Author's Note: I'm crossposting this from Questionable Questing so that others can view it. Each chapter will go up as I get to it until I've caught up with Questionable Questing. While I like to think I know everything that falls within the Mature rating I've given this story, I'm not infallible. As such, if something does not meet the guidelines of FFN and I'm notified, I will edit or remove such sections as needed. If this happens and you wish to view the uncut version, it will remain up on Questionable Questing. Further, I'm writing this for my enjoyment. Whether it's good or bad is subjective. I just write things. Sometimes they make sense.
Without further ado, I hope you enjoy what I've written.
V - Two months after arriving in Night City
When Jackie told me about a tech living in Heywood, I didn't expect to end up knocking on the door of a megabuilding apartment. I also didn't expect the woman who opened the door to be less than five feet tall, her head covered by a full helmet and mask combo, and holding a Carnage shotgun like it was a cheap kid's toy despite her small frame. My mind flashed back to what Jack had told me about her over the holo.
"Xeah's real skittish when it comes to people. Doesn't trust too many people in Night City, though she told me she has a bit of a soft spot for Nomads. She'll probably answer the door with iron in hand, so be sure to mention me by name. It'll get your foot in the door with her, but it won't earn her trust. That'll be on you. She works on guns and armor mostly, but lately she's been dipping into cyberware, and asked if I knew anyone who'd be interested. I figured you two would get along great. Good luck, hermana."
I cleared my throat, and hoped I wasn't about to get ripped in half by a shotgun loli.
"Jackie sent me. Said you were good with tech. Saw what you did with his jacket. Took a shot from an Igla right to the back and the worst he had was some bruises." I said calmly. Most people like an ego boost, right? God knows most gonks in NC run on that shit.
She stood unmoving for a second.
"It helped?" Her voice was a little unsteady, bordering on concern.
I nodded once.
"Yeah, was good as new after our ripper got a look at him."
The woman, Xeah, let out what sounded suspiciously like a sigh of relief, before taking a step back and to the side.
"Come inside, and take a seat."
Stepping inside, I found that the usual layout for megabuilding apartments had almost completely disappeared. Instead of the tv, couches, and coffee table, there was an L-shaped workbench with various tools laid on it. What looked like a copperhead was in pieces, a few oddly shaped symbols carved into the internals. Where a personal terminal usually was, instead was a large and old looking safe, completely analog instead of electric. Ironically, those were more secure nowadays than anything digital. Instead of a commercial vending machine, there was an actual kitchen set up, with an oven and a fridge. They weren't anything special, but the only other person I knew who had a kitchen setup was Mama Welles. Most others in NC stuck to vending machines and street vendors. The only place I could really sit other than the bed alcove was a small couch shoved up against one of the workbenches.
It was when I took a seat that I realized Xeah hadn't put down the Carnage, as she stood a short distance out of reach.
"I make guns and armor better than they are normally. For instance, my shotgun shoots three times more pellets than the regular Carnage, is a third of the weight, and has a third of the recoil. I can do this for just about any shotgun I get my hands on, and other things for other guns."
She took a deep breath, her chest expanding for only a moment before she let it out.
"What's most important to you in life, and why? Be honest."
My brow furrowed. What was this all of a sudden?
"There a point to this?"
Xeah nodded.
"Yeah. It's either this or Jackie's going to have to do a lot of vouching for you, trade a lot of favors."
I frowned, but gave the question some thought. Jack had stuck his neck out for me, and the thought of having a Carnage capable of the damage I was hearing was pretty tempting.
What did I value? It hadn't been too long since I left the Bakkers, but since then I'd met Jackie, Misty, Vik, and T-bug. Of the four of them, I only really knew Jackie. I talked to Misty every now and then, and I was racking up bills I needed to pay Vik, but I couldn't say that I truly knew them. As for T-bug… She and I didn't really talk outside of gigs.
I came to Night City because it seemed like a City of Opportunity. Still did, when I thought about it. There was work and opportunities here that I didn't hear about anywhere else. Money, fame, and respect.
"I want to be the best in Night City. Make my mark. That's what's important to me."
Xeah shifted, the Carnage lowering a bit.
"You want people to remember you? Know you existed?"
I winced slightly. Shit, that hit the nail right on the head. I nodded once, not trusting my voice.
Xeah finally put the Carnage down, letting it rest against the wall next to her, before walking past me to the workbench.
"You came to the wrong city for that. Mercs don't get remembered in this place, V. Gangoons don't get remembered in this place." I turned and found her placing a small box on the bench, before digging through it.
"Politicians, corpos, gangoons, mercs, cops, nomads… Fugitives… Nobody ever finds what they really want in this city." She turned on a music player while pulling an unloaded Lexington handgun from the box. A bit of classical music I hadn't heard before started playing as she disassembled the gun.
"How do you figure that? Make it sound like you've seen it before."
Her hands didn't stop as she grabbed various tools.
"I have. I see it in joy-toys too strung out or damaged to keep working. I see it in mercs desperately competing for even the most suicidal jobs. I see it in corpos killing each other off every day. Gangoons fighting the same turf war that's been fought for the last ten years. Politicians making exactly zero changes to Night City no matter who's elected. Fixers who keep struggling to stay on top of the ever shifting pile of contacts. Fugitives looking for a place to hide, only to realize that there's nowhere left to run." She took a strange looking chisel and started carving into the metal by hand. It had to take a crazy amount of strength to do that, but she was completely 'ganic. I couldn't help but watch with rapt attention.
"There was a group about a year or so back. A bunch of mercs with nothing to lose and everything to gain." The music was beginning to swell, but she sounded sad as she spoke.
"What happened to 'em?"
"The first of their crew died on a job hitting Biotechnica. She found a file on a medicine called Securicine. It killed her mother, and she wanted to make sure Biotechnica couldn't do it to anyone else ever again. She died, and Biotechnica's stock only fell by three percentage points. They recovered a month later." She turned the slide of the gun over, and started carving on another side.
"About a year later, they had two more netrunners to replace her. Then their cyberware supplier got killed in a drive by. She had a kid she was trying to get into the corpo life so he wouldn't have the life she did. He ended up working with the crew." The music continued to build, and she continued to carve.
"It wasn't too long later that their techie got killed. They were just walking along when he decided to mess with a guy, just a little. Turns out the guy was a cyberpsycho, and that was that. Their techie was gone, leaving his sister behind." Her voice shook a bit. Did she know these guys? Is that what this was?
"They kept working, trying to make do without him. Their fixer was working them hard to finish a job. And they did, for the most part. Got the guy they were after, and were getting the information they needed to get paid. Then their leader went cyberpsycho due to the stress of the job, his friends dying, and his implants being too much. Got himself, his output, and the guy they were after killed in a Maxtac raid. The kid who joined them? He had a sandevistan that pretty much guaranteed cyberpsychosis for anyone else who didn't have as high a cyberware tolerance. The kid watched the guy who had all but become his father figure die, before eventually implanting those same arms into himself. I think it was sentimentalism that made him do it." The music was filling the apartment now.
"There were only five of them left at that point. Then their fixer betrayed them. Turns out both the kid and one of their netrunners were really valuable to Arasaka. The former as a test subject, and the latter as an escaped asset." The music had what sounded like an old age alarm go off, static between that and the violins.
"The kid implanted an incredibly experimental piece of cyberware known as the Cyber Skeleton. Anti gravity, flight, multiple arms for firing weapons, it might've even had missiles if I remember right. The netrunner was drugged and kidnapped to be taken back to Arasaka. The crew fought their way out of the ambush, with the other netrunner having split off after helping the fixer betray them. She would later get gunned down by a dumpster by two hired gangoons."
I remembered the story she was telling me. There had been some sort of chase throughout Night City, culminating in a part of Corpo Plaza being destroyed. Was Xeah there?
"They made it to the City Center and saved the netrunner, only for Adam Smasher himself to show up. He killed their rimbo first. She was a sweet but mildly psychotic girl. The three of them that were left tried to fight back, but they never stood a chance. Using the last of his sanity, as the kid had been dipping in and out of cyberpsychosis, he gave the other two a chance to get away. The driver, and the netrunner. They did. He didn't. Congratulations David, you got a drink at the Afterlife named after you. Was it worth losing every friend you had, your mother, your body, and your sanity?"
I was distinctly uncomfortable now. I hadn't come here to listen to a sob story.
"Is there a point to this story? Were you there or something?"
She was reassembling the gun now, the song having finished and switched to something else, what sounded like a classic guitar.
"No, I wasn't there when it happened. The point is that it was just one story of Night City. There's dozens like it, though. If you want to be remembered, you're going to lose everything first. You'll lose Jackie, or Jackie will lose you, or maybe neither of you will ever get that far." She looked over the Lexington once more, before walking back around the workbench before sitting down next to me, the unloaded gun in her hands.
"Or maybe I'm wrong, and you'll both become living legends, beating the odds that have hundreds of mercs dying every year." Her voice was quiet now. She offered me the gun, along with a few unloaded magazines for it.
"It's called Promise. The bullets shot out of it hit harder, are more accurate, and are nearly silent. If you take it, then you're promising me you'll be careful. That you'll do your very best and not chrome up too fast, or take jobs that are too much for you. I don't want you or Jackie to be just another story in Night City."
I looked at the gun as I took both it and the magazines. I hadn't noticed it before, but the top end of the gun looked like it had a few words engraved onto the left and right sides in silver threading. 'A promise made' and 'A promise kept.'
It was while I was distracted that I felt a pair of arms wrap around me, and I looked up to find that Xeah had wrapped me in a hug, her small frame forcing her to pull me down a bit. Huh… When did I last get one of those?
"You made a promise. So you better keep it." She let me go then, before standing up from the couch and walking back to the workbench, her footsteps soft on the carpet. I looked back down at the gun for a moment. I hadn't seen her do much other than carve away with her chisel, but maybe she'd already done some work on it beforehand? She had pulled it out of a box, so maybe it was one of her already finished works. I'd take it to a range to check it out later. Her voice pulled me out of my thoughts.
"If you want any other work done I'll have to start charging for it, and you'll have to tell me what you want. I don't work on building cyberware, more modifying it before it's been implanted. Usually it helps the adaptation process. Armor and guns are fine, though. I can even work with things as simple as cotton t-shirts if that's what you have or want to use." She was now grabbing and working on individual pieces of the Copperhead I'd seen upon first walking in. At the moment she was just slowly shaving down a small part of the grip, presumably to make it lighter.
I thought about what I might ask for. I had actually come in wanting to get a custom made gun, considering when I'd tried I had barely managed to cobble together a Lexington of my own, but there were a number of kinks I had yet to work out. The fact that she'd just given me one, then made me promise not to get killed…
"Maybe something like what you gave Jackie? I don't have much in regards to eddies, but I'll pay you back the difference later, I promise."
Xeah looked over at me for a moment, before a sort of tension seemed to bleed from her shoulders.
"Of course. Would you like a jacket, or a shirt?"
Xeah told me that it would take her two days to finish the jacket she was working on for me. Once it was finished it would supposedly be good at regulating temperature, and it would be rated for pistols and shotguns, as well as rifles and light machine guns in a pinch, though I'd have to bring it to her for repairs if I ran into that kind of trouble. As for the gun she made, fortunately there was a range I could go to nearby.
It was at the range just on the edge of Santo Domingo that I found out Xeah wasn't kidding when she told me what the gun could do. I was hitting the large majority of my shots, the targets being torn to shreds while the wall behind it was actually receiving a bit more wear and tear. The best part was, the gun was damn near silent the whole time, every bullet shooting out of the gun with a muffled 'click' only for a louder click to tell me when the gun was empty.
When I finally called Jackie and told him how it went, he was speechless, for all of two seconds.
"Xeah hugged you? Damn, she must'a really liked you, hermana. First time I met her, she had a Carnage held up against a Sixth Street's pecker and was about to flatline 'em. Nearly turned on me too when I got involved. Took her about a week afterward to even start to warm up to me. Speaking of Sixth Street, come on back to the Coyote. Padre's got another gig lined up for us.
The build is NSFW, so if you want that, go to Questionable Questing.