<i>"Don't get yourself killed out there. Au revoir!"</i><br/><br/>Valerie's words chased the man's back while she watched him leave. The crippled woman felt a lot more vulnerable with the gunslinger's departure. She let her eyes wander through the somber room. In contrast to the clean clinics and hospital of Pangu the dreg chopchops felt more like a place where people died rather than be cured. It didn't help Valerie's mood that a cripple in a wheelchair looked right at home in these sad surroundings. She held up a hand to the flickering of the light above, looking at the balljoints of her fingers. Her existence here in this fragile world was truly a miserable and pathetic one.<br/><br/>Thankfully, there was another. Just by closing your eyes and stepping with your consciousness away you could leave AR and reality behind to enter the neuronet. The collective thoughts, opinions, fantasies and conjectures of billions of people melding together in one great mass that even the greatest companies had trouble with steering and controlling. Like the dreg the neuronet could promise freedom to the more experienced user, but it was freedom of the mind instead of strength. In the mere blink of an eye Valerie trawled dozens of discussion boards, news sites and rumourmonger's blogs. Someone had to be talking about that case and she needed every clue if she wanted to use it to get out of the Dreg.<br/><br/><b>-Click. Thunk.-</b><br/><br/>She opened her eyes and blinked away the fora overlays, putting them away for new. Her eyes focused on the man that had entered and strode so confidently past her. Chul or one of his subordinates? Hard to tell, the weapon suggested him to be just muscle. Dangerous muscle. Valerie closed her eyes and focused on readying her spiel as the man and Shizu had their exchange. Half the time it felt like she had to keep the dumb muscle here from killing her just because she was smarter than them.<br/><br/>Eyes opened again, the man was watching her again. He probably couldn't figure out if she was just some mechanized doll or human. Valerie couldn't blame him, she had trouble telling herself at times. She met the man's gaze, ignoring his question to first answer his shocked exclamation.<i>"He'll be back in business before long, which is more than the guys who did that to him can say."<br/>
<br/>
"I'm Valerie DuMonde. I owed Chul money. That's past tense now because of these."</i>Valerie pat one of the prosthetic cases.<i>"Military prosthetics with a value easily in the tens of thousands and above. And that's in the world above. One of these babies is enough to turn a loser kid to the king of the block down here. They don't really fit this body of mine but I'm sure Chul'll be pretty happy with these regardless."</i><div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>