QUOTE (Hagga @ Aug 12 2010, 11:37 AM)

A) As said, palace guards for King of an Awakened Nation. Also called neon signs, specifically, signs that read "Do not do what you are thinking about doing".
B) Harlequin's been like this for a while. Frosty's not nearly as cheesy, but she's still got all sorts of dirty tricks and generally stays out of the action except for a few very specific times.
And you go tyhrough the city because you don't have any other options; you can't rent anything there and then (barring an Okada), everyone is out to kill you and you did rent a transport; you just need to get to it. Even if you did go POW, TRANSPORT you still have to get through a *massive* amount of gridlock. No way to land a helicopter on the building, assuming you could even get one through Lagos without it getting shot down.
Dawn went pretty well for my group and required less tinkering than Midnight did. This is how my I and my group handled it.
[ Spoiler ]
-I gave Frost(y) a set of stats that made her a powerful veteran runner with a few unique metamagic feats. I refused to let her be a statless Deus Ex Machina.
-I heavily modified the scene in which she reveals her uber-ness by making what she did to help in the ambush less spectacular and in line with one of the unique metamagic techniques I gave her. It was all moot when my group managed to avoid the ambush.
-When the mission changed to "get the map at all costs" and the group realized they had a real chance of being outbid, they did the logical thing and rented a helicopter. During the auction one runner went with Frost and the rest stayed with the rented chopper. They very cleverly sabotaged the Aztech chopper. When Medjay, the agent of Celedyr, wins the auction and leaves the building his plan is, I shit you not, to strike out alone and on okada to make it to the airport. This is the part of the plot that, in hindsight, I should have modified. So he heads out across the bridge on an okada. The team takes off and quickly overtakes him while he's still on the bridge. Judicious placement of a number of CS grenades, a Levitate spell on the map case and then a clutch sniper rifle shot to sever the strap holding the case to Medjay's back. The map case levitates up to the chopper while Medjay goes down under a combination of CS gas and gel-round fire from the team's street sam. The Aztech team is delayed by their sabotaged chopper, the APEP team hasn't even gotten to their boat by this point, and all the other hopefuls have set up ambushes further along the route.
So they got away clean and stylish. As I said, I should have given Medjay more support. The author badly wanted a foot race through the slums of Lagos and had to defy the logic of the SR universe to get that scene written.