Free cruise for you and your friends; a Christmas vacation for runners

Free cruise for you and your friends; a Christmas vacation for runners
Date 2080-12-22 GM DocMcGuffin Location A cruise ship en route to route to Hawaii
Belligerents
Riot Hybrid Setback Night Claws - John Holis	Rival Runner Team

Summary

Horizon hires runner teams to kill and protect the same target an a cruise ship, and broadcasts the ensuing conflict.

The Meet

The team meets the Johnson in a Horizon matrix host, and is jerked around a bit. The Johnson makes an active effort to avoid directly describing the run, speaking only in vague deniable language that would be assumed to just be normal conversation to anyone listening. The team is given a name and a price, but no instructions. Riot and Setback try to communicate on the level the Johnson is talking to get an answer with results that could be better...

Riot (Through DNI): "Just, I dunno, use the word killing in some form as slang. See if she agrees. Then we'll know if she's trying to hire us to kill the guy, or protect him." Setback (Bad Luck triggers on his pre-edged roll): "So you want us to kill this guy, right?"

Nonetheless, the team finds out they need to protect the guy. there is to be no killings on the cruise. None. Zero killing.

The Plan

Once on the cruise, the team does a little scouting. Riot asks Hotaru to do a little astral recon, and he finds 2 watcher spirits who make an active effort to avoid him, but do not appear to cause any sort of security response. Riot mistakenly believes these are part of the ship's security, and that simply spirits are not disallowed here. The team then sneaks into the VIP area to get into the target's room, sweeping it for bugs. 4 bugs are found and destroyed, and the team leaves behind their own bugs.

The Run

After getting out, the team heads to the dining hall for dinner. Someone notices the telltale signs of a silencer on another guest. Riot assenses and spots an illusion spell on them both. Hybrid tries to hack their gear, but finds it behind a very beefy firewall which could only be provided by a rival decker. Riot dispels both illusion spells, and the rival team quickly tries to leave the dining hall. Setback goes to have a friendly chat with one of the rival runners, who calls in their team muscle to try and persuade them into letting him go. Night Claws shows up and throws his street cred around to intimidate the rival runner team into agreeing to abandon their job.

Meanwhile, the target's wife, a technomancer herself, notices Hybrid's sprite. She calls over Hybrid and Riot to try and ask us to be a little more discreet about using technomancer power on the ship. At the same time, she's sustaining something on her husband, so the team convinces her to drop that because for some reason our first assumption was she was using it to puppeteer her husband's skillwires to control him like a puppet. We were wrong, and still don't know what she was actually doing.

After a quick talk, the team resolves that we can't trust the rival team to really back down, so we go to their room and kick in the door. The fight is short, and they are knocked unconscious. They are tied up and stripped of gear. Their decker is pulled aside and his cyberdeck is threatened until he reveals he was hired by the same J. The rival team is then left in their room, needs are provided, and Hotaru keeps an eye on them for the rest of the trip. They are told to get off at Hawaii and not get back on the ship.

Rewards

• ¥12k nuyen
• 5 karma
• 2cdp
• 1 Public Awareness

Player After Action Reports (AARs)

Riot

Riot was laying back on the beach chair on the pool deck. The sun was warm, the drink was cold, and just this once she could relax. The job was done. This was her prize for victory. This and the money, but hey. She knew the Berserker wanted her to find a new challenge. But just this once, she took the chance to have a break.

Hybrid

The meeting with the Ms. Johnson turned out to be pretty amusing with Setback's remark. We understood what needed to be done though. I felt almost overzealous when the political figure supported technomancers, and I wanted to make sure our target survived. What I did not expect was his wife being the technomancer instead, and the politican himself was not. It turns out she was threading a puppeteer complex form on her own husband, which NC and I did not agree with. Thankfully, NC spoke to her about it, so hopefully she'll tone down the frowned usage of resonance. When push came to shove and we encountered our opposition, which turned out to be another runner team, we knocked them unconscious far quicker than expected. The cruise otherwise was nice.