Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Tommy's Story: more runs, fewer chummers



Starting over is never easy.

After Pepper died, I still had to live.  I know that makes all kinds of obvious sense, but when you've lost your best chummer, when you've lost that feeling of normalcy and of belonging, there doesn't feel like there is much left.

I had been a hot shot, wiz-kid shadowrunner for a little over a year.  In that time, I had worked with a handful of different teams but once I settled in with Pepper and Angel the rest had become pretty much fixed.

I hadn't really cared one way or the other about Zip, until he put an assault rifle in my face (in my experience that tends to change your opinion of someone pretty fast). When he died I didn't really care about the lose of him beyond how it affected the rest of us.

I had held a good bit of respect for Sapphire, and I may even have had a bit of a crush on her.  Her death was tragic, foolish, and a waste of a brilliant talent.

Grack and I never really got along.  He seemed like he was always either threatening to beat me into a bloody stump, or planning the act of beating me bloody.  We worked best together when we weren't actually together.  That said, he was hellishly dangerous with heavy and assault weapons, wasn't afraid to mix it up in a firefight, and had so much metal in him I once heard a bullet that hit him ricochet off this cyber.  Grack was a scary piece of stereotype reinforcing macho attitude, muscle, metal, and thinly veiled sociopath personality.

Angel. (file segment deleted.... play nice Tommy)

Then suddenly it was just me, knowing two reliable shadowrunners, broke as hell after burying my best chummer, and needing work.

Sheila X, didn't call me for a week.  It was probably best that she waited that long as I was in no fit mental state to do anything professionally.

******************

April 1st, 2056

My pocket secretary was ringing.  I was ignoring it at first as my land lord had already called twice to remind me to pay my rent.  It was annoying as hell that I couldn't. I was picking up the hateful little device when I realized that the number was one Sheila used when she rang me up.

"Tommy?", Sheila sounded like she always did.  You would never know that anything horrible had happened just days before.

"Ms. X.  Nice of you to call me.  How can I help you today." I was trying to be upbeat.  In retrospect it was probably the dumbest way to approach such a call.

"If you want to work, come down for a meeting.  I know some people who need a specialist like you.  If you're done with what you needed to do come on down.  If you can't hold it together, don't bother."

"Ms. X, I'm chill as February. I'll be there in an hour." I was still going for upbeat.

Sheila X hung up on me and I went to grab my bag.

A little less than an hour later I was walking to the Brick House (I know, I sometimes call it the Brick Yard... too much time spent with folks calling it by two different names I guess).  Little Rickie was on the door, and I once again felt that attack of politeness coming over me.  Little Rickie waved me in.

I walked in and realized immediately that things were different.  The main room had maybe forty really hard looking folks wearing armor I hadn't seen outside of a trideo show until that point. Those armor sets were all done over in black and grey, digital imagery- hazing camouflage patterns.  They all had helmets and assault weapons, except for a handful of trolls who had honest-to-ghost assault cannons. They looked like a bad-ass bunch of mercenaries about to storm a target.

Sandy, the ork girl who seemed to always be behind the bar, waved me toward the back (where Sheila's usual booth was).  I walked around a few knots of heavily armed hard men and women, realizing that the whole place was strangely quite other than the occasional click or bump sound as someone checked a weapon.  Sheila was sitting in the booth with an elf woman across from her, standing next to the booth was an angel.

I'm not romanticizing it.  The angel was about seven feet tall, had three faces, carried a flaming sword and had wings.  (Ever since this meeting I've made a point to own a Bible.  My favorite is an Orthodox Christian Bible, some might say Eastern Orthodox, but take my advice and don't).  The angel was probably a spirit.  I told myself that the moment I saw it. As far as I know I may have been right.

You should listen closely to that last part.  After all I've done, all the magic I've wrought, all the places and metaplanes I've been to and I can't tell you positively it was a spirit.  A part of me believes it was an actual angel of God, big "G".

Anyway, I didn't realize I was staring at the angel until Sheila told me to sit down.

The job paid very well.  Well enough to keep my landlord off my case for few months, feed me well, and pay for some things I really wanted and thought I needed.  It was also dangerous as all Hell, big "H".

Ms. Johnson, the elf lady, needed a magician for a particular task.  The forty men and women with us in the bar were just her "good friends" who were out with her for a walk.

Yeah.  Right.

I was desperate for work, emotionally drained, magically capable, and available.  So I got the job.

It was basic astral recon with a side order of terror.  Go to place, check out place, poke astral whatsits in the eye, don't get killed, come back and get paid.

**********************

April 1st, 2056  2355 hours

I was in an old warehouse in Puyallup.  Seventeen year old me had just finished drawing out a circle in ritual materials particular to the astral jaunt I was about to undertake.

With ten of the "good friends" securing the area, the angel standing outside my circle and Ms. Johnson working a ritual in a circle of her own, I was ready to get the thing over with. Laying down in my circle, I let my astral form slip from my meat body.  It was a very freeing experience. Astral travel is quick, and in the blink of an eye I was in Bellevue, and encroaching on target.

I ran right into a ward. I remember it felt like I had rammed my head into concrete.  It really did hurt quite a lot. A few moments, and a bit of magic later, and the ward was nothing more than broken fragments of mana in the astral plane, bleeding out into nothingness.  I slipped through the building's wall and into a nightmare.

The wards had been containing the astral stench that the building hid.  Suffering and pain, the likes of which I have rarely experienced since, mixed with depraved hunger to pollute the astral in nightmarish whirls of sickening echoes. There were living people in the building and they were suffering in ways I can't explain to you.  There were also un-living people in the building.

No one had told me there would be vampires.

In the next blink I was fighting for my life and soul.  A magician was in the astral, his aura strangely dark and marked with a shifting patina of small mouths filled with fangs that seemed to shift and twirl throughout his being. When his astral form slammed into mine I felt like I would vomit (no easy trick when you don't have your stomach).

The fight took too long.  I was good in an astral tangle but I was quickly aware that this bastard was better.  He tore at my soul, ripping into it and causing me the kind of pain you only really ever hear about but hopefully never experience. I was losing, so I cheated.

Casting spells in the astral is stupid for a variety of reasons.  One of the big reasons not to cast spells while astral projecting is that it puts an inordinate strain on your body and essence/soul.  As I was firmly convinced I was about to have a soul-shredding experience (literally), I gave it everything I had and pumped the nastiest mana spell I knew into the oncoming fiend.  It staggered as the spell ripped into it, and I managed to get a second spell off into it's astral form. My spells disrupted the magician, driving him out of astral space and back to his meat body (hopefully with tons on injury).

I was about to leave.  Honestly, I wanted to get out of there badly.  But from astral space I saw the dim auras of people who were trapped in that hell-hole. One of those people was very little.

I thought about Pepper's son.  I thought about what Pepper would do if he were there in the meat.  I thought about laying that family to rest and the laughter and happiness that had been quieted.  I was hurt, but I wasn't dead, and there were children, little children, in danger.

I went looking for the magician's meat body.

I found him two floors down.  He was already up and looked as healthy and dangerous as the first time he tackled me.  There was a newly dead woman, her essence shattered into fragments and fading away, laying on the floor.

The vampire's astral form surged out of his meat body (which collapsed on the floor next to the dead woman) and came after me.  In the astral he looked like a feral, monstrous being (and was), and he was coming to kill me.

I just managed to send out the call to the one spirit I had bound to me at the time, and it arrived at my side as the vamp ripped into me.

I screamed.  I screamed from the bottom of my soul as the vamp nearly tore me in half.  My fire elemental joined the fray and I was frantically fighting to save my own ass.  I couldn't risk another spell in the condition I was in, so it was just raw astral combat.

Then the vampire tore my fire elemental into little pieces.  I'm not exaggerating.  He literally grabbed the elemental and ripped it's essence in half, then in half again.  The elemental screamed as it was destroyed.

I thought I was going to die.  I couldn't outrun the juiced up vampire, my best spirit was destroyed, I was nearly dead, and the vampire didn't have a mark on him.  So I punched him in the nose.

Astral combat is largely figurative.  Your perception of your opponent and yourself is really how you interpret the interaction.  I am firmly convinced that how others perceive the combat is just as unique as your own perception.  The injury is real though.  I hit the vampire with my best shot, and staggered him.  I was winding up for another astral haymaker when the room we were fighting in lit up like the sun was shining in the astral and in the room itself in the meat world.

I turned and looked straight into the faces of an avenging angel, and everything went dark.

*******************

April 2nd, 2056  0013 hours

I came to in my magic circle in the warehouse.  Ms. Johnson was finishing her ritual, and I watched as a dark, bloodstained doll was burned over a candle adorned with the sign of the cross. In the back of my perceptions, I heard a scream that hit my battered senses and made a shiver run down my spine.  That happens to me whenever I hear the cries of the damned.

Ms. Johnson and her "good friends" didn't say much.  A radio squawked somewhere, then one of the hard cases said, "Kill confirmed with one collateral casualty. Father Mitchel is conducting rites for the victim now."

Ms. Johnson only said, "God forgive us."

I stood up shakily, and broke my magic circle.  Ms. Johnson, didn't say anything else, just waved at the guy who spoke.  He handed me a cred-stick with a tidy sum on it, and walked me to the door. There was a car waiting for me outside, courtesy of Sheila X, that took me back to the Brick Yard.


That run snapped me out of it.  I was harder after that, less carefree. I was also alive, so I paid my rent and bought a couple of things I needed, then took two weeks off.

I spent some time in the church of that priest who spoke at Pepper's and his family's funerals.  It helped me grieve.

*****

That was a long one.

Lets go get a coffee and watch the hipsters pass by.









No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for your comment chummer.