Amnesia Rush

Amnesia Rush
Date 2081-12-09 GM Onebi Location Puyallup Status Threat Level: Low
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven Ancients Laesa Syndicate	Cutters
Oathbane Babylon Kitsune	Ace, Grenadier Fuzzy, Druid Mage Sam, Samurai Wheelman Howitzer, Tactician
Casualties and losses
Oathbane's Technomancer cover (only for the team and Argent)	The Cutter rookies were brought alive to the Ancients, to an unknown fate.

Summary

In which the runners are hired to recover a big delivery of laes that was stolen by a team of ambitious Cutters rookies.

Background

Early on the 9nth of december, the laësa syndicate managed to smuggle in a significant dose of laës through the Tacoma airport of Seattle, but to do so they had to bribe some officials in advance. One of these officials happened to be a relative of Howitzer, a rookie of the Cutters gang looking to make a name for himself. When he heard about this bribe, he used his little bud of influence to recruit fellow cutters and glean some info on the path the cargo was the most likely to take.

At about 9h30 AM, Howitzer put his plan into motion. His Grenadier Ace planted a bomb right in the middle of a crossroad, and his mage camouflaged it expertly. Once the bomb planted, the Cutters team retreated behind a dilapidated store and waited for the convoy to pass. 10h24 is the time when the convoy passed over the explosives, and thus when the detonation occured, a short scuffle happened but it was over before it started. The Laësa rigger died in the crash, leaving only a Troll to defend the convoy, the second bodyguard mage having surrendered fast after recognizing a pal of his among the aggressors. Indeed, it turns out Fuzzy, the mage from the cutters and Vulture, the one from the convoy were both of the same Druidic tradition, and even initiated together at the same place. The Cutters quickly beat the troll guard into submission, and ran off with the Laësa palette in a GMC Universe van, boosted by the help of an air spirit.

On the way they called on their Cutters superiors to secure themselves a hideout until they can deliver it to them, which they got in the form of a small underground apartment in the mines of the Carbonado region.

At about 11h, Argent gets the word about the incident and seize the opportunity to look good to it's boss, he goes on scene and calls up a team of runners in the hope that they can get the package back before the Cutters manage to make it disappear.

The Meet

Argent's team of runner being completed, at the price of airlifting Oathbane from Redmond, he waited for them on the site of the explosion. Meanwhile Tusk, the Troll bodyguard of the convoy, covers up the cadaver of the now deceased rigger. The team mostly gets there in time, and they see what is obviously the scene of an ambush, a small truck is overturned and the road is damaged. Argent meet the runners and thank them for their expediency, before explaining to them the little he knows. Babylon turns out to act as the face, and they learn that during this ambush a large quantity of Laës was actually stolen, Argent offers the team 10 000 each Nuyens for their retrieval of the package. Everyone seems okay with that to his surprise and when the question of what to do with the actual stealers came up, argent could not care less about their fates, in retaliation for the dead rigger. However Vulture (the convoy's mage) bugged him into promising 2 000 Nuyens each for the recovery of the organizer of the ambush, and 4 000 Nuyens for the whole team. Oh, and Babylon managed to tip off Argent on the nature of his matrix specialist.

The Runners having accepted this deal, they went ahead and started examining the place.

Investigation

When asking around, they quickly discovered from Tusk that the ambushers actually were from the Cutters gang, and there were four of them. Babylon took the initiative of checking the overturned truck to see what info it had in memory from it's camera. She managed to extract the data with success, and with the help of Oathbane removing artifacts from the video, they had a clear feed of the camera around the time of the events. Watching the tape, they learnt the explosive was actually invisible, and had a good view of the ambushers while they shot at and pummeled Tusk into the ground, interestingly, Vulture was seemingly not attacked during the Ambush. At the end of the video, they could see a GMC universe speeding away with unnatural speed towards the south east.

To glean even more information, Oathbane decided to hack the host of a nearby pawn shop. Easily marking her way in, she entered an host sculpted after an old far west shop, where she did not loose time before marking the camera's icon, A spyglass looking outwards of the host. She then threaded herself a Cookie shaped edit sprite to recover the data from the Spyglass, 01 the world tree came to her aid by dissolving the matrix protocols around the Spyglass and her Cookie aggregator, his roots penetrating and fooling the device and it's host into letting this info be copied.

Babylon used this time to invoke a force 5 spirit and assense the local space, perceiving traces of a spell cast here recently, she memorized the aura associated with it before Oathbane sent to her and Kitsune the result of her hacking shenanigans. The video featured the ambushers clearly setting up the scene about an hour before the actual ambush, and then deliberately not shooting at the mage, which did not attack them either. They decided to send the video to Argent by DNI, who gave them 5 minutes to interrogate the mage before he has to take diciplinary action against him.

Kitsune stepped up to the challenge, and Probed the mind of the hesitating mage. She managed to read his surface thoughts, and thanks to the help of Babylon and her own social skills, they managed to know that he knew the opposing mage in a way, that they initiated together in a cave in Carborado, and they got an idea of how the mine entrance looked like.

With all of that info, the team felt confident and decided to get moving. Seeing the group lacked a fast transport for the newly discovered techno and scooter user, Argent lent the team one of his bikes.

The Run

Closing in on their location, the team passed Hell's kitchen and just arrived near Carbonado, at which point Kitsune decided to fetch simple clothes to apply her fashion spell to, while also morphing her body to appear as the ambusher's mage. Babylon decided for her part to send her force 5 spirit to search for the same mage, using the aura she memorized earlier. The spirit comes back about twenty minutes later, having identified the place where the aura's owner went, but it could not go further due to the background count inside.

The team got back on the road, now with a precise destination in mind, but carefull about not being seen in enemy gang territory. Successfully staying out of the radar of the locals, they got on site, a huge mining operation was underway here a long time ago until the crash 2.0 decimated the local mining and boring companies. What stayed behind are the carcasses of huge machines and vehicles, and long tunnels underground. Babylon asked her force 5 spirit demon to camouflage the bikes while she and Kitsune ventured in the mines, Oathbane preferring to stay out of it to not suffer from the migraine that is the static of a cave to a technomancer.

In the mines, Babylon and Kitsune quickly felt the magic landscape morph around them into a steady stream of heat, anger, respect and a destruction. The change mostly impacted Kitsune, whose body morhing started to take on more animalistic and druidic traits the further they penetrated the mine. At some point the mine developped into a terminal for mining operations, featuring mine-carts systems and multiple tunnels going deeper in the mine. Babylon and Kitsune felt a strong magic flow coming from one specifically however, that they decided to investigate. Sending a drone and assensing at the same time, they saw a communion of druids during a ceremony of theirs in a natural cave to appease the local nature spirits after their place have been ravaged by human mining operations. Kitsune and Babylon tried establishing some plans to get past the group without being seen, but ended up figuring that the target was not among the druids and that they had no reason to hide from them.

Oathbane percieved the matrix around her comrades, and found out one device, a commlink running silent and slaved to a deck. Furthering her investigation, and with the help of the world tree, she managed to know that the team was near their hideout, about 90 meters away. At this point Babylon wanted to keep her face a secret, so she asked Oathbane to shut down the cameras that she could see, which she did successfully. It however tipped off the team in their hiding spot, as the camera feed turned to black and their off site Decker was not the source of the disturbance. With this, the ambushers decided to rig the entrance with explosives and a tripwire, and get in their GMC Universe waiting to hear the boom before speeding out of the cave. Babylon, in front of the futuristic-looking entrance embedded into the rock wall itself, opened the door and waited for the drone to map the room first, and she did well as it spotted the tripwire before she triggered it.

Once inside, she cased the place and, following the trace of the magician's aura, she opened a door to a concealed garage where the ambushers were waiting to speed off as soon as they heard the explosion of their tripwire. A short scuffle ensued where Babylon directed a force 6 spirit to confuse the magician in the car, a litteral collumn of flame manifesting in the car, but the magician was not impressed. The pilot/samurai used suppressive fire in the general direction of Babylon from the driver's seat, forcing her to duck out of the way. However, in a move that could be called "clutch", Oathbane's rotodrone sent a flashbang straight through the front window of the van, where it explode and make everyone in the car unconscious except the Troll, who gave up all resistance with ease.

Aftermath

Contacting Argent to get a drop off point, they are directed towards a site next to tarislar, where they will be welcomed by a number of bikes and a luxury vehicle. Argent welcomes the runners and is all smiles, while his boss looks from afar. He quickly ask Babylon if they managed to bring the team along which she confirmed, and the Laës shipment seemed to be (mostly) in good state. At this point Argent's boss examined the shipment and, being satisfied and quite impressed with his initiative's success, gave him two packages of Laës while congratulating him. The Ancients quickly took care of isolating the four ambushers, leaving them to an unknown fate.

Babylon managed to get a price on Laës and Laës-spiked lipstick from Argent, and everyone made good impression on this day.

Rewards

14 000 nuyens (7 rvp)

2 karma (2 rvp)

2 CDP

+2 reputation to share between the Laesa syndicate and the Ancients

Optionnal rewards :

2:1 On Laës

Argent 1/3, Ancients associate and rising star in the Laësa's ranks (cost 3 RVP or 6 CDP or any in between)

Game Quotes

GM: [Complicated desciption of magna influenced astral space] Kitsune : Fire, basically. Like a hearth, warm but with the threat of hot.

Player After Action Reports (AARs)

Babylon

My first job with this new ShadowHaven outfit and I end up working for the Ancients like I usually do - not a bad gig as far as I'm concerned, though, Argent's a go-getter and usually has work so I was happy to get tagged in and make some in-roads with the Laesa, plus I even managed to get my hands on enough of their product to last me until I can learn to alter memories with magic (I'll just need to store it somewhere secure). I was a bit taken aback when he said these "rookies" were a crew with the Cutters, but they went down easy enough in the end - I'd have put them all in a shared shallow grave for taking out the truck driver like they did, but we got paid extra to nab them alive and its probably better not to provoke the only gang around who can step to the Ancients, even if they did punch throw the first punch at our allies.

All in all no real issues except for all the druid stuff messing with the astral space - turns out there was a whole circle down there, and even though they were a bunch of tree-hugging hippies apparently at least one or two were initiates, so all their ritual bulldrek had fragged with the background mana enough to seriously dampen my mojo. I was not a fan at all, but there were too many to take on with me as the only real combatant (and even that's stretching it); they let us pass and take in their boy with the Cutters though, guess they didn't want any trouble. Guess they were smarter than they looked. The ritual stuff was a bit neat I guess, but still I can't imagine sharing power like that - or squatting out in an abandoned mine in Carbonado just to get closer to nature. At least the shamans leave the sprawl to do that.

The team was on their game too, even if it was a toaster-fragger and another black mage too afraid to openly rep the Left Hand Path - both were trying to hide what they really were, but I saw through the masking and the fake deck easy enough. Honestly I was more concerned that all they had to drive was a Jackrabbit and a damn Scoot; Argent had to lend us a bike that could keep up with my Mirage just to get their hoops out to Carbonado in a reasonable timeframe. Still, both knew what they were doing - the mysad, Kitsune, was better with mind magic than me and could also do a bunch of adept tricks to disguise herself (which was cool as hell), and Oathbane, the techno, was a wiz on the 'trix and kept the Cutters from picking us up on cams, plus she had a drone with a flashbang that took most of them out. Good crew, would work with again.

Anyway, enough reminicing - I've got the nuyen here to set up a proper lodge so that I can finally do some real conjuring, with enough cash left over to buy myself a nice new commlink as a birthday present and throw a killer party.

Oathbane: It was difficult trying to supply matrix supports in a place where there was a lot of static and The Cave walls were not helping my technology at all to gaining effect .Luckily enough my drone was able to handle majority due to it’s weapon and  I was able to acquire a better vehicle afterwards so I don't have to worry about the jackrabbit anymore . It was good to help and shut down the cams so none of my team was notice.