[FIXER’S COMMUNIQUE: CLASSIFIED]
SUBJECT: The Price of a Distraction (A Guide to the City’s Vices)
This city is a pressure cooker, and every soul in it is screaming. The cold, the hunger, the constant, grinding static—it’s enough to make you want to rip your own chrome out just to feel something different. So you go looking for an escape. A distraction. A moment of warmth in the endless cold.
Just remember, in The Bastion, nothing is free. Every pleasure has a price, and it’s usually paid in more than just Cal. This is the menu of the city’s numbness.
The Corporate Fix: The Merchants of Bliss
For those with the Creds, the Corpos offer a clean, sanitized escape. Alterscape Corp are the undisputed masters of this racket, the official dealers of the city’s favorite opiate: bliss .
- Dream-Loungers: You pay your Cal, you lie back in a plush, comfortable chair, and you let the machine do the work. A heavy, thick cable thunks into the neural port at the back of your skull, and for an hour, the world melts away. You’re fed a curated, corporate-approved fantasy—a warm beach from the old world, a victory you never earned. It’s perfect, it’s repeatable, and it’s utterly hollow.
- Mood-Stims: Alterscape has weaponized desire, and their designer drugs are the ammunition. They sell emotions in a vial—a shot of pure confidence before a big meeting, a dose of serenity to quiet the Whispers. It’s clean, it’s efficient, and it’s another leash they use to keep the populace numb and compliant.
The Gutter’s Comforts: The Flesh Market
For those who want something more real, the street always provides. This is the oldest trade in the newest hell, and it thrives in the neon-slicked alleys and private booths of the underbelly.
- The Look of the Street: You’ll see them in the perpetual twilight, the streetwalkers with their translucent coats and flickering LED highlights woven into their hair. They are part of the city’s desperate, vibrant pulse.
- The Commodity of Flesh: In a world saturated with cold chrome and synthetic parts, the warmth of real, un-augmented skin has become a rare and expensive commodity. This has created a grim hierarchy. A fully organic “doll” can command a fortune from a Vaulted suit desperate to feel something human. At the other end, a Synthetic might offer a different kind of experience, one of cold, mechanical perfection, devoid of the messy emotions of the flesh.
- The Roleplay of the Transaction: This is a limitless world. The transaction is the start of the story, not the end. Is it a simple exchange of Cal for a moment of warmth and forgetting? A desperate attempt to feel a human connection? Or is it something more dangerous? That streetwalker might be a Mnemonic with a hidden neural rig, paid to lift secrets from a client’s mind during a moment of weakness. That client might be a Sanguine, looking for a different kind of sustenance. In this city, intimacy is the most dangerous game.
The Heretical Escapes: Beyond Flesh and Chrome
For some, the normal vices aren’t enough. The Static has gotten too loud, and they need a scream to drown it out. These are the forbidden pleasures, the ones that can cost you your soul.
- The Sanguine’s Kiss: This is the ultimate, dark transaction. A Sanguine can offer their “prey” a moment of transcendent bliss, a taste of the raw, predatory power that courses through their veins. The price is a piece of your life force, a tithe of blood or bio-energy. It’s a high that no chemical can match, and it’s utterly addictive. It’s a dark, intimate dance on the edge of predator and prey.
- Echo-Jacking (The Mnemonic’s Vice): This is the ultimate voyeurism, and it’s highly illegal. A Mnemonic with the right tech and loose morals can get their hands on a raw, unfiltered Echo—the last, most intense moments of a person’s life. Jacking into it allows you to experience their death, their moment of terror, their final memory. It’s a vicarious, soul-shattering thrill for those who have exhausted every other form of stimulation and are desperate to feel anything at all.
[TRANSMISSION END]
