Red vs. Blue

Red vs. Blue
Date 2081-11-07 GM Sarcarian Location Atlanta, CAS Status Threat Level: High
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven PepsiCo	CocaCola
Frag Face King Beef Mission Control Spider eyes	Helpless Scientist Lone Star Security Officer Security Spider Security Mage
Casualties and losses
	Helpless Scientist x6, Lone Star Security Officer x6, Security Spider

Summary

In which the runners are hired by Pepsi to extract a chemist from one of Coke’s research laboratories.

The Meet

Mr. Johnson has the team meet him in a rent-by-the-hour host on the Matrix; a bit of diligent pre-meet legwork by Mission Control determines that it is most likely owned by an Aztechnology subsidiary. Everyone rezzes in right on schedule and are greeted by a smiling cowboy in a white suit on a horse, who fills them in on the usual “what, when, where, how much, and can we cause collateral damage” questions (the answers being “an extraction”, “as soon as possible”, “in Atlanta”, “16 grand, with potential for bonus pay” and “my employer encourages it”, respectively).

The team, especially Frag Face and King Beef, is excited at the news that they encourage collateral damage, and predictably ask about the opportunities for further payment. Mr. J tells them that in addition to the extraction of a talented scientist (who is unwilling and being made an offer he can’t refuse, and who must be retrieved whole and intact), his employer wants the research data for the project he’s been working on as well as the facility smashed up so that progress will be stymied. For each bonus objective, they will receive another 4000 nuyen each on top of the 16k base payment.

The team is happy with the terms, but they attempt to push for a bump to the base pay – however none of them know how to negotiate, so Frag Face gives it his best attempt using his skillwires. Sadly the professional Johnson wants to keep his cut and has double the dice pool, so he shoots it down and they accept the offer as presented to them, knowing they’ll fulfill at least one of the bonus objectives.

The Plan

Mission Control does his thing and tackles the pre-run legwork, looking over the dossier of information given to him by the J and planning out a strategy. Spider Eyes is eager to help out with reconnaissance, but Frag Face and King Beef are simple creatures and prefer simple solutions to their problems – they think the best way to go about things is to simply smash through anything between them and their target, and the others find it difficult to disagree with the pair of Smashing Blow-wielding trog adepts. The two sides come to an agreeable compromise – MC and SE will be allowed to do their strategizing in order to determine the most optimal direction to point FF and KB in so that they can most effectively utilize the power of smash to achieve their shared goals.

According to their intel and Mission Control’s Host Design knowledge, the facility they’re hitting uses an industrial host to protect its expensive and fragile devices from remote sabotage. This means that their data protection is less-than-stellar, so a work-around was developed using physical terminals that retrieve data directly from the Foundation and store it for retrieval in isolated, wired servers. This means that the team will not need a dedicated hacker to get the research data, simply someone who can obtain a mark on a terminal they’re directly connected to and call up the info from the Foundation into the physical server, which can subsequently be ripped directly out of the wall for easy transport.

Arriving in Atlanta via Pepsi cargo plane, the team is given a vehicle for transportation with the runner’s special and a rigger interface installed. Spider Eyes gets familiar with it as the team makes their way across the sprawl to the Coke flavor lab where their target works. They find a modern (non-ET) building with uniformed security from Lone Star standing guard out front, as well as standard access control measures like bollards and maglocked doors, plus regular perimeter patrols by both drones and spirits. Spider Eyes identifies a potential ingress point in a rear wall that does not have bollard coverage where he can drive right up up to the hole they make in it, and the team agrees on the strategy.

The Run

Everything starts off smoothly enough – Spider Eyes finds an inconspicuous place to park the van and deploy his drones, and Mission Control leads Frag Face and King Beef in a diamond formation, slice-the-pie maneuver using his SmUTty knowledge as they leave the vehicle and make their way towards their ingress point. However unbeknownst to anyone King Beef is an astral beacon, and the patrolling spirits immediately spot him despite their best efforts to make an initially stealthy approach before going loud.

Any pretense of subtlety immediately goes out the window once the spirit sees them, so Frag Face says frag it and immediately charges at the wall, bursting right through it and proceeding another 11m inside. Spider Eyes sends his rotodrones around to the other side of the building to distract the security drones, while King Beef empowers himself with adrenaline surge and elemental body before summoning up his own spiritual support. Mission Control just sighs heavily, wondering why nobody tells him important things like this, before approaching the hole left in Frag Face’s wake, alarms blazing in the distance.

The air spirits attempt to engage the enemy, but 2 out of three of them are clad in chemsealed armor so their options are limited - one attempts to make Mission Control have an accident and fails, while the other uses its noxious breath ability on King Beef (which fails to get through his respirator). The security spider, having hit the panic button, attempts to get Spider Eyes drone to frag off while Lone Star secures the scene and has one of his own rotodrones present its weapon to make the point clear, so he starts firing upon it, having one of his own drones disabled before he takes it down.

Inside the building, Frag Face scares the crap out of every poor defenceless scientist he comes across, using Mona Lisa facial recognition software to help him locate their target in the chaos. Lone Star, the poor fools, attempt to stop him with stick-and-shock flachette rounds from their LeMat revolvers, but it has little effect as Frag Face just swats the ammo aside before walking directly through them on the way towards his goal. The spider attempts to employ the building’s gas-based countermeasures, but Frag Face is clad in chemsealed SWAT armor and can’t be stopped by something as simple as neurostun.

Mission Control has a small attack of conscience and attempts to put the Lone Star guards he encounters down with stick-and-shock to spare them from being punched to death by kami-filled adepts, however once the air spirit engulfs King Beef and begins sucking the air out of his lungs to suffocate him he decides to stop screwing around and fills it with ADPS, dispersing it. The other air spirit goes after Frag Face and attempts to use its movement power to slow him down, but the ork is having none of it and casually disperses it with a swipe of his fist before finally managing to locate their target, swiftly paralyzing him with a nerve strike and tossing him over his shoulder.

Free of the air spirit and one stun box away from passing out, King Beef stim-patches himself and starts smashing his way towards the server room in the basement of the office area of the building, where the spider is located (Spider Eyes is able to locate him for them via his matrix persona before dumpshocking him out of a drone he’s rigged into). Mission Control follows through the new minotaur-sized holes in the walls of the chemical labs, being careful not to step in anything and confident that the two trogs have earned everyone their bonus pay. King Beef smashes directly through the floor and surprises the unfortunately-disoriented spider by cracking his rigger cocoon open like an egg while Mission Control watchdogs a mark onto one of the computer terminals and begins loading the research data; once it’s ready, King Beef rips it out of the wall and the two make their way towards the egress point.

Frag Face kills indiscriminately on his way to the exit, his flame-wreathed form and distinctive armor being caught on camera all the while for his many enemies to see later, before running into the Lone Star mage who attempts to slow his progress with illusions so that the incoming HTR can arrive and overwhelm him with superior firepower. However he resists through the power of edge and spots the mage on the astral, deliberately holding back with his punch and doing stun damage with killing hands just to see if it’s still enough to kill him (the resulting stun damage puts him 1 box from physical overflow). With the primary threats neutralized, Spider Eyes pulls up with a power slide and everyone hops in the van with extraction target and research data in hand before peeling out; at this point King Beef, having soaked more than a few stick-and-shock rounds, crashes from his stimpatch and passes out.

However, Coke and Lone Star aren’t quite done with the runners just yet – the two remaining conjurers send out watcher spirits after the van, who stay on the astral as they relentlessly trail their quarry. Mission Control can’t ADPS them and the Frag Face can’t punch them, so Spider Eyes pulls some Crazy Ivans maneuvers and successfully manages to break line of sight long enough to ditch the tail. The team very quickly rob a Stuffer Shack for some tin foil to wrap their target’s head in when they realize he has an implanted Caliban that their jammers can’t shut off – a task so trivial for them that it doesn’t even merit a roll, however the footage does end up collected by Lone Star later on and contributes to everyone receiving a point of public awareness for their highly public smash-and-grab crime spree across Atlanta.

Aftermath

Managing to lose the cops, Spider Eyes gets the van back to the Pepsi airfield without too much trouble; Mr. Johnson is waiting for them there to accept the target and the data and to give them the credsticks. The handoff goes off without a hitch – Pepsi is very pleased with the runners performance, and their new chemist is alive and well (or will be after the temporary paralysis wears off), so everyone walks away happy (except the chemist, but wageslaves don’t count).

Rewards

• 24,000 nuyen
• 2 karma
• 2 CDP
• +1 PepsiCo rep
• -1 CocaCola rep
• 1 Public Awareness

Game Quotes

Frag Face: [on looking for their target] “Look, it’s just a high intensity game of ‘Where’s Waldo’."

Player After Action Reports (AARs)

King Beef

I'm tellin' you the fuckin' pea shooters all these cops are using musta gotten upgraded at some point. They still can't really mess me up but they're knockin' me out more than I'd like. Well that and the drekhead spirits that try to suck your lungs out. Thankfully good teammates makes the difference and Mission Control saved me from their spirit. I was able to patch myself up and join Frag Face in putting enough holes into that building to make that uuuuh hole-y cheese blush. Spider Eyes helped me find our target too so I ripped that server out and we all dipped. Good run I gotta say.