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Base Price
SWAT armour ¥8000 x 20 = ¥160,000
SWAT helmet ¥1500 x 10 = ¥15,000
At 15% 26k
At 25% 44k
Website: www.dsouza.uk
During downtime (late Nov to early Jan), Vlad has been shiftworking to tail a manager, who he kidnaps (Sanguine helps wipe the cameras), now going to shift as the manager, convincing the kid who he had been shiftworking on he is the manager. Vlad then starts cannibalising parts of the manager to assume his identity, fingerprints etc. Loki then announces he’s ‘leaving to work overseas’ and kills the partially eaten fellow.
Jack has thrown himself back into work and study and created a magical lodge in the firehouse. After some experimenting he’s got a shiny button on him and has been away a few days, returning with a speedy Japanese roadbike, with a back seat for Theta. He can now bitchslap people to cause magical damage which is something.
Loki has improved his agility bleep testing on the firing range, made Titania even easier to saltire, and been doing 10h/wk work for the boss whilst maintaining the rent on his Cambridge gaff.
Sanguine moves in wholeheartedly, having replaced his right arm, learned to cook a little, and stocked the basement up with whisky. Not a bad downtime.
Smith has been training to boost his reaction times, sparring with Vlad, floating for a few weeks to get infused; over the last few weeks he’s focussed on giving Theta tasks, having bought her a small pistol to shoot, improving his teaching activities. The bomb room remains quiet.
Mon 4th Jan ‘77, 10am:
Jack receives a call from Holly Kendrick from the bar in Cambridge, for a feelgood mission and favour. Jack thinks as the team are bored they fancy a job. We assemble in the war room, sans Smith. He doesn’t seem to be around. Sanguine calls and Smith confirms he’s not about, and won’t be available for the job for some time…(in the background of the call we hear some automatic weapon fire and some crossfire) - turns out he’s brought a Theta to a gunfight.
We drive once again to Cambridge and park outside the Kindled Flame. Heading in we find it calm and Holly is tending bar. Swap greetings and drinks (Sanguine having a fancy cocktail with Japanese whisky, honey syrup, amaro and grapefruit bitters, yum). In the backroom is a lady Johnson, 5’7”, seated at the far end with a nice beeeeeg armour jacket because she has a giganto right arm and some scarred face action. “Serenity”. Holly turns on a jammer and white noise generator and pops over to join Serenity. We all sit down.
Raspy ork woman wants to hire us for investigation and poss extraction. Nicola Holland, young girl, disappeared a month ago. She left a video message:
Jack professes our one hundred???? Percent success rate in recovering people, although he sounds unsure. She’s joined the ‘brethren of the return’ cult. Holly also notes the fringe benefits of doing this job for the benefit of the magic community. Serenity is quite magical - Nicola less so. The disapproval stems from her leaving uni (where she was studying Arcane theory) and falling in with this bunch I guess? Holly thinks the brethren may be dangerous as a number of young mages have disappeared, few return - those that do have severed all ties with friends and family, they do things for the cult, they don’t ‘return’. The brethren think mages should rule and magic is a ‘blessing’.
Pay: 20k from serenity plus 20k more (so...40k total for the job, Y10k each?! This is a charity drive) - 20k extract, 20k info - who are they, what do they do with their conscripts, more info to help stop the brethren from continuing operation.
Vlad asks for a magical weapon foci - Holly says she can find someone who can supply and will put Vlad in touch - although it being complex (finger whip) it may not be a guarantee. Job accepted! Legwork time, just checking if Serenity shows up for the big dance or comes for legwork too. Serenity has nothing to do so is along for the ride apparently. Holly leaves and turns off the jammer for let Sanguine do some matrix work.
The commlink isn’t matrix connected, locked, and ork-lady has no idea how to hack it. Daughter’s commlink, some contacted, some not. Adam has no calls or messages, suspicious [Sanguine realises this log was deleted so he can try and find this commlink but risks it being flagged by Adam]. Call log stops 1 month ago [incoming texts/missed calls]; in the 2-3 months leading up social media uses falls steadily. Call logs cleared too, hmm. GPS feed, Sanguine is crosschecking what constitutes ‘normality’. Pattern of visiting coffee shop ‘like clockwork’, and going on a long walk to a park and then sitting on the same bench for an extended period of time before walking on.
First call to/from Adam was 3 months prior, increasing in frequency.
Sanguine continues searching for Adam’s device and finds it in...Cambridge city tip. ‘Still might be worth retrieving though’...with marks on it though Sanguine tries to copy data across. It’s only been used for calls, no other media at all. 30sec calls rather than long calls to everyone except Nicola, which are lengthier calls.
Trawling the GPS (not deleted) show monthly visits towards Ely and the stinkfens. A lead! 3 locations, 2 numbers and a name. Jack is happy.
We drive to the soykaf shop “Kaff a Nice Day”, a subsidiary of Aztechnology. Sanguine heads around the back, everyone else in the front. Students etc. having soykaf, a female troll barista behind the counter, no queue; Loki causes a trippy, table spilling noise for Sanguine to have the interference to frig with the cameras. Sanguine does the necessary, Loki establishes that a) the troll barista is flirted with often and b) is an under-the-counter drug dealer, perhaps.
Weirdly...Nicola comes in and buys a coffee and is gone in 5mins. So how is it showing she’s here for 4hrs? Jack suggests that perhaps she is upstairs for that four hours and then leave (but not before getting a coffee). Exploration occurs of this and Serenity punches the hell out of the lock. We all head up except Sanguine, who keeps a watch. Jack suggests we may simply want to wipe the cameras to be on the safe side. Room above the café (tres precis) is ‘Sarah McDonald, Therapist’, corridor with listed offices (on the frontplate) down the left hand side, and thankfully noone has come to see the lockpopping. Although they may have a data security/ethics issue if they think their patient records may be compromised.
Debate between getting Vlad to pose as Nicola for therapeutic purposes, he prefers intimidation. It’s almost like he’s worried about opening up. The door is locked, and rather than ask Serenity, Vlad picks it. It’s a waiting room but bare walls...a small room, some chairs. Not very therapist? Another door at the far end with frosting yet a curtain the other side of the door. Dim with thick red drapes on all the walls. An odd chandelier in the ceiling? Arcane paraphernalia. Hmmmmmm. Jack looks around (nonmagical items, tat designed to seem mystical - it’s varied tat, not linked to one school of magic, deliberately curated to look impressive), but there’s an echo of a lingering repeat spell cast time and time again here, as well as other spells cast by others in the space. Vlad breaks the lock on the desk and finds an honest-to-goodness paper diary - flicking through he finds it filled out with little detail, but it’s been inked in showing certain days showing names next to dates - meetings? On the days when Nicola is here, it’s noted. Flicking the book to Jack, it hits him in the face as he’s busy perceiving non-paper items. Last appointment was 2 days ago - not a recognised name. Some standing appointments, some one-offs. A note next to one says ‘promising’, hm. Jack also notes ‘boat’ markings and shows these to Serenity too for her benefit. Jack says ‘we may wish to watch this place, they may not be done here’. Sanguine pops 3 spy cameras in the room to try and get best angles. Next appointment is tomorrow. Vlad replaces the book and relocks.
We stage a fake-in on a shipping manifest area. Serenity punches the door in, the thing flies open, and a lady elf behind the desk screams super loudly, filling the corridor, and is now frozen in shock. Serenity casts something to make her go blind, and the screaming escalates, and lots of smashing around as she trips up. A one-person commotion. People in offices nearby start opening, looking at the ruckus.
Sanguine, Jack and Loki retreat first
Vlad ‘performs’ to look surprised and shocked at this turn of events, so Vlad goes all white knight and picks the elf up and dusts her off and plants the seed of possibility that this is a clumsy shadowrunner who was coming to steal manifests. Very credulous, she calms, checks nothing is gone, calms further, thanks Vlad for his chivalry. Vlad consoles and then beats a retreat when she calls the fuzz to report.
Serenity moves back and with line of sight breaking the elf recovers her sight and the screams subside. She catches up to Sanguine and Loki, and we get back in Titania. Vlad rejoins us thereafter and we’re in the clear before the cops arrive.
Vlad congratulates Serenity with a clanky shoulderpat and asks how magical she can be with many limbs. And curses corporations. Smith calls us on route and asks how things are going.
We swing by the park, nothing particularly suspicious, we crash in Cambridge and the next morning (Tue 5/1/77) Sanguine looks over footage as it rolls in - the appointment at 10am; 9.30am a human man [yet the therapist sign was ‘Sarah McDonald’???], mid20s walks in, dressed in casual wear, goes behind a curtain and pulls out some OTT robes and stuff and pops them on. He then sits behind the desk, takes out the diary and commlink, writes up and waits for the appointment. Come 10am the door opens up and a woman, early 30s, enters. The impression is they’re unmet previously; they sit and talk, and at one point conjures what Jack would recognise as an illusion, gesturing to her to ask for similar and she casts a small fireball which sputters and goes out. She shrugs apologetically, they talk longer, she leaves, and he takes some notes but crosses a line through a name and closes the book. Not promising then. He picks up his commlink and sends some messages/calls (no AR, all manual) as he waits for afternoon meetings. This runs to 11am.
Magicman is sat at his desk, taking calls, making notes, killing time. We think about the fens...they are blighted - low level land has toxic air, the water is contact toxic, it’s uninhabitable and really not welcoming either. Travel is tough. Thanks to a lack of devices and repeaters the matrix is very poor, lots of noise thanks to lack of grid, badlands in every sense. Unpatrolled, cops don’t bother with the place.
Sanguine searches for safe methods to avoid inhaling (respirators) toxins and avoiding contact poison water (splash-resistance or chemical seal for full protection).
Whilst discussing options, we notice movement on the feed and the fella looks up to see an ork man walk in, late 20s, they sit and have another conversation, same as before, but he doesn’t ask the ork to ‘perform’ - instead he sees the act of spellcasting and the ork begins a jig, and stops when the fella pops his hand up. He smiles at the ork, gives an encouraging look, they talk more, shake hands, leaves and the fella returns to noting stuff.
Jack gets out of Titania, pops his head out and sees orkman heading down the main road. Sanguine also gets out and takes a look. Jack uses his PI persona to discuss with the ork, who notes he doesn’t require therapy, but someone is using this office. Jack asks about Nicola, using the word ‘disappeared’ and the ork looks askance at this, noting he’s never met a woman there, has only been twice. The Ork asks ‘what is this about?’ and Jack confirms that he’s looking for a missing person and expresses confirm about his wellbeing. No need to worry! Says the Ork - ‘if she came to join the brethren she’s sure to have been accepted, as have i, and i now have a trip to make’. Jack asks what the ork was promised - ‘what you you think?’ - so Jack rephrases ‘what were you told?’...this seems to lead nowhere so Jack dumbs it down. Having met the fella in the office twice, the ‘potential’ for the ork has been offered to be ‘unlocked’ but Jack points out heading into the toxic zone is ‘unusual’. The ork isn’t a mage but has ‘promise’ far removed from his day job as a plumber. Jack assenses him and notes his happy healthy mundanity, not under the influence of a spell, and no cyberware besides a datajack. The ork has had enough of this and says ‘I’m sure if this woman is with the brethren she’s perfectly safe, I know she’s left her old life behind, no personal possessions and so on’...
Fella is taking another call.
Jack continues to ask ‘what he’s getting out of the brethren’ - the ork says ‘I might be able to become a mage if I show promise’...Jack is perfectly skeptical. Jack packs him off after some more chitchat. The valedictory “when people go missing, those who are left behind worry for them” so the ork things to leave a note to his loved ones. Jack suggests conversing but the ork things they won’t understand or will try and stop him. This guy seems a total drip, Loki would have booted him by now. Jack gives yet more platitudes and the ork seems sad cleaning corpscum toilets. Jack signs off with a slightly creepy ‘maybe I’ll see you again’. Jack continues to try and work out if his decision was magically influenced even if he’s not under the influence. He’s just a credulous idiot.
Jack returns to the car and is reminded by Sanguine to focus on the prize, i.e. to extract Nicola and get some info. Sanguine thinks disappearing this fella is a bad move - wait till Friday, get own boat, hazmat suits etc. and all that?
Suggested Vlad jumps the next person (arriving in 30) and morph into them. The conspiring rumbles on the but the consensus is for Vlad to hang around the van, driven round the back, Jack is going to be ‘fixing’ the lock. We don’t see many in the area - trollgirl chucking bags in the bin behind the coffeehouse, after 30mins we see a woman (human) mid-late 20s, wearing joggers and Sanguine scans her, as she heads towards the door after checking directions. Jack tries to talk her round and she starts to make a call, so Sanguine hacks the device and the call routes to Vlad, who tells her ‘I’m behind you’. Vlad suggests interviewing in the van, and Sanguine makes a show of getting out and thanking Brother Patrick. She gets in, looking around at the menagerie of van inhabitants. Vlad introduces Serenity and ‘Clive’ (Loki). She admits she’s not sure how the meeting will go, so Vlad asks what she hopes to get out - “to be selected for a place at the commune”, “to improve her magical connection”. She shows her trick (running very fast), Vlad tells her it’s not that impressive, and sacks her off. Jack fashions some clothes for Vlad’s impersonation attempt.
Vlad heads in, the guy looks him over and mutters about the essence losses, and Vlad then loses all ability to keep his counsel and he spills his entire backstory, our ruse and who we all are. Oh boy. So Sanguine, Serenity and Jack go charging up the stairs to sort out this mess.
Serenity arrives in to see Vlad spilling the beans to Patrick/Adam. Serenity makes a fist, the knuckles flip back and reveal a double barrel and she fires a shot at him. He evades the shot and the bullet goes out the window. She has time to message ‘he’s speedy’ before he reacts. He ducks under the desk and attempts to use his commlink…
Jack charges down the corridor and orders his F3 man spirit to materialise in the room and inhibit the mage. Sanguine uses sprite to cripple his commlink. Vlad gets ready to rip the Johnson to shreds. The Johnson creates an axe from their hand and attacks Brother Patrick. Jack’s spirit fails to make an impact. Brother Patrick casts an electrical AOE, Serenity tries to counter-spell it...reduces it but doesn't stop it. He looks at his commlink, curses and turns to run, diving out of the window.
Turns out it’s the front window, Loki hears the splat, and he’s a dead one. Commlink is bust, we retrieve the book, Sanguine gets the cameras and Vlad advances on Serenity...menacingly? But they chat instead. Vlad makes clear Serenity should not share the Saeder-Krupp hatred with anyone, and establishes she’s ex-Renraku. Jack is placating the neighbours and advising they return to offices. They all retreat to the van: Vlad pumps Serenity for info (Sanguine leaves one of his coins in the office). Turns out she’s still corpscum eh.
We pull away, Sanguine wipes the cameras but warns Vlad his confession is out there in the matrix. Loki tosses the book to Jack after Jack tells Vlad he needs to learn to guard his mind better. The book is a list of people, 1ppp, listing Nicola’s name inter alia, from a couple of months ago or so. It gives an idea of her details, brief description, likely essence/ware, and then it says “full mage, magical ability acceptable, weak-willed, candidate ideal”. A later date a month ago says “ship to commune”. Jack wonders about the ork, to whom Jack has become fond. “Extremely susceptible to mental control, he should be accepted”. Are they building an army of simple minded suicide bombers? Mundane people are being picked based on their susceptibility to mind control, Mages and Adepts appear to be selected on other merits - their weak-will isn’t the key point, in those cases it’s looking for above threshold of power. The boat arrives at the dock every Friday but when reviewing the notebook candidates don’t come each week - maybe 1/mo at most. It’s just a weekly ‘drop’.
They debate perhaps staging the building to look like he’s not actually dead (repair window, remove body etc.)...but the sirens were already approaching and the commlink is gone. So this plan is dead in the water. Hire a boat? “Interrogate” them? Serenity suggests her and Jack are the ‘mages’, Vlad is the ‘Adam/Patrick’, and they stow on the boat. Serenity then suggests the credulous ones get on instead (Loki?!) Meanwhile Sanguine and Loki rent a narrowboat to push up the canals? Stealth tagging the boat?? Sanguine remembers the -5 noise in the fens...and asks whether FM radio is an option! Lots of kicking around options.
They give Smith a call who was with Theta - the firefight was unintentional, Theta had messed with an Ancient’s bike who took unkindly, an unfortunate fight ensued, she’s now back in the house and is on his way. He’s very happy to wander into the swamps if that’s what we want.
3 options
Loki goes to talk to the local boat-people. Apparently there are some communities who live in the fen (disgusting ghouls for example) and these locals deliver to them. There are about four boats. Loki is silver-tongued- works out a deal. £200 to get the location of the Friday boat (driven by ‘Trev’), it’s Eye Castle, takes a day and a bit. Loki offers him £5000 to trail Trev and take us to Eye Castle, Loki seals the deal!
We turn up Friday morning. Hazmat-suited up, showing high levels of radiation and toxicity. We ask the guy’s name and he says it is ‘Fisher’ with a big wink!
Fisher will be navigating by his ‘noggin’ alone. Fisher agrees to wait a few hours for us.
Some half-hearted questioning we should have made before the deal occurs before we get onboard and there’s a chemseal getting us nice and safe.
We hear some vehicles drive up to dock - 2 people heading towards the boat in front; a dwarf man (trev?) hops off the boat and ushers them forwards - one is the credulous ork idiot from 3days hence! They’re entirely without possessions and hop on board and shortly after sets off. The boat lumbers away from dock and begins chugging fenward. Fisher gives us a look and asks “so...I’ve never done this before, you want me to go now?” Loki begins explaining the art of tailing and negotiating the waterway and we set off. Fisher explains the nuts and bolts of the boat to Loki’s endless interest and engagement.
The area is blighted as hell, no insects, no wildlife, nada. Plants are twisted and rank. Abandoned villages etc. gross as hell.
Loki, (after an internal struggle between driving and playing poker), he and Sanguine play cards for money, Loki rinses Sanguine and takes £500. Jack practices some magic and finds it superduper difficult to weave normally. Particularly in abandoned villages. Sanguine also notes the matrix-noise.
As the day rolls to PM/evening, we see the boat in front set up their harecatcher lights and Loki has a go steering. Peering out into the mist, Loki can just about make out the beacons, and definitely sees something up ahead - a light moving away. We follow, Loki turns the boat to follow the light - it seems to be getting closer. The light persuades Loki that the answer to all is inside the light and Loki cracks open the seal, and mist wanders into the boat. Vlad gets his hood up, Sanguine grabs the helm, and Serenity tries to hold Loki back to no avail - Loki gets up on the prow and drags Serenity with him. Sanguine seems some kind of floaty lighty boaty. Serenity can see a massive spectral octopus in midair! Loki dives in, mmmmmmm, looking for the solution to Home Rule.
Very briefly, it appears Sanguine is spoken to softly, giving him the impression of an offerance, but he shakes it off and clears his mind. Vlad is happy that his chemseal work. Loki hits the ground and his untrousered legs are wrapped in weed/reed/whatever. He swims towards Scottish destiny. As he moves forwards, dragging his leg through these weeds, he feels a heavier item rush past his leg and - again, as he presses on, something brushes past an arm. Hmm. At this point Loki is struck by a massive pulse of electricity. His muscles contract and he dunks himself. Oof. Sanguine hands control back to Fisher and runs up to see some sort of electric eel, a foot wide, alongside the boat. Sanguine shoots the heck out of eely. It’s deid as feck. Jack looks ahead, amazed by the blighted lands but looking ahead at the light-switching to astral- Jack sees the airy cephalopod, a couple of limbs reaching towards Loki, and Jack realises it is a will o’t’wisp, and recalls the fact that being devoured by will is a euphoric experience. He relays this to Serenity and casts a mana barrier, blocking it from Loki. It responds by shattering the barrier and moving a tentacle towards Loki, mmm.
Vlad bellows at Loki to get out the water as more eels head toward the boat and spew more electrickery at us. Serenity gets hit a bunch thanks to being blind, Sanguine presumably for some other reason as he’s sighted but still got hit, and yet blows 3 of its tentacles off it and it nears expiration. Serenity kills it - although the light fades above Loki. Loki sees the light approach and realises it was a lie. A Yoon lie. Loki hits and it reacts with a riposte, which Loki dodges. It floats away, kinda, and we all regroup.
Vlad now dives in after hearing the siren call. Loki realises swimming around him in the water are the large eels. He plunges his spurs in trying to spear both, and in doing so one dives below the fist, but the other gets speared and dies. The eels now go for Loki and Vlad, and we both dodge, nifty af. The other eel goes for teeth in Loki’s face and he swats it with the dead eel on the spurs. Sanguine obliterates the octopus and the light blows out, the thing is eviscerated and that’s the end of the secret to Scottish Independence / Saeder Krupp’s secrets and weaknesses. Jack congratulates Sanguine and asks Fisher to chug up towards Loki. Loki, meanwhile, hits the hell out of the eel, skewering another. He hops back up on the boat. As does Vlad. Over the next hour Loki feels queasy, some abdominal pain, a vomitous urge or two which result in delightful spew. Sanguine tries to locate the other boat despite the matrix-noise and catches a commlink, so traces it. It’s a km to the SE of us and it’s marked. Sanguine heals Loki up all nice, and then spots the persona-commlink of Smith some 200m away. We spot Trev’s boat up ahead but yet despite the harecatcher lights we also see 20m up and all around, many lights eek. Fisher shouts back ‘we’re here!’. We pull up 400m from the jetty.
Vlad asks about non-eels: crocs, maybe? and proposes diving in to swim to the jetty. He has been asked not to lose his mind…. Again...and he sneaks stealthily up to the jetty. He sees a hill, with atop the ruins of a former ancient fortress. A ruined semi-submerged village surrounds the fort out of the water, and approaching 50m from the hill he sees the sharp slope of the hill and the concrete job done on the fort patching it up along with some huts on the downslope encircling the hill. The concrete jetty runs alongside the hill and Vlad espies a small group on said jetty. 2 get off the boat and some metahumans in white robes greet them, with an elf (white robe, red sash) heading ‘em up. They are greeted in some way and ‘checked in’/led inside to a hut along the jetty; coming out they’re now dressed - ork in white robes, other person (human male) in white robe, black sash. They’re stripped of former belongings and are taken up towards the castle, the ork being led off by whiterobes and the blacksash male being led up to the castle by elflady redsash. Vlad relays all this by micro-transmitter. Meanwhile Trev is unloading suppliers onto the jetty to be carried off and will be some time ditching stock.
Jack astrally perceives and invites Serenity to join, leading towards the castle keep. Jack wants to poke around the keep, look for an inner courtyard, any spirits/cast spells, mana barrier, ongoing rituals… but see nothing of note. As they fly above the castle they notice the background count drops to 2 (??). A number of astral forms charge up at Jack/Serenity and they fly up into the air, with J/S unable to escape, and they circle-dance around J/S. A couple stay lower down and are looking up at the rest of the group, and those risen up/flitting around seem very excited to be doing so, what a wondrous experience for them projecting. Serenity swaps some conversation and floats over to Jack. Then, Serenity proposes separating from the group and divebomb into the plants for cover. Jack likewise mingles for some time, being a third person on the edge of a convo, then makes an excuse too. Jack gathers that they think ‘a ritual has been performed’ to allow them to do it - Jack realises these are mundanes, not mages, they’ve never been able to do this before! - and returns to the boat unmolested.
No icons on the island, unlikely Nicola will go quietly. Sanguine asks Serenity if she’ll spot Nicola’s ‘astral signature’, Loki still feels queasy.
Vlad swims over towards the jetty to go looking for robes; Trev’s boat is still here but he’s just inside there, no spots on, no more cargo to lug. Vlad pulls himself out of the water and looks at the building on the jetty end (single storey prefab), Vlad looks through the belongings and finds Nicola’s gear. Vlad learns the codification of robes - white = suggestible, black sash = mages. Vlad grabs 3 robes with bands for Jack, Serenity, Vlad; the remainder get white robes. Vlad doublebags them, ropes them up and intends to swim back shawshank style to our boat to hand em out. In fact, after some discussion the suggestion is the boaty people hazmat up and wander up to Vlad instead. Go figure. So instead we get into the water, bobbing along and Vlad sees several ungainly orange-clad hazmatters splashing along. So stealthy. We get in, de-suit, and Vlad unpacks and hands out robes.
The top of the hill looks airier and less smelly. Sanguine stashes the hazmat suit in the chest with peoples’ former belongings (and nicola’s near the top too). We can hear faint sounds from Trev’s boat, many voices (trid?), but no movement outside. Vlad decides to scout upslope so back in chameleon suit, robe divested, sneaking away. A path leads up the hill and outside the castle several more prefabs. We walk up the hill and hear voices coming from a nearby prefab; organise our weapons for ease of reaching, and Sanguine notices a gun symbol (wireless signal for active firearm). Sanguine gets a mark on it despite the noisy atmosphere around here, then drops it.
Sanguine checks out some other nearby buildings - a generator room. Perhaps for bombing later. Next building, canteen? Final unlit building, unfurnished bar rugs on the floor and at the far end a 4ft statue of a seated cross-legged man; Jack assenses it, presumably without consent as it’s bronze, and it’s not a focus but some sort of magical signature pervades. Spells have been cast around it.
Another building, lit: mens dorms, many metatypes; last lit building presumably women’s dorm....Serenity goes to take a look. Women’s dorm, mostly asleep, Serenity looks around for Nicola, no luck?
Sanguine considers remotely detonating the generator at such time we need to.
We head up towards the castle, with blacksashes leading the way (Vlad foremost to report back seeings). Lights are on inside including front gate, sneaking up Vlad finds the gates empty, so walking through the stone archway Vlad peers inside seeing a courtyard, opposite the arch being a main hall, Vlad sees someone crosslegged in their room (redsash?). Vlad confidently throws a door open and walks through like he owns the place. Vlad comes to another door with a mechanical lock, listens to the door to ascertain if someone is inside, hears nothing, and now tries to pick open the door. He goes in, seems empty although the gun is in the desk (Sanguine says so). On opening the drawer there’s no gun in there! Vlad checks for secret buttons - the drawer is indeed shallower than it should be. Vlad carves the drawer up with monofil but sadly not breadsticks, just the gun. Sanguine replaces the gun and stashes the ammo separately. A key is found which opens a wardrobe full of robes. Vlad pokes around and spots a fingerprint lock in the back of the wardrobe! Sanguine attempts to skinlink it.
Meanwhile we outsiders see some people coming in and out of the main hall, all blacksashers. The music continues. A faint wisp of smoke follows out too. The main hall is ground floor and this floor is 3rd floor.
Returning to room, Sanguine unlocks the back panel and Vlad sees the panel slide aside with a doorway leading to a small sideroom - lots of metal furnishing - tables with two laptops on (one connected to satellite uplink), an assault rifle mounted on the wall and a few shelves of other items. Sanguine moves to the laptops and Vlad messages Jack to get us all in here. On entering the room Serenity sees the mana barrier. Loki comes in and removes the Ultimax rainforest carbine from the wall, checks the magazine (full clip AP rounds), safety, it’s wireless but turned off.
Sanguine looks at the non-uplinked laptop, turning it on. It’s encrypted but Sanguine cracks it and shuffles round the files and passing relevant stuff, copying it all. Alas a data bomb goes off!! Sanguine gets punched a bit and gets a nosebleed, and the data deletes itself. Sanguine throws the laptop against the wall in a fit of pique and moves to the next laptop. Regular reports being sent here (daily?), today’s report noting 2 recruits, use of a drug called Shade during initiation, no new intrusions anticipated. Oh, have there been other intrusions?
There’s a note on Nicola, being a mage, and of the patriarch - and a note that if the leader were to leave they should shoot on sight. Father Methuselah?
Sanguine wonders about who runs this gaff if this isn’t the leader’s place. Sanguine continues riffling through the files whilst Loki stands over him rifling in hand. Vlad and others go exploring; Vlad goes up a floor and hears music, and looks at some of the ruined building around this section. It’s easy to look down tho - looking down Vlad sees a lavish prayer hall with a bigger statue, with a human man with a big white bushy beard standing in front of the statue, leading a ceremony. Scattered around the floor are ~20 people in white robes totally unconscious, and some blacksashes who are conscious and watching. Vlad is looking down for Nicola, and she’s in the room! She’s kneeling in a blacksash near the front, and praying/meditating. Vlad concocts foolproof plan to kidnap, e.g.
Jack is prodding around at Methusaleh’s belongings and finds a very flowery journal framing the notes in religious terms, this has been going 18mo or so. Jack just takes photos of each page for returning to Holly. He also finds several small wooden boxes with dried plant matter in. Jack bags some as a sample for Holly - the smell similar to incense; the compound has been mentioned in books - it’s highly illegal, a contact toxin - “Zombie Dust” - this is used to prepare a target for possession by a spirit! Hmm. Jack snaps the box closed. “Not just mind manipulation”, says Jack to Serenity - perhaps the credulous fools are being primed for possession! Sheesh. Serenity suggests that the people being ‘returned to society’ are spirit possessed. Hmm some sort of weird on-the-street apocalypse They Live! network being prepared.
Whilst flicking through personnel files, Sanguine notices someone missing from personnel files - redsash - not listed or mentioned in dispatches. Weird? Running the backtrail of the satellite uplink, there’s been major effort to bounce the signal and get it lost - but further digging by Sanguine leads him to see all the satellites are Aztechnology corp.
Redsash is in fact up front along with Nicola near old beardy Methusaleh. Fearing that Nicola’s soon on the block Serenity suggests it’s high time to extract her. Vlad notices a whiterobe credulous come-to (it’s 4am) and they look groggy as heck but grinning, and a blacksash comes to check on them. Vlad suggests this is probably move-time.
Sanguine and Loki begin to withdraw from the room, keeping the rifle (since the desk is cut to ribbons and that’s where the key was).
Loose plan:
A few hours pass by and dawn looms, Sanguine uses some first aid, Vlad continues to look out over the ground floor at Nicola and the room of people; Sanguine gets a sprite out and connects despite all the noise to let Ms Kendrick know what we’re up to. Vlad continues to peruse the room, and we watch the feed to see if any military-type gait, nope. Vlad recognises that Nicola is the only awake one in the room, so this might be an ideal time to spring a kidnap. We ask her mum what form of kidnap she’d prefer, whether she can get involved etc. Vlad decides to pop the glove on, sneak up to Nicola and stun her; Serenity will counter any magic, and Loki will collect Nicola and carry her away as she’s ‘having a trip’. Sanguine is heading to the generator in case some swift sabotage is required, he skinlinks and prepares for shutdown if required.
Vlad scoots across the courtyard (empty) and up to door (closed, which is a large wooden door and not silent on opening). He pushes the door ajar but doesn’t step thru; he peeks - Nicola hasn’t moved: he creeps up like a cartoon villain on tippytoes. Unfortunately as she hears something but the quietness is the giveaway - so she turns to face Vlad and sees a black clad athletic shape, black goggles, face mask...rather intimidating! She bellows ‘what the frack is that’ at the Vlad-shape and that’s when things all kick off…
Vlad breaks into a walk (given his pace) and closes the distance between him and Nicola and brow-touches her with the stunglove. Thanks to his newly acquired good fortune, he connects and she gets stunned, cries in pain and reels back looking groggy as heck, muscles twitch-firing, and she slips over - groggy but unbowed. Loki takes the opportunity to rush in and use his stun baton (“the difference-maker”) and puts her out cold. Sanguine hangs about. Jack comes in, switches to Astral, and takes a look around the gaff at the bodies and for any spirits or lack thereof. Jack spots a single form, bashing into its body trying to get ‘back in’, and getting increasingly frustrated being unable to enter themselves, wayhey.
Vlad prepares to vacate the premises but feels his insides warming up, as if a wee bit of heartburn, and looks up to see Father Methuselah staring at him with some look of quite intense hatred. Serenity, meanwhile, also feels herself being spelled at and spots two blacksashes entering the courtyard from doors. Loki decides to blag like he’s here to help take her back to her bed, picks her up and sashays towards the door. Sanguine spots the uplink kick on and a datasquawk - but no interception. Serenity blasts a shot at blacksash fella spellin’ on her.
Vlad tackles the problem head-on and charges father with an attempt to stunglove. He considered monofilament whipping but with a chemsuit on the hand is sealed in, so glove it must be. With liquid speed the old fella sways aside and Vlad absolutely airballs his attempt. Old man then decides the best course of action would be to cast a fireball at Vlad, who dodges neatly. Loki continues out of the room and walks - briskly, with purpose - towards the front of the castle as if to head towards her block. The confidence he exudes is unparalleled. Serenity covers Loki in counterspells as she continues to fire hell out of the mage. She also gets spelled upon but she absolutely snuffs it out. Sanguine continues to straight chill in the genny room but not before trying to work out where these data packets are heading, uplink style. It transpires that the laptop user is sending messages to the Aztec Corp as well as another site nearby (perhaps a secondary base??) and in the past has sent them data files regularly.
Jack casts thunderbolt, unclear of the results.
Vlad waps out the stun glove again of Methuselah, successful, he’s looking close to going down. But Vlad continues to suffer internal burn. Loki leaves the castle walls with Nicola. Serenity continues to do battle with the other mages, a wizard’s duel! Sanguine sends a message, hoping to dissuade the recipients that it was a false alarm and then kills the lights before heading out to meet Loki.
Vlad tries to finish Methuselah but isn’t able to. The Father instead twists his face in unnatural ways, causing Vlad to shit himself. Vlad, naturally, flees, abandoning the two mages.
Loki continues his exit, covered by Sanguine as the dorms are evacuated.
Jack is left alone in the castle with Serenity surrounded by the mob. Jack casts a defensive spell and then begins his exodus, but not before casting fly on Serenity who kills a mage on her way up.
Vlad makes it to Trev’s boat, sees a bloody mess and decides to leave and jump in the swamp. Sanguine prepares the haz mat suits for Loki, Loki decides not to take him up on this and goes into the murder scene boat instead. Vlad gets a grip of himself. Jack yanks off Serenity (successfully). Sanguine exits the warehouse (leaving his calling card) and gets shot at by an unknown assailant in the bushes. He returns fire and makes it to Trev’s boat. Loki fires up the engine. The boat is then peppered by automatic fire, shattering windows and breaking the air tight integrity of the vessel.
Vlad is shot in the water, going unconscious. More fire into the boat, clipping Nicola. Jack decides to punch one of the three assailants, downing him and taking his helmet off. Sanguine fails to hit anything with his shot, Serenity stabs one with a blade but is then taken out.
Sanguin blows away the last goon and we are able to pack up and leave. Vlad and Serenity still unconscious. We find Fisher is still there (lad!) and take Trev’s body with us, returning through the swamps.
We’re on Fisher’s boat; Sanguine tries to heal Serenity...nope; so in the meantime he sits opposite Nicola pointing a gun just in case she comes to and is hostile. Serenity still comes to, sits next to Nicola. Loki talks to Fisher about boats. Sanguine now tries to heal Vlad but gets nowhere, so chucks a blanket over him instead. Nicola comes to, feels the broken arm pain, screams a bit, yells at her mum, tries to spellcast grumpily at Loki, then slumps back. She’s a bit too pained to interrogate the ‘whos’ ‘whats’ ‘wheres’ and ‘whys’ she babbled at her mum. She gets dosed up with painkillers and drowses. The 12hr journey back to Ely occurs. Loki gets a wee go at the tiller. We get off the boat, hand a credstick to Fisher with Y3k on (a wee bonus) and we all bundle into Titania. We debate where to head - drop Serenity off first, with Nicola, then report to Holly for debrief. We head to the Kindled Flame, dropping Serenity off, and receiving our credstick.
We go into the flame, Holly scurries us into a backroom with whisky, and Jack begins explaining. Sanguine adds the satlink, techroom etc. and the background Aztechnology situation and the quick response goons. Jack mentions the weird bronze statue, we get the credstick and Holly fears a quick response. Jack suggests following up on the ‘persons of interest’ perhaps possessed by the zombie dust awaiting a trigger...
Holly also vouches on our behalf to her ‘community’ in case that helps in future with a promise to be in touch with job or news. Jack asks for some time off and gets it.
Vlad heals back up, Holly sends Jack a video clip of Eyecastle getting bombed to smithere’ens. Apparently Holly wished it had gone differently but either way...KABOOM.
Downtimes!
Jack goes to Berlin, gets a tattoo, gets initiated, hangs around corp bars with wageslaves :O
Sanguine submerges then weaponises further, has a chat with Vlad about his talking cars :D
Loki gets water navigation lessons two-ways: one on a narrowboat, one in a swimming pool :P
Vlad plots another phase in his hatred of corps, gets Sanguine to help him with some matrix digging around for other revenge plans - he kidnaps, murders and impersonates a pro-corp-propaganda generator and feeds the corpse to our ghouls. :S
Sanguine gets a call from Fabiana and reports on a ‘big thing’, reporting on the potential WMD technology we’re aware of, yet it doesn’t seem to capture their attention. They also talk some hokey stuff about ‘balance’ between runners, corps and crime families etc., hmm. They also talk about magic elf kid - she is ‘corp property’ and will come to ‘retrieve lost’.
Next Run!
Dax contacts Sanguine and talks to him with the many voices, Info on the iron angels. Thinks they have found a technomancer? Related to them. Their life is in danger (She). Has made a call to doc wagon and has put out a matrix call for help - only recently revealed themselves to the community.
On Corp territory. Sanguine mentions that the group might kill her. Dax points out that they have information that the group would want.
Dax has a message for “Robert’’ - saying that she has helped them before and is willing to offer more help in exchange for saving her life
Provides info on the doc wagon that might have her location?
Calls herself Copper
Sanguine reports this to the team
He then traces the docwagon commlink number
Further hacking gets him a biomonitor feed
Sanguine needs to remember to try and find Copper’s persona whilst en route.
We are trying to work out what’s up with the docwagon-before-injury and what-is-Copper-up-to (is she a prisoner? Guinea pig? On a run gone bad?)
Sanguine asks how to approach the persona to Smith, and how to negotiate.
Smith also asks about camera feeds from the van of corp peeps - shown to the group
Sanguine tries to hack the persona - dropping into VR, spies a bald human woman with white eyes leaning against a virtual wall. Sanguine steps over assertively, and speaks to her, establishes what’s wrong “she got found”; “who is Smith”; “I’m on a run, with a small team, but I think - we were infiltrating this place to help liberate some of the research they were doing”. How are you still alive if they found you? “We managed to hide enough. There are some of my runners nearby, we were split”. 4 in total; human female razorgal, dwarf male rigger, elf male medic. Where in the building are you? Copper is in some vents. They appear to be actively searching the building.
Ends call and discuss - HTR on their way (or just using their own response)? Do we enter via tunnel or front door? Cause distraction at front and fewer people infiltrate?
HTR has been called - arrival in 14 mins after we arrive.
We get to the warehouse. Sanguine hacks the host to turn off the cameras, deactivate sensors on doors and fence. The Father cuts his way through the fence (large enough for a troll) and attempts to pick the lock on the door.
Smith spots someone working in a small area of light - he sneaks over (tries to) to subdue the guy and has to decide about firing narcojet on them - he does so, being forced to resist a whole lotta stun. He goes down and they propose getting the light to move around like he is, just so we don’t spot the pool of light over a slumped fella. He nearly flubs it but just gets there, spotlight wandering. Dancing in the moonlight.
We move down the ramp, Vlad continuing to ping locks, and Sanguine uses his skinlink to adequately open the door without triggering stuff. There’s a mana barrier the other side of the door? Jack assesses this, dropping what needs dropped and recasting it the other side. We cut the link to the motion sensor lights and move in the darkness, Smith and Loki managing with thermovision. We get to a door with another cardlock on. Vlad pops it.
We ask Sanguine where the target is. He slumps to VR and recontacts, asks where she is. Floor 13. Rather than take a lift in a lockdown building, with spider, we consider other options.
Above, we hear mutters and Vlad notices they are running UPstairs…”search”, “look for”, “intruders” as keywords, clearly looking for the first runners, not us. Phew!
We begin running upstairs as well. We get to the 6th floor - which is where the spider is - we intend to subdue. Vlad pings the panel, Sanguine moves to unlock whilst seeing if he’s yet to be found out on the matrix: he feels that he caught something’s eye whilst unlocking. Eep.
Sanguine warns Vlad, who belts down the corridor (sending messages back to Sanguine as he runs such as ... ?)
Jack casts a spirit, then Initiative time…
Smith and Loki run upstairs
Sanguine pops a clip out of a turret, Vlad runs down corridor and doesn’t get killed
Smith and Loki continue up (as does Jack’s spirit), and Jack (invisibly) reaching floor 10/11
Sanguine continues to befuddle stuff with sprites. Vlad is nearing the security door so Sanguine tries to pop it open with a bluffy keycard, but that keycard was unprivileged. How awkward!
Sanguine is hacked by local security, a virtual eyeball smacks into his persona’s head marking him.
Smith runs upstairs to L12 and slows down to peek at what they’re up to (gesturing at the door leading into that floor). Smith waits for Jack and Loki to catch up.
Sanguine’s sprite hangs ten whilst Jack’s spirit pops up through the floor and spots the people gawking at the door - 5 people glowing as if magically active. It halts, identifies a priority target, but doesn’t engage just yet, pending combat.
Vlad gets his whip out and turns it off; Smith turns the corner of the staircase and sprays stick-and-shock flechettes on these geezers, targeting the 2 nearest. They go down like a sack of spuds and the electrical noise fills the air. A little sparkfest ensues.
Loki runs up and shocks up another fella too, who gets a centre round and spasms a bit as he tries to steady his gunhand.
Jack’s spirit engages in astral combat with the mage. Connects nicely indeed. Jack proceeds invisibly upstairs, spies the 3 remaining standing and spells at ‘em. Two of them appear buffeted by the spell but the mage seems ok. Counterspells all round.
Sanguine tries to force the door open. Fails. D’oh.
The 3 standing people realise they’re being set upon, so fire on Smith and Loki. They miss/ping off. The mage casts a spell at Jack and misses. Smith mullers 2 more. Loki drops the last. Silence abounds, till Jack talks. Sanguine eventually pops the door.
Vlad hears the bolt clear, thoonk. Sanguine sends a thankyou message even tho Vlad didn’t help, and Vlad turns to meet Mr Spider.
Vlad pushes open the door and sees a person plugged into a console leaning back in a chair, but cocooned - so has no fleshy bits to hit! Vlad violently attacks said cocoon with whip. The cocoon can’t dodge, of course, and a hole begins being cut.
Smith attempts to shoot the lock off the door, pow. Door is kicked open for a flourish. As the door opens, there are two turrets on rails pointed at the door. Eep. These things open up automatic stun rounds on Smith. Smith sees no ill effect. Loki tries to fire on one, misses, takes cover.
Vlad/Finlay has another slice of cocoon. He gets it open. Prepares to eviscerate the spider to obliterate him and his miserable corp life. Sanguine notices ICE begin deployment. He feels good that he suppressed it for that long. Smug much. High fives offered by Vlad with the whip-stowed hand.
Out of combat, the drones are dispatched, and the spider is gone. Sanguine skinlinks the console, having to reach into the stinky cocoon. Scans the cameras to floor 13 looking for trouble; we get pinged the location where she entered the vents. Smith heads on, Jack readies a microdrone, Loki follows Smith, both reloading clips.
Loki suggests Jack use wispy spirit to look in the vents for Copper. Meanwhile Sanguine is scanning the cameras and spots dwarf getting turreted. Sanguine is also checking if turrets are firing as the plan might be to get Copper to come out on L13 and meet us halfway. Jack does take Loki’s suggestion, incroyable.
Sanguine asks Copper to start heading out, she asks about her team; “not located yet”. “There’s a lot of security, we don’t have much time”.
We hear gunshots on L14 reverberating down to us. Smith asks Sanguine to check on L14, despite ICE. Sanguine sees the chromed razorgal having a one-on-many with corp security. He suggests Vlad and he pop upstairs for a corp murdering killspree, and sticks a coin in the cocoon on his way out. Sanguine tips the group that they’re heading up to L14.
We move on, Smith hearing the gunfire to the side before the rest of the gang running with him; he continues towards ventry. Jack notices spirits congregating and tells us to hustle. Sanguine and Vlad trot upstairs at Sanguine’s sweaty pace; Jack’s spirit advises Jack where Copper is, vented, and drones are en route to intercept her. Smith trots on the way he was advised previously, then Jack gets the chance to warn Smith the 20 may have changed. Jack moves down a fork with the spirit whilst Smith and Loki continue.
The spirit continues to observe this person’s aura, and assenses - mundane cyberarmed non-recognised aura. The elfmedic perchance? Or our Copper?
Smith looks round the corner - barrelfirst - and spots two turrets patrolling the corridor. Perhaps following the ducting above? Smiths takes a clever shot targeting both of them.
Jack gets to where in the vent he thought the spirit was pointing and spots the vent above him, open. He’s pretty confident Copper is above him and DNI’s back. Loki catches up to Smith and waits there.
Jack’s spirit points at the person in the vent to Jack and stands there like a wet lemon.
Sanguine and Finlay make it to the 14th floor fast but Sanguine is pooped. Finlay waits another round before acting rashly.
Smith looks around for grates to rip off and check the vents, does a pullup, checks down the vent and establishes drag marks in the direction of travel (away from Jack).
Jack gets the other microdrone out and chucks it into the ceiling vent. He establishes the thing bleeding in the vent was an elf male. Jack sighs audibly.
Loki heads in the direction Smith points, he comes face to face with another turret drone.
Sanguine moves on the shooting party and wants in, since he can’t message razorgal without her digits. He shouts help is incoming, and Finlay moves to eviscerate the first of 3 guards. Clean off.
Jack sends a list of questions to injured dwarfman. Meanwhile Loki dives back down the corridor before the turrets pick him off. Smith looks on unamused.
Sanguine works some more shooty magic, and Jack gets his response: not awakened, not sure if can survive being pushed 5ft down the vent, needs to be stabilized - has an attached medkit but it on its own isn’t doing enough. Jack’s spirit ekes this fella out of the vent.
Finlay, without breaking stride after the first decapitation kill, moves onto the next guard and indeed once again, it connects beautifully, and they have a chance to look very surprised until the head rolls clean off the shoulders.
Smith marches past loki to dispatch both turrets, with some disappointment at Loki’s self-preservation instincts.
Jack tries to use the medkit, which is out of supplies, and he adds his last supply to the kit.
Loki gets back up, dusts himself off, steps back to Smith and shoots a turret.
Sanguine looks for a cool guy gif and messages Razorgal to get moving. She gives Finlay a nod who advises he was here as part of DocWagon to administer last rites to the needy. She doesn’t get the joke so DNI’s Sanguine to ask what the priest is playing at. Sanguine advises her about the inscrutable nature of the gods, to which she seems unimpressed.
Jack’s spirit goes off looking for riggerdwarf. It also forms some sort of weird fiery magic and goes off like a molotov cocktail, to burn hell out of one of the turrets. A bullet explodes in its chamber and bang goes one, literally.
Sanguine asks Jack if he needs some help and suggests a direction of travel, as the drone remaining fires on Smith and Loki drop to the floor. Smith now tries to shoot in response. Smithereens. Runs along continuing to the next nearest venthatch.
Jack scans the Elf-fella’s vitals and things are bad. He’s been shot. Splendid. Bit of ineffectual first aid help too.
Loki rejoins Smith and hangs out at the next venthatch. Jack’s spirit again goes for a turret, and Finley and Sanguine trot on downstairs. The potshots at dwarf-rigger are audible at the entrance to 13th floor. Smith shouts to Sanguine “where the **** is she? Can’t find her. Still in the vent somewhere.” Meanwhile Smith listens out for any noise before hoisting up to look in the vent. Jack casts something fairly big, doesn’t talk to the rest of us since things are clearly under control. Loki joins Smith again and gives him some leg support whilst he’s looking down the vent. Sanguine gives Copper the riot act about how she needs to give us a location stat. She sends Sanguine back a picture of Smith (gasmasked up) and Sanguine confirms that’s one of our party. Sanguine gets his climbing kit out and Finlay trots in in the hope of killing more corps.
Jack’s spirit falls back to using elemental attack to keep messing up these gun turrets, using his spirit hand to melt up the turret. It turns to slag under his ‘fingers’, and turns to face dwarfrigger. The dwarf raises his hands in a surrender/whoa posture.
Smith sees Copper holding gun at pointblank range, so he reaches to grab Copper and remove her from the vent. Copper gets the message from Sanguine just in time so doesn’t shoot Smith in the face, but Smith drags her out of the vent and drops her to the ground; Loki lets go of Jack and seeks to break Copper’s fall.
Jack continues to sustain his heal spell on the elf medic, and calls his spirit back. We begin to arrange our exit preparations.
Razorgal and Dwarf are reunited with each other and head towards Elf-medic.
Copper asks whether we’re the friends she called for...Smith confirms she is ‘Copper’, indeed, quickdraws pistol and shoots her in the face, specifically a capsule round down the gullet.
The gang kneel down next to Jack and Razorgal thanks Jack for the heal-help. It’s time to go! Jack proposes they exit swiftly. Razorgal then pulls her gun on Jack, and the spirit pulls a weapon in response. She asks what our party is up to, Jack says ‘extracting her’ and Razorgal pulls a picture up of Smith shooting her. Since Jack has his hands on elf-medic he’s not dead yet, but DNI’s Finlay for support; razorgal explains there’s a monstrosity to kill. It’s a technocritter, and the centre of the building and 2 floors given over to this ‘darklab’. When it’s clear Copper hired these goons to assist, Jack says ‘we want 5/8ths’. She stares down Jack, and says ‘fine’. Jack explains we need a number! 75k, Finlay says GOGOGO! Smith agrees so long as we leave time to depart before HTR.
Finlay runs over and recites the last rites to Elf-medic, his fractured Latin doing the job there.
Smith applies head-jammer to Copper’s unconscious body, Loki tosses her over shoulder and they join the markers at a very well reinforced door.
The implied area covered on the floorplan is extremely big, doubleheight floors, 200m of space.
Jack commands his spirit to fight/guard. Sanguine comes around the corner wearing the legloops of his harness, looking a little cheesed off. He has to skinlink the lock, as well as dip into the host to see if there are cameras in the technocritter lair. He continues to skirt the ICE countermeasures - popping the door but not getting more info for fear of being ICEd.
A lever allows the door to be pulled open, and Sanguine advises he is a bit matrix-light at the mo with all the countermeasures. Harrison and Loki look in the dark room and sees a ball-shaped thing chained up in the centre of the room. Jack looks for a light switch and does his longwinded assense of the technocritter. Interesting takehomes:
Smith relays his thermographic view to the rest of the group: Jack tries to turn the heat-ball into an idea which critter it is. It’s not native; Vlad suggests just burning the room. Smith tries to work out if it’s like room sized, bus sized, blue whale sized; whatever: it’s about 10m across curled up. Jack asks the other team what on earth they came prepared with. ‘Some explosives’. NOT ENOUGH!
Vlad shines his phone-torch around the room - avoiding the critter - to see what else there is: side rooms with viewpoints, areas of dirt (emulating “habitat”); Sanguine tries getting in touch with it matrixely now the door is open (clearly was a faraday cage): he gets through, looking for information, and perhaps a lethal weapon we could use to subdue it. Images are relayed of humans (some positive association [“tail up”], some negative [“hoofprint”]), get some command words etc. but it seems a little patchy/random. Vlad puts on sneaky chameleon suit and sneaks on; Smith pulls out a breaching charge. Sanguine raises his weapon.
As people step in the lights turn on, illuminating the critter, Vlad creeps up trying to cut the critter’s chains, and Smith tells us in no uncertain terms to commence running. He turns to go, Loki turning too.
It awakes.
It IS an armadillo! It’s also a juggernaut. But a wee one. Despite Sanguine pitching the concept of feeders coming, the juggernaut starts charging. And it moves FAST.
Finlay runs out the room, DNI’ing back over his shoulder to shut the door.
Smith scoops Sanguine up in order to carry him and run nice and quickly. And run, runs.
Jack gets the spirit to remove him, and casts ‘net bind’ on the ‘dillo, standing tight.
Loki runs about a third of the distance Smith runs, lugging Copper.
The spirit wings Jack away, then the ‘dillo tries to resist the net-bind and charges out the room, going like 70-odd metres and smashing out a wall. Finlay watches this and regrets his action to release it. Seems like a foolish decision.
Jack calls his drone back, and gets carried by spirit.
The dillo continues crashing through things whilst Jack marvels at why they decided to stick this thing 14 floors up and not more securely. Sheesh.
Smith watches as the dillo crashes through a wall in front of him, before crashing through another like a messed up freight train. Sanguine continues in his arms, content: he does mention that he could be clipped to the rope when they get to the stairwell for ease of descent.
Jack tells the spirit on arrival at the stairwell to jump down!
Loki gets almost to stairwell.
We hear crashing stop, falling masonry etc. pauses, but we hear a rummaging sound and then movement heading back towards us…
Sanguine abseils down, wheeeeeeee. He rappels down at 7m/s.
Finlay also reaches the stairs, weighing up rope vs staircase.
Smith returns to Loki and asks for Copper to be handed to him.
Jack casts a physical barrier in the hopes of ramping this dillo away from us; it creates a nice forcefield which is criminally weak. Mmmm, glass ramp.
Loki offloads Copper to Smith, runs past and begins descending the stairs.
We hear an armadillo roar as it charges in our general direction, finishing its turn just before the glass ramp.
Sanguine falls out of the sky, slowing his descent as the ground approaches. As falling he fumbles a little, having been tossed off by Smith, but rotates around and gets his grips and halts pretty much face-to-ground. Phew. He begins unbuckling and asks “same route out?”.
Finlay, Loki et al descend the staircase.
The dillo blasts into the glass ramp, and Jack seeks to bombard it with some trid phantasm imagery of being in some sort of paradise for Armadillos with a very attractive Armadillo, nice hay smells and other things (Marvin Gaye soundtrack) to distract the ‘dillo. It seems currently a bit perplexed, circling and wondering what is occurring.
At basement level, we intend to move into the corridor from whence we entered, we barrel out the tunnel, Sanguine getting the door locks each time. Carrying down the dark corridor, we crack on, other party in tow. We emerge the other side, security seems more alert to this prospect, with sirens winding up; Jack gets his bike over, we bundle towards titania.
Three docwagons appear (to pick up the party) and 4th Ambulance appears with people coming out and approaching us - clearly wanting to extract Titania most professionally. They are walking towards us currently as they watch us bundle Copper into Titania.
GMC endurance x2 and Ares Roadmaster variant x1 docwagons appear. One medic and one assault rifle clad person walk up to us and we turn to get in Titania; the medic turns and runs back to the car, and the assaulter fires a shot at Titania, in an effort to immobilise her. It hits but only takes a bit of beating.
Finlay gets in the car. Gunman hops into the Ares and are chasing us down; as we look out of the rear window, lean out the passenger side etc., shooting at us as Loki handbrake turns around a hard junction, dodging the shot. Jack gets on his bike behind the Ares, hanging 1 cars length back, kind of tailing/moving to flank. Smith tries to shoot the engine block but no luck.
Sanguine drops into VR and looks over Copper - spotting the biomonitor bracelet and embedded RFID tracker. He gets ready with sprite to hack it next moment.
The gunman now fires at Smith who grabs the troll mattress off Loki’s boot-bed, avoiding the shots. Sanguine gets to work on the chip whilst Finlay does some stick figure AR bikework diagrams for Jack, asking whether he’d prefer Finlay to navigate. A port opens atop the Ares, and the gunman pops out the top of the car and points at Titania, drawing a machine gun and firing upon her once more with a spray of suppression. Everyone drops except Loki who takes a stickandshock to the head, Titania getting away unscathed this time. <3
Sanguine’s sprite finishes deactivating the tracker on Copper.
Some unpiloted bike starts racing up to be alongside Loki...uh oh. Jack creeps up alongside the car behind and tries to flank the gunman;
Smith launches himself onto the hood of the docwagon but just about grabs onto the top of the roof as he hits the car, rolls up and flies off the back.
Loki handbrake turns down a sidestreet, Titania getting raked up the side in the process. 100m up is a cross-street. Sanguine throws a tracker onto a car heading the other way in a bid to shift the tail.
Smith drops a frag grenade into the car, likely eviscerating everyone within. The updraft ejects the gunner and Smith off the top of the car, bouncing along tarmac, pavement, up against building, rather dinged up but unfazed. Sanguine does some spritey stuff, before the ejected gunman - hacked off in the righteous indignation - full auto bursts at Smith. Smith dodges deftly.
Loki gets outflanked by the bike which gets in front of Titania, and the bike drops a grenade onto the hood of the Titan, exploding into a glitterbomb, which EMP-dumps Sanguine out of VR.
Loki’s tunes stop, his wipers don’t work, so he rolls the window down, leans out and pots a shot at the biker, whilst driving along. Jack pulls up alongside the left-hand door of Titania so Vlad can leap out onto Jack’s bike, then the ejected-from-car fella recovers and fires at Smith again. Once again Smith rolls inelegantly from the fire but enough to dodge it all again.
Again from the bike another ‘fthpp’ and another grenade comes down the chute - the driver’s side window just in front of Loki and he gets paint-in-the-face. Oh dear.
Sanguine springs forward to toss the driver’s cupholder of beer in the face of Loki in a bid to clear his eyes, but he misses and gives Loki a nice drink. Sanguine is now at least able to help Loki blind-navigate.
Smith chooses to fight back against this fella shooting at him constantly, using his fists of fury, finishing with a roundhouse kick to the face.
Loki drops his gun, wipes his eyes, and now sees Sanguine leaning out of the window aiming his gun at the bike.
Vlad and Sanguine begin acting retribution on this biker prick. He goes DOWN.
Smith hops into the Ares and has a look to see if he can drive it - nope, and the back is goopy.
Jack circles back and wheels up to Smith, piloting him back.
We intend to? head back to ghoultown to interrogate this lassie.
Sanguine and Smith exchange some messages about avoiding the problem and propose next location: Firehouse or derelict building? We search ourselves and navigation for a sensible interrogation shack. Jack suggests alternatives to the bomb room or Loki’s bog. We decide to head to the Barrens. The building is empty-ish, still, formerly of the formerly Scattered (and now regathered) Angels. Jack and Smith arrive first and check it’s clear as Loki et al pull up with the cargo. Vlad continues to nap in the back, as we get the unconscious asset out the boot and give a patdown for weaponry. We remove the armour jacket, Jack assenses without consent again to look for cyberware etc. and they confirm the basics:
Smith restrains Copper. We wait to shake off some stun and for Copper to come round. Question planning:
Jack sees her come round and Smith proposes he doesn’t ask the questions. Loki goes to look for a beer whilst Jack waterboards her, then suggests we get down to business. Copper wiggles against the restraints and realises she’s somewhat stuck. Jack notes there are some questions.
She asks if we’re part of ‘Sykes’’s group. Who is Sykes? So Jack asks for more info...and Smith confirms that’s an alias of his. Jack confirms we can let her go if we get the information we’re both after? Copper asks again if that were the case why she were shot and tied up. She’s negotiating for the ‘use of her hands’....Jack isn’t yet buying it and points out he’s the friendliest face to talk to. Smith asks Sanguine to keep an eye in the matrix to ensure Copper isn’t getting a connection or doing something in VR.
Interrogation begins! Jack broaches the work of last year she did with Platinum and the Iron Angels, dropping those buzzwords. Copper points out her saving our lives and this is repayment, not a conversation but an interrogation. Moan moan ‘I reached out, you’d never have found me blah blah’. Loki is getting bored but the interrogation will begin proper soon. Copper suggests she’d have traded rescue for information but perhaps if this way she gets rescued perhaps she should just die and not trade the info. We strike a deal where she gets to go hands free if she doesn’t touch her jamming headband; Loki is standing behind her to unlock the cuffs, and cut her heart open if she does anything stupid.
She’s still restrained at ankles, chest, legs etc. Copper turns her top half to look behind her, sees Loki, Sanguine, Finlay and a gas-masked fella in the corner who is Smith, and after squinting she assesses him and asks if that’s him. She now shares some words with Smith, and some more with Jack too…
Copper was part of the iron angels for ‘a few years’, and she left the group some time later. She and Jack talk about the darkweb and whatever Renraku might be up to. Jack asks for more info in what Platinum has been or may be up to, given she’s dabbling quite heavily - Platinum is in the Renraku arkology - having moved in within the last year, in some enforcement/cleanup operations, perhaps internally, managing events needing ‘cleanup’. Sanguine notes she’s ex-Saeder Krupp, or employed by both, prompting confusion in Jack and spitting in Vlad/Finlay.
Given how little Platinum gets out of the arkology, is it clear how often she’ll be outside and we can jump her etc. - and we also ask where the other Iron Angels are about. She mentions some Tristan fellow who’s been recently ‘let go’ by Platinum, and that’s not a euphemism for being iced. She proposes taking us to him - after a rest and she tools up. And to let her go! HAHAHAHA. Vlad cannot believe his ears. He suggests using Leal to brainwash her, knock her out and restart the interrogation process with slightly more information than before. Handing the vial to Jack and suggesting it might be time for a do-over. We are obliged to insert the pill and force her to swallow it. She crunches a tooth, begins foaming at the mouth, and when we connect her up to the medkit it turns out she’s taken a cyanide capsule. That’s a bummer. The medkit suggests a total transfusion is the best option...so we start the car. After driving towards a clinic we are far too late and the Copper dies.
We return to Ghoultown to feed her to ghouls. Vlad DNI’s Jack and has a chat with Smith about how annoying she was and better off dead.
Smith confirms Tristan is the mole - and worked for a company Smith used to work for; Sanguine asks if he’ll be similarly cooperative or not, but Smith is unsure. Sanguine sets about trying to find him. Jack drives off with the hump.
Downtime: Loki 90% fixes car after fixing it for 32hrs, Vlad views the news for destruction of London thanks to armoureddillo juggy and begins stalking a new target in this shell company thingy. Smith impatiently pumps Sanguine for information, and goes to see Angela to provide the info we mined, asking her to talk to other members of the company for any leads. Jack definitely has the hump and stays in Cambridge. Sanguine and Theta play trid games together so Sanguine can assess Theta’s matrix ability (and reports this to Dax indicating she could be a future apprentice); Dax asks about Sanguine’s party and whether he trusts them to do stuff etc, and perhaps Sanguine could bring them to the matrix sometime. Sanguine then goes to Vlad to discuss this and the matrix version of astral plane, and crafts some e-invites for a lovely ‘crew meal’, sprucing up the war room and getting it all dinner party-esque. During the meal Sanguine brings up this wheeze and pitches it to the group, Smith asking how long this will take. Sanguine points out to him it’s uncharted territory. And Smith points out we’re not technically apt, but it’s for strength of will. It’s all about rescuing Vlad’s car-spirits or something. Theta also likes the prospect of a high-resonance road trip to rescue the lost car-spirits apparently. And Sanguine offers Loki the chance to take Titania, so he is finally in. Jack also consents to joining but only for ‘her’, not for Vlad. Sanguine calls Dax to confirm this job is a goer.
We are assigned homework following dinner, to watch Disney’s Alice in Wonderland; The Matrix; Inception; and Yellow Submarine, to mentally prepare us for these trippy weirdspaces. Sanguine also leads some short sessions to new folk in cybercombat, hacking, software, electronic warfare and other topics etc. - mostly in context to Loki about how this will better allow him to defend Titania.
Sanguine gives us a spiel (Sanguine: eloquent request) about (Loki: how we have to be) (Sanguine: ASKED IF YOU WOULD) polite and respectful to these people letting us in, even though we’re doing some sort of favour (for Vlad, not for DAX (Although to Loki, having to do favours for anyone is galling))? I don’t know. Anyway, Loki doesn’t grumble about this (but grits his teeth and makes a face) being told to behave ourselves amongst people we don’t know if they’ll piss us off yet.
16/2/77
Smith contacts Angela, a nurse of some kind, to prepare some crash-type beds to keep us hooked up to IVs etc. to ensure we don’t die whilst under. We head to said clinic and tip Dax off that we’re en route to the adventure. We hop onto beds and prepare ourselves (and those looking to mainline drugs too sort out their Psyche doses). Angela hooks us up one by one, and we follow our own little rabbitholes to wonderland. Angela also notes to Smith that Sanguine saw to himself, ie is a technomancer, and marveled that he traded up an arm.
Loki is decked out in his clan tartan and a beautiful stylised Titania is getting filled with whiskey by Sanguine; Vlad comes in looking like an Arthurian knight, all St George tabard and all, with a stallion greeting him; Jack comes in looking younger and in weird future-imagined clothing, with a German MX bike to ride; then Smith finally drops in like a pixellated image and a batmobile to ride.
Sanguine spins up a road for us to follow and he just skates like Raeburn’s skating minister down the road. Lanes set themself up including some grass for Vlad’s horsey. We navigate away. As we drive we reach a point where we don’t seem to gain ground on the horizon of reaching Dax...and his form suddenly splits into five, one in each lane! And they rush into conversational distance right in our faces. All 5 Daxes talk at once, cacophanously, to note we’ve made it. After some chipper talk they decide to dispense with introductions. Dax proffers a hand to each of us to lead us further down the road, Sanguine going first; on contact Dax disappears from view and reappears in our passenger seats/sidecars/rear seat/riding pillion and we zoom forward.
We go at speed and see on the horizon the road coming to a point which we move towards - Sanguine pops through first, losing sensation, direction, orientation, which reconvenes at some point, feeling floating downwards before landing on grass. Dax looks now like a standard person(a) to Sanguine; a human female appears dressed simply and sort of hoody (cloak?). We each hurtle in our own ways. Titania happily stays with Sanguine, Vlad lands in a crumple with his horse but both vehicles are unharmed. We look at each other and notice our personae have become more like us. But...mixed up!! So Loki looks like Vlad’s persona, St George tabard and all, and Vlad is bekilted astride his horse. Loki presumably has the longsword poking out of the window. Vlad asks in a Scottish/Smoggie(?) accent, whether it can be put right, and Loki realises in horror he may have an English accent as well. Also, it appears that Jack and Smith have swapped bodies too. Dax seeks to ‘put this right’ but it will take ‘some time’. Oh dear.
Theta also joins us! Bizarrely similar persona to Dax, but lens glarey/glowy. She turns a blade of grass into a lightsaber and gets spun up a speeder, and we begin to follow the tyre tracks of one of Vlad’s cars. Smith marvels that he’d expected more circuits and numbers and all, and Sanguine explains it’s all and nothing, in a way. Unfortunately Loki doesn’t know where the hell he is going and the tracks trail off, the grass goes, things just kind of wink out. Wisps of data flow brush by us. Sanguine spots therefore that Loki is not quite the keen navigator in this weird netherworld. Sanguine instead of embarrassing Loki’s bad navigation instead steers the matrix so it’s going the right way relative to Loki. Smooooooth. Loki is emboldened by navigating sooooooo well clearly that he puts his foot down and follows the tracks, glowing, en route. Titania’s wheels glow with the same colour as these tracks and we kind of lock in step as we follow. Smith is similarly successful in his endeavours to continue and Vlad, feeling like Loki, decides to push his horse-vehicle along. So far so good! Jack barks leadership questions at Loki trying to get him to divulge information about idealised Titania, whilst Loki remains tight-lipped. Sanguine feels as if we have come across the plains reaching the desert and the scenery shifts and we come out on to Monument Valley. He even sparks up some Troll thrash metal, Western style. Yeehaw. In the end this works just for Loki out of his front screen, but it gets the job done. Loki then flubs a survival roll looking around for food and water? Since it’s unclear what survival in the matrix would be, he looks around aimlessly but sees an eye hunting US. Eep. Even when averting his eyes Loki feels watched everywhere he looks. Disconcerting. Smith seeing we’re turning from hunter in to hunted, looks to get some tracking skills down to trail our prey and shake off our pursuer...but doesn’t. The matrix is apparently not traceable in the same way, tracks can’t be smudged the same way. The data seems tricksy!
Vlad decides being unsworded, he needs a big ol weapon, something Scottish. He searches and yields a Claymore yet the one he summons from the ether is a super duper long longsword. Jack explores some theoretical wonderings whilst mid-matrix, testing out whilst in Smiths body(?) using some spells to see if they operate the same way in-matrix (e.g. Trid Phantasm), so trying to use magic in magical sense, not in a computing sense. He summons quite the posse of Scottish Claymore wielding horse riders shouting ‘freedom’ in gaelic. Loki nods approvingly even more so than when it was just Vlad.
We end up somehow in an undersea world...but are at least ourselves again. That’s something (although Vlad continues to rock the Scottish accent, to Loki’s approval). Jack and Sanguine share some understanding of living on other planes and such. Sanguine summons us up some diving bell old school gear. We wander around looking for signs of life and we find an (undersea!) firepit with a former fireplace waiting for us. Sanguine pops his head into the tipi Jack spots some name badges with greek letters and numbers...flicking them over to Vlad, who sees the E11/E17 notes and does some heady reminiscing. Smith recalls Theta is T17. Vlad “is” 23 apparently, and Theta may be around...early teen? Preteen? Vlad recalls further some other people in the party...a woman with a poison tipped tail? Anyway, Sanguine focuses on the task i.e. looking for a way out of camp. He gets handed the tags and senses a ‘trail’ like a smokewisp leading away - but Sanguine also notes the camp is in use. By them?? After some discussion it becomes plain we’re unsure if they were running from us or Theta...or were just flighty all along. Sanguine suggests splitting the party; Sanguine and Theta staying at camp whilst we explore further, in case they’re fleeing her.
We share a bunch of navigation tests to try and locate these fella-cars and hear the sounds of creatures fighting somewhere nearby, and as we approach Sanguine feels a code-based shockwave pulse out from the smoke wisp we were following. Sanguine asks whether we wait for these creatures to kill one another. As Vlad yanks some kelp up from this environment he spots an error message appear as the kelp gets yanked and Vlad ties a bone to the sword using this new kelprope. The monster fight progresses and sparkles appear where the fight develops, gashes in the monsters appearing on the floor as ‘pure code’. Neither clearly has a winner, and Smith asks again why we’re waiting here for them to finish - why can’t we walk around the trail and rejoin the other side? Sure...as we do that and press on, cresting the rock, we hear a “thump” as the giant bat comes lumbering towards us, hurtling through the undergrowth (and more error messages trailing in its wake) and we dive out the way but both these monsters have now seen us.
So we fight them! Eek. A non-real-world-yellow-submarine-war.
The first one charges Sanguine and tries to attack with a bite, but Sanguine is able to shake it off. Smith goes to punch one in the face but it dodges. Loki also checks his spurs turn on (THAT’S A THING), and goes to punch - also it dodges, sheesh. Jack starts casting up a storm and absolutely drops a thing in a single hit, pow. It is apparently stunned into submission but not necessarily dead. Your friend is only technically dead.
Smith lands some blows too (on the giant bat-thing?). Sanguine tries to intimidate it and casts a big ol light to ward it away, to no avail, before Vlad - now a half-size troll shouting ‘freedom’ and charging down with his monofil whip; he lands a hit but not enough to cut down, so Smith counterblows and the fists really crunch off a piece. Loki tries to shank again, but it lifts off with its leathery wings. Ugh.
Fight continues! Smith survives some sort of mental assault.
Theta is swinging her lightsaber around ineffectually. Sanguine yells over telling her how to use the thing better and then lashes out at this thingy with a puppeteering trick to no effect. Vlad then attempts to whip it again (good). But it sees him whipping and uses a rock to deflect the whip, before Smith comes tearing in which a punch it also avoids. This is an OUTRAGE. Sanguine comments what a slippery bastard it is.
Jack channels some...code...whatever lightning is in a matrix world. Static, yeah. He dumps static into a microchip somewhere in the matrix, overvolting and hoping to cause kablooey. Dodged again!
It lines up Vlad for a shot and does as well as we do at hitting it. A firestorm shoots out at Vlad but he neatly preempts and dodges it. Sanguine wakes his sprites up and commands them to attack, before getting a piece of coral and matrix-flings it to Smith in order to try and form some elaborate knuckleduster. Fancy.
Smith’s newly acquired dusters smash the face of this thing and a nice large crunch and code-spark arcs off. The first punch was physical, this one really punches through the shell of the matrix into this weird thing. Very nice!
Loki sees a punch land and thinks ‘I can do that’. He can’t do that. It takes to the skies again.
Then sprites arrive! A massive blue sprite lumbers into frame and tries to disintegrate this thing. After a bit of tinkering for maximal effect, the thing goes to pieces, nice.
Combat ends, Sanguine looks pretty overjoyed to have had so much fun, and Loki dusts his hands off pretending he’d contributed a ton but actually hadn’t. Sanguine fashions matrix weapons for us all who want it, very nice. Sanguine combines matrix-coral with matrix-bones to fashion matrix-shotguns and weird semi-automatic shotgun-pistol things for Loki. He takes pot shots at the stunned monster’s lying corpse until it ceases to be. Sanguine turns it tartan, nice, before asking Theta to knock up some coral armour stuff. Sanguine pitches in as Theta is shaping it and Sanguine helps form it. Scottish Vlad echoes this tartan interest and Loki holds him to the sword of naming the clan. Thanks to some quick reverse image searching Vlad names it in one. Clan brethren.
We head on...somewhere. Scottish Vlad assumes point. Vlad tries to find us a path as we sneak along, but then gets seemingly lost in the matrix. Smith focuses his mind further and hears the sound of a pistol being cocked, lunges at Vlad and drags him to the floor in a bid for safety. Vlad finds himself taken out by Smith, wheeling around for whatever nightmare must be in sight because clearly Smith would only conduct this selfless act for Vlad’s self-preservation and the pistol cracks, dust puffs at Vlad’s feet and we hear ‘stop there!’.
Jack nonchalantly says ‘ok’, then they ask who we are. Whilst exchanging pleasantries, and they were asking the questions, Smith locates both, gives Vlad the target on the right, and sprints at these targets. Vlad gets to his feet and lunges after them. Smith tackles, floors and pins down one, knocking their weapon out of their hand. Vlad reaches the other, holding no pistol, but looks shocked at the tartan-kelp-whip Scottish fella charging him. As Vlad reaches them his memory triggers the recollection of these car-people. He stops and looks at them, then demands ID papers. They start stuttering helplessly. Ensuring these people are disarmed, noticing the one he floored is now unconscious, Smith continues to watch them as the others approach, and Vlad’s target finally spits out “Epsilon” [17].
Vlad tries to change his face into Pascal and introduces himself as Gamma-17. “What?” says the stopped person, and Vlad drops the whip and proffers his hand. They shakily accept it, wincing at the first shake expecting to face pain. Vlad asks who the other is - “That one is number 11”. Vlad pulls the person up, and asks where “Delta-8” is. They don’t know. Vlad calls for Theta, as the rest of us have sauntered up to join the group. Theta is clearly hiding behind Jack, but pops her head round. Vlad introduces E-17 to T-17 and asks about whether they remember their time as a vehicle. They ask “how are you here? Where is here?” and Vlad directs the question to Sanguine. Sanguine confirms we’re in the ‘resonance realms, deep inside the matrix’ and asks what they were hiding from. They just went to sleep and woke up here (hmm?). Sanguine wonders if they have a body to return to...they remember being taken to the ‘testing room’, and wonder where their datajacks are, and it increasingly appears they may be stuck here?
Sanguine asks for Dax to pop up (down?) so they could discuss the fact they found their contacts but we’re trying to work out if they're dead - bodiless - personae just living in the matrix? Dax leans over at E-17 to get a good ol look at them, as they fall back into Vlad’s arms. Dax says to E-17 “so you’re probably a ghost”. We get the full story about the crash and these people now being bodiless. Sanguine asks if there’s a way to get them in new bodies…? Dax straightens up then stands up straight, weiiiiird, but confirms a ghost liberated from body can’t return. Vlad says ‘why not back into some cars?!’ And Dax asks if they’d like to rejoin metal bodies. But Sanguine asks - why did they leave the car last time?? Sanguine asks E-17 and G- what they remember.
Jack suggests Dax takes a few steps back, because doing a rather weird example of wearing Sanguine’s bottom body-half to assemble some sort of weird Frankenstein’s monster thing? I dunno, basically this makes E-17 even jumpier. After some back and forth Sanguine basically seems to want to offer them the chance of ‘resurfacing’ in some form or another instead of being down here in the deep resonance, or if a mercy killing of their personae (“bringing them peace”) is better. Sanguine points out if they’re not resurfacing they’re a bit green to be surviving down here.
Sanguine fashions some wee coralfort for everyone to rest up in for an hour whilst we wait for the person Smith inadvertently knocked out to come to. Theta does some consoling whilst Sanguine listens in, whilst Epsilon-17 is still proving too dense to understand what exactly is happening and where we are, so Theta gives the rundown of who we are. Vlad then sidles up and in Deutsch he asks if Epsilon and Theta have previously been acquainted, and Epsilon feels they remember Gamma (Vlad), and that Epsilon was shot! Yet is unscarred, so Vlad explains the “vehicle we were in was riddled with bullets”. Obliquely trying to miss the point they were the car.
E-11 begins to stir, Smith moves to block the door, and the rest of us stand about as they sit up. They’re face to face with Vlad, who is sitting cross legged 1m away, who waves to them, and Delta looks around at Vlad, Loki, Dax and Sanguine, getting increasingly confused by top halves and bottom halves and big trolls. They clearly black out a little but rescue themselves from a full faint. Jack says ‘you’ve taken a hit’ and E-11 squeaks in terror having not noticed Jack. Sanguine explains ‘we are family’ (E-11, E-17, G-17 and T-17). E-11 is still a bit perturbed about being effectively rounded up, but they lean back against a wall and ask ‘what happened’, here we go again. Sanguine hopes his conchhouse will last long enough to get this conversation out.
They knew they were being tracked and trying to work out who we were, and Sanguine hands the floor to Vlad, who commences noting how not-put-together E-17 is. Vlad asks what E-11 remembers from ‘before they were here’. E-11 remembers Vlad stuck bodies in the boot of his car (him?). And asks how long ago that was. It was 4 months ago, but ‘that doesn’t make sense as we’ve been here years’. Sanguine explains what the resonance realms is. And that the resonance realm is like a VIP lounge not normally accessible by the likes of us normally.
Vlad continues to mine why they stopped being cars. They protest that being slaves to the corporation wasn’t a big problem - they went into the testing room, went to sleep, woke up a car, then Vlad stuck bodies in the boot so they decided to stop being cars? They also remember a burning sensation, their personae being torn apart, and they managed to get away. Sanguine talks up how powerful/skilful they are for ‘getting away’ and into the resonance. But they doubt/can’t piece together if they really did..escape?
Sanguine explains the situation as best he understands - no getting back to old bodies, can be android or car instead or stick around here or whatever else they like. What a fun side project. They should talk to him to decide if they want mercy killing or whatever. Vlad recalls ‘we were very close when you were in my car’ and suggests the option of being a car, or robot, or something else. Vlad would pick a robot to be most human-like. Sanguine asks Theta if she likes her life at the firehouse and whether these two might like to join. “It’s, er, I dunno, it’s fun”. Turns out it’s broadly similar to the corp?
Jack begins negotiating with them for the ‘come with us’ crowd as Loki gets his mouth shut by Sanguine. Although...Sanguine notes we have no receptacles for them to get to in the fire house. Dax points and grows another arm, pointing at Loki, suggesting as Loki’s mouth unzips that a temporary home like a roomba? (or car, or Sanguine’s synth) would do for now. Vlad suggests even visiting a sexbot parlour to get them the most anatomically correct/generous body options.
Sanguine introduces Dax again since E-11 was unconscious last time, and Dax offers to keep them ‘safe’ for now till we have bodies for them to take on in our meatspace. They ask Sanguine if this is best, well duh yeah, there’s definitely nowhere safer than with Dax, then if you wanna hop into a robot body and hang with us in the firehouse, cool, or you can stay with Dax, whatever. So fine, Dax will let the Es hang with them, Dax shatters the Spongebob conchhouse and we turn to prepare our journey back.
Before leaving Dax addresses funds, won’t the bodies cost a little? Vlad admits as if we were to steal them, but Dax grinds together some conch into a fancy diamond. Vlad gets custody of this, a programme to deposit Y100k, isn’t that nice. Vlad does broach the fact we may not steal the bodies any more, but can Dax make a few more goodies?! Apparently the wake of destruction of our coralbusting shenanigans mean we can’t have more money booooooooo.
Dax drops out of view into pieces of crumblecoral and Sanguinelegs, rolls towards us all and form mouths shouting ‘ready?’ at us in unison. We feel a rumbling beneath us and a geyser bursts through blowing us skywards. Sanguine fashions us some sort of iron man jets which clamp to our hands and help us correct course to go up and out. Smith bursts out of the water and moves to agilely land upon the prairie of monument valley we’re about to land in, and on sticking the landing, rescues Theta from a potential grassy bellyflop. Loki bursts out of the water, spots Titania, goes in through her sunroof, throws a door open for people to join the ride, and then tears away.
Jack hopped in Titania so looks around now for something to do and tries to ID the direction to our bodies, lest we end up on a road to nowhere. Jack calls to his spirits to assist and they come along riding in the wake of the car, and helps Loki navigate. Meanwhile, Vlad, astride his steed, morphing back into Scottish Vlad, and he fends off some evil boggarts hurting Titania whilst apparently barrel rolling; Sanguine also performs first aid on Titania to prevent her getting nipped any worse. The patching up is going nicely. And Loki doesn’t notice! Lest his a) driving worsen and b) jealousy at someone patching up Titania take hold.
Smith gets his coralgun and tries to punch a hole in this swarm of spritey things in our way. Loki, all cocksure, tries to navigate out (despite forgetting he got lost going in) and we head towards a giant starfish. What? Jack moves back to Theta and offers some instruction during this odd turn. Vlad uses his animal handling skills to craft an escape, and thanks to some hastily put together edge, flips out of the saddle - but only just after shaking his foot from the stirrup.
We want to get on site soonish to scout the locations and plans. Sanguine is pressing for a job close to the machines. We need a tissue sample of Trystan too, so perhaps finding a way into that office with some fake roles. We work out Justin could shake the person’s hand for 6 mins for an osmotic quality. Take Trystan out for drinks?
With 3 weeks to the d-day Smith points out we don’t want to pull the trigger too soon, but need to spruce our CVs.
Jack: skilled listener, people person, artisanal drinks maker, skilled chef.
Loki: cleaner, great at moving golf carts of laundry, forklift license (possibly not true)
Vlad: Security expertise and very multilingual (English, German, Russian, French, Japanese)
Sanguine: Software engineer, basic Japanese skills. No hobbies!
Smith: Strictly non-technical logistic. Definitely not a heavy lifter.
We’re messaged Friday 5th get assignments starting Monday 8th:
Jack: canteen staff - prep/serve; Loki: warehouse loading / janitor the other times; Vlad: PA/Escort for guests on site in secure areas. Sanguine: UAT tester. Smith: external ‘focus group’ for product testing for a military game.
Restrictions: generally required to be on site Mon-Sat 07h-19h. Jack buys longhaul as with prep that means 04-22h work! Basic uniform is branded t-shirt and jeans (blazer for Vlad). Loki buys an armour vest and brings along his hi-vis. No weapons except physically connected, and Vlad can smuggle a light pistol in for Smith in his skin pouch (week 2). Smith also proposes lock picking items and plastic restraints (skin pouch week 1)
Monday 8th March - report in by 0600h (1st hr unpaid booooooo)
We get scanned and check our SIMs - Vlad goes in as Justin, Loki as Brian McDougal, Sanguine as ‘Giles’, Jack as ‘Paul Sokolowski’, Smith DNI’s Sanguine to warn him his SIN is shaky (rating 2) and may need some hacking help. Sanguine gets a sprite ready in case some help needed and indeed the light flashes yellow (“suspect” not rumbled). Thankfully the sprite helps and Welsh Dafydd Webb gets in. Sanguine castigates him for a flaky sim, but Smith gives fulsome reliability praise in return. Next the cyberware scanner, and Vlad declares his fingertip (lost in a lawnmower incident). Loki reveals his spurs (well, box cutters) and reflexes and is waved through. We meet Maxwell who provides t-shirts and blazers where requested. Vlad dislikes polyester t-shirt and proposes cotton instead.
We get induction guides and tablets etc. which we’re supposed to read. We head off to our tasks.
Sanguine is trying to touch up all the surfaces. He pushes into the host and looks up Trystan’s details, contact, address, details of routine. Jack prepares a lot of soyburritos. Loki gets job direction and the supervisor gets calls and sends people out for work; Loki is called to mop up a spill and return and scouts around (past the canteen). Most of the staff are perm and they send someone to do a run each day to get lunch; Sanguine sends details and notes the location of Trystan’s office, which Loki passes by.
Vlad runs coffee and fancier food to VIPs, and is a trolley dolly. He mentally notes people to kill later. Smith games tests in AR/VR and gets some free food. He’s fairly enclosed but gets short breaks. Jack continues to establish rapport with soyburrito eaters. Sanguine now moves on to asking questions about Totoya, and as he starts looking around, he feels the host is guarding Totoya’s info more jealously. Sanguine looks around for info on voting machines as well - not due to be delivered till w/c 15th March, locations marked up (AD offices but with meeting spaces converted to polling place). We propose Vlad imitating him for cameras, then delete the footage but not quite well enough.
We meet Maxwell after work to find we’ve been allocated shared housing for the 5 of us (like student flat - 5 bedroom, soyburrito stashed, communal area). We debrief and head out for ‘a walk’ - as we move into posher areas (less highrise communal blocks and more semi-detacheds). We look conspicuous there so Vlad and Sanguine go for a drink at a bar instead. Jack, meanwhile, goes for a ‘jog’ with Smith and despite their conspicuousness they are not questioned: the house is indeed a semi-detached one. The curtains are drawn and the light on, and whilst looking around Smith takes inventory on entries/exits/paths/fences etc.
Drinks are finished and Vlad plans to x-lax all the exec drinks tomorrow.
Tue 9th March…
Sanguine continues to scout around for us - devices etc. in the semi-detached complex - yes, very monitored. Proposal is tampering the machine early to inflate votes, but give Maxwell the ‘trigger’ to investigate somehow. Vlad x-laxed one of the snipper corptypes and had to go home.
Wed 10th March…
Sanguine gets called into MHR for a ‘meeting’ with Maxwell and Jasper who note the neighbourhood watch has been somewhat perturbed by walker and runners, and Sanguine was observed as one of the ‘walkers’. Sanguine says he won’t do this again if it’s unfamiliar to be walking around the complex. The recommended place for exercise is the gym, but this is clearly a temp-perm misunderstanding. Also a burner phone is acquired for building up incriminating stuff. Jack works extra hours to ingratiate him with his coworkers so he can sneak away. Loki keeps working warehouse and getting food for the gang. Vlad continues his work and trashing the reputation of the fatter, crasser executives. He is reminded his contractor statement and to please the executives. This rebuke means that Vlad is incapable of doing other than laxativeing his coffee. Smith continues to look at waypoints, routes A->B, other elements of the operation to optimise success (route minimising cameras etc.), very organised. And all this whilst playtesting.
We establish that Trystan is a reasonably built (ex-runner) dwarf. Loki won’t be able to impersonate him but we’ll hope Vlad can, mostly sticking the extra mass in his legs when he face-shifts. Plan for next week and election day/early fix:
15th-16th Delivery
16th Date Night
17th Mission is go
18th Pen Testing
23rd Voting?
Jack asks how we will manage the 18-23 window from when Trystan realises he is missing a day yet was seen about town - and he doesn’t just bug out at that point. Smith salivates at the prospect of getting him off corp turf and making him ours. Jack also toys between asking Trystan out for drinks and just casting Intoxication on him…
Jack attempts to get close to Tristan during a lunch, bussing the nearby tables, marrying the ketchups, and tries to find an ‘in’ on a conversation. He hears a Troy Reed film being discussed and this is his way in! They profess him to really know his cinematic stuff. Especially about the taxonomy of xmas movies, and as Jack bewails his social calendar they mention the corp cinema - next to the gym! No less. They invite Jack to the next screening! It’s on 16th. Jack sends Vlad/Pascal a recording of Trystan’s voice and mannerisms and busses their trays in the hopes of using a glass/plate of Trystan’s for a fingerprint.
Jack catches a movie with this gang on Friday 12th and they repair to a bar to drink, where Jack assesses Trystan the dwarf’s sturdiness and pathogenic/toxicity resistance meaning he’s unlikely to get inebriated. He diverts the conversation to bartending prowess and that he might be an excellent social lubricant.
We roll on to Sunday 14th March to collect burner comms, etc., and Jack orders a detox spell (to come to the corplands addressed to ‘Titania McDougall’ for Loki to intercept). Vlad also requests some Leal and Novacoke and 2 bottles of Absinthe to ‘Mel Gibson’ for same. Vlad also prints a cellular glove using the DNA sample Jack grifted from a glass - he gets 1-2 clean prints from a right hand.
We return on 15th for ‘work’ and on the day of machine delivery, Loki prepares to receive them (albeit with a wide timeframe), so when they comes in - crated - he carries them into a room for storage. Lets Sanguine know they have arrived, is tasked to take some photos and confirms room security etc. (Keycard lock with cameras)
Meanwhile as Loki heads over he hears some muttering about package with a suspect name that’s already been incinerated, so breaks the bad news to Loki, and 3 more boxes of voting machines to be moved. What a day. Loki makes an mental note to try and intercept Jack’s mail a little better.
Sanguine considers getting Totoya and Trystan met up some time around ‘the fix’ so the groundwork of implication is laid. Thanks to some serious tinkering the whole schedule for Trystan is copied. Sanguine also looks for Wed 17th obligations again, and Sanguine wants to contrive a plan where they get Trystan to bump into Totoya and then go home and drink himself into a stupor. Totoya is leading a rally at the entertainment complex on 17th and is apparently a man! Great stuff.
Loki does intercept the envelope for Titania McDougall and ensures it reaches Jack safely but sweatily thanks to its concealment up his back. It is a rock! A detox rocks.
Jack also goes to watch shift pattern: with a vengeance (observing March is a bit of an odd time to watch winter movies), they watch the movie, chat and progress to the bar with some good seeding of thought. Vlad is introduced at the bar as a ‘fancy pants executive assistant’. Tipsiness ensues, although Trystan is drinking solidly Vlad gets his drunken act up enough to keep people drinking. Jack decides to start asking personal questions and then his political preferences. Vlad goads Trystan by talking up the bad lying candidate and then Vlad gets a hack battle going on which the barman shuts down promptly. Vlad also suggest an afterparty at Trystan’s and they swing by the flats to get booze, people peel off and Trystan, a few others, and Jack/Vlad too. Before we know it one’s returned to their bed and the other nods off on the sofa, so Jack prompts them to head home with some negotiating skills! Sanguine also starts tinkering too to help with some commlink hacking: and fabricating video showing Vlad ‘leaving’ after some time.
Meanwhile Vlad prepares the sting, stunning the hell out of Trystan, then sprinkling absinthe over him, pouring novacoke in the sink, he’s green from the fairy, the bed is covered, Vlad now absorbs his DNA and wees on him to make him look like he has wet himself. A brief struggle ensues about keeping to plan, or perhaps just whacking Trystan sooner - surely better than keeping him subdued for 2 days?! Vlad checks, the house is sadly not a Faraday cage, nor can one be fashioned, so Sanguine just bricks the commlink. Ha. Vlad makes clear that this guy isn’t returning to work so it’s just a matter of keeping him alive at least as long as we can rig the machines and he doesn’t prove ‘dead’ before the rig. So
Trystan confirmed tied up with cable ties and gagged/blindfolded.
Wednesday 17th March
Pen testing meeting and premortem takes place, with Sanguine listening in. Vlad also makes sure he gets to tip Totoya an obvious wink at the rally - he attempts to approach Totoya who is gladhanding, and when Totoya greets him with a ‘we haven’t met before’, Vlad grabs his hand and mouths “everything is in place”. Totoya asks him what he just mouthed and Vlad says “I’m sure you’ll do very well, sir.” Totoya thanks Vlad for his support, and that seed is planted.
Thursday 18th March
Vlad wanders into a room with a voting machine and finds the matrix connection drop: the voting room is faraday caged. The machine is a box with no obvious external ports, so hopefully Sanguine has been drilling Vlad with some homework for what was in this room to follow…….
Vlad recaps his training but has a bit of struggle asking security for enough privacy to fiddle with the machines, the new plan being that Vlad goes in, Jack causes a trid phantasm to appear whilst invisible (which makes it look like Vlad has popped in and out). Now to execute:
Vlad asks the guard to let him in to get his deck, requiring a bribe to boot.
Jack casts trid phantasm and Vlad gets to work on the booths under this obfuscation. He sneaks in the silhouette and positions his deck to the phantasm of it, and as the security guard reaches for the doorhandle (phantasmed) to pull it, he falls backwards (since the door was open)! He feels ‘weird’, but gets up to get out of the room and turn back to usher Vlad out. With some quick reflexes Vlad scoops up dropped items, and they get away clean.
NB before 16th, Sanguine seeks to forge meetings for Trystan’s new ‘burner’ commlink and leaves a smattering of histories, messages etc. which imply nefariousness whilst not being crass.
Friday 19th March
AM, Jack added to group chat re Troy Reed films, suggesting a trip out to watch “Shift Pattern: on a Plane” (tagline: “I have had it with these muthaf***ing shift patterns on this muthaf***ing plane!”), getting Y/Ns with responses coming in. With a bricked commlink Trystan can’t respond...Vlad starts getting peppered with messages about why he’s not DNIing etc., very sus that the commlink is off. Proposal: fighting a rival jacker, bricked commlink, filling out requisition now for a replacement. Has to type the report. Manually! This is an outrage. Some discussion takes place over whether to try and get a new commlink but there are issues surrounding whether we need Trystan’s brain in a jar to do that. Vlad-Trystan feels he’s no longer a Troy Reed fan, finds him derivative etc., which strikes them as an abrupt change of personality, being the founder member of the Troy Reed fan club. He walks these comments back, suggesting he was overreacting. Excuses are made, tired, not feeling himself, yada. After his workday, Trystan-Vlad awaits the arrival of Smith, after Vlad has given Trystan a short tickle with his stun glove.
Smith revels in the fact that tonight is the night for interrogation. The suicide is meant to look like suspicious but not torture-y. The plan is to wire DNI so he can remain gagged and not scream, what with the neighbours and all. Trystan is tied to chair, burned from the glove work, and Smith pulls up a pew and hooks up a wire to start the DNI convo. Head jammer also added for good measure. Stim patch to wake him up and away we go! Trystan thought Smith was dead, who says ‘I am, technically speaking’. A wilting emoji (preceded from waking up on a jaw-drop one). Smith asks ‘why Trystan did it’, answer: family, she has them (and still does) - so Smith (noting he has already met them - husband and 2 kids) suggests knowing the answer to where she is might come in handy for both of them. It’s noted she works for this place (Saeder-Krupp/Renraku) and a “file” is handed over to Smith, who forwards it to Sanguine with some warning to check/qualify. We think the file, rough and ready, concerns information about her possible whereabouts, as he argues he can’t openly betray her. Data: safe but incoherent. It needs some analysis time as it’s rambly. He got close to her in the arkology - and notes she wants to stay in ‘hiring’, and is using him to spy on the execs here. Given its a subsidiary, Smith wants to know why this place is so useful - it’s developing software to trigger magic-technology interfaces. But why does she need to know about it? Trystan doesn’t know. Trystan asks nicely if Smith will save his family, but since someone has to pay for the death of many, including some young innocent victims. Apparently if ‘Angela’ had found her he’d have been flayed. Staging the death - suggest a shock fetishist who has burned out literally (of the heart, and possibly the genitals). Smith instead proposes air embolism, much more effective, even if less hilarious than Vlad thinks the former plan.
Smith prepares to end Trystan; Sanguine gives self-reported progress updates on looking at the data, and Vlad considers options to get out if he can’t leave as himself any more: perhaps in a crate Loki prepares? Smith unclips the wire and lets everyone know we have the info we need (hopefully) but will keep him alive till the drop is verified. Sanguine spends the night piecing thru the extensive info but it’s pieced together - a timeline of locations of suspected locations and where his family might be, a handful of potential contacts/marks. Sanguine relays this and notes that further work will take days, and Smith decides this file is all we’re gonna get. Sanguine reiterates the need to off him since he may use Smith as leverage; Smith says ‘no doy this guy’s a goner’. Smith rounds up a couple of bottles of vodka, hands one to him, plugs in the DNI and says ‘start drinking’ after explaining the need to make it look like a botched suicide. The gag is untied and he says ‘you’ll need more than this’ - Smith holds up the second bottle - ‘more’ - and Smith says ‘I just need you out of it’ - apparently he has a toxin extractor so time is of the essence. Now the gag is off, Sanguine asks Smith whether he has any ‘recording’ cyberware - a black box?! - but Jack’s assensing revealed nothing like that. So chin chin! He begins swigging. Whilst drinking, Smith says he’ll try to do his best to find family and not tell them what he did. That seems unusually fair of Smith. Trystan realises in retrospect he was played, and once his family were roped in it just got harder. Vlad sits in the corner waiting for Trystan’s inevitable demise. He accepts he’s getting what he deserves and starts weeping silent tears, maudlin drunk. After 4 more quaffs, he asks what’s next and Smith says - drink till the toxin extractor gets overwhelmed and you go sparko, then Smith does the rest. They share one last toast and Trystan then chugs away.
Just before the collapse he points to the top drawer of his bedside table and croaks ‘false bottom, take it’. He falls forward in his chair; Smith unties him, lifts him up, dumps him on the bed and gives him an empty dose of syringe to drop air and waits to confirm his demise. He reports job is done, and Vlad asks about adding the shock glove for effect to justify the burns. Smith goes over to check the drawer with false bottom. Some photos of former team, and a handwritten list of the names of the former teammates, some memories of each person and rough(!) sketches of the people. Smith would recognise the sketches as other company people not in the photo. Smith pockets them and suggest Vlad leaves. Vlad transitions back to Justin (after some discussions about pretending to be Smith instead), and they prepare to sneak out, Sanguine scrubbing/fixing video on the way out successfully.
Saturday 20th March
Justin asks what the best line of approach is: after 3 days away presumably Maxwell has been informed and Justin should be ‘terminated’ and evicted from the extra-territorial locale. On the way home Justin nips into Renrakushack to buy some more hooch with corpscrip. Remembering his RFID chip card is abandoned at work, he goes to palm a bottle instead, since he can’t purchase it. Sanguine sees on the camera that the shopkeepers have spotted what he’s up to, given the fridges were in view of the counter. Sauntering out, Sanguine DNIs that the jig is up, and Justin begins acting drunk and disordely, singing out loud, unscrewing the bottle and beginning to swig. Continuing the ruse to try and be kicked out of the territory rather than renditioned, a cheery non-violent drunk! He sings to his heart’s content, and he’s herded into a backroom, where he encourages the staff to sing along too. They lock him in the room but leave him with the bottle at least, and they put a call in to corp security. Sanguine intercepts the call to security to instead propose Maxwell escort Justin offsite. Maxwell says security should bring Justin to him to pop him through ‘disciplinary’. Sanguine follows the suggested procedure, so security will come to relocate Justin to Maxwell.
10mins after call put through, Justin is taken to the main building. Sanguine (himself) gets a call from an unknown number to a personal commlink. Despite his misgivings about taking unknown numbers, he picks up and Fabiana hails him. A situation is afoot! Maxwell is working for the other side dun dun dunnnnnnnn. Fabiana’s other informants will be moving to pin this on us all, we contractors. Sanguine asks if it’s time to abort, but Fabiana suggests instead we need to take him out. As long as Maxwell is a goner, the rest should be fine. Sanguine proposes the informants leak the address of Trystan, who has been ‘killed by Totoya’, his friends confirming he has recently ‘acted out of character’, find the commlink in the false bottom of the drawer to find ‘false records’ of meeting with Totoya and the brief but suspicious interaction with them both and 4/5 machines compromised in voting. Fabiana kicks up another 10k dead / 20k alive if we can get Maxwell out. Spicy. How necessary is discretion?! “If it’s related enough to this, the informants can swing it”. So we don’t quite have carte blanche. But will do our best.
We’re DNI’d the offer, Smith curses freely, and Sanguine sends a message from Maxwell but the forgery fails and security keep rolling towards Maxwell…
Sanguine asks if Loki can deliver ‘a crate’ to the building to drop Maxwell into. Smith also heads in the same direction. Loki rounds up an old machine crate which is going to waste and asks the best drop point: to the floor Maxwell is on, with a rendezvous to be set when Maxwell is unconscious.
Jack considers his options - visit the floor Maxwell is on to ‘offer coffee’, ‘reload the machines’ or generally be on standby?
Justin continues to be led by security towards the main building whilst he continues to feign drunkenness. Smith heads briskly towards the building. As Justin makes it to the lift, someone is standing there staring at him and he is led forwards but not to Maxwell’s office, those tricksy guards. He’s being led instead to a ‘meeting room’ - the starer stalking along behind and mumbling behind, very irritating. Justin asks what he is playing at. As Justin sends panicky messages to us about location, they seem to weaken and distort…he’s shown to a room, and as the door closes, the net drops and he’s without wireless.
Sanguine sends Maxwell a message asking if Justin has landed, to probe what’s occurring. Maxwell confirms Justin has arrived. Sanguine proposes a meeting and is invited too - 15-30mins time. Smith confirms he can’t get Justin, Sanguine thinks we’re gonna get dropped in it, do we buy time and imply we have info to share? As Sanguine can’t knock Maxwell out, Smith instead picks up the pace.
Vlad recognises one of the walls to be looking glass, sees no obvious cameras. We line up a plan where eg Smith and Sanguine break Vlad out, whilst Loki and Jack try talking to Maxwell, if indeed he’s there. Sanguine starts hacking into the host to get some whereabouts and lookouts. He finds them and starts accessing, but feels being seen by the camera icons [agents] whilst doing this. Unfortunately he feels less hidden and more focussed upon, uh ohhhh, and he gets marked. Things are going south for Sanguine and he gets stunned up seriously. He jacks out. For all the stun in the world he establishes Maxwell remains in his office. Smith instead proposes plan B: hit him in the office.
Jack is also being tailed! He heads into the kitchen to buy a loo break, but sees security getting up from their table to outflank the door. Loki looks around but doesn’t see guards, and gets to the cargo lift, waiting as if to call it. Sanguine continues to trail over.
Vlad, meanwhile, gets a video message from Maxwell who implies he’s just trumping up charges to get him fired, but on a deeper level Justin knows Maxwell is full of crap.
Smith gets to the building and takes the lift to Justin’s floor. On exiting, Smith is accosted by two goons who check his ID and inform him this is staff-only, rather than focus testing. Smith thinks he has a meeting and rattles off the room name, hoping this bluff will do the job. Smith DNIs us to say ‘if we want to get to Maxwell we may need to get through these guys’; Loki punches the call button to join Smith on his floor.
Smith checks out their arms - stun baton, armour jacket, etc. etc. - and whether they think he’s genuinely just a lost wayfarer. Sanguine checks the conditions by which violence can now be realise, i.e. it doesn’t frig the election-rigging. Before Sanguine gives the go ahead, Smith turns back to security and unhinges his jaw in such a way he can fire pepperpunch into the security guards’s face. One drops to the floor and the other drops to one knee spluttering before Smith conks him out.
Down in the kitchen, Jack casts a trid phantasm of himself to try and attempt to leave through the door disguised as someone else. The weaving and muttering confuses some of the kitchen staff, who look weirdly at Jack. As Jack tries to bluff what he’s up to they seem to be reacting in such a way in AR as if they’re alerting someone. Jack sets up an elaborate ruse to ensure the message is not going to a superior. Jack then begins walking out of the room, seeing two more armoured corp guards outside, who take a look at this persona walking out the room, wearing a new face now, and they give a nod as he comes out and Jack goes past, seemingly shaking their tail, changing out of his chefs whites, disguising up. Sanguine rendezvouses with Jack to head up to the floor Vlad is at. As they round the corner to head up they spot a security guard type barred door around a doorway, along with some guards, a little more armoured...so Sanguine uses the stim patch to shake off stun for the next 40mins. Jack summons a person-spirit who keeps coming up against mana barriers. Meanwhile he fashions a Renraku suit too and introduces himself as Herr Rothburg, furious at the fact security don’t recognise him. Sanguine adds the appointment to their agenda noting Rothburg is here to fire some drunken corpstaff.
Meanwhile, Loki punches the button to Smith’s floor and emerges from the cargo lift - realising he is at the opposite end (staff lift) and they can rendezvous halfway but Loki is blocked by 2 guards asking for the relevant work order number which of course Loki does not have, so messages Smith asking for some assistance. The guards start to get a bit agitated and swap messages, as Smith charges down the way, and Loki proposes hitting the one on our respective lefts. Smith knocks one over and Loki one-two wolverine stabs the other. More unconscious/dead bodies littering the floor...Smith beckons and Loki wheels the box along. We reach the door, which is closed, and Smith boots it open. The room is...empty. Smith curses and Loki proposes we now go for Justin.
Justin is circling the room, peeing over everything, and one of the walls goes transparent and Maxwell is revealed the other side of it. Sanguine zips back up and stares at Maxwell. Maxwell says ‘well, I don’t know what to say’, not apologising for meaning Justin has to befoul a meeting room. Maxwell came to say hi, apparently, and that Fabiana’s changed her plans slightly, needing to keep him longer. Justin asks who Fabiana is - ‘you mean Totoya?’. He bluffs a lack of this knowledge and Maxwell waves goodbye for now as gases start seeping into the room....
Jack and Sanguine are being led by the guard who gestures into a room which is not the last known location of Justin. They indicate ‘in there, sir’. Jack asks where the arresting officer is, if not him. The Guard says ‘I’m sure they’ll be here presently, or inside’. Jack looks inside this guard - inside the door there’s a table and chairs but no Vlad. They spot the opaque glass and Sanguine seeks to flip it, as the guard closes the door behind them. There’s noone the other side of the glass, this is an outrage. Jack sits Sanguine down and asks him to be seated and do something. Meanwhile Jack opens the door and looks at the guard who blandly asks him to stay in the room, whilst sending for a cigarette. Or smoking in a room, since it’s ventilated! Jack insists on requiring fresh air to smoke with which can be piped in.
Smith and Loki go to Justin’s last location, DNI’ing Sanguine asking for an update, who reveals the spectacular failure. Justin meanwhile lowers himself to his pee-stained floor to avoid the gas, noting the room is hermetically sealed. As Loki and Smith rush along, a new guard spirits up a pack of cigarettes for Jack. Jack compliments this guard and asks the other a) why he’s chemseal helmeted up, as if he’s b) expecting a war. He’s asked back in the room to enjoy his piped in fresh air. Sanguine assesses their weapon items - cyber eyes, heavy pistol, stun baton. Jack looks at them cooly and decides to walk off down the corridor as they move to intercept. They pull a stun baton and reach for Jack, who almost goes down with the stun. The other guard runs into the room to go for Sanguine with their stun baton who gets clipped, although he dodges slightly. Not enough! And goes down.
Meanwhile Loki and Smith arrive at the corridor to find another two guards, full body armour, helmeted. Smith assesses their arms - heavy pistol and stun baton. We decide to charge them down, box first in Loki’s case. Smith puts a nice big dent into the chest armour of one who is still standing. The other guard fires stick and shock at Loki, connecting and nearly dropping him. The dented guard hits out at Smith with a stun baton who counterstrikes. Loki runs straight into the guy, connecting with the trollied box and wellying him, denting his armour some too.
Jack meanwhile flings his soycaff in this guard’s face and attempts to follow it up with a sizeably forceable punch, which flings him backwards at supreme pace. Jack steps to the side and asks his spirit to join him. Justin meanwhile tries to sup the remaining untainted (by gas, not piss) air. Smith tries to end the one with whom he’s brawling, and drops him. Smith rushes now towards the rest of the gang just in time to see someone repelling at speed away from Jack, who gestures to the door. The spirit then seeks to join Jack, but meanwhile the other guard drops their gun, pulls their stun baton and drops Loki too. The other guard comes out of the room and turns on Smith, who dodges, and meanwhile the Spirit materialises and does little more than bamboozle him.
Smith punches back at the one who unleashed on him, flooring this one too, and makes it to Vlad’s door. Jack’s spirit tries to confuse remaining guards, and when Smith is asked for a password for the door, Smith decides just to punch it in. A 2m2 portion: the door in its entirety, then, blows off the hinges. He grabs Vlad and pulls him into the corridor. Vlad receives his feed dump from all of his time inside the un-matrixed room and gets the headlines: 2 down, 1 combatant, Jack moving away and feeling ropey. Vlad enters the fray and knocks the combatant out. Welcome to the party, pal. Vlad notices the combatant is only unconscious, so cuts him into pieces to ensure he is dead.
Combat ends! For now. Smith and Jack stand over Sangine, noting he is looking ropey; meanwhile a door is kicked in and a cowering Maxwell is found. Jack also finds a stim patch and wanders over to slap it on Loki. He sparks awake again and connects a medkit to Sanguine but with no revival it looks like he may go in the trolley box rather than Maxwell.
Maxwell, eh. Meanwhile Smith picks him up by the next and chokes him out. Fireman’s lift over shoulder and he stalks out looking for the box to chuck Maxwell in. They then debate double-stimpatching Sanguine, and after a brief discussion about the merits of this, Smith slaps second patch on. Sanguine breathes to life again, unstunned, heart racing away.
We’re awake! Time to try and bug out of this place rapidomente. As we head out we note a looooooot of security guards approaching with tasers, stun batons etc. and Smith gets in amongst them, banging skulls together and knocking them off their feet. Vlad joins Smith in this revelry, whipping away. Loki then bears down on the remaining handful who uses the trolley to bowl them out of the way like ninepins. As Sanguine looks into the matrix it’s clear messages coordinating response and alarms are going off. He uses a guard’s commlink to run extra interference on the armed response. Jack asserts leadership skills, directing us correctly, reducing the indiscriminate killing, and otherwise hectoring successfully.
We reach the loading bay and Smith looks for the controls for the gate to open to the loading bay, and Smith also notes the control box for the external gate. Justin, covered in blood and piss, eyes up the unarmed warehouse people and intimidates them into compliance. Loki then spots a bulldog to hotwire, albeit without troll seats, and sparks it up, box goes in back, van sparks up, people hop in. Sanguine hops in and Loki tosses him a heavy pistol, and Sanguine spots a guard leveling on Loki and fires away, correcting himself just in the last to get the connecting blow. As we depart Sanguine fires a coin back into the loading bay and we scream off the corp territory, heading away with Maxwell in a Box.
We discuss whether to drop Maxwell with Fabiana given the driver is on a 1hr stim clock and Sanguine on a double-patch 40min or less...so maybe we head back to the firehouse instead for starters. Sanguine messages to advise all well and we need to scrub up before a meet. We drop the van where Titania was parked up and head to ghoultown.
Still Saturday 20th March 2077 in-game
Sanguine eventually scans for trackers and disables them on Maxwell; we drive to Fabiana’s rendezvous point and meet her there to drop off the cargo. Sanguine is reeling a little whilst talking to her, but holds it together. Barely. Loki passes out so Smith gets the box out and Maxwell is turfed out of the box. Sanguine offers Smith for interrogation purposes and when Fabiana says that won’t be required, Vlad hops out to watch the fun. Jack then feels the sense of magic being channeled around them, and Fabiana places a hand on Maxwell’s forehead and he jerks back in the chair screaming. Fabiana looks forward to fun and promises breadsticks in due course. Sanguine gives some more thanks, sycophant, then passes out. Loki gets his second stim patch of the day, springs to and we drive off.
When we pull up to ghoultown another car is there and a fella with a briefcase/box thingy pops out and says hi. Jack suggests that the fella opens the case and they suggest it’s customary that we do it. Jack walks up and finds 5 credsticks. Sanguine gets thrown into Loki’s foldout bed in the van and everyone else rolls inside. They test the credsticks and £50k/apiece. Woo!
Jack researches parazoology, and looks up insect spirits, then shops around for some scales. He creates a force 4 focus to help him summon things and all magic spells without going insane.
Sanguine gets Theta in on some technomancery stuff, in seeeeeeecret.
Loki asks Smith to teach him about bombs, and also looks up possibilities to rig a Scottish Independence referendum using the voting machines we saw in the previous run.
Vlad moves on to the next corp to insinuate himself into - having met the impersonee in the meetings and gets Sanguine’s help.
Smith does some reading up and asks for advice on insect spirits too - whether there’s a bugspray equivalent for big bugs. Vlad tries to avoid conversation on this but whenever he sees a Saeder-Krupp ‘bug-b-gone’ spray it gets binned. Smith contacts his arms dealers for near-illegal item level insecticide.
Sanguine scans through the data
We establish that Platinum is involved in some magically technically stuff involving bugs and the like. Jack points out if we’re going to extract her it may take another trip to the arkology. Vlad suggests blowing it up. Not easily, says Smith. Either trucks of military grade weapons, blueprints for weakspots etc. or steal a nuke? Or, just go in and shoot her. Or, get a contact of hers outside the arkology. Or, find an outside-arkology research base, take that out and try and draw her out?
Sanguine’s run idea: Secret Base investigation, scout locations, try and work out if Platinum will visit one of these and take her out there? Locations are mostly corp territories, subsidiaries of S-K and Renraku. Data steal idea whilst there? Sanguine begins with a subterfugey, black hoodies and general stealthy exercise. Stealthy apart from dropping people as quickly and quietly as possible, thanks to Vlad. Sanguine finds his way to a Faraday caged area and accesses data and bugs out ;)
Nets each 12karma and £40k
Analysing data from experimental sensors. - How to measure magic with technology
Some ties to insect spirits/metaplanes
Vlad uses his contact with Holly to extract some interesting stuff she promised him in passing some time before.
Jack’s run idea: after reading a ton of parazoology, asking around, leveling up, doing darkweb searches and stuff he only finds some examples of rumoured spirit insect infestations but they all seem locked behind corpmatrix firewalls, with information just out of reach that’d help. Using Fabiana, Jackal and friends, everyone travels to Chicago, which is/was bug city. Some grenades get filled with proper high tension bug-b-gone which may help dispatch spirit bugs.
Nets each £20k and 14karma.
Smith’s run idea: hunts down a contact named Alloy, who is also employed by Saeder-Krupp, and rather doing a hit on the place, we extract data on a convoy delivery of gear and data moving between sites, which we take out on route. An anti-vehicle mine triggers the first vehicle whilst Loki blows the back one up and we go in all-guns to extract the items. The cargo look like datajacks but when analysing, Sanguine notes they’ve been modified for another purpose - they feel magical (the implants do). We lack the expertise to understand the fusion of magic and technology, so would need to send it off for further analysis.
£40k and 8 karma each
Loki’s run idea: head back to the logistics depot in which he engaged in smuggling, to locate Avail 20x items to be “bought” at half-price. On the way back he tries to hit up political contacts who may be interested in a referendum, just so the seeds of scottish independence can be planted.
Access to item and 8 karma. Kit VTOL?!
In downtime first, Vlad infiltrates a Saeder-Krupp corp site and whilst there - panicked commcall - Vlad calls to say he’s been rumbled and is barricaded in a building, we get the ol’ GPS ping and the worried-looking emoji. But has found some really exciting data to trade for his liberation.
Vlad’s run idea: rescue Vlad? We screech to the headquarters in town, Loki punches a bomb into a wall, blows it out and we storm in to extract Vlad. We so dance out of the building, Vlad’s extracted data as well, and we utilise the Screaming Barons in order to ensure our escape, intact. The data shows a bit of research in locations y,z; another location needing a delivery, shipment address from there, all hopefully yielding a path to Platinum.
£35k each, 10karma
We especially note 2 secure locations, and also a flying vehicle which transports key staff including Platinum but we could move to intercept it...perhaps in our own flying vehicle, or some surface-to-air missiles…
Sanguine submerges and develops the ability to become like a magnetic power and can stick to these things...like aeroplanes, for example! Or we stick him to a big metal box and he can’t move as it’s so heavy.
Time has passed...it’s near October.
Mission will be to get access to, intercept, take out? Platinum and the plane. The plane will of course have defences. We also establish the family of Tristan is being held in stasis on the same plane, so if we want to spare them...we need a plan B.
Plan B appears to be buying a plane. With a 50% Loki-earned discount a plane for £200k then tricking it out with some weaponry is within shared budgets…
Plan? Fly above their plane, land on top of it, gecko grip onto plane, breach hull (or use boarding ramp) with some detonators, and head inside, killing everything that moves. Sounds nice.
Smith researches planes (the one we’re buying...and perhaps the one we’ll breach). Considered also using knockout gas for the inhabitants. But I guess they’re likely to have respirator/masks??
So purchasing list:
Things to consider:
The council proffer us additional information of sites/locations and other Saeder-Krupp goodies of info. Implication is we need to destroy researchers as well as intercept plane as the work will continue even if we ice Platinum.
Parts for Ares trickle in over a month. Venture with
Sanguine is hacking the Nano-virus code
We build the venture in a warehouse in Ghoultown, modding it with all its requisite parts. Sanguine asks Smith in confidence about ways to armour himself better. Vlad overhears and does the same. Smith wants to know the flightplan of the ship we’re hitting and we also discuss some simulation activities to get the hang of flying and….hitting aircraft.
Skills challenge!
Sanguine hacks into corporate airline companies to look for pilot training scheme and download sims. He then tries to design a boarding sim scenario. He cobbles together a bunch including some zipline/limpet scenarios. Loki practices flying Mab in the sim and it just about works, getting the hang of it.
Smith plans how to board the enemy plane, trialling a few methods: hack rear door, making a zipline, landing atop the thing, using a breaching charge/miniwelder to make hole in hull, generally size up the options. All whilst on the back of a plane doing 700mph! This takes some of Smith’s gymnastics abilities...nicely done.
Jack prepares a magical (trid phantasm) session to inculcate fear in all of us of these bug spirits, which really scares the hell out of Vlad.
Vlad struggles to contain this fear, gets out of the foetal position and works on the clear drill with Smith.
In a number of scenarios of breaching, Sanguine uses his VR skills to simulate turbulence, add obstacles, evasive manoeuvres etc. militia and mages to fight Smith, Vlad and Jack. Testing their weaknesses!
Loki then practices rapid repair and reassembly of the additional weaponry and mounts in case fixing in realtime is required.
Smith plots optimal routes for intercept. He resimulates repeated dives on the plane to maximise efforts and improve response time.
Jack runs some more leadership inspiration sessions before Vlad works on his gunnery skills.
We begin preparing for the real job out of VR now! Working out the final costings on paper and the remaining 69k split between Vlad and Sanguine buys out the aircraft.
Skipping to -1 day before intercept and Jack’s working on his alchemical preparations, who has 6 reagents primed. We get a recap of our plan and walkthrough. Fly from London to intercept, breach, kill non-civilians, fly to venue. If no manual controls and run by rigger, in theory, don’t kill rigger. We’ll see.
Somewhere ‘over the ocean’, Loki has command of the plane. Sanguine is scanning sensors, and we move to infiltrate using sensors and the flightplan: fly above, match position, remaining covered. We begin dropping to intercept. Looking at sensors ahead, thicker cover is coming ahead including a storm. We drop faster to try and get ahead of the storm when moving to intercept. Loki is getting a kick out of this and clearly dicing with some near misses, comes in rather hot and manages to thrust it back. We get to within 10ft, having made an almighty racket, and we head to the rear bay door to begin the intercept. Sanguine and Smith move to the gunnery side-door and slide it open, looking out at the other plane, 10-20ft below. Smith then spots sensor targeting and turrets on the below plane turning to meet us.
Smith grabs the grappling hook as we hear the lock-on warning begin! Vlad grabs sniper rifle and spots the fore and rear turrets. He hits a glancing blow off the turret but not enough to damage it. Smith meanwhile shoots the grappling gun at the plane. It connects and he ziplines down to meet. The front turret then begins opening fire at the ship, and Loki attempts to dodge but fails at the automatic burst. The vehicle takes 6P damage; the rear turret shoots Smith and connects handily; meanwhile the other ship takes evasive manouevres but Loki manages to keep pace with it, and generally avoid taking flak. Jack works with his spirit to deflect, and the spirit of air joins the convoy on the back of the new ship. Loki pings Smith a message to check how long to hold here - given the difficulty flipping to autopilot.
With the grappling hook in place, Sanguine joins the fray on the back of the plane and hacks the turret and gets it to hit the front turret. It looks like it connects neatly and the front turret caves in.
Vlad sees the front turret go so programmes one of the missiles to up and over onto the rear turret. It of course is an anti aircraft missile so it does a boatload of damage. Like, BANG, the back of the plane blows off. It begins to descend. Smith trots over to the hole left by the missile, smashes into the deck and looks up to look around and see who he can shoot. He pulls his shotgun and gets to a set of doors, preparing to open it and open up on whoever’s there.
The big ship descends erratically, the turrets are out of commission. Loki matches pace.
Sanguine joins Smith aboard; Vlad asks Loki to line up better with the breach, then leaps down to join the ship.
Smith - at the door - hears the kerfuffle the other side of the door noticing the ship is doing down, and then kicks the door in. He sees two samurai sitting next to the door, and opens fire on one before Jack’s spirit flies in the door to muller the other one. Sadly, it misses. The first samurai realising a spirit and an autoshotgun person is in range, charges at Smith. It misses - but is quite surprised to see Jack and Sanguine and Vlad out there too!
Another person leaves the front of the ship and sees a glowing aura - the spirit warns Jack this person seems magical! It goes for the spirit.
Loki gets bored of being alone, flicks to autopilot and then walks over to leap into the other ship. He misses with the grappling hook, shrugs, and returns to the controls, flicking autopilot back off.
Jack can’t invite to levitate him down so turns instead to take on the adept, whilst Sanguine opens up on the samurai from the upside-down ceiling metal-stuck posture. It almost looks like a dodge but its sword deflects the bullet into his helmet - he doesn’t drop but yeouch. Vlad steps up to finish him off. Two more people burst through the front door - one magical, one … less so? The mundane one aims a full auto burst shot at Vlad. Then glowy sword magical person charges up for another crack. Vlad deftly dodges both. Another person bursts out wielding an Ares alpha weapon and fires full auto at Smith. Smith manages to compose himself and dodge it all. He then fires a spray of suppressing fire through the ship. Pleasingly it connects :D A number drop prone.
Loki drops in at last, but not before a near death experience! Another Samurai drops to Vlad who steals Smith’s kill (after the previous one). Jack also kills off a Samurai. The two remaining people still under suppressing fire so fire from the floor - to no avail.
Vlad and Smith now engage in a mad scramble to be the first to reach and kill the remaining people. It’s presumably a sea of blood.
Session ends
Sanguine walks up towards the next wave of doors towards the cockpit, and opens a door using AR controls. Double bedroom is empty; the cargo bay is full of crates. From the door we see even larger person-sized ones...Sanguine looks over the icons to see if any are people, then floods us with contents but highlights a couple of note. 4 are labelled with cargo of interest. The single rooms are also now empty. As is the toilet! Jack summons another spirit to join the party, Sanguine checks the port side doors - one is locked, the other clear. Sanguine skinlinks the control panel to the locked door, whilst Smith moves up close to the cockpit. Loki draws a gun ready for the opening of this mysterious locked room, as the door opens we spot a weapon icon appear, and it’s triggering: Sanguine attempts to hack to no avail and we’re peppered with a burst - Loki avoids but Sanguine gets hit. Sanguine reaches his gun around the corner, looking down his barrel as such, to get a shot off. Sanguine sees a person! This room is clearly some sort of infirmary/medbay, and from the pod there’s a person trying to evacuate using an ejection method. Sanguine tries to hack it as Loki blindly fires off stick and shock in the hopes of frying the device, hearing some pops and sizzles. Smith pops back and comes round the doorway corner shooting heavily, no rest for the wicked here. He registers that the person in the pod, a human lady, prepares to throw a grenade. As it arcs, Smith commits to his plan to burst in firing, firing some devastating artillery at the pod - but having a grenade land right next to him. It’s a flashbang! It impacts everyone except Loki who fled for the cockpit. Meanwhile Sanguine sends a command for the medevac capsule to shut down; meanwhile Smith dumps more armour piercing rounds into the capsule itself. Smith notes this person is at least the spitting image of Platinum we’ve seen before (matching memory) - armour jacket but no helmet - and round after round punches the casket. Some blood etc. oozes. Sanguine leaves Smith alone with his corpse. Smith frisks them for a commlink and other goodies. Smith takes a biological sample to make really truly sure we know who is dead but still sticks 2 more bullets in the brain, then checks the room for important items. He finds another commlink and a data module.
Loki gets to a locked door so wolverines them open and steps through, scanning the room for hostiles. He gets to the bow doors, hears some voices behind the door, messages back and is told to go in, eviscerate, and then take control. Meanwhile, Jack is looking over the 4 person-cryo-crates, but can’t assense more, so gets Vlad involved too. Jack begins looking for parachutes to dump these crates safely to ground. Jack finds some! Vlad begins tying troll-sized parachutes to the crates in question. Sanguine joins Loki, who stows spurs and then, realising stick and shock will fry controls but blood won’t, gets spurs back out. Loki indicates he expects Sanguine to skinlink this door open, and as the door opens, sees pilots in two chairs and rigger front and centre. Sanguine murders the one, and Loki pulls apart the cocoon with knives aplenty and unfortunately the death judders of the rigger cause the plan to jerk around, up, down, then flips, leaving us all on the roof except magneto-Sanguine. Jack has magboots whilst Vlad is busily tying off the crates and holding on…
Smith gecko grips on to a surface to avoid being bounced around, and we get the vomit comet 0G treatment as the engines are now pointing totally the wrong way. Sanguine asks about manual controls whilst Loki continues stabbing till the rigger is truly dead. With the rigger dead Sanguine has to reach into the disgusting foul rigger cocoon to skinlink to the plane, and it’s warm, wet and sticky, full of sharp edges. Nevertheless, he persisted, with the desire for us to all not crashland badly. Sanguine searchers for a pilot programme, nope, as it’s piloted by rigger, so he summons the secondary controls console for Loki’s perusal.
Jack and Vlad, who don’t have the benefit of a forward window to avoid the travel sickness, are in a cargo bay, floating and generally feeling light and probably woozy. Vlad clings to the parachute. Jack applies some stealth tags to the crates, and he looks for a commlink plugin and checks how much alt he is running out of.
Loki begins looking over the upside-down-AR console, so a one-handed flip and begins doing things. Sanguine pings everyone to stand by with a picture of this farce. Loki first tries to right the plane, and some minor improvements occur...but not brilliant. We are now on a 90deg angle so everything shifts again. Smith and Jack begin cracking the crates open to check the cargo of family were in one piece.
Loki finally gets the plane the right way up, and bursts the engines to try and bleed some speed. Jack scans the commlink over and looks for nearby support from Smith, whilst Loki also plans to land the bird on the water. Sanguine simulates to basically form a cross-check method to ensure Loki best manages angle of descent etc. Sanguine continues to help stabilise electronically whilst Loki is a little more mechanical.
Meanwhile, Jack suggests Smith returns to our plane - since otherwise we have no means of re-accessing it. The slow glide continues, whilst the gang manage the cargo shifting and parachuting and general exercising diligence to move the cargo. Vlad saws open the cargo thing to allow Smith to check the contents and ensure the cargo is indeed the family members he was seeking. Vlad continues sawing through more cargo, and Jack asks the spirit to help slide the contents out of the box into the aisle, noting the control panel warns about disconnecting from mains and now on battery power. Jack looks inside the cryopanel and sees a wee kid in that one, so Jack assenses without consent once more. Jack hits the ‘rapid defrost button’ on said cryopod, and Smith continues working round pods and stresses to Jack not to open another one for the time being. One box contains another Platinum lookalike (besides the medbay one already dead) - Jack assenses her and sees an essence ca. 3, and chrome in the brain/spine, but no magic. 4th box contains another kid. Jack assesses this one, which is a technomancer(!) with Deltaware in their head.
Smith asks Vlad, our resident disguisey person - how easily would it be to disguise someone this well? Vlad says, only with magic, really, unless it’s a crummy robot face. Smith points out with the Ares Venture door open we can wirelessly beckon it, so diving out with our cargo is a gooooood moooove. Smith messages Sanguine and asks him to pull flight logs, plans etc. from the mainframe to aid our information mining. Sanguine is called back to the crates as there seems to be demand for his presence in the back. Smith explains he needs to accelerate the opening of these pods etc., so he gets his skin on them but it seems like they’ll still take some time. Sanguine considers the potential of them floating, which mollifies Smith a little. Sanguine points to Platinum - defrost or just kick her out the door? Jack senses the end game is approaching so straps on a parachute, gets his gun back from his spirit, and gets Sanguine to try and disable all 2FA on this plane, which was proving very irritating. Smith asks Platinum to get cracked open too. Meanwhile the turbulence increases as descent does likewise. They dole out people to strap to each of the runners, then call out to Loki that it’s time to bug out. He saunters back to join the party again and Sanguine asks Loki to watch out for them once we hit the water.
We leap out the back of the plane, Smith first, Loki, Sanguine, Jack and Vlad. Smith springs out and as we have a brief period of freefall, Smith wants to corral us all to link up and ensure we aren’t miles apart when we land. Very wise! He gathers a few together to form the freefall ring but 2 are flying the other way. Loki holds distance - doesn’t increase separation but nor does he get back towards Smith’s ring of fallers. Sanguine instead comes alongside Loki rather than uses Smith’s ring of safety. Jack’s spirit scoops up Sanguine and shoves him into Loki’s arms. Vlad adopts the Troy Reed posture of profesh skydiver to catch up with Smith, with perfect emulation, and flies over to Smith’s circle of trust.
Smith pulls chute, disconnects from main and plunges into the water, swimming up and breaking the surface neatly. Loki - with fear for the maximum weight rating for his chute - shoves Sanguine away, then pulls chute and skims the water’s surface, making the usual troll-sized splash. Sanguine calls the plane over to route to us, and hits the water. Quite hard. Likely to bruise in the medium term! But for now…
Jack controls his descent using levitation all the way down to the water. The parachute was a mere prop. Vlad recites a Troy Reed soliloquy whilst soaring like a chutey eagle to water level and dives in with nary a splashback. We’re then collected by plane, how civilised. We’re all soggy and wet apart from levitatey Jack, and on our own plane - moderately battered - with our 4 cold cargo. Loki takes the helm, asks ‘where to’, and Jack hooks up the bodies to medkits. Loki watches our bird crash into the water, ripping it in two, the nose diving into the water even whilst the engines power, flips, then turns and splashes into the water.
Smith points out he’s killed something looking just like this one (Platinum 1, 2?) and they debate whether she has many twins. We debate the merits and demerits of turning around and coming back, but with one remaining missile, being deflected of radar, etc., so we press on. Meanwhile they are checking Platinum3 to see whether they are insectile, have bombs in head, how their teeth look etc. Interesting features: control rig and nanite boosters.
The commlink gets hacked to look over messages, logistics and timing factors but otherwise it’s been lightly used. We agree that the need to get into the country ahead is a good shout, and Sanguine needs some time to bag information from home. Meanwhile Smith does a roll call of german speakers - Vlad and Jack! Vlad also considers calling his dad in Berlin to get some outside assistance.
As we fly towards the horizon line, Vlad stalks off after not being given a high five and Smith reminds people not to feel sorry for him, given his earlier missiling of a plane…
Session of 04/02/2021
As we head towards the United Netherlands, Sanguine keeps hacking to get locations, and Smith suggests we stay in international airspace as long as possible, but if we need to get near Berlin the best approach is Denmark -> Baltic -> into Berlin. So Scandinavia into United German States. Loki hugs the german-danish border as long as possible whilst we decide options on navigating, and skirt the range of other planes in airspace. We’re pinged, however, and a light aircraft drone moves to intercept. Sanguine drops into VR to look for the drone, remembers that we’re in a faraday cage, so trots over to the wire and tries to distract said drone from its pursuit of us. The drone flies, and does a U-turn following the icon Sanguine has thrown, and it seems to be moving away from our location. Jack has been reminded of his German contacts who may assist with smuggling routes in and out of Germany. They provide drone routes, contacts whilst in country and also - for a cost - run interference to distract the drones. Jack passes details to Loki so using navigation Loki leans in to the drone route, and sadly misses one, which has taken off at this exact point, and we’re directly above an air base no less. We actually clip the thing at high speed, so we’re guessing that may have attracted attention. Vlad runs over to the remaining rocket and considers firing on the base itself, or at least, a vehicle at the base. Smith proposes trying not to shoot anything right now might be the best - Loki warns of this clipping of a big bird and Sanguine proposes gunning the thing down. Vlad tries to snipe the drone but it sees, dodges and reports to base. So Sanguine, instead, tries to appeal to Loki’s sensibilities by tuning in some glorious troll thrash metal music. Smith asks Sanguine to frig a commlink to have a fake icon and some garbled info to attract the drone instead. Sanguine needs some time to do this whilst Smith attaches a parachute to the commlink. Loki takes Smith seriously and drops low to the ground and fast. As we nosedive towards the earth and accelerates, everyone slams into the back of the plane, apart from Sanguine, and we level off low to the ground but badly failed to shake the drone, which apparently is unimpressed by this technical chicanery. Jack uses the open panel to trid phantasm the drone, and as Loki looks through the cameras, he pulls out of the dive and in the “rear view mirror” as Jack describes what he phantasmed - a fireball - Loki also sees this. The implication is that Loki failed to pull out of dive and boomed into a field. As Jack can only hold this whilst in view, we need a plan B for soon...Smith sets the ‘weather balloon’ commlink going, strapped into its parachute, and Loki climbs hard giving everyone another G-blast. Smith chucks the parachute out, closes the flap and demands Loki dive again. This parabolic flightpath inspires nausea in many, but Sanguine enjoys the more sedate VR ride. Sanguine suggests we set down ‘in a forest near Berlin’ (Forst Grunewald) which has some maintained forest even in these capitalistic days. Jack makes a call to one of Jackal’s contacts, looking for a ‘ripper doc’ and a place for the VTOL to land. They nail their prices down which apparently amount to not a lot besides a landing place and we get a landing place pin and a flightpath to avoid the forest drones. As we turn to land, we settle down and look around - no-one visible yet. Vlad opens the back hatch as Loki spots some heat signatures surrounding the plane. Loki trots over to the sniper rifle and aims at one of the heat signatures, Vlad can see nothing but unfurls his whip to be on the safe side. Jack hails one of these people who advise that we’re welcome in their dear nation and the Tiefervald. As these people are ununiformed but capable (Jack is assessing their overall quality) - they ask if we’re ok to remove the medical cargo, and Jack goes to check their vitals. Loki sits back down in the cockpit and sees 4 moving to shroud the thing in camouflage netting, so he flips the switch to camouflage. Nevertheless, they persist (as the netting has plants in! Fancy). Jack and others head into the forest with them to their secret lair oooooooh. As the last of us passes in, with patients, the door pivots back; the base is relatively well appointed with bunks, kitchen, tables etc. and the gang are offered soy burritos. Sanguine is very sad for a lack of matrix access. He takes soy burritos for Loki and after a stilted conversation is let out. Loki eats delicious soy burritos, Sanguine continues to research the eventual location, Smith waits. Sanguine searches more, spots the base is 30mi (48km!) away, Jack looks for Platinum-clone not having a hidden tooth compartment. The door opens and minor pleasantries are exchanged, the doctor emerges. Jack explains the situation to the medic, these people bailing out of cryosleep, needing some medical hands. Jack also warns her that Platinum is a prisoner so restraints are needed. Smith also asks for the samples to be compared in order to check if the murdered cryobay Platinum was the prime version.
Everyone returns to the ship, and have a discussion about what to do next, rest, scout the new base out. The consensus is to rest till the next day. Vlad spends the day doing weird stuff with his face to trick sensors on base (but may need a shave to fully distract the sensors). Smith’s intention is to wake Platinum-clone up, intimidate her, check for knowhow then dump her body in the woods. Meanwhile it’ll be another day till they rise AND the sample test comes in. We decide to spend one more night here, then fly to within 8km of the new base, and we have some dodge/weave to do to avoid the drones managing the forest-space. As we get to within 16km of the base, we begin checking sensors for stuff, and Smith suggests we set ‘er down. We do so, and camouflage up nicely. Sanguine, Smith etc. go off for a scout. Sanguine returns to the ship as the trees weird him out. Smith scouts for traps and sensors - things to find us. The tree-scouting drones seem the biggest issues. Smith presses on to the perimeter of the base (3km away) and notices some of the trees appear to have vents in the trunk! They’re brown so match the trunk, but v. unusual. Smith walks up to it, but notices pressure netting around the tree. Smith beckons Sanguine over to see these various surprises in the woods. Sanguine is unable to sense/turn the thing off etc. and skinlinking is risky! As they press on the same thing - drones and sentry-vent-trees. There is still no evidence of a landing strip for a plane of the size we downed (which wasn’t VTOLable). Smith spots the dirt is disturbed around him, and the patterns suggest it’s been moved - perhaps it’s a landing zone, of a sort? Or hangar door. Sanguine sneaks up to another tree, resisting the urge to yodel. Smith spots a drone and stops Sanguine trotting out in front of it. Going up to the tree, these appear much older living trees, and as he reaches out he can tell within the root there appears to be wiring! The indication is there are sensors within the tree. Akin to a sensor array in vehicles and drones. Looking around Sanguine spots an optical sensor (not in line of sight) as well as others (thermographic etc.).
Smith and Sanguine discuss further, and pull back to the ship. Vlad suggests lots of blowing up, and Smith isn’t sure there’s enough explosives in the area to blow the base up. Also Loki needs to take a diet to get greased up well enough to fit down a vent.
Vlad suddenly remembers this is the place he escaped from as a kid! So realllllly wants to blow it up. Although, Sanguine asks whether that means there are other kids down there. Smith wisely suggests if Vlad left here, perhaps the militia that got him out know other access/ingress routes rather than going in hot. Apparently they return to the ship to see Loki.
Vlad texts his pa, mentioning he’s back on the blops site from which he was rescued. He sends a selfie with his shadowrun buddies, and is promptly called from his pa! The dad expresses his disquiet that Vlad appears not to be avoiding corporations and keeping himself safe, and in fact doing explicitly what he’s been told not to do - cf unleashing juggernauts on building-destroying cities. Shocking. Vlad throws the video so pop can see his runner gang for a lark. He also shares silly stories about stealing dolphins, nanobot fiery virii, working for rabbits etc., and the dad is taking all this in. He’s not happy about sending his son into a ‘suicide den’ but Vlad makes very clear he’s been in worse situations. He invites Vlad et al for dinner and briefing - but doesn’t have space for a VTOL to land. He rings off and Vlad decides approach - fly? Car? Get him to visit us? What do we do about German SINs? Smith goes off and sees if the gang have a vehicle of some kind. It’s an hour away. No spare SINs alas. The car pulls up - Loki has to fit in the boot - the person jumps out and hands over the RFID key, Loki claims it (of course) and the person starts giggling at the prospect of a troll behind the wheel. Loki folds himself behind the wheel, seat all the way back, and Vlad hops in the boot before Loki demands he’s shotgun to direct. Sanguine hops in, and Jack sits rearside passenger seat. The suspension begins to creak badly once Smith clambers in too. Before he gets in he does see that the prisoner is Slabbed to ensure they don’t come to.
We pull away, Loki pranking them by driving on the left, then pulls over to the right side and we hit a checkpoint at the city limits SIN checking. Sanguine thinks he has this under control, and convinces the machinery 5 normal German SINs are within. We proceed as normal. Vlad remembers his pa is at a Uni in town (Humboldt or another?). The roads across the Spree lead into the campus area. Vlad is mindful we’re supposed to be on campus only for good reason or if you’re a student...so Vlad texts pa asking for visitor passes. The dad instead demands that we use this as an object lesson for Vlad’s ability to survive ingress to the blops site. Sanguine assesses the uni’s technical ability of getting hacked - he sees a giant oak door blocking his way just now. We discuss methods of ingress including boat-stealing, being levitated over by Jack, and generally blagging things, and we head down to the jetty therefore to see what we can steal. There are people down on the docks so Smith suggests Sanguine hacks a loading crane to get them distracted whilst Smith steals a boat. Sanguine does indeed cause some havoc and tells Smith to move fast, as Sanguine spots other people in VR approaching (Sanguine adopts a jester’s form and cap to show he’s mischief making). Smith nicks the boat good and well, hopping into a dinghy and pootles out the harbour; as he exits, he sees an RFID beacon out into the Matrix reporting location of dinghy, and Smith messages Sanguine to put the crane down and to kill the tag instead. Sanguine has to ditch the tail he has in VR so uses a sprite to electron storm them (using a bell from his cap as a grenade to blow their tale). Then Sanguine finds the chip, and clones it to put the GPS back on the dock, so it’s unaware that the boat has been nicked. Sanguine sorts it all out and his jester form skips out of VR as Smith gives locations to be picked up. We hop down the bankside and climb aboard. Smith navigates us to the corner of the Uni complex and the two sides the Spree borders the Uni and see a garden to clamber into, mooring the boat there. Vlad’s struggling to remember where his dad is! Sanguine suggests skinlinking something, and Smith points out faculty members’ details are clearly public domain. His bio page suggests he’s doing historic studies and directs Vlad to a door with a ‘doorbell - SIN scanner’. Sigh! Vlad looks over at Sanguine for assistance, as he pops the top off with his lock picking tools, and Sanguine moves to grab a wire. Realising this is the doorbell Sanguine suggests the door instead, sigh! Vlad cracks the lock, and the door clunks open and Vlad is hit with a waft of cooking smells, yum, and the door alarm beep-boops. Vlad sees his dad cooking and jumps out making a scary noise. The dad shouts out, falls over, and looks up at his son. He is shocked, and Vlad/Pascal laughs at this chicanery. He also notes his dad looks like shit and wonders what happened to him, apparently needing to eat more is a thing? The dad comments how rude he still is. Vlad introduces everyone - Jack, Sanguine, Loki and Smith. He shares some of each gang’s mad exploits and we sit down to dinner - Loki literally on the floor as no chair will support him in this teeny tiny gaff. We try small talk, starting with passive-aggressivisms, then Vlad explains about liberating Theta and how he is co-parenting and the now-grandfather asks for how long - and why he wasn’t informed sooner. Vlad admits he probably should have spoken to his father about acquiring the kid and all. Vlad proposes a trip for his dad to meet her. Jack and he then exchange some barbs about how he only rescued one kid from the blops site, and the guy admits it’s a tough gig. Jack says it’s time to end the base there, and now’s the right time after all. More conversations are exchanged with Jack, Vlad decides that enough is enough, and we rise to leave - Jack gets admonished by the dad to ensure Vlad and he get back to their daughter. Jack says he’ll try but could do with a pass out - instead we head back to the boats. Vlad looks over the piece of paper he received about Kasper, who’s not on campus - he’s a ghoul! (did Sanguine know that?!). As he works in a stuffer shack which is open 24/7 Smith suggests visiting right now. Sanguine, now not seething over no vegetarian option, asks what the hell we’re doing talking to a ghoul and Jack explains Kasper is the person to help access the blops site - part of the movement and surveiller of the site. Since we also got the coordinates from Vlad’s dad this is bonus information - and Smith’s all about that. Happily our boat is indeed still there. And there’s an hour left on Sanguine’s bluffing RFID clock. We hop back into the boat, Smith drops us off on the riverbank and takes the boat back to the harbour, sneaking out in one piece. We rendezvous and Jack rings Kasper up using Isaac’s name to buy him in then speaks in Stuffer Shack code about the ‘order’ (information - but also a soy burrito order) and we drive to the shack. Sanguine expresses profound, audible shock at the concept of a ghoul doing paid employment, much to the embarrassment of Vlad in his homeland, and Sanguine frigs with some security so we’re not noted, and we head into the staff area at the back. Then back outside! Sanguine keeps his distance from the ghoul, who pushes a dumpster to reveal a manhole cover, gives it a rhythmic knock and it gets lifted from below and we’re invited into the sewers, with the ghouls. Sanguine is deeply unimpressed. We drop down a few metres, get guided through the stinky ghoulinfested sewers and are seated with Kasper and another ghoul (Lars). Sanguine rinses his mouth out with whisk(e)y and is generally unimpressed. Jack introduces Sanguine, who glares at him for sharing names with ghouls. Vlad is introduced as one ‘from there’ and they seem to want to know why - very odd. After a lot of very cautious questioning (‘why this site’ ‘are you mad’ etc. etc.) they actually start to impart some useful information finally. Jack also asks about where they’d have landed the bigger ship that was trying to fly in. The hatch leads to an underground runway with catapult launcher. Sanguine asks if they have any bombs etc. to support us. They said they could gather stuff if Smith were to explain what was required. Smith considers a dirty bomb option to decommission the base, but Vlad also wants to hunt down and murder the researchers.
We establish a nuclear meltdown is possibly a bad idea given the difficulty and the risk of making Berlin toxic. Smith says we can’t carry enough munitions in there, and without blueprints we can’t collapse it. Perhaps enough damage to make it unusable may be enough. Caving in the hangar will make it obvious, so it stops being a ‘black’ site, and we then destroy data and rescue any innocents. Vlad and Sanguine again stress killing the scientists is the key ;)
We debate the merits of gas (sensors, masks etc.). Smith likes stealth job - go in, control room, take out the spider. Vlad also likes this. Sanguine asks about blueprints and they only have entry/exit points, and can’t say how heavily used some of them are. Most are single-person service hatches. Sanguine says without prints we have absolutely no way of going in clean and relatively safely and Smith agrees. Vlad asks about neurotoxins but doesn’t really have a clue. Smith also confirms a lot would be needed if we intended to flood the base. They can get something called ‘retro’ which is a start. Smith says without sending a spirit down to take a look all we can do is tool up and prepare...Jack asks if there have been any other escapees? Possibly, around the time Vlad was sprung. Noone we could tap up to ask if they know their way around.
We return to the car, soy burritos in hands, clown car seat giving Loki difficulty but we navigate back uneventfully. We head into ze bunker for Smith to interrogate Platinum-3. The medkit implies she’s coming to - twitchily - and Vlad suggests we all stand behind her so she wakes up ‘alone’ and tries to send a distress call. Vlad also proposes replicating the look of Platinum 2-or-3 - and Vlad squeezes down to push out another couple of inches of hair. He also uses previous recording files to take on her voice nicely, and then Platinum-3’s eyes flutter open and Vlad-Platinum puts on a concern-fear expression and shush-finger-on-lips’es Platinum-3. Vlad-Platinum implies people are listening and Platinum-3 looks confused. Vlad-Platinum draws out a wire and attempts to pick the lock, DNIing everyone to move away from the door so he pretends to break out to win her trust. We all retreat up a level to give Vlad some space, but she seems unfocussed and isn’t marvelling at Vlad’s lockpicking so he DNIs and asks if she’s brain damaged or something so Vlad-Platinum talks to her, she flinches and says ‘what’s happened?’ Vlad-Platinum says ‘we’ve been captured but we have an opportunity to escape’. She starts clawing back from Vlad-Platinum and nearly falls off the gurney. She then crashes to the floor and continues to push back. Her limbs are unfunctional and she asks ‘what are you doing here?’ she seems disbelieving that Platinum could be captured, but Vlad-Platinum asserts. “Can’t be! Captured?” Her limbs start to work better and she works into the corner of the room. She asks “you’re saving me?” to which V-P says ‘of course!’ and Platinum-3 tries to shove the briefcase medkit at him. Vlad gives up, calls us in, Loki pushes the door open and Vlad says ‘not a fan of Platinum then? You should talk to this guy’ and Loki moves to allow Smith the floor. Sanguine fetches the isotonic drink of capri-sun and hands it to Platinum-3. Vlad calls it quits with this interrogation, whilst Platinum-3 asserts ‘we are her’. Smith points out we’re not friends - nor enemies of her enemy! Sanguine asks where Platinum is, and she knows 6 months ago (presumably when she was cryo-crated): Renraku offices, Berlin. Sanguine asks if she’s a clone, or other relation. She says ‘you really don’t know much do you?’ and Loki glowers, to which she response ‘I think we are, at least, that is what we were told’. Smith asks how old she is: unknown - alive the last 2 years. Sanguine asks what her use is - body double/protection? Yeah, other things too, run business wings etc. Sanguine 3 says ‘what do you want’ and begins asking quid pro quos. This has gone from Blade Runner to Silence of the Lambs. Sanguine is keen to know if she has the skillsets of Platinum (memories of, but not pure skill: can fight to an extent). Sanguine sends DNI out with a shrug emoji, possible asset? Can we use her? Loki says gun emoji, Vlad says victim of corps, let live. Smith begins asking: they transplant memories: how good are they? Platinum-3 - some good, some hazy, a bit different for each. Also sometimes there are defects: “I can’t imagine they intended to make me how I feel”. Smith asks about the blops site in Berlin - ‘are you aware?’ - “I think so. Underground?”...Smith probes for memories of having attended, nope, but “I” know some memories of the place.
Jack assenses her, and Smith asks how many there were - 5 including the original, as ‘not cheap to make’ , but soon after 4 as there were 2 malcontents (her included, she assumes the other is vaporized). Smith says if that’s true at least 2 clones are dead, this alive clone, one more clone unaccounted for, and the original. He asks how they tell each other apart, what they call each other etc. Normally tags are on the commlink - this one is “Iridium”, and they tell each other apart via some tats (Iridiums says 77 which apparently is the atomic number for Iridium, ldo).
Jack asks if she knew where she was ‘birthed’: a tank; by the time she understood what was going on, a lab, then trained and moved them before acting-in-the-world, Berlin being the first place. Sanguine asks “what would you like to happen now?” and she says ‘not to be killed’. ‘Then what?’, tack change: ‘if we go up against her, what advice?’ - she asks for something to draw on and a disabled commlink is proffered, and she looks around the room to judge us. She turns to Vlad and says the voice will help with some comms - but some is biological, and Iridium gets the same clearance - but it also knows it’s her rather than another copy.
Some more chat and Smith asks the people here to kill her in 2 days if we don’t return. Vlad starts sizing up Loki’s dragging ability to make him a wee C4 sled.
Jack starts prepping spells, Smith starts prepping explosives, Sanguine sends Dax a message saying ‘might not come back, see ya in the Matrix yo’. Sanguine also discusses with the Council and the gang about what happens to Theta in the event of our demise. Jack makes a call to some cockerney geezer (Seb) looking after Theta, who comes onto the phone and asks “Uncle Jack'' when he’s coming home. She asks about home schooling and ‘opening the post’ (RFID tags pushed through a letter box), which includes a Soymino’s two for tuesday pizza deal, Theta super excited.
We turn back to thinking about the venue to infiltrate, Smith now having made a nice big breaching charge from his commercial explosives. Iridium has some more map marked out, and shares her other clone names (Mercury, Gold, Osmium - these flank Platinum y’see).
Jack is looking over the other cryocrates (not likely to awaken for another 2 days or so).
We consider infiltration points, looking for ones boarded up/less used. The plan is to start stealthily and see when/if noisiness occurs. We wait for night to fall and leave Iridium under watch with the crew, walking in the woods and we spot an unboarded/less used hatch. We previously established it’s a 1mi diameter hemisphere-arc bowl, with the reactor in the centre, outside ring for accommodation, and space for both experiments and to house the subjects. Some labs are also marked up. The spider/security room is near the centre and noted on our plans. Sanguine notes there appear to be noone the other side of the hatch, but also searching around he spots a jackport connection next to the hatch. Sanguine jabs his finger in and spots an image of an agent pop up in front of him, asking for username and credentials. Sanguine runs interference, gets the door open but then sees a persona walking towards the door - a decker/spider coming to investigate why this has happened. Sanguine creates a log suggesting a random glitch, now resolved. He hops into meatspace, Loki yanks the hatch.
We hop in and pull the door closed and Sanguine jacks back in to confirm it’s all closed up. When he hops in the decker is there puzzling over the audit logs, so Sanguine creeps up to re-secure the door. As he does the latch clicks, and the decker spins round, spotting Sanguine; Sanguine throws up a ghost sprite to obscure him and backs out, warning us. We’re in a 3x3m room with lift doors at the other end. Sanguine has a fit, so Loki, then Smith, give him a slap and tell him to get his act together. He fails to call the lift. We discuss how else to get down: try again? Levitate, use rope...a mile of it?!...and Smith just calls the lift. We lever the doors open with Smith’s crowbar, and Sanguine spots the error notification fire off, but he stops it getting out. Sanguine also gets us to descend and continues intercepting errors/logging. We descend, Jack gives us a pep talk, there’s no lift musak, most disappointing. As the lift decelerates, we hear it PING and the doors open. We’re shown a metal corridor, side-on, noone in the corridor, Loki doesn’t see any cameras so begins to exit. Smith sees the cameras! And points them to Sanguine who sorts them and we begin moving down the corridor, camouflaged people first, but we’re making quite some clanking based on how unstealthy we’re being. We press on, trying to avoid more crowded areas. As we move through communal areas (food to/from a canteen, lounge areas etc.), the stealthy camouflaged people get by ok but somehow despite us stomping through the general sounds dissipate and we make it through probably unseen. Phew!
Smith looks around for signs and spots one for the labs, which gets Vlad intrigued. Also testing chambers and more generic ones like “central area”. Passing this slidey door we finally spot some guards and keycard readers. Vlad finally sees a chance to take lives. Sanguine hacks the biomonitors so if we flatline these chumps they don’t trigger a response, and Vlad unfurls his whip. Jack casts a 4m spell of silence to capture any howls of pain. Vlad looks to take off his shoulder and chops right through him. Smith also fires on the other one, turning him to goo. We rush the door. Vlad catches the forearm he’s lopped off and tosses it to Sanguine. Both the people crumple ragdoll style and Smith digs out a commlink to try and bust the door - but needs Sanguine’s help with yet another password. We discuss whether or not we just kick it down.
The door is opened! Another corridor with more signs to ‘central area’, ‘control room’ &c. Corridor is empty, so Smith drags the bodies inside. We then kill some more people to get through another door and begin running fast. Apart from Jack. We then run into the control area and hear people rushing towards us, clanking away armouredly.
Combat!
Smith gets to the corner and takes cover, then aims at the closest approacher with a burst of fire, and doubletaps one - the first one catches in the grille but the second punches both through and this one falls to the ground. Vlad splits his combat to target two people - one a sword wielder - with Mr Whippy. Alas, he misses both. The swordless person drops his gun and pulls spurs out of each hand, Loki nods approvingly, and they swing at Vlad, before Loki fires on this spurwielding freak, grazing him. Swordude turns and attacks Vlad, missing, then Jack gets his elemental to join the fray and he himself attacks sword dude but does not connect in any real fashion. Sanguine, already brandishing Bad News (willed away now to Sanguine in the event of his demise), pulls the trigger on swordude. He smushes him, and Smith then fires off another shot from his sniper rifle, executing the other one.
Combat ends!
We head the way these people were charging, executing and picking off lone guards as we head along, seeking out the control room and reach the area - ‘SECURITY CONTROL ROOM’. Jack calls a spirit to de-manifest and hop into the room to have a look around for us. The spirit sees 6 individuals in the room, two of which are astrally active. Jack shouts to pull back and Jack tells us the situation and looks around for spirits - and spots one heading into the room - it was further down the corridor and has slunk back in. Smith pops the camera above the door, Sanguine looks for a panel to access the door, for Vlad to pick locks, and Loki says baws to that, just breach it with the 7kg of explosives!! Smith hands out kinder eggs - frag grenades for Vlad, explosive grenades for Loki to hold for Sanguine, and Jack pops some Psyche. Smith straps the breaching charge to the door, and we take cover…
The door blows and Vlad immediately tosses the frag grenade inside whilst the people inside spring for cover themselves...we see 3 ares wielders and 2 swordudes, then one person not wearing armour who’s clearly magelike.
Combat? Apparently the grenading that followed absolutely obliterates all but one health of the remaining 6, showering the machinery in a fine red mist of goo. Vlad loves this! He charges in to finish off the one dazed and crawling away, hanging by a thread, which Vlad clips. Loki checks the rigger’s a goner too, of course. Looking around at the control panels, they are no longer in a usable state. Vlad consults his Troy Reed movie compendium to see if these control panels are failsafing/shutting down/melting down the reactor. He can’t remember. But Jack also notes a lack of spirits! That’s good news too. We’re the ones in spirits now.
What next? Smith proposes finding the reactor, setting a breaching charge on all the coolant pressure vessels, sets a timer for 30-60mins, and then bug out. Smith thinks there might be a backup control room with a second spider...perhaps for the reactor, or the base - like for redundancy. Hmm!
Sanguine is unable to find a stable connection to their internal systems, thanks largely to the room explosion. Sanguine considers the implications and possibility of accidentally melting down the reactor (don’t do, toxic zones bad, insect spirits love toxic zones). Sanguine and Smith propose directionality. We find a nearby door on the inner ring, Sanguine gestures to it and draws Bad News. Jack sends a spirit in to check for anyone - nope - and Smith opens the door. Noting smartglass, Vlad whips the panel off for Sanguine to skinlink to, but in doing so the glass goes clear and we see some sort of...circulation space in the middle (with the reactor hovering above). Smith sees scratches, weapon fire, impact etc. and invites Jack to have a look. Jack thinks the marks could be a large clawed paracreature, and the metalwarping implies heat distortion. Smith seeks reassurance it’s not a dragon that was in there - too small a room? Sanguine hacks away, using Vlad as an arm-rest to keep him plugged in. We are reminded the inner ring contains labs and subject living areas, but Sanguine also reminds us of the need to find the backup control room. As we round a corner we are on the inside of a guard post (keypad), Sanguine hacks it but it seems to be waiting for a key/card too. Smith starts welding in whilst Sanguine gives Loki some of his hipflask of single malt. We prepare weapons, Jack counterspells it up, Smith finishes welding and kicks that door down. He sees a corridor and branchpoints: a quick assessment shows 2 people either side at the branchpoints, covering themselves, guns drawn at door, and one further back (albeit not gun-drawn). Smith readies his rifle, and takes aim firing at the 2-person side, kneeling down. The kneeler spins away unhurt. Smith mutters. Vlad charges in, whip held aloft, seeking out the magiest looking one, eviscerates it, then has to dodge an almighty hail of bullets. Such a dynamic fellow! Jack’s spirit demanifests, walks in and sees a couple of spirits on the other side. Loki pops a shot off to absolutely no avail. Vlad is once again absolutely opened up on, and a couple of rounds punch into him this time. Jack does some spellcasting funsies, recklessly casting a net attempt on the room, to try and reduce the fire Vlad is taking. Sanguine tries some shenanigans which also get nowhere with this lot.
Smith drops prone and targets the one suppressing fire, connecting nicely. Alas it doesn’t bring him down and Smith mutters “dammit”, Jack Bauer style. A spirit of beasts then manifests in front of the junction, looking like a hellhound. One of the paras drops another 10bullets on Vlad, who uses a lot of good fortune to avoid being hit. Vlad drops prone, crawls up to the spirit-beast and cleaves it in two with his whip. Jack then joins the other spirit in astral combat. He also has a wee fit and gets stunned, before Sanguine Bad Newses Jack’s target and fires him a cheeky wink to boot.
Smith fires on Mr. Fire Suppressor, Vlad finally goes down - after some considerable firepower! But Jack gets fired at, but also avoids dropping. Smith then takes some shots and is stunned but unbowed, then Jack’s spirit continues the spirit slugfest. Loki fires some more rounds, knocking out the armoured fire-suppressor, so things go a little quiet. Smith ends the one standing over Vlad, then the panicking remaining guard pumps the grenade-launcher bit on his Ares Alpha. It goes kaboom and we take varying amount of stun damage from the blow. Smith then levels his gun at the remaining guard, who’s just launched grenade, and prepares to blow him away. He misses, so the fella cheeses it down the corridor, so Loki, chivalrous fellow he is, shoots him in the back. He doesn’t go down. There’s no justice in the world. Jack recklessly stunbolts the spirit in front of him, which causes it to dissipate, then Sanguine pops round the corner, shows exactly how to shoot a departing enemy in the back, ending his life, then they toast with the delicious single malt.
We drop out of combat, Vlad fails to stop dying, so Jack casts ‘stabilise’ on Vlad so now he’s unconscious. Mmm mmmmmm. Loki scoops Vlad up, Sanguine says ‘why can’t we teach Vlad to use a gun instead of charging in’, Smith says ‘I’ve been trying 2 years to do that’, and we try to get off corridors and hole up somewhere for an hour for Vlad to come to. We head towards the backup control room, not meeting resistance but spotting bubble cameras along the way. The room we get to is once again keycarded so here we go, fishing around in dead people’s pockets for keycards, and Smith spots it and fishes it out. Smith suggests Vlad gets put down (sad face!), then he pops the key card in, door opens, we go in all guns blazing. Smith has eyes on the kill. We all get some serious surprise drop on them, burst in the room and we absolutely OBLITERATE them. Sanguine pops in, spots the rigger plugged in and leaves him for Loki, opening up on someone back to a wall (so as not to blow a console). Loki has no concern about this and leaves the rigger in shards. Jack levitates some targets away from consoles and leaves them easy pickings for Smith, who pops a round in each head of the levitated folk. Sanguine now tries to hotwire the keycard reader to turn it to our purposes and deny the folk entry. Loki scoops Vlad back up and we head into the now-secured room, and Sanguine/Jack do a teamy first aid on Vlad. Vlad coughs-to, asking “we won?” with a little bit of bloodmist. Sanguine affirms victory, Vlad says “YES!” and asks if Sanguine saw him kill a spirit. Jack also casts a heal spell on Vlad, trying to get him to stay still whilst the wounds heal. Cauterising and analgesia takes place, and Vlad leaps off the table feeling fresh as a daisy. A daisy who’s been shot up a bit, but otherwise a daisy. Smith asks how we’re doing and Jack/Loki are a little woozy but otherwise fine.
Smith proposes a short adjournment, we figure we’ve been in the place another hour - do we crack on and rely on stim patches to avoid passing out? Last thing we need is reinforcements to come from Berlin, so the consensus is to press on. Smith still proposes to
Session of 11/3/21
Sanguine assesses the area:
Vlad wants a meltdown, Smith wants to collapse the thing to make it unusable
Poss rockstar exit on plane in hangar out? Could load lots of experimentees this way rather than up and down in the lifts
Sanguine searches for head honcho types on base. Some sort of authenticator challenges Sanguine evades it by spiriting himself away from the tendrils holding his leg, and gets a list of 4 big names. Vlad gets the list of names and rooms/labs and Vlad hops to his feet, ready to go. He sees everyone still resting and sits back down, but Jack reluctantly agrees to drag his woozy body up. Sanguine shuts down all routes except the route for us - Scientists -> Experimentees -> get out of dodge. Some partial success for Sanguine, not all routes locked down.
We round a corner and vaporise 2 guards before they get a chance to react thanks to our concealment but when that drops, Vlad moves fast and whip-kills a couple more people before there’s any time to react. Each interjection from Jack leads to another dying at the hand of his whip. The message sinks in so Vlad goes to maim one instead of killing them, clipping off his ankles, they drag themselves away screaming before slumping. In the end we count 5 scientists and 2 guards. We press on, cautious as before, and as we scout down another corridor we spot a door we reach, knowing the other side is the final corridor prior to the ‘safe area’/’panic room door’ Sanguine spotted in plans. This run is likely to have turrets and cover and the guards will hole up here for a stand. Sanguine asks if Loki can tear down some wires for Sanguine to skinlink to; Jack prepares a sheet of magic glass ledge for Loki to hop onto and it’s apparently not up to the job. Jack now realises what exactly is needed - Loki to hit the roof - so casts Levitate on him, and after a stumble, not surprising how easily it was to lift him, bumps Loki off the roof, who then tears a panel out, rips some wires down and dangles them for Sanguine. Loki is lowered and presents Sanguine the wire. Sanguine sends a sprite out to cause some matrix damage on a decker attached to the turret, aiming to cold-cock destroy their deck. They see it coming and send a hailstorm back Sanguine and the Sprite’s way, and they glance past it, then it’s hand to hand (deck to sprite?) combat. Sanguine successfully frigs the deck, ripping the persona apart from the lightning ball, and the puppet strings connected to the turrets fall to the virtual floor. Sanguine tries to connect to the turrets, to scout the guards in the room: yes indeed, a number of people. We are fed the link to see layout, and Sanguine prepares to shoot from the turrets as we breach the door.
COMBAAAAAAAAAAAT
Vlad waits for Sanguine to start the turrets, Sanguine calls us to stand by, the wizard-like fella levels a hand cannon at the door, and the decker plugs into a new deck (Sanguine sees them re-forming in the matrix). We basically all get our guns leveled, one and all, and Smith lines up a shot against the nearest unarmoured person - and absolutely murders them. Smith KICKS THE DOOR DOON. The decker plugs back in and tries their insipid data spike attack again, but is at least causing Sanguine distraction from the turret piloting. Smith goes in and murders another; Jack’s spirit charges at a dwarf on the next run of barriers, then Loki barges in and begins shooting at the Dwarf in combat with Jack’s spirit, and then ducks down. Vlad dodges a hail of bullets, Jack attempts to attack (failing) and then everyone in the corridor gets hit with a hail of suppressing fire. Smith drops to cover, Loki hits the floor, and Vlad and the spirit stay up and dodge. Vlad moves and eviscerates the dwarf before getting right in the mix of the 3 guards near the panic room door. Smith finishes off one of the ones Vlad was in the grill of. Sanguine spots some goggles one of the guards was using to view, hacks them up and tries to blind him, succeeding for the moment. Vlad whips up the guard nearest him, who he drops, and Smith locks onto the remaining guard and blows them uppppppp.
Vlad goes up to the panic room door, knocks on it and says “all clear” in the guard’s voice. No answer. Vlad suggests breaching charge on this door, since he thinks Jack really, really won’t let him blow up the nuclear reactor. A look from Jack is all he needs to know. Smith hands over penultimate breaching charge and explains the process (sticky strip off and roll down). Vlad looks real keen! Hopefully not too keen. Vlad looks behind him, pulls the pin, and runs for cover. Smith stands there because the breach points towards enemy, and Vlad is charging away. Kablam. A 1.5sqm hole (knee to chest) opens up, and as the tinkling settles we here some worried voices, and Vlad immediately catches what he sees as a glimpse of white labcoats, the bloodlust descends again. Turns out they’re in PJs as it’s past bedtime, but Vlad squeezes through and asks if any of them happen to be scientists who experiment on vulnerable children. Those that can scoot away push back a little more, cowering. Sanguine reminds Vlad of the 4 head honcho faces, so he can scan the crowd he is eviscerating to see if they’re in here, and whilst he’s doing all this we’re reloading, plundering gas grenades from guards etc., and Vlad spots one of the honchos. Some try squeezing out of the door and getting away, so Loki guns them down, lest Vlad be disappointed in us all. Sanguine points out a honcho but Loki’s killing them anyway.
Meanwhile Vlad spots the head honcho not only didn’t raise his hand to the question, and was using scientists as a human shield, so Vlad exterminates that one with prejudice. A third of the way through the bloodshed (50 were in the room) Vlad checks his temperature and sees if he should plough on, so he stops and asks the room again: “so, you think it’s ok to torture…<to himself> well torture, it’s ok...I mean, experiment on innocent children?”. Vlad points to a random person and asks “do you?”. They say “no” but have no answer readily enough, so Vlad executes him too. This is enough to resolve the situation: they all must die. A few minutes of pure murder unfolds, then Vlad comes back out to ask how many more scientists must be left: about half, and half the honchos. Splendid. Sanguine suggests half is enough, but Loki protests that’s enough to resume at half speed. And Smith says if Vlad’s bloodlust is sated, then...We dispatch some more guards as we go and we then reach a lab door. It’s an observation room - looking in on obstacle courses and the like - and Vlad comes across a party of others, killing 3 before stopping and asking the fourth who she is. This someone claims to be a shadowrunner, sent by Berlin Ghouls, to help liberate the experimentees. Vlad is super unsure what’s going on, as Sanguine is the one pointing a gun in his face and tells her to back up so Sanguine can take the console. Sanguine looks over the prison-cell-bound experimentees - one with a giant head, one with a scorpion tail, one v v big, but no cars in there, Vlad looks with disappointment.
This shadowrunner - who has killed no scientists, asks what we’re up to, and she seems bemused we want to kill. Vlad and Loki give her no uncertain reasons for killing scientists before Sanguine asks the sensible question: will they leave the cells and follow her or us out, pied piper style? And she says ‘they might listen to me’. Sanguine asks what her exit plan is so there seems to be some strategy swapping. She introduces herself as Francesca; Sanguine says enough chit chat and begins opening cells. She gives a lot of wishy washy stalling talk so Smith pops a round of stick and shock and hits her between the eyes. Vlad DNI’s Sanguine asking for the quickest route to reactor, and to Smith to ask to borrow the last breaching charge and not tell Jack.
Sanguine tries to open the cells and it fails: the cells lock down entirely and the console powers down; whilst Smith marks the glass pane which is breakable, with the consoles down and the doors locked we may have a hard time moving faster. Smith starts welding through the door. Vlad interrobangs Smith, and Sanguine agrees to give him a reactor route. Smith kicks the door in, with his door-kicking foot, and Smith appears to get charged down by experimentees wielding weapons (one whip, one a hammer). Oh dear...
Session of 28/11/2021 (midnight to 1.30am)
There are a few experimentees behind the two charging the door: one cyborgian, one apparently naked(?), and one ‘relatively normal’ but wearing heavy armour.
COMBAAAAAAAT
Smith makes to sweep the person in front of him, just to keep them out of trouble rather than cause significant damage. Smith, indeed, manages to put this person wielding a hammer on their back. He knocks him out cold, and the hammer’s weight keeps him there. Vlad looks on, marvelling, then moves forward to stun glove the whippy experimentee. A small caress stuns them slightly. Loki also moves in to flank Vlad, fires a few rounds of stick n’ shock, and Whippy goes down too.
Cyborg (with brain-in-window) spots the whip (Vlad) and gun (Loki), sees them operating wirelessly, and goes to brute force their devices; Vlad dodges somehow but Loki’s gun starts sparking, and Sanguine sees this happening in the matrix, a big brain in a window reaching out to ally icons. “Boring” experimentee turns out to be magical and starts conjuring phantasms of an empty room - unconscious bodies and all. Noone sees past this obvious ruse! Sanguine tries to aim by icon - nothing physical but the Matrix never lies - and points Bad News at the brain-borg. The bullets connect, and Sanguine steps to the side to break line of sight. Meanwhile Jack uses his Astral vision, declares counterspell, and we get some AR arrows pointing out the location of the invisible- which Vlad and Smith use to get a decent bead on them, bar the mage. Unable to see anyone to fire at, Loki yells that we’ve actually come to rescue the lot of them, and to put their guns down! The trid phantasm drops and boring mage looks worried and visible, pulls a gun and points it to his head. Vlad leaps forward with the plan to stun this one out of a suicide attempt, but after their crit and Vlad’s fancy footwork he wrests the weapon from their hand. He de-clips it and tosses it away as an errant round is loosed, but does no harm. Vlad takes a hand to his shoulder and tells the kit to get a grip. He grasps Vlad’s risk, feels a spell being cast and Jack throws his countermagic at him - but Vlad also turns on the glove. It goes badly for him and he begins bleeding from his eyes and nose and the like, and Vlad just shocks him out cold.
Out of combat…
The unconscious bodies all reappear and we look around the chamber. We discuss how we can’t render all 20 experimentees unconscious as we can’t carry them all and perhaps a Tannoy call from us to let them know might be an idea. Sanguine finds an intercom system, heads up and skinlinks preparing for a message to be sent. Vlad clears his throat, Jack suggests that he thinks before he speaks, “Hello Everybody! This is me, Gamma 17, if anybody wants rescue then stand in orderly queue…” [jack says ‘think about what you’re saying’], Vlad hesitates [what am I saying?], all the time the intercom is on…”come to doors of hub room and we will escort you to hanger for extraction to life of happiness in another place where you can have all the milkshake you want, and soy burrito, soykaff...a lot of soy but it’s still pretty good”...
Meanwhile, Sanguine is looking into the cells using the cameras, and there’s clearly some discussion amongst them if they were picking up what Vlad is putting down. There is clearly confusion, so Vlad reiterates “this is a friendly rescue operation from your local Shadowrun group! This venue will be rendered uninhabitable in a short while so please come to be rescued”. Sanguine sees some more gesturing and begins tapping mics into the cells and they speak back “hello!”. Vlad gets a patch through and they ask who he is, and it’s clear they don’t remember him. He explains his backstory and they ask why they need rescuing - Vlad explains “where you’re living it’s pretty shit, and in 30mins it’ll become radioactive and you’ll die”. They ask where Francesca is and Vlad confirms she’s here! But she ‘hit her head and cannot currently talk’. The kids clearly want to see her so Smith slaps a stim patch on her whilst Vlad rants about how everyone accuses him of being the psychopath. Francesca wakes up, Sanguine explains ‘the combat team are subdued and we’re trying to convince the rest to rally, and you have to talk to them’. She’s handed the mic, but continues to protest the combat team ‘were on our side’. After more protestation she eventually talks into the mic, and the experimentees speak back to her. She confirms she does not know us, that we shot her, and when they ask if we can be trusted (Vlad giving a non-verbal thumbs up) she says “I don’t know, but I don’t think we have a choice”. They agree to follow us. Sanguine opens the cell doors and the 15 remaining experimentees stream out, looking at the unconscious 5 as they pass. Sanguine suggests they organise a means to collect them, then uses the cameras to check a clear path exists between us and the hanger - not least because Vlad is making come-hither eyes to Smith to get that breaching charge and nip over to the reactor. It looks clear - although Sanguine doesn’t do a great job of it per se. A cargo plan is in the hangar bay area.
Smith asks which 2 of the 5 should be awoken, and Francesca waves at the whiphand and the hammer person. Vlad mutters how useless these two were but resigned to doing so, these two are awoken. The other 3 are scooped up by their comrades.
Francesca is told to head for the hangar with the experimentees, and we have another mission to tend to (Vlad makes ‘kaboom’ gesture with hands and looks very excited). We also establish Francesca has a chip for flying, which displeases Loki, but we send her off with a spirit from Jack. We give advice to wait for our arrival - but we’re off to blow something up.
Jack is entirely unimpressed with this suggestion but Sanguine and Loki are all for it, and Vlad has had enough of talking and jogs away, looking hopefully at Smith to come along. Jack reels him back in and expresses his deep-seated resistance to this suggestion, asks whether there’s data on site, whether a meltdown plan was a good idea or not. Such talk from an action-oriented group. A recap of our prior plan was that meltdowns maybe bad and collapsing the hangar site would render a black ops site not very black. Sanguine asks Jack the master plan - destroy the data room and what? Jack says there’s not a lot left bar dead scientists etc. In a sort of vote, Loki and Vlad are outvoted, sort of, since Sanguine didn’t actively say no, just proposed blowing up a data room instead. Sanguine gets to the data room and finds it locked down (of course, many doors were) and starts hacking in; whilst doing so he spots in the combat room under the reactor there is a person in there waving at the cameras. Zooming in on the feed - and it looks like Platinum! Sanguine does not mention this to Smith, and after hacking the door, we get it pried open and in this room, many AR screens in the data storage room allllll showingggggg Platinummmmmmmm.
With the experimentees in the elevator, the spirit notes a mana barrier is blocking it, so can no longer follow them...Jack asks the spirit to return and we hope for the best there.
Looking past the AR screens, we propose to blow these servers (visible behind) up, but Smith is staring at the many screens - and Vlad asks ‘isn’t that the lady…’ ‘isn’t she under the reactor’... Sanguine and Loki begin shooting up the servers. The AR screens are puffing out as we pop each one, and Smith then DNIs Sanguine asking for the quickest route to his room. The last AR picture pops off and Sanguine turns to Smith, throws up a route and says ‘let’s get the bitch’. Jack says ‘you know this is a trap right? And do you know what she probably has?’, Vlad notes ‘near the reactor room, good’ but then remembers his bug fear...and proposes flaking out to the hangar room. Jack overrules this - one for all! - and after some more protestations from Vlad we head to deal with Platinum, we hope. Jack tells Vlad to ‘compose himself’ in a leaderly fashion, and it seems to work - Vlad is willing to run with it. And Jack adds the carrot of ‘if we kill her, maybe no more bugs!’. Sanguine and Loki swap to serious ammo, Sanguine slaps on a stim patch to temporarily clear out his stun, and then tinkers around in the network to check Platinum is really in the room and this isn’t a ruse. The connection is way looser thanks to destroying many of the servers, hops back into the camera system and sees her, Francesca and 15 other people...the video appears to show Francesca kneeling with her hands behind her back and the experimentees all out cold. The feed gets added to our AR/comms and Vlad suggests once again melting down the place. Sanguine takes another look and thinks that parts of the video feel wrong: picking through it Platinum is definitely there but the rest of the feed is weird: like, there may be bits not in it, or bits in it that aren’t. The connection is way too flaky to determine the wrong bits.
Smith recalls the original control room offers a route into the arena with some ‘out and round’ chicanery. We muse about why an arena is built under a reactor (if the subjects are too strong, stick some goo on them). On we go back to the control room, the least damaged one, and peer through the glass to see Platinum waiting, plus 10 bodies (not the experimentees, 10 adult bodies probably infested with insect spirits - notably dressed unlike from round here). Smith asks Sanguine to check whether there’s a matrix signal on anything in the room, and whilst not getting strong signals he picks up Platinum, likely rocking ware. The ware of a rigger! Ugh. Loi gives Smith his full support, and Smith notes it’s time to find a door to breach. Vlad is despondent that this is the last breaching charge, which means no charge for a reactor. V sad Vlad.
Session of 28/11/2021 (after sleep)
Sanguine calls a sprite who prepares some pre-entry tasks - cover on entry, sealing down the other doors, and perhaps creating some sort of pit to drain the insect-bodies into which we can toss grenades into. Sanguine and his sprite begin shaping the arena form for best effect (the room is a 100m oval). Sanguine crowdsources the design, hits activate, hands everyone bar Loki an insecticide grenade, as his hands are crap, and we chemseal ourselves up. The rumbles of the mechanisms shaping terrain kick in and a minute later things lock into place. Jack and Vlad take a stim patch, knowing this is likely the last hour come sleep or death, and Jack Jazz-Psyches up too. His Spirit wields one of Smith’s shotguns, just for good measure, and Smith pops some Kamikaze.
Initiative time!
As we enter Sanguine shouts at his sprite to get threading, and Vlad hangs back. Smith bursts in, hops on the cover provided by Sanguine, hears an ungodly buzzing from the pit below, and arcs a high explosive grenade into the pit in which he hopes Platinum resides. Kaboom. Some shockwaves emanate. Jack then hops into the astral plane, looks around and sees few spirits about, then casts a mana barrier. He adds to his spirits to get in, git shootin’ and steps into the arena. Jack sees an insect spirit blast into the mana barrier, and the body inhabiting the spirit arcs across the room and lands like a sack of spuds. The second one crashes through, looking woozy and disoriented, barely keeping its composure as its flightpath wobbles. The mana barrier breaks, and the third spirit emerges, bigger than the others, hugging the ground level and advancing towards us. Loki comes in, sees this big buggy insect, and fires a few APDS bullets at hit, winging the thing. Sanguine tries to resonance spike the highest flying bug, dinging it.
Vlad trots up to join Smith on the cover, handing the grenade back to him. He prepares his whip to slice and dice. Smith still hears buzzing from the pit so it’s time to fling an insecticide grenade, it arcs, flies out and we see a nice foggy hiss noise, it passes the lip a little high - they’ll need to fly through it but it’s clear a barrier has been erected to stop the grenade passing lower. Jack may need to tinker with this! He levitates himself then his spirits begin full auto shotgunning like a madman, superb. Alas the bullets go wild and the large, earlier winged nymph dodges easily. Another insect emerges, feeling a little shaken having moved through the cloud, and another winged beast emerges, same. The last one fixates its many bug eyes on Sanguine, and spots the icon for the datajack flare to life and it fire off a matrix attack on him. Sanguine repels it handily thanks to the wobble of the mana barrier and insecticide. The large bug who Loki winged rumbles over towards us and this time his 3 bullets whizz past with no damage, shame. Sanguine continues resonance spiking the bug high up above Platinum to no avail, but starts to see it looking a little twitchy, so will keep chipping away there. He also tells his sprite to finish it.
Vlad tosses his grenade, missing his mark, but landing near one of the bugs, but it fizzles out with limited success. Vlad curses mildly, and Smith fires a shot at the nymph nearest us, the blast rattling into its body, absolutely punching the life out of it with round after round after round after round after round after round slam into it. It is super dead. Sanguine then follows this up by his sprite blinking the flying bug spirit out of existence, the body it was inhabiting dropping back into the pit from which it came. Jack casts something intended to cause excruciating agony at the acid spitty bug who got a little insecticided on the way up. Jack hovers that little more higher and peeks above the barrier erected by Sanguine in front of us. The acid spitty bug buzzes ever closer, exerting itself to fly closer, and another bug bursts through the cloud of gas in the central pit, then the nymph reaches our gun-totin’ spirit. Another bug drifts up but doesn’t quite clear the pit.
Vlad takes a deep queasy breath, hops off the cover and runs round to the bug engaging the spirit, look of panicky revulsion on his face, and whips it good. Down it goes, and the bug counter pops up to 4/10. Smith seeks to pop off some more rounds against the acid spitty bug which raced towards us and he smashes more rounds into it.
That’s the first 3 seconds of our time in the arena, and then we all take a quick breath and prepare to resume.
Vlad holds an attack for when a bug engages someone in melee. Sanguine’s sprite attacks an icon down in the pit (firing blind) and managed to pop it in one hit with a data spike. Smith prepares another nice long burst of bullets into the many eyeballs of the flying bug nearest him, and splats it nicely. Jack’s spirit absolutely lights up the acid bug buzzing over midway between us and Platinum, connects well, clearly the spirit has a taste for shotguns as a wing and a leg falls off, but it’s still lumbering over towards us, not yet fully defeated.
The latest not-yet-emerged bug finally gets out and races across the gap to us; Vlad hears it race up to us and uses his attack action he’d been holding out for. Sadly it misses, but sends a strong message. Jack fires a manabolt and necrotised the bug’s remains after the spirit peppered the hell out of it. Platinum emerges, gives Smith a big smile and yanks her datajack out of her spinal column, yeouch. She falls down face first, her body ripples, then she becomes a very large bug. That sounds like a not very reversible process in any material sense. Loki can see the bug who Vlad tried to whip, and flicks a few more bullets at it. He once again lands a shot, but this heavily armoured bug spirit resists it all. Sanguine spots that Platinum now has nothing to dial into, having “surgically removed” her datajack, so instead pulls out Bad News and seeks to revoke the bug Loki fired at. Alas it once again avoids the shot.
Platinum-bug comes over and claws at Smith but he dodges this amorous onslaught from his “can you feel the tension” nemesis. Jack’s spirit obliges its master and finishes off the bug who Vlad and Loki singularly failed to hit. Jack seeks to make Platinum-bug feel very despairing and really futile about it all, her plans come totally to nothing. Jack succeeds in this, and the wave of despair rolls across Platinum-bug. The effort to create this despair wave hurt Jack terrible, the crushing despair felt in his crushing lungs. Loki joins Smith on the barricades and pops off a few more rounds but not even this novel depression causes her to take bullets. Loki curses. Sanguine then shimmies up the side of the barricade and points his hand cannon at Platinumbug, solid shots abound, and yet misses too. This depression has not affected her sense of self-preservation. He sneaks another round into the chamber and secures a hit after all, and some bullets punch into her buggy carapace.
Vlad comes to join the Platinum-bug-killing party, unfurling his whip and connecting with her buzzing depressed form. Another part of her gets lopped off, and she turns to breathe on us before spotting the full-body chemseal suits, so she instead goes for the last person to hit her, probably seeing the confused fear on Vlad’s face. Vlad’s fear galvanises him as he burns some of his good fortune away to ensure this accursed bug doesn’t lay a leg on him. Smith also decides now’s the time to burn fortune too, rams the sniper barrel in her proboscis, and prepares to unleash blows. He punches round after round into her, triple taps her and as the third shot exits with the other two bullets, the skin transforms back as the bug-form collapses, and she turns back. Her eyes lock onto Smith’s mask, she reaches out to Smith, and she falls backwards into the pit-moat in front of our barricades.
Jack continues to drift up to the ceiling as Smith jumps down, looking for a tattoo which confirms 78 - Platinum. Smith nods with grim satisfaction and not a lot more.
Sanguine quickly scans the cameras around the hangar bay to ensure the experimentees are ok - but they’re pinned down by guard fire, safe for now. Vlad continues to lobby for meltdown, Jack yelling from the ceiling that is not happening, and we instead plan a route to the hangar. Sanguine en route looks for places in the hangar to set off a collapse. The Spirit checks for astral signatures (nope) and is left to patrol down below since it can’t join us in the elevator.
We reach the hangar, Smith is pointed out the place to stick the collapse charge. We kill the remaining guards holding down the experimentees. We reach the plane mounted on a catapult, and Loki asks Sanguine to hack to open the hangar bay doors, the catapult raises us. We close the loading bay door and through the gap Sanguine flicks a coin through for luck. Vlad also notes the explosion won’t be as good as a meltdown. Sanguine launches the catapult to get us lifting off and away we go!
Vlad peeks out the window whilst everyone else faces forwards, and we see a fireball plume from the hangar, then the land slips away, revealing the depths of the base below. Vlad looks at his geiger counter and shakes his head sadly, not even a tickle. We fly back towards the forest we stashed our own vehicle in. We unload ourselves, leaving Francesca and 15 children, homeless (but not planeless) and SINless in a forest outside Germany. Jack and Vlad insist this is best for them and they’ll have a much nicer upbringing and probably not turn out as much of a psychopath as Vlad.
We pick up our VTOL and Iridium and head back to the UK. Jack and Vlad hang around Berlin-side with a local shadowrun group to keep an eye on the site and make sure nothing emerges. Vlad bangs on and on about how if the site were more radioactive this wouldn’t be necessary.
Epilogues!
The ghouls council kick us down some funds and leave the group on retainer for important jobs. This is great for Smith and Vlad who barely look like they’ve aged a day over the next 45 years or so, and Jack and Sanguine a tad older. Sadly there’s no more Loki, he already being late middle age at the time of the collapse.
The run makes pretty hot news, of the black ops site and clean up crews having to deal with a minor nuclear waste spill. The corps begin some coverup work! Findings of experiments and items recovered - the camera panning across osmium maces and a coin which news reports is linked with many crime sites.
Sanguine retires from the shadowrunning game, using his connections with Fabiana and the mafia to use the parlayed prestige to join the org. A few years later he’s a little bored of the prestige and power; after a bunch of submersions he loses his sense of reality and becomes more Daxlike. We start to only see him in the matrix and not really...physically any more. The coins trade on a little bit of infamy and urban legend Sanguine trades off a little - “coinmaster” in the matrix with his pale face and red eyes.
Jack hangs in Berlin for quite a while - moving into the fixing game, opening his own bar (write what you know), working with the Berlin team and occasionally hops into the odd run where a silver tongued mage is required.
Loki returns to Scotland with newfound bomb making skills and a desire to accelerate the Scottish independence process, and whilst he dies in an untimely fashion at the hand of a badly timed bomb. Apparently the runners go to the funeral and it’s a proper send-off.
Smith retires, with money and no other vendettas to quash, and returns to a short-time job running Security for the medical clinic. He becomes uncle to Theta since noone else wanted to stop her eating ice cream on her own. He returns to the bodyguard game, including as short stint for Troy Reed.
Iridium, who was ported back with us but is released under her own recognisance, makes contact with Mercury to try and hire Smith to do some freelance for her Shadowrun team which likes to fight against corporations, what a noble cause. Smith recommends Vlad, who hates corps!
Vlad drops in on Theta fairly regularly over the next 5 years, and she impresses upon him forcefully that he has to survive to support her. 20 years later, implausibly, he’s still alive and a little resentful of this fact. Theta is being trained up by Smith in the gun realm, and the matrix by Sanguine and is pretty darn handy. Why didn’t we have a runner like that in our gang?
Kasper Ganz
DocWagon - Basic
Street - Awakened Hangouts (London Sprawl) - 3, 6 (8)
Interest - Connoisseur (Wines) - 3, 6 (8)
Language - English - 6, 10
Language - German - N
Language - Japanese - 3, 7
Academic - History - 6, 10
Academic - Magical Theory - 4, 8
Academic - Parazoology - 2, 6
Edge - 5
Burcott, Waldemar, Schafer, James, Isaak, Jeremy, Anton Borowski, Leopold, Mageycakes apparently, Hatto
German N
English 6+4
Cantonese 2+4
Japanese 3+4
Cred 21
Notoriety 5
Public Awareness 3
Rating 2: Raymond Volker
Rating 3: Pawl Sokolowski
Rating 5: Wilhelm Schafer
mAGICAL bONG
Medium Lifestyle with DocWagon Basic £5,416.67
Squatter £500
Day job - Bartending £1000
Promises:
Owes Seb at least one favour (Babysitting Theta)
Jack will do all he can to stop Fabiana from harming Theta (to Vlad)
Jack will not ask Theta “Bitte würdest du .....” (To Fabiana)
Promised Adey to tell him what happened with Isabelle
Promised that he’d always have Seb’s back
I can vouch for all of my companions (To Natalie James ref the Haven)
I will see this job done (Ref Deadbolt’s / Braun Chemical Corp)
Edge - 3
Interest - Ballet 1, 7
Interest - Roman Catholic Theology 4, 10
Academic - Biology 2, 4
Academic - Genetics 2, 4
Language - English 5, 11
Language - French 2, 8
Language - German N
Language - Russian 2, 8
Vlad, Justin, Finlay
Money
Squatter Prepaid
6000 Debt
3 weeks - Initiation
Street cred - 13
Notoriety - 3
Public Awareness - 1
Rating 2: Pavlo Kostyantynovych Kolisnyk
Rating 3: Justin Delvaux
Connoisseur (Bourbon, Whiskey)
Corporation: NeoNET
Literature
Matrix
SIN:
Rating 3 SIN with a Decker Licence (Giles)
Edge: 4
Street cred -
Notoriety - 3
Public Awareness - 1
5th World Video 1, 6
British Nobility 2, 7
Combat ‘ware 2, 7
Firearms 2, 5
Military 2, 5
Security Procedures + Tactics 5, 8
Language- Japanese 3, 8
Edge 4
Smith
¥2000 a month Lifestyle
~¥5000 every 3 months for new SINs
¥¥¥¥ Ammunition! ¥¥¥¥
Street cred - 17
Notoriety - 0
Public Awareness - 1
Troll Thrash Metal Bands - 6
Gambling Card Games - 6
Social Justice issues - 1
Loki
¥10000 a month for accommodation and garage
Less ¥1000 for 10hpw job (as Brian McDougal)
Street cred - 33 [0+karma/10]
Notoriety - 3
Public Awareness - 2
Rating 4: Nicholl Sturging
Rating 4: Bobby McGee
Rating 4: Brian McDougal → tied to workplace 10hpw job
(also all have weapon and driver’s license)
Deleted:
Rating 4: Jeremy Bruce
(also all have weapon and driver’s license)