Before they are lost to us

Before they are lost to us
Part of Dance Around The Fire That We Once Believed - The Ex-Firewatch Story
Date 2080-11-30 GM Darklordiablo Location Tacoma, Seattle, UCAS
Belligerents
Shadowhaven Paladin Trash Panda Shark Evans Doyle	Phantasm Intelligence Security Team Project Pyro Hive
Casualties and losses
	9 Security Staff Fleshform Wasp Scout

Background

"Thanks to some data a team pulled, we know that there is a group of mages in danger of losing themselves. We need them extracted, stat."

The Meet

The Team was asked to meet at the Lost Unicorn in Fort Lewis, where they ran into a familiar contact for two of them, Alex, a new member of the Ex-Firewatch group.

Alex explained that thanks to an Ares datasteal job, Ex-Firewatch had become aware of a number of awakened-aligned corporations are being bought up by Ares and Project Pyro, and their staff are being sent to Detroit for "Mandatory Teamwork Exercise Courses". One such company is having their 16 staff moved tonight. Rescue them.

The Legwork

The team quickly searched for what plans they could, pulling up a maintenance tunnel plan, and assessing what they could about the security, which wasn't much, pressed for time as they were. Mostly this involved detect life spells to try and determine where the 16 people were.

This revealed a ward over the surface building, a basement with most of the security team and a single staff member, and a sub-basement where the other 15 staff were being held under armed guard.

The Plan

Trash Panda would summon a Earth Spirit to tunnel into the underground complex, the team would breach the sub-basement, rescue the bulk of the staff, then breach the basement for the HR manager. The staff would be piled into Solace vans, and they would be spirited away to an Ex-Firewatch safehouse.

The Run

For once, the plan went mostly to plan. Trash Panda summoned a whopper of a F7 Earth Spirit, Henceforth known and Punchy McStonefists, so the team breached the bottom floor as planned. Unfortunately they hadn't discussed their lethality expectations, so while Paladin incapacitated one of the security guards, Evans Doyle put a bullet through the head of the other.

Shark and Paladin kept control of the civilians, directing them upstairs to the vans, while the security captain came downstairs. He anticipated the motion sensor grenade left at the elevator door, his shield catching the explosion, but it stopped the other guards getting out of the elevator, so when Doyle launched a grenade in, they would have had a lot of work to do to ID the remains.

The team then made their way back up their tunnel, and Paladin ran their ambush, and the team quickly disabled the remaining security forces. However, at this point, the CEO burst out of his office and attempted to touch Trash Panda. Paladin told him to stop, but the man laughed at her. In a slight panic, Trash Panda stabbed the Flesh form Wasp Scout through the gut, killing him.

Aftermath

Alex was happy the team had done so well, and upon hearing of the execution of the bug spirit, she tossed Panda an extra bounty for the kill.

• 3 mages join up with the Ex-Firewatch faction.
• 3 mages and 10 wageslaves escape becoming bugs.
• A security team has most of it's members die. The survivors undergo several years of therapy.

Rewards

• 8,000¥ (+2000¥ for Trash Panda)
• 8 karma
• +1 faction rep Ex-Firewatch

Paladin

Another bughunt, or whatever. Same J as before, this time asking us to spring some mages before they get turned into bug spirits or have to see Knight's withered 120 year old penis or whatever. Trash Panda gets the idea to live out her trid idols and decides to tunnel into it. When asked about her engineering expertise she mutters something about an earth elemental. We find the place, do some scouting in the tunnels underneath, and decide to proceed with it. She brings a whopper of a spirit that gets us to the first sublevel where I drop one of two goons holding folks. New guy, Doyle, has apparently not been informed of the less-lethal preference and the 2nd guard is quickly doing the ADPS gore dance and security goes into maximum response. Elevator opens and gets to say high to Doyle's rifle'nade. I get the terrified civilians out and moving to our microbus evac before we head up to the second sublevel just as the elemental breaches there. I'm in first, pulse weave, practicing my mantra of the fragging fraggers, raiden in one hand, blade in the other, when two goons open up on me with ex-ex. Pings off the armor and they find out being knocked off your feet and hitting your head on the way down is only moderately less painful than just getting stabbed. We find the last person we're looking for, this rambling civilian mundane, and...some guy who didn't show up on Panda's Detect Life spell. I order them to surrender in my best Dragonslayer voice and he tells me to frag off. Dragonslayer informs me to kill the drek out of this dude, immediately. I relay this to the rest of the team, and Panda complies and the dudes melts into a wasp spirit. Er. A dead one..

Later on I mentioned that last bit to the J and Panda gets a bonus but not the rest of us. Mental note, drop anyone who doesn't immediately go down to mojo, under an expansion of the Geek The Mage rule.