The character of Dempsey is copyright © 1990 Loren K. Wiseman and is used with his permission.
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[1] Oh, this is what a footnote is. Slick.
[2] Sure, the Beretta Viper 14 is old. So’s gravity, but it still works. Nice thing about the Viper is that I have a bullet, I have a target, I pull the trigger, and the gun does all the math for the hit. And with the Viper, I never have batteries go dead on me in the middle of a firefight.
[3] Yeah, I know grunge is fairly vulgar slang for ork, but the term applied to the orks who worked for La Plante. I think he found stupid ones, then fed them paint chips to dull down any native intelligence they had. Since he used them mostly as mobile weapon transport and trigger fingers, brains weren’t vital. As we used to joke, to work for La Plante, you took an intelligence test: if you failed you were in.
[4] I’ve always thought The Chauffeur was a dumb street name. Usually, in street names, you want something that suggests you’re on top, like Tiger or King Cobra or something slick like that. Wolf, maybe, even. But The Chauffeur? I guess he liked it because he thought it made him sound like he was going places.
[5] Yeah, yeah. It’s another antique gun, but it shoots straight, which is all I ask. Stealth keeps my guns as well tuned as my mechanic does my Mustang, so they work. Besides, the MP-9 is considered such a toy by most gillettes that they don’t see it as much of a danger until one of its bullets is finished making an exit wound.
[6] This was a shocker. I didn’t even know Doc was dating. Turns out he wasn’t, but that’s a story for another time.
[7] Okay, right, everyone knows there’s no such thing as a werewolf. And a hundred years ago there was no such thing as a dragon, too. Raven’s explained it all to me, that the Wolf spirit picked me special to grace me with abilities and all. Doc’s smart, but he’s never been through this transformation and even Native American traditions tell of skinwalkers. The Old One and I know what I am, which means you don’t want to invite me to any Full Moon parties you'll be having.
[8] Thing I like most about the Viper, as old as it is, is that I get fourteen in the clip and one in the chamber. Not that I need that many shots, mind you, but you never can tell when something will just be too stupid to die.
[9] I don’t know that Moira was really a princess per se—the elf I know best is Raven and he’s not much on hereditary titles. Anyway, she was pretty important and after her rescue Doc had been bouncing back and forth ’tween the Tir and the sprawl. I gather there was a lot of palavering going on, but about what I had no idea at the time.
[10] Sure, they’re really called the Mariners still, but only if you want to suck up to management.
[11] Raven did insist on making Stealth a pair of normal legs, so I know he can swap the nightmare pair out for regular legs whenever he wants. I’ve never seen him when he’s wanted to—or, he’s never let me see him when he was running around on normal feet. That ability to go unnoticed, given his trade, is a useful one.
[12] Stealth would prefer it if I would get a “real” submachine gun instead of this HK antique. I think he thinks my weapon choice reflects badly on him. Of course, since he’s Kid Stealth, if anyone did think less of him for it, they wouldn’t say anything—at least, not in public, and not for long.
[13] Frankly, I think he could do better than an AK-97, but he’s jazzed that baby up so it does everything shy of cooking hot meals for him.
[13] Sure, the legs may look goofy, but when he needs to stand tall, they certainly do the job.
[14] So, okay, maybe all the orks working for La Plante weren’t sociopathic. Fact was, though, that their employment contracts paid bonuses for antisocial behavior committed upon intruders like me, which colored my perception a bit.
[15] The Seattle franchise for major league baseball is officially still called the Mariners, but pretty much everyone who isn’t under contract to them calls them the Seadogs. About ten, fifteen years ago they had a really bad streak—stats just weren’t clicking the way they should, so everyone started calling the team the Dogs. Then this guy—an ork related somehow to Plutarch Graogrim, another of Doc’s chummers—gets this idea about turning out Seattle Seadogs merchandise, including caps and shirts, and all with a great pirate-hound logo. Everybody started getting into the whole charade, with a local radio station even doing play-by-play of fantasy dog-day games. The Mariners tried to sue, but when fans stopped coming to games in protest, the suit was dropped and the Seadog name has been a thorn in their sides ever since, even though the team has gotten good.
[16] I hasten to note that even some newer, wizzer gun wouldn’t have kept me out of this situation.
[17] Because Stealth knows I like using a Beretta Viper and an HK MP-9—both of which he thinks should be in a museum—he’s decided I can’t really handle any weapon crafted for use in the twenty-first century. Taking the specs for a Derringer from some docudrama about the old, old West (I think it was called Deadlands), he manufactured the gun for me. I mean, I was glad to have it, and even happier that he had a hobby, but I kind of wished his hobby was more benign, like model trains. Then again, I didn’t really want to see what the Murder Machine would do with model trains.
[18] I had gotten the feeling, at the time we rescued Lynn, that she was special. The fact that she was a Seadogs fan proved it. And I do mean she was a Seadogs fan—I don’t think I ever heard her call the team the Mariners.
[19] I had actually planned to refer to the Seadogs as the Mariners in this portion of my memoirs, but the word-processing software Valerie set me up with seems to be determined to avoid use of the word Mariner.
[20] Statsofts are what they call baseball activesofts. They’re just like normal activesofts in all respects save that they carry with them a bit of a personality overlay—much the way an activesoft of Hamlet for some actor might carry with it data on how the role was played by this actor or that in the past. Depending on the rev of Hamlet you run, you can be Gibson, Branagh, or Olivier.
[21] Active wear for the chic. I actually prefer Gucci-Puma sneakers myself—despite the Old One’s protests—but part of the licensing deal with the team meant we got this stuff for free, which meant I didn’t mind slumming my way into it.
[22] There was a time, of course, when metahumans weren’t allowed to play baseball, but that sort of prejudice pretty much ended fast when folks realized elves made great pitchers and having an ork blocking the plate made running through him something that didn’t always work. Dwarfs and trolls, of course, weren’t allowed to play because of strike zone problems, but they had their own spring and fall leagues respectively, and drew decent crowds.
[23] The exception being road trips to New York, of course.
[24] Actually, Val had told me I’d better do at least that much, and I didn’t see giving her any reason to be angry at me as a survival trait.
[25] That’s the name they had me play under because it had parts close enough
to my real name that I’d catch it, and it fit on the back of a jersey real easy.
[26] Raven said that was Arthur C. Clarke, some old guy who wrote way back when, back when they used ink and stuff.
[27] Never did show him how well I spit, however. I kept thinking he might get his tongue swapped out for some cyberthing that would allow him to spit venom like a cobra, if he ever thought of it. (If he hasn’t already done it!)
[28] The nice thing about carrying around and using a gun as old as the Beretta Viper 14 was that under most current laws, antiques weren’t really considered “weapons” for concealment purposes. Me, I never saw the allure of these newfangled guns full of computer components and all. Go ahead, rely on Windows Sniper 4.0 if you want to, but I prefer not to need software patches when I’m in a firefight.
[29] Valerie took it as a personal victory that Jimmy referred to the team as the Seadogs in Matrix chat she set up for him, despite the trouble it could have caused him. Granted, only a few of her closest friends were present, and the one transcript of the chat came bundled with a virus that did nasty things, but it was a victory for her nonetheless.
[30] I’d like to say I stuck with the MP-9 because it was an old friend, but the fact was, I really wanted a cannon. Unfortunately, given how I was feeling, a gun with only a few working parts was all I could handle.
[31] Yeah, coins are archaic, but Stealth knows I don’t handle new guns well . . .
[32] Pretty much every pundit who ever posted an opinion to the altweirdtblks.shapeshifier news groups has noted that there are no such things as werewolves. And Raven had told me that I’m really just blessed by the Wolf spirit—so blessed that a chunk of it is subletting a portion of my cerebral cortex. Fine. But if you ask anyone on the street what they call someone who becomes a wolf under the full moon, “someone blessed by the Wolf spirit” isn’t the answer you’ll get.
[33] Despite the vaunted opinions of some, carrying even an old gun like the Viper 14 is better than going unarmed.
[34] See, I wasn’t kidding, was I?
[35] Ogres are about as rare as hen’s teeth, and the presence of two of them meant Sampson had serious juice. I knew that, but the Old One just thought hunting had suddenly gotten very good.
[36] Given his abnormal size and skin condition, there was clearly some serious modification that had been done to him. That, or he ate real well as a child and now wasn’t getting enough Vitamin E.
Michael A. Stackpole, Wolf and Raven
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