Mack and Hack: Ride or Die

Mack and Hack: Ride or Die
Date 2082-05-20 GM Explosions Location Renton, Seattle Status Threat Level: Medium
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven Halloweeners	Lone Star
Bland Basilisk Canter Potato	Chief Deputy Thaddeus Davis 4 Lone Star officers
Casualties and losses
	3 Lone Star officers and the entire R&R

Summary

The team gets tasked with freeing a skeezy Halloweener decker from the Lone Star Redmond & Renton Holding Center before he gets shipped to jail. Chaos ensues.

Background

Macahuitl and Hack Skellington are a pair of Halloweeners, and self-proclaimed "bros 4 lyfe". Unfortunately, during a recent trip with some pals to go steal scrap from an automotive junkyard just over the border in Renton, they got a little cocky. In celebration of cleanly disabling the alarms on the front gate to allow his friends entry, Hack indulged in his favorite vice: Novacoke. Given that he actually missed a laser tripwire and got high right before the pawns showed up, this was perhaps not the best idea. The last Mack saw of his best bud, he was being ushered into a squad car after trying to punch a cop, while he and the rest of the gang sprinted back into the Barrens to escape the law.

Hours later, Mack, having managed to convince the local Halloweener leader to front the cash, sends out a call for a runner team to bust his friend out of the clink.

Canter, after doing donuts in a Knight Errant precinct parking lot and humiliating the officers that came to deal with her, is given a call by her friend Maisy Gardner. Though it's unclear how exactly this 92 year old woman caught wind of a job from the Halloweeners, she gets the wheelwoman on board and shoots her the location for the meet.

Basilisk is enjoying a Barrens Feast - which is to say, a can of pet food - when her fixer, Tanya, rings her up. Though scatterbrained as usual, she nonetheless manages to communicate that there's a job available, as well as provide an address for the meet after messily sifting through some papers.

Bland is pacing around his apartment in an anxious fit after his last job, having learned about the nature of the Krieger Strain - and, as any rational person would, he immediately purchased a chemically sealed suit of full body armor. That, as well as his unfamiliarity with wearing armor in the first place, is probably why the video call from Alessa P, his fixer, goes unanswered for almost a full minute. After finally managing to remove his helmet and glove, he endures a bitching-out from the short-tempered Pixie before agreeing to get in on the job.

Potato, as she often does, sates her sweet tooth at the same Snohomish Stuffer Shack she usually frequents. After delivering a mountain of candy to the overworked, pimply teen at the register, alongside a box of rare, discontinued Green Tea-flavor Snappers, she gets tapped by Mint on the way to her car. A job offer and a promise of blueberry muffins later, Potato sets off to Redmond for the meet.

The Meet

As the team arrives to the meetup point - save for Basilisk, who unfortunately got yet another wrong address from her fixer and ended up in an empty lot a half mile away - they find it to be an abandoned parking lot in neutral territory just south of Touristville. Waiting for them is a hulking troll, decked out in a vaguely Aztec headdress, a heavy armor jacket painted to match, and a huge sword sheathe draped across his back. After Basilisk arrives, Mack greets the team and almost immediately shows that he's not used to this whole "Mr. J" business.

The 'Weener explains, at length, that his best friend in the whole world has been picked up by the cops. Hack has likely been dropped off at the Lone Star Redmond & Renton Holding Center (aka, the R&R), a small facility just over the border into Renton that functions as an area to keep detainees while they wait to be picked up for a trip to the actual prison. Canter, after years of street racing and all the crime that entails, knows the place pretty well; a number of her friends have spent the night there before, a couple of which have been finessed out by their pals. She also knows that the prison transport comes by to pick up whatever poor bastards are stuck there at 2 AM, sharp - which means the team has just over six hours to get there, get the job done, and get out.

After Bland cleanly convinces the poor, inexperienced Johnson for an extra 2k apiece, the team agrees to settle for a comparatively measly 10,000 nuyen, and set off to get the job done.

The Plan

Presumably, the team was going to make one at some point. Instead, Canter dove straight into the host, and in the process of cracking open a few secure files, alerted the Star to the presence of a hacker. While the Patrol IC in the host (modeled after an old west saloon) wasn't able to find the culprit, there was no evidence that said hacker had left, either; a minute and a number of additional hacking attempts against the camera system, and corporate raised the alarm, expecting to save the underfunded station from yet another PR nightmare.

The Run

Things happened very fast after that. The rest of the team, parked roughly two blocks away while Canter sat unconscious in her Rigger cocoon, heard the distinct ring of the alarm off in the distance. Absent any communication of the situation from Canter, and having taken a variety of potent drugs to pregame for a smash and grab, the group save for Canter spilled out of the car and began the approach to the station by sidewalk.

Meanwhile, in the host, Canter was finding herself essentially unchallenged; even after a Security Troubleshooter from corporate was sent in to handle the situation, they were wasting precious moments just trying to find her, let alone throwing attacks her way. From inside, she disabled the alarm and left some graffiti of a horse stamped onto the antique bell used to represent it in the Matrix - before, of course, dropping a data bomb on it on her way out. Nearing convergence inside the host, she rebooted her deck just as the Troubleshooter finally spotted the culprit: A sweet old grandma riding on a flaming, beefy steed.

Back in the meat, the situation was devolving as the team grew closer to their target. As far as Bland and Basilisk could tell from the shadows in the front bar, there were at least three Lone Star officers inside, plus an additional two figures that weren't quite as distinct. Unfortunately, while they considered this to be a perfectly reasonable amount of recon given the attempt at a stealthy approach, Potato had it in mind to re-enact the wonderful song, "With Catlike Tread", from Pirates of Penzance. Stepping out into the street to get a better angle for seeing into the front bar, she was almost immediately spotted by the four officers and two Spirits of Man Lone Star had sent ahead to investigate the situation. That's when things got messy.

Potato, being the perfectly reasonable woman she is, considered this to be the perfect opportunity to unsling the grenade launcher from her shoulder and fire a High Explosive grenade directly at the ballistic glass front door, right after a Spirit of Man summoned by Canter before the run had dropped an ice sheet directly in the middle of the cops. The door (and by extension, the Rating 4 SIN and MAD scanners hidden in its frame) exploded inwards, showering all gathered in a hail of splintered glass and metal propelled by a wave of explosive pressure. Bland and Basilisk, meanwhile, broke for the corner of the building, taking cover from the coming shitstorm in a narrow path to the side door used by legal representation for the prisoners.

The Lone Star officers, as one might imagine, didn't take very kindly to being blown up. Almost immediately, Potato was pelted with a hail of light pistol fire as they ignored Manny, the punk rock Man spirit, in favor of the terrifying dwarf lady with a huge grenade launcher. Unfortunately for them, it was far from enough to drop her before she could drop another grenade in their midst. As the quartet of cops were bodily tossed around the room in a huge explosion, the longcoat-wearing Spirits of Man sent ahead by the corporation were unfazed, and absolutely furious. The first, thankfully, was stopped in its tracks the moment it popped out of the front door, a well-placed shot from Bland turning it into a rapidly-dissipating cloud of smoke after he made a point of watching for anyone coming out. The second, however, was less understanding. Charging in after its compatriot, it immediately closed the distance between it and Bland, giving the former accountant a sharp right hook to dissuade him from a second shot.

Manny, at the behest of Canter as she came to and began piloting over to be ready for a quick getaway, dropped a mana barrier around the angered spirit. While it quickly cracked through the invisible wall with another punch, Basilisk came to the rescue after having previously run up to start cracking the side door's maglock. Activating Killing Hands, she was able to land a punch powerful enough to distract the spirit from Bland as he shakily reloaded his Cavalier Champion. She was given a glimpse beneath the spirit's longcoat as a reward, showing her a scene of a frigid meat locker icy enough to freeze her to death in moments. Thankfully, with Manny's help, the distraction gave Bland enough time to reposition and land another oversized bullet right between the spirit's eyes, its wide-brimmed hat flipping end over end before dissipating into mist.

Meanwhile, Potato was cleaning up after herself. After thoroughly clearing the front bar with a pair of grenades, she closed the distance and followed up with a molotov cocktail to make absolutely certain that the last conscious officer didn't get any funny ideas about getting up and continuing the fight. Two more were thrown in good measure afterwards. After briefly basking in the sight of her pyromaniacal handiwork, she did the coolest thing she could think of: Sprinting through the flaming bar and smashing through the door in the back to head further into the R&R.

While she managed to cleanly burst through the door with a Kamikaze-fueled cybernetic punch, she found herself staring down the barrel of a very fancy shotgun. The officer in charge of the R&R, Chief Deputy Thaddeus Davis, had retrieved the Mossberg AM-CMDT reserved for emergencies from the station's armory upon hearing the commotion outside, and was now getting ready to pull the trigger on the mask-wearing dwarf in front of him. Unfortunately, however, he never got the chance; thinking fast, Potato pumped him full of enough Stick and Shock rounds to drop someone twice his size, and he fell, unconscious and spasming, into the open door of the armory.

With the station's staff and Lone Star's advance troops taken care of, the group got to work. Basilisk easily cracked open the side door's maglock and gave the team an entrance that wasn't currently on fire while Potato rushed into the cellblock, opening all the cells to free the various ne'er-do-wells the Star had picked up over the past day. It wasn't hard to find Hack Skellington among them; the weedy, greasy, skull-facepaint-wearing ganger was at the bars of his cell asking to be let out the moment she arrived outside of it. After freeing the extraction target and making a brief detour to grab his deck and a massive bag of Novacoke from the evidence lockup, Potato joined the rest of the team at the car. While she was gone, they'd been busy. Canter had already gotten Manny to drag the unconscious Chief Deputy out and stuff him into the back seat, while Bland had just moved the last living Lone Star officer across the street after stabilizing him and rescuing him from the burning building. The team left to the sound of sirens closing in from the distance.

Aftermath

It wasn't long before the runners arranged a rendezvous and met back up with Mack, the pair of gangers immediately closing the distance to get in a genuinely touching embrace despite being pyromaniac, Halloween-loving psychos. There were a few minutes of additional, contentious argument that followed as Canter tried to offer Thaddeus for extra cash, Bland tried to remind her that doing so was absolutely fucking insane, and Basilisk tried to offer the service of killing him right then and there for a bit of extra nooj. Eventually, Bland managed to talk down the riled-up gangers to the point where the team was allowed to leave unmolested, dropping off the unconscious Chief Deputy at a small clinic in the northern area of Redmond.

Potato, to celebrate a job well done(?), immediately cracked open the box of discontinued Green Tea goodness the moment she got back to her car. In her haste, unfortunately, she neglected to properly vet the Snappers - the faded green and white box she'd retrieved from the back of a display in the Stuffer Shack had actually been a stock of preservative gel packs, and biting into the toxic material was particularly unpleasant. The ensuing nosebleed and the crash from her various drugs were enough to knock her clean out in the driver's seat for a good few hours; truly, befitting someone who just blew up a police station.

Rewards

• 10,000 Nuyen apiece
• 6 Karma
• Optional Contact: Mack and Hack, at 1/2 (2 RVP from Nuyen or Karma)
• 2 CDP

For Potato: +1 Notoriety, +1 Public Awareness

For Canter: +1 Public Awareness

Game Quotes

"What are you doing?! Stop killing everybody! What's WRONG with you?!" - Bland, at Potato