Saturday, 27 February 2016

Orca: Punch the Shark

As a runner, you generally only work alone if you're the best thing in the universe or a right burke. Since I’m neither, I have a team of sorts that I run with. They're pretty damned eclectic and don't follow a lot of your standard Runner team "rules" (Everyone had a Sam, a Decker and a Shaman/Mage, right?. We don't have two of those and the third is an interesting case) so we have to do a lot of our stuff through non-traditional means. For example, I’m the team's "big gun" even though I'm not there in person like a Sam would be.

Orca's our magic. How she does that is pretty interesting, even if I don't pretend to have a clue about how it all works. What it means, however, is that she can do a lot of interesting things and definitely is not someone that you can immediately figure how she's going to do it.


Orca, sans bow, knife or board
She was the first member of the team I met, and everything about her screams "surfer girl", down to the bleached blonde hair. And yes, that's exactly what she is. It also means she has to be pretty bloody brave given that she goes out into the ocean and braves the combination of massive waves, freak storms, pollution and bloody Megaladons for fun. She definitely knows what she's doing, however, and since she hasn't yet been eaten by a bloody great shark, she must be doing it well.

What she does is pretty keen, however. She's Awakened, but not in your traditional mage sense. For starters, she's more Adept than anything else, with the usual degree of enhanced abilities and The like. So yes, if things came down to it, she could indeed punch a shark. However, her preferred weapons are a bow and knife, both of which she can do her adept stuff through to turn into absurdly lethal weapons. (Remember what I said about Automatics being insanely illegal here? Yeah. Orca's one of the people who got the good side of the deal)

But it's the other thing she does that's so bloody good and useful. Unlike your other adepts, Orca can also do a bit of magic on the side. While she’s thrown around a few spells here and there (and quite useful ones at that!) her biggest magey thing is summoning Spirits, which she seems to be quite good at. Several times she's pulled out some netherworld beasty for whatever purpose, ranging from spying to blowing the ever living crap out of things, and it has worked out fantastically. Her spirits seem to manifest as basically humanoid shapes made out of whatever they're meant to be (fire, lava, water and so on) but there's no mistaking them for human

In many ways, her spirits are the magical equivalent of my Drones. I guess that makes her a Spirit Rigger or something. We're definitely an army of two.

Megaladon: Big, dumb and hungry. Orca dodges these
for fun
Orca is still young-ish (19?) and to be fair, she doesn’t seem to know a lot about magic and how it works. Instead she takes a very freestyle, make-it-up-as-she-goes-along approach, big on impro and weak on rules and stuff.  I gathered she kind of fell into her magical awakening and is a bit short on formal training but is great at making it up as she goes along. Like many magic users, she follows a ‘Mentor Spirit’ of sorts, which in her case seems to be Shark. Strangely appropriate for a surfer, huh? Maybe there’s a bit of cause-and-effect there.

She's pretty easy going and definitely easy to get along with. We first met in a pub which is a nice and casual start to a working relationship, especially when you're both guzzling down a bowl of hot and actually real potato chips. (Note: What Americans call 'fries'). She apparently lives in a flophouse in Marubroa but she did like the idea of moving up north to where I am. After all, the accommodation’s better and I have access to a good surf beach and living here isn't too bad save for when the storms wash over the spit and flood everything. Or a bloody Megaldadon tries to eat the Esplanade again.


Yamaha Growler. I can only assume that nobody at Yamaha
knows their Brit slang...
She rides a Yamaha Growler, which is a nice and practical bike for what she does, especially when it comes to driving over beaches and dunes. It’s not fancy, but it gets the job done and I can appreciate that.

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