Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Play-by-Post => Topic started by: Tecumseh on <07-28-15/0109:07>
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Touristville - Redmond - Seattle - Saturday - July 27, 2075 - 03:40
It's the end of another long shift at the Seamstress Union, a Redmond institution. The Friday night / Saturday morning crowd has finally thinned out, leaving only a handful of regulars leaning over the bar. Some are nursing cups of soykaf; others are asleep. Cherry Bomb, the luscious, forever-young elf, cleans behind the bar. Mr. Kluwe, the dapper but aging troll, is yawning. He's twenty years past his prime, and trolls don't age well. Still, Mrs. Kubota - the "madam of the house" - would never consider getting rid of him. Even if he is a bit slow, there are few that would mess with the height or breadth of a troll. Plus, his horns are magnificent.
Shadow counts out her tips for the evening. It was an intensely busy Friday night. A large group of Japanese sararīman had come in looking to celebrate a new soda for orks, or a hot new pitcher for the Mariners, or a destroyed orphanage, or whatever corpers celebrated. They were loud and lusty and looking for something exotic; they kept Shadow busy all night. The noctura is as fit as any professional athlete but still... the dancer's pole is hard and starts to hurt after a few hours. Still, there was no denying the rewards. It had been a highly profitable night: ¥1,400, which would go a long way toward the bills for her father and paying the rent for their two-bedroom apartment in Bridal Trails, about seven clicks down the road to the southwest.
Shadow wants to celebrate her good fortune but she was just too tired. Pulling on her armor jacket, she slots her Ares Predator into the quick-draw holster. The weight of it is comforting. Cherry sees that Shadow is gearing up to leave.
"Want me to call you a cab, sugar?" Cherry asks.
Shadow nods. Home is about seven klicks down the road; she's much too tired to walk, even if walking at 4am in the Barrens wasn't a dreadful idea. Which it is.
Cherry places the call and the cab arrives shortly thereafter, heavily armored and ready to rumble with any go-gangs that get frisky. Shadow heads for the door. Mr. Kluwe instinctively steps backward, giving her room to pass. He's pleasant, the old troll, and very polite. But he gives Shadow a wide berth, likely because he unconsciously knows that she could beat the crap out of him. Trolls aren't accustomed to feeling physically matched by elves that weigh one-eighth of what they do, and the notion is uncomfortable.
Stepping outside, Shadow scans the streets before walking quickly to the cab. There are Halloweeners out, burning rubbish in steel drums on street corners. It's not even that cold out - maybe 14 C - but Halloweeners don't need much of an excuse to burn things. Shadow pulls her armor jacket tighter around her, not to ward away a chill but to feel the heavy, protective plates close to her. The Halloweeners are too drunk or high or lit up on BTLs to notice her. One of them takes a long pull from a bottle, then throws it down an alley. The alley erupts in flames as the molotov cocktail explodes. The ganger sprays his mouthful of fuel at a lighter, creating a fireball in front of him. Definitely time to go home.
Getting into the cab, Shadow throws an ARO with the address to the cabbie. The cab sets off and Shadow has to fight to stay awake in the backseat. The odds of the cabbie brutally murdering her are pretty close to zero, but they're not zero, so she'll try her best to stay awake for another ten minutes. Shadow notices the man glancing at her in the rear-view mirror repeatedly. She understands: she's pretty, she's exotic. Drawing men's attention is how she makes her money. Still, it's best not to draw too much attention, lest she find herself in some fatal attraction scenario. Nothing in excess.
Shadow suddenly feels very weak and very dull. Thinking about it more, she realizes what the problem is. It’s the great equalizer: it’ll stop a troll the size of car as easily as the smallest dwarf or the thinnest elf. It isn't a weapon, spell or even a dragon — it’s hunger. When it’s time to eat, you just gotta get the stuffers into your stomach before you go berserk. Junk food, munchies, stuffers. They’re probably just as good for you as nutrisoy and krill-filler, regardless of those ads from the Nutrition Council. When the pangs hit, there’s only one place to go (especially when the sun rises in two hours) to find that kind of chow. It’s the place everyone loves to hate: Stuffer Shack.
Shadow realizes that she's been performing all night with little to go on other than caffeine and second-hand smoke. She's starving and she knows it. There's a Stuffer Shack not far from her apartment where she can find something to get her through the day. Once she wakes up, she can celebrate her windfall with her father.
"Change of plans. Drop me off at the Stuffer Shack," Shadow tells the cabbie. The man nods, turning off the road into the parking lot. Shadow pays the ¥20 fare and adds in a decent tip to share her unexpected good fortune.
The cab drives off. The Stuffer Shack - open every minute of every day of every year - is intensely familiar. Each Stuffer Shack looks exactly like every other, so Shadow could probably navigate the aisles with her eyes closed. That's good; given how tired she is, she might have to.
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Shadow slowly walks into the Stuffer Shack rubbing her empty belly, ignoring anybody of the nightshift, not greeting anybody of the present personell.
She walks through the aisles, not even looking if there were any other customers ripe for pickpocketing, partly because she was too tired, partly because it wasn't worth it in a stuffer shack after scoring the amount of cash she had just earned.
She grabs one bag of the cheapest snacks you can find, rips it open and eats a mouthful and another and another. The bag was almost gone before she arrived at another aisle to pick up a can of Aztekcola. When she got ready to go to the counter the bag was already empty, but she felt spendy enough to pay for that too.
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Shadow immediately feels better after eating a NutraSoy Energy Cake™. Feeling some blood rush back into her face and brain, she looks up and finds herself in Aisle 11. It features baked goodies, such as cakes, doughnuts, twisters, Sweeteez and Krak-L-Snaps.
With the threat of starvation postponed, Shadow looks around at her surroundings.
Great tracts of neon and fluorescent lights that leech away color to make everything a uniform, dull gray indicate that you have arrived at the home of synth-alcohol, soykaf, porno-simchips, Holohayo 3D greeting cards, pneumatic fluid for your bike, cheap fetish trinkets for the magical wannabes, soygrits, and a full line of stuffers with no redeeming nutritional or social value. Yes, it's the Stuffer Shack.
In Aisle 7, there are two punk-rocker-royalty wannabes. The guy is dressed head to toe in skin-tight white leather pants, a sleeveless white leather shirt and a white fringed leather vest. He also has several kilograms of FauxGold™ jewelry hanging around his neck. Angie is wearing a skin-tight black leather jumpsuit featuring about forty-two working zippers and with nearly eight meters of mesh chain wrapped around her body and appendages. They are making out, slobbering all over each others' faces, while the girl covertly slips some cans of cat food into her jacket. Shadow can only smirk at a kindred soul.
In the freezer aisle, a mousy, nervous man searches the ice-cream cases frantically as though his life hung in the balance. He looks nebbish, with an engineer's white, collared shirt with short sleeves and a thin black tie. His glasses are huge; his hairline, receding. He grabs a pint of ice cream. Peeling off the lid, he checks to see if anyone is watching, then dips his finger into the ice cream and gives it a taste.
Shadow walks toward the checkout counter. The clerk - an ARO identifies him as "Vern" - looks like a complete loser. His eyes are half-open as he stares at his holo-zine. His girlfriend - a homely, pudgy dwarf - yaps about her completely uneventful day and this new hair removal cream that Vern should use on his back.
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With a lot more grace than before Shadow moves over to the checkout-clerk, "Vern", and elegantly puts down the empty bag as well as the can of Aztekcola while throwing both of them a playful smile.
How much are these? Shadow asks Vern without waiting for him to say anything or check-out. How's the night going? Shadow continues immediately Not even all that cold, ey?
but after spurting that much info at Vern who didn't even seem to be fully awake to begin with Shadow realized that she had to stop herself, must be the sugar talking, and wait for the tired clerk to actually get up, put his holo-zine away and do his job.
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Vern looks up when Shadow speaks to him. He's about to respond when he goes slackjawed; he's never seen anything like Shadow and doesn't know how to respond.
During the awkward, extended silence, the RFID chips in the products Shadow grabbed transmit their prices to the local host.
>>>>>(NutraSoy Energy Cake™: ¥2. Aztekcola: ¥1. Total: ¥3. This price okay? Y/N)<<<<<
A car pulls into parking lot in front of the building. Shadow turns to her left to see a mildly attractive elven woman enter the store with a wailing infant in tow. The bawling baby assaults Shadow's keen ears. The mother looks like she hasn't slept in two weeks.
Shadow feels a tingle at the base of her head, where her spine meets her skull. Danger. From the woman? The child? She doesn't know, but the buzz grows and grows to the point where Shadow can't ignore it anymore. She catapults herself across the counter, toward the startled Vern, and hits the floor.
Suddenly a violent explosion erupts form the parking lot, spraying glass and Stuffers everywhere! The wall caves in and dangling fluorescent lamps spray sparks as they sway precariously. Vern is blasted into the cigarette rack and knocked unconscious. Shadow turns to see Vern's girlfriend cowering behind a collapsed holo-zine rack, whimpering quietly to herself.
After a few moments of shocked silence, Shadow can hear two heavy figures step through the gaping blast hole that used to be the front of the Stuffer Shack. One of them shouts, "None of ya’s is gonna get hurt if ya keep yer yaps shut and stay outta the way. Now tell me where the lady with tha baby is and you all is gonna live to see sunrise."
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Shadow is sure that she does not have the goon's attention yet. She readies her Predator loaded with regular ammo. Never was a good idea getting caught on a regular job carrying anything worse. Even passing this stuff off as legal was cahllenging enough sometimes.
The smartlink of the Predator awoke to life, feeding tactical information directly into Shadow's optical nerve through her implanted smartlink. Aiming her favorite American pistol with her right hand, and brushing some glass off of her armor jacket Shadow rises from behind the counter keeping an eye out for the woman and all potential threats, and says with a coolness in her voice I always wanted a red appartment. I would leave now or I'll do the colorjob tonight. With your blood.
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Mace was having a dreck day, well technically two days running now... first his doss got turned over by KE doing a 'security check', actually just knocking around some SINless slummers for a handful of easy credits. Then he'd been chased around by a pack of bored Halloweeners, being a member of a small time gang did frag all around a gang as powerful as the Halloweeners. And now here he was in the Stuffer Shack at too-damned-close to 4AM in the morning trying to decide if he could splurge the extra credit 'creme' filled turnover or just get some cinnamons, frag knows he needed the sugar.
He'd eyes the nocturna as she walked through, hell would be impossible not to eye her off. She looked almost as tired as he was, but he was enough of a street tough to know she was dangerous. He watched her chatting with the clerk, a rather monotonous one-way conversation, then the evlen chit with her brat bawning in tow comes in. Groaning and rubbing his head he decided that this was the last straw and reaches for the turnover...
... and then the world turned over, or at least that's what it felt like to Mace's ringing head as he gets thrown into the shelving and slumps dazed to the ground, his head spinning from lack of sleep, lack of food and the beginnings of a concussion. He's barely able to focus his eyes on the gaping hole that used to be the front of the 'Shack, his head and eyes ringing too badly to make out what anyone might be saying, his head spins a little more as he mutters out loud "Ohh fucking hell, gimmie a fucking break..."
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Shadow takes a moment to compose herself and check for injuries. Finding none, she silently removes her Ares Predator from its holster.
Before she stands, she can hear the two men kicking over shelves and debris. There's a screen behind the counter with the camera feeds for the store, but all of them are static. Were they knocked out in the explosion or hacked?
"Whar is she!" one shouts.
"I don't know!" the other responds. "Keep looking!"
“Ya don’t cooperate, yer dead! Get over by da freezer aisle!"
"Man, hurry up! Make or break time!"
Shadow can hear their desperation grow with each passing second. She stands and sees two orks stomping through the store with AKs. She speaks and they swing around in alarm.
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Orks with AKs. Not the most professional lot Shadow has ever faced though possibly a cut above from your average ganger. She quickly pulled the trigger three times while aiming at the nearest orc leisurely, yes pulling the trigger. She never liked shooting through smartgun electronics even though she liked everything else about smart links.
A weapon telling you when it needed to be taken to the gunsmith was wondrous for a girl so technologically impaired as herself. But this was not a time where it needed to be taken to a gunsmith. This was a time to make use of her favourite gun.
Without checking what her shots had done she hunkered down behind the counter again, expecting a hail of 7.62 bullets to come crashing down into the counter and herself. Now she was awake. Sugar and adrenaline made actually for a quite enjoyable rush. Her life hand't even been remotely in danger since last year's fall when... never mind that wasn't the time to think about these things. Though she wondered what these guys wanted from that woman. But, even if the woman was the dreaded Ghostwalker in disguise, she would neither put up being threatened, OR having a mother and her child threatened. She mentally readied herself for turning the entire shack into a battle zone.
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Shadow feels the recoil from the Ares Predator slam into her wrist three times. As much as it hurts, it's nothing compared to what the shots do to the target. Shadow's trio is tightly clustered and as precise as someone could be with a Predator.
The ork is wearing an armor vest and nothing underneath, likely due to the warm summer weather. Unwisely, the vest was not fastened down the middle, and the rounds find their way straight through the gap. They pound him in the gut, spraying blood and stomach acid onto the pile of pet food that the man is standing on.
Orks being orks, the man does not drop. Instead, he and his partner bring their AKs up to bear while Shadow drops for cover. They hammer on the triggers and send an angry swarm of bullets her way. The cash register terminal is the first to go, then the credstick receptor and the barcode scanner. Then it's the counter displays, including a line of greeting cards and packages of Long Haul, Betel, and G3.
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Everything around Shadow gets torn to bits by bullets, though she avoids the sluggish shots by these unprofessional orks by using evasive manoeuvres and the merger cover provided around her to maximum effect. Even without her supernatural danger senses it would be possible to predict the trajectory of there shots. After the first load of bullets has subsided Shadow was almost the only thing unscathed by the hail of bullets. She hisses Boys, always predictable and annoying.
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Right after that she stands up into a standing position, exposing more of herself than need be, but she is now full of herself again and takes another snapshot at the wounded ork while motioning a pistol shot with her off hand.
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First the pawns... then the Halloweeners... then the baby... then the bomb... and now they're shooting at each other. Mace covers his heads with his hards, partially to try and stop the sickening spinning, partially to try and block out the roaring AKs. As things settle down he notices the checkout shot to hell, blood and bile dripping from one orc and a deluxe creme filled turnover in his lap, undamaged. Taking this as a sign he stuffs the pack in a pocket and makes a run for it, with everything else going on no-one's going to miss a ¥3 stuffer.
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Shadow lines up her pistol and aims right for the ork's heart. He tries to throw himself to the side but all he accomplishes is getting shot in the side of the ribs instead of the front. He collapses into a heap on a pile of Purrrfect Cat FoodTM. He is unconscious and bleeding profusely; it is clear he will die without medical attention.
His partner reacts coolly to Shadow gunning down his accomplice. Taking time to recenter his aim, he fires off a six-round burst at the dodgy little elf, hoping to plaster her all over the wall.
Shadow feels a warming sensation to her right, near the huge hole that the explosion tore in the wall. The feeling grows hotter and hotter until it's TOO HOT! TOO HOT! It feels like someone has started a microwave with the microwave door open. At first she wonders if the Stuffer Shack microwaves were damaged in the hail of gunfire and are now malfunctioning. But, no, that doesn't make sense. The Cook-It-Your-Self microwave, the rotating pizza display machine, the Synthmeat “Hot Dog” dispenser and the Soy Patty Yummy Burger Grill-O-Matic are all to her left and she is most definitely getting irradiated from the right. She can feel the hair on her face start to singe; it smells terrible!
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And as the pain becomes unbearable she realizes it must be fragging magic. She had been hit by stunbolts and powerbolts and all that other drek mojo mages were slinging. Now there was a real threat. She changed her mind from being cocky to being a bit more careful. Realizing that she hadn't yet spottet the source of the spell, she decided to ignore the number one rule to geek the mage and focused on the threat she could clearly see. She hammered the trigger once more and hoped to take out the goon she actually could see. The pain was tough on her entire right side but not enough to prevent her from landing a shot. That the shot pretty much struck the goon into his armor and didn't do a load of hurt was another story. After that she immediately ate dirt and cowered down behind the counter as to hopefully avoid getting hit by any more of that mojo.
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Quickly but carefully Shadow tried to crawl around the counter to gert a shot at that fragging ork just when he let another salvo of bullets rip. Her supernatural senses didn't protect her this time and one bullet broke trhough the counter and slammed hard into her chest. This was going to leave a bruise. She just thought that being covered in complete black fur was good for business in this case. Any other girl like her would have been out of the job until the ugly blue green bruise had healed. Which wasn't really good if you had barely enough money to feed yourself to begin with. Shadow arrived at the corner and just as she was about to line up a shot her commlink now also chirped and informed her that it was struggling fighting off malicious software. This was just getting better every second...
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Peeking around the corner, Shadow sees the ork with the AK going nuts on the counter. His shots are spread out in a fan; one hit Shadow by pure luck and she would prefer that there not be a second.
She raises her gun to fire, eager to squeeze off a shot before the ork sees her and realizes he's firing at the wrong location. Giving the mental command, her smartlink triggers her Ares, which pumps a heavy slug straight into the ork's gut. He doubles over, vomits, then collapses on to the shelving before sliding to the floor. His AK clatters to the floor while the contents of the shelves rain down on him, pummeling him with Zap-O-Nuke microwaves, Toast-R-ovens, coffee makers, and other small appliances.
Shadow's Transys Avalon registers another attack while the hair on the back of Shadow's neck starts to stand up. Electricity? No, more burning heat...
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Shadow pops to her feet and scans the room, looking for the source of the malicious magic.
Behind the counter, the pudgy, ugly dwarf whimpers and cowers in a ball. There's a shotgun on the floor not far from her. It looks like it was under the counter until the explosion dislodged it. Vern, the store clerk, is still flattened out on the floor, seeing stars circling above his head.
In the freezer aisle, the thin, mousy man is frantically trying to climb into the freezer case. He's got the door open and is clawing out the contents onto the ground, trying to create some space. Not the worst idea, but his execution is poor. Having emptied out the ice cream, he throws himself against the shelves, which reject him back into the aisle. He slips on the cartons of ice cream and falls on his face. He sobs and tries again.
The punk rock couple have evidently decided to make the most of the situation. They are crawling on the remains of Aisle 6 - the medical aisle - stuffing various medkit supplies and over-the-counter medicines into their pockets. Shadow notes that the man has a light pistol in his hand. It isn't raised at anybody and seems to be purely defensive. As nobody is shooting at him at the moment, he will return the favor by not shooting as well. Despite their pillaging, their heads are up and alert to danger.
Finally Shadow catches sight of a figure standing near the remains of the front door. He makes eye contact with Shadow and knows he's been spotted. "Hey, sizzlechest!" he yells. "Yer brain is gonna cook in yer skull, fragger!"
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Shadow's commlink chirped again. All it's programs and routines where fighting a tough battle in an attempt to keep a hacker out of her PAN, but so far it didn't seem that he was gaining any ground at breaking into her network.
You wish, hissed Shadow, turning her attention to the shady figure, as she let her Predator rip at the figure without giving him any time to react.
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The punk snarls as Shadow sends three bullets at him. They chew up the plasticrete wall, showering him with harmless pebbles and tumbling bullet debris. His lip curls back as his eyes glow. He launches another manabolt with a cackle.
"I'm gonna frag your corpse while it's still warm!" he shouts.
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Chummer is exposed just a bit to far out of cover and Shadow sees her opportunity to make him pay. He's leaning around the fragged remains of the front door so that he can barbecue Shadow with his mystic mumbo jumbo.
Shadow aims carefully and sends a slug directly through his left shoulder, right under the bone where the shoulder meets the pectoral. There's a green shimmering haze around the man when the bullet strikes; likely some sort of mystical armor. It obviously wasn't enough because there's a bloom of red that bursts forth from the wound. The man lands on his ass and promptly crawls/rolls/scrambles for safety behind what remains of the wall between the front door and the huge gash created by the explosion.
"I'm hit!" the man yells to someone Shadow can't see. "Eject her clip, eject her clip!!"
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You fraggin' coward! screams Shadow as she leaps over the counter to go after the magician, now quite aggravated by a mix of sugar and a cocktail of endorphins and adrenaline caused by the fight and the injuries that had already started to hurt really bad. The pain was so great that Shadow thought to loose consciousness for a moment but then she was back, fully focused in the fight just quick enough to not slip on a thin sheath of ice that had just formed in front of the magicians hideout, no doubt another attempt at holding her away.
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Shadow races across the frosty parking lot surface easily. Turning the corner, she raises her gun on the prone magician.
"Oh, God, no!" he screams, holding up his arms in front of his face as a puny shield. Shadow triggers her smartgun and his head bursts like a watermelon. He goes limp; the green shimmering around him dissipates, and a torrent of blood floods out onto the parking lot.
A man gets out of a Mercury Comet. Shadow has three MARKs on his commlink, indicating that he is the hacker.
"Don't shoot!" he shouts, waving his hands above his head. "Oh, God, Fornis!" he says, looking at the pile of meat that used to be the magician.
"Stooby!" he shouts at the Stuffer Shack. "Stooby, are you okay?!"
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Careful now. Shadow shouts over to the hacker while pointing her Predator at him and slowly walking towards him.. Get out your 'link and smash it on the ground and then you lay the frag down yourself!
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The man - a human, not huge - fumbles in his pocket. He drops a commlink on the ground and hits it a few times with his heel. Shadow sees it break up.
In the distance, Shadow's keen ears pick up the first hints of approaching sirens. They're probably a couple minutes away still but it won't be long until there are cops and paramedics on the scene.
The man gets on his knees, then flat on his face on the pavement. "Hang on, Stooby! Stooby, hang on!" he shouts.
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Shadow shuffles over to the counter, grabs her can of Aztekcola, or at least some can that has survived and scans quickly if she can see the woman.
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Upon further investigation, the can of Aztekcola has been blown off the counter and remains MIA.
With some additional time to examine the interior of the store, Shadow finds a true mess. A machine in the back is spurting a black, chunky liquid. Another machine is dispensing a blue, fizzy pseudo-meat. A small fire has broken out, too tiny to trigger the fire-suppression system, but large enough to melt some orange, smelly plastic. Floating in the air there's a pink, soft powder that may or may not be a carcinogen if inhaled. All over the floor there's a red, sticky liquid. Without closer examination it's impossible to say if it's blood or simply SlurpDoo concentrate. Other spilled liquids are mixing with other spilled powders to create pink, sudsy bubbles that billow out of a fallen aisle.
Vern, the store clerk, is just starting to come around. His girlfriend is slapping his face and shouting, "Vern, Vern, wake up! I can't believe you slept through the whole thing!"
The punk rockers are pocketing things as quickly as they can. This golden opportunity to loot is not lost on them.
The thin man is gone. Did he run, or is he stuck in the freezer?
Then, buried underneath bags of diapers and baby products, Shadow sees the young mother huddled over her baby. The baby is either in shock or is blessed with the good sense not to scream and identify its location. The mother is upright but not moving, possibly trying to keep still to avoid notice.
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Shadow speeds over to the woman and asks her: Are you okay? Do you need a place to rest or other help?
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The woman screams and recoils from Shadow. Shadow wonders if it's her appearance, at first because she's a Night One and then a moment later wondering if the manabolts caused damage to her looks. No time to worry about that now.
After Shadow convinces the woman that she's not there to kill her, the woman settles down.
"Those men were here for me!" she says, looking traumatized. "They were going to kill me and Cody!" Shadow realizes that must be her son.
"He must have sent those goons after me!" Who? "Cody's father!" She then relates a semi-hysterical, medium-coherent story about how she is the misstress to a corper who doesn't want to pay "child support" lest his wife find out about it. The woman, whose name is Brandeen, concludes that the man figured it would be cheaper to kill her than pay her. Such is the value of life in the Sixth World.
The sirens are getting close. Shadow only has a minute to decide whether to stay and explain the situation to Knight-Errant or to slip away. The woman looks equally uncertain about whether she wants to trust the cops or if it's better to run to the shadows.
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Shadow decides that after murdering multiple gangers while carrying deadly weapons is something she doesn'the want to talk to Knights Errant about. She picks up the baby and the woman'seeking hand Come with me! and makes a break for it with the two out of the busted up front of the stuffer shack and into an alleyway removed from the bigger streets. To prevent from being traced too easily she mentally switches her commlink to silent and also turns off her sin broadcast
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Shadow disappears out the back, leaving a gigantic mess for someone else to clean up.
There's a hobo in the alley behind the Stuffer Shack - a male dwarf with dirty, matted hair. He looks annoyed that someone has interrupted his dumpster diving at this early hour. He casts a sour look at Shadow, the woman, and the baby.
It's only five minutes to Shadow's apartment. The biggest trick to getting there undetected will be crossing streets. From the sounds of the sirens, the emergency response to the explosion will be large and will put a lot of eyes (and flashing lights) on the scene.
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Shadow ignores the dwarf entirely and urges the woman to press on, occasionally helping her to get forward with her trauma and baby. Shadow crosses the street on the darkest strip, the one that isn't well illuminated by neon signs and street lamps. Shadow disappears with the woman behind another set of garbage bins just before one of the emergency response cars drives through the road. After it had parked and the operators gotten out, Shadow slips into the next dark alleyway on the other side of the street.
From here on it would be somewhat easier. At least until she arrived at her apartment building. It was close enough that even here police cars were driving and the street was much better illuminated. Shadow had to take the risk and cross the street quickly when no cars where in sight and she was in luck. She was so quick that one nearing police car didn't even notice them crossing the street. Shadow entered the building and slammed the door shut after the woman had also come in as fast as she could.
Shadow took a few moments of relief. She knew that it couldn't get much worse and that she should be safe for a few hours of sleep and healing. And also to find out why this woman was hunted by heavily armed ganger.
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Shadow slams the door, then remembers that her father is likely still sleeping. She listens for a minute but doesn't hear anything from her father's room. She turns and shows Brandeen and Cody into the living room.
Shadow is justifiably proud of her apartment. It's secure and quiet, a welcome reprieve from the constant danger and turmoil of the Redmond Barrens. The furniture is mass-produced but comfortable and durable. The household drones keep things clean and the multi-function soy processing unit has a respectable menu, even if it's a bit depleted right now. There's even some higher-priced real food in the fridge. Not enough to make a meal out of, but enough to supplement the soy. The walls are decorated and there are artistic knick-knacks on the shelves, most of which Shadow stole herself. At 100 square meters, there are two bedrooms (one each for Shadow and her father) plus a small patio for nice weather when the acid raid stops and the ash isn't blowing in from Puyallup. The neighbors are respectable white-collared types who are secretly afraid of Shadow, but they're mostly at work when she's home during the day so there's not much overlap to generate friction.
Shadow steers Brandeen and Cody onto a couch. The woman collapses, then starts to shake as shock sets in. Cody, to his credit, hasn't cried since the explosion. Maybe it rattled him, or maybe his eardrums ruptured and he can't hear anything. Either way, he's now silent while his mother starts to dry heave and sob.
Slowly, as Shadow plies Brandeen with tea and tissues and comforting pats on the back, the story starts to emerge:
"Cody is the son of Mel Cozi, a senior vice president for Alliance Designs," she says. "Mel isn't exactly single. He's married, and was married while we were seeing each other. He's refused to help support Cody because he doesn't want his wife to see that money is missing and make the connection. So I threatened to tell his wife unless he ponied up some child support. Well that obviously didn't go over well. Those men tonight were probably his solution to the problem. He probably did the math and figured it was cheaper to kill his own son than to pay child support!" She indignantly slams her hand down, then tears up again.
"He's always like that! So coldly analytical! Everything has a nuyen value, even life. I suppose that's how you get to be a senior VP, but God! What a psychopath!" She looks disgusted at herself for ever having been involved with him.
"I have to get out of town or he'll find me and finish the job. Maybe I can hide in Tarislar, or Tir Tairngire. But I'm a single mother... how am I going to make it?" Tears start to well up again as she faces the dismal prospects of her future.
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Shadow replies softly while calming the distraught mother by gently stroking her sholder with her right hand and holding the underarm with the left hand:
You're safe here for now. I know a few people and I'll look into getting you out of Seattle as soon as I can. But for now, I think we all deserve some sleep. Is there anything else that you need?
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Brandeen is exhausted. She throws up her hands, unsure of what she needs. Nothing. Everything.
"A blanket," she says finally.
She gets up from the couch to use the restroom and change Cody's diaper. (Luckily she has several diapers in her bag.) She comes out of the bathroom ten minutes later and it's clear that she's been weeping.
She lays on the couch with Cody against her chest. Curling into the fetal position, she starts to shudder as Shadow puts a blanket over her. Cody nurses while Brandeen cries. After Cody has finished, Brandeen halfheartedly burps him, then they both fall asleep.
-
Just to be safe, Shadow first locks the door to her room and then the door to her father's bedroom, then puts her Predator on a table on the other side of the room and points it to a location in front of Brandeen in a way that, if it was remotely fired could potentially strike an attacker who was standing next to her. This way she also had a simple security camera into this room.
After that Shadow goes into her own room, only removing her armor jacket and falling asleep on the bed immediately.
-
Shadow falls into a deep sleep, exhausted from her long day at the club followed by the adrenaline of the Stuffer Shack altercation. When she wakes up, the adrenaline and endorphins have worn off and all she's left with is a blistering sensation over most of her body that feels like a second-degree burn. She curses the mage who did this to her and wonders how she's going to be able to work until she heals. She can already tell than the shedding and the peeling are going to be horrendous.
Checking her commlink, she sees that she slept until noon. She staggers out of bed, every movement painful, and leaves her room. Her father is up; he has drawn all the blinds in deference to Shadow's allergy. She can tell that it's a bright, sunny summer day outside. All that sun just reminds her of sunburn which reminds her of her own burns which makes them hurt that much more.
Her father is sitting on the couch, sipping soykaf and browsing the news on his commlink. Brandeen and Cody are gone. Her father doesn't ask about them or even seem to know that they were here. That means they must have left before he woke up, which means that they've been gone for hours. Shadow sits down, wondering what will happen to the mildly-attractive elven woman and her six-month-old son out in the Seattle Sprawl.
-
After a while Shadow gets back up to take a shower. As much as she hated it, she had to check on her injuries. Nocturna-fur was very short and still it was shedding in patches, leaving almost zombie-like pale ares of skin that were so sensitive of light that even that little bit coming from the small window close to her shower caused tingling and burning.
As she stood under the shower she mentally commanded her commlink to write a message. It was short, just informing Miss Kubota and her other employees at the Seamstresses that she wouldn't be coming for a couple of days. Work. That was another good word. She had completely forgotten that she had made quite a fortune yesterday.
When she was done with the shower she decided to throw a little party with her father which essentially meant his favorite trids and real food. This time she decided she'd let stuffer shack deliver by drone service, least she got in yet another fight. That wasn't what she needed right now. She wondered once more about Brandeen, and if she'd see her ever again, but on the other hand, if she didn't want her help then she was not obligated to search for her and force it on to her.
-
Mrs. Kobuta clucks and expresses concern over Shadow's well-being. She reminds Shadow that the Seamstress Union offers medical care for its employees, regardless of the injury's implications for the dancer's earning potential. Shadow thanks her and disconnects.
Shadow bandages her burns, applying NuSkin to minimize blistering and promote healing, then wrapping the affected areas with white gauze that looks comically bright against her dark fur. Finished, she sighs and slumps her aching body onto the couch. She fights her fatigue but loses. Closing her eyes, she sleeps, and dreams.
-
Finis