Arena One

Extremely Large Fight Arena | Abina De Beer, Arena One Owner | No Bias

Housing the popular Street Name Smackdown fights, the event only marks the beginning of near nightly competitive combat ranging from martial arts to big sweaty guys just beating each other shitless with clubs.  The arena is massive, hidden inside a carved out 15 story former office building, and can house nearly 5,000 spectators.  Since sometimes fights do involve flying objects (sherken fights turned out to be especially harmful to audience members) the audience is protected by dual mesh with a fence of translucent monoweave between them to (usually) obliterate the object, or at the very least slow it down.  Seating ranges from stadium on the lower levels, boxes and balconies 2 levels up, and then the ‘Cage’, a web of chain link that overlays the arena on the 3rd level that offer excellent overhead blow by blows.  (It is very important to remember the golden rule about viewing the fight from the Cage: If you drop something from the Cage, you get dropped from the Cage.)

The general nightly lineup consists of Street Name Smackdown at 11:00; General unranked fights at 12:00 (non-lethal); Championship matches at 1:00 (again, non-lethal).  In addition, after pretty much everybody has cleared out except for those who purchased expensive “exhibition” matches, 2:00 begins exhibition matches where the various competitors test out new techniques and new styles (Gun Kata is extremely popular, with gel rounds keeping things from getting out of hand.)

At 3:30, the arena is emptied and only those with tickets that make the cost of exhibition tickets look like peanuts are permitted to enter.  And at 4:00, the Blood Matches begin.  These involve the cream of the crop of what Arena One has to offer because people didn’t pay good money just to see somebody stabbed through the face, they paid good money to see an actual fight before somebody gets stabbed through the face.  Fighters can be paid upwards of 100k for a single fight, and while most medical expenses are covered, damage to, or need for, cyberware or bioware replacements or upgrades comes out of the fighter’s own pocket.

Much of the remainder of the building is dedicated to training facilities, with the exception of the 5th floor, which houses near hospital grade medical facilities, and the 6th and 7th floor, which hold luxury ‘apartments’ granted as a home away from home for the Arena’s best combatants.

Abina De Beer

Archetype: Elf Combat Arena Owner Decker

While most of the promotion and public relations for Arena One is handled by Mr. Teeth, Abina, tied into the functions and security of the facility nearly at all times, even sleeping while jacked in, controls everything else.  During combat, she watches from a luxury balcony (and through one way glass) ready to use the ‘sliver gun’, a small gun in the arena that operates with military accuracy, able to shoot an invisible, but potent, dart into a combatant to knock them out if she feels the ‘story’ (which she has never explained) needs it.

Happy Clean

Small Cleaners / Guy Happy, Owner / No Bias

Owned by the Happy family for over 30 years, happy clean boasts that it has never found a stain they couldn’t remove, which would be interesting if you weren’t completely fucking freaked out by the twisted, high cheek grins all of the employees have on their faces.  The basic rumor is that a mage brought in a garment with an ‘astral stain’, an event that really didn’t surprise Guy Happy, who studied the possibility and launched into a 4 hour exposé about how it ‘doesn’t count’.  The mage, pissed, released a curse on the family and their fellow employees so that, at least in one respect, they’ll actually “live up to their names”.  One can assume the grins are somewhat painful as the occasional tear will drip from their squinted eyes.

Aside from that, they’re pretty cool and almost all of the family members and employees have had various small scanners and magnifiers installed in cyber-fingers and cyber eyes that allow for the precise diagnosis of what a stain is, how long its been there, what flavor the jam was; Basically, anything.  In addition to being a favorite of runners, Happy Clean will also work with street level cops as an ‘unofficial’ forensics expert it they need the results right fucking now.

Guy Happy

Archetype: Human Cleaners Owner

Mr. Happy isn’t at all happy that he and his family and colleagues look so happy.  After hours he pours over downloads of books on curses and spells, looking for a way out.  The business, while still making a lot of profit (those forensic services ain’t free) blows nearly all of it on spells and potions and paying a fleet of private investigators to find the mage that cursed them in the first place.