“Hey, Luna,” I called as I dropped down into my hidden cave workshop. The Drop Chutes at my back kicked on for a moment, and totally broke my fall.

”Hey, Shiro.” The girl twirled around in a rolly chair and glanced at me. Vox stood motionlessly on a table while my netrunner ran several wires up into the metallic fox to adjust and fix up the code. “I started up your Foundry like you asked.”

”Thanks.” While I was busy with Feras, I had her operate it. I wanted to start working on some server banks and stuff to get her setup soon. “It wasn’t too complicated?”

”Not really.” She glanced at the large machine blitzing away. “Just tap and start with the blueprints you gave me.”

“Nova.” I dropped into one of my chairs and watched my machinery work. What did I want to do today? Finally craft some actual gear for Nightshade? If I wanted my alter-ego to stand apart from me, I needed to make some actually good equipment.

I cleaned off one of my work tables, and pulled out my sketch pad—it was full. ‘Course it was. I tossed it onto a rack attached to one of the rock pillars supporting the roof and grabbed a new one instead.

Where should I even start? Maybe some kind of exo armor? It’d have to be sleek, though, and not anything like the usual sets I’d seen around. This was still for thieving… maybe not a full exo suit, but a full set of armor, then? Or I could even rock an unpowered design. That’d slim the armor down a whole lot.

I sketched out a couple patterns and designs. Nothing really felt right until I shifted to Panther related designs. The eidolon freaked me out, to be honest. I just felt uncomfortable with him, though there was no denying his rewards were good. He had a nice aesthetic, too. Hmm… I scratched through my other stuff and designed a new set based on the design of the Panther’s Fang.

It was all functional, ‘course, but nothing felt right. To be honest, it wasn’t a lack of functionality, but rather nothing looked cool. If I was going to build something, I wanted it to look cool more than anything else. If the design was boring and lacked personality, I didn’t want to work on it. It was as simple as that.

I rubbed at my temples and set the pencil down. This wasn’t getting me anywhere. I grabbed my stuff and tossed it into my backpack. “I’m going up. You need anything?”

”Um… maybe an energy drink?” Luna asked. She was still working away on her code—no, actually, she had three decks set up. Two of them were working on Vox’s code, and the last was running through news articles related to her brother…

I sighed and pulled at the strap of my bag lightly. Nothing had turned up yet. I was going to have to run through some alternative avenues to try and find him. “Check. I’ll get you one on my way back.”

The ascender was already attached to the line and waiting for me when I got to it. As it pulled me up toward the speakeasy, I made yet another mental note to set my autominers to cut a more permanent and clean path down into the Underground.

Back up in the speakeasy, I took a seat in one of my booths and summoned out Crow’s Canteen of Chaos. I flicked on one of the TVs, and a Ukiyonese drama show started up. TV usually wasn’t my thing, but it was kinda nice to just turn off my brain for once and watch something mindless. I settled back and idly sketched away.

A couple hours later, I headed back down after swinging by a vending machine a block away from the apartment building. I tossed the energy drink to Luna, and then plugged in earbuds to get onto the final design I’d ultimately ended up settling on.

I liked the bodysuit. I wasn’t so sure at first, but it was nice not to have to worry about thermal sensors with it. I finalized my sketch for it, though with a slight modification. I wanted to add some specialized fabric into the suit so it’d be able to channel electricity a bit better for my Kinetic ability.

While the bodysuit worked, the poncho had to go. It screamed Shiro, and I’d worn it too long to simply give it up for Nightshade. Not to mention it was far too comfy to wear for everyday life. I was better making something else for Nightshade. I was thinking a kimono or something might be interesting.

I started with armoring the suit. It needed to be modular. I didn’t want a full exo-suit or power armor like I made for Mira. To start with, I redesigned my original Hex-scale armor that I’d been so proud of. Recent innovations with the Foundry would allow me to make the plates much smaller, more resilient, and not nearly as clunky.

What should I call it? I eyed the interlocking panels of armor designed to absorb and disperse impacts rather than just outright block it. The springs at the back were so much stronger, which should boost the defensive property of the plating by a substantial amount. CM Hex V.2? That worked. The core material I used for the platings also got majorly reworked into something a little stronger.

Originally, I wanted to use whatever alloy the Crusade used to make their armor. I offered up fifteen fire crystals in exchange using Transmutation. Each one was worth somewhere around five thousand rayn, based on my calculations. In return for all that, Transmutation spat out a tiny little speck of metal that was barely even visible. That wasn’t an option at the moment. It’d cost way too much to convert enough to be usable.

Instead, I swapped to a specialty titanium alloy that I’d just recently learned about. It was from the water purification plant, actually. It was one of the things Luna pulled from the database. The metal was a resistant alloy the AI developed to help chemical resistance, and be strong enough for thin plates to resist impacts without spilling acid. It was the stuff that kept the vats from exploding when they were caught in the cross fire.

With the type of armor solved, next came where to put it. I layered it across my design, carefully ensuring that it wouldn’t limit mobility in the slightest. At the end of the day, this was a suit designed for stealth, not taking hits. Mobility and silence mattered more than full protection. I had to trim back some of the plating, and replaced some sections of CM Hex with other materials to better support joints.

Next came the helmet. Using my mask was, ‘course, still an option. For the armor I wanted something a little more concrete. Something that’d hide my entire head, so not even a lick of detail could get out and expose me. I slapped together a design based on a panther’s head. Nothing too crazy. It just had a voice modulator, a bunch of different optic options, a dozen different scanners, and a built-in rebreather.

I flicked to a new page and started work on a slightly better audio suite to sit on top of the helmet based around the design I used for Vox. The ears were shorter, though, and matched closer to a panther’s. I could definitely get Luna to copy over Vox’s audio spatial tracking code so I could have that too.

The boots were also super important. I was short. It was an undeniable truth. Nightshade was supposed to be a terrifying thief, and being short didn’t help with initial intimidation. I added in a ton of features to boost my height subtly, and even made them adjustable just in case. I added an extremely thin unpowered exo-armor brace up along the back of the leg to support the rest of the armor. The strength enhancement would be marginal, but even marginal was better than nothing.

For the gauntlets, I ran a skin-tight design of interlocking metal hexes, and added a built-in fingerprint spoofer so I wouldn’t have to dig around my backpack while on a heist. I also threw in an exo-armor brace along the backside of the arm to increase strength. Like the leg part, it was based of Mira’s Shift Exo-Core. Most of my modifications were based on chrome adapted for armor, actually.

”Hey, Shiro?” Luna called, drawing me from my work.

”Chek?” I glanced up and spotted her stretching out with all of the decks shut. She had thick black bags under her eyes like she’d been up all night.

”I’m going to check on Iris.” She pointed off to a line of the vehicles near the back of my workshop. They were mostly ready to go, and just needed fuel to start running. “C-can I borrow a Roughrider?”

“Just take mine.” I tossed her the keys. If I needed to go somewhere, I could just grab one of the freshly made ones. I needed to make Luna and Saint their own, anyway. “Need me to come with you?”

”No… you look like you’re busy.” She packed off up deck and headed toward the tunnel back to the surface.

After checking my Foundries, I got back to work. The chest piece needed a lot of work to keep my designs slim and form-fitting. For the first time since I learned how to make it, I modified my Blinder module. Instead of the ball-like design that I always used, I shifted to a much flatter piece designed to fit into the shoulder of the chest piece.

My backpack had a Blinder already built in, ‘course, but I didn’t want to wear it around as Nightshade. It was pretty distinctive just like my poncho, so it had to go. Not to mention I’d look a little more confident not lugging around an armory with me everywhere, though it did mean I’d have to be a bit more careful. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Most of the stuff I carried could be safely moved to a belt. The last thing that couldn’t be so easily swapped over was the Drop Chutes. I took a quick break to start printing parts for the armor, and turned back to work on the chutes.

This was by far the most complex part aside from the helmet. I’d used the Drop Chutes exactly how I got them, and had never changed their design. Now, though, I need something different.

Instead of the five spread across the back, I dropped it to just two much chunkier thrusters meant to attach to the hips. Four microscopic chambers scattered around the armor would give it a bit more stability, but the two thrusters were the main draw. It was also where the power armor cell that’d run everything would be stored.

I just couldn’t get it small enough. The Drop Chutes and power cell had a fixed size that I couldn’t do anything about. Instead of continuing to try and force it, I shifted the design to have an external hip pack instead. It’d sit right on the small of my back above the belt, and hold all of that stuff.

It took quite a bit of work to get something that I think could work designed. I’d have to actually build it all and test it, which was why I hadn’t tried to mess with the Drop Chutes in the past. If I evenly slightly messed up the gravitic chamber’s calibration, and I could easily shatter my limbs. Although I could heal back, that didn’t mean I wanted to get injured in the first place.

With the final piece in play, I moved through and polished up the rest of my design. Mainly, I added a bunch of sonic suppressors around the intensely mechanical parts. The last thing I wanted was a creak of metal giving my position away.

I left a lot of room for future modifications and iterations of the design. I got most of the stuff I could think of off the top of my head, but actually using the suit would likely reveal all sorts of things I missed.

It was late afternoon by the time I finished up sketching out and designing the suit. I was just waiting on parts to finish to actually start assembling it, and that’d take a while. It was fine. I had other things I could be doing while it worked.

I gathered up my stuff, grabbed a cyberoptic that’d been left to collect dust, and headed back out toward the surface. It was really about time I replaced my clone flesh eye. Hopefully, Neal wouldn’t be opposed to it this time around.

— — —

Nael paused his radio as soon as I stepped in, and set down a book. He didn’t say anything for a moment, and just carefully watched me. “You took longer than I expected.”

”Well… I had some stuff to do.” I rubbed at the crook of my arm, and looked away from the man. “You were right. Thanks for telling it to me straight.”

”No problem, kid.” He chuckled lightly and shook his head. A weight seemed to come off his shoulders. For once, I saw the aged man as he was—someone who’d seen the very best and worst of this city, yet still tried his best in spite of it. “You feeling better now?”

”Chek…” I slung my backpack off my shoulder and rooted out the cyberoptic I’d made. It was almost exactly like Vox’s with a full suite of different things it could see. Thermal and night vision was included in that mix. “I need to get rid of this clone flesh, Nael.”

The medek nodded his head and he stood up. He grabbed the optic I offered out to him, and moved over to the chair to start running scans on it. “Take a seat. I’ll take a look and see what we’re dealing with.”

Phew… I was worried he’d turn me away at the door again. I mean, it really hadn’t been all that long since I last left this place. “Thanks.”

”This made by you?” He looked up from a terminal and eyed me. “You’ve got much better ICE than the last one you brought by.”

“A friend helped me out.” I pulled a chip and passed it to him. Luna made a temporary bypass key at my request so he could take a look. “Here.”

”Thanks.” Nael slotted it into the terminal and turned his attention back to the chrome. “Your Neural System Interface should be able to handle this thing’s load. You might want to look at upgrading or getting an additional internal processor if you want something else, though. This eye’s military grade.”

”Right…” The NSI I originally built was just for some basic stuff. Back then, I didn’t think I’d ever have super complex chrome, so I hadn’t bothered incorporating anything to up my capacity. “What are the numbers we’re looking at?”

“Your NSI is decent. It can sustain about thirty-two points of neural load.” He tapped on his terminal, and pushed a scanner over the chair.

”My, uh, friend said that was good?” No idea why I was still clinging to it being my friend that made all of this stuff. He knew it was me. I was too deep now, though.

”It’s not terrible. You’re Neural Link takes up around eight. A little higher than standard.” He flicked a scanner around, and it revealed my entire bone structure alongside the little bits of metal weaved in through it. “This eye’s got too many features, though. Do you really need Radiation Sight?”

”Radiation’s been present recently.” I’d run into radiation only once before back when I traveled with the Crimson Company. My Blinder ran off radiation, though. There were a few more things that it’d help with. “What are we looking at?”

”A load of around twenty nine all together. You’re cutting it close, kid.”

“Not too close, though, right?” Running the line was fine, but the chrome wouldn’t always stay at nice round numbers. Damage and stress could spike them if I wasn’t careful. Not to mention a Netrunner could cause all sorts of damage if I was right on the line. Even chrome just being aged could cause issues too, like what happened to my original Neural System Interface.

”A two point buffer is what I’d usually recommend,” Nael said. “Any less, and you risk your reaction speeds dying right when you need them.”

Then I was still in the clear. Three points below my limit were better than two. I had some magicky stuff going on, so I didn’t want to toe the line too closely, anyway. “So I’m good?”

“For now.” He passed me a breathing mask connected to a tank of gas. “You won’t be able to chip anything else after this. Not without melting your brain.”

“That’s fine. Not like I’d want much else, anyway.” I grabbed the breathing mask and pulled the band around the back of my head. I could just use external gear, anyway. I didn’t need any other cybernetics unless I lost an arm or something.

The eye having such a big impact on neural load was a bit outside of my expectations. Unlike with a robot, I couldn’t just slap more and more processors into myself and hope for the best. For future chrome, I’d have to play it a bit slower and think things through more before getting it chipped.

Nael flashed me a thumbs up, and moved off to collect some supplies. As I watched him, the gas slowly lulled me into a deep sleep.