Smother The Flames
| Smother The Flames | ||||||||||
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| Factions Involved | ||||||||||
| Wasp Bug Hive | Bot'Kham |
Cobra 'A' Cobra T-Bone | ||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | ||||||||||
| Hive Queen | ||||||||||
| Units involved | ||||||||||
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6 Ork mercenaries 3 Hellhounds Havok Lilly 2 Bug Spirits Matthew Garneau | ||||||||||
| Casualties and losses | ||||||||||
| 6 Ork mercenaries, Havok | None | |||||||||
| 3 Edge burned this run | ||||||||||
Background
The bug hive threatening the Haven is using an insect shaman, one Matthew Garneau, to summon more of their "kind". Their expansion has made them look for additional shamans to bring over and aid them, which lead Matthew to approach a friend of his in Lela Canales, another street mage. She became suspicious of his advances, however, and through posting about it on some shady Matrix sites caught the attention of the Aztech J working alongside Booker, Ashe, and the other runners looking into the bug hive. He organised a run to kidnap Matthew by attempting a sting operation through Lela and interrogate him for the location of the bug hive.
Meet
The runners make their way to the Everett Marina where they have been told an Evo Johnson has work for them. The messages from their Fixers seem strangely vague, and some of the runners are uneasy even before they meet their future employer. From the marina, they are ferried to a large, high-class yacht sitting in the Puget Sound. There they are greeted by a sparse crew, mostly guards and personafixed waiters, and their supposedly Evo Mr Johnson. After some negotiations, a price is decided on and though they question the Johnson about his true affiliation, they are greeted by smug silence.
Run
Having been given a meeting with a Bot'Kham smuggler named Marcelo Rojas who is providing security for Lela at noon the next day, the runners rest and make their way to the Ork Underground to meet their contact. With T-Bone leading the way inside and Dapper waiting back on street level in their van, the team heads down and into some more sparsely populated areas of the Underground. They start becoming concerned when the comm-code that was given to them to contact Marcelo with fails to become active. Arriving at the location of the smuggler hideout, they find other armed Bot'Kham members there and after a tense meeting find that Marcelo has been killed and Lela was taken by Orc mercenaries. Identifying one of these mercs as Havok, a bug-inhabited former Haven runner, the team tracked down Lela using one of her foci she dropped at the hideout in their confusion. Once A pinpointed her location, Cobra took over and followed her scent trail through the sewers. The trail guided them to a disused transfer station, where they were detected by camera drones run by the bugged rigger known as Lilly, another former Haven runner. After a brutal confrontation with two Ork mercs and a Hellhound, the three runners present along with Dapper in a Doberman assault the shaman and his entourage.
A brutal combat ensues, with the runners being hard-pressed early by the tenacity of the Ork mercs and Havok's intervention. Cobra rushes forward and quickly neutralises the shaman, but not before they call in two Force 4 bug scouts to aid the combat. She is left to fend for herself against two mercs and the spirits, managing eventually to take them out but not without significant trouble. T-Bone and Dapper, along with A throwing down fireballs on the mercs fight back well, but things start coming apart when Dapper's Doberman is hit by flechettes from an Ork merc and disabled, knocking the rigger out the fight and almost killing him with Biofeedback. The three remaining continue to struggle, with T-Bone falling unconscious temporarily from a savage attack by Havok. Seeing that the combat is taking too long for his liking, however, the bug takes a more direct approach, mutating his flesh body to better serve in combat, assuming a gruesome hybrid form. Meanwhile, Cobra is also knocked out, one Ork merc attempting to drown her before the stim-patch she had primed kicks in and she turns the tables on him. With his ranks thinning and T-Bone revived by A, Havok takes the offensive and impales A into a wall with a deep stab from his katana, knocking her out of the fight as well. T-Bone, seeing his opportunity, raises his Ares Alpha and pumps a stream of armour-piercing bullets into the bugged runner, finally ending the abomination's rampage.
With their enemies dead around them, the runners are greeted shortly after by the Bot'Kham who had followed the sounds of the drawn-out firefight. The leader executes one surviving Ork merc, paying back the blood debt owed by Marcelo's murder and allows the others to take the shaman away. They part not on friendly terms perhaps, but at least with common understanding.
Aftermath
The runners call their J from a secure location and have the shaman picked up by a recovery team. Now that he is in Aztech's hands, Matthew is tortured relentlessly until he spills information on the bug hive and its whereabouts.
Rewards
Player Characters
T-Bone
35k nuyen 5 Karma +3 Aztech
2 Edge burned to Smackdown consecutive Bullseye-Bursts
A
35k nuyen 5 Karma +3 Aztech
1 Edge burned to not die
Dapper
35k nuyen 5 Karma +3 Aztech
1 bricked Doberman and damaged RCC
Cobra
35k nuyen 5 Karma