[Imagine this is read by the movie trailer guy]
The Year is 199X
Experiments at a research lab deep in the bowels of an old nickel mine have unleashed the rebirth of magic on Earth. Creatures of Myth and Legend have Awoken, bringing with them miracles and nightmares alike. They clash with the latest in advanced technology. Sorcerers trade fire with laser pistols. Whirring logic engines going head to head with the third eye of a powerful demon. Magical beings are paid handsomely to shill for increasingly caffeinated soda flavours. All these are possible in the city at the centre of the Manabloom. Though it was once called something else, its position at the vanguard of the old and new mysteries has given it a more auspicious title more befitting its importance.
XTREME CITY
People of all species and magical disposition come to experience the cultural, technological, and arcane centre of the world.
This is just one of their stories.
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The streets of Xtreme City were never truly dark. Even when the sun slid behind the roofs of the towering skyscrapers, casting the highways that snaked through the downtown core into shadow, the hum of neon lights turning on heralded a veritable wave of illumination. Garish facsimiles of all the shades and hues of nature all competing for prominence. For Grendle, the speed of her SNO-Board made it so that no single colour could stand out from the pack. Signs and billboards blended into a haze at her peripheral vision, her focus locked solely onto what lay ahead.
From her position behind a bright blue taxi, it was all moving too fast. Cars, ranging from old gas guzzlers to the more modern hydrogen cells to even the occasional flywheel engine, swarmed around her. Each internal computer on the machines making micro adjustments, cutting off one another and making last-minute adjustments to get their occupants to their place of work just a bit faster. Each individual machine moving left and right with the precision of a clock ticking down to an execution, yet all jockeying for position and space in ways that made driving without a smart car to keep you safe a suicidal prospect. And yet, here she was, skitching a ride on the rear bumper of one! Her cranial rig did the heavy lifting, 64 megabytes of pure RAM power making the thousands of calculations a second needed to keep her from getting flattened in the swarm of traffic.
As the blue sedan she was clinging onto sped up, she gripped the chrome for dear life. The messenger bag dug into her shoulder, the strap pulling taut with each sharp jerk of the vehicle's autopilot wheel. Her offramp was in a few moments. This might get dicey. Getting into traffic was one thing. Getting out without eating bumper...
Just as the worry crossed her mind, the maze of cars ahead thinned. The haze of exhaust cleared enough to reveal the forward echelon of vehicles was coming to a halt. Heavy MRAPs in the livery of the local Bounty Mountie precinct blocked the road, the barrels of weapons poking out from behind set firing positions aimed at her.
"Stop where you are and drop the stolen corporate property!" a cop in Community Outreach armour shouted into his headset mic. Rather than hear it, they pumped the voice through a Sonic Cannon mounted on one of the patrol tanks' roofs. If she didn't have her rig's sonic filters, it might have hurt. As it was, it caused the ride she was hitching to rock back and forth. She let go and swerved into a clear lane, the dangerous momentum preserved and sending her hurtling towards the cops at breakneck speeds. They had already levelled their guns at her. Taser bullets, by the looks of them.
She looked down at her only weapon: her tried and tested hardlight projector. Built out of a state-of-the-art glove shaped gaming peripheral, it channeled a powerful incantation woven into the circuit board that let her throw out simple, tangible wireframe shapes into the real world. Her imagination rendered their dimension through her cranial implant and the glove projected them into reality. A digitized ammo slot on the left of her vision showed she still had a couple charges left. Not much to get around a full police barricade.
There were two options, as far as Grendle could see. Come to a halt, give up her life of crime, get a normal job working at a burger joint, enter subsidized housing and raise 1.3 kids...or think of something totally bananas and hope to God that she was looking out for her.
She gunned the acceleration control on her 'board. This fast, there wasn't much juice left to give, but if she was gonna make this work, she'd need every advantage.
The cops opened fire. She swerved as best she could without killing her speed, relying on her body's motion to keep her out of the path of the electrified rounds. At the last minute, she used one of the last two charges to throw up a shield. Purple light coalesced into a translucent wall that stopped the needle-tipped bullets flat. But the rounds kept coming. The barrier buckled, cracked. A final volley blew it apart. Only her riding gear was keeping the rest of her body safe. Even with its built-in grounding, all it would take was a lucky shot, and she'd be a toasted pancake on the side of one of their cruisers. But the shield had bought her enough time. She hoped, at least.
Her second conjuration took shape at the foot of the nearest cruiser. Not another shield, but an inclined plane at a 45-degree angle. It grew out toward her, still in motion by the time her front wheels touched the lip. The police got the idea, and their gun retrained on the construct. But by that time it was too late. At the speed of night she accelerated up the ramp, glowing engine leaving contrails of light as she soared through the air, over the cops and their bullshit rules and oppressive night time noise restrictions. Mid-flip, she had the presence of mind to flip them off. Their sour faces were all the payment she needed.
Her knees flexed just time for the wheels of the SNO-Board to hit the pavement, keeping her level and with a surprising amount of speed from the jump. That and the offramp's decline meant she had plenty of velocity to get her far away from the retaliatory shots of the officers, who were proven once again to be total dorks. Off the highway, it was skiddy's work to get lost in the endless twisting side streets of Nickel City, one of the older parts of the town and the last to be reached by the wonders of the Manabloom. You still got hard looks down here, but at least it was from people who hated you for understandable reasons like you'd robbed them or your family ain't on great terms with their family, not just because of what you were born as.
Finding the little power exchange shed she used as a base of operation was second nature. Past the third burned-out car, down two more roads, make a left at the abandoned gas station, and keep going until you could smell nothing but ozone. By the time her trembling fingers had gotten the lock undone, her adrenaline high was fading into exhaustion. She needed to crash.
With exaggerated effort, she pulled the helmet off her head. The black hair that spilled down on only one side of her face had showed her bright orange roots. Two teeth poked out either edges of her lower lip like ivory stalagmites. Her pale green complexion made it clear how little time she spent in the sun, at least without obscuring clothing. Her natural eye colour, ruby red, had been concealed behind a brown contact lens that kept her biometrics from being read by any security reader she glanced at. With the leathers and gear stowed in its cardboard box on the high shelf of the shed she could look like any other orc trying to blend into the humie world. T-shirt top, jean shorts, sneakers. The one deviation from the corporate norm was the tattoo on her arm: the one of a snake coiled around a computer tower. The fangs on the serpent were not so coincidentally located on the lower jaw, not the upper. Below it, two words. Her motto.
Bite Back.