December 24th, 2024.
Only, whatever you picturing ain't working for the proper mood setting if you ain't from The GLOW.
Currently 11pm but the place is lit up brighter than shit. There's no longer any true night. Here this close to Old City, what was once called and is still technically called Mobile, the fucking Soulburn sometimes gets its panties in a wad and burns so brightly that it casts shadows at noon on a cloudless day.
I have left The Citadel, a mall so big it makes some non-GLOW cities feel quaint, and in the backseat I have a teddy bear. A real one. Not a ServiSynth 3.0 or something magicked from the basement. No gadgets or grimoires required. Batteries not included because why the fuck would you? Just a plain as shit teddy bear like some kid in the 1950s would smile about.
It's for my daughter. Jullie. She's 15, really close to 16, and on her way to being a bigger bitch than her mom. Almost as big of a bitch as me. Good for her. This fucking world needs getting bitched at. She's fancy like I never was, spending my money good, and I'm happy about it.
She doesn't collect the stuffed animals or anything. All her hobbies are the same as all bored teenagers around here: talking shit about everyone on the 'Wave. Still, I feel deep in my dad heart she'll like the gift. Knew it when I first saw it. She one time ate a bag of Cheese 'n Onion flavored chips I bought her despite Catria, my wife and her mom, insisting that Jullie doesn't like onions.
I think she did it for spite. Or because she was being nice. Probably both.
I love that child.
I'm cutting across some of the rougher parts of The Old City at unnecessary risks to myself. Don't know why. Driving on vibe. Like fate is calling me to fall into the void.
I see a building on a street so war-torn looking it might as well be a prop in a movie. "Building." At least the bones of one. Scorch marks still scar it like cancer though the Gulf weather has stripped most of it.
It's the sign out front that caught my eye.
"THE END IS NIGH!" is says. Said. Now you can read "HE ND I NIH" with only bits of the other letters. Takes me back. A dozen years ago. When the field psychics went insane. When half The Order went insane. Before restructuring when The GLOW changed so much and so little at the same time.
Above the sign, in much newer spraypaint or its aethertech equivalent are the words: "The Witch-King Lives." I don't know what it means.
I don't fucking want to know.
I feel a strange buzz in my teeth and pull the car over near the sign, keeping an eye out for any of the million billion dangers that might lurk nearby. I fish in my pocket and take out a small marble-sized object.
I know the cool kids do shit like have them implanted in ServiSynth familiars or wear them like jewelry. The extreme one having them implanted into their own body, having to dig them out every year as a new model releases. I'm too old for that shit.
I tap my All Seeing Eye and the subtle sigil-grafts under my hair fire up. A HUD starts to fill in the world around me. Street names. Information tags. MUNI-issued warnings about relative crime statistics on this block. The standard data most GLOWians see 24/7.
I mentally swipe these away and focus on a ghostly shape in the corner and bring it into focus. A woman around my age. Face lined. Ex-smoker. Best way to describe it would be to say she looks international. Depending on the day, you might peg her as South-East Asian or African or Indian or something else. All at the same time, most times.
Arkyu Uno. AKA RQ. AKA Red Queen. Only she no longer calls herself that. Red Queen, I mean. She tried out just the initials and people kept asking what they stood for. She ended up with "Arkyu" which, combined with her non-specific ethnic background, confuses enough folks into silence.
Time was, her and her brother were bodyguards to some religious nut job who got offed in the 90s. I say "brother" but what I mean is, "Why the fuck would I care?" Scuttlebutt is he was her brother by a different mother but could have been her lover or gay best friend for all we know. Red Queen and Black Jack. Loyal meat shields becoming independent contractors becoming crime lords.
Then, in 2012, when the madness hit, the brother disappeared. He'd been up doing some work in Huntsville. The first city to official sign on to the subsidiary GLOW program as a test run before Wales and other cities joined. Outsourcing the Harrowing with a few thousand regulations attached. Just last year, London joined the family. I am still shocked by that one.
After Black Jack went, Arkyu disappeared herself for a bit and then showed back up. Taking Juan Uno's place. Apparently they were old friends. Or married. Or she blackmailed him into fleeing. I don't know.
She pays well, though sometimes she is really demanding. Like when she sends you on impossible missions knowing you'll fail so she can get half your pay on the more lucrative ones where there is just a faint chance at succeeding.
I know I'm making her sound absolutely awful but let me tell you, she's actually kind of nice. Friendly. Maybe even loving for her new not-quite-crime-family, if a mama bear who sometimes uses her cubs for manipulative game is a form of loving.
"GOBLIN!," she says, all smiles, and I groan. This can't be good. She's drunk and seems to be celebrating and that's awful news for an old smasher like me.
"Hey, Arkyu, I'm pulled over for this in a fairly old part of Old City. This might need to be quick before folks try and jack an old man."
"You can drive while talking, you know. The ASE will pilot your car. We talked about this."
"Eh...," I grunt. I leave out that I had a punk hacker type rip out enough of the interface to disallow that on this car. This is my family car, by which I mean the car I drive while out with Cartia and Jullie. I don't trust folks being to control my car when my family is involved.
I know it makes no sense. Cartia's car has the ASE aetherware built in. The one we are looking to get Jullie has it too. Cars that stop a few miles short of Montgomery or Orlando or the Texas border because they are so tied into the GLOW they were never made to work outside of its Soulburn grip.
It feels personal for me to give up that control when I am driving, though. Things have a tendency to go awry around me, especially when the cogs of the world turn.
"Anyhow, are you and Bugbear free?"
"On Christmas Eve, not even a little bit."
"It pays well."
"And Cartia will, quite literally, murder me." Cartia. Codename Honeysuckle. Ex Order operative turned hedge mage with an absolutely shockingly good aptitude for magically enhancing poisons. Retired on becoming a mom, though her spending money always seems to outpace my earnings. I try to not ask.
"She could be of help."
"If I ask her that, she'll murder us both. What do you need?" Part of me suspects that if Arkyu is talking to me, she has already discussed it with Cartia. I'm expected to protest but I'm likely already in by mutual understanding that I don't get a goddamned say.
"I am saving it for when you and Bugbear are together. I'll drop my fee to 20% if you can arrange that within an hour."
"Your fee is 10%."
"See, you haggled, that means you have to be in. 15% it is!"
Fuck my luck. I start picturing my eulogy after this all goes south faster than old Canadians in the winter. I barely notice that Arkyu has "hung up" on me. She's so fucking sure of herself.
Of course I'm going to see what she wants. Part of the reason Jullie can be just a normal kid is because just about everyone knows that the Arkyu inner-circle is tight knit enough that if you infringe upon the untouchables, like kids, then you will not survive the drive to the airport while trying to flee the hornet next you just kicked.
I take five deep breaths, tap my fingers on the steering wheel four times, make three clicks with my tongue, stare at two different objects - a trash can that has been full since May and a can of soda that seems unopened and left abandoned on the sidewalk - and then say, aloud, "I am one."
I'm not an idiot. I call Cartia immediately. She makes a huge fuss about it but I can tell it's all play-acting. Twenty-five years of marriage does that to you, gives you the sense. I try and not worry about the fact that I can hear people talking behind her, the clink of glasses as someone is served a drink.
I pull out of the relative squalor of Old City and head down a main artery, GL3, back towards Pensacola where Arkyu awaits at her so-called diner. My car looking like a relic, an expensive relic, compared to the few other vehicles out this time of night on Christmas Eve. Most of the others only look like what most would call a car. ServiSynths. ASE infused collections of glyphs and wards. Gnole-Tech. A few good honest aethertech mechs which only require a PhD to understand. All shaped with roughly four-wheels and two-to-four doors but deep down, this is a river of beasts and madness.
As I pass a sign that looks like an old timey speed limit sign but is really a complex hive of glyphs communicating a thousand pieces of information to the world around it, I see a person standing under it.
Whether its tech or sigils or something more sinister, I note that their face is blurred so much that it hurts my eyes to look at them for long. As I am turning to the task on hand, wandering if Bugbear can get free of his husband quick enough to just meet me there, the person lifts an arm and waves at me.
"Fuck me," I mumble.
Goblin vs the Christmas Miracle is a title I came up with before really contemplating the story all that much. The idea is to jump ahead several years into The GLOW's history after the events of the 1996 timeline altered the shape of the megacity. Eustace has become the Witch-King, and in doing so took control of the rapidly spreading Harrowing.
The city is no longer an out of control explosion that was going to consume the planet but now more of a smoldering cinder of its former glory. Still big enough to dwarf any other non-GLOW city, still capable of generating magic and miracles, but not on the cusp of going critical. At least not without help.
Now all the weird stuff that goes down is due to the vast number of power players on the field.
There are a few elements in play. Many I have tried to keep vague to myself. Goblin, real name Garret Mar, and Bugbear [Thomas Wan], are a pair of operators that specialize in destroying objects of power and protections that might guard such objects. Garett's cousin Sebastian Mar was Hobgoblin whose specialty was dealing with stopping people of power. Even I have no idea what happened to Hobgoblin.
The Red Queen and The Black Jack are 100% Abra and Yori from the 1996 timeline. I left it vague if they lived because I liked the idea of them somewhat redeeming themselves from a bit of a pair of hapless bodyguards and here we are.
Some other changes include that the aethernet has been replaced, largely, by the aetherwave: a more immersive enhanced-reality style interface. Sigils/Glyphs/Wards [actual difference is fairly muddled by me and I have no idea, really] are no longer locked down by the Order, which has collapsed. The Scrying Glasses - essentially the aethernet equivalent of cellphones - have been large replaced with All Seeing Eyes which interface with the 'Wave. ServiSynths are more self-contained entities now. Gnole-Tech, experimental biological upgrades, are more commonplace. The city as a whole is somewhere between 50% magic and 50% tech though the tech is starting to take over with the mystical stuff being integrated directly into it.
In 2012, the apocalyptic event (The Ultimate Harrowing, aka, "The Stars Are Right") where the GLOW would spread like wildfire was stopped (by Eustace) but the genetic code built into humans by a extraterrestrial invasion of humanity - who had been using The GLOW to power their own plans to return to a million-year war - still triggered a sort of psychic seismic wave that caused the more powerful psychics, mages, and witches to largely burn out. Literally, in some cases. For better or worse, such powers are more "democratic" now and lower level.
Besides that, I am still not 100% sure which system I will use to play this but currently it is down to two likely candidates: The Tricube Tales Chrome Shells and Neon Streets or Cities Without Number with some magic tacked in from Worlds Without Number. As tempting as the latter is, the workload to tell a relatively low stakes story might make the former win out by default.
I'll give it a think.
Shortly, a few hours, after first writing this post [but before it was actually published] another candidate came to mind and that will be what I use: Neon City Overdrive. I've not played the system directly, but I like the whole "dice vs danger dice" mechanic and it's Tags + Edges style system is something I have used in other systems and really like for the kind of game that this will be. One where stuff can get weird but will also be a bit normal, where power scaling can be stapled into scenes without requiring complex math, and where some scenes can be played "against rules" without exactly breaking the rules.
And Gamemaster's Apprentice: Cyberpunk 2e will return as the oracle of choice. With Tricube Tales: Chrome Shells and Neon Streets' image oracle for extra inspiration.
OH, and just to note that one of the major inspirations for this is the movie (and presumably book) Bullet Train. I like the idea of a criminal operative whose "super power" is basically that he is terribly unlucky but has the ability to largely survive his own bad luck.