OR
How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Future Shock and Love Seattle
Captain Dover S. Gladstone (US Black Operations) lay on the bed.
His hands fucking hurt. What the Hell did they put in the damn teleporter, a cat? His hands were fucking deforming and he could barely hold the damn Colt AMTs, and his pupils were... narrowing? And since when in the Hell do you feel..."needles" or whatever in your fingers? Whatever. Catfish was already mocking the fact that he had cat ears and looked like a shojo girl’s wet dream, and every time he dragged his arse off the bunk to teach class at Stanford-Seattle, Dover learned that the students paid much more attention when your professor is sporting cat ears and his hands are now paws. Or, more accurately, mutated paw-things. He couldn’t even play the drums or sax when Catfish, Face, and Kitten did the Portishead tributes for the grunts and officers in the damn rec room.
Seattle's clouds lashed against the barracks, wrapping the sky in another gray specter, more angry tapping from waterdrops like Freddy getting pissed that you replaced the door with admantium or something.
Two years. One? Whatever, seemed like fuckin' forever since they woke him up from cyrosleep, then getting tossed all over the world and finally told to go to Seattle, spy on corporations and evil terrorists/capitalist pig-dogs/pinko commies/renegade AI. Oh, and dealing with shadowrunners.
The joys of a first run usually go like this:
"Give it to the trog at Dante's," then have a package given to you, then calling a taxi, waltzing to a bigass club and looking some big red wanker wearing a fecking stupid mask, give the package, walk back.
He did, amongst jeers and some idiotic name that meant "nerd" or something, due to the labcoat he wore all the time.
Then return, get paid, sit your ass down on the small room you rented, stare at the trid, then leap up five feet when you get a call on the transcomm from a controller who is screaming "DOVER WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY GET DOWN HERE NOW!!!ONEELEVEN", loud enough to make the fucking Neophyte center shake.
Of course, that was a year ago. The emergency was some rouge agent running around throwing paper at people, because Catfish thought it would be funny to show that agent her former boyfriend's face, when he had been explicitly warned not to. And by paper, he meant "paper changed into razor-sharp crap". And by "rouge agent" he meant "crazy bastard using paper as weapons".
That didn't end well. The chick was hot, too!
Anyway, back to daydreaming.
Meeting in Seattle with other people was interesting. Many didn’t say much, except for the fact that Dover’s name for a while was “hey runner” or “hey chummer” or the rare “oy slitch”, followed by “take this slotter out” or “steal this” or However, there used to be a mass of shadowrunners that often milled outside Dante’s, just outside of the line. This was where he learned that some Australian he had known for a while that usually yelled at him to get the frag out every time he spoke on the radio (even if he was disguising his voice] had his face melted off, and the fact that the former KGB oni was a gigolo-cum-stripper (pardon the pun) and giving that shy elf who loved undead things his portable plasma TV and both of them watching Shaun of the Dead, and him getting socked in the face by her… boyfriend, or whatever, every time he made a pass at her. Of course, that was up until she got her chest pounded with stakes by that Harlequin on the abandoned ship full of zombies. Or dealing with Russians. Dealing with Russians, regardless of many a runner bitching about them, was pretty easy, compared to dodging an angry CEO nip in fucking nano-tech powered Samurai armor and the whole building about to crash on you.
He had dealt with the man until a bunch of Siberian Shapeshifters [or so he had heard] blasted the dude’s head off. Or, at least, according to Julia-Stiles-in-black.
Anyway.
There was that one time where a bunch of dumb-ass terrorists decided to think that setting up a wall and holding a bunch of damn tourists often would make a big statement. WRONG. He, appearing as a regular Army officers [snort] with a bunch of other runners, filled a bunch of stupid terrorists with lead, and he "persuaded" the remaining terrorists to give up. By "persuaded", he meant "blasted their noggin off with a .700NE EX bullet."
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This page may be updated later. Or not. Shoo. Go away. There's better stories to read. This is not one of them. Git.
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"Those that live by the sword get shot by those that don't."
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