Chapter 7

+200 Body XP (+100 from Rested XP Bonus)

I smirked and took a break from walking the street, leaning up against a barbecue joint, next to an alley I’d just checked for ne'er-do-wells. A hologram above my head showed some sort of odd looking bazooka launching an endless stream of pulled pork sandwiches into the smiling, barbecue sauce covered, face of a fat guy on the other side of the building. Just walking for a half hour had been enough to trigger the notice, and I was breathing a little heavily. It was just shy of 930AM and I’d made it about a mile south of Gary’s where I’d started. I was walking on what my map called Dream Boulevard, the same street The Carlton, megabuilding B9, and Doc Brown’s ripper shop all sat on. I’d made it farther south past that cross street that headed to Noir City’s western exit, so this was all new territory to me. It was starting to feel a bit homogeneous though. Even as the signs and ads changed, they maintained a level of similarity that started to blend together after a while.

The quantity of traffic and the number of people on the sidewalks had been slowly increasing as I walked. It wasn’t exactly claustrophobic or anything, but it was definitely starting to get a touch more crowded. I was a bit disappointed by the lack of violence today, since I was specifically looking for it, but it was still early yet. Recalling how much I saw on my way into town that first day bolstered my optimism, and I started walking back the way I’d come. When I saw an opening in the traffic I darted across the street as quickly as I could. Maybe this side of the street will work out better. I mentally crossed my fingers that a mugger would show himself sooner rather than later.

I crossed back over Far Gone Street, the street that would exit town off to the west, and continued my leisurely stroll north while keeping my eyes on the other pedestrians, on the lookout for trouble. I’d passed by Doc Brown’s ripper doc shop and noticed that it had no signs advertising its presence. When I zoomed in on my map app it did show all the various shops using different icons for the different types of business and Doc’s did show up on there, but there was nothing indicating it on the building itself. When I focused on the little red cross icon it brought up something similar to a webpage that very specifically stated, ‘By appointment only!’ No prices or anything were listed on the page. Damn, Sara would have had to contact him directly to get that information…how many rippers did she contact trying to get a good price I wonder? It was kind of humbling to find even more effort my sister had gone to to get me back on my feet. I firmed my resolve to get her out of that BurgerDepot and strode just a bit faster down the street.

“Ow! Damnit, I told you, I don’t have a hundred credits to pay you even if I wanted to!” a voice came out of the alley just ahead. I slowed to a stop and listened in.

“Nice suit like that? You definitely have the creds. And this here’s a toll road. You wanna walk down our road, you pay the toll. If you don’t pay the toll…well, tell him what happens if he doesn’t pay the toll, Scud,” a mean-sounding voice came out of the alley.

A deep slow speaking voice answered, “Heh, you don’t pay, and da boss puts a cred shard in yer slot, then I make you dead, and we take all da creds that end up on da shard.” A wet sounding chuckle echoed out of the alley. “Den we go get dat good smoke and have a good night.” The presumed ‘Scud’ didn’t sound like the brightest bulb in the pack. Interesting, so if someone dies with a cred shard slotted their personal account automatically drains into the shard? I mean I guess it makes sense, but good to know.

I peeked around the edge of the alley for a second before pulling back. Man, these Kobayashi eyes are great. The built in night vision is seriously convenient. I’d seen a guy in a tan suit, that actually looked pretty cheap to my uneducated eyes, being held by a gigantic eight foot tall goon who had picked him up by the shoulder with one massive hand and had him firmly pinned to the wall a good two feet off the ground. A skinny guy with the greasiest looking hair I’d ever seen was leaning against the wall next to the pinned man and was playing with a knife, running a thumb over the blade.

“I told you, I don’t have it! I’m on my way to a job interview right now! This isn’t even my suit! I borrowed it from a friend, I can get you credits after I get the job and work a shift, but I’ve got nothing!” The first man was sounding a bit panicked.

“Ah, that’s too bad then,” I peeked again and confirmed it was the greasy haired dude speaking. “In that case we’re going to have to-”

I’d heard enough, these two were definitely not upstanding citizens. I moved into the alley and drew down on the knife wielding skinny goon first. My gun leapt from its holster and let a round fly, my pistol filled hand practically teleporting from my hip to a point in front of me where it was aimed perfectly. Damn, that Quickdraw perk is no joke. I hit him square in the back of the neck, spraying the wall with blood. He bounced against that same bloodied wall even as I shifted my aim to the giant who was just startling from the loud noise of the shot in the alley. I pegged the giant square in the temple. The flesh seemed to deform a bit, denting inwards, but not penetrating. I focused and fired three more times, taking a split second to keep my aim on that temple as the giant dropped the guy in the suit and stumbled sideways a bit. The third and fourth round to his temple were rewarded by a spray of blood and tissue.

I holstered my gun and walked farther into the alley, noticing my hand was shaking a bit as it returned my Overseer to my hip. The guy in the suit was picking himself up out of the pile of trash he’d landed on and was looking around in confusion as I crouched down and picked up the skinny guy’s knife off the putrid alley floor. It wasn’t a terrible looking blade, some kind of combat knife with a single edge and a bit of serration on the back side. It obviously hadn’t been taken great care of as the edge of the blade had a few nicks and didn’t seem particularly sharp. There was also a nasty greasy substance on the handle. When I examined the guy’s corpse I could see where it came from. The guy looked like he was literally sweating some kind of ooze and it’d transferred from his palm to the knife’s grip. So gross. I patted down his pockets and helped myself to an empty knife sheath from his belt that matched the blade in my hand. I sheathed and pocketed it as tan suit guy fished a cheap looking briefcase out of the trash where he’d apparently dropped it. As the man straightened up, briefcase in hand, he looked at me with fear in his eyes. “Uh, what, uh?” he eloquently queried me.

I cocked a thumb at the dead guy as I turned the corpse’ head to get access to his shard ports. “These gentlemen didn’t pay the asshole tax…Tell the man what happens when you don’t pay the asshole tax, Scud.” I looked to the very large, and very dead, man to the suit’s right. The suit glanced at the large dead man and then back to me. I raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Might wanna get moving, bud. Don’t wanna be late for your interview. Makes a poor impression, you know?” I tilted my head towards the alley exit and the man just took off at a run without another word. Seems smart enough, hope he gets that job.

The ports behind Greasy’s left ear were empty. I turned his head the other way and was rewarded with a shard slotted in one of his sockets. My hands now felt disgusting with that gross grease on them. I looked at the shard with some disgust as it seemed to have some of the nasty substance on it too. Didn’t really want to stick that in my head as is. I considered wiping my hands and the shard off on the guy’s shirt, but it looked just as nasty. I instead moved over to Scud. His clothes didn’t look nearly as bad. Still dirty, but at least not veritably slimy with that grease sweat stuff. His leather vest that was the only thing covering his chest didn’t seem particularly absorbent, so I wiped my hands and shard off on his thigh then slotted the shard. I immediately found there were 102 creds on it and transferred them to my personal account, smiling as +102c appeared over my vision. I removed and pocketed the shard, no reason to keep it slotted any longer than necessary. A quick search of the big guy found he wasn’t carrying anything of value. I stood up, and, my business in the alley completed, I exited and continued on my way north.

Oh yeah, I should have gotten XP from-

+500XP

+1000XP

+200 Handgun XP (+100 from Rested XP Bonus)

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Level up!

+1 Perk point

+1 Skill point

Fuck yes! With a quick check I found that that put my Character Level to 1 and my XP at 500/2000XP towards level 2. I frowned, wait…shouldn’t it be an attribute point and a perk point? Does that mean I have to build up all my attributes the hard way? I pulled up my Character tab and tried to raise my Body attribute, and it immediately jumped up to 2.

Use Skill point on Body? Confirm/Cancel?

Uh, no? I thought at the box that had popped up over the character tab. Body remained at 1 as the box closed, I’d keep working on Body the old fashioned way for now. Good to know I can use skill points on attributes though.

I laughed out loud and pumped my fist in victory while my fellow pedestrians gave me some distance. Oh man, I am looking pretty. I’ve got a Perk point to spend, a Skill point to spend, 113 creds in my acct, and a brand new, to me, knife. For my first violent encounter I am looking damn good.

Having increased my cred count by ten times its previous, I decided to grab an early lunch and sit down for a bit while I selected my Perk and Skill. I noticed a delectable smell in the air and followed it into a restaurant I was passing, something called AutoFood according to the neon sign above the entrance.

Heading inside I found a clean looking room with metallic walls and floors, a large number of half filled booths ringed the room. I took a seat in one of the empty booths, and looked around. There didn’t seem to be any waiters or a counter to order at. As I was watching the table of a booth on the other side of the room opened up and a tray filled with food and drinks rose up out of the hole. I looked at the center of my table and saw an odd symbol reminiscent of the one I’d seen on the shooting range counter at Gary’s. As I focused on it I got a prompt on my internal agent asking if I wanted to use their temporary menu app. I confirmed that in fact I did, and a menu popped up in my vision. It was only around 10AM so I decided to take a look at the breakfast menu and get my brunch on.

There were a surprisingly large number of options and I ended up selecting a breakfast sandwich with a side of hashbrowns. To drink I went with the closest thing I could find to orange juice, something the menu referred to as JuicyJuicy Orange Drink. I watched -12c appear in front of my eyes as my order went through, 10c for the meal and 2c for the drink. A countdown appeared in the corner of my vision, letting me know it would be ready in 5 minutes.

With a little time to kill I started looking into my options. Deciding to start with my Perk I pulled up my character tab and entered the Body section. There were dozens of potential choices, and even more that were grayed out. Looks like some of those are perk trees that require prerequisites before I could select them. As I read through the options I found some of them very interesting. Something called Bullet Ballet, that would reduce my bullet spread by 25% while moving, would be nice no matter what kind of weapon I was using…well maybe not shotguns, but they don’t use bullets so it just doesn’t really apply. Iron Lungs seemed cool, it lowered the stamina expended from exertion by half. Wouldn’t that mean I could just straight up run twice as far, or exercise twice as long? There were a variety of options that would increase my health regeneration in a variety of situations, but given that it increased by a percentage, and I was currently healing at the rate of a normal human, it didn’t seem super useful at the moment. I read through a fairly extensive list of options that would increase my abilities with blunt weapons, but given that I was currently armed with a revolver and a knife those options weren’t particularly appealing either. The perk Spontaneous Obliteration put a smile on my face, but the idea of my bullets sometimes randomly causing the person I shot to essentially explode into bloody chunks…well that’s the kind of thing that gets a guy noticed by people you don’t want noticing you. There were some interesting options for shotguns, but since I didn’t have one I ruled those out.

Just as my table opened up and a tray with my food popped up I found a Body perk I liked the look of. I took a sip of my orange drink, which didn’t really taste much like OJ at all, and read through the perk’s description. Suck It Up: efficacy of medical inhalers increased by 50%. It was simple, but it could totally save my life. With a hundred credits left to me, I could hit a drug store and pick some up. I wish I could remember the pricing on those things, but it couldn’t be too much right? I mentally added Suck It Up to my shortlist, but decided to take my time and go through my available options.

I took a bite of my breakfast sandwich. Much better than the orange drink, not that the drink was bad per say, it just didn’t taste anything like the orange juice I’d been craving. Not having seen anything else in Body that screamed my name I moved on to checking out the other attributes. In the interest of picking something that would be immediately useful, I ignored tech and net for now.

Reading through the perks for reflex I found some that were pretty interesting. Especially the section on blades, apparently if I followed one of the perk trees I could actually get to the point where I could deflect bullets. I mean how cool is that shit? There were some nice reload perks in there as well. Reloading a revolver wasn’t an especially quick process. At least I wasn’t especially quick at it. Practicing might help a bit, but a perk would be sweet too. When I saw the perk for Slippery I almost chose it out of hand, ‘Slippery: The faster you move the harder you are to hit. Effect increases when dashing, dodging, sliding, sprinting, flipping, or generally doing anything to try and get out of the way of a bullet’. That made the shortlist for sure.

Eventually I moved on to the Cool attribute in the interest of being thorough and almost immediately found a few perks that were kind of awesome. Ninjutsu of course immediately came to the forefront. After all, who doesn’t want to be all silent and deadly. Ninja style, baby, nin-nin. Focus was kinda neat. It’d slow time down a little bit when I aimed with pistols, revolvers, precision rifles, and snipers, while doing an extra 10% damage on headshots or to weak spots. There were some cool abilities related to throwing knives in there too. Given that I only have the two weapons though, the thought of throwing one of them away makes me somewhat nervous.

I munched on my hashbrowns as I considered my options. I just kept coming back to the idea of Slippery keeping me from getting shot in the first place. I mean yeah, reloading faster would increase my ability to shoot people with a faster overall rate of fire…but if I got shot while reloading faster I’m just as dead. Same issue with Suck It Up, it requires me to get shot or otherwise hurt before I can even use it. Isn’t it better just to avoid getting shot in the first place? If I can just run around and do random crazy shit to dodge bullets…well that sounds both hilarious and incredibly overpowered. I shrugged, not like I’m not going to have a lot more perk points as I level up…and this definitely won’t hurt. I bit the proverbial bullet and selected Slippery

+Slippery Perk

I finished off my food as I moved on to my Skill point. When I hit the Character tab, this time I went for the skill progression section near the bottom. The list had previously only shown two skills, Handgun and Acrobatics. Now? Well now there was a list of available skills that just seemed to go on and on. I started scrolling halfheartedly through the list. God damn, there are some seriously useless skills here. Facetiously I did a quick search and discovered that Underwater Basket Weaving was absolutely an available skill. What the fuck?

Damn near anything a person could conceivably train themselves to do was an option in the skill list. I checked and found that some of the skills I’d already seriously considered learning, like Netrunning and Programming, were available options. Some that I’d never have considered were too. I paused briefly when I saw the Rockerboy skill. I’d always wanted to play an instrument in my last life but had never gotten around to it. Gunsmith seemed neat, I could build next gen guns that could conceivably punch a hole through almost anything using never before seen tech, if I just scored enough perks in it. Robotics would allow me to create, alter, repair, or just maintain robots and drones. I can just imagine walking down the street with an army of drones behind me. There were tons of options in the section for chrome. Chrome Surgeon, Chrome Engineer, Chrome Crafter, Chrome Scavenger, Chrome Customizer, the list went on and on.

I had to take a breath. There were just too many options. I needed to come at this another way. What kind of skill do I need right now? I mean I’ve got Handgun for shooting, I’ve got Acrobatics and Slippery to help me get out of the way of bullets. What do I have to help me fight when my gun is empty? A dull knife. Hmm, so I need to know how to fight with a knife? What if I lose the knife? So…martial arts? I paused, a smile slowly growing on my face as I checked the list. Yes, there it was. My Smile turned to a crazed grin as I made my selection, and I began cackling aloud like a madman.

“The fuck is your problem, pendejo?” Asked the elderly gentleman in the booth behind me.

I turned and grinned at him. “I know kung-fu,” I said cheerfully.

+Kung-fu Skill