Mainilan Fire

Mainilan Fire
Date 2084-02-14 GM Asmodeus Location Helsinki, Lohja, Lahti, Mikkeli (Finland) Status Threat Level: Extreme
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven Erika Hextech Tapio	Ex Pacis
Delphi Eidolon Katherine Tyler	Jesus Spark
Casualties and losses
Kate almost died.	Drone was irrevocably destroyed.

Summary

The gang gets hired by Erika to track down a Russian spy. This is only half-correct. It's an Ex-Pacis op to provoke a war between Finland and Russia.

The Meet

The meet is still in Seattle, a datachip and trid projector showcasing an AI-generated view of a red-haired woman with an eyepatch offering the team a free flight to Finland for a job that they need foreigners for. They don't trust European shadow communities for this and their local Finnish talent isn't enough to manage this, so they have to recruit heavier capability. They do warn that they can't provide too much information beforehand due to serious security concerns, but they'll try to be as forthcoming as possible. Delphi and Eidolon ask several questions.

Erika believes the target to be a foreign operative, possibly Russian. They've infiltrated various maintenance and infrastructure core points in Southern and Western Finland with varying fake SINs and varied appearances from troll to human figures. Despite this, their extensive Divination attempts point towards this all being done by the same individual, as incredulous as it seems. Delphi's confused, since massive height variance is incredibly hard to pull off with False Faces or adept powers. Still, they agree to track the guy down and bring them to be interrogated; Delphi considers surrendering it to the Finnish military instead of Erika, however.

The Plan

The flight is the easy part. Everyone's offered R6 Linguasofts for Finnish. Kate doesn't have one so she has to read a book on the flight to learn basic words and phrases. Delphi finds two street-level shadow circles, one in Helsinki and one in Kuopio as well as Varjolauta, sometimes also called ShadowGlobe outside the country. The literal translation is "Shadowboard" however. The most recent sight of the infiltrator was when they were initially detected, failing to breach one of the police force's hidden nested hosts. This hack was traced and pinpointed to a hotel room in Lohja, one of the worst cities in the country. Upon receiving hotel accommodations in Helsinki, the team takes a moment to gawk at the clear skies, low background counts and relatively healthy food (as well as the lack of distant gunshots which sets the barrens rat, Eidolon, on edge).

The Run

Delphi searches for images of the Lohja hotel and builds a crude map that lets her figure out which room the hack was in. While it was raided by police strike teams, they found nothing. Delphi astrally projects there and is revolted by the high background count of depravity and lack of care in the city. Nevertheless, she presses on and finds the location, psychometrizing it. The vision provides sights of cybernetic eyes, vocal recordings of sex to mask the bald figure's decking and the complaints of a neighboring hotel customer. They leave through the window by rappelling, having disconnected from a cyberdeck.

Delphi immediately uses a Visualizer to run facial recognition on the face and sends it to SuPo, the Finnish Witness Protection service. They run it through the national traffic footage system and find evidence that the man picked up a bus to Lahti further up north. Delphi returns to her body and with the visuals she got from the psychometry, she manages to team up with Kate's knowledge of hardware and Matrix tech, they discover that man to have used some proprietary set of cybereyes with both Aztechnology and EVO architecture. The cyberdeck was EVO Ural-99, roughly comparable to a Shiawase Cyber-5.

Upon asking the neighbor in Lohja, he reports that his trid projector had been flickering the whole time the weird bald guy was there. Delphi checks the trid projector and avoids sexual harassment from the degenerate hotel customeer, but finds nothing conclusive. Taking yet another train to Lahti, Eidolon's amazed by the sniping positions due to the low-cut landscape of the cities and lack of skyscrapers. Delphi and Kate investigate the bus stop where the bald man stepped off and Delphi gets minor mental anguish from psychometrizing the bus stop bench, witnessing the mental anguish and depression of your average Finnish citizens. She does find one vision where the bald man walks in an absolutely direct path right into the woods from the bus. The team begins tracking the trail but stops for a moment while Delphi tries to ask local runners for help. It's a long trial, having to consort with Great Form Beast Spirits guarding the ancient woods and ask them for guidance as well as convincing a very suspicious witch for help (and avoiding dia via migraine from a F10 Masking Ward) before Delphi finds Tapio, a physical adept known for wrangling and fighting alongside two biodroned bears.

He's hated by some of the spirits due to taking care of heavily augmented bears, but he himself is terse, speaks few words and offers to at least do the common courtesy of hearing the runners out. After a brief talk, he gets on one of the bears and rides across the cities to reach the runners' physical location. The team enjoy Tapio's tracking expertise for a short period, but have to rest due to long term forest trekking being in none of their skillset. He helps them pick up the trail and follow the trail back to Kouvola and then Mikkeli. The target appears to have shifted appearance in the woods to become a troll with mismatched horns, so once the traffic search from SuPo launches yet again, it appears the troll's caught onto the fact that he's being tracked and skipped from Kouvola to get yet another city away from pursuit.

The follow-up is immense, but Eidolon does recall a mark he once failed to assassinate in Seattle that left behind a calling card purely to mock him. He calls the burner and is laughed at for a solid two minutes by the triumphant decker that can't believe she was called back. Eidolon elaborates that he needs a decker's help and that he's in the country -- Delphi and Kate promise to try and sweet talk 3310 up to Erika and the government if she helps, advancing her career as a software engineer. She agrees and successfully traces the infiltrator spy down to an office building which the team can only approach by the time night starts falling.

Eidolon sets up on the east side of the building, Kate infiltrates by hacking the front entrance and Delphi runs EWAR duty on the drone sensors. Kate manages to spot some laser sensors and ruthenium polymer-coated flashbang traps in a corridor, but gets ambushed by the spy getting the drop on her instead, gassing her with Neurostun X. An intense chase ensues where Eidolon wallbangs the office building over and over trying to hit the slippery mark while Kate's desperately trying to keep up with the inhumanely fast spy who had laid the building full of traps that are highly damaging but leave no trace of their existence after popping. Kate corners the spy into a bathroom until its forearms shoot synthetic spidersilk to trap Kate's hand in the doorway. With that, he nimbly ducks past Kate's interception and runs away. Eidolon manages a once-in-a-lifetime miracle shot and hits just the right millisecond through four plascrete walls to demolish one of the spy's knees. He continues hopping away on one foot by the time Kate's practically dragged a piece of the wall with her to no longer be stuck. Another thwip of spidersilk pins her foot to the floor, resulting in immobilizing the CAS Navy Seal once again. Delphi and Kate both get viciously brutalized in Matrix Combat by a competent opposing decker, Kate's unique AI-built cyberdeck being utterly bricked despite the hardening module. Delphi's afraid of the potency of her enemy and drops into Coldsim to avoid the greatest of biofeedback, but even then takes a heavy amount of damage.

Somehow, Eidolon succeeds in shooting off the other leg as well. The spy is cornered, immobilized on an office chair and with Kate hot on his heels. Failing its mission, it decides to go out in a blaze of glory and dives Kate, announcing "We failed once, but the spirit of peace will triumph" in Russian before self-destructive. Kate's torso is utterly ravaged by the contained explosion and she goes instantly into a critical state, saved but by the Grace of God. Delphi collects some of the drone parts and Trauma Patches Kate, waiting for the ambulance to warn them about Kate's Carrier status. Eidolon and Delphi have nerve-wracking days waiting for dozens of hours of surgery to finish until Kate is properly stable.

Aftermath

During this downtime, Delphi manages to extract a few of the dozens of impressions in the drone. She uncovers a potential source in the culprits, a far Siberian workshop using various parts bought discreetly from all of the Big Ten and built into some sort of unique model based loosely off the Shiawase iDoll. The craftsman speaks in a deep Russian voice and holds almost religious reverence to the drone which he refers to as a son, a spark and his very own Jesus Christ, comparing himself to God who watches his son walk towards his own crucifixion. Implication of other actors helping this craftsman are revealed, but they foresaw the potential of the drone being psychometrized and as a result concealed all of their identities with Voice Mask augmentations and full body chameleon suits.

Delivering the Visualizer recordings to the Finnish government and Erika, the AA corporation is immensely grateful and, considering the threat of Ex Pacis remnants or wanna-be terrorists, are willing to double the initial pay of 25,000. This will include part of the travel expenses and she even attempts to ask the Finnish Special Forces if she can deduct one of the lower end Pi-Tacs from their newest batch for Delphi. The Johnson, who leaves the team to wait for Kate's full recovery, offers to pay for their flight back as well as Kate's surgery. The team offers the rewards, but leaves the country back to Seattle with a motion of uneasiness. The initial threat was thwarted, but the craftsman is still somewhere out there, as are everyone who helped him. Finland was pretty when they first arrived, but even a week in the country revealed that even such a quiet and peaceful land is far from perfect and full of misery in its own way.

Rewards (1.66x Runtime Multiplier)

• 70,000 Nuyen (35 RVP)
• 10 Karma (10 RVP)
• 1 Street Cred (1 RVP)
• 10 CDP (4 RVP)
• +5 Erika Reputation
• Delphi gets +5 Nexus Reputation due to ShadowGlobe posting nothing but praise
  1. Optional Contact: Taina Kauhava, 5/1 Erika Gear License Provider (5 RVP) (Johnson offers her as a Seattle gear provider in case they want to purchase more of Erika's products in the future)
  2. Optional Contact: 3310, 3/1 Nokia Software Developer - ONLY FOR EIDOLON (3 RVP) (Gained from a use of I Know A Guy feature involving Edge)
  3. Optional Gear: R1 Pi-Tac @ Gear Rates (57,500 Nuyen) (Model name is Erika Pohjantähti - tl. Erika North Star)
  4. Optional Gear: Any Erika Items @ Gear Rates (Erika Elite, Erika MCD-1)
  5. Optional Gear: Cerebral & Cerebellum Boosters, Datajack+, Soft Nanohives w/ Neural Amplifiers, Headware up to Betaware and Avail 19 (Gear Rates so 50% discount)

Game Quotes

Amusing quote from game.