Ken collapsed to his knees in the gangway. His eyes were squeezed shut, his face twisted in agony. The hands tightly clutched his precious family jewels.
“NOT. MY...” The last word refused to leave his mouth.
He had recovered in this world, did this girl want him to go back to being one balled?!
Quick, serious question. Does pain feel less if you slow down the world?
Ken didn’t try Sandy. He didn’t dare. He vaguely remembered reading somewhere that accelerated perception didn’t reduce pain.
It made it worse. Apparently, your brain simply had more time to appreciate every miserable second of it.
He had no intention of conducting that experiment firsthand. ‘...absolutely not.’
“Seriously, what are you even talking about... making it so awkward.” The girl fiercely spat, absolutely unsympathising with his pain.
“Kuh! S-sorry, for being such an awkward fellow.” Ken slowly unfolded himself off the floor, one hand still hovering protectively over the family jewels, the other bracing against the gangway wall.
Dignity, he decided, was for those with dignity anyway. He’d already lost most of his to a Sandevistan-powered slap to his own face. What was one more knee to the crown jewels between friends?
Not friends. Definitely not friends. He didn’t even know her name.
“You done?” she asked, arms crossed, watching him climb back to something resembling standing.
“Done with what?”
“Being pathetic.”
“Working on it,” Ken wheezed. “Just... give me some minutes!”
“At this rate, my estimate says years.”
Despite everything–the knee, the ICE, the monowire he was still very much not thinking about–Ken found himself almost laughing. Almost. The pain forced the almost.
The awkward silence returned, thicker this time. Ken cleared his throat and, because apparently near-death didn’t come with the good sense to stay quiet, tried again.
“So. Since you know my whole life story, student ID and chromes included... only feels fair when I get something back. What do I call you?”
She studied him for a long moment. Red-painted eyes, unreadable, sweeping over him the way she probably swept over a target’s firewall before deciding whether it was worth the effort of cracking. “Should I add something to the list, D? A corpo student being an underground mule? With a sandy at that, that’s some edgerunner in making. Juicy, juicy story.”
“How?!” He put his alt com channel to deep sleep, how did she even wake that up? Was such a small link possible to be noticed in such a short time?
“Let’s see, your style certainly doesn’t look like an usual corpo. A rebellious boyo, aren’t ya? Your mama’s gonna be sad.”
“...Is that bad?” Ken said, his eyes dropping to his feet.
“Eh...?” She definitely didn’t expect his full vibe to change.
“Everyone has a dream or two, don’t they? Is it bad for me to have one?” Ken chewed his lip. “And... Mom, I hope she is not sad.”
“...”
The gangway was silent for a moment.
[Watson. Now stopping at Watson.]
“...”
“Does your academy give you a course on awkwardness? Ah, fine!” The girl suddenly ran a hand through the side of her head and extended the other to him. “I’m Lucy, and that’s what all a stalker gets.”
“Lucy.” Ken tried it out. It fit better than he expected. Then he shook her hand. “I’m Ken... but you probably know most of the things about me, talk about being an overachiever... but I'm really not a stalker. How about, an admirer with poor impulse control?”
“That’s worse.”
“...” Ken admitted in silence.
Lucy looked out toward the gangway's scratched-up window, at Night City sliding past in smears of neon and rust.
“Don't get comfortable, Ken.” She said his name like she was testing whether it tasted like a mistake. “Don’t read too much into it.”
“Wow. Rejected before the first date.”
“There's not going to be a first date.”
“...zero’th date? Is that a thing? Guess we are already here?” He gestured vaguely at the gangway, at the two of them wedged between train cars like a couple of contraband chips somebody forgot to notice.
Lucy didn't answer that. Which, Ken decided, was somehow worse than if she'd hit him again.
“Your Black-ICE is a joke,” she said instead. “Who even puts ICE on Sandy? Idiot. Consider it as motivation to actually learn how to protect yourself before you get fried.”
“...” Ken nodded, for some reason it felt like a goodbye to him.
The girl glanced at him. He looked like an abandoned kitten. Sighing, she couldn’t help but propose, “Talk about a crazy idea, are you good with that Sandy?”
“I do like to think of myself as one.”
“Wanna go on a heist together?”
“By heist, you mean stealing?” Despite that, his eyes perked up for some reason.
“Again, is it really stealing if it’s ‘Saka?”
Ken felt the need to clarify. “True, so we’re only targeting corpos?”
“Oh, you’re in. That’s how it has to be.”
She walked out of the gangway and Ken followed, murmuring, “This is practically a heist date, isn’t it!”
Regretfully, lost in his own world, he didn’t notice her expression.
They found a bench near the platform edge, and Lucy’s eyes flashed with a yellow hue, running through something Ken couldn’t follow.
“Alright, business.” She didn't look up. “80-20.”
“80-20?!” Ken repeated it. “In whose favor, exactly?”
“Mine, obviously. I'm doing the actual heavy lifting here. Breaching, checking balance, ejecting shards. You’re just... legs. With a very mediocre Sandy.”
“Legs that carry loot without triggering a single glance, and can outrun a bullet. Very mediocre legs, sure.”
“Legs that got caught by a simple picksocket in under thirty seconds.”
Ken opened his mouth. Closed it. Then opened it again, “So you admit yourself to be just a...”
Lucy stared daggers at him like she dared him to continue.
He offered. “...50-50.”
“70-30. I’m the one who'll be pushing the klepped shards.”
“60-40. I can do the klepping if you want.”
“Didn’t expect you to have such connections. Ok, 65-35, I'm feeling generous. Blame the kitten face.”
“I don’t have a kitten face.”
“You have several.” She finally glanced up, something amused flickering behind the boredom and nonchalant smile. “Deal, or you go back to being a stray cat on the railing watching me smoke.”
That dealt some serious damage than Ken had expected.
“...Deal.” he stuck out his hand. She looked at it like he'd offered her a dead rat, then shook it anyway, quick and businesslike.
“Good boy.” She stood. “C'mon. There's a corpo mixer two stops down. Junior execs, the kind who wear their whole net worth on their wrists because daddy hasn't cut them off yet.”
“And we just... walk in?”
“You walk in. I stay outside and do the actual work.” She tapped her temple. “I crack their agents remotely, flag which ones are worth lifting, you grab the physical shard off whoever's dumbest enough to keep one on them instead of trusting the cloud. Old money still likes touching their eddies, you'd be surprised.”
“So I'm bait AND a pickpocket.”
“You're bait, a pickpocket, and legs. Multitasking. Very corpo of you.”
“Ugh, can you do a scan beforehand and let me know if there’s any Arasaka Academy ID like you did mine?”
“Why, are you worried about getting caught by someone you know?”
“Very much.”
“Cute.”
The mixer was exactly as garish as advertised. A rooftop lounge dripping with holo-ivy and the kind of ambient music that existed purely to make silence feel expensive. Ken drifted through it in a borrowed blazer Lucy had apparently produced from nowhere, nodding at people whose names he’d already forgotten, his mini-map quietly painting the room in a scatter of neutral transparent and the occasional cautious yellow.
His holo buzzed. Lucy's voice, private channel, relaxed as ever.
<Lucy: Guy in the maroon jacket. Third from the bar. His wall's softer than wet paper.>
<D: On it.>
The lift was clean–a brush of the shoulder, a murmured apology, and the shard was in his palm and gone into a pocket before the guy even finished his sentence about quarterly projections. Ken kept walking, heart hammering harder than the actual theft probably warranted.
<D: Got it. One down.>
<Lucy: Don't celebrate. There's like six more targets and this event ends in forty minutes.>
<D: Okay, so, genuine question. Instead of me doing this walk of shame six separate times, can't you just flag all six now? I grab and bounce, we're out of here before the canapés run out.>
<Lucy: You want me to send you five or six live targets at once?>
<D: Multitasking and efficiency. It’s apparently a corpo virtue, someone just taught me.>
There was a pause on the line long enough that Ken almost thought she'd hung up.
<Lucy: You quite hold a grudge, huh... Fine. But if you fumble even one and start a scene, I'm netrunning myself straight out of this and leaving you to explain a stolen shard to hotel security.>
<D: Noble as always. Make a gap of 0.3 seconds, you can manage that much, right?>
<Lucy: Oh, are you challenging me?>
<D: Whatever could you be meaning?>
Following the projected Scan from Lucy’s holo, five markers also bloomed across his mini-map a moment later, small gold pins layered over five distinct transparent dots scattered around the lounge. Ken exhaled, rolled his shoulders, and let Sandy do the rest of the talking.
Time slowed. Lucy made sure the camera just happened to patrol the other way. He crossed the room in a blur, brushing past shoulder after shoulder, palm skimming the lifted shards vanishing straight into his jacket lining between one slowed heartbeat and the next.
Three. Four. Five.
He came to a stop by the bar, a mask of casual boredom sliding back over his face as the world snapped back to real time, and reached for a drink he had no intention of paying for.
Wrong choice of drink.
Fizzy.
<Lucy: ...Ok, that was ridiculous.>
<D: You mean super cool, right? How cool though?>
<Lucy: I’ll allow myself a five percent adjustment. 60-40.>
<D: I’m starting to like you. I’ll take it.>
<Lucy: Oh, you mean more simping?>
<D: ...>
They caught the next NCART and waltzed through the whole transit. Two stops later, Lucy slid into the seat beside him with the kind of loose, satisfied posture of someone who’d just had a genuinely good night at someone else’s expense.
Ken went to check his haul and froze.
“...Huh.”
“What.”
He pulled up his Cyberware page, more out of habit than intent, and immediately regretted it.
RCD: 28H
“Vik’s gonna murder me.”
“Vik?”
“My ripper. Never mind.” Ken rubbed his face. Ten runs. He’d genuinely lost count somewhere around the fourth or fifth, too busy chasing gold pins across a rooftop to notice the number climbing. Viktor's voice echoed in his skull anyway, clear as day–try to limit it to 5 times, even in an emergency don’t push it over eight.
He’d blown past that a while ago and hadn’t even clocked it. Using it for reading just because RCD doesn’t climb much had been a mistake.
A glance at his HP bar confirmed the second half of the bad news.
97% had quietly become 94%.
‘Huh, I didn’t take any damage.’ he thought back to their heist again.
<Lucy: We have a juicy target.>
Ken’s vision glowed on the target. It was the guy just in front of them.
“That doesn’t look like a corpo to me.” Ken whispered back to her.
<Lucy: One of the Animal gangs, hired muscle of ‘Saka.>
<D: Cool. Definitely getting him.>
<Lucy: Go!>
Ken was back in a flash. In fact, Lucy only felt a glitch.
<Lucy: Are you sure that stuff’s just Mk.II?>
<D: Vik says the same thing. Apparently my compatibility with it is just too good.>
Lucy raised an eyebrow but didn’t push. Ken pocketed the thought, told himself he’d bring it up with Viktor at the next checkup, and let the train rattle on.
<Lucy: Let’s Delta, some will notice soon.>
<D: Cool!> Honestly, Ken was having too much fun to even realize that he was actually stealing, or for the better word, picksocketing.
Ok, that was worse in some ways.
<Lucy: Oh, last meal, chirpy girls, at 10’o clock. Three.>
<D: Go.>
<Lucy: Let’s get off here.>
She didn’t even bother checking whether he succeeded or not. She already knew.
That movement was just too sick.
Just beside the station, both were leaning on the railing, smiles pasted on their faces that couldn’t be erased.
“So, what do you think? How did I do?” Ken asked.
“I’d say well worth the 35%.”
“You mean 40.”
“Haha, you got me there.” She turned to him and said with a self-satisfied smile, “Totally unexpected, but we do make a great combi.”
“We totally do! Wait, what do you mean unexpected?”
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Create a Party with Lucyna Kushinada?
→ Yes / No
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
‘Eh? That name, where did I...’
He felt like the name left a great impression on him–
He realized where.
‘No, no, no.’
He was absolutely fucking toast, wasn’t he?
{Alt Titles: My Dream?; Lucy: The Girl on the Platform; Partners in Crime; An Unlikely Partnership; Hesit? It’s a Date; Love at First ICE; Black ICE & Butterflies; The Girl Who Hacked His Heart; My Stalker Was a Netrunner; A Sandevistan-Powered Confession; The Kitten Face Discount; Lucy's Proposal; The Girl on the RED Map;}