It was extremely similar to the real thing. Maybe it [i]was[/i] the real thing, considering. On particularly overcast nights like this one, trying to pick it out was all but impossible. 

Tracy Guiomar bitterly peered up into the nighttime gloom in the distant sky, grimacing as he adjusted his hand to shield his eyes from a the glaring neon flare of a rotating billboard hovering just overhead. It was an advertisement for sneakers. The overblown celebrity-endorsed kind that obsessive hobbyists and entrepreneurs would buy and sell at private fairs for a king's ransom. Admittedly, If Tracy had a shipping address he might have considered getting a pair. Or any pair of sneakers really; the one thing he had noticed since coming here was that nothing let you run your ass off quite like a new pair a sneakers, the poor man's lifehack equivalent to getting wired. Fortunately he was spared the possibility of yielding to any sort of vain temptation, the only sneakers he could afford were the kind he could lift off of the cooling bodies of posers. His current pair were not to his liking, they were mismatched on account of a puncture hole in the left one's toeguard that he was pretty sure had been made with a knife.

And no set of air-lifters or Hermes would have let him jump high enough to get where he [i]really[/i] wanted to be right this second. He had no idea if the [i]Phantasmagoria[/i] was even around, truth be told. Every examination he stopped to risk was little more than nervous vigilance on his part; if it had actually been there he would know by now if only due to being reduced to a steaming pile of flash-vaporized slop on the ground. But he could not really help it, the overcast sky just made him [i]nervous[/i], as though there were an actual blade of Damocles poised over his head. If only the sky were clear, [i]then[/i] he might be able to focus...

...Fooling absolutely nobody as he visibly winced at the sound of nearby gunfire, reflexively shying away from the edge of the street overlook. His breath caught in his throat, and he had to catch himself mentally with the usual reminder. He had exactly forty-seven reasons why it was not a good idea to get cold feet when facing down imminent death. The solo he was anxiously tip-toeing after - who went by the name Golemeth - had been leaving a trail of emptied 31 caliber hardened tungsten penetration rounds in their wake. Along with poser bodies. The first body he had found had practically been cut in half, with chunky viscera sprayed across the street and tiny splinters of bone dotting the brick-and-mortar wall that had been behind them. After taking a minute to dry-heave and gag wretchedly into a dumpster filled with corroded silicon-boards (he had not had anything [i]solid[/i] to eat in days), Tracy had nervously eyed the body up-and-down while chewing on his thumb, thinking. 

It spoke volumes that despite still being so readily unnerved at the sight of corpses, he was more worried about trying to deal with their friends than the psychotic, lumbering giant that had bodied them so thoroughly. Golemeth Tracy could deal with. He was one guy, wired and chipped to the high heavens and probably high and drunk and [i]burnt[/i] from maladaptive chipset sweets, but still just one guy, and Tracy was good at dancing around baggage these days. But all these poser corpses would have whatever gang had sent them howling for blood, moreso than usual, and it was always hard to gauge when every poser nearby was coffin stuffing. There was always the risk there would be some extra-nervous guy with a poly cowering in a port-a-potty waiting to spring out and geek you with the surprise shot to the back of the head, only with posers you multiplied that guy times ten, and then times a hundred in the combat zone. He could talk Golemeth down. He would be a bit more hard pressed trying that shit out while his newfound friends kept popping up like whack-a-moles. He really needed Golemeth somewhere safe and isolated.

That was when Tracy's gaze had been drawn to the poser's knockoff, replica micro-uzi. Even he could tell it was cheap and pitiful, but it was a step up from a poly at least in that it was loud, distracting, and had burst fire. Until it fell apart at the seams anyway, but that was just as well considering Tracy had no intention of getting too attached to the weapon. Gingerly, at first he had tried to prise the weapon from the poser's grasp. Then, wretching as he did so, he pulled back the poser's clawed fingers, frozen in rigor-mortis one by one in order to wrench the weapon free. He almost had a moment where he felt a momentary pang of victory as he was readily able to slide a magazine of bullets out of the poser's off-brand darker-than-black khaki pockets, but was brought back to reality when he realized he had no idea how to eject the weapon's current magazine. His examination had then been cut short by the continued sound of heavy-weapons fire, and panicking internally at the thought of the murderous rage-machine dying, Tracy had raced off through the snaking alleyways towards the confrontation. The streets were thankfully deserted, only idiots like him were out right now while the firefight with the apartment-shredding psychoguns was still raging. For once he did not have to worry about being just the right shade of ragged and destitute to avoid being held up for money or getting used as a punching bag.

Which had led him to the street overpass five minutes later, overlooking the lower street where Golemeth had just finished firing off a burst through the boarded-up window of a condemned store, a settling mist of crimson settling down in the dark recesses of the building as the last sputter of bullets finally hit a structurally important column and caused the second floor to collapse in on whoever might still have been alive in there. Golemeth's weapon of choice was longer than the hulking man was tall - both the him and his weapon were cast in stark detail by the brilliant blazing neon light of a floating billboard advertising sneakers on an overcast, cloudy night in the perpetually dim and stygian Night City. Tracy, who had thought the giant man had finally finished with his rampage only to become spooked by the fresh set of gunshots as he shied away from the edge overlooking the lower street and the buildings below took a moment to realize: Those gunshots had not been from Golemeth. Those had come from the alleyway between two of the smaller condemned brick buildings just below the overlook. Tracy went through a brief paroxysm of mixed frantic hysteria and ecstatic relief as Golemeth took most of the shots on the chin - both literally and figuratively from the looks of it - and looked to have only gotten angrier, hefting the barrel of his oversized weapons towards the mouth of the alley the shots had come from.

Doing some quick mental acrobatics as he raced along the side of short concrete and chain-link siderail for the overpass in order to get a good look inside the alley. There he saw...

...Some random poser. He certainly looked the part anyway, wearing combat boots and trousers with a leather coat. Tracy felt a surge of relief; with his luck he had been halfway convinced the gunman in the alley would have been some biotech super-cyber-soldier freak with psychic powers, but it was just some unmodded virgin-fleshed thug with nary a chip or wire to him, at least as far as Tracy could make out in the gloom. That simplified things immensely.

This was probably the best chance he was going to get, in fact. Posed as he was in the overpass, Tracy had instant-cover on demand whenever he felt like going prone beneath the concrete barrier. If Golemeth looked up at all, he would see Tracy in the distance. If Tracy shot at the poser in the alley, maybe throw a little dramatic wave Golemeth's way after the fact, maybe he could then improvise a meet-up and try to get the hulking brute somewhere safe.

But the only way that was going to happen was if the poser in the alley got geeked. Tracy chewed on his lip as he awkwardly raised his stolen replica weapon. He was not a killer. He had never killed anyone before. Even knowing that this poser was probably a miserable piece of shit who actually [i]had[/i] killed people in cold blood before did not make it even slightly easier to contemplate aiming the gun at him. But.

But...

Tracy's hand only trembled slightly as he squinted through the penumbra where the dark of night met the Neon glare of Night city and pointed the uzi at the alley.

He had forty-seven people counting on him. Forty-seven decent, innocent people. If the choice came down to them or one poser gunned down in the street...

Not that he planned on shooting the poser, of course. He was not going to let such a pitiful moral dilemma make a killer out of him. He would just pepper the side of the building with a small burst, get both of their attentions - and hopefully make a good impression with Golemeth in the process. And if the distraction just so happened to startle the poser long enough for their midsection to get sawed in half by machinegun fire, [i]that was not Tracy's fault...[/i]

Unfortunately for Tracy, for once he had not been [i]quite[/i] paranoid enough. Even the fact that the weapon's recoil caught him offguard due to his poor stance and grip, sending the bullets unintentionally directly at Theron rather than at the alley-wall, was not going to get him anything. Even before the first bullet had crossed half the distance between the overpass and the alleyway, the Intelllitron Hunter's Graff-Stein and Re-Human-enhanced vestibular tracking response had alerted the outwardly-human mercenary to the incoming hail of bullets from behind him and the hostile up in the street overpass.