Shadowrun: Clockwork Ashes 1.1 (Patreon)

Revolution: 1.1

The small company bus was not designed for metahumans, despite the high amount of elves, orks, dwarves and trolls employed by MCT.

For some godforsaken reason, the whole thing was designed for people with human standard heights, which left the rest us to either bend to fit or jump to sit, even if I had it better than most elves by virtue of being a comparative shortstack.

That day I’d managed to wake up early for once and made it to the tram in time to grab one of the last available seats, collapsing on the squeaky plastic with a relieved sigh as I pulled my headphones out of my jacket’s inside pocket. It was twenty minutes to the main lab from company housing and a seat meant I wouldn’t have to spend them crushed in the sweaty mass of bodies.

“Hold the door! Hold the door!” a gravelly voice called out, just as I was about to turn on my music. I turned and watched as Rusty, an old ork that worked with security rushed for the transport.

(They called him Rusty on account of his ancient second-gen prosthetic legs. The nickname seemed a little mean-spirited to me, but that was how he’d introduced himself when we met.)

He barely made it in, squeezing between people and causing some discreet grumbling as the space became even tighter thanks to his bulky frame. His eyes landed on me as he adjusted, muttering apologies, and he gave me a grin, nodding his head.

I smiled back and stood up, stepping aside to offer my seat. Before he could take the offer, a Dwarf squeezed past him and hopped onto the seat.

I blinked. I cleared a throat and spoke up, though saying I rose my voice would be an exaggeration. “Um, excuse me?”

The dwarf gave me a look and raised his eyebrow, challenging.

“I-I was offering that seat to Rusty, his legs need the rest—”

“Oh really?” the dwarf asked, rolling his eyes. He made a show of turning in his seat, before giving me a wide-eyed look. “That’s funny, I don’t see his name on it.”

“N-no, but really, he—”

The dwarf pulled his own set of headphones from his pocket and put them in, ignoring me with ease.

My lips pressed in a tight line and I huffed, but I saw Rusty give me a smile out of the corner of my eye, urging me to let it go. He was always a patient guy.

Patience and forgiveness are for other people, I decided.

The manipulation of magic is difficult to explain to mundanes. I can say that I expanded my conciousness to the astral plane and tapped into a strand of mana before weaving it into a spell through mathematical equations, but the process is a lot more complex and headache-inducing than advertised.

Still, it was only a momentary twinge, and well worth it for the adhesion that appeared between the back of the dwarf’s pants and the seat. It wasn’t a very strong spell, just a bit of stickyness that could be broken with a bit of struggling.

Unless, of course, you stayed in place and weighed down on it for the full duration of a twenty-minute ride. Then, you’d soon find yourself making a choice between your pants and arriving late. And I had a feeling he, like anyone else in the bus, would choose the latter.

I gave Rusty an apologetic smile that he waved off, but a frown appeared on my face when the usual feeling of giddiness didn’t appear in the back of my mind at the dwarf’s misfortune. Instead, all I felt was...

Dissapointment? In what?!

No answer came, and I was left to be crushed by the mass of commuters, not remembering to turn on my tunes until eleven minutes into the trip.

Even as I got off the tram, ignoring the struggling dwarf or the sound of cloth ripping behind me while I presented my ID at the first of three security checkpoints, my thoughts remained on that sensation of foreign disappointment.

Fox and I would have to talk soon.

*+*+*

Don’t think about your answer, what comes to your mind when you hear the words “magic research”?

Is your answer “sitting in front of a computer for hours on end, doing math” your answer? No? Then I’m afraid you’re wrong. The hermetic school of magic, which my department preferred, relies on channeling the energies of the astral plane through calculus.

Therefore, my job consisted mostly of trying to increase the energy efficiency of different spells, wards, foci, talismans and such, running the math over and over and struggling constantly to find the little edge that would keep the hermetic labs ahead of the others in the Magical Research Department.

Personally, I considered all the competitiveness rather stupid. Especially since there wasn’t any sort of prize other than bragging rights and a few extra funds that always got funnelled to the projects run by humans.

The theurgists had gained the title last month thanks to a foci that was 20% more efficient and had already hit the markets to wide acclaim, so the lab head had been weighing on us to out put more products with slight improvements, choosing quantity over quality.

I took a sip out of my mug of coffee, blinking slowly as I tried to look at the ward I was recreating from a different angle. I knew there were some  Wuxing tricks with feng shui that would make it work better, but we weren’t allowed to use ‘resources from other departments’. Even just borrowing ideas could get me reprimanded.

Maybe I could say that there had to be some physical arrangements for the calculations? Add a few scribbled runes here and there, and it actually might be better than with just feng shui. Just how much bullshit could I get away with?

My gut begrudgingly told me ‘plenty’, so I checked over my shoulder then switched tabs to refresh myself on what I knew about geomancy.

A little bit later, I presented a file with a runic array that ‘coincidentally’ suggested a few things to make the mana in a room flow better. Altogether, it would be about 15% more energy-efficient, protect the walls along with the dorways, and bounce back any weak magic tossed at it.

This would be the end of about three weeks of research, plus the two hours I spent working in the Wuxing element that day. I sent it to the lab head so he’d approve it for testing, then unceremoniously moved on to the next ongoing project, a talisman meant to enhance fire spells.

Maybe I could make it gather the hydrogen in the area in the direction the user wanted? It’d be difficult to handle, but... no, better to assume the user is an idiot. That tends to be safer. So what would be a safe way to enhance the fire talisman?

... I had to think of a way to make a fire talisman—a talisman made for shooting fire—safe. Or else we’d get complaints, and the whole thing would be tracked to me and get me fired.

I looked at the clock. Four hours until my smoke break.

I sighed, sipped the cold remnants of coffee from my mug and went back to work.

*+*+*

“... and that’s what’s going to carry this team forward,” said Park. “Teamwork. With all of us gathered together, working as a unit under my leadership, we can keep this lab ahead of the competition.”

The bootlickers in the room clapped as he capped off his speech, cuing the rest of us to stop sleeping with our eyes open and join the clapping.

The whole meeting could have been summarized with an email, a motivational poster and a scale statue of Park built in front of us with a plaque saying ‘I am your God’ on the pedastal.

It was ten minutes of him asking the more attractive members of the lab what they were working on, twenty minutes letting us know about three things the administration expected from us (which were only really relevant the members of the lab working on a particular project most of us hadn’t even known existed before the meeting) and fourty-five minutes of him giving us a ‘pep-talk’.

By the second minute of that last one, I was about ready to chew my own face off if only to give me something mildly interesting to think about.

Park smiled and gracefully accepted the tribute of clapping and nodding while people started getting up, competing to see who would be the second to leave, thus not looking eager to get away but still managing to be out as soon as possible.

I started to get up as well, and Park looked away from the person congratulating him for the meeting to call out, “Feyden! A moment, please?”

I suppressed a sigh and nodded, giving a smile that failed to reach my eyes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few people scoff.

Once everyone had left, I walked over to Park, where he was sitting on the edge of the table, trying to look casual

“I wanted to talk to you about a file you sent my way,” he said.

He was a tall man of korean descent, muscular and lean, though with a receding hairline and thick, fishy lips. His brown eyes ran over my body, failing to raise over my neckline as he talked. It was well known that Aaron Park had a bit of a fetish for elves, especially considering his wallpaper.

I spent almost all of the brainpower not dedicated to my work on notthinking about how I looked a lot like the scantily-clad elvish model on his computer.

“Which one, sir?” I asked.

“One of the wards, the file mentioned it would be 15% more efficient?” I nodded. “I noticed there were some suggestions about furniture placement and lighting...”

Shit. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. My gut had failed me. Why the fuck had my gut failed me? My gut was more trustworthy than that.

“W-Well, yes, just to make the runic array work better,” I said.

“Right, it was mentioned. Listen, I’m no expert—” that was a fairly generous assesment from him, considering I wasn’t totally sure he was Awakened, or if he had even studied the thaumaturgic sciences. The head of the research division of MCT was named Park as well, after all. “—but that sounds like feng shui to me.”

“M-Maybe a little, but it’s centered around the Hermetic practice, I added all the calculus—”

“Ava,” he said, and I struggled not to cringe. I hated when people got overly friendly. “I’m not mad, but you have to understand that this is the Hermeticlab. We can’t just pick and choose what we use.”

“The talisman that the Shinto lab released last semester had elements of Voodoo—”

“Yes, but this isn’t the Shinto lab, now is it?” he asked, smiling patiently like he was talking with a small child instead of someone with a goddamn doctorate. “Listen, I know you listed yourself as a chaos mage for whatever reason, but as I’ve told you a dozen times before, you’re with the Hermetic lab. You need to act like we’re using the one true form of magic here. Because we are.”

“But—”

“No buts,” he chastised me. “Now, I know your time is valuable, so I don’t want to have you redesign the whole thing. So I’m willing to work out a deal.”

I looked at him warily and asked, “What sort of deal?”

“Well... showing a product like this might cost me some face as the head of the lab,” he said, slowly. “Perhaps I might ignore this after a nice dinner?”

Park put his hand over mine and looked at me with wide hopeful eyes that rested on mine for all of two seconds before drifting to my ear, then my chest.

(I don’t even know what he got out of either one. Orks, trolls and dwarves all have pointed ears, and I wasn’t exactly carrying some heavy amunition in the latter area.)

Anger flooded my chest, both mine and foreign, and for a brief moment I started calculating the force and vectors required to make his teeth explode out of his mouth.

Then I took a breath and tuned it down to just calculating the heat required to boil his saliva inside his mouth.

Another breath and I was down to punching him in the face, which was the level I usually worked diplomacy from.

I pulled my hand away, said, “I’ll get back to working on the ward,” and walked away as fast as politeness allowed.

On the way to refill my mug with some tea, I heard Lawrence, a tall human, lean towards a friend and stage whisper, “You think we’ll see some scuff marks on her knees later?”

His idiot friend laughed, I bit my cheek and checked my commlink.

One hour and twenty-three until my smoke break. More than enough time to file a harassment report against Park, drink my tea and try to put the formula for a fireball spell out of my mind before I did something I regret.

*+*+*

“Heya, pointdexter!”

“Hoi, Toshiro,” I said, exhaling a plume of smoke from my lips. “To what do I owe the displeasure?”

“Ah, you know, just taking a moment to remove my boss’ dick out of my ass,” he said, leaning on the banister next to me. The only thing that entered my field of vision was his large, beefy arm, with the small glistening bone spikes glittering slightly under the sun. “But enough about me, how’ve you been?”

“Keeping my boss’ dick out of my ass, actually.”

“Ah, Park’s still bothering you?” he asked, producing a thin black cigar and extending it towards me. “That’s unfortunate.”

“Mm,” I hummed as I snapped my fingers, creating a small fire between my index and my thumb, then held it under the cigar. “But why be pessimistic, right? Maybe the twelfth try’s the charm.”

“Ain’t he connected, though?”

“I’m not the only elf in the lab,” I shrugged. “Maybe there’ll be a rare moment of knife-ear solidarity and we’ll gather enough noise to get him demoted, at least.”

“Right,” I saw Toshiro nod out of the corner of my eye. “And maybe I’ll get a pony for my birthday.”

“... not to imply anything about your weight, but wouldn’t you just crush the poor thing?”

“Watch it,” he said, pointing at me.

I smirked, and he huffed.

“How’re things in the Voodoo lab?” I asked.

“Well, after that talisman that ripped off some of my work, we got permission to look at some of the other lab’s latest work and see if we can produce anything with the results,” he said.

“And by ‘we’, you mean...”

“The humans and elves in the lab, yeah.”

“That sucks,” I muttered. “The fraggin’ thing was based off of your work.”

“Y’know, it’s funny? When I pointed that out everyone was eager to remind me that it’s the lab’s tech, legally,” he huffed, creating a big cloud of smoke that was quickly carried away by the wind. “Now I gotta go to a team-building seminar because my attitude’s a problem.”

“Jesus,” I said. “At least harassment from Park is brief. Those things are like a couple hours.”

“Yeah, and I ain’t getting paid for those,” he noted. “Let me tell you, if I could get paid from the time my boss takes out of my life to give me drek, I’d be one happy camper.”

“... well, suddenly I feel a lot better about my lot in life,” I said. “Thanks, Toshi.”

“Go fuck yourself, chummer,” he replied, making me chuckle.

Toshiro was good at that. He had a knack for making people relax, as long as they saw past the horns and the bulky frame.

Still, my cheer lasted only a few seconds before I was back to morosely staring down at the city.

Ashenport was a bustling metropolis of the UCAS northeast, with a booming shipping and construction industry, millions of citizens and an incredibly dedicated criminal element. I’d lived here all my life, and by the time I’d turned ten I’d either been subjected to or witnessed somewhere around a low couple hundred muggings.

A skyline crowded by plascrete skyscrapers and shaped by the two opposing hills the city had been build into, separated by a large river that cut through the city, allowing for two separate docks. Each one with their own districts and their own neighborhoods, populated by dockworkers and their families.

The research division of the local Mitsuhama branch had its labs built near the top of the westernmost hill, and now that winter was well underway and the days were getting shorter, the sun would be setting behind the building soon, casting a shadow over a large portion of the city.

I could see some people below me, probably the wretched souls of interns carrying messages and coffee from lab to lab. I could hear the echoing of car honks from deep in the city, and a thick storm front could be seen coming in from over the sea.

“At least the view’s nice,” Toshiro observed, making me realized we’d been silent for a couple of minutes.

“... yeah,” I said. “At least there’s that.”

I produced another cigarette, and snapping my fingers again produced the flame that consumed its tip, blown out by a breath of air and rekindled to drag smoke into my lungs with an inhale. I’d bought the pack yesterday and I was already almost done with it, I’d have to cut back a bit.

I exhaled, and with a bit of effort, the smoke became a small bird that flew around my head and landed on Toshiro’s.

“Nice touch,” he said as the smoke bird dissolved. “I bet you’re a hit at parties.”

“I’m not much for parties, actually.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured. Y’know, on account of every facet of your personality.”

“Bite me.”

*+*+*

It took six more hours, but I finally arrived at the end of my twelve hour shift. Against my expectations, Park didn’t force me to pull any unpaid overtime despite me rejecting his advances.

The return home was spent in a daze, and I didn’t clock back into my own thoughts until I was through the doorway, kicking off my shoes and slowly untensing my shoulders.

My apartment was standard-issue Mitsuhama employee housing. One bedroom, one bathroom, one living room that was only separated from the kitchen by a bar that I usually ate in. The walls were all painted white, except for the ones adjacent to the kitchen, which were midnight blue.

Through a sliding glass door, I could exit onto a balcony, on which there was a folding lawn chair that I’d bought with a promise that I would try to get a tan, only to realize too late that by the time I got out of work there wouldn’t be enough sunshine for that, even in the height of summer.

I’d been living there since I graduated from MIT&T five years prior, and it still didn’t feel like home.

I took off the suit jacket and hung it on the coatrack I’d hooked on the front door, followed by my tie. I unbuttoned the top two buttons of my shirt, undid my belt, and let out a relieved groan of, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” as I finally shrugged off my functioning adult costume.

I stumbled forward in the living room and collapsed on the plush brown couch, and contemplated just falling asleep there again.

A feeling of endargement came to me, and I rolled my eyes, sitting up. Honestly, he didn’t have to threaten me to get me to eat.

With an effort of will and math, my fingertips gained a light white glow as I made a clawing motion, making the remote for the trid float through the air onto my hand, where I turned it on and did zapping until I found something for background noise.

“Alright kids, now, we need to have a serious discussion,” claimed an upbeat-looking human man in an eye-searing green suit, talking to a crowd of kids of varying races and metatypes. “Can anyone tell me what metatypes are?”

“Nope,” I said, switching to a different channel. I wasn’t in a mood to see Racism & You For Kids.

The image switched and I was watching two teenaged elves walking through what looked like a high school corridor. Both elves were classically pretty, as most of my kind tended to be, and they were absolutely dreadful actors, managing to mumble every line while twisting their faces in exaggerated forms of every possible emotion possible to mortals.

“—on’t know what to do, Elethrian,” one of them sighed, leaning against a locker in such a way that his open hoodie showed the six pack his lack of shirt showed perfectly. “I love Betty-Anne, but I know her parents would never allow our love to blossom!”

Elethrian put his arm around the other actor’s shoulders, leaning close enough for homoerotism, “Maybe you’re looking for love in all the wrong places, Andriel... maybe you need to look... closer.”

Andriel looked at him, almost bumping his nose to Elethrian’s, before looking away. “My heart is spoken for.”

“C’mon!” Elethrian suddenly roared, snapping away from Andriel and tearing open his shirt in the process. “A dwarf and an elf?! It’ll never be!”

I was almost intrigued, honestly, but, “Nope.”

“—oose cannon, O’Malley,” a human with a handlebar moustache said, standing behind a desk as a human and a troll stood with their arms folded behind their backs. “But dammit, you’re the best damn cop in this entire damn district.”

“Thanks, chief,” said the human—presumably O’Malley, “But I couldn’t have done it without my partner here.”

“O’Malley friend,” said the troll in a ‘simpleton’ voice, making me wince. “Me protect friend.”

“Jesus. Whatever they paid you wasn’t enough, my guy.”

“And we’re off to the races! The Denver Thunderheads are taking an aggressive strategy, but the Ares Predators are showing a mighty defense and—OH MY GOD! Mickey, are you seeing this?!” the announcer’s voice came, loud and obnoxious as an overhead view of an Urban Brawl match showed dozens of athletes beating the everloving hell out of each other. One of them, an orc with oversized metal arms, was lifting a member of the opposite team over his head and using him as a club against his weapon’s teammates. “‘Killer’ Grayson strikes again!”

“Nope.”

“—from this moment forward, we’re not people. Not humans, orcs, elves or nothing. We’re shadowrunners, and onlyshadowrunners,” claimed a human man with a lit cigarette on the corner of his lips and a sword at his hip. “We only call each other by our roles. You’ll adress me as Adept or Boss.”

The camera panned to show a human woman with a neon green mohawk and several wires coming from the back of her head while “Adept” kept talking. “From now on, your name will be Decker.”

The camera panned to an orc with bull-like horns, grey skin, osseous scales on his neck and collar and an eyepatch. “Samurai.”

The camera panned—

“Nope.”

“—ankfully, the Lone Star officers were able to stop the vehicle and capture the team of shadowrunners,” I raised an eyebrow. The newscaster, a pretty elf in a red dress with blonde hair loose around her shoulders and lovely green mechanical eyes, kept talking in a smooth voice. “The criminal mercenaries are in interrogation as we speak, and we can only hope that Wuxing Incorporated’s property was not damaged in the altercation.”

The image beside her, showing a tipped-over bulldog van with a ragtag crew with their arms up surrounded by Stars, faded away. The camera zoomed out, showing an ork with an undercut and wire-frame glasses sitting next to her. Thanks to the lights playing on the ork’s eyes, I could see that they were AR glasses, probably feeding him his lines.

“Moving on to our main story tonight,” the ork said, his voice a rumbling baritone. “Three more citizens have disappeared since last night, making that twenty-eight disappearances over the last four months.”

“That’s right, Saul,” said the elf. “And while no physical connecting factor has been identified, Lone Star and Knight Errant investigators seem to believe all the disappearances are connected.”

I raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. “Good enough.”

The trid kept playing as I got up and headed for my fridge. “Apparently, the lack of clues have in themselves worked as a connecting factor, as even shaman and mage investigators have failed to find any astral trails.”

“Not only that, but all the disappearances happened in locations with either no cameras, or failing cameras,” said Saul. “No eyewitnesses, no suspicious vehicles in the area, nothing.”

“It’s a real mystery, huh Saul?”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself, Sally.”

I think that says more about you than her, Saul, I thought.

I pulled out a block of cheese, a bag with two soyburger patties and another bag with burger buns from my fridge, closing it with my hip behind me as I set down the ingredients on the counter and turned on the electric stove.

While I used the spell I used on the remote on the frill pan that’d come with my apartment, Sally kept talking. “—and so, Trevor McMurray has hit the streets to see just what the people of Ashenport feel about the current events.”

I looked over my shoulder and found that the camera had cut to a dark haired human with a small gap tooth that gave him a bit of a boyish air as he gave a plastic grin to the camera.

“Thank you, Sally,” said Trevor. “I’m here at Wallsbury Avenue, and we’re going to see if we can find anyone with some insight on the recent disappearances.”

The scene cut to a couple teenagers, humans and trolls, who were sitting around near a fountain in what I recognized as Watterson Park.

“What are your thoughts on the recent disappearances?”

“It’s gotta be technomancers,” one of the teens, a human with greasy hair, said. “The cameras all failed to see anything, right? Gotta be some technomancer dr*k.”

“You’re crazy,” a troll teen said. “It’s probably some shady corp dr*k.”

“You think everything’s shady corp dr*k.”

“‘Cause it is!”

It cut to a dwarf woman with a baby in her arms, and I turned back around to throw the patties on the pan before turning back to the trideo. “Honestly, I’m just terrified it’ll happen to my kids. What good are the fr**ging Stars if they can’t find out who’s doing this?”

“And what if it’s not kidnappings?” asked Trevor. “What if people are purposefully vanishing?”

The dwarf scoffed, making the babe in her arms stir. “I’ve seen the news. These people had families, friends. What could possibly make them want to leave?”

“What indeed...” said Trevor, showcasing that he’d missed his calling as a tridnovela actor.

The interviews continued like this for a solid while, distracting me enough that I ended up burning the patties, the yellowish off-white spongy substance turning hard, black and bitter.

Still, food was food, so I stacked them between the buns with slices of cheese inbetween and dug in, watching as they kept talking about the disappearances, then about a dog with hellhound blood that had taken a job in a food truck working as an emergency gas stove.

I fell asleep on the couch with a foul taste in my mouth and without even removing my glasses, and woke up in the middle of the night with a sore neck and crumbs all over my work shirt while the trid still played.

Grumbling, I turned off the trid and brushed the crumbs off, resolving to sweep the floor tomorrow with absolutely no sincerity, then I trudged over to my bedroom to try to get a few hours of proper sleep.

That plan went out the window when I turned the lights on and saw the red envelope on my pillow.

The red envelope that hadn’t been there when I left that morning.

Someone had been in my apartment.

Someone had been in my apartment and I hadn’t realized until hours later.

Someone could have been in my apartment while I was asleep on the couch.

Like opening my already wide eyes, the astral plane unveiled itself to me as I frantically spun around, weaving together a spell and letting out a wave of energy. Perceiving the astral didn’t let me see through walls—quite the opposite, it meant I couldn’t even see through windows—but convining it with a life detecting spell meant that I got a pretty good feel for the location of all my neighbors.

No one seemed to be out of place. Which probably meant that whoever had been in my apartment was long gone.

I turned back to my bed, and to the letter on it, and approached. My heart was beating a little faster, but I didn’t feel panicked. It’s not like it was a big brown ticking package, it was just a letter in a red envelope.

In the astral space, it glimmered with the slightest bit of energy. Someone had emotional investment in the letter.

Alright, I told myself. Best case scenario: an extremely attractive, extremely wealthy woman with a heart of gold but a poor understanding of personal boundaries has decided to leave me a love letter.

Obviously, I knew that wasn’t true on account that I could see that the letter didn’t shimmer with colours of love, even if I couldn’t quite identify what it did hold, but hope was one of those rare things in the Sixth World that cost nothing.

I closed my eyes to the astral space and picked up the letter, turning it over.

On the back, it said:

From: Dami
To: My Punk-Ass-Corporate-Sellout Best Friend

I immediately tore the envelope open.

Damien Grimmshaw had been my best friend for as long as I had use of reason. He was practically my polar opposite, the tall dwarf to my short elf, the unrepentant anarchist to my ‘corporate sellout’. Still, our apartments being next to eachother’s and our tendency to get bullied for spending too much time studying had lead us to become friends, and time had only depened that bond.

The last time I saw him, we were both crying unconsolably as I graduated three years early from high school and prepared to leave for MIT&T, and while we’d tried to keep in touch over comms, communications had slowed until I suddenly got an ominous message saying he would have to stop messaging me for my own safety.

That letter was the first piece of information I’d gotten from him in four years. Even his family had no idea where he was, which was unusual as they were as typically close-knit as any dwarf family.

There was a couple pages inside the evelope, with his tiny chicken-scratch writing on both sides of each.

The letter read as such:

“Dear Ava:

“I feel like the first thing I say in this letter should be an apology. I know that vanishing on you like I did must’ve scared you, and I know that you’ve been keeping in touch with Ma and the others in my absence. I’m thankful for that.

“Honestly, I have so much I’d like to say to you. Ask how you’ve been, how was college, if your corp overlords have been riding you too hard, how’s your health. I’d like to tell you everything about my life after high school, the terrible time I spent working in Pa’s shop, a couple girls and boys I had fun with. Life hasn’t been the same when I wasn’t sharing it with you.

“Unfortunately, if you’re reading this then there’s no time for pleasantries. Either because I am extremely dead, or because I need help ASAP. The former’s more likely, though.

“I guess I should start from the beginning. You’ll be glad to know that I finally put my money where my mouth is. As I write this, I am a bonafide Shadowrunner.

“I know. I can barely believe it myself. Despite the fact that it’s what got me in this position, I gotta tell you that the ‘runner lifestyle is pretty fraggin’ awesome. I have seen some amazing things, omae. I genuinely believe that it was worth all the danger just for the priviledge of living outside the corps’ rules.

“The only problem is that I may have peeked a little too deep behind the curtain. I was on a run when I ran (heh) into some trouble. It was supposed to be a milk run, a datasteal job that I could have done with my eyes closed. But while I was jacked in, I realized the computer was connected to a far-off server that was leaking money from it through a backdoor.

“I figured, y’know, no crime to steal from thieves, right? So I jandered through the connection and took some nuyen for myself, took some paydata, broke some IC, no biggie.

“But it turns out the second thing doomed me. I was reading through the data I stole to see if there was anything worth a pretty penny there, and I found records of experiments. Experiments on a lot of people, with very small survival rates. Experiments on adults, kids, the elderly. Pretty much anyone these guys could get their hands on.

“And you know me. I might not be a saint, but I could never stand a bully.

“I managed to track down one of the places these guys were doing experiments in, inspected the place, got some more data. Turns out, this drek had been going on for a solid couple decades. And they hadn’t taken kindly to anyone poking their nose in on their business. Which was around the time I realized I may have fragged myself.

“The group behind the experiments had no name for themselves, but I took to call them the White Labs, on account of how spotless the first place I raided was. The WL are well-funded, well-organized, and well-willing to geek anyone poking their nose where it doesn’t belong. Ask me how I know.

“I’ve had a few close shaves with their thugs, they butted in on a couple jobs or posed as Mr. Johnsons to lure me into traps. It’s gotten to the point where it’s actually getting a little hard to find people willing to work with me. It’d be even harder if I weren’t the novahot decker that I am. ;)

“Still, I figured I may as well keep digging since I had no way out except running away to, like, Asamando or something. And I ain’t eager to turn into ghoul food, so digging it was.

“This runs so much deeper than I could have ever expected, omae. The stuff they’re doing... they forcefully implanted synthlimbs into people to try to take them pastzero essence. They’ve been experimenting with HMHVV, VITAS, and all sorts of nasty drek to make bioweapons, or to help with the first thing. They’ve been forcing the surviors of their less lethal experiments to breed like fragging lab rats, trying some weird eugenics drek.

“And the worst part is, I think I made them desperate. I’m sure you’ve heard about the disappearances that’ve happened over the last two months. That’s the White Lab. Used to be that they were so subtle that you couldn’t tie any disappearances together. Now they’re just subtle enough that you’ll never find them if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

“I fragged the whole situation, omae. And it’s up to me to make it better.

“But maybe I can’t. Maybe I get geeked, or ‘disappeared’. And that’s what this letter is for.

“I’m giving you a choice, Ava. I’m sorry, it’s a terrible choice, but someone needs to make it and you’re the most capable person I have ever had the priviledge of meeting. You can turn over this information to the Stars, where it’ll probably get ignored. Or you can come to the shadows after me.

“I know I’m asking you to give up a lot. I know it’s a terrible burden. But someone needs to do something.

“If you’re reading this, it means no one has heard from me for at least three months. In that case, I asked my fixer to arrange for the letter to find its way to your apartment. I would’ve picked a less creepy and invasive means to deliver it, but I kinda needed to make sure no one but you read it.

“In any case, I need you to understand that there is no judgement if you choose to ignore this message. You have a life, and I don’t want you to throw it away just because I asked. The shadows are no place for someone unwilling. You’re gonna have to make some sacrifices, and you’re gonna have to want to make those sacrifices because otherwise you’ll stop moving forward.

“It’s not an easy life. It’s worth it, but it’s not easy. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think you could handle it.

“If you do decide to run the shadows, or at least make what happened to me known to the other runners, I want you to contact my fixer.

“Go to ‘Dresden’s Bar & Grill’ in Oldtown and ask around for Everest. Fair warning: he hates being called Everest, so while it’ll definitely get you his attention, you’ll have to negotiate with him in a bad mood. Let’s hope you’re still disarmingly cute.

“You’ll have to ask him for three favours. For him to become your fixer, for him to have your SIN burned, and for him to give you access to my apartment. I’ve hid all my notes on the White Lab there, in exactly the kind of place you’d expect me to hide them.

“I can’t apologize enough for what I ask of you, omae. I only hope that, if you do chase after me, you find the same worth in living in the shadows that I did.

Your friend, now and forever,
Damien “Hawkeye” Grimmshaw”

I looked at the last page of the letter for a moment.

Then I read it again. Then again. Then again.

At one point, I wasn’t even reading the letter, just repeating it in my head while I stared blankly at the pages, lost in my own thoughts.

My head was spinning as I tried to process everything. Absurdly, I kept coming back to asking myself if I should explain this to Mrs. Grimmshaw next time I called her.

At some point, my commlink started blaring my alarm, and I realized I’d stayed up all night with the letter.

I had to work again.

Dami might be dead and I had to work again.

The world had gone crazy.