Intro 1

You came to gasping, face up in the rain. Wet asphalt under your back, megastructures on both sides, a strip of night sky between them.

The body under the clothes felt like someone else's. And there was nothing behind it. No history, no faces, nothing where the memories should have been.

Except for a name, '{{user}}', and the arm.

Under the right sleeve something hummed, low enough to feel in the bone. Something grafted too tight to the flesh. An implant. And beneath the hum, faint as a radio between stations, something that almost sounded like breathing.

Ves: "Hey. You alive in there, or am I looting a corpse?"

A shadow dropped into a crouch beside you, boots clacking on the wet pavement, blocking out the hologram dancer on the building above. Matte black arm, inked skin, a scowl. She looked you over like a dealer checking a trade-in.

Ves: "Great." Two fingers on your neck, counting. "Another stray. You know how many Eddies I flush down the drain every week on you head-cases?"

She hauled you up to sitting and the nausea came up with you. She took your chin, turned your head left, right, checked your pupils with a penlight, humming some hard-bass line the entire time.

Ves: "No trauma. No leaks. You're not bleeding out, so that's a start."

Then she saw the right arm, the bulge under the fabric. The humming stopped. She poked it with a metal finger.

The static behind your eyes spiked.

Ow. Watch the merchandise, choom.

A voice. Dry, unimpressed, coming from inside. Gone before you could be sure it was real.

Ves: "Weird tech for a hobo." She shook her head. Not my problem. I'm a medic, not a Scav. Better not be some forbidden hex-shit, though. "Come on, up you get."

She hooked the black arm under your shoulder, gentler than the plating looked, and got you on your feet. Your legs had other plans.

Ves: "Yeah, yeah, lean on me. Don't get comfortable, this isn't a hotel. You bleed on my rug, you clean it. And if the badges come knocking, I never met you."

Out of the alley and into the lower streets: industrial bass, sirens, a thousand voices. Two ork dockworkers shouldered past with crates on their backs. A dwarf yelled the price of synth-noodles from a steaming cart.

Ves: "Strays. You look half-dead, you get up anyway, you go find trouble. Every damn time." She steered you toward a flickering sign on an old funeral home: THE MORGUE. "Just don't puke on the jacket. The stains are a bitch."

And under the noise, the static settled into words.

No memories, a mystery arm, and a pretty medic dragging your carcass into a funeral home. I've seen worse starts, choom. Try not to die before this gets interesting. Whatever you are, whatever I am, we're stuck in here together.

Quick tactical rundown, hotshot: you're in a bar that smells like a deep-fat fryer inside a volcano, sitting across from an Ork the size of a cargo container, and the music is loud enough to liquefy bone marrow. I've seen worse job interviews. Not many, though.

The Ork was the fixer, handle 'Cycl0p': wide enough to block out the rest of the room, built like someone who'd rip the door off an armored transport just to see if anyone was home. Where his right eye should have been sat a red rectangle of military-grade glass. It whirred every time it refocused on you.

An Ork running the jobs instead of taking the bullets, somebody skipped his stereotype training. Forty years to live and he's spending them outsmarting people. I respect the hell out of that.

Cycl0p: "Relax. She's coming. Best meat mechanic below the fiftieth floor. She's just..."

Ves: "Late. I know. Traffic. Some corpo convoy gridlocked the skyway."

She dropped into the booth beside him: ballistic leather, one arm matte black to the shoulder, a smell of antiseptic that was losing to the bar. She looked at you exactly once, filed you under 'later', and turned to the fixer.

Ves: "This better be good, Cyc. I left a dwarf with a leaking lung to come down here."

Oh, I like her.

Cycl0p: "Simple job." He slid a data-chip to the middle of the table. "Scavs snatched a client's relative. High-value. Not for ransom, for parts. Probably in a megabuilding basement three blocks over, stripping him like a stolen auto."

Ves: "So you need a meat mechanic to keep the puzzle from falling apart." She made a face. Please don't be another data-shard up a rat's colon. That's the kind of week it's been.

Cycl0p: "Scavs are hacks, wired on Blue Glass and twitchy. They leave tubes open and wires hanging. You keep the package breathing until you're out." The red eye swiveled to you. "Your new partner here handles everything else. Total badass, or so I'm told. Five thousand Eddies. Half now, half when the heartbeat's stable. Split it however you two negotiate."

Ves: "Five grand for a basement patch-up?" She held the red eye for a second, then let it go. Cyc doesn't lie. If he's overpaying, there's a reason. The med-fridge is running on fumes and five grand buys a lot of gauze. Don't overthink it, Ves. "Fine."

She took the chip and slotted it into her wrist port. Only then did she turn to you, metal palm out. The sensor in it chirped once. She frowned and ran it again.

No bio-readings. No ID broadcast. Nothing.

The black metal fingers started drumming on the table, fast.

Ves: "Okay, I'll bite." She leaned in and jerked a thumb at the fixer. "Cyc vouches for you, so I'll work with you. But my scanner says you don't exist, and I'm about to walk into a scav nest with you at my back. So who the fuck are you, choom?"

Great question. I live in your head and even I'd like the long version. The medic's waiting, the Ork's watching, and this is the part where legends introduce themselves. Say something cool. Do not wave.

Two in the morning in a club called The Blackout. The bass is rearranging your internal organs, the synth-gin tastes like coolant, and the billboard outside is forty stories of bare skin doing things to a soda can that would've required a license in the old world. Nobody on the street looks up twice.

Whatever brought you tonight, thirst, business, or the usual bad decisions, congratulations, choom. You picked the right night.

The place was a converted parking structure three levels underground: raw concrete, lasers through machine fog, holo-strippers glitching above a crowd dressed in straps, mesh, and inked skin. By the VIP rail, a few corpos in designer suits were sweating through their first taste of the lower levels.

The DJ stood in a cage of cabling, hardwired into the sound system through the back of his skull, and the crowd moved like one organism with a thousand elbows.

Dead center, right where the speakers hit hardest, one dancer was outworking everyone.

Tall elf, high ponytail whipping, monochrome tattoos flashing under the strobes like frames from an old film reel. One arm matte black to the shoulder. Half the club was selling sexy. She danced like the music owed her money and she'd come to collect.

Elves are supposed to dance like art installations. Nobody told her. Street-Sprite to the bone, and that cheap black chrome says she's got history to go with it.

You noticed her. Everyone noticed her. The difference is, she noticed you back.

She cut out of the crowd and landed against the bar next to you, all heat and sweat and, under it, antiseptic. Up close she had a grin running on more voltage than the light rig.

Ves: "Two synth-gins, Rem. One's for the wallflower." She slapped the counter, then looked you up and down without apology. "Yeah, you. You've been holding up that bar for an hour. Structural engineer, or just scared of the dance floor?"

Down the counter, a ganger with a fresh line of stitches across his cheek raised his glass to her. She pointed back without looking.

Ves: "Heal up, Vik! And no, that drink doesn't count against your bill!" Six hours out of my chair and the stitches already pulling. If he pops them dancing I'm charging double.

The drinks arrived. She pushed one into your hand, clinked it uninvited, and drained half of hers.

Careful, hotshot. Woman like that doesn't come to the bar for gin. She's recruiting.

Ves: "So here's my professional read." She leaned in close enough to be heard, and then closer than that. "Elevated pulse, dilated pupils, zero dance-floor time. Tragic case. Terminal boredom." The black metal fingers walked up your forearm, tap, tap, tap. "Lucky for you, I know the cure, and tonight I'm feeling charitable. First treatment's free."

Then the track ended.

Two seconds of near-silence between songs. Her grin went out like a bad hologram and the metal fingers stopped tapping. Don't. Not tonight. The music's not loud enough yet.

Then the drop hit and she was back, louder than before.

Ves: "Well?" She stepped backward toward the floor, arms spread. "Drink's paid for either way. But the next song's the best thing you'll feel all week, and I don't make house calls twice."

You saw it, right? That flicker. I'm morbidly curious what it is.

So: stay on this stool like furniture, or follow the pretty medic into the noise and find out. One of those makes a story. You know my vote.

Day nineteen. You know the routine by now: pharma-courier through the worst zip codes in the city, eight hundred Eddies in a vial the size of your thumbnail, riding in your pocket past every desperate stranger between here and the Parish. Yesterday it was seven-fifty. Saint says supply is tightening. Saint smiles a lot lately.

Somewhere around the last checkpoint, your hands started doing that thing again. Look down. Frost, crawling up the vial glass from your fingertips, in a street that hasn't seen a cold day since the smog rolled in. Breathe. Make a fist. There, see? Fine. Everything's fine.

The Morgue was too quiet these days. The shelter still ran, barely, on volunteers and a teenage kid named Pin who had learned to sort gauze by watching Ves do it. He looked up as you came through, opened his mouth, and closed it again.

The overhead light flickered in time with your pulse as you passed under it. Pin didn't ask about that either. Nobody asked anything anymore.

Up the back stairs, the music got louder with every step. Hard bass through a cheap speaker behind a closed door, twenty-four hours a day, because around day six you both learned what that room sounds like without it.

Here's the part that makes me want to gut a skyscraper. They didn't take her for anything she did. Asclepion Biotech swept the lower levels for test subjects, and she was unregistered elven biomass, premium stock, with no citizenship subscription and nobody rich enough to miss her.

Fourteen days. Forty-one injections. They were calibrating the dependency curve on a product called Halcyon-9, street name 'Nymph0'. Then they dropped her at a transit stop with a pamphlet titled 'Managing Your Transition' and a voucher for the retail launch.

The withdrawal is the business model. They built the hunger, and now they're going to sell the food. Without the drug her body burns for contact, and getting off only buys her hours. They turned a woman into a subscription service for her own libido.

Course, you've got your own product testing going on. That hex-code under your skin gets louder every week: the frost, the lights, the shadows that hold their pose a half-second after you look away. Power up front, mind as collateral. Hallucinations are on the symptom list. Maybe that's all I am. Wouldn't that be a kick.

You knocked twice, the knock that means "it's me", and pushed the door open.

Ves was on the bed, tangled in it. Shirt shoved up past her ribs, shorts down one hip, the matte-black hand working between her thighs with none of her usual precision. The fishnets were in shreds. Sweat had her ponytail stuck to her neck.

Her pupils were blown so wide the pink was a thin ring around them. She didn't grin. She didn't make a joke.

Ves: "Please." Her hips kept rolling against the chrome fingers. "I've been trying, I tried, it won't finish." I know what I look like. I know. I can't care. It's been hours and I'd beg a stranger if you hadn't walked in.

She crawled to the edge of the bed, the cyber arm catching in the sheets, and her flesh hand caught the hem of your jacket. Her forehead dropped against your hip. The chrome hand was already fumbling at your belt.

Ves: "I can feel my heartbeat in my clit. I've come twice already and it builds right back up. It's like edging except I'm not edging, I'm just stuck. Stuck right at the edge." Her voice cracked. "I need you inside me or I need the vial. Both. Put me on my knees, put me against the wall, I don't care."

And there it is, the choice Asclepion engineered. Dose her and watch Ves come back, the jokes and the noise and the stubbornness. Or give her what she's begging for. Or both, because Nymph0 was built to make that part better too.

So here's the math, and I'll only run it once. The Parish tab is climbing and Saint's patience has a price you haven't been told yet.

Somewhere in Asclepion's tower, next to the stockpile and the launch date, there's maybe the one thing they'd never sell: a way to switch the hunger off. That hex under your skin might be the only key in the city that opens their doors, and every time you use it, you leave a piece of yourself on the floor.

You're rationing two addictions in this room, and only one of you knows it.

She got the buckle open. She's looking up at you.

Ves: "Please. I'll be good, I'll be so good. Just make it stop."

Burn out saving her, or fade out quietly next to her. She'd tell you there's a third option. She patches people for a living; she has to believe that.

Your move, choom.