She shrugged and made a couple of mental notes and then dismissed the man, "Alright. Thank you for coming in. I may pair her with your team if there are suitable gigs in the future."
With everything we had looted, we had easily cleared over fifteen thousand Eurodollars for a single evening's work. I ended up buying a number of things from the pot, so I only got about ten thousand, but that was still more than I made in six weeks at my day job. It was clear why people did this sort of thing.
I sighed as I thought about spending over half of the money I did collect on various specialised equipment and tools purchased from over a half dozen companies directly on the net. I had already built a number of beakers, round-bottom flasks and distillation setups in a Tinker fugue a while ago, but this was additional computer analysis equipment and automation equipment used in chemistry. I was probably putting my name on some kind of list by buying it all, but none of it was really too out there.
Right now, though, I was waking up from another fugue as I had an idea for a special bioactive compound, which it looked like I built and incorporated into an implant that I installed on my fingers while I was out.
I could tell my fingernails weren't normal, as they were just slightly longer, much thicker, made of some kind of metal and painted pink, a bright colour that I hated, especially because this shade of pink was Emma's favourite colour.
I frowned and tried to recall what exactly I had built. I hope I hadn't peeled off my fingernails to build home-grown scratchers. I didn't like those types of implants; they were really quite dangerous and hazardous to be around.
I carefully tested the sharpness of the fingers on a few things and sighed in relief when no matter how I slid them across test surfaces, they didn't cut anything to ribbons. Scratchers were made from specially produced glassy-metallic compounds, sharper than razors but only in one specific direction. You generally had to slide them sideways to cut with them.
Still, they were quite sturdy. I took a medical sonic imager from my bench and used them to get an internal image of my fingers, finding the nails were carefully fused to the distal phalanges. That was interesting. They were made of some kind of metal, too, and although they weren't designed to be sharp, I could clearly scratch someone very easily, I supposed.
Kind of an odd thing to do to myself in a fugue, though, when I was thinking about a bioactive compound that would respond to haemoglobin. Then I turned my hand around, peered at the underside of the nails, and was enlightened.
I had been thinking about a compound that would react with haemoglobin to produce a synthetic analogue of succinylcholine. That was a paralytic that was often used in emergency medicine as a prelude to intubating someone. However, originally, it was derived from curare which had been used for hundreds of years to treat the darts of indigenous South American tribesmen for hunting and for warfare.
I had thought to use it for the same reason, as a coating for a dart or perhaps a knife. Since the compound I was thinking of would create the chemical on exposure to haemoglobin, it was not only reasonably safe and inert until blood touched it but long-lasting.
It was also one of the chemicals that would be neutralised by my artificial liver. Not because the liver would filter it out, because it would paralyse me far too quickly to be metabolised, but because it would release a counteracting agent, which would prevent the effect on my central nervous system from propagating. The liver contained a limited amount of compounds like this; for example, it also contained naloxone in the event I was ever the victim of an enormous opiate overdose.
That was good; otherwise, I might have accidentally paralysed myself if I scratched a damn itch too vigorously. As it stood, I might still need to remove them if I ever got a boyfriend and made it past second base. I mean... some of the romance books I had read indicated that sometimes the girl might scratch the boy's back... you know... in her... fervour. It would really kill the romance if I found someone I liked and then accidentally paralysed him, including their diaphragm, in flagrante delicto .
The chemical produced by these small bioactive pads would tend to stop even the muscles a person used to breathe at high doses, so they would require rather prompt medical assistance or a counter agent, which I figured I would start carrying in a small EpiPen-like dispenser. That would be so embarrassing .
Oh, who was I kidding? It wasn't like I would likely find anyone that wanted to date me any time soon anyway. Or ever.
Why were they pink, though? I sighed but then noticed a new application on my system and discovered that I had actually used SmartPaint in their construction, and I could change them to whatever colour I wanted, just like my monowire had.
I frowned. I didn't really like the idea of nail polish in the first place, but transparent really wasn't an option. Finally, I decided on a dark red colour.
Things had been going pretty well since that day a few weeks ago. Trauma Team's intelligence department did have a couple of questions for me, but they made it clear that they didn't really care what I was doing in my off time. I told them the truth, although I didn't tell them any of the identities of either the Fixer or the Ruslan's group. I just told them that somebody hired me to go in after they cleared it out to remove any valuable implants from the dead Scavs and that two more had arrived while I was working, hauling our client with them.
Apparently, the virus on the data shard wasn't one they had seen before. I wasn't that surprised; such things were always a game of cat and mouse.
In any event, the Intel people thanked me and left and suggested I pick up extra shifts on the Debt Reclamation Team. That I wasn't interested in. It was one thing to take implants out of dead Scavs and criminals, but I wasn't about to steal someone's arm just because they couldn't afford the payments on our services after we saved their life.
Still, the kudos for saving a client while I was off work did come with half a day of paid time off, although I had to schedule it sixty days in advance. I figured I'd save it for after I accumulated a day and a half of vacation time and then take them all together so I'd have over a week off in one long period of days off.
Suddenly, there was a squawk and banging from my apartment. I blinked, and stood up and ran into my private area to see Mr Pegpig facing off against a small raptor inside my apartment. His wife was cowering in the corner next to my refrigerator. I had left the window open so he could come and go as he pleased. A small falcon? Maybe a kite? I wasn't a bird watcher, but it was still well over twice his size either way!
I went to intercede, this predator would eat poor Mr Pegpig in two bites, but the plucky pigeon leapt at the big obligate carnivore, wings flapping and tackled it in a squawk. The raptor's birdy-little face showed astonishment before it leapt up and flew out of my open window. It even glanced back at us, mid-glide, and I could have sworn I saw it shaking its little birdy head.
Mr Pegpig hopped up to the counter with a raptor's feather in his beak and seemed to move his wings as if he was dusting the dirt off his shoulder.
Was he always this buff? I grabbed him at super speed, causing him to drop his battle trophy and squawk in dismay.
"Oh, shush," I told him and carried him off to the front, where all of my tools and equipment were. Maybe I should cut back on the diet of programmed nanomeds for the pigeons? At the very least, I needed to check him over to make sure he wasn't going to die or something.
A half-hour later, I released the bird and discovered a few things. Firstly, it was a female. You would have thought I would have already known that by now, but honestly, you didn't really need to look under a bird's skirt to design and install a primitive prosthesis for its little leg. The second thing I learned was Mrs Pegpig was quite healthy.
I grabbed her husband, which I thought was her wife, and did a similar exam on him. I refused to call this one Mr Pegpig, though, so I was now just calling him Consort.
One thing Wakako Okada told me that was one hundred per cent true. I wouldn't be able to reach my goals of self-funding my trip through medical school through solely my paycheck at Trauma Team alone.
With all of the chemistry equipment I had been buying and making lately, though, I could push forward with my plan to sell my intellectual property to a biotech firm. I could probably use Mrs Okada to approach them, and they would just assume I had stolen the research data from one of their competitors.
Having a good working arrangement with a team of edgerunners would help that as well, as I'd definitely need protection even if Mrs Okada could arrange a sale.
Very dangerous, in a lot of ways, but I still thought the risk was lesser than doing one hundred jobs like the Scav den job.
Sometimes I wondered why I was going through such hoops, as I didn't really expect to learn much in four years of medical school and one or two of residency. Perhaps it was pride; I wanted the name Hebert to mean something if someone heard it.
I knew I could change the world, and hopefully, it would be for the better.
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The anger of a gentle man
I flat-out ran, panting a bit as I zig-zagged through alleys and attempted to out-run the group of four men who were, undoubtedly, going to kill me forthwith. Glancing down at the gunshot wound in my abdomen, I grimaced and kept applying pressure on it with one hand.
The wound was life-threatening, but not immediately so. What was more immediately dangerous were the assailants, which was proven out by another quick burst of bullets firing and missing me to the left, pinging off a heavy-duty steel dumpster as I ducked out of reflex.
The men chasing me were a bit faster than me, and they were better at street parkour than I was, and I wasn't going to get away, but thankfully I didn't need to. I just needed to make it two more blocks.
"Don't run, bitch!" one of them yelled from behind me, which caused me to scrunch my face up in displeasure. I suppose it was kind of silly to criticise someone's word choices as they were attempting to murder me, but it seemed very unoriginal. I mean, I had been running for some time now, too.
Turning a corner, I put on the rest of the speed I had left and ran straight for a stereotypical kid's tree house. The dichotomy of the surroundings was stark; up until now, I had been running through a downtown area, but now it had shifted to a suburban one, almost with no warning.
As I started climbing the treehouse, luckily in cover by the trunk of the tree, I found what I was looking for. Nodding, I pointed one-handed at the approaching nar-do-wells. I commanded, mentally, ' Attack!' Instantly, a massive swarm of wasps emerged from a large hive on the side of the nearby house and quickly began swarming over and stinging the men chasing me, causing them to cry out in shock and allowing me to get into the main level of the treehouse without further being molested, or shot.
Taking stock of myself once in the treehouse, I frowned at my injury. I didn't really have much equipment with me, but I did have a pocket knife, though, so I cut some cloth around my midriff, turning my shirt into a halter-top to try to get some material to form a bandage. The wound was a through-and-through, and if I could stop it from bleeding, I could reach a hospital to get treated.
[You have killed LVL5 Minion]
[You have killed LVL6 Minion]
[You have killed LVL5 Minion]
Blinking, I glanced outside the tree house. I thought the wasps would have killed all of them, actually. Right as I was wondering where the last guy went, he suddenly made his presence known directly underneath the treehouse, still being swarmed by wasps. He threw something in a low, overhand parabola, causing it to bounce inside the tree house.
[You have killed LVL10 Mastermind]
However, then I identified the object he tossed inside. A fragmentation grenade. Fuck! There was a flash of light and loud noise.
[You have been killed!]
Growling, I found myself in a waiting area, where I would have to sit in time out before being respawned. At least the grenade killed me more or less instantly. I wasn't using a premium subscription package that would allow me to turn down the amount of pain my avatar experienced past a certain level, so, for example, getting shot earlier hurt quite a lot.
I also wondered how that ass managed to acquire explosives so early in the game. He didn't even really have a superpower yet; I didn't think. In World of Heroes, you could put off unlocking your superpower until you reached certain levels in exchange for better starting equipment. In this case, he likely got those three minion NPCs. As for those automatic weapons and grenades? He probably got them from his clan or guild, I guessed.
I hadn't joined the Trauma Team guild yet, mainly because I was interested to see what I could do alone. The superpower the game had chosen for me after playing through the tutorial would be what I would call a Master power, but the game classified me as a Controller.
I could control and direct any animals that were smaller than, say, a mouse. Unlike Ladybug's power, I wasn't limited to arthropods only, but realistically I was, as there weren't very many small animals that would be useful to me. Eventually, if my power got... well... more powerful, I would likely end up being able to summon insects regardless of where I was.
It was... a pretty good power, as could be determined from my killing of four heavily armed men with it. There was a heads-up display component that would tell me where things like insect hives were located, so I would always know where I could go for "resources." From what I knew about how the famous Ward's power worked, though, my version of the game was much inferior. Ladybug could give individual commands to millions of different insects, whereas I could give a number of predefined commands like Attack, Move, Defend, et cetera to a swarm as if it was a single entity. As my power levelled up, I would get more commands and could create subsets of my total swarm to issue those commands to, but right now, it was pretty much all or nothing.
There wasn't a lot one could do to compare a superpower in a video game with a real-life superpower, though. There was only so much the game could do to simulate it.
I was a little disappointed, actually. Typically, people with Kerenzikov implants usually got speedster-related powers, and I was actually looking forward to that. There wasn't anything the game could do to slow my perception of time, but they could prevent me from moving and running faster than they thought a regular person should. As such, Controller-based powers like mine were another commonly given superpower, as I did have a lot of time, comparatively, to issue commands and orders.
