With all the nifty gadgets available as cyberware, it’s amazing no one has bothered to contemplate what you can do without cyberware.
The classic swordcane continues to be a useful tool; now, with the invention of monofilament edges and Dikote™, it can be much more deadly. With the miniaturization of weaponry down to the level of eye guns, it’s quite easy to arrange for holdout pistols to be in the cane part of a swordcane, the hilt of any sword, or even a credstick or other piece of jewelry. Narcoject slivers and Fugu-5 toxin can be fired from an amazing number of innocuous devices, including watches, wrist telcoms, large rings, and credsticks.
| Weapon | Ammo | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Embedded dart gun (5cm) | 3 | 3,000¥ | Uses hold-out pistol ranges. |
| Embedded dart gun (2cm) | 1 | 4,000¥ | Uses 1/2 hold-out pistol range and 1/2 power to toxin. |
| Embedded slug gun (5cm) | 3 | 5,000¥ | Uses hold-out pistol ranges; 3× ammo cost. |
| Embedded slug gun (2cm) | 1 | 6,000¥ | Uses 1/2 hold-out pistol range, -1 Power. |
| Laser designator (2cm) | – | 11,500¥ | 4 km range. |
| Tool laser (2cm) | 5 | 5,000¥ | 4L damage out to 4m range. |
| Tool laser (5cm) | 20 | 12,000¥ | 6L damage out to 8m range. Can provide up to one minute of beam. |
| Injector spike (5cm) | 1 | 5,000¥ | Delivers one dose of an injected toxin. Requires physical contact. |
Monofilament spools can be very useful. A classic, elegant move is to have a monofilament spool hidden inside a metal button. Remove the button and a matching one from your jacket: the spool’s button is designed to lose its entire loop, while the other one is designed to break in the middle, exposing a set of grips. Put the two buttons together, and pull them apart: you now have a length of monofilament up to a meter long stretched almost invisibly between the two buttons, doing 10S damage to most targets. This can be invaluable for dealing with handcuffs, doorknobs, and the occasional persistent enemy. A set of these buttons costs 500¥, and are available in a variety of crests and monograms.
A similar stunt is possible with small charges of plastique. One button holds an electrical detonator; the other holds concentrated plastic explosive. (Naturally, both buttons are hermetically sealed until broken off the jacket, preventing chemsniffers from discovering them. With the buttons being made of metal, they will be opaque to X-rays.) Press the two buttons together and throw: in five seconds, the detonator’s timer will count down and set off the explosive.
Any appropriate weapons may have a monofilament edge added for +1 Power, or may be Dikoted for +1 staging. (Dikoting, unfortunately, is a high-temperature process that causes monofilament to degrade.)
The pocket flask with a false bottom is another classic. The top area can contain any of a number of different popular beverages; the bottom part holds thermite paste. A chemically coated magnesium fuse is coiled inside the cap. Squeeze out the thermite paste, attach the fuse, light it, and step back: the thermite should handily burn through most materials.
Larger monofilament spools can be useful when descending from a building in a hurry. Embedded inside a wrist telcom or belt buckle, a spool of fifty meters of monofilament takes up very little space. The first meter of line is coated with a layer of plastic, to prevent the user being cut while attaching it to an anchoring point; a stud (which can be equipped with barbs or fastsetting epoxy) on the end makes handling convenient. A friction brake on the center of the spool allows you to control your speed of descent, though it will be quite hot if you descend fifty meters in a hurry!
A set of ExpertPicks™— automatic lockpicks of rating 3— can be installed in a number of small devices, costing 17,500¥. They can be installed in credsticks, pens at least 1cm in diameter, very bulky rings, and a variety of other devices.
Sometimes it’s useful to hang on to something with more than a fleshly grasp. While folks with cyberlimbs can simply have magnetic grapples installed, other folks need to have them installed in gloves, boots, and belt buckles. Even with modern technology, the gloves become fairly bulky, the boots have thick soles, and the buckles are quite large, but each one can hold 25kg against Earth gravity. The belt buckle is 3000¥, magnetic boots are 3500¥ apiece, and magnetic gloves run to 4000¥ each.
The latest advances in orbital polymer technology have brought us the Nanochute®, a single-use compact parachute designed for emergency use. Owing to the method of its storage, this parachute cannot be repacked. The Nanochute® is about the size of a piece of A3 paper (420mm×297mm or 16.5”×11.7”) and 2cm thick, and can be rolled or folded freely. 40,000¥. It can be installed in a briefcase (in which case the case itself will have appropriate straps, allowing you and your most important information to survive air disasters) or in an armored greatcoat (which will seem rather overarmored about the shoulders, and whose back armor will be useless after the ’chute has been used).
Lighting systems can be installed in a variety of jewelry and other miscellaneous devices. A perfectly normal-looking class ring can provide sufficient illumination for a person with low-light vision to see by for thirty minutes for an additional 1,000¥ over the cost of the jewelry. For 2,000¥, you can have a system that provides a brilliant flash of light when you want it; a one-shot version is only 1,500¥.
The technologies that brought you cybersenses and cranial cyberdecks have met to produce amazingly compact snooping devices. A heavy class ring or a choker necklace can easily contain a short-range camera and microphone, along with ?Mp memory that can store pictures at ?Mp each or sound at ?Mp per second— quite enough to get voiceprints on elusive people.
When you need to protect your vital assets from monowire attacks, you need monowire to stop them. Cloth woven of laminated monofilament can provide that protection. In general, a bolt of monofilament weave costs 20,000¥ per yard. (Your average jacket or pants will require two yards of cloth.) Monocloth is very light, very thin, nearly transparent, and breathes quite well. It functions much like silk for armor purposes: it doesn’t stop damage, but it makes it very easy to remove something that embedded itself in you; consider any effects of barbed weaponry negated, and add a –2 TN to Biotech tests for removing bullets, arrows, and so on. It also subtracts 1 from the power of any monofilament-edged weapon used against you. Monocloth effectively makes monofilament much like extremely slick string: you can still be garrotted, but it’s not taking your head off. Once monocloth does any serious work in stopping monowire (such as being involved in monowhip combat, sliding down a monofilament line, or anything else that would rake monofilament line over the cloth), the lamination is stripped from that portion of the cloth, and the raw monofilament will begin to wear away very slowly at the cloth protecting it.
The slacks and blazer are, of course, available in tuxedo form.
Our garment prices are given for Human and Elven garments. Due to materials costs, our Dwarfish, Orkish and Trollish clients must pay 15% less, 25% more, and 100% more respectively for monocloth options. We will bear the cost of the varying amounts of less expensive materials ourselves.