Scenes from the Shadows

Story Post #1 for May 2016

Universe: Shadowrun

Word count: 5,869

Tags: Human, Orc, Cyberpunk

This month’s story post is a strange one, so buckle up guys.

It might not surprise many of you to find out that I'm a huge RPG fan, and that I've been playing roleplaying games forever, since I was like 12. One of the games I enjoyed playing a lot was Shadowrun, a dystopian sci-fi game set in the 'Real world' after the return of magic, the rise of mega-corporations, and the fall of most of the world’s governments as roughly a quarter of the world’s population was transformed into elves, dwarves, orcs, and trolls.

Players take on the role of Shadow Runners, augmented or magical people who live on the wrong side of what’s left of the “law”, doing all the dirty work of the great and powerful. They might hunt down magical beasts to gather ritual components, sabotage rival corporations, kidnap potential ‘new hires’, kill rivals, or go bounty hunting. A friend of mine put it this way. Runners are professional “Dicks with guns” for hire.

Basically, Shadowrun is one of the original gritty cyberpunk settings which were popular in the 80's, and I love it.

(If this all sounds familiar to you, it should. The very first story I posted to this Patreon is basically set in the Shadowrun universe. https://www.patreon.com/posts/story-double-3594601)

A few years ago, I ran a very long running Shadowrun game for a few friends, and sometimes I would write little short fictions for them to read before a game, or when we had a long period of downtime, and I needed to bridge the gap from one game to the next. The scenes all take place during a time in which the core group had broken up and gone their separate ways, each runner thinking that they had seen the last of the others, before getting pulled back in...

I've collected some of those stories here, in a series of narration vignettes that won’t make a whole lot of sense story wise, but I hope you enjoy the imagery and descriptions they invoke.

You might consider them narration for a play that was never finished.

***

This first scene is directed at Jade, a dangerous and subtle woman who is a powerful street mage. Able to wield magic, she was the magical guns of the group, combining subtle illusion magic with the white hot flame that can shatter the soul.

***

Stormy Horizons

You wake up before your alarm goes off, well rested and relaxed.

A full night's sleep uninterrupted by gunshots or commcalls still doesn't feel natural, but that's what your life is like now. You rise, stretch, and shuffle to the shower. As you bathe, you close your eyes and mentally probe the wards and protective spirits of the high rise apartment building you live in. Fully staffed and owned by the megacorp Horizon, you get a heavy stipend for supplying magical security for the building. It’s more than enough to pay for the apartment, and your morning shower provides the perfect moment of serenity to reinforce them.

The wards are in place, untouched by anything during the night, and you reinforce them. You greet the four spirits bound to the building as you dry off, and each of the beast spirits, pack of spirit tigers led by a truly giant white tiger, bring you idle gossip about your neighbors as you dress.

You brush your now long hair, braiding and pulling it back, doing it up in a bun and using two chop sticks to hold the braids in place. The long hair conceals the carefully placed trodes on the back of your neck that let your brain tap into your commlink directly. You never used to wear trodes, especially on a daily basis, but now they are a standard part of your day. With an idle gesture you tint the hair a dark black for today. Makeup is a snap with magic, and you don the latest trend in fashion that has swept through the office, a cross between a kimono and a pant suit. The outfit is a deep red, trimmed in black, and is so alluring and slinky that you would easily turn heads on the street.

As you exit the bathroom, you pick up your commlink and with a thought, use your commlink to untint the huge floor to ceiling windows that form one side of your apartment. You squint reflexively, expecting bright morning sunlight to flood your spacious one bedroom apartment.

Instead, it's raining heavily outside, and all you can see is dark, roiling clouds laced with bright lightning passing your 30th floor window. You set your sound system to rebroadcast the sound of the rain and thunder outside as you walking into your living room, mentally turning on the television to hear the morning news. The television screen appears on the window, dark storms swirling behind the anchor woman as you sit at a table, facing the stormy horizon of Seattle, the Emerald City.

The table is jet black, your reflection looking back up at you as a hot cup of coffee is set beside your hand along with a knife and fork. Then the automated chef sets in front of you a hot plate of perfectly cooked eggs, thick juicy bacon, and fluffy pancakes with syrup and melting butter on top.

You smile and nod absently in thanks, though the robotic butler doesn't respond, it merely whirs away.

Then with a soft jingle of a bell and almost demanding 'Mow', your cat leaps up onto the shiny black table top. The slinky and svelte orange tabby cat sits there calmly, appearing for a moment to be two cats, one the mirror of the other in the shiny black surface of the table. Without a word, the butler sets a plate of wet cat food down in front of Hexi.

Hexi isn't your cat, exactly, he's just 'the cat'. His appearance on your doorstep five months ago in a shipping crate along with your things sent you into a panic, as you tried desperately to figure out how someone would have found you and sent the damn cat from your old place to you. You looked frantically for a data trail, and found nothing.

Instead, as the apartments automated machines were hacked and subverted, you realized who was doing it. Hexi, a name you took from the user name the feline gave himself on the local nodes, wasn't just a cat. He was a new type of para-critter, the orange and fluffy version of the new Technomancers running around hacking the planet with their brains. Or at least you think he is. You can't find any other way to explain what's happened to the computers. He didn't want anything more than milk, cat food, and a comfortable chair to sleep in, and he’s attacked viciously anyone attempting to hack your home's node, even warning you and the building's tech support team via the Matrix. It's the kind of warning system worth a can of tuna fish each day.

Breakfast done, email read, and cat petted you stand and walk out the door, not even bothering with an umbrella. Your GridGuide auto driving car will be waiting in the basement to take you directly to the studio's covered parking lot, avoiding every drop of rain falling on the Emerald City. The only person who will see you in your beautiful red dress is the cat, and he probably doesn't count.

***

The bright and cheerful offices of Horizon Pictures is so well lit and full of friendly people who smile and wave hello that you keep expecting to be ambushed at any moment. Even after six months of working here, the reaction of the corporate citizens of Horizon baffles you. "Morning Jade!" they call to you, and you wave back to them, smiling genuinely. You pass a plate of fresh made brownies, and are suckered by the secretary into taking one. They are delightful, and she smiles at you as you eat it daintily with a napkin. You are, after all, in costume already.

Smiling still feels weird. No one in the shadows smiled. Oh, the dwarf Gavin did when holding down the trigger of his Areas assault rifle, but people never smiled just because they were happy to see you.

Horizon citizens smile. All. The. Time. You did so at first to blend in, getting good ratings from your new coworkers. The level of surveillance equipment in this building would have given Specs a heart attack by now, all those people watching and rating each other on the Horizon social network.

Now, your smiles happens without thinking because you actually enjoy being here. The realization you were actually looking forward to going into an office, for Work, was shocking. These people had somehow, by dint of sheer cheerful relentlessness, worn down your gritty, jaded heart. They actually liked seeing you. You actually like seeing them. It took you some time to deal with that idea.

Today, you're walking through the office section of the studio out of habit alone, just to say good morning to everyone before you're due on set. You even detour past one of the manager’s offices for a few minutes, just so that you can say hello to Greg. He's a producer on several television shows, and he smiles broadly at you.

"Hello sweetie," he says, giving you a friendly kiss on the cheek. "How is my star villain today?" He says it playfully, his thin face is smiling. Greg doesn't work in front of a camera, he doesn't have the face for it, but his face isn't why you started seeing him. His charm did that.

You chat for a bit, and he fills you in on your role for the day. A show he produces is in need of a mage again, and you’re playing a villainous and mysterious woman in red that ruins the plans of the protagonists. You aren't even sure what supernatural bunk the show is based on, you only know that a few weeks ago they needed a villain, you were wearing this dark red, slinky dress, and they picked you to step in because of the happy, yet cackling laugh you gave at a colleague’s joke while helping with the makeup.

Now, you are "The Woman in Red", the new behind the scenes villainess who ruins the hard boiled cops day from time to time. It's an on screen role, and your illusion magic makes it possible for you to play the ever changing sorcerous without revealing your identity to the world. It's thrilling, fun, and amusing as hell to watch the Matrix buzz every time you show up on one of the various silly adventure, drama, or crime shows that Horizon produces.

You suspect Greg is having the writers work up an actual plan for your character, but you aren't sure.

Terry, the slender Mexican mage who plays the lead mage role and did the shows effects before you joined, nods in approval at your look today. He's been your contact with the mages here, and you're shocked how good these people are at manipulation and charismatic magics. He's taught you a great deal. You've in turn taught him what being a real combat mage means.

He likes you, and you suspect would make a pass on you if you hadn't taken Greg up on his offer of a date first. You probably wouldn't date him however, since you know his little secret, and an orcish brother in jail that his family had shunned him. Terry didn't, he paid for his brother to receive treatment, but his new corporate life didn't allow for a junkie brother to tag along. You put Terry in touch with Gavin, who is living on the south side of town with a gang who could protect the boy.

Not that you have time to ponder how that all worked out, as the director shouts at you all to move into your places. The day has begun.

It’s time to ruin some do-gooders day.

***

The perspective now shifts to Gavin, a dwarven hacker whose decided that the corporate life isn’t for him, and has joined a gang called the Ragers, a neighborhood defense gang made up of orcs and trolls, as a way to lay low in the slums.

***

Raging Loyalty

A commcall wakes you wake up in the middle of the night, or maybe it's the afternoon. You aren't sure. The curtains in your room are blackout ones after all. A wall clock tells you that it's 2:34, but that doesn't help. It's probably night time, since your aren't alone. You grunt and push the heavy, sleeping orc off your chest and sit up on the end of your bed. Robert 'Thrum' Harris doesn't even stir in his sleep, he just rolls over and sprawls across the big bed. He's naked of course; Thrum always ends up naked when he brings a six pack over to 'watch the game'. You shake your head, your neat beard parting in a grin. The orc is built like a truck and twice your body mass, but he gives the best head.

When you first moved in, putting you in a room with a troll sized bed had been a joke. Now, you're pretty sure the joke was on the Ragers.

You connect your commlink to a floating vidcam drone, careful to keep the shot neck up, and step away from your bed so Thrum won't be showing off for whoever is calling. You see the name 'Karg' glowing in the lower left of your vision, and you gesture to bring his call up. The young, nervously smiling face appears in a window. "Hey Gav, I wake you?"

"Nah, I'm good," you rumble brushing a hand through your hair to get your bangs out of your eyes. "What's up?" The orc glances off camera as someone nearby shouts, and your ears automatically tune into the sounds of two people, a man and a woman, fighting in the background. You don't have to even turn your LinguaSoft translator on to understand the gist of the broken Spanish and raised voices. "Your folks are fighting again. Which one’s drunk this time?" you ask.

Karg frowns. His Hispanic skin, even with the natural hint of green all orcs have, isn’t enough to hide the red flush of embarrassment. Being a high school dropout and an orc meant living at home, even if you're 21 and your folks are nuts. "Both. Can I..."

"Yah, yah," you say wryly. "But you're on the sofa tonight got it?"

***

Karg shows up about an hour later. You unlock the door to your suite, the music from down stairs echoing in from the hallway. He greets you with a friendly hug despite you being naked, and when the door closes, he gives a brief kiss as a thank you. He heads for the couch on one side of the studio style apartment blushing like mad when he sees Thrum sprawled out still naked as the day he was born. On any other night Karg would probably be in his place, but within 10 minutes the smaller orc is passed out on the ancient sofa.

You don't need any more sleep, so you prop yourself up against the wall in bed and stay up coding, and sorting through the security logs for the various nodes and servers you manage for the gang. Your agent programs have stopped several intrusions from kids messing around on the network, one of the houses borked up their cable trying to hack a porno channel, and there's another 100¥ in the account you keep to fund the wireless service. Another couple of locals in the neighborhood have signed up to get onto the little corner of the Matrix you now manage. You are basically running a little neighborhood ISP by networking the nodes in each of the gang owned, or at least occupied, buildings. The Ragers use it as a part of the gang's protection ratchet, working as small time security for the shops and residences around their neighborhood.

Except, now that protection isn’t just a lie, because you're actually providing actual network security. The Ragers network is now the most secure connection to the wider Matrix available in these dock side projects. Seven streets wide and a four blocks long, the Ragers turf isn’t pretty, and it isn’t nice, but for now its home.

You scratch at your chest hair idly as you lay in bed, Thrum's naked body curled around your legs now. Your gaze idly rests on Karg. The young man has his shirt off and his armored coat folded up under his head like a pillow. That's another, very real, piece of protection you provided to the Ragers. You were shocked to find out how few in the gang had bullet proof coats or reliable guns.

You can almost understand how the leadership let it happened. There are over a hundred guys in the gang, and they don’t have a lot of cash. Their corner of the Seattle slums is too poor and too unimportant for anybody to own something like body armor or a decent weapon. HardRain had a talk with you about possibly funding some enterprises, but instead you put them in contact with Lady Jade for a reliable source of gear. 15k nuyen later, and the whole gang is sporting armored coats in black and grey. You also got rid of the Saturday night specials everyone carried, the damn things were as dangerous to the boys firing them as their targets and you weren’t gonna get shot in the back somebody who was supposed to be on your side, especially by accident. You replaced them with Ares Predator pistols and a commlink that isn’t going to fry if somebody looks at it funny.

That kind of gear goes a long, long way to building up a person’s rep. In some cases, you’ve spent more money on these gangers than anyone else ever has. When they found out you could patch people up, the Ragers start sending guys who got wounded to you for medical help. You dealt with the ones you could, and brought the rest to Doc Tido.

It’s caused a strange shift in the way gang fights go. Nobody wants to get into a fight with another Rager and have to be patched up by Doc Gav, but they’re have also been a lot fewer revenge killings too. There’s no need to start a gang rumble over somebody getting shot if they don’t die. Between the gear, the Matrix work, and your skill with a med kit, you’ve brought a hell of a lot to the Ragers.

And the gang paid you back. Not in money, but they more than paid you back for your nuyen.

They used their new gear to become an actual reliable group instead of an angry bunch of misfits. The neighborhood crime rate dropped like a stone because now they had the kind of respect to keep other gangs, and the Vory, out.

They’ve also amassed you a truly impressive suite of software, swiped and bribed off of dozens of sources from across the city. Skillwire apps, drone runners, linguiasofts, infosofts, and top of the line gaming software, all of it. You even started teaching some of the weaker, but brighter, orcs how to run the Matrix.

And they gave you their friendship. More then just friendship, you think as you pat Thrum's dark hair, an amused smile on your face. You know the signs to flash as you pass your fellow gangers by, know their names and faces, what they like to drink, and you've gotten a serious amount of tail over the last six months.

It started out slow. The first Friday night party after you took up residence in this spare room; nobody would talk to you except Tony and a couple of the guys who had gone on the Rig run. Then you’d fixed the cable box so it actually got some fucking channels, and by the end of week two they were drinking with you like you had been born in the projects with them. Your clean system allowed you to drink half the trolls and all the orcs in the gang under the table, and you found yourself laughing and playing stupid games with them all night. You even made out with one of the bolder orcs, Marco, in the upstairs hallway where nobody could see you. That led to a half dozen more furtive make out sessions, mutual hand jobs with a few of the guys like Thrum, the super macho, super physical, and secretly gay as hell orc with his head in your lap.

There are a lot of guys like Thrum in the gang. They party, boast, and rock out to Nabu’s punk music, trying to be as gangster and hardcore as they can. They go on and on about how they want to fuck the chicks and whores that are the hangers on of the gang, but by midnight half of them are making out together with their hands in each other’s pants. Once it got around you're not opposed to a little fling, it became an almost nightly thing, and the flop house you call home has become a very strange extended family.

You're providing protection for them too, in a way. The ultra-macho lifestyle the boys in the Ragers live is rough and a lot rougher for somebody who gets labeled as queer. That part baffles you. Half these guys are doing stuff while drunk, but if you catch them sober they won’t admit it.

Early on, one of the trolls who really didn't like dwarves tried to gay bash you when he caught you sleeping with a fellow gang member. You tore of his cyber arm and broke both his knees caps with it. HardRain didn't care, your job is Matrix security and you do that so well it don't matter what or who you do in your spare time. Besides, you took the idiot to Doc Tido and paid to have a real cyberlimb put back on in place of the crude refurb you’d ripped off.

You figure this is all a numbers game really, like prison. Orc mothers have two or three kids at a time, and they're male about 66% percent of the time. That leaves a lot more guys then gals in an orc neighborhood, and it takes a lot to win an orc girl since they can punch as hard as any man. So any guy who gets an orc girl to marry him tends to settle down and become wage-slaves to some corporate entity, leaving a full third of the population out in the cold. The Ragers are where the ones without a girl end up in this neighborhood, and they don’t have a lot of outlets for their urges.

Once you got established, the ones who are actually gay and the nerdy ones interested in computers have ended up hanging out with you. With your help, they're well on their way to being a minor Matrix gang in their own right. HardRain is encouraging that because frankly he wants the gang to grow, and fast, and drug money isn’t going to do that.

An ARO pops up in front of you, a text from Big Tony about an upcoming job. The troll is one of the gang’s top men now, and through him, you've become a senior advisor of sorts. Somebody who gets consulted any time the gang needs to do something big or runs into a runner team. Somebody who can tell Tony if taking a job is a good idea, a bad idea, or an increadibly stupid idea. This is one of those times.

The email is vague, but simple enough. A “Mr. Johnson” needs help “transporting” a newly hired employee from a small airport outside of town to the local offices of the Mitsuhama megacorp without any ‘incidents’ along the way.

Which means that whoever this poor bastard is, he didn’t sign up for his new job voluntarily, and his old employer probably wants him back. There are details in a secured document, should the gang accept the job.

Well, might as well take a look at it. The security on the file is a joke to crack and…

Your blood runs cold as the file opens, and the face of your friend Specs, who you have no seen or heard form since going into hiding six months ago appears.

You’ve called your old team, Jade, Star, and Terry, before BigTony can even has time to send you another text message asking you what you think about the job.

****

This is where the actual Shadowrun game took place, as Jade, Gavin, and the rest of the team regrouped to rescue their friend Specs. The remainder of these scenes are from Specs point of view, after everything goes down.

***

Rain, Rain Go Away

You are wet to the skin. Your clothes cling to your body like a second skin as you sag in a cheap arm chair of a rundown Motel 6, rain hammering on the roof and windows of this second floor rented room.

A gun rests on the arm of the chair. A commlink rests on your knee, the screen glowing in the darkness of the room. Outside lightning flashes and illuminates the room for just a moment. When the darkness returns, all you can see is the dim time clock that your cyber-eyes displays in the lower right corner of your vision.

Across the tiny rented room, Gavin is sprawled out across one of the beds, asleep in his now dry clothes, his gun resting alongside him. The dwarf's sleep regulator meant that if someone burst through the door, he would be up and firing that massive gun before the door even hit the wall.

You never expected to see Gavin again. You'd left all this behind. You had a new life, a new name, a new world. Saeder-Krupp had embraced you, and you were a part of it. Hamburg was... such a different place. Your internal commlink is even still in German language mode.

As you think about it, your commlink brightens the floating ARO screens projected into your vision by that internal commlink. They had faded to mere ghosts after several minutes of disuse as you sat there dumbstruck, but now they glowed brightly again. The evidence is all there laid out in front of you. The money transfers, the communications, it’s all there. You know what happened. You now know all the sorted details of how you got to this run down little hotel in the barrens outside Seattle from your nicely furnished apartment in Hamburg, Germany.

The man who bought you, the Johnson, was simply an acquisitions manager for Mitsuhama. He had no idea who you really were; he just knew that you were a bright new ideas man for Saeder-Krupp who was already well augmented for the job of designing nifty new technologies. His commlink had only the details of your extraction on it, but it had enough for you to follow the data trail back.

The contract on you was for just a few thousand dollars, which meant Mitsuhama was getting you for a song. Your cyber eyes alone were worth more than they’d paid to kidnap you. The extraction team was organized by a local fixer in Germany, someone who didn't even know who you were. They’d merely put the Mitsuhama Johnson in touch with the man who sold you out.

Two weeks ago, the first call went out. It went to an underground ‘employment’ forum, a place where corporate raiders like the good Mr. Johnson bought and sold Human Resource assets in the shadows. You were suddenly ‘available for hire’, and it was your team's manager Martin Pross, who made the sales offer. He’d even made the call from his home. Oh, he'd used a burn comm and an encrypted link to do it, but he'd accessed his home node to reach the Matrix at large. A sloppy move, but then he isn't a professional Shadowrunner like you were.

He was just a jealous, racist man who didn't want a orc charming the woman he was obsessed with. Patricia was your design team's secretary. She smiled at you, treated you so normally, as if you weren’t an orc at all. Patricia talked with you, and admired both your mind and body.

You hadn't realized how much a life of shadow running had changed your body from the fat, flabby kid you’d grown up as. Now, thanks to all the time busting heads and jacking your body with science you were , and while no supermodel, Patricia was pretty. She's asked you out on a date for Valentine’s day, just for fun she'd said. You said yes, and the night had been a romantic dinner at a fine restaurant, wine and candle light making you both smile. It was so normal. You wanted that normal life...

Martin didn't though. He had gone into a jealous rage. You hacked his apartment node easily; you seen the video of him on Valentine's day as he drunkenly smashed things. It was so stupid... he betrayed you over nothing. He ruined your first chance at a good life over a woman who didn't even like him...

Now, you are thousands of miles away from that life. Wet and cold in a hotel in the slums of Seattle again, rescued by the criminals you had abandoned for your new life.

The Mitsuhama Johnson who was 'acquiring' you lies dead, blood washed away by the rain, alongside his entire security team. The blog feeds are crawling with stories about the attack by the mysterious "Lady in Red", which people seem to think is a publicity stun by Horizon for one of their television shows. Mitsuhama is in full damage control mode, eagerly covering up the actual, highly illegal events, willing to make the night into something good for Horizon, in favor of pissing off Saeder-Krupp for poaching their talent and risk the wrath of their vengeful Chairman.

The other runner team is gone, taking their charter flight back to Germany. They'd gottne their pay, and ran when your friends started shooting, but you'll always remember the faces of that crew.

The police at home back in Hamburg have found your apartment in shambles after the break in. The runners left Humanis symbols scrawled across the walls and your furnished apartment was trashed. You are listed as a missing person, presumed dead, and the Saeder-Krupp security forces have started an investigation. They will find your fake ID eventually, and going back to Hamburg will be impossible when they do. Perhaps if you contact Saeder-Krupp they can help you somehow. Gavin says he kept your van in storage, salvaging all the tools you had here in The Emerald City, minus justa few he's borrowed in the last six months.

Lightning crashes outside, as the rain of the West Coast continues to fall all around you. The future is nothing but fog now.

************

"Oi!"

The sound cuts through the pounding music, accompanied by a ARO message sent directly to you saying the same thing, and signed with the tag 'Simon'. You glance to the side, and see a whip thin white man sitting in one of the booths off to one side. You duck and push your way through the crowd, heading towards him. The man looks like he's in his late 20's, with bright green hair that falls over his eyes. He's dressed in jeans and a vest over a union jack flag, with buttons along one side of the leather vest. "Well, look at you." The man drawls in a thick British accent. "When I got the message from HR, I didn't actually except you to show up in the flesh."

You shift, shrugging slightly. Your ork frame is a bit too big for the booth, and you don’t want to move and bump the table. The man across from you, Simon Andrews, is lounging back with a leg crossed in front of him. He’s short and wirey enough that the booth is spacious for him, and you barely have room to sit down. "I thought it best to make sure you knew I was serious. I didn't want the company to think I had left willingly."

"Well, I'm guessing you must be on the up and up mate." The young British punk grins at you. "Folks who screw over Master Lofwyr don't just walk back into the dragon's den. You got your proof with you?"

You Shiver a little as Andrews mentions the dragon COE of Saeder-Krupp, and then you skim the data chip across the table to him. He slots it into a hand held commlink with ease. You can see his eyes moving as he watches the video, and you notice that they aren't human eyes. You do a quick Matrix search, and your commlink identifies them as lizard eyes. The man across from you has had some serious biomodification to make those work.

Simon shifts, grinning at the footage of your retrieval, and when he licks his upper lip you notice his tongue is slightly forked at the end. "Well. Well, well, well," the man's grin is a bit infectious. "I guess you really are telling the truth. All right then, Specs, consider yourself to be square with Saeder-Krupp and more importantly, Master Lofwyr. It's a shame you can't go back to work, but the guys who snatched you were professionals. You've been declared dead back in Hamburg." You feel a pang of guilt, as you think about your friends there mourning you. "I'll be in touch. You were flagged as a possible spy by Saeder-Krupp Prime cause of all that nifty cyber, but now we know you're just another shadow. If I need any work done I'll give you a call, aright mate? Till then, feel free to have a drink with me."

The young man's tone is unmistakable lecherous, but you get up and adjust your coat. "I’m afraid I can’t, I need to establish myself here in Seattle again.” You say it as casually as possible, but its heart wrenching to admit that you’ll have to start all over again, “Have a nice night Mr. Andrews."

"You to, Specs." The man holds out his hand, grinning slightly as you shake it, and as your hands touch, you can feel the roughness fo scales on your skin. With a wink, Andrews drops the illusion around himself just for a moment. He's a changeling, a full body one. Simon Andrews is a damn walking, talking lizard, and a pretty canny mage too judging by how quick he puts that illusion back up. Jade will have to keep her eyes open from now on. He palms you a small cred chip and sends you a commlink number as you walk away, heading back into the shadows.

***

That's it for now folks! I hope you enjoyed these scenes, and there will be more in this universe to follow I'm sure.