Setback in Northside
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(Start at Part 1 here.)
The next morning found Wrench working on his van. The nomad didn’t have the lug nuts to crawl back to the ripperdoc after his warning (which he didn’t heed,) but he was feeling a little better and up for some grease-monkeying. A sudden call on his holo almost caused him to drop the van’s hood on his head.
“We got a ping!” It was Maven’s excited face in a box, along with Hardpoint’s serious expression from the box next to her. Thorn’s half-extended “bed hair” barely concealed his sleepy face within a third box below. Sometimes, the facial simulation software in older Chyron versions glitches and adds another face or even body parts when they get too close to the caller. A woman’s face with tussled, dual-toned hair emerged from the rockerboy’s shoulder as if she was peeking curiously over it, even though she was not actually on the call.
There was an awkward silence. Thorn's amalgamated image looked beside him and then back at the group with a look of feigned embarrassment. Things like this happened after a night of "hanging out" with Papa Garcin. The face kissed the rockerboy, then disappeared behind him.
Maven blinked and continued: “The jacket was in Watson; Northside. Get over here, you gonks!” She cut the call.
***
The van dropped off Thorn’s “groupie” at the corner of Cortes and Kennedy Street. She made the antiquated sign for “call me” at the rockerboy as the van screeched off. Maven and Hardpoint were in the back, snickering like schoolgirls. Wrench glared at Thorn as the rockerboy waved goodbye from the passenger-side window: “Do I look like one of those bald, blue-lipped Delamains to you?! Ah! Would you like to purchase the Excelsior package for just a billion eddies more, Sir? It comes with a complementary bottle of La Perle des Alpes.” Wrench's impression of the automated taxi service left something to be desired, but it was pretty entertaining. He grumbled: "I don’t see why we had to waste time dropping off your input! Jacket’s probably long gone by now!"
Thorn shrugged and glanced at a screen on the dashboard which displayed the “mirror” view from the passenger-side camera. Words scrolled below the girl's shrinking shape in the distance: “objects are closer than they appear” The image gave Thorn an idea for the song he was working on, but he was a little hung over, and didn’t relish the thought of composing in a stuffy van while arguing with a cranky nomad. “Relax, she needed the ride and it was on the way,” he said.
"Don’t worry, big brother." Maven placed her little hand on the nomad’s broad shoulder in the same way he had done to her days ago. “The signal is delayed anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter if we’re a little late. We might still find a good lead.” Wrench grunted and concentrated on the road, fuming in silence.
***
They arrived at the ping’s coordinates: an abandoned shantytown in the middle of nowhere – technically still in the NID, but reaching the city’s northern outskirts, near the old oilfields. The megacorps had abandoned this area a long time ago, but it still smelled of toxic fumes.
As Thorn’s mother told it, their family had lived in a place like this towards the end of the Time of the Red. The sitting Mayor at the time was hell-bent on a crusade against homelessness to shore up support for reelection, so the shantytown had to go (translation: some megacorp wanted the land.) To avoid PR blowback, there was a lottery to house some of the families in one of the new megabuildings that had been constructed; really a subsidized rent scheme that funneled money to the same megacorp’s subsidiaries, with a little left over for the Mayor’s pockets as well. Thorn’s family had been lucky “winners” but most of the other families in that shantytown were never heard from again.
"Karma is a bitch," however, and by the time Thorn had turned about 13 or 14, his family was kicked out of the apartment they lived in, along with several others on that floor. The entire floor (a mid-to-upper one) was prime real estate that a developer wanted to buy for peanuts, spruce up, and rent out for even more eddies as higher-end units. An “error” in the system showed that his parents had not paid their rent in several months. They had. Thorn saw to it while his mom and dad went on one of their usual benders. It was a one-two punch of corporate layoffs, plus alcoholism and substance abuse after their corpo-prescribed stimulants were cut off. It wrecked his parents. The fun, wholesome family sitcom of his childhood turned dark during those years, and music became his escape. Corpos: 2, average folks: 0.1
Wrench parked the van a safe distance from the area and the group moved cautiously towards the middle of the shantytown. It was eerily quiet here, and the morning haze (or was it the chemicals?) obscured vision between the abandoned, aluminum shacks and piles of trash. Not a soul was around. Something didn’t feel right.
Hardpoint was the first one to notice it: the glint of a scope.2 She only had time to yell: “It’s a trap!” before she was forced to duck behind one of the shacks. A rifle round barely missed her.
Two gonks with holo-shades and bulky, Satara tech shotguns emerged from hiding places to open fire. If our edgerunners were small fish in a big pond, these were bottom-feeders. Young toughs, or down-on-their-luck cyberpunks with scavenged iron and cheap, LED-lit, "Qin Da Chi" blades from some market in Kabuki (dried blood still on both) to complete the street ronin look. They worked for small-time eddies, and were highly expendable, but still dangerous. The edgerunner crew scattered for cover. None of them couldn’t see who fired the rifle shot.
Wrench and Thorn exchanged gunfire with the two edgerunner gonks. Hardpoint moved around the shacks, keeping cover between her and the direction of the rifle shot, to flank one of the edgerunner gonks. He barely had time to look upward to see the solo’s silhouette in the morning sun, dropping on him with Mantis Blades fully extended. Still, he managed to dodge out of the way, and produced his cheap, ronin’s blade to clumsily (but effectively,) fend off Hardpoint’s onslaught.
Maven found a tall, stepped stack of containers covered by an old tarp flapping in the wind. She clambered her way up easily this time, and set up a position with her Techtronika rifle, partially concealed by the tarp. Her custom optics were fuzzy for a brief second as they interfaced with the sniper rifle’s scope to reveal four silhouettes in the area, highlighted in red.3 One was kneeling from the top of a shack with a rifle. She found him. “Getting the hang of this edgerunning thing!" she thought to herself with newfound confidence.
With one of the gonks preoccupied, the rockerboy and nomad concentrated their fire on the other. They could hear the sound of clashing blades between them. This gonk was not bad, Hardpoint thought. He might have even had a future as an edgerunner, but she intended to make sure his talent went undiscovered.
Maven got a bead on the rifleman and fired. A hit! But he was only stunned for a moment; must have body armor under the coat, or dermal plating, the tech thought. Worse, he managed to spot her and shoot before leaping off of the shack. Damn! That was too close! Maven had to leave her compromised position as well, like when she was spotted “camping” in one of those VR shoot-em-ups she played as a teen.
Once below, she realized that her custom optics were still fuzzy, even though she had disconnected safely from her rifle scope. “That’s not right! I just calibrated them…” her heart sank. One of the four gonks she had spotted earlier wasn’t fighting, just kneeling behind some cover. She thought it was odd, but she had been focused on the rifleman on top of the shack then. Netrunner; must have picked up her signal when her optics connected to her scope. “That’s the last time I settle for bargain firewall soft, even if I have to eat kibble!” The tech stumbled, hampered by staticky vision, as she tried to find new cover. She couldn’t see that the rifleman was on her tail.
Hardpoint was getting tired of the blade exchange, but the edgerunner gonk was tiring as well. In the end, titanium cyberware beat cheap steel, which snapped like freeze-dried scop cracker. Her blade continued its trajectory to cut through neck and bone like a rush-and-bamboo tameshigiri, ending that particular street ronin’s career.
Maven managed to find cover behind another shack closer to where the edgerunner crew had entered the shantytown. She tried peeking around a corner to see if she was safe, but was effectively blind in one eye. She had to warn the others about that netrunner, but if she did, the ‘runner would know everything she exchanged with her crew! The tech concentrated on all her disappointment and anger at what she perceived to be her failures on this gig: “GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!” Her firewall finally kicked in, and dumped the intruder. Maven wished it had been black ICE to fry them instead, but at least she was safe.
“Netrunner! Watch out!” she quickly messaged to the others. Her baby-faced, winning grin was cut short by rifle fire against her cover. She peeked out briefly, and could see the rifleman with her optics clearly now. The ratty, black leather coat he wore contrasted with clean-cut, Asian features. This guy was no edgerunner gonk, he was a professional corpo agent; Arasaka. Maven’s heart skipped a beat as she realized the danger she was in.
Thorn and Wrench looked at each other while they were sheltering behind cover and reloading. They had both seen Maven’s message. “Go find that netrunner, I’ll cover you!” Wrench said. The nomad emerged and unleashed with his Kang Tao. Smart shells flew like a swarm of lighting-fast bees to make contact with the enemy’s armor in several places, driving him back behind cover. Thorn dashed between the shacks, and past the preoccupied gonk, with a clumsy, one-handed blast from his Carnage for good measure. Maven messaged the netrunner’s location to the rockerboy over his holo.4
Hardpoint had also received Maven’s messages, but the solo was more concerned about that corpo agent she mentioned. Maven was alone with him. Hardpoint produced her own, Arasaka rifle, racked it with the familiar, satisfying sound of a well-maintained weapon, and ran towards Maven’s position.
The remaining edgerunner gonk recovered, and came out of cover briefly to fire his Satara at the rockerboy, but only managed to hit a makeshift AC unit on the side of a shack. It exploded with flying sparks (was the electricity still connected here?!) This was enough of a distraction for Wrench to charge and close the distance, slamming into the gonk like a nomad rig. His cyberfist made impact and broke the gonk’s face with an audible crunch and a glitch of his holo-shades. Only the gonk’s spray-painted, armorjack helmet saved his skull. Some edgerunners forego head protection, since it interferes with their “style,” but that often results in not-so-stylish corpses.5 This edgerunner was smarter than most…until the concussion killed his bonus brain cells.
Thorn spotted the netrunner and fired his shotgun to disrupt her. The netrunner returned fire with her own pistol, but the LEDs in her eyes were flashing blue. Thorn realized what she was doing: probably hacking his chrome right now and he wouldn’t know it until it was too late. The rockerboy didn’t have much cyberware save for his neurport and AudioVox implant. If the netrunner got to that, it would mean he would have to miss his next music gig while he got an antivirus checkup with his ripperdoc. No real loss. The netrunner fired her pistol again and ran off. Thorn chased after her.
But Thorn had not been the netrunner’s target. One of Wrench’s Gorilla Arms stopped in mid swing to twitch and spasm. “Fuck!” Wrench took his eyes off the edgerunner gonk to look at his malfunctioning arm in an involuntary reflex. That was all the time the gonk needed to recover, pick up his shotgun, and shoot, destroying the same arm in a burst of parts. Wrench tried to smash the gonk with his other arm, but missed wildly and the gonk fired again. The tech shot blasted through the nomad’s already damaged armorjack and straight to flesh. There’s a reason protective equipment comes with a disclaimer not to reuse after damage. The nomad went down.
***
The Arasaka agent advanced on Maven’s position as she was reloading, but a barrage of automatic rifle fire from Hardpoint checked his progress. Maven popped out of the shack's "window" opening and fired her shotgun. A pattern of small holes appeared on the agent’s leather coat as he jumped behind cover. The tech and the solo had him successfully pinned down.6
***
The battered, edgerunner gonk approached Wrench, his face bleeding and bruised, but murderously confident. The nomad was incapacitated and having trouble moving. Blood trickled from his mouth and flowed freely from the wound in his torso. He couldn’t speak, but the hatred in his eyes sent an unmistakable message. The gonk raised his shotgun to finish off the nomad, but Wrench's remaining Gorilla Arm darted out and latched on to his throat. Microservos in the nomad’s fingers contracted hard enough to crunch trachea and squeeze the life out of him.7 The nomad's cyberhand only released when the life left him to join his brother and sister riders in the sky. The two edgerunners fell together as if they were choombas embracing. They might have shared drinks at the Afterlife had circumstances been different. Regardless, everyone is equal in death.
***
The netrunner could see through her Chyron link that half her team had flatlined. She decided the meager eddies for this scop job weren’t worth it, and fled, vowing to work from the sidelines from now on. The hustle can do the front-line work.8 She dived into the edgerunner gonks' beat-up ride and started it while the Arasaka agent yelled curses at her in Japanese. She cut the holo link. Thorn was about to run after the vehicle, as ridiculous as chasing a car without cyberlegs sounds, but Hardpoint called the crew back over the holo. There was no response from Wrench.
***
The Arasaka agent fired his last few rounds to cover his own escape into the oilfields. Blood drops appeared on the ground in his wake, but Hardpoint decided not to follow. She had a bad feeling. Regrouping with Maven, the two rushed to Wrench’s location to find the nomad had fallen. Maven put her hands to her mouth in shock, and Hardpoint ran to render first aid, but it was too late. She turned to Maven and shook her head. The young tech fell to her knees. The edgerunning thing had seemed so exciting when she had told her Zetatech boss to stuff it, and sold her services on the black market to other edgerunners. After hearing their stories, she decided she wanted to live on the Edge too. Now life and death on the Edge was a terrible reality for her.
Thorn arrived shortly after, out of breath. Maven was crying softly. When the rockerboy realized what had happened, he pounded his fist against the side of a shack and cursed. Hardpoint waited a moment before she got the rockerboy's attention: “Thorn, help me with him.” He hung his head and nodded, then went over to assist the solo with their fallen teammate.9
***
The edgerunner crew ended up at DaKota Garage later. Calling their client was the best idea they could come up with after the ambush in Northside. Falco told them to meet up at the fixer’s place.
The group spent the rest of the day there, numb from the days' events. Thorn had found a bottle of Papa Garcin somewhere, and was taking swigs off of it while pacing shirtless, with tech hair fully extended.10 The LEDs in his hair and light tattoos pulsed every time he swallowed, which made him look like an advertisement. Maven sat quietly by Wrench’s remains. They had been covered respectfully with an old, but clean blanket. Her face was marred by tear streaks on one side. Hardpoint was talking with Dakota in the fixer’s office.
“You did good bringing him here, sister.” The older, nomad woman said as they emerged from her office. “We’ll get him to his people. Normally, his belongings go back to the family since it rightfully belongs to them, but you’ll need them to complete the job. I think he would have wanted that.” Hardpoint voiced her thanks, Maven hung her head down in despair, and Thorn took another swig of rum, performed a weird pirouette while doing so, and ended with a clumsy bow of gratitude in the direction of Dakota.
Falco watched the eerily-familiar scene from the shadows while leaning on a nomad vehicle that was undergoing repairs at the garage. His gaze switched from examining the Lexington pistol the edgerunners had recovered back to the group. He sighed, hesitating before he spoke: “Y’all don’t have to complete this job if y’all don’t want to. I understand. I’ll pay you for what you’ve done so far. Might have to just call this a loss.” He had lost so much already, what’s one more?
Thorn stopped mid-swallow, and spit the rum out with a cough. He wiped his mouth and pointed with an index and pinky finger in their general direction: “Nah! Stuff that! It’s personal now. I don’t know why Arasaka is after that jacket, and I don’t give a scop. You’re getting your stuff, cowboy, all of it, and riding off into the sunset! Us too, with our eddies!” Maven raised her head and looked at both Thorn and Hardpoint. The solo nodded back at the both of them in respectful agreement. She knew a thing or two about wanting payback.
Falco couldn’t help smiling bitterly under his mustache. Did stories just repeat themselves like this? “Then at least take some downtime before you get back on the job. Believe me, I know you need it. Call me if there’s any development.”
The sound of an approaching vehicle indicated that the Aldecaldos had arrived to bring back one of their own. “You may pay your respects before you go, if you want.” Dakota said. Hardpoint went up to Wrench and gave the fallen nomad a professional nod, but no one could tell what she said to him. Maven got up and went up to the covered nomad, kissed her hand, and touched his forehead. She whispered, her voice breaking: “Good bye, big brother.” Days before, when Maven had asked him, Wrench had told her that calling chooms “brother” and “sister” was a term of respect among nomads, even if they weren’t related. It meant you were family, and treated as such. It seemed fitting. There is bond that forms among people who experience danger together, even complete strangers. That bond was beginning to form with this crew.
Thorn shuffled over to Wrench, “poured one out” for him, then took a drink himself. He turned and stumbled in the direction of the garage’s exit, but away from Maven and Hardpoint, who were going to nomad’s van – now their van. “You’re not coming with us?” Maven asked.
“Nah…” Thorn slurred, shaking his head to sober up. “There’s a motel and bar a short distance from here; heard Wrench liked to go there. I’m gonna check it out. I’ll find my way back.” He stumbled down the road, with the mostly-empty bottle of Papa on one hand and making a hitchhiker’s thumbs-up with the other.
"We can give you a ride!” Maven yelled after him. Thorn did a gesture that said “I’m good” without looking back and then spread his arms wide, looking up at the darkening sky to feel the cool, desert breeze. Hardpoint put her arm around Maven and ushered her to the van: “Come on. Let’s go get something to eat.”
The solo started the van, and the two sped back toward the mirage of vertical, holographic lights that was Night City. Thorn mock saluted them as they drove by.11
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| Never Forget |
To be continued…
Game Notes
1 Thorn’s lifepath includes “megabuilding” in both the Family Background and Childhood Environment sections, with the addition of “driven from his home” as his Family Crisis.↩
2 Hardpoint succeeded her Perception roll, and tends to act first pretty much every time due to her class ability's initiative bonus. This included the chase encounter in the previous episode.↩
3 I know that’s not necessarily how the Grad’s scope looks, but I like the idea of Maven’s custom optics becoming one with it, since they do give her a bonus to spotting enemies.↩
4 Like in the video game, I figured that she “tagged” the enemies and would know their positions in real-time.↩
5 Characters in media seldom wear helmets, but any experienced RPG player, especially playing with an old school GM, knows that’s a bad move.↩
6 These were just regular attacks. I didn’t know at that time that there are rules in the Cyberpunk RED rulebook for suppressive fire. I have a copy, but I’ve just been referencing the CEMK rulebook during play.↩
7 This was pretty awesome! I offset the nomad's Mortally Wounded penalty by dumping Luck into this last, “F.U.” to this guy (he didn’t have a lot of HP left from the nomad’s pummeling earlier.) I only learned later that characters can attempt to stabilize themselves. Oh well…the gonk would have probably finished Wrench off, anyway.↩
8 Who was this mysterious netrunner? I had some ideas, but too many cameos is too many cameos, so I didn’t actually ask the GM oracle. You decide!↩
9 I rolled the shantytown encounter randomly since this part of the encounter order (i.e. “beats”) is left to the GM to decide as to which one happens next. It was a brutal, and I recommend GMs be judicious in deciding when to place this one (or not *evil laughter.*) I kept whiffing rolls with Hardpoint, and made things worse by committing the deadliest of sins in RPGs: don’t split the party! As a result, Wrench’s death is completely on me.↩
10 Hey! You find food and drink items lying around in the video game all the time!↩
11 I considered the scene at Dakota’s as part of “downtime,” but I felt the need to flesh it out to give Wrench a proper goodbye, even if it’s a little melodramatic. I build on these events later. I even asked the GM oracle if the other characters could keep Wrench’s things (incl. the van.) PCs are like hyenas when it comes to their fallen choom’s stuff.↩
Bonus: Environmental Options
Cyberpunk RED and the CEMK have pretty robust rules for cover with some examples, but here are some additional options for cover and other environmental features that can spice up combat encounters.
- Aluminum shack: this counts as "Thin Steel" cover. At the GM's discretion, enough damage to the walls (about three sections,) could cause it to collapse for 6d6 damage, with a DV17 Athletics check to avoid.
- Barbed or concertina wire: causes1d6 damage to anyone trying to move into or through this space. In addition, the character must spend an action to untangle themselves.
- Billboard or sidewalk ad board: counts as "Thin Steel" cover; may glitch when hit, with potential, hilarious results.
- CHOOH2 canister: larger ones count as "Thin Steel" cover. Regardless of size, these explode for 6d6 damage in a 10m radius when destroyed.
- Large crate, plastic: counts as "Plaster/Foam/Plastic"; could have stuff inside, like a piñata! Hopefully not explosives!
- Large crate, wood: counts as "Thick Wood" cover. As an option, splintering shrapnel may cause 1d6 damage to anyone within 2m when destroyed.
- Holographic ad projector: ranged attacks against a character standing behind a hologram suffer a -1 penalty. Characters concealed by a holographic ad also have a +1 bonus to Stealth.
- Oil drums: counts as "Thin Steel" cover. See toxic waste below for toxic drums. CHOOH2 drums explode like canisters above.
- Power source: anyone taking cover near a power generator, transformer, or the like may take damage if it is destroyed. A CHOOH2 generator explodes (as above.) An electrical source shocks anyone within 2m for 3d6 damage to the body.
- Obscuring smoke, fog, or foliage: thin varieties of these penalize ranged attacks against a concealed character by -2, while thick varieties penalize ranged attacks by -4.
- Toxic waste: caustic chemicals cause 1d6 damage per round exposed. “Heeelp…meee…ooohhh…!” – Paul McCrane as Emil Antonowsky after being doused in toxic waste, Robocop (1987.)
- Vehicle, whole: use the vehicle’s SDP and use your judgment as to whether a destroyed part (like the gas tank or engine,) causes it to explode. Explosions function like a CHOOH2 canister.
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material based on the Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit is unofficial
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