Chapter 9
Career Moves
After Orion left, I sat there pondering the situation. I was dead tired and my nerves were so shot that I was jumping at the slightest noise. I really wanted to go home as well however, I needed to make sure that everything went well first. I really didn’t think it was proper to leave like that after dropping a wounded at Dr. Asano’s doorstep. Meeting the mobster coming here might prove troublesome but I’d cross that bridge when I’d get there.
A small part of me was excited for unlocking new Qualities but my choices throughout the day were gnawing at me. In some sense I was sure I’d get used to living in world but I still felt bewildered and guilty.
Shooting the ganger at the burger joint was something I had managed to successfully repress by justifying my actions as necessary or even heroic to an extent. The amazement at unlocking new skills and improving myself was something that also helped. However, facing a second life threatening situation within the same say left me deeply pondering my choices and motivations.
On one hand I was horrified by what I had done and how easy it was to get caught up in a life of crime and a potentially short lived one at that. On the other, I was amazed at how naturally it had come to me. When you live your life in relative safety and stability you almost never think about these kinds of thing and even if you do, you’d always imagine yourself able to make the perfectly moral and safe choices.
I was still focused on finding some sort of regular job and working towards a normal life. But with the possibilities presented to me by the System, maybe I could claw a better life for myself and even improve the lives of others. After all, isn’t a chance like this what I always dreamed of?
*New Journal entry unlocked*
“Huh?”
I opened my Journal in a flash, curious to see what that was about.
Job Hunting Find and hold a job for at least a week. Reward: 2 Karma.
“Damn System, I know.” Sighing loudly, I closed the Journal.
Feeling myself get nowhere with my musings but with my conscience somewhat assuaged, I decided to peek at my character sheet.
Opening the sheet, I saw the Qualities section highlighted and proceeded to click on it without hesitation. While I was expecting some new options, I didn’t expect the sheer amount. There were 14 qualities available for purchase, all at the cost of 2-3 Karma. The cost led me to believe that the more Karma I had, the more Qualities would be unlocked which really tickled my gaming instincts.
Refocusing myself, I took a good look at the list.
Agile Defender Cost: 2 Karma Speed kills, but quickness and agility can be the key to avoiding a speedy death. You get a bonus to dodging when deliberately focusing on avoiding attacks.
Animal Empathy Cost: 3 Karma Paging Dr. Doolittle. This quality gives you a natural knack for working with animals. This affects all attempts to influence or control any animal, including Awakened species.
Common Sense Cost: 3 Karma "Common sense is not so common" as they say. It’s nothing supernatural, just a keen sense of knowing when something is just a bad idea. Whenever you attempt doing something extremely foolish, you get a sense of wrongness a maximum number of times a day equal to your Edge rating.
Intimidating Presence Cost: 2 Karma Something about you commands attention. People who deal with you feel a sense of apprehension, making it more difficult for them to resist attempts at intimidation.
Gifted Healer Cost: 2 Karma
People always said you were insightful to other's problems. You get a bonus to any First Aid and Medicine attempts whether by normal or magical means when dealing with diagnosis and treatment.
Hair Trigger Cost: 2 Karma You may be the reserved type but when it comes to competition, your excitement can't be contained. When faced with any sort of stand-off you are more likely to act first.
Hawk Eyes Cost: 3 Karma 20/20 vision is for chumps. Your natural vision is so keen that you can identify a face 100 meters away without binoculars or spot a spent casing in a shadowy crack at ten meters. You have a bonus to any perception attempts and environmental modifiers that obstruct vision affect you less. This quality is part of your natural eyes and is not compatible with electronic vision enhancements and/or cyber or bioware augmentations or replacements.
Night Vision Cost: 3 Karma The name says it all. This quality provides you with low-light vision. Thanks to the extremely light-sensitive nature of the eye, you have difficulty with perception when faced with strong glare.
Outdoorsman Cost: 3 Karma You are often described as woodsy. You feel as comfortable in wilderness and rural environments as you would in your home town. You gain a natural sense for tracking prey and always know which way is North.
Profiler Cost: 3 Karma If you know someone well enough, you can often guess at their actions. Given enough information about someone, you are able to get into their head and know what buttons to push and how to manipulate them. With an appropriate dossier gathered by an intermediate Matrix search and one hour to study it, you gain a bonus on all social tests regarding that person
Speed Demon Cost: 2 Karma Pushing your vehicle to its limits makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up but in a good way. You feel alive, alert and ready to do anything. You get a bonus on all piloting tests.
Speed Reading Cost: 2 Karma When a professor offered an open-book final that could count as one hundred percent of your grade, you covered a year's tuition by betting you could ace it without ever attending a class. With this quality you can read through a full page of text (about 800 words) in five seconds. The information read is not memorized but you gain a basic understanding of the contents.
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Too Pretty To Hit Cost: 2 Karma It's more about force of personality than actually being pretty. You have a presence about you that keeps people from shooting straight. This quality allows your Charisma modifier to also affect any attempts at avoiding attacks.
Will to Live Cost: 3 Karma per rank (Max 3 ranks) Having a reason to go on can make all the difference. For each rank in Will to Live, you need to sustain more damage before dying. They do not raise the threshold to become unconscious or incapacitated.
Damn! Those were some pretty cool options.
What really stood out to me was that if I were to take the writing at face value, these qualities wouldn’t just provide simple bonuses but would also change some aspect of either my character of physiology. While they seemed to be of differing amounts of utility, all would provide a noticeable change.
Even though I wished I could have them all, effectively, I could only pick one with the Karma I had available.
While some might prove situationally stronger, I thought that my best choice would be a Quality that would provide the most general utility for now. With that in mind some options I dismissed out of hand.
Since I wasn’t planning on standing there and trying to dodge attacks, Agile Defender was out of the question. Animal Empathy, while cool, seemed useless for now. Gifted Healer was just meh. Profiler seemed useful but extremely situational. Speed Demon was out since I didn’t even have a vehicle. And finally, Too Pretty to Hit gave almost the same utility as Agile Defender.
Having knocked out 6 choices already, I moved on to the rest. Hair Trigger, was the easiest to dismiss. While it would be applicable to more situations than just combat, I wasn’t sure how useful acting first would be at my certain level of skill. Also, I was kinda worried that it would change my personality to be more competitive as mentioned in the skill description.
Intimidating presence was much of the same. It would certainly be nice to be taken more seriously, especially when dealing with the more unsavory types of people. However, the rest simply won out in terms of variety or utility.
Outdoorsman was tempting for sure. Having a better sense of direction and being able to track prey was pretty cool. However, I didn’t have any plans to leave the city for now which would make Outdoorsman of limited utility for now.
While Common Sense might be useful since I wasn’t that knowledgeable about this world and added additional utility to my Edge attribute, it didn’t feel that necessary to me.
That left me with Hawk Eyes, Night Vision, Speed Reading and Will to Live. All of them were excellent and I think I would be happy with any one of them.
Will to Live was really tempting. It seemed to be one of those things that you would rarely need but when you did, you would really need it. Speed reading could potentially allow me to gain and level up knowledge-based skills faster. As for Hawk Eyes and Night Vision, their worth was blindingly obvious. Thinking of it like that, it was really easy to pick a favorite.
I vowed to get Speed Reading and Will to Live next as soon as I could. Choosing between the last 2 was also really easy. While both of the came with excellent utility, only one of them had a stated drawback.
I almost clicked on Hawk Eyes immediately but thought better of it. The skill as described would make a pretty significant change to my biological eyes.
Did I want to this now or wait till I get back home?
On one hand I was at a clinic, so if something happened to me Dr. Asano would probably take care of me. On the other, what if I clicked on it and the system knocked me out for hours while it did its work. In that case it would only be disadvantageous for me. Besides, any unlocks and rank ups I got so far, didn’t imply any chance the processes going wrong.
That settles it, I thought to myself. I’ll wait till I get back home and pick the Quality then.
I looked at the time, having lost all sense so far. I was surprised to see it was only 01:30 AM. While not much time had passed since we left the bar, it had felt like hours had gone by. Sighing for probably the thousandth time today, I resolved to waiting.
While I waited, I decided to take a look at the SMGs I had picked up. Their tags labeled them both as Steyr TMPs. Black, plastic and very lightweight, they had a very classic sub machine gun look complete with extended mag holding 30 9mm rounds, a bulbous forward grip and a picatinny rail on top for sight attachments. They were capable of burst fire as well as full auto and also seemed like they could take a stock attachment. After playing with them for a bit, I knew that while my pistols skill would help, a different skill would be responsible for automatic weapons.
Not even five minutes later, the double doors of the exam room swung open and Dr. Asano walked through. He was wearing a blood-stained blue medical apron and looked dead tired.
“How is she?” I asked anxiously while standing up.
“She’s stable, don’t worry,” he said reassuringly. Even though she lost some blood, she got lucky. The bullet got slowed down enough by her clothing so while it managed to get past the abdominal muscles, it didn’t quite reach the intestines.”
“That’s honestly a huge relief.”
“I won’t ask for what happened but since I will need to keep her here for a day for observation.”
“I’m not sure if that’s going to be an issue or not. Someone who is related to Lucy will be coming by soon,” I said apprehensively. “As for her treatment costs, I don’t have any money right now but hopefully either Lucy or the visitor will be able to cover them.”
Dr. Asano let out a chortle. “There will not be any need for that my boy. I owed you a favor and that’s that. If there is the girl wants to stay longer, any additional costs will be her responsibility.”
“That’s good to hear. I’m in a bit of a tight spot financially right now.”
“Hmmm,” Dr. Asano said, his hand going the stubble on his face. “Tell me Jack, how did you know how to provide the medical attention that you did?”
Fuck. I hadn’t thought about it till now, but it would be inevitable that my skills would be a bit suspicious to anyone perceptive enough. A kid like me didn’t usually have such skills. I need to come up with something quick.
“It’s a bit embarrassing to admit but I once got my hands on simchip featuring a paramedic,” I replied, scratching the back of my head sheepishly.
“And that was enough?” he said with eyes squinted in suspicion.
“Well, experiencing it yourself multiple times through someone else’s eyes instead of reading about it makes a huge difference. Besides, I have a talent for picking things up quickly.”
“Interesting,” he replied. “And what is the extent of your knowledge?”
“Not a lot,” I said. “I’m sure a trained paramedic would know heaps more but I can provide CPR, check for a pulse, provide basic wound care, set a splint and do the Heimlich maneuver.”
Dr. Asano seemed to be deep in thought. After a few seconds of awkward silence, he looked me up and down seemingly sizing me up.
“How would you like to come work for me?”
“Huh?” I exclaimed in bewilderment.
“You seem like the trustworthy type my boy. If what you said is true and you promise not to bring trouble to my doorstep, I would love to help to have some extra help around the place.”
“I would love to Dr. Asano!” I replied excitedly. “You don’t know how much this means to me.”
“Oh, believe me son. I know a thing or two about hardship. I can’t pay you much for now, let us say 5¥ but I might be able to teach you a thing or two as well.”
“Anything would be great. What would you have me do?”
“You see, my daughter has started medical school this year so for 6 hours a day on week days, I have no one to help me. I will need you to perform triage, take history and assist me through any examinations and procedures.”
“I understand. When do I start?”
“I can see that you are exhausted. Be sure to rest well and you can start the day after tomorrow. Please be here at 8 am sharp and be sure to—” His eyes lit up blue interrupting him mid-sentence. “Apologies,” he said to me as he seemed to be answering a call.
“Golden Health clinic, what is your emergency?” he asked curtly.
After a short silence Dr. Asano spoke again.
“And what is your sister’s name?” he asked. “I understand, please come in.”
A few seconds later through the dark of the lobby, I saw the silhouette of a large man turn the corner. In the dark he looked absolutely menacing and when stepped into the light he looked even more so.
About 7 feet tall, wearing a burgundy turtleneck and a gray suit that was positively straining to contain his bulging musculature. He wore his brown hair in a crew cut and even though he wore horn-rimmed glasses, they didn’t soften his features at all. Hearing Mr. Asano mention it and now looking at this man’s face, I could see the resemblance. He had the same blue eyes and mouth as Lucy. Tying everything together was a scar that run from the edge of his left eyebrow down to the middle of his cheek.
The man stepped up to us and gave us both an appraising look.
“How is my sister?” he asked Dr. Asano in a lilting accent, his voice gravely.
“She is doing well. Her wound was not too deep. She is sleeping now but she should be able to return to her home tomorrow.”
“Will she have a normal recovery?”
“It will take some months of inactivity but she is expected to make a full recovery,” Dr. Asano replied matter of factly.
The man nodded and turned to me. Having him looking down on me was an experience that made me wish that I had picked the Intimidating Presence quality. Maybe then, I wouldn’t have to worry about pissing myself.
He raised his right hand which was gloved in black leather and grabbed a fistful of my shirt. He then proceeded to lift me up like I weighed nothing as my hands immediately went grab to his forearm for support.
“You’re the piece of drek who got my little Lucy hurt?”
Fuck this man is terrifying, I thought to myself.
“I did no such thing. I even stayed here to make sure she’s ok,” I replied trying to show as much composure as I could.
“I know for a fact father did not pick you for the job. What were you doing with my sister?”
“I’m Justin’s friend man! He took me along with him as a lookout. I’m the one who spotted the Yaks and I am the one who pulled your sister out of there. Go ahead, call him or hell, go talk to your sister.”
Before the man could say anything, Dr. Asano spoke up.
“Please Mr. O’Malley, let the boy down. This is not behavior befitting a place of healing. While I do not know the circumstances surrounding the injury, I can say with certainty that without Mr. Garland’s intervention your sister would have certainly bled out. He took care of her wound and ensured she found a place where she would be treated at this hour with no questions asked.”
“This true lad?” the man said to me putting me down gently.
“Yes,” I replied. “While I’d never met your sister before today, I took up a certain amount of responsibility when going with her and Justin and I’d be damned if I didn’t follow through.”
“If that’s all Mr. O’Malley, Jack will be going on his way and we can discuss further care as well as payment,” Dr. Asano said.
“The job was successful by the way,” I said smugly to the man as I started to walk away. “Everything is in the trunk of Lucy’s car.”
“Take care now lad,” he spoke up. “When my sister wakes up, I’ll get to the bottom of this so don’t think I can’t find where you live.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said waving my hand not bothering to look back.
I stepped out of the clinic and started making my way back home.
Along the way I found a vending machine selling “Hot Krill Dogs” with “Real Relish™” for 2¥. realizing I was starving, I picked one up. While I won’t say that it was delicious, it was palatable and most of all cheap.
Seemingly on autopilot I found myself back home. Not even having the energy to brush my teeth, I proceed to throw my clothes off and set all of my weapons on the pile. Next, I plopped my ass down on the mattress and opened up the Qualities menu once more, not wasting a moment in picking Hawk Eyes.
Please confirm your choice.
I accepted the prompt and instantly passed out.