@Mercedes:
You study Sheldon intently. Sheldon the enigma. On the one side he's pushing chips and god knows what else to more than half of the barrens, even to residents of his own neighborhood. Then on the other hand he seems to genuinely care about the people he grew up with. Your mind ponders how the affection and carefree shine in his eyes as he was playing stick ball with this plaza's street kids could in an instant turn to a cold-blooded death-sentence of a stare. You'd seen something similar before. Sometimes when the data run would go wrong your mother would come home with a black eye or a bloody nose, but she would still ramble on about how good the Laesa had been for ya'll and how important it was to be grateful and never snitch. Tough love was what she called it.
But somehow this was different.....let's face it, the elves had it different and just were.... different.... that's the bottom line. As much as any elf kid slinging it with the Ancients in Puyallup wanted to kid himself, he was still just expendable riff raff...insecure, lethally macho on the outside and soft as butter somewhere deep in his heart...but just like any meta without a SIN, ultimately expendable.
But at least that kid could kid himself....ride around with other pointy ears callin himself a prince, pick-up as many human girls as his bike could ferry back and forth from the club in one night. Once that elf kid got a little bit older and had his fill, maybe he'd apply for automatic citizenship in Portland, get a grueling but secure job down at the docks and just be that tattooed elf with a record who hangs around the pub after 6:00pm....."don't mind him, he's harmless"...just riding out the rest of his centuries. All the thugs from the ancients or even Laesa always had that "I'm doing this until life takes me down some other path" type of look in their face..."maybe i'm poor as hell right now, but it's merely temporary". When you got centuries in front of you, then they're probably right. When you got centuries or even eternity in front of you it also makes you think twice about wasting another elf over just space on the sidewalk. Instead of pulling out the Ingram and throwing it all away......better pull out the Carromeleg instead and keep the organs safe.
Sheldon however was part of a whole different world...even when Sheldon's kind have SINs, they still are the last to get hired and the first to get fired. For the humans on the west side, they're the ones who are gonna brutally rape your girlfriend if you don't slave her PAN to your comm to keep tabs on her. They're the ones who have no value for life whatesoever because they don't got much in them anyways. They're the ones who supposedly don't have the skills to be anything but bodyguards and cannon-fodder. If you never grew up in Redmond or any of the other barrens, then this is what you'd most likely take as the truth. If you did grow up right here on these streets, then you know something else entirely about "those people". They're the ones who Seattle undercounts most by a ratio of 4/1 in their census estimates. They're the ones who bore the brunt of the night of rage, were thrown out of their families in the highest numbers and die most often in encounters with KE or corp. sec. If you grew up here you'd realize that they're the ones who are your brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and each one of them is a hell of a character.
Sheldon realizes the un-tapped potential that everyday is wasted here. The next winner of Dunkelzahn's Will money for finding a blood substitute for HMHVV victims or a way to fuse magic and machine could be right there in front of all of you playing stick-ball. Sheldon knows too that that's just never gonna happen. Orks, especially those from these neighborhoods do themselves a favor by not thinking too big....it's just setting yourself up for crushing disappointment. It's best to think small, but Sheldon wants them to think none-the-less. In his own small way he's helping out a whole community.....but you know that he could do so much better if the socially engineered cold-blooded killer inside of him wasn't constantly wrestling against the genius with a heart of gold.
He seems very genuine in his thanks for teaching Koello.
