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It looked like we were going to be hiding out based out of Heoi for a while, so I wanted to get familiar with the zone. I knew from growing up in the Barrens – if you look out for your neighbors they’ll look out for you. Its not like you can count on the badges.

For starters I wanted to check out the “Parlor of Five Phases”. It was a library/magic shop not far from where the Bolthole was anchored up.

The owner was a woman who went by “Crafty” Xu. Her real name was “Miao” – said just like it looks – and so she used it as little as possible. Her mother had owned the place when she was little, and she had taken over after her mother’s death. She gave me some much needed tips – showing me how to better manage lightning and also the basics of healing magic. I wasn’t going to be patching up broken bones any time soon, but at least now I could manage basic cuts and burns.

I asked her about my nightmare, and learned that they were common in Kowloon. Everybody had them. But it was just recently that they had started affecting folks in Heoi as well. Her mother had been convinced there was an actual curse operating in Kowloon. And had driven herself to madness trying to prove it. Crafty had chalked it up to insanity at the time, but now that it was leaking out… she wasn’t so sure. I encouraged her to look through her mother’s old notes and see if she could find anything useful.

As talked with folks around the docks, I learned that *everyone* was having terrible recurring nightmares. All variations on someone or something in Kowloon chasing/eating/corrupting the dreamer. Anyone who could find other digs was streaming for the exits. There was a set of Go players near the docks, who spent their spare time playing and watching the area. Seemed like good folks to know. And they all had the nightmares. Some willing to talk about it, some not.

Looking through the secure commlink terminal at the Bolthole, Auntie has passed along several possible missions. One was looking into something killing members of the Whampoa commune – an odd tech geek community. Another was an artifact raid on some foreign suit using his connections to turn a burial site on his property into a tourist museum. Finally there was an odd corpo raid. Corps hiring runners to sabotage each other wasn’t that unusual. But this one involved magic sabotage. They wanted us to sneak in and perform clandestine redecoration – intentionally messing up the Feng Shui of the office to bring the target bad luck.

I decided the third option was the best for our initial run. It was a get in, get out smash-and-grab without the grab. Done properly we didn’t have to hurt anyone, and shaving a few percentage points off of a mega-corp’s profits didn’t exactly trigger my conscience. The target? Wuxing Inc. Rich banksters getting richer by figuring out how to make bank off old Chinese folk magic – from Feng Shui to fortune telling. I wanted to learn more about Qi and Ley Lines anyway, so a raid on Wuxing seemed pretty Wiz.

The idea was a two-level strike. If we just tweaked the exec suites it would get noticed and fixed. But if we made a crude and obvious attack on the roof-top temple garden, then more subtle tweaks on the lower levels might not be noticed for months. Plenty of time for bad karma to cost them primo nuyen.

The Johnson provided a fake ID, but Iz said it probably wouldn’t do more than get us past the front gate. Since Wuxing specialized in tapping into old superstitions, the guards were pretty used to odd looking characters coming and going at odd times. Which should serve us pretty well. Dunk could clean up and pass for corpo-security easily enough. The rest of us… not so much.

As expected, it wasn’t hard to talk my way past the front desk – even with others in tow as my entourage. But getting off the ground floor would require real credentials.

I considered a bit of schmoozing with the low-level employees, but even if I juiced an ID off of one I didn’t want to get them in trouble. I wasn’t going to be the reason for some wageslave getting kicked to the streets. So we made out like Iz was maintenance and got her jacked in to an out-of-the-way terminal. Her mission was to find anything we could use to get past the elevator guards and security systems without raising an alarm.

Hacking Wuxing’s systems was nothing like Strangler Bao’s patchwork network. The ICE here had teeth. Iz saw several areas that looked like they might have had valuable paydata, but I had told her not to take risks. She swiped some codes that would give her temp admin creds, but then she had to bug-out with ICE hot on her heels.

That was enough to upgrade the credentials on our ID to give us access to the upper levels. The executive suite looked neat and orderly. Too neat and orderly. As if it were more a work of art than someplace people actually worked.

Using Astral sight I could see the Qi points spread about the office. Gob showed me how to recognize them – and how to manipulate them. A cracked mirror here. A divider wall out of alignment there – and soon enough we could see the harmonious energy flow breaking down.

But as the Qi flow degraded the redirected energy did more. It weakened the wall between… and spirits from the other side came through. We ended up in a pitched battle in the office with hostile elemental spirits.

After banishing the spirits, the Qi flow got even worse. Dunk and Iz couldn’t see it like me and Gob, but even they could feel the “wrongness” in the air. This wasn’t just bad Feng Shui. For the local mana to react this strongly to our disruptions Wuxing had to be channeling some *serious* mojo through this building.

The rooftop garden was pretty swank, I almost felt guilty about tearing it up – until I thought about how many people in Kowloon could have been fed with those creds.

The garden had guardian spirits, who jumped us before we even began. Fortunately we were ready for them.

Having a look in Astral I saw why we’d been getting such a big reaction from our tweaks. I’d seen ley lines and nodes before (dragon lines here). But the golden statue at the back of the garden centered the most massive node I’d ever seen!

Then we got to work sabotaging the place.

We were just wrapping up when trouble arrived. A real security team. Corporate mages. An entire squad. And they were more interested in blasting than talking.

We were getting burnt to a crisp. We simply didn’t have enough firepower to match up. So I yelled over to the others. “Cover Me!”. “What!? What are you doing Ye!” “Just give me two minutes!” And then I made a break for it while the others let loose with wildly sprayed full-auto to give me space…

To hit the dragon node…I’d never felt so amped before – so *alive* with power. I’d connected to nodes. Every mage had. But nothing like this. It was exhilarating. I almost laughed out loud.

And then utterly erased those wagemages. Finishing wrecking the temple in the bargain. And that’s when I passed out. Tapping that kind of power has a price.

I don’t know how exactly they got past security downstairs. I was out cold. Apparently Gob gave them a convincing story about being attacked on the rooftop – and just let them assume we were what was left of the “good guys”.

Back at the base we all headed to our quarters to heal up and recover. But after that rough end I wanted to make sure and check on everyone. Gob was holed up eating truly terrible takeout – which she happily shared with me. Meanwhile she decided that as an “experienced runner” she was going to take me under her wing and teach me the ropes.

She told the story of a run she was on early, and then asked what I thought the lesson was. It had been a milk run to steal back stuff left behind in a breakup. Or it should have been. Instead their cybered-up leader accidentally killed the target and smashed the stuff they were supposed to grab when kicking in the door with a newly-upgraded cybernetic leg. Setting off alarms in the process. While the others were arguing about it, Gob started a kitchen fire. She hoped to kick off a building evacuation so they could sneak out with the crowds. Except her teammates were too busy arguing to listen to her, and so stayed and died in the fire. Even though all the actual inhabitants had plenty of time to evac. I thought the lesson should be “don’t go on runs with idiots who can’t handle basic burglarly without destroying a building“. Gob said it was “go with your gut and don’t second guess yourself“. Sure Gob. You go with that.

I tried to talk to Iz too, but it was very hard to pull her away from her Deck. She was much happier in the Matrix than she ever was in meatspace. I was trying to get some information out of her about the nightmares and growing up in Kowloon. I thought at first that she didn’t want to talk about it because of childhood trauma. But it seemed she actually could barely remember. Something had happened to much of her early memories, and she wouldn’t or couldn’t explain further. She did say that rumours about spirits and curses were rampant in Kowloon – particularly something called “Yama Kings”. She said it was just folk tales, but these were apparently supernatural beings that offered power to those who sought them out – but always at a price. And preyed on the desperate.

She also told me she had been matrix-searching Uncle Ray. Trying to find anything about his background that might help. She said Uncle was very hard to pin down, and before 2032 he didn’t appear to exist at *all* – which shouldn’t be possible. I really wished I knew who or what Uncle had been before we knew him. Clearly there was far more to that story than he had ever told us.

Finally I went to talk to Dunk some more. He was worried about me. Said he wasn’t sure I knew what I was getting into. True. But we couldn’t very well stop now. He said he’d been thinking about Carter, and why her death had hit him so hard. He said when he’d first joined the force he’d had a lot of trouble controlling his anger – enjoying the violent parts of the job a bit too much. Carter had helped him focus himself better. And helped him see when he was going too far.

“That used to be you, Ye.” He told me. “Back in the Barrens you were always the leader. And I let you because I didn’t trust me. I wanted to hurt people. I *liked* hurting people. I knew I shouldn’t. But if I let you decide, then I knew I’d be okay. You were wild. But you cared about people. I knew you’d never let me hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. When you disappeared, I didn’t know what to do. “

I thought about that for a long time. I knew it some. I knew he’d always been angry. I didn’t know he’d basically been using me as a replacement conscience. Finally I told him, “So maybe what you should really do is honor Carter by living the way she would have wanted. You can think in your head ‘What would Carter say?’ or ‘What would Ye do?’ without giving up on figuring out ‘What would the Dunk that I want to be do?’“

He stared back at me with an odd look, “Is this Ying Ye, Hijinx, master of disaster, giving me wise advice?” He laughed. “You’ve changed too Ye. And it suits you. I’m glad you came back.”

I just smiled and headed back to my digs to crash out for the night. I was glad me and Dunk seemed to be sorted. But that last run really had me thinking. I needed to do a lot better job prepping for these runs. I needed better plans for when things went sideways. I was *not* going lose anybody else like we lost Carter.

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Author’s Notes:

I think I’m finally getting settled on good looks for the others. Is0bel was pretty easy, but Gob and Dunk have been a bit of a challenge to stabilize. I’d forgotten how well fleshed out your relationships with your companions gets in this game. Some people don’t like it. Too much talking. But for me it works. They’re not trauma dumping. They don’t need you to save them. Dunk’s the only one that gets heavy quickly – and he literally grew up with you..

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