Daily Life

A lot of people ask themselves what daily life in Shadowrun is like. Is it as sensational as the stories tell, of people living down and out lives? Or going out in a blaze of glory? Well, like most stories, people love to embellish the parts that are over-the-top, while ignoring a lot of the mundane. We're going to cover a lot of the everyday living in the Sixth World for those curious about what happens behind the scenes.

## Life, Death, and Everything In-between

### Early Life

Giving birth in the Sixth World is about like it always does. Mom and dad have sex, if everything goes to plan then about 40 weeks later (give or take given metahumans) a baby comes out. Most give birth in various hospitals scattered across the Metroplex, where the mother and baby are monitored to ensure both are healthy. If all goes to plan, mom and baby go home and everyone's happy. At least, that's if your parents have a SIN (Social Identification Number), in which case you'll 'inherit' one of your own, usually a Corporate Limited or National SIN depending. If no SIN, then more than likely your first breaths happened at a local Street Doc or even at home with a midwife, someone who knows what to do if there's a baby being delivered. In *most* cases, a high-risk pregnancy might get emergency care at one of the established hospitals, but don't count on it. Instead, some poorly funded street doc with subpar equipment does the best they can to deliver the baby happy and healthy, but that's not always a guarantee.

Around age 4 or 5, kids get to start enrolling in school, whether an accredited school or just a street school. Yes, just like doctors, there are teachers who provide education for the less privileged, usually out of a neighbor's home or grandma's. Home schooling is pretty sub-par but it's better than nothing, Usually these lessons are focused on the core curriculum like normal schools, but with a lot of emphasis on the skills that are useful on the street than in some college. A lot of these street schools get very hands on, with some of the teachers sending the children off to shadow and later apprentice under a technician or someone who can show them things most kids with a SIN won't learn until after they graduate. While these SINless kids won't ever make six figure incomes in a traditional sense, their ability to diagnose and handle problems on their own make them extremely useful in the SINless communities they live in, getting paid under the table to fix problems that would cost three or four times what a traditional tradesman would cost, though usually done very crudly and not very pretty since *proper* repairs cost a lot and it just needs to survive another month or two.

For those with a SIN of some capacity, they either attend a nationally accredited primary education or one of the corporate schools. Corporate schools are similar to national schools except with unhealthy amounts of propaganda tossed in for good measure. Most corporate kids can recite the major CEOs of their corporation and deliver a dozen sales pitches from memory, assuming they don't scrub it all from their minds the second they get free. The education though is usually some of the best, using algorithms to study each student and focus on their specific abilities to find the best corporate role for them. The artistic, for example, will usually wind up in the marketing department, while the technical kids end up on the technical and engineering tracks. The underachievers... well, someone has to man the register at the Stuffer Shack, right?