Details

Smashing Blow allows one to make an Unarmed Combat test to attack a barrier— the default target number is 4— and add the successes to the Power of the attack, then compare it against the Barrier Rating normally.

Killing Hands negates Immunity and magical defenses against normal weapons.

Traceless Walk is a limited form of levitation that allows walking on any solid surface— pressure pads, nightingale floors, snow crust— without actually resting weight on that surface. Requires a Stealth roll.

Dazzle resistance reduces flashpack effects by half. Improved Scent allows scent identification like a bloodhound. Improved Taste can sense poisons using Chemistry, and can make a Perception (3) test to determine if water is clean if you have Survival skill. Hearing Amplification cuts effective range for hearing tests by a factor of 10.

Barry’s intolerance of injustice requires him to make a Willpower (4) test not to interfere, and leaves him at +2 to his TN’s if he has to stand by and watch helplessly.

The Astral Pool officially applies only to situations in which either an Astral Combat Pool or Magic Pool in Astral Space would apply, and to resisting drain on metaplanar quests. Physical Adepts can only center for physical skills (unless they purchase Enhanced Centering), which limits the possibilities to Athletics, Stealth, and Dance.

Barry has paid the 8 karma to bond with his Rating 8 katana; since its blade is inscribed with “Water reflects an image of the moon/The mind should be reflected in the location of the quiescent sword,” he has dubbed it “Moonlight”. (The quote is from Yagyu Munenori’s Family Traditions on the Art of War.) A weapon focus, when active, adds its rating to the wielder’s weapon skill directly.

Gear

29030¥ in certified cred, 1300¥ with level 1 fake ID “Bart Clayton” (Trollish college student). 21000¥ with level 6 fake ID “Bernard Clausewitz”. DocWagon Platinum contract through 6/55. Bernard Clausewitz is a member of the Mothers of Metahumans policlub and the Rural Awakened Defense Society (which helps sasquatches defend their land against developers, greedy talismongers, etc.).

Str 9 Ranger-X bow with accessory mount holding smartlink II and rangefinder. 15 IPE concussion minigrenades, 10 IR smoke minigrenades, 10 flash minigrenades, all for fitting into grenade arrows. 30 regualar arrows, 10 mini-grenade arrows, 10 wooden arrows suitable for shooting at vampires. 10 IPE concussion grenades, 10 IPE offensive grenades, 10 IR smoke grenades, 10 flash grenades. Smartlink II/data display mirrorshades.

Dikoted steel Troll-sized katana (200 cm²)— 6/96 hrs, 2000¥, 3kg. Plastic boken (600¥). Grapple gun with 400kg take-up reel (3000¥, 5kg) and 600m stealth grapple line.

Secure jacket (B5 I3 C9 3kg), form-fitting body armor (B4 I1 C12 1.75kg), forest camouflage jacket (B5 I3 2kg), Mortimer Greatcoat (B4 I2 C11 3kg), Tuxedo (B3 I1 C12 1kg), chemsuit-3, chemsuit-10, 1 week’s miscellaneous clothing. Helmet (+1B +1I) with heads-up display functioning as ultrasound sight, data display, and smartgoggles, communicator, respirator.

Wrist phone with chip reader, GPS locator with orientation system, survival kit, respirator. Map chip for Denver (streets, downtown, Colorado roads, wide-area aerial). 5 sets of plastic restraints. Sprawl fuser and collection of thrash metal, trog rock, and other sources of noise that can pass for music. Medkit-3 with 5 tranq patch 10’s, 10 antidote patch 8’s.

Vid/music playback unit, small library of chips from college. German 6 tutor program; Gaelic 3 tutor program; Perkins-Athapascan 6 tutor program; Hawai’ian 6 tutor program. Middle lifestyle paid through 7/55 (saving 750¥ by living at HQ).

Antique Scottish greatsword with MacDonald crest and documentation of history; worth 40k¥.

Ares Squirt (see Shadowtech) with insecticide load.

Appearance and Personality

Barry is an unusually handsome Troll, standing ten feet tall in bare feet; he is fairly robust, but there are bigger Trolls his height. His dermal armor is unusually symmetric for his subspecies, due largely to his regiment of working out which bashes out all the irregularities; working out regularly, along with good posture, helps to keep the dermal armor on his back from forcing him into the all-too-common Trollish slouch. He has two short, backward-curving horns at the edges of his forehead, which he keeps well trimmed and polished. Barry speaks in a resonant bass, and Trollish tusks seem to be no barrier to accurate pronunciation for him. His father’s ancestry in the British Isles has been completely overwhelmed by his mother’s Greek background, and he sports swarthy skin, straight black hair (usually pulled into a short queue at the nape of his neck), and brown eyes that appear green in certain lights. He generally goes clean-shaven, eschewing depilatories in favor of a straight razor and soap most of the time; like most Trolls, he is fairly hirsute.

Casually, he usually wears jeans and a sweatshirt around Seattle, though can easily enough switch to slacks and an Oxford shirt when the situation calls for it. (Form-fitting body armor is his default choice of underwear.) For formal occasions, he owns an armored tuxedo that is cut to allow free movement in combat. On runs, he generally wears black clothing and tabi under a black armored jacket. His favorite colors are black and gold, and his wardrobe is usually full of jewel tones in white, burgundy, forest green, and deep blue.

Despite the numerous temptations to trouble in his life, Barry does his best to remain calm at all times, which can sometimes irritate his teammates. He has little tolerance for injustice, and will often step into potential fights when he sees a bunch of humans ganging up on a metahuman, or vice versa, or Lone Star officers making trouble for innocent civilians. (It didn’t take him long acquire the local branch of the Humanis policlub as an enemy after he arrived in Seattle.) Through all this, he attempts to maintain the inner calm described as “the moon reflected in a pool of water” by Yagyu Munenori; longtime friends can usually spot when he is irritated, but he seems amazingly levelheaded to most acquaintances. He’s particularly good at lateral thinking, possibly a side effect of his training in aikido.

A combination of perversity (with regard to the stereotypical Trollish condition) and sharp senses bring Barry an appreciation of quality in many things. He enjoys fine beers, wines, meads, and whiskeys, and hopes one day to have an actual library of paper books, and occasionally treats himself to a genuine steak dinner when he’s feeling extremely affluent. He has a broad range of tastes in music, enjoying most things with strong melodic content; Mike Oldfield is a particular favorite. His view on cosmology is strongly influenced by Eastern traditions: his philosophy is based around notions of getting back the kind of karma you give out, he has a vague belief in reincarnation (though isn’t terribly sure of it), and his studies in Magic Theory are concentrated in feng shui. When he decides to kill someone, he regards it as “cosmic recycling” and often describes it as “giving them a free trip around the Wheel.” He is always reluctant to take life, though he views death as a favor for creatures driven to unwholesome lifestyles, like the wendigo. He tends to vote for the Green Party if they seem to be making sense this year, and would in general like to see the world become a more comfortable, freer, cleaner place, and tends to quote Thoreau regarding matters of government: “The government is best which governs the least, and the ideal government would govern not at all. When mankind is ready for this government, this is the one he will have.” Until then, democracy and capitalism seem to be the least of all evils.

Barry usually spends his time teaching aikido to street kids to help them learn the discipline that is the key to making your way in the world, and studying whatever seems to be the skill currently needed to contribute to his worldliness, whether it be studying a new language, going to the zoo with chipbooks on parazoology to assense the creatures, or spending time practicing controlling a vehicle or using weapons. He writes home every few weeks, and occasionally picks up letters and packages from home via a covert post office box. (The packages usually contain clothes, though occasionally oatmeal-and-raisin cookies show up.) His parents think he’s some sort of handyman, based on the vague descriptions he sends back of what he’s been up to, and have no notion that their darling boy is a shadowrunner.

Deep down in his heart of hearts, Barry really wants to be a James Bond sort of individual: calm, cool, debonair, sophisticated, diplomatic, able to appear comfortable in any cultural setting— and capable of using force to get things done when all the former things fail. He knows that prejudice against Trolls will make this nearly impossible (especially with respect to Japanese culture)— but he’s still trying to meet all challenges with superior style. He finds it repugnant to slur his speech, forget his grammar, and slouch in order to appear less distinctive as a Troll, but will do so grudgingly for purposes of disguise.

One of Barry’s long-term dreams is to travel— preferably after having had a chance to study the languages and cultures of the places he wants to see. He’s most curious about Western Europe and the Mediterranean; the Trollkönigreich Schwarzwald in what used to be Germany has a particular fascination for him, as he’s never had the chance to see a society where Orks and Trolls are the most common citizens before.

He has little attachment to worldly possessions— his philosophy concentrates on one’s inner being rather than one’s external world— but has a few curios that are important to him: his diploma from UC Berkeley and the associated class ring, a trophy earned for essay writing in high school, and a copy of The Joy of Awakened Sex presented to him upon graduation by his fellow employees at Madam Helen’s.

Quotes

“Of all the things I break, I enjoy stereotypes the most.”

“All this vicarious violence is giving me an appetite.”

“Baka to hasami no you ni tsukaete ne.” (“Fools, like scissors, are sharp if used right.”)

While using aikido to throw charging mooks out a broken window on top of a skyscraper, during an Astral Quest: “Urameshi-sensei said there’d be days like this.”

“This isn’ vigilanteism. It’s charity work.”

History

Barry Haverford was born on June 5, 2032, a vigorously healthy human to a human couple living in San Rafael, California and working in San Francisco. His father, George, was a middle manager at one of the Japanese corporations; George Haverford had met Cynthia, a secretary from a different department, at a company party, and a relationship developed. Neither one had any inklings of their latent magical genes.

Barry grew up with a fairly normal life; his parents could afford to send him to a good private school, and the years went by in a relatively uneventful way. The troubles of Orkland were a bridge away, and the glass ceiling for gaijin in San Francisco didn’t make enough trouble to disrupt his home life. Due to financial considerations, he was an only child.

A couple of months after his thirteenth birthday, Barry begin to show a continuous, high fever, and lapsed into a coma shortly thereafter. At the hospital, the doctors quickly identified the case as goblinization, hooked him up to an intrevenous drip, attached a number of biomonitors, and regularly monitored him for complications. He endured the experience quite well physically: his health had always been good, and the change was, at a physiological level, fairly straightforward.

Mentally, however, Barry Haverford was a mess. He had just gained three feet of height and lost a significant portion of his mental faculties; the experience had been quite traumatic. When he was released from the hospital, he had become sullen, moody, and prone to violent mood swings between black depression and a hot temper. His Trollish strength and latent powers as a Physical Adept combined to make him a danger to most people and architecture in his vicinity.

David Barnes, Barry’s Physical Education teacher at his high school, was unable to cope with this uncontrollable force, but knew someone who could. Barnes went to his old martial arts teacher, Urameshi-sensei, a Japanese native who had settled in Sausalito. Urameshi-sensei agreed to take on Barry as a charity case, as long as his parents signed away their right to make any sort of legal trouble for Urameshi-sensei if Barry were injured; he left Barnes to soften this notion for Barry’s worried parents.

Being beaten up regularly by a geriatric man less than half his size did no good for Barry’s temper at first, but he soon began to figure out how to control himself, if only to get back at Urameshi-sensei. Somewhere along the line, the motivation of revenge got lost as the adolescent Troll focussed on self-control.

Meanwhile, his parents did their best to cope with their changed offspring. Cynthia, a woman of little imagination, simply decided to ignore the whole matter of Barry being a Troll (other than the fact that he was suddenly a different size) and went on loving her son as she always did, never quite figuring out his dietary changes and tendency to see into into the infrared portions of the spectrum. George, on the other hand, began looking at the metahuman condition for the first time in his life, and began taking an active interest in metahuman rights issues.

Goblinization may have been the best thing that ever happened to Barry’s relationship with his father. George Haverford made a point of breaking stereotypes, attending fancy social occasions with his wife and son all in excellent formal garb, showing perfect behavior, attempting to expose racists and, when possible, have them ejected from events for boorish behavior. Expeditions of “stalking the wild racist” led to one of the cornerstones of Barry’s future personality.

At a company event shortly after Barry’s graduation from high school at 17, George’s new boss (who had heard of Barry but never met him) made a remark in Japanese to his superior that praised George Haverford on having such a well-trained pet. Barry, who had been learning a good deal about the Japanese language and culture from Urameshi-sensei, in the same language placidly quoted a passage from Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings about the dangers of poor assumptions. It turned out that George’s boss hadn’t actually studied the text, but his superior had— dreadfully embarrassing George’s boss. Shortly thereafter, George and Cynthia found themselves presented with pink slips, ostensibly due to “downsizing the department.” Barry’s parents lived for a while on savings until George found a new job in Buffalo, NY.

When his parents moved back East, Barry stayed behind to go to college at UC Berkeley. He majored in English Literature. Finding a special scholarship for a Troll was not difficult, but it didn’t quite make ends meet. When he displayed a talent for diplomatically intimidating people out of a fight in Café Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue, one of the bouncers at Madame Helen’s, a rather exclusive brothel hidden in the Berkeley Hills, approached him about a part-time job at a place where one of the most important job requirements is keeping your cool, no matter what.

Barry went through his four years at UC Berkeley attending class and doing homework during the day, and showing up for work at Madame Helen’s three days a week; his rather unusual job required an ability to get along with people as well as being able introduce them to the outdoor pavement in a ballistic fashion. Conversation with the staff and customers at Madame Helen’s helped improve his command of etiquette and culture, and he was occasionally hired away for bodyguarding work at social functions where his presence underscored a subtle point his employer wished to make. (His coworkers at Madame Helen’s were very amused at his professional refusal to take advantage of his position there.)

The rest of the time, he trained with Urameshi-sensei; his favorite martial art was aikido, which was what had been used on him as a raging teenager, though he also studied Tae Kwon Do and some archery and kendo for their offensive potential. During this time, one of his fellow students was Violet, an Elven girl of Japanese descent who had grown up in a corporate orphanage and whose tenure at Urameshi-sensei’s was paid for by the corp that wanted her trained as a Physical Adept. Violet, he could tell, was one of the other good students whom Urameshi-sensei invited round outside of training hours to watch martial arts films varying from the very good to the extremely cheesy (with far more of the latter than the former), inviting students to make commentary on the moves used by the actors. Students making mistakes in their observations found out at the next training session when Urameshi-sensei forcibly proved their idea wrong.

During college, he had many acquaintances, several friends, and a few relationships. Before he had goblinized, he had already acquired some ideas about his taste in women, and seldom found the females of his own subspecies pretty; in addition, finding intellectual female Trolls to talk to was incredibly difficult. (He had very little attracting their attention, with his own looks, but after a couple of attempts that led to despair gave up on the notion of dating anyone he couldn’t spend hours having good conversations with.) At one point, he joined a band, Catastrophic Harmonic Resonance, which went around measuring the venues they would play in beforehand and retuning their instruments to produce resonant frequencies that would tend to vibrate the floor and rattle the walls. Barry played double bass guitar (an instrument invented about the time that the first full-grown Trolls began appearing) and sang backup, taking lead only on “Oh, Yeah!”

Bodyguarding work just wasn’t Barry’s style; professionally getting in the way of bullets with someone else’s name on them didn’t seem like a way to live to a ripe old age to him. The only places he would be able to get a job in the area paid rather poorly, and he had a number of impressive skills as a Physical Adept. Seattle, he had heard many times, had many opportunities for a talented individual, so he and Violet (fleeing the corp, which wanted to add cyberware to her to improve her efficiency) decided to team up and took the tube out of California. At the time, Barry’s sole possessions were the armored tux and form-fitting body armor from his job, a katana, his double bass guitar, a chip library of music and books from his college career, and a few minor keepsakes, all of it in a large duffel bag.

He currently lives at the Twilight Brigade headquarters building, registered to Pharos Safety Consulting, at Middle lifestyle. He gets around on a Honda Viking motorcycle.

In the shadows of Seattle, he is simply known as “Barry.” When people inquire as to why he hasn’t managed to be dubbed with a street name, most of the folk who know him simply say: “What do you call a ten-foot-tall Troll who can kick a hole in a reinforced concrete wall?”

Barry has yet to be presented with an opportunity to leave the shadows; he’s begun to acquire an appreciation of the amount of good he can do people from there, without necessarily getting into crossfire. (He’s already helped prevent a major gang war and beheaded a mass murderer; this seems, to him, to be a good start.)

Contacts

One of Barry’s more unusual contacts is Rohana Azure, a simsense star that he met when doing some bodyguarding work in San Francisco. She is an “action simsense” star who is known best for her role as Michelle Bond, one of James Bond’s many grandchildren. She enjoys having Barry drop by for sheer shock value, and will occasionally get him to escort her to various social events to bother Humanis-leaning people in the profession. (If her company weren’t prejudiced, she would’ve hired him as a bodyguard already.) They aren’t close friends, but they share a delight in blowing minds.

Davey Carmichael is a Human street kid who’s been learning aikido from Barry.

Oscar Three Bears is a Human Bear shaman, Initiated at least to grade 3, who does research into healing magicks. He knows a formula for helping people recover Essence lost from vampiric drain.

“Elvis Johnson” is a person at Ares who seems to have an interest in wiping out cockroach spirits. He is not a good contact for casually phoning up, but could be useful when matters of importance arise.

David Ahawane is a traffic control rigger at Honolulu International that Barry once bribed for flight information.

Slider is a minor-league decker, a protege of Artemis, who has since retired.

Sandra Brown is an investment banker and financial software analyst at Fuchi Investment Analysis; we suspect her of being a former shadowrunner, probably Artemis. She hired the team (through Slider) to track down her daughter, Andrea, when she went missing.

Andrea Brown (AKA Crystal Brown) is an employee of Renraku, apparently involved in something surreptitious since she has an apparent job in marketing a competitor to NERPS Cola, but also is involved in setting wards; apparently a former Astral Adept, she is now a houngan.

Sarah is a houngan whose mait tete is Erzulie; she lives in Cats’ neighborhood and knows some healing rites, including some for bringing someone back from being a drugged zombie. We know her through Oscar Three Bears.

Symbol

Barry has adopted a personal symbol, which he uses occasionally: a picture of a blue-green planet like Earth seen from space, the only visible continent constrasting against the ocean like a yin-yang symbol, with a hurricane system over the ocean at the “eye” of the yin. He has a synthleather armor jacket with the symbol and some business cards and stationery, but avoids letting it become identified with his shadowrunning identity. (He has vague plans of using as a coat of arms when he buys a title in the Trollkönigreich Schwarzwald someday.)

Martial Arts

Urameshi-sensei is thought by his students to have an extremely tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, and taught control over various Physical Adept abilities by giving them names as “stances”, much like the cheesy kung fu movies he showed as part of training. (The origin of the terms comes from the study of Chinese martial arts that imitated the motions of animals and were taught as motion from one stance to another, and the relationship to animal motions even has some decent magic theory behind it. Still, the school takes it somewhat over the top.) Some of them were simply particular katas and exercises meant to key the mind to the proper pattern, such as Cat’s Eye Stance; others are full-fledged martial techniques. Among them are

Cat’s Eye Stance	Low-Light Vision		Charging Yak Stance	Smashing Blow
Cat’s Ear Stance	Extended Hearing		Blind Stance	Dazzle Resistance
Cat Paw Stance	Traceless Walk		Deaf Stance	Sound Damping
Cat Claw Stance	Killing Hands L		Wind Stance	Increased Reflexes 1
Eagle Claw Stance	Killing Hands M		Thunder Stance	Increased Reflexes 2
Tiger Claw Stance	Killing Hands S		Whirlwind Stance	Increased Reflexes 3
Dragon Claw Stance	Killing Hands D		Lightning Stance	Increased Reflexes 4
Bloodhound Stance	Improved Smell		Gourmet Stance	Improved Taste
Flying Stance	Wuxia Leaping		Eavesdropper Stance	Selective Hearing
Bat Stance	High/Low Hearing

(This has no game effect, and is there purely to provide some interesting roleplaying when talking shop with fellow shadowrunners.)

Each level of Wuxia Leaping adds the Adept’s Magic rating (in meters) to horizontal jumps and half their Magic rating to vertical ones.

House of Memory

Many runners and fixers maintain a complex web of information in their headware, allowing the precision of machines to keep track of all the endless details of phone numbers and connections. Barry uses an older technique, used by many folk in preliterate societies, called the House of Memory.

A House of Memory is a complex visualization that keeps track of details by placing them in a mental museum, laid out in a pattern that makes sense to the person constructing the House in their mind. Under ordinary conditions, it is merely a mnemonic tool, and as such still survives in the modern era (sometimes being used as a way of helping rehabilitate people from brain damage caused by strokes and other problems).

Barry’s basic layout is a sprawling mansion in a variety of styles: the front is Victorian, the dojo on the side a proper Japanese construction with rice-paper screens, and the auditorium in back with the Hall of Players is a more modern creation. The second story contains the bedrooms.

• The Living Room, with a portrait of his parents over the fireplace. It connects to the Library and the Dojo, and a walkway leads to the Hall of Players.

• Barry maintains a number of bedrooms for his different identities. The one for himself is very detailed: a large futon with a comforter, a closet containing his favorite clothes (including gi, kimono, hakama, and tabi, a tuxedo, the leather jacket bearing his personal symbol, and an assortment of T-shirts), his diploma from UC Berkeley, and his katana, boken, and shinai.

  The bedroom for Bernard Clausewitz, security consultant from Seattle, is more functional.

• The Library, a high-tech research center at one end and a comfortable place of bookshelves and tomes at the other. On a couch in the middle of the room are Theora (holding a mask that looks like the face of Max Headroom), Talks-With-Cats, Lightfoot, and Rikki. Oscar Three Bears is here, reading a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Deckers and magicians end up filed in here in various portraits and poses. The Library is adjoined by

• The Map Room, which has an inlaid global map on the floor and a variety of maps at varying scale tacked up on the Wall. There are some tables off to the side with models of cities that Barry knows well, set up muck like model railroads.

• The Dojo, a traditional Japanese dojo featuring Urameshi-sensei sitting in the lotus position, remote control for the tridscreen in hand, Doc Grizzly in the middle of calisthenics, and Violet and Dreme in practice stances with katanas; Davey Carmichael is in an aikido stance. One wall contains a variety of interesting martial arts weapons; the other is covered in firearms and other technological instruments of destruction.

• The Garage, a cavernous place with a number of vehicles and drones, most of which have access panels open and otherwise display their capabilities well. (Almost all of them appear to have been shot up a bit, and the holes in the armor serve as a mnemonic device for how tough they are.) Johnny Doppler is usually to be found somewhere in here, along with other riggers.

• Immediately above the Garage is the Hall of Players, an auditorium-sized room. On the wall to the right of the entrance are the flags of major countries and their prominent leaders, including the UCAS, CAS, CFS, Tir Tairngire, Aztlan, Amazonia, Tír na nÓg, and Great Britain, along with some lesser nations such as Hawai’i, the various Native American Nations (grouped together), and the states of the former nation of Germany. (The Trollkönigreich Schwarzwald and Hawai’i are particularly detailed, as places that accept Orks and Trolls openly interest Barry.) On the left wall are the banners of the eight AAA megacorps and their CEO’s and major shareholders. The far wall contains various independent forces, such as Dunkelzahn and Gaeatronics. In the middle are statues of Johnsons and fixers, sometimes standing, sometimes seated at desks, wearing lapel pins showing their corporate or national affiliations and displaying their wares from open briefcases, duffel bags, or overcoats. Rohana Azure is there under the flag of her simsense production company.

• On the Roof of the Hall of Players, a series of street samurai, assassins, and other wetworkers perch along one edge. The other holds a set of cat burglars, thieves, and B&E specialists.

Plans

(Ordeals save Floor([Magic + Initiate Grade]/2) karma. The only ones a Physical Adept can reasonably take are Oath, Meditation, Astral Quest (with metaplanar access), Thesis, and Deed. For Deed to be efficient, it would have to generate less karma than you save— if going for grade 6, a 6-karma run breaks even, and is profitable for anything less.)

Skills to work on: improving Aikido, Tae Kwon Do, Stealth; acquiring Firearms, Gunnery, all vehicle skills he can practice, Biotech: Massage/Chiropractic, Magic Theory: Feng Shui, whatever we can come up with for cooking, liquor tasting, and so on, as well as keeping his various metaplanar survival skills up with his Initiate grade. Upping stats is important: another point of Quickness will give him another point of Combat Pool and a point of Reaction to boot. That’ll run a good 12 karma all told, but it’s cheaper than Initiating to get the same bonuses.

Becoming a fixer should involve acquiring a good memory. Someone like Patricia can just use her encephalon and encryption and be quite safe. Someone like Barry would be very vulnerable to having their information stolen, since having it accessible during a meet would require external displays. However, a “house of memory” technique might indeed be very handy with some karma sunk into it and perhaps an magic point or two. (It might be something that he can visit on a one-person-only Astral Quest, for instance.)

Planned identities: Hawai’ian journalist, landowner from the Trollkönigreich Schwarzwald, a geomancer from the Pueblo Corporate Council, a diplomatic translator (speaking Lakota) from Billings (formerly of Montana, now in the Sioux Nation).

When he’s being an apprentice fixer: he’s a Part-Timer, getting him no lifestyle bonus, a Police Trouble of 1, an Income Multiplier of 50, and no Reputation. He should get a skill in Private Enterprising; he’s got them in Etiquette, Interrogation, and Negotiation. To work as a Middle Man, he uses Negotation for Private Enterprising and Etiquette for Equipment Acquisition. To work as an Information Broker, he’ll need to get Private Enterprising (Info). So, for Patty, he can certainly function as a Middle Man, which is about right for someone of his rank. This means he can probably chop about 10 hours off Patty’s work week. For that, he’ll get paid about twice her income multiplier each month, which is 1000¥ if she’s just a Dealer, and 5000¥ if she’s a Johnson.