Milk was the final item on Max's shopping list.
"Take care!" his boyfriend shouted after him as he left his parents' flat. The Sixth World was a dangerous place.
Max warily jogged down the grimy streets. This part of the Sprawl was something of a food desert after insect spirits made their hive in the nearest supermarket. But the rent was almost affordable, and, all going well, the nearest Stuffer Shack was only three quarters of an hour away.
Things never did go well.
If he'd been taller, the burned out shells of cars wouldn't have blocked his view and he might have seen the Humanis mob earlier. But then, if he'd been taller, they might have let him go. Judging by the mobs' jeers, they held contradictory but compartmentalised ideas about what sort of threat a teen dwarf posed to humanity, but he had a very clear idea about what sort of threat a bunch of semi-organised human suprematists posed to him.
Max ran.
Humans had the advantage of longer legs, so he couldn't let this become a drawn out chase in the hope they'd run out of breath and interest. That was why he only barely hesitated before jumping down a conveniently open manhole.
He hit the damp concrete with a dull thud, but continued on quickly. On the surface, the Humanis thugs laughed and cursed, but didn't seem to follow. Max gagged, for the sewer smelled like a sewer. Nothing for it. Hopefully what was said about dwarven immune systems was true.
The first few minutes were uneventful enough. It wasn't actually too hard to evade an awakened alligator if you saw it in time. He was almost at an exit, and those splashing, squelching footsteps that didn't quite align with his own were only ripples and echoes, right?
Max spun around. A ghoul, wearing last year's fashion, stood in his phone's light.
Max screamed and sprinted away as fast as he could.
"Rude," the ghoul said, her judgement echoing off the walls.
It was possible that he might simply have dropped his keys or something and she wanted to return them, but he wasn't taking chances. He scrambled up the ladder, pushed aside the manhole cover with desperate strength and hauled himself onto the road.
Lying on his stomach, he took deep breaths of the horribly polluted, but fresh compared to the sewer, air. He blinked in the sunlight like an escapee from Plato's Cave. Unlike an escapee from Plato's Cave, the shadows failed to resolve themselves into higher forms. Quite the opposite. Humanis.
Frag. Max braced himself.
Gunfire erupted. This was the end. And the Urban Brawl finals weren't until tomorrow.
Nothing happened. Eventually, Max risked looking up. The Humanis lay dead. In the middle distance, shadowrunners, loaded with paydata, guns blazing, mohawks pink, were having a running firefight with Lone Star. Max kept his head down.
Once the gunfire faded away, he carefully got to his feet. He brushed himself off while looking around. All seemed quiet. A hand reached out from the sewer and dragged down one of the dead Humanis men. "Bon Appetit!" Max shouted as he hurried off.
Unbelievably, the rest of the trip to the store passed without major incident. A dragon flew overhead at one point.
Reaching into his pocket for his shopping list, he realised that his credstick was there, but his key was not. He'd probably dropped it in the sewer, either while jumping in or when evading the alligator. With his boyfriend home to let him in, he wasn't going back down to look.
Max greeted the cashier. The machine that had briefly replaced them had turned out to be malfunctioning, homicidal, or both. This would not have been a reason for Aztechnology to re-employ a metahuman, but the robot had also undercharged the surviving customers.
He grabbed a basket and started picking his groceries. Someone screamed, but that was in another aisle. Perhaps it was because of the prices.
Finally, Max reached the refrigerated section. He was faced with vast arrays of cheese, yogurt, spreads, and more. The milk, however, was too high to reach.
The End
