Winding Roads: Rude Awakening 1.1 (ch. 1) (Patreon)

Cold. More than anything else, more than pain from a dozen injuries, more than confusion or outright panic, I felt cold. My chest heaved with a wheeze, and peeling my eyelids open, I saw an unfamiliar ceiling. The light felt like it was stabbing my brain with a pair of icepicks, but I squinted against it, trying to get some idea where I was. 

I regretted it as soon as I did. 

A corpse was lying over me, half-submerged in a bath full of ice cubes. Bile threatened to rise in the back of my throat, meeting the vacant stare of a man with half of his head just… meat. Shot by a high-caliber bullet. Or a shotgun. I couldn’t tell, and I was already trying to escape the tub. Key word: trying, because it felt like my limbs belonged to someone else…

Because some of them did. It was as I was trying to push myself up after flopping out of the tub that I realized my left arm wasn’t responding, not from the cold, but because it was missing. With numb fingers, I went to my shoulder, finding a metallic port but nothing else. Then to my eye, and I found nothing covering it and an empty socket. That was more confusing than anything else. All the more so when I saw my body was littered with scars I don’t recall ever having. It looked like someone had hacked me apart, carved out everything worth taking, then put me on ice. 

Pure panic got me on my feet, even if they wobbled dangerously. Even discounting the dead body, the bathroom looked like it belonged to Jigsaw -- broken mirror, walls covered in more black mold than paint, flickering lights, and bloodstains on the cracked tile floors. My gaze landed on the one exit, and I couldn't help but see more bloodstains on the door. Swallowing a lump in my throat, I took a shaky step forward and pressed my ear to it. 

“-klept a bit of hardware. Not a bad haul for a couple of stiffs. Would'a been more eddies if Raul hadn't fucked the snatch and grab.” The voice was faint through the door, but clear enough. “The other one? Don't know shit. Found ‘em fresh with a couple tunnels in the dome, carved ‘em up. Nothin’ that would make a borg nut, but the arm and optic were decent, pair of synth lungs, and an anti-tox liver. I’ll toss ‘em in a sec.” 

Oh. They really had carved me up. That raised questions, but they fell to the wayside. I didn't know if this was some horrid nightmare, but as far as I knew, it was real and the guy outside the door was the kind of man who saw a dead body and thought ‘free loot.’ I was not safe. If he came into the bathroom, odds are he'd finish the job. 

Swallowing the lump in my throat once more, I cracked open the door. The sound of grinding metal felt impossibly loud, but there wasn't any sudden alarm in response. The guy was still on the phone, seemingly distracted for the moment. 

Outside the bathroom wasn’t in any better shape than inside. Wall paper peeled, a faux-hardwood floor was scuffed to hell and back, stained with more blood from where they dragged bodies to the tub, and littered with trash. Opening the door no more than necessary, I slipped through it, watching my step as I approached a corner. 

“I dunno what to tell you -- since he started hitting the glitter, you can't count on Raul for shit. Sent him to pick up some grub half a fucking hour ago to a place down the block. Gave him a ring ten minutes ago and he told me he's ‘waiting in line.’” A loud aggravated sigh escaped the man while I peeked around the corner. 

What I saw was a man with a holographic face to hide his identity. He was leaning back on a lazy boy that was half rotten, his pants around his ankles, while a- hm. Well, he was distracted. That helped me. 

The kitchen was pure chaos. A meth lab post-explosion would be tidier. However, my gaze found a gun lying haphazardly on a counter. Looking between it and the man, I saw that he wasn't facing the right angle to see me. Slowly, with my heart hammering in my throat, I crept forward towards the gun. 

“Some chooms can run with straight glitter in their veins. Raul ain't one of ‘em. I say we zero him, harvest his chrome, and toss the rest. I know a buyer for his arm cannon.” Picking up the gun, I felt its weight. It had half a magazine, even if I didn’t know why I could judge that by the weight alone. Looked like a flash piece, only it was scuffed to hell. My finger curled around the trigger, creeping behind the man. “Nova. If someone hasn't dropped him already, I will after we eat.” 

The man let out a contented sound, starting to rise to his feet, and I knew the call was over. 

In two quick steps, I pressed the barrel of the gun to the base of his skull and pulled the trigger twice. Two loud bangs echoed out of the room, but the man dropped like a stone back into his lazy boy. Looking down at him- 

“A scav?” I muttered, the feeling of confusion not letting up. I recognized the holographic face covering. It was from Cyberpunk 2077. I just had no idea what I was doing, looking at a scav of flesh and blood. 

I would panic later. Have a full mental breakdown, probably. Crying, snot, curling up in the fetal position -- the whole nine yards. Until then, I was naked, down an arm and an eye, and sharing an apartment with two dead bodies. The mental breakdown would simply have to wait until I was safe, clothed, and preferably with a few answers, so I would have fewer reasons to freak out. 

Lowering the gun, I started patting him down in the hopes of finding those answers. What I found was a thin roll of what looked like money, and a couple of thumb drive-looking things in a case. Shards, I think. Pulling the ones from the corpses' neural ports, I stashed them away before I went about finding clothes and some answers. Finding the former was a bit easier when I found the stash he mentioned.

Clothes, implants, and a freezer full of organs. Including a pair of synth-lungs and a liver. It was impossible to tell which arm was mine, so I had to guesstimate based on arm length. Same for the pile of eyes. Grabbing them, a pair of pants, boots that were a size too small, and a long-sleeved shirt, I felt… not good, but better. What I didn't find were answers. 

Tucking the gun into my waistband for lack of a better place to put it, I grabbed my arm and headed towards the door. Poking my head out first, I saw the rest of the apartment complex was every bit as ragged as the apartment itself. Keeping my head down, I walked quickly to an elevator down the hall. 

My heart just about jumped out of my throat when the doors opened before I was about to press the button. Reacting with reflexes I didn’t know I had, I stepped to the side and awkwardly hefted my gun with my arm tucked in my armpit. A man, another with a holographic mask, stepped out, and I just about pulled the trigger. 

It wasn’t hesitation that stopped me. It was math. I hadn’t seen any cameras in that apartment, so, in theory, I got away clean. I don’t know the first guy's name, but he was already planning to kill Raul. When he found the dead body, he would probably ring whoever they worked with, telling the truth that he had just found him dead. 

But given that their partner gave the okay to rub Raul out, something Raul wouldn’t know, it would sound like a lie. 

Leaving me in the clear. In theory, at least. 

Raul walked by me, completely oblivious as he carried a pizza with both hands. Before the doors closed behind him, I slipped in the elevator. I stilled when the elevator decided to head to the ground floor, but given that's where I wanted to go, I just leveled my gun at whoever would be waiting for me on the bottom floor. 

Which turned out to be no one. Poking my head out, I saw a ragged lobby and an empty front office kiosk. No one was waiting for me. So, I rushed towards the door, pushing it open, and stepped into the light. It hurt just as much as the artificial lighting, but I endured it all the same, taking in a deep, slow breath to calm my racing heart. 

The air had a toxic quality to it. I had experience with something like it when I visited New Delhi once. Just the feeling of chemicals and sludge coating my lungs with every breath, but for all the contamination outside air had never tasted so sweet. It was then, and only then, that I asked the question I had been dying to ask since I woke up. 

“What. The. Fuck?”

…

Night City was almost beautiful in a horribly tragic kind of way. The streets were locked in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the buildings were peppered with new and old bullet holes, and graffiti was sprayed everywhere. Trash gathered in giant piles, the dumpsters overflowing, and there wasn't a corner that didn't have at least three homeless people begging for change that everyone else walked right by, not acknowledging their existence, if they even noticed it in the first place. 

Each and every single one of them was a character. Some had vibrantly dyed hair, others had off-color skin, and more than a few sported visible implants like legs, arms, or even faces. It was a challenge not to gawk as I walked blindly, half hoping I would just wake up from the nightmare I was trapped in. The other half… 

The other half accepted that I was here. I had no idea how. No clue why -- no ROB to give me an introductory course, or memories of my death. Unless I had choked on my sandwich, I hadn’t died before waking up in a bathtub. Couldn’t say that I was exactly clicking my heels with joy, but it was what it was. I just had to make the best of it. 

Somehow. 

To that end, my wandering wasn’t aimless. There was a painful shortage of good people in Night City due to its unfortunate habit of punishing good intentions. As V, you run into a few of them. First and foremost, and the one most relevant to my… present circumstances, was Viktor Vector. Ripperdoc, champion boxer, and living legend. 

“Welcome to… your aura is dark. Rough day?” Misty Olszewski, owner of Misty's Esoterica, greeted me with an immediate concerned expression. 

“Can’t lie. I’ve been better,” I admitted, shifting my arm under my arm. “But, you know what? I’m not dead. So, I have that going for me.” I tried to be a glass-half-full kind of guy. It wasn’t easy, but I tried. 

That earned a small but earnest smile from Misty, “That you do. I’m guessing you’re here for Vik?” She asked, her gaze going to the arm. And the bulge in my pocket that was very clearly an eye. “He’s in the back. I’ll send you right to him.”

“‘Preciate it,” I said, sliding past the front kiosk and the back alley to descend into a basement. Anywhere else, I would be crawling out of my skin and running for the hills, but when I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw one of the few friendly faces in the city. 

Vik gave me a once-over, warned of my arrival by Misty. “Always happy to have a customer, but you don’t seem to be my usual clientele.” Probably mercs?

“You came recommended as a ripperdoc that wouldn’t harvest my organs. Which I can appreciate because I’m fresh off an encounter with scavs,” I answered, making his eyebrows climb high. “I escaped, but they took off my arm and… I think my eye. There- ah, well, there were a bunch in a pile, and I just grabbed one that looked like it was mine.”

“Fuck me, kid,” Vik breathed, already concerned. “Are you… You good? You want to talk to someone?"

“Uh…” I thought about it for a second before shrugging. “Ask me again when I’m not in shock. Anyway, would you be able to chip in my arm and eye? I might be short some eddies- I won’t know unless I pop the eye back in.” I did have an agent built in somewhere in my body. I could feel a reaction in my brain when I tried to pull it up to view my bank account or call someone. But without the optic, I couldn’t see the data. “But, if I am, I’ll pay you back. Scouts honor.”

Vik let out a breath, gesturing for me to take a seat. “Don’t think there have been boy scouts since the twenties, but I’ll take your word for it. Pass me the chrome, and I’ll slot it in.” Following instructions, I accepted a jack from one of Vik’s monitors and plugged it into my ear with minimal difficulty. “Let’s see what those butchers did to you.”

I was curious about that myself. Apparently, they took my lungs, but I'm breathing just fine. More interestingly, the diagnostic was information I was almost more interested in learning. 

Rocinante Alphonse Donquixote. That was my name, apparently. Not what I would have picked for myself, but it worked for me. I was also nineteen years old. Again. 

The other piece of information was the date. 2/19/2075. Two years before the start of the game. About a year before the events of Edgerunners- or, rather, before the ending of Edgerunners. That was… something. I’m not sure what, but it was something. It gave me time to prepare for the events of canon. It also meant most of my metaknowledge simply wasn’t relevant yet. Jackie, V’s partner in crime, was still a solo merc doing scut work. To say nothing about my not having the foggiest idea which V I would be dealing with. 

“Well… all things considered, you’re not in terrible shape,” Vik brought my attention back to him. “Your soft got hard scrambled. Don’t know what the Scavs hit you with, but it wasn’t pleasant.” 

Only the Scavs hadn’t killed me. They’d found me dead from a couple bullets to the head. Which raised an uncomfortable question -- who killed me? Or, rather, Rocinante?

“But, I’m not seeing any reason on your end why we couldn’t chip in your optic and prosthetic.” Vik continued, and that was something, I guess. “We’ll start with the eye. Just gonna lay you back for a quick second…” He was being gentle. Talking me through the entire procedure, wary of a trauma that wasn’t there simply because I didn’t have the memories. 

Getting the optic installed was an interesting experience. It was a bit like going to the dentist. Only I was swapping out body parts.  

“Kiroshi optics, Clarity series MK Three,” Vik rattled off the name as I adjusted to seeing with both eyes again. “A good series. Maybe not high-end, but they’re reliable. Sixteen times the zoom, dazzle filters, with a built-in face camo. So, maybe I was wrong about you not being my usual clientele.”

That did sound like a list of perks that would appeal to a mercenary. Or someone who generally saw combat more than the average civilian. 

Now that I had the optic, I was able to bring up my agent. I immediately zeroed in on my last message while Vik did the prep work to reconnect my arm to the port. It was to an unknown number. 

‘Here.’ From me. Or Rocinante. 

Meaning that I had willingly gone to the meeting that resulted in my death. Maybe if I could find out where ‘here’ was I could find another clue, but scouring my contacts, I didn’t see anything. There weren’t any other unknown numbers, except for spam. 

What I did learn was that Rocinante was indeed something of a mercenary. I didn’t see any familiar names amongst his contact list, which told me he hadn’t been scouted by any of the major league Fixers. Or even the mid-level ones. That, and the fact that he had three thousand eddies in his account. There were a few records of conversations of gigs with people I didn’t recognize, primarily a ‘Kirk’ and an ‘Amy.’ 

It felt like I was snooping on someone else's life as I scanned through the conversations, trying to gauge the tone by the language used. At the very least, Rocinante didn’t seem to be an idiot who botched gigs. Mostly curious work with the occasional theft and one assassination. However, all of the conversations were three weeks old. What that meant, I wasn’t sure. 

“And there we go,” Vik said, and suddenly, there was feeling in my left arm. Though feeling was probably the wrong word. There was a sense of pressure, hot and cold, but not much beyond that. Tentatively opening and closing my hand, it felt natural. Maybe not as good as flesh and blood, but not as much of a downgrade as I’d feared. “Zetatech biotics, Ironhand series. Another reliable series. Doesn’t do anything the best, but it doesn’t do anything poorly either.”

“Thanks, Vik. What do I owe you? Apparently, the Scavs didn’t empty my bank account while they were at it.” I said, rolling my shoulder to adjust to the new limb. I thought it would bother me more, honestly. Maybe it was just that this body was used to having the prosthetics? 

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” Vik waved me off. “I’m not in the habit of kicking someone when they’re down.” And that was why Vik was the best. Hands down. 

All the same, with a thought, which almost felt instinctual, I flicked him five hundred eddies. “For my pride,” I told him, earning a chuckle from the older man. 

“Won’t say no, but get yourself sorted, alright?” Vik said. “I prefer repeat customers, after all.” 

“I hear you,” I replied. I didn’t really know my financial situation, so I risked being too generous, but making a good first impression was important. “Thanks again. If I ever need a ripperdoc again, I know who to call. With money, next time.”

“Heh. I’ll be waiting, kid. Keep your head on straight.” Vik waved me off, hiding his concerned eyes behind his sunglasses as he watched me walk up to the street above. 

Leaving the back alley behind, I walked back through Misty’s, finding her behind the counter as she had been thirty minutes ago. She perked up ever so slightly when she saw me walking back, greeting me with a slight smile. “You look better already. Your aura is still dim, but lighter.”

I would take that as a ringing endorsement. “Vik does good work.”

“What’s next for you?” Misty probed, and that was an excellent question. 

“I don’t remember much,” I admitted. “Went to meet someone and the next I know, I’m sharing a bathtub with a corpse in a scav den. Nothing in between.” That took the smile right off her face, but she seemed more intrigued than concerned. “So, I’m going hunting for a few answers. I don’t  suppose you would have anything to help me with that?”

I spared a glance at the four-armed Shiva guy by me, making Misty chuckle. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a believer,” she noted. 

I wasn’t. A lifelong atheist. Didn’t believe in ghosts, demons, or gods. That was before I found myself in a new universe. In particular, one with uncannily accurate predictions from Misty’s tarot. “I’m willing to entertain a few things I wouldn’t have before today,” I admitted that much. 

She offered a thin smile, “Brushes with death do have a habit of opening one's inner eye. While I can’t promise you any answers, I might be able to help point you in the direction of answers if you don’t mind a tarot reading?” She brightened when I gave the nod, rounding the kiosk while she took out a deck. Giving them a good shuffle, Misty plucked the top card off the deck and laid it down.  

“The Fool Reversed,” Misty began, her tone suitably mysterious. “The Fool represents beginnings, both good and ill. What it means in this context depends on the rest of the tarot…”

With that, she laid down the next card. Her expression betrayed her thoughts. “Death Reversed. Paired together, you’ve undergone a new start but it was… violent. Unclean.” She gave me a vaguely apologetic look, likely thinking that I assumed that was obvious. Instead, gooseflesh rose up on my arms- well, arm. 

She couldn’t have known it, but that reading was very accurate. Seeing that I wasn’t going to call her a hack or anything, she continued, placing down another card. This one eased some of the tension from you, “Chariot Upright. It represents a sense of will. Your determination to ride out this turbulent time.”

Misty’s brow furrowed when she placed the last card on the table, “The Tower Upright. It represents… chaos, for lack of a better word. Nothing inherently malicious, but your future is determined by your will. You’ll find no shortage of challenges in your way, but if you can overcome them all… you’ll reach the very top.”

She offered a weak smile, “That probably didn’t help much, did it? It’s a bit vague, but you’re at the eye of the storm. There isn’t a right or wrong answer. Just an answer.”

I took in a slow breath, turning over the tarot: Fool, Death, Chariot, Tower. I was a fool. I died. The chariot… could be a car or some manner of vehicle, either physical or metaphorical, with the tower being just that. A tower. A skyscraper, a megabuilding…

“I think you helped me more than you think,” I decided, flicking her a hundred eddies. Her eyes widened a bit, but I was already turning around. “Thanks. Be seeing you. Hopefully,” I said, offering a wave over my shoulder as I left the shop behind. 

It felt like I had a direction now. Back on the streets, I took in a slow breath, feeling… well, maybe not whole, but better. Like I had my feet on the ground again, instead of grasping blindly in total freefall. 

With my optic, I had more information about myself. Name, date of birth, bank account, contact list, and the crème de la crème -- an address. 

“Megabuilding H4,” I muttered, pulling up a map of Night City with my optic to plan out my route. Which involved a stop on the Metrorail. Luckily, I had a pass for it. Wouldn’t be more than a twenty-minute ride as the megabuilding was in Arroyo. 

With my destination set, I made my way to the Metrorail, the pass scanned automatically before I took a seat near a window. People stumbled in, leaving the metro packed by the time it was time to leave with a vague sense of acceleration. I kept my gaze out the window, watching Night City fly by. It was a deeply unfamiliar skyline. I wasn’t even a big city kind of guy to begin with. 

The tarot reading had stirred up options I hadn’t considered. My gaze found a rocket that took off in the distance on Morro Rock. Like that. Just up and leaving. Abandoning the hunt for answers, packing my bags, and just hitting the road with as fresh a start as I could get. Everywhere in Cyberpunk sucked, but there were places that sucked more than others, with Night City being pretty high up on that list. 

The thought lingered once I reached my stop, following the flow of foot traffic that took me out of the station, over a bridge, and towards the Megabuilding itself. It was a towering concrete pillar that rose impossibly high. The real kicker was that it wasn’t done, with construction still underway at the very top. 

Inside, it was Night City distilled into a single building. Everything was covered in a layer of grime and general neglect. Trash piled high with homeless people loitering in the lobby, the halls, and outside people’s doors. People ignored them and the smell as they went about their business. I tried not to look too hard at anyone in particular, though half-hoping that someone would catch my eye and give me some answers. Even if I would have to fake the interaction. 

My apartment was on the twenty-sixth floor. On the way, I walked by an entirely self-contained ecosystem. A single building where you could spend your entire life, if that’s what you wanted -- restaurants, clothing stores, tech shops, doctors, and even gun ranges. It was just twisted into a nightmarish version of itself, becoming a poverty-stricken hellhole. 

The door that marked my apartment slid open at my approach, revealing… “A bachelor pad,” I deduced easily enough. It was very much the apartment of a guy in his teens that was very single. There was organized chaos of clothes on the floor, take-out trash gathered in piles, with guns tossed haphazardly on shelves, the couch, and even the bed. 

There weren’t any photos. That stood out to me as I walked the room that was identical to the one in the game. No little knick-knacks or trophies. I noticed it when I thumbed through the contact list. There wasn’t anyone who was labeled Mom or Dad. There were texts with what seemed to be friends, but they were all at least two years old. It gave the impression of a loner, possibly by his own choice. 

It was convenient for me. I had no idea how I would fake being Rocinante if he had a loving family. Still, it was also sad in its own way. All the more so because I couldn’t find anything that casued such a clean break. 

My stomach growled suddenly, and I realized I probably hadn't eaten today. My gaze went to what amounted to a vending machine built into the wall. Based on the number of foil wraps, Rocinante had a favorite: the XXXL beef burrito. 

With five eddies down the drain, it only took thirty seconds before the burrito slid out the slot. Grabbing it, I took a seat before the computer monitor at what passed for a desk. The password was thankfully on auto fill, taking me straight to the homescreen with a scantily clad model I didn't recognize as the wallpaper. 

Taking a bite out of the burrito- Hm. It… wasn't bad. It was a long way away from being good, though. It was massively overseasoned, probably to distract from the fact that it was basically styrofoam wrapped in wax paper disguised as a tortilla. It was also dry. Not the suck out every trace of moisture in my mouth kind of dry, but the beef foam, the bean and veggie paste, it kinda coated my mouth like peanut butter. 

With a shrug, I took another bite and began to search the computer for any clues. Bringing up the web and taking a peek at Rocinante’s search history-

“Aha,” I muttered around a mouthful of burrito. “So, you’re the chariot, huh?”

A Turbo-R V-Tech. A car worth about fifteen million eddies, though largely by virtue of the fact that it was the car used in a popular movie Bushidō 7: Revenge Never Sleeps. It was more of a collector's item than a genuine car, though the base model would still cost around a million and a half. 

It was entirely possible that it was just the dream car of a down-on-his-luck teenager. I wasn’t much of a car guy, but it looked nice, and it had a monster of an engine under the hood that even a luddite could appreciate. Digging a little deeper into it, I found hints of previous searches. Token efforts to clear a search history, but by someone who thought ‘clear browser history’ was enough to do the trick. 

That search brought me to an Alan Smith. An affluent nepo-baby who seemed to have nothing going for him beyond inheriting a truly absurd amount of wealth. The kind that let him own a vacation home in Westbrook, the district that catered exclusively to multimillionaires, rock stars, political powerhouses, or corporate executives. 

And it was Alan Smith who purchased the V-Tech three years ago. It was barely a blurb in a very long list of increasingly impractical purchases. The ones that were publicly recorded, at least. 

That didn’t feel like a coincidence. 

Setting aside the burrito, I tried to dig up more information, but there wasn’t much more than that on the computer. A bunch of spam messages, a notification that rent was due in a week. It felt… clean. Maybe a little too clean. Like someone had scrubbed all the evidence of something from the computer. It could have been Rocinante covering his tracks… or it could have been whoever killed him covering theirs. 

Scratching at my jaw, I stood up, letting the information settle. I needed to think. And I always did my best thinking in the shower. Peeling off the clothes I scavenged from the scav den, I walked into the bathroom. 

I hadn’t meant to, but I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I wasn’t avoiding the mirror specifically. It was more… looking at myself made it real. When I looked in the mirror I didn’t recognize myself, in a very literal sense. 

My hair was black with natural waves cut short. I was handsome, at least. Strong jawline, defined cheekbones, and a small scar that clipped my bottom lip. Couldn’t grow a beard for shit, though. There was just thin dusty pubes that I already found myself reaching for a razor to cut off. My optic matched my organic eye, showing the same dark blue.

There were traces of blood on my face, but I’m guessing the bath I woke up in took care of the worst of it. That brought my attention to the left side of my forehead, where I saw faint scars marking where Rocinante had gotten himself shot. One small round hole above my eye, while the other was closer to my hairline and a little more ragged where the bullet skirted off my skull before punching through. 

I had to tear my gaze away and step into the shower, letting the water wash over me. The grime, the sweat, and everything else washed off, letting me think without any distractions. 

If the V-Tech was indeed the Chariot, then the signs pointed to me either stealing it or attempting to steal it. Possibly for a gig, but I couldn’t think of a Fixer that operated in the shadows like this. Which could mean Rocinante hadn't gone with a Fixer at all. 

The game warned against that. Double and triple crosses were commonplace. Enough so that the creation of a position like a Fixer became a necessity for mercs. It gave the client and the mercenaries a degree of separation to prevent sudden but inevitable betrayals. 

When I looked into Rocinante's bank history, it felt like a theory that held water. His payouts from the gigs he picked up with Kirk and Amy were pitiful. A hundred eddies there, two hundred there. The biggest payout was the assassination for a grand total of five hundred eddies. 

It made the big spikes leading up to Rocinante's death stand out that much more. There were two spikes in his account -- one of 10,000€$ and another of 5,000€$. Then, in the days leading up to today, Roci spent 20,000€$, dipping into his savings and leaving me with just 3,000€$. Annoyingly, there was nothing on the recipient. It was just labeled ‘Null Contact.’ 

“He got antsy,” I guessed. A young merc who was getting frustrated with kiddie gigs that paid nickels and dimes. He wanted to move up in the world and become a major league mercenary, so he ditched his Fixers and found a client to steal an incredibly expensive and rare vehicle. That was the kind of job that would get him noticed, so he committed. He dropped twenty grand on something to help him get the job done, leaving him with just enough to pay rent for another month if everything fell through. 

On the assumption that all of that was correct, that narrowed things down a little bit. Assuming the car was to be kept, I could most likely dismiss the Megabuildings as possible Towers. The people who lived in them weren't the kind who could afford to scratch a multimillion eddie car, much less own it. Park it in the car lot, and it'd be stolen before your back was even turned. There was one literal tower that came to mind, however. 

Arasaka Tower. 

“If I find the car,” I reasoned, stepping out of the shower and drying off. “Then I find the client.” Easier said than done, of course. 

If Rocinante did manage to steal the car, then whoever he stole it for was likely keeping it on the down low. Meaning that he was going to need to retrace his steps a bit. Find where he died, maybe pay someone to switch together footage from some of the billions of cameras that were everywhere. On the assumption that the client was keeping the car, they would have the money to hire someone to do their dirty work and kill Rocinante to tie off a loose end. So, finding out who pulled the trigger would be another big step in finding out who had Rocinante killed. 

Getting dressed in clothes that actually fit, I was left with just two questions. “Where did he get fifteen thousand eddies? And what did he spend it on-” 

Almost as if to answer me, there was a sudden loud banging on my door, followed by a shout, “Roc! I know you're in there! Where! Is! My! FUCKING! MONEY?!” 

Well, I suppose that answered one question. 

…

This is an idea that’s stuck with me since Ciri mentioned that she and Avallac’h visited Night City, but I never managed to make it to work until now. The first chapter always felt so clunky trying to introduce the MC, Night City, and Ciri with all of her baggage. Kinda figured I’d never do anything with the idea until, between the announcement for Witcher 4 and the latest season of Edgerunners, I got a random burst of inspiration. 

Rather than introduce everything all at once, there’s an intro arc that will let Roc’s character breathe a bit and let him get his feet under him. So, the Witcher side of things would enter the picture by chapter 3. From there, we’ll have a pretty lengthy stay in Cyberpunk, covering their adventures and preparation for the eventual return to Witcher and confronting the Wild Hunt. 

Hope you enjoy!