Icarus and Daedalus

Chapter 1

***Ok, folks, here goes nothing. This is my first fanfiction. Ever. I recently finished playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and decided to write a story that takes place after you make the final choice at Panchaea. This chapter is LONG. Sorry. Please bear with me. Please read and review. Also, please read the entire note at the bottom. Thanks. ***

Adam Jensen walked into the dimly lit pub in Duluth, Minnesota and moved towards the bar for a drink. His current orders were to wait somewhere while Faridah Malik, Sarif Industries' chief pilot, conducted airborne reconnaissance on their target. A bar probably wasn't the best place to be while on the job, but at 23:00, everywhere else on the street was closed, and he wasn't going to wait for Malik on some exposed street corner during this particular rainstorm. There were no windows in this pub, so the patrons looked through the open doorway as Adam entered to get a look at the weather outside. The brief glimpse of the violent thunderstorm only just beginning was enough to convince everyone in the pub to settle in and order another round rather than head home. "What'll you have?" asked the bartender as Adam sat down at a stool. "Bourbon, neat," Adam replied. "Any preference on the brand?" the bartender inquired. "Something good," responded Jensen. As the bartender measured out a dose of Woodford Reserve, Francis Pritchard's voice crackled over Adam's Infolink. "Drinking on duty, are we?" came Pritchard's trademark sarcastic drawl. "Why the hell not? It's been one of those years, Pritchard."

It certainly had. The shitstorm resulting from Adam's actions following the attack on Sarif Industries was finally starting to clear up. Adam had chosen to remain an employee of David Sarif for a few reasons. Any ulterior motives notwithstanding, Sarif had saved his life, and he supposed he owed the man some measure of loyalty. He also couldn't deny that the considerable paycheck he received was a strong incentive to stay on. But mostly, Adam continued to work for Sarif because, quite frankly, he didn't have much else to do. No police force would touch him, given the events of the previous year combined with his less-than-pleasant departure from Detroit PD, and working for some PMC like Belltower or Bluewater would never be an option, no matter how much money they offered to throw his way. So, Adam Jensen found himself as the head of security for Sarif Industries as well as the occasional private detective for the good people of Detroit.

It was Jensen's growing popularity as a PI that made David Sarif realize what an asset he had in terms of corporate espionage, or rather, counter-espionage. Sarif Industries, like any other huge multinational corporation, had its fair share of detractors, disgruntled former employees and customers, and outright enemies. Most of them confined their activities to petty vandalism and generating bad publicity towards the company, but some posed more of a threat. More than once, some skilled hacker with an axe to grind with Sarif had decided to actually do some real damage. Altering records, re-routing shipping orders, and even stealing funds from company accounts had been attempted by hackers with varying degrees of success. Usually, Pritchard's skills were enough to stop the hackers and prevent any serious trouble, but occasionally someone came along who was able to leave even Pritchard vexed. In these situations, Adam was often called in to find the hackers personally and physically disrupt their sabotage. Currently, one extremely skilled hacker was stealing massive sums of credits from Sarif Industries' accounts. For three weeks, the hacker had been able to get in and out without a trace, but finally, he made a mistake and left a back door open for Pritchard to find. Pritchard quickly tracked him down to an apartment in Duluth, and David Sarif had ordered Jensen to find him and interrogate him in order to recover the stolen credits. It was this assignment that had Jensen sitting in a pub just off the shore of Lake Superior on a cold November night, waiting for Malik to finish up her recon and report back. He texted his location to Malik's computer so that she would know where to find him. Ordinarily, he would have called her via Infolink, but he knew that Malik would be concentrating hard on flying and reconnaissance, and he figured that a text would be less distracting. He doubted that her recon would be terribly fruitful. Even with the aircraft's advanced imaging equipment, the rain and electrical activity would make it difficult to see much of anything. However, that wasn't Adam's primary concern. Given the weather, he just hoped that she wouldn't end up being fished out of the lake by the Coast Guard.

Faridah Malik walked into the bar where Adam told her to meet him. She was thankful for her water-repellant clothing, but she wished that she had something to keep her warm. She knew that Jensen had heating coils built into his augmentations to keep him comfortable, but she was freezing. It was only a quarter-mile to the pub from the landing site, and already her teeth were chattering uncontrollably. She walked into the pub as Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald" finished playing on the radio and sat on the stool next to Adam. "Hey, Spy Boy," she said in the playful tone she usually used when speaking to Jensen. "Hey, Fly Girl," he replied while looking her over. She certainly did look uncomfortable. Her normally slightly spiked, close-cropped brown hair was plastered to her head from the rain, and her ears were bright red from the cold. "What's the matter Fly Girl?" he asked playfully. "You forget your umbrella?" Faridah punched him lightly on the shoulder and immediately regretted it; the action rewarding her with only a sharp stinging as her frozen hand impacted the hard steel and carbon fiber of Adam's cybernetic arm. She winced visibly, and Adam chuckled, earning him an equally painful flick to his right ear. "Superior, it's said, never gives up her dead when the Gales of November come early," said Faridah, quoting the song that had just finished playing. "Boy, you got that right," she continued. "I thought that storm was going to throw me straight into the lake." Adam passed her a large mug of fresh coffee. Faridah gave him a quizzical look. "I ordered it when you told me that you were on your way," explained Adam. "I figured you could use something to warm you up." "That was sweet of you. Thanks," she replied. That was sweet of him, she thought to herself as she sipped her coffee. Then again, she wasn't surprised. It was little things like that which made her enjoy working with Jensen. Being a VIP pilot for Sarif Industries, she often had to work with rich executives who treated her like some sort of servant. She was one of the best pilots in the skies, but very few people seemed to acknowledge that. Even David Sarif sometimes treated her like a glorified chauffer. To his credit, it was not a sign of disrespect on Sarif's part. Rather, he was usually so busy that the pilot of the VTOL that he was riding in was probably the last thing on his mind. Faridah understood that, but then, that's what made working with Jensen all the more enjoyable. When she was with him, she was treated as an equal. Hell, she was an equal. More often than not, she was Jensen's only backup, and over the course of the last year spent helping Jensen with his PI work as well as his company assignments, her skills on the ground had been just as invaluable as her skills in the air, if not more so. Not to mention, Adam was easily the most attractive man who'd ever flown in the back of her bird… Adam's voice brought her focus back to the current situation. He wanted to know the results of her reconnaissance. She told him. It was fairly straightforward. Three-story apartment building, no real security to speak of, no known threats in the area. She had pinpointed the hacker's apartment in the complex and Pritchard had looked up the lease details and determined that only one tenant was registered to the apartment. Hopefully it would be a simple matter of kicking down the door, interrogating the hacker, destroying his equipment, and giving Sarif the information necessary to retrieve the company's stolen credits. The two of them finished their drinks, paid the tab, and walked out into the roaring gale.

Adam and Faridah walked down the street towards the hacker's apartment complex, Adam being led by his Wayfinder augmentation. The two of them shared Adam's umbrella, although given that the rain was practically blowing sideways due to the high winds, it made little difference. Had anyone else been on the streets that night, the pair certainly would have attracted second glances. Jensen was a tall, heavily augmented, well-built man, with an imposing stance, and a don't-fuck-with-me attitude. And then there was Malik. Malik was fairly tall for a woman, standing at an impressive five feet, eleven inches, and even though she was wearing her flight suit, she would still have attracted the attention of male passersby. She was a fair-skinned woman in her mid-twenties with a slim figure and a clear complexion, save for a small mole on her right upper lip. Her richly-colored brown eyes always had a playful twinkle to them that endeared her to almost everyone she met. For all appearances, she was the typical girl-next-door. Anyone who actually knew her knew the real story. For all of her feminine good looks, she was a complete tomboy. She'd never been to a nail salon in her life and refused to wear makeup. She wouldn't be caught dead in the ladies' section of a clothing store, preferring instead to wear blue jeans and T-shirts when she wasn't in her Sarif-issue flight suit. She preferred the social company of men over women, and she could fight, swear, and drink with the best of them. She was, quite simply, a stereotypical flyboy: a wild-spirited daredevil who constantly toed the line between brave and crazy. Whether it was flying down the freeway at 180 miles per hour on a motorcycle, or performing aerobatics that would make the Blue Angels squeamish, she wasn't truly content unless she was doing something that ordinary people would consider to be insanely dangerous.

As a child, she had been more or less the same. She was born into a fairly moneyed family in the year 2002 in Dearborn, Michigan. They were not part of what the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 would have called the "one percent," but they certainly never hurt financially. She was an only child, but due to her tomboy nature, the family would often joke that her parents had been blessed with a daughter and a son. In addition to being an expert former pilot for the United States Air Force, her father had a love of things that went fast, two of which were a heavily modified 1969 Chevy Camaro SS and a restored P51 Mustang. While other girls her age were learning gymnastics and ballet, she was learning marksmanship and Krav Maga from her father, and while other adolescent girls spent their time going to malls and the movies, she spent her time overhauling big block Chevrolets and helping her dad with aircraft maintenance. And when kids her age were starting to get their driver's licenses, she was a licensed pilot. Her fondest memory from high school was the day of the senior prom, but instead of going to the dance, she was flying her father's restored warbird in an air show in New York City. She followed in her father's footsteps to become a pilot, but a career in the military had never interested her, so she moved back and forth between companies as a corporate pilot before settling in with Sarif Industries. Sarif had proved to be an excellent choice. With Sarif, not only was she well-paid to ferry executives to various locations, she also got sent on assignments that could get her adrenaline flowing properly. Lately, most of those assignments had been with Jensen. They worked extremely well together and, ever since the incident in Lower Hengsha when Adam had saved her from almost certain death, they shared a bond that only exists between soldiers thrust into the hellish chaos of combat. The pair had earned the reputation of getting things done quickly with minimal, if any, collateral damage. So, when Sarif needed a hacker interrogated in an occupied apartment complex in the middle of a suburb without anyone else knowing about it, Jensen and Malik were his first choice.

The storm grew worse as the two of them got closer to the hacker's location. Adam noticed that Faridah was shivering. He increased the output of the heating coils in his prosthetic limbs and put his arm around her. She moved closer to him, resting her frozen cheek against his metallic shoulder as they walked down the street drenched with rain. Adam's gesture was not the least bit intimate, but Faridah couldn't help but notice certain things about him. She noticed his smell: some kind of spicy cologne; strong but not unpleasantly so. She noticed the feel of his body, augmentations included. Granted, he didn't have very much natural muscle left, but what he did have was well built, and the transition from flesh to metal was seamless. Plus, the prosthetics were sexy in a way. They were the same size as normal arms, as opposed to the bulky appendages of Tai Yong Medical, and were constructed from exotic metals and carbon fiber. The whole thing reminded her of her uncle's Corvette Stingray. Sleek and powerful. But still organic. That was the genius of Sarif Industries' prosthetics, she decided. They still looked and felt human. She had been in the arms of men before, and apart from the hardness of the metal and carbon, there was no difference between a human arm and Adam's cybernetic arm. Anyway, as she discovered when Adam pulled her from the damaged VTOL in Hengsha, his mechanical limbs could be as gentle as those of a normal man. She snapped herself out of that train of thought. Plenty of time to think about that during the flight home, she told herself. Still, she was a little bit sorry when they reached their destination and Adam pulled his arm away.

The attitudes of Jensen and Malik changed instantly. While they had been fairly casual in the pub and on the street, as soon as they reached the apartment complex, they were all business. The complex was rather nice, with all of the hallways leading to the different apartments located inside one large building, rather than several buildings with external hallways and staircases. They approached the entrance, checked their weapons, and Adam performed a final check with his visual enhancement. "Nobody in the hallways," Adam confirmed. "We go straight up the first staircase and make a left. The hacker's apartment is the last door on the right. Let's make this quick." The two agents entered the building, ascended the staircase, and moved quickly to the hacker's door, never noticing the small camera that the hacker had installed in the hallway. Jensen and Malik both drew their sidearms. The Zenith 10mm pistol felt slightly foreign in Malik's hand. Her preferred weapon was the .45 caliber Colt 1911 which, despite being designed well before her grandparents were born, remained in production as a proven shooting platform. However, since this mission required stealth and her 1911 wasn't terribly well-suited to a silencer, she found herself with the Zenith. Still, while it may have felt a bit foreign to her, she was lethally precise with it. Jensen opted not to waste any time hacking the lock to the door, instead preferring to kick the door off of its hinges with one swift motion. The hacker spun around from his workstation to face them. His first thought was to grab the .44 magnum sitting on the desk, but he thought better of it once he saw the two pistols pointed at him and noticed the two red laser dots fixed squarely over his heart. Malik walked to the desk and took the revolver and was about to start asking questions, when Adam answered a call on his Infolink. "Shit!" he yelled. "Malik, we gotta move. Now!" Malik was confused. "What the hell, Jensen?" she asked. "Pritchard picked up 12 men converging on the apartment," Adam responded. "This geek's got some friends who don't want us talking to him, and there's only one exit out of this place. We're not equipped for a firefight, and even if we were, I don't want these tenants caught in the crossfire. We have to get out of here before they block the exit." Malik began to move towards the door. The hacker decided to taunt the two agents. "Looks like the help I called got here just in time. Sorry you have to dash off so soon, guys. Say 'hi' to my pals on the way out," he cackled. "Maybe you can chat longer next time." Jensen grabbed him by the back of the neck and began dragging him out of the apartment. "You're coming with us, asshole," he growled.

Jensen passed the hacker off to his companion and descended the staircase first. "We might be able to run away from this one, but we have to move fast," he called back. Malik was struggling to drag their prisoner along, the hacker having decided to go limp in an effort to slow her down. Weighing 200 pounds, he was fairly successful. Jensen opened the door to the building and a .357 round slammed into the brick, inches away from his head. "Too late!" he yelled, as he dived back behind cover. "Malik, I need some help," yelled Jensen. "But make sure that son of a bitch doesn't run off." Thinking fast, Malik grabbed a set of handcuffs, a roll of electrician's tape, and a fragmentation grenade, and dragged the hacker to the handrail of the staircase. She cuffed one wrist to the railing and taped the body of the grenade to the same hand. She clasped the hacker's other hand around the grenade's spoon and then pulled the pin. "Don't do anything stupid," she snarled, before running to join her partner. They were most definitely outgunned by their attackers. The twelve men approaching them were armed with combat rifles, machine pistols, and shotguns. Jensen and Malik each had a 10mm pistol and two extra 15-round magazines. They would have to make their shots count. The first two attackers charged wildly at the doorway and were quickly put down with several shots to the chest. The third attacker was firing controlled bursts from his machine pistol, forcing Jensen and Malik to stay hidden behind cover. However, he made the fatal mistake of leaving himself exposed with no cover to hide behind when his magazine ran dry. Jensen seized the opportunity to fire a well-placed round at the attacker's heart. The attacker remained standing as he furiously worked to reload his weapon. Realizing that he was wearing body armor, Jensen snarled and emptied his magazine into the thug's chest, dropping him onto the drenched parking lot. Malik and Jensen found themselves reloading at the same time, and seeing their vulnerability, two men rushed the entrance, wielding shotguns. Both agents reacted almost simultaneously. Jensen swung his leg out, sending the thug sprawling onto the floor, and before the assailant could rise, Jensen had driven his left combat blade through the man's temple. Malik moved with both graceful elegance and lethal force. She switched her pistol to her left hand and used her right hand to grab the barrel of the second thug's shotgun as he ran down the entryway. Twisting the shotgun from his grasp, she drove the butt of her pistol into the man's diaphragm, dropping him to his knees. Without hesitation, she grabbed the thug's head in a well-practiced hold and deftly snapped his neck. With five of their number gone in under two minutes, the remaining attackers dropped back behind cover and began to work smarter. What followed was five minutes of intense shooting that ended with the final thug having most of his head forcibly removed by a blast from the shotgun of the man that Jensen had killed earlier.

Breathing heavily, Jensen and Malik moved out into the parking lot to make sure that the threats were eliminated. Very quickly something came to Jensen's attention that he voiced aloud. "Hold on, Malik. Pritchard said that there were twelve of these guys. I'm only counting elev—" "Oh shit!" yelled Malik. Jensen spun around to see what Malik was looking at. "Fuck!" he shouted. The twelfth thug had slipped past them as they were checking the parking lot, and was quickly trying to cut through the hacker's handcuff chain with a pair of bolt cutters. Malik and Jensen had both emptied their sidearms, so Malik quickly reached for the .44 that she'd taken from the hacker's desk. However, before she could draw and fire, the thug cut through the chain, ripped the grenade free from the hacker's hand, and threw it at the two agents. Jensen and Malik dove behind parked cars as the grenade detonated where they had been standing only moments before. Malik then jumped up and gunned down the thug in the entryway. The hacker, however, was nowhere to be found. Jensen and Malik looked everywhere around the complex to no avail. It was as though the hacker had simply vanished. "Damn. That fat ass can really move when he wants to," said Malik. "No kidding," responded Jensen. "I need to call Sarif. He's not going to like this."

Malik was breathing hard. Combat was still a relatively new experience for her; she had not yet fully learned to master the thoughts and emotions that came with it. The adrenaline rush, the fear of death, the thrill and horror of killing an enemy, and the coming down after the action was over left her drained and shaking. She focused on what Adam had told her after her first firefight. Calm down, she told herself. Breathe regular. Feel your feet on the ground. It's over; you survived. You're going to be ok. Her hands were shaking and she felt unsteady. Jensen was still talking to Sarif via Infolink, but, sensing her unease, he gently put his arm across her shoulders to steady her. Jensen was shaken a bit as well. He had quite a bit more experience with combat, between his work with Detroit SWAT and the events of the past year, but still. That attack had been sudden, he had been vastly outgunned, the attackers were reasonably well trained, and his target had escaped. It seemed as though someone had gone to quite an effort to strike at Sarif Industries.

Thirty minutes later, after a rather heated discussion with David Sarif, Adam and Faridah checked into a hotel. The storm had only gotten worse, and flying back home would have been stupid, even for a pilot of Malik's skill level. Not to mention, they were both pretty shaken up, and really just wanted to take a shower and crash. So, Sarif authorized them to check into a hotel for the night on the company's dime. It was a nice hotel, nicely furnished, well decorated, and with high thread-count sheets. Not that either of them really cared. A blanket and something other than the floor would have been adequate for both of them. Adam had finished showering and was drying himself off in the bedroom. He had told Faridah that he was going to walk down to the convenient store to see about finding them something to eat. Faridah got out of the shower and, thinking that Adam had already left, stepped out into the bedroom to dry off. They both looked at each other standing naked in the close confines of the hotel room and froze in stunned silence. Adam looked at Faridah standing in the doorway. She apparently never tanned, as her body was the same pearly white as her face. Adam knew that she was quite strong, but her body was slim and sleek. She had already toweled off her hair, and it was back to its usual spiky appearance, creating an appealing contrast with the smoothness of everything else. Her breasts weren't large, but they were quite firm, and the way that the water ran off of them was mesmerizing to Adam. Faridah was just as mesmerized looking at him. The fact that his limbs were mechanical didn't even register in her mind. She was stunned by how, well, beautiful they were. The glossy metal caught and reflected the light, while the matte finish of the carbon fiber provided a subtle contrast. The limbs were accented with red anodized titanium in the pivots of the joints. It was as though an artist had provided just as much input as the biomedical engineers who had designed the prosthetics. She looked over his entire body, taking in everything that had been replaced as well as everything that hadn't. She looked up at his face, a stunning combination of natural and artificial. His facial hair wasn't exactly long, but it was longer than stubble, and he had it trimmed into a rather pointed goatee that accented his angular facial features quite well. The implants for his sunglasses were embedded into his temples, calling attention to his eyes, or rather, the eyes that Sarif Industries replaced them with. Faridah rarely got to see his eyes, but now that his sunglasses were retracted, they grabbed her attention. They were actually very highly sophisticated cameras, but that didn't detract from their beauty. If anything, it added to it. Two green and amber orbs, brighter than any human eyes, fixed squarely on her. Just as she had been with his arms, she was surprised by how human his artificial eyes still seemed. They still conveyed emotion, and when she looked into his eyes, she felt like she could still look into him.

It took several moments before either of them realized that the other one was there. They both came to this realization simultaneously. Adam reacted first, blushing deeply and hurrying to cover himself with a towel. "I'm—I'm sorry," he said quickly. "I wasn't expecting you to—"Faridah blushed just as deeply and retreated quickly back into the bathroom, stammering an awkward apology. "It's m-my fault. I didn't know you were still here, I should have s-said something." Adam dressed quickly and left the room, heading to the convenient store to find something to eat. He felt almost intoxicated, and he shook himself in the cold night air to clear his head. He hadn't felt like that since, well, since Meagan. He hadn't been properly aroused since the incident that recreated him, and until that moment in the hotel room, he had assumed that his injuries and augmentation had rendered him impotent. He knew that he should put those thoughts out of his mind. She was a coworker, for Christ's sake. Hell, not even just a coworker, a comrade, support in a fight. He needed that relationship to get complicated like he needed another hole in his head. Still, there was something about Faridah Malik that was special. Maybe it was the fact that they spent so much time together, maybe it was the fact that he had saved her life, but for some reason, he felt something towards her that was slightly different, but just as powerful as what he had felt with Meagan. Faridah sat on her bed in the hotel room lost in more or less the same train of thought as Adam. She knew that she shouldn't do anything to compromise their working relationship, but damn—there was something about Adam...

This wasn't the first time that she had felt this way. She had thought of him, of them, often when she was alone, or on a particularly long flight while the autopilot was flying the bird. At first, she thought that maybe it was just Nightingale Syndrome: Adam had saved her life, so she felt attached to him. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized the truth. She hadn't started feeling this way after he saved her life. She felt this way before, during the first trip to Hengsha, when Adam helped her take down her friend's murderer. He seemed to genuinely care for her, and that was something that she didn't see very often. Every other guy that she'd been involved with just seemed to gradually drift away, but with Adam, it felt like they were gradually getting closer. She barely noticed Adam walking in with a box of cereal, a carton of milk, and two bananas. They ate more or less in silence, with occasional snippets of meaningless small talk. Adam stood up to throw the trash away in the bathroom and as he reached down to get the empty cereal box, his fingers brushed against Faridah's. She held onto his fingertips for the briefest moment before he walked over to the trash can. When Adam turned around, Faridah was standing in front of him, her bathrobe lying at her feet. She hooked one arm around his waist, and raised her other hand to his face. It was just another one of those moments where each knew what the other was thinking without a single word being spoken. Adam leaned down and kissed her. They stood there for a full minute, their lips pressed together, their arms wrapped around each other's bodies, each the other's world entire. They parted after a minute, gazing into each other's eyes, neither of them caring that Adam was more metal than flesh, or that they worked together and that Sarif probably wouldn't be terribly happy about what was happening. Neither of them caring about anything, for that matter. After a few seconds, Malik's eyes got that familiar sparkle to them again, and with sudden vigor, she shoved Adam against the wall and pressed herself close to him, pinning his arms to his sides, moving her body against his, biting his lower lip. Hard. Adam was taken completely by surprise, although, given Malik's personality, he probably should have expected something like this, he reasoned. They were both breathing heavily at this point. "Malik. Faridah," he said. "Wouldn't this be a little bit more comfortable on, you know, the bed?" She pulled off his robe and threw it aside. "What makes you think I give a damn about being comfortable, Spy Boy?" she asked, as she turned off the light.

***And there you have it. The first chapter of "Icarus and Daedalus." I hope that it was as enjoyable to read as it was to write. Again, I appologize for the length. I know that a lot of you prefer shorter chapters that are easier to read in one sitting. I made this one long because I wanted to display a few different writing styles that will be found throughout the story. There's character background, there's some dialogue, there's descriptive passages, there's action, and there's sex. Speaking of sex, let's have a brief discussion about that subject. YES, this story will feature a romance between Faridah and Adam. I have yet to find a good Deus Ex fanfic that features a romance between these two characters, and I think that a lot of people have been looking for one. NO, the romance will not be the only thing that the story focuses on, and NO, I will not turn Malik into a Mary Sue-ish character.
As for the sex scene, I debated long and hard (no pun intended) over it. My main worry was that it happened way too fast. Think of it this way: things have happened since the end of the game that the reader doesn't know about, and Farida and Adam have become closer. Also, I have an idea about how I'm going to continue writing that should allow me to still be able to build up a sexual tension between the two. I will not turn this into some sappy love story. If you're familiar with the characters of Michael and Fiona from USA Network's "Burn Notice," that's the dynamic that I'm picturing for Faridah and Adam.
The main reason that I wrote the sex scene in the first chapter is because I've never written one before. This story featuring a romance, there will be at least one more sex scene (and probably more) in the story, though not necesarily between Faridah and Adam. So, I figured since I had no experience with that, I'd throw it out there and let you readers give me your input about how to improve it (along with everything else). If you have any suggestions, let me know. However, bear this in mind: The sex scene in this chapter was not explicitly described. This WILL NOT change. I went into good detail about the bodies of Adam and Faridah because I wanted to paint a picture of how they saw each other at that moment. I hope that it was visually descriptive without being tasteless. That being said, the sex scenes will leave most of the details to the imagination. We're all big boys and girls, and we all know what happens when two people get naked and turn out the lights. If you're looking for pornographic descriptions and dialogue, look elsewhere. Perhaps a website devoted to pornography. Also, I hope that this was written in such a way that it was appealing to both male and female readers. To achieve this, I tried do give detailed descriptions of Faridah AND Adam. This is my goal. If I have missed that, please help me get back on track. That's really all I have to say about the sex.
As for what's coming next, expect deception, intrigue, romance, grit, and much more. It hasn't quite gotten there yet, but this will be for mature readers only. I'm planning on having Adam do some PI work unrelated to Sarif and giving some assistance to the police (like the Detroit sidequest where you help the undercover cop), and some of this stuff will be very dark and possibly disturbing. It's an interesting style to explore from an artistic standpoint. If I think it's going to be very bad, I will endeavour to write in such a way that people who want to can skip it without missing important overall plot details.
So, I believe that's that. I hope that you enjoyed this first chapter. Thank you very much for the time that you spent reading it, and I hope that you will follow this story as I write it. Please review.
-Markspectre
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