WHO ART IN HEAVEN

High, high above the smoke and spires of CY- past filthy air, verging on the escape
from the gravity of the planet of the damned -is THE BRINK. The great
orbital plate that blocks out the brooding, melancholy sun’s pallid glow. From the
ground it seems like a paradise, silent and gleaming, sitting on the shore of the
endless majesty of the stars.

From within, there is a different story to The Brink. As free as it may seem, like
everything man has touched, it’s tied to the city. Foul tendrils, reaching up from
the cursed earth they thought was so far below to strangle the life out of the
gleaming station hanging over the planet.

Gravity and radiation-proofing is for those who can afford it. The rest live with
brittle bodies, eroding under the toxic kiss of the sun. No atmosphere to shield
you here. Eyes blur, tumors bloom- no surprise that cybernetics are popular,
replacing the parts that become too ragged to use. A quick-fix for a cheap machine.

Resources are even more carefully managed here- more scrupulously hoarded by those
who have more than they’ll ever use -than they are on the planet below. Do you know
how much it costs to ferry a single brick of NuMeat printer protein from the
surface up to The Brink? (The answer is “as much as Royal West says it does”.)

It’s not a problem for the ultrelite, the chromed or nuflesh’d Olympian inhabitants
of this heavenly palace. The commoners- the tediously necessary satellites around
the glistening luminaries -it’s their problem. They’re the ones who deal with
studies to see how much oxygen they really need to survive, how many square feet of
clothing The Brink actually needs to import. It’s their quarters that are built so
shoddily that a stray chunk of orbital trash can break off a hab module and send its
inhabitants out into the endless night.

In space all you can hear are the screams

L.C.O. is an independent production by Ross_Hollander and is not affiliated

with Stockholm Kartell. It is published under the CY_BORG Third Party License.
CY_BORG IS ©2022 STOCKHOLM KARTEL.
THE FRONT DOOR.
…and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven…

The only way to get into The Brink is by a shuttle, and the
only place you can get shuttles from is Torus Station. Torus
Station is in The Ports, and is commonly known as Torus
Spaceport, because that sounds a lot more stylish than ‘a
failed attempt at a space elevator, relegated to a very tall
launch pad for hop flights out to The Brink’.

Shuttle fare: to/from, coach ¤500 to/from, private ¤1K

Coach class means you get a chair and that’s pretty much it.
Private class gets a light sedation and comfy seats with
armrests, making the whole trip a mild haze until you dock
and they give you a juice-up shot to revive you from your
stupor.

Mandatory to be checked on the flight are firearms, drones,

drugs, and pets. They’ll be sealed in time-release capsules
that will open up upon docking. (Not the pets, they’re kept
in separate oxygenated safety cubes. They’ll be fine,
probably.) More than 500mL of drugs, or one clip of
ammunition for a personal firearm, are forbidden to be
transported on the shuttle. All explosives are forbidden.

Private shuttles are more frequent at Torus Station than the

transit ones. Transit goes once a day; there’s all but
always a private shuttle touching down or going up at the
great, mushrooming, disc-shaped top of Torus Station.

Torus Station is kept secure and orderly by ACGS guards who

go by dedicated ACGS SecOp division ‘WARDENS’, trained at
high altitudes to
endure their lofty
deployment. Some of them
have difficulty breathing
at lower altitudes.

WARDEN
LIMBO
First layer of hell, outermost
module of The Brink. They call it
Limbo because the people who live
there are undecided. Teetering on,
as it were, the Brink. Some make
the wise call and descend back to
the planet. They remember the wax
wings and return to the earth
below, leaving behind their
fantasies of fortune to be made in
orbit. Others don’t.

Who you’d find…

1. Shuttle port staff and technicians.
2. Fresh surface-side immigrants settling into the cheap habitation modules.
3. Orbital elite and their entourages en route to or from the shuttle ports.
4. Beggars trying to scrape up enough creds for a shuttle hop back planetside.
5. Headhunters picking off new immigrants for cheap work.
6. Smugglers and countersmugglers- Royal West stinger SecOps on the hunt for
anyone undercutting their prices with cheap portside deals.

What it’s like…

Noisy, jostling, crowded. Scuttling. Smells like hot metal, fumes. There’s that
sticks-to-your-teeth packed-subway-car crowd-odor. Sounds like a busy airport,
three busy airports jammed into one. Occasional shriek and howl of engines blasting
off down to Torus.

Reasons to go to Limbo:
1. Smuggler friend needs backup if a client turns out to be a stinger.
2. Bushwhack a VIP as they’re coming in for their orbital vacation.
3. Lay explosive charges on a luxury shuttle to blow a Brink corpo sky-high on
their way down planetside.
4. Elite hired gun is heading planetside to carry out a hit for the Vipers;
sneak aboard the shuttle and kill them while they’re sedated for the ride.
5. Bumbuster SecOps are herding vagrants into rickety shuttles and basically
throwing them planetside. They’re meant to crash. Sneak aboard and jack up a
proper pilot AI to land them safely.
6. Hunt down a corp informant before they can jump on a shuttle planetside.
THRUWAY
Heart pumping blood. Distribution, storage, shipping. Everything that goes
somewhere and doesn’t need oxygen while it’s doing it goes from Thruway.

Drone hangars where suited technicians stand out in open space, affixing parcels to
be flown around, under, across the station. Shipping gets more interesting in such a
fully three-dimensional environment.

Courier bikers take their packages- take as many packages as they can -take each
other’s package, when they can get away with it- more creds for packages delivered,
more very, very slim chances at a tip -and speed off, engines purring, tires
squealing as they take the corners on two wheels. No room for trucks on the
station- it takes more nimble means.

You get paid for what you deliver. The shipping clerks hire whoever’s there and pay
whoever presents a receipt. Syndicates have formed- Bydrosta Hustlers, Indenus
Runners, Vanlen Bros Scramblers. You work for them- move their parcels, bring in
the receipts -you get a handful of profit back.
Piracy is common; Runners are the worst offenders,
lurking at intersections. Pot-shot as a courier goes
by, driver flies off and bike crashes, nab the
packages and get them on the loitering bikes nearby.

(Every now and then the station SecOps declare

they’re cleaning up package-jacking, for good this
time, and every time they don’t.)

There’s no ‘here’ in Thruway. Everything moves, and

fast. It’s just a network of transport tunnels,
creeping all over the station, like one weed strangling another.

What it’s like: noisy, cold,fast- courier bikers streaking by, drones whirring like
dragonflies. The insulation on the transport tunnels is notoriously bad. Sometimes
there’s space-leaks; best to wear a helmet or at least a rebreather.

Off the sides of the main tunnels, you’ll spot the unlicensed modules; flophouses for
courier gangs, hangouts, pit stops, and garrisons in case of serious fighting. Don’t
go in if you can’t prove affiliation. Getting airlocked isn’t fun.
PODS
People, from the view of the multifaceted, bickering array of station management
boards, are unhygienic and distasteful necessities, like plungers. The pods are the
storage bins for the warm bodies. If it can’t fit in six feet by four you probably
don’t need it anyways.

Anyone who isn’t rich enough for their money to make more money of its own, more or
less, lives in a pod. The pods are a ceasefire zone. Courier gangs don’t shoot each
other dead in their pods, even though they’d really like to. Smugglers don’t do
business in the pods, because that would end with Seccy raids through the pods, and
nobody wants that.

There’s public showers (¤3/5 minutes), coin laundry (¤2/wash+dry) and bathrooms
(¤1 entry fee) spaced throughout the Pods. The whole place smells like cheap air
freshener (because it gets sprayed through the oxygen vents once an hour).

Pod rent rates: ¤200/mo. No exceptions. No alternate rates. No deluxe options.

The big pod “neighborhood” is The Brink’s initial coach-class barracks, built for
100,000, which is what people are referring to when they say ‘the Pods’. Since
then, though, there have been a few expansions. Ex-1 was built with 300,000 more
pods, then Ex-2 added 10,000 more. Ex-2 was smashed open by a hunk of flying shuttle
debris last year. Six thousand or so dead, sucked out into the vacuum. ¤500
settlement paid to all the victims’ families and a tacky public apology by
Alliansen for the incident.

Station SecOps patrol the Pods, but mostly for show. They don’t lift a finger on the
prostitution, the gambling, fights, and so on, except sometimes to call for a
janitor to clean the mess. They just march their beat in threes, inscrutable behind
mirrored visors, only acting if they spot a firearm.

Not everyone can afford the pods. NapCap soundproofed capsules are positioned in
small banks along the public corridors. ¤10 for two hours, ¤20 for six.

Sights in the Pods.

1. Craps game for small stakes: so far the pot stands at a notepad, a pack of
synthetic ramen, and a quarter-ounce of Sunset Chalk.
2. Mother lecturing two kids that they’ll need to keep sharing unless they start
making enough to earn separate pods each.
3. Courier gangsters conferring over a hand-drawn map of the Thruway routes
around the station. Discussing rise in drive-bys from rival gangs.
4. Trine of SecOps confiscating a resident’s electric guitar after one too many
complaints from pod neighbors.
5. Handsome suit-wearing Transformation preacher expounding the truth of
Prosperity as the gauge of Virtue, passing out pamphlets and snack bars to
those who sit down to listen.
6. Somebody calling out frantically for gangway as they try to gingerly carry a
brimming, steaming noodle cup back to their pod.
7. Small crowd nervously watching a repair team fixing a wall up. Somebody’s
murmuring about the chance of a space breach.
8. Somebody’s tripped and fallen out of their pod. Looks like they twisted
something not meant to twist. They’re screaming in agony on the floor while
people around try to pool creds to call for a MediCrisis team.
9. Naked person sprinting to their pod from the shower after forgetting the
clothes they meant to change into.
10.Hard-core Beastmasters! Battle Monsters Compete LAN tournament between six
little kids. Volume on their PlayJacks is way too high.
 MIDDLING
That is, neither here nor there. Not all of The Brink can be classified as belonging
to one section or another. Packed tight in this rickety raft hanging on the shores
of the infinite, star-speckled sea are eateries, shops, schoolrooms (or at least
iLearn comprehension upload facilities), clubs, at least two minigolf courses, and
the Transformationist Dihmal and Tenunri Sgutapak Temple and Spiritual Study
Center, who claim the prestigious title of first permanent extraterrestrial chapel
of any faith in known history.

The fact is that there simply isn’t enough, ha ha, space to keep the kind of
segregation by wallet weight that planetsiders achieve. (Now, when they go
planetside, Brinker elites tend to remain exclusively in the hills.) That’s why the
actual physical shops are for the inbetweens, the cubicle herds, the working meat.
What they walk down corridors and hitch squeakies (Brink slang; electric taxis,
named for the sound of tires on corridor tile) for, the elite simply don’t. Why
bother with tedious public spaces when all you could want can be delivered direct
to your own luxury home?

That’s why- and you’ll feel it -that’s why everything seems so cheap here.
Everything is half price on sale exclusive deal. Off-brands and value packs and
second-hand and refurbished. Fast food, ten-minutes-a-cred PC bangs, cheap shops
selling assorted colors and shapes of plastic junk for kids. Overworked heating
systems cook the sweat of several hundred thousand people into a disgusting fog
that planetsiders tend to get nauseous from on their first visit but all the locals
have long since gone thoroughly nose-blind to. Everything feels overcrowded,
nuisance, noise, grime, chewing gum stuck underneath a table, tide of breathing
meat. A cheap existence for cheap people, where being alive means spending money.
This may be Hell.

What it’s like: reek of grease and sweat and sneakers and Tobac and twenty different
strains of Purpltm smoke and slight undertone of vomit and ten thousand
conversations too loud cramming themselves down your ears and hissing
grease and order-up numbers and club music and shop music and
advertisements and the blaring glow of fluorescents and garish ad
screens and babies screaming and squeakies squealing and whirring
fans and oxy circulators and-
You call this being alive?
 Diversions
D12 Middling businesses.
1. VRcade advertising the latest in haptic tech; claims to cause PTSD in users.
2. Tissue-printer for creating synthetic fruit and veggies.
3. Fight club- drop in and skin your knuckles, ten-cred ante.
4. Slots station blaring sirens, bells, whistles and bullhorns for jackpots.
5. Strip club promoting genuine genetically modified catgirls.
6. Demolition derby (sign on waiver for extreme maiming or death beforehand).
7. Mukbang cafe, eat ‘til you drop.
8. Ten Minute Therapy, problems solved or your money back*. (*we decide if
they’re solved, not you)
9. Sensestim parlor. Jack in and get a pure endorphin dump into your brain.
10.Vacuum driving range, smack your shots right into the void.
11.AIutograph parlor, meet neuroclones of your favorite celebrities (charge by
the chat session).
12.Telescope parlor with a ‘scientific-grade lens’: scan space and glimpse
galaxies, for fifteen creds a minute.
Paradise Bloc
Where you never need stress about the hustle and bustle of station life. Relax to
the sound of clinking glasses, quiet talk, the odd bell of a jackpot from the
famous Sidera Game House.

Relax in comfort, knowing that devoted, state-of-the-art PERIMAX security

teams at every entrance are ensuring Paradise Bloc remains orderly and
protected. Even in the event of an emergency, you can make your way to the
cutting-edge Phobos escape pods, pre-programmed for a safe, smooth
atmospheric reentry.

● Are you a fitness fan? Enjoy our grav-stabilized gym, where you can keep in
perfect planetside shape.
● Want to try your luck? The Sidera is open at all hours, as are the Wishing Star
and our own branch of the Hot Slot Games Empire.
● Eagle-eyed sharpshooters can show their skill at our shooting range, from
9mm to indoor missile launcher drone-skeet.
● Retire to the Fairy Tail Therapeutic Massage, where conscience-loading into
high-grade vat-grown bodies make our attendants customizable, durable and
eager to please our beloved clientele.
● Dine on the finest from Paradise Eateries Co., from 99.8% gene-accuracy
printed meat (now including orca, turtle and gorilla) to personalized
smartmealtm capsules tailored to your personal metabolism.

Meet some of our neighborhood’s welcoming, friendly VIPs- a price on your head
won’t get you down when you’re living starside in Paradise Bloc.
1. Bitrad Siemzac, senior head of low-orbit and orbital estate projects for AreaM
Developments after defecting from Urban Ease.
2. Seline Tanamola, a.k.a. ‘the Incinerator’, enjoying her decorated retirement
after thirty years of SecCorp enforcement work.
3. Unugion Broron, expvnk turned intelligence broker to the rich and famous;
renowned for their part in the Bu-Kent bombing scandal.
4. Andi Yudjib, blood-enemy of the Tosk family after the Zhan assassination, now
practicing independently in personal injury and malpractice claims.
5. Divalou Stenhel, formerly of UCS Breaker Team ‘Sledgehammer’, sold his mech
on the black market to buy an Estate-class lodging here!
6. Cela Polava, personal physician to the late ‘the Asp’ of the Virid Vipers, who
passed away tragically of surgical complications just two months ago.
Paradise Bloc is like a cross between a community center, a shopping mall and a hotel.
It’s quiet here. The walls, floors and carpets are all painstakingly designed to muffle
and deaden sound. The temperature is kept at a drowsy warmth, the lights are a dim
yellow. The whole place makes you feel lethargic.

You can’t get into Paradise Bloc. Generally, people who go in there stay there, and
people who aren’t in there stay out of there. The security teams see to it. Workers
psycommute into meat suits from outside, including meat suits for the workers whose
job is maintenance on all the other meat suits. (Jobs in Paradise Bloc are prized due to
this; compared with the junk-food-fed, radiation-scarred body of a pod-dweller, the
high-end meat suits are actually really nice.) Only the dock workers come and go,
unloading cargo drones or taking in shipments from Thruway couriers.

Nobody does anything here. It’s a pod, although a much more pleasant one for much
higher rates. There’s the body-play parlors and the casinos and the coffee shops and
all, but at the end of the day, you can feel it in the air, see it under their eyes. This is
where people go to rot. It’s an endless weekend afternoon with nothing left to do.

If you want to get into Paradise

Bloc, the best way to do it is to jack
into a meatsuit. Nobody will notice.
The people here don’t pay attention
to things, and they classify the
workers as ‘things’. You won’t have
any gear and, depending on which
business’ meatsuit you jump into,
might not be in the most practical
outfit either, but it’s a foolproof
way of getting in.

(Working through a meatsuit is the equivalent of being plugged into a cyberdeck.

You also have no cybergear or Nanos in the body. Dying in a meatsuit, or being
affected by a noisemaker, will cut off your connection and has a 5 in 6 chance of
booting you back into your body, 1 in 6 chance of deleting your conscience entirely.)

You could also sneak your way in dressed in a dock worker’s spacesuit, or (if you
wanted to be very adventurous) inside a cargo crate, although you’d better make sure
it’s a well-sealed one. Getting out is just a matter of looking the part- the guards
won’t question anyone who looks filthy rich and existentially bored.
The Arcology
luxury spaceside housing for health and peace of mind
brought to you by Alliansen Inc.

The oxygen purity levels here are so absurdly high compared with surface CY or
even the rest of the station that there’s a dedicated airlock for visitors to acclimate
in before they enter, to prevent the chance of system shock.

Spacious apartments, all with their greenery-lined patios overlooking the main
avenue, baked with artificial sunlight (real sunlight would be too sloppy for paying
customers like these). Kept summery-warm by the heating systems and pleasantly
middling in humidity by the…humidifiers. Courier drones buzzing through the air to
deliver online packages to those who don’t care to buy from the neohipster
storefronts and designer outlets.

The Arcology was the conceptual heart of The Brink, and it shows it with the amount
of care that was put into it, from smallest shrub to encompassing metal shell. Even
the machinery that keeps it all so lush and fresh is muffled to prevent the hum from
disturbing the macrobucks heirs and executives that could afford to live here. It’s not
Alliansen’s biggest source of profit by any means- they’ve got fingers in far too
many pies for any one venture to represent a solid majority -but it’s a respectable
chunk thereof.

Paradise Bloc has more to do, but the Arcology is nicer to be in. They even play
birdsong (originally, actual songbirds were put in, but cats kept getting to them) to
heighten the tranquil ambience. Rumor has it that the air is laced with something
that peps you up when you breathe it, which it is.

Everything that keeps this place working happens between the pavement or the
lighting-ceiling and the cold metal exterior of the station. About twenty workers per
resident scuttle around, out of sight and out of mind to those luxuriating within,
changing bulbs, managing thermostats, refilling canteens, loading up delivery
drones, patching drip pipes on the garden beds. Seeing anyone worth less than 50K
is generally considered a day-ruining shock to the residents of the Arcology.

Sights in the Arcology…

1. Herd of cyclists pedaling down the central Lane. Blur of chrome from both
high-end bikes and the cybernetic legs pushing them.
2. Dog-walking couple with designer strains- little yapping furballs that need
cyberware implants just for their genetically screwed metabolisms to work.
3. Old couple nodding enthusiastically as chromed grandkid explains their latest
cyberware doohickey.
4. Pair of SecOps in old-fashioned blue-black cop fits and pasted-on smiles
escorting a worker loitering on break back to the maintenance tunnels. (Stick
around and you’ll hear the single gunshot after they close the manhole
behind them.)
5. Novayoga public session. Multiple workout mats with people in high-end
stretch fabric stretching and bending in various meditative positions.
6. Gaggle of teens window-shopping the designer boutiques. One of them seems
to have decided skin is passe and has a bare skull (with dynamic color streaks
painted on) for a face.
7. Courier biker storming and beaming like she’s gone mad, clutching the
thousand-cred tip a customer absentmindedly paid- pocket change, here.
8. Quiet, somber public meatwake. The body is laid out on display, with the
flesh-deceased’s new android body staring pensively at it as visitors and
passerby offer condolences.
9. Kids playing tag on booster skates at 40 mph. Nanobot clouds cushion them
from the breakneck turns and possible falls.
10. A round-the-block queue for the new gas-oven pizza place. They’re offering
genuine cheese, real tomato, actual flour slices, free, for the next hour.
 ManuFactors Park
Where you’re manufacked six ways from Sunday

Of course, the purpose of The Brink isn’t just as a rest home/luxury vacation resort for
the obscenely wealthy. It’s also a work camp of efficiency that all the planetside
corplords are purple with envy of. Think about it like a three-step process:
1. Sell them what they need to live.
2. Pay them for their work, with the money you got from them paying you.
3. Repeat, selling what they make working for you at more than it costs
to supply them with what they need to live.

Manufactors Park itself is a weightless, freezing cold tangle of unregulated machinery.

Anyone planning on starting a firefight in this zone should first brush up on the effects of
vastly reduced gravity on attempting to shoot somebody. The SecOps don’t have to worry
about it, of course; they’ve got maneuvering jets and magnetic boots. Should push come to
shove and fight to riot, they’ve also got control of the oxygen circulation systems. The
bodies wouldn’t even rot.

The biggest parts of the Manufactory are the Centomotori auto plant (they gambled on
buying into orbital real estate to expand production, and by the Line Going Up, they seem
to have won), the Alliansen textiles factory (which accounts for .7% of all cybernetic
digits and hands purchased from Kaytell), and the ACGS processed snacks factory, which
cashed in hard on the ‘made in space’ novelty. This is where the mindlessly buying herds
of the Middling toil away their days, for those of them who don’t work servicing the elite
hand and foot in the Arcology and Paradise Bloc.

Weightless Combat:
Is difficult. Shooting, melee and defense are all +2DR if you’re not magna-locked to
something you could think of as the floor. If you aren’t, keep in mind:
1. Nobody stays still unless you have something to grab onto and keep
yourself still. Shooting, being shot, or just moving around give you
momentum that doesn’t really go away in this environment.
2. The force of a cut or thrust in melee combat can also send you
spiraling; if you’re going to grab and stab, grab on tight, or risk
going adrift.
3. If you break away from all surfaces but manage to kill your
momentum before you can collide with another one, you’ll be stuck
hovering. If you are, you defend at +4DR as a sitting duck. (If you’re
desperate, try using your own recoil to push yourself.)
The fact is, they could turn on the gravity if they wanted to- Manufactors Park was built
with gravity engines, it’s not like this module of The Brink doesn’t have them -but the
concept of a factory where one man can carry a truck while another one tugs along a ton of
steel components like an old-fashioned helium balloon (before we ran out of it) was just
too good to resist. The savings, the analysts will tell you on and on, were massive. (Now
if only there was a way they could turn a profit by upping the anti-radiation shielding.)

The SecOps don’t patrol in Manufactors Park. They’re on call, but in a

hiding-in-plain-sight way, this would be the surest place to go to avoid detection.
Besides, with the constant crush of people going on and off their shift and moving materiel
around, it’d be easy to lose yourself in the crowd.

What it’s like: loud, busy. Somehow still quieter than Middling but
about on par with Limbo. Pounding, screaming machinery. Shouting,
from throat and bullhorn, directions, responses to directions,
general cussing. Loud beeping and whirring of machinery. Feels a
little like a train station: a lot of fast, massive, purposeful
movement. No loiterers here; the workers kick them out if the shift
supervisors don’t call SecOps on them. Besides, it’s loud, cold and
gravityless; nobody really wants to bum here in the first place.

They Knew The Risks (d8 Accidents)

1. Cargo crash between two jet-lorries has sent rubble spraying in a sort of
weightless avalanche down the entire tunnel.
2. Space breach, everyone’s hanging on for dear life until the crisis team arrives and
re-seals the hull.
3. Fire. They’re clearing the sector so they can shut off oxygen to douse it.
4. Chem spill. Globules of caustic industrial waste floating loose through the air.
5. Oxy lapse. Circulator systems have broken down; there’s no new oxygen getting in.
6. Gravity glitch: everyone is pinned down by their own quadrupled weight.
7. Collision between bulk steel sheets and human body. People are searching for the
guy’s legs while trying to get him to stop screaming.
8. Bad interaction between the zero-g environment and the new machinery. Freewheeling,
slicing, whirling pistons and stamps floating through the air, no gravity to stop
their movement.
 Who’s Who: d8 Pvnks! In! SpaaAce!
Scum, vandals and burdens on society that haunt the dead ends and forgotten
corners of The Brink.
1. Kamil Kacha (she/her), gun-centric cyberfreak and self-proclaimed
bio-militarization accelerationist: the end goal of humanity is a race of
perfected weapons. Half weaponized chrome, half chemo-sapped flesh. Public
activist (Seccies prefer ‘deranged vigilante’ or ‘Class-1 anti-officer
offender’). Good source for cyberware repairs and new parts.
2. Asiph Kent (he/him), demoniac cultist of the End Days but more importantly
renegade reaperdoc. Licensed revoked for embezzlement; he was patching up
people who couldn’t pay for it, using company resources. Horns, claws,
red-orange Glotm optic modules. Don’t let it fool you, you’re safe on his table.
(Though his preaching while he works can get a little droning.)
3. Nukabad (it/its), reformed hatefiend. Found its way after its ‘shaman guide’
Wildcaller_21 was gunned down by SecOps. Coke-white skin, haplogroup tattoo on
its forehead (a mistake it feels it needs to stay reminded of). Troll and
NET-stirrer par excellence, good for digging up dirt on people or personal
info. Also knows a few channels to get stuff you can’t find on the shelves.
4. Surda Ergeli (he/him), Hustler liaison. Pvnk ideology states the couriers
should probably be working with each other instead of fighting amongst
themselves, but right now, Bydrosta claims exclusive connection to Brink pvnks,
and begrudgingly, vice versa. Need someone or something moved quick, secret or
secure- choose two of three -at moderate price? Ask Surda.
5. Ruga Stradsson (he/him), compromised. Streaked gray hair, rings under his eyes
that no super-soldier or AI could detonate. Technically, a deep plant for UCS
enforcement networks, seeking ins on crime rings spaceside. Practically, a UCS
insider who can get you information about the security systems and guard
schedules for any facility that uses their stuff.
6. Barrika “Chopshop” Fizhe (she/her), plate wiper. Started out in a Virid Viper
sub-sub-subgang, worked her way up and then out. Still hotwiring and
plate-changing; does a steady trade with the courier gangs. Permanently
paint-splattered and greasy, rats’-nest hair tangled to the waist. Goes by her
nickname only. (‘Barrika’ sounds, according to her, nerdy.) She can rig up mods
onto a vehicle, or get you a fresh paintjob, plates and registration in just
about an hour.
7. Katarin Qaro (she/they), spiritualist biochemist. Ex-TG Labs, ‘ex’ in a ‘shoot
on sight’ way, part of why she stowed away to space in the first place
(survived the trip in a specially-built suitcase by a hair). Deep brown skin,
too many pockets, and a full-face RCD screen. Shows emojis on it to punctuate
statements. Used to work with Nano weaponization. Still capable if you need
someone to extract one, or implant a new strain.
8. Murkillik (they/them), unfortunate necessity. Clone specialist reaperdoc. Used
to work in model design, cranking out camera fodder for ads and movies; their
job got automated and they went off the books. Lots of plastic tubes in flesh
and fleshy veins protruding into plasticky monitors. If your friend gets gunned
down, Murkillik can have them step out of the growth tube in time to attend
their own funeral.
 Community Service
(scum to remove for the benefit of the average resident)

Sometimes it’s not enough to just take hit jobs that happen
to also inconvenience high-ranking corpo heirs. On the
bounty-board of concerned citizens of The Brink, here are the
top picks of the week for enterprising Brinkers interested in
serving the public good:

1. CUTTING COMMERS you know what gets people riled up? When the NET goes down.
Out-of-station work, knock down data links on the Arcology and Paradise Bloc hull
regions. (Move quickly. There’s patrols out there.)
2. FRESH OUT conspicuous consumption is a key part of the hierarchy we oppose. Engage
in a little bit of trolling on incoming freight shuttles with high-end consumer
goods, either out-of-station or in the unloading docks. (This one’s easy because
Royal West already blames rival freight getting lost or damaged on ‘piracy’.)
3. ONCE AND FOR ALL the courier gangs could form a potent force if they weren’t
fighting all the time. Stymy a planned inter-gang ambush to keep hostilities low,
while on the other end, we try to weld them together into something functional.
They can’t know we stopped it.
4. NON PLUS ULTRA things are bad enough as is, but news that the corpos are planning
another shoddy expansion to The Brink is something that demands action. Two
Alliansen brokers, one GMT fixer, one UCS contract negotiator. Nobody can leave that
heavily-guarded conference room alive.
5. POP QUIZ a new batch of Brink-side enforcers are being drilled in
breach-and-exterminate on the wrecked bits of Ex-2. It would be the perfect cover
to sneak in as ‘Designated OpFor’ and actually cause some damage.
6. LA PERRUQUE a shift boss in Manufactors’ Park has asked for somebody to rid him of
some turbulent ‘productivity ensurance teams’ [read, corpo scabs]. It’s heavy
industry, you know. Accidents happen. The only problem is that the way they ensure
productivity is watching everyone working, while hooked up to a constant live-feed
to planetside HQ- this needs to be very subtle.
Goods and Services
Space Suits
A must-have for out-of-station work.
- Standard: the SCUSEME (Self Contained Unbreathable Surroundings Manipulation and
Exploration Equipment) Suite. 500 creds. Holds water and oxygen for 24 hours, but
if you’re stabbed or shot it’ll be compromised. Still counts as -1 armor.
- Magnet boots add-on: 75 creds
- Maneuvering jets add-on: 200 creds
- Reinforced: UCS patented version costs 1000 creds, holds water and oxygen for 24
hours, plus a short-range communicator to all suits within 100m with their
receivers switched on. (Careful: there might be more people listening than you
think.) Also features magnetized boots. Counts as -d3 armor.
- Tactical: Alliansen patented COMNTRU (Combat Necessities, Traversal & Respiration
Unit) costs about 5000 creds. 24 hrs. water and oxygen, magnet boots, bioscan radar
that will detect anything larger than a cat within 100m, radio to select suits on
the network within 1km (you choose which ones to listen to, or which will hear
you), navigation jets and a shoulder-mounted grappling hook launcher. -d6 armor.
Bribery
● Pod inspection guard looks the other way to modifications, or to give you somebody’s
pod number: 5creds
● Get a parcel of fun powder through Limbo customs: 20creds
● Slip by the bouncer at a Paradise Bloc club: 50creds
● Pay off a Thruway courier to let you keep your parcels: 50creds
● Five more minutes in the fresh air in the Arcology: 60creds
● Clearance to dock an unregistered craft: 200creds
Stationside Food:
Middling food court: 2creds
Paradise Bloc hipster bar: 50creds
Arcology diner: 80creds+5cred tip
Gadgets
> Magna tug, uses combination of zero gravity and weak magnetic rays to act like a
grappling hook (or a long-distance shove), 80creds
> Oxybubble, crack plastic sealing to encase yourself in oxygenated ooze that’ll
last about an hour, hope the rescue trawler shows up by then, 50creds
> Vacuum drone, equipped with manipulator arms and camera feed, 200creds
> Commtap rig, hack into inter-suit comms within 200m undetected, 50creds
 Station Map to The Brink
Getting here to there.

● The whole of the station, on a private shuttle, at average speed, would take
about 4 hours to fly across.
● Via the Thruway, it would take about 6 hours to cross, if you didn’t get mugged
along the way.
○ Which is highly likely if you try to get through there unaffiliated (80%
odds of a hold-up, 40% of a random drive-by). If you’re hitching a ride
with courier syndicate members, are one yourself, or can disguise
yourself as one, that sinks the chances of both those odds by 20%. Travel
in a convoy (six bikes or more) and you don’t need to worry about
drive-bys at all, and holdups are only a 15% chance.
● Without a private shuttle, or Thruway travel, you can’t get into the Arcology
or Paradise Bloc. There’s no pedestrian or traffic connection.
● You could, with abundant oxygen supply, walk across the station. It would take
about 24 hours, by which time you’d probably be spotted on external cams,
reported, and shot.
 As an Aside:
What’s to Eat?
Space food is notoriously bad, which is why
anyone who can afford to in The Brink doesn’t
eat space food. Everyone in The Arcology is
either caught up in the long-release nutrient
pill fad, or buys planetside food from the
shipments. It’s passe to ‘eat like a spacer’
there. Contrast Paradise Bloc, which has, in
total, miles of kitchens, with tissue
printers, rapid cultivators and Digital
Gardens that produce 99%+gene-accuracy
replicas of fruit, fish, vegetables, cereals,
meat and more for the patrons' dining delight.

In the past, those who couldn’t afford such

luxurious means of munching were stuck with boost juice, sucking down liquid blends of
calories and a few essential nutrients for about five creds a cup. It could last you all
day, all year, and all life, except that you’d probably die of combined digestive tract
and heart failure around forty, which was disincentivizing new settlers on The Brink.

These days, most of the station’s have-nots eat the patented ACGS Blast Off Foods line,
which is created via infusing a shaped and textured digestible bioplastic framework with
nutrient goop. (Thus, for instance, everything fish-y about a fish is extracted, then pumped
back into an artificial fish-shaped bioplast matrix.) It gives it texture and a more
appealing look than nutrient mush, but they all tend to taste the same.

High Class Dining:

Choice of true cheese* and roast vegetable antipasto, or smoked planetside salmon (*may be replaced with synth
Dairy Advance for the lactose-sensitive).
Fresh greens salad from our cultivators, or onion soup with croutons.
Grilled rack of lamb (available in simple printed meat or Meat II hyperproteinized meat), with our garlic sauce,
and side of sauteed planetgrown mushrooms and grilled asparagus (vegetarian option: zesty stuffed zucchini
steaks, or a gourmet Third Day Productions green-meat replica of carnist option).
Delectable finish of chocolate mousse and full-grown fruit platter (no printed or spliced, our guarantee).

Everyone Else:
Today’s special: replica mac&cheez with real planetside Spudtm chips.