Entering the Shadows
Title: Entering the Shadows
Genre(s): Cyberpunk, Fantasy
Rating: PG-13
Themes: #1 The First Time
Author: giving_ground
Author's notes: This is Shadowrun fanfiction using original characters. I do not own the setting these characters inhabit, have no rights to it, etc. But I do enjoy it. Lots.
Summary: In the beginning...
“So that’s it? Nothing more?” Nine scowls with fake irritation, “You can’t expect me to let you be until you tell me more, you know. All you’ll ever let on is little hints and references. You’ve barely even told me who these people are, or what went wrong.”
“Why do you want to know so badly, anyway?” Senna mutters sleepily, “It’s been a long day. A long few days. Something like that.”
“I want to know because I care, silly,” Nine says, a genuine concern hidden in his voice beneath the teasing, and Senna can’t help but smile.
“Hmph. If you must.”
She begins to explain, from the ground up.
The streets of London, she says, have always been a bit strange. She grew up there, and even she can spot that. She was raised in Stockwell by poor parents, an elf from birth, and perhaps partly because of her parents’ notions about elves they poured a great deal of effort into raising her properly. They even scraped together the money to send her to university, where she studied in psychology, though even at this stage she was beginning to be aware that she was set aside in more ways than simply being a metahuman. True realisation that she was Awakened would not come until much later. The resurgence of magic into the world was recent enough, and its display was rare enough, that the pointers could go undetected for some time unless an individual’s ability to use magic displayed in some highly dramatic way.
Senna lived, she says, in a sort of bubble, protected from the reality of just how strange the world had become. Part of this, she admits, was down to London. Few major corporations, slow to pick up on the virtual reality of the matrix after the sudden destruction of the internet, and still using paper money, even; a far cry from the high-tech lives people in the majority of the world were living, even then. Cyberware drew stares in the street, and people who didn’t hide the fact that they were wired probably got more attention than metahumans. Tech slipped in around the edges, of course, but the British seemed remarkably resistant to change. SINs were introduced recently enough that she remembers the public outcry immediately beforehand, though once the identification system was actually implemented, most people living normal lives just stopped caring -- and the ones living in stranger ways found loopholes. At that time, she lived a normal life.
Beyond rumours, news stories, and movies, the first time she encountered life in the shadows was the moment at which she was dragged down into it.
She was still in university when her parents died in a car crash, and it became obvious that they hadn’t been able to afford to keep her there, not really. The amount of debt they’d acquired had been fairly impressive, Senna notes, her face a picture of exasperation even now, though there’s little pain as she talks of her parents’ death. She wasn’t that close to them, she explains; she thinks they mostly put effort into her education on principle, and in the hope that she might support them when they were older, rather than out of deep affection. After the sums had been done, it became obvious that she could either find a sponsor in one of the relatively small corporations which were, by then, on the ascendant; or leave education. Her world was idealistic and did not include becoming a corporate wage-slave as any kind of a future. She left.
She didn’t realise quite what it meant, until one day, after she’d cleaned out her parents’ house and sold it to cover most of their debt, she turned to face the world and realised she’d left everything she knew. She lived for a while in dingy hostels, the very British equivalent of coffin motels, less automated but pretty much as cheap, but work was hard to come by, and her money -- a pitiful amount to begin with -- was going to run out soon, however careful she was.
It was by the old building which had been Waterloo station that she met the Marquis for the first time. He had been lounging against a wall, looking as though he owned the world in his worn tailcoat and scuffed boots, and he’d waved casually to her, for all the world as if he already knew her. He’d strolled over, fallen in step beside her, and looked at her as though he was looking beyond the reality she could see and onto some other level, which with hindsight she realised was precisely what he’d been doing.
“I’m sure you don’t want to be seen with a fellow like me right now,” he’d told her, “but I can be a lifeline to you, because I know what you are and what you can become.”
And he’d grinned widely, and his face had seemed sort of feline for an instant.
“Think about it. When you run out of money, I got a place you can stay, and when you want to know what to do with that power you got, I can show you. I’ll be able to find you when you want to know more, I’m sure.”
He’d slipped her a piece of paper, an archaic little white square like a business card, and sauntered off into some back-alley, without Senna saying a word.
And that was, really, most of how it began.
Genre(s): Cyberpunk, Fantasy
Rating: PG-13
Themes: #1 The First Time
Author: giving_ground
Author's notes: This is Shadowrun fanfiction using original characters. I do not own the setting these characters inhabit, have no rights to it, etc. But I do enjoy it. Lots.
Summary: In the beginning...
“So that’s it? Nothing more?” Nine scowls with fake irritation, “You can’t expect me to let you be until you tell me more, you know. All you’ll ever let on is little hints and references. You’ve barely even told me who these people are, or what went wrong.”
“Why do you want to know so badly, anyway?” Senna mutters sleepily, “It’s been a long day. A long few days. Something like that.”
“I want to know because I care, silly,” Nine says, a genuine concern hidden in his voice beneath the teasing, and Senna can’t help but smile.
“Hmph. If you must.”
She begins to explain, from the ground up.
The streets of London, she says, have always been a bit strange. She grew up there, and even she can spot that. She was raised in Stockwell by poor parents, an elf from birth, and perhaps partly because of her parents’ notions about elves they poured a great deal of effort into raising her properly. They even scraped together the money to send her to university, where she studied in psychology, though even at this stage she was beginning to be aware that she was set aside in more ways than simply being a metahuman. True realisation that she was Awakened would not come until much later. The resurgence of magic into the world was recent enough, and its display was rare enough, that the pointers could go undetected for some time unless an individual’s ability to use magic displayed in some highly dramatic way.
Senna lived, she says, in a sort of bubble, protected from the reality of just how strange the world had become. Part of this, she admits, was down to London. Few major corporations, slow to pick up on the virtual reality of the matrix after the sudden destruction of the internet, and still using paper money, even; a far cry from the high-tech lives people in the majority of the world were living, even then. Cyberware drew stares in the street, and people who didn’t hide the fact that they were wired probably got more attention than metahumans. Tech slipped in around the edges, of course, but the British seemed remarkably resistant to change. SINs were introduced recently enough that she remembers the public outcry immediately beforehand, though once the identification system was actually implemented, most people living normal lives just stopped caring -- and the ones living in stranger ways found loopholes. At that time, she lived a normal life.
Beyond rumours, news stories, and movies, the first time she encountered life in the shadows was the moment at which she was dragged down into it.
She was still in university when her parents died in a car crash, and it became obvious that they hadn’t been able to afford to keep her there, not really. The amount of debt they’d acquired had been fairly impressive, Senna notes, her face a picture of exasperation even now, though there’s little pain as she talks of her parents’ death. She wasn’t that close to them, she explains; she thinks they mostly put effort into her education on principle, and in the hope that she might support them when they were older, rather than out of deep affection. After the sums had been done, it became obvious that she could either find a sponsor in one of the relatively small corporations which were, by then, on the ascendant; or leave education. Her world was idealistic and did not include becoming a corporate wage-slave as any kind of a future. She left.
She didn’t realise quite what it meant, until one day, after she’d cleaned out her parents’ house and sold it to cover most of their debt, she turned to face the world and realised she’d left everything she knew. She lived for a while in dingy hostels, the very British equivalent of coffin motels, less automated but pretty much as cheap, but work was hard to come by, and her money -- a pitiful amount to begin with -- was going to run out soon, however careful she was.
It was by the old building which had been Waterloo station that she met the Marquis for the first time. He had been lounging against a wall, looking as though he owned the world in his worn tailcoat and scuffed boots, and he’d waved casually to her, for all the world as if he already knew her. He’d strolled over, fallen in step beside her, and looked at her as though he was looking beyond the reality she could see and onto some other level, which with hindsight she realised was precisely what he’d been doing.
“I’m sure you don’t want to be seen with a fellow like me right now,” he’d told her, “but I can be a lifeline to you, because I know what you are and what you can become.”
And he’d grinned widely, and his face had seemed sort of feline for an instant.
“Think about it. When you run out of money, I got a place you can stay, and when you want to know what to do with that power you got, I can show you. I’ll be able to find you when you want to know more, I’m sure.”
He’d slipped her a piece of paper, an archaic little white square like a business card, and sauntered off into some back-alley, without Senna saying a word.
And that was, really, most of how it began.