Future Shock: Chapter One-History [Date: 13 Years - P.B.]

   At age sixteen, Hana Searcy’s alter ego Jade ruled the streets. An industrious young runaway, she had built a reputation as a guru of sorts to the games, a barbaric blood
sport whose sole purpose for existing was to entertain and amuse the overly rich and overly bored patrons of the city. New York City. Not that she’d ever participated in the
games, she was far too petite and far too fragile for that. She began her career by betting on the competitions, getting to know each contestant personally, discovering
thier individual strengths and weaknesses, therefore predicting the outcome accurately eight times out of ten. When she’d earned enough money, she started to sponser
warriors that showed unusual amounts of promise, donating money towards training and equipment in return for a substantial cut of thier winnings. The whole thing was
very illegal and VERY profitable.

As Jade, she was something of a gothic geisha. She used make-up to enhance her naturally pale porceline-like complexion and a thick layer of black eyeliner drawn to
points at the corners of each of her lovely almond shaped eyes to give her more of an ‘otherworldly’ appearence. She painted her thin, graceful mouth dark purple, as well as
her nails, and sported just above her chin and below her bottom lip a single shining pierced stud. Her straight, shoulder length auburn hair appeared almost back when she
brushed her styling gunk in creating long, thin, stiffened whisps that fell before her beautiful face and dark, deep eyes like an ethereal veil. Her wardrobe as well was
something to behold, kind of a cross between a futuristic raver girl and a new age prophet, all in black of course.

Hana, on the other hand, was a completely different person. Plain, unassuming yet no less stunning in her own way. This simple, streetwise girl was the person that nineteen year old Richard B. Riddick fell in love with.

Riddick was like a thousand other street kids, young, lost, jaded and trigger happy. He’d arrived in New York only recently. Desperate to escape the tyrany and tragedy of
his own life he wandered aimlessly from place to place, sometimes off planet, sometimes not, hoping to find relief from his troubled history. He took a job running
errands and doing odd jobs for a local scumbag slumlord. One particular ‘odd job’ included a run to Shea Stadium to ‘eliminate’ a certain contestan in the games. One of
Jade’s contestants. She caught him in the act but did nothing to stop him. Instead of blowing the whistle, instead of calling the cops, she’d stood back and let him do what he was there to do, saying afterwards, “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m not supposed to be here either. You wouldn’t be interested in a position as my personal bodygaurd would you?” Riddick accepted on the spot. He was tired of sleeping on the street, tired
of scraping together just enough money for one meal everyday and Jade was promising
room and board.

He moved into her loft in the abandoned and possibly condemed building she shared with about forty or fifty other children of the streets in the old part of the City, and rather rapidly the relationship between the two of them became something other than professional. They were two lost souls looking for comfort, for consolation from the
harsh world around them. It could only end badly.

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