Our heroes have discovered the details of their mission: Rescue the spoiled Azlander known as Loc from his home, which has crashed in a pocket of wildly fluctuating mana on the sea floor in an unknown location. Direct competitor for their target is Aztlan, the very nation of Loc's birth. He is to be a human sacrifice, his heart slashed out and burned on an altar to ensure a victorious invasion of Bogota. While their employer sits in shock, a gang of pirates has been trying to steal Gil's boat. Gil and Kensei have dashed out to the street, weapons in hand to challenge the foolish mob. B Bandit converses with a tutor sprite, Librarian, inside one pirate's surprisingly robust commlink. Key has been left with the dinner menu and the elf butler, while Fins protects everyone else from the dangerous rum.

The pirates ready their weapons to engage.

Key approached the windows overlooking the direction that Gil and Kensei had vanished in…well, no armour and just a taser in her shoulder bag…let the big boys run at the group screaming, it might just give her an opportunity to slip around in the shadows there that the lovely bright sun have created…

Fins followed Key to the window and looked out at the pier and the situation that was unfolding. "Foolish." He muttered, "Shouldn't have not gone out there unprepared like they did. At least the Asian looks like he can handle himself."

Fins took a drink from his glass that has been blissfully refilled every time it got even close to half empty by the ever present Elf. "Course if I had a S-A M107 we could handle this without even leaving the comfort of the AC...there would probably also be some significant damage to Gil's boat though, but at least we would still be cool." Fins said with a half grin on his face.

As the pirate crew turns to face the enraged shadowrunners, the sea water just past the end of the short dock erupts as a roughly metahuman shape takes form and pulls itself erect. It roars with the voice of storms, and runs to try and get to engagement distance Kensei. On the Astral plane, a flash of power heralds the Spirits use of a power, and it's movement drastically increases. It is 10 meters away.

Kensei calmly walked towards the water spirit, his hands firmly on the hilt and sheat of his undrawn katana. When he was in striking distance to the mystical being, his relaxed body posture changed in an instant as he exploded into motion, attacking his enemy with a battokiri, a cutting draw technique. His sword glid out of it's sheat and in one smooth motion arched forward in a deadly silver flash.

The water spirit moves to parry the samurai's blades, but badly miscalculates the timing of the Kensei's battokiri and steps directly into the blade. Kensei's katana opens the spirit from top to bottom, releasing a tsunami of sea water and small marine life. Kensei is knocked back and down from the force of the spirit's disruption, where he sits dripping and watching one of the spirit's small crabs trip over itself trying to scuttle away .

//Maybe I can cause some havoc..//

B Bandit does a search on the node, looking for subscriptions.

//Whoah, didn't expect something like that on here. Good thing I didn't set off any alarms//

(((Hey all, looks like there are five of them, and they have a tacnet, so watch out.)))

((Librarian, you may want to get out of the node, seems it's going to get cold here soon.)))

//So much to do, so little time. Times like this I wish I could get tanks.//

B Bandit reaches into her duster and pulls out a sniper rifle, taking a moment to aim it at the agent she spotted //Bye Bye// she thinks to herself as she squeezes the trigger, sending a bullet flying silently towards the agent.

One of the pirates opens up and sprays a cloud of bullets down the pier. The banging of each individual shell is lost in the stream of reports and the ricochet of rounds off the ground. The gel rounds tear at the pavement, and the red lances of tracers map a smoking ruin in the walls of the hotel and the buildings across the street. Behind Gil and Kensei, an old lady walking her dog is caught in the hail and falls to the ground, knocked out cold. Her dog wines and licks her face.

Gil hit the ground as one of the pirates started spraying bullets in his general area. He wasn't quite fast enough and got winged by one of them -- which was rubber, making these the first pirates he'd ever come across that used non-lethal rounds -- and that was going to leave a nasty bruise on his shoulder. He sighted down the barrel, giving the crosshairs on his smartlink time to re-adjust and lock on to the guy hosing the place, and snapped off a single shot.

Key looked across where the woman had fallen, shit shit shit this was stupid, going in to a combat situation practically unarmed, in a dress, with no commcodes yet for the rest of the team and now civilians are getting mown down...not her fight...but can't leave these people to shoot the locals, and sitting this one out would hardly do her rep any good.

Revving her wires she slipped in to the shadows at the side of the building and headed for the dock, time slowed to a crawl as she moved down towards the water, once there she would have some measure of protection from flying lead and be able to hopefully pick off one of the pirates to help even the odds...

Stealth roll Infiltration + Intuation 10D6 = Hits 4

KEY
For just a moment as Key slips into the harbor waters, she sees a human face staring up at her from just a few meters into the bay. As she immerses, she sees that it wasn't a dead body after all, it was just a dolphin. Several dolphins, actually.

KENSEI and GIL
Gil snaps a clean shot at the pirate who is emptying a gun, but the pirate darts to the side, performing a model tuck and roll. The pirates spread out; the ork ducks inside the curve of the boat, while the humans crouch and cover the firing zones forward, past the hotel to the street, and the hotel itself. The only pirate that doesn't scatter is the troll, who calmly lumbers toward the prone duo while lighting the under-barrel flamethrower on his troll-sized combat shotgun.

B BANDIT
The node is calm, and gives a lovely display of all that the "pirate" team is seeing, which is a shocking amount. The ork's feed shows him hacking into the speedboat. The poor little pilot in the smuggler's boat puts for a heroic effort fails miserably. One of the humans is carefully lining up on Kensei's eye, and the other is sending some sort of information down an encrypted channel that doesn't connect up to the rest of the pirate's tacnet. B Bandit sees Key slip into the water and Simon walk to the window through the tacnet, but the pirates clearly did not.

FINS
Fins has seen that the elf is communicating over his commlink, but is surprised when he overhears the words "cow" and "airlift", as opposed to something like "pirate" and "with guns". Simon seems to have recovered a bit, and strolls over to the floor to ceiling window that Key had just left by. He seems curious.

(((Sniper on one of you males, the wet one.))) B Bandit warns her teammates, not actually knowing who is who. (((Key I think you're good.)))

//Now to see what I can manage, better make sure they aren't calling reinforcements.//

B Bandit splits her concentration, another copy of herself forming and moving towards the data channel. She quickly picks it up, listening to the static, but she concentrates on the static, attempting to turn it into something intelligible, while copying even the static onto her commlink so that she can catch up on anything she missed.

As her one self focuses on the channel, her other self focuses on causing havoc, or at least as much as it can with her attention so split. She starts by evening the odds a bit, forcing the smartgun to eject its clip, and then having the sensor stop feeding data, hoping to make Tacnet less effective.

B BANDIT
B Bandit sees the Agents on the TacNet pass status queries to each other and realizes that they will soon come looking. She gets to work on breaking into the pirate's communication stream, and throws some chaos into the 'Net. The pirates haven't noticed yet, but the clip slides out of one of the Ingrams, and it's sensors start to shut off.

KENSEI
Kensei charges the advancing troll, deadly swords held at the ready. The troll grins and chin-points an acceptance of the shapeshifter's personal challenge.

As Key slipped quietly in to the water she took a moment to send a text back to Ctec, wishing that she’d made more time on the trip over here…

(((Mum, Finn & the Girls, Monarch has sent me off again so I’m sorry I can’t make it back home yet. Something about Pirates and you know how I feel about them! I’ll stay safe and be back home soon. Mia xx)))

She made a mental note to ensure that she kept her promise! As the water closed over her she felt any tiny scraps of fear drain away and just the tang of adrenalin at the prospect of confrontation. This was her element…the webbing on her hands and feet extended and she felt the kiss of salt water over her gills.

The human pirate that had opened up full auto pops up from his crouch just long enough to send a long hail of bullets down the dock at the prone Gil. He follows with a shorter burst, almost friendly compared to his previous wall of rubber-jacketed lead.

The high-impact rubber bullets smacked into the dock all around Gil and a bunch nailed him cleanly. He grunted in obvious pain. The human clambered unsteadily to his feet and as a second burst was fired, he threw himself to one side, leaping clean off the dock and making a passable dive into the water. He swam under the surface all of ten feet and came up beneath the dock, trying hard to come up slowly without a splash or a gasp, but breathing was painful with cracked ribs.

Point blank to the charging Kensei, the troll pirate opens up with his Franchi SPAS-22, using rounds that are decidedly not rubber. A burst of flichette to center mass fails to drop the tiger shapeshifter, but a follow up burst leaves him looking little better than an organ-theft victim. Gil takes to the water, hoping to hide under the cover of the dock, while Key swims closer. Fins continues to study the combat tactics of the "pirates", and Simon begins to look concerned. He instructs the elf to get a medic and pours another drink for himself and Fins.

His opponent downed but regenerating, the troll seems a little disappointed. He makes a long-suffering face, shrugs and douses Kensei's limp body with flames. Before joining his team in the water, he carefully places a loaded shotgun shell just out of range of fire's heat. Under the water, Gil and Key are witnesses to a strange sight. The "pirates" splash down after Gil, but seem uninterested in chasing him down. The dolphins that were swimming around the dock move with a slow, fluid grace to pick up their riders, and begin to move out of the harbor. B Bandit, still in the pirate's network, see's the pirate hacker drop the encrypted connection, and link the five commlinks into a cluster as she is towed away by her dolphin.

Unless you would like to do something, we can drop out of combat time now. Kensei is on fire, having to resist 6P fire damage per Combat Turn. The dock is very wet, and doesn't seem to be likely to burn. A medical helicopter will get to you in about three minutes, at about the same time the cow does.

Kensei was drifting through blackness, his mind detached from reality. But slowly a sensation stirred at the edge of his awareness, a feeling of warmth, growing stronger and stronger. First it was almost cozy but it kept getting more intensive and eventually it crossed the line from relaxing warmth to painful heat. And it didn't stop there. Suddenly he snapped out of the cold dark back into consciousness and realized he was on fire.
His regenerative powers fought the damage the flames were doing to his body but it couldn't keep that up forever. The pain was hard to bear, even for him, but he quickly forced his aching body upright and catapulted himself of the pier into the ocean. The water was almost unbearably cold on his burnt skin but it put out the flames.

Less then ten seconds later he had healed all his injuries and was climbing back on the pier again. He was almost naked now, some charred and cut up scraps were everything that remained from his once-white kimono. His body was fine now, but so extensively covered with blood and smut that he looked like he was severly injured. If he'd ever meet them again he'd be prepared.

Carefully he put his swords back into their sheaths. Scanning the water he caught a last glimpse of the mysteriously retreating pirates. His calm demeanor on the outside didn't show but inside he was raging. His instincts told him to go after them, to rip them to shreds. They had defeated him with shameful easy and everything in him was eager to listen to his animal voice. But he knew he couldn't catch them anyway underwater.

After making sure that Gil was okay the shapeshifter started walking back towards the hotel were the rest of the team was still enjoying their drinks.
He needed a long shower. And some new clothes

Gil watched the pirates -- well-armed pirates, to be sure -- ride away on fraggin' dolphins before climbing out of the water. He was nursing some bruised (possibly broken) ribs, but he checked on his boat first to make sure it was still secure, and his bike and other belongings in the cargo hold were still secure; he didn't see any of those yahoos walking away with his water carbine or a motorcycle, but one could never be too sure these days.

He came limping back up the steps to the hotel trying to shake the water out of his unruly mop of hair and cussing up a storm about "bloody pirates." "Anybody got any clue what in God's name that was all about? I doubt they were actually trying to take my boat, since they could have waltzed off with it while we were licking our wounds."

Key climbed out of the water, uncomfortably aware of the dress clinging to her, and shook the water from her hands, the hot sunshine quickly causing the webbing to retract in to her skin...

"Well what the hell was that all about?"

Time to get geared up already if this was going to be the tone of the jaunt down in to Carib waters!

B Bandit spends her fleeting time in the system gathering all she can and performing her usual covering of her tracks. It may have only been 9 seconds, but to her it seemed like 9 minutes at least as she ran through large swaths of information looking for anything useful, while setting herself up for a return visit, this didn't seem like a random occurrence. While her searches don't return much, a good hacker knows that any information has value, especially if you know how to look at it.

Before she can do any more with the system, she fells the signal growing weak as they dive deeper into the salty water, and so she erases all information of her and Librarian's presence, sets up something to make sure even her exit is missed, and leaves the system. Knowing that what was said could be important, she spends several seconds working on the message, but quickly realizes that the few seconds of conversation she has isn't enough, especially because it could be in an unknown language.

((You guys lost? I was kicking butt, I even got everyone souvenirs.)) She pulls up the tacnet recording and watches as the two men get mowed down, and Key doesn't get a chance to do much besides take a refreshing swim. ((Well, come on up, I've found out some interesting things.))

While waiting for the team to get back she contacts the hotels and requests them to bring several towels to the conference room.

Once everyone arrives, she explains a bit about what she learned "So, these guys were really well informed about most of us, or at the least knew more or less what they were getting into. They certainly weren't just pirates. They were also very interested in not killing us, and particularly not interested in coming face to face with Simon." Without turning to face him, she addresses Simon "This is turning into a way bigger deal than you first let on, we're dealing with multiple nations and corporations. Granted they're more friendly than most, not wanting to kill us, but I'm guessing that won't last as we dig deeper. I'm not sure 20k will be enough, especially considering we don't even know how long this will take. It could take months just to find this guy. Also any ideas why they would want to avoid contact with you? I know you're important, which just makes it all the odder that they wouldn't want to try and kidnap you or threaten you to keep you out of this."

POSTS after this one should be for comments and criticisms regarding this chapter, in character chat should move to Chapter 3. Anything you liked especially, or disliked especially, please let me know. Readers and lurkers should feel free to add their opinions as well.

I've mentioned that I didn't intend for combat to be so harsh, but we've upgraded the Mooks to recurring villains, which is always fun. Hopefully no hard feelings.

Is Ghostmaker still around, or do we need to try and find some replacements?

I like how we got our asses kicked in physical combat, but had the matrix totally down

But no, to be honest I did enjoy that we got caught off guard, and for a very good reason. Our J is fairly... completely incompetent, and we didn't really have any idea of the true magnitude/scope of things. Should be interesting to see where all things go. I'm interested to see our god/mage or whatever. Provided we ever find him

Did you make a chapter three thread yet? I don't see it.

Oh, also I guess B Bandit tried her hand at negotiation, so suppose I should roll. No skill... this should end well.

Negotiating I suppose (7d6.hits(5)=2)

I've done worse. I'm sure we have a real face around here somewhere.