Name: [???]
Origin: Civil Servant
Traits: Hard Shell, Stoic
Abilities: Cool +1, Clever +1, Tough +2, Quick +2
Defenses: Cool 9, Clever 8, Tough 13, Quick 11
Burden: 2
Occupation: Soldier 2 (first), Street Fighter 1
Talents: For The Cause, Cool Head, Martial Arts
Specialties: Tough Defense (+3), Detective (+2), Way of the Fist (+2), Black Ops (+1), Bonsai (+1), Fishing (+1), Crossfit (+1)
Assets: Badge, Police radio earpiece
Augments: “Skywalker” model forearm (Combat Augments, +1 to Way of the Fist)

Initiative: [3, 3] + 2 = 8
First attack: This asshole's going to try and grab you: [4,2 + 2 (Tough) + 2 (Fist)] = 10.

There were bugs in the light fixtures, two of them. Your choice what you did with them before the hammer went down - if you did anything, yet.

The other - You’ll be able to find Marco’s tossed medication in the bathroom, somewhere other than where they’re supposed to be. You can also find a thumbdrive in the bedroom, taped to the back of the headboard. You don’t even need to finish the fight to find them.

It all started with an attempt at fad diets.

Listen, that in itself is worth saying, because most attempts to radically modify biology started with farm animals. The earliest biopunks were radical bodybuilders messing around with the implants and augments originally meant for beef stock. A 5% fatality rate is unacceptable for legitimate human use, but well within acceptable loss margins for agricultural purposes. And on the black market, well within tolerance for the kind of bodybuilder that would otherwise turn to synthol. A lot of what would become the legitimate furry movement built off this early foundation.

The go-green movement, though, in all its names? That one’s uniquely a human vanity project from the inception. Usually it’s a misunderstood science innovation that spawns a fad diet, capitalizing on the sum-difference between cultural awareness of an idea and real knowledge of it - you can chart it in horror movie monsters and superhero origin stories, jumping from ‘radiation’ to ‘quantum’ to ‘nanomachines’. Greening is a rare, wild instance of the tech chasing the fad, starting out with custom minor organ implants and targeted pancreatic or bone marrow splicing, stuff that became way more generally useful only because it was widespread adopted here, first.

It’s lost who originally pushed the idea in the late 2040s, catching on by the 2050s. The real story’s lost in a sea of real-fake doctors and celebrity endorsements. We can trace acai berries to two dipshit white hippies in the Amazon because there wasn’t a wave of litigation chasing them for doing it. Going green started more like the antivaxxer movement. It’s only possible to pin down the people who made it popular.

See, chlorophyll turns water and sunlight into sugar. It didn’t matter that you were still digesting it, original proponents - like Timothée Chalamet and a young Hershey Dandenong - said it could help cut sugar out of your diet, and that had appeal. Some original proponents likened it to a nicotine patch, others saw it as a radical solution to diabetes. Almost totally complete nonsense, but what fad diet isn’t?

The second wave was aesthetic, and took off even before the fad diet angle wore out. Some people loved the green skin look, especially the entire generation of girls who had hit puberty watching the 2035 Batman Beyond revival (Future is Now), and its teenage reboot take on an antihero Poison Ivy - a bi icon for a generation that couldn’t buy the line that ecoterrorism was bad.

That’s where the meme hit critical mass, and mutation was inevitable. When enough people share two different cultural spaces, the overlap goes from an intersection on a venn diagram to its own circle and splits off like parthenogenesis. Like how you start with American audience samurai movie fans, and that overlap creates both Star Wars and Westerns. Both a new appeal with a new audience, neither of which having to identify with either of the original circles in the venn diagram that created them.

The next few waves of the go-green movement pinged off like neutrons firing from a split atom. Some drew heavy inspiration from Henry David Thoreau, who had written Walden starting with an accounting of just how expensive his idyllic life had been, its upfront costs. Here naturalist philosophers found common cause with radical survivalists, who took heavily to radical chlorophyll mods in an attempt to reduce their caloric intake. Aevum has a few of their sovereign-citizen style encampments in its green spaces, like secular Amish communities. They’re a great place to get handmade furniture and homebrewed liquor. Personally, I recommend the plum port from the radical homeless camp in Medici district of Renn. Hermes as some of the best on Aevum.

You can tell these folk from the rest because they’re big on mavrophyll. The designed black pigment absorbs way more light energy than natural chlorophyll, and this lot’s more concerned with the efficiency than the look. That being said, I did see one mavrophyll-dyed guy in Ares with a silver-ink tattoo of a snow owl down his arm, and I nearly made some major life choices off that look.

Others only care about the what the look signifies. There’s plenty of ways to actually turn your skin green semi-permanently, but for some people it’s still way more about what the green means, that it’s real chlorophyll. This sort are usually hardcore vegetarians who won’t even eat synthetic meat, run community gardens, waify guys that wear sundresses, that sort of thing. It’s a fifty-fifty split you’re seeing the platonic ideal of a preschool teacher, or just a shy misanthrope who’s too conflict averse to make a point of it. It can be hard to tell the difference at first, but figure out if they want to talk to you about their garden, or if their garden’s the only thing they want to talk to.

There is one last category I’ve chased up on that I’m interested in. Umaryll. This took some digging, but it’s a portmanteau between ‘phyll’, obvious, and ‘umarell’, less obvious. Apparently it was an Italian(?) slang term for the old men who’d hang around construction sites, watching the workers. Its literal translation ‘little man’ threw me off, obviously. The shortest umaryll I’ve seen was half again my height.

See, this is one of those things about the technology following the fad. Enough people got bone marrow splices for dietary reasons that a rare one-in-a-hundred-thousand shot of mutation happened to at least ten people. Some of those ended up being pretty fucking nasty, obviously. The first umaryll came about by an accident like the collapse of the space fountain at a cellular level.

It comes from old tech, really bootleg shit. Before the perfection of the full-code rewrites we enjoy today, stuff like this was done externally. A generic clone organ was grown in architecture, like a pancreas, and then rewritten with a carrier virus. The rewritten custom organ could then be transplanted, made in isolation, knowing it was viable outside of the patient’s body first.

The problem with stuff like bone marrow is it really wasn’t worth the surgery, so it was a staging ground for a relatively minor, targeted rewrite treatment, done at a time where that had only ever been considered for last-resort life-saving medical treatments. The kinks weren’t worked out, is what I mean. It was a total alignment-of-the-planets moment in history, where they were confident enough in the tech to use it on millions of people, but a mistake this bad was still possible in the edge cases.

In these rare cases, the carrier virus went rogue and survived in the patient and started attacking cells they were never supposed to be able to infect. This was already scary as hell, because that kind of mutation opened the door back up to transmissibility, the possibility the virus could jump the patient it was originally tailored for. Fortunately none did, at least none I’m aware of.

Six people died when either their red or white blood cells all turned green, though at least two survived without an immune system long enough for the damage to be reversed. Maybe a dozen more had extreme cases of sugar shock when their body started producing more sugar than it could handle. That was just when the mutation stayed where it was meant to, just did more than it was meant to.

Maybe twenty had their cells become structurally plant-like. A few died when their lung tissue developed rigid cell walls, or something just as gruesome. One or two survived, though it’s impossible to track them or their doctors down. If someone has that information, let me know as soon as possible?

More than chlorophyll, their bodies started producing meristem cells, and enough of their cells were rewritten enough to take advantage of those cells. Their cells also had radically different telomeres, that like plant telomeres didn’t suffer from senescence, which-

I already see my editor’s red pen being thrown at my head. Just because I had to read a science journal to write this, shouldn’t mean you have to read one to know where the huge leafy men who feed birds in the park came from.

Basically, the treatment cured aging, but even the perfected version came with some nasty side effects. Get a big enough cut on the palm of your hand, and you might end up trying to grow a second thumb, that kind of thing. And when cells did die, or get old, the treatment didn’t heal them. It made new cells to support the old ones.

This is where you get umaryll, the tree men in the park. For a few years this really was the best thing going for extending quality of life. Cut them open and you’ll see they probably have six or seven smaller kidneys budding off, or a liver the size of a basketball. What matters is it all works.

We still have no idea how long they’ll really live for, how effective the treatment really was. The oldest are barely in their hundreds, most are maybe ninety years old. We don’t know yet how big they’ll end up growing, what their problems are going to be, and how we’ll deal with it if it happens.

The ones we see will be the only of their kind, the treatment stopped being offered twenty years ago. Less radical and invasive solutions to aging came out in the years after, but these old folk are stuck with what they have. Their bodies have been too changed too much for too long. None of the ones I spoke to, though, seemed bothered by that.

It’s easier to make sweeping statements of some cultural groups than others. Groups with shared ideas tend to attract more similar people than groups with shared experiences, and umaryll are as diverse as any group of people their age can be.

But as a group they are remarkable. They all seem to have a sense that they’ve cheated death. They carry with them the incredible patience of all people who have lived a full life. Their heavy bodies move slowly, but without pain or error. The same is true of their thoughts and their speech, the price paid for minds and memories that stay sharp and ageless.

It’s possible that one day, they’ll perceive the passage of time as a tree would. From their slowing perception, hours will feel like minutes. It will become impossible for them to talk to anyone who isn’t like they are, except maybe through letters.

I can only imagine them as happy for it. They’ll watch the construction sites rise like circus tents, their gardens bloom faster every year. Giant hands sew without tremor, and feet without need of shoes walk the endless train lines, just to see where it takes them.

An umaryll named Fatima, ninety seven years old, told me that she has no regrets. She tells me that every day the sunlight feels sweet on her mossy skin. More than twenty years later, and she still hasn’t gotten tired of that.

• JuntaSThompson

Personal Prep: Dice: 3,1 +3 Clever
Overprepared for +1 Prep
Total of 3 Prep
However, November's Repurposed stat causes her to suffer dysphoria, putting social rolls at disadvantage for the rest of the operation
Roll 1 (spending 1 prep to Boost): 5, 3, 6 +3 Clever +1 hacking +1 cybersecurity: 19(!)
Roll 2: 3, 3: +3 Clever +1 Engineering: 10 - Critical Success
Roll 3: 2, 1, - +1 Housekeeping, +1 Magratoid Protocol, +3 Drone (Cargo Delivery) +0 tough, total of 8 - Failure by 1
Roll 4: (advantage and disadvantage cancel): 5, 3 +2 Cool +1 Waifu 11