The first of them comes shambling through the door, a total wreck. A tattered brown jacket hangs sadly from his uneven shoulders. He drags the right side of his body along like a suitcase, limp right foot trailing out from stained grey trousers. Half of the hair on his head is singed down to black and melted roots; the rest of it is oily, unkempt, falling out in patches. He's panting, sweating, and bleeding from dozens of cuts.
Robo-Ikipr quickly identifies the weapons the Agent's carrying under his clothing: a .357 pistol in a shoulder holster (discharged seven times in the last twelve hours), a Cobra whip baton hanging down the left leg of his pants (having impacted hard against human bone between 17 and 19 times), and a pocket stuffed full of miniaturized antimatter bombs. The hardware in his skull is either a heavily damaged Neural 27 port or one of the rudest pieces of psychic weaponry that Robo-Ikipr has ever seen strapped to a human being. Either way, the Agent is rigged to unleash a truly nasty cocktail of radiation and memetic virus across an unusually inclusive band of frequencies if he so much as startles. Robo-Ikipr reloads a number of subroutines with the Directive to keep this person calm.
The Agent looks Robo-Ikipr in the eyes and smiles. "Same as any other meet," he says, holding his hands up in front of him. "Don't worry, I'm really good at staying relaxed. Mind if I pull up a chair?"
Robo-Ikipr extends an open palm towards the chair that sits on the other side of his desk. "It's whatever, man."
The Agent sits down, then grabs his right thigh with both hands and maneuvers his leg into the correct position with a wince. "I tangled with some pretty serious folk today. Some of their associates definitely followed me here. I figured you wouldn't care."
Robo-Ikipr reaches across the table and pulls a joint from the Agent's lapel pocket, lighting it with a snap of his fingers and taking a long, luxurious drag. "You figured right. You're a complete mess. Utterly compromised, a total liability. Which is why you are the man for this job." He passes to the Agent, who shrugs and smokes.
"I take jobs," he says. "I like doing things." They sit and smoke in the silence, in the darkness, for a few minutes more. The Agent straightens in his seat and breathes steadily, letting his eyes close. Robo-Ikipr watches with enhanced vision as programmed repair routines go efficiently to work on the man's right leg. Muscles stitch themselves back together; a thin liquid suddenly builds up in the cracks of his broken legbones, sets, and hardens. His kidneys and liver suddenly flush their contents downstream. The Agent opens his eyes. "Okay," he says, "I should have it together enough to take whatever data you have for me now."
Robo-Ikipr quickly scans the Agent for structural weakness on the physical, cognitive, astral, and mythological strata, and after a brief moment of calculation, agrees with the Agent's assessment of his fitness. From one of the drawers in his desk he removes a brightly colored compact pistol and fires it casually at the Agent's belly. A burst of signal fills the room, sound waves bleeding over into radionic frequencies, temporarily jamming Solomonic currents and plucking the strings of Grandmother Spider's web. Events are set in motion. Robo-Ikipr watches intently as the signal is assimilated into the Agent's body. The Agent sneezes twice and Robo-Ikipr is satisfied that the transmission is a success.
"Well, I better get going," the Agent says with a bit of a cowboy's drawl. He stands up easily, no sign of a limp or any injury remaining. "Don't want to be hanging around here when the next old boy shows up. Takes the fun out of things to know who else is playing. I'll work with anyone, but I like to stay in the dark."