My first SR fiction., It's about Shen. Options

[emo samurai]

Edit: There's a revised version at the bottom if you don't want to read the woefully flawed semi-rough draft.

Lunch with the Streets by emo samurai

Why do people struggle against each other? Why do they fight towards the peak of a mountain made of those who have tried and failed to do the same? It can’t be mere self-interest; only one person can win in any competition, and everyone must know, deep down, that they most probably will not be that person.

This principle, of course, is seen everywhere, including the streets. From the callow, ambitious youth to the leering sycophantic crony, one always senses the clamor, the desperation, that goes on behind their eyes. People are always fawning over societies that will never do anything but suppress them. Perhaps it is human nature; that thought does not make the human condition any less pathetic. On the contrary, it destroys all hope I might have had for change.

I mused on all of this while watching the sprawled form of the boy who shot at me. If I hadn't quickened a deflection spell on myself, I would have been dead. Of course, things did not turn out this way, since I later levitated the boy 20 feet into the air and dropped him on a pile of trash, half of which, by my reckoning, was broken and sharp. People, with all their banal predictability, still interest me, so instead of letting the child die from his wounds, I decided to heal him.

The boy was about 3'9" tall, just below average for a dwarf, and was decorated with crudely tattoed symbols from nearly every gang in the Barrens that would admit a dwarf. It was likely that none of the tattoos were drawn by the gangs themselves; the only reason the gangs spared him for this slight was most likely a mixture of sympathy and a grudging admiration of his exhuberance. I imagined that they paid others to set up fake meetings so that he wouldn’t be disheartened that nobody real wanted to talk to him. Across his forehead was tattooed the word “Toady.” No self-respecting gang would call themselves the “Toadies,” and every gang had to at least feign self-respect, so I supposed that to be his name.

When he woke up to find that his ghost had not left him, his first act was to reach for his holster. When that proved futile, he resignedly decided to speak.

“Why did you shoot me?” I didn’t know of any gangs that I’d angered, but on second thought, I don't presume to understand gangs.

“Mostly for money. Word is you’ve got a lot of it, and it’s fragging hard to attack you in that apartment of yours.” Fair enough.

“Do you want some lunch? I will pay for your share, if you'd like.”

“S-s--sure, I guess. My name’s-”

I cut him off curtly and offhandedly. “‘Toady, I know.”

I eventually decided to go to Tetsuo’s Folly, a sushi palace that served fish that were genetically modified to fall into a coma within minutes of when they reached the prime age for harvesting. The modification was the product of an attempt to make sure that the fish never developed beyond when their meat was the mosts succulent. Technically, it did the job, it simply had a few... side effects. The fish were born... wrong, for lack of a better term. What the farmers had was a batch of fish with extra eyes and fins that were very, very good to eat. They also made most hardened fishermen and hatchery owners regurgitate when they saw the fish for the first time. The formula was never perfected because the only real problems were cosmetic.

“So..." he paused, narrowing one eye and widening the other as he stared at his food, "Are they supposed to look–”

I cut him off, curtly and offhandedly for the second time. Pehaps I was developing a pattern. “Yes.”

“Um... Okay." He looked unconvinced.

“We should begin with the most basic aspects of our situation. Why did you attack me? You obviously knew that I was a mage of some power.”

He seemed to think that I was foolish for asking. “Mostly being poor and hungry.”

“I mean before that.”

“So you want a life story?” He asked resignedly.

“Yes.”

“Is that what you took me to lunch for?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you didn’t let me bleed to death?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a weird guy.”

“Yes. So what happened to you? What led up to the shooting? What turned you into
‘Toady, Biter of More Than He Can Chew’?”

“Fuck off.”

“Answer my question.” The air darkened around me a bit, casting a light shadow over everything. Nothing large, simply a small illusion spell to gently frighten the child.

“It started with being born. You’d think I was being boring and stupid, saying that, but you never had my mom. She was nice enough, a boring, average single corporate mom, until it was obvious that I wouldn’t grow much after the age of 5. Then she took up drinking and lost her job.”

“Sounds terrible...”

“Nah, I’m okay. I’m pretty safe for a Barrens kid; all the gangs look after me ‘cause I’m so small, and corp life was boring as hell. Even as a kid I knew it was all drek. Company this, company that, blah blah blah blah blah... ”

“What happened to your mother?”

“As you can imagine, she drank even more after losing her job. She stopped noticing me about a month after being kicked out. The Ancients took me in as a foundling, thinking that they should ‘look after their lessers’ or some drek like that. The fact that I’m an orphan helps.”

“Do you take any drugs?”

“I don’t, but the gangs I run with sometimes do. It depends on the gang; it’s mostly the troll and ork ones that do. They offer me some, but I guess it’s the Ancients who mostly influence me. Meaning I don’t do any drugs.

“Speaking of the Ancients, didya know that they’ve got this huge weapons cache? They’re going to go down to Glow City and totally...”

“Yes, very interesting... So how do you survive?”

“I bum food and drink off of my friends and random people. Like I said, it helps that I’m an orphan.”

“I’m sure. How do you like your sushi?”

“‘s good, I guess. A bit slimy.”

“It’s supposed to be that way.”

“I guess. They say fish’s supposed to be good for your brain. Is that why the Japanese and you are so smart?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well... thanks.”

“Thank you for your insight.”

“In-what?”

“Insight. Penetration. The act or power to see into a situation.”

“Oh...”

“For example, you have insight into the world of the gangs. You know of a part of them that I would never have guessed at; you know of their capacity for an unexpected, if limited, sense of compassion, a humanity, if you will.”

“You sound like a corper.”

“I suppose I do.”

“Are you one?”

“No. I think of the corporations much the same as I do the gangs. To me, they are large, impersonal, self-interested meta-entities whose goals and intentions have nothing to do with the interests of the people who make them work. They live solely to accumulate power and wealth for the sake of accumulating power and wealth. Much like gangs, but with less snarling and brandishing of chains.”

“You don’t make me sound very good.”

“I don’t.”

“They’re not that bad.”

“So they don’t kill people for walking down the wrong sidewalk and mug old women for money? They're perfect citizens who make their living without violence and vice?”

“...”

“Exactly.”

“They’re nice to me.”

“So was the corporation.”

“... I wanna go now.”

“That is your choice. I would suggest finishing your lunch.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“As you will.”

I explained to the waiter that I would pay for his bill and ate what he left behind. No use wasting good sushi, even if it would leave me overstuffed. People were, after all, starving, and it would be unhealthy to eat by the time I gave it to a beggar; postmortem susceptibility to food poisoning was a side effect of the fishes’ genetic engineering because of the weakened cell membranes.

He was waiting for me at the door outside my Barrens apartment. I had paid contractors to reinforce the rotting floors and walls with plasteel and put a palmlock on the outside door. I had a water elemental bound to protect it from all intruders. All of which did nothing to protect me from his knife. He managed to lodge it in my thigh; if I’d prepared for it, I wouldn’t have fallen the way I did, clutching at my wound and yelling.

The look on his face was both encouraging and infuriating. His eyes belied an obvious horror; wide open and round, they were in the classic look of fear and unexpected remorse. That was encouraging. His mouth, though... his mouth was also open, but closed just enough to betray complete incomprehension. Incomprehension is to me the most basic human fallacy, and to show it at a moment like that...

I pulled out the knife and healed myself. Not with the "laying on hands" gesture of magician serials, but with apparently spontaneous self-healing. I could always target myself with my own spells. To academics and magicians this makes sense, but to any normal person, as I was quickly realizing, the vision was horrific, like some awful cacodemon regenerating himself after being slashed with a brave knight's sword. He ran and screamed like any idiot in his position would, and like any angry self-appointed guardian in my position would, I levitated him onto my apartment’s rooftop. I would feed him in a day or two.

Perhaps.