Shadowrun: Clockwork Ashes 1.4 (Patreon)

Revolution: 1.4

She’s just a Johnson, I told myself, swaying in place as I held onto a handrail. You meet her twice at most. You do the job, you get paid, you never talk again. There’s nothing to be nervous about.

This had been my mantra for the past hour or so as I took the subway to the park where I’d agreed to meet with ‘Concerned Mother’, or as I’d have to call her for the rest of this job, ‘Mrs. Johnson’.

(Hopefully trids hadn’t lied to me and shadowrunners really called their employers that. And if they didn’t, hopefully she wouldn’t know the difference.)

I’d spent most of my morning pacing around in circles in my room in what I still thought of as Da—Hawkeye’s apartment. Then I spent a couple hours looking for clothes that didn’t make me look like a corporate stooge, planning how the conversation would go so I could practice on the mirror to minimize stuttering, and struggling to keep down my breakfast.

The outfit I finally settled on was a black, blank t-shirt, a grey hoodie that I wore zipped-up under a black synthleather jacket, contact lenses, grey work jeans, steel-toed boots, black gloves and a black facemask.

My SIN was still active, and while my outfit probably wouldn’t do too much to keep me hidden if I fragged up and gained the attention law enforcement, I figured I might as well have it in case miracles existed and it did help. Plus, better not to leave fingerprints, even if it made my hands sweaty.

It was hard to get to any part of Ashenport that wasn’t surveyed by cameras. Brother Eye, a local AA company that specialized in security among other things, had held a big part in installing security cameras throughout the city, which had been assisted by Mitsuhama, Ares and Aztechnology in a small way.

I’d turned off my commlink before stepping out of the apartment, and I’d avoided looking at any cameras once spotted. Then I’d realized that this probably made me look extremely suspicious to anyone looking through them and I went back to walking like a normal fragging person.

So now I was just taking the subway with a facemask on, ocassionally coughing to justify its presence. Not that anyone gave two dreks about me, but paranoia abounds in the skull of an anxious mage.

Ashenport actually had two separate subway networks, each on one side of the river, though there was a line on each side that stopped close to the bridge, so it was pretty easy to start on one end of the city and end up on the other within two hours by mostly just taking the subway.

Not that I needed to, since my destination was on the south side of town, which was where Oldtown was anyways.

The stations blurred past as I repeated my mantra, to the point that I almost missed my stop. I walked out with a forced casualness in my stride, making my way up the automatic stairs and across a couple streets before stopping at the Bouchard Memorial Park, a small bit of green in the middle of the city that connected to Bouchard Memorial Mall, a cityblock-sized building full of shops, venues and consummerist culture.

I’d been a few times as a teenager, mostly to hang out with Damien and his friends and ocassionally for dates. It was a little weird to pass the fountain that I’d lost my virginity against on my way to a job, but I got over it.

As I got to the area we’d arranged to meet at, I found it a little crowded. It was a nice day out, not too hot but not too cold, perfect spring weather, so it was full of families, couples and friend groups out together.

Opening my eyes to the astral plane, I looked at the people standing alone until I found one shining with anxiety, both short-term and the general background buzz of something that had been gnawing at them for a while. Turning back to normal sight, I found a human woman wearing a red dress with a floral pattern, as the poorly-written message had said she would be.

I walked towards her, then turned and took the long route to come up behind her to give me some more time before she spotted me.

You’re gonna ask if she’s ‘Concerned Mother’, stretch out your hand, and say she can call you Hex, I thought. Easy, personable, suave. Everything you’re not— NOPE! None of that! You have confidence! If you say it enough, it’ll be true!

I walked up to her, realized I had to call her attention or I’d just be standing there like a creep until she turned around, and cleared my throat, making her jump slightly and turn around.

She was fairly attractive, with a soft round face, black hair that was starting to go grey and a slightly chubby build that made her seem cute. Her eyes and bone structure spoke of asiatic heritage, possibly Chinese. Her nails were long and painted pink, and her hands were curled around a white purse of nice make.

She gulped as she stared up at me, and I realized she’d done her makeup pretty well for this, which I found to be kinda ridiculous. Did she want to look good for the criminal mercenary she was hiring to find her daughter?

‘Goodness, what if the shadowrunner thinks I don’t take care of myself?’

“‘Concerned Mother’? I asked, voice rough from all the times I’d pretended to cough. At her nod, I stretched a gloved hand forward out of my jacket pocket. “C-Call me Hex.”

FRAG! GODDAMNED FRAGGING STUTTER!

Thankfully, she didn’t seem to notice, as her eyes went from my face, to my ears, to my hand, then back again until she snapped out of it and shook it. “A-Ah, yes, of course. My name is—”

“No names, please,” I said. “‘Mrs. Johnson’ will do.”

“R-Right,” she nodded. “Um... so... how does this work?”

Good fragging question, I thought.

Luckily, I’d spent a whole sleepless night thinking on this and looking up methods on the matrix (which’d be very embarrassing if someone looked up my search history, but whatever).

“I have a few questions,” I slowly said, both to control my stuttering and to keep my throat relaxed. I really shouldn’t have faked coughing so much. “First of all, has your daughter l-left any objects she’s particularly fond of b-behind?”

I pretended to look away thoughtfully so she couldn’t see me cringing at my failure to control my stupid tic.

“Um, I-I don’t know, I-I think so?” she said. “W-What does it matter?”

“Objects that have been deeply loved have an astral signature m-matching the owner,” I explained. “Having one will assist me in finding the target.”

“... you’re a mage.”

I frowned, then turned back to look at her.

She was staring at me with wide eyes and her grip on her purse was back to being white-knuckled. I was close enough to see her pupils were dilated, and her breathing was starting to speed up.

Shit, shit, shit, I thought. Okay, I gotta calm her down. How do I do that? Uh... frag it, just do something!

“Do you mind if I sit down?” I asked. When she failed to answer, I walked around the bench and sat down, turning my body to look at her. “Mrs. Johnson, I understand that m-mages can be scary for people. Awakened individuals aren’t always r-responsible with their g-gifts. But I swear to whatever s-spirits are watching, my only concern is with reuniting you with your daughter.”

Mentioning her daughter seemed to do the trick. Bit by bit, Mrs. Johnson’s body untensed, shoulders slowly dropping and jaw unclenching by the tiniest margin.

“... okay,” she sighed, closing her eyes for a moment. “O-Okay, okay, I can do this.”

Gee, so glad you can get past the horror of my existance, I thought, somehow managing not to roll my eyes.

After a moment, she opened her eyes and looked at me. “You really think you can find my T— my daughter?”

I nodded.

“... okay,” she said. And despite my distaste for her prejudices, I had to admit that that was some gleam in her eye. “What do you need?”

*+*+*

Mrs. Johnson lived in a sprawl near the park, her apartment building a classic brutalist behemoth of plascrete with no lobby. She held the door open for me, which I thanked her for with a nod.

She lead me two stories up the stairs, then into apartment 204, at the end of a hallway. She lived in a two bedroom, one bathroom apartment. It was filled with the traces of family life to the point of cluttering, pictures adorning most walls and flat surfaces.

Hung on a wall, between a picture showing Mrs. Johnson with a large blonde caucasian man and a young girl and a picture showing only Mrs. Johnson and the man together, was a cross. The body of Christ was still attatched to it, and he had a face that managed to mix incredible agony and boredom, somehow.

Mrs. Johnson lead me to one of the rooms, giving me wary eyes when she noted me examining her apartment and keeping a careful eye on my hands, which I made sure to keep in my jacket’s pockets.

“Th-This is her room,” she said. “Um, I’m not sure... she’s a very private girl, I’m not sure what would be... astral?”

“N-No problem,” I assured her. “I’ll figure it out on my own.”

I stepped into the room and looked around. The walls were painted peach pink, with a few posters taped to them here and there, and a few shelves over the bed covered in stuffed animals. Her bed was in the corner, covered in heavy blankets and plush pillows—so many of the latter that it was almost hard to imagine someone sleeping on it without throwing most to the floor.

To my surprise, a laptop was on the bed, plugged on and closed.

I looked at Mrs. Johnson over my shoulder and pointed at it.

“That’s your d-daughter’s?” I asked. She nodded, and I turned back to it, putting my hand back in my pocket. “... huh.”

On the corner in front of the bed was a desk that a few binders and a pencil case tossed carelessly on it. The chair in front of it had a few dirty clothes on it.

Against the wall opposite to the desk and bed, next to the door, was a dresser.

A blocky wooden thing that, upon opening, I found had quite a few coat hangers bare, and a small amount of clothes laying on the inside. At a look I figured there weren’t as many clothes dropped as bare hangers, but still quite a few.

“... could you t-tell me about how y-your daughter went m-missing?” I asked, frowning at what I was finding.

“W-Well, it was all very sudden,” Mrs. Johnson said, “She just... one day, we called her for dinner and she was just... gone. Eventually we came to check, a-and the window was open and she was just gone!”

“... that so?” I walked over to the window, which was on the wall the desk and the dresser were against, and opened the curtains to look down it. The fire escape was a rusty thing, outdated and slightly consumed by acid rain. Personally, I would’ve had to be at gunpoint to go down it.

“... I don’t know why she left,” Mrs. Johnson confessed, and I turned to find her wringing her hands. “We—We never hit her. You have to believe me, we’d never do that! My husband and I love our little Toph so much, she’s—”

She swallowed, and I was startled to find tears smearing her makeup.

“Did we do something wrong?” she asked.

Awkwardly, I walked over and patted her shoulder, saying, “N-No, I... I h-have a theory of w-why she ran away.”

She sniffed, blinked and looked at me, “Y-You do?”

I grit my teeth, nodded, and spoke carefully to control my stutter, “I’ll... I’ll tell you my theory after I f-find her. And if I’m right, it’ll be easy t-to make sure she doesn’t feel the need to run away again.”

Mrs. Johnson swallowed, nodded, and whispered, “Th-Thank you.”

“... mm,” I said, stepping away from her.

Alright, enough dicking around, I decided, opening my eyes to the astral world. Let’s see... what... ah.

As I expected, there was a fairly strong astral signature filling the room. Nothing truly extraordinary... but something large enough to confirm my suspicion.

Mrs. Johnson’s daughter had probably escaped after Awakening.

I withheld a sigh, then looked around for the object most imprinted on. I’d expected the laptop or one of the plush toys, but it turned out to be a poster of Maria Mercurial posing with a guitar.

The biggest emotion in the imprint was lust, which I guess made sense, but it made peeling the poster off the wall and folding it to put it in my pocket a little awkward.

“You mentioned your d-daughter’s name is Toph?” I asked. Mrs. Johnson blanched a little at realizing she did, but nodded. “C-Can you tell me some places she frequents?”

“Um, there’s the mall—the Bouchard Memorial Mall, I mean—she met with some of her friends there sometimes,” she said, wringing her hands. I nodded, encouraging her to continue, “Um, I-I guess there’s also her school, Walter Ellingson High? Oh! And, well, she used to hang with some unsavory types down near the docks at this iron mill that got abandoned, but we forbid her from doing that.”

“Can you tell me the e-exact address of the mill?” I asked, pulling out my commlink to write it down.

“It was down by—”

We were interrupted by the door opening and a deep baritone calling out, “Cai! I’m home!”

Mrs. Johnson—Cai, apparently—paled considerably as her eyes got very wide. For a moment she looked like she was considering throwing me out the window to cover her tracks.

“Cai? Cai! Where are you?!”

“... in here, dear!” she called out. She looked at me, “The mill is by Lafayette and Grimmshaw, please hurry out of my apartment.”

“Wha—” was all I managed as the foosteps of whom I assumed was his husband got closer.

“God dammit, Cai, I’ve told you a hundred times you can’t just wallow in—” upon opening the door, the husband froze upon seeing me.

There was a moment of silence where we all stood there in silence, staring at each other and waiting for someone else to make the first move.

I looked at him. Mrs. Johnson’s husband—should I call him Mr. Johnson? He hadn’t hired me, so probably not—was a big, burly blonde man with a thick braided beard held in place by small metal rings. The hair at the top of his head was gelled back and starting to thin at the corners, and his eyes had a few wrinkles in the corners.

He was wearing a white button-down and holding a navy blue tie in the hand he’d used to open the door, as well as slacks and dress shoes. Probably an office worker like I’d been. His wide green eyes were trained on me, going from my facemask to my ears, then to my clothes.

I broke the tension by raising my hand and giving him a little wave.

He started to return the gesture before shaking his head, pointing at me with the waving hand and asking, “Who the hell is this?!”

“D-Dear, this is H-Hex,” Mrs. Johnson said, looking down at the floor and wringing her hands. “Sh-She’ll be helping us look for our T-Toph.”

“Hex? What—” the husband’s eyes snapped wide and he turned an angry glare at his wife, “You hired a fragging shadowrunner?!”

“I-It’s not like I had a choice!” Mrs. Johnson defended herself. “You said you didn’t want Lone Star or Knight Errant involved, s-so I had to improvise!”

“Cai, there’s a world of difference between ‘improvising’ and ‘hiring a fragging runner’!” he shouted, making her flinch back. “Where did you even get the money to hire one?”

“I-I-I t-took some money from our savings,” she stuttered.

“Wh—” his eyes gained a glint I decided I did not like. “How much?”

“I—”

“How. Much?!”

“... a thousand nuye—”

“A THOUSAND?!” he screamed. He raised a hand to run it through his thinning hair and Mrs. Johnson flinched back, “Oh my god—a thousand?! You’ve had some stupid ideas, but this...”

“It’s our daughter!” Mrs. Johnson shouted, “Don’t you want her back?!”

“Of course I want her back! But that’s my money, Cai! I need that if things go sideways!”

“It’s my money too!” she shouted.

“The frag it is—!” he started, taking a step forward.

Before I realized what I was doing, I took a step forward and to the side, coming to a stop in front of Cai. He stopped on a dime, eyes going wide at remembering that I was there.

I didn’t trust myself to say anything without stuttering and ruining whatever chance there was that I came across as a badass, but I didn’t need to talk. I just glared at him, making him break out into a sweat the more I held the look.

Eventually, he started to look away and turn his head, so I took a step forward, making him take one back.

This continued until we were at the living room and the back of his knees hit the couch, making him fall backwards on his ass.

I leaned in, making him start to crawl back, and I pointed at my eyes with two fingers before using those same fingers to point at him.

Message delivered, I turned back around, looked at Mrs. Johnson, and said, “Do you have a recent picture of your daughter you can give me?”

She blinked at me a couple times, before snapping out of it and reaching into the purse she was still carrying, her hand coming out with a physical photograph of a young girl that looked more like her mother than her father.

The photo showed ‘Toph’ to be a fairly pretty young Chinese-American human girl, with her mother’s pitch-black hair tied back in a tight bun with two locks of hair framing her face. The photo didn’t show much of her body, but she looked to be rather waifish. She had bottle-green eyes like her father and a button nose.

It was a little awkward when I got to the front door and realized it was one of those doors you need a key to go through both ways so I had to wait for another resident to leave, but I think I made my statement.

*+*+*

Since the mall was the closest place, I went there first.

The building was a behemoth at seven stories, plus three basement levels dedicated to holding the cars of shoppers and employees alike. Tall glass windows occupied most of all the outer walls, allowing for a nice view of the park on one side and a less nice view of buildings, alleyways and streets on the others.

Unfortunately, I decided to be thorough and start from the bottom in my search there, so even that much of a view was denied to me for a while.

The spell I was using to help me look for Toph was basically like the astral equivalent of a radar, sending out a small, barely-noticeable wave of mana out and letting me know what astral signatures it hit within a range of about five hundred meters.

By adding a few modifications and focusing on the folded square of poster in my pocket, I managed to narrow down the return information and doubled the range to tell me if Toph was within a range of a thousand meters from me when I cast the spell. It wasn’t too draining, besides.

Unfortunately the bubble of awareness didn’t reach through solid plascrete, though it did manage to go around, so while I could search a whole floor with only a few uses of the spell if I divided each floor by sixths and searched methodically, I wasn’t searching multiple stories at once.

What followed was a pretty boring twenty minutes of walking around the subterrenean parking lot, then a bothersome forty minutes spent walking around the crowded mall, firing off the spell as discreetly as possible.

It wasn’t without incident. I was at about the fifth story of the building, increasingly certain that I wasn’t going to find Toph there, when my eyes happened to catch my reflection on a shop’s display window.

More speciffically, my eyes caught on to the two members of mall security whispering between each other and pointing at me.

Doing away with subtlelty, I looked over my shoulder and peered into the astral. As I figured, one of them shone with the intensity of an Awakened individual.

“Damn,” I whispered, quickening my pace towards the escalators, brushing past a few people. There was a final sixth of the floor to look for, but that didn’t seem to be an option anymore.

If it turns out she was in that last sixth, I’m going to be fragging pissed, a distant part of my brain thought, even as the rest of me rushed to think of a way out of it. Looking around, I spotted the bathrooms. I didn’t think the mall cop wouldn’t follow me into the ladies’ room, but...

Okay, how did that formula go? I asked myself, growing increasingly frantic as I neared the top of the escalator. Okay, okay, so there was the light refraction equation, and then... Frag it, frag it, frag it! You’re a chaos mage, Feyden, so just... improvise!

I filled my mind with what I remembered of the equation, then tried to recall the feeling of attention falling around me. Of standing behind someone, unseen. Of knowing someone’s distraction allowed you to act with impunity.

I walked away from the bathrooms and pulled a gloved hand out of my pocket, making a small twist of my fingers. Mostly just for personal effect and a flair for the dramatic, but it was a bit of a mnemonic technique to help me focus.

My vision blurred for a moment and someone almost crashed into me, but it wasn’t until I turned around and watched a blurry figure that kinda resembled the security officer look around and walk right past me, away from the bathrooms.

A relieved laugh escaped me, and I made my way to the bathrooms, avoiding touching anyone so as to not risk cracking the spell or alerting them that there was an invisible individual in their midst.

The mall being as crowded as it was, I almost brushed quite a few people, making my heartbeat stutter, but I made it to the bathroom.

And then I realized I’d gotten into the men’s bathroom, on account of all the blurry people standing in front of white stuff on the wall.

Could’ve lived a long, happy life that didn’t involve learning that trids hadn’t lied about men actually peeing where everyone can see them, I bitterly thought, even as I inspected the stalls and found one that had its door mostly closed. I slipped in as fast as possible and locked the door behind me, dismissing my cloaking spell.

“Huh?” someone said. After a few terrified moments, nothing happened.

Thank God for metahumanity’s tendency to rationalize weird stuff, even in the Sixth World.

Once I was sure nobody was alerted to me, I took off my jacket and held it in my mouth, going on to remove my hoodie and tie it around my waist.

I put the jacket back on over my shirt, looked at my hand, and sighed.

Illusions are... complicated, from the viewpoint of hermetic magic. For example, the invisibility spell consisted of an equation about bending light around you, another equation about altering the first equation so you get light in your eyes and can see, another equation about not letting your pupils be visible...

It’s a mess. There’s so many variables for just the standard stuff that doing something unique requires an insane amount of planning and thinking.

Do you know how hard it is to calculate the alterations required to change the color something is? You have grab light, which involves figuring out if it feels like being a particle or a wave at that particular moment, and shake it the right way so it comes across the right color.

... that is, if you’re thinking like a hermetic mage. Which I’d had to do for the previous five years.

... Fox? I thought. Then, deciding I wasn’t being honest enough, I actually whispered, “Fox? I... I know I’ve disappointed you, I’m sorry, but I could use a hand here. Please? For... for the kid?”

I waited for a moment. Seconds ticked by, one by one, and I almost started to believe his silence was my answer.

That fear disappeared. Not for any external factor, it’s more like the anxiety that tends to hound at me was drained away, leaving me with a void that was soon filled with an easygoing confidence I tend to lack in most aspects of my life.

Almost without my imput, guided by a powerful hunch of what to do, I twirled my fingers in a circular motion, and I watched red extend through my jacket, starting from the sleeves. Upon reaching my t-shirt, it was dyed white, which extended downwards until it touched my pants and the hoodie tied around my legs, both of which turned blue.

Feeling a buzzing against my skin, specifically my head, I removed my gloves to find that my skin was quite a few shades lighter from it’s usual dark-ish brown, and my nails were painted orange, the color of my mentor’s coat.

I flushed the toilet, unlocked the door and walked out, heading straight to leave the bathroom. I caught my reflection on the way out, and saw that I’d been turned into a blonde male elf with a whispy little goatee, blue eyes and thick-rimmed glasses with no lenses.

... okay, so Fox is happy enough with me to help but still made enough to make me look like some hipster douche, I noted with a flat look. Good to know. Note to self: rely on no one.

I was almost through the door when a deep voice called out, “Hey!”

I froze, and turned around to find a heavily-tattooed bald ork wearing a black tanktop glaring down at me.

“U-Um, yes?”

“... ain’t you gonna wash your hands?” he asked.

“... uh,” I blinked, then I blinked again, then I nodded, “O-Oh, y-yeah, right, sorry. I-I’m... distracted.”

He huffed. “Too distracted for basic hygene?”

I blinked again, then just headed to the sink and gave my hands a quick rub under cold water before heading back to the door.

Behind me, I heard the ork mutter, “Didn’t even use soap. Fraggin’ savage.”

“Seriously,” someone answered, “And people wonder why the world’s a mess.”

I left the bathroom slightly humilliated and reassessing my assumptions about how much men care about personal hygene.

*+*+*

Disappointingly, I failed to find any hint of Toph in the mall, but at least I managed to leave and retake my normal appearance in a discrete alleyway without issue, just before the Drain started hitting me too hard and making my headache go from ‘buzzing’ to ‘pounding’.

Once my clothes were back in order and I was back to amber eyes, black skin and auburn hair, I inspected my list of places she frequented.

The high school... Toph probably wasn’t staying there.

It wasn’t impossible for her to have been staying at the mall during the day and then sleeping somewhere else at night, but it hadn’t felt all that likely. The high school was straight up out, but it mightpresent me with opportunity to ask some people close to her about where she might be staying.

Granted... I was having a hard time thinking of how to do that without coming across as a total fragging creep.

‘Yes, hello children,’ I imagined myself saying, ‘I am just here to ask invasive questions about who here is friends with whom and whether or not anyone knows where Toph has decided to run away to. If you’d happen to know if she recently developed supernatural powers, that’d be swell.’

Alternatively, there was the iron mill. It was a little distant, and my guess was that Toph had left in a panic if she’d left behind her laptop and all those clothes on the floor of her closet, so I wasn’t sure if she would’ve thought to grab some money and a pass for the subway in the process.

Still... it was a pretty obvious move. Maybe... she would’ve?

The thought ocurred to me that maybe I should have asked her parents for personality traits, habits, stuff like that. And if I asked it now...

Dresden had given me the job with the expectation that I would prove competent. Any admission of weakness could result in him not hiring me, making tracking down Damien infinitely harder. But what if Toph was in danger? She’d been missing for weeks by then.

I frowned, took a deep breath, and came to a decision.

I would wait until night and take as much as another day for this investigation. A lot of ‘realistic’ trid shows had told me that detective work was a whole lot of waiting around, so being patient felt like the correct route.

I would wait until night, then I would break into a high school. From there, I would break into some unfortunate teenager’s apartment. And from there, hopefully I’d have a better idea of where I could find Toph.

... really moving up in the world, Feyden. I thought, picking a random direction and walking towards it.

Hopefully I’d find a nice coffee house to kill time in while I waited for a better time to commit felonies in.

=][=

Author’s Note: I’m really hoping that Hex’s lack of experience came across here. She’s new at this, she’s taking the first bumbling steps in being a runner, and that’s gonna involve fucking up something fierce a couple of times.