Mirage Island

Mirage Island
Part of Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger
Date 2080-10-03 GM Purkinje Location Touristville, Seattle Result Runners escaped with the data.
Factions Involved
Decoy Night Claws Yata	Four Oyabun Rengo
Casualties and losses
None	10 Four Oyabun Street Samurai 12 Civilians

Summary

A decker finds a mysterious host running out of a building in Touristville. He wants to know what it's protecting.

Background

On the Emerald City grid, there are rumors about a mysterious host called Mirage Island. There is little consistency to the rumors aside from two things: the host disappears and reappears, and nothing on it is anything good. A decker by the name of c1ph3r believes he has found the real Mirage Island, but his foray into its depths was only able to trace a single device slaved to the host: a computer terminal somewhere on the outskirts of Touristville. While in the host, he found a single file that wasn't junk. He wasn't able to grab it before he had to jack out.

The Meet

The runners met with c1ph3r in a strange host full of abstract geometry and platonic solids. The negotiation was straight and to-the-point: in exchange for 30,000¥, the team would recover the file. They were given the location of the terminal in Touristville, but there was little else to go on.

The Plan

After doing some legwork, the team learned that the location of the terminal was inside a BTL den operated by the Four Oyabun Rengo of the Yakuza. Night Claws was able to dig up a strange clause where customers were required to sign away their free while while inside and had to obey orders given by den operators. The building's security was poor, appearing to be a pre-millennial building outfitted with next to nothing in the way of reinforcements.

The Run

Not initially finding much on the matrix except for a number of Meta-Link commlinks, the team decided to send Decoy and Yata in for physical infiltration. They climbed up the fire escape and onto the roof, where Yata picked the lock on a roof access door. The third and second floors of the building were largely unguarded, sparsely populated with malnourished addicts whose chipjacks were plugged into slots in the wall. On the ground floor, a Four Oyabun street samurai on patrol spotted them, and a firefight broke out. Night Claws provided matrix support from the car while Yata and Decoy engaged a team of four street samurai in the hallway. With ample bombardment from gas and Ultraglide grenades and a series of well-placed shots, the team managed to eliminate all OpFor on the ground floor. However, Night Claws spotted six more commlinks attached to smartguns elsewhere in the building, which led the team to look for a basement level.

In the meantime, Night Claws was spotted by a matrix security hacker. The two exchanged data spikes before the hacker vanished. Decoy had his Roadmaster shoot open the front door to make way for his Steel Lynx to provide fire support as he and Yata descended to the basement. Night Claws and his fault sprite proceeded to attack the smartguns in cybercombat, slowly dealing damage to them as lead flew in ample measure. Yata and Decoy were outnumbered, and the six samurai had an excellent defensive position; it took the intervention of a smoke grenade to turn the tide against the Four Oyabun samurai. Seeing themselves backed into a corner, they called upon the personafix chips installed into the addicts' chipjacks and forced them to attack Decoy and Yata. Decoy had his Steel Lynx gun them down, killing them all instantly in a hail of bullets.

Once the physical security had been handled, Night Claws proceeded to the basement and connected directly to the terminal, which was running a rogue host not anchored to the matrix foundation. Decoy ran his agent on his custom cyberdeck as backup. Inside, the host looked like a desert island blanketed in thick jungle. Searching through the jungle took some time, but between Night Claws, the companion sprite and the agent, they were able to find the file they were looking for in thirty seconds. However, a patrol IC spotted the agent and alerted the host, causing it to spawn a Blaster IC. The Blaster IC managed to link-lock Night Claws and the agent before they could escape with the file, but they were both able to break the link-lock and jack out in one piece. They fled the BTL den before backup arrived.

Aftermath

The client was satisfied with the paydata. Night Claws' copy of the file revealed it to be an MCT North America report on confirmed SINless technomancers operating in the Pacific Northwest, listing bounties, a threat assessment, and physical description. One of the technomancers was listed as caught, held in a facility in Seattle.

Rewards

• 10,000¥
• 6 karma