1. A Many Faceted Prysm.

Prysm O’Doole looked into the mirror in his flat in a middle class suburb of county Killarney. Deep set eyes with Shamrock green pupils stared back at him. Pale green hair cut long framed his almost child like face. A small nose and delicate eyebrows. In an attempt to look older than he did without it, he had grown a gote’ and moustache. To his initial dismay and eventual satisfaction, his facial hair seemed to grow at a different colour to his head hair. Strawberry blond. He wondered if his father had ever had this problem. A black Celtic cross tattoo on his right cheek denoted an old gang affiliation, long in the past now. Pale skin like everyone born of his country. He brushed his long hair over his slightly pointed ears, which denoted him as an elf. Standing just shy of seven feet tall and weighing in at 230 lbs, he was built more heavily than almost any other elf in the whole of Tir na nOg’.

He turned away from his face and glided like a wraith in his leather duster jacket and baggy pants towards the front door. The back door was the window. He slung a backpack over his shoulder on his way out into the wet world that greeted him.

"Why does it always rain on Monday?" he asked himself in a Tir na nOg’ accent that had just a hint of the Welsh valleys he had spent so much of his childhood in. In a single fluid motion, he had brought a retractable umbrella from his pack and opened it.

He was on his way to the gym to work out and then to the Dojo to work on his palm slaps. He studied Atemi, a Japanese martial art, almost exclusively, it focused on minimal force, maximum effect by using hits to vital areas and nerves. He never even made it halfway to the gym before the TRC car pulled up beside him and rolled down the window.

"Hay there sonny, if you get in the car, I’ll gave you a sweety," came a mocking voice from in the car.

"No thank you officer, I am on a diet," he kept a deadly serious face. The TRC were not to be played with. They not only acted as SWAT and anti-terrorist, but they also covered covert opps and assassinations.

The car pulled over and a single male norm stepped out.

"Sonny, I don’t think you heard me right. I said step in the car."

Prysm shrugged, sometimes things happened if you let them or not.

Well, at least it was dry he thought sarcastically as he was unceremoniously hauled into the downtown building that housed their centre of operations for this small area of the Tir. On the way through the door, he pretended to bump into the norm who had been so rude to him’s leg. Aiming for a certain group of muscles, he stifled a laugh as the norms legs suddenly decided they didn’t like it here and wanted to be somewhere else. They folded up under him as he hit the floor. He would be fine in a few minutes but his colleagues would take the mic, as it were, for months. They laughed at him now as he was rubbing feeling back into his legs.

"Look, sonny boy," Prysm mocked, "Do you want me to walk to where I am going on my own?"

"I don’t think that will be necessary," came a deep and commanding voice from behind him.

When he turned around, he felt a chill in the air, like he always did when a heavily cybered person was near. And this joker felt like he was death on legs. Prysm quickly assenced him. Almost not much meat left to bother about on this one. The feeling of death was not just his own, from the looks. It hung around him. When he had finished, Prysm saw he was somehow amused. Could he tell what Prysm had just thought?

"I assume you are Prysm O’Doole. Age 23, sex male, race Caucasian elf, date of birth November 17th, nationality Tir na nOg’ and partly Welsh, no close family in the Tir, no registered political following, no criminal record and one huge mother fragger."

He nodded.

"Well, it is my happy job to welcome you to the TRC boy."

"But.... There has to be some mistake."

"There is no mistake, you’ve been drafted."

Oh, just great ran through Prysm’s mind.

"Then after a two week basic training course, you will join our small ring of undercover field agents working in the fine county we live in. Any longer on the training and you might be missed."

"Uhhhhhhh...... where’s the part if you ask me if I want to do this? You know, a concession form or whatever," Prysm’s neo-Irish accent was blooming.

"Oh, boy. You have so much to learn. Maybe two weeks isn’t enough."

TWO WEEKS LATER.

I walked into my apartment almost like a different person. The smell of sweet Opium Joss sticks I left burning just before I was "Recruited" still hung in the air. I had done reasonably well in training even though I had no interest in doing it. My attuned body and mind tended to carry me foreword in all the classes I was given. Some of the other people being trained wouldn’t last a minute outside the centre, but that didn’t really matter to the TRC. I flew through the weapons training due to the fact I teach most of it as a profession.

I walked over and collapsed onto the bed. After I pulled my tall boots off, I looked through my back mail. As fate would have it, there was a sample pack for a new type of Jasmine Coffee. I made it and sat down drinking it in long draughts. I flipped the switch on the trid and sat back to watch the news.

The elven lady on the screen was reporting the latest IRA bombing of Killarney. I looked at the TRC members present and noticed the face of the recruiting officer who I had talked to. His stern norm features and jet black hair seemed to be looking through the camera right at me. It panned away from him and back to the mess. It had been an elven-owned department store. The anti-elven rule IRA had given fair warning to the owners, but bureaucratic babble and corp procedure had ment that a few people still got caught in the tail end of the blast. The Trid crew showed a few crying children and mothers with head wounds. It didn’t have the same effect anymore, not after the accusation that most of the injured people came in with the TRC on lorries. The journalist who leaked that information had no career left now. I didn’t like my employers much. But still, it bugged me that an anti-terrorist operative recruited me. They always had their reasons.

I just sat back and relaxed. I had been told to carry on life as usual. That’s just what I intended to do.

2. Prysmatic Spheres.

The standard issue wrist phone I had been given by my covert employers was bleeping. I wasn’t wearing it, like they had told me to, but it was on the table next to my bed. The self same bed I had been sleeping in less than twenty seconds ago.

"Naaaaaahhhhhhhaaaarrrrrrrgggggg......." I exclaimed to the world in general.

When I hit the receive button, the cold eyed stare I received hit me like a bucket of ice.

"I want you to come to HQ for briefing at 0600 hours. That gives you time for a shower and a shave. Get that damn ferret off your face."

The screen went blank.

"You hoop kissin’ mother fragger," I attempted to tell him. The chances of me shaving off my Gote’ was not dissimilar to the chances of Jesus in a Lycra jump-suit crashing through my wall riding a motor boat.

I smiled at the thought as I rolled out of bed. I looked at the wall clock. 3 am. How long does this fragger take to shower, I thought. Or is he over-estimating my Gote’?

I ran through some simple stretches and moved out towards the shower.

After I had tidied myself and had something to eat, some noodles and a few pieces of bread, I made my way downstairs and outside. It was a long walk to the HQ but I didn’t care. As I stepped into the rain, a thought ran through my mind as I opened my umbrella.

"Why does it always rain on Tuesdays?"

The fog swallowed me and I was away.

WALES, 7 YEARS AGO.

"But gran, why do some of us become hermetic, some shamanic and some..... like me?"

"Well, boy, that’s just one of our god’s mysteries I guess. I mean, our family have been very...... active, for generations. Your just one of us. You have to be careful though, when your brothers and sisters and cousins and neviews are playing jokes on you using their powers, you must never use your talents to hurt them. You have the potential to seriously hurt people. With that comes responsibility. So, as uncle John says, just grin and Bear it."

We both laughed at this. My family was special. So far, in three generations, not more than five of us had not become magically active in one way or another. We had shamans, mainly of wilderness totems, but my sister follower Cat, we had hermetics, we had adepts in conjuring and sorcery. Then we had me. I was thought to be the sixth mundane in the family until one night when a gang of thugs set on me and my, at the time, girlfriend Joan.

Six of them, three norms, one elf, one dwarf, and on ork. We had tried to walk past without saying anything and she ignored their cat-calls. We were fine till I lost my temper and shouted for them to leave her alone. When they found out I was from Tir na nOg’, it was all over for me. They insulted my heritage and mocked my voice. I threw the first punch. It would have been a normal beating as well, if I had just lay there and accepted it. I was grossly outclassed. Now I am large. Almost 7 foot tall. But there were six of them, and I was no fighter. But still, I stubbornly refused to go down. So one of them pulled a knife. Joan died half an hour later from the blood loss. I was more lucky. When I was in recovery a few days later, they told me my aura was expressing it’s self. They said it was reacting to the situation I had been put in and that, depending on how I treated myself, would react to stimuli that I gave it. If I wanted to be faster, I should just train as hard as I could and it would develop. My ability to see into the astral came first, I didn’t even think about that one. I guess it was my longing to be like my brothers and sisters and move in that fantastic realm. I finally got to see what it looked like.

My family sponsored me to go to an Atemi classes, I showed a flare for it. The instructor was a French/Japanese man looking to be in his mid forties, but I was told he was over sixty. Atemi was the art that the warrior caste of Japan used before they began to use swords almost exclusively. Although the art was ment to be extinct, Sensi Du Pont told me he was almost the last teaching practitioner. Our style of fighting, he told me, owed it’s roots back even further then Japan, in the ancient style of ch’ uan-fa.

Now, speed I had an edge on. I was fast. So my aura apparently decided I wanted to be faster. I am allot faster now. After a while, I developed the ability to see into the infra-red spectrum like a troll and my hearing capacity increased greatly. Then, four months of hard training later, my skin started to turn black. I was very worried by this, and as my worry mounted, it went back to normal. I concentrated on this and found I could change my skin colour if I tried. After another year of training this, I could do it almost at will, also changing my hair and eyes. But I decided to keep this ability a closely guarded secret between me, my gran, who was having regular updates on my progress, and my Senei.

When I was finally 18, I made the decision to move back to the Tir na nOg’, where my parents had died so long ago. I had lived in Wales for four years now and it was time to go home.......

I made it to the HQ on time and was shown into an office the size of a shoe box. The recruiting officer looked at me silently over the desk. I sat down. Several seconds passed while his eyes bored into the back of my skull.

He spoke, "Mr O’Doole, your first assignment has been decided," he seemed to pause, "You no doubts heard about the IRA bombing late yesterday afternoon?"

I nodded mutely.

"Well, we have reason to believe that a certain friend of yours, a Mr. Du Pont has been implicated to have affiliations with the Killarney cell that was held responsible."

My jaw hit the floor. Sensi Du Pont was my personal teacher of the art of Atemi. He had gone into a semi-retirement when my family had made some deal or pulled a past favour for him to teach me.

My mind worked at full speed when I realised that Du Pont was in no way part of the anti-elven organisation due to the rational that most of his friends were, in fact, elves.

A rodent-like smell floated distinctly into my range.

But what could they possibly want with my Sensi, I wondered. Then I thought about it for a few seconds. The sole teacher of an extremely deadly martial art?

They wanted an edge. Or, at least, they didn’t want anyone else with that edge.

Remembering the way this man seemed to be able to read me like a book, I cleared my mind of any emotion. In this state, I was basically a walking automaton, cut off from any feelings. It was not something I used often, and I never used it to control my guilt, I had been instructed that it would only make it worse when I dropped it. But, hopefully, he wouldn’t notice my new found revolution of him.

The thing that was now Prysm carried on a conversation about how he was to gather evidence on his friend and possibly follow him to the other conspirators. It belayed no regret that Du Pont was in trouble and must have seemed like it was just glad to have another terrorist put away.

When it left the TRC headquarters, it dropped the facade and ran into a back street. There I began to cry.........

After careful deliberation, I decided that there was no way on earth that I could ever possibly think of betraying my friend and teacher, so I decided it was time to disappear. I contacted my Sensi on a vid near my home. The smiling fatherly face looked back at me.

"Yes, boy, what do you wish?"

"I have to leave, the TRC have tried to recruit me to get to you."

"Then they can have me, I am old and they wont have me for long."

"Look, I don’t care how old you are, I am going to have to leave. I can’t frame you for a crime for them. You know I can’t. And, besides, they only want you to have an edge, and although they do cover anti-terrorist opps, I suspect that your help would go to the assassinations side of the operation. Look, I have to disappear. I know where I am going to go, I have a small sum of money that I can get a flight with, so long as I leave tonight."

"You think this is goodbye?"

"Yes."

"Well, I will see what I can do about that. I need to vanish, too. I can’t have the TRC bothering me all the time."

"Yeah, well, you always said you would like to see China again."

He smiled, "You will be seeing me."

The line went dead.

He didn’t even know where I was going. The old guy was something more than others. I expected to see him again soon. Even though we may be going to different countries.

It was a matter of minutes to book into a sub-orbital flight to America, the land where the sun shines. I had seen the trids and heard the talk, the place to be was Seattle and that’s where I intended to go. Losing my rights as a citizen may not be so bad. Well, It might be. But the amounts of money to be made in the shadow business was ment to be unparalleled.

Maybe I will get a break from the rain, I wondered.

3. Prysms and Rainbows.

The flight was murder, but about halfway I figured out they weren’t on to me yet. I had my suspicions about a few of the people in second class, the ones in suits, but I didn’t need to have them. I had used a fake ID to book my tickets and as far as they knew, I had just fallen off the face of the earth. Not that I really thought I would get away scott free, I had used their money to get the tickets and had about £40,000 of theirs in my pocket now. Not enough to get a new life, but enough to get started. They would send someone every now and again, just to complicate things for me, but I wasn’t exactly on the Most Wanted list.

I left the airport and flagged down a taxi.

"Hoi chummer, where’s your destination on this long road?" his accent hit me like a brick and I knew I was here.

"Well chummer, I was thinking about some place I could sleep for about a week or two. Nothing too fancy," My accent struck him like a brick, too and I could see his expression.

"What the DREK did you just say?"

"I said," I repeated more slowly, "A place to stay, you know, a hotel?"

"Ahhhhhhh, sure chummer, your lookin’ for a lil’ ole’ hidy hole."

"Aye, whatever you say."

I suddenly realised I had a small problem.

We pulled up in a small hotel in Renton, near Bellvue.

"Thanks chummer, how much do I owe you?"

I saw his expression, "Uhhhhhhh, that’ll be twenty New ones."

I assumed he ment nu Yen. I gave him a small tip and walked into my first home here. I saw the first room and hoped it would not be a permanent one......

It was my third day in this hell hole. I was in a cheap bar not too far from my hotel. It was just coming to the end of the night and the place was emptying. Just me, the barman and a lady on another table. I had finished off almost a bottle of Irish whiskey and I was feeling sorry for myself. I should have gone somewhere else. Anywhere else.

I was just about to get going when I saw three people enter the bar. One had high-chrome eyes, the other was a just about average height ork and the third had the cocky look about him that most mages had. I would have left, too, if I hadn’t seen a tear in the lady’s eye.

It was as if I had noticed her for the first time. She had red hair, like the lady’s of my homeland, and pale green eyes. She was pale as a sheet and had long, thin, delicate hands. I sat back and stayed a while. The barman had no such ideas.

The chrome guy walked over to her slowly and sat down. The others stayed back to watch.

After a few words, his hands became a blur as he slapped her. Her cheek went red.

"It was a bad idea coming in here to hide. Every bar closes after a while."

I didn’t know if it was just me, but I could have swore he hit a lady. I had learned a lot in Wales, one of them had been not to hit a lady. I had to step in.

"Excuse me sir, I couldn’t help but notice you have a problem with my friend here. Can I help you sort this out?"

"No chummer, this is personal."

"Oh, really, well, I am sure you can confide your problem with her in me, I have a very sympathetic ear."

Before anything had really happened, I heard a slapping noise and my cheek began to sting. I felt a welt rise above my tattoo. The chrome guy was standing in front of me now.

"I am sure you want to be somewhere else." It didn’t seem to be a question, more a statement.

"Look, I am sure you didn’t mean to hit me then, you just lost it for a second. If you say sorry, you can still walk out of here without any new scars."

I saw him tense and I swung backwards, just out of his reach. He swung for me and found nothing but thin air. I simply stepped in and helped him follow the course his hand was taking. He fell on his butt.

"Now, are you going to leave the lady be?"

His face twisted and he was on his feet without perceivably moving.

Oh drek.

He shifted into a neutral stance, not giving anything away.

I didn’t move.

"You can still say sorry."

He jumped at me and kicked out with his foot. It was too sloppy for the move I had seen last and I detected his feint. Instead of moving where he expected me to go, I moved in front of his kick and pulled his foot upwards.

This time his head hit the floor first.

He didn’t look too happy.

After regaining his feet, he launched a series of punches that, although well executed, my Atemi had found counters for five centuries ago. I estimated that he was using Sho To Kan Karate style on me, so I fell back a few paces and slipped into a diagonal position to him. The weakest spot in their training. From there it was a simple move to locate a nerve group on his neck and apply simple pressure. His pain sensors over-loaded and he fell to the floor, unconscious.

About then, I wished they used more tables as a fighting weapon in Japan five hundred years ago, because what I really needed was a suitable block for a high-speed one. I went sprawling.

The ork walked down the few steps to me as I picked myself up. I wished I had some armour as he looked like he had a whole world of hurt he would just love to show me. He, on the other hand, looked like he was the proud owner of an armour jacket. I had to use tactics.

He threw a punch for me that would have taken my head with it. I ducked under his, relatively, slow punch and came back with an uppercut that, by all rights, should have broken his jaw. Not very much effect. His bones must be laced. I stood back and we sized each other up.

He was almost my height and we had about the same bulk. I heard a Slicht sound as his spurs extended. Oh frag.

He slashed towards my neck unexpectedly and I dodged out of range. He was fast. Almost as fast as the Sam. I moved away from him again and closed my eyes. I felt him move to push an anodised steel blade through each of my eyes. I side-stepped out of the way and brought my knee up into his Solar plexus. I felt him go limp as all the air left his body. He retched and was sick all over the floor. Before I could knock him out, I felt an attack coming from another source.

The extreme stress and raise in blood pressure resulting from a mana attack is not nice to have after all that Whiskey. I joined the ork in being sick. Thinking he had an advantage, the mage went to channel a damaging manipulation spell from the sound of it.

I reached up onto an empty table and found what I was looking for. A steak knife went hurling through the air and imbedded it’s self in his belly. He keeled over and the Doc Wagon bracelet he was wearing started to squeal.

The woman grabbed me by the hair and forced me to look into her face.

"You are a very stupid person who is obviously not from around here," my face fell, "But I am still grateful, none the less. Look, do you need anything?"

"How about a glass of water?" I retched again. She smiled and went to get one.
I crawled over to the ork, who seemed to be just getting his head in order. I reached out and pressed his jaw so it cut off blood to his brain. He was unconscious within a very short time.

I took his old armour jacket off him and put it on. I also took the mage’s Narcote pistol and rifle, the Sam’s Ares Viper and Colt Manhunter and the ork’s sword and stun baton.

I drank the water that was offered to me and composed myself a bit.

"Why were they after you?"

"I am a fixer, I guess they blamed me for fragging them over, one of their team got killed getting out of a set up. They have already killed my guard. On the subject of business, do you have a fixer?"

"No, and I am on the market for a bit of work. I could also do with a bit of equipment."

"Sure chummer, here is my number. I am having a slow patch at the moment, so you had better look else where for a while. Oh yeah, by the way chummer, what’s your name?"

"Oh, it’s Prysm."

"Prism?"

"No, Prysm. As in Prysm O’Doole. Try to say it Pry-sum."

"Prism."

"No, I said,"

"OK, it’s Prism now, you need a street name anyways."

"Your the boss."

We talked for a while and I found out, to my amazement that we shared quite a few of the same tastes. Including women, apparently. Ruby, my new fixer, was lesbian. It didn’t really matter to me, but she told me she had allot of problems with the other runners she hired because of it.

And that’s how my fourth day in Seattle started. And I found my future looking all the brighter.

*********************************************************

A quick word from me.

Prysm is the love child of reading Celtic Double Cross one too many times and a lot of Caffeine. He is going to(hopefully) carry on having stories written about him till he gets his own life back. But, until then, he is in the shadows of Seattle and he is going to make a name for himself.

Thanks to Bill Shapland for this one, it’s a bit shorter than I expected it to be, but there’s more to come. I haven’t even met Topaz yet........