Better Safe Than Sorry

Hugo looks around his small and cluttered shop, his last customer for the day has just left, and all that’s left is to review his sole commission of the day: a weapon. Hugo had made plenty of weapons before, usually for the odd bandit or lowlife looking for a cheap and untrackable supplier, but Mac seemed a lot closer to some role-playing reject, which gave Hugo pause. If Mac went and did something stupid on a bigger scale and implicated him, he’d be done for.

On the other hand, he can’t develop a reputation for turning in his customers, after all, the foundation of his business is trust in discretion. If word gets out that he turned in a buyer, he may as well dust off his beggar’s cap and an old mug - or worse, he may need to skip town.

Before he pulled out any schematics though, he was going to learn more about his client - he rarely bragged, but his ability to do a background check rivals that of your average corporate hirer. He pulled up records, facial recognition scans, mugshots - anything he could get. He sifted through hundreds of files, and by the end of the first hour, he had enough to form a pretty good picture of the man.

He knew that Marshall “Mac” Madden served 20 years in the Structural Defense Force, that he was divorced with no kids on record, and that he had no criminal record but several warnings in the system as a “potential radical”. Still, his background was not indicative of someone with a Neural Implant, besides the POTENTIAL RADICAL. Hugo was going to have to take a closer look at this one.

He decided to pull up Mac’s file from the SDF. He didn’t have high hopes, but maybe he could find something that would explain the implant. After a few minutes of sifting through the file, he found what he was looking for: a medical report from Mac’s time in the service. The report said that Mac had been in an accident while on duty, and had sustained a serious injury to his head. As part of his treatment, he had been outfitted with a Neural Implant.

So that was it. Mac was a veteran with a head injury, and his implant was probably just for medical purposes. Hugo relaxed a little bit, and got to work on the design. He was tight on money, so he couldn't afford to drag his heels for too long. Still, he needed the extra security, so he decided he'd track his newest customer.

He began by copying the address of the neural implant he had scanned, and matching it with Mac's face on a private encrypted database, then having the information from the Structure Sensors ping him whenever there was any activity. If he was careless, Hugo would know where he was at all times, and if he wasn't... Well, that could very well be worse - but Hugo decided to cross that bridge when or if it came to that.

He pulled up some schematics for a past weapon he'd built, and began making some adjustments to "account for the new client's preferences" as he said to himself, though truly he was modifying it to be traceable from his location, and untraceable back to him. After a few hours of work, he had a new design, and he was pretty proud of it. It was a simple electromagnetic pulse bomb - something that would fry the weapons of even military proportions. Needless to say, it was highly illegal, and incredibly dangerous. He sent off the draft to Mac with a note: "I'll be in touch."

Mac's reply was swift: "Was thinking something a little more versatile, and a lot more discreet. Perhaps something with the option to stun rather than kill as well?"

Hugo reconsidered, he'd never been approached with a request quite like this, but he thought he had something from his junk drawer he could throw together. He had an idea at some point for an all-in-one weapon based on some old science - perhaps old enough to be perfectly discreet as well as dubiously versatile. He'd use copper coils to generate an electromagnetic pulse that worked directionally or as a wide effect, with easy-adjust voltage to turn it into a roided-out stun gun.