[LordGrizzle]

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...

[Tecumseh]

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...

[Tecumseh]

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!"

[LordGrizzle]

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.

[Tecumseh]

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.

[Tecumseh]

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!!"

[LordGrizzle]

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.

[Tecumseh]

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?!"

[LordGrizzle]

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!

[Tecumseh]

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.

[LordGrizzle]

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.

[Tecumseh]

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.

[LordGrizzle]

Shadow speeds over to the woman and asks her: Are you okay? Do you need a place to rest or other help?

[Tecumseh]

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.

[LordGrizzle]

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