Character Fiction: Doctor Indigo Makes A House Call....

[viridian]

One of the hazards for a writer playing RPGs is running into wandering plot bunnies and having them latch onto your ankles with the zeal and perseverance of a chihuahua on viagra.

My current character in Torbin's shadowrun game is a changeling street doc name Indigo. He's not very happy with his current lot in life, and it shows.

In short, he is a jerk.

He's sarcastic, foul-mouthed, and abusive. He's recently discovered that breaking the law pays much better than setting broken bones - especially since he paid off his debt to the Yakuza in a bit less than a month. Unfortunately, that means he has to work with other lowlifes to get the job done, and he has little patience with fools.

Our "Face" person, an elven pretty-boy, seems to bring out the worst in him, for reasons you can probably guess. (Especially since most changelings looked perfectly metahuman until they were exposed to high mana levels and underwent a painful metamorphosis.) But even his oldest... er, colleague... in the group gets referred to with language that would make a drill sargeant blush.

Anyway, Sunday night Tempest (who was playing the aforementioned pretty-boy) made an off-hand comment along the lines of "when isn't Indigo a jerk?". Of course, my subconscious found that interesting and jumped on it. I was distracted for parts of the remainder of that session, and as soon as we signed off, I started writing. Nine hours later I was done.


Oh, and a word of warning before you go any further. It's a bit gritty in places. Not worse than say, an episode of CSI, but the 2070s is a violent decade.

[viridian]

The man who called himself “Doctor Indigo” jerked out of bed as the cheap commlink screeched at him. That ringtone was reserved for his fixer Twiggy and a few other people he was willing to get up in the middle of the night for.

“Was ist das?” he grunted as he opened the connection. Between low-light vision and the faint blue glow emanating from his ocular sclera, he didn’t need to turn on a light.

“Doctor? We have a situation,” Twiggy said hurriedly. “Daimler, an associate of mine is asking for a favor, a big one. I’ll patch him through.”

There was a crunch of static and the voice changed. Twiggy’s thin voice was replaced by a deep baritone with a European accent. “You are Indigo?” The words were rushed, with an undertone of panic.

“Ja.”

“I have… a team. They are on a job, but I think they’ve run into trouble. I’ve lost contact with them in the Barrens, not far from your clinic.” There was a pause. “I want to hire you as back-up, and if they are in trouble, patch them up. Can you do it?”

Indigo scratched the messy deep blue locks that gave rise to his street handle. “Ja, I can do it. Let me get mein boots on.”

“Twenty large if you… if you get there in time,” the unknown fixer added without prompting. Indigo didn’t need to guess if he was close to someone on that team. Not if he wasn’t even going to haggle.

“Very vell, send me pictures and their coordinates. I vill be departing shortly.”


OoOoO


No one willingly hangs out in the Barrens at this time of night. At least, no one with any sense. Indigo pulled his Pathfinder into an alleyway a block from the coordinates he’d been given. Stowing the bike behind a battered dumpster and engaging the security system took only a moment. Furling his cloak around him, Indigo cautiously made his way toward the meeting the team was supposed to attend.

As he made his way there, he concentrated and engaged his Kirlian vision. Now he could see the psychic residue attached to places and objects, as well as get a clear idea if anyone he saw had psionic potential.

Unfortunately, the Redmond Barrens was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, balanced out by the poverty and desperation of nearly all the inhabitants. That made it dead easy to lose oneself – especially if one wanted to stay lost. It also made it extremely unpleasant to see the effects this had on ectoplasmic residue.

Indigo’s headache started almost immediately, and grew worse the longer he kept it on. But he persevered – it might warn him of something in time to make a difference.

To go with his headache was a growing sense of dread. It was simply too damn quiet. The locals and the gangers should be making some noise…

He got his answer when he found the first dead go-ganger. He’d taken a large-caliber round through the upper-right quadrant of his chest. The exit wound was larger than his fist, exposing shattered ribs and shredded lung tissue. It was a toss-up whether he died instantly of shock or catastrophic exsanguination.

Doctor or not, Indigo didn’t waste much time examining the obviously-dead ganger. When he reached the next alleyway, he noticed bullet-marks on the bricks and pavement before he even rounded the corner.

The alleyway was an utter abattoir. The mouth was littered with dead gangers, their leathers slicked with blood and gobbets of flesh. It looked like they’d tried to dig out an entrenched enemy, and paid the price in blood.

As he picked through the remains, Indigo began to wonder if the runner team he was looking for had managed to outlast the gangers. Then he found the first body behind a pile of crates that had proven to be insufficient cover.

The elf was dressed in a bizarre combination of neo-renaissance garb and street-punk. From the lack of obvious weaponry, Indigo guessed she was the mage. The bullet wounds in her left shoulder and right thigh probably left her unable to cast effectively, but were not immediately fatal. However, her armored jacket had been ripped apart and the gossamer fabric beneath was a bloody shredded mass. He couldn’t tell if she’d been raped before, after, or while she was stabbed to death. Not that it mattered now.

The hacker was only identifiable because of the wrecked drone crashed next to the body. He’d taken a round through the center of her face that obliterated most of his skull. What was left of his face was horribly distorted, like a funhouse mirror.

While it was unclear with the elf, the leader of the team had obviously been tortured. Someone had clearly gone to some effort, perhaps to extract information. She’d been kneecapped, leaving both joints a ruined mess and immobilizing her. Her clothes were gone, scattered shreds on the ground around her, while her arms and torso showed signs of calculated abuse. There was no doubt that she’d been raped as well. The coup de grace was an enormous gash through her throat through which Indigo could see exposed bone.

Indigo’s hands moved automatically, taking pictures of the bodies as they lay, while he struggled to keep from vomiting – something that hadn’t happened since his first year of med school. Even as he finished his examination, he checked the files he’d been sent. One of the runners was missing.

He called Daimler to let him know what he’d found, but he was only halfway through his report when the man hung up with a strangled cry.

Blood from the bodies had pooled in the alleyway. Distorted footprints tracked through it, leaving multiple trails of smears down the filthy pavement and around the corner. Indigo followed them, a little faster than was prudent, but he was eager to leave the site of the blood-soaked last stand.

At this point, he didn’t even know if he was getting paid - but he still had a job to do, neh?

He followed the smears into an even more torn up section of the Barrens near Glow City. Indigo went through a mental inventory of the anti-rad drugs back at his clinic. He should be all right as long as he didn’t stay out here all night.

A guttural cry from ahead brought him up short. Indigo concentrated, gathering a thought-form to overlay his physical processes. He felt something like a cool mist wash over his skin, making his movements quieter and hiding him from sight.

Stealthily, but paradoxically with greater confidence, Indigo made his way over the hillock of rubble that used to be a department store. He almost threw up for the second time that night.

The bloody trail of the gangers ended at the site of another slaughter. Blood was splashed from one side of the hollow to the other, mixed in with other, less identifiable substances.
A pair of indistinct figures picked through the mess, little more than shrouded masses even to his low-light vision. Then the wind shifted a little and his nose told Indigo what he was looking at.

To anyone who has smelled it, the ripe aroma of a live ghoul is an unmistakable stench.

To be honest, Indigo did not have a huge personal beef with the unfortunate victims of Krieger Strain Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus. Those that retained their minds had just as much right to live as anyone else, horrific dietary requirements aside.

However, a good proportion of those infected regressed to a bestial state that was irreversible to modern science. Those acted with all the restraint of wild dogs when it came to sating their cravings for the flesh of other types of metahumans. Feral Ghouls had killed the father of his friend Roulette and she hunted them at any opportunity. She usually didn’t even bother to collect the bounty.

It also looked like they wiped out any survivors of the sickening slaughter he’d just left behind. A fleeing runner and pursuing gangers were just more meat for their appetites.

Indigo was gathering his energies to fry the two he saw before him when they grunted at each other and prepared to leave. He paused. If they had a nest nearby, he could perhaps take out the whole thing. He arrived too late to help Daimler’s team, but maybe he could do something constructive before he had to report his complete failure. Avenging them seemed like a hollow victory, but it beat returning empty-handed.

Indigo shadowed the ghouls as they picked their way through the rubble. As clumsily as the tarp-shrouded figures moved, he didn’t think he’d have trouble following them, even without his boosts.

On the other hand, he felt a few twinges of apprehension when they pried up a manhole cover and climbed down into the decommissioned sewer tunnels. He wasn’t eager to encounter a pack of ghouls of unknown size in close quarters underground. He clenched his fists, irrationally unwilling to admit failure and back off. On the other hand, if he did run into a mess, he still had that new electrokinetic technique he’d been working on.

After a moment’s deliberation, the blue-haired changeling pried up the manhole cover and followed his quarry into the mouth of darkness.


OoOoO


While Indigo blessed his thermographic vision in the pitch-black tunnel, his other senses were less than happy – especially his nose. The ghoul-stench was thick in these tunnels, making him wonder how long they’d been in use. There was also a cacophony of grunts and other noises echoing down the tunnel, growing louder the farther he went.

He maintained a steady pace, peering ahead carefully to make sure he remained undiscovered by his unwitting guides. He needed to proceed with caution if he didn’t want to become part of tonight’s menu, ja?

All that went out of his head when he heard the first scream.

He was already moving forward as telepathic lances smashed outward from his forehead, crushing the feeble minds of his quarry and dropping them to the tunnel floor, blood pouring from noses and ears.

Indigo ran past them at full speed, actually running a short ways up the side of the tunnel as it made a sharp bend. In a few seconds, he entered what was once probably a pumping station.

Now it was a lair.

He counted at least twenty ghouls, moving through the debris and junk that had been hauled down here for unknowable reasons. Maybe some fleeting elements of mind still resided in these feral hulks, but any sympathy he might have held evaporated the moment they began hunting live food.

But he scarcely noticed the ghouls. His eyes, aided by a smoldering fire that was evidently maintained to heat the dank chamber, picked out a struggling form in the middle of a knot of corpse-eaters.

The girl was certainly less than twenty, though she looked younger because of her height. She wore the tattered remains of a bastardized martial arts uniform, worn over a partially shredded armored vest that showed through gaping rents in the cloth. Incongruously, she also wore combat boots and fingerless gloves as well.

Three ghouls had hold of her, though even as Indigo watched, she slammed an elbow into one’s ribs, sending it staggering back. The next instant, another ghoul’s filthy claws rocked her head back as they laid her cheek open. She had no less than half a dozen minor wounds, and her shredded uniform was spattered with blood.

It took less than a second for his mind to record this, and then his will was smashing outward, picking off the stragglers from the feeding frenzy. The more he dropped before they realized they were under attack, the better the outcome. He only hoped she could hold out a little while longer…

Twisting and struggling, the girl managed to wrench away from her captors, leaving behind most of her gi top. A fist lashed out and one of the beasts before her fell, accompanied by the distinctive crack of cervical vertebrae snapping. A backfist strike staggered another and her booted foot smashed into its ribcage, crushing the heart and lungs. She fought like a berserker, with no thought left for defense.

The next moment, she was blind-sided. A ghoul tackled her from the side and knocked her to the floor of the filthy artificial cavern. The pack converged on the downed girl, mouths gaping and claws reaching forward. Indigo knew he was out of time.

He cupped his hands together and focused his energy. A tiny spark of blue-white light appeared and instantly bloomed into a crackling ball of energy. Indigo shuddered as he poured more energy into the matrix, then shoved the ball forward with a convulsive heave.

Panting for breath, he struggled not to fall to one knee as the ball of electricity flew over the bodies of the ghouls he’d stunned, then slammed into one flank of the pack converging on the girl. It exploded in a flash of azure light with an earth-shaking boom. Body parts flew into the air and Indigo hoped his aim was on target and he hadn’t just incinerated the girl.

On the other hand, it would at least be a quicker, less agonizing death than what those beasts had in store for her.

As the smoke cleared, Indigo let out the breath he’d been holding. He’d been precisely on target. The ghouls reaching for the girl had unwittingly shielded her with their bodies, even as the electrokinetic strike tore into them. The ones standing above her had been staggered back.

Indigo thought about throwing another one past the pack to incinerate most of the other half, but the spots dancing before his eyes convinced him otherwise. He’d drained much of his psychic energy fueling the new attack, and if he passed out now, he’d never wake up again.

Of course, recognizing that you were at a disadvantage and acknowledging it to others were two entirely different things. Indigo leapt to the top of one of the more stable-looking trash heaps. He threw back his cloak as he dropped the masking effect and placed his hands on his hips. “Haff you filthy bastards had enough yet?” he roared at the top of his lungs.

His voice was shockingly loud amongst the dying echoes of the explosion. The ghouls reaching for the girl flinched back at the sound. Indigo felt their eyeless gazes turn toward him.

Eight were still on their feet moving toward him. The lead one dropped to a telekinetic strike that smashed bones in both legs. The others leapt over him, charging toward the blue-haired king of the hill, when the blood-smeared girl surged to her feet. Her hands closed around the skull of the trailing ghoul and ripped the head completely off.

Evidently liebchen still had a little fight left in her, neh?

Indigo dropped two of the remaining four before they reached him, while the last ghoul turned back toward his former meal. The remaining three threw themselves at him, their breath making his eyes water even as their claws tore at him.

He blocked as best he could, his smaller stature making it easier to dodge their strikes, even as it was harder to block those that did hit. Their crusted claws ripped through his cloak, but between the armored padding on his Urban Explorer jumpsuit and his orthoskin-reinforced epidermis, they did no further damage.

Indigo gritted his teeth to keep from retching at the overpowering stench coming from his foes. He smashed his foot into the left one’s knee. Reinforced bones made his strikes shockingly powerful despite his size. Bone snapped as the ghoul pitched to the side, fouling the middle one. The one on his right, however, looped a scabrous arm around Indigo’s neck, pulling his face toward a mouth full of jagged teeth.

Indigo ducked his head as best he could, slamming a short right hook directly into the beast’s solar plexus. It fell back, but its arm pulled Indigo forward off balance. The middle ghoul regained its footing and grabbed onto the changeling’s left arm. Indigo scrambled to get his footing back when two bloody hands reached up and slammed the ghouls’ heads together with a sickening crunch.

The crippled ghoul reached for Indigo as he wrenched at the corpses hanging onto him. A focused telekinetic strike made its head explode and the pumping station was suddenly silent except for the crackling fire.

Indigo finally tore himself free at the cost of more cloak fabric and a few more scratches on his jumpsuit. He looked over at the bloody girl, who was peering at him with an odd expression as she began to sway from side to side.

“Masako?” he asked.

She nodded once, short hair stiff with clotted blood. Indigo barely managed to catch her as she collapsed onto him.



OoOoO


Fortunately, she was surprisingly light. Indigo was able to wrap his ruined cloak around her and heft her in an improvised one-armed fireman’s carry. He was a little worried about her going into hypovolemic shock, but the ghoul lair was far too filthy to even consider treating her there if he could avoid it. At least the lining would keep her warm.

Indigo debated the merits of a stim patch. He’d been using his psychic abilities pretty hard all evening – er, morning. His head was throbbing in time with his pulse, a sure sign of the migraine to come. The drugs in the patch would mute the pain for a while, but he’d pay the price later. After a moment, he slid the patch back into his belt unopened. His patient needed evac, and he wasn’t about to drive his bike with stim jitters.

Fortunately, they reached the manhole without encountering any more ghouls. The ones he’d followed in were evidently the stragglers of the pack. Had they brought the girl back as live food for the tribe? He wasn’t sure but one or two of the pack he’d electrocuted might have been pregnant. His stomach rolled queasily.

The clear air, polluted as it was, seemed to revive the girl a little. She shifted in the improvised shroud, and then began to struggle frantically when she realized her arms were pinned.

Indigo hastily set her down, not wanting her to ram a fist through his skull in her panic.

“Easy, easy liebchen,” he murmured. “My name is Indigo. Doctor Indigo. Daimler hired me to find, er, rescue you. You’re safe…” he paused, looking around the debris-strewn Z-zone. “Safer now. Let’s get you back to mine clinic and ve’ll patch you right up, eh?”

He was actually about as German as Neil the Ork Barbarian, but the accent was part of his cover. It kept people from asking… inconvenient… questions. It also seemed to give people greater confidence in his medical skills, which amused him to no end.

It seemed to work on the girl as well. She nodded her acceptance, and allowed him to pick her up again. From the look on her face, Indigo didn’t think she’d have allowed it if she wasn’t too weak from blood loss to move under her own power. He was just glad she was as short as he was. The last time he’d had to carry a drunken Roulette, he’d smacked the Russian elf’s head against the doorjamb so hard he thought he might have fractured her skull. It would have served the vodka-swilling tart right.

The girl was quiet as he carefully picked his way to where he’d stashed the bike. He was grateful. He didn’t really want to have to manifest another thought-form if he could help it.

By the time they reached the Pathfinder, she was looking at little green, though. Worried about septic shock, he leaned the girl against the bike and used a vitakinetic technique that generated a diffused pulse of energy. Harmless to anything flea-sized or larger, it would severely disrupt the cellular processes of any single-celled life form it encountered. It would also denature the protein strands of any stray virus particles.
In short, it would sterilize the immediate area, including her open wounds.

Fortunately, it didn’t require much energy, so he still had enough to spare to boost her immune system even as he pulled the spray can of Nu-skin™ out of his medi-kit. Most of the claw marks (and one apparent bullet graze) were already scabbing over, so he only needed to temporarily seal the deepest and most recent wounds.

She shuddered as the bio-neutral polymer bonded to her skin. He reached out to steady her and helped her onto the bike. As ambulances go, it left a lot to be desired, but he couldn’t really afford a proper vehicle. Yet.

She needed to keep her arms wrapped around Indigo to stay upright, and he ended up driving with one arm clamped down over hers to ensure she stayed on the bike if she passed out. As pale as she was, he was honestly surprised when she made it back to the clinic without losing consciousness.

That last feat seemed to have sapped her remaining resources, as he had to carry her up the stairs. Two minutes after he engaged the mag-lock, she was laid out on one of the cots with an IV in her arm dripping Ringer’s lactate into her veins to start restoring blood volume. Once she was situated, he ducked out to the miniscule kitchenette and sucked down a large electrolyte drink. Damn thing tasted like piss, but it was formulated to restore anything depleted by sustained physical or mental effort. He didn’t know if it would really help with the drain he experienced when over-using his abilities, but at that point he would gladly accept a placebo.

When he checked back on his patient, her color was improving. He frowned for a moment, then slotted in a bag of D5W and set the infusion pump to mix that in fifty-fifty with the remaining Ringer’s Lactate. Indigo carefully removed her damaged armor, trying to avoid re-opening any wounds. Then he began cleaning and disinfecting any remaining lesions.

Throughout this process, she lay limp as a rag. Indigo would have thought her asleep if her eyes hadn’t been wide open the entire time. As he finished applying the dressings and pulled the sheet over her, she began to speak.

“The… the meet was a trap. We were waiting for Johnson when those bangers just poured into the alleyway, firing at us. Karen told us to grab cover, but Sylvie had already been hit in the leg and couldn’t run. I’m not much good with a gun, so she told me to stay put until they got closer, then ambush them hand-to-hand. I think she figured after we killed a few they would back off, but I think they were hyped up on something. No matter how many we killed, they just kept coming and coming.”

Her voice was slow at first but the words came faster and faster the longer she talked.

“Sylvie fried a couple, but she leaned out too far to do it and got hit in the shoulder, knocking her down where they could hit her again. Aggie’s drone was laying down covering fire, but he stood up too far and one of those bastards got a lucky shot. Karen and I were running up to drag Sylvie back when they hit her leg. She fell down and screamed for me to run… and I did. I ran. But I could hear more shots. Then they stopped. Then the screaming began. I kept running. For some reason, I couldn’t stop. Even when I almost passed out, I couldn’t stop.”

Indigo’s eyebrows raised. That behavior was nothing like what he saw in the den. Then he remembered the psychic residue he’d sensed laid over the area like a pall of smog. He wondered if a wraith or an incubus has begun to frequent the area. Or something even worse. He hadn’t seen any signs with his Kirlian vision, but he’d only been in the area a short while, and focused on something else as well.

“Then I saw the storm drain. For some reason I was sure if I hid down there I’d be safe. So I pried up the manhole cover and climbed down, closing it over me. It was dark. I tried to be quiet, but I couldn’t catch my breath. And then something grabbed me. Hands were tearing at me. I tried to fight them off, but something hit my head and everything went black.”

She shuddered, just a little, as her iron control seemed to slip for a moment. Indigo’s stomach twitched as he remembered the scene down below. She must have awoken after being dragged in as fresh meat. If he hadn’t arrived when he did… He swallowed thickly. He tried to pat the arm that didn’t have the IV, but quick as a snake her hand reached out and clasped his.

He sat with Masako for a long time until she finally fell asleep.

[Tempest Kitsune]

You realize that if Spinner ever finds out about this, he's gonna owe Indigo a major apology, ja?

[MrRigger2]

Now, I can't say I know much of anything about Shadowrun, but I liked the character. Seems to be a good person to have fixing you up or bailing you out, even if you wouldn't ever want to talk to him.

MrRigger

[Darkandus]

I enjoyed it. I've always taken an interest in Shadowrun but have never had the opportunity to play. Just read some of the source material and stories of characters.

[viridian]

You realize that if Spinner ever finds out about this, he's gonna owe Indigo a major apology, ja?

Und vhy iz dat?

[Tempest Kitsune]

Up until now he's been convinced that Indigo is the penultimate asshat, no matter what. He doesn't like being wrong, and when he is he tries to rectify it, even if that means eating crow and making an apology.

[spudman]

As I read I keep imagining Indigo's voice as Kenneth Mars's, and that makes me smile.

[viridian]

Up until now he's been convinced that Indigo is the penultimate asshat, no matter what. He doesn't like being wrong, and when he is he tries to rectify it, even if that means eating crow and making an apology.

Just because he helped Masoko doesn't mean he isn't a jerk.
(Besides, it isn't every day he meets a woman that doesn't make him feel short...)
And if Spinner starting going soft on him, the results... would not be pretty.

[Random_fan]

Just out of curiosity what happened to the woman after Indigo rescued her?

[viridian]

Not precisely sure yet. Runsamok and I actually discussed it on the way home from work tonight. Her team is toast and he confidence is likely shot by what happened. Even if Daimler tries to stick her with another team (assuming he even wants to), other runners might shun her as bad luck.


Nurse Masoko is a possibility. (And I mean Nurse in the same sense as the husky 250+ pound orderlies hospitals use to restrain patients that need to be forcibly sedated.)