Absent Friends

November 2, 2075.  

Redmond never changes.  Go back as far as people have been running the shadows and it's still the same blighted landscape.  Supposedly, this place had been beautiful back before the Crash of 2029, but if so, Sigrún had a hard time imagining it.  She'd lived here for a long time now, and it was pretty much the same as it had always been: flat urban zones blending into old suburbia as seen through the prism of almost fifty years of blight and urban decay.  Acid rain wasn't kind to the greenery, but that didn't stop more than half a million people from living here in a state of almost total anarchy.

It's evening, and Sigrún leaves her home - taking care to ensure that the wards are at full strength and the doors securely locked - on her way out.  The house she calls her own is large and rambling and sagging.  The windows on the ground floor are all boarded shut, and the paint has all been weathered away.   It stands in what was once an upscale suburban residential neighborhood, her house itself at the top of one of the area's few small hills.  The basement and most of the first floor is livable provided one is comfortable with a low lifestyle; the second and third floors are a Bad Place, and not fit for metahuman habitation.  It's a brooding sort of place, its construction distantly Victorian.  The structure is overgrown and forbidding, and it is rich in local legend.  There are other houses nearby - even inhabited ones - plus a couple of large tent encampments that will probably come down before the weather gets much colder, and the area is dangerous in the best of times, but none of the local gangers have ever approached the house, and Sigrún likes that just fine.  She brings her dirt-bike up from the basement, relocks and secures the entrance, and heads off into town.  

It's November 2nd, 2075, and she has somewhere to be.  

She arrives at the Joke at the corner of Union Hill Road and 208th Avenue some twenty minutes later, parks her bike, and walks in.  The place is dimly lit and intensely atmospheric, and she nods to the bouncer as she walks in.  The place is an apartment tower, and the entire lobby and ground floor now serve as the club.  The place is busy.  Kanaga-gumi, mostly, plus some civilians and Shadowrunners.  There's a bawdy cabaret show being performed on a circular stage with little tables surrounded by comfortable-looking leather seats all around, each placed to have as unimpeded a view of the stage as possible.   The smell of cigarette smoke is thick in the air.  

Sigrún does not look like herself: her facial scars are gone, and she has long hair; it's golden-blonde, and drawn back into a ponytail. There are subtle differences throughout the rest of her appearance: her eyes stand out a little more, and are a brilliant shining blue; her cheekbones are less prominent, and her breasts are less prominent, appearing a full cup size smaller. She's wearing black jeans, black boots, a white tank-top, an overshirt and a coat. She walks straight to the bar and has a seat.  

Danny Tucson - a pale, skinny man with black hair dressed all in black - is tending bar, and he nods in greeting when he sees her.  "Evening," he says.

Sigrún nods back. "Hey, Danny," she says. She sounds British. Not posh. She's got a Lancashire accent. She orders a whiskey, and he provides. "Leave the bottle?" she asks.

He looks at her a moment, then nods. "Sure thing, Lara," he says.

Lara Greenleaf.  A false name.  One of many.  Not that 'Danny Tucson' was the bartender's real name, either.  Sigrún doesn't know all the details, but rumor has it Danny is some hotshot technomancer who had wound up owing Johnny Wakshira more than was healthy.  It wasn't her business, though.  "Thanks," she replies, takes the glass full of whiskey in hand and raises it in salute to absent friends, in remembrance of them, of Rook, and of all the people who lost everything on November 2nd, 2064.  She drinks, and it burns all the way down.

(Edited the original post to correctly account for the Lara Greenleaf appearance.  It's all pretty simple techniques: a good wig, color contacts, makeup to de-emphasize the cheekbones and hide the scars, a minimizing bra, Illusion magic to smooth out the rough edges.)

Absent friends.  

When you're a shadowrunner for more than a few years, the names of dead friends and dead lovers have a way of accumulating.  You don't mean for it to happen.  It just does.  It's a dangerous line of work, a kind of game played with death, and not everyone wins.  A lot of people do it to because they want something.  Something that they couldn't have if they lived a normal life.  Something they can only achieve in the shadows.  Once they have it, they leave.  They retire.  They go legit.  Or they die along the way.  It wasn't like that for Sigrún.  That wasn't why she ran the shadows.

Three hours after she arrived, Sigrún is halfway through the bottle of whiskey.  She'd been approached a few times, propositioned, flirted with and chatted up, but her somber mood had killed the interest of the men and women who had approached her right quick.  Tonight wasn't about that.  There would be other nights for that.

That's when Jamie Finnigan walks into the bar.  She, too, does not look like herself, and her disguise is better than Sigrún's, and more skillfully applied; no one in a million years would recognize her as James Michael Finnigan's oldest daughter.  There she is, full beautiful, a faery's child; her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild.  She, too, is an elf; she is dressed in black slacks and a heavy green winter coat that conceals whatever else she might wear beneath, and like Sigrún, when she enters the room, almost every eye turns to her.  It's a reaction both have had a long time to get used to. She ignores the rest of the establishment to make a bee-line to Sigrún.  

"Lara," she says in greeting; her voice is lovely, and her accent is that of a Seattle native.

Even in her somber mood, Sigrún looks up and smiles. "I was beginning to wonder if you would show," she says in her native Sperethiel.  

"Of course I would," Jamie replies in the same language. "I know what day it is."  That's all the explanation that's offered.  That's all the explanation that's needed.  They hug, and then Jamie sits down at the bar stool next to Sigrún.  

Danny Tucson is quick to provide another glass for Jamie's use, but doesn't otherwise intrude.  

Old friends.  They've known each other for the better part of eighteen years, now, through good times and bad: the runaway and the mob boss's daughter.

Sigrún pours Jamie a glass, then takes up her own. "To absent friends," she says. "Long may their memory endure."

"To absent friends," Jamie echoes, raising the glass to her lips.

They drink.

It's better with two.

There's a reason Sigrún is still in this life.  A reason Jamie is still in the business as a fixer, too, and hasn't shown any interest in her Family's Business.  It isn't just friendship.  It isn't just the shared burden of loss, or the memories of better days, or the hope of better days to come.  It's something more basic; it is sine qua non; the life of a Shadowrunner may be dangerous and difficult, but...

the SINless are free.