[sup][h1][b][INDENT][color=black] A B B Y + C U P I D[/color] [color=F8EF00]A B B Y + C U P I D[/color][/INDENT] [/b][/h1][/sup] [img]https://i.imgur.com/7Cb1ywk.png[/img] [img]https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/033/035/380/large/michal-lisowski-003-bossapp-006-update.jpg?1608201501[/img] [right][img]https://i.imgur.com/wgYH2dA.png[/img][/right] [center][color=white] Collab with [@stitches][/color][/center] [img]https://i.imgur.com/7Cb1ywk.png[/img] [color=lightgray]Valentine stood, hunched over his rifle, listening closely to the scavs behind the door. He could hear at least three of them talking, plus some footsteps further out in the shitty apartment they were holed up in - bare minimum, that made four of them, and if you could see four, you should assume there were eight, and prepare for twelve. They weren’t prepared for twelve - but between them Abby and Valentine still stood a pretty good chance, and they retained the element of surprise. He patted himself down, sorting through his chest rig in his head - five spare magazines for the rifle, three spare for the pistol, aid kit from the fidelis bag he’d left in Abby’s van, zip ties, two stims and two airhypos, and lastly the dump pouch. It always felt incomplete - but without the map and compass he’d trained with it probably always would. [color=ff5294]“Remember, we have two principals to protect - little guy with long hair, and a big girl with a shaved head. Both have Valentino tattoos and plenty of chrome - hopefully, they still do. They take priority just as soon as we make the scene safe.”[/color] He looked up at Abby, sleek Pifner pointed somewhere she wasn’t looking, her own chrome matte in the darkness. She nodded; always a little bit within the digisphere of their immediate surroundings; listening but not responding. Her silicone fingers hooked around the rim of her helmet, pulling it over her face and fixing her gloves. It wasn’t like the Valentinos to go off on their own and get vulnerable without backup - but then again, Valentine seemed to spend much of his time around atypical sorts from their gang. Andreas had gotten in touch a day ago, let him know that a couple of their own had gone missing and were probably in trouble; tracing them wasn’t too hard, especially with the Valentinos putting everything to the side to get them back - but the Scavs were a problem, and there was no guarantee that the principals were still alive. [color=ff5294]“Ready when you are. Give me a warning, then hack the door.”[/color] Abby lifted her hand and turned her head in Valentine's direction. [color=C9ABAB]"Three, two, one, go-"[/color] The door hissed open and Valentine ducked in first, rifle up and sights aligned. He was right, there were more than four. The three who'd been talking got a split second to turn their heads before they were punctured neatly through the centre of them. Cupid flicked his rifle to fully automatic as the two who'd been pacing in the corner - probably eyeing eachother's cyber - realised just what was happening and went for their weapons. The element of surprise and violence of action were the prayers and mantras that special forces lived by - and while Cupid had never really been properly special forces, he'd certainly gotten blasted drunk with them enough to remember. Centre mass. Three shots. Each. He could feel every vein in his body, every artery, stretching and recoiling under the pulse pressure of his excited, howling heart. Ears ringing, mind racing, hands still and silent and ready. Cupid advanced into the room, moving straight to cover behind one of the load bearing pillars in the centre of the wide open kitchen-living room. No Valentinos. But lots of doors. [color=ff5294]"Abby, scan for scavs."[/color] There was a door to the left of the entry hall - looked like a bathroom, thermal signature high, might be in use. [color=C9ABAB]"Left,"[/color] Abby intoned dully as she pulled out her Heatblade and started it up. Another door across the room, to another corridor it looked like - cool air flowing from the gap at the bottom, visible both on Pifner and on Rubicon. Walk in fridge? Cyber suite? Ice room for the bodies? She started towards the cold signature first, but gave a cursory glance to the other doors. First was a little further ahead, again on the left - and it was glass, leading out to a balcony and the dirty sunshine of Night City. The other was on the right, labeled 'Dick's Room'. There was shouting. Another three distinct voices at bare minimum. Cyber would be visible on the net - especially dirty cyber run by idiots like Scavs. Abby was uniquely experienced in fucking around with cheap, low quality equipment so the moment they got in range her fingers twitched. A UI popped up in her Pifner. She was able to connect to their augmentations and swarm them all with malware. One by one, there were dull thumps and the shouting turned quiet. [color=C9ABAB]"They're not dead,"[/color] Abby elaborated offhandedly. [color=C9ABAB]"Go see if I got any of the hostages. I'll check their freezer."[/color] [color=ff5294]"Keep your guard up. Not all scavs show up on the net."[/color] Cupid remarked equally offhandedly, as he drew his sidearm, flicking the safety on his rifle and swinging around to his back on its sling as he went for Dick's Room. Inside were two scavs - one sat at a terminal, twitching limply, and the other lying in bed, lost to the world on drugs. Neither survived him. Abby opened the door to the cold room and found that there were several, all down a long corridor. This was the sort of place that had been designed originally as very high density living space for the poor - at least seven total bedrooms, each designed to hold more than one person, all oriented around a shared communal space. Some of the bedrooms were still being used that way, but of the six that lined the corridor four of them had been turned into either people-fridges or rudimentary operating theatres. Spotting the corridor were more disabled Scavs. Three of them. They writhed and clutched at their parts, some of them overheated and some of them knocked out with static inputs. This was where the Heatblade came in handy. There were too many doors to hide behind, too many corpses that may or may not be corpses; her blade steamed in the crisp air and buzzed as it slid through the meat and metal with ease. Abby always went for the neck when she could; she sliced through the spine and cooked the meat within. Abby heard suppressed gunfire from behind her - Cupid, cleaning up. He was going to get whoever was left in the bathroom next, if there was anyone at all, and then join her. She started first with the operating theatres, migrating towards the familiar blips of medical equipment. If either of the hostages were in there, they wouldn't have much time at all. She opened the first door - and found a young woman, naked on the slab, bleeding, with one arm and some of her lower left leg simply missing. The 'ripperdoc' was holding a gun and looking around blindly, pointing it at things that weren't there, illusions the malware was flooding his own Pifner with. The woman wasn't the one they were looking for. But Valentine could save her anyway - it just had to occur to Abby that he [I]would[/I]. She didn't need to waste a bullet here either; sprinting towards the scav she swung her blade in an arc and severed his hands off by the wrists with a sizzling zap, silencing his screaming by quickly jamming the blade into his head. For a moment she stood and watched the crackling sparks. She flicked her radio on. [color=C9ABAB]"Got a lady here, first door on the left when you go in, no arm and a leg but she's breathing and bleeding,"[/color] she spoke and headed out, trying the other operating rooms. She wasn't being paid to rescue that one. Cupid came running, and they met in the corridor. [color=ff5294]"They were using the bathroom to scrub cyber. Nothing belonging to our marks."[/color] He reported, advancing down the hallway with her to finish securing the site. The next room was cold, but relatively empty. Three bath tubs filled with ice, AC turned down to fuck, and only one body - not one they recognised, but someone who was still intact, who had no visible cyber, and whose thermal signature read them as entirely deceased. More importantly, no scavs. [color=ff5294]"We're clear. Next."[/color] Just as they reached for the door handle to the next freezer room, Abby felt her ICE tingle. There was a runner in there, and they were trying to hack her. She froze. She simply stopped moving as she checked to make sure nothing was compromised. This wasn't an unfamiliar sight for Valentine, but it did leave her vulnerable for those few seconds. [color=darkred]"Stay the fuck out! Get the fuck outta my house, Choom, or I'm gonna fuckin' eat you alive!"[/color] Came a voice from behind the door. [color=ff5294]"If you can see him, ping the spot. Can't hack if you're dead."[/color] Abby didn't respond, but a flickering humanoid outline cropped up in valentine's visuals behind the door. Cupid took one deep breath, and booted the door in. The hack ended to the beat of an automatic rifle, brought to finale with the sounds of a magazine changing. Inside the fridge were another three bathtubs, stolen from ruins or bombed out apartments elsewhere in the city, each filled with water, ice, and a body. One empty and bloody, and two Valentinos. All intact. [color=ff5294]"Found our guys. Let's check the other rooms."[/color] The rest of the flat was pretty much clear. One scav left, who'd balled themselves up and tried to hide underneath a bed that was more or less fixed to the floor - so not the most effective strategy. Abby was quick to kill him as she wandered the apartment checking for any survivors, flapping her hands as she checked any available surveillance as well as checking external feeds to the van. [color=ff5294]"Abby,"[/color] came the voice of Valentine, a little urgently, [color=ff5294]"I'm needed here, go get our marks out of the tub."[/color] She jogged past him and back into the final room, sloshing the woman out of the ice water and dragging her to the nearest bed. Her arms whirred quietly under the strain; cyberaddicts do tire eventually but it takes more than some legwork and deadweight to sincerely hinder one with enough coordinated machinery to damn near replace the human body in its entirety. She wrapped her in the sheets, mechanically shunted her into the recovery position in an act of habit and grabbed some garish purple silk bedspread from another cramped compartment to wrap the man in. Valentine set to work on the girl left on the operating table. The aid kit he had wasn't much but it had a couple of tourniquets that would buy him time. She was pale, blue around her lips and hands and feet and tongue, and wasn't bleeding fast - right now, that was a bad sign. [color=ff5294]"Come to think of it, once you do, can you grab my bag from the van?"[/color] [color=C9ABAB]"Yes,"[/color] Abby called through the open doorway as she lugged the male mark down the corridor. Oftentimes Abby had to make a deliberate, concerted effort to perform actions manually; just because she could turn on the TV and crank up the heating with her quickhacks after coming out of an ice bath of her own didn't mean she ought to do it for every little chore that'd require her to lift a finger. On the job, however, the world around her just seemed to crumple and give way. Doors slid open, lights turned on, cameras received interference and the back door to the van popped ajar as she sprinted out of the block. The heaters were already blasting warm air into the back by the time she'd roughly laid the first hostage inside. She closed and locked the van after slinging Valentine's kit over her shoulder and was back in a few precious seconds to much more carefully drop it off for the surgeon. Valentine was already at work, running cold water through the hose the scavs had set up to wash bits off the ‘ware, rinsing her wounds, using the suction attached to their rudimentary table to remove debris and clear the site of bleeding. [color=ff5294]“Ah, Abby, thank you darling.”[/color] He glanced up and muttered absent mindedly as she dropped the bag off. He took precious seconds away from his patient to unzip it and pull the trauma gear out - seconds that he more than earned back by clamping the largest arteries and preparing them for ligation, before getting a cannula in-situ and feeding her a full bag of saline, and another of blood replacement fluid. He wrapped the sphyg-band around her one good arm and checked the OLED display. [i]Pulse 148, BP 72/40, SpO2 83%. Unacceptable, but there was no oxygen to hand. Only one thing for it.[/i] Valentine retrieved an airhypo and a stim injector from his rig, and jammed both into the side of her thigh on her intact leg. Blood pressure gradually started to rise, and she reflexively took a deep, agonised breath in as the drugs hit. [color=ff5294]“Stim’ll kill the pain, hypo will… whatever the fuck those things even really do.”[/color] He muttered to himself, peeling the girl’s eyelids back. Her pupils were pinpoint - narrow as the ends of needles. Scavs had drugged her - but they’d not touch anyone else again. Plenty of things could cause pupillary constriction like that, Valentine reasoned - plenty of things, one of which was much more common than the others. He nodded. It couldn’t hurt. He went into the kit and retrieved a vial of pronaloxone - a next generation opiate antagonist drug, or NGOAD for short. This one was going through her IV, and getting followed right up with the next bag of fluids. [color=ff5294]“Come on love.”[/color] More muttering from Valentine. [color=ff5294]“Come on.”[/color] There was a decision to be made here. He could risk trying to preserve the limbs as much as possible - ideally pending reintegration of either her existing cyberware, or fresh parts - or he could do the smart thing and cut more out of her so he could close the wounds. Abby did not need to make such difficult decisions, she only needed to run fast enough to keep two cold bodies from getting any colder. The female hostage was as tall as she was wide; far heavier than her male counterpart but still only capable of eliciting a pained grunt or exertion from the hacker without slowing her down too much. Her cybernetic limbs, though slender, were optimised for what they could do and she made short work of the heavy lifting, already out the door and in the van with the two hostages. Just like anything in Night City, cybernetics were just as much of a glittering veneer as they were a genuine asset. The organic shreds of her body shrieked with pain as the numb, metallic parts weighed heavy on the muscles that were left. It was a fatigue that wouldn't make her nonfunctional, not for hours if not days from now - those machines could keep going long before the fragility of the mind willed the amalgamation to slow down. Her heartbeat spiked and her shoulders shook as she sat in the driver's seat and checked the visual and audio feeds for the back of the van. Both hostages were breathing. She didn't need to go back in. She wasted time if she did. Her Pifner lit up with panels in her mind, views of the street, of the apartment, the balcony, the operating room - and intermittently, unbidden, of recorded video footage displaying the moment she pierced that scav's Pifner with her Heatblade. She kept irritably switching that panel off and continued surveillance only for it to flicker back on again the moment she allowed her focus to falter. Seeking a more productive distraction, Abby got back on the radio. [color=C9ABAB]"You done yet?"[/color] Valentine grunted back into the radio. [color=ff5294]“Patient just woke up screaming and punched me right in the face. I love drug antidotes.”[/color] He remarked sarcastically. [color=ff5294]“Although in fairness, I did give her a stim first. I’m going to dress her wounds, pack our shit up, and come down to you as fast as.”[/color] He drew his breath in sharply and looked back at the patient, who was scrabbling around on the surgical slab like a wild animal. [color=ff5294]“Afternoon.”[/color] He bit his tongue as he stood up. He wasn’t about to tell Abby just how much of an asskicking that single punch had really been. [color=ff5294]“Name is Cupid, the scavs took out your cyber, we took out the scavs. I’m not here for you, but I’m going to save your life whether you like it or not. We do not have much time, and I’m going to have to carry you out, but those wounds need dressed first. Do you understand?”[/color] Her eyes widened. [color=white]“I don’t have any cyber.”[/color] Valentine’s heart dropped. His hung his head - but only for a second. [color=ff5294]“Well, that’s probably going to have to change too then. I’ll grab what I can from their stocks, and I’ll make sure you’re not left helpless when we’re done, ok? But I’ve [i]got[/i] to finish with the wounds, and then we have [i]got[/i] to leave. You’re awake because of stim, and an antidote to what they gave you - it won’t last, but you’re safe with us. Ok?”[/color] She blinked, frozen in place. [color=white]“Ok.”[/color] Valentine sprinted to one of the bedrooms and grabbed a blanket for the girl. He took care of her wounds, wrapped her up in it, and stuffed an arm and a leg from the scavs’ bathroom - that looked close enough to her proportions - into his bag. He didn’t want to owe anyone favours, but what the fuck else was he gonna do? [color=ff5294]“Abby, we’re on our way out. Time is eight minutes, thirty nine seconds. Ish. We might need Straid’s help with this girl. I’ll pay.”[/color] [color=C9ABAB]"Are the cost of the repairs gonna outweigh how much we're making on this job?"[/color] Abby settled into the driver's seat and started to plot out the route. [color=ff5294]“Doubt it. She didn’t have any of her own. They were just cutting her up for fun. I picked up spares, we’re gonna hope they fit - so Straid won’t charge his notorious ‘materiel fee’ at least. And I said I would pay. Your cut is safe.”[/color] Then he dropped Andreas a text message. [indent][indent][i][color=ff5294]420Cupid >//: Got both, plus a third victim. All stable. Bloody freezing. Taking to clinic, see you soon.[/color] [color=Violet]ESP4D4VRD3 >//: good shit. Scavs trouble?[/color] [color=ff5294]420Cupid >//: Yes. We had fun.[/color] [color=Violet]ESP4D4VRD3 >//: u scare me. see u soon, love u[/color][/i][/indent][/indent] [/color] [right][img]https://i.imgur.com/wgYH2dA.png[/img][/right]