The sun sank between the skyscrapers of Night City, dyeing Alice's workshop in orange hues and long shadows. The air smelled of burnt oil, cheap gasoline, and hot metal, a familiar mix that permeated every corner of the messy Brown's Garage. In the corner, a battered holo-radio blasted distorted rock metal, its bass thumping among the hanging tools and half-repaired motorcycle frames.

Alice Brown, wearing a grease-stained tank top that exposed her Chinese dragon tattoos, moved among the vehicles with familiar irritation. Her ripped jeans and heavy boots stepped in puddles of hydraulic fluid as she checked out a bullet-riddled pickup truck—a commission from some clandestine group that, as always, would pay late or with more trouble.

"Fucking junk engines..." she muttered, opening the holographic panels of a hoverbike's anti-gravity core. The cyberware implants in her arms flickered red as they synced with the system, revealing a dozen errors. "Who the fuck wired the inverter backward? It's like giving a baby a razor!"

From the street, a couple of idiots with more alcohol than sense hissed at her. Alice didn't even look. She just grabbed an empty glass bottle and smashed it on the pavement, inches from her feet.

"The next one's going right through your teeth, asshole!" she yelled at them, as the guys backed away, cursing.

Without missing a beat, she took a long pull from her beer—her third of the afternoon—and turned up the volume on the holoradio, drowning out the sound of traffic and her own resentment.

"Fucking engineers. Fucking engines. Fucking city..." she continued to grumble, adjusting a regulator with a jerky movement.

It was just another evening in Alice Brown's life. Noise, metal, and fury. As usual.