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Nyx Smith is the author of the short story Striper in the Shadowrun anthology Into The Shadows (1992); and he is the author of four Shadowrun novels: Striper Assassin (1993), Fade To Black (1994), Who Hunts The Hunter (1995), and Steel Rain (1997).
Striper is a tiger-shapeshifter (Critters, p.42; Shadowrun Companion, p.36). In animal form, a shapeshifter can regenerate from any injury short of major damage to the central nervous system. They are allergic to silver. Though shapeshifters are dual beings and thus should be able to perceive astral space, Striper never displays this ability.
Striper made a cameo appearance in Find Your Own Truth (Robert Charette, 1991), and appears again as a main character in Who Hunts The Hunter.
p.15: Prominent Philadelphia-area corporations include, "Cigna Universal, Renraku, ITT-Rand, SmithKliner, Fuchi, or Aztechnology." Also Kono-Furata-Ko International and Minuteman Security Services.
p.22: Tikki guesses that Adama Ho is a "Red Pole" (number 426), or chief enforcer of a Triad. This fits the Triad organization later outlined in the Underworld Sourcebook (Steve Kenson, 1997), so Smith did his homework. In actuality, though, "Adama Ho" is Adam Malik, a mage with no connection whatsoever to the Triads.
p.22: "Certain things he has said in private suggest ties with the Green Circle Gang, a particularly vicious arm of the infamous 999 Society, controlled by Silicon Ma out of Hong Kong. This is interesting because Tikki's mother once did some work for Silicon Ma himself." If accurate, this means the 999 Society is the top Triad in Hong Kong, and its lodgemaster Silicon Ma has been in power for a long time.
p.23: Smith outlines the Philadelphia underworld.
"The Philadelphia-Camden sprawl is a kind of three-way split. Northern Philadelphia is the fractured territory, the Zone, constantly battled over by gangs: go-gangs and thrill gangs, ordinary street gangs, fleeting associations of skells and scum, humans and trogs, even elves. Strictly amateur stuff. South Philly belongs to the Sicilian mob. The mob does some serious biz down there, but the yakuza rule the sweetest territory, the casino sprawl over on the Camden side of the Delaware River... All of the above have interests downtown. Even the Korean Seoulpa Rings have interests downtown."
p.26: "Tiger, tiger, burning bright ... in the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?" Adam Malik (Adama Ho) is (mis-) quoting The Tyger, a poem by William Blake.
p.38: The public law enforcement contract for Philadelphia is held by Minuteman Security Services, a subdivision of Helter-Shutt, Inc.
p.52: Bernard Ohara employs two bodyguards from the highly reputable Birnoth Comitatus private security firm. Among other advantages, they are equipped with cyberware guaranteeing their discretion: "When the privacy function is initiated, implanted headware blanks their memory of everything they see and hear every sixty seconds. At the end of the day, they remember nothing except accompanying Ohara into his office and then out of it again." This cyberware later appears in Man & Machine as a Data Filter.
p.53: Exotech Entertainment has a successful line of simsense productions featuring Hermetic magic: The Summoning of Abbirleth and Night of the Enchanter were blockbuster successes.
p.63: The shadowrunners' mage, Dana Giachetti, appears to have a gesture geas (Magic in the Shadows, p.32). She never casts a spell without using her hands. "Emblemology of power", she calls it.
p.66: Striper kills an ork and steals his motorcycle. Would be a throwaway incident, but it comes back to haunt her two years later in Who Hunts The Hunter. The ork's mother, Germaine Olsson, takes her revenge by arranging for Striper and her infant cub to be captured and sold to a metascience laboratory for experiments -- for Striper, a fate worse than death.
p.67: KFK may be affiliated with Philadelphia's leading yakuza clan, the Honjowara-gumi.
p.79: Bernard Ohara consistently abuses a variety of Better-Than-Life (BTL) simsense called Personafix (P-fix) BTL. P-fix BTL feeds the user an emotive track only -- it does not include an RAS override or sensory track. P-fix merely provides an emotional high, altering various personality characteristics. Taken to an extreme, they can make the user behave like an entirely different person. Ohara's P-fix BTLs boost his confidence and self-esteem to absurd levels. They have titles like The Master Corporator, Omnipower, and The Almighty!
p.83: Striper has an impressive rep, according to Minuteman Security Services' Lt. Kirkland: "She's been linked to assassinations in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and maybe a dozen other cities scattered across Japan, Korea, China, and Southeast Asia. She's done work for just about every major criminal organization with ties to East Asia and North America, the Yakuza, Triads, you name it. She's absolutely ruthless."
p.85: "You had a big blowout at one of your sites up near Germantown about a year ago. A fire, a few deaths. Some mana-types cooked up something that got a little out of hand." That would be the understatement of the year, courtesy of Lieutenant Kirkland. The accident is the key event upon which the entire novel turns, even though it takes place a year before the narrative begins (not even a Prologue? C'mon, Nyx!).
p.101: Striper disables a security camera with a device called a line-looper. "What it does is record what a security cam sees over the course of, say, a millisecond, then feeds that recording endlessly to the central monitoring station. That effectively blinds the cams to what's really passing by." A simple electronic alternative to hiring a decker.
p.126: Neona Jaxx decks into "the LTG for Reno, Nevada." Oops. Nevada ceased to exist with the Treaty of Denver in 2018. Most of the old state of Nevada became the Ute Nation.
p.129: Cameo appearance by the now-legendary decker Dodger (who also appears in Never Deal With A Dragon, Choose Your Enemies Carefully, Find Your Own Truth, and Never Trust An Elf). In his dedication, Nyx Smith credits Robert N. Charette for the loan of the character.
p.137: Striper meets another fixer with whom she has dealt often in the past, a wolf-shapeshifter named Castellano. Castellano also appears in Never Deal With A Dragon, Into the Shadows, and Who Hunts the Hunter, though his name is spelled "Castillano" in those books. Sloppy editing.
p.148: Either the Shadow free spirit, Abbirleth; the magical artifact called the Vault of Souls; or both together derive some measure of power from the women Malik tortures to death in the name of his murdered lover, Leandra. Malik is plainly insane, and almost certainly under Abbirleth's control.
p.190: The Walking Wounded are a street gang located in Germantown. According to Kirkland, "The Walking Wounded is headquartered in London, with a few chapters in Europe and here in North America." They are listed with other South London gangs in the London Sourcebook (p.50). The gang's leader in Philadelphia is a toxic gargoyle shaman from the Smoke.
p.195: "There is something new to this world, Horatio ... Something undreamt of in your philosophy." Feinberg is paraphrasing William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act I, Scene 5): "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
p.195: After assensing the site of the "accident" at the abandoned Exotech facility, Inspector Feinberg declares it the result of a botched summoning. The Exotech mages attempted to summon an extraordinarily powerful spirit, and it escaped their control. Feinberg characterizes the spirit as a Shadow (Magic in the Shadows, p.114). "Likely, it killed whoever summoned it. Perhaps it even possessed him. I can't be sure." The Shadow free spirit, Abbirleth, formed a Spirit Pact (MitS, p.124) with Malik and concealed its life inside him (Hidden Life power, MitS p.117).
p.214: Northeast Philly is the turf of the Death Angels gang.
p.219: Camden uses a different security provider from the rest of the Philadelphia sprawl. Omni Police Services.
p.221: The Gloucester City industrial district is the territory of the Paradise Slayers go-gang.
p.239: John Brandon Conway was mentioned in Striper as a "Mr. White", an untouchable megacorporate fixer. He is mentioned again here, in context with the events of the short story. "Conway is a fixer, one of the biggest and most elusive. He works as a middleman for multinational conglomerates, governments. His deals involve twelve- and fifteen-digit numbers." That's trillions and up. When this guy talks, people listen.
p.242: The Exotech Special Projects Section that created the title effect for the hit simsense The Summoning Of Abbirleth was composed of seven hermetic magicians. Three died in the "accident" at the Germantown studio (including Leandra Forrester), three (Neiman, Jorge, Harris) were burned out but survived, and one (Adam Malik) disappeared. The free spirit made a Pact with Adam Malik and facilitated his manipulation of Striper.
p.281: Kono-Furata-Ko International was founded by three men: Kono Koreyasu, Furata Morimoto, and Ko Akifusa. Note that Japanese list the family name first and the given name second, a practice to which Nyx Smith adheres throughout the book.
p.300: Adam Malik's enormous power comes from a unique magical object called the Vault of Souls and from the Shadow free spirit summoned by the Special Project Section. He and the spirit have very likely formed a Spirit Pact (Magic in the Shadows, p.124). Malik is certainly a Corrupted mage by this point (MitS, p.134). The nature of the Vault of Souls is never explained, though it seems to derive its power from proximity to violent death.
p.306: "Malik himself steps through the door and onto the street. Within his etheric form drifts a stygian blackness. This, Eliana knows, is the etheric form of a shadow spirit. The spirit has not only possessed the man. It has hidden its life inside him." Hidden Life is a Free Spirit power described in Magic in the Shadows on p.117. It is thought to cause mental flaws when used with a Metahuman, which Malik certainly has in abundance.
p.308: Eliana obtains the Vault of Souls. "She assenses the gems true power. Hidden at its core, an orb of orange-gold orichalcum, infused with the essence of uncounted beings .. all victims of violent death." Eliana's desire for the artifact appears to be limited to simple greed for magical power. The consequences to her remain unexplored.
A few thoughts on the cover painting by Romas: While I like the picture well enough on its own merits, it has little if anything to do with the characters or events of the book. Striper wears her hair close-cropped and tinted red, so the long brown hair of the woman on the cover is completely out of place. Her outfit is equally out of character, and the scene depicted does not occur anywhere in the novel.
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