Author: Community Admin

Sedoy, having just had her brilliant plan to shoot through the floor fail hears a muffled growl of something loud and menacing but mostly unintelligible.

The only word she catches is “eliminated” – with this, she contemplates sending another text to Gabriel to ask him for help laying low. Maybe she could just run back to her apartment, grab her backpack, and leave Mavis, Reed, and ISO to deal with this.

Momentarily weighing her odds of success and her guilt over leaving her friends, she shakes her head and thinks better of it.

—
Produced by Starling Ronan

High above the smoke and flames of the Oasis corpo housing district, Reed sits in the pilot seat of a Trauma Team Heavy Aerial Assault vehicle.

He closes his eyes, and steadies his breath, focusing on the datastream flooding his neural link. The advanced thermal cameras run a full sweep, peeling back the walls of their client Oscar Christiansan’s penthouse apartment, and feeding that data directly into Reed’s sensory inputs.
Reed feels his neural implant getting warmer – something under his scalp begins to itch.

8 targets.
Two with military cyberwear.
Readying weapons.

‘…You best pick up the phone when I call, or you should lose this number’.

The words from Nico, their Fixer, bounce around in ISO’s head, as Sedoy gathers up the last of her things. She flits around her desk, organizing and arranging her workbench with near-manic energy from her recently injested Synth***. ISO rolls his eyes, he glances at his agent, checking the time.

Their last gig from Nico didn’t go as well as it could have, so he waits patiently for Sedoy to finish up… whatever she’s doing.

While Mavis and Reed fight through the crowds of desperate people searching for Cyberwear parts… Our story today starts on a much quieter scene – in the apartment of Sedoy.

ISO, growing increasingly starved for interaction, lounges on Sedoy’s couch scrolling through the datapools on his Agent.

There isn’t much to look at. His usual Night City datapools are inaccessible today for ‘maintanence’, and his Oasis datapool collection is still frustratingly slim.

Sedoy flexes her arm, testing out the new addition of her invention – the Cyberian Cooler. She glances at Mavis, a concerned look crossing her stern face for a brief moment – and then instructs her base-level internal operating system to power up the cooling equipment.

As the fans in her arm begin to lightly hum, she watches as the Environment Temperature Differential on her Biomon and her Central Nervous Thermoregulation signals begin to drop slowly, each in sync with the other.

She sighs a heavy exhale of relief – the cyberwear seems to be functioning within expected parameters.

A black cloaked figure stands in the middle of the intersection, directly in front of the sleek automated vehicle containing Sedoy.

The traffic indicator in front of her car turns green, and the vehicles on the opposite side of the road begin to move. The cloaked figure, however, remains motionless – their expression and appearance concealed by a long dark hood.

There’s an awkward pause as the left rear window of the automated vehicle rolls down slowly. Sedoy’s head comes into view, leaning out the window with confused expression on her face.

She studies this strange character for a moment, but before she can make sense of what she’s looking at, a small explosion pops the front end of her car several feet into the air. She slams her head against the top of the window frame, and as the car violently crashes back down to the street, her jaw smashes into the door.

With a crunch, ISO flips over the front of the handlebars of his new motorbike, as he’s flung unceremoniously into the air.

Time seems to slow to a crawl as he tumbles head over heels towards a row of abandoned nomad motorbikes. He feels his grapple arm snap as it slams into the roof of an old, rusted sedan.

ISO barely has enough time mid-flight to process the loss of his enhanced arm before he crashes clumsily into the row of rusty motor bikes – which in-turn then collapse on top of him forming a tangled heap of handlebars, wheels, and one extremely unlucky Media.

A large, black SUV waits in the shadow of Oasis Apartment Building 72-BCB. Inside the empty vehicle, a lone computer display bolted to the center front console reads ‘Waiting for Passenger – Sedoy. 136 passengers in queue’.

After a moment, the door flies open with an impatient swing, and a few moments later, Sedoy slides into the SUV.

[Welcome Sedoy. You are [3 and a half] hours late. Is everything okay?]
“Is that right? What time is it?”
[It is currently 11:32 AM.]
“I am half-hour early, what are you talking about? Dumb car.”

The door shuts automatically, and with a soft hum the electric motor comes to life as the luxury vehicle speeds away through the harsh desert sun. 

The sleeping form of Reed lies sprawled on the ground, empty bottle in one hand and several more scattered about the floor next to him. As the sun rises outside his window, a square of light slowly crawls across his bed, onto the floor, and finally onto the upper chest of the sleeping nomad. He opens his eyes and blinks slowly.

As he tries lift his hand to shade his vision from the harsh sunlight emanating from his window, Reed’s attention is drawn to one of the small pile of bottles.

His heavy pistol has been posed amongst the glass and synth-plastic containers, as if the remains of his drunken bender were used as props for an album cover of an edgy indie punk band. For reasons that currently escape Reed’s alcohol-soaked brain, the words ‘Mars Sazerac’ are scrawled across the barrel.

He blinks.

He blinks again.

His brow furrows as he reaches slowly towards the familiar firearm, which he grasps and weighs it in his hands.

Reed looks through his bedroom doorway, and towards his front door, slightly ajar.

Perhaps Mavis remembers what happened.