Chop Shop [Crime WIP | CH.02 released]

CH .02 | +35,350 - PLAY HERE

Chop Shop: Chapter .02 is now available! What to expect:

  • meet the rest of the crew; four, dilani and sunny.
  • take a bribe – or don’t!
  • a conversation with natasha and her plans to come.
  • finally get your hands on some birthday cake.
  • someone makes you an offer.
  • and more!

AN - ch2 is here!! i have done some tiny tweaking to ch1, adding hidden achievements for natasha, maggie, jax and taha. most notably, there are headlines at significant transitions in the story, just for the reader to keep track of where the mc is un scenes. hopefully this eases the playing experience!

fingers crossed this won’t break saves as i haven’t added/changed variables for ch1. if you do experience errors or bugs, i recommend playing from the beginning again. if you encounter game breaking bugs, inconsistencies, or find things aren’t triggering properly, please feel free to contact me :^)!

thank you for your patience and support! :heartpulse::checkered_flag:

26 Likes

I really want to take revenge on the crew. Will it be possible to betray then in the future?

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My MC can’t get a break he just trying to be a average guy and just do his job but somehow keep getting swept in some crazy things :rofl:

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Ugh, my poor mc hates Natashja so much! :rage:

I also don’t see how her “deal” helps mc, I mean he’d still earn the same shit pay as an assistant to Jonno’s father and if Nat is right the father is actually competent, so it will mean even less chance to get away with anything and more work for the same shit pay.
Don’t really see how the mc benefits here in any way, unless Nat is really going to blackmail us.
Otherwise keeping Jonno stress free and mc permanently stressed with the only reward being that they can get even more stressed working for Jonno’s dad in the future isn’t exactly great prospects.

In spite of everything my mc likes Maz and Dilani already, Four isn’t too bad either although not feeling him romantically.
Pity, pity, pity, Dilani isn’t male, the tall stature, icy stare, sharp mind and sexy motorcycle…if only she’d been male. She wouldn’t happen to have an equally cute brother by any chance would she? And Maz, sadly enough also isn’t male and the best friend (although at the moment my mc is really, really mad at KJ) is also quite close to perfect, but sadly doesn’t seem to be an ro.
Seems my poor boy is fated to remain alone, unless this thing is gonna be a series with new opportunities in book 2 or something. :disappointed:

Edit, even when Dilani blackmails my poor mc it somehow manages to come off as sexy, instead of bratty, like Natasha. Too bad my mc is male and gay.

Well my mc certainly would like to play a prank or two on Maz to get even in the future, but nothing so drastic as actual revenge.
Now for actual revenge, Jonno, his dad and Natasha would be right in my mc’s crosshairs. :drop_of_blood: :hocho: :gun:

Is it strange if I want to break my other hand one of their faces as well?

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I’m curious about this, will this story be a PG-13, sanitized portrayal of criminals? Or will it show the harsh and brutal reality of that life down the line?

Also, I didnt get why Natasha had to pull you aside just for her to tell you take care of her husband. Am I missing something there?

And lastly, I hope there is a good reason as to why the crew decided to meet with MC after that whole incident and the bribe thing. Maybe they found out he is close to Jonno and wants to use that to throw smoke screens for the search for his car?

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I am so sorry, dear author. You’ve made all these delightful ROs on the crew, and instead I’m suddenly watching my MC discover she has a metric shit ton of repressed anger and rage. Apologies to Maz, too, for the punch; I promise my MC’s not usually like this.

5 Likes

They run a chop shop, they can very quickly scrap it for parts, then ship those to some other shady dealer somewhere in Asia or Africa, they drive Mercedes there too, and nobody will be any the wiser. Yes that doesn’t make as much profit as the intact thing, but at current market rates it is not a loss either and much better than going to jail over some posh twat’s fancy car. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy by the way. Now if the car had been very rare or unique it would have been another story but AMG roadsters aren’t terribly rare.
I don’t think this is about a single stolen car, I think this is about a bigger, more sophisticated con or even a series of them, probably including the one that is going to get the mc shot in the prologue, since the mc works for an insurance firm there are quite a few possibilities.

Not exactly surprising, considering how almost everybody treats the mc.

Which would have counted for something if they hadn’t been the ones to steal mc’s shit in the first place.

@losingface Any plans to give the mc hobbies, outside of work? I mean even if they are very poor it seems my mc could benefit from kickboxing classes and no matter how poor he is he’ll probably have found a way to keep his library membership.

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To be fair, they’re not the worst about it. They’re polite, they tried to drive you home…

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hello! i don’t plan to specify hobbies in the game as i don’t see how it will fit my narrative. i’m leaving those sorts of details up to player headcanons.

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Skill raising opportunities maybe? It doesn’t need to be long-winded. And, of course, an mc who does some sort of martial arts probably wouldn’t have broken their fist with that punch. :thinking:
Just picturing how satisfying it would be for my mc to unwind on a Saturday by kicking and punching training dummies imagining they were Jonno/Natasha, those stupid bouncers and now KJ too. :smiling_imp: Some defensive skills also wouldn’t serve mc wrong in the underworld to be sure.

Just think about it, I think it would help add verisimilitude and make the mc feel more like a real person. You don’t need to write hobby scenes if you don’t want to, one or two mentions in casual conversation and maybe a slight hobby related skill boost/ relationship boost with some characters would be more than sufficient.
It’s just a suggestion though and reading is not a hard hobby for me to headcanon for my mc in any case, less so for martial arts considering the mc’s amateur punch.Ouch! :adhesive_bandage:

But if not a hobby I will make one further suggestion to at least add knowing how to punch correctly to the mc who has served some jail-time, you’ll have a very hard time in prison, particularly since the mc is not rich and cannot buy protection, if you cannot do that.

Otherwise keep up the good work and I hope mc will be able to be more respected towards the end, cause right now they have it just as bad a Walter White in the first season of breaking bad in terms of being disrespected by virtually everybody around them. So, hope mc too can make some progression towards being the one who knocks. :grin:

thank you for your input! again, i don’t believe this suits the narrative i’m going for :slight_smile:

i think there are some presumptions about the game being laid out here, especially when it comes to violence. i’m not interested in writing an mc that punches their way out of situations. also, i don’t believe i wrote that the mc ever served time if they had a shady past.

as of right now, we are only 2 chapters in! there is still a lot of events to be covered that will allow the mc to grow and change over the course of the book.

as vince gilligan said, he pitched the idea of breaking bad by saying “You take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface.” - and they did exactly that over a long and calculated 5 season series. so, again, the mc needs to experience things before the changes happen.

still you are free to headcanon hobbies, but i won’t be adding anything specific as of right now.

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How else will I take my revenge on the crew

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Pity that will take rigged MMA/prizefighting/betting out of the mix of options to launder their criminal cash, sadly enough, but I respect that if you don’t want to write about violence it is your story even if it means parts of the criminal world will remain barred to the mc as a result, seems poor mc will have to find another outlet for their years of pent up frustrations then, particularly once the poor kid finds out that to get 100k laundered and clean for legit spending through, for example, online gambling it’s gonna cost him around 400k in dirty money and the underworld in the 21st century tends to follow the same neoliberal rules as the “legit” business world in that it is infinitely easier and much cheaper to launder your criminal proceeds if you’re already legitimately wealthy or rich.

The crew are not the problem, except for the part that the two I like most right now (Maz and Dilani) aren’t male, so no romance for my boy.
My mc wants revenge on the posh stuck up crowd who constantly humiliate him more than anything, still there are non-violent ways, even if they are rather less cathartic and require boatloads of money. Not that this example will likely be in the game and it will take years or decades to pull off. But if he ever makes enough money he could say buy that hotel where they treated him abominably with a shell company investment fund, proceed to leverage it with debt…let it go bankrupt, buy the now distressed assets with another (shell) company, restructure it and turn it into small condos, which would make all the staff including the bouncers and snooty managers redundant during bankruptcy where you can fire them for cheap due to cessation of the hotel business.

I omitted a few steps there, but you get the picture, best thing is that it is not illegal as leveraged buy-outs are how the real world elite have made loads of money these past few decades, all legal and above board. The same procedure is, in theory, applicable to AutoLuxe itself, but more difficult and requiring more steps due to it being an insurance firm and thus a financial institution which fall into a rather more complicated regulatory scheme.

It’s just an example though, sadly I do not think the mc can really get that rich here and even if they could they’d likely be in their sixties or something by the time they could pull something like that off.
Revenge doesn’t necessarily require violence but it is often the easier path, not to mention provides for a certain cathartic release in entertainment.

While my mc would have loved to beat up those bouncers in a (semi)legal or underground fight once he had gotten good enough at fighting that sort of underworld career/archetype is not a path the author here seems interested in writing.

But between the two extremes I have mentioned I am keen to see what kinds of opportunities to command respect and maybe finally get some revenge the mc will get to have here.
The writing at least is very good and the modern day UK flavour is distinctive enough to make me curious to see where it goes. But I’ll withhold going further into this subject until we see some more chapters and hopefully get a better idea of which direction(s) the mc will be allowed to go here.
I simply hope the author hasn’t done such a good job at creating this much pent up anger in the mc without giving us some good opportunities to do something with it later on.

Well my mc does want to give Maz a good scare prank, but that is a prank and, yes, it is also a bit of good-natured payback if it works.

The posh twats though, they really make my mc’s blood boil and he really does want some real revenge on them.

4 Likes

Honestly, to everyone who wants to take revenge on the crew/do bad things to them, I think this might not be the IF for you.

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I think violence and crime goes hand-in-hand like peanut butter and jelly so its only natural when people, such as myself ask about it. I’m not talking about if the MC will shoot the crew or break their kneeecaps. but maybe down the line we see the violent aspect of the criminal world, whether its the MC and crew doing it or another crew or the insurance company idk. That’s what I was looking for.

Sanitized criminals isnt my cup of tea since it makes a questionable people with morals suddenly become good guys and they lose the nuance that stories of the crime genre provide.

Take Mike Ehrmantraut for example, he’s a good provider and grandfather to Kaylee, but he’s a cold and ruthless hitman for Gustavo Fring. And his reasons for turning to crime is sympathetic, but he isn’t brutal or sadistic like Tuco or Lalo.

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Sliding out of my hole because I cannot get over how cool the characters designs are (I love how much personality they have and how varied and distinct they are!) Also love that car art (so much). I don’t have much time to play through things but the opening had great vibes and writing and I look forward to seeing more!

Very in love with your designs and had to try drawing Four (I wanted to draw the rest but alas…time…)

Good luck with Chop Shop :slight_smile:

10 Likes

well, the mc does get shot in the prologue :sweat_smile: i think that’s a clue we are ramping up to something.

edit: i think stating that portraying non-violent criminals is sanitisation undermines the concept of criminality. you can be a non-violent criminal and still be an extremely dangerous and bad person. crime is about the grey because that’s where the majority of it operates.

if we are going to continue using brba/bcs as examples, we can talk about Saul/Jimmy, Gale, Lydia, even Marco, Betsy, Craig and Kim to an extent. i would include Gus, because he doesn’t engage in violence for the majority of the series, but eventually does when he is pushed to his absolute limit when Gale is murdered. in no way are these people framed as ‘good guys’. they do extremely bad things, that ruin peoples lives (and as we saw with Howard - ends them) but they never pull the trigger themselves so to say. that is what the entirety of better call saul is about; non-violent crime that can be just as devastating as violence and can spiral into violence.

again i have to say, we are only 2 chapters in. we are still at the surface. i haven’t gotten to the crews history and backgrounds yet, so who is to say these people haven’t been faced with or engaged in violence before? the story will present that when it is ready.

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oh my GOD, no way :sob: this is amazing!!! i’ve been sitting here staring for the past 5 minutes because i don’t know what to say!! you’ve captured the sweetness of four so wonderfully!! thank you so much, i love it!!! :heart: :heart: :heart:

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In that case, consider me hooked for the future chapters! What I meant about sanitized criminals are individuals who avoid violence at all costs, whether directly or indirectly.

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