The Found Arcana - Chapter 9, The last Tarot card Options

[Gilga]

Late February, 2079

It has been a while since any client approached SIS and the little that did so by matrix. So the house office remains lonely after the bomb, and adrenaline levels are low. Neighbors also seem to take their distance from SIS, figuring that if they are important enough to send a bomb, then they are too dangerous. The group feels a bit isolated in Redmond despite their honest attempts to return to normal.

In Mato's news shows, the refugee crisis caused by Ghostwalker’s coup worsens, and many of these end up in the UCAS due to a better economy than in the native American lands. The news is filled with heartbreaking stories about the hardships of the way, and while many people help, other problems escalate. Humanis has been especially active in Seattle with several attacks against metahumans within the city, many of them in Redmond, where the police do not care, and all of them uploaded with a live feed from obscure servers to satisfy their sadistic and racist fans, and raise money for even more attacks.

In the local scene, internal frictions within Urubia’s fledgling syndicate become evident as two Crimson Crush members were ambushed right in Touristvile by Humanis supporters. It has been a week without any visible response. The hotheaded gangers now need to work with a cold, cunning, and calculated dragon whose perspective they do not understand. Whatever feud they had with Carnival feels less relevant as the clown car had not moved for over a month, and Carnival was not seen for a long time. Was their rival hiding from their vengeance, or perhaps they had some more important thing to do than to play an insane murder clown remains open for speculation.


Within this chaos, AM finally receives her new high-level fake SIN, and she decides that it is now safe enough to go and visit her mother. The same mother thinks that she is a secretary at a respected private detective firm. AM dreaded that day for a long time, not wanting to come clean about what she was doing in Seattle, but she wanted to bring her mother over and was confident that she could get a high-level fake for her mother as well. Her mother would blend in more in Seattle than in Sioux. AM says her farewells, takes the Xenon and drives to her birthplace, a small enclave near Chayanne.


Thursday, March 2, 2079


It is a cold, grey, and rainy day in Redmond. Tamarind and Raven would likely move in to avoid paying for another month when business is so slow. Between the news, the tense atmosphere in the streets, the idleness, and the weather. It is likely that the group is holed in home, trying to learn how not to get on each other nerves.

It has been nine days since the last paying job and even that job was a simple one tracking a husband that was supposed to be having an affair but ended up taking a second drek job to hide a demotion and a pay cut from his wife and preserve the old standard of living. Easy 500 nuyen but insignificant in the wider perspective. February ends barely balanced, where they only earned 5k nuyen altogether, there were no lucrative jobs, and the team only remains balanced due to the Bellevue hacker club that pays their debt on time, although not without complaining. So SIS keeps floating for what has been its slowest month so far, saving up for a rainy day has never felt so literal.

At about 9:00 AM Bobby receives a message from captain Razak. >> You would have a walk-in this evening with a lucrative proposal. Make sure that you are all available and presentable, and seriously consider accepting the proposal. Here it was, perhaps the first time their silent backer gives a suggestion. Razak does not provide any more details.