On Bloodied Wings

On Bloodied Wings
Part of The Name of Heaven
Date 2085-05-12 GM Sleevey Location Seattle Grid Status Threat Level: High
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven Grimm and Xylobones Various Goons sent by Cecilia Cross	Dissonant Heavenseekers
Quinntessence Lumin	FacelessEyeless Squirm
Casualties and losses
One Point of Edge Was Burned	FacelessEyeless was last seen being ravaged by a monster in the foundation.

Summary

Harriot and Lumin are thrust into a hunt for heaven. Along they way, they mop up a strangers blood, get chased around by a woman with a machete, witness a machete murder, are subjected to claustrophic horrors within a foundation, mop up their own blood and hold hands.

Background

One year ago, a great beast was unsealed. It screamed across the matrix, seen by a few and ripped through a few specific hosts. Now, strange sightings have occurred across the matrix. Hosts have gone offline. Whispers of Heaven pass through deaf crowds.

And Harriot returns from Germany to spend a night with her girlfriend at her apartment.

The Meet

Zelda gives an impromptu a slide show presentation detailing her recent work to her very jetlagged girlfriend, going over a series of coincidences related to the strange happenings on the grid. Sightings of a golden shape moving very fast, as well as a series of hosts that went down recently. The grids the sightings were on seem to match the host blackouts. Harriot, exhausted but nonetheless endeared, nods along.

It was here that The Skeleton appeared.

The two of them were greeted by the sound of rattlin' bones and, shortly thereafter, the source of the noise. A skeleton sprite in the style of an old black and white cartoon came dancing out before them, slapping an ulna bone across his ribcage to give his jig some music. He also looked beat to hell and back. He was missing an arm and his skull was cracked. He proudly presented an audio file to the two of them. The two of them, curious but very much on guard, scan the file for data bombs before decrypting it and playing it. It's a cry for help, the voice of someone around their age, clearly exhausted, asking for help ... telling them that they are looking for him. The two of them don't quite know exactly what to do with this information and the grooving skeleton provides no form of elaboration.

A few minutes later, they get a knock on the door.

The two of them scamper to the peephole, where they see a scruffy head of black hair leaning against the door and hear heavy, strained breathing. Lumin grabs her taser and bravely opens the door. On the other side is a ragged little goth nerd, no more than 20 years old. They also doesn't look so hot, their skull and bone makeup is smeared and peeling and they're bleeding profusely. They offer a weak smile, flickering a living persona weakly before collapsing onto the floor.

The two technos bring in the dork and patch them up. Eventually, they come to in the middle of a tarp (they were getting blood everywhere) with a taser pointed at them. Still woozy from blood loss, they tell them that their name is Grimm and the sprite's is Xylobones. They're being hunted by a dissonant technomancer due to their knowledge of a place called heaven that they stumbled upon while in the resonance realms. They know the location of a treasure map that should lead to a key. They don't know where the key is or where the door the key opens is, a fact that they bemoan. They learned about Lumin through Sarah Snow and stumbled their way here, out of friends and places to hide.

Before they can decide whether this weirdo is their responsibility or not, there's another knock at the door. On the other side is a strange man with all the marks of normality, a normal suit, a normal face, a normal briefcase ... but an ever-present wrongness to him. A dark glimmer in his black eyes, a predatory air to his long smile. He says he's from a nearby hospital and that a delirious patient escaped and that they should tell him if they know anything. He gives a description of the patient, a description that matches Grimm to a T. His ID and SIN also seem to check out ... but the bad vibes are picked up on nevertheless. Zelda lies to the man and shuts the door.

Grimm identifies the man as one of the people chasing them. They scan the matrix and find that Xylobones has disappeared after being commanded to 'devour itself'. Putting their techno heads together, the duo scans the matrix and manages to spot a terrible form within one hundred meters of them, running silent. It wore a suit but where skin would be, instead a jagged layer of teeth jutted out. From the base of its neck, a series of thin, fleshy tentacles reached down and stretched out into the grid, the few that ended near him culminating in a various organs, displaced from their hosts and hanging in the air. The uncanny vibe was the same as the terrible man.

It was clear, they had to get out of there.

The Escape

First, Zelda called up Cecelia Cross, who agreed to send a few beefcakes their way in exchange for favors owed. After more matrix snooping and meat scouting, the fellas arrived, three beefy ex-Aztlan pit fighters that Samsara had placed into Cross's hands. Feeling more comfortable with the seasoned fighters next to them, the team stumbled out and took the elevator down, with the technomancers opting to go matrix dark in fear of the meat technomancer.

As they moved out into the foyer and started towards the stairs to the parking lot, one of the beefcakes suddenly came to a stop. He just stood there, twitching. Slowly, ever so slowly, his head twisted around, his body moving as though puppeteered via strings. Stark terror was writ plain across his face. He tried to command his mouth to move, to warn them but his body would not obey him. The duo looked on in terror, before being splattered by a spray of blood. Thrust through the chest of the second bodyguard with incredible force was a machete and holding the weapon was a terrible, twitching woman with death in her terrible eyes. She was clearly heavily augmented, steel cyberlimbs strong enough to rip apart steel were just as easily used to push the machete up and out of metahuman flesh, bisecting the bodyguard diagonally.

The last warrior stood his ground and activated his adrenaline pump, throwing a flurry of strikes at his newfound foe as the technomancers sprinted away into the parking garage and climbed into the car. As they started to drive away, the headlamps lit up the form of the twitching, puppeteered bodyguard from before, stumbling towards the car with his arms outstretched. They swerved around him and drove down the ramp and onto the road towards freedom. As they drove away, they watched the woman dismember the remaining bodyguard.

Although the meat techno attempted to place a mark on the vehicle, they warded it off and activated the manual control override, escaping into the night.

The Run

Once they were a safe distance away and confirmed the two assailants were not following them, the technomancers were able to requisition two safe houses, one for Grimm and one for them. Grimm, still very much in no position to do anything of use thanks to physical and brain damage, told them what he knew about Heaven and the location of the treasure map. Supposedly, it was within the archive of a former Neonet archival host that had changed hands several times but never was properly dismantled. Curious for The Truth, the Harriot and Quintessence decided to investigate further.

The host took the form of a dilapidated library. The two of them evaded the lantern bearing IC and found their way to the foundation entrance, Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'. They joined hands and fell together into the abyss.

But first ... they saw a memory.

A staircase, climbing up into the sky. A red haired woman smiling, walking into the light.

They awake in darkness, in a cramped space. The foundation took the form of a search underground for a hidden city, within the rock. A foundation denizen named Tommy was helpful, digging them out of the rubble and guiding them towards the main expedition group where they argued about whether they should be trying to killing a mysterious monster within the network of tunnels or ignoring it and pressing forward towards the ruins of the ancient city. Zelda and Harriot, dressed as miners, negotiated with the man in charge (the security node) and sorted out the situation while also gaining a map. The various parties were to split up into two parties. The two technomancers joined the party searching for the secrets of lost city, rightly making the assumption that the archive would be there. Along the way, Zelda pocketed a small revolver.

After several denizens were picked off in the darkness, one by one, devoured in the darkness by the monster, the team found their way through a terrible squeeze, the ground slick with blood and intestine (though Tommy remained by their side) They fell out onto the other side into a pit, knee deep in bones. Their flickering lantern revealed a stone door on the other side and, leaning against it, an injured person. Tommy sprinted over and helped her up while the technomancers pushed open the door to the ancient city.

Inside was magical. Crystals and luminous plants bathed the room in faint but beautiful natural light. Faded wall carvings, showing people bowing to a bird-headed deity leading up to an altar with an enormous tome atop it. The two of them joined hands and dove into the tome, reading the songs and sonnets to the bird deity within it and finding, between the code, memories that call to them and within that, they find the map ... and another memory, a memory of hundreds of thousands of personas, all climbing up towards the golden staircase.

"Is that it, did you find what you're looking for?"

A voice from behind them, the injured woman but ... no, not quite.

They spun around and came face to face with that awful man from before. Tommy, lying in a spreading pool of blood, twitching. The man grinned.

Lumin instantly pulled out the revolver and dumped 5 rounds into the guy, knocking him down but not killing him, with his infused firewall. This bought them enough time to sprint past, back towards the bone pit and down a bone slide into a greater bone chamber.

At the center was a great nest, filled with bone, viscera and eggshells. In the center, a blind lizard creature with great and terrible claws fed strips of human flesh to a single, surviving baby lizard. As they landed in the bones, the creature spun towards the sound. Noticing the creature was blind, Harriot and Zelda held very, very still. Reading the data trails, they could determine the portal node was in front of them, either the creature, the nest or the child. Slowly, painstakingly slowly, they moved forward through the bones. One agonizing step at a time.

They got very, very close. Within arms reach. Quintessence took another step forward but noticed her girlfriend had stopped. A familiar, fleshy tendril wrapped tightly around her upper forearm. She felt something horrible scramble across her skin, something terrible and violent. A dissonance spike. Below the elbow, her arm rotted away, maggots crawling amidst the virulent flesh and it hurt like nothing else. The tendril led up to the ceiling where, crawling like a horrible spider with his head swiveled around was the dissonanct technomancer. The meat man.

Zelda stumbled towards the portal node, identified as the baby, frantically urging her girlfriend to do the same. The creature, however, wasn't so happy with the prospect and growled at them, as they climbed closer. Zelda grappled with the creature while Harriot made the first attempt to leave. She was bounced, triggering variance. The bones of the bone pits started to reach up, trying to devour her. The meat man on the ceiling laughed.

The situation was looking more and more dire. Sensing their looming demise, Quintessence reached into the depths of the resonance and summoned a mighty courage within herself. She bent time and space and the rules of the world they were in and latched strings onto the meat man, puppeteering him into the creatures jaws. With a scream, the beast savaged him, tearing his face clean off.

As they grabbed the baby lizard and made another attempt to leave, the beast spun around, still not content to let some randos grab its baby. Before it could close the distance and claw them, the lizard was hit from the side by a surprise tackle. Tommy, bleeding but still alive, pushed the beast into the bone pit and shouted at the team to leave, that he would buy them enough time. Both technomancers, one injured from immense fade and the other from claw marks and dissonance spikes, grabbed the lizard and made their escape.

Game Quotes

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