writer & aspiring artist. feel free to send asks or tag me in things regardless of whether we're mutuals. tech enthusiast interested in cyberpunk worldbuilding. avid lover of nuance.
#heart-thief valentine
valentine myśliwiec | 33 | corpo techie | nonbinary (she/he/they)
former Arasaka employee with complicated feelings about the company that molded her and then tossed her out. loyal enough to help Takemura accomplish his goals and cynical enough not to trust any of Hanako's promises. skilled in getting things done but not in combat. willing to help anybody but herself.
#the damn things overlap
longfic covering the game's events from Valentine's POV after doing Hellman's and Evelyn's quests in Act 2, with some canon divergence and a vastly accelerated timeline. caught between her determination to help Takemura in his plan for revenge and her decision to let Johnny have her body, all the while avoiding the question of her future, which is growing shorter by the day. a story about becoming a martyr, the dangers of success, and the art of avoiding difficult problems.
ships:
#twin human highway flares - goro/valentine
#a pair of open graves - johnny/valentine (neither romantic or platonic but some secret third thing)
#nothing gold can stay - abernathy/valentine
smut fics:
the binds that tie
valentine ties up and soft doms goro
everything where it belongs
valentine/goro domestic fluff with a dash of forbidden relationship
when her edges soften
johnny/valentine post-game bonding activities. combative. homoerotic. johnny is borrowing a body based on a deal that clouds made with alt while valentine is back working at arasaka.
cwe 755 - improper handling of exceptional conditions
victoria/valentine corpos vying for control at work. what if the relic could be used for some... recreational stimulation?
thread-safe
valentine/goro au where everything is worse. goro refused all of valentine's advances and pined from a distance. after a stint back at arasaka, she fled with johnny, kerry, rogue, and alt to las vegas. goro is sent to retrieve her. contains two story branches based on whether he succeeds.
see all my cyberpunk fics here on ao3
other tags of note:
#cyberpunk meta
#felix talks tech
wip wednesday
#art!!
#my art
#my fic
and of course:
#felix is a hater : when I get annoyed at cyberpunk worldbuilding
last note: I do have most virtual photography filtered, because quite a large percentage of it has people looking into the camera or close-ups on faces and having so much of it on my dash was stressful and exhausting. If you are a mostly vp-focused blog I may not follow or may be low on interactions, and that's why. It's nothing personal– unfortunately this is the best solution I've found to keep myself sane. If we're mutuals feel free to show me stuff or tag me if you'd like me to take a look at something cool :) And thank you to all who have tagged things as #eye contact cw or #scopophobia because I do like to peek at things from my mutuals from time to time and its helpful to know what I'm in for.
I want a video game with realistic dick and balls physics not for any prurient reason, but... okay, so you know how in some games with boob physics, there's a palpable delay after a character model is instantiated before physics start to apply to the boobs, so it's like *pop* ... *FWOMP*? I want to see the cock version of that. Penis-having character spawns in, there's a beat, then the physics engine tries to play catch-up and applies a full second of gravitational acceleration to their junk all at once and they just randomly start helicoptering.
most people who know me know I don't really watch things (movie or tv) because I don't generally have the attention span, but documentaries are one of the exceptions and lately I've been getting into YT essayists and enjoying listening to different perspectives and interests and also pop culture analysis of things I've never heard of because I live under a rock, and all this to say I really enjoyed this video by Lani's Lens where she talks about the feeling that I've been struggling with recently, which is what feels like a current societal obsession with morality coming up against the fact that people seem to be struggling more with critical analysis:
tucks hair behind ear so sierra destroys herself in the end for nothing u say????? if you'd ever want to tell us about that... 👉👈👀
ohohohohoho tamber tamber tamber... I'm very glad u asked because since reblogging that post I've been working on finally getting the lore behind this out there!!! Sierra destroying herself for nothing is essentially the entire crux of SRINC... >:) (buckle up, it's a long one!!)
in the beginning, she's a low-level media writing trashy gossip columns and reviewing cheesy BDs for WNS. she hates it. she wants to be a real, hard-hitting journalist, an investigative journalist who can really make a difference in people's lives, but her editor keeps giving her boring scop articles to write. people tell her she should be thankful she's got a writing job at all and they're not just using an AI to do it.
then she's approached by Mia (aka Lucy Thackery from the Hippocratic Oath gig), a ripperdoc working for Octavio Delgado in the slums of Coronado Dam. Mia's only been working there a few months but she can already tell things are bad. the residents are incredibly sick, even by Night City standards. Mia has her suspicions, as do some of the residents, but feels her hands are tied. she starts looking for a media to investigate and find out what's going on, and she discovers Sierra, a Rancho Coronado native herself. she decides to shoot Sierra an email, who after some slight hesitation realises this could finally be her big break, and so she takes on the job — investigate the Petrochem power plant in Arroyo and confirm Mia's suspicions that the corp is illegally polluting the area and causing the unusually high rates of cancer and birth defects in the local population.
things are never that simple in Night City though.
after trying the legal route of polite emails and boardroom meetings, Sierra realises she's gonna have to play dirty. she hires a duo of mercs, Elise and Austin, as well as childhood choom Devon to do some of the more dirty work needed to get the proof she needs. the initial gig is a success, Elise and Austin manage to help get Devon into Petrochem's subnet and go digging for gold. this is when things start to go wrong.
Devon spends days jacked in to the net and swimming through troves of information, all while trying to avoid detection from Petrochem's netrunners. he's finding stuff, but none of it really seems relevant to Sierra's story. then he finds something. something called Project Canary, a project run jointly between Petrochem and Biotechnica during the 2050s and 60s. he almost pays it no mind, until he discovers somebody mentioned in it has the same surname as Sierra. didn't Sierra's dad work for Petrochem...?
Project Canary was an operation to eradicate Night City's bird population by periodically releasing increasingly deadly strains of bird flu in a bid to persuade the City Council to introduce the Avian Extermination Act. why would they want to get rid of birds? well, much like canaries in a coal mine, local bird populations were often the first signs of increased pollution in the area, and local residents were constantly pointing to sick and deformed birds and asking too many questions. Petrochem and Biotechnica decided the residents couldn't point to any birds if there weren't any around...
the majority of the scientists working on the project had no idea what it was even about. they thought they were curing bird flu, while only a select few were let in on the secret. anyone who did know the realities were kept under close watch, and any found to be at risk of jeopardising the whole thing were swiftly dealt with. one Robert Sapir was one of those listed as 'at risk', and eventually listed as 'terminated'.
Sierra's whole world starts to fall apart. after discovering the truth behind her father's death she tells her mother everything, who instead of sharing her horror and disbelief instead berates and shuns her for pedalling such nonsense. WNS think she's lost the plot too, refusing to run her story and promptly firing her. Mia and her sick patients can't believe she'd waste their time when they've already suffered enough.
then Devon is nearly flatlined by Petrochem netrunners and is forced to flee deep into the net, his physical body in stasis as it's too dangerous to jack out. meanwhile in the physical world, Petrochem agents come after Sierra, Elise and Austin, and the trio are forced to go on the run. Sierra becomes paranoid that her signature blue hair makes her easy to spot so she cuts it and stops dyeing it. she's crashing out, but Elise and Austin encourage her to become an independent media instead and offer to let her accompany them on gigs when this all blows over...
...and then Austin is killed in a firefight with Petrochem agents. Tas blames Sierra and Elise for his death and bans them from his funeral. Elise spirals, and Sierra is utterly destroyed.
hey, I couldn't help but notice you're getting crushed under a boot. that's a real bummer. I can see how it happened, though, you were doing things that get you crushed by boots. there's really no helping that--the existence of boots and the things they crush you for, I mean--but I do have some advice. I've never gotten crushed by a boot in my life, you see--not in real life. what I do is, I make a boot of my own in my head and just crush myself with it pre-emptively 24/7. and that way I never ever do anything, ever, you see? it's easy. it's incredibly easy and makes my life so much better.
another reason doing this little sidebar recap was a good idea: realizing that Abernathy and every other arasaka employee not at the parade were glued to the screen watching Smasher blast his way into the float containing Hanako, Takemura, Oda, and Some Guy Who Got Fired Last Year
if you think about it, she is exactly like saburo arasaka. betrayed cruelly! by someone she should have dealt with more harshly before they became a Real Threat. this wouldn't be a problem if she weren't such a good person who felt obliged to take responsibility for her mistakes. and this is exactly the kind of ungrateful behavior you get when someone utterly fails to appreciate all you've done for them,,,
For years she had carefully sculpted her Galatea, and then when finally faced with the embodiment of her desires, had been utterly repulsed. And who could blame her? She had kept her creation beneath her so long they would never be equals.
if you think about it, she is exactly like saburo arasaka. betrayed cruelly! by someone she should have dealt with more harshly before they became a Real Threat. this wouldn't be a problem if she weren't such a good person who felt obliged to take responsibility for her mistakes. and this is exactly the kind of ungrateful behavior you get when someone utterly fails to appreciate all you've done for them,,,
