Caliban's mind was reeling from all the information and things that were going on. It wasn't too much, but it was more than he was used to, staying mostly at home, working on his art.

Blank was a very take-charge sorta guy - he respected him for that, and he seemed to treat Caliban as an equal, which was... well, unexpected, but cool. Wraith, well, he had the personality of a wet pancake, but that tended to be the case with those who lived in the Matrix. Caliban never quite got the whole unreality thing or whatever it was called.

Danger Mouse... his eyes flickered to the little girl...woman... she seemed to be so harmless and yet there was an underlying edge to her. He liked her most of all, but he wasn't even sure why. And now he was following her to some strange place, and more bizarrely, he was going to let her come to his place and then, on top of that, summon a spirit there?

Yeah, this was definitely more than he was used to.

With a big sigh, he followed macha to Zhiyi's place...whatever that was.

Before they left the Lan Kwai macha summoned a Watcher spirit and sent it off to Zhiyi's place with instructions to let the old decker know his new friend wei lao was coming to see him.

Then macha took them north, back across the bay and into Kowloon City.

Not the walled city, of course -- no one in their right mind went into that place after dark. Even "crazy macha" wasn't that crazy. As they moved he noticed her sharp eyes were scanning her surroundings, picking out what looked like meaningless scrawls or partially completed graffiti as he might pick out roadsigns and landmarks. Only when they encountered knots of people did she cease this, casting her eyes down to the sidewalk below her shuffling feat until they'd gotten clear. Then her head would come back up, she'd find the next obscure marking and they'd turn, or take a stairwell up to the rooftops or slide underground through tunnels and viaducts unknown to most of the city's denizens. They boarded public transports and ground cars and eventually found their way to where macha said they needed to go.

It probably took them longer than it could have -- but macha was navigating by her reality, the reality of a Hong Kong City urban shaman, not the endless virtual tags, signs and maps which were in her opinion good for nothing but getting gweilo lost, or maybe killed.

Zhiyi lived in a sprawling tenement not far from Yau Tsim Mong. Desperation kept a polite face in this part of Kowloon, but like most places in Hong Kong that didn't glitter with nuyen, it was only a matter of time until things were going to get ugly. Caliban's little guide headed up the stairwell, concrete and as dank-smelling as the inside of an old toilet,

Her friend Yuan Zhiyi was an old man whose ancestry had spanned most of the Pacific Rim. He was also a decker, mostly retired, but who'd been around the Matrix a long time. Their guanxi connection wasn't rock solid but he'd helped her get that fake SIN last year, the good one not the cheap crap she'd jacked years before. Cheap SIN let you pay your rent, if you had rent to pay -- more expensive SIN gave better access, and sometimes better access was something everyone needed. In return she hooked him up with chummers who needed Matrix access without no loose ends and who could pay.

macha didn't need net access, but Zhiyi had printers and lip glue. He'd use the former to give her images she could show to the spirits she summoned; he'd use the latter to keep his knowledge of this to himself.

She keyed her commlink on the way up the stairs and sent him a quick instant message, rolling her eyes when the "User not found" icon came back. It didn't stop her, she got those all the time, she invited Caliban into the link, then pulled the message back up and told it to resend. This time it did so most politely. In another moment, Zhiyi's avatar (a fat Buddha licking a lollipop) came up in her field of vision, which gave her a moment of extreme dizziness. Instead of cursing or scolding him (they weren't on those kinds of terms), macha sent a generic avatar back which bowed deeply. After a moment, so did Zhiyi's.

"Greetings, wei lao. What brings my good friend to my home this evening?" He wanted to know, but phrased it politely enough.

"Just bring new friend, come to see, maybe talk about a print job," she replied, leaning on Caliban a bit until the vertigo passed. "Can come in?"

Caliban, having joined the link when invited, was surprised at the physical contact; most people keep a bit more distance from him. This near-stranger apparently was not like most people.

Zhiyi's avatar bowed again. "My friend and her friend are always welcome," he replied. The Buddha image disappeared, and macha heaved a sigh of relief and reswallowed her stomach.

"Sorry," she told Caliban abruptly as she put her weight back on her own feet. "Always make me dizzy, that unreal stuff. You make nice with Zhiyi, show good face, maybe he be part of your gwanxi network too. Good decker always good to know."

She led the remainder of the way to his door, which was as dingy and unremarkable as the rest they'd passed. They could smell the pipe tobacco smoke long before they got there, which made macha wrinkle her nose even though it definitely smelled better than the aroma of stale vomit in the hallway. "Zhiyi," she coughed, opening the door slowly. "You still alive in here or what?"

Caliban's nose screwed up at the tobacco smell. Oh, well, it could be worse... He looked around Zhiyi's place, trying to get an idea of what sort of situation he was finding himself in. I wonder if we should've gotten my gun first.

Zhiyi, like many men who lived alone, had a common hobby: humming loudly. He sang songs to himself at all times, bawdy tunes that rolled from barely the back of his throat, loud enough for him to hear but not loud enough to be heard through his sometimes-paper-thin walls. He maintained his humming long after Caliban and Dangermouse had entered; even so far as to hum as he took his seat on the lowered couch, and tried to cross his legs before him.

He looked, in a lot of ways, like his avatar. He had a smooth, round belly that stuck out from under a shirt that was emblazoned with some old cartoon character. His pants were two sizes too small, at least, and only came down to his calves. The bottoms of his feet were sooty, and small debris like the corners of wrappers or paperclips seemed permanently attached.

Zhiyi pulled off his pipe, hummed on the hold, and then let the smoke curl out of his mouth.

"Prosperous day, give thanks," he hummed a bit more. He exhaled again, and then turned his attention to his company.

"I'd offer you something to drink, but I don't have anything. So instead, we should get down to business. What would you like?"

macha bobbed a bow, offering "face" to her host. Which of them was higher in their little gwanxi association was really debatable but an HKC shaman treated everyone as if they were superior -- part of that "being of service" attitude. "Hi Zhiyi, just a print job, no trouble," she began in her usual monotone.

She was about to go on when she noticed their host glancing up at Caliban, again and again. Protocol had never been one of her notable attributes, but she'd gotten better in the past couple of years. "Sorry. Zhiyi, this Caliban, new chummer, we working for a Johnson of course. Caliban, this Yuan Zhiyi, like I told you. He old Matrix hand, know more about that stuff than almost anyone."

Greasing the wheels in your gwanxi network never, never hurt.

Nodding as the introductions were made, Caliban said, "A pleasure, sir." Polite, terse. Wonder how long we're going to be here, he thought as he looked around. Most places weren't built with a troll's comfort in mind.

Zhiyi offered a bob of his head, a terse little motion so slight, it could've been mistaken for a twitch, or as if he were trying to shoo some fly from atop his pate. It was simple, but it served.

His eyes focused, and he raised his fingers to an ethereal keyboard. He'd logged on. Quick system boot up, digital overlay synapses using only the slightest motions of his body to indicate his actions. It was a slick, cutting edge system, and it was probably in every third apartment in this region. Hackers in Hong Kong weren't as rare as they were everywhere else.

"Print jobs are simple enough. Details?" he asked.

"You pull them off my commlink," macha said, handing it to him. Zhiyi knew about her troubles with electronics, after all. It's why'd he'd recommended the unit she eventually bought. "And Johnson say don't go looking for this guy in the Matrix, okay? He dangerous and it not your job, Zhiyi." Then she grinned, suddenly. "If you recognize him though, I try to make it worth your while to tell me what you know."

Zhiyi smiled, nodded, and - with some effort - stood. He took the stick and walked over to a maelstrom of effects and blinking gadgets. They seemed to thrum and whiz at the prospect of new data, lights blinking and ports opening. He slipped the port into one such device, hit a button, and selected print. Glossy photographs started to slide out.

He watched each as it was fed out, only to be covered by the next.

"Handsome fella, I guess. Can't say I recognize him, but I will say this. That port in his head," he pointed, showing the glossy copper ring on the side of their target's temple. "That's old school. They don't make them like that anymore. He's been plugged in for a long time. Probably hurts his head, yeah? The old ports give ya a nice headache after a while."

"So what reasons would a person have to not upgrade," Caliban finds himself wondering out loud.

"On the surface, none. New tech doesn't talk to old tech as well as it should. But you always have your die hards, who don't want to upgrade. There's other reasons, though. These things are harder to track. They don't have a signal unless they're plugged in. There isn't that sensation of permanently being plugged in.

"I've heard a couple of chip-heads insist that the old connections give a different buzz on BTL, but I bet that's just fuzz talk, yeah?"

"Yeah, I bet you're right," Caliban nodded as he agreed, though he really wasn't sure at all. Hell, he wasn't sure what fuzz-talk was, for that matter. He glanced at macha, to see if she was more on board than he was.

She didn't quite meet his eyes, but she did shrug, obviously as clueless as he was. "So he not change out his copper port for newer one, make him harder to track, okay. Guy like that going to be in chronic pain if he really a chiphead, like Johnson said," she said, turning to glance at Caliban again. "Can talk to Wraith? Tell him what Zhiyi says -- may help."

Caliban nodded, and looked to Zhiyi, "Excuse me a moment." He stepped to a corner of the room, or somewhere equally 'private', to make the call to Wraith, to let him know what they'd learned.

macha stood up from her squat and shuffled over to stand beside the decker. "Thank you, Zhiyi," she told him. "What can I do to make my friend's life easier?"

It was one of those "face" things -- you never spoke of money or payment to those in your gwanxi network, even if money was always the bottom line in your relationship. Always, to preserve face, transactions were phrased indirectly. Gweilo always thought it took too much time, and maybe it did -- but in Hong Kong, it was how such things were done.

Zhiyi said little or nothing, as he handed the print out of the photograph to macha. He only smiled, and offered a slight, polite bow.

"One can never tell what the future holds. Perhaps, in time, I'll be able to answer that question better."

macha bobbed an awkward half-bow, approximating gratitude though Zhiyi likely knew she didn't really understand what that emotion was. "Okay Zhiyi, you know how to find me. We go now, see if we can find this guy. Hey Caliban -- you talk to Wraith yet?"

(OOC: PRESUMING SUCCESSFULLY CONTACTED?) Caliban nods the affirmative, "He knows what we think we know."