Piper stood in the hallway of her brother’s apartment building, all legs and anguish, while I jimmied a lock with a vibro-pick. The thing hummed in my hand, a low, angry buzz that finally clicked with a sigh. The door slid open, spilling the stale smell of recycled air into the corridor.
“After you,” I grunted, letting her step into the dimness first. A gentleman I’m not, but it pays to let the client take the first potential bullet.
The apartment was a sty. A single servant bot was dormant in the corner, its chrome dull with dust. Takeout containers crowded the floor. But we weren’t the first visitors.
A man was on his knees, his hands deep inside a vent cover he’d pried loose. He wasn’t a pro. Pros don’t startle. This one jerked like a spooked cat, scrambling to his feet and turning to face us. He was built like a fireplug, with a face that had lost an argument with a pavement grinder and a cheap synth-leather jacket that squeaked when he moved.
I leaned against the doorframe. “Relax, friend,” I said. “We’re just here for the tour. You uh, looking for something?”
His hand twitched toward his jacket. I didn’t move mine. Sometimes, not moving says more than a drawn pistol. He saw something in my eyes, or maybe just calculated the odds, and thought better of it.
“I was just leavin’,” he mumbled.
“Not yet,” I said. “You work for Silas.”
It wasn’t a question. The name of the local syndicate boss hung in the air like a threat. The lackey’s shoulders slumped. He knew the game was up.
“Look, pal,” he said, holding up his empty, greasy hands. “I’m just the clean-up crew. We heard the kid skipped town. My boss just wants to make sure he didn’t leave any messy souvenirs behind. Nothing that would get the badges sniffing around.”
Piper stepped forward, her voice tight. “Where is my brother?”
The lackey looked at her, and for a second, I saw a flicker of something that wasn’t entirely thuggish. Pity, maybe. “Lady, I don’t know. Honest. The kid was a mule. A good one, for a while. Smuggled packages through the checkpoints in his custom rig. We ain’t heard from him in several cycles.”
He looked from Piper’s pale, determined face back to me. “We square? I got no beef with you. Just doing my job.”
I nodded toward the door. “Beat it.” He didn’t need telling twice. He sidled past us, the squeak of his jacket fading down the hall. The silence he left behind was heavier than before.
“Everyone leaves a trace, sister,” I said, the old lie sounding hollow even to me. “They sweat, they bleed, they get scared. It leaves a stain.” I looked around the sterile, ransacked apartment. “It’s just that sometimes, the stains get cleaned up before you can see them.”
I took her arm, gentle this time. “Come on. Let’s go. There’s nothing for you here.” We hit the sidewalk, Piper a step behind me, her hope as washed out as the pavement. The rain had started again, a fine, misty drizzle that made the neon signs on the street bleed like watercolor wounds. The air smelled of wet asphalt and ozone from the passing hover-cars. I was thinking about the missing mule, the cleaned-out apartment, and the distinct feeling I was playing a game where I didn’t know the rules.
That’s when the shadows detached themselves from the alley mouth next to the apartment block. Three of them, moving with the synchronized purpose of men who’ve done this before. No words, no demands. Just fists and bad intentions.
The first one came in low, a human battering ram. I sidestepped and put everything I had into a short, sharp right that connected with his jaw. There was a wet crack, like stepping on a bundle of twigs. He dropped to the ground and didn’t so much as twitch. One down.
The other two didn’t give me time to admire my work. They swarmed me. A fist glanced off my ribs, sending a jolt of fire through my side. I caught a glimpse of Piper, her face a pale oval of terror in the gloom. We were dancing a ugly waltz, the kind that ends with someone in the morgue.
Then the dame decided to enter the fray. She snatched a sickly-looking potted plant from a stand by the building’s entrance. With little effort, she heaved the whole ceramic pot at the nearest goon. It sailed past his head and exploded against the brick wall in a shower of dirt and clay.
It missed, but it was the distraction I needed. While the thug flinched from the unexpected horticultural assault, I closed the distance on the other one. We grappled, a messy tangle of limbs, stumbling back until we hit the wet ground. He was strong, smelling of sweat and stale alcohol. He got a hand around my throat, but I drove a knee into his gut and reversed our positions. My forearm found his neck, and I leaned in, a relentless pressure. His struggles grew frantic, then weak, and finally ceased altogether. I rolled off him, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
That’s when I saw the steel. The last goon, the one who’d dodged the plant, had a knife. A mean, six-inch shiv that caught the flickering light of a nearby club sign. He held it low, the way they teach you in the gutters.
We started to circle, a slow, deliberate orbit on the slick concrete. The rain plastered my hair to my forehead. I kept my distance, my hands up, watching his feet, his shoulders, the way his knuckles were white on the knife’s grip.
He got anxious, just like I figured he would. He lunged, a sloppy, over-committed thrust aimed at my belly. I was faster, my left hand snapping out to grab his wrist. I twisted, hard, using his own momentum against him. There was a grunt of pain and the knife clattered to the ground. Before he could recover, my right hand, balled into a fist of concrete and pure spite, connected with the point of his jaw. His eyes rolled back in his head and he joined his friends on the pavement.
The whole thing had taken less than a minute. The street was quiet again, save for the hum of the city and the soft hiss of the rain. I straightened my coat, wincing at the throb in my side.
“Time to go, sister,” I grunted, steering her away from the unconscious gallery. “This neighborhood’s getting unfriendly.”
We melted into the foot traffic on the next major street, two more shadows in the rain-swept night, heading for the bright, anonymous lights of the nearest mass transit station. The wolves weren’t just on the kid’s scent anymore. They were on ours.
Session Notes
- In-between sessions, Tana Pigeon sent me a draft of some rules to playtest for the upcoming “Micro Mythic” collection of one-pagers. I used the new one-page task & combat rules to run this scenario instead of Starport Scum. After some initial feedback, I got a second draft later in the day and those rules ran really smoothly.
- Deciding to stick with the flow, I switched from using the “Find Encounter” procedures from 5150 to using the One Page Mystery Crafter from the Mythic Magazine. Again, that worked really well. I’ll probably just stick to using the one-page Mythic rules collection I have (and the new playtest materials) and see if our Detective can solve this mystery.
- The NPC at the apartment was generated from a “is anyone here?” fate question, then a “stat check” to gauge how many people were there, then the one page character crafter to generate a profile. I got a Lackey with good reflexes and a helpful personality. Their character behavior was “Gives something, item or information”, so hat’s how steered the scene towards an exchange of info rather a fight.
- 5150 says we always check when leaving a building for an encounter and so I asked a fate question about that. I could’ve asked about the nature of encounter using a meaning table roll or something but it just made sense to me this would be more goons trying to get us to back off the case. I generated the goons stats using the one page character crafter and ran the fight using the one page combat rules.
