WETWARE: [SP-01] "Spare Parts"

[UncleJunior]

KAYLA “GHOST” VAN HEYMBEECK – Emberlight Sector​

The capsule pod hums with recycled air and neon shadow. You haven’t slept — not really. You’d been combing subnets when the Whispers feed spikes hot.
<<< Incoming contract tag: #0447-∆S8F >>>
<<< Trust Score: Verified Buyer - Tier 3 Access >>>

The fee is better than average.

<<< You’ll need muscle. You’ll need tools. This isn’t a solo run. >>

---

GINA MORETTI – Spires District, Upper Ring

Your shift ends with two bodies and an incident report that will never see daylight. You’re halfway out of your flak vest when your private comm flickers — not your corp line, the other one. The encrypted one.

The voice is synthetic, running a corp filter. Not one of yours.

“You want to prove you're better than the badge, Officer Moretti?”

There’s no sender ID. Just a hex-code and a district map marked for site access override — the kind only internal security gets.

---

JON GORDENSON – Gordenson Repair Services, The Hollow

You’re closing up shop when a kid with bad wiring and worse posture drops a fried mod on your counter. You’re not a charity, but the kid’s eyes say “desperate”.

You patch it out of habit — and that’s when you find the signal. A tiny digital worm squirming in the old circuits, a relic from an old medtech build that's not supposed to exist.

When you crack it, a voice speaks from the static:

“I need someone who still understands how the old machines breathe. They’re waking up again, and they need to be shut off.”

The message ends with a schematic… and a buyer’s mark.

---

MIssion ID: SP-01 "Spare Parts"

Something’s been stripping the backline service drones along the transit tunnels beneath Verge Station. Parts are vanishing. Power disruptions. Glitched drones wandering into forbidden zones. The corp pulled its maintenance crews after three went dark in the span of a week. Local scavvers avoid the tunnels now, whispering about flickers in the dark.

A sub-layer data tap has flagged asset loss near a dormant surge relay. Someone — or something — is salvaging high-grade components off-grid. We want to know who is doing it, how they’re staying hidden, and what else might be down there.

OBJECTIVES:

• Infiltrate Verge Station's lower tunnels.
• Locate missing drone parts.
• Identify any unauthorized salvage activity.
• If hostile, neutralize or contain.
• If salvageable, recover valuable components.

BRIEFING NOTES:

• Expect low light and degraded infrastructure.
• Motion sensors may glitch. Some drones may be corrupted or aggressive.
• Underground signals may be unstable — standard neural links may experience lag or bleed.
• Bring: low-profile gear, light arms, EMPs if available, sensor upgrades, climbing gear or cable tethers recommended.
• Avoid attracting the attention of corp patrols in the upper tunnels.

CONTACT:
Anonymous via secure proxy. Payment escrowed.
Intel broker verified: GHOST

 

[Gamina]

Kayla had just finished her brew when the slightly unnerving alert from the whisper network, buzzed through her mind. Quickly opening it she scanned the message and smiled as she saw the contract or better said when she saw the fee. With it, she would not have to hussle to cover the coming bills, meaning she will be able to focus on quality writing, which in turn promised better commissions.

The contract was weird enough to attract her curiosity, but didn't have the apparent redflags usually following well paying gigs, so without bothering herself too much with the idea of having to hire extra manpower she accepted the contract, and allocated a portion of balance into escrow to be able to hire some decent merc.

Pulling on her jacket she exited the pod and looked around out of habit, before making her way towards the rendering out point.

 

[siobhancan99]

Gina looked down at the communication and rolled her eyes. Nothing was better than the badge. Whether you were in an oligarchy or an oligarchy pretending to be a democratically elected republic, the badge was what stood between the tweakers and shiftless layabouts and the good normal folk just trying to make the rent.

She was curious enough that she'd go to see what was up though. She stowed her vest away, leaving her in the clothes she used during investigations. Grey slacks, white blouse. Business-like if it wasn't for the boots beneath being more military than Manolo Blahnik. She strapped her personal sidearm on, then added her long overcoat. She stopped by the weapons locker, stowing her service piece and headed out into the gloom of the night. Tucking the top of her vape pen in her mouth, she didn't inhale. She was trying to quit, but the feel of it between her teeth was comforting when she was irked.

Making her way out of the Hitokama-Fukunaga Zaibatsu campus, she flagged down an AI cab and paid the premium for it not to report its location back to the home office.

 

[Gamina]

Getting to the rendezvous point slightly ahead of the specified time, she leaned against a graffitied wall with a good view of the spot. While she semi trusted the contact who arranged the contract to provide the right tools and people for the job, it never hurted to spot contacts before they spot you as how someone entered a scene told you much more about them, than their own introductions.

Putting in her ancient wired headphones on, (an aesthetic choice as she as easily could play music from her own tech) she put on some old school Shamisen Metal rock as she people watched. When a AI cab arrived who did not ping on her software she smiled as at least someone was being carefully, but the person who came out of the cab surprised her as it was clearly not a mechanic, but also clearly did not fit her stereotype for muscle. Interesting she poundered to herself flagging the woman down with a little wave of the hand.

 

[siobhancan99]

Looking over at the other woman, Gina assumed she was there for the same reason. Especially with the wave, though you never knew who might just be from the midwest or something. She smiled and headed over, looking around the area. She put her hands in the pockets of her coat as she moved. Her eyes drank in the other woman. Cute enough, she supposed, though probably not someone she could bring back to her H-F campus condo. Oh well. She moved in closer to the other, "do you know how many we're expecting?" She stook next to the woman, not watching her but watching the street. These things never happened anywhere nice, and it would not be great to be shot while chatting.

 

[Gamina]

"One more, a mechanic."

She said pushing her headphones off, letting it rest around her neck, the sound of traditional Japanese instruments playing a metal song, faintly humming through them.

Giving the woman a once over, clearly pinging her as corpo security she extended her hand since while she didn't really like corpo's between her journo job and her extracurricular activities she had learned to work with them.

"You can call me Ghost." She said before adding. "So this is what y'all do for fun?"

 

[UncleJunior]

The Verge Station is barely a station anymore. Just a rusted transit artery half-swallowed by the sprawl — its upper levels still active with flickering vendor signs and the distant hum of corporate drones, but its lower platforms forgotten, walled off with collapsible barriers and digital “Out of Service” tags that no one’s updated in years.

The air here smells like wet concrete, burned ozone, and hydraulic fluid gone sour. What little lighting remains is patchy — sodium-yellow bars that pulse like dying fire, casting jagged shadows over broken benches and tagged plexglass.

At the far end of the platform, behind an abandoned line, a narrow maintenance stairwell descends into the dark. No guards. No checkpoint. Just a red strip of tape across the gate that reads:

SURGE RISK – CLEARANCE REQUIRED – DO NOT ENTER

 

[siobhancan99]

"I hang out in abandoned subway terminals" Grina grinned, then took the hand. She pinged on the woman's reticence. Cops had a way of instilling that reaction. Part of the job. She let go of the woman's outstretched hand and put her own back in her pocket, pulling out her vape. This time she did hit it. "Honestly mostly fistfulls of hallucinogenics and casual sex." She found a little disarming honesty was the way to break the ice in these sort of situations. Nobody from corporate was here to judge what she did on her free time. H-F was, in that way, pretty good as far as employers went. As long as she wasn't disturbing the neighbors or ending up in the news she was free to be as degenerate as she wanted when she was off the clock. Picking up on the strains of the music she gestured "You like Jagatara? It's the only Japanese band i really ever got into."

She looked down into the dark of the maintenance shaft, checking her gun subconsciously. The fact of the matter was she didn't know quite what role she was playing here. She was a talker first and shooter a distant second.

 

[Gamina]

"How convenient as we are to do just that."

She said as the copper made her joke.

"In that order?" then after a small pause she added " More of a stim and casual sex girlie myself."

As the woman picked up on the Japanese influence in her music she just shrugged.

"Jagatara, is interesting for how they blend punk, funk, and reggae, but i am more of a metal and pop person myself. "

Looking at her watch while the woman was checking out the maintenance shaft, Kayla sighed, the mechanic was late.

"Should we go ahead and explore?"

 

[siobhancan99]

Gina shrugged "depends on what you're going for. The hallucinogens usually take about 45 minutes to come on. So you know, timing is key." She laughed and looked down the dark hole again "I mean we should probably give anyone else coming a few minutes. Details weren't exactly you know. Overflowing. I'm not sure what we're even doing down that hole." She looked around for something to lean on, then made a face at the griminess of it all "Still, sooner we go in sooner we come out. Hopefully." Moving over to the dark tunnel she peered down it. She made a mental note to try to get the corp to upgrade her to some cyber-eyes. "How about you? know what the fuck we're doing here?"

 

[Gamina]

Kayla suppressed her impatience with people, aesthetic woman made sense. But this delay highlighted why she proffered to work alone. But as the corpo seemed to also lose patience, she took out a marker and wrote.

"Hey Mech, we are inside already. Mention verified broker name when catching up"

And with that she made her way I side.

"Not much, o lying that they are willing to pay well and that they do not want the corpo's topside to know."

She said being swallowed by the shadows of the tunnel. She too had wondered who was stripping the backline drones, and more importantly why, as they were not necessarily the easiest way to get to components.

 

[siobhancan99]

Gina nodded and head into the gloom along with what she assumed was the hacker. "Honestly, I'm mostly just a talker so hopefully our third shows up. Or you know, whatever is happening involves getting people to come out of a door unarmed." She smirked and took out a small light, shining it around and looking down the darkened area. She moved quietly and carefully, not wanting to step on anything here with the dodgy maintenance.

 

[Gamina]

DM PROMP


There’s no official sign for where Verge Station ends and the dead zone begins.

No guard post. No checkpoint. Just the feel of it — like a pressure drop in the lungs, or that static prickle along the jaw where implants sync too tight against the skull.

The corridor here was once a pedestrian throughway, back when the trains still ran this far south. Now, it’s been claimed by rust and silence. Stray light bleeds from a shattered guidance strip overhead, flickering weakly in warning colors long since bleached into pale rot.

You notice a kiosk — its screen shattered, its voice module looped into a corrupted whisper:

“—Welcome to—el—Verge—station. Caution. Surfaces—may be—live—”

The floor is cracked polymer tile, stained with oil, rain, and time. Bootprints crisscross the dust — some old, some new. A set of drag marks cuts across them all, like something was pulled deeper in… and then the trail just stops.

The Far End of the Corridor…

The wall is fake.

It looks like part of the structure — slabs of polycrete, tagged in layers of street glyphs, an old CorpSec “Maintenance Access Only” plate rusted into place.

But the seams don’t match. The angle’s just wrong.
And if you step close enough, your HUD pings a faint current.
Beneath the bulkhead, something hums.

To the left of the false wall, a utility stairwell descends beneath a collapsed lighting fixture. Someone has pulled the caution tape taut across the entrance like a ritual — frayed ends tied in little knots, worry knots, soaked in soot and still twitching in the faint breeze.

At the base of the stairwell: a door.
Unlabeled. No interface. Only a half-burned handprint above the sensor pad — a warning or a key.

You feel the vibration through the soles of your boots before you hear it.
Something is active inside.

The Feed sputters for a moment, then reconfigures.
A low-band scrape flashes across your HUD:

_// Verge.Stn.Log: unauthorized pulse detected // SIGNAL CONTAINS MEMORY SIGNATURES //

 

[Gamina]

Kayla was happy to not be down here alone, while she usually proffered solo gigs as it was easier to slip in and out of data streams without anyone knowing, when literally nobody knew about it. Thus station gave her the creeps and she actually wished the mechanic had shown up on time.

Arriving at a hub after what seemed to be an eternity in the dark, she was attracted by the kiosk display. Considering this station was not I use she would have figured everything would have been powered down, but clearly not.

Approaching the display she plugged in figuring she could run a diagnostic to see what else in the network was running and what had changed the display as a warning for a live surface was not a normal thing to see.

 

[siobhancan99]

Gina hmmmed. "I'll bet there's a door back there. There's current of some sort." She put her hand on the false wall, tracing the seams of the concrete, tracing them with a nail to see if the slight cracks that show are deep or shallow. In case she's wrong about it being controlled by the nearby terminal, she crouches and looks for a physical release. One would make sense, in case power was out and there needed to be access, but sense and weird false walls were often strangers. "You getting anything off the kiosk?" She didn't want to interrupt the woman, but since she was getting half the pay she felt like she should at least be seen contributing even if her contribution was more show than actuality.

 

[UncleJunior]

In Kaylas' HUD, a prompt blinks:

// WARNING: SYSTEM ROOT CORRUPTED// DIAGNOSTIC MODE // PROCEED? [Y/N]

The text stutters.

>>ghost: Neural handshake sync unstable.

>>Result: Partial netmap active. Two active nodes: LOCAL DOOR CONTROL [UNKNOWN AUTH] and INTERNAL GRID (status: critical faults). security daemons=0/-.

Suddenly, a spectral image flickers across her feed: a security overlay, faded and nearly dead. A hallway blueprint. Some rooms are greyed out, while others blink in red. A timestamp from 16 years ago hovers in the corner before glitching out entirely.

Gina’s finger traces a seam that isn’t quite flush. Concrete flakes off, revealing an old mechanical lever hidden behind a sliding panel. No corp tag. Manual.

Failover access.