Familiar, but unfamiliar. That's what Mary would describe her surroundings as. She wasn't unfamiliar to the Slag at all, but it was strange being out of her home turf and in someone else's for such a long period of time. At least, in the sense of lingering about without much direction besides keeping the peace.
She strolled down the street, her orange cybereyes clicking and whirring nearly silently as she walked towards the rising sun. Cybereyes that cost tens of thousands of credits, being used in lieu of wearing a pair of sunglasses that would've cost tens of credits, at best. Not to say that they didn't have other features—given that you could make a shopping list of all the other sorts of things they could do—but it seems as of late being a pair of expensive shades was their primary function.
Wherever she was in Blackwell must've been a former strip-mall prior to the entire incident that cooked the place. The signage lining the structure was largely burnt to a crisp, faded in other places to the point where it wasn't at all legible. The shape of the place was the only reason she could assume that it was some low-rent strip mall at all. Now? It was being used as ad-hoc apartments, with clothing being strung up on lines and the wide reinforced storefront windows being covered with a menagerie of fabrics in place of curtains.
Mary shrugged to herself. Things like that weren't an uncommon sight in the Slag, if anything, it was the norm. Her home chapter out of Thorndale had a tighter grip on the situation, and it was much the same there. You took what you could get when you're living out here. Certain things were easy enough to steal from convoy trucks heading into Novonachalsk; other things could be grown, or made. Plascrete and other synthetic materials are a touch harder to make or acquire in the Slag.
A loud clunk echoed down the street as the street lights automatically shut themselves off. She kept herself moving, despite thinking to herself. The trip to the Night Market would've been faster on her bike, but there was something calming about being on her cyberlegs. Though, it was readily apparent with how quickly the sun was encompassing the horizon that she should've left earlier if she wanted to catch the vendors that she set out for in the first place. Though, it was mostly her fault for sleeping in far later than usual. She'd have to detour to another place if she was looking for fresh produce.
A flick of the wrist as she brought up the HUD in her cybereyes and began to navigate through it. The difficult part about being in the Slag was that it could be hard to find something if you weren't connected to the right nodes. If you wanted to find something, you had to hear about it from someone else, you had to find it yourself, or you needed to be connected to the right place. Each one of the markers on her grid was painstakingly placed by her own hand. The various markets, stalls, clubs, shops, bars, and otherwise. It was all necessary to existing out here, even with the backing of the Banshees behind her.
When you're busy keeping the peace, you don't have a lot of time to maintain a greenhouse for plants, or anything else to produce the commodities that you'd need to make life comfortable this far out.
The nearest place seemed to be a few blocks off from her original destination of the Night Market. A secluded little shop amongst what she assumed was a residential area from when she was about last. She redoubled her pace, causing her boots to loudly clomp on the cracked plascrete below. Not quite a run or a sprint, but a brisk jog. It was better to get there before they closed as well.
Around the corner and—
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Straight into an ork's chest. Thump. Both Mary and the ork rebounded off of each other, neither one quite tumbling the ground. It was like a brick wall meeting with a brick wall. Mary was pure chrome, and this dude must've been close to the same. Definitely a cheaper grade, though.
“Oyy. Fuckin’ watch it,” he snapped at the cyborg.
It was rather evident this wasn't an accident, given that several of what appeared to be his buddies started gathering around. Either they were looking for a fight, or they were looking to mug her.
“Ah. Sorry! Sorry. I wasn't paying attention,” she lied. Of course she was paying attention. She was one of the worst possible marks that they could've made out here. Four, she counted. The one she ran into, who was more than likely the only real threat out of the group, and three low-rent gangbangers that more than likely were coerced into working with the first guy.
“My boys don't exactly like strangers bein’ on our turf, do we?”
Unsurprisingly, there was a lack of a response. They must've figured that something was up when what should've been a dainty elf didn't fall onto her ass after running face-first into a brick shithouse. Still, she wasn't sure what they wanted, and she just wanted to go out and get some apples.
“—Uuh. I'm not planning on sticking around, sorry. Can I just get past?”
They weren't budging. The lead ork folded his arms over his chest. “How's about we make an example out of you?”
“Er… You know I'm with the Banshees, right?” She held up a hand, flashing a quick ARO of the gang's logo. She didn't know why she was doing this. If they wanted a fight, she wasn't going to be able to avoid it. Maybe some part of her wanted a fight as well.
“Banshees? Who the hell. I don't recognize no Banshees here.”
He drew his fist back to prep a swing. This was the kind of guy that relied on his augmentations more than he relied on technique. Mary caught on to this rather quickly. This wasn't the first time she ended up in a brawl. Wouldn't be the last either.
She took a quick step forwards, ducking under his wide swing before he even had the chance to follow through with his threat. Despite all of her chrome, he probably could've taken her head clean off with those sledgehammers that he probably called fists. She wasn't a snob, but she was struggling to not scoff at how crude his augments were, now that she was viewing them from a better angle.
The ork was too gobsmacked to realize what happened by the time that his fist caught the air where Mary was. Mary, on the other hand, repaid him with a quick jab to the kidneys. She might've wanted a fight, she had no interest in making it last. She wasn't that cocky.
A kick to the back of the knee. Elbow to the base of the neck. Crunch. She flipped her enhanced reflex module off, and the ork went down like a sack of potatoes. As she figured. Older augmentations that you'd find in the lower price bracket tended to have terribly exposed control modules.
“Sorry! Again! I—really gotta go!” she blurted off as she skipped down the road, not bothering to stick around to deal with the mess she just made. At the very least, she probably only caused a few hundred credits worth of damage. A few hundred credits she didn't have on her, and what little she had was going towards a basket of fruit.
Maybe being a former corp-kid has its perks, especially when you have two parents that worked in high-end prosthetics development.