<b><span style="text-decoration: underline">Valerie</span></b><br/><br/>The dreg promised many things to it's extra-legal inhabitants. Danger, excitement, a high chance of lead rain, and much more. To the people living in it, there was something about the neon shine that made this hellhole of theirs so bright. Goaxing street was one of it's beating hearts, pumping people, drugs, money and weapons in the surrounding gang areas. It was a glorification of that anti-establishment ideal of "chaos" and "freedom".<br/><br/>Valerie never saw the big deal about it really. Big guys with guns threatening you, what was the difference between a gangbanger and a PMC soldier safe for the state of equipment and politeness level? She didn't really see the point of all this freedom-mongering. The exoticness of tits on display everywhere also quickly lost it's charm. It's like a shitty porn's store movie collection. There was no allure, no seduction, just raw tits, pussy and cock everywhere. That sentiment went for the whole place really. Everything was so raw. More than anything, it made Valerie miss those quiet, forlorn and tucked away streets that sprawled through the Heart by the thousands. In the Dreg, all you found in back-alleys was trouble, bodies and trash.<br/><br/>For some reason though, trash still had a value in the Dreg though. An antique, not even fit for a museum, was worth killing someone over down here, as Valerie had harshly learned in her first days in the Dreg. And now, Valerie had been given the peculiar task of putting a price tag on trash. It was ludicrous, really, if several years back someone had asked her to price this junk she'd have laughed in their faces and pointed to the nearest trash can and hardware store. Yet here she was, sifting through old motherboards and hard drives. Just because it'd give her a chance to delay her next loan payment enough for her to actually get it.<br/><br/>The reason she was doing this, Kal, wasn't a bad guy. He was smarter than most of the street. He also tried to keep her safe whenever there was a job like this. Too many people would rather try to make a quick buck off her than gamble to get a greater amount through the work she does.  Funnily enough, she wouldn't even have given him the time of the day before.<br/><br/>Heh, before...<br/><br/>Life can change quickly and drastically, as Valerie had learned. From a promising star, she'd been knocked out of the sky and sent crashing to the pits below. Broken, she had been rebuild into this doll's body trapped in this wheelchair. Some days, Valerie questioned if she hadn't really died and ended up in hell. All these debts a sisyphean labour that will never see an end.<br/><br/>Valerie sighed to herself, closing her eyes. She was letting her thought processes get derailed in her boredom. Leaving the world of Greek mythology for another time, Valerie opened her eyes to the world before her. Those eyes of hers remained human, but in them was reflected a view of the world few shared with her. Nothing as clumsy as augmented reality where digital markers were superimposed on one's view, no, the technology in her brain let Valerie stay with one foot in the digital world of the Datastream and the 'net.<br/><br/>The table before her was not just littered in cases of computer hardware but also in the glyphic references pointing her to model ID lists, market price list and over half a dozen guides. The trio before her and Kal were mostly dull and gray save for the glowing of their weaponry, swarming in forum posts and reviews made by gun nuts and fanatics. Kal, like those guns of the men before her, shone vividly with digital information. He wasn't a Dreg hotshot, but his name was known further than he knew(Not that Valerie would bother to tell him). Even as her limbs whirred, jittered and struggled to move she was swimming through a stream of data. Her studies in neuronetics letting her manipulate her systems like no other in the Dreg could.<br/><br/>Through that mixed view of digital and physical existence, price approximations began to emerge. Most of the equipment was decent, if horribly outdated. Some of it would need a touch up to coax a few more months or years of service out of them, and a few pieces were only useful to set your beerglass on.<br/><br/>All the four tense men in the room saw of Valerie's work however, was this wheel-chair bound girl with prosthetic limbs struggle to sift the parts into roughly three pieces. Her silence not helping the tension Valerie could only vaguely sense, building quietly. That tension was finally broken when she did speak.<i>"Alright... that's a fairly decent guess." </i>Kal received a neatly arrayed list on his deck, giving the price of the parts when they were new, and comparing that with the current market value and Valerie's estimated Dreg street value. Valerie looked up, meeting gaze with that businessman that had not stopped nervously eyeing her for even one second. The numbers weren't exactly in his favour, but Valerie figured he was still getting a fair deal, right?<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>