Chapter 4

After my shower, which had actually cost me 1c to get turned on, I’d started back up on my exercises. Unfortunately I had to do considerably more work to get those XP pop ups. On the plus side, now that I could stand, I had a lot more exercises available to me and for the first 4 hours I was getting double XP from the Rested Bonus. So, while I’d only gotten two, it’d still netted me 400 Body XP. In the end I felt vaguely as though I may die if I kept working out, so I just watched some weird TV for a few hours to relax and then managed to go back to sleep in the hope of erasing my fatigue. Never would have thought recovering from a coma was this exhausting.

I woke up around 3PM according to my HUD’s clock and, as was becoming the usual, found a message from Sara. “Heard you working out in the wee hours of the morning. Good job! Keep it up and you’ll be back on your feet before you know it! Heading to work, should be back around 9PM.” Realizing I hadn’t talked to her in almost a full day, I messaged back, “Congrats on the job and the promotion! Looking forward to the story of how you landed that on day one. My compliments to the chef, those burgers were delicious. Although I may have been starving to death in a somewhat literal sense, so mayhaps that was a contributing factor. More please! Have a good day at work and I’ll see you when you get back!”

I cracked my neck to the left and then the right and jumped right back into my exercises. Squats, albeit slow ones done with considerable effort, had been added at regular intervals and I again found myself slowly but surely gaining those tasty tasty XP notices. By the time 9PM rolled around I found myself up to 800/1000XP towards Level 2 Body.

“I’m home!” Sara loudly declared as the door slid open, permitting her entrance. I’d been working on some more crunches while laying on the couch and relaxed to lay back, gasping at the effort I’d been putting forth. A plastic bag landed on my stomach, causing me to flinch painfully as my overworked abs tried to contract. I groaned as I pulled myself to a sitting position and was joined by Sara who flopped onto her back on the couch and propped her feet in my lap as I barely managed to keep her from crushing the bag she’d thrown me. She sighed tiredly, “Long fucking day. I’m pretty sure those two morons that work under me are so dumb they can’t even read.”

I opened the bag and pulled out a burger. Upon unwrapping it and taking a bite I discovered that they were considerably tastier when still warm. “So what’s the story on that promotion?” I asked through a mouthful of burger.

Sara smiled. “Oh yeah. That was a whole thing. So I spent the first hour yesterday watching orientation vids and then worked as cashier for a bit. Eventually the guy feeding the burger hopper left, and the only other guy there was too dumb to run it. As previously mentioned, I don’t think he can read. And you have to be able to read the labels on the boxes to know which ones go in which slots on the burger machine in the back. Anyway, while I was loading boxes of ingredients into the hopper, the assistant manager came back there and started grabbing my ass.” I stopped eating and glared down at my reclining sister.

“And when are we murdering him?” I asked grimly.

Sara laughed, “We’re not. I took care of it…Well first I contacted HR. According to the orientation vids, they’re supposed to have hidden cameras covering all areas of the entire restaurant. But they actually don’t, since HR said there was no vid evidence, so they couldn’t do anything. On the plus side, that told me that there was no camera watching that particular area. So the next time he grabbed my ass…” Sara reached into her pocket and pulled out a pocket knife. With the press of a button an 8 inch blade shot out. “I took his hand off.” She cackled. “He complained to HR of course, but there was no vid evidence so they couldn’t do anything. And since he couldn’t work with only one hand and a gaping wound on his other wrist, he left to go to a ripper, and got fired for leaving without advanced notice that he’d be unable to complete his shift. They immediately offered me the job.” She smiled up at me. “Got a nice little raise there too, making 12 creds an hour now.” Her smile lessened. “Though it’s going to take quite a while to get the cash together for decent subdermal armor at that rate. I messaged Doc, and the subdermal I’d want is going to run at least 15 grand.”

I did some quick math and frowned. “You’re right. That’s going to take awhile, especially if you’re paying rent and feeding an invalid…Alright, fuck it. I’m going to get back on my feet this week and get to earning.” I gave a decisive nod as I unwrapped the second and final burger from the bag.

Sara smiled sadly. “It’s going to take you longer than that, Mal. Remember, the doc said it’d be at least a month.”

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I met Sara’s eyes with a determined stare. I tensed my legs and laboriously stood, dropping her feet off my lap. As I stood there, looking at the surprise on her face, I took a vicious bite of my burger. “I like Doc, but he doesn’t know me or what I’m capable of.” I let myself fall back down onto the couch and continued eating my burger.”Gimme a day, maybe two, and I’ll be out of this apartment and get to making some scratch.”

“That’s…How?!” asked Sara, flabbergasted.

“I’ve spent every waking hour since we got to this apartment working out . When I can’t move anymore, I sleep. When I wake up, I work out. I refuse to be a useless lump leeching off of you. Once I’m up and about, I’m going to hit a shooting range if I can afford it, and then I’ll hunt down some asshole, or assholes, that no one will miss and loot their corpses. That should be enough to get me started. At that point I think I’ve got a few scores in mind that’ll get us the chrome we’ll need or the creds to buy it,” I stated confidently.

Sara sat up. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” she asked.

I finished my burger and dropped the wrapper into the bag. “Very. As much as I’m proud of you for getting that job and that promotion, I’m not going to let you keep working a dead end job like that. We’re gearing up and getting the fuck off street level. If I play my cards right I think we’ll have enough creds to get the chrome we need and an apartment up on, or above, level 100 in B9. I’ve done a bit of research while I work out, and I think I’ve got a handle on the various gangs in the megabuilding. At the very least I know a floor that’s entirely populated by scavs. Once we’re chromed up that’s free money if we’re the first there for the slaughter.”

I thought back to everything I knew about the megabuilding. I’d literally been researching it just prior to dying, so it was still pretty fresh in my memory. I knew more than a few little caches and stashes throughout the city that would be worth looking into, but first things first. I mean it’s right there. Not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. So yeah, the corpse in sub basement level 9 would be the best get that I was aware of, but I didn’t have a way to get into the apartment yet, much less a way to get the corpse out of fucking duracrete. That shit was tough. The massive scav nest was taking up pretty much the entirety of floor 13. The Dragon Claws gang were all the way up top on floor 200. They had pretty good chrome for sale and top of the line guns, but they were an extremely insular gang and wouldn’t sell to anybody that didn’t speak japanese. I’d need some good hardware or software to translate for me to take advantage of that. The Beasts ran floors 50-60, tough cromed out gangers that could be good allies or a large pile of creds if we decided to kill them. There was a fixer working out of a taxi business up on 100 that could hopefully throw us some work if I could get her attention. Hmm, what else? Right, there was that pawnshop up on 190 that had katanas that were even better than what the Dragon Claws had for sale. That high end brothel on 150 that had girls going missing every time they left the floor. Some serial killer asshole that lived on the floor below that was using netrunning to track them down and disable them before dragging them back to his apartment for a truly grisly death…Anything else? Hmm, right, that bar on 100 that mercs liked to hang out in. Might be a good place to put together a crew. After all, if I couldn’t get into that sub basement apartment or get through the duracrete that didn’t mean I couldn’t just recruit some folks that could.

Oh yeah, definitely wanna avoid sub basement level 10 right above the parking garage. I recalled the vlogger that found the mummified corpse getting absolutely destroyed down there. He’d figured if there was something that good on sub 9 there had to be something even better on sub 10. But what he’d found was a massive gang of feral children. I shuddered when I remembered the video of his character being torn to shreds by over a hundred raggedy kids with knives. It’d been like watching a school of piranhas. The guy had gone full auto with a really nice rifle, but they just kept coming. He must have killed 50 of the little bastards, but they never hesitated. Just kept swarming til he was very very dead.

I nodded to myself. Alright, get mobile. Get a few kills to level up a bit. Get a small crew together and get that corpse filled with creds. If I remember right, it was over 20k. That’d get Sara her subdermal and out of that shit job.

Sara and I hung out and chatted as we watched TV for a bit before she had to get some sleep. She bought us a couple of drinks out of a vending machine in the hall. MaxQuench LimeSlime didn’t sound super appealing to me, but it was actually pretty decent, if admittedly just as slimy feeling in my mouth as one might expect from the name.

We watched some crazy fashion contest called Leather Skin where fashion designers had to create fashionable clothing or accessories out of leather. The catch was that the loser of each week’s show was skinned alive and had their skin treated to become the leather that the designers would use on next week’s show. Frankly I thought the guy that lost got robbed when the judges mocked the snazzy bow tie he’d created. The winner had made a nice set of high heeled pumps. All the remaining designers were really excited about next week’s show since the guy that lost had been pretty fat, and they were looking forward to all the extra material they’d have to work with. Fortunately they didn’t show much of the loser getting skinned alive. Just him screaming as they first started cutting into him and about two seconds of his skinless body laying in a heap before cutting back to the remaining designers. Pretty disturbing stuff, even if Sara did love those shoes the winner had made.