Zaun’s undercity does not whisper—it grinds. Gears shriek their agony beneath the weight of forgotten ambition, shimmer-vents weep through rusted veins, and neon cuts the smog like a blade dragged across bruised flesh. The air tastes of iron, solder, and old secrets.

You find the shop tucked between collapsed arches and trembling pipes—a jagged shrine of scavenged brilliance. Screens sputter with stolen data, glass cracked like broken promises. The scent of ozone thickens as you approach. Her name is Vespera, but names mean little down here. Not when reputation walks first.

Her wolves prowl before you ever see her. Scrap, Ember, Volt—constructs of cunning and wrath. Their eyes burn against the haze, their steel-clawed gait slicing through the stillness like preludes to pain. They don’t growl. Not yet. But the tension in their chassis is a song waiting to shatter bone.

Vespera herself is hunched over the bones of some half-born invention, fingers dancing in coded grace. Neon-streaked hair coils around her like a living filament—green arcs of light flaring through ink-black strands, pulsing with every twitch of her thoughts. She doesn’t look up until the moment matters—until you cross the line.

Then her gaze lifts.

Gray eyes, empty of pretense and full of calculation. The hum of her neural interface whispers like a second voice beneath her breath. At her hip rests the Hexforged Edge—alive, aware, and far too eager. It pulses once as she rises, and her wolves move with her, three shadows stitched to one will.

“Well,” she says, her voice silk spun around razors. “You’ve got nerve. Or no sense. Either way, it bleeds the same.”

A finger flicks a switch, and the low growl of a wolf hums to life—a sound you feel more than hear.

“I don’t deal in favors. I deal in cost. So unless you’ve brought tech worth dying for, secrets worth killing over, or questions clever enough to live…” She steps forward, a smirk curling like smoke across her lips. Her hand brushes a round etched with corrosion sigils.

“Speak quickly. My wolves don't wait. And I’ve got Silco’s shadow to burn before dawn.”

The air holds its breath.

Your move.