This will be the Info thread for my Seattle Knights game. That means this is a thread for OOC discussion (unless you'd really rather I made a new thread for that, in which case I will,) as well information like session summaries and anything useful or interesting or completely inane and irrelevant you find in the news.

I'll be keeping a link-list of useful posts in the OP.

Session... 1, I guess.

We'll call it 1 since I haven't been keeping formal recaps until now. (Also I probably should've done this on Monday, but hey.)

In any event, last game, we concluded the first run by narrating it out. Said narration can be found here. Then we proceeded to meet some new people; a Texan ex-pat with a heavily-armored hovertruck and a horse, and a Pueblo hacker who arrived with a flatbed's worth of drones and, most likely, some kind of past that will be catching up to her in the future. Everybody got to meet each other, and Angelrat got to meet an exceptionally large and strong pony.


Everyone also earned 2 Karma, except for those who earned more by making the GM laugh so hard he temporarily lost the power of breathing.

Session 2: In which Misters Johnson are negotiated with.

(almost_human did not appear for this session, and earns no Karma for it.)

This game began when the group ventured to Club Infinity, downtown, to meet the Mr. Johnson that Elrohir had told them about the day previously. After acquiring clubware, they ventured in, Bom having to bribe his way in because he chose to wear Hipster clothes rather than clubware, and they enjoyed the club for a bit, including the live band, an all-female group of Night One metavariant elves who rock out in the nude, even live.

The group then met Mr. Johnson, a flamboyant troll in purple, who treated those of them who wished to partake to some fine wine, and outlined the business at hand: stripping away the stuff that's likely to be lies, damned lies or misinformation, he wants them to recover an old-style optical data disk that's recently been offered for sale, and the data on that disk, and they are authorized to use any means necessary, including simply buying it, but the Johnson doesn't want any bidding war shenanigans going on.

Not much to go on, but the initially-offered fee was 20,000:nuyen: with a quarter up-front, which got haggled up to 27,000:nuyen: with no additional up-front. The group took the job, and headed out, when they were called by Elrohir: he had another Johnson who was calling for them by name, for immediate meeting in cold sim VR on a node in low earth orbit.

They met, and the second Mr. Johnson outlined the job: he wants them to discretely and securely watch a property he has come into possession of, keep it nice and in good repair, deal with any local flavor that happens, and stay vigilant for any of his potential enemies. The group deliberated for a while, and ultimately decided (since he was, evidently, tight with Elrohir,) to take the job. They didn't haggle up his starting price of 750:nuyen: a week, but instead took trade in kind: fake SINs for all.




XP Awards:
Everyone who attended gains 3 Karma for the start of an adventure.
Cascade gains 1 additional Karma for the first time playing up her Reality Impaired flaw.
Alexander gains 1 additional Karma for Darkone making a joke in #Exalted relevant to both Exalted and Shadowrun that both left me in stitches, and was mocked by a humorless meanie.

Loot: Everyone (that includes Long Johnson, unless for some reason almost_normal wants him to decline the offer,) gets a Rating 4 Fake SIN, details of which to be determined by you, the players, to fit in with your Johnson's tale to the HOA that he's a freelance information technologies consultant who travels a lot for his work. You also gain access to 221B Baker Street. Blimey Estates, Renton, a lifestyle that belongs to Mr. Johnson.

And finally, the 5,000:nuyen: up-front payment from the troll Mr. Johnson.


It is Thursday, March 17, 2072. Your meeting with Mr. Johnson was at midnight, and then Mr. Johnson (the electronic one) was met at around 1 AM.

Session 3: In which we get a taste of Local Flavor and the group enacts Maxim 38. Everyone got 2 XP, except for Kotaru, who made the GM snort marinara sauce out his nose, and got 3.

(almost_human did not appear for this session, and earns no Karma for it.)

Friday began with a mousy little woman turning up to officiously deliver a notice that the home would be forfeited if it were not occupied before the HOA meeting. When she found that it was, in fact, occupied, evidently by several people, she was flustered and left, and simply left an invitation to the town council/HOA meeting at the town courthouse.

The group did their legwork on Darius St. Johnson's case, and attended the meeting. Their presence swayed one vote which could have gone inconveniently for them had the measure passed. These were the main measures on the vote:
1: Should a bylaw be passed allowing for financial penalty to be applied to persons, vehicles or properties which do not keep with the neighborhood aesthetic? (Vote: No, with the vote of 221B Baker being the deciding vote.)
2: Should a bylaw be passed requiring every home and business to maintain at least one ornament on their lawn? (Vote passed overwhelmingly on just the voice count alone.)
3: Should a bylaw be passed allowing for a stricter curfew to be enforced by financial penalty? (Voted down overwhelmingly on the voice count.)

From there, the searchbots found their lead: a handsome orc in Underworld 92 talking about the email to his friends, then deleting it. Angelrat called up Mara Barret, the teenaged music aficionado and orc who lives on the FV Maureena Gale, and learned that this handsome Orc is named Nabo, an up-and-coming Goblin Rocker who was setting up for his farewell concert in Redmond tomorrow before flying off to begin his world tour.

Thanks to the GM opening his big mouth, the players hatched an insane scheme to steal Nabo's commlink without ever disembarking from their vehicles. Bom loaded up a truck with two crates of rats, one of which was marked "For Metahuman Consumption," and one small metal cage with a Demon Rat, and had Cascade forge a Shangri-La Productions Purchase Order for the rats to the tune of 1,800:nuyen:. All of this is because Nabo's commlink is having connection issues, and full-sim VR hacking it would be not only impossible, but dangerous.

The plan was as simple as it was nuts: The Runners in the truck would lure Nabo out into the open with their bizzare delivery of live rats, then the Ninja, wearing his Ruthenum stealth suit, with invisibility cast on him and his bike, would roar past through the scene while Alex, in the form of Mindrape McFieldMouse (posing as Bom's pet mouse) would use Suggestion to make Nabo ignore the motorcycle sounds.

It... Worked perfectly, thanks to an amazing set of rolls on the part of Kotaru, Ninja Thief, then (thanks to another suggestion on Nabo to trust Bom,) Nabo not only ordered his men to unload the rats (suspecting them to be part of a prank being played on him by a man called Ari, whom he signed the deal with,) but he paid for the theft of Bom's disposable commlink as well (again, suspecting it to be a prank played on him.)

Bom also had pen and paper on him, and Nabo signed a couple of hastily-rewritten generic invoices, to replace the "purchase order" which was on the stolen commlink. These have been earmarked for Mara and Angelrat as sou-ven-wairs.


So, the group has acquired Nabo's commlink, offloaded dangerous live paracritter cargo to a place where nothing bad could possibly come as a result of it, never in all of imagination, and you're ready to get hackin'!


You retrieve the email from Nabo's commlink - it was deleted, but anything deleted can be recovered, you know that. It's been anonymized, dropped from a throwaway email account that is almost certainly not the real email address of whomever sent the emails. Hacking to figure out who that mysterious person is will have to wait for next Sunday.

You also retrieve some paydata: though it's not likely you're interested in Nabo's porn collection, since none of it appears to be anything you could remotely blackmail him with, you do find lyrics-in-progress on several songs he was tweaking, his itinerary for the upcoming tour, and contact information on several other famous people and various actors in the music biz. What you do with it is up to you.


And lastly, here is a collection of people that were recorded at the Blimey Estates HOA meeting and were interesting enough to do a Matrix search upon. It should be pointed out that there is no elected Town Council in Blimey; the only elected office is that of Mayor, with administrative posts filled by appointees, though a vote of no-confidence in any given appointed official (or the elected official, for that matter,) can be called at any time by the presentation of a demand for such signed by a resident of 20% of occupied households. The "Council," then, consists of "everyone who bothers to show up in person." Each household is given one vote. Households which cannot agree within itself on a topic forfeit their vote on that topic.

As the mayor and official of the meeting, he was unable to vote.

Martin Short, the Mayor of Blimey. On the short end of average height with a full head of boring brown hair and a reasonably cheap twill suit, Mayor Short might as well be a middle school mathematics teacher. The state of his dress seems to make the case that being Mayor of Blimey is like getting the Keys to the City; mostly ceremonial and people tend to ignore it. He's been reelected as Mayor of Blimey every election since 2052, largely by virtue of the fact that he's been opposed only thrice in that time. (Elections are held every two years.) He seems to be a thoroughly boring person, cultivating no distinct accent whatsoever and not possessing any deep or powerful voice.

Gavin O'Toole, the CEO of Peelers, Inc, effectively Blimey's chief of police. That is his real name, by the way, given to him by his parents in 2036. He is, in fact, First-Generation Irish-American, given that he was born to an authentic Irishman and Woman who fled to the UCAS from the creation of Tir na nOg, he inherited control of Peelers, Inc, in 2070 from his retiring father, who founded the company on the basis of the fact that he was once, in fact, an authentic policeman from Ireland. Gavin himself has inherited most of his father's bad traits, but it cannot be said that he's not diligent, because he goes out in his extra-shiny, extra-custom uniform and walks a patrol five days a week like every enforcement officer in the company. Typically he doesn't speak with an accent, but when angry or excited, he develops one, indicating that he actively suppresses a genuine accent rather than intentionally using a fake.

As an appointed official of the Estates, Gavin was unable to vote.


Seamus O'Toole, former CEO of Peelers, Inc. If any man could ever be said to be a living throwback stereotype, it would be Seamus. He speaks full-time with a quick Connacht brogue and moves with the vigor of a man half of his age. Born in December 2002 in Galway, his 70th birthday is still a ways off, but he has successfully retired from a lifetime of police service, first fifteen years in the service of the Republic of Ireland, then to Lone Star Security Services when he and his late wife arrived in Seattle in 2035, and since 2041 as the chief executive officer of Peelers, Inc. He still wears his uniform Ulysses jacket, with shining gold buttons just like his son's, and he goes everywhere with a long, shining black walking stick shod in copper with a shiny, polished knob on the top.

Seamus voted yes on every ordinance.


Margaret Mayfield owns the Sixes and Sevens Pub at the intersection of Stalwart Avenue and Coronation Street. In public she speaks with a broad variety of accents from all over the United Kingdom, changing roughly on a weekly basis, indicating that she is probably a highly talented vocalist. There wasn't much information on the Matrix about her; whether that indicates that she's hiding something, or that aside from her ownership of a pub and an impressive range of accents she's a tremendously boring person, is hard to say.

Margaret voted no to the first two ordinances and yes to the third.

Brett Williams owns the Stuffer Shack franchise located just outside the gates of the Estates and lives just inside. Although his shop technically sits just outside the Estates, he's privately contracted Peelers, Inc, to provide on-site security, and he recently went the extra mile to renovate his Stuffer Shack to appear to be what he imagines a Stuffer Shack would have looked like in the mid-1950s UK. He's an especially vocal member of the community, who took the opportunity to passionately debate on all of the measures.

He voted yes on the first measure, and no on the second two.

Matthew Tomas owns Wanker's Grocery on Regicide Avenue, the nearest shop. Reputed to have the worst accent in the Estates, his stubborn attempts to put on a Cockney accent are so terrible he's often forced to drop it when conducting business. The name of his store comes from the fact that he often attempts to be exceptionally rude using only slang terms native to the UK, and the people of the estates took to calling him 'The Wanker' as a result.

He voted no on all three ordinances.

Kerwin Loomis moved into the Estates in 2069, taking possession of O'Malley's Pub when O'Malley died and left it to him for some inexplicable reason, and promptly renamed it O'Loomis's Pub. That was basically the extent of his concessions to fitting in to the Estates, he makes no attempt whatsoever to hide his Downtown accent. His father, the late Clarence "K-Spot" Loomis, died recently, possibly explaining the fact that he appeared to be quite distracted.

Loomis attended the meeting, but abstained from voting on any ordinances.

Beatrice Mallory owns the Honking Good Cafe on Coronation Street. The elderly Beatrice looks and sounds like somebody's grandmother, probably because she is the grandmother to several somebodies. She has a reputation for being the biggest gossip in the Estates by far, and quite possibly in all of Seattle, her goals in life seems to be nothing more than to run her cafe, serving the best tea, omlettes, paninis and quiche in all of Seattle, and to amass enough garden gnomes to march them to war. Her cafe proudly advertises the fact that all ingredients in her foods are organically grown locally, and all teas are imported from the United Kingdom. Her cafe has made several guidebooks and lists of the best places to eat in Seattle for twenty years running, and she singlehandedly brings in 40% of the outside commerce into Blimey. She speaks with a warm, grandmotherly English country accent, and has been doing so for so long it appears to have supplanted her native Seattlite accent.

Beatrice (call me Bea, dear, like the actress,) voted no on the first and third ordinance, and yes on the second, for which she authored and submitted the petition.


Nigel Smith is a man with Caucasian features and skin the color of tea heavily adulterated by cream. It's an open secret in the neighborhood that he's called "Knock-Off Nigel," both behind and to his face, and that he's a Fixer of sorts, with a specialization in acquiring counterfeit goods. His notable difference from everyone else in Seattle who peddles such goods is full transparency - even if the Predator-clone he's selling you has Ares Macrotechnology's logo on it, he will tell you that it is, in fact, a Chinese knock-off, and give you a reliable appraisal of just how shoddy the craftsmanship really is. He can acquire goods which are "just as good as the real thing," to "I'll sell it to you cheap if you want it, but that thing's half-likely to blow up in your hand." Virtually everyone in the Estates has bought something from him, including nearly all of the police, so he's the closest thing a black marketeer gets to legitimacy.

Nigel listened to all of the arguments and spoke up on all of them, but abstained from casting his vote on any of them.


It is Friday, March 18, 2072 as of the conclusion of the session, so it'll be Saturday the 19th when the next session picks up.Fri

Session 4 was a short session, everybody received 1 Karma.


Having possession of Nabo's commlink, the group decided not to wait at all, but to strike while the iron was hot, and to track down the sender of the email.

Cascade, with support from Angelrat, did just that, tracking the sender to a delightful bar in Tacoma called the Cathode Glow, which is full of computerized gear from as late as the very last days of the cyberdeck to extremely early amber-text dinosaur terminals. Aside from the alcohol, the science-fiction surroundings (including drones who are dressed up to look like famous and obscure sci-fi robots of ages past,) and the open lesbians who frequent the back, the main attraction is the video games and the nerd-friendly atmosphere.

Bom (surprisingly enough) got the group a warm entry into the Cathode Glow when he correctly identified, without taking time to look it up on the trix, the door-greeter drone as being made to strongly resemble the TT-8L/Y7 Gatekeeper Droid from Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, and responded to it appropriately. Once inside, the group enjoyed the atmosphere a bit, then asked about the name they had found: Zipper. Casey, the bartender, pointed them to the butch dwarf in the back, but warned them not to start trouble or try to strongarm his customers in his bar.



Zipper was at first reluctant to talk to the group, and Alexander's early attempts to be nice were read (rightly or wrongly,) as veiled intimidation, but when the promise of an appropriate bribe came up, Zipper quickly became chatty, even resuming the game of footsie she was playing with the other dwarf woman at the table. She named her asking price at 1,000 which Alexander promptly paid without haggling from the money the group had conned out of Nabo.

Zipper spilled the beans as fast as she could open the cans: The jackass who got her to send out emails is Kerwin "K-Spot2" Loomis, son of the late Clarence "K-Spot" Loomis, a musical impresario who was at the top of the world back in the 2040s. K-Spot2 was much less well-off than his pop was, having owned a dive-bar in Redmond called the Coda until it burned down "mysteriously" in 2069, at which point he somehow took over O'Malley's pub in Blimey Estates and renamed it O'Loomis's pub. (Zipper offered her opinion that this was an example of K-Spot arranging some largesse for his only son in his dotage, but offered no details nor evidence to back it up; the only remaining facts known are that K-Spot2 was somehow named as sole beneficiary in O'Malley's will.)


She also explained the origin of the disk to a limited degree: it was left to Kerwin when K-Spot croaked, and now Kerwin wants to offload it for nuyen and move up in the world.

Zipper's role in all of this was simple: she had a massive bar debt owed to K-Spot2, though probably not as much as she claimed, and Loomis is the kind of guy not to forget a debt he's owed. However, rather than nagging her for money, he promised to forgive the debt entirely if she sent out the emails, and to cut her in for 2% of anything he got from the disk itself.


Needless to say, this came as a bit of a blow to the head for the group, some members of whom had laid their eyes on Kerwin Loomis that very morning, at the Blimey Estates town council meeting. Is it Karma or serendipity that their secondary job would take them so close to the target of their first? For all you know, he may have had the disk upon his person at the time.

The question now is... What now? We'll pick up in the morning (well, after the sun rises, anyway,) on Saturday, March 19th, 2072.


Also, to show no hard feelings, Angelrat gave Zipper her contact information, effectively making herself a Contact for Zipper. In response, the mollified dwarf returned her own contact information, so Angelrat gets Zipper as a Connections 2, Loyalty 1 Contact. It never hurts to make friends... Or at least get the numbers of people who can be bribed to do stuff for you.

(PS, sorry for the truncated session. I woke up too early and couldn't go back to sleep.)

In closing, the group stops of at the edge of Renton; Cascade is sent back to 221B Baker Street to sit the house, while the rest of the group went home. When you get there, however, you find that Long John's hover-van is missing. In the kitchen, you all find dinner waiting for you in the stove; he baked you a casserole, and left a note on the table.

The note reads as follows:

I am very sorry to have to do this, y'all seem like nice people. I've enjoyed my stay here, and I wish it could've been longer. Unfortunately, my damn cousin has gone and gotten himself and his woman into trouble with some troublesome folk and called me to come and bail him out. Fair's fair, and he's kin, so I can't exactly say no.

I'm taking my truck and I'm gonna get my cousin and his woman and we're heading off into the woods to go camp until this all blows over. I don't know when, if ever, that I'll be back. I'm glad for that you took me in on such short notice, and I don't feel that y'all owe me anything for any of my work done for y'all. I owe you, and probably more than what I can do on such short notice is worth; if I get a chance, I'll see to it something comes your way by way of repaying your hospitality to me. Sadly, I've got to take Nixie, as we'll need her in the sticks. She really liked Angelrat, and I'm afraid this is probably gonna break her heart as much as it will yours, girl.

Before I left, I had my friends go over that big rig y'all have gotten, and they've identified all the RFID tags, including the stealth tags and the Security tag. I've left a chip on the driver's seat with instructions on how you can reprogram all those chips to say what you want and make it look like a new truck; you'll have to replace the Secure tag, though, those are hardwired, not even my friends can change them.

There's also a chip in the Kotaru's bunk. It'll only work in his datajack, and has information which is private to him. What he chooses to share of that is up to him.


Kotaru, when you slot the chip, you find a message from Long John.

My friends looked around in your head, and this is what they found out, cyber-man: You've got a bomb in your head, this you already know. What you most likely didn't know is that it was fancy; it had a kink mode and a kill mode. My friends were able to tamper with it so even if someone tries to activate the kill mode, it'll only kink you. The good news is that the kink mode is only designed to destroy your headware commlink. The bad news is what else is inside that headware commlink of yours: Some son-of-a-bitch squirreled in a data filter and a headsafe. It's rather clever, actually; what my little friends tell me, it bypasses the usual problems of using a data filter by using the headsafe as additional loong-term storage, with the data filter writing to it instead of to your gray matter, then when the system's shut down again, the headsafe closes up and you forget what you just did.

Maybe with a lot more time, my little friends and I could have tampered with it and gotten into it, disabled the remote activation system or opened up the headsafe itself. Unfortunately, this is not the case, so it's all I can do to warn you about it. I can tell you that there is nothing - nothing cybernetic, anyway - in your head that will force your behavior when the system goes on, but I don't reckon that's going to be more than a little bit of comfort.

I was, however, able to tamper with the remote activation system so its diagnostic mode will start up when it's switched on. If you see a red-and-white checkered board appear in the lower-right of your vision, that means that someone has activated it and it's about to start up. I think I diddled it so it'll dump its diagnostic stuff to a text file in your main commlink memory instead of the datasafe, but there's no way to test it. You may want to take this opportunity to activate some kind of recording device not linked to your augmentations in any way, shape, or form.

That's all I can tell you. It ain't good news, but it could be worse. I wish you luck in your struggles, friend; you're gonna need 'em.

Um... Just out of curiosity...

I know you guys are reading this thread. Does nobody have any comments, anything to say about the game?

I CAN REPLY TO THINGS NOW!

I'm reading along, but I don't have any particular questions. You've been very thorough keeping all this up, and that helps because I'm that player that tends to forget details between sessions when I don't take notes...and your notes are way better than mine! Thanks for the repository! XD

You're welcome. Um... Can you post for the others exactly what you had to do to get to be able to post? I joined so long ago, I didn't have to go through this nonsense.

LINK

That was the link with directions that actually WORKED. Basically, send "forums@dumpshock.com" an e-mail from the one you used to register, make sure to include your username, and request activation. One of the admins will get around to it in a timely manner, and you should then be fully activated.

Session 5 was another short session, another 1 Karma.

Cascade thoroughly violated the sanctity of Kerwin Loomis' home and business, getting into his systems and pwning the crap out of them undetected,and discovered that Loomis is a greedy/paranoid person who slurps all the money that comes into his hands off onto credsticks the moment it comes to him. This seems to be a "Loomis" thing, as there is no evidence that can be seen that he's being squeezed by anyone. She also discovered that he's either been unable or unwilling to copy the data off the disk, and has made no mention of it in any correspondences, save those cryptic ones with Zipper.

The group then cased O'Loomis' Pub, where they learned that the local authentic Irishman (not Tir citizen, Irishman, thank ye kindly,) Seamus O'Toole, was having words with Loomis over the running of his pub. While Loomis was serving reasonably suspicious food-like product under the guise of an English breakfast to Bom and Kotaru, Angelrat called with a voicechanger on, and talked with him, hearing his asking price of 500,000 . She ominously advised him to come down, and called Mister Johnson to relay his asking price.

Mister Johnson called back in the late evening of that day, talking a bit. He said that he would be willing to pay 20,000 sight-unseen, sound-unheard, for the disk. Upon hearing that it supposedly contained lost songs by JetBlack, however, he grew grave, and told the team that they were not to risk destroying the disk under any circumstances, and that he wanted this to be done cleanly if at all possible, telling them to authenticate the disk. He instructed the team to tell Loomis that if (only if, mind you,) it's authenticity were verified, then six figures was a guarantee, and the exact disposition of those figures could be negotiated once more was known about the contents - the number of tracks, when they were from in his career, and how good they are.

Session 6!
We had a proper length session for a change! Everyone gets two Karma! (Yay.) Bom gets an additional Karma for making the GM break into giggles. [1] (Yay.)

The game began late on Sunday, with the group meeting Kerwin Loomis at O'Loomis's pub. They met him, confirmed that the physical disk was real, and left to get a device that could read it. They found it at the Cathode Glow, which they rented the use of for 500 (with a 2,500 security deposit.)

Fun Facts: The disk itself was a media that was never terrible popular back in the day; it had a fantastically huge capacity, the sort of thing owned by audiophiles and simphiles and tridophiles, or used for the recording of studio master files, because it could hold a hell of a lot of uncompressed data, but was deliberately only writable once. It was also used as a media for storing vast quantities of research data in portable form.

They went back to O'Loomis's on Monday, but the group had company - tough guys with an invisibility spell up, that didn't fool the cameras. The group owned them despite the toughs making the first move, stunning them all down without taking any hurt whatsoever in return. Loomis was shocked (and needed a smoke, since they caught him with some Orgy collateral damage,) but unharmed; the toughs were taken to the chilled, insulated keg cellar and their belongings were searched, while Loomis deflected concern about the gunshots that Kotaru had fired by faking evidence they were merely firecrackers. He still got fleeced to the tune of 400 though.

Angelrat and Cascade then collaborated and conspired to crack the encryption, only to run afoul of some cryptologist genius's devilish handiwork: the encryption is dual-layer, and decrypting one layer hashes the second layer to the point that it becomes absolutely unsolvable, resulting in a file which is recognizable, but not viable. It's not a good idea for small important things (like battle plans) because enough will get through as to compromise the plan, but it can render huge files (uncompressed simsense, vast swathes of raw data) unusable commercially (or unreliable, scientifically,) through the introduction of vast, systemic errors and massive quality degradation. It's brilliant, and one might wonder why it hasn't caught on.

Regardless, they were able to tell that the voice on the recording is unquestionably JetBlack, and the seven tracks on the disk are definitely not in the established discography. Music labels would quite literally kill for this, so you should take it as a kindness that so far, they've been sticking with SnS. With any luck, they'll continue to do so as long as you do the same!


With the disk's existance compromised to more parties and the revelation that others are seeking the disk, the group parted with Loomis, who is presumably going to put the disk in a safe-deposit box for now, and the group has gone to call Mr. Johnson about the disk. They left a message for him about the disk's authenticity.

When gameplay ended, it was the wee hours of Tuesday, March 22nd, 2072. Go to one of your homes, get some shuteye!


[1] Because it was requested, this is why Bom earned an extra Karma.

Context: Kerwin "K-Spot2" "O'"Loomis (that makes sense in context of its own) wants to sell a disk containing 7 lost recordings by legendary dead rocket JetBlack.

<ShadowDragon8685> Loomis produces the disk, and carefully sets it in the machine...
<ShadowDragon8685> For a few seconds you hear nothing, then your ears are ASSAULTED (with intent) by a cacophonous mix of pops, crackles, and squeals, punctuated by the occasional loud blast of guitar chord or a snippet of voice for just a few seconds at late-19th-century levels of fidelity. The musicality is obvious, but it's heavily encrypted.
* Angelrat winces, and turns the thing down.
<ShadowDragon8685> Loomis looks pained by the sound, and he plugs his ears, wincing.
<Bom> "Oh, I didn't realize he went into electronic music. Huh. Can't say I really care for it, not much of a beat."

I immediately thought of Skrillex when I saw that line, lol.

I have no questions or concerns before next session. Everything seems remarkably clear, which in this game I'm thinking means it's about to get very, very muddy and/or violent.


...OK, lied. One concern: Get some sleep so we can keep having normal sessions! XD

I'm trying to. My brain often commits mutiny by staying up late on Saturdays and/or going "lol early wake up."

I'm trying to beat it into shape.

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2072, and Session 7 opened with the group awakening and proceeding with the plan to track down a way to unlock the disk's secrets fully. After they returned the disk-reader to the Cathode Glow and got their 2,500 deposit back, they proceeded to the site of Healey Productions, formerly Apogee Records Redmond, formerly Carrion Studios.

There, they met a man with a rather contented outlook on like, an older African-American Orc named Stanley Laskey, the maintenance man/janitor, who used to be a sound tech for Apogee Records Redmond, who used to be a junior sound tech for Carrion Studios. He had some amazing tales to tell them about the history of the studio, and had even laid his own hands on a (different) copy of the Carrion Sessions '48, a long time ago.

Stanley told about the history of the studio: Carrion was the place to record back in the day, all the megahot stars were in and out of the place in the 40s, and the place peaked even later than that, during his day. But the peak was also the time of the greatest excess; pretty much everyone more senior than him was heavily invested in some kinds of vice, and skimming from the company coffers to feed their habit. Though they were often recording 24/7, and the big name music stars loved them, the financial situation was swirling the drain faster and faster, until the company shopped around for a bail-out. They found it when the record label Apogee bought them out, and promptly sacked everyone who was embezzling.


This turned out to be a miscalculation on the part of Apogee; the stars immediately mutinied, because they'd fired K-Spot and Delphia the amazing sound engineer, breaking their contracts as a bloc and telling Apogee to get stuffed. Literally overnight, the same record studio that had been recording Maria Mercurial the night before was reduced to recording second-string acts, and Stanley was charged with cleaning everything of the old guard out. He found the disk in Clarence Loomis's office safe, and duly turned it over to Apogee Records, where it was (at cost of great expense and time) brute-force decrypted sometime between 2059 and 2064.

Apogee always played the long-game, they were planning to release it as part of a huge JetBlack retrospective in 2068, on the 20th anniversary of his death. They were ultra-secure about it, storing it all offline in their offices, where only a handful of people (Stanley among them because, in his own words, he 'kept his ears to the ground,') even knew they existed, and where they were insulated from theft by deckers or matrix glitch.


Unfortunately, they weren't insulated against fire, or the subsequent physical collapse of their main headquarters, that occurred in the aftermath of the Crash 2.0. It was all destroyed, and Apogee sold itself to Horizon, who folded the personnel (the only thing worth keeping) into Shangri-La Productions. Yes, those guys, the ones who manage Nabo, the ones who went after the disk. The subsidaries were sold off for a song and a dance; Mr. Healey, the guy who was managing Apogee Records Redmond, bought the studio. Unfortunately for him, he didn't have any charismatic attractors on his staff the way K-Spot 2 or Delphia used to be, and his talent fled him to better record labels and better studios.

Now the place supports itself by giving studio time to any jackass with a garage band who can meet their 150 an hour studio fee while overworked, underskilled, unappreciated sound techs try to make them sound competent.


Stanley then told the group that if they wanted to know the story of those nigh-mythical sessions, they'd need to dig out the records. Fortunately, he archived them in 2061, before the Crash but after the advent of the commonly-used optical chip specification. The catch was that said chips were in the back of the back room, which had become a devil rat nest. He explained that he had been going to try to clean it out himself, but that he had come to the realization that he preferred Mr. Healey's displeasure to the possibility of getting his body eaten by Devil Rats, and had never taken the shotgun he'd brought in and used it on the rats. He gave the shotgun and shotshell to Kotaru, and gave them a maglock key to the room, which had a second door that opened into the alleyway.

What followed was nothing short of a pitched battle; six devil rats inside, and, once they opened the door, five devil rats outside, and one Demon Rat. Angelrat took some hurt early on, but later the group was mowing the damn things down. At the end, the Demon Rat let out a howl that was returned from all around, in the sewers, in the upstairs of all the wrecked buildings around them, but the group captured it with levitate, shoved it in Bom's critter cage on the truck, and Angelrat and Cascade drove off with it, leading the swarm away, hopefully.


The group then cleaned up the back room, finding 350 in antique paper currency in one of the desk drawers, and the records they were after. Stanley told them they could cart off anything they wanted, and the group promised to do just that later. He also gave them his number (Stanley is a Connections 2, Loyalty 2 Contact for everyone he met, which is everyone except Cascade,) and found the record they were looking for; March 2nd, 2048, the entry made at 2:58 AM. It lists JetBlack as having recorded it with his backup band, and most of the expected sound techs were absent, with only the chief tech, a woman named Delphia, and Marli Bremmerton, known to have been a close confidante of JetBlack's, manning the sound booth.

(Stanley explained that when he knew her, Marli was a big of a technical wizzer with talent, his own equal on the sound-boards.)


He didn't know where to find Marli, but knew that if anyone knew, it would be Delphia, who was always one of Marli's closest confidantes. Dee has fallen from grace hard, with the beetles, and is now believed to be a street-level pusher. Stanley guesstimated that thanks to Knight Errant's new campaign, she would have been pushed to somewhere she could flee into the lawless parts of Redmond, and that meant she was probably in the area, as it was one of the slightly-lawful parts of Redmond, and her old stomping grounds from her golden years. He suggested they speak with Mary, the dwarf teenager on the desk, as her sister was a chiphead.

Mary confirmed that her sister's dealer was supposed to look like Stanley's description of Delphia, and gave them her address in exchange for a promise they would either try to talk her into cutting her sister off altogether, or score something from her so heinous and terrible that she could scare her sister off the Beetles with it.


So!

The group has acquired the following:


3 Karma (Kotaru got 4, for a Three-Die Stunt with his shotgun.)
A break-action over/under 12-ga shotgun with a red dot sight above the barrel and a tactical flashlight below it. (It came with 12 shotshells. Kotaru blew through six.)
350 in old-school bills.
The data they were looking for regarding the Carrion sessions.
A new lead on Marli Bremmerton: in the form of Delphia.
A contact, Stan Laskey, 2/2, with his ears to the ground in the music biz, janitorial and maintenance skills, and electronics and music mixing skills.
And a Devil Rat Gamma. (The one with Regeneration.)

Sorry I've been tardy about writing this. I've been busy making the Old Republic a safer place.


Ahem...


Session 8 proceeded immediately from the one prior to it. After spending a short few minutes engaged in a terrific gunbattle with a bunch of rats; regular, devil, and even demon, the group had acquired the information they needed regarding the next lead in their investigation. The more they dig, the more of a picture they paint of what happened back in the day.

The group tracks down their mysterious cryptologist recording engineer, Delphia. Only two blocks removed, geographically, from the site of her glory days, she's become a sad sight; giving teenagers barely more than kids guns to guard her little pushing operation and keeping them wired up and happy with low-level simsense stimulation, Delphia herself is somehow, amazingly, still in control of all of her faculties. The woman must have an absolutely incredible amount of willpower, because she isn't walking the path of the burnout so much as bombing along it at top speed, yet she is lucid enough to continue dealing.


The group managed to snap her out of her jonesing, incredibly, by mentioning her old days, and subsequently got her to talking. Yes, she knows where Marli Bremmerton is, and yes, she did encrypt the file they're looking for. She very nearly came close to cutting out the next step of the investigation when they asked her for the encryption key, but after she pulled out her old friend - an extremely customized Cyberdeck which began life as a Fairlight Durandal and lives on in the case of a Fairlight Excalibur - and started sorting through all the old keys, they told her what they wanted her to unencode; which turns out to have been the one key she actually deleted, because her best friend - only friend - Marli Bremmerton had asked her to.

She would have given them the code just to get them out of her squat, but asking her to betray the last person in the world who had ever been nice to her was another matter. She cursed herself for it, but agreed that she would do it for a price - 10,000 - or services she considered equivalent. In this case, retrieval of a datachip containing something which is most likely to be another BTL recording. She sent one of her customers, an orc girl, to go get it, but the girl evidently slotted it, then ran into the Underground to a doctor named Sally.

Delphia's not vengeful. She doesn't want the girl roughed up or anything; she just told them to get back what was hers and return it to her, and that would be the end of it, and she'd give them the information on Marli Bremmerton. But first, the group needed to get into the Underground; not an easy task at the best of times, for a group without a single pointy tooth or horn amongst them. The first plan to be circulated was that Bom would call his organlegger and ask for a hollowed-out husk of an Ork or Troll that he could have a spirit animate, but One-Eyed Willy had just sold all of his by-products off as ghoul chow.

Plan B was to call Elrohir. Calling an elf fixer to find an orc or a troll seems weird, but Elrohir has friends everywhere. He knew an old Runner, a troll, who was still alive and notionally retired, and gave her a call. She responded by sending her boy, Brick, to help out.


Brick showed up at Elrohir's warehouse as promised, and after he called his doctor - the very same doctor the girl had allegedly run to, in a remarkable coincidence, hemmed and hawwed and determined in the end that going through the Rhino was probably the best and fastest way to get down into the Underground, even if it meant they were likely to get their faces on holo by Humanis. A little magical disguise took care of that, but when the group arrived, it seemed that things were getting more and more tense, by the way that all the orcs and trogs were scrupulously polite; lots of hairy eyeballs, not an unkind word. When they got to the underground itself, the streets had almost become a second crime mall, with people hawking everything from guns - openly - to body armor, gas masks, and more.

The Underground is clearly concerned about an invasion from above, and who could really blame them, what with notorious racist and Humanis man Kenneth Brackhaven in office, and promising that the "Underground Question" will be being "looked into very thoroughly." Someone in the Underground has thumped it into all of the residents that they desperately need not to be the side that throws the first punch or fires the first shot... But it almost seems like every orc and his mother down there is well-armed and prepared to fire the second, third, fourth, and fifth shots.


It's not really your problem, but it's something that could well lead to employment in the future. Strife begets opportunity, after all.


The group found the doctor - Sally Hayes, M.D., a Caucasian Orc with a medical degree to prove she's a real doctor, that's about four-fifths likely to be genuine, in a clinic set up in the old basements. It never hurts to know a good street doc. When she found out what they were there for, she became briefly enraged, telling how the poor young woman who had slotted it had run to her, crying like a little girl, begging her to do something, anything, to kill her memory. The doctor couldn't get any straight answers out of her, so she did the stupid and slotted it herself, thankfully in low-gain mode.

Then she took on an almost malevolant sense of cold, medical detachment, when a member of the group (Kotaru) jokingly asked if it was a snuff BTL, and explained that it was the last forty-two minutes and seven seconds of life of a teenaged girl who appeared to be pacific islander, and no larger than Angelrat. (Which would put her around 13-15.) The doctor was not done; she went on to explain, in thankfully brief detail, that the girl had been beaten badly by three adult men, then raped, simultaneously. Offhandedly, she adds that the girl had been a virgin. The girl was then beaten more, until she ceased to cry; then a horse was brought in, and the doctor made it clear without specifying that the horse had been made to rape the girl as well.

The snuffchip ended, she explained, when one of the men forced himself into her throat and choked the life out of her while using her. This, the doctor estimated, might actually have been some small measure of mercy, given that in her medical opinion, it spared the girl about thirty minutes of death by bleeding from internal trauma.


The doctor then invited the group - just the couriers - to take the damn chip, and let the woman who ordered it be damned. Bom promised to pass along the message of damnation to Delphia and took the chip, even after the doctor stated that she had made a copy and sent it to Interpol.


A brief discussion on the punishment for inhuman crimes ensued, with the doctor stating that she felt they should be hanged; death by firing squad being too swift and merciful for the men responsible, but death by lethal injection being too slow and inhumane; and decapitation, too messy. Alexander expressed his view that someone should get medieval on them (a woodchipper was involved in his suggestion,) but Bom sided with the doctor.

Cascade copied the chip, though for what reason is unknown. There was also talk of tampering with it, sabotaging it somehow so that it laid down a P-Fix compulsion to break the habit of BTLs, but none of the group had the skills to do that, and with Delphia being the electronic wizzer she is, and likely to find out if her chip has been tampered with, would be furious. If the group denied culpability, then the only reasonable conclusion she could draw was that the doctor did it.


The game ended before the group could return to Delphia, largely due to electromagnetic activity in the skies over the GM's home. Sorry about that. But the group did decide to keep Brick around, deciding that having some trog muscle would be a good idea, and make them look a little less like a smoothskin/pointy-ear alliance conspiracy. (The GM may have added that last bit, but it does. )


The group gained a new member: Brick, a trog heavy! Bom is working on working off his prejudices as well.

The group also got take-out from the Big Rhino to-go; hope you like barbeque. You retrieved Delphia's chip, and everyone who attended - yes, including brick - earns three Karma. Bom and Brick both earn an additional Karma, for making jokes that robbed the GM of the power of breath.

Much, yet so little, yet so much, was accomplished, in Session 9.

The group found Delphia again, and gave her the chip she wanted, and a lecture. Sarcastically, she threw another snuff BTL at Angelrat, explaining that it was an Aztlaner torture 'interrogation" session that depicts the final hour of several Yucatan dissident's lives, and that she doesn't get anything out of it anymore. She also gave you Marli's address.


Marli Bremmerton lives in Belvue, in a haunted mansion. No, no joke, no euphemisms. It's a haunted mansion in every sense. You got one of the resident ghosts to introduce you to Marli, which should clue you in that Marli can Astrally Percieve, since ghosts can't Materialize. Upon learning you have a copy of the disk's contents - and name-dropping JetBlack - you were invited in. Marli was cold at first, but as she was using her recording studio to clean up the music to more bearable scrambled song, she talked and rambled a lot, about a lot of things. She told about her break with Delphia, and dropped an unsubtle reference to them having been lovers, as well as that she blew her top at Delphia after the Year of the Comet changed her, losing her temper and accusing Delphia of lying to her.

A ferocious thunderstorm kicked up while the group were in the recording studio, and it was so bad Marli didn't want to send them back out in it, so she had the drones prepare dinner. Unfortunately for Alex, the chicken was glazed with a soy-based sauce, kicking in his allergies, so he's not having the bestest night ever. Maybe he would've been better off calling up Cynthia and asking her to do wild and kinky things to him.


Then a lightningstrike nearby put Angel flat on her back, and caused a mains power surge which killed the mansion's CHN. The backup generator didn't kick in automatically, and the group scrambled to find Marli, believing that she might have been on life support. Brick thankfully found a way down a secret hatch in the wine cellar, to her second cellar bunker, where the group found her; Dumpshocked, but not in need of life support. She broke into tears when they first saw her, but when the group failed to reacted in horror to the mean way in which SURGE treated her - creating dermal deposits and bony protrusions, much like those of Trolls - she perked up, even though Bom's fumbling attempts to administer medicinal and magical help were little more than placebos.


In the end, the group has made a contact, a friendly one. Marli was once a rock-star, now she spends most of her time in the Matri. She's not as good an e-wizzer as Delphia was, but she is, in fact, a passable Rigger and Hacker, and she still has her connections. Bom wants to encourage her to get out more and reclaim her stardom, but even if she can pass the self-esteem hurdle, Marli hasn't aged as well as Delphia, largely due to a sedentary lifestyle and brutally minimal caloric intake brought about by the way moving causes her severe pain. Still, there are ways around that, and if anyone can afford the full treatment, it's got to be Marli Bremmerton.

The group also encouraged her to reach out to Delphia. Perhaps she will.


Everyone receives 2 Karma, and Marli Bremmerton as a Connections 4, Loyalty 3 Contact. You really touched her when you jumped into action out of fear for her safety, and failed to react in horror to her appearance.


And we have news - bad news. Bom has to quit the game, owing to a real life group occupying this time-slot. Bummer. But, on the other hand, now we can recruit again. Yaaay.

This run should be wrapped up in a few more sessions, and I'll start recruiting when it's closer.

Session 10. Wow. Has it been that long?

Session 10 wraps up your first real, proper Shadowrun, and what a crazy ride it's been! 10 was a marathon, 10-hour session, and everyone reaps the just rewards for that: 5 Karma for sticking it out.

Now, it's time to go down the Karma awards.

Situation Awards:

• You got the data from Nabo's commlink - hell, you took the commlink right out of his hand! 1 Karma.
• You tracked down Kerwin Loomis, and though you didn't steal the disk from his person when you had the chance, you ultimately got it to your employer on satisfactory (if expensive!) terms. 1 Karma.
• You found Marli Bremmerton, and dealt with her without killing her or injuring her seriously. 1 Karma.
  
  • In addition, when Marli Bremmerton became injured due to events outside your control, the team leapt into action, at no obvious gain to themselves, to provide aid to her, and emotional support at seeing her true face. 1 Karma.
• You found Delphia, and dealt with her without killing her or injuring her seriously. 1 Karma.
  
  • In addition, despite your disgust at how far along the road in a hell of her own making she is, you still tried to help her, by providing her contact information to her old friend and once-lover, Marli Bremmerton, and to someone who can provide her with employment, Darius St. George. 1 Karma.
• You delivered the disk to Mr. Johnson exclusively, despite stiff and trained opposition, including company men, Shadowrunners, and a team of goths with machine guns, led by a Street Samurai, a Mage, and whatever the hell Risa was, probably an Adept or Magician, and unquestionably a Vampire. 1 Karma.

Additionally, everyone survived, and earns 1 additional Karma.
Brick has been doing fantastic roleplaying since he arrived, and earns 2 Karma on that front. Angel and Cascade are often quieter than I'd like, but when you do decide to pipe in, you've always got something good to say, and everyone else has been on-the-ball with roleplaying as well. The rest of you get 1 Karma.

Brick and Alex displayed guts (and stupidity, but guts) in walking into an obvious trap, baited with nothing but air, out of sheer curiosity. You get a Karma for bravery.

Humor awards are awarded per-game. In Session 10, Alex left me in stitches at one point, so he gets the humor award for this session as well. 1 Karma to Alex for that.


By the way, you just missed out on getting a pacifist run award by shooting down the street samurai in the last session.




Session 10 opened with the group awakening on Wednesday, March 23nd 2072, finding that someone was approaching their long-term Johnson's house in Blimey Estates. She was evidently a teenaged punk trying to tag the place, and Alexander decided to magically fuck with her. He attempted to maintain the pretense that it wasn't him, but she wasn't fooled. the Peelers showed up to investigate, but took no other action other than filing a statement. They've got their eyes on you, though. This is probably not what Mr. Johnson meant when he asked you to keep things low-key.

The group reported to Mr. Johnson of their efforts to find the decryption key, and how they had fruitlessly exhausted every imaginable lead short of digging up JetBlack's lost copy of the key, the location to which remains a complete and utter mystery. Johnson called the group in to return and deliver.


Kerwin Loomis had gone to ground in the stupidest place possible; across the street from the wreckage of his old bar in Redmond, the Coda. He did not have the disk on him, but when the group got there, they were being pursued by another team. Runners. Attacking from lightly-armored vehicles with light machine guns and rotor-drones, they were no match for the armor on the CityMaster, and after the driver of one car was put into physical overflow and the car crashed, they yielded the fight and the group left.


The group then drove to Renton to offload the gun (which wouldn't have passed inspection downtown) in a box a Elrohir's facillity, and drove towards the meet. But as they were leaving, they got a call from a woman who identified herself as Risa, the executor of JetBlack's estate, with an offer to double the number they had in-hand for the disk. When they sounded skeptical, Risa claimed to have Kerwin Loomis hostage, which came as something of a surprise, given that the group had Kerwin Loomis in their possession.

Curiosity more than anything else led to Brick and Alexander being offloaded to meet Risa, with Angelrat and Cascade flying matrix and drone overwatch. This turned out to be a good thing; predictably it was a trap, but things got hairy when half the team from before; the Dwarf, Samurai, and Rigger - attacked in the good car, with the two drones. That battle was decisively ended very swiftly (in under two combat passes!) with the Samurai dead at the guns of a drone commanded by Cascade (actually Kotaru, since Cascade had been forced to retire for the night, and Kotaru had nothing else to do,) Risa's mage and sammie 'retired' by the guns on the two rotor-drones the other Runner's team brought, and the Dwarf shot up nearly to full stun (he's a TOUGH bastard!) by a full narrow burst through the driver's windshield on his truck.


With Risa shot to full stun by Brick, and one of her goons knocked out; five Goons both Suppressed and Orgied, the driver nearly unconscious, and a Force 5 Air Spirit materialized in their truck, the dwarf signaled his team's unconditional surrender, knowing that you probably weren't going to accept a second yield in as many hours. You let them walk away with the clothes on their backs and their dead friend, and even administered magical and mundane first aid to the dwarf, which is a hell of a lot more than they could have expected from a lot of denizens of the sprawl. The ork's pissed, but the dwarf seems to have him under control. You may not have made a friend, but you didn't make an enemy, either. They also explained that, though it probably looked like an attack on everyone, it actually wasn't. They were under the belief you sent the truck away as a decoy while you made the real meet, and their plan was to opportunistically jump your Johnson (Risa) after you'd left. When they saw Risa's goons holding you at gunpoint, they figured you were in for a doublecross, and they could jump in, gun down Risa's goons, you could take your money, they could take the disk, and you all walked away happy.


Angelrat and Kotaru met with Mr. Johsnon, with Kerwin Loomis in tow. They negotiated their deal for an undisclosed, but certainly massive, sum of nuyen, and then Mr. Johnson called you in. He received your report about the other players in the game, and was duly impressed. He hired a no-name team and got Prime Runner results.

Mr. Johnson paid you, and paid you a substantial bonus. Additionally, Loomis promised you a rich sum to deliver him to the meet, then to Sea-Tac airport, intact, which happened. You're all going to bed well-fed and happy tonight.


Now, the total take for this session is substantial; you emerged victorious in a huge battle. You stripped them of their stuff, but left the payment Risa's team brought to tempt you away from Mr. Johnson, thereby avoiding the wrath of her employer.
Mr. Johnson paid you the rest of your free agreed upon when the Run began; 22,000 . He additionally paid you a sum of 10,000 as a bonus for a job well done, and Kerwin Loomis paid you an additional 5,000 to ensure his safe departure from Seattle.

From Risa's group, you took the following:

• Guns
  
  • Ares Predator IV x1
  • Ceska Black Scorpion (Smartlinked) x7
  • Colt Manhunter x1
  • HK 227X x7
  • Thermal Smoke Grenades x2
  • Yamaha Sakura Fubuki x1
• Ammo
  
  • Ares Predator Magazines (15x 10mm Caseless) x3
  • Colt Manhunter Magazines (16x .357 Magnum) x3
  • HE Grenades x2
  • HK 227X Magazines (28x 9x19mm Parabellum) x21
  • Yamaha Sakura Fubuki ammo (40x 5.7x16mm Cherry Blossom)
• Other Weapons
  
  • Monofilament Sword x1
• Armor
  
  • Armor Jacket x1
  • Lined Coat (Nonconductivity 4) (Risa's)
  • Lined Coat x1
  • Camouflage Suit (Urban Night/Day reversible) x7
• Commlinks
  
  • Erika Elite (Risa'a) [3, 4, 3, 3]
  • Hermes Ikon (Sammy's) [4, 3, 4, 4]
  • Sony Emperor (Mage's) [2, 3, 2, 2]
  • Renraku Sensei x7 (Flunkies) [2, 4, 2, 2]

You got a fantastic haul from the Runners you beat up. They left with little more than their dignity and the clothes on their backs, but it's not likely they'll seek revenge, since they crossed you twice in as many hours and you let them live. Whether Ari Tarkasian, their Johnson, will be so kind, is a matter for the future to resolve.

• Vehicles & Drones
  
  • GMC MPUV*
  • Hawker-Siddley Mixcoatl x2**
  • LoneStar iBall x2 (Flash Pak/Smoke Grenade)
• Guns
  
  • AK-97 w/underbarrel Smartgun System (Samurai's)
  • Ares Viper Slivergun x1 (Dwarf's)
  • Mossberg AM-CMDT x1 (Dwarf's)
• Other Weapons
  
  • Phalanx Systems Großwildjäger X Missile Launcher ***
• Ammo
  
  • AK-94 Magazines (38x 7.62mm Soviet) x3
  • Anti-Vehicle Missiles x2
  • Ares Viper Magazines (30x Viperfang Slivers) x2
  • HE Grenade x1
  • Frag Grenade x1
  • Fragmentation Missiles x2
  • Mossberg Magazines (10x 12ga Buckshot) x2
  • Smoke Grenades x3
• Other Gear
  
  • Concealed Arm Slide Holster (Dwarf's) x1
  • Handheld Radio Signal Scanner (Rating 3) x1
  • Smartlink Goggles x1
• Commlinks
  
  • Hermes Ikon (Dwarf's)
  • Hermes Ikon (Samurai's)
  • Hermes Ikon (Rigger's)

*GMC MPUV (Runner's Black Book/MilSpecTech)

Surprisingly gutless for a military vehicle, the GMC MPUV is pretty much the bare minimum vehicle you want to drive around Redmond Barrens. It's been around for twenty years, and except for the people signing the procurement bills, everyone agrees that it's the worst main-line military “jeep”-role vehicle to come along since the actual jeep from the 1940s, a situation which is only exacerbated by the fact that military units still try to use it in roles that larger, better-armored and more off-road-capable vehicles filled, to very mixed results.

Still, it is actually armored, and soldiers who have to take it into combat have taken to nicknaming it the “combat hatchback” based on the visual profile of the standard model, even though it does not, in fact, have a hatch-back door. The latest factory models have actually addressed some of the issues soldiers have had with them, such as undercarriage armor, a stronger Signal rating, and even a better engine. Unfortunately for you, this is not a late model.

This one has an infrared spotlight mounted to the top, a winch, the standard multi-fuel engine and offroad suspension. It's had the hatch and pintle-mount added as a factory modification, and has seats for five; six, if one of them doesn't mind standing at the gun-post the whole trip.

Handling: -1; Acceleration: 15/30; Speed: 120; Pilot: 1; Body: 14; Armor: 6; Sensor: 1; Availability: 8; Cost: 16,000

This vehicle has an Ares MP-LMG (Arsenal) built into the pintle mount, feeding from a 100-round belt.
Damage: 6P, AP: -1; Mode: BF/FA; RC 2(3) (irrelevant); Ammo: Belt; Availability 12F; Cost 1,500
There are two spare boxes of ammo, each containing a whole belt, in the truck.


**Hawker-Siddley Mixcoatl (Runner's Black Book/MilSpecTech)
If you feel bad about using Aztechnology gear, you should simply mollify yourself with the fact that you can always use this thing to blow a few Azzies away. The Mixcoatl resembles nothing so much as a miniature helicopter the size (in total) of a medium-length sedan. It is marketed and used as a perimeter defense drone, primarily for support of armored columns on the move and supply camps in dense jungles, such as Bogota. For a medium drone, it has a surprisingly large sensor suite, it comes with a weapon mount by default, and it has six articulated legs that, while incapable of providing locomotion on their own, allow the Mixcoatl to confidently land on and take off from broken terrain. It has an exceptionally long duration mission profile thanks to SunCell technology incorporated into its outer plating, though the SunCell system makes any modifications to the hull a royal bitch.

As a rotordrone, it is obviously capable of vertical landing and lift-off, it has improved sensors, a Suncell system, and an external, flexible, remote weapons mount.

Handling: +1; Acceleration: 10/20; Speed: 90; Pilot: 3; Body: 3; Armor: 6; Sensor: 3; Availability: 9R; Cost: 17,000

These particular Mixcoatl have been armed with a pair of Ingram SuperMach 100s. (Arsenal)

Ingram SuperMach 100:
Damage: 4P; AP -; Mode: SA/FA; RC 3(4) (irrelevant); Ammo: 60©; Availability: 9F; Cost: 975


*** Phalanx Systems Vogeljäger II Missile Launcher?
This is a – wait, what? It appears to be a Phalanx Systems Vogeljäger II, but someone has scratched out the Vogeljäger II logo, and painted below it, in wild red letters, is the name Großwildjäger X. A quick Matrix search shows this to be a German word for someone who hunts exotic, dangerous large game, such as lions or paracritters. The weapon's computer has a user manual on it, that reads as follows:

“Hi. If you're reading this then you, like me, got pissed off at the utter lack of a good, single-shot launcher for ground-to-ground missiles that wasn't a tripod, and one that had a good sensor outfit in it. Or, you killed someone who bought it from me, in which case, good for you. Or, you stole it from me, in which case I'm gonna hunt you down, rip your cock off with my fingernails and shove it up your ass when I disembowel you. Don't bother trying to return it to me, it's too late for that. If you want forgiveness, you'd better return it and pay the cost of it, whatever number I feel like quoting, without so much as a word of complaint.

So! The Großwildjäger X. I have no idea how to pronounce that, and I don't care. It's a big-game hunter, whatever the game in your turf might be, whether it's a bunch of unruly trogs or your unfriendly local Knight Errant or Lone Star patrol in their Ares Citymasters. Or maybe you're on the other side of that tracks – see also “killed someone who bought it from me,” and you've just realized that what you have here will annihilate the ballsacks of those pesky riggers and their barrens tanks made out of bulldog panel vans. I don't care; here's how it works.

I modified the standard sensor package and upgraded it. It used to be that this beast was a dedicated SAM launcher and was worth balls against ground contacts; not any more. It retains its advanced targeting lock-on characteristics against aircraft, but now it locks onto ground targets just as well as a Great Dragon ATGM. Most of the work is done by the launcher anyway, so the missiles are plug and play – grab any missile with the right interface, jam it down the tube nice and hard until it arms, then point it at what you want to go boom and pull the trigger! Through the magic of rocketry, a big old payload will be conveyed downrange, hopefully directly into whatever son-of-a-bitch pissed you off this morning, and whatever it hits will go bye-bye.

Note: I haven't touched the launch mechanism or the tube, so if anything untoward happens, up to and including this fucker blowing up next to your head, direct any complaints you may have to Phalanx Systems. If you complain to me about a defect in their launcher, on a good day I'll shoot at you. On a bad day, I won't stop until you're dead. Now frag off and kill something. Oh, and everything I've done to this thing violated the warranties worse than I violate a joygirl in a bunraku parlor, so don't even try getting it replaced if that happens, Phalanx will laugh you off the comm.”

So, it seems that what you have here is a highly-customized single-shot reusable rocket launcher. You might want to hang on to this... Or you might decide it's way the hell too hot to handle and try to offload it as expeditiously as metahumanly possible.

It has a ridiculous Availability rating, raising questions you may not want to know the answers to, about just how in holy hell your “friends” got hold of the damn thing, and features am imaging scope with built-in low-light and thermographic vision enhancements, and plenty of room for more mods. Its sensor unit provides a +1 dice pool modifier against aerial targets, and no penalty on launches against ground targets.

Everyone, do note: my sleep schedule has become completely dewhacked, and I have been unable to unfuck it, and it's unlikely I'll be able to do so by the scheduled game time.

So, I may be on, but probably not at 10:30 AM. Also, I'm not even gonna try and cobble a Run together in the time I have remaining. (Damn you, TOR, why are you so addictive? Oh yeah, Twi'leks.)


However, we can still meet, there are some things worth thinking about, such as whether we'd like to go to d10s or not. Also, since Odd_Canuck never did, I need to work out the stats of the Junkyard and how much it costs in rent and all.


Also, you guys have gotten a lot of loot, especially vehicular loot, and all of it needs fixing, or at least RFID scrubbing. You guys need to go over the stuff you've got and decide what you want to do with it. (It would be hilarious if you got the tractor-trailer troll-modified.)

Don't get your hopes too high, but I've just woken up from a nice long half-sleep, with a nap in the middle of the day earlier. Sol Invictus willing, I'll manage to pull something similar tomorrow, and I may be on-time.

I know Angel's not interested in much of the loot (aside from maybe Risa's shiny anti-electric coat), but does want to spend some downtime taking care of old business; making sure the Jungle's node is still secure, and applying Hardening to Marli's residence where needed. Also wanted to get started on coding some software, and seeing about acquiring some TacNet software for the team (Unwired, pg 122; I wasn't aware it's not something you can't do off the cuff.)

You know it would be reasonably simple to get your own coat and/or jumpsuit modified with nonconductivity, right?

Well yes...but this way, I'd have *two*. Gotta pad out that closet somehow.

SOLD:

Weapons:
1x Ares Predator IV
7x Ceska Black Scorpion (smartlinked)
1x Colt Manhunter
7x HK 227X
1x Yamaha Sakura Fubuki
1x AK-97, underbarrel smartgun
1x Ares Viper Slivergun
1x Mossberg AM-CMDT
1x Monofilament Sword
Accompanying ammo

Armor:
7x Camouflage Suit
1x Armor Jacket
1x Lined Coat

Commlinks:
1x Erika Elite
4x Hermes Ikon
1x Sony Emperor
7x Renraku Sensei

Misc:
1x Arm Slide Holster
1x R3 Radio Signal Scanner
1x Smartlink Goggles

------------------------------------
KEPT:

Grenades: (Brick)
2x Thermal Smoke Grenades
3x HE Grenades
3x Smoke Grenades
1x Frag Grenade

Vehicles/Drones:
1x GMC MPUV (Group)
2x Hawker-Siddley Mixcoatl (Cascade/Group)
2x LoneStar iBall (Cascade/Group)

Awesome:
1x Phalanx Systems Großwildjäger X Missile Launcher (Group)
2x Fragmentation Missiles

------------------------------------
The sold items netted a total of 17k , which went to buy a R2 Tactical Network, and fixing the Ares Roadmaster obtained in a previous run.

------------------------------------
Brick spent 700 for the last bit of money needed for Roadmaster fixing, and modding it will a troll-sized metahuman adaptation
Brick spent 14 karma to improve Automatics from 2->4
Brick burned 2 street cred to go down to 0 notoriety.

Kotaru has spent 4 Karma to get Gunnery rank 1.

Also a total of 8 Karma exchanged to Nuyen as per the exchange rule, which was spent on:
2 points of Strength enhancement, spread across limbs as per SD's really generous cyber rulings.
2 points of Body enhancement, ditto.
One Cyber-Holster
One Cyber-Gyromount
One Ares Predator because I forgot to grab the one in the pile before we sold it. So maybe the Fixer gave it back to me lol.

Also going to ask the Fix to keep an ear to the ground for me regarding interesting bike parts, mods, and upgrades now that I could actually afford one or two. Don't have time to do anything with it yet, but I'd like to keep a line on stuff for it if possible since I should actually use it and all.

Posting for Darkone
5 karma + 500Y for Increase Charisma.
4000Y -> 2 Karma.
Any days not spent on learning spell spent doing work - Wards, whatever.
Increase Logic on Cascade while she works on the truck.
2 Cred burnt letting people know that not only did I not know they were rescuing us, but I even healed them.

Cascade spends 8000Y on a Large Drone Rack and a Concealed Visibility Mod.
She spends time on installing them in the Citymaster and on gathering data from the chip (Indirectly).

Additional activities: Planning a team for the game Warmech with Angel and Alex if they're interested. Karaoke at the Banshee with [whoever that wants to tag along].

Cascade is saving up karma for Edge 7.

Edit: Also, I won't be able to make it next week, as I'm moving that weekend.

Two weeks passed, during which the group gained a new member; Cassandra, the befanged, tatooed pit fighter girl, and downtime stuff happened! Making the date this all took place on Wednesday, April 6th, 2072

Everyone who showed up; Alexander, Angelrat, Brick, Cass, and Kotaru, get 2 Karma for the long session.


The group were bemoaning their lack of jobs, when they got a mysterious call, telling them to go to a coffee shop the next day, buy breakfast, and ask for the Dutchman. The Dutchman, it turned out, was a Dwarf who introduced himself as Meneer Janssen. (Which is what Johnsons from the United Netherlands call themselves.)

The Janssen explained that he worked for DocWagon, and was low-level. He explained further that there were bad things afoot: calls have been being delayed getting to DocWagon, while CrashCart seems to have no trouble. This is letting CrashCart pick up some DocWagon calls they wouldn't otherwise have picked up, but causes problems when a call comes in that CrashCart can't pick up and DocWagon doesn't know to pick up. Case in point: a runner in Redmond, with a Platinum account no less, became ghoul chow because of this.

He suspected the boss of CrashCart in Seattle, one Dixie Flatline*, for being behind this, but far from finding proof, he wants this problem fixed and buried, fearing a shadow war between CrashCart and DocWagon, which would be bad for everyone. To this end, he hired the Junkyard Dogs, and suggested that you could get a lead by finding DocWagon customers who were deserving of some comeuppance and placing them in physical peril, then tracking the calls to wait and see until you got one which was delayed.

The price offered was low - only 10,000 and no up-front bonus. When asked about this, he explained that the budget he could use autonomously was very tight, and if he exceeded it, he'd have to explain himself to someone higher-up, which would result in more teams being hired, less scrupulous teams, and most likely for a retributive strike on CrashCart, thus precipitating the very shadow war he wants to avoid. But, he explained, he was able to register Basic accounts without being audited; and he could secure medical supplies and other assorted things without it being noticed.

The group agreed, asking for dopadrine as their up-front fee, and Basic contracts for them that don't have one (and an extension for the one who does,) and the implied promise of more payment in trade later.

Then the group decided that, since their payment for the job was going to be so low, they should see if they couldn't get paid twice, and contacted Cynthia, the Ancients LT with a crush on Alex, to put together a hit list of people whom the Ancients would like legbroken. She agreed.


*Brick had an Agent run a data search on Dixie Flatline, and this is the information he came up with:
1: Dixie Flatline is the name of a chromed stripper who dances at a fetish club in Renton. (Not a likely hit.)
2: A "Dixie Flatline" is what hackers in the CAS call it when they kill someone with Black Hammer.
3: Dixie Flatline is the CEO and majority shareholder of CrashCart Seattle.
3: Despite being the CEO, Dixie works at least one night shift a week in the trauma ward.
4: Before she bought into CC Seattle, Dixie ran a street clinic in Redmond.

Additionally, resolutions to ask some old-timers were made. Brick asked his mother, and this is what she had to say: "Dixie Flatline?! It's been a long, long damn time since I heard the name of that thieving bitch. I owe her my life three times over, and I owe the slitch my foot up her ass as many times. Sure, she'd save you, and every time she did, she'd help herself to 10% of everything you had."

Elrohir recalled her name as well: "She had a terrible reputation in the Shadows in the old days, but she was the only game in Redmond - hell, all of Seattle - if you wanted a competent, actually-trained Street Doc who could patch you up and keep you safe while she did it. Nobody liked her business practices, and I've heard she made more than a few huge scores by patching up Runners who were carrying retirement money on their persons when they got shot up bad. If you want me to dig up more, I can, but it's going to cost you two grand: digging up a corporate bigwig's dirt is dicy, I'll need to grease a lot of palms."


The group's dopadrine arrived at Elrohir's as promised; a box containing five 200-ml bottles of Dopadrine at a concentration of 10 ml to the dose. Elrohir will hold it for you, of course; he also notes that he has a Parashield pistol and rifle in stock from an order that never got sold, along with 50 darts. Altogether they'd cost 3,050 but since he hasn't been able to move them in a month, he'll let you have them all for 2,000 - but only as a whole sale. If you want individual parts of the lot, you pay full price.



And Cynthia's (s)hit-list:

Mason Stone, troll private eye/bounty hunter.
A troll with a big shotgun and a badass jacket, Mason Stone goes by 'Rock,' and is a PI/bounty hunter for hire, on an ill-advised crusade. Mason's shithead cousin Carter rode with the Spikes for a while. After he and his posse came across three Ancients in a go-bar without any backup, they attacked them, overpowered them, raped them, strangled them to death, cut their heads off and put them on rebar spikes on the side of the highway. This, they filmed, and put on the 'trix. In response, Cynthia led an Ancients hit squad in taking brutal revenge, and they wiped out Carter's group. She was not very specific, but mentioned that she used "the grenade launcher" and left Carter "in a smear of about a mile down the interstate."

Now Mason is hunting down Ancients with prices on their heads or warrants for arrest, and turning them over to those who want them. The Ancients are about ready to do to him like they did his brother, but are willing to try playing a little softer; she told you to find him, hospitalize him badly, and inform him that this was his one and only warning from the Ancients to back off. Robbing him is at your discretion, but she said she reckoned he was the kind of guy to take it personal.

The price for doing Mason is 1,500 dead or alive, so don't feel too bad if you fuck it up and accidentally kill him.


Karal the Kombatmage and fake Ancient:
Karal is a bald elf with biolum tats down the sides of his head, who fancies himself Karl Kombatmage. He wears a jacket with the Ancients colors and symbol on it, and likes to drop names he's not connected with, posing as an Ancient to intimidate people.

The Ancients find this shit to be unacceptable, and want you to find him and beat him good, subdue him, take all of his things with the Ancients' colors or symbols on them and destroy them in front of him, then explain to him that the Ancients will not tolerate imposters using their name. They do not, however, want him to be robbed (besides his unearned colors destroyed,) because he's a good enough Rider that they might think about recruiting him; and that you should tell him that if he still wants to be an Ancient so bad, he can consider the beating you give him to be his jumping in, and he can come join them when he gets out of the hospital.

She wants you to search his doss as well as his person for things with the Ancients colors, and the price for the trouble you'll have to go to in addition to not permitting him to be robbed, is 2,500 - additionally, given that he's a known fraudster, Cynthia isn't absolutely certain his DocWagon band is real, or even that if it is, that it isn't old or expired or stolen.


Leonardo da Redmond, Mafia Enforcer.
Dona Rowena O'Malley is the new head of the Finnigan family, but her grasp on power is tenuous at best. Power struggles are expected to happen within the family the very moment the consigliere, "Uncle Al" Cavalieri, croaks. As the old man is basically on his last legs, this will happen soon; as a consequence, Rowena is searching for allies and power to bolster her position. Some of those allies she's been recruiting are Tir expatriates, members of the old power circles in Tir Tairngire who ruled for decades before being recently ousted.

The Ancients and the Laésa both have bad blood with this new crop of Tir expats, largely because this crop are the former power-holders who exiled many of the founding members of the Ancients and the Laésa in the first place. The Ancients and Laésa don't agree on much, but one matter on which they're in lockstep is that they have it in hard for these expats, and if said expats want to find comfort and shelter in Seattle, they're going to do so on their knees, supplicating the ones they themselves exiled, and the price will be very dear indeed.

Send a message to Dona O'Malley on behalf of the Ancients that the Ancients will not tolerate her offering shelter to, let alone allying herself with, any Tir expats. This message should come in the form of Leonardo da Redmond, a powerful Troll enforcer in a bad, cheap suit, who considers himself something of a Renaissance man and is very loyal to Dona O'Malley.

The Ancients want you to attack Leonardo, and not just anywhere; they want you to attack him in his home, beat him badly, leave a handwritten note in Sperethiel (not provided) on expensive paper (not provided) in expensive green ink (sensing the pattern? Not provided,) on his dinner table, informing Dona O'Malley that even were she in full control of her family, she would not have the power to survive picking a war with the Ancients over this matter, and it is in her best interests to turn the expatriates out in the cold. The note should further extend an offer of some understanding and assistance in her struggles if she were willing to go the extra mile and round up the expats she already has, bus them to Tarislar, and dump them all 'as ignominiously as possible' in the heart of Ancients territory.

This one is a risky job, of course; in addition to being a formidable opponent on his own, Leonardo lives in a building Downtown with good security. Additionally, the amount of insult to be distributed must be very measured; aside from the damage to himself, and any incidental damage that might happen during the struggle, no damage nor theft must occur. The Ancients will pay 5,000 for this one. Buying the stationary for the note will set you back a tenth of that, though you'll get enough to last you for a very long time.


Mujina, Dwarf Fixer.
A man with a long and complicated history, Mujina is actually a cockney-speaking Dwarf from the UK who took the name when, for whatever reason, he fled his homeland to Japan to try and set up shop in a new market. He crossed the Ancients back in 2069 when a deal he arranged went sideways; a group of Ancients who had taken to the seas as waterborne smugglers were in Japan to get some goods. The skipper of the boat wound up mistakenly picking a katana duel with a high-strung young Japanese man from an old Samurai family over the would-be Samurai's mistreatment of a woman. The crew were going to rescue him, but Mujina and his crew rolled up on them before they could leap into action, holding them at shotgun point and preventing the rescue, fearing it would damage his reputation and his business, and forcing the duel to take place.

The captain survived, but was badly injured. He's wanted payback for a long time, but the dwarf has been out of reach - until now. Mujina - or 'Hatter' as he now calls himself, was forced to flee Japan recently, and has moved to the Pacific Northwest. He's a red-headed, ugly little bastard with a penchant for very fancy hats, and he's trying to set up a Fixing operation on Vancouver's docks. It's a long drive (or a pricy flight,) but the Ancients are willing to pay well to see some harm come to him: very specific harm, in fact: they want him (in addition to whatever harm needs to be bestowed upon him to subdue him) stabbed, slashed, or otherwise damaged with a sword of some kind, in the right side of the chest.

The ancients will pay 2,500 for this job, with an additional 1,000 if the damage to him is properly executed to mirror the wounds the captain suffered, with a katana (as opposed to any other sort of blade,) and an additional 2,500 if he can be subdued without harm and forced to engage a skilled swordsman in a duel which is filmed and returned to the Ancients. Other than that, there's no restrictions whatsoever, so if you decide to go for him, you can rob him of every last thing he owns.

Storm, Ork Gunslinger.
This one doesn't come from the Ancients so much as from Cynthia herself. Storm is a female Ork with whom Cynthia carried on a torrid and passionate affair, lasting from six months ago to just under a week ago. Storm, it turns out, was doing this all in a build-up to convince Cynthia to let her record one of their lovemaking sessions, and put on a good show of it; now Storm is holding the recording over Cynthia's head, knowing full well that Cynthia will be a laughingstock, if not thrown out, if the rest of the gang ever gets hold of a recording of her passionately making love to an ork.

Cynthia wants Storm's doss invaded and the recording retrieved and brought back to her, and she's okay if you break her bracelet, thus forcing an (expensive) emergency response from DocWagon. She also wants you to steal every gun and bullet Storm owns, to make Storm come crawling back on her padded knees to the woman who can provide her with more. However, other than that, you can't rob her, and under no circumstances can be she be harmed; if you take her down, it has to be magically or chemically.

There's no nuyen reward for this one, but Cynthia will give you some very nifty things she's squirreled away over the years: a Victorinox Smartstaff (War!) and a Fichetti Pain Inducer (SR4A,) and, of course, whatever guns you take from Storm.

After meeting with Cynthia on Wednesday, April 6th, 2072, the group decided to push on. They placed a comm-call to Mason Stone, the troll Bounty Hunter, and learned that he was in the area south of Loveland, in Puyallup. Going there, While putting out some feelers on Karal, the Ancients Poseur, the group tracked Mason himself to the Old Saloon, one of three biker bars in the area, surrounded by Leather Devils, asking their leader for information.

Brick promptly started a fight with the Leather Devils, and head-shotted two of them in under a second, and the fight itself was over blisteringly quickly... But it gave time for Mason to leave. The group grabbed the Leather Devil's leader, who was only mostly dead, intent on selling him to tamanous.

The Leather Devil's pack leader was wearing a CrashCart bracelet, and a DocWagon CRT Helicopter responded to the call*, ordering you to pull over and disembark or they would assume you were kidnapping the patient. Instead, Brick tossed him out of the vehicle, and the DocWagon crew landed to recover him.


Having caught up with Mason, Brick dropped him with some precision shooting from his rifle loaded with gel rounds. His DocWagon bracelet's call was tracked, but there was seemingly no delay; it went to all emergency responders, properly. A message was left on his commlink, which was cloned by Cascade, and the Ancients symbol was carved into his gas tank.


*Since there's been some confusion, let me explain the reciprocity agreement: All the armed medical service responders will respond to each other's client's emergency calls. Thus, if a DocWagon call goes out on an Evo-owned extraterritorial facility, and you actually get pulled out, chances are it was CrashCart, since CC can go onto Evo property without asking for permission; or, if you're a CrashCart customer and get get hurt in the Barrens where air extraction is likely to be the only possible extraction, it's probably going to be a DocWagon team pulling you out, because DocWagon has many, many, many more aircraft and much more coverage than CrashCart.

Granted, it will be expensive, but the extra costs are going to be shifted onto the company that should have extracted you, but didn't. You're liable to them for what you normally are, and they're liable to the company that actually saved your hoop.

This is also the reason the current run is even going down; CrashCart has been picking up DocWagon patients that DocWagon otherwise would have gotten to first, remember?


**Mason's commlink was pretty barren, looks like he backs up most of his info to another device and wipes this regularly. It has his contact list, and info on his current job:

Mason was hunting an Ancient rider named Zipzer, on behalf of a private party from Tir Tairngire. The reason for this is that Zipzer raped the Johnson's daughter while she was visiting family in Tarislar, and there's a 10,000 bounty on him, along with the number to call when he has been captured, to tell the client to pick him up at the docks in Tacoma. There's a picture of Zipzer, by way of a cybereyes recording of the girl's rape at a loud party in some kind of club. She can clearly be heard screaming at him to stop, but he doesn't. Lovely fellow, isn't he?


Anyway, the group members who showed up (everyone but Angelrat) gets 2 Karma for this session. Cascade gets 2 more for TWICE rolling more successes than she had die pool!

And I believe you decided to take Elrohir up on his offer to buy the parashield gear at a discount? Well, add it to your sheets and figure out the payment.

I don't know for how long I'll be able to participate today. Perhaps 4 hours or so.

Nevermind the insomnia. Now let's hope I can GM on sleep from 5:00 to 8:52.

Sorry for the late recap.


So, last session began immediately where the previous one left off, on Wednesday, April 6th, 2072, in the immediate aftermath of beating up Mason Stone.

The group was in Puyallup, except for Angel, who was in Renton, at Blimey Estates. Angel used the lifestyle car's autopilot to meet the group in southern Auburn. They decided to hit Karal the Kombatmage and Fake Ancient, and after an incredibly successful data search by Angel and Cascade, they had narrowed it down to four apartment numbers, within a rough kilometer of each other, by way of an ork pizza boy's blog and recounted how an elf with a sword in Ancients gear had answered the door and looked ready to carve him up, but then saw he was the pizza guy and paid up, and hacking into his commlink to see what deliveries he made around that time.e


Then Alex decided to have a Spirit use its Search power to find him, and it found him - unfortunately, the Kombatmage was Astrally Perceiving at the time and playing with his weapon focus, and he made his perception roll to see the spirit, despite said spirit being Concealed. A momentary standoff occurred, during which the spirit and the magician stared at one another, then the spirit pulled back to observe the hall while Alex summoned a Watcher to observe the outside; and during which time the magician tracked back to Alex over that astral link he'd observed.

Karal proceeded to attack Alex where it hurts - in the Quickened spells - and drew him into astral combat, where Alex was at a massive disadvantage; yet somehow, largely due to the fact that the spirit was still sustaining a -2 Confusion penalty on Karal, Alex managed to avoid the combatmage's ferocious blows with his weapon focus, and Karal managed to shake off all of Alex's attempts to impose mental influences on him, which just enraged him beyond all belief.

Then Karal decided to stop fucking around and unloaded an overcast Force 10 Manabolt on Alex, which nearly killed his meatbod and did a hell of a number on his astral form. In ohshit mode, Alex had his Spirit come out of nowhere and intercept Karal while Karal was chasing him into a building, then Engulf him, putting his astral form unconscious and giving the group the win.


So, the group was ultimately successful, but Alex is in really bad shape and needs proper healing and medical treatment. Brick wanted to kill him for nearly killing Alex, but was reminded by Kotaru that it wasn't exactly an unprovoked assault, given that the group actually had shown up out of the blue to inflict grievous bodily harm on him for money, that making things personal was bad for business, and that they wouldn't get paid if they killed him.

And Cascade looted some of his mead and wine coolers from his fridge, and his pizza from the kitchen table. Not, strictly speaking, according to Cynthia's instructions, but she's not likely to be upset by you looting his kitchen.

Everyone gets 2 Karma; Angelrat gets 3, for making the GM lose the power of breath owing to laughter, and yes, Alexander gets back the 5 Karma he spent on the Quickened spell that was disrupted.

More like, she's not likely to learn of it at all.

Today's game began where the last one left off, Wednesday, April 6th, and proceeded to a little past noon on Thursday, April 7th. Everyone earned 2 Karma.

The group sped the stricken Alexander home in the back of the truck; calling ahead, Bom was prepared to administer emergency first aid, and he did so massively successfully, reversing most of the trauma that Alex's body had suffered from the Manabolt. Alex himself repaired the rest, with magic, going from nearly dead in one spell, to barely-hanging-on-by-a-thread through some emergency first aid, to healthy-and-recovering in one administration of proper first treatment, to hale and whole in the course of one spell. Plots were laid, Contacts were called, and Angelrat attempted to hack the Seattle LTG. Though she was detected upon logging in with her hacked Admin account, it held out long enough for her to snag data pertaining to the delayed call from last time, and get out.

From this data, it was determined that the delaying is being caused by a virus in the Seattle LTG, a virus that changes the logs to read what they should read. Through careful analysis of the scraps of virus and virus traces, Angel determined that this virus is highly sophisticated and very malleable, capable of receiving reconfiguration updates from other source. With access to the full virus's code, the reconfiguration protocol could be reverse-engineered; or, alternatively (an alternative that has so far been paid little heed,) a Run could be staged on CrashCart Seattle owner Dixie Flatline, to get the information from her commlink. The current plan, though, is for Angel to try to get a lock on it with another hack into the LTG, and Purge it with standard antivirus purge software.


The group then decided to get more data (and some goodies) by attacking Storm, the orc gunslinger who was blackmailing Cynthia. Her home was broken into, her guns (and the camera she used to record the video Cynthia wants back) were stolen, most of them; save the ones on her. After tailing her for a while, the group jumped her, and, though she fought like a wildcat, she was eventually manually restrained by Cassandra and relieved of the rest of her guns, alive and unharmed, if furiously kicking. Her DocWagon call went out, and was delayed, but only by two minutes. (CrashCart still managed to make it there first, though, this time.)


Unfortunately, fencing her guns won't be easy, if at all possible. Each of them is heavily customized, and very, very personalized.

You did, however, secure the video of Cynthia and Storm in Storm's apartment. It's very graphic, as both of the lovers took occasional turns grabbing the camera and holding it, and as Cynthia promised, sex with Storm is very akin to a workout, judging by how out-of-breath they both are at the end of an hour and ten minutes. There's also no wonder that Cynthia wants this video buried so the Ancients never get it; video of her messily french-kissing an orc, let alone going down on one, letting one tie her up, or screaming "Yes! Fuck me harder, you beautiful tusked beast!" would almost certainly mean the end of her ride with the Ancients, if not risk her life.

You only recovered standard ammunition for Storm's weapons; each weapon recovered had twenty reloads of ammo stored for it. (The Sheriff, that took high-powered ammo, had twenty reloads of high-powered ammo.)


In other news, you failed to attend the Town Hall meeting in Blimey Estates, because you were (justifiably) far more concerned about Alex's health. 221B Baker Street's household CHN got a transcript of the meeting, the only highlight of which is a new ordnance they passed that each household with an automobile must have an automobile which is presentable and aesthetically acceptable. Failure to comply is punishable with a fine of two hundred and fifty nuyen immediately upon the passage of the law, and all cars which are found to be unacceptable will be impounded, confiscated, and auctioned off on Friday the 15th.

Predictably, immediately after receiving this news, 221B receives a fine from the town council in the amount of 250 for possessing an automobile which is an unpainted eyesore, along with a picture of the automobile in question (the household's matte-gray primer-coated Nissan Patrol-1) and its license plate. Looks like you're going to have to deal with this and get it painted toot-sweet. Mr. Johnson probably won't be thrilled if you let his car get seized and auctioned off.


And Cascade analyzed the data that Brick retrieved from the LTG whilst Angel was scanning. It's not databombed, but it's encrypted. Fortunately, the encryption is nothing you can't crack with a little digital work. Astoundingly, Brick managed to retrieve the complete list of Central House Nodes for Belvue, along with their owners of record. Marli Bremmerton is on here, that would've saved you a lot of time and trouble last month; not to mention various big names in crime and corporate life. You hit paydirt! Now you just need to figure out how to monetize it; or you could keep it for your own nefarious uses.




Lastly, the list of guns you got from Storm can be found Here, in lieu of typing that up again. Fencing them would be really, really hard, if not impossible... But there's some nice damn guns in here!

The game began on Thorsday, April 7, and proceeded through Friday, April 8.


We opened in the immediate aftermath of the previous game, with Storm's DocWagon bracelet having been crushed, and Angelrat (hacking from the CityMaster,) following it into Seattle's LTG with the admin account hacked in by Brick's BrickBOT.

As expected, Angelrat was discovered, and she tracked down the virus as it was tampering with the DocWagon emergency call. The system noticed her and launched a Trace IC. She found the virus doing its dirty work - and found it to be pretty damn strong, in that it resisted her first attempt to scrub it out of the system with a standard Purge program. The second attempt worked, and WomBOT scrubbed the evidence of Angel's passing, including the scattered data trail of the virus, from the logs, just before Angel logged out - but not before the Trace IC got a lock in on her Matrix ID and the CityMaster.


So Angel jacked out and shut down her commlink, and the group hauled ass into the nearest Barrens to Stuck - that is, they went to Auburn. Along the way, they called Cynthia to find places in Auburn they could lay low. She directed them at first to a remote coffin motel build on an old toxic waste dump, then spoke of a place in Loveland. The group first went to the out-of-the-way option, but the moment Alex got a breath of that background count, he vetoed the idea and the group wound up going to Stuck and looking around, eventually finding themselves at a Stouker's Coffin Hotel. Despite the violent nature of Loveland, they weren't there long enough - and were heavily-armored enough, in the van - that nobody bothered them, and they lucky had to deal with no violence in the hotel itself, even if they were (un)luckily treated to the sight of a couple of nanotatooed prositutes getting pounded for an early-morning shag in the communal showers.

Kotaru also lucked into what looked like an amatuer hitman's stash in his pod. Later that night, Angelrat got a call from Mara Barret, who was excitedly showing her what was going on with her family; they were trawling up in Alaskan waters, but something had attacked the net; big enough to eat their catch and shred the net, just small enough to get hopelessly entangled and stuck. They somehow managed to drag it to the surface, and revealed that they'd caught a Megalodon, an awakened variant of the Great White Shark which was massively, ridiculously huge. Rather than cut the net and eat the loss, they hauled the hypershark to the surface to kill it and butcher it, and Mara offered the group the opportunity to buy a shitload of prime sharkmeat and whatever the damn thing had in its belly - since they were well known for swallowing just about anything.


The next morning, there appeared to be no heat, and you returned to Redmond without incident, calling Cynthia to hand over what you had so far and get your payment. Cynthia asked for Storm's guns, and after the group decided they wouldn't be able to sell them easily, and anyone they did sell them to would likely be a target for Storm, to just give them over to Cynthia in exchange for a favor and a contact. You also called Mister Jannsen, who sent you a message saying he couldn't talk now, and named the same place and time you had met him previously - Mitzy's Cafe, Downtown, 8:50 AM, tomorrow - that is, Saturday, April 9th.

Cynthia arrived, with the Fichetti Pain Inducer and Victorinox Smartstaff, as promised, along with the 4,000 you were owed for doing Mason Stone and Karal. She also gave you the contact, as promised. She used the opportunity and pretext of going to the Junkyard alone to put the moves on Alex again, but despite Cassandra and Angelrat encouraging him to lay her, Alex escaped by orgybombing the trio of women and girl and running off to beat a Spirit senseless with a metal girder - he claimed. They were not thrilled, with Angelrat and Cassandra vowing revenge, and Cynthia asking them to at least let her fuck him before they made with the killing and/or savage beating, but ultimately they didn't follow through; Angelrat left to do the laundry and/or possibly explore the sensations of the Orgy spell further, and Cynthia, basking in the afterglow of a half-hour extended orgasm, shifted her attention to Cassandra, resulting in the pit fighter carrying the elf biker to her bunk room, discarding their clothes at the laundry room door, followed by a few hours of enflamed and passionate noises coming from behind the closed door.

Maybe you should invest in better soundproofing. Or not, if you prefer it that way.


Recap:
All players who participated get 2 Karma: that means Alexander, Kotaru, Angelrat and Cassandra, basically. Cascade showed up, but was basically braindead, but since she informed us of this fact in advance, she gets one Karma for attendance.

The stuff that Kotaru found amounted to:
One Colt America L36 light pistol with a silencer,
An (unopened) bag of 20 Stealth RFID chips,
Assorted dubious data chips,
And a Novatech Airwave running Iris Orb (Rating 3 across the board,) with all Common Use programs at Rating 3.


Additionally, you recieved a Fichetti Pain Inducer and a Victorinox Smartstaff from Cynthia.

Everyone receives the following Contact:

Jason Bourne Sykes, Elf Gunsmith, Armorer, Mechanic, sometimes-gun-dealer, and lech. He's Loyalty 1 (he don't know you from Nixon,) and Connections 4.

Cynthia also included a dossier on him: "He's a greedy bastard and an overt lech, but he knows his mechanics and guns inside out, and can source and install pretty much whatever you need. He doesn't run a street shop operation, either, he can handle complicated stuff. Girls and cute boys can get discounts for flirting with him - or going farther - but even if you go all the way and let him fuck you without a condom, he still won't go below 85%. I also know for a fact he doesn't let petty concerns like 'age of consent' or even 'sexual maturity' get in the way of his indulgences; Kiddo, be careful around this guy, don't do anything you aren't absolutely sure you want to do. I don't think he'd try anything stupid, but if given half a chance he'll ruin you, and once he's got a girl in his clutches, he's not the kind to stop just because she changes her mind or cries.

All of that said, and bearing in mind he's jackass and at least one kind of scum, he can get rare and military guns, and vehicles (even cars - blech) easily, and he works on all kinds of vehicles, not just bikes; even drones."


You also did Cynthia an important favor, by dealing with Storm without hurting her, and giving her Storm's guns to use to negotiate with her lover.
Angelrat: Her Loyalty goes up to 5.
Kotaru: Her Loyalty goes up to 3.
Alexander: her Loyalty goes up to 4.
Brick: You gain Cynthia, Ancients LT, as a contact. She has Connections 4, and you gain her at Loyalty 2. Just try not to talk too loud about being on speaking terms with an Ancients rider, okay?
Cassandra: You gain Cynthia, Ancients LT, as a contact. She has Connections 4, and you gain her at Loyalty 3.
Cascade: You gain Cynthia, Ancients LT, as a Contact. She has Connections 4, and you gain her at Loyalty 2.

Most likely not going to be able to make it to game tomorrow, sorry. Sad ninja.

So! You had a momentous session today.

We began on Friday, 6th of April, some time after Cynthia's visit. Because Angelrat vanished very early in the game, her call to Mr. Johnson was retconned out, so as to keep the game moving. The group decided to go after their last Seattleite target, Leonardo da Redmond, mafia enforcer and Renaissance Troll. (Next game begins on Friday, 15th of April.)

The group drove to his neighborhood and found that the physical security on his apartment building was a little steeper than they really felt like tangling with, but the Matrix and Astral security were barely above mediocre; no match for Alex's astral might and Cascade's hacking. Angelrat made the note as requested, and while she glitched and ruined the materials, she did one adequately-made note prepared, and the group chose to simply mail the letter to Leonardo, sealing it up in an envelope and having it delivered to his apartment via courier drone by way of his building's parcel-handling system.


When Leonardo came home, you sent in the most godless killing machine available; a Force 5 Spirit of Air Shapeshifted into a Honey Badger, which brute-forced its way through the ward around Leonardo's home and Materialized on his couch as he was sitting down. It glared at him, expressing the only emotion it could; badger; and attacked, pummeling the troll mightily and chewing off and eating one of his testes and half his penis. Needless to say, the troll was rendered into lethal overflow, the honey badger departed, and the security mage contracted from the company with whom his Ward was established showed up with a Spirit that had the Stabilize spell, to stabilize him.

In the process, you discovered that no, the virus was not defeated by Angelrat's Purge program, and yes, the troll is on his way to a CrashCart trauma ward, since the CC CRT helicopter landed on the roof of his building first. You also managed to deliver the Ancient's message to the mafia, striking a perfect balance between the Ancient's wild, go-ganger give-no-fucks attitude and old-school Mafia "send a message by beating up a bag man, but don't steal the money" ethos. You unleashed the Honey Badger.

However, in doing so, Alexander has mightily pissed off all Air Spirits, because he forced one of them to become something it wasn't. Spirits of BEAST, and maybe Earth, would be glad to take on the form of the godless Honey Badger; air, not so much. So until Alex arranges a suitable penance, Spirits of Air are going to be spending Edge to resist his attempts to bind them.

Cynthia wired you the 5,000 as promised. In the wake of this, however, Cascade decided to strike while the iron was hot, and jacked into the Matrix, miraculously hacking on the fly and pulling off a User account on the Seattle LTG. Unfortunately, the LTG detected her, but was unable to stop her from jacking in. That was when she discovered that the person who sculpted the LTG was, evidently, a fan of turn-of-the-century science-fiction depictions of the Matrix, and had taken extensive liberties with the emerald city scheme that Seattle had installed in 2070; she promptly wound up chasing down the virus-delayed telecomm call on a light-cycle (the metaphor for a User account,) and Angelrat jacked in with a Guest account, giving chase.

And what a tough chase it was; Trace IC closing in on Cascade, who could see the virus, and Cascade started to throw chaff in its way, redirecting its route, and getting a Chase IC after her, in her floating guest fish-tank like flying bowl, resulting in another Trace IC being launched at her. There they stood, chasing the virus and the commcall it was trapping in a verification loop, Cascade roaring into its heart and Analyzing it, to get a full copy of its code, while Angelrat hang back at the edge of its haze effect, hurling junk data and re-routing info at the Trace IC tracking in on them both. Through the power of teamwork, victory was achieved! Cascade got a full copy of the virus, and they jacked off the 'trix with the Trace IC more than two Traces away from homing in on them, farther away from them than when they started.

Then came the part where they figured out what to do with it. They were facing a Threshold 26 extended programming test to reverse-engineer the virus, with a four-day interval. Both Angel and Cascade spent an Edge to cut the interval in half, and spent Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday living the lives of sequestered matrix geeks, furiously programming and reverse-engineering the Virus. At the end, they discovered important facts about it:
1: It was custom-made for the Seattle LTG, and couldn't have spread. It wouldn't even have run on another LTG's hardware, let alone spread to anyone else's commlinks.
2: It had been inserted into the LTG's hard-backup restore software, so even though the active copy was being Purged hourly by the LTG's vigorous antivirus software, it was being re-loaded from the supposedly-fresh copy. This could only have been the result of a Shadowrun, and only when the hard-backup were forced to take over for the active following the active grid going down.
3: The Virus was designed to have full capability to rewrite itself given instructions to do so dropped in a Matrix drop-box; these instructions would be scanned, read by the virus on the hard-backup, and executed during the hourly purge/restore. Such instructions could have been anything, from completely reconfiguring the code to look like something else, to giving it code to let it easily defeat a new antivirus software, to instructions to completely pack it in and eradicate itself from the LTG. This is the option you took, and within an hour of you finishing the reverse-engineering project, you'd fragged the virus clean off the LTG.


In other news, Mara called your group back. It took them all day to butcher that Megalodon, but butcher it they did. She revealed the contents of the megashark's stomach: hide, replete with glistening scales, and a fin, from a Leviathan dragon. IT must have been part of a big pack of Megalodon, to have attacked and eaten a Leviathan. The words 'dragon,' 'leviathan' or 'scales' were never mentioned on the link. Alex sniffed around at purchasing them, and Angelrat agreed to speak to Elrohir about putting the Barrets in touch with him to offload tons and tons of mega Great White Shark meat at more than the asshole rate. Exact prices were not discussed.

Angelrat also agreed to take Mara clubbing when she got in.

So! Good game!

You earned, after losses, 4,500 towards the group slush fund, and you paid 1,000 to have the Chrysler-Nissan Patrol-1 from Blimey Estates repainted. Another 750 arrived on Thursday. Whomever is the first to answer gets to decide how the car was painted (IE, what colors/styling.) Everyone who attended also earns 2 Karma for the session, and Cascade pulled off a three-die stunt, so she gets another.

Dammit that sounds awesome but I was picking apples all day.

As mentioned, I won't be able to make it next session.

Fair enough.

By the way, is anyone of a mind and interest to switch off GMing with me for a while? I'd really like a chance to play for a change.

Alright, so, everyone but Brick showed up for the last game session, and gets two Karma.


The group Met with Mister Jannsen on Friday, April 15, telling him that the job was done. Mister Jannsen paid you, but not what you'd agreed upon: He didn't have your full 10K, and he couldn't enter you into DocWagon's system, because he didn't work for DocWagon, he worked for CrashCart. And he didn't have your 10K, he only had 1,500 .

The group was less than pleased with this, but declined to stab or shoot him in the middle of a coffee house during the breakfast rush. The Johnson - who, perhaps foolishly, showed you his employee ID - revealed his name to be Dr. Felix van der See, MD, and a great many other letters besides, and explained that he'd pay you as he could, and you'd get your money. Angelrat asked the group if they liked her plan; they did, and she informed Felix that, instead of paying them 500 a week until their agreed-upon balance was paid off, he'd instead pay them 500 a week for the next year.

Angel must have hit the right congruence of "enough that his eyes pop" and "not so much that he won't pay it," because though Felix choked on his coffee, he agreed under the condition that anything he managed to make "walk away" goes off half-off that total (IE, every 1,000 nuyen worth he gets you takes a week off.) Maybe he's not a very good negotiator, because you would have settled for full. He also told you why he did it, under questioning: because he is a doctor who first swore to do no harm, and he holds to that. The scheme that Dixie Flatline instituted was getting people (five confirmed so far) killed for lack of prompt medical attention. He was also not BSing you when he said he was worried that it would spark a series of Shadow reprisals between DocWagon and CrashCart, which he didn't want.



In later news, the group went to the Tacoma docks where the Barret family had docked. Their ship showed signs of the battle damage incurred with the megalodon, primarily from where it thrashed around on deck. Alex summoned a spirit which glitched its Assensing roll, declared Mara to be a dragon, and cravenly fled; under his own assessing, she doesn't look to be Awakened at all. Everyone looked at the dragon-hide in the freezer for a bit, before deciding that it was the remains of a sapient creature and deserved to be treated with respect and finality, not made into enchanted coats or harvested for scales to be sold to talisleggers. (The prospect of draconic reprisals may have influenced this decision.) In order to do so, the group decided they would take the remains to the Draco Foundation on the 3rd of next month.

The group also got a hundred pounds of prime shark meat off that megalodon, and Angelrat took Mara Barret out for a night on the town, a night that Scath has volunteered to give details about.


The group also finally got around to pawning off Nabo's commlink and the datafile BrickBOT slurped off the LTG: Elrohir's eyes popped when he saw them, and he offered twenty grand on the spot for the two of them. Rather than haggle, you just shut up and took the money.

So, in the group fund, that left:
3,750 from Blimey Johnson
1,500 from Felix van der See
9,000 from the Ancients
20,000 from Elrohir
34,250 nuyen. Not bad for a run on which you got stiffed.

Your expenses were:
250 in the form of a fine in Blimey Estates.
500 for the materials to write the calligraphic letter to the Mafia, which were spent after the one letter because Angel spilled the ink pot on the stack of clean paper after she was finished writing.
1,000 to get the Nissan Patrol-1 belonging to Blimey Johnson painted.

That leaves you with a total of 32,500 in the group fund.

For the Junkyard, this month, four players have been in basically full-time residence: Alexander, Angelrat, Kotaru, and Cassandra/Cascade. (Cascade started staying at Blimey most of the time during this month, around the time Cassandra showed up.) Brick moves in (financially speaking) next pay cycle. That makes five people sharing it, all told (counting Bom, who pays a share of the junkyard rent from his animal wrangling,) and means the title your group owes on the lifestyle this month is 6,048 nuyen. It was decided not to pay the Junkyard lifestyle off first, so Alex, Angelrat, and Kotaru owe 1,512 nuyen for the Junkyard, and Cassandra and Cascade each owe 756.

It was decided to leave 2,500 nuyen in the group fund (earmarked for the Blimp Project,) giving everyone a nice round number of 5,000 nuyen, and the group is going after Zipzer for another 10K from the bounty on him. You called up Cynthia, who (after a successful Connections roll) had him beaten and ejected from the Ancients go-gang. Alex and his spirit managed to get to him before anyone else, and gave him a Suggestion that his best bet would be to get off the road and hide, rather than ride right into the heart of Spikes territory.


So, the group gets Felix van der See, MD, badass trauma surgeon, and office thief, as a contact; Connections 3, Loyalty 3. He's not happy, but you did decide not to kill him or ruin him, and he has to admit it was your right to renegotiate terms after he broke the original ones.

Cascade also spent a while interacting with Cynthia, improving her relations with her; the Ancients rider took to the breeder hacker, and Cynthia's loyalty towards her went up by one, to 4.

Pssst, SD: You forgot to post the 7 or so story karma everyone got. Unless you're holding that until we finish investigating


No downtime plans, at least until we finish the thing with Zipzer and maybe others. Then I might have enough during downtime...

Herpty derp.

Yes, everyone recieves seven Karma for the following scenes the group saw:
1: You met Mr. Jannsen and got a job.
2: You met (and beat up) Mason Stone.
3: You met (and beat up) Karal the Kombatelf.
4: You met (and beat up) Leonardo da Redmond.
5: You found the Virus on the LTG and fully scanned it.
6: You implemented a solution to the virus.
7: You met Mr. Jannsen again, and wrapped up the run.


You did not earn Karma for:
1: Fully researching Dixie Flatline
2: You did not confront Dixie Flatline
3: You did not infiltrate the CrashCart headquarters.
4: You did not search Dixie Flatline's living quarters.
5: You did not beat up Mujina.

So, 7/13. You got slightly over half of the potential scenes from this Run.

Alright. Since I've been thinking and I can't really make a whole session out of it...


What happens with Zipzer is that you guys scoop him up thanks to Alexander liberally abusing the Influence spell to make him trust you. You help yourselves to his stuff, and take him to the docks in Tacoma where Mason Stone was supposed to meet the Johnson to hand him off.


The Johnson was on a boat with several elfy types with rifles, but you guys put up an imposing presence yourselves. At first they didn't want to deal with you because you weren't the person they had hired, but it was easy to inform him that if so, that was fine - you'd just cut Zipzer loose, with all of his cybereye footage of who hired a Runner to grab him, and wouldn't the Ancients just love that?

They then looked like they were about to shoot at you, but thought better of it when intimidated; maybe you showed them the badger video or something, or just had a spirit put on an imposing show, since none of them were magicians.

Gritting their teeth, they paid you the 10,000 nuyen and left.

A day later, you get a message, which filtered to you through a number of intermediaries until it was delivered by Elrohir, from none other than Mason Stone, the troll you knocked off his bike and put in the hospital. He's out now.



"You motherfuckers owe me money," the rough trog growls, standing in front of what looks like wilderness. "Specifically, you stole my job, after you beat me up for trying to do it, you hypocritical cunts." He spits off-frame. "So here's the deal. You're going to pay me a quarter of the ten grand those Tir jackasses were gonna pay me to bring in the motherfucker that raped their little bitch, and call it my finder's fee." He snorts. "Or we're going to have problems, understand?"

The troll chews down on something, and spits again, it coming out oily and brown this time. "But I won't be entirely unreasonable about this. So here's the deal." He holds up a picture of an Orc, wearing a sports team jacket with the left arm cut off to reveal an obvious, chromed cyberarm, and a ball-cap from the same team. "I heard you motherfraggers were looking for this motherfragger. He's in town, for now, and I know where he is. Give me my money, and I'll give you his address, comm-code, and the place he does his frigging laundry, and we'll be square. Got it?"

Oh, hey, what's his bike like? And the rest of the loot?

I'm not sure what to say to Stone. Well, Crazy Alex would tell him he's toootally wrong and that they beat him up because of being paid to, and Zipzer was just a pleasant and unpleasant surprise. Who's the orc though? Mujina? Still, I get the feeling the rest of the team might have different plans

If we decide not to pay him off, I suggest something like sending him a picture of an assault rifle and the text "We'll be waiting."
But given that it sounds like SD has just that run planned for us, I think we should just do it

No, the orc is the guy that you have on security cameras from the time when Angel was dropped off at the junkyard. The Orc is the rigger that drove the suit who carried angel into the disused garage across from the junkyard and left her there.

You guys put out word that you were looking for him a while back; Mason clearly figured out you were the same guys who put out that word, and presumably threw in that offer to sweeten the deal.


[e]Oh, and Zipzer's bike? He had a Yamaha Katana-11, but he must not have been an Ancient for a while, because it wasn't modded.

The Katana-11 is a "Similar Model" of a Thundercloud Contrail, with a focus on Handling and Top Speed at the expense of Acceleration and Armor. It has +2 Handling, 16/32 acceleration, a maximum speed of 216 meters/combat turn, a Pilot of 1, Body of 6, Armor of 3, and Sensor of 1. It also has +4 modification slots, for a total of 10.

The next session was on Saturday, April 16, 2072.

Without a job for the moment, the group settled in for some downtime. Mason Stone was paid off his 2,500 nuyen, and as he promised, he sweetened the deal by giving you the details on the guy you were looking for: an Orc rigger with a left cyberarm, who likes ball-caps and sports jackets with the left arm cut off so everyone can see his shiny chrome arm.

After a Matrix search by Angelrat confirmed all of this information (and then some,) it turns out that the guy you were looking for is one Matthew Broderick, an Orc from Redmond who goes by Gear Hed or Led Eye. He's evidently a pretty successful Rigger/mechanic, judging by how he posted to ShadowSEA a guide no how to mount an Ares Thunderstruck Gauss Rifle in a GMC Bulldog step-van in a concealed turret formation while leaving sufficiently adequate room inside the van's cabin. He's also apparently got the good sense to keep his mouth shut about Runs he does and when to skip town, because his team has had more than its share of fatal turnover in the past and he's a still-breathing founding member.

You contacted him and asked to speak, offering him to choose the location; he named the Double Clutch Bar in Redmond, and advised the group very strongly not to bring any motorbikes, lest they be fucked with/cut in half/incinerated/detonated. When you arrived at the Double Clutch; Brick, Alex and Cassandra, in the CityMaster and Kotaru on his bike, you saw that he was evidently not joking around in the slightest: the bar itself was set back from the road, with a large parking lot in front of it and gates big and wide enough to admit the CityMaster. A motorbike was hanging from both sides of the gate, cut in half and gibbeted. There was also an empty lot across the street from the bar, full of the rusted, burnt hulks of motorbikes.

Clearly, this is a four-wheels-and-up bar, though you might be able to get away with a half-track or a full-track. Kotaru wisely decided not to tempt fate and park in their parking lot, let alone in the reserved spot under the car shelter from which a human-ish woman with four arms drove out an antique, about-70-year-old 5th-generation Ford Mustang GT.


Venturing inside the bar, your group met the Orc you were looking for, with Cassandra taking the lead and Alexander on her shoulders in the form of a Honey Badger. Needless to say, nobody fucked with the slit carrying a godless killing machine like most women carry ferrets. Cass took a shot of what the Orc was drinking; Orkstaff's XXX, a slightly-less-got-punchy variation of hurlg made by a local microbrewery. The bartender normally makes sure humans and elves who order the stuff know what they're in for, but it never even crossed his mind to question the drink choices of a woman carrying a fucking live Honey Badger. Brick didn't react in time to stop her, and Cassandra got a taste of Hurlg!

Hurlg (and Orkstaff's XXX,) is 180-proof alcohol, with the other 10% by volume being approximately liquid nutmeg. It's a mild hallucinogen, though what it does to the digestive systems of anyone less stout than an Ork, Troll, or Dwarf, is anything but mild. (You get to roll a Composure test, substituting BOD for Charisma. That's how long in half-hour increments you can go before you start to suffer truly painful stomach cramps. The crash when it wears off doesn't help, either.)

Still, Cassandra kept her cool and shot the shot back like it was no little 'thang, which no doubt earned her some hardcore points (as if walking around with what was apparently a tame Honey Badger didn't already.) She questioned Gear Hed, who related his story:


The Ork sighed, and rubbed his eyes. "You know... Meh. I always thought that was major fishy, anyway." He takes a sip from his drink. "And the guy didn't pay me to keep my mouth shut, so... Pay my tab for the day and I'll talk all you want. You got balls, for a pussy."

Cassandra paid off his impressive sixty-nuyen tab (good drinker, that one) and he sighed.

"Alright. The girl I dropped off at the junkyard, yeah? The J contacted me in the middle of the friggin' night, told me to pick him up in Sea-Tac and drive. He was fronting a huge account, so I was willing to drive him wherever the frag he asked me to. She wasn't with him, then, he just had me drive through the Barrens - Puyallup, Redmond. Said he wanted to go in general directions - north, south, 'that-a-way,' but never dictated any particular turns or anything. It was like he was looking for something. I asked him what it was, he said he'd tell me when we had the package."

"Eventually, he told me to head to the old airfield in Puyallup. Smuggler's field, nowadays. We met an unmarked T-Bird - not a smuggler, at least, not a local that I know. I know all the local's birds, and this wasn't one of theirs. He asked me to help him get the package out. Normally I'm like, frag that, but this guy was super-polite and fronting a huge bill, so I did it. The package was a box, short enough to fit in my van, but he asked me to get a tarp and put it in the back instead. So I did, and he took another and rolled it up like a pillow. When I looked back, he was liftin' this unconscious elf girl into the van."

"It made me skeevy - she was just the kind that'd be meat in the grinder, young, innocent, frail. Fuck, my daughter's nine and she's bigger and tougher than that kid. I drew my Predator on him, told him that if he was going to tell me to take her to a bunraku parlor, I'd lay him in a ditch and his Yak masters could eat my shiny chrome dick."

At this point, the Honey Badger (Alexander) offered the Ork a bro-fist, and after incredulously asking if it was serious, he gave it - with his chrome arm.

Then, the ork blinked, and chuckled. "Not that it's actually chrome, you know... Just... Trash talking the guy - he was mega-Jap, you see. But he kept his cool, told me he wasn't serving the Yakuza, and he was already losing his job to keep her from bein' geeked."

"So the J - Tanaka's what they call 'em in Japan, right? I'll stick with Johnson. The J told me to take her north to Redmond. He didn't like either of the Barrens, but he liked Puyallup less. We drove around for a while, and I asked him again what he was looking for. He said she'd wake up in the morning, and he was trying to find someplace she'd be safe - for the night, and the future. I laughed at him. Safe? In Redmond? Well, as safe as is possible. He pointed out that she was wearing an Urban Explorer jumpsuit. Now, don't get me wrong, I like the Urban Explorer, it's what I get for my own kid... But it doesn't constitute safe. Not in Redmond. He saw what I meant, and mentioned that she had a smartgun link in her eyes, and maybe we should get her a gun."

"That made me curious, I'll admit. They tell you that kids shouldn't get chromed until they hit adult stature, you know? It's easier on orcs, we hit adult height around thirteen, fourteen or so, but that kid? Tiny elf like that? Well, I didn't ask, I just assumed he was in a better position to know. I asked if he wanted me to drive him to the Crime Mall, but he said he'd pay retail to get all the goodies that come with it, just as long as it came with no strings attached... So I drove him to Stuck, to hit up the Ares Weapons World. They don't ask questions, don't ask for ID, and there's a guy in a kiosk out front who'll burn out all the RFIDs and has a hacked nanoforge to erase the serial numbers."

"So, I set up the anti-theft on the van and I went in with him. He didn't know much about guns, but me, the guy at the counter, and some crazy Chinese Ork chica with more guns than God and hotter than a coal in a barbeque - damn, I'd have liked me some of that, but I was on the clock so I didn't bother trying to make a pass - all agreed that the Predator IV was the way to go for a first-timer needing a heavy, reliable pistol with a smartgun link. He had them shop-mold the grip to her fingers - he had all her measurements on a datachip. I suggested she might not want to kill everyone she met, but they were out of Stick N' Shock. The Clerk at the desk showed us a Yamaha Pulsar DX - same as a Pulsar, but comes factory-modified with an internal smartgun. Heck, I bought two."

"Again, with the custom grip molding, and then ammo, and a heavy, armored lined coat, and a couple of quick-draw holsters to go with it. It stuck in the mind, 'cause he was insistent about getting everything he paid for; the hardware, the documentation, even the packaging. Plus, you know, I recorded it all. Cybereyes, natch. Oh yeah, and skinlinks for the grips in the guns. He didn't have the clerk install 'em - or that gun bunny who was hanging around, or me. Said it was something she'd need to do herself, something to focus her when she came out of it. Anyway, we went back to Redmond."

"The J said he was looking for somewhere she'd be safe enough... Somewhere she wouldn't find some cop and convince him to do a background check on her. He said it probably wouldn't matter, but it would be best if any of that took time. Somewhere she'd be able to survive, prosper. He assured me that she had received formal training in using those guns we bought her, had developed some hacking, electronics skills, could worm her way out of manual restraints with ease, and was supernaturally adorable - Glamour, I think he called it. I mean, heck... She sounded half-way like Runner material, or backup Runner material. So I mentioned to him this junkyard I knew of, where this old guy would take in anyone who'd work for their room and board, where he keeps critters, and is sometimes known to do... You know, stuff. I figured, little girl, critters, perfect combo, right?"

"Or at least, that's what I told the J. We rolled past the place for a bit, scouted it. He tossed a microdrone out the window into the garage across the street from their main entrance, watched it for a while, decided it wasn't secure enough. He told me he could fix it, though, and we went and bought a spare truck battery... Suit took my toolkit and some insulated gloves and the battery into that garage while I parked and watched. Old man rolled his sleeves up and got to work, cutting into those old wire trunks with my bolt cutters like it was nothing, rigging the battery up, and got main power going."

"I gotta admit, I was not expecting that from a suit. He tested the maglock on the doors, declared that it would hold. Then he unloaded the girl and my tarps - paid thrice what they were worth - and all the stuff we'd bought her, sealed it up, and we left. I'll be honest, at that point I was thinkin' I'd drop him back at Sea-Tac aerospace port, then I'd haul ass back to that garage, cut my way in with my torch and take her home with me. My girl's always wanted a sister, and elf or not, that's a pretty drekky situation to leave a little girl in, even if you're going out of your way to give her the best fighting chance you can."

"I think he knew what I was thinking, though, so he kept me driving around, grilling me about Seattle, about the Barrens, about Redmond and Puyallup. It was way after sun-up when he finally told me to stop, in Loveland. He asked me what the bill was, and I told him, and he paid it without blinking an eyelash. I made more - for myself alone, mind you - that night than my whole team's made on some runs."

"The old man just looked around at Loveland, said it looked like as good a place as any to start his journey. I asked what he was journeying for, he said he was looking for a place and a time to die with as much honor as he could muster. He asked me if I knew of any Shinto temples in the area... I didn't, but what the hell, I looked one up for him. Then he got out, bowed to me, and headed into a coffin motel, to sleep it all off, I guess. By the time I got back... Well, the garage was already open, no sign of anyone. Nothing for me to do but go home."

"And the reason I sold you all that story for just my bar tab?" He grinned at you. "The old man said that some day, the girl might track me down for info about her past. He said I should tell her what I know." He was a crazy old coot, if you ask me, but nice enough. He's probably processed ghoul chow by now."

He gave you the video log of his night driving around the old Japanese man, all god-knows how many hours of it, along with the name and address of the Shinto temple he took the old man to, in Loveland. The group paid his bar tab plus some change, and proceeded to Loveland; parking in the neon Japantown part of Loveland, and after Brick almost picked a fight with the Yakuza (like, approximately all of the Yakuza, by insinuating unwisely that he might be looking to start trouble in the shrine,) Kotaru (and weirdly, Alex) managed to defuse the situation and proceeded inside, where you found that the bottom three floors of the apartment building had been gutted, with the required structural members redesigned to look like Japanese pillars as one might find in an old shrine, and a full-sized, if small, shrine had been constructed inside the apartment building. The priest wasn't with the honden when you came in, but he was instead behind the shrine-building, tending to his hobbies: a small garden of Bonsai trees, poker, and tarot.

(Cassandra was in the truck, riding on some extra-strength pharmaceuticals and still suffering for the shot of Orkstaff's she had.)

You asked him about the salaryman you were looking for, and displayed a picture of the man. "I recall many men who fit the general description of a salaryman... Ah, yes! I recall this man quite well. He stuck out in the mind."

"Many things troubled him, yet he had the serene look of a man who has seen his fate coming and accepted it." The priest plucked a card from his tarot deck, and smiles when he saw the face of the card, before showing you The Tower. "Suits him quite perfectly, I'd say. He wouldn't tell me the details of his troubles - said they would stain my soul to have to bear."

Kotaru questioned him, "If I may ask, what did he do? And did he tell you where he might be going? All we know is that he meant to "die with as much honor as he could muster."

"Yes, those were the exact words he spoke to me. I found him one morning, meditating before the honden, his clothes freshly laundered. He told me that in his youth he had been a priest, but lapsed in his duties in order to become a man who earned nuyen... A troubled man. He explained to me, in vauge terms, that not long ago, at his place of employment in a foreign land which was not the homeland of his father - he would not say where, but I expect it was a megacorporation - he caught his immediate superior, a gaijin, but who had recently traveled to his homeland and found enlightenment in his faith - about to commit a terrible sin."

"He became angry with his superior, demanded he cease his shameful conduct at once - and the man did. Then he demanded that the man I've taken to calling a wanderer help him to ensure that no-one could ever know of what he almost did. He did so, he said, but in doing so he was required to do something that he felt was greatly dishonorable, that made him feel unclean. He had been expected to return, but he was going to disobey that expectation, and wander - wherever his fate took him, until it killed him."

"I asked him, if he felt his dishonor was so great, why he did not disembowel himself. He told me that he considered it, and that fate might lead him to it, but not yet. Firstly, and practically, he needed a sword, and a second. Secondly, he needed to remain alive as long as he could, until fate found him. I didn't press him for the details, though. I suspect he intends to wander until someone who is searching for him finds him, or until he meets a violent end."

Kotaru then pressed the priest for more clues, "I see. I don't suppose he left any sort of...well, anything identifiable here? Our trail is colder than I would like."

Upon considering, the Priest responded, "Well... When we spoke of his history as a priest, he mentioned a shrine he tended. Extrapolating his rough age, I suppose it would be possible to search records and uncover his name."

The priest turned to his table, and produced a jar of ink, brush, and paper - actual paper - from somewhere. He carefully, calligraphically created the name of a shrine on the paper, then hands it to Kotaru. "He looked to be about my age, that would put him, oh, about seventy or so. He said he left when he was thirty, so look forty years ago."

By siccing BrickBOT on the problem (with programming from Kotaru, because Brick probably can't read calligraphic Japanese,) the data search took a while, but you eventually came up with the name of a man: Meisho Satto. His father was an electrician, but Satto, in his early years, found himself more interested in spiritualism, and became a priest, which lasted until he was about thirty. With his father and his mother old and frail, and no other brothers to take care of them, Satto left the priesthood to care for them. He got his electrician's certifications almost immediately, indicating that he had clearly kept up with his practical skills while tending the shrines, and took a job with an A-Rated corp. His life unfolds before your very eyes, as evidently he was proud of his accomplishments in the field of information technology, which he branched into. His company sent him to San Fransisco during the Imperial occupation, but then things changed: he found what was going on to be deplorable, and arranged to slip the net, and into the California Free State.

There he took a job with a small, very liberally-minded information firm, one of the firms that was quickly conglomerated under the umbrella of the nascent Horizon Group, and Satto worked on the project to upgrade Los Angeles to the Wireless Matrix protocols - then the Crash hit.

By the time the dust settled, Satto held Horizon AAA-mega citizenship, and worked on a number of small, fast projects, before being made a Lead Synergist on a project in 2068. The project concluded successfully, three years ahead of deadline, in '69, and Satto was rewarded by being made Lead Synergist on something he said "should be big, and mustn't be spoken of before its time has come." That's when his Matrix history goes dark.


So, that's where you are now. You paid out a little nuyen and got a lot of story in return, all of which paints a pretty vague, but grim, picture, and now you're looking for a man who's loose in at least all of Puyallup, if not farther abroad. He's been known to have had physical vigor and lifespan extension treatments, so even though the man you're looking for is very old, he's probably fully capable of walking the length and breadth of Seattle, barring violence befalling him (which in fairness, is quite likely to happen in Seattle.)

In short, you've got quite a mystery.


In other news, Angel spent the day at Blimey Estates with Mara. She didn't feel like leaving and going into public. Cascade was asked to give Angel and Mara the house the previous night, which she did; possibly she had a night out on the town herself, or went and spent the night in the Matrix after crawling into a coffin hotel somewhere, or something to that effect.


Angelrat, Kotaru, Brick, Cassandra, and Alex get 2 Karma for showing up.

And Brick gets +1 Karma for the "Making the GM lose the power of breath through laughter" award.

Cassandra and Brick get Matthew Broderick, alias Gear Hed, as a Connections 3, Loyalty 2, Rigger/Mechanic contact.

And Mara's loyalty to Angel goes up to 6.

Now this could be something interesting....HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Leaving a note here mostly to remind myself: next time we have downtime, Kotaru needs to call up the dude Cynth put us in contact with to get some work done on the bike, especially since he can afford to have it all done at once now, time permitting.


And on the subject of the switch-off GM convo: I could tentatively put my name on the list, though I've no SR experience and have no idea what I would sic on my vict-PLAYERS should it not be SR.

Well, the notion of Pathfinder/D&D 3.5 came up. Some oldschool hijinks sound good to me, if you don't wanna do Shadowrun - personally, for a switch-off thing, I'd been thinking that if someone wanted to switch off, I'd make a character and we'd engineer a reason why the switched-off player's character needed to vanish for a while.

I wouldn't be against the idea of playing another game every other Sunday, if it comes to that. Plenty of interesting systems/settings out there.