Rajvik_wolfboy
Wolf amongst the stars.
- Location
- Florida
all i will say is at least its not the SCIRE
Good People (Worm/Shadowrun)
- Thread starter Redcoat_Officer
- Start date
- Location
- Sweden, Europe, Earth, Sol
And in this case it's also a question of deciding what level of dakka is "good enough" with the current demands of a budget, even if the answer to that question will always be some variation of "never enough, could always use more".
Rajvik_wolfboy
Wolf amongst the stars.
- Location
- Florida
standard character loadout for me is
1-AS-7 shotgun w/Smartlink 20rnd slug 25rnd flechette
1-Ares Predator II w/Smartlink 30rnd standard or ex-explosive
1-Cougar fineblade (knife)
1-Smartshade smart goggles
1-half-body form fit armor+secure clothing+secure Long Coat
this is the best ballance i have found for weapons/armor vs cost for a starting physical adept or technomancer on a physical path (i forget what it was called in 4ed)
1-AS-7 shotgun w/Smartlink 20rnd slug 25rnd flechette
1-Ares Predator II w/Smartlink 30rnd standard or ex-explosive
1-Cougar fineblade (knife)
1-Smartshade smart goggles
1-half-body form fit armor+secure clothing+secure Long Coat
this is the best ballance i have found for weapons/armor vs cost for a starting physical adept or technomancer on a physical path (i forget what it was called in 4ed)
Persona - 2.03
Redcoat_Officer
Long Live the King
Persona - 2.03
Lisa's prediction proved to be accurate indeed, as the very next day I got a call from Brian saying that he'd received an invitation from Faultline. After my apparently less than stellar first impression, he was very sure to make sure that I knew to dress both smartly and professionally.
So I opened up my wardrobe and slipped on the clothes I'd bought the day before, covering myself in the aesthetic of a Shadowrunner in the hope that it would make me feel more like one. Slipping my belt through the loops on the top of my holster and wrapping the bottom strap around my thigh was one of the strangest experiences of my life, not least because I kept making eye contact with my old teddy bear that had been left on a shelf in my wardrobe for well over a decade now.
It felt like a betrayal, of dad at least. I wasn't sure how mom would have reacted to my career. She'd worked on the other side of the table from time to time, sending out teams of runners for the ORC, and I couldn't help wondering how she thought of them? Were they just opportunistic mercenaries in her eyes, whose greed could be turned to a progressive cause? Were they themselves non-conformists and rebels, whose criminality was just a reflection of the society they lived in?
I think she'd have given them more agency than that. They could be saints or sinners, depending on what they did and who they did it for. I just hope she'd understand. They seem like good people. I think.
Walking through the city with a gun at my side felt a lot more normal than I was expecting it to, but then again it wasn't like I'd left home much anyway over the past few years. Out here, I didn't have any memories for it to distort. Instead I watched with a sort of professional detachment as all the nervous looks returned, but at least this time I knew it was as much to do with me being armed as it was me being a troll.
They were waiting for me in the workshop below the loft. Brian and Rachel were dressed much the same as they had done during the raid, though both had left their body armour behind and Brian was wearing a collared shirt beneath his jacket. Regent's clothes were all different, but the theme was largely the same, while Lisa seemed to be going for a shamanic private detective look, with a collared shirt and slacks underneath a long trenchcoat, and shamanic totems on layered necklaces.
Grue was armed, but not excessively so. Whether or not he'd managed to buy a replacement for his rifle, he'd only brought his smart pistol to the meeting. He wore it in a thigh holster, rather than tucked away in his jacket. Rachel had a drone perched on her shoulder – the Crawler she'd brought but not used on the last job – and while Regent or Lisa weren't obviously armed, they were obviously mages. Which was just as good.
More to the point, all of us looked like we fit. Even Alec's style broadly matched with the rest of the group. We looked like a team, and I straightened up a little at the thought. It felt good.
"Is that an Executioner?" Grue asked, with disbelief in his voice.
I shrugged my shoulders. "It's more proportional than a regular pistol, and I got it at a discount. So, what do you think? Do I look like a Shadowrunner?"
Immediately I regretted giving him the excuse to look me up and down, and my nerves came rushing back all at once. After a moment, though, he simply nodded.
"You do. Maybe not a decker, but much better than before."
"Oh?" I smirked. "And what does a decker look like, exactly?"
"Fair enough," he nodded. "Regardless, this is your first meeting with a client, so keep calm, pay attention and don't show any weakness. He'll sniff it right out and take it out of our paycheck."
"I've got it," I said back, a little tense. Grue paused for a moment, looking at me, and nodded.
"Then let's go."
With the full team in Bitch's van, it was more than a little cramped. Grue rode up front with her, and I was grateful for that. The two of us were easily the biggest people on the team, after all. Tattletale and Regent were tiny in comparison, and Regent only made one crack about how much space I took up.
We travelled south west through the north end of the city, skirting around the periphery of the elevated ring-road that separated downtown from the rest of Brockton Bay. West of downtown, equally placed to hoover up traffic from the corporate heart of the city and the vast swathes of residential districts to the north, was a long stretch of bars, clubs, restaurants and anywhere else people might go to let their hair down. It hugged the campus of Brockton Bay University – just barely far enough to maintain plausible deniability – and from what I'd heard more than a few students paid for their digs with evening shifts.
We sped quickly through the red light district, its brothels, strip clubs, Simsense dens and dollhouses shut up for the day, before passing into the broader market of nightclubs and bars that took up most of Constitution Hill, the hill itself rising up in front of us in endless tiers of rooftop bars and gardens.
It was a part of the city I had never been to before. Maybe, if things had gone differently, I'd have gone to college like I knew mom always wanted me to, and I'd have come down here with whatever friends I managed to make. As it was, this part of the city was utterly alien to me, and I had no idea what to expect from the club itself.
While almost everywhere was quiet at this time of day – the shutters pulled down over their doors, their signs unlit and their matrix hosts quiet – Palanquin seemed somehow even quieter than most. It didn't stand out, with a bare brick front and a sign that was about as simple as signs get. I found myself wondering if drew popularity from word of mouth, or if it deliberately cultivated the quiet to better serve its secondary purpose as a fixer's base of operations.
Either way, Rachel pulled to a halt right at the front doors and, once we'd all disembarked, turned her van over to the autopilot; to burn fuel circling the block rather than burn money on exorbitant parking charges.
This early in the day, there was no line to get into the club, but there was still a burly ork bouncer wearing a dark blue turtleneck under his suit jacket, and with a faint string of data linking his concealed smartgun to his black sunglasses.
I watched the matrix as an algorithm inside the building drew on the feed from those glasses, before sending back a response. Wordlessly, the bouncer stepped aside and gestured for us to enter.
Grue led the way, equally wordlessly, but I mumbled "thanks" to the bouncer before realising I might have made some sort of Shadowrunner faux pas by not being cool and aloof.
The main floor of the club was wide and expansive, with an open dance floor gathered around a raised stage. The dance floor was, in turn, surrounded by a raised area – level with the stage – that held two bars, quieter areas with a few couches and booths, and the doors to the bathrooms.
The lights were up, but I could see a whole panopticon of stage lighting raised on gantries over the dance floor. I couldn't even begin to picture what it would look like when packed full of people every evening, with the lights sending out the strobing patterns I could see burned into their programming.
At one of the bars, staff members were busy restocking the shelves for the evening. Each of them wore crisp white shirts, the men in trousers and the women in pencil skirts, though that wasn't a universal rule in either case. It was more of a dress code than a proper uniform, but it did add a lot to the professionalism of the place. If it weren't for the fact that there was another team of obvious Shadowrunners hanging out on some of the couches, I'd have felt out of place.
There was a woman standing in front of the bar, her outfit much the same as the other staff but of a noticeably higher quality. As we entered, she turned from where she had been directing the her colleagues to walk over to us. She was a brunette human with a freckled face and the nametag pinned to her shirt read 'Emily: Duty Manager.'
"You must be Grue. Welcome to Palanquin. You're a little early, so just grab a seat somewhere and I'll come and get you when Mr Johnson is ready for you. In the meantime, can I get any of you something to drink?"
"Not while we're working, thanks," Grue replied for us.
"Suit yourself," Emily shrugged, before heading back over to the bar.
We claimed a few couches for ourselves, and Regent immediately kicked his feet up onto the low coffee table in front of his. I sat next to Lisa, stretching my legs out in front of me. The club had a few troll-sized couches scattered about the small seating area, but that would mean sitting apart from the others.
"So," Tattletale began, "do you think this is a ploy?"
"What is?" I asked.
"Making us wait."
"I think you're overthinking things," Grue replied.
The two fell into conversation, and I found myself looking around the club. Not at its physical presence, but at its AR features. There was the usual slew of fluctuating holographic price tags, review boards, and dormant special effects programmes for the stage, but something seemed off about them.
They looked a lot more organic than I'd come to expect from store-bought programmes, but nor did they have the rigid lines and careful tuning of something custom-made by a single decker.
I was contemplating whether to dive into the matrix and poke around some more when my attention was drawn back to the real world as Grue locked eyes with a woman who had just walked through the front door.
"Faultline," he murmured, apparently for my benefit.
Our fixer appeared to be a human woman in her late twenties, with black hair tied back in a ponytail and a severe expression on her face. She looked like she'd just come back from some corporate meeting; dressed in a sharp grey suit jacket and slacks.
Her appearance was also a carefully sculpted façade of bioware to hide the extent of her modifications. I could see tightly-coiled cyberware bristling beneath her skin, full of potential energy.
She ignored us at first, walking over to talk to Emily. At the same time, I could see a constant stream of information flowing into her implanted commlink, but it was encrypted and I wasn't about to risk angering her with a failed attempt to crack the encryption.
Once she'd finished her business with the duty manager, Faultline turned and strode across the room towards us, the manager in tow. I watched as Grue stiffened in his seat, but the others seemed largely indifferent. Tattletale even seemed to relax more, leaning back and throwing her arm over the back of the couch. As for me, I tried my best not to wilt under her appraising stare.
"Mr Johnson has just arrived via the VIP entrance," she informed us, matter of factly. "I'm sure you're all familiar with the protocol for this sort of meet."
"We aren't amateurs," Grue said.
"You aren't. Well, most of you aren't." She turned to look at me. "Welcome to the game, Bug. I have high expectations, and that goes for the rest of you as well. Clients come to me because they know I have quality people who do quality work. Shadowrunners come to me because they know I have quality clients. It's a mutually beneficial relationship, and I work hard to keep it beneficial."
"This job is another test, isn't it?" Tattletale asked, as Grue's eyes widened at the interruption.
"Of course it is," Faultline replied with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "I'll leave it up to you to decide what exactly I'm testing."
She turned and made her way back across the room, leaving her employee behind.
"Mr Johnson is ready for you now," Emily said. "Please follow me."
Grue led the way as we followed her past a bouncer – who unlatched a velvet rope blocking off a set of stairs – and up into what seemed to be a VIP area located on a mezzanine floor above the main club, with one-way windows looking down past the lighting rig. It was a much more intimate space than the floor below, with secluded booths and couches, and the walls seemed to absorb the sound rather than echo it.
The booths were more than wide enough for a team of Shadowrunners plus one extra, and two of the ones in the room were hidden away behind drawn curtains, as other teams on Palanquin's roster negotiated with their own clients.
Apart from us, only one other person was visible in the room. 'Mr Johnson' was actually a young human woman – maybe a few years older than me – with platinum blonde hair. She was the archetypal kind of beautiful, the sort of person who was probably a cheerleader in high school, and who probably didn't go to Winslow if her expensive suit was any indication. It was jet black, trimmed with gold, and even though she was tall enough not to need to, she was wearing heels.
She blinked as she caught sight of us, before very deliberately schooling her face into a neutral expression.
"Mr Johnson," Grue greeted her, entirely deadpan.
The client smiled, flashing her teeth.
"I'd prefer 'Ms Johnson.' I'm sure you enjoy your cloak and dagger traditions, but we have to move with the times. Please, sit down."
Grue chuckled, but it sounded fake. Like he knew it was expected of him, and he was trying to make things go smoother. I stood aside as the others filed into the booth, so I wouldn't have to cram my legs underneath the table, then sat on the end as Emily closed the curtain, sealing us off from the rest of the club and immediately giving the space a small and intimate feel that was maybe only a hair's breadth away from being cramped.
"So," Grue began, "how can we help you?"
"I need you to find someone," Ms Johnson responded, "and then snatch them."
"I see," Grue said, even as Tattletale leant forward in her seat. "I assume they won't come willingly?"
"Not if they have any sense," Ms Johnson said with an almost bloodthirsty grin. "I assume that won't be a problem?"
"Not on principle, no. Who's the target?"
"A waste of space called Andrew Garcia," she said venomously, even as I discreetly twisted my fingers to call up a messenger sprite. "He's Chosen filth, or he was. He disappeared right as the cops were closing in on him, and he hasn't been seen since. This would be seven years ago, now."
I subtly twisted the fingers of my left hand, pulling on the ambient resonance flowing through the club. It was slower, clumsier, than when I was doing it in the Matrix – the physical limitations of my meat fingers a poor substitute for those of my persona – but I was still able to slowly begin weaving a messenger sprite.
"A lot can happen in seven years," Grue said, a little hesitantly. "He could have left the city, for one."
"In which case you tell me and I give you a quarter of your fee for wasting your time."
"Half." Grue responded, firmly.
"I'm paying you to find and kidnap a gangbanger. If you can't do either of those, twenty five percent is a very generous consolation prize."
The sprite took shape, perched on top of my knuckles, and I found myself eye-to-eye not with the oversized dragonfly I'd expected, but with a jet black crow. It stared up at me with black beady eyes and I blinked, surprised. I could still feel my connection to it, and I knew it would obey my commands, but this was… weird.
"Perhaps," Grue conceded, "but that depends on what it's twenty five percent of."
The crow tilted its head and cawed, leaping off my hand to hop around the table, then flapping its wings once to pounce up onto the client's shoulder before finally perching on her head. It looked at me like it was waiting for something, its black wings flickering with pent-up energy. Hesitantly, I reached out and forced my will onto the crow, sending it to root through my mother's files, back in my apartment. It let out a last caw, before spreading its wings and flying off in a digital blur.
"I understand Nuyen is preferable. Twenty thousand. I've already paid your Fixer's fee, so that money's all yours."
Split five ways, that's four thousand. A good pay out by my standards, but not much more than the three thousand we got for the last job.
"There are a lot of unknowns in this job," Grue said, leaning forward. "The most important is that we don't yet know where Mr Garcia is now, or what sort of opposition we'll face while extracting him. Twenty thousand isn't enough for an unknown."
The client laughed. "If you're trying to put a number to a fantasy, you can't. It could be more dangerous than you're expecting, but it could just as easily be a cakewalk. Twenty thousand is what I'm offering."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tattletale growing increasingly more irritated, though she was doing a good job at hiding the expression. She looked like she wanted to jump in and say something, but that went against what Grue had told me of how these things usually went down. The team leader was the one who handled negotiations, and since Grue had the most experience, that meant him.
Instead, I saw her discreetly yet forcefully stamp Grue's foot. Since her boots were as fashionable as they were practical, and his were heavy steel-toed things, Grue didn't show any visible reaction, and simply kept talking.
"Twenty thousand is what we'd charge for a low to medium risk job with known quantities. If you want us to step into the unknown, you need to sweeten the pot. Even a little."
Suddenly, I felt a stream of data linking me to my apartment, as the messenger crow constructed a link between me and mom's files. Her Ork Rights Commission files, rather. I was pretty sure I wouldn't find anything useful in her university files. More importantly, those files also held her password for the ORC's systems, a password that – as far as I was aware – had never been removed or reset. From across the city, I sent another instruction to the courier, and it took those codes off on another journey.
Ms Johnson sighed, leaning back in her chair and checking her fingernails rather than continuing to make eye contact with Grue. Then she seemed to firm up, meeting his gaze again.
"I can do twenty-one thousand."
Four thousand two hundred. Not a massive increase, but Grue seems satisfied.
"Acceptable. Now, we need to discuss the details. Tattletale and Bug are our best investigators," he nodded to us, and Ms Johnson's eyes immediately looked the pair of us up and down. They spent a lot longer on Lisa than on me, but I supposed that was because she was obviously a mage. I didn't exactly scream 'hacker,' and if our client was the type to see stereotypes then she'd have a hard time making the connection. "I'm sure they have questions."
"If you have any information on Mr Garcia," Tattletale leapt at the invitation to speak, "no matter how small, we can make use of it. DNA samples would be ideal, but nothing's ever that easy."
Mom's files had four different references to three different Andrew Garcia's, but one of those was for a case in Baltimore she'd packaged into an awareness presentation. The incoming stream of data from the ORC was more informative; they kept a somewhat comprehensive list of Chosen members, as well as a more comprehensive list of former members. Six hits, two casual members and four with a much longer list of crimes. Only one of them also appeared on the active list.
"There are three Chosen members named Andrew Garcia who've dropped off the grid or out of the gang," I said, only realising a moment later that I'd unintentionally cut Ms Johnson off. "Which one are you referring to?"
"Okay…" the client said, hesitantly. "I'm feeling a lot more confident about this than I was when I walked in here. Um, he was a person of interest in the firebombing of a med-centre in Sixty-Three. February, I think?"
"Got him," I said, flagging the right guy and having the crow copy his file to mom's computer.
Weird. He's one of the ones without much of a record, and the med-centre bombing wasn't the most notable crime linked to him.
"You know where he is?" she asked, her cool having vanished beneath naked shock.
"What?" I asked, puzzled. "Oh, no, sorry. I know which guy you're talking about. Breadcrumbs, that's all I've got. Still have to follow the trail."
"Oh," she replied, slumping back in her seat. "Well, I can see you have this all well in hand. If you're happy to proceed," she said, looking at Grue, "I'll be happy to turn over the funds when you're done."
"What should we do when we have the guy?" Grue asked.
"Just call me," she replied. "I'll arrange a handover and wire you the money."
"Then I'd say you have a deal," he said, stretching his arm across the table.
As she reciprocated, I could see that – while Grue's hand still dwarfed hers – our client was surprisingly athletic in her own right. I could see taut muscles beneath the lines of her suit as she shook his hand, before she stood up, brushed the curtain outside, and left the VIP room with what looked like a slight spring in her step.
We watched in silence as she left, before Tattletale leant over me, pulled the curtain back shut, and immediately leant forward, resting her elbows on the table with her fingers steepled in front of her.
"Anyone else get the feeling she's hiding something from us?" she asked.
"It's not our business," Grue said. "All we have to do is find Andrew Garcia, and thanks to Bug we have a lead."
"It is our business if she screws us over," Tattletale pointed out. "Seriously, how old was she? Twenty two, maybe? Way too young to be running anything serious, but just the right age to be a patsy for someone else."
For my part, I thought Tattletale had a point. Ms Johnson was an enigma, but more to the point there was a lot about her that didn't add up. My instincts were screaming at me to dig deeper, to untangle the web and figure this out. Why go into a situation without knowing all the variables?
"That's not how it's done, Tattletale," Grue said, wearily. "Damnit, we've talked about this."
I stood up.
"I'm going to go use the bathroom real quick," I said. "Then I'll tell you what I've dug up so far."
"Sure," Grue said. "Well done, by the way. An impression like that will work wonders for our rep."
I nodded, looking around the VIP area before spotting a door tucked away in the corner, with WC written on a metal plaque. Inside, the VIP bathroom certainly lived up to its name, with marble countertops and each stall being an individual room in its own right, with proper walls rather than flimsy boards. They didn't even have any graffiti on them.
I locked the door, dropped the lid on the toilet seat, sat down and let meatspace disappear as my body slumped bonelessly against the wall.
I flung my persona down, passing through the floor and into the main room of the club. A digital bouncer was floating over the dance floor, a piece of security ICE given a facelift to match the space, but since I wasn't doing anything against the rules it paid me no mind.
There were a few devices in the room, but only one icon was on its way out of the door. A commlink, almost certainly belonging to Ms Johnson herself. I wated until she'd left the club's host and moved out onto the public grid, then subtly peeled away the walls of her commlink. A few moments later, and I pulled my matrix avatar back, satisfied.
What I wasn't expecting was to find a woman standing in the bathroom, looking down at where my body lay in meatspace. She appeared to be a blonde elf, maybe a couple of years younger than me, wearing a thin and willowy dress that disappeared into labyrinthine patterns of digital fractals. She also appeared to be a persona, but there was a tangibility to her presence that made me think twice. She seemed almost weaved into the environment.
And then there was the crow perched on her shoulder, looking to all the world like it was whispering into her ear. She turned as I drifted back into the room, and I was struck by a singularly unique sense of déjà vu.
It's like looking in the mirror.
It was a paradoxical thought – we couldn't have looked further apart – but it was true all the same. Beyond the cosmetic differences of our personas, we both interacted with the world in the same way.
"Hello," she said, smiling, "I am Labyrinth. It's nice to meet you."
I felt a handful of datastreams caress my form, spiralling down from the ceiling. She had complete control of this environment, and I was a guest in her home. That was the digital equivalent of a handshake, for people whose hands feel rigid and bound by physical limitations.
"I've never met another Technomancer before," I said, almost wondrously.
"I have," she replied, with a strange melancholy to the resonance that made up her words. "But it has been a long time."
"Do you work for Faultline?" I asked, and Labyrinth nodded.
"I do. I keep her domain safe, and provide her with information. It is a small price to pay for safety and a domain of my own."
"Information…" I said. "So you'll tell her I'm a Technomancer?"
"I will," she replied. "You intrigue her, though not as much as Tattletale does."
"Tattletale?" I asked, confused.
"She has a secret, and she guards it well. Faultline does not like secrets" – her persona seemed to light up with amusement – "and neither do you, it seems."
I didn't say anything, but I felt more than a little sheepish that I'd been caught.
"Be careful," Labyrinth said, her presence was fading, but there was a weight to her words. An age beyond her youthful appearance. "The world is a beautiful place, and the deeper you look the more beautiful it gets. But it is not without its dangers."
And with that, she was gone. I pulled myself back from the matrix, stood up on shaky legs and pushed open the stall to find Tattletale leaning against the sinks.
"So?" she asked, smugly.
"You didn't tell Brian you needed to use the bathroom as well, right?" I asked.
"I'm 'getting drinks,'" she replied, punctuating the words with air quotes.
"Her name is Victoria Dallon," I stated. "What she didn't mention is that Andrew Garcia disappeared after murdering Jess Montrose, an investigative journalist and an elf, who'd published a piece on the Chosen. Won an award, even. Her death caused a public outcry, a few riots, but Garcia disappeared before anything could come of the case."
"So what's the connection to Miss Dallon?"
"Montrose was in a long-term relationship with Dallon's uncle, though the two never married. 'Ms Johnson' referred to her as 'auntie Jess' on her social media."
Tattletale nodded, seemingly satisfied. "Nothing to worry about, then. And, as a bonus, we get to feel all good inside while we're helping her live out her revenge fantasy."
"Maybe Grue had a point," I replied. "That really didn't seem like it was worth investigating."
"But it could have been," Tattletale countered. "Look, Grue's got more experience than any of us, but it's a very specific kind of experience, and it leads him to think in specific ways. He's used to working on his own and handling the negotiations himself, but I know for a fact that if I'd handled it then I could easily have squeezed twenty-five out of her by asking her to cough up more if we face armed resistance. Make the uncertainty an asset, rather than a detriment."
"Speaking from experience?" I asked, thinking about what Labyrinth had said.
"I spent a while working as a con artist," Tattletale replied, proudly. "I've got pretty good at reading people."
"That sounded more like corporate speak than con artistry," I said, uncertainly, Labyrinth's words still fresh in my mind.
"Oh, Bug." She smiled, warmly. "That's the secret; they're the same thing. Now, before we go back, do you have anything on Garcia?"
"A lot of posts on human supremacist boards," I replied. "I was going to suggest we pull in his old associates and see if any of them know where he went off to."
Tattletale nodded. "Now you're thinking like a Shadowrunner. Come on, the others are waiting. Let's get back to it."
Lisa's prediction proved to be accurate indeed, as the very next day I got a call from Brian saying that he'd received an invitation from Faultline. After my apparently less than stellar first impression, he was very sure to make sure that I knew to dress both smartly and professionally.
So I opened up my wardrobe and slipped on the clothes I'd bought the day before, covering myself in the aesthetic of a Shadowrunner in the hope that it would make me feel more like one. Slipping my belt through the loops on the top of my holster and wrapping the bottom strap around my thigh was one of the strangest experiences of my life, not least because I kept making eye contact with my old teddy bear that had been left on a shelf in my wardrobe for well over a decade now.
It felt like a betrayal, of dad at least. I wasn't sure how mom would have reacted to my career. She'd worked on the other side of the table from time to time, sending out teams of runners for the ORC, and I couldn't help wondering how she thought of them? Were they just opportunistic mercenaries in her eyes, whose greed could be turned to a progressive cause? Were they themselves non-conformists and rebels, whose criminality was just a reflection of the society they lived in?
I think she'd have given them more agency than that. They could be saints or sinners, depending on what they did and who they did it for. I just hope she'd understand. They seem like good people. I think.
Walking through the city with a gun at my side felt a lot more normal than I was expecting it to, but then again it wasn't like I'd left home much anyway over the past few years. Out here, I didn't have any memories for it to distort. Instead I watched with a sort of professional detachment as all the nervous looks returned, but at least this time I knew it was as much to do with me being armed as it was me being a troll.
They were waiting for me in the workshop below the loft. Brian and Rachel were dressed much the same as they had done during the raid, though both had left their body armour behind and Brian was wearing a collared shirt beneath his jacket. Regent's clothes were all different, but the theme was largely the same, while Lisa seemed to be going for a shamanic private detective look, with a collared shirt and slacks underneath a long trenchcoat, and shamanic totems on layered necklaces.
Grue was armed, but not excessively so. Whether or not he'd managed to buy a replacement for his rifle, he'd only brought his smart pistol to the meeting. He wore it in a thigh holster, rather than tucked away in his jacket. Rachel had a drone perched on her shoulder – the Crawler she'd brought but not used on the last job – and while Regent or Lisa weren't obviously armed, they were obviously mages. Which was just as good.
More to the point, all of us looked like we fit. Even Alec's style broadly matched with the rest of the group. We looked like a team, and I straightened up a little at the thought. It felt good.
"Is that an Executioner?" Grue asked, with disbelief in his voice.
I shrugged my shoulders. "It's more proportional than a regular pistol, and I got it at a discount. So, what do you think? Do I look like a Shadowrunner?"
Immediately I regretted giving him the excuse to look me up and down, and my nerves came rushing back all at once. After a moment, though, he simply nodded.
"You do. Maybe not a decker, but much better than before."
"Oh?" I smirked. "And what does a decker look like, exactly?"
"Fair enough," he nodded. "Regardless, this is your first meeting with a client, so keep calm, pay attention and don't show any weakness. He'll sniff it right out and take it out of our paycheck."
"I've got it," I said back, a little tense. Grue paused for a moment, looking at me, and nodded.
"Then let's go."
With the full team in Bitch's van, it was more than a little cramped. Grue rode up front with her, and I was grateful for that. The two of us were easily the biggest people on the team, after all. Tattletale and Regent were tiny in comparison, and Regent only made one crack about how much space I took up.
We travelled south west through the north end of the city, skirting around the periphery of the elevated ring-road that separated downtown from the rest of Brockton Bay. West of downtown, equally placed to hoover up traffic from the corporate heart of the city and the vast swathes of residential districts to the north, was a long stretch of bars, clubs, restaurants and anywhere else people might go to let their hair down. It hugged the campus of Brockton Bay University – just barely far enough to maintain plausible deniability – and from what I'd heard more than a few students paid for their digs with evening shifts.
We sped quickly through the red light district, its brothels, strip clubs, Simsense dens and dollhouses shut up for the day, before passing into the broader market of nightclubs and bars that took up most of Constitution Hill, the hill itself rising up in front of us in endless tiers of rooftop bars and gardens.
It was a part of the city I had never been to before. Maybe, if things had gone differently, I'd have gone to college like I knew mom always wanted me to, and I'd have come down here with whatever friends I managed to make. As it was, this part of the city was utterly alien to me, and I had no idea what to expect from the club itself.
While almost everywhere was quiet at this time of day – the shutters pulled down over their doors, their signs unlit and their matrix hosts quiet – Palanquin seemed somehow even quieter than most. It didn't stand out, with a bare brick front and a sign that was about as simple as signs get. I found myself wondering if drew popularity from word of mouth, or if it deliberately cultivated the quiet to better serve its secondary purpose as a fixer's base of operations.
Either way, Rachel pulled to a halt right at the front doors and, once we'd all disembarked, turned her van over to the autopilot; to burn fuel circling the block rather than burn money on exorbitant parking charges.
This early in the day, there was no line to get into the club, but there was still a burly ork bouncer wearing a dark blue turtleneck under his suit jacket, and with a faint string of data linking his concealed smartgun to his black sunglasses.
I watched the matrix as an algorithm inside the building drew on the feed from those glasses, before sending back a response. Wordlessly, the bouncer stepped aside and gestured for us to enter.
Grue led the way, equally wordlessly, but I mumbled "thanks" to the bouncer before realising I might have made some sort of Shadowrunner faux pas by not being cool and aloof.
The main floor of the club was wide and expansive, with an open dance floor gathered around a raised stage. The dance floor was, in turn, surrounded by a raised area – level with the stage – that held two bars, quieter areas with a few couches and booths, and the doors to the bathrooms.
The lights were up, but I could see a whole panopticon of stage lighting raised on gantries over the dance floor. I couldn't even begin to picture what it would look like when packed full of people every evening, with the lights sending out the strobing patterns I could see burned into their programming.
At one of the bars, staff members were busy restocking the shelves for the evening. Each of them wore crisp white shirts, the men in trousers and the women in pencil skirts, though that wasn't a universal rule in either case. It was more of a dress code than a proper uniform, but it did add a lot to the professionalism of the place. If it weren't for the fact that there was another team of obvious Shadowrunners hanging out on some of the couches, I'd have felt out of place.
There was a woman standing in front of the bar, her outfit much the same as the other staff but of a noticeably higher quality. As we entered, she turned from where she had been directing the her colleagues to walk over to us. She was a brunette human with a freckled face and the nametag pinned to her shirt read 'Emily: Duty Manager.'
"You must be Grue. Welcome to Palanquin. You're a little early, so just grab a seat somewhere and I'll come and get you when Mr Johnson is ready for you. In the meantime, can I get any of you something to drink?"
"Not while we're working, thanks," Grue replied for us.
"Suit yourself," Emily shrugged, before heading back over to the bar.
We claimed a few couches for ourselves, and Regent immediately kicked his feet up onto the low coffee table in front of his. I sat next to Lisa, stretching my legs out in front of me. The club had a few troll-sized couches scattered about the small seating area, but that would mean sitting apart from the others.
"So," Tattletale began, "do you think this is a ploy?"
"What is?" I asked.
"Making us wait."
"I think you're overthinking things," Grue replied.
The two fell into conversation, and I found myself looking around the club. Not at its physical presence, but at its AR features. There was the usual slew of fluctuating holographic price tags, review boards, and dormant special effects programmes for the stage, but something seemed off about them.
They looked a lot more organic than I'd come to expect from store-bought programmes, but nor did they have the rigid lines and careful tuning of something custom-made by a single decker.
I was contemplating whether to dive into the matrix and poke around some more when my attention was drawn back to the real world as Grue locked eyes with a woman who had just walked through the front door.
"Faultline," he murmured, apparently for my benefit.
Our fixer appeared to be a human woman in her late twenties, with black hair tied back in a ponytail and a severe expression on her face. She looked like she'd just come back from some corporate meeting; dressed in a sharp grey suit jacket and slacks.
Her appearance was also a carefully sculpted façade of bioware to hide the extent of her modifications. I could see tightly-coiled cyberware bristling beneath her skin, full of potential energy.
She ignored us at first, walking over to talk to Emily. At the same time, I could see a constant stream of information flowing into her implanted commlink, but it was encrypted and I wasn't about to risk angering her with a failed attempt to crack the encryption.
Once she'd finished her business with the duty manager, Faultline turned and strode across the room towards us, the manager in tow. I watched as Grue stiffened in his seat, but the others seemed largely indifferent. Tattletale even seemed to relax more, leaning back and throwing her arm over the back of the couch. As for me, I tried my best not to wilt under her appraising stare.
"Mr Johnson has just arrived via the VIP entrance," she informed us, matter of factly. "I'm sure you're all familiar with the protocol for this sort of meet."
"We aren't amateurs," Grue said.
"You aren't. Well, most of you aren't." She turned to look at me. "Welcome to the game, Bug. I have high expectations, and that goes for the rest of you as well. Clients come to me because they know I have quality people who do quality work. Shadowrunners come to me because they know I have quality clients. It's a mutually beneficial relationship, and I work hard to keep it beneficial."
"This job is another test, isn't it?" Tattletale asked, as Grue's eyes widened at the interruption.
"Of course it is," Faultline replied with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "I'll leave it up to you to decide what exactly I'm testing."
She turned and made her way back across the room, leaving her employee behind.
"Mr Johnson is ready for you now," Emily said. "Please follow me."
Grue led the way as we followed her past a bouncer – who unlatched a velvet rope blocking off a set of stairs – and up into what seemed to be a VIP area located on a mezzanine floor above the main club, with one-way windows looking down past the lighting rig. It was a much more intimate space than the floor below, with secluded booths and couches, and the walls seemed to absorb the sound rather than echo it.
The booths were more than wide enough for a team of Shadowrunners plus one extra, and two of the ones in the room were hidden away behind drawn curtains, as other teams on Palanquin's roster negotiated with their own clients.
Apart from us, only one other person was visible in the room. 'Mr Johnson' was actually a young human woman – maybe a few years older than me – with platinum blonde hair. She was the archetypal kind of beautiful, the sort of person who was probably a cheerleader in high school, and who probably didn't go to Winslow if her expensive suit was any indication. It was jet black, trimmed with gold, and even though she was tall enough not to need to, she was wearing heels.
She blinked as she caught sight of us, before very deliberately schooling her face into a neutral expression.
"Mr Johnson," Grue greeted her, entirely deadpan.
The client smiled, flashing her teeth.
"I'd prefer 'Ms Johnson.' I'm sure you enjoy your cloak and dagger traditions, but we have to move with the times. Please, sit down."
Grue chuckled, but it sounded fake. Like he knew it was expected of him, and he was trying to make things go smoother. I stood aside as the others filed into the booth, so I wouldn't have to cram my legs underneath the table, then sat on the end as Emily closed the curtain, sealing us off from the rest of the club and immediately giving the space a small and intimate feel that was maybe only a hair's breadth away from being cramped.
"So," Grue began, "how can we help you?"
"I need you to find someone," Ms Johnson responded, "and then snatch them."
"I see," Grue said, even as Tattletale leant forward in her seat. "I assume they won't come willingly?"
"Not if they have any sense," Ms Johnson said with an almost bloodthirsty grin. "I assume that won't be a problem?"
"Not on principle, no. Who's the target?"
"A waste of space called Andrew Garcia," she said venomously, even as I discreetly twisted my fingers to call up a messenger sprite. "He's Chosen filth, or he was. He disappeared right as the cops were closing in on him, and he hasn't been seen since. This would be seven years ago, now."
I subtly twisted the fingers of my left hand, pulling on the ambient resonance flowing through the club. It was slower, clumsier, than when I was doing it in the Matrix – the physical limitations of my meat fingers a poor substitute for those of my persona – but I was still able to slowly begin weaving a messenger sprite.
"A lot can happen in seven years," Grue said, a little hesitantly. "He could have left the city, for one."
"In which case you tell me and I give you a quarter of your fee for wasting your time."
"Half." Grue responded, firmly.
"I'm paying you to find and kidnap a gangbanger. If you can't do either of those, twenty five percent is a very generous consolation prize."
The sprite took shape, perched on top of my knuckles, and I found myself eye-to-eye not with the oversized dragonfly I'd expected, but with a jet black crow. It stared up at me with black beady eyes and I blinked, surprised. I could still feel my connection to it, and I knew it would obey my commands, but this was… weird.
"Perhaps," Grue conceded, "but that depends on what it's twenty five percent of."
The crow tilted its head and cawed, leaping off my hand to hop around the table, then flapping its wings once to pounce up onto the client's shoulder before finally perching on her head. It looked at me like it was waiting for something, its black wings flickering with pent-up energy. Hesitantly, I reached out and forced my will onto the crow, sending it to root through my mother's files, back in my apartment. It let out a last caw, before spreading its wings and flying off in a digital blur.
"I understand Nuyen is preferable. Twenty thousand. I've already paid your Fixer's fee, so that money's all yours."
Split five ways, that's four thousand. A good pay out by my standards, but not much more than the three thousand we got for the last job.
"There are a lot of unknowns in this job," Grue said, leaning forward. "The most important is that we don't yet know where Mr Garcia is now, or what sort of opposition we'll face while extracting him. Twenty thousand isn't enough for an unknown."
The client laughed. "If you're trying to put a number to a fantasy, you can't. It could be more dangerous than you're expecting, but it could just as easily be a cakewalk. Twenty thousand is what I'm offering."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tattletale growing increasingly more irritated, though she was doing a good job at hiding the expression. She looked like she wanted to jump in and say something, but that went against what Grue had told me of how these things usually went down. The team leader was the one who handled negotiations, and since Grue had the most experience, that meant him.
Instead, I saw her discreetly yet forcefully stamp Grue's foot. Since her boots were as fashionable as they were practical, and his were heavy steel-toed things, Grue didn't show any visible reaction, and simply kept talking.
"Twenty thousand is what we'd charge for a low to medium risk job with known quantities. If you want us to step into the unknown, you need to sweeten the pot. Even a little."
Suddenly, I felt a stream of data linking me to my apartment, as the messenger crow constructed a link between me and mom's files. Her Ork Rights Commission files, rather. I was pretty sure I wouldn't find anything useful in her university files. More importantly, those files also held her password for the ORC's systems, a password that – as far as I was aware – had never been removed or reset. From across the city, I sent another instruction to the courier, and it took those codes off on another journey.
Ms Johnson sighed, leaning back in her chair and checking her fingernails rather than continuing to make eye contact with Grue. Then she seemed to firm up, meeting his gaze again.
"I can do twenty-one thousand."
Four thousand two hundred. Not a massive increase, but Grue seems satisfied.
"Acceptable. Now, we need to discuss the details. Tattletale and Bug are our best investigators," he nodded to us, and Ms Johnson's eyes immediately looked the pair of us up and down. They spent a lot longer on Lisa than on me, but I supposed that was because she was obviously a mage. I didn't exactly scream 'hacker,' and if our client was the type to see stereotypes then she'd have a hard time making the connection. "I'm sure they have questions."
"If you have any information on Mr Garcia," Tattletale leapt at the invitation to speak, "no matter how small, we can make use of it. DNA samples would be ideal, but nothing's ever that easy."
Mom's files had four different references to three different Andrew Garcia's, but one of those was for a case in Baltimore she'd packaged into an awareness presentation. The incoming stream of data from the ORC was more informative; they kept a somewhat comprehensive list of Chosen members, as well as a more comprehensive list of former members. Six hits, two casual members and four with a much longer list of crimes. Only one of them also appeared on the active list.
"There are three Chosen members named Andrew Garcia who've dropped off the grid or out of the gang," I said, only realising a moment later that I'd unintentionally cut Ms Johnson off. "Which one are you referring to?"
"Okay…" the client said, hesitantly. "I'm feeling a lot more confident about this than I was when I walked in here. Um, he was a person of interest in the firebombing of a med-centre in Sixty-Three. February, I think?"
"Got him," I said, flagging the right guy and having the crow copy his file to mom's computer.
Weird. He's one of the ones without much of a record, and the med-centre bombing wasn't the most notable crime linked to him.
"You know where he is?" she asked, her cool having vanished beneath naked shock.
"What?" I asked, puzzled. "Oh, no, sorry. I know which guy you're talking about. Breadcrumbs, that's all I've got. Still have to follow the trail."
"Oh," she replied, slumping back in her seat. "Well, I can see you have this all well in hand. If you're happy to proceed," she said, looking at Grue, "I'll be happy to turn over the funds when you're done."
"What should we do when we have the guy?" Grue asked.
"Just call me," she replied. "I'll arrange a handover and wire you the money."
"Then I'd say you have a deal," he said, stretching his arm across the table.
As she reciprocated, I could see that – while Grue's hand still dwarfed hers – our client was surprisingly athletic in her own right. I could see taut muscles beneath the lines of her suit as she shook his hand, before she stood up, brushed the curtain outside, and left the VIP room with what looked like a slight spring in her step.
We watched in silence as she left, before Tattletale leant over me, pulled the curtain back shut, and immediately leant forward, resting her elbows on the table with her fingers steepled in front of her.
"Anyone else get the feeling she's hiding something from us?" she asked.
"It's not our business," Grue said. "All we have to do is find Andrew Garcia, and thanks to Bug we have a lead."
"It is our business if she screws us over," Tattletale pointed out. "Seriously, how old was she? Twenty two, maybe? Way too young to be running anything serious, but just the right age to be a patsy for someone else."
For my part, I thought Tattletale had a point. Ms Johnson was an enigma, but more to the point there was a lot about her that didn't add up. My instincts were screaming at me to dig deeper, to untangle the web and figure this out. Why go into a situation without knowing all the variables?
"That's not how it's done, Tattletale," Grue said, wearily. "Damnit, we've talked about this."
I stood up.
"I'm going to go use the bathroom real quick," I said. "Then I'll tell you what I've dug up so far."
"Sure," Grue said. "Well done, by the way. An impression like that will work wonders for our rep."
I nodded, looking around the VIP area before spotting a door tucked away in the corner, with WC written on a metal plaque. Inside, the VIP bathroom certainly lived up to its name, with marble countertops and each stall being an individual room in its own right, with proper walls rather than flimsy boards. They didn't even have any graffiti on them.
I locked the door, dropped the lid on the toilet seat, sat down and let meatspace disappear as my body slumped bonelessly against the wall.
I flung my persona down, passing through the floor and into the main room of the club. A digital bouncer was floating over the dance floor, a piece of security ICE given a facelift to match the space, but since I wasn't doing anything against the rules it paid me no mind.
There were a few devices in the room, but only one icon was on its way out of the door. A commlink, almost certainly belonging to Ms Johnson herself. I wated until she'd left the club's host and moved out onto the public grid, then subtly peeled away the walls of her commlink. A few moments later, and I pulled my matrix avatar back, satisfied.
What I wasn't expecting was to find a woman standing in the bathroom, looking down at where my body lay in meatspace. She appeared to be a blonde elf, maybe a couple of years younger than me, wearing a thin and willowy dress that disappeared into labyrinthine patterns of digital fractals. She also appeared to be a persona, but there was a tangibility to her presence that made me think twice. She seemed almost weaved into the environment.
And then there was the crow perched on her shoulder, looking to all the world like it was whispering into her ear. She turned as I drifted back into the room, and I was struck by a singularly unique sense of déjà vu.
It's like looking in the mirror.
It was a paradoxical thought – we couldn't have looked further apart – but it was true all the same. Beyond the cosmetic differences of our personas, we both interacted with the world in the same way.
"Hello," she said, smiling, "I am Labyrinth. It's nice to meet you."
I felt a handful of datastreams caress my form, spiralling down from the ceiling. She had complete control of this environment, and I was a guest in her home. That was the digital equivalent of a handshake, for people whose hands feel rigid and bound by physical limitations.
"I've never met another Technomancer before," I said, almost wondrously.
"I have," she replied, with a strange melancholy to the resonance that made up her words. "But it has been a long time."
"Do you work for Faultline?" I asked, and Labyrinth nodded.
"I do. I keep her domain safe, and provide her with information. It is a small price to pay for safety and a domain of my own."
"Information…" I said. "So you'll tell her I'm a Technomancer?"
"I will," she replied. "You intrigue her, though not as much as Tattletale does."
"Tattletale?" I asked, confused.
"She has a secret, and she guards it well. Faultline does not like secrets" – her persona seemed to light up with amusement – "and neither do you, it seems."
I didn't say anything, but I felt more than a little sheepish that I'd been caught.
"Be careful," Labyrinth said, her presence was fading, but there was a weight to her words. An age beyond her youthful appearance. "The world is a beautiful place, and the deeper you look the more beautiful it gets. But it is not without its dangers."
And with that, she was gone. I pulled myself back from the matrix, stood up on shaky legs and pushed open the stall to find Tattletale leaning against the sinks.
"So?" she asked, smugly.
"You didn't tell Brian you needed to use the bathroom as well, right?" I asked.
"I'm 'getting drinks,'" she replied, punctuating the words with air quotes.
"Her name is Victoria Dallon," I stated. "What she didn't mention is that Andrew Garcia disappeared after murdering Jess Montrose, an investigative journalist and an elf, who'd published a piece on the Chosen. Won an award, even. Her death caused a public outcry, a few riots, but Garcia disappeared before anything could come of the case."
"So what's the connection to Miss Dallon?"
"Montrose was in a long-term relationship with Dallon's uncle, though the two never married. 'Ms Johnson' referred to her as 'auntie Jess' on her social media."
Tattletale nodded, seemingly satisfied. "Nothing to worry about, then. And, as a bonus, we get to feel all good inside while we're helping her live out her revenge fantasy."
"Maybe Grue had a point," I replied. "That really didn't seem like it was worth investigating."
"But it could have been," Tattletale countered. "Look, Grue's got more experience than any of us, but it's a very specific kind of experience, and it leads him to think in specific ways. He's used to working on his own and handling the negotiations himself, but I know for a fact that if I'd handled it then I could easily have squeezed twenty-five out of her by asking her to cough up more if we face armed resistance. Make the uncertainty an asset, rather than a detriment."
"Speaking from experience?" I asked, thinking about what Labyrinth had said.
"I spent a while working as a con artist," Tattletale replied, proudly. "I've got pretty good at reading people."
"That sounded more like corporate speak than con artistry," I said, uncertainly, Labyrinth's words still fresh in my mind.
"Oh, Bug." She smiled, warmly. "That's the secret; they're the same thing. Now, before we go back, do you have anything on Garcia?"
"A lot of posts on human supremacist boards," I replied. "I was going to suggest we pull in his old associates and see if any of them know where he went off to."
Tattletale nodded. "Now you're thinking like a Shadowrunner. Come on, the others are waiting. Let's get back to it."
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TikiTau
Commander Pangolinski
- Location
- Texas
This is a very fun Fusion.
Also, I did not know I needed Labyrinth and Bug, Technomancer Buddies, until just now.
(Okay, sure, it's early in things and their team's respective professional relationships, so it's more Technomancer Polite Acquaintances at the moment, but I can hope for future Technomancer Buddy Cop antics!)
Also, I did not know I needed Labyrinth and Bug, Technomancer Buddies, until just now.
(Okay, sure, it's early in things and their team's respective professional relationships, so it's more Technomancer Polite Acquaintances at the moment, but I can hope for future Technomancer Buddy Cop antics!)
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And this is why you don't use free Wi-Fi to do any sort of sensitive work on the net.
While making a good impression might have been cool, now at least one other group (Labyrinth, Faultline and Gregor at the very least) knows that she's a Technomancer, and ms. Dallon would know just enough to suspect such a thing - with no visible chrome and wireless connection to Matrix, Technomancer would make the list for people aware of such a phenomenon. Though not the main theory, I guess, there's still all sorts of magic that could be done to similar effect.
While making a good impression might have been cool, now at least one other group (Labyrinth, Faultline and Gregor at the very least) knows that she's a Technomancer, and ms. Dallon would know just enough to suspect such a thing - with no visible chrome and wireless connection to Matrix, Technomancer would make the list for people aware of such a phenomenon. Though not the main theory, I guess, there's still all sorts of magic that could be done to similar effect.
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TikiTau
Commander Pangolinski
- Location
- Texas
Eh, Vicky probably doesn't know.
AR contacts are a thing in this era and commlinks/decks can easily be shoved in a troll-sized jacket Inner pockets. An implanted cyberlink would also not be immediately obvious, either, depending where the data jack is.
Also, 4E was when obvious chrome became less popular in favor of bioware and low profile stuff, especially with AR being in vogue.
Obvious chrome was still popular, because cheap and effective, but lower profile stuff became much more affordable around then for the common 'runner.
Mind you, getting a commlink for your technomancer never hurts for showing people what they expect to see and thus stops them looking looking deeper (ie, Bug outed herself as Unusual when helping Tattletale crack the ABB commlink earlier in story and had awkward moment about file transfer question)
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Geas
Meat Thing
If this version of Faultline is anything like canon, she possibly will sit on the info that Taylor is a technomancer, given her mercenary-with-morals schtick. Technomancers are rare and suffered a lot in the setting.
Also, a fixer that fucks over their runners isn't likely to last long in the business. They either suddenly find themselves lacking in runners willing to trust them, or end up having to defend themselves if/when the shadowrunner they fucked over somehow survives.
That doesn't even take into consideration that if word spread (and it almost always inevitably seems to with these things), other technomancers might take an unhealthy interest in her business and feel the need to do something about it, and Labyrinth is only one girl (assuming that she even stayed on Faultine's side in such a scenario). For someone with so much chrome, an angry technomancer or technomancers would be a concern.
Also, Dallon genuinely might not have come to that conclusion. Cyberdecks cancbe as small as a real-world tablet or smartphone in 2070s Shadowrun - a good decker could have easily been holding one under the table and out of her line of sight along with a wireless datajack, or even have a cyberdeck implanted inside of their body. Chrome in Shadowrun can be very, very subtle.
Edit: imped.
- Location
- Earth, probably.
- Pronouns
- None/Any
I'm a big fan of the meeting between Taylor and Labyrinth, and I hope that further jobs from Faultline will mean they talk more. Also, I'm immensely curious to see what's going on with Victoria, if only for her utter surprise at how quickly Taylor was able to find even this information.
Persona - 2.04
Redcoat_Officer
Long Live the King
Persona - 2.04
The sky was lit by a thousand fires, mingling with the light of the setting sun to cast a blood-red glow over the plains beyond the city walls. The city was under siege, the sloped and angled walls surrounded by the besiegers own earthen trenches as cannons ceaselessly pounded away at the stone and magical artillery arced through the sky, momentarily overwhelming the red glare with brilliant light.
From the city's fleches and bastions, the defenders fired back as best they could, and the ceaseless barrage had churned the land between the two sets of fortifications into a swampy quagmire, full of ghouls feasting on the quiet dead, while the unquiet dead rose as zombies, banshees and ghosts.
Warriors strode amongst that hellish landscape, wearing a myriad of colours and standards but ultimately in the service of either the city or the besieging army. They descended into that man-made swamp to cull the number of ghouls, to escort sapping parties as they pushed the lines forward, even to raid their enemy's camps in hopes of hastening or delaying the fall of the city.
And that was where the ambience broke down, because no matter how realistic you make your game's world, players will always break that illusion. For one, they were far too clean. For two, they were wearing all the wrong outfits. For three, they were reliant on UI interfaces and floating numbers that got in the way of the visuals. But no game is built purely for the satisfaction of the developers, and ultimately it was the player's sandbox to roam.
Warring Leagues was a fairly typical VRMMO, conceived by some captive creatives on an exclusive contract and given life by a veritable army of programmers, artists, designers, play-testers, marketers and random hangers-on in a Horizon-owned studio, sealed away from the outside world in a constant environment of crunch and deadlines.
The setting might well have been picked by throwing a peg at a dartboard, but it was popular enough, with a player base in the low millions. For every decker using VR as a tool to enable their hacking, there were thousands more who used lower-power cyberdecks for this exact sort of entertainment. Rather than cranking up their device's processing power to boost hacking, they'd focus on enhancing their auditory and visual senses until their virtual playground almost felt more real to them than meatspace itself – chasing the impossible sensation I felt every day.
I stood atop a dismounted gun, a great bombard cut loose from its carriage and half-buried in a muddy rise. Its surface bore intricately detailed engravings depicting battle scenes from its nation's illustrious past, with the words "the final argument of kings and men" wrapped in a loop around the muzzle in cursive script. The metal giving way to rust, the richly-worked engravings, even the past those engravings depicted were all the product of a team of designers and artists, ordered to pursue greater and greater realism as a mere marketing tool, while the player ignored their efforts as she slaughtered a party of scouts in the shadow of the gun.
The letters above her head identified her as Valk1R3, and showed her allegiance to the 'Free Cities of Hansaal,' which told me that she was fighting on the side of the besieged today, rather than the besiegers.
Her avatar was human, though that wasn't a surprise for multiple reasons. From the small icon next to her name, I could see she was a Rogue who specialised in evading damage rather than tanking hits or delivering killing blows, which explained why she felt confident enough to head out here on her own.
As was typical of video games, her apparel bore no resemblance to what could be called 'armour,' revealing more than it protected, and – as was typical of people – her avatar was an idealised interpretation of how she looked in the real world. Generally speaking, people only tended to depart from that pattern on their second or third character.
Sarah Lancet went to the same school as our target, though they were a year apart. In their final year, they both worked part-time in the same corner shop during the evenings. The corner shop was in a neighbourhood with a small but noticeable Chosen presence, and it was where Garcia had made the jump from frequenting human-supremacist forums to plotting ways to impress the Chosen themselves. Since he didn't know any Chosen, that meant grabbing their attention.
Sarah's saving grace was that she never went as deep down the rabbit hole as Andrew did, though she still had some racist leanings. They'd started dating each other, before her boyfriend shot Jess Montrose and vanished into thin air.
When I'd run the list of Garcia's social media contacts past Tattletale, she'd immediately latched onto two possibilities. The first was that the killing had driven Garcia off the deep end, and he'd become increasingly radical, hiding out for the last seven years with the Chosen under an assumed identity. In which case, Sarah would be useless.
The second possibility was that the resulting outcry and riots had caused a change of heart, or – more likely – given Garcia cold feet, and he'd hidden himself away from both the DA's office and the Chosen. That possibility was more unlikely, but Sarah's dad was a badge with Knight Errant, and could have provided the way into witness protection.
Either way, Sarah could know something. So I'd taken her, while Grue and Rachel picked up a buddy of Garcia's who was still in the Chosen, and Tattletale walked Regent through some more social investigations that she couldn't conduct herself thanks to having the wrong ear shape.
It had been expectedly easy to fool Warring Leagues' systems into thinking I was just another player on a premium subscription. After all, I'd done it before dozens, if not hundreds, of times for all sorts of different games. I didn't play them myself, but there were a lot of people out there who were interested in playing games like this, but not interested enough to cough up full price.
Getting myself admin permissions had been significantly harder, and I'd proceeded slowly and methodically to avoid drawing the attention of Horizon's ICE or the host's live-in monitors. I could afford to go slow; Sarah spent hours online each night. She wasn't going anywhere.
I watched her slaughter the last of the scouts, her avatar dancing around them with impossible grace as the software in her VR link interpreted her will into movement that rivalled that of professional gymnasts, mystically-fuelled martial artists or cybernetically enhanced Samurai.
My own body was the same avatar I had used when fighting Bakuda – an insectoid woman hidden beneath spidersilk robes. Using my hacked admin privileges, I'd given it statistics and attributes roughly equivalent to Valk1R3, then multiplied them by ten. I could have gone further, but Horizon's anti-cheat measures would have detected the abnormal stats.
Instead, when I leapt off the cannon and landed in front of her, my robes flying off as four long limbs grew out of my back to arrest my fall, the rogue's eyes widened in shock as she dropped fluidly into a combat stance, before a grin spread across her face.
It wasn't hard to figure out what she was thinking – I wasn't displaying any of the information a player would, so to her eyes I must have come across as a hidden enemy.
She darted forwards, her rapier held out in front of her, and – on a whim – I decided to play along. I leapt backwards, driving my insectoid limbs into the ground with far more strength than any real legs could manage, then used the reach of those same limbs to stab out at her.
My movements were fluid, efficient, and driven almost entirely by programmed move sets I'd pulled out of the game's files. Still, it was exhilarating to dance around her, and for a brief moment I felt I could understand why people would get sucked into these games. If you lived in Meatspace your whole life, bound by the limitations of your flesh, then games like this would let you experience and even surpass the limits of that flesh, without the years of exercise or invasive augmentations needed by someone like Brian.
Valk1R3 managed to drive her sword into my torso, but I abandoned the move set's instinct to stagger back, instead grasping her wrist and dragging myself down the length of her rapier with one hand, while reaching out with the other and dragging it down her neck.
She gasped, as the simulated pain kicked into action, but I couldn't help myself from comparing it unfavourably to the genuine pain I'd seen on the faces of the gangster's at the freight warehouse. She let go of the sword, backflipping out of reach just as my spear-tipped limbs closed in.
In my chest, the sword disappeared, reappearing in her grip. A skill, perhaps, or just a feature of the game. The power fantasy would fall flat if people were fumbling with their weapons all the time, after all.
"Okay," she said out loud – to herself, not to me – "this is interesting."
"You don't know the half of it," I snarked back, then – as her eyes widened in shock – lunged forward, driving a limb into her torso with inhuman speed. As the tip pierced her persona, I poured myself into the wound, driving a resonance spike into her code.
The rules of the game meant that her persona needed to open itself up in ways that simply wouldn't apply on the rest of the grid. Where most personas – particularly those used by people expecting to be hacked – were a carefully-coiled bundle of data designed to keep attacks out, hers was deliberately set up to allow certain attacks that fit the rules of the game.
It was a crack in her armour, and I'd just widened it into a chasm. I stepped towards her, my insectoid limbs folding together and retracting into my back, and reached out with a hand to pluck at the tether of data tying her to me. It was simplicity itself to edit that stream, borrowing a programme from the game's code to inflict her with a paralysis effect below the neck that would have had her slumping bonelessly to the floor, if I hadn't elected to hold her in place so our eyes were level.
"Sarah Lancet," – she gasped in shock – "I have question for you."
My eye was drawn to a single stream of data, trying and failing to get past the web of resonance I had coiled around her. She'd just tried to log off, and the realisation that she couldn't, that I wouldn't let her, sent her into a panic attack. She started hyperventilating; a pointless physical response in this digital world.
The failed log off attempt had drawn a lot of attention; I could see Horizon snoopers casting out exploratory datastreams in search of their distressed customer. I reached out, pulling on those streams and twisting them into a veil of static that fell like a fog around both of us – digital chaff sealing us away from prying eyes. For now.
"You can go when I have my answer," I said, trying to calm her down. The fear of being stuck in the matrix was an instinctive one that tickled at the most inherent fears of the metahuman mind; the loss of the self. The fear of being cast loose from their body, from meatspace, and becoming a ghost in the machine.
It was never a fear of mine, but then I was something in-between meatspace and the matrix. There were times when it didn't even sound so bad.
Sarah was still obviously terrified, but at least she'd quietened down.
"I'm looking for Andrew Garcia," I said, and Sarah let out an involuntary laugh, her face contorted in a manic expression.
"He's what this is about?" she asked, incredulously. "What the fuck!?"
"You used to know him," I continued. "Perhaps you still do. You tell me what you know, and I'll let you go."
"I haven't spoken to him in four years!" she shouted, desperately.
"Four?" I leaned in closer. "He disappeared seven years ago, after murdering Jess Montrose."
"He didn't do shit to that pixie bitch," she retorted, and I frowned at the slur. "Andrew was an edgy dick, but he didn't have the balls."
"You dated him," I snapped back.
"Before I realised what a creep he was, yeah. Broke it off when the pawns came looking for him, not that I ever told him it was over."
"So four years ago he came back looking for his output?"
"Fuck you," she shouted, trying to spit at me. Of course, nothing came out, and I couldn't help but laugh.
"You're not in meatspace anymore," I said. "This is my domain, so you're going to answer my questions. Unless you'd like to stay here. Forever."
"Goddamn freak!" she shouted, before she seemed to sag. "Fucking fine. He came by to try and pick up where he left off, but I turned him down."
"He say where he was working?" I asked. "Where he lived?"
I let the paralysis effect fade, to reward good behaviour, and Sarah dropped to the ground on her hands and knees, faux-breathing for a few moments before staggering upright. She didn't run, not that there would be any point.
"Wouldn't shut up about it." She coughed, her mind still tricked into thinking she was in a biological body, with biological lungs. "Medhall. He works for Medhall."
Medhall? Some sympathetic middle-manager take pity on the poor, persecuted, human teen and offer him a job?
"Fetch and carry? That sort of thing?"
Sarah shook her head.
"Said he was a duty manager. He was very specific about that. Said he had money now, I said I still wasn't interested."
The fuck? People don't go from stacking shelves in a convenience store to junior management in a near-megacorp. Definitely not when they've got a murder charge chasing them.
"You're sure about this?" I asked her. "Sure he wasn't bullshitting you to get in your slot?"
"I'm sure," she said. "He was dressed the part, and he showed me his corp ID."
I paced around her for a moment, thinking it over. I couldn't tell if she was lying to me, but I also didn't have any way of verifying what she'd said. Not quickly, at least. In the end, I just had to take her at her word.
"The corp ID. Don't suppose you remember where it was for? What building?"
"Uhh… shit." Her eyes darted around, looking anywhere except at me. "Manufacturing, I think. Wait!" she exclaimed, realisation lighting up in her eyes. "Charter Hill. He was bragging about his new digs in Charter Hill. A company pad."
A Medhall plant in Charter Hill, tied to a corporate living space. That narrows it down, but not by much. Hopefully the others have more.
"Thank you for your assistance," I said, removing my presence from her data as she staggered at the sudden return of control. "You're free to go."
"Never touching this game again," she muttered to herself, before turning to me. "You could've just fucking asked."
I shrugged my shoulders. "Had to be sure. Oh, and don't tell anyone about this."
"Like I'm that stupid," she said, before her persona vanished as she logged off. I followed, leaving the host behind before Horizon could finish tracking me down.
Once I was back in the comfortably familiar networks of Brockton Bay's public grid, I called up Grue's commlink. He picked up after a few moments.
"Bug? What is it?"
"I've got a lead, but something's off about it."
"Same here. We should talk face to face."
"What's wrong with the comm?" I asked, a little annoyed.
"Bitch and I have just arrived back," he said, and I heard the sound of a van door slamming shut in the background. "Come on out, we'll go over it as a team."
"Fine," I sighed, taking a last look at the vast expanse of the matrix before pulling myself back down to Earth.
I blinked away at the ceiling light as my eyes adjusted, shifting forwards in the couch so that I wasn't looking directly at it. I hadn't been gone for long, so my body only ached a little from how long it'd spent in one place. Still, compared to the limitless freedom of cyberspace it felt like I'd suddenly developed arthritis. It always did.
I stood up, leant against the wall to steady myself for a moment, and pushed the door open before stepping out into the corridor.
The others were all there, waiting on the couches in the loft's living space. I shrank a little under the four pairs of eyes that had turned to look at me, but pressed on regardless. Brian and Rachel looked like they had only just got in, their jackets still wet from the rain I could hear pounding against the loft's roof – even through the makeshift insulation. He and Rachel had taken one of the long couches, while Lisa was sat in the armchair. Alec was sprawled out across the last remaining couch, his head resting on one armrest and his feet on the other.
"So, what did you find?" I asked Grue as I slumped gracelessly onto the human-sized couch, trusting Alec to move his legs or lose them.
Grue leant forwards in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees.
"We snatched Dante Kaur off the street," he said with a nod to Rachel. Kaur was another former friend of Garcia's, but he was unique among the bunch in that he'd actually managed to graduate from posting about trogs online to actually being a card-carrying, flag-waving member of the Chosen.
"It took us a while," Grue continued, "but we managed to get him talking. Not only is he still in contact with Garcia, they're regular business partners. Garcia sources the Chosen opiates, which they then distribute to their dealers across the city. And he gets the opiates-"
"From Medhall," I interrupted, frowning. "But that doesn't make sense."
"Something you want to add?" Grue asked.
"Garcia's ex confirmed he worked for the corp," I explained. "He has citizenship and everything, which explains why his UCAS SIN has completely dropped off the grid. But he's a manager, not some factory floor worker slipping a few stray pills to his buddies. A duty manager, sure, but still."
"It's not a few stray pills, either," Grue said. "I'm talking boxes of the stuff, though Kaur didn't confirm how many in each shipment."
"Taylor's right," Lisa added with a frown, "something doesn't add up. Let's say some Medhall manager with Humanis sympathies – and we all know there are plenty in the company – took pity on him and offered him a job. A patron would explain how he wound up in junior management, but why would he spit in that patron's eye by stealing product? And why hasn't the Corp noticed and shut him down?"
"Maybe they have," Grue pointed out. "Could be our client is Medhall, and they're using us to close the leak without drawing attention to the company."
Lisa and I shared a brief look, but neither of us spoke up. We both knew that wasn't true, but we couldn't exactly tell Grue that without revealing we'd broken the unspoken rules of Shadowrunning.
"I guess it doesn't matter," Lisa said after a moment, shaking her head. "The client wants Garcia, and it's our job to deliver him to her. Hopefully his corporate SIN doesn't complicate things; if she was expecting some thug in hiding, it'll come as a surprise."
"That's her problem to deal with," Grue shrugged. "Ours is getting the guy out." He turned to look at me. "Bug, is there anything you can do to track down a Medhall employee?"
"That depends," I answered. "What drug is he supplying?"
"Dopadrine."
"Then I know which factory he works at."
Grue looked surprised. "Just like that?"
"Medhall's factories have limited extraterritoriality because of a deal with the State government, so they don't have to declare what they make, but they still ship it through the port, and those shipments do have to be declared – for now, at least. They have four factories in the city that ship out dopadrine, but thanks to Ms Lancet I know Garcia lives in corporate accommodation in Charter Hill. That narrows it down to one."
"Excellent work." Grue genuinely sounded grateful, and I couldn't help the smile that crept across my face. "Now we just need to work out an extraction plan."
"If I can get close enough," Alec spoke up for the first time, "I can take control of his body. Walk him right out the front door." His tone made it sound like he was doing us a massive favour.
"It'd be better than sedating him and carrying him out," Brian mulled the idea over, stroking his chin. "But we'd still need to get ourselves into the building. Bug, do you know his home address?"
I shook my head. "I might be able to get it, but data on corporate employees is tightly guarded, even for junior managers. It's to prevent armed talent scouting."
"So it would have to be the factory. Great."
"Places like this tend to have large rotating staffs," Lisa explained. "At least on the lower rungs of the ladder. There'll be a high turnover of building custodians and other menials, maybe it'll even be subcontracted out. All we'd need are some overalls with the right logos. How long do we have?"
"Not long," Brian shook his head. "Kaur was supposed to pick up the next shipment in three days."
"You didn't…" I hesitated, not sure I wanted to ask. "He's still alive, right?"
"Welded his arms to an I-beam," Rachel explained, her tone matter-of-fact. "He isn't going anywhere."
"We'll cut him loose when the job's done," Brian elaborated. "For now, we don't want to complicate things with loose ends."
He paused for a moment, looking at me before continuing.
"What about on your end? Is Garcia's old flame going to be a problem?"
"No, she won't," I answered quickly. "I scared her pretty good, and she and Garcia didn't part on good terms regardless."
"Glad to hear it," Brian nodded. "Then I suggest we move tomorrow. Tattletale and Bitch will stay outside with the van, but we can bring in Bitch's Crawler in a bag to scout the place out. Me, Regent and Bug will go in and extract the guy. Bug, I can get us generic fake ID cards but I'll need you to spoof whatever punch clock system they have."
"Wait a second," I leant forward. "Why do I have to go in with you?"
"A second pair of strong hands might come in handy if Regent can't maintain control," he explained. "Besides, Regent doesn't exactly look like a janitor. The two of us fit the profile, especially in Medhall."
"Fuck," I sank back into the seat. "If mom could see me now…" I murmured to myself.
I looked up at Brian, but I saw nothing but confidence in his eyes.
They're cybernetic. Confidence is easy to fake.
"If this turns into a shootout…" I began, but Brian cut me off.
"Then I'll take point, and Bitch will roll drones through the front door to create a distraction. You'll be fine, Bug."
"Damnit, okay," I said after a moment. "But I want to be thorough about this. We can't just wing it like last time."
I spun a sprite together and sent it off into the Matrix, to snoop through building plans in City Hall, techno-anarchist datadumps, anything else that would help give us an idea of the building layout. Then I slumped back onto the couch, falling into a trance-like state as I re-entered the Matrix and accessed public data from the city's traffic management system, beamed in real time to hundreds of thousands of sat-navs across the city. When combined with the feeds from any CCTV cameras in the neighbouring buildings that even so much has glanced at our target, it gave us a picture of how people moved in and out of the site.
I left the matrix behind, pulling up all the information I'd gathered into an augmented reality display on top of the coffee table. I fed the data directly to Brian and Rachel's cyberyeyes, while Lisa and Alec put on their own AR sunglasses to add their own input – though Lisa contributed a lot more, there. We planned long into the night, over a Jamaican takeaway – that Alec ordered – and cans of soft drinks, and at the end of the night I almost felt optimistic about the idea.
I was still having second thoughts, and third thoughts, fourth thoughts, and so on, but I was just barely confident enough that I wasn't going to let them stop me.
"So if there's nothing else, I think we just planned a hostile extraction before midnight," Lisa said with a grin.
I reached out in the matrix, idly tugging on a passing datastream and checking its timestamp. Sure enough, it was only eleven thirty, with a night and most of a day before we went in with the evening shift.
I couldn't help but wonder if that was a good thing.
The sky was lit by a thousand fires, mingling with the light of the setting sun to cast a blood-red glow over the plains beyond the city walls. The city was under siege, the sloped and angled walls surrounded by the besiegers own earthen trenches as cannons ceaselessly pounded away at the stone and magical artillery arced through the sky, momentarily overwhelming the red glare with brilliant light.
From the city's fleches and bastions, the defenders fired back as best they could, and the ceaseless barrage had churned the land between the two sets of fortifications into a swampy quagmire, full of ghouls feasting on the quiet dead, while the unquiet dead rose as zombies, banshees and ghosts.
Warriors strode amongst that hellish landscape, wearing a myriad of colours and standards but ultimately in the service of either the city or the besieging army. They descended into that man-made swamp to cull the number of ghouls, to escort sapping parties as they pushed the lines forward, even to raid their enemy's camps in hopes of hastening or delaying the fall of the city.
And that was where the ambience broke down, because no matter how realistic you make your game's world, players will always break that illusion. For one, they were far too clean. For two, they were wearing all the wrong outfits. For three, they were reliant on UI interfaces and floating numbers that got in the way of the visuals. But no game is built purely for the satisfaction of the developers, and ultimately it was the player's sandbox to roam.
Warring Leagues was a fairly typical VRMMO, conceived by some captive creatives on an exclusive contract and given life by a veritable army of programmers, artists, designers, play-testers, marketers and random hangers-on in a Horizon-owned studio, sealed away from the outside world in a constant environment of crunch and deadlines.
The setting might well have been picked by throwing a peg at a dartboard, but it was popular enough, with a player base in the low millions. For every decker using VR as a tool to enable their hacking, there were thousands more who used lower-power cyberdecks for this exact sort of entertainment. Rather than cranking up their device's processing power to boost hacking, they'd focus on enhancing their auditory and visual senses until their virtual playground almost felt more real to them than meatspace itself – chasing the impossible sensation I felt every day.
I stood atop a dismounted gun, a great bombard cut loose from its carriage and half-buried in a muddy rise. Its surface bore intricately detailed engravings depicting battle scenes from its nation's illustrious past, with the words "the final argument of kings and men" wrapped in a loop around the muzzle in cursive script. The metal giving way to rust, the richly-worked engravings, even the past those engravings depicted were all the product of a team of designers and artists, ordered to pursue greater and greater realism as a mere marketing tool, while the player ignored their efforts as she slaughtered a party of scouts in the shadow of the gun.
The letters above her head identified her as Valk1R3, and showed her allegiance to the 'Free Cities of Hansaal,' which told me that she was fighting on the side of the besieged today, rather than the besiegers.
Her avatar was human, though that wasn't a surprise for multiple reasons. From the small icon next to her name, I could see she was a Rogue who specialised in evading damage rather than tanking hits or delivering killing blows, which explained why she felt confident enough to head out here on her own.
As was typical of video games, her apparel bore no resemblance to what could be called 'armour,' revealing more than it protected, and – as was typical of people – her avatar was an idealised interpretation of how she looked in the real world. Generally speaking, people only tended to depart from that pattern on their second or third character.
Sarah Lancet went to the same school as our target, though they were a year apart. In their final year, they both worked part-time in the same corner shop during the evenings. The corner shop was in a neighbourhood with a small but noticeable Chosen presence, and it was where Garcia had made the jump from frequenting human-supremacist forums to plotting ways to impress the Chosen themselves. Since he didn't know any Chosen, that meant grabbing their attention.
Sarah's saving grace was that she never went as deep down the rabbit hole as Andrew did, though she still had some racist leanings. They'd started dating each other, before her boyfriend shot Jess Montrose and vanished into thin air.
When I'd run the list of Garcia's social media contacts past Tattletale, she'd immediately latched onto two possibilities. The first was that the killing had driven Garcia off the deep end, and he'd become increasingly radical, hiding out for the last seven years with the Chosen under an assumed identity. In which case, Sarah would be useless.
The second possibility was that the resulting outcry and riots had caused a change of heart, or – more likely – given Garcia cold feet, and he'd hidden himself away from both the DA's office and the Chosen. That possibility was more unlikely, but Sarah's dad was a badge with Knight Errant, and could have provided the way into witness protection.
Either way, Sarah could know something. So I'd taken her, while Grue and Rachel picked up a buddy of Garcia's who was still in the Chosen, and Tattletale walked Regent through some more social investigations that she couldn't conduct herself thanks to having the wrong ear shape.
It had been expectedly easy to fool Warring Leagues' systems into thinking I was just another player on a premium subscription. After all, I'd done it before dozens, if not hundreds, of times for all sorts of different games. I didn't play them myself, but there were a lot of people out there who were interested in playing games like this, but not interested enough to cough up full price.
Getting myself admin permissions had been significantly harder, and I'd proceeded slowly and methodically to avoid drawing the attention of Horizon's ICE or the host's live-in monitors. I could afford to go slow; Sarah spent hours online each night. She wasn't going anywhere.
I watched her slaughter the last of the scouts, her avatar dancing around them with impossible grace as the software in her VR link interpreted her will into movement that rivalled that of professional gymnasts, mystically-fuelled martial artists or cybernetically enhanced Samurai.
My own body was the same avatar I had used when fighting Bakuda – an insectoid woman hidden beneath spidersilk robes. Using my hacked admin privileges, I'd given it statistics and attributes roughly equivalent to Valk1R3, then multiplied them by ten. I could have gone further, but Horizon's anti-cheat measures would have detected the abnormal stats.
Instead, when I leapt off the cannon and landed in front of her, my robes flying off as four long limbs grew out of my back to arrest my fall, the rogue's eyes widened in shock as she dropped fluidly into a combat stance, before a grin spread across her face.
It wasn't hard to figure out what she was thinking – I wasn't displaying any of the information a player would, so to her eyes I must have come across as a hidden enemy.
She darted forwards, her rapier held out in front of her, and – on a whim – I decided to play along. I leapt backwards, driving my insectoid limbs into the ground with far more strength than any real legs could manage, then used the reach of those same limbs to stab out at her.
My movements were fluid, efficient, and driven almost entirely by programmed move sets I'd pulled out of the game's files. Still, it was exhilarating to dance around her, and for a brief moment I felt I could understand why people would get sucked into these games. If you lived in Meatspace your whole life, bound by the limitations of your flesh, then games like this would let you experience and even surpass the limits of that flesh, without the years of exercise or invasive augmentations needed by someone like Brian.
Valk1R3 managed to drive her sword into my torso, but I abandoned the move set's instinct to stagger back, instead grasping her wrist and dragging myself down the length of her rapier with one hand, while reaching out with the other and dragging it down her neck.
She gasped, as the simulated pain kicked into action, but I couldn't help myself from comparing it unfavourably to the genuine pain I'd seen on the faces of the gangster's at the freight warehouse. She let go of the sword, backflipping out of reach just as my spear-tipped limbs closed in.
In my chest, the sword disappeared, reappearing in her grip. A skill, perhaps, or just a feature of the game. The power fantasy would fall flat if people were fumbling with their weapons all the time, after all.
"Okay," she said out loud – to herself, not to me – "this is interesting."
"You don't know the half of it," I snarked back, then – as her eyes widened in shock – lunged forward, driving a limb into her torso with inhuman speed. As the tip pierced her persona, I poured myself into the wound, driving a resonance spike into her code.
The rules of the game meant that her persona needed to open itself up in ways that simply wouldn't apply on the rest of the grid. Where most personas – particularly those used by people expecting to be hacked – were a carefully-coiled bundle of data designed to keep attacks out, hers was deliberately set up to allow certain attacks that fit the rules of the game.
It was a crack in her armour, and I'd just widened it into a chasm. I stepped towards her, my insectoid limbs folding together and retracting into my back, and reached out with a hand to pluck at the tether of data tying her to me. It was simplicity itself to edit that stream, borrowing a programme from the game's code to inflict her with a paralysis effect below the neck that would have had her slumping bonelessly to the floor, if I hadn't elected to hold her in place so our eyes were level.
"Sarah Lancet," – she gasped in shock – "I have question for you."
My eye was drawn to a single stream of data, trying and failing to get past the web of resonance I had coiled around her. She'd just tried to log off, and the realisation that she couldn't, that I wouldn't let her, sent her into a panic attack. She started hyperventilating; a pointless physical response in this digital world.
The failed log off attempt had drawn a lot of attention; I could see Horizon snoopers casting out exploratory datastreams in search of their distressed customer. I reached out, pulling on those streams and twisting them into a veil of static that fell like a fog around both of us – digital chaff sealing us away from prying eyes. For now.
"You can go when I have my answer," I said, trying to calm her down. The fear of being stuck in the matrix was an instinctive one that tickled at the most inherent fears of the metahuman mind; the loss of the self. The fear of being cast loose from their body, from meatspace, and becoming a ghost in the machine.
It was never a fear of mine, but then I was something in-between meatspace and the matrix. There were times when it didn't even sound so bad.
Sarah was still obviously terrified, but at least she'd quietened down.
"I'm looking for Andrew Garcia," I said, and Sarah let out an involuntary laugh, her face contorted in a manic expression.
"He's what this is about?" she asked, incredulously. "What the fuck!?"
"You used to know him," I continued. "Perhaps you still do. You tell me what you know, and I'll let you go."
"I haven't spoken to him in four years!" she shouted, desperately.
"Four?" I leaned in closer. "He disappeared seven years ago, after murdering Jess Montrose."
"He didn't do shit to that pixie bitch," she retorted, and I frowned at the slur. "Andrew was an edgy dick, but he didn't have the balls."
"You dated him," I snapped back.
"Before I realised what a creep he was, yeah. Broke it off when the pawns came looking for him, not that I ever told him it was over."
"So four years ago he came back looking for his output?"
"Fuck you," she shouted, trying to spit at me. Of course, nothing came out, and I couldn't help but laugh.
"You're not in meatspace anymore," I said. "This is my domain, so you're going to answer my questions. Unless you'd like to stay here. Forever."
"Goddamn freak!" she shouted, before she seemed to sag. "Fucking fine. He came by to try and pick up where he left off, but I turned him down."
"He say where he was working?" I asked. "Where he lived?"
I let the paralysis effect fade, to reward good behaviour, and Sarah dropped to the ground on her hands and knees, faux-breathing for a few moments before staggering upright. She didn't run, not that there would be any point.
"Wouldn't shut up about it." She coughed, her mind still tricked into thinking she was in a biological body, with biological lungs. "Medhall. He works for Medhall."
Medhall? Some sympathetic middle-manager take pity on the poor, persecuted, human teen and offer him a job?
"Fetch and carry? That sort of thing?"
Sarah shook her head.
"Said he was a duty manager. He was very specific about that. Said he had money now, I said I still wasn't interested."
The fuck? People don't go from stacking shelves in a convenience store to junior management in a near-megacorp. Definitely not when they've got a murder charge chasing them.
"You're sure about this?" I asked her. "Sure he wasn't bullshitting you to get in your slot?"
"I'm sure," she said. "He was dressed the part, and he showed me his corp ID."
I paced around her for a moment, thinking it over. I couldn't tell if she was lying to me, but I also didn't have any way of verifying what she'd said. Not quickly, at least. In the end, I just had to take her at her word.
"The corp ID. Don't suppose you remember where it was for? What building?"
"Uhh… shit." Her eyes darted around, looking anywhere except at me. "Manufacturing, I think. Wait!" she exclaimed, realisation lighting up in her eyes. "Charter Hill. He was bragging about his new digs in Charter Hill. A company pad."
A Medhall plant in Charter Hill, tied to a corporate living space. That narrows it down, but not by much. Hopefully the others have more.
"Thank you for your assistance," I said, removing my presence from her data as she staggered at the sudden return of control. "You're free to go."
"Never touching this game again," she muttered to herself, before turning to me. "You could've just fucking asked."
I shrugged my shoulders. "Had to be sure. Oh, and don't tell anyone about this."
"Like I'm that stupid," she said, before her persona vanished as she logged off. I followed, leaving the host behind before Horizon could finish tracking me down.
Once I was back in the comfortably familiar networks of Brockton Bay's public grid, I called up Grue's commlink. He picked up after a few moments.
"Bug? What is it?"
"I've got a lead, but something's off about it."
"Same here. We should talk face to face."
"What's wrong with the comm?" I asked, a little annoyed.
"Bitch and I have just arrived back," he said, and I heard the sound of a van door slamming shut in the background. "Come on out, we'll go over it as a team."
"Fine," I sighed, taking a last look at the vast expanse of the matrix before pulling myself back down to Earth.
I blinked away at the ceiling light as my eyes adjusted, shifting forwards in the couch so that I wasn't looking directly at it. I hadn't been gone for long, so my body only ached a little from how long it'd spent in one place. Still, compared to the limitless freedom of cyberspace it felt like I'd suddenly developed arthritis. It always did.
I stood up, leant against the wall to steady myself for a moment, and pushed the door open before stepping out into the corridor.
The others were all there, waiting on the couches in the loft's living space. I shrank a little under the four pairs of eyes that had turned to look at me, but pressed on regardless. Brian and Rachel looked like they had only just got in, their jackets still wet from the rain I could hear pounding against the loft's roof – even through the makeshift insulation. He and Rachel had taken one of the long couches, while Lisa was sat in the armchair. Alec was sprawled out across the last remaining couch, his head resting on one armrest and his feet on the other.
"So, what did you find?" I asked Grue as I slumped gracelessly onto the human-sized couch, trusting Alec to move his legs or lose them.
Grue leant forwards in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees.
"We snatched Dante Kaur off the street," he said with a nod to Rachel. Kaur was another former friend of Garcia's, but he was unique among the bunch in that he'd actually managed to graduate from posting about trogs online to actually being a card-carrying, flag-waving member of the Chosen.
"It took us a while," Grue continued, "but we managed to get him talking. Not only is he still in contact with Garcia, they're regular business partners. Garcia sources the Chosen opiates, which they then distribute to their dealers across the city. And he gets the opiates-"
"From Medhall," I interrupted, frowning. "But that doesn't make sense."
"Something you want to add?" Grue asked.
"Garcia's ex confirmed he worked for the corp," I explained. "He has citizenship and everything, which explains why his UCAS SIN has completely dropped off the grid. But he's a manager, not some factory floor worker slipping a few stray pills to his buddies. A duty manager, sure, but still."
"It's not a few stray pills, either," Grue said. "I'm talking boxes of the stuff, though Kaur didn't confirm how many in each shipment."
"Taylor's right," Lisa added with a frown, "something doesn't add up. Let's say some Medhall manager with Humanis sympathies – and we all know there are plenty in the company – took pity on him and offered him a job. A patron would explain how he wound up in junior management, but why would he spit in that patron's eye by stealing product? And why hasn't the Corp noticed and shut him down?"
"Maybe they have," Grue pointed out. "Could be our client is Medhall, and they're using us to close the leak without drawing attention to the company."
Lisa and I shared a brief look, but neither of us spoke up. We both knew that wasn't true, but we couldn't exactly tell Grue that without revealing we'd broken the unspoken rules of Shadowrunning.
"I guess it doesn't matter," Lisa said after a moment, shaking her head. "The client wants Garcia, and it's our job to deliver him to her. Hopefully his corporate SIN doesn't complicate things; if she was expecting some thug in hiding, it'll come as a surprise."
"That's her problem to deal with," Grue shrugged. "Ours is getting the guy out." He turned to look at me. "Bug, is there anything you can do to track down a Medhall employee?"
"That depends," I answered. "What drug is he supplying?"
"Dopadrine."
"Then I know which factory he works at."
Grue looked surprised. "Just like that?"
"Medhall's factories have limited extraterritoriality because of a deal with the State government, so they don't have to declare what they make, but they still ship it through the port, and those shipments do have to be declared – for now, at least. They have four factories in the city that ship out dopadrine, but thanks to Ms Lancet I know Garcia lives in corporate accommodation in Charter Hill. That narrows it down to one."
"Excellent work." Grue genuinely sounded grateful, and I couldn't help the smile that crept across my face. "Now we just need to work out an extraction plan."
"If I can get close enough," Alec spoke up for the first time, "I can take control of his body. Walk him right out the front door." His tone made it sound like he was doing us a massive favour.
"It'd be better than sedating him and carrying him out," Brian mulled the idea over, stroking his chin. "But we'd still need to get ourselves into the building. Bug, do you know his home address?"
I shook my head. "I might be able to get it, but data on corporate employees is tightly guarded, even for junior managers. It's to prevent armed talent scouting."
"So it would have to be the factory. Great."
"Places like this tend to have large rotating staffs," Lisa explained. "At least on the lower rungs of the ladder. There'll be a high turnover of building custodians and other menials, maybe it'll even be subcontracted out. All we'd need are some overalls with the right logos. How long do we have?"
"Not long," Brian shook his head. "Kaur was supposed to pick up the next shipment in three days."
"You didn't…" I hesitated, not sure I wanted to ask. "He's still alive, right?"
"Welded his arms to an I-beam," Rachel explained, her tone matter-of-fact. "He isn't going anywhere."
"We'll cut him loose when the job's done," Brian elaborated. "For now, we don't want to complicate things with loose ends."
He paused for a moment, looking at me before continuing.
"What about on your end? Is Garcia's old flame going to be a problem?"
"No, she won't," I answered quickly. "I scared her pretty good, and she and Garcia didn't part on good terms regardless."
"Glad to hear it," Brian nodded. "Then I suggest we move tomorrow. Tattletale and Bitch will stay outside with the van, but we can bring in Bitch's Crawler in a bag to scout the place out. Me, Regent and Bug will go in and extract the guy. Bug, I can get us generic fake ID cards but I'll need you to spoof whatever punch clock system they have."
"Wait a second," I leant forward. "Why do I have to go in with you?"
"A second pair of strong hands might come in handy if Regent can't maintain control," he explained. "Besides, Regent doesn't exactly look like a janitor. The two of us fit the profile, especially in Medhall."
"Fuck," I sank back into the seat. "If mom could see me now…" I murmured to myself.
I looked up at Brian, but I saw nothing but confidence in his eyes.
They're cybernetic. Confidence is easy to fake.
"If this turns into a shootout…" I began, but Brian cut me off.
"Then I'll take point, and Bitch will roll drones through the front door to create a distraction. You'll be fine, Bug."
"Damnit, okay," I said after a moment. "But I want to be thorough about this. We can't just wing it like last time."
I spun a sprite together and sent it off into the Matrix, to snoop through building plans in City Hall, techno-anarchist datadumps, anything else that would help give us an idea of the building layout. Then I slumped back onto the couch, falling into a trance-like state as I re-entered the Matrix and accessed public data from the city's traffic management system, beamed in real time to hundreds of thousands of sat-navs across the city. When combined with the feeds from any CCTV cameras in the neighbouring buildings that even so much has glanced at our target, it gave us a picture of how people moved in and out of the site.
I left the matrix behind, pulling up all the information I'd gathered into an augmented reality display on top of the coffee table. I fed the data directly to Brian and Rachel's cyberyeyes, while Lisa and Alec put on their own AR sunglasses to add their own input – though Lisa contributed a lot more, there. We planned long into the night, over a Jamaican takeaway – that Alec ordered – and cans of soft drinks, and at the end of the night I almost felt optimistic about the idea.
I was still having second thoughts, and third thoughts, fourth thoughts, and so on, but I was just barely confident enough that I wasn't going to let them stop me.
"So if there's nothing else, I think we just planned a hostile extraction before midnight," Lisa said with a grin.
I reached out in the matrix, idly tugging on a passing datastream and checking its timestamp. Sure enough, it was only eleven thirty, with a night and most of a day before we went in with the evening shift.
I couldn't help but wonder if that was a good thing.
Rajvik_wolfboy
Wolf amongst the stars.
- Location
- Florida
disagree, been there done that and sometimes its still needed. just like bringing your decker into the job in person. closed systems are a bitch
On the other hand, it might just serve as a way to establish her persona as a discount Samurai, and "definitely not a Technomancer, no sir!".
Redcoat_Officer
Long Live the King
Glad to hear it! I'm a firm believer in making crossovers accessible to people who're only familiar with one side of the fandom, which means I need to ensure this is as much a Shadowrun story as it is a Worm one.
TikiTau
Commander Pangolinski
- Location
- Texas
Re: Grue and Tattletale keep getting Bug to show up in person...
Part of it is a trust/cohesion thing. They've worked with her on one job so far. If they just needed her as a contact-sort ('oh, I guess we need someone to decrypt a commlink' 'I'll call Bug') sort of thing where she was just a part timer, yeah, they could probably not bother her into being in the meat. Since they want her as a team member (both in a 'she does good work' sort of way and a 'our Fixer won't give us better jobs without permanent Matrix support') , though, getting the hikkomori troll technomancer out of her cave and meshing with the team more is probably a goal for both of them.
Plus, again, they only did one job with her. Letting her do remote stuff all the time is a bit risky until they know her better, because they have to acknowledge the risk of the remote decker selling them out.
(I mean, Rigger X, a Jackpointer, routinely spies on all his teammates and cargo out of paranoia and will sell the info on former team members in the main gameline if the offer is good enough, so that sortbof thing happens...)
As Grue noted earlier when Bug first met them, showing up in the flesh is also a sign of trust (you're trusting the other guys not to gank you and they are trusting you to do the same) and respect (you aren't doing everything in pajamas and took the effort to get at least some degree of presentable).
Also, yeah, some stuff needs to be hacked up close. Every system you have to Hackett get access to another is another potential point of failure, so getting Bug in the habit now is a good thing from the Team's point of view.
Edit: Also, amusingly Bug's already upping the professional rating of the Undersiders from what we've seen.
Pre-Bug: eh. Wing it. *kick door in*
Post-Bug: *annoyed technomancer noises* no, we are PLANNING THINGS and GETTING INTEL! ...and Jamaican takeout.
Part of it is a trust/cohesion thing. They've worked with her on one job so far. If they just needed her as a contact-sort ('oh, I guess we need someone to decrypt a commlink' 'I'll call Bug') sort of thing where she was just a part timer, yeah, they could probably not bother her into being in the meat. Since they want her as a team member (both in a 'she does good work' sort of way and a 'our Fixer won't give us better jobs without permanent Matrix support') , though, getting the hikkomori troll technomancer out of her cave and meshing with the team more is probably a goal for both of them.
Plus, again, they only did one job with her. Letting her do remote stuff all the time is a bit risky until they know her better, because they have to acknowledge the risk of the remote decker selling them out.
(I mean, Rigger X, a Jackpointer, routinely spies on all his teammates and cargo out of paranoia and will sell the info on former team members in the main gameline if the offer is good enough, so that sortbof thing happens...)
As Grue noted earlier when Bug first met them, showing up in the flesh is also a sign of trust (you're trusting the other guys not to gank you and they are trusting you to do the same) and respect (you aren't doing everything in pajamas and took the effort to get at least some degree of presentable).
Also, yeah, some stuff needs to be hacked up close. Every system you have to Hackett get access to another is another potential point of failure, so getting Bug in the habit now is a good thing from the Team's point of view.
Edit: Also, amusingly Bug's already upping the professional rating of the Undersiders from what we've seen.
Pre-Bug: eh. Wing it. *kick door in*
Post-Bug: *annoyed technomancer noises* no, we are PLANNING THINGS and GETTING INTEL! ...and Jamaican takeout.
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- Location
- Somewhere with a Thousand Watchful Eyes
- Pronouns
- They/Them
'Tis a hard life, being the team schemer.
Leaving your Matrix support behind isn't what it used to be. I don't know how the more recent edition does it, but I remember signal strength and interference being obstacles to long-distance hacking, and sometimes you have to deal with non-wireless tech or your hack gets traced and you're stuck in your underwear with no backup.
Plus, having an extra body with a gun is always better than not having an extra body with a gun. You gotta shape up, Taylor.
Plus, having an extra body with a gun is always better than not having an extra body with a gun. You gotta shape up, Taylor.
TikiTau
Commander Pangolinski
- Location
- Texas
Also, if your Matrix Support is dealing with lethal ICE, it's better to have them on hand, or at least have a team member nearby.
That's the difference between 'the Hacker got brain-fried and is a corpse' and 'we managed to keep her alive with some magical healing spell/was fast enough to slap a trauma patch on taking the edge off the Dumpshock', sometimes.
The city of Brockton Bay - circa 2070
Redcoat_Officer
Long Live the King
If any of you are familiar with Swallowtail (and if you aren't, go read it) you may be familiar with the map @NotDis made of Brockton Bay. In an effort to better wrap my head around the setting of Good People, I asked if he could send me a blank copy of that map, and he offered to send one that had been recoloured in a more cyberpunk-y scheme. I gladly accepted, and have since embellished on that map to create a somewhat-accurate depiction of Brockton Bay in the Sixth World.
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- Location
- Somewhere with a Thousand Watchful Eyes
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Looks so cool. I'll probably forget to check in on it when locations are named, but hey! Maybe I won't.
Rajvik_wolfboy
Wolf amongst the stars.
- Location
- Florida
I may steal this for "Shadows of a Worm" if i ever have Taylor end up in UPTIME BB
TheMagister
Lord Magus
I do love a good Chemical Row. Cyberpunk needs grime and my god that place sounds grimy
Redcoat_Officer
Long Live the King
Less so than you might initially think. I'm definitely going to do a big informational post after the next chapter elaborating on most of the bigger names on this map, but basically Chemical Row is largely home to high-tech pharmaceutical industries, including both manufacturing plants and research laboratories. With its location right next to Anders Memorial University, it's well-placed to offer industry placements to the students there, and a generous scholarship programme (so long as you don't look at the fine print) ensures that Medhall in particular will never lack for lab techs. For the older employees, it's within commuting distance of the sprawling suburbia of Greater Brockton.
If the Ares Docks are the heart of Ares Macrotechnology's presence in the city, Chemical Row is where Medhall's presence is at its most obvious. There are plenty of industrial chemical plants in the heart of the district that are a lot less clean, away from the prying eyes of homeowners associations, but most of Medhall's dirtier plants are kept in the northern half of the city where the pollution won't bother anybody who matters.
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