A/N: Drumroll please, and Antumbra Saga by Cirion begins! Fighter's first real Shadowrun, the first mission of the famous module, will take us just about to the end of her beginning. I've adapted to some extent; ironically, Wizard is standing in for an eccentric Dwarf shaman the PC could choose to hire, as an alternative to the Troll heavy,Tua. You can't hire them both because of a messy breakup, or something.


"Real Runners don't need to backstab their clients, ever," Susan remembered what Harry had said, "They can close any job, and they close it their way. SINless and free. They don't beat on the weak, and they can save anybody. Even save the world!"

Aria Landers, fighting to breathe on the floor. Fighter shut her eyes.

She was resting the front step of the block, with Maria's mother, Ana Ortega. The young Adept was still in her armour. Ana was smoking a roll-up.

"Frag." Ana said, again, "I bet nearly killing your client–"

"–isn't too chill, yeah. I gave back most of her money. It should be okay."

"Chip truth, girl. Are you okay?"

"…think so. It was just more awful drek. Whatever comes next, I'll deal."

"Maybe by trusting liars a bit fragging less?" Ana blew out smoke in a sigh, "All I've got to say. You trust your idiot boyfriend, then this knife-eared lesbo. Frag, you even believed in me. Isn't there, like, loads of backstabbing and lies in your job? Trust maybe not the best play? I just don't want to be telling Maria you wound up in landfill, chica."

Fighter turned away. She had to be more careful…but she had to trust. Jackson. The baseball Adept. Father. He'd trained her so punishing hard, she'd even thought she wasn't loved…but she'd done those push ups, every one, and he'd said she was a good girl. His daughter would defend the weak and make them strong. She had tried, every day.

Then there had been that messy-haired boy, smile full of hope, who dreamt of Running the Shadows, with her. After the assault, he'd never doubted she'd fight again. He'd fragged a lot up, but he'd saved her. Smiled for her and bled, fought and risked it all.

They'd set up an email dead-drop on Jackson's ancient PC, but he hadn't replied to her last message. If he was dead, she would never know, but he was not.

She'd always believe in Harry–he'd believed in her. Believing in no one but Harry was the scary, easy thing. She couldn't look a Trog in the face, or hear some ganger laugh in the street, without the stab of rage and fear, and the drek kept coming...but life had never been easy. She would trust until she broke, while she still had trust inside her.

"Sorry to say, Ana…" She heard her own voice shake, bitterly smiled, "I'd give anything to have that idiot back here. I…just want him so fragging bad."

Ana sniffed, and threw an arm round Fighter's sagging back.

-0-

"Probably no need to skip town, just stay out of Bellevue," The Fixer told her, "Might be tough finding work for a bit. Sorry."

He did look sorry. A few days later though, when Fighter returned to the Blunder Inn, the Fixer was smiling so much, her back ominously itched. She still sat down. You couldn't work, if you didn't trust your Fixer.

"Fighter. I'd like you to head to Everett and meet with a friend of mine. A Mister Johnson."

A Johnson. Not a street-level fixer, an agent reporting to the Megacorps direct. A tendril reaching down to the gutter, from the titanic old monsters that sprawled across the planet. Fought for it, drawing more into their grasps, through the silent, deniable assets–the Shadowrunners. Fighter could well imagine how Warrior would have smiled.

Everett was the naval shipyard district. In the last year it had been dolled up on Mafia money, with glittering shops and nightclubs bursting out all over. Antumbra was the newest and biggest megaclub, said to have Corporate backing. Its grand opening, that night, was being rabidly touted as the party of the year.

All far over the heads of most slummers in Redmond, but Fighter had actually heard of it. Years ago, the manager of Antumbra had been a rising singer, dropped out of view overnight. Then shot back to the top, as a producer and club-owner–but Fighter had liked her music. She'd played Kali's first single until neighbours banged on the walls.

It was early evening, but clubbers of all metatypes were already crowding the street outside Antumbra. A wide black edifice, with all the neon in white. Flashing in the rain, as Fighter strode closer, from the empty end of the street.

The Johnson was waiting in an alley, near the club. He was unsettlingly nondescript, a human in a jacket, not a suit. Buzz-cut hair, eyes blue and cold.

"You're Fighter?"

"In the flesh."

"Good," No smile, "I'm Mr Johnson. This is a simple job, definite milk run. It could lead to much more, if you play ball, understand?"

"Yeah. The Fix told me that too." She'd had a long metro ride to conclude that she no longer believed in milk runs.

"I have a package. It must be left in a certain room, on the top floor of Antumbra, tonight. Call it a surprise gift. Call me, as soon as the package is in place, and we'll arrange to meet again for your payment of four thousand nyuyen. The room is marked here."

With a burner PDA, the Johnson pinged the map to Fighter's Comm; she supposed that made hers a burner as well. In his other hand, to her dull shock, was a small cardboard box.

She glanced back at the looming Megaclub, already leaking out beats onto the street. Below the name in neon that was twice her height, a Troll guard with a rifle was waving the punters in.

"Surprise present. No appointment, then?"

"Hack their system and get an appointment. Shoot your way to the top floor, fly up on a dragon, I don't care." It was clear he didn't, "It must be secret, it must be done tonight. Deliver the package, and don't even think about what's in it."

Maybe she could still back out, alive. Alone. A failure.

"I'll need an advance."

As Johnson handed her the money, his eyes said the time to back out was gone; no need for threats. Fighter knew Mr Johnson could have her in five pieces, in Corp vivisection labs across five countries, with a movement of one finger.

"We were told you were a shadowrunner. The only one who'd take this job, anyway. Just get it done."

Shadowrunners could close any job. Every huge, mad, dirty job, they got, and this was simple. Deliver a package, do not ask questions. The box weighed on Fighters hands.

She thought of her father. Protecting the weak. Thought of Harry. Her own way, SINless and free. Why had she ever chosen this life? What was the reason she always looked death in the face?

She walked towards the club. Shoved the box into her tote bag for medkits, after she'd checked what was in it.

-0-

When Ilsa 'Wizard' Tresckow, , had fled the Allied German States ahead of both hitmen and the public prosecutor, reinvention had been the word on her mind. She'd known the word meant more than dying her hair, buying a skin-showing top, or talking until dawn with an Amindian shaman near Wenatchee. The backbone of magic, after all, was the meaning of words. However, it had taken the fight at the docks–specifically, the sickening rush of triumph when she had first boiled a human's flesh from his bones–for her to learn that plain word and raw meaning were not always the same thing.

Gripped by revulsion, vomiting on her knees, as her soul leapt with joy, for she was alive…it had been entirely new. Weak stomach notwithstanding, she was stronger for it. Some part of reinvention was reawakening–the greatness of the true self–Nietzsche had been very sound on that. It would be as necessary as survival, if she ever meant to return, restore her name, and grind her calumniators into the dirt.

She had never entered a nightclub, so she would find what meaning there was in that. A Runner she'd worked with, on the NAN dig, had recommended Antumbra. Tua was a simple guard-Troll for hire, with her own shotgun and motorbike, too easygoing and hearty to realise that Ilsa thought her a bore and a dummkopf. Although she had flattened the pervert who'd groped the young redhead's tush in the queue.

So far, they had stuck to a table in the bar section. Tua had lain out a regiment of dead beer cans already, and seemed to have barely got started on her drinking. Ilsa sat behind a gin and tonic with a bored expression.

The nightclub answered its purpose as such, at least. Music in various modern genres, at a volume to make the eardrums bleed. Flowing cups of the gut bier, indeed slopping from the trays of wait-staff, and stumbling dancers, over the floor. Flailing in the darkness, through a packed and heaving forest of human flesh and strobelight. Grinning and screaming, like a soup of Hogath's horrors, stirred by DJ Oliphant's chromatic thrash.

The giant, shining hologram of a dancer cavorted above the mosh floor. Some excited revellers had thrown off clothes they were unlikely to see again. A headbanging dwarf butted his friend in the groin by mistake; another punched a guard's knee from sheer high spirits, was thrown out with a broken jaw, and no one stopped the party or noticed. Ilsa wondered if the club had put something in the drinks, or if there was mind-bending magic at work. Her hands were certainly prickling, and her teeth on edge–but that might just be the noise. Still, the people-watching was worth the door charge.

The guards with batons and rifles, stood brutishly round the room, or out breaking up the odd knifefight. That suit with a weak goatee, pawing at a waitress. Another waitress, a well-built Chinese girl, who seized the drunk's wrist and told him…wait.

Ilsa adjusted her glasses and sat back. That waitress had not been serving drinks in a halter top, split skirt and fishnets, when they'd last met; she'd been killing with her fists and feet. She was undoubtedly that shadowrunner, Fighter. Who had noticed Ilsa herself, in the same moment.

"Hey, Wiz?" Tua boomed, beside her, "Spotted a hot guy? Or, trouble…?" Her piggy eyes narrowed; even Trolls couldn't survive in the Shadows without a sense for danger.

Ilsa thought about introducing Fighter, once she had told Tua again that Wiz was not her chosen street name. However, the young Adept's eyes were fixed on hers, desperately. Hers alone.

"Well, hot guy or trouble? Want you to stay safe, chica."

"Hot waitress actually," Ilsa told the first lie that sprang to mind, "I think I might step away for one moment, and try to seduce her in the restrooms."

"HAH HA! Who'd have thought it?" Tua boisterously shook Ilsa's shoulder, almost pitching her glasses into her glass, "Come back here when you're done, I'll get you any guy in this place! Or any girl! Let's all drink a gallon of something awful and get laid!"

"Yes. Quite." And quite appallingly predictable. This waitress, however, was most definitely something interesting.

Ilsa got up, with another glance at Fighter, straightened her skirt and cloak, and then pushed through the crowd to a restroom. Tua kept knocking them back behind her.

-0-

Ilsa had never conceived of a public restroom with noisy couples in literally every stall, but that was thankfully by the way. Fighter took more than five minutes (Ilsa wondered if she was thinking better of trusting a virtual stranger), but when she came in she was beaming.

"Wiz!" Distressingly, that name seemed to be sticking, "What are you doing here?"

"Having what I believe is known as a 'crap evening', and yourself? Was your Shadowrunning so unsuccessful…?"

"No! This for a job. I have to get to the top floor, but it seems I need an appointment. The guards in here, it's like talking to drones!"

"Seduction seemed unlikely to work then?"

"I tried telling them I had a drinks order," Fighter went on, with a quick, savage look, "Then a secret message. Then a mixtape that'd make Kali another ten million, if they gave me five minutes, but no tickee, no laundry–no appointment, slot the drek off!"

"How did you gain employment here in the first place? Your Fixer must have supplied you with references, a false SIN?"

"Uh, no, I just went round to the kitchens, and maybe punched out another jobseeker who was getting violent. This place is way over capacity, the waitstaff were getting wiped out. I got a two-minute interview, 20 Nuyen for the night and this stupid outfit."

"Impressive. And your plan now is?"

"I told you, I'm stuck. I didn't have a real plan, I just have to get in," Fighter looked at Ilsa directly, hands on hips, "You're smart, you went to college and all that drek. If you've got anything, I'll split the money, twenty percent."

"Heidelberg University did not offer modules in larceny. However, I may be able to think of something."

"Can you at least tell me what this is?" Impatiently, Fighter thrust out her bag, and the cardboard box.

Ilsa looked in the box. The hazard sign, on a small steel canister, stared up at her like a demon's eye. She swallowed ever so slightly.

"Fortunately, I assisted the Bruckner group in their research on magically-enhanced–"

"Tonight please, Wiz?"

"Fighter, this appears to be a weaponized nanite swarm. If released, it could kill everyone in this building by molecular disassembly, or possibly everyone on the block."