Shadowrun: Imugi

You've never been very interested in women. It's okay to admit that now isn't it? After everything, after Jiaolong. There's never been anything about them that's made your heart race, made the heat rise in your cheeks. Shit that other guys live and breathe, the kind of stuff Gahm knew from verse to chorus, you've always fumbled with. Learning it like a second language: with rote and repetition and full-on immersion. Drinking it down, day after day, until you could vomit it back on command. Tits and ass and what to say about her face. Is she a prude or does she put out? What're her best features? What's her family like? It's crass, it's clinical, it's a neat little folder of things saved up in your head that lets you get by even as it leaves you cold.

Mi-ran Seonwoo leaves you cold.

The dress she wears is like stained glass turned to fabric: a hundred fractured, geometric panes of golden cloth winding up her body. Sections so small and fine they could be almost scales along the front, the chest, larger shards coiling up her legs, her back, framing the body below. Rippling through shades of ocher and amber as she moves, digital displays wrapping her wrists, her arms, in slim rings of burning brass. Everything culminating in a collar the color of the setting sun around her throat, extending up around her shoulders and the top of her spine in a sleek, synthetic halo. It catches the eye and oh you can hear from here, everyone's complimenting it. And it is beautiful, you can admit that (with a little bit of jealousy).

But the woman herself is- not plain no. The rich and powerful aren't ever plain. But there's something subtly mathematic to it, carefully calculated. A narrow face and a sharp chin, a slender neck with long brown hair falling to her shoulders. She's like a composite of every single face on every single fashion magazine in the Republic. She could be any of them, all of them, none of them. She's not much older than you and definitely shorter than you. No obvious enhancements, you could probably shatter her spine over your knee and toss the broken, bleeding pieces away. You wouldn't even break a sweat.

So if she's not a fixation and not a threat why do you pick her? Her and not her mother, not her father, not her handsome brother, smiling as he shakes hands, teeth gleaming, blonde highlights so obviously dyed in. Suit cut to frame the gym-tailored muscle beneath.

Maybe it's because she's less threatening. Maybe you tell yourself the taint, the toxic keen won't be as strong because she's the youngest of the batch. That there's less a chance of her noticing you noticing her, less a chance of you hurting yourself. Or maybe it's just because you see something almost...sad behind her amber eyes. Something familiar. Just a flicker, muted behind layers of perfectly coordinated clothing and makeup and skin and genetics and then gone.

You're probably just projecting. In the end it doesn't matter. You still need to know.

The veins in your eyes bloat, red turning to black as your iris widens, drawing up into a slit as the wet surface of the sclera carbonizes. Flash burning into so much ash, bleeding away in a thin trickle of soot. A bodyguard passes behind you, a couple holds a conversation by your elbow. You stand framed by the press, just a face in the crowd. Feeling the pivot, the tug behind ocular nerves as the world shifts.

Security spirits loom over the party. Each one is a goliath, a colossus: insectile and reptilian and industrial. Clinging to the curved flanks of the spire with huge, hulking limbs. Arachnid arms made out of ceramic composite and bunched CNT muscle, black glass bones jutting through, code crawling over the haptic screens. Long cables trailing from their backs, floating up into the sky, slowly undulating like kelp caught in an undersea current. Their heads are spotlights fused to angular crowns, golden beams slowly, methodically scanning the seams of the gardens, the points the plaza begins to blur and bleed into the fracturing, neon-laced insanity of Pyongyang's Astral shadow.

Other, smaller denizens watch the party itself: fully matured camera-spirits sitting on ledges, kneeling on the underside of balconies near the black blisters of their physical bodies. Lanky stick-limbed men: a single glassy lens where a human's face should be, emaciated rubber-black bodies studded with ports and sockets. Knight-Errant summons stand beside their shamans, armored sentinels with visors lowered, their full plate a collage of firearms and blades smelted and forged together. Heavy halberds and greatswords resting against their shoulders, golden cloaks and tabards stamped with company insignia. Most are doglike, something canine to the shape beneath the suit, others avian or bovine.

And then you see her.

It's about what you'd expect honestly. A handful of bound spirits clustered around her like cleaner fish, beautifying her on the Astral, lending her that subtle sparkle, that shine in the Real. Essence rolls off her like a heat haze, mingling with the bonfire blaze of her family, their guards and the other guests. Carefully controlled and restrained, emotions kept in rigid check lest they bleed out and betray her to the Second Sight. Look at past it. There's nothing else. Keep looking. There's nothing there. Keep searching, scanning, you've seen the seam in the mask, and once you know its a trick it's all just a matter of patience and picking it apart.

There. You have it, focus, iit takes a bit of work but just treat it like you're trying one of those optical illusions. You just have to relax and look the right way and the spiral will twist all on its own. The air shivers, her body goes translucent. The skin she wears, it's not the real her: it's just a see-through sack wrapped around the core, like Ms. Wu, like you.

But she's not like you.

Oh she's not like you at all.

You understand it now don't you? Even if you don't want to. Even if you wish you could claw it out of your eyes, rip it free and throw it on the floor and smash the image beneath your heel like a bloated worm. Feel it squish. Innards splattering out in an oil black stain. But it's too late to take this kind of thing back. And it doesn't matter, it's fine if your brain's having a hard time working through it. Your body gets it: your guts turning watery, your belly clenched into a freezing fist. For one terrifying moment you're absolutely sure that you'll shit yourself. It's not that she's ugly, it'd be easier if she were just ugly. It's not that she's monstrous, you don't mind the monstrous.

She's nightmare logic.

The human body crucified against the spirit's skeleton. Fused and enmeshed and sewn (or is it grown?) together. Like a worker fallen between the gears, mangled and bent around the toothed cogs and spinning drums until you can't tell where the machine stops and twisted, torqued carrion starts. Her skin is glossy black plastic, shot through with circuitry, with sheathed cables like tendons and veins. Giant cockroach wings curl around her waist like a skirt. Anchored to the small of her back, the metamaterials as thin as tissue. You can see the shadow of her legs beneath the gauzy brown. Her toes trailing a few inches above the ground. Withered arms crossed just over her navel, a bony thumb stroking her wrist.

She hangs suspended between mantis limbs. Crooked, hooked things, bowing her beneath their weight even as they lift her up. Hold her over half the crowd. Each one is like...a building heh. No, no they are. They are buildings, downtown Pyongyang in miniature, in a model. Steel and concrete and glass drawn into hypermodern skyscrapers. The skyscrapers bent until they're shaped into limbs. Lined with logos you don't recognize, holographic script that makes your eyes water and tear. Slim wires web between the skeletal radio masts and spiked transmission towers rising from her spine, curling like vines. Miniature satellite dishes unfolding like petals. A garden of metal. A telecom array blooming from her back.

Burnished mandibles chitter where her jaw should be. A smaller secondary set within grooming and cleaning like a man anxiously wringing his hands. Her head is heartshaped. Studded with pools of black oil. Half-hidden mechanisms irising wider, narrowing just below the surface,

It takes you a second to realize they're camera lenses.

Mi-ran reaches up with one thin hand to brush back her hair (brown hair, she still has it in exactly the same style too heh). But then she stops. Then her head just...cocks. Neck craning as she turns to look over her own fucked up legs, every optic cycling wide.

And for a second, just a second, you see the shape of something behind her. Some behemoth, some beast vast enough that the distortion alone makes your head throb, your brain ache. And for a second, just a second, your eyes meet Mi-ran's.

Look away. Lids shut tight.

Fuck.

Start walking. Walk faster.

Fuck.

Catch Jiaolong's elbow.

Fuck.

"Wh-" Does he see your face? You don't know, you can't tell, your eyes are screwed up tight. Fingers on your free hand twitching, staccato drumming against your thigh. You feel like everyone's watching you, everyone's staring. You feel like you're stained, like her attention rubbed off on you, and now your skin's burning and itching like a chemical spill. The Drake shudders, shivering and thrashing. It slams itself against your skinsuit and you almost stumble. Crack your lids what are you fucking doing, do you want to draw more attention? Opulence and comfort swims back into detail. The cold bulk of Dust soaring above you, drowning you in its shadow. "Christoph what is i-"

"Don't talk. Walk. We need to get out of this party. I think I've been made."

Your voice pitched low, barely a murmur, moving your lips as little as possible. His reply is soft, his voice serious and soothing. "By who?"

"Mi-ran, the Seonwoo they're not- they're not human. I looked at the daughter in the Astral and she was some kind of thing man. She was like me but all wrong. Like someone took me and built someone off my plans but made them wrong."

"Insect spirit?"

"No I don't...I don't know." Maybe if you'd Awakened to a Totem. Maybe if you'd been a better student. God- goddammit heh. Astral Ecology was one of the few classes you really liked, the old troll made every lecture feel so alive and-

Focus. Focus you need to focus.

The family is taking the stage to steady applause, the CEO is going to give a speech and whatever notice you've attracted is torn away. Vanished, if only for a moment, giving you and him a chance to wend your through the edges of the crowd. Where the well-dressed dozens fray away into small knots standing in twos and threes. A little win but you take it, hold onto it with both hands. It's good you caught Park early or you would have had to try to pick his pocket or some shit, try to peel him away in all of this and that thought alone is enough to make sweat stipple your neck."

Things are moving fast now. Details blurring. Jiaolong leads the way, taking a drink off a passing tray as you move into the shadows, into the empty space. The Seonwoo family stands in the spotlight, Mi-ran just beside and behind her mother. Hands clasped at her waist, her face frozen in a smile. As you watch a pair of Knight-Errant troopers descend from the platform, down the stairs and into the sea of people. You see black glass helmets and golden faceplates on the other side. Something's happening but whatever it is the ceremony's slowed it, stalled it.

Just long enough for you and Jiaolong to slip through the cordon, mingling into the steady stream of people going back and forth from a side-door. A short, brightly lit corridor stretching to a kitchen and makeshift prep area. Waiters dropping off empty trays, carts being methodically, rapidly, loaded up like it's a race track and the white-uniformed serving staff and chefs are the pit crew. Most of them don't even give you a second glance, so exhausted they've hit that meditative, zen stage. There's an ork soldier in ballistic plate, armor settled across his shoulders, clinging to whatever cybernetics he has beneath the mantle. He does a doubletake when he sees the two of you. Steps towards Jiaolong with a palm gingerly held up, other hand kept well clear of his sheathed sword.

"S-sir you shouldn't-"

Jialong immediately clasps his shoulder, leaaaaning into him, glass sloshing in his hand.

"Yyyouuu are a tall bastard aren't you? What ever could they be paying you I don't- you see I prefer a certain kind of height to my security escort it's crucial. Crucial! That you look, mnm, the right kind of imposing. And that's the sort of thing that only a man's stature can really bring."

Kick your brain into gear. You give the trooper a plaintive look over his shoulder and mouth the word "bathroom"? He points with a pair of fingers around the corner. You gently ease your way in between the two of them and, with some ginger nudging and careful guidance, move your principal on. Deeper into the warren of service corridors, past identical, utilitarian doors until-

There. One just like all the others but you stop, Jiaolong straightens and you wait. You tapping your foot, him quiet. The sound of your breathing absolutely deafening. You think you're about to scream when the lock turns green and the barrier splits apart. You duck through, one after the other, the partitions whispering shut in your wake.

There's a maintenance drone on the other side, clinging to the ceiling like a polyp, interfacing with the camera, it sketches a little wave to you. Fenrir. Nyx. Earning their keep. Fuck they don't know yet but you can't linger, can't dwell on that. All you can do is press on, slinking through the foundations of the colossal tower. You can feel its weight on top of you. The weight of the city on top of you.

When the last door opens onto that bare concrete balcony you almost keep walking and pitch right the fuck over the railing. Jiaolong catches you by the collar, steadies you even as he gingerly tugs you against side enormous, curved section. A hundred plus stories curving, visibly sloping, as it leans into the next segment of the megastructure. Poised above you, if you tilt your head up it stretches over you.

The wind moans between the portions, freezing and laced with fumes. You watch as scattered raindrops fall, a fine white mist, a silver shine in the black. Whipping up, visibly rising and falling in the artificial canyon. Skyscrapers shine above you, you can barely see the night sky.

More waiting. You open your mouth and Jiaolong just loops an arm over your shoulder and wordlessly drags you against him. You shut up and take it. You have to stoop a little to make it work but you take it, if only to feel the heat of his body, the sleek, sinewy strength beneath those clothes. It makes it a little better.

"We'll get out of this, alright? Just follow the plan."

You nod and his embrace turns into a half-headlock, his lips brushing your cheek. You manage a weak, brittle smile. It sticks and stays as you see Tyrhand come rising up. Bobbing a bit, motors whining, central fan straining. A duffel bag beneath it, the straps stretched taut. You help guide it down onto the walkway and slip the loops over the drone's rigid "wings". It boops. It sounds almost happy as it hovers in place.

You can Jiaolong start stripping right there in the open air. Back to back. Not out of shame, no, but at least this way he won't have to see that smile slip off your face and smash to pieces on the floor. Shrug your coat off and pull your shirt over your head. Pull your visor out of the bag and slip it on. Boot up the comms.

[ ] Talk to Nyx. You've spoken the least to her, out of everyone, but there's something kind of comforting about her cold, mechanical indifference right now.
[ ] Talk to Fenrir. You've bonded with him the most (you think) and he knows you, probably more than any other friend you've made in...in a really long time.
[ ] Talk to Jiaolong. He's still a mystery to you, you know there's things you don't understand, but you know he cares. That he doesn't want to hurt you.
[ ] SerpentOfEden isn't here. Not really. He can't be. But your weird voyeur...your friend is comforting in his own way. Talk to yourself and pretend.

There's a brutal sort of beauty to your mask: all sheer, sleek, lines and harsh angles. A solid wedge, an anvil-head, sweeping up along your cheekbones and over your nose, clamped just below your hairline. The impression of fangs in the negative space along the lower lip, the missing pieces cut to leave your mouth free. Articulated arms anchoring into the edges, jointed things running above your ears and hooking just below the lobes. Twin sets of actuators running to the segmented, sectioned half-collar clinging to the back of your neck, the base of your skull. Its nothing like Nyx's visor with its weird, almost delicate construction. Like origami paper creased and folded and bonded to crystalline composite. Nah, yours is predatory. One part fighter pilot to two parts raptor. Blood red rimmed in black rubber seals.

Breathe in, breathe out, let the distance soothe you, let it slow the steady hammering in your chest. The world beyond the visor is muted, softened into shades of scarlet and smudges of charcoal. The edge of the balcony just a blur of shadow. It's safer this way. You're safer this way. Tug the second half of your mask down over your head, roll the gauzy cloth over your mouth, your chin, your throat. Stitched in skeletal jaws patterned over your teeth, stretching as you work your jaw, as the comm suite boots up. Pluck up the edges, setting them flush to the helm.

You're not a kid anymore and you're not hiding beneath a blanket but it's the same principle.

The Baekho Armory logo flashes across your field of view. Streams of silver white slithering from the edges of your vision, twisting into a stylized, snarling tiger. The company name stamped below in Hangul, the characters glitching, converting to English as a tone plays. It fades out and Dust swims back into crystalline clarity, rain drops striking your mask one by one, a gentle plink, a barely audible patter. They quirk and squirming away from the hydrophobic material suspended a fraction of an inch from your face. Dripping down to the cloth warmer. Beading on your ears.

Startup finishes, finalizes, a set of names scrolling up past your right eye in stutters and starts as they come online one by one. Fenrir, Nyx, Jiaolong after a second. Folding, collapsing back into the nest of menus and applications hovering just offscreen, waiting to be called back up.

It's amazing how much better it makes you feel isn't it? Just having this. It hits you with a little surge of dopamine. Feel-good fuzzies bubbling up inside your brain like a just-cracked can of soda pop, sugar on the tongue and a tingling against your teeth. Connection brings catharsis.

But then it's always been this way.

Before this, before all of this, before you changed, before the thing inside you hatched and tore its way out of your skin, this was your lifeline. Your umbilical. A little arrow-slit of a window looking out on the world outside, candy colors floating into your drab, shoebox of an apartment through a screen. Fun shit. Cute shit. Chin on your crossed forearms, looking through porn, comedy shows, news streams, cartoons. Mouth against your skin, covered from the nose down, just looking up stuff to keep the silence at bay while Emil slept in his little stuffed bed by your foot. Slim snout tucked down, body drawn into a corkscrew.

Wind plays over your bare chest, flowing over your skin with freezing fingers. Pale flesh tightening, goosebumps rippling out but you don't really feel it, it's just a false reaction, an imitation response. Rain sizzles against your shoulders as you draw on those long, loose sleeves, loop between your thumbs and the rest of your fingers, sitting snug across your palm. You flex as the smart-mesh activates and it draws tight. Fabric textured to match the major muscle groups below, clinging so close it could be painted on, accentuating the definition. Like you dipped your limbs in a vat of crude up to the shoulder. The angled plates run in ridges down the outside of your arms, clinking softly as you test your range. Smoke grey hovering over an oil slick. Red lines kindle to life, forking and flowing down to your wrist; raw arteries and bloody tendons.

You step out of your pants and ping Nyx.

It's not because she's warm, or sweet, or nice, or...even likeable really. It's because she doesn't care, won't care about how scared you are, how scared you all should be. It's because she won't give a single, solitary fuck that you just saw a megacorp exec fixed and flayed and splayed out blood eagle style between her own pillar legs and you could use that. That kind of absolute indifference, that ability to casually carve away all the parts of the world that don't make sense and slice through the rest.

You're connected but all you get is dead air.

For a second you don't think it went through and your hand creeps up to tap the side of your mask, the more amorphous fear of the unknown momentarily overcome by the fear of being the only one whose shit won't work. But no, no it's working, she's there she's just not saying anything, you can't even hear her breathing. Behind you Jiaolong tugs on a long coat; the cloth in that uneasy band between midnight blue and true black, somewhere between a deep tissue bruise and fresh spilled ink. He turns his collar up against the chill and you see that he's wearing a hooded shirt beneath it or- no. No you can see the reinforced panels, these almost organic, chitinous segments shifting and twisting as he moves, sheer membranes stretching as the sections separate. His mask is different now, smaller, something like a muzzle, something like a beak. It's new and it's distracting.

She says something and her words are flat, even, disinterested and uninvested. And it comes so mechanically that you don't process it at first, tuning it out in the same way you automatically tune out advertisements that call your name, staring instead at the back of Jiaolong's head. She repeats herself, terser this time.

"What?"

That gets your attention. You stumble, stammer through an answer as you pull leggings on over your compression shorts.

"It's, um, it's Foe-"

"I know," she says "what is it?"

"I need a threat assessment. What are, um, what's your familiarity with astral-"

"Adequate. Continue."

And you tell her.

It's not capital-T Talking, not really, you're getting better at that but you're still not anything close to good. But that's okay, she doesn't care about how you feel, she doesn't care what you want. If she did she would but she doesn't so she's not. Leaving you with no expectation, no demand, just steady, unwavering attention. Evenly applied in its awfulness and utterly impersonal in its pressure. You eventually fall silent and lick your lips beneath the scarf-thing, throat dry. You hear the not-so-distant clatter of rotors, almost lost beneath the steady drum of rain on metal. A shadowy shape moves against the storm and the sheer, golden glass, backlit in a flash of lighting. Vanishing again as thunder rolls through the megastructure, echoing between the fast petals. You can still feel it there, prowling, circling over your head like a shark over a reef.

"I'm unsure," she says at last "The markers are atypical for possession. Generally-"

"Generally people who get taken end up lopsided. Half a guy's body burns away or cables start growing from his skin like messed up tumors. But that's not what this was. This was…" you trail off, searching for the words.

"Coherent."

"Yeah."

"Min-seo Seonwoo's mother isn't on any records. The general assumption is she died in the Unification."

"That's not that weird," you say.

"It's not," she agrees, "but you noted similar Essence signatures from other members of her family. The most likely explanation is that it's inherited. They're hybrids."

"I-"

You want to laugh, reflexively, anxiously, because it's...stupid isn't it? Of course it's stupid. It has to be stupid. The world doesn't work that way, spirits are not like people. That's the first thing they teach you: that no matter how cultured or amiable a spirit acts they're not like people.

Instead what comes out is a kind of strangled "huh" as the idea hits your brain and fucking sticks.

Each and every spirit has a thing that defines them, guides them, that nourishes and shelters them. They want it beyond obsession, they want it beyond reason, they want it like you "want" air or water, heat or gravity. They're built differently, gestalts in escalating complexity. The grove is every component tree, the forest is every grove in aggregate; a shopping mall is every store and sunglass stand. That kind of thing.

It all works on thematics, functions on continuity and metaphor. That's why you liked the class so much heh, it was so much easier for you to follow, to understand. And you know, you know that sure spirits can make deals. That's the foundations of shamanistic traditions. And you know spirits can talk, even make friends or enemies. That's just politics.

But that kind of fusion? Breeding, blending, distilling down into one thing?

It doesn't work like that.

Well why not? whispers a voice in the back of your head, wagging the Drake's tongue and smiling with your teeth, isn't that what you are? The best of both worlds?

"This is concerning," she says after that half-formed slush of thoughts just drips off your tongue, splattering to the ground below. Her voice is even, level, with less enthusiasm or engagement than a targeted advertisement, "Spirits are purpose driven. An astral entity cultivating highly placed corporate citizens for decades speaks to a complex purpose. More vision than a denizen usually displays and a need for resources."

"Purpose driven," you murmur back.


But you don't know and you can't guess the endgame, there's too many pieces you're missing, too much you don't k- guh.

There's a pain, a pain building behind your right eye. A steady merciless throb rising in intensity. Like someone's taking a hammer and chisel to the back of your socket. Cock your head and squint and try to stop thinking, just focus on breathing, on the air in your lungs and the qi slowly swirling through your stomach, your chest. Let your brain go empty, it's probably not as hard as it should be.

"But I wouldn't worry about it."

"H-huh?"

"We're made to kill. In the end even spirits die, discorporate, stop. If there's an emergency Fenrir and I will move to extract you. You can handle anything less yourself. Even with Jiaolong slowing you down."

"You know I can hear you," his voice filters through the comms, faintly amused.

"And?"

"Aaaand nothing, I put myself in Foehn's capable hands I guess."

"Okay," and then before you can say anything, she closes out her end of the link and reverts to standby state. Leaving you standing there, at the precipice, with your mouth half open and hands just below your navel, your belt hanging slack around your waist.

Jiaolong laughs, a little too terse, a little too strained to be natural but he's trying. You match him, a little shy and a little selfconsciously but it makes you feel better. Flashbangs and smoke grenades on the back of your belt, flanking a small medkit. Pull your swords from the pack and clip them in place, the weight on either hip lifts a steel girder off your shoulders.

He's ready, you are too. It's time to go, time to fly, security'll work their way down here eventually and you know you can't stay.

But instead you...hesitate there, just for a heartbeat. Your hand held out to him, standing at the base of the giants, those artificial mountains. Once you cross the chasm you're going to split up, him to Park's office and you to the security station. You won't rendezvous again until its done and you're already on the way out to the sewers.

You're not superstitious, and you feel better from the call (sorta), but you'd like to say something wouldn't you? Just...just in case.

Your last words to Jiaolong are…
[ ] A compliment. Tell him how nice he looks tonight, act like you're any other couple at any other place in Pyongyang.
[ ] A confession. Tell him how happy you are doing this, even as afraid as you are, because you get to do it with him.
[ ] A question. Ask him his real name. It's not like he's hidden it from you exactly you've just never really had the spine to ask.
[ ] Encouragement. Tell him he can do it. You think he might be braver than you but this is still pretty fucked up by any measure.