AN: Alright, you black-lace-injecting gonks, we are back on regular programming.
The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novice Magoth, HellzHound, Keith Spurr, and Michael May.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
Color me surprised when Dino hit my agent with a text saying we were going to meet in the Afterlife tonight.
I'd heard about the place, a legendary fixer bar built inside a converted mortuary in Watson, where the biggest deals in Night City got brokered over drinks named after dead mercs and where the only currency that bought you entry was a reputation worth having.
It was almost nine in the night when I arrived with a slightly different get-up tonight. I had decided that if I was going to be stepping into the Afterlife, I had to do so looking dapper. I threw on a black bomber jacket, on top of a cream colored mock turtleneck, with black tactical pants, and black boots. I switched my mask out for a cream-and-gold-colored half-mask, gold-rimmed glasses, and threw on some gloves because the fit just looked fucking nova with them.
The bouncer was a woman with a shaved head and Gorilla Arms who briefly evaluated me.
"Name," she asked.
"Ghost," I replied.
Her eyes glowed for a second, and then she stepped aside, sweeping her arm out. "Welcome to the Afterlife."
I stepped through, and inside the converted mortuary stretched out into a dim space that still carried traces of its former purpose. The bar ran along the back wall beneath a row of screens showing N54 News on mute, the ticker cycling through the latest news, which said that Hansen had made yet another advance and was now even closer to Night City.
I spotted Dino in a corner booth in the same clothing he had when I met him in The Silo. He had a bottle in front of him, and one boot up on the seat beside him like the booth belonged to him.
I looked around and saw that Torque was at the bar, two seats from the end, with a bottle of vodka. He noticed me too and gave me a short nod before returning to his bottle. I looked around a bit more, trying to spot Patch or Moth, but it looked like they weren't here.
I slid into the booth across from Dino.
"Looking rather suave, Ghost," he said. "And in one piece. My favorite outcome."
"Yeah, everybody came back," I said while nodding.
"Yeah, Torque already filled me in," he said before taking a swig of the bottle. "Exit could have used a little more refinement, but all's well that ends well. So talk to me, did you get what you went in for?"
"Before I do, I'd like to say your crew's solid," I said. "Torque held the ground floor and was quite efficient in his use of ammo. Patch's bypass on the loading dock was most likely what saved our asses if I'm being honest. Moth is quite skilled as well."
Dino grinned widely.
"They'll like hearing that," he said as he set the bottle down. "Now. The extraction."
I reached into my left cargo pocket and placed shard one on the table.
"This contains the complete file set from the sub-level-three research partition," I said. "I encrypted it and ensured that I got everything your client asked for."
Dino looked at the shard and nodded once. Then his eyes moved to my hands, which hadn't left the table.
I reached into my right pocket and placed another shard beside the first. Dino's eyes went from the shard to my face, and they grew sharper as he seemed to sober up.
"And what's this?" he asked.
"A little something I found and thought it might interest you," I said, smiling beneath my mask.
"Something you found," Dino said, but didn't reach out to touch the shard.
"Yeah," I confirmed. "There was a storage partition in the facility's data management system with no active monitoring and some old-ass encryption."
"And?" Dino asked.
"I copied some of the data," I said. "It has black-budget project files, covert financial transactions linking Militech procurement to offshore entities that don't exist on any registry, political correspondence between Militech executives and NUSA officials documenting... influential operations. It also has information about procurement fraud, and a selection of prototype chrome with manufacturing specs."
Dino looked at me and quietly picked up the shard. He turned it between his fingers slowly, and I watched as the gears turned behind his eyes.
"I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that this is a curated sample," he said. "Not a raw dump."
"Yeah," I nodded. "I went through the trouble of pulling the material that has immediate leverage value and has the ability to reshape negotiations."
Dino set the shard down and looked at me with a sly smirk.
"You curated it," he said. "Rather than just sitting down and grabbing everything and dumping it on the table, you actually took the time to sift through all of the bullshit and build me a package."
He leaned forward, planting his forearms on the table. "That's not what runners do, Ghost. Runners steal and sell data, but they don't edit it. They let the fixer sort shit out."
"I guess most runners don't read what they steal," I said.
"No," Dino said. "They don't. Most runners are only interested in the payout from stealing something, and could give two fucks what that something is."
He looked up for a second and started chuckling.
"Oh... oh. You motherfucker. You brought me leverage... You actually gave me something I can use strategically, saving me time and money. Kid, you just made yourself much more valuable than I initially anticipated." He reached into his vest and produced a credit shard, sliding it across the table. "Seventy-five. As agreed."
I picked it up and scanned it before slotting it in.
Transfer authenticated: 75,000 eddies.
Then Dino produced a second credit shard and set it beside the first.
I looked at it. Then at him. "What's this?"
"Most mercs complete contracts," Dino said while shaking his head. "But this is the first time someone has improved mine. That instinct is worth paying for, and I'd rather overpay a runner who brings me opportunities than underpay one who brings me problems. That right there brings your total to two hundred."
I picked up the second shard, scanned it as well, removed the previous credit chip from my data port, and slotted this one in.
Transfer authenticated: 125,000 eddies.
I watched in real time as the eddies ran through my Aiden Protocol and dripped into my account, bringing my balance up to 218,789 eddies and turning this into the most lucrative gig I had ever carried out. It was also more than enough for me to settle the fifty grand I owed Vik and pay Orsen the price of the materials for the Widowmaker. And even then, I'd still have over eighty grand leftover.
"That's very much appreciated," I said, trying to make my voice sound calm.
"Don't fucking appreciate it," Dino said as he leaned back into the booth. "Style, kid. You keep bringing me shit at this level, and I'll keep feeding you gigs and eddies. Simple as is."
"Simple works," I chuckled.
"Simple always works." He raised the bottle a fraction in my direction and drank. Then he tilted his head at me, and something in his expression shifted. "How 'bout you take the mask off?"
"What?" I asked, my brain short-circuiting for a second.
"You heard me. You're in the Afterlife, kid. Nobody in here gives a shit who you are, and if they do, they're smart enough not to say it out loud," he said as he gestured at the room with the bottle. "Half the people in this building are wanted by at least two corporations. The other half are wanted by three. You're the safest you've ever been."
I looked around and noticed that he was telling the truth. Nobody was watching us. Nobody had been watching us the entire time. I hesitated for a second, then pulled the mask down.
"You just cleared two hundred K on a single gig," he said. "You walked into a Militech black site, walked out with something they didn't even know they were hiding, and you didn't so much as leave a footprint. You know what that makes you?"
"A legendary runner?" I asked.
"Fuck no," Dino laughed. He then pointed the neck of the bottle at me. "You're a man. You've been a kid doing a man's work for a while now, but you just crossed over. And every man's got to have a drink. Not the drink someone handed you or the drink the room's already ordering. You need your drink. The one that shows up in front of you when you sit down somewhere because the bartender already knows."
"I'm sixteen," I said.
"Like anybody gives a fuck," Dina smirked. "Plus, you downed a whole glass of premium vodka at my bar five days ago and walked it off."
"I drank vodka once at your bar because your bartender is a menace and told me it was RealWater," I countered.
Dino let out a real laugh, loud enough that I noticed a couple of heads turn to see who was laughing, then immediately turn back.
"Mojo's a professional. She saw a kid who needed his first drink, and she gave him one. That's some real motherfucking service right there," he said as he slid out of the booth and stood. "Come on."
The woman who'd been working the bar was pulling off her apron and hanging it on a hook beneath the register as we approached. She said something to the man stepping in behind her, most likely a quick handoff that covered the open tabs and the booth reservations, and then she was gone through the main entrance without looking back.
The man who replaced her was tall. Not my kind of tall, but tall enough to fill the space behind the bar with his physical presence. He was a black man, bald by choice since I could see some of his hair growing back, and with a neatly trimmed beard that framed a jaw that looked like it had been carved from stone.
His forearms were thick, and he worked without any hurry as he dried a glass with a bar towel, and his dark eyes seemed to sweep the room, as if he was scanning who was here and who wasn't. If I was being honest, the guy looked like he should be the bouncer rather than the chick out front, and he probably would've been if not for his minimal visible chrome. He had no obvious implants, and the name tag pinned to his vest read IDRIS ELBA in block letters.
"He's buying," Dino said, jerking a thumb at me. "And he's figuring out what he drinks."
Idris looked at me and then at Dino with the same expression.
"Start him with vodka," Dino said. "Premium. He's already got a relationship with it."
Idris didn't say anything as he served up three ounces of vodka with nothing else. I drank it, and it burned the same way it had at The Silo, like drinking something designed to sterilize surgical instruments.
"Not bad," I said. "But not it."
"Vodka's a foundation," Dino said. "You're supposed to build on it."
Over the next twenty minutes, we ran through the options. Vodka with citrus was too bright and too thin, tasted like something a corpo would order to impress a table full of people who didn't respect him. Vodka with synthetic bitters was all edges and no body and tasted like medicine. Vodka with a coffee reduction that Dino swore by and that tasted, to me, like shit.
"You're zero for three," Dino said. "I'm starting to think you just don't like drinking."
"I think I like drinking fine," I said, feeling alright since the alcohol wasn't really having much of an effect on me.
Idris had been listening without appearing to, a skill I practiced myself. Without a word, he reached under the bar and set down a bottle of blackberry concentrate.
It was dark and thick enough to move slowly when he tilted it, and when it hit a fresh pour of vodka it bloomed through the glass in a slow spiral of deep purple that caught the Afterlife's neon and turned it into something else entirely.
"There you go," Dino said quietly.
I slowly adjusted it. Four ounces of Vodka, an ounce of the blackberry, then a quarter ounce of black cherry synth syrup, and three ice cubes to top it all off.
The result sat in the glass as a mostly dark violet with subtle burgundy highlights from the cherry syrup. It would shift between deep purple and crimson depending on whether it was being hit by blue, violet, or red lights. As the ice began to melt, the edges lightened gradually, bleeding outward from the dense center into a translucent purple that crept along the glass in shifting gradients.
Dino leaned forward on his elbows and looked at the glass for a long moment.
"Well," he said. "If that isn't the most fitting drink I've ever seen a man make."
"Fitting?" I asked.
"Kid, you've got white hair, violet eyes, and you just made a drink that looks like it came out of your own optics." He turned to Idris. "Let me try what the runt made."
Idris made it with the same proportions and sequence. He then set it in front of Dino, who picked it up, held it under the neon, watched it glow, and drank.
I drank mine at the same time.
The first sip bit like ice wrapped around fire. Pure vodka, clean and sharp and impossible to ignore, cutting a line straight down the center of my tongue with a cold authority that demanded attention. Then the blackberry crept in behind it, softening the edges without dulling them, and wrapping the burn in something that made it bearable. By the time I swallowed, a whisper of black cherry lingered at the back of my tongue, just sweet enough to tempt another sip before the burn had completely faded.
I set the glass down.
"I think that hit the spot," I said.
"Fuck yeah, it did," Dino agreed as he set his glass down beside mine and looked at me with a hint of respect. "You know what I like about you, Ghost? You didn't shy away from it. Most kids your age would've buried the vodka under six ounces of syrup and called it a cocktail. You built something that still tastes like what it is and let the alcohol do its job, giving it just enough company to make the job interesting."
"Is that another style lesson?" I asked while smiling.
"Everything's a style lesson," He said as he picked his glass back up. "How you drink. How you dress. How you do your gigs. It's all the same shit. The world watches you whether you want it to or not, so you might as well give them something worth watching."
As he finished speaking, someone walked past the end of the bar and conversations died down a bit. A merc two seats down straightened his posture without noticing, and Idris's hands paused mid-pour for a fraction of a second before resuming.
The person who walked in was a tall blonde, and she moved through the Afterlife as she owned it, which she did.
"Rogue," Dino said as he set his glass down and slid off the stool. "Kid, great work. You can keep the drink. I'll be in touch when I get another gig for you."
He crossed the floor toward her, saying something I couldn't catch, and she turned and gave him a tolerant look, as if she had known Dino for a long time, and then they both disappeared into a booth on the far side of the room.
I finished the last of my drink, took my time drinking the one Dino had left me, and left a tip. I pulled the mask back up and turned to leave when something caught my attention.
At the far end of the bar, Torque was still sitting where he'd been all night, his bottle of Vodka in front of him. As I watched, he raised one hand from the bar's surface and extended a single finger toward Idris in the gesture of a salute.
Idris saw it and set down the glass he was drying. He walked to Torque's end of the bar and extended his hand, and Torque shook it.
The handshake was brief, as if they knew each other. Idris leaned down on the bar, bringing his face close to Torque's, and they started chatting. After a few seconds, both of them looked at me and nodded.
I returned the nod and turned to walk out of the Afterlife.
---
AN: Our next goal for a Bonus chapter was to be 900 stones. So, stone away.
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each (Though currently that number has dropped because of work and other unforeseen circumstances)