Idolatry

Idolatry
Date 2081-02-28 GM Ryncewynde88 Location Downtown, Seattle (UCAS)
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven Chop Shop Moth Granuaile Eisenjägerin

Summary

Delusional man wants to seduce Hestaby, hires runners to distract security, shadow spirit who inadvertently put him up to it hires them to thwart his efforts instead.

Background

Shadow spirit succubus accidentally over-baked her Compulsion and sent him off to seduce his crush who turned out to be Hestaby. Spirit did not foresee this, but is now panicking to avoid drawing her attention. Man decided to cause distraction by hiring the runners to extract a technomancer who managed talk show streams.

The Plan

Do both runs, starting with the spirit's.

The Run

Successfully KO'd the J at home, tied him up until he recovered from the Compulsion. The runners infiltrated the venue as extra security and managed to spoof work orders to get the techniciomancer down to the loading bays to bring in some shiny new cameras, escorted by the runners on the inside. They managed to KO the techniciomancer and drag him into the van without alerting anyone, including the watcher spirits, and escaped without raising alarms.

Aftermath

Thankful J, Hestaby's as close to none-the-wiser as a Great Dragon can be.

Rewards

Run 1

• 2 Karma
• 32000 Nuyen
• 2 CDP

Run 2

• 7 Karma
• 6000 Nuyen
• 2 CDP

Moth's Report

My first run!

Moth here. This is the story of my first run.

The initial notice was pretty vague, but there was a place and time to meet the johnson at the Tiny Horse restaurant. He was a nervous looking troll in a suit. I got there early and walked over to him, but he said he really wanted to finish his meal before the meeting, so I killed some time while the others arrived. There were four of us. Me, Granuaile – a talented adept who also helped with Face stuff, Chop Shop – an ex solider combat decker type, and Eisen Jagerin, a stealthy soldier type.

The troll explained that he wanted a guy kidnapped and taken to a meet point. The guy was in tech at a big news agency. And he actually lived at their downtown location. Inside Seattle. Super good security. The troll said he wanted him to do a job, and he’d been reluctant, and this was going to persuade him. The troll also said it had to be done tomorrow night. No sooner, no later. I didn’t know if that was odd. First job. The money was pretty good, and he clearly wanted it bad, so I leaned in all persuasive-like and talked him up to 32,000 for each of us. Which seemed like a good payout.

We couldn’t think of any other questions then, but got the Troll’s contact info in case we did.

And then everyone got busy with the legwork. It was a group of smart, cautious planner-types. You can’t beat that! So, we were researching the target. The building. All of that.

Several of us grabbed a hotel room across the street from the building. Of note, we learned this is where many guests of the news agency stay. They host a lot of celebrities. Big rating talk shows and stuff.

Well, the plan was taking shape and … knock, knock. Someone at the door to our hotel room! But no one should have known we were there.

It’s a woman (spoiler: it was not) and she wants in to have a chat about our job! So, the guys train their guns on her, and I let her in. Well, she was actually a succubus. Who had been working our Mr. Nervous Troll. And gotten him in an absolute lather over his crush such that he was planning a big ‘romantic gesture’ (spoiler: harassment and attempted rape) of her at the same time as our job, and the whole timing was to pull all the newsroom security away from her.

Bummer.

But it gets worse.

The succubus is contacting us because she has realized her head is going to roll because his crush is, in fact, one Miss Super Important Dragon. Uh oh. She wants to pay us a paltry 6,000 per head to stop Mr. Nervous Troll from creating political incident disaster uno. Drawing the dragon’s eye to her. And also, she wants us to know if we do the distraction job, and the Dragon is nuisance during it, we will have made enemies of Miss Super Important Dragon. So, clearly we should betray our johnson, and work for her instead.

So everyone is like ‘Moth, runner rule number one, don’t mess with dragons’. But also I’m like ‘This is my very first job. I can’t fail my very first job.’ How am I going to tell papa I failed my very first johnson??? And the chance to get 32,000 nuyen??? So, a lot of brainstorming follows. But my teammates are crafty!

We break it down. Mr. Nervous Troll is paying us to deliver the kidnap victim. We do that, we get paid. Period. And, it is surely in his best interest that he not actually commit political and personal suicide by assaulting Miss Super Important Dragon. So, we would only be working for him – helping him! – to make sure that plan goes awry.

We do this right, we get paid twice.

And help everyone.

Except the kidnap victim. But, hey. He’s not paying.

Now we have a whole 24 hours before kidnap job window, so we have time to do ‘new plan’ which is take Mr. Nervous Troll out of action so he absolutely does not do anything during the kidnap job. (Making it a much less risky proposition, with no political fallout). Of course, we don’t want him to know this is what we did. So. We need to kidnap and secure him. But also mess with his memory. When he wakes up in an alley the morning after we kidnap his job, he is just going to remember trying his crazy plan and Miss Dragon knocking him unconscious. Lesson learned.

We track him to his apartment. There are two guards at a security desk. I work my total charms on them. Granuaile helps. I have them so thoroughly distracted that our two heavies are able to get in, go up the elevator, tag and bag a troll, and drag him past the security desk on the round trip and out to the car without getting noticed. Yeah that’s right. I can be a hella good distraction when I want to be.

They take him out first shot so good chance he doesn’t even know who shot him. But still, we want to erase this part.

Now, around this time the guys are like damn if we only had Laes.

And I’m like Laes, you say? Hmmm. So, this is I’m Laesa Syndicate. My dad’s King Midas. We run Laes all day long. Now the whole point of this run was to show papa that I can hold my own and make money myself, and not mooch off him. But we’re going to call it a win with grown-up girl independence that I only had to call papa this one time in the course of the run. Mostly I just had to say 32,000 nuyen, and he lets me know a drop point in Seattle close to us where we can get it.

Meanwhile the other guys are pulling all kinds of supplies out of the air too. They are solid with their contacts. We’ve got burner SIMs. We’ve gotten two of us onto the security detail for the new agency. (Because we realized hey … they are probably picking up extra staff with Miss Dragon staying there, and sure enough…) We’ve got security armor like all the other guards. Helmets and everything. I add a layer of disguise under that so we are perfect matches to the burner SIMs.

Anyway, Mr. Nervous Troll is out for two days unconscious and we just get the Laes into him fast enough to entirely blur the day from meeting us at the Tiny Horse on. He’s a befuddled blank slate. Then our slick adept Granuaile finishes that job with the implanted memories about trying the I’m lying on her bed in a bathrobe and flower petals stalker Valentines day plan of his actually getting far enough that she shows up and knocks him unconscious. Really, it’s as good as he could have hoped. Only it didn’t actually happen, so he isn’t dead.

On to the news station.

Lots of legwork from our brilliant decker Chop Shop sorts out that the only time Mr. Kidnap Victim leaves his room is to check supply deliveries at the loading dock. So he triggers a fake e-mail from his boss telling him to do a pick up that night.

The guys manage to get an actual delivery truck so we can pull this off soft and quiet.

Now we know this guy doesn’t walk down to the loading dock without guards. And also there are like watcher spirits that can set off an alarm? So this still needs so much trickery.

And we also owe the SIMs guy help with a news feed thing.

Our adept Granuaile can do a ward that blocks an area from the watcher spirits sight. She can extend that over the truck itself. But there is a ward on the building that will alarm if we cast into or across it. So we have to get Mr. Kidnap Victim to walk willingly into the truck before we can pull this off.

So the two of us assigned to the guard detail, and in the guard uniforms and armor, infiltrate for a couple hours and learn enough to intercept Mr. Kidnap Victim before he reaches his real guards, so we are the ones walking him to the dock, or ‘trap’.

He is a canny guy. (Technomancer gnome actually) And you can just tell he is intuitively suspicious but I pull off the guard impersonation just right, so he steps into the truck. Boom. Ward up. Bullet knocks him unconscious and we are off.

And Mr. Gnome ends up in a faraday smuggling compartment in one of the guy's jeep. Gnome-sized.

Now he has a super important role running the news agency feeds so they notice when he goes unconscious, but we manage to get clean away.

We wake him up long enough to sweet talk him into doing the feed thing we need to pay back SIM guy, and convince him this is a harmless ‘test of the security system’ prank and just go along, it’s fine, he’ll be back to work tomorrow. (Which could be true!)

Delivery made. Runners paid.

Then back to Miss Succubus. Job done. Paid to run.

And that’s how I made 38,000 nuyen on my first job!

Papa was thrilled!

It’s enough money to move out of Tarislar and into a house in Bellevue! A house!

Chop Shop

A corporate extraction job comes in off the 'trix. Null sweat, easy nuyen so of course I'm in. Unfortunately the meet turns out to reek of a setup as the Johnson turns out to be a twitchy amateur, but he's paying well for an extraction and a dead drop, and also goes for third party escrow so there will be no funny business so why not. Turns out the target is some tech jockey for KSAF, no sweat not exactly a hard target. The tricky part is he works and lives in the downtown studio which puts a damper on just walking in, grabbing the dweeb and getting paid. Downtown was going to require some planning, so the team decided to grab a safe house near by to do some recon and make plans while I headed off to grab my kit and meet them there.

While I was away the team was apparently approached by a Succubus that offered a counter offer and some more insight into the original job. Turns out the J has the hots for Hestaby, who happens to be in town, and has decided to hire us as a distraction for her security team so he can serve up a side of troll beefcake. Wiz. The spirit put the whammy on him and is afraid that after Hestaby is done eating the J that she'll come for her and wants us to abandon the first job and stop the Johnson from succeeding in his plan to naked man his way into Hestaby's heart. The team is understandably spooked after this turn of events and starts to lean heavily towards abandoning the first job and saving their hoops from the vague threats of Hestaby blaming us for the Succubus and J's drekstorm. That is until I pointed out we could do both and get paid twice. The J isn't part of our arrangement to drop the dweeb, in fact he obviously hadn't even planned on being anywhere near the site of the drop off, our pay also didn't require him to complete it as that was setup in escrow. We could take out the J and then also extract the target and collect all around.

Unfortunately the time frame was too tight to do anything too fancy with what was now effectively a double extraction in opposite ends of town so we piled into the team's Jeep and tore off for Redmond to neutralize the Johnson. Luckily Moth had an in for some Laes so we could pull this job off and leave the J breathing and none the wiser, so while she and Granuaile distracted the door guards, Eisen Jaeger and I headed up to have a chat with the J. With no resistance getting in and a quick bit of work made on the lock, we burst into the J's dingy apartment and I put a gel round between his eyes before he could blink twice sending him right back off to la la land. Black bagged with a pillowcase the two of us grabbed and arm and started hauling a fragging huge troll down the hall and back to the elevator. Meanwhile down in the lobby Granuaile and Moth were still busy flashing some skin, so the guards had no eyes for the two of us dragging a 120 kilo unconscious troll out the front door, crack up job Corpo's, and with the Johnson secured in the trunk the rest of the team was recalled and job two was complete. The J was then force fed some Laes and false memories then rolled into an alley to sleep it off we turned our attention to job two.

Cracking the host was no problem, and with a little poking and prodding I get into their internal communications and it turns out we have an in. Our boy fairly regularly gets dispatched out to check in new equipment when it arrives, giving us an opening where we could get to him without having to breach an entire office building, however the snag is that there are still watcher spirits, cameras, and usually a pair of guards to contend with. With time quickly ticking down we set up a forged order to go check in gear and quickly scramble to arrange some fake SINs and security armor so we can insert EisenJaeger and Moth to be his security detail for the pick up. Unfortunately some strings come attached to that rush job and now we have a third job, that we're not getting paid for, to complete. Tap the feed. Why can't the nuyen ever be easy?

Our insiders get in and manage to fly under the radar as go time arrives. Granuaile sets up to lock down the watchers and I yet again hit the host and start looping the loading dock cameras. Our target comes strutting out, a gnome of all things, with our guys in tow and as the back doors of the van are opened, we drop some mana barriers, I drill the guy with another Gel Round and the security team piles his unconscious body into the van. We pull out and are on our way out of the district to the dead drop with no one the wiser.

Dead drop is clean, the J apparently hired some SINless guy to confirm the drop, and the rest of the team contacts the succubus to report success. For the small cost of ¥5 in gel rounds, we all parted ways ¥38,000 richer.