Weatherfront

Weatherfront
Date 2086-09-15 GM Asmodeus Location Victoria Status Threat Level: Medium
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven White Vory Bone Daddy	Warring Brothers
Cleaner Cleaner Colcannon Valvravn Z	Sea Brother
Casualties and losses
	Sea Brother

Summary

A hero in her youth goes missing, and Bone Daddy hires a crew to retrieve her from the villains who have taken her. Meanwhile, an acidic storm rages in Victoria. Four runners sail out to the edge of Salish territory, following her trail through a hunting hound's friendly connections among the local villains. A brotherly feud is interrupted by an irritated troll and an ideologically-motivated sniper. Nobody walks away happy, except Colcannon.

Background

A girl named Irene, known for her "heroic" proclivities and running off to cause mischief for local gangs, had recently gone missing from her home neighborhood of Sophocles. Nobody really has enough money to cover the expenses, so it seems Bone Daddy will have to seek out the least socially competent runners around to keep prices down.

The Meet

The crew meets without much fanfare in Sophocles, coming to chat with an older ork lady as Bone Daddy presides over the negotiations. She explains that the little troublemaker's vanished for longer than anyone's comfortable with, and that the locals have scrounged together eight grand to find her - two for each runner. This is, frankly speaking, a pitiful amount by the team's standards, but the best negotiator is Cleaner Cleaner, who has five whole dice. Negotiations do not go their way.

Conceding to Bone Daddy's stern glare, the team accepts. How hard could it be, anyway?

The Plan

With some info on her most recent whereabouts, the team heads out. They know she was most recently seen on a terminal in the area, and so they went there to check for signs of activity. There was very little of note, though, aside from one oddity - someone's commlink, pinging on the Matrix, below their feet.

Valvravn, of course, immediately went about hacking it. With a bit of elbow grease, she managed to crack the DR4 device and access its camera and flashlight, plus recent text logs. With some searching, the team found a sewer gutter that should lead to the commlink - perhaps it was dropped down? - but the hole was too narrow for anyone to fit through.

Cue Colcannon with a monofilament chainsaw buzzing that shit open like a professional.

The Run

Valvravn takes the helm of CC's Nightrunner, being the only one among them realistically capable of driving a boat into a storm. With some visual assistance by Colcannon to see through the intensifying storm, she manages to keep the thing on track just fine - though the acid rain eats away at the paint, and pits out Colcannon's armor something fierce. As they dock, CC looks out and notices two things. First off, there's a warehouse by the beach with a Vory sigil painted onto its seabound face, which she correctly guesses is probably where Irene is being held. Second off, the storm appears to be converging around a point slightly inland - references to a map of Victoria indicate its eye must be above a local park.

Cleaner Cleaner first points out the warehouse, but then says that she's going to go "fix the storm" and kill the one conjuring it, suspecting a toxic mage at work. The team, for their various reasons, acquiesce. Valvravn opens with a Fly-Spy, confirming that the storm's intensity raises with proximity to the park but cannot breach the eye-wall's intense winds. Her drone is damaged - fixable, but inoperable for the moment. Z compiles a sprite and effectively hands it over to CC, for her to use as she sees fit.

CC and Colcannon then proceed inland, toward the eye of the storm.

It doesn't take them all too long to reach their destination - it's not a pleasant journey, but with their chemsealed armor they don't take any real damage from the acid rain. Along the journey, though, CC notes something... odd.

She's felt this kind of... dense, glacial power once before. In Shaanxi, when standing before a monstrously powerful Astral being. It is not a murky, cloying musk within the Astral - there is no toxic magic at work here - but whatever it is, it's a danger.

There is one more obstacle - the wind-wall itself, blowing hard enough to warp trees and shred buildings. The two brace against each other, with CC activating her sprite task to Diagnose her bone lacing and brace harder, but it's just barely not enough to push through the storm... until Colcannon burns a point of Edge to push through. Bracing against the winds, they successfully break into the calm eye of the storm, where they see a dark-skinned troll in a black suit levitating near a titanic Storm Spirit.

CC solemnly sets down her gun-case and begins assembling her rifle, as the man says that they should not be here. Him and Colcannon get into a debate, which CC joins a few moments later - about who he is, about how this rain is causing so much damage, about why it's happening in the first place, all that.

It turns out, he is one of two brothers - he follows the Sea, and his brother, the Sun. Their father passed, recently, and the rules of inheritance were... unclear. They elected to settle this the only way such opposed brothers can - a test of wit and might, an arcane duel to be waged within the city of Victoria. Without telling any of its citizens, of course.

Brother Sea - as he will be called, as the team never learned his name - had summoned this spirit to flood the region with rain, planning to smother his brother's power and slowly drive him to surrender. The fact that anyone else could be hurt in the crossfire never even occurred to him, not that he'd care.

He refused to end the storm. They refused to leave. As is the nature of shadowrunners, this debate ended in bloodshed.

Brother Sea called forth a pair of elementals and sent them forth to kill the intruders, one apiece, while he ducked behind the Storm Spirit. Z and Valvravn began running diagnostics on the team's gear and Tagging Brother Sea to clear some of the visiblity penalties. Colcannon took a couple serious hits, but she's a big girl, she was just fine. More importantly, she got in the way of the one going after CC, and when it tried to bypass her - she punched it right in the soul, and discorporated it in one shot.

With the path clear, CC dashed around the Storm Spirit, lined up a shot, and fired. In a heartbeat, Brother Sea's arcane intellect was scattered across the grass.

His remaining spirit retreated to the Astral. The Storm Spirit, its formula no longer possessed by another, stopped sustaining its weather manipulation. It reached into Brother Sea's pocket, retrieving its formula, and - after receiving a formal bow from CC - said something to her in a language nobody understood. Then, it simply left for the Astral, taking its formula with it.

CC briefly moved to Brother Sea's decapitated body, reaching down to fix his lapels before wandering away. Colcannon then immediately ruined his lapels by rummaging through his pockets for spare change, coming away with a DR7 smartwatch, a (waterlogged) ebony credstick, and a power focus attuned to the Sea mentor spirit. The two returned to the boat after collecting themselves and fetching the broken Fly-Spy, and after a brief chat with the local Vory, retrieved Irene.

With their package secure, they returned to Seattle.

Aftermath

Irene was returned safely to the Johnson, and upon awakening proceeded to give everyone a headache by prattling on about being a hero, fighting villains, and that she's never going to die because heroes always win in the end. The team got paid, Valvravn started cyberstalking a child to keep her out of trouble, Colcannon got a cool new ring, Z got entertainment, and CC... well, she's still trying to reconcile the fact that a starry-eyed kid thinks her family is evil. One must wonder how she'll respond to that...