Shadowrun 33 Psychotrope

"Time turns inside out for deckers lost in a virtual hell."--Cover

ESTIMATED LIFE SPAN: 12 MINUTES It started out as a simple Matrix run, but now five deckers are trapped inside a nightmarish virtual landscape where jacking out is an impossibility--and what waits has all the hallmarks of the afterlife: tunnels of brilliant light, greetings from long-dead friends and family...and the terrifying sense of being juggled between Heaven and Hell. But in this computer-generated netherworld, there is only one thing that can be trusted. And it isn't the senses... ...THE COUNTDOWN BEGINS It's the uncommon experience the deckers have in common: a near brush with death. It has brought them together in this hell-raising realm and under the influence of a twisted intelligence with diabolical plans for the unwary travelers in grid-time. Having their minds and souls extinguished before the Matrix-scape crash is only the beginning of the puzzle. Discovering why will be the end. A dead end...

VEXING MEGACORPS FOR FUN AND PROFIT… Landon and Liana Hoffman are on summer vacation, and look forward to producing their Matrix repair show, the Right2RepairRigger, and hanging out at the local makerspace. But when they get a chance at a lucrative salvage run, they can’t say no—especially when they owe the fixer who’s hiring them. Beyond settling their account, the job promises untold riches in salvageable, possibly beyond state-of-the-art gear at a secret, abandoned military facility. Aware of the dangers involved, the run is still too good to pass up. However, the place may not be as abandoned as it seems—and the clock is ticking. Also, there are powerful enemies who don’t like what the Right2RepairRigger is doing, and are willing to destroy whoever they can to put a stop to it—including arresting anyone possibly connected with the twins’ program. Can Landon and Liana finish the run and save their family at the same time?

A New Shadowrun Short Story! Most Awakened folks in the Sixth World have Mentor Spirits to help them navigate the vast, often confusing world of magic. Many times, the mage chooses a spirit that compliments them, and can help them out in tough situations. And then there’s Jimmy Kincaid. Kincaid’s never been one for taking the easy road, and to say his life is complicated is like saying water’s wet. And when a simple trace job leads to a nest of Humanis thugs that have captured a metahuman hostage, well the voice of his Mentor Spirit isn’t whispering peace and goodwill in the P.I.’s ear. Because Kincaid’s Mentor Spirit is Adversary…and Adversary just wants to see the world burn… Will Jimmy resist his mentor’s siren call of death and destruction…or give in to those darker instincts and just level the entire place?

NO PLACE FOR A HERO... Jimmy Kincaid, burned-out mage, P. I., and the closest thing Puyallup’s got to a hero, has a lot on his plate these days. Simmering gang wars, feuding mobsters, missing runaways, magical power only as reliable as his stubborn sorcerous patron, and—well above his usual pay grade—an encrypted data file that's already cost him friends, but that he can’t even access. When the always-dangerous troubles of the Seattle sprawl deepen into a bloody conspiracy with ties to neighboring nations and inhuman powers, he knows he’s on the job of his life. Facing the longest of long odds, Kincaid’s all too aware that the house always wins. Luckily, he’s not alone. A man like Jimmy can’t walk these shadowed streets without making enemies, but he’s made allies, too. With the help of his bounty-hunting best friends, an up-and-coming shadowrunner team, a former Lone Star detective who’s short in stature but big in style, and his loyal, albeit flighty ally spirit, Jimmy’s stacked the deck in his favor. Maybe he’s got a shot after all. Maybe he can make it all work. Maybe he can find the right balance, share the right truths, and make something good out of a whole lot of bad. Of course, the problem with a house of cards is it just takes one good hit to bring it all tumbling down…

DOWN THESE DARK STREETS… Most folks see Puyallup as the worst Seattle’s got to offer; a tangled mess of metahumanity and greet, poverty and ghettoes, vice and corruption, where the crime is more organized than the government. They call it a Barrens, an armpit, a cesspool. Jimmy Kincaid, though, calls it home. Walking the line between shadows and the desperate light, semi-legit like only a Puyallup brat and former cop can be, he insists Puyallup has a heart and a soul, that it’s a place of life, magic, and starving hope. A former combat mage, now as burnt out as his neighborhood, he does what he can to police the worst excesses of the crime-riddled city he loves. In the darkness of the Seattle Sprawl, what’s one more murder? To Kincaid, it’s everything. He’s got a dead mentor, a hermetic group in need, and a mysterious file that might have been worth killing for. To unlock the data and get a little justice, he’ll face the worst the Sprawl has to offer, wading through blood, darkness, and a murderous web of lies. It’s a good thing he’s got friends—in high and low places…

A DEADLY QUEST FOR RICHES… A seemingly-harmless photo seen by the wrong person sets off a dangerous treasure hunt for a fortune contained in the opalized fossil skeleton of a dragon in the Australian Outback. On one side, the corporate operators of a ruthless mining company, who’s greedy owner wants the potential billions of nuyen such a find would bring on the black market. On the other side, a loose alliance of shadowrunners, Awakened magic-users, and local tribespeople for whom the site of the fossil, nicknamed the Old Timer, is sacred land, and who will defend it by any means necessary. But when the megacorp ups the stakes by releasing a debilitating nanovirus among the scattered communities around the site, the shadowrunners do what they do best—execute a daring run both in the Matrix and real-time at the mining corp’s headquarters in search of something—anything—to get the corp to stand down. But will they succeed before the corp operators find the Old Timer and steal it away?

MIRROR IMAGE… Nero is a mage with a murky past, working with a tight-knit crew out of Amsterdam. When a Johnson hires the team to extract her to see what they can do, she surprises them even further with the real mission: infiltrate a high-level business meeting and make sure the pending asset sale goes to the Johnson herself. And there’s one more twist to this run: Nero will have to pose as the man who put the entire deal together—his twin brother Enzo…who left him for dead when they were teenagers years ago. Ghosts from Nero’s past clash with danger in his present, as he must now walk a tightrope between the shadowrunning world and the corporate world, an entire universe he knows nothing about, and one that works by its own intricate systems. But when the run goes wrong, Nero is suddenly placed in mortal peril, and it’s up to his team to get him out of a place where one wrong move can leave all of them very, very dead…