Friday Night Firefight - elterrible (2024)

Chapter 1 Chapter Text

My first thought on waking up was: why the hell is it so bright in my apartment? That was quickly followed with: when was my apartment moved outside? Who turned New York City into a desert? Why am I naked? What is this mattress stained with? And finally: what the hell is going on?

The blue twin mattress I woke up on was covered in what I hoped was merely years of dirt and grime. I was out in the middle of the desert despite passing out last night in the relative comfort of my one-bedroom apartment. Okay, I’m going to be honest here. It’s not even a one-bedroom. There’s a small alcove for my bed set off from the rest of the apartment and I tell everyone it’s a one-bed. Makes me feel a little more put together than I actually am. But my crappy apartment was a big step up from sleeping outside under the stars on a – I hope – dirt covered mattress, completely naked.

I sat up and took stock of where I was and what was around me, hoping that jeans and a t-shirt would magically appear next to me on the dirty mattress, and quickly noticed the gargantuan mountain of trash at my back. Climbing up from the mattress, trying not to notice the dirt that clung to me, I stared up at the mountain before spinning around and trying to figure out where I was. A couple wind turbines dotted the horizon, a somewhat broken and aged asphalt road stretched out ahead of me, and miles away was the tell-tale skyline of a massive city. But that’s not what caught my attention.

Hovering above the city, like a flock of birds, were…I don’t know what. They were too big and rigid to be blimps. And when was the last time anyone ever saw a blimp floating above a city? It was like someone took a small building and tipped it over on its side and flung it through the air. There were dozens of them, all flying around above the skyscrapers of the city. They were too big to be birds, too small to be airplanes.

What the hell was going on?

I picked my way over to the asphalt road, the desert floor hiding rocks and twigs that scraped my feet and made me dance-march over to the paved road. And that wasn’t any better. It was scorching in the midday sun, so I stood off to the side on the slightly cooler sand.

Billboards jutted up into the sky and my eyes quickly scanned them, reading through the advertisem*nts.

‘Feeling kumquat today?’ Nope. I definitely wasn’t.

‘Real Water. Only 99E$/Gallon.’ That had to be some Instagram influencer product, maybe something sold by a Kardashian.

‘Decker Tanaka & Rogers. We move things, so your business can grow.’

‘Pure Overkill. RT-46 Burya.’ Something about the Burya name twigged my memory but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And what was with the E$ after the Real Water?

I walked along the road, heading towards the city. What else was I going to do? Someone had kidnapped me and smuggled me out into the middle of a desert, stripped me naked, and left me on the most disgusting and uncomfortable mattress outside of a frat house. Was it a prank? I tried thinking of any of my friends who had both the inclination and economic resources to pull off something like this and no one came to mind.

I passed a few more billboards as I made my way along the road.

‘Now in King Size. Abydos. Let’s Warm You Up!’ Man, ads have gotten really sexual lately.

‘Nicola. Taste the love.’ Why did I want to read that in an annoyingly high-pitched voice?

‘Sojagil Machistador. Explosion of Taste.’

‘Introducing the new Aerondight. Substance and Style. Rayfield.’

Wait. Wait. WAIT. I knew that car. In the ad it was a sleek gold and black and looked nice and futuristic. But I knew it drove like an old boat and was completely impractical as a city car. Every time I drove it I’d glide across the lanes and accidentally slam into pedestrians. What are these memories?

I thought back to the other ads. Nicola, taste the love. And I want to say it in a weird cartoon voice. I could almost hear it while riding an…elevator? The Burya. It was a gun that had ridiculous recoil. AVs in the sky. Wind turbine looking things. Desert. A massive city filled with enough skyscrapers to fill a skyline that would put New York’s to shame.

Was this Night City!? How? Oh, holy hell. I got isekai’d. I bounced up and down and flapped my arms for the lack of anything better to do. The excitement was getting to me, but I couldn’t run around because I w would have stabbed my feet on a rock or stripped my foot of the skin if I wandered onto the burning asphalt. I wanted to tell someone I had been isekai’d. But who could I tell? I was out here in the middle of the desert, not a soul to be seen for miles. No. Not the desert. I was in the badlands. And as soon as that thought filled my mind I started to squeal. Well, less a squeal and more a…squeam? A squeal combined with the scream of excitement you might hear from someone who has suddenly found themselves in a video game. I punched the air and jumped around, laughing. I got isekai’d!

Did I get hit by a bus? The last thing I remembered was passing out in my tiny alcove bed. Unless a bud somehow climbed three stories and made its way through my slightly janky door, something else had to have teleported me here. Oh sh*t. I’m going to meet Panam and Vik and Judy. I’m going to become a ninja and cut bullets out of the air. And, if I knew anything about the isekai genre, which I definitely did, then…

“System,” I shouted up into the air. Nothing happened. No scrolling words. No ‘quest’ or ‘tutorial’ popped up in my vision.

“Uh. Stats?” Nothing. “Settings. Cool. Body. Reflex.” Still nothing.

“Tutorial? Um…help?” The silence from my isekai system was jarring. It was a standard trope of the genre. The main character gets teleported to a mystical new world and is given a gamified system of stats by a benevolent god or goddess and uses it to become ridiculously OP. So, where the hell was my system?

The only possible answer to that question was: since this was the Cyberpunk world, I needed some kind of optics to unlock the system. I didn’t have a HUD because normal boring people with their normal boring eyes didn’t have a HUD. I needed optics before I could gain access to my system.

Satisfied with my sound reasoning, I continued my walk towards the city. Daydreams filled my vision as I marched along. I’d become so OP. There was a level cap on V in the game, but I probably didn’t have one. I could envision future me, bullets bouncing off my skin, running through the air like a ‘saka ninja, hacking people and spreading overheat and short circuits everywhere, then dicing them up with a katana and a couple of those laser grenades.

The few negative thoughts that intruded on my daydreams were centered around all the people I had left behind. How did I get isekai’d? Did I die? Was there a funeral? Did everyone just think I was ghosting them or that I dropped off the face of the Earth? Was anyone even looking for me? Would I ever see my friends and family again? But despite the gloom that rose from those questions, I quickly cheered back up.

Unlike most main characters in the isekai genre, I was going to embrace my new life. Afterlife merc. Crazy rich dude. Guy who you didn’t want to mess with. I’d beat Adam Smasher and claim his spot as the number one Night City nightmare.

My daydreams didn’t last long, being interrupted by the roar of engines and a shock of fear that crept its way up my spine. I was naked and unarmed and wandering through the badlands. And I had completely forgotten about the Wraiths.

I was at a T intersection with a road sign – a road sign in the middle of the desert? – telling me I was on Edgewood Lane. I could hear engines roaring to my left, hidden behind a sand dune and piles of garbage that had spilled down from the massive trash mountain. I dropped into a crouch and desperately searched for cover. I was a sitting duck out here in the middle of the road. The only safe place for me was a run-down shack far off in the distance.

I sprinted towards it, trying to cover the distance and hide before the Wraiths could find me. The desert ground gave way to wet squelching mud that clung to my feet and disrupted my sprint, my legs and lungs burning with effort as I tried to power my way towards the shack. Sharp bits of metal and plastic that spilled from trash bags littered the ground in front of me and jammed into the soles of my feet, causing pain and occasionally drawing blood. This was the desert. Why was the ground suddenly muddy? And where did all this trash come from?

I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind as I ran. I was too weak at this point to challenge the Wraiths. Maybe in a month or so, after I leveled and trained a bit and had a gun, I’d come back to the badlands and take out every Wraith I could find. But right now, a naked, dirty, bleeding, unarmed man wasn’t going to strike fear in the hearts of the Mad Max villains of the Cyberpunk world.

The engines increased in volume behind me, and I knew the Wraiths had spotted me. I imagined it would be hard to miss my pale naked ass running through the desert. Why hadn’t I ever bothered to tan? I was so pale I probably glowed like a beacon, drawing the Wraiths towards me like moths to flame. My skin probably reflected sunlight at them, telling them ‘Hey, come chase down the human-shaped disco ball and break it.’ And why didn’t I ever exercise? A stitch developed in my side as I ran, and every footstep brought a curse from my mouth. “Why was I so lazy?”

The Wraiths were going to be on me in seconds, so I scanned the terrain for some place I could make a final stand. But before I could come up with any kind of plan, something hit me, and I went flying. I could hear a crack, felt a pain, blacked out for a second, and then once more woke up on my back. My arm was bent underneath me, and I was covered in dirt and grime. At first, I thought the crack I heard was the windshield of the car that hit me. That made me a little happy that I could wreck someone’s vehicle when they tried to kill me. But a quick glance at my arm, combined with the sharp pain that radiated through my body, told me that something was probably broken. I had enough sense to look up at the Wraiths instead of just lay there, moaning in pain, and I noticed three Wraiths were approaching: one car and two motorcycles.

The car had been what smashed into me and sent me flying, eliciting a cheer from the bikers. I could feel a tenderness in my side – the car had probably messed up my ribs – and a stinging pain coming from my shoulder. The Wraith driver climbed out of his car, a grin plastered across his face, as I struggled to my feet. There were only three of them. I was hoping to run away but…I could take them. My videogame body would soon heal, then I’d take out these three dudes, grab their weapons and cars, and make my way to Night City.

I staggered to my feet and the scene in Lethal Weapon where Mel Gibson pops his arm back into place by smashing it against a wall fluttered into my mind. That probably wasn’t a great idea. I’ll fix my arm later. Preferably not by smashing it into a wall.

The Wraiths made no move towards me, just laughing at my obviously injured state. The two bikers parked behind me, cutting off any chance I had to safely run towards the shack. But that wasn’t my intention. The driver of the car was in front of me and if I could take him out, grab his gun, and use his car as a barrier to protect myself from gunfire, I felt good about my chances against the two biker Wraiths. Hide behind the car, take potshots at the bikers. That’s the plan. I’ll come out of this fine, with two bikes and a car and a bunch of weapons. With that, I charged the driver, thinking ‘you dicks should have finished me off when you had the chance.’

Three sounds rang through the air in quick succession. The first was the pained “agghh” that tored itself from my throat as I ran at the driver. After two janky steps towards him my jerky movement had jostled my shoulder enough that the pain ripping through my body made me want to pass out. The second sound was the gunshot that came from the pistol held by the Wraith driver. My right leg gave out as I stepped down and I felt a burning sting in my thigh, and I belly flopped to the ground. The mud didn’t completely rob me of my forward momentum, so I slid to a stop about ten feet from where I fell, covered in bits of trash collected during my slide. The third sound was the belly laughter that escaped the Wraiths as they watched all this happen.

I knew I couldn’t get up. My body was telling me I was an idiot who was about to die. Again. Maybe this time I’d be isekai’d into a nice magical fantasy world. Maybe this time my system would actually work, and I could level a bit before being thrown directly into combat with bandits.

The laughter and conversation became muted in my ears as I slowly slid into unconsciousness. Were they arguing? What was going on? One of them said something about a scan. I ignored the arguments as I slowly lost consciousness and my last thoughts were ‘the Cyberpunk world sucks.’

Chapter 2: Chapter 2

Chapter Text

Do you know how painful a broken arm, cracked ribs, and a gunshot wound to the leg is? The answer is: all the pain. Take all the pain you’ve ever felt, wrap it around a brick, and then smash it directly into your body. That’s what it felt like when I woke up on a surgical bed in a strange tent. I didn’t know where I was or how I got there, a feeling that I was sadly becoming used to. If I had to guess, the Wraiths had dragged me to their camp. But for what? I had no clue. At the same time, I kind of had a good idea of what was about to happen.

I never really thought much about the dissected and mutilated bodies that could be found in Raffen camps in the game. Now, it was all my mind wanted to dwell on. Thankfully I wasn’t alone with my thoughts for very long.

A hulking brute of a man stepped into the tent, wearing a long black trench coat that I couldn’t help but think was wildly impractical in the desert of the badlands. A dust mask hid his face as he stepped up next to the surgical bed I was splayed across. He ‘gently’ tapped my leg wound which I noticed had been recently bandaged, before whipping off his dust mask and grinning down at the obvious pain his greeting produced.

“And what’s your name?” he asked.

“John,” I mumbled before wincing in realization. I always thought that one of the best things about the isekai genre was how the main character could reinvent themselves. They weren’t stuck being who they were before they got magicked into a new world. They could be a new person with new goals and, more importantly, a new name. John was such a basic name. It wasn’t the name of a great warrior or a leader of men who made people tremble in fear and awe. It was the name of an unidentified body that was found buried in a shallow, unmarked grave in the middle of the desert. I didn’t want to be a John.

“Well John,” he said with a hint of sarcasm. What was up with that? Did he not believe it was my name? Who would pretend their name was John? God, I hated that name. “I think you can guess where we are.”

He took a step back and held out an arm as if displaying the camp I could see through the opened tent flaps.

“My boys brought you here because when they scanned you, no profile popped up. You’re too pale to be a nomad. Too well fed to be poor.” His dig at the slight excess weight I carried kind of hurt, more so because it reminded me that I had run out of breath trying to sprint away from the Wraiths. “And you haven’t chipped in yet. You’ve got no chrome whatsoever. Which leads us to believe that you’re some spoiled rich tit out here, rocking some expensive biomods, looking for some fun in the dangerous badlands.”

He must have misread the stupefied look on my face because he held his palms out in a mock calming gesture. “It’s pointless to try and get you to tell us the truth about who you are right now. Hell, they probably teach you corpo sh*ts how to lie when you’re still in the crib,” he said, pressing a finger down onto my wounded leg.

“You’re still under the delusion that your parents are going to come and save you and make all the bad men go away, and that this story will be just some grand adventure you can brag about to all the other spoiled little rich kids.” He dug his thumb into my thigh, forcing my body to jerk up in pain.

“You’re mistaken. We’re the power out here. My boys can take anyone. Hell, just this morning we knocked off a Biotechnica convoy. A couple of guards flatlined, couple boxes klepped. That was all business as usual for us. In fact, that’s how we found you. My boys were trashing the evidence of the raid out in the dump, and they came across your pale ass free birding across the badlands.”

I wanted to tell him I wasn’t rich. I had so many student loans that I refused to even think about them. Out of sight, out of mind. That was my motto for basically every problem I’ve ever had. The thought of never being forced to pay off that mountain of debt was enough to almost make a smile grace my face despite being pseudo-tortured by the Wraith leader. But before I could get a word-in edgewise, he pushed me back fully onto the surgical bed until I was laying down and looking up at him.

“We had to call our ripper out here and Rufus hates to make house calls. He charges something fierce,” he said as his face hovered over mine. “You took on debt. In a couple days you’re gonna tell us who you are, and we’re gonna ransom you back to your folks.”

He gave me a patronizing pat on my cheek. It was probably meant to make me feel intimidated but honestly it was just plain weird. “And if no one is gonna pay, we’ll just start cutting. Organs can go for a lot if you know who to sell to and something tells me we’re gonna make a lot off you.” He grabbed an inhaler from the side table next to the bed, jammed it into my mouth, and pressed down on the top. Almost instantly the pain in my body receded and my eyelids grew heavy, and I relaxed back onto the bed.

I woke to the sound of gunfire. Rapid fire shots from an assault rifle – thank you Hollywood special effects teams for teaching me what that sounded like – warred with what I could only assume was a heavy machine gun. My body instinctively recoiled from the sound, trying to climb into itself to be better protected against any stray rounds that pierced the cloth tent. I tried climbing out of the surgical bed to crawl to safety, or at least put something between me and the fighting, but my body refused to obey my commands. I was only three or four feet above the ground, but that seemed like an insurmountable distance to drop.

So, I just stared out the front of the tent, desperate to know what was happening in the camp. All I could make out were a few shadows thrown up by the campfire still blazing away in the middle of the camp. All I could hear was the panicked challenges bellowed out by the Wraiths, aimed at some unseen adversary attacking from the dark.

The roar of the heavy machine gun fell silent, followed quickly by the rest of the Wraith weapons. I didn’t know if that meant they had won or lost. I couldn’t see anything from my unprotected spot up on the surgical bed and I couldn’t get my body to climb down and go look.

Eventually I did notice a few figures stalking through the camp. Their outlines grew more distinct the longer I watched, and I noticed they were much more uniform in appearance than the Wraiths I had seen earlier. They wore Kevlar vests, knee pads, military style boots, and helmets. A few of the figures let loose rounds from their rifles at the wounded bodies scattered throughout the camp and all I could do was watch, wide-eyed, as one of the figures stepped into the tent.

Unlike when the Wraith leader made his appearance earlier in the day, this guy didn’t deign to take off his mask. He co*cked his head and spoke into his comms system as he kept his eyes on me.

“Camp cleared. 12 hostiles down. One unknown on a surgical bed. It looks like the nomads haven’t started operating on him yet.”

My mouth grew dry as I kept an eye on the soldier’s finger as it hovered near the trigger of his rifle. I tried to quiet my ragged breathing. I didn’t want to do anything that might draw his attention to myself or make this guy think I was a threat to him or his team.

“Understood. Pickup in ten minutes.” As suddenly as he appeared the soldier was gone, having turned on his heel and left the tent. I could hear the rest of the soldiers scouring the camp, grabbing containers stamped with the Biotechnica logo. An AV landed in the distance and the soldiers filed out of the camp, loading the containers onto the AV.

They had to work for Biotechnica. That would explain their armor, weapons, access to an AV, and training capable of turning a Wraith camp into nothing but a pile of bodies. This was a military op and the Raffen never stood a chance. There were a couple missions in the game that pointed to Biotechnica being as underhanded and unethical as the rest of the megacorporations in the Cyberpunk world, but all that flew out the window of my thoughts with the reasoning that: they had doctors and medicine that could fix me. I needed to get out there and beg them to take me back to civilization.

I struggled to sit up on the surgical bed, desperate to make my way outside to the idling AV. Even if Biotechnica was an evil corporation that conducted illegal human experimentation on Nomads, they could still give me pain killers and at least get me closer to a town or a doctor or something. As it was, even though the Wraiths all seemed dead and I was free to go, I’d still be stuck out in the middle of the desert, naked and unarmed, and damaged from multiple wounds.

I finally managed to force my body to obey as I rolled onto my side. But that was the last coherent command my limbs listened to. My legs didn’t want to work properly, so when I managed to rock my way off the surgical bed, I collapsed and fell what felt like thirty or forty feet, face first, to the ground. My clumsiness managed to help me land on both my injured right leg and broken left arm at the same time. And that’s when I passed out again.

Here’s an interesting fact about Human anatomy. The pontine micturition center is the part of the brain stem that controls communication between the brain and the bladder. It’s what tells your bladder when it’s okay to pee and when you need to hold it until your back teeth are floating. It’s a relatively low-level functionary in the whole of the brain bureaucracy, akin to the accountant lady who oversees giving you your per diem on work trips; only ever really noticeable when she doesn’t show up to work.

When you’re knocked unconscious or have a TBI, communication between your bladder and the pontine micturition center gets disrupted. It’s like the accountant lady embezzled some of that per diem and is now sitting comfortably on a beach somewhere, earning interest and drinking pina coladas, while the bladder is panicking over how full it’s getting.

All of this is just a pretentious way of saying that when I came to after falling unconscious again, I found I had pissed myself. For once, my nakedness came in handy as I didn’t have to do much to clean myself up. I simply rolled away from the growing wet pile of ground and dragged myself out of the tent.

Once I stood up a wave of nausea hit me, and it grew worse as I left the tent and stepped out into the camp and was greeted by the sight of so many dead bodies. The Biotechnica squad had really put in the work, and I spent a couple minutes just walking around the camp, taking in the carnage. My left arm hung uselessly by my side, my ribs were feeling tender and abused, and my right leg felt both hot and stiff – not a great sign. But I ignored all of that to take in the scene of brutality laid out in front of me; red blood and white borg fluid stained the desert ground, bodies littered the camp, and spent shell casings were scattered around.

One of the Wraith vehicles was parked off to the side. It was a Colby something or other. I struggled my way over and tried to open the car door to drive away from the bloodbath in the desert but once I got there, I found the door locked. You remember when Tesla first started getting popular and seemingly every Uber driver had one and you’d try and open the door, but Tesla designed to design a needlessly complicated handle?

Yea. It was like that. No matter what I tried, the door to the Colby remained stubbornly shut. Finally, my body gave out and I slumped to the ground to try and catch my breath, my back resting against one of the SUV’s wheels. That’s when I remembered that everything in this world ran off those chip shard thingies. In the game you could pick up money shards or cyberware capacity shards off dead bodies. Car keys obviously ran off the same system.

I crawled my way to the nearest body and twisted the head so I could look at the side of its neck. Yep. There it was. A USB port looking thing was embedded in the body’s neck, along with a couple of those shards. I tried to wrestle them free of the port but quickly gave up on the idea. Either I was doing it wrong, or the chips were wedged in too tightly for me to pull them out by hand and I didn’t want to take the chance they’d snap before I could pry them out. Didn’t Lucy just pop them out of the port in the anime? I sat back to think over my options and grimaced when the only solution presented itself.

I never had the most accurate internal clock, but I’d wager that it had taken me a little over three hours to finish my work and get ready to finally leave the camp. I had decided to address my nakedness first. Over 24 hours in this world and I still hadn’t put on a single stitch of clothing which was…odd to say the least. Most of the pants I found I’d discounted for various reasons. Some were too big, some were too small, some were too stained with various fluids I refused to think about. Stripping corpses for their pants was a little much, which left a single pair of jean shorts that ended a few inches above my knees as my only option.

I wasn’t as lucky with my choices when it came to shirts. The first time I tried to slip a shirt over my head, my body screamed in pain as I jostled my arm. I quickly gave up on the idea that I could completely cover my torso and instead settled for an armored jacket I had found in one of the tents. I slid my right arm into it and then just draped the rest of the jacket over my left shoulder. It made me look entirely insane, but it would do until I could figure out something better. I also grabbed a pair of Wraith boots that were a size too big. I did take those off a body. There was something different between taking a corpses’ shoes and stripping and wearing a dead man’s pants.

After I was somewhat clothed, I got down to the true work of leaving the camp. It took me a few hours to wrestle some of the Wraith corpses into the bed of the Colby. Since I couldn’t pop the chips out of the ports in their necks without risking breaking them, I figured I’d just take the entire corpse with me. Getting the bodies up and in the back of the cab was both awkward and backbreaking work, made even more difficult because I only had one functioning arm and was still limping around because of my leg wound. But I finally managed to unlock the Colby door with the fourth corpse I stashed in the truck bed. I also grabbed a couple guns that were scattered around the camp and tossed them in the cab.

I climbed up into the front seat and blanked as soon as I saw all the knobs and switches and doodads on the console. I had no clue what any of them did, but fortunately the big red button on the steering console started up the Colby and I was away.

I crested a sand dune and gazed out at the desert. Night City was to my left, the big highway was directly ahead of me, and I could just about make out a cluster of buildings I figured was probably the Sunset Motel. If I was remembering the geography from the game correctly, Dakota’s garage would be to the right of the motel, set just back from the highway. I pointed the Colby in the general direction of what I hoped was her garage and pushed down on the gas.

Every bump in the ride, every sand dune crested, every jostle of the Colby sent pain shooting down my arm and up my leg. I couldn’t move my left arm anymore, just hugged it close to my body. My right hand was barely holding onto the steering wheel. My legs shook with what I hoped wasn’t some new injury. And my vision blurred around the edges until it narrowed down to a small cone so I could only make out what was directly in front of me. I hoped I was driving in the right direction because otherwise I was screwed. All I could do was keep my foot on the gas, one hand on the wheel, and fight to remain conscious.

Midway through the drive – how many hours was it? – I realized I hadn’t eaten or drank anything since I woke up in the world. That was a disconcerting thought and went a long way towards explaining why I was sweating so much and had cotton mouth. I didn’t think I blacked out during the drive, but I do remember being startled at finding myself driving once or twice. How did I get in this car? Where am I going? What the hell is happening here?

I focused enough momentarily to realize I was coming up on some sort of building. Or buildings. Blurs were scattered out front. They were blocky and…I think they were stationary. My mind told me I needed to get someone’s attention and that cars were usually equipped with horns for that very reason.

My eyes shifted around the dashboard, searching for the horn, but I couldn’t see anything except a tiny red button by my hand. I pressed it and the sound of gunfire snapped out of the car. Hmmm…is someone shooting at me? That’s not good.

Then the car jerked to a stop, and I heard honking. I must have run out of gas or something and now there was a traffic pile up behind me which was incredibly weird. I was in the desert. There shouldn’t be any traffic in the desert. Why was there traffic here? It wasn’t like we were on a road or anything. There were literal miles on either side of me for the drivers behind me to squeeze on past, but they were being dicks and blaring their car horns at me. I started to fume at them and decided to do something about it.

“Oh my God! Go around,” I screamed and tried to wave the cars behind me forward with my left arm. The sharp pain and lack of control in my hand snapped my attention back to the present. My face was smashed into the weird joystick handle steering wheel and I could feel blood trickling down from my scalp to get into my eyes. On the bright side, I realized that the car did in fact have a horn. It was exactly where every other car horn ever designed was, directly in the middle of the steering wheel, currently crushed by face.

I peeled my head off the steering wheel and the horn cut off and then I passed out for the…fourth time in 24 hours? Man, I really need to get better at this.

Chapter 3 Chapter Text

Anything becomes routine if you do it often enough. That’s why I wasn’t completely freaked out when I woke up in a strange new place. At least I wasn’t out in the middle of the desert splayed out on a grungy mattress or stretched out on a surgical bed in the middle of a Wraith encampment. Instead, I was laid out on a leather couch in what looked like the back office of a garage.

It had to be Dakota’s place. The fact that I managed to make it here in the state I was in was nothing short of miraculous. My guess proved correct when the old woman herself waltzed into the room shortly after I woke.

“You’re Dakota,” I exclaimed. It was my first time meeting a character from the game and I was excited. Sure, she wasn’t a major character and, outside a few gigs she offered, I never really interacted with her. But still. I barely managed to refrain from geeking out on her as she pulled over a rolling chair and took a seat next to the couch.

“I am. The question is, who are you?”

“I’m John…dammit,” I winced. I had been given a do-over and still managed to screw it up. I beat myself up a little over the fact that, despite having a second chance to change my name, I didn’t have a cool one ready to go. It was a somewhat understandable failing, what with having been kidnapped by Wraiths and getting horribly injured and everything. I just didn’t have the time to sit down and think about what name I wanted to be known by.

“John Dammit.” I could almost feel the disbelief radiating from her. “I didn’t ask your name, especially because I doubt that you’d give me a real one. I asked who you are.”

I was kind of stunned by the question. Did Dakota want to delve into a deep philosophical debate with me? I mean, who are any of us really? Are we our pasts? Are we products of the societies that birthed and nurtured us? Are we simply a collection of experiences and moments in time? Do we consider our own hopes and dreams in the answer to that question, even if we never act on them other than by simply voicing them aloud when in the safe company of our closest friends?

Taking my stunned silence as a refusal to speak, Dakota plowed on.

“You rode up to my garage driving a Wraith vehicle, opened fire on a couple cars my people were paid to fix up, and then crashed into a very expensive turret – which was lucky since you knocked it out of action before it could fire on you and cut you down. When we finally peeled you out of the Colby, you were wearing an armored Wraith jacket and boots a size too big.

“What’s more, my people pulled four bodies and a bunch of guns out of the Colby. One of those bodies belonged to a notorious Wraith leader who had recently moved into the area and who has been plaguing this portion of the badlands for the past few months. When my people scanned you, no NCPD file popped up, no Night City CIN was found. And when they followed the tracks from your vehicle back to where you came from, we found a camp filled with dead Raffen. So, I ask again. Who are you?”

My eyes went wide. When she laid everything out like that, I could understand her curiosity. I told her the story of how I ended up in her garage. Not the entire story of course. I left out the isekai parts and the peeing myself after falling unconscious episode. And I threw in a couple odd embellishments here and there. I told her how the Wraiths had hit me with their car and shot me in the leg, took me back to their camp and threatened to harvest my organs, how Biotechnica mercs stormed their camp and wiped them all out, and how I looted what I could from the camp before driving to her garage.

“That doesn’t explain the corpses,” she said as if catching me in a lie. She reached down for an oxygen mask at her side and huffed away at it. Since when did she need oxygen? I knew she looked older than the other fixers – with the notable exception of Padre – but…I put that thought out of my mind.

“The Colby wouldn’t unlock. I needed the key but whenever I tried pulling the shards out of the port thing of the Wraiths, I fumbled it and began worrying I’d break something. I figured that, as long as the chips were near the car, it would be unlocked and I’d be okay.”

She gave me a long, studied look before saying “you’re not from around here.”

I paused, trying to think up a suitable lie. Maybe she’d believe me if I said I ran away from a religious community that refused to allow their members to interact with technology. That could explain why I didn’t have an NCPD file or any of the cyberware that V starts the game with. I even flirted with the idea of saying that I was on rumspringa, but I didn’t know if the Amish were still a thing in the Cyberpunk world. What if she asked me questions only an Amish person would know the answers to? No. It was better to keep my lies simple and believable.

I opened my mouth to answer but she held up her hands to stop me. “No. I could see you struggling to come up with a lie I’d believe. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s your business.” She scrounged around in one of her pockets before drawing what looked like a metal credit card and held it up in front of me.

“This is a key fob. It unlocks a car. One of your Wraith corpses had his fob in his pocket and when you jammed his body in the back, it unlocked the Colby. Key fobs are too big to slot into chip slots.”

Oh. I was such an idiot. I had spent all that time and energy dragging those bodies into the Colby when I could have just rifled through their pockets. The embarrassment crept into my face and I quickly tried to pull the conversation away from both my ineptitude and shocking lack of everyday knowledge.

“The Colby I drove up in, I’d like to sell it. I also wanted to sell a bunch of the weapons I looted.”

Chapter 4 Chapter Text

“So, you don’t have a place to stay, do you?” It was less a question and more Fred making an informed statement. He looked me over and I could see a flash of something pass his eyes before he stood up and motioned for me to follow him.

“Let’s get you something to eat. You deserve it after the beating you just took.” He released a good-natured laugh which helped lessen some of the sting from his completely factual statement. He guided us down the street towards a food stall whose neon purple glow lights and pictures of noodles and rice bowls drew me in like a moth to a flame.

My stomach rumbled, reminded me I hadn’t eaten any solid food since coming to this world. The ripper Dakota had got to fix me up had probably poked an IV into my arm to make sure I got enough nutrients while I recovered. I guess they also could have just squeezed some past or something into my mouth while I was unconscious. I had found a vending machine earlier that sold something called Holobites Peach Pie that looked kind of like go-gurt. Dakota could have squeezed some of that in my mouth while I was recuperating. I shook the thought of buying a half liquid, half solid peach pie out of my mind and instead focused on the noodle stand in front of us. My mouth watered thinking about the first real food I’d get to eat in Night City.

Fred followed my gaze towards the noodle stand and let out another boisterous laugh. “Nah, too expensive choom. We ain’t celebrating. Just trying to get some energy back in you.”

He guided us further down the street towards a small cart half a block away. It looked like someone had welded a wire fence onto one of those old park grills. Placed atop the fence, with a lit fire underneath, was some kind of meat. I hoped.

“Charlie,” Fred shouted out in greeting. “How’s the night treating you?”

“Eh. It’s been slow. I was just about to pack up shop when I noticed you making your way over.” The older guy behind the grill pushed the meat around the fence with a piece of metal he’d bent into the shape of a pair of tongs. After he made sure the meat was nice and hot he fumbled under the cart and came up with two pieces of bread.

Hot dogs. I felt stupid for not realizing that he was cooking hot dogs at his food stand. But, in all fairness, I had just been beat over the head. Didn’t they call them scop dogs here in Night City? I didn’t know what the difference between the two was, but the smell was amazing.

I stared at the food, not caring that the scop dogs probably weren’t filled with real meat, but at the same time uncomfortable for being forced to lean on Fred’s charity. We had just met, and it was painfully obvious that he was homeless and unemployed. And here he was going to use whatever money he had managed to scrounge up to feed a guy he’d just met. The clothes he wore told the story of someone who didn’t have a fixed address or a disposable income, and the bag over his shoulder was ratty and one step up from broken. But then again, I couldn’t really judge his appearance as I was standing there in jean shorts and a grey shirt that had drops of my own blood staining the front.

Charlie handed two of the hot dogs to us and I pretended not to notice as Fred put up a finger and gave a small nod of his head towards me. Charlie wrapped a second scop dog with another piece of bread and handed it to me with a smile on his face. And then Fred and I were off, munching on our food as we walked through the streets. I couldn’t understand why we weren’t trying to find some out of the way place to stand and eat our food in peace, but I was content to let Fred guide us. He seemed to want to get us away from the area quickly. He looked back at me and, as if reading my mind, motioned me closer.

“Officer Kirk was giving you ‘the look.’ You probably didn’t notice, but I wanted to get you out of there before he started anything.”

I had no clue who Officer Kirk was or what was so wrong about ‘the look’ he was allegedly giving me.

“Some badges don’t like it when we ‘loiter,’” said Fred with a note of disgust in his voice. “Officer Kirk works the beat around here and he definitely saw Dennis beating on you, but he didn’t move in to stop it. Not that most badges care about what goes on between all of us. As long as we don’t mess with the straphangers, badges mostly leave us alone. But to Kirk, it would have been preferable if Dennis had gone too far and caved your head in. One less homeless out on the streets, and he gets to lock Dennis away for murder.”

My shock was written plainly on my face and Fred just nodded. “The badges are a gang just like all the others in the city.”

He chewed his scop dog as we walked half a block before he stopped and turned fully towards me. “Nah, they’re worse. If you only learn one thing from me Noah, learn this: never look a cop directly in the face. They take it as an insult. Makes them think we’re challenging them or something. I don’t know. They like to enforce their own version of the hierarchy out here on the streets. We’re the lowest of the low, the homeless and unwanted. They can’t pick on corpos or any of the larger gangs, so they decide to come after us. And us daring to lock eyes with them, well they get real angry about that.”

Fred kept up a running commentary of the neighborhood of Watson as he guided me along. I finished off my two scop dogs as he warned me about what I needed to be careful of. He told me to never get involved with the Tyger Claws because they never fought fair. If I got in a fight with one, they’d see it as me challenging their entire organization. And they had enough of a presence here in Watson that I’d be hunted down almost immediately.

He also warned me against going to the north of Watson because that was Maelstrom territory. “If you’re lucky, they’d just kill you,” said Fred as we crossed the street. He pointed to the fresh cuts on my face and the bruise forming around one of my eyes. “How lucky have you been so far in NC?”

We kept walking and he pointed out which businesses paid protection money to the Claws, which street dealers were trying to get around the TC monopoly on the prime drug corners, and which small-time gangs were trying to gather enough numbers and guns to make a move on unclaimed territory. I hung on every word. I had never really given much thought to the gangs of Night City. They were never enough of a challenge for my V to worry about. I always used them as XP farms in the early game and, once I hit the level cap, mostly just used them as targets for when I tested out any iconic weapons I got. But in the real world, gangs were much more menacing. I had been put on the ground by some chump as soon as I left the safety of the train station. How much worse were the Tyger Claws and Maelstrom? I mean, those were people who committed acts of violence as a way of life.

Before long Fred led me through a side street and the neon glow of a familiar sign brought me up short. We were right in front of Lizzie’s bar. What were we doing here? Was I about to meet Judy? Would Evelyn be stopping by for a drink?

Fred guided me to the right of the bar where a small, roofed alcove was filled with chairs and couches. A bunch of homeless were hanging around, drinking and chatting with each other. It was a party-like atmosphere. When we got closer, shouts of greeting rose from the crowd at Fred’s appearance and his grinning face sent greetings back at everyone. Pats on his back or nods of heads showed how well-respected Fred was. I didn’t warrant anything close to that kind of respect, instead getting flashed inquisitive glances as Fred led me through the throng of people over to a beaten-up leather couch.

“Heya boys. How was the take tonight?” Fred called out to the small group seated on the couch and nearby chairs. Cheers answered him and a guy who seemed half asleep perked up and grinned at Fred beneath long shaggy hair.

“Not bad. Couple fellas scored a broken BD wreath earlier. Deng took it up to Frank and now we’re fully stocked,” he said, jerking his thumb towards a broken mini fridge next to the couch.

“Excellent,” crowed Fred as he shrugged off his bag and sat down on a nearby chair. He motioned for me to take the middle seat of the couch and introduced me as he started rifling through his bag. “This here is Noah. Be nice, he’s new.”

A few people tossed greetings my way, but the guy seated next to me on the couch pushed my shoulder until I turned to face him. “Damn kid. What happened to you?”

“Dennis got to him.” Fred kept grabbing stuff out of his bag as he spoke. “I found him over by Ellison. Dennis hit him right as he got off the train. Noah, this is Mor. Mor, Noah.” Fred finally found what he was looking for, a bottle of some green liquid, and he held it out to Mor who nodded towards it appreciatively.

Mor grabbed his cup and blew out whatever dirt or dust had been in it before passing it over to Fred who had grabbed his own cup out of his bag.

“You know why they call him Mor don’t you?” Fred asked as he started pouring the liquor into the glasses. “Tell me how much you want.”

“More!”

Both men broke into fits of laughter at the joke. I found myself smiling too. Not because the dad joke was funny at all. It painfully wasn’t. But I laughed because this was the first sign of camaraderie I had witnessed since coming to Night City. Two friends were sharing a drink at the end of the day. And then I blanched as my mind turned towards the guy who had attacked me.

“Uh, is Dennis connected to anyone? Tyger Claws or something like that? I don’t…” I paused. I wanted to say I didn’t want to make trouble for Fred. He’d been extremely nice to me so far; the first person in Night City to treat me like an actual human being. If Dennis was going to be hunting me, I didn’t want Fred to get caught in the crossfire.

“Nah kid.” Fred sank back into his chair and sipped his drink. “He’s just some wannabe. He conned a couple kids into following him and they all like to act tough. Don’t worry. We’ll introduce you around and get you sorted. He only ever attacks single targets.”

Mor shook his head in disgust. “Damn gonk is always starting sh*t. Valentinos should have flatlined him back in the day and saved us all the trouble.”

“Why would the Valentinos have killed him?” I asked.

“He used to live over in Heywood. Pissed off the wrong person and got run out. Moved over to Santo Domingo and it wasn’t too long before he got run out of there too. Now he’s over here in Watson, bothering us.” Mor refilled his cut and sat back to get more comfortable on the couch. “I’m telling you. One of these days he’s gonna pick the wrong target and they’ll have to call the meat wagons to scrape him off the pavement.”

“If he sticks to people walking alone, won’t that be enough to keep him safe?” I didn’t see what could be done about Dennis. When I saw him, he was with a friend and had easily ambushed me. Any target he went after would be completely unprepared to deal with him until it was too late.

“There are people who don’t have backup because they don’t know any better,” Mor pointed at me with an apologetic smile. “And then there are people who walk around without backup because they don’t need it. He’s gonna piss off an edgerunner one of these days. Mark my words, he’s not long for this world.”

Over the next couple hours, I listened as the two men talked. They taught me about the dozen or so smaller gangs that controlled either an apartment building or a few stores in Watson. Those never came up in the game. They also warned me against going into Kabuki without a few people watching my back. Apparently, there were rumors of gangs and cops grabbing up youngsters and disappearing them. And most of all, they both warned me against ever venturing into Charter Hill.

“If a cop finds you in Charter Hill and beats you bloody and arrests you, count yourself lucky. Hell, play the numbers if that ever happens to you because you’d be the luckiest gonk alive.” Mor had drained two glasses of the green liquor Fred brought along and then put his cup away and switched to the Nicolas he’d stocked the mini fridge with. “Mostly it’s corpo security that takes care of Charter Hill. They find you out there, they’ll disappear you.”

But more than the education I was getting from Fred and Mor, it was the atmosphere of the hangout area that I was most enjoying. I had learned that the covered alcove near Lizzie’s had become an unofficial meeting spot for much of the area’s homeless population. They had couches and tables, a roof over their head, and the music leaking out of Lizzie’s provided a background ambiance that was enjoyable. Everyone who visited the alcove was on their best behavior for fear of losing access to the place if they started trouble.

Whenever a client of Lizzie’s tried to get handsy with one of the joytoys, the Mox would rough them up and toss them out of the club. Then, Mor would gather a few people and roll the guy while he was still unconscious. The money from rolling creeps, the broken BD Wreaths the Mox would toss out and which could be sold to vendors in the Kabuki Roundabout, and the fact that the Mox never messed with the homeless in the alcove, made the area one of the best spots in Watson. Mor and Fred explained that the alcove existed more out of benign neglect rather than any concerted effort by the Mox to be helpful.

“They used to be a lot better back in the day,” said Fred. “I remember when the Claws cut up that poor girl. The riots were bad, and the Mox grew out of them. They said they were fighting for all the joytoys, but ‘all’ morphed into ‘some’. And then ‘some’ turned into ‘a few’ which turned into ‘only the ones who are useful to us.’

“Eh, they’re just like everyone else in this city,” said Mor as he handed me a Nicola from the fridge. “You find your people and try and take care of them the best you can.”

Mor tipped his own can of Nicola in my direction, and I smiled. The tension in my shoulders that I hadn’t noticed I’d been carrying since the badlands slowly started to melt away.

Chapter 5 Chapter Text

The party outside Lizzie’s lasted well into the night. Fred and Mor kept up a running list of introductions of all the people who stopped by to chat with them, letting them all know I was a newbie who’d be hanging around. All the names and faces started blurring together after a few hours and, by the end of the night, I had no clue how many people I had met.

I started drifting off on the couch, the day’s adventure having caught up with me, and Fred jostled me awake. He said his goodbyes to Mor and the others and guided me out of the alcove and towards his small camp on a Watson side street where I’d be able to sleep. On our way there he explained that it was a hard rule that nobody was allowed to pass out in the alcove. It was the only place in Watson where people like us could meet up and hang out without having to look over our shoulders for the NCPD or Tyger Claws or Maelstrom. If we treated the alcove like any other homeless encampment in Watson, we ran the risk that the Mox would grow tired of us and kick us out. We’d lose the one safe haven that we had built in the neighborhood.

Fred’s place was in a small dead end of an alley that he had cleared out and stocked with a mattress, blankets, and various odds and ends. I scrounged up a couple blankets to make myself a bed and conked out. I was able to get a couple fitful hours of sleep, waking up every so often to the sounds of cars racing past. When morning came Fred shook me awake, handed me a drink he grabbed from a vending machine, and had us set out into the city. As we walked, he started in on what he called ‘the Night City finishing school.’ It was mostly advice he earned through years of living on the streets: don’t challenge gang members, always know whose territory you’re walking through, don’t pick fights with someone wearing a suit because they probably have corpo security at their beck and call.

“The first rule of surviving in Night City is: never work alone,” Fred explained as we strolled up to a covered walkway that connected two streets. “You saw what that got you with Dennis. That’s why I’m partnering you with someone today. You two will work together while I deal with the match.”

“Match?” What match?” I asked.

“Stickball,” he said with a fierce grin. “I’m running a match today. You joined at a good time Noah. You can be one of the lookouts.”

We walked through the covered walkway which was packed with people despite the early hour. A sign on the street we passed said we were on Farrier Street, but I didn’t recognize the area. One of the side effects of always navigating by minimap in the game was that I didn’t really pay much attention to the places I was traveling to. Shops were sunk into buildings on either side of the walkway, creating a small shopping center where people milled about. In the middle of the walkway were several concrete benches, but nobody was seated there. Instead, a growing crowd packed into the stores along the walkway, setting up small barricades and claiming spots near the shop windows.

Fred muscled his way through the crowd and pulled me into a collection of people I recognized from last night’s party. As soon as we appeared, the group broke out into excited chatter and threw greetings at Fred. He pulled a couple people in for hugs and back pats, and then motioned for one guy to step out of the crowd.

“Noah, this is Tomas. Tomas, Noah. You two will be working together today. I gotta see about setting up,” he said as he grabbed a can of spray paint from someone in the crowd.

Tomas was one of the younger guys I had noticed hanging around the alcove last night. I say younger, but he was probably in his mid-twenties. Older than me but younger than both Fred and Mor. He kept up a conversation with a few people from the crowd as I watched Fred set up for the game of ‘stickball’ that I still had no clue about.

“Hey Tomas, what is all this?” I asked, drawing his attention away from the group he was chatting with.

“Stickball,” he said, not answering my curiosity. I shrugged at him for him to complete his explanation and all he said was “you don’t know stickball?”

“I’m not local. Never heard about it before.”

“Oh choom, you’re missing out.” He put a hand on my shoulder and guided me away from the group he’d been speaking with and pointed at where Fred was setting up the field.

“You got three circles on the field, and a ball goes in each of the circles. Each team has a goal, and the third circle is for the halfway mark,” he said pointing out Fred as he painted large circles in the walkway. “It’s a three-on-three match. Anything goes, except killing of course. The goal is to get all three balls into your own circle and stop the other team from doing the same.”

“No killing?” I asked. I mean, that was a normal rule in most sports. Unless there was a kumite style underground fighting ring somewhere in Night City. The thought of going to watch a kumite excited me. The only real sport in the video games was boxing. There was also that one mission in Dogtown where V infiltrates a sports complex packed with children who are all sporting experimental cyberware. I think there were soccer and basketball players in that mission, but you never got to watch a game.

“Killing is against the whole point,” said Tomas. “It’s mostly small-time gangs that play. It lets them solve all their problems without starting wars. Some gangs only have ten or twenty people, and it’s stupid to have half your manpower flatlined trying to grab a single block of territory.”

Tomas kept explaining the rules and intricacies of stickball. Apparently, Fred was well regarded as a ref for stickball games. Whenever two gangs wanted to play, they’d call him up and he’d set up a match and officiate the whole thing. He would tap up a couple people from the alcove to act as huscle and then call in a large crowd to watch. I was only half listening to Tomas when one of the gangs finally arrived at the walkway.

“Tomas, who the hell is that?!”

“Hm? Who? The rimbo?” Tomas nodded to a girl who was tatted up and had some of those high-heel blade feet cyberlegs.

“No, that guy,” I said as I pointed to the largest man I’d ever seen. He was a behemoth; at least six and a half feet tall and all of it was muscle. He wore a black tank top, showing chrome arms that looked like they could rip apart a car. His legs were almost as big as my waist. Looking at him, I expected to see one of those alligator math symbols to be hovering over his head. Greater than. This man was greater than everyone around him. Damn, that would be a cool street name.

“I don’t know,” shrugged Tomas. “I wasn’t paying attention when Fred told us who would be playing today. No clue what gang he’s with.”

I looked at him with incredulity. How could he not know who one of the most intimidating people I’d ever seen was?

“What? I hang out in Kabuki. That’s Tyger Claw territory. No small gangs poke their heads up around there. You’d be a gonk to mess with the Claws on their home turf, so I never cared about small-time gangoons.”

“Dude isn’t small-time, he’s intimidating,” I shook my head and mumbled. “Like he should be…I don’t know, working in a punching factory or something.”

Tomas laughed and was about to ask me what I meant by that, but Fred came over to chat with us before we could continue our conversation. We weren’t going to be allowed to watch the game, something that Tomas was bummed about. Instead, we were told to take up a lookout position a few blocks from the walkway and keep an eye out for any gang or NCPD presence that might try and break up the game.

Tomas explained to me that it was unlikely we’d need to do anything as gangs knew not to mess with stickball games. The big ones viewed it as below them and the smaller ones never knew when they might need Fred to act as a neutral third-party to ref their own games. Even the NCPD didn’t try and shut down stickball games. Their view was that, as long as the meat wagons didn’t need to be called, anything the gangs did was their own business.

Tomas and I perched at the corner of a street a few blocks away and Tomas kept up a running commentary of everything he enjoyed about the city. Or something like that. I wasn’t really paying much attention to what he was talking about. All my focus was back in the walkway with Greater Than. He was one of the scariest people I’d ever seen in my life, but nobody around seemed to have been phased by him. Neither Tomas nor Fred gave him a second glance, which told me he was on the bottom rung of gangsters in the city. It drove home how truly outclassed I was in this world. I couldn’t even fend off Dennis. Greater Than was just some low-rent hood, but he still far outclassed anything I brought to the table.

About an hour later Fred found his way over to the street Tomas and I were guarding and handed us both twenty eddies. “Your cut.”

“Not bad for a few hours of work,” said Tomas as he said his goodbyes and walked away.

“We still got a bunch of daylight left. How about I show you around?” Fred asked as he started walking down the street. I raced to catch up and fell into step next to him. We walked towards the western shore of Night City while Fred once again threw out a litany of life lessons he’d learned while being homeless.

We got to the shore and Fred had us drop down to the beach below. The area was littered with trash bags and loose garbage and as I took it in, I understood why Fred said it was the best place to go to find hidden treasures that could be converted into eddies. We split up, not going more than thirty feet away from each other, and started combing through the trash bags that cluttered the area to find something that was worth selling.

Over the first half of our scavenger hunt I was squeamish about digging through the trash bags. I’d carefully untie the tops of the bag and poke around a bit, looking for anything that might earn me a couple eddies from vendors that Fred said he’d introduce me to. This wasn’t how I envisioned my life in Night City going. I figured I’d stroll into the city, pick up some cyberware, grab a katana or some mantis blades, and carve a path through the gangs and corporations to get my way into the Afterlife and eternal glory. Instead, I found myself picking through trash, trying to find anything of value that might net me enough eddies to buy some food and get me through another day.

We combed through the trash-ridden beach for a couple hours, slowly picking our way through the garbage people had tossed away. I grabbed a couple things that Fred suggested might be worth something; a broken-down coffee maker, a few books, and a trashed tablet whose screen was cracked to oblivion. But the prize that drew Fred’s eyes was a sex toy I found in a soggy box under a pile of trash bags.

Despite the grime that clung to me after hours of scouring the beach, I still didn’t want to touch the thing until Fred let out an appreciative noise at the sight of my discovery. He peered over at me from his own island of trash and saw the toy I had spotted. It was the kind of sex toy that could connect to a BD wreath and mimic whatever action was happening in the BD. Fred claimed it was a lucky find, patted me on the back, and said that the toy was ‘as good as gold.’ He even suggested that we should finish up for the day and that he’d walk with me to sell the thing up at the Kabuki Roundabout.

Chapter 6 Chapter Text

“Quick. Get in. You’ve only got ten minutes.”

Deng ushered me into the tiny hotel room he’d rented and pushed me towards the bathroom. I let my eyes wander around the room as I crossed it and felt my nose wrinkle. The rest of the group that Deng assembled had already cammed themselves in the tiny room, making the place feel cramped and suffocating.

The place that Deng chose was not somewhere I would have stepped foot in in my past life; it wreaked of the previous occupants, the carpet was sticky and seemed to want to get up and follow me with every footstep, and a kaleidoscope of stains covered everything. I doubted that the place employed a cleaning staff. They probably just paid someone to come in once a week to spray the place down with disinfectants.

I jumped into the shower and washed as fast as I could. I had neither the time, nor the soap or stainless-steel brush pads to completely scrape off all the dirt I had accumulated over the past couple days, but I did enough to make myself smell somewhat clean and look passably presentable. Once I finished washing, I grabbed the outfit that Deng had laid out for me on the bathroom sink.

The neon colors looked ridiculous to my eyes and the clothes were obviously meant for someone much heavier than me – the pants kept sliding down my waist and Deng hadn’t thought to bring a belt with him. But the clothes were clean and in a style that teenagers around Watson preferred. I wouldn’t stand out too much walking around, despite all the misgivings I had over how I looked.

It had only taken me four minutes from when I entered the room until I finished showering and changing. Once I was presentable, I stepped out of the bathroom. Deng gave me a quick once over and a nod. That was the sign for everyone to get ready. He tossed me a bag that I slung over my shoulder and the entire team filed out of the hotel.

The past two weeks had been an educational experience for me. During the day, Fred and I wandered out to the shoreline with a few other homeless from around Watson. We’d scrounge through the bags of trash that had been dumped there, searching for anything of value we could turn into eddies. Our goods either went to Frank, who was always willing to buy quality scrap from us that he’d then fix up and sell in his stall, or to the various Kabuki Roundabout vendors who went crazy over any piece of tech, no matter how broken or outdated it was. Whenever we found a TV, computer, BD wreath, projector, or anything else with even a modicum of electronics in it, we’d make our way to the Roundabout and sell everything.

Fred and I also picked up the odd jobs every now and then. We mostly did manual labor for local small business owners. We’d sweep out buildings, move inventory from storage spaces to store fronts, and clear trash away from shop entrances.

Fred and Mor had become a constant presence in my life, schooling me on the finer points of living in Watson. They’d explain which gangs controlled different drug corners, which buildings had Scav presences – make sure to stay away from them – which small time gangoons were building up their numbers to try and make a push for territory. I treated their lessons like gospel, slowly acclimating to life in the city. I was no longer the naïve kid who had been mugged within my first ten minutes of getting off the train. Now I was someone who could be relied upon when older members of the alcove came up with gigs. That was how I came to work with Deng.

He terrified me the first time we met. Mor had introduced us one night at the alcove. Something about the way he looked at me made me feel like prey who should run and hide in the face of a new and unknown threat. If Tomas was constantly hanging around Deng, it stood to reason why he never saw Greater Than as any kind of serious threat. Deng was…different.

For one, he was ancient. Around 70 years old or older. The age lines carved deep in his face spoke of a life lived hard. His shrunken body was hidden behind numerous layers of clothing. His arms were thin and wiry, and his cheeks were gaunt. But despite all that, he still carried a certain aura about himself. It took me a bit to figure out what I was feeling, but I eventually realized that Deng carried himself like someone who was supremely confident in their ability to kill anyone and everyone around. Of all the dangerous people I had come across since popping into this world – the Wraiths, the Biotechnica commandos, the NCPD, Dennis, Greater Than – only Deng was someone I was subconsciously terrified of.

But despite all that, he was one of my favorite people I had met in my short time in the city. When Mor introduced us, he let slip that Deng had worked with Militech before the 4^th Corporate War. He had served somewhere in South America; a young kid who had signed up solely for the paycheck and was instantly thrown to the wolves. After hearing his story, I peppered him with questions about what life was like back then, the first of which was: did he ever meet Morgan Blackhand?

As soon as the question was out of my mouth, all Deng could do was laugh for ten minutes straight. I tried defending myself by saying that Morgan Blackhand had got his start with Militech and that it wasn’t completely out of left field that they might know each other. I mean, how many people actually worked for one of the largest corporations in the world?

The rest of the night, I bugged him for information about what Night City was like back in the 20s. Was he in the city when the bomb went off? Did he ever go to a Samurai concert? Did he ever fight the Bozo’s gang? Did he ever pull a gig with any famous mercs like Andrew Weyland or Rogue?

Deng seemed bemused by my questions, which was entirely understandable. Here was a kid who was shockingly ignorant about the modern world and all its technologies, yet somehow knew about Alt Cunningham, Johnny Silverhand, and Morgan Blackhand. I knew more about the 4^th Corporate War than the present day, even though the war was over long before I was born. I knew about Johnny and Rogue attacking Arasaka Tower, Alt’s creation of Soulkiller, and Adam Smasher turning into one of the most dangerous borgs in existence. I knew all those things, and yet had no idea how to use an Agent or what chips were. It tickled him that I was asking all those questions and begging for stories about the old days, especially since most of the people he talked with never wanted to speak about ancient history or Night City legends.

Perhaps his amusem*nt was one of the reasons Deng had tapped me up for his gig.

He had met a media a couple years back; some enterprising N54 reporter had the bright idea to cultivate contacts among Watson’s homeless population. It was brilliant, right? The homeless were always out on the streets, knew everyone, could tell you what each gang was doing, and knew all the small gritty details of the streets that most people never thought about. Deng’s partnership with the media worked out well for both of them. The media got tips on emerging stories – who was starting sh*t in Watson, which gangs were gearing up for war – and Deng was given information he could use. The media had contacts in the NCPD that could tell Deng when someone died in Watson who either didn’t have a next of kin or whose family lived in a far-flung city. Once Deng found out about these deaths, he’d round up a few people and raid the dead guy’s apartment. It was a relatively easy gig and had made Deng one of Night City’s wealthier homeless.

Our current target’s apartment was in Megabuilding 10. He was a young guy who was killed in a hit and run a few hours earlier. As we left the skeevy hotel room, we split into three groups of two and made our way towards the Megabuilding. As we got closer, I started buzzing with excitement. Not only was this gig a possible huge payday, but we were hitting a building I had been inside of in the game. It was V’s building. I knew V hadn’t moved in yet. A screamsheet I got hold of a week or so ago told me it was still 2076. That meant V was either still with Arasaka, the Bakkers, or in Atlanta. Still…I was excited.

Deng and I walked to the elevators and pressed the button for the 27^th floor. When the doors slid open, we calmly headed down the hall to the target’s apartment. Deng pulled out a small spray can and pushed a tiny red straw in the nozzle. I glanced at the can, a look of puzzlement clear on my face, and Deng held it up to me with a smile. Compressed air? I knew it from my past life working with computers, but what was Deng going to do with it?

We came up to the door of the apartment and Deng flipped the can upside down and squeezed the small straw in between the door and frame and held down the nozzle. I could hear the air pouring through the straw and, seconds later, the door popped open and Deng ushered me inside. What the hell just happened?

Deng shut the door but made sure it didn’t latch and then turned to me and saw my confusion.

“Couple years back there was a fire in a megabuilding. Bunch of people were locked in their apartments and burned to death. When nobody wanted to rent apartments in megabuildings anymore, the owners started putting these sensors over the door and telling everyone it was safe now,” he said as he pointed to the top of the door frame. I noticed a small black box with a red blinking light there.

“The sensors open the doors whenever they sense a vast change in the surrounding temperature. Compressed air can, turned upside down, releases cold air. I flood the sensor and, voila!”

The rest of the team eventually filed into the apartment behind us and started walking through the place, tossing things in the bags they had slung over their shoulders. I only knew a few of them from seeing them around Lizzie’s. None of us hung out in the same groups. They each had their own parts of Watson they worked, their own camps where they felt safe, and their own Freds and Mors who would watch their backs. Our only connection was Deng.

The team split and I watched as one guy went to the fridge to empty it into his sack while another handled the extensive BD collection the guy had stacked on a shelf. Somone stripped the linen from the bed while another guy padded through the apartment, slipping various bric-a-brac into his bag. I grabbed what was in the wardrobe and stuffed it in my bag while Deng worked on breaking down the computer. Five minutes later we had picked the place clean. The team split up once more into different groups and Deng and I rode the main elevator to the lobby.

We hit the ground floor and strolled outside, my bag bulging with all the clothes I had grabbed. I kept telling myself to calm down and not jump around in excitement as Deng led me away from the building and down a couple side streets towards our agreed upon meeting spot. The teams eventually all made their way free of the building and we marched towards the Roundabout. And just like that, I was hundreds of eddies richer.

We sold almost everything from the apartment to vendors around the Roundabout. The bed sheets and pillows were doled out to the people on the team. They were precious commodities among the homeless because everyone could always use something extra to pad out their camps. Deng grabbed my bag with all the clothes and said he knew a safe spot we could stash them. They’d be used as disguises for the next job. Deng claimed that if we went into a megabuilding while clean, dressed in somewhat fashionable clothes, and looking like we belonged, nobody would bat an eye at us. I had doubted him at the time, but was more than happy to have been proven wrong.

We sold off the BD collection, computer, and all the extra stuff we grabbed from the apartment, and then Deng passed out our cuts. It was more money than I had ever made scrounging through the trash. I had around 400 eddies in my pocket now. Sure, it wasn’t a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. By the end of the game, V was a multimillionaire with a garage filled with cars and a stash of expensive weapons. But, those 400 eddies were worth so much more than any other money I’d ever made in my entire life. It was tangible proof that I could survive in Night City and that Fred and Mor hadn’t wasted their time teaching me.

I went a little insane with my newfound wealth. I bought a shirt that wasn’t covered in my own blood from when Dennis ambushed me, some bottles of alcohol that I passed out at the alcove as thanks for looking out for me, and a burner phone from a vendor in the Roundabout because I was tired of Fred joking that I was the only teenager not glued to his Agent. I also took Fred and Mor to that noodle stand I had seen over near Ellison Plaza on my first day in Night City. Fred’s words that the place was too expensive, and that we weren’t celebrating anything the day we met had stuck in my head.

Now that I had something to celebrate, I wanted to thank the two people who had most helped me. We devoured three bowls of noodles apiece and then stopped by Charlie’s scop dog stand afterwards.

The night was calm and an enjoyable breeze blew through the streets, reminding me of the lazy summer days I used to enjoy in my past life. I relaxed and reveled in a job done well as we picked our way through Watson towards Lizzie’s. Fred and Mor joked that I was a big shot now and that I’d be taking Night City by storm. I smiled at the good-natured ribbing and walked in amiable silence next to them.

Gunshots pierced the air, ruining the celebratory mood. My thoughts were instantly transported back to the Wraith camp, to being stretched out on a surgical bed, helpless and exposed. I fell to the ground behind a concrete barrier, poking my head up to try and figure out who was shooting. Fred and Mor crouched down next to me, searching for where the gunshots were coming from so they could run the other way.

A few people who had been walking along the streets earlier were now sprinting away from the gunshots or cowering in store fronts, trying to find safety. Fred grabbed me by the shoulder and pointed in the direction of the fleeing mob as if to say ‘what the hell are you doing? We need to leave.’ But an idea had wormed its way into my head and I crouch-walked towards the firefight. Mor reached out to pull me back, but I shook myself free and moved.

Two NCPD squad cars had blocked the road and the officers were hunkered down behind them. I could just make out Tyger Claws ahead, firing rounds at the NCPD, hoping to break the deadlock and flee before NCPD reinforcements could get there. The badges had either tried to arrest a Tyger Claw or the TC had taken offense that cops had wandered into their territory. I neither knew nor cared as I slowly crept closer to the firefight. One Claw was sprawled out on the ground, the puddle of blood framing his body letting me know he was dead. Everyone else hid behind cover, occasionally raising up a gun and popping off a few rounds towards their opponents.

I crept to the side of the firefight, trying to ensure a clear view of both the NCPD and the Claws. I hugged an overturned scop dog cart and watched the fight, my eyes glowing wide when I saw one of the Claws get up and bolt in my direction. She must have been trying to get a flanking spot on the cops. She held out her submachine gun, shooting at the cop cars as she ran. It was one of those stupid looking guns with the big curvy magazines and the pointy barrel. I didn’t know its name because I always thought it looked ridiculous and never used it in the game.

She charged to the side, racing for the cover I was hiding behind. Her gun clicked on an empty magazine and she reached behind her back to unholster a pistol. She fired off a couple more rounds at the cops as she ran. That was around the time the cops started taking her threat a little more seriously. As one, the cops all unloaded on her and she crumpled to the ground steps away from where I hid.

The next moment found me running, not away from the gunfight but towards the now dead Tyger Claw. I slid next to her side and heard the gunshots fall silent. It was as if everyone had stopped and sat confused, wondering what the hell some random teenager was doing jumping into the middle of a gunfight. Was I trying to check the body? Was I going to drag her away and administer first aid? Was I just a complete idiot who willingly threw himself in the middle of a gunfight? I fumbled for her pistol, grabbing it off the ground and turned away and sprinted. I might have been imagining things but I felt both the NCPD and Tyger Claws target me as I ran, not knowing if I was friend or foe and taking no chances.

I kept running until I was a few streets away from the firefight. My lungs heaved and my legs were shaking. Fred and Mor caught up with me and both took turns slapping me upside my head while screaming invectives at me. They yelled that I was an idiot and ‘they had put too much time and effort into me so that I could run off and do something as stupid as that.’

But I wasn’t listening. I was looking down at the Unity I held in my hands. I wasn’t unarmed anymore. I wasn’t defenseless and at the whims of the forces of Night City. I was ready to get to work.

Chapter 7 Chapter Text

“Such a stupid thing to do.”

“Pulls one job and thinks he’s untouchable.”

“Could have gotten himself shot and I’d be damned if I was gonna wade through a gunfight to drag his gonk ass out of there.”

Fred and Mor kept up a litany of insults aimed my way during our entire walk back towards Lizzie’s and it showed no signs of stopping as we took up our well-worn spots on the couch.

“He’s got a gun now but he’s also a gonk who doesn’t understand how stupid it was to run into a firefight without armor or weapons.”

“Could have bought a gun with a few extra days of scrounging. And what the hell is he gonna do with it anyway?”

“Probably rob a store. That sounds like something a gonk would do.”

I didn’t bother arguing with them. I knew it had been stupid to rush into the middle of a gunfight to loot a body, but it had been worth the risk. At least, it was in my mind. One of the first things I had done in the days after meeting Fred and Mor was check the price of guns in Night City. I didn’t want to get flat footed again. I needed some way to protect myself. I had to give up on the idea of walking around armed once I learned that even the cheapest gun was way out of my price range.

The DR-5 Nova, that stupid looking revolver that has the cylinder under the gun barrel, was around 300 eddies. A Unity, like the one I was cradling in my hands, ran close to 500. Hell, even the Slaught-o-Matic guns, cheap plastic one-use pistols dispensed from vending machines, cost 50 eddies. That was enough money to pay for food for a couple days. It was enough to act as an emergency stash of cash. It was enough to get medicine to treat infections.

I kept one ear on Fred and Mor’s insults while I cradled the Unity in my arms, trying to get a better feel for the gun so I didn’t look like a complete moron. I hated how characters in movies would get their hands on a gun for the first time and say something idiotic like ‘it’s heavier than I expected.’ I knew enough from video games and Hollywood to have a basic understanding of how to handle a gun. There was a tiny notch like thing on the barrel that I was guessing was the safety. A button on the side of the grip released the magazine. I counted out seven bullets in the magazine, the rest having been shot off by the Tyger Claw in the fight.

A cheer rose from the people hanging around the alcove and I raised my head to watch a guy being unceremoniously dragged out of the club and tossed into the dumpsters by Rita, the Mox bouncer I still hadn’t worked up the courage to speak to. I noticed Deng standing by one of the alcove walls, and he pointed to a few people hanging around to go and roll the guy. After he made sure they were dealing with the drunken dude he pushed himself off the wall and came over to Fred, Mor and myself, tossing a quick look at the Unity in my hand.

“First gun?”

“Yea,” I said. And because Deng still intimidated the hell out of me, and I didn’t know what else to say and wanted to fill the silence he left sitting there, I added “it’s heavier than I expected.” Dammit. I’m such an idiot.

He chuckled good-naturedly. Probably heard that line from a bunch of idiots. “First thing you need to know is it’s not a toy. Always treat it like it’s loaded. I can show you a couple things if you want. We can go up to the range and shoot off a few rounds just to make sure you don’t do anything stupid like accidentally blow off your own foot.”

Fred and Mor sent glares my way before shouting something along the lines of “he already did something stupid by running out to get the thing in the first place.”

But I noticed that the heat of their insults had started to dissipate. As much as they might yell at me for running out in the middle of a firefight to look a gun, they both knew that having one meant I was much safer on the streets of Night City. The homeless were always targets for gangs and badges. Having a gun wouldn’t instantly make me less of a target or suddenly propel me into the ranks of Night City legend. But it might make people think twice before targeting me, and it could diffuse tense situations and stop me from getting jumped.

The guy kicked out of Lizzie’s was dragged off to the side, his head lolling around as he fought to stay conscious. Shouts of elation rose from the guys who rolled him, and it sounded like our little club would soon be restocked with alcohol, courtesy of a creep who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Tomas came over to us and was showing off some of the BDs he managed to grab from the guy. They’d easily sell for a bunch of eddies up at the Roundabout. Mor narrowed his eyes at the BDs and reached out to grab a few of them.

“These aren’t Mox markings. Who the hell goes to a BD bar with BDs already in their pockets?” Mor rifled through the BDs, giving each a cursory glance, before he came across one that was out of its plastic packaging and sporting a handwritten title. He handed it back to Tomas and told him “Give that to Rita and tell her it was on the guy she threw out.”

I raised an eyebrow in his direction.

“Pretty sure that BD is spiked. Choom was probably looking for a girl, then he’d tell her he had some preem sh*t he got from the Mox, and he’d slip her the BD in one of those booths they got in there. If she watches it, it’d daze her and put her out of action for a while.”

Deng narrowed his eyes and nudged Mor to ask, “want me to stay around for a bit?”

“Nah. Rita’ll handle it. Hell, they might even slip us a bottle of something for being such good and upstanding citizens.”

Deng nodded and stood up from the couch, motioning me up. “Then I’m taking the kid up to the range. Maybe I’ll be able to knock some sense into him before we get up there.”

We ended up at the bottom floor of the Kabuki Roundabout at a Gun-o-rama franchise store called Straight Shooters. When we entered, I noticed the shop owner standing behind the bullet proof glass look up and greet Deng with a wide smile.

“Hey Alejandro. This is Noah. Just got his first gun and I’m teaching him how to shoot.”

“Ah, a first timer. Don’t get many of those.” He looked at the Unity I had stuffed into the waistband of my pants and pulled a box from behind the counter and pushed it through the slot in front of him. “A gift. Learn well and when you’re ready to upgrade your iron remember me and I’ll help you out. I’ve got everything.”

I picked up the box, which was just some cheap 9mm ammo, and followed Deng down into the basem*nt of the shop. I heard the gun range before I saw it. The pop pop pop of gunshots was noticeable even though we were separated from the range by several walls. There were only a few shooters this late at night. I guess it was understandable. It was late and close to the weekend. Most people probably didn’t practice their shooting as a hobby and would instead be out partying.

Three Tyger Claws were clumped together, firing off rounds from their pistols. As I watched them, I was filled with the irrational fear that they’d all know how I got my gun. I resisted the urge to pull out the Unity from my waist band and scour it for any engravings or a name etched on the side or any other discernible markings. I’d already looked it over well enough to know there was nothing that could differentiate it from any other Unity, but I was still nervous.

Deng and I set up on the far left of the range and he walked me through how to hold and fire my new weapon. He gave a few safety rules and dolled out a couple tips that worked best for him when he was shooting. I loaded up the magazine, slotted it in, and took aim. Just like Hollywood showed me. Gun out, aim at the target, squeeze the trigger.

The gun barked in my hands as I sent a round down range. I could feel the recoil travel through my arms, and I was wholly unprepared for it. I almost dropped the pistol in shock but had enough sense to keep ahold of it as I tried to understand what just happened.

What the hell was that? The fact that I was holding a deadly weapon that could easily kill me if I misused it was quickly driven home with my first shot. Fear tore its way up in my spine and my heart jumped into my throat as I thought of how easily I could have accidentally shot myself or someone I cared about. An image of me cradling the gun while I was sitting in the alcove by Lizzie’s flashed through my mind. What kind of moron would do something like that? Who treats a deadly weapon with such careless disregard? I calmed my breathing and sent a couple more rounds down range, each shot surprising and desensitizing me little by little. I could sense Deng watching as I got used to firing the gun.

Soon enough the magazine was spent, and I clicked the button on the side to release it and then set down the Unity. Deng helped me reload and gave me a few more tips. He wanted me to shoot the rest of the free ammo that Alejandro had gifted me. He said it would give me a better feel for the gun and make me less skittish. So I reloaded and got to work.

After finishing off the box, Deng surprised me by pulling out his own gun which I noticed he carried in a concealed holster in the small of his back. It was one of those fancy Omaha pistols I remembered from the game. He squeezed off a few rounds before giving me a go, saying I needed experience with different types of firearms.

By the time we worked through the ammunition and left the range I was no longer caught flat footed when I shot my Unity. It was still an awesome power in my hand, and I meant that in the way the word was originally meant to be used. Every time I fired it, I became more and more aware of just how dangerous a gun was; that it could easily snuff out a life.

Deng led me back upstairs and we were once again in front of Alejandro. I painfully spent 20 eddies from my dwindling funds to buy another box of ammunition and a spare magazine. Both went into my pockets while the gun sat snug in my waist band. I didn’t have enough money to splurge on a holster and Deng berated me about buying one. He said it was unsafe and foolish to keep a gun tucked in my waist band. There was a chance that it would fall out when I needed it the most. While I understood his concerns, I just couldn’t justify the purchase.

On our way back to Lizzie’s we took a wide circuitous route and Deng rattled off a few more rules about gun safety. Don’t point it at anything you don’t want to kill. It’s a tool, not a toy. Don’t go waving it around. Having a gun doesn’t make you invincible, don’t act like it does. I listened, not only because Deng was intimidating as hell, but also because he was one of the few people I could trust to educate me fully on guns and, after the range, I had developed a new respect for the Unity at my waist.

We cut through an alley on our way to Lizzie’s and I soon saw the neon blue sign of the bar and could hear boisterous calls coming from the alcove despite the fact we were still an entire block away. They must have already sent someone to the Roundabout to fence the BDs and got a good price for them. Walking through the alley I looked around and noticed it opened to a half-court with a bunch of people shooting hoops. A few people playing on the court were unknown to me as I hadn’t seen them around the neighborhood before.

Fred and Mor had drilled it into me to always pay attention to everyone on the streets. You never knew when a new gang would pop up and you’d have to learn the rules on how to deal with them. Did the new gang target the homeless? Was there any potential of a gang war hitting your block? It was always better to know everything about the people around you then be caught flat footed when the shooting started.

The court was occupied by a new crew who stood around, watching the game. As Deng and I kept heading towards Lizzie’s I took note of the tell-tale signs of drug deals going on. Two dealers were around the outside of the court, talking with customers, doling out their products. A third was posted up at the top of the stairs behind the court, his eyes sweeping over the entire area.

I knew their lookout didn’t pose much of a threat to us. Everyone in the neighborhood knew and respected Deng. Not even freelance drug dealers were stupid enough to try and mess with a guy who carried himself the way Deng did. And I was kind of like those tiny birds that pick meat out of the teeth of crocodiles. I was safe by association. As much as it hurt to admit that to myself.

We weren’t accosted by the new crew as we picked our way past, but I kept my eyes open anyway and a plan began forming in my mind. I needed money. If I made enough cash, I could start taking better care of Fred and Mor. I could have bought a holster for my new Unity. I could have done so many things.

And who always carries eddies on them? What business is seemingly only done with paper money rather than the cred transfers that most businesses prefer? I made a special note of the dealers as Deng and I kept walking. I’d be back there soon.

By the time we got back to Lizzie’s Fred and Mor had both finally calmed down and no longer showed any interest in berating me, the Mox had sent out a bottle of something blue that was being passed around, I had gotten used to shooting a gun and was no longer such an easy target, and I had a plan on how to make enough money to change my life.

Things were finally starting to look up.

Chapter 8 Chapter Text

“Get tighter on him Joe. You gotta close the lanes down. They’re killing us in the paint choom.”

I leaned my back against the wall and popped another chip in my mouth as I watched the game. Some residents from Megabuilding 10 had formed a pick-up basketball team and were holding down the court over by Lizzie’s They had put out the word earlier in the day, saying they’d best all challengers, and a small crowd had formed for the free entertainment. That was something I long learned to cherish in Night City.

One of the things I most wanted to do in the city was watch all the braindances that I couldn’t watch in the game. That wasn’t in the cards though as all my money went towards survival. After food and drink and clothes and everything else, I never had enough eddies left over to count as disposable income. During my time in the city, I had been bombarded with ads about all the new braindances being released weekly.

Badlands Raid 2.0, Crime and Punishment and Zombies, Conqueror 9000. I wanted to watch all those and more. There were BDs of police chases, rock shows, and odd slice-of-life BDs where you were a farmer or a pastor or a handy man in a megabuilding. I had neither a BD wreath nor the money to rent any of the BDs I heard about, instead relying on the free entertainment of the city to pass my time. That was probably true for most everyone who was crowded around the half-court near Lizzie’s.

That was also my cover for being at the game that day. In listening to Deng’s stories about his time with Militech, as well as being bombarded with sermons that Fred and Mor preached about how best to protect myself, I learned that one of the most important rules of safety was recon.

About to ambush a SovOil convoy sending supplies to South American paramilitaries? How many cards and guards and guns are you expecting? What’s the threat level? What route are they taking and where can you set up your shooters? Going to a part of Watson you don’t normally frequent? Who are the major players? Who controls the territory? Do any of the gangs there target the homeless or will they leave you alone as long as you don’t interfere in their business?

Recon was exceedingly important, and it was why I kept one eye on the drug dealers while still watching the game and cheering. It was why I was noting how the dealers interacted with each other and the clients, where the money was kept, who was charged with guarding the stash, and when they did their re-up.

After an hour of hanging around the court I had a basic understanding of the crew. They were relatively inexperienced, and I couldn’t tell if they were ballsy or just plain stupid. This was Tyger Claw territory. Everyone knew that. So why were these fools openly selling drugs here and not cutting in the Claws? Deng would have been embarrassed by how sloppy the dealers took their security.

The court was placed between an alleyway that led up to Lizzie’s and a set of stairs that led out to an apartment block. The two dealers on the court were positioned so they had a view of both ends of the alley; one watching the ramp that led past the court towards Lizzie’s, and the other watching the end that fed out to a street about a block away. It was the third dealer, the one stationed at the top of the stairs, who was their weak link.

He was supposed to be extra muscle for the dealers on the court as well as make sure that there was no one sneaking up on them from the apartment block behind the court. He was also supposed to guard the stash. If the NCPD came around, he’d grab the stash and make a run for it. This would ensure the crew didn’t lose all their drugs if the badges decided to do their jobs. But with the basketball game going on, he had allowed his attention to drift and was more engrossed with what was happening on the court than watching for potential threats.

With a plan in place, I crumpled my bag of chips in a ball and tossed it away before heading down the long alley that would let me out several streets away. It would be a five- or ten-minute walk around the block and then I’d come up behind the dealer on the stairs. Every step I took increased the beat of my heart as I repeated the plan in my head.

This was the first gig I’d be pulling myself, and I wanted it to go smoothly. Deng and his crew had held my hand during the break-in at the megabuilding and you couldn’t really call scrounging for trash and selling it to vendors in the Roundabout a gig. So, this was really my first major gig, and the beat of my heart kept me informed of that fact.

I slowed my steps and took deep breaths, trying to will my body to remain calm as I circled the block and came up behind the dealer. He was facing towards the street, his eyes scanning the area for threats, and I slowed my walk. Don’t worry about me. I’m just some random homeless guy strolling through the neighborhood. I don’t pose any threat whatsoever. Just forget about me as I keep walking.

I scanned the ground and picked up a few scattered cigarette butts. I tossed them in a small paper container I always kept in my left back pocket and kept scanning the ground. During our walks through the city, I noticed that Fred was often grabbing cigarettes off the ground so he could strip them of the tobacco that hadn’t been burned off. He’d get four or five of the tossed cigarettes, strip out the tobacco, and reroll them. I saw him occasionally pass out his recycled cigarettes to people hanging near Lizzie’s and came to like the idea. It was a nice little gift to give people and gave me a plausible explanation for when I needed to lounge around an area without drawing too much attention to myself.

It took a few minutes but eventually the dealer lost interest in the apartment block, and he turned his focus back towards the game. I slowly crept forward. My gun was in my waist band, and I could feel its weight there. It was a comfort that I clung to with what was about to happen. I didn’t need the gun for this. It would be too loud. But it was nice knowing it was there and could help me if I needed it. I crept forward and slid my second weapon out of my back pocket.

A few days after Fred took me in, he had suggested that I needed to find some way to defend myself. We found a thin piece of metal in the trash and filed down one edge until it was sharp and jagged. The homemade shiv wasn’t enough of a weapon to pose much of a threat to anyone truly dangerous, but it gave me some comfort while walking the streets of Night City and would work perfectly for what I had in mind. When I was planning the gig, I realized that the shiv would let me do silent takedowns. I reached the dealer, my heart beating a million beats a minute, and I reached out with my shiv.

And then I blanked.

How do I do this? My mind raced through thousands of scenarios. I tried to recall every movie, tv show, video game, and youtube video I had ever seen or played. Video games made stealth seem so easy. Sneak up behind someone and press F or right click the mouse. Snake would do his CQC animation and muffle a guard’s mouth when he took him down. V would snap the neck. Altair would just hidden-blade the dude in the chest and walk away while the guard slowly came to the realization he was already dead.

I crouched near the dealer who was completely absorbed in the game and raced through my thoughts for any ideas. Should I slit his throat? What if I didn’t cut deep enough? He could shout out and then I’d be screwed. Should I reach around him and try and slap a hand over his mouth? Take him down with CQC? I don’t even know what CQC stands for which meant I definitely didn’t know how to do it. Plus, my body was that of a 19-year-old homeless kid who hadn’t eaten a full meal for a while and had lost a bunch of weight and muscle mass. I wasn’t all that strong in my previous life. There was no telling how much of that limited strength had atrophied during all my time in Night City.

It felt like hours since I had crept up behind the dealer and the entire time I held my shiv out, poised to flash out and end his life. He’d turn around any second now and I had no clue what I’d do. I had never killed before. Outside of being jumped by the Wraiths and Dennis and a bully in the 5^th grade, I had never even been in a fight before. My mouth was dry, my hands shook, and my mind was blanking with ideas on what I should do.

I quietly slipped the shiv back in my pocket, kept my head down, and passed the dealer as I walked down the stairs to the basketball court. Maybe I’d ask Deng to teach me what I should do in that position. I should probably go to him for advice and have him teach me a little bit before I took on more dangerous gigs.

I kept my head down and walked along the outside of the court before slipping into the alley, walking away from Lizzie’s. Shame crept into my cheeks and my mind was deep in thought as I walked.

I was so focused on my failure that I didn’t notice as someone approached me as I left the basketball court. I did, however, feel the two punches that caught me in the face, making my eyes water and my head snap bag. Another punch took me in the stomach, and I was on the ground wheezing, trying to pump breath into my lungs.

“I remember you. Little bennie I klepped all those eddies from awhile back.” I looked up and saw Dennis standing over me with a predatory look on his face. He bent to rifle through my pockets and came up with the few eddies I still had. Again? I could see him wheel back to kick me and I reached for the Unity at my waist.

But it was there. Had I dropped it? Where the hell was my gun?

Dennis’ foot connected with my head and I rolled over, my nose was broken and I was bleeding from a split lip. I could feel him coming closer, probably to stomp on me while I was down. I reached into my back pocket and grabbed my shiv. When he got closer, I swung out wildly. Mor had taught me a little bit about how to defend myself with the shiv, but I hadn’t practiced much and my mind was panicking. My actions were jerky and nowhere near what I thought I was capable of, but all I needed to do was keep a distance between Dennis and myself. I swiped with the shiv and connected with something, the jerk of resistance threatening to rip the shiv from my hand.

When I looked up, I noticed that Dennis had reeled back and was clutching a hand to his forearm, trying to stem a spurt of blood that was leaking out. This was my chance. I could have rushed him and tried to drive my shiv into his neck. Maybe that would end Dennis’ attacks on me for good. But the fear screamed at me to leave as fast as I could. I jumped up and ran but felt a weight pulling at my leg, trying to drag me down. I kicked out and heard something clatter on the street, but I kept racing down the alley.

I heard a soft pop pop before I reached the end of the alley and I sprinted off to the right. There was a stitch in my side as I hadn’t run a whole lot over the past few weeks, but I ignored it and kept racing away from the court and Dennis as fast as I could go. I needed to get to safety, and I knew that Patrick Street was my best bet. That’s where Fred had his camp, and I figured it was the safest place around.

When I got to the small section of Patrick Street that Fred had claimed I laid down and tried to run through what exactly had happened. I couldn’t get to my Unity during the fight. I guess Deng’s warnings that my gun wouldn’t be where I needed it without a holster were prescient because my gun was nowhere to be found, even after I patted myself down. A memory of the weight I felt while running from Dennis popped in my mind, and I realized my gun must have slipped down one of the legs of my pants when I fell. sh*t. I remembered the soft pops I heard while running away. That was probably Dennis shooting at me with my own gun. Why weren’t the gunshots louder? Shooting the Unity at the range, I remembered the sounds being deafening.

My shirt was once again stained with my own blood. It was the second shirt that had been ruined with my blood after Dennis cold co*cked me. That was another thing I owed him now. Plus, the cold realization that I wouldn’t be able to hang around near Lizzie’s started settling on me. I had cut Dennis with a shiv. He wouldn’t let that go. He’d lock down the area and keep me from the only place in Night City where I could go to unwind and relax.

I eventually staunched the nosebleed Dennis had given me and checked myself in a small mirror Fred had in his camp. Other than a sore face where Dennis had hit me, I had probably got off light. The punch to the stomach took my breath away but it didn’t do any lasting damage. His kick had once again made me see stars, but I had already shrugged off the worst of it by the time I got to Fred’s place.

Heavy and stilted footsteps sounded near me and slowly grew louder and closer. I jerked my head in that direction, my hand moving to the shiv I had stuffed back in my back pocket, but then calmed as I noticed Fred and Deng rounding the corner. But when I saw Fred’s swollen face and his arm curled around his stomach, my heart leapt. Fred had been beated even worse than I was. Was it Dennis? Did he come looking for me only to find Fred instead? Did I cause this?

Deng laid Fred down on his mattress and glanced over towards me, noticing the blood that stained my face and shirt. “Damn kid, you too? What happened?”

“Dennis,” I answered. Fred hadn’t greeted me as he was carried in, instead crumpling down onto his mattress and closing his eyes. I looked at Deng and nodded my head towards Fred in a question.

“Officer Kirk,” answered Deng. And I could hear the malice in Deng’s voice. “I’m gonna head over to a medtech I know, see if she’s got anything that can help him with the pain.”

I nodded, the helplessness I felt drowning out the pain I was left with after my latest beating from Dennis. He’d once again stripped me of my money, and I had even lost my gun in the fight. If I hadn’t I could have pawned it to help cover Fred’s medical costs. I heard Fred’s labored breathing as he slipped off to sleep and tears started forming in my eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was because I had once again been victimized by Dennis, seeing Fred in a broken state, or the frustration at not being able to do anything to change either situation.

Fred had been there for me at my lowest point. He’d been a constant presence for me in Night City and helped teach me how to survive on the streets. And how did I repay him for his kindness? The noodle restaurant I took both him and Mor to felt like such a hollow gesture now. I couldn’t buy him medicine, couldn’t ensure his safety, couldn’t even pick up his spirits because he’d probably take one look at me and see me all beat to hell alongside him. All I could do was sit by his side, listen to his groans of pain, and silently watch him suffer.

There were always going to be people like Dennis and Officer Kirk in Night City; people who’d prey on others simply to make themselves feel powerful. Fred and Mor had tried to drive that fact about the city into my head countless times. They told me that the best we could hope for was to be seen as the least appealing target.

As Fred and I sat together, both nursing our wounds in his tiny camp, I felt all the pain and agony of my life in Night City coalesce. All the experiences of the past few weeks played back in my head; being hunted by the Wraiths, Biotechnica mercs looking at me as a worthless entity in the camp, Dennis beating me twice, all the people I passed on the streets looking at me as useless and undeserving of their time. I sat by Fred, watching as he tried to fall asleep, and stewed in the memories.

Chapter 9 Chapter Text

One of the best pieces of advice that Fred gave me was: always have an emergency stash of cash squirreled away. Every time I got paid for scrounging through the trash, doing menial jobs for store owners, or pulling the gig with Deng, I stuffed a tiny bit of eddies in my shoes.

Fred called it the rainy-day fund and told me to only pull it out in case of emergencies. After Fred and I were beaten and my gun and cash were lost to Dennis, and all my work over the past few weeks seemed to be for nought, I felt justified in pulling the money out of my socks.

I only had 52 eddies to my name. Not enough to do much. It wouldn’t let me buy medicine to help Fred, ensure we were fed for the week or so it would take us to get back on our feet, or pay a merc to run Dennis and his crew out of Watson to ensure my safety. But the slightly soggy bills could buy me a Slaught-o-Matic from one of the nearby vending machines. The cheap plastic orange gun looked like it was ripped from a 1950s comic about aliens and space pirates and retro-futurism. I was never a big fan of the aesthetic, but I needed some form of protection, and it was the cheapest option available.

Deng would have been happy to learn that I understood the importance of holsters. If I had one, I could have dealt with Dennis back near the court. But my emergency fund could only stretch so far, and after buying the cheap one-use weapon I was tapped out. I promised myself that the next time I got a gun I’d spring for a holster. The Slaught-o-Matic was stuffed in my waist band and the weight there was a comfort as I sat outside Megabuilding 10.

Once word got around that both Fred and I had been beaten, a host of people descended on Fred’s camp to check in on us and make sure we were safe. I’m pretty sure most had come for Fred. His years on the street had made him much more popular than the new kid who had been following him around like a lost puppy for the past few weeks. But seeing so many people come by the camp lifted my spirits a little. It also drew a line under the promise I made to myself while sitting next to Fred, listening to him groan in pain: take care of you and yours.

Tomas had stopped by to check on Fred and we ended up talking late into the night. It was the first time we had really chatted since being introduced to each other at the stickball game. He always went out of his way to say hello to me when I stopped by the alcove, but try as I might, I never fell into an easy rapport with him the same way I did with Fred and Mor.

I think he saw me as something akin to a younger brother. Someone at the alcove had once told me that Fred enjoyed helping people who had been recently kicked in the face by the city; that he had a knack for finding those who had been shunted off to the wayside by life and picking them up and helping them survive their new circ*mstances. I think that was why Tomas was so friendly to me every time we saw each other. Perhaps he too had been saved by Fred and felt some sort of pseudo-family kinship with me. All I know is that every time we talked, I was always conscious of how aloof I was despite feeling bad about not opening up to him.

When he stopped by and noticed all my bruises he asked if Officer Kirk had attacked me too. I told him that Dennis was responsible for all my injuries and then explained that Dennis had been the guy who mugged me on my first night in the city. I recounted the whole story of how he’d attacked me after I left the metro for the first time, and how he found me walking by the basketball court near Lizzie’s and messed me up there too.

Tomas nodded his head as I finished my story. “Yea, I heard about him. He’s been expanding his crew.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He used to stick to simple robberies or beatings. But from what I hear, he’s moving up to selling black lace and glitter. That crew over by the half-court near Lizzie’s…those are Dennis’ people.”

A smile crept up my face as a plan started to form. I needed medicine to help Fred and I knew where I could get the eddies to buy it as well as gain a modicum of revenge on Dennis for what he put me through. All I needed was to do what I should have done earlier: rob the crew by the basketball court.

It was still early when I got to Megabuilding 10. The basketball team hadn’t yet emerged to head towards the court by Lizzie’s They were a vital cog in my plan to help Fred, so I just sat outside to wait for them. Nobody bothered the homeless kid staring at the entrance, deep in his own thoughts. They just left me to it as I ran through plans and contingencies in my mind. How was this robbery going to go? What happens if Dennis is at the court? What are the ways in which this could go wrong, and how could I mitigate that?

I kept an eye at the entrance to the megabuilding and as the basketball team finally emerged from the elevators and started walking in the direction of Lizzie’s, joking about what they had been up to last night, I slowly stood and fell into step several feet behind them. I let them build out a lead before plodding along in their wake, hoping that no one would notice that we were all walking in the same direction. They seemed in no hurry to get to the court, just lumbering their way down the sidewalk and laughing with each other as I silently urged them to move quicker from half a block away.

Once they finally turned down the alley to the court near Lizzie’s, I slipped away. Tomas was a few blocks down from the court where he told me he’d be waiting, and I quickly ran through the plan I had pieced together last night.

After he had told me it was Dennis’ crew who were dealing on the court, he noticed my reaction. He knew that I was planning something, and I couldn’t shake him off. He finally pried it out of me that I was going to rob their stash and, once he heard my cobbled together plan, demanded to be cut in.

It was basically the same plan I had made to rob the crew before. The two dealers would be focused on the clients down on the court while the lookout would be drawn into the game. I’d sneak in and, instead of attacking the guard at the top of the stairs, just grab the stash he was supposed to be looking after. If everything went according to plan, nobody would notice the stash was gone for a good twenty minutes or so. That was plenty of time for Tomas and I to get out of there and fence the stash. Tomas claimed that he knew some people who’d give us a good deal on the stash, and that we’d be able to use the money to get Fred fixed up.

He also claimed he’d be a better decoy than just relying on a basketball team to keep the attention of the dealers. With the game going and Tomas grabbing as much attention as possibly by arguing with the dealers – complaining that prices were too high or something – I should be able to waltz in and snatch the stash easily. I was a little hesitant to work with Tomas for the simple fact that we hadn’t pulled any jobs together. But he assured me he dealt with people like Dennis’ crew all the time and could make enough of a nuisance of himself without putting either himself or the plan in jeopardy. I finally had to relent and allow him to come on the gig with me, if for no better reason than I couldn’t think of a way to turn him down.

With our final preparations made Tomas moved towards the alley and I quickly circled the block. He promised to give me some time to get into position before he acted, but I decided to hurry just in case. As I circled the block, thoughts of my failure the previous day kept plopping into my mind.

Every step forward brought memories of me standing behind the lookout with my shiv drawn, doing nothing. What if I froze again? What would happen to Fred and me? I reasoned that I wasn’t trying to stab the lookout in the back this time, and that would make all the difference. I’d just be nabbing the stash. I could do that and get away. There was no need for violence, and no need for me to blank. If everything went according to plan, I’d be in and out without any of the dealers knowing I was there.

My heart beat a tatu in my chest, the sound growing louder in my ears. I tried arguing with my brain to calm down, that the plan would obviously work. Dennis wouldn’t change up the security around the crew. He probably didn’t even know that I was scouting them when he attacked me. He didn’t need to fix the deficiencies in the security that I had spotted because there was no pressing need. I was just some kid who was an easy target for him to exploit, not a man plotting to steal from him. I was a target of opportunity, not a threat. Hell, he probably didn’t even know that his lookout was too focused on the game to protect the stash. It was just bad luck that I had been there while he was stopping by to re-up his crew’s supply and pick up the cash.

Bad luck. If it was really bad luck that caused me to be there at the same time as Dennis, then my bad luck was of epic proportions. Dennis had probably used the cash he stole off me a few weeks ago as start-up funds for his little foray into the drug business. And now that he had taken even more cash from me, along with the gun I had dropped when he attacked, he was better defended and had a cushion for his burgeoning drug empire. I was like a pinata. The more Dennis beat on me, the more gifts I dropped for him.

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. I needed to focus. Get my head in the game. I needed to be calm and steady, so I didn’t have inane thoughts worm their way into my head and mess everything up out of fear. I ran through the plan one more, reciting it like a mantra.

Sneak up behind the lookout, grab the stash, get out without anyone seeing, sell the stash for eddies, buy medicine for Fred. Sneak in, grab the stash, get out, sell the stash, buy the medicine. Sneak in, grab the stash, buy the medicine. Sneak in, stash, medicine. Sneak in, stash, medicine. Sneak in, stash medicine. The chant calmed me as I turned the corner and spotted the lookout.

I crouched down and pulled the Slaught-o-Matic from my waist. My pistol wasn’t going to slip down my pants this time. I pulled the cheap plastic toggle at the top of the gun, priming it to fire, and crouch walked towards the lookout. As I got closer, I could hear Tomas begin his distraction. I scanned the lookout and the area where he was standing and found a small box. That was the stash.

Tomas’ voice started rising, complaining that the crew was trying to rip him off and, at their prices, he’d only have enough eddies for one dose. I slowly moved forward, reaching my hand out to try and grab the stash. Should I open it here and grab everything inside? Should I just take the whole thing and get as far away as possible? I heard Tomas yelling at the dealers on the court, asking if they wanted him to walk across town to the Tyger Claws where they’d give him two doses for the same price.

I was directly behind the lookout on the stairs, my left hand reaching out to open the stash, when Tomas’ mention of the Claws seemed to spook everyone. So, they did know that they were operating in Claw territory. My eyes fixed on the lookout’s back and I saw him turn to check the apartment block behind him, saw his eyes go wide at the sight of my left hand reaching for the stash and my right hand closed around the grip of my pistol, saw as he panicked and reached for the gun I knew he carried at his waist.

I came to a second later. The lookout was on the ground, blood pooling around him as he gasped for breath. My right hand was hot, and I glanced over at it to figure out why. The Slaught-o-Matic barrel looked deformed, the plastic melting from the heat escaping the gun.

My eyes snuck back to the lookout who was still staring up at the sky, feebly moving. His hands were shaking as they clutched at his chest and his breaths were labored and sounded more like gurgles. Why wasn’t anyone helping him? I looked down the stairs and noticed a few people running away and something in my brain shouted at me. Stash, medicine, Fred. Stash, medicine, Fred.

Oh right, I was here to rob this guy. I tossed my now useless gun and rifled through the lookout’s pockets, but my hands were clumsy. What was happening? Why aren’t my hands listening to what I tell them? Stupid hands. I accidentally ripped open the lookout’s pockets and grabbed at whatever was in them, then stood and bolted. Stash, medicine, Fred. I needed to get back to Fred. I had the stash and I’d give it to him and he’d get better. I ran in the direction of Patrick Street. He’d be there. That’s where his camp was and that was where I had left him this morning. Get the stash to Patrick Street.

I ran until my legs were jelly and the taste of batteries filled my mouth. When I finally turned down Patrick Street and reached Fred’s little camp, he wasn’t there. I looked around, still clutching the stash in my hands. No Fred. No Deng. No one around. Fred’s supposed to be here so I can give him the stash.

My hands were starting to shake, and I was getting weak in the knees, and I felt like I was going to vomit. Was that a normal feeling after running only a couple blocks? I stuffed the items I grabbed from the lookout into my pockets and sat down on the mattress to wait.

I had the stash. But I don’t have Fred. Now what?

Chapter 10: Chapter 10

Chapter Text

Someone did a study once. They showed that after a person killed for the first time, their amygdala was changed irrevocably. The thing in your brain that processes emotions became desensitized after committing murder. It was as if killing someone sent a powerful enough shock into your brain that your entire consciousness kind of just shut down in an act of self-preservation. You don’t feel the same way after killing a person. Is that why everyone says it gets easier after the first? The first time you kill is the hardest. That’s what they say in all the movies and the books and the tv shows that I’ve watched. In the Bond movie with Daniel Craig, the first one where it’s a reboot and he’s just starting his career as a secret agent. Wait…was it a reboot? There’s that theory that James Bond is just a codename for multiple secret agents, kind of like how 007 is a codename. The theory says that there are multiple secret agents in MI-6 and they all take on the codename James Bond when they’re active. That would explain why so many different actors played Bond throughout the years. Connery, Moore, Brosnan, Craig. Oh yea, the first Daniel Craig movie. They had that opening scene where he’s fighting a guy in the bathroom and then it shows him going to kill the next guy and it flashes between the two scenes and the second victim of bond is like “it takes to kills to qualify as a double o agent,” and Bond is like “yea, I killed so and so,” and the dude is like “well, after the first kill you’ll find it gets much easier,” and then Bond shoots him and he’s like “oh, I agree,” or “much easier, quite,” in that very British manner he uses. And he shoots the dude and that shows that the second kill was much easier because Bond didn’t even flinch. He didn’t struggle killing the second guy. The first kill was all sloppy and dirty and he was all banged up after fighting in the bathroom. I think he fought a guy in the bathroom. Pretty sure. And then the scene flashes back to the first kill and Bond struggles to stand and walk away but the guy is still alive and then it morphs into that famous Bond shooting pose with the whole barrel thing acting as the camera lens. But that barrel wasn’t what the drug dealer saw when I shot him. I don’t even know what his name is. Was. I didn’t know what his name was when I shot him. Should I name him? I feel like that’s something a person should do. How about Daniel? Like Daniel Craig. Or Jeremiah. Why Jeremiah? That’s a weird name. Jeremiah probably wouldn’t like it if I gave him that name. How about Steve? Yes. Let’s go with Steve. That barrel thing from the Bond movies wasn’t the last thing that Steve saw. Well, I guess people don’t really see the barrel camera thing either. The barrel is just the gun that is pointed at Bond while he’s walking away. So, the last thing the dude who saw Bond walking away sees is…Bond walking away. Yea. That sounds about right. Bond is walking away, all Bond-like, and then he goes into his shooter pose and shoots. That shooter pose wasn’t the last thing that Steve saw either. He probably just saw some kid in front of him, holding a bright orange ray gun looking thing. Or was I seated on my ass? I think when he turned around I had already fallen backwards on my ass in shock. Yea. He saw some stupid kid, flat on his ass, eyes wide in surprise, with a bright orange ray gun looking pistol raised up at him and then bang. That was it. Wait. No. He was still bleeding and breathing and doing things after I shot him. I shot him and he was on the ground staring up at the sky and then I rifled through his pockets to grab whatever was in there and he didn’t look at me when I was doing that so the last thing he saw was probably the sky. I guess that’s a whole lot better than seeing the guy who shot you start freaking out and then rifle through your pockets. I guess he did feel me going through his pockets. He felt me, right? But he didn’t see me as I was freaking out. So, yea, he looked up at the sky and probably thought ‘oh that’s beautiful.’ Yea. That sounds nice. I felt someone shaking my shoulder, trying to get my attention.

“Noah. Noah!”

I snapped to and saw Fred hovering over me, his hands on my shoulders. He looked better than yesterday even though he was still sporting a blackened and bloody eye. What do you call that? It’s not a bloodshot eye. Burst eye? That sounds worse than it is. His eye was all red where it was supposed to be white. My eyes drifted away from Fred towards Deng who was standing behind him. Why was Deng looking at me with a…look? Indecipherable. Was he just watching me or was there a reason he was looking at me? I couldn’t tell.

“Noah. What’s wrong with you?” Fred kept shaking my shoulders, trying to keep my attention on him. Had I given him the medicine yet? Is that why he no longer looked completely beaten to hell? No. I had been waiting for him. That’s right. I came here to try and give him the medicine, but he hadn’t been around.

“I was waiting for you. I got you some medicine,” I said, but something was telling me that wasn’t entirely true. I had the stash, but I still needed to sell it. Tomas said he could help with that. He said he knew people who’d give us a good price. Where was he? “Tomas and I still need to fence the stash. But afterwards, we’ll be able to buy you some medicine.”

“What are you talking about kid? Tomas? It looks like you’ve been crying. Did he get jumped again?” The last question was aimed over his shoulder towards Deng and some quiet part of my brain noted that Fred was freaking out. Deng was still calm and just watched me and I saw him shake his head at Fred’s question.

“I don’t think that’s what this is. It looks like adrenaline. It does weird sh*t to your body. A lot of people get the shakes afterwards. Or they vomit. Or cry. It’s normal.” Deng knelt down next to me and drew my eyes towards him. “What happened kid?”

“Normal for what? They get the shakes after what?” Fred was standing now, letting Deng take over as he realized he had no idea what was happening, and Deng seemed like he was a better fit to handle an unknown situation. His voice was rising, and I wanted to do something to assure him that everything was going to be okay now. I had helped. He didn’t need to worry about anything.

Wait…adrenaline makes you cry? I had been crying? I don’t remember that. When did I start crying?

“Kid. Focus. What happened?”

“I went out with Tomas to get medicine for Fred. We figured that Dennis’ crew had taken all my money so…” the image of a guy sprawled out on the ground, gasping for breath and clutching at his chest, flashed through my mind and I shut my mouth. I couldn’t let them know what I did. They’d look at me differently. I had to ignore that part of what happened so that Fred wouldn’t start worrying.

I heard Fred suck in his breath through his teeth and then step away. He picked out his old beaten-to-hell Agent from his pocket and started dialing. I would have thought that Officer Kirk had broken that. Did Fred not have it on him when he was beaten? I was just about to ask him when Deng snapped his fingers in front of my face.

“You went to get medicine from the dealers. And then what?”

“I, uh, came back here to give it to Fred. But he wasn’t here. So, I waited and then you guys showed up.”

Deng sat back on his haunches and looked at me. There was a perplexed look on his face as he stared at me. He stopped asking questions and I figured that we were done. Fred looked better. I got the medicine. Wait. No, I didn’t. There was another step in the plan. I needed to fence the stash to buy the medicine. I tried to figure out where I put the stash and struggled to stand, but Deng put a hand on my shoulder to calm me down and keep me seated.

“That was Mor,” said Fred as he slipped his Agent back in his pocket and came back over to us. “He said Tomas isn’t by Lizzie’s. He’s sent some people over to the court to check it out.”

Deng sat there with a look of – concentration? – on his face before he stood and helped me up. Why were we standing? My body felt wrung out and all I wanted to do was sit back down on Fred’s mattress, but Deng put a hand on my shoulder to steady me. Wasn’t I trying to stand earlier and he stopped me? Make up your mind Deng.

“I think I know what happened. Come on kid,” he said as he guided me forward and prodded me to start walking. Fred fell in step behind us, a look of concern splashed across his face as he mumbled something to Deng.

“He’s in shock,” answered Deng. I couldn’t hear what Fred had asked him. He should speak up. It’s rude to talk so quietly when other people are around. Wait…was that rude? Fred had never been intentionally rude to me before. I shrugged my shoulders and decided to trust that Fred hadn’t suddenly morphed into a person who’d be rude to me without reason. “His mind is shutting down. Actually, it’s more like aimless wandering. It’s a defense mechanism.”

“From getting jumped? I’ve never seen something like that before.”

“I don’t think he was jumped,” was all Deng said as he side-eyed me and kept leading me forward. I had no idea where we were going but I trusted the two of them to get us there so I was quiet and meek while we walked.

I followed the two of them for a while and started perking up when I heard music and voices. I looked around, expecting to see the familiar glow of the ‘Lizzie’s’ sign and Rita guarding her post at the front door. But neither were in sight. We were in some kind of alley or something. A dead-end alley. There was probably a better word for it. A…culvert? No. Pretty sure that was meant for water under roads. Cul-de-sac? Nope. That’s houses. We were in a dead-end alley sort of thing.

A party was going on and I noticed a bunch of cars parked in a semi-circle, Japanese lettering stenciled on the side of the cars. Bright neon glows were coming from their…under carriage? How come I can’t remember words? Ha. Fargo.

“Are you sure you don’t want the undercoating?” I said which drew the attention of Deng and Fred.

Why did I immediately think of that movie? Weird. People were gathered around the cars, chatting and joking with each other. I think each of the car radios was set to the same station and music blared from them for everyone to dance to. Did any of these people know that I had killed Steve? Did they know that he died gurgling on his own blood? Is that why they were all looking at me like I was a rodent intruding on their picnic?

They had clocked Fred, Deng and I as we got close and a few people came over to…greet us? They didn’t look friendly, but Deng stepped forward and spoke in a low voice to one of the new guys. Now that we had stopped moving and Deng was talking to someone, I felt it safe to let my attention drift towards all the people dancing around.

“Noah,” Deng pulled my focus back towards him. He was standing in front of me with a well-dressed Asian guy whose jacket was unbuttoned, showing off glowing tattoos on his chest. “This is Haru. Tell him about the dealers over by the basketball court.”

Haru looked at Deng and then at me and seemed to notice something. He softened slightly when I glanced over at the people dancing. Tyger Claws. Oh. We were crashing a Tyger Claw party. Should we be here? They looked upset at my presence. I guess Fred, Deng and I were all underdressed. That was probably a major party foul. Plus, we didn’t bring any gifts or anything. Thank God Dennis had taken my Unity. I didn’t want to explain to all these dancing people that my gun came from a dead Tyger Claw. A few of the dancers noticed me standing there and marched forward, getting ready to yell in my face, but Haru held up a hand to stop them and then spoke to me in a soft voice.

“Noah? That’s your name? I’m Haru. Your friend says you know of a crew that’s on our turf. Tell me about them.”

I looked over at Deng and he nodded a ‘go ahead’ at me. “There were three of them. Two should still be down by the court. They work for a guy named Dennis. I was there with a friend, and he mentioned the Tyger Claws, and they all freaked out because they know it’s your turf and…” I paused. I didn’t want all these people to know I had killed Steve. Fred would know and look at me like I was a monster. Haru was nice. Would he still be nice after learning that I had killed Steve? He was gasping, and gurgling, and I did nothing except rifle through his pockets and run away. Would he still be nice knowing that I did that?

“There were three? You got one?”

All I could do was nod and I saw Fred pale at Haru’s words. Deng didn’t react at all. sh*t. Fred was probably disappointed in me now. I kept my eyes locked on Haru and away from Fred so I couldn’t see the distress on his face.

Various things happened but I wasn’t paying attention and I was minimally aware that Deng, Fred and I were soon shunted off to the side. Fred seemed a little out of place with all the Tyger Claws hanging around. But Deng was completely composed. A Tyger Claw guard had come over and stood near us, probably keeping an eye on us, but I wasn’t paying him any attention. I was trying to find out which radio station all the cars were tuned to. Would I hear Maximum Mike spouting conspiracy theories? That would be trippy hearing the voice of Mike Pondsmith coming from the radio. That would be like God coming down and speaking to his creations. I always wondered if the conspiracy theories that Maximum Mike talked about were true or completely batsh*t insane. Maybe I’d try and meet with him to get to know him better. Maximum Mike. Not Mike Pondsmith. How trippy would it be to meet –

Fred stepped away from us and pulled out his Agent. I noticed the Tyger Claw guard shift as if to say something to Fred but he took one look at Deng and didn’t try and force the issue. Were we guests? Haru was nice and probably told everyone to treat us with respect and not be all rude.

“That was Mor. He said the Claws just cleared out the court. Tomas is safe and Mor has him over at Lizzie’s. Dennis’ people beat on him and cut him a little bit, but they didn’t do anything permanent. He’ll be okay.”

Deng nodded and a few moments later Haru came back over to us. I saw his eyes flash with a golden glow before they dimmed and he stood in front of Deng. “Your information was correct. We took care of the other two dealers at the court.”

“Only two? Was there a leader there?” asked Deng.

“We took out the two dealers at the court. If he wasn’t among them, we didn’t handle him,” he said, slightly aggravated by Deng’s questions. He sighed and slipped something to Fred and Deng. “If you ever hear of any more dealers on our turf, let us know.”

I thought that was that and we’d be leaving. I wanted to get back to the mattress. Wait. No. I needed to pawn the stash. Why did I keep forgetting about that? Haru stepped in front of me and drew my eyes towards him.

“You did good work today. Be proud.” He slipped something into my hands, and I looked down to see what it was. 100 eddies.

“Your first kill is always the hardest. It gets easier.”

Hmm…just like James Bond.