Sim Hell

Stylish early 20th century Me

I’m going to start this by assuming you know what the Foundation is. If not, go ask a Decker like Lightspeed or Neon and they’ll explain it to you (even if that explanation is ‘blah blah blah blah blah nerd stuff’) then come back.

So now that we all know what it is, let’s give you some background. We’d discovered that Pierce was a crazy digital murder god, and we discovered that he had some crazy long term plan. We didn’t know the full details of said plan, however, only bits of it. Added to that, we had no idea where Pierce was hiding, which meant that if we ‘killed’ him in the Matrix, he’d just run off to his safe haven to recompile. Above all else, to this, Pierce himself had deleted all the data we needed on his creation and function down to the point of destroying the research facility host.

The good news was that in theory it survived in the Foundation of the research facility where he was ‘born’. Added to that, Neon had been able to drop an anchor into that Foundation’s Portal Node, which mean that in theory she could get into it again. Unfortunately, we could only do it by jacking in through a friendly host’s foundation and then jumping across from there. The upside is that we know somebody who runs their own data store that we could use. And so Lightspeed joined us on this crazy little trip, which proved to be very useful.

I realised that I've been mis-spelling Abbey's name all along

She also often wears a mask, but that doesn't make
for as interesting a picture

Okay. Time for me to talk about Abbey.

Um... actually, I don't have much to say about her, really. We've only worked together a few times, and it's really hard to get a read on her. She's quiet and elusive, and definitely likes it that way. I really don't know much about her beyond ‘human’ but there's a whole bunch of stuff that I've figured out or that I’ve heard from various other sources. Oh, and apparently Abbey is not her street name, but like Freddie, she hasn't had much luck in making something stick.

So let's look at the things we know and what that means for the team. The first thing is that Abbey is an awakened adept. However, she's not the typical 'run around screaming and leaping off stuff and punching people and making them explode' type that you often find in Runner circles. Rather, she's actually more about agility and stealth then anything else, and has a number of tricks that make hr really damned good at it.

I am a fragging motorcycle ninja

Me on my bike. It's fast enough to keep up with me

So a lot of runners have different definitions of what constitutes a "good" run. Some say it's one where you never have to engage in a fight at all, and nobody ever knows that you're there. Others think it's when you reduce the place to rubble and leave nothing but dead bodies and burning wreckage in your wake. I think if you asked any two runners, they'd say completely different things.

Now what I think was one of the best damn runs I’ve ever been on was definitely on the more colourful, loud and public end of it. But all things considered, it worked out pretty well for us. Not only because of what happened on the job, but because of what we got out of it in terms of fringe benefits and other things. Even if there was one catch.

Wraith: he's like a boss

There's two things you need to know about Wraith. The first is that even though he's a Runner, he's actually a pretty good guy. The second is that he lies all the time.

This is the best photo you'll ever see of him

Now with that being said, let's talk about the guy. He's very camera shy for reasons that might become obvious, but he does cut a distinctive figure to say the least. He's pretty buff, clearly of NAN extraction and he has this really weird hair. Like, it's silver down one side, copper down the other and braided in the middle level weird. He claims that it's natural, but then again he's also given any number of other explanations as to how it came to be this way. Like I said, lies all the time.

Oh, and he also has these really cool tats; possibly even cooler then mine. A Ghost Wolf on his forehead, and then a second one running down the length of each arm and more on his back. At various stages he's claimed that they used to be magical or that they're his spirit beasts or something else. Like I said, lies all the time.

And while he doesn't actually hit on me (or neon, or Abbey), he definitely likes having lots of Elf ladies around him. Guy's a total horn dog, I swear. He once joked that if we get a mage on the team, it should be another woman while he was eyeing Cinders.

Dangerous Aquaintences

So beyond the team, there's a bunch of people we know one way or another. These guys are more or less allies, although this being what it is and our doing what we do, there's plenty of ways that any given ally could be tomorrow's deadly enemy. It's the way things go.

Lightspeed. Yes, she always looks this grumpy

Lightspeed was a runner in the 2050s, but since she's an Elf, it doesn't really show. She used to be a decker back in the Old Matrix and had the good luck to survive crash 2.0 which drove her into retirement. Nowadays she's more of a consultant and info broker and is rather well connected, even if many of her contacts are other old fart ex-runners. She definitely knows her stuff, and I suppose the fact that she lived so long as a runner means that she knows what she's doing. Her network has been very helpful to us in a number of ways, not the least of which is getting us some more recognition. She also apparently runs her own Data Store which serves Seattle area runners.

While she hasn't said much, I got the impression that most of her old team were dead or retired now. The few times she's mentioned them, she didn't seem to have many nice things to day about them.  Lightspeed apparently has a lot of her old pre-Crash cyberdecks, although they're utterly useless now. She turned one of them into an Ant Farm.

We jokingly call her "decker mom", although it turns out that she actually is Neon's mom (and, incidentally, refers to Neon as "the brat" a lot). Apparently, she didn’t know that Neon was an active Runner for some time, until someone 'outed' Neon in front of her. On the other hand, it explains a lot about where Neon got a lot of her skills and knowledge from.

Cluster-fragged sixteen ways to Sunday

Calling today a complete clusterfrag would be an understatement. The worst part of it was that we lost one of our allies, that rarest thing in the shadows; a Johnson who is good to the team and doesn’t try to screw you over.

Ares Johnson, RIP

Ares Johnson (We call him that because we never knew his real name. But that’s the rules) was good to us from day one. We didn’t initially know that he was from Ares, but he sent subtle signs. Like the fact that he was clearly a grizzled veteran. Or the cowboy accent. Or the fact that he liked to meet the team at steakhouses where he’d buy us all massive steak dinners (One of which was the first time Abbey had ever had Steak!). That sort of subtle sign.

And as we did more jobs for him (all of which paid very well), we managed to get ‘in’ with him as we found out more about what was going on. It was a complex mess involving a MCT AI research facility, a plot by elements of the Salish-Shidhe Council to engineer an incident that would allow them to annex Seattle, Bug Spirits, illegal street races, fire drakes, jumping out of hotels and fighting helicopters, the assistant to a Tir Tangire prince, stealing weapons research without hurting anyone in the process, the deaths of Wraith’s old team and, above all else, a Crazy Digital Murder God (I’ve heard the preferred terms are ‘AI’ or ‘Xenosapient’, but I think that this is more accurate) who was involved in manipulating all of the above in order to improve MCT’s market share. I am not making this up.

The fast and the Freddie

As I mentioned before, Freddie's the first of the team that I worked with (Okay, him and Neon, but one profile at a time) and as such, I've known the longest. He’s also in many ways the most open of the team, so I have a lot to say about him.

Orks with 'staches are apparently not that
common. Freddie makes up for that all
on his own

First up, he's an Ork. As mentioned, he Goblinised during puberty, something that I've gathered doesn't happen very often any more. He's in his late twenties, but that's a human late twenties, not an Ork late twenties, for whatever that means. I really can't say much else on the physical looks side of it beyond his moustache. It's actually rather impressive, and I can tell he's proud of it and takes good care of it. Combined with his love of driving caps, it gives him a bit of a dapper, old-world look.

Aside from that, though, he's got this whole "farm boy" thing going for him. I know that he's from rural Tir Tangire, although the "rural" part definitely shows in everything from being mostly laid back to the fact that his Matrix persona is a scarecrow. He speaks Sperenthiel, which Wraith finds kind of amusing given that I don't. Also, going towards the 'country bumpkin' thing is the fact that he can't tell a lie to save his life. It's painfully obvious when he tries.