Neon Dream of Organic Toys Chap 3

Joy weakly groaned and winced, stumbling out of the dented black car as the emergency meds and painkillers she had taken herself began to wear off. Clouds of polluted dust and drops of fresh blood trailed the limping lemur as she slowly dragged herself into Buster’s HyperClinic, their ripperdoc of choice as Doug had mentioned in his panicked phone call to him.

The cloth she held tightly around her throat grew redder and redder, dripping frighteningly frequently as she passed two shirtless bulls filling their noses with glittery escapism powder. Despite being drugged out of their minds they were still aware enough to spare the wounded netrunner a passing glance.

The last remnants of Chloe’s shattered mind idly wondered why they weren’t dropping her off as well, considering that she was in much worse condition than Joy was. Her legs and multiple ribs were still ground into a powder from being hit by the same car she now rode in. Her fur was bloody and pasted with dirt and she was sure that her mouth was missing multiple teeth.

“Wake up.” Doug’s deep, rumbling voice tickled her sensitive ears as he applied yet another Bounce Back to Chloe’s neck, “Don’t you zero out on us now.”

The darkness at the edges of her vision rushed away as another shot of adrenaline began to flow through her blood. He wiggled the plastic mouthpiece of a MaxDoc inhaler between her numb, immobile lips and sprayed, filling Chloe’s lungs with yet another soothing concoction of painkillers and other medical magic. Thankfully the internal bleeding was temporarily stopped by her multiple previous injections but her body still screamed from the pain her mind couldn’t feel.

The fat pig squeezed back into the driver’s seat and drove off.

He glanced in the rear-view mirror at the broken fox girl who had run out of tears an hour ago. She stared out the window with glazed, empty eyes, the only thing her body was now capable of.

“Fuck.” Doug sighed and grumbled to himself as he turned onto the entrance ramp and onto the freeway, “Sly fucking fox, ain’t’cha? Leadin’ us on a grand goose chase. If it makes you feel better,” he patted the large holster on his hip, “my iron’s fitted with the Pax attachment. Non-Lethal. Your folks? Yeah, they’ll live. They’re gonna be hurtin’ for a few weeks but… they’ll live. Was supposed to be for you, but ol’ Theresa said otherwise.”

He awkwardly chuckled and lovingly slapped the steering wheel of the car.

A line of drool spilled out of Chloe’s gaping mouth as she continued to stare at the world they drove by, too tired to listen but too drugged up with adrenaline to fall asleep. The glittering skyscrapers seared the fresh morning sun directly into her eyes. The skies were a perfect, clear blue, only broken by the ultimate symbol of corporate arrogance in the form of holo-ads that floated high enough to annoy even God with products he didn’t need nor want.

Chloe’s nose twitched as a small draft of air whistled from a rusted hole in the doorframe and gently cooled her face. Despite the pollution farted out by the nearby factories and the acrid stink that occasionally wafted over from the nearby landfill, the air of Night City’s inner core was somehow still cleaner and less smelly than the air she had been breathing since she was born.

But the moment her family was mentioned her chest began to shake as her sniffle returned, eventually turning into a dry sob.

“God-fucking-dammit, not again! ‘ey, kid!” Doug annoyingly yelled, trying to stay on the road while looking backwards, “I’ll… Shit! I’ll roll’ round and give your folks some meds and eddies if you shut up!”

Chloe kept crying as the events of the last few hours finally caught up to her, but the final remnant of her consciousness acknowledged his deal. She had already fucked up majorly, the least she could do was to not make things worse. With the last shreds of her strength she bit down on her lower lip and forced her silence.

”Thank fuck.” Doug turned away as her crying was suppressed down to nothing but subtly quivering shoulders.

He took a deep breath and tiredly sighed after rubbing his weary face, “Merc’s honor.” he finally whispered, more to himself than to his prey, “I’ll visit them later. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel bad though. You’re just some random-ass kid, not fucking Militech. You give me a chance to nuke those bitches, I’d be pressing the red button without waiting a single fucking second… Well, I ain’t saying you didn’t deserve it, you’re the one who fucked up the Wilkins and smashed the car after all. A fucking Caliburn…! Worth more money than I’ve ever made and spent. Didn’t your momma ever teach you not to start shit with humans, especially the ultra-rich ones riding around in fancy cars? She didn’t deserve to see her daughter be treated like this.”

Chloe hiccupped, the only sound and movement she could still make in response to Doug’s ramblings to himself.

“Fuck!” he punched his steering wheel yet again. “It’s not like we didn’t fuck up bad too. That was some sloppy shit. Joy was just supposed to hit you with an Overheat and knock you the fuck out. I drive over, we stuff you in the back, boom. Job done, easy n’ simple. If you resisted I’d shoot you with a less-lethal. She didn’t realize you were full ‘ganic. Like nothin, not even a shard reader. Foreigner, if you didn’t notice. Talks real weird but she’s a helluva of a runner. Nice girl, but naive as fuck. She thought she could take on Night City with nothing but her chrome. This job too, she insisted she could pull off easily. I’m glad she got a good lesson before we took the serious jobs, though. I’ll make sure she carries some iron next time. You tore her neck up real good, you know that? Fast on your feet too. Real fast. Real fucking fast.” There was almost a hint of admiration in his voice, ”Could’ve used you on our last job. I’d offer you a position on our crew if we didn’t have to give you over to Mrs. Samant-”

Doug choked on his tongue. He jumped and cursed loudly, accidentally swerving into the neighboring car. Chloe’s ears twitched as she heard the screeching of metal and angry curses as the two vehicles traded the paint on their sides. The hog didn’t even bother looking up, only accelerating away from the minor accident as he began to rapidly tap the screen on the center console until a small jingle began to play. Somehow the risk of getting turned into a burning wreck on the side of the freeway was preferable to potentially aggravating whoever he was calling.

The phone rang for a full minute, during which the hog’s fingers switched between rapidly tapping and nervously strangling the faux leather steering wheel until the jingle ended and a very familiar voice filled the car.

“Oh, Mister Doug. You’re late.” The woman’s greeting started with a clearly sarcastically forced light and friendly tone only for it to wear out by the end, finishing off her first sentence with a light growl, clearly annoyed.

“Sorry ‘bout that Samantha!” Doug cheerfully responded until he realized his mistake and cleared his throat, continuing with a cleaner, more professional voice, “Oh uh, Ma’am.”

Chloe gurgled as she finally put two and two together and connected the woman’s voice with the memory of the drunk, angry goldie professionally drunk-hucking a beer bottle into her head.

“Mh, hm.” Samantha unamusingly hummed on the other side of the call, “I thought you said this job was going to take a day or two, max. Not an entire week.”

“Yeah, sorry about that, Mrs. Wilkins. Our target was a sly one.”

“Right, you totally didn’t spend the last week jerking off. Mh hm, of course you didn’t.”

“Hey! Com’on now, Mrs. Sammy!” Doug chuckled out a nervous attempt to lighten the mood, “You know we don’t fuck around on the job!”

“Yeah. Sure. Totally. So how is she?”

Doug glanced at Chloe through the mirror again, “Alive.”

He shrunk down as the almost painful grinding of Samantha’s teeth made the car rumble, “She fucking better be, Doug. Mister paid for Alive. If she’s dead you’re not even getting half.”

“She’s alive, Mrs. Wilkins. Barely, but alive.”

She paused.

“First off, I wanted to beat the shit out of her myself. Second, what the fuck do you mean by barely?! All you had to do was nab her off the streets. I don’t care if she got roughed up but was she that hard to catch?”

“Well, she’s pretty quick on her paws so me and Joy had to chase her down.”

“Duh.” Despite their distance, the two inside the car could hear her rolling her eyes from the sheer amount of sarcasm she had laced her single word response with. “...And you shot her?”

“Well no, I uh,” Doug guiltily scratched his chin and sucked in air through clenched teeth, “Ah… I might’ve got caught up in the heat of the chase and uh… ran her ass over with the car.”

Samantha gasped, what sounded like a cup of coffee rolled out of her hand and onto her desk, shattering on the floor. The labrador choked, coughing and hacking and desperately swallowing, probably due to the same coffee going down the wrong way.

And then she began to laugh. She howled until her throat was dry and raspy, uncontrollably as if she was a crossbreed between a husky and a hyena who had heard the best joke of her life. The pig glanced worryingly at his phone as the sound of the dog repeatedly slamming her fist into her heavy hardwood desk continued to thunder out of the speakers and caused all the other drivers to give them a weird look. Even Chloe narrowed her eyes with slight fear as the laughter continued without weakening for a whole five minutes.

“Bahahaha! Holy shit! Ho- Hold on, my bra just got messed up, gimme a sec.”

Doug scrunched his eyebrows together as he heard his client sliding off her jacket and top while continuing to wheeze for air, “That’s nova as fuck, Doug! You got the vid?”

“Y-Yes, ma’am. Dashcam was rolling.”

Yet more howling laughter.

“Don’t you… Whoo! Don’t tell your fixer about this but-” Samantha coughed, still giddy, “-stop by my office for an extra bonus, I owe you that much!”

“You’re joking…”

“I’m not! I’m not, Doug! You gotta give me the vid though, I haven’t laughed like that in a long time!”

Samantha held her breath for a moment to force her giggles to cool.

“Al…Alright, Megabuilding H9 as usual. I’ll have Charlie waiting with a stretcher at loading dock A4. Park wherever you want and come up to my office.”

“Gottit. I’ll be there in a few, Ma’am.”

“Nova.”

The call ended with a beep. As the adrenaline wore off the exhaustion of the chase finally caught up to Chloe. With Samantha’s shrieking laughter replaced by the soft sound of late morning traffic and the gentle rocking of the car’s worn out suspension, the little fox girl finally closed her eyes and slept for the remainder of the journey.

“And whatta we got here?”

Chloe stirred, not even having the energy to break the dried gunk that glued her eyelids shut to see who was now poking and feeling up her helplessly naked body. The voice was a woman’s but it was not Samantha’s. It was light and playfully casual, speaking normal words in normal speech. But strangely her hands were featureless, with no claws, pads, or fur as anthros would have.

She felt a prick on her neck as she was administered yet another injection. She had lost count how many meds they had used by this point to keep her alive. Was she this valuable to them?

The woman slid her arms under her limp body and gently heaved, easing the battered girl out of the car and onto a bare metal stretcher. Chloe felt the splintered remnants of her lower skeleton grinding against each other as she was laid down. Had it been any other day she would have screamed. But not today, not with at least a dozen shots of painkillers and blood thickeners flowing through her blood. A soft whoosh of air flowed over her naked body as someone closed the door of Doug’s car. The sliding glass doors opened smoothly with a faint hiss and the rattling vibrations turned to a sterile glide as the stretcher’s wheels rolled off of the loading dock’s rough concrete and onto smooth, featureless linoleum tiles.

She felt the warmth of a lamp being shone into her face and sank back into the darkness of a dreamless sleep.

Chloe woke after what felt like mere seconds to the faint sounds of whirring and buzzing. Distant laughter made her jump for a moment, thinking it was her mother and Zara talking about their day. But it wasn’t. The younger woman was screaming to this year’s latest manufactured hit song. The older woman was absentmindedly babbling to her friend about men as they usually did.

The sheer sterility of the air stung her nostrils as she inhaled a lungful of the cleanest air she had ever sucked in. Above her head were the piercing pure white lights that could be found in any medical room, though thankfully they had been dimmed to a much more bearable gentle glow. The bed she laid on was eerily clean but the mattress, while mildly uncomfortable even by Night City standards, was the softest thing she had ever slept on with the exception of her mother’s chest when she was younger and smaller. Teal curtains surrounded her bed while her naked form was covered in a disposable cloth gown.

The seemingly permanent street grit in the fuzz between her toes was gone. She slid her legs across the bedsheet, trying to process just how unimaginably smooth everything felt. Her mouth and throat were more than clean. A life of breathing in pollution made for constant black phlegm, enough so that they would occasionally be woken up by clogged throats at night, and their makeshift toothbrushes were hardly effective in combating oral filth. The only word she could describe her mouth was empty, more empty than it had ever been in her whole life.

Her first bath and her first piece of new clothing.

Chloe screamed or at least tried to gurgle out in surprise as she finally came to. Everything burned for the first few moments. She felt the ghostly blade of a phantom knife slowly slicing through the flesh of her thighs, the heat of her pain perpetually rising yet never actually moving. Pins and needles pricked her lips, and the back of her throat was dry and leathery. The ache of a lifetime pulled at her jaw and the slightest of movements caused by her shivering made her feel as if one of the ribs was repeatedly stabbing her stomach.

“G’mornin, sunshine!”

The woman who had extracted her from Doug’s car was back. Chloe peeked her eyelids open, realizing that they too had been cleaned while she slept, making them easy to move again. The fox gurgled once again in surprise as she realized that she was being stared at through soft brown eyes by the ripperdoc at an uncomfortably close distance.

The pain disappeared as soon as it had come and the blurry shadow in her vision was replaced by a human. A woman.

Equally as rare as male humans but certainly less common to see in popular media and advertisements, appearing only rarely to advertise something the middle-class male anthros could afford to buy. Her skin was a gentle tan, unlike any other human Chloe had seen before. Her eyes were somehow wider yet slenderer at the same time, similar to the Japanese humans and anthros. She had propped up her elbows on the edge of her bed, chin in her hands to support her round, homey face as she stared at her patient. Her chocolate brown lips were puffed up in a sly, cheeky cat-like grin as if she was a schoolgirl keeping an extra spicy secret from her friends.

Chloe gasped and gurgled again.

“Easy, tiger!” the woman said, almost singing her words as she reached over and patted Chloe’s upper chest to force her back down, “I spent waaaay too much time to have you die on me! So how are you feeling? Any pain in those legs?”

The fox girl mumbled out her answer past her numb lips, unintelligible even to herself.

“Hmm… Okay. Okay.” the woman mumbled as she quickly ran her hands over Chloe’s body, “Well, you’re going to be fine. Not great, but I didn’t get the okay to completely fix you up.”

Chloe gurgled out a question.

The human stood up and twirled, letting her white lab coat and skirt gracefully flutter in the air, “You’re in my very own ripper clinic! Welcome to the Organic Toybox, by the way! Where digital dreams come to life and-!” she rolled her eyes and dropped her outstretched arms, “...Fuck that, I’m not doing that advertisement again.”

With her doctor now standing up Chloe turned her head and took a good look at her savior. She was quite the petite woman, surprisingly barely taller or bustier than Chloe herself despite being clearly at least a decade her senior. Maybe even a decade and a half. Her face was covered with the telltale silver lines of hidden cybernetics that probably also ran all over her body but were covered by her long white coat that reached all the way down to her ankles, roughly secured to her thin waist by a tight belt. Her exposed arms were a chitinous black, glossy and segmented like an insect’s from the countless panels and covers that hid many tools in her fingertips and wrists. Behind her Chloe noticed an entire wall of cybernetic arms, each with a different set of tools for whatever job needed doing from what she could tell.

The vixen gasped and weakly hummed another question, wondering if this human had gotten lucky or if she was just really good at interpreting incoherent mumbling.

“Yeah, I fixed you up. Not as much as I wanted to, but Sammy’s a bitch. She ordered me to do the minimum to keep you alive but nothing more. Fucking mongrel thinks she’s hot shit because she gets the big boss dick every night. Not anymore though, hah!” she sat back down on her wheeled stool and rolled around to her desk, picking up a tablet and holding it up to Chloe.

Her drowsy mind could only barely realize the severity of her injuries from the small X-Ray image and how it showed her just how destroyed her body had become in a few short hours.

“See? Pretty much your entire lower half was crushed! I had to stitch up your intestines and bladder and fill everything under your belly button with skeletal repair compound so you should still be able to manage a limp. But you’re probably not gonna be running around anymore. If Sammy signs off on it I’d be down to fit you with some ‘ganic replacement chrome so you can at least walk normally. She won’t though, she’s a cheapass bitch and she hates you. Fuck 'er. But I did give you a shot of some purge nanites I had laying around. Lemme tell you, I’ve seen some filthy strays in the past but you get the big Number One trophy with the amount of worms, toxins, and heavy metals that came out of ya! It’s on the house but it was more for everyone else’s benefit that an untreated, diseased mutt wasn’t walking around, no offense.”

The tablet flew across the room and landed back on the desk with a loud clatter.

“Oh yeah. Name’s Charlie, by the way. It’s funny cuz, ya’ know, I’m a fucking dink?”

She leaned back in her chair and laughed.

“Cuz, Charlie’s what they used to call- Oh forget it, you kids wouldn’t know anything about that. Actually it’s not even Charlie but no one in this damn town can pronounce my real name.” She raised her hands and mockingly waved them in the air, “Oooh everyone’s got no problem with that Jap shit but what the fuck is your name? What do you go by instead of that nying-nyong brown asian bullshit?!”

Charlie rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue, “Myegh. So I chose Charlie because I thought it was fucking hilarious. How ‘bout you?”

She mumbled her name, slowly pushing herself up into a sitting position to better look around her surroundings.

“Chloe, gottit. Nice to meetcha! No really,” Charlie leaned in, pressing her warm cheek right up against Chloe’s with an even wider toothy grin, “you’re the one who smashed up the Boss and Sammy, weren’t you?”

The teen nodded, or at least tried to. Why was this lady smiling when she had almost killed her supposedly beloved boss?

“Hehehe. Nice.” Charlie backed off, “Well, only kinda nice. The Boss- Ooh! His name’s Richard, by the way! Mr. Richard Donavan Wilkings the Third if you want to shove your tongue up his ass. I call him Richie cuz we go all the way back, same high school, used to go out together. Everyone else calls him Boss or Sir. Or Daddy, if you’re one of the toys. We like him, he’s cool. His dog, not so much. Whatta bitch. Samantha’s a real fucking cunt about everyone giving her the same respect even though she totally doesn’t deserve it. Take my advice and stay the fuck away from her. Not that you have a choice…”

Charlie rolled her stool away and began returning some medicines that were on the counter back into their cabinets.

“Anyways, he’s one hell of a workaholic and hasn’t taken a vacation in years. You smashed him up real bad but when you got the Platinum Plus Plan and all the options checked off from Trauma no one’s gotta worry about anything. They got him patched up in their fancy, private med center without lil’ ol’ me no problemo. And you managed to piss off the Boss enough that he finally pulled out the stick from Sammy’s asshole. Or maybe he stuck an even bigger one up in there.” she laughed as she filled a cup of water from the little sink in the wall and handed it to Chloe.

“Samantha Madeline Wilkings, apparently she’s the daughter of a high-ranker at PetroChem or something. Labrador but not friendly at all. I heard she got one hell of a talking to about trying to service him all by herself instead of letting other people help. No fucking way the boss is gonna let her drive anymore either. She’s been quiet for the last two weeks. Real fucking quiet. Like I haven’t heard her screaming about shit for whole days. Fuck, the last time I saw her she was walking around slow with her tail between her legs. The other girls are probably gonna hate you since you hurt the boss but you made Sam shut the fuck up so… who the fuck knows what kind of rep you’ve got here.”

Chloe gripped the cup as tightly as she could, knowing that she would definitely manage to drop it in her current state. She put the plastic cup to her lips and let the ice cold, perfectly pure liquid flow into her empty stomach as Charlie continued to ramble on.

She mumbled a quick word of gratitude.

“Yeah yeah, you’re welcome, girl.” Charlie began patting her back, coaxing out a little burp. “Hah, I knew there was something in there. Good to get those out before you go upstairs.”

“Up… stairs?” Chloe rasped, her voice somewhat restored by the water.

“Yeap.” the ripperdoc sighed before reaching under the bed and pulling out a folding wheelchair, “Richie wants to talk to ya about the whole thing. I can’t promise you’ll walk out of there, if you could walk. I’ve seen Samantha shoot people for much less but I don’t know if she still has that authority.”

The dread that formed in her stomach almost made her puke up the water she had just drank. It was exactly like her mother had said, never mess with the humans, especially not one in a suit. And now she was to meet the one she had wronged face to face.

“Please… Please don’t…” Chloe slowly reached out in desperation as she tried to find the right words to say, finally realizing the gravity of her situation. She slowly grabbed onto the doctor’s sleeve like she had done with the leg of Doug’s pants, begging for any kind of salvation despite knowing full well she absolutely deserved to be dragged upstairs and suffer whatever horrors they had in store for her. She had wronged the human and his dog, she had involved her family. She knew she had to pay, even though she didn’t want to.

“Sorry, girl. For what it’s worth I am actually sorry.” Charlie softly shrugged, accidentally shaking off the vixen’s weak grip but catching Chloe by her armpits before she could tumble off her bed, “But them’s the breaks when you fuck with the big guys. And I can’t lose my job to save you. Overall, you’re basically the most hated person in this building right now. They might hate Sam but they love the Boss more. Sure, Trauma’s treatment means he won’t even have scars when he comes home but...”

The young vixen continued to plead until the guilty, broken look on her face finally made it through.

“Alright! Alright! Look,” Charlie sighed, kicking the wheelchair away before sitting back down, defeated, “I can’t stop the meeting but I can at least pretend that you’re still knocked the fuck out. You think you can keep down dinner?”

Chloe sniffled and nodded. Anything to delay her fate.

“Aye. Ey Naomi!”

A few seconds later a brilliantly blue bird anthro pulled open one of the curtains and seductively slid inside, replacing the now open teal plastic dividers with a brilliant plume that formed a portable and permanently attached backdrop. Her feathers were sharp and shiny, shimmering beautifully iridescent despite being illuminated by nothing more than the drab fluorescent lights of the clinic.

Her eyes were soft, hiding a quiet soul behind her flashy, sexually charged exterior. And yet the moment they glanced towards Chloe all she wanted to do was shrink down and disappear from the sheer judgment that they radiated.

She wore nothing but a hot pink g-string that dug into the soft flesh around her curvy hips. Chloe tried to hide her rapidly blushing cheeks as Naomi strutted out and stopped, her natural stance seemingly posing for an invisible photographer.

“Yes, Ma’am?”

His soft, androgynous voice threw off the vixen, who only stared at the flamboyant not-female bird in confusion. She took another look and realized that the small patch of cloth that was his underwear was hiding a suspiciously large bulge between his legs, confirming his gender.

“You’re going for dinner in a bit, right?”

“Yes, ma’am. I was thinking about Mr. Yang’s stand. Mapo Tofu. We haven’t had that in a while.”

Charlie ooh’ed and softly clapped in approval, “Yeah, that’s sounding real nice.”

“Extra spicy, concentrated chili oil for you?”

“Yeah, make sure he knows it’s me. Legit Asian spicy, not that white people “spicy”. Oh and toss in another small size bowl but tell him zero fucking horsepower in this one.”

Naomi glanced at Chloe, who immediately ducked her eyes to avoid his brief, yet intense stare that seemed to bore straight through her soul and sins.

“Very good, madam. Will that be all?”

“Actually I’ll take two Nicola Blues. Ya want anything to drink, Chloe?”

The vixen shrunk down under Naomi’s soft, yet somehow intensely judging gaze.

“A-Anything’s fine.” she finally murmured.

Charlie turned to her sexy birdtoy, “Two more Nicolas, then. I’ll let you choose the flavors. Oh! And can you get four Pierre’s Croissants and an Orgiatic Omniflave for later?”

“Of course, ma’am.” Naomi bowed.

“Thanks babe!” Charlie reached out, giving his round bottom a firm, commanding smack as he turned and left. What seemed to be the entire floor began giggling as they heard his high-pitched yelp of both surprise and arousal. Chloe watched as his whole rear seemed to continue wiggling from Charlie’s spank until the curtains were closed again.

“That’s Naomi. My little bitch-boi that I like to use to try out all the latest sexy chrome. I’d take some of the other boys to bed, but this club focuses on Chara-Clones than joytoys or dolls and I like my boys shiny. He’s also a test bed for a little something I’ve been working on.” Charlie giggled, licking her lips as she grabbed her tablet and showed Chloe an online order page, “You know what a cyberpsycho is, right?”

Chloe nodded slowly, looking at the catalog in confusion and embarrassment. There were the usual Mr. Studd and Midnight Lady sexual enhancement implants for human men and anthro women respectively, no different than the ones advertised out in the middle of the street. Below, there were many additions and other smaller toys and augments to improve one’s sex life. But then she swiped to another page and some different modifications showed up.

She didn’t know what exactly she was looking at, all she could process was that it was horrific, lewd, and above all else, most likely highly illegal.

“Well he’s a little something I’ve been working on, most cyberpsychos just start shooting up the local NCPD station and get put down like a rabid dog. But you could say my little Naomi’s… special. He was born a raven, black as the night and as nerdy as any night owl shut-in if you could believe that from the fucking fabulous feathers he’s got now. He has an incredible potential to handle cybernetics. Most gonks who can handle multiple major addons usually load themselves up with combat chrome and become mercs but my dude Naomi wanted none of that shit. Which is why I’ve loaded his ass up with at least three dozen sex augments. For both genders, too.”

Chloe nodded slowly with a quickly growing blush on her face, despite the fact that she didn’t really follow.

“That’s right! He’s my little ultraslut with an on-off switch for his cyberpsychosis. Except instead of killing people, he fucks them like crazy. And gets fucked. Basically anyone around him better be ready for a good time ‘cuz Mr. Studd ain’t got shit on my prototype!” Charlie guiltily sank in her chair and stuck out her tongue, “‘Course there was that one time early in the project he got triggered in the middle of the street and I couldn’t control him. Ended up satisfying about fifty guys and gals and got creamed by at least a dozen before the pigs showed up and joined in. God! The MaxTac guys were laughing so hard. Can- Oh, fuck I forgot about this! Can you believe that one of the guys he sucked off was a rich corpo faggot who paid for the bribe to get him cleared up if he could spend a month fucking him privately?”

The ripperdoc laughed out loud as she reminisced.

“Don’t mention any of this shit to him by the way, he hates the fact that pics of him swallowing dicks in broad daylight are still circulating.”

Chloe only continued to smile and nod weakly, wondering when this woman was going to stop talking while she went on and on about her life.

In many ways she was intensely jealous. Never did Charlie mention going to sleep hungry, finding water that didn’t smell like sewage, or having to cut up a trash bag so that she could have something to wear. Food and drink were bought without any sort of worry to their price during breaks and at the night Charlie went home to her very own apartment on the upper levels of the megabuilding, after which she would enjoy a movie or sometimes destroy her walking, talking, feathered dildo through many hours of rough sex.

Charlie continued to talk on and on as she multitasked, snapping out the legs on a small metal bed tray and placing it straddled across Chloe’s legs. She tossed a small pack of alcohol wipes towards her and pulled a larger folding table from behind a desk, jabbering on and on about things the fox didn’t even have the context to understand.

But the luxuries of a stable life weren’t even the peak. As a member of the extremely exclusive human club, Charlie casually referenced certain societal treatments that not even Chloe could believe.

Possibly the most unimaginable was the fact that she could walk through the absolute worst areas of Night City without bothering to care about her safety. Such was the respect that her very presence commanded that an entire gang war had screeched to a halt the moment she had casually walked through their line of fire without a care in the world. An anthro, even a child, would have been shot dead either unintentionally or not.

And Charlie didn’t even realize it.

Chloe’s eyes and head began sliding downwards as the doctor’s endless words turned into white noise, lulling the tired fox back into her sleep, only to jump as she saw the flash of her reflection in the shiny metal surface.

She slowly reached up and touched the soft nub that used to be her left ear, running a finger across the patch of bare skin on her head where her fur had been shaved off and her wound stitched. She stuck out her tongue in order to do the same to her upper lip which had also been torn open, only to instead feel that two of her canine teeth were now gone.

Charlie kept talking despite the mess of a teenage girl before her. Most likely she had and will see much worse.

Not that it made Chloe feel any better to take a good look at her destroyed image.

Naomi had finally returned ten whole minutes later. To Chloe’s relief, Charlie stopped her rambling long enough to open the curtains for him. He strutted magnificently with multiple plastic bags under his arms.

“Madam!”

“Sweeeeeeeet. Lezeeeat!” Charlie grinned wide and rubbed her hands together as her birdtoy dropped their dinner on the table.

Chloe’s stomach audibly gurgled as the heavenly scent escaping from the steaming bag reached her nose. Even the scent itself was delicious, heavier and more flavorful than anything else she had eaten. The smell of ground synthmeat and sim-spices filled the air as Naomi slowly opened the bag and extracted from it three plastic bowls and spoons.

Naomi slowly placed the heavy bowl, a wrapped plastic spoon, and a can of soda with a stylized bird mascot onto the fox’s bed table. For a full minute she could only stare at her meal, not knowing what or even how to start eating until the bird looked over and sighed in annoyance after setting the table for him and his mistress.

Her eyes went wide as he popped the lid off and pulled out her spoon from its plastic wrapping. Naomi held it up for a few seconds before rolling his eyes, taking her hand and wiggling the utensil in between her fingers. Knowing she would probably have trouble with her soda as well, the avian deftly popped the metal can open with a single hand and pushed it towards her.

The open can of soda fizzled quietly as it began to form and drip condensation onto her tray. Chloe said nothing, only continuing to stare in disbelief at the sheer intensity and weight of the first real meal which was almost certainly too much for her malnourished body to handle.

Naomi paused and raised an eyebrow before letting the ends of his mouth curl downwards with the faintest scowl of disdain at the lack of even a single word of gratitude.

He turned away and joined his mistress in eating his own portion silently, not bothering to start any trouble with a little fox girl who would be dead in a few hours anyways.