Kanfy posted:

In case someone likes their games non-steamy, you can get the Shadowrun trio for roughly from Gog.com right now.

I dont know posted:

If anyone is fence sitting, that's an insanely good value for some of the best RPG's (particularly the sequels) of the last few years.

Kanfy posted:

And by "spirit" I mean this godforsaken abomination bearing the name "Apocalypse". Man, I remember when we used to summon cute water and earth spirits, these days it's just one affront to nature after another.

Ze Pollack posted:

Oh, there's plenty of people who are hopelessly loving evil in the setting.The shades of grey are exactly how many hopelessly evil people you're willing to use to try to accomplish your goals, and the odds are good that your friendly local Mr. Johnson looks at you about the same way you look at someone like Holmes.

Tiggum posted:

Tiggum posted:

Glazius posted:

Actually I wonder if those video disks are from the guy the elf wound up replacing, and those bunraku blanks have just been... sitting there while all this madness went on?

AriadneThread posted:

but what would they eat?

Kanfy posted:

Kanfy posted:

On an unrelated note



R.I.P. Amazon

???? - 2054

"I don't need 4 points in Body, I've got drones!"

Kanfy posted:

I don't think anything's pointing at the real Holmes being a shady character, plus the description about the bunraku man specifically mentions he was operated on recently:

wiegieman posted:

Funnily enough, in tabletop a good rigger absolutely can sit in the van just off site and run their assortment of drones from there.

The Lone Badger posted:

Until someone manages to trace the signal.

Shadowrun Returns Anthology posted:

The Deep End, Part 1


“Shecky Green.”

That got ‘em hunting. You could find anything from after the first Crash without a problem, but looking up garbage from before the Crash is more hit-or-miss. Looking up stuff from the previous century is even worse, and looking up stuff from before the Internet existed? You never know how that’s going to go. So they all looked, and eventually they agreed that yeah, the resemblance was there, especially when Green was smiling. The broad mouth and wide nose were the key attributes. Green didn’t have the gently pointed ears of a dwarf, and he didn’t have my bald head, but otherwise the resemblance was there.

Now in truth, I would have gone with Joe E. Brown instead, because of the mouth. I’m not a vain person. I know what I look like. I know my mouth is freakishly large, just like Brown’s. And I know I’m not exactly matinee idol material, just like him. But I’m getting away from the point. Claymore had said he thought I looked like Shecky Green, so that’s what people went with. A few nights after he made the remark, when I walked into the Seamstresses Union, I was greeted by makeshift paper masks that looked like Shecky Green on every single face in the place. All these broad smiles looking back at me, vacant eyed and expecting. Then they all laughed.

So I laughed back. Of course I laughed! I had to appreciate the effort, didn’t I? And when a bunch of people go out of their way to welcome you, what are you supposed to do, feel embarrassed? Feel bad? Of course not! They were waiting for me, so I didn’t want to disappoint them. I dropped on a stool near the bar and caught the drink that was already sliding toward me.

There are reasons I’m here most nights.

“What’d the cat drag in today, doc?” Zakenman asked as I settled in. His long, thin torso hovered over the bar like a taut bow.

I was happy to have a good one for them. “Okay, hook your ears to this one. We had a body come in at about six in the morning, an ork, looked like he was killed overnight, right? And he was in a couple of pieces, the head and the rest of him. So I started making my notes, doing the preliminary eyeballing, when not half an hour later a second body comes in. Another ork, another overnight death, and another decapitated head. So I shrugged and said all right, someone out there wants to make sure the people they’re killing are well and truly dead. Good on them for being thorough.

“Once the preliminary work’s done, I get to examining the wound. I mean, yeah, I’m pretty sure cause of death is going to be cranial separation and all, but still, gotta check everything, make sure there wasn’t some other wound that hit before the head came off, that sort of thing. I start doing some measurements, and it hits me pretty quick—the head of the first ork doesn’t fit. It’s too small. The neck of the head’s a good two centimeters narrower than the neck of the body. This head doesn’t belong to the body!

“I figure I need to roast Lone Star about being sloppy with their body parts, but then a thought strikes me. I take a look at the other body. Sure enough, the neck of the second head’s too big for the body. But if would fit perfectly with the first body. I run a few quick tests, and I’ve got confirmation. The second head indeed belongs to the first body.”

My drink had been ignored for too long by this point, so I decided to pay it some attention. I heard how quiet it was when I sipped. They’d been waiting for me to arrive so they could pull their little joke, so I’d had an audience full of anticipation before I’d started. Zakenman had his hollow gaze fixed on me in that disconcerting way of his, Glint was pushing her way into a spot at the bar about three meters away from me, and Claymore was noticeably less twitchy than usual as he focused on the story. Even Hatchetman, off in his corner, was paying attention, even if it was only to find something he could make fun of.

Sip swallowed, I continued the story.

“I called up the officer who brought the second one in, guy named Slake Crabbage. I started yelling as soon as he picked up the call. ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ I said. ‘Don’t you idiots know how to keep evidence safe? How the hell do you get any crimes solved if you can’t even keep the right heads with the right bodies?

“He wasn’t happy that I was yelling at him, of course, and he was a little confused too. He made me slow down and explain what I was talking about. Once he understood, he told me he hadn’t mixed anything up. The head he’d sent in was the one he’d found. He even sent me a picture of where the body was found, and sure enough, there was the wrong head, laying on a burned-out foundation next to the thinner body.

“I sent him what I’d seen. My head unit had recorded the whole thing, of course, from the moment the body had rolled in, so he saw what I saw, right down to the measurements and the tests. And he was stumped.

“ ‘Listen, Dresden, that first body wasn’t found in my beat. It was a good ten kilometers away, for poo poo’s sake! I don’t know when the mix-up happened, but it wasn’t on our end. Someone switched the heads before we found them.’

“So that’s the case of the day. Two bodies, two heads, more than ten kilometers from each other. And someone switched them.”

“Gotta be someone yanking you around,” Claymore said. His legs swung freely, since they didn’t come anywhere close to his barstool’s footrest. “Some sort of sick, awesome practical joke. Someone found the heads, that’s what they did, then switched them on you.”

“Sure, Clay,” I said. “Who would find the two bodies so far from each other? And then go to the trouble to travel back and forth? You gotta cross at least three gang’s territories to get from me spot to the other. Who would do that?”

“The Ancients, that’s who,” Zankenman said in that low voice of his that likely set off all seismographs within twenty kilometers. “They would think that sort of thing is funny. They can’t tell one ork from another anyway, so they would be amused to switch the heads around.”

Glint hadn’t found a seat, which was good, because if she had she probably would have jumped up from it. She’s just over a meter and a half, but when she bounces like she does on her toes, she seems a lot taller.

“This wasn’t a joke,” she said, waving her hands emphatically. “This was a message.”

“A very confusing one,” Zankenman said.

Glint whirled on him, green eyes flashing. “Confusing to you,” she said. “But that’s because it wasn’t meant for you.”

Hatchetman chose this time to enter the conversation. He has two ways of speaking—one is a mocking drawl, the other is an amped-up, hyper shout. The first one may be annoying sometimes, but you take it, because if you hear the second one, you know that poo poo’s about to get real awfully soon. “So tell us, girl. What kind of message would someone send by switching heads around?”

“I don’t know. It’s got to be… something about interchangeability. Like maybe one’s a new guy, fresh recruit to a gang, and the other is one of their top hitters, and whoever got them is saying ‘hey, both of these guys are the same to us. Your best is no better than your worst, as far as we’re concerned.’”

Hatchetman cocked his head. “Actually, that’s not bad.” Catching the bartender’s gaze, he jerked his head toward Glint. “Her next one’s on me.”

That was nice of Hatchetman and all, but as soon as he did it I wished that he hadn’t. Glint got even bouncier, even more excited as soon as he said that, and that meant she was on me in a second.

“You heard that, right? It was a good theory. He said it was a good theory.”

“Yeah, Glint, yeah, I heard it.”

She leaned toward me, chin down, which gave her long nose a little foreshortening, which didn’t hurt. Her broad forehead tapered to a tiny chin, and her short black hair was spiked in ways that only come from sleep. She was dressed in fatigues and an armored vest that had been patched so often I wouldn’t place any faith in its bullet-stopping abilities.

“So, let’s go. Let’s find out what’s going on. We figure out what gang these guys were a part of, we can figure out what the message was.”

I laughed. “You’ve been watching too many Inquest of Truth trids. Coroners don’t go out solving crimes. I don’t do investigations. I don’t participate in interrogations. It’s not my thing, right? I check out the corpses, look at the wounds, test the blood, and slosh through whatever’s in the stomach. I’ve got plenty to look at without dancing out into the streets trying to find out who’s in what gang and why they’re killing each other.”

“But you’re not thinking!” she said. “You’re not seeing what we could do with the right information! Right now, you’re the only person with this information. We could give the message to the gang it was meant for, or we could find other gangs and tell them what’s happening. Gangs are always looking to get something over on each other—we could sell information to them.”

Then she came even closer, and I’ll tell you that her odor wasn’t so much intoxicating as intoxicated, but that was okay with me.

“But let’s put all that aside for a minute and forget about how we can make money or gain influence or a minute and think about the people that come into your shop every day. They’re loose ends, unanswered questions. They’re stories without an ending. Don’t you want to know the endings?”

I smiled. Not my widest smile, because then I look like a jack-o-lantern, but a half smile. Which either makes me look wise and a little sad, or like I had some food caught in my gums. It’s tough to tell without a mirror.

“You’ve got it wrong, my energetic friend,” I said. “They’ve got an ending. The ultimate ending. They’re dead. That’s not an ending I’m too eager to share. I get enough of it in my day job, right? Last thing I need is to take my work home with me.”

“But don’t you want to know—”

I cut her off with a laugh. “But I do know. I do. You want to know what happened? The same thing that always happens to people who come into my shop. They got in too deep.” I shook my head. “That’s no way to be. The stuff you’re talking about, that’s at the deep end of the pool. I’m telling you that fewer people drown in the shallow end. And the water’s warmer besides.”

I’m pretty sure she wasn’t convinced, but she had a drink in her hand that Hatchetman bought her, then I bought her another one, and one after that. I hoped that would be enough to fend off foolish notions.


***


The night went on too long, and the morning came too early. The sun was rising somewhere not too far away, and in my white, stark room I thought about it because it kept me in a better mood than I’d be in otherwise. It was a quiet morning in Organ Grinders — no crush of bodies flowing in, no complicated cases leftover from the previous night — which I know meant only one thing. Something was coming in.

And come in it did, at 6:36. The time was recorded automatically as soon as the tagged corpse rolled into the shop. I was pleased to see Crabbage walking in with the gurney. It’s not that I liked Crabbage much, but he tends to bring me good stories. His dull grey cybereyes made his face bland and soulless, and his cement-grinder voice didn’t change the impression.

“Dresden,” he said. “Body for you.”

“So I see. What do you need from me?”

“Only the basics. Get an ID, basic cause of death. Nothing fancy.”

I pulled back the sheet.

“Any reason to think the stab wounds aren’t it?”

“No.”

I shrugged. “All right then. As long as Lone Star’s paying, I’ll look at anything. Let’s dive in.”

I’ve known some cutters who are really anal about their work, very direct and organized, focused and methodical. None of them, to a person, are any fun. I’ve got all the computing power in the office I want. Once I’ve done, I can take the recording my headware made and edit it into something relevant and cohesive. So why make work more boring than it needs to be? I launched in.

“Okay, let’s take a look here. Count ‘em up, we got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven stab wounds on the abdomen. They’re pretty shallow, can’t say any actually penetrated either the thoracic or abdominal cavities — whoa, except for this one! Check out this baby, lower right abdomen, that sucker goes all the way through. We’ll see just what that did to her in a minute. Her. Did I mention that part? Female human Caucasian, probably early twenties, but some hard years in there. Don’t see any visible bruising, which could mean she was sedated before she was stabbed, because otherwise you tend of thrash around, right? Wounds are pretty clean. Someone cleaned her up, not any dried blood around. Let’s check the back of the legs — nope, clean too, even the ankles. No blood, no dirt. Let’s bring in another character here, Lieutenant — it’s Lieutenant, right? — Slake Crabbage. Lieutenant, where was the body found?”

“Alley. Redmond.”

“And what was she wearing?”

“What you see. Nothing.”

“So, naked body in an alley, stab wounds, but no blood, no dirt. You didn’t clean her, did you, Lieutenant?”

Crabbage just snorted in a way that I’d be replaying tonight at the Seamstresses Union.

“Okay, so either we’ve got a neatnik killer or a good samaritan cleaner. If I was a betting man, I’d go with the former, but it’s not my concern. So, clean wounds, but still some blood clots, because that kind of thing’s going to happen. And it means the heart was still beating when she was stabbed, so plus one for stab wounds being the cause of death instead of happening post mortem. Let’s take a look at the big one here. Wow. Look at that. Crabbage, will you look at that? Are you looking?”

I looked at him so I could preserve his expression for posterity. He was looking at the wound the same way you’d look at a cat you’d just kicked out of your way.

“It’s clean! You see that? You see how straight that line is, how smooth the wound is? Someone was cutting with something sharp. I’m talking scalpel-level precision here! Very impressive! Now, he got through the abdominal wall and — hello! This isn’t clean all the way up. Look at this, Crabbage! It’s torn at the top. So how did that happen? You want to guess how that happened?”

“Knife got dull halfway through.”

“Ha! Good one! And people say you don’t have a sense of humor! No, human flesh isn’t rough enough to dull a sharp knife so quickly. No, this looks like the opening was stretched after it was cut, so the ends — both ends, by the looks of it — were torn. She wasn’t just cut, she was operated on!”

Now this is where I have to be ashamed of myself and admit that at this second I probably should have understood more. Should have gotten my bearings quicker. But I was zipping along too fast, not connecting the dots. I like my methods, I enjoy the way I work, but maybe this one time I should have slowed down. But I didn’t.

“Best thing I can think of here is to pry her open and see what the surgeon who opened her up was looking at, see if we can get any traces of his handiwork. So we’ll get a retractor in place, shine a light in the right place, take a look and… oh.”

And then came my second mistake. Don’t change. Don’t do anything out of the normal. That’s when people start to notice.

I don’t know how long I was quiet before Crabbage spoke.

“And what?”

I looked up and could not remember for a second why I had been looking down. “Beg pardon?”

“Said something, then stopped. And what?”

I looked down and wished I wasn’t seeing what I wasn’t seeing.

“Her kidney is gone.”

Shadowrun Returns Anthology posted:

The Deep End, Part 2


When I went to the Seamstresses Union that night, there wasn’t a big greeting, since I’m sure they didn’t want me to think I was the center of the place’s universe or anything. I came in, nodded at Claymore and Lady G, who were in earnest conversation at the bar, waved at Daisychain at the bar, then saw Zankenman sitting in a dark table in a corner. For tonight, that would be perfect. I sat next to him without a word, and we stared at our respective drinks for a while. I have to admit it was weird to be sitting there and not talking, but that’s what I felt like doing at the moment.

I saw Glint when she walked in, and she saw me. She started heading my way, got within a few meters, then saw I wasn’t saying anything, so I guess she decided she didn’t need to be near me. She went to the bar. That was fine — one obstacle avoided.

The evening went on, and things got a little rowdier near the bar, with Mrs. Kubota getting into a drinking contest with Norma Ray. It looked epic, and knowing those two, it had a chance to go late into the night. A good distraction for everyone, and it livened the place up. All was well.

Then Marrow entered. Now, the Union is Mrs. Kubota’s place, so she gets to set the rules, but if it was up to me, one of the first rules I’d institute would be no press. Who needs them? Yeah, I understand they need to unwind too, but they got bars where they can hang out with their journo buddies and not bug the rest of us. It’s especially bad with people like Marrow, who don’t have any downtime. He could be totally in his cups, passed out on the floor, and if a hint of a juicy story drifted into his ears, they’d twitch and he’d be on his feet, already composing a lead paragraph in his head.

He moved like a trideo that was missing a few frames here and there, full of odd, jerky fits and starts. He had a datajack on his head that had looked red and inflamed, and he was always scratching it. His angular, batlike face twitched, like he was always hearing hints of stories in the air. Or like he was being lightly slapped by invisible hands.

I hadn’t been happy to see him enter the bar, and I became less happy when he made a beeline for me. I was about to say something to Zankenman, when I realized he had slipped off sometime in the past few seconds.

“Hey hey hey, it’s the good Doctor Dresden!” Marrow said with a smile that struggled to not look pained.

I smiled and leaned back. I know the drill—nothing sets people’s alarms off faster than if you act too different than you normally do.

“Marrow! How goes the pursuit of truth, the crusade to let people know what’s really going on in this filthy world of ours?”

“Great, great, really good. Because there’s so many stories to tell, right? So many good ones out there. Like, you know, serial killers.”

I twisted my mouth. “Serial killers? People like that sort of thing?”

“Like it? They love it, can’t get enough of it. Especially when there’s one on the loose, right? A new one? They get both thrilled and scared. Great for ratings. Especially if, you know, you get on the ground floor.”

“I suppose.”

Marrow still hadn’t sat down, just slowly kept circling the table. I didn’t bother keeping up with him — he usually didn’t meet my eyes when I talked to him anyway.

“Doc… Doc, come on, don’t hold out on me. If you had a story, if you had something I could use, you’d work with me, right? I mean, it would be good for me, and good for you.”

“Good for me how?”

“Getting the word out! Keeping people informed, on their toes, on the lookout. You could stop someone from dying, or maybe the information you release could even help get the guy caught! Saving lives, what’s better than that?”

“Well, Marrow, maybe someday we could talk about whether there’s ever been a serial killer captured through crowd sourcing, and then we could follow it up with a conversation about how much Lone Star hates it when I release information they’re trying to keep confidential, but none of that matters because I don’t have a serial killer to tell you about.”

“Oh come on, Doc, I heard rumors. I’m not bad at what I do — I know what you think of me, but I do know how to get information — and I heard about a body. A body with, like, surgical stab wounds. Don’t play dumb. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I may have examined a body with stab wounds and concluded that being pierced repeatedly with a knife was in fact very bad for the individual’s health, but one stabbed individual does not a serial killer make. If it did, we’d have one hundred serial killers wandering the Barrens at this very moment.”

“Yeah, you’re joking, Doc, but that number actually sounds low to me. Look, you know what I’m talking about, but I can see you’re not in a mood to share right now, and that’s fine. I just want you to think, as things move forward, about your pal Marrow, and how I can help you and you can help me. You know how to get a hold of me, so feel free to, you know?”

I nodded my head, even though I had never once called Marrow and did not intend to do so ever. He smiled at me and skittered away.

And there, behind him, was Glint.

I cursed silently. But effusively and eloquently. How had she gotten there without me noticing? It wasn’t as if my conversation with Marrow was so absorbing that I’d been ignoring the rest of the world. But I slipped up and was about to pay.

Glint watched Marrow go and slid up to my table with what seemed like a single long, gliding step.

“So, serial killer, eh?”

“No, Marrow had it wrong.”

“Come on, Dresden, you and I both know Marrow usually gets it right. If he came to you, it’s because he thinks he has something legit. What was going on at Organ Grinders this morning?”

“Same as usual, sweetie. Dead bodies and formaldehyde.”

“I understand you don’t want to say anything to Marrow, because telling it to him is telling the world. But it’s me. Come on, it’s late, we’re in the Union. Tell me a story.”

Now, I’ve looked back a number of times, and tried to explain to myself why I told her. Was I trying to impress her? Was I just trying to kill time? Or was it just because telling stories in the Union was what I did, and it was
too easy to fall into habit?

I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it much, because there aren’t many explanations that make me like myself. But liking myself is a luxury very few of us have these days.

The upshot is, I told Glint about the body, the incisions, the missing kidney, the odd cleanliness about the body. And either my telling was great or the subject matter enthralled her or both, because she was hooked. She started analyzing as soon as I was done.

“The dismemberment, that’s classic Jack the Ripper, of course. But the cleanliness is weird. The Black Dahlia’s body was cleaned. Ted Bundy would sometimes go back and prettify his corpses, but the less said about his reasons for doing that, the better. A lot of times, killers either walk away from the corpse and leave it in ruins, or they keep it for themselves for their own purposes. Cleaning it and leaving it — that’s weird.”

“You seem to have unexpected expertise in this area.”

“If you were a young lady walking the streets by yourself, you might want to know how some of these sickos work. Forewarned is forearmed. But the thing is, Marrow was right. This is a serial killer. Maybe this is the first one, maybe not, but that’s what it is.”

I smiled and picked up my glass. “Well, here’s to more business coming my way!”

She didn’t show a hint of a smile. “More people are going to die, John.”

“Yep. That’s the way it tends to be.”

“I know how this goes. The people targeted, they’ll be the outcasts, the SINless, the people easily to forget. People I know. People like me. If we don’t stop this, a friend of mine could be next. We can stop that.”

I don’t have an excess of gifts in this life, but one I do have is an ability to never look like I’m angry. I can play the storytelling clown for as long as it takes.

“It would be a great trid series, wouldn’t it? Coroner and street urchin team up to solve crimes and save lives! I’d watch it. We can catch a serial killer every week, then we can uncover corruption in city hall! It’ll be something!”

“This is serious, John.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“We could save someone’s life!”

“My dear, there are turtles with a lifespan that can exceed two hundred years. They only shorten it when they are unwise enough to stick their necks out of their shells.”

Glint stood up, shoving her chair backward loudly enough that many people turned to look at us. I was happy for the dim light that kept me from seeing her face.

“Fine. Stay here. I’m going out. I’m going to do something.”

“Okay. Be careful.”

“If you wanted to make sure I’m safe, come with me.”

I just shook my head.

“Fine,” she said again, then turned to leave.

“You don’t even know where to start,” I said.

She stopped but did not turn around. “Lone Star went into Redmond to recover a mutilated corpse. Someone noticed. That’ll be enough.”

Then she left. I sat at my table for the rest of the night and didn’t tell any more stories.


***


Life went on as normal for a few days. Bodies came in, my verdicts went out, and I spent some of my downtime at the Union, some of it other places. I didn’t see Glint, but that was normal. People would be gone from the Union for days or weeks as they took on jobs that kept them busy or when they decided to keep a low profile for a time. So I had no reason to worry, and no reason to do anything than what normally I did.

Then one cool grey morning I walked into Organ Grinders and turned on the lights and nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing under one of the lights was a tall elf, gaunt and pale enough to look like one of my corpses come to life.

“Holy hell on a buttered skillet!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

The elf had an alien stillness to him, along with a weird sort of anti-charisma. He was so homely that I couldn’t stop looking at his face.

“Mr. Dresden.” He very deliberately didn’t call me Doctor or any such thing. “Didn’t much want to see you again.”

“The feeling’s very mutual!” I said that with perfect honesty and sincerity.

“I would not be here if everything was going well.”

“It isn’t?” I said in a perfectly pleasant tone.

“Someone’s been talking too much.”

I felt like someone had just poured a glass of ice water down my spine. “Oh?”

“A girl out there is asking questions. Looking into things she shouldn’t.”

“I didn’t—”

“It will be taken care of, soon,” the elf interrupted. “This time, you are lucky.”

“What do you mean?”

I think what the elf did next was smile, but I couldn’t be sure. His mouth stretched wider, the corners drifting across his cheeks like slow, dark drops of oil slowly drifting downhill. It was like his face was slowly being carved open.

“It is a fortunate coincidence.” He pulled out a piece of paper — the list I had given him. The list that had taken months of painstaking research, and was currently paying for my nightlife. And would continue to do so for many
months. The first name on the list was crossed off.

“You call her Glint.” He pointed to the second name. “Her real name is here.”

“You’re not serious,” I said.

“The problem will take care of itself,” he said. “You don’t need to pay the full price this time. Next time, though, it’ll be different.”

I left immediately. Yeah, the elf could have done anything in the morgue, messed up any corpses or ongoing investigations, but he’d already broken in before I got there. If there was anything he’d wanted to do, he’d already done it. So I didn’t need to worry about him.

Especially since I know had business elsewhere. I hadn’t known. How could I know there would be someone I knew on the list? What were the odds? Of course, the odds didn’t matter. The thing had happened, and I had to do something about it.

Shadowrun Returns Anthology posted:

The Deep End, Part 3


The sun was coming up. I first thought, great, I had the whole day to find her before anything bad happened, but then I remembered that there really wasn’t anything to keep anyone from killing someone in the daytime.

The Seamstresses Union would be pretty much dead at this point, but I dropped a quick call to see if Glint was there. Mrs. Kubota didn’t answer, and whoever did said there wasn’t anyone in the bar. I asked her when she had last seen Glint, and she said she hadn’t been around. So that was one stop I didn’t need to make.

I jumped in my Americar headed for the Barrens while calling Crabbage.

“I got nothing pending with you,” he said instead of “hello.”

“Yeah, I know. But remember the body you brought in a few days ago? The cut-up one? Any more like that coming in?”

“What are you, making a collection?”

“No, it’s just… I’m, uh — I’m worried the killer is going to strike again.”

“You’re what?”

“Worried the killer will strike again.”

“Uh-huh. Okay. Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

“Well, find him. Stop him.”

“Great idea, Dresden. Brilliant. Never would have thought of it myself.” Then he hung up.

The rest of my drive was quiet.


***


By 9:45 a.m., I found someone who knew Glint. I’d like to take credit for brilliant detective work, but I’m not a detective, I’m a doctor, so it’s not my thing. All I did was remember that Glint had said that on nights when the Seamstresses Union was slow, she went to Banshee. So that’s where I went.

It was closed, of course, as any self-respecting nightclub should be at this time in the morning. But luck was with me — a tired-looking guy in a wrinkled suit and loosened tie was locking the nondescript grey door in a nondescript grey building. I guess Banshee was the kind of place that kept all its energy and decor on the inside.

“Hey!” I said while quickly approaching the guy. “You work here?”

He looked me up and down, the way anyone in Redmond would look at anyone who was a stranger and asking about their business.

“We’re closed,” he said, clearly hoping that would eliminate the need for any other conversation.

“I see that,” I said. “But I’m going to give you one hundred nuyen for answering a simple question. You can do that, can’t you?”

He set his jaw. It was already pretty square to begin with, now it made his face look like a perfect cube. “Depends on the question.”

“You have a pocket secretary?” He nodded. “Give it to me.”

He looked at me warily, but reached into his pocket and handed his device over to me. I pulled a cable out of my pocket, plugged one end into his pocket secretary, and jammed the other end into my left eye. Then I downloaded a picture of Glint and pulled it up on the screen.

“Know her?”

“Yeah. One hundred nuyen.”

I threw a credstick his way instead of arguing. “Want more? Where can I find her?”

“Don’t know. Probably wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

“It’s a matter of life and death.”

“Yeah, that’s what they all say.”

I smiled. “All right, you’re cautious. Can’t blame you for that. And I hope you can’t blame me for trying.”

“Can’t see that I care.”

“Fair enough,” I said, then sauntered off to my car.

I turned and looked at the guy as I slid behind the wheel. He watched me climb in then pulled out his pocket secretary and dialed a number. Thanks to my headware, I was able to make out the number.

I’ve done plenty of favors for various Lone Star officers over the years. I called in one of them to find out who the nightclub guy had called.


***


By 11:30 a.m., I’d found one of Glint’s friends, thanks to the phone number. Her name was Artemis, and she lived not far from Glow City. I hated being in the area, because I always imagined I could feel the radiation hitting my tissue and mutating various cells. The people slinking around the battered streets didn’t encourage any optimism.

It was all right. I didn’t want to be there long anyway, so further encouragement to take care of business quickly was fine. Fortunately, circumstances worked in my favor. It seems that not long after she spoke with the guy at the nightclub, Artemis took something calming — zen, by my guess. She was not a great conversationalist in this state, but she was quite suggestable. It didn’t take long before I had an address and was moving away from Glow City.


***


By 2:00 p.m., I was at Glint’s house. I was proud of her — she managed to maintain an actual apartment, instead of squatting in a dumpster or something. She lived in a five-story brown building with narrow, dark hallways. There was buzzer security in the front door, but it was broken. Luckily, so was the lock. I opened the door and slipped in. According to Artemis, Glint’s apartment was on the fourth floor. The elevator was broken and had a putrid smell emanating from it, so I took the stairs. They did not smell much better, but I got where I was going.

The door to Glint’s apartment was locked and she didn’t answer to any knocks, but I have nimble fingers. And a set of lockpicks. So I was inside in short order.

The place was, at most, six square meters. The only way it would fit a bed along with other furniture was if the bed was mounted on the wall above everything else. Which it was.

There wasn’t much space to store things, so there wasn’t much there. No Glint. No bloodstains. Nothing worth more than twenty nuyen, and I’d be hard pressed to get even that much for the few belongings I saw. There was no note saying, If anyone’s looking for me, I’ll be at X. That would have been convenient.

The search of the entire place took me ten minutes. I admit I may have missed some hidden panel or cubbyhole somewhere, but I don’t think so. I found something, though. A plastic wristband from a DocWagon clinic. It wasn’t anything more than a bar code, but I had a scanner programmed with DocWagon codes. That told me where she had been and where. There would be doctor-patient confidentiality rules to get around, but I was a doctor, too. I knew how to get other docs to tell me what I needed to know.


***


By 4:00 p.m., I was talking to one of Glint’s team members. The medical info led me to a doc, and the doc knew who she worked with. This particular guy’s name was Charnelhouse, and he smoked and steamed everywhere. He had a huge cigar that looked small in his hands, its smoke drifting past his head and out his nose and mouth. His leather jacket was wet — he’d just come in from the rain — and the steam rising from it wafted past his deeply grooved horns. He was a mass of black leather and glowering eyes, and he didn’t seem to like me at all. I sat at his table in some dank bar and felt like a brownstone in the shadow of the Wuxing SkyTower.

“If you wanted to help her, you’d be watching her back.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be trying, you should be there. You should be with her right now, if you cared so much. You’re slow.”

I’d been calm with the ugly elf. Congenial with the guy in the nightclub. Patient with Artemis. I had been wandering around for hours and hadn’t eaten much. The rarely evoked unpleasant side of my personality emerged.

“Someone you worked with, one of your teammates is out there, in trouble, maybe in danger of being killed, and you want to talk about timing. About timing? Are you loving kidding me? This isn’t the time for you to do some sort of bullshit loyalty test, to see if I’m worthy enough to help Glint. This is the time to get any resources you have together, and see if we can find her and keep her safe!” I kind of surprised myself with all that.

“How do you even know you’re right? That she’s in danger?”

I stood up. It would have been nice to be looking down at the troll at this second, but it wasn’t to be. I craned my neck upward.

“Why would I be talking to you if I weren’t certain? Why would I be here? Why would I look as lovely as I do?”

Charnelhouse didn’t hesitate, didn’t blink. “Because you’re a bounty hunter who hasn’t brought anyone in for a while. Because you’re an old boyfriend who hasn’t slept since she dumped you. Because you’re strung out and always look wasted. Be nice if there was only one possible explanation for how you look, but there ain’t. So take your sad, soggy desperation somewhere else. I’m not selling out anyone.”

“Then don’t tell me anything. Show me. Help me find her. And if I do anything wrong when I find her, put one of those anvil-sized fists through my head.”

Charnelhouse stared down at me. “It’s raining. And I don’t go nowhere for free.”

I flipped a credstick on the table. “I hope you have a car. Mine won’t fit you.”


***


By 10:30 p.m., I thought there was a good chance that I had narrowed down the area where Glint to ten square kilometers. Most of it was open space, with traces of building foundations buried under weeds, trees, and plants that may have been orange or puce in the daylight, but now were a uniform black. There were no streetlights, or any other lights in most of this area, except for the occasional flash of a pocket secretary screen or some unidentifiable object. I chased after most of these urban will o’ the wisps, but none led me to anything worthwhile.

Charnelhouse was with me the whole time, though it took two more credsticks from my pocket to keep him there. He gave a little advice and helped introduce me to a few people who had seen Glint in the last few days, but for the most part he kept silent. We ran into a few devil rats at one point, and I jumped back. He didn’t flinch, just stepped on a couple with his huge boots and watched the others flee. Then he looked at me and shook his head.

We drove and walked and covered as much ground as we could, but didn’t see Glint once. We saw a corpse that had been dead for, by my estimate, two weeks, and an old woman leaning on a burning trash can who would probably be dead by morning, either from exposure or burns. We saw gang members carrying knives, lead pipes, and Molotov cocktails walking with a clear sense of purpose, but we didn’t see where they were going. A few hours later, we passed near the spot where we had seen them and saw the smoldering remains of some kind of shed. I didn’t see anything that looked like human remains.

We saw cold, tired, hungry, angry, aggressive, lonely, unpleasant, uncomfortable people. But we didn’t see Glint.


***


By 4:30 a.m., I was back at Organ Grinders. I hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. I didn’t have any energy or adrenaline left. All I had was an absolute certainty as to how the rest of the morning would go.

And it did. It went exactly as I expected. I could barely lift my feet to sleepwalk through my part, and I kept waiting to either wake up from this dream or fall asleep into another one. But reality stubbornly persisted in staying right in my face.

A Lone Star car and a DocWagon ambulance pulled up just as I arrived. As if they had been timed, or waiting for me. I plodded toward the employee entrance while the medics backed the ambulance into the receiving bay. Crabbage — who else? — got out of the police vehicle and walked toward me.

“Morning, Dresden,” he said. “Got another one for you.”

“Yeah,” I said, then walked inside.

“A lot like the last one I brought you,” he said. “Chop job. Plenty of wounds. But not much blood. Which is okay. Blood makes a mess.”

“Yeah.”

The medics were wheeling the body into the morgue. I was washing up, organizing my instruments, going through all the normal procedures without thinking about any of them. Dreading what was about to happen while also supremely anxious to get it over with so I wouldn’t have to dread it anymore.

The instruments were ready. My hands were ready. The gurney was in place and the wheels were locked. I took a breath, then I pulled back the sheet.

“Another young girl,” Crabbage said. “Probably a pattern.”

“Yeah. Pattern,” I said. Because it was. I had seen the list. I had sold the list. I knew the pattern quite well.

There are some people whose face never looks right in pictures. Something about a still frame doesn’t capture their energy, their facial expressions, the animation their personality gives their features.

Those people tend not to look like themselves when they’re dead.

Glint didn’t look like herself any more. She didn’t look peaceful, she didn’t look hurt (well, except for the slices in her torso), she didn’t look angry, she didn’t look sad. She looked dead. There were several clean slices and one big, long one. I knew there would be an organ missing under that big one. I guessed it was the uterus.

I went to work. I didn’t tell her I was sorry. I had warned her. This is not a world where you should go chasing after what you don’t know. Not a world where you should stick your neck out. Do your thing. Stay safe. That’s what I told her. And she hadn’t listened.

Of course, she was on the list. So they would have found her, eventually, no matter what. So again, not my fault. If they wanted her, they would have found her. Someone was going to make money on the deal; it just happened to be me. Gotta make a living.

I conducted the rest of the autopsy without looking at her face again.


***


I went to the Union that night with the intention of getting well and truly drunk. I still hadn’t slept, but I didn’t want to close my eyes.

The Union was crowded and lively. Mrs. Kubota waved at me, Daisychain and Zankenman and others greeted me warmly, and Hatchetman motioned to a chair at his table. I sat at it without thinking.

“So Doc, what news today from the world of the gruesomely dead?”

I stared blankly for what I hope was not an awkward amount of time. Then I smiled.

“Slow day today,” I said. “Heart attacks and cancer. Nothing juicy.”

The room sighed in disappointment, then turned their attention to other things.

I’d be back tomorrow, and I’d be myself again. The list would still be out there, and someone would keep working on it, but I’d forget about it, pretend I didn’t know it existed. I’d share stories and make everyone laugh. But I wouldn’t tell them Glint’s story.

Ever.

Kanfy posted:

Something's odd about this one elf, you can tell from the speech bubble above his head.



Who's asking?

[The elf giggles - a strange, high-pitched warble you would not expect to emerge from his misshapen face.]

Hmm, I can't quite place my finger on what exactly it is, but there's something subtly villainous about this guy.

Oh, I'm no one of consequence. Never mind that though. A good evening to you and your friend the coroner.

Oh okay, my mistake. The inconsequential elf runs off, surely never to be seen again.


We go back to Dresden one more time to see what he has to say about our new acquaintances.

By the way, did you notice a particularly ugly elf standing over there in the crowd earlier?

Huh? Where? [Dresden scans the spectators surrounding the crime scene.]

He's gone now... but he was asking about the body. Wondering which Organ Grinders facility it will be taken to.

Interesting. Well... there's some who might be interested in purchasing some of her parts, sure, but that's pretty poor form to inquire at the site of a murder. An ugly elf, eh? I'll keep an eye out. Shouldn't be hard to spot if he comes back around.

Y'know, I appreciate that the game actually allows you to mention the hilariously suspicious guy to someone and they even listen to you to boot.

Thanks again, Dresden.

Anytime.

Psion posted:

Well, that's a thing. I know the Anthology doesn't line up exactly 1:1 due to changes in the game as it was developed, but I wonder if Dresden was one of those changes or if it was totally intentional the whole time and the game just didn't communicate it effectively?

White Coke posted:

Is it going to turn out that Holmes is actually a bunraku, and that's why he's so nakedly evil?

White Coke posted:

Is it going to turn out that Holmes is actually a bunraku, and that's why he's so nakedly evil?

Podima posted:

You know, from the start I really expected the true bad guy to be the dwarf coroner. It seemed to fit too well - he was at the crime scenes, and had the surgical know-how to extract organs. I guess this works too, even if the actual villain is just cartoonishly evil.

RedMagus posted:

Thinking about it now, it would of been a great entry into the entire series. Shadowrun is just cyber-up'd noir at times, and having been betrayed by someone you thought was a friend is a staple of those stories.

Kanfy posted:

Part 11b - Meeting the Locals Continued

Sam was sick?



Well, his liver problems are definitely gone now that the liver took the problems with it.

Did he say how he got better?

He said his mom helped him out. Never said how, though.