CORPSE//WORK: Throwing Shade

In Death City, the shade is everywhere.

Sometimes you see them smoking by a noodle stand, translucent elbow resting on the counter. Sometimes they argue with someone only they can see. Sometimes they’re screaming—words swallowed by gunfire, their incorporeal body shredded clean through by bullets that do not harm them, because they were not intended for them.

And sometimes, they’re just watching.
Quiet. Soft-edged. Waiting for something that isn’t coming back.

Miss Reliah

What life do you choose? RIGGED, or a life in the Shade?

Tobias Kwan

---

WHAT IS A SHADE?

A shade is someone who has died too many times without enough to hold them here.

No memories remaining that connect them to their pre-death life.
Either by doing so willingly, through rigorous cleansing of a parasitic RIG, or by a stroke of good//bad luck.

This means nothing to turn to obol's.
And with no use for them either: What value does another's memory hold? What the hell is an Obol?
 
I know, I know. I still need to explain how Obols work. But that's for another post. The market one. 
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Sign in blood
Name here
ID. Not the one stored on your phone.
The one stored in the very DNA of your being.
... What if Crypto was tied to your soul?
Your net-worth a function of the names you reap
And the misery you sow
Just so you can keep yourself in the market

Not for shades.
They've rejected it.
Market, Memory, Soul.
Gone the way that the ancient greeks did upon death.
Maybe Death City was once Elysium, and Styx was once Lethe?

...  But one thing is fore sure, without memories their form then loses coherence.

It takes on a different substantiality: Also in the Market, vis-á-vis the lack of Obols.
They cannot make contracts. There is nothing to form a RIG: Their presence is worth nothing, can no longer be milked for currency, for labour, for anything. And therefore, not many will hire a shade. 

To the elite, the shades are nothing but faded shadows. Walking heresies that they can do nothing to quell. What the market would consider environmental damage or clutter. 

To most, they are unseen. Not invisible, rather: filtered away by eyes tuned to see threat and value.
To violence, they are unharmed. It is only possible to harm a shade when it intents to harm you or after it has done so. With that intent comes again a limited corporeality.
To each other—and to those who love them—they are visible, felt, and realer than real.

Jason Shawn Alexander

You become a shade when you stop trading your soul for survival, and start living.

---

The Laws of a shade

Shades can kill.
They are not pacifists.
They are just unseen—until they aren’t.

To lift a weapon is to declare a stake.
To hold a gun is to enter intention’s gravity.

And the moment you do—

You are perceived.
You become real again.
You become a target.

It does not matter if the shot was righteous.
It does not matter if you fired in love, in grief, in self-defense.
It does not matter if you have pulled the trigger yet.
Once you act, the machine of death spins to face you.

And a shade who becomes corporeal can be killed like anyone else—
but without rig, without shield, without contract clause, it is much-much easier to do so.
It is just yet another dip in the river.

Some accept this.
Some choose it anyway.
After all, death just means crawling out of the river again, as light as they first did when they chose to let go.

They say you can always spot a shade who’s planning something.
Their shape is just a little clearer.
Their eyes are just a little darker.
Their shadow pulls toward the nearest gun.

Written in rules:

A shade is incorporeal to all, unless:

• They intend harm

• They brandish a weapon of death

• They face someone they have harmed since their last return from the river

With intent, comes gravity. With violence, comes weight. They slip into the world again—real, and thus killable.

To Lift a Gun Is to Become Real

The moment a shade draws a weapon or chooses violence, they become to all:

• Corporeal

• Visible

• Killable

No contract protects them. No rig shields them.
The Market’s machine recognizes them again—as a threat.
And it bears down.

Fragile, and Free

A shade is always if following my system

• Bloodied
• Injured

What this means is: they die easy.
But also: they die often, and without shame.
Dying does not trap them. It frees them again.
After each death, the shade can re-enter the situation. They may do so immediately once since the last dip they have had in the river Styx. Otherwise, it is right after the next death, or after the current conflict ends. This is only applicable if there is a conflict.

Unbound, But Never Far

A shade is never bound to the scene.

• If any player wants them near, If the shade has ire, or if they have left a meaningful memento at the place they may enter.

• Their body is maybe summoned, maybe already there. Just soft-edged. Overlooked.

Let them flicker at the edges. Let them arrive like a traumatic memory: sudden, sharp, inevitable.

Ire, and the Thread of Vengeance

Every kill may braid a new thread of ire between killer and shade.

If a shade kills, or is killed, either side may invoke:

• Mark a bond of ire with the other.

• Use it to speak across death and space, or ignore the next unwanted consequence from the other (be that harm, insult, or demand) or have both feel the tether of ire. The invocation is two way.

Ire is not hate. It is the unfinished. It is memory’s snag: How many uses are there? Until neither dare invoke it. Until one take a dip in the river. It is not payment, but may be cleansed along with it-

Or until the Shade deems their vengeance true. Something that makes them them. Vengeance becomes memory, and they are no longer a shade. It beceomes a central tether then, a scar. It should mark the sheet. Define who they are. The one true memory that again gave them materiality.

Haunting, Possession, and Hex

A shade may haunt a place, object, or person—declaring how they haunt and what the nature is of the haunt - Cold sorrow, Fiery Hatred, A needle-like pain in the ear, screaming death. It must be based on something on the shades character sheet.

To haunt someone directly, the shade must be in contact with the other through one sense (sight - the entire targets body should be seen, sound - be heard clearly, touch firmly.

A haunted object feels haunted, but coming into contact with it will give the shade an opportunity to affect them:

Anyone haunte may suffer an additional escalation for opportunity or each moment they are in contact with the shade.

The shade remains real to the haunted until the hex breaks.

A shade may also possess someone:

• The unconscious (until they wake, then it becomes unwilling)
  

• The Unwilling (contested, each may take actions It is a fight for both to take control or maintain it. It can be battle, or a form of trade, leverage. I won't do this if you don't do this.)

• The willing (as symbiosis)

Together, they may:

• Share body and armaments

• Act separately or in tandem

• Suffer harm for one another

Let it feel like intimacy. Let it feel like a shared breath.

Wounds, healing, blessings.

Shades heal only by entering the river.
Until then: every wound lingers. Every bruise tells a story. 
The limp never heals.
Every blessing continues on too.
But on entering the river, all disappears.
And so too does the memory of even their last post-death life - blurring slightly.
The shade gets to say what one thing they keep.
The rest is taken by Her

This is not a penalty. It is weight. It is poetry of choice.
It is also not total: A shade will know their lovers, their enemies, their friends and foes.
But the specifics of their last life is only half a jig-saw.
But ultimately:

Let the player decide what it means to carry their damage and what it means to let it go.

Ania Swiatlowska

THE LITTLE WAY

Some people choose to fall.

They walk into Her and offer everything.
Memory. Vengeance. Reckoning.
The dream of becoming whole again.
All their memories, their obols are taken by the river. Erase them from your sheet - they may be freely given to those dear to you. 
All their memory threads are taken by the river. Erase them from your sheet.
Their rig falls apart. Erase it from your sheet.

And they come back quieter. Not empty. Not broken.
Just done.

“I would rather tend this street stall than sell another death.”

“I don’t need to remember their name. I remember the shape of their smile. And to wake up beside them.”

“Let the rigged ones run. I’ll stay here. I’ll stay. Right where I am.”

In Death City, that kind of refusal is heresy.
Which is why they’re invisible.
And why they’re holy. 

THE SHADE IN THE SHOOTOUT

You’re standing by your noodle cart. Your rigless hands work fast, flipping dumplings with a cracked spatula.

Then—gunfire.

The chrome assassin is here again, chasing a quarry with a bounty and a half-paid contract. The rigged-up death machines are shredding walls and igniting fuel lines.

Your stall explodes.
You do not.

Because you were not the target.
Because you don’t exist in that economy anymore.

Your body becomes smoke under the bullets.
You scream—more shock than any real pain—but the sound bends sideways, unheard by the 'living'.
The tumult passes. 
You pick up the pieces of porcelain, right the flipped countertop.
Put on the bunsen-burner, hadean fumes licking up the pan.
Then you keep cooking. Because someone will want noodles again.
And the river will bring them back, eventually.

THREADS OF MEMORY

To some operatives, it just gets too heavy.

Too many jobs taking names they tried not to learn.
Too many rig upgrades that felt like bolting grief in the shape of steel onto spine.
Too many returns from the river—soaked and hollow,
crying without knowing why
Too many obols wrested from dying hands just so they can pay off the last time their own flame fucking sputtered out. 
Too much fucking in between, just to forget without forgetting.
Too many fucking deaths.
And too little living.

One day, they stop waiting for the other to crawl back from Styx.
They stop waiting for the next mission.

They start waiting for each other.
At the river’s mouth.
At the edge of Her, beneath the humming lights of Death City.

Two rigged bodies lean into the current.
The bone-machines still cling to their backs—shining, brutal, sacred—
but they are loosening now.
Coming apart.

No response—
just the press of one chest to the other.
Legs folding beneath knees.
Bodies folding into each other.

The tide rises.

They let go.
Together.

They let Her kiss laver them.
Drown them.
Not to forget the pain—
but to stop carrying it like debt.

Their rigs crack and sink:
Unbreakable death-stuff dissolving like paper.
The past unspooling like thread.

They find home in soft bodies
no longer dressed for war.

They rise. Lighter.

And in the quiet—
arms slung around one another, drunk for the first time on the now in what seems like eons—
they slink back.

Eyes vacant, but full.
Not hollow. Overflowing.

They stumble into an abandoned studio.
And fall asleep.

They cook.
They fuck.
They sleep again.

They dream of nothing.
And it is enough.

If some asshole comes after them—
well.
The gun’s still there. It still remembers how to sing.

And if they die again?
They’ll just wake in the river, coughing laughter and pain
Without the past tearing at them
and shamble hand in hand back to their apartment.
Still wet.
Still in love.
Still unbothered.

Because the war is over, for them.
They chose rice and pomegranates, not excess.
They chose less, but now.
They chose one another.
And that choice they can keep making.

NicoSaba