Cleanskin
You refused the needle.
The refusal
In the dev build The refusal runs in the development build, at the First Splice.
At the Clinic, at Operator 10, a Legend can refuse the needle. The First Splice is where the choice is made, and a Cleanskin declares it in place of choosing a travel line.
It is the one permanent choice in the travel system. The five weave lines close for good: Skybreak, Redline, Ghostware, Graviton and Tiderunner. The gear and skill lines stay open, and Freerunner gives a Cleanskin its first node for free.
The Clinic bell rings once for every completed First Splice. It never rings for a refusal.
You refused the needle. No weave-alloy, no registry lock, no scanner in Catena has your gait on file.
Powersets on hardware
Partly built The sets are catalogued and the Forge screen saves your frame. Nothing here runs in a fight yet.
A Cleanskin still frames powersets. They are carried on hardware you built, on a body nobody modified.
Every set that is not one of your archetype's two anchors rides on external hardware and costs a small extra Strain. The premium never touches the two anchors, and it never changes how many sets you can run.
The belt and the human body
Designed Design only. The belt itself is the Jury-Rig line, which has its own page.
The design gives a Cleanskin a gadget belt (a grapple-zip, a jump pad and a boot-jet), a peak-human baseline with a faster mantle and a dodge-roll, and a resource of its own.
That resource is Clutch, the human counterpart of Sync. It fills by the same rules of style. Once it is half full it fuels two things. Focus slows the world for you alone, with free aim. Second Wind lets you survive a killing blow, once per full charge.
None of this runs in the build yet. The belt is designed as the Jury-Rig line, whose tree is written and whose gadgets are not built.
No ware, no help, no explanation. Get up.
Scanners
Designed A scanner reading nothing is the game's design. No checkpoint exists in the build.
Meridian's scanners do not flag a Cleanskin. The reader chirps nothing, and the guard looks up, then back down.
At a checkpoint that is the single most unsettling result the job produces.
...Next.
There's no file. Do you know how rare it is that I have nothing to read?
The fork at Operator 30
Designed Both roads are design only. Neither has a date.
At Operator 30 a Cleanskin's road forks. One way stays human. The other goes to chrome.
Apex Conditioning stays human: a second Focus charge, a faster Second Wind, zipline pairs and ally-carry. Chromed goes the other way, adding chop-shop chrome on top of the Cleanskin base.
Chromed has a price. You lose your invisibility to the scanners, so you are hunted on a scan and not by a warrant, and you take on Heat, a resource that fills with use and punishes overclocking. It is not the street's heat.
Chromed is the later of the two. Apex Conditioning may slip to join it.
That is the trade: the city cannot upgrade what it cannot see.