Friday Night Firefight: A Cyberpunk Isekai

The party outside Lizzie's lasted well into the night. Fred and Mor kept up a running list of introductions of all the people who stopped by to chat with them, letting them all know I was a newbie who'd be hanging around. All the names and faces started blurring together after a few hours and, by the end of the night, I had no clue how many people I had met.

I started drifting off on the couch, the day's adventures having finally caught up with me, and Fred jostled me awake. He said his goodbyes to Mor and the others and guided me out of the alcove and towards his small camp on a Watson side street where I'd be able to get some sleep. On our way there he explained that it was a hard rule that nobody was allowed to pass out in the alcove. It was the only place in Watson where people like us could meet up and hang out without having to look over our shoulders for the NCPD or Tyger Claws or Maelstrom. If we treated the alcove like any other homeless encampment in Watson, we ran the risk that the Mox would grow tired of us and kick us out. We'd lose the one safe haven that we had built in the neighborhood.

Fred's place was in a small dead end of an alley that he had cleared out and stocked with a mattress, blankets, and various odds and ends. I scrounged up a couple blankets to make myself a bed and conked out. I was able to get a couple fitful hours of sleep, waking up every so often to the sounds of cars racing past. When morning came Fred shook me awake, handed me a drink he grabbed from a vending machine, and had us set out into the city. As we walked, he started in on what he called 'the Night City finishing school.' It was mostly advice he earned through years of living on the streets: don't challenge gang members, always know whose territory you're walking through, don't pick fights with someone wearing a suit because they probably have corpo security at their beck and call.

“The first rule of surviving in Night City is: never work alone,” Fred explained as we strolled up to a covered walkway that connected two streets. “You saw what that got you with Dennis. That’s why I’m partnering you with someone today. You two will work together while I deal with the match.”

“Match?” What match?” I asked.

“Stickball,” he said with a fierce grin. “I’m running a match today. You joined at a good time Noah. You can be one of the lookouts.”

We walked through the covered walkway which was packed with people despite the early hour. A sign on the street we passed said we were on Farrier Street, but I didn’t recognize the area. One of the side effects of always navigating by minimap in the game was that I didn’t really pay much attention to the places I was traveling to. Shops were sunk into buildings on either side of the walkway, creating a small shopping center where people milled about. In the middle of the walkway were several concrete benches, but nobody was seated there. Instead, a growing crowd packed into the stores along the walkway, setting up small barricades and claiming spots near the shop windows.

Fred muscled his way through the crowd and pulled me into a collection of people I recognized from last night’s party. As soon as we appeared, the group broke out into excited chatter and threw greetings at Fred. He pulled a couple people in for hugs and back pats, and then motioned for one guy to step out of the crowd.

“Noah, this is Tomas. Tomas, Noah. You two will be working together today. I gotta see about setting up,” he said as he grabbed a can of spray paint from someone in the crowd.

Tomas was one of the younger guys I had noticed hanging around the alcove last night. I say younger, but he was probably in his mid-twenties. Older than me but younger than both Fred and Mor. He kept up a conversation with a few people from the crowd as I watched Fred set up for the game of ‘stickball’ that I still had no clue about.

“Hey Tomas, what is all this?” I asked, drawing his attention away from the group he was chatting with.

“Stickball,” he said, not answering my curiosity. I shrugged at him for him to complete his explanation and all he said was “you don’t know stickball?”

“I’m not local. Never heard about it before.”

“Oh choom, you’re missing out.” He put a hand on my shoulder and guided me away from the group he’d been speaking with and pointed at where Fred was setting up the field.

“You got three circles on the field, and a ball goes in each of the circles. Each team has a goal, and the third circle is for the halfway mark,” he said pointing out Fred as he painted large circles in the walkway. “It’s a three-on-three match. Anything goes, except killing of course. The goal is to get all three balls into your own circle and stop the other team from doing the same.”

“No killing?” I asked. I mean, that was a normal rule in most sports. Unless there was a kumite style underground fighting ring somewhere in Night City. The thought of going to watch a kumite excited me. The only real sport in the video games was boxing. There was also that one mission in Dogtown where V infiltrates a sports complex packed with children who are all sporting experimental cyberware. I think there were soccer and basketball players in that mission, but you never got to watch a game.

“Killing is against the whole point,” said Tomas. “It’s mostly small-time gangs that play. It lets them solve all their problems without starting wars. Some gangs only have ten or twenty people, and it’s stupid to have half your manpower flatlined trying to grab a single block of territory.”

Tomas kept explaining the rules and intricacies of stickball. Apparently, Fred was well regarded as a ref for stickball games. Whenever two gangs wanted to play, they’d call him up and he’d set up a match and officiate the whole thing. He would tap up a couple people from the alcove to act as huscle and then call in a large crowd to watch. I was only half listening to Tomas when one of the gangs finally arrived at the walkway.

“Tomas, who the hell is that?!”

“Hm? Who? The rimbo?” Tomas nodded to a girl who was tatted up and had some of those high-heel blade feet cyberlegs.

“No, that guy,” I said as I pointed to the largest man I’d ever seen. He was a behemoth; at least six and a half feet tall and all of it was muscle. He wore a black tank top, showing chrome arms that looked like they could rip apart a car. His legs were almost as big as my waist. Looking at him, I expected to see one of those alligator math symbols to be hovering over his head. Greater than. This man was greater than everyone around him. Damn, that would be a cool street name.

“I don’t know,” shrugged Tomas. “I wasn’t paying attention when Fred told us who would be playing today. No clue what gang he’s with.”

I looked at him with incredulity. How could he not know who one of the most intimidating people I’d ever seen was?

“What? I hang out in Kabuki. That’s Tyger Claw territory. No small gangs poke their heads up around there. You’d be a gonk to mess with the Claws on their home turf, so I never cared about small-time gangoons.”

“Dude isn’t small-time, he’s intimidating,” I shook my head and mumbled. “Like he should be…I don’t know, working in a punching factory or something.”

Tomas laughed and was about to ask me what I meant by that, but Fred came over to chat with us before we could continue our conversation. We weren’t going to be allowed to watch the game, something that Tomas was bummed about. Instead, we were told to take up a lookout position a few blocks from the walkway and keep an eye out for any gang or NCPD presence that might try and break up the game.

Tomas explained to me that it was unlikely we’d need to do anything as gangs knew not to mess with stickball games. The big ones viewed it as below them and the smaller ones never knew when they might need Fred to act as a neutral third-party to ref their own games. Even the NCPD didn’t try and shut down stickball games. Their view was that, as long as the meat wagons didn’t need to be called, anything the gangs did was their own business.

Tomas and I perched at the corner of a street a few blocks away and Tomas kept up a running commentary of everything he enjoyed about the city. Or something like that. I wasn’t really paying much attention to what he was talking about. All my focus was back in the walkway with Greater Than. He was one of the scariest people I’d ever seen in my life, but nobody around seemed to have been phased by him. Neither Tomas nor Fred gave him a second glance, which told me he was on the bottom rung of gangsters in the city. It drove home how truly outclassed I was in this world. I couldn’t even fend off Dennis. Greater Than was just some low-rent hood, but he still far outclassed anything I brought to the table.

About an hour later Fred found his way over to the street Tomas and I were guarding and handed us both twenty eddies. “Your cut.”

“Not bad for a few hours of work,” said Tomas as he said his goodbyes and walked away.

“We still got a bunch of daylight left. How about I show you around?” Fred asked as he started walking down the street. I raced to catch up and fell into step next to him. We walked towards the western shore of Night City while Fred once again threw out a litany of life lessons he’d learned while being homeless.

We got to the shore and Fred had us drop down to the beach below. The area was littered with trash bags and loose garbage and as I took it in, I understood why Fred said it was the best place to go to find hidden treasures that could be converted into eddies. We split up, not going more than thirty feet away from each other, and started combing through the trash bags that cluttered the area to find something that was worth selling.

Over the first half of our scavenger hunt I was squeamish about digging through the trash bags. I’d carefully untie the tops of the bag and poke around a bit, looking for anything that might earn me a couple eddies from vendors that Fred said he’d introduce me to. This wasn’t how I envisioned my life in Night City going. I figured I’d stroll into the city, pick up some cyberware, grab a katana or some mantis blades, and carve a path through the gangs and corporations to get my way into the Afterlife and eternal glory. Instead, I found myself picking through trash, trying to find anything of value that might net me enough eddies to buy some food and get me through another day.

We combed through the trash-ridden beach for a couple hours, slowly picking our way through the garbage people had tossed away. I grabbed a couple things that Fred suggested might be worth something; a broken-down coffee maker, a few books, and a trashed tablet whose screen was cracked to oblivion. But the prize that drew Fred’s eyes was a sex toy I found in a soggy box under a pile of trash bags.

Despite the grime that clung to me after hours of scouring the beach, I still didn’t want to touch the thing until Fred let out an appreciative noise at the sight of my discovery. He peered over at me from his own island of trash and saw the toy I had spotted. It was the kind of sex toy that could connect to a BD wreath and mimic whatever action was happening in the BD. Fred claimed it was a lucky find, patted me on the back, and said that the toy was ‘as good as gold.’ He even suggested that we should finish up for the day and that he’d walk with me to sell the thing up at the Kabuki Roundabout.

We schlepped our found goods across town in the direction of the Roundabout. Fred had commandeered a small cart that we stuffed everything inside of. He had his own pile of scraps that he carefully arranged in the cart before loaning me a bag that I could stuff all my goods inside. And then we were off, and Fred started teaching me about the Roundabout.

I remembered it from the games. It was where you protected Blue Moon from her stalker, and where you picked up Ping from that one netrunner who knows T-Bug. Fred spoke about it as if it were a magical place. He said it was filled with vendors who would buy anything they could get their hands on, and it was the main way that Fred was able to make enough eddies to take care of himself.

We got to the Roundabout and Fred introduced me to a vendor named Frank. His shop was set on the outskirts of the Roundabout and was the first place that Fred always stopped at. Frank primarily purchased used appliances and pieces of tech that he’d fix up and sell as second-hand goods. Anything that was worth fixing up went to Frank as he was known to pay much more than any other vendor in the Roundabout. That was driven home when Frank tossed me 25 eddies for the broken-down coffee maker and then poured through all the scrap that Fred brought him.

When we were finished with Frank, Fred guided me towards another vendor in the Roundabout; a middle-aged woman who ran a dinky shop about a block away from the main thoroughfare.

“Ibada!” Fred shouted at the store owner who flashed him a smile back in greeting. He pushed his cart to the front of the shop and put a hand on my back, pushing me forward. “I want you to meet Noah. He’s a new guy I’m showing the ropes to, and he’s got some stuff he wants to sell you.”

Ibada smiled at me and started shifting objects from the small table at the front of her store, clearing a space for me to put down all the trash I had collected. On our way to her shop, Fred explained that each Roundabout vendor specialized in different types of goods. Ibada, however, was a generalist. The broken tablet, books, and sex toy that I found would go to Ibada because she bought basically anything people were willing to sell.

During our walk across town, I daydreamed about everything that I’d spend all my hard-earned eddies on. Most of those dreams consisted of a hot shower and a clean bed, and they grew more outlandish after Frank paid me for the broken-down coffee maker. If I could earn 25 eddies for that hunk of junk, how much more was the find that Fred had coo’d over?

Those daydreams were shattered as soon as I dropped the trash I had scavenged down on Ibada’s table. I plopped the sex toy down on the counter, expecting her to make the same appreciative noises that Fred had when we found it. Instead, she shot me a look of disgust and I heard wheezing and gut bursting laughter coming from behind me. I wheeled to Fred, only to see him snapping a still of me with his phone, making sure to get my confused and embarrassed face in the picture.

“Oh, you utter ass,” I said without much heat in my voice.

“Oh my God, that was priceless. I’m sorry kid, but free entertainment is hard to come by around here.”

My face grew red, and I hid behind Fred while Ibada glanced through the rest of the trash I had collected. Once she ran through it all she tossed me a couple bills. Only 17 eddies. I looked at the pitiful amount of money and frowned. It was going to take awhile before I could rent a hotel room and get myself cleaned up.