One Year Later

The Story So Far: If the PLAYER is reading this, they chose to side with the villain in Dragonfall’s climax. As a result, the Flux-State of anarchist Berlin is destroyed, and the world’s entire dragon population is exterminated.

This interactive lore entry is one of many that serve to catch the player up on the unintended consequences of their decision.

COMPUTER: >>THREAT FILE: ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES<<

>>EC_01 // 2055-07-10 / BACKGROUND COUNT

>>EC_02 // 2055-09-01 / [VID] CRIME WAVE

>>EC_03 // 2055-10-10 / PARAZOOLOGICAL THREATS

PLAYER: [Open the entry labeled “Background Count.”]

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: GLOBAL BACKGROUND COUNT RISING

July 10, 2055

Dr. Jake Hansen is one of the world’s foremost experts in mana dynamics. He’s taken a break from his own research to travel to my lab. Since he arrived, he’s spent the better part of a day poring over reams of data that my team collected.

Straightening, he looks me in the eye, and his normally jovial expression has turned grim. “We’re in trouble, Liz,” he says.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: Dr. Hansen’s proclamation confirms what I already know. Still, I wince.

I was hoping he’d find something to prove me wrong.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: To explain why we’re in trouble, I’ll first have to introduce a piece of metamagical terminology to you: “background count.”

In hermetic theory circles, the term “background count” refers to the intensity of magical saturation in a location. A rating of 0 is neutral, and as the amount of concentrated mana in a location increases, the scale goes up.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: Outside of freak mana storms, the highest background counts ever recorded have come from places like Hiroshima and Auschwitz, which have been holding steady at a rate of 5 for as long as they’ve been measured.

The conventional wisdom has always been that extraordinary circumstances create strong background counts. Incidents of great physical or emotional turmoil, be they positive or negative, can warp the magical environment of a place and cause its background count to rise.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: But in recent months, my lab has recorded a disturbing trend: a steady, *global* increase in the world’s background count. This has been observed in every location we’ve measured, from Germany to the Antarctic.

Locations that used to be neutral now carry a measurable background count of 1-2. And those high-count locations, like Hiroshima and Auschwitz? They’ve exploded into full-fledged mana storms.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: And this brings me back to the trouble that we’re all in—though that term might be underselling it a bit.

“Deep shit” is probably closer to the mark.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: The higher the world’s background count rises, the less predictably magic will behave. The spells and rituals that we all rely on are already beginning to fail us.

If we do nothing, it is conceivable—maybe even probable—that magic will become too dangerous to use within our lifetime. And if we can no longer use magic, it will in turn become impossible for us to solve the problem.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: Back in my lab, Dr. Hansen is still staring.

“You need to get the word out about this, Liz,” he tells me. “I’ll back you. The community needs to know.”

He’s right, of course. We, as a community, need to pool our resources and find a way to reverse this trend. And we need to do it quickly.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: If we do nothing, we might soon find ourselves outpaced by a rapidly changing magical environment, unable to adapt to the world as it changes around us.

“In trouble,” indeed.

>>Dr. Elizabeth Alder

PLAYER: [Open the entry labeled “Parazoological Threats.”]

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: PARAZOOLOGICAL THREATS: THE RISING TIDE

October 10, 2055

I’m standing in the laboratory of Dr. Jacob Okinyi, head zoologist at the Institute of Primate Research in Karen, Kenya.

Strapped to a reinforced examination table is a creature unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The thing is approximately the size and shape of a gibbon, but it has six mouths arranged in a ring around a pale, grub-like head. It’s disgusting.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: Dr. Okinyi sees my reaction, and he laughs. “What you see now is nothing,” he tells me. “When it was alive, it killed six men—ripped the faces and genitals off of two, and bathed the other four in some kind of caustic fluid. And all the while, it was laughing.”

“Laughing?” I ask. “Like, hyena-laughing?”

“No. It was laughing like a man.”

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: He must see my brow furrow, because he continues on.

“This was not a simple animal, Dr. Alder. It acted with *purpose* when it killed those men, and the only surviving witness tells me that it grew fat on their screams.”

Sure enough, the creature’s belly does look distended. I know that the thing is dead, but that doesn’t stop me from edging away.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: Dr. Okinyi goes on to tell me that many similar creatures had been captured throughout the jungles of Nairobi—monkey-like things with bizarre mutations and vicious temperaments. But each has been different enough from the others to defy classification; this one had a cluster of eyes and an extra set of legs, while that one had a coat of quills and the rasping mouth of a lamprey.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: “The emergence of magic some forty years ago put a new wrinkle into biological field work,” Dr. Okinyi tells me. “New species are being discovered all the time. But this… this is something different.”

“These creatures that have been popping up recently fall outside of any meaningful system of classification. And what’s more, I have conducted enough autopsies on them to know that they do not belong here.”

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: I press him for clarification on that point. “What I mean to tell you is that their internal anatomy is all wrong. It doesn’t even make sense,” he explains. “These creatures could not exist were it not for magic. And six months ago, I would have told you that they could not exist at all.”

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: The story is the same across the globe. Strange creatures of myriad shapes and descriptions appearing out of nowhere, acting with intelligence and malice.

Killing for the pleasure of it.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: When comparing the results of my own magical research to Dr. Okinyi’s observations, an unsettling picture begins to emerge. As I reported in the last edition of SMQ, the magical background count of the world is rising. And the more mana that saturates our environment, the more of these strange creatures we see.

These things—whatever they are—are multiplying. And they’re getting bigger.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: If we as a community fail to find a solution to this problem, we’ll have much bigger things to worry about than our ability to practice magic.

The ecosystem of our planet is changing around us. The one-way flow of mana into our world is making the Earth less and less suitable for human habitation, and more and more suitable for the horrors that are invading our world.

STREET MAGIC QUARTERLY: The clock is ticking, people. We are running out of time.

>>Dr. Elizabeth Alder

—”One Year Later,” Shadowrun: Dragonfall—Director’s Cut