FIXER’S COMMUNIQUE: THE RIPPERDOC’S CATALOG] SUBJECT: The Ripperdoc’s Catalog (A Guide to the 9 Augment Categories)
Every ripperdoc in this city has a catalog. It’s a menu of the different ways you can trade your meat for metal. Don’t think of it as a list of upgrades. Think of it as a list of promises, each with a price tag written in blood and Cal. Choose your poison.
1. NEURAL CHROME
- The Racket: This is the chrome for ghosts, Mnemonics, and wannabe Nulls — anyone who’d rather live in the static than in their own skin. It promises a sharper mind, faster hacking, and a firewall against the Blight’s psychic whispers.
- The Cost: You start to detach. The real world feels slow and muddy compared to the clean logic of the Interlink. It’s a high that makes you a god in the machine and a ghost in the real world.
2. REFLEX CHROME
- The Racket: For the Nekos and Runners who live on the edge. This chrome turns your nervous system into a humming wire, promising blinding speed and the ability to dodge a bullet before the trigger’s even pulled. It’s the high of a Sandevistan kicking in, turning a firefight into a slow-motion ballet.
- The Cost: The world outside of combat feels agonizingly slow. You’re jumpy, twitchy, and always on edge. You’re not living; you’re just waiting for the next jolt.
3. DERMAL CHROME
- The Racket: The choice for brutes, Outlanders, and anyone who solves problems by walking through them. This stuff turns your skin into armor, shrugging off bullets and Blight with equal contempt. The real prize is Amber Integration, the heretical tech that turns the Blight’s corruption into a shield.
- The Cost: You stop feeling things. The warmth of a heater, the sting of the rain — it all gets duller. You become a walking slab, a piece of living architecture, and you forget what it was like to have skin instead of a shell.
4. OPTIC CHROME
- The Racket: For snipers, scouts, and the terminally paranoid. This chrome peels back the curtain, letting you see thermal signatures, calculate bullet trajectories, and even detect the Blight in others. It promises you’ll see the knife before it hits your back.
- The Cost: You see too much. Your vision is a constant, flickering scroll of useless diagnostic data. You see threats in every shadow until the paranoia is no longer a side effect; it’s your entire personality.
5. COMBAT CHROME
- The Racket: The most honest chrome on the menu. No subtlety. It turns your limbs into weapons. Gorilla Arms to pulp a man’s skull, Mantis Blades to turn a crowd into confetti. It doesn’t promise to make you smarter or faster — just deadlier.
- The Cost: You become what you install. You’re a weapon, and a weapon only has one purpose. Every problem starts to look like something you can punch, stab, or shoot your way out of.
6. CARDIO CHROME
- The Racket: For the survivors who expect to get shot. This chrome is a quiet, tireless engine in your chest, filtering toxins, cleansing the Blight from your blood, and stitching your flesh back together. The legendary Phoenix Protocol promises to even drag your sorry ass back from the dead.
- The Cost: You become reckless. The fear of death starts to fade, and you take risks that get your crew killed. It’s a safety net with a hidden price tag, paid by the people around you.
7. SOCIAL CHROME
- The Racket: The most insidious chrome of all. For the liars, the cult leaders, and the Fixers. It doesn’t make you stronger; it makes you a better manipulator, tweaking pheromones and reading micro-expressions to turn every conversation your way. It promises that no one will ever be able to lie to you again.
- The Cost: You forget how to be real. Every interaction becomes a calculation. You lose the ability to genuinely trust anyone because you can see the machinery of their emotions. You become a perfect, charismatic, and utterly empty shell.
8. ECONOMIC CHROME
- The Racket: The smartest choice on the menu, and the most boring. This is for the merchants and pragmatists who know the only real god in this city is the Cal. It skims transactions, optimizes costs, and generates a passive income from the city’s data flow. It promises wealth.
- The Cost: You become part of the machine. Your life becomes a ledger of profits and losses. You see people not as allies or enemies, but as assets or liabilities. It’s the cleanest way to lose your soul.
9. TEMPORAL CHROME
- The Racket: The heretic’s choice. The weird stuff. This isn’t just tech; it’s a flirtation with the glitch in reality itself. It gives you flashes of precognition, lets you reroll a bad choice, and bends your perception of time. This is the chrome for the Ascended and the true glitch-hunters.
- The Cost: Your sanity. You start seeing echoes of what was and what might be, until the present becomes a confusing, fluid thing. You’re not just living in the world; you’re unstuck from it.
[TRANSMISSION END]
