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You are Kai, a newly minted edgerunner trying to scrape by in Night City. A week ago your father, an NCPD netrunner, was murdered under suspicious circumstances during a Cyberpsycho attack on Kabuki Marketplace. You’re out looking for answers. Answers and <span class="mu-i">eddies</span>. Eddies to pay for your several ill mother’s medical expenses, eddies for more gear, eddies for information, eddies for allies. Everything in Night City has a price, and everyone has secrets, especially your family - Dad was an Edgrerunner for decades in secret, your Mom used to be a corpo scientist for Biotechnica, and even you're hiding your new line of work from almost everyone in your old life. The only person you can fully trust is yourself… and perhaps Alice, the ghostly AI that your netrunner father was working with in secret before they both got attacked on New Year’s Eve. The last few days have been busy with small jobs for the static Aldecaldo fixer Dakota, both solo and with other edgerunners. You’re still one of the freshest faces around Night City's shadows for now, but all it takes to end that is a single bullet - This line of work is a meat grinder, and runners are the meat.
<span class="mu-s">2076.01.06, 13:25
Night City (Kabuki, your apartment)</span>
Sitting down in your father’s old chair, you look at your reflection in the dark screens of his dormant comp. It’s a faint image, ghostly and somehow unreal - Shaking your head you look away from the screens, having had more than your fill of ghosts recently.
<span class="mu-g"><span class="mu-i">”Are you prepared for the journey, Kai?”</span></span> Alice’s voice whispers within your mind, projected across a secured Net connection and directly into your neuralink. Her dulcet tones relax you a touch, and if you didn’t know better you’d swear she was standing beside you - that’s impossible of course. <span class="mu-i">She’s dead.</span> A ghost caught in the Net, human consciousness transformed into a kind of wild and unplanned artificial intelligence… Or at least that’s the best you’ve been able to make of the situation so far.
“...I am.” You speak the words aloud, preferring the control of verbal communication to the stuttery messiness of communication by pure thought. Reaching into the interior of your blue aramid jacket, a reward of sorts from your first job for your fixer Dakota, you grab a hold of a large device you’ve been concealed since your return from Kabuki’s roundabout marketplace.
<span class="mu-s">2076.01.06, 13:25
Night City (Kabuki, your apartment)</span>
Sitting down in your father’s old chair, you look at your reflection in the dark screens of his dormant comp. It’s a faint image, ghostly and somehow unreal - Shaking your head you look away from the screens, having had more than your fill of ghosts recently.
<span class="mu-g"><span class="mu-i">”Are you prepared for the journey, Kai?”</span></span> Alice’s voice whispers within your mind, projected across a secured Net connection and directly into your neuralink. Her dulcet tones relax you a touch, and if you didn’t know better you’d swear she was standing beside you - that’s impossible of course. <span class="mu-i">She’s dead.</span> A ghost caught in the Net, human consciousness transformed into a kind of wild and unplanned artificial intelligence… Or at least that’s the best you’ve been able to make of the situation so far.
“...I am.” You speak the words aloud, preferring the control of verbal communication to the stuttery messiness of communication by pure thought. Reaching into the interior of your blue aramid jacket, a reward of sorts from your first job for your fixer Dakota, you grab a hold of a large device you’ve been concealed since your return from Kabuki’s roundabout marketplace.
