Frankly a lot of people scoffed when the kid with the degenerative spinal condition decided he was going to join the Blackvines. They would not have called it that, preferring to couch their incredulity as sympathy for the kid's parents and the pain they must feel at not being able to drive home his dire condition. After all, there was no way he would be able to afford the treatments on his backwater home planet and he would be lucky to live to see sixty even with the treatments.
When the kid hacked an auto-doc and had it perform an absurdly risky nerve bypass with an obsolete and heavily modded datajack, they were too shocked to stop him.
Things seemed to return to normal for a while, sure he was walking around under his own power now but that was nothing really. The kid had an expiration date, no matter how much he might run himself through physical therapy regimens to make up for lost time or how he might work at refurbishing the second-hand pulsecaster rifle he dug out of a scrap-heap.
Then he got the armor.
Cheap military surplus, poorly fitted and with a gaping hole from where it failed to protect its last wearer. He had to patch it and that took time too, but he did not rush and did not cut corners. When he was ready, he left with barely a good-by, turning his back on the backwater scrap-planet that had birthed him. After all, he had a tight schedule to see to.
