June 27, 2051

Jump House Bar

Redmond Barrens, Seattle, United Canadian and American States

~~~

It had been almost two years since Sylvia had gone from orphan to homeless vagrant murdering shaman on the run.

Life at the orphanage was bad, but at least there was a consistent roof over your head. At least there was routine. At least there were three square meals a day.

Life on the streets and fringes of Seattle was inconsistent in many ways, and one that, by all rights, should've killed Sylvia. She should've been left as yet another statistic lying on the Seattle pavement, waiting to be sold to a clinic as spare organs. No young, frail teenage girl lacking true knowledge of life in the gutters should've lasted two days, let alone two years.

However, Sylvia had managed, somehow, making judicious use of her magic to fool the unawakened mundanes. Her newfound golden Naga totem gave her spirit visions that helped her learn spells, and also helped track down seemingly useless garbage to use in rituals, helping her to learn more spells. The first fire spell she had casted to obliterate Billy Bones and the female vampire was good, but it also knocked her unconscious from the effort, and left her bleeding heavily from spots she didn't know could bleed. Communing with lesser fire spirits had taught her how to unleash less taxing spells, taking the form of smaller darts and spheres instead of a curtain of fiery death obliterating everything.

Sylvia had also learned Mana-based spells, enabling her to shoot purple-coloured mana lightning instead of fire, which Sylvia figured would be useful in certain situations. More crucially, however, she had figured out an Invisibility spell. It didn't work against heat-sensing cameras or fellow mages, but she intended to research this further, so she could go around the city and not stand out to anyone. For now, it was good enough to hide from anyone who looked like they might ask her questions about Billy Bones.

There were times she felt almost bad for killing him, and felt really bad for killing the lady vampire, but it had to be done. It was her or them, and Sylvia tried her best to convince herself of that. But Seattle's policing corp Lone Star wouldn't see it that way, and that made Sylvia worried.

Of course, for reasons unknown to her, Sylvia had nothing to worry about. Lone Star completely bungled the case, as they tended to do in low-income, low-priority districts like Puyallup. Some digging and questioning from a capable detective might've connected the disappearances with the reported explosion at the abandoned building. Samples of Billy Bones ashes might've been taken from a capable crime scene investigator, along with maybe a hair sample from Sylvia. Instead, Lone Star rooted through the place for an hour after a tactical team cleaned out the remaining ghouls, and lazily chalked the whole thing up to a gas leak. There was no evidence to back this up, but it was easier for the low-rent Puyallup detectives to close the file and move on to more pressing matters. The orphanage staff seemed glad that Billy Bones and his lackeys had run off, and Sylvia's disappearance was barely noticed or cared about. No wanted posters were put up, and the orphanage chalked it up as four beds cleared out to make room for others.

But even with all her magic, and even with no Lone Star officers actually chasing her, life had been hard for Sylvia. She had only 100 nuyen in her pants pocket when she ran from the orphanage. When she woke up for her spell-induced unconsciousness, Sylvia fled from the abandoned building, and knew there was no coming back to the orphanage. She ended up at a Stuffer Shack on the opposite side of Puyallup. Thinking quickly, she bought a bottle of sandy brown hair dye and a small supper, using paper nuyen she had in her pocket from doing daily chores at the orphanage. The last of the nuyen was enough to afford three nights at a coffin hotel, where she cut her black hair short, dyed it, and cried herself to sleep.

Sylvia tried searching for inconspicuous jobs to keep herself afloat, and got a good one with the Tarislar City Inn at first, a well-respected hotel in Puyallup that was always friendly to elves. Sylvia did maid work, and slept fitfully in a makeshift cot in the laundry room after her shifts. But the inn went through a forced staff purge of the SINless within a few months, getting rid of any employees without a System Identification Number (a controversial identification/tracking tag that was becoming increasingly necessary in society, making it very hard to get services like medical care without one.) Sylvia lacked a SIN due to her orphan background, and was fired as a result.

Sylvia then ended up waitressing tables at a bar called The Wanderer. A fairly quiet bar, it averaged about one fight every three hours. One of those fights led to Sylvia getting fired, despite her simply being a bystander, she was somehow blamed for a fracas that nearly got an important customer killed, named "Mr. Johnson". Then another job working as a cashier for a store in the Crime Mall ended when Sylvia almost got swept up by a Lone Star raid. Sylvia escaped, but her employer and several customers were shot at by police, and Sylvia had no idea what happened to them afterwards.

This was enough to cause Sylvia to bail from Puyallup, and look for another place to hide out. Sylvia wasn't sure it was possible to end up in a worse place than Puyallup, but she was dead wrong, as she ended up in the Redmond Barrens. The infamous nuclear-tinted hellhole of a neighborhood had been a black eye to Seattle ever since a nuclear power plant meltdown in 2013, followed by a neighborhood industry collapse in 2029 due to the Matrix Crash, followed by seemingly every other bad thing that could happen.

Since the 2030s, most parts of the Redmond Barrens had degenerated into borderline warzones, with various gangs and solo players fighting for every square of turf they could get their hands on. The wars burned for decades unabated, with Lone Star deeming some areas of the Barrens to be so dangerous that they didn't bother policing them, figuring it was best to let the rats kill each other.

Sylvia stayed around the "safer" parts of Redmond to avoid this. There was a tourist section, as some rich people were so fascinated by the utter disaster Redmond had turned into that they showed up in the place with bodyguards, intending to hit up neighborhood bars and sample the "local colour". It was near the tourist-y section where Sylvia finally found steady employment, getting a lucky gig as a waitress in a small-time bar called the Jump House.

The dwarven bartender / owner had taken a shine to Sylvia right away, and she had worked there close to a year now, sleeping sometimes on an air mattress in a back room to save money. The bar was frequented by some slimy characters and small-time criminals, but Sylvia liked the energy of the place, and was largely left alone by even the scummiest regulars. Sylvia even did a magic show once or twice, when she learned a masking spell and some other small-time illusion magic. She could transform her appearance to become actually beautiful, then pulled illusion doves from a hat that became illusion flaming phoenixes. Low-level stuff, but then the Jump House was a low-end place.

Sylvia had also dipped her toes into shadowrunning, using her invisibility spells and quick feet on occasion to deliver packages on behalf of a "Mr. Johnson" in the Jump House. His actual name was Gunderson, and he was a fat man who paid almost as badly as he smelled, but it was easy small work for Sylvia. Like the Jump House owner, Gunderson took a shine to Sylvia, appreciating her reliability, unpretentiousness, and professionalism, not exactly common traits amongst the low-level gutter filth who worked for him. Soon, Sylvia was starting to have actual money left over at the end of each month, and things were looking up.

However, a month after her 18th birthday, the good times hit a snag in the road......

Sylvia reported to work at the Jump House for the start of a 4PM to midnight shift, but noticed the dwarven bartender/owner talking to a sinister-looking group in a drab array of trenchcoats. The owner was raising his arms in the air and waving his head as he talked, and seemed exasperated as he noticed Sylvia and pointed her out to the group.

Sylvia's blood turned to ice. Could they be Lone Star detectives?

The group walked over to Sylvia, with the tallest one of the bunch, a female elf, reaching out her hand to Sylvia.

"Hello, you're Sylvia, right? I'm Lillian, and we're with a small hermetical mage group called the Silver Plane. Can we talk to you in private?"

Sylvia looked warily at Lillian, as her smile widened and her colleagues behind her began to shift restlessly.

~~~

(10 minutes later)

A long-haired young man with sunglasses was strolling lightly down a back alley in Redmond, carrying a package. He had come back from Boston to Seattle for the first time in a while, and he felt an almost warm sense of nostalgia walking around his stomping grounds. Redmond smelled like toxic waste, looked like toxic waste, and had some residents that were about as dangerous and deadly to you as toxic waste if you crossed them.

But the young man loved the Barrens. They appealed to a sense of adventure he had, a sense of wanting to push his instincts and abilities to the limits, to fight for survival, because the end of your life could exist around the next corner. He didn't want to be consumed by the shadows, and he didn't always love what he had become since arriving in the UCAS to work as a shadowrunner a few years ago. But right now, he loved it.

As he walked down a side alley near a partially walled-off, mostly deconstructed site of an old ghoul haunt, the hair began to rise on the back of the young man's neck. He carefully tucked his package in his black leather trenchcoat, and kept his hand close to a Predator Heavy Pistol holstered on his right hip. The young man stealthily walked behind a crumbling brick wall, and peeked his head out to see what was setting off his danger sense.

The young man saw six people in varying sizes in drab trenchcoats, and he could make out some magical particles in front of them. He guessed that it was a barrier of some kind, and he noticed them slowly moving in to corner a girl with sandy brown hair against a solid-looking wall. The cornered girl was wearing what looked like .....a Jump House waitress uniform?

What was going on here?

"We know you killed the young man named William Bones!" screamed a female voice from the trenchcoat gang. "But we're not here to punish you for that! We know of your latent magical potential! We're here to help you! Join us, and we'll give you a better life!"

The waitress-looking girl shook her head. "I didn't want them to die. I didn't want ANYONE to die! I didn't want any of these powers! I just wanted a normal life!"

The waitress then lashed out with a series of purple-coloured spells, but they didn't seem to phase the trenchcoat gang too much.

"It's useless, we have Mana Barriers up." said one gruff-sounding member of the gang. "This is one of the many tricks we can teach you, little girlie."

"Why would we teach her anything?" said an angry-sounding man. "We're just gonna take her totem and her life for the ritual. What's the point of doing anything else, let's just take her already!"

"Shut up, Blood Claw!" piped up the woman. "We will not decide anything like that for any of our members!......Don't listen to him, Sylvia. We of the Silver Plane do NOT sacrifice anyone who becomes one of us. We serve a higher purpose, and we want you to be a part of that."

"Drop the barriers and let me go, I'll think about it."

"You already ran from us once. We can't have that happening again, can we?"

"Lillian, just put her out and let's take her already!"

"SHUT UP BLOOD CLAW!"

As this bizarre cult recruitment played out in front of the young man hidden behind the bricks, a small voice rang out in his head with a clear instruction.

"Protect the girl."

The young man didn't think twice. Sure, it was 1-on-6, sure, the girl had just confessed to a murder of some sort, and sure he was against mages with powers he didn't fully understand. But when his instincts told him to do something, he did it, and he did it without question. His instincts hadn't let him down yet, and he had faced even worse odds than 1-on-6 and lived to talked about it......

The young man grabbed for his gun, sighted in one of the trenchcoats, and pulled the trigger.