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The Sharp End (Shadowrun)

Reader mode
I'd put money on it being the sfw vs nsfw forums split, I only found this story because I saw you comment in nsfw and wondered if you'd been writing and I had just missed the notification again.
 
I usually played more Cyberpunk than Shadowrun, but I was really liking this story in any case. Even if the corpo PoV was strange to me, from time to time ( maybe because 99% of my interaction with them in the game was killing them while trying to survive them ).

I enjoyed quite a lot both of your latest stories, the Polish girl with the II and this one too. So I'll be watching your next one, that's for sure.

Good luck with your muse, that bitc err nice lady is a bit fickle...
 
I'll miss this story but Thank You Cliff for writing the most intriguing and thrilling stories on Shadowrun on the Net. Seriously there's no one who has the sheer depth of Lore knowledge and breadth of world building anywhere else. And let's not forget about the amazing characterizations, which is very rare to find among Fanfic writers. Your characters actually have a "Voice", I have no other way of saying it but your characters actually feel and sound like real people and not like a one dimensional paper maché like most fanfic writers are commonly writing. Thank you again and I'll be keenly awaiting your next project.
 
I enjoyed this story, but it did seem somewhat atypical. Sometimes, that's just what you need to get the creative juices flowing, other times the creative juices just run out. So long as you just write for enjoyment, and don't make a living writing books, I totally get just switching tracks when you don't enjoy writing any more. At least we got the closure of knowing that at least one of the team survived, quit KE, and got married.

I myself have never really gotten any independent creative endeavour to the stage where I would really want to show other people, if you discount the time I wrote an inappropriately long and detailed backstory for a DnD character for the meme. I guess all the academic writing the last few years sort of zapped the desire to actually write out of me.
 
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Noooooooo!

This was a decent story.

Oh well, at least there will be a new story in a couple months.
 
What Could Have Been
  • Threadmarks
    • Someone on the SB thread asked me what, if anything, I had already planned out for the future story. I answered that there, so I'll also mirror it here.

    I suppose.

    There was going to be an incident in Denver that split the team. They'd be ordered to do something grotty, or see something grotty done - the dark side of corpo life - and some of them could take it and some of them couldn't. We're talking something on the order of 'The Lieutenant ordered them to shoot the Ares scientist being kidnapped by those shadowrunners because they were about to get away and if Ares couldn't recover their intellectual property, they damn sure weren't letting Rival Corp extract it alive', or similar war crimes level shit.

    Gabriel, as hopefully came across plainly in the fic, is a genuinely decent guy but he's also a 100% company man. His parents were both Ares, he grew up in Ares, he can't really think outside the Ares box ever. Even when he knows it's wrong, he's still going to stay.

    Rebecca's a freethinker; the only reason she's in Ares at all is because she grew up in the Detroit slums and brained her way out. She stood out enough even in the lower-class Detroit educational system to qualify for an Ares college scholarship (remember that Detroit is where Ares' world HQ is located, so it's basically as heavily Ares as Night City is heavily Arasaka) with the obvious obligation of 'once you graduate, you work for Ares' and she took it because it was the only opportunity she had. But she doesn't buy into the corpo way of life at all; it was basically inevitable that she'd eventually grow disaffected enough to leave, the only question was when and how.

    Nick is a family man; he's there because for an ork with nothing but a high school education this is the best job he can possibly get and lets him keep the wife and kids fed and safe, but he has no loyalty to Ares patriotically (unlike Gabe), he just has the more pragmatic loyalty of 'I really don't want to get fired'.

    Mitchell... is still deciding who he wants to be. He joined Ares because he's a poor kid from hicksville whose only real job skills were the Army, and after he lost that and lost his arm Ares was his only hope of still being able to do the only job skill he has that isn't minimum-wage labor and to not be crippled. This is of course why he's the protagonist; he's the one caught between everyone else.

    So the Denver arc would end with Rebecca's apparently committing suicide over how she couldn't handle what they'd been forced to see/do (actually faking her death and heading to the shadows) and the team dealing with the grief and loss. Nick would put in for a transfer to less responsible duties (i.e., to go be a security guard standing around outside an Ares building somewhere) so that even though he'd make less money he'd also be in a more settled situation where he could spend more time with his family and have less chance of ending up in this kind of black ops shit again.

    And Gabriel would reveal that his father was a senior Ares executive (not, like, 'actually knows Damien Knight' senior but still, someone well up in the ranks) and that he'd always felt like the family disappointment because he just didn't have what it took to actually make it through MBA school which is how he ended up enlisting in the corporate military. (One very subtle hint already in the fic, although it's certainly not enough to deduce this ahead of time - it was there to look more obvious in hindsight. Notably, that despite the fact that the Lieutenant visibly doesn't like Gabriel, absolutely nothing bad has happened to Gabe's career and he doesn't even worry about it happening. Gabriel would have to commit outright corporate treason to get a black mark on his file, given who he's related to. And yes, that means he took that hardship posting to Sekondi deliberately when he was younger, he was making a point to his dad.)

    Which is how Gabriel and Mitchell would end up transferred to Detroit, escaping the dissolutoin of their team not with black marks but with actual bumps up - that would finally be what triggers Gabe to go back to his dad and ask for a favor, not for himself but to keep the people he's with from getting screwed over by consequences. Nick gets the tranfer to somewhere nice that he wants, and Mitchell and Gabe partner up to get reassigned to the security detachment at Ares World HQ itself, the 'Palace Guard'. (And of course as the new guys they end up watching doors at the outer perimeter, but still, being on-staff at HQ at all is a notable assignment).

    Which would bring us to the 'corporate glitter' arc as we get an employees'-eye view of the high end of corporate life, because these are the guys running the security checkpoint at one of the doors that the megacorp HQ staff use every day, as well as taking their turn on security assignments around the downtown corporate plaza.

    And that would end when the conspiracy thriller part started, which was foreshadowed already with the whole mysterious thing surrounding Captain Ravenheart's team and the start of the Bug City mess years ago and the thing that the counter-intel suits from HQ came out to make damn sure that our boys had never got a sniff of. I hadn't figured out what yet would make the people behind the Dark Secret decide retroactively later that they were compromised and it's time to kill every member of the old team just to make sure, but Nick and Gabe were both going to die in that one. Nick would simply have been an unremarkable incident that by itself aroused no suspicion - he was on duty, bad guys broke in, he got shot. But the hit on Gabe and Mitch would go wrong, leaving Gabe dying with a sad and astonished '... why?' as he realized agents of his own corporation were murdering him, leaving Mitchell alone and on the run by the skin of his teeth.

    At which point the only other survivor of Team Three, Rebecca, comes back out of the shadows - as Pistons, the canon SR character whose background was 'ex-Knight Errant combat decker' and who I was overjoyed to be able to fold into my fic even if I had to fanon up a real name and appearance for her - and a solidly-established shadowrunner, because the deaths of two of her three surviving teammates tripped a search flag for her and she's damn well going to try and help her last surviving friend figure out what the fuck is trying to kill them both and why. Even if that leads to some tense reconciliation over the whole 'you let us believe you'd killed yourself' part...

    Oh, the conspiracy plot?

    It is Shadowrun tie-in novel canon - from 'Burning Bright', the same novel that I got Kyle Teller and Anne Ravenheart and Hanna Uljkanen from - that Roger Soaring Owl, CEO of Knight Errant, was in Chicago the day the Cermak nuke was used. He had to be, Ares doesn't pass out the nuclear codes to captains. It is also canon that Kyle Teller was the POV character when the transport they were riding in got hit by bugs, and he was knocked unconscious and woke up only a day later.

    So I ran with that and went 'Since we never saw how Soaring Owl got out... what if he didn't get out?'

    Eeee-yup. In this timeline, that dude is a bug and has been since the start of Bug City. Of course, the problem is that by the time they bugged him up the bugs were already in a trap - the Containment Zone was already up, high-level attention was already on the problem, and Soaring Owl was being micromanaged by Damien Knight too closely to do anything but his job. Still, he had good enough Masking to avoid being made as a bug, and eventually the bugs decided that the CZ plan was a bust and the only thing to do was drag it out long enough that they'd have years and years to do a separate slow infiltration of Ares.

    Which is why they were so damn paranoid about making sure that everybody else who was on that mission that night - i.e., Captain Ravenheart and her team - didn't see anything, and weren't in a position to tell anyone anything. A job that was complicated for them for years since her team went dark in the CZ and never came out, and because the bugs in Ares couldn't push too hard on it without giving people like Damien Knight a clue that something was going on.

    Oh, Operation Popcorn? That black ops was unrelated to the bug plot. It was just a science team hitting the University of Chicago biolabs to retrieve some research that would become part of Strain-III Beta.

    Anyway, back to the conspiracy thriller. So yeah, our heroes have to run the thread back to Chicago, go back into the Zone, find out the truth, and then figure out how the fuck they're going to kill the CEO of the largest PMC in the world.

    Amusing note: The vehicles in the convoy attack where Soaring Owl got bugged? You've already seen them. That was the wrecked APC the team drove past in the street on the day Mitchell lost his arm. (Readers of 'Burning Bright' would have noted that the street address I gave was right near where they were.)

    I actually had the final arc at least partly done, including the end scene. It was going to involve a badass HALO jump over Detroit onto the roof of the Opera House where Soaring Owl was attending that night, using all of Mitchell's inside knowledge of security procedures from his time on the Palace Guard and everything Pistons could hack, to get close enough to Soaring Owl to... well, they'd try to shoot him if they could, but it wouldn't matter if they failed and got caught, just so long as the man actually came close enough...

    ... to either of the dying devil rats stuffed in tubes in Mitchell's and Rebecca's backpacks. The ones they'd just picked up in Chicago less than a day before heading to Detroit... and deliberately trolled through spaces still infected with Strain-III Beta.

    Because you remember what Beta does to a dual-natured life form - such as, oh, a flesh-form insect spirit - once it gets close enough, right? And they can't escape it.

    And the fic would end with Damien Knight rewarding the last two survivors with what they most wanted - a position on Damien's personal security detail as a high-level operative for Mitchell, and a free pass back into the shadows for Rebecca/Pistons. As the two best friends would hug and accept that yeah, they couldn't really see each other again after this, but both of them would be where they'd need to be.

    Specifically, she'd be free to find the truth... and he'd be in a position to put one in the back of Knight's head if it ever turned out he was a bug too.

    The End.
     
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  • Threadmarks
    • Unfortunate, I'm not a big commenter but I normally like posts so the author sees that small bit of support without having to insert myself into a conversation I normally feel too dumb to participate in. Hope your muse hits you with inspiration for something new, Ive always liked your more realistic takes on CYOAs and stuff without going all grimdark and saying "a person getting isekaid will emotionally cripple them and they will constantly and forevermore be mentally unwell"
     
    Very sad for this fic. Anything in the NSFW forum seems to get a lot more attention. It doesn't require smut either, the level pf violence and marure themes you usually employ would seem to justify posting there, thus getting more potencial views.
     
    Sad to see this end, but it sounds like it would've been a trip. I think the biggest impact on readership is that this isn't in NSFW, like another reader suggested. The difference in viewership is night and day. So even if it's just for the purposes of gore, I would suggest posting in NSFW next time.
     
    Maybe. I was posting here out of respect for the 'keep non-NSFW stories off of NSFW' thing... but apparently SFW is dead, so fuck it.

    Granted, I'm pretty sure that wasn't the only reason I was getting little traffic. Someone on SB quite cogently pointed out that most Shadowrun readers come to SR fic expecting heroic anti-corpo protags, meaning I was already starting at a handicap by starting on the other side unless it was an origin story buildup to an immediate defection (which it wasn't, at least for the mC), and my very slow burn approach to a start before getting into the real conspiracy thriller was not going to overcome said handicap in time.

    I'm usually better at pacing, but I suppose the root error is that I took my finger off the pulse - and that really determines what pacing works.
     
    cliffc999 said:
    Someone on SB quite cogently pointed out that most Shadowrun readers come to SR fic expecting heroic anti-corpo protags, meaning I was already starting at a handicap by starting on the other side unless it was an origin story buildup to an immediate defection
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    I'll be honest, if I didn't trust you to write interesting stuff, I'd suspect this story would see the MC immediately defect and pick up a trenchcoat, katana and a lot of anti-corpo angst, since that's been my experience with corpo MCs previously.

    Cyberpunk doesn't have to start with the burnt out protagonist waking up in a plate of synth-spaghetti after being fired from their job, but a lot of people just took Gibson as the blueprint for cyberpunk and ran with it. Contrast Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Deckard started and ended as a bounty hunter working for the state, doing completely legal bounty hunting, but he was still a changed man by the end of it.
     
    cliffc999 said:
    so it's basically as heavily Ares as Night City is heavily Arasaka
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    Looked like a great story in the making. Cool n well thought out. Ever thought of giving Cyberpunk another shot? You do well on a character with a military mindset so I could definitely see a solo or Merc story done by you in that Universe. Hell, A WC version of someone taking a shadow run character Template would do well.
    Either way I really do hope to see more writing. I always enjoy it.
     
    Pavalos said:
    Hell, A WC version of someone taking a shadow run character Template would do well.
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    If not that a slow charged Inspired Inventor would be real neat. Given Cliff's recent comments for Industrious' II Naruto story. The intrigue of wanting to do good but being under observation of Corps and AI practically 24/7 unless you went out of town Nomad style. Maybe just post Bartmoss' Datakrash for more leeway and added shenanigans of being someone with reliable information in a world with practically none. Fear there would be the same as the BtVS segment of the recent jumper story, people crying that there's not enough tech-up without consequences. Obligatory fuck those people that story was amazing and why I will read damn near everything you do.
     
    cliffc999 said:
    Oh, the conspiracy plot?
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    I kinda thought that was at least halfway to canon. I mean, I'm pretty sure it's canon that Ares is desperate to keep something secret about those events, despite much of them already being quite public. And I'm pretty sure it's canon that Ares basically loses the war on Bugs, in a way that implies that something is very wrong near that top of the company, and also in a way that implies a significant degree of Bug infiltration.
     
    I've enjoyed the story, despite only really knowing Shadowrun from your stories, and I'll be sad to see it go. I've also got to say that, for someone like me who generally lurks wherever they go, but at least likes the chapters I like, I get why my lack of comments contributed to the lack of interest.

    I've done the fanfic author sustained by the dopamine hits of likes and comments thing before, but sometimes, since I know little about the setting, I don't comment because it's just a "great chapter, have a dopamine hit on me" otherwise.
     
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