Arriving at night, in the suburbs of Nantes, in cozy, small hotel, that appears to be still run like a family business - but a brief matrix search quickly disillusion the runners, the establishment has been bought by a subsidiaries of Renraku a few years ago. Regardless, the staff is nice and polite, despite the late arrival and the all building, guests like management, seems sound asleep. The room they booked is small but coy, and the staff took the time to bring a basket for the "service dog", with a bowl of water.
Once done with the necessary "human interaction" due to their check in, Waywalker jumps back in to VR, his meat on the bed, to order the van to go back to Paris and to browse the matrix for more information. He does not have to look too long for a mapsoft of Brittany, the local government, run by the High Council of Brittany, has a semi-public node publishing (almost) real-time data on the mist. The VR environment is actually incredibly well-done, where the person used being automatically wrapped by a sort of Hazmat suit and allowed to fly across a real size representation of the region, where to examine each patch of Mist, and even access some local data along with (a lot of) warnings from the agency.
It is a perfect environment to do the sort of reckon Waywalker wants to do and he quickly get access to all the data he wants. But, sadly, the news are not good for the runners.
First of all, the village is deep into on of the most stable patch of Mist. Actually, this patch has never receded since the first apparition of the mist, so nobody has been to this place for decades in the place. Exploring the VRscape, he also discovers that Brittany has very poor coverage, most people of sat-link, in their village, but once one is away from 10 to 20 km from a civilized place, the place is more/less a static zone. To make matter worse, the mist has an effect on technology, creating a lot of interference, increasing again the level of noise.
Correlating old maps, still mentioning the village and the current data provided by the public node, Waywalker estimate that their target is 10 to 15km inside the mist. The patch of Mist the village resides in is also quite far away from most inhabited part of the region, so it most likely to be a static zone.
The rigger keeps exploring the node available information and, at last, stumble upon some information about sending drone inside the mist. Apparently, the Council uses a lot of drone to monitor the mist's progress, but generally tries to not sent them inside. As far as he can gather, drone often come back, but some times "disappear", exactly like people tends to do...
Waywalker is still processing the amount of data when he finally notices the message of his partner. Before replying, he does a quick research over the matrix to confirm his intuition. As he expected, having drone upgraded - whether to have extra armour or some other (non-military) transformation, is possible but not quickly, and not... discreetly. Clearly, people are expected to buy them "out of the shelves" and extra tuning is not a common demands of most buyers. However, Waywalker have found several places, in Paris or around, to buy part he would need to add almost any kind of modules to his new "Nestor" (which, for some reason, is the name given to Juan line in France.
[ Spoiler ]
@Waywalker short from adding weapon, you can buy whatever you need to implement any modules described in Rigger 5. Buying the part will be the cost mentioned in Rigger 5 to make it simple. You will however need to modify the drone yourself.
Just in case the fluff text above was not clear - you send a drone into the mist to do the job, but given the amount of Noise, you should rather be nearby the mist to reduce the chance of losing contact with the drone. Given that searching the place where the book was stored is not going to be simple task, it is unlikely the dog brain will be able to do it on its own, so you will need to either jumped in it or at least able to direct it.
- regarding the time I used Astral Tracking and not Search, but you are right, Search was probably more appropriate. Anyhow, even it found you before, it waited for you to stop driving for a second.