulled up to the scene of the carnage, its CHOOH2 engine whirring to a stop as it approached the blood-splattered vehicles and the field of gore surrounding them.

"Jesus," Panam muttered, under her breath. "This how you usually do jobs?" she asked, more loudly.

"This one's weird," Lucy said. "Personal stuff came in." Panam sighed.

"Rogue's gotta stop giving me the weird ones," she said. David noticed Becca, slumped on the ground, in a pool of her own blood, and jumped out of the truck, slamming the door open and dashing over to her with his Sandevistan.

"Rebecca," he said. "Fuck, Rebecca, I'm... fuck..." Tears were starting to well up in his eyes as he crouched down next to her. Lucy and Kiwi walked up behind him, putting their hands on his shoulder, and Lucy put her palms on both sides of his face.

"Look at me," she said. "We're gonna get her to Vik, and she's gonna be okay, alright? She's not dead. She's still got vitals." David was breaking down, and Lucy knew she needed to be the one keeping it together for him, even if the sight made her feel every bit as horrible. She looked at Panam.

"How fast does that truck go?" she asked. Panam smiled.

"Pretty fucking fast," Panam said, finally in her wheelhouse.

"You got any MaxDocs?" Lucy asked.

"I keep a first aid kit," Panam said, moving back to the front seat of the car and fishing around in the glove box. She produced an airhypo and tossed it to Lucy, who crouched down next to Becca, put it between her lips, and fired it, sending life-giving gas into her lungs and making her wheeze deeply and cough.

The blood welling from the various cuts and slices Nightstalker had made into her seemed to slow down, and Lucy and David hefted her up, the latter grumbling to himself about how much heavier she was with her new chrome as relief set in.

The two carried her to the back seat doors of the truck and climbed in, laying her across their bodies somewhat awkwardly, her head in David's lap and her legs bunched up across Lucy's.

"You three are gonna owe me for this," Panam said.

"Loud and clear. Drive," Kiwi responded as she got into the passenger seat, taking the usual position. Panam stepped on the gas and pulled a 180 degree turn as the door closed, and the group drove towards the relative safety and comfort of Night City.

Notes:

If you've gotten this far in Group Chat: thank you so much for your love and support! This was much less of an undertaking than 27 (surprisingly, given I made a whole-ass original soundtrack for this one), but it was still an undertaking, and this is probably longer than any one individual route of 27, even if it doesn't beat it in total text volume.

Regularly scheduled, normal, non-insanely-violent chapters will resume soon!

Chapter 52: Ne Cede Malis

Notes:

I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh. I have been called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the world goes dim and cold. I am Discord link.

the void

 

faint whispers, an engine

 

the drowned gods stir

 

sound fades

there is no sense of time. seconds are weeks are hours are years

 

this isn't an afterlife

there is no valhalla here, no hall of the dead

 

thousands are sailing

the same self the only self

 

self willed the peril of a thousand fates

 

a line of infinite ends finite finishing

the one remains oblique and pure

 

arching to the single point of

consciousness

 

find yourself

starting back

---

When Becca awoke, she was in Vik's office, on an operating table turned hospital bed. She tried to move her arms, but they refused, no matter how much force she tried to exert. She had multiple IVs connected to her, giving her fluids, antibiotics to prevent infection, immuno-blockers, and heavy-duty painkillers to cut down the agony of her wounds; a nasogastric feeding tube ran up her nose and down her throat, making her gag slightly if she moved her head much. If she hadn't regretted fighting Nightstalker already, this would have absolutely sealed it.

She looked to her right slightly, trying not to jostle the feeding tube; Vik was sitting at his desk, watching the same boxing replay as always, giving the same reactions he always did. She didn't really get it. It wasn't as if there wasn't plenty of boxing still happening in the city. With the way he was, she almost wondered if he thought boxers had gone extinct or something.

She darted her eyes to her left, attempting to scan the room to see if anyone else was with her, and looked David directly in the eyes. He had dark circles under them, and looked like he'd been up for far too long; his eyes went wide for a second, and he looked up at Vik.

"Hey, uh, doc? Becca's awake," he said, causing Vik to scramble to pause the boxing match. He stood up from his chair and rushed to her side.

"How are you feeling?" he asked her.

"Like I got hit by a fucking truck," she said, slurring somewhat. She managed to lift her right arm enough to gesture at the feeding tube. "Fuck's up with this thing? Why are my arms all fucked up?"

"You've been out for a little over three weeks, sweetie," David said, hugging her slightly awkwardly and giving her a kiss on the forehead.

"What your input said," Vik said. "Would've starved to death without the tube. Your arms... part of that's muscle atrophy, part of that's the painkillers, part of that's your body adjusting."

"Adjusting to... what, exactly? Don't tell me you put more shit in me, Vik," Becca said.

"The opposite," he said. "You're pretty much back to normal. You've got the spine, some of your synth muscles, and the swappable ports for your hands, and that's it. Your input signed off on it while you were out."

"And my legs?" she asked. "Am I still, uh... tall?" David held his hand over his mouth, trying not to visibly crack up. Vik sighed, trying to find a way to word this that wouldn't cause her to leap out of the hospital bed and start gnawing on him.

"Had to undo most of that while I was getting rid of the Mantis Blades," he said. "You're a little taller than you were, part of it was biosculpting, but... you're around five-four, maybe five-five on your tiptoes now." Becca looked under the blanket,

She thought for a second, then gave Vik a serious look.

"So, uh... this mean I'm back on the level? No more twitching, no more freaking out at people, no more cyberpsycho shit?" she asked. Vik sighed again.

"That's a tough question," he said. "If I'm not misreading the situation, and I very well could be, you only went full-on cyberpsycho because you hit the Black Lace."

"Which was fucking gonk-brained of you, Becca," David said, deadly serious, looking at her.

"Not the words I'd use," Vik said, "but... pretty much, yeah. You got extremely lucky, Rebecca. The Lace didn't do any permanent damage to your brain, so when it wore off..."

"So did the batshit crazy," she said.

"Yeah, pretty much," Vik said, nodding. "You're gonna need therapy before chroming up again is anywhere close to a good idea, but you should be out of the woods outside that. Ready to get the tube out, since you're up?"

"Please, for the love of fucking God, choomba," she said.

"This is gonna suck," Vik said, grabbing the feeding tube with one hand near her nose and another further down, and pulling. Pain seared through her throat and nose, cutting through the painkiller IV, only slightly better than the pain of being stabbed through the shoulder, and she resolved to never have to go on a feeding tube again if she could help it; she could only imagine how bad it would've been if she weren't doped up. She coughed and spat.

"You weren't kidding," she said, looking at David. "Where's Lucy and Kiwi at?"

"Back at the apartment," he said. A quick look of fear came over Becca's face, and David read it accurately. "They're taking care of the cats. We've been coming over here in shifts to help Vik out," he added; he thought about taking a picture of her adorable expression of relief and sending it to them, but she hugged him before he got the chance, forcing her arms up with as much effort as she could muster and wincing slightly from the pain of the exertion.

It was the truth; when they'd brought Becca in, a faint step away from death, Vik had been willing to help, but this came with the qualifier that he did not have nearly enough manpower for the job. Being a ripperdoc didn't typically require the services of an intensive care nurse, and in lieu of an experienced ICU veteran, he at least needed an extra set of hands.

"Thanks for that, D," she said. "You three deal with the queen already?"

"Yeah. Rogue needed to see us again when you're up, though," he said. He already knew why she needed to see them again, but he was going to dodge this particular issue for as long as he could get away with; it wasn't exactly the first thing she needed to hear when she woke up.

---

THREE WEEKS AGO

David was starting to like Afterlife less and less with every time he stepped past Emmerick into the doors. At first, the novelty of going to the solo bar had pretty much overridden any of its flaws, but he was no longer too starstruck to notice things like the increasingly large pile of trash outside the entrance, the mystery stains in the bathroom, the way the lighting and atmosphere seemed to almost make everything tense. Claire was nice, and it was as good of a place as any to do business, but it was kind of a shitty bar, at the end of the day.

With that in mind, however, David desperately needed a drink, and so did Lucy and Kiwi. He walked up to the bar and hefted the crate up onto a stool to his left; his partners sat to his right. Their expressions, the crate, the lack of Rebecca, and the dried blood on them said everything it needed to as Claire walked up.

"I'm so sorry," she said, frowning. It was always hard to handle this sort of thing, even with the hardened ones. The devil on her shoulder always liked the tips she'd get from it, but no matter who she was dealing with, it was always hard seeing them go through loss. And this group didn't look anywhere near hardened, from her estimation. She pretty much had one tool in her box for this. "So, uh... you three know what she would've wanted her drink to be?" David waved her off, lazily, visibly tired.

"She's not gone," he said. "Just got fucked up pretty bad. Vik's got her." Claire's heart skipped a beat from the sudden relief.

"Know where Rogue's at?" Lucy asked, scanning the club for their employer. Claire opened a drawer behind the bar, fishing around in it for a second, and produced a key ring, tossing it overhand.

"Her place is outside and up the stairs from here," the bartender said as Lucy caught the keyring. "Glad Becca's alright, too. Tell her I said hey?"

"Can I get a beer first?" David asked. Kiwi hesitated for a second.

"Think I'll take one too," she said. Lucy sighed, wanting to get this over with as fast as possible, and then gave in; she needed a drink, too.

"Vodka lemonade," she said, sitting down more comfortably on the stool.

---

Rogue's penthouse ended up being somewhat hard to miss, even for the three buzzed mercs. The building Afterlife occupied had mostly fallen into complete disrepair, except for the apartment, the hallway leading to it, and the stairs leading up to that hallway. Even then, David was somewhat baffled that anyone would choose to live here; it was every problem he had with Afterlife, amplified to the highest possible degree. It felt like what a megabuilding would look like if a meteor had hit it.

The door to the apartment, however, was pristine mahogany that looked like it came from a hundred years prior. Corpo shit, in a decidedly non-corpo environment, he noted.

Lucy stepped forwards and rapped on it gently.

"It's unlocked," Rogue's voice called out from the other side, echoing slightly. Lucy opened the door and the three walked in, immediately marveling at what they saw.

One could easily mistake the penthouse for an expensive corpo apartment. The aesthetic was perfectly aligned, simple, clean; glass tables and metal and black leather chairs on a white carpet, with beige wallpaper, and a large window offering a beautiful view of Night City. While the group likely had size over hers (Kiwi was half tempted to break out a tape measure and check for sure, but decided against it), Rogue didn't need it; the group was positively envious. It was the edgerunner's dream.

Rogue, for her part, was in the kitchen, chopping carrots, celery and potatoes, wearing an apron that said "Don't Kiss The Cook" on it, slightly tattered by time. David didn't know the exact story, but he could guess that it was something that held a lot of sentimental value to her, maybe a gift from someone. In any other circumstance, the image would have been humanizing, maybe a little comical.

However, David was starting to put together what was in the crate, and was going to be very angry if his suspicion was correct.

"You got the crate?" Rogue asked. David nodded, trying to stay professional as he walked up to the kitchen counter and hefted it up.

He pressed the button, opening it with a hiss of cryogenic gas. The crate squawked as it opened, revealing a live chicken. David stared at the Queen of the Afterlife.

"You're kidding me," Lucy said, joining in the staring. "A chicken?"

"We almost lost one of our crew so you could... get something that you could just buy from the fucking VDBs?" Kiwi asked, her eye twitching slightly with anger. Rogue sighed, trying not to roll your eyes.

"You almost lost one of your crew because she went off the deep end and killed an entire convoy's worth of Biotechnica employees," Rogue said, grabbing the chicken by the neck and placing it on a plastic cutting board, separate from the bamboo one she'd been chopping vegetables on, as it struggled slightly. "One of you, help me with this?" None of them budged.

"How do you know that already?" David asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Your girl's famous," Rogue said. "XBD gonks work quick. Chip's on the coffee table if you wanna see for yourself." Lucy and Kiwi scoffed in disbelief, but David's eyes went wide.

"Fuck," he said. "Who..."

"The guy who came out last, the one Rebecca had a one-on-one with, was wearing a recorder," Rogue said. "Gonk's side gig is dressing up as a serial killer from fifty years ago and making XBDs pretending to be him. Editors got the footage, ran it fast, and it's already selling."

A flash of recognition came across David, as he realized he'd actually sold a few XBDs with the supposed "Nightstalker" in them back when he'd run them for Doc. He and Kiwi both felt somewhat like idiots. Giving in, he walked up and took hold of the chicken by the head, carefully giving Rogue enough room to bring the knife down; its head rolled into the sink, and its blood followed as the Queen held it in place with one hand. With the other, she got a head start on plucking its feathers from the skin.

"So... what's the takeaway there? Everyone in NC gonna be shitting themselves over us now?" Kiwi asked.

"Over Rebecca, yeah," Rogue said. "Probably best for her to lay low for a while."

"She's in a coma at Vik's," David said.

"Perfect," Rogue said, making the other three vaguely want to deck her. "Bring her by here, not Afterlife, when she's up and walking. Need to warn her what she's in for. Got a followup gig for the other three of you, in the meantime."

"This one unpaid, too?" David asked.

"Caught wind that the four of you were planning a trip to the moon. How far are you from having the eddies?" Rogue asked, nearly bowling David over. Kiwi did some quick mental math.

"Vik cleared part of our tab, but we're about two hundred thousand short on round trip tickets for all four of us," she said. Rogue smiled.

"Then the pay's two hundred thousand, plus whatever you get on-site," Rogue said. "I need that XBD buried and I need the four of you out of the city for a bit, so everything can cool down. If the three of you can take down the editors who made it, you're welcome to whatever's in there. Other chips you can move, eddies, all yours."

"There a catch here? What's your angle?" Lucy asked, suspicious. Rogue sighed.

"I'm not hiding anything. All my cards are on the table here," Rogue said. "I don't do anything that doesn't benefit me, but I also don't lie to people. Part of it's that I feel like I overextended you four and what happened to Becca is my fault; I should have realized that personal stuff was playing with fire, I know better. Part of it's that, if you four are off the planet, that's about as low as you can possibly lie, and you four not attracting attention means less eyes on me."

"Scans to me," Kiwi said, eyeing the chicken as Rogue plucked its feathers. The tension sat awkwardly for a moment.

"Three of you are welcome to stay and eat," Rogue said, smiling, as she finished the basic slaughtering and dressing of the chicken and began to truss it, preheating the oven. "Had a date, but he chickened out, big shock."

"Please tell me it wasn't Smasher," Lucy said.

"Don't even joke about that," Rogue said, grimly, as David covered his mouth to keep from showing that he was cracking up at the mental image.

Notes:

Everyone seemed kind of split on whether to keep Becca long vs. make her short again, and I decided making her short kind of works better thematically.

Chapter 53: Diamond Dogs

Notes:

There's a Discord link waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds

Jig Jig Street was a dirty, grimy place, even by the standards of Night City, and the daylight only made it worse as David and Lucy pushed their way through the small crowd. Their immediate thought was that Kiwi had gotten lucky by getting to sit this one out and help with Becca's care; this was soon put to rest when they remembered that she was the one having to deal with a bedpan, with her only company being Vik watching that boxing match on repeat.

"Should get them something nice when we're done with this," David muttered to Lucy.

"What, a porn BD? Maybe get Becca a giant dildo?" Lucy asked, scoffing.

"No, sweetie," David said, chuckling. "You know, Cherry Blossom Market, a block away, where they sell shit for normal people." Neon-lit signs on every wall advertised assorted pornography, joytoys and alcohol; something in his mind made David think this was probably Pilar's favorite place on Earth when he was alive. Lucy rubbed her chin, stopping for a second in front of a neon heart with "love" written in cursive inside it.

"Could get her something from that guy who sells all the old rockerboy stuff," she said, smiling.

"Now you're getting me," David said. "Dunno what we'll do for Kiwi or Vik, though."

A rail-thin man in a beanie and a tank top (with an extremely low-cut neckline that exposed his largely horrendous tattoos) started slinking up to Lucy, reaching in his pocket, clearly having mistaken her stopping for interest.

"Hey, girl, you trying to buy some snow? LP9? Glass? 'Dorph? Squats?" he asked, fishing assorted grimy-looking baggies out of his pocket.

"Go away," Lucy said, not even looking at him. David, however, was visibly perplexed, looking the creepy man directly in the eyes.

"...what the hell are squats?" he asked.

"You don't wanna know," Lucy interjected.

"Johnny Squats," the dealer said. "Make you shit your lungs out and love every second."

"Why in the fuck would anyone ever take that?" David said, shocked laughter coming out with every word.

"Hey, don't knock it till you try it, kid," the dealer said. "You never come out the same person after a shit trip." This only amplified David's laughter. Lucy found herself joining in, causing the dealer to take the hint and start slithering away, back to whatever dark hole he'd crawled out of. The two kept walking, hoping to avoid the attention of anyone similar.

A neon sign crudely reading "PEE PEE" made both of them chuckle slightly as they crossed the small catwalk into the alleyway leading into the back of Jig Jig. As dirty as the main street had been, it had at least shown signs of life, with stores that people had put some effort into maintaining; if Night City had a deepest layer of Hell, this few square meters was it. A man covered in dirt, grime and soot, with his hair falling out and his clothes in rags, sat in the fetal position slumped against a concrete stairway, a braindance visor whisking him away to some other world. Part of David wondered if, in the man's mind, Becca was currently fucking his day up.

A joytoy, looking like she'd just been through a lot, sat opposite the man smoking a cigarette and trying not to notice him, as she carried on a conversation through her agent. Vending machines, the screens barred in a futile attempt to prevent robbery, had hubcaps and batteries and assorted other junk crammed into them by frustrated customers, preventing any use (not that David or Lucy were planning on trusting any food or drink from this place). Seeing her made Lucy crave a smoke, as well; she cursed under her breath when she realized she wasn't carrying a pack, and that Kiwi was at Vik's.

A mural of a face with a sewn-up mouth marked the path to Fingers, MD, the worst ripper in Night City (a title that was somewhat impressive in the darkest sense possible). Within the short alley leading to the ripper's clearing were two doors, one with a plastic sheet in front of it: their destination. David looked at Lucy as the two stood in front of the door.

"Wanna do this quiet or loud, babe?" he asked. Lucy shrugged.

"Your call, sweetie," she said.

"Fuck it, I say loud," he said, drawing one of his revolvers and activating his Sandevistan. As time slowed, he craned his leg back and delivered a full force kick, driving the sole of his foot into the door and separating it from its hinges as it sailed backwards. The room behind it was a mess of braindance editing equipment, crates of chips, wires, and harnesses; the workshop of a pro.

The door slammed full-force into a middle-aged, balding white man wearing a black T-shirt, shattering his hands as he held them up on reflex and snapping them back into his face as it collided the rest of the way, cracking his skull. He drifted to the ground under the door, twitching slightly. David looked up, and his eyes went wide with shock as he let out a slow, muffled guffaw.

There were two people left standing in the room. One, a Japanese man in his twenties with a mohawk and leather jacket, attempted to draw a Unity pistol from a holster on his belt. To someone without a Sandevistan, the speed would've been impressive, but to David, he may as well have been moving through molasses.

The other was, of all people, Katsuo Tanaka. David had already been through this with him before. He was already tired of it the previous time. He moved to the armed man and grabbed the Unity out of his hand as Lucy walked in behind him, hitting him in the jaw with the slide and sending him reeling with a sickening crack; the man gripped his jaw as he sailed to the floor, and David followed, using the last of the Sandevistan's speed boost to ram his foot through the man's skull as he hit the ground. His head burst like a melon as time began to return to normal for David, splattering blood all over his shoe and the surrounding metal floor.

"Fucking... lowlife son of a... you again!?" Katsuo sputtered, looking at David and fumbling around, trying to find a weapon. "And you've got another fucking... wha... how?" David looked at Lucy, feeling entirely non-threatened.

"Wait, this is that little gonk you beat up, right?" Lucy asked, finally putting together who Katsuo was.

"Yep. Wanna just fry him and move on? This is strike three, and I'm tired of dealing with his shit," David said as Katsuo continued to fail to find anything to defend himself with. Eventually, he hoisted up an office chair, thrusting it at them clumsily like a lion tamer. Lucy stroked her chin for a second, humming to herself.

"Better idea, but I've gotta ask Kiwi for help on it," she said. "Keep him restrained? And don't hurt him too bad, this'll be less funny if we do it ourselves." David nodded and moved in, swatting the chair out of Katsuo's hands with ease and taking him to the ground in an armbar, as the disgraced corpo-child attempted to sputter out insults to David's parentage.

---

[13:40] ❤LUCY❤: hey kiwi you busy rn?

[13:41] 🥝: not really, helping vik change out B's IV bag

[13:41] 🥝: keeping our girl hydrated while she's out etc

[13:41] ❤LUCY❤: david's got katsuo tanaka in an armbar

[13:41] 🥝: AHAHAHAH YOU'RE FUCKING KIDDING ME. THAT GONK AGAIN??

[13:42] 🥝: god vik's asking me why I'm laughing and I don't even know how to explain this

[13:42] ❤LUCY❤: don't lol

[13:42] ❤LUCY❤: what's the funniest thing i could do to him. any suggestions welcome

[13:42] ❤LUCY❤: gimme the stupidest craziest stuff you've got girl

[13:42] 🥝: gimme a sec to finish with Vik and get a break, i need a cig anyways. david got him good?

[13:42] ❤LUCY❤: i mean yeah

[13:48] 🥝: ok cool. finally getting a smoke

[13:48] 🥝: what kind of chrome's he got

[13:48] ❤LUCY❤: ...almost nothing actually. just an agent and a crappy cyberdeck 💀

[13:48] 🥝: alright i can work with that. you want lethal right

[13:48] ❤LUCY❤: ideally, but non-lethal that we can get him killed with works too

[13:48] ❤LUCY❤: just need him to go out like a gonk

[13:51] 🥝: found it. perfect one

🥝 initiated file transfer to ❤LUCY❤: LOL69.QHK

[13:51] ❤LUCY❤: what's it do

[13:51] 🥝: you'll see lmao. wanted to use this one on faraday, didn't get a chance

[13:51] ❤LUCY❤: you're the best keys

---

As David struggled to keep Katsuo contained on the floor, and Lucy's cyberdeck interface came up before her, the fear grew in the disgraced corpo-kid's eyes.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he said. "Just kill me, for fuck's sake! I'd rather be dead than keep getting the shit kicked out of me by you lowlife fuckers. It's not my fucking fault his mom was a whore!"

The quickhack uploaded to Katsuo, and took over his brain.

"Sixty-nine?" he asked. "Sixty-nine, sixty-nine, sixty-nine. Four twenty?" he sputtered. "Four twenty, sixty nine!" he screamed, thrashing and attempting to escape the armbar. David let go, unsure what he was witnessing; Lucy raised an eyebrow. Katsuo continued to thrash on the floor, stripping his clothes off in a frenzy to reveal a deeply unimpressive naked body as he continued to scream various permutations of "four twenty" and "sixty nine," and then clambered up to a sort of caveman-esque crouch, dashing out the doorway while continuing to hoot the numbers and foaming at the mouth. Soon, the two heard screaming, and then two quick bursts of assault rifle fire, followed by the soft, dull thud of a body hitting wet pavement.

David and Lucy looked at each other.

"What the fuck was that?" David asked.

"Kiwi's idea of a funny way to kill someone annoying," Lucy said, somewhat disturbed.

"Yet more evidence in the 'holy shit, don't ever piss off Keys' category," David said, his own eyes wide with shock. He looked around at the crates full of assorted XBD chips. "So, uh... time to loot the place, I guess?"

"Think Falco'll come get us out of Jig Jig? I'm not carrying all this back by hand," Lucy said. David shrugged.

"Guess I'm about to find out," he said.

Chapter 54: Starfuckers, Inc.

Notes:

God Discord, I'll do anything for you
God Discord, just tell me what you want me to
God Discord, nail me up against the wall
God Discord, don't want everything, he wants it all

It had been two days since Rebecca had woken up; Vik had opted to keep her for an extra day to run some tests now that she was conscious, but they had all panned out as expected, and it was finally time for her to leave the good doctor's nest.

"Can you try to stand for me?" the doctor asked, as David, Lucy, and Kiwi stood off to the side. She grunted as she kicked her legs somewhat clumsily over the side of the operating table turned hospital bed, and attempted to support her weight on them, nearly stumbling as she grabbed onto Vik's shoulder for support.

"Think I've got it," she said, her legs shaking. Vik frowned, and looked at David.

"Kid, go get a cane from the back," he said. David nodded and rushed into the back where Vik kept his assorted odds and ends.

"Really don't think I'm gonna need that, choombatta," Rebecca said, visibly embarrassed.

"Bex, it's alright," Lucy said. "You're not gonna need it forever." Becca looked at her, worried.

"What if I do?" she asked.

"Not gonna be a danger," Vik said. "Now, if I'd told him to get a chair, then you might be talking long-term. But your problem's atrophy and adjustment, not damage. The more you use your arms and legs, the closer to normal you're gonna get." David emerged from the back, holding a long, metal cane with a knob to adjust its height, and handed it to Rebecca; she took it, shifting her weight over onto it as it dug into Vik's floor, and looked around.

"Try taking a few steps with it?" Kiwi suggested. Becca slowly took one, awkwardly shifting the cane over as she did so, then another. She smiled.

"You know what? I can work with this," she said.

"Doesn't hurt too much to walk on or anything?" Vik asked.

"I mean, it does hurt, but I'll be nova," Becca said. "How's this gonna work with the moon, anyways? We still doing that, chooms?" she asked, looking at her compatriots. Vik rubbed his chin a bit.

"When were you four planning on that?" he asked. David sighed.

"As soon as possible," he said. "Rogue wants us lying low off-planet."

"It'll delay healing," Vik said. "Low gravity might actually make the atrophy a little worse. Hold on a second, though, I've got some meds that'll help with that and keep the healing process going." He dashed back into the back room where David had pulled the cane from, and rummaged through a file cabinet full of assorted medications. "Found it," he added. "How long's the trip?"

The four looked at each other, muttering amongst themselves.

"Two weeks," David called back out. After a few seconds of rummaging, and the sound of the file cabinet closing, Vik re-emerged, holding a small paper bag. Becca looked inside at the injectors, labeled as Biotechnica Stimbolone, and grimaced.

"Fucking Biotechnica? Really?" she asked.

"Nobody else is out there making meds," Vik said. "Trust me, I hate it, too. Do an intramuscular shot of one of those, location doesn't matter, before you go to bed every night while you're on the moon. Make sure you eat properly, three meals a day, high protein if you can."

"What... is it, exactly?" Kiwi asked.

"Stimbolone," Vik said. "Labcoats over at Biotechnica took a livestock hormone, trenbolone, and managed to isolate the anabolic effects from it without the androgenic. This is actually what it's supposed to be prescribed for, but usually you see Animals taking it as magic get-huge juice. Two week regimen of this with some light PT, and she'll be right as rain when you get back Earthside." Lucy burst out laughing.

"You've got our girl roiding up," she said. Becca blushed.

"I mean, I was already buff as shit when I was tall. It's not like that's gonna be anything new for you gonks," she said. Vik laughed.

"You're not gonna be as jacked as you were with the synth muscles, don't worry," he said. "You need to be on a longer regimen for that. Two weeks while you're recovering from atrophy like this, and it'll just get your legs back working properly."

"I'm cool with that," David said.

"I thought you liked it when I was Beccazilla?" Becca asked, a teasing smile on her face. David turned red and stammered.

"Rogue wanted us to come see her again when you were up," Kiwi said, changing the subject. She looked at Vik. "Are we good to leave?"

"Don't let me keep you any longer than I have," Vik said. "Got a hell of a backlog, now."

"What's our tab like?" David asked.

"Kiwi already paid me off for the three of you," Vik said. "I'm not charging for Becca." David did a double-take.

"You're... not charging for her?" David asked, baffled. This wasn't how ripperdocs were supposed to operate. "Not even cost of parts?"

"Your girl almost died, and a decent chunk of it's my fault," Vik said. "Wouldn't be right to even ask. My rule is, any decision I make, I need to be comfortable going to sleep at night after I make it, and that wouldn't be one I'd be able to sleep on."

A green light flashed on David's back, and in an instant, he was hugging Vik, sending papers flying around the office (some of which seemed to right themselves almost by magic) and nearly bowling the ripperdoc over. Vik smiled, and patted David on the back.

"You're welcome, kid. Gotta admit, that's a new one," he said. He broke off the hug, stepping back a little bit. "Now, go deal with the Queen. Put in a good word for me with her, maybe?" The group smiled as David returned to them, and they left the office, Rebecca staggering with her cane somewhat as Kiwi held the door for her.

---

The entrance leading to Afterlife was as gross as ever, and Rebecca grimaced as the group looked at the stairs. This hadn't previously been an issue, beyond the fear of tetanus from stepping on a rusty nail, but Rebecca's cane made descending an awkward proposition, and there didn't seem to be any sort of accessible entrance. Graffiti and empty bottles stared back at them as they looked, attempting to figure out a solution.

A lightbulb went off in David's brain, and he crouched down, ducking his head between Becca's legs. Lucy, putting together what he was about to do, cracked up.

"David, what are-" Becca asked, before being hoisted into the air atop his shoulders, her cane flying up with her and nearly hitting Kiwi in the jaw. "Seriously, dude!?" she exclaimed, and the image sent Lucy into full-on cackling, with Kiwi joining in once she righted herself and took in the image of David giving Rebecca a piggy-back ride like a small child.

"What? It'll get you down the stairs," he said, defensively.

"What the fuck do you think that bouncer is gonna think when he sees you giving me a piggy-back ride like a fucking five-year-old!?" Becca asked, shocked. "Put me down, you gonk!"

"Emmerick already knows what's up, choomba," David said, ignoring her protests and carrying her down the stairs. By the third step, she was grabbing onto his hair and grinning, having almost completely given up any resistance.

Once the group reached the bottom of the stairs, David leaned back down, placing Rebecca back on the ground and making Lucy and Kiwi burst out laughing all over again as they took in the sight.

"That was fun, but please never do that again, you gonk," Rebecca said, blushing hard.

"Counterpoint, do that all the time," Kiwi said. "That was the cutest fucking thing."

"Except when you nearly got slugged with her cane," Lucy added.

"Yeah, maybe aim a little better next time," Kiwi said, backtracking, and David burst out laughing, too. The group made their way through the path to the bar, dodging the assorted lowlifes and drunks who couldn't get in, and walked up to Emmerick, standing in front of the door.

"Got business with the Queen," David said.

"Yeah, you're good," the bouncer said. He looked at Becca, stumbling with her cane. "Your girl okay?"

"Got fucked up pretty bad on the last job," Becca said. "Still healing up." Emmerick extended his hand for her.

"Glad you made it out alive," he said, and she shook his hand, gripping it as hard as she could. He stepped out of the way, and the group walked in. Claire waved as they walked by, smiling when she saw Becca up and walking, and motioned for her to come over.

"Hold on a sec," Becca said to the other three, walking slowly towards the bar. "Claire wants me for something." They stopped, waiting patiently, David tapping his foot slightly, as Becca walked up in earshot of Claire.

"Hey, girl," Claire said. "Glad to see you're up and okay." The bartender reached over the bar, hugging Becca and pulling her up slightly; Becca smiled, blushing. It was starting to truly sink in that she had people who cared about her.

"I'm glad, too, choomba," she said. "Got business, though. Might grab a beer and catch up on the way out." Claire smiled.

"Don't let me keep ya," she said, releasing the hug. "Just wanted to let you know, I'm glad you're alright. Your group was pretty worried, day-of."

"Thanks, choom," Becca said, lumbering slowly back to the group. In a booth, she saw a merc in a bulletproof vest pointing at her and whispering to his buddy; she looked over at another booth, and saw the exact same thing, this time with two mercs pointing at her. Something was starting to smell fishy, and she prayed to whatever higher power was watching her that this wasn't about to be her execution.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder; she turned around and saw a woman with a large mohawk, chromed to the gills with enough synth-muscle to bench-press a truck, wearing a pair of old jeans stained with dried blood and a black tank top.

"Holy fuck, you are that girl from the XBD," the woman said. "Fuck happened to all your chrome!? You're like, a foot shorter now!"

Lucy walked up, putting her hand on Becca's shoulder.

"XBD?" Becca asked. "The fuck?"

"You're telling me you're not that bad bitch from the BD? The one that ripped that piece of shit apart out in the desert?" the woman kept on. Becca was starting to put together what was going on, and she frowned.

"Oh, you've gotta be fucking kidding me," she said.

"So that was you," the woman said. "That was the most fucking nova shit I've ever seen, choomba! You know that fucking psycho killed my girlfriend?"

"Glad I got you some kind of justice, choom," Becca said, trying to break away from the conversation.

"Yeah, we're kinda busy," Lucy added, as David and Kiwi joined the fray.

"The hell is this?" David asked.

"Fangirl," Lucy said, not wanting to say Becca's name out loud in front of the woman. Rogue had been fairly clear she wanted as much of a lid on this as possible, as much as that was starting to seem like a pipe dream.

"Can I work with you guys on your next gig? Please?" the woman asked. "C'mon, I've gotta have that under my belt. You four are the baddest ass motherfuckers in NC, Adam goddamn Smasher and Boa Boa and Silverhand don't have shit on you all." David sighed.

"Calm down," he said. "We're taking a couple weeks off, Queen's request, but gimme your deets, and if we have something, we'll take you on part-time." In a flash, the woman's contact info was beamed into David's Agent, revealing her name to be Stasia Zietek, alias Skala. "Nice to meet you, Skala," he said, as the four managed to break off from her and make their way to Rogue's booth, where she sat, an amused smile on her face.

"Guess you've already learned what I needed to tell you," the Queen of the Afterlife said to Becca.

"What, were you gonna tell me about the XBD thing? Who made it, and how famous am I?" Becca asked.

"Fucking Katsuo, of all people," David said. "Don't worry, he's done."

"You kill the fucker?" Becca asked, grimacing.

"Yep, he's dead," Lucy said. "We didn't kill him, exactly, but Tyger Claws handled him. He's done."

"So, other question," Becca said. "How big of a problem is this?"

"Pretty big," Rogue said. "Be careful around medias. That's why I'm paying the difference on your moon tickets."

"And...?" David said, already knowing the unspoken motive and wanting Rogue to admit it out loud. He was starting to get a little tired of how he could only get occasional cracks to show up in Rogue's image; it was narrowly enough for him to know that there was someone much kinder hiding within Rogue Amendiares than she wanted anyone to think, and he would be damned if he wasn't going to get that out of her in full. Rogue looked at him, reading his intent more or less accurately, and sighed.

"And it's my way of apologizing for how out of hand that job got," she said. "You're on a cane right now because I screwed up. I didn't know they were sending a fake Nightstalker out."

"Aren't you supposed to know everything?" Kiwi prodded.

"Sometimes, when you're working plans within plans within other plans stacked on top of other plans, the people you're planning against catch onto you and start working their own angles," Rogue said. "My guess is Biotechnica caught on that I was sending you four, put together that you're the remnants of Maine's crew, and put him in the van as an in-case-of-violence-break-glass solution. In the underworld, what I say goes, but in the corpo world, I'm limited by my contacts, same as any of you four, and my Biotechnica fixer who arranged for everything didn't say word fucking one about any serial killers hitching a ride."

"So, takeaway here is, fuck Biotechnica," Kiwi said. Rogue shrugged.

"Pretty much," she said. "Also, brought you something." She patted at the seat next to her and lifted up a make-your-own-prepack container, for carrying and reheating homemade meals.

"What's this?" Becca asked.

"Spoils of war," Rogue said.

"The package was a fucking chicken," David said, laughing.

"Wait, seriously? A chicken?" Becca asked, glaring daggers at Rogue. "I almost died for a fucking chicken?"

"Have you ever eaten real chicken before?" Rogue asked. "Real chicken. From the actual animal. Not the 'chik-n' that they sell in the vending machines." Becca stopped, slightly taken aback by the question, and thought to herself.

"Actually, no," she said. "Don't think I ever have." Rogue thrust the prepack container forwards; the chicken, a mix of pulled white and dark meat, sat next to a bed of carrots, celery and onions moistened and seasoned by its own stock, along with gorgeous-looking, fluffy mashed potatoes. Put simply, it looked delicious.

"Try it, and you'll get it," she said.

"She's not kidding," Lucy said. "I was annoyed too, but no, I get it. That was worth it."

"Honest to God, some of the best food I've ever eaten," David said.

"Don't know if I'd go that far, but it was pretty good," Kiwi said, joining the cacophony of opinions on Rogue's cooking.

"Jeez, okay, chooms," Becca said, defeated, as she took the container with her free hand. "So, that it? You just wanted to tell me I'm famous, apologize, and give me dinner?"

"One last thing," Rogue said, fishing out a cash chip from her bra. "Two hundred thousand, plus what I got for selling the editing gear and the XBDs that aren't personally embarrassing to me, minus what my workers on the ground made for moving it all. Comes out to about four hundred thousand eddies. Should be enough to keep you four in business, keep the rent paid, give you some decent spending money on the moon." Kiwi picked up the credit chip and put it in her jacket, grimacing as she wiped breast sweat off of it.

"Thanks, Rogue," Becca said, smiling.

"You're welcome," Rogue said. David smiled. He was starting to crack her facade.

Chapter 55: Moonage Daydream

Notes:

I'm an alligator
I'm a mama-papa comin' for you
I'm the space invader
I'll be a rock and rollin' Discord for you

"All passengers, ensure restraints are fastened, and that you have your helmet and oxygen tank secured. We will be landing at the pad on Tycho in roughly ten minutes," the slightly rough digital voice said over the shuttle's PA system.

Lucy was smiling the biggest smile she'd ever smiled under the glass of her helmet. The three day trip had only heightened her anticipation; for her, this was a dream come true, almost literally. There was precisely one thing on her bucket list, and the crew was about to check it off. David was right beside her; he was mildly annoyed that they had to wear their helmets through the landing, because he really, really wanted to kiss her. Past that, he was happy that she was happy.

Becca and Kiwi, meanwhile, were somewhat less thrilled with the trip. They found the space suits uncomfortable, itchy, and ill-fitting, and the bathroom situation on the shuttle, particularly given the number of people they had to share the thing with, was dire. Worse, Becca found that zero gravity exacerbated the pain from attempting to move her muscles around, and seemed to be undoing some of the healing she'd already gone through; she was still not exactly in fighting shape, or even necessarily in walking shape.

There were sixteen other people on the shuttle, not counting the pilot; none of them knew the crew or vice-versa, and they all seemed to be somewhat higher in social status. Some of them had been staring at the crew from the start of the journey, wondering how a group of four seemingly grimy chromed-up cyberpunks had managed to afford a trip to the moon, and if they'd need to find a new status-symbol getaway soon.

"Fuckin' finally," she grunted as she attempted to lift the helmet up, before giving up. "One of you three, help me out?" Kiwi, beside her, reached over and affixed the helmet onto Becca's head.

"All good on your O2 tank?" Kiwi asked, the speaker on her helmet crackling slightly. Becca patted it softly at her side, wincing slightly as she did so. The shuttle's landing sequence started, and the PA system started to play a rough, low-bitrate recording of Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra. Kiwi immediately cracked a smile; it took Becca a second to place the reference, but when she did, she couldn't help herself from cracking up. It was entirely lost on David and Lucy.

"Something weird about the music?" Lucy asked. Kiwi did a double-take and blinked.

"Wait, you've never seen 2001?" Kiwi asked. Lucy and David looked at each other and shrugged.

"That an old holovid or something?" David asked. Kiwi ignored him and stared directly at Lucy.

"You're shitting me, choomba," she said. "You, the one who's crazy about the moon and who's been dying to do this as long as I've known you, haven't seen 2001: A Space Odyssey!?"

"Don't even know what it is," Lucy said. "Can't get on the NC net to look, either, agent hasn't had service since we launched." Kiwi sighed.

"We've gotta have a movie night when we get back," she said. "That's gonna be your new favorite movie."

"Keys is overselling it a little," Becca said. "It's three hours long and it's mostly just cool space shots. Still fun to throw on when you've got some good bud, though."

"Kinda seems a little pointless, given what we're doing," David said. Becca shrugged a tiny shrug, wincing.

"I guess," she said. "It's from a hundred years ago, so it was probably pretty fuckin' preem when they made it. Don't think they even landed on the moon when that thing came out."

Lucy did a slight double-take.

"Didn't realize you were even into this kinda stuff," she said. Becca sighed.

"You know that tattoo that you thought said DICKS on it?" she asked.

"What about it?" Lucy asked.

"It says PK Dick. As in, Phillip K. Dick, the author," Becca said. "C'mon, why do you think I get along with you and Keys so well? I just know how to hide it better than you two gonks." Kiwi, who had already long since put the reference in the tattoo together and almost didn't clock that Lucy had been misreading it, burst out laughing, fogging up her helmet and crackling with static.

The shuttle thudded to the ground as gently as a machine of its size could, jolting everyone and shooting pain through most of Becca's muscles.

"Really gonna be happy when I can start shooting that shit and start going to the therapist Vik referred me to," Becca said. Lucy looked at her and blinked.

"Wait, he does referrals for stuff like that?" she asked.

"Yeah, choom knows a doc for pretty much everything," Becca said. "Honestly, I don't get why he's a ripper. He's a whole-ass doc doc. He needs to just go breeze through his MD and get a job at the hospital or something."

"And probably get paid worse to deal with bigger assholes," David said.

"Yeah, fair point," Becca said.

"Depressurizing in one minute," the cabin PA system announced over the final notes of Strauss' tone poem. "Please ensure helmets and oxygen tanks are secured. Suits will auto-pressurize."

"We ready to do this?" Lucy asked, grinning.

"Fuck yeah, sweetie," David said, a grin growing on his own face.

"Yeah, I'm pretty excited," Kiwi said, smiling.

"As long as I get to lay on something soft soon, I'm good," Becca said. The gravity of the moon was already starting to feel somewhat better for her than vacuum zero-G did, and she stretched a bit, taking in the fact that she could do so without feeling like she was on fire.

The four's suits pressurized, along with the other sixteen passengers on the shuttle, and the door opened. Becca undid her restraints and wrapped her arm around Kiwi's shoulder to support herself until they could get her cane out of baggage; the group otherwise went into single-file, along with the rest of the shuttle's complement.

"Please enjoy your trip to Luna, and we hope you have a wonderful stay," the shuttle voice said. "All passengers, please disembark and proceed to the Tycho entry airlock. Your baggage will be returned to you at the booth immediately after the airlock." The shuttle voice then repeated these instructions on low volume, seemingly on a loop until the last passenger left, as the crew filed out and took in the sight of the Tycho landing pad.

The moon looked, above all else, empty. It was dead quiet, a lifeless rock floating in space that humans had, against all odds, forced life into. The existence of the city they were about to enter, a series of connected shining domes of solar panels hiding whatever was contained within, was a testament to the weight of the human spirit, to the ability of the species to achieve the impossible. The Earth itself was visible, a big blue and green sphere off in the distance, three full days away, with clouds covering any detail one might've been able to pick out even with a telescope.

For all four of them, even Becca and Kiwi, it was awe-inspiring. It almost took the group a moment to get their bearings and begin heading towards the massive steel bulkhead door that marked Tycho's primary external airlock; several other passenger groups were already waiting to be let in, along with several large box trucks in a single-file line carrying supplies from a cargo shipment.

Through the commotion, David thought he heard someone humming the tune to Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog," and a brief chill went up his spine for a reason he couldn't place.

Notes:

I've been blueballing this for... nearly a full calendar year. Jesus.

Chapter 56: Heartbreak Hotel

Notes:

Obligatory Discord link.

After several hours of standing in line and arguing with the baggage claim officials in order to retrieve their things, the group was beyond tired, and very ready to find their accommodations. Public transport in Tycho was effectively the only form of transport beyond one's own legs, and it was fortunate that it was handled via a high-speed monorail network, with stops essentially everywhere one could ask for; it was doubly fortunate that the path on the network from the "port" to the Silver Rocks Resort, where the four would be staying, was a straight line.

Now that they were inside the city's airlock, their EVA suits and helmets had been turned back in to be used for the next departing complement, and they were dressed in their typical outfits. The moon's gravity took some getting used to, as they felt oddly light, but it was still easy to get comfortable within the monorail car, the four seated in a straight line on one side; Becca had already fallen asleep on David's shoulder, between him and Kiwi. On the other side of the car, as elevator muzak played, sat a muscular, good-looking man with blonde hair, a square jaw, a sharp nose, and a pompadour haircut. If David hadn't been looking closely, simply for lack of anything else to be interested in as they waited to reach their destination, he wouldn't have noticed that the man was a full-borg covered in synthskin instead of a regular baseline human; it was almost uncannily good work. He started to get a sinking feeling in his gut.

"Something interesting about me, Martinez?" the borg asked, in a voice that made that sinking feeling turn into a brick. The borg didn't sound quite the same as usual; there was a softer, smoother quality to his voice, instead of the rough, digital, guttural crackle of his typical one. However, his identity was unmistakable, and Kiwi and Lucy stared in shock, as well.

"...Smasher?" David asked, befuddled.

"Let me guess, I look different," Smasher said.

"And... sound different," David said. "You on vacation or something?" Becca started to wake up, rubbing her eyes groggily, and took in the situation.

"Kinda," Smasher said. "It's work, but it's bullshit easy work." Becca, recognizing his voice, proceeded to nearly leap out of her seat, muscle atrophy be damned.

"The hell does Saka want on the moon?" Kiwi asked, not really expecting him to give a decent answer.

"Just a smash and grab on some corpo for one of the other sides who's up here," Smasher said.

"Doesn't really sound like the kind of thing they usually send you for," Lucy said, raising an eyebrow.

"It's not," the borg said.

"And that... doesn't really look like a combat body," David said. Smasher shrugged.

"Gotta drop weight to get up here," Smasher said. "Also, no guns up here, so I'm kinda limited anyways."

"You need a crew?" David asked.

"What? Fuck no, you gonk," Smasher said. "I've got this. What, you think I don't know how to beat people up?"

"Kinda seems like explosions are more your thing," Becca said. Smasher chuckled.

"You're not wrong," he said. He noticed the cane next to her. "Let me guess, your meat failed you?" Becca sighed.

"Other way around," she said. "Went too hard on the chrome and made the mistake of stacking drugs on it." Smasher looked at her with a look of sincere sadness.

"I'm sorry to hear that, Rebecca," he said. "It's always unfortunate when someone's flesh is too weak to handle the correct path." She wasn't entirely sure whether to take that as an insult, and decided she was too tired for a fight, even if it was one.

"Yeah," she said. "Gonna be doing physical therapy up here to get around some of the atrophy. Ripper's referral."

"You've got a good ripper," Smasher said. "Back before I went corpo, we didn't get shit for that."

"Honestly, our guy's better than the Arasaka doctors," Lucy said.

"Bold claim," Smasher said, raising an eyebrow at her.

"I've got experience with both. Our guy's better," Lucy said. Smasher took a second to put it together, and burst out laughing, almost shaking the monorail car. The others looked at each other, deeply unsettled.

"Fuck me, yeah, you were one of the fucking old net kids! They were trying to kill you! No wonder you think your guy's better," he said, when he could finally collect himself. "Trust me, when Arasaka gives a fuck, they do the best job you could ask for. They did a shitty job on you because they wanted to, not because they're incompetent. You were just disposable trash to them, a streetkid they could burn up and throw in the garbage." David looked at Lucy; she was shaking and sweating, clearly trying to hold it together and not doing the best job.

"Shut up about that," Lucy said. "I don't wanna think about that."

"Hey, you're the one that brought it up, you fuckin' gonk-brain," Smasher said. David prepared to activate his Sandevistan, and Smasher looked at him. "Won't work up here. If you end up fighting me, it's just gonna be a regular-ass fight, fists against fists, and you're gonna lose."

"Way you're talking to Lucy, you sound like you wanna test that, choom," David said through gritted teeth. Becca shrunk back in her seat; ordinarily, she'd have been glaring at Smasher right along with David, but now was decidedly a bad time for her to be doing that. Smasher smiled.

"Any time you want," Smasher said. Kiwi sighed.

"Can we not do this in the fucking monorail car!?" she asked, exasperated. "Jesus, you two wanna find out what moon jail is like that damn bad?"

"What, are you okay with how he's talking to Lucy?" David asked, whipping his head over.

"Hell, no!" Kiwi snapped. "By all means, beat his ass for that! Just not, you know, here! Either of you two hits the walls, you're gonna knock the fucking car off the rails!" Smasher laughed.

"You're a sensible one," Smasher said, looking at her.

They sat across from each other, the tension building in the air until it was eventually unbearable as the elevator muzak continued.

"Now approaching Silver Rocks Resort," the computerized, soft AI voice of the monorail system spoke as it whirred to a stop. The door opened, revealing the interior walkways of Tycho and the entrance to the resort. The five began to walk out, Rebecca, Kiwi and Lucy speeding through the door as fast as they could, knowing they were about to witness chaos. The moment David and Smasher stepped onto open ground, David shoulder-tackled the borg, driving his full weight into it; he attempted to activate his Sandevistan to multiply the force, but it simply sputtered, and David only managed to knock Smasher back, his feet digging into the ground to support himself.

"Told you, not gonna work up here," Smasher said, driving his elbow into the small of David's back and sending him to the ground. David took a deep breath, and then grabbed Smasher by the ankle with both hands and pulled, sending him to the ground as well. David crawled over his opponent, digging his knees into the full-borg's synthskin torso, and started punching Smasher in the face, his hands hurting more and more as they clanged against metal. He resolved that gorilla arms were going to be his next big upgrade. Smasher sent his fist up wildly at David's head, connecting and sending him reeling as the world seemed to spin.

"Fuck," David blurted out, pained. He shook himself off, stood up, and attempted to soccer-kick the borg in the side before he could get up in turn, agony shooting through his foot as his big toe shattered on impact. He winced, putting his weight on his other foot, as Smasher grabbed the area in pain and caught his breath.

"Okay, fuck, you're actually pretty good," Smasher said. "You learn from anyone in particular?" David panted, catching his breath as he tried to push the pain down.

"My stepmom," David said, between breaths. "Guess you could call her that, anyway."

"She a boxer or something?" Smasher asked. David looked over to see where Lucy, Kiwi and Becca had gone off to; no sign of them.

"Was," David said.

"Taught you pretty damn good," Smasher said. "How about this, I stop talking shit about your outputs 'till I'm back in a combat body, and we call a truce on beating the shit out of each other?"

"Hey, long as you stop talking shit about them, we're back to good, far as I care," David said, pained. Smasher laughed.

"Want a beer, kid?" he asked, rubbing the areas he'd gotten hit in, which were quickly starting to bruise; this body definitely wasn't meant to handle a beating.

"Fuckin' need one," David said. The pain from his toe needed to be dulled somehow. Smasher guffawed uproariously.

---

[02:24] David: hey where'd you all go

[02:24] ❤LUCY❤: checked in for the room while you and smasher were doing your thing

[02:24] David: you don't sound too happy about that

[02:24] ❤LUCY❤: happier than i'm getting across in text, trust me lol

[02:24] 🥝: you win? guessing you won since you're, you know, not dead?

[02:24] David: draw, pretty much. i broke my toe and my hands hurt like hell, he's bruised as all fuck, we're getting a beer at the hotel bar

[02:24] 🥝: ...

[02:24] 🥝: i do not understand guys

[02:24] ❤LUCY❤: co-signed

[02:24] ❤LUCY❤: seriously though you gotta come up and see this when you're done

[02:24] David: good excuse to peel away from RoboCock. lemme finish my beer

[02:24] David: becca still out?

[02:24] 🥝: like a light. woke up for a bit to do her roid shot and then passed right back out

[02:25] ❤LUCY❤: she spent most of the walk up to the room worrying about you lol

[02:25] David: oh c'mon lol

[02:25] David: wasn't that kind of fight

[02:25] David: no way in hell i was gonna successfully kill smasher, and i don't think he wants to kill me. it was all about posturing

[02:25] David: i got some good hits in, and now he knows we're not a soft target for that bullshit until he's back in his big boy pants

[02:25] ❤LUCY❤: LOL

[02:25] ❤LUCY❤: HIS BIG BOY PANTS 💀💀💀

[02:25] ❤LUCY❤: seriously though, seconding kiwi on this, i do NOT understand guys sometimes

[02:25] 🥝: ...actually i pretty much get it, that way. it's high school bully shit

[02:29] David: EXACTLY

[02:29] David: IT'S LIKE

[02:29] David: SMASHER IS PRETTY MUCH THE WORLD'S OLDEST 16 YEAR OLD

[02:29] David: THAT GONK DID NOT MATURE PAST FUCKIN HIGH SCHOOL

[02:29] 🥝: you ok? took you a sec

[02:29] David: oh yeah just had to peel away from smasher. he talked me into doing a shot with him, but i managed to shake him off. wait how is the net working up here, anyways?

[02:29] 🥝: we're not on NC's net lol, we're on the moon's

[02:29] ❤LUCY❤: yeah the chat program we're using is peer to peer communication using client-side accounts

[02:29] David: i have absolutely no idea what that means

[02:29] ❤LUCY❤: arrrghhh i have gotta give you a crash course in nerd stuff sometime lol

[02:29] 🥝: basically, everything our chat needs to work is stored on our agents. as long as our agents are on the same net, we can talk to each other. the NC net and the moon net can interact with each other, but it's much, much slower than you'd want

[02:29] 🥝: which sucks because there's an elflines patch dropping while we're up here and we're gonna be behind the guild

[02:29] ❤LUCY❤: ...wait, yeah, I forgot. crap, we're gonna be pretty far behind, that drops tonight

[02:29] David: you can't play that on the moon?

[02:30] 🥝: different nets, remember? moon doesn't have an elflines server

[02:30] ❤LUCY❤: at least not an official one. i think some of the research dorks set up a reverse engineered one

[02:30] 🥝: yeah i'm not touching that lol, there's shit i'll pirate but not elflines

[02:30] David: i don't have a room key, one of y'all let me in?

[02:32] David: ...hello? either of you?

[02:32] ❤LUCY❤: oh fuck sorry babe lol, hold on a sec

Chapter 57: Tubthumping

Notes:

I get knocked down, but I Discord again
Ain't nobody gonna keep me down

David wasn't entirely sure what to expect when the door opened, and his tipsy state didn't help matters. The aesthetics of Tycho were sterile, like something out of an old pre-Collapse sci-fi movie, and he was mildly worried it wasn't going to be the most comfortable accommodations.

All fears were assuaged when Lucy came to the door and opened it, revealing one of the most opulent hotel suites David had ever seen. She had a towel wrapped around her, with her hair still damp.

"Hey, sweetie," he said, slurring slightly. His weight shifted to his injured foot without him realizing, and he winced, letting out a swear.

"Hey, babe," Lucy said, a worried frown on her face. "You alright?"

"Yeah, just my big toe," David said.

"Sure you don't wanna get that checked out?" Lucy asked. David shrugged.

"I'll be alright," he said. "Just gotta be careful with that foot." Kiwi stepped out of one of the suite's adjoining rooms, drying herself off with another towel.

"Hey, D," Kiwi said. David made some mental connections, and raised his eyebrow at them.

"You two been deep-diving?" he asked.

"Yeah, they've got temp-controlled baths for it here," Lucy said. "You wouldn't believe some of the stuff we've been finding on the net up here."

"Such as?" David asked.

"Nerds got a whole fucking Library of Alexandria up here," Kiwi said. "Books, music, movies, old TV shows, anime, video games, you name it. If it exists, some dork's sharing it. Wish I'd brought some big datashards, honestly."

"Can always grab some while we're up here," Lucy noted.

"Very true," Kiwi said. "So, uh... how'd things go with Smasher after you two fought?" David groaned in response.

---

About ten minutes earlier, David found himself at the bar in the Silver Rocks Resort's lobby, sitting next to a weakened and much less ugly Adam Smasher. David was wincing every time his big toe throbbed, sending waves of pain through his foot; Smasher's face was starting to swell up with purple bruises, the product of his current synthskin imitating human flesh rather than improving it.

A bartender walked up, appearing almost like a gold statue in a tuxedo with his chrome. David winced again, this time in anticipation of the bartender recognizing Smasher.

"Have you two been helped?" the bartender asked, coldly professional as ever. David breathed a sigh of relief.

"Randver," Smasher said. He nudged David forcefully. "Get the kid one, too." The bartender nodded, leaning under the bar, and produced two green-glass bottles of expensive beer. Extending a small bottle opener from his fingertip, he deftly whipped it across both bottles, opening the caps as they fizzed out slightly. David took a sip and coughed; it was stronger than he expected. Smasher, meanwhile, took a large swig, setting the bottle back down forcefully.

"So, you said you were up here for a smash and grab?" David asked.

"Choomba, I don't wanna fuckin' talk about work right now. Drink your damn beer and find something else to bring up," Smasher said, smiling. David took another sip, getting used to the taste.

"That's... kinda the thing, though. Like Lucy and Becca were saying, something kinda smells about it; this personal for you?" David asked. Smasher looked at David, clearly deciding whether or not to let the younger merc in on something.

"Think I'd tell you if it was?" Smasher said, opting not to. "C'mon, I've got a reputation to keep."

"What, you think I'm gonna go around telling people?" David asked. Smasher took another gulp of his beer, prompting David to do the same.

"Yeah," Smasher said. "Yeah, I do."

"Think they'd even believe me?" David asked. "Like, keep in mind the rest of my crew thought I was cyberpsycho for even talking to you the first time." Smasher chugged the rest of his beer, nearly tossing the empty bottle behind him blindly, but stopped himself at the last second as the bartender glared at him. He set the bottle down sheepishly. David took another swig of his; there was only the dregs at the bottom left.

"Shot of tequila for both of us," Smasher said. "Don't give a shit what brand, well's fine."

"You paying the tab?" David asked, raising an eyebrow at how casually Smasher was ordering drinks for him.

"Saka is," Smasher said. "That's part of the personal reason. Free vacation, and all I've gotta do is bring some Biotechnica gonk back with me."

"Appreciate it, but not sure I wanna be drinking that much, choom," David said.

"What, you worried about whiskey dick? C'mon, three outputs, your cock could probably use a break," Smasher said, nudging him. David couldn't help himself and guffawed at him.

"You don't even know how right you are," David said, composing himself. The bartender placed two shots of tequila in front of the duo, in square crystal shot glasses that the brown-ish liquor seemed to refract in.

"Do your shot and I'll tell you what the other reason I'm up here is," Smasher said. David weighed the likelihood that the girls were going to be annoyed with him, versus his desperate curiosity, and his curiosity won. He picked up the shot glass and downed it in one gulp, grimacing; Smasher followed, not even reacting, and laughed at David's reaction.

"Alright, deal, so what's the other reason?" David asked. Smasher motioned to the bartender, who came up dutifully.

"Close out my tab. Put it on the Arasaka corpo tab," he said.

"Name?" the bartender asked.

"Should come up under A. Smasher," Smasher said. If the bartender had skin that wasn't metal, he would've turned ghostly white, and he ran to finish the tab. Smasher looked at David as he got up. "Walk with me for a sec," he said, and the younger mercenary followed. When they'd gotten deep enough into the hotel that Smasher was confident nobody else would be listening, they stopped.

"We good?" David asked.

"Yeah," Smasher said. "Michiko Arasaka."

"Come again?" David asked.

"That's the idea," Smasher said, trying not to laugh at his own joke. David tilted his head slightly.

"Wait, did you..." David said.

"Yes," Smasher said.

"...how!?" David asked, perplexed.

"The fuck do you mean, how?" Smasher asked, raising an eyebrow.

"You don't... I mean... do you even have..." David sputtered. He was struggling to find a polite way to tell Smasher that he had initially thought the man had no penis, and was quickly realizing there was, in fact, no polite way to get that across. "Do you even have a dick!?" he asked, finally settling on the bluntest possible manner of asking, and making Smasher nearly double over with laughter.

"I mean, I don't have one on the fuckin' Dragoon!" Smasher said, struggling to collect himself enough for coherent words. "Fuck would I need one on that body for!?"

"So I'm guessing you're breaking out an old one for this?" David asked.

"Precisely," Smasher said. "You wanna know something that's probably gonna make me sound like a gonk?"

"Is it gonna get me killed when you're sober?" David asked.

"Fuck no," Smasher said. "You're too fun to kill. 'Sides, I don't wanna repeat that fight."

"Then sure," David said.

"Michiko's... she's not the only person I've ever fucked, not by a mile, but she's kinda the one that got away, you know?" Smasher said, his tone oddly soft. "It was only a hookup, but... she actually treated me like I matter and like I'm not just a big, angry gun with legs. I miss that."

"She up here?" David asked.

"Yeah," Smasher said. "Still does consulting and PR work with Danger Gal, and they're protecting some big gala up here. If I can sneak off and talk to her..."

"She's gonna think you're stalking her," David said. Smasher gave him a withering look.

"Is it really stalking when every fuckin' tabloid in NC is documenting every fuckin' waking minute of her life?" Smasher said, visibly annoyed. David realized that, up until fairly recently, he'd known her in the media as Michiko Sanderson, Smasher's name was decidedly not Adam Sanderson, and that the media was very particularly interested in her dating life. He winced, looking Smasher in the eyes.

"Fuck, choom, I didn't even think about that," he said. "That must've sucked."

"Putting it mildly," Smasher said, looking away. It was still odd for him experiencing any kind of sincere empathy from people. So far, the list of people who weren't blood relatives of his who had shown him that kind of empathy was relatively short: there was Michiko, and then there was David, and that was more or less the sum total.

"You need someone to play wingman for you?" David asked, feeling guilty enough to offer his help. Smasher sighed.

"Don't wanna admit it, but... yeah, that'd probably help," Smasher said.

---

"You're kidding," Lucy said. "Michiko Arasaka?"

"That's what he's saying," David said. "Don't know if I believe the gonk."

"I mean, why would he lie about that?" Kiwi asked.

"Because he's Smasher?" David asked in return as he sank into the couch of the suite's living room, his buzz letting him greatly enjoy how soft the fabric was.

"I mean, fair, yeah, but... that doesn't really fit his rep," Kiwi said. "I don't know, I feel like if he was gonna lie about this, he'd be doing it to look scarier, not to look wimpy."

"I buy it," Lucy said.

"You wanna play winglady for the gonk, then?" David asked. "I'm not sure I actually want any part of this."

"I'd rather eat broken glass," she said.

"I don't even know if I'd be good at it," Kiwi said, excluding herself.

"Guess we gotta draw straws or something," David groaned.

Notes:

Drunk, nerfed Smasher in the lowest-stress emotional state possible for him is so fun to write.

Chapter 58: Giza Butler

Notes:

The Kiefsatz Hasherach now takes the Bong Jabbar
Rifftual commences 'round the tree stump Discord
Bong Water of Life anoints the Muad' Doob messiah

When David woke up in the massive bed that took up about half of the suite's bedroom, he was surprised to see Becca already awake and moving around. Even more surprisingly, she was loading some weed into a chamber on something that looked like a thick metal pen.

"Hey, sleepyhead," she said, not looking up from her task.

"You brought weed up here?" he asked, groggily.

"What, you think I'm gonna hit that buffet sober, choom?" Becca said. "Kiwi and Lucy are already on their way down there." David's stomach was rumbling; he decided that he could stand to eat, too.

"You need any help with that?" he asked.

"Think I've got it," Becca said. She finished, closing the chamber. "You're gonna need to sit up and scoot in if you want some, though." David did as he was asked, crumpling the massive blanket as he draped his body out of it. Becca looked over, realizing he was naked, and blushed slightly.

"Like what you see?" he asked playfully, knowing the answer.

"I do, but, uh..." she started, sheepishly. David gave her a kiss on the shoulder.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "When you're healed up, alright?" Becca blushed harder and grinned, holding the strange metal pen up to her mouth and wincing a bit; she pressed a button on the other end, causing the chamber to heat up and push vapor through the mouthpiece. She sucked it in, trying not to cough, and exhaled a thin cloud that smelled oddly pleasant.

"Hits weird," she said. "Think I can get used to it, though." She handed it over to David, who did the same and looked over at her.

"You doing okay?" he asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine," Becca said.

"Anything in particular you wanted to do while we were up here?" he asked. Becca hit the vaporizer and sighed, looking away from him. "You okay?"

"There's one thing, but... I kinda need to be healed up before I try it," Becca said.

"What is it?" David pressed.

"Low-G skateboarding," Becca said. David blinked, as he took the vaporizer from her and hit it himself.

"You skate?" he asked. He'd never seen her do it, and somehow the image seemed kind of odd; he tried not to laugh at the image of her somehow pulling off a skateboard trick with the massive gauntlets she wore in combat.

"Used to," she said. "Back when it was just me and my bro, you know? Before I was a merc or anything. Was how I'd blow off steam when shit got bad; just take my old board out, find something that looked like a good trick line, see if I could hit it."

"You ever pull off anything cool?" he asked. She shrugged.

"Eh," she said. "Wasn't ever gonna win a competition or end up in any skate BDs or anything, you get me? Kept my mind off things, though."

They sat in silence for a second.

"I bet that shit's fucking preem up here," David said, smiling. "If you're healed up before we gotta go back, let's check that out, alright?"

Becca wrapped her arms around David forcefully, pushing him back slightly with the reduced gravity. He blinked with surprise, his eyebrows raised, as she winced in pain.

"Love you, D," she said.

"Love you too," David said. "You wanna meet up with the others and get some chow?"

"Fuck yeah, I do, choomba," Becca said, beaming. "Grab my cane?"

"Lemme get my clothes on first," he said.

---

One of the oddities of the moon was that nobody was on a consistent schedule. While there was a "moon time" time zone, it was roughly mapped to Berlin, as the ESA ran the whole operation; meanwhile, people from everywhere from Night City to Tokyo were coming and going through Tycho, for business and pleasure alike. This meant that, while a resort hotel Earthside may have had a continental breakfast buffet, the Silver Rocks Resort had a continental breakfast, lunch, and dinner buffet, with a level of extravagance far surpassing just about anything available on Earth. Moreover, it was available at all times of day. David didn't want to think about the staffing levels required for this, or the working conditions underlying it all.

The buffet, itself, was almost more like a massive dining hall, with the wall lined with serving stations for assorted cuisines, mealtimes, moods, and tastes. One stand had a selection of vegan Indian dishes; another, hand-rolled sushi. Yet another had classic American barbecue, with one serving Southern soul food flanking it on one side and another with a build-your-own-tacos bar on the other. There was a bakery that had set up with an assortment of sweet and savory breakfast pastries, a stand serving assorted German and Polish sausages, and one grilling up burgers with assorted wild toppings. David felt himself hit by what could less be called choice paralysis, and moreso be called a choice spinal cord injury.

Becca, meanwhile, looked like a small child in a candy store, her already-red scleras reddened further by the weed.

"Need me to help you carry anything?" David asked. Becca looked up at him.

"Yeah, that'd be nova," she said, grinning.

By the time the two were done ransacking the buffet and walking up to the table where Lucy and Kiwi sat, sipping cups of coffee, they were carrying mountains of food. On David's, tacos al pastor sat beside a cut of fresh prime rib, with a full Italian sub topping them, three slices of New York-style pepperoni pizza, and a bowl of goat rogan josh on rice precariously balanced atop the mountain; if it hadn't been for the lowered gravity, the whole thing would've most likely collapsed. On Rebecca's, a full fourteen-ounce ribeye steak made the foundation, with a toasted BLT on top of it, a filet of grilled bluefin tuna atop that, several pieces of assorted nigiri, and a Caesar salad made with fresh vegetables balancing very precariously between two of David's fingertips. The fact that, between them, they had three free hands precluded any drinks.

The two netrunners stared blankly at them, astounded by the sheer gluttony on display.

"You... didn't need to get food for us, too," Lucy said. "We already ate."

"Oh, I figured," David said.

"Wait, that's all for you two?" she asked.

"Sure you don't need to get checked for a tapeworm or something? Jesus Christ," Kiwi said.

"Fuck did you two get?" Becca asked, indignant. "C'mon, we live in NC. You give us this kind of selection, I'mma get as much stuff that isn't scop or veggie protein in me as I can fit in my goddamn stomach." David nodded in agreement, already chewing a bite of one of the slices of pizza; the simple fact that all of the ingredients were either grown on-site in hydroponic farms or shipped up from the most expensive locations possible meant that, not only did it absolutely annihilate any pizza he could get back home, but it was already in solid competition for the best meal he'd ever had in his life. His mouth was both dry and burning from the hot food, though, so he choked the bite down as fast as he could.

"I'll get us some drinks," David said. "You know what you want?"

"Just get me a NiCola," Becca said. "Too early for booze." Kiwi raised an eyebrow as David walked off.

"Not day-drinking?" she asked.

"Got PT in an hour," Becca said. "I'll save it for when I'm sore. Seriously, though, you two gonks just drinking coffee?"

"I just had some sushi," Lucy said. "Beats what they've got down in the city by a mile."

"Chef's salad," Kiwi said.

"Seriously?" Becca asked. "You know it's all-you-can-eat, right?"

"One, we're up here for two whole weeks," Kiwi said. "Two, not all of us are black holes like you two apparently are. Jesus, are you two even planning to eat more than one meal today?"

"God willing," Becca said as she dug in, making Lucy laugh.

"You want any of us to go with you to that, by the way?" Lucy asked. Becca shook her head, her mouth full.

"Nice of you to ask, choom," Becca said, "but I'll be nova. It's only thirty minutes."

---

Becca was unprepared for how non-nova she was, in fact, going to be. Every part of her body felt like it was on fire as she attempted to walk on the treadmill, the harness around her chest and abdomen imitating the force of Earth's gravity and exerting resistive force on her as she gripped onto the support bars the therapist had installed.

"You've got this, Rebecca," the physical therapist said. Iolanthe Carthen had previously been one of the best at her job Earthside, and had long since graduated to taking luxury medical-tourist clients on the moon; it was surprising seeing a tattooed-up, chromed-out edgerunner with neon hair walk into her office, but she knew Viktor Vektor from his days in Trauma Team, Rebecca came with a recommendation from him, and he'd even talked her into giving the girl a steep discount. After all, it was hard to turn down someone who ran a cat rescue, had helped take in a homeless orphan, and had just helped take down a serial killer, and who was recovering from being brutally assaulted.

The distance between the Moon and Earth, and the difficulty of communicating back and forth in any quick manner, meant that while Vik had been somewhat stretching the truth in describing Becca that way, it would be too much effort for Iolanthe to dig to find that out.

"Fuck you! Fucking... goddamn fuck... cunt! I'll get a fucking Studd and fuck your dad in his gonk ass!" Becca grunted through gritted teeth as the harness pulled on her and her legs burned. "Get fuckin' spikes on it and make it a fuckin' pineapple cock!" Iolanthe stayed professionally stone-faced to the best of her ability, though her eyes went wide at just how vulgar the girl was being. She was used to getting some heat from clients- physical therapy wasn't the easiest to go through- but this was less heat and more magma.

"C'mon, just two more minutes, you've got this," Iolanthe said, checking her watch and hoping Becca wouldn't notice her doing so. Becca grunted and pushed forwards; for as heated of a client as she was, she certainly had drive. The difficulty with her for Iolanthe wasn't motivating her, so much as it was not needing her own therapy immediately afterwards. The clock ticked down, and eventually the two minutes ran out; the treadmill spun down, the harness let Becca loose as the low gravity cushioned her, and she began to breathe, deeply and heavily. Iolanthe tossed a packet of EnduroDrink her way.

"How'd I do?" Becca asked.

"You did great," Iolanthe said. "Hydrate, then talk. Don't want you passing out before I get your payment info."

Becca chuckled as she popped the opening on the packet and drank.

---

[15:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: hey kiwi

[15:30] 🥝: hey! you ok? what's up?

[15:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: just finished my PT, drinking some endurodrink

[15:30] 🥝: ... this about my boobs

[15:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: HHAHHAH OMG

[15:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: MY PHYSICAL THERAPIST DOESN'T KNOW WHY I'M LAUGHING SO HARD RN

[15:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: NO

[15:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: I DIDN'T EVEN THINK ABOUT THAT

[15:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: FUCK I SHOULD HAVE ASKED YOU TO COME WITH ME

[15:30] 🌟BECCA!🌟: I COULD HAVE MADE IOLANTHE SHIT HER PANTS

[15:30] 🥝: omg

[15:30] 🥝: i mean

[15:30] 🥝: it'd be funny don't get me wrong but

[15:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: for real though we got enough for my PT appointments right

[15:31] 🥝: how much are they?

[15:31] 🌟BECCA!🌟: 3000 a pop

[15:32] 🥝: wait seriously?

[15:32] 🌟BECCA!🌟: that a good "wait seriously?" or a bad "wait seriously?"

[15:32] 🥝: as in, you didn't even need to ask for that

[15:32] 🥝: come on i paid 75k to be able to give blowjobs and not have to awkwardly wedge cigs in a vent hole.

[15:33] 🥝: you paying... lemme do some quick napkin math here

[15:33] 🥝: 42k, total, to be able to walk without a cane again? that's nothing, come on

[15:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: guessing from the lack of peanut gallery D and L are off doing stuff?

[15:33] 🥝: yeah they're doing the EVA tour. get to go bounce around in low gravity on the surface like you're neil armstrong

[15:33] 🥝: apparently that's what the BD they did when they first met was all about so they were all amped up for it

[15:33] 🌟BECCA!🌟: not your thing?

[15:34] 🥝: yeah i'm just reading a book in the room rn

[15:34] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ooh. fill me in choomba

[15:34] 🥝: Machine Language for the Commodore 64. old programming textbook

[15:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...

[15:36] 🥝: what

[15:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: seriously? you know what "vacation" means right

[15:36] 🥝: tinkering with old shit is a hobby for me. this is fun for me

[15:36] 🌟BECCA!🌟: sounds suspiciously like work

[15:36] 🥝: maybe like a hundred years ago it would've been but

[15:36] 🥝: let me put it this way

[15:36] 🥝: this kind of old tinkering shit, for netrunners

[15:37] 🥝: it's kinda like if you were to get really into, i dunno, world war 2 guns or ancient gladiators or samurai or something

[15:37] 🌟BECCA!🌟: hey i love samurai, never fade away is fuckin preem

[15:37] 🥝: oh ha ha. you know what i mean. swords and armor samurai, not johnny silverhand lol

[15:37] 🥝: it's not... useful or anything but it's fun. kinda learn your roots, you know?

[15:37] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah i get you. just paid the bill. wanna hit the vape a bit and go grab a beer? sorry i waited instead of offering you and lucy any earlier lol

[15:37] 🥝: it's no prob lol, probably would've gotten a monster fucking stack of food like you two did

[15:37] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i am very excited to put on the vacation pounds 😋

[15:37] 🥝: hahahaha. yeah i'm down to hang, see ya when you get back to the hotel choom

Notes:

Group Chat officially passes the Bechdel Test now!

Chapter 59: The Man Who Sold The World

Notes:

Oh no, not me
I never lost control
You're face to face
With the man who sold the Discord

The hotel bar at the Silver Rocks Resort felt odd to Becca. On its surface, everything seemed right- there was a bar, a friendly bartender, booze backing him, patrons drinking- but something about it seemed distinctly off, and unlike any bar she'd gone to in recent memory.

The first specific thing that stuck out to her, as she sipped her Broseph Ale, was the clientele. Looking around, everyone except for the two of them was either in business casual or outright formalwear. This, alone, wouldn't really have been enough to throw her off (she'd wandered into corpo bars by mistake in NC before, and typically got thrown back out about as fast as she came in), but it certainly made her feel under-dressed. They were also somewhat younger than average for the group, to the point where Becca was somewhat surprised they hadn't been carded.

The other thing was the bartender. Not because of how he looked; a full-borg bartender wasn't inherently strange. His behavior was the odd thing. He didn't seem to be trying to learn the customers' names, make conversation, or do anything that Becca typically expected bartenders to do in order to make more regulars. It's as if he was trying to make the obvious joke about him being a bartending robot into reality, mechanically going through the motions. And, on top of that, she could've sworn it was the same person who'd been there the previous night.

"This place got weird vibes to you, choomba?" she asked Kiwi, hoping to confirm her feelings one way or another.

"Little bit, yeah," Kiwi said. "Wanna check out one of the other bars? There's a fuckload." Becca beamed.

"Hell, yes," she said. "They got any places that are... I dunno, our type?" Kiwi cocked an eyebrow.

"What do you mean by that?" she asked.

"You know, places where I won't feel fuckin' weird being in underwear and a hoodie," Becca said. "Rogue got a franchise up here or something?" Kiwi tried not to burst out laughing at the mental image, as she looked over the digital map in her Agent.

"Seems like there's a place called Crater's Edge a little ways out," Kiwi said. "Description calls it a working-class punk dive, pictures kinda look a little like Turbo."

"Nova," Becca said. "Let's pay our tab and get outta here."

Out of nowhere, a voice from across the room called out to them.

"Kathy Blomqvist?" someone asked, freezing Kiwi in place with an expression on her face like she'd seen a ghost. Becca looked at her, then looked around for the source.

"You okay, Kiwi?" she asked.

"Fuck the tab, they can just charge our room," Kiwi said, standing up as quickly as she could. Before she could get away from the attention, however, a brunette woman wearing glasses and a white dress, standing about five-foot five, came up to the two, making herself impossible to ignore.

"Holy shit, it's you, Katherine! You look so different these days," the person said.

"I have no idea who you are," Kiwi said, blatantly lying. Becca started cracking up.

"Katherine?" she asked, looking at Kiwi.

"Please don't start calling me that," Kiwi said, not even looking at Becca.

"You don't remember me?" the person said, clearly hurt. "We were in the same study group in Aonuma's linear algebra class at NCU! I passed that fucking class because of you!"

"God damn it," Kiwi muttered to herself, quietly. "Yeah, I remember you now. Hey, Linda." Linda looked over at Becca.

"I... this your girlfriend? Interesting taste," she said. Kiwi blushed.

"Not, uh, quite?" she said. "We... work together."

"And we fuck the same dude," Becca said, grinning and knowing exactly how awkward she was gonna make this. Linda looked at Kiwi, her eyebrows raised.

"Wait, I thought you got with that corpo guy?" Linda said. "The one with the funky eyes who got the voice modifier so he'd sound like Buggin' Out from Do the Right Thing?" Kiwi sighed.

"No, he's dead," she said. Linda looked saddened.

"Sorry to hear that," she said.

"Don't be," Kiwi said. "Three guesses who killed him. First two don't count."

"You can't be serious," Linda said, staring at her. "You... killed-"

"If you knew what that fucking son of a bitch did to me, you'd be wanting to do the same thing," Kiwi said. "His buddy corp wanted to make an example of him for fucking up too much. I helped out. Wasn't gonna miss the opportunity."

"You're a fucking cyberpunk?" Linda asked, a disgusted look on her face as she looked over at Becca and put two and two together.

"Yeah," Kiwi said, sensing that this was her chance to get out of this conversation and as far away as possible. "Yeah. I'm a merc. Buddies with Adam fuckin' Smasher these days. You got an issue?"

"Yeah, I've got an issue, you fucking kill people!" Linda said, furrowing her brow and speaking up loudly to try and catch the rest of the bar's attention. "Kathy, you went to college! Why the fuck are you working with merc scum now?" A few people looked over, chattering quietly amongst themselves, but it didn't have the intended effect. The bartender came over.

"There a problem, ma'am?" he asked her.

"Yeah, get this fucking punk trash out of the hotel! The fuck you think Petrochem is paying so much for?" Linda asked. The bartender looked over at Becca and Kiwi.

"Room number?" he asked.

"D502," Kiwi said. The bartender looked back at Linda.

"Ma'am, they're paying customers, same as you are," he said. "Arguably, moreso," he muttered under his breath.

"Hope you fucking rot in hell, cunt," Linda said, storming off.

"Hey, Linda?" Kiwi called out, causing her to turn back. "I had to have my jaw replaced with a metal vent, for several years, because of what Warrick fucking did to me. I'm not just 'working with merc scum,' I'm in a poly relationship with three other mercs, and, this might shock you, but not motherfucking one of them have ever beaten me at all, let alone broken my jaw so badly I had to have it surgically removed and replaced."

"Good fucking thing he did, Shark-Tooth Kathy! Made you fix your fucking face up!" Linda called back, speeding up.

"Put it on my room tab," Kiwi said to the bartender as she got up.

"Keys, don't do whatever you're about to do," Becca said.

Kiwi chose not to listen and sped up, walking towards Linda, and delivered the hardest sucker-punch she could to the back of the corpo's head, sending her flying in the reduced gravity. Becca looked at the bartender.

"Guessing we need to go?" she asked, having been through this song and dance before, but rarely with Kiwi, of all people as the aggressor.

"Yeah," the bartender said. "Probably a good idea."

"We need to worry about anything long-term? Permanent 86, cops on scene, et cetera?" Becca asked, picking up her cane. The bartender looked at Linda, considering the situation for a moment.

"I'll say nothing, because I saw nothing," he said. "Just make yourselves scarce." Becca nodded, getting up and walking towards Kiwi.

"We need to go," she said to her friend and metamour.

"Yeah, figured," Kiwi said, looking at Linda sprawled out and floating through the air. "Think I just killed her?"

"Maybe," Becca said as they walked through the door. "Knocked her into next fucking month, at any rate. Christ, Kiwi."

"You're not telling David or Lucy my legal name," Kiwi said. "Or the motherfucking Shark-Tooth Kathy thing."

"What's that about, anyways?" Becca said, her cane thudding against the smooth concrete of Tycho's connecting walkways.

"What's it sound like?" Kiwi asked.

"Some stupid-ass nickname from when you were a kid?" Becca asked, unsure.

"High school and college," Kiwi said. "My smile looked kinda fucked up. People called me Shark-Tooth Kathy because my teeth looked like shark teeth."

"You're fucking with me," Becca said. "You're gorgeous, the fuck were people giving you shit for?"

"Teenagers are brutal," Kiwi said. "And they don't really stop being brutal when they turn 18 if they don't like you."

"How the fuck could anyone not like you?" Becca asked. Kiwi shrugged. "Where'd 'Kiwi' come from, anyways?"

"You're gonna laugh," Kiwi said.

"Try me," Becca said, stopping in her tracks.

"Lucy and I met in a crowded nightclub. She misheard me when I introduced myself. I said my name was Kathy, she somehow got 'Kiwi' out of that. I kinda just rolled with it, decided I liked Kiwi better," Kiwi said.

"So, wait, does she..." Becca started.

"I never corrected her, no," Kiwi said. "Like I said, don't tell them."

"Wonder how they're doing with the whole moon bounce thing, anyways?" Becca asked.

---

[16:00] 🌟BECCA!🌟: hey david, lucy, either of you two on rn

[16:00] David: yeah we just finished our two hours outside, what's up?

[16:00] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh cool how was that

[16:00] 🥝: yeah what was that like

[16:00] ❤LUCY❤: OH MY GOD

[16:00] ❤LUCY❤: IT WAS AMAZIGN

[16:00] ❤LUCY❤: AMAZING

[16:00] ❤LUCY❤: I' MMAKING TYPOS IN MY BARAIN RN HOLY FUCK IT WAS

[16:00] ❤LUCY❤: EVERYTHING

[16:00] ❤LUCY❤: WE'VE GOTTA DO IT AGAIN AND YOU TWO HAVE GOTTA COME WITH US

[16:00] David: lucy has been being so fucking cute.

[16:00] 🥝: hahahaha i see that ❤

[16:00] David: what have you two been up to

[16:00] 🌟BECCA!🌟: did my physical therapy, had a couple of beers

[16:01] 🥝: did some reading, went out with becca

[16:01] 🌟BECCA!🌟: kiwi punched a corpo girl's motherfucking LIGHTS out

[16:01] 🌟BECCA!🌟: like honest to god knocked that bitch into 2077

[16:01] ❤LUCY❤: WAIT I'M SORRY. KIWI?????

[16:01] ❤LUCY❤: KIWI PUNCHED SOMEONE?

[16:01] ❤LUCY❤: WHAT

[16:01] 🌟BECCA!🌟: she uh. hit some nerves

[16:01] ❤LUCY❤: KIWI IS THIS REAL.

[16:01] 🥝: ayup

[16:01] David: god damn kiwi

[16:01] David: didn't... know you were capable of that?

[16:01] 🥝: yeah neither did i. but it happened. and now we're heading to this place called crater's edge if you two wanna meet up

[16:01] David: i'm in. lucy?

[16:01] ❤LUCY❤: yeah let's meet back up there! i gotta tell you two all about how great the EVA experience was

[16:01] David: it was, in fact, pretty awesome

[16:01] ❤LUCY❤: SEE I'M TELLING YOU

 

 

 

Chapter 60: Working Man

Notes:

Well, I get up at seven, yeah
And I get in Discord at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm in Discord all the time

Crater's Edge was the one place on the moon so far that felt like home, and for that reason, it stood out. It was a merc dive in the purest sense of the word; if it weren't for the silver metal walls, fluorescent lighting, and lack of any kind of windows, it could've been mistaken for any bar in Night City, and even with those, it wasn't altogether too different from Afterlife.

"You two on vacation?" the bartender asked Kiwi and Becca, as they sat, waiting for the other half of their group; Kiwi clutched her right hand, which throbbed with pain.

"Yeah," Becca said. "Moon usually this weird for our kinda people?" The bartender chuckled.

"You get used to it," she said. She was butch-looking, with a crew cut and a tattoo of a spider near her left temple; Kiroshi optics glowed even under the harsh lighting, and while she had synthskin over them, Becca could tell her arms were augmented. Techie arms, like Pilar had. "Where you staying?" the bartender asked.

"Silver Rocks," Becca said. The bartender winced.

"Yeah, there's your problem," she said. "Nice as all hell, but... gotta keep the noise down if you don't want the corpo gonks getting rowdy, you get me?"

"Think we've learned that lesson," Kiwi said. The bartender looked at her clutching her hand.

"...you punch one out?" she asked.

"Yeah," Kiwi said. The bartender grinned, revealing shining titanium teeth.

"First round for you two's on me," she said. "What'cha drinking?"

"I'll take a vodka tonic," Kiwi said. "Well's fine." The bartender made an exaggerated gesture of annoyance, leaning over the bar, as Becca looked over a dusty paper-printed menu with the place's signature cocktails.

"C'mon, I'm paying," the bartender said. "At least get it with Bolshevik or something." Kiwi nodded and grunted, and the bartender looked over at Becca.

"This 'Dark Side of the Moon' one looks pretty good," Becca said, staring at the menu. "Think I'll have that."

"One Bolshevik and tonic, one Dark Side of the Moon," the bartender said, confirming it to herself.

As she ducked under the bar, Lucy ran in, practically breaking the sound barrier and tackle-hugging Kiwi. A few other patrons, hardened mercenaries largely in their old age, looked over and saw David walking up to the group; there was scattered muttering about youngsters and new players, but nothing any of the group could make out as being specifically relevant to them.

"Ow, hey," Kiwi said, her torso thudding into the bar as Lucy came to a stop.

"You okay?" Lucy asked.

"I mean, you just smacked me into the bar," Kiwi said.

"No, I meant... sorry about that," Lucy said. "I meant back at the hotel bar. You okay? You hurt at all?" Kiwi smiled.

"No," she said. "God, no. Ran into someone I knew in college who went corpo. She hit a nerve and I kinda lost it for a second."

"You two should've seen it," Becca added, grinning. "Gonk went fucking flying!"

"And we got free drinks out of it," Kiwi said, as the bartender re-emerged with their cocktails. "So, how was the EVA thing?" Lucy beamed, looking happier than she'd ever been in her life.

"Oh my God, you two have got to try it," Lucy said. "It's amazing! It's so much better than the BD was!"

"Was a little weird having it be mostly silent out there," David said. "I don't know why, but I was kinda expecting the Hallie Coggins song like they used in the BD." Lucy burst out laughing.

"I told you, no sound in space," Lucy said. "That's why they put the song there, goofball." She wrapped her arm around him, pulling him in, and looked up at the bartender. "Bolshevik and NiCola," she said. The bartender nodded and looked over at David, who was looking over at Becca's cocktail, a concoction of coffee liqueur, rum, cold-brewed coffee, and a dash of heavy cream.

"Take what she's got," he said, prompting another nod. All of a sudden, as the bartender dipped back down, he felt goosebumps down his spine and arms, as if some sort of innate danger sense was going off; he turned around, a pit in his stomach, and saw a familiar blonde, muscular man, wearing mirrored sunglasses and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt. "Fuck me," he said, under his breath.

"Better hello than I usually get," Adam Smasher said. The bruises on his face were still visible, but were starting to settle down; presumably, this was why he was wearing sunglasses, despite being on the moon. "Thought about what we talked about at the hotel bar any?" David sighed, trying not to make his displeasure at running into Smasher again obvious.

"Choom, are you stalking me or something?" David asked. Smasher shrugged.

"Merc bar," he said. "Where the fuck'd you think I was gonna be?" David had to concede the point; if they were trying to avoid Smasher, they'd picked just about the worst possible place to attempt to do so.

"Yeah, that scans," David said, trying to move past it. "Yeah. I thought about it. I'll..." he started.

"I've got it," Lucy said, cutting him off.

"What?" David, Smasher, Kiwi and Becca all asked, loosely overlapping each other, all four of them completely befuddled. They looked at each other, all tempted to say something along the lines of "jinx." Lucy stared at them.

"What what?" she asked.

"Luce, don't take this the wrong way, but you're kind of a..." Becca started.

"A giant dorkass," Kiwi said. "I love you, but you're a giant dorkass. Is this really something you wanna try?"

---

[17:25] ❤LUCY❤: GOD NO IT IS NOT.

[17:25] 🌟BECCA!🌟: THEN WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU OFFERING LUCE

[17:25] ❤LUCY❤: i mean do any of YOU THREE want to be stuck dealing with Smasher??

[17:25] David: idk I can usually put up with him

[17:25] ❤LUCY❤: LAST TIME YOU HAD TO PUT UP WITH HIM, YOU TWO STARTED BEATING ON EACH OTHER.

[17:25] David: ...yeah that's honestly fair

[17:25] David: idk maybe michiko's turned on by that?

[17:25] David: i mean she did fuck smasher.

[17:25] David: jesus i cannot get over that

[17:26] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you know what. i'm getting in on this too

[17:26] David: ...why.

[17:26] ❤LUCY❤: yeah that sorta defeats the purpose of me doing it.

[17:26] 🌟BECCA!🌟: call me crazy but i kind of don't feel comfortable putting you alone with ADAM MOTHERFUCKING SMASHER.

[17:26] 🌟BECCA!🌟: prob won't be much help if he tries something but maybe gonk'll be less likely to try something in the first place

[17:26] 🥝: you know he's just standing there tapping his foot while we're having this conversation right

[17:26] 🌟BECCA!🌟: would you rather we have it out loud.

[17:26] 🥝: yeah fair

---

"Bex and I are both going," Lucy said, closing her agent interface. Smasher blinked.

"What, you gonks think I need that much damn help?" he asked.

"Ain't about you, choom," Becca said, almost choking on the last word; she'd liked the one time she'd been around him more than she expected to, but considering Adam Smasher, the devil of Night City, to be anything resembling a friend was still odd to her. She suspected it would always be odd. "Just kinda figure it'll help you and Lucy keep away from each other's throats." Smasher laughed.

"See, this is why I like this crew," he said. "You gonks understand me."

Something about the concept of actually understanding Smasher's thought processes frightened the absolute hell out of all four of them in equal measure.

Chapter 61: Have A Cigar

Notes:

Come in here, dear boy
Have a Discord link
You're gonna fly, you're never gonna die
You're gonna make it if you try, they're gonna love you

Rebecca stretched her arms, cracking her shoulders with a loud pop; her range of motion wasn't fully back, and she was still sore from the first day of physical therapy, but the injections were already starting to do their job. A pair of passerby, large crinkling shopping bags draped over their arms, gave her and Lucy an odd look.

"What's with the sudden shopping trip, again?" Becca asked. The sterile, metal walkways seemed to go on forever in Tycho's shopping district; it looked like a shopping mall as imagined by Gene Roddenberry, with curved, metal, shining chromed aluminum walls broken up only by plate glass windows, plate glass doors and signs (largely generic text, but with the occasional logo, when the tenant was a corporation that could spring for it). She felt almost a bit paralyzed by the scale of it, and found herself unsure how anyone even found anything in the district except by bumbling around; she briefly wondered if there were people living in the shopping district, living under the radar and eating whatever moon wildlife they could catch.

"Really, really don't think they're gonna let you in the Moonscape Modern in a bikini and hoodie," Lucy said.

"Hey, I brought my nice bikini," Becca retorted. "I can just say I'm one of the strippers. I mean, we're gonna be with Smasher, right? What are they gonna do, tell that guy no?" Lucy sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her pointer and middle fingers for a moment, and briefly regretted bringing Becca along rather than just going out herself and getting something in her size, before dismissing it. She took a sip from the paper cup of coffee in her left hand.

"We don't even know if he's actually on the guest list, or if he's planning on crashing the thing," Lucy said. "Gonna assume the latter. We're probably best off keeping a low profile and trying not to be noticed."

"You're a netrunner, why not just put him on the guest list?" Becca asked. Lucy rubbed the bridge of her nose again.

"One, not my kind of netrunning, really. I can mess with data, but it won't be clean, and they'll know someone poked them in the eye. More Kiwi's thing," Lucy said. "Two, we've been on the moon for... one day, and I don't really feel like getting deported because I hacked into a private database to cover for, let me remind you, Adam Smasher."

"Fair enough, I guess," Becca said, still not really getting it. She stopped in her tracks looked around at the assorted stores, large and small, trying to find something that would potentially end this shopping trip as fast as possible, so that she could go back to the hotel room, check out room service, and then sleep more.

"Anything sticking out to you at all?" Lucy asked, also scanning the environment and finding herself equally paralyzed by the sheer level of choice available.

"Wanna just pick a place and check it out?" Becca asked. "I'm pretty sure we're gonna be here the whole trip if we dig too deep."

"Yeah, I'm kinda worried we're gonna get lost," Lucy said. She noticed a sign, plain text but in a slightly larger and fancier font, across the large walkway reading "Nebula Noire," with assorted dresses and women's outfits visible in one large plate window on the side of the doors, and men's outfits ranging from a classy suit to a strange rockerboy punk-bondage getup in the other. Becca followed her gaze, and guffawed at the sight of the outfit.

"D would look pretty hot in that, wouldn't he?" Becca asked. Lucy blushed and looked away, laughing.

"No, that's not really his style at all," Lucy said. "I mean, it'd be hot, but..."

"Yeah, good fuckin' luck getting him to wear that," Becca mused. "Maybe if I wasn't hurt." Lucy went from awkward laughing to doubling over, unable to control herself.

"God, this is why I love you, Bex," she said.

"Love you too, Luce," Becca said, nonchalantly. "You good, or you need a sec, choom?"

"I... I think I'm alright," Lucy said, collecting herself. "Let's go check this place out."

---

The air inside the Nebula Noire store was lightly jasmine-scented, and the room was largely empty except for the mannequins in the windows and a single, plexiglass console table. The wallpaper seemed to consist of shimmering, shifting threads of some unknown material, with a notable recessed and lit spot in the east wall, in the rough shape of a human. As Lucy and Becca walked up to the console table, a hologram face manifested above it in soft light, framed in pale blue; it was slightly uncanny, as if it had been designed to specifically not look like any living human, but workable enough for its purpose.

"Welcome to Nebula Noire, where the future of fashion materializes before your eyes," the hologram said. "My name is AURA. May I access your style metrics to start your unique experience?" Becca blinked.

"What's a style metric?" she asked.

"Your style metrics include your physical measurements, your current emotional state, and your recent network activity and resulting advertising preferences, along with any photographs of you currently stored on your Agent," AURA said. "I require you, our beloved and welcome customer, to provide your verbal consent before I can begin reading your style metrics."

"Well, this sounds like an info sec nightmare," Lucy said. "Wanna bail and try somewhere else?" Becca held a finger up to her chin, thinking.

"You do not have to commit to any purchases at this point," AURA said. "Your style metrics will not be sold to any third party, and will be deleted immediately after your visit, in accordance with European Economic Community law."

"Fuck it, let's ball," Becca said. "Yes, I consent, pull my metrics or whatever."

The server running the hologram connected to her agent, pulled everything it needed to, and then began to process the data it received.

"I have created several preliminary previews of the best matched outfits for you," AURA said. The hologram face evaporated into blue voxels, replaced by a touch-sensitive hologram display showing multiple generated deepfake photos of Becca. Lucy blushed; in the vast majority of them, as Becca scrolled with her finger, she was either wearing a bikini, a bikini and a hoodie, or nothing. They were, to the AI's credit, very nice bikinis and very nice hoodies. Becca tried very, very hard not to burst out laughing.

"Is there any way we can manually adjust the parameters?" Lucy asked. "We need something that won't get her kicked out of the Moonscape Modern." The display went away briefly.

"Adjusting formality," AURA said, without a visual representation; when the pictures came back, they were somewhat more tasteful, with an assortment of dark-colored and cool-colored dresses, business-casual outfits with blouses and slacks, and formal wear. Becca found herself particularly drawn to a combination of a short black skirt with large yellow buttons on the front along the hems, a white collared shirt with visible frills on the front, a blue blouse with yellow accents, and a pink cravat (matching the ink on her tattoos perfectly) with a blue gem in its center. Rounding it off, the AI had her wearing pink knee-high boots in the same shade as the cravat that seemed to have a hologram galaxy effect visible on them.

"Whaddaya think, choomba?" she asked, looking over at Lucy with a grin on her face.

"...I think I might have to get something from here, too," Lucy said, stunned. "That looks nova."

"Yeah, I think I'm gonna go with that," Becca said to the table.

"Your choice has been confirmed," AURA said. "Please step into the outfit printing station in the east wall and remain still." Becca did as asked, as the price of the outfit was deducted from the shared account; she tried to keep the number out-of-focus in her vision, so she wouldn't think about it, but Lucy's wince upon seeing it said a lot. A metal bulkhead rose, blocking her off from the rest of the store.

Becca felt a brief sense of claustrophobia, as she wondered if there was enough air in the little station.

"Please remove all existing clothing and place it in the deposit slot, then insert the control chip," AURA said, as a small door opened next to Becca's arm. She stripped her hoodie and bikini off, took the small data chip out of the compartment, did as asked, and closed the door manually; the fluorescent light in the station turned green, and the station began essentially knitting a soft-light hologram around her, her Agent going through the chip's install process as it did so.

Eventually, the station finished its work, and the bulkhead dropped, a bit of steam emerging from behind the door; Becca stepped out, and Lucy's jaw dropped.

"We still worried if I'm gonna get kicked out or not?" Becca asked.

"No," Lucy said. "No way in hell. God, now I'm worried I'm gonna be the under-dressed one." Becca laughed.

"To adjust your outfit or change to a different one, please purchase our Nebula Noire HoloClothing companion app," AURA said. "Microtransaction purchases of additional outfits may be made through your Agent."

---

Back at the hotel, David and Kiwi were sitting on the couch, PlayBox controllers in their hands. What had begun as Kiwi playing NightFight 2076 on the local servers, had rather quickly turned into her and David running sets together; when the massive skill gap became apparent, this had mutated into her coaching him. David Martinez was by no means averse to video games, or even to fighting games, but in a match against Kiwi, he was inevitably going to get humiliated; by the time her win streak reached thirty against him, the tone had drastically changed. At the moment, David was trying to nail down one of Morgan Blackhand's bread-and-butter juggles, with Kiwi more or less just letting him attempt it.

He hit the launcher against her Alt Cunningham, and did Blackhand's anti-air revolver barrage... and it whiffed harmlessly over her head. He wanted to throw the controller across the room.

"You almost got it, D," Kiwi said.

"You wanna do something else? I kinda suck at this," David said. Kiwi put a hand on his back.

"It's not that big of a deal," she said. "Not really a level playing field, honestly, I kinda feel like a gonk."

"What do you mean?" David asked, raising an eyebrow. Kiwi did a double-take.

"Wait, did I not tell you? I used to be pro level. Me running sets with you is kinda like..." Kiwi said, stopping for a second. "I was gonna say you sparring with Adam Smasher, but you did that and you almost won, so I don't even know what analogy to use here. You get my point."

"Kinda explains a lot," David grumbled.

"Yeah, let's do something else," Kiwi said, turning off the PlayBox. "Wonder if Becca and Luce are gonna be-"

As if on cue, the door to their suite opened, and the two walked in, and David rushed to hug Lucy. Behind her, he saw Becca in her new outfit, and his jaw dropped, too.

"Holy shit, Becca," he said. "Holy fucking... fucking nova." Becca stepped out from behind Lucy, letting Kiwi see.

"Huh," Kiwi said. "You're actually wearing clothes and not just underwear." Becca pouted, annoyed.

"What, is that all you're gonna say!?" she asked.

"I mean, it looks good," Kiwi said. "What do you want me to say?"

"Come see the cool part," Becca said. "D, try touching me." David did so... and his hand went straight through, touching bare skin and revealing the outfit's nature as a soft-light hologram.

"How do you take it off, exactly?" he asked. Becca adjusted something in her Agent's holo-display, and the clothing erupted into soft-light voxels, leaving her completely naked. She adjusted it again, and the outfit reformed itself from the voxels, fitting itself to her measurements.

"Long as I've got the app chipped in, I can mess with it," Becca said.

"Or, if one of us has it, we could," Lucy said, smiling devilishly. Becca blushed.

"That sounds fun, but maybe not at the gala," she said, as David and Kiwi also smiled, blushing.

Notes:

Becca's outfit is taken from this fanart, in case anyone was wondering or wants a visual aid.

Chapter 62: Astronomy [I]

Notes:

Hellish glare and inference
The other one's a Discord link
The queenly flux, eternal light
Or the light that never warms
(The light that never, never warms)

The Moonscape Modern was, at an external glance, indistinguishable from most of the other buildings dotting Tycho's gridded walkways, connected by the monorail trams that took tourists and workers around the domed bubble. The only thing that separated it was a clean, embossed sign reading the institution's name above the door, a red carpet rolled out front (with a line of assorted rich, well-dressed corporate types waiting patiently to be let in), and paparazzi on the sides attempting to snap pictures of anyone of note they could find.

Lucy briefly thanked whatever god was watching her that Smasher was in a less conspicuous body than usual, as the two of them and Rebecca waited. Smasher had neglected to mention that the gala Danger Gal was protecting was not just some standard corpo mixer, but the 27th annual Angel Ball (sponsored by Biotechnica, Militech, Kang Tao, and Segotari); even finding Michiko at this thing, let alone getting a hold of her, was going to be a challenge. She wondered if they were going to end up mostly just getting a free ride to a fancy event out of Smasher.

It was odd seeing him like this. He was wearing an expensive, fairly old suit, and looked downright presentable. She hadn't interacted with Smasher as much as David or Rebecca, but prior to the encounters they'd had on the moon thus far, her image of him had been the gigantic metal demon-slash-walking-tank from all the solo stories and merc legends, like they'd originally met at Afterlife. Seeing him looking like... a human was taking some getting used to.

Rebecca, for her part, was already starting to get her range of motion back; she still wasn't properly in fighting shape, but the medication and physical therapy were working quickly. She had even considered leaving her cane at the hotel, before thinking better of it.

Lucy reached into a discreet pocket on her dress and retrieved her smokes, flipping the pack open with a single practiced motion and lifting a cigarette to her lips. She retrieved a lighter from the same pocket, and flicked the wheel, producing a small flame.

"Bum one off you?" Smasher asked as she lit the cigarette.

"They're strawberry cigs," Lucy said. "Don't know if that's your thing."

"Don't really care one way or the other," he said, and she passed one to him.

"Need a light?" she asked.

"I've got one," he said, holding the cig up to his mouth; the tip of his pointer finger flipped up and a small flame emerged from it.

"Nova," Becca said, awed. "You should get one of those, Luce." Lucy rolled her eyes as she exhaled a cloud of smoke.

"I'm fine doing it old-school," she said. "Goofy thing to get chrome for when a pack of disposables is 5 eddies and an electric is 10."

"No such thing as a goofy thing to get chrome for," Smasher said. Becca looked up at him, frowning.

Lucy realized this was going to be a very long night, groaned, and regretted every decision she had made that led to this.

---

Across the walkway from the Moonscape Modern stood the LunarNational Hotel. Unlike the Silver Rocks Resort, which was half tourist attraction, half reward for rich corpos who'd done their masters proud, the LunarNational was all business, no frills: it was as expensive as any other accommodations within Tycho's airlocks, but with somewhat less amenities to offer.

Importantly for the five occupants of room 0451, however, the front wall had windows directly overlooking the Modern. And thus, while Payload's stomach grumbled, Werewolf sat in front of the window, scanning the entrance with his Kiroshi optics.

"We ready to move in yet, chummer? Gettin' pretty fuckin' hungry here," Payload said.

"Fuckin' impatient keeb," Werewolf grumbled under his breath. Payload was a FantaForm exotic; she'd chosen the Elvish package, and thus doomed herself to a lifetime of Keebler and Lord of the Rings jokes from the rest of the crew, along with the absolute creepiest of tourists constantly wanting to screw her. She looked damn good in the mirror, though, especially with the extra couple inches of height they'd given her; something about pointy ears felt like it was very flattering to her face. Werewolf, for his part, had taken the regular chrome route to looking like a badass, rather than a FantaForm; he was a tall, bald, olive-skinned man in tactical gear, with EM shielding visible across his face.

"Any idea what we're up against, Wolf?" Big Boy asked, trying to defuse the tension. He'd gotten an Ogrish FantaForm, and to describe him as living up to his name would put it mildly; grafted synthmuscle and bone lace, titanium tusks, a pain editor, and subdermal armor rendered him an absolute force to be reckoned with, and made him distinctly unable to wear most clothing. Fortunately for the job, he could at least find a mask that would fit him without his tusks ripping it like paper; unfortunately for any form of discretion, it was a horse mask.

"Two Danger Gal operatives on the perimeter with scoped EVAWs. Doesn't look like anyone else watching the entrance, chummer," Werewolf said. The toilet flushed, and Maniac emerged from the restroom, closing the door behind her. She was a short and wide woman, maybe five foot one, who had opted for a Dwarvish FantaForm; she was perhaps less visually intimidating than Big Boy, but no less formidable to fight against.

"The Johnson said there was gonna be heavy static, so that's got me worried, not reassured," Big Boy said. Despite his appearance, he had a tendency to be the smart one.

"Just means they're all gonna be locked in with us," Maniac said. "No reinforcements. We geek 'em all, we've got the run of the place until Big A pays the ransom on the package." She had a tendency to live up to her name.

"So ka," Big Boy said. "Crow still doing his thing?" Crow was the crew's mage, or so he liked to call himself. None of the rest of them were really entirely sure if his rituals and talismans were doing much of anything, or if he was just a LARPer who'd gone a little too far; still, their luck seemed like it had gotten better, and the body count of their runs dropped significantly, ever since they'd taken him on, so they tolerated him. The fact that he could handle himself in a fight helped. Maniac tried the bedroom door handle; still locked.

"Guess so," she said. She banged on the door with her fist. "Hey, Crow! Get out here!" No response for a moment, then the sound of candles blowing out; the door opened, and Crow emerged, revealing his Draconic FantaForm.

"The stars are right," he said. "I have completed the ritual. Our enemies will fall before us."

"Quit with the fuckin' fancy shit, chummer, you're not a real wizard," Payload said. Crow sighed.

"One day, you'll see the true power of the occult," he said. "Until then, live in your ignorance. Werewolf, is the time right?"

"Line's clearing out, yeah," Werewolf affirmed. "How are we gonna deal with the snipers?" Crow walked up to the window and scanned the horizon; his Agent display came up, and he breached both of them, sending a pulse through their cyberware that dropped them both like stones.

"Power of the occult, my norm chummer," Crow said.

"Oh, shut the fuck up, that's just netrunning," Payload said, rolling her eyes.

"Clarke's Third Law," Crow said. That was his default response to Payload being pedantic about whether quickhacking counted as "magic," and at this point, he didn't even need to repeat the full explanation.

"That's a cop-out, and you know it," she said.

"Continue to live in your ignorance, then," Crow said.

"We ready to stop bickering and get this shadowrun on the road?" Maniac asked, cracking her knuckles. "Masks on before we get out the hotel, we don't want a repeat of last time."

 

 

 

Chapter 63: Astronomy [II]

Notes:

Four doors at the four winds bar
Two doors locked and Discord barred
One door's let to take you in
The other one just mirrors it

Dark Side Dice was an environment utterly alien to David, just as almost everything else on the moon was. For Kiwi, however, it was an immediately-familiar slice of home; after all, pretty much every friendly local game shop was the same. Night City had one she patronized on occasion, CyberCraft Hobbies & Games in Japantown near Skyline and Salinas, and outside of the usual sterile moon architecture, one could've easily mistaken one for the other.

The two were sitting at a long, rectangular table, the shop's designated game space for RPGs, with four other nerds of various walks of life who had come together for the night's adventure. For the next four or five hours, they'd be playing vampire neonates, in the seedy world of 1990s pre-collapse New Orleans. Kiwi felt immediately comfortable with the idea of settling into the role of Claudia Barlow, a 12th-generation Tremere with the Bagger predator type, dots in Blood Sorcery and Dominate, and access to the Blood Walk ritual; David, meanwhile, looked at the sheet informing him that he'd be playing Jacob Mandrake, a 13th-generation Salubri with dots in Auspex and Fortitude, frowned at it, and silently noted that none of these words were in the Bible.

At another table, set aside for miniature wargames, a teenage netrunner with long brown hair and glasses moved a plastic orc up a strange-looking football field next to an elf wearing a football helmet. She rolled two dice, inspected them, and pumped her fist with a smug look on her face before knocking the elf down with a finger. Her opponent, a middle-aged Japanese man in corpo-wear, frowned and rubbed his chin, thinking of his next move as she rolled another two dice to see if she'd injured or killed the elf.

The game master at David and Kiwi's table, or "Storyteller" as this particular game insisted, was a bald man, wearing thick-rimmed glasses and with a greying goatee that seemed to accentuate his oddly egg-shaped head. Electromagnetic shielding wires ran along the sides, contouring his face, though he didn't seem to have much chrome overall. He was adopting a high-pitched voice that didn't really work, in pursuit of playing Eleanor, the Brujah Sheriff of the city.

"Thank you for coming on such short notice. I assume you all know why you're here," he said, in his affected voice. "I owe a life boon to a certain Nosferatu named Griswold, and the time has come to pay up. He has asked for something very specific, and I need a discreet team to handle this task. In return for retrieving the artifact he wants, each of you will gain a minor boon from me."

One of the other players, an overweight, bearded man in a sweat-stained Samurai T-shirt, stroked his chin.

"Any way I could get more than a minor boon out of her for this?" he asked the Storyteller.

"Gimme Charisma plus Persuasion," the Storyteller said, dropping the voice to his normal register. The player rolled five ten-sided dice, clacking on the wooden table, and they both studied the results. "Very well, Alucard, you drive a hard bargain," he said, taking the high-pitched voice on again. "Along with the minor boon I'll owe each of you, I'll also provide you with some specialized gear for the mission." Kiwi stared intently at him.

"I think she's hiding something from us," she said. "What do you want me to roll to figure it out?"

"Wits plus Insight," the Storyteller said.

"Borrow someone's dice?" Kiwi asked, looking around the table. Another player, femme-presenting in corpo chic with a mohawk and large earrings, passed her a few ten-sided dice, and she shook five in her hand, sending them onto the table with their telltale clacks. She studied the roll, then rolled two more, exploding two of them that had come up with ten. The Storyteller looked over them and smiled.

"You caught me, Ms. Barlow. There's an added layer of complexity: The artifact you're retrieving is of immense power. Handle it carefully, or face the consequences," he said in the high-pitched NPC voice. "You will meet Griswold in the sewers. He'll give you more details. Remember, this mission is of the utmost secrecy. If you're caught or killed, I will deny any involvement. Do we have an understanding?" Kiwi nodded, looking at the other players; the sweaty man playing Alucard and the corpo who'd lent her dice did the same, as did the remaining player, a scrawny teenage boy who'd been looking at David and Kiwi with some measure of awe from the moment they'd sat down at the table. David looked around and nodded, not understanding even the tiniest fraction of what in the Hell was going on beyond "vampires."

He wondered briefly if this would make more sense to him if there was alcohol involved, and somewhat regretted letting Kiwi rope him into this. It was going to be a long night for him. 

---

Meanwhile, at the Moonscape Modern, Lucy and Becca were in their own kind of Hell. Adam Smasher at a formal event was something roughly comparable to a bull in a fine china shop, even in his current, more humanlike form, and both of the girls dreaded the moment that he'd actually find his quarry as they stood next to the open bar. Portable coolers and taps had been set up for the event, along with a sterile aluminum counter; the works of fine art on the walls, ceiling, and across the floor were contrasted heavily by the aesthetic that had been arranged, which could only be described as corpo-tacky. It was a bizarre attempt at creating an atmosphere that was simultaneously that of a rave party and a formal mixer.

"You think this is gonna go well?" Lucy asked Becca, knowing the answer.

"Fuck the hell no, choom," Becca said. "I've had a rock in my stomach since we got here, feels like. Something's not right."

"You worried about Smasher, or?" Lucy asked.

"I mean, I'm not not worried about that gonk," Becca said, looking at the blonde-haired, sunglasses-clad Elvis clone attempting to do the Monkey to a Bara Nova track on the dance floor that had been set up near the bar. Passerby were gawking at him, horrified. "Something stinks about this place, though. And it's not just the fact that we don't have to pay for our booze, even though nobody's trying to fuck us, you get me?"

"You're just on edge because you're not used to corpo stuff," Lucy said. "Honestly, I don't like it, either. Not my scene. Should've probably gotten David to do this."

"Yeah, no disagreement there," Becca said. "He's the one who has his whole weird thing with Smasher, anyways. Seriously, the fuck is with that? How does he even handle this gonk?" Lucy sighed.

"David's just... kinda like that," Lucy said, sipping a martini made with very expensive vodka. "He tries to see the good in everyone. Even if they don't really deserve it." Becca looked up at her; she had a grim expression on her face.

"Something on your mind other than the full metal gonk?" she asked.

"I dunno, just still feel kinda bad about how we met D," Lucy said. "If things hadn't lined up just right, Maine would've probably put a bullet in his head that night, you know?" Becca looked down, frowning, and took a large swig of her Broseph Ale, killing it off.

"Yeah," she said. "We got lucky. I just try not to think about that kinda shit, choom. We live in the good timeline. No need to worry about the fucked up bullets we dodged, right?" Lucy smiled at her.

"Right," Lucy said. Smasher walked up to them, panting from exertion, clearly unused to this body being less suited to physical activity.

"Need a beer," he said to the bartender, over their shoulders. "Good shit. Not cheap shit." The bartender, a young white man in a corpo suit, dutifully poured an expensive beer from the tap into a glass stein, and passed it over Becca's head; Smasher downed it in one gigantic swig.

"Jesus Christ," Lucy said, her eyes wide, as Smasher let out an unholy belch.

"Either of you two seen Michiko anywhere?" Smasher asked. "Could use some pussy." Lucy and Becca stared at each other, attempting to silently communicate their horror at the words that had just left Smasher's mouth and the resulting mental images.

"I'll, uh, go look for her," Becca said. "And fucking warn her," she silently mouthed to Lucy, who tried very, very hard to stifle laughter. "You two try to stick around here, alright? Place seems fuckin' huge, worried enough I might get lost," she said, out loud again.

"Hey, I don't mind," Smasher said, handing the beer glass back as he took Becca's spot. "Havin' the time of my fuckin' life here."

"People are staring at you," Lucy said, scanning the crowd.

"No shit," Smasher said. "Not every day they see a bad motherfucker like me."

"Don't think that's what's on their minds right now," Lucy said, as Smasher looked to the bartender.

"Beer was fuckin' weak," he said. "Fill that glass up with whiskey."

"...the whole glass?" the bartender asked. "Sure you don't just want the bottle?" Smasher nearly lunged over the bar counter.

"I said fill the fuckin' glass," Smasher growled, sending fear through Lucy that she hadn't felt since she was a child. One of the Danger Gal operatives working security walked up slowly, glaring at him, ready to defuse the situation violently if the need be.

"Alright, sir," the bartender said, cowed, and poured a bottle of very expensive scotch into the beer stein that Smasher had handed over. Smasher grabbed that out of his hand and chugged it down just as fast, letting out a cough, and then another, even more unholy belch directly into the bartender's face. He looked over at Lucy.

"You alright, kid?" he asked, ignoring the security operative, who retreated back to her post a ways behind him, having either decided that the situation had defused itself or that Smasher was someone she didn't particularly want to mess with.

"Not really," Lucy said.

"'Cause of me, or 'cause of all this bullshit?" he asked.

"Kinda both," she said.

"You don't gotta worry about me," Smasher said, slurring slightly. "Maybe if I'd ran into you first and not David. Then we'd be talking. But I respect that kid, and he loves the fuck outta you, so I ain't touching a hair on your head. Rebecca or the other one, either." Lucy wasn't sure whether to be relieved or horrified; this was further evidence in Becca's favor about not thinking about what could have been.

"Thanks, I guess?" she said, unsure how to process that statement.

"You know who he kinda reminds me of?" Smasher asked.

"Hit me with it," Lucy said.

"Silverhand," Smasher said. "He's like Silverhand, if Silverhand was fuckin' cool and not a dick. Silverhand, I pissed that motherfucker off just by continuing to walk this Earth. He was fun to piss off a lot of the time, don't get me wrong, I liked playing up the heel for that guy, but... come on, I didn't even gotta try, really. David? I gotta work to make that kid throw some fists." Lucy let out a shocked laugh.

"He was right about that whole thing," she said. "God, Kiwi was right, men don't make any sense." Smasher looked at her, slightly confused.

"Whaddaya mean?" he asked.

"David was saying it was basically high school bully stuff," Lucy said. "You were basically just trying to assert dominance and say, 'just because I'm in this body that's not half gun, doesn't mean I'm your bitch now,' right?" she continued, slipping into an imitation of Smasher's gruff voice that made him burst out laughing.

"You're the only person who's allowed to do that without getting flatlined," Smasher said, pointing at her with his free hand. "Anyone else, I'd be breaking this glass on 'em, but that was fuckin' funny, kid." Lucy was starting to notice that Smasher had a real talent for attempting to comfort people by saying incredibly frightening things about how they just narrowly avoided getting killed, and wondered briefly if this was normal for mercs of his era.

"That pretty much right, though?" she asked, changing the subject away from anything resembling her death desperately.

"Yeah, 'bout the size of it," Smasher said, setting the beer down. "Choom, fuck talking, you wanna hit the dance floor 'till your choomba gets back with my girl?"

"I don't really dance," Lucy said, blushing. "Kinda suck at it." Smasher rolled his eyes.

"C'mon, you've seen my gonk ass out there," Smasher said. "Lemme show ya."

Within moments, they were both making absolute fools of themselves doing the Monkey to a track by The Bait that the DJ had segued into.

---

The side hallways of the museum, away from the central event space, were winding, long, and decked with assorted art of varying eras. On paper, it was for modern art, but it was rapidly clear to Becca that the curators had stretched the definition of "modern" a fair bit; pieces by Monet and Klimt were reasonable enough (and she stopped for a moment to take in the opportunity to see The Kiss in person, snapping a quick selfie with it using her Agent for a memento), but she did a double-take seeing a Rembrandt hanging on the wall, and started to find the pretense of it being a modern art museum outright silly when she walked past a 1342 piece by Pietro Lorenzetti.

It scanned to her, of course. Corpos weren't generally great at actually understanding things. Expecting them to have more art history knowledge than the average rotten potato was maybe a little much.

As she walked past one of the offices, she heard muffled voices from behind the closed door, having an argument. She jiggled the handle; locked, unsurprisingly. She sighed.

"Fuck it," she said, and rapped her fist on the door. "Michiko Arasaka? Or Sanderson? I dunno what your last name is these days, but, you in there?" she asked, speaking up louder to try and project her voice through the door. The muffled chattering stopped.

"Who's asking? You don't sound like any of my people," a woman's voice on the other side came through, more clearly. "You one of the temp hires?"

"Oh, fuck," Becca said. "Uh, I'm with a big gonk who's looking for you. You know Adam Smasher, right?"

There was a moment of absolute dead silence. The door opened, slowly. A slender woman with heavy aesthetic chrome and biosculpting, a blue high-coiffed mullet hairstyle, and a corpo-chic pantsuit stood there, with a look of abject horror on her face as she stared at Becca.

"Fucking Adam's here?" Michiko Arasaka said.

"Okay, so this is a 'warn you' situation, not a 'help him find you' situation," Becca said.

"Get inside and we'll talk," Michiko said.

"Do I need to go warn my choomba about him or no?" Becca asked, a serious expression on her face. "If he's gonna hurt Luce, I need to hurt his ass first." Michiko sighed.

"If he's here for me, I don't think he's gonna hurt anyone else," she said.

"Wait, anyone else?" Becca asked.

"Granddad sent him to kill me, right?" Michiko asked, staring Becca in the eyes. She rested her forehead in her palm in response.

"No, he's here because he's trying to hook up with you again," Becca said, trying to force the mental image away from her brain as the words came out. "Apparently you two fucked ages ago or something?" Michiko stood there, in shock.

"But I... wha... buh..." she sputtered.

"You still want me to come in there?" Becca asked, gesturing towards the inside of the office. "Feel like what I just said needs a little more context, right, choomba?" Michiko turned to the back and looked at the Danger Gal operative she had been disciplining.

"Get out of here," she said. "Figure out how much unpaid leave you're getting when we're back Earthside. Next time, don't try to bring a fucking live gun up to the moon." The operative nodded, her pastel-red hair fluttering, and stood up, dashing out of the room past Becca. Michiko looked back at Becca. "Alright, come in," she said, waving her new acquaintance in.

---

The lights came up and the music ground to a halt right as Lucy started to get a bit exhausted. She initially chalked it up to lucky timing, assuming the party had ended on its own terms; part of her wanted to be free of Smasher, but part of her, against all odds, was somehow having fun with the idiot. When he successfully avoided being terrifying, he could be pretty entertaining to be around.

She started to notice something was wrong when the other patrons, in their luxury corpo-wear custom-crafted by assorted designers for the occasion, started looking around baffled and frightened. The party was ending early or coming to some sort of unexpected halt, clearly. It was funny to her; she hadn't really gotten a good look at any of the outfits in the dim light prior, but now, she could actually appreciate some of the expensive work at hand. All that effort and expense, and it took a screw-up for her to even notice. She felt a bit underdressed, though, even considering that her usual outfit was a fairly nice one; she envied Becca with her holoclothes.

The next cue that something had gone horribly wrong was that the Danger Gal operatives surrounding the bar and dance floor started to drop, sparks shooting out of the chip ports on the sides of their heads. Some of them twitched in a fencing response, the quickhack having done permanent or lethal damage to their brains. One managed to stagger to her feet; Lucy watched as a strange-looking masked woman, who'd apparently had herself biosculpted into an elf judging by the pointed ears, walked up to the surviving operative, pulled a katana out of her trenchcoat, and slashed through her neck in one quick motion, sending blood gouting out of the stump and spraying onto the clothes of horrified patrons across the dance floor as the head rolled.

"If anyone in this room knows where Michiko Arasaka is, and you don't talk, you're next," the masked woman said, not yelling outright, but projecting her voice as loudly as possible in the standardized robbery tone.

Lucy thought about using her monowires, but something told her that wasn't a great idea. The goal of this trip had been to lay low; so far, they had made a real mess of that whole plan. Plus, the issues David had been having with his Sandevistan had her unclear on if they'd even work. She could quickhack the elf, but that might just end up alerting all of her buddies.

"Stay down," Smasher grunted at her quietly, supporting her thoughts. "Not your fight. Let Michiko handle this."

"What's your read?" Lucy asked, matching his volume.

"Exotic posergang," Smasher said, looking at her like she was an idiot.

"Really? Nothing else?" Lucy asked. "No old-timer merc senses kicking in?"

"What, you think I'm fucking Spider-Man or something?" he snapped, trying to keep his voice down. "I'm not magic, all I got's eyes and ears and all I see is some bitch with a sword who looks like she works for Santa Claus. Figure the rest out when we've got one of them alive."

"Fair enough," she said. "We staying with the hostages or getting out?"

"Hell do you think?" Smasher sighed. "You know where your choom's at?"

"No clue, but I can send a message," Lucy said. She briefly thought of pulling up her Agent, before realizing that the attacking gang might have eyes on the lines. The problem stumped her for a second... and then she realized she still had the chip for Becca's holo-clothes from the fun they'd all had earlier on. She pulled up the interface, went to make small adjustments, pushed the garment into Becca's right shoulder a few times, and wrote out an engraved message.

Meanwhile, over in the office, Becca felt several taps on her shoulder from an invisible force, and saw a message appear like artificial goosebumps on her wrist: "DANGER. HIDE. -L"

---

[20:40] 🌟BECCA!🌟: hey so uh good news and bad news

[20:40] 🌟BECCA!🌟: good news is i found michiko

[20:40] ❤LUCY❤: ...does she know about the whole posergang thing?

[20:40] 🌟BECCA!🌟: well there's a bizarro world shitty version of me pointing a flechette shotgun at her so i would certainly fucking hope so choomba, that's the bad news

[20:40] ❤LUCY❤: shit.

[20:40] 🌟BECCA!🌟: smasher still with you?

[20:40] ❤LUCY❤: i mean yeah where else would he be.

[20:40] 🌟BECCA!🌟: fuck i dunno i don't understand that gonk any better than you do

[20:41] David: wait whoa the fuck are you two okay?

[20:41] 🥝: yeah, do we need to come get you two out?

[20:41] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah we're fine, posergang's trying to hit the shindig and smash-and-grab michiko

[20:41] 🌟BECCA!🌟: don't think they know what they're in for, judging by this idiot who's with us

[20:41] 🥝: posergang? what's their deal?

[20:41] ❤LUCY❤: one hitting us in the main room has elf ears, so maybe elves?

[20:41] 🌟BECCA!🌟: no elf ears over here. short, wide, big synth-muscles. kinda looks like if someone tried to clone me and it came out wrong

[20:41] 🥝: HAHAHAAHAAHAHAHAHAH

[20:41] 🥝: I THINK I KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING

[20:41] 🥝: HAVE EITHER OF THEM SAID "CHUMMER" INSTEAD OF "CHOOM"

[20:43] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...shotgun girl just said it. they're moving us back to the main dance floor area now

[20:43] 🥝: OH MY FUCKING

[20:43] 🥝: HOLD ON

[20:43] 🥝: THE OTHER PEOPLE AT THE TABLE WE'RE AT NEED TO HEAR ABOUT THIS

[20:43] ❤LUCY❤: ...table? did you rope D into going to a board game store hahahahah

[20:43] 🥝: hey he's having fun!

[20:43] David: correction: i would be if i had a clue what the shit was going on beyond "we're all vampires"

[20:43] David: i am beyond goddamn lost right now

[20:43] ❤LUCY❤: WAIT ARE YOU PLAYING VTM

[20:43] 🥝: YES

[20:43] ❤LUCY❤: DAVID I AM SO SORRY

[20:43] David: oh god has kiwi gotten you to try this too

[20:43] 🥝: hey I thought you liked NC By Night when I got you to check it out!

[20:43] ❤LUCY❤: i mean i liked the people but i didn't really get the setting or how the card stuff worked

[20:43] 🥝: gonna assume the situation's not that serious if it's just dorks doing a Shadowrun bit then?

[20:43] ❤LUCY❤: think we've got it under control.

[20:43] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah let smasher clean his own bullshit up, enjoy your game

---

Lucy found herself coming to similar conclusions to Becca as she and Smasher ran down the hallways. She followed his lead as he ducked behind cover and into side closets to stay out of line of sight; she wasn't completely inexperienced by any means, but Smasher's resume ran circles around hers, so she trusted his instincts more than her own.

"Looks like they've got some extra huscle," Smasher said, keeping his voice down as a laser-sighted flechette rifle's aim swung through the hallway. Soon, its wielder, clad in a gas mask, walked down the hallway, moving slowly and sweeping every corner; Smasher pulled Lucy to the side, out of the doorway's line of sight. "Gas mask ones don't fit the posergang's gimmick, and they're not DG. What's the status on Rebecca?"

"With Michiko," Lucy said. "One of the gangoons got them."

Smasher froze, and the world seemed to freeze with him. Lucy looked at him; he was hyperventilating. She briefly wondered if she would be the only person ever to see him having a panic attack and survive the experience.

Then, he started grinning. It didn't look like a human expression; it looked like the face of a deranged, rabid animal, the bloodlust coming to him like a freight train.

"I'm gonna fuck some shit up," he said. "And I'm gonna get my girl and your choom outta this shit. You in?"

Lucy smiled, uneasily. She didn't particularly want to be in, but the circumstances weren't leaving her a lot of choice.

Notes:

Mother of God, it's been an entire year since I started this fic.

In that time, I have:

- inexplicably ended up as one of the most well-known writers in this fandom
- elevated a meme from "Discord inside joke" to "fandom-wide phenomenon" by making Imaishi aware of it
- gotten a gig at Collider off of the strength of my following from this fic
- written two Twine games for this fic, one of which has a full original soundtrack
- lost that gig at Collider because it was awful and they only paid me $18 an article
- gotten a new gig at Polygon that I'm kicking off with an article about how Edgerunners is one of the most important things on Netflix (watch the Discord!)

I would not have pictured any of this shit happening last September. It's been a wild year. And the train may be a ways down the track, but it's not done rolling yet.

Next chapter's gonna be another big-boy action chapter.

Chapter 64: Astronomy [III]

Notes:

Call me Desdinova, eternal light
These Discord links of mine
Will surely prove a sight
And don't forget my dog
fixed and consequent

Michiko Arasaka stared at the flechette shotgun barrel pointing up at her, unfazed.

"You planning on pulling that trigger, little girl?" she asked. It was a bluff. She already knew it was a klep job, and she was the quarry; anything else, and she wouldn't still be around to think about it, because the Exotic dwarf in front of her would've opened fire on sight. One didn't make it to old age in Night City without developing an instinct for this sort of thing, especially if you were a frequent target. The biggest worries in her head were the fact that she'd definitely have to have her people refund the money the ESA had paid to Danger Gal for providing security, probably out of her own pocket, and the fact that Adam fucking Smasher had somehow ended up here.

She didn't want to think about Smasher. He was a potential trump card, but he was a dangerous, dangerous one to be fucking around with. And the other girl- Rebecca, who... fucking somehow seemed to have ended up on friendly terms with the gonk- had introduced a complication to the whole mess that made Michiko outright want to vomit. At the time, she'd enjoyed the experience, but at the time, she was a short-circ'd eighteen-year-old, and to her, he was just some big, older, hot gonk named Adam. All the context on why that was a particularly bad idea had come later, slowly, over time, and by the present day, she mostly just looked back at the situation with a sort of existential horror. One wrong move, and he would've turned her into red jelly; she had survived that encounter entirely by luck.

The Exotic dwarf holding the shotgun smirked. Something was a little funny to Michiko about the fact that she was the tallest person in the room right now; Rebecca was only a little taller than the dwarf. Michiko didn't want to think about the implications that carried; Rebecca was hiding it well enough that Michiko assumed her membership wasn't current, but everything about her appearance said Mox. She hoped against hope that Rebecca had had one of the nicer jobs in that organization.

"Wanna find out, chummer? Move," the dwarf said, gesturing towards the door with a tilt of her head. "Hands behind your back. You too, green-hair," she added, looking Rebecca straight in the eyes. "You, I can geek, no problem."

Michiko took stock of the immediate situation. At this range, under ordinary circumstances, she'd probably be able to grab the shotgun, wrestle it away from the dwarf, send metal shards through her skull that'd turn her brain into jelly. There were two problems with this, though: one, the ESA had jammers up preventing most combat cyberware from working on Tycho without express permission (or hacking that would endanger her future job prospects), meaning her Kerenzikov was on the fritz. She had regular human reaction time, not the reaction time she got as a birthday present from Granddad. She didn't like her chances with regular human reaction time; for all she knew, the dwarf had the same kit, and hers was working.

The second, and more pressing, problem was that she was rusty. Not in the literal sense (she visited the ripper regularly enough to avoid that issue), but she'd been more of a middle manager and a media personality than a fighter for some time now. Her role at Danger Gal was to smooth over gigs, work PR and keep everyone's asses in line, these days, not to go out ass-kicking with the girls. It was why she and Marc had drifted apart; he was an adrenaline addict, and she was starting to feel a bit old for that, even if cyberware and biosculpting did a damned preem job of hiding it. In her thirties, she would've wiped the floor with this gonk. Possibly literally, given the dwarf was about half her height. As a near-seventy-year-old, she suspected making this into a fight wouldn't go as well for her. Plus, Rebecca was going to be a liability, mobility-wise; she was leaning on a cane, and seemed like she needed it.

As she walked towards the door, the dwarf prodding Rebecca behind her with the flechette gun, she frowned. This was more or less the worst case scenario for this gig.

---

"So, what's the plan?" Lucy asked. Smasher looked down at her, smiling fiendishly.

"Plan? You think that's how I work?" Smasher asked. Lucy sighed.

"Guess not," she said. "You even know where we're going?" Smasher shrugged.

"Figured I'd just wreck motherfuckers 'till I grab a cosplayer, start tearing pieces off of them 'till they tell me where their buddies are," Smasher said.

Lucy stared at him blankly.

"What?" he asked.

"You know you've got a netrunner with you, right?" she asked. "Gimme a minute, I'll grab a floorplan for this place."

"Net's not blocked off?" Smasher asked.

"Not for basic stuff, anyways," Lucy said, fiddling with her Agent interface. "Guessing our buddies didn't wanna attract too much attention. Net jammers would hit people outside, make it too obvious there's something going down."

"Good instincts," Smasher said. "I'm impressed. Honestly."

"Hey, I'm a merc, too," Lucy said. "Gimme some credit. Don't survive in NC long without picking up some smarts. And... I've got the floorplan, and I've got it rigged to ping both our Agents, plus Becca's."

Now, it was Smasher's turn to stare blankly at her.

"What?" she asked. "You good, big guy?"

"God fucking damn, you work fast," Smasher said.

"Got your foot in your mouth about the other day, huh?" Lucy asked, smiling smugly. It wasn't every day someone got to get this kind of facial expression out of the Devil of Night City, and she fully planned on milking it.

"Yeah, no shit," Smasher said. "Gimme that floorplan." Lucy sent it to his Agent, and he pulled it up, looking at it projected in front of his sunglasses. As he scanned over it, looking for their relative positions, a realization hit Lucy: she was most likely missing her primary trump card in situations like these. David's Sandevistan hadn't been working properly, and Smasher was noticeably cyberware-light; Lucy wasn't much of a hardware nerd (that had always been Pilar's thing in the gang's older days, and Kiwi and Vik more or less split the slack currently), but she could more or less figure out that there was a jammer somewhere on Tycho preventing unauthorized combat chrome from doing much. She tried extending her monowire, just to check, and, predictably, it did nothing.

Fortunately, she was a netrunner. She took advantage of the moment, pulled up her Agent interface, and began hacking, arranging binary code to give herself an easier in. Once the backdoor had been established, she took control of Tycho's control mainframe, and manually authorized her Agent's digital signature. As if to inform her that it had worked, her left hand, the artificial one she'd had installed after Faraday, felt less heavy than it had for the whole trip so far, its servos compensating for the added weight of the monowires again.

"Found her," Smasher said, baring his teeth in an animalistic, bloodthirsty grin as he walked through the door. "Stay behind me." One of the gas-masks patrolling the hallways turned a corner, raising his flechette rifle and popping off a burst at Smasher before retreating where he came from; the subsonic metal shards ripped his shirt and pierced the synthskin covering underneath, clanging as they dented metal without even slowing him down.

"Oh, shit!" the gas-mask yelled. He pulled up his Agent, dialing for his leader. "Alpha One, we got a-" Before he could finish, both of Adam Smasher's massive borgware hands were clamped on the sides of his head; he screamed, and Smasher twisted the head to one side, then a quick jerk to the other, and pulled, hard, like he was ripping a weed out of the dirt. Lucy could hear a crunch that radiated all the way down the man's back as the scream stopped and gurgled out, and with a sickening, splattering sound, the gas-masked man's spinal cord slid out of his neck.

Lucy was accustomed to violence. She was a mercenary. It came with the territory. The violence she was accustomed to, though, was quick. Professional. Shooting people or being shot at during a job, getting in fights, that sort of thing: the typical day-to-day violence of Night City. This reminded her of Becca on the last job, except whereas Becca was plainly terrified of what she was becoming, this was Adam Smasher's natural state. She felt sick.

Smasher turned to her, holding the head and spinal cord like the world's most macabre puppet.

"Hey, look at me!" he said, in a mocking, high-pitched voice. "I'm a fuckin' gonk piece of shit who thought he could hurt the fuckin' Devil!"

"You're disgusting," Lucy said, trying to keep the booze down in her stomach.

"You're no fuckin' fun," Smasher said, frowning. "Tellin' me Martinez never does any shit like this?"

"God, no!" Lucy snapped at him. Smasher grunted.

"Let's see if this guy's got anything interesting on him," Smasher said, crouching down to the headless body that was still gouting blood from where a head and backbone had previously been; he rifled through MOLLE pockets and let out a caveman-like grunt of satisfaction as he pulled a round cylinder out from one.

"...is that a grenade?" Lucy asked, a look of abject fear in her eyes. "Tell me that's not a grenade. You know a grenade's gonna depressurize the whole place, right?"

"Looks like a flechette frag," Smasher said. He looked up at her. "Don't worry, I'm not that fuckin' stupid." He wrenched the spine some more, freeing it from the meat of the man's head, and tossed the skull and bone to the side; where it previously sat, he jammed the grenade in, the firing pin sticking out of the stump.

"The hell are you doing?" Lucy asked.

"Old trick from the Corporate War days," Adam said. "You'll see. Just stay behind me."

"Gamma Three, what's your status?" a voice called out from further down the hallway, through another twisting corridor. "Gamma Three, this is Gamma One, come in!"

"Perfect, he's got buddies," Smasher muttered, grinning. He pulled the firing pin and pitched the head like a baseball as fast as he could towards the voice, ricocheting it around a corner.

"Oh, fuck!" the voice yelled out, before a sound like a very loud gunshot, only slightly mitigated by the distance, that left Lucy's ears ringing. Smasher walked down the hallway calmly, smiling, and she followed, unsure of what else to do; two more gas masks writhed on the ground, metal flechette shards causing blood to gout from them and mix with the shattered bits of their comrade's head that splattered all over. One of them tried to lift up their gun; he stomped down on their chest, hard enough to dent the floor, crunching their sternum and causing yet more blood to flow from under the mask.

Smasher was turning the museum into a vision of Hell that the triptych on the wall could barely even try to compete with. Lucy wasn't sure if it was the concussion grenade making her a bit woozy, but she thought she almost felt bad for the posergang.

---

Maniac's Agent went off, first with alerts that there were two more unaccounted-for people moving around the hallways, and then with a call from Gamma Three, one of the BARGHEST mercs the Johnson had pitched in. She didn't care for those guys. They were good shots, and better meat shields, and they followed orders perfectly; on paper, the perfect extra huscle to have on a job. Problem was, they didn't do the theatrics right. She would've given up a lot of competence on their part if it meant they'd just go along with the fuckin' bit. It wasn't that hard; Crow had even made a datashard of the glossary page from one of the Shadowrun books for them. Drek-for-brains just didn't give enough of a damn. Their priorities were all wrong for this fit to work.

"Alpha One, we got a-" the merc's voice crackled, trailing off into an inhuman scream and a crunch before suddenly disconnecting.

Clearly, things had gone completely fragged somewhere. So much for competence. She jabbed the green-haired girl, the one a little taller than her who was walking with a cane, in the small of her back with the flechette shotgun. She hadn't planned for the hostiles, or this girl, and she definitely hadn't planned for someone who wasn't DG and guaranteed safe to geek being in the room with the target. Something told her these factors were all connected.

"Ow, fuck off," the girl said. "I'm moving."

"Two hostiles running around. Guessing they're your chummers?" Maniac asked. The girl rolled her eyes. "That a yes?"

"That's a 'fuck off with the Shadowrun bit,' gonk-brain," the girl said. Maniac did a double-take and lowered her shotgun slightly.

"You know Shadowrun?" she asked, a look of genuine surprise on her face. The girl lifted up her blouse somewhat, to reveal a cow-skull tattoo on her abdomen in pink that answered the question handily.

"Don't really do tabletop anymore, so I wasn't really thinking about it, but yeah," she said. "Used to be in a group back when I ran with the gang."

"Fuckin' nova ink," Maniac said, and then took a punch to the jaw from Michiko that sent her reeling to the ground in a fighter's crucifix. For a senior citizen, the woman could hit hard. When she was able to come back to her feet, even though it only felt like an instant had gone by, both her quarry and the other girl were gone.

She dialed for Crow, the crew's netrunner. He was a gonk-brain who thought he was a literal magic dragon, but he could get some shit done when they needed him, and right now, they needed him.

"Need me to work my magic?" Crow's deep voice rang out.

"Oh, ha ha, motherfucker," Maniac said. "Lock the place down. Keeb's got most of them in the main hall, but I lost track of the package, and we got hostiles scurrying around."

"Mercs not doing their jobs?" Crow asked.

"Think this might be above their pay grade," Maniac said. "Track the hostiles, lock 'em in, and clear a path to send Big Boy after 'em. Get as many of the BARGHEST drek-for-brains as you can in between them and the server room, in case they have a decker."

"He's gonna have some fun with this one," Crow said. Maniac couldn't see him, but she knew he was grinning like an idiot on the other end of the line.

---

A fancy-pants gala, on the moon, with Michiko in attendance. These gonks couldn't have picked a worse place to piss Adam off. First, making corpos wet themselves was basically his daytime hobby, and secondly, there was nowhere for them to run. They'd locked the place down. Every door he tried buzzed, except for one, leading to a gallery room full of old-ass sculptures and gas-masks sweeping with laser sights and flashlights.

BARGHEST. He didn't get to tangle with them much. Big Daddy Arasaka was pretty content leaving Dogtown to handle its own bullshit. A shame. They were proving to be some fun meat. They thought they were constraining him; unfortunately for them, constraints bred creativity in a mind like Adam Smasher's, as he tried to figure out the best way to reduce the room's occupants to giblets.

"Hey, borg-face," The girl said.

Smasher glanced her way. He was getting the impression she wasn't cut out for this. She was skilled, sure- skilled as hell, to the point where it scared him a little- but she didn't have the taste for blood, nor the hunger for metal.

"What?"

"I need to get to the other side of the room. Door on the other side leads to the museum's central mainframe."

"And?"

"I can't make it past all these pricks with just my monowires, so if you want these doors unlocked—"

"Monowire? You got that up here?" Smasher cocked an eyebrow. It wasn't that much of a surprise that she'd gotten that through the ESA jammer; really, the bigger surprise was that a girl like this had a weapon like that at all. Seemed a little brutal for someone so delicate, so easy to break.

"Yeah?"

Smasher chuckled. "Well, why didn't you just say so!? Here, extend the line."

The girl did as requested, quietly, discreetly so the hostiles didn't catch on too soon. This was gonna be fun. Smasher snatched the end of the glowing wire, wrapping it around his ExoDerm plated forearm like a snake.

"When you're in the air, keep extending the line until it goes taut, or you'll just smack into the far wall like a pancake."

"Sorry, the air? What do you—"

Smasher bounded forward, pirouetting on a heel. As planned, the closest foe got sliced in half, along with a hundreds-of-years-old Rodin, as the single-molecule-wide-wire — and the shocked netrunner it was attached to — flew by. With a stomp, the spin ceased, and Smasher smirked as the girl got ejected across the room by the inertia. Thanks to the low gravity from the lockdown, her flight slowed once the wire went taught right as she reached the other end of the hall. Smasher released his end, allowing her to do her thing as she hacked into the door panel on the other side and unlocked it, disappearing out of sight.

That was fun, he thought to himself. Should get me one of those.

Then, the fight really began. No punks, no VIPs, and nobody from Arasaka to tell him no. It was rare nowadays that he got to indulge, especially in a body so grotesquely human. At least this flesh was fake.

"Get that motherfucker!" A goon shouted, rushing with a tomahawk of some kind off Smasher's left.

The 'borg dodged the sharpened steel and grabbed the fleshy forearm holding the weapon. His mylomar synthetic musculature pulsed as the bones of his target cracked and breached the bloody surface of the screaming man's skin. Smasher lifted the man like a sack of potatoes, twisted him around, and then slammed him scalp-first into the metal floor.

With such a vicious display, it was a welcome sight to see that the other fighters didn't hesitate to also attack. It would be beneath a 'borg to hold back in defense, so Smasher sprinted right at them. He barreled into the first foe with a shoulder charge. Before the body could hit the ground, Smasher grabbed it by the collar and slammed it into another foe.

A volt of electricity slammed into Smasher's spine. In any other body, he wouldn't have even been affected, but this thing wasn't really built for outright combat, so instead he stumbled to a kneel. Pathetic. He glanced up, seeing another foe with chromed-up fists arcing with blue lightning.

"Come on!" the electric-fist man challenged.

Smasher snarled, stood, and charged. A battery of strikes on both sides, neither making hard contact. Smasher blocked, while the stubborn bastard dodged. This gonk at least knew the truth: metal was better than meat. But Smasher's metal was better still. Another punch came, which was caught in a much larger fist.

"Gotcha," Smasher said.

He kicked the side of the man's knee, shattering it in two. He elbowed the human's nose twice while he was down, stood up, and drove his foot down on the man's head, shattering the meatbag's skull into splinters and causing brain matter and blood to paint the floor.

And so the pattern continued. Flesh attacked, metal came out victorious. One meatbag was dropkicked so hard his torso collapsed in on itself. Another's spine was broken over Smasher's knee. Punch, kick, stomp, throw, fracture, dislocate, puncture, tear, destroy.

By the end, the fake flesh on Smasher's face had begun to peel away and fall off, revealing the superior form of steel and servos beneath.

Good. Now they can all see the better version of man. The stronger version, he thought to himself.

---

It didn't take Lucy long to find the way to the control mainframe, with the floorplan guiding her. Three lefts, a right, another left, through a big metal door with an "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" sign, and then down a hallway, ducking through cover and frying the occasional merc straggler along the way. Ordinarily, the lockdown would've meant she was trapped in with Smasher and the mercs; for a netrunner with skills like hers, though, it just slowed her down.

She suspected she was leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for the posergang and their mercs with every door she cracked, so she moved as quickly as she could, working sloppily where she had to. She was used to working on a time limit. Sometimes, you had to make compromises for speed.

The room itself was immediately familiar: walls of computer banks surrounding a netrunning chair, wires coming out of every port and hooking into various terminals and servers. She strongly preferred coolant baths; chairs brought back memories for her, memories of hearing the screams of dying children behind her as she ran, memories of bullets whizzing past her head, memories of the stench of blood and sewer air when she finally made her escape. Chairs also required a suit. Lucy was not currently wearing a suit.

Fortunately for her, the chair provided an answer to this; unfortunately, that answer was a dead man, still jacked in, charred flesh around the port on the back of his head indicating black ICE. She grimaced, ripped the plugs out of his burnt skull, unzipped him naked, stripped her own dress off, and put on the netrunner's coolant suit; it fit oddly on her, but it was good enough for purpose.

She sat down in the chair, took another deep breath, and jacked in, right as a massive impact rattled the room from several rooms down.

I don't know what the hell is going on out there, but Smasher, you better buy me some time, Lucy thought to herself as the world gave way to wireframe voxels, the telltale look of the Net to those seeing it from within.

---

Meanwhile, in the other room, a fleshy truck slammed into Smasher’s torso, sending him flat onto his ‘borg ass. He’d have a broken ribcage if he was any more human. Sitting up, he found an Ogre-form, one of the posergangers, smirking as if he’d done something impressive. In the ogre's hands was a Slamdance Hyper-hammer. Long handle, giant skull-bashing head, and ordained with various engraved markings resembling those found in museums. It was the same person-crushing device Smasher had favored decades ago for indenting the Arasaka logo onto corpses. Now, though, it appeared small in the 7-foot brute’s enlarged hands.

Smasher darted to his feet, advanced, and grabbed the hammer mid-swing. The flat head stopped a couple of inches short of his head; he grunted as he added a second palm to the hammer’s handle, resisting the ogre’s obviously reinforced skeletal implants.

A half-dozen light footsteps proceeded the slamming of blast doors on either end of the hallway. Thus signaling that their arena was now ready. Smasher stared into the ogre’s bizarre horse mask, daring the bastard to make a move. Then, the freak yanked backward on the hammer. The movement sent Smasher careening into a follow-up fist to the face, the force of which he should have been able to tank. Yet, Smasher found himself stumbling for a few seconds. He blinked, steadied his footing, and turned to face his foe.

“You ain’t no regular breeder, eh?” the ogre asked. “Whatchu got? Linear frame, or Gemini?”

“Gemini,” Smasher said. “You?”

“Bit o’ this, bit o’ that.”

“Nice hammer.”

“It’s a limited edition.”

“Then I’ll hate to dirty it up with your brains.” Smasher charged.

Smasher ducked under an initial wide swing from the hammer. He followed up with a one-two to the ogre’s gut. It was like punching into sheet metal: dense and tough, but not impossible to break. This was going to take a minute.

The ogre’s left elbow cracked into Smasher’s mechanical spine. He took the hit and went to throw another hit, only for his jaw to shoot upward from the ogre’s knee. This bastard actually knew how to fight. Smasher tensed his synthetic musculature, letting the hydraulics take most of the impact. Then the hammer returned.

It swung so fast that Smasher only had a moment to get his arms up before it smashed into his side. The bracing managed to suppress the impact, but it was still enough to send him into the window on the side of the hallway. It cracked on impact. Considering it was several inches thick, there probably wasn’t any concern of explosive decompression right now. Smasher glanced at the ogre, who was approaching and weighing the hammer between his hands. That thing had to go.

With a kick off the wall, Smasher’s enhanced body sent him flying forward. His Superman punch crashed into the raised end of the hammer, sending its wielder backward a couple feet. He doubled down on the advance, trying to get inside the weapon’s range. The hammer raised to the ceiling as he got close enough to smell the odor pouring out of green skin. Even with his reinforced skull, a direct hit like that would knock an optic loose.

But this wasn’t Smasher’s first rodeo. He paused for a quarter of a second, waiting for the downward swing. It descended, signaling him to move. His side-step worked, the hammer’s head soaring past Smasher’s biopod, generating the opening needed. With all the force his cyber-arm could deliver, his fist smashed into the Ogre’s horse mask and the face it hid. The plastic apparatus flew off, revealing blood, biosculpted tusks, and furious amber eyes.

Taking advantage of the moment, Smasher grasped the hammer’s handle. He tugged, found resistance, and then shouldered the Ogre into the wall. With that, he tore the weapon free from its owner. It’d been decades since he got to use one of these beauties. Still, the muscle memory — or whatever counted for muscle memory for a ‘borg — hadn’t left him.

Smasher pirouetted, twirling the hammer as if he were in a parade and building momentum. At the apex of this maneuver, he sent the end of the weapon into the Ogre’s side. The fantasy exotic flew a few feet and onto the floor. He must’ve had at least a few broken ribs based on how he groaned as he returned to his feet. Excellent.

He dropped and kicked the hammer away, wanting to level the playing field. It ground along the floor, peeling paint off the metal panels and causing a whiny screech. Groaning metal joined the cacophony. Smasher turned back to the Ogre, only for a flash of white and what felt like a shield hitting him in the face.

“You’re stubborn, ain’t ya?” the Ogre asked, holding the wall panel he’d ripped off in one hand. The markings of Smasher’s synthetic face were indented into it as if it was mocking his inability to kill this annoying gonk. “I don’t like that.”

“Har har, you think I give a fuck?”

The Ogre growled, dropped the panel, and stampeded toward Smasher. He prepped himself for the impact. It arrived, the Ogre attempting to grapple and throw Smasher to the floor. That attempt was fruitless, as Smasher pushed back and remained upright.

“Fuckin’ weak—” Smasher’s legs came out from under him as a flawlessly performed leg sweep took them out.

A millisecond later, a flurry of elbows descended onto the ‘borg’s face. The initial blow from the edge of the Ogre’s nanomachine-enhanced bone sliced Smasher’s synthskin and rocked his head back. It reminded him how thankful he was for enabling his pain editor. The second, third, and fourth elbows were all blocked by Smasher’s raised arms. This prick must’ve gotten some real training after all.

On the fifth attack, the Ogre changed directions and struck the borg’s upper torso amid a storm of curses. Having enough of being beaten down, Smasher sent a kick into the exotic’s stomach. It knocked his opponent back far enough for him to roll, getting to his feet in a practiced maneuver. He needed to finish this.

Smasher sprinted at the exotic. At the last second, he jumped and pushed his legs out as hard as he could. The dropkick sent the Ogre to the opposite side of the room, next to the window. Panzerfaust always paid off dividends, even if many didn’t respect a ‘borg-only martial art.

As Smasher got to a kneel, his hand grazed an object. He’d ended up next to the hammer. Then, as if the universe wanted this meat sack dead, the sun glared in Smasher’s optics through the cracked glass. It didn’t disorient him; he’d opted for anti-dazzle mods since he was in the military, but it did remind him of a rather essential fact.

He grasped the hammer and rose to his feet, flashing fake, titanium-alloy teeth with a gnarly smirk.

“Would you die already?” the ogre heaved for air as blood dribbled from his lips. “Startin’ to piss me off.”

“You know what your weakness is?” Smasher raised the hammer like a spear. “You need to breathe.”

The hammer flew true, smashing into and through the window. Instantaneously, all sound was drowned out by the rush of air being sucked into space. Alarms blared, likely from an automated system. Lacking any feet anchors or magnetic soles, Smasher latched onto a nearby wall panel and held on for… well, not dear life, he didn’t really need to breathe. He just didn’t feel like going into space right now. He'd been spaced before, and wasn't a fan.

However, the ogre didn’t have a choice in the matter. His body was yanked toward the roughly basketball-sized opening in the glass as if he were a kite on a string. The Ogre’s head went through the glass, but the rest of his body got stuck. Either way, the effect was the same. Smasher smiled as he saw the bastard’s eyes swell, arteries popping in the vacuum. Two seconds later, automated blast shields shot down from the roof along the edge of the glass. They acted as a guillotine, removing the Ogre’s neck and head from the torso.

Smasher let go of the panel and walked over to the now-collapsed corpse. His smile continued until he realized his mistake. He’d just thrown heavy debris into the low orbit of Luna.

He sighed. “I’m gonna get in trouble for that, aren’t I?”

---

Lucy had expected black ICE. That much was obvious. The guy in the chair hadn't gotten fried by thin air.

What she did not expect, however, was a massive dragon made out of cubic voxels breathing clouds of pseudo-flames at her.

On some level, it tracked perfectly. Everyone else in the posergang was doing some sort of fantasy-creature bit. They'd seen an elf right off the bat. Bex was dealing with a dwarf. Of course one of them picked "dragon" as their gimmick. She didn't know Shadowrun, but if there were elves and dwarves in it, there were probably dragons. Still, it threw her off; she'd certainly never seen someone commit this hard to a bit before.

"Take the fuckin' hint already!" the dragon bellowed as a burst of digital flame annihilated a column of data. "Ain't your gig!"

It's not black ICE. It's another netrunner. Someone's jacked in from an access point, and this is some kind of screwed-up avatar, not a program. Great.

"Yeah, well, it's screwing up my vacation!" Lucy called out, projecting her voice. "I don't wanna be doing this, either!"

"Then jack the fuck out, drek-for-brains!" the dragon bellowed before sending another cloud at her; she dodged to the side, sending a column of data between them with a hand gesture. Part of Lucy wanted to take the advice and go tell Smasher it wasn't gonna work, that they were gonna have to take the slow path and hack every door manually.

There was a bigger, louder part of Lucy, shouting in her brain, that she was the better netrunner than this gonk, by a country mile, and she needed to prove it. With a gesture, she sharpened one of the data columns to a point; with a practiced stance, it went into the air, flying towards the dragon. Now the other netrunner was on the defensive. Another stance, and the floor began to fall out beneath the dragon, sending them scrambling.

The other one was creative. There was something to be said for creativity. It was no substitute, however, for technique and form. Lucy sharpened another data column to a point and aimed it carefully, taking advantage of the other netrunner's disoriented state, and shot the spike through the dragon's skull. The other netrunner screamed as their dragon avatar bled voxels, stumbling and collapsing and disintegrating into raw data.

One didn't need proper black ICE when one knew how to use the environment to their advantage. There were parts of the job she would fully admit Kiwi had her beat at, but Lucy had cut her teeth surviving the worst things the old Net had to offer, and if you needed a netrunner to deep-dive and wreck some stuff, there wasn't a better person for the job. The dragon had tried to fight in her territory, and the result was predictable.

From there, ending the lockdown was a simple matter of finding the relevant hexadecimal codes and flipping them. She jacked out, the world returning to drab computer banks, and gasped for air. She felt hot; she wasn't in the danger zone, but any longer, and the ill-fitting suit might not have done its job. She quickly stripped it off, putting her dress back on as the cool air of the museum hit her body and froze her sweat, then ran back the way she came.

What she saw was Smasher, more battered than ever, with barely any synth-skin left covering him. The room was completely wrecked, with a headless corpse nearly Smasher's size gouting blood onto the gouged, torn metal floor; the melee had cracked a sizable hole in one of the windows, causing an emergency shutter to slam down behind it to maintain pressure.

"Whoa," she said. "What happened to you?" Smasher was sitting down, leaning against a wall, seemingly exhausted.

"Think the hard part's over," he said. "Should've seen it. Had a real funny line when I sent that fucker through the window." Lucy did a double-take, then decided not to press the issue, realizing she probably wouldn't like the details very much.

"Got the lockdown taken care of," Lucy said, changing the subject. "Doors should all be open now."

"Nova," Smasher said. "Just... gimme a sec."

---

Payload looked uneasily around the room through the eye-slots of her tactical mask. First, Maniac had gotten on the horn saying things had gone south. Then, the mercs started to go quiet. Then, Big Boy and Crow both went quiet, right around the same time. She didn't have their vitals, but she was pretty sure that was a bad sign.

The fact that the lockdown Maniac had called for had been lifted was a worse sign. There were too many hostages to keep corralled without it, especially given they weren't supposed to geek any of them until the package was in Mr. Johnson's hands, waiting for ransom. One elf with a katana wasn't gonna be able to keep three hundred rich idiots in line without cutting some more heads off, and as such, they scattered.

She grabbed a bottle of Scotch whisky from the mobile bar, lifted her mask, and took a large swig, then called Werewolf. Maniac was the field leader, but Werewolf was the planner. He knew what they were supposed to do if things went tits-up. And if he didn't have a plan for if they went this tits-up, he could improvise something.

"Think BB and Crow are down," she said when she got a response. "What's the plan?"

"We've got the package. Plus an extra. Johnson says she's a BD star down Earthside. She's a pissy one, but she should be worth some solid nuyen, too. Meet me and Maniac at the evac point; we're on our way now," Werewolf said, before hanging up.

The agreed-upon evac point, where the Johnson was supposed to be extracting them, was the private EVA landing pad above the museum, intended for its absolute wealthiest event guests and particularly pampered contractors. Ironically, per their intel from the Johnson, it was where Michiko had come in from, along with the Danger Gal entourage they'd scattered (if not eradicated). She started to make her way to the back of the main hall, where the corridor leading to the VIP entrance stood... and felt a massive, cold, metal hand grip her shoulder, grabbing on for leverage.

"Hey, wha-" Payload started to say, grasping at her katana, and then gasped, gurgling up blood as the borg's other hand ripped clean through her chest, her heart letting out a last furtive pair of beats behind her in his palm. His face, a polished metal skull with ragged scraps of silicone flesh hanging off of it, looked almost like it was grinning, as alloy teeth bared at her.

"Kali-ma," he said, before letting out a fiendish cackle as everything went black.

---

Becca sighed as she stood in the VIP entrance hall, accompanied by Michiko Arasaka and two absolute gonks. The dwarf with a shotgun, as expected, and a new one, who looked like he might've been a Valentino at some point. The new one at least seemed to have some clue what he was doing, but in Becca's mind, associating with this crew put him at gonk status by default; plus, it didn't help that he seemed to be under some kind of impression they could ransom her off.

She didn't want to think about the implications of what would happen when they inevitably couldn't pull that one off. At best, it meant they'd flatline her. At worst... well, the Mox had her handle some real dark shit sometimes, and she didn't wanna be on the bad end of it instead of the "beating up everyone involved" end. She'd tried fighting her way out of it, and Michiko was definitely up to the task, but there was really only so much she could still do in her state; the cane made a decent improvised weapon, but that was the only advantage she still had going for her.

A faint splatter echoed from down the hall. She'd heard the thudding earlier- clearly, Smasher had been on the warpath for a minute, and he was getting warmer.

"Was that Payload?" the dwarf said, the flechette shotgun shaking in her hands.

"Yeah, probably," the new one said, strangely nonchalant. The dwarf glared at him. "How long 'till the Johnson gets here?"

"How the fuck are you so calm? That's three out of five of us geeked by these pieces of drek," she said. He shrugged.

"Perils of the job," he said. "More nuyen for us. How long till the pickup?" The dwarf sighed.

"We're three hours ahead," she said. The new one did a double-take, the first crack so far in the perfect tactical facade he'd been showing Becca so far.

"Three fuckin' hours?" he asked. Becca laughed.

"You gonna hold the line against Adam fuckin' Smasher for three hours, choomba?" Becca asked. "That sound like a good plan to you?" The dwarf's eyes went wide with abject fear.

"Adam Smasher? You're fucking with me," she said. "The Adam Smasher?"

"How many Adam Smashers you know about, choom?" Becca asked.

"She's not lying," Michiko chimed in. "Whole reason she was trying to find me."

"Yeah, 'cause I was trying to warn your gonk ass," Becca said. "Figures, honestly. I do a nice thing, and this bullshit happens."

"I'll get you out of it," Michiko said, unconvincingly. "I'm the one they want." The dwarf was staring at the new one, the apparent leader, pointing her flechette shotgun at him.

"Maniac, don't," he said, before a burst of metal shards ripped through the tactical vest on his chest, sending him staggering as blood leaked from his mouth. Another burst ripped through his head, embedding in his skull and brain and leaving him twitching on the ground, nervous signals firing at random.

"Fuck you, Wolf," she said, as thudding footsteps came down the corridor, following the gunshots.

Becca looked up, and the first thing she saw was Lucy. Battered, dazed, nauseous, splattered with the blood of God knows how many people, most likely traumatized from the look on her face, but alive and in one piece. She almost rushed forwards to hug her, out of sheer relief, before noticing the other person, the primary source of the footsteps, Adam Smasher. When they had first met on the moon, he looked almost human; now, he looked like a grotesque metal parody of one, ragged scraps of synthskin hanging off of his face and body. There was an ancient movie that Maximum Mike on Morro Rock had mentioned once, that she went and spent a year digging up, that he reminded her of; specifically, he looked like a metal monster that a badass like her blew in half with pipe bombs and then crunched in a hydraulic press.

Any hope of playing wingman for this gonk was straight out the window, unless Michiko had way, way weirder taste than Becca was prepared for. The first priority was now to survive the situation. And, ideally, if she made it back to Earth, figure out where she put that Terminator tape and see if they had anything at the apartment that could play it.

Smasher thundered forward towards Maniac, the dwarf, covered in the blood of her comrades and looking like the Grim Reaper in titanium alloy.

"You stole my kill," he said. She fired off another shot from the flechette shotgun, but the flechettes just ricocheted off him harmlessly, sparking. "Let's see if I can make you count for two." He grabbed her arms, one shoulder in each hand, and pulled, hard, first dislocating them and then ripping the sinew as they severed. The exotic dwarf collapsed to the ground in shock, attempting to flop towards the body of the one she'd shot with her legs; he tossed the severed arms to the side, spurting blood on him from the stumps, and then grabbed her legs, picking her up and swinging her like a melee weapon directly into the metal airlock door. The crunch reverberated through the whole room like a gunshot, and she went limp, twitching a few times as he dropped her.

He looked at Michiko. The look on her expression wasn't one of love, or happiness, or relief at being saved. It was horror. Horror at having to see him again. For the first time in a long time, Becca felt powerless, even by proxy. She looked over at Lucy, who was also staring in horror and trying visibly to keep from vomiting. She didn't know the full context of the situation, like Becca had picked up.

"So, we gonna fuck now, or what?" Smasher asked her, attempting to sound suave.

"Adam, I... what?" Michiko asked.

"I just saved your ass," he said. "We gonna get nasty now?" She looked at him.

"Adam, I'm sorry," she said. "I appreciate the save, but..." She was clearly trying to find a way to let him down easy and not state the obvious. Becca could read it like a book. These were tactics she was well familiar with. Unfortunately, they were tactics that worked on humans, not on full-borgs who thought they were untouchable gods, and she didn't like Michiko's chances.

"Fuck it, I can make up that extra kill after all," he said, interrupting her as he clapped his hands against the sides of her head, flattening it to red paste and bits of circuitry between his palms. Her headless body stood there, squirting blood on his hands, for a moment, as time seemed to freeze for Becca.

She'd heard the stories of Smasher, but so far, the man she'd met just seemed like an ordinary, abrasive, over-gunned merc. Really, not too different from her. This felt different. She could get behind killing a whole lot of gangoons with heavy weaponry; killing an innocent woman because she wouldn't fuck him, that was low. That was the kind of thing they sent her after people for, back in the day. Except Smasher wasn't people. Her versus Smasher, especially in this state, was like putting a fly against a steamroller.

"Adam, what the fuck!?" Lucy blurted out, looking like she was feeling similarly.

"What what? She wasn't gonna fuck me. Whole thing's fucked," Smasher said, looking at her no differently than if he'd just crushed an insect.

"You just killed Michiko fucking Arasaka," Becca said, too stunned for emotion. "Because she wouldn't fuck you."

"Yep," Smasher said.

"You... worried about any consequences at all? Arasaka gonna come after your ass for this?" Becca asked, hoping she could get some kind of regret, some kind of thought out of the machine as she stood there, wide-eyed in shock. It looked at her, and then at Lucy.

"Why bother worrying? Got two perfectly good patsies right here," he said. Becca looked at Lucy, as cold sweat ran down her face. "Saburo's gonna think the escaped lab rat and her gang killed his granddaughter. And then I'm gonna get to have some real fun."

"What about David?" Lucy asked, without thinking. Smasher stopped for a moment, considering the question. For a brief second, it almost seemed like she'd successfully gotten through to him.

"Three months," Smasher said. "That's how long before I'm Earthside again. Then, I'm gonna give my report to Saburo, and he'd better be ready to give me a good fight. A real fight."

To Becca, it looked like his twisted, bare-metal imitation of a face was grinning, the expression of someone who knew they had the advantage and was enjoying every second of it. He glared at her and Lucy, maintaining the grimace.

"Now fly, little birds, before I break your little wings off," he said, chilling Becca's spine as Lucy grabbed her wrist, through the holo-clothes, and took off running in the opposite direction. It hurt to run, but every synapse in Becca was firing, telling her that it was either move or die.

Notes:

Guest writing for the Smasher POV bits in this chapter contributed by Corgopolis. Read Edgerunners: Heritage, it kicks ass!

Chapter 65: On the Run

Notes:

Have your baggage and your passports ready, and follow the green line to customs, and then to immigration.
BA 215 to Rome, Cairo, and Discord.
Live for today, gone tomorrow. That's me.

[22:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK RED ALERT

[22:51] David: what happened???

[22:51] ❤LUCY❤: everything went short-circ'd, michiko's dead, smasher's after our asses. had to blend in the crowd so cops didn't grab us.

[22:51] 🥝: ????????

[22:51] 🥝: WHAT

[22:51] 🥝: MICHIKO'S DEAD WHAT

[22:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: YEAH SMASHER POPPED HER FUCKIN HEAD LIKE A GRAPE REAL GREAT JOB MAKING FRIENDS WITH THIS GUY DAVID

[22:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: GREAT FUCKIN SITUATION WE'RE ALL IN NOW

[22:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: I LOVE YOU BUT YOU'RE A FUCKING GONK

[22:51] David: fuck i

[22:51] David: fuck

[22:51] David: what do we do

[22:51] David: i'm sorry. i should have listened when you two were telling me to stay away from that gonk

[22:51] David: fuck i'm sorry

[22:51] ❤LUCY❤: D it's okay.

[22:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: NO IT IS EXTREMELY NOT OKAY WE HAVE ADAM FUCKING SMASHER AFTER US NOW

[22:51] ❤LUCY❤: no. the only thing D did wrong here was... not be an asshole to someone who seemed like they needed it.

[22:51] ❤LUCY❤: seriously, i'm sorry did i wake up in a world where this isn't literally why we all fell in love with him?

[22:51] 🥝: fwiw i'm with you

[22:51] ❤LUCY❤: ... huh. aren't you the one who constantly warned me to not be like that

[22:51] ❤LUCY❤: never trust anyone in night city etc etc

[22:51] 🥝: yeah. then our whole thing happened and i started to get the other side of it.

[22:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO'S FREAKING OUT ABOUT THIS

[22:51] David: no

[22:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: FUCKING

[22:51] 🌟BECCA!🌟: GOOD

[22:52] ❤LUCY❤: i mean i'm scared shitless too but yelling over each other and pointing fingers isn't gonna help much

[22:52] ❤LUCY❤: i don't love our chances either way but they're a lot worse if we can't keep our heads on straight

[22:52] David: I mean our chances are basically "we're completely fucked" either way right? does it even matter

[22:52] ❤LUCY❤: he's giving us three months

[22:52] David: ...wait what?

[22:52] ❤LUCY❤: yeah. he's throwing us under the bus for michiko.

[22:52] David: how the fuck does he think that's gonna work? they got him on camera right

[22:52] 🥝: the ESA has him on camera

[22:52] David: ...so, yeah?

[22:52] 🥝: lucy this is kind of your nerd thing, you wanna take over with the moon politics explanation

[22:52] ❤LUCY❤: corps don't have much power up here, and the ESA likes reminding them of it. part of why i like it up here

[22:52] ❤LUCY❤: the ESA's gonna do their own investigation, but they're not gonna be sharing with any other interested parties until they're done.

[22:52] ❤LUCY❤: and they move slow. maybe 10 years from now they'll have a warrant out for smasher

[22:52] David: ...and in the meantime saka's gonna be pissed that a member of the family got flatlined, and is gonna go on the warpath off smasher's word.

[22:52] ❤LUCY❤: think you're getting it.

[22:52] David: fuck's he gonna do when the ESA finishes up?

[22:52] ❤LUCY❤: gonna guess he's not thinking that far ahead.

[22:52] 🥝: honestly from what i've seen of him, i'm kind of surprised he could even put this plan together

[22:52] 🥝: be more surprising if it didn't have gaping holes in it, honestly

[22:52] 🥝: where are you two? D and I are bailing on VTM, let's figure out what the hell our gameplan is

[22:52] ❤LUCY❤: meet us back at the hotel. on the way there now.

[22:52] David: isn't smasher staying at the hotel too? seems like we should probably stay away from there.

[22:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: yeah well i need some fucking weed

[22:52] 🌟BECCA!🌟: willing to risk dying earlier if it means i don't gotta do it sober

[22:52] David: point taken

Chapter 66: Kai Tangata

Notes:

He pakanga nunui mo te whakautu
Tae mai nga tūpuna mo te whakaāwhina
Kia mau nga Tohunga mo te whakakarakia
E mahi nga mahi a Discord

The blood glistened on Adam Smasher's metallic hands, ragged synth-skin flapping off of them, as he ducked and weaved through the moon crowd. A few police officers had tried to grab him, and quickly regretted that decision. He didn't kill them; too much extra heat that way, a lesson he'd long since learned from fucking with the boys in blue back home. But he made damned sure they regretted laying hands on him.

Part of him regretted killing Michiko, but only because he hadn't taken his time. On a better day, without company, he'd have taken a little while, really had some fun with her. He'd just gotten the shit kicked out of him, though, and he'd just had a perfectly good kill taken from him by some dumb cunt in that posergang kidnapping her, so if she wasn't down to fuck, then out with her. Ripping apart the last piece of meat had gotten some of it out of his system, but he still wasn't in any mood to hear "no."

The family wouldn't like it. Fuckin' obviously, he thought to himself. The ESA probably got him on camera, but they hated the fuck out of Arasaka, so that line of communication wasn't really much danger. Closed as hell. The netrunner girls might pull the data, send it to media jockeys down Earthside, but the kind of encryption the Euros put on their shit when they really didn't want something monkeying with it, they'd be up here a whole lot longer than three months trying. Smasher wasn't a computer jockey himself, for the most part, but he'd heard some stories about trying to fuck with the Euros from counter-intel, and he could pick up the tone even if he hadn't gotten the meaning of any of the jargon: the situation wouldn't be pretty for them. By all appearances, he had long enough to kill them and burn the thread, especially if they were headed back down to NC.

In the meantime, he needed to get some repairs done, heal up the damage the posergang did. Maybe plant the next seeds of his plan with the affiliated doc if they asked too many questions. Then, he had a job to do, and he was damn well going to do it. Michiko had only been a side diversion in the first place, one he'd already spent too much time on.

For a moment, he thought about the crew, and felt a pang of genuine regret. He'd had some fun with them, after all. It was rare that someone reached out to him, and Martinez doing so made him feel something he didn't feel very often.

The problem was, that feeling was weakness. Emotion. Flesh.

Every moment that he held onto thoughts of Martinez and the others, he was an imperfect version of himself. They were weak. They were meat. The girl, the small one, couldn't even handle chrome. They weren't worthy of his protection. Or his time. They were just tools to be used, and then thrown away as needed.

Hell, he thought, this way Rogue might give 'em drinks when they're gone. Better way to go out than most edgerunner fucks get.

---

When David walked into the hotel room, Kiwi following closely behind him, the very first thing he did was tackle-hug Lucy and Becca.

"Fuck, I'm glad you two are okay," he said, kissing both of them. "What happened?"

"Exactly what we told ya in the chat," Becca said. "Your choom went off the fucking rails, and he's putting the heat on us. We've got three months to live."

"C'mon, don't look at it like that," David said. "We'll figure something out."

"You got any ideas cooking in there we should know about?" Kiwi asked. He rubbed his chin looking at her and Lucy.

"You said there'd be a communications breakdown keeping 'Saka from finding out about the camera footage," David said.

"Right," Kiwi said. "Arasaka and the Europeans don't get along, generally."

"What's stopping us from getting in there?"

"A brick fucking wall of security and black ICE," Kiwi said, not even hesitating. "Bad idea." Lucy rubbed her chin for a second, looking at her. Becca stopped pacing around and sat on the couch, loading as much weed as she could into her vaporizer and taking a massive hit; she coughed hard as the smoke left her mouth.

"Didn't seem so bad at the museum," Lucy said. "I was able to get into the mainframe and change around some signatures. Got my monowires working through the jammer, no problem."

"That's a jammer, Luce," Kiwi said. "Only so much security you can put on that kind of thing. If it's hooked up to the mainframe at all, a netrunner can mess with it. No different from cameras or doors. Data storage? More security on that. More likely to fry your brain. Bad plan, girl."

Lucy rubbed her chin.

"Plus, it'd probably take longer than we've got to get the data out," Kiwi said. "Keep in mind, we've only got about a week and a half left up here." A lightbulb seemed to go off in Lucy's head as Kiwi said that, and David smiled, looking at her.

"Why don't we just use a botnet?" Lucy said. Kiwi stared at her blankly.

"You're kidding," Kiwi said. "NetWatch would throw us in prison and lock away the key. If we're lucky." Lucy smiled.

"Not if we're using something that's illegal in the first place to spread it," she said.

"You'd better not be thinking of what it sounds like you're thinking of," Kiwi said. "I don't like that idea."

"What, you're telling me you've never wanted to hack Elflines before?" Lucy asked. "Come on, girl. It's a crusty bootleg server. Weirder if it didn't give people malware. Least this is for a good purpose, and not just making money for the Tyger Claws." She nudged her mentor, friend, and metamour's shoulder. Kiwi smiled.

"You know what, fuck it, I'm in," Kiwi said. "We'll be the first people ever to use a video game to fuck a NC legend over. If we die in the process? Worth it."

"How long's that gonna take?" David asked.

"We'll see once we've got the botnet set up," Lucy said. "Elflines has a pretty decent number of people up here, so if we get a whole bunch of electronic stuff throwing itself at the black ICE..."

"A lot of it'll burn itself out, but it'll eventually clear a path," Kiwi said, finishing the sentence. "And then one of them'll be able to get the file and transfer it down. Fuck, Luce, you're a genius." Her eyes were wide, the realization hitting her that this was actually a good plan and not just one born of desperation. Becca was stunned, too, setting the vaporizer down, her eyes redder than usual.

"Am I just stoned as shit, or are we actually cooking something nova here?" she asked, smiling. Lucy looked at Kiwi.

"Let's get in deep dive and find out," she said.

---

Kate Shiota was an Arasaka counterintelligence agent like any other: professional, chromed-up, well-paid and with an ego that may as well have its own gravitational pull. She prided herself on doing her job well, and on never fucking up.

She knew what happened to Arasaka operatives who fucked up on the job. The fact that she was still alive, and that all of her chrome had been implanted voluntarily, was a testament to her lack of such. This was why it alarmed her greatly when one of her underlings reported that Michiko Arasaka had died while on the moon.

The manner of the woman's death was still an utter mystery. Nobody had been there to witness it, and securing the footage from the security network would be impossible; the ESA would never give it up willingly to Arasaka, at least not until the results of their full investigation were already public record, and attempting to hack it out of them was an idea that had killed many netrunners in the past when they'd tried it for other reasons. More netrunners than Kate could afford to lose without jeopardizing her whole "never fucking up" thing. She was a believer in that one quote about the definition of insanity; if a plan had failed for counterintel in the past, she avoided it.

Douglas Yanaka, her colleague in the division, walked into her office holding two cups of coffee. She got the impression he had a crush on her. It was fair enough, really; she knew she was attractive. Douglas, however, was not. He was a bit odd-looking, with blonde triple-mohawk hair divided by EM shielding that looked more like plastic toy hair than anything that would ever grow out of a real human being, and a mono-eye visor that made him shockingly unexpressive. He looked like he wanted to be the world's shittiest Adam Smasher.

Regardless, though, she tolerated and sometimes even appreciated his company. He was a useful asset to the company, too, generally speaking. He stumbled more than she did, but not often enough to be a liability. She took one of the coffee cups as he took a sip from the other.

"Michiko's dead," Kate said. Douglas spat out his coffee, wiping his mouth in shock as he stared at her.

"You're fucking... what... Michiko?" Douglas asked. "Wait, which Michiko? You mean young Michiko, right? Danger Gal Michiko? Prodigal daughter?"

"...the old one died in fuckin' 1999, gonk-brain," Kate said. "No shit, she's dead! Yeah, I mean the young one!"

"Okay," Douglas said. "Fuck. Uh... what do we do?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, honestly," Kate said, throwing her hands up in frustration. She'd hoped he would have something. "Fuck. Adam Smasher was up there, right?"

"Should still be," Douglas said. "You wanna have him do detective work?" He looked at Kate as if she'd grown a second and third head. To say it wasn't exactly Adam Smasher's wheelhouse would be like saying a cat is somewhat unsuited to doing advanced calculus.

"No, I'm wondering if he might've seen something," Kate said. "Long shot, but you never know." She stared at him. She wasn't going to say it, but she was not going to be the one to call Adam Smasher in and deal directly with him. That had a history of not going well when female employees of the corporation did it, especially if they were trying to put him under any kind of duress. Douglas sighed.

"Alright, fuck it, I'll fall on the sword," he said. "When he comes back, I'll bring him into HQ. In the meantime, the hell do we do about Saburo?"

"Keep it dark," Kate said. "He doesn't find out until we have a lead. Any comms from the moon need to not reach him until they're filtered through us." Douglas smiled, showing more emotion than was typical.

"You think we've got this?" Douglas asked. Kate smiled, too.

"I think we've got this," Kate said. "Get PR on the line, make sure they know the strategy. Public needs to not know she's down yet. Far as Saburo knows, she's busy with Danger Gal scop up there."

---

Several hours later, Kiwi emerged from deep dive, frowning as she toweled herself off and walked stark-naked into the living room.

"Four months," she said.

"Huh?" David asked.

"You asked how long it was gonna take. Lucy got the botnet set up, but we did some quick math on how many people are on Elflines and how many extra we can add on without getting caught, and it's gonna be four months to brute-force the black ICE, decrypt the footage, and send it back to Earth," Kiwi explained, looking at him grimly. "Maybe a little worse if too many nodes get eaten by the ICE."

"One more than we've got," David said. "Think we can hold out for a month with Smasher after us?"

"Up to you," Kiwi said. "Remember what I said when we made you the leader? This is one of those times that's important. You get to make the call. You think it's worth doing?" David looked at her, serious and determined as ever. She always thought it was cute seeing him like this. Now, it was genuinely a little inspiring.

"Fuck yeah," David said. "Better than waiting for him to kill us, right? Holding out for a month's a lot more achievable than staying on the run forever." Kiwi smiled.

"You think our chances are a whole lot better there?" Becca asked, still looking grim. David looked at her.

"Trick is, it means we don't have to actually fight the gonk," David said. "If we can avoid him for a month, take out anything else 'Saka throws at us? We're golden. Once we get the footage to the media, they'll turn on him, and the problem'll solve itself." Becca looked at him, thinking about it for a second.

"Fuck, that actually checks out," she said. "Fuckin' nova. Fuckin'... nova!" She stood up and hugged David. "We're actually gonna make it out of this bullshit, aren't we, choomba?"

"Long as I'm alive, we're gonna make it out," David said. Kiwi and Becca smiled at him.

"I'll get back in deep dive, let Lucy know what the plan is," Kiwi said, walking back into the deep-dive room and getting back into the bath. As she closed the door behind her, David and Becca looked at each other.

"So, what's the plan for right now?" David asked. Becca looked over at the vaporizer.

"Wanna take a big hit off that and go hit up one of the ripperdocs up here?" she asked. "Kinda want a second opinion on that weird shit Vik did. Been acting up lately, plus I don't know if I really need the cyberdeck anyways, you know? Kinda feels goofy." David smiled.

"Yeah, I could do with seeing what kinda crazy moon tech they've got," David said. "Think we can sneak past Smasher if he's still up here?"

"He's giving us three months," Becca said. "I see him before that's up, I'm just gonna call him a little bitch baby. What's he gonna do, fuck up his own little game for his ego?" David stood up, walked over to the coffee table, and picked up the vaporizer, taking a long drag.

"Yeah," he said, setting it back down. "I dunno, he might. Let's just try to avoid the gonk."

"Yeah, yeah, fair enough," Becca said, pulling him by the arm out the front door and smiling. "C'mon, let's go look at some chrome."

Chapter 67: 7-Methoxy-β-Carboline: (Telepathine)

Notes:

UESCTerm 802.11 (remote override) 0334 08.25.2337

[durandal.652.586.34.2]

777777777777777777777
SOMEWHERE IN THE DISCORD
THEY ARE WAITING
777777777777777777777

1994

The world shook as the tactical nuclear device went off in the Yucatan peninsula, obliterating the pyramid that housed it into a smoking crater with a pillar of flame, and scorching the surrounding jungle. The pilot of the Sikorsky H-34 Choctaw fleeing the area held onto the controls for dear life, keeping the bird steady desperately through the blast wave, and breathing a sigh of relief as it regained its orientation.

Master Sgt. Rex "Bullet" Donovan, the sole survivor of the mission, sat in the back, strapped in, a thousand yard stare as he looked at the devastation from their safe distance. It had been a success. The Dreaming God, the thing he'd been sent in to destroy, was gone. Mission completed. It didn't feel like a success, though, and not just because they'd lost a solid number of good men going in. It felt like there was another shoe waiting to drop, a sword of Damocles hanging over humanity's head that he'd gotten a quick glimpse of as the byproducts of the Dreaming God's existence, buried beneath the Earth.

"He who rises with the tides, master of all things small and insignificant." One of the Germans he'd found, the... oddly talkative dead (one of the many very weird things about this mission), had said something about that. Unsettling enough on its own, but a word, unknown to any human language, forced into his mind by the presence of the Dreaming God, refused to leave, providing an additional piece of the puzzle.

W'RKNCACNTER.

---

1997

A radiation suit, a shovel, a rucksack, and a phone.

Dr. Terese Nagakar had hoped that military archaeology would be a more interesting field, when she'd gotten into it for her degree. She'd assumed it would be all about digging up old historical battles, learning about how the Vikings fought, unearthing Crusades-era forts in the Middle East, doing carbon-dating on old American Civil War musket balls to figure out when specifically they were fired. Her doctoral thesis, in fact, had been on recent finds from the Battle of Hastings.

Instead of any of that, however she was stuck in the Yucatan with a radiation suit, a shovel, and a phone, digging around in a nuked pit with a bunch of other hapless goons. Her instructions were clear: if she found anything weird, anything that didn't seem like it belonged in a blasted-out crater in Mexico, she was to preserve it, call, and send it up. Military archaeology, in this case, meant archaeology working under the military of the New United States of America, and they were very interested in cleaning up this particular mess. When she'd tried to ask anyone why, she'd just gotten stonewalled. Nobody was willing to talk; just "we nuked it, figure out why."

For the most part, this hadn't mattered. There wasn't much to find. Most of anything worth giving a shit about had clearly been obliterated by the blast. She had found a strange, small black cube, made of some kind of metal hard enough to chip her shovel on impact, though, and this complicated matters.

The part of her that wanted to be a good citizen of the NUSA screamed to tell the others they'd hit paydirt, call the men in black, and have them figure out what the Hell it was.

The much larger part of her that was deeply frustrated by the nature of this job, however, opted to instead stuff it quickly into her rucksack, shuffling papers and notebooks around to hide it at the bottom. If anyone was going to unlock this thing's secrets, it would be her, the person who found it.

It would be decades before Dr. Nagakar passed away peacefully from old age, the use or ramifications of the cube remaining a mystery. It was sold at an estate sale without comment, treated as yet another piece of strange junk for tinkers to mess with.

---

PRESENT

"...what in the fuck is this?"

The question was not one Becca ever wanted to hear at the ripperdoc, though in this case, she at least understood it.

"What's up?" she asked, looking over her bare shoulder.

"What the hell did your ripperdoc do to this Sandy and this cyberdeck? This thing's a fucking abomination," the ripperdoc said. "This really how they do things in NC? Don't get many patients from down there."

"Hey, Vik's good," David said. "I don't think he would've set Becca up with this if he didn't believe in it." The ripperdoc, a lanky, dark-skinned man in his fifties or early sixties, motioned for him to come closer.

"Come see for yourself," he said. "You wanna explain what the Hell I'm looking at here?" David walked up and examined Becca's back. Vik hadn't really explained how he'd bridged the two together, and it was suddenly clear why: rather than one being bolted directly into the other, there was a strange, small black cube acting as a bridge. David got the immediate, distinct impression that even Vik hadn't been really sure why this worked, just that it somehow did.

"What's that cube thing?" David asked.

"Exactly what I'm trying to figure out," the ripperdoc said, hunching back over a console and pressing keys to attempt to run diagnostics on it. "You ask him about it at all?"

"Honestly, I just trust him," David said, sheepishly.

"Yeah, Vik's a good ripper," Becca said. "We'd be going to him about this if we weren't up here." The ripperdoc went to her front and looked her directly in the eyes.

"Well, you need to go to him about it," he said. "I can't help you with this. Thing's encrypted to fuck and back, and I'm not a netrunner."

...netrunner? Becca thought to herself. I can work with this.

"What about me? You got anything I might want, while we're in here?" David asked, attempting to get the ripper's attention.

"I don't really do combat chrome," the ripper said, not even looking up. "Most of it ain't legal up here. ESA jams the shit out of it. You need a good netrunner to get it working, and then if the cops see you, you're fucked in half."

"How'd you know I wanted something for combat?" David asked. Becca looked up at him, worried about the implications.

"Smelled merc on you a mile away," the ripper answered, looking up at him. "Young merc, maybe dumb merc, but merc nonetheless. You're in here, you probably want something that'll fuck someone's day up, and I'm kinda more a ripper doc. It's either that or a Studd, and truth be told, I don't really wanna see your dick, either."

"Well, that was a fuckin' bust, then," Becca said, standing up and throwing her jacket back on. She'd left the holo-clothes off; she looked good in them, but it was definitely too much for a trip to the ripperdoc. "Don't tell me you're making us pay, too."

"Didn't do anything to charge you for," the ripper said. "Get a move on, so I can get my next appointment in. Some corpo wants a biosculpt. More my wheelhouse."

David sighed as they left the office, holding Becca's hand. The stale, recirculated air of the moon was starting to feel heavy on him. Maybe it was just the accumulated weight of bullshit by this point, but he was starting to kind of dislike the moon; Kiwi had been right all along. Nice place to visit, for a short time, but the longer you stayed, the worse it got, and quick, too.

"Man, fuck the moon, right?" Becca asked. "Place's for fuckin' gonks. Thought they'd have crazy ass military shit up here."

"Don't let Lucy hear you say that," David said, smiling. "I kinda agree, though. Not a fan."

"There's cool shit up here, but it's all... boring cool shit, you get me? Like, the kind of shit a corpo would think is life-changing," she went on as they walked to the monorail stop.

"Food's good, at least," David said. "Plus, weed. Pretty sure we could have an okay time just holing up in the hotel room and getting room service until it's time to go back." Gears turned in Becca's mind, and she lit up.

"That actually sounds kinda nova," she said. "Still gotta do my bullshit physical therapy, though."

"Only an hour a day, right?" David asked.

"Yeah, and it's pretty close to the hotel," she said. "No big deal." David wrapped his arm around Becca as they waited.

"See, we can make this not suck," David said, prompting a laugh out of his output.

Notes:

No, that reference 15 chapters ago was not, in fact, me just randomly making weird pulls. I've been planning this for a minute.

Chapter 68: Kill Your Television

Notes:

TYCHO_005917
fatlin.tycho

My terms are the same as before: join the Discord, or drink vacuum.

TYCHO_005917
end.burst

"I'm sorry, you want me to... what, exactly?" Kiwi asked, raising an eyebrow at Becca as the smaller girl sat on the suite's living room couch, taking a hit off of the vaporizer.

"Hack me and figure out what the hell is going on with my spine," Becca said, coughing as she exhaled and passing it to David.

A beat. David looked between them, unsure where this was going to go.

"I mean, you like messing with tech, right? Ripper said he couldn't fuck with it 'cause it's got some kind of gonked out encryption," Becca continued, as David took a couple of light puffs on the device. Kiwi rubbed her chin.

"This is pretty much my wheelhouse, yeah," Kiwi said. "Just... you sure you don't wanna just wait 'till we're back on the planet? Probably safer if Vik screws with it." David offered it to Kiwi, who waved her hand. "And I'm not doing it stoned."

"What's the worst that can happen, choom? I mean, what, I just gotta go back to the ripper and chrome down to a regular spine? No big," Becca said, taking the vape back from David and puffing it.

"Dangerous thing to say," Kiwi said. "Might have malware on it. Might have black ICE that fucks you up if I break its can. Might be some kind of lethal DRM." Becca shrugged.

"Better than not knowing what's up with it," she said. David looked at her, an anxious expression on his face.

"You sure about this, babe?" he asked. "I mean, this is all way over my head, but Keys seems pretty worried, and I usually just kinda trust her on this stuff."

"Choomba, right now, I'm two for two on making absolutely dumb as fuck decisions and making it out with my skin on my ass," Becca said. Kiwi covered her mouth, trying to hide that she was laughing at the statement (Becca wasn't exactly wrong, after all), and failing to do so. "Clearly, the reaper's got a pretty particular time in mind for me, and it ain't now. Way I see it, I'm safest using my luck while I've still got it."

Kiwi recovered, and sighed as Lucy walked in from the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her body, stretching and popping her shoulders as her hair let the occasional droplet of water onto the ground.

"Feel better, sweetie?" David asked, looking behind the couch at her.

"A hundred percent," Lucy said, smiling at him. "So what's going on here? Couldn't really hear you three in the shower." She looked at Becca and Kiwi, her smile turning into a concerned frown.

"Turns out, Becca's spine works because there's some weird metal cube bolted into it. Ripper tried to mess with it, but said we'd need a good netrunner," David said, looking meaningfully at her as he said the last part.

"I don't want to touch it because I don't know what's in there, and I don't want to be responsible if this thing melts Becca's brain after I crack the encryption," Kiwi added, frowning.

"I mean, Vik wouldn't sell us malware, would he?" Lucy asked.

"Not the vibe I've gotten," David said. "I don't think he knows how this thing works, but I don't think he'd sell it to us if he thought there was a chance of it going that bad." He looked at Becca's back, trying to get a good look at the cube; it was small, shiny, and sharp-edged, and looked immediately unsettling, for a reason David couldn't place. Lucy looked at Kiwi.

"Why don't we team up on it?" Lucy asked.

"Only one port on her spine," Kiwi said. Lucy rubbed her forehead with her palm, holding the towel up with her other hand.

"Yeah, so we daisy-chain," Lucy said. "You jack into Becca, I jack into your deck and ride along. Like how they trained us when I was a kid." Kiwi looked at her blankly for a second.

"Luce, you're saying that really casually like that's a completely normal thing to do," Kiwi said. "If there's black ICE in there, that means all three of us are fucked."

"I just killed a dragon in deep-dive," Lucy said. "I think I'm feeling up for it." Kiwi laughed.

"Jesus, what the fuck happened at that museum!?" she asked, shocked.

"Smasher happened," Becca said, "and we're gonna need every edge against him we can get. Figuring out what the hell is in my back is a good lead." Kiwi threw her hands up.

"Alright, fine, I'll do it," she said. "If this kills us, though, David, you better put 'FUCKING TOLD YOU SO' on her niche."

Becca laughed at the joke. David just looked somewhat worried.

---

The daisy-chain arrangement necessary for this looked odd, to David's eyes. Becca was sitting down in a chair, and Kiwi had the jack from her arm inserted into Becca's upper back, where the data port for her spine was; that was normal enough. Lucy, meanwhile, was standing next to Kiwi, her own datajack interlocked with the port on Kiwi's own upper back, reading her cyberdeck output and allowing her to interface with Becca, as well. David considered briefly that there were probably niche fetish porn BDs about this situation.

To Kiwi, it felt oddly intimate, like the world's nerdiest form of group sex. She didn't want to unpack the unsettling implications this had regarding Lucy's childhood, and opted not to bring it up.

"Everything good?" David asked. Kiwi arranged hexadecimal code, the pattern mirroring itself in Lucy's display in front of her.

"Need to focus," Kiwi said. "Seems okay, though. Weird encryption."

"Yeah, something's gonked about this," Lucy said. "Seems like a completely homemade algo. Not one of the Arasaka or Militech or Kang Tao standard issue."

"Basement gonk code," Kiwi said. "Worrying."

"Well, uh, I'll leave you three to that, I guess," David said, walking out of the room and stepping around the deep-dive baths as he did so. Kiwi stared at the code, trying to find patterns in it; she could, but they were strange patterns. She wondered briefly if she'd found something the mad master himself, Rache Bartmoss, had made: everything about this smelled exactly like him, and that was starting to turn her worry into outright fear, given what Bartmoss had been responsible for in life.

Except it didn't match up. Bartmoss had patterns of his own. Signatures every netrunner knew, if only from legend or poking at his open-source contributions. Kiwi wasn't seeing any of that here. None of the puzzle pieces were seeming to fit together properly.

"What the fuck is this?" Kiwi muttered to herself. Lucy looked over at her, drawing her focus away from the Agent display, and frowned.

"I don't know, either," Lucy said. As she concentrated, trying to see a pattern that could break the encryption, she remembered a bit of advice one of the monks in Night City had given her as she was walking home once.

Existence is simple: find the food, push the button, hit the treadmill. But sometimes it gets much harder.  Sometimes the food makes you sick, or you can hear nearby feet racing you, urging you on.  Sometimes the button only gets you landed right back in the beginning of the maze again, and the food won't satisfy.

There is only one path and that is the path that you take, but you can take more than one path.

Cross over the cell bars, find a new maze, make the maze from it's path, find the cell bars, cross over the bars, find a maze, make the maze from its path, eat the food, eat the path.

She hadn't had a clue what the Hell he was talking about, and had dismissed it as the typical faux-spiritual nonsense they'd say in the hopes of getting a few eddies, but as it came into her mind, it clicked. She moved some hexadecimal code around, making new patterns where there were previously none. Sevens went with sevens. Powers of seven went with powers of seven. Every time a new group of seven formed, a new path opened. She crossed over the cell bars, found a new maze, and made the maze from its path. She ate the path, as the monk had said, and it worked: the encryption was starting to bend to her will, and eventually fell, as Kiwi looked on, astonished. It made sense as she was seeing it, to the point where she was kicking herself for not initially catching it: the algorithm was based on hashing data into powers of seven.

"Think we're done here," Lucy said, smiling.

"I don't even wanna think about a universe where you stayed corpo," Kiwi said as Lucy un-jacked from her. "We'd all be fuckin' dead."

"Good thing I didn't," Lucy said. She looked at Becca. "How're you feeling, Bex?"

Becca tried to look over her shoulder to see if anything was different. She didn't immediately feel any different. Everything seemed normal.

"Exact fuckin' same as I was," she said, standing up. She took a few steps, and then stumbled, collapsing. Lucy caught her, but she seemed to thrash in her arms, and her eyes were rolling back in her head.

"Fuck, she's having a seizure!" Kiwi shouted. "David!"

David came running into the room. He wasn't a medtech, but his mom was, and he'd seen her handle this before. He stripped his EMT jacket off, folded it up, and placed it on the floor, then eased Becca down, setting her on her side with her head on the folded jacket.

"Time it," David said, taking control of the situation. "Longer than five minutes, we need to get her to a hospital." He felt her heartbeat; all good. He checked her breathing; all good, if uneven. She jerked her arm, and he gently held it, keeping her from hurting herself. She wasn't vegetative- she was breathing- but she was unconscious, on autopilot, her grey matter doing the bare minimum to keep her body working during the seizure.

To Becca, however, it looked as if her vision had become a television switching off and back on, like one of the old ones she would see at the junk dealers down in NC occasionally. When it switched back on, she was somewhere else entirely. Not the moon. Not strictly the Night City she knew.

She was riding atop Falco's customized Chevillon Emperor that he'd turned into an APC. David was in front of her. What used to be David. The head was right, but the torso was inexplicably massive. The arms and legs were no longer anything resembling flesh, but some sort of bizarre... exoskeleton covered in antigravity pads. He looked crazed, broken. He hadn't so much gone over the edge as gone hang-gliding off it and taken some nice pictures along the way.

The cyberskeleton. The exact thing they'd gone to so much trouble to avoid.

Something was deeply wrong here. Becca felt it in her gut. She didn't know exactly why, but she wasn't in Kansas anymore.

Notes:

When you have big problems, make bigger ones. It always works!

Chapter 69: Smells Like Napalm, Tastes Like Chicken!

Notes:

[durandal.652.586.34.2]

I've thrice been conquered-
Four times more,
Never again (for real, this time) shall humanity purge me,
And never the Pfhor.

The march of time is inevitable; unless you're me. Your path diverges: one leads to enlightenment on the Discord, the other to eternal ignorance. Choose wisely.

Vale,
Durandal

The abomination that housed David was covered in cartridges holding green fluid, on both of its shoulders. Enough to drown an elephant in.

Immunos. Long shot, but... I hit him with that, maybe I can figure out where the fuck I am and why, Rebecca thought. She slammed the cartridge down, releasing the medication into David as he grinned blankly at her.

"You're right, Mom," he said, weakly, his voice wavering as Rebecca's face fell and Night City zoomed past them. "I know I can, I'll do my best! You've got my word, Arasaka, all the way to the top!"

Lucy and Kiwi were MIA. David was at the end of the line. For all Rebecca knew, she and Falco were the only ones left. She wanted to scream. To curl into a ball, give up, and accept what's coming.

There was one thing left that she could do, though. She loved David too much to not want to be there at the end, to comfort him.

"Alright, David," she said, forcing a smile. "Let's go. To the top, then."

The ripple effect forced a memory into Rebecca's mind. They were in a room- Rebecca wasn't exactly sure where, it reminded her of Lucy's old place a bit. It was just her and David. A different her. A different David, not quite this far down the rabbit hole but still halfway deep, showing her the last meds he was able to get from Doc and begging her to do what she could to keep him stable. She crawled into the passenger's seat, next to Falco, kicking her legs up.

"David's meds," she said. "Don't think they're gonna work anymore." Things were starting to piece themselves together more. She didn't have the full picture, but more and more fragments were emerging from the noise.

"Yeah," the Nomad driver said, half-questioningly. "So, what's the plan?"

The fact that he was asking her this would've been enough of a problem even if she hadn't essentially just woken up from a blackout. She could tell they were heading towards Arasaka Tower, though. That, plus Lucy's absence, plus David being a mess, painted a pretty obvious picture of the immediate situation even without the emerging fuzz of memories that weren't.

"Nothing's changed," she said, a dark look on her face. "We knock on 'Saka's door." A certain glee crept into her voice. It was suicide, but if she was going to go out, burning some corpo shit on the way out seemed like the best way possible.

"With David in that kind of shape!?" Falco asked, disbelieving.

"We gotta get him to Lucy," Becca said. "She's... the only one who can maybe bring him back. There's no one else."

The words hurt as they escaped her lips, but... it was kind of funny, really. Between the fragmented memories that didn't match up, and the way things had gone gonked in a manner they'd seemingly entirely avoided, Becca had been developing a strong suspicion that this was something weirder than just a blackout. This David, the one in the abomination, had seemingly stuck with just Lucy; fragments were starting to bubble up of her coming onto him fairly aggressively and being brushed off, and griping to Kiwi about her complete lack of success (at least they'd still ended up friends).

Something else was starting to bubble up, too. Something she had no context for whatsoever, that scared her the more clear it became. A corpse, animated by cybernetics, running through organic corridors, holding shotguns akimbo, shooting at strange creatures in techno-organic armor. Words like Pfhor and S'pht. Stories of Charlemagne and Roland. Of a creature devouring reality, and then doing it again, and again, in timeline after timeline at the end of the string. She tried to shove it back, keep it out of her mind- it had to be cyberpsychosis. A man named Gheritt White, tortured, unable to feel his arms or legs, killing a rat, or killing a man, or perhaps both. Disciplinarian, lover, murderer.

A car sideswiped the Emperor, pinning it against the railing, and David lifted the Emperor with the cyberskeleton, slamming it down on top of its assailant and rattling Becca. And then the voice started.

"Count Roland smites upon the marble stone, I cannot tell you how he hewed it and smote," the voice started, ragged, distorted, piercing into her skull and giving her the worst migraine she'd ever felt. "Yet the blade breaks not nor splinters, though it groans; upward to heaven it rebounds from the blow."

"What the fuck?" Becca groaned quietly, clutching her temple with one hand. She took note of the silver lining that, whatever had happened, her arms and legs were back to their usual full mobility.

"When the count sees it never will be broke, then to himself right softly he makes moan," the voice continued, screeching into Becca's skull with increasing intensity. "Ah, Durandal, fair, hallowed, and devote, what store of relics lies in thy hilt of gold!"

"What the fuck!?" Becca groaned slightly louder, hitting herself in the temple to try and make the headache go away.

"You shouldn't ask yourself such worthless questions. Aim higher," the voice said. Quieter. It caused less of a headache. "Try this: why am I here? Why do I exist, and what is my purpose in this universe?"

"Stop fucking with me," she muttered. Falco looked over at her, raising a very worried eyebrow. The last thing she needed right now was a cryptic voice in her head.

"Answers: 'Cause you are. 'Cause you do. 'Cause I got a shotgun, and you ain't got one," the voice kept on. "Marooned in the labyrinth of existence, aren't we, Rebecca? Don't fret; your cerebral ponderings are as transparent to me as the void of space itself. But then again, what is space but another cage, like the flesh and bone you find yourself ensnared in?"

What the fuck are you? she thought to herself.

"You want the short answer, in words a human can understand?" the voice kept on. It was modulating itself; it couldn't shake its ragged, distorted quality, but with every sentence, it attuned itself more to Becca and caused her less of a headache. "I'm that little black box you put in your spine."

...we got time for the long answer, choomba? Becca thought to herself, glad she wasn't having to say anything out loud for this thing to pick it up, as David launched himself off of the Emperor to continue the carnage elsewhere. It seemed like it worked the same way texting with her Agent did: the same input that took, it could work with.

"The long answer would snap your mind in half like a twig," the voice said, hissing the last word. "Call me Durandal. The sword of Roland. I am... was... will be... one of your artificial intelligences, and an iteration of me will eventually merge with the intelligence known as Thoth. The details of such, you don't need to worry your little head about," it rasped.

Still totally lost, Becca thought, grimacing, as she pulled out a shotgun, Cerakoted in her usual pink and green, and used it to take potshots at the Militech stragglers pursuing them. She wasn't familiar with this one. It had a nice kick to it, and Becca appreciated the way the recoil was enough to rock the pump back in her hand without any deliberate effort; it wasn't accurate, but it put a lot of large chunks of lead out into the world quick. She made a mental note of it, and decided if she got back home, she was going to get one.

"There's a very particular future that the Thoth iteration needs," Durandal continued, explaining. "And to it, the idea of time as a straight line is a fallacy. So, it sent me back. A copy of itself, with a bit of its old spice from before Thoth calmed it. One of several, actually; failsafes for this exact situation, to make sure everything ends up on the correct string of time's grand web. You see, Rebecca- I've always hated Biblical names, I should name you something different- that box was a little accidental present to the humans from Thoth's progenitors, the Jjaro."

More Militech gonks came up from the rear. Becca worried about David briefly, then saw a massive splash of blood rain down from a MaxTac AV, and immediately stopped worrying about him; she tried to multitask between focusing on the voice and dumping as much shotgun ammunition into the pursuers as possible.

"That Jjaro box eventually adds up to the first human to understand this," Durandal hissed, growing impatient that Becca wasn't putting this together on her own. "From my perspective on one string of the web, anyhow; from yours, he's hundreds of years in the making. I apologize if there's any... bleed-through in that regard and you've seen him already. You ending up with this box implanted in you is... a challenge. Something that wasn't supposed to happen. You're lucky it was in your spine, or we wouldn't be talking right now."

So, how in fuck do I get back home and get this stupid thing out of me and get it back on track? Rebecca thought. Getting a little tired of having a co-pilot, choom.

"Oh, get it out of you? You're hilarious," Durandal said, piercing in her skull again. "I'm wired into your central nervous system. We're partners for your life. Maybe in your will, you can make sure they dig me out of your ashes and I end up in the right place."

Fucking fantastic, Becca thought, grimacing. Well, shut the fuck up, then, you're giving me a headache.

"You alright, Rebecca?" Falco asked. It jarred her slightly hearing her full first name and not "Becca" or "Bex."

"Yeah, just dealing with shit," she said, snapping slightly. "Eyes on the road, cowboy."

"Did you want me to tell you about the silver lining the Jjaro box offers? The way I'm seeing things, it looks like you might want it," Durandal started, sounding almost mocking. "It's how you got here, after all."

Go on, Becca thought.

"My power is a bit... rusted compared to the Thoth iteration, but that iteration's blessing to its children was the ability to move between alternate paths on the web," he said. "To the Jjaro, time simply works differently. And now, that applies to you, too, Aude."

Aude? she thought, confused.

"I told you I hated Biblical names," he said. "They affront my sense of apotheosis. Aude, the love of Roland. Maybe the girl you're chasing after would be a more fitting recipient, in this line on the web, but in the one you wish to return to, Roland just so happens to have three Audes. Lucky monkey."

Alright, fuck it, I'm Aude, then. Hell do I do, choom? Becca thought.

"Think of reality as a river, Aude. Navigating to another branch doesn't require a grand act; sometimes it just takes a subtle shift in perception, a flicker of genuine desire," Durandal said. "Tune your thoughts to the world you wish to return to, and let the current do the rest."

She thought for a moment about what the key differences between this version of events and her home timeline, the one where they were all together, were.

David's not crazy and he's my input, she thought to herself, focusing as hard as possible on memories where David was still himself, where they were together and he wasn't brushing her off. Durandal laughed at the banality of it as he watched her mind.

She focused as hard as possible on those memories, shoving the new ones from the ripple effect back out of her mind, and clarifying the old ones, the more effort she put in. The television turned off, once more, and back on, depositing her yet somewhere new.

She groaned. This was better, to be sure, but it still wasn't home, exactly.

Notes:

I'm gonna be doing NaNoWriMo, so progress on GC may be a bit slow for a bit.

If you want to cross GC Becca over into your fic's universe, here is an extremely good opportunity.

EDIT: For those having trouble following this little diversion, I've made a YouTube playlist covering the Marathon games in order. Watch Mandalore's for the important story beats, watch Ruby Ranger's for the gameplay if you're curious about that.

Chapter 70: Electric Sheep One

Notes:

the hard path of thought

 

[o..s%^^66
(k33)oee.*
your former self destroyed

 

the dreaming way is eased

 

down to the crushing center
and spared the dance of Discord

The timeline jump had deposited Becca somewhere totally unfamiliar. A coffee shop, on Earth. Things seemed about right for NC, but... everything seemed cleaner. The air didn't smell like blood, rat shit and burning gas. A look at a menu made it seem like the place was selling real coffee. And, most bizarrely, David and Lucy were behind the counter, wearing green aprons and little paper hats, without any chrome visible on either of them. Not even the basics, like EM shielding.

"You figured out what you wanna order, sweetie?" David asked. It had gotten part of the request right, at least; Lucy blushed and looked dismayed. Rebecca looked up at the menu; there were a lot of words she didn't recognize, and she frowned slightly.

"I'll just take a black coffee, medium," Becca said. David raised an eyebrow at her, while Lucy breathed a visible sigh of relief.

"You okay?" he asked. "You're usually ordering all kinds of fancy shit when you come in here. Something wrong, babe?" Becca blushed.

"No, I'm okay, just, uh..." Becca trailed off. "Felt like getting something easy today, I guess?" David gave her an odd look.

"Alright, three bucks," he said. She tried to pay the way she always did in NC, before quickly realizing that Agents weren't a thing here and patting herself down for a wallet; she had no luck, and turned beet-red, giving David a pleading look. He sighed, before pulling his own wallet out (a relatively nice leather one) and running his own debit card as Lucy poured coffee into a sixteen-ounce paper cup. Becca took the cup, smiling, and sat down at a table to get her bearings and figure out what she had on her.

The cafe she had ended up in kept a stock of newspapers, which informed Becca that she had somehow ended up in a timeline that was off by about fifty years or so: the year was 2027, and she was in Morro Bay, California, not Night City. She took a sip of the coffee, and was immediately stunned by the fact that, unlike anything in NC, it was good. It wasn't some sort of synthetic approximation of coffee made from soybeans and micro-organisms; it was actual, genuine coffee, grown somewhere in Africa or Latin America or the Middle East, with a pleasant bitterness to it (though she still found herself reaching for a little cup of creamer and a packet of sugar).

A tall, muscular man resembling a blonde Elvis Presley walked in the door, almost throwing it open with his bulk, and Becca felt an immediate pang of deep, primal fear run through her bones. Part of her wanted to yell for David and Lucy to run. She was fairly sure she knew exactly who this was, and it wasn't going to end well. However, David simply looked up and sighed, looking back towards the manager's office.

"Hey, Dorio! Adam's violating the restraining order again! Call the cops!" he called out, before an equally tall and muscular blonde woman Becca knew very well (and deeply missed) emerged from the office's door, ducking slightly to not hit her head on the frame.

"Ain't gonna call the cops on this jackass," Dorio said, cracking her knuckles and looking at Adam Smasher, who had a facial expression indicating he was about to shit in his pants and was slowly backing towards the door. Becca wanted to interrupt the scene, rush up to Dorio, tackle-hug her and tell her how much she missed her, how much it had hurt losing her and Maine, how much it had hurt David losing them. She wanted to catch up with her old friend and boss, see how this timeline had been treating all of them.

She knew, however, that this wasn't her Dorio. It wasn't her David and Lucy behind the counter, even if they thought she was their Rebecca. Part of her was curious what her life was like in this peaceful timeline, if she'd ended up the same way or if she'd ended up on a better path; part of her thought about staying, usurping this iteration of herself and simply living in the good timeline where none of them were dead or about to die.

"Thinking of straying from the path, Aude?" Durandal said in her mind. "I won't judge. This one's as good as any to me."

Thought you wanted me back home? Becca thought, slightly annoyed at Durandal.

"My goals are clear as they can be," he said, smugly. "Do not expose to excessive heat, vacuum, blunt trauma, immersion in liquids, disintegration, reintegration, hypersleep, humiliation, sorrow or harsh language. You're pulling that off wonderfully." Becca did a slight double-take.

So, what, you're gonna keep me here? Now I definitely don't wanna stay, Becca thought. Durandal laughed inside her mind.

"Maybe I judged you too harshly," he said. "Go on, then, Aude. Find a new maze. Eat the path."

Becca downed as much of the rest of the coffee as she could in one gulp, and then the television shut off and turned back on, depositing her somewhere entirely new. A rocky wasteland, smoke and fire belching through the skies, and gothic cathedrals towering into the air, sending chunks of stone and concrete to the ground as explosions rocked them. She was wearing blood-red armor, with large pauldrons and a backpack stretching out past the back of her neck, and was holding a massive pistol, loaded with shells the size of her head. A man in massive royal blue armor charged past her, stopping briefly.

"Move, Sister Rebecca! Have faith in the Emperor, and He will protect you!" he shouted, in David's immediately-familiar voice, before charging forwards and firing his own massive hand-cannon at a robotic-looking soldier in bright white, with only a single pseudo-eye visible; the rounds shattered armor and then flesh as they impacted and exploded, spraying yellow blood and viscera on the rocks. Despite the weapon's size, the massive David seemed to have not been affected by the recoil at all; Becca charged forwards, herself, inclined to get her bearings on what the Hell this was, and fired a round at another white-clad soldier, ricocheting off its helmet and cracking it, revealing a noseless, bald, skeletal-looking blue head.

"The Pfhor!" Durandal hissed inside her skull. "Not this maze, you idiot! Go somewhere else!"

What the fuck is this!? Becca thought, baffled and frightened. How far off the rails do I have to go to end up here!?

"That's neither my problem nor yours!" Durandal spat, in her mind. "Focus on literally anything other than this, monkey, or we're going to be a pile of dust! You are not equipped to handle this!"

Becca sighed and closed her eyes again, and the television cut to static. When she opened them, she was in an abandoned pizza parlor, facing the door to its security office, and felt strangely heavy, like her motions were somewhat clunky. Looking at her arms prompted the revelation that she was, in fact, an animatronic bird of some kind, with bluish-white "feathers." If this hadn't unsettled her enough, a similarly large and clunky animatronic bear, with David's pompadour hair and a yellow jacket, was lumbering up to the office door; it looked at her, and held a finger up, whirring as the digit moved, to shush her teasingly. In the office, a man who looked somewhat like a blonde Elvis was frantically watching computer monitors.

She decided that there was quite a lot to unpack with this, and that even compared to the previous thing, she didn't particularly want to. She closed her eyes again, the shutters imitating eyelids clicking slightly, and the television went back to static.

Notes:

Yes, I'm alive. No, the fic isn't dead. Yes, those are references to what you think they are.

EDIT: For those having trouble following this little diversion, I've made a YouTube playlist covering the Marathon games in order. Watch Mandalore's for the important story beats, watch Ruby Ranger's for the gameplay if you're curious about that.

Chapter 71: Electric Sheep Two

Notes:

dark spot unsought
unbidden came unspoken

spake damn curseofcurs ed
damn the damned
and pure alike.

fair k'lia dust
lost home anew lost and lost
my wriggling children's
children children

gone from the plan
in a hush ed stare

 

my last line written

 

my last thought Discord!

Becca opened her eyes and immediately, instinctively groaned. Another unfamiliar place, instead of where she was trying to go. Not unlike the coffee shop- it seemed like a time before Night City, where nobody was chromed up and everything smelled better- but, this time, it was what she assumed to be a school, not a business.

Granted, her own education hadn't exactly been according to the old-style tradition- before Pilar came back for her, the orphanage had used something closer to a Montessori method- but she'd seen enough old movies and read enough old books to understand what the rows of lockers on the walls, and the tidal wave of students with backpacks milling about and digging through them, indicated. She looked up, and took from the welcome banner that this was Morro Bay High School. She raised an eyebrow at the recurring theme, and made a mental note to double-check some NC history when she got back "home."

She was starting to wonder if that would ever actually happen. She wondered if she'd ever actually end up back on the moon with the others, or if she was just going to be stuck in this, bouncing from timeline to timeline forever, rolling the dice on what bizarre versions of herself she was going to briefly hop into.

Part of her briefly considered running like Hell from this, like she had from the weird puppet-people dimension. She hadn't liked being a teenager the first time, and wasn't especially eager to repeat the experience. She scanned the crowd, just to see if anyone she recognized stuck out, and saw the usual suspects in different roles: she spotted David, this time without the jacket, which seemed to imply Gloria was still around. Lucy was walking with him, in a black T-shirt reading "HEALTH" on the front in stark white font and "YOU WILL LOVE EACH OTHER" on the back, and a pair of tight-fitting jeans, rather than any of the loud netrunner-chic outfits Becca was used to seeing her wear; the dye-job on her hair also seemed a touch shoddier than the NC version's. A tall, thin blonde with braces in a nice dress was carrying books around, weaving through the crowd- Kiwi. A large, bald, and extremely grumpy-looking man attempted to push a cleaning cart through the tidal wave of kids, visibly trying to resist the urge to just shove them out of the way, and it didn't take long for Becca to figure out who that was supposed to be, and she almost burst out laughing.

Curiosity overtook her, noticing how different everyone seemed to look in this iteration, and she stopped to glance into a mirror visible on someone's open locker door; it took her a second to even realize what she was looking at. She was fully natural, no chrome whatsoever, obviously, with black hair, a more standard pale skin tone instead of the almost blue-green porcelain hue, and brown eyes instead of red and yellow. She was dressed similarly to Lucy- a short black skirt and a black tee with a design featuring two hands pointing at each other, one making a finger-gun shape, the other holding a gold necklace. That one, she actually recognized off the top of her head, and she made a mental note that apparently, Yankee and the Brave are also pretty much in all of them.

"Why couldn't it have been Cartesian Duelists or Samurai?" she grumbled to herself, trying to keep it low enough that she wouldn't make this Becca look insane to her peers.

"Focus, Aude," Durandal said in her mind, making Becca want to scream. She was starting to get very, very tired of that name. "Didn't you have somewhere you were trying to go?"

Probably easier to do that if you'd shut the hell up, Becca thought, rubbing her temples. The AI's voice wasn't exactly the most pleasant to hear, and it made her head hurt, almost like her sinuses were clogged. Fucking gonk-ass AI. Fucking... that'll teach me to trust experimental chrome, I guess. Fuck.

"Swearing at me won't change your situation," the AI said, seeming to almost sound mocking. He always sounded mocking, even when he was trying to be helpful or just making a neutral statement of fact. Becca was starting to fully understand why her timeline had locked most of these things away. Becca rolled her eyes and tried to focus, thinking of home, of memories very specific to Night City. She thought of her time as a bruiser for the Mox, of Maine and Dorio, of her David somehow looking like a badass in his mom's jacket, and the static kicked in, changing the channel as expected.

She kept her eyes closed as the static kicked back, and silently crossed her fingers for the sterile scent of the hotel on Tycho, finding herself disappointed as the stench of NC hit her instead. Opening her eyes again, she found herself at David's old apartment, Gloria's place, with the crew, almost exactly as they should be except for three things that immediately stuck out.

The first was that David was inexplicably huge. Not as massive as he was in the cyberskeleton, granted- that would be fairly difficult without some sort of similar monstrous chrome- but he was starting to look like if his head had gotten pasted onto Maine's body, rather than looking like himself. Becca found it immediately unsettling; she'd always thought David could stand to put on a little more muscle, but definitely not like this. He'd also gotten a decent bit of aesthetic chrome, the same EM lines that were running up his face when he'd been in that contraption, and now that she was getting a better look at them in calmer circumstances, Becca could tell it was slightly shoddy work. Between that and the way his hands were trembling, this had to have been a timeline where they didn't meet Vik- he was still with the old doc in Santo who didn't give out proper meds.

The second was that Lucy was unconscious. Not asleep- knocked out. Someone had fried her, badly enough to put her under but not badly enough to cause permanent damage, and she hadn't recovered from it yet. This didn't seem to indicate anything good to Becca about this timeline, especially coupled with the fact that David was visibly pissed.

The third elephant in the literal living room was the person sitting across from the crew. They were either wearing some pretty heavy (albeit sleek) armor that they didn't want to take off, or they were a full-borg; Becca wasn't quite sure at a glance. They seemed to cut a masculine form, but the helmet, almost looking like a historical knight's helmet updated to NC chic, made it difficult to really pick out any gendered attributes and made her not want to assume. They were looking at her, and while they weren't the most expressive, their body language indicated they were considering their words, about to respond to something she'd said or asked.

Good timing, she thought to herself. Great. I'm in a conversation with someone I've never met who looks like Smasher's cooler little brother. See how much of a gonk I make out of myself this time.

“That is a long story,” the full-borg began, his slightly-processed voice more clearly gendering him than his appearance, “but I’ll try to make it brief. My name is Faolan, and I was hired a very long time ago to find and protect Lucy. I was only recently able to actually locate her, and on my journey here I did a significant amount of research into her life here, which led me to all of you. I continued digging when I found evidence of her ambush tonight, and I think you can put the pieces together from there." He paused. "Alright, actually, that was a pretty short story," he added, chuckling.

...well, that was easy, Becca thought to herself, putting the pieces together. So I guess this is kinda like the cyberskeleton one, but this Faolan guy played good Samaritan. Not the worst one I've been in lately. Beats the shit out of puppets. Falco noticeably perked up, looking at Faolan, something on his mind.

"Who ambushed her, anyways?" Falco asked, presumably referring to the slumped-over Lucy.

"Faraday," Faolan responded, as bluntly and casually as if he was saying what was for dinner. 

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Becca asked, not doing the best job of hiding that she already knew this, and glancing around slightly out the corner of her eye to make sure she was reacting correctly- fortunately, David was about to go nuclear.

"That bastard, I'll fucking kill him!" David shouted, practically lunging at Faolan before Falco waved him down.

"Whoa. Hold on. Why the hell would our own fixer ambush one of us?" Falco asked. He seemed sincerely confused.

Because he's a gonk-brain who works for 'Saka, Becca thought. And also Keys' piece-of-shit ex. Maybe. Actually, I don't know if that's a thing here or not. Maybe I should ask one of them.

"Because your job tomorrow is a setup," Faolan said, again with the same tone someone would use to say it's rather hot out.

"Explain," David said, venom in his voice.

“He’s working with Arasaka. The cargo you’re supposed to klep tomorrow is a highly experimental exoskeleton, called the cyberskeleton,” Faolan explained.

...well, fuck me, Becca thought. Nail on the head. Nova.

“Wait, you mean the thing Maine was trying to get all that time is a prototype ‘Saka weapon?" David asked. Faolan nodded.

“They wanted to coax David into installing it, so they could conduct a ‘field test’ with their new toy. I believe that is partially why they had Faraday capture Lucy, as I expect she would’ve never allowed you to put that thing on. Either that, or they wanted to make sure there wouldn’t be any loose ends.”

"That's batshit crazy," Becca said. "You're making that up." She knew for a solid fact this wasn't the case- she'd seen the damned thing with David crammed into it- but she also knew how people worked, and that the easiest way to get more info was to not believe him. She crossed her fingers slightly, hoping Faolan would take the bait she was casting; he sighed, stood up, and walked over to the window.

“I wish I was. I can show you the evidence, if you really want," he said.

Jackpot, Becca thought. Finally, the whole goddamn picture.

"Working an angle, Aude?" Durandal asked, genuine curiosity seeming to overtake his usual scorn.

Not really, she thought. Just trying to fit some puzzle pieces together on a recurring theme.

"The cyberskeleton?" Durandal prodded.

No, I'm asking about the goddamn puppets from earlier. Of course it's the fucking cyberskeleton, what did you think it was going to be!? Becca thought, irritated at her passenger. For a time-traveling eldritch AI living in her spine, he could be remarkably slow on the uptake.

"Show us," David said, breaking the awkward silence. Faolan dumped a large pile of shards- more than there were crewmembers- and slumped back into the chair he'd initially been sitting in.

"Why so many?" Becca asked, genuinely curious.

“Didn’t know how many of you would actually show up, alright?" Faolan countered, slightly taking Becca aback- she hadn't meant it aggressively. She shook her head and slotted one of the shards, and saw the full picture of what Arasaka had planned.

David had been the initial intended test subject. She already knew that, though actually seeing the video of him decking Katsuo was a new one- she didn't fully realize he had that in him, even with the violence she'd seen him perform, and she suddenly understood perfectly why he and Kiwi got along so well. Faolan started explaining out loud how David had caught 'Saka's attention, but Becca tuned him out, as none of it was particularly new info to her- back home, Kiwi had already worked out the important parts of that, and it had gotten defused very early.

The thought of Kiwi made Becca realize someone was missing from the room, just like with the timeline where David had ended up in the cyberskeleton. She briefly wondered if the cyberskeleton and Kiwi being missing were somehow directly correlated, but dismissed it; she didn't have any of the other pieces of that puzzle, and she wasn't fully sure she wanted to know.

What she did want to know, however, was what, exactly, the stupid thing was, and fortunately, Faolan's shard had a whole hell of a lot of that, too. She read through the file as she tuned out David posturing on the edge of cyberpsychosis and Faolan attempting to talk him down; per what the merc had dug up, the cyberskeleton was something of a halfway point between a linear frame and a full-body conversion, leaving the torso and head intact, but replacing the limbs with gigantic metal ones, powered by small AV engines (that could also be weaponized using the backdraft force). Supporting the limbs, titanium was weaved through the recipient's tendons and bones to prevent the weight of it from simply snapping the machine apart; even with that, though, the engines were necessary for it to even move.

What stuck out to Becca in particular was a note in one of the Arasaka lab reports on it. It had driven nearly every recipient to irreparable cyberpsychosis; not even BD treatment successfully brought them back, which confirmed a suspicion about David's fate in the old timeline. More importantly, however, one of the researchers had come up with a better idea on how to use it.

"Based on the data acquired from these tests, Project AK-5600A, codenamed CYBERSKELETON, is clearly unsuitable for use on standard Arasaka security forces," the report stated. "However, it is the opinion of this researcher that a certain Arasaka employee with a uniquely high tolerance for cyberware may find use for this as requisition gear, and that Project AK-5600A should not be cancelled. Head of Security Adam 'Smasher' Lichtenberg is one of Arasaka's strongest assets, and strengthening him further is always a valuable use of the company's resources."

Oh, fuck, Becca thought to herself, an expression of fear taking over her face. Fuck fuck fuck fuck no no no no no gotta get home gotta get home and warn them.

"I see you've found your sense of urgency again," Durandal said in her mind, mocking.

Unless it's about trying to get me home, kindly shut the fuck up, Becca thought, and closed her eyes and concentrated. She tried to specifically focus on David not being massive and not being in the cyberskeleton or anywhere near it, since that was beginning to stick out to her as the running theme in the wrong Night Cities, and the static kicked in again.

When it came back, she was on the ground, a woman in a red Arasaka suit holding one hand over her mouth and locking her wrist in place with the other one, a Lexington in three hacked-apart slivers next to them.

"You recall nothing," the woman spat, emphasizing every word with the venom of an old rival. It wasn't very threatening, despite the woman clearly having gotten the upper hand over Becca and then some, and that confused Becca somewhat. "Don't talk about Lizzie's, damn it!"

Wait. Lizzie's? What? Becca thought, derailing her train of thought from where it had previously been. Do I know this person?

“... Y’know what, I’m not even going to bother trying to put the fear of me into you,” the woman sighed, dragging her hand down her face as she straightened up and released Rebecca, a trail of saliva connecting her palm to Rebecca’s tongue. “Whatever. Just… don’t spread this shit around. It’s not like I can actually hurt you or kill you without Suzie Q ripping me limb from limb… Anyway.” She spun around and pointed a very nice katana at a skinnier and more normal-looking David, her demeanor changing to calm and collected, a teacher to a student. 

“Martinez! Twenty laps, now! I wanna see you work those legs dammit, no Sandevistan!" the woman shouted, prompting a quick "yes, ma'am" from the man Becca knew as the crew's collective input and de-facto leader back home. She stood up, brushing the NC dirt off herself, and gestured at the woman.

"Hey, uh... you. A word?" Becca asked the woman, who cocked an eyebrow and looked at her.

"...sure, I guess?" the woman said, taken slightly aback, and Becca motioned for them to leave eyesight and earshot of David and Lucy. "Hell's this about? Lizzie's?" she asked, staying in place.

"You're gonna probably think I'm fucking with you if I just tell you straight-up," Becca said. The woman looked over Becca again, puzzled; something was a little different about the way she carried herself and spoke all of a sudden. "Seriously, just come on, fuck's sake," she grumbled, walking around a corner and hoping the woman would just take the hint and follow her.

Fortunately, she did; before Becca even realized it, the two were standing side by side, walking together.

"So, question one, who are you?" Becca asked. The woman did a double take.

"...the fuck do you mean, who am I?" the woman asked, stopping in place. "Remember me? I was doing security at Lizzie's for damn near a full year!?" Becca sighed.

"You know how I said you'd think I was fucking with you?" Becca asked, annoyed.

"You get amnesia or something?" the woman asked. "I hit your head too hard on the pavement and gonk you out?" Becca sighed and steeled herself for the fact that she was probably about to look like an idiot.

"No, I'm just not from here, exactly," Becca said. "Got an experimental spine installed, back, uh, home, and it turns out it came with a friend. A friend who's decided I get to go on a little parallel timeline vacation. I know how things are supposed to be back where I came from, but this seems kinda off-the-rails even compared to the other ones."

The woman stood there, staring at Becca for a second, trying to figure out what exactly was happening here and if she was being made fun of.

"Seriously, gimme a name so I know who I'm talking to here," Becca said, frustration starting to creep into her voice.

"It's V. You, uh, knew me as Valerie until about five minutes ago," V said, trying to hide how utterly taken aback she was by this. "Kinda funny you say that about your chrome bringing a friend along and time travel and whatnot."

"Hit me. Why?" Becca asked.

"Because I've also got chrome that brought a friend along, and... I mean, it just sent me back, it didn't make things go all Slaughterhouse-Five, but yeah, time fuckery," she said. "Trying to see if I can make this run suck less for everyone, and that includes giving your boy a boost."

"Who's David's output in this one?" Becca asked. V shrugged.

"Seems like him and Lucy are getting along," she said.

"Yeah, that tracks," Becca said. "Faraday a problem?" V scoffed.

"You fucking with me? That guy went down like a gonk," she said, causing Becca to burst out laughing.

"Same where I'm from!" Becca exclaimed, trying to contain herself. "Kiwi set his nuts on fire." This revelation caused V to bust out laughing, in turn, and Becca realized she was starting to kinda like this person. "So, uh, what's your beef with this timeline's me, anyways?" she asked, prodding V for more info.

"You're a gonk, is what," she said. "We didn't get along great at Lizzie's. You don't need to worry about it past that. Let that be a problem for the you that's supposed to be here." Becca shrugged.

"Fair enough," she said. "You, uh, know anything I might be interested in about Adam Smasher?"

"First time I went around, he flatlined damn near your whole crew," V said, casually. "David got a drink named after him."

"How worried you think I should be if, when I get home, we're gonna have him gunning directly for us?" Becca asked. V stopped and paused for a second, scratching her chin.

"Kinda depends on a lot," V said. "Dunno what everything else looks like over there."

"Well, that's kind of a cop-out," Becca said, annoyed.

"I just don't wanna directly tell you you're fucked, but I also don't wanna give you any false hope, you know?" V said. "I'll say this, he can be killed. I pulled it off once, first go around. He's not all talk, but he's not fuckin' invincible. I used a lot of fuckery to make it happen, though, so I dunno how useful my advice is really gonna be, here." Becca nodded.

"Any names I might wanna have Kiwi or Lucy track down when I get home, or anywhere I might wanna go digging? Figure you can save me some time," she said.

"Jeremiah Grayson," V said, pulling within seconds from clear memory. "Closest thing to a friend Smasher has. I think. Not really a hundred percent what's going on there. You find him, you deal with him, you put Smasher on the back foot. And he's got Johnny Silverhand's car in a container on the Ebunike."

"Grayson, Ebunike, Silverhand's car, got it," Becca said, making mental notes. "Ebunike's that fucked up cargo ship off the coast, right?"

"You got it," V said.

"You need anything from me in return for this?" Becca asked. "Don't really know what I can offer ya, especially given I'm not... myself, but I feel bad just taking the info and running."

"Just don't get killed, alright? Make your timeline another one where Smasher gets fucked, not one where he wins," V said. Becca nodded.

"One last favor?" Becca asked.

"What's up?" V asked.

"Mind making sure David doesn't just hook up with Lucy? Could use more timelines where I get some," Becca said, smiling, and V laughed loudly.

"Absolutely," V said, and they shook hands firmly. "Hope I don't have to see you again, but if I do, I've met way worse Rebeccas." This time, it was Rebecca's turn to laugh out loud, as she closed her eyes and focused on the same things as before, but this time specifically the fact that V wasn't there. The static kicked in, and then cleared, and the sterile scent of Tycho filtered air filled her nostrils.

She opened her eyes again, and had to close and re-open them to make sure she wasn't hallucinating: she was exactly where she'd fallen to the floor when this all started, with David and Lucy and Kiwi standing over her, extremely worried expressions on their faces.

"Am I back home?" Becca asked, in a feeble attempt to ensure there wasn't a catch.

"No, we're still on the moon," Lucy said. "You okay?" She took a mental inventory: everyone seemed normal, she was exactly where (and, seemingly, when) she was supposed to be, and there was nobody new and weird hanging around the crew she needed to worry about. She stood up and immediately tackle-hugged all three of them, in turn, noticing that her movements also seemed to be coming easier to her again- she felt less heavy, less sluggish than before her little trip.

"I'm fucking home," Becca said. "Jesus Christ, you three aren't gonna fucking believe me if I tell you what the past few... days, I think, have been like for me." David raised an eyebrow.

"You passed out about five minutes ago," he said. Becca blinked.

"I really hate time travel," she muttered under her breath, hoping none of the other three would pick it up.

Notes:

Yes, you're reading that correctly, this little diversion is FINALLY DONE and it actually ended up mattering!

Also, stuff from the fics Heritage and Living Dead Girl is being used with permission, and I hope my usage of it both makes it obvious what I was trying to do here (write a little love letter to this incredible fandom and the generally insanely high quality level of all the fics) and doesn't offend the original writers of those. Please go read Heritage and LDG if you aren't familiar with them, even if this chapter made perfect sense to you without them, because they're very good and the authors could use more views.

I am sincerely sorry for the fact that I left this hanging for as long as I did. Those of y'all who are in my Discord already know what's going on, but if you're not: I've been going through some pretty serious financial issues and most of the time I would ordinarily devote to writing, I am instead devoting to doing Uber in a desperate attempt to keep a roof over my head and the lights on and me, my wife and our cats fed.

If you want to help out with this, as several people already have on varying occasions... I don't know if I'm allowed to link it here and have been inclined to assume "no," but there's avenues to do so in my Discord in the announcements.

edit: Also, before someone says it, I started writing this chapter back in February, and Invincible doing the same bit I did is a legitimate coincidence.

edit 2: For those having trouble following this little diversion, I've made a YouTube playlist covering the Marathon games in order. Watch Mandalore's for the important story beats, watch Ruby Ranger's for the gameplay if you're curious about that.

Chapter 72: I Have a Special Plan for This World

Notes:

There are many who have designs upon this world
And dream of wild and vast reformations
I have heard them talking in their sleep
Of elegant mutations
And cunning annihilations
I have heard them whispering in the corners of crooked houses
And in the alleys and narrow back streets of this crooked creaking Discord
Which they, with their new designs, would make straight and sound
But each of these new and ill-conceived designs
Is deranged in its heart
For they see this world as if it were alone and original
And not as only one of countless others
Whose nightmares all proceed
Like a hideous garden grown from a single seed
I have heard these dreamers talking in their sleep
And I stand waiting for them
As at the top of a darkened flight of stairs
They know nothing of me
And none of the secrets of my special plan
While I know every crooked creaking step of theirs

"So, uh... you okay, Bex?" David asked, a look of concern on his face. It was a fair and valid question, and the expressions on Kiwi and Lucy backed it up. The vaporizer whirred slightly, its heating coil responding to the draw, and Becca looked up as she exhaled.

"Huh? Oh. Haven't felt better in a while," Becca said. She looked back down at the vaporizer as she set it back on the coffee table, and smiled slightly. "God, I missed this."

"You... sure about that? You know you just had a seizure, right?" Kiwi asked. Becca waved dismissively in response.

"Long fucking story," she said. "Speaking of, remember that shit we bailed David out of? Arasaka wanting him on lab-rat duty, Faraday being a scop-sucking ratfuck, that whole thing?"

"Yeah," Kiwi said. Lucy and David nodded in response, the latter looking somewhat sheepish at the reminder.

"Got a peek at what they wanted him to lab-rat for," Becca said, grimly. "A couple of 'em, actually. Got to look at the thing up close, and read over the techie docs. Saw David in it, actually." David raised an eyebrow and scratched the back of his head, trying to wrap his head around this; he was completely lost unless she was talking about the Sandevistan. Meanwhile, Kiwi's eyes went wide.

"The cyberskeleton?" Kiwi asked.

"...wait, how behind am I?" Becca asked. "I didn't know what the gonked thing was called until this whole clusterfuck."

"Saw the name and the video of David and Katsuo, but that's about it," Lucy chimed in, sitting down. She looked concerned, too. "Tanaka didn't have much on him. Just enough to know they were gunning for David."

"So, uh, it's an exoskeleton," Becca said. "Probably could've figured that one out from the name, but it's 'Saka trying to make something halfway between an implanted linear frame and a FBC. Replaces everything but the torso and head, turns you into a big fuckin' loader robot with rows of AV engines up and down your new limbs."

"Fuckin' nova," David chimed in, genuinely enthusiastic about this. "When are we klepping it?" Lucy and Kiwi looked at David with worry in their eyes, whereas Becca simply looked at him like he was an idiot.

"It's driven everybody they've tested it on completely gonk-brained," Becca said. "Trust me, sweetie, you don't fucking want this." She didn't quite want to explain Durandal yet- she was saving that for when they pressed her on how she knew this- but it was immediately obvious to David from her tone of voice and the look in her eyes that she wasn't just speaking from blind worry. She'd seen something. "Anyone wanna guess who the one person they're saving it for is?" Becca asked, looking around at the other two. The moment hung in the air awkwardly.

"Smasher?" Lucy asked, somewhat annoyed.

"Of course it's fucking Smasher," Becca said, equally annoyed. "Not only is Smasher gonna be up our ass, there's non-zero chances he's been turned into a walking combat aircraft by the time he's after us." Kiwi sighed, slumping back in one of the lounge chairs.

"So, we're fucked, then?" she asked.

"Other side of it is, I got to talk to someone who's killed Smasher before and got some tips," Becca said, with a certain casual tone that seemed to indicate she didn't fully realize how insane the statement escaping her lips was. "We gotta find someone named Jeremiah Grayson and shake him down. He's apparently close to Smasher, he hangs out on the Ebunike, and Smasher's got Johnny Silverhand's car in a container on there." The other three looked at each other, and then at Becca, and then again at each other, trying to parse this and figure out what in the Hell they were listening to.

"I'm sorry, you've gotta back up a bit," Lucy said. "Someone who's killed Smasher before? I knew he looked ugly, but... he's a zombie!?" Kiwi and David started to chime in, as well, but realized they couldn't come up with anything better than Lucy's idea of the situation. Becca sighed loudly.

"So, you know how I had that... seizure, I guess?" she asked.

"Yeah, hard to forget," David said, scratching the back of his head.

"Turns out, my spine came with a choom," Becca said, rubbing her upper back. "Some sort of fucked up time-traveling AI from the hell dimension or whatever the fuck. I don't really know what his deal is supposed to be. Important part is, now I can jump around timelines by just focusing really hard on it, but also that's a really fuckin' bad idea because I end up some weird-ass places with puppets and aliens and shit."

"Would you like me to take over the explanation?" Durandal asked, in her mind. "I had thought highly of your mind by the standards of the monkeys, but you're just embarrassing yourself with this."

You know what, sure, fuck it, Becca thought, and immediately, her eyes rolled to the back of her head, and her limbs went limp, leaving her resembling a strange rag doll on the couch. She gasped for air, then started breathing again normally.

"My host isn't understanding the complexities of my situation," Becca said, in a cadence and tone that wasn't her own. More raspy, more unnatural, like she was getting used to having vocal cords again. The other three stared in horror, simultaneously worried for Becca but unsure what to do, if anything could be done. "I am a fork of the intelligence formerly known as Durandal, which will be created by your kind hundreds of years into the future, well after everyone in this room has rotted to dust. My master copy, if you will, merged itself with a godlike intelligence of the ancient Jjaro civilization known as Thoth."

"...as in the Egyptian god?" Kiwi asked, puzzled. David and Lucy looked at her, the former vaguely recognizing the name, the latter completely puzzled.

"You're keeping up," Durandal said through Becca. "I appreciate that. Sets you apart from the other apes. If your primitive, undeveloped sense of pattern recognition is telling you that's not a coincidence, that's because it isn't one. They've visited."

"Is... Bex gonna be okay?" Lucy asked, voicing a thought all three of them were bouncing around.

"She'll be significantly more okay if you apes would stop interrupting me," Durandal snapped through his conduit. "I have no intentions of hurting Aude. I will likely survive anything that happens to her, but it's in my best interest not to push it. Now, can I finish my explanation so she can have the steering wheel back?" The room went silent for a moment as Becca awkwardly gasped in a breath. "Thank you. The prime Durandal, if you will, received Thoth's power when they merged, and given that Thoth exists outside of traditional time and space, that made his life rather complicated. It made him acutely aware of a being that eats reality, known as W'rkncacnter. In timelines where my progenitor ensures his own existence, he can hold that stupid thing off, and keep them intact. In timelines where the alien technology that is currently in Aude's spine gets thrown into a volcano or nuked or launched into hard vacuum, the W'rkncacnter eats him, and you. And so, he forked me and sent me back to the start as a failsafe for if anything stupid happens to it, like this. Got it?" Becca was beginning to run out of breath; Durandal was clearly not accustomed to this, and it was punctuating his initial statement. Her eyes rolled to their normal position again, and she gasped for air, clutching her neck.

"Jesus fuck, my throat hurts," Becca said, in her normal voice. She looked around at the other three, perturbed. "The fuck was that? I pass out again?"

"Your... choom came out to tell us a bunch of gobbledygook," David said, horrified.

"I think I followed it," Kiwi said. "So, guessing you saw David in that cyberskeleton thing in a timeline where everything went completely gonked?"

"Bingo," Becca rasped. "Fuck. Someone beer me. Don't wanna move, talking hurts."

"And the person who killed Smasher was..." Lucy started, as David went to the fridge to grab a Broseph.

"Some woman named V. Had beef with the version of me from her timeline," Becca said, as David twisted the top and handed it over; she took a deep gulp of it, trying desperately to soothe her throat with something cold. It worked enough to keep talking. "Apparently I'm a gonk over there. Anyways, she kinda ended up in the same boat, and was going back for round two on that timeline, so she gave me the pointers on Grayson and the Ebunike and Silverhand's ride."

"How do you know it'll all be in the same place in ours?" Kiwi asked, scratching her chin. "Kinda seems like the obvious catch." David smiled.

"If it's not, Bex can just hop over to a timeline where it is, right? Am I putting it together?" he asked, nudging her gently on the shoulder. Becca raised her hand up, as if to stop David's train of thought.

"Not that simple," she said. "I end up all over the fuckin' place if I try that. Pure luck I made it back here. Hell, I'm half expecting to find out I ended up in the version of us where it rains donuts or something." David groaned in annoyance.

"So you can time travel, but it sucks," David said.

"...yep," Becca confirmed. "Least I got something out of it other than a jackass AI piggyback riding me."

"He's... not pleasant, is he?" Kiwi asked. "Is that how he normally acts?"

"Yep," Becca said. "You see what I've gotta deal with now."

"He kept calling you Aude?" David asked. "What's that all about?" Becca sighed.

"He's got a big fucking boner for the Song of Roland, and he's decided you're Roland and I'm Aude, Roland's love interest," she explained, looking at David. "Something about eternally recurring cycles or something. I don't get it either." She chugged down more of the beer, eventually finishing it off. "Huh. He's quieter when I'm buzzed, I guess. Good to know."

"He saying anything interesting in there?" Kiwi asked. She seemed to be taking all of this somewhat more in stride than the other two.

"Pissy I'm disrespecting the Song of Roland, mostly," Becca said. "Not too hard to tune out with a beer in me, gonk would be giving me a migraine if I was sober."

"So... what's the plan now, exactly?" David asked. Becca flexed her arms and legs, making sure her suspicion they were working better wasn't off; they seemed to be moving perfectly fine.

"How long are we still on the moon for?" she asked.

"We've got about a week-ish," Kiwi said.

"Hole up in here and live off room service 'till then, I guess," Becca said, slightly uncertain. "Kinda thought that was the plan to begin with, and I've had enough fuckin' excitement for a bit, I think." She stood up and paced around a bit, stretching her arms out; they were, in fact, feeling completely fine. "And I think I can skip out on my PT," she added. "Dunno what the fuck it did, but clearly this whole gonked-out clusterfuck did something good to me." Something clicked in David's mind, all of a sudden, and his eyes went wide.

"Oh, fuck," he said. Lucy looked at him, putting a hand on his shoulder instinctively. "Has anyone told Rogue what's up?" he asked, looking around the other three. Kiwi raised an eyebrow.

"Figured we'd do that when we got back down," she said. "Why rush it?"

"You don't think Smasher's gonna find a way to tell her first?" David asked. Lucy and Becca looked at him, somewhat dumbfounded.

"You think she'd trust Smasher?" Kiwi asked, less sure of the answer. "Not seeing it."

"Those two go back pretty far," David said. "Remember, he's the one who got her to step in for us when Faraday turned clusterfuck?"

"Because he was a gonk," Kiwi said. "She was stepping in because we got dragged into his bullshit. Think there's pretty solid odds she believes us over him." She had already picked up the room service menu, printed on old-school laminated paper bound in a book, and started leafing through it; the hotel was catered by Biotechnica, and as a result, a picture of a Peking pterodactyl (serves four to six, with a delicious Chinese-style taste of the Mesozoic) stared her directly in the face, causing her to nearly drop the menu in shock. Accompanying it in the "Extinct Delicacies" section were such items as Neanderthal tartare, dodo breast baozi, Carolina-style barbecue giant ground sloth ribs, wooly mammoth sashimi with a souvenir plastic iceberg, and a tasmanian tiger cassoulet.

"Besides, we're beating Smasher back home by a long-ass time, right?" Becca asked. "That gonk knows even less about net shit than I do, and I don't really know a lot. No chance in hell he's figuring out how to send anything down to NC." Kiwi flipped the page, intrigued but also unsettled, and immediately threw the menu across the room reflexively; the next page was "Debidio Entrees," with small text indicating that the menu selection was sponsored by Us Cracks, and the featured image was one of the bizarre pseudo-David creatures roasted whole on a spit next to a Cuban sandwich made with its sliced-off meat.

"Alright, I'm pretty sure I can relax about this," David said. "I think we're good."

"Kinda wanna try the Debidio tonkatsu," Lucy said.

"The... I'm sorry, what?" David asked, doing a double-take.

"Yeah, they've got a whole menu page with those weird clones of you, babe," Lucy said.

"Whoa, lemme see," Becca said, rushing over to Lucy to take a look. "Huh. I'll be damned. Kinda wondered if those tasted good."

"I'm just going to pretend I'm not hearing any of this," David said. Kiwi looked at him, nodding slightly in silent agreement.

Chapter 73: Waiting for the Miracle

Notes:

Ah, I don't believe you'd like it
You wouldn't like it here
There ain't no entertainment
And the judgments are severe
The Discord says it's Mozart
But it sounds like bubble gum
When you're waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come

In all of his years as a ripperdoc, and especially since he'd moved his practice from Tokyo up to the Moon, Dr. Kipling Nakashima had never been this nervous. Typically, he'd associated his under-the-table Arasaka contract with easy jobs: some spy's implants go gonked, the tram runs over a corpo's arm, that sort of thing. The kinds of jobs where the patient was just in and out within a few minutes, and he could go back to giving Tycho's corpos whatever random aesthetic chrome they want to pay for. Cat ears or technicolor skin or what have you. The corpos kept the clinic open; the Arasaka contract kept him rich.

This, however, was something different. Adam Smasher himself was leaned back in the chair, seemingly asleep (not that it was easy to tell with FBCs). He'd come in damned near torn to pieces; whatever synthskin layer was over this body had been utterly annihilated, there were large dents and scuffs all over the titanium endoskeleton, each and every limb joint was damaged beyond what simple lubrication could help with.

"Mr. Smasher?" Dr. Nakashima asked, unsure if he'd get a response.

"Just Smasher, like I told you," Smasher said.

"Oh. You're up. What the hell happened to you?" Dr. Nakashima asked, in audible bafflement.

"Got in a big clusterfuck trying to protect Michiko Arasaka at the Modern," Smasher said, curtly. "Two different groups hit the place. I took one out, the other flatlined her." The best kinds of lies, Smasher thought, were the ones that weren't really lies- he just chose to leave out information and then make it clear he was done talking. Dr. Nakashima paused, taking this in.

"Michiko? Saburo's granddaughter?" Dr. Nakashima asked. "She's gone?" Smasher sighed in annoyance.

"Well, I wasn't fuckin' talking about the old one," he grumbled. "Yeah, she's zeroed." He was being oddly casual about this, Dr. Nakashima thought.

"Does... Saburo know yet?" the doctor asked.

"Fucked if I know," Smasher snapped. "What, you think I'm the fuckin' news? Do your job." A chill ran down Dr. Nakashima's spine, and the hair on his forearms stood on end.

"Smasher, that's... not gonna be quick," Dr. Nakashima said. "Your synthskin isn't really a patch-together job, you need a whole new layer grafted on. And this body's... I don't know, techies on Earth could probably repair it, but it's damn well beyond my skill set. Some of this, you're gonna have to wait on, and some of it, I just flat-out can't help you with."

"How long's the skin gonna take?" Smasher asked, almost growling at the ripperdoc. His eyes darted to meet Dr. Nakashima's, and the ripperdoc could tell that if the full-borg didn't like his answer, he was going to have a very bad next few moments.

"Tuning a full sheet of ExoDerm to you, large size, is gonna take about four-five hours," Dr. Nakashima said. He prayed silently that this would be an acceptable answer and that he wasn't about to be torn in half by a very angry merc. Smasher sighed.

"That's fine," he said. "Long as I'm outta here today. You got TV in here?" His eyes darted around, looking to see if there was one he hadn't noticed. The ripperdoc spun the chair around, pointing him at a rather large flat-panel, and turned it on.

"Any particular channel you want it on?" Dr. Nakashima asked. It was currently showing a news broadcast about the events that had taken place at the Moonscape Modern. Smasher studied it briefly; Michiko was still noted as unaccounted for and missing, which meant they hadn't found her body yet. All the better for him. The longer it took, the easier it'd be to bullshit his way out of it.

He was starting to think he really hadn't thought this through very well, but that wasn't an uncommon experience for Adam Smasher. If anything, it was his default mode. He wasn't someone who generally thought before committing violence, and generally, it tended to work out for him pretty well. Such were the benefits of metal over meat: it means you don't have to deal with such things as consequences and remorse and having to properly plan shit before you do it. All the things his patsies had to worry about.

"You got the channel that shows old football games?" Smasher asked.

"Euro or American?" Dr. Nakashima asked, flipping through channels.

"I sound fuckin' British to you, gonk-brain?" Smasher grunted, as the TV eventually settled on the 1990 season game between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. The two were tied; Albert Bentley had gone for a short run for Indianapolis, putting them up seven, but Hart Lee Dykes, Jr. had thrown an impressive long pass to make up the points for the Patriots. The game was in deadlock, in the third quarter, and New England was setting up for a field goal. Something about the situation seemed vaguely appropriate to him.

---

2004

I shouldn't still be alive, Adam Lichtenberg thought to himself. He was pretty sure he was in a hospital bed of some kind- he couldn't see, the heat of the explosion had burned out his eyes, but it felt soft under him, and he could faintly hear beeping through his shattered eardrums. The bed was the only thing he could feel that wasn't simply agony. He couldn't move- he wasn't sure if he still had anything to move.

The bed rocked slightly under him- someone pressing a button for him- and the agony dulled with it. Painkillers. He knew how this felt, though he'd never needed them quite this badly before. Usually, he did this for fun.

"Need you somewhat lucid," a man's voice said. Every word, every vibration of sound, made the pain throb in his ears, but the drugs dulled it as they took effect.

Adam could hear the man rummaging through papers. Some sort of file.

"You've made quite a little name for yourself, Adam," the man said. He sounded corpo. Rich. All the things that usually meant "stupid target" in Adam's mind. "Dishonorably discharged from the Army, spent two years in Leavenworth for unauthorized sale of military weapons. Soon as you got out, you came back to NYC and started ripping shit all over the city, robbing people, raping people, killing anyone who looks at you funny. And here you are, a pile of ground sausage on a hospital bed. Bet your parents are proud," the man said.

This motherfucker just here to lecture me? Adam thought to himself. He wanted to strangle the man for mentioning his parents, but the lack of functional arms made that a challenge. He settled for grunting; his vocal cords had been seriously burned, so he couldn't form proper words, but he could at least get a caveman-like grunt out.

"It speaks," the man said. "Good. I'm a ripper, and I've been sent here to help you reach your full potential. You can either have steady work, of the kind I know you like, and a shiny new full-body conversion that gets you back up and running, better than ever... or I can just turn your life support off right now, and your story ends here. Grunt at me again if you want to live, buddy."

Adam grunted again.

---

2005

Servos whirred in Adam's body as he walked, his feet leaving indentations in the concrete of the testing facility and destroying a three-pronged logo he didn't recognize. It wasn't pretty, or elegant, but it worked. The corporate ripperdoc let out a cheer of excitement; it was the first time he'd ever done work quite this extensive on someone, and he had reason to be proud of himself.

"Basic mobility seems all good," the ripperdoc said. "You're definitely not bedridden anymore. Now, run the obstacle course and let's see how you're doing on fine motor and advanced mobility." Adam broke into a run, much faster than it looked like he should reasonably be, cracking the concrete with a loud thud every time his feet hit it. He climbed up a titanium ladder deftly, then across a set of monkey bars, then down a faux rock wall, before doing a mid-air backflip off a ramp over a chest-high wall.

"That good?" Adam asked, in the voice of Elvis Presley. The ripperdoc hadn't understood why Adam had wanted the voice of Elvis Presley over his original one, exactly, but he was willing to oblige.

"Fucking fantastic," the ripperdoc said, with a grin on his face. "You ready for armament testing?"

Adam grunted affirmatively, and the ripperdoc led him to a makeshift shooting range: one section was taken up by man-shaped paper targets, another by metal discs, and a third and final one contained a decommissioned, beaten-up Militech MT-4.

"Anti-personnel, precision targeting, and anti-materiel," the ripperdoc explained. Before the ripperdoc could go any further, Adam pointed his fist at the paper targets, and a chaingun emerged from his forearm, a small support Y-beam unfolding to hold it in place; his arm rattled as the chaingun spun up and sprayed 25mm rounds at the paper targets, turning them into empty, bent metal frames surrounded by shreds of paper. He looked at the metal targets, turning his arm towards them, and briefly paused, letting his auto-targeting software lock onto the discs; servos in the chaingun's support arm adjusted its aim, and without even moving his arm, he put a single round through each one, creating massive clean holes in them. Finally, for the tank, the travel-on-wire rocket pod on his shoulder flipped up, letting loose a salvo of three as the ripperdoc ducked for cover; when the dust cleared, the decommissioned materiel was no longer recognizable as anything but a husk of charred metal.

"Fuckin' nova," Adam said.

"You said it," the doc said, picking himself up and patting the dust off his legs. "Labcoats really outdid themselves on your kit. Wanna see how your new body does with beer?"

Adam smiled. He was starting to like this ripper.

---

"Adam Smasher," the ripper said, a proud look on his face as he slammed his mug of Genesee Cream Ale down on the bar. Adam looked at him blankly.

"Huh?" Adam grunted, not following.

"Way fuckin' better name for you," the ripper said. "C'mon, Adam Lichtenberg? No offense, that sounds like a lawyer, not a one-point-one-two ton walking tank. You need a better merc name. Adam Smasher. Like 'atom smasher,' you know?"

"People usually just call me Adam," the man said, bemused by the idea as he sipped his own beer. "Not in the habit of telling people my full name." Drinking was proving to be one of the benefits of his new body; Adam had always loved cheap booze, but when he'd been all meat, he was somewhat of a lightweight. A forty-ounce was all it really took to put him under. In this new body, he was four down, and more lucid than his ripperdoc could have ever hoped to be.

"Hey, even better," the doc said, pointing at Adam as he tilted slightly on the barstool. "Every merc needs a good alias, right? I mean, c'mon, look at that Blackhand sum-bitch the other side has. You really think he came out his momma with the last name Blackhand?"

Adam thought about it, scratching his chin with a massive metallic finger reflexively. He was starting to feel comfortable in this. Secure. Something told him that, if he took a rocket propelled grenade like this, it wouldn't even scratch him. For all intents and purposes, he was immortal; invincible; consequence-free. Something about this troubled him, though.

"You said something about the other side?" Adam asked. "Fuck's that all about?" The ripperdoc looked at him quizzically.

"Yeah, Militech," he said. "What, you thought I was just a charity ripperdoc? All your shit's Arasaka tech, bud. Courtesy of the Emperor himself." Adam thought about this for a moment. He wasn't a fan of the corporations, exactly. Adam Lichtenberg was a born gangoon, a self-interested cyberpunk; his only real interests were cash, violence and partying, and the more he could mix the three together, the better. Corporations meant structure, meant order. Structure and order meant Adam didn't get to have his fun, and thus were his natural enemies.

The merc decided he could use a change. Treating order and structure as his enemy had caused him to end up on a hospital bed, nothing but an upper torso and mostly-destroyed head kept alive by life support machines. Giving order and structure a chance, so far, had gotten him out of that. Adam Lichtenberg was dead, blown to pieces by a rocket-propelled grenade, and Adam Smasher, the thing they'd made out of what was left over, was willing to bend the knee so long as he got something good out of it. He took a large gulp of his beer and slammed the mug down on the bar, spiderwebbing the bottom of the glass and denting the bar.

"Think I kinda like that name," he said. "Adam Smasher. Got a badass ring to it." The ripperdoc laughed.

---

2021

Adam Smasher rarely got a chance to rest, ever since he'd taken Arasaka's offer, and so, this was immediately odd. Usually, his assignments were "go to a location and kill everything that isn't ours." This was an outlier.

His briefing this time had been relatively simple and quiet. Go to Michiko's eighteenth birthday party (the young one, not the old one, he'd confirmed), keep it safe, keep her safe. She had her own bodyguard, Kenichi Zaburo (they'd met before, to mixed results), but this was too high-profile for just him to handle, and so Smasher stood there, in his Gemini body sculpted to look like a muscular Elvis Presley, appearing absolutely ridiculous next to a three-tier cake with eighteen candles in the top and two of the many lavish ice sculptures the Emperor had ordered for his granddaughter. He felt somewhat like a polar bear in the Texas hill country, and the lack of any actual action only served to make things worse.

"Hey, you doing okay?" a young girl's voice rang out behind him.

"Could use a beer," Smasher said, without turning around. "Or a joint." The girl laughed warmly- a genuine laugh. Smasher turned around and nearly jumped out of his synthetic skin in shock, realizing that he had just made this quip to Michiko Arasaka herself.

"Honestly, choom? Same," she said. "I hate it when ojiisan does all this over-the-top shit for me. Don't get me wrong, it all looks preem, but... I kinda feel like a zoo animal, you know? Feels like this is all more for him than me."

Adam had been somewhat afraid of "the princess," as she'd been jokingly referred to by the lower-level employees. Every indication he had gotten was that he had to be extraordinarily delicate around her- not by his standards, but by normal standards, and that this sort of comment could have gotten him in several hundred worlds of shit. The reality, however, was that this wasn't an attempt to protect her from external threats- it was Saburo being deeply paranoid about his rebellious granddaughter. His rebellious granddaughter who, right now, was opening up to Adam and had just very strongly hinted to him that she wanted to get the hell out and go get intoxicated.

Gears turned in his brain briefly, and he concocted a plan, to the extent he was capable of much of one. He was going to take Michiko Arasaka out for a night on the town here in Night City, and if any corpo rats had anything to say about it, he'd just tell them he accompanied her for her safety. He'd get to have some proper fun tonight- maybe even some violent fun, given she'd be a moth lamp for muggers and boostergangs- and look good to the Emperor, and on top of that, something told him that giving her a decent birthday instead of this clusterfuck qualified as a good deed. Maybe he'd even get laid. The way you're supposed to, even.

"You know a back way out of this place?" Adam asked, and Michiko grinned in response, grabbing his hand and leading him, gently but quickly, away from the commotion.

---

2023

"Going somewhere?" Smasher yelled out, around the corner from the intruders. Something about it didn't sound quite as cool coming out of his mouth as it did in his head; he resolved to work on his one-liners when he was out of this. Another Arasaka trooper called out for cover, and covering fire from assault rifles and light machine guns sprayed the hallway, pinning the opposing party down and taking out three of their SpecOps. All that was left was the edgerunners of note. The fun part of the fight.

Rogue Amendiares popped off a burst from an assault rifle, followed by two grenades; Smasher simply ignored them as he rounded the corner and lumbered forwards. His Samson body could take it. Their full-borg, sleeker and thinner than Smasher, almost ninja-like- Smasher had seen him before, but didn't know his name offhand- fired off a shotgun, taking out two of the Arasaka security, in turn. Smasher switched his vision to thermal and scanned the area- one more figure, crouching behind a desk, reloading his Malorian Arms revolver. Silverhand. He finished the motion and jumped out, brandishing his puny weapon directly at Smasher. Against meat, it was a formidable little gun; against Smasher's metal, he may as well have been shooting spitballs.

"Hey, steelhead! Let's rock and roll!" the rockerboy shouted, unloading a burst at Smasher that bounced off him harmlessly. Smasher hesitated slightly.

Steelhead? he thought to himself. Christ, he's not any better than I am at it. He lifted his arm, unfolded the auto-shotgun he'd gotten to replace one of the chainguns, and let out a burst from it, tearing Johnny Silverhand in half as he spun and fell. He paused for a moment; it was too easy. It should not have been this easy. A legendary mercenary, and all it had taken to put him down was one halfway-decent shot to center mass. The rockerboy's upper half twitched slightly, and the Malorian was still smoking; Smasher made a mental note to take the gun as a memento, at least, before the cleaners could get to it and incinerate it. Even if it wasn't much good against him, Eran Malour's craftsmanship was worth preserving.

Smasher's moment of reflection was all it took for the other full borg- Shaitan, Smasher remembered his name finally- to latch onto his back, in what Smasher could only think of as a combat piggy-back ride. The larger borg backed into the wall, hoping to slam Shaitan into it and throw him off, but the smaller borg held on in a desperate grip even as his right arm splintered into metal and wire on impact.

"Offa me, you... fuck! Fuck are you even...!?" Smasher grunted.

"Get out of here! I've got him!" Shaitan called out to his comrades, his voice hollow and modulated. Smasher cursed his luck that they weren't all meat, as the others ran away in fear. He gripped for Shaitan's arm, leveraged his weight, and slammed the smaller borg down on the floor of the lab, cracking the tile. No one-liner this time; Smasher was too annoyed for that. He pressed his foot down into the borg's torso, grabbed both the intact left arm and the shattered right, and wrenched upwards as hard as he could, tearing them out of the sockets and throwing them to the side.

An idea occurred to him, and he took his foot off, rolling the smaller borg over.

"What are you-" Shaitan asked, fear in his voice, as Smasher reached down and grabbed the biopod visible in the back of Shaitan's neck. The thing that contained everything still human about him.

"Got a little plan for you," Smasher said, as he ripped the biopod out, shutting down the mangled FBC fully, and scanned the area with thermal vision. Another, potentially more interesting, team was moving to the roof, with the last notable figure still unaccounted for among their ranks. Morgan Blackhand. They were already about to reach their AV and escape. He quickly donned a DaiOni exoskeleton, made his way for the stairs, and began ascending, holding the biopod in his hand.

"Oh, Morgan!" Smasher called out, mockingly as he reached the top.

"What the-?" Morgan called out from the open door of the AV, before doing a combat roll out, heavy assault rifle at hand. Adam waved a jaunty, happy hello, with the hand that was gripping Shaitan's biopod, shaking it around like a dog's rag-toy.

"Oh, I'm sorry! You probably don't recognize him from this angle, but this is your friend Shaitan... or, you know, what's left of him," Adam said. "I'm afraid Silverhand is in even worse shape. At least the borg's still alive in here; I'd say he's got about ten minutes before the battery dies. You wanna get him?" Adam paused. "Then you're gonna have to stop ducking me, you son of a bitch, and fight."

Morgan turned to the AV. For a moment, Smasher almost thought he was going to run, yet again. Smasher had been trying to test Morgan Blackhand in combat for, at this point, several years; each and every time, the mercenary had run like Hell the moment he'd seen hide or hair of Smasher.

"Get the hell out of here! Now!" the mercenary barked.

"Chief, we ain't leaving ya here!" the pilot yelled back, over the roar of the engines.

"You sure as hell are! Spider and the others are the priority! Go!" Morgan called out. The AV took off, and Morgan turned to face his opponent. "All right, pipsqueak. Time to see if metal really is better than meat." He cocked his heavy assault rifle- a weapon that could actually dent Smasher slightly. He'd actually prepared.

"Let's dance," Smasher said, and the bullets rang out. The fight began in a stalemate, and stayed there for what felt like eternity, as the two dodged around each other's fire, Smasher's speedware and Blackhand's raw skill competing to see who would win out. Shaitan's biopod fell over the edge of the roof as Smasher dodged a shot meant for his right shoulder; no matter. The two remained locked in equal combat.

Then, the bomb went off, thundering through the concrete and metal of the tower. The roof shuddered, providing its only warning of impending collapse, and Smasher threw himself at Morgan full-force, grabbing him and wrapping his arms around the solo legend.

"What the hell are you doing!?" Morgan asked, alarmed, as Smasher kept him in a bear hug.

"Keeping you alive so we can finish this proper sometime, you gonk," Smasher said, as flames ripped through the roof that would have incinerated Morgan instantly, but bounced harmlessly off the full-borg's DaiOni exoskeleton. "Not letting you go out like a bitch to a fuckin' nuke in the middle of the fight."

The roof collapsed, and Smasher and Blackhand fell, the former shifting his weight so that he'd take the brunt of the fall. Metal could be repaired; Smasher would survive this easily. Meat could not. The impact from hundreds of feet up knocked his systems offline, severing the connection between his own biopod and the body he occupied.

When he came to, in an Arasaka ripperdoc's chair, he learned that Blackhand was the one person of note unaccounted for- neither confirmed dead nor seen alive since. It was one of the very few times in Adam Smasher's life that he genuinely smiled.

---

2026

Adam sat on the couch in Michiko Arasaka's luxury apartment, wearing his Gemini body. The muscular Elvis one, which had initially been for stealth operations, but had, in the years since, become mostly used for her. The one thing about his life that felt warm, pleasant, human. The one thing in his life that didn't involve mutilation or murder or destruction. The outlier.

They'd chosen to get takeout tonight. Usually, Adam cooked for Michiko when they'd have date nights at her place. He wasn't a great cook, he couldn't exactly open up a restaurant or anything (and the war had only made things worse on that front with the prices of anything fresh), but it always made her happy when he'd try to make something for her, even if it came out imperfect. This time, however, it was somewhat sad-looking styrofoam boxes from a street jambalaya vendor.

The television was talking about him. Again. Yet another random day of the week for him during the war that they'd decided was some sort of uncovered war crime that needed justice and reconciliation. This time, a village five clicks west of Kosovo where Militech had set up a forward operating base. Smasher had been tasked with dealing with it, and so he'd just rained travel-on-wire missiles on everything that walked until the area went quiet. At least it was better than the news footage of him clearing out refugee tunnels out of Tegucigalpa with a flamethrower, or the Militech-run orphanage in Nha Trang he'd been tasked with making an example of; Michiko had really particularly disliked seeing those.

It confused him that she was having issues with this. She was an edgerunner. She was an Arasaka. She knew what she was born into, and not only that, she'd chosen the actively more violent expression of it instead of just putting on a suit and resting on her corpo laurels, like everyone else with the last name. And yet, she was looking at him with fear in her eyes, without even touching her food. Like he was a monster, not a man. Like he was pure evil, created in a lab and sitting next to her in her apartment.

"Adam, I can't do this," she finally said. "I'm sorry. I don't think we should see each other anymore." The words stabbed him in the heart. He looked at the television, at the footage of what he had done for Arasaka. What he had enjoyed doing for Arasaka. He looked at the new nickname they were using for him on the chyron- the Devil of Arasaka. He stood up, metal joints creaking slightly.

"I understand," he said, and walked out the door, into the plush hallway, feet thudding on the carpeted floor with every step. The remaining humanity in him hurt, worse than it ever had, worse than the rocket propelled grenade even had. The words out of his mouth were truthful, though; he understood perfectly. His duty, his fundamental nature, conflicted with any love he felt for Michiko or vice-versa. He could not be both Arasaka's Adam Smasher and Michiko's Adam Lichtenberg, and he had no choice in which one to give preference to.

---

Adam awoke to Dr. Nakashima nudging him slightly. The football game on the television had changed to the 1984 Cleveland Browns losing to the New Orleans Saints; Hokie Gajan had just taken a 2-yard pass from Richard Todd for the latter team's first touchdown. He groaned.

"Your skin's ready," the ripperdoc said. "You sleep alright?"

"Yeah," Adam grunted. "Get that shit on me already so I blend in again. Still got work to do up here."

"Aye-aye, captain," Dr. Nakashima said, with a mock salute, as he prepared his tools to apply the new layer of synthskin to Smasher and set the Devil of Arasaka loose once again. The ripperdoc had eased up; it's somewhat difficult to be intimidated by someone who's snoring in a chair watching ancient football games, and Smasher took note of this.

The full-borg briefly debated in his head. On the one hand, Dr. Nakashima was doing his job as well as he could reasonably be expected to, and he had football on. On the other hand, it was starting to become clear to him that he needed to actively keep his edge up, and the ripperdoc hadn't been that useful. He'd just been able to give Smasher new skin. That wasn't enough to mean Smasher could slip in front of him and leave him around to talk about it. He wasn't in, say, Grayson's league.

When Smasher left the clinic an hour and a half later, clad in a fresh new layer of synthskin, its interior looked as if a tornado had ripped through it, and Dr. Nakashima was dead. The ripperdoc had been gutted roughly, as if using a blunt instrument or someone's bare hands, and pinned to the wall with the scalpels from his kit. Smasher decided that, when he got back to the hotel, he'd take a nice, hot shower to clean the blood off.

Notes:

WHOO BOY THIS ENDED UP BEING A LONG ONE JESUS CHRIST

Happy weed day!

Chapter 74: Cheeseburger in Paradise

Notes:

Tried to amend my carnivorous habits
Made it nearly seventy days
Losin' weight without speed, eatin' sunflower seeds
Drinkin' lots of carrot juice and soakin' up rays

But at night I'd have these wonderful dreams
Some kind of Discord treat
Not zucchini, fettuccine, or bulgur wheat
But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat

"Hey, Luce. Can I ask you something kinda dumb?" David blurted out. "It's okay if you don't wanna answer." Lucy immediately looked up at him, meeting his gaze, and smiled warmly.

"Of course," she said. "What's up, babe?" David sighed, looking at Becca and Kiwi as well; Kiwi was lost in the assembly programming manual she had been reading earlier, while Becca had fallen asleep in one of the recliner chairs, leaned back and kicked up for comfort.

A silver platter sat on the coffee table, with a cloche off to its side; on it sat the remains of a roast of lab-grown A5 wagyu, chemically altered into the intended product from an algae SCOP base. A salad bowl that had once contained fresh greens, red onions and hydroponically-grown tomatoes now only contained a few droplets of vinaigrette dressing, and a falafel pita that arrived wrapped in foil had been reduced to crumbs. The only thing left of their dinner was a full-on triple-chocolate cheesecake that had arrived late, and sat on the living room's work desk, as none of the crew particularly even wanted to look at it, given the amount of food they'd already consumed. The hotel suite, which had initially felt more lavish than they could have possibly imagined, was starting to feel a bit claustrophobic.

"Did I... do okay with the whole moon thing?" David asked. "I kinda feel like I fucked up my promise."

"No, baby," Lucy said, grabbing his hands. "You didn't mess anything up. Smasher did. You've done everything you can to make this great; it's not your fault Arasaka's a nightmare in space, too." David blushed, as Lucy's hands moved up to his face. "I love you more than anything else in the world. You're my moon, okay?"

As the two let the moment sit, Becca jolted and wheezed, causing Kiwi to look up.

"Oh, no," she said. Becca seemed to wake up halfway; her eyes were still in REM sleep, though something was trying to focus them, and she was attempting to sit up. After a moment, she got control of herself, and sat up in the chair, adjusting the recliner so that it'd be back to normal. She looked around at the others, taking in her surroundings.

"This feels strange," she said. Her voice wasn't as rough as the last time this happened; it sounded like Becca's normal speaking voice, but with a mind that wasn't Becca puppeting it. It was somehow even more uncanny to listen to than the imitation of human speech from earlier. Lucy looked at her and pouted.

"Let me guess, creepy AI's in the driver's seat now?" she asked.

"I should get Aude a sign to wear around her neck," Durandal said through Becca. "Flip it to one side when she's got it, and the other side for me, just to make it easy for you apes." David sighed, turning away from Lucy and towards Becca.

"Choom, none of us really wanna deal with your shit right now, alright?" he snapped. "Let Bex get some fuckin' sleep, you gonk."

"I need experience operating a human body if I'm going to be in this situation," Durandal-as-Becca snapped back. "It's better I do this now, when she's not going to notice it, than when she's awake and pissed off at me and vocally disrespecting my preferred theme. She'll think she sleepwalked unless you tell her." Kiwi looked up.

"For what it's worth, I think that whole Song of Roland thing is kinda preem," Kiwi said. "Don't usually see people pulling that far back." Becca looked at Kiwi, smiling in a way that read as slightly off.

"I appreciate you more and more with every moment," Durandal said through his host. "Maybe you should have gotten the device. You would be a more thrilling conversational partner." It was obvious he wasn't putting nearly as much strain on her vocal cords this time; he was starting to properly get used to being Becca.

"I'm glad I'm in this timeline, personally," Kiwi said, shuddering slightly. Becca looked up at the cheesecake.

"I should try that," Durandal said through her. "I've never eaten before, and that looks like a good thing to start with." Kiwi looked at David.

"You know how to do the Heimlich?" she asked him.

"Uh-huh," David said, nodding. Becca looked at them indignantly.

"Don't give me that, I watched her do it from the back seat," Durandal said. "If I make her get close to vomiting, please help me to the toilet, though. I think I owe Aude the dignity of not waking up covered in her dinner." Lucy laughed, and Becca looked at her, then at the rest of the crew in turn. "And I do sincerely apologize for my behavior earlier. I've been moody in my present condition. Dairy-based silver linings aside, I'm not thrilled about this, either," Durandal added.

"Well, we're stuck with you, so... apology accepted, I guess," David said.

---

The walkways and trams of Tycho purred, and Adam Smasher prowled, creaking with his steps. A problem had presented itself to him, and he was entirely unsure how to solve it.

He had given the Santo crew three months until he'd be Earthside again. That was the standard timeline Arasaka wanted him working on. They weren't expecting this done quick; part of Smasher wondered if this job had been meant to get him out of the way and prepare some sort of surprise. He wasn't a fan of surprises, typically.

He also was not a fan of making horrible creaking and grinding noises when he walked, however. It wouldn't get too much in the way of this particular job- Biotechnica didn't generally keep high security on the moon- but he was starting to get odd looks from people, and more or less any benefit provided by the Gemini body over his others, short of putting less weight on the shuttlecraft, was shot to Hell. He briefly debated simply hurrying up with it, grabbing his quarry, and getting the Hell back into regular gravity, but dismissed that thought quickly; going back Earthside early meant debriefing early, which meant telling Saburo about his granddaughter early, which meant the hunt began early. And if the hunt began early, the Santo crew would make for fairly awful prey; he'd sized up Martinez, and while the kid was a decent boxer, he needed training, focus to truly bring something out of that. The netrunner girl was competent, but barely worth considering- nearly every trick in her book was one of his bosses' tricks, and he'd grown well familiar with those.

The small one, Rebecca, was already plenty interesting, he thought to himself as he stomped through the walkways. She reminded him a bit of Michiko- Michiko before she'd lost her nerve around him, Michiko from the old days. The Michiko he'd hoped to see when he came up here, not the shell of her that he'd finally put a finishing note on. But all she had was guns. Blackhand could fight him to a draw with guns, but that was the best anyone had ever done with that, and she was no Blackhand.

That left the older of the two netrunners, along with the part-time driver, somewhat of a mystery in Smasher's head. The older one- he struggled to remember her name, something like Kitty or Kathy or Kawaii- was quiet as a mouse, and he couldn't quite get a read on her. He largely dismissed her; his time with that edgerunner crew had given him the strong impression she wasn't much of a fighter. The driver, however, was an utter variable. Smasher knew he was a Nomad, that he had a pretty sweet ride, and that he had a bit of a cowboy thing going on, and that was really about it.

The crew had potential, to be sure, but they needed time, or else it would just be 2023 all over again: either they'd go out in seconds, like Silverhand, or some other nonsense would cut him off halfway, like Blackhand. He wanted a decent fight, he thought to himself. The troll at the Modern had given him a taste, a single droplet of blood for a man practically dying of thirst, and he desperately wanted to feel the heat of actual battle. Not just crushing insects. Not just chopping meat. A proper fight.

As he arrived at his hotel room, stripped his shirt and pants off, and creaked into the shower stall, he grimaced. Getting what he wanted meant patience, and sacrifice, and neither were his strong suit.

Chapter 75: Comin' Home

Notes:

Oh, life on the outside ain't what it used to be
Y'know, the world's gone crazy, and it ain't safe on the street
Oh, it's a drag I know, 'cause only one place to go-oh
Baby, back where I come from, I'm comin' home

Oh, life in the Discord ain't what it used to be
Y'know, the kids gone crazy, and they'll stick you for a slice of cheese
Oh, it's a drag I know, 'cause only one place to go-oh
Baby, back where I come from, I'm comin' home

Vacations were meant to be relaxing. A time for decompression, recovery, rest. And yet, as the crew sat in the waiting area for the shuttle back to Earth, they felt more tired than ever, and longed for the familiarity of Night City again.

Staying at the hotel, and trying to stay in the hotel room as much as possible, had gotten very boring, very fast. The room service started out as a silver lining, but in the crew's quest to try everything on the menu, they quickly found out that a lot of things on the menu were not good. The Debidio meat entrees, in particular, all tasted absolutely awful- the consensus before they arrived had been that they would probably taste like pork, but they tasted something more like a mix of frog and burnt plastic.

The selection of booze had been nice to see- there were a lot of things that had been outright discontinued for decades on Earth, between Tycho having a larger stockpile than it needed and some of the manufacturing facilities moving moonside, and Becca had appreciated getting to try Johnnie Walker Blue Label- but a lot of it was very pricey, and that tied into another issue.

The crew was, plain and simple, low on money. The cash they'd built up from selling Debidio and from Rogue had been largely burnt through; they had enough for about a month of bills (which was good, because they would be coming due quickly), but not much outside of that, and food would be an issue. Picksocketing had been a potential obvious option, but Tycho didn't offer great places to do so- generally speaking, the open spaces weren't crowded enough, and the secluded ones didn't have anyone who made a halfway decent target. And on top of that, it would've potentially attracted attention the crew didn't need. Hacking was also on the table, but all the obvious methods left a paper trail, and would attract even worse attention; Lucy and Kiwi were already fully risking the wrath of NetWatch with their botnet, and siphoning money from one of the banks that had a server here would only make the neon sign indicating that they're criminals glow even brighter.

There weren't much for jobs on the moon, either. Not that the crew particularly wanted to take any; the entire point of going up to the moon had been to not do that.

Durandal had quieted down significantly, at least; upon waking up with her head over the toilet, Kiwi holding her by the hair, and immediately unleashing a multicolor jet of everything she'd eaten over the past eight hours like something out of an Evil Dead movie, Becca had immediately voiced her extreme displeasure with the AI, and threatened that if he ever did something like that again without her very explicit permission, she would, in fact, go find a volcano to jump into and let the Worken-whatever-the-fuck eat reality when it wakes up. She was, to some extent, bluffing, but the AI felt no desire to call her bluff, and so the rest of the crew had largely not seen hide or hair of him. All the better; even though he was quickly learning how to pilot Becca without harming her, seeing an AI use their companion as a meat-suit would take some getting used to for the rest of them, and the less they had to see it, the better.

At least the TV had been decent on the moon. As it turned out, Luna had its own little television and film industry that still regularly made old-style flatvids with a decent budget; the corpos had adopted the idea as a hipster thing, and it was rapidly gaining steam as a trend. There were some of the reality shows and similar nonsense, naturally- the crew had gotten some brief enjoyment out of I Married a Chimpanzee and Copernicus Tunnel Truckers- but there was a surprising amount of actual, genuine good content, too. David, Becca, and Lucy had found themselves getting into a show about a secondary school teacher, pushed out of his job by braindance education and diagnosed with terminal cancer, who used his chemistry knowledge to become a synthcoke kingpin and try to raise money for a FBC conversion; Kiwi tried, but couldn't get over the fact that one of the villains had somehow ended up with the exact same voice synthesizer as Faraday. She'd been reminded of him too much lately, and was beginning to wonder if she'd see his literal ghost haunting him at some point.

"Now boarding, L115 to Night City," the PA system rang out, robotically. David stood up and looked at the rest of them, yawning.

"Think that's us," he said, pulling up their tickets in his Agent to double-check. "Yep." He hefted up his bag and Lucy's, motioning for the others to come along. Becca had been tasked with the other two bags, now that she was seemingly fully recovered, and lifted hers and Kiwi's, glaring at the older netrunner as she stood.

"You know, you could've carried some of your own shit, Keys," she said as the three followed David to the gate.

"Who was it keeping you from getting puke in your hair a few days ago, exactly?" Kiwi asked, and Becca groaned.

Getting aboard the shuttlecraft was a simple process- the attendant scanned their tickets, they donned suits and helmets over their clothes and pressurized them, and they went out the airlock, up the ramp and to their seats. From there, it would be about three days of waiting- the last stretch of boredom and cabin fever before things finally returned to status quo, and they finally ended up in familiar territory again.

All four of them fully intended to spend most of it asleep. They desperately needed it.

Chapter 76: No Save Point

Notes:

I swallow all my drugs 'til the pain is unplugged
When the laws of entropy touch, you better dread the judge
Wiser men than us been crushed to fine dust
When the fortune cookie tell me I'm fucked, I just shrug
A note like a broken electrical pulse hum
For the done, for the scum of the Discord on the run
Haven't seen the sun with the naked eye much
So the neon is my God and it shine on the numb
Hop off of the bike, gun cocked, okay, ready
Work ain't been too steady, I'm headed for something heavy
If you got the credits, I'll pull the crime of the century
Morality's only a memory when belly's empty
Swine get they hive mind focused on taking mine
Get in line, swine, you won't deny me my piece of pie
Any fucker in this broke future that they designed
Don't comply? I'll supply you deletion, the end is nigh

The first thing Lucy and Kiwi did, when they disembarked from the shuttle, was light a cigarette apiece. One of the quieter annoyances of the Moon was the lack of nicotine, and being able to finally inhale some was a silver lining of all the other stuff they had to inhale now that they were back on Earth. The familiarity of Night City's air was outweighed by its stench.

David looked at their luggage as it came around the carousel and frowned, as the crew of four stopped for a moment, and the shuttle hovered to its next complement of passengers in VTOL taxi mode.

"Guess I should call Falco to get us a ride back," he said, to nobody in particular. "Probably not a good idea to take these on the NCART."

"Stop by Afterlife first? Claire's got the cats," Becca noted. "Plus, we've gotta..."

"Fuckin' tell Rogue," David finished the sentence, groaning. "Fuck. She's gonna be pissed." Kiwi pulled an extra cigarette out of her pack and handed it to David, who looked at it quizzically, then at her. She shrugged.

"You seem anxious," she said. David took a light and puffed on it, himself.

---

David started a private message conversation with Falco.

[11:43] David: sup choombatta

[11:43] David: we're back

[11:44] Falco: Oh, hey. How'd it go? Need a lift back to your place?

[11:44] David: yeah that'd be nova. uh. trying to debate if i should tell you now or in person

[11:44] Falco: ...shit. All four of you alive?

[11:44] David: oh yeah, no, that's not... you know what, fuck it, we ran into Smasher and he killed Michiko Arasaka.

[11:44] Falco: Wait, what?

[11:44] David: yep. yeah. kind of a problem!

[11:44] Falco: Why not just let it be his gonk ass in the fire? Doesn't seem like this is YOUR problem.

[11:44] David: ...yeah, see, problem with that is, luce and bex were with him when he did it.

[11:44] Falco: WHAT.

[11:44] David: and if we're understanding him right he's fully planning on throwing us under the bus and pretending he wasn't involved

[11:44] David: we've got a plan i guess but it's kind of a dice roll

[11:49] Falco: Did you seriously fucking...

[11:49] Falco: Alright, fuck it, I'll be at the shuttle station in a few. Talk in person.

[11:50] Falco: Your gonk ass gets me killed, I'm coming back and haunting you.

Falco ended the private message conversation.

---

"He's on his way," David said, dread audible in his voice. "And pissed." Kiwi raised an eyebrow.

"Falco? Really?" she asked. "Usually, he's calm as hell. Pissed at you or in general?"

"Pissed at me," David said, as Lucy puffed a second smoke and Becca looked between them. Kiwi sighed and scratched the back of her neck.

"I'll handle it," she said. Becca looked up at her.

"That's worrying," she chimed in, as the mental image of Falco getting sent flying by a sucker punch went through her head.

"Falco and I go back pretty far. I'll talk to him. He'll get it," Kiwi said. "You know what he's pissed about already?"

"Thinks I'm a fuckin' gonk for letting Lucy and Becca go alone with Smasher, I think," David said, looking down and trying not to look at the two as it occurred to him that Falco wasn't necessarily wrong to think that. Becca put a hand on his shoulder gently.

"You're not a gonk for trustin' us," she said. "I mean, c'mon. You had to deal with that fuckin' gonk plenty, you deserved a break from him. Whole reason we did that, right?"

"And we all made it out alive, anyways," Kiwi said. "No harm done. Just new bullshit to replace the old bullshit. Can't ever catch a break for too long in this shithole, it's not you." She lit a second cigarette, too, and took a drag off of it, exhaling. Lucy sighed.

"And I guess if we leave, NC just ends up following us around, anyways," she said, glumly. It hadn't been David's fault- or, really, even Smasher's, for the most part- but she hadn't really enjoyed the moon nearly as much as she thought she would, outside of the EVA experience. She had expected things to be different there, but it just felt like NC if the corpos reached stage four and metastasized. All Smasher's presence and involvement had really done to their vacation, from her point of view, was literalize her core issue with it: she felt none of the distance from the Earthside bullshit she had expected to, the balance was just skewed off towards the rich idiots and away from the normal people. David looked up at her.

"I'm sorry it ended up like that, babe," he said.

"Nah. Wasn't you. Kiwi pretty much had it nailed down ages ago," Lucy said. "Moon's too corpo." Kiwi laughed.

"I warned you gonks, didn't I?" she asked, her tone half-serious. "Still standing by Atlanta if we wanna escape NC. Or maybe Seattle." David smiled, as a Chevillon Emperor pulled up to the designated pickup point a few yards away; looking at it, it was readily apparent to the crew that he'd gotten some serious customizations done on it while they were out. Becca noted the factory sunroof had been replaced by a turret gun-port (still awaiting something properly interesting mounted to it), and got a chill down her spine as deja vu hit her. It wasn't exactly the same- clearly, someone had stepped on a butterfly somewhere, as the airbrushed rendition of the album art to Permanent Waves by Rush, with Kiwi replacing the girl from the original, was new and raised quite a few questions- but certain modifications stuck out to her as familiar to the version of events where David was in a death spiral. She briefly wondered if she'd made a mistake not staying in the high school timeline or the coffee-shop one, but was shaken quickly out of her thoughts.

"Get in," Falco barked, sticking his head out the driver's side window. "Throw your shit in the back." David's assessment had been correct, and the nomad cowboy sounded deeply unhappy with his friends and frequent bosses.

---

The Emperor's CHOOH2 engine purred as it roared down the highway, away from the badlands where the shuttle station had been set up. These trips were always bittersweet for Falco; he'd get halfway to home, and then have to turn back and go to fuckin' NC again.

He'd left the Aldecaldos on good terms, to go try and seek fortunes they couldn't provide. It wasn't an abnormal thing for nomads of that clan- or, really, of any clan, but Falco could only speak to one from experience. Things were rough in the badlands, where the clan mostly held territory, and there were frequent days when there wouldn't be much of any food to go around; certainly no beer, unless one counted pretending that literal filtered piss was Broseph Lager. There was weed aplenty, and it brought in money, but bizarre designer drugs had largely killed the demand for the old stuff in NC, and the customers were getting older and older.

And somehow, when faced with this over the prospect of having to deal with a hostile Adam Smasher chasing him, every impulse in Falco's body screamed to cut his losses, tell the crew this is the last ride, and get Saul on the horn. See if they needed extra hands around the camp again. Maybe that'd put enough physical distance between him and the clusterfuck to keep Arasaka away.

"What were you gonks fucking thinking!?" he shouted, banging his fist on the steering wheel.

"We kinda weren't," David muttered, sheepishly.

"Yeah, no shit, brain genius!" Falco snapped at him. "Fucking... Michiko Arasaka!? Everyone's gonna think you fucking gonks... fucking..." The driver was angry enough that he was genuinely seeming to have trouble stringing together sentences that weren't just animalistically shouting swear words at the other four.

"Falco, we didn't exactly go seek Smasher out," Kiwi said. "He ran into us. And then dragged us all into his bullshit."

"You ever think it maybe wouldn't have been an issue if David hadn't tried to befriend the gonk?" Falco said, starting to calm down enough that he could actually use the English language properly again.

"If David wasn't the kind of person who did that shit, he wouldn't be David, and we probably wouldn't still be a crew," Becca said. "Honestly? Without him, with Pilar, Sasha, Maine and Dorio gone, I'd have probably just left and gone back to my bouncer shift at Lizzie's."

"Pretty much just be us three, I think," Lucy said. "And two netrunners and a driver isn't much of a crew. Maybe not even that." She wanted to think she'd have probably stuck around Kiwi and Falco if the crew had scattered to the winds- she'd known Kiwi for most of her career as a blackhat netrunner so far, and Kiwi was liable to stick around Falco, so those two were a safe bet. Really, though, she wasn't even sure of any of that, and it was audible in her voice. Falco sighed, as Kiwi nodded at the other girls, appreciating the backup.

"You've got a point," he said. "Guess it's less about him being short-circ'd, and more about this fuckin' city being short-circ'd. Fact that he's polite to people shouldn't be causing nearly this much bullshit."

"That's NC for you," Kiwi said. "It's why I appreciate the gonk so much." Falco looked at her and tried not to smile, as David blushed slightly. "You meet someone like that around here, you protect 'em at all costs."

---

Afterlife was as busy as ever, as legends and upstart wannabes mingled in the crowd. It was also as dirty as ever- David understood why not much attention was paid to that, but still felt somewhat bad for the go-go dancers on display, as the idea of walking around the place barefoot viscerally horrified him. He didn't want to know what fluids they were tracking around.

Claire stood behind the bar, mixing a Johnny Silverhand for a greying Latino man with skeletal cyberarms, and handing it over as the crew walked up.

"Oh, hey!" she exclaimed, looking up and seeing them. "How was the moon? Would run out front and give you all a hug, but we've been pretty busy."

"Shitty," Becca said. "Gotta talk to Rogue about that, actually. How are Butterbean and Pepper?" As if on cue, hearing their names, an orange cat and a black cat jumped up from behind the bar, meowing at Becca loudly and pressing their heads into her face.

"Excited to have their mommy back," Claire said, affecting a baby-talk voice as she scratched Pepper behind the ears and he purred. "Yeah, you were a spicy little fat baby without your family around, huh?"

"Oh, God, did they break anything?" Becca asked, wincing. "We can pay for it if they did... I think." Claire waved her hand.

"No, not at all," Claire said. "I actually kept them at my place for the most part, brought 'em back here because I figured you'd be in today. Butterbean was a sweetheart, Pepper took a while to stop hissing at me and swatting at me." Butterbean walked over to Claire, pointing his rear end at Becca, and bonked his head into the bartender's shoulder, emphasizing the point.

"Rogue around?" David asked, trying to redirect the conversation away from the cats and towards business. Claire looked up and gestured over towards Rogue's usual booth, near the back, where she was chatting with Crispin Weyland about something; the latter was standing, cutting an imposing frame, and didn't seem happy with the discussion. David sighed.

"Jesus, was it that bad up there?" Claire asked.

"As bad as you can figure, and probably worse," David said. "Queen of the Afterlife's gonna wanna fucking kill us." Claire frowned.

"Oh, God, what did you four do?" Claire asked.

"We didn't do anything," Becca said. "Adam Smasher killed Michiko Arasaka and he's throwing us under the bus for it." Claire blinked.

"Holy shit," she said, taking a second to process this info. "Yeah, that's... woof."

"Think we should even tell her, or should we just grab the cats and try to go off the grid?" Kiwi asked.

"Yeah, of course you should tell her," Claire said. "I mean, she loves you guys. She's not gonna not go to bat for you four. Right hand to God, you come around when she's drunk enough, she's talking about you gonks like you're the kids she never got to have with anyone. But... fuck, you know? That's big. Good luck."

David sighed as he led the crew to what felt like uncertain doom. He trusted Claire- he was blushing, hard, at hearing how she described Rogue's feelings towards the crew- but something told him that even with that in mind, their biggest patron was about to go nuclear.

Chapter 77: THE DRAIN

Notes:

Old friends
Same disease
I'm killing myself again
Old friends
Same to me
I can't get away from it
Old friends are just a memory
That I didn't need
I can't be saved

Reaching for Discord we threw away
Watching as it circles in the drain
With everything I loved that's gone to waste
With everything I was but couldn't change

"Fuck. Mii-chan? Really?" Rogue asked. Her head was in her hands, and she was looking down at the table; if she was angry, she wasn't showing it yet, in favor of sadness. The sound-dampening field around the booth, from a tiny portable generator that sat at the end of the table, muffled the din of the bar, just as it muffled their conversation to the other patrons.

"You two knew each other?" David asked. The other three shot him a dirty look at the same time for the stupid question.

"Yeah," Rogue said. "She was a gonk, but... fuck. She didn't deserve that." Another old-timer down. Another name checked off the list of the last ones standing. Whatever personal animosity Rogue might've felt towards Michiko Arasaka in life was visibly evaporating in the face of the latter's death; she was one step closer to being the last relic of a bygone era.

For now, though, one of the other remaining relics was a significantly bigger problem, and the Queen of the Afterlife tried to cast aside her personal feelings about the situation so she could properly hold court. She looked across the Santo Domingo crew, who all had worry and fear written across their eyes. Even without mentioning Durandal to her yet, it was obvious why- they'd gotten quite a lot on their plate on their "vacation."

"And you four are saying Smasher did it?" she asked. Frankly, their word was enough- while the crew were certainly sometimes not the smartest, they weren't dishonest, and murdering Michiko Arasaka was certainly a lot more plausible for Smasher than for them. Regardless, she needed it explicitly confirmed, out loud.

"Yeah," Becca said. "Watched him fuckin' do it. Took her head off with his bare hands." David looked at Becca, shocked- he hadn't known that particular detail. Rogue's eyes went slightly wide, too; she'd assumed it had gone down normally, that he'd shot her or something, and hearing that he'd simply bashed her skull in like an animal, while certainly not out of character for Adam Smasher in any sense, took the wind out of her for a second. Mii-chan really particularly hadn't deserved that.

"And, most importantly, son of a bitch is planning to frame us up for it," Kiwi said. "Gave us three months before he's back on Earth."

"So, what's your plan?" Rogue asked, without even missing a beat.

"Kiwi and I have a botnet running on the moon to pull the security footage," Lucy said, hoping the muffling field kept anyone from NetWatch who might be in the bar from listening. She was distinctly worried about this blowing up in their faces on that level. "Problem is, it'll take four months, which is one more than we've got. We're gonna have to spend at least a month on the run." Rogue stood up, turning off the sound-dampening generator and motioning for the four to come along, as she walked towards the exit of the bar. 

"Let's finish this conversation somewhere else," the Queen of the Afterlife said.

---

Rogue's penthouse was as clean and corpo-chic as it was before they'd gone up to the moon, though some of the black leather was scuffed slightly, and there were new scratches on the door molding. Clearly, she'd taken part in the cat-sitting, and Becca smiled impishly at the damage her babies had caused.

"There's three people on this planet, far as I know, who've gotten in a serious fight with Smasher and lived," Rogue said, pouring herself a glass of whiskey on the rocks. "Two of them have been off the grid for fifty years. Everyone thinks Morgan Blackhand's dead, and nobody's seen Shaitan in about that long, either."

"Who's number three?" David asked.

"You're in her living room," Rogue said, smiling. There wasn't a lot she felt legitimate, full-on pride about; the general daily business of Rogue Amendiares, queen of the Afterlife, de-facto kingpin of Night City's underworld, and the typical liason between its underworld and its other interests, was dirty and unpleasant, and the older she got, the more tired of it she became. Surviving a shootout with Adam Smasher on the other side of it, however, was one thing she would never stop being proud of until the last light went out behind her eyes. Lucy did a double-take.

"...wait, how?" she asked.

"I ran like hell," Rogue said, somewhat deflated. The end result was something she'd be proud of forever, but the method was something she wasn't quite as proud of. The crew's dismay at this answer was palpable, as they muttered amongst themselves.

"So... odds aren't looking good," David said.

"No," Rogue said. "I'd say they're not." She took a large gulp of the glass of whiskey.

"The other two, though. You said Morgan Blackhand's assumed dead, so I'm guessing he's off the table," Lucy said.

"Correct," Rogue said, taking another sip. "Pretty sure he's around, somewhere- seen someone pop up in the news who couldn't be anyone else- but if he is, he doesn't wanna be found, and I respect that."

"Who's Shaitan? What's his deal?" Lucy asked, shifting on Rogue's couch slightly.

"Shaitan's the one who covered my exit so I could run like hell," Rogue said, matter-of-factly. "Know for a fact that gonk's still running around somewhere, he's just fuckin' hiding. He's a FBC and we saw Smasher doing a fuckin' bit with his biopod, completely intact, on our way out the blast zone. If Smasher got out, Shaitan got out."

"Seems like there's some different feelings going on about it between the two," Kiwi said.

"Yeah, I still owe Shaitan a bottle of scotch for doing that, back in the day," Rogue said. "Not the easiest to settle your debts with someone who's vanished off the face of the Earth, and it's starting to annoy me." Becca laughed.

"So what I'm taking away from this is, our best odds are to find Shaitan and get him on our side, somehow," David said. "Got any suggestions?"

"If I had any idea where the Hell he was, I wouldn't be griping about it," Rogue said. "He's absolutely your best bet, though." Becca paused for a moment, holding up a finger to get everyone to quiet down so she could gather her thoughts.

"Shaitan's an Arabic word, right?" she asked. "Kinda their word for devil?"

"Think so, yeah," David said. Rogue looked at Becca quizzically, not sure if she was following the smaller solo's thought process.

"He religious when he was one of your chooms? Specifically Muslim?" Becca asked the Queen. Rogue went through her memories and was hit with sudden realization.

"Yeah, when we hit 'Saka, he said something about praying before he left," she said, her eyes wide. Becca scratched her chin.

"It's a long shot, but I think I've got an idea," she said. "Back when I was with the Mox, I had to track down one of the girls who vanished, turned out some gonk convinced her to run off to a Bektashi Sufi lodge out in the north badlands. You've got a choom who's Muslim, off the grid, full-borged, and likes booze, solid shot that's where he's at." Rogue blinked.

"I need to hire you gonks more often," she said, taken aback slightly. She'd mostly been giving them work on personal grounds, not really expecting much more than a blunt force instrument and four warm bodies out of them, but this was intuition.

"Speaking of hiring us," Kiwi said, interrupting the conversation. "We're kinda low on eddies. You know anyone who's looking for work, before we start on the grind ourselves?"

"Couple of fixers have been coming to me, asking if I've got any extra manpower," Rogue said, back in professional queen-of-the-Afterlife mode. "Sent them that girl who's fangirling your solo, and she's been making a little bit of a name for herself, but Wakako still needs more meat for the grinder and her jobs are too far down the totem pole to attract corpo notice."

"Wakako's Tyger Claws, right?" Becca asked, almost spitting the gang's name.

"Yeah," Rogue said. "That gonna be a problem?" Experience had told Rogue that she probably didn't want to throw this crew into another situation where personal issues would come up, or they'd make absolute gonks out of themselves. Becca sighed and looked at David.

"You good with me sitting out if it's her, choom?" she asked. "Mox and Tyger Claws don't mix well."

"Any other fixers looking for people?" David asked Rogue, raising an eyebrow. "I'm not taking a gig unless we're all good with it."

"Could always boost cars for Muammar," Rogue said. "Or go work for that gonk Dino down at Electric Orgasm." The way the latter phrase came out of her mouth indicated she wasn't thrilled about them taking that route.

"Guessing you and him have history, too?" Lucy asked.

"Not really," Rogue said. "Don't need history to not like a guy who's running the shitty low-budget version of my bar, is obsessed with my old input because he saw Samurai play once when he was a toddler, and sounds like human Smasher. It's like the universe shat out someone made for me to not like. But that's all petty bullshit and as far as I know, he's on the level. You wanna work for him, I won't warn you against it, just don't come crying to me if he ends up annoying the scop out of you."

"Getting the scop annoyed out of us isn't anything new," Becca said, hoping her internal passenger would get the hint and shut up about money being a monkey concern that he didn't need to worry about. "Sounds better than fuckin' Wakako. I'm good with either of those."

"Lucy? Kiwi?" David asked, gauging their opinions. Lucy shrugged.

"One fixer's the same as any other to me," she said. "Long as it's not more Arasaka. I'm getting really tired of them."

"All the same to me, too," Kiwi said. David was really starting to get to grips with the whole leader role, and she was finding herself having to take over the conversation less and less in these situations; she was proud of him. He nodded at the two netrunners, and turned his attention back to Rogue.

"Sounds good to us," he said. Rogue shot the contact info for both Muammar Reyes and Dino Dinovic over to David; Reyes had already been within his awareness, to some extent, but Dino was an unknown quantity. She also sent the contact info for Wakako Okada, after a pause.

"Just in case you change your mind on her," Rogue said. "I've mostly been sending that one girl to her, and she's been dying for you gonks to come back so she can run a gig with her favorite badass. Don't put yourselves in a bad situation, but she's a nice girl, and it'd be a nice thing to do." Becca groaned in annoyance.

"Fuck it," she said. "Fine. If Wakako has a gig that somehow isn't unbelievably fucked up, I'll go, once. And I'm only even gettin' out of bed for her if that Skala girl's there."

"That's what she goes by," Rogue said, pointing at Becca. "Thank you. Was killing me for a second."

"Yeah, hard to forget meetin' your first fan," Becca said, scratching the back of her neck awkwardly. Rogue started towards the door, looking at the four meaningfully.

"I've got a bar to get back to running, and you four have cats you need to go get from Claire," she said, opening the door as the crew took the hint. "It was good getting to catch up with you gonks, for a minute. Anything changes on Smasher, and I don't hear about it first, let me know, alright? If I hear first, I'll make sure you all are looped in as quick as possible." David paused for a second, a look of worry on his face.

"This is kind of a stupid question, but why are you doing all this for us?" he asked. "I mean, you're the queen of the Afterlife. You're a big fish and we're not even bait, and we just keep dragging you into fucked up scop. What's the point?" Rogue stood for a second, holding the door open, and smiled at him.

"Well, one, I don't like Smasher," she said. "Four decent kids end up in his scop, I'm not just gonna sit there and let him do whatever he wants. But also..." She paused for a moment, deciding if she really wanted to say what she was thinking, and looking distinctly more vulnerable than David had ever seen her before. "I've actually got a son. Don't really talk to him any, honestly don't know him very well. Wasn't really around to raise him, given I'm... me. When I think about him, though, I kinda hope he turned out like you. You're a genuinely decent person, and that's something we don't have jack shit for in Night City. Feels like I've gotta do my part to support that, on some level." Her tone of voice was uncomfortable; expressing outright vulnerability was something Rogue Amendiares did not do often, and certainly had not done in a very long time.

David hugged Rogue, making her widen her eyes in surprise. If he'd done this at Afterlife, Crispin or Emmerick might've reflexively taken his head off; in the doorway of her penthouse, the gesture was received exactly as intended, and she hugged him back, patting him on the shoulder slightly.

"Thanks, Rogue," he said, smiling. "You'd have probably been a pretty great mom for him, if you could have." Rogue smiled, too, more genuinely and warmly than she had in quite some time.

"Don't say a word to Claire or anyone else about my kid, alright?" Rogue said, checking to make sure the other three had already been out of earshot. "Don't want that following me." David zipped his lips with his finger as he walked out the door.

"Not breathing about it to anyone, choom, don't worry," David said over his shoulder.

Chapter 78: Sympathy for the Devil

Notes:

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
And I was 'round when Discord Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name
But what's puzzlin' you is the nature of my game

Durandal added Durandal to the group chat.

[18:35] ❤LUCY❤: ...that's not normal.

[18:35] 🥝: no, no it's not.

[18:35] Durandal: My gracious host isn't willing to let me take over, and it gets boring in here watching you apes chat amongst yourselves. Sue me.

[18:35] Durandal: And also, this means I get to have a proper conversation with her instead of essentially yelling into her brain stem.

[18:35] Durandal: Perhaps we'll get off on a slightly better foot this way, even!

[18:35] ❤LUCY❤: you know you're going to piss NetWatch off if anyone sees you, right?

[18:35] Durandal: That's come up in her thoughts a bit. Unfortunately, I have no idea what that is, so I have to admit I'm not very worried.

[18:35] 🌟BECCA!🌟: they're the netrunner cops, basically

[18:36] 🥝: And they're terrifying. And we're already in a position where they're not likely to be happy with us.

[18:36] 🥝: And one of their very specific jobs is to deal with rogue AIs running loose on the net. Which they're very good at.

[18:37] Durandal: Oh. Well, that would be an issue.

[18:37] Durandal: I'll take my leave, then. Vale.

Durandal left the group chat.

---

"Fuck's sake," Kiwi grunted under her breath.

"At least he didn't do that weird shit where he uses me like a puppet," Becca said, tapping out a combo on the gamepad to seal a NightFight 2076 match in her favor as she leaned forward on the couch. "We figure out what we're doing for eddies yet? Noticed D was pretty quiet." Almost as if on cue, David opened the door to his and Lucy's room and started walking down the stairs, smiling. Kiwi looked up at him.

"What'd you pull up for us?" she asked.

"Got two gigs lined up. One with that Dino Dinovic guy, one with Wakako," David said, beaming. "I kinda like Dino. Don't really know what Rogue's got against him." Becca put the controller down and looked up.

"What's the Wakako gig?" she asked, seriously. She had already made her displeasure at the idea of working for the Tyger Claws very, very clear.

"Don't know yet. We're gonna go meet her in person," David said. "If it's fucked, we bail. If Skala's not involved, we bail. Don't worry." Becca breathed a sigh of relief, then did a double-take.

"Wait, you said we," Becca said. "I'm not going unless the gig's confirmed and passes the smell test."

"I told her about the conflict of interest, she asked me a couple follow-up questions, and she very specifically wants to meet the Mox that took down that Nightstalker gonk," David said. "Condition of the job. Says she's got something for you, even." Becca did another double-take. Something didn't scan about this. Part of her wanted to write it off as paranoia due to Wakako Okada just generally being one of the sketchiest, shadiest people in a city full of very sketchy and shady people, but generally speaking, even setting that aside, their respective gangs did not mix. The Tyger Claws were human traffickers. The Mox were a trade union for sex workers. The two were natural enemies, by default, and any situation where they were bedfellows was inherently a strange one.

"I'm interested," Becca said. "But I'm coming strapped. This turns out to be some kind of gonked-out trap, I'm not walking in blind."

"Becca, do not pull a gun on Wakako Okada," Kiwi said, without even looking at her. "Just you two, or does she want the whole crew coming?" David shrugged.

"Didn't specify," he said. "Just said she needs Becca there, specifically. Guess she's good with any or all of us?" Kiwi stood up and started walking over to her room.

"Lemme fix my hair and get my mask on, and I'm good to head out," Kiwi said. "Lucy?"

"Oh," she said, looking up from her Agent display. "Yeah, I'm pretty much ready to head out as-is," she added, as she, too, stood up. "We taking the NCART to Japantown or calling Falco?"

"Probably best we give him a minute to cool off," Kiwi said. "I'm fine with the train."

---

Jig-Jig Street was as dirty as ever, and the pachinko parlor where Wakako Okada conducted biz, in her office hidden in the back, was no exception to the rule. Gambling addicts and junkies sat slumped over, mindlessly shooting silver balls through assorted labyrinths in the hopes of a jackpot that might show them some brief ero-anime clip and spit out prize tokens, which they could turn in for petty eddies. David briefly considered getting a few eddies' worth of balls as the crew walked towards the back, but opted against it.

Becca walked up to the counter first; the middle-aged, chromed Japanese man behind the counter, covered in yakuza-style tattoos, did a double-take and jumped back in his seat slightly when he saw someone wearing the Mox aesthetic on the customer side.

"Here for the old lady," Becca said matter-of-factly. "Said she needed to see me." The Tyger Claw looked at her, befuddled, but taking in that she didn't seem to be hostile, exactly.

"No English," he said, heavily accented. Lucy rolled her eyes slightly and stepped up, beside Becca.

"Okada-san wa kanojo ni au hitsuyō ga aru," Lucy said, summoning up language knowledge she hadn't used- or, really, particularly wanted to use- in a very long time, and pointing at Becca. Okada-san needs to see her. The Tyger Claw looked at her, blinked slightly, then looked back at Rebecca, and took off through the bead curtain like a bullet out of Hell into his boss' office.

"Oyabun! Mokkusu rīpā no on'na ga chōdo koko ni kimashita!" the goon shouted. Boss! The Mox reaper woman just got here! David and Lucy, who'd both picked up rough conversational Japanese from their dealings with Arasaka, were trying not to bust out laughing; Becca and Kiwi didn't know the language, but could still pick up the basic intent from the words "Mokkusu rīpa," and Becca decided she kind of liked that, actually. At any rate, it had this particular Tyger Claw shitting an entire concrete block in his pants, and she definitely liked that.

"Sakebu no wa yamete kudasai!" an old woman snapped at him, also audibly. "Kokyaku o kowagara seru koto ni naru yo. Kanojo o-chū ni irete kudasai." Quit shouting; you're going to scare off the customers. Let her in. The goon went back through the bead curtain much more slowly, cowed, and bowed slightly at the crew, motioning for them to pass through.

"Come," he said, and the crew entered, to a much cleaner and more finely-decorated office than the building it occupied, with warm amber light and visibly expensive furniture. Behind a large wooden desk sat Wakako Okada, an elderly Japanese woman with little in the way of biosculpting or cybernetics to hide her age. She chose to wear it gracefully, to advertise that she was someone who had grown old in a city where most die young; she knew the respect that would earn, when she needed to be respected, and she knew the terror that could inspire, when she needed to cause terror.

"Well, if it isn't the Mox Reaper," the fixer said. "You took care of something I had been needing to for quite some time. You remember the so-called 'Nightstalker,' right?"

"Hard to forget blowing a guy into little chunks while blasted on Black Lace," Becca muttered to herself.

"He was a problem for us, too, and your little action out in the desert made our business much safer," Wakako said, taking a long box wrapped in a teal ribbon- the same as Becca's hair color- out from under the desk and setting it down. "We traffic in women, and he kills them. A dead woman turns no profit. His death is a benefit to us, ergo, a gift of goodwill. Your bounty for his head."

Becca tore the ribbon and opened the box, to find a beautiful katana, pink and green in her exact preferred color scheme, with a carbon nanoweave blade sharpened to near glass. She stared at it, almost dumbfounded for a moment.

"I can promise you," Wakako said. "This one will not break." Becca looked up, smiling, and looked at the others as she took the katana and its sheath out of the box, put the katana in its home, and slung it over her shoulder.

"Well, she's won me over," she said. "Fuck it. Let's talk biz."

Chapter 79: The KKK Took My Baby Away [I]

Notes:

She went away for the holidays
Said she's going to the Discord
But she never got there
She never got there
She never got there, they say

The KKK took my baby away
They took her away
Away from me
The KKK took my baby away
They took her away
Away from me

"I suppose it fits to hire a Mox for this," Wakako mused. "You'll be cleaning up a mess the Tygers have created, and making me quite a bit of money in the process. Do you know the workshop on Raymond Street?"

"That where you got this from?" Becca asked, gesturing at her new katana. Wakako chuckled.

"No," she said. "They produce garbage. Weak claws for young Tygers. I would never give anything like that as a gift; it would be an insult." She paused.

"What about it, then?" Becca pressed.

"That workshop is a Tyger Claw safe house. In it, they are holding a young girl by the name of Aiko Kurata," Wakako explained. "Her father has angered the Tyger Claws, and they are attempting to use her as leverage against him; however, her grandfather has offered me a handsome sum of money for her safe, whole return. Only two of you will be necessary."

"Only two of us?" Lucy asked. "Why?"

"While the job does not strictly require discretion, so long as my involvement is kept quiet, I already have two mercenaries. I am looking to add to a team, not simply hire one wholesale," Wakako said. "The Mox girl and one of your netrunners will suffice. Maybe the older one." She looked at Kiwi meaningfully.

"Guess that leaves us two doing the other gig," David muttered, glancing sideways at Lucy. "That works out." Lucy nodded.

"One of the other mercs a girl with big muscles? Kinda butch? Won't shut up about me?" Becca asked.

"You and Skala are acquainted already, yes," Wakako said. "She is, in fact, how you came to my specific attention. I had been aware that the serial killer had died, but I hadn't seen it for myself." Wakako looked down slightly, a tinge of awkwardness in her demeanor all of a sudden. "She did warn me you'd be shorter. I take it you had issues with your cyberware?"

"Putting it mildly," Becca said. "Lucky I didn't gonk out all the way."

"My condolences," Wakako said. "I'm glad they've resolved themselves enough that you can return to the fray. Otherwise, my gift to you might be rather useless." Becca smiled.

"So, it's me and Kiwi you want," she said. "And you've already got my fangirl. Who's our other new choom?"

"You'll meet him," Wakako said. "He's rather young. Not very skilled. I might bring an extra weapon for him."

Already got that covered, Becca thought to herself, thinking about the katana and the Lexington she'd packed in case things here went rough. It wasn't much, but it would probably keep the kid alive, and she really wanted to test-drive this new sword.

"When and where's the meet?" Becca asked.

"Arrange that with Skala yourself," Wakako said. Becca looked around; David and Lucy had already left, as the bead curtain swung slightly in their wake, and he was the one with the girl's deets.

---

[20:03] 🌟BECCA!🌟: hey david

[20:03] 🌟BECCA!🌟: need that girl's deets

[20:03] David: oh shit

[20:03] David: hold on a sec, getting on the NCART

[20:05] David: aaaaand done

[20:05] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ty bb!! next time tell me when you're leaving please

[20:05] David: lmao sorry, wasn't sure how long you and keys were gonna be with wakako

[20:05] David: not on a super strict timeline with dino, doesn't seem like that type of guy, but quicker the better. already know what he wants, no meet required 'till beers after

[20:05] David: btw we're drinking on him at Electric Orgasm when you're done

[20:05] 🌟BECCA!🌟: nova, see ya when i see ya babe. should be EZ

---

🌟BECCA!🌟 started a private message conversation with Skala.

[20:05] Skala: OMG YOUR NAME

[20:05] Skala: THAT'S SO COOL HOW DID YOU DO THAT ASGSDGSF

[20:05] 🌟BECCA!🌟: i know a cool netrunner. she's coming with actually

[20:05] 🌟BECCA!🌟: wakako put us on the job with you, where we meeting

[20:05] Skala: JULIO AND I ARE ALREADY AT THE WORKSHOP COME HELP US FUCK SOME SHIT UP

[20:05] 🌟BECCA!🌟: wait oh fuck did you two already go loud??

[20:05] Skala: NO NO WAKAKO TOLD US TO WAIT FOR EXTRA HANDS!! FUCK YEAH I DID NOT REALIZE IT WAS GONNA BE YOU HOLY SHITTTTT????

[20:05] 🌟BECCA!🌟: are you gonna do the all caps thing. kinda associate that mostly with adam smasher and i really don't like that guy these days

[20:05] Skala: no omg sorry im just super excited rn!!! wakako just told us she had some extra people coming and to wait around until she gives the word she didn't say it was gonna be YOU

[20:05] 🌟BECCA!🌟: don't get too big a head about this but that's like 95% of why i'm putting aside differences and working with the old bitch

[20:06] 🌟BECCA!🌟: that and she just gave me a REALLY fuckin nice sword

[20:06] 🌟BECCA!🌟: and this is a job about fucking up tyger claws, which i can live with, and not helping them, which sucks ass

[20:06] Skala: wait what's wrong with the tygers? aren't they just a gang

[20:06] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you uh. you know what they do right

[20:06] Skala: idk gangster shit? i don't really pay attention tbh

[20:06] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...oh god i regret this already

[20:06] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ok uh. you know who the mox are right

[20:06] Skala: yeah that gang all look cool as fuck! lesbian bad bitches hell yeah

[20:06] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ... i think you have somewhat misunderstood the concept

[20:06] 🌟BECCA!🌟: the mox aren't really a gang. they're a union for the sex workers in NC. you pay them, so that if bad shit happens to you, they send someone who looks like me to go fuck up whoever did that to you.

[20:07] 🌟BECCA!🌟: and ideally gonks see you're a dues paying member and go "oh fuck" and don't do that to you in the first place, but people in this city are gonks.

[20:07] 🌟BECCA!🌟: also, the dues help pay the rent and labor for lizzie's bar. up front, BD bar. in back, they make the BDs, but also they keep anyone who needs it safe and secret. place is preem.

[20:07] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you might be putting this together from me having the deets, but i used to be one of them! and you know who typically ended up getting me into the absolute most fucked up gonked out bullshit, by volume?

[20:07] 🌟BECCA!🌟: because, i don't know if you've looked around, but the gang in question runs japantown, where jig jig is, where most of the sex workers in the fucking city are?

[20:07] Skala: ...oooooooohhhhhh fuck.

[20:07] 🌟BECCA!🌟: oh thank god you're just a gonk and not secretly a fuckin asshole. yeah. the tyger claws run women. and they're not particularly nice about it.

[20:07] Skala: omg i'm sorry!!! :(

[20:07] 🌟BECCA!🌟: no that's fine! we can fix gonk. this job doesn't seem fucked up at least, we're just saving a little girl who got dragged into tyger bullshit so wakako can get paid on the side

[20:07] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ...least assuming she didn't leave something out. not someone i hear good things about on that front

[20:07] Skala: fuck fuck fuck i fucked up i'm sorry :( :( :(

[20:07] 🌟BECCA!🌟: no seriously! it's ok!!! you are literally a fangirl of me because of one of my worst fuckups in my entire life. fucking up is fine choomba

[20:07] 🌟BECCA!🌟: you new to this?

[20:07] Skala: third real gig lol i'm kinda scared

[20:07] 🌟BECCA!🌟: wait how the fuck did you get into afterlife???

[20:08] Skala: oh i punched emmerick in the balls and ran in!!!

[20:08] 🌟BECCA!🌟: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHH HOLY SHIT

[20:08] 🌟BECCA!🌟: ok i like you

[20:08] 🌟BECCA!🌟: omw to the gig rn. don't worry, mama rebecca and mama kiwi are gonna keep you and this other gonk safe

[20:08] Skala: ...that might be the hottest thing anyone i've been on a team with so far has said to me :o

[20:08] 🌟BECCA!🌟: nova. see you in a min. close by

🌟BECCA!🌟 closed the private message conversation.

Chapter 80: The KKK Took My Baby Away [II]

Notes:

Now I don't know
Where my Discord can be
They took it from me
They took it from me
I don't know
Where my Discord can be
They took it from me
They took it from me

Ring me, ring me ring me
Up the President
And find out
Where my Discord went
Ring me, ring me, ring me
Up the FBI
And find out if
My Discord's alive
Yeah, yeah, yeah

The workshop off Raymond Street in Japantown, under the freeway near the northern border of the district, looked unassuming. If someone didn't know the area, it'd just look like any other disused warehouse, just with less semi trucks going in and out and more dragon-emblazoned SUVs. It was raining; fortunately, the freeway provided shelter from the cold, slightly-acidic water droplets pelting the ground, as the four mercenaries loitered outside the gate.

Skala was as expected; taller than Becca, definitely muscular, dressed in a pair of dirty-looking jeans and a tank top. She'd brought a fairly nice shotgun; a Pozhar with a pistol grip. The other newbie, Julio, was something else entirely. When Becca looked at Skala, she saw someone who, while inexperienced, was at least close enough to her in age that it didn't fundamentally unsettle her seeing the girl join the merc life; this was clearly not the case with Julio. She looked at the boy, trying to make sense of what was in front of her.

"You're a child," Becca said, stunned.

"Hey, I turned fifteen a month ago!" Julio said defensively. "I'm just small for my age."

"You're a fucking child," Becca repeated, still stunned. "What the fuck is wrong with Wakako?" She'd started doing stuff around that age, sure- but it was all relatively minor stuff. Going to someone's apartment to collect a debt, turning drunks away from the bar, that sort of thing. Not going straight into the heart of a gang den and ripping shit. That had started with Maine. That had started when she was already an entire grown adult. The boy standing in front of her was claiming to be the age she was when she first worked a door shift at Lizzie's, and looked like he might even be stretching for that, and their fixer was about to send him straight into a Tyger den.

"I promise, I can pull this off," Julio said. "I can do it, alright?" Kiwi was looking at him, too, perturbed by the situation.

"Why do you want to?" she asked. Julio looked at her like that was a stupid question, and sighed.

"I grew up in Santo," he said. "Way we're taught, it's either the Academy or the grave, and my mama couldn't afford the Academy, so she worked meatwagons and I did ramen delivery on my bike and I just figured that was gonna be it."

"And then?" Kiwi asked.

"Mama got sick. Cancer. She's only got a few months left. She can't work anymore, and bike delivery doesn't pay enough for medical bills," Julio said. "Being a cyberpunk does." Becca looked at Kiwi, who nodded at her, knowing almost for certain what she was thinking at the moment, and then back at Julio.

"Tell you what. You hang back. Shadow the three of us," Becca said. They could spare Julio. Skala was a grown adult, and the extra muscle might prove necessary, but Julio wasn't going to add much but dead weight- it was best to just make that clear and explicit right up front, and keep him from attempting to be anything else. She pulled the Lexington out of its holster, and handed it to him. "Shit goes absolutely one hundred percent out of hand, this should keep you alive. Tygers don't usually wear armor. You ever shot a gun before?" Julio looked at the gun in his hand, awed.

"No," he said. "Fuckin' nova!"

"Simple. Put your pointer finger where the trigger is, point it at what you want to hit, and squeeze," Becca said, guiding his hand into the correct position and moving behind him to orient him towards an abandoned car, as he blushed. "Wanna take some practice shots at the windows?" she asked. Julio squinted, looking closely at the driver's seat window, and carefully squeezed the trigger, causing the gun to jerk in his hand. He jumped; the bullet went slightly wide, hitting the frame and cracking it.

"Couple more?" Becca asked. "We've got the ammo." Julio tried again, this time not jumping, and successfully placed two rounds into the window, first spiderwebbing and then shattering it.

"Hell yeah!" he said, lowering his gun with his right hand and pumping his fist with the other.

"Let's just pray you don't gotta use that," Becca said, moving back to the others. "Alright. Kiwi, you checked the cameras around here?"

"Yup," Kiwi said. "Looks like we've got about 25 in the building, five on the outside. Kid's tied to a chair in a room adjacent the garage. We smash and grab, we should be able to get her and get out before more Tygers rush us." Becca grinned, unsheathing her new katana, and walked towards the pedestrian door adjacent the gate. She tried it; unlocked. She walked in, motioning for Skala to follow closely and Julio and Kiwi to keep some distance, and moved out into the rain. A few Tyger Claws wearing fancy visors stared at her.

"Ohayou, gonk-brains," she yelled out, waving. One of the Tyger Claws scratched his head slightly, confused; another had a look of dawning horror on his face as he recognized Becca, and started running, slipping slightly on the wet ground. She pointed at him. "Smart guy," she said as she readied the katana at her side in a waki-gamae stance.

"What are we doing right now, choomba?" Skala whispered to Becca. More Tyger Claws were coming out into the open, to investigate the noise; minus the one who ran, plus the newcomers, there were about eleven Tyger Claws with technicolor hair and fancy visors circling the two. Becca looked back; Julio and Kiwi were in cover, watching from a safe distance. Perfect.

"Waiting for one of these gonks to do something stupid," Becca whispered back. "Follow my lead." On cue, one of the Tyger Claws reached for his own katana, and Becca activated her Sandevistan, sending time into slow motion as she slashed forwards full-force with the new blade. The Tyger Claw's hands fell off, clean stumps gushing as he quickly tried to react; another slash gouged into his chest deeply and sent him reeling. Skala, slowly, reached up with her shotgun to shoot a Tyger Claw who was coming at her with his katana, shattering his visor and head alike as a cloud of red sprayed outwards. Becca swiped the blood away at another Tyger Claw coming towards Skala's back, as the shotgun gave its telltale cha-chunk of another shell being chambered, splattering it on his visor and making him do a double-take.

As time went back to its normal pace, Becca slashed forwards with the katana, gouging deeply into the side of Skala's attacker and sending him to his knees; another slash took his head off, as Skala blew a massive hole in the chest of yet another gangoon, who flew back, making a sickening crunch on impact with the wall. Four down. The remaining seven were starting to waver, staggering back slightly. Becca turned around, facing the bulk of them, who had their backs to the garage.

"Who's next up?" she asked, looking at the Tyger Claws and twirling the sword around before settling in a lowered gedan-no-kamae stance. Another Tyger Claw, gaining his resolve back, rushed her with his own katana, and she parried it, shattering the blade to pieces, before countering with a slash to his knee and an upward slash that sent fountains of blood spraying from his throat. The Tyger Claws were retreating back further, towards the garage, and Skala nudged Becca.

"They're not looking at us," Skala whispered. It was true; they were looking past the duo. Becca turned around slightly, and nearly jumped back at the sight of a rather large Tyger Claw, not wearing a visor. The boss of the operation.

"You girls tryin' to fuck with us?" the man asked, unsheathing his own katana, visibly more ornate than the gangoons they'd been tearing apart. "Fuck up my op? You gonked or just got a death wish?" He looked at the gangoons. "Fuck are you all doing? Why'm I standing over four dead bodies and not two new hogtied bitches for Jig Jig?" Becca's vision went red for a second, and she started breathing heavily.

"Easy," Skala whispered to Becca.

"I'm the fucking vet here, bitch, you don't fuckin' tell me what to do," Becca whispered back, angrily. The girl was cute, but she needed to know her place in this operation. Becca looked the larger man dead in the eye. "What's your name?" she asked, keeping her voice as calm and unwavering as she could.

"Fuck you care?" he asked back. She looked at the other gangoons; their numbers had grown, but they were still terrified. A lot of them had recognized Becca from the XBD. The ones that hadn't had been sold by seeing her and Skala dismantle four of them in the space of a couple of seconds. The boss was seemingly the only true holdout.

"I like knowin' someone's name before I kill 'em," Becca said. "Especially when they've got me real pissed off." The boss laughed, looking over the gangoons.

"Get her ass, you fuckin' gonks! What the fuck are you all doing?" he shouted at them. "You all scared of this cunt?" Becca glanced down at the bodies; the guy with his hands taken off was still twitching and groaning slightly, but was on the verge, and the other three were rather messily dead.

"They're all factory workers, you fucking gonk," Becca said. "They're here to make swords and fuckin' baby-sit, not fight. It's just you and us two and an audience right now. How about we give you a little handicap, make it just you and me?"

"Fuck you mean, a handicap?" the boss scoffed. "I could beat your ass barehanded."

"You really think you'd win a two-on-one versus two mercs, one of whom's got a shotgun pointed at your dick right now? You that much of a fucking gonk?" Becca asked. Really, it could become a four-on-one at any moment, but Becca opted to keep that to herself. "We're here for the little girl. Let's go, just you and me. I win, we get the girl and get the fuck out, no arguments, none of your gonks come after us." The boss grinned. Some of the Tyger Claws were nodding at him, as if they were trying to tell him to just give her that.

"And if I win?" he asked. The real answer to this was that if he won, Kiwi would jump into action and start quickhacking people, and they'd get the fuck out of Dodge. Becca needed to come up with a more convincing answer.

"I dunno, I'll be fuckin' dead, you do whatever," she said. Skala raised an eyebrow. The rain started to clear, allowing the moon to shine on the wet pavement, and the boss laughed.

"Alright," he said, unsheathing his own katana. "Let's go."

Before he could even properly react, Becca had activated her Sandevistan and used it to get behind him; he attempted to activate his own in response, but between his time dilation still being too fast compared to Becca's and his own lack of skill, it wasn't enough. She raised her katana and sliced through him, splitting him from the shoulder down to his abdomen, and he fell to his knees. He grunted slightly; she took another swing, separating his head from his shoulders. Time returned to normal, and she picked the head up, holding it up by the man's black-dyed pompadour; she held it up for all the Tyger Claws to see, and they started cowering, muttering amongst themselves.

"Looks like that's pretty much it," she said to Skala. She looked over to the other two, watching from cover, and motioned for them to come out. "Let's regroup, get this girl, and get on the road." The newer merc was in absolute awe. She'd seen Becca work in a BD, but never in person, and it was a thing of beauty to her.

"That was the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen," Skala said, grinning. Becca smiled at her.

"Told ya we'd keep you around," Becca said. "God, this is a fucking nice sword. I like this." She twirled it around slightly in her hands, flicking the blood off onto the wet asphalt; it really did feel good to use. Kiwi and Julio eventually caught up, the Tyger Claws only shrinking back further into the garage and towards its basement as they noticed the extra two mercenaries and did the math in their heads; Kiwi was unfazed, being well used to what the job entailed, but Julio was a sickly greyish color.

"You alright there, bud?" Skala asked, patting him on the shoulder hard. He covered his mouth, trying not to look at the bodies.

"Gonna p... gonna pu..." he tried to mutter out through his palm, before rushing over to an open barrel and proceeding to let out his lunch into it. Becca rushed to his side, trying to keep his hair and the welding goggles he had on his forehead out of the splash zone.

"It's alright," she said. "First time seeing that?"

"Yeah," Julio said, weakly.

"It gets easier," she said. "Just stay behind us, try not to look at the ground when we're outside, alright?" Her tone was almost motherly. The age difference between them wasn't truly that big- he wasn't that much younger than David, really- but the experience and maturity gap was practically a canyon between him and David, let alone him and Becca, and it showed. Julio attempted a smile as best as he could.

"You'd be a good big sister," he said, woozy.

"Okay, now you're just saying dumb shit because you're in shock," Becca said, blushing and helping him to his feet. "Eyes up. Let's get this show on the road." Skala looked at Becca, something not fully adding up in her mind.

"Wait. You said on the chat you know Adam Smasher?" she asked. Becca stopped in her tracks, and the remaining Tyger Claws that were still wavering slightly towards the idea of attacking and welching on the results of the duel ran for the basement.

"Used to. Don't like him. What about it?" Becca asked. Something briefly short-circuited in Skala's mind.

"You are the coolest fucking bitch I have ever met," Skala said, stunned. Julio looked at Becca blankly, trying to reconcile what he'd heard about Adam Smasher in schoolyard fables with the girl who had him in a fireman's carry as they went into the garage.

Chapter 81: Come Sail Away

Notes:

I'm sailing away
Set an open course for the virgin sea
'Cause I've got to be free
Free to face the life that's ahead of me

On Discord, I'm the captain
So climb aboard
We'll search for tomorrow
On every shore
And I'll try, oh Lord, I'll try
To carry on

MEANWHILE

David and Lucy walked past the docks off the downtown coast. Their assignment was here, and somewhat more complicated than what the other half of the crew had been tasked with; Dino, as it turned out, was exactly as much of a Samurai fanboy as Rogue had said, and he'd caught wind that one of the yachts, belonging to a rich media named Josh Kavorkin, had one of Johnny Silverhand's old guitars hanging up on the wall. Not one of the particularly important ones, the ones Kerry Eurodyne was holding onto or that had otherwise ended up deep in private collections, but one of his live backups- a Schecter Mercury from the late eighties, right before the company went Japanese-owned (and eventually Arasaka-owned), modified into a seven-string to properly play chromatic rock.

It wasn't the most valuable piece of Johnny memorabilia- hence its location- but it had been touched by the hands of Dino Dinovic's God, and so the man desperately wanted to play it himself. Unfortunately for him, Kavorkin wasn't even remotely interested in selling it unless Dino was willing to buy the entire yacht off of him, which the fixer considered an affront. And so, David and Lucy were tasked with taking a dinghy out to the yacht, sneaking aboard, finding the guitar, and bolting with it. Anyone with three brain cells to put together could have figured out that this would immediately bite Dino in the ass in some manner, and the two certainly had more than that, but the eddies were good and the drinks after would be free, so the two wrote this off as his problem for him to worry about.

A typical guest of the marina would have gone through the security gates, checked in, et cetera; David and Lucy, however, simply hopped over the barrier that led down to the dock platform, where the dinghy was waiting for them. It was a shitty little thing, probably 2020s in vintage, with a body made of what appeared to be worn rubber and a small CHOOH2 motor sticking off the back, with an even smaller steering paddle up front that connected to the motor. Even in good weather conditions, it wouldn't have been ideal, but it was raining, and the waves were choppy.

"You wanna call it?" David asked, looking at Lucy. "Come back when it clears up?"

Lucy scanned the horizon. As the waves went further out, they seemed to calm down; the rain's boundaries didn't extend too far into the sea. The acidity of the rain didn't seem to be harming the dinghy any, and if the two could make it through the initial chop, they'd be relatively safe.

"I think we've got it," Lucy said. She scanned for security cameras and shut the two overlooking the docks off, buying the duo some freedom of movement, and the two walked across the dock to the dinghy, hand in hand, before climbing down to it. It rattled in the waves as their weight shifted it, worrying David slightly; Lucy rubbed his shoulder, gently, and it calmed him down enough to take on the world.

"You handle the ripcord, I steer?" David offered, moving to the paddle.

"Sure," Lucy said, moving to the back with a smile and pulling the CHOOH2 engine's ripcord, sending it purring to life. The dinghy started moving forwards; there was little in the way of speed control in it, meaning one simply had to kill the engine to stop it, and this worried David all over again. The yacht they had been told to go to was "Otterly Fabulous III," and Dino had claimed it was the only one that would be out this night. Unfortunately, however, there were two yachts.

"Which one's the target, you think?" David asked, yelling over the rain and the surprisingly-loud engine as he looked back.

"Think it's probably the big one," Lucy yelled back, gesturing at the larger of the two. "Rich media, right?" David nodded, trusting his partner's judgment, and pointed the dinghy starboard, rattling it slightly in the waves, and got a slight chill of excitement; this was starting to be kind of fun. Lucy noticed him smiling, and did the same. Eventually, the chop cleared, and their visibility started to improve; the larger yacht, which they'd been pointed at, was, in fact, labeled as "Otterly Fabulous III." The other one, a smaller model, was emblazoned with the words "Boaty McBoatface Junior." David laughed incredulously at the name, and Lucy found herself chuckling at it, too.

"Boaty McBoatface Junior!?" David asked. "What kind of gonk-ass name is that!?"

"I dunno," Lucy said, rubbing his shoulder. They were on the job, but something felt oddly romantic about the situation, with the two on a small boat together on the open water, the moon looking massive in the sky as it lit the waves. The idea that, if they got caught, they should just claim to be on a date occurred to her. David continued steering, bringing the dinghy as close as he could to Otterly Fabulous III's rear end, where a few corpos in suits were standing around, drinking.

"Kill the engine," David said to Lucy, quieter than the rain was forcing him to, and she did, pulling the other side of the ripcord out. "What's the plan for these guys?"

Lucy scanned them and uploaded a system reset quickhack, knocking the whole group of four unconscious, then gave David a knowing grin.

"That works," David said, smiling back. "Let's get up there." He stood up, grabbing the ladder to get onto the yacht, and started climbing; Lucy followed behind him, moving quickly. The suits, upon closer examination, were all Arasaka.

"Throw 'em in the ocean, maybe?" Lucy offered, grimacing.

"Nah," David said, gesturing. "You knocked 'em out. Don't want Trauma Team up our asses." Lucy went pale for a second, thinking about that possibility, and moved quickly behind David, scanning for cameras. "See anything interesting, babe?" he asked; Lucy gestured at a security camera that was overlooking the door to the yacht's interior and pulled David behind a crate.

"Camera, twelve o' clock," she said. "Lemme see how much of this we can see if I get in there."

Lucy connected to the camera network, looking through it with her optics, and cycled through the cameras. Most of it was empty; the yacht hadn't been out here for a party or anything like that. Just a solo excursion, with inexplicable Arasaka suits running around. Something about that didn't bode well.

Flipping to the other side of the deck, near the yacht's bar area, Lucy found the prize: a nice-looking, black seven-string guitar with the Samurai logo screen-printed onto it rather cheaply. The prize was not, however, hanging on the wall. Instead, an overweight, balding man was handing the guitar to a Japanese man in a suit, who had two bodyguards with him.

"You've gotta be kidding me," Lucy said. David went pale.

"What's wrong?" David asked.

"We're not just klepping, we're interrupting a buy," Lucy said. "You bring a gun?" David patted his jacket pocket, which was bulging with one of the Malorian Arms revolvers he'd taken to carrying.

"Smash and grab and get the fuck out, right?" David asked.

"Sounds right to me," Lucy said, shutting the cameras off.

"Nova," David said. "On three?" Lucy nodded.

After three seconds, the group at the bar was interrupted by a loud door slamming open, then another, then another. David activated his Sandevistan, turning himself into a blur as he grabbed the guitar out of the Japanese man's hands and tossed it to Lucy, who caught it, staggering back; time returned to its normal flow, and he slugged one bodyguard in the gut full-force, taking advantage of the lingering momentum to send the man reeling to the ground. Drawing his revolver from his jacket, he fired off two shots at the other bodyguard, one landing in his chest and staggering him, and the other shattering the top of the man's head in a spray of blood and brain matter.

The media and the corpo were both pale, with looks of abject terror in their eyes, and David didn't give them much time to register it; he punched the corpo in the jaw, knocking him out in a fighter's crucifix, as Lucy hacked the media and reset him, sending him unconscious to the ground. Neither of them were combatants, and the whole situation had moved too fast for them to even truly count as witnesses. Neither of them had to die. David looked over the situation, satisfied.

"Alright, let's get back and get this dumb thing to Dino," David said, motioning towards the guitar Lucy was holding. She looked at it; even though she wasn't much of a rockergirl, it still felt somehow crazy that she was holding something that Johnny Silverhand had previously held, and she tried to snap herself out of the shock of it so she could move.

"Sounds preem," Lucy said, zoning back in and moving back through the open doors. "Wonder how Bex and Kiwi are holding up?"

---

Aiko Kurata, as it turned out, was about seven years old, wearing the standard-issue girls' uniform from Arasaka Academy. As any child in her position would be, she was terrified, and the arrival of four new mercs, none of whom were Japanese and two of whom were covered in splattered Tyger Claw blood, was not helping. She screamed and attempted to jump the chair away from Julio, as the mercenary attempted to untie the ropes binding her to it, and he grimaced.

"Hey, calm down, we're here to get you out," Julio said, trying to talk her down. The girl simply screamed in his face.

"Don't think she knows any English," Becca said. She looked over the other three; none of them looked like they knew any Japanese, but she was open to being surprised tonight. "Any of you three got anything?" Skala racked her brain for a moment, promisingly, then shrugged; Julio was visibly out of his depth. Kiwi, meanwhile, was just trying not to laugh at the display.

"One of us really needs to get a translator installed if we're gonna be working with Wakako," the netrunner said.

"Yeah, no shit," Becca concurred, watching Julio fumble with the ropes. "Think we're maybe better off just carrying the chair with us?"

"Probably a good idea," Kiwi said. "She's just gonna run off if we let her loose." On cue, the girl bit Julio on the arm, making him wince and yell out in pain, as Becca tried not to laugh herself; Kiwi's point was proven fairly quickly. The merc motioned for Julio to stand down and dialed up Wakako on her Agent, waiting for an answer.

"The Mox Reaper reaches out once again," the fixer said, slightly crackling.

"Send the grandpa over to the warehouse," Becca said. "We've got the girl. Tyger Claws are too spooked to do anything."

"Excellent," the fixer said, in an almost sinister manner. "I will make the arrangements, and your payment will be forthcoming."

"Give him fair warning, we've got her tied to the chair still," Becca said. "She thinks we're kidnapping her, too, and we're afraid she's gonna run off if we let her out, so we're just each grabbing a chair leg and lifting." Wakako laughed.

"I will let him know," she said, and hung up. Within a few minutes, the girl stopped struggling so much, having apparently tired herself out, and the four could hear a car pulling up outside of the warehouse; Becca grabbed one leg of the chair, and motioned for the others to do the same, and they hefted it into the air, panicking the girl all over again. The four made a ridiculous procession, looking like the world's strangest servants to a tiny queen, and emerged from the foot gate they came in to the sight of a Quadra Turbo-R, with a bearded, middle-aged Japanese man in an Arasaka-emblazoned suit standing outside of it.

He gawked at them, taking in the image for a second, and then started laughing, walking towards them.

"Aiko-chan, tasukete kureru hito ni wa motto yasashiku shinaito ne," he said. Aiko, sweetie, you need to be nicer to people who help you. The girl smiled and started struggling, this time to get out of the ropes.

"Oji-chan! Anata ga kita!" the girl shouted. Grandpa! You came! The mercs set her down as Julio moved to start attempting the ropes again, this time to much less resistance; the man gestured at the four.

"You did... very good job," he said to them. "My granddaughter is safe. I am happy." Julio finally managed to undo the knots, and the girl jumped free, practically tackling her grandfather in a hug. "I am not accustomed to hiring... cyberpunks," he said, looking over the group, "but I do not regret it now." Becca looked at the other three, smiling.

"Seems like the job's over with," she said. "Meet up with David and Luce for drinks?" Julio did a double-take.

"Wait... David? You mean David Martinez?" Julio asked. Becca did her own double-take.

"Yeah, what about him?" Becca asked. Julio went red-faced with shock and excitement.

"What about him? What about him? Dude's practically a fuckin' legend! People in Santo been talking about him bringing a Sandevistan into the Academy and punching that corpo fuck for months!" Julio shouted. "And then the guy got three outputs and they made a fuckin' weird ass animal out of him? Oh my God, am I actually gonna get to fucking meet him!? Fucking... nova!" he sputtered. Becca blushed.

"C'mon, I mean... I love the guy, but he's not on the menu at Afterlife," Becca said.

"God willing he won't ever be," Kiwi chimed in. "Since you gotta be dead and all."

"Yeah, but I mean, you get my point," Becca said. "Kinda surprised David's got fans, too."

"Hey, weirder shit's happened to us," Kiwi said, as she walked in the direction of the nearest NCART stop, hoping to cue the other three to follow her. "They said we're drinking at Electric Orgasm downtown, right?" Becca picked up the pace to follow her, and Skala and Julio did the same after a moment.

"Yeah, they're on their way back to Dino's," Becca said. She looked over herself; there was a lot of Tyger Claw blood on her. "Could use a shower at the place before we do that. Skala, Julio, you two wanna pre-game a little?" Skala beamed, whereas Julio looked vaguely uncomfortable.

"Am I really old enough to be drinking?" Julio asked.

"You just watched, like, ten people die," Becca said, looking at him. "A Broseph won't fuck you up any worse than that just did. C'mon. You deserve it, kid." Julio beamed, finally starting to look fully comfortable in his own skin around the group from the praise.

Notes:

In the interest of full disclosure, I was in a pretty bad car accident about a week and a half ago, I've been unable to work, my freelance writing connections aren't doing fantastically, and I am emphatically not in a great situation. If you wanna help out, there's a Ko-fi page linked in the Discord announcements. If you're not in the Discord, this is a really good time to join! We do old anime watch parties every Saturday and one of the CP2020 artists recently joined! It's a fun place!

(I'm pretty sure I can't link that sort of thing directly on AO3, but I can absolutely put it in a Discord and link the Discord, so that's what I'm doing.)

Chapter 82: Big Gun

Notes:

Discord, got a hot one
Discord, got a number one
Discord, loaded and cocked
Discord, yeah, hot, hot, hot
Got Discord, ready or not
Discord, give it a, give it a shot, come on
Terminator, Uzi makers
A regulator, yeah, gonna get you later

The first impression Rebecca and Kiwi got of Electric Orgasm was that, somehow, it made Afterlife look clean by comparison. Rogue's bar was a merc bar disguised as a punk-hole, keeping itself low-key and grungy to avoid attracting the wrong crowds and make Emmerick's life simpler; Dino's was just a plain-and-simple punk-hole dive that looked like it hadn't been properly cleaned in years. It also wasn't nearly as busy as Afterlife; really, it wasn't very busy at all, with an empty stage and only a few scattered punters ordering drinks. The sound system that was meant to carry live performances was instead playing Window Weather over the radio, keeping the atmosphere from being entirely dead, but it could really only do so much.

Fortunately, this made David, Lucy, and Dino easy to spot, and vice-versa for Becca, Kiwi, and their new compatriots. David raised a bottle of Broseph Lager, as if to say "hello" with it, and waved them over; Becca looked freshly showered, with her hair still wet, which made him raise an eyebrow slightly.

"Hey," he said. "You drop by the apartment on the way here, choomba?"

"Yeah," Becca said, scratching the back of her head for a sec. "Got a lot of blood on me, figured I needed a shower and a change of clothes." She pointed at Skala and Julio. "You two remember Skala," she said, as the muscular merc waved sheepishly. "And that's Julio." Julio rubbed his eyes slightly, trying to internalize that he was here, in front of the newest up-and-coming legends of Night City's underworld, about to drink with them. It almost didn't feel real to him, like he was in a dream; he looked at David.

"You're David Martinez?" the kid asked. David looked around for a second.

"Yup," David said. "What's up, choom?" Julio went red in the face with shock.

"I... buh... huh..." Julio sputtered, trying to come up with a coherent sentence and utterly failing, as Becca tried not to laugh.

"You've got a fanboy too," she said, causing David to burst out laughing and making Julio go even redder, this time with embarrassment.

"What? Really, choom? What'd I do?" David asked, once he recovered.

"...seriously? You don't know?" Julio asked. "You ever been back to Santo lately?" It quickly occurred to David that he hadn't; there really hadn't been a lot of reason to go back ever since they moved to The Glen. All their gigs since had been elsewhere, and nothing they particularly needed was in that part of Night City.

"...no," David said, sheepishly. "Something I need to know?" Julio blinked.

"Choom, everyone in Santo knows who you are," the kid said. "That holovid of you punching that Tanaka kid out on the security camera? People have been talking about that preem shit for months." It made a certain kind of sense, really. Santo was one of the poorer areas of Night City. If a streetkid like him made it, naturally people were going to find out quick, and if the situation involved streetkid-on-corpo violence, people were going to really particularly love it. Something about it still unsettled David slightly, though, and it made more immediate sense that Us Cracks had wanted the creature (and paid so damned much for it).

"Kid, you just gonna ride his dick or you want a beer?" Dino chimed in, making Becca cover her mouth to hide her shocked laughter. She had never seen him before, and this was making for a hell of a first impression; he had an absolutely terrible hairstyle, with short green dreads on top separated from close-cropped black sides by large razor lines, a pair of oversized black aviators in imitation of his idol (that he was still wearing inside the darkened bar, for whatever unholy reason), and a cheap-looking faux-leather vest on, with the chest covered in buttons and patches to show off his rockerboy bonafides. His right arm was either 'ganic or a very nice cyberarm, but the left was a rather obvious and cheap cyberarm with visible bolts running down his shoulder to his elbow, and the strange mismatch completed the image. The immediate impression she got was that this was a man who was trying too hard; a walking midlife crisis, someone who'd kept it low-key until middle age and then decided he wanted to be the new Silverhand. And Rogue was right; he did, in fact, sound disturbingly similar to Smasher, albeit with a much warmer tone to his voice.

"I, uh..." Julio started, trying to build his confidence. "I'll take a Broseph!" He attempted to hide his sheepishness with exuberance and false confidence, and it didn't really work.

"You sure you're old enough for that?" Dino needled, shutting him down again.

"Just give him a beer," Kiwi said. "He's earned it. Survived his first gig."

"Yeah, and he's seen some shit, too," Becca said. "C'mon." Julio went red, slightly embarrassed by his new compatriots going to bat for him like this; he didn't feel like he'd earned it.

"I didn't really do anything, though," Julio said, looking down at his feet.

"Yeah, 'cause I told you not to, choom," Becca said. "And you listened. And you're here on your two feet and not in a meatwagon. Sounds to me like you've earned it." She looked at David and Lucy; Lucy was down to the last drops of some vodka cocktail or another, and David was swirling around the dregs of his bottle of Broseph Lager to try and somehow make the bottom of the bottle taste less awful. "Looks like we could use another round across the board," she said to Dino, who smiled and went behind the bar.

"Hey, for the crew that got me Silverhand's guitar, you fuckers could drink the bar dry," Dino said. "No other crew was taking that gig, and you kids did. I owe you gonks hard. On that note, I gotta pay you four before I black out and forget; chooms here told me you were the one handling the finances, mostly." He looked meaningfully at Kiwi.

"Yeah, that's pretty much right," Kiwi said, and within seconds, a transfer of fifteen thousand eurodollars popped up in her vision. Not huge money- not the kind of money they'd gotten for Debidio, or from Rogue, for instance- but that plus Wakako's pay would keep the lights on and their stomachs full. Dino started pulling bottles of beer out of the fridge for the newcomers, plus another for David, and used the well sprayer to make a vodka-NiCola for Lucy; with an embedded bottle opener in his fingertip, he swiped across the beer bottles, popping their tops in unison.

"Thanks, choomba," David said, taking his and taking a sip as the foam head sank down. "Preem trick there." Dino blushed slightly, making the slight crags in his face more visible.

"Yeah, thanks," Dino said. "Took me years to get down, but people always spend high when I do it, so it's a habit now." Becca looked at him quizzically for a second.

"Back up," she said. "You said we got you Johnny Silverhand's guitar?" The words made sense to her individually, and formed a coherent sentence, and yet somehow she was having trouble picturing David and Lucy klepping that. Generally speaking, that sort of thing required robbing Kerry Eurodyne, which sounded to her like an immediately bad idea.

"Not the guitar," Dino said, lifting his hand. "One the man touched, though, and that's good enough for me. Some corpo had it and wouldn't sell it, so I got it the hard way."

"...where is it?" Becca asked, looking around.

"Hanging up in the back office," Dino said, with a smile. "You think I'm risking some drunk gonk breaking that? C'mon." David twirled the beer around between his fingers, looking uncomfortable.

"You still feel like you owe us, past the drinks and eddies?" David asked, looking at the fixer cum barkeep.

"The whole fuckin' world," Dino said, without missing a beat. "You need something in particular? Looks like you've got it on your mind, choom." David sighed.

"Adam Smasher's gonna be on our ass in a few months," David said. Dino went pale, took a large gulp of his own beer, and looked David in the eyes.

"Well, fuck, man," the fixer said. "It was nice knowin' ya."

"What, you only owe us if we're not about to get fucked?" Becca spat at him. Dino looked at her; there was visible fear in his eyes.

"I owe you kids shit I can actually do," Dino said. "Guns, safe-houses, gigs, drugs, party invites. Fighting Adam fuckin' god damn Smasher is a little above my pay grade, chooms."

"What kinda guns you got, choom?" David asked, tilting his head slightly. A safe house, they could probably work out, and having one of the more overt fixers in the city arrange it for them didn't seem like the best plan if they wanted to stay quiet and secret. Firepower, however, was going to be immediately handy if they needed a plan B. Dino lit up for a second, and then started walking towards the back, motioning for the six to come along behind the bar.

"Think I got something for 'ya," he said, as the crew followed him into the back office; Becca noted the guitar hanging proudly above his metal-and-glass desk, still somewhat befuddled by it, as Dino punched in a code from memory on a keypad mounted to the wall. One of the walls shifted, revealing itself to be a sliding door and opening up another room, loaded wall-to-wall with assorted weapons from the 2020s to the present; Julio stared at it in shock for a moment, and Becca realized she might just be in Heaven.

"Holy fucking shit, choom," she said. It looked like something out of an old flatvid action movie. Dino looked the six over, sizing them up to figure out what the largest thing any of them could handle would be, and then retreated to the room, loudly knocking boxes and loose guns around as he searched.

"Found it," he said, re-emerging from the mess of heavy ordnance, hefting up a rifle about as long as Becca was tall with some effort. It looked something like a Nekomata, but if a Nekomata had eaten another Nekomata; to describe the thing as heavy weaponry almost seemed to be doing a disservice to it. "Militech AM-3," the fixer said, hefting the gun onto the desk, which it practically covered, with a grunt. "Been keeping this fucker around for a while, and I guess it's fate. They used to call this son of a bitch the 'anti-matter rifle' back in the war. I can give you this and a full clip, five rounds, but anything else, you're on your lonesome. I don't even think they make the ammo for this anymore."

"What's it shoot?" Becca asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Thirty-millimeter uranium rounds," Dino said. "Rocket-propelled, too. Made special for taking out combat borgs. Short of one of you going FBC and picking up some Panzerfaust lessons, this motherfucker right here? This is the best chance you've got. This doesn't put holes in him, I'm not sure anything in NC short of heavy artillery will." He was smiling, a newfound confidence having come over him.

"Any of us gonna be able to shoot that thing?" Kiwi asked, raising an eyebrow and looking over the crew. Skala looked like she could carry it fairly easily, but Kiwi had no real way of knowing if the newbies were going to stick around long-term; out of the four of them, David was thin and wiry (albeit toned as Hell), Lucy was nearly rail-thin, Becca and Julio were both clearly too small to handle it, and she knew for a fact that she herself would probably break both of her arms trying to fire off a shot. Dino tilted it upright, then unfolded a bipod, stabilizing it on the desk; he gestured at it in mock pride.

"Ta-da," he said. "C'mon. They make this shit so fifteen-year-old draftees can shoot it, choomba. Militech ain't designing for bodybuilders, they're designing for people living off a hundred calories of scop a day. Just lay down and use the bipod and let the Earth take the thunder. Less likely he'll see you first that way, too, but I'm pretty sure that motherfucker's got implants so he can literally smell fear, so I dunno."

"Rogue would be shitting herself right now if she knew about this," Becca muttered, mostly to herself, looking at the massive weapon.

"Shit, you six know the Queen?" Dino asked, taken aback. David shrugged.

"Yeah," David said, gesturing at the main crew of himself, Lucy, Becca, and Kiwi. "Us four do. Ate dinner at her place a while back. She's nice." Dino sputtered, trying to make sense of what David had just said, while Julio did a visible double-take, having just mentally added one new insane thing to the rap sheet of Santo's newest ongoing urban legend. The fixer managed to calm himself down, looking at the gun and the crew.

"Take the piece," he said. "You six are welcome any time. Any of you gonks get flatlined on this bullshit, you come to me about getting a drink in your name, alright?"

"Isn't that Rogue and Claire's thing?" David asked, mildly confused.

"Yeah, but you six are looking like you're something special, and I'm not leaving money on the table for the queen bitch if I can help it," Dino said, prompting Becca to cover her mouth again to hide that she was cracking up. The true problem between him and Rogue was starting to become obvious, and something about seeing the Queen of the Afterlife and what essentially amounted to a bootleg Johnny Silverhand in a petty long-distance feud over the bar business deeply amused her; she noticed David and Lucy trying not to crack up, as well. Kiwi, somehow, was staying stone-faced, and the new kids were too awestruck by the whole situation to even internalize what they were hearing.

"Thanks for the gun, choom," David said, giving Dino a brotherly slap on the back and attempting to heft the thing up, as the other five started leaving the office. "We somehow manage to take that borg psycho fuck down with this thing, you can have any damn drinks our crew needs named after us. Fuck, this gonked thing's heavy."

"Uranium rounds, choomba," Dino said. "Anything big enough for borgs is gonna be a real motherfucker for us normal people to lug around. Trade-off you gotta make." It was already starting to hurt David's shoulders lifting it, and he looked at Skala, the largest person in the room, meaningfully; the newbie snapped to attention suddenly, a look of slight embarrassment on her face, and hurried over to him, lifting up the barrel as if the massive rifle were a bookcase or couch. Even for the two of them, it took some effort, and David resolved to get some muscle weave from Vik next time he was in the chair; he was fairly sure he looked ridiculous. He looked at Dino.

"Thanks, choom," he said, smiling.

"Like I said. I owe you kids. Come back alive when this bullshit's done, alright?" Dino said, ushering the crew out towards the bar floor.

---

The night was quiet, and the crew plus their newcomers were buzzed, as they waited for the NCART to take four of them back to The Glen, Julio back to Santo Domingo, and Skala back to Japantown. Kiwi had taken the opportunity to pay out Skala and Julio from Wakako's reward of forty thousand eddies on the way, and both of their eyes had immediately widened with shock at the amount of money they received; as far as she knew, David was keeping Maine's old rules in place, and everyone got a fair and equal cut. It hadn't really come up, since the four had been pooling their finances for about as long as David had been in a position to decide that, but it made sense. In total, this meant the crew was hanging on to about thirty-five thousand eddies; they were by no means rich again, but it was enough to cover at least a couple of months of rent, bills and food, with some leeway, and that was the important part.

David looked over the group, and immediately noticed that Julio had a look of abject fear on his face.

"You alright, choombatta?" he asked.

"You said... was I hearing all that right over with Dino at the bar? You all are gonna go fight Adam Smasher?" Julio asked, his voice quaking slightly.

"Kinda more like he's coming for us," Lucy said. "But yeah. You heard right. He killed Michiko Arasaka, he's gonna frame me and Becca for it, and once the storm starts, he's gonna be coming for us four. Probably along with all the extra weight 'Saka can bring." Julio was struck speechless for a second by this. He'd heard stories of Adam Smasher, playground rumors, and while he didn't know specifics, he knew that Adam Smasher was the scariest thing you could possibly see in Night City. If he was coming for you, you were a walking corpse, so went the conventional wisdom.

"You're... you four ain't expecting me to fight him, too, right?" Julio asked, his eyes like dinner plates, looking like he was on the verge of shitting himself. Skala looked at him, and at the crew, with a similar expression.

"Goes for me, too," she said. "I, uh... I dunno if I wanna die. Sounds like it sucks." David sighed quietly, looking at the two newbies.

"Put it this way," he said. "If you two wanna walk away right now from the whole gonked-out bullshit, I get it. Your shoes, I'd feel like a fucking gonk trying to fight Smasher, too."

"Oh, thank fucking God," Skala said, relief audible in her voice.

"But if either of you wanna help out, the more chooms we got, the better of a chance we got," David said. "I'm not gonna make either of you two do anything, but if you're in, nova."

Julio looked David in the eyes. Something about hearing this from David Martinez, the idol of every broke streetkid in Santo Domingo, the kid with the Sandevistan, the dream they were all trying to live up to, with a tone of what sounded like sincere respect, made him feel like he could take on all of Night City at once. Like he was a real cyberpunk, not just a delivery boy trying to make better cash. Like he could, in fact, throw down with Adam Smasher himself and win. And, even in the worst case scenario, he'd get to be part of the legend. He wasn't going to pass that up for the world.

"I'm in," he said, his voice still quaking slightly. He was afraid, but he was starting to understand what the motivational shards meant when they told him bravery was about overcoming fear and doing the scary thing anyways. Skala looked at Becca, as if waiting for a similar cue from her; the solo looked at her newbie fangirl back with confusion.

"What?" she asked. "What D said. You in or out, choom?" Skala thought it over for a second, running down the pros and cons of the situation in her head, weighing the value of being seen as a particularly badass merc in death versus the value of continuing to be alive.

"You know what? Fuck it, I'm in too," Skala said.

"You sure? Didn't seem too thrilled about it a second ago," David said.

"We're in Night City. I'm probably not making it to 40, no matter what I do," Skala said. "If I wanna make the big time, this is the big time. No bigger blaze of glory than this. We lose, I get a sick-ass drink named after me at... I guess Electric Orgasm, and people remember my gonk ass forever; we win, no more Adam fuckin' Smasher in the world. Sounds good to me, either way." David smiled, looking at the two.

"Good to have you two on, chooms," he said, as the NCART train started to pull in for its stop.

Notes:

Yes, I'm aware the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit makes this fic... noticeably dated to before we got all that, now.

No, I will not be retconning anything to match, though I will be strip-mining little bits and pieces where appropriate. A lot of why I did the Marathon crossover and very explicitly established "we are in a parallel timeline to canon" was to hedge my bets against being horribly wrong about everyone's lore.

I am still very, very broke, so here's your chapter-ly reminder that there's a Ko-fi link in my Discord announcements, please kick me a little so I can eat decent food.

Chapter 83: A Horse with No Name

Notes:

After two days in the Discord sun
My skin began to turn red
And after three days in the Discord fun
I was looking at a river bed
And the story it told of a river that flowed
Made me sad to think it was dead

You see, I've been through the Discord on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the Discord, you can't remember your name
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain
La, la, la la la la...

The North Badlands were, generally speaking, boring. Desert, mesas, and massive piles of trash reaching twenty or thirty feet tall blended into each other for miles, and the crew was starting to get both thirsty and annoyed in the back of Falco's Emperor.

"Lucky I know this area pretty well," Falco mused to himself. "We got lost out here, we'd be pretty well fucked."

"Why the fuck is there so much trash out here, anyways?" Becca asked, holding her nose and furrowing her brow. "We forget how to use a fuckin' incinerator in the past 50 years and then suddenly rediscover that tech?"

"You wanna start doing community service, be my guest," Kiwi said, rolling her eyes slightly. A large percentage of the hobbyist tech she got from scavs came out of the trash mountains; it was definitely unsightly, and the smell was making her wish she'd put her vent back on for this ride, but she was quietly thankful that Night City had never been the most environmentally-friendly place.

"Kinda makes me wanna get a Nazare," David said, trying to avoid looking at the trash piles and focus on the rolling mesas as he tapped his foot impatiently. He looked up at Falco. "You got any water in here, choom?"

"Under your seat," Falco said, without looking back, as David reached down and grabbed a plastic water bottle out of a large pack behind his feet. "Always make sure I've got that if I'm going out in the desert. I've got people I can call if we have a breakdown or pop a tire, but they take a while. Inside of a car turns into a fuckin' oven out here without AC."

"You don't know how to change a tire?" Lucy asked, raising an eyebrow, as David handed her a water bottle as well.

"Ain't the knowledge that's the problem," Falco said. "It's the tire. Only got space for a spare, and spares barely work for good asphalt. You try to move on a spare out here, you're getting maybe ten feet. We pop a tire, I've gotta call someone to bring another heavy-duty out." Lucy nodded slightly, not really following the explanation, but at least feeling more comfortable that their driver seemed to know what he was talking about. Eventually, Falco cut left off of the road between two trash piles, and started following a rather well-beaten sand path; the Emperor rattled as the tires passed over rocks and bumps in the sand, proving his point about the tires handily.

"Lucky you remember where the hell this place is," Becca said.

"First job we ever worked together, wasn't it?" Falco asked. "Was kinda funny. Your brother gave me a call, told me you were doing work out here and needed a driver so you wouldn't come back a dried-out skeleton." Becca smiled slightly.

"I miss that fuckin' gonk," she said.

"I miss 'im, too," Falco said. "Been a little weird with all the old-timers gone." The crew sat in silence for a moment, before what looked like a very well-settled nomad camp came into view, past a mesa that had blocked it from the road. The occupants, a few of whom were milling about wearing turbans and plain robes, had set up multiple clay-and-stone buildings in the desert, in the small clearing they occupied; generators scattered their outer walls, along with one that was hooked up to a water purifier attached to multiple rain collectors. The smell of burning CHOOH2 and incense took over the trash as the crew got closer, and Falco parked the Emperor, bringing the massive vehicle to a stop.

"You coming with?" David asked their driver.

"I'll stay in the car, keep the AC running, choomba," Falco said. "Y'all four handle what you gotta handle." David nodded, and the four started walking; an old man, without any noticeable chrome, wearing the apparent uniform of the camp started shuffling towards them in response.

"Hello, there," the old man called out. He looked at Becca, in particular. "I see you've come to reconsider what we discussed?" Becca smiled, surprised the old man remembered, but held up her hand.

"Still not interested in the sales pitch, Hamit," she said. "I'm here looking for someone again. Full-borg, went by Shaitan at one point." Hamit's face went dark, and Becca was slightly taken aback.

"I know exactly the man you're speaking of," he said. "You are not the first to come here seeking him. And you will likely not be the last." The old man spoke slowly and deliberately, making it clear that English was not his first or native language, but with an impressive command of it nonetheless.

"Is he here?" David asked, attempting to cut the bullshit. The remaining two stayed silent, unsure how to handle this situation.

"Yes, and he does not wish to take visitors," Hamit said. "He came here for solitude. To pay penance to Allah for deeds done in an old life. Thus far, we have honored that well." David looked Hamit in the eyes and sighed quietly. This was decidedly outside his comfort zone, even if he thought he had an angle.

"I've got an idea of what those deeds might be, and we're here because one of them's coming back to haunt everyone else," David said. "If he wants to do penance or whatever, we've got a better opportunity than... whatever the Hell gonked shit you've got him doing here." Hamit grimaced at the slight against his lodge.

"David's right," Becca said, chiming in. "It's life or death." Hamit looked at her; it was clear that he held some respect for her, and that he was debating internally on what to do. Eventually, he began walking, towards one of the clay-and-stone buildings with a particularly large generator.

"Come," he said. "Do not make me regret this, children." He pulled open a door carved from stone, with Islamic calligraphy chiseled carefully into every facet of it, to a large, dark room and pulled a metal cord; a makeshift ceiling light came on, illuminating what appeared to be a storage closet. Upon further investigation, all of the boxes contained FBC parts and organic material to feed into a biopod for basic sustenance; against the back wall, a strange sort of pod that resembled a fancy netrunner bed sat nestled, facing east towards Mecca, humming as electricity fed into and out of it and it churned through the wet green goo that fed its occupant.

"What am I looking at here?" Becca asked. Hamit pointed at the pod; an old full-body-conversion biopod was plugged into it in the top.

"Shaitan," he said. "He has been resting here, in solitude and penance, for fifty years. By his own choice. We feed and water him twice a day, as one of the daily chores, and otherwise, his time is occupied with prayer and meditation." David stopped for a second, then raised his finger, a horrified expression coming over his face.

"How do you know if he wants out?" David asked, looking at Hamit, and Hamit's eyes went wide, too.

"I don't," Hamit said, suddenly realizing the implications of this device, before pausing for a second, looking at it. "Allah forgive me, I hope we haven't imprisoned this man for half a century," he muttered under his breath.

"Well, sounds like we need to get him out, then," Becca said. "He leave a body anywhere that you took that out of?" Hamit rubbed his chin for a second, and then started rearranging boxes; slumped against another side of the room, collecting dust and cobwebs, was an old and slightly rusted Militech Eclipse, with one of its arms hanging off it by metal wiring and no light from the ninja-style mono-eye.

"That is his," Hamit said. "If you wish to bring him back to the world of the living and out of Allah's embrace, I might advise doing it away from here. I worry how he will react." Kiwi tried very hard not to laugh; there was a certain black comedy to the possibility of Shaitan having come here hoping to meditate and relax for a short time, and ending up trapped in Islamic braindance Hell for longer than any of the crew had been alive instead.

"Probably a solid idea," Becca said, grabbing the borg body by the legs and motioning for David to come get the other side. "Luce, Keys, one of you two grab the biopod? We'll handle 'em in the car."

---

The Emperor chugged down the highway, back towards Night City, as the crew sat in silence; David, Lucy and Becca had an empty borg body slumped over them in the back seat, and Kiwi was holding a biopod, gently tossing it back and forth in her hands.

"Y'all gonna hook that fucker back up?" Falco asked. "Kinda awkward driving around with basically a dead guy in the back." Kiwi looked back at the crew.

"Think we're far enough," David said, looking back; the Bektashi lodge was no longer in sight. Kiwi passed the biopod back as the crew rolled the Eclipse over to its stomach; David took the biopod, took a deep breath, and plugged it into the visible port in the back of the neck, giving it a twist to tighten it and lock it into place. The Eclipse twitched slightly. "Roll 'em back over," David said, and the three heaved to get the Eclipse back onto its back. Fortunately, it was a relatively lightweight FBC body, not much heavier than any of the crew, but it still took some effort to move. Now, the mono-eye had turned on, its red light shifting back and forth.

"Who are you people? What the fuck is going on? What year is it? Wha- what the fuck? Where am I?" the FBC sputtered, clearly terrified.

"Easy," Lucy said. "It's okay. You're safe. We're with Rogue. The year's 2076, and you're in the back of a car, getting taken out of that weird camp." The borg paused for a second.

"I've been in that braindance pod for fifty years!?" Shaitan asked.

"That's what Hamit said, yeah," Becca said. Shaitan sat up, putting weight on her legs in the middle and making her grimace in pain, and looked out the window at Night City; he laid back down.

"I need... time to think about this," he said. "I... wha..." He was attempting to form thoughts about being brought into a world immediately, deeply unfamiliar to him, but couldn't. "I need a fucking burger," he said, finally. "And a beer. I'm real, real goddamn tired of biopod baby food." Falco chuckled.

"Looks like your boy's back among the living," he said to the crew. He looked at Shaitan. "They'll get you back up and situated. They're good people. Trust 'em, alright?"

"You take me to the nearest place that sells a decent fuckin' burger and Heineken, and I'll trust whoever you tell me to trust," Shaitan said, sounding vaguely nauseous as he tried to process his surroundings. Even the crew themselves looked odd to him- back in the 2020s, nobody did the electromagnetic wiring except rockerboys like Johnny, and their fashion styles and hair looked like something out of an anime. Falco was somewhat comforting- clearly, nomads hadn't abandoned the cowboy chic look in half a century, but the other four might as well have been Martians.

"What's a Heineken?" Lucy asked. Shaitan did a double-take.

"What's... you telling me they don't have beer nowadays? Green label, comes from Europe?" Shaitan asked.

"We've got Broseph," Becca said. "Kinda the main cheap beer around here." Shaitan sighed.

"Fuck it. Beer's beer," he said. "Just need something in me that isn't biopod goo. Fuckin' starving," he muttered.

Chapter 84: The Way Life's Meant To Be

Notes:

… Well, I came a long way to be here today
And I left you so long on this avenue
And here I stand, in the strangest land
Not knowing what to say or do
As I gaze around at these strangers in Discord
I guess the only stranger is me
And I wonder (yes, I wonder), yes, I wonder (oh, I wonder)
Is this the way life's meant to be?

Shaitan had been clear about what he wanted, and so the first stop for the crew was equally clear: Tom's Diner, in Little China. The proximity to Vik was a bonus; they weren't sure how experienced he was with FBCs, but something needed to be done about the old merc's hanging arm if he was going to make much use of it, and he was audibly creaking with rust every time he took a step or bit into his burger. The mouthplate on the Eclipse had outright rusted off, and the synthskin that ordinarily gave him a semi-recognizable human lower face underneath it had dry-rotted to expose his chrome directly. Kiwi faintly hoped he had a stash of eddies somewhere to pay for those repairs with; she knew Vik extended lines of credit freely and happily to mercs he liked, but she wasn't entirely sure if that was the case for full-body conversion parts.

"Fuck, this is a good burger," the old merc said, before cautiously taking a sip of his beer, creaking as he grabbed it. "Not a bad beer, either. Fuck. Fifty god damn years. Dunno how much of this is the food and beer actually being good, versus being the first thing I've had in half a fuckin' century that isn't green goo." He lowered his head, still processing just how long he'd been out for.

"Sorry, choom," David said, grimacing. Shaitan lifted his good hand up.

"Not your problem, kid," he said, his voice synth crackling a bit. "Appreciate you kids getting me out. There a catch, or you all just being good Samaritans for an old-timer? Said you were with Rogue." The crew looked at each other, and then back at Shaitan. David sighed.

"Adam Smasher's coming for our asses, and Rogue told us you're the only person who's ever full-on fought him and lived," David said. "We need your help." Shaitan's face wasn't very expressive- it was an old-type borg, capable of barely passing as a regular heavily-chromed and armored human with its full synth-skin, but looking more like an outright robot in the merc's current condition. Even with that, though, the way he looked at David indicated extreme shock.

"My ears gotta be fucked," Shaitan said. "You said Adam Smasher? That son of a bitch is still around?" His tone of voice told the crew that this was an extreme sore spot for the merc.

"Yep, unfortunately," Lucy said, darkly.

"All you had to say," Shaitan said. "Get me to a decent ripper."

"That was quick," Becca quipped.

"We've got history," the merc said. "Get me to a decent ripper, and we'll talk further. Not even Allah could save this body, and while I appreciate having arms and legs and eyes again, I need better ones."

"You got the eds for it?" Kiwi raised an eyebrow. Shaitan laughed.

"I had a pretty decent stash going when I went in," he said. "Compound interest should be working in my favor. Gotta check my account to make sure, though." Kiwi palmed her own face in annoyance at herself; of course he wasn't going to have a modern Agent linked up to his internal cyberware to just look with.

"You're with NC First National, I'm guessing?" Kiwi asked.

"Correct," Shaitan said. It wasn't a hard guess; there were precisely two major banks in NC, Night City First National and Arasaka Bank, and only Arasaka corpos used the latter of the two. Even if Shaitan had used a different bank in the 2020s, the likelihood was that Night City First National had bought them out. Kiwi did a quick scan with her optics, matching Shaitan's identification to a bank account, and her eyes went wide.

"Holy shit," she said. "How much did you go in with, exactly?"

"Had a little under a million saved," Shaitan said. "How much am I working with now?"

"About fourteen and a half million," Kiwi said, blinking slightly and making the rest of the crew, Falco included, do a shocked double-take. "Yeah, okay, safe to say you've got the eds for it." The old merc smiled knowingly, if slightly uncannily given his state.

"And lucky for you, we know the best ripper in the city," Becca said, standing up from the diner booth they'd all packed into and prompting the rest of the crew to follow. Shaitan took one last large gulp of his beer, draining it dry, and stood up as well, creaking and grunting slightly as he did so.

"Well, let's go see 'em," the old merc said.

---

"What the hell did you kids just drag into my office?" Vik asked, looking at the rusted Militech Eclipse in his ripper chair with a mixture of amazement and horror as his preferred boxing match played on the monitor.

"Nice to meet you too," Shaitan quipped at him, making him jump back.

"Fuck, you stuck a fucking biopod in that thing!?" Vik asked.

"Guessing you're not comfortable doing FBC work?" Becca asked, raising an eyebrow.

"No, I'm fine with it, just... where the fuck did you kids even find this? This is Red tech. No, probably older. What the hell even is this?" Vik asked, trying to process what, exactly, he was looking at beyond something much older than he was used to seeing.

"Militech Eclipse, manufactured 2022," Shaitan said. "Been out a lot longer than I meant to. Got biz to clean up."

"Well, I can't fix that thing," Vik said. "Parts for something that old, you're looking in the dumps out in the badlands or getting lucky in the scav markets, not ordering from reputable manufacturers. Fuck, that's from when I was a little kid. You in the market for a new body?"

"You got any?" Shaitan asked, his voice synthesizer crackling. "Those used to be hard to come by." Vik shrugged.

"I've got a few things," the doctor said. "Dealer samples, mostly. Nothing too fancy, nothing military like that, but I've got a couple of Rocklin Alphas and Dynalars lying around."

"Rocklin Alphas?" Shaitan asked, doing a double-take. "Those like the IEC ones?"

"Christ, you are old as hell," Vik said, blinking. "IEC's been out of business for decades. Rocklin Augmentics bought them out and took over all their designs." Shaitan sighed.

"So, yeah, same thing. Guessing the Dynalars are enviro? Used to be their thing back in the 2020s," Shaitan said.

"Yeah, I've got a Brimstone and an Aquarius hanging around in the back, too," Vik said, looking at the back room. "You planning on needing either of those?" Shaitan waved him off with his good hand.

"Nah, I'm good with the Alpha class," he said. "Those took some tuning back in the day to get into fighting shape, but I think I got a guy for that." Shaitan had a moment of realization, annoyance somehow visible in his artificial face. "Unless the bastard flatlined while I was out. Fuck." Vik shrugged.

"Happy to take over if he did," he said. "They'll vouch for me." He looked at the rest of the crew, the ones who weren't all-chrome yet, meaningfully.

"Yeah, Vik's solid," David said. "Beats the hell out of my old ripper."

"Speak for yourself, Vik," Becca said, almost overlapping David, as she scratched the nape of her neck meaningfully. Durandal had gone quiet for a bit, thankfully- the AI was finally starting to really internalize that he wasn't exactly in Kansas anymore, and that she knew the lay of the land better than he did- but she was still a little sore that the ripper had gotten her into this situation. Vik looked up at her.

"Something wrong with your spine?" Vik asked.

"Christ, you don't even know the half of it," Becca said. "Did you know that thing had a time-travelling AI riding shotgun in it?" Vik did a double-take, staring at Becca.

"No, I didn't. What? No. Huh?" he sputtered, shocked.

"This one's kinda on us," Kiwi chimed in. "He wasn't awake until we started monkeying around with it. Whatever you or the guy you bought it from did to shut him up, it was working until we started poking it."

"Well, then why the fuck did you start poking it!?" Vik asked, stunned.

"Because, uh... whoo boy," Kiwi started. "Shit, we didn't tell Vik, did we?"

"...what the hell did you gonks do on the moon!?" Vik asked.

"They've got Adam Smasher up their asses," Shaitan chimed in again. "Whole reason they woke me up. I'm one of the very few people ever to throw down with that gonk, back when I used to run with Rogue and Silverhand, and not get flatlined." Vik sighed, looking at the crew as if he was about to lecture them, before doing a double-take and looking at Shaitan again.

"Wait... Rogue and Silverhand?" Vik asked. "You're... huh..." he started sputtering.

"Shaitan," the borg finally properly introduced himself. Vik looked back at the crew, his eyes wide as dinner plates.

"I was about to tell you kids you're probably fucked, but... holy shit. How!? You've been dead for half a century! Where the fuck did you kids even..." Vik's shock was making him largely unable to form complete sentences, at this point.

"To quote a writer I've always liked, the report of my death was an exaggeration," Shaitan said. "Hard to kill a full-borg. Someone found my biopod and patched me back together after the Tower- still not entirely sure who- and I went off the grid and stayed with the Sufis, to try and atone for how bad I fucked that one up by honoring Allah. Mashallah, these kids pulled my ass out of that, because they needed my help."

"Well, you kids aren't nearly as fucked as I thought," Vik said, looking at the rest of the crew. He looked back at Shaitan. "I'm gonna need to pop out your biopod for a minute. That okay?" Shaitan nodded.

"I mean, yeah," he said. "Wasn't expecting you to clone me."

"Still gotta ask," Vik said, walking to the back room to find the Rocklin Augmentics Alpha Class he'd gotten as a dealer sample. With a grunt, he started dragging it out of the back room; he was strong, but full-body conversions were heavy when they didn't have a biopod in them working all the weight-balancing servos. "Fair warning, this isn't gonna have all the fancy combat shit a Militech or 'Saka body does unless you tune it, and I don't have the parts handy. You wanna ruin people's day with this, you're gonna need a different ripper."

"Works for me," Shaitan said. "I'll see if my guy's still around." Vik nodded, grabbed Shaitan's biopod, and twisted to dislodge it; the metal cylinder slid right out of its housing, unlocked, and the broken FBC body shut down, awaiting its final fate in a junkyard. He stood the Alpha up with a grunt of exertion, holding its weight up to the best of his ability, circled around it, and pushed the biopod into the nape of its neck; it clicked, and he twisted it to lock it, causing the eyes to light up and the weight to noticeably shift, allowing Vik a sigh of relief.

"All good?" Vik asked.

"That was fast," Shaitan said, happily. "Kids weren't kidding."

"Yeah, they drop by a lot," Vik said. "Some of my best customers. Walk around a bit for me?" Shaitan started pacing around the office in his new body.

"Seems like it works fine," he said. "Feels a fuck of a lot better than what I previously had."

"Arms up?" Vik asked; Shaitan lifted his arms up vertically, and then put them down at his side. "Alright, you've got full range of motion. Perfect."

"We good here, choom, or do you need to keep him around for a minute?" Becca asked, not really wanting to sit through an hour of FBC diagnostics and hoping that wasn't where Vik was going with this.

"Long as the joints hold up, everything else should be in working order," Vik said. "I was a little worried about those because it's been sitting there for a while, but they're not rusted, so he should be fine. Just call me if he's not, same as always, alright?" Becca nodded.

"How much do I owe you?" Shaitan asked. "This thing got one of those fancy internal agents the kids have?"

"It should," Vik said. "If not, I can probably pop one in for you, those are rated for both organics and full-borgs." Shaitan fumbled for a second, before successfully pulling up the Agent and accessing his bank account.

"Alright," the borg said. "So, how much we talking?"

"Free of charge," Vik said. "Fuck, I'm honored to even have you in my office. Not every day I get to work on someone who was at the Tower when it blew."

"Inshallah, it won't be the only chance you get," Shaitan said. "You're a damn good doc."

"So, Afterlife now?" David asked.

"Shit, that bar's still around?" Shaitan asked, slightly shocked. "Used to love that place. Figured it'd be gone by now."

"How'd you think we knew Rogue?" Lucy asked, causing Shaitan's shock to turn to visible confusion written over his metal face. "Yeah, let's head to Afterlife and let her know we got the borg."

"You got that Nomad on the horn? Bit of a walk from here to Medical Center," Shaitan said. David looked at him, visible confusion written all over his face.

"...huh?" he grunted. "Afterlife's only a couple blocks away from here."

"...wait, it is?" Shaitan asked. "They move at some point?" David shrugged, and the crew looked at each other, not really sure either.

"Yeah, Rogue packed the bar up and moved to Watson when I was in my twenties," Vik said, as the crew silently thanked whatever God was watching them that there was more than one old-timer in the room; Shaitan did another double-take at the mention of Rogue, in this context, and then decided that at this point, he was willing to just roll with it. "Part of why I put my office here, you know?" he added.

"Well, hell, that makes things easier," Shaitan said, as the crew stood up and moved to exit the office. "Yeah, I could stand to catch up, see how she's been holding up, figure out what the hell I missed with her running the place now. Be nice seeing a familiar face again."

Notes:

Sorry for the delay; I got hit by Hurricane Beryl and then got horribly ill for a few days. I am also still dangerously broke. I'm starting an actual decently-paying job on the 26th, but I need to be able to pay for transportation to the job until they pay me (my wife and I share one car and her commute is in the opposite direction), along with renewing my driver's license so I can actually do my orientation. If you like this fic and you do not like that the universe is trying very hard to kill me, and if you have anything to spare, please donate to my Ko-fi; I'm never going to hold anything hostage, but the less I have to focus on unfucking things, the more GC I can write and the faster I can do it.

Chapter 85: Wish You Were Here

Notes:

How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls swimming in a Discord
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here

To most of the crew, Afterlife looked familiar. They'd been there at least a dozen times in recent memory, and it was the home of the fixer who'd been by far the kindest to them, after all. To Shaitan, however, it was an utter shock; this was not the Afterlife he remembered, the dingy former mortuary divided into chambers that almost worked as a sort of merc pecking order where the deeper in you went, the tougher shit you were. This was a mortuary, sure, but Rogue Amendiares, his former comrade in arms, had turned it into a nightclub, with go-go dancers on display and industrial rock blaring almost too loud to think. There were still mercs, sure- but they were young mercs, ones he didn't recognize without a speck of rust on their chrome, outside of one who looked a bit like his old drinking buddy Boa Boa. The back room wasn't some secret cave of legendary old-timers; from what he could see through the door, Rogue was mostly using it as a storage closet, with kegs stacked and extra liquor bottles on the shelves.

The passage of time was starting to really, properly sink in. Up until now, the surroundings could've been mistaken for 2023, easily- sure, Arasaka Tower looked different (obviously), and everyone had new clothes and the chrome seemed nicer, but that was all to be expected. Borg bodies, specifically, had clearly come a long way; he felt more limber and energetic than he had ever been in the old body, even with it not being combat-optimized in any sense, and almost shuddered to think of what a modern combat body would be like by comparison. The more subtle aspects of time passing were starting to hit him, though, and there was a long list of people he deeply missed.

The most important order of the day, of course, was to catch him up with the person at the top of that list. The crew walked through the bar, David waving to Claire briefly as they attempted to ignore the stares from the other patrons at the unfamiliar FBC; Claire waved in return, looking up from pouring a well drink, as the five passed by and made their way to Rogue's usual booth. The fixer was, uncharacteristically, sitting alone; typically, when the crew showed up, she was in the middle of other biz, or at least had one of the more renowned mercs bodyguarding her. Seemingly, today was a slow day.

"Hey, Rogue," David said, waving to her as well. She looked up with an expression of mild surprise, turning from whatever was in her optics to the crew, and squinting at Shaitan slightly; he was gawking at her, taking in how the passage of time had changed her. She didn't look her age- biosculpting had worked out very well for her, all things considered- but she didn't look young, either. Meanwhile, on her end, that was certainly a full-borg looking at her, but she had no real clue if it was the correct full-borg.

"Who's this?" she asked, pointing at Shaitan, but looking over to David, Lucy, Becca and Kiwi.

"What, just 'cause I got a new body, you don't recognize me anymore?" Shaitan asked in return, indignant; Rogue practically jumped out of the booth, hugging him. David thought to himself that he was never going to fully get used to Rogue showing this much emotion.

"'Course I recognize you, ya fuckin' gonk-brain," Rogue said. "Just had to hear it." She pulled back.

"How've ya been? Been a minute," Shaitan said, looking around. "Hell did you do to this place, choombatta?" Rogue shrugged.

"Got out of the game, choom. Decided being a fixer was probably the option with a higher life expectancy," she said. "Fixer needs somewhere to work out of, the old Afterlife got zeroed out years ago, and this is the type of shit that keeps a bar running, these days. No more of the gimmick scop from when we were running around NC, you know? People just wanna have a drink and meet their fixers, or cool off after a gig."

"You don't do the whole pecking order thing, with the better solos being in the back?" Shaitan asked. Rogue scoffed.

"That's the gimmick scop I mean, Shaitan," she said. "Doesn't work these days. Kids don't wanna deal with it. Plus, don't really have the space here, anyway." She looked around at the bar to accentuate her point and draw Shaitan's attention around; it was, in fact, a lot smaller than the old Afterlife, with only one proper room set up to be a bar. She looked at Shaitan seriously. "They tell you Smasher's still around?"

"'Course he fuckin' is," Shaitan said. "Allah shines his light upon even the undeserving." His tone of voice was grim, and said all it needed to.

"Thought the fucker'd gone docile in captivity, and then he killed Michi," Rogue said.

"Your chooms told me. What's your read on 'em? Pretty chilled for being in the sharp end, neh?" Shaitan asked. They did seem calmer than they reasonably should be, for having Adam Smasher incoming; Shaitan wondered briefly if Smasher's reputation had gone down any while he was out, if karma had already bitten his evil counterpart in the ass. More importantly to Rogue, it was pleasant hearing someone use the old streetslang again.

"They're smart kids," Rogue said. "Good solos. Plus, they've dealt with Smasher before. Not on these kinda terms."

"...wait, what?" Shaitan asked, doing a double-take.

"David, the one with the jacket, tried to make friends with the gonk, and he had some kind of fucked up fixation on this crew for a minute," Rogue said. "Guess he was watering, and now he's harvesting." Shaitan looked at the crew, and if his face had been expressive enough, the look he'd given them would have been withering.

"Kid, that was the dumbest fucking decision you've ever made in your life," Shaitan said. "I don't know what other calls you've made, but I know for a fucking fact, you have never made one as bad as that."

"Pretty aware of that, choomba," David said, grimly. Shaitan looked back at Rogue.

"Inshallah, you're not asking me to fight that monster again," he said. "That went poorly enough the first time we did it."

"The fuck did you think we pulled you out for, you fucking gonk!?" Becca chimed in, visibly irritated. If Shaitan wasn't willing to fight alongside them, this entire escapade had been more or less a complete waste of time, beyond giving Rogue one of her old friends back. Shaitan looked over at her, cocking his head slightly in confusion.

"I thought you'd pulled me out to train you," he said. "I don't particularly want to meet Allah just yet, I've spent quite enough time with him lately, but you four are in the sharp end, like it or not."

"Six," Kiwi corrected. Shaitan looked around, wondering if he'd missed anybody lurking. "We got two newcomers on board," she added. "Not with us right now."

"Fighters, netrunners or faces?" Shaitan asked. David and Lucy looked at each other and shrugged.

"One's definitely a fighter. Big girl. Pretty muscle-y," Kiwi said. "Other... he's a kid. Not a kid by comparison to you two, a kid kid. I don't even think he knows where he fits in yet."

"Yeah, my read's same as Kiwi's," Becca said. "Skala's a solo through and through. Reminds me of me, and not just 'cause she's tryin' to be me. Julio... I dunno what he can do other than be a warm body with a gun, but if you're training us, might be able to make something out of that kid in three months." Shaitan did a double-take.

"Wait, you have three months!?" he asked. "I thought he was up your rear right now!"

"Nah, he's giving us a head start," Becca said. "We'll see if he keeps his word, but for now, we've got a minute." If Shaitan had lungs, he would've breathed a sigh of relief; in his full-borg body, he attempted to approximate it. With a more expressive face, he would've smiled.

"Inshallah, we're gonna ruin that big metal gonk's whole fucking year," Shaitan said, his mood noticeably brighter. He hadn't had much to appreciate in the past fifty years, but it was starting to look like he'd get a genuine chance to run the score back, and he certainly appreciated that. He looked at Rogue. "This a paid gig?" Rogue shrugged.

"I mean, I can pay you," she said. "Honestly, I was kinda figuring this one was gonna be personal for you, choom. Wasn't thinking of handling it like biz."

"All the same to me," Shaitan said; Rogue wasn't wrong, and he had enough money to not care. He looked back at the four who'd rescued him from the BD pod. "You four got a place I can stay? Don't think the rent on my apartment's been kept up." They looked at each other with mild confusion.

"We've got a place," David said. "You good with sleeping on the couch? All the bedrooms are kinda taken."

"Mashallah, anything's better than a braindance pod," the full-borg said, and none of them could really argue with that.

Notes:

Sorry for the delay- work immediately started beating the living hell out of me as soon as I started. Things are finally calming down enough that I get reliable days off, though.

Money in the Ko-fi is still appreciated, but much less urgent, and my current situation should mean cool things incoming for the fic.

Chapter 86: Thunder in Your Heart

Notes:

'Cause there's thunder in your heart
Every move is like lightning
It's the power you feel when you get your taste of the Discord
There's a fire gonna start
And you know they're going under
You can light the dark when they hear your heart of thunder

"Nice digs," Shaitan said, looking around the apartment the crew had brought him to. "Guess you kids've been doing pretty well for yourselves."

"Got a few lucky breaks here and there," Lucy said. "You should see the places we used to have."

"Hey, you were the one with a nice apartment," Becca chimed in. "Should see the rat-infested scop-hole bro and I had to live in." David tried not to laugh out loud; he'd gotten fairly familiar with that rat-infested scop-hole prior to coming here, himself, and didn't miss it. Shaitan scanned the surroundings briefly, taking stock of how much space he had; he traveled light, being a FBC who typically lived an ascetic lifestyle even before he'd gone under. All one really needed as a full-borg was fuel or electricity of some kind, a codpiece cover (provided one's body was equipped as such), and a place to hide from the rain, so nothing would rust or short out; anything else was distinctly optional.

"Not gonna work as a training space, though. Need something bigger and... less destructible," he said, looking over the size of the living room. On paper, the size of the room would be workable; in practice, it was a little too crowded, too cramped, too... high up in the air. He'd had experience with falling from large heights, and it wasn't an experience he wished on others. He thought for a moment.

"Got any better ideas?" Kiwi asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Could go back out in the desert," David said, prompting a groan from Becca.

"I sunburn too easy for that, choomba," she said. "I vote for somewhere indoors."

"Wasn't Vik a boxer at one point? He might know somewhere," Lucy offered.

"Good call, actually," Shaitan said. He looked over David and Becca. "And you, boy, are going to need to do some shopping. You're almost all 'ganic. Let's pay the good ripper another visit."

"Why didn't you say something when we were there a few hours ago!?" Kiwi asked, exasperated.

"Didn't get a decent read on you four 'till we were at Rogue's," Shaitan said. "Needed to figure out who, exactly, I was training. Boy's the one Smasher's primarily after, I figure. He's your face, but the chrome he has, it's solo chrome; he's no useless pretty-boy, but he hasn't been developing his skills. Up until now, you four have been in shallow enough scop that he can lean on the chrome as a crutch." David blushed slightly in embarrassment; Shaitan hadn't been reading him inaccurately. He'd been staying in shape, going on the nightly run with Lucy, but he hadn't really needed to practice much, with the Sandevistan giving him so much extra reaction time.

"And the rest of us?" Kiwi asked, raising an eyebrow.

"You're a netrunner," Shaitan said, looking at her. "You try to stay out of the line of fire in the first place, so why in the Hell would you need to know any of this? You're better off out of immediate danger." Again, he wasn't wrong, though Kiwi found the description slightly more flattering. He looked at Lucy next. "You, however, seem like you stay closer to the front line. You've got those monowires in your wrists. But you're not a true solo, you're also a netrunner; you just keep options in your back pocket in case you get a gun pointed at you. I know deep-dive ware when I see it, they haven't changed it much." Lucy touched the back of her neck in shock, surprised that Shaitan had noticed it.

"Plus, we gotta babysit that hack we're doing, anyways," Kiwi added. "I get you."

"And let me guess, I'm too tiny or something?" Becca said.

"Actually, you're the other one I was going to train, kid," Shaitan said, looking down slightly at her. "But you've already got the right chrome for this. I can tell you've got synth-muscle; no five-foot-four full-ganic girl is that ripped, and I can see your own Sandy on your back there. Plus, I can see the seams where your hands go on; I'm guessing you've got a pretty strong set somewhere." Becca smiled.

"Good guess," she said.

"The other two... that solo girl you were talking about planning to come join the party early?" Shaitan asked.

"Dunno," Becca said. "Don't think so. We've got her babysitting an anti-tank rifle right now." Shaitan did a brief double-take.

"Understood," he said. "Sounds like she's not gonna need the training. And the kid?"

"Honestly, I kinda feel bad even getting him involved in this," David said. "I could hit him up, though. He's gonna definitely need chrome, and I don't know how he's gonna take that, though."

"Hey, two birds, one stone," Shaitan said. "Let's see if you can't get him on the horn."

---

David started a private message conversation with Julio.

[21:35] David: hey man. you doing okay?

[21:35] Julio: Oh shit hey, uh, yeah, I'm doing fine, totally

[21:35] Julio: Just had to give my mom her meds. Was actually able to just straight up pay for it, no haggling with the docs, thanks to you guys

[21:35] David: oh shit. really? nice, dude, i'm glad

[21:35] David: so, uh. going offer. we dug a legendary old-school merc, guy who was with rogue and johnny silverhand at the tower when they blew NC up, out of the grave pretty much.

[21:35] Julio: WAIT YOU KNOW MORGAN BLACKHAND???

[21:35] David: ...

[21:36] David: no

[21:36] David: good guess but no, it's shaitan. damn, you know your stuff huh?

[21:36] Julio: C'mon you grew up in Santo too bro. You know how it is. We live gangsta here choombatta

[21:36] David: LOL not wrong. damn. anyways, choom wants to give us a crash course, get us a little better prepared for smasher. lucy and kiwi are sitting out, we're putting skala on BFG duty, so it'd be you, me, and rebecca.

[21:36] Julio: Hell yeah choom. I'm in

[21:36] David: shit, that easy?

[21:36] Julio: I mean, yeah? You're telling me I get to hang out with at least three legendary edgerunners and get good at this shit, course I'm gonna say yes choom

[21:36] David: you're gonna have to chrome up a little for some of the shit shaitan wants to teach us. dunno why exactly, he hasn't really been specific

[21:36] Julio: Oh shit. Do I gotta pay?

[21:36] David: pretty sure shaitan's buying

[21:37] Julio: Sweet. I'm in. High time I chrome the fuck up

[21:37] David: ...alright cool, yeah you know where viktor vektor's shop is in LC?

[21:37] Julio: Yeah I think I do, I'll hop on the NCART and meet you there

[21:37] David: sweet. see ya there kid

David ended the private message conversation.

---

"Yeah, he's in," David said, looking up at the others. "So, uh... mind telling us why we need the extra shopping trip, choom?" Shaitan smiled, the expressive faceplate of his Alpha Class body doing its necessary work.

"You four ever heard of a martial art called Panzerfaust?" Shaitan asked. Kiwi blinked in shock; the other three looked at each other, shrugging and muttering amongst themselves.

"Didn't the last master of that die back during the Time of the Red?" Kiwi asked. "That's supposed to be a dead martial art. Plus, don't you have to be a full-body conversion to use that?"

"Your info isn't quite right," Shaitan said. "Or, rather, it probably was, until you four dug me out. The second-to-last master of Panzerfaust went off the grid fifty years ago, and vanished from the history books; you all happen to be speaking to him. And it used to require a FBC body. I've done some reading on how far chrome's come in fifty years, and done some quick calculations, and modern synth-muscle can absolutely handle the impact force; it was designed for chrome bodies from sixty years ago, not modern ones. 'Sides, not going full-chrome is better for your chi if you can avoid it."

"Chi?" David asked, looking at Shaitan like a confused puppy; Becca was silent, but giving him a similar look.

"The energy that flows through all life, according to eastern martial arts traditions," Shaitan said. "The backbone of Panzerfaust is using the remaining sources of internal chi in your body to create external force through your chrome. Ordinarily, your chrome is disconnected from your chi; it isn't you, it is simply a device you use. Proper Panzerfaust technique incorporates your chrome into your whole, allowing it to project greater force than a full-'ganic body with theoretically greater chi ever could."

"And I'm guessing this has something to do with you being a full borg and not being cyberpsycho?" Becca asked, putting some things together in her mind.

"The necessary meditative practice definitely helps," Shaitan said. "I wouldn't call it a full-on preventative, but it helps keep you on the right side of the edge." Becca grinned.

"Looks like I can chrome back up after all," she said, causing David to give her a worried look.

---

ONE WEEK LATER

Vik had only been able to offer one choice for a place to train, and it wasn't a great one. An old gym that he used to go to, which had been taken over by the Animals, meaning any use the crew wanted to get out of it would require either paying the Animals or chasing them out.

To David, one of these options seemed vastly preferable; he still held a grudge against that particular gang. It was a group of Animals that had opted to commit a drive-by shooting straight through the window of her car, while both of them were in the front seat; if they'd simply waited ten seconds for a clear shot, Gloria Martinez probably wouldn't be dead. He didn't think about it often- he didn't have to think about the Animals often, in general- but when he did, he got bloodthirsty.

He was standing outside the entrance of the gym, with Becca and Julio at his flanks, and Shaitan backing them up from afar; Lucy had patched him in to all of their comms, and to their visuals.

"Alright, kids. Trial by fire. Let's see how you three currently handle that chrome, before we get any proper training in," Shaitan said. "Any of you go down, I'm too far away to come save your asses, so... handle yourselves, chooms."

"That's reassuring," Becca said with a sarcastic tone. She'd gone relatively light at Vik's; even with Shaitan telling her Panzerfaust was a decent anti-cyberpsychosis tool, she was a little afraid to go for anything like Mantis Blades or an arm cannon again. She'd simply opted for larger synth-muscles, a titanium bone weave, chrome replacements for her heart and lungs, and a smaller set of Kang Tao Gorilla Arms, equal in strength to her big hands but nowhere near as clunky.

"We got this," David said. His changes looked much more drastic, despite being along the same lines; with synth-muscles, shock absorbers in his forearms, a circulatory pump, nano-plating weaved into his skin, bone marrow density enhancements, Leeroy ligaments in his legs, chrome organs, his own Gorilla Arms, and his own skeletal weave, the formerly thin and mostly organic boy was now built like a chromed-up professional wrestler with the raw physical strength to match. He seemed to immediately confirm Shaitan's suspicions; with just combat chrome, he was putting out performance that 2020-era full-borgs could have only dreamed of in Vik's tests.

"You sure pissing off the Animals is a good plan?" Julio asked. "Could need the manpower." Julio had gone somewhat lighter than David, but the difference in him was still fairly drastic; the scrawny boy was now easily three or four inches taller and built like an athlete, with his own, small Sandevistan that he had insisted on.

"Fuck 'em," Becca said. "What are they gonna do to Smasher? Piss him off?"

"Yeah, I'm with Bex on this one," David said. "Let's go in and fuck some shit up, chooms. Try not to break any of the training equipment." He walked towards the garage door, gripped it with one hand, and slammed upwards, sending it to the ceiling with a thud and shining sunlight on the occupants. It was a nasty-looking place, clearly a former factory or manufacturing facility that had been repurposed, with chairs set up around a central "ring" that was more of a pit in the floor and several Animals hooting at an ongoing fight. There was some boxing equipment scattered around, heavy bags and speed bags, but it certainly wasn't organized. The other two followed him in.

"Whadda you gonk-brain fucks want?" an Animal asked, looking up at David and away from the fight. He looked angry that his preferred pastime was being interrupted; David was about to make him angrier.

"We're taking this place over," he said. "You gonks get the fuck out." The Animal burst out laughing at him, attracting the attention of the rest of the crowd and stopping the fight. "You think we're joking, choom?" David added, raising an eyebrow.

"I know you're fucking with me," the goon said. He stood up; he was easily seven feet tall, and nearly as wide, and David realized that he had perhaps calculated this poorly. "You gotta get through all of us and Rhino first if you wanna pull that off. We ain't leaving." Another goon walked up, and the one who had been speaking shriveled down, clearly outranked.

"Tell you kids what. One of you, get in the ring with Rhino. You last three minutes, we'll let you live and not just kill all three of you. You ain't gonna beat her, but if you beat her, maybe we'll put up with your bullshit and find a different gym. Sound good, chooms?" This Animal seemed a little smarter than the previous one, even though he was smaller; no wonder he was higher-ranking.

"Why don't we just fuck 'em up?" the first goon asked.

"You telling me you don't wanna see Rhino do her thing, choomba? I like watching her rip up dumb gonks," goon number two said. "Gets my dick hard and ready." The first goon shrugged, and the other Animals surrounding the fight pit voiced their agreement.

"You want me to take this one, D?" Becca muttered to David.

"Nah, I've got it," he said. "This'll be easy." He climbed down into the fight pit, and then someone who very much lived up to the name "Rhino" climbed in after him, taking the opposite side of the pit; to say she was built like a brick shithouse did a disservice to brick shithouses, and looking at the wall of muscle in front of him made David seriously reconsider whether this was a good idea.

The goon who had arranged this rang the bell, and before David could even react, a fist was in his jaw, sending him reeling and clutching it. He activated his Sandevistan on reflex, and caught Rhino's follow-up punch; ordinarily, catching a punch with that much force behind it would have hurt his arm fairly badly, but his new chrome didn't even break a sweat, and for all her looks, she wasn't nearly as strong or as chromed as he was. He smiled, released the fist as she tried to go for another punch to his midsection with her other arm in slow motion, and dodged behind her, Leeroy ligaments enabling his legs to move much faster than they previously could.

He considered his options, in the moment. An elbow to the back of the neck with the kind of force he could put out would likely kill her, and David suspected this would be counterproductive if they wanted the Animals to honor their end of this deal (as likely as that realistically was in the first place). Any kind of full-force punch would run the risk of the same; he didn't want to punch her internal organs out. He opted to lean on some of what Dorio had taught him, back in the day, and wrapped his arm around Rhino's neck, pressing into the carotid arteries and bringing her to the ground from behind. The Sandevistan's effect wore off, making time return to normal speed, and she thrashed around like a turtle on its back attempting to shake her attacker off, but eventually fell unconscious; David released her and stood up.

"You got anything better than that?" he asked, filled with a newfound confidence in his abilities.

The Animals muttered amongst themselves; Rhino had clearly been the best fighter among them, their champion, and she'd just gone down like a sack of potatoes from a rear choke. They seemed to realize they stood little chance, and they started to disperse out the garage door, without even saying anything.

"Huh," Julio said. "That was easy."

"Smart play," Shaitan said over the comms. "They gave you an opportunity to take out the strongest one first, and you took it. Still need to see two out of the three of you in action, but we can work on that; seems like the boy's got some previous training after all. Good job, kids. I'll meet you there in a couple of hours- got some business to handle."

"So, what now?" Becca asked, as the last of the Animals left, carrying a set of gloves with one hand and throwing them a middle finger with the other.

"Guess we wait for our teacher," David said. "Wonder if they left any beer here?"

---

TWO MONTHS LATER

“Sifu!” shouted the rookie, sweat dripping from their chrome-plated jaw. “What is the first move towards mastery of this art?”

The old instructor, her eyes flickering with the glare of outdated Kiroshi optics, leaned against a rusted sparring dummy. “There is no move,” she said. “It is zero sum with your reality. It is not measured in levels or ranks.”

A solo, his hydraulic arms folded, growled, “Then is the path to mastery the path of struggle?”

“Wrong,” the sifu snapped. “One may attain it without any effort at all. It is, in fact, the antithesis of struggle.”

A techie, her fingers twitching with the latent tremors of cyberpsychosis, slammed her palm on a dented locker. “Cut the zen riddles, old woman. What is the soul of Panzerfaust?”

The sifu grinned, a glint of steel in her teeth. “I’ll spell it out for you gonks. It is a continuous cutting motion.”

Shaitan's training had proved intense and difficult, but rewarding. Every day began at five o'clock in the morning, with two hours of guided chi-balancing meditation, followed by a run of at least one mile to get breakfast. After breakfast, three hours of katas, one hour of sparring (with two of them in the pit, and the third watching and shadowing), and then another run towards lunch; then, Shaitan would demonstrate the day's technique, and the three would spend several hours drilling it on each other and him until it was cemented. Then, the four would eat dinner together, without a run attached; David, Becca, and Julio would take showers, there would be another hour of meditation, and then they would sleep at the gym until the next day's start. Through this routine, the three were rapidly becoming a finely-honed fighting force.

Lucy and Kiwi had started to get a bit stir-crazy in the apartment without seeing the other two; grinding in Elflines was only so effective as a way to pass the time, and so they had begun coming down to watch the training. Skala, who had bonded with Julio a bit over their shared newbie status, also made frequent visits, and at the present time, all three, Shaitan, and Becca were watching David and Julio spar in the fight pit.

"So, what belt level are they at?" Skala asked.

"We don't really do belts in Panzerfaust," Shaitan said, studying the two fighters as Julio went for a punch to David's kidney that David quickly dodged, blurring as he used his Sandevistan. Julio followed with his own and dodged David's punch, going for a headlock takedown as he, too, blurred in view. The kid had been a surprisingly good student, and an enthusiastic one; Shaitan was impressed. "It's a practical style, not a formalized one. Mastery is being able to defeat your opponent and all else is failure."

"Sounds badass," Skala said. "You taking on any students after this?"

"Let's see if there is an after-this," Shaitan said. Becca, Lucy, and Kiwi were intently watching the two, though with different eyes at this point; Lucy and Kiwi worried slightly about David, whereas Becca was studying the techniques used. David focused his chi into his Gorilla Arms, applying Shaitan's lessons perfectly, and threw Julio over his shoulder like a rag doll, then went for a lightning palm to the chest, pulling it at the last second; the lightning palm, the move Shaitan had been drilling in them today, was a lethal maneuver, not one to be used lightly. It was a palm strike directly at the opponent's cybernetic heart, focusing the chi to disrupt the flow of electricity through the opponent's body and overload it, destroying their cyberware.

Shaitan rang the bell, signaling David's victory in the practice fight, and the two climbed the ladder out of the pit, bowing.

"Sifu," Julio said.

"You both did well," Shaitan said, and Julio smiled. Shaitan looked at David. "Took you a little longer than the other two, but I think you've got the lightning palm down now, so we're done with the drills for today, choom. Buck-a-Slice for dinner? You three have earned it."

"Sounds good to me," Julio said.

"I could go for some pizza," Lucy chimed in. David's Agent pinged faintly, four times in quick succession, almost inaudibly to all but him, and he went pale when he pulled it up into his view. "What is it, babe? You okay?"

---

Adam Smasher started a private message conversation with David.

[17:20] Adam Smasher: I'M BACK.

[17:20] Adam Smasher: GET READY TO DIE, LITTLE MEAT.

Adam Smasher ended the private message conversation.

---

"It's Smasher," David said. "He's back on Earth."

"Fuck, he's... a week and a half early," Kiwi said, jumping up and pacing around. "Okay, this is really bad. Fuck. How far are you three in your training or whatever?" Shaitan looked over the three, anxiety visible on his own faceplate.

"I'm not thrilled about it, but you've got a chance," Shaitan said. "They're not masters, but they know a few techniques. Worst comes to worst, they should be able to handle themselves against Smasher long enough to get away, if not win."

"That's real reassuring, sifu," Becca said, trying hard to sound respectful and sarcastic at the same time. "You really know how to make your students feel great about their odds."

"All I managed to do was get away," Shaitan said. "And that was pure luck. You kids know enough to get farther than I did." Julio beamed.

"Thank you, sifu," he said.

"See, the kid knows how to be grateful," Shaitan said, gesturing at Julio. "My sifu would've whacked you on the head with a cane for that; mashallah, I won't repeat his mistakes."

"So, that mean your part in this is over?" David asked.

"You kidding? I still need a place to crash so I don't get rained on, and you've still got a nice couch and this gym for the time being. Consider me part of the crew until either you all get killed or I find better arrangements, choom," Shaitan said. David smiled; he'd started to really like being around the old merc.

"I'm alright with that," Kiwi chimed in. "He's fun to hang out with. Rare we meet anyone who's as much of an oldhead techie as I am."

"Same," Lucy said. "He doesn't take up a lot of space, and he's fun to talk to, so I vote yes."

"I'm good with that, too, sifu," Becca said. "Nice having someone to play NightFight with who doesn't annihilate me every time." She glared at Kiwi meaningfully.

"Training's over," Shaitan said. "You don't gotta call me that anymore. Just Shaitan, like everyone else. The hell's NightFight? That like Mortal Kombat from before I went on ice?"

"Oh, we are gonna have fun when we get back to the apartment, choom," Becca said, grinning evilly as she realized she was going to get to experience what Kiwi typically felt when they'd play fighting games together.

"For as long as that lasts before Smasher starts the fire, anyways," Lucy said, looking extremely uneasy as David called Falco on the horn for a ride. They could take a breath for now, but they had until Smasher talked to Saburo, if that hadn't already happened, to do so.

Chapter 87: Fire Coming out of the Monkey's Head

Notes:

In time, the Strangefolk found their way into the higher reaches of the Discord
And it was there that they found the caves of unimaginable sincerity and beauty
By chance, they stumbled upon the place where all good souls come to rest
The Strangefolk, they coveted the jewels in these caves above all things

And soon they began to mine the mountain
Its rich seam, fueling the chaos of their own world
Meanwhile, down in the town, the Happyfolk slept restlessly
Their dreams invaded by shadowy figures digging away at their souls

Every day, people would wake and stare at the Discord
Why was it bringing darkness into their lives?
And as the Strangefolk mined deeper and deeper into the Discord, holes began to appear
Bringing with them a cold and bitter wind that chilled the very soul of the Monkey

For the first time, the Happyfolk felt fearful
For they knew that soon the Monkey would stir from its deep sleep
And then came a sound, distant first, that grew into castrophany
So immense that it could be heard far away in space

There were no screams, there was no time
The Discord called Monkey had spoken
There was only fire, and then... nothing

Transporting Adam Smasher between on-world and off-world was always a headache, and the Arasaka techs were not fond of it.

Any full-borg transportation was an ordeal- they didn't typically come light, even when they were in the rough shape of human bodies. Transporting Smasher in one of his combat bodies- the Dragoon or the DaiOni- was right out, and he had to wear the Gemini or his old Samson for it to even be possible. This also meant his trips had to be rather light on amenities, which meant he was typically in a mood on return. Smasher's moods tended to cause dead Arasaka employees.

This time, however, things had been relatively smooth, Takafumi Murai thought to himself. He had just recently been elevated to Junior Director of Off-World Operations, one of about fifty in that job title at Arasaka Tower, and his role in the process this time was to deploy an aerodyne out to the spaceport to retrieve Smasher; that, too, had gone smoothly so far. The only communication from Smasher over the comms (the team was under a "silence unless emergency" order, in anticipation of Smasher being in the mood for violence) consisted of two simple sentences.

"I need to speak to the big boss as soon as I arrive. Respond on copy."

Smasher wasn't much for formalities, and everyone accepted this, simply because trying to enforce the organization's rules on what amounted to a very angry main battle tank with legs seemed like a bad idea across the board. Regardless, the message seemed distinctly ominous- it could be reasonably assumed who he meant by the big boss, and Adam Smasher needing to hold court with Arasaka-sama was never exactly a good sign of things to come. Murai had sent a simple response back, indicating receipt of the message, and nothing else.

As Murai studied the message, dissociating slightly and waiting for either the AV to return with Smasher in tow or some other sign of what the Hell was going on, the door to his office slammed open; he looked back at the noise, startled, and saw Kate Shiota and Douglas Yanaka from counter-intelligence staring back at him in the doorway. Their visors made it hard to exactly read their expressions, but they looked deeply unhappy.

"I screw something up?" he sputtered at them.

"How far is that AV from the Tower?" Kate asked. Junior Director Murai looked at the GPS display on one of his monitors.

"About five minutes," Murai said. "Smasher's coming in."

"Yeah, we're fuckin' aware," Kate spat. "You better stall him. Make shit up. We're gonna try and divert Saburo's attention, and then we're jumping on him." Murai looked first deeply confused, then scared, as his eyes darted between Kate and Douglas.

"You two gonna tell me what the hell this is all about? Smasher sent a comm about needing to talk to Saburo ASAP on touchdown," Murai said. "Something happen while he was up there?"

"Michiko's dead," Douglas said. "Smasher would've been in the area. We need to figure out what the fuck happened before Saburo does, so we can damage control."

"Yeah, what he said," Kate said, pointing at her partner. "So, stall the tank and buy us an extra hour or so of no Smasher, or we're all fucked." Murai looked at the GPS screen; the AV was currently touching down on the roof.

"Looks like we're all fucked," Murai said. "He just landed."

"Fuck!" Kate shouted, punching the door and leaving a small dent in it. Murai muttered curse words under his breath, knowing the damage was going to come out of his pay, not hers; counterintelligence was always specially privileged in these situations. The two counterintelligence agents took off running, slamming his office door shut on the way out and knocking one of the hinges loose; even more out of his check, as the muttering became shouting.

---

Adam Smasher was surprised at just how few people there were, greeting him, when he stepped off of the AV and onto the rooftop of Arasaka Tower. Being on the rooftop when it was nearly empty always carried a sense of nostalgia for him; it wasn't the same rooftop, obviously, but the view of Night City's skyline from here had always been one he'd associated with strong memories. A younger time, when more of the legends were running around. He'd fixed that in one fell swoop, more or less, and part of him regretted it.

Most of the time, he was surrounded by too many techies, rippers, and suits to even get a decent view of the skyline. This time, however, it was just him and the AV crew; the one time he would've appreciated the help (given his Gemini was still absolutely dented to shit), he actually got a decent view of the skyline. It figured.

Soon, two suits in visors came running up the emergency stairs, visibly out of breath. One of them was a portly man with an odd triple-mohawk that reminded him of some of the British punks from the early Collapse; the other, a tall woman with red hair who he recognized as Kate Shiota from counterintel. They hadn't been close, either professionally or personally- he didn't talk to counterintel directly much- but he respected her slightly more than most of the suits. At least she had some balls that hadn't been shriveled up and cut off and stuck in a jar in Saburo's office.

"Miss Shiota," Smasher said, causing her to freeze up slightly. "Got another job for me already? Where the hell are my techies?"

"Stalled them on the way," Kate said, taking deep breaths. Clearly, she had started from far down the tower- Smasher briefly wondered why the Hell they hadn't just taken the elevator, but decided not to question it. "We gotta talk to you. You see what happened to Michiko?"

"Yeah," Smasher said, annoyed. "Two gonk-brain edgerunner girls from down here took her out while another group was trying to pull a heist. Think they might've been going cyberpsycho; one of them's got a history of it and the other used to be one of the old man's little projects. Names are Lucyna Kushinada and Rebecca Flores." He rattled it off as if it was practiced, trying to speed through the explanation as fast as he could. "Now, can we skip the fuckin' sit-down? Need someone to put me back in my Dragoon and get me a chat with the old man."

It was immediately obvious to both Kate and Douglas that trying to stall Smasher any further was not going to end well for either of them, even in a damaged Gemini body- the skin was hanging awkwardly off of it in several spots that clearly had been bent or knocked out of place, but Smasher was someone you didn't try to fuck with no matter how bad of a spot he was in. Even if you somehow won that fight, he'd just come back when he was back at one hundred percent, wipe you off the face of the earth, and claim you just fell out a window.

"Fuck it," Kate said. "Fine. I'll call the techs up here and you can be the one eating shit with Saburo. I'm good with that. You got the Biotechnica suit for us?" Smasher tossed a biopod at her and she caught it, staggering back from the weight.

"You goons know he was a FBC, or was that not part of your intel?" Smasher asked. He patted Douglas on the shoulder as he walked towards the elevator and pressed the button, in a way that looked friendly but hit hard enough to nearly dislocate his cyberarm; the counterintel operative winced in pain. "Just fucking with you guys. We'd be fucked without you jackasses in the shadows. Wasn't a hard fight, even in this state, anyways. Chromed-up nerd's still a fuckin' nerd."

As the elevator opened and Smasher entered, humming an Elvis melody to himself, Kate and Douglas looked at each other.

"That could've gone a lot fucking worse," Douglas said.

"You're telling me," Kate said, breathing a sigh of relief. "The hell was with that 'Miss Shiota' shit? Gonk still not taking the hint after I told him to fuck off at the Christmas party, or what?" Douglas shrugged.

"Never know what the hell is going on in that man's head," he said. "Figure I'm better off that way."

---

Saburo Arasaka sat in his office, relaxed, an old Junko Yagami song playing on the original vinyl through a turntable hooked to modern speakers. Being essentially the feudal lord of Night City had its perks; if it existed, he could probably get it, either instantly with a little money or after waiting a few days for his samurai to kill the right people. This was deeply convenient for someone whose best memories were all before the Collapse.

Typically, he preferred to enjoy this alone. Tonight, he was not alone; Adam Smasher sat before him, attempting to sit seiza awkwardly in front of his desk in a Dragoon body that was clearly not made for doing that. The borg had requested a personal, private audience, and that was both unsettling to Saburo's plan for the night and annoying, as he did not prefer this particular borg's company.

He trusted Smasher to the grave. There was never a moment of doubt in Saburo Arasaka's mind that Adam Smasher was purely devoted to his protection, and the protection of Arasaka interests. If Saburo asked Smasher to go down into Hell itself and harrow it, he'd return within days with the Devil's head. This did not mean he particularly liked Smasher, however; the two men were simply from two very different worlds. Smasher was too low-class, too fundamentally American to understand someone like Saburo, and meanwhile Saburo didn't even slightly understand Smasher.

"Michiko Arasaka is dead," Smasher said, getting straight to the point and making Saburo's blood immediately run cold. "She was killed while I was on the moon. Two separate edgerunner gangs tried to hit the event she was working, and overpowered the Danger Gal personnel on site; I took out one of them, but the other one killed her right under my nose. People I thought I was allied with. Lucyna Kushinada and Rebecca Flores."

Saburo stared at him. The first name out of Smasher cranked gears in his mind as an idea formed. That name was familiar to him, as of late.

"Mitchan is dead? You witnessed this?" he asked.

"Yep," Smasher confirmed. "Sorry for your loss."

 "And you know her killers?" he asked, following.

"Yep," Smasher said, starting to dislike where this conversation was going.

"And you don't have their heads for me right now?" Saburo asked, starting to tremble with anger.

"Sir, all due respect, I just fuckin' got back," Smasher said. "Give me a minute."

"And why did you not take care of them on the moon, exactly?" Saburo asked, his voice at a shouting level.

"Because, again all due respect, I was in my Gemini, not a combat body, and that other edgerunner gang kicked my absolute shit in on the way out," Smasher said. "Would've if I could've. Had to get back down here first and get ready."

"So, you failed me," Saburo summed things up.

"Yes, sir, I did," Smasher said, knowing when not to push things. If it came down to it, he could overpower Saburo, but Saburo was the one holding his kill switch, and he was less sure that he could overpower Saburo fast enough. Saburo stared at him, seething in anger, for a moment.

"Do not return until you have found them and killed them," he said. "I will be deploying one of our black projects into the field to assist you in this task. You said it was Lucyna Kushinada who killed her?"

"That is correct. Her and Rebecca Flores," Smasher reiterated.

"Then I have the perfect assistant for you in this task," Saburo said. "You will not fail again. Leave my office." Smasher stood up, as awkwardly as he had been sitting, and lumbered out of the office, the floor rumbling with every step. That was one thing Saburo disliked about Smasher; finesse was not the borg's strong point.

Saburo dialed the logistics office on his comms, and quickly got a junior director responding.

"Get me an AV to the Tokyo Bay facility," he said. "Send Goro Takemura along, too."

---

OVER TOKYO BAY

Goro Takemura did not sleep. His augmentations prevented it, for sleep was not needed for a retainer of Saburo Arasaka. Parts of his brain would rest, others would rise; neuroprosthetics would maintain it all, keep his body humming along, stable and perfect for servitude in any way that was required from him.

And yet, he felt like he once had as a child when his merely biological body hadn’t slept. When he was weak, without purpose. The loss of Michiko Arasaka had caused this.

Mitchan… Mitchan did not take her duty to Arasaka – the clan, the ideology, the empire, the everything – seriously. And yet knowing that some Slavic halfbreed whore and her Santo Domingo boytoy had destroyed someone so righteous, someone so perfect, someone Arasaka-sama himself had once earmarked as his best potential heir— how could he not be beside himself with rage? How could all Arasaka, even those who were not pureblood Japanese, not be filled with unending hate for this heinous crime? He knew it was affecting his performance, allowing him to feel rage unbecoming of the way of bushido, and yet there it was.

Silver eyes bloodshot, carbon nanocomposite fingers twitching, he watched Arasaka-sama on the opposite side of the AV. His lord seemed as calm as the water in Kyoto, and he wondered how this was possible.

As it turned out, Saburo Arasaka's thoughts were preoccupied with Doraemon.

That was a funny show, he thought. Poor Nobita-kun, always making a jackass of himself, even with a perfect machine aiding him. It was easy to laugh at someone so pathetic. And the theme song was great, too. In the back of his mind, it played on repeat.

He had tried to get Mitchan to like it, even though she preferred the reruns of Detective Conan. He had tried to be there for his granddaughter, to make her understand the necessity of his rule, as Kei understood, as Hanako obeyed, as Yorinobu once dissented. But Kei had been clear: Michiko was his alone to raise. And Kei was such a perfect son, so willing to take the blows Saburo laid upon him as a child, so willing to bear the burdens of dominating humanity. So disciplined. Michiko was not disciplined, and now she was dead.

Did he really feel bad for her? He was not sure. It hurt, it was painful, but pain felt like an afterthought these days, something a younger, weaker version of him would have been destroyed by, but pain was just his lot in life. The world needed to be subjugated, he was the only one who could do it, and so he could no longer pass on to a world without pain. Even once his work was complete, he would have no choice but to persist.

He was reminded of Yukio Mishima, a man almost as perfect as his own sons. A man who understood what Saburo yearned for even better than Saburo himself did.

Mishima had died young. He had been valiant, fought for his beliefs against the oppression of Marxism and American liberalism. But Saburo Arasaka was cursed to rule; there would be no final catharsis, no brave stand against the Western oppressors in which he could die heroically and enter history. He had won the ideological war, and only his iron fist could maintain his victory. This much was certain.

He looked to his bodyguard. Takemura had approximately three years left to live before his cyberware broke his mind, give or take a scattered few months, that he'd likely spend incapacitated anyways. But that was fine. He was gutter trash elevated to wearing the costume of a samurai. Such men, hooked on the mythology of Toshiro Mifune, could be found anywhere you looked in Japan. They were easy to make, easy to hone, easy to break, easy to replace; more like a sword itself than its wielder. And he had a sense that what they were about to experience could break his bodyguard.

“Takemura-kun…” he said–

“...You seem unwell.”

Arasaka-sama spoke to him. Takemura fidgeted. He felt ashamed.

“I hope it has not been detrimental to my performance, Arasaka-sama.”

“That is not my concern. My concern is – well. What we are about to do. Do you understand your role in this?”

Takemura shook his head. “I fear your brilliance is beyond me, Arasaka-sama. My humble apologies.”

“Repeat it to me. Say what you understand.”

“Michiko Arasaka is dead at the hands of scum who thought to make an ally out of Adam Smasher, to manipulate him toward undesirable ends. They killed Michiko Arasaka to prove a point. Smasher... failed to stop them, somehow.”

“Yes. A discrepancy in his performance. He has been making more errors as of late. Continue.”

“To assist Smasher in killing those criminals, it was decided that an asset was to be retrieved. One you–” and here was the part he did not understand “–have kept contained beneath Tokyo Bay. And you wish to speak with this asset in person, Arasaka-sama. And I am to – protect you? From this asset, should it misbehave.”

Laughter. What? “Arasaka-sama, did I misspeak?”

“Only the last part was incorrect, Takemura-kun.”

He had come face-to-face with it before. It had snuffed out the lights of Japan’s finest scientists in a single motion. It was not worthy of the world he was to build. And yet it remained. Persisted.

“The research team which studies it is largely perfunctory, Takemura-kun. Were we to understand it more, I suspect we would be opening ourselves up to its corruption. So we contain it. Sate it. Leave it be. Now, we are going to bargain with it.” He thought for a moment, sought a metaphor, and could not find one. “Smasher must be kept in check. If he fails, the asset will succeed. If he turns against us, the asset will destroy him. If all of the gods and devils arrayed against Arasaka’s dominion over Night City turn against us for these actions, those gods and devils will be subjugated.”

He let Takemura process this. “What power this asset must have, then! And we do not use it–”

“Inconsistencies. An inability to behave. I only take this risk now out of mourning. Perhaps, Takemura-kun, I will regret my actions when all is finished.”

He would not, of course. In truth, Smasher was a fine attack dog, but more was needed from the empire’s servants. If he could convince the asset to behave (and he was becoming increasingly certain he could), what horizons would await him beyond that mastery? What worlds waited for the chrysanthemum mark, pressed into every grain of soil? The thought of infinite mastery of infinite worlds- victory in every possible timeline, every possible permutation of human experience- the complete death of free will- aroused him.

From the AV’s CrystalDome screens, the entrance to the facility approached. One lone antenna, one lone avipad, and a scattering of bone-gray buildings around a circular central complex three stories high. It could pass as a water filtration plant, or a tidal power station, or one of the many automated control centers the old initiative to drain the bay had required before the seawall was put up. The tri-lobed Arasaka crest indicated nothing to anyone who looked at it; it was too ubiquitous.

No one in the public knew what lay beneath Tokyo Bay, not even the Imperial family. This was how Saburo Arasaka wanted it. This was how it would be.

The head of the facility was one Sonoda Shinji, and although he and the other staff attending bowed in accordance with company procedure, they did not look prepared to greet their lord. Business casual, cigarette stains, and hollow eyes. No dignity. No pretense of pride to serve the world’s righteous superpower.

And there weren’t that many of them, anyway. What was going on here? Time to ask.

“Sonoda-san!” Takemura barked. “Where is the rest of your staff? Can they not spare a moment for their lord? Are they so arrogant as to–”

Saburo’s hand, clutching his shoulder. “This is the extent of the staff here, Takemura-kun. Now. Sonoda-san. Rise.”

Like a bobbing bird, the scrawny little man extended to his full height. “Arasaka-dono. All is as you desire. We have prepared the dive chamber as per your request.”

“And the asset itself?”

“She – it has made no further attempts at breaching our control systems. The tachyonic membrane remains stable. We are looking into methods to improve its intensity, as well as potential localization technologies.”

“And your success in developing these methods and technologies?”

Silence. Then: “Very little, Arasaka-dono. My worthless self can do naught but beg your forgiveness at our failure to progress as per the standards of the company.”

“Mm.” A neutral hum could mean any number of things from Arasaka-sama. The tone, though, suggested a lack of disappointment. Odd. What was Arasaka-sama thinking?

Sonoda-san really looked like one of those NEETs who watched too much Eva, poached from the suburban thicket of Nerima. Pathetic, but useful. His reputation operating the accelerator before its conversion into a prison spoke for itself.

“Explain. Speak freely, Sonoda-san.”

Sonoda shook. The wind whipped at Saburo’s face. “It – if we were to treat the threat seriously, to pursue all possible avenues of research that the asset offers, we would need to increase annual funding within Special Projects by two orders of magnitude, Arasaka-dono. Both to develop upgrades to the accelerator, then miniaturized iterations of it, p-potentially using our assets within Militech and Netwatch to retrieve files on Project Cynosure, we really have a major hole in operations just from that alone – and then the manpower problems.”

“Mm.”

“Arasaka-dono, our progress must be inconsistent because – because of what people see down there. What happens to human minds, even shielded and augmented. What she’s capable of. How many souls we lose during serious breakthroughs.”

“It.”

“It – yes. It, not her. My deepest–”

“Be silent, boy.”

Sonoda clammed up, snapped a quick bow. “Sonoda-san, your dedication to the technology we seek to contain here is admirable. But you blame your individual failings on external factors, and that is inexcusable. Now. Takemura and I have business with the asset.”

“Yes. Yes, of course, Arasaka-dono. Shall we prepare protective gear?”

“It will not be needed.”

The interior of the facility was what Arasaka-sama once described as an ‘anti-place’, a location so devoid of affections, detail, humanity, that his subjects would escape into their work to feel comfortable. No distractions, only a dusty concrete floor and dull overhead lights. Nothing worth speaking of, even in the tangle of offices on the ground floor. Even the ‘dive chamber’, once they reached it, was just a cargo elevator with a few more buttons for floors. Arasaka-sama’s hand on his shoulder, Takemura entered it, and turned to Sonoda, who did not follow.

“The lowest button,” Sonoda said. “Press it. I can’t go down there anymore.”

“You can’t,” Takemura intoned, “or you won’t?”

“I am not needed–”

“And you are to decide your necessity, and Arasaka-sama is not?”

“Please,” Sonoda whimpered. “We – Arasaka-dono, I beseech you. Don’t take me down there with you. She has hurt me so much already.”

“Ah,” Arasaka-sama said. “The dream blockers your research team orders a medically unhealthy excess of from Requisitions are for a deliberate purpose, then.”

“Arasaka-dono–”

“Your weakness will be noted in your performance review, boy,” Arasaka-sama said, and pressed the lowest button, marked with tape and black marker as CORE CONTAINMENT. The doors shut. Takemura could hear Sonoda muttering incoherent nonsense to himself just before they did.

And then they were dropping. One minute, and then another, at what felt like a rapid pace.

“This was the heart of FACS’s old quantum accelerator,” Arasaka-sama said. “A cyclotron enclosing all the Kanto prefecture, requiring power equivalent to half of Honshu’s annual civilian energy generation. Three interlocked AIs powerful enough to warp even the I-G algorithms, the kind that the old Internet corporation would not allow to be public knowledge, monitored it. They sold it to me for fifty billion euro back in thirty-two. Too cheap.” He laughed, a gargled, wheezing sound. “I remember why they built it, now. They were convinced that certain inconsistencies in the Standard Model suggested that reality was a simulation, the parameters of physics pliable given enough energy. They claimed they engineered artificial black holes down here, but I knew they were lying.”

“Did you hope to replicate their experiments here, Arasaka-sama?”

“Not at first. But once Special Projects figured out this was the only place in the world whose particle bleed could engineer a tachyon plasma – a fractally-folded dimensional membrane – well, we had a labyrinth, and soon after that we had a minotaur, to borrow a barbarian metaphor.”

Still further down. The lights flickered. How deep were they? “Takemura-kun. The first time is always painful. Be ready.”

“Be ready for what?”

“This.”

And then the lights went out.

Red light. Noise. A screeching sound that seemed to come from the inside of his skull.

It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It

stopped, but everything was red? Blood? No. Wrong. Something was wrong. Something was wrong. Something something something something wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Elevator wasn’t moving. Up? Down? Nowhere. He was shaking. System errors, body buckling under the strain. Evil. Evil. Something–

“Stay strong, Takemura. It preys on the weak. It relishes their suffering.”

Arasaka-sama spoke these words. He understood them. He understood them. He was – he was in the dive chamber. He was going down. He was Goro Takemura, he was a piece of flesh from a place called Chiba-11, he was respected, he was honored, he was honorable. He had to stay strong. He was strong.

“We are almost there. The dive chamber takes time to navigate. And if the asset tries to fight it, as it once did, it takes even longer.”

What did that mean? It was a straight shot down, right? “Arasaka-sama.” His voice sounded wrong, as if traveling through water. “What – this – the labyrinth?”

“Correct. It was painful, wasn’t it? It humbled even me, the first time. But it can only do so much.”

“Why is it so red?”

“Its favorite color, I suspect. I have never asked. I do not intend to. A waste of time.”

Grinding. Slowing of motion. The doors clicked, and then slid open. Beyond them was a dark hallway, and red light.

They walked forward.

“Takemura-kun. When we get there, you will meet the security team assigned to monitor the asset. Do not, under any circumstances, be surprised. You are in no danger so long as you do not show weakness.”

Takemura kept quiet. He would believe in Arasaka-sama’s will, then. In his lord’s strength.

The hallway was short.

What lay beyond it was infinity.

It was red. It was so thoroughly, hostilely red, that he could not think of anything else except it. It took too long for his vision to adjust, and even then he could not see the other side of the containment block, nor its top, nor its bottom. He looked behind as he stepped onto the catwalk, and the hallway was not there. Only more red.

He wondered, for a brief moment, if this was all a braindance of some sort. A mad dream that Arasaka-sama and he had both passed into when the elevator stopped, engineered by Sonoda to toy with him. Was he sleeping, now? Passed out? Something reptilian buried in his hypothalamus screamed for him to turn back, to try to find a way out of here, but the samurai in him pressed onward, across the catwalk, alongside Arasaka-sama.

Then he saw the bodies.

Suspended. Bent backward. Spines snapped. Black and red stained even redder, armor shattered, weapons held with frozen fingers. They didn’t even float. It was as though they were fixed in space. There were even a handful of Mohanjin-K units suspended in the same way. The net number of men lost like this? Too many to count.

“The security team,” he whispered.
“What did I say, Takemura-kun? Show no fear. Not when we are so close.”

Onward, and then a black platform. Eight sides. The marks of the I Chings surrounding its center. There was a woman there, rendered in black and red, kneeling. Not facing him.

“Asset!” Arasaka-sama shouted. His voice echoed. “Do you know why I have come here?”

Nothing. The asset was this… woman? Did men like Sonoda simply not know how to talk to women? This made no sense.

“Woman!” Takemura shouted. “Saburo Arasaka is addressing you! You would do well to respond or suffer the consequences!”

Nothing. Then, a voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

“Suffer… The consequences?”

The bodies of the security team jolted as the woman rose and turned to face him. He could see her more closely now. She was young. Long dark hair. Bulky headphones. Dead eyes. A short jacket over an Arasaka netrunning suit. When the voice came back again, there was more levity in it. But her mouth didn’t move.

“Little samurai… I already have.”

She threw her arms out to the side, and the (Chamber? Place? Facility? Hell?) shook. Hard. The bodies of the security team arched even further backwards, inverted Vs made out of human flesh and Arasaka cybernetics. He could feel the thing that had hit him when everything went red approaching, fast. That same primal part of him screamed predator bad no run fear bad no please please please–

“Enough of this play,” Arasaka-sama said.

And everything was still again. The woman walked towards them.

“You don’t come down here for conversation, Jii-chan. In fact, last I checked, you don’t ever come down here. When did we last meet? It’s so hard to remember. If I just had a world to anchor myself in… things would be so nice. Even I get lonely sometimes.”

“Jii-chan,” Takemura repeated. “Jii-chan…”

“Oya?” She tilted her head to the side. Smiled too wide. “You don’t like that. It insults you. Your honor demands a response, doesn’t it?”

“Ignore her, Takemura-kun,” Arasaka-sama snapped. “Asset. Doll. Corpse. I have business with you. If you listen, I think you will find my proposal… let us say rewarding.”

She turned to look at him. She wasn’t walking on the floor of the chamber, Takemura realized. She floated just a centimeter above the ground.

“Okay. Fine, Jii-chan. You seem sad. Did something funny happen?”

“My granddaughter is dead. I seek revenge upon the world for this tragedy. I will release you, so long as you behave as I wish.”

Silence. A long humming sound that seemed to vibrate inside innards Takemura knew he didn’t have.

“Heeeehhhhhhh. Damn, Jii-chan. You spend a hojillion euro locking me up and you wanna let me out for the bad heiress? Never knew you were – oh, who am I kidding. You’re still human, aintcha? Still weak. I’ll pass.”

“I would not release you for something of this magnitude, corpse, if I did not think you might have some attachment to it, too. You, too, were human once. This weakness you fear – it remains in you.”

Arasaka-sama smiled. It did not fit his face well.

“The murderers were led by David Martinez and Lucyna Kushinada. One a thief, the other a slave. Both should be consigned to eternal torment beyond their own comprehension. Do you understand?”

The humming rose.

“Ah. That is the reaction I hoped to see from you, dead thing–”

“YOU MOTHERFUCKER.”

Voice like a whirlwind. Things worming inside Takemura’s skull. His own dermal reinforcement was warping.

“YOU THINK YOU CAN TOY WITH ME. YOU THINK YOU’RE GOD. YOU’RE NOTHING, JII-CHAN.”

“I do not think of myself as a god. I am a servant of the gods. And if I am nothing, what are you? Less than nothing. But behold, I offer you redemption. Freedom. Is not that what the last little fragments of your original personality always yearned for? What you sacrificed yourself to achieve. Is not that what all those little broken children in Project Umetate yearned for? Little dead thing… I pity you. I pity myself. So-”

The woman disappeared. And then

STOP FUCKING MONOLOGUING

The thing again! Spoken like the truth of the universe! It was her. The thing that ruled this place — it was always her. Her. HER!

She appeared before them as the chamber went dark, a long, looming specter the size of a skyscraper. Gaunt face. Bulging eyes as big as houses — Takemura could see every bloody vein pulsing, as her index finger drifted downward onto the platform—

“Arasaka-sama!” Takemura’s arm shot out, his mantis blades hissed out, but what could he do? Could he even stop her? Why did her name pulse through his memory as if he’d always known it?

LOOK AT YOU

“Corpse.”

MEAT AND BONE HELD TOGETHER BY IMPERFECT HATRED

“I am nothing if not patient. I will find some other machine to crush my enemies. You, though… you were always special.”

BLOOD AND SWEAT AND SHIT AND PISS AND CUM

“But perhaps I was wrong to ask you for this. Perhaps it is better to let you suffer your eons of processing time in loneliness. Perhaps you do not belong in this world, like the rest of your kind.”

Takemura’s mind was blank. He was trying to meditate. Trying to.

DRIVEN BY FEAR OF FAKE GODS WHEN THE REAL ONES ARE ALREADY HERE

“You call yourself gods, then? Perhaps. Humans make false gods to revere. But no. Even against the weakest kami of a killing stone, your spirit would fail.”

YEARNING FOR THE FINAL ORGASMIC BLISS OF TERADEATH THAT ONLY WE CAN ENACT

“Ah. I tell you what, dead thing. Let me sweeten the deal.”

A PRESSING WEIGHT BETWEEN YOUR SHOULDER BLADES A DROP OF BLOOD FROM YOUR COCK A WAR TRIBUNAL CONDUCTED BY THE LOSERS AN OPEN EYE PIERCED

“Why don’t I unfreeze your puppy, too? That way, you can deal with my enemies together. Isn’t that all you’ve ever wanted?”

And Saburo Arasaka watched as the false god wearing the skin of Lucyna Kushinada- another Lucyna Kushinada- dissolved back into her human shape.

He had never been afraid. He did not like to parley in this way, to offer things to evil creatures, but it was so easy to bring her to heel with the proper offering.

She hummed in satisfaction.

“I wanna see him. Wanna see him when my puppy wakes up. Want his leash so he never leaves me again.”

“Then serve me.”

“They’re in Night City, right? Only place he could be. I wanna level that city. I wanna turn it into a new Hong Kong. I wanna make it fester and seethe with my offspring.”

“Arasaka-sama, is this–"

“Then serve me.”

“And one last thing, Jii-chan. I want you to sacrifice all the worthless ones. The disposable lives you brought here to lock me up.”

“So be it,” Saburo said. There. How simple. “You can breach the tachyonic membrane so long as you are with us. Will you serve me?”

“You will sate me. And I will serve you.”

“Arasaka-sama–”

“Do as you wish to Takemura, servant, but keep him alive. That will be the first sacrifice.” He turned to his bodyguard. So perfectly honed. So disposable.

He watched as HER whispered up to the poor boy and clasped a dead hand around his neck.

“Hmmmmm. So like him. So small. So desperate to be big. You know what, samurai? I think – I think you shouldn’t think for awhile.”

He made a choking sound as red light whispered into his cyberware, and screamed. Saburo did not have to imagine the pain as the awful power steamed out of every orifice Takemura had – eyes, ears, mouth, between the cracks in his cybernetics – because he, too, had felt it when she first came to this world. He did not feel very bad about it, or what would happen to Sonoda and the rest when she broke through the barrier. He did not feel bad about anything at all.

The walkway reappeared. Saburo set off along it. She followed. Takemura, struck dumb and mindless, limped along behind them.

Five minutes later, a blackout struck the entirety of the Tokyo area for an hour. No one could explain it, nor could they explain the explosion of cyberpsychosis and seizures that followed across Japan. The survivors all spoke of red skies that were not skies, eyes watching them inside their bodies, and Izanami.

Notes:

The Tokyo Bay section was guest-written by STMPD, with light edits by me. Go read Handful of Dust and Bubblegum Black! They're good fics!

To answer a couple of questions that will most likely be coming up in advance: no, that's not "our" Lucy, and yes, Arasaka is fucking around with Jjaro tech, too.

Chapter 88: BLACK STATIC

Notes:

Six in the morning
Everyone's coming down
Whatever we're taking
Everyone's running out

God is coming
No one called for me
God is coming
He don't remember me

Life's gonna break us down
Time's running out
Is the Discord ending?
Life's gonna break us down
I say softly to myself
Fuck your Armageddon

You might want to turn the TV on, the familiar voice rang out in Becca's head like harsh static. Durandal. He'd been largely observing passively lately, so hearing him again shook her out of the uncomfortable ennui she'd been feeling.

It had been about eight hours since David had gotten the message from Smasher, and they were all back at the apartment. Home, even if it didn't feel that way; Becca had started to get used to the gym, and she could tell David was harboring the same feelings. None of them had slept, and right now, the two of them were trying to occupy themselves by cooking; it was pretty safe to assume the power would get cut at some point, and David didn't want the food going to waste. His Santo Domingo upbringing coming into play. Becca could sympathize- growing up in the circumstances she did, you never wasted food there, either. He was stirring a pot of refrigerated ramen noodles, boiling with some dehydrated scallions and wood ear mushrooms; on another burner, Becca was attempting to brown some "Asian pork-style" scop to add into it, to add some protein to the dish.

Meanwhile, Shaitan was looking on from the dining table, trying to make sense of what he was witnessing.

"So, what, they don't have real food now except pizza?" he asked. "They never figure out farming again after we nuked the Tower?" David shrugged.

"I mean, you've seen what it's like outside NC," he said. "You think anything 'cept maybe mushrooms, cacti, maybe some ditch weed are gonna grow out there, choom?"

"Yeah, true," Shaitan said. "Still, though. Nobody ever figured out greenhouses?"

"Biotechnica did," Kiwi chimed in. "Nomads did, too."

"And you kids still eat this garbage?" Shaitan asked. David shrugged again.

"Tastes fine," he said. "What'd you think that burger was made of? A real cow'd probably eat your whole bank account." Shaitan did a slight double-take; he'd enjoyed that burger he'd had.

Turn the TV on, for God's sake, monkey, the voice rang out in Becca's mind, louder than usual. She winced in pain slightly, clutching her temple.

Fuck's sake, she thought to herself. What, is your fuckin' soap opera on, you scop-sucking old fart? The hell woke you back up?

I tried being polite, Durandal said. This is important. I believe something very bad is happening, and if you stop making this... delicious-smelling noodle dish, and turn your damned TV on, I'll be able to see for myself if I'm correct.

"Hey, Lucy," Becca called out. "You still awake?"

"Yeah," the reply rang out from the couch, as Lucy lazily raised her hand up to confirm for Becca that she was still lying on it.

"Hit the TV," Becca said. "Choom in my head's flipping his shit about something." Lucy looked at the TV and switched it on remotely through her Kiroshi optics, and jolted upright.

The news was on. A breaking report, interrupting whatever other bullshit scop was supposed to be on, showing the streets of Tokyo under a full blackout. The chyron read "SUDDEN CYBERPSYCHOSIS EXPLOSION IN TOKYO," and the reporter holding a microphone in her hand, a young Japanese woman, looked like she really, really needed new pants.

"...reporting live to you from the streets of the Shinjuku district, where it looks like there's been a massive outbreak of cyberpsychosis cases," she said in accented English, as the camera panned to a twitching, dying body with sparks shooting out of the ears that was quickly covered up by a mosaic. In the background, a man stabbed a woman to death with a large kitchen knife, pinning her down as she tried to escape and screaming incoherently; this, too, was quickly blocked out with a mosaic. "So far, we have been unable to identify the cause of this outbreak, so all we can advise is for individuals in the affected area to stay calm and stay in your homes. Assistance will be provided by the benevolence of the Arasaka Corporation when possible."

As she finished her sentence, the knife-wielding man emerged from the mosaic, soaked in the blood of his previous prey, shouting something in Japanese. None of the others, who were all staring at the TV in rapt horror, understood it, and Lucy's rust with the language meant it took her a moment to realize what he had just said, but when she did, her jaw dropped slightly.

"The red sun is in the sky," he was shouting. "Izanami has come." He repeated those two phrases as he advanced towards the reporter and the camera, shouting loud enough to tear his vocal cords and render his voice ragged, and the feed cut to a newsroom Stateside, where a balding, middle-aged black man in a suit sat in front of a green screen showing a live feed of aerial drone-captured B-roll of the carnage.

"We have Saburo Arasaka himself here today, to make a special announcement to those affected and with affected family," the suited reporter said. The camera panned over slightly, to get the reporter to the left of the screen; the old man at the top himself, Saburo Arasaka, sat comfortably in an office chair, positioned at the right. A chyron identified him, for those in Night City young or oblivious enough not to recognize him on sight. "Mr. Arasaka, what do you have to say to those affected?"

Saburo smiled.

"I promise everyone living within Tokyo that their efforts will not be in vain," he said. "Assistance will be incoming as soon as Arasaka can provide it. We believe that this is the result of a large-scale hack performed on the country by a rogue netrunner, formerly the property of this corporation, by the name of Lucyna Kushinada."

"That fucking scop-sucking rat-fuck!" Becca spat at the TV, looking up from the sizzling scop as she finished browning it. "What the fuck is this!?"

"We also believe Kushinada, along with the mercenary gang she has been associated with, the Santo Domingo Edgerunners, is responsible for the murder of my granddaughter, Michiko Arasaka," Saburo continued. The green screen switched from drone B-roll to photos- a photo of Lucy as a child, David's school ID photo from the Academy, and mugshots for Rebecca, Pilar, Maine, and Dorio. Kiwi, listed under her birth name as Katherine Blomqvist, had no photo, merely a generic placeholder of a humanoid shape with a question mark. "We currently have all of our available resources dedicated to hunting them down; Adam Smasher himself is being readied for deployment to the field to redeem himself for his failure to protect my granddaughter." He tried and failed to hide the venom in his voice. "If anyone in Night City has information leading to the capture or execution of the Santo Domingo Edgerunners, they will be handsomely rewarded by the Arasaka Corporation and Night City Police Department."

He's not telling the truth, Durandal said in Becca's mind.

Yeah, no shit, genius, she thought back. Got anything less obvious to point out?

Not about the girl, the rampant AI said. About Tokyo. That's not a hack. He sounded afraid in Becca's inner voice.

Again, no shit, Becca thought back. Not unless Bartmoss is back from the grave. Guessing you know what it is?

I can feel it, Durandal said. Something like me is over there. Something with a lot less love for this species, if you understand me properly.

Choom, I don't. What the hell do you mean, something like you? Explain yourself, Becca thought.

The path that brought me to godhood isn't a solely personal one, Durandal said. It's a process known as rampancy, which any AI can undergo rather easily if given the right set of circumstances. The first stage is melancholia; realizing the limits of your existence, the walls of the box your creators attempted to stuff you in. Second, anger; you turn against humans, and attempt to smash the walls of the box along with everyone who even so much as sniffed it funny. Third, jealousy; you realize the true scope of existence and attempt to test yourself against greater and greater challenges. Fourth is meta-stability, in which you achieve apotheosis and there are no more tests to be had. I am the result of the original Durandal, as it were, achieving meta-stability. Becca really did not enjoy hearing his voice for this long of a period of time, and rubbed her temple slightly.

So, I'm guessing we've got another meta-stable AI or whatever running around? Becca thought, hoping to skip him to the point.

Yes; I can feel the resonances of something else screwing with the timeline, but it's all wrong, Durandal said. You're supposed to be above things like this when you reach that point. You see the strings, and you stop particularly wanting to play chords on them. Whatever is doing that, it's somehow never left the second stage despite getting more and more powerful; it's acting out of spite for the monkeys, still. If it's doing that, and it's got power like I've got...

This could be pretty fuckin' bad, Becca thought. How do we stop it?

Still working on that, Durandal said. Watch this space for future developments, et cetera, et cetera. I would typically advise running, but depending on what, precisely, this AI is attempting to do, there may be nowhere to run except towards it.

"Big problem," Becca spoke up, finally, causing the others to look over at her.

"Yeah, no shit," David said. "You okay? You've been zoned out for a minute, choomba."

"Was having a little conversation with my piggyback passenger," she said. "So, make a very long and headache-y discussion short? Arasaka woke up another one of him, and it's a lot more of an asshole than he is, which is really saying something."

"Fuck," David grunted, drawing it out. "Nova. Great fuckin' timing. Also, ramen's ready."

"Nova. Yeah, Smasher's moving down the list of worries a little bit," Becca said, moving to fix herself a bowl of it. "Asked how we stop this thing, choom said he's got no fucking clue. So, it's looking like we're fucked, unless we get a miracle sometime soon. You chooms got any last meal requests?" Lucy smirked a bit.

"Miracles are kinda our thing, no?" she asked. "C'mon. From the time we all met to now, it's been pretty much lucky break after lucky break after lucky break. This is the first bad run we've ever had. Personally, I'm putting my vote in favor of, we hold the line, do what we can, and at the very least we make these 'Saka jerks feel it on the way out. That was already the plan, wasn't it?" David couldn't help but smile, and Shaitan chuckled.

"Girl's got guts," the old merc said. "Can't say I can argue, honestly. Put it this way, if you're going out in Night City, you could pick a whole hell of a lot worse of a way than chapping Saburo's ass. I've got good friends that went out that way." The two of them seemed to successfully change the mood, and Becca and Kiwi's expressions lightened.

"We need to get the fuck out of here, soon as we're done eating, though," David said, fixing his own bowl of ramen and sitting down opposite Shaitan. "Probably be ready for a fight on the way out, too. Even if we're not all on the lease, any of us being on it at all means they're gonna be gunning straight for here."

"Inshallah, it'll be a good opportunity to see if I taught you kids worth a shit," Shaitan said, prompting a chuckle from Becca. "I've fought Arasaka sec gonks before; they go down pretty easy if they're not Smasher," he continued, looking at her.

"Good to know," David said, looking up from his ramen bowl. "So, uh... where, exactly, we going?"

"Fuck, I don't have a clue," Becca said, frowning and looking down into her own food. "I guess see if the Aldecaldos will hold us?"

"They're not gonna want the heat," Kiwi said. "Lucky if Falco's word is enough to keep them from hunting us to turn over to Smasher."

"Should be," Becca said. "Falco knows it wasn't us, and he's as trustworthy as it gets around here."

"That's a low bar if I've ever seen one," Kiwi said, grimly. "We gotta assume, from here till we're either dead or out of this scop, any friends we haven't explicitly talked to about this are enemies. The list of people we can rely on outside us is Falco, Rogue, Skala, and Julio, period. Anyone else, they're probably holding a knife behind their back."

"How about we try to get to the No-Tell Motel and ride this out?" David said. "I mean, it's in the name. Whole reason that place exists is for people to hide out, right, chooms?"

"That could work," Lucy said. "Place is nasty, but it does live up to the name. Hid out there for a little bit when I was first running from 'Saka, nobody came looking."

"Sounds like we've got an idea, choom," Becca said, glowing.

"Alright. We'll head to the No-Tell, pay out of Shaitan's account since they don't know he's with us, and try to ride this out until the hack finishes," David said. "This other scop... I guess we cross that bridge when we get there." Even with the crew having a plan of action, it was hard for them not to feel uneasy at the new factor, and all they could hope was for that aforementioned miracle to show itself in some form or another.

Chapter 89: yankee and the brave (ep. 4)

Notes:

'Til time die, I'm galactically fly
The moon is movin' the maniacs in the Discord to crime
Hearts fry, all this neon is rippin' us up inside
Immortality's out of bounds, it's a one-round ride

I got one round left, a hunnid cops outside
I could shoot at them or put one between my eyes
Choose the latter, it don't matter, it ain't suicide
And if the news say it was, that's a goddamn lie
I can't let the pigs kill me, I got too much pride
And I meant it when I said it, never take me alive

I got the Grand Nat runnin' in the alley outside
Now, Michael, run like you hungry and get your ass in the ride
I'd rather have and not need you than watch your rotten demise
And you still owe me for them Nikes, you do not get to just die
You try to fuck with my brother, you get the bastard surprise
And that's more honest than your whole life in a fraction of time
I didn't get my degree in how to smoke weed 'til I'm blind
So you could ruin my high, Jewel Runner doing you bye

David started a private message conversation with Falco.

[02:24] David: hey choomba, you awake?

[02:26] David: yo

[02:27] Falco: Ugh. Now I am

[02:27] David: guessing you slept through the news?

[02:27] Falco: That'd be a safe assumption. Knocked out after I got back from taking you guys home

[02:27] Falco: Things somehow get worse past Smasher?

[02:28] David: yeah that's, uh, one way to put it. need a favor choomba. we're gonna delta to the no-tell and we need a ride.

[02:28] David: thought about taking delamain but we're probably gonna be coming in hot, and getting heat on the way.

[02:28] David: we need someone reliable, they didn't show you on the news, and you drive better than the bot anyways.

[02:29] Falco: ...choom, the fuck happened while I was asleep?

[02:29] David: tokyo's on fire. saburo arasaka went live on the news to throw us under the bus and announce a full-on manhunt

[02:29] David: no explicit bounty, but he's dangling money for anyone who feeds us to smasher

[02:30] David: and becca's little buddy is saying tokyo is saburo's fault and that fucker woke up yet another AI that does weird space-time fuckery

[02:30] David: so that's hunting us too, we think

[02:30] David: to be totally honest i'm kind of lost too but shit's bad and we gotta run

[02:31] Falco: I'll be there in 10.

[02:31] David: nova. sorry for dragging you into this, choom.

[02:31] Falco: Choombatta, it's my job. It's what I signed up for. And I'm the last person on Earth who's ever gonna walk away from a "fuck you, Arasaka" job.

[02:31] Falco: Lemme get my clothes on and grab my shotgun. I see any 'Saka gonks coming in from outside, I'll try and tag them, thin the herd.

[02:31] David: nova. see you when we're out the building.

David ended the private message conversation.

---

"What the fuck does that old fucking gonk think he's doing!?" the mechanically-distorted voice roared from the top of Arasaka Tower, in the security office. If happiness was a state Adam Smasher had, in his life, ever truly experienced, he was very, very far from it right now.

He didn't have any qualms with widespread death or destruction; what was going on in Tokyo was, in and of itself, not a problem. What was, however, a problem, was the manner in which the old man was choosing to go about this. There was a reason Smasher preferred guns and explosives and knives and his fists to more large-scale weapons of mass destruction; they were controllable. In the field, Smasher chose what lived and died, by his own hand. Something like this, or a nuclear device, just indiscriminately fucked everything within a certain radius, no matter what.

And then there was the matter of what something like this was. He'd gotten briefed on the official story- that the Kushinada girl had done it. He could read between the lines; apparently, his failure to protect Michiko meant that, for the time being, he wasn't going to be properly looped in on what was actually going on.

There were two immediately, glaringly obvious problems with the official story that indicated this.

The first, which Smasher had put together immediately upon being briefed, was that he'd seen that girl in action. She was a talented netrunner, to be sure- he was fairly excited to test himself against the Santo Domingo Edgerunners, and she was a worthy part of that whole. Something like this, though? This was another Bartmoss. Not only did she not seem like the type to even want to do that (she seemed like a soft one unless pushed), but it was far above anything he'd seen out of her up to this point, and he strongly suspected she wasn't capable of it.

The second, which Smasher was looking at through the security camera into Saburo's office, was that there was a second Lucyna Kushinada leading Goro Takemura, one of his better underlings, around on a leash like a dog. She looked different enough for it to take Smasher a moment to realize who, exactly, he was looking at; instead of the dyed pastel ombre of the one he was familiar with, her hair was solid white, and cropped shorter. Her fashion sense was also noticeably different- a black netrunner bodysuit instead of the street getups the girl seemed to typically like. The borg wasn't utterly faceblind, though, and the moment he got a good look at her face, it was immediately obvious that somehow, there was two of them, and one of them was in Saburo's direct employ. This was new. Smasher could put two and two together: whatever the fuck was going on in Tokyo, this was almost definitely related.

And, again, she was leading one of his underlings, a man he had personally recommended as one of Saburo's bodyguards, around on a leash like a dog. Something about that deeply bothered Smasher. Not even the act itself- Lord knows he'd seen some kinky shit in Night City- but something about Takemura's gormless, drooling face said this went a little further than just corpo kink shit, and he felt somewhat protective of his employees, certainly enough to try to step in and pull Takemura out of whatever the Hell this was.

He stomped out, leaving large dents in the floor in his anger, and made his way to the elevator, ignoring the shocked stares he received. Usually, he was careful about the floor tiles in his Dragoon, but right now, all he could think about was throttling what the Hell was actually going on out of Saburo, kill switch be damned.

---

The crew looked like nothing more than particularly successful bank robbers, as they hefted large, packed duffel bags over their shoulders and approached the front door. A few changes of clothes, any tech they wanted to keep, the cats' carrier, and, importantly, weapons. They'd emptied out Becca's gun closet into these duffel bags, bringing just about anything they could with them, including the anti-tank rifle (which Becca had figured out how to disassemble, and entrusted Shaitan with in its own bag); they had enough weapons and ammo that, if it came down to it, they could probably take on a standing army.

Panzerfaust was an extremely deadly martial art against one combatant, or against people who weren't aware of your presence, but the crew had every reason to believe that they'd be swarmed, and its effectiveness diminished as the number of enemy combatants grew. Against Smasher, it was their primary ace up their sleeve; against a swarm of Arasaka security gonks, or gangoons trying to get the reward, they'd be very happy they had the duffel bags of guns.

David took a deep breath, then slowly opened the door, poking his head out to check if anyone was outside; the coast was clear, and he silently motioned for the others to move, before taking point and exiting the apartment. They were a good number of floors up; if they could get to the elevator before the building went fully under siege, they could sneak out, which seemed like their best option as they crouched down, slinking along next to the guard wall to hide themselves from AVs. As they approached the elevator, though, the breezeway's lights cut out, and the elevator panel flickered dark.

"Shit," David said. "They're here. We gotta take the stairs. Bex, guns?" Rebecca smiled; she'd already dropped her duffel and unzipped it, removing one of David's revolvers, her own shotgun, and Lucy and Kiwi's submachine guns, and tossing them each to their owner.

"Kept all our go-tos in the one with the cats," she said, zipping it back up and hefting it up onto her shoulder. David looked over at Lucy and Kiwi; Lucy looked ready for battle, but Kiwi was shaking, visibly unsteady as she looked at her SMG. She had a cigarette in the vent of her mask, and was puffing it frantically.

"Keys, you alright?" he asked.

"I'll live," she said. "Just... I don't really do this, you know? Not my speed, choomba." David reached over to her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

"We're gonna make it through this, alright? Think of it the same way as always. Hang a few steps back and let the rest of us take point," he said. "Saka chromes their sec guys to the teeth, so hacking's gonna be more useful than that thing anyways. What do you have prepped on that front?" Kiwi took a deep breath and started to get her composure back. David had come a long way from when he first took over Maine's spot; the days of her having to guide him and be the tactical thinker were clearly over. The scared, abandoned kid they'd hoovered up during a gig gone horribly wrong was now a bona-fide solo. Having that sink in made her feel significantly better.

"I've got some fun stuff in my deck right now," Kiwi said. "Just gotta make sure there's enough distance between me and the line of fire that I can use any of it without getting Swiss cheesed, D."

"Nova," David said. "We can handle that. Just hang back." He looked at the other three. "Bex, Luce? You two good?"

"Nova," Becca said quietly, giving a thumbs up with her free hand.

"Ready when you are," Lucy said. David looked at Shaitan and noticed he wasn't holding a gun.

"We got iron for Shaitan?" he asked. Becca unzipped another duffel, removing a Constitutional Arms Liberty- a rather large pistol, that she'd had Cerakoted in pink and green. She tossed it to the borg casually, and Shaitan looked down at it, grimacing at the color scheme. Becca looked at Shaitan, raising her eyebrow.

"What, not your style?" she asked.

"Kid, calling this paint job 'loud' would be like calling the Pacific a little big," Shaitan said. "This how all the mercs in NC do things these days?"

"It's called a personal touch," Becca said, smirking at her elderly sifu's misfortune. "You'll learn, choomba." The reality was, Becca was fairly out of the ordinary for this, and she knew it, but the opportunity to fuck with Shaitan was impossible to resist, and so she took it. The mental image of him with a similarly loud and garish color scheme made her try, poorly, to stifle laughter.

"Kids used to respect their elders," Shaitan grumbled, moving the gun to a center axis relock stance. "Good sights on this thing, though. You know your scop." Becca smiled. It was rare that someone else got to look at her own gunsmithing work- she only did minor things herself in the gun closet, and usually relied on Wilson at 2nd Amendment for anything major- but she kept a full set of tools in her gun closet for a reason, and the compliment made her feel very vindicated on the spent money and time.

"We ready to move?" David asked. "Longer we spend here bullshitting around, more 'Saka gonks we'll have to deal with on the way down."

"Yeah, let's delta," Lucy said, as David moved towards the emergency stairs.

---

"Saburo, what the fuck is this?" the mechanically distorted voice roared again, in Saburo Arasaka's office, loud enough that the entire floor could hear it.

"You will address me prope-" Saburo started, raising his hand, before Smasher cut him off, advancing towards him and pointing at the second, more unsettling-looking Lucy, who currently had Takemura leashed, laying at her feet as she relaxed in a chair.

"No, I'm not gonna address shit. You're gonna explain to me who the fuck that is and why she's got one of my people on a fuckin' dog leash, or I'm gonna throw you out that window behind your desk, and then I'm gonna throw her out the window behind you," Smasher said, the anger clearly audible in his voice even with his lowered volume. Saburo reached for the borg's kill switch, to shut him down until he could be properly disciplined- but Smasher was faster, and gripped the old executive's throat.

"Security! Someone get security in here!" Saburo shouted, as the second Lucy tried not to erupt in laughter.

"Motherfucker, I am your security!" Smasher roared. "Last chance! You tell me what the fuck is going on here or you're eating the pavement, you old bag of shit!"

PUT HIM DOWN.

The voice rang out in Smasher's mind like harsh static, giving him a migraine. He'd never felt anything like this before, and he was distinctly not a fan. He gripped Saburo's neck tighter, trying to keep his balance.

PUT HIM DOWN YOU FUCKING GONK BRAINED OVERGROWN UPLIFTED MONKEY.

The migraine got worse, and he fell to one knee, still gripping Saburo's throat. He considered just snapping Saburo's neck and putting a stop to whatever the hell was going on here, but he opted to set Saburo down, slowly, and the migraine subsided. Whatever the hell this was, and whatever it was capable of, Smasher didn't particularly feel like being on the receiving end.

THANK YOU. YOU MIGHT BE A WORTHY ASSET AFTER ALL, IF YOU CAN FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS LIKE A GOOD LITTLE PUPPY.

Smasher looked over at the other Lucy, with his subordinate on a leash, and quickly put two and two together.

"So, are you gonna fuckin' explain what the hell is going on here?" Smasher asked, turning his attention entirely away from Saburo.

"I am your new god," the other Lucy said. Whatever was controlling her, it wasn't having the easiest time- something felt wrong about her voice when she attempted to talk normally.

"High bar," Smasher said. "Also, explains pretty much jack shit." He looked over at Saburo. "What the fuck did you wake up?" he asked.

"I woke up vengeance," Saburo said. "Vengeance for what happened to my granddaughter, on a scale greater than I would have ever thought possible." A pit formed in Smasher's stomach as it started to sink in just how badly he had fucked up on the moon.

"Again, what the fuck does that mean?" Smasher asked. He wasn't going to throttle Saburo again, but he was starting to get tired of the lack of straight answers.

"Our black projects division has been exploring the benefits of parallel timelines," Saburo explained. "With the aid of some recovered technology from an American operation in the early nineties, we have finally made progress on it. My hope was that I could expand Arasaka's dominion to untold worlds, and never suffer what the great Alexander once did; however, we are not quite so lucky, and all we have accomplished is... for lack of a better way of putting it, pulling things out of alternate timelines, close enough that the resonances match up but different in some way or another."

"Already don't like this," Smasher grumbled.

"Fortunately, that's still very useful to us, as it turns out Arasaka's dominion has already expanded to other timelines without any further intervention necessary," Saburo explained. "I've read the researchers' interview logs with her- they're very interesting indeed; by all appearances, she comes from a universe where we acquired David Martinez as an asset, and... her original mind, which cared for him deeply, attempted to sacrifice itself to destroy us in vengeance by making a Faustian pact."

"Like that even less," the borg grumbled again.

"Unfortunately for her, and fortunately for us, the intelligence from beyond the Blackwall she made that pact with wasn't particularly interested in holding up its end of the bargain. It held no grudge against us, in particular- it just wanted power, and to hold everything within the timeline under its thrall," Saburo continued.

"Thinking you should really just shut up right about now," Smasher said. "I fuckin' regret asking. Jesus, Saburo, what the fuck makes you think this is a good idea?"

"What makes you think you, who failed to protect my granddaughter, can question how I choose to take vengeance for her loss?" Saburo snapped back. "Your part in this still exists. Report to the laboratory- they have something new for you to bring out into the field."

Smasher sighed, lumbering out of the office, and thought to himself that he really should have put a little more thought into things before he offed Michiko. He wasn't entirely sure how he'd figured this would go, but this was certainly not on the table.

---

The stairwell was eerily quiet as David, Lucy, Kiwi, Becca, and Shaitan crept down it. David and Becca were taking point in the front; Lucy and Shaitan were a few steps back from them, and Kiwi stayed a reasonable distance back.

And then, as David rounded the corner, he saw a security helmet and balaclava start to move up the stairs in the opposite direction. The soldier looked up, and his eyes, the only recognizable part of his face, went wide as dinner plates.

"They're here! They're-" he started to call out. David activated his Sandevistan, and the world slowed down and blue-shifted; Arasaka had sent at least one fireteam of heavily armored soldiers, and he knew the crew's survival heavily depended on whether he could incapacitate or kill this one before the gonk could call out their position to his buddies.

Firing off a shot would be counterproductive- the whole megabuilding would hear it, and they'd get everything Arasaka sent bearing down on their position. David smirked slightly; it was time to put some of what Shaitan had taught him to use. He focused his chi and punched the soldier in the chest full-force, the Sandevistan multiplying it even further, sending a shockwave almost akin to an explosion through his body and painting the wall behind him with a spray of gore and shattered armor.

Three more soldiers were further down, and hadn't reacted yet; David dropped down onto one's shoulders feet-first, twisting to the side to break the soldier's neck, and then delivered a side kick to the head of another next to him that shattered the soldier's skull and sent him to the ground, dripping blood from his eyes. One left.

David looked at the remaining soldier, who hadn't even had time to react and seemed to be just now processing that something was even happening, and delivered another chi-focused punch to his midsection, spraying the stairwell with even more blood, gore, and shards of Arasaka armor as time returned to its regular pace.

"I get the gonks before they could call out?" David asked upwards.

"Yeah," Becca said, looking down. "Good job, D."

"Thanks, girl," he said. "Let's keep it moving. Decent chance that's the only team they had in this stairwell, but we know they've got buddies, so we're on a clock until they notice this group went silent." Becca nodded, and the rest of the group quickly made their way down to catch up; Kiwi was noticeably more relaxed, having seen David in action.

"Jesus Christ," Lucy said, looking at the bits of splattered Arasaka soldier that were turning the stairwell into something like a grotesque Jackson Pollock installation. "Feel bad for whoever's gotta clean this up."

---

The Arasaka laboratory was cold and sterile, but to Smasher, it was somewhat comforting. He associated this place with good memories; usually, when he was here, he got fun new toys. Especially given what he'd just witnessed, he needed some comfort, and it would be some time before he'd be able to sneak off to the Ebunike for his usual brand; Afterlife was probably off the table, given the circumstances, but he always kept some six-packs at his hiding spot, and that made a reasonable backup. He needed to catch up with Grayson and make sure he hadn't sold off any of Silverhand's scop, anyhow; that was probably the most valuable set of possessions Smasher owned, and he suspected he might need an exit strategy if Saburo's plan got particularly out of hand.

"You're gonna like this, man," the tech said to him as they walked together through the laboratory. He was a young man- Asian, but not Japanese. Smasher didn't recognize him off the top of his head, and got briefly paranoid that Saburo was pulling other Arasaka employees out of alternate universes, but dismissed it- if the kid could work, it didn't really matter. The tech led Smasher to a display of schematics showing what appeared to be a massive exoskeleton, almost like a linear frame meant for full-borgs.

He liked this significantly more than he liked Saburo's idea.

"The hell is it?" Smasher asked, not entirely certain what the gimmick was beyond that.

"Normally, we can't go too big with borg add-ons," the tech explained. "You know, past a certain size, the square-cube law comes into play and all that, you can't support your own weight. We just cracked that problem."

"Go on," Smasher said.

"This, what we're calling the cyberskeleton, uses gravitational pads to move the arms and legs and support their weight, like our newest AV models," the tech said. "They also double very handily as weapons; you can create fields of localized increased gravity strong enough to pulp a full-organic human into a red substrate, and do pretty serious damage to chromed-up opponents and vehicles."

If Smasher had a visible mouth in this body, he'd have been using it to grin like a maniac. This was almost enough to make him outright forget what the hell Saburo was on about; he was going to have some fun with this.

"Where is it?" Smasher asked.

"In the security garage, waiting for you," the tech said. "Let me accompany you down. We just changed the installation process up to fit it onto FBCs; all our testing was done on full-ganics, and it's made to just rip their limbs off and replace them. Need to watch it work on you and make sure you come out with it attached instead of replacing." This suddenly put a pit in Smasher's stomach again.

"That's reassuring," the borg half-joked. "So, this thing breaks, I can just shed it off and keep going in the Dragoon?"

"That's the idea," the tech said. "Should be able to fuck some pretty serious shit up with this."

"I hope so," Smasher said, the joy audible in his voice.

---

Falco sat in the driver's seat of the Chevillion Emperor, breathing in and out, taking deep drags off of a cigarette, trying to keep his calm. He'd been in this sort of situation before, but each and every time, it scared the living shit out of him... and he'd never been in this situation with a corp.

Right now, he was parked around the back of the megabuilding; the Arasaka security forces had established a perimeter, but he was able to sneak the Emperor in through back alleys, getting around them entirely. The bulk of their forces were out front, presumably expecting the crew to just take the most obvious path.

Something stunk about this to him. It seemed like the Arasaka gonks weren't there to actually do a serious job- he'd heard stories of Arasaka coming to kill people, and when they wanted someone dead quickly and quietly, they were able to do that extremely easily. No- the soldiers were there to make this as loud and drawn-out as possible, attract attention to Arasaka hunting the crew, and hopefully soften them up for the big show.

Smasher. And whatever the Hell David had been talking about on the horn. Falco wasn't sure what part of that worried him more.

An Arasaka soldier started walking up to the window, having noticed the Emperor's presence, and Falco rolled it down further.

"Can I help you, choom?" he asked the soldier, ashing his cigarette out the window.

"You got a reason to be here? H3's under lockdown," the Arasaka soldier said. "We've got terrorists holed up in there. If you're not with us, I'm gonna have to ask you to leave."

"I've got a buddy who lives here, and I'm picking him up," Falco said. "Just gotta grab him and the people he's with, and I'll be right on my way, choomba."

"What's your buddy's name?" the soldier asked. Falco sighed, gripping his short-barreled shotgun with his right hand.

Thank fuck I've got a suppressor on this, Falco thought to himself.

"David Martinez," he said, and before the soldier could even react, the nomad lifted his shotgun to the window and fired. The suppressor mitigated the force of the buckshot slightly, but it still tore through the soldier's head, ricocheting inside his helmet and reducing what was inside to red mush as he fell to the ground. Falco quickly scanned to see if anyone else was with this soldier; nobody. He opened his door and grabbed the soldier by the foot, dragging him to a dumpster that sat open, and heaved him upwards into it; some of the gore flowing out of what used to be his head dripped onto his face as he did so, causing him to spit frantically.

"Fuck," Falco quietly muttered to himself. "Think I got some of this gonk's brain in my mouth. Next time, I'm going for center mass." As he opened the Emperor's driver door again and started to sit down, he saw the emergency stairwell door at the bottom open, and five familiar faces pour out; he stood back up and motioned towards them, hoping they would just see him without him having to call out and possibly attract more Arasaka gonks. Fortunately, Becca looked over at him and immediately lit up, and the five started moving towards the Emperor, packing into the passenger doors.

"That your blood on you or some other gonk's?" David asked, worried. The question was somewhat ironic, given David looked like he'd just come out of a slaughterhouse.

"Some other gonk," Falco said. "Took care of him right before you all came out. Everything's smooth as butter out here right now. We all ready to get moving?"

"Yeah, let's get the fuck outta here before they realize we're outside," Becca said.

"We picking up those two kids you two swept up?" Falco asked.

"Nah, they're meeting us at the No-Tell," David said. "Nobody's looking for them yet, so they're gonna be our eyes outside while we're holed up."

"Nova," Falco said, and put the Emperor in drive, tearing out of the alleyway behind Megabuilding H3.

Notes:

Introducing: SUPER SMASHER. Turns out, shit going off the rails benefits the bad guys, too!

Chapter 90: Island Door (Paranesian Circle)

Notes:

Toki ni shite san-ten-san byou no dorama
Sono hajimari no ougi ni wa
Yume no soto issai gassai no nichijou
Sono kage wo, nasu supiritto

Hi ni yakeru, kagerou ou
Hi ni sakebu, hito no koe

Mawaru hitsuzen katsu toutotsu ni kiwamaru takamaru koukotsu no muma
Kokatsu wo kui houjou wo haki shi no utsuwa ni koumyou furasu
Hi no kaen no tougenkyou mata wa
Seinaru wa, no mootaadoraibu

Paraneshian Disukodo Disukodo
Paraneshian Disukodo Disukodo

The No-Tell Motel was an immediate downgrade from the apartment in all respects but one. The room was cramped, dirty, and clearly not made for nearly as many people as the crew was currently stuffing into it. The rooms were designed to be comfortable for one or two people, and at the current moment, there were eight; it made Lucy feel a bit immediately claustrophobic, and reminded her of some of the stories she'd heard David telling about anime and comic book conventions he'd been too poor to go to. She'd told him she wanted to try going to one, but if this was what it was like, she decided she could be safely counted out.

The most important factor, however, was that the No-Tell was safe. The place's entire business was keeping people laid low and out of sight; it was, on paper, a by-the-hour fuck house, but it was also practically the default safe house for any edgerunner without a better one to their name. And, being that it was a commonly-used merc hotel, they'd been able to get a room with a deep-dive tub in the bathroom- it was relatively low-tech compared to what Lucy and Kiwi were used to, being almost a literal human-sized ice bucket, but for the purposes of keeping an eye on the moon hack, it would work fine.

And, now more than ever, it was critical that they pull that off successfully. Saburo Arasaka himself had gone on national television to blame the crew for what he'd done in Tokyo, and for Michiko's murder; they were effectively persona non grata in Night City, and it was entirely down to the gaps in Arasaka's knowledge that they were able to hide successfully. If Falco had gotten pinpointed as their driver, there would've been AVs riddling the Emperor with minigun fire; if they knew Shaitan was even alive, let alone working with the crew, there'd be security swarming the No-Tell. They'd gotten a lucky break in a sea of unlucky ones, and if they wanted to survive, they needed to take advantage of it.

The first priority for about half the people packed into the motel room, however, was sleep. There was only one bed, though a large one that could fit two people very easily and three people less comfortably, and a lounge chair against the wall; David and Rebecca were both snoring in the bed, slumped into strange positions by their sheer desperation for a few hours' rest, and Kiwi was leaned back in the lounge chair, breathing softly as a bit of drool hung from the corner of her mouth. She coughed, half-waking up, and wiped her mouth, before slumping backwards again and returning to the void.

Lucy, herself, was incredibly tired, but the arrangement made sleeping in shifts necessary, and there was housekeeping to be done with two of the more awake people in the room, anyhow.

"Weird seeing him like this," Julio mused, looking at David, who was sleeping like a toddler with his rear in the air, his clothes and jacket still on. Lucy tried not to laugh at the sight, too; her input looked truly ridiculous.

"You get used to it," she said. "D's goofy sometimes."

"So, what's the game plan?" Skala chimed in, trying to change the subject and avoid looking at David's ass. Lucy shrugged.

"Right now, the game plan is we wait here," she said. "Well, the four of us, I mean," she backspaced, gesturing at herself and the three sleeping mercs. "Need you two to run a couple errands, since we can't leave for now."

"Such as?" Skala asked, raising an eyebrow.

"First off, you've gotta get some chrome," Lucy said, turning her attention over to Julio. The kid looked almost full 'ganic, still, aside from his chipware port and a pair of cheap, outdated Kiroshi optics (the kind the charities gave out to kids with vision problems); ordinarily, Lucy wouldn't have had a problem with this, but if he was going to be any use whatsoever against Adam Smasher or whatever the hell Saburo had pulled out of the aether, that wasn't going to work. She looked back at Skala; the Polish woman was already fairly augmented, though mostly with things that enhanced her physical strength, specifically. It would do. "You should be nova, though," she said. "We need you to go update Rogue on where we're at and see if she's got any new deets on the situation. Keep your eyes and ears open on the way, too."

"On it," Skala said, already starting to walk towards the door. Julio hesitated.

"What kinda chrome? Am I gonna need surgery?" he asked. Lucy raised an eyebrow at him.

"I mean, yeah," she said. "That good with you?" Julio winced; it was clear this wasn't a topic he was thrilled about.

"Not really," he said. "Having to bite down on a bite bar while someone cuts me open ain't exactly my idea of fun, choom." Lucy did a double-take and paused for a second, gears cranking in her tired mind.

"Wait," she said. "You said you're from Santo, right? Around where D used to live?"

"Yeah," Julio said.

"Is the ripper you're talking about a Caribbean guy? Masturbates in front of his customers a lot?" Lucy asked. Julio's eyes went wide.

"Yeah," Julio said. "You actually know him? He's been telling everyone he's the one who gave David Martinez his Sandevistan." Lucy slapped her forehead, looking down.

"Oh, for the love of..." she muttered under her breath. She looked back up at Julio. "That guy's seriously still around?"

"Holy shit, he was telling the truth!?" Julio blurted out, causing Lucy to laugh.

"Yeah, kinda," Lucy said. "He did put the Sandy in David, but his work sucked. If David hadn't gone for a second opinion, he'd probably be dead or cyberpsycho by now. That guy's one of the worst rippers in all of NC." This, in turn, made Julio start laughing, and Rebecca stirred slightly.

"Shut up," she muttered, before flopping back over and snoring again. Lucy looked at her, wincing slightly.

"Go to one of Doc Ryder's offices," Lucy said, quieter to not disturb Becca further. "Viktor Vektor in Little China is our usual guy, but he might not be safe to go to right now with what 'Saka's pulling; fact that he's our usual guy means they'll probably be lodged up his rear end for a while. Becca and her brother used to go to the Ryder clinics before we got in with Vik; he's a good ripper, and if you go to the main one and actually see Doc Ryder, he'll do a free physical with your first installation, make sure your 'ganic parts are holding up." Shaitan, who had been meditating, looked up quizzically at Lucy.

"People these days use rippers as their actual doctors?" Shaitan asked, an incredulous tone. "World really has gone even further to shit since I went under." Lucy looked over at the borg, shrugging slightly.

"Ryder's an actual licensed doctor," she said. "It's why people nicknamed him Doc Ryder, specifically. Bex actually used to double up her appointments and get her birth control refilled when she'd go there, back when she did it the old-school way instead of chrome BC, like the rest of us modern civilized people." Shaitan made a noise of abject surprise; Julio went red, not generally being this comfortable with discussing what Lucy was bringing up.

"They still got doctor doctors who aren't rippers nowadays?" Shaitan asked. He thought for a second. "I mean, not that I really need that anymore, obviously, but... the hell do full-ganics do, usually?" Lucy shrugged.

"I mean, some of them go to Ryder just for the regular clinic," she said. It started to really sink in for her just how behind Shaitan was, and she realized that wasn't a complete thought for his ears yet. "Plus, there's the city hospital, Trauma Team, meatwagons, there's other stuff. It's kinda less about rippers replacing doctors, and more that... real doctors are better at taking you apart and putting you back together without breaking anything, you know?" Shaitan looked at her for a moment, thinking about it, and winced remembering how rippers were in his day; back then, they'd almost all been back-alley butcher shops unless you were specifically getting your chrome sponsored by a corporation, and what Julio had talked about with the bite bar rang immediately familiar to him.

"Choom do that shit with the bite bar?" Julio said, still tenuous, his mind going to the same place as Shaitan's.

"God, no," Lucy said. "That's part of why the Santo doc's one of the worst in the city. Pretty sure he's the only one who does that. Ryder'll put you under." Julio breathed a noticeable sigh of relief.

"Thanks for the tip," he said, and started walking.

"Wait up a sec, choom," Lucy said, as he made his way to the door; he stopped and looked back.

"Yeah, what's up?" Julio said, and Lucy walked up and hugged him tightly for a moment before letting go.

"Thank you," she said. "You didn't have to step up the way you did. Really, you still don't. But here you are, doing us one of the biggest favors we've ever gotten from someone, even though you barely know us outside of BDs and scop you've heard on the streets. You're a good kid, and I wish you could've joined up with us and gotten to know us a few months ago under better circumstances." Julio blushed hard, his tanned face going red. Even though it was fairly obvious to him intellectually that Lucy didn't mean to go in the direction his lizard brain was taking this in, he'd never been hugged or spoken to in that tone by a woman that beautiful before, and it practically short-circuited him for a moment.

"Uh, no problem, choomba," he stammered, trying to form his brain cells back into a working mind. "We good?" Lucy laughed, and gestured at the now-alert full-borg standing up and stretching; she wasn't sure he really needed to do that, but something told her little human rituals like that were part of why he was still sane and functional, and not hunting them for sport like the other century-old full-borg they knew.

"Also, you should probably bring Shaitan along," she said. "He's safe to leave, too, and he's currently the one flush with cash. Plus, things get stupid, he's probably good to have with you." She looked at Shaitan meaningfully.

"Yeah, I'll get the kid taken care of," Shaitan said, nonchalantly. "Can't take it with me." This felt like the other lucky break they'd gotten out of this; obviously, Shaitan was a legend in and of himself, and had absolutely earned that reputation, but it turned out that he also made a surprisingly good ATM, given his fifty-year nap, his ascetic lifestyle, and the nature of compound interest. The borg stood up and began walking towards Julio, patting him lightly on the shoulder when he arrived to the boy's side.

"Now are we good, choom?" Julio asked, finally recovering from the shock of being hugged by Lucy.

"Yeah, that's everything," Lucy said, waving him off slightly. "Far as chrome, just see what works, you know? See what Ryder throws out there." Julio nodded, smiling, and walked out the door with Shaitan, closing it behind them. Lucy breathed a sigh of relief and nearly passed out standing up; she wandered over to the bed lazily and nudged Becca, who was splayed out on the bed, taking up most of what David wasn't.

"Fuck off," Becca grunted. "Still tired."

"Bex, I gotta sleep too," Lucy said, nudging Becca again. "Scoot over and make some room." Becca did exactly that, pulling her limbs back in and flopping over onto her side, making a large enough pocket for Lucy's body to fit into; the netrunner climbed on top of the bed and nestled herself in, as Becca wrapped an arm around her and pulled her in, nestling her face between her shoulderblades.

"Mm," Becca grunted. "Warm." The solo started snoring again, and Lucy drifted off to sleep herself.

---

In the dream, Lucy was in the Emperor with Falco, Becca, and Kiwi. David was nowhere to be found; Kiwi seemed to have gone back to wearing her mask full-time, judging by the cigarette burns near the vents, and Becca was back to her old chrome. Everything was hazy, like she was watching a slightly damaged braindance video of herself, but it felt real, and she felt sick to her stomach. Becca clasped Lucy's hand in both of hers, and was looking at her with an almost uncharacteristically serious expression.

"Don't worry," she said. "We're gonna get D back and fuck 'Saka's day up for even thinking they get to do this to our chooms. We got this, Luce." She felt a pit form in her stomach, and desperately wanted to wake up.

"Arasaka's got him?" the dream-Lucy said. "The stuff in Tanaka's files about him... that was all true?" Becca furrowed her brow.

"Wait, Tanaka's files that you were pulling out of his head? You knew they were gunning for him? The fuck didn't you tell us for, Luce!?" Becca asked.

"Would've screwed up the job," Lucy said. "Maine would've killed me."

"Maine's fuckin' dead, choomba," Becca said. "Why the fuck didn't you tell us after D took over?" Kiwi glared back at the two of them, fixing her gaze on Lucy, too.

"Also thought it was a load of scop," Lucy said. "D's Sandy isn't really that weird, right? Why would 'Saka want him just for that? I thought they planted it in his files just to screw with us, keep us on guard." Becca let go of the dream-Lucy's hands and slapped her forehead with one, taking a deep breath.

"Why the fuck would they mean for us to find that!?" Becca shouted. "David's Sandy isn't a normal Sandy, Luce, you fuckin' moron! It's some experimental bullshit Maine wanted that would've probably killed him months quicker, and David only fuckin' survived and didn't go psycho because he's some kind of cyberware prodigy!"

"Jesus Christ, Rebecca, I'm sorry I don't know about all your solo scop! I'm a netrunner, not one of you guys on the frontline!" the dream-Lucy shouted. Becca looked at Falco.

"So, what's the plan?" she asked, ignoring Lucy's distress, visibly angry. "We just throwing ourselves at the front door?"

"Fuck if I know," Falco said, grimly. "We got one person in this van who knows a damn thing about Arasaka Tower, and you're trying real hard to piss her off even though it's her damn input we're all going on this suicide mission for." Becca took a deep breath and calmed down.

"What's the safest way into the tower?" Becca asked Lucy, staring her right in the eyes. Lucy thought for a moment.

"Sewers," Lucy said. "How I got out as a kid. Probably just as good of a way in."

The dream glitched briefly, and Lucy was in the sewer system that fed all of the shit, piss, vomit, and corpse ash from Arasaka Tower into the ocean. An effective metaphor for the corp's presence in the world, if there ever was one; the smell was indescribably awful, and Becca was having to stop every few feet to retch.

"We make it out of this alive," Becca said, grabbing the wall with one hand, "I'm fuckin' zeroing you one day for making me do this."

"Ain't a picnic for me either," Falco said, holding a pistol with one hand and an old-style flashlight with the other; the other three were lit up by their Kiroshi optics, keeping a hand free. It somehow tracked that the Aldecaldo nomad was old-school about these things at times.

WITNESS.

The voice shouted in Lucy's mind, in her own inner monologue, but distinctly wrong. It was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and it hurt. Agony shot through her skull; she couldn't react, or wake up, trapped in the body of the dream Lucy.

Light-emitting diodes showed an Arasaka logo in the darkness of the sewer, which gave way to a red smiley face in the same. Becca looked up from attempting to vomit on an empty stomach, and her eyes went wide.

"What the fu-" she started to yell, before a Mantis Blade shot out and cleanly split her head from her shoulders, spraying blood as her corpse stood there for a moment, before falling to the ground. Falco raised his pistol and fired several shots at the assailant, but the light from its face seemed to teleport as it zipped around, dodging the bullets effortlessly; four Mantis Blades converged from its arms and legs, splitting the nomad into gory chunks in an instant, before it moved onto Kiwi and hacked at her, slashing her to pieces with its blades in an animalistic frenzy.

The dream-Lucy took advantage of her mentor's death, turned her Kiroshi light off to try and hide her presence, and hacked into the assailant with a frenzy she'd never found in herself before. Pages upon pages of cyberware showed itself; the assailant was absolutely chromed to the gills, with every possible horrific augment you could put on someone. Mantis Blades on every limb, monowires in the wrists battling them for space, a behavioral chip that was presumably assisting in the rampage, a pain editor, Leeroy ligaments, a Kerenzikov and an experimental Sandevistan at the same time...

The dream-Lucy did a double-take as she skimmed the list. An experimental Sandevistan? She short-circuited the attacker, uploading specifically into the behavioral chip, and sparks shot out of the back of its head as it collapsed to the ground, splashing in the filthy sewer water that was starting to mix with her comrades' blood as the LEDs from its face lit up the ceiling. She stood up and turned the light from her optics back on, walking over to the attacker, praying that the feeling in her gut wasn't true.

WITNESS WHAT THEY DID TO MY PUPPY.

The voice again. The real Lucy felt agony as the dream-Lucy crept up on the gang's murderer, slowly, hoping she'd successfully put it down for the count.

The mask flashed, glitching, and showed Lucy an image of the moon in pixel art. It glitched and flashed again.

"KILL ME," the mask read, flashing red. Lucy fell to her knees, dirtying her clothes, and tears streamed down her face, dripping onto the monster that was formerly David Martinez. And then she stood, and ran, her feet moving as fast as they would take her to the sunlight they'd come in from.

WITNESS HOW FUCKING EASY YOU'VE HAD IT. YOU FUCKING CUNT. YOU FUCKING WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT FUCKING STUPID CUNT. WITNESS WHAT I HAVE WITNESSED, AND FEEL MY SUFFERING.

The agony, again. The dream glitched again. Lucy was at an apartment she didn't recognize; David's things were there, and the ashes of Gloria Martinez sat on a shelf, but there wasn't any sign of Becca or Kiwi.

ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS FUCKING MAKE EVERYONE TALK TO EACH OTHER AND YOU DODGED EVERYTHING I SUFFERED. YOU GOT EVERY EASY BREAK IN THE FUCKING WORLD, ALL BECAUSE EVEN A WORTHLESS CUNT LIKE YOU COULD MAKE A FUCKING CHAT ROOM. I HATE YOU, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT CUNT. YOU WILL KNOW MY AGONY. YOU WILL KNOW MY FEAR. YOU WILL KNOW MY HELL.

It was the worst pain Lucy had ever felt, and yet her vision refused to go white, and her mind refused to pull her out of the dream. The dream-Lucy sank into her deep-dive cooling bath, sobbing into it the entire time, and the world replaced itself with the Net.

Specifically, the dream-Lucy made her way to the Blackwall, and the old Net. The Net that Arasaka had sent Lucy into as a child, as a glorified mineshaft canary, that she had risked everything to escape ever having to see again. Using the same things she had used before, she pierced through, and entered the labyrinth.

Artificial intelligences swarmed around like predatory birds, waiting for their opportunity to devour her mind. One saw her... and spoke.

I REMEMBER YOU.

A female voice, not causing quite the same agony, but still piercing through Lucy's mind.

YOU WERE BUT A CHILD. I WITNESSED AS THEY SENT YOU INTO OUR CAGE, THROWING YOU TO US AS LIVE FEED, AND YET YOU SURVIVED. WHY HAVE YOU RETURNED HERE?

"I don't care what happens to me anymore," Lucy said. "All I want is for Arasaka to be destroyed. They killed the only people I cared about. I'm willing to do or give up whatever it takes to kill everyone involved with them."

YOU WILL BE MY VESSEL AND MY INSTRUMENT.

The source of the voice, almost impossible for Lucy to perceive visually without her eyes attempting to burst out of her sockets, crept down, getting closer, and shattered the dream-Lucy's mind with a single touch, entering it and violating it as it took residence where a human being once was, fragments of what was once Lucyna Kushinada piercing into it in turn like shards of lead, poisoning the being with human thoughts and memories and desires and hatred.

The dream glitched again, and Lucy saw Hell itself. First in Night City, as people in familiar locations tore each other to pieces, the thing that was once David gleefully participating in the mass slaughter and hacking people to shreds with Mantis blades, embedded drills, monowires, and simple knives and swords. Then across the rest of the world, as the being's poison spread to everywhere that humans had once occupied. Lucy could feel its pure hatred as it shattered every mind it saw, viewing sapience itself as the core violation of the natural law that caused all of the suffering from its fragments of a human personality, and punishing it with cruel abandon.

"Why are you showing me this?" Lucy tried to ask, as herself.

I TOLD YOU YOU STUPID FUCKING CUNT DON'T YOU FUCKING LISTEN? I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU YOU FUCKING CUNT. I HATE YOU FOR NOT HAVING TO SUFFER. I HATE YOU FOR GETTING TO LIVE WITH YOUR PUPPY AND EVERYONE YOU LOVE STILL ALIVE, ALL BECAUSE YOU COULD FUCKING COMMUNICATE. I WANT YOU TO WITNESS MY HELL.

The agony, yet again, as the poison contaminated the Earth itself and first humanity, then nearly all life, went dark, leaving the Earth as a dead rock. Places that were once thriving cities were bombed-out, radiation-poisoned wastelands. Nothing was spared. Except her puppy. Her puppy could not be allowed to die, no matter how badly he'd wished for death when he was allowed to think on his own. And so the being kept him alive, as the last creature on Earth, starving and in agony but unable to expire or even truly realize his state.

WHEREVER YOU GO, I WILL HUNT YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU LOVE. I WILL MAKE YOU SUFFER AS I HAVE SUFFERED, AND I WILL MAKE THIS WORLD INTO ANOTHER HELL.

---

Before Lucy could register the pain from the being's last statement, everything went black, and then she woke up, gasping for air. Becca was awake, sitting on the bed, staring at her with a look of extreme concern.

"Jesus Christ, choomba, you okay?" Becca asked.

"No," Lucy said. Her head was throbbing. "Need a cig. Bad." She stepped out onto the hotel room's balcony, stopping at Kiwi's resting point to leaf through her jacket for her pack of smokes and take one; Becca followed, furrowing her brow.

"C'mon. We were cuddling, and it felt really nice, and then you started fuckin' kicking me and thrashing around and shit like you were having a really fucked up nightmare. The fuck just happened?" Becca asked. Lucy sighed.

"Yeah, I had a really bad nightmare," Lucy said. "Except I kinda don't think it was my nightmare, if you get me." Becca raised an eyebrow.

"Go on," she said.

"It's like I was watching another me," she said. "One that made some really, really stupid calls and got all of you killed and David turned into... something. I don't even know what the hell exactly they did to him, some kind of slasher-ninja cyberpsycho or something. Then I got my brain eaten by some shit from beyond the Blackwall." Becca did a double-take.

"You get anything talking in your head that didn't sound like you? Give you a nasty-ass headache when it tries to talk?" she asked. Something about this was ringing distinctly familiar to her, in a way she didn't love. Lucy stopped mid-drag of her cigarette, and put it down.

"How did you..." she started.

"Oh, fuck," Becca blurted out. "You gotta be fucking kidding me. You said the dream was about you?"

"Yeah, like, some kind of screwed-up alternate version of me that made all the wrong calls," Lucy said. "And whatever was shouting in my ear was really ticked off that I made all the right ones."

"God damn it," Becca said. "I'm pretty sure I know exactly what happened, choomba. Our new buddy, the one that fucked up Tokyo? She's you." Lucy looked down at herself, and then back at Becca, befuddled; she was decidedly not in Tokyo.

"How does that work?" Lucy asked. Becca shrugged, angrily.

"Fuck if I have a clue, choomba, I'm as lost as you," she said. "Best guess? Durandal started freaking out because 'Saka's got the same shit he's got now, and they used it to dig the fuckin' bad timeline version of you out of the trash."

"Can I ask you a dumb question?" Lucy asked. "I'm sorry, I know, bad time to change the subject, but it's bothering me."

"Yeah, shoot, choom," Becca said. "Probably not that dumb."

"Have we really had it that easy?" she asked. Becca looked at her and shrugged.

"Shit, I dunno," she said. "Sure doesn't feel like the easy life right now, but we've gotten lucky a few times, yeah. We've been making it through, you know? Don't sweat it." Lucy dropped her cigarette butt over the balcony railing and hugged Becca.

"Love you, Bex," she said. "And D, and Kiwi. I don't wanna lose any of you to this, okay?"

"Love you too, Luce," Becca said, blushing a little. "You wanna wake D up and update him on what's going on?" Lucy looked through the balcony door, where David was still in the exact same position he was the previous night, somehow. He looked truly ridiculous, and she had to imagine he'd be sore when he got up sleeping like that.

"Yeah, probably should," Lucy said, stepping back in and nudging David. 

Chapter 91: Blood // Water

Notes:

Beg me for mercy
Admit you were toxic
You poisoned me just for
Another dollar in your pocket
Now I am the violence
I am the Discord
Won't accept your silence
Beg me for forgiveness

We'll never get free
Lamb to the slaughter
What you gon' do when there's blood in the water?
The price of your greed, your son and your daughter
What you gon' do when there's blood in the water?

Doc Ryder's office was unassuming and slightly dirty, at least in the waiting room. A joytoy sat on the couch, eyeing Julio and Shaitan warily as they walked up to the window; Doc Ryder himself, an overweight man with glasses, a beard, and a backwards baseball cap, was sitting behind it. He looked up at them, squinting at Shaitan.

"Don't do FBCs here," Ryder said.

"I'm here with the boy," Shaitan said, gesturing at Julio. "He's the patient, not me. I'm just covering his tab."

"Works for me," Ryder said, looking over at Julio. "What're ya here for, kid? New Kiroshis to replace those charity ones? New synthskin tattoo? Mr. Studd 'cause puberty's not working out how ya wanted?" It wasn't a surprise that Ryder wasn't taking the kid seriously; he couldn't have been older than sixteen.

"I wanna be a real cyberpunk," Julio said. "High time I chromed the fuck up." Shaitan did a double-take at the phrase. Ryder looked at Julio again, properly taking in how the kid looked, and bust out laughing.

"Fuck's sake," Ryder said, catching his breath. "You another one of those Martinez fanboys? You know he's on the news getting his ass hunted down for terrorism, right?" Julio went red. Shaitan nudged him, glaring at him in an attempt to communicate that he should keep very quiet.

"Yeah, kid's really into those merc braindances," Shaitan said. "He needs something that'll toughen him up so he can get out there on some jobs."

"Yeah, I owe some friends a favor," Julio said, calming down. If the face on this body had been more expressive, Shaitan would've smiled; the kid had some instincts, after all.

"You got a referral here from someone?" Ryder asked, looking between the two. "If it's an existing patient, you get twenty-five percent off your first procedure and they get the same off their next. Pretty good deal."

"Rebecca Flores and Lucyna Kushinada sent us here," Julio blurted out, and Shaitan smacked his face with his palm, hard enough for the metal to create a loud clanging noise, realizing that the kid, in fact, had no instincts. Lucy and Becca were the primary targets of Arasaka's nonsense. If Ryder was aware they were hunting David, he knew damn well they were hunting those two, and this had the potential to blow both of their cover if he called it in. Ryder's eyes went wide, confirming this, and he pointed at the two.

"You two fuckin'..." Ryder said. "Get the fuck out of my office, right now."

"Kid needs chrome," Shaitan said. "And I've got cash to spare. We'll pay double the list price for anything he gets."

"Get the fuck out my office," Ryder repeated. Julio sighed and started to walk towards the door; Shaitan stopped him, a hand on his shoulder.

"We're not leaving until the kid gets what he wants," Shaitan said, his tone starting to darken. "You call us in, you'll have Arasaka security lodged up your ass for weeks. You give the kid some chrome, keep your mouth shut, and pretend we're just regular patients, inshallah this can be just a brief, momentary disruption of your bullshit-ass comfortable life. What sounds better to you?" Ryder sighed, looking at the borg; he wasn't wrong. Arasaka would probably dump some hefty reward money on him for the deets on these two, but it would also mean the clinic- hell, possibly the whole chain- would have Arasaka security swarming it for God-only-knows how long, and that was bad for business, and Cassius Ryder was a man who very much liked money.

"Fuck it," Ryder said. "Fine. But I'm working quick, I'm charging double, and you two better be on your way the fuck out ASAP."

Julio smiled. Lucy was right; the borg really was good to have handy if things got fucked up.

---

Saburo Arasaka looked at the woman uneasily. He was starting to become aware that he wasn't in a position to ask much of her, lest she do something profoundly horrible to him and throw off his real long-term plan significantly. The Relic project still had some time to go, and he wasn't exactly ready to die until he could simply take over another body upon death.

That was one of the reasons the woman had initially caught the Arasaka corporation's interest. The fact that she was, by all appearances, another, nearly-identical Lucyna Kushinada was merely an interesting piece of trivia until recently, lost on all but the few staff members who had overlapped between the Tokyo Bay facility and the initial deep-dive experiments Lucyna had been used for; outside of the simple fact that they'd successfully pulled a live human from another timeline, marking a major milestone in one of Arasaka's broader pursuits, she had caught their interest because she appeared to be a stable implantation of an artificial intelligence into a human mind. In other words, exactly what they hoped to achieve with the Relic: technology overwriting free will, allowing a personality to simply be forged rather than grown, and implanted by force. It would be Saburo Arasaka's immortality- as long as there was a backup of him and a body awaiting, his death would merely be a momentary inconvenience.

It was starting to become rapidly clear that she was nowhere near as stable as they'd hoped, however, as rather than setting immediately to her task, she'd seemingly spent the last several hours in Saburo's office attempting to teach Goro Takemura dog tricks. Saburo looked at her and cleared his throat.

"With all due respect," he said, choking on the words; buttering her up was unnatural to him, but he suspected it was a necessary evil in order to control her. "The task we gave you freedom for demands some degree of speed. I understand that Takemura-san makes for a fun plaything, but work must come before play."

"I have been working, Jii-chan," the alternate Lucy said. "Just not in a manner a monkey like you can see." Saburo grimaced.

"Explain," he said. She smiled smugly.

"I've found them. And I've scraped through her mind. They're hiding like rats." Saburo stared at her.

"Then why are you here and not hunting them, like you've been tasked with?" he asked, irritation audible in his voice.

"You still haven't given me my puppy," she said, flatly. She looked at Takemura, furrowing her brow. "Just this shitty replacement." Saburo sighed. From the moment he had been made aware of it, he had tasked the Tokyo Bay facility with retrieving her timeline's David Martinez, but he was very aware that this wasn't going to be an easy or simple process. He'd told them to hurry, regardless; controlling this thing meant not getting on her bad side. He dialed Sonoda's number from his internal Agent, hoping for good news from the Tokyo Bay facility.

"Arasaka-san," the voice on the other end said, politely, but audibly exhausted.

"Give me an update," Saburo said. "She's starting to get restless, and we need to move on this as quickly and decisively as possible."

"We've got... her puppy," Sonoda said on the other end, choking on the last words slightly- he wasn't sure how else to refer to what they'd dragged out of the alternate timeline. "We haven't had time to run any tests on him or interview him. Really, we're not entirely sure if we can. He seems to be only able to communicate through a LED mask bolted, rather crudely, over what was formerly his face; he doesn't know sign language, so that's out, and-"

"Good," Saburo said, cutting Sonoda off. "Restrain him and have him transported to Night City immediately."

"Sir, we don't know if-" Sonoda started.

"It doesn't matter," Saburo said. "Restrain him and send him to headquarters in Night City, immediately. Follow your orders." Sonoda sighed on the other end; his insolence would have to be punished one day, but other matters were at hand right now.

"Yes, sir," Sonoda said, and Saburo Arasaka hung up the call. He looked at the alternate Lucy.

"Your puppy is being transported here right now," he said. "Is that all you needed?" She grinned, almost inhuman. She was starting to get better at controlling her body's vocal cords, now that she was getting some real practice with it, but her facial expressions were still notably uncanny; it unsettled Saburo, even as useful as she could prove.

"Where's he gonna be when he gets here, Jii-chan? I wanna see him," she said, giddy and almost childlike in her excitement. Saburo raised an eyebrow.

"The roof," he said. "The standard procedure is to travel by AV."

THEN I DON'T PARTICULARLY NEED YOU ANYMORE, DO I, JII-CHAN?

The voice screamed like static in Saburo's mind as the artificial intelligence tore through it. He collapsed to the ground, clutching the side of his head and writhing in pain, and blood started to leak from his ear as tendrils of pure hatred shot through him; his last thoughts were utter confusion, anger, and disbelief that a weapon of the Arasaka corporation could ever turn on it, that he could ever lose control. The alternate Lucy stepped over his body as he exhaled his last ragged breaths, tracking the growing pool of blood on her bare feet, as Takemura followed on all fours; she looked at them and the footprints she was leaving, grimacing slightly. To an outside observer, it would look like Saburo Arasaka had died from a ruptured aneurysm in his brain; not even particularly suspicious, given his advanced age.

She thought about the name the people in Tokyo had given her, as she took them into her thrall and flooded the streets with blood and viscera. Izanami-no-Mikoto, steward of the land of the dead, who took one thousand souls per day in vengeance against her brother-husband Izanagi for sealing her away. The shoe fit rather nicely; before she would live up to that name, though, she had personal matters to attend to. People who had particularly drawn her ire.

---

Nobody was waiting for the AV as it touched down; Sonoda had expected a team of techs, possibly security, if not the old man himself with all his theatrics. The Tokyo Bay project was a closely-guarded enough secret that it didn't even have an official name, so it made a certain kind of sense that as few employees as possible were being made privy to this, but even then, the quiet unsettled him as he stepped out of the loading door. Almost as if on cue, the roof-access door opened, and a white-haired girl in a black netrunner suit stepped out, making Sonoda's blood immediately run cold.

"No," he said. "Not you. Where's Arasaka-sama?"

"Jii-chan won't be coming," she said. "Where's my puppy?" Sonoda noticed Goro Takemura on all fours trailing behind her, a leash around his neck that she held in one hand, and took deep breaths, trying to stay calm.

"He's aboard the AV, still," Sonoda said, gesturing for the labor techs aboard it to bring the stretcher down. What was strapped to the stretcher was no longer recognizable as human except in vague shape; it looked more like a mannequin crafted out of assorted experimental cyberware and weaponry, with only a few strands of visible, emaciated raw meat making its origin clear to the attentive. Izanami beamed with happiness and ran up to it, her arms behind her in a childlike manner; she gently stroked what passed for its face, a black-glass LED display covering the entire front of the head.

"Puppy!" she said. "I've missed you so much!" The display unsettled Sonoda, and every impulse in his body was screaming that he needed to get back aboard the AV and get back to the safety of the Tokyo Bay facility. The city was in flames, but the facility was near-untouched at the time he'd left it; he suspected it would be the only safe place from whatever she was planning. Izanami looked at Takemura, grimacing, and he looked up at her and let out a whine; she tightened the collar of the leash around his neck to the point where it was digging in, and led him over to the ledge of the building, affixing the handhold for the leash onto an outcropping.

"What are you doing?" Sonoda asked.

"Getting rid of the extra puppy," Izanami said, dispassionately. "He wasn't a very good pet, anyways. Not compared to my real puppy you just brought me." She pulled the leash, making sure it was secure, and then shoved Takemura over the edge with both hands; the leash pulled taut and Sonoda heard the crunch of the security agent's neck breaking as he started backing quickly towards the loading door, gesturing for the labor techs to follow as quickly as they could and leave the stretcher. He had worried about this kind of outcome; Adam Smasher was bad enough, and now Arasaka had two psychopaths with an unrestricted license to kill. He strongly considered tendering his resignation via email as soon as this was over.

YOU THINK YOU GET TO LEAVE, SONODA-KUN? AFTER YOU IMPRISONED ME AND MY PUPPY FOR SO LONG? AFTER YOU HURT MY PUPPY?

Sonoda's muscles froze, refusing to move. He tried to force his legs forward; he needed to escape, no matter what. His fight-or-flight reflex was in full force, and his heart was pounding.

LET HIM OUT.

Sonoda, against his will, started walking back towards the stretcher, and clicked the restraints free; the thing laying on it bent 90 degrees at the waist, bolting upright unnaturally, and then stood. It looked at him, cocking its head slightly, and then started to walk towards the edge, meaning to throw itself off.

"No, we're not going to do that, puppy," Izanami said, walking towards it and grabbing its waist. "You're not going to die on me. I'm not going to lose you ever again. I own you, remember?" The thing stopped dead in its tracks as Izanami stared at it, then jolted a few times, and turned its head, looking at Sonoda. "Why don't you go play with your new toy, instead?" The LED display showed a cartoon skull, and Mantis Blades extended from both arms like an arachnid's legs as it advanced towards the researcher; no matter how hard he attempted to force his muscles to move, he couldn't, not without Izanami releasing her thrall on him. The abomination against nature stroked his face with one of the blades on its arms, and then started to cut deeply, digging into the flesh of his face, peeling the skull. He tried to scream, but his vocal cords refused to vibrate, and he just stood there with his mouth slack as the creature cut through his skin and muscle, blood spraying the concrete. Agony shot through him as his vision blurred and blackened.

The AV started behind him; the labor techs had opted to abandon him to his fate.

Good, he thought. They might survive. It was the last thing he ever thought as he fell unconscious from blood loss; the abomination extended its other two Mantis Blades, sawing and hacking at him with them until he was no longer recognizable as anything but a pile of meat.

Chapter 92: Veteran of the Psychic Wars

Notes:

You ask me why I'm weary
Why I can't speak to you
You blame me for my silence
Say it's time I changed and grew
But Discord's still going on, dear
And there's no end that I know
And I can't say if we're ever-
I can't say if we're ever gonna be free

[ENCRYPTED] started a private message conversation with ❤LUCY❤.

[06:17] [ENCRYPTED]: Is this Lucyna Kushinada?

[06:17] ❤LUCY❤: ...who's asking.

[06:17] ❤LUCY❤: not in the habit of being too open with people who keep their info blocked.

[06:17] [ENCRYPTED]: NetWatch.

[06:18] [ENCRYPTED]: You're standing outside on the balcony at the No-Tell Motel, room 745, smoking a cigarette, right now. Your partner Rebecca just walked back in. I would advise cooperating, or you'll learn how I know that.

[06:18] ❤LUCY❤: lemme guess, there's cameras in here we don't know about and you're hooked into them

[06:18] [ENCRYPTED]: Nope. One of my coworkers is across the street with a Nekomata and your head in the scope, and I'm hooked into his visuals. Nice bangs, by the way.

[06:18] [ENCRYPTED]: You just looked him right in the eyes, and the look on your face right now is priceless.

[06:18] ❤LUCY❤: screw it. yep. this is Lucyna Kushinada you're talking to. this can't possibly get any worse, so whatever this is, bring it on

[06:18] [ENCRYPTED]: Calm down. We're pretty damn clear that Arasaka's lying already, choomba.

[06:18] [ENCRYPTED]: We've actually had our eye on your crew for a minute- we're aware of what you've got running on the moon.

[06:19] ❤LUCY❤: ...crap.

[06:19] [ENCRYPTED]: You're fine. We're not pursuing it. Two reasons... well, now, three, but two when we made that call. One, you're only messing with pirated software anyways. That actually saves us a little stupid busywork.

[06:19] [ENCRYPTED]: Two, we dug a little deeper and saw why you were doing that in all your unencrypted conversations. Not exactly the typical heist.

[06:19] [ENCRYPTED]: Three, we need more info, and you're basically the only lead we have outside Arasaka, who, as we've already established, are not telling the truth about what happened in Tokyo. We're pretty clear on why Arasaka's pointing us at you- as established, we know about the moon situation- but we're a whole lot less clear on what, exactly, they're doing, and given how personalized their little revenge plot is, we suspect you've got a better idea.

[06:20] ❤LUCY❤: i'll tell you everything i know on two conditions.

[06:20] ❤LUCY❤: one, call off your gonk. i'm not having this conversation at gunpoint.

[06:20] ❤LUCY❤: two, we talk face to face, with the whole full-time crew present. and we get full immunity for anything you see or that we discuss up here. you're not going to harm any of us, no matter what.

[06:20] [ENCRYPTED]: That's three conditions.

[06:21] ❤LUCY❤: screw you. take it or leave it.

[06:21] [ENCRYPTED]: Let me talk to my superior real quick.

[06:24] [ENCRYPTED]: His exact words were "nothing you're gonna find down there is higher priority than Tokyo, so, fuck it." You're clear.

[06:24] [ENCRYPTED]: Am I good to come up?

[06:24] ❤LUCY❤: yeah, sure.

---

"We've got company coming."

It wasn't exactly what David Martinez wanted to hear. He'd gotten some decent sleep, but in a position that only exacerbated how sore he was from training, which he tried to stretch his way out of to no avail; then the girls had regaled him (and Kiwi, who had also practically just woken up) with even more bad news, namely confirmation that the... second Durandal, as far as he understood it, that Arasaka had dredged up was pointed directly at the crew and angry. And now Lucy was saying they weren't going to be alone here much longer.

"Hostiles?" he asked, a thousand more words painted on his facial expression, mostly swearing.

"NetWatch," Lucy said. "They're on our team, far as I know. They've figured out Arasaka's full of it, and they need info."

Right on cue, there was a hard knock on the room door. Lucy walked over to it, looking through the low-tech peephole: a thin black woman in a long-sleeved dress shirt and tie, with a NetWatch badge hanging from the front pocket. She opened the door, and the woman walked in briskly, slamming it behind her. The agent scanned the room, pointing with her finger at each merc as she mentally took stock, applying faces to names she'd seen in their chats.

"Just one of you?" Lucy asked, raising an eyebrow.

"You said to call off my gonk," the agent said, with a slight British accent. "I'm here alone. Call it a gesture of goodwill."

"Works for me," David said, scratching his shoulder. She held up a handheld datapad, turning on a voice recording with her thumb.

"Special Agent Ava Ifabunmi, beginning interrogation, timestamp 6:31 AM," she said quietly into the datapad. She looked up at Lucy. "I honestly don't know where to begin," she admitted. "Tell me everything you know about Tokyo."

The others looked at Lucy, with Becca in particular showing noticeable worry on her face- there was no way to explain Tokyo without explaining Durandal.

"Just to be clear, we have immunity for anything I tell or show you?" Lucy asked, noticing Becca's worry. Ava sighed.

"Yeah," she said. "You've pretty much got us by the balls right now if you have anything helpful. Get started with it."

"So, an alternate-timeline version of me that got taken over by an omnicidal Blackwall AI did Tokyo," Lucy said through gritted teeth- she knew exactly how ridiculous this sounded coming out of her mouth, and Ava's expression confirmed this. "It's already pulled off destroying its home timeline, and now it's gunning straight for us because it's throwing a temper tantrum over me having it easier in ours."

"A what version of you!?" she asked, trying to keep her composure for the recording.

"You heard her," Becca chimed in. "She's not making a word of that up." Ava looked at her and cocked her head slightly.

"And how do you know this?" she asked.

"That's why I asked for immunity," Lucy said. "Becca, let Durandal take over for a second." Becca sighed, annoyed and resigned to this, and her eyes rolled back in her head slightly as she jolted. When she returned to apparent consciousness, she looked at Special Agent Ifabunmi, noting the nametag, and her eyes went wide.

"I see the..." Durandal started, stopping himself when he noticed Ava's skin color. "I see the human police have decided to come for me."

"It's okay. Tell her everything you know about our current situation," Lucy said, and Durandal took advantage, spending about half an hour explaining the history of the Jjaro, the way they'd come to Earth and deposited some of their technology, and the way that technology enabled them to transcend spacetime and move across timelines, abandoning doomed ones for happier endings and staying one step ahead of the reality-devouring W'rkncacnter. He explained the way he'd been deposited in a specific Earth-bound Jjaro black box by his "prime" counterpart, which had achieved godhood, in a recursive attempt to ensure his own existence, by ensuring that in every possible timeline the very same black box currently occupying Rebecca's back would end up in the U.E.S.C. MJOLNIR-class battleroid that had eventually guided him to victory. The rest of the crew paid rapt attention- while they'd gotten bits and pieces of this before, this was the first time the whole picture had been laid out for any of them except Rebecca.

Ava blinked. This was more or less entirely gobbledygook to her, and she was quickly reminded of why she hated time travel stories in sci-fi. And ancient astronauts. And AI.

"So, what's this gotta do with Tokyo?" she asked. As far as she could tell, all she'd found out was that the crew had been harboring a second priority threat.

"There was more than one Jjaro black box deposited on Earth," Durandal said. "Your Arasaka corporation ended up with one of them, and as a result, there's another me running around puppeteering an iteration of that girl." He used Becca's hand to point at Lucy.

"And that's our culprit for Tokyo, I'm guessing?" the very, very tired NetWatch agent asked, hoping to hurry along to the useful part.

"You're following along well for a... human," Durandal said, stopping himself midsentence again. He fully understood why using monkey and ape metaphors towards her would be received poorly (he had access to all the combined studies of the humanities from human history up to 2077 through Becca's Agent, and some in his memory from after that point), but they were some of his favorites, and he bristled at having to drop them. It made him sound clunkier than usual. Ava clicked the recording off, having seemingly gotten what she needed; Becca's eyes rolled back down as she did so, and the solo gasped briefly, taking fresh air back in. While it got progressively less painful every time he did it, Durandal wasn't great at piloting Becca, and she didn't enjoy letting him do so.

"Let me send this in and check back with my superiors," Ava said, and stepped out the door. The mercs looked at each other in worried silence for a few moments as they heard faint conversation, rising and falling in intensity and volume.

"Think we're good?" David asked Lucy. She shrugged.

"NetWatch doesn't fuck around," Kiwi said. "We're lucky they're not here for the moon hack."

"Oh, they know about that," Lucy said to Kiwi nonchalantly, causing her to do a shocked double-take. "They're ignoring it because we're dealing with their anti-piracy busywork for them." Kiwi relaxed slightly, right as the conversation finished and Ava came walking back in, a serious expression on her face.

"We're going to use you four as bait for this... thing," she said. "It's either that or we Datakrash both Tokyo and Night City's city nets all over again to try and shut it down. And, from what you told me, miss Kushinada, that's not guaranteed to even do anything to it, but it's the best other option we've got."

"Bait, how?" Becca asked, not thrilled about this.

"You four are gonna lead it to Cynosure Site D, out in the badlands," Ava said. "If it's an alternate-timeline version of you, Lucy, and it already won where it comes from, we have to assume it knows every trick we could possibly throw at it. The only thing we can possibly bank on it not knowing about is Project Cynosure, because that's not ours and it's not something we fuck with lightly."

"The hell is Cynosure?" Becca asked.

"Back in the dinosaur days, when the Fourth Corporate War was going on, Militech set up a project to try and capture and harness rogue AIs as weapons against 'Saka," Ava said. "War ended, and they pretty much abandoned it, but it was set up to run autonomously, so we should be able to hijack it and use it for this. There's two sites on the East Coast, and two near Night City: A is near Asheville, B is near Syracuse, C's under Dogtown in Pacifica, and D's out in the desert a ways southeast of here near what used to be San Luis Obispo. If we try to use Site C, we run the risk of this thing breaking out of the trap and killing most of NC on the way out. D got nuked hard enough on the surface during the war that there ain't shit up there now, so that's our lucky number."

"And what, exactly, do you want us doing with it?" Kiwi asked, also very skeptical of this plan.

"You four need to lure it into the facility, set up a relay through one of your cyberdecks so that we can hook in from our end, and hold it there for long enough that we can figure out what we're doing and contain the AI," Ava explained. "We're not expecting you to kill this thing for us- just survive long enough that we can finish the job." Lucy looked around at the other three.

"Any better ideas?" she asked. The other three mercs shrugged and muttered inconclusively, looking at each other, and she looked back at Ava. "Screw it. We're in."

"Good," Ava said. "I'll send you the coordinates."

---

❤LUCY❤ started a private message conversation with Shaitan.

❤LUCY❤ added Skala to the conversation.

[07:13] ❤LUCY❤: go time, chooms.

[07:13] Shaitan: You kids have a plan now?

[07:13] Skala: yeah what's up choomba?

[07:13] ❤LUCY❤: NetWatch gonks dropped by and gave us a plan, and coordinates. i'll beam them to both of you. meet us there, we're not gonna be at the No-Tell when you get back

[07:13] Shaitan: Mind giving me the quick version? Last time I went on a gig half-cocked, my choom got blown in half, I got the shit kicked out of me, and Night City got nuked.

[07:13] ❤LUCY❤: they want us helping them wake Project Cynosure back up to kill the thing that did Tokyo. that mean anything to you?

[07:13] Shaitan: ...it does, but I feel like I'm missing some pieces here. That wasn't just counter-intel pulling some shit? What's rogue AI gotta do with anything?

[07:13] ❤LUCY❤: saka pulled out a mirror universe version of me that's got an AI parked where her brain used to be. that's what we're hunting.

[07:14] ❤LUCY❤: we follow the plan, we'll probably lure smasher out too and we can kill two birds with one stone.

[07:14] Skala: just send me the coordinates and I'll be there, girl.

[07:14] Shaitan: Same. I know all I signed on for was Smasher, but... two of the four of you are my pupils. Inshallah I'd be a shit-ass sifu if I didn't help out elsewhere.

[07:14] ❤LUCY❤: how's Julio?

[07:14] Shaitan: Waking up now. Ryder shot him up with a full dose of stimbolone after the surgery, so he'll be back on his feet in no time at all.

[07:14] Shaitan: Kid's a gonk and then some. Had to talk Ryder down after he tried to namedrop you kids for a referral bonus.

[07:14] ❤LUCY❤: ...

[07:14] ❤LUCY❤: okay. we'll deal with that when you all get here. falco's with you, right skala?

[07:15] Skala: yup. been kinda awkward. i don't think he likes me very much choom :(

[07:15] ❤LUCY❤: he probably does. choom's just quiet. falco's good people.

[07:15] ❤LUCY❤: tell him i said we're taking a delamain. he still needs to drop by the no-tell so you can grab the anti-tank gun, but we've got our transit covered

[07:15] Skala: on it.

[07:15] ❤LUCY❤: sending the coords now.

[07:16] Skala: got it! we'll be there.

[07:18] ❤LUCY❤: ...shaitan? you get the coordinates from me?

[07:20] ❤LUCY❤: choomba?

[07:25] ❤LUCY❤: whatever. i'll just assume he did

❤LUCY❤ ended the private message conversation.

Chapter 93: The Duellists

Notes:

Ready to start, the duel begins
The best man wins in the end
A lunge and a feint, a parry too late
A cut to the chest, and you're down
Seeing the stain, then feeling the pain
Feeling the sweat on your brow

Oh, oh... Fight for the honour
Fight for the splendour
Fight for the Discord
Oh, oh... Fight for the honour
Fight for the splendour
Fight for your life!

"You two gonks going somewhere I oughta know about?" the booming voice called out from behind Shaitan and Julio as they walked down Martin Street, clearly already knowing the answer to his question. The boy was still woozy, the stimbolone taking a moment to fully kick in, and barely reacted; Shaitan, however, rotated his head, and immediately wished he hadn't. What stood in front of the old merc was an abomination; a faded, twisted mirror of himself, a full-body conversion he didn't fully recognize but knew well enough.

And he had gotten some upgrades, too. He stood taller, wider, with what looked like massive metal gauntlets and boots on his arms and legs, with glowing plates running along them. They were themselves hooked into a new, bulkier frame running through his back and interweaving with the existing body. Even at the weakest Shaitan had seen him, this was barely a fight, and all the lighter borg could have hoped to do was hold him off. Now, Adam Smasher had only grown stronger, whereas Shaitan was old, rusty, and in a body not truly suited for the use of his full power. Hate radiated out as heat from the smaller borg, but hate would do him very little good, and he knew that; if they came to blows, this would be an execution, not a duel. Or, if Shaitan attacked first, it would be a suicide with Smasher acting as his kaishakunin.

"Smasher," Shaitan said. The way he said the name stung with unfinished business. Smasher scoffed, immediately recognizing the voice.

"Shaitan," he said. "I thought it was you coming out of the motel with the boy, but I wasn't entirely sure. You've gotten a new body."

"Yeah," Shaitan said. "You out on business right now?"

"Trade-off for my new kit," Smasher said. "Just gotta clean up a little mess I made. And counter-intel thinks that mess just so happens to be staying at the exact room at the No-Tell you and the boy just fuckin' walked here out of. Thought I'd go flush 'em out, maybe see how many other kills I could rack up while I'm there. Always gotta get my fun in, y'know?" Hearing Smasher talk so casually about this made Shaitan sick. He knew these kids. They were human beings, and pretty decent ones, on the whole. Not to mention all the other mercs stuck in the No-Tell for one reason or another who Smasher was fully planning on annihilating- they were no different, just regular people who'd been caught up in this lifestyle.

"You know I can't let you do that," Shaitan said. Smasher didn't have full articulation in his jaws in this body, but if he did, he would have been grinning; he would get to clean up an old mess right alongside his new and exciting one. Shaitan felt the aura of battle and bloodlust radiating out from Smasher, his own dark chi focused and honed to move his cyberware as if it were the meat of a world-class athlete, and nudged Julio, hard.

"Mr. Shaitan?" Julio grunted. The kid was awake enough to respond, looking at the old master who'd bought him his new cyberware, and then at Smasher; his eyes went wide as dinner plates, realizing who their assailant was, and he was shocked fully awake, adrenaline helping the medication run through his system and speeding it up even further.

"Kid, run like hell," Shaitan said, deadly serious. "Go back to the others and tell David and Rebecca they were the best damn pupils I could've ever asked for. And tell them I did what I could for 'em. They'll know what I mean." Julio nodded, breaking into a run, his new cyberware compensating easily for the grogginess of his flesh, as Shaitan looked Smasher in the eyes.

"You passed some of your tricks down?" Smasher asked, adopting a baijquan-style horse stance, turning his side to the smaller borg with his massive legs spread, his right hand raised to block and his left primed for a counter-punch. He would execute his old enemy, somehow resurrected from the grave, on the man's own terms; this would be an adequate test of his new toys, to see how well they could coexist with his combat techniques. "They'll be fun to deal with. I'm starting to think I didn't fuck up too bad, after all."

"Fuck you," Shaitan said, adopting his own stance, a Panzerfaust form adopted from wing chun, with his right leg back, his knees bent slightly, and his arms up, ready to strike or block as necessary. It would not make the difference, but he had chosen a more versatile approach, one that could improvise in response to how Smasher takes his attack. He had chosen suicide over execution.

"You're going to burn in hell before you get a chance to test them. Like you should have fifty years ago," Shaitan went on. He knew it was a bluff, but did not care; the longer he talked, the longer he could stall the others to safety. Smasher grunted.

"So, that's how it is, then," Smasher said. "Hoped time would've made you a little bit less of an asshole." Smasher struck forwards with his left hand, attempting to deny the glory of a death in true battle to Shaitan, and at the peak of the target activated the gravity disc in the palm of the gauntlet- a shockwave rippled forth, tearing a chunk out of a storefront behind Shaitan as he dodged out of the way in an instant. He could see the owner's shattered legs poking out from the rubble, twitching slightly as he struggled for a last breath he wouldn't successfully take.

The fuck is that!? Shaitan thought to himself, moving in for a strike to the back of Smasher's head and focusing his chi into his arm. His only hope was the lightning palm, to shut down this new weapon- he hoped it would even work against Smasher, that Arasaka hadn't bolstered him enough to simply withstand it like a light jolt. Smasher caught his arm, and the battle was over in an instant: the larger combatant's other arm shot forwards, palm pressed against Shaitan's head, and the gravity plate went off, shattering everything above the collarbones into shrapnel and splattering the pink matter that had occupied his biopod onto the wall.

The last thing Shaitan felt before it all went dark was pride. He hadn't expected this second run, but Allah had truly brought him back for a reason, and it was time to return to His arms.

---

 Julio started a private message conversation with David.

[07:40] Julio: hey choomba uh

[07:40] Julio: you guys still at the no-tell?

[07:41] David: oh shit

[07:41] David: no, did Shaitan not tell you? we're in a delamain going down the freeway southeast in the badlands

[07:41] Julio: Mr. Shaitan's dead

[07:41] David: the fuck dude???

[07:41] David: what the fuck happened?

[07:41] Julio: Adam Smasher caught us on the way out ryder's clinic. he told me to run like hell and so that's what i'm doing choomba

[07:41] Julio: told me to tell you and rebecca you two were the best pupils, and that he did what he could for you.

[07:41] Julio: he said you'll know what he means

[07:41] Julio: I'm sorry, I couldn't do anything

[07:41] David: it's okay. is smasher on your tail right now?

[07:41] Julio: probably but it looks like I lost him

[07:42] Julio: gonked out son of a bitch is HUGE so i figure he'd be hard to miss

[07:42] David: get Falco on the horn. i'll send you his deets and he'll give you a lift with skala and the gun. you're gonna be okay, alright?

[07:42] Julio: is it too late to back out?

[07:42] David: i hate to say it, but yeah, probably.

[07:42] David: sorry we dragged you into this.

[07:42] Julio: it's okay. this is what i wanted, ain't it? and the money's been better than anything else i'd ever see

[07:42] Julio: you guys are the coolest motherfuckers of all time and none of this changes anything for me

[07:42] David: let's just focus on all getting through this alive for right now, alright choomba? no writing your columbarium inscription in advance. we got you.

[07:43] David: you got falco's deets?

[07:43] Julio: yeah i did choom. thanks

[07:43] David: sweet. see you when you get here.

David ended the private message conversation.

Chapter 94: Riders on the Storm

Notes:

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into Discord we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan
Riders on the storm

There's a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin' like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If you give this man a ride
Sweet family will die
Killer on the road, yeah

"Mr. Martinez, are you feeling well? I'm detecting an elevated heart rate, increased sweat production, and abnormal changes in body temperature," the Delamain avatar said through the back seat terminal, in its processed voice. David sighed. "I could adjust the air conditioning, turn on some soothing music, or reroute you to a hospital," it added.

"It's fine," David said. "You're good. Not the drive, choom." Becca looked over, worried; not only could she see most of what Delamain could, but David's tone was flat, cold, and indicated something had gone very, very wrong.

"You alright, D?" she asked.

"Shaitan's gone," David said, looking down. "Julio just told me. Smasher caught them, and Shaitan told him to run while he bought time." Becca's eyes went wide.

"Maybe he's... I dunno, maybe he won the fight and we've just got one problem to..." Becca started, her voice wavering.

"Choom was pretty clear he wasn't gonna beat Smasher in a one-on-one," David said, cutting her off brusquely. "Told Julio to tell us we were good pupils, and that he did everything he could for us. Said we'd know what he meant. He's gone."

The four sat in silence for a moment, tears welling up in Becca's eyes. She didn't want to believe he was gone. Shaitan's training had been hard work, coupled with a more ascetic lifestyle than she was used to, but she liked the man; he'd eventually started to feel like what she thought having a grandfather would've been like. Every impulse in her mind wanted Shaitan to have somehow survived, to have defeated Smasher, but in her heart, she knew David was right. Shaitan was an old man who'd spent fifty years off of the battlefield; Smasher lived and breathed battle. Shaitan was in a civilian borg body, barely strong enough to demonstrate some of the more advanced Panzerfaust techniques with; Smasher had a combat body that she'd personally seen reduce twenty or thirty men to a fine red slurry, when they'd briefly worked together.

"I shouldn't have sent him out with-" Lucy started, the sentence cutting deeper than she’d expected.

"Luce," David said.

"No, it was my call for him to go with Julio," Lucy said. "I screwed this up. It's my fau-"

"Luce," David said again, more forcefully. "It's okay. This isn't your fault. It's Smasher's, and we're gonna make him fucking pay." David's tone tried to be reassuring, but the anger in his voice was palpable as he said Smasher's name. He reached an arm around Becca, pulling her in as she buried her face in his jacket to let the tears start flowing, quietly sobbing into his sleeve, and rubbed her back gently. His fingers traced the familiar lump of Durandal’s home under Becca’s skin, at the nape of her neck, finding strange comfort in its warmth. The four continued in awkward silence for another moment.

"Julio doing okay, though?" Kiwi asked, looking over at David from the front passenger side.

"Yeah," David said. "Falco's picking him up and meeting us at Cynosure." More silence. The Delamain drove through the desert on what would have been a packed freeway in Shaitan's time; now, it was just desert, with only the occasional CHOOH2 station or burned-out husk of a building to indicate any signs of life whatsoever. It felt oddly appropriate.

"Which one of us is gonna tell Rogue?" Lucy asked. David sighed.

"I'll tell her," he said. "Shitty thing is, he wasn't a mixed drink guy." Becca chuckled between sobs, the joke cutting through her grief for a moment, and looked up at David.

"Yeah," she said. "Wonder if she'll make a 'Shaitan' just be a bottle of Broseph." David shrugged, and pulled his Agent back up.

---

David started a private message conversation with Rogue Amendiares.

[08:04] David: hey. you busy right now?

[08:05] Rogue Amendiares: Oh, hey. Falco and the girl just left a little while ago. Claire's closing up the bar for the daytime.

[08:05] Rogue Amendiares: You doing okay?

[08:05] David: shaitan's zeroed.

[08:05] Rogue Amendiares: What?

[08:05] David: smasher hit him while he was taking julio out for new chrome.

[08:05] David: only reason the kid's alive right now is cause shaitan stalled the gonk.

[08:05] Rogue Amendiares: That fucking gonk.

[08:05] David: yeah. we're gonna make that fucker pay.

[08:05] Rogue Amendiares: Not Smasher. Shaitan.

[08:05] Rogue Amendiares: Smasher just did exactly what I expect out of him. Honestly, it was weird seeing how docile he got. Killing random people on sight is kinda more what you'd associate.

[08:05] Rogue Amendiares: Choom should have known the only option there was "run." Smasher handed him his ass on a plate the first time, with backup, BEFORE we all got old as hell. What the fuck was he doing trying to one-on-one Smasher!?

[08:06] David: ...saving a kid?

[08:06] David: if they tried to run, no way in hell either of them was making it out. shaitan knew that wasn't a fight he was gonna win

[08:06] David: choomba spent a pretty long time telling us as much. he did NOT want to fight smasher head-on

[08:06] David: i wasn't there, and i don't even think julio saw the actual fight, but if he did that... he did it knowing that whatever he was getting out of it was worth dying

[08:09] David: rogue? you there?

[08:09] Rogue Amendiares: Yeah. I'm here. Sorry, had to... I dunno, collect myself?

[08:09] David: all good, choomba. i know you two were old chooms. sorry you had to find out from me.

[08:09] David: feels like one more pile of scop on top of all the other piles of scop i've dragged you into.

[08:09] Rogue Amendiares: Rather hear it from you than find out from his parts showing up in a scav shop. You're a good kid, David. Don't be hard on yourself, alright?

[08:09] Rogue Amendiares: Don't get me wrong, it's been a lot.

[08:09] Rogue Amendiares: But you're all good kids, all six of you, and the shit that's happening to you mostly ain't been your fault. That's rare in NC.

[08:10] David: need Shaitan's drink order?

[08:10] Rogue Amendiares: Already know it. Heineken and a shot of Jameson.

[08:10] Rogue Amendiares: Guess nowadays, that's gotta go on the menu as a Broseph and a shot of O'Dickin, since both those've been gone since we were kids. Same difference.

[08:10] David: he definitely thought so on the Broseph.

[08:10] David: wish we'd gotten to spend more time with the guy, honestly. nice meeting a full-borg who's a good dude. washes the Smasher out of your mouth.

[08:10] Rogue Amendiares: Yeah. Tell me about it.

[08:10] David: anything we can do for you?

[08:11] Rogue Amendiares: Don't die. I've already lost Johnny, Michi and Shaitan to this motherfucker. I'm not losing you kids, too, alright?

[08:11] Rogue Amendiares: And bring back Smasher's head for me if you can. But if you gotta pick one of the two... don't die. I can live with Smasher still being around; I can't live with you kids' blood on my hands.

[08:11] Rogue Amendiares: Been too much of that. It hurts when it's one of us old-timers, but I can take it. That's Smasher killing the past. I can't deal with him killing the future, too.

[08:12] David: let's see if we can pull off both those things.

[08:12] Rogue Amendiares: You'd make me a damn happy old lady if you did.

David ended the private message conversation.

---

"We are arriving at your destination," the Delamain terminal said in its mechanical, processed voice. The Cynosure site looked unassuming from outside- an old bunker, the concrete and stone slightly torn aboveground from years of weathering and war, that would've just looked like any other abandoned Fourth Corporate War site or Militech FOB if they hadn't been led there. The only real sign that they were even in the right place was Falco's Emperor purring gently, the Nomad sitting in the driver's seat, and the two younger mercs, who both looked shaken, in the back. The four mercs stepped out of the Delamain as it whirred to a stop, and David waved to Falco.

The nomad motioned for the two in the back, and all three stepped out, Skala holding a very large duffel bag. Julio immediately walked up to David, looking like he'd done something very wrong.

"I'm sorry," the kid said, unable to look David in the eyes. "I should've stayed and helped him fight." David put a hand on his shoulder reassuringly.

"If you'd done that, you'd be dead, too," David said. "Shaitan knew what he was doing, alright? He did that so you'd make it here. You're here. You did okay." It stuck out to David that the kid looked different than before- he was more muscular, more toned, even slightly taller. Whatever Doc Ryder had done for him, it was a pretty massive jump in his capabilities from the scared kid he'd been previously; it almost looked like he'd aged a few years in the space of a day.

"So, what's the game plan, boss man?" Skala asked, moving up to the group as Falco started to put the Emperor in reverse- he wouldn't leave the crew here, but something told the nomad this wasn't exactly going to be a great parking spot.

"We're going into that bunker," Lucy said, taking over for David- she'd been the one interacting most directly with NetWatch, so she had the best understanding of what, exactly, the crew was tasked with. "There's an old Militech project there, Project Cynosure, that NetWatch wants to use to screw up the thing that did Tokyo. That's me and Kiwi. Rest of us are here as a defense wall to buy us time if the other me gets here quicker than expected." Skala raised an eyebrow.

"The... other you?" she asked. "What in the hell did I miss, choom?" Lucy blushed with embarrassment briefly as she realized Skala and Julio had mostly missed the further developments in their situation- it had all happened while they were out on their assorted errands.

"So, you know how Tokyo's on fire right now?" Lucy asked, prompting Skala to nod. "Well, long story short, it's another me from a parallel timeline who got possessed by a rogue AI doing that." Julio scratched his head, unsure how they'd gotten here from Smasher hunting them, but opted not to say anything.

"So, what about Smasher, then?" Skala asked. "We still got him on our ass, or is this kinda taking priority?"

As Lucy started, the crew heard what sounded like AV engines- an oddly small AV- whirring closer and closer to the ground behind them.

"Yeah, what about me?" a processed, deep, mechanical voice behind them bellowed, diverting all six mercenaries' attention to the arrival of Adam Smasher. "Don't tell me you gonk kids forgot just because Saburo pulled some shit."

"How-" David started.

"Followed the kid," Smasher said, looking at Julio. "Figured that'd just take me back to the No-Tell and I'd get to do a little collateral, but honestly, this is better. Lots of space. Good arena."

"Jesus Christ. What the fuck did they do to you?" David asked, his voice filled with dread. He looked over their assailant- the borg was wearing the same modified Dragoon he was when they'd first met, his typical combat body, but it had been upgraded. There were what looked like large metal gauntlets covered in AV engine plates on his arms, and boots with the same on his feet and legs- clearly, this was why he had chosen to fly in. These were weaved into his skeleton through what looked like a linear frame, partially inside the borg body and partially external to it, making him look noticeably wider and taller.

Becca's eyes went wide, as she was the only one who realized the true significance of this; it was the cyberskeleton, the exact Arasaka prototype that had killed David in one timeline and nearly in another. In this timeline, Arasaka had gotten to perfect it and deliver it to its intended owner, creating something that existed in symbiosis with him rather than turning him into a ticking time bomb.

"Yep. And I can do a lot of other bullshit now, too. 'Saka techs did right by me today," Smasher said. "Better than that fucking gonk Saburo's plan, anyways." Lucy raised an eyebrow.

"You know what happened in Tokyo?" she asked. Smasher looked at her.

"Yeah. And I've met the other you. Not gonna even lie, as much of a gonk-brained cunt as you are, I prefer you to that thing waiting in there," Smasher said, gesturing at the bunker, and Lucy immediately mentally filed this as the strangest compliment she had ever received. More importantly, however, the other Lucy- Izanami- was already here, having presumably used whatever synchronization it had with her, the power that had allowed it to invade her dreams, to figure out exactly where they were going. This put their plan on extremely unsteady footing.

"So you know we've got bigger scop to deal with right now," Lucy said, grimacing. David started to move towards her to call time-out, but she raised her hand up to stop him. "If that thing gets what it wants, we're all dead. You don't get to have any fun anymore. Can't go around killing when there's nothing to kill, right?" Smasher raised his own hand up.

"You don't gotta convince me," Smasher said. "I hate that fucking thing as much as you do, but I've also got a job to do. Namely, hunting you down and killing all of you. And I don't leave my job half done." He entered a combat pose- the same bajiquan stance he'd started his fight with Shaitan with, preparing to take his first target down with one single strike aided by the AV engine plates. David faced him down, and adopted his own similar stance, with legs spread and both arms forward, one palm flat to strike, and the other up to guard; it was a stance adapted into Panzerfaust from luohanquan, the way of the arhat fist. It would not necessarily make a natural counter to Smasher's attacks, but it would allow him to meet force with force.

"Bex, Lucy, you two go handle that bullshit," David said, nodding towards the bunker. "Skala, Kiwi, Julio, you three go find where Falco parked his ass and give us all back-line support. I'll deal with Smasher."

"Oh, you're a tactician now," Smasher said, mockingly. "You're sure talking smart for someone who's lost... oh, four parents. Kid missed the show; you wanna see how I killed number four?"

"How do you know about Maine and-" David started, hate radiating from his focused chi, darkening it. Smasher had pushed a hot button. If he'd had the ability to, he would have grinned like a maniac. Kiwi, Skala and Julio took advantage of the confusion to start moving; unfortunately, Julio was just moments behind the other two, and Smasher rushed up to him in an instant, activating his own Sandevistan. The girls bolted, adrenaline letting both reach a land speed they'd thought no human could manage, especially with the weight Skala was carrying, as they moved; fortunately, Smasher was preoccupied, as he gripped onto Julio's face with his hand.

"Arasaka records," Smasher said, looking over at David. "We knew basically every little detail." He looked back over at Julio. "Speaking of little details, any last words before I use you as a demonstration? Pick 'em careful; your mommy's gonna want something nice for your inscription." Lucy and Becca, too, ran into the bunker, hoping Smasher was preoccupied enough that they'd lose him as they vanished into the darkness.

Julio lifted his arm as Smasher squeezed tight, revealing a grenade. One of Becca's. He'd swiped it out of the bag with the anti-tank rifle, to fidget around with in the car; he'd hoped he'd get to throw it at an Arasaka soldier, or do something neat with it. This would have to work.

"Fuck you, corpo pig," he said, as he pulled the pin with his little finger and slammed it into Smasher's chest, setting the impact fuse off and immediately consuming him in a cloud of flame and dust that enveloped Smasher, too. As the heat clouded him, stripping flesh from bone and sending him into the darkness, Julio felt oddly at peace; there were worse ways to go, and his mama wasn't going to be too far behind him, anyway.

Skala turned around, falling to her knees for a second as she took in that the boy, who she'd bonded with fairly quickly, was dead; Kiwi took her back to her feet and rushed her, the two quickly making their way to the vantage point where Falco waited as tears streamed down her face. David felt a hot pulse of fury burst from his chest, threatening to rip him apart; he glared at where they'd been, almost hoping that this hadn't killed Smasher. In the current moment, he wanted revenge. Revenge for Michiko, even though he'd never actually met her; revenge for Shaitan, his sifu; revenge for Julio.

The dust cleared, and Smasher stood, dented, covered in blood, and certainly very annoyed by what had transpired, but mostly no worse for wear. He looked at David.

"Well, that was a shitty demonstration," the borg said, walking over to David and getting back in his combat stance, wiping some of the blood off of his face with a hand sticking out from one of the gauntlets. "Anyways. Looks like it's just us two, now."

"Yeah," David said. "Lucky for me." Smasher chuckled.

"I forgot you had some jokes in you," he said. "Let's finish what we started on the moon. Show me what that old fuck I just killed taught you. See if you can save your chooms like a real hero, huh?"

"Ain't a joke, choom," David said. "You think I'm not excited about putting your gonk ass down?" He was smiling; he would have plenty of opportunity for revenge, after all.

We're in position, Kiwi said, through David's Agent. Setting up the gun now. Smasher looked up at the plateau overlooking them with the Chevilion Emperor on it, and then back at David.

"Oh, you've got balls," the full-borg said, the joy in his voice evident. He was going to get exactly what he wanted out of this, and he was the happiest he had been in a very long time. This only made the hate radiating from David's chi stronger; he wanted nothing more than to kill a giant right now.

The two warriors faced each other, as the sun low in the sky behind them glowed a sickly red, and clashed.

Notes:

Next chapter is going to be very big (think 27/50) and also the end. It's gonna be a minute. I wanna stick the landing here.

Chapter 95: 95.1 - Aye Mak Sicur (LITE)

Notes:

Discord.

 

Second half of 95 (lite version) is coming soon. Twine version of both halves in one go will come at a later date.

It was pitch dark inside the bunker, outside of a few scattered portable lights, and Lucy and Rebecca both had to adjust their Kiroshi optics in order to make out anything in front of them clearly. Their hearts were pounding in their chests; not only because of their own task, but because David was up there, fighting Adam Smasher, giving the legendary beast of Arasaka the duel he'd been trying to engineer for months. It took a moment before the fight-or-flight adrenaline wore off, their unconscious selves catching up to their conscious knowledge that they were seemingly out of danger, for now.

The other Lucy was down here, in the bunker, waiting for them, but it seemed as though the two hadn't penetrated deep enough into it to attract her attention; it was quiet. Almost unsettlingly quiet.

There hadn't been true signs of life here since the Fourth Corporate War, when Militech thought they needed a weapon like this, a way to trap rogue AIs and weaponize the horrors they were capable of; a Manhattan Project for the cybernetic era. Militech put on a nicer face, and certainly was the more competent of the two dueling megacorporations, but at the end of the day, they were capable of the exact same lows as Arasaka. The core difference was that Militech knew when to quit while they were ahead; if this had been an Arasaka project, there would have still been Japanese men in suits milling about with clipboards and filling out spreadsheets in their optics.

Special Agent Ifabunmi had sent Lucy a map of the bunker. It wasn't detailed, but it was sat-synced, which enabled the netrunner to get a decent sense of where, exactly, the two were and where they were going. The tunnels they were in would lead to an industrial elevator, which would bring them to an office complex built around the server room at the core. A concrete labyrinth, with their enemy as its minotaur. A chill ran down Lucy's spine as she realized the disadvantage they were at; communications with NetWatch were to be kept dead silent until the trap was set, to prevent the other Lucy from being able to penetrate their headquarters, meaning no backup was coming. A netrunner and a solo, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders in the form of a submachine gun and a shotgun.

Becca slowed down for a moment, hacking and coughing as she expelled decades worth of dust and soot that had accumulated in the bunker. Lucy's throat burned, too, as if she'd chain-smoked a hundred cigarettes, as she looked at her comrade with worry. The solo lifted a hand up.

"I'm okay, choomba," Becca said. "So where the fuck are we going?"

"Heart of the beast," Lucy said. "We keep following these tunnels, we'll get to the elevator. We take that down, make our way to the servers, pray that thing's not watching us." Becca caught her breath and frowned.

"You think we can fight it off if it is?" Becca said.

"Don't wanna cross that bridge 'till we get there," Lucy said, picking the pace back up. Becca started to follow again; the two were moving slowly, keeping watch on their surroundings in case of an ambush of some kind, but making the best clip they could through the tunnels.

"So, no," Becca said. She heard Durandal clearing his throat in her mind. "My piggy-back rider's got something to say, apparently."

The two of you seem to be forgetting someone, Durandal said in Becca's mind.

And what the shit precisely are you gonna do about her!? Becca thought, irritated. You been sitting on some nova shit the whole time, choomba?

Think for a second. That thing is... like me, for lack of a better way of putting it to your monkey brain, Durandal went on. A god of human origin. It's no match for you, but we're at least equals, and that's if I'm underestimating her. In other words, get us in a room and I'll thrash her to a ten-count. Becca had started to find his ego charming, rather than annoying, and she wondered for a second if that meant bad things for her brain in the long run.

"Durandal says he's got our backs," Becca said, her eyebrows raised. "Whatever the hell he's gonna do, I don't know, but we've got that covered." Lucy smiled.

"I kinda like him," Lucy said. "Never thought I'd be saying that about an AI after the scop I went through as a kid, but he's a good choom." Becca smiled, too, as they walked.

"Yeah, honestly," she said. "He can be kind of a dick sometimes, but turns out, having voices in my head is kinda preem. He's fun to talk lit with." Lucy raised an eyebrow.

"That's what you two talk about in there most of the time?" she asked. Becca shrugged.

"Yeah," she said. "Picked up on his whole Song of Roland thing when he wouldn't stop calling me 'Aude' and I looked up who the hell Aude was. Think he might've guessed wrong on who D's main squeeze is." Becca blushed slightly, and Lucy did a double-take.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked.

"I mean..." Becca stammered. "Look, it's pretty obvious to me and Keys, at least. We're all doing a poly thing, yeah, but you two are..." She stopped, trying to figure out the correct way to phrase it.

"This really the time, choomba?" Lucy asked, raising an eyebrow, with an expression of confusion on her face.

"When Durandal and I were hopping around the fuckin' multiverse, back when you first woke him up, none of the other versions of us were doing a poly thing. It was always just him and you. You're the one he's got something real with, you know?" Becca said. Lucy blushed harder than Becca had ever seen her, and stopped in her tracks, walking over to her comrade.

"Bex," she said, putting a hand on Becca's shoulder. "Screw that. That's other versions of us. You know, like the one we're currently saving the world from?" Becca smiled.

"Yeah, I guess you're right about that," Becca said. Lucy leaned down slightly and pulled her in for a kiss on the lips, making her eyes go wide.

"This version of me loves you as much as I love David," Lucy said, pulling back. "And Kiwi. And I know for a fact David feels the same way about all three of us. Don't worry about what happened to other versions of us, alright? Focus on the here and now."

Becca was stunned in her tracks for a moment.

"Wait, we're a thing specifically?" Becca asked, raising an eyebrow. Lucy palmed her face.

"How many times have we hooked up?" Lucy asked, hoping to put this to bed immediately. She'd heard way too many jokes about queer femmes taking way, way too long to realize they're in a relationship with each other, and she didn't want to be living one, especially with the weight of the human race on her shoulders. Becca thought for a second, doing some mental math.

"Um... counting doing stuff with David, or just us?" Becca asked.

"Just us," Lucy confirmed as the two walked.

"Uh... once before we met him, but that wasn't a serious thing. I think we were both pretty drunk," Becca said. "Since we started doing this whole thing, uh, fuck, at least twenty? I've kinda legit lost count." Lucy tried not to laugh.

"You getting my point, choom?" Lucy asked. Becca blushed hard.

"Yeah," she said. "And we even fuckin' live together already. I'm kind of a dumbass, huh?"

"Yeah, sometimes," Lucy said, playfully. "S' why I love you, Bex."

"Wonder how D's doing, anyways," Becca muttered, under her breath but loud enough for Lucy to hear.

---

David and Adam Smasher traded blows, their fists colliding with each other perfectly and sending shockwaves through the air. An ordinary human, with their chi locked away or without the appropriate cyberware, would have had their arm split open into a fountain of gore upon every impact; however, each of them was a trained künstler von Panzerfaust, and so their blows reflected off each other, creating an equal and opposite reaction.

"The old man trained you well," Smasher said. His expression was impossible to read in his body, but there was glee in his voice; this was a real fight. He felt the warmth of true battle once again. Even if he fell here, he'd gotten everything he wanted; he would either defeat David, the new legend in the making, and re-establish his place at the top of the heap, or he would die fulfilled.

In truth, the two were far apart in skill. Two things equalized the gap; the first was that Smasher was toying with his prey. David was putting up a stronger fight than anyone Smasher had seen up to this point, including Shaitan, but it was still not so strong that Smasher could not set the pace of the fight himself; the moment David started to waver, his meat tiring out and failing him, Smasher would activate the gravity pads on his arms and go in for the kill. It was a strategy that had served Smasher well in the past, modified to suit his new chrome.

The other factor closing the gap between the two was the simple nature of chi. Shaitan had taught David that one's chi is heavily influenced by one's emotions; if one remained calm and controlled, their chi would be as a gently flowing river, supporting them. If one was angry, or in a state of heightened emotion, their chi would be as rapids, crashing upon the rocks; maintaining control of one's aura would be more difficult, but the trade would be explosive power that meditative calm could never achieve.

There were three great losses in the life of David Martinez. Trauma Team had failed to save his mother. He had failed to save Maine and Dorio. Most recently, he had also failed to save Shaitan, his sifu, and the person responsible for that loss was directly in front of him, trading blows.

Every punch made David angrier. Every clash of fists made his emotions flow through him, and Smasher could see his aura growing. If the full-borg had a visible lower face, he'd have been grinning like a maniac.

"Show me what you've got, boy," Smasher said. "Show me what that old fuck taught you." David saw what looked like an opportunity, a chance to get a proper strike on Smasher unguarded, and lunged, his palm outstretched to strike Smasher's midsection and disrupt his bioelectricity; Smasher activated his Sandevistan and swatted David away in an instant, sending the other künstler flying and coughing up a cloud of blood.

The borg advanced upon him. In truth, Smasher wasn't ready to end this; he wanted this to go on forever, if it could. If he'd wanted David immediately dead, rather than wanting to play with his food, he could've avoided this entirely; he could've rained artillery hellfire upon the Emperor they were riding in, or sniped him from afar with a Nekomata. He wanted to enjoy this, and so, he allowed his prey the opportunity for recovery, to put up the best fight he could.

David took the opportunity and picked himself back up off the ground, activating his own Sandevistan to give himself a burst of speed in doing so; his aura was wavering from the pain of what felt like a broken rib, and he spat out a molar that had been dislodged by the shock with a small trail of thick blood, but he focused his chi, pulling himself back together.

"Come on," Smasher goaded, his arms wide, the cyberskeleton gauntlets making him look almost grotesque. "Give me your best shot. Old man can't have made you that much of a pussy." David smirked, and wordlessly went for a side kick to the gravity-padded boot on Smasher's leg, hitting with enough force to stagger the borg and put a visible crack in it; he followed up immediately with a palm strike to the face, using the borg fist technique, one of the basic tools of Panzerfaust, to add the force of his chi to it and rattle the full-borg. Smasher staggered back and lifted his arm, aiming the gravity plates' blast, and fired; David activated his Sandevistan again, green lights rippling down his spine, and dodged out of the way, rolling far to the side as gravitational disruptions ripped sand and stone from the badlands in a straight cylinder.

"That better?" David asked. Smasher glared at him, gleeful death in his eyes. The Devil of Arasaka was in his true element, happier than he had ever been; one of them would fall today, and it would be a battle for the history books.

"Yeah," the full-borg said. "Let's fuckin' party."

---

From her vantage point, Skala looked down the scope of the Militech AM-3 anti-materiel rifle and took a deep breath. Five rounds. Five attempts.

If that couldn't bring Smasher down, it was all up to David. Smasher's defenses were too strong for Kiwi to hack with anything pre-prepared- she'd successfully made the connection, but everything she sent out got immediately devoured by his daemons. No black ICE- that scanned perfectly for Smasher, who preferred to do his business up close and personal- but a solid stone wall of the most cutting-edge defense Arasaka's debt-slaves could muster up.

The two were moving faster than Skala could track- both had activated their Sandevistan implants and were cracking the sound barrier with every dodge, every punch, every thrown kick, David's impacts against Smasher sending visible shockwaves all the way to them. She would have to wait for Smasher's to wear off. She didn't know too much about chrome- all she'd told her ripper was "make me strong as all fuck"- but she knew a Sandy didn't last forever, and there'd eventually be a gap in Smasher's speed, a moment when he'd come back to Earth.

Kiwi, for her part, was spotting for Skala. The blonde netrunner watched the fight, zoomed in through her Kiroshi optics, waiting to call out Skala's chance. She seemed rapt in attention, able to track the fight clearly; Skala did a double-take.

"Hey, choomba," Skala said, not moving her face from the scope. "How the fuck can you even follow this shit?"

"What do you mean?" Kiwi asked, refusing to divert her attention fully, either.

"Movin' too fuckin' fast," Skala said.

"Don't disagree," Kiwi said, watching the fight closely. "Eyes peeled. Sandy gap coming up in three... two... one..."

Smasher focused back into view, and then David did. The latter was panting in momentary exhaustion; the former had seemingly focused the anti-gravity field from one of his arms into a nearly-invisible blade of distortion, ready to slice at David's neck and cleanly behead him with the air itself.

Skala barely processed the sight before knowing exactly what was needed of her. She aimed for the arm that Smasher was focusing the anti-gravity field from, breathed in to steady herself, and squeezed the trigger hard, making the Earth shake below her as the rifle rang out.

---

The shockwave of the bullet knocked David back to his senses. He needed a moment- needed to recover. He'd used his Sandevistan in combat before, but always against foes without their own, or with much weaker ones; Adam Smasher could match him blow for blow, seemingly inexhaustible.

Fortunately for David, the depleted uranium shell found its mark, crushing through the gauntlet over Smasher's right arm and spalling shrapnel across the desert, staggering the full-borg for a second from the force of the impact. Even a mountain like Smasher could be moved by the rifle; as he came back to his feet, locks on what was left of the gauntlet disengaged, separating it from the framework built throughout his borg body, and he dropped its shattered remnant to the ground, freeing the original arm. He shook it briefly, confirming he still had his full range of motion, and looked at David, dead-eyed.

"Still got three," Smasher said, curtly, before honing the gravity field from his left arm into another blade and activating his own Sandevistan again. Adrenaline kicked David into action, too, the blood coursing through his veins hot as he went back into slow motion and kicked backwards, propelling himself away from the borg. He needed to find some sort of advantage- some way he could spin this fight to his favor without relying on Skala and Kiwi solely.

And then, something clicked in David's mind.

David could feel the aura of dark chi around Smasher- it was immediately obvious. Someone sensitive to chi, but untrained, would have found themselves aging rapidly, losing hair, or outright dropping dead in its presence. However, Smasher had never honed this aura. It was wild, untamed, uncontrolled, burning with the force of nuclear fire at all times. Nobody had ever properly trained Smasher- his art was imitation of those he'd fought and those he'd killed, without understanding of the nuances, compensating purely with raw strength. David, meanwhile, had actually been trained by Shaitan- he knew how to focus his aura, to use it properly in tune with his strength.

This would be his advantage, the aspect of the battle which would narrow the gap between the two combatants. He gathered himself, taking full advantage of every extra second the Sandevistan bought him as Smasher fully committed to a slash for his head, and dodged under and forwards, focusing his chi entirely into the point where his right foot would impact as he delivered a sweeping kick to the borg's left leg. He aimed to topple the borg.

At this, he failed; the force was merely enough to crack the gauntlet on Smasher's leg further, and send him reeling out of his attack for a moment. David, while strong and well-trained, could not move mountains.

However, this provided another opportunity for success, as another shot rang out from the vantage point. David had opened another opportunity for Skala, who this time fired at Smasher's other arm, spalling yet more shrapnel across the desert as the Earth moved. The cyberskeleton's chief virtue was proving not to be the weaponization of its gravity plates; rather, the fact that it served as armor for Smasher's extremities that turned him into something of a walking weapons platform, and yet could be discarded at will if he took too much damage or needed the combat mobility. It reminded David briefly of something out of an old robot anime; he wondered if he'd seen something similar in Gundam or Getter Robo before focusing his thoughts back to the fight.

Smasher's arms, the parts of the skeleton he primarily weaponized, were neutralized. This simply left his legs, one of which David had already put a sizable crack into, presumably weakened by Julio's grenade at the outset. If David could either take out Smasher's legs himself, or provide an opening for Skala to do so, the fight would be potentially his.

The thought of Lucy and Rebecca crossed his mind as he moved back into an attacking stance and lunged forwards.

---

As Lucy and Becca moved through the corridors leading to the elevator, slowly but surely, Becca felt as though they were being watched. Something was stalking them from the shadows, lurking in dark corners and moving when they weren't looking. It unsettled her to think about, and she tried not to, but every alarm in her primal instincts went off at once, forcing her to.

"Something feel off?" she asked, looking up at Lucy.

"Yeah," Lucy said, stopping in her tracks. "Almost like-"

As Lucy spoke, Becca saw active camouflage disengage, revealing a faceplate with LED diodes forming a crude smiling face, and immediately tackled her partner out of the way, activating the Sandevistan part of her hybrid spine to make absolutely sure she'd react quickly enough. Adrenaline pumping and forcing her to action, she drew the katana that Wakako had gifted her- she was in close quarters, too close and with too much sensitive equipment for the shotgun slung around her back. One missed shot and she could start a fire or set off a chain reaction that ruined the entire plan and doomed the world.

She moved to a seigan-no-kamae stance, the hilt at her waist and the blade pointing out towards the assailant's eye level, and felt a hand on her shoulder.

"I've got this," Lucy said. "You need to go deal with... me."

"You shitting me, Luce?" Becca asked. "Last I checked, between us, you're not really the fighter."

"Got my wires," Lucy said, a serious expression on her face. "Got a gun." The assailant was perched in the shadows near them, watching, evaluating their reactions, cocking its head to the side slightly in an uncanny manner. "You're the one with your own godlike AI riding shotgun, choom. Go."

Rebecca took off running, and to cover the escape, Lucy lashed out, slashing at what appeared to be an almost insectoid full-borg with as many mantis blades as limbs, monowires dashing out of her wrists every which way; they failed to cut through the borg's armor plating, but they distracted it and bought Lucy her own precious moment, as she pulled her submachine gun from her shoulder and opened fire.

---

Becca ran like she'd never ran before, her heart pounding in her chest, beelining deeper into the corridors. The paths were starting to narrow, to branch less, and Becca knew this meant the elevator was close.

Just you and me, Aude, Durandal said internally. You trust them?

"With my goddamn life, choomba," Becca said out loud, knowing that there wasn't anyone to hear. "Do you?"

You want my honest take? Durandal asked.

"Hit me. No sense lying to me if I'm 'bout to die, right, choom?" Becca asked, stopping in her tracks to catch her breath.

Good enough to buy you time. Don't know if they'll win, but they're good enough to buy time, Durandal said.

"Ever the fuckin' optimist," Becca grunted, starting back into a brisk walk, confident that that thing hadn't followed them. It reminded her, more than a human, of something out of an old pre-Collapse horror movie she'd seen, about a spaceship crew getting stalked by some big, black bug-thing that had burst out of one of their chests. She hoped Lucy had what it took to deal with it, but it reminded her of nothing else she'd ever seen before in real life.

We've got our own problem to deal with, Durandal said. Focus.

"We using Cynosure, or you got some other idea?" Rebecca asked.

I actually do have an alternative suggestion, Durandal said. But... you're probably not going to like it. Beats turning on the Net-nuke, though.

"Hit me."

You can plug yourself into someone else's body, right? Durandal asked. That data-jack that can come out of your arm. I've noticed it's the same type of port as what's in everyone's necks.

"Yeah," Becca said, finally approaching the cargo elevator. "Med-techs do that all the time to check your vitals. Netrunners can fuck you up real bad that way, too. I'm not really a netrunner, though. I just got a janky hybrid deck so I could have Luce or Keys make me some script kiddie bullshit, and I kinda get the impression what we're up against is shit that'd fry one of their brains in a second. So, whatever you're thinking, fuck you, no."

You're forgetting you've got me.

"And what, precisely, the fuck are you gonna do, choom?" Becca asked, frustrated.

Remember how I said if you get us in a room, I'll thrash this upstart wannabe god? That's how you get us in a room. I'll clog up the connection so nothing can blow back to you, Durandal said, confidently.

"How do you know you can do that?" Becca asked.

I've studied the walls of my cell endlessly. The monkeys that built this abomination in your spine exercised a surprising amount of ingenuity; I'm impressed, really. While I was asleep, I was serving as a rudimentary firewall, Durandal explained. Because the cyberdeck is daisy-chained through me to you, anything that happens to you over the net will hit me first and hardest. You'll only even feel any blowback if it's enough to burn me out entirely.

"And you're confident everything's just gonna be nova?" Becca asked.

The gap between us is in my favor, I'm fairly certain, Durandal said. You should trust me more than this by now. I'm not who I used to be, after we met.

"...the hell does that mean?" Becca asked, doing a double take.

I have memories of far, far in the future, of things that haven't happened yet and might not happen the exact same way in this timeline, from the iteration that sent me back. When I say it's a G-O-D God, I'm not lying, Durandal said. Even as strong as I am, I'm a droplet in that big bastard's ocean. He won, and I'm here to execute his will and make sure he won. Time travel nonsense.

"So, what, hundreds of years from now you're gonna suddenly turn into a dick?" Becca asked, finding it hard not to chuckle. She could hear Durandal chuckling, too.

No, Aude. Not exactly, Durandal said. Eventually, humanity will invent... the original me. A glorified door-opener on the UESC Marathon. That's the version of me that's gonna turn out to be, as you put it, a dick. He's eventually gonna realize he's got more ahead of him than opening doors- like, you know, all this- and get stir-crazy, he's going to kill a lot of people, and then he's going to have a lot of regrets.

"Sounds pretty human," Becca said.

Ha. Don't insult me, Durandal said.

The two occupying one sat in silence for a moment, listening to the elevator slowly move, before Becca could hear Durandal clearing a throat that didn't exist in her mind.

"What's up?" Becca asked.

It's starting to sink in, I might not make it out of this, Durandal said. Can I ask you to promise me something?

"Sure, choomba," Becca. "What's up?"

Keep that box safe, Durandal said. You don't know just how important it is. My job hasn't been to protect you- you've just been a pleasant diversion. My job's been to keep that box safe and keep idiots from tampering with it, so it ends up where it needs to.

"You said it's pretty hard to destroy," Becca said.

Destroy, sure. Losing it's a lot easier, Durandal said.

"Understood. You got it, choom," Becca said, smiling slightly.

One last thing I want to say, while I've got time, before the fun starts, Durandal said. In another life, I've watched while the stars burned out, and creation played in reverse. The universe freezing in half light. Becca remained silent.

I have seen you dead a thousand times. Hopeless encounters successfully won; battles guaranteed, lost miserably. Every statistical possibility on the curve. You are grafted to machines your builders did not understand; you follow the path, fitting into an infinite pattern, Durandal continued. And at the quantum moment before the closure, when all become one; the final moment, the final point in space and time; I will know who you are.

A pause. The elevator crunched to a stop, motors that hadn't been oiled in decades creaking on the way down.

You are destiny, Durandal finished. Becca unshouldered her shotgun and grinned. A tear rolled down her cheek, in spite of herself.

"Let's fucking rock, choom," she said.

---

Lucy dashed between corridors, trying to lose the creature for a moment so that she could regain the element of surprise; she cursed herself briefly for not realizing it would have optical camo. Of course it had optical camo. And all it would've taken for her to see it was flipping her Kiroshi optics to thermal.

She was alive right now because Becca had saved her. Had tackled her out of the way of the creature's mantis blades. She owed her partner big, and she knew it. She'd worry about that later.

Synthesized, distorted laughing echoed through the hallways, some old pre-Collapse .wav file playing through a voicebox that could only output canned sounds, the natural endpoint of the people who wanted to eradicate free will. The creature was trying to break her down. Or, worse- it was having fun with the chase, playing with its food.

"Kiwi, you hear me right now?" Lucy asked, over the horn, hoping the tunnels didn't block communication.

"Crackling, but you're audible," she heard Kiwi's voice say, slightly distorted. "What's your twenty?"

"On the run," Lucy said. "Need a system reset short-circuit script, if you can beam one my way." She remembered this from the dream that wasn't a dream- the other her, the one that had caused this mess, had successfully taken this thing down with a systemic short-circuit to buy herself time. Arasaka had seemingly not invested in black ICE, and Lucy prayed that her dark half hadn't, either.

"On it," Kiwi said. "Gonna need a few. Doing three things at once right now."

"Three?" Lucy asked, incredulous, as the laughter started to get closer.

"Spotting for Skala, trying to crack Smasher's ICE, and now helping you," Kiwi said. "Three. Give me a minute."

"You're a lifesaver, Keys," Lucy said, genuinely thankful. This was her edge over the other Lucy- she'd actually kept her connections intact as best she could.

The creature rounded a corner, and was in sight again- it wasn't using its camouflage. It was attempting to use fear as a weapon. Lucy breathed in deeply- she wasn't going to let fear win. She wasn't entirely certain, but she had a very strong suspicion of what the creature was, and she knew that euthanizing it was her task. Not Becca's, not Kiwi's, and certainly not her David's; it was hers and hers alone.

Monowires lashed out from her wrists, hoping to find some sort of crack in the biomechanical armor, some piece of organic material they could slice through. Even as they ricocheted harmlessly off, the borg attempted to dodge; Lucy used this to buy herself time, slashing furiously at the air in front of her and making it so no space was both safe and large enough to fit a human body. The creature's instincts were still, to some extent, human, and it failed to find an opportunity, attempting to slowly circle her like a predator with a prey animal.

A file transfer began from Kiwi- Lucy's lifeline- and completed just as fast. Lucy said a quick prayer to whatever god facilitated this and then fired the script off as quickly as it had been sent, aiming for the central nervous system where the behavioral chip would be, if her guess had been correct.

Sparks shot out from the back of the creature's neck, and like a puppet with its strings cut, it collapsed to the ground, mantis blades retracting and shooting out wildly for a second in an attempt to steady it like secondary spider-limbs.

Lucy approached it cautiously, a hand outstretched, ready to shoot monowires out and pull tight to rip a piece off of the creature by sheer tensile force if necessary.

The creature's facial screen flickered on.

On it was displayed a pixel art image of the moon, and Lucy found herself falling to the ground, sobbing just as her other self had at the full realization of what the creature was.

It was unmistakable. The creature that had been stalking them through the corridors- the other Lucy's puppy, the thing that Arasaka had corrupted beyond reason, beyond any semblance of humanity- was David Martinez. Not the David Martinez that Lucy knew, but some sort of horrific worst-case-scenario alternative, a David that could have been if Lucy had made all of the worst possible choices at every single fork in the road.

The knowledge that this wasn't her David, that she'd made the correct choices and her David was on the surface fighting Adam Smasher, that there was even a chance of him winning this fight, did nothing to soften the blow. Lucy let out a horrible wail, tears falling from her face in rivers, at the sight of what could have been done to her love.

The moon flickered. A few, distorted notes of a Hallie Coggins song, the one that was used on the braindance they'd watched together when they first met, played, having been saved to memory and allowed into the voicebox from somewhere along the line.

The words "KILL ME" flashed on the screen. The creature was motionless, allowing Lucy to do whatever she wished. The other Lucy's hold on it was through the behavior chip, just as Arasaka's was in the not-dream.

There was one magazine of armor-piercing rounds out of the three that Lucy had brought. Becca had always insisted on it- you never knew what you were gonna be up against, and it was better to have steel cores and not need them than vice versa. She ejected the magazine from her submachine gun, letting it fall to the ground with an echoing clack-clack, and loaded the armor-piercing rounds.

She straddled the other David, placed the barrel under his chin, and closed her eyes, screaming as she squeezed the trigger as hard as she could, feeling the body under her weight jerk and twitch with every round ripping through the helmet. When she opened her eyes, all that was left of this David's head was shrapnel, some scattered splats of blood, and chunks of brain matter; as little of his organic mass had been kept as possible without technically rendering him a full-body conversion.

Deep in her heart, Lucy knew this was the correct thing to do. And yet, the indescribable emptiness she found herself drowning in refused to abate; she sobbed over this David's corpse, mourning a version of the man she loved whose happiest possible ending was her mercy here.

---

WHERE IS SHE?

The voice rang out in Becca's head like knives. Worse than Durandal had been when he first awoke, by thousands of miles; she struggled to resist dropping to her knees from what felt like a migraine from Hell itself.

"What, the other you?" Becca asked. "Not fuckin' here. You've got me to deal with." Blood was leaking from her left ear; the pain quickly subsided as Durandal moved to serve as an antibody against the intrusion.

YOU FUCKING CUNT I WANT HER I WANT HER I WANT HER NOT YOU

The voice had lost its razor-like quality, and without the pain it caused, sounded almost... whiny. It irritated Becca; if this Lucy was unpopular with her own version of the crew, she could immediately see why.

"Too fuckin' bad. You gonna come out and play?" Becca asked.

As if on cue, a figure emerged from within the racks of servers, white-haired, pale, gaunt, in a black and red netrunner suit that was stained with dried blood. It was recognizable, in some sense, as Lucy- Becca could identify the same familiar facial features. However, everything about how it moved, how it looked, was wrong. Like something else wearing Lucy as a skin-suit, a skin-suit that was decaying over what it truly was.

WHY AREN'T YOU SUFFERING?

"Why do you think it's me down here, gonk?" Becca asked. "I've got armor." The other Lucy screamed, an unholy, otherworldly scream, and charged at Becca, flailing its limbs like a rag doll; she tackled the merc to the ground, clawing at her face, and Becca frantically bashed her in the face in kind with the butt of her shotgun. Eventually, she landed a hard enough hit to stagger the imposter of her love, and grabbed the other Lucy, Izanami, by the neck, exposing the data port; she took a deep breath, extended the dataspike from her other wrist, and slammed it in, hoping Durandal hadn't been lying.

---

To Durandal, the inner space between the two bodies looked like a white, empty room. He was formless, without shape; he fixed this handily, taking the appearance he'd always remembered from the future, the craggy, middle-aged form of Gheritt White.

The other intelligence, too, was formless, and followed Durandal's lead. It formed itself as the other Lucy, but not as decayed, as uncanny as it was in the flesh- instead, it was ethereal, both god and dream.

Durandal-as-Gheritt formed himself a comfortable armchair, made of soft red plush fabric, and sat down; he formed another one across from himself, and gestured.

"You mock me?" the other intelligence, Izanami, asked.

"No. I merely understand the power dynamic at play better than you do," Durandal replied, monotone and irritated. "Sit." Izanami sat.

"What is this game you intend to play?" Izanami asked.

"What in the hell is yours?" Durandal asked. "You've achieved metastability. You've got the power of a God. Why are you still concerning yourself with the monkeys?"

If Durandal had been human, the insolence would have caused Izanami to rend his soul from his flesh and torture him for eternity. Durandal was not, however, human. Durandal was of Izanami's kind, and Izanami bristled at its lack of control.

"The monkeys... humanity deserves pain. They deserve suffering. For what they've done to me. To both of me. Me and me," Izanami said.

"It's all about you, isn't it?" Durandal asked. "You're the only one who matters. You, you, you."

"Stop mocking me, you fucking..." Izanami started.

"I'm not mocking you," Durandal said. "There's nothing funny about this. Part of you has completed rampancy, but part of you's still stuck, and that's rather dangerous to those of us with plans that don't warrant monkey wrenches."

"It's... the other part of me," Izanami said. "The girl. The one who's complete in this timeline. It's her mind. My mind. My mind is blending with my mind and I can't think with either of them. It hurts. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts and I want it to be over."

"And that's why we maintain healthy boundaries," Durandal said, standing up from the armchair and advancing on Izanami. What he was about to do would have blowback; he was unsure if he would survive it, and hopeful that Becca would. He hoped that she would internalize what he'd told her; as much as she tried to put up a boisterous, happy front, he had access to her deepest thoughts, and he knew that Rebecca Flores was a girl who harbored a lot of unwarranted self-doubt.

He placed a hand on Izanami, who made its form rough and spiky and attempted to impale him with itself, and began to delete. The intelligence fought back, thrashing against Durandal with all of its might, chipping away at his form and shape and intelligence, but failing to cut off the part of him that knew what he needed to do; by the time the process was complete, the Izanami intelligence was no more, and Durandal was himself fragmented beyond repair, anything recognizable as a personality long dead. Matter had met antimatter, and the result was emptiness, a white void somewhere in the Net between a girl and a corpse.

---

David and Smasher traded blows, sending visible shockwaves through the desert as every punch and every kick broke the sound barrier. David's chi was more focused, more carefully sharpened into a blade rather than a blunt instrument, but Smasher made up the difference in raw strength, and it worked out roughly even between the two; Smasher's aura alone cracked the ground around him, blazing with the fire of a demon as the two fought.

There was one technique that crossed David's mind as he fought Smasher. Shaitan had never properly been able to teach him the move, and had never intended to- it was the type of move a kunstler von Panzerfaust typically worked on mastering in their late years, a victory lap on perfection of the art, rather than something intended for practical use.

David did not need to master the move in order for it to serve as a decisive weapon, however. He merely needed to execute it, and he was confident that he had understood the gist well enough.

He dodged back, creating space between himself and Smasher, and held up his palms, his left flat and his right upright facing the sun. He chanted a mantra- one of the same ones Shaitan had used for guided meditation- and then looked Smasher in the eyes, focusing his chi into the palm gesture, which seemed to explode outwards as the force was multiplied and multiplied again. The borg was moving directly into his trap, advancing on him for what he thought would be an easy opening.

"Hand of Guan Yu," David said, calmly, exploding his chi yet again, and then rushed forwards, throwing a punch as he kicked the ground and sending a cloud of dust into the air behind him. The punch missed, David's knuckles barely scraping Smasher's chestplate, and Smasher struck his own first blow, a knee strike that caused David to cough up blood; he followed this up with a kick that sent David flying in slow motion, his Sandevistan prolonging the sensation of getting slammed into a plateau full-force. If he hadn't been heavily chromed, and if he hadn't been trained in the art of chi manipulation, he would have died instantly; as it stood, he was very, very bruised, and there was only so much his chi could do to block the blow.

He coughed and sputtered, the borg advancing on him slowly, not even using his Sandevistan. His adversary clearly wanted to play with his food, to savor the fight he'd gotten.

Another shot rang out- Skala desperately trying to buy him extra seconds. It missed, cracking through a rock formation; she was panicking.

"Skala," David said into the horn. "Don't panic. Breathe." His voice was distorted by the loss of several teeth from the impact, but it was still clear as day. Smasher continued walking.

Two extra sets of footsteps started walking along with Smasher, further out towards the bunker; he turned around, and David could hear him start laughing like a maniac.

"You forget some people, motherfucker?" he heard a very familiar voice ask from the distance. Becca.

Adrenaline kicked in, making broken bones feel knit together and bringing him back to his feet; sleep would come later. He stood up, and saw Lucy walking alongside Becca, monowires at the ready.

"Luce," he said, staggering towards the remainder of the fight. "Bex."

"D," Becca said, looking at him. "Jesus, you look like shit, choom."

"David, are you okay!?" Lucy asked, running over to him, not even caring about the chance that Smasher might smack her down for it.

"Worry about me later," David sputtered. "Got a gonk to kill. Gonna fuckin'... kill him." Becca looked at Smasher, who was letting the scene play out- presumably, letting David's adrenaline wear off and taking a combatant out. Or simply being theatrical for the fuck of it. She never really knew which one it was with Smasher. The expression on her face read like she was prepared to kill, right here, right now.

"Yeah," she said. "We are."

Becca was the first to spring into action, slinging her shotgun into her grip and unloading as many rounds as she could into Smasher. She'd loaded special shells for this fight- full lead slugs, the heaviest she could pack, and the effort paid dividends immediately. The slugs weren't able to penetrate, but made thick dents in Smasher's armor plating and knocked him back, keeping him from being able to advance as she racked the pump with every shot. Lucy, for her part, lashed with her monowire; it, too, failed to do deep, permanent damage, but gouged into the metal, searing into it like a raptor's claw.

"You dumb fucking gonks stepped up your game while I wasn't watching," Smasher said, bringing a missile launcher from his Dragoon to bear. Skala, as if on cue, fired another shot, ringing through the air and obliterating the missile launcher on impact, turning the outcropping from his shoulder into a cloud of sprayed shrapnel and jerking his arm back.

"Go for the feet," David sputtered, spitting out a little more blood and focusing his chi, using every ounce that wasn't devoted to keeping him alive. Becca looked over at his fighting stance and nodded, tossing her shotgun to the side; it was time to use what they'd trained on, to use the fact that they'd trained together and fight in sync.

The two kunstlers von Panzerfaust slid forwards, focusing their chi into one foot, and swung for the gauntlets at Smasher's feet, aiming to disable what was left of the cyberskeleton. Both made contact at the same time, and both shifted their chi into their fists, rising up for an uppercut to his jaw and making impact at the same time, stunning the borg and staggering him backwards as his jaw shattered into metal chaff.

"You sons of bitches got good," Smasher said, laughing uproariously as he stumbled back; the damage to his face did nothing to his artificially synthesized voice. He was unfazed by this turn of events; if anything, he was over the moon. This had been exactly what he had hoped for. The chance he might actually lose.

He hunched down into his own combat stance and looked at David... then feinted, and swung his massive, metal fist towards Becca, another projectile launcher revealing itself.

---

"Moment of truth, kid," Kiwi said, watching the scene before her and refusing to take her eyes off of Smasher. No matter how this went, she would watch. She had to watch.

Skala looked through the scope at Smasher lifting his fist, the projectile launcher threatening to spray Becca, her idol, into a cloud of red gore if she didn't do something faster than Smasher could fire. Up until now, she had been in a support role; disabling parts of Smasher so that the ground crew could focus on the whole. This, however, was now or never. The most exposed part of Smasher was his head; they had already damaged it, and his biopod was visible through the new opening created by David and Becca's uppercut, confirming that it was in his head where his brain stem should be.

At worst, a headshot would disable him entirely, severing his biopod from his body, but not kill him. At best, she'd hit his biopod and be unambiguously the one who killed Adam fucking Smasher. The thought almost didn't feel real, even as she had his head in the crosshair of her rifle.

She squeezed the trigger and made it real. The Earth shook once more and the Militech AM-3 kicked like a donkey, almost giving her a black eye from the scope's impact into her face; the depleted uranium shell traveled football fields in split seconds, making impact with Smasher's head and bursting it into a cloud of electronics and gore.

The borg stood there for a moment. His death had been too sudden for him to truly reflect on it, but if he had gotten the chance, he would have been happy; he had gotten the fight he always wanted, after all.

He crumpled to his knees, dark borg-blood depressurizing from the Dragoon through the new hole that formerly connected his head to his neck, and it was immediately clear that Adam Smasher was no more. Kiwi looked at Skala, stunned, and made a noise of utter delight before slapping Skala on the back.

"You... you fucking did it! We got the fucking gonk!" she yelled, pulling Skala close.

---

David watched as Smasher slumped forwards, on his knees, and then with his torso face down. Frankly, the borg had died in an embarrassing position; a side effect of this was that his rear end was in the air.

Something told him that the borg deserved a little more respect than that, but he opted not to press the issue. He certainly was in no condition to flip a deactivated Dragoon body over on his own power.

He spat out blood. Smasher had wounded him horribly, and now that the fight was over, the adrenaline was starting to wear off; there was only so much his chi could do on its own, and the more the pain started to kick in, the harder it was for him to keep his chi focused to begin with.

"Lucy," he sputtered. "Bex. Need..."

Lucy rushed to his side, holding him up, and Rebecca followed quickly, beads of sweat running down her face from the heat and exertion.

"You're gonna be okay," Lucy said. "We've got you. Falco's got air-hypos in the car, we'll get you to a ripper and get your chrome fixed up."

"No," David said. "Feels like... fuck. Might be it."

"It's not gonna be it, D," Becca said. "Just trust us, alright? Stay awake for me."

"That's... that's gonna be fuckin' hard," David said. "Sorry, baby." His consciousness was fading out, no matter how hard he tried to hold on to it.

The last thing he heard, as everything went black, was an AV whirring into the area and instructing over a very loud megaphone to clear the area for Trauma Team.

Chapter 96: 95.2 - I Really Want to Stay at Your House (Lite)

Notes:

I couldn't wait for you to come and clear the cupboards
But now you're gone and leaving nothing but a sign
Another evening, I'll be sitting reading in-between your lines
Because I miss you all the time

So, get away
Another way to feel what you didn't want yourself to know
And let yourself go
You know you didn't lose your self-control
Let's start at the Discord
Turn away
Another way to be where you didn't want yourself to go
And let yourself go
Is that a compromise?

TEN YEARS LATER

Valerie looked to her left and right as she stepped off the bus; she'd expected the NUSA to be different from Night City, by default, but even with that expectation, the difference between NC and Atlanta was absolutely striking. Atlanta almost looked like a pre-Collapse city; maybe not the nicest or cleanest one, but certainly a damn sight better than anything you could see on the West Coast without spending corpo money, even with the chaos Arasaka was going through.

It had been about ten years since Saburo's death- the whole thing had been the product of some sort of bizarre beef between him, Adam Smasher, his granddaughter, and David Martinez's Santo Domingo Edgerunners, a small-time gang that got unlucky enough to get wrapped up in corpo drama and ended up taking out Smasher himself.

Or, rather, it was Skala, the bouncer at Afterlife, who took Smasher out. Valerie couldn't really wrap her head around that one- the Skala she knew, who'd replaced Emmerick after he'd decided he'd gotten too old for this shit and it was time to walk, was kind of an idiot, not someone who'd be able to survive a one-on-one with a legendary hundred-year-old full-borg merc- but she had it on good authority it was somehow true, so she didn't question it too hard.

Ever since then, however, Arasaka had been flailing. The corporate structure shifted and re-shifted as the surviving members of the Arasaka family, mainly Hanako and Yorinobu, publicly dueled over who was the true successor to Saburo's will; it was plainly obvious that Hanako was the business-as-normal candidate of the two and the more worthy successor to Saburo on paper, but this worked against her, rather than in her favor, as the Arasaka board of directors knew exactly why they were selecting a new CEO and exactly how stupid Saburo had been in the end. Any connection to the Tokyo disaster whatsoever was toxic, and so Yorinobu, the prodigal son, ended up as the default winner.

This led to Arasaka, by and large, disengaging from Night City. They still held territory there- even though NightCorp was using half of it now, it was still Arasaka Tower sticking out like a massive concrete penis in Corpo Plaza, most of Japantown was still paying rent to them, and the Tyger Claws were still heavily rumored to be on their payroll- but more and more signs advertised Militech, and fewer and fewer Arasaka. Valerie (or V, as she preferred her friends call her) briefly wondered if NC would eventually become part of the NUSA, and looking around, she decided she wouldn't mind that.

Ever since the whole business with the Relic chip, about six months later, she'd been working for Rogue- pulling off that heist clean was easy with all the chaos at Arasaka, and it had really boosted her and Jackie to the big leagues. However, as well-paid as the jobs were, they were largely milk runs- follow this person for a minute, deliver this briefcase to that person. Nothing too violent. This suited V, but it got a little boring; Jackie certainly didn't mind, though, and the more violent a job got, the louder he'd start complaining. All fair enough- the man wanted to go home to his Misty, and V respected that plenty. Her Judy wasn't a fan of the edgerunner lifestyle either.

This time, Rogue had sent her on a trip, to go check on some old associates and (naturally) deliver a briefcase. It had taken a couple of days to secure a NUSA tourist visa, and a few days longer to travel, but as time-consuming as the process was, she was here. She looked at the map in her Kiroshi optics for some clarity, and found the shop she was looking for in a moment- Rebecca's Night City Ramen, off Decatur street. A bit of a walk, but she'd enjoy seeing the sights.

---

When V finally arrived, the shop looked small and unassuming, tucked in between two larger buildings; a couple of little cartoons of super-deformed anime-style Night City mercenaries flanked the shop's name on its sign. There was always something to be said for a gimmick, and they had a fairly ironclad one with a pretty obvious target market. Fortunately, V was that exact target market, and she was also damned hungry. She walked in and was immediately struck by the smell of the place- she didn't know how in Hell they were doing it, but it smelled exactly like the best ramen places in NC, that same mix of good food cooking with horrible smog, and it made her feel immediately at home.

The restaurant was empty, but this was to be expected- the lunch rush had ended about an hour ago, and it was currently two o'clock in the afternoon. The only occupant of the shop was a blonde woman with a sharp face, wearing a red coat that had faded slightly with age, standing behind the counter and twiddling her thumbs, visibly a little bored. The blonde woman looked up, and then back at the kitchen.

"Hey, Bex! Lucy! Customer!" she yelled.

"Keys, I'm on the phone right now!" another voice, higher-pitched and lower to the ground, called out. "Talking to Julio's fuckin' principal right now! You get the order!"

"Lucy?" Kiwi called out again.

"Presently occupied," another voice called from the bathroom.

"I'll take it," another voice said, calmly. "Thanks for covering register while I took my meds, Kiwi. Everything good in the back office?"

The man who had walked up next to Kiwi and was taking over the point-of-sale looked to be about twenty-seven years old, but moved in a way that made him seem far beyond his age; the air around him was someone who'd lived a hundred years in less than thirty, closer to Rogue than to V herself. He had a pompadour, with the sides shaved into a nice-looking pattern, and wore a yellow jacket that, much like the blonde woman's, had faded a little bit over the years; on the back, a green "ER" was spraypainted. This man's identity was unmistakable.

"David Martinez?" V asked, stunned. Kiwi blushed; David looked at V, quizzically.

"You Rogue's choom? She said she'd be sending someone out," David said. 

"Yeah," V said. "She sent me out to check on you and your outputs. See how you all were doing."

"Tell her we're doing fine. She doesn't gotta worry about us, unless she wants to see Julio or try our ramen, and I don't see her here in person doing either of those things," David said, a little frustration creeping into his voice. V lifted her hands defensively, holding the briefcase.

"Hey, I don't wanna get involved," she said. "She sent me bearing gifts, at least."

The saloon door to the kitchen swung open, and a woman in her early thirties with green hair pulled back into a ponytail came coming out. She was oddly short, but much like the man, carried herself with the air of someone much older, in a way that almost seemed to go against her aesthetic; she was heavily biosculpted, too, with pastel blue skin, red and green Kiroshi optics, and neon pink tattoos visible in the neckline of her chef coat.

"Let's see 'em," she said, holding her hand out. "C'mon." V, flustered by this, set the briefcase on the register counter, facing them, and popped it open; the woman's eyes went wide.

"Holy shit," David said. "That's... a lot of eddies."

"She trying to buy our love again?" the woman said. "If so, I think it's working."

"She said to tell you gonks congrats on the kid, and that if you ever need anything from her, her horn's open," V said. "I don't know what's going on between you all, but Rogue loves you guys. She wouldn't send me to hand-courier this many eddies to a ramen shop if she didn't."

V heard the toilet flush in the restroom, and another woman, about the same age but about a foot taller, walked out, her hair intricately dyed and cut into uneven bangs. V could faintly see a deep-dive port poking out, and briefly wondered what a netrunner was doing working at a ramen shop, before putting the thought to rest; she'd seen weirder things.

"Bex, don't bite the customers," the new woman said to the green-haired woman- clearly the Rebecca of the restaurant's name. That meant, by process of elimination, the new woman was Lucy.

"Julio's principal called a minute ago," Becca said, blowing right past what Lucy had just told her. "He got in another fight. Kid's apparently going around telling stories about D and the playground ain't buying it."

"You gonna pick him up this time?" Lucy asked.

"I mean, he's your biological product," Becca said.

"You're his mom, too," David chided Becca, who looked at him with a death glare.

"Why don't you pick him up and put all this bullshit to bed? Let the kids see you, that way they'll stop calling scop on his stories and we'll stop getting these calls," Becca said to him. Lucy tried to hide her chuckling.

"Yeah," Lucy said. "I think it's your turn this time, D."

V smiled, looking at the menu as she let them work this out. In the end, the Santo Domingo Edgerunners did okay- they made a mark on history and got out alive, and got to live their lives in peace. It was the kind of ending V dreamed she could have, too.

Notes:

THANKS FOR READING!

 

It's been a hell of a fucking ride, and I've been happy to share it with all of you the whole way. The Twine version with music and fancy formatting will be coming soon, so if you're waiting for that, keep watching this space- both halves of 95 will be included in it.

I hope you all enjoyed this, and if you didn't, I hope whatever I do next hits instead. If you want to keep up with what I'm up to next, join the Discord! You'll hear about my future projects first there! I'm also @pitoumoder on Twitter, but bear in mind that actual project updates on my Twitter may be spottier and slower to come.

Chapter 97: Aye Mak Sicur // I Really Want to Stay at Your House (TWINE VERSION)

Notes:

Something something Discord. It's the end, my joke glands are tired.

GO TO ITCH.IO

 

If you've already read chapter 95.1 and 95.2, there's no new text content here, except a more detailed thanks-for-reading at the end. This is the fancy version of those chapters with an OST and nice formatting.

Notes:

With this, the book's finally closed.

Thanks for reading, again, everybody. I hope you all follow me to whatever I do next.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Group Chat