and i still get sad every time fastjack and his final logout are mentioned <.< . .

Fastjack? Don't you mean Captain Chaos?

I still want to know what happens to Captain Chaos *after* the Crash.

I'd say more but I don't want to spoil anything for those who may not have read it yet.

Regarding the Captain,

Oh contraire,

What are the leads concerning FastJack's meeting with Saeletra ? (Good morning world. Welcome back. Play nice.)
Was the name mentioned elsewhere ?

And how angry is she that people aren't playing nice?

Why didn't Dunkelzahn do anything to prevent the death of his first interpreter? What REALLY happened?

Who is Fastjack? What happened to him?

Who - or, more importantly, what - is Juan Atzcapotzalco?

If Elves live 300+ years, why aren't there loads and loads of them everywhere?

Why is the Ares Predator IV pistol harder to find than highly invasive cybernetic surgery?





What the heck are you talking about?

And, most importantly...

What is Ancient History's real name?[b][/b]




Saeletra. Likely an IE's pseudonym.

Bobby.

Fastjack is "just" a very old, and very skilled, decker. Over the years, he's become famous for all his exploits. He also created the original "Jack Hammer" utility, which may be the first Black Hammer program usable by personas. No one has reported meeting him in person, but those who've seen him in the Matrix say his skills are amazing.


Because "modern elves" weren't officially born until UGE hit in 2011. While there were a few "spike babies" (Dodger is believed to be one of them), for the most part, elves and dwarves weren't born until UGE.


Bobby Derie.

insert obvious Bobby Drake joke here.

Yes...but WHO is he? He's been there since nearly the beginning - back in the days when cyberdecks were big enough to be called cyberdesks, bought only by corporations and universities. Is he a disgruntled university professor, wiz-kid student, ex-corporate coder, or something else entirely? Where is he from? Is he even a "he"?



I'm well aware of this. However, longevity generally implies wealth - which, in turn, implies a low rate of birth mortality. Assuming that they have a naturalbirth rate 1/10 that of a similar human population, they'd still outnumber us by a huge margin after only a few hundred years. Combine this with modern fertility treatments that allow you to have kids whenever you want, and you have a lot of elves.

There's also the obvious social issues. A human in 2012 will have entered college in 2030, graduated in 2034, finished grad school in 2039, and will be nearing retirement at age 2070, preparing for his retirement in less than ten years. An elf born at the exact same time, however, will be the biological equivalent of less than forty, capable of a far more strenuous workload and further increasing his skills long after the human has become worm food. There's no good reason why he couldn't keep working for another hundred and fifty years after that - making a human with a possible maximum of 90 years' experience completely useless.

Then we get to orks, who are capable of childbearing about the same time a human male starts getting a fuzzy upper lip...and, if memory serves, have quite a lot of twins and triplets.

Ork infant mortality rates are much higher than other metatypes, largely because a lot of them are poor, and have little access to medical facilities.

Even allowing for multiple outbreaks of VITAS, there's no reason for elves to outnumber baseline humans. Given that the average lifespan of a human in 2008 is 78 years, elves simply haven't been around long enough to outlive humans born in 2011, the year of UGE. The oldest elf, excluding spike babies, would only be in his late 50's. That's not especially old.

This is more like metabolic rates; less longevity-because-they-eat-better-and-have-medical-care than the lifespan of a tortoise - the egg that doesn't get eaten by rats has the potential of living a couple hundred years.

Is there any reason to buy a Colt Manhunter, when the Ares Predator IV is so clearly superior?

Charlie Norris, granddaughter of actor Chuck Norris, used one in her very popular 2069 sim "Ork Cowgirl."

This is why I said "In a few hundred years". After a few centuries, humans will be second-rate members of society, vastly outnumbered and outclassed by elves.

I know it doesn't have a huge impact on the game setting, but it's a lot easier to understand the fear of Humanis and the Alamos 20k. After all, regular old humans have just become obsolete.



I'm well aware of this. However, it's quite a lot easier to save up some money and find a stable living situation if you've had a long time to do it - and an average elf would be having kids about the same time a human would retire. To continue your tortoise metaphor, the eggs simply wouldn't get devoured - there's too many autoturrets guarding them.

Longevity means squat in a hostile environment. Anybody below the poverty line today could potentially save their pennies and set their kids up for life, but the realities of the situation suggest that they won't or won't have the option to. (And where did you get the idea that elves don't get knocked up as teenagers and end up working minimum-wage jobs?)

By that same logic, an elf is capable of childbearing for 150 years or more. Elves will make more elves...but the first elves aren't going anywhere. Having ten kids is no big deal if you have no more than two at a time. Furthermore, the kid of that elf teenager has the same potential mortality rate as anyone else...but I'd wager that in the thirty year period she could wait before having her next kid, she'll likely own the Stuffer Shack she works at.

Ignoring that, there's still the social implications. All history professors, by definition, will be elves - why pay a guy who studied the time period when you could hire one who was actually there? And then there's the sticky issue of tenure - any elf who gets a job won't be leaving it for centuries.

"Yes, Jeeves has been in the family for generations."

You're assuming they live that long. It's like saying everyone today has a potential lifespan of 115 years; there's certainly examples to prove you right, but it's still only a fraction that makes it that far along.

Still, I'm glad you're thinking that way - as an issue it hasn't come into its own yet in SR (and won't for a bit), there is that bit with the Ancients...

Heh. The problem with the Ancients is the very high mortality rate. They're possibly the only group of elves for which that descriptor is oxymoronic.

Of course, it does give a new meaning to giving respect to an Original Gangsta...


Speaking of questions: What the fnord does Pornomancer reference?

LOL. There are a few women in first world countries who have 10+ kids. But I dare say they are the exception. They're so unusual, they have television shows about families like that. There comes a point in a mother's life where she just can't stand the idea of any more sleepless nights, diapers, baby vomit, and repeated mastitis infections.

Seriously. Human women now could easily (on average) bear ten or more children during their fertile years. How many do you know who do??? Two or three kids is fairly standard. Why do they stop? There are reasons above and beyond "child-bearing years" that dictate how many kids you have. Most women stop having babies while they're still fertile. So it's not that. Finances might be one, but really, for many families, it isn't the biggest consideration (I know very few families that say, "Oh, we want another baby, but we can't afford it" - when you've got the baby bug, money isn't generally the first thing on your mind). It's sanity. My kids are potty trained, occasionally sleep through the night (but never the same night), and one is even starting school. I love babies. Really. But I don't think I could start over. Maybe in 30 years, I'd have forgotten the morning sickness, the 5! mastitis infections, the 37.5 diaper changes per night, the smell of kid vomit in my car... or maybe I'd be thinking it'd be nice to just enjoy my grandkids.

It may be great in the abstract to say that elves could have a kid every 18 years and over run the world. But I daresay you wouldn't find many elven women who'd be interested in that. ("What? I just got Betsy through puberty and out of the house. You think I'm going to do that again? Crazy man!")

Even given a hundred years or so, a human who undergoes regular Leonization can live for a hell of a long time. As far as fear goes, I thought the fact that elves could expect to live 300+ years wasn't common knowledge?


A pornomancer is a massively broken social adept, who has 30+ dice for seduction rolls. Basically, even if you're straight, you just got seduced. There's a few sample builds floating around Dumpshock, you can look up the build if you want to.

And now imagine what a free spirit could do with its lifespan- they're theoretically immortal.

In fact, the differing lifespans should -and most likely will- cause all kinds of problems in the 6th world.
RC adresses problems such as fully mature orks being treated as kids, then there's the problem that no one born as an ork will live long enough to see retirement baring leonization (and we all know how many orks can afford that, right?), a jail sentence of 10-20 years can easily mean they'll never get out of the box again while for a free spirit, it may mean next to nothing and so on.



Usually, it's 4 children (selective abortions may be a huge issue among ork communities, now that i think about it).
There's a reason why they have become the second most numerous metatype in spite of short lifespans and generally poor living conditions.

Assuming you have two kids, and wait 30 years....then repeat.... you'll still have six kids.

Leonization is very expensive, and only an option for few. Being born with pointy ears can happen to anyone.

While the exact lifespans of elves are not common knowlege, there are elves in the 6th world that appear to be in their early thirties despite being 58. Even half again a normal human lifespan could make a huge social difference...and, as we all know, it's a heck of a lot longer than that.



Not a lot of them, though. That said, I wonder what happens when happens when a mommy human and a daddy spirit from the Elemental Plane of Cannoli love each other very much?




WTF? If someone weighs 300 lbs. and can crush cans on his forehead without emptying them first, most people won't card him. (This applies in the 5th world, too.)



How often to high-powered free spirits get arrested, anyway?

That said, there is an obvious problem here. Five years in the clink is a noticable chunk of time for a human, an age for a troll, and slightly less than the amount of time an average Immortal Elf spends on decorating the second bathrrom.

Fluff in earlier editions actually suggested that elves simply stopped aging at around age 20 and that it theoretically would set in again after about 400-500 years.

So people might very well get the mistaken impression that elves don't age at all.




I don't think spirits can have offspring.
Even if they have the Realistic Form power and therefore appearently normal and functional reproductive glands, i'd say that they are infertile, as the power merely mimics physical being's properties, instead of actually duplicating them.




This still doesn't mean they can get a driver's license or vote at age 13, even though they might be mature enough to do so.
And being physically that powerful at a certain age will cause a lot of trouble, too.
Imagine going to school as a human in an ork neighborhood.



You do have a point, with only about 5000 free spirits worldwide, but among sapient rights activists (time that they use this term in the books, metahuman rights activist is starting to sound politically incorrect), it is an issue what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment for a spirit, so one might as well view it from the other side.

No Jubruq...yet.

While Leonization and other age rejuvenation therapies are expensive, they're not prohibitively so. Anyone who's rich enough can afford the treatment out of pocket; people who aren't quite that rich could take out a mortgage and pay for it that way. Given the number of people I know who live in homes valued over $750,000, I have no doubt they could finance an age rejuvenation treatment.

Well...



What I want to know is what happens after that.

someone had better press N

Along the lines of the Spoilered conversation, what did Fastjack find when he went to check on "an old friend's grave"?

Ever seen Dark Star?

I haven't but the synopsis reminds me of a Douglas Adams book I read about a cruise ship.

Probably a bunch of graffiti, or a Goth Couple making out.

So you think he went to the meatworld location? That would be an interesting but gruesome run, find an excavate Captain Chaos. The ramifications in the shadow community would reverberate for years.

Ah yes the great movie with the beach ball monster, and the bombs that want to go boom. Pop Corn Popper Helmets and muffin pans for spacesuit breastplates.....

WMS

While veering off topic, this very point was being made in my game by one Eric von Slaeger, an alderman in Seattle and a member of the Humanis policlub (Remember, we're not anti-metahuman, we're just pro-human.) In college, he gained fame with his documentary on Elf Posers and went on to do PR work before entering politics. THERE, his current angle is trying to introduce legislation that would unlist Metahumans as Humans.

"An Ork only lives to be, on average, thirty years old. To require them to attend school until they're well past the middle of their lives is hardly fair, but, under the UCAS constitution, we can't allow them to leave school early, since all metahumans are promised equal educational opportunities. Meanwhile, we have Elves soon to retire at sixty-five, when research shows that they'll live to be several hundred years of age, perhaps even immortal! Can our strained budget truly support Elves living off the public dole for two HUNDRED years?! But, again, we cannot de-list them, due to the Constitution. Clearly, new laws must be considered that balance the specific need of each race... seperate, but equal."

Heck, we know that there's still research being done for a 'cure' for being Metahuman, and there're several treatments via surgery or bioware to "Normalize" metas. Luckily, it turns out that few things are as enjoyable to a gaming group than to beat the ever-leaving drek out of a racist gang. Fantastic badguys.

Bacl on topic.

1) Did we ever find out where the Crash Virus originated from? I still lay odds on it having germinated on the Wal-Mart computer network (Second largest in the world behind the Department of Defense, largest company in the world until the Resource Rush, income in 2000 as great as a 2055 Megacorp, utterly *vanished* after the Crash hit... all the parts are there.)

2) Who is Fastjack, exactly? Was he a part of Echo Mirage? We know he was born in '99, IIRC, is male, and we have a picture of him (Thanks, SR 1!) but that's about all. (And the '99 thing might not be him, in retrospect. I remember *someone* was born in '99, however. But not who. Ack!)

3) The Shadowtalk from the Aztlan Sourcebook ... we know who most everyone was, or at least have a clue, aside from The Watcher. But who were the two people who watched the meeting invisibly and uploaded it?

4) Where did CatCo's Seraphim go?

5) Where did Horizon get all the money from for such a huge expansion, especially since they're listed as a private, rather than public-traded, company? That means no stock options for cash infusions.

I'll add a few more after I wake up.

Did you ever know that you're my hero?


Does make sense.


'Jack says that he was born in '99, and in that same document (his, "And This Is The World" post at the opening of the history section of the BBB) claims that while he wasn't involved with the Echo Mirage crew (he wished he was though), he knew many of them and they were good friends.

How you doin' post Gencon?

Does Seattle have a Board of Aldermen? I thought that was a Chicago-area thing.

He became a pair of delicious brown nipples?

In the novel Night's Pawn the protagonist is aware of the the rumors about FastJack and Echo Mirage but dimisses them as he (claims to) knows every actual EM member by name.

Egads! Someone who knows me! Shhhh!

(And I missed the Shadowrun card game that Saturday. FOOL of a took that I am!

Alas, alas.

At any rate, yeah, took a few days to recover, since, you know, driving = HELL, but I made it.

Currently in a downtime, trying to get my computer to play TF2 again (Stopped on Saturday due to some memory thing and been unable to restart since!), so, fiddling around with Shadowrun stuff. Need to see what's in the freelancer queue, see if maybe I can get picked up this time. (Last two stabs, I was happy with one, not so much the other. Third time's the charm, eh?)

Hey, you're doing better than I am when it comes to freelance work. Of course, I haven't tried, but I don't think I'm quite at that level yet.

Good to hear you survived though

Dunno if this is the place, but what happened to Puck after Unwired. He seemingly dropped off Jackpoint and the matrix (as NetCat noted)...?

There's some passages from Dunkelzahn's Will I've always wondered about:



Who is he, and what was in the box?



Again, what's in the boxes?

There's only one other reference to a box like that, that I know of:

Not quite what you were hoping for, but maybe it's a helpful clue?

Okay, now I'm REALLY curious.

Why, the last Rickroll of course.

Sorry, sorry.

So far, we haven't seen another "Double Tuesday", I hope...