[X] My Assistant

[Bugfoxmaster]

THE STORY CONTINUES


We take up again a while later, as the party rests on their laurels from the completion of their last job for a bit. They begin to train their skills and spend their money, cheered by the fact that for once, they don't need to worry about rent for a few months.

Geppetto, having been terribly injured and stricken with the Banshee virus (I'll be speaking to the players about this and seeing how they want to deal with this, but for now I'm going to write it as we were playing it) ends up quitting his job and pretty much sleeping and healing up over the next couple weeks. Aside from his neighborhood committee meeting (ah, how annoying living by community can), he came out for very few things - he'd earlier slept with Dona Rowena O'Malley, and needing an initiatory group (and being of Italian blood), he asked if he could get in contact with any magicians she might know. It was in this way that Geppetto was introduced to Mercury and Mars, a pair of members of the Merlyns gang. The Merlyns, as an adjunct group of the Mafia, decided to allow Geppetto to join their group, on a trial basis, if he could complete their challenge (to cast spells of successively higher forces repeatedly and outlast some of their current members), and if he'd agree to do them a favor or few in the future. Thus a member of an initiatory group, Geppetto initiated for the first time, taking the "Masking" power to hide his Banshee nature better.

2-D had perhaps the least eventful break, as he submerged after helping an entropic sprite reassemble itself with one of his registered sprites, and rested from the hilarious fading he'd undergone from binding that same registered sprite in the first place. He watched the trid, and noticed that Evo had fired a director of one of their branches who he'd never liked, and resolved to not continued his absurd blood feud with them so long as they didn't (and after all, how much does a megacorp, or even a department of a megacorp, actually care about one random terrorist?). With this, he spent the rest of the break relaxing with his girlfriend and renting a new home in a better neighborhood in Snohomish.

Dervish decided to become a bad-ass, and headed to the Barrens, where he took up training with "Sensei", an old orc street samurai who began teaching him the arts of "Sangre y Acero", which he'd picked up while in an Aztlan prison. Dervish also spent a lot of time learning about the old man's fascinating life, and went with the old man to beat the tar out of a man named "Jim" who kept calling him and asking him to bring drugs over, mistaking Dervish's number with his dealer's. At one point, Dervish found himself being followed by someone he couldn't quite keep track of, but had 2D spot the guy with a flyspy drone - Dervish them tracked him down and beat him into revealing that Dervish apparently had killed the man's father before his amnesia. Dervish, not really having anything to say about this, shoved the guy into a gutter and went along on his way.

Tank decided to be a good sibling for once, and tried to clean his and his sister's apartment - unfortunately, an enormous troll is not exactly the most effective housemaid, and so he ended up instead breaking the refrigerator. His sister reacted to this with a characteristically resigned attitude, and so the guilty troll bought a new fridge as a present - his sister, though, in the meanwhile had apparently spoken to her friend's father, who worked in the SIN registry, and the sympathetic man had offered to obtain legal identification for both Tank and his sister! Tank really, really didn't want a SIN, considering his line of work, so he went to a contact of the party's who obtained for him a fake under his own name - yes, a fake SIN using Tank's real name and information. His sister, fooled, happily agreed to a social worker looking over the house, which she did. Everything went well until one of the police officers with her scanned Tank's fake SIN - and with Tank's crap luck, his SIN failed the test. Tank was taken to the police station, but luckily 2D managed to inform the party fixer, who sent a lawyer to keep Tank... something. Tank was heavily fined, given community service, and received a real SIN. Unfortunately, most of his money from the last job had ended up in someone or the other's pocket now, but there was nothing for it.

As Tank moped around looking for solo thug jobs for a bit (he made a little bit of cash guarding a warehouse occasionally as a temporary worker), he spotted a car following him home. He ditched the tail (he thought) and headed home, suspiciously looking around to see if someone was still around, but saw nobody. Thus, he went inside, took his armor off, and began eating dinner.

It was at this point when the door burst open to reveal an elf and an ork, with an assault rifle and shotgun respectively, the ork just having blown the door off its hinges. The window shattered as well, a human flying through on a zipline. Tank was caught suddenly by two long burst of automatic fire and a shutgun blast, followed with a powerbolt spell. Barely conscious and alive, he staggered towards the window and leapt out, triggering the PANICBUTTON system as he went. landing two stories down, and luckily taking no more injuries, Tank made his way down the road, dodging another burst of gunfire. Luckily, sirens in the distance led to the assassins escaping via helicopter, as ambulances took Tank away to the hospital. The rest of the team merely waited as Tank healed up, and moved him and his sister to Geppetto's place, hoping for the best.

THE RUN

It was now, well, a week later, that Danny got into contact with the team. He had another big job for them, and they were to meet the Johnson at the Eye of the Needle in formal dress. The party suited up and headed to the restaurant, where they found an official-looking elf with a severe face waiting. The party ate dinner over small talk, then got down to business. The job, as usual, sounded simple. Another group of runners had abducted a little girl and her dog, as she returned from school, likely for ransom purposes or blackmail. The Johnson's employers wanted the little girl returned, alive. Also her dog, preferably. The team accepted (and received what information the Johnson had), and was on their way.

On the next day, 2D examined the feeds for the security cameras around where the girl had been taken - they showed the enemy van picking the girl and her captor up, then heading down the road then vanishing. 2D and a few sprites followed the subtle signs of editing and of magical disturbance, though, and determined that the van was headed into Everett. Geppetto, with a good image of the girl and dog, summoned a Spirit of Man and set it to searching for the girl. Midway into the night, it returned with a positive match.

On the next morning, Dervish followed the spirit through Everett to near a warehouse, where the spirit affirmed that the group was hiding. Dervish then decided that he'd check the warehouse out after lunch, and went to get a burrito. On his return (with the spirit watching and waiting patiently at the warehouse), he began walking down the street only to suddenly take a sniper bullet to the back of the head, nearly killing him instantly. Luckily, he was then able to have the spirit rush him back to his motorcycle, which he then rushed to the hospital, avoiding death at the hands of the team's sniper narrowly (on a side note, could someone tell me if it's possible to use the "movement" power on a vehicle? I assume it'd be subject to the body limitations stated int he power description, but we weren't quite sure, otherwise. Would the power have to beat the bike's object resistance?).

In the meanwhile, knowing that the enemy team was going to escape from the warehouse, the rest of the team hopped into 2D's Rigger van and heded straight for Everett. From Renton. This was going to take a while. Geppetto began spamming watcher spirits to follow and harass the enemy team, but found them to be getting blown away at an alarming rate - only reasonable, he found, as he was attacking in the astral by a beast spirit. Luckily, he managed to summon a fire spirit of his own to destroy his attacker, and informed the rest of the team of recent events. 2D then began scanning the feeds of cameras near the warehouse, and spotted a sedan and a rigger van leaving the warehouse. Not sure which to follow and hack, he began hacking the sedan.

The sedan's node, however, had been loaded with three mid-level Black IC. A brutal cybercombat ensued in the node, with 2D taking an absurd quantity of physical damage and coming close to dying multiple times, only to be saved by his fault sprite's medic complex form. Finally, he finished destroying the IC, only to find that inside the car, there was only one passenger in the sedan, an orc with a shotgun. In a fit of pique, 2D stopped the car on the side of the road, and the orc hopped out, running as fast as he could away. The party then realized that they could capture him for information, and sent the Spirit of Man to "Detain him, and make sure he's alive and can speak. Be creative."

[I should note that I've been playing spirits of man as being vaguely tricksterish, with a tendency to do interesting and bizarre things rather than taking the most straightforward path - Geppetto is a Black Magic-tradition caster, so I thought it fit]

As the party watched in the Astral and through a nearby camera, the spirit Influenced the orc to assault a woman on a nearby sidewalk, leading to a pair of Knight Errant [I missed until this session that Knight Errant had taken over the Seattle police. Whoops.] officers brutally beating down and nearly arresting him. The spirit then influenced the woman to tell the officers to "just throw him in a dumpster or something, please, I think the scum's learned his lesson". The orc ended up unconscious in a dumpster, and the party leisurely headed over and picked him up.

The party sent 2D and his girlfriend to take Tank's sister and several of her friends to an amusement park while the rest of the team (Dervish not included - he was still in surgery from the sniper wound) interrogated the ork. After convincing the ork that Tank liked raping prisoners (and also uploading amusement park roller-coaster software into the ork's penile implant so that it loop-the-looped painfully on the ork's crotch), they managed to get the identities of the rest of the enemy team - and their next stop, the airport. Furthermore, it turned out that there was a flyspy over Geppetto's home (where they were interrogating the suspect, for some reason). 2D tried to hack it, but set off a databomb that knocked him unconscious and deep into physical overflow, forcing the party to heal him up and begin heading for the airport as fast as they could, leaving Dervish a message.

In the meanwhile, as they headed over, Dervish awoke and leapt out of his hospital window, taking his sniper rifle and motorcycle to the airport - on the way, he phoned in a terrorist bomb threat, narrowly succeeding at convincing the Knight Errant operator that this was no joke. As he arrived there, he carefully stealthed his way onto the roof, and began waiting. In the meanwhile, the rest of the party arrived, only to find Knight Errant troopers everywhere, and they narrowly avoided arrest for Tank's machine gun and 2D's multiple heavily armed drones. They bailed and began heading away, relatively certain that the enemy team wouldn't be able to take off.

Unfortunately, this was an incorrect assumption, as the other team slid their van across the tarmac towards a private hanger in the corner. Dervish lined up his rifle and waited, even as several people hopped out with a large crate. Having turned his commlink off and unwilling to turn it on, thus highlighting his location, Dervish made the decision to go - and shot two of the enemy team members before they could react.

The enemies ran into the warehouse, and levitated their comrades' unconscious bodies and the crate inside, even as the rigger drove their van in as well. A stalemate ensued, as Dervish finally contacted his team and headed down onto the tarmac himself. The team began heading back - again. Unfortunately, 2D wasn't willing to risk another assault on the team's hacker's commlink, which by now had all the other equipment slaved to it. Geppetto tried sending a fire spirit into the hangar to attack the enemy team's plane or helicopter, but the team's mage managed to shut it down quickly. The stalemate continued, until four Knight Errant troopers entered the hangar. Dervish tried to listen in, but the noise created by the plane was too much, and he was only able to figure out that there was some sort of amiable conversation going on inside. Frustrated that the enemy team had somehow subverted Knight Errant, the team pulled back and called Mr. Johnson. Johnson informed them that apparently the girl had just been returned safely, and that the job was suspended temporarily, pending review. The team, still angry, and now without a payday to look forward to, pulled out.

The team headed to Geppetto's house, only to find it under attack, likely by Tank's enemies once more - the party scared off the two fire spirits that had been merrily burning the building and retrieved all their important equipment - just as 2D spotted yet another Flyspy in the sky. The team cloaked their van with an invisibility spell and took off to hide. Deciding that their pursuers would never check the warehouse where the OTHER team was hiding, they put their van in a parking garage and made their way into the warehouse - where they received a call from their Johnson. Johnson told them that the old job was to be cancelled - sort of. Ther were now to be employed on a new job, to be explained by a man who'd be waiting in the warehouse itself.

The party entered, to find another man, who also called himself Mr. Johnson (don't they all?). THIS Johnson explained that the girl had originally been kidnapped in a corporate faction war of sorts, as blackmail material - but that factional conflict had been dealt with, so the girl had been returned - unfortunately, the enemy team had NOT returned the dog, keeping it as a sort of souvenir.

The dog, though, was the bearer of important classified information, which the enemy runners likely didn't actually know at all - it was being kept at the girl's home by her father in hiding, and had only been snatched in the first place through bad luck. The party's NEW job, for more money (and with more difficulty and danger) was to track down the other team and retrieve the dog, dead or alive - and to kill the enemy team's hacker/rigger, who was the only one likely to be able to figure out what the dog really was.

The party, thus re-employed, said goodbye to Tank's sister and 2D's girlfriend and gathered their equipment, hopping on a plane to the same place the enemies had been headed to (at least according to the flight manifest) - Las Vegas [Are there ANY books with a reasonably dense treatment of Las Vegas? Neither VICE nor Sixth World Almanac really gave me anything, and I could use a little more information...].

***

And so there you go - the party's on another run - a particularly difficult, but interesting one. Not sure how they'll go about this, but hopefully they avoid anything too dumb or too weird - whatever it is, it'll certainly continue to make for an interesting story, I hope. Keep replying, and I hope you have some more insights you can offee

[Manunancy]

One possibility to handle the magic loss and sweeten a bit the loss of magic would be to sum up the karma it would cost to raise his magic back to what it was and use that as a rebate on the 130 karma cost. Sur it hurts, but at least he's got less karma locked away.

Another option limit the 'can't improve anything for xx games until I've paid the 'infected' cost' would be to consider that a fraction of hte karma gains must go for it (i'd say half, up to two thirds) and the rest is free.

Oh and a note about the hacking : medic will fix the condition monitors of the programs, it won't do a thing for the hacker's 'meat' wounds, be they stun or physical damage.

[Bugfoxmaster]

One possibility to handle the magic loss and sweeten a bit the loss of magic would be to sum up the karma it would cost to raise his magic back to what it was and use that as a rebate on the 130 karma cost. Sur it hurts, but at least he's got less karma locked away.

Another option limit the 'can't improve anything for xx games until I'v paid the 'infected' cost' would be to consider that a fraction of hte larma gains must go for it (i'd say half, up to two thirds) and the rest is free.

Oh and a noe about the hacking : medic will fix the condition monitors of the programs, it won't do a thing for the hacker's 'meat' wounds, be they stun or physical damage.

That'd work really well - it'd let him lock away less karma and while he's going to advance slower, he's not going to be frozen, at least. I'll suggest that to him.

On the other hand, the techno actually never would have gone DOWN from the damage - he'd just have a dice pool penalty of one or two, so it's no big change, though I will have to tell 2D's character tomorrow so that he doesn't make that mistake again.