Anthracite Solstice (Cyberpunk d20)

Talk about things that are not making games here. But you should also make games!

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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

"They probably heard, but who cares? He practically told us to take it. What we need to do is be less careful about this. The more people who know we're going off for a weekend secret mission to capture a rogue AI, the better. Makes it harder for them to disappear us."

The doctor is making no effort to lower his voice or disguise his intentions. He even gives an old lady a "What's up?" head nod as he talks.

"Besides all that, if they want us dead, we're dead. 50 bucks says there's a bomb in that tablet, just waiting for some kind of secret signal before it sends us all to hell."
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Scott cringes at the thought of the tablet suddenly exploding in his bag. "Yeah, you're right. If they wanted us dead, we'd already be dead."

He glances out the window. "This is our transfer, right?"
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

"So was that a yes or a no?" Tokamak hisses at Doc. "Is he still here or not?". Her fists clench and unclench. She is annoyed that he didn't answer her question directly.

When Scott notes that they are almost to their final transfer she mutters "Thank God!"

"I agree they know what's up. They wanted us to steal the thing, and we are doing it." She says with a confidence that she didn't feel until she opened her mouth.

"I just don't want ANYBODY following us."
Last edited by Bob the Hamster on Mon Feb 27, 2017 4:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

"I don't see him on the bus, no."
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

"Fine"

As they transfer and board the the Won Ton Express, Tokamak looks around in surprise. "I've passed this bus a hundred times. I never thought it would be more gaudy on the inside than the outside"

She ducks under the neon sign behind the driver, and pushes to the back where she accosts a food vendor taking up two whole rows.

"Hey! Give me some fried Won Tons!" She shouts over the din of the music.

The old Chinese man shouts back in German "Du bist rassistisch!" He pounds his spatula on the grill "Wir verkaufen nur die besten Würste!"
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Post by Gizmog »

"Don't sit in front of the dragon unless you want to get burned." Piperman reads from the neon sign, written in glowing pink cantonese , a beautiful thing that he's always admired. "That's good advice."

The chaos of the interior is too much for the Doc's motion sensor to take, so he heads to the upper deck and watches the kids swatting stale dumplings and riceballs into the streets with a stick.
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Tokamak eventually finds her way to the upper deck as well, and sits next to Doc.

She has a steaming bratwurst in one hand, and a can of Coca Cola Xeno* in the other.

She is in the closest thing to a good mood that she has been in since the group first met.

"So, Doc, this is your neighborhood, huh? What do you do? What kinda doctor are you."

She sips from the can of Xeno.


*The recipe for Coca Cola Xeno is exactly the same as standard Coca Cola, except that the sugar and caffeine are both doubled, and the water it is brewed with contains a 6X homeopathic dose of extraterrestrial water from melted ice mined on Saturn's Moon Enceladus, most of which used to be owned by Coca-Cola-Amazon Exo-Orbital Logistics
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Gizmog
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The doc quirks an eyebrow at the can of Xeno, but doesn't say anything about it. He quirks his eyebrow even more and leans in conspiratorially. "I'll tell you, but I gotta know something first. Have you ever been arrested?"
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Tokamak's face clouds as she starts to take offense, but she thinks twice and laughs it off.

"Sure! Plenty of times for illegal street racing, but the pigs haven't caught me for anything big since way back when I was a minor."

"Why do you ask? You some kinda prison doctor?"
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"Or some sort of back alley cybernetics surgeon? I've heard there's good money in that." Scott turns to Tokomak, "And you shouldn't drink that stuff. Rots your teeth. And your organs."
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Tokamak reacts with surprise attached Scott's comment. She looks at the can in her hand as if only now realizing she is holding it.

"Old habits die hard" she mumbles in embarrassment before draining the whole rest of the can in one long swig, and flinging the empty off the bus into the street below.
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

Piperman takes a close look at Tokamak when she mentions street racing.. naw, couldn't be. "Ha! I wish I was a back alley cyber-chop. The reason I ask, is to see if you're familliar with what I'm talking about. My problems all started my junior year of pre-med." He taps the side of his shades and takes them off, his eyes wild with the memories.

"Someone was cutting up cadavers, trying to sell some left-over cybernetics on the side. Which isn't a bad thing, we all did it, one of the perks, but most of us tried to learn a thing or two about anatomy first. This guy was a butcher. Every morning there were 3 or 4 piles of meat chunks on the floor, and you'd have to be a damn genius to figure out which chunk was supposed to connect to which, or even what pile it belonged to."

The doc doesn't feel like he's explaining himself well. "It shouldn't have been a federal case, is what I'm trying to say. Plenty of cadavers to go around, go grab four more, no big deal. Just.. an annoyance, right?" He looks from Tokamak to Scott, trying to find the right analogy. Got it. He points at Scott "It's like rooting to the bottom of the box to get the toy, without eating any of the cereal. But the Dean found out and he didn't like it, and he told the cops and they didn't like it, and pretty soon the whole precinct was out there to take us in for hyper-polygraph tests to find out who did it. And you know what happened next?"

He reaches up to take his glasses off for dramatic effect, but they're already off. He tries to play it off by slicking his hair back.
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Scott grumbles, "I don't play with toys, and I don't like cereal either." He leans back in his seat and guesses at the story's conclusion, "Then you went to prison for hacking up the med school's bodies?"
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Tokamak chews her bratwurst and listens
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Gizmog
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"I don't know what happened next either. I had to buy a school paper the next day to learn the parts I do know. One minute I was yelling how this used to be a free country and they can't do that, and the next minute I'm getting thrown out of a squad car, being told I'm cleared of all charges."

He glares at the kid for thinking he was the butcher. No respect! He turns the glasses around to show the two the tiny feed of women on the treadmill, their faces covered with a shiny plastic helmet+mask.

"Picture on the front page of the paper showed me wearing a bulkier version of that. It's basically an EMP device for your brain. When you've got one on, you can't do anything except go where they tell you to go, and when you take it off, you've got no recollection at all of anything that happened to you during that time. I had to get mine from this firm in Korea. Sells 'em out of the back of comic books!"

If his eyes were wild before, they're absolutely feral now and he's gone into complete lecture mode, not caring what the other passengers think.

"The greatest invention since the wheel, and what's it do? Hypnotize korean kids and keep prisoners from getting chafed wrists. No vision! No imagination! That's the problem with the whole damn world. What if I told you the most dangerous part of surgery is the gas? Better than it used to be, but you still have to pay some lunatic big money to gas you half to death so you don't feel your appendix getting sucked out. You get one of these babies and every anesthesiologist in the hospital is out of work, and no hangover after, either!"

"Of course, these lovely ladies aren't having surgery. They're just giving up a day or two of their lives to walk their way to better health. They come in, put on the helmet, I hook 'em up to some IV nutrients and fluids, and a day or two later, after they've rested, we take the helmet off and they're in the best shapes of their lives. No willpower, no membership, and no awful inspirational soundtracks required. And *THAT'S* what we do at the Piperman Weight Loss Institute."
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