Cyberpunk 2077: Trauma Team
Nadia: Everyone's resentful of how little money they make. Doesn't change anything.
We get the call. We do the job.
Cyberpunk 2077: Trauma Team is a graphic novel by Cullen Bunn and Miguel Valderrama. It takes place in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe, wherein Trauma Team International (#TTI!) is a corporation that responds to medical emergencies with Combat Medics and sharpshooters.
The story follows Nadia, a Trauma Team EMT who became the Sole Survivor of a rescue operation that resulted in the death of her entire squad at the hands of a blood-thirsty Solo. While Nadia succeeded in saving her client's life, she remains haunted by the loss of her comrades and seeks to bury the Survivor Guilt by returning to her job. After finally being cleared for active duty by her employers, Nadia is reassigned to Squad Bravo, which has been deployed to extract a Platinum level client out of the Forbidden Zone that is Night City's Pacifica.
And everything proceeds to go downhill from there...
This comic book provides examples of:
- Affably Evil: The Platinum client is surprisingly upbeat in spite of his dire circumstances and tries his best to cooperate with Squad Bravo so they can all make it out Animals territory in one piece. But it doesn't change the fact that he's the psycho merc who murdered Nadia's original squad, is completely remorseless about it, and loves rubbing in the sheer irony on how it's now Nadia's job to keep him alive after what he did to her. On the flip side, he also defends Nadia's decision to give the mother of a deathly ill child antibiotics after barging into their home to escape the Animals and casually murders Stratter to keep him from snitching on Nadia out of some twisted sense of gratitude for her help.Nadia: What...What did you do?The Client: Looks to me I did you a favor.Nadia: A...A favor? He's my teammate.The Client: He had it in for you. You heard him. He was going to ruin you.Nadia: So you just killed him?The Client: You're Trauma Team right? Without that, what are you? Now, he won't take that from you. You're the last "good little med-tech" standing.
- Asshole Victim: Stratter's desire to destroy Nadia over giving antibiotics to children is enough reason to be glad when the Client kills him.
- Black-and-White Insanity: The safety of the client trumps all things, including the lives of Trauma Team members. One wonders how they manange to engender this kind of loyalty given everyone is solely working for money.
- Combat Medic: Trauma Team squads often have to go into live-fire areas, and generally consist of two security specialists, two emergency medical technicians, a gunner and a pilot respectively.
- Corporate Samurai: Trauma Team's devotion to their clients goes beyond common sense, reason, and even Greed.
- Downer Ending: Nadia, refusing to let the man who murdered the love of her life walk away, turns her gun on the client just as another Trauma Team squad drops in as reinforcements. While her hallucination of Dodds begs her to not throw her life away like this, Nadia dismisses him and seemingly pulls the trigger, resulting in a firefight with Trauma Team where the likelihood of her survival is slim to none.
- From Bad to Worse: Not only is the Platinum client Squad Bravo is sent to rescue currently a captive of the Animals street gang, who have all augmented themselves into becoming hulking berserkers, the client also turns out to be the same damn Solo who brutally murdered Nadia's original squad.
- Honor Before Reason: The Trauma Team company seems quite content to take a Solo mercenary on as a client as long as he has the Eddies, despite said client having killed a previous Trauma Team unit. They also are willing to turn on one of their own on behalf of said client.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Stratter, one of the members of Squad Bravo, is established right off the bat as a total prick who goes out of his way to antagonize Nadia after she was reassigned to his team. But he's also right to point out that Nadia was clearly not mentally sound enough to return to active duty and her inability to get her head in the game will likely get the entire squad killed.
- Laughing Mad: The Platinum Client is a Psycho Knife Nut who is all too in love with his job, and gleefully slices up the gangbangers blocking Squad Bravo's way to the exit after shooting up a combat stim.
- The Lost Lenore: Nadia was in a intimate relationship with her late squadmate Dodds, who she now constantly sees in various Flashback Nightmares and Hallucinations throughout the graphic novel's events.
- Sole Survivor: Nadia is the last living member of her original squad after a Solo hired to assassinate their client butchered them all for getting in the way.
- Survivor Guilt: The main reason why Nadia is so mentally and emotionally damaged comes from the fact that in spite of promising that she'd prioritize the safety of her lover Dodds over a client's if the job ever put them in such a position, Nadia ended up doing the exact opposite and left Dodds to die while she tended to the needs of her client.
- Too Dumb to Live: Trauma Team's stubborn refusal to protect their client, even when he's killed members of Trauma Team, gets them killed.
- Winter Royal Lady: The woman interviewing Nadia to determine her mental stability and combat readiness.
