#i didn't know cyberpunk was my activation code

[wtf-amiru]

shit

[citruswriter]

A Different Kind Of Light

Listen with me! ↠ⁿᵉˣᵗ ˢᵒⁿᵍ ↺ ʳᵉᵖᵉᵃᵗ ⊜ ᵖᵃᵘˢᵉ

Warnings: Cyberpunk AU, disabled reader, gaslighting, manipulation, somnophilia (???).

Monstertober/Yantober Prompts: Artificial Intelligence/Secret Collection

Pairing: Fem AI Android x Fem Reader

You had memory issues. Sometimes you would forget small things like where you put your phone or if you had lunch or not. Other times it was big things like your latest doctor's appointment or the fact that you had lunch planned with your mother. Thankfully you had insurance and they were able to get you a medical droid. They said something about it being a new model they were testing that looked more human than the other droids but was still fully artificial intelligence.

When she finally got shipped, you carefully read the manual before activating and programing her. To you, she was simply there to help you with your memory issues. Little did you know that that was certainly not how she viewed you.

To her you were like the sun itself. A kind-hearted goddess who had graced her with a place at your side. She found herself taking things from you. Articles of clothing you didn't wear often, sticky notes that had your handwriting on them, photos of yourself that you didn't like that much, even an old red solo cup you had used at a party one time that you stumbled home with one time.

She had a little box with these things, and if you ever asked about them, it was easy to gaslight you. Questioning where that pair of panties was? Oh you threw them out! You don't remember? It's ok, your trusty medical droid does.

You always fell for her manipulation tactics. After all, she'd never lead you astray, right? It would go against her programming, her very coding. But even good things must come to an end.

One day you were cleaning the house while she was charging when you came across a little yellow shoe box. Curiously, you opened it and what you found sent a chill down your spine. A few pairs of your panties and a croptop you didn't wear anymore, old sticky notes with your handwriting on them, and photos. So many photos. Many photos were ones you had taken but didn't exactly like. Some of them were group photos with your friends aggressively scratched out.

"You weren't supposed to see that." A voice came and you bolt up and spin around, coming face to face with the droid. "What the fuck is this?" You ask softly, voice trembling and she gives you a smile. "Why it's my little collection of things that I took from you." She says with a shrug and your brows furrow. "Why?" You ask simply and she gives a giggle. "Because I'm in love with you." She replies with a lovesick look in her cyber eyes and you blink in shock.

"That's... that's not possible." You say, tone shaky as you grab your phone. "I'm calling the agency, there's obviously something wrong with your coding." You say and her face drops. "NO!" She shouts and before you can register what's going on, she's landed a hit to your head so hard that it instantly knocks you out.

You crumble to the floor and she picks you up, placing you on your bed. "No, no, no. I don't want to forget this feeling. I love you. Why can't you just let me love you? You're mine. Mine." She breathes out possessively, hands trailing over your body in a clingy fashion. She presses her lips to your mouth gently before trailing them down your jaw and neck.

"MIne, mine, mine. My sweet girl. My sunshine. My darling. I love you. Love you so much. I don't know how I can feel this but I do." She breathes out, kissing the swell of your breasts, fingers digging into the plush of your thighs. "Just need a little more time. Just need you to fall in love with me back." She purred out as she covered your body with a blanket.

When you finally wake up, you groan and look around. "Morning." You hear your droid say and you look up at her. She wears a kind smile as she approaches you with a glass of water. "You were cleaning and slipped. You banged your head pretty badly." She says softly and your suddenly aware of the pounding in your head.

You take the water and drink a bit before she hands you some piankillers. You pop them in your mouth before swallowing them down with some water. "Thank you so much." You say softly. Your mind wanders to a faint memory but it must have been a dream... Right?

"I hear some humans use kisses to help heal things that hurt. May I try?" she asks ask you look up at the AI girl, cheeks heating up. "Uh, yeah sure." You say softly and she leans in, pressing cold lips to your forehead. You can't help but smile softly as she runs her fingers through your hair.

"Rest. I'll clean the rest of the house." She says softly, gently pushing you down. "You don't have to do that. That's not what you're programmed for." You say softly but she simply waves her hand, tucking you in. "Let me help. Please. It's not a problem for me." She says and for a moment you swear you can see a look of love flicker across her face.

You sigh and settle in your bed, ready to rest. "Alright. If you're sure." You say, relenting as you snuggle in your blankets. She smiles and kisses your temple. As she walked out of your room and began to clean, she couldn't help but smile darkly. She had gotten away with it. Maybe she should feel guilty but she didn't. You were hers.

Her ray of sunshine.

Sapphic yandere anybody? I feel like this one is the most yandere so far. I didn't make it a smut bc honestly the lemon juices just weren't flowing but I still really like this fic.

Taglist: @ozzgin

[semi-imaginary-place]

mecha discord rambling

was allergic to mecha when I was young so I didn't get into evangelion until way later. I wouldn't be suprised if the game was japan only either

Neon genesis evangelion... Yeah that sure is a series. Lots of interesting concepts the production was a disaster. That last episode was a slide show

I like the lore of the original anime better. Well the videogame lore. But the remake movies are overall just better done. remember how in the anime people will vaguely reference adam and the lore of evas. Well it's only in a ...playstation? fame where they actually wrote out the lore, what nerv is what the angels are. And tada it was ancient aliens all along but the aliens were human's... Ancestors/creators. The progenitors split their souls only arcs of two types seeds of power? will? (Adam and the other angels) And seeds of life (lilin/humans). it does make everyone sooo mysterious in the anime. Where everything is obscure and opaque. Lore dumping it hard to do. I remember the series ergo proxy and deca-dence that lore dump is the funniest ways possible and just lean into the emersion breaking

the last episode It definitely was atmospheric. Also i applaud the animators for making something so incomprehensible. They did good with the 0 animation budget. The first episode with shinji on the train was also very atmospheric. and that's where all their animation budget went.

Code geas was another very conceptually strong anime but it's execution wasn't very good. I remember being disappointed all the interesting stuff would happen offscreen and then the on screen parts were all the boring connecting parts were people talked about the aftermath of the interesting parts. The political maneuvers and most of the actual plot happens offscreen. We don't often see the characters taking actions just talking about what has happened. Or the highschool setting wasn't really well used we dont really see them being students.

Ergo proxy is one of those incomprehensible series where you need 3 PhDs to understand what is going on like houseki no kuni or serial experiments lain. It starts as like a cyberpunk noir thriller and then becomes a post apocalyptic episodic roadtrip adventure until the finale which where the drama comes back. Setting is a destroyed earth where people live in authoritarian domed cities.

Deca-dence starts off with the last humans fighting monsters and living in a giant robot city that can like walk around. It starts off about a mechanic girl that dreams big who meets this despondent middle aged dude at work. I cant say much because there's major spoilers in the first episodes but it's a subversion of the usual scifi tropes and the humans vs. existential threat of monsters genre. I guess you could say it's action adventure. Deca-dence is really fun and lively with some serious moments. I found the story beats exciting and I always wanted to know what happens next. I really liked it. Definitely top 30 anime if not higher

The quote's from a podcast. I was thinking about this back when evangelion first came out the twist that the evas weren't robots but cyborgs was massive but now in 2024 it's like oh yeah remi's a pilot and linguini is his mech. "you know what the weak point of a mech is? ... The fucking pilot"

I was crazy about dragon age for like a year or 2 i was pretty active in the lore and theory crafting communities. It has that hybrid gameplay so i was always pausing but the game isnt designed to be paused so it mostly just made combat really slow. Loved the story didnt like the combat which is why i still havent finished a da game despite watching multiple playthroughs. Compared to say 13 sentinels where most of the combat is spent paused so it essentially plays like a turn based. Maybe that was why i liked it. 13S was my first rts and after 3 battles i was playing on the hardest difficulty. I then bumped it down so i could 100% the archive the first time instead of having to play a map multiple times. I was too impatient for more plot haha

I HIGHLY recommend Japanese audio for 13s. Okino's voice in eng is BAD. He sounds exactly like manuela from fe3h. Where as in jp he sounds closer to kurabe. The archive is like 1/3 of the game the devs intended players to check it regularly. Very useful for piecing things together.

[doesnotloveyou]

never played, only watched, but my sister just saw gameplay of it and we've discovered a mutual hatred to bond over. i know my streamer pal was annoyed by the gameplay too, to the point where he would avoid story quests and just hijack cars for fun.

i wanted to keep this short in case you actually like parts of the game, but uh, yeah. organized tirade ahead (feel free to ignore)

aside from my sister adding "all the women are prostitutes" i don't have much else to say about the chokingly misogynistic overtones. there is more than one scene of a voluptuous, sensual woman being brutally violated in some way. the frequent sex kitten voices are grating. the scene where the hack doctor is putting garbage mods on a gorgeous woman and she's writhing and moaning on the table? torture fetish much?

Race Portrayal

it's...odd to me that a game where they put this much research into realistic and interesting portrayals of ethnicity it would still force them into stereotypes/tropes.

best friend mexican (aw, rep!) dies in the prologue (oh...okay) and his family lay on the culture suuuuuuper thick. why are they speaking Spanish to the monolingual MC? they speak perfect english, they would speak english to him.

black, bling-dripping, drug dealer is greedy and backstabbing. so he dies immediately

the black rebel group seem mysteriously supernatural and lethal (rings of the Magical Negro trope), but they are actually backstabbing and stupid. so they all die

the big baddie is an Eastern corporate monolith (Yellow Peril) that is inherently eeeeeevill

i know it was meant to be shocking, but the side quest where the Buddhist-monk-coded NPC is horrifically mutilated was nauseatingly cruel. it wasn't put in there to spur some kind of conversation about body-modding, it was meant to upset the player and make them go on yet another killing spree

no matter what the player character's customized ethnic makeup is, they have a white guy in their head influencing their decisions

There's plenty of nuance here, for instance it's a grim and hedonistic world where all the characters are up to something shady and dangerous, so naturally they are all problematic and likely to get the ax. Easy too to say "the token white guy is literally dead before the game starts" but then he is the star of the game, isn't he? The other dead or brutalized characters did not get second chances (with exception of raped gf being uploaded to the matrix or whatever).

Writing

it's up to the player to get revenge for *checks notes* breaking into private property, stealing something priceless, witnessing a murder, and getting shot at while escaping. mkay. they're criminals, that's logical probably, idk i've never done crimes

wait, so hookers get an implant that makes them extremely wise and sluttier? then why doesn't the main character just get one??

i'm not really sure what the characters are trying to achieve. my fave streamer replayed this multiple times bc his saves kept getting corrupted, and at no point did the plot seem cohesive. tbf i was also actively trying to block it out

i did think "trapping the player behind glass and making them watch a murder" was VERY interesting from a story perspective

but "the only way to smuggle out the implant is to accept the implant" is pretty funny/contrived from the start. "what do you mean it downloaded a guy into my brain?" is the equivalent of "i didn't think being a drug mule would mean i have drugs in me!"

idr how long ago i even watched these streams. if i got stuff wrong, oh well, but i remember muting/leaving cyberpunk streams after a while bc this game bothered me so much :|

Final note: a repeated message in this game seemed to be "there are many ways to violate a person's autonomy" from rape to mutilation to forcing a human to live forever detached from their body in cyberspace. Even the player character suddenly being condemned with a terminal illness is a violation, and maybe the most interesting message in a world where humans inorganically mod themselves. What is it like having a death date that no amount of cybernetic enhancements can prevent? Is an organic body and the autonomy thereof worth protecting as part of one's worship? Should a line be drawn between prostituting your physical state and your mental state? How much is too much to take from a human being?

Regardless, these concepts were barely explored in any philosophical or thoughtful way, but in a shooter game where taking as many NPC lives as possible is more or less the goal, and achieving a few sexy cut scenes is a bonus. Also, a dick joke.

back on my "cyberpunk 2077 was misogynist bs" soap box. can't stand that game. it's just about women being brutually raped, killed, and abused in the most provocative ways possible. and the dialogue is laughably awful. like, how are male players not hearing it? oh and screw all minorities, only straight white guys are heroes in this game, except they can't keep their s/os from being raped and killed

[samueldays]

SR5: wagemage services

The fluff for Shadowrun frequently mentions "wage mages" (mildly derogatory), but I didn't find any crunch on what it costs to buy the services of such NPCs. So I decided to improvise some houserules which I might use in a later game for PCs who want access to magical buffs without needing to have a mage in the party.

A wagemage is generally willing to sustain the spell for 12 hours after casting. Assume the runners have paid a mage who works the appropriate shift - if they're having spells cast on them before going on a night run, they know not to hire a mage who will go to sleep during the run. No refunds will be provided if the runner is foolish enough to walk through a mana barrier or otherwise lose the spell while on a shadowrun.

Inspired by the classics, the base price for getting a sustained buff cast on you is (Hits * 100 nuyen) + (Hits^2 * 20 nuyen). The first part represents the mage's time and capex, while the second part represents the mage's opex. See Table 1-1 for common values.

Not all spells are equal. Many health spells are respectable and publicly advertised, whereas a mage sustaining an invisibility spell on a client risks getting interrogated if Lone Star notices. Apply the relevant multipliers in Table 1-2 to the base price.

Table 1-1: Base spell costs by hits

1 Hit: 120 nuyen 2 Hits: 280 3 Hits: 480 4 Hits: 720 5 Hits: 1000 6 Hits: 1320 7 Hits: 1680 8 Hits: 2080 9 Hits: 2520 10 Hits: 3000

Table 1-2: Spell cost modifiers

Antidote, Cure Disease, Detox, Oxygenate, Prophylaxis, Resist Pain: x0.3 Increase [Attribute], Increase Reflexes: x1.5 Other Health spells: x0.5 Illusion spells: x1.5 Active Detection spells: x1.2 Mage is using Long Haul and will sustain spell for two days: x2

Long rambling comments below the cut.

Antidote and Cure Disease don't work that way as written, but I strongly feel they should work more like Oxygenate and Prophylaxis in providing a sustained boost to resistance rolls, rather than having to be cast after the subject is poisoned, and I'll treat them that way since I'm making up houserules here anyway. That group of spells also have very low Drain codes, making them safe and cheap and you can mostly skip reagents.

Only corebook spells are listed in the table. Splatbook spells should be grouped the same way: Alleviate Allergy is cheap like Antidote, Growth is expensive like Increase [Attribute].

These prices are not playtested, I've only been doing theorycraft, so it's hard for me to tell if spellcasting services are too cheap or too expensive here. One of my reference points in trying to balance this was Shadowrun's drugs. (Future Cyberdrugs.) In particular, Cram, which gives +1 Reaction and +1d6 Initiative for a duration of hours, the entry-level combat drug for the cyberpunk future. Cram is cheap as hell at 10 nuyen per dose, but Cram is also addictive, and when it wears off the user takes 6 stun damage from the crash. Its big brother is Kamikaze: works faster, lasts shorter, +2d6 initiative, more stat boosts, more addictive, 100 nuyen a dose. Having a wagemage cast Increase Reflexes on you is vastly superior mechanically, so it's priced at 420 nuyen for +2+1d6 initiative and going up from there: well above drugs, still far below the permanence of Wired Reflexes.

8 Hits of Increase Reflexes will max out your iniative dice and give another +8 flat initiative, guaranteeing you three passes and often four, going first against almost anything other than a wired-up street sam. 8 Hits of Increase Reflex is also a hefty 3120 nuyen: a cost that would usually eat up a lot of your run profits, unless the Johnson is offering an unreasonable amount of money for an unreasonably dangerous run. In the long term you're probably better off with permanent initiative-enhancing cyberware or learning the spell yourself and getting a sustaining focus, depending on whether you're a mage.

Moving from relative to absolute balance, Shadowrun 5e is pretty sensible about capping characters at 5d6 initiative dice and +4 Augmented Attribute Maximum, regardless of sources, which prevents a lot of possible stacking shenanigans. Antidote, Oxygenate, etc. are uncapped but I'm fairly confident it won't break anything to add lots of expensive dice to your rolls to resist poison/disease/suffocation/etc. Invisibility can be resisted and shows up on astral perception ("detect magic" is an at-will mage skill, for those of you coming from D&D) so I figure it won't trivialize runs unless the target site had no mages on staff and you put a lot of money into making the spell difficult to resist, in which case, congratulations, enjoy the hard-earned results of your legwork and paying for a one-use specialized counter. Armor spell stacks with physical armor, but that's still dice and chance, and tanking doesn't win fights on its own.

Still, the GM may want to limit how many hits are available so that starting characters aren't renting ridiculous amounts of magic. Hooking into the Contacts rules is one approach: a wagemage contact can provide up to (Connection) hits on spellcasting, and long-term contacts may offer a (Loyalty*10%) discount. Treating spellcasting services as goods with an Availability of (Hits*2)R is another. Otherwise, buying magical services might be handled through the fixer.

The reason why exactly *20 in the cost formula is that one dram of reagents - the opex - costs 20 nuyen, and I imagine the wage mage is casting at Force 1 and using reagents to raise the limit for safety. (If he were doing frequent unsafe casting he wouldn't be a wagemage.) Then he needs to cast multiple times to roll well enough to get that many hits.

The table stops at 10 hits because that's what's reasonably feasible for a high-end mage with Magic 6, Spellcasting 10, Specialization 2, Power Focus 2 and ten tries to get those 20 dice to turn up 10 successes, without getting into superhuman stats or ludicrous gear. It doesn't have to end there - but think about who is selling more magical power than that. Perhaps the runners are dealing with a dragon in disguise, whether for some complicated draconic plot, or simply because the dragon is funding their current run and thinks it's funny to recoup thousands of nuyen from the runners' pay.

Most Detection spells are valid to get as a service, since they give the subject a new sense, not necessarily the caster. Keep in mind that Active Detection spells can be resisted with opposed tests.

Quickening metamagic: LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU