Never work for a clown.

I was seventeen years old.

I'm not going to give you a date for this, honestly the people it involves are too scary to call any attention to this piece of ancient history.  Suffice it to say that I was seventeen and it happened in the summer.

A certain decker chummer of mine had been working steadily and building an ever bigger name for herself. 

I, however, was running through teams like Oakland.  Seriously, it was that bad. 

In all fairness it wasn't all my fault. 

I had a falling out with a certain troll when he decided to slam my favorite cranium into a wall.  The wall was softer than my cranium and I didn't die, but it hurt like all hell and I was bleeding.  Add to that the fact that there wasn't anything going on other than the team sitting and talking about how we were going to spend the next few days and how we could get in touch for work, and you can understand that I was not a happy magician.

It started with a stunbolt, (sometimes referred to as "good night chummer") that had that certain troll unconscious on the floor.  He woke up a couple of hours later, and I was fully prepared to be cordial. That certain troll woke up, sat up, and immediately became belligerent.  He reached for his hand cannon only to find it wasn't there.  That set off a string of curses and expletives I won't bother repeating. 

After several minutes of ranting, the big jerk finally seemed to calm down.  I gave him his gun back, and pointed to sack of weapons in the corner (previously rendered invisible) where the rest of his weapons were nicely stored for him.  He whipped the hand cannon up to my head and pulled the trigger.  It clicked on an empty cylinder (note this:  NEVER give a loaded weapon to someone you don't trust), and clicked on empty cylinders four more times.

I reached up and touched his wrist.  "Unprofessional, and dishonorable", was all I said.

Magic surged from my fingers into his body.  What little bit of real person, the meat part not the cyber part, died off as power coursed violently through his cells.  He jerked suddenly and blood started leaking out of the corners of his eyes, from his nose, and from under his fingertips.  He dropped to the floor of the abandoned day care center we were meeting in. He was actually dead before he hit the floor. Blood and other fluids leaked out of him in a stinky pool.  I say "leaked" because dead people leak, only the living 'bleed'. 

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The summer wasn't starting well.  After that certain troll hit the floor, the team fell apart.  I had no interest at that time in building relationships or team building.  I just wanted to score some cash to fuel my studies.  I had grand ideas about power and glory, wealth and women. 

Come on, I was seventeen.

I was getting work, and getting my jobs done.  I was actually doing pretty well, but it seemed like folks thought I was bad luck.  Runners kept getting killed on my jobs.  Not through fault of mine, but just their own plain carelessness.  

I was ready to take a little vacation somewhere not in the Seattle Metroplex, when my comm buzzed with yet more work from Sheila X.

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BrickYard, 2345 hours:

Mr. Johnson was an elf.  An elf with a painted face, white gloves, a tuxedo, and a beautiful sword at his belt.  He had an accent I couldn't identify and have never heard again.  He was flawlessly groomed, and spoke as if he were about to laugh at a joke.

The job was set to pay very well, and that made me a bit nervous. 

It would be real wiz if I cold tell you there was something about him that put me off, but there wasn't.  He was slick, but not oily, chill but not sub-zero, had style but not to much flash.  I listened to what he said, but I didn't quite catch what he meant in those "in between the lines" places.

So I took the job, with some shadow talent that all had solid reputations.  I had worked with one or two of them before and worked well enough.  No one seemed put out or overly stressed about the Johnson or the job. 

That should have worried me. 

I'm not going to go into details about the job itself. 

It was dangerous, there were shots and magic fired around, electrons were fighting other electrons in the matrix, a pizza delivery driver took a rocket meant for the car I was in (sorry about that chummer), and somehow a flower shop got burned to the ground before the job was over. 

What really makes the tale though, is the end. 

We shook the last of our pursuers, switched vehicles and incinerated the getaway car.  Runners were bleeding all over the place and I was making heavy use a spell to sanitize cellular samples.  Normally its used to disinfect but I use it to foil forensic evidence.  When I was certain the dump site for the getaway car was clean, I climbed into the passenger seat of the suv we were taking to the meet. 

We pulled into the abandoned lot and I got out to take up a position to cover the meet.  As I was climbing up the fire escape, I ran right into an ork setting up with a sniper rifle.  He reached for his gun and I drew in my power and hit him with the best stun bolt I could throw back then.  He fell over like a sack of flour. 

I toggled my comm but couldn't get a signal. 

I shouldered the sniper rifle, and got a real good view of the meet as it went down.

Mr. Johnson, still wearing the face paint and tux, was handing off credsticks to my guys.

I couldn't hear what was said, but everything seemed chill.

Then I heard the soft whine of rotors and new something was going down.

Half a dozen rotor drones zipped in and started firing on the meeting. 

Mr. Johnson jumped, flipped and rolled behind his Mercedes, as rotor drones poured out death into the area.  Two of my team were cut to pieces by hundreds of rounds in those first seconds.

Spells are usually hard to use against drones.  But I had a sniper rifle, and even though I hadn't been trained to use one, it seemed fairly simple.  I sighted and squeezed the trigger... nothing happened.

FRAG!

I tried everything I could think of to get that rifle to fire, but nothing worked. 

For several seconds the rotor drones fired without pause, stitching rounds all over the place.  Then, suddenly, they were flying off into the night.

A quick bit of levitation brought me to the blood soaked, broken pavement. 

My decker friend was still in the vehicle.  A bullet had gone through her shoulder, but otherwise she was fine.  Everyone one else in the vehicle was dead. 

The two street samurai out on the kill zone were dead, and Mr. Johnson was laughing his fool head off. 

I walked out to grab the credsticks and watched as Mr. Johnson stood and walked around his Mercedes, still laughing his fool head off, shaking his head at the dents and dings in the armored luxury car. 

"Not my night, I suppose", he said as his laughter died down..

"Not their night, really", I said.  I was pointing to two bodies that had been chopped up by the light machine guns the rotor drones had loosed.   "Their night really sucked!"

"It is unfortunate, but it holds true, street meat rots in the street does it not?", the fragger was smiling as he said it. 

"To true," he continued, "well, good night young sir.  Don't let the locals bite!"  Then he climbed into his car and drove away, little sparks and smoke coming from the vehicle as he vanished into the night.

My decker buddy and I had to hoof it.  The vehicle we came in was shot to hell (literally). 

Mr. Johnson, clown make up and all, had an evil sense of humor.  "Don't let the locals bite!"
We were running from ghouls until we reached the water. 

The cred went a long way toward salving my wounded sensibilities, but I made a rule that night, and I've kept it ever sense: Never work for a clown.

Take my advice on that, you'll live longer.