A breath of fresh air, as Moriko Tendou stares out into the cityscape, her hair freshly dyed back to green.  Inside the apartment itself, there's the sounds of a party.  Carter and Paperbunny, drinking and eating merrily, enjoying the spark of a successful job.  Maybe it'd be a bit smarter for everyone to lay low, and hell, she's going to, but tonight?  It's nice just to enjoy the wind on her hair, the taste of nice fresh Guava juice, the scent of rain.  It's not-so-acid-y, today.

It's enough to make one recollect.  It seems like so long ago, that she was a scared punk on her first run, in the middle of a Pullayup forest, running into a hail of gunfire to save another runner from the army of thugs and punks they had ambushed.  The first time she met Galilee, her first friend in the shadows, her first run.  Ingram smartguns.  All that for Stuffer Shack submachine guns.  It seems petty, even now, but pettiness is common in the Shadows, and the yen's still good.

She'd thought of the heist, even then.  Make some contacts, steal some shit, flip it.  At the time, she'd aimed way lower.  Drugs from a drug lab, easy to flip and hard to trace.  Put some shitheads out of business, score some combat drugs.  Not even two runs after that, she met Blume - the strange rich fellow in the tower in Downtown, going from gang warfare to corporate warfare.  Her new van, fancier than anything she'd ever driven even with the yakuza.  Meeting Lotus, even if Moriko didn't know that one day, they'd be part of the same magical covenant.

Seeing Helena, AKA Carter, back from the dead, was what she remembered most strongly.  Her greatest failure, the strongest object lesson of why Moriko couldn't have friends or stability, back on her feet, as if to say, 'Don't let me stop you!'  And she even went on that run, with the spider-tank.  Spider-tank!

That should have been the first hint.  That everything was going crazy.  That there'd be runs killing Toxic Mages, meeting people like Geodesic and Serena, reliable senpai with hidden depths.  That there'd be runs bombing corporate lobbies, where she met Grimoire, the oddest decker she'd grown to trust, and Bogle, the handsome older man she still kinda pined for.

The real two suicide runs she remembered from that time came almost one right after the other after that - fighting strange cyber-men in a space blimp that required sneaking onboard with a high end aircraft piloted by Turnabout, who must have been one of the best pilots she'd ever met, the ever-popular Auto, Wizlord, and once more, Grimoire.  She couldn't believe she got out of that mess alive - hell, she was barely functional on the jet flight back.  And then, right after that stratosphere boarding madness, there was a goddamn dragon.

A dragon.

A DRAGON.

Moriko shudders, drinking more of her guava juice.  She'd rather not remember that, or the haunting horror that followed her.  She'd rather remember the friends she made there.  Makara, Sauce, even that weirdo Tengu, fully sealing her friendship with Grimoire.  And the runs that came after.  Helping out Jacque, the plant spirits, those kids in the Orc Underground,