Both sides now
This one is a little different. I wrote both sides: Em and Dean Seger, a corpo contact of hers that she has on-and-off dated that was being very pushy on a day she was even less emotionally available than she usually is. I had a blast writing both sides of this! The GM took this and basically made him show up to the bar the party was at and we played through a pretty tense, fun, situation.
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“… YOU didn't know, and reading people's what you do...”
“… How'd Stafford miss a stationary target with a bloody shotgun?”
Em looks at the Professor, keeping her face as neutral as possible, “Yeah, crazy…”
Fuck.
He’s right.
I didn’t read him. For fucking weeks. And he fucked up something he usually can do in his sleep. Something is off.. or has been off and now it’s fixed. That means every single fucking time you thought…
Em’s thoughts are interrupted by her buzzing commlink. It’s a message from Dean Seger, “Dinner tonight?”
She notices the Professor looking at the commlink. “Just some guy I know.” She messages Dean back, “Not tonight, sorry.”
She looks at the message and then back at the Professor, her face expressionless. “We should do dinner tonight, all of us. To celebrate. I’ll find a place.”
She needed to level-set on their dynamic. They were runners... friends even sometimes.... But she obviously just hadn't worked with any one group for more than one or two jobs at a time and the time spent with them was throwing her off her game. She actually doesn't want to hurt the Professor's feelings by telling him how she feels about the neo anarchists. Since when had that mattered? And Stafford.... She's just seeing things that aren't there because she was... what? Lonely? Please, that's laughably tragic. Either way, she had obviously been fucking up consistently without even realizing it for weeks now, and it took the fucking Professor to point it out. She should probably cut back on the nova…
Em finds a place called Geno’s nearby – a runner’s bar apparently – “Let’s go”, she downs the rest of her soykaf and stands up. "I'll message Stafford." She pulls out her commlink and sends him a message: "Dinner, drinks now at Geno's to celebrate" - send -
Geno’s is surprisingly similar to the Pelican in its dour-looking troll bartender, sticky wooden floors and the main light sources being the neon alcohol signs on the wall. The place is starting to get busy.
She weaves through some people and full tables to find a table in the middle of the room for the three of them. She gets another message from Dean, “I can come to you.” She ignores it. She does her usual scan of the room and makes a mental note of all the people obviously and discretely looking at them. There’s one guy that looks like he might be trouble. A human man with brown hair with temples just starting to grey, stubble and wearing an Ace of Clubs jacket from Vashon Island two years ago, is eyeing them, leaning with one elbow on the bar, grinning smugly. She makes a note of him and switches focus to the Professor, grinning. “Drinking tonight?” She starts looking up to catch the eye of one of the two servers bustling around.
.
.
.
Dean
“Not tonight, sorry.”
Dean Seger frowns, slowly puts the commlink back into his pocket and lies back in the barber chair, gesturing for Rolf – a dwarf with a bald head and a long, immaculately-shaped white beard – to continue. Rolf keeps the place open after hours for Dean’s weekly straight-razor shave pretty often and can tell when Dean isn’t feeling chatty – like right now. So the room is silent, punctuated only by the scraping noise of the razor moving carefully, expertly across Dean’s face.
He lies quiet, still, but his thoughts are prickly and annoyed. His day had been challenging; he had been looking forward to taking the edge off with Em.
No reasons, nothing. Just ‘not tonight, sorry’. What the fuck.
People didn’t turn down time with him – they vied for it.
Once the shave is done and Dean sits up to examine himself in the mirror: even though he’s irritated he can’t help a small appraising smile at his reflection. He looked good. Sharp.
As he thanks Rolf and gets out of the chair, he pulls out his commlink to look at the message again. It wasn’t encrypted. He should see where she was. This wasn’t even about the dinner anymore, he told himself. He wanted to make sure she was okay after that whole Oculus thing. He had heard he was killed, along with Hightower, in a bombing or… shootout.. or… something? Whatever. No idea how Em was involved, but she must have been. Checking up on her was the right thing to do. He’d given her all that intel after all.
He sends her commlink details to his assistant with a request to set up a personal-use location trace for 4 hours – a perk of the job at his seniority level and social score. Horizon was very particular about the 4-hour cutoff though – wouldn’t want anyone to think you’re doing anything unseemly.
A few moments later as he’s leaving the shop, his commlink buzzes: The trace has been set up with a link showing Em’s commlink’s real-time location. Visions of him swooping into some dingy warehouse and saving her from meathead thugs flash in his mind.
Clicking on the link, he sees the marker at a place downtown called Geno’s. The fuck is Geno’s? He looks it up: Some shitty bar. The kind they might go to together in Seattle. So she was blowing him off to go to a bar? Who else did she know in Chicago?
Impulsively, he sends her another message, “I can come to you.” He walks to his black town car and gets in the back, staring at the commlink. Nothing.
“Home, sir?” the driver asks, making eye contact with him in the rear-view mirror.
“Not yet.”
He lights a cigarette and slowly smokes it. The commlink stays silent. He was no good like this, all knotted up – he needed to relax. He pulls out a vial of novacoke he always keeps on his person. The seat pocket contains everything needed to do lines comfortably: a large mirror, a tray table to rest it on, and a few playing cards he likes to use to cut the nova into lines. Six thick rails later, Dean leans back, closes his eyes and lets himself sink into the familiar and welcome feeling of the tingling under his skin, certain senses heightening, others dulling.
As he lights another cigarette, he has a sudden thought: He should surprise her. It’ll be fun to surprise her. They always had a fucking blast together. She’s always happy to see him – she probably just hadn’t seen his message. He’ll go to the bar, buy everyone drinks, and they can hang out – it’ll be a blast. He’s been feeling a bit in a rut lately – this would be fun. He’s never been to Geno’s – it’d be good for him to know another bar in the city too.
“We’re going to Geno’s,” he says to the driver, grinning broadly now, “How long do you think it’ll take to get there?”
The driver types something into the car’s nav system: “Probably twenty minutes or so, fifteen if we make the lights.”
“Let’s roll,” Dean smiles, flicking the half-smoked cigarette out the window.
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