Clusterfrag

Posted: **Fri May 30, 2014 5:15 am**

Bradbury Alston
Nuyen: ¥4,000

Age: 34
Metatype: Ork
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 224 lbs

[ QUALITIES ]
+ Will to Live (2)
+ Mentor Spirit (Shark)
- Full Amnesia
- Mysterious Implant

[ ATTRIBUTES ]
BOD: 6
AGI: 5
REA: 6(9)
STR: 6
WIL: 4
LOG: 1
INT: 4
CHA: 1
EDG: 6
Essence: 6.0
Initiative: 10(13)+4d6
Limitis: 9P/4M/4S

[ SKILLS ]
Unarmed combat (Attacking): 6(7)
Automatics: 4
Locksmith: 6
Perception: 5
Athletics Group: 1
Stealth Group: 2
Pilot Ground Craft: 2

[ POWERS ]
Critical Strike (4)
Improve Skill (Unarmed Combat)
Improved Reflexes (3)
Killing Hands
Plague Cloud

[ ARMOR ]
Lined Coat [9]

[ GEAR ]
Climbing Gear
Lockpick Set
Sequencer
Standard Rope
Stim Patch
Survival Kit
Autopicker [2]
Maglock Passkey [1]

[ CONTACTS ]
Jax (Bartender) [3/4]

Posted: **Sat May 31, 2014 12:31 pm**

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 Bradbury
sits on the edge of the barstool and rubs his index finger around the mouth of
a glass of bottom shelf scotch. He is wearing a thick salt and pepper beard
that plumes off his cheeks like the fog banks rolling into Seattle beneath a
Fall sunset. The black wool beanie is pulled down over his ears, and the lines
in his face creep up from underneath his facial hair—deep grooves of
hard-days-too-many and long-nights-a-fraggin'-plenty. His eyes are impassive
but distant, and he's nowhere near drunk. 

 Everything
aches. His lower back is a dull moan of pain, radiating heat from the seat of
his hips up to his shoulder blades and down the backs of his thighs. His knees
creak every time he shifts on the stool—its padding long since pressed hard
beneath its cracked vinyl surface. The fire in his boots is better ignored than
considered, and his eggshell-walk into the bar after every shift goes unnoticed
for its place in the procession of the other strong, stout men that shamble in
at 5:30 every night. He becomes aware that a bell is tolling in the foggy
distance beyond the walls of the rundown watering hole. 

 Looking up
from his drink, he makes eye contact with himself in the mirror behind the
liquor bottles across from him. A thick cloud of cigarette smoke dances in the
air, and he doesn't like who he sees looking back at him. That is the face of a
stranger—the face of a man he never expected to be when he was growing up.
Every kid grows up wanting to be an astronaut, or President, or a famous actor—what no kid dreams of doing is lugging
crates thirteen hours a day, six days a week. He looks at himself in the mirror
and he doesn't recognize who he's become, and he can't begin to track how his
life has washed him ashore in this bar and at this moment. He wishes he knew
how to change it, but if wishes were horses... 

 “Am I
right, Alston?”

 He's broken
out of his reverie and glances distractedly at the atypically small troll
sitting to his left. “Hmm?”

 “Heller is
a fraggin' jag, am I right?”

 Sudden
dawning and apathetic recognition strikes his face as he cocks his eyebrows and
nods, mumbling through a mouth full of marbles, “Couldn't have said it better
myself.”

 The troll
raises his bottle and blurts a disgruntled approval, slugging back the rest of
his beer in one gulp. Its contents emptied down his gullet, the troll slams the
brown longneck down on the haggard bar top and barks, “Set me up again, Jax!”

 The ork
tending bar glances up from the dingy towel he's running over a chipped beer
mug, nods noncommittally, and mumbles, “Yar.” 

 Bradbury
drops his gaze back to his watered down drink and allows the sound to modulate
into the distance, the desultory ballad from the new Johnny Nuclear record
growing muffled and indistinct. “I don't have to be metahuman / to see you
in the dark. / You opened up the world to me / when you opened up your heart.”
The song—More Than Human—has been a Top Five Hit-with-a-capital-H going into
its eighty third week, and all of the Djs made sure you knew it every twenty
minutes; it's the kind of set-your-watch-to-it hit that can only be written by
a bank of supercomputers. Johnny Nuclear had been a recording industry megacorp
institution for going on twenty five years now, and the brand was already on
its third “Johnny Nuclear.” Rumor was that the guys at the top put the last
Johnny out to permanent pasture when he fell in love and wanted to settle
down—not something they apparently felt agreed with their bottom line. Johnny
2.0 had supposedly retired to the Balkans, but any day might be the day his
remains were discovered buried in ferrocrete or washing ashore. Bradbury
doesn't know how he knows all this drek. 

 His mind
wanders. Heller had been riding them all a lot harder lately, but it was
common knowledge that she and her old lady had been going through a rough
patch. At times like these, Bradbury had always found that the best way to
dodge around trouble was to put his head down and do his work. He was still
pretty green on the docks, but he'd already built a reputation as a hard worker,
and Heller seemed to more or less ignore him. Melrick, on the otherhand... 

 Bradbury is
again snapped out of himself as Melrick slamms the empty bottle down onto the
bar top once more. “Hey! Jax! I ain't here for the fraggin' amm-bee-ance!”

 Jax the bartender
looks up from his glass with clear annoyance, and calls back, “Hey—get fragged,
pug-ugly! You can get the frag outta' my bar if that's how you want to play
it!”

 “More
than huuuumaaaan, / I bathe in your gloooow. / I'd give you everythiiiing. /
I'd give you it aaaall.”

 Bradbury
looks at Melrick and starts, “Take it easy, man... he's just—” 

 “Don't you
start gettin' on my case, too, Alston! I got too much drek pilin' up on me to
deal with you settin' in on me, too! It's Heller all week! Now it's Jax! And
now it's you, too?!” 

 Johnny was
kicking it into gear on the knock-off retro jukebox. “More than huuuumaaaan!
/ More than a maaaan!”

 The troll's
eyes blaze in Brabury's direction, and Bradbury is reminded again of how
achingly—how desperately tired he is. He begins to speak, but simply
doesn't have it in him. For a moment he only stares back into the eyes of the
troll beside him before turning away again, defeated not by fear but by
weariness. The scotch suddenly looks very unappealing—very meaningless. The
triumphant power chords wail along with Johnny as he reaches his zenith—his
most emotionally bare. “I'll give you everything! / Everything I caaaan!”


 He shakes
his head gently, pulls his glass to his mouth, sips off half of the remaining
scotch with a disinterested half-grimace, and sets it back down on the bar as
he stands. Lightning bolts of pain shoot up his legs and into his hips.
Wincing, he makes his way to the door and crosses the threshold into the
Seattle night as the shouting match between the troll crane operator and ork
bartender heats up inside. Their voices grow muffled as the cheap door with its
dirty porthole window swings creakily closed on its hinges. The indistinct
sound from jukebox is already a memory from another life.

 The air is
wet and thick. His breath steams out in front of him as he pulls the collar of
his peacoat up around his neck and bushy cheeks. Bradbury absent-mindedly
reaches into his pockets, but withdraws his empty hand after a moment of idle,
fruitless searching. He doesn't seem to notice. Tracing his gaze up to the low
freeway bridge running over the bar, and drinking in the roar of the traffic
commingling with the surf, he removes his beanie, exposing his pointy elfin
ears as he runs his hand through his hair. A small tugboat chuffs its horn in
the anonymous gloom of Elliott Bay as it makes its lonesome way out to sea.
Replacing the hat, he sets off under a dreary streetlamp heading for home. 

<o:p> </o:p>

*****

<o:p> </o:p>

 A hand in
his pocket. He's awoken by a light jostling, and his awareness comes resolves
as both fuzzy and indistinct. Cold, wet air plays at his face; his cheeks are
freezing. The hand in his pocket searches delicately. An incomprehensible
murmuring comes from just beside his face. Words? Can't be words. That voice is
harried, quiet but rushed, intense and over the shoulder. The not-words become
words, and the voice becomes two.

 At least
two.

 "...
his other pocket!"

 "I'm
telling you, he don't got drek!"

 "Just
check, you fraggin' slitch!"

 The hand
withdraws from his pocket in clumsy but fragile motions, and he hears feet
shuffle. He smells the potpourri of urban life rushing in all around him--
fuels and garbage and street food and wet blacktop and grime. His head is
drooped down, his chin resting against the plane of his chest. For a moment the
muscles in his neck won't respond, and his head remains in its fallen place.
The person searching his pockets is on his other side now, and he can feel the
figure's indefinable presence lurking in the immediate blackness beyond his
closed eyes. The hand begins to creep into another pocket.

 "His
jacket pocket!" Still whispers, but through the urgency he can all but see
them looking around to make sure nobody is watching.

 "Slot
yerself! I ain't reachin' into his jacket pocket!"

 "He's
glitched out, man! Just do it!"

 A third
voice, female and young. "You two don't got half a brain between
you..."

 "Take
it up yer' hoop!"

 The hand
moves to his chest and begins gingerly slipping into the fold of his damp
jacket, searching for its inner breast pocket. There's a moment when his head
still refuses to move, but the paralysis gives way as he shakily raises his
chin from his breastbone. There's a gasp from just to his right and the hand
immediately pulls back from his jacket. The kink in his neck is excruciating as
his head wobbles to an upright resting place. His eyes open muddily, the world
a dull neon glow through an unfocused haze. The murky waters of his sight begin
to clear as he blinks the daze away, groaning his confusion.

 "What
are you doing, man! The frag!" The female voice rises from its whisper,
ascending as it rides toward an angry shriek.

 The scene
has just begun coming into focus when his vision explodes in an orgasm of
stars, the right side of his face instantly burning hot with pain as something
hard connects with his skull just above the temple. He topples to his left,
landing on his shoulder on the seat of the bench where he has been sitting
before falling forward and onto the rough, unforgiving sidewalk. The headache
comes immediately, and his right ear is ringing in a low, round hum. Footsteps
scrambling all around him. He puts his palm down on the concrete, cold and damp
on his skin as something sharp bites into his flesh.

 He pushes
himself up from the ground as blood begins to pour down from the wound on the
right side of his head. He can feel the hair matting to his forehead, sticking
to itself and his skin as the blood runs down his face and drips to the ground.
His breathing is harsh through groans of pain. Through the din of his right
side deafness, he hears a voice, now reaching into a stratospheric panic,
shouting "Come on! We gotta' get outta' here!" It's far
away--unimportant. He brings his right hand from the sidewalk up to the wound
on his head, pulls it away slicked with blood, and stares at it for a moment.
He looks away from his hand out toward his assailant, and has a brief moment to
think 'I'm getting my ass kicked by a guy with a pink mohawk,' just before a
boot connects with his ribs.

 'Correction,
a *kid* with a pink mohawk.' He looks up from his place, fallen back to the
ground and onto his side, at a boy of no more than fourteen. The diminutive ork
stands anxiously over him, not knowing whether to run or keep on kicking. He
still can't see the other two, but Pink Mohawk's earlier inclinations to cut
and run seem to have been confused by his outburst of violence. The ork bounces
on his arches, jerking forward and to the sides as he alternates between
wanting to kick off the beating in earnest or take flight.

 The female
again. "Come on, Andrew! Come *ON*!"

 Scurrying
footfalls. Their boots slap at the sidewalk as they flee down the street. He
makes them out mostly in silhouette, but can tell from their sizes that the two
in flight are roughly the same age as Pink Mohawk. Streetlight and neon glint
off chains and buckles that flit out behind them, dazzling with their metallic
tinkling as they shrink into the distance. They disappear around a corner in a
blur of neon hair and black vinyl. His eyes trace upward to the tri-d
billboard. A Japanese model in kabuki makeup daintily sucking ramen from her
chopsticks. She smiles at the camera, but the smile never touches her eyes.

 He turns
back to Pink Mohawk, who is paralyzed in the moment. The nervous bouncing has
dimmed, replaced now with a slight swaying and an intent stare that masks
racing thoughts. A web of sickly looking veins are beginning to creep out from
the edges of the datajack on Pink Mohawk's temple, the skin around it red and
irritated and infected. "I got no beetles, kid." His mouth forms the
words on their own, conferring not with his conscious mind as to their meaning.

 'What the
frag is a beetle?' He searches his memory, but can't remember. Though he
fumbles for it, BTL poisoning dances just beyond his grasp, slipping through
his fingers like so much smoke.

 A kind of
dopesick fury washes over Pink Mohawk's face, and in another instant the attack
really begins. Pink Mohawk punches again, and again, and again. The blows land
hard as the young ork screams his frustration, and his voice cracks wildly as
he wails. Blood coats the ork's ragged knuckles—a mixture of his own and the
stranger's—and the fire in them radiates up to his metacarpals as the bones
bruise from the repeated impacts. Had he more than a cursory awareness, he
would recognize that several of his bones were already broken. A single kick to
the stomach punctuates the end of the attack, and the ork with the pink mohawk
flees with the kind of reckless agility reserved for youth. The scene grows
very still.

 He rolls
over from his shoulder onto his back as a car passes by. The slick road buzzes
beneath its tires. He lays there a moment, coughing in jagged fits before
pulling himself upright enough to spit out the blood accumulating in his mouth
rather than swallow it. The splatter slaps down to the sidewalk and settles
into a seam between two sections of concrete. With one hand on the bench, he
manages enough strength to get himself seated with his back against the
plexiglas.

 He realizes
that he's sitting at a bus stop. The structure has built-in overhead lamps that
flicker and batter him with harsh, yellow-greenish light. To his right is a
schedule map that shows which buses stop here and the routes they service; to
his left is a movie poster for the new JC Jensen movie, "Stimshock."
This November, nothing is what it seems! He squints at the poster and wonders,
'Who the frag is JC Jensen?'

 A wave of
nausea takes him and he doubles over, vomiting onto the ground between his
boots. The retching comes in hard jerks, and produces thankfully little blood.
'Well there's that, at least,' he thinks with his head bowed and sweat beading
on his brow. Some of the vomit has spattered his pants.

 He sits
back wearily but tentatively as all of his body cries out in agony. Eventually
he manages to ease his way back to resting against the plexiglas and allows his
hands to flop to the bench on either side. He closes his eyes and tries not to
focus on the pain, his mind glossing over the confusion of his circumstances in
favor of actively zeroing in on not zeroing in on his injuries. The Japanese
ramen girl has been replaced by an advertisement for a new Fuji cyberdeck, and
the light from the billboard plays in bright blues and reds on his bloodied, swollen
face. He opens his eyes again and sees a young woman on the other side of the
street, bundled up against the cold with her right hand clutched at the throat
of her jacket. When his gaze meets hers she shies her head down and away, and
turns and walks off anxiously down the street. The smell of the city has been
replaced with the sticky aroma of his own blood. 

 His hands
begin making an inventory of his body and injuries, gravitating first to where
the pain is most severe and then moving onto lesser damages. His ribs are
blindingly tender and several of them are more than likely broken, and the
headache screams inside his skull like the full fury of a jet engine. He
rummages around in his pants pockets idly, dreamily not connecting that if he'd
had anything in any of those places it would have taken off down the street
with Pink Mohawk. Eventually his hand reaches into the folds of his jacket and
slips into his inner breast pocket, touching upon two items.

 Pulling
them from his pocket, he flips the credstick and keycard over in his hands
several times. The objects feel foreign to his fingers. The keycard bears no
distinguishing marks. Turning his attention more closely to the credstick, the
name screams back at him. "BRADBURY ALSTON." It doesn't sound familiar.

<o:p> </o:p>

*****

<o:p> </o:p>

 Bradbury
shuffles tenderly down the street, passing through the oases created by the
grimy spotlight glow of the ancient streetlamps that line the sidewalks down by
the docks. Melrick. Jax. Heller. He hasn't known any of them longer than six
weeks, but they're the closest he has to any connections. Bradbury wakes up in
the morning, works all day, and goes home. But it isn't really home. Every time
he walks through the door, the place seems strange and uninviting—like walking
into Chinatown and getting assaulted from every angle with stares begging
'who's the laowai?' So why is this strange place in this strange part of town
the only place he knows to kick off his boots?

 Two days
after being awoken to a boot party at the bus stop, Bradbury had ventured out
of the apartment in search of some answers. His first thought the previous day
was to make his way to a hospital, but of course he knew he wasn't a member
with any. There was a new Sainai franchise downtown, but they didn't take
people off the streets. To get into a place like that you had to be sponsored
for membership by an existing member. So that left street doctors—the kind that
shuffle from dark place to dark place like cockroaches—unlicensed and of
exceedingly questionable scruples. He didn't remember a single thing prior to
the bus stop, and he wanted to know why. 

 After a few
hours of limping through streets and asking questions of orks and trolls that
were none too interested in dishing out much information, he had finally been
pointed to a doctor in the Barrens called ZawBonez. Easing himself into
ZawBonez's body scanner, he shielded his eyes from the hard surgical light
fixture directly over head. The room smelled like human fat—a murky, sweet
smell that seemed to drip in slow, sloppy spills down the walls. 

 “Before we
get started, I've got a special I'm running this week on eye replacement. Buy
them up front, and swap them out if you ever get into a jam?” ZawBonez was a
gangly dwarf, his greasy, curly hair dangling lecherously on either side of his
mottled face. He wasn't licking his lips as he asked the question, but it
seemed like he should have been. 

 “Just the
scan.”

 The dwarf
turned his lips down in a disappointed sneer of a frown, and rolled away from
Bradbury across the tile floor—the chair leaving tracks in the grime as it
slid. “Please keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times, and do
not disturb your driver; he's a few kidneys short on his stock and is always
looking for donors.” ZawBonez tittered huskily at himself—who doesn't like a
good black market organ harvesting joke?—and turned a series of knobs on a
console halfway across the room. 

 The
machinery around Bradbury came to life—its servos whirred and chassis creaked
as the scan moved first from his head down to his feet. A horizontal bar of
green light tracked where the machine's sensors currently focused. The bar
reached his feet, and returned back to its starting place. The scan apparently
completed, the machinery clunked back to its resting place and the room went
quiet but for the pen ZawBonez was tapping against the bottoms of his top
teeth. His eyes slitted as he interpreted the data from the screen staring back
at him. “Well,” he started, “you're definitely a good candidate for sexual
reassignment. That's the good news.” His focus on the screen remained unbroken
as he hawked a hearty wad of something wretched out of his sinuses and
deposited it into a handkerchief he had produced from a pocket. Still not
looking, he crumpled the handkerchief back up, replaced it in his pocket, and
wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “The bad news,” he continued, “is that your
brain doesn't show any of the signs of trauma or tampering you'd expect to see
with memory loss like yours.” The dwarf turned then to Bradbury and smiled
maliciously. “Well... that and the implant.”

 “Implant?”
Bradbury asked, suddenly very anxious. 

 The elf got
up from the scanner and crossed the room quickly, a glint of mischievous fancy
flickering in ZawBonez's eyes as the distance between them was closed. 

 “Take a
look for yourself.” 

 ZawBonez
swiveled the display so that it faced Bradbury, and there staring back at him
was something—some foreign object hardly larger than a cigarette
lighter—affixed to his spinal cord around the small of his back just above his
hips. 
 “What the frag is it?”
Bradbury asked, his anxiety plain. 

 “Fragged if
I know,” ZawBonez replied, “I seen most implants walk through my door—hell,
installed most of 'em myself—but this one don't look like nothin' I seen before.”

 Bradbury's
mind raced. “I need to know whatever you can find out for me about this thing,”
the harried elf exhorted, “anything at all.”

 The dwarf
spun the display back around to him and lifted his hands in front of him.
Bradbury walked around behind him as ZawBonez made a rectangle with his thumbs
and index fingers, and dragged the shape open, zooming in on the implant as he
did. The disreputable doctor went back to tapping his pen against his top
teeth. “Innnnnteresting...” he mumbled to himself as he tilted his head to the
side. 
 “What is it?” Bradbury begged.


 “What
you've got here is something state of the art, pally. Ishikawa is one of the
newest and best names in 'ware and implants. This drek won't be available on
the streets for at least six months.” The dwarf paused for dramatic effect,
delighting in the opportunity to draw it all out, “And it looks like it's
interfaced directly with your central nervous system.” 

 Bradbury
leaned in closer and saw it for himself. The small device was cylindrical, and
had a collection of contacts that extended out from its mass and coiled around
the nerves in Bradbury's spinal cord. The group of nanowires and leads wriggled
into him and extended out into the rest of his nervous system, making the elf
think immediately of some kind of virus. 

 “Can you
take it out?”

 “Pssh!”
ZawBonez exasperated before bursting into a short fit of laughter. “Take that
thing out? Here?! You gotta be glitched, man! You see that? That
thing is all tangled up inside your spine! There's no taking that thing out
unless you know exactly how it got there and what it does. And even then it's
fraggin' risky!” The dwarf was loving it. An obvious and wicked joy had filled
him over this discovery. 

 “Well what can
you do?” Bradbury asked with increasing anger.

 “I can sign
you up for ZawBonez's preferred donor program for whenever that thing does
whatever it's supposed to do.” The smile on his face was revelatory—his voice
excited dripping with anticipation. “After all, it would appear to be transmitting.”

 “Transmitting?”

 “Blammo!”
The dwarf shot Bradbury with an imaginary finger gun and spun gaily in his
chair. “I don't know what information it's taking from you, but there's a
signal leaving that delicious little doodad.” Seeing the sickened alarm wash
over Bradbury's face, ZawBonez pouted out his lower lip and feigned an
obviously insincere concern. “I wouldn't be so worried about that, though. I'd
worry more about when it starts receiving.” 

 It all
suddenly became too much for Bradbury. The room was spinning, and his
equilibrium was failing him. ZawBonez had begun to laugh when Bradbury turned
for the door to the room and shambled off-balance toward it. Stumbling and
reaching the door, the handle wouldn't turn in his sweaty hand. “I'm afraid
there's no point in letting you leave,” ZawBonez called after him. “I'd just be
letting a perfectly good pay day walk out the door.”

 Bradbury
spun around, swooning from the shock of it all, to see the dwarf approaching
him with a grotesquely large syringe in his right hand. The needle was held
upright, and ZawBonez was flicking its barrel with his left hand to jolt any
air bubbles in its payload free. The sneer painted on his face exposed a
monstrous set of teeth behind his lips, and the splotchy patches of flesh on
his face were burning a bright red. 

 “Just
relax, pally. In a minute all your troubles will be behind you.”

 The dwarf
closed the distance on Bradbury quickly, and reached forward to grab him with
his left hand while drawing back the syringe in his right. His senses dazed,
Bradbury didn't realize what was happening as he deflected the grab upward with
his right arm, twisting ZawBone's left arm backward with a sickening crack. The
dwarf had time enough to spasm his right arm out to his side and lift his head
as he yelped, but the sound of the dwarf's pain was quickly cut off as Bradbury
shoved the butt of his left hand up with a hard, sharp movement, driving the
doctor's dislocated septum back through his sinuses and directly into his
brain. The crunch from the blow hung in the air as ZawBonez's head went
immediately limp on his neck and flopped back over his shoulders. Releasing his
grip on the dwarf's left arm, Bradbury allowed the body to drop to the floor
with a dull thud. His hands shaking, Bradbury looked down at them before slowly
glancing dreamily about the room. 

 “Frag,” he
whispered into the drear. 

<o:p> </o:p>

*****

 
 Bradbury's reflections come to
a hazy end as he reaches the front steps of his building. There are four steps
leading up to the front door from the sidewalk, and each one of them has all
manner of refuse scattered across them. The thick concrete side rails on the
steps are covered in graffiti. The trashcans at the base of the steps are
overflowing—garbage strike—and the drek inside hasn't been picked up in weeks.
Sighing as he passes the rotten refuse, Bradbury climbs the steps and crosses
the threshold into the building. 

 The ratty
interior of the building is falling apart. The faux-wood flooring is peeling up
all over the place, exposing the concrete foundation beneath. More graffiti
adorns the walls, and only every third light fixtures casts any illumination on
the scene. Probably for the best. Bradbury makes his way down the hallway,
stepping lightly around bits of trash and discarded personal items that litter
the walkway. An old toy bike sits stilly in place—it hasn't moved since the
first time Bradbury can remember walking down this hallway six weeks ago. Music
is blaring from one of the apartments he passes, and another rings with the
sounds of domestic discord shouted over the cries of a wailing infant. Reaching
his door at the end of the hallway on the first floor, Bradbury pulls out the
keycard that had been in his pocket after the attack from Pink Mohawk and
Friends. Swiping it by the magnetic reader, the elf moves wearily through the
doorway and into his apartment. 

 In contrast
to the wreckage outside, Bradbury's apartment is clean. The walls bear neither
artwork or graffiti, and the only pieces of furniture to be seen are a sofabed,
a small coffee table in front of it with a single take out Chinese container
resting on it with chopsticks sticking out the top, and a small end table with
a lamp to the couch's left. The lamp is tied to the front door's card reader,
and turns on automatically when Bradbury comes home. It's the closest this
place gets to any amenities. 

 The elf
turns left from the front door and heads toward his kitchen. Not wanting to
deal with the garbage strike, he's been eating out mostly, and his garbage can
stands empty. Bradbury opens an overhead cabinet as he reaches the kitchen
sink, withdraws a glass, and fills it with water. Closing his eyes, the elf
takes a long swallow of tap water—knowing but not caring about all the drek in
it that will give you cancer if ingested over a life time. 

 He tops the
glass back up and turns around, leaning against the sink and looking at his
retro-styled home comm. The machine sits on the counter directly next to the
refrigerator, a little black box with a blinking red light on it. He remembers
similar looking machines from old movies—“answering machines,” they'd been
called. He doesn't know how he knows that; he doesn't remember ever having seen
an old movie. Crossing over to it, he punches the red light and the black box
flips open, revealing a small screen which displays a list of menu options.
“Contacts, Call, Message,” and “Settings” are all present on the list, and the
“Message” button is blinking. Taking another drink of water, Bradbury presses
the blinking touch screen button and watches as a video message takes over the
display. 

 “Alston,
I'm sorry to have to make this call to you, but we're going to have to let you
go.” Heller looks legitimately regretful about the message she's having to
leave. “I'd rather you not be one of the calls I have to make tonight, but you
know how the unions are—seniority wins out every time.” She pauses briefly,
seemingly distracted, before continuing. “Look—this can be only temporary, I
think. I shouldn't be telling you this, but I'll give you priority if you want
to come back. I'd understand if you don't want to, but just think about it,
okay? We'll be in touch when this all gets sorted out.” The message ends. 

 “She didn't
even explain what 'this all' is, and why it needs to get sorted out,” Bradbury
says to himself. The display on the comm retracts after a moment of inactivity,
and the machine settles back into its retro appearance. Finishing off the glass
of water, Bradbury sets it down on the counter next to the comm with a hollow *CLING*
and walks over to his sofabed. Settling himself down into the uncomfortable
seat, he removes his beanie and unbuttons his peacoat. 

 “Well,”
Bradbury begins to nobody at all, weighing the emptiness of the room and the
dull echo of his voice, “guess I'd better find a job.”

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Clusterfrag

Bradbury - John

Bradbury - John

Re: Bradbury - John