#25 ????

Last time, on Nightmare Harvest (where the language is still fairly explicit):

We're playing as B4n5h33, a fool-sniping elven shadowrunner.

In our prologue, our girl had apparently just finished a shadowrun, met with a contact in a place called The Shambles, had a celebratory drink, and then the screen went black, with narration about getting into a new mess or something like that. Nice.

Doesn't sound familiar? Well B4n5h33's on your side, since she apparently has amnesia. Like being abandoned, only if you had friends, you have no happy memories of them.

Well, let's see how bad our situation is.

First things first, let's allocate that karma.

We add some Dodge points, improve our Ranged Combat and bring Body to 4. Dodge is a decent skill for Quickness builds - it makes your character harder to hit and by extension discourages the AI from trying.

Now let's see how sunk we are.

...that's pretty bad, yes.

Bullet points:

• B4n5h33 woke up with no memory in the most terrible slum she’s ever seen.

• Her run went south and an employer or partner splattered her brain with a high grade BTL, hence the amnesia.

• She can’t escape on pain of death.

• Contact told her to get noodles.

• Also, said note was stapled to her chest.

We examine our surroundings.

Let's play: spot the editing error!

Thirty years in the magical future, a slum is still a slum.

Right after we check out the car with the person 'living" in it, the BTL dealer from across the street - well, crosses the street.

What a "coincidence" that after being buzzed by a high grade BTL, we end up literally half a block away from a dealer. But then again, in a neighbourhood like this there might be one on every block.

Weighing our options, we decide to tell him that our girl isn't a chiphead.

Won't take no for an answer, huh? Let's play along for the moment then. This guy seems desperate and we want to let him down gently.

Yeah, wants to scam and then rob us. That BTL is probably lethal. B4n5h33 prepares for an ambush.

...That was one HELL of a punch, girl.

A point blank pistol shot is all it takes.

I'm willing to bet that the body in the car was his last victim.

With nothing left to do here, we make our way up the street --

-- and past a homeless person by a barrel fire. A woman comes into view between the bus stop and the lamppost. She makes a striking figure, alone in the rain, under the streetlight.

The fact that the actual street is much cleaner than the alley doesn't hurt either.

Well hello there.

The gang life's treated her surprisingly well. She's older than she looks, but she still certainly looks. Our fool-sniper tries to break the ice.

The ice refuses to be broke. Oh well, no means no.

Just a side note - if we'd threatened or attacked her instead, she would've revealed herself as a magic user.

But anyway, let's move o-

Enter teen on some kind of high grade BTL. Opposite of Doba, he's younger than he looks.

So Doba and his brother were supposed to make a deal, but he's here instead. He knew she was going to be here, and he's chipped and weird.

This stinks of a setup, and we want no part in that.

No.

Don't you dare.

She doesn't even have time to blink. One shot and she's down, in a spreading pool of blood. Toshi himself is out of his corner and running for cover.

We trade shots back and forth, B4n5h33 wounds him pretty badly, and he bolts for a hole in the fence, soon disappearing into the night.

.

We're left with Doba's body and even more questions than before.

If she is tied to a gang, luck might not be the right word here.

We make our way to the fence - then out comes the most out-of-place looking person we've seen in this dead end alley. He rushes past us, then stops just short of the corpse, clearly waiting to be interrogated.

I'm not sure I want to make fun of this guy's speech just yet, and to be fair, he was understandable. But man, I don't think I want to do the interrogating.

He'll probably introduce himself at the end - and offer an opinion. How do I know? This is clearly someone who likes the sound of his own voice, and I doubt he would have run out to talk to us in an obviously dangerous place like this unless he had designs on our situation.

So we ask what seems the most relevant question.

Oh, no introduction. So that woman we were flirting with had -- has -- an adult son? Eesh.

Extra karma goes into Body. And through the fence we go.

I'd say pretty run down for a corporate district, but as the description told us, they're down on their luck over here.

This thug with a submachine gun looks trustworthy.

Well, that was useful.

We abandon the gangsters and head south-east to the market.

Let's try talking to the locals.

...none of these are helpful.

We keep going towards a magical tree in the distance. Inscribed conjurations hang from its branches, illuminating the area like a gigantic blue flame.

A moment to say hello to the resident shaman --

-- she tells us what's happened but doesn't seem to know why. At least one of said holes is right behind her, being eyed dolefully by a local.

Oh, yikes. No one seems to be happy here

We decide to retrace our steps, past the shaman and the tree, past the gossiping pair, back to the dangerous-looking building we passed on the way here.

We stop in front of it to buy a ninja costume from a nearby merchant.

THOUGHT I WAS JOKING HUH

A moment to examine the building, hoping to find answers inside.

Just so happens we're in the market for trouble. In we go --

Oh.

It's a scene right out of an anti-BTL PSA. The pad is old, decrepit and abandoned - littered with garbage and construction materials. The body of a young woman lies on the ground, beside the remains of a cyberdeck and a very alive, very strung out junkie.

Like Toshi, the teen who shot Doba earlier.

HEY.

I take exception to that.

B4n5h33 is not a drifter.

She's a respectable shadowrunner in a whole neighbourhood of drifters.

The first shot takes us by surprise and leaves her half dead.

He runs for cover, and manages to hit us again, but we finally finish him off, taking his gun and losing most of B4n5h33's health along the way.

We get five karma too, and we use it to spend get enough Ranged Combat to actually use that weapon later on.

What the hell is going on here? We've killed two people, seen a third die, know that there are Yakuza and Comaches and crazy nightmare-inducing BTLs about - but really, we have no real idea what's happening.

We make for the pad's exit, knowing one thing for certain. Today isn't just randomly weird and dark and dingy - it's also

Yeah, it's a weird year for "pranks", so we're keeping it relatively tame right now.

Have a good one!

Before the Shadow continues in our next post!