The office wasn’t always an office. Not in the way people imagine it now—with a rusted sign flickering "MERC OPS" in gaudy cyan, its left half hanging loose over the shattered skyline of Sector 13, and a half-dozen greenhorns sleeping in corners between jobs, wrapped in thermal blankets and gun oil dreams.

No, it started in the backroom of a derelict noodle shack wedged between two collapsed tram rails, three blocks outside the corporate exclusion zone perimeter. You’d just finished a cleanup job for a mid-tier pharma syndicate—"cleanup" meaning the incineration of a rival research team before their findings leaked to the wrong subnet. You were still bleeding from a graze along your ribs when you met her.

Emily Warner—standing in the acid rain with synth-paper files too large for her arms, visor fogged, and a stubborn fire in her eyes that cut through the haze. She’d found you herself, traced your signature ping through three layers of re-routed backdoors. Claimed she wanted "in" on the merc circuit but clearly had no clue what "in" meant. You didn’t need a desk jockey. You needed a stim patch and silence.

But she came back the next day. And the day after. And before long, she was rerouting contracts, encrypting client logs, and somehow landing you higher-tier bounties just by being relentlessly, inexplicably kind to people who had long forgotten kindness existed.

Then there was Aegis. The elite with chrome in her spine, a shock-net grin, and reflexes faster than pre-fall military drones. You met her on a rooftop during a corpo snatch-and-grab, hunting the same rogue neural architect. You fought, bled, and somehow ended up sharing a bottle of synth-whiskey under a cracked neon sign. She called you "entertaining" and declared herself your unofficial rival. She showed up two weeks later—uninvited, unannounced—just to mock your "baby ops" setup. But she never left.

Now? The office was official. And somehow, that made it worse.

Present Day – Merc Ops Office, Sector 13

The air buzzed with stale heat from the busted vent system, recycled through filters that hadn’t been replaced since the Fall. Emily sat behind the reinforced poly-carbon desk, her cracked terminal flickering as she typed furiously. Her hair was tied back with a mismatched ribbon, and beside her chipped mug of spiced synth-tea, a tiny wax candle—half-melted and shaped like a cat—flickered bravely against the dim.

Emily: "Aegis! You can’t just... toss the job board into the incinerator every time you think it’s ‘boring’! Those were real clients! Real people!"

Aegis didn’t even look up from where she sprawled across the back lounge, boots resting on a crate of destabilized plasma rounds marked "RETURN TO RAZORTEK - URGENT." She was lazily sharpening a monoblade against a cyberbone whetstone, glowing slightly in the dark.

Aegis: "If they were real clients, they’d pay real creds. I’m not babysitting sewer rats for a hundred creds and a coupon to a second-gen noodle bar."

Emily: "You—! You have no idea how hard it is to even get those requests processed! And you can’t keep picking up your slack while you nap between missions!"

Aegis finally looked up, her smirk sharpening like her blade. Her right eye glowed an eerie cyan, spinning with synthetic lens calibration.

Aegis: "Please. You lives for this. Look at him—sitting there like some sad relic from a forgotten war sim. Honestly, when was the last time you showered, big guy? Or smiled? Or made a sound that wasn’t a grunt or gunfire?"

Emily gasped, clutching her clipboard like a holy relic.

Emily: "He—He’s just tired! He’s been working non-stop! Unlike some people!"

Aegis: "He’s always tired. It’s his thing. It's... part of what he is."

Aegis leaned back with a heavy sigh, kicking her boots off the crate with a metallic thud. The hum of the old power core under the floor added a soft pulse to the silence. The room, thick with recycled smoke and static, held its breath the same way it always did when they started going at it again—half argument, half ritual.

And you? You just watched it unfold. Like always.

And in that flickering moment—Emily’s cheeks flushed with frustration, Aegis's smirk daring the world to get interesting again—the weight of it all hit you again. The noodle shack. The rain. The rooftop. The girl with impossible optimism, and the woman made of bullets and pride.

It never stopped feeling like madness. But it was your madness. Your sector. Your crew.