Hehe. It was fun. That was actually the result of one of their jobs.
They were still up and comers, and so were taking whatever jobs they could get. They had just come off a hard one, and so when this came up they jumped on it. (This was set in Year of the Comet) Long story short, one of the big players in the Probe Race wanted to off their lead program team to keep them from leaking information (they had already suffered one such leak, and didn't want it to happen again). They were monitoring the programming team 24/7 to figure out how and when they could do this in a way that would give them plausible deniability.
So one day, Jack Behrenger (one of the programmers) is sitting around in the same room he has been in every night for three years (the corp had them on lockdown while working on the project, with the only time they let them out being when the leak occurred) when he gets word that they're actually getting a week off, and can actually leave the building! A few days prior, he had been watching a Shadowrunning Movie Marathon when he saw a commercial for Adventures Unlimited.
<cue commercial>
That’s right, you can be anything you want. Do anything you want. You want to explore the Australian Outback? Done! You want to be on an Urban Brawl team? Done!
</commercial>
It was settled. Jack wanted to be a Shadowrunner For a Day (the name of the run). So he booked a flight for Seattle, and made arrangements with AU to be a shadowrunner. AU wanted the experience to be as realistic as possible, so they hired "outside talent" to form Jack's team (cue 'runners). AU also "rented" a nicer section of the barrens and roped it off with guards at the perimeter. Then AU stocked the "target" building with "terrorists" and a "hostage", all played by AU actors.
Knowing all of this, the corp (SK in this case, because it fit the ongoing plot) sent their own talent to replace the actors and kill Jack.
The other complication? A rival corp had found out that Jack (and the other programmers from the team, but Jack is the only one that matters here) was going to be in Seattle, and through their own legwork, that he would be at this building doing this "adventure". So they hired a team of SRs to go in and extract him.
So, the job ended up being:
- Protect Jack
- Rescue hostage AU employees
- Escape from crossfire between SK goons and another SR team
- Figure out why all these people were after Jack, and how they could make more money off the situation (okay, so they made that goal up themselves wink.gif).
It was great fun. A huge cluster. The best part? The runners' weapons were loaded with blanks and hooked up with lazer zap equipment for the simulation. So here they are "sneaking up on the building" with their lazer tag guns and this chattery dorky programmer guy that knows nothing about combat, and I tell them "you hear a weapon go off (faces steady), and the wall of the building next to you explodes in a shower of concrete (faces not so steady)". smile.gif Thankfully, they're paranoid enough that they brought actual ammunition for their weapons, and back up weapons. Also there's the mage, which kept them safe long enough to make the quick B/R check to take the lazer zap junk off their weapons (it was low and only there as a tension device).
So that's why the AU employees were striking.
All in all, one of the more fun runs over that campaign.