#shadowstuck

This was the main prompt that caught my attention, to be honest. Here’s a sketch page just hashing out ideas. Below are some more thoughts about the roles and characters each Rose and Kanaya play in a Shadowrun/cyberpunk universe.

Blurbs :

Rose [SEER] was a high potential magic recruit, rushed through the Ares Firewatch academy. Present at the Wilds Lab breach, during her first duty watch, Seer was the sole survivor of the event. Afterwards she was moved to special projects within the Ares Magi-Tech division. Aspected several times, she’s become a dedicated scry, working on high level Corporate Espionage and Material Retrieval.

Within the universe Magic and High tech doesn’t interact well. Despite this, Ares Magi-Tech was able to develop a cybernetic implant that allows her to see via fiber-optic camera, through a a fiber-optic cable. This would allow Seer to cast spells from around corners, or have the camera carried by a small drone, preventing line of sight on her person.

At some point in recent years she departed Ares to join the shadows, selling her abilities to whatever Mr. Johnson could spare the cash.

Kanaya [INSECTRA] grew up on the streets of the Emerald City, where she used her large stature, percussive diplomacy, and a budding talent with electronics to settle many disputes. By the late 2070s she had established herself as ‘Buzz’, a competent combat decker working the shadows in mostly street level ventures.

After a dumbluck during a job, Kanaya was able to flip paydata for semi-retirement. Dropping off of the grid, effectively, She focused on sharpening her skills and bought some out of the way property. A few years later she reemerged as INSECTRA; a matrix specialist, drone pilot, and all around info broker. It’d be years before anyone saw her outside of her Matrix icon.

On the Matrix, INSECTRA appears to be a large 6-armed insect, made of emeralds, pearls, and gilded wings. A crown hovers above her large angular head, with the eyes being the only portion appearing organic. When attacking, cracking, or otherwise being hostile on the matrix INSTECTRA’s top most arms will reach out and physically tear away at her target. The Lowest most arms are always busily interacting with AR interfaces. The Central arms maintain a serene mirrored gesture.

No one pursued you away from the scene of the heist; you’d wager that the Yaks and Lone Star must’ve ended up butting heads, giving you three plenty of time to disappear. All-in-all, a clean extraction, just the way you liked it. You could already taste the second half of your fifteen thousand nuyen paycheck. All that was left was to make the handoff.

Mr. Johnson was terse with you when you called to announce the successful acquisition of his package, the technomancer named Dirk. He directed you to an address in Tacoma, the meeting to occur in several hours. This left you with some time to kill.

Dirk, for his part, seemed to be taking getting passed around like some burnout’s deepweed pipe in stride. He spent the drive to Tacoma sprawled out in the backseat of Mindfang’s bullet-hole pocked Eurocar, idly flipping through stations on the radio with his fragged-up brain.

“Hey, drekhead, will you pick one and stick with it?” Mindfang shouted at him after ten solid minutes of his indecision.

“Man, it’s like Springsteen said: fifty channels and nothing on.”

He settled on a classic hip-hop station in the middle of a non-stop block of your faaaavorite aughts hits! Mindfang snorted as the opening lines of Good Morning started pounding out of the car’s speakers. Wake up Mr. West, Mr. West, Mr. by-his-self-he-so-impressed...

“You listen to this grandpa drek?”

“Kanye,” he said, tapping a finger in time with the beat, “is a tiny god, you fragging philistine.”

“Yeah, if you’re ninety-five years old and start sentences with ‘back in my day.’”

“It’s better than listening to a bunch of cranky losers holler about how hard it is that the girl they like doesn’t notice them while they do violence to their guitars,” you interjected.

“Oh blow me, Redglare, Malcolm Tent shreds and you know it.”

“The only thing shredded was my ear drums.”

The rest of the trip proceeded uneventfully, Dirk maintaining veto power over the music to prevent Mindfang from inflicting any of her godawful taste on you. Eventually, as you neared your destination, she pulled off into the parking lot of a Stuffer Shack. It was well after midnight, with still nearly an hour until the meet, and the only other soul in sight was a BTL-head reclining against the wall, lost in his own private fantasy life being piped directly to his senses from the chip wedged into his brain.

“You want anything?” Mindfang said to you.

“I could stand a bite to eat. What about you, Mister Package?”

“Soycaf. Black. Leave the car running; they’re playing Kendrick next.”

The interior of the ‘Shack was equally deserted. The scrawny, pimpled young ork manning the counter gave the two of you a jaundiced look as you entered.

“Welcome to Stuffer Shack, home of the five nuyen mexisoymelt combo. Let me know if I can help you in any way,” he recited in a tone of voice suggesting that there were literally thousands of things he’d rather do than help you, then returned his attention to his commlink.

While Mindfang filled two cups with toxic-smelling soycaf, you busied yourself among the racks of brightly-colored candies, snatching up a fistful of tooth decay in a bag.

“Seriously?” she said, eyeing the gummy worms and licorice you dumped onto the counter. “What are you, eight?”

“I don’t tell you not to cram yourself full of creepy machinery, kindly return the favor and do not tell me not to cram myself full of artificial colors and sweeteners.”

“Y’know those give you cancer, right?”

“Dear me, you’re right! I could die before my time! What a terrible risk!”

The ork resentfully slouched over and started ringing you up. Mindfang added a pack of Kowloon Kings cigarettes to the order.

“Speaking of cancer,” you snickered.

“Bite me,”

“You keep making these invitations that I do not think you really want me to follow up on.”

You clicked your teeth at her. Like those of most trolls, they were sharp.

“Jesus, get a room,” the ork muttered, somehow managing to bag your purchases in a resentful fashion.

“Excuse me? You feel like making a contribution? Speak up!” Mindfang snarled, leaning over the counter at him.

The ork remained unimpressed. Given the state of the neighborhood, you were probably far from the first sketchy customers of the night.

“Down girl,” you said, shoving the bag of candy and cigarettes into her hands. “Please excuse her, sir, she’s very poorly socialized.”

“Thank you for choosing Stuffer Shack, please come again,” he recited as the automatic doors slid open for you, letting you back out into the night. “Or, like, don’t. Whatever.”

Mindfang passed Dirk his soycaf through the window, then leaned against the car and sparked a cigarette.

“So,” she said, “is it just me or do you smell something wrong with this job?”

A gummy worm twirled away between your lips.

“I always operate under the assumption that there will be unforeseen complications,” you replied, “but yes. Something smells wrong here.”

She blew a plume of smoke from her nose and took a sip from her soycaf.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never complain about being well-compensated, but thirty thousand for this run feels like too much money for something so easy.”

“Do you think the Johnson means to try and stiff us?”

“Among other things. It’d be pretty poor form, but getting ahold of a technomancer with no witnesses might be worth the hit to his reputation.”

“We are, after all, deniable assets. Very few people would miss a couple of Shadowrunners.”

Dirk’s window rolled down.

“Hey,” he said, “hate to interrupt, but I couldn’t help but overhear. I’ve had Hal crawling the corporate grids and—”

“Who’s Hal?” Mindfang interrupted.

“Lil’ Hal, my sprite. A semi-autonomous entity made of pure Matrix-stuff. Try not to think too hard about it, you’ll just give yourself a headache.”

“And you named it ‘Hal?’” you said.

“What, not a Kubrick fan? Anyway, point being, he’s been scraping corp chatter and there’s definitely something popping off. Mitsuhama’s pissed, obviously, but there’s also some movement happening with Saeder-Krupp. Assets of the non-deniable kind being mobilized, that sort of thing. Nothing specific, a lot of it is encrypted, but if you’re worried about a double-cross you might not be too far off the mark.”

Mindfang ground her cigarette out on the ground.

You had to admit, you never thought you’d miss Captor’s decking ability until you found yourself speeding along I-5, strapped into the passenger seat of Mindfang’s Eurocar Westwind, doing eighty miles an hour alongside an automated semi-trailer truck while Mitsuhama’s Yakuza thugs took potshots at you from behind. Thirty seconds of hacking could have resolved this situation before it spiraled out of control, but unfortunately Captor wasn’t here. Instead, all you had to back you up was Mindfang, a lunatic razorgirl with an itchy trigger finger and more chrome than was, strictly speaking, healthy. 

You’d had better partners before, is what you were saying.

“Stop shooting holes in my fragging ride!” Mindfang screamed as bullets spanged off the chassis. She tapped a command into the car’s center console, locking it to Seattle’s navigational grid, then pulled her Ruger and leaned out the driver’s side window to snap off a few shots at your pursuers. 

“How do we stop the truck?” you shouted over the sound of gunfire.

“Beats me!” she shouted back. 

A full automatic burst from the Yaks drove her inside the car. 

“Dammit! They’re on us like ugly on an ork!” she said, ejecting the spent casings from her revolver all over the already-cluttered interior of the car and driving a speed-loader home.

The semi loomed large in your senses. 

“Keep them busy,” you said as you unfastened your seatbelt.

“The hell are you planning?”

“Something really stupid.”

Mindfang obliged, sending shots downrange while you opened the passenger door and, ever so carefully, pulled yourself out onto the hood of her car. Civilian traffic was giving you a wide berth, leaving you, the semi, and the Yaks with all the highway you needed to hash out your differences. 

There came a screeching of tires as one of the Yakuza vehicles pulled level with Mindfang’s car. 

‘Aw, dammit!” She gave you a severe look through the windshield. “You got this?”

“I got this!” you shouted back, over the wind.

“Alright, let’s get paid!”

She slammed another speed-loader into her Ruger, then unbuckled herself, checked at a glance that the Westwind was locked to its current speed and heading, then slid over to the passenger side and launched herself out the door at the Yaks. She hit them with the loud slam of metal meeting metal, followed by the shriek of her monoblades opening their vehicle like a tin of sardines.

You stopped paying attention to her antics at this point, focusing instead on the broad flank of the semi-trailer before you. Your package waited inside, distant as the moon despite being only a few meters away. Focusing, you called up the Dragonslayer and gave him a piece of your mind.

You’ve never screwed me before, you thought as you loosed your sword and prepared to step into thin air. Don’t start now.

Taking your dikoted blade in an underhanded grip, you leapt, arms pinwheeling wildly for a terrible instant before your hand found purchase at the intersection of the trailer roof and its side. Your sword punched through the aluminum side, giving you some semblance of security. A burst of fire from within the trailer stitched a line of bullet holes towards you, the guards inside reacting to the sudden appearance of a sword in their midst. Heaving with all your might, you propelled yourself upwards onto the top of the trailer.

A crackle of static, followed by Mindfang’s voice, came from the microbead in your ear. 

“They wing you?” she said.

“I don’t think so,” you replied.

“Good. There’s a van coming up on us. I think it may be Yak heavy artillery, so do whatever you’re gonna do and do it quick. I’ll try and hold their attention, but no promises.”

Risking a look over the side of the trailer, you watched Mindfang leap back to her Westwind from the car full of now extremely dead Yaks, doing a perfect Dukes of Hazzard in through the open window. The derelict Yakuza car continued plowing along on autopilot, and would do so until its battery ran out or Lone Star took steps to secure it. 

You took stock of your situation — there were armed escorts inside the truck that would need dealing with. Non-lethal dealing, you preferred not to kill people who were only doing their jobs if at all possible. And of course, there was the question of how to gain entrance.

You grinned to yourself as you struck four swift strokes with your sword, cutting a hole in the roof through which you then dropped. That problem, at least was easily solved. The two guards inside presented slightly more challenge, but in the end they turned out to not exactly be Red Samurai material and surrendered eagerly after you lopped off the barrels of their guns.

Having zip-tied the guards’ hands behind their backs, you turned your attention to the third inhabitant of the trailer, who had watched your entrance from his seat on the floor. He was a human male with the kind of hair that came either from tremendous amounts of product or an extended stay in a wind tunnel, a pair of triangular mirror shades over his eyes, and a heavy electronic collar fitted around his neck, on which a red light blinked at regular intervals in a hostile manner. He smelled... wrong, somehow. Not bad in any particular way, just off. Like a room full of old, disused computers.

“’Sup,” he said, conversationally, with a faint Texan twang.

“Mister Package, I presume?” you replied.

“Guess that would be me, unless you just broke into the waaaay wrong autotruck.” 

Mindfang’s voice came over your microbead again.

“They’ve got a fragging rigger!”

You heard a pair of small rotorcraft pass overhead, followed by rapid gunfire. A rigger meant drones, and drones meant that your life was now considerably more difficult, as well as maybe considerably shorter. The squealing of tires that followed, combined with the intermittent bangs of Mindfang’s Ruger and the profanity coming over your microbead, suggested that your partner was having some problems dealing with them.

“Trouble?” said the package. 

“You could call it that.”

“Sounds like trouble. Might be able to help you out with that, but unfortunately,” he tapped his collar, “if I try anything cute, this thing explodes and messes me all kinds of up.”

“If I get it off, what can you do?”

He waggled his fingers at you. 

“Spooky, spooky magic.”

“I doubt half the criminal element in this city would be out chasing some random mage.”

“’Spose it’ll have to be a surprise then.”

You weighed your options. There weren’t many to speak of.

The collar clattered to the floor, its locking mechanism sliced neatly through. The package rubbed his neck and rose to his feet. 

“Damn, how much to do my sideburns too?”

“We can talk rates later.”

“Fair enough. Hey, offhand, when they sent you on this run, did they tell you this truck was a Faraday cage?”

Your grin faded. If he was telling the truth, then the hole you just cut in the roof had broken some kind of containment.

“They did not.”

“Nice, I love happy accidents."

The back doors of the truck suddenly flew open of their own accord, laying the vista of the current conflict open to you. A little ways down the highway was the Yak rigger’s van, skulking around just far enough away to make it hard for Mindfang to hit with her Ruger. Above, a pair of rotodrones was coming in for another attack run.

“Alright, what's this guy rocking?” said the package, stepping to the doors. “Two whirlybirds and a pedowagon slaved to a piece of hot Radio Shack garbage, flashing a wireless signal all over town like a saucy little minx. This is some real babytown frolics up in here.”

His fingers twitched.

“Your ride is drek,” he said.

The van’s brakes locked, sending it skidding across two lanes and almost into the median.

“Your rig is drek.”

The rotodrones switched course and plunged headlong for the van.

“Your toys are drek.”

The drones opened up with their machine guns, tearing the van apart, before crashing into it and exploding.

“And now your drek is ruined.”

You took a moment to try to process everything that had just happened.

“What the hell was that?!” Mindfang hollered over the microbead, neatly summarizing your own current state of mind.

“I don’t want to speak rashly,” you replied, slowly, “but I think we may have just sprung a technomancer.”