Nothing interferes with Lucy arriving in NYC... Soon she's downtown, just a few blocks southwest of Times Square...

Lucy has a few items on her agenda on arriving in the big city, the first few of which are pretty simple:  check into a hotel, have a shower, get a new anonymous burner phone from any of probably a dozen street kiosks, walk to a coin-op laundromat and ponder her next step while she watches her laundry spin.

She'd been somewhat dreading the prospect of having to find a new dealer in New York, but now she wonders whether she even wants to bother.  Finding a source in New Jersey who wasn't a violently unstable sociopath had taken a fair bit of time and more than a few peeks into some very unpleasant minds, which was not a routine Lucy cared to repeat.  She wasn't a complete helpless junkie (yet), she didn't need to re-up every day or even every week.  And Atlantic City is a relatively short and cheap bus ride away.  For the moment she decides to just put a pin in the whole idea, and plan to keep relying on Hector should it become necessary.

And the whole poker scam thing had begun to wear on her.  Reading poker opponents was a nice play, simply because nobody would ever be able to prove she was doing anything illicit.  But it required her to look into peoples' mind fairly repeatedly, which was tiring at least and occasionally brought on what Lucy has come to refer to as a "Bad Head Day."  She needed to find another revenue stream, something with a little bit nicer ratio of reward to effort.

And so she watched her whites tumble clockwise over and over and over, and pondered.

(Pause here in case the GM wants to add anything!)

(Nope, proceed!)

Loafing in the laundromat watching her whites tumble around in the dryer, a few Big Ideas do manage to tumble around in Lucy's head.  Unfortunately, most of them seem to come with a whole host of attendant complications that she's not sure how to resolve.

But she's realizing these past few days that she's been thinking too small.  This whole scam at cheating poker games was good for a few quick bucks, but it wasn't going to make her any real money.  And so of her several Big Ideas, one does seem by far the most appealing: insider trading!  That would obviously be the life, using a few pieces of choice illicit information gently lifted from peoples' minds down on Wall Street to start making money off of knowing things she shouldn't have any way of knowing.  Like Martha Stewart!  How complicated could it be for a psychic?  Just go down to Wall Street (well, find out where exactly Wall Street was, and then go there), find out where stock traders hang out, and drop into the minds of a few of them who look slick or shady or whatever, until she got lucky and found someone who knew something she could use.

Of course first she'd have to figure out how to go about even just regular trading, setting up an account with...  someone?  Stockbrokers, that's what they're called.  And for that she'd probably need a fake ID.  And way better than just a spoofed out-of-state driver's license that she could use to buy alcohol, too, she'd need one that would stand up to the scrutiny of, like, banks and whatever.  So like, one of those deals she'd seen in movies where she steals the legitimate identity of someone who died, like their social security number and everything.  Not that she has any idea how to go about getting something like that, but she does know at least one reasonably trustworthy drug dealer.  Maybe Hector had a connection?  A long shot, maybe, but it's a place to start.

(At no point during this train of thought would it occur to Lucy to use her real identity.  Anybody who knew her when she had a usable social security number of her own, she doesn't care to have tracking her down.)

Last of her laundry dried and bundled back into her roller suitcase, she'll find a room at a cheap but not disgusting hotel, then find some street vendor or corner store to sell her a new burner phone, and call Hector's number, intending to ask if he could talk business (i.e., whether he was confident the pigs didn't have him bugged or whatever).

"--Yo, who's this?" Hector says on the other end of the call once Lucy obtains her new burner phone (since he doesn't recognize the new number).
This message was last edited by the GM at 19:56, Sun 10 Jan 2021.

"Your favorite Cubana, new phone.  You got a minute we can talk?"

[Just for clarity here, OOC I'm perfectly aware that Lucy's insider trading plan is...  let's say "implausible."  :)  But she's at least trying to broaden her horizons, and maybe she'll get a solid forged identity out of it.]

"Sure thing, talk away girl..."

"I'm wondering if you got a friend who can get me something, because you're so popular and all.  I need a fake ID.  Not just some driver's license for buying booze, I mean a good one.  One that stands up to background checks.  I'm hoping you maybe know a guy who knows a guy or whatever?"

"I know a guy... A card that good at fooling pigs'll cost, though... This gonna be for you?"

"Yeah, it's for me.  And not just pigs either, I'm looking for a whole fake identity, like good enough to set up bank accounts or whatever."

"Sounds like you gonna run a big scam or somethin'. Need an investor? What's th' play?"

"Maybe I'm just sick of keeping my money in a sock in my backpack?"  A bit of a dodge, inasmuch as her answer was perfectly true, even if not the whole truth.  But she wasn't about to let herself get put in a situation where she owed money to Hector.  That sounded like a recipe for disaster.

"Hmmmm... Well, how fast do you want what you want...?"

Hmm, a question she hadn't considered.  Lucy pauses a moment to think it over now.

"I don't need to pay extra for a rush job," she says.  "It takes as long as it takes to get it right."

"Well, I think on average this would take at least a week, normally... You got that long...?"

"If that's how long it takes then that's how long I got."  Not exactly ideal, having to wait, but a week really didn't seem like an unreasonably long time for such a thing.  "How much am I going to need?"  She braces herself for a shockingly huge number.

"Unnn. I'll have to ask. If I had to guess, I'd brace yourself for maybe..." He thinks. "...Are we talking about 'fool a pig who might happen to look it up to check on it,' or are we talking 'some fed is definitely gonna look it up and check on it?'"

"Yeah, I don't think I'm even talking about cops at all, I'm talking about getting like, a social security number to set up bank accounts, like...  I don't know, like from movies, you know?  Someone steals a legit identity from someone who dies as a kid or whatever?  That's a real thing that happens, yeah?  I don't think cops even look at social security numbers, I mean, if you get a social security number that passes, you don't even need a fake driver's license, you can go to the DMV and get a real one, right?"  Lucy had never had a driver's license herself (or stolen an identity!), so her conception of the process was vague at best.
This message was last edited by the player at 07:42, Thu 21 Jan 2021.

"...Okay, so this is more about a passable ess-ess card, huh. ...I'm guessing... Might be in the neighborhood of... maybe 3K. Just to give you a ballpark figure."

Lucy presumes that he's probably tacking on a few hundred for himself.

Lucy doesn't begrudge a bit of middleman markup; being the "guy who knows a guy" is a valuable service and it's perfectly fair that he should get paid for it.  And three grand was...   a lot, but not a much as she might have feared.  She'd made that much on a good night at the tables.  Not often, but once or twice.  It was within the realm of plausibility.  She'd have to stick with the poker hustle for a bit longer than she'd have liked, but that wasn't the worst fate imaginable.

"Okay, I think I can get that much.  I'm in New York but you can get ma at this number, if your guy needs to reach me.  Otherwise I'll call you in a few days, yeah?"
This message was last edited by the player at 19:54, Thu 21 Jan 2021.

"Got it. I'll hold onto this number, otherwise I'll talk to you when you get back." The implication is that her being in New York is just a visit for some reason. (Will she correct it?)

"Sí, bueno.  Gracias, Hector," she says as she hangs up.  Lucy notes his assumption but declines to correct him for the moment.  Possibly she'll update him when she sees him next regarding her ID.  Or possibly she won't ever correct him at all, who knows?  She hasn't decided yet.  She means to go on using Hector for now as her connection for her "medication" regardless of her intended relocation; Atlantic City is only a relatively short and cheap bus ride away from the Big City, and reliable drug dealers are -so- hard to find these days.

So, one problem on the way towards being solved, or tentatively solved at least.  Which left her with the rest of the day to kill.  She could always get back to the tables, but the whole process of finding and getting familiar with the local casinos seemed just exhausting at the moment; she'd leave that for tomorrow.

For the moment, she feels like just getting the lay of the land, maybe picking up a bit of a feel for the sort of people she'd be trying to work on next.  She locates Wall Street on a subway map, spends thirty of her dwindling dollars on a MetroCard, boards the next suitable train, and off she goes, intending to spend a few hours just absorbing the local aura, watching the brokers and traders bustling around, listening to them talk, picking up a bit of the lingo, maybe trying a subtle peek into someone's mind if they seem to stand out in some sort of interesting way.

On Wall Street, someone catches Lucy's eye-- very healthy and in good shape, and their clothes are incredibly sharp and expensive-looking. Really, one might think this was a fashion model or a movie star, except their look says 1. business and 2. even more money than a top fashion model nor movie star.

They have the air of someone very in control of their life-- except right now-- right now, they seem rather distracted, like they're thinking about some sort of problem that's really troubling them...

(Describe this person (gender? race? other?))

Lucy is not really a jealous sort of person: her rage is reserved for a more nebulously brooding bitterness at the general awfulness and injustice of an arbitrary, indifferent universe, and for her family in particular, her stepfather of course foremost of all.  Strangers and passing acquaintances aren't often the subjects of her wrath, or even really an particular emotion at all.  They're either people she can use, or people she has no use for.  (Genuine love and friendship are, in Lucy's experience, completely mythological concepts that don't actually occur in the real world.)

Every once in a good long while though, the world presents Lucy with what feels to her like a sort of paragon of what-if, an exemplar of everything Lucy could have been and might have done if only she hadn't spent her entire life getting shit dumped on her by the universe.  Her doppelganger, her mirror image.

She was tall, she was curvy, she was gorgeous, the brown of her hair and eyes both light enough to be almost golden, the Latina bronze of her skin smooth and perfect.  Her pencil skirt and suit jacket were so perfectly white that the word "white" seemed inadequate to convey the impact; her silk shirt and kitten heels were precisely the color of freshly drawn blood.  ... I could rock that outfit, Lucy brooded, trying not to stare.  Clipped to the lapel of the woman's jacket was a name badge, like she'd just come from some sort of professional convention: Ana Marquez.  Whatever was printed beneath it, presumably her job title or the name of her company, was too small for Lucy to read.

Clearly the woman was -someone-, and furthermore it seemed plausible that she was someone Lucy could use:  she concentrated and tried to peer into Ana's mind.

[06:00, Today: Lucy Lopez rolled 10 using 2d6+1 with rolls of 5,4.  read Ana.]

Ana does in fact have lots of money-- was born to it in fact. But she's gotten a lot more since then. She owns not one but three companies: fashion, pharmaceutical research, and marketing. She's concerned right now because her insider-trading confidant is feeling pressure. Ana would lay odds that the guy isn't going to crack, or at least not in a way that gets her in trouble, but she doesn't like the fact that odds could in fact be given, however much they lean slightly in her favor.

And yes, Ana is someone who could absolutely lose money-- quite a bit of money, by Lucy's standards-- and barely notice it. Money that could potentially just trip and fall into Lucy's wallet, if she handled things right...

Or... more? Maybe theft/grift isn't ambitious enough, considering the target...?