Good Faith Biz

The Street Cred started rolling in again when me and the chooms posted some footage including slow motion capture of me testing out my new Perk, Quick Draw, which doubled my draw speed.

I'd been honing my quick draw skills for years, my fastest time prior to this was a hit on target at twenty yards in .33 seconds with my right hand and .45 seconds with left hand. With the new perk my new record was .17 seconds making me the new quickdraw world record holder and the fastest hands not boosted by cyberware.

My quickdraw is actually too fast for even trained humans to react to now, only someone sporting a Sandevistan can keep up with my draw, but they'd have to first react to activate the system, meaning I can flatline pretty much anyone I draw first on.

We sent the videos to Guinness who came out three weeks later and tested me again, this time I was a little faster during one of the tests, putting the official world record for a hit on target quick draw at .16 seconds under the name 'Big' Juan D. Welles.

My Street Cred jumped to 15 soon after, but even with all the cred my mom still wouldn't let up about my adventure with the homies down to Little China (which is hilariously run by the Japanese). She appreciated that we saved a little old lady from getting sliced up for parts, but still decried it all as gangster shit, especially the part were we blew away the Ripperdoc Jaunie hired to install a preem health monitor in his abuela which the doc then sold the deets to scavs for another payday.

Getting yelled at by my mom and never being able to go to Japantown again to eat shitty ramen with Jackie was a small price to pay for six mother fucking levels. I literally cut years off my time table and all I had to do was self defense a bunch of mean gonks to death. 10 out of 10 would self defense again.

With that many skill points built up I maxed out Medicine, Repair, Science, and Guns and put the remaining 20 points into my Driving.

The levels didn't all come from just the vid and getting into Guinness. Malorian contacted me and after going through word for word three revisions to a contract I ended up doing an interview and two commercial advertisements for them for a fat check. Those ads contributed to my big boost before it all tapered off.

And boy did it pay off. I took the Robotics Expert and Jury Rigging perks at level 12 and 14 respectively. With those perks, my skills, and a few months of studying databases and stolen Corpo schematics and experiments my designs for my custom cyberware quickly moved from the stuff of legends to the realm of the gods.

Now all I need is enough eddies to buy an aircraft carrier, suppliers willing to sell to me, and all the equipment to fab it up. Plus I need to invent an Autodoc so I don't have to deal with a fucking Ripperdoc getting a little to enamored with my cyberware to part with it while I'm under.

Fortunately I could craft lesser variants before building up to that lofty goal. I could have a full set in the Uncommon quality within a year so long as I keep my nose to the grindstone at work (up to five cars a day now boys!) even at blue rarity the stats are easily military grade, but I think I will hold off on it because of two perks I see on the horizon. At level 16 I can unlock converted schematics for the various implants seen in New Vegas, meaning that I can boost up my special stats one more point and even gain the ones found in the Old World Blues DLC. I'd love to see how a Sandy and Grade 2 Implant GRX play together.

Level 20 is where things get interesting. There is a Perk that teaches me how to achieve the Brainless, Spineless, and Heartless special perks and their restored versions. With those I could convert into an android and live forever. Or at least be a brain in a jar. I don't really know which my soul would go into, my brain or my body. In the game you operate the body while your brain chills out quite happy to be free of the vulgarities of flesh.

It is definitely something to think about as I'd be very close to the Omnissiah in that state, having completely shucked off the weakness of flesh and embraced the certainty of steel.

The only real question is how do I make some biotech testicles that produce my own natural baby batter. After all, a snake with no venom is just a belt.

As I was getting ready to jack out for the day from my tower a message came through from a Netrunner I'd never used before. Dangling QianT research like a particularly fuckable cut of meat. I know they're working towards the Warp Dancer, the best Sandevistan hands down available in 2077. If I get my hands on their research with my system advantages I could have it finished and ready for install in months, a year tops. I'd be the fastest man in the world with no one capable of even getting close for almost a decade.

Normally I'd recommend never taking a random offer in this part of the net, and that Netrunners should only ever be approached about biz, never do the approaching, but I'm confident in my hardware and the recently updated software protecting my anonymity.

VaultBoy: Price?

LU-C13: I want access to the encryption programs you are using.

VaultBoy: No.

LU-C13: You've spent a lot of eddies buying schematics and R & D Research, I have QianT's.

VaultBoy: Some schematics from QianT aren't worth what I've got.

LU-C13: I have their Sandevistan files.

Holy fuck, boys. Its happening.

VaultBoy: It's custom hardware.

LU-C13: I need it.

VaultBoy: Which of the runners talked.

LU-C13: All of them.

Fucking hell. Right now the only way to track me online is word of mouth, this entity I'm talking to is slick as hell. The probes are subtle, smooth, and powerful but they are just passing through my net presence like I'm not even there. My Tower PC is basically Kamui and I'm running around like a very good boy no one can touch.

VaultBoy: Send me the R & D reports. If they are legit we can discuss the rest at a later date.

LU-C13: You're demanding the most valuable data upfront. The rest is barely equal to it in worth.

VaultBoy: It proves you are legit.

LU-C13: It would prove I am desperate.

VaultBoy: You're the one that said need.

LU-C13 took a few minutes in silence before the files came over to my quarantine zone.

VaultBoy: Will get back to you.

VaultBoy logged off.

I called Manny to tell him that I wasn't coming in for the day. I had documents to tear through.

____________________________________________________________________________

From the research documents I was able to piece together my very own Sandevistan system and some mean modifiers. Overclocked processors, improved heatsinks, amped neurotransmitters. It wasn't the Wave Dancer, but it was a few steps up from what's currently available to the Corpos.

I logged back in and shot LU-C13 the following message.

VaultBoy: Will start the build. Contact again when complete.

Then logged back off and called Gustavo.

Gus: Talk to me, Grande.

Big Juan: Need a loan, amigo. Offered a good faith deal and the other side took it. Gotta get some special tools now.

Gus: Send me the deets.

I sent Gus the specs on what I needed to buy and how much.

Gus: I'll need to talk to some people. Give me a few days and I should have the eddies.

Big Juan: Thank you, Gus.

Now to do some planning. Gotta protect my proprietary tech after all.

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Name: 'Big' Juan D. Welles

Level: 15 (204.5 unlocked skill points)

AKA: Juan Grande, Sexy Juan, Juan with the Thiccness, Handy Juan, Juan with the Big Hands, The Taco Terminator

SKILLS

Barter: 58

Driving: 65

Explosives: 45

Guns: 100

Small Crimes: 45

Medicine: 100

Melee Weapons: 47

Repair: 100

Science: 100

Sneak: 63

Speach: 58

Survival: 49

Unarmed: 72

PERKS

Lady Killer, Educated, Comprehension, Toughness (2), Intense Training (10), Gunslinger, Quick Draw, Robotics Expert, Jury Rigging.

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The story hit the fresh list. My last one did too, but that doesn't mean I am any less grateful to the people that are vibing this one.

I think this is the first story I actually tagged Harem, which is funny because it is the one I am least sure of actually being a harem. It is however the most frequently asked question on any of my stories 'Is this a harem story?' 'is harem' and other derivatives. I'm never a hundred percent sure on that because I don't right one dimensional relationships between my characters. Things can be casual, serious relationships can end, people can still want each other but wind up on opposite sides of a conflict, people can be using others for breeding purposes. Shit's complex.

But I've been seeing a growing trend of people mindlessly praising a story simply for tagging it No Harem. So I did the opposite because I'm a contrarian person. I decided that Juan is a man-whore without pretension. Its a character flaw that can be fun, cause drama, cause conflict. That's damn important because more and more I see stories about characters that are cowards. That is a character flaw that is often treated like is a virtue. Like it is somehow smart.

Characters getting dropped into a setting and then basing all of their choices off of surviving has become boring. Its an instant drop for me when characters start talking about all the things they'll do once the big bad is finally dealt with somewhere in the far flung future. It's like people don't even realize that the MC is so feckless that he's putting his life on hold because some bad guy that prolly doesn't even know he exists is rocking the setting doing whatever the fuck he wants like a baller.

Don't even get me started on those stories where the MC panics about cannon events changing. That is the height of cowardice. These asswipes slave themselves to someone else's story acting like once everything plays out they'll be golden, but news flash dipshit, when you do something for years on end it becomes deeply engrained habit, and by replacing your agency with the comfort of a narrative someone else came up with you've turned yourself into an NPC and that doesn't magically change when the OG MC gets the happy ending. Now he gets to go off an be happy while you have to live your life making your own decisions but you have no idea how to do that because for years all you've done is maintain some one else's story.

Can we please get more stories like Edgerunners where the MC is heading for a bad end but doesn't change his course because he's got more riding on the outcome than just his pathetic life? It doesn't all need to be overly dramatic like Code Geass where the MC's death somehow makes the world unite in peace, but courage used to be at the heart of our stories and the stories we tell ourselves form the heart of our being. If we fill that heart with cowardice then life won't be worth living as we won't be men and women any more, just pathetic scared children.

Damn, pumped out a five paragraph essay on themes in fan fiction. What is this, fucking middle school again?

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