have killed a 'normal' man by now.'
Lucky grunted at the man's racism. 'Dying's easy. Living with pricks like you around, that's the real challenge.'
The hatchet-faced man shifted in his seat but refused to meet Lucky's eyes. The dwarf stared at him for a moment, then turned back to the banker. 'So,' he said, 'do you want my money or not?'
'Why do you want to play?' the gunman said. 'I mean, you're going to lose, right? What's the point?'
'Because I want to tell you a story,' the dwarf said. 'And interrupting a game of cards is rude. '
The white-haired man nodded at the banker. The man reached out and scooped up the packet of bills. Without counting the money, he pulled 100,000 nuyen worth of chips from the tray in front of him and pushed them across the table toward the dwarf.
Lucky swept the chips into a pile in front of him. Then he looked each of the men-every one of whom hated him and anyone like him, he knew-and grinned.
'All right,' he said. 'Let's play.'
The hatchet-faced man dealt. Lucky spotted him slipping cards from the bottom of the deck as he went, but he didn't bother to say anything. He knew he was going to lose, after all. He expected it. The game meant nothing.
'So,' the white-haired man said. 'What's your story?'
'Yeah,' the too-handsome man with the gun still sitting in front of him said. 'You're about to pay us a lot of money to listen, so out with it.'
Lucky gathered in his cards and looked at them. They read 2, 3, 4, 5, 7. All of them were clubs, with the exception of the 7, which was a spade. He put the cards down in front of him and tossed a 1,000 nuyen chip into the center of the table.
'I wasn't always the unluckiest dwarf you'll ever meet. Well, I mean most people. I suspect idiots like you don't run into a whole lot of dwarves in your corporate boardrooms.
'I was one of the first dwarves ever born. When I came out of my momma, imagine what a surprise that must have been. At first they must have just thought I was a little small. Maybe just a bit behind the growth curve. By the time I got to school, though, they must have had their suspicions. I know when I finally went off to middle school, for sure, they had more than guesses that I was a, well-'
'Freak.' The man with the gun sneered at Lucky.
The dwarf shrugged it off. 'Maybe. Hell, probably. They even talked with some doctors about how to surgically lengthen my not-so-long bones.
'After they talked with enough specialists, though, they realized that they didn't have some kind of genetic anomaly on their hands, but a child in the vanguard of a new resurgence of an ancient race.'
Lucky held up his hands to stave off the scoffing.
'Save it. You think I'm a freak of nature, and I think you're a murderous bunch of assholes. Maybe we're both right, but that's not the point of the story. So, if you'll let me go on?'
The others looked to the white-haired man, who nodded his assent.
'Back in those days, there weren't a whole lot of things a dwarf could do. I didn't fancy joining the circus, thank you, so I had to forge a new destiny for myself. When I was eighteen, the computers all crashed, and my identity was lost. I took that as a sign and never registered with the rebooted systems. Instead, I slipped into the shadows, and I've never come out since.
'The year I turned twenty-eight, I was a hardcore shadowrunner. That was back in '39, back when it all went bad. I lost a lot of friends in the riots on the Night of Rage.'
Lucky stopped for a moment and gazed up at the spot where the Sears Tower had once stood. Although it had been gone for so long, it still felt like someone had cut off one of his limbs. When he got this close to it, it almost seemed like he could still feel it out there, teeming with thousands of lives.
He didn't bother drawing any cards. He just kept the ones he'd been dealt. Still, he called every bet and every raise.
'My parents worked downtown, right near the Sears Tower. They died the day it went down. I was somewhere off in Manhattan, still trying to help clean up, to make a difference after the riots.'
The banker threw down the winning hand and raked in the chips. The deal passed to the white-haired man, and the cards came sliding across the felt again. Lucky didn't even bother to look at his cards this time. He kept playing mechanically while he talked.
'As you might imagine, all that made me pretty mad. I was a real revolutionary for a while there. I cut off all contact with humans.
'As far as I was concerned, you guys were the enemy. A dead-end branch on the evolutionary path to the top of the food chain. If I'd have had my way, I'd have pushed all the resurgent races into havens on the West Coast and then nuked the rest of the continent until it was a sheet of glowing, green glass.'
Lucky paused for a moment to relish the looks on the faces of the men staring at him. They were used to being the haters, not the hated, and the swap in positions discomforted them.
'Instead, after a lot of soul searching and no little amount of beer, I decided to switch tactics. Instead of doing runs for anyone with enough credits to spare, I swore I would only take on contracts for missions that would help the resurgents and do something to keep disasters like the Sears Tower from ever happening again.
'I specialized in curses.'
The breath in the white-haired man's plastic lungs caught. Lucky was sure he was the only one who noticed, as it came at the end of another hand. The gunman won this time, and after raking in his winnings he started to deal as well.
'Magic came back along with the metahumans, as I'm sure pisses every one of you off to this day. You probably think the only kind of magic is eeeevil magic, but you're as wrong about that as you are about everything else.
'Magic is a tool. It doesn't tell you how to use it. You just pick it up and do what comes naturally.
'If you have a chainsaw, for instance, you might start knocking down trees. Paul Bunyan might hate the chainsaw, but every other lumberjack around loves it.
'If you decide to use it for something more, ah, antisocial, though-like knocking off heads instead-then you're the evil one. The murderous urges come from inside you. The chainsaw is innocent.'
The gunman shook his head. 'But that's not true. Magic doesn't work that way. You just mentioned curses.'
'Yes,' the banker chipped in. 'Aren't you supposed to be cursed?'
Lucky tapped his temple with a thick index finger. 'Exactly,' he said. 'Magic can be bad, just like people can be bad. Curses are bad, but they're not the worst.'
The dwarf called the bet and raised it again. He waited for play to continue, but the hatchet-faced man held up his hand for it to stop.
'What is it then?'
'What?'
'The worst sort of magic. Does it have anything to do with something that causes perfectly normal women to give birth to genetic freaks?'
'Do you know to keep an asshole in suspense?'
The man shook his head.
'I'll tell you later. Now see that raise or fold.'
The man tossed in his chips, and Lucky began speaking again.
'I got sent on one of my last missions back in '45. I wound up at a secret base up in northern Michigan, near Sioux St. Marie. The scientists there had located a cursed artifact of some sort or another and were trying to weaponize it.'
The gunman scoffed. 'Are you telling me that some of those damned elves were trying to figure out a way to throw the evil eye at a whole city at once?'
Lucky waited for the man to stop chuckling at himself. Then he started in.
'Ever read The Lord of the Rings?' he asked.
The gunman shrugged and shook his head. The hatchet-faced man and the banker followed suit. Only the white-haired man seemed prepared to admit he'd ever even heard of the books.
