Chopsticks hadn't been back to Frisco in a long time; a full decade since he'd left before high school was done -- the Japanese government did a lot of 'worship the emperor' shit woven into the Cali Free State curriculum; he remembered the mandatory classes in the Japanese language and the attempts of the occupying Japanese Imperial State to try to change the natives of Frisco and the rest the Free State that they ran into good little subjects of the Japanese Imperial State. It just didn't work that way; from 2036 on, when the United Canadian-American States gave California the go-ahead on secession-- but in a way that fucked California. Politics as usual. Secession happened when the Governor of California was out in Africa. Tir Tairngire, the elven kingdom that encompassed modern day Portland and other parts of Oregon and Washington, Atzlan (Mexico) both pounced and someone got the bright idea to beg Japan for aid in defending the numerous Japanese corporations that had their North America headquarters in Cali. Great idea, but the Japanese decided to take Frisco for themselves. An entire generation, his generation, grew up under the shadow of the Rising Sun here on the Bay. It used to be a quinetessentially American city, the most Californian place in all California.
Chopsticks wasn't alive for that, but he grew up in a lot of it -- fear of the I-Marines, the occupation force of the JIS, drilled into him by seeing the way those cold bastards operated, the constant mantra of 'you are inferior' and the contrasting vibrant underground of Californian resistance against the Japanese occupation. They tried to turn them into obedient servants, but they failed on that front, even if extreme firepower kept the peace-- especially now that the Japanese occupation became a Japanese military dictatorship and all pretense was gone. The guys here were the hardcore of the Japanese -- the ones that wanted to stay and keep the 'dream' of making Northern California an all-Japanese show alive. The JIS recalled Colonel Keiji Saito and the occupation forces back to the Home Islands, and he responded by declaring himself the Protector-General and cracking down even harder, as well as trying to grab more territory. In the past, the Japanese stuck to Frisco. Now, they were all over the place and Norcal was seething. It was the guns of the I-Marines backed by the guns of the J-Corps that kept things down for now -- guns, drones, artillery, all of it visible even at this little customs and papers check at the entrance of the Golden Gate Bridge, which led into Frisco, the center of their occupation. Traffic was even slower now, because these guys were intent on not letting anything through, particularly as terrorism, as the Japanese called it, was on the rise. Heavily bulk-armored Japanese Imperial Marines, wielding assault rifles and machineguns bristling with technological additions, hyper-chromed and looking futuristically menacing, checking all the papers and making sure everyone was on the up and up -- his cabbie was pulled over because the wireless device he'd gotten, a legal-seeming 'throwaway' identified him as a newly-arrived visa.
Everyone was tense at this checkpoint, a pullover point before they could even get on the Bridge and there was no love lost between the occupiers and the Californians, but Chopsticks didn't pay as much attention to that as the view -- he'd timed his arrival by day so that he could admire the city -- his city-- and the Bay. The town had to deal with the Japanese, but it never lost its character as a hippie-dippie sort of place with that new age culture, especially since Magic came back. It deserved better than an occupation by some humorless, human supremacist meglomaniac working for a bunch of foreign corporations trying to lock down a monpoly.
The Japanese didn't like the Sixth World, the return of magic. They wanted to pretend that the world was a cold, sterile place of technology and logic. Even though their national religion was one of spirit worship, they'd long since ripped that out of themselves and enslaved themselves to corporate tech. They were cold and arrogant, moving with assurance from vehicle to vehicle here in the 'flagged' line of vehicles pulled over for a search, either randomly or for because their customs routines in the Matrix flagged new arrivals to Frisco. They were drilled in their superiority over the metahuman masses, as well as the gaijin they routinely looked down on, these troops.
Including half-Sioux, half-Chinese John "Chopsticks" Red Elk (the latter being the name he took while in the Sioux Nation; it used to be Chen) hadn't been back to Frisco in a long time -- not since he got an offer out of the blue for a scholarship at the University of Cheyenne that got him the fuck out of Frisco -- it was the only thing his father, an Ares wage slave that divorced his mother and left Frisco for a promotion, ever left him, the Sioux citizenship. Luckily, the I-Marine optically scanning his papers with a helmet-mounted, matrix-enabled rig that instantaneously cross-referenced it with files had no idea that he was a Sioux citizen or he would have gotten a lot more actual scrutiny -- it wasn't like the Native American Nations ever gave Japan more than a casual 'fuck off' in foreign relations, and Colonel Saito didn't even rate that. It was clean -- he had a California Free State citizenship -- that read "John Chen" and didn't say anything about the Sioux. Luckily, the overly-tech conscious Japanese I-Marines didn't bother to check to see if “John Chen” had something else up his sleeve. He wasn't chromed, sure, but chrome wasn't all there was out there in the Sixth World. It was only half the equation.
"First time to the City of San Francisco?" There was a hint of scorn to the tone as the man went down the list of prompts on his visor, though he was expressionless with it on -- the black visor and the lips compressed, the jaw thrusting forward aggressively.
"No, I grew up here," Chopsticks replied, with a hint of a grin; he looked Asian enough, though strange to the eyes of the Japanese -- no love lost between them and the Chinese, and the Japanese probably never even heard of the fucking Lakota tribe. This Japanese fucker switched to the native language real fast, rapid-firing it, assuming he knew the language.
Chopsticks hated to admit that he did.
"Then you know. Obey the laws. You know the penalties."
"Hai wakarimasu, wašícu." He didn't bother to add the flowery courtesy they loved to impose, and since everything checked out, this corporal had to swallow that.
"Move along," the I-Marine told the cabbie, a white that grinned a bit at the exchange when no one was looking. As the cab sped along, an electronic job that looked well kept, because Japanese regulations were strict about vehicle maintenance and cleanliness. The white, a rough older looking fellow, finally had to do the cabbie-talk.
"Hey chummer, what was it you called that fucker?"
"Wašícu."
"Yeah. What's that mean?"
"It's what my father's people call fuckers that aren't supposed to be here."
"I'll drink to that, as soon as I'm off duty."
The rest of the ride, all the way down into Chinatown, where his grandmother still lived, was pretty quiet -- chit chat about Frisco and what was up. The cabbie, Milton, knew some shit, and he shared. By the end of the ride, Chopsticks knocked on the partition and told Milton, "Listen, chummer, there's something extra for that drink."
"Thanks, boss. Welcome home."
Chopsticks, as he stepped out, grunted a bit. Welcome home indeed. He had a friend to bury. And shit looked tense in Frisco.
--
Aunt Celia was from his mother's side of the family, the Chinese one, and he had a place to lay up in Chinatown before and after the funeral of his buddy, Kyle Sandberg. It was something to be said that he'd show up to a place like Frisco after almost a decade for a dead friend, but they'd stayed in touch from time to time and they'd grown up together...though Kyle moved out to Berkeley, then to Oakland, now a sprawl, after his college years. While staying at Aunt Celia's, he heard all sorts of things from the old Chinatown types -- the conversation was in Mandarin this time. Two days spent in Chinatown, and Yee Chan made a visit to welcome an old neighborhood boy back, and to make quiet inquiries about his connections with the outside. Chopsticks played coy with the gangster, never outright confirming anything, but indicated that he'd be happy to bring out any messages the old man would like to have delivered.
Chinatown was neat and fairly quiet, always a well run, but tourist friendly exterior that blended Chinese culture and small business sense to draw in the customers, though it was also brimming with intrigue on the twisting back streets-- they were the supply line of all sorts of intelligence and supplies that were passed onto Oakland; there was no love lost between the Triads and the Yakuza, and the Triads were spearheading a war in the shadows to steal from, spy on and otherwise disrupt as many Japanese corporate or criminal operations as they could, though often subtly so as to avoid being easily traced. Chinatown was in a quiet rebellion, a subtle form of support that kept them just over one side of the line so that Saito couldn't mount violent reprisals and shoot up the place -- too much media attention from outlets in Europe, the UCAS, the Ute Corporate Council and the Tir, not to mention rival American Corps like Ares would pounce all over the chance to make the occupation look worse than it already did. Chinatown knew this and kept the connections in the matrix to the outside world well-oiled.
The world beyond Chinatown, and outside the neighborhoods the Japanese were holding down tight, where their own people and the corp execs and anyone with money lived, however, was a different story. The parts that tourists didn't see got a different kind of treatment. And Chopsticks was taking a cab ride right into it; not a licensed cab, but a more expensive unlicensed hack willing to go into the warzone that was Oakland.
The Japanese Imperial Marines couldn't hold the Sprawl down, they could just throw a cordon around it and hope the shit didn't blow up too much. It worked, to a point, but it meant that the Oakland Barrens were a seething hive of discontent as gangs and groups stopped fighting among themselves and started working on dealing with the Japanese and the few human supremacist types, like the Human Nation, that were fanatical enough to endorse Saito's rule.
Chopsticks wasn't here for the politics, even if they drew him in a bit. Instead, it was the funeral. But it was the Barrens-- the poor parts of Frisco's Sprawl, where the servants, the menials and the metahumans left. Before Saito took over, the metahumans, elves, dwarves, orks and trolls, could get a job in the City doing something menial and low-paid. Frisco was a place for Japan to dump off the unwanted, because Japan wanted to maintain its 'purity.' So there were even more metahumans than usual in the Frisco area, because it was where Japan sent all of theirs. The place was bursting at the seams with a whole class of recruits for a fight against the Protectorate, courtesy of thirty-something years of deportation policy. It was no wonder the Japanese Imperial State sent the recall. It almost amazed Chopsticks, who could read between the lines, that a guy like Kenji Saito didn't see how untenable the situation was. Frisco was about to blow, and he'd go with it.
There weren't overt signs of resistance in the Oakland Barrens by day, except for scorchmarks here, ruined roofs there. The place wasn't being destroyed wholesale with heavy weaponry on a regular basis, but it was seeing a certain low intensity -- the concrete in places was pocked with bulletholes once in a while. Oakland didn't used to be one of the worst sprawls, like Seattle. It had a well-behaved population, part of that being that the Japanese deportees were often not rowdy types as a whole, that tried to make things better in Oakland.
Clearly, Chopsticks saw with his own two eyes, things had changed since he'd gone east, away from the coast.
The funeral parlor had seen better days, in an era when the bodies came around often and burials were often cremations to save space, but this was only a temporary stopping point – the body was cremated here already, and they were heading out to scatter his ashes in a more appropriate way and place.
In high school, they'd toked on weed and snowboarded up on Mount Shasta, which was part of the domain of the great dragon Hestaby who, ironically, allowed snowboarders to do their thing. Once, they'd seen her in flight, copper flashing in the sunlight, which was a bit of a 'whoa' moment when they toked. The weird part was speaking to the auburn-haired woman that showed up near them, and getting the impression that something was up even though the conversation was about the hand-made, hand-painted snowboards they'd made in Kyle's dad's home workshop, using designs taken off the 'grid and instructions on how to finish them. Something was off about the lady, even though she was nice, but they only made the connection when they were a little less high and afterward. “Fuck man, we chatted about snowboards with a DRAGON dude. Far out,” Kyle said, a lot. The dragon thing was a huge deal to him. Shasta's shamans told Chopsticks he was Awakened – that he had the magic in him. But Kyle had taken things more to heart and became passionate about environmental causes as well as the Japanese occupation.
Those days were good ones, before life got really complicated, when things that seemed so important were small potatoes.
Kyle was a total computer nerd, and did something with computers as an adult, but he never got over the new age bohemian stuff, and Chopsticks couldn't help but chuckle a bit when told at the funeral parlor that the procession would take them over to the Gray Whale Cove beach – that made sense, given that Kyle went pretty eco-hippie over the years. When Chopsticks turned out to be awakened, he was ecstatic, and they'd stayed in contact through the years Chopsticks was in the Sioux Nation, talking about their lives a bit.
There'd never been time to meet up and snowboard on Mount Shasta again. Instead, the procession of vehicles and cabs out of Oakland, along the San Mateo toll bridge and over to the beach proceed along, though it had papers checked by the Japanese as always -- but Saito was hard up for forces, and the guys checking the papers weren't I-Marines, but conscripted locals who were less enthusiastic about their role as occupiers. Perhaps, it seemed, these guys were starting to question the wisdom of signing up to be Saito's cannon fodder as things started to get grimmer in Frisco and the NorCal protectorate. These guys were all humans, no metas allowed, that signed on because they hated elves, dwarves, orks, trolls and anyone with magical ability. Of course, even those guys were wondering if it was worth paying the price of Saito to achieve their goals.
Kyle, apparently, had a lot of friends in Oakland and all over Frisco, because the space they had rented out for his funeral was pretty well packed with people, and parked vehicles nearby. There were a variety of dress codes going on, but not a lot of mourner black – plenty of tye-dye, some sixth world neo-shamanistic stuff, lots of wild sprawl-style hairdos, including shave-cuts to keep hair out of datajacks and to display head-tattoos alongside the datajacks. Chopsticks was dressed down by those standards, wearing a synth-leather casual jacket and a pair of jeans, along with a t-shirt beneath it. Sure, he had a little beadwork around his neck and his hair was pulled back in a ponytail – he'd spent a lot of time in Cheyenne and sort of went with that AmerInd aesthetic of a bit of tribal jewelry here and there, and dressing down. The Sprawls were different – everyone liked riotous colors and an array of distinguishing clothing, including, to his amusement, stuff from the Pueblo nation, which was next door.
There were also the flashes of chrome and the subtle bulges of weaponry. Nothing serious, because it was a funeral, but some people were packing heat. Others, well a quick look in the astral, a flash over, showed who those threats were.
He hadn't neglected his own equipment – this was a funeral, but he was in the 'biz, Shadowrunning, which meant that he had his own concealed heat, an old Colt 1911 that'd been done-over with aftermarket additions and a custom-built fighting knife forged back in the Sioux. It wasn't heavy firepower as far as the Japanese were concerned, but none of it was on the books. It was just a risk they ran here, in Frisco, though personal firepower was generally conceded as a necessity these days and few questions were asked.
The eulogy had just started when Chopsticks felt a tap on his shoulder.
Chopsticks wasn't alive for that, but he grew up in a lot of it -- fear of the I-Marines, the occupation force of the JIS, drilled into him by seeing the way those cold bastards operated, the constant mantra of 'you are inferior' and the contrasting vibrant underground of Californian resistance against the Japanese occupation. They tried to turn them into obedient servants, but they failed on that front, even if extreme firepower kept the peace-- especially now that the Japanese occupation became a Japanese military dictatorship and all pretense was gone. The guys here were the hardcore of the Japanese -- the ones that wanted to stay and keep the 'dream' of making Northern California an all-Japanese show alive. The JIS recalled Colonel Keiji Saito and the occupation forces back to the Home Islands, and he responded by declaring himself the Protector-General and cracking down even harder, as well as trying to grab more territory. In the past, the Japanese stuck to Frisco. Now, they were all over the place and Norcal was seething. It was the guns of the I-Marines backed by the guns of the J-Corps that kept things down for now -- guns, drones, artillery, all of it visible even at this little customs and papers check at the entrance of the Golden Gate Bridge, which led into Frisco, the center of their occupation. Traffic was even slower now, because these guys were intent on not letting anything through, particularly as terrorism, as the Japanese called it, was on the rise. Heavily bulk-armored Japanese Imperial Marines, wielding assault rifles and machineguns bristling with technological additions, hyper-chromed and looking futuristically menacing, checking all the papers and making sure everyone was on the up and up -- his cabbie was pulled over because the wireless device he'd gotten, a legal-seeming 'throwaway' identified him as a newly-arrived visa.
Everyone was tense at this checkpoint, a pullover point before they could even get on the Bridge and there was no love lost between the occupiers and the Californians, but Chopsticks didn't pay as much attention to that as the view -- he'd timed his arrival by day so that he could admire the city -- his city-- and the Bay. The town had to deal with the Japanese, but it never lost its character as a hippie-dippie sort of place with that new age culture, especially since Magic came back. It deserved better than an occupation by some humorless, human supremacist meglomaniac working for a bunch of foreign corporations trying to lock down a monpoly.
The Japanese didn't like the Sixth World, the return of magic. They wanted to pretend that the world was a cold, sterile place of technology and logic. Even though their national religion was one of spirit worship, they'd long since ripped that out of themselves and enslaved themselves to corporate tech. They were cold and arrogant, moving with assurance from vehicle to vehicle here in the 'flagged' line of vehicles pulled over for a search, either randomly or for because their customs routines in the Matrix flagged new arrivals to Frisco. They were drilled in their superiority over the metahuman masses, as well as the gaijin they routinely looked down on, these troops.
Including half-Sioux, half-Chinese John "Chopsticks" Red Elk (the latter being the name he took while in the Sioux Nation; it used to be Chen) hadn't been back to Frisco in a long time -- not since he got an offer out of the blue for a scholarship at the University of Cheyenne that got him the fuck out of Frisco -- it was the only thing his father, an Ares wage slave that divorced his mother and left Frisco for a promotion, ever left him, the Sioux citizenship. Luckily, the I-Marine optically scanning his papers with a helmet-mounted, matrix-enabled rig that instantaneously cross-referenced it with files had no idea that he was a Sioux citizen or he would have gotten a lot more actual scrutiny -- it wasn't like the Native American Nations ever gave Japan more than a casual 'fuck off' in foreign relations, and Colonel Saito didn't even rate that. It was clean -- he had a California Free State citizenship -- that read "John Chen" and didn't say anything about the Sioux. Luckily, the overly-tech conscious Japanese I-Marines didn't bother to check to see if “John Chen” had something else up his sleeve. He wasn't chromed, sure, but chrome wasn't all there was out there in the Sixth World. It was only half the equation.
"First time to the City of San Francisco?" There was a hint of scorn to the tone as the man went down the list of prompts on his visor, though he was expressionless with it on -- the black visor and the lips compressed, the jaw thrusting forward aggressively.
"No, I grew up here," Chopsticks replied, with a hint of a grin; he looked Asian enough, though strange to the eyes of the Japanese -- no love lost between them and the Chinese, and the Japanese probably never even heard of the fucking Lakota tribe. This Japanese fucker switched to the native language real fast, rapid-firing it, assuming he knew the language.
Chopsticks hated to admit that he did.
"Then you know. Obey the laws. You know the penalties."
"Hai wakarimasu, wašícu." He didn't bother to add the flowery courtesy they loved to impose, and since everything checked out, this corporal had to swallow that.
"Move along," the I-Marine told the cabbie, a white that grinned a bit at the exchange when no one was looking. As the cab sped along, an electronic job that looked well kept, because Japanese regulations were strict about vehicle maintenance and cleanliness. The white, a rough older looking fellow, finally had to do the cabbie-talk.
"Hey chummer, what was it you called that fucker?"
"Wašícu."
"Yeah. What's that mean?"
"It's what my father's people call fuckers that aren't supposed to be here."
"I'll drink to that, as soon as I'm off duty."
The rest of the ride, all the way down into Chinatown, where his grandmother still lived, was pretty quiet -- chit chat about Frisco and what was up. The cabbie, Milton, knew some shit, and he shared. By the end of the ride, Chopsticks knocked on the partition and told Milton, "Listen, chummer, there's something extra for that drink."
"Thanks, boss. Welcome home."
Chopsticks, as he stepped out, grunted a bit. Welcome home indeed. He had a friend to bury. And shit looked tense in Frisco.
--
Aunt Celia was from his mother's side of the family, the Chinese one, and he had a place to lay up in Chinatown before and after the funeral of his buddy, Kyle Sandberg. It was something to be said that he'd show up to a place like Frisco after almost a decade for a dead friend, but they'd stayed in touch from time to time and they'd grown up together...though Kyle moved out to Berkeley, then to Oakland, now a sprawl, after his college years. While staying at Aunt Celia's, he heard all sorts of things from the old Chinatown types -- the conversation was in Mandarin this time. Two days spent in Chinatown, and Yee Chan made a visit to welcome an old neighborhood boy back, and to make quiet inquiries about his connections with the outside. Chopsticks played coy with the gangster, never outright confirming anything, but indicated that he'd be happy to bring out any messages the old man would like to have delivered.
Chinatown was neat and fairly quiet, always a well run, but tourist friendly exterior that blended Chinese culture and small business sense to draw in the customers, though it was also brimming with intrigue on the twisting back streets-- they were the supply line of all sorts of intelligence and supplies that were passed onto Oakland; there was no love lost between the Triads and the Yakuza, and the Triads were spearheading a war in the shadows to steal from, spy on and otherwise disrupt as many Japanese corporate or criminal operations as they could, though often subtly so as to avoid being easily traced. Chinatown was in a quiet rebellion, a subtle form of support that kept them just over one side of the line so that Saito couldn't mount violent reprisals and shoot up the place -- too much media attention from outlets in Europe, the UCAS, the Ute Corporate Council and the Tir, not to mention rival American Corps like Ares would pounce all over the chance to make the occupation look worse than it already did. Chinatown knew this and kept the connections in the matrix to the outside world well-oiled.
The world beyond Chinatown, and outside the neighborhoods the Japanese were holding down tight, where their own people and the corp execs and anyone with money lived, however, was a different story. The parts that tourists didn't see got a different kind of treatment. And Chopsticks was taking a cab ride right into it; not a licensed cab, but a more expensive unlicensed hack willing to go into the warzone that was Oakland.
The Japanese Imperial Marines couldn't hold the Sprawl down, they could just throw a cordon around it and hope the shit didn't blow up too much. It worked, to a point, but it meant that the Oakland Barrens were a seething hive of discontent as gangs and groups stopped fighting among themselves and started working on dealing with the Japanese and the few human supremacist types, like the Human Nation, that were fanatical enough to endorse Saito's rule.
Chopsticks wasn't here for the politics, even if they drew him in a bit. Instead, it was the funeral. But it was the Barrens-- the poor parts of Frisco's Sprawl, where the servants, the menials and the metahumans left. Before Saito took over, the metahumans, elves, dwarves, orks and trolls, could get a job in the City doing something menial and low-paid. Frisco was a place for Japan to dump off the unwanted, because Japan wanted to maintain its 'purity.' So there were even more metahumans than usual in the Frisco area, because it was where Japan sent all of theirs. The place was bursting at the seams with a whole class of recruits for a fight against the Protectorate, courtesy of thirty-something years of deportation policy. It was no wonder the Japanese Imperial State sent the recall. It almost amazed Chopsticks, who could read between the lines, that a guy like Kenji Saito didn't see how untenable the situation was. Frisco was about to blow, and he'd go with it.
There weren't overt signs of resistance in the Oakland Barrens by day, except for scorchmarks here, ruined roofs there. The place wasn't being destroyed wholesale with heavy weaponry on a regular basis, but it was seeing a certain low intensity -- the concrete in places was pocked with bulletholes once in a while. Oakland didn't used to be one of the worst sprawls, like Seattle. It had a well-behaved population, part of that being that the Japanese deportees were often not rowdy types as a whole, that tried to make things better in Oakland.
Clearly, Chopsticks saw with his own two eyes, things had changed since he'd gone east, away from the coast.
The funeral parlor had seen better days, in an era when the bodies came around often and burials were often cremations to save space, but this was only a temporary stopping point – the body was cremated here already, and they were heading out to scatter his ashes in a more appropriate way and place.
In high school, they'd toked on weed and snowboarded up on Mount Shasta, which was part of the domain of the great dragon Hestaby who, ironically, allowed snowboarders to do their thing. Once, they'd seen her in flight, copper flashing in the sunlight, which was a bit of a 'whoa' moment when they toked. The weird part was speaking to the auburn-haired woman that showed up near them, and getting the impression that something was up even though the conversation was about the hand-made, hand-painted snowboards they'd made in Kyle's dad's home workshop, using designs taken off the 'grid and instructions on how to finish them. Something was off about the lady, even though she was nice, but they only made the connection when they were a little less high and afterward. “Fuck man, we chatted about snowboards with a DRAGON dude. Far out,” Kyle said, a lot. The dragon thing was a huge deal to him. Shasta's shamans told Chopsticks he was Awakened – that he had the magic in him. But Kyle had taken things more to heart and became passionate about environmental causes as well as the Japanese occupation.
Those days were good ones, before life got really complicated, when things that seemed so important were small potatoes.
Kyle was a total computer nerd, and did something with computers as an adult, but he never got over the new age bohemian stuff, and Chopsticks couldn't help but chuckle a bit when told at the funeral parlor that the procession would take them over to the Gray Whale Cove beach – that made sense, given that Kyle went pretty eco-hippie over the years. When Chopsticks turned out to be awakened, he was ecstatic, and they'd stayed in contact through the years Chopsticks was in the Sioux Nation, talking about their lives a bit.
There'd never been time to meet up and snowboard on Mount Shasta again. Instead, the procession of vehicles and cabs out of Oakland, along the San Mateo toll bridge and over to the beach proceed along, though it had papers checked by the Japanese as always -- but Saito was hard up for forces, and the guys checking the papers weren't I-Marines, but conscripted locals who were less enthusiastic about their role as occupiers. Perhaps, it seemed, these guys were starting to question the wisdom of signing up to be Saito's cannon fodder as things started to get grimmer in Frisco and the NorCal protectorate. These guys were all humans, no metas allowed, that signed on because they hated elves, dwarves, orks, trolls and anyone with magical ability. Of course, even those guys were wondering if it was worth paying the price of Saito to achieve their goals.
Kyle, apparently, had a lot of friends in Oakland and all over Frisco, because the space they had rented out for his funeral was pretty well packed with people, and parked vehicles nearby. There were a variety of dress codes going on, but not a lot of mourner black – plenty of tye-dye, some sixth world neo-shamanistic stuff, lots of wild sprawl-style hairdos, including shave-cuts to keep hair out of datajacks and to display head-tattoos alongside the datajacks. Chopsticks was dressed down by those standards, wearing a synth-leather casual jacket and a pair of jeans, along with a t-shirt beneath it. Sure, he had a little beadwork around his neck and his hair was pulled back in a ponytail – he'd spent a lot of time in Cheyenne and sort of went with that AmerInd aesthetic of a bit of tribal jewelry here and there, and dressing down. The Sprawls were different – everyone liked riotous colors and an array of distinguishing clothing, including, to his amusement, stuff from the Pueblo nation, which was next door.
There were also the flashes of chrome and the subtle bulges of weaponry. Nothing serious, because it was a funeral, but some people were packing heat. Others, well a quick look in the astral, a flash over, showed who those threats were.
He hadn't neglected his own equipment – this was a funeral, but he was in the 'biz, Shadowrunning, which meant that he had his own concealed heat, an old Colt 1911 that'd been done-over with aftermarket additions and a custom-built fighting knife forged back in the Sioux. It wasn't heavy firepower as far as the Japanese were concerned, but none of it was on the books. It was just a risk they ran here, in Frisco, though personal firepower was generally conceded as a necessity these days and few questions were asked.
The eulogy had just started when Chopsticks felt a tap on his shoulder.