More dangerous acquaintances

It’s been a while since I did a round-up of people we know (for better or for worse) and a lot has happened since then. Alphonso being no longer my boyfriend is about the least important, actually (Unless you’re his nuts or his car), which means that there's actually a lot of ground to cover.

Not pictured: BBQ sauce

I'll start with the one who is, at least to my mind, the most important at the moment. Mark Hawkins is an Ares Johnson who's very... Enthusiastic. That's probably the best way to put it, He's loud, he's bombastic, he's outgoing and he claims to be on our side. He also says he’s trying to work for the good of the people and make life better for those in the Barrens, which is all well and good in theory. In practice it feels less like he’s making their lives better as it does like a blatant Ares land-grab in territory that nobody else has a claim on.

Plus I feel that he knows just a bit too much about us. He knows where we live, and out and walked into the Firehouse once. Likewise, he met me at a Club where I was taking the evening off. It wasn't even a pre-arranged meeting or the like; rather, he just happened to be there. That's not an accident. So he's spying on us and I dread the thought of how much he's not letting on and what his end-game here is.

Captain Cancer calls her "Fierce Azzie Lady"
He has issues

Speaking of Johnsons where we have no clue what they’re playing at, Aysa Cozzi, alias Azzie Johnson Lady, is up to something all right. The problem is that not just do we have no idea what it is, but all the evidence is pointing in truly bizarre directions. Aysa has been involved in hiring for runs against other executives within Aztechnology, specifically their department of Unusual Procurement, which handles all the magical artifacts and the like. Why is a mystery, as from what we have found, she's pretty secure in her position which has no overlap. So it’s not like she's getting herself ahead here.

What she doesn't know is that her husband had an affair with Brandine, an Elf girl from the Barrens, and fathered a child with her. We've been able to use that little fact to get more information out of him along the way,

Renraku and AIs have such
a good history togehter...

Compared to the other two, we know a lot more about what Noboduke Yamura, alias Renraku Johnson, was planning with Pierce. He's slipped into the background now, but I feel like he’s more of a loose end that we need to tie up. I'd been working with Wraith on ways to permanently take him out of the picture before he had to leave the team, so now those plans have taken something of a back-seat. I have good reason to want to get him out of the way, however. Besides the whole 'unleash a Crazy Digital Murder God onto the city' thing, he also has made several efforts to recruit us for Renraku. Each time we've rebuffed him and while it seems he's given up, I'm not sure I want to leave that hanging.

Unfortunately, there's one complication that's a part of why he's alive still. He's got a Red Sam working directly for him, and she's clearly good at her job. She also really, really doesn't like us.

Okay, enough about Johnsons. I do want to say a bit more about Theresa, however, given that she's been insanely helpful to us and pulled our arses out of the fire along the way. It turned out that she used to be a runner before she wound up working for KE instead. She met Lightspeed back in 2055 when she helped pull what was lefft of LS's team out of Bug City. That’s the sort of favour that you don’t forget at all. The pair of them have been friends since, to the point where Neon calls Theresa 'auntie'.

I know two Orks who
like driving caps now

Ion Roarke is an associate of Abbey's and a man of many talents. Obstinately he's a Talismonger with a taste for ties, expensive sweaters and European Luxury cars. He's very knowledgeable of a number of fields of magical theory, and clearly knows a lot about different types of magic, how they work and so on. Added to that, he's very well connected in the Shadow Community, with his hands in a lot of pies. The other thing ut him is that he's awakened himself and is a practicing Druid (like an English version of a Shaman), which means that his knowledge is more than just theoretical.

Unfortunately, not all our Runner contacts are pleasant. Slackintosh and Snig the Axe are a lovely couple that we've run across on several occasions. We've worked with them and against them, and I’m going to say that the latter is actually the more preferable as it means that you don't need to deal with their sunny dispositions and pleasant personalities.

Slackintosh is a Dwarf Decker who is an expert sniper. She's Also gruff, abrasive, argumentative, often contrary for the sake of it, more then a touch paranoid and he sort who has to have things their way or not at all. Added to that, she now hates me for what I did at Deck-Con, so yay. Snig the Axe is a Hobgoblin (Middle Eastern Ork metavariant) Street Samurai who, as his name would suggest, likes axes. He also likes motorcycles and shotgun attachments for everything. Unfortunately, he’s also a straight-out arse and jerk, permanently angry and prone to lashing out at whatever annoys him.

Their fixer is a creep called Six Finger Discount, who was last seen running away. Even he doesn’t like them.

His casual wardrobe is nothing
but black turtlenecks

Another Runner we’ve crossed paths with twice is a guy called Kristoff. He’s European, and is a rude, condescending, arrogant jerk who acts like he’s better then everything else. So, European. He has a tendency to more ‘use’ people then work with them, to the point that he let an entire race get hit by GOD interceptor drones to take the fall for him. He was well connected enough with KE insiders to get him a lot of info and one of those BMW i8 Interceptors, which he showed more concern for then the rest of his team. Emphasis ‘was’ as both he and those insiders are now locked up, and hopefully we’ll never see him again.

And finally there’s Blindsite. Sigh. He’s an Elf Adept, allegedly the son of some Atzlan runner. Like Abbey, his abilities go largely towards stealth and infiltration, but he also has some magical abilities that he doesn’t like to talk about on the grounds of ‘don’t give away all your tricks at once’, which does make some sense. The problem is that it seems like there’s a lot more he’s not telling us about.

I forsee this ending well

For example, it seems that he was actually working with Kristoff’s team during their attempt to kill De La Marr at Deck-Con. Kristoff’s team were all ring-ins from New York, and yet Blindsite’s allegedly a poor kid who lives in a squat in the Barrens. So there’s just a bit of an inconsistency in there.

In retrospect, I should have thought about some of these concerns before I slept with him. Oops.