Chain Mail
| Chain Mail | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of La Famille Du Peintre | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven The Green-Eyed Witch Vee-Jay Kenneth "Flamesaw" Murphy June Sano | Assorted "Debtors" | ||||||||
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Saint Lady Argentum Insonia Kadō |
Florence Ishada Karol "Drundeah" Abdolhossein Sumidero Sky Damien Frank | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| None | |||||||||
Summary
A team of runners are brought on board to deliver a series of curious letters for an equally curious employer. Their perceptions, morals and patience are all tested.
Background
An entity now known as The Green-Eyed Witch was trapped in the metaplane of man for an exceedingly long time after her banishment from the fey courts. During this time, once they became sufficiently reconstituted, they were able to master walking the dream paths and began covertly making bargains, influencing lives here and there with deals. Offers of fame. Fortune. Success.
Now, he is looking to cash in.
The Dreams
The run began with a series of dreams.
Kadō dreamt of being younger, being back home. Below the blankets on a sunny afternoon day, treated to breakfast in bed by her maid, Rie. A memory. A warm, comforting memory. It should have been a good dream ... until the cracks began to show. Her ordinarily perfect memory seemed flawed. Details were changed. The script was different. Rie had green eyes.
Saint dreams of fire. She stands in the burned out ruin where her parents met their fiery end, burning alive with limbs of flesh. She hears a monstrous horde of Red Ribboned entities, hears the sounds of a roto-drones engine whir. She grabs a gun off the ground and fires ... but it jams. She turns and sees Oberon, also burning alive, who tells her that he's had this dream before and that she should follow the deer. Saint, still panicking, sprints into increasingly wooded alleyways, pursued by the ribbon monsters, until she finds a verdant pond, where a deer drinks. Still burning, she collapses into the depths and is claimed by darkness.
Lady Argentum dreams of combat. She holds her old claymore sword, stands in a fencing studio surrounded by masked figures. One stands with a broadsword and faces her in combat. The two clash, her opponent and herself seeming equally matched but her opponent seeming slightly stronger. Slightly faster. Nevertheless, the holds strong in form and her training and slashes her adversary across the chest. As she goes to help them up, moving their mask to the side, she sees a familiar white-haired visage and the bearing of fangs that are quickly buried in her neck. As she staggers backward, actively exsanguinated, she pulls a dagger from her belt and stabs the apparent vampire several times in the chest. The thing dies and she looks at her own monstrous face. When she blinks, the fangs are gone and she holds the corpse of a green-eyed girl in her arms. As she ponders what just happens, she has a short conversation with one of the spectators, apparently a dream-walker known as 'Stranger' seeking out some kind of quarry across the dream paths. With more questions than answers, she finds herself drifting back to wakefulness.
Insonia, fortunately or unfortunately, cannot sleep that night due to her insomnia. She has a pleasant evening of working on her new, stolen car. In the back, she finds a strange little thing, a Styrofoam mannequin head that someone painted over the eyes with green paint. Odd. Thinking nothing of it, she continues on with her work.
Meeting the Devil
The team filed into the Water Lily restaurant, finding it in a state of strangeness, with chairs and utensils all arrayed in an imitation of activity, as if the place was stopped in the middle of a typical business day and, in the blink of an eye, all food and people vanished. At least, save for one. An androgynous, green-eyed person with a military style coat sat in a booth and invited the runners over. Unfortunately for the vampires, they also sat behind a ward, making the job of the vampires more complicated. Nevertheless, everyone sat down and the premise was explained. The J needed 4 letters delivered to 4 specific people. Upon delivery, they would need to confirm the recipient fully read and understood the letters contents and then said a phrase out loud, that phrase being: "Goodbye blue skies. Hello, green eyes."
The names on the letters are as follows: Florence Ishada, Karol "Drundeah" Abdolhossein, Sumidero Sky, Damien Frank
After some negotiations, the team settle on 16,000 nuyen for the job. With that done, they head out to do some legwork.
The Legwork
Insonia fires up her deck and searches up the names and addresses finding out some crucial details about the names given.
Florence Ishada is a middle-aged paper pusher for Cross Applied Technologies who lives in Auburn, solidly Kenran-Kai turf. Record listed an extended period of unemployment before getting picked up by Cross and getting a nice, cushy wageslave gig.
Karol Abdolhossein is a former troll pit fighter who went by 'Drundeah'. She saw a line of startling upsets in the ring, unseating one champion after another before eventually retiring entirely from the ring and getting work as a Skraacha leg-breaker. Unlike other former-pitfighters or members of the skraacha, she hasn't dipped her toes back into the fight-pit culture since leaving, even for a victory lap. She frequents the OU beneath Renton.
Sumidero Sky is an accomplished artist who apparently crawled his way out of the barrens by virtue of his inspiring, classical landscapes. It's a proper, UCAS success story, with his paintings being lauded by critics and sold for great sums. Recently, he has been quiet. There are rumors of some big project but nothing directly from the man himself.
Damien Frank