PRIVATE Street Spirit (Fade Out)

[Quantum]

STREET SPIRIT (FADE OUT)
Somewhere, buried beneath concrete and exposed wire a stage fills with shifting silhouettes

// Kino 88 — Ruins of a BD Theater, Pacific North, Watson
// 21:30 — Local Signal Active​

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[video]

The crowd didn't arrive so much as bleed in, shuffling like ghosts from alleys, ducts, underpasses—every part of Night City that still pulsed without permission. Nobody asked questions at Kino 88. They came when the signal whispered. They followed the coordinates spray-painted on the side of a wrecked BD kiosk three days ago. Or maybe it came in a glitch-loop, audio only, woven through a pirate dream on the black feeds. Kino 88 was largely without its ceiling, the old asphalt roofing slowly crumbled in on itself like an old effigy collapsing into ash. Some bygone fire left the dulled whites and sepia oranges an ashy white. The screen was cracked, a spiderweb of impact points and old chemical warping, but it still flickered dimly, like a wounded optic refusing to shut down. Beneath it: rows of what used to be seats, now plastic skeletons. A tangled mess of speaker wire and melted metal. The smell of wet dust and burned mylar hung like a ghost through the air.

And in the center of it all, shuffling through slowly accumulating bodies, was Cormac. He didn't walk onstage. He climbed up, combat boots crunching glass and synthetic polymer as he scaled the rusted scaffolding behind the projector rig. His silhouette hit the cracked screen first—biker jacket fluttering with each jagged movement and the outline of his guitar slung low. The veins in his arms glowed faintly beneath the artificial neons that were loosely scaffolded around the stage, pulsing to a beat only he seemed to hear.

He paused, surveying the crowd—like some preacher regarding his gathered mass. He began to shift slowly across the stage, hands planted now over his guitar. It was a vintage telecaster heavily modified, running with dual wires that streamed cold electric code through his wrists. It's body was dented and chipped, paintwork largely dulled, with a kill-switch, feeltrack interface, and various other adornments haphazardly intwined with the wooden body. The headstock, uniquely, was untouched. That same, all-American, anachronistic silhouette. Some vestige of a musical amenity long gone and largely abandoned in the dopaminergic noise.

The Capsules were already there, and had largely setup the makeshift venue. In a place like Kino, something hollowed out, abandoned and then suddenly claimed, they were felt more than seen—loitering in the shadows, sitting atop broken speaker towers, sprawled across busted rows. There home was wherever they imprinted themselves, claimed wordlessly, and bastardized with an intangible pride. Moss was tapping a beat into the armrest with the side of a shiv. Hex had a transmitter running from his collar to a BD spike. Someone—probably Sawtooth—had tagged the Capsule pill sigil in blood-red neon across the side of the burned concession booth. It pulsed like it was breathing, almost in pain.

Then Cormac stepped into the beam of the flickering screenlight. No pyrotechnics. No announcement.

He stood there for a breath too long. Then his fingers wrapped over the fretboard in some over-practiced precision, and his pick violently glided down the bridge's string. Rigid, almost atonal, piercing strikes sent a chord through the air. Through the boosted chrome speakers it rendered something otherworldly, and the sound seemed like it could split the metal of the rafters. He sent this going for some time, singular, one after another, the tempo speeding but almost imperceptibly.

"If you think your souls can be bought, then they've already been sold. We've been asleep a long time."

Silence. Then the hum. A low feedback loop spiraling from the stack of scavenged amps behind him. Not mechanical. Not clean. It shivered, like it had been buried in the dirt too long. Cormac knelt and ran his palm across the neck of his guitar. The contact made the air warble. The aggression may have lunged those string out of time, but the rig was jacked directly into his wrist, the beating of his pulse regulating his rhythm. Syncopated to his imagined perfection. He looked out at them—not just the Capsules, but the strays, the burned-out BD junkies, the dopesick solos, every feeble, insignificant punk willing to follow some spare signal into a destitute shell. Each would soon be a prodigal son to those six strings.

"You're not here chasing a sound," he said, voice cutting through like a broken sermon. "Nah, it's 'cause there's something in your head you can't kill. You tried. Over and over. You spent. You silenced. And it's still there. It just won't go, will it?"

A few nods. A few murmurs. Someone in the third row dropped to their knees, unclear for what.

"Good," he whispered. "Because we owe this for the ones that couldn't pull through."

Visions of heroes, of idols he knew only in posters and dreams swept through his mind. It was his pulse and his breath, shaped into the calloused fingers that shifted across the frets as though unearthing some commandment hidden beneath the aged rosewood.



And then his singular, rhythmic strums became melodic, chords shifting in diatonic precision before giving way to melodies that dripped like liquid from a river of sound. It was delicate at first—like he was coaxing something broken back to life. His fingers danced across the strings not with speed, but with an intensity of vulnerable, wrapping tones. The tonic was ambiguous, but so were the lot of all those gathered there. Resolution didn't exist in that small encampment of nomadic souls. His guitar slowly convulsed into an exhale, a nervous system prolapsed into space. The chords rose, layered with subtle feedback and ghosted harmony, carrying the weight of things never said, wordless grief like a substance in the air.



The Capsules watched in stillness. Some with eyes closed. Some mouthing words to songs that hadn't been written yet. The BD feed hummed on illegal wavelengths, slicing across rooftops and signal towers, and in that moment, for anyone listening, it didn't feel like a show. It felt like memory. Like a place you forgot you lived in. The climax didn't explode. It unfolded in a raw, ascending motif full of dissonance and grace, as if the sound itself was struggling to hold together, like it might collapse under the weight of its own self-inflicted burden. And Cormac played through it, eyes unfocused, face half-shadowed in the flickering light of the ruined screen behind him.



The sound tore out of the speakers like an open wound. Layered across it: archival riot loops, screams from old BDs, heart monitor spikes, the voice of a child saying "please" on repeat. The Capsules leaned into it, for them more a ritual than a show.



The Coil had come aboveground tonight. Night city may well have forgotten the sound, but the voiceless heads swaying beneath the sensory excess of the disemboweled theater wouldn't.

​

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[Vex Kiranova]

@Quantum , Leave

Peasant work. This was peasant work.

Nicotine and tar choked his lungs as Vex lingered just beyond the periphery of the would-be-club. Kino 88, or so his handlers had informed him - a hive of decadence as it'd been described by Siren. Take your iron, keep your wits, gird your soul, she'd said. Don't go breaking any hearts, stay off the drink: easy instructions he had every intention of casting to the wayside.

He didn't know who Gunner and his ilk thought they were sending him on an errand like this. He was the best edgerunner in Night City, not some messenger boy. The messenger boy was content to brood on his circumstances as miscreants and dregs filtered through the doors like roaches pouring up from NC's foundations. Vex looked the part -- he was still fairly drunk from his bender at the Citadel. His long coat trailed to his knees and was potmarked with stains of various origin. His skin had been covered with a thin layer of dust, courtesy of road work he'd been forced to walk through in his passage and the sweat that had clung to his skin. His 'ganic eye was red rimmed and bloodshot, with grew black bags hanging from it in testament to his poor health.

The cigarette, home rolled and low quality, sputtered smoke like a coughing cancer patient from the bright cherry that gleamed between his lips. Truth be told, he more keen on looking for the more scantily clad ladies among the crowd than anyone of note. He had all night, no need to rush the mission.

The message he was to give was a rather simple one anyway. "Hey kids, Watson belongs to Gunner, give him a cut or get cut," or something stupid like that. He'd only paid half a mind when Siren had cornered him in his hangover corner and spouted objectives at him like he was some kind of task-oriented automaton. She'd woken him up shortly after returning from the docks and made certain rest was a reward for later - though he imagined the slavedrivers would have some new, equally menial task for him the moment he was done here.

Better to drag his feet.

"You still upset with me?" He asked aloud. There was no response, not from the drone in his coat, nor the synthetic synapses that had been knit across his neurons like a spider's web. "It's been two days Nyx, c'mon." Only the raccous weeping of a guitar from within spoke to greet him. A seed of anxiety bloomed in his chest as he wondered if he'd really fucked things up between the two of them this time. Theoretically, if Nyx did not want to come back, she didn't have to.

That would complicate things.

"Love you girl," he added through a smoke-addled sigh. Shaking his head, Vex cast the cig aside and stomped out the cherry as he merged with the flowing tide of people.

Kino 88 was a different world than his usual. He often found himself lingering in the midst of the grunge, but this was more grassroots than anything he'd ever attended. The faces bled into one another - visions of youth and coming death intermingled in the neon-glazed shadow. The audience was as eclectic as the scenery: simultaneously pointlessly random and yet meticulously planned. Kino 88 was a concrete oxymoron.

He crossed the foyer and found himself swept into a whirlwind of sound and movement. The band poured their hearts out into the city, and despite himself, Vex was a little moved. He lingered in the midst of the crowd; eyes drifting shut for a moment as his mind clung to the hurricane of noise. He did not so much ride it as he gripped its coattails, a soul adrift on a sea of a thousand others, threatening to drown.

The climax hit, the band piloted it like a scooner on a storm, and Vex's eyes shot open. The miasma of noise, ranging from a child's voice to the death-screams of BD memory, tore him from his brief reverie. He'd lit another cigarette automatically, unaware that the cancer stick was burning between his lips until he tasted the smoke. His eyes darted toward a concession stand to the burning neon logo of the Capsules.

Gunner wanted to send a message. Vex wanted to live. Drastic measures demanded action.

The climax drew its close, and the crowd slipped off the side of a cliff. Vex would have gone with them had he not steeled his resolve, his fingers wrapping around the handle of his .50 hanging loosely from his coat pocket.

Send a message loud enough that it can't be ignored. Cut through the storm.

Those members of the crowd still bearing a semblance of their minds parted for him as Vex marched like the man on a mission that he was toward the stage. His feet chewed the distance in a matter of seconds, and his arms were burning as his hands clung to the edge and hoisted him up.

This was stupid. Too much. Tact might as well have been a sin.

But he wanted to feel the rush, he didn't want to be conscious when he was sober, and he knew if he failed Gunner here the consequences would be dire, both for himself and for Wilma. One did not trifle with a murderer.

The gangoons that served as security were already moving by the time he'd hoisted his weight over the stage. Weapons were quietly drawn as they tried to decide if he was simply an overly intoxicated fan, a heckler, or something worse.

The cig had fallen from his mouth, and it was weeping wispy curls of smoke up onto the stage as he stood up to his full height, arms held out wide to show he was no threat, a wicked, stupid grin splayed across his dirty visage. It was an open challenge in the form of reckless abandon.

Go ahead, shoot.

His eyes, burning sulphuric coals in a tarnished patrician face, stared holes through Cormac's head. Vex's lips moved but no sound registered - his words whispered along a strand of the net that Siren had woven into her web. They crept across that wire and into the man's head - registering as a private call that could be rejected if so desired.

"Ya got a good show here," he mouthed silently, his voice like a waterfall crashing over crags over the neural connection. "Hate to bust it up, but we gotta talk choom. Right now." His tone was dire and brooked no disagreement.

 

[Quantum]

The crowd stilled as the intruding party made their way upon the stage. The Capsule faithful held their breath, but for the perceptive gaze their expressions did not read fear, but anticipation. They watched with a juvenile excitement suppressed beneath flashing lights and face paint. The kind that comes just before the curtain tears open or the sky gives way.

Cormac didn't move at first. Just looked up, face haloed by the last flickers of screenlight. His fingers lingered on the strings like the song hadn't finished with him. He took in the shape of the man on stage—ragged coat, dirty grin, gun half-concealed like a nervous thought. And arms splayed open wide in a strange, perhaps biblical gesture.

A cigarette smoldered below them, forgotten.

Then Cormac stood. His guitar hung low against his chest, humming with ghost notes trickling down the waves of reverb. The crowd pressed inward without meaning to, a tribal instinct best described as atavistic. Cormac spoke softly.
​

"You climbed the wrong altar, choom. I have no penance to offer you."

The words dropped like stones in still water. No mic. No reverb. Just the weight of them settling in the silence Vex had ruptured.

Cormac walked forward just enough to make the space between them intimate and dangerous. He didn't look at the weapon. He looked through the man, into the wire-tight tension coiled behind his uneasy grin. Into the glazed over eyes of a man riding a two week hangover. Into the destitution not-so buried beneath his rough, pockmarked features. To Vex, his expression probably read has placid, almost entirely indifferent. It was the end of his set, after all, and sweat slowly beat down from his forehead.

There was a twitch beneath the surface of the gang below and around the stage. A tightening of shoulders as the unspoken pulse that ran between them like a shared signal buzzed more clearly now. They had seen it before—the way Cormac could shift, without warning, from poet to jackal, a brief release from the cold charisma that seemed endemic to him. Some of them lived for it, in the way that only the truly unmoored did: not out of overt cruelty (though for some the brutality alone demanded attention), but rather because a pain delivered by someone who believed in something felt like a kind of order. Punks could claim chaos in speech and in sermon, but few could deny that implicit desire for some thinning thread of justice to peer out from the floorboards of an otherwise orderless world. It was a frontier hope they only half carried and only a quarter believed in.

But the Capsules wouldn't get their show. As Cormac stood before Vex, he did so only long enough to meet his gaze, to let the weight of silence press down like a hand on the back of the neck. For a moment, the crowd hung in the balance with him, held between expectation and desire, straining to see if he would become violence again, if this night would crack open in blood and teeth. But he walked past.

Without a word, Cormac stepped through the man's space as if it were smoke and returned to the center of the stage, where his guitar still waited at his waist like a faithful weapon. He met strings with pick once more, and the final song began in a tremendous stir, the bandmates continuing without falter. That last track on the setlist climbed through the air like a sunrise made of ruin. The crow's silence abruptly ended. ​

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[Vex Kiranova]

@Quantum , Untitled

The narcissist and the death wish warred for dominance over his heart as the guitarist regarded him for the wretch he appeared to be. Expectations slipped through his fingertips when his digits reflexively twitched at the man's words. Nyx would've been pumping him full of chems right about now, but she was busy enjoying life without "the anchor around her neck" that she'd informed Vex he'd become. He met the world raw and expected it to match his rancor. The guitarist regarded him with a master's confidence - Vex had wandered into a foreign realm prepared for a war and found a force that regarded him as so small as to be ignored.

His head was empty.

Sweat dripped down the back of his neck as he felt the heat of the lights burning his flesh. A thousand inclinations pulled him in every direction, and his body remained frozen as the soul struggled to pick one. In the end, he found himself simply returning the guitarist's stare. The rationalist in him demanded an audience: that the Capsules stop for just a fuckin' second and listen before bodies started dropping over back-alley BDs - that he'd find the right words to break the spell they'd cast and help them to understand that he was here to help before Gunner started doing what Gunner did.

The id had entirely different priorities. It'd come here looking for a fix. There was only one solution to the depressive sludge that gunked up the gears of his neurons: adrenaline, fast and hard, the more the better, and he was here hunting it like an addict.

Sure, Gunner'd given his orders, but it was still Vex's choice to obey. He could draw on the slaver and die for it, eat up every last bit of pride he could scrounge before Gunner fried his synapses with the touch of a button, and meet God with his shoulders held high. The temptation to self-destruct was ever-present and all-demanding, but other factors kept his chem-burned brain in line. If Nyx's vacation turned out to be a permanent stay, then Wilma was all he had left. Killing Gunner was killing her, and for all his bluster he couldn't bring himself to burn that last bridge, even if she'd rejected him in every sense beyond what was required of her.

Where to put all that self-loathing then? On the stage of Kino 88, gun and sword in hand, choking beneath a sea of bodies and barking laughing curses on his lips as the bedraggled masses bookended an exceedingly miserable story.

"You climbed the wrong altar, choom. I have no penance to offer you."
The dismissal reverberated through his skull like a gunshot. The face of this cult of personality strode past him, either apathetic, intoxicated by confidence, or a mix of the two. Vex's 'ganic eye twitched.

"Кім ты, чорт вазьмі, сябе лічыш? // Who the fuck do you think you are?" The words hissed past Vex's lips instinctively, vile venom dripping from every syllable. Restrained violence coiled through every muscle as his arms dropped, and the band began to play once more. The id wanted blood: to prove to the world that Vex Kiranova was not a man to be so easily dismissed, as he so often was of late. What remained of his sanity pulled tight on its collar, and his arms remained firmly at his sides.

He was here to send a message to prevent violence, not start it, and he would not win if he did. If Nyx was with him, maybe, but... no.

Use your words caveman.

Vex inhaled until his chest was puffed and his lungs were filled to capacity. He let it out slow, expelling his outrage as much as he could manage while the club shivered to the vibrations of the guitar.

Rational. Calm. Peacemaker.

His disembodied voice whispered over the growing cacophony into Cormac's skull. "I don't care about your penance, and I've got no reverence for your altar. There are chromed up murderers down the block that want to kill you and yours, and I'm trying to prevent it." His expression was that of stone as he stared down the guitarist. "Finish your set, drink in that crowd, 'cause if you don't listen to me it's gonna be the last one you ever get to perform."

The obvious threat gave him a taste of the high he was hunting. Fresh adrenaline slithered through his veins like a frozen serpent, and his heart raced to meet it. For a moment, the muck was burned away, and he was alive: functioning. "I'm getting a drink and I'm leaving in thirty. If you give a shit, find me by the concessions. If not, I'd advise hiring some mercs and finding a hole to hide in. I can't control what happens. I'm just the messenger."

He enjoyed the shock that ran up his legs as he dropped off the side of the stage back into the crowd. Some paid him a bit of curiosity as he passed by, but their attentions quickly returned to their idol. Vex marched pointedly toward a corpulent man hocking various forms of intoxication in the corner of the chamber. He took a beer from the man's ice chest, flicked around a dozen eddies his way, and turned to watch the performance, a small grin marring the seriousness of his face as the familiar taste of his favorite vice met his tongue.

Time will tell.

 

[Quantum]

The song continued on, Cormac now standing ahead of Vex and facing the crowd, leaving the man squarely in the center stage and yet hidden behind the flashing neon and rising smoke. The words he delivered he could perhaps only half hear, resigned inside his head as the world around him rung and echoed with sound.

"Finish your set, drink in that crowd, 'cause if you don't listen to me it's gonna be the last one you ever get to perform."

At that Vex was finally granted a brief, momentary acknowledgement. Cormac's head veered right, half his face backlit as an eye set upon the shifting 'merc. Cormac let a faint grin tugged at the corner of his mouth, amidst the lights it wasn't entirely clear the manner of his expression. It wasn't kind or cruel, more something vague and alive. A flicker of recognition between two wolves pretending they aren't circling the same fire. It was brief, a second at most, before he withdrew back into his world and the singular, unascribable voice of the crowd kicked and racketed across the walls of Kino 88.

In time final chord rang out, warped slightly by feedback. And as it trembled into silence, Cormac leaned into the mic like he was speaking to someone who wasn't in that room. His voice came low, rasped from smoke and sweat, but steady—delivered not like a lyric, but like some dispensation.

"Sun's up and the ground starts reaching out. To pluck the eyes away. It's better to burn out."

His voice hung as thin as ash, then slowly vanished into the hum of lingering amplifier feedback. The projector behind him sputtered once and went black. No encore. No bows. Just the slow rumble of motion as the Capsules broke formation, melting into the crowd like heat sinking back into ash. The stage was dark, and by the time the eye could reacclimate to the darkness the band's shifting figures were just the faintest phantoms in the layers of black.


He found Vex near the concession stand, posted up like someone trying not to look like they were waiting. The beer in his hand was already half-drained, and he slid a pill under his tongue and fill his mouth with the lukewarm liquor. Capsules still lined the outer walls like broken statues, pretending not to watch. Cormac didn't say anything at first. Just stepped into the periphery—close enough to be heard, far enough not to give anything away.

"Let me guess," he said, voice low, dust-dry. "You're one of Gunner's boys. No no, let me try again - A Tyger Claw lapdog they sent to sniff the rot?"

A pause, not long enough for interruption.

"Or maybe you're freelance. Looking to warn the freak show before the lions come." He glanced once at the crowd, the cracked ceiling, the fading projector light bleeding behind them. "I got something of an impression of the kind of people Gunner sends. Reputation tells me he's not much of a negotiator. Me, personally, I prefer negotiators. Lot more fun to talk to."

He leaned against the countertop, arms folded past the elbows, a quiet calm in his posture. Cormac looked at Vex—truly looked now, as if only just bothering to gauge the man behind the mess. Not sizing him up like a threat. More like a song that hadn't decided on its key yet.

"Go on, choom. You wanted a conversation." A slight tilt of his head and a sardonic tap on his earlobe. "I'm listening"

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[Vex Kiranova]

@Quantum , Parametric

The waiting was always the worst of it.

Ever impatient, Vex did his best to cling to the music and let his mind ride on the lyrics, but there was no having it. The music became noise and sound become dull background stimulae. Adrenaline steadied slow, then settled, carving canyons through his veins where it'd went and leaving little but empty space. The spirit burned out as quickly as it'd been set aflame, and he doused the remaining embers with greedy gulps of his beer. He'd drained the vast majority of it within a minute's time -- all autopilot, none of it savored.

The brain, being the complex machine that it was, connected the dull flavor of the drink to the last time he'd imbibed in it a few days ago. "I liked you better when you were threatening to kill me," she'd said. Her walls had come up, and he wasn't sure if she'd been making a jest or speaking the God's honest truth. They'd reconciled for a fragment of a moment before the status quo came steamrolling over the foundations of whatever they were starting to build. Things were fine again - normal, whatever their normal was, and yet he was left feeling unsatisfied.

Nyx was gone. He'd either come home to an empty room or linger in his corner passing the time while she worked: cohabitating in the barest sense of the word. He wanted more, she didn't, and they were stuck together. The only solution was to not want more, but then how could he when those briefest moments of comradery invaded the melancholy and gave him a taste of belonging? Was it crueler to let a man starve, or to feed him just before his body succumbs, only to abandon him again until death waited at the door? Vex wasn't sure.

How do you tell someone you love them when you don't?

"Sun's up and the ground starts reaching out. To pluck the eyes away. It's better to burn out." The lead man's rasping words dragged him from the pits of his inner world. Vex only caught half the meaning. "How nihilistic," he muttered as he drained what remained of his beer. The 'runner awaited the final parting words, the crescendo to the dance, but there was none. The screen winked out, the people drew quiet, and all was darkness, save for the tagged neon that ran rainbows across his body. His nose scrunched up with unexpected distaste as he turned for another beer, taking a testing swig off the top and lying to himself that he'd take this one slower.

The leadman emerged from the shadows like a wraith at the edge of his peripherals. Vex had half-expected his warning to be ignored: that the Capsules would be so self-assured as to think themselves above the vulgar chaos of the Watson streets. Some part of him, the very human remnant of his sentience, was pleased that the Capsules might have a bit of sense. The other part, the id, still wanted to knock frontman's teeth out to make the pecking order clear. Vex was wise to smother the voice of the latter.

He listened to the man speak with a slightly cocked head and equally cocked brow. An easy smile crept across his face as he fell into his persona: he was Vex, merc prodigy, star of Watson, soon to be top runner of all NC. He didn't need Nyx to be the best, or at the least that's what he told himself. He let frontman finish before offering a reply.

"All valid observations," his spoken voice was creakier than his mental. The excessive intake of intoxicants over the past two weeks had left him hoarser than he would have liked. "Though I gotta ask - I look Japanese to you? Tiger Claws? C'mon, man," his nose scrunched up as he grinned, an easy laugh lacing his words. "I am none of those things, and some of those things. You'd call me a contradiction."

His expression shifted to something more serious as he cast his weight back against the countertop, one arm folded over his chest, the other cradling his new beer closely. "My name's Vex - I work with Gunner's people, but I ain't one of 'em." Understatement of the century. "And I ain't surprised you've heard of him. Watson's pretty much his, 'least when it comes to gettin' gigs. He doesn't fuck with the usual gangoons or care much for territory, but," his 'ganic eye drifted off toward the logo of the Capsules that'd been tagged onto the stand, "- he does care about profits. One of Gunner's sycophants spins most of the BD's that roam through Watson. All the good, top shelf shit anyway. Far as I know - and I dunno all that much - they've had the run of the place for about a year now."

Vex paused then, turning bodily toward Cormac and meeting the man's gaze, as much taking the frontman's measure as giving the respect of eye contact. "So last night, I get home, been dealing with some gonk bullshit at the docks all day. All I want is to sit back, drink a beer, and catch up on Watson Whore, but then this blonde thing comes calling me saying we got a problem and I gotta deal with it. I ask her what the biz is, and she tells me, -" Vex pitched his voice high in imitation of a very shrill English woman's voice. "Well Vex, I'm sorry to disturb you right when you're getting home, but there's this band-gang-thing selling BD's that are selling like hotcakes. They're cutting deep into our profits, and Gunner's on my ass, so now I'm gonna get on your ass." The runner waggled his finger like a teacher scolding an unruly student as he spoke. "I ask her what she wants me to do about that," he said in his normal voice, "She tells me I need to have a word with you, 'cause if I don't, Gunner will, and he's a fuckuvalot meaner than I am. She called me first to keep things from getting messy."

He took another long, almost obnoxious swig from the beer bottle, tilting his head back like a showman until it was drained entirely. A fat stupid grin plastered across his face as he regarded the frontman. "So here I am, trying to keep things from getting messy. Being utterly honest, I've got no beef with you and I really, really hate it when people get hurt over stupid bullshit, so if you're keen to work something out, I'm keen. You guys are good. Don't think it's right to keep you from doing what you're doing."

Another pause. "Also some of the more violently inclined members of Gunner's respective cult of personality are hanging out down the block ready to stir up a shitshow if you don't wanna play ball. Not threatening, not my call, just informing you of the situation."

 

[Quantum]

Cormac listened silently and with a patience he could in part attribute to a post-gig fatigue. His gloved fingers tapped some indiscernible rhythm against his chrome-leather jacket and his expression hung still as the man spoke. The boozey smell that hung around was acidic and hoppy against the Biker's nostrils, and his gaze would occasionally trace Vex's posture as he spoke. His own posture was largely unmoving. One arm rested casually on the edge of the counter, the other hung relaxed at his side, spinning the beer bottle in some idle rotation between his index and middle finger. A few Capsules stole a glance but knew to leave Cormac to it after a show, half-surprised he wasn't nose-deep in a groupie or BD back stage. The bartender, a man with long matted hair and sunken blue eyes, did his best not to disclose his eavesdropping, but betrayed his interest nonetheless with his lethargic movements behind the counter.

When Vex finally finished, flashing that stupid grin like a man trying to sell mercy, Cormac exhaled a slow breath through his nose. He set his beer bottle over the table and poked the inside of his cheek with his tongue.

"You ever hear a man talk so much, he starts forgetting what he's really saying?"

He let those words linger for a moment, turning now to face Vex again.

"Let me be clear." Cormac's voice was low and even, but there was iron beneath it now, more verdict than threat. "Capsules don't cut deals. Don't pay tribute. And sure as shit don't hand our signal over to someone like Gunner just because he built himself a throne out of BD addicts and past-their-prime solos."

He stepped a little closer—not enough to invade, just enough that his voice didn't have to rise to carry weight.

"I get it, pal. You're not one of them. You're just the messenger. Just trying to stop the bleeding before it starts. But here's the thing." His tone was easy, almost offhand, like the bluntness of words posed too much an inconvenience for him to make them land with much intensity. Yet there was a kind of unshakable poise in it—not an overt arrogance, but more a quiet, practiced confidence. "You keep telling yourself you're not part of his machine. Meanwhile, you're out here doing his maintenance."

A pause. Let that land.

"I don't need a war. But I'm not gonna beg to avoid one either. You tell your girl with the accent, and the man upstairs who doesn't care who dies for his margin sheet—if they bring trouble to my people, they better not miss. And if they kill me, they better kill all of us."

Another pause—briefer this time. Then, softer:

"And you?" Cormac's voice was quieter now, but it cut cleaner for it. "You might wanna start thinking about what exactly it is you're trying to drown—'cause every time you run courier for a guy like Gunner, you get a little farther from being a messenger and a lot closer to being a mouthpiece. Guys like him, least from what my boys have told me, they operate on ownership. All that gang of four style chain of command bullshit."

The crowd was thinning. The static had settled. Cormac leaned one elbow against the scarred bartop, the aftertaste of amplifier hum still caught in the back of his throat. Worldessly, the bartender slid a glass a few inchess across the counter; short, chipped at the rim, filled with a viscous black amber that shimmered like oil under the flickering neon. It smelled like ash, old leather, and rain on hot concrete.

He picked it up with ceremony and held it for a second. It was an almost reverent pause, like the drink needed time to remember him, before he knocked back a long gulp. It hit slow. Smoky at first, then sharp. Somewhere in the finish was something cold and clean in a sanitized, artificial way, like the silence after a funeral.

"But I'm not convinced you're stupid, just drunk. You knew all that already. Your problem, if I had to wager, is you got no fucking agency. No control, choom," he eyed the man's now empty bottle with a weak smile. "Not a bad cause for drink."

---

 

[Vex Kiranova]

@Quantum , Parametric

The spell wasn't nearly as effective as it usually was.

Usually, Vex could spin a yarn entertaining and confusing enough to follow that most folks simply acquiesced to whatever it was that he wanted. The vast majority of Night City's ilk were barely above brain dead in terms of cognitive function. They were too busy wondering about how they'd catch up on rent to pay attention to whatever nuance vex was hiding between the piles of bullshit.

Not this one, evidently.

The 'runner cradled his empty bottle like a newborn and kept his mouth shut as Cormac spoke his piece.

"You ever hear a man talk so much, he starts forgetting what he's really saying?"

Something between annoyance and silent rage birthed a new twitch in Vex's 'ganic eye, though to his credit he smothered the retort before it left his lips.

"Let me be clear." Cormac's voice was low and even, but there was iron beneath it now, more verdict than threat. "Capsules don't cut deals. Don't pay tribute. And sure as shit don't hand our signal over to someone like Gunner just because he built himself a throne out of BD addicts and past-their-prime solos."

Reasonable, proud -- foolhardy too, but Vex understood the need for independence. More than most did, given the events of the past few months. Even still, he could not help but recall the weight of the boot on the back of his neck when Gunner had informed him of his new status: when Wilma had opted to throw his life away as a bargaining chip to save face. He imagined that same boot crushing down hard on the frontman's neck, only this time there'd be no mercy. Just the squelch, the crack, ragged breathing and a slow, miserable death.

Frontman stepped closer, and Vex waited a moment to determine if the man intended to deliver a threat. None came, only condemnation and assuredness - misplaced in his opinion but self-righteous all the same.

"And you?" Cormac's voice was quieter now, but it cut cleaner for it. "You might wanna start thinking about what exactly it is you're trying to drown—'cause every time you run courier for a guy like Gunner, you get a little farther from being a messenger and a lot closer to being a mouthpiece. Guys like him, least from what my boys have told me, they operate on ownership. All that gang of four style chain of command bullshit."

There was the turnaround. Vex's easy grin settled into something with teeth an iron behind it. He cocked his head at frontman, his eye narrowing mischeviously as he picked through the man's game and found the pieces he was looking for. Nothing he said was incorrect, and then all of it was.

It was in that contradiction that Vex thrived.

"But I'm not convinced you're stupid, just drunk. You knew all that already. Your problem, if I had to wager, is you got no fucking agency. No control, choom," he eyed the man's now empty bottle with a weak smile. "Not a bad cause for drink."

Frontman was coaxing out the honesty like he was trying to drag a frightened dog up from a gutter. The issue therein? The dog still had its teeth.

"How often does psychoanalyzing work for you, choom? I imagine the groupies and the cultists are easy pickings. Listen to someone, make 'em feel special, and they'll do anything you want to get that feeling again - at least if they don't feel special already."

He only paid a quarter of a mind to the masses lined around them and the eavesdropping bartender. His cyber eye darted off and broke the symmetry of his gaze, one eye lingering on frontman, the other on the bartender. " 'Nother beer please." He clipped off to the side before both eyes settled back on Frontman.

"Unfortunately for you, my friend who has still not offered me his name," the predation in his smile was smothered by the amusement he took with himself. "I know I'm special." The sweat and dust marring his skin and the stench of detritus and bad decisions that clung to his clothes were a testament to that. His rituals of self-destruction were his own artform: it was his lot in life to see the evils of the world, and to suffer knowing that stopping them was beyond his power, and that very few cared too beyond him anyway. A heart could not survive in so callous a world, and he'd already lost his in the most literal sense.

A hand fluttered anxiously over his chest where the synthetic ticker thudded away. The meat of his soul had been stripped against his will and been replaced with a titanium folley. Cain's mark had been imprinted on him long ago.

"I can see this is going to be difficult, so we might as well get comfortable," a quiet sigh escaped his lips as he turned back toward the bar and leaned both arms against the sticky metal. "You're not incorrect, but there's some nuance to my relationship with Gunner, or lack thereof. I am working with him in the short term. If I don't, two people I care for very much will suffer tremendously, and I'll die. Not a good death either - pissing your pants and seizing up while your brain melts in a bathroom stall kinda dead. Point being, I'm out of options."

He turned his head to regard Frontman. "And so are you, unfortunately."

A hint of sadness played across his features. The slightest hint of pity flickered in his gaze, and his tone grew more somber, like they were kindred spirits though he doubted frontman would truly understand the gravity of it. "I'm sure you're aware Gunner's crew hogs most of the gigs in Watson. It's how they came up, make their eds - the BD biz is secondary income. More to keep a handful of individuals afloat rather than the whole operation. S'why I was thinking if I could talk to you first, and maybe you'd be keen on cutting some of the profits - say like, five, ten percent - just to appease the brute, it might not have to be a big deal."

"Way I see it, I don't think Gunner cares that much about the missing eddies. I think he does care about someone stepping on his toys and everyone else watching you do it." The muscles in his face pulled his mouth up to the left as it scrunched up and he tried to find the right words. "All I'm asking you to do is to shove those toys into a closet before you go marching all over 'em. Save face for both parties, you lose a tiny bit of your profits, no one dies over stupid bullshit." His brow would have furrowed if he could crease it any further than it already was. "And I know that feels like a lot. I know it feels like giving up some of your independence, like you're kowtowing, but it's the smart move. The machievalen move. Ain't gotta be forever. Gunner's old. He's gonna get killed one of these days. Probably do it myself when I get the chance," the aura of intoxication left him for a moment as he affixed frontman with a deathly sober stare. "But until then, you've got a grizzly bear prowling around your camp. Just give it a steak so it'll fuck off - cause if you don't - and I'm sure you're confident you can handle it - but if you don't, that bear is going to kill you, and everyone else you lead in your camp. It's all the bear knows to do, it's been doing it a lot longer than either of us have been alive, and all it wants is a reason. Don't give it that reason."

 

[Quantum]

Cormac didn't interrupt. He didn't bite at the grin. Didn't flinch at the sarcasm. He let the words come, let the man ramble, swirl around himself in circles until the bottle was drained and the truth slipped out by accident. It was a long pitch Vex gave, and a practiced one at that—sounded like something he'd tried on himself more than anyone else. When it was over, Cormac just stood there for a second. The neon from the far wall cut shadows sharp across his jaw.

"I get it," Cormac said finally, shifting his weight, glancing idly toward the battered jukebox still flickering in the corner. "You think I'm here to moralize. But if that was the goal, I would've done it from the mic. And the name's Cormac, sortof assumed you'd figured that out."

He was waiting for Vex to finish tuning his instrument so the real music could start. A slight turn, shoulder popping just slightly, propping an elbow against the bar, but not yet taking the seat.

"I'm not looking for saints, Vex. I'm not one. And I know better than to spit on a man caught between the noose and the fire."

Cormac took a long, unhurried sip of his drink. The silence he allowed between thoughts was like gas filling a tight vacuum of space.

"You say you're out of options. But you're still here. Talking to me. Not in the wind, not back with your boss, and odds are you had a feeling we wouldn't fold. So if this was just business, you'd have delivered your message and walked. But you're here. Which means there's something you want."

He set the glass down and tapped the rim to release a reverberant hum, the tonal frequency just hovering above unpleasant. The neon streaks that formed the capsule sigil on his back pulsed with a luminescence that ran like fluid through veins. He withdrew from that jacket some old brand packet of cigarettes with an image of a Native American smoking a tobacco pipe and he tapped the bottom until a half-bent cigarette butt poked through amongst its brothers. He raised it between his lips tilted his attention back up to Vex. He had his silver butane lighter in hand then, flipping it open with a jerk of his wrist.

"Five percent's nothing. A leash dressed like a compromise. Give it a month, it's ten. Then twenty. Then Gunner's cutting into our shows, running merch through our crew, taking a cut off everything that moves. And I'm sure he knows we don't just peddle BDs. Know how we ride, lay claim, run gigs. I've seen how men like him play it. There is no 'one and done.' Bears don't leave scraps."

His thumb wrestled a few times with the match wheel before a flame hung just below his cigarette, and it's glow framed his face in red and orange. Neon rimmed his head, and that anachronistic, oil-burning fire flame before his eyes postured him like some old bust leveraging life once more. He took a long drag and released plumes of smoke that made a small contribution to a ceiling coated in hazy gray.

"Maybe you're right. Maybe you're special. Just not in the way Gunner thinks. You've got that rare thing most people lost in this city, a pragmatist's ambivalence. Not cold enough to be loyal. Not brave enough to walk, at least not willing to be for their shit cause. Definitely something foolhardy beneath that chromed out Kiroshi optic. That's a valuable place to stand—because it means you're waiting for something."

He finally sat. Spun his fingers toward the bartender for another drink, then fixed Vex with a look that didn't quite blink. He ashed his cigarette into the empty glass in the meantime.

"So do yourself a favor, tell me what you want from me. How can I help you and by extension help ourselves? Good couriers know not to stick around, and they don't make pleas. You ain't much a courier, Vex. So in this little engagement of ours," Cormac traced his finger in a circle over the table. "what are you gonna be?"

---

 

[Vex Kiranova]

@Quantum, Loose Talk

They were both cutting off the chaff, but they were looking for a different kind of meat. Cormac was smarter than your average rockerboy: presenting a problem and possibilities that would have contradicted one another if Vex didn't live a walking contradiction every day. He didn't sip at his new beer, instead letting it hang between two fingers as he listened to Cormac and let his gaze wander over the masses.

The Capsules had a good thing going here. The crowd was eclectic, perhaps not the sort most would have wanted to garner, but he could taste their loyalty in the air like smog. Despite himself, Vex could not help but imagine the violence that would follow. Bodies, mutilated and torn, twitching as burned out nervous systems sent signals to dead brains. The gore of HeavenMed greeted him like a lost friend then: walls stained red like a charnel house, limbs splayed at odd angles in macabre artistic displays, the scent of rot and shit permeating through the air and clinging to his clothes for days after.

Gunner's people wouldn't kill all of them. Just enough to break their spirit - he wasn't sure if that was better.

Vex swallowed hard as he forced his eyes back to Cormac. His easy confidence bled out of him with Cormac's astute analysis of the situation. This was only gonna end one way - unless he played things smart, played cards he didn't have and hope neither Cormac or Gunner called his hand.

Cormac was right though. The grizzly wasn't going to leave once it'd been fed.

"Would the leash be more enticing if we put your name on it? Bedazzle it in gold?" His smile was weaker now as he attempted to slice through the building tension with humor. For his own part, it didn't work. "Not right to say a man's name without asking for it anyway."

"I can see we're not going to come to a deal. Least, not one that's going to satisfy our mutual antagonist." He did well to keep the defeat from his voice, but part of him wanted to deflate. Were he sober, he might have, but the drink gave him an honestly he otherwise lacked. "You're not wrong. I've only been with Gunner's people for about a month and a half now, but I've seen enough to know he won't let you slip the leash. He's a CEO and his corp operates outside even that thin veneer of the rules binding 'Saka, Militech, and all the rest of 'em."

A pragmatist's ambivalence. Vex had never considered himself with such flowery prose, but he supposed it was an accurate assessment. Night City was supposed to be an escape, not an open air jail cell. He had no ties here, his loyalties remained with himself and Nyx, and just about everyone he'd worked with or come across had opted to use him or try ot fuck him over. In that, Cormac's observation was correct - he was an outsider keen on making the best of a shitty situation, and if that included screwing over his would-be comrades, then by all means.

"Waiting is a choice word," he muttered, just loud enough to carry over the quiet rumble of the crowd. "Hunting, more like it. Gunner's sycophants wired a suicide code into my neuroport. Code's good: too good. Haven't fucked with it much, rather not set it off by accident, but once I have enough eds I'll be able to afford the tech to remove that or at least hire someone more skilled than myself to do it."

He knocked back a quarter of his beer, "They think they've got something good in me; all they have is a death sentence in waiting. Once I'm free, I'm sticking Gunner's head on a flagpole along with anyone dumbfuck enough try to protect him."

Except for Wilma.

"I like you Cormac, you're intelligent," Vex shook his head, "But I ain't sure there's any way you can help me. Not in the short term anyway. I just wanted to talk with you before folks started getting shot. Mindless cruelty pisses me the fuck off." He waved his free hand around animatedly as he spoke. "Can't get away from it either. People die over nothing everywhere, and what can we do? Sing a couple songs, get that feeling out into the world, sure, but you try and change things? Really change things? You're dead. You and everyone you love -- and again, can't get away from it."

The sigh that escaped him then sounded almost painful. "I can lie to them. Tell 'em you plan on paying up, buy you some time. Maybe let you know when the fist's coming down so you can move your whole op outta here, but eventually they'll figure out it's me feeding you info. That's just a temporary solution." He offered Cormac a weak shrug. " 'Less you got a netrunning prodigy in your repertoire that can rewire my brain -- and I don't trust you enough to let you do that -- I can't help you in anything more tangible than a few white lies."