PUBLIC A Night To Remember | Lizzie's Bar | OPEN

Ryan smirked at Jossy's enthusiasm, taking a slow drag from his own cigarette as she tried her best to play it cool. He gave a small nod.

"Yeah, hit me."

Ryan's eyes lit up sky blue, the Kiroshi optics briefly at work. "I'll run it by the crew, see how you fit in." The words were easy, but they carried weight. If Joss could pull her weight, she'd earn her spot.

He barely had time to finish his smoke before the first distant shouts outside turned into something uglier. The bass-heavy thump of the club made it hard to hear at first, but the tension in the air shifted. Something was wrong. His fingers instinctively tensed near Jossy's beer bottle, sharp eyes flicking toward the entrance.

Then the doors blew open, and hell poured in.

Lizzie's neon glow turned blood-red as the first wave of Lacers crashed into the bar. Wild, chrome-plated bastards, howling and swinging like they owned the place. A gunshot cracked, a scream followed, and suddenly, the music wasn't the loudest thing in the room anymore. Smashing the beer bottle over the counter-top, Ryan moved before he thought. Pressing his hand on Jossy's back and flipping over the bar in front of them as the first shots rang out.

Bottles shattered, glass raining over the bar top. The percussion of gunfire mixed with the flashing strobes, turning the room into a disorienting warzone. One of the Mox, shrieked before getting cut off by a brutal crunch. He reached for Newt's collar, his grip firm as he tried to pull him aside. "Stay low, keep breathing." His eyes flicked to Jocelyn. "You still wanna run with us? Looks like your goddamn audition."

They just needed to make it out, they could stay down and out of the fight if they wanted but Ryan was a fighter. He'd carve his own way out. He stood up as a Lacer approached with a knife brandished, shoving the broken bottle immediately into the man's neck with one hand, while subsequently twisting his arm to take the knife with his other.

The knife swiveled in his hand, reverse grip, ready to go. He just needed an iron.





 
Something was -- off.

Jocelyn couldn't put her finger on it, not until a moment before it all erupted, by which point Redline was already in motion. The man's a pro, she would reflect later with not a little hero worship, but in the moment, she was too busy being hauled over the bar to safety to put together a coherent thought. She came to a hard landing on the corrugated rubber mat as screams and gunfire erupted around them. She glanced across Ryan to see that Newt was there, too. That was good; she had made a quip about strength in numbers before as a joke, but now it was true.

She nodded breathlessly at Ryan and took a deep breath. Her cigarette was gone in the shuffle, her handbag too. She pulled herself into a squatting crouch, peered over the edge of the bar until she saw the handbag and she yanked it back. "Left my gun in my other purse," Joss cracked grimly to the two men as her hand groped around inside her pocketbook before alighting on her cigarette lighter. "Maybe this will come in handy?" She produced the lighter, offering it to Redline, before she drew her cyberdeck from inside. "Gonna see what I can do with that." She hooked her thumb over her shoulder, gesturing at the now-abandoned bartender's terminal. "With any luck it'll be interfaced to security cameras. Can get us some eyes."

Joss shifted, darting over to the station. Dark eyes scoured it for a port, found one, and she tugged the neural link port from her wrist. It always felt like she should be pulling something from deep inside her, but she felt nothing until she jacked in. It took a few moments to hack through the standard retail security. Her eyes flashed a vivid electric blue as her brain directly interfaced with the system.

"Fuck," she announced unceremoniously to Ryan and Newt without looking at them. The camera feeds painted a grim picture: countless bodies, armed, streaming through the now-breached doors into Lizzie's bar's vestibule and then into the bar itself. "Too many," she said, raising her voice to be heard over the racket, though her fingers danced across her cyberdeck all the same. She was looking at the scene through the eyes of the camera installed over the entry door. She could see that some of the attackers were connected to the local subnet by virtue of their proximity, and she wasted no time in flicking quickhacks at those closest to the bar, but her 'deck was last-gen tech, with all the struggles that came with it. She was rapidly maxing out the RAM available to her.

"Come on -- you -- fucking thing," she hissed to herself, twisting at the physical housing of the cyberdeck, as if willing it to upload the quickhacks faster. Her dark eyes went wide, shining artificially cyan as she waited to see whether her quickhacks would succeed in lighting up the attackers like Christmas trees --

 
There I was, finishing the last sip of the drink the edgerunner had so kindly bought me, when shit hit the fan. Good God it was the Reds! They'd finally invaded! Eyes wide at the sight of the screaming shooters mowing down the Mox guards, and scrambled over the counter top and fell behind the bad with a thunk and shatter of whatever glass I'd taken down with me.

Was I tripping? Was this a bad trip? Maybe I had taken something before my outing this evening. Maybe life's a trip. Who fucking knows...

The bartender was ducking down below the bar with me, yelling something, with a look of what the fuck are you doing man? plastered on his face. He reached into a compartment of the bar and pulled out a big beefin' pump-action shotgun, then popped up, unloaded a shot, and returned to our cover as the bullets flew. I peeked up over as he went for another shot, just enough that my eyes could see over the bar, and watched as one of the attackers took a full blast to the chest.

"Ha! Take that you fucking lizard scum!" I yelled, terrified out of my gourd in all honesty. Could I even begin to quickhack in my current state of intoxication? I wouldn't be the first time, I supposed.

As the bartender went for a third shot, one of the aggravated assaulters dove over the top of the bar, tackling the man to the ground. The bartender seemed to hit his head something fierce on the way down, with a knife to his throat.

"Hey, Choomba!" I yelled out, getting his attention, a moment of hesitation by which to maybe save the bartender's life if he had any left. The Red Chromer turned to look at me, all surprised I'd give away my hidey spot, his face quickly turning to a devious smirk as he took the knife from the barman's throat and brandished it at me.

The alphanumeric sequencing played out rapidly before my eyes, weaving a connection between myself and the man. Poor bastard had no ICE to speak of, and certainly no trauma team coverage, but lucky me... he had a biomonitor.

"Chill out." I executed the command of the quickhack, a signal lighting up in the man's biomonitor, which then gave a signal to the man's serotonin receptors: full blast. The man's pupils dilated wide, and he began shaking, sweating, enough to drop the knife.

"What the fuck did you do to me?!" he asked through increasingly ragged breath, before collapsing to the floor. Oh fuck, had I killed him? Always possible when you fuck with a man's brain chemicals. Was it that big of a deal? Hell no.
 


One-by-one, the feeds of the Lacers and True Believers that Evi had organized to record the stomp blinked into the corner of her vision, and she cut the visual stream off so that all she saw were the names of those currently recording - enough to keep track of them was all she really needed, the kids were smart enough to figure out the rest usually. Later, she'd take that footage and splice it together into something else. For now there was still work to do.

A body slammed into her back, and she turned while using her momentum to put an elbow into whoever it was. When she turned whoever it was had already been swallowed up into the melee, and she caught a glimpse of Northman's stupid fucking grin as he threw himself fists first at someone else she couldn't see. Evi scoffed, smiling despite herself, but it soured the second she noticed one of the names had disappeared.

It wasn't like losing a few during a stomp was unusual, but the ones she personally chose to help out weren't usually that fucking stupid. There went another, and she saw a figure in a Legion-emblazoned jacket crumple behind the bar at the same moment (@Newt). "Son of a fucking bitch." Evi didn't have a particular attachment to most of those in the lower rungs of the Movement, but she'd damn near raised some of these kids.

There was a sea of bodies between her and the bar, but there was nothing chrome knuckles to someone's jaw couldn't fix. Anyone in her way soon wouldn't be, whether they found themselves on the floor with a few missing teeth, or moved of their own volition.

The flash of a red jacket caught her eye, and she didn't need to really look at the Lacer on the ground for more than a second to know he was dead. The weight of her knife in her hand was comfortable, and unlike most of the kids she actually knew how to use it. Evi didn't wait for the man to notice her, lunging forward with the intent to end this before it started (@Ryan Graves).

@Jocelyn Tashiro | @Red Chrome Legion

 
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And it begun!

The concert she'd braved the dregs of humanity tonight to see. She'd throat punch anyone who said the words aloud, but she was a closet Corporate Culture fangirl from wayyy back. Ya know, for like 8 months now. A freakin' lifetime when you're a venerable 20 years young.

When the house went dark, every hair on her body snapped to attention. Her eyebrows shot straight up and off her whole damn head, and she could no longer contain the squees and giggles. Cause there he was larger than life and her optics took in every bit of @Cameron "Camshow" and his band. When they hit that first note, Omega let go. Her body started moving as the music began to rise and swell. She jumped off her stool, throwing her arms in the air. Eyes closed as the street kid forgot about real life and allowed herself to feel the music deep within her soul.

And then...All hell decides to break loose. Sum bitch

Omega's fully entranced when @Red Chrome Legion makes their ever so orderly and calm entrance. So utterly in tune is she with the vibes, it takes a second or two before reality demands her attention by means of bullets whizzing past her and everyone else. Gut instinct? Drop.

She drops low, into a 3 point crouch, balancing on three fingers on her left hand. Next move, she upends the nearest table for some impromptu cover. That gives her precious milliseconds to figure out wtf just happened. She'd heard the @Red Chrome Legion concert nearby and had skirted it purposefully. Those guys were nutjobs. REAL nutjobs. Tween them and Maelstrom, picking who was worse depended on the day of the week, what neighborhood you're in and who you're talking to. Either way, not the most civilized of company to be seen with.


It didn't take a degree to figure out the concert was over and thus, no more fangirling. Dammit. Did they know how rare this was?! How long she'd been waiting for this night?! All these and more started flooding her mind and fueling her anger. Few more years and her first reaction in a situation like this will probably be less chaotic and, ahem, juvenile. But...YOLO bitches!

It took half a second of scanning and Omega found her way in. As the Net took shape for her, she wasted no time. Her Virtuality optic implants eliminated the requisite goggles netrunners needed. She grinned bog and broad, proud of herself for that splurge. It paid for itself every single time she jacked in, always.

Ah ha, what do we have here? Fire suppression system? That sounds like fun. Naturally it was protected. Arson was a legit 24/7 concern here in NC. Be a shame if someone just...Broke the password...Started randomly "pressing buttons" and "flipping switches" in the Fire Suppression Systems.

Cause she does. The password was tricky, took her 2 tries before she hacked it. That gave RCL time to hack, slash and wreck all kinds of hell. And then the Sprinklers activate throughout the entire building. Cause of course you don't want to risk a fire spreading from area to area, so she makes extra sure the stage, bar, backstage, even the VIP and the Mox offices get hosed down.

As the chaos in meatspace quickly spreads and consumes the bar stage area as well, Omega starts plotting her own escape. Before she Jacks Out, she sends a 911 ping to NCPD. Riot in progress, attaches location. She drops her Cloak and then exits the Net, stage left. Gods willing and the creek don't rise, that is.

Once fully back in meatspace, she has to wait and kinda shelter in place behind her lil bar table cover. The dance area had been pretty full before all hell broke loose, people really vibing and dancing. Add in psycho RCL peeps and it had turned into a no holds barred battle royale to the death. She didn't have a death wish tonight, so she figured she'd wait where she was. Bodies were dropping left and right. Sheer math said she has a better odd of survival with less alive people shooting.

Math FTW

​
 
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Glass shattered, neon lights flickered, and the bass-heavy pulse of the club drowned beneath the roar of gunfire and screams. Ryan stood with a knife in hand, the ganger beneath him sputtering, having collapsed onto the ground with spray of crimson painting the floor. Redline's knuckles were slick with blood, the blade held tightly in a reverse grip as his eyes focused on what was to come next.

Jossy was already on her deck, fingers flying, her glowing blue optics flickering as she pushed quickhacks into the fray. Newt was well, handling it, his own way. The edgerunner smirked despite the tension, watching from his side eye as a chrome-plated ganger nearby dropped like a rag doll after whatever the hell Newt pumped into his brain.

"Keep at it," Ryan muttered aloud.

"Anything you can do to stall 'em out, fuck with their comms, I'll take it." He slid his cigarette lighter out of his pocket, shaking his head with a dry chuckle. "Not a bad idea Jossy."

Then he caught a presence in his peripheral, something closing in fast. Ryan turned just as she lunged. The flash of a blade, the blur of movement, narrowly avoiding the strike meant for his ribs. The edge of her knife scraped his jacket, leaving a deep tear in his signature red leather. He'd reacted on pure instinct and muscle memory, twisting to the side just enough to prevent the end of his career here and now.

The Solo didn't waste a second, his free hand shot up, grasping for the wrist holding the knife in a bid to prevent another near miss. His eyes locked onto hers, cold and calculating, adrenaline pumping, heart racing. He lifted his right leg swiftly, looking to try and create some space between them with a swift kick.

He had recognized the look in his opponent's eyes's, rage, purpose, and a whole lot of bad decisions waiting to happen. She didn't look like just some Red Chrome goon looking for blood. Of course, then the sprinklers and fire suppression systems ignited throughout the building.

Great. Just what he fucking needed.




 
Jossy's jaw ached and she realized she had been clenching her teeth in frustration. There were too many goons, and more coming, and not enough time or RAM to set them all on fire. She glanced distractedly at @Ryan Graves, nodding urgently at his suggestion. "Good thought," she muttered, and she scrolled through the cams until she got a good view on the controls to the exterior door. She clicked in, found each of the overrides, slicing through them, and finally -- she overrode the safety controls keeping the doors open because of the presence of the bodies within the doorway. She didn't hear the doors cleave through the flesh and bones of the attackers in the doorway, but she imagined the squelch, the grinding, the fantastic crunch --

No time to revel; she cycled through the cameras, found the second door control panel, repeated the process, forcing the doors shut against -- and in some cases through -- the attackers streaming through. Joss scanned the camera view, beady eyes darting to find communications circuits. She sent daemons -- a Sonic Shock here, a Weapon Glitch there, a cheeky little Cyberware Malfunction on that side -- trying to cripple the invaders before they could do more damage.

By then, the sprinklers had snapped on, and Jocelyn found herself sitting in a puddle of water behind the bar.

The aspiring netrunner cycled the cameras again, this time seeing the bar from an upper angle -- and Redline grappling with one of the Red Chrome Legion. "Fuck," she spat and jacked out, shaking the slight sense of vertigo from the transition back to the real world. One hand groped above her, closed around that bottle of beer she had almost made herself sick with. She barked a quick -- "Ryan, watch out!" -- before hurling it across the space at @Evi "Dustoff" Ashford with as much vigor as she could muster.

Now that the sprinklers were going, a molotov wouldn't do much good, but broken glass was almost as good as a knife. She seized another bottle -- O'Dickin Whiskey this time -- and smashed it against the edge of the bar to create a jagged edge. "Get back," she hissed at a RCL goon across the bar, brandishing the makeshift shiv.

 



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Everything happened so fast. The gunshots, the doors flying open. The screams. Before he could even grasp what was happening, Cam watched as Trojan jumped into the crowd with his guitar in hand. He could hear him yelling down there, but not like scared yelling, he was angry yelling - his guitar flying through the air as he swung it this way and that.

What the fuck? What the actual fuck. This was fucked up man.

He wasn't a stranger to fist fights, but this was fucking mad. People were shooting, there were shivs. What the FUCK? Scrambling to his feet, Cam wiped the sweat from his eyes and tried to make sense of the violence all around him. Shit, where did Troj go? Fuck, fuck, fuck. Okay, stop panicking, right? Just fucking think, you wanker. Right. He just needed to think. What kind of punk rocker was he if he couldn't punch a nazi? There were like a thousand songs about punching nazis. Punks were singing about punching nazis before he was even alive! But...where do you begin? Like how hard do you punch a nazi? Could he even throw a punch hard enough? Like he'd thrown punches but-

Fuck off! Stop thinking about it, mate. Just fucking do it!

Right. Just fucking do it. Well, he wasn't going to endanger his guitar. He gave the neck of the axe a gentle smooch and then laid it down just as gently on the deck of the stage. "Just stay right there, daddy'll be back."

Right. Punching nazis. Which one though? There are so many...he searched the crowd. That's when he spotted it. His target. Behind the bar, @Jocelyn Tashiro was waving a shattered bottle around, the jagged edge threating some goon with a shaved head. The goon just smiled, sticking his tongue out and acting play afraid as he tried to encroach on her.

Well. That's a good a nazi as any....fuck how do I get down there? Too slow to climb down...oh fuck my life.

He took a breath. It was just like crowd surfing...except with nazis...and no one was gonna catch him. Fuck too much thinking, just do it!

So he did. With a war cry of pure trepidation, Cam charged toward the edge of the stage and launched himself through the air. Like a soaring eagle with clipped wings, he flew over the bar with ease, his shadow passing over Jocelyn. Fist first, like a dumb version of Superman, he collided with the Red Chromer's jaw. Cam's head soon followed and, end over end, both he and the nazis tumbled - sending bottles crashing to the ground as they both smashed through the bar top in a spray of shrapnel.


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@Ryan Graves was fast. Faster than she'd expected, and knew damn well what he was doing. There wasn't much time for her to consider that, and by the time she had the thought in the first place she was stumbling back from his kick. A boot in her gut was usual, and Evi laughed as she caught her breath in those precious few seconds, pushing off the wall.

Her vision went black momentarily when the bottle clipped her, shattering somewhere behind her and sending shards of glass flying. She was dimly aware of the warmth of blood somewhere towards the back of her skull, but blind probing only rewarded her with more pain and bloody fingertips. What the fuck?

It took just a split second for her vision to be restored, and an instant more to feel that she was soaked to the bone. The sprinklers weren't about to stop anytime soon, but neither was she.

In the fraction of a second of respite, Evi's eyes had caught on one of the stools at the bartop, and a plan formed in a heartbeat. With a steel-toed boot she kicked the stool up, catching it and hurling it at her opponent. Then she surged forward, her knife again intent on his ribs.

Somewhere behind her @Cameron "Camshow" crashed across the bar, coming to @Jocelyn Tashiro's clumsy rescue. The Lacer that had been knocked to the ground fumbled blindly for his shiv, struggling to catch his bearings after the tumble.

The chaos raged.



 
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