Well, a bit of a comment to that effect (or even a lie saying they couldn't find anything) would have been nice.

Badger's dressed in working clothes -- form-fitting body armor, natch, combined with a Ulysses hooded longcoat. He, much like Val, brought a number of weapons -- Predator III and Viper Slivergun with a few spare clips, a Ceska vz/120 as a backup piece for an ankle holster, a handful of assorted grenades (some of which he's got hidden on his person, though they're only flash and concussion -- nothing lethal or that would likely even knock someone out cold), and a trio of pool balls. Pretty much all but the pool balls are stashed back in his SUV. The pool balls are wrapped in felt and in a satchel, along with a low-light flashlight, a couple of pens and pencils, a pad of paper, and a paper bag containing the remnants of his dinner.

Why pool balls, you ask? Well, they make for a decent improvised ranged combat option, and there's not a person alive who could honestly call them "weapons".

How likely is it, though, that Badger would've gone up and started talking with some huge mechanical powered-armor suit? (That's presuming, of course, that the powered armor is what Twitchy turned up in.)

Anyone for quick character descriptions as we all nervously approach this smoking crater which apparently leads down into the sewers?

Badger's a broad, stocky fellow, stuck somewhere in the middle between a dwarf's size and a human's at around five foot even. His full beard and features lead you to believe he's the former. He's wearing a plain long-sleeved grey cotton shirt tucked into belted denim jeans, boots, half-finger knit wool gloves, and a hooded longcoat to keep off the rain. No obvious cyberware or weapons, but a fiberoptic cable does snake up from within his coat to behind his right ear.

Sure, I'll get a better description of Valentine up for you guys iin a little while. Time for dinner now.

The pack I mentioned in my IC post contained a Savoir Advanced Medkit.

Lilt is around 6' but fairly slim. As I've mentioned before; he is of jamaican descent with shoulder-length black dreadlocks.

Lilt has no obvious cyberware or weapons (unless you're likely to recognise a pair of hardliner gloves). A closer inspection, if you could get past the dreads, would reveal a fibroptic cable running from inside his Jumpsuit to somewhere behind his right ear.

Popular place for it, I see.

Valentine is your typical pretty-boy human (see linked photo). He stands at about 5'10'' and has a strong, athletic build. His hair is naturally brown, but has been bleached blonde through years of living in the Sunshine State.

The only piece of obvious cyberware that he has is a stylish faux-orichalcum datajack on his left temple that, upon closer inspection, is decorated with numerous tiny runes. Nothing is currently plugged into it, though anyone who bothers to shake his hands will note that he has two more jacks, one on each wrist, and both are plugged into some cable that disappears up his sleeves. He is otherwise non-descript, just like any good bodyguard would be.

Currently he's dressed in an expensive charcoal-grey suit with a thin overcoat a shade or two darker. The silk tie is striped in yellow and black. His eyes are completely hidden behind a tres chic shades.

And... I think that about covers him for now. Sorry for the crappy descriptions.

I described Stitch in the IC Thread. One thing I forgot to mention - he has a datajack (which would be pretty obvious with his short hair), although there are no cables coming out of it.

He is wearing ordinary clothing with his Ulysses Coat and Form-Fitting Body Armor, and has his wrist phone, pager, and his Heal Focus with him. The duffel bag has his Savior Medkit and 2 of his Antidote Patches.

He will be using astral perception to start with, using masking to hide being dual-natured and the mirrorshades to hide the "distant" look that spellslingers get when they are assensing. He will have looked at the others to note things like cyberware and general emotional state. When he starts climbing down, he will switch back to mundane (low-light) vision. He currently has 6 dice allocated for Spell Defense.

Kat's small, and lithe. She's auged all to hell and back, though nothing very obvious. For the most part, she looks and dresses like a club kid, going for tight and sexy with flair.

Badger's got quite a bit of augmentation, taking him down perhaps a quarter of a normal human's. His fingertips, in particular, seem heavily augmented. Additionally, his aura is... strange. It's like the currents of mana move sluggishly in his immediate area.

Oh yes, and to anyone assensing him on the astral (not directed at anyone in-particular ): lilt still has more than half of his essence left. He has only light body-wide internal augmentations (less than wired reflexes), with other augmentations in his eyes and head.

Don't you just love Johnsons that talk about themselves in the third person.

Anyone thinking to assense Powerhouse won't see much humanity at all... little fragger inside is muay augmented.

Just a quick note to let you guys know that I (The Frumious Bandersnatch) finally remembered my old password, so I'm back to my "original" name. Sorry for the hassle.

Sorry for being slow. I got behind and then kept not catching up. Kat'll try to negotiate, since it's her thing (negotiations 6).

I apologize for that last post's brevity, but DSF has been hating me by not posting for me so I had to rewrite the same one 6 times. I got more than a little frustrated with the thing and just wanted to get it over with.

CE: Could Powerhouse fit in the back of my van? I have 45CF and 1100 load left which should be enough for a body 3 drone (around 13.5CF and 750 load by the rules in R3).

And actually: Is there anything illegal about the drone? AFAIK drones are not illegal. We could disguise powerhouse as a manual labour drone which I am renting or something.

The difficulty may come in the size of the thing -- after all, DH has described the powersuit as being 11 feet tall and nearly that wide across the shoulders. We might be able to fit it in, but then the rest of us might have a spot of trouble getting across unless we were to cross in separate parties and meet up, somehow, on the Sioux side of the border.

Then again, that might be a workable idea anyways... less attention if we cross in small bands.

As to legality... well, who knows? The powered armor's pretty much one of a kind... and what happens if we run into a border cop who's a drone aficionado and wonders who manufactures this jury-rigged automaton? Somehow I don't think "Powerhouse crushes his skull and we bury the corpse in the badlands" is a workable solution...

I was thinking more along the lines of potentially slipping the armor in a packing crate into a transport semi, and meeting up with it somewhere on the other side. We could do that either illegally, by hacking into some shipping company's roster and "inserting" our own cargo, or just pack everything up and ground FedEx it. Assuming there's no explosives or weapon-type things, it would likely get past any chemsniffers and/or drug searches. After all, it's "just a drone prototype", right? That way, we also have the cover of a on-the-level transport company to work through as well.

I know you probably won't believe me, Kuru, but I had written my IC post before I read the ones in here. Great minds think alike, I suppose.

*grin* See, the thing is, Badger really doesn't know how to negotiate. He knows how to talk to people and how to fit into a situation, but he doesn't know the first thing about the give-and-take of dealing. Usually, he just has a flat rate that he charges, plus expenses, and clients can take it or leave it... either that, or he's going after a specific bounty, which usually isn't a negotiable sum.

As an aside, regarding Twitchy's question about corps doing things more "economically"... nope. I'm working as a travel coordinator/admin assistant for a fairly large corp right now, and the executives here want to get to and back as quickly and as comfortably as possible. That means, without a doubt, airplane flights.

I've driven from the SF Bay Area (California) all the way out to visit a friend in Moorhead, Minnesota -- a drive of about 2000 miles. It took me, at sixteen hours or so of driving a day, two days to get there. I did it because, at the time, yeah, it was more economical (and I like long drives and hadn't ever driven across country before). Nonetheless, it took quite a while and was exhausting and saved me, maybe two or three hundred dollars in airfare.

Corps don't think that way. They budget millions of dollars per fiscal quarter to their operations, and making sure that their execs are transported quickly and efficiently to important meetings/conferences is just another operation to them. Trust me on this -- the "corpers driving to a Denver conference" thing probably wouldn't fly. No corp would force their suits to spend a full day or two travelling, and arrive exhausted, when they could spend what for them is a trifling amount and have the suits arrive quickly and well-rested.

Umm. Are we satisfied on the payment thing? The choice Lilt would go for is the expense account which we can request money for. He'll attempt to nudge the descision that way using his own negotiations but only if it is the most popular choice.

I think the details of transportation will rely on what is available (& interaction with contacts from what other people are saying). If we can call-up VV once we decide what to do, then he can credit us with however many nuyen we need.

I'm just waiting for any response to the negotiation attempts so far which is why I haven't even bothered using my own Negotiations skill beyond requesting funds for fuel, a new fake ID for each of us, the Mapsofts, and the Linguasofts for travel expenses.

As for the details of the traveling, that's precisely why Valentine said "or some other similar arrangement."

The expense account idea is fine as well, but one of you need to take charge and negotiate a better deal for our actual payment.

Sorry, just posted. Life has been hectic as of late. Things are back to normal though.

Stitch would probably have negotiated a bit differently for the payment, but Badger's assumption kind of sabotaged that for him. What he's trying to do now is to assure that the piddly 5K they are each getting will not be eaten up by expenses. He considers the 5K barely adequate, and will likely try to renegotiate if the search takes any significant amount of time.

not trying to be disruptive, just that, playing this character, he would consider that amount a very low offer for that kind of job. To me, I see that as, like I said, a relatively simple extraction run, and 5K is kind of cheap to be running all around the NAN chasing an old trail of a missing person. Let me know if your world runs on a slightly different payscale, Cheese. Maybe it was supposed to be about what a run like that does pay, in which case I will play him a bit less edgy about it in future posts.

Stitch is still assensing, but if he notes Valentine's anger, he will be unlikely to attach the significance to it that he should, due to his own irritation.

I assure you you'll get the money you need, you just have to be patient since it's not all going to come from one source. And you're getting 15,000 up front.

I admit I'm curious -- what pay range were you anticipating, Glyph?

(I admit, though, the assumption that the payment was a lump sum was a bad rookie mistake on my part... can you tell I don't negotiate much? )

CE: Is it possible that with my expertiese in cybertechnology, cybernetics, and biotechnology, I could attempt to give some advice to aid against cyberware scans? IE: stuff to mess with the magnetic or sonic detection systems used in cyberware scanners? (In a way that dosen't make them look like a cyberzombie)

I'm pretty sure Valentine can give a more precise plan for how to evade such things, as he has a specialization in Security Systems (Weak Spots) as well as the Security Procedures skill, both at... sufficiently high levels.

And unless those of you willing to fly are stock full of illegal implants, we can simply include a license for them with the Fake IDs. You just need to have a rational reason for possessing them, such as Valentine being a licensed bodyguard.

So would someone else please try to smooth over Badger's faux paus and negotiate for more nuyen?

Nope. Valentine's still not even sure if he's going to accept the job (price notwithstanding). He's mostly waiting to see how the others deal with the situation before agreeing. It's not very obvious that that's what he's doing, though. He's a bit of a bastard like that.

I'd like to point out that VV originally wanted to give the team 15k just to make sure everyone remembers that.

Well, he's Good Looking and has a Charisma of 7, an Etiquette of 7, and really knows how to work his Body Language. Hell, *I'd* fuck Valentine.

*so wishes he hadn't had to drop out of Cage Fight*

Alright... Twitchy's about to get antsy... all this roundabout talk, gonna drive the little bugger madder...

Hopefully that'll kick-start the IC thread again...

*listens to the crickets chirping* *considers rolling all the other PCs for spare change and going to get a SoySlurpee at the local Stuffer Shack*

Ah. So that's why they call you Valentine...

I would have posted but A: I've been busy (deadlines, essays, ETC at uni) and B: People seemed to want to negotiate, but lilt was OK as it was, so I though I'd leave it to other people.

Um... is the game dead?

Right now, we seem to be waiting for the Vicious Vole to respond to Badger. The GM might have some urgent business that suddenly came up in "real life" - the last post from Cheese Emperor was the 14th.

I apologize for my abscence, as with many of GM's in the past real life suddenly warped me into a parallel dimension where I actually had stuff to do. If you want to start this back up, I'd be glad to.

Hey, I'm still here - I definitely want to keep going. Right now, we're waiting for the Vicious Vole's reply to Badger.