NIGHT CITY ALIENS

█ 𝚊 indie, private, & selective 𝐃𝐀𝐕𝐈𝐃 𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐄𝐙 of cyberpunk: edgerunners - 2077. minors/personals (non-roleplayers), dni. black-american adult. in college. low activity by default.

affiliates: @spectredge (lucy)

graphics credit: halo coms/ezekiel.

𝙸𝙽𝚂𝙿𝙾 : meat and metal, mind and machine, a devouring city, the currency of flesh, dreaming in neon and dying in the gutter, the slow erosion of sanity, humanity corroding around the blind, romance is a battlefield, survival is not living, the disposable generation, the weight of an unfulfilled legacy, love in the wake of death, the god of the new age bleeds oil, the ghosts in the circuitry, built to burn out, a ouroboros system.

𝚃𝙷𝙴𝙼𝙴𝚂: 𝚄𝙻𝚃𝚁𝙰𝚅𝙸𝙾𝙻𝙴𝙽𝙲𝙴, 𝙽𝚂𝙵𝚆, 𝙳𝚁𝚄𝙶 𝙰𝙱𝚄𝚂𝙴, 𝙰𝙳𝙳𝙸𝙲𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝚄𝙽𝙴𝚃𝙷𝙸𝙲𝙰𝙻 𝙼𝙴𝙳𝙸𝙲𝙰𝙻 𝙿𝚁𝙰𝙲𝚃𝙸𝙲𝙴𝚂, 𝙿𝚂𝚈𝙲𝙷𝙾𝙻𝙾𝙶𝚈, 𝙳𝙸𝚂𝙲𝚁𝙸𝙼𝙸𝙽𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝙲𝙾𝚁𝚁𝚄𝙿𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝙱𝙾𝙳𝚈 𝙷𝙾𝚁𝚁𝙾𝚁, 𝙳𝚈𝚂𝚃𝙾𝙿𝙸𝙰𝙽 𝚂𝙾𝙲𝙸𝙴𝚃𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙴𝚂, 𝙴𝚇𝙿𝙻𝙾𝙸𝚃𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽, 𝚂𝚄𝙸𝙲𝙸𝙳𝙴, 𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙲𝙰𝙻, 𝚃𝙴𝚁𝚁𝙾𝚁𝙸𝚂𝙼, 𝙴𝚇𝙸𝚂𝚃𝙴𝙽𝚃𝙸𝙰𝙻𝙸𝚂𝙼, 𝚂𝚃𝙰𝚁-𝙲𝚁𝙾𝚂𝚂𝙴𝙳 𝙻𝙾𝚅𝙴𝚁𝚂, 𝙿𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙾, 𝙶𝙴𝙾𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙲𝚂, 𝙵𝙾𝙻𝙺𝙻𝙾𝚁𝙴 𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝚅𝙰𝚁𝙸𝙾𝚄𝚂 𝙲𝚄𝙻𝚃𝚄𝚁𝙴𝚂.

world-building is comprised of elements from the following:

the matrix, blade runner, ghost in the shell, elysium, altered carbon, akira, terminator, outside the wire, mad max, crank, tetsuo: the iron man, the substance, electric state, etc.

RULES / DISCLAIMER BELOW.

nobody likes the haunting of words. words the dead had said. words that shouldn’t have come. words that never did.

funny — if nobody likes it, then why do we keep buildin’ our own graveyards outta unfinished sentences? why do we line ‘em up neat in our heads, like headstones we visit when we can’t sleep. replayin’ what was said. what wasn’t. what almost made it past the teeth. like if we keep standin’ there long enough, maybe one of ‘em’ll answer back.

david's mind was racing faster than the speed of light, it felt like, and he couldn't keep up.

he's sitting on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees. hands clasped loose, but tight enough to turn his human knuckles white against his light brown skin. the apartment’s quiet. uncomfortably quiet. the city noise muted behind reinforced glass. the hum of the fridge louder than it should be.

“ i wasn't jealous. ” it comes out flat. his eyes keeps to the floor. there's a faint scuff mark near the coffee table, something from weeks ago.he focuses on that instead of her. he'd like to look at her, because he likes looking at her. but then there are times where he doesn't.

his jaw shifts sharply, almost as if it wanted to come off the hinges. “ not about pilar. not about that. i know what that was. you explained it before. i remember. he tends to cross lines. you handled it. simple. ”

he hated how defensive he was coming off. it made him feel small, and he knew it was irrational. he had to get this straight, before it away at any more of his self-respect. he exhales through his nose, peeved by the nature of the conversation, albeit she wasn't the cause for him feeling like that.

“ just.... sometimes i get stuck in my head. see somethin' and my brain runs it somewhere it ain't suppose to go. ” it's not about pilar. it never was.

“ do you think there's a happy ending for folks like us, luce?… or were we just born wrong… wrong city… wrong—yunno? ” david keeps his eyes on the sky when he says it. a listless watcher of the neon bleeding across the low clouds like bad rendering. AVs drift overhead, red tracking lights blinking slow, like a slow, dramatic prologue to a horror flick. somewhere below, a siren warps through the murky alleyways, probably nearly crushing a vagrant or a trick receiving timed services from a joytoy, swallowed by obnoxious bass and distant gunfire.

david wets his tongue quickly with the flat soda he was holding. he swallows once, and released a sigh. “ i mean... don't gotta tell you none that you don't already know. this place chews through people like rabid strays through scop dogs. everybody's runnin' some hustle, tryin' not to flatline before twenty-seven. ”

his fingers tap lightly against his bulky thigh. hs chrome knuckles faintly ticked, micro-servos correcting pressure he didn't consciosuly apply.

“ we wake up, we grind, we mod, we bleed. we do it for the eddies. the freedom. your moon. whatever keeps our brain from fryin' to shit. ” he finally glances at her then.

“ we're only here once, right? ain't like we were made immortal. not just the hurt. not just playin' survival games tryin' to keep up with corpos who don't even know we exist. ” the wind bows against gloria's jacket, tugging at the old fabric and pushing the faint smell of her perfume across his nostrils. the sensation nearly brought tears to his modified brown optics.

suddenly, he feels like he let the words hang too long. this was too honest of a conversation. he felt like he was asking too much. like he was hoping out loud, and if he were, that'd be more dangerous than any chrome he's slotted. or that's the kind of thinking his mind resigned to.

his throat works. he clears it as he crushes the can of soda in his palm, letting it fall to his side. then, he rose the same palm to the nape of his neck. “ erhm. never mind. dumb question. ”

he looks away again, like the skyline can absorb what she shouldn't have to.

060. What is your character’s attitude toward education and learning?

059. "it's time to chrome the fuck up."

the powerlessness at the lost of his mother, and the helplessness of the predatory streets, and corporate world, david chose to put his life on the line and be strong enough. if all it takes a little bit of flesh (in his case, a lot) to have secure his place in the world and to take care of the people he needs to, he'd gladly give it all up.

"still breathin', ain't i? don't you believe in me?"

sarcastic optimism. he likes to pretend he's not running on fumes. he doesn't like to acknowledge. it's half of what his mom used to say when rent was late and her back was hurting her more than usual. and a callback to what lucy said to him.

"fuckin' chooms."

it can either mean he's annoyed, tired, barely holding back the rage he has bottled up, or it can mean affection, depending on his tone. street language made out of love, frustration, and survival

060. david's a sponge for information. he attended a prodigious school and was an A+ student across all of his courses. assimilating into the system was the martinez way of survival. so learning tech, systems, tactics, neuro-architecture—he devoured these subjects like lunch food.

everything else he learned is instinct and fieldwork. bloody. fast. efficient. he carries that scholarly itch—between wanting to know more, and feeling like he couldn't survive for too long in a formal academic setting. he didn't fit in. his classmates looked down on him because of his background and he didn't make friends there.

but most of all, he didn't want to rise up in the corporate world. it made his mom happy, so he went along with it, but he was suffering from feeling like an outsider. and when she died, it was easy to see how school and getting it by playing the "straight-and-arrow" won't keep the city from eating alive. so he got his the fast way.

039. What do they think is the worst thing that can be done to a person? 051. If they knew they would die tomorrow, what would they do today? 065. Is your character better at leading or following? Which do they prefer? 079. How easy is it for them to read the emotions of others?

@spectredge

039. to make them lose their memory. to become a construct [ if he was aware of the soul-killer program, he would not be down for it. ] killing someone is one evil, but hollowing them? scraping out the meat and bones, extracting the soul and amalgamating that with the machine that strips them of their will, purpose, past, rage, until all that's left is compliance dressed up in a neat corporate bow is a chilling thought. it's not even death. it's becoming a tool without the capacity to rebel back. another silence in a city full of ghosts and societal disconnect in the age of evolving technology.

051. they'd want to feel everything one last time. throw down until a couple of jaws broke in his fists, leaving a few shards of shattered teeth in his mechanical knuckles. unfreeze the last meal his mom made and drink a bottle of water (he long stopped drinking alcohol to blend in withthe older edgerunners after maine, dorio, and pilar's death) or flat soda.

he'd probably polish off rebecca's shotguns and sort out her belongings and see what he could past down to a new crew member, if one had joined his at the time.

with lucy, he'd hold her, if she let him. wouldn't say anything poetic because that's just not his style and he was never one for flowery words. he'd leave gloria's jacket to her and write something for his crew like, " i didn't waste what you all gave me. appreciate it, chooms. " in reference to the family unit and purpose.

065. although david assumes maine's role in the crew, becoming the defacto leader, he doesn't lead in the traditional sense. he carries. he doesn't bark orders—he'd be the one bleeding first. the first on the field, the face, the tank, the shield, carrying all the agro. people follow that. they trust what doesn't flinch under the pressure of danger.

but in his heart of hearts, he'd rather follow—if the cause is right. if the leader bleeds honest, and the goal isn't just bloodshed for the sake of it. but most of time, he ends up at the front anyway, not because he wants to be.... but because no one else is built like him—a guy designed to take the hits.

079. too easy, sometimes. that's part of the problem. because he can be aloof, or if he's well in-tuned with the moment, he can read 'em like static-coded braindances. he sees the guilt behind fake smiles, the fear behind twitchy fingers. maine was former military and taught david some signs to look out for. but his own trauma filters his perception.

he can tell when someone's in pain, but he naturally assumes they won't want his help. he may make it worse if he's close to that person and believe they just want personal space and create what he thinks is a respectable distance between them, if they don't say nothing.

as a merc, a job is a job. if it demands violence. on a personal note, when it speaks for the dead. yes.

violence is the language of his grief. he was never taught to suppress it. when he was younger, he used to get into bloody brawls.

one turned straight-up frightening for one kid that beat the hell out of david, which resulted in david laughing maniacally when the kid broke his hand over david's face. he laughed for a whole hour straight, which made the people in the neighborhood think he was crazy, but some of them reassured david, telling him he was special and he'd go on to perform great things in his life.

when violence comes, it comes. he's seen justice fail time and time again. violence is a product of the system's failure, so due to his proximity to it, seeing nothing but body bags and bullshit pr, what he does in the streets is what he have to do to ensure the security of him and his gang

but there's another part of this answer: sometimes, violence is the only thing that makes him feel real. and he hates when it slips out of his control, because of senseless murder, i.e., making the next kid parentless and potentially turning them into him.

but he doesn't stop it. he doesn't know how. he answers the call for extreme violence when the ghosts won't stay dead unless their killers are left bleeding and destroyed, and when david runs out of other ways to keep breathing.

cathexis.

because david, much to his detriment, invests plenty of his emotional energy into people and their ideas (dreams). because of his environment, and the tragedy that befallen him with the violent loss of his mother, it's survival-wired attachment. his identity is poured into those who helped shape him, and their goals and ideals for him tether him to his own humanity in a world purposed to sever that.

if he stopped fighting for his family's dreams (gloria, marine, etc), it'll be as though he stopped being himself.

i can break this down a little further with the three main parties in his life.

lucy. she is his sanctuary, his anchor. her dreams of going to the moon become his mouth outta hell. it's not that desperation that attaches him to her but with definition. if she believes there's something better outside of night city, then he subconsciously programs himself into becoming someone worth more than nc has designed for him. with the death of maine and his mother, his selfhood is invested entirely into her. this is why he loses an ounce of his humanity when their communication becomes increasingly complicated. it was his humanity, his humans connections, that made him unique and helped him stay mentally afloat for as long as he did.

gloria. she was his mother. his reason he existed. his reason. his grief, he never had a chance to properly grieve him. it calcified into fuel when her underworld entanglements came barreling into his home. cathexis means she's not just a memory for david—she’s a cause. his entire body, his mods, his choices.... in school.. in the streets.. on the ripperdoc's slab... they all orbit that loss. that trauma became him.

the edgerunners = a family of ghosts. he loved them. they were his mother's only other attachments. their deaths don't just haunt him, they have residency inside him. every fight he engages in, every detour he takes into the fighter's pits after he enhances himself with maine's gorilla arms, he carries the edgerunners with him. his rage in the streets is personal. he's not just avenging them. he inherited them.

so yeah, cathexis is devoting oneself in the shape of identity. moving on, half-feel, David doesn't know none of that. he commits to it wholeheartedly. sometimes it's violent. it's what makes him powerful, but it's also what's killing him. it's difficult for him to detach. he only knows how to be the burning bright star for what he loves. even if it leaves nothing of him behind. and i mean nothing. not an ash, not even an atom.

EMOTIONS / FEELINGS

emotionally wired like a battlefield: overloaded, repressed, then rupturing. all alarmingly violent. when david breaks, it’s never clean—it’s collateral.

haunted by grief reloaded through chrome. never processed his mother’s death—he just converted it into purpose and bottled rage.

guilty for surviving maine, rebecca, gloria. guilty for still wanting something soft in a city that punishes softness.

lives in the emotional aftershock of intimacy. doesn't know how to rest inside peace, only beside it. longs for connection.

tender at his core, but it shows up as loyalty that gets him hurt. again. again. again.

afraid of outliving everyone he loves. more afraid of what he becomes if he doesn’t.

sharp-edged vulnerability: doesn’t ask to be held, but bleeds in plain sight and pretends he meant to with a shaky grin.

finds clarity in chaos, and comfort in people who don’t flinch when he’s not quite human. it oddly ground him.

COLORS

Rust-Tarnished Gold (#bfa53f): broken brilliance. worn honor though he's not a soldier. a relic of who he wanted to be, burnished by early death.

Neon Red (#ff0033): rage at rest. temporary. the maddening glow behind his optic lens. a warning that never goes off in time.

Gunmetal Blue (#2f3e46): grief disguised as resolve. the color of rainy asphalt and sleepless nights.

Mercury Chrome (#d4d4d4): synthetic survival. what’s left when the flesh fails and the mission doesn’t.

Oil-Slick Black (#0a0a0a): where the guilt lives and festers as mold. yet it's where he feels safest. where he forgets he’s still human. even if it hurts to breathe.

SCENTS

liniment, gun oil, and rain-slick asphalt. body still warm from the gym or participating in underground fighting rings hosted by the animals. boyhood trauma still fresh and flowing through the veins.

chrome overheating under combat stress. smells like a machine dying slow in the dark—burnt wires, fried nerves, ready unleash a fire that'll burn just itself or everyone in proximity.

her scent in his hoodie. sakura shampoo and ghost perfume. he never washes it. not really. it triggers some of the sweetest memories his brain hasn't erased.

blood on rubber. combat sweat, diesel stench, wet concrete. the ring stinks of memory more than violence.

sweet rot. the scent of scav leftovers: pork gone too long. stays in his throat. he dreams it.

hospital antiseptic & back-alley ozone. the ripperdoc blend. trauma clinging to steel tools and cold hands.

smoke off rooftops. that half-second stillness before the living city starts up again.

CLOTHING

jackets with torn seams and faded logos. blood washed out, trauma stitched in. sometimes it is better to keep a shirt off.

boots scuffed to high hell. hardly worth the polish. memory lives in the tread.

his mother’s old work ID folded in a hidden pocket. can’t wear her love, but he carries the proof a woman like her ever existed.

simple tanks and hoodies. nothing that screams “edgerunner.” he already screams enough.

tactical gloves modified with knuckle caps. not for fashion—for forgetting what softness feels like.

one piece of lucy’s jewelry in his stash. untouched. not stolen. sacred.

OBJECTS

a chrome crucifix that isn’t religious—it's sentimental. heavy with the idea of sacrifice.

a pair of cracked kiroshi optics he keeps from maine. one still flickers faintly when handled.

an empty blood pack with a ripped label: used during a back-alley surgery, kept out of superstition.

a black-and-white photo of gloria, blurred from sweat. folds sharp from constant handling.

lucy’s moon sketch, rendered into a fragment of permanent ink along his ribs. a promise etched too late.

VICES / BAD HABITS

fights to feel things. kills to silence the parts that feel too much.

craves control, fears what he’ll become when he gets it.

pulls away from softness like it’s a lie. but lingers like it might be a promise.

doesn’t sleep unless his body crashes. runs until the wiring glitches and the guilt shuts down.

pushes people away when he needs them most. doesn't know how to properly communicate his feelings.

hyper-fixates on past mistakes. replays them in his memory like corrupted braindances.

can’t stop performing martyrdom. even when nobody’s watching.

BODY LANGUAGE

moves like someone who’s already been hit—just braced to take it again until his body wears down.

sometimes forgets how loud his chrome is. the sound of synthetic joints gives him away.

touches his own scars absentmindedly. not shame, not pride—just remembering. phantom feelings of lost flesh.

gives nods instead of words. doesn’t like how his voice sounds when he’s hurting.

tilts his head when trying to stay human in conversation. doesn’t always work.

rarely blinks. partly habit, partly cyberware, partly fear of missing something. never could articulate it.

leans closer than necessary when listening. doesn’t know how else to say i’m still here.

AESTHETICS

rooftop shadows lit by failing neon. rain hits the chrome like prayers unanswered.

crushed chrome wares and the meat it was attached to under a bloodied boot. another fight he didn’t start, but needed to finish.

arms trembling post-sandevistan use, jaw clenched, trying to look normal.

bed still made on one side. her spot untouched. he doesn’t lay there unless he’s dreaming.

bathroom mirror cracked—because he didn’t recognize himself last time.

streetlights flickering like faulty memories. every one another face he couldn’t save.

gloves still stained red even after three washes. he doesn’t care anymore. or does he? difficult to recall... feelings.

tagged by: no one. old meme i stole from me self.