House of Horrors

House of Horrors
Date 2085-11-22 GM J.R. Location Hollywood, Redmond Barrens Status Threat Level: Extreme
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven	Major Corp
Samael Misfire Oberon The Brazen Bull Red Ribbon	Character1 Character2

Summary

Duration:

• 11/23 - 7 hrs
• 11/27 - 6 hrs

Background

During some prior runs for Ms. K, trying to lower the property values of the area, they discovered a fortified site which seemed unable to be cracked. Ms. K is now sending a new runner team to clear out the site in question, leading to the current team having to clear out an Infected nest while dodging people on alert from prior runs like Detective Rusty "Hellsing" Chambers and the sites proximity to Bellevue.

The Meet

The team gets their various contact pings from their Shadowhaven job board which is totally not JackedIn, some kind of LinkedIn clone during the 6th world. Ms. K sends out contact notes for the meet, interrupting the various runners Friday evenings.

The team meets with her in Tacoma, at a real estate office front for her. Half the team meets in AR, but half shows up in person.

A prior run in Hollywood attempted to drive down property values, and something went strange with one particular location that seems unusually more secure than the others.

The goal is to get into the site and clear it out, preferably as quietly as possible given it's a "C" zone. A local water supply issue resulted in mass ghouling and so we're reasonably expecting a large ghoul population. There is local enough defenses that there are visible turrets on the outside as well as obvious wards.

Job Pays 25K or 50K in Lifestyle. 10K operating Budget up front. Ms. K offers to fence any shit we manage to recover from the site as part of the old EVO site.

The Plan

• Pull any of the possible complications out of the way.
• Run the host and get an internal map
• Stealth the door, hack the turret facing the door.
• Quiet infil until we find the targets and then go loud / go as quiet as we can until we can't.
• Resolve the ghouls in the sewer via rain of rockets and such from above.

The Run

Legwork

Matrix Information:

• Rusty Chambers: 31 Male, Ares Corporate Citizen on loan to KE. MIT&T Hermetic Mage. Known to have arts of Divination, Psychometry, etc. Forward scout and combat mage in Desert Wars. About four months ago, he allegedly got attacked by a vampire at a Stuffer Shack and has basically gone on a one-nerd crusade against them. General infected hunter, nicknamed "Hellsing" because of how bad he is at it.

• Target Site, Former EVO: Until 2 years ago, building was a small shadowclinic. Got shut down, a local runner lived in it for a while (Rex, possibly?) with his brother. Went silent about 2 years ago, area went downhill quickly. Building was owned by EVO until then, then got sold around to misc. companies for real estate. The building itself is generating a large amount of noise because the buildings are old and were built for matrix protection was copper painting to generate noise.

• Site Host: R4 (A8 S9 D7 F6) - gnarly looking, staticy. Rogue Host, was probably an EVO darksite host and it has been trashed by locals since then.

• Bunraku Building: There is a flyspy stationary on the northern corner that seems to have come from the wall around the Evo site. It is slaved to a different PAN and may be a tell that Rusty is nearby or possibly other KE complications.

Magical Information:

• Oberon recalls that the ork populations had a grendel strain run, given the presence of devil rats. Grendels have weird powers.
• Gorilla-y with elongated limbs. Good smelling, thermo visual, paralysis in claws.
• Control animals, hard to sense or track
• Oberon calls a contact which tells him that there is an Infected Troll adept who lives around here, possibly in the Evo Site.
• Lex, the Infected Troll Adept, is fast, sneaky, and obviously tough. Dangerous close combat.

Physical Information:

• A detective named Rusty Chambers is lurking around due to prior runner shenanigans
• The team discusses infection risks and makes some contact calls for chemsealed armor
• Mulitple spy drones along the walls of the site. Camera roto drone along the walls
• Cameras outside running silent, apparently not slaved to the host.
• Likely opfor - Runner Team: Rex the Mage, Lex the Adept, Dex the Spider. All infected. All Runner tier opfor
• Misfire calls Alexey Dorosov to check on the possibly bounties on Lex, Dex, and Rex from the Vory. One of Rex's cousins took something they shouldn't have and the Vory put out a bounty but it seemed to have been "completed" when one the buildings got blown up three years ago.
• Samael calls Ashley Davis in order to sideline Rusty with her KE connections. While she can probably get him pulled off task and away from the building, she can't do it until Saturday evening or possibly even Sunday.
• Brazen Bull calls Ghostwire in order to give us a warning if HTR is on route.
• During the night watch on Friday night, Samael realizes someone goes in or out via the manhole in the street.

The Host Dive

• Ribbon calls WRN3 in order to have another decker on backup for the host run.
• The inside of the Host is gross, having been torn apart by every errant script kiddie in the last few years.
• R6 Tarballs IC running around, unsurprisingly shaped like a Troll head.
• Ribbon finds a hidden file location relating to Michael and Melinda Frost. Samael had indicated those were 'long term clients' he was doing work for, opting to not explain that those are his parents in front of a whole team of runners.
• Host is running a huge amount of medical devices in the 'lab' inside the building, but doesn't appear to be running the building security.
• Through some Cameras, there is an ork and a human floating in tanks. Creation of new infected?
• Ribbon finds a databombed journal file in the host, pokes it, and explodes it. She explodes the file, the hosts research notes, bricks her RCC, and take some dumpshock for added insult to injury.
• The files on the Frosts: Off book EVO notes, full physical and psych profiles, full ware profile on Michael. Appears to be a corporate file for some kind of corporate assets.

Fly Spy-ing the sewers and the site

• Ribbon sends in a fly spy
• In the sewers are two manifested sewer water elementals and a four machine gun turrets - a KRIME boom, a triple troll, and some HMGs.
• Bodies down in the sewers, likely the mass of ghouls, in the sewage water. 30-40 feral ghouls, including grendels.
• Giant hole in sewers leads up to building - seems to be a dumping ground for infected being experimented on from the building.
• Building is mostly locked in and tight. HVAC system but no roof access to building.
• 6-8m climb or jump from Sewers to bottom floor. Most likely best access in.
• Spirits are bound so mage is likely conscious.

Running the Site

• The team breaches the front door, choosing the hard way in since they know it's a trap anyways and avoiding the ghouls seems wiser.
• Ribbon realizes that the Spider is running an RCC of all the security turrets.
• One of the trolls, Lex, spots us as we enter and the firefight begins!
• We immediately get swarmed by ghouls and grendels.
• A number of the grendels have backpack bombs. Bombdels, if you will.
• During all this, one of the brothers gets dropped but the other two try to escape.
• Rusty makes an appearance via astral, getting into it with Oberon

Aftermath

The team used The mage's unconscious body as a bomb to take out a another parcel of infected. BB Cut the spider's head off, detonating his last couple turrets, the grenaded out the rest of the basement, got a ping that HTR would arrive in 7 minutes. Oberron got a one minute rewind on Rusty after he had been feared, so he ran (but is aware of Oberron at this point through signature quality) , the gang ran upstairs and did a team hardware check to loot the lab of prototype materials as fast as possible, getting out literally 1 minute before HTR roto drones clocked the van.

The client got negotiated to not being upset at the immense damage and all the ghoul blood, that place pretty much need to get knocked down after KE takes the credit for all of it.

Rewards

Extreme: 25 RVP x2 Time Modifier = 50 RVP

• 50K Nuyen (25 RVP) or 100K In Lifestyle Rewards, Armor/Weapons Rewards up to 20 Availability.(Approved by Thematics)
• 20Karma (20 RVP)
• 12 CDP (5 RVP)

Assorted and Personal Rewards swappable:

• Ghostwire Loyalty 3 for Brazen Bull at 10 CDP-Required ( i know a guy)
• Qualifies as Mundane Ascension for Misfire and BB.
• Increase in loyalty to 2 for Alexi at 1 RVP for Misfire.
• Drug Tolerant for Sam at 6 RVP
• Optional: Watch the Suit for 3 RVP
• Optional Contact Ms. K up to Loyalty 2: (5 connection 1/2 Loyalty) 5 RVP/6RVP
• 1x Rank of Prototype Materials, 1 x Rank of Spec Mods for 5 RVP Each.

• Oberron: Rusty looking for his Signiture.
• Sam: Neg Qual: Driven. Investigate the Frost Files.

Game Quotes

Amusing quote from game.

Player After Action Reports (AARs)

Samael - It was a gamble. The odds were good. I knew EVO had something to do with my parents death and the rogue leftover host from an old research facility had all the right markings to be a data trove. I could have never expected to find, amid exploding grendels and ghouls stacked deep enough to swim, information this detailed on my parents. My mother was, according to this, magically awakened. My father augmented with a variety of bioware and some discrete combat cyberware not altogether dissimilar from mine. This makes... no sense whatsoever. They were bankers. Bankers in London with a boring life and retirement plans and healthcare. Or were they....

The Brazen Bull - Those suspension tubes, remind me a lot of where I came from. Can't say I'm super happy to let so much of that bio tech get back into the hand of the corps, but at least we were able to blow up some of it. Might keep KE from getting it in their head to do some research or something.