Turn 83 (Pt. 3)- Crime In Progress: Armed Robbery (I)

--- Maya ---

“Can’t just rush in.” She told herself before using her COMP to try and scan out a map of the building, while also pulling up a schematic of it with her Informant Network.

(How is this helping, they’re both right there!) Her inner Madness -metaphorically- scowled.

“We need to know what’s going on.” She told herself. “Maybe there’s something we can use to our advantage like hitting the breaker box or something.”

(Perhaps, but given the state of the victim on the floor do we have the time for such?) Her inner logic wondered. (In fact, depending on how we handle the breaker we could be causing the store more damage than simply letting the thieves rob them.)

“Someone’s life is in danger!” She hissed at herself.

(Which is why we should prioritize helping them. We do have our serum injector after all.)

(Blah! We can’t just wait for them to leave, with that guy panicking who knows how long that’ll take!) Her inner impatience growled. (Besides, heroes don’t let the bad guys get away!)

(Perhaps we could disable the car so that they don’t then?) Her inner reason offered. (Then we wait for them to come out and ambush them away from the civilians.)

“We don’t exactly have a subtle way of doing that…” She grimaced, realizing that all of her methods of disabling the vehicle were either very loud or very flashy. (Fuck, even a knife would be enough to slash their tires…)

(What the Heavyweight lacks in precision it makes up for with power!) Her inner madness reminded her. (You wouldn’t have killed those pinche Creeps at the hospital so easily with a flimsy little knife.)

(Yeah, you’d have to be half insane to take on a monster like that with a knife.) She conceded, even though it did nothing for her actual issues.

Especially when she remembered that (Using the Heavyweight on a regular human will probably cause permanent damage.)

(They’re criminals. They shot someone so fuck ‘em.)

(Do we really wish to start our heroic career with such a violent turn?) Her inner logic wondered.

“Okay, okay… can’t turn out the lights without causing more harm than good. Can’t use the Heavyweight without causing too much damage.” She banged her head lightly on the wall behind her. “What does that leave?”

Her eyes once more drifted to her COMP before she started shifting through her programs while running the numbers off of her Scan… “That might work…”

She took one more glance at the state of the store and the robbers, before firing a Burst() of blinding light between the thugs quickly followed by a second Burst() of Sound, thus creating a makeshift flashbang.

There were screams of shock and another gunshot that had her wincing and praying no one else got shot, before she stood, turned, and entered the store.

Before either of the stunned thugs could react she tackled the closest one to the ground, causing his head to slam against the tile as they crashed into the ground, something that (hopefully) knocked him out.

Knowing that the other thug -the one with the gun- was still a threat, she quickly raised her hand cannon at the man who had just begun to clear the shadows from his eyes as he aimed his gun in Maya’s general direction.

Not willing to risk letting him open fire, she unleashed a wave of sound from her cannon, unintentionally forcing the man to fire his gun for a third time.

A loud bang tore through the store, somehow louder than her bursts of sound before she felt a sharp pain in her arm.

Fearing the worst, her eyes darted to her arm as her heart began to pound in her chest.

She couldn’t help but stare at the cut on her arm, one that was largely superficial, barely a cut and significantly less harmful than the numerous scrapes and bruises she’d given herself. And yet, as she stared at the faintly bleeding cut her mind, the world around her seemed to fade a bit as she realized. (I… I was shot…)

A nearby shifting had her eyes darting up and her hand cannon locking onto the movement, only to realize it was a tanned woman wearing a hijab. One that had frozen, staring at her with no small amount of fear.

“S-sorry…” She apologized, lowering her hand.

Trying very hard not to think about the cut on her arm, she looked down at the man she’d tackled, making sure that he was really knocked out before glancing at the other man -who had crashed through a glass plane and was currently sitting there unconscious surrounded by rolling cans- to do the same.

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With that done, and no small desire to focus on how she was doing, Maya instead turned her attention onto the more pressing issue. One that she could actually do something about right now.

The tanned woman flinched as she drew closer to the thug’s victim -a teenage girl from what she could see- and Maya raised her hands in (what I hope is) a calming gesture. “H-hey, it’s okay. I’m, I’m just trying to… help, I’ve uh… I’ve got this healing serum… thing that can fix… a lot of damage.”

She wasn’t actually sure how much damage it would fix in regards to a bullet hole, given how she’d never really tested it, but her simulations had shown that it could accelerate the natural healing rate to do a week's worth of healing in a single day.

The woman stared at her for a moment, her eyes darting to the girl, before nodding with a desperate look to her eyes, “P-please help ibnaty, m-my daughter. How-however you can.”

“Right, don’t worry. I’ll have Ibnaty fixed up in no time.” She promised the terrified mother, doing her best to bluff through her own panic at the revelation that, (someone’s life is in my hands…)

The woman gave her a look before shaking her head and moving to give Maya more room, even as she held onto her daughter’s hand.

Nodding as much to herself as the mother, she reached into her kit and pulled out her serum injector before loading in her Healing Serum.

“Okay, now we just need to-” She froze as she actually saw the girl’s face. (Oh, fuck…)

“What’s wrong?” The mother asked her, beginning to panic. “You-you can still help her, y-yes?”

“Y-yeah.” She forced herself to nod, even as her hands began to shake. “She’s just my… age…” She admitted both the truth and a lie as she got on her knees to more easily use the injector.

For a moment she thought her hands were shaking too much for her to use the injector, before voices began to whisper from the depths of her panicking mind. Knowing that she wouldn’t be able to do this on her own she let the whispers take over, nudging her thoughts and movements with a surety that she absolutely did not feel herself.

Her eyes moved around the store before she stood up and grabbed a couple of packages off a nearby rack.

The mother asked her what she was doing but she was too far under to respond.

Instead she set the injector down and opened the package she’d taken with one hand and her teeth before removing the tweezers from their package and a spare herb from her kit, sticking the first into the girl’s wound and ignoring the way the girl flinched in pain as she stuck the later in her own mouth, her hands instinctively adjusting to keep from damaging the girl any further.

As she got a proper grip on the bullet, she picked her injector back up and aligned it to an artery in the girl’s lower stomach with her offhand. Using a bit more force than she normally would, she drove the injector deep enough to actually reach the artery and adjusted the pressure she applied to the trigger to only use a fifth of the serum.

With that done she removed the injector before lining up with another artery and repeating the process from several different positions around the girl’s abdomen to optimize the serum flow to the bullet hole.

Forty-three percent of the way through the third injection, her mind hit an internal counter and she removed the bullet just as the serum sealed shut the parts of the wound that it had been holding closed, before tossing it to the side and using her hand to pull out the herb she’d been chewing on pressing the smallest amount of the sludge into the wound.

Her saliva functioning as an antibacterial amplified by the herb, accelerating the internal healing process enough that she needed both hands to adjust the tweezers to slowly remove it, the left behind residue more than enough to prevent its own infection.

With the wound largely taken care of, she used the bullet hole in the girl’s shirt to tear a strip of cloth that she placed the rest of the chewed up herbs into before taking the pack of tape she’d grabbed with the tweezers and taping it down over the largely closed bullet hole in the girl’s stomach.

She turned to the girl’s mother and told her, “She’s out of critical condition and the wound is mostly taken care of. At this point her primary issue is blood loss and while I could fix that it would require someone donating it. It’s more efficient if she gets a transfusion from the ambulance that -that once reported- should be here in approximately twelve point two four minutes given local traffic trends and response times.”

“Thank you, thank you, shukran.” The woman thanked her over and over again, before pausing as her look of concern slowly returned as she actually looked at Maya. “Are-are you okay?”

She ran a hand under her nose wiping away the blood that had begun to drip into her mouth. “Minor neural overload, caused by excessive overclocking of cognitive functions. Common side effect of power usage. As long as it’s used minimally no permanent damage will occur.”

That explanation seemed to do nothing to relieve the worried mother.

Unfortunately, she had other priorities at the moment and stood up, giving her patient one last glance over to make sure she was in stable condition before turning to leave. Her current emotional state being nonoptimal for dealing with law enforcement.

As she passed them, she gave each of the thugs a kick to their head with the exact amount of force necessary to prolong their unconscious states without worsening their medical conditions.

The clerk attempted to stop her but she ignored him as irrelevant and instead climbed onto her Tech Bike and proceeded to leave the scene and return to base before she could be detained by law enforcement.

Once at base she proceeded to make her way to a section of the hospital none of her Minions would find her as worsening their own mental states would be sub-optimal for long-term post overclock recovery.

With a suitable location discovered she sat down against the wall and inhaled before exhaling as the ever present whispers pulled back and she immediately threw up to her side as the stress of everything hit her.

When finally stopped gagging she found that she couldn’t stop shaking or steady her breathing, both things that only grew worse once she saw all of the blood drying on her hands.

“She-she’s alive. She’s okay. I s-saved her. I-I’m alive and, and okay. We’re-we’re both okay… we’re both s-safe and okay…”

Event Consequences

-For using your programs to quickly defeat the two Thugs gained 1XP to Combat Hacking and Fighting.

--Currently: Combat Hacking Lv. 3 (6/8) and Fighting Lv. 8 (5/18)

-Due to witnessing ??? Maya’s Sanity takes critical damage.

-M.A.D. Trait Revealed: M.A.D. Survival Fugue.

-Thanks to M.A.D. Fugue, Maya has gained 6XP to First Aid.

--*Skill Level Up* First Aid Lv. 2 (3/6)

-Trait Revealed:

-M.A.D. Survival Fugue

--This unit can forcibly raise the success rate of Mental or Reflexive Skill Check, at the cost of 1 Sanity for every point you add. All Social Checks suffer minimum auto-fail for Scene Duration.

-Maya’s Current Mental Health: [Very Poor]