Charm City II [IC] Options

[Thanee]

"Thank you, Monifa! We will turn over every stone we can find. I mean, metaphorically, obviously."

When the gang leader has left, Selina turns to Lisa.

"Hey there! Lisa, right? I'm Selina." She also looks at Bello and Abaje for a moment, as she introduces herself.

"So, you're awakened? That's pretty cool! I'm a shaman myself."

[sunnyside]

Monifa walks away from the team, and without turning around gives them a thumbs up, raising their left arm. The racerback style to her tank and crossbody sports bra leave the muscular area around her shoulder blades exposed, and with the teams sharp senses they could tell she's flexing a little for effect. For someone who has had a few attempts on her life recently, she's projecting nothing but confidence to the rest of the gang. Thermal or aural analysis might reveal otherwise, but the rest of the gang is rolling with it.

As Selina addresses Lisa, it seems like she finally remembers to stand up straight. "Good. There might be magical reasons for all this, and really, I ought to get back to Monifa as soon as I can. She's still strutting around like she's invincible without any upper body armor, but a spirit could suddenly be spraying acid on her. Maybe I've complained about how hard it is to work magic here too many times, or she puts too much faith in her friend. One spirit on patrol can't catch everything. Just because it kept the spirit during the helicopter raid from even getting near her doesn't mean it won't be out of position next time.

But I guess if she didn't act like that she'd never have gotten where she is. " Lisa looks after where Monfia went, but then turns back to the team.

"Well. Let's get this done. Come on Selina, and the rest of you can follow once you look a little less heavily armed like Bello said.

As she starts to Lenny starts patting himself over and says without thinking "Hey, what do I need to do?" and then, realizing it should be nothing, he awkwardly starts after her, wondering if he's third wheeling, and hoping the job takes priority.


Some in the crafts might not be so strong in etiquette, but at least Paul makes an effort to pay attention to folks (OOC: Just enough to buy the single hit he needs). As he moves into the building he becomes increasingly aware that people are staring at him. Not the usual hungry stares of people wondering just what flavors of soy they could afford if they swiped one of those drones, but instead a look of surprise. As if an alien had landed and walked into the building.

[Thanee]

When Lisa mentions the astral pollution, Selina nods. "Tell me about it. I got a headache ever since I set foot in here."

"If you are worried about spirits suddenly rushing in, have you thought about putting up some Wards?"

[Koekepan]

Paul behaves affably. If anybody asks a question, he says: ""Fixin' some cyber for a friend. I can take appointments if you need 'em, but I gotta help this dude first, yaknow?""

Other than that, he just keeps walking.

[sunnyside]

Lisa seems to lose some of that newly found good posture at Selina's comment. She holds on to her right arm with he left as she says "I have. But it's not easy in here you know? I can only manage limited areas. "

She pauses a little "Even that really hurts. "

She continues with an odd smile that still manages to be sad around her eyes " I had my lodge up on the roof where things are better. I put up more protections, so Monifa could go there in case of an attack, or just to sleep more soundly. Luckily neither of us were there during the helicopter attack. Nobody was in there actually, but now if I close the shutters, I can still see light coming in through the bullet holes. I'm sure she won't want to stay there now. "



Down lower in the building, but quickly approaching the hundredth floor, Paul gets to give his speech to the curious fellow staring at him in the elevator. Not with a crew by the look of them, unless their crew really doesn't like uniforms. These Orks look awfully gaunt and their clothes threadbare to be doing regular biz.

One of them looks at the panel and says "They going all the way up. Monifa getting better chrome? " A second says "Don't they need, like, a whole hospital for that? Can somebody just put a floppy worm on you a drill in some armor?" They look like they might ask Paul about that but a third says "Or he's not a doctor and he's taking a bomb up!"

They almost start arguing about that, but the elevator opens and they just all get out of there.

If something about his appearance hadn't gotten enough stares as it was, that last exclamation gets people looking his way. Not that these folks seem to have anything better to do than stare. In the cage like elevator, Paul is on display like a zoo animal as it rises up towards the hundredth floor, with, he notes, at least a few stops on the way from Orks no longer on the elevator.

[Thanee]

Selina pulls out her commlink and writes a message to Tubesnake.

<< Are you okay, or do you need someone to come down and provide an escort? If someone asks, or causes you trouble, you can just say you are working for Monifa, that should shut them up, according to her. It's also true, at least at the moment. We were just on our way to examine the bodies. We will wait for you. >>


Then she turns to Bello and Abaje, who seem to be in charge for their little group.

"Heads up! Another team member is coming up now. In case you need to let someone know. We should wait for him before we go see the bodies."

[Koekepan]

To the folks on the elevator, he laughs easily. ""It's a medkit, omae. If that explodes, your doc is cheating you.""
He even pops the lid a bit to show them.

When Seline's message reaches him, he says: <<Nah, I'm on my way. Just had to walk up. Folks are friendly, and maybe bored, and maybe watch too much TriD.>>

Less than a minute later, the elevator dings and Tubesnake steps out, ready for autopsy action.

[Thanee]

When Tubesnake emerges from the elevator, Selina says: "Looks like we are all here now. Lead the way!"

[sunnyside]

The increasingly paranoid gangers on the hundredth-floor start reacting to the commotion down below and start getting each other, perhaps preparing to geek first and hope nobody asks questions. However, able to see quite a ways around the building once clear of the large room, Selina's alert gets Bello on the coms.

With all that, he just shakes his head and starts moving towards the other side of the building with the group.

(OOC: I'm assuming Bongo and Willie are coming too. They could stow weapons in a less visible way, but Bello is sufficiently distracted they could follow with them on and deal with it if he notices later. )

Bello, Abeje and Lisa lead the group around the promenade to the south side of the building and through one of the apartments. This one still has most of the walls of the original apartment just with the master bedroom walls taken out to make something of an expansion of the kitchen area that you walk into, and doors on either side of the kitchen that look like they were added in later, and not by professional builders.

There are a half dozen trunk freezers here. Bello opens up one of them and starts working to take out three bodies, laying them on a nearby clear plastic tarp covering the fake hardwood floor. He adds "We kept these three. It'd be whiz to get them the fuck away from all our better food. "

There are three humans each wearing worn jeans and jackets meant to look worn and old. Underneath they have more maintained and professional body armor and gear harnesses. It looks like the gear itself is missing as holsters, pouches, and sheaths sit empty.

Bello adds "We didn't really figure out there was some serious drek going on even with this group. Could have been a hundred reasons they'd be up to something here. The helicopter makes a statement though."

One of the males is really shot up. Abeje indicate him "That one was some sort of mage. Everybody has heard "geek the mage first" from trid shows or BTLs. So when he started lighting up everybody focused on him. Too bad for him if he didn't have any mojo and just had light up tattoos go off or something. "

The others are a man and a woman both with brown hair, brown eyes, and light features. The woman has a cyberarm that might pass for organic without the damage it's taken. The man has an external datajack poking out by his ear.

[Thanee]

Selina wrinkles her nose slightly. "You keep those in there with your food? Uhm, alright. I guess, there wasn't really any alternative. Yeah, I can certainly see why you want them gone..."

"A helicopter does that. But this place is so huge, you cannot really prevent infiltration, if it is done properly."

She also makes a mental note not to do any sudden magic around the twitchy guards. Just in case.

Taking a look, astrally, she does not expect to see much of use, but it's still worth a try.

[ Spoiler ]

Assensing 0 hits. Not much, indeed. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Koekepan]

Tubesnake glances back while they haul out the dead meat.

""Uh - your friends OK back there, or is something up? They seem pretty twitchy.""

But unless someone stops him, he parks the medkit, pulls out some sanitary gloves, a laser scalpel, and also cyberdoc tools for identification and analysis of cybernetics, starting with a portable ultrasound wand and tag tracker.

[Thanee]

"You mean, other than having been raided three times by now, and expecting another attack at any time, so every stranger is suspicious?"

[pbangarth]

Bongo takes a good look at each of the cadavers, searching for clues. Tubesnake's ... deep dive investigations probably help discover patterns and anomalies.

[ Spoiler ]

Three cadavers, three Perception Tests:

1) 12 dice: 6 hits

2) 12 dice: 3 hits

3) 12 dice: 3 hits

[Koekepan]

Tubesnake whistles while he works. Nothing terribly exciting, but a medley of popular songs of varying vintages. He is however quite methodical and detailed in taking of notes and samples, checking everything from neural links to embedded chip jacks. And, of course, the basics - fingerprints and footprints, dental records. Even if he lacks the means to check up on all that, right here and right now, he knows some people who can do it faster and better than he could, if they only had the data on hand.

In between whistling tunes, he lets people in on what he's doing. ""OK, so we gotta check this cyberarm for data, scan? But it's not just a cyberarm. There's also things like smartlink connections in it, and they're an optional extra. There can be details on them too, and I gotta get the data from them all. Here, I'm checking with the ultrasounder to see what else I can see running up the arms. Are there skillwires? Wired reflexes? Reaction enhancers? All sortsa stuff.""

[pbangarth]

"I see," says Bongo. "Devil in the details and all that. Like, there might be a single supplier for some of the parts in one person, providing a lead. Quality of materials might be useful, too."

He keeps a close eye on all that transpires in the autopsies.

[sunnyside]

Abeje nods after Selina's response "Yeah, plus folks aren't exactly used to seeing maintenance folk coming around, especially lugging potentially pricey stuff all alone. Not everybody is violent here, but too many are, and more would try a grab and dash. Those in the tower are supposed to catch all of that stuff. Bet they do actually. They just don't roll out the drones and swat team like they planned. "

Between the frozen cadavers and background count Selina doesn't spot anything. With the bodies are they are Bongo can commit them to memory. He also notices that they've got bits of sticky stuff on their face. He's pretty sure the were all wearing masks that got yanked off. The faces have been cleaned a little so it's hard to say if they lost them before or after getting shot. He supposes pulling out a bullet from a headshot would let you tell. Also he gets the impression that the clothing would originally have hidden all the armor and gear, some of the pouches look to just have foam in them, which would have made things less likely to print and would have made the humans look bulkier. The clothing would have blended in with the poor folk living here, except for the boots. They scuffed 'em up a little, but they still look like nice black combat boots. The clothing also covers them nearly from head to toe, including gloves. Actually, with the masks on they'd be fully covered since it seems at least one probably had a wig suck on.

For Tubesnakes part he's definitely detecting more cyberware underneath their skin, except for the magic user. Dermal plating on the guy is reasonably obvious, probably some sort of reaction enhancement based on the spine, a smartlink in their right hand, spur in their left, and cybereyes. The woman likely has some reaction system too and also has cybereyes and cyberears, something inside her torso as well.

For details, he'll have to start opening the bodies up, especially since the cyberware is totally powered down as the bodies haven't generated any ATP to feed the systems for some time.

No tags, so at least someone checked for that.

(OOC: gotta run)

[Koekepan]

Tubesnake continues whistling while he works, barring the occasional commentary.

""Folks, I'll be doing a standard Y-incision on torsos to open up and inspect. If you don't have breathing filters, it could get funky. If you have a weak stomach, maybe go for a soykaf while I do this. If you can dine with ghouls and keep the conversation going, feel free to hang around.""

However, for safety's sake he does first check to see if anything looks like a cranial or torso bomb before just going nuts and yanking. There are cybermedical protocols around this stuff, but with this collection of crazies, anything is possible.

[sunnyside]

(OOC: as Tubesnake gets into things, is he trying to extract stuff in operational order, or deliberately cracking wares to try and get at things like lot numbers that would be hard for whoever dealt with the tags to get at? Maybe trying to determine what's badly damaged and only getting into the guts of that? In any case a roll seems appropriate. That could also serve as a sort of perception test toward the earlier questions like quality of installation. )

While tubesnake works Lenny, standing in the back, tries to look around Willie and Bongo. "Uh. Any comlinks or anything? I could probably do something with those."

Bello replies "Remember we didn't know we were going to be dealing with a helicopter later. And it wasn't just our crew involved. Stuff vanishes fast around here. "

A deep sigh emanates from underneath Lenny's helmet.

While Tubesnake gets to work, Abeje takes a few steps back and replies to something she remembered Selina saying earlier. "We aren't such an easy nut to crack. And these folks found. Especially now our crew is watching the elevators. You can see them all the way down. That's how we got tipped off to the first group, a bunch of punks in with new armor and barely used guns that just tried to ride the elevators up and whack us. They didn't think about all the other people using elevators. Even if most people don't use them very often, there are a lot of people. Even if you scare all the grannies and chipheads from getting in with you, they've gone and fucked your plan of arriving at the same time.

These tried to sneak up the stairs, but you can see all of those too, and nobody just does a hundred floors of stairs. There are mouseholes all in the apartments so the maintenance tower can't see people moving around. Legend has it when these opened they'd rush out of that maintenance tower if they even thought they saw a drug deal. I dunno about that, but you're still going through somebodies house or a gangs flop if you're doing that drek. Even if nobody would want to mess with me and mine, I don't even know where they all are to go bottom to top. So we aren't so easy to fuck around with."

Lisa adds quietly. "But even when we win we lose. Monifa is training a lot of new folks."

Abeje replies "They're lucky they're getting promoted to our crew. A whole lotta folks in the tower wish they could be so lucky."

[Thanee]

Selina wonders what all this means, while take a few steps back to give Tubesnake room to work, and be clear of the repercussions of said work, mostly the foul smell.

"Whoever is behind this, surely has resources. But they also don't seem to have much of a clue of what they are dealing with. They just seem to grab a bunch of rapscallions, give them some money and equipment, and tell them to do this if they want more. This really does not sound like another gang to me. More like some corporation chiphead with no connection to real life. Maybe someone is interested in doing something with this whole place here, and they figured that Monifa and her crew are the ones standing in their way. On the other hand, someone like this would probably just try to pay you guys to set up shop elsewhere. You havn't gotten any such offers in the recent past, or did you? Anyways, just thinking out loud here."

Turning to Lisa, she says: "You probably lost some friends in all this mess. Sorry to hear that."

She uses her commlink to send a message to the team, especially Angel, who isn't physcially present.

<< Have we looked into who owns this property? And whether it has been sold recently, or there are offers to buy it? >>

[Koekepan]

Tubesnake is working for convenience, but isn't just randomly wrecking things because a sawzall exists as a concept either. If there are no other identifying features available, then he'll set the flatworker to cutting things open while he delves into anatomy, but if he can get numbers even by gently powering the cyber up and reading diagnostic reports from contacts, then that's what he'll do. Waste not, want not, after all.

[pbangarth]

"Looks like they tried to blend into the crowd, the way they dressed and covered their gear with used-looking clothing," Bongo shares. "Not sure we can pull that off with what we have with us."

He adds to the matrix talk. <<Lenny, you think you could dig that info out of the city's databases, or real estate sites?>>

[sunnyside]

Lenny replies <<I'll get on it.>>

Abeje looks thoughtful "You know, you might have a point there. I'd figured by the time someone would try something serious, they'd be intimately familiar with this big chunk of ferrocrete. Monifa didn't say anything about someone trying to buy her out. I don't even know what that would mean for a corporation though. There are a handful of little businesses here and there, but most biz here involves trying to separate people from their welfare. "

Bello adds "And separate that cred in such satisfying way that they prefer to stay here instead of some curb. So we really do give decent deals on chips and drugs. Lousy profits, but it's a lotta people. But yeah, hard to imagine a corp wanting this biz. I guess if they could vacate everybody it's a big building."

For her part Lisa just nods, maybe more in response to Selina's comment than Abeje and Bello's

Lenny chimes in again very shortly after <<Well, it's still public housing, with nothing indicating the city is interested in selling, but I can poke around some>>

From some of the discussion points, Bongo notes that these humans seem a little older. Probably 30s. So not the young punks that came first.

Tubesnakes having a hard time with the cyberware, though to an extent that tells him that this was certainly a street docs work. Probably they didn't scrub the cyberware for the runners benefit, except maybe for having fewer tags, but someone upstream that didn't want the wares to point back to where they fell off the back of a truck. Still, it's hard to get into the guts of these systems without risking damaging them. Tubesnake finds that's quite true as he's pretty sure (OOC: With that one hit) that he's not getting some of the wares he's working with properly operational again. Still, working with the zoom on his cameras he can get some numbers and model information off of artificial retinas and the neural relays of wired reflexes. Standard wares, installed quite some time ago. The extensive biological integration in a full set of wired 2 means they must have worked their essence pretty low with the other gear. Maybe one of the hackers can work with some of the make, model, and numbers to get a picture. Tubesnake is reasonably sure they kept going back to the same source.

This all takes more time than Tubesnake thought (OOC: with one hit to start, he can keep at it though to buy a couple more).


It hasn't been all that long until Angel pings the group <<I've got my drone!!! I got it from Brewster. Can I use it please?!>>

[Koekepan]

Tubesnake keeps plugging away, while feeding any data that he captures back to the team as it comes in.

""Not too much recent work, by the looks of it. So these folks aren't amateurs, but also probably not riding high on the success curve either. They definitely got it done street-style, not in a military hospital or anything like that.""

[sunnyside]

Paul thinks he has at least some numbers and whatnot the matrix types might be able to do something with. Also from powering up some cyberware briefly he can get some addressing information which would allow finding the gear they used to have connected to it, such as guns working with smartlinks or comlinks working with the datajack or cybereye. That's assuming whoever swiped them has them powered up, online, and without changing their addressing data.

However in the process he notices something else. Their lungs seem messed up, as if they had gotten gassed. Also it looks like their armor took a lot of hits without bullets getting through. Though obviously some did, or hit a head. But a lot got snagged by their armor and bounced off the dermal plating on the guy. Judging by the arm she was using it to fairly effectively shield herself.

Lenny sends a reply to Angel but includes everybody <<Look, Paul is a little busy, but so long as you keep the drone in legal places doing legal enough things the fact it might have some traceability shouldn't be problem. Just pay attention to your routing if you decide to hack anything. Scratch over the comlink, sniff over the drone. >>

Lenny is a little proud of that, but Angel never got exposed to anything scratch and sniff, and is too excited about the drone anyway.

A few moments later Lenny jerks a bit and then sends out another message to the group. <<ooop. I was still logged into the toy. A spider dropped in. I'm pretty sure they didn't see me and I'm out now. We should still be cool, I guess just avoid in-person negotiating with Monifa for a while. >>

[pbangarth]

Willie grunts in admiration. "That hidey hole stuff on the way up was a good idea. Back home, me and some of the local boys used to have fun leading cops on a chase through territory we knew like the back of our hands. We even set up a kill zone when it was somebody trying to muscle in on the local ... commerce."

He thinks a moment longer. "Any idea what kind of weaponry these people came armed with?"