Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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Left/Keyrunner (Fixer): Alias Tag: Clicker | Echo-ID: CK | Undervine Alias: CK117 | Race: Mirialan
Profile: Small-time Mirialan Keyrunner, Honest, Reliable, but Twitchy.
Assistance: Undernet Backdoors.

Right/Target: Alias Tag: Shardwalker | Echo-ID: SW | Undervine Alias: SW009 | Race: Lorrdian
Profile: An ex-corporate Lorrdian neuromancer turned undernet mystic. He claims to have 'walked the Shard', a mythical cyberspace code-fracture said to hold rogue AI ghosts, ancient secrets, and forbidden code. Speaks in riddles, half holy man and half cyberterrorist.


Clicker400.jpg
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  • Darkpatch Contract: Seeding a Shadow Signal
  • Mission Brief: Two slicer job. Find and establish a quiet, secure connection with the Black Net Prophet, a spectre in the Undernet. The shifting layers of the undernet hold corridors of forgotten code and rogue programs. We need you to skirt close to the Nullframe Abyss, and to monitor and restore each other in case of signal degradation.
  • Risk Level: Blueline Level 2. Abyss proximity. Minor interference is expected. Watch for data spectres, rogue AI and passive trace signals, you aren't the only one looking for your target; counter-slicing is possible, along with likely obfuscation by your target himself.
  • Target Status: Signal drift detected. May require constant recalibration to reduce signal loss due to abyss proximity.
  • Undervine Whisper: Even the quietest signals leave echoes; the abyss leaves none.

Payment Each:
1x Spoofed Echo-ID Replica, good for 2-3 uses.
1x Drift Token for Nomadic holonet and undernet data havens.
5,000 Credits




Sitting in his Denon apartment, he patched an AT-Line direct into the side of his neck, his vision fractaling-out into the datastream before he resynced into the current. A second later he rezzed into the Undernet preloading mission node. Cheap hardware to use, but he was a datagrub trying to work his way up, he couldn't afford better.

How a small-time keyrunner like Clicker had pulled a contract like this was his first thought. Also, this didn't feel like Blueline work; whispers of the undernet abyss on the deeper layers had him uneasy.

His Undernet Echo-ID resolved into a ghost-grey render of himself, the symbol of a Key glowing on the back of his jacket. His features were gridded, low-res—a default in the starting node. On other nodes they'd sharpen up. Some nodes pulled your details into perfect clarity, in others things just got weird, this one was a low-bandwidth safe zone, with a limited signal trace, revealing little about each slicer.

Ghostkey blinked, scanning the datascape. Who was his team-up for this run?

Saul Whesai Saul Whesai

Undernet Starting Node Inspiration
 
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Another Undernet Echo-ID would show up soon after him. Saul was unsure about how all this worked, with this being his first time out. He had heard rumors about the Undernet before but hadn't had the time or a permanent place to try it before. After getting a new apartment and the equipment needed to unload himself into the Undernet. The wires extended off his cybernetic arms, the same AT-Line's GhostKey was using. It was time to see if this Undernet was worth the investment.

Taking a breath, he focused on the surroundings of the safe zone. His avi looked like a homeless man with a painted-over gasmask, the ragged clothes hanging off of his electronic bones. Seeing GhostKey's Avi which looked like the contact he was given, he slowly walked over, waving hello. He hoped that he would be kind to beginners. He would need the time and space to experiment with this place, not being run out into the front lines right away. "Ghostkey?"

GhostKey GhostKey

 
"Hey, yep, looks like I'm echo-live and glitch-free." A miracle considering his rig was scrap-grade, patched and jury-rigged just to hold the signal together. He blinked, adjusting to the gridded nature of the starting node, low-res but a steady feed.

"They didn't wire your handle. What's your tag?" Gotta keep things clean, no names, just echoes. GhostKey's voice still marked him as a late teen, unmodulated as it was. He wondered if the other slicer had filtered his voice. Scanning his appearance, "looking spire." Cool, low-key, good look for this kind of run.

"Ready?" No point lagging. He wasn't big on waiting around. Young, keen, and masking his excitement as best he could. This job was his backdoor into the big leagues!

A holo-interface blinked into existence beside his hand, lines of translucent light sketching out the mission feed. Handshake protocols locked in, a confirmation ping echoing in their audios. The gridded environment they were in flickered, raising into a layered overlay of the Undernet's deeper sectors, a rough idea of where a trace of Shardwalker their target might be. Somewhere beneath it all, past the uncertain static, the Nullframe Abyss lurked like a signaless void.

"You syncing clean? Seeing any ways to slip by?" He scanned for back doors, entry points manifesting as floating access terminals or flickering breach gates leading to deeper more likely nodes. If the other slicer hesitated, GK wouldn't push, just offer help. He was wired and excited but didn't want to burn their shot early.

Mind to matrix in this node. They didn't control everything in here—the Undernet physics had its own rules—but they had just enough juice to inject their own code and programs, draw up their interfaces, and bring their own key jammers in to scramble the locks, maybe more if they were creative.

Saul Whesai Saul Whesai
 
The tag "Ratcatcher" flickerered to life above his virtual head. Saul trusted that he "looking spire" was a good thing. Looking hestient at the younger man's wanting to push on ahead, he sighed though his mask before nodding, getting himself mentally ready for what was to come. "Sure Kid, lets give this a try." Noting the same mission objectives that were infront of his partner, he replied with a calm voice that tried to suggest he wasn't out of his depth as he felt. "I'm syncing fine, lets get this job done."

Trying to keep his feet as their environment shifted, he glanced at their enivorment, seeing what new things opened up for them both. Looking around as the young kid talked, he saw one access panel dug into one the shifting hillsides. It was going to be a climb to get there. Pointing it out to Ghostkey, he said. "Looks like its going to be a climb..." Walking up to the cliffface, he started to climb up the front of the hill. Thankfully, it would be a short climb up to the access nod, but as he grunted with the effort of trying to get to the next area, he could only hope that the next area would be easier.

GhostKey GhostKey
 
"Looks like we're stack walkin' Ratcatcher," GK decided, blind to the fact that his crewmate was just as green in the stack, gripping a gridded ledge of raw code as the system hummed around them. The deeper they climbed, the more he felt his footing slip—gaps in the architecture like corrupted fragments, execution core threads looping in on themselves to error routines. A lag-spike brought him to a stop for a nano "Yo! Getting delay. Latency spiking, lock my sync-line. Seeing any code fragmentation?" "He ran a stabilizer pass on the other slicer just in case, a precaution they weren't in deep yet.

Ghostkey didn't see any fragmentation, but he wasn't exactly an expert at reading the deep undernet layers. He pulled himself up alongside the other slicer toward the terminal, eyes lifting up toward a door of compressed light, faint from here, twisting in and out of legible connection.

"See it?" he pinged, tagging the data elevator to a higher rez—a tower of glowing lines, compressing and decompressing streams of pulsing data endlessly. Not a pleasant ride—getting scrambled in the stream was not comfortable, but it was fast and more importantly, quiet.

He redoubled his grip on the fractured grid-ledge, his voice finding processing time threaded through the digital weave of their environment. "Pickin' up anything outbound on the terminal?" Wondering if it would lead them where they needed, could be a misdirect or dead end just as easy.

Saul Whesai Saul Whesai
 
Its was hard to understand GK's terms that he was using but he got the general ghist of things. He felt himself slipping like his partner was but all he could do was keep going. They were taking a chance that he hoped would work out.

As they came along the terminal, Saul could only nod as they came along the stream of pulsing data. It was a maginfientic sight, tons of data streaming past his eyes. He sinked everything in abit before coming back to the situation at hand. Looking at the data flow's destintion via the terminal, he saw that it went exactly where they needed to go, the next area. "It seems geniune... I guess we will have to see for ourselves." And with that he stepped into the datastream, closing his eyes as his body turned to light streaming across the Undernet.

GhostKey GhostKey
 
Ratcatcher signaled clean and GK exhaled, hoping the other slicer was watching his link the same way he was covering Rats. GK's Denon street slang was heavy, trying harder than he needed to. Just a kid from Kashyyyk's forests, way out of his element, hiding it behind Denonese and tech-speak. Bytegods willing the other slicer wouldn't notice. Not that Clicker, their Keyrunner, hired legends. He hired hungry hands, not known ones.

Climbing the stacks, literally, the Undernet's layers, GK pulled himself to the elevator. His sync flickered once but held. Minimal loss, or so he told himself. At least Ratcatcher's signal looked clean. Endless data towers stretched beyond his view and the doorway was a touch away.

He pressed a hand to the stream and derezzed, unravelling into compressed lines of code. Data injected, pulled through the elevator's interface. His T-link flared, the scrap-tier rig nearly sparking hard enough to fry his neurons. His vision fractured, scrambled lines washing over his HUD before the node fully rendered into view.

He blinked back into existence.

"Forcesakes, I hate scramble lines." GK shook his head, letting his system resync, the pain in his forehead dulled. He scanned the environment, syncing to the next node.

"We get in clean? Anything ride the stream with us?"




The Stacktower Node

Not as gridded, more electrical, and illuminating in appearance. The Stacktower Node screamed corpo code, built by standardized limited AIs but abandoned, rewritten, or sliced into something else. A floating metropolis of glowing skyscrapers stretched out like a circuit board, data-lights pulsing with preprogrammed cycles. The corridors between them shifted, code rewriting itself but not at random. There was a pattern.

"Corpo-drones, whatever," he muttered. Looked a little insulted to be slumming it in some forgotten data-maze, even if corpo fingers hadn't pressed a key in cycles.

"You seeing it?" He pinged a corridor where pathways flickered at odd ticks, signal distorted the code hard. Something was masking the route. "Either the system's collapsing there, or someone wants it to look that way."

Follow the pattern and risk a trap, or force a new route and deal with whatever called this node home?

Saul Whesai Saul Whesai
 
Letting out a slight groan as the pixels of his body came back together, Saul checked over himself and his gear to make sure everything was alright. Thankfully, his aftermarket rig could handle the stress of the jump. "Yeah... This wasn't my favorite thing either, but we seem to have gotten through scot-free for now."

Looking ahead, Saul almost lost his breath. Not being the seasoned runner that GK was, all that was for him was a fantastic light show. He did notice their route disappearing in front of them. Some bug must have made this place it's nest. "Want to take the chance and follow along? I don't think we want to get jumped this early on." They would likely need all their tricks for later during this job.

GhostKey GhostKey
 
Undernet Deeper Layers
The Stacktower Node
Tag
Saul Whesai Saul Whesai

Follow along! Ratcatcher was either a good guesser or learning who Ghostkey really was fast. The glowing form of his avatar flashed a wide grin. Route one all the way.

"Straight through Rats. 'Sides, what's the worst a corpo can cook up? Red tape?"

Felt like a bad idea to voice that. Bad bad idea.

He rolled his shoulders, or at least, the digital equivalent of running a test, before setting off through the glowing circuit grid, careful not to step on any signal running too bright below. Get lost in the noise and static, and you risked a desync or another scrambled headache. Hacker's hopscotch, hoppers in a VR maze, with corridors shifting, and floors rewriting themselves underfoot.

He tried to line up his data track, a slicer's attempt to chart clean routes through unstable code, set against the patterns ahead. But as they neared the distortion, it clicked.

Too late.

ByteL.jpg

Byte Leech.

Self-replicating parasites, nibbling through processing power like hungry mice or womprats on the power cables. Every access cycle strained the node, costing memory and bandwidth. The more they loaded in, the worse it rendered. Flickering distorted walls collapsed into signal voids at the edge.

Ghostkey winced. "Got anything to...." he pointed a finger like a gun at the literal bugs, "....flush em out? Lock them in place, burn them or jam the signal?"

Or clean this bugged-out mess up before we crash out and derezz!
 
GK would see his face twist as he mentioned, "What's the worst a corpo could cook up?". He could have said it himself but decided against it. The less he told about his past, the less people would find issues with it. The last thing they needed was for his running partner to think he was some corp spy.

Hopping after his partner among the shifting glowing walls of the cyberweb, Saul was wondering what else was running this maze with them. The mission packet had said there would possibly be other runners to be after the same target. It was impossible not to feel like they were being watched, but soon they would have bigger things to think about.

Seeing the problem as they came to a stop, Saul only nodded as he flipped through the programming deck in his UI. Pressing the button with a Swordsman symbol, he generated a giant figure of a Warrior with dual swords. Within moments, it ran towards the targets, slicing the Leeches to pixels as his program debugged the passage ahead. As long as the Leeches didn't overwhelm his creation, they should be in the clear. What he was more concerned about what or who this action would draw in.

samurai-cyborg-cyberpunk-style-cartoon-character-illustration_132871-180.jpg
 
Undernet Deeper Layers
The Stacktower Node
Deep in the Code Maze
Tag:
Saul Whesai Saul Whesai

Clever debug routine on the leeches; GK had to admit, he liked the style.

"Choice program! Code it yourself? Didn't even see it coming."

Saul was probably already moving ahead while Ghostkey was too busy admiring the show. But yep, those bugs had been left there for cleanup, a possum.

EchoNull.jpg

A glitching specter of scrambled code fragments stepped out of a hidden backdoor, its form flickering between stolen user avatars and raw error messages. Rogue program? AI? GK couldn't tell at a glance.

"What the frag is that supposed to be?" He blinked. "Nano-sec, running a trace."

The specter raised its hands, and immediately, the terrain began to shift. Corridors collapsed into dead ends and pathways reformed themselves.

"Fast!" Ghostkey urged, sprinting toward the nearest solid structure, something stable to shelter in while they worked out a plan. Then everything stut….stut….stuttered to a stop.

Several copies of their avatars flickered into existence throughout the maze. Turning quickly, GK realized he couldn't tell who was real, and neither could the rogue program. So it stopped too. Was this another trap, or had someone just saved their asses?

"Hey Rats! Where you at?" Multiple versions of Ghostkey shouted at once. Not helpful. "Uh this node is giving me brain lag." Hearing himself speak in chorus was fragged six ways from static.

Now what? Find the real exit, find each other, or neutralize the code fragment ahead. Which Ghost didn't have name for yet, so he just made one up, an Echo-Null, an Echo-ID that didn't exist, maybe Null-Echo, hmm think on that one later.
 
Well, at least he was leaving a good impression. Saul didn't have time to dwell on GK's smile before he saw the form too, it looking to home as some specter. Given their target, this could mean they were getting closer to him with all this weirdness popping up, or something really bad was happening. Both were... concerning... "Something that isn't supposed to be here!"

The Android did the same as Ghostkey, gripping onto another wall as the room shifted around them. Trying to keep his balance, he looked around as he tried to figure out how to kill that thing. It was then that the room stopped spinning, and he was able to get his feet, only to hear the Avaters copy him as he called out, "GK! Where did you land?!" Changing his display name into a different font and color so his partner would know the real him. If he could find him, that is.

Once they had regrouped, he made his choice on which plan of action they should take. "We need to slide through here. Something bigger is going on than meets the eye. I don't want to attack that thing directly and see how scary that code monster is up close."

GhostKey GhostKey
 
Undernet Deeper Layers
The Stacktower Node
Deep in the Code Maze
Tag:
Saul Whesai Saul Whesai

Rats updated himself on the fly—clever. Ghostkey did the same, borrowing some of his friend Sickle's neon green so his alias was more readable. It worked a little too well—Echo-Null noticed. So GK hurried to back Ratcatcher up in the confusion.

Weaving through the avatars was like pushing against a crowd moving the wrong way. With their separation from the copies, the fakes moved on their own now—or something else was pulling the strings. It waited until GK linked back up with Rat, and then all the copies snapped to their appearance again. Perfect cover. But for who?

"Yeah, looks sketchy. Might trip it into something worse. Even more glitchy than it renders here, I bet." Dropping a command like /set: variable terrain_attack: Source was an option, but interfacing with that mess? No thanks. He wasn't about to make things worse. Not always the reckless street-rat.

"Got an idea, hang tight."

Coding faster than a Jawa's speed-dating dialogue would flatline, he injected his own override. A small cube appeared, and tethers plugged itself into the nodes floor, translucent, snaking into the code. Despite looking fancy, taking control of the copies… was easier than it should have been.

"Feels off, ain't right." For a nano-sec he was channeling Juju the bad-feeling, bad-omen girl on their crew.

Some of the fakes charged at Echo-Null—doing exactly nothing since they were just phantoms. But others ran for a door. That got its attention. The null spectre turned, processing in hesitation for a moment before following. As it moved, it left behind traces of processing cycles in each step, littered like imprinted footprints. Code copies, glitching memory leaks, maybe something useful.

GK's illuminated avatar turned toward Saul, eyes flashing an idea like the bright node around them.

"Rats those footprints, they're leaking data. You pulling anything useful?" Like where the best door out of here was! Maybe the one it was trying to guard. Or how to nullify the null out of the equation, maybe the origin point of the Echo-Null, so he could jam the signal. Didn't have many ticks before it realised what was going on. Ball was in rats court No pressure!
 
AIn't right was pretty much the sum of things as Saul watched his partner work. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't natural. The android was impressed though by the quality of his fellow runners work. He made taking control of the phantoms look easy and he could appriate a profession at work as well as anyone.

Nodding at GK's request, Saul pulled his own cube out of thin air, the data flowed through the interface and wires of his setup into his hooked up brain. He controlled the data flow, and while he was unable to find the origin point, he was able to find a exit door that was thankfully in the oppisite direction of where that Null was being lead. Hopefully it would stay in it's corner while they got out of here. "There, follow me." With that, he tried to run along the lines of the maze to the door and trying to exit through the node, hoping the Null didn't follow them.

GhostKey GhostKey
 
The Echo-Null did something strange, well, stranger than usual.

For a cycle, its surface glitched, turning into a fragmented GhostKey lookalike before changing again, this time replicating Saul's anti-byte leech swordsman. The corrupted copy jerked and stuttered mid-swing, a laggy shadowed mimic, bugged-out, half-coded, still functional... until it froze. Stop. Start. Stop... Start.

As they turned to run, the Echo-Null cut through their decoys, reducing them to bursts of chaotic light with its sword. Then it reformed, locked onto them, and lunged forward, parsing in rapid bursts of speed.

Closer... and closer.

"Let's go!" No time to second-guess. GhostKey dove headfirst into the open jumpgate, trusting Ratcatcher was right behind him.



System Transfer Point: Undernet Sub-Domain

For a second, the jump stretched him out, Ghost's avatar dissolving into thin wireframe lines. Broken packets of cut-and-pasted code drifted past, remnants left turning over forever in the deeper layers. The system lagged, then finally rendered the new node.



The Shardwalker's Node

An empited out corporate vault, repurposed into a digital refuge. Dim red light pulsed through ancient pillars of code, mimicking a beating heart. Encrypted scripts turned around them, fragments of old transactions and long-ended protocols. At the node's center, a dark figure stood, made of broken firewall fragments and stolen memory segments. The Shardwalker, his presence weighty even with his ghostly form.

GhostKey's avatar was dimmed here, but still visible up close, like much of the node.

"Easy, yeah?"
He tapped Saul's shoulder, a quick ping to his companion, but back in the real world, he was sweating.

GK laughed, stepping forward—

THUZZZZZZZZ

A giant red firewall rezzed into existence, running into their avatars like a physical wall.

"ERROR 804: UNAUTHORIZED. ACCESS DENIED."


A taunting ping probably flashed in Saul's interface "Wrong place, time, and side, Ratcatcher." Rival slicers. The same cocky attitude Ghost had gave that away. But Ghost was caught in a loop, walking over and over into the wall, it was all on Rats! Sound familiar?

Saul Whesai Saul Whesai
 
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This... Echo-null was something else... something that he hoped to never deal with again. Something that could change a construct's code in an instant, now that was something to be feared. The thought as he jumped through the door was the he was glad he would never have to see something like it again.

Saul was looking around at the floating fragments of code when Ghostkey got caught, making sure they were dormant. It was the only reason he hadn't been caught up with him against the firewall. Look before you leap, and with the final destination, there was every reason that it could be a trap. With a lot of swearing going on his head as he quickly got moving, popping a speed hack that made him shoot forward like a lightning bolt, while a silver shield shrounding his body as he ran head first into and hopefully though the firewall, hoping his homemade shield program would protect him for long enough to get him through. He needed to get out of the Killzone, that much was sure. Then he could figure out whose brain he had to deactivate.

GhostKey GhostKey
 

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