Chapter 2: Lizzie's Sanctuary
POV: Tom
Morning in Night City arrived like a hangover—slow, painful, and impossible to ignore. Tom woke in the same alley where he'd collapsed the night before, his body stiff from sleeping on concrete but surprisingly refreshed. His chrome augmentations had apparently been busy while he slept; he could feel them humming with quiet activity beneath his skin.
The memories hit him in waves: waking up in a different world, the impossible cyberware, the fight with the Tyger Claws. Either he was having the most persistent and detailed psychotic break in medical history, or he'd somehow been transported into the world of Cyberpunk 2077.
Given that he could still taste chrome and feel electronic signals prickling at the edge of his consciousness, psychotic break was looking less likely by the hour.
Tom stood and stretched, marveling at how fluid his movements felt. His body responded with precision that belonged to someone years younger and significantly more athletic than the software engineer he remembered being. The chrome in his arms shifted and settled like sleeping cats, and when he flexed his shoulders, he could feel protective plating adjusting beneath synthetic skin.
Focus, he told himself. Shelter. Safety. Then figure out what happened.
His game knowledge kicked in with startling clarity. If this was Night City—and every detail suggested it was—then he needed to find allies. People who could offer protection while he learned to navigate this new reality.
Judy Alvarez.
The name surfaced from memory along with detailed knowledge of her personality, her skills, her location. In the game, she'd been a brilliant braindance editor working out of Lizzie's Bar. Technically proficient, politically minded, fiercely protective of her friends.
Also, if his transmigrated memories were accurate, someone who might actually help a stranger in need.
Tom made his way through Watson's maze of streets, guided by mental maps that felt eerily familiar. Every corner, every landmark, every shortcut was exactly where his game experience said it should be. The sensation was profoundly unsettling—like walking through a recurring dream made flesh.
Lizzie's Bar sat in its expected location, the pink neon facade flickering with welcoming warmth. Tom paused outside, struck by the surreal nature of what he was about to do. He was going to walk into a video game location and attempt conversation with a video game character who was apparently a real person.
She's not a character, he reminded himself. If this is real, she's a human being with her own thoughts and feelings and problems. Treat her like one.
The bar's interior was exactly as he remembered—dim lighting, cyberpunk aesthetic, the faint smell of alcohol and ozone. A few patrons nursed drinks at scattered tables, their chrome glinting in the neon ambiance. Behind the bar, a woman with distinctive tattoos and brightly colored hair was reviewing something on a tablet.
Judy Alvarez. In person. Real.
Tom approached the bar with what he hoped looked like casual confidence rather than barely controlled panic.
"You lost, stranger?" Judy didn't look up from her tablet, but her tone carried the particular wariness of someone who'd survived Night City by being suspicious of everyone.
"Maybe," Tom admitted. "New in town. Heard this was a good place for tech work."
Now she did look up, and Tom felt his breath catch. Seeing her in person was different from watching rendered animations. Her eyes held intelligence and pain in equal measure, and when she studied him, he felt like she was cataloguing every detail about his appearance, his posture, his potential threat level.
"Tech work." Her tone was flat. "What kind of tech work?"
Tom gestured vaguely, hoping he sounded knowledgeable rather than evasive. "Systems integration. Neural interfaces. Whatever needs fixing."
Judy's expression shifted slightly—still suspicious, but now curious rather than hostile. "You got experience with braindance equipment?"
"Some." It wasn't entirely a lie. His enhanced memories seemed to include technical knowledge he'd never actually learned. "Mostly hardware integration, but I can adapt."
"Adapt." She repeated the word like it meant something specific. "You got work history? References? Or you just another street kid with delusions of competence?"
Before Tom could answer, the bar's entertainment system emitted a sharp squeal of feedback. Patrons winced and several shot annoyed looks toward the source of the noise—a holo-projector that was cycling through error messages.
"Shit," Judy muttered, setting down her tablet. "Third time this week. System's on its last legs."
Tom found himself moving before his conscious mind caught up. "Mind if I take a look?"
Judy raised an eyebrow but gestured toward the malfunctioning equipment. Tom approached the projector and placed his hand on the control interface.
The sensation was instant and overwhelming. Electronic systems flooded his consciousness like water through a broken dam—power flow, data streams, error logs, diagnostic protocols. The projector's problems were immediately obvious: corrupted drivers, failing memory modules, and a cascade of minor errors that had accumulated into major system failure.
Without thinking, Tom's will pressed against the machine's software architecture. Corrupt files repaired themselves. Memory errors cleared. Driver conflicts resolved. The diagnostic cascade halted and reversed.
The squealing stopped. The error messages vanished. The projector hummed back to life with perfect clarity.
Tom pulled his hand away and turned to find Judy staring at him.
"How did you do that?"
"I..." Tom struggled for an explanation that wouldn't sound insane. "I'm good with systems. Sometimes you can feel what's wrong."
"Feel what's wrong." Judy's voice carried a dangerous edge. "That projector's been dying for months. Our tech support couldn't fix it. I couldn't fix it. But you just touched it and suddenly everything works perfectly."
The bar had gone quiet. Tom became aware that other patrons were watching the exchange with interest. In Night City, unusual abilities attracted attention—and attention was rarely good.
"Lucky, I guess," Tom said weakly.
"Lucky." Judy moved closer, her eyes narrowing. "You know what luck looks like in Night City? Luck looks like accidents. Random chance. Chaos theory in action." She gestured at the perfectly functioning projector. "That wasn't luck. That was control."
Tom's enhanced hearing picked up the subtle sounds of people shifting in their seats, hands moving closer to concealed weapons. The atmosphere in the bar had shifted from casual to predatory in the space of seconds.
"Maybe we should continue this conversation somewhere private," Judy suggested, though it sounded more like a command than an offer.
She led him toward the back rooms, past the main bar area into a corridor lined with doors marked with various warnings about authorized personnel only. Tom followed, acutely aware that he was walking deeper into a building with unknown exit routes and potentially hostile witnesses.
Judy opened a door marked "Technical Storage" and gestured for him to enter. The room was cramped, filled with braindance equipment, servers, and enough electronic components to stock a small tech shop. She closed the door behind them and leaned against it.
"Alright, stranger. Time for truth. What are you?"
"I'm nobody," Tom said. "Just someone looking for work."
"Nobody doesn't fix fried electronics by touching them. Nobody doesn't have chrome signatures that don't match any manufacturer I know." Judy's hand rested casually on what Tom now recognized as a concealed pistol. "So let's try again. What. Are. You?"
Tom's mind raced through possible explanations. Corporate experiment. Military project. Rogue netrunner. None of them sounded believable, and all of them would likely result in either exploitation or elimination.
Before he could answer, alarms started blaring throughout the building. Emergency lighting bathed everything in red, and Judy's posture shifted from threatening to professionally alert.
"Tyger Claws," she said, checking her pistol. "Probably looking for someone. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"
Through the walls, Tom could hear shouting voices and the distinctive sound of boots on concrete. His enhanced senses picked up electronic signatures—multiple cyber-implants, weapon targeting systems, and the particular electromagnetic profile of military-grade hardware.
They weren't here for a social call.
"They might be looking for me," Tom admitted. "I had a disagreement with some of their members last night."
Judy's expression shifted from suspicious to exasperated. "Outstanding. I try to help one stranger and he brings gang war to my doorstep." She moved to a wall panel and began typing rapidly. "There's a service tunnel that connects to the basement. Leads to the adjacent building. We can—"
The door exploded inward.
Three Tyger Claw soldiers poured into the storage room, weapons drawn and scanning for targets. Tom recognized their leader—the one whose wrist he'd crushed the night before. The man's chrome arm had been replaced with military-grade hardware, and his expression promised violence.
"Found you, freak," the leader snarled. "Time to pay for my medical bills."
Judy moved with practiced efficiency, drawing her pistol and putting herself between Tom and the immediate threat. "This is neutral ground. Lizzie's doesn't take sides in gang disputes."
"Not your fight, techie," one of the soldiers replied. "Just hand over the chrome-job and walk away."
"Can't do that," Judy said calmly. "House rules. Nobody gets touched inside Lizzie's without my say-so."
The gang leader laughed. "Your house rules don't mean shit when we've got guns and you've got attitude problems."
Time stretched as Tom calculated odds and options. Three armed gang members with military chrome. Judy with a single pistol and protective instincts that were going to get her killed. One exit blocked, another requiring movement past hostile forces.
His enhanced reflexes catalogued weapons, angles of attack, cover positions. His chrome augmentations hummed with readiness, defensive systems preparing for imminent combat. Somewhere in his cybernetic nervous system, time-dilation protocols activated without conscious command.
Sandevistan.
The world slowed to honey-thick crawls of motion. The gang leader's weapon rose toward Judy with glacial deliberation. Her return movement seemed impossibly sluggish. Tom could see the exact trajectory of incoming violence, could calculate precise countermeasures.
He moved.
To the gang members, Tom simply vanished and reappeared. One moment he was standing behind Judy; the next, he was between her and the soldiers. The leader's shot went wide as Tom's chrome-enhanced hand closed around the weapon's barrel and crushed it like aluminum foil.
The soldier stared in shock at his destroyed weapon. Tom stared back, equally surprised by his own impossible speed.
Time snapped back to normal speed.
"What the—" the soldier began.
Tom didn't let him finish. His fist, backed by chrome-enhanced strength and adrenaline-fueled desperation, caught the gang member in the solar plexus with enough force to lift him off his feet. The man hit the wall and slid to the floor, unconscious.
The other two soldiers opened fire.
Tom's adaptive cyberware responded automatically, hardening skin and redistributing impact force across his entire frame. Bullets struck him with metallic clangs rather than penetrating flesh. Each impact hurt—his augmentations weren't magical—but the rounds deformed against armor plating that was growing stronger with every hit.
Judy fired past him, her shots precise and professional. One soldier went down with a leg wound; the other dove for cover behind a server rack.
"We need to move," Judy shouted over the gunfire. "More incoming."
Tom could hear them—boots in the corridor, tactical radio chatter, the electromagnetic signatures of additional weapons powering up. A dozen more Tyger Claws converging on their position.
"Service tunnel," Judy commanded, grabbing emergency supplies from a wall cache. "Now."
She led him through a concealed panel into maintenance corridors that ran between buildings. They crawled through cramped spaces while combat raged behind them, eventually emerging in the basement of an abandoned retail space three blocks away.
Judy slumped against a support pillar, breathing hard. Tom collapsed beside her, feeling his chrome augmentations slowly powering down from combat readiness. The adrenaline crash hit like a physical blow.
"Alright," Judy said when she'd caught her breath. "I helped you escape an active combat situation. I put myself and my business at risk. I shot people." She turned to look at him directly. "So now you're going to tell me exactly what you are, or I'm going to put a bullet in your head and claim self-defense. Clear?"
Tom met her gaze and made a choice. Not the whole truth—that would sound insane—but enough truth to build trust.
"I don't know what I am," he said quietly. "I woke up in an alley yesterday with chrome I never installed, abilities I never learned, and memories that don't make sense. Something happened to me, but I don't know what or how."
Judy studied his face with the intensity of someone trained to spot lies. "You're scared," she observed.
"Terrified," Tom confirmed. "I'm changing into something that might not be human anymore, and I don't understand any of it. All I know is that people keep trying to kill me, and I keep surviving things I shouldn't survive."
"The chrome," Judy said. "It's adaptive, isn't it? Learning from damage."
Tom nodded. "Among other things."
"And the tech control? That wasn't a fluke."
"No. I can interface with electronic systems through touch. Don't ask me how—I have no idea."
Judy was quiet for a long moment, processing information. "You know what you sound like?"
"A corporate experiment gone wrong?"
"A ghost story," she said. "The kind of urban legend netrunners whisper about. Someone who evolved past baseline human, became something new." She gestured at his arms, where chrome patterns were still visible beneath synthetic skin. "Except you're sitting right here, breathing hard and looking like you're about to throw up."
"I might," Tom admitted.
"Don't. I just cleaned this floor." Judy's expression softened slightly. "Look, I don't know what happened to you, and I sure as hell don't know what you're becoming. But you put yourself between me and bullets back there. That counts for something."
"Does it count for help?"
Judy smiled for the first time since he'd met her—a genuine expression that transformed her entire face. "Stranger, you just gave me the most interesting technical challenge I've encountered in years. Of course I'm going to help. Besides," she added, standing and offering him a hand up, "Night City's got plenty of monsters. What's one more who's trying to stay human?"
Tom accepted her help and found himself smiling back. "I'm Tom, by the way. Tom Adler."
"Judy Alvarez. Welcome to the neighborhood, Tom Adler. Try not to bring any more gang wars to my doorstep."
"I'll do my best."
"That's all any of us can do." Judy headed for the basement exit, then paused. "Oh, and Tom? Next time you demonstrate impossible abilities in public, maybe warn me first. My heart rate still hasn't returned to normal."
Tom followed her toward the exit and whatever passed for safety in Night City. Behind them, the sounds of combat faded into the urban background noise. Ahead lay uncertainty, danger, and the slim possibility of finding answers.
But for the first time since waking up in this impossible world, Tom felt like he wasn't completely alone.
The chrome beneath his skin pulsed with soft light—a rhythm that was becoming familiar, like a heartbeat made visible. Whatever he was becoming, at least now he had someone willing to help him figure it out.
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