The sanctioned jobs are in another chapter. This is the other economy, the one that actually moves the city, and every line of it’s a role you can walk into tonight. Read it as a menu of who you could be, and notice that every trade on it needs a protector taking a cut and an enemy who wants the corner, because that’s where your scenes come from.
The corners. Somebody runs product on every block worth the name, and the product is the point of this whole city’s pharmacology. Two things sell hardest, and both are Everwinter’s own. Suppressants, the inverted drug, you’re not buying a high, you’re buying time as yourself, cut-rate Blight suppression for people who can’t afford the clinic and aren’t ready to change. The suppressant corner is the most sympathetic dealer in the city and the most reliable, because the customer isn’t chasing a good time, they’re running from the alternative, and they will always be back. And glow, the honest damnation, deliberate microdosed amber, sold to people who want the edge of the change, the clarity, the way the Static starts to sound like music, without the commitment of the full conversion. Glow is the only product in the Bastion the seller can’t pretend is harmless, and it’s the best trade on the street, and both of those things are true because it works. Beyond the two natives, everything else, mood-stims lifted from Alterscape, combat stims for the crews, the old chemical comforts that predate the snow.
The flesh. The oldest trade, run frankly here. In a city of cold chrome, real un-augmented warmth is a luxury good, and the market has a hierarchy it doesn’t pretend to hide, a fully organic partner commands a fortune from a Vaulted suit desperate to feel something human; a Synthetic sells the opposite, a cold mechanical perfection with none of the mess; a companion sells the hour and the illusion of being chosen. The booths are in every district and priced by it. And sitting quietly above the flesh trade is the refinement trade, cut Blight crystal, prepared and dosed for the Sanguine table, brokered like gemstones because that’s what it is, and brokering it is a profession, because the demand is real and the supply has standards. Where sex and the refined trade and memory-lifting all happen in the same rooms, intimacy becomes the most dangerous game in the city, and the most played. That streetwalker may be a Mnemonic with a hidden rig. That client may be a Sanguine shopping. That companion may remember more than a companion should.
The shards. The memory trade at its street level, fencing salvaged shards, running unlicensed warm ones, and at the bottom of it, echo-jacking, raw memory taken neat, the snuff tier of a trade that’s mostly respectable at the top. A fence needs a runner to supply and a Counter to move quiet questions through. That’s three player roles in one sentence.
The leverage trades. Debt, held and collected. Protection, sold and enforced. Fixing, the connective tissue of the whole underworld, a fixer who knows who needs what and takes a cut of the introduction. Smuggling through the gate, where the CA’s writ ends and the profit begins. And the fence, the collector, the broker, the fixer, none of these are NPCs in a working sim. They’re the most powerful people on their streets, and they’re player chairs, currently empty, waiting.
Everything on this menu is illegal, or close enough that the difference is a citation.
[MENU ENDS. THE CITY IS HIRING. IT ALWAYS IS.]