Golden Boy

## The Golden Boy

* **Street Name:**The Golden Boy
* **Metatype:**Human  (*Homo sapiens sapiens*)
* **Origin:**Winnipeg
* **Affiliations:**Famously none (occasionally worked with the Fargo Team)
* **Specialties:**Physical Adept, Path of the Athlete, specializes in combat, protection and infiltration.

Winnipeg is, in some ways, a perfect environment for shadowrunning, a bit of a Mini-Denver  of the North, it sits in a disputed zone on the border between three  hostile  nations making it a hotbed of intrigue, politics, conflict and all the other things that make it good for business in a certain line of work. Its a haven for spies  and smugglers and thieves.

One the other hand, those very same factors and the fact that the Powers That Be are aware of them and take steps to compensate for them, make it a very hard place to run the shadows. Its not that Winnipeg doesn't produce and attract its share of shadowrunners, on the contrary it has become a bit of a mecca for the breed. Its just that shadowrunners up here don't seem to last very long, either moving on to bigger  and better  things elsewhere or falling afoul of the delicate balance of powers in the Zone capital, where even a slight misjudgement can lead to catastrophic consequences. Because of the awareness that a slight misstep could cause another war, Winnipeg's movers and shakers prefer to hire from outside of town, with the Fargo Team and the Faceless Menbeing among their favorites.

Which is all to say that it takes something special to run the shadows in Winnipeg itself. And to do so alone is phenominal. Not that local sports hero, public minded citizen and, oh yes, criminal for hire 'Golden Boy' has EVER doubted that he has (and is) something special. Popping up on the scene in the late '60's, handsome, cool and extremely gifted both as a mundane athlete and a Physical Adept, suprisingly little is known about his background before that, although he's always claimed to be Winnipeg born-and-bred.

His street name, by the way, doesn't come from his blond good looks or natural talent, but is instead a reference to the famous statue of the 'Golden Boy' on top of the old Manitoba Legislative Building (currently the headquarters of the Oceti Sakowin governor of the Zone). Never adopting an alias or dropping character, Golden Boy has survived through a combination of sheer physical prowess and adept image-manipulation, often showing up and pitching in during public crisis (like fires or riots) to assist the city in whatever way he can, making himself a local hero and thus, hard to touch.

Those who have worked with the famous loner however hint that he has a pragmatic ruthlessness which ALSO helps explain how he's managed to last in a town that chews shadowrunners up and spits them out. Famously hating to work with teams, he's managed to alienate many of the groups he'd normally work with through a contempt for those who can't keep up with him and a reckless disregard for other people's plans. Its probably one of the reasons he hasn't moved on from Winnipeg, because anywhere bigger and he'd need to work with a team to survive.

The one exception in this pattern is his occasional alliances with Roadwork's version of the Team, who would hire him to do footwork for them in the Winnipeg area or even sometimes work with him when they needed extra muscle. Although rumor had it that making an exception to working with others had as much to do with his on-again-off-again dalliances with the team's mage Lightrider  as any business motive. He was both a friend and a rival to The Thunder and there was a rumor that while they would work with him on his home turf that Roadwork  wouldn't let him run down in Fargo  at all.

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