Shubh prabhaat! Your friendly neighborhood spider is here to talk about the ins and outs of your favorite concealed weapons. That's right, the cyberclaw, a pre-Fall classic. The LLC suits would have you panicking like an old granny about having meta-materials in your body because it's an infection vector. You know what else is an infection vector? Fucking everything. Living for an extra tenth of a second when the stalkers are trying to eat your sweetbreads isn't worth as much as giving the assholes one last goodbye stab. The thing is, no two people seem to agree on how your claws are supposed to work. When you think claws, you imagine these liquid metal blades coming out of your fingertips, right? That's how the 'corp choose-your-own movies show it. I think it started with, main yah yaad nahin hai… let me bring up the read-access… yeah, "Red Patriot", 4 A.F., that's where it started. Martian detective hunting "terrorists" who look kind of like my farcast mesh friends. Morph with kind of Chinese features but actually a little bit Mongolian according to the Tomatillo reviews, and he has the claws in his fingertips because he literally does this Tiger Claw kind of martial arts. And if you really do fight like that, good for you, get the fingertip cyberclaws. Muscle memory might fuck you over if you try to fingernail gouge my shiny metal ass, so evening the odds is nice if you think you're fighting synths. Having five tiny blades instead of one large one makes it easier to form barbs and hooks too, maybe a toothpick if you don't have time to sonic-shower the vat beef out of your teeth. Heh, problem is that this is the worst, the WORST way an org morph can have their claws set up. You notice how narrow and small most of your fingers are? It's not even a problem of being fragile, it's how your skin is way less opaque than you think it is. Sometimes you need an element of surprise, with something like a Splicer that's usually all you get, and civilians aren't supposed to have murderfucker blades hidden inside them. But if you're cybered-up right under the skin, the color's going to be off, the texture of your fingertips is going to be off, and unless you're replacing your phalanges entirely it's gonna be all overstuffed. Go ahead and tell everyone the obvious blade spots are a toolkit or a pre-Fall chic datajack, but you might be asked to actually use the things so good luck with that. There's also the other classic, the under-the-wrist model. Useful for conspiracy spooks who need to stab other conspiracy spooks and make it look like an accident. Using this one is damned awkward, trust me on this. It's not a katar, and you'll just hurt yourself if you EVER try to slash with it. You kind of have to… gently caress your opponent, lay your hands on them and let the spring-action on the cyberblade do all the work. Properly fighting a fair fight with one of these should only happen if you've been practicing and know you're smarter then your enemy, and if you have to ask if you're smarter you aren't. At the very least get some skillware patches so you can un-learn your weird new fighting style before you use it by accident without the blades installed. Good news is, though, it's pretty easy to cover up if you're a sack of mostly water like I used to be. Only one smartmetal patch right over the carpal tunnel, in between the ulna and radius. If you're on Luna and the cops have T-ray goggles- and they will- just say it's a recreational auto-injector or something. They don't give a shit if you inject bleach into your eyeballs, but it's a shame if you were carrying a six inch pocketknife. Now the over-the-wrist model is about as old as a cyberclaw gets. The earliest models were dumb carbon-steel blades jammed into heavy-ass cyberlimbs. Can you imagine that? If a solid blade got bent even just a little bit, you'd have a broken sword sticking out of your arm for the next six hours or so until you get to an old-timey limb shop. Not only would you be arrested on sight by a gang unit, but your tea break would be totally ruined. Smartmetal solves most of those issues. In 10 A.F. this is probably the best blade configuration you can jam into an org. Hell, worker pods have so many pointless extra seams and glowing bits that you'd probably look exactly the same with or without. Probably why pods get held up at customs, now that I think of it. When it's mounted like that, it's probably the most intuitive for a transhuman to use. You could probably swing the blade like a fucking blernsball bat and not fuck up too badly. It's more like knife-fighting than the kind of stuff a pre-Fall belt factory dojo would teach a kid, but who hasn't needed to use a knife at some point within the last, like, decade or so? Oh, and this style can hide a pair of elbow spikes too. The original 1.0 cyberclaws were wrist spikes that reversed into elbow spikes, kinda finicky but the old 'corps did the best they could with minimal space to jam stuff in. Just don't bother with knee spikes, you'll probably use them once tops before you ditch the morph. But you're wondering about me. Big scary Arachnoid, not human-shaped at all. Look, just because I'm good at stabbing people, and I think some people need a good stabbing, doesn't mean I actually like stabbing. It's not fun, people. Stupid dumb violence screwed up my old civilian life, and the Steel Liberators mostly gave it a context where I could do some good with it. I'm not exactly Stab-Man or Knifey-Boy here. …But I got cyberclaws, eight of them. Big, stompy spikes so I can just walk into a guy and make him pay. My morph is exactly as painful as it looks. You'd think the blades would be in my little face-palps like the tool mounts Arachnoids are supposed to have, and if you want to set your tools to Scalpel and void the warranty, knock yourself out. No seriously, you'll probably get all your forward sensors knocked out when some Fury rips your head off. Never stick your face in an enemy's grille. So now that I'm done raving about cyberclaws, I want to hear about yours. How do you set up your blades? What works for you guys? I'm sure the rest of the server would like to hear. -------------------------------- Touch [u]here[/u] to +Rep the Steel Liberators. Don't call us toasters if you don't want to be toast.