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p.4: about Australia: "In the days before magic had returned to the earth, the country had been well served with roads. Aircraft had flown high above the deserts and grasslands to connect the coastal population centers with the interior's scattered bastions of civilization. But with the Awakening, the land had come to chaotic -- and often malevolent -- life, swallowing roads and brewing vast, swirling storms of such violence that air travel was often too risky. The Dreamtime had returned as a Nightmaretime, and mankind had retreated before the unleased fury of the wild magic. Only a few resource-exploitation centers belonging to megacorporations remained in the interior, and even their lifelines were tenuous."
p.11: some Australian Totems: Kangaroo, Koala, Bandicoot, Snake, Crocodile
The cave at Ayer rock is called Imiri ti-Versakhan, which Urdli translates as "Citadel of Remembrance" (p.190). The literal translation according to the vocabulary in Tir Tairngire (p.68) would be closer to "Memorial of an Enemy".
The cave is home to a particularly nasty paracritter, an amphibious shapeshifting behemoth called a Bunyip. It was apparently placed there specifically to protect the cave's treasure (how very D&D). Since it was recognizable to an Australian shadowrunner, Bunyips are presumably native to the region.
In the real world, Ayer Rock is major Australian landmark, analagous to the Grand Canyon in the United States. The Aboriginal name for it is Uluru.
There are some guest appearances in this novel by characters belonging to other authors, credited by Charette in his acknowledgements. Rikki Ratboy belongs to Paul Hume (another of Shadowrun's original designers). Striper belongs to Nyx Smith (Striper Assassin and Who Hunts The Hunter).
Because of its association with the Great Ghost Dance, Mount Ranier serves as a place of power for shamanic rituals.
p.106: Dodger remembers Daniel "Howling Coyote" Coleman's broadcast claiming responsibility for the eruption of Redondo Peak and destruction of Los Alamos in 2014. That would almost certainly make Dodger a "spike baby", since even the first elves born in the "Year of Chaos" (2011) would have been only three years old at the time. His association with Sean Laverty suggests that he may have been one of the children raised by the Xavier Foundation (Tir Tairngire, p.50).
In Never Trust An Elf (p.161), Dodger claims to remember the news broadcast of the New York Earthquake (12 August 2005), and admits to being a spike baby.
p.108: Daniel Coleman is the author of a book called Howling in the Wilderness, written while he was president of the Sovereign Tribal Council (2018-2037). It's described as "sort of a Mein Kampf crossed with Castaneda's Yaqui Way of Knowledge."
p.113: "... my body is a well-honed machine, and like any machine, it can be rebuilt if necessary. You know the old saying, 'We have the technology'." Neko is quoting the character Oscar Goldman from The Six Million Dollar Man. The television series appears to have been immortalized following the advent of cyberware, even as far away as Hong Kong. (The full quote also appears in the Cybertechnology chapter of Shadowtech, p.36: "Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. Better. Stronger. Faster.")
p.121: Coleman was a Ute indian by tribal affiliation.
p.146: Hong Kong is more ethnically diverse in 2052. Chinese no longer comprise a majority -- there are equal numbers of Japanese and Caucasian, with other ethnic types represented as well.
p.150: Lots of Sperethiel vocabulary here. Makkannagee (willfully stupid), morkhan (fornicator of swine), carromeleg (an elven martial arts style), shatatain (carromeleg combat stance), zathien (zen-like stillness of spirit).
p.156: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tripoli, and Baghdad are specifically identified as locations decimated by nuclear weapons. It's not a complete list -- Israel hit Libya with three nuclear warheads in 2004, striking two other population centers besides Tripoli.
p.159: Nice example of a City Spirit's use of the Alienation power, as described in the first and second edition rules. Alienation is gone in the third edition, but the effect could be explained as Confusion, Accident, or both.
p.190: Urdli: "Long ago, this world knew magic. It was a better time then; all lived in accordance with their natures. The world was not perfect, but it was happier. In time changes came, and the magic grew weak. Many wonderful things perished. Some evil things as well, but evil always seems less vulnerable to the lack of magic. For a long time there was no mana, but the time of lack was only an interval. The mana returned and brought us the Sixth World.
Howling Coyote: "Aztec number... Hopi got a different count. Aleut, too."
Urdli: "The number is unimportant, but the concept should be understood. Mana has waxed and waned. There was a time when the mana was low, too low for the true nature of the world to manifest."
In first-edition Shadowrun, it was possible for deckers to work without a cyberdeck, naked in the matrix (SR1, p.111). It required a piece of cyberware called a program carrier. Dodger does this in the short story Night on the Town (SR1, p.8), and does so again in this novel (page 201). In terms of the second or third edition game, the program carrier could be re-interpreted as a very rudimentary form of Cranial Cyberdeck.
Sam was orphaned on the Night of Rage, 7 Feb 2039, when his parents and older brother Oliver were killed by a mob outside their home. The night marked Sam's first unconscious use of magic, when he summoned a city spirit to protect himself and his sister Janice. Grandmother (p.32) and Enterich/Lofwyr (p.211), were paying attention to the Verners, among others. There is a cryptic reference to their bloodline that is never explained.
Janice Verner did not goblinize naturally. While Sam was undergoing his datajack implantation at Soriyama's cyberclinic, Sato was interrogating Janice on the orders of Grandmother, questions about her family history to which she did not have any answers. He also used her as a test subject for his pet project: a metamorphosis serum that caused her goblinization into an ork. After she was sent to Yomi, Janice fell victim to a banshee named Hugh Glass, from whom she contracted the Human-MetaHuman Vampiric Virus (HMHVV), transforming her into a wendigo.
p.230: Dodger's close association with the Morgan AI has elevated his decking skill immensely. At this point, he is probably the most competent decker in the world, with the possible exception of "Leonardo" (Black Madonna, Blood in the Boardroom). It's even possible that Morgan made Dodger otaku (p.282: "...she was the Ghost in the Machine, and he, through her tutelage, was enabled beyond a flesh-limited decker."). Psychotrope and Renraku Arcology Shutdown imply that AIs are capable of this.
p.267: The USS Wichita was a Nereid-class ballistic missile submarine that was scuttled in Puget Sound by its captain (Walker) in 2015, when Salish forces led by Thunder Tyee captured the Naval shipyard at Bremerton.
p.313: Morgan and Dodger encounter Semi-Autonomous Knowbots (SK's) in Grandmother's computer system. This is the first mention of SK's, which won't appear in a sourcebook until Virtual Realities 2.0. This is also the original source of Morgan's quote, "They are what I was," pertaining to SK's in that sourcebook's Artificial Intelligence chapter (VR2, p.138). These SK's are Renraku constructs dispatched by Sato to crash Grandmother's system.
p.316: Morgan describes her "birth": "Chance is an element in all existence. For myself, there is certainty that the chance element was the unauthorized intrusion into the Renraku matrix by Samuel Verner-Sam-Twist and yourself. As organisms standing in the immediate generative position of an entity, you are the parents of myself." This description of her creation is paraphrased in the Renraku Arcology Shutdown sourcebook (p.71).
p.316: According to Howling Coyote, the phenomenal magical power of the Great Ghost Dance is generated by four principles: (1) the voluntary self-sacrifice of the dancers, (2) their intense belief, (3) harmony with the natural order, and (4) the righteousness of their cause.
The Spider totem in this book does not behave like the Spider totem described in Bug City (p.144) or Magic in the Shadows (p.157). For that matter, it doesn't behave like a Totem at all. Its servants in the novel appear to be true form and flesh form insect spirits, though they are never identified as such. For myself, I'll just consider Spider/Rachnei to be an immensely powerful magical entity masquerading as the Spider totem.
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