Shadow Schools, or: Keeping the Kids off the Damned Street! Options

[Raven the Tricks...]

Yay! More Shadowskool (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Ryusukanku]

Nurse Leo did his week-end inventory. Carefully accounting for the contents of the medical supplies was a chore that he didn’t care for but it was a necessity in the Skool. Some kids had a jonesing for something from the Nurse’s office and didn’t have the decency to ask… of course there were also those who just enjoyed proving that they could take something on the principal of the matter. He preferred the latter as they usually just left the stolen goods at the front office, the former he often wished he could catch and smack around a little.

Still it could be worse. Having no supplies whatsoever would have him reduced to using the red-hot poker type medicine too often seen in the barrens. He felt it fortunate that the Rockefellers paid for their children’s “tuition” in bulk medical supplies. There were far too many kids at this school who had never even gotten a decent check-up in their lives much less a tetanus shot, and there was only so much that he could skim from hospital supplies where he worked.

He paused a moment and sighed running his hand through his thick mane, the cat ears twitching in annoyance at the tedious task. Normally Red was more than happy to assist with anything accounting-related, and even though he admitted Leo’s chimerical nature “creeped him out” he enjoyed the task, but he was currently busy with something big. Leo wasn’t sure what it was but it was obviously enough to put the entire available faculty on alert. And so Leo was on alert too, in his own way. His office was his domain and he would report any intrusion on what might be the most sterile three rooms in a five mile radius.

He shook his head to clear the cobwebs and stepped out of the storage room, closing the heavy recycled steel door behind him and locking it. He needed a Double-strength soycaf if he was going to keep doing this. Going to his office he poured himself a cup and had a seat at his desk.

Despite the satisfaction he got from tending to the needy here, the Shadowskool was just a resource to him. Or at least that’s what Leo kept telling himself. It hadn’t been that long ago the comet passed by and changed his life forever. Considering some of the crap he had seen other chimera bitch-slapped with, turning into a living breathing Catboi was getting off easy. But if he had’ve looked like a cockroach then at least he wouldn’t have been drugged, had his skull and nervous system crammed full of wires and whored out at a Bunraku parlor. A wave of nausea hit as he remembered how many times he awoke in that cage, used, abused and his mind a total blank as to what happened. He was almost grateful that one client was into electroplay. It did something to his wired system that freed up his mind. Once he had a chance to think for himself, he had a chance to escape… and make sure that not only the others escaped, but also the owners never plagued anyone again.

Returning to work had been difficult after that, every once in a while a patient would give him THAT look, the one that said “I’ve had your furry tail”, but his personal jihad against unscrupulous Bunraku Parlors gave him an emotional outlet. That’s why he worked at the Shadowskool, gaining ‘credit’ so he could call in favors later when he needed them.

He paused and an ear twitched. He heard an obviously uneven gait coming down the hall to his door.

He sighed, puyt his soycaff down and sat up straight, Timmy had come for a visitation.

[Ascalaphus]

This convinced me to actually go and read the rules for changelings.

[CanRay]

CatGrrls and CatBois are proof the Spirits love us and want us to be happy. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

[Ryusukanku]

The Nurse’s office door opened hesitantly and in came a young boy who was almost painful to look at. Not because he was ugly, no in fact he had one of the most normal faces a kid could ask for. The problem lay in his bodywork. “Bodywork” being the key word.

Timmy was to put it mildly, accident prone. He had suffered more mishaps in his brief span on earth than could be natural. Some suggested he had been viciously cursed to suffer a painful demise for some transgression his parents had caused, some just shrugged and just called him a jinx. Whatever the reason none could deny he possessed a will to live that bordered on the supernatural… and a positive attitude that virtually invincible even if he was not.

His body was punctuated by obvious amounts of mismatched cyberware that not only was no doubt second hand but much of it wasn’t even meant for his metatype. Perhaps the most obvious being the left arm which must have belonged to a troll at some point. Rumor had it his parents were professional cyber-snatchers, explaining the use of so many so-not-off-the-rack parts.”

“Hello Timmy. Is something wrong?”

“Nothing that can’t wait until mom and dad get back, Mister Leo. I just have a bit more tension in lefty’s grip than I should. Kinda crushed my combination lock by accident today.”

“You are perhaps the only kid here who actually uses those lockers. Ok, Cybernetics aren’t my strong suit but can’t hurt to have a look.”

Taking the diversion from his inventory to heart he pulled out the simple penlight and examined the oversized limb. The light stabbed deep into it’s inner workings and a practiced eye found what he was looking for… an easy answer.

“There we go, Timmy. There’s a bullet lodged in the redundant neural relay cluster. It’s just connecting the circuit. I can pull it out but I’d say it’s harmless enough to wait until your parents get your cyberdoc to do it proper.”

“Yeah, I guess. Aw heck, I trust ya, Mister Leo.”

“Well that’s one of us.” He joked as he selected a pair of insulated tweezers from the drawer. “So any good rumors floating around the skool?”

“Well, they think Mr. Lee is a dragon in disguise now.”

“He is pretty old, and tough. Although I think becoming a dragon would be a demotion for him. Anything else?”

“Um, the Skool is really a way for Lone Star to develop profiles on new shadowrunners?”

“That one’s a little harder to shrug off, but do they really have enough Nuyen just to blow on a place just for that purpose? Gotta be easier ways to do that.”

“Yeah. Good point. Oh! They say you and Madame Q are seeing each other!”

He paused in his task to give the young man an incredulous expression of surprise.

“Madame Q? Me and the ‘social studies’ teacher? I gotta admit that she’s a very attractive woman but I’m not sure my mother would approve of me dating someone who teaches “Accounting for Negotiable Affection”, “Training for Personnel In Management Positions” and of course, my personal favorite, “Creative Dancing, 101”.”

“That’s the one with the brass pole, right?”

“I’m afraid so, Timmy.”

He took a pair of insulated tweezers and carefully removed the offending copper-coated slug from the apparatus. He could tell it had been in there for a while, nobody used them anymore. Way too expensive compared to steel jackets. Perhaps it was a souvenir from it’s previous owner. He closed the hatch on the arm and smiled.

“There you go Timmy. That should fix things.”

“Thanks Mister Leo. And I’m sorry I interrupted your time with your friends.”

“My friends?”

He slowly turned around and felt his fur stand on end. Two people were standing in his examination room, both looked like total ganger material. One bore the ugly look and colors of one of The Spikes and next to him was an elf, looking surprisingly elegant in biker leathers, who was an obvious Ancient. To have members of two viciously rival gangs standing there together in total silence was creepy enough but their skin was marred by a black pattern that reminded him of cracked pottery, and their eyes… He had seen black cosmetic eyeware before and never had it such a FLUID look to it.

The duo began to walk forwards and Leo narrowed his eyes, his hold-out pistol sliding from up his sleeve into his grip. Behind them the window in the examination room was wide open, not an easy task to achieve considering there had been a heavy plate of plassteel over it. The patience it must have taken to remove the heavy-gague screws and lower it to the ground without alerting anyone was impressive.

“Ok, that’s far enough boys. I don’t know what your game is but classes are over. Go home.”

As if on cue they both went for their guns, and the world slowed down for Leo. He felt that inner ‘push’ as he forced himself to move just a little faster than his opponents, and in the time their hands closed on the butts of their weapons he had pushed Timmy behind his desk and was raising his own weapon. By the time their pistols cleared their holsters he had squeezed off one round into the elf, hitting his gun-arm in the elbow causing a thick spray of molasses-like blood. The Troll’s hand cannon was level with Leo when he had the next target, it was a little skill and a lot of luck that caused the spray of buck to miss his face but he responded in kind squeezing off three bullets into the Spike’s weapon-arm, making it as useless as his partner’s.

In that moment it was over, time went back to normal, the guns were on the floor and the two stared dumbly at him as their useless weapon arms hung limply at their sides. He was set to crow a little but neither was screaming in pain like they should be, even the most doped up street-trash would acknowledge a destroyed arm even in passing. It was then they did the unexpected, they suddenly rushed him.

[Angelone]

DUN DUN DUN! Good stuff keep it coming please.

[Ryusukanku]

Thanks.

Taking an earlier suggestion and started going back to move my Story-posts to a singular location to make it easier to read.

Check out the first chapter at http://ryusukanku.deviantart.com/

[Ryusukanku]

Leo felt himself being pushed back against his desk by the Troll and Elf, his body being bent backwards against the hard slab of laminated concrete. It was taking all his strength to keep the jagged bones of their ruined weapon arms from spearing him as they pressed the advantage.

The ‘push’ he had slid into at the beginning of combat hadn’t ended just because he had disarmed them, and he was thankful for that… and the inhuman level of flexibility he possessed. As they forced his shoulder blades to touch the flat desktop he had a heartbeat to take in more information about his foes.

Their eyes were black, but they seemed to be ‘weeping’ black tears, and their wounds were seeping a thick tar-like black syrup that was starting to numb him where it touched his flesh. The most disturbing thing was the completely dispassionate expressions they bore, as if this moment were not so much a life-and-death struggle but more akin to folding laundry. They were immune to pain and emotion, but that seemed to take the edge off of their speed. Yes there was a terrible inertia to their actions but they seemed to not have the frantic energy that most other people would have when fighting.

He wondered if this was the result of some manner of new nanotech rig that these two had gotten their hands on, or maybe a virulent new disease or infection, like those ones on the nature trids that made animals and insects act suicidal against their will. Then once that heartbeat of time was over he got his own head back in the game. He pulled his knees up to his chest and planting his feet against their sternums gave a hard shove, knocking them back. Taking this moment of breathing room he rolled off the desk and reaching a hand under it drew his well-worn Jian from the scabbard hidden beneath it.

Nicked and pitted by age as it seemed it was a working sword. The first time he had held it in his hands he had pulled it from the scabbard of the Bunraku parlor’s owner, taking him by surprise… right before he fed it to the bastard tip-first, severing his spine at the first and second vertebrae through the back of his mouth. That was right before he used it to slaughter his lieutenants where they stood. Since then he didn’t feel like casting it aside, it felt so natural in his hand. It seemed strange that back in high school when he had met lǎo shī māo, the who had taught him everything he knew about martial arts, he had never dreamed he use it to take a life, even with a sword. But as his mentor once said, “when your foes have no reverence for life, why should you?”

Wiping his hands off on his shirt to remove the ichor from them he gripped the Jian and struck. The two bikers had regained their footing and the slender steel of the blade homed in on the troll, sliding nearly effortlessly between the ribcage, right through his heart. Making an abrupt twist to the right before withdrawing the blade resulted in the troll’s cantaloupe-sized heart being cut in half. Leo felt it happen right through the pommel, and yet… the troll still stood.
The black goo tinged the sword where it had sunk in, there was no mistaking he had provided a lethal blow to the biker, and yet he seemed unfazed.

They started to attack once more, and Leo was less sure of himself this time, but he wasn’t out of tricks yet. He twisted out of their way, dodging their grappling attempts with his accelerated speed, then he willed a different push within himself. Rechanneling his chi into a new pattern. This time the length of his sword crackled to life, blue lightning traveling from hilt to tip, turning the ichor on the blade to ghostly steam. He spun behind the Elf, slashing the electrified blade across the backs of his knees, severing tendons and finally eliciting a terrible shriek of agony from him as his feather-fine hair stood up and curled from the power coursing through him. The elf fell to the floor and started coughing up obscene amounts of black Bile, surprising Leo and causing him to momentarily forget the Spike which started charging him… then was stopped cold as Four very large metal fingers and a thumb encircled his head… and squeezed it like a large black-puss-filled pimple.

The headless body dropped to the floor oozing black in thick spurts as Timmy stood there, his troll-sized cyber arm dripping in goo. His face looked deadly serious as he took a few deep breaths and then examined his hand.
“I hope you aren’t mad at me Mister Leo. It’s just…”

“You did the right thing Timmy.” Leo interjected, a little surprised that the gentle boy was capable of making such a hard decision.

“Wow… this stuff is… Mister Leo, this stuff is trying to crawl into my works. My Nanohive is taking care of it, but I thought you should know.”

Glancing down at the twin corpses, Leo suddenly realized that both were looking almost desiccated as the black slime was vacating them and pooling into a large central mass on his floor. It was starting to rise up like yeast-filed bread dough and he narrowed his eyes.

“Glad your parents finally got that Nanohive in you then. Ok Timmy. Here’s what I want you to do… Run out that door and go tell the first teachers you see about this.”

“And what are you gonna do?”

Leo hefted his sword, the blue lightning had purified it of the taint in moments. He then Plunged it’s length into the black mass and swore somewhere at the back of his head he heard an echo of a shriek as it literally boiled away to dust.

“A quick room-to-room search. Something tells me this is just the beginning.

[Raven the Tricks...]

Awesome fight scene!

Also: Yay, the Shadow Skool is back!!! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[darthmord]

This thread is full of win. Man, having school back in session has never been so much fun.

[CanRay]

Wish my mind was in better shape, I'd stat out those Drug Spirits...

[Xahn Borealis]

Wish my mind was in better shape, I'd stat out those Drug Spirits...

Hitting the chips a little hard?

[CanRay]

I wish, then I could just stop whenever I wanted. (I just don't want to.).

Don't know what it is, major blocks. I was writing so well for awhile there, too. Oh well, something to work on.

[Xahn Borealis]

Wish I could give you some of the stuff I'm running on. I've been burning up recently, desperately trying to find an outlet for all this damn creativity. I wrote a feature-length movie earlier.

[PiXeL01]

I bow down in awe of the creative talents and arguments hidden within this thread. Both the Shadowskool story as well as discussion connected to it is pure AWESOME.

Keep gimme some moar!

[CanRay]

More ShadowSkool? OK, how about this...

Reach into your contacts, folks. How many might be students (Adult Education Courses are available!), or might possibly be teachers or supporters in the Skool? Bet there's more than you'd think.

ESL and JSL courses alone would be filled to the brim constantly!

[onlyghostdancesw...]

sweet! nice to see this thread resurrected

[Xahn Borealis]

I can imagine a runner-started corp that clandestinely sets these schools up in several sprawls.

[PiXeL01]

Kessler looked up from his canvas and compared the Japanese character he has just completed to the one Mr. Yamazato had posted on the board in front of the class. He got the radicals right but Mr. Yamazato kept complaining over things such as "Balance" and "Stroke order", something Kessler still couldnt understand.

Kessler had chosen the course "Basic Japanese" in order to communicate better with potential Japanese "clients" over the sights of his LMG, but after three lessons of reciting "A-I-U-E-O" and various polite requests, the 4`8" little Japanese salaryman had handed all his students a small paint brush, some black ink, some thin rough paper and asked his students, politely of course, to the paint the characters he had posten on the board.
Kessler seriously doubted this exercise would be useful during extractions and was sure that a Cyberarm with a built-in Gyromount wasnt designed for this, especially since he now had ink everywhere. On his urban fatigues, in his buzz-cut hair, his right tusk and pretty sure also in the circuits of his right arm. Mr. Yamazato had stated caligraphy would stregthen their resolve and bring inner balance if only the students painted the characters perfectly.

Kessler wasnt the only adult in the classroom, nor was he the only ork but he seemed to be the only one having problems with this damn brush. How the children could paint their characters so beautifully and master the language so much quicker than him was beyond Kessler. To him it would be a much easier task to suppress a large area with his LMG than politely request another cup of tea in Japanese.
Then it hit him. Mr Yamazato had suggested that all the students should try and combine their interests with learning the language. Trying to paint the characters with bullet holes seemed impossible but what if...
Kessler pulled out a belt of LMG rounds and started painting on the projectiles, one character on each bullet. "SU" "MI" "MA" "SE" "N" "DE" "MO" "JA" MA" "DA". There, that was one long burst, maybe he should write "thank you very much" in Japanese on the next set of 10 rounds.

After Kessler started in bursts instead of strokes Japanese began much easier for him...

...
OOC
Well that was utter crap. I do not possess the artistic spirit of Ryu ^^ I was just trying to imaging my ork mercenary trying to learn Basic Japanese at the ShadowSkool

[CanRay]

All good, man. Ryu didn't start out the way he did. I certainly put out a lot of drek before I was confident enough to put things online (And, well, it's still Drek, but that only because it's mostly unedited.).

Certainly a good way to find out a bit about how to write in Japanese. And seen Kessler will be able to write "Have a nice death" on his belts to make it that much more insulting!

[Xahn Borealis]

Was that what he wrote?

-says the shameless gaijin.

[Raven the Tricks...]

Given my relatively rough Japanese, it's not an exact translation, but I'm pretty sure that's "Sorry, but, see you" (Literal translation)

Someone with a better understanding of Japanese is welcome to correct me, my informal Japanese is not that great.

[CanRay]

I know English and Bad English. (I learned the second from a Call Center job talking to New Yorkers.).

Hell, I wasn't even able to learn French in the city with the largest Francophone population outside of Quebec.

[Raven the Tricks...]

Well the problem with sumimasen is that it can translate about a half dozen different ways depending on the characters actually used. The most common usage (based largely on watching a lot of anime) seems to be either sorry or excuse me, but a quick google search shows that the literal translation of the word is essentially something along the lines of "it does not end" or "it is not finished".

In context, the usage is probably sorry, but it's one of those things with Japanese where knowing the characters used makes a difference in the translation.

His next one would probably be A RI GA TO GO ZA I MA SHI TA to get 10 bullets, which is essentially a past tense "thank you very much" (present tense would only get you 9)

[CanRay]

Hmmmmmmmmmmm, wonder what you could write on the whole nine yards?

(For those that don't know, the .50 MGs on airplanes in WWII were given belts of ammo that were supposedly nine yards long. To give someone "The Whole Nine Yards" was to empty your guns at them.).