"Shit. Shitshitshit."

They're shouting about calling an ambulance, and they have knives and one of them has a gun.

She should just go home and hide.

But he's definitely gonna die before the EMTs get here. Her power's completely sure of it. Crushed throat, no chance of breathing.

"Hey, I can help! I know first aid!" She waves a classic red bag with the plus symbol.

And then they're shoving her at him. Punk-ass teens in a moderate level of panic.

"Now, listen up- I can help him, but I need to cut open his throat and insert a breathing tube." Pause, eyeroll. "Shut up! Stop arguing while your choom's suffocating! This is standard ripperdoc shit! Fuck. Hold him down!"

It takes another minute of tense, heart-pounding adrenaline to get it done. The breathing tube. The throat hole. Her hands guided by her power. Blood on the concrete floor. Rapid emergency tracheostomy... Not ideal, but better than 'dead'.

The guy stops making those awful choking sounds. She lets out a deep breath and sits back. "He's gonna be fine. He'll be fine! The ambulance is coming, yeah? Look, they'll get him to the hospital, or a ripperdoc, and this way he'll still be alive when he gets there." ... "No, there's nothing else I can really do now. Don't let him hit his head. Talk to him, tell him to calm down. I can't fucking understand Japanese. Yeah, I'm a hafu, shut up. Goddammit."

She's still there five minutes later when EMTs cart the kid off on a stretcher, his buddies cornering her near the elevator and making it clear she's not allowed to leave. 

This was a mistake. Her power is whispering ideas to escape with her little medkit, to her- Choke them with the long bandage, throw the disinfectant in their eye, stab at a tendon with the swiss army knife- But that would just make things worse. This is a fuckin' gang.

They're twitchy, nervous, some coming off the high, other keeping themselves going with implants or just jittering fear. Who's she? What's she up to?

Then the elevator dings.

There's a line of his granddaddy's that always goes through Katsu's head when someone fucks up, with the smell of smoke and oil, tequila and hot plastic. "Two kinds of people in every gang, every corp, every street," the giant had said. "There's the brute loonies, and there’s the people who clean up messes.”

("Which are you?" Shakkin had asked, and he'd helped her cover up the bruise, after.)

It's going through his head right now. How does it go this bad.

He's not much older than her but he wears armorjack over vest, clothes sober as any corpo, but the Tyger Claws tattoos under that gleam sharp and new. His right hand’s chipped and he’s got iron bright (JKE-X2 Kenshin with extended mag, holoscope and rapidfire mode) for any eye to see and another gun under his jacket. Light chrome, but the kids relax when he shows.

Some of that might be the prick behind him, though. He's cybered from here to hell and he's twitching like he's on synthcoke or riding a Kerenzikov - or both, more like. 

...So, what's the play here. She's done nothing wrong. She helped! But shit! Everything she's seen since her isekai warns her that these guys are violent druggies.

She settles for scowling at nothing in particular.

He walks up to her, bows deeply and formally and says, in Japanese, "Hello, ma'am, I am honored to meet you. Fujiwara Katsuro." His Japanese is fluent, grammatical and only very lightly accented.

"...Sumimasen. I don't speak Japanese well, Fujiwara-san. Hafu desu."

Nervous glance at the big guy behind him.

The big guy is bored and annoyed. Subjectively speaking it's already been a couple minutes and The Kid will not get to the point, ever.

"I understand," he says, switching to English. Then back to Japanese, to the big guy, "Kento, there's not going to be any trouble," he'll slip him something, "You can head down to the isle, all right?" His gesture takes in half the gang.

There's perks, though. Fair enough.

And, in English, as his numerical advantage decreases (and the gender balance evens), "I offer my thanks and those of my friends, for saving Toshiko's life."

"Eh- Ano-"

Well, she can't exactly deny it.

"I guess I did do that. It takes a heartless gonk to just stand there when you can help..."

"There's a lot of heartless gonks in the world," he says. "We are tremendously grateful." A quick scan... how desperate does she look? "Will you take tea with me?"

(Moderately so? She's not on any drugs- Any obvious uppers, at least. No cyberware. Dirty clothes and a recent bandaged injury, but not starving or anything. Scared. Determined. Thinks she has What It Takes, or One Weird Trick, or some other advantage.)

A thin-lipped considering look.

"Ah- I hope I'm not offending when I say I don't really want to be involved in... Certain things. More than necessary. Especially being so new to Night City. So I hope 'tea' is just tea."

(Katsuro is painfully aware he does not have One Weird Trick. He appreciates people who do, though.)

Also - "Perhaps I must explain," he says, without changing expression. "The people in the Japanese community of Night City know that we are likely to be judged together, ne? So we must stand together? So we reasonable men of Japantown are agreed that, when someone does one of us a favor, we should all work together repay it, so that it is well known that people should do favors for reasonable men. You see?"

Yeah, no, she's not getting out of this. The only way out is through. Don't ask for too much, be performative about what you do receive, shirk future contact...?

"...Well. It's best when everyone is reasonable. I should not like to have unreasonable men for neighbors. Tea sounds lovely."

Oh good. "Oh, are you a neighbor of mine?" With a few words he can bring a couple of the more senior Tyger Claws with (one male, one female) and then they can get moving.

"I rented an apartment in this Megabuilding last week." And there sure are a lot of Tyger Claws around.

In the elevator, there will be three, and an even gender balance. "Is medicine your profession, or just a hobby of yours?"

(Neither of the Claws look like they're paying much attention. One of them's chroming out to her brainphone and the other looks like he's watching or reading something funny.)

Ah, but they aren't picking fights, are they?

"I have some training in medicine. First aid... Sort of." She really doesn't want her power to get out. She has to phone it in and launder the things she repairs already. "Long story, I should really study up more officially to cover gaps there. Ah, but I was very confident about the breathing tube. It's not the ideal way... But the ideal way assumes you have a full ambulance, not just my personal kit."

He nods. "Medicine is a useful skill. Do you expect to keep encountering situations where you need it?" Elevator goes up.