The GLOW 2024: Goblin vs The Christmas Miracle, Session 0

I pull the car into a 24/7 garage with ServiSynth guards meant to look like like department store mannequins carrying guns. Establishing the vibe. This part of Pensacola is all safe street markets and tattoo artists selling cantrip level sigils to tourists who know they won't work back home. Locals know the guns are just low level stun guns to incapacitate rowdy drunks until MUNI shows up.

Locals also know that the real hunter-killers can be summoned within seconds from hidden compartments in the pillars. My car is safer here than in my own driveway.

I breathe in an out a few times, remembering my meditations. My breath clouds in the cold air. I pull my coat around my shoulders. On me, it looks oversized. Growing up while realizing I was the shortest boy in the class used to do bad things to my self-esteem. Nowadays, I realize it has been really helpful in my line of work.

I enter through the side door into Uno Cafe. Once Juan's, now Arkyu's. The cute, twee courtyard with plants and old-timey-looking chairs and "wood" pillars is all for show. The wood is aethertech disguised to monitor things and to keep itself looking spotless. The plants are real enough but the pots regulate moisture content of the soil and provide nutrients and warmth.

The firefly looking ServiSynths floating around casually provide lighting and heat but also are capable of delivering a deadly amount of firepower if they need.

Hell, even the Christmas lights are probably some sort of advanced weapon or monitoring device, but that might just be my paranoia.

I get a few steps in and then come to a dead stop. "Ah, fuck."

My wife, Catria, is sitting there talking to another woman of around the same age. She's laughing. Both of them, I mean. Laughing and having a good time. Catria is taking a long puff off a stick and blowing out multi-color vapor. I'm not close enough to tell, but I bet it tastes like black licorice. She loves black licorice. The stick is a standard aethervape for all the cool kids who don't want to take up the usual pasttime of chain smoking to an early grave.

Like a magic wand hollowed out into a straw, glyphs inside activate when you inhale Soulburn-laced air through it and the effects can range from full on buzz to simply making pretty colored vapor. It's up to you if you want it to get hot.

She told me she quit.

Other woman I don't know. Nor do I know the big dude behind both of them keeping watch, but the sigils they wear are old school. These people are ex-Order. Like Catria, too low to get burned out, but high enough to not hide the marks on their skins. Well, the guy's marks are...marred.

I don't know what that means but it can't be good.

Catria looks my way, unsurprised. Gives me a wink. A very horny wink. She gets like this when talking to the old crew and getting drunk. Great. I have to go and take on a job and then get free enough to make sure she's not cranky for Christmas. Actually, probably not that order. If she falls asleep before I'm done I'm getting coal in my stocking and yes that is a metaphor and no you don't know want to know.

One of the fireflies twitches and spazzes and then goes a shade of red overhead. Like it contemplated shooting me. If I stand here long enough, it just might.

I walk past with a wink of my own, I'm too married to not flirt back, and enter into the main dining area of the cafe and then knock twice on the back door that you have to have two separate sigils just to see. I have those and a half dozen others that help with data gathering.

An older Japanese man opens and beckons me inside. Eye is his codename, but he prefers Genny. I don't have to look up to see his main partner, Hook. Don't know her name. The two times I've heard her speak, she retains some accent from Eastern Europe. With the heavier tattoos and shaved head, she looks more ex-mil but him, but I really don't know their backstory.

She's a lot younger than Genny but they have been a team for longer than Bugbear and myself. Used to do the same job for Juan before lung cancer took him to that great cafe in the sky.

Genny has sigils around his eyes and hands that make one of The GLOW's deadliest snipers. Hook carries a strange curved sword but that's just for show. The sigils on her arms and legs make her punches and kicks hit like steel. Reflexes of a cat and claws of a tiger, blah blah blah.

Genny likes me. I'm not sure if Hook likes anything.

Thing is, I've never been in this room when they weren't. They are human, at least I am pretty sure they are human, but it's hard to not picture them sitting in the dark, waiting for trouble. Not that trouble is ever dumb enough to try and get past them.

In part, because of the room itself. You'd expect something like a 5m x 5m, give or take, room with a desk and some filing cabinets, maybe an ash tray, diplomas on the wall. Motivational posters. Hell, even a drinks cabinet. Something normal. Instead, you enter into a space like a barely grasped memory of some half-abandoned office building's lobby from the 1980s at around 3am.

Your feet clack on tile floor. There's a desk in front of you, and on that desk - which is neither exactly shoddy nor precisely pricey - is a computer. Old. Never turned on. It's probably not a computer but I do not know what it is. There is also, tonight, a rag. Like someone was cleaning the desk. Off to your right, between two pillars, darkness devours the world. A single distant display case showing some arcane piece of art sits there.

Do NOT look at the art for too long. In fact, do not walk into the darkness at all. I say from experience that you will not enjoy the experience.

The light source is three more of these firefly ServiSynths, around 20m up. The room makes you feel like you should be able to look up and see other floors, other rooms. I do not look up.

Behind the desk is a wall that has a sign that says, "Elevators," with an arrow pointing into the darkness. There are no elevators. A couple of chairs in the same rough price range as the desk itself are against this wall, and this is where Hook and Eye sit.

To the left of the desk, as facing in from the door, a pair of tables that match the outside decor have been set up with a couple of chairs.

The whole thing feels like, and almost definitely is, a borrowed place from some other time. And that's good enough for me to know my place.

I sit down at the table and twiddle my thumbs. I keep thinking I should ask what we are waiting on when Genny looks up and says, "Now that the two of you are here, I'll get Ar."

I am about to ask what he is talking about when I realize Bugbear, all 2.3 meters of him, has somehow gotten inside the room and is sitting in the chair next to me. It catches me off guard enough that even having worked with the man for fifteen years I still jump. "Jesus Christ!"

Let me put a puzzle to you. Take a chess set. Fancy. Cheap, I don't care. You have all the chess pieces. Queens. Pawns. What the fuck ever. I tell you, you can put any three pieces on any spaces on the board and then I have to guess them precisely or pay you 500 Noodles. What do you pick to stump me?

See, it's a trick. While you spend the thirty seconds coming up with a foolproof money maker, Bugbear has used that distraction to disarm your entire security network. He scares me and I love him like a brother. You? You don't have time to be scared of him. By the time you realize he is there, he is, well...hopefully...gone. If things go well.

You will be surprised and awed to know that things don't always go so well.

He did not spend too much time getting dressed so he is wearing a bALLWORLd shirt. You know, the game where everything is a ball? Players are a ball. NPCs are a ball. Monsters are various scary looking balls. Where you combine a door ball, a roof ball, four wall balls, as many window balls as you want and you get a house ball? That one?

Yeah, I don't fucking know, either. But Bugbear's husband, TannyLym, is the #2 influencer on the 'Wave with content entirely centered on the game. Unfortunately, the #1 bALLWORLd influencer...

...Alec December, goes by the outrageously stupid "Flaracetamol," aka Flare, has a hard-on for breaking Tanny. The two used to be a couple ten years prior but now are in their damned forties acting like school children. Unfortunately, this feud is worth literally millions of New-Dollars. The brand deals alone has Bugbear set for life as a kept man, but he sticks to me like a brother.

Which he practically is. In all ways that matter.

Genny taps a complex series of knocks on the wall behind him, right under the elevator sign, and the room lurches in a strange way as I feel the pressure pop in my ears. The room is disconnected from here and going to there. I mean, it was already not-here. Look, let's not get bogged down in technicals. The scary fucking place is now in another scary fucking place. I think. The temperature rises by a couple of degrees and the air smells...different.

Once the sensation of movement stops, a door is now in front us like it has always been there, unnoticed, right in the center of the darkness which feels less like a portal into some other awful place and more like a wall painted to look like darkness. It opens and the smell of peppermint vape and a cacophony of horny, female giggles erupts out. Mood lighting and Christmas lights flicker from the open doorway. Arkyu is having a party, the kind where a group of twenty-something beauties walk around wearing nothing but Christmas bows and Santa hats and look really pretty for her majesty.

Speaking of, she comes out and is wearing a thin nightie that threatens to show off her middle-aged curves in the flicking faux-firelight behind her.

"GOBLIN! You made it!"

I have to use Bene Gesserit levels of muscle control to stop from rolling my eyes.

"What's the job, Ar? You sound busy. Bugbear needs to get back to Tan. And Cat is giving me come-hithers. We all got better things to do."

"Do you know the Metroplex One-Three?"

The MP1+3 was meant to be the Metroplex 1-4. Four towers to house a lot of folks who were having trouble keeping up with the rapid rise of New-Dollars. Only 2012 hit right after the third tower was finished and before the fourth was more than just some scaffolding. A pair of witches who were doing something in MP2 exploded into flames and burned that one down. Leaving just MP1 and MP3 standing. Since then, it's been occupied like a hornet's nest is occupied. Buzzing. Crackling.

I nod. She smiles brighter and behind her I hear a shout as one of her guests has started doing something, something intimate, to another. I kind of wish the door would close. It feels uncomfortable.

"How about Boris Oblonsky? Ratfuck?"

I shake my head no.

"He was being sought out by the Dragons. But the Rabbits snagged him. Now the Vultures want revenge." She goes on to explain some more details.

Shit. The Fractal Dragons is an old group for The GLOW. Legit friendly street shit types. Mostly do minor jobs, traffic in ArtEms (Artificial Emotions), and engage in the kind of mischief where they turn a parking lot into an apple orchard using hedge magic. They take care of people, even if they do it in ways that MUNI gets pissed about. People like the Dragons. Currently lead by a person known as Madame Rosa who pushes a vibe as an old, cranky matriarch but is actually a decade-and-a-half younger than myself and drop dead gorgeous.

The White Rabbits, though. Those are real fuckers. Cruel. Wearing rabbit masks, talking in child-like voices, shouting 'Wave-speak...as they cut your arms off and use crayons and glitter to decorate your intestines.

And the Vultures are a different sort of trouble. The main body is from New Orleans but a schism sent some of the more deranged here to Old City. All about edge-lord yokai-tinged loas and fake, tourist-level voodoo shit blended with anime memes. Not as nasty as the Rabbits but also prone to being more weird. Sometimes violently so.

Boris "Ratfuck" Oblonsky was hired by the Vultures to capture a few of the Dragon's Wraiths - the 'Wave equivalent to ServiSynths - to repurpose into "yo-loas." Only he found something that he is trying to sell to Bloody Alice, which has pissed both the Dragons and Vultures off. Not to mention that Bloody Alice is furious because he refuses to give it over unless they pay a heavy fee.

"What did he find?," I ask.

"A feather," Arkyu says, "A...big one." She holds up her hands around a meter a part. "Bright and glowing."

"What kind of fucking feather is that?"

"A raven feather," Arkyu says, like that makes fucking sense.

"A crow."

This was Hook and hearing her speak, for what is now a grand tally of three times in the past decade while I'm about, with something like religious fervor, almost makes me jump harder than Bugbear showing up out of the blue. Only, what really unnerves me is the look on Arkyu's face. Fear. She's goddamned terrified. She lives in an impossibly room full of actual horrors and this is what makes her afraid?

"I don't...," I start, so caught off guard that I want to run.

"Get to Boris before they kill him or, worse, break him. Destroy the data. Destroy the feather. Rosa has specifically requested the latter."

"Ma'am," Bugbear says, in that weird way he talks that makes him sound like a college student confused by a test, "We don't do rescue missions."

"It's not a rescue mission."

"Or wetwork," I say, which is not entirely true. It's just more a side-effect than a primary goal.

"It's not an assassination attempt. Boris is probably best dead but that's for the Vultures to do. The hope is that if the Rabbits' base has its defenses dropped, the Vultures will swoop in and take out the man for his betrayal. At either rate, that data and that feather must be destroyed to fulfill the contract."

"Will the Dragons' be involved in any way?"

"No. Their cover will be spend most of the day handing out food to the homeless. They were going to do it anyway and Rosa refuses to budge on that."

"What's the timeline?"

"Sooner is better, but not until the soup kitchen opens at 07:00. Before it closes at 23:00. Once you have the feather destroyed and the defenses dropped, let me know and I'll get word to the Vultures."

A few minutes later, Arkyu is all horny smiles, again, and off to get laid in her impossible bedroom and a second series of knocks has us back here.

I walk out the door and Catria is drunk and kissing me and it tastes just like black licorice. I'm about to be rewarded for taking on a dangerous, last-minute job that will likely pay double. She wants me out of the game and knows we still need to make sure that Jullie is taken care of before I can hit the ESC button.

A few hours later, Catria snoring and Jullie's teddy bear tied up with a bow and left by my daughter's door, I get up and look outside and wished I hadn't agreed to quit smoking. Because I can feel it.

If I survive this one unscathed, it's going to be a goddamned Christmas miracle.

Credits

The art used in this is a combination of a photo by Tommy on Unsplash, a photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash, and an illustration posted by Desmond W. Helmore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.