Storm was hurting. Not just physically; she needed some action. She'd spent most of her downtime in her low-rent ground floor apartment recovering from the several round of surgeries she'd just gone through. The remainder of her time was spent playing with her 'ware and learning a couple new spells from a trideo package she'd purchased. She wasn't terribly interested in going out and being social, at least not just yet. She was still on a lot of people's hit-list due to the assassination last month. She had been forced to use her real SIN, meaning she was now a person of interest in a rather high-profile crime. Not so good. At least the money had been worth it, while it lasted. She was sporting a new Rating 5 SIN with the name Jerzet Ma’kolbx, a name that was far safer to use than either her real name or the fake SIN her employer had used to contact her for the previous run. That SIN was worthless now. Worse than worthless, since it would likely have gotten her killed.
She focused her new cyber eyes on a distant abandoned building over the barrens. It was much too far away to see before the surgery, but afterwards she could zoom in without any trace of glare, switch vision modes, and digitally enhance the image with nothing more than a thought. She reached out with her new black-market Spellslinger glove and a targeting reticle appeared in her field of view. She cast Ball Lightning and watched the upper floor of the abandoned building crackle with electricity, throwing sparks from the long-gone window openings.
She inhaled deeply, the corner of her vision filling with various readouts on air composition and pollutant count. She knew that if she entered an area with explosives, gunpowder, nerve gas, or any other environmentally detectable substance she'd immediately know about it. An armored taxi drove by, spewing noxious fumes from its faulty power cell, and her readouts spiked.
That's the crappy part, she thought, I get a reminder of just how nasty this city is on a constant basis.
She had gotten some rather expensive bioware that let her become hyper-aware of the emotions of people around her based on their pheromones, and she found that there were a lot more perverts living nearby than she could have possibly known about. She enjoyed using her Fear spell on them without their knowledge; she got a euphoric high when she smelled their conflicted emotions, a mixture of terror and lust.
The most painful surgery by far was the addition of Platelet Factories. It felt like her blood was on fire for weeks afterwards. Now that she's had a chance to get used to it she hardly noticed it at all. She'd been distracted once while practicing her new spell and lost her concentration. The spell went off, but she wasn't ready for it. She felt the usual "thump" at the core of her chest, and expected to get the soreness in her arms that accompanied the trauma of capillaries exploding; this time all she felt was a numbness followed by a tingling sensation as her augmented healing system immediately went to work at the cellular level, fixing problems before they bled into and damaged other areas.
Storm saw the encrypted message scroll across her PAN. She liked working with Zach, even though she knew he's in the game for one person and one person only. A true Shadowrunner.
Nothing wrong with that, she thought.
Storm replied that he should meet her at GRINDER, a local coffee bar that served shitty coffee that you could order laced with nearly anything you wanted. Anything. She'd been getting her fix of Psyche there for the past few weeks and had scoped it out pretty thoroughly. No wards, no recording devices, and no questions.
@Zach: Meet me at GRINDER, 8:00 tonight. I will bring some friends. Udachi, chummer.
[Zach knew her well enough to know that she didn't exactly have any friends, and that she was obviously referring to summoned and bound spirits.]
[OOC: Storm is going to spend the day binding a couple spirits]