[Shadowrun] Are you ready?; Lessons
Oct. 16th, 2005 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firstlightAnd now, back to your regular content: crappy SR fic! Yaaaay! Syl, I maintain you need to reward me properly for doing that meme thing. :P
Next two for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
30_originals:
Title: Are You Ready?
Genre(s): Cyberpunk, Fantasy
Rating: PG
Themes: #2 Park; Nature
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
giving_ground
Author's notes: This is Shadowrun fanfiction using original characters. I do not own the setting these characters inhabit, have no rights to it, etc. But I do enjoy it. Lots.
Summary: She was sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, her life in a carrier bag, when he found her again.
She was sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, her life in a carrier bag, when he found her again. Everything had fallen through, and all she had left was a bag of clothes and a few small coins. She was sure he must have known that she’d come to this, and when it happened he was there, waiting to catch her as she collapsed. She couldn’t pretend she understood why, even afterwards.
It was November, and cold. It wasn’t raining, but it threatened to; London, as ever, was grey and dreary. Somehow, even the brightness of colour which should be present in a park was absent, with the trees appearing dark and skeletal, everything around looking dormant, or dead. Senna was staring absently through the fence of London Zoo, into empty cages, wondering what animals used to live in them and if they were going to fill them again, and she didn’t notice the presence of the Marquis until he lit up a cigarette beside her, the smell of smoke grabbing her attention before anything else.
“Want one?” he says, as soon as she turns to look at him. She nods, takes the cigarette he holds out to her, lights up. A pause as they smoke, silently, side by side on the bench: the confident man, and the young, edgy elf.
“You ready?”
She just nods again, looking straight ahead; she doesn’t feel like she has a choice.
The wind picks up the damp autumn leaves, swirls them around in eddies, blowing them along the paths and across grassy banks. She feels like she’s being swept along by some wind far too powerful for her to even think of resisting, like the leaves. She wonders what he really wants. She would have said it was to dangerous, once, and refused to follow a stranger. But now...
“Okay,” he grins, showing a set of perfect white teeth, “then step this way, lady.”
And he’s running across the park, surprisingly fast, his tailcoat flapping in the wind, his hair flying out behind him. It’s all she can do to keep up.
Title: Lessons
Genre(s): Cyberpunk, Fantasy
Rating: PG-13
Themes: #14 Fairytale; Fantasy
Author:giving_ground
Author's notes: This is Shadowrun fanfiction using original characters. I do not own the setting these characters inhabit, have no rights to it, etc. But I do enjoy it. Lots.
Summary: The dangers of making suggestions.
She learnt a lot from the Marquis, and more still as Cat took her, made itself her totem. The Marquis guided her on her path, for Cat spoke to him, too. She thought back, sometimes, to that fleeting glimpse she’d caught the first time she saw him, the feline element to his face in that moment, and that was one thing about him that she understood now. She could count the things about him that she knew for sure and that she really understood on the fingers of one hand.
She learnt a lot, but he was elusive in himself. The main thing she did learn about him was that his life was a carefully constructed fantasy, layer upon layer of it, until whoever he was had become lost somewhere underneath it all. Whoever he head been, he was now the Marquis, a caricature of a man, a fake -- however convincing he seemed to the world as a whole. This very fact was what made really learning anything meaningful impossible, but when it came to the working of sorcery, astral projection and the summoning of spirits, he knew what he was doing; and so she was satisfied with what she knew, and the knowledge that he could teach her more. Naturally, their magical activity was secret, unregistered. Naturally, most of the spells they practised, at the power they practised them, were highly restricted. The ability to implant a suggestion into someone’s mind, to pass silent and unseen, distort the world that people saw as though they’d taken drugs and even to toy with the perception of machines: the Marquis had all these and more, and before too long, so did she.
She tried suggesting, once, that he tell her the truth about himself, the truth of the man, not the Marquis, and he made her regret it. He’d swatted her spell aside without breaking a sweat, and called her on her game. They’d fought, away from their bodies, in the mirror world. He’d beaten her down, and then, a final insult as she slid back into her now-bruised body, slipped a suggestion of his own into her mind, effortlessly. You want to walk away, now, and not ask me about these stupid things. And she’d done it. He’d withdrawn his spell before too long, but she knew what he’d done, and the fear of retribution had kept her from trying anything of the kind again. The Marquis taught harsh lessons, and his anger if she tried to push aside his neat little fantasy and uncover what lay underneath was unmatched.
Next two for
30_originals:Title: Are You Ready?
Genre(s): Cyberpunk, Fantasy
Rating: PG
Themes: #2 Park; Nature
Author:
giving_groundAuthor's notes: This is Shadowrun fanfiction using original characters. I do not own the setting these characters inhabit, have no rights to it, etc. But I do enjoy it. Lots.
Summary: She was sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, her life in a carrier bag, when he found her again.
She was sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, her life in a carrier bag, when he found her again. Everything had fallen through, and all she had left was a bag of clothes and a few small coins. She was sure he must have known that she’d come to this, and when it happened he was there, waiting to catch her as she collapsed. She couldn’t pretend she understood why, even afterwards.
It was November, and cold. It wasn’t raining, but it threatened to; London, as ever, was grey and dreary. Somehow, even the brightness of colour which should be present in a park was absent, with the trees appearing dark and skeletal, everything around looking dormant, or dead. Senna was staring absently through the fence of London Zoo, into empty cages, wondering what animals used to live in them and if they were going to fill them again, and she didn’t notice the presence of the Marquis until he lit up a cigarette beside her, the smell of smoke grabbing her attention before anything else.
“Want one?” he says, as soon as she turns to look at him. She nods, takes the cigarette he holds out to her, lights up. A pause as they smoke, silently, side by side on the bench: the confident man, and the young, edgy elf.
“You ready?”
She just nods again, looking straight ahead; she doesn’t feel like she has a choice.
The wind picks up the damp autumn leaves, swirls them around in eddies, blowing them along the paths and across grassy banks. She feels like she’s being swept along by some wind far too powerful for her to even think of resisting, like the leaves. She wonders what he really wants. She would have said it was to dangerous, once, and refused to follow a stranger. But now...
“Okay,” he grins, showing a set of perfect white teeth, “then step this way, lady.”
And he’s running across the park, surprisingly fast, his tailcoat flapping in the wind, his hair flying out behind him. It’s all she can do to keep up.
Title: Lessons
Genre(s): Cyberpunk, Fantasy
Rating: PG-13
Themes: #14 Fairytale; Fantasy
Author:
giving_groundAuthor's notes: This is Shadowrun fanfiction using original characters. I do not own the setting these characters inhabit, have no rights to it, etc. But I do enjoy it. Lots.
Summary: The dangers of making suggestions.
She learnt a lot from the Marquis, and more still as Cat took her, made itself her totem. The Marquis guided her on her path, for Cat spoke to him, too. She thought back, sometimes, to that fleeting glimpse she’d caught the first time she saw him, the feline element to his face in that moment, and that was one thing about him that she understood now. She could count the things about him that she knew for sure and that she really understood on the fingers of one hand.
She learnt a lot, but he was elusive in himself. The main thing she did learn about him was that his life was a carefully constructed fantasy, layer upon layer of it, until whoever he was had become lost somewhere underneath it all. Whoever he head been, he was now the Marquis, a caricature of a man, a fake -- however convincing he seemed to the world as a whole. This very fact was what made really learning anything meaningful impossible, but when it came to the working of sorcery, astral projection and the summoning of spirits, he knew what he was doing; and so she was satisfied with what she knew, and the knowledge that he could teach her more. Naturally, their magical activity was secret, unregistered. Naturally, most of the spells they practised, at the power they practised them, were highly restricted. The ability to implant a suggestion into someone’s mind, to pass silent and unseen, distort the world that people saw as though they’d taken drugs and even to toy with the perception of machines: the Marquis had all these and more, and before too long, so did she.
She tried suggesting, once, that he tell her the truth about himself, the truth of the man, not the Marquis, and he made her regret it. He’d swatted her spell aside without breaking a sweat, and called her on her game. They’d fought, away from their bodies, in the mirror world. He’d beaten her down, and then, a final insult as she slid back into her now-bruised body, slipped a suggestion of his own into her mind, effortlessly. You want to walk away, now, and not ask me about these stupid things. And she’d done it. He’d withdrawn his spell before too long, but she knew what he’d done, and the fear of retribution had kept her from trying anything of the kind again. The Marquis taught harsh lessons, and his anger if she tried to push aside his neat little fantasy and uncover what lay underneath was unmatched.
