Lamplight Machete

Written by: Ripshot

So these big fellas have only been out on the streets for a while, but city council's already shitting themselves because they were the ones who put them out in the first place.
Okay, so that's kind of not technically true, but here's the short story: A couple of years back, Raleigh was having another one of those moods where they had to make the city look a little nicer on our tax money, so in a wild and exciting impulse-move, they... renovated the street-lights. They had a little ribbon-cutting ceremony and everything.
Now these lights were fancy, I guess. I don't know shit about designing public fixtures but they looked different, at least. More to the point, the service panel had a fancy cover to it, with a curved and tapered shape, inset handle and fancy sliding rail system, the sort of stuff that looked cool but was actually real shitty for engineers to work with. Some lunatics in barrens-gang called The Howling Blades, however, saw a better use for e'm: They pried the covers off the post, give the edge opposite the inset handle a quick sharpening off one of the billions of whetstones they somehow got lying around and found that the panel-door made for a primitive but surprisingly sturdy machete, and promptly started ripping them off every streetlight they could get away with.
It took the city-council a few weeks and a few severed arms to realise why a specific part of all their beloved new streetlights were going missing, but when they found out they panicked like hell and began fitting the street-lights with newer, less weaponisable covers while telling the cops to crack down on the new fad scaring soccer-moms. As of writing this, if you're found with one of these panel-covers in or around your apartment, sharpened or not, Lone Star are gonna try and book you for vandalism and weaponisation of public property (so naturally, I got like four sitting in my bedroom. Find your own, chummer!)
As for how they are as weapons? I'm not sure how much I can talk about it, really. It's a big hunk of metal with a sharp edge. You gotta be built big just to lift the damn thing, much less use it, but it's hard to beat the satisfaction of swinging something as inelegant and crude as one of these and cleaving right through some corpsec's expensive body-armor. Worth making one for yourself, if you can find one.

Funny thing, when the city council replaced the streetlight covers with the flimsy aluminum ones to stop vandals from turning them into swords, they took the rest of the old covers and just dumped 'em to be recycled later. Didn't take long for those to all vanish...

— Anonymous poster

Item type

Weapon, Melee

Manufacturer

The Howling Blades

Owning Organization

The Howling Blades

Rarity

6F

Weight

7.1 KG

Dimensions

28" long

Base Price

220¥

Type

Blade

Accuracy

3

Reach

2

Damage

S+2P

AP

-3

If the wielder's strength is under 4, all attacks with the lamplight machete suffer a -2 dicepool penalty.