RIP Bozo

RIP Bozo
Part of The Name of Heaven
Date 2085-06-16 GM sleevey Location Issaquath, Renton (Seattle) Status Threat Level: Medium
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven ch1t1n	Night Hunters
Buck Digifex Lanius Saint	Goons Spider Big Guy Biggest Guy
Casualties and losses
Lanius Visits the Beach That Makes You Dissonant, Digifex Loses His Resolve	Yes

Summary

Night Hunters get clowned on, and the clown gets rescued.

WIP

Background

Battle Not With Monsters

Lanius talks with their wrestling fixer - they discuss the finer points of what a heel rescuing a kid would do to their marketing and optics. They agree to figure something out in the edit. Buck talks with Cairn, a very weird snake who emerges from the gutters of the garden he's maintaining. They've heard about a really cool skull that he should definitely track down, and have a lead in the form of a Johnson asking for help. Saint, on ordered bed rest and while recovering from a punctured lung, talks with her fixer Alex Samson - he tells her it's blatantly a drek job and that he's sending her primarily because he doesn't really like the client. If she gets paid at all, he demands his standard %10 cut. She asks him bluntly if he only calls her when he has clients he doesn't like, and he hangs up on her. Digifex talks with his fixer, who again tells him this is a drek job, but one that he's uniquely qualified to handle. The J might be like him, after all, and knowing how important that is, he accepts.

The Meet

ch1t1n meets with the runners at a Matrix mixed reality bar called Syberspace in Downtown. Saint, Digifex, and Buck go in VR, while Lanius puts on a nice dress and goes in person, simultaneously entering the host in AR. ch1t1n is a very sad, alcoholic bug man on the Matrix, and just a very sad alcoholic on the meat. He says that he's had a falling out with his friend, a clown, who has since started mentally deteriorating and gone missing. The three of them were apparently involved in a "Treasure Hunt" talked about on the Matrix in forums and other hidden circles. After someone "destroyed the world" of their host, b0z0 changed and lashed out at his friends - Br34ker broke off contact, but ch1t1n has been keeping tabs on his friend since then. His persona has very recently gone completely offline.

Digifex waxes on about the divinity of the Matrix. ch1t1n brags about sleazing drinks off the host, and Saint, unimpressed, drinks an entire bottle of Glint Eye simsense to prove it's not real (it is very real, though she conceals how much it affects her).

They prise as much from the bug man as they can and determine that their target's last known whereabouts were in Renton. Some Matrix nerds track down his online presence and trace him from there while Saint and Buck, presumably, recline back at home. Saint "helps" with a Matrix search by screencapping a page of google results and sending it as a compressed jpg to Lanius.

The Plan

Connections are made, and it seems likely that b0z0 is a Xapiri Thepe, but like, with umlauts above the e's I don't make the rules. The area is occupied largely by Humanis and Humanis sympathizers, including the thrill gang Night Hunters, which are themselves a more extremist cell tied directly to Humanis Policlub. A green elf in the wrong gang's neighborhood is just asking for trouble. They narrow the likely safehouses down to a specific suburb, and keep a distant watch on the situation just to confirm this is their target. The guys loitering outside seem suspicious enough - shaved heads, and Humanis tattoos on deniable areas of their bodies like the forearm. Seems good.

In lieu of an actual plan, the crew deign to just waltz in and start swinging, which seems pretty typical of this particular team composition to be honest.

The Run

Fight time, technos do techno things and surreptitiously get marks on the host by brushing their hand against a slaved car so they can go inside and hit their guns and other wireless objects. Saint saints, Buck bucks, Lanius clinches, and Digifex fex them up. Clearing the outside guard, Saint goes to a side door and gets punched through the wood - she wheezes with the effort, and her stitches tear open slightly. She is not making her doctor happy.

Ashford's evil racist twin emerges. Digifex, in a cruel twist of meta-irony, bricks his gun and puts him down as well.

Shots go through the walls of the home to ping several other humanis gamers. Saint tosses a frag into the garages and eats another couple of blows to dash through them to the interior of the house. It salsafies one of them, though two others remain, who promptly surrender.

Saint has a moment with the leader? The big guy, who has much more obvious tattoos and ware, like this dude is obviously not living a normal life outside of his dream job here. Oh don't forget the trap door in the garage that's important. She asks if he has any keebs in the building, and he says yeah, there's one in the basement. He asks if he should raise a white flag, and Saint wonders if the people he hurt ever did. He has a kid, he says. She asks him if he teaches his kid to do shit like this, and if he's got a wife to take over for him instead, and he says that's rich coming from someone so chromed out. She asks him who made her like that. He doesn't have an answer save to spit on her, and she kills him.

They find an escort shot by a bullet through the wall in the other room of the house. After some deliberation, the runners apply a trauma patch and resolve to bring her with them before the police arrive to make sure she gets the care she needs. Kind of a situation they themselves caused, but at least their hearts are in the right place.

Into the basement. b0z0, the chlorophyll elf, is alive and not well. He, like a feral animal, scrambles away from the light and digs his little nails into the compacted dirt in a corner of the basement room. Across from him, an ork's body lies dead in the dirt, freshly killed. In the dirt is a skull - Lanius grabs it and has a really bad time. Digifex is convinced that this is dissonance and that the kid needs to be put down, though Saint and Buck both object to this. Saint tells Digifex to stop being so morally grand-standing and to just shoot the kid if he really believes he should die, fully prepared to disarm him when he does. Buck, similarly though far more bluntly, says that he is leaving this room with the kid over his shoulder, alive.

Lanius escapes from the Beach that makes you dissonant and, similarly, says the kid's gotta die. The group eventually come to the consensus that no, he doesn't actually have to die, and they bring him back to ch1t1n's meat body, a sad human in a hoodie waiting outside a house in Redmond.

Aftermath

Lanius publishes a video (with the other runners edited out) of the massacre, lending her public awareness and insane negative reputation with the involved factions. Lanius also researches the Beach that Makes You Dissonant and sends Caliban a nastily worded message about what she did during Battle Not With Monsters. Buck brings Cairn the weird skull and Cairn is all about it, he loves it. Digifex is broken, torn between breaking the Dissonance that he sees as an affront to the divinity of the Matrix and the innocence of a child afflicted with it. Saint doesn't get any of this resonance drek but pats ch1t1n on the head for a job well done protecting his friend.

Game Quotes

"I guess etiquette would be better for racially profiling him..." -Bean, as Lanius

Player After Action Reports (AARs)

Digifex - "Everything was simple going until the damn kid had to be dissonant. If he's not fully gone, I can only hope that something can help, whether a paragon's divine blessing or a wiz doc, I don't care, just don't let one more of us fade into nothing. I'll say I won't hold out hope, but Paragons, I have to."

Buck - "You know, usually I like my dust-ups with a little less creepy-murder-basement-pits and a little more fun-in-the-sun. But then again, any day I get to save a sick kid and put down some racists is a good day. And everybody important walked away more or less unscathed. Or... Well, almost everybody..."

Saint - "They were seriously gonna kill some kid over the 'beach that makes you evil' or some shit - the frag does that even mean? Drek, he's got people who love him, you see how big that hug was? Glad he made it outta there - he'll be fine with friends like that by his side... Hope the girl makes it too."