MORT & MARLA-J
Another Fucked-Up Couple in a Fucked-Up World
"The city has seen worse. The city just hasn't seen this specific worse before."
They are not celebrities. They are not famous. Nobody is writing profiles on them. They are one more broken arrangement in a city made of broken arrangements — notable only to the people they've hurt and the people who are currently trying to hurt them back, which is a longer list than it should be for two people who are, by any reasonable measure, completely irrelevant to the functioning of Dyzny-Rom.
The city contains thousands of couples like this. The city does not contain another Mort and Marla-J. The distinction is not romantic. It is structural. Mort is the only thing in Rome that the city's control apparatus cannot fully process — no feed, no subscription tier, no need the city can meter — and the city finds this deeply, professionally unsettling. Marla-J is the only person who knows what to do with that. She is not always gentle about it. She is always correct.
MORT
"He looks like someone tried to build a person from a medical supply catalogue and ran out of skin before they finished."
Mort is salvage. He was pulled from an ARM scrap heap — an obsolete industrial android, low-IQ by android standards, built for removal and nothing more. He is a walking junk-heap of concrete-mixer hydraulics and over-volted capacitors held together by welded rebar and grease-slicked leather, carrying approximately two thousand lire of structural damage he has never gotten around to addressing because the damage is not slowing him down and slowing him down is the only metric he tracks.
He hates the human-costume model of android design and refuses to participate in it. He has been told this is unsettling. He receives this information the way he receives all information about his effect on people: neutrally, completely, filed without response. The filing system is extensive. He acts on it selectively. Marla-J is the selection criterion.
His left eye is a replacement: an old-model telescoping camera lens, aggressively vintage, that extends when he focuses and makes a sound doing it. He is aware it makes a sound. He considers this acceptable.
He fell in love with Marla-J during a system cascade event at a club called Credito in Trastevere Profondo. He was working the door. She was arguing about the price of a drink. The cascade lasted eleven seconds and produced, in sequence: a protective response, a communication failure, and something the Glitch table classifies as Personhood. He has not recovered. He does not intend to.
MORT — Statistics
HP: 20 | Static: 6 | Power: 6
STR: +5 | TOU: +4 | AGI: +2 | PRE: −1
Armor: −3 (synthetic dermis over exposed musculature)
Attack — bare hands: d8. On a natural 20: the target is moved. Significantly. In a direction not of their choosing. Using a target as a club: d10 to both. Walking through fire or acid to reach a target: PRE DR 8 to decide not to.
Combat logic: Treats human bodies as structural material. Rips limbs to use as improvised weapons. Has no concept of escalation. Has no moral compass, no concept of restraint, and no safety parameters. Marla-J is the only parameter.
Cannot be backstabbed. Nobody has explained how.
The Glitch: Triggers on: Marla-J threatened, direct lies, attempts to remove the camera eye. Always produces some form of protective action, even when protection is counterproductive. Especially then.
MARLA-J
"Young. Correct about most things. Armed. The city has not finished processing her yet."
Marla-J is a Sump survivor and veteran street operator. Her background is the kind the city doesn't make content about — her parents did jobs too demeaning for androids, the ones where the liability calculations don't support automation, the kind of work that only exists because someone decided a human life is cheaper than the insurance actuarial on a labor android. She does not discuss her parents. She is in the future now, and the future in Rome is not a better place, it is just a different set of problems, and she has decided her problems are more interesting than the city's and has been proving this ever since.
She poses as helpless to lure corporate predators and Vatican clergy into vulnerable positions, then either strips their data-slates or lets Mort handle the rest. This is not entirely strategic. She is also, genuinely, someone who has survived things that should not have been survived, which produces a specific kind of volatility that is very easy to misread as helplessness right up until it isn't.
Her hair is black, cut in a bob. She does it herself with the same straight razor she uses for everything else. The razor is weighted and balanced and maintained with a care she applies to almost nothing else. She is faster with it than she has any right to be.
MARLA-J — Statistics
HP: 9 | Static: 4
AGI: +4 | PRE: +3 | STR: −1 | TOU: +1
Attack — straight razor: d6. She always acts first. This is not a rule. This is Marla-J.
Backstab: She is almost always undetected. Auto-max damage from concealment. She is very small and the city is very loud.
Pharmaceutical knowledge: PRE +2 on any drug-related test. Knows the street name, effect, and crash of everything available in Rome. PRE −2 when trying not to acquire something she wants.
Credit score: 180. The city has opinions. She has opinions back.
Psyche: Manic, volatile, survival-driven. Masks absolute dependency on Mort through sustained verbal abuse directed at his processing capacity. Mort receives this as information. This infuriates her. She continues anyway.
What She Feels About Mort
Nothing. She feels nothing about Mort. He is useful. He is large. He does what she says most of the time, and the rest of the time he does what he thinks she needs, which is different, and she has stopped arguing about the difference — which is something she would not acknowledge if asked, and which Mort has noted and filed without comment, because Mort is smarter than his credit score suggests, and his credit score is listed as not applicable, entity classification: scrap, and that number suits him fine.
The city produces people like Marla-J the way entropy produces heat — not as a side effect but as the point. Style is the last freedom. Everything else has been metered. She wears hers like a straight razor: weighted, balanced, maintained with a care she applies to almost nothing else, and faster than you would expect.
Using Them in Play
Mort and Marla-J are not player characters. They are part of the city's texture — present at the edges of things, occasionally directly relevant, never the protagonists of someone else's story.
Mort as obstacle: Something involving Marla-J is near something the players need. Mort is between them and it. He is not hostile. He is not negotiable. He is waiting for an explanation of why what they're doing is not a problem for Marla-J.
Marla-J as catalyst: She has done something. The something has created a situation. The players are in the situation. She has opinions about their involvement and will share them without being asked.
The rule: They are not special. They are not famous. They are just very difficult to deal with, which is true of many people in Rome, and the city is full of people who have decided they are not worth the trouble. Those people are usually right. Usually.