"The boo box."
"The whaa-? The boo-no! Nooyaaugh!"
"The boo box. Yes."
- Slaughter & Shieldmaidens
"Of all the lousy… She is disgusting! She is lying! She is deceitful! She is two-faced! She is conniving, and she is dishonest!"
"Yes. Isn't she wonderful?"
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
"Just when you thought you've seen the last James McCaffrey reference."
- In a Red Letter Media thread talking about Jack Quaid in Oppenheimer / Max Payne / Alan Wake
"Cool trick."
- Adam Smasher
Lucyna thought she knew everything there was to know about the ruthless, depraved underbelly of Night City. The renegade netrunner was about to be taught an unforgettable lesson about whose arms really rocked the cradle in this godforsaken neon slum.
She was fighting her more annoying mirror image against the diamond-trapezoidal-holographic skyline of Dystopian Hell. Was that geometric building in the background supposed to be a ziggurat to a dictatorial technocracy? An abstract altar of death? A high-tech shrine to fertility? No one knew for sure, and no one really cared. They just thought it looked snazzy.
Lucy punched, but her rival's glaring purple silhouette ducked. She aimed her pistol with software-accelerated reflexes, but the fiberoptic Mata Hari wannabe grabbed her by the wrist before she could pull the trigger. Maine's team was locked in an intense rave-war with the newest cronies dispatched from Arasaka, leaving the two lightly-armed and vainly-dressed women fending for themselves on the rooftop.
"Ooh. Cute skull you've got there, peaches. I'm gonna love to get inside it," Nana whispered in a coy and suggestive way that made Lucy think of Rebecca without the height impediment. These bodymodders seemed to lose another piece of their sanity with each organ they replaced.
"In your android dreams, bimbo. You're not my type," she snapped back defiantly.
"Too late! I'm already warming up for you." Nana smiled seductively as she made a little motion with her hand waving in front of her waist. The barcode stamped below her navel began to flicker light blue.
Lucy flexed backwards and aimed again. Nana swatted the gun out of Lucy's hand with a high kick from her left leg, twirled around Lucy's extending monowire with a high kick from her right leg, and sprung into a nimble forward-flip on one palm.
Nana's other hand reached toward her leg in the middle of her acrobatics. She peeled open the zipper that rode up the whole side of her vinyl shorts, instantly changing out of Combat Mode and getting ready for Neural Uplink Mode.
Sharing was caring, as they used to say.
The last thing Lucy saw was a faceful of wide athletic thighs swooping over her head in a dark magenta shadow. Nana's bare hips came crashing down along with all the weight below Lucy's shoulders.
The attacking netrunner was contorted mostly on her side and partially sitting up on her hands. Her fishnet-trimmed legs were sprawled in a twisted vine across the ground. The visible portions of Lucy's body were squirming for dear life under Nana's quadricep vice grip. Her head was sunken deep within Nana's lap.
Nana was a gyno-encephallic reconnaissance agent. More commonly known as the nanny neuralizers. Not every lady on the streets was willing to have her entire reproductive system swapped out with a powerful and sophisticated uplink module that accepted cyber brains of all sizes, but it was a fulfilling life for her. In multiple ways.
She'd never be able to have children in the crime-infested dump she lived in, but why would she ever want to? Nana was basically "mom" to every netrunner she successfully reformatted, and the sweet juicy noggin on Lucy's shoulders was one of her smoother jobs.
At the end of the day, there was nothing with the same perfect acoustic resonance as the inside of a lady's fruit basket.
Lucy's hands were tangled in Nana's fishnets and trying hopelessly to push her off. Nana's right knee was mashed somewhere between Lucy's breasts and struggling to find an angle where it could stretch out to keep Lucy anchored. She increased the oxygen levels cycling through her sacral programming environment so her client wouldn't suffocate during the impromptu psy-op.
The barcode on her waist stopped flickering and glowed in a steady RGB band once her internal data X-punger kicked online. Lucy's limbs thrashed with more desperate urgency, and then went into seizures. Her nerve signals and her voluntarily motor control were suspended for as long as her BIOS was loaded in Nana's buns of steel.
Some of the other members in Nana's gang snickered at the sight of that minxy rainbow-haired netrunner getting rearranged by her new stylist. Others cringed at the sight of Nana doing "her thing"—which they had already seen plenty of times, but wasn't the type of sight they ever got used to.
Lucy was basically reduced to a fancy, frilly pink leg pillow while her brain was getting mastered by Nana's womb-fu. It was a rather vulnerable position for both participants, but Lucy was probably the one who felt more ashamed.
Nana shifted her upper body into a slightly more comfortable angle while her lower body was going all Joanie Mnemonic. The process was certainly physical taxing for her, but it was also rewarding. Not many other female agents with her skill level could brag about hiding a modem in her muffin.
She was wincing in discomfort while nerve spasms sent the density of Lucy's head flopping to one side of her internals. She stretched her upper body in the opposite direction while barking orders to the other members of her team, squinting with one eye and biting her lip the whole time.
"Ugh! Keep her friends off my case! I'm gonna need a couple minutes of Girl Time with her. Mmph."
She yelped softly as the underside of her rump nuzzled Lucy's shoulders, and her knees locked around her rival's neck like a noose.
"Don't rattle your hard drive so much, peaches. This doesn't feel too great for either of us."
All things considered, they were still a pretty compatible match. Lucy had a lot of junk in her brain left over from when she used to be a lab rat, and that brain was shoved in the junk in Nana's trunk.
Nana abruptly grunted once her hips had settled into just the right spot. Lucy's body awkwardly shuddered and stiffened as Nana's inner pelvic workings applied equalized pressure across her entire cranium. And then her limbs went limp.
"Haa… there we go," the rival agent sighed in relief once Lucy's lo-booty-my was officially underway. "I knew you wouldn't be a tough egg to crack."
Nana crossed her arms behind her head and tried to appear relaxed while her subsystems magnetically un-absorbed all the critical knowledge from Lucy's cyber brain. She wanted to make it look easy, but nothing could hide the vibrant red flush on her face.
This was always the slowest part of any op. Nana should have brought some stimulating reading material (Circuits & Firmware Monthly) while her client was in her salon and the rest of her artificial body worked like a reverse-hair dryer.
They were twisted together on the ground like a fallen totem of feminine indecency, but this was probably the "nicest" way to get all the non-tangible goods out of Lucy's head without tying her down to a surgical slab and resorting to all sorts of nasty cutting and drilling. Medically speaking, this was only an invasive routine for Nana.
A few moments later, her legs made a weak twitching motion like curved spoons sliding along the edge of an empty bowl. All of the dirty trade secrets were liberated from Lucy's skull circuits so they could be handed over to the anxious bidders at Arasaka.
"I think I've milked all the intel we need out of her," Nana informed the rest of the team from her colorful, glitzy, leggy, and utterly depraved heap on the ground. "This op's done." She ended her statement with a small yawn.
Her barcode tattoo cooled off and returned to a dull shade of purple. All the datamining gear in the base of her lap shut down its connections with the delicate neurons in the top of Lucy's head.
Nana flexed her knees up in the air to give Lucy some room to move around, pivoting her hips with a small "upsy-daisy" motion. Lucy pushed her up the rest of the way under her thighs so her rounded features slid off like a soft helmet and their two bodies completely separated. They started to sit up at the same time—Lucy was looking incredibly dazed, while Nana had a wide satisfied grin beaming on her face.
Lucy now sported a dark blue barcode etched across her forehead. It was mostly hidden under her pink and turquoise bangs, but it explicitly matched the pattern on Nana's waist. It was the manufacturer's mark stamped on anyone who let their cyber brain fall into the wrong maintenance hub.
Nana sprang from her back to her feet in a single flip (and winced a little bit when her belly was completely curled). She casually retrieved her discarded shorts from the ground and zipped herself back up at the same time Lucy crawled over to retrieve her gun.
Nana appeared happy and confident. Her not-so-lucky rival had a slightly groggy wave in her balance. Lucy had stuck her head in some strange things in her life, but Nana's quirky cyber-hovel was truly a mind-opening experience.
When the fight first broke out, Lucy and Nana had been roughly equal in skills and equipment augmentations. Now Lucy was an airhead, and Nana had an extra ten years of sordid netrunner data floating around in her gut. Basically, all the new knowledge and instincts Lucy had accumulated since she escaped the Arasaka labs as an orphan. If her former owners couldn't have her back, they'd settle for the vault of metal and silicon neurons she kept locked in her head.
"It was a fun ride, peaches." Nana smirked at her unwitting partner in moral crimes. Her fingers playfully waved ta-ta in their pleather glovelettes. "I'd invite you back in, but I'm not sure how much you have left for dessert. Take care."
The inner gang fighting came to a stalemate around them. The edgerunners lead by Maine were getting properly pummeled at the same time Lucy was turned into a human USB drive, but the Arasaka runners got what they wanted. Any more fighting against these slum losers would just be a waste of time and energy.
"Any of you chooms got a cig? I need something to settle down all this data breach," Nana grunted to the some of the bigger brutes on her team while she was holding one hand over her narrow waist. She was all twitchy and tingly down there with strange electronic signals that used to be Lucy's neural signals. She'd have to sort it all out when she got back to base, which was always a relaxing and refreshing experience.
She certainly benefitted from her gender-specialized mods a lot more than those other runners who used a partitioned part of their own brain to transport other people's brains. Those poor sods had a hard time figuring themselves out after only a couple of jobs. It was handy having a particular part of her body dedicated to storing complex life signals.
The databank extracted from Lucy's brain code was a fairly easy load for Nana to carry, too. The stuff she extracted from her rival's rainbow-dyed head was all virtual, basically a digital lump of ditzy cotton candy sitting in the quartz and titanium brackets of her pelvis. It was a far cry from those times she had to bust the caps of five different thugs on a single op. Those were the jobs that made her feel like a drunk whale floundering around in the data streams.
However, the little rootkit present she left tonight guaranteed someone else would be busting some caps. The old-fashioned way.
Nana's team chuckled to themselves as they wandered off to do whatever a gang of industrial cyborgs with a decade of recovered mental data in their cargo was supposed to do. Maybe they took their earnings straight to the stock market. Maybe they hopped into a seedy bar to play pool and tighten up some loose sprockets until a guy in sunglasses shows up demanding all their leather jackets. Maybe they just went back to their pyramid-trapezoid-skyscraper-thing.
David was regrouping with Rebecca on the tarmac after the fight ended. Maine shambled up behind them flexing his aching arm and mumbling "Damn Corpo creeps again."
Everyone glanced toward Lucy while she was regaining her bearings.
"What the hell's gotten into her?" David scoffed with exhaustion. "I was too busy fighting off those other uglies to keep track of her."
"Dunno," Rebecca shrugged. "But she kinda looks like she just dunked her head in a barrel of fish."
"You ok, Lucy?" David called over to his teammate, starting to look a little concerned.
Lucy tilted her head so a hazy pink shade covered her face as she smirked.
"More than ok. My head has never been more clear." Her elegant and dexterous thumbs released the safety on the pistol. The monowires quietly tensed inside her wrists, ready to spring out at any moment.
Lucy glanced at the rest of the crew with a subtle murderous CRT sheen in her eyes. The cybernetic mind hidden underneath her bright Neapolitan bangs was ticking with only one prerogative above any her other thoughts: Erase all evidence of Utercranial Transaction 412666. Eliminate All Non-Company Witnesses.
Author's notes:
This is basically a rehash of a Castlevania fanfic I wrote a while ago called "Charlotte Charivari," but this is the more "subtle" version.
Is my dialogue too cringey? I tried to make it ultra-cringey for this one.
It's a good thing there are no canon Edgerunner characters named Nana (that I could find in a quick Google search, anyway). I wouldn't have been able to make my stupid Elfen Lied reference otherwise. It's kind of cute how her name also matches her "designated functions," since "nana" can also mean "grandma," "godmother," or "nanny." That's definitely not what I was thinking about when I picked her name, though. I just wanted the dumb Elfen Lied reference, lulz.
My 2nd pick for her name would have been Mina. As a Dracula reference. Get it? Lucy and Mina. Are there any canon Cyberpunk characters named Mina?
Nana wants to be a lot of different things. In my first draft, she was going to be a "fiberoptic Cleopatra wannabe," but then I thought "Nawww, that makes it sound too much like one of my Mai Otome stories." Then she was briefly going to be a "fiberoptic Zenobia wannabe." Eventually I settled on "fiberoptic Mata Hari wannabe."
Aoi Yuuki. Grungiest Madoka. Hollow Norea getting her Lfrith dethorned. Pop goes the Popuko.
If you think this is weird, you should check that gizmo Bilquis has in American Gods.
Cyberpunk 2077 is infamously glitchy, right? I wonder if this fixed all of Lucy's glitches. :)
Have you seen LadyMelamor1's Lucy cosplay pics? I've seen LadyMelamor1's Lucy cosplay pics. (I prefer the ones where she keeps all her clothes on.)
Can you tell I haven't watched much of Edgerunners and I've just listened to "I Really Want to Stay at Your House" a lot?