[right][h3]Outsider[/h3][/right]
[hr]

The plane a suborb, not a semi-ballistic because those were spooky for the Awakened, but fast enough; four and a half hours in a cramped, supersonic jetliner with a cabin so narrow that it had two seats to each side of the aisle only. 

A quick scan of the other passengers confirmed sararaiman types for the most part, and he'd dressed in a casual turtleneck and suit arrangement that was fashionable and made him blend right on in with the 'locals' who were engrossed in their augmented reality interfaces for the most part. Spreadsheet shit, probably, and one dude that should have gotten a subvocal mic implant as he talked business, though just about everyone had the means to tune him out thoroughly, except the stewards.

Chopsticks in a regulated breathing-heartbeat-muscle relaxation routine managed to make the time go by just fine. A cursory check of the astral showed a greater than usual number of awakened, but that was to be expected. Still, as far as he could tell, corp hermetic mage types or similar. The whine of the engines dulled in the astral, where the glows came up. There wasn't much spirit activity in a plane cabin, but there was a view below, through mist and energy, of the landscape on takeoff and during approach for landing.

Iceland had a very different look and feel to it, a new and unfamiliar vibe. He was sensitive to the rhythms of the land, even if he was no shaman, and the first footfall felt heavy. The trip to Reykjavik from Cheyenne was a straight shot; from the Sioux Council to the Trans Polar Aleut Nation. But while Reykjavik was part of the NAN, Iceland was its own cultural entity, and extremely alien. The Sioux passport got him through with a lighter scrutiny than outside the NAN, but it wasn't like they gave each other handsigns or whatever crap the vids portrayed it as. The customs agent was not blonde, but she was blue-eyed and definitely Nordic, and so were a lot of the others.

--

The last three days were spent in a small resort town soaking in things on Iceland like the hot baths; mud up to the neck and a little bit of booze, the devil drink was socially disapproved of in Cheyenne and the rest of Sioux lands. It wasn't merely an exercise in relaxation, but a good excuse to get a sense of the locals, the land and the really fucked up day-night cycle. It was cool to see the starry sky from geothermally-cooled pool and otherwise get bearings. He was treated like an outsider, but it wasn't so bad -- Frisco, when Saito ran the place, and even before, growing up, was fucking hostile, down to the Hell Night on Liberation Day, when the Chinese gangs sniped at Japanacorp personnel and the corps sent out security goons to collect metahuman ears. 

The place looked nautical, which sort of reminded him of Frisco. University types, the usual Nordic bunch. But he didn't really stick out -- no feathers in the hair, no warpaint, and he went with a pair of jeans and a good, warm coat to keep the freeze out. He could pass for someone doing their postgrad here, a little older than some of the other students, but plausible. College bar, according to research pulled down from the grid, not some hardened runner joint. Chopsticks wasn't complaining about a daylight meeting in a fairly innocuous part of town with some university types.

He'd never gone, though both his parents had. It looked a bit like the Silicon valley his mom inhabited when she was alive, a place full of garage-hackers punching out software for the corps on contract, dangerous bleeding edge stuff. They partied, but not wildly and dangerously, because a lot of the local University types were on their way to employment...probably with S-K, the big one around here.

Through the years, he'd learned that wired reflexes could be installed with a switch to take them offline, and street sam that had that switch swore by it, because the alternative was to live constantly wired, a slave to your reflexes. Throwing people over things before you even realized you reacted, keeping the back to the wall to avoid being surprised into knee-jerk action. What he had wasn't the same way, but he'd all the same learned to appreciate the magical equivalent of learning to do that, to let it all go. So he sauntered in, rather than rolling with some sort of ethereal grace and stick out like a sore thumb; dangerous runners and college bars were incongruous.

A bunch of runners were meeting here, sure, but that didn't mean they had to stick out more than they already did.

So he ordered the local piss and had a seat near the street sam with a nod. They all had dossiers on each other, but that didn't tell the whole tale. The brutal scouring of humanity left him cold on the instinctive level. The dossier info was basic, but first eye contact was instructive, even as he forced a semi-friendly nod. He'd come minimally armed to this, because it was supposed to be a nice, civilized meeting, but he found himself wondering if he'd come underarmed. With corpsec types keeping an eye over the place and the local cops showing strong signs of S-K influence, he didn't want to push the envelope.