Chapter 12: Evelyn Saved

A/N: Here's the new Chapter! Which also means the next four chapters are up on my for early access as well as the chance to vote on the direction of the story!

Evelyn POV~

-x-X-x-

It wasn’t quite accurate to say that Evelyn Parker ‘woke up’. The initial attack had driven her unconscious, but that was purely from the immediate explosion of pain originating from the location of her Doll Chip. She’d actually come back to consciousness rather quickly after that, just in time for the client she’d been working with to come back into the room with Clouds’ security.

Unfortunately, waking up then hadn’t done her any good, because she’d not been able to do or say anything. She’d been trapped in her own body, and in many ways, trapped in her own mind as well. Her every thought had been muddy, her recollections of the proceeding events more than a little… spotty.

She remembered enough though. She was aware for enough. Clouds’ security had dragged her into the back, where Oswald Forrest, aka Woodman, had looked her over and tried to reboot her Doll Chip. The caretaker of Clouds’ main ‘product’, aka dolls like Evelyn, had done the equivalent of trying to turn her off and on again for a couple of hours before throwing up his hands in the air and shrugging like it wasn’t his problem.

Then, he’d had her transported to his office where he could ‘figure out what to do with her’. Evelyn had known there was nothing good about any of that, especially when she’d heard him muttering under his breath about removing her from the system… Clouds’ system, no doubt.

Things were starting to look rather dire when he’d pulled down his zipper, but before the inevitable could come to pass, rescue had arrived. Trapped in her own body, delirious from the pain and muddled thoughts, Evelyn had found herself saved by Judy and V of all people. Woodman had died, and they’d extracted her from Clouds with no one the wiser, like some sort of Spec Ops Team.

After that, they’d brought her here… to a ripperdoc. Evelyn hadn’t been conscious for all of it, but she’d been conscious enough to know what was happening. And she was certainly cognizant enough to hear the ripperdoc say that her Doll Chip was unsalvageable, as well as Judy telling him to remove it and help her.

And thus was the procedure done, and Evelyn freed of her own fleshy prison. Her body, which hadn’t responded to her for hours, comes under her control once again, her fingers and toes twitching as she slowly regains the ability to move. A sheet has been draped over her to provide her modesty, but she’s not alone, with Judy by her side perking up when she sees Evelyn start shifting.

“Ev?”

Of course, this particular ripperdoc doesn’t so much have a clinic as he has an underground garage, so hearing Judy’s voice also causes the doc and V to turn. While the ripperdoc stays back, V walks over, the mercenary gazing down at her from over Judy’s shoulder with an unreadable look in his eye.

Evelyn’s lips press tightly together for a moment before she wets them and tries to speak, only for nothing but a raspy cough to come out. Fuck, she’s parched.

“Water! You need water!”

Judy quickly gets her a drink, and a straw is placed against Evelyn’s lips that she’s quick to suck from. She drinks deeply and steadily for a few long moments before pushing the bottle away. Truthfully, she doesn’t know what to feel right now. Gratitude? Obviously. But it’s overshadowed by fear, and that fear twists itself up into outrage.

Part of her wants to tell Judy that she had no right having Evelyn’s doll chip removed without her consent. But she knows how ridiculous that would sound coming out of her mouth. Especially after they just risked their lives to save her. But then, how had they even known? Was Judy spying on her? A frown spreads across Evelyn’s face at that thought, and she looks to her longtime friend, suddenly suspicious.

“Did you… bug me, Judy? Hack my chrome? How did you even know I needed help?”

Judy blinks, clearly not expecting suspicion and outrage right out the gate. But then, if she wasn’t expecting that, she didn’t know Evelyn as well as she thought she did. After a moment though, Judy shakes her head.

“No… I… I wouldn’t have even known you were in t-trouble if it wasn’t for V…”

Evelyn switches her gaze to V, staring at him somewhat incredulously. What? This wet behind the ears merc had somehow lowjacked her? But the V that looks back at her isn’t the V she met before the complete mess that was Konpeki Plaza. That V had been competent enough, but still incredibly green. Eager to leave his mark on the world, but inexperienced enough to actually say he would consider her offer to cut Dexter DeShawn out and work with her directly.

Of course, that ‘consideration’ hadn’t panned out for any of them, had it? Everyone involved in that mess except for Evelyn and V were now dead. And the people she’d been trying to double cross, who had hired her to scope out Yorinobu’s suite in the first place, had clearly tracked the heist back to her and decided she needed to be ‘cleaned up’ as well.

Rather than answer the unasked accusation in Evelyn’s eyes about how he’d known she was even in trouble, V just stares her down for a long moment before tilting his head to the side.

“You should be in the clear now, so long as you keep your head down. I would think I don’t have to say this but knowing you Evelyn… DON’T try to get a new doll chip. Even if you hide your true identity, it’ll almost certainly get back to Them.”

Evelyn stiffens up at that. She hears the capitalization in the word ‘Them’ and knows beyond a shadow of a doubt in that moment that V knows about the Voodoo Boys. Does he know everything though? Does it matter? Before Evelyn could muster up a response, the ripperdoc that had removed her ruined doll chip pipes up.

“Even if you weren’t talking about having to go into hiding, I wouldn’t recommend ever installing another doll chip. That virus that the kid removed from your systems was nasty as all hell and left behind lasting damage. The rest of your chrome might have survived this time, mostly on account of the speed with which you were brought to me, but the virus didn’t go down easily… your body will almost certainly reject the implementation and activation of another doll chip.”

Evelyn stares for a second at the ripperdoc, before quietly revising her opinion of him up a few notches. On the one hand, this place was one of the shittier clinics she’d ever been in. On the other hand, this man clearly knew his thing. And yet…

“Doll work is all I’ve ever done. Now that my… alternative has fallen through, that was all I had. What am I supposed to do?”

Judy answers that, reaching under the sheet to grab ahold of one of Evelyn’s hands and give it a squeeze.

“You still have me, Ev. We’ll figure things out. I’ve got your back; you know I do.”

For a moment, a rather vicious thought runs through Evelyn’s mind about how this was everything Judy had ever wanted, so of course SHE was happy. But she manages to bite her tongue and not say that out loud. Instead, she turns her head to V, not actually responding to Judy’s offer… but also not taking her hand out of the techie’s either.

“Is it even safe for me to be around Judy? You say I should be in the clear now… but how? If you know who did this to me, how can you possibly say I’m in the clear?”

V tilts his head to the side at that, and again Evelyn is struck by just how… experienced he now looks. She’d glossed over it back in Judy’s little lair the night that Konpeki had gone tits up, but now she has more of a chance to observe the kid and… he’s not a kid anymore. Was he ever?

“Because Woodman did us the favor of deleting you from Clouds’ systems before croaking. Some reworking of the camera footage outside of Clouds’ back entrance has not only made it seem like we were never there, but also firmly put your fate in the hands of a rather notorious group of Scavs. And with your doll chip removed and the trail going cold, the natural assumption is that the Scavs did what they do best and rendered you down for parts.”

Judy’s hand suddenly squeezes Evelyn’s hand so tightly that it actually hurts. But she barely notices that, because she’s too busy shuddering over imagining such a fate. It’s not very difficult truth be told… selling her limp body off to Scavs after making use of her for his own pleasure for a while sounds exactly like something Woodman might do to ‘cut his losses’. Fuck.

“Anyways, I’m heading out. Vik, you can go ahead and put this on my tab.”

“You just got done paying that down, V.”

Before the mercenary can respond, Judy speaks up.

“I’ll pay for it. You’ve done a lot already, V. Thank you.”

V pauses for a moment, having already made his way to the garage’s exit. Finally, he nods and then departs without another word. Evelyn watches him go, feeling a strange sort of wonder, like she was just in the wake of a giant or something. The last several hours felt like a surreal nightmare… but the absence of her doll chip makes it all too real. This was her life now. Her new reality.

She wishes she could deny Judy’s charity, tell her that she would handle things… but Evelyn doesn’t have to even look at her bank account to know she can’t afford that. In the end, when Judy gives her hand another comforting squeeze and smiles at her, Evelyn just has to smile back, even as a shiver runs down her spine at just how close she’d come.

Night City loved to snatch people up, chew on them, and sometimes, very rarely, spit them back out. But most of the time it just swallows them whole. Evelyn Parker had just avoided the latter option by the skin of her teeth, through no action of her own. She’d been spared a truly grisly fate… and yet, she really didn’t know how to feel about it all the same.

-x-X-x-

“She’s going to be okay because of you, V. A good deed if I’ve ever seen one.”

As V leaves Vik’s behind with Alt by his side, visibly only to him, he contemplates the events of the past several hours.

“Heh, I suppose.”

In the original timeline, Evelyn Parker’s fate had been far more gruesome, as he’d somewhat outlined to Judy in the form of a hypothetical. So gruesome, in fact, that he’d never stopped to consider the Voodoo Boys’ actions before. That first time around, their virus had been allowed to rampage through Evelyn’s systems unchecked and undeterred for days… no, not days, for WEEKS.

Except, it hadn’t killed her even then. It clearly hadn’t been made to kill her. Instead, it’d shut down her systems, leaving her trapped and a prisoner in her own head. After that, she’d been passed around like an actual doll, first used by Woodman, than by Fingers, and finally by those Scavs who had scrolled horrifying, grotesque XBDs with her before V and Judy had finally arrived to save her.

Only, there wasn’t enough of Evelyn left to save by that point, was there? Judy had clearly managed to wipe the virus out of Evelyn’s systems with her own skills in the original timeline, and the moment Evelyn got control of her own body back, she’d offed herself.

This time around, Evelyn had only suffered from the virus for a few hours before they’d arrived and Alt had been able to purge it completely from her systems. That was probably why she was able to get off so cheaply, with only the doll chip as a casualty. Evelyn might not see it that way, but frankly she had gotten off extremely light here.

And yet… in both cases, the Voodoo Boys had never actually tried to kill her. Cripple her, yes. Make an example of her… maybe. But could it be? Could the true purpose of the attack on Evelyn have been… bait?

“You think that the Voodoo Boys only went after Evelyn to draw you to them in the first place, so that they could get to the chip and Johnny, in order to eventually get to me.”

V tilts his head to the side in wordless agreement with Alt’s statement. The beautiful blonde frowns at that, crossing her arms over her chest as they keep walking.

“If that is the case, then it means they won’t stop coming, V.”

Yeah. Which was the other reason that V had told Evelyn she didn’t have to worry anymore. Because he was going to have to go to the Pacifica Voodoo Boys either way, and probably going to have to kill Maman Brigitte and all of her people, just to shut that shit down.

… From what he remembered, Brigitte had personally hacked Evelyn’s doll chip and sent the virus that trapped her in her own head. Sometime after that, possibly days, possibly weeks, a NetWatch Agent would be caught mapping out the Voodoo Boys’ data fortress in Pacifica for the purposes of shutting it down.

In being caught, he would hit Brigitte and her second with black ICE, freezing them and trapping them on the Net, thoroughly weakening the Voodoo Boys and leaving them under the command of the racist, Outsider-Hating Placide. Which explained why Maman Brigitte had never followed up on hunting V down after hacking Evelyn.

If V just waited for that to happen, the Voodoo Boys would be far weaker. He could also team up with NetWatch to deal with them all a lot faster. On the other hand, there might be a world where he could take the Voodoo Boys out before NetWatch ever had a chance to get involved.

The orders were probably already sent, the NetWatch Agent likely already in the city… but V had a rapidly closing window where he could deal with the Voodoo Boys himself, even if it would probably be a lot harder than waiting a bit longer.

“Heh, not going to try and negotiate with them, V?”

V snorts at Alt, knowing she’s not serious. He didn’t necessarily hate the Voodoo Boys as a whole, but both Placide and Brigitte could choke on a dick and die as far as he was concerned.

After all was said and done, he’d killed them all in the original timeline… and he’d do so again here, one way or another.

[ ] Go after them immediately before NetWatch gets set up and deal with them by himself - 23%

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