[FIXER’S COMMUNIQUE: THE PRICE OF FLESH]
SUBJECT: The Price of Flesh (An Introduction to Chrome)
The Corpos will sell you a beautiful lie. They’ll show you vids of smiling suits with seamless chrome, moving through the world like gods. They’ll tell you it’s transcendence, the next step in human evolution. Forget it. That’s the sales pitch. This is the truth.
Chrome is power, yes. It’s the fusion of flesh and machine, a necessary evil for anyone who wants to survive in a world poisoned by the Amber Blight. But it is not clean. It’s plumbing. It’s surgery with a wrench. It’s bolting a piece of industrial hardware onto soft meat and praying your body doesn’t reject the graft. Every piece of chrome is a bargain you make with your own humanity, and the house always wins.
Here’s how you make the deal.
Step 1: The Black Market Catalog
It starts on the Everwinter Dashboard. You’ll find the Chrome Catalog, a black-market menu of every upgrade, enhancement, and weaponized prosthetic this city has to offer. You’ll see the price in credits, the tier, and the requirements—the story chapters you need to have survived, the other pieces of junk you need to have already installed. This is where you window-shop for a new soul.
Step 2: The Down Payment
Once you’ve saved up enough Cal and click “Purchase,” the credits are gone. But you don’t have the chrome. Not really. What you have is a promise, a piece of hardware sitting in your inventory with a “Pending” status. It’s a useless, expensive paperweight. You don’t get the benefits until you’ve paid the real price.
Step 3: The Ripperdoc’s Chair
The real price is a visit to the Ripperdoc—the black-market surgeons who operate in the city’s shadows. You bring them the part you bought, they strap you into a chair that smells of antiseptic and rust, and they get to work. When you wake up, the chrome is installed, its status is “Active,” and the effects hit you like a shot of cheap stims.
This is the moment the bargain is sealed. The deal is permanent. And now the slow rot begins.
[TRANSMISSION END]