A Pound of Flesh

A Pound of Flesh
Date 2082-02-01 GM Aurora Location Seattle (Puyallup) Status Threat Level: Medium
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven Tamanous
Lil' Boomer	Grieving Father, Girlfriend
Casualties and losses
	Grieving Father
Note: LB's Initation 1 Run

Summary

Lil' Boomer is tasked with playing courier for a street doc that provides meals for the infected in Seattle. He's met with several along the way that view him with fear, discomfort, and vengeance. LB meets those responses in kind before completing the delivery.

Background

Several morgues and street docs around Seattle pay a flesh tax to keep Ghouls fed and out of sight. Others pay a flesh tax for a little scratch. In either case, a morgue in the northern half of Seattle prepared a cooler for transport to Doctor O+ in Puyallup.

The Pickup

LB receives a call from his Fixer, Patches. A morgue in Redmond has a cooler of value for a Ghoul-friendly street doc in Puyallup, and Tamanous dispatches him to play courier. Utilizing taxi services from Zigzag, Lil' Boomer arrives at the morgue without any trouble. The mortician, terrified to be interacting with ghouls in general and LB in particular, is curt but polite. As Lil' Boomer exits the morgue, he finds his ally and ride, Zigzag, caught in an argument with an individual whose aura he does not recognize. Given the general shape of the figure's clothing and headwear, LB realizes that this individual is law enforcement, so he changes direction to catch a bus. Thanks to some good luck, the bus was headed to Puyallup.

LB'S NOTES:

I get a call from Patches about a pickup. Patches is absolute drek and will sell anything he can to anyone who will buy it. That's handy for me; scruples don't pay the bills or help you sleep at night. So, I gotta barter with Zig for a while. She wants half the fee and her flesh fee to boot. That seems crazy to me; we know if someone starts shootin', I'm going to be the one rolling out of the car to return fire. We settle on 60-40, and I toss in a snack. Fine.

We roll down to the morgue and I pop in. The Mortician looks like she's sees a ghost when I walk in. She's stammering and askin' me not to eat her. Lady, I'm not gonna eat you. You're all gristle, and I had breakfast. I grab the cooler, but the damn thing's as big as I am. It's not even that it's heavy, it's just...it's just too big, you know? So I start draggin' this thing out, and the rough plastic bottom of the cooler is just like--grinding on the floor. It's making this terrible sandpaper sound as I slowly head to the door, and it just looks like it's eating her soul the entire way. I woulda felt bad for her in the moment if she didn't despise me just for existing.

So, I finally make my way outside, and the cops are giving Zag the business. "what's a ghoul doing parked outside a morgue, do you have a license, blah blah blah." Pigs make me sick...just let us eat and we won't eat you instead. Fraggin' idiots. I give her a nod and push my way over to the bus stop and climb on the first bus rolling through. I get lucky when I realize the route's gonna make its way to Puyallup eventually.

The Bus

Lil' Boomer has a bus pass, and the driver doesn't want to be eaten. Panicking, he lets LB on, but refuses to make eye contact. Lil' Boomer strikes up conversation with a few passengers who then decide to take the next bus, but--in the process--he learns that Babylon has misinformed him about what certain glowing auras do.

LB'S NOTES:

So, I get on the bus, and it's the normal song and dance. I show my pass, the bus drivers try to think of a reason to slam the doors before I can get on, but after you're on, they normally drive and just try not to turn around.

I'm sitting there, and I can tell these two are eyeballin' me. One has an aura that's like...familiar. Babylon called someone with this aura a toaster fragger. So when she said something 'bout me eating people, I asked her why she liked to frag toasters. The two of them were agape, like...like I said something that could POSSIBLY be as bad as people think me havin' ta eat is. So, we get to talking, and the one on the left lies about being named Matthew. I get being scared o' me. I mean, I don't, I'm a nice friggin guy. But people are scared animals too busy with their thumbs up their asses to actually pay attention, so I know why people are scare of me. Here's what I don't get: if you were going to pick your own name, why the frag would you go with MATTHEW? That's some biblically terrible shit. You coulda gone "Rock" or something cool, you know? How boring do you have to be as a person to say "of all the names in the world, I see myself as more of a Matthew?

But, it's all I got, so I study him really hard, and write "Matthew" down in my book.

Anyway, I get to talkin' to the toaster fragger, and she tells me to lower my voice--that she's not a registered technomancer. Holy...now the corpo scum and the government are registering people based on the music they play. So, I jot Babylon's name back down. I'm not a fan of lookin' foolish, and she's gonna need to come clean about if they frag toasters or what. But, we connect a little bit about how much the system's rigged--or I thought we did.

She wanted nothin' to do with ol' LB, though. They find a stop, get off, and just--they just wait for the next bus. I mean...okay, so I gotta eat to live, and people got some misconceptions about how that works. But, we've been talkin' for like twenty minutes, and they're still actin' like I'm gonna take a bite out of one of 'em at any moment.

Then everyone seems shocked when you don't mind lobbing a grenade or two into a Matrix shop. My eyes don't work as good as they used to, but I'm not deaf. I hear how they talk to me.

The Clinic

Lil' Boomer gets off the bus a couple of blocks from Doctor O+'s. As he arrives, he spots an angry couple yelling slurs. The man summons an earth spirit to attack the street doc's office. LB, decides to summon a spirit to destroy the earth spirit, but fails on his first attempt. After wiping the blood from his nose, he summons a fire spirit to destroy the earth spirit. The caster, spotting Lil' Boomer and realizing he has taken down his spirit, almost kills LB with a mana bolt.

Lil' Boomer kills the man, but dismisses the spirit before it can kill the woman. LB completes the delivery.

LB'S NOTES:

I get off the bus, and there's the couple shouting at the clinic. This girl's moving like she's crying but her aura is this weird mix of sadness and like--excitement. As much as she was bummed out by what they were screaming about, she was excited to try to demolish the facility. The guy--he's just fury and vengeance. So, he summons this earth elemental and it starts attacking the building. And I got to thinkin'...

What beats rock?

Paper, right? So, I was going to try to summon some kind of paper spirit, but then--then I thought: What beats PAPER? And that, my friends, is fire. So, I decided to summon a fire feasting on paper. It made sense in my head, you know? So I concentrate, and I try to connect with a spirit in the astral and...wow, I start bleeding out my nose. No good. So I clear my head, and I concentrate again, and I find this perfect spirit who just gets it. It's like this book burning...it's pages scattering into the wind and fury from knowledge lost at the hand of hate.

That fire spirit crushes the earth spirit, and the summoner catches sight of me. He says ghouls killed his kid or whatever, and I don't really friggin' care, right? He wants to just kill any greyskin he sees and pretends like THAT'S somehow fair game. So, he slings a manabolt at me. I summon another fire spirit, and he hits me so hard with a manabolt I about get shoved outta my body for the first and last time. The fire spirit wrapped him up in a big ol' hug and cooked him dead on the street.

That's what you get for lobbing manabolts at people--but yeah, now the girlfriend is REALLY sobbing, and I just don't know what to do. She's not trying to hit me or nothin, so I dismiss the spirit, pick up the cooler, and walk into Doctor O+'s clinic.

Aftermath

Zion calls LB as he's finalizing payment with Doctor O+, and they schedule lunch. She's excited to meet in the afternoon in a park, and he agrees.

Rewards

• 4k Yuyen
• Doctor O+ at Loyalty 1
• 6 karma
• Ordeal for IG 1