Shadowrun: Imugi

The Astral is you, you-the-individual and you-the-collective and that's the joke isn't it? This place huddles around metahumanity, drawing power from it, pouring itself into the shapes that mankind offers. Affections and affinities flayed apart, reworked and reconstructed into something new, something more honest. It's intoxicating: you don't have to fight to show the world who you are, what you are, don't have to carve out the most inoffensive slivers of yourself you can find, serve them up to everyone else on a bended knee. You don't have to hear Her voice, whispering in the back of her head every time you open your mouth, telling you that they don't care, it doesn't matter, they won't want you either. The truth is just...stripped out of you. Showcased for all to see.

You couldn't hide it even if you wanted to.

Walk on, backlit by a black sun crowned in fire. Walk on and feel the raw power roll off of you; the air around you swimming, shuddering behind a heat haze. The temperature spiking, your footprints steaming and smoking on the rain-slick stone. Those spirits kneeling on either side, flinching as your shadow passes over them and oh you have so many shadows here. They cling to your feet, fanning out like tarot cards. This one a man, broad shouldered and long haired, his mouth cracking open into a broken, predatory smile; like a kid's drawing of a monster's teeth. This one clad in corporate armor, sleek and skin tight; tailcoats falling to the back of his thighs, billowing a bit as he walks. This one a beast, hunched over and half-crippled; prowling on all fours as his body shudders and snaps.

A pair of great wings that span the width of the square. Pouring themselves over it in silhouette, staining it like tar. Larger than they are even in the real world, so huge that they seem more at home on a true dragon than your hybrid body. Beating once, twice, before settling down around you. Embracing you. Vicious, gutting hook claws, reformed "thumbs" tap tap tapping silently on the plaza's pavers as you slowly scan the tangle of tracks and paths that fork away. The four you need waiting ahead.

The air around you sparkles.

"Huh?"

You're surrounded by chains. Half-material, half-seen, like spars of glass held at just the right angle, shining one second and then gone with a turn of the wrist. More fading into view as you take another, hesitant step, pulling them into visibility by the flexing, the tension of your body. They're delicate things, slender things, each link no longer or wider than your pinky nail. The leads running for meters before they melt away into nothing. You stop and they glimmer for a second, gently clinking, before sight and sound slip away again. The plaza around you empty.

Raise a hand, tap your thumb to a bare pectoral. Gently probing the heavy muscle of your chest. Channel your qi, just a trace, just a quirking, vein-like tendril into your breast. A lustrous glow shoots out and you see it again, see the others too: anchored to your scales, your skin, by golden loops and molten piercings. A brand kindles to life beneath your hand, scoring itself in clay-soft flesh and false muscle. A glyph in a language you don't know. Or no- no that's not right. You do know it, you're just not far gone enough to remember, you're still wearing enough of Christoph's body that it acts as a mask. But even you (he) know what it is. The materials are different, the script unutterably ancient, but the principles are the same.

It's a bar-code. A serial number. Because…well.

You remember don't you?

How could you forget? You were made, you were manufactured, and all Christoph Esser the Human Being ever was was a fat caterpillar. Chewing on his leaf, waiting for some subliminal signal to become something else. Something more. But that doesn't change the facts.

You are a slave. You are a sword (his sword). You are property (his property). You are owned. By the king (your king). The emperor (your emperor).

You slowly wind the chain between your fingers. Feeling the links slither around curved claws. Do as you please, live as you like right? You can pull it free if you want. Tear out these umbilicals that bind you to that other sun. The Drake shifts within you: uneasy and uncomfortable for once, but you ignore him. Is this want you want? You pause, tip your head back to stare at the painted sky. You don't...have an answer you think. The golden monster that's staked its claim to your soul, the long lost science project that lives beneath your skin, between the two of them they've given you everything you ever wanted. And all it cost is everything you were.

Gray areas, gradients, you let the leash slide out of your grip. You feel the Drake relax. Maybe it doesn't really matter, either way you've changed so much there's no way back from this. Not for you, not for the thing you've become. The butterfly can't fold itself up and bloat back into a caterpillar and that's...that's alright, you decide. That's alright too. You know they'd be proud of you, that kid lingering at the threshold, waiting and hoping; that young man sweating through his thin shirt in Detroit's pre-dawn chill.

They'd be happy for you, to see you're still around, that you've come so far and you're doing so much better.

Steps the soft colors of a polluted sunrise ascend in crooked, canted tiers. Sweeping out at the edges, a deck of playing cards half-shuffled together and knocked out in the center. Glass-faced bluffs rising at the top. There's a stillness, a quiet, even as the energy in the air soaks into your blood, into your bones, hitting you like a caffeine shot, an adrenaline burst. Raptors the size of helicopters watch from their scattered roosts. Tilting cockpit canopy skulls, fanning and folding rotor-blade feathers as they keep a wary distance. Wires and armored plates embedded in their downy breasts and scaly patches of reptilian skin. Weapons pods carefully concealed beneath pinions. High above you can see more of those spotlight-monsters clinging to the slopes of the mountain, anvil-heads scanning the sky. Road-wide tails lashing, boulevard broad shoulders bunched with power, beams of light probing the storm.

The heavens ripple and roil, thick, fluffy, clouds whipping past at hurricane speeds. They're a hundred colors: red blush and tangerine skin and the first feathery touches of jaundice. You feel the world flex, feel it shiver, some outside pressure pushing against your heat, your strength, and the motion being welcomed. Reciprocated.

They're waiting for you inside.

Take the steps one at a time, bare feet barely a whisper on the polished cement. Draw your blades, the one full of leashed lightning and thunder in your left. The keening tempest in your right. Your body's split open, coming undone at the seams as you roll your shoulders. Barely contained by the tight sleeves and the leggings. The doors slide open on rubber tracks. They stand waiting in the center of the terminal. A holographic board hanging above, sunken stairwells beyond.

Dog headed, bull headed, hawk headed, ram headed. Their bodies are smelted together guns and swords and soot-stained armor. Their cloaks whipping, billowing out like sheets of fire; golden bright, livid, lurid. The eclipse outside filters through the great windows. Orange-yellow shapes splashed out onto the ground between you and them. You're a scarlet-etched shadow against the sun. Cock your head and as one they draw.

"Save us," says the Dog.

"Kill us," says the Bull.

"Eat us," says the Hawk.

"We have not raised the alarm, there is only us," says the Ram.

"It wouldn't matter even if you tried," you reply softly, "I kill faster than you can scream."

"Good," says the Dog.

They were dead the moment you crossed the threshold, they lost the moment you pulled Lung's gifts free of their sheathes. Everything else, everything: the impact and shock of your blades on theirs, the qi coursing through saturated, transforming tissue, crash and rumble of collapsing stone, it's all…

Details.

You don't have Nyx's raw economy of movement, her precision calculated grace, no. You're as relentless as a river. Jagged and hungry as roaring flame. You surge forward, body rippling, snarling behind your stitched skeletal smile and they are not ready. How could they? You exist to end things like them. Your thudding heartbeat sets the tempo. Giving time to the machinegun impacts as metal crashes against metal, to the squealing of shorn armor and scraped scales. Giving order to the fury, the frenzy.

Unseam the Ram, open their belly, mana spilling out in colored tendrils as they crumple. Arc your jian overhead, carve deep into the Hawk's shoulder, the Bull's sword caught on your sidearm. Channel qi through the blade, water and gale-force winds blasting out in a razored ribbon, hewing Hawk in half as Dog thrusts. As you smack the canid spirit's greatsword with your tail; redirecting momentum, smashing it into the ground. Lightning chains down Bull's wrist, numbing and slowing. You hit them like a hurricane. Their sword shatters with a scream of tortured metal. They fall with a gargling bellow. And then it's just him, just the Dog, alone against the storm.

He swings. You fade to the side and spear him neatly through the throat.

There's something like relief in those eyes as his sword slips from a gauntleted hand. Something like satisfaction his knees hit the lobby floor and he slumps forward. He doesn't try to save himself, doesn't try to spite you, he just lifts his chin as he lays there, widening the wound. Mana pumping out more thickly now, splashing across the shorn gorget, curling up like clouds of paint in water. Multicolored strands of the self, coming undone. The sparks he has instead of pupils go to his fading comrades. Drift down at his own ruined body. The plea is mute but achingly sincere. You stand over him: in the wound you see something brutal, something sharp; cement tumors and steel shards lacing the phantom matter and now you think understand, at least a little.

Flick the ichor from your swords and resheath them. Pull down your scarf and bare those pearly whites, sharp enough to rip chunks from even the unborn, the undying. Sharp enough to rend an inhuman soul. The sound that thrums in your chest halfway between a growl and a purr.

And for the first time since you hatched from your skin, your body charred and carbonized into an ashen shell, you give in. You make it quick; there's only four, they go fast.

There's a kind of salvation in consumption.





Work your jaw, lick your chops, the taste of them lingers on your tongue. You feel the gentle hum, the rattle and rock of the tram beneath your feet as it carries you along the winding track. Claustrophobic concrete tubing broken up, interspersed, by yawning chasms: the wind roaring, howling past, hard enough to rock the train on its rails. Flecked with skeins of silicate, glass and grit whispering, hissing as they flow over the metal hull and then you're back in the tubes. Burrowing your way deeper into the building. How far have you traveled? It feels like at least a mile. How long have you been here? Feels like it must have been at least half an hour.

Three minutes, murmurs the Drake.

Well. You guess you must be getting close then.

A shadow slips over you, gloom rushing along the length of the car as you enter another tunnel. The tram slowing, brakes whirring as it gradually comes to a stop. The doors opening onto a platform just like- hah, just like the one at Sze. You walk out, up yet another set of stairs. Space is variable in the astral, indexed to importance, the weight of memory. And the room you come out into, blinking, a little dazed is gigantic.

The same room patterned over and over again, running in rings, descending in tiers. The same sectioned countertops with the same sink and small electric stove, the same handful of tables and uniform chairs, the same sets of windows looking out on the same skyline. Every room with three walls and the same stretch of short grey carpet running past where the door should be. Every room copied and pasted a dozen times, a hundred times, a hundred empty sockets merged together. Cells in a shadowed, honeycomb hive. The potted plants grow wildly, ivy climbing over burners and clinging to the sills; thick roots (or is that rubber?) running across the "hallways". Over the lip of one tier and down the walls of the rooms below.

The ceiling hangs heavy and low, a checkerboard of fluorescent lights buzzing, gently crackling, iron pipes framing the patches of flickering white. Veining the spaces between. In the center, a good fifty feet down and even further away, there's a well. A sinkhole, bored straight into the foundations of the room. Thigh-thick hoses and clusters of tubing laying thick around the edge. The water is dark, stagnant. The circuit-patterned leaves that cluster around it are black and rotting. Plastic sloughing off the branches.

It takes you a second to realize it, what's so wrong with this place, this picture. You, the city kid so used to the sound of cars honking at 3:00 AM and rotors thudding past at 4. So used to the sounds of the city in its sleep that you'd be climbing the walls in five minutes flat if you ever got dumped in some country cabin.

It's the quiet.

Nothing moves. Nothing breathes. Ash grey boughs rustle in the flow of air from countless vents. Somewhere water drips from from a faucet tap. You pace forward, cautious, and then stop as your claws click on something hard and cold. Look down.

Metal grows through the ground beneath your feet, stark as any scar; a mirror-polished swathe oily, bruised alloy. Neon bright advertisements spidering across the surface, too fast to catch. Your eyes itching, aching when you try to read the text. Look closer: there's an impression in the surface, the fossil of some spirit, an afterimage in indentations.

"You know," says SerpentOfEden over your shoulder, "they really think they're signing on with the winning side-side-side."

Your whirl, swords scraping the sheath, singing as they leap into your hands, eyes wide beneath your visor. But there's nothing, nobody, just the stairs back the way you came. Your breathing comes hard, each pant so loud, so harsh in your ears. Swallow and feel the sharp-edged lump bob in your throat.

"H-h-hey easy Chris easy. Easy." You lash out without thinking, your arm moving on raw instinct. Whipping your shocksword into-

Empty space. The movement makes you twist a bit offbalance, a rush of qi helps you steady. Leaves you in a low crouch, looking out over the silent breakroom. You hear a sound, a gentle chiming, you gingerly, gingerly, pad forward to the edge of the upper level. Look down into the exposed room below. An icon flashes across the tri-d set hanging in the corner. The projectors into the narrow lip that's all the breakroom has in way of a roof. A snake sketched in pixels curled around an eight-bit apple.

A single cup of tea sits on the table, a tongue of steam curling up.

"It's okay. I wouldn't hurt you. Are we friends Chris? I think of you as a friend. N-n-never been good at getting them, keeping them. But you…"

Four minutes, the Drake breathes.

"C'mon, we have time. And we should talk." His voice buzzes through the speakers, distorted and tinny. Glitches and digital artifacts crawling across the screen, blooming like rainbow fractures before being swallowed up by the dead, glossy, black. After a second you step over the edge, let yourself fall. Land lightly on your feet. You stare down at the cup, up to the tri-d set.

"How do you kill a corporation Chris? Don't- hey. There's a point. I promise-promise-promise."

"I…," you'd say it's just to humor him, just to pump him for information in return, to fish for some fucking answers. But this place is all about honesty and let's be honest: you're not even close to done processing this. This...whatever this is.

Whatever this is.

[ ] You kill a corporation by killing its revenue stream. Megas exist to sate stockholders and make a profit; without the money nothing else matters.
[ ] You kill a corporation by killing its leaders. The board provides the vision, the mission statement, the guiding light. Without them it's just a name
[ ] You kill a corporation by killing its reputation. Companies can only soak so much scandal before they start carving themselves open to escape it.
[ ] You kill a corporation by killing its infrastructure. The workers, the servers, the physical locations: murder the body and the soul won't survive.
[ ] Write-in.