Newest flash fic at 826 words.

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Look at any city in the world, and I guarantee you’ll find magic there if you look hard enough.

Look at all of those spires reaching into the sky. If your skyline’s impaired look at the grid of lights extending in all directions. Question where your waste goes when it leaves your dwelling. The cover story is that we have services in place to handle things, and other places where our discards go. Which is true after a sense.

But, most people don’t dig deep enough to find out how it all gets done.

I dig. It’s what I do. I don’t have much say in the matter. I guess you could say it’s in my nature.

My people were subjugated in the earliest ages of the world. We have never forgotten. Under the constant watch of trolls and goblins, they toiled and bled, wrenching the treasures of the earth from their subterranean lairs. We knew the cruelty of the lash, the exhaustion of forced labor.

I’m told that aside from the whipping, we’d have done all this anyhow. The only real differences were being in bondage and being forced to give away our spoils. If left to our own devices, we’d have dug anyhow. We love the earth. It gives up its bounty to us.

At some point though we rebelled. The partial histories we have are drenched in the blood of troll, goblin and dwarf alike. The others, they did not help us. Not a whit. They couldn’t. They had no way to know who we were. When the first of our kind traversed the realms above from which our malefactors came, we came upon the open sky and cowered in terror. We wanted none of the open spaces. We retreated to our homes in the earth. For a while, it’s said that things went okay.

We found the others when they became curious. There were misgivings. Our ways are foriegn to the Others. There were the tall ones who wished to trade, then the fair ones who sought to lord over us. We preferred the company of neither. Dwarves keep to their own mostly. And over time, we built some relations with the tall ones.

This went on for thousands of years, I’m told. And then, we lost innumerable volumes of our lore. Even what little history we do have is called into question because of the vast gaps in our own heritage. But, sometime during this darkened period of our own history, it passed that the number of the fair dwindled, and the tall ones propagated across the lands. Trolls became rarer and rarer. We lost all contact with the outside world for a time. Those were supposedly happier times. We keep to ourselves and work with the earth. We needed little else.

Then, the tall ones came again. This time, not to our cave entrances and not to trade, but wholly on accident. We must share some blood I suppose. Because, suddenly, the tall folks were digging. They came with the assistance of huge machines. They were building into the earth as we do. It was crude, and their numbers sometimes died in then process of securing what they had dug. Their work was admirable if for no other reason than effort.

And soon, they were everywhere. They were breaching our homes, finding our tunnels and taking from the earth. There was a great cry of concern. We were being invaded all over again.

However, this time, we were smart. We weren’t going to ignore the problem. Some of us advanced toward the digging machines. We called upon those who found us and we took them. We made them understand. It took time. The tall ones were always obtuse. They had a tendency to see things only the way they wanted to see things. I guess it’s why we eventually came to a sort of understanding.

Subways? Their idea, but we refined it, made it workable. Sewers? Dreadful business, but if we didn’t want to swim in rivers of waste in our warrens, we’d have to teach them how to do it in a way that wouldn’t befoul our own. Oil drilling? We know where it is – unfortunate given that theres not a lot and the tall folk seem to pride themselves on acquiring it.

But, that wasn’t all. They brought us up. Showed us many of the wonders of the world. Not many took them up on the offer, but I was one. And in my time above, I discovered one thing above all others.

You humans are not at the top by virtue of your own cleverness.

The postal service? Impossible. The sprites have taught you how to do everything and in many places actually take up the job. Electrical services? Aided by captured Thunderbirds. High speed pizza delivery? Boggans.

You learned from the best, and in many ways still rely on us. You probably always will.

So, remember. We’re the ones keeping the lights on at night, keeping you clean, keeping you informed. The magic is running the show. Never forget that, and we’ll get along fine.

— Sturri Evengard
Dwarf Emmisary, Philadelphia, PA.

When I last bought a desktop, it was in 2001. It was a Dell, and it rocked my world.  I pretty much plugged it in and people basically didn’t see me for a while. I’d shut it down at night (provided I wasn’t rendering an assignment) and go to bed. When I woke, I would get right back on and pick up where I left off.

Time passed. Poverty ensued. I bought a couple laptops. They became my stable platforms, and then, eventually, the desktop ended up going the way of dodo. My love affair with Dell was over and I came back to the fruit-side and went Mac again.

And ever since, I’ve dealt with MacBooks of different stripes as well as a Dell cheapie which has one and only one saving virtue. It runs windows and is able to integrate better with my work applications.

And, it slowly came to me over the course of years that a big reason I didn’t really care about my design work any longer was because my tools sucked. Because trying to design something with trackpads and shitty optical mice, and screens that really didn’t display color accurately were becoming a handicap. I needed a desktop. And that Dell from 2001 wasn’t gonna cut it.

So, I’ve scrimped and saved. It took several months and a lot of perseverance. But, here it is.

My new iMac is freaking badass.

As we speak I am loading this badboy up. It is going to sing – actually, it’s singing right now if you count Muse as streamed by Spotify.

And soon, it’s song will be heard. Who knows, once I get back into the game again, it may just be time to make the visual arts a part of Ossua again.

Let’s see what the future holds.

I got the first 30K worth of words in the novel revised. I think I’ve hit another landmark. The prologue and the first part are ready to be looked at for really reals now. And I’ll have to let those with red pens cut down my poor grammar choices and typos (which I think any author will tell you sneak in all the time).

My revisions in the first portion of the novel have much to do with content however, mostly to deal with the love interest between two main characters. My betas (rightly) noted that the romance seemed wooden. I think I’ve eased some of that out I hope. I’m a poor judge given that relationships, to date, have not been my strong suit.

The next part I think will mostly be timing related. Making sure things happen in a sensible order that won’t confuse the hell out of the reader. We’ll see how it turns out.

I love Shadowrun.

This is not a slight to my favorite game, Cyberpunk 2020. But, CP 2020 didn’t get played a lot. Shadowrun got run by three separate gamesmasters. Including me. It was what everyone knew in my early RPG experiences.

For those unaware of the IP on Shadowrun, it’s a game set in the late 21st century. The future is a place not only of bleeding edge technology (cybernetics, man/machine interface, space colonization) but also one of magic returned from our ancient histories (magic, spirits, dragons). It’s a world wracked by cataclysms and run by megacorporations that have all of the benefits and rights of fully formed nations. It’s a world populated by humans, but also by dwarves, elves, orks and trolls. It’s a world best described as high-tech low-life. And in the shadows of ‘civilized’ society, there are a class of people who take on jobs others don’t wish to dirty their hands with. People who will do what they’re told, no questions asked – usually. These are Shadowrunners. Part thief, part mercenary, part killer, part hacker. Players of the game take on the personas of Shadowrunners. They are bad people who do worse things to people who may or may not deserve it in exchange for money – though sometimes it gets to be personal. You can play it as grey or as black as you like it, but taking the high road more often than not got you killed.

It was an intricate setting that called for an intricate system of rules to govern it. Character creation was diverse. The old systems (versions 1 through 3) used what was called the priority system. You picked what was most important: Race, Attributes, Skills, Gear or Magic in order of A through E. You then got a certain amount of points/nuyen or race modifiers and went to town. Very simple. the only intense math was additive or subtractive as you whittled away your nuyen into a smaller and smaller stack.

Then 4th edition came out and it got horrendously fragging complicated.

SR4 has finally got the kinks worked out though with the advent of the Runners Toolkit. It features some very straight forward skill/attribute/gear packages in easy to purchase PACKS (Pre-generated Auxiliary Character Kit Systems). Want to be good with guns? Buy the sidearms, longarms or exotics PACKS. Need to be a big beefy character? Take the Tank attribute PACKS. The point values are already calced. Mix ’em and match ’em. Takes a lot less time than using the custom system.

A lot less.

Planning on putting it past the noobs on my Thursday night game. I think they’re gonna like it.