>>5944103<span class="mu-g"><span class="mu-i">”Hide yourself, with haste! There are crawling things here, even in the bright places, spiders and frightful grasping creatures.”</span></span> Alice implores from beside you, her own faintly crimson digital form far more detailed and solid than your own wavering blue, hints of truer colors playing faintly beneath the surface of her skin, like an old holographic card reflecting light strangely. She’s crouched low, almost blending entirely into a stream of passing data as it rushes by in a torrent, her form becoming harder to perceive by the moment except for a faint silver cord running from her clothes to your own. A direct connection through your neuralink.
“Hide from what? Are they close?” You ask quietly, crouching beside the ghostly AI, your sheathed sword bumping up against her thigh as you move half a step closer and into the stream… Your <span class="mu-i">sword?</span> A <span class="mu-i">dull</span> sword, and one you scarcely know how to wield. Another visualization of your deck’s core programs you realize, along with the scroll hanging by straps at your other side. That’s the daemon you bought in Kabuki marketplace earlier, the imp sold to you by Yoko - He’s sealed up in his datashard for now, ready to defend at a moment’s notice, already patrolling your personal network even if you’ve yet to think of him strongly enough to force his appearance.
<span class="mu-g"><span class="mu-i">”Everything is close, Kai, even the sky.”</span></span> Alice squints off in the distance, down the path of the datastream, her awareness pulling yours along with it - And suddenly you are elsewhere, a much darker place, falling up, up, up, tumbling too and fro among currents of data - and with a thwack you land, in another forest, among other rustling digital trees, the same imposing data-fortresses from before still far off in the ‘mountains’ but the angles completely changed. Ahead of you now is a small encampment of tents surrounded by a ‘log’ palisade and ditches, resembling some sort of hastily constructed and half ignored military camp from long ages past… No, not a military camp, a barbarian one. Sloppy, haphazard, the work of bandits. Of <span class="mu-i">scavs</span>. A pair of wart covered and hunchbacked green goblin-like creatures patrol about the entrance with weighty wooden clubs in hand, their beady little black eyes looking out occasionally into the forest of data surrounding the scav subnet. IC of some kind, and not very good IC either.
“...We’re here.” You’re aware of it at once that Alice has brought you directly to the scav subnet you need to scout out for the job tomorrow, “That was preem tracing work Alice.”
