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.

The Brat

So I’ve been rather distracted given all that’s happened of late. It’s hard not to be, what with Bug Spirits, Crazy Digital Murder Gods and other such crap. This means I’ve been overlooking something in my journal here which I should have gotten around to long ago.

She's not a kid, and she'll point it out every
chance she gets

Neon is our team’s Decker. We first met on the first run that Me and Freddie worked together on, which in retrospect was the start of this whole Dr Akabe revenge plan/Crazy Digital Murder God/Whatever else mess. Don’t get me wrong, she was actually pretty damned useful on that one run, barring one problem that, in all fairness, she really couldn’t have planned on in advance and definitely falls under the “things that Johnson should have told us” list. Of course, given who the Johnson was and why they were organizing that run, the omission might have been deliberate.

The thing is, though, Neon’s really good at what she does. She’s a master of sneaking around the Matrix and does a lot of things that helps the team. I mean, there’s the usual stuff of stealing Paydata or erasing records or whatever else that you need a Decker for, and that’s pretty wiz. But there’s a lot of other Stuff she does, like messing with security systems, faking passes, bypassing locks, shutting off cameras and the like that’s insanely helpful on a run. Wraith is really good at finding ways to utilize her skills, often thinking of something creative for her to do in support of whatever our objective is.

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.