Al Diamond readies himself for another long night.

Al Diamond sits in his office in a green, worn out cushion atop his chair. The sky is a neon pink flame of a setting sun outside his window with chipped white paint along the frame. It burns in the back of his eyes. A Slow rhythmic heartbeat echoes in his every nerve, huge pulses in his veins. He drags a cigarette seeking a calming stillness. He knows it's not be found. He reaches in the left pocket of his brown trenchcoat and pulls out a metallic disk that glimmers in a ray of dying light cast from stray trajectories unknown.

"The kooky old bastard," he says to himself, gritting teeth as he drifts into the fuzzy domain of nostalgia, momentarily recalling his time spent with Chuck executing advanced datarun maneuvers in some of the direst of B-Cluster domains. Chuck used to make Al's job easier, a minor request in information acquisition, and Ol' Chuck was down at the docks interfacing the D-VI punks, sometimes with wrenches or crowbars. After this quick shakedown Chuck would be back in the office as if no time had passed at all, dropping Al nuggets of street wisdom.

All that was back then though, before the scrapyards were thrice as nasty a place as the land Al had once thought of as home. How quickly he'd welcome back the unfamiliarity with notions like head-hunting zombie beast wielded by mad scientist, zombie clowns, killer robot battle suits and nanoscaled alien pathogen infections. He sighs, dropping his cigarette on the wooden floor and stepping it out. He misses the days when the entire circuit wasn't one big cheat.

Slowly, he stands, every bone in his body feeling rickety as he proceeds to don his brown hat and face north toward his door. He knows the night will come soon, and our boy Diamond is saddled with merciful task of hunting lychen and vampiric scum in the dim and dirty dirges of the tunnels. Yes, those Tunnels.

He's looking for Old Man Brantley. The one who might actually be the original. He may be the only person capable of gauging why the autolocks on the Orbital Stations are sudenly in place, bringing all traffick to and from the Skycolonies to a grinding halt. Even more importantly, he may be the only person capable of hacking them, or at the least helping Diamond to do so himself. Rumor has it he was involved in that recent, and messy, Darkstar operation. There's also indications he may be working some Lenisker job in an abandoned hangar up north. Impossible to gauge any validity of these rumors as Brantley was once known for purposefully bi-locating and planting replicants in key areas as a tactic for confusing his opponent. This was a frequent occurence: Brantley has many enemies but does not know who they are.

Al Diamond pockets a couple Silver Bullets made from a Key to some heavy Iron Astral door. He'd acquired it in some mission that felt like it took place ages ago but it was only two or so years past. A Standard revolver and Tri-Coil tunable RGB gun he'd manage to buy off some street punk completes his arsenal. He's already closing the door behind him before his thought processes catch up with his action and he realizes that's he stepped out into the black embrace of the evening, lost in a swirl of smoke and thoughts, somewhere fixated on the case at hand underneath it all. A cold chill raises the hairs on the back on his neck. This was how these sorts of jobs always began.

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