[X] My Assistant

[Gilga]

Alright.

Trouble in the meanwhile materializes near the car and then moves the explosives to the car, carrying both of them with his powers.

[Tecumseh]

Huge struggled in his new form. Maybe it was the bonk on the brain or maybe it's just the unfamiliar form, but he can barely get his arms and feet underneath him. Not that he really has anywhere he could go.

The satchels get moved to the car, courtesy of Trouble. Huge turns his head slowly to watch them go. But sloths don't have great eyesight to begin with, and see poorly in dim light, so he probably can't see much.

[Gilga]

AM contacts Fagin and aks >>Faign I need Leäl ASAP and can pay double your normal price if you can get it within the hour.

[Jack_Spade]

Bobby took a moment to refocuse and turned into a coyote, a typical scavenger for the urban environment, sauntered over to the sloth and picked it almost gently up by the scruff of its neck, carrying it in the shade of the bushes towards the car.

'Open the door for me. I've got Hugh under control. If nothing else can be done, I can turn him into a rat and we force feed him high percentage alcohol. That should knock him out as well with his diminished body size and also jumble his memories. Still, I'd prefer the Lael stuff.
But we still need to take care of the drone and the logs, before we can bring him to bed again.'

[Gilga]

"Its a longshot but I'll try getting it."

[Tecumseh]

Fagin shoots back a response less than a minute later:

<<Oo, aren't you a lucky one! I don't have any on hand at the moment but I'm Downtown and just a dozen blocks away from the elves of South Lake Union. I know a guy who can have some ready with about five minutes' notice.>>

<<Where are you? Redmond? Okay, with light traffic at this hour I'm about half an hour minutes out from your position unless you want to meet me somewhere closer. So between the pickup and the commute I'll be to you in about 40, 45 tops unless I get ambushed on the way. That should qualify for your delivery bonus.>>

Somewhere, Iktomi smiles, although who knows why.

[Gilga]

AM shows the message to Boobie and says "We need to determine a meetup, and I need to rehack the host and eliminate traces of our existence. If we're going to keep Huge alive there is a way out."

[Jack_Spade]

'Let's do it then, all around less scruntiny if no explosions happen tonight.'
Bobby replied through his mind connection, still carrying the sloth in his jaws

[Tecumseh]

Bobby arrives at the car and drags Huge in.

Huge, dazed and confused, tries to reach for the door handle, but he's about as fast and accurate as you would expect a drunken sloth with a concussion to be.

Jawsey finishes his scrubbing and arrives back in the car about the same time as Bobby and Huge.

AM coordinates with Fagin to meet in the parking lot of a Stuffer Shack that's right on the border of Redmond and Bellevue. It doesn't have the security concerns of Redmond nor the scrutiny of Bellevue so it's a good place to do a dark deal.

Leäl is ingested. Presumably the easiest way to give it to Huge is a spiked drink.

[Beta]

Not that buying beer in a Stuffer Shack ever felt good -- there was always a feeling of spiritual grime -- but buying beer in a Stuffer Shack so that they could spike it with Leäl and give it to a sloth-dwarf-bombmaker was a whole other level of feeling dirty inside.

Still, Jawsey did it. He even grabbed one of those electrolyte restoring exercise drinks for Bobby, because that much spell casting and critter-form work had to have been tiring.

As he walked back to the car he messaged the others <<So I guess we need to knock him out and then dribble the spiked drink into him? Anyone know anything about knocking out small sloths without doing serious damage to them? And then we need to deliver him home before he wakes up. I guess he'll wake up naked, but that shouldn't be too big of a deal if he assumes that he drank enough to pass out. I don't know if we can work around the drone well enough to also pour out some of his beer, so that the count seems about right for having gotten black-out drunk?>>

[Tecumseh]

While Jawsey shops for beer, Bobby keeps an eye on AM while she hacks and on Huge while he struggles to free himself from the bag that Bobby has stuffed him into. From the smell of things, Huge has soiled himself, either due to fear or to a lack of perfect control over his sloth bodily functions.

AM dips into the Matrix and zips off in hot sim. The velocity is thrilling, as usual, although this part of the Matrix is a bit rough. She finds the host for the garage, reapplies her mark, and then slips inside.

Inside, the host's visuals are bright red: it's still on full alert. Furthermore, AM isn't alone! There's someone else there, looking around. Judging by the persona, it's a security spider. Given her familiarity with Matrix Security, AM guesses that the persona is from either Securitech International (a subsidiary of Renraku) or Vector Matrix Services (a subsidiary of Shiawase).

The spider has clearly responded to the alert and is busy reviewing the situation.

[Jack_Spade]

Bobby was back in his comfortable, rip-off trousers and t-shirt, driving through the night. Despite the stressful situation, he enjoyed himself. Now that he had a minute to think things through, he realized that they had been too over confident, thinking that the drone wasn't going to be a problem.
Something to remember for the future.

His trode patch also allowed him to drop the mindlink and communicate with the others in a less taxing way:
<<I was thinking forcing him to drink pure vodka and the Leäl will do the trick nicely. Those little critters have a very low alcohol tolerance. The trick will be to administer just enough to get his BAC to around 1,5 promille. That will make him sleepy enough - and give the drug a bit more time to do its work.
AM, how are things on your end?>>

[Gilga]

AM cautiously backs off understanding that it is above her equipment and skill level to go toe-to-toe with a cooperate spider and risk being exposed to a powerful syndicate. Especially as they kidnapped Huge and she does not want to aggravate things further. She silently backs off without cleaning up what she intended figuring it is the least of evils.


>> I am leaving it as is - there is already a cooperate spider inside the host so it is too late for me to meddle in his inspection. I'd rather leave a trace of a failed spoofed command than risk getting caught with my hand in the cookie jar. Especially after we kidnapped Huge. I don't want to up-play this event.

[Jack_Spade]

<<Well, drek. Seems like we fragged up. All we can hope for now, is Hugh having a bit of a reputation for over-indulging. If no-one questions him sleeping through an alert of his drone, we can still get out of this without getting caught.>>


Bobby replied, while keeping the car on the road towards their destination.

[Beta]

<<What can they pick up from the matrix? Whatever the drone saw, which was probably raccoon Bobby running out the window? Maybe the explosives floating out? And records of the hacking that you were doing, but do those include your matrix identify in some ways, or just that somebody tried to send an illegal command and it was resisted? Like, when you reboot does it wipe the traceability??>

Jawsey realized that he probably should have paid attention to the matrix side of things more at some point. This seems like things that a detective should know.

<<At least they were not too quick on getting astral security on the scene, so I think I got all of the signatures scrubbed. So it is down to a mix of what they can find in the matrix and what they can deduce -- and they aren't bound by and standards of 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. They may put together that we visited Huge earlier, that we have been bothering all the gangs and are upset at our treatment, and an odd animal invasion backed by matrix ability. .... wait, do any of the gangs know about AM's hacking, or have you consistently appeared to them as a mage?>>

[Gilga]

>> I messed up, I am sorry I was careless about hacking when there was a safer solution and the Trickster punished me for this stupidity.

They'll know there was a failed hacking attack on the drone's log file, but even if I deleted it before the spider looked at it (and cannot say if the Spider looked at it or not). There would be information tying us into this incident. The place is riddled with cameras that we did not loop. So these may catch the small critters behaving strangely. It is also not impossible to place our car in the vicinity of the scene or to spot the explosive packets moving out of the window. All these are faults in our plan before the failed spoofed command. So I am under the assumption that the syndicate would suspect that we stole explosives if they investigate this incident to the fullest and our best bet is to downplay it as much as we can.

I'd advise against further going because we did not acquire the explosives as quietly as we thought. If they investigate we may have gotten some respect, we did not openly challenge anyone - but we did make a point, and they do not have to respond. We could have easily taken out Huge, or blown his place up, or whatnot.

[Jack_Spade]

Bobby sighed:
<<Agreed. It pains me to admit, but we'll have to postpone our revenge. I don't think they'll find the package theft immediately. The drone was distracted and only Huge saw me and the packets - whose memory we are going to wipe. Now we have to go for the blackout drunk option and hope for the best.
At least that gives me some time to study up on explosives for real. But that kind of gives us urgend need to leave Touristville - at least our residence there. Don't drek where you sleep, a lesson that Huge should have thought about as well.
We'll get AM a grade A fake SIN and set our residence up in her name. That should prevent at least the gangers from easily fiding our new place.
We hang on to the explosives until things have calmed down - and then we can go to town again.>>

[Gilga]

"Are we crushing Bernt's place? or any other smart ideas for a home office?

[Beta]

"You know, this could work out OK for us, if we play our cards right. We've been thinking about it as a failed attempt to do it all in complete secrecy, but instead think of it as us deliberately 'counting coup'. After all, you three are Sioux, right? And that was one of their things if I remember properly, the idea of touching an enemy in battle without hurting them, to show that you had the skill and ability to do real damage, but chose not to."

"Obviously we COULD have stolen the explosives and left no trace, and we could have blown up the workshop, and we could have killed Huge, and we could have taken those explosives and blown up, well, something. But instead we showed that we could do those things but only gently tapped them instead, and left just enough evidence to let them figure out it was us, without making it too obvious."

"In reality we screwed it all up, but we portray it as leaving just enough clues to let them know who reached out and touched them."

[Gilga]

AM laughs So we put an eagle feather in our hair and carry on as if nothing happened?"

[Beta]

"Oh, we still totally prepare to move. But we don't make it look like panic, and we keep a knowing smile ready in case anyone looks our way, and maybe have a few explosion or racoon puns ready. We admit nothing but at the same time we show satisfaction. Think about politicians that everyone knows are on the make but just smugly officially deny doing anything wrong. It is key to look confident like we know we scored a coup, confidence is the key to conning someone."

[Jack_Spade]

Bobby shrugged:
<<First of all - keep the conversation to the matrix. Huge can still hear and understand you. I know we want to delete his memory, but just in case - we fragged up enough tonight, wouldn't put it past our favorite Trickster God to frag with us some more.

Seeing it as a counting coup, we still missed the mark. You are supposed to do the touching without getting caught - let's call it 2 out of 3. But yeah, if anyone asks, we just shrug and grin. Better than anything else we can do. We just have to make the best of it. If you want, I can scrounge up some eagle feathers for you too.>>

[Tecumseh]

Huge squirms around and continues to smell bad.

[Gilga]

>> Frag me 100 times, you are right. Hard to get used to the shape change spell. You are supposed to let them know you could have killed them but do not kill, which is sort of what we did. An honorable warrior would respect that kind of thing - but criminals? I don't know. They seem to follow ancient eye for an eye morality.

[Beta]

<<right, forgot that a sloth can still be intelligent.>>

<<Just to be paranoid, AM, did you check Huge for an internal commlink? I assume it wouldn't work now, but magic is weird. On the less magical side, again just to be paranoid, the detonators and the rest of the explosives don't have a matrix connection, right?>>