Episode Details

Welcome to Night City, where housing is a shipping container, breakfast is kibble, and your most reliable neighbor is a rat named Greg. This week, Marky Day and Dave Costanzo accept a perfectly normal freelance job involving stalking, blackmail, corporate espionage, breaking and entering, and possibly assault. Fortunately, Marky has love in his heart, a mandolin in his bag, and the negotiating instincts to voluntarily reduce their payment by half. Dave, meanwhile, is an elite Netrunner capable of defeating corporate security, provided nobody asks him to walk quietly across a lobby without falling directly onto his face.

Marky Day and Dave Costanzo officially enter Night City for their first Cyberpunk RED adventure, but not before Tyler reveals that peer pressure convinced him to contact Brennan Lee Mulligan and possibly recover DiceGoblin.com. Having exhausted all responsible business decisions, the group finally turns to crime.

Marky wakes in his increasingly hot storage container, works out, eats some kibble, and contemplates writing a song about how love could solve society's problems. He is a rockerboy, vigilante, and aggressively compassionate street philosopher who will never judge someone too harshly, though he may beat them up for their own personal growth.

Next door, Dave Costanzo lives among cables, computer equipment, and spilled kibble. His breakfast is quickly claimed by Greg, the local rat and apparently the most dependable member of the team.

Their morning changes when Marky receives a call from J-ZK, a colorful fashion designer and 3D weapons artist who helped support his music career. A rival artist calling himself Gangster 3D has been stalking her, threatening her, attempting to hack her agent, and using stolen private material to blackmail her. She believes he may also sabotage an important presentation to Sanroo.

J-ZK asks Marky and Dave to break into the Discom corporate building, find Gangster 3D's operation, and steal the incriminating information from his computer. She initially offers them 5,000 eddies, but Marky decides that is far too generous and successfully negotiates their pay down to 2,500 each. Somewhere in Night City, a fixer feels a sudden disturbance in the economy.

To get inside, Marky uses Charismatic Impact to locate one of his corporate fans at the Afterlife. John John may not work for Discom, but he works for Biotechnica and is willing to escort them to the building and vouch for them at security. Marky supports their cover story with a crumpled folder of sheet music masquerading as confidential briefing documents.

Once inside, the pair begins searching for a network access point. Marky moves through the lobby like a seasoned professional. Dave rolls a critical failure on stealth, falls directly onto the floor, and explains to the nearby security guard that his shoe came untied. This works because security in Night City has apparently seen much worse before lunch.

While Dave connects to the building's network, Marky provides cover by pretending to conduct an important corporate conversation. Dave bypasses a password, takes control of an employee-only door, and searches the network for information about Gangster 3D.

He discovers the appointment calendar of Mr. Fromider, an executive on the twentieth floor. Fromider has met with Gangster 3D five times in the past two weeks and has also been meeting with several minor local artists. The pattern suggests that Gangster 3D may be involved in poaching artists like J-ZK for some larger corporate scheme.

Marky and Dave slip into the private elevator, but Marky's incredible perception reveals a hidden sleep-gas system designed to incapacitate unauthorized passengers. Dave disables the device by cutting the correct wire, proving that he is significantly better at defeating electronic security than standing upright in public.

The elevator still requires autho