Twenty Thousand Soldiers
| Twenty Thousand Soldiers | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven Central Intelligence Agency | Crying Masks | ||||||||
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Chófer Eidolon Ez-Azael Iron M3chan1c Shy |
Masked Mooks X | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Masked Mooks x3, X | |||||||||
Summary
In which the runners are hired to break some prisoners out of cold storage, and end up turning on their employers instead.
Background
In A Shadowrun Based on the Film Con Air, a former Winternight operative called Harbinger was sprung from Lone Star custody by his allies in the Crying Masks - armed with a good deal of Secret Knowledge(TM), Harbinger has been hard at work collecting pawns for his Nefarious Schemes(TM). Some of those likely pawns include Alamos 20k super soldiers of racism who were imprisoned by the UCAS government following the New Revolution, of which there are currently a dozen in cryo-storage secured in a secret bunker located under an army supply depot in Fort Lewis. Harbinger has made contact with Carolina Petrovski in order to hire shadowrunners who can free them.
The Meet
The runners are contacted individually by their fixers and told to meet with Ms. Johnson at Brother Antolie, a redneck bar in Snohomish - the metahumans among them are advised to wear hoods and comport themselves well, though no further elaboration is provided (Iron however determines with a Matrix search that the bar has played host to Humanis meetups in the past). All of them manage to arrive mostly without incident, and somehow the giant and the changling don't attract anything more than rude stares; Shy however ends up getting cat-called and hit on by one of the drunks, prompting her to draw her gun on the man. Before a fight can break out however there's a sarcastic clapping sound from one of the booths that seems to freeze everyone in place - Shy included when she sees that the source of it is the unassuming-looking gentleman who she helped to break out of jail some months previous.
Harbinger greets the party and leads them into a back room where Carolina Petrovski waits for them; the atmosphere is very tense, especially after Shy reveals via DNI that she knows Harbinger is a Winternight operative. Petrovski gives the usual Johnson speech while providing as little info as possible, telling the party only that she wants them to rescue "political prisoners who have committed a crime against the state and been denied lawful due process" (not strictly a lie), however her caginess on the matter and her shady companion raise heckles for many in the group. Iron pushes for more details, receiving prevarications in reply, so he straight up walks out of the meet - he is allowed to leave without consuming the laesed drinks offered to him, since he doesn't know much, and his sensor collar provides only blurred images of the pair thanks to their Faceless systems.
The rest of the group are left in something of a bind - walk out and risk the hit to their reputations, or attempt to salvage the situation. Eidolon pushes for either more information or more money, so Petrovski offers 30k each to shut down that line of inquiry, handily out-negotiating Ez-Azael's attempts to wring more blood from the stone. In something of a bind, the group collectively agree to undertake the job while searching out a means to thwart their employers from doing something terrible.
The Plan
With Iron having taken his leave, the party contact M3chan1c for tech support, however upon being told that they plan to betray the J, Iron agrees to provide his assistance as well. Still, the group find themselves in quite the pickle - they either have to break into Fort Lewis and somehow screw up in such a way that their employers don't get what they're after while still making themselves look competent. They debate various ways to have their cake without eating it, but in the end Shy proposes a solution: use N-51's newly-forged connections with the UCAS government to contact the CIA and alert them to the situation.
A vigorous debate ensues about the wisdom of contacting the CIA with this matter, but Shy's assurances that she will take on the worst of the blowback for the decision eventually win out, and the rest of the runners acquiesce. Contacting Commander, she explains things and says that she needs to speak to the unit's handler, telling him it relates to the job that she was sent on last year. He is naturally hesitant, but after being told the weight of the situation and that it could potentially ingratiate them to their new overlords, he agrees to make the call. A few hours later, Shy receives a call from an unknown number directing her and the rest of the group to a warehouse in south Tacoma, where a black van with tinted windows waits outside; Shy, along with Chófer, Eidolon, and Ez-Azael, head inside while the tech support remains remote.
Inside, the quartet are confronted with a lone man calling himself Slater, who addresses most of his questions towards Shy. He asks how she knows she's dealing with a Winternight operative, and she is forthcoming with details, though he still requires proof if he is to convince his superiors to allow any sort of sting to capture Harbinger to go forward - mostly he is interested in plugging the information leak and finding out how he knows about the secret bunker. Shy volunteers to undergo interrogation, even providing her own gamma-scopolimine, so Slater leads her into the back room while the others are left to contemplate the seriousness of their situation. Iron, for his part, seeks out a backdoor into the Resonance Realms and undertakes a quest to de-pixelate the images he has of Harbinger and Petrovski, returning from his brain-vacation with digital proof of who they met with; combined with the results of Shy's interrogation/mind probing, this proves sufficient to satisfy the CIA agent.
The Run
With the CIA agent's Q clearance and accompanying escort, and with Chófer flying UCAS army colours and codes from her roadmaster to blend in, the group are easily able to get past the Ft. Lewis military checkpoints and reach the supply depot that hides the secret bunker. Slater tells the MPs guarding it to take the night off, then leads the runners inside and down to the cryo-storage tanks. Opening one of them, he reveals a hulking super-soldier with "Θ-7" tattooed on his forehead, before injecting him with something and telling the party to take him as bait for Harbinger.
Contacting Petrovski, the group are told to drop their human cargo off at a street doc's clinic south of Puyallup City. Heading there and scouting the place out, they find a basement clinic with a wired camera pointing at a reinforced steel door with no apparent way to open it. Eidolon walks up to the door to obscure the camera's view while Shy sneaks a gas grenade into the nearby vent. A crackly voice tells them to identify themselves and prove they have Theta-Seven, and upon confirmation the door buzzes open to admit them to the underground surgery suite.
Inside, the group find a quartet of masked figures lead by a man with X's over his eyes - Shy recognizes him as Harbinger's confederate who hired her for the job to spring him; giving the group the signal via her pi-tac, the runners spring their ambush, but the Crying Masks prove prepared - a brutal knock-down, drag-out fight ensues, with the tech people providing calibration and IATF support to the combatants in order to help them compete with the experienced and powerful fighters. Thankfully their tech support spots the fact that the Crying Masks are equipped with suicide vests hooked up to wired detonators in their forearm guards, and some skillful sharp-shooting manages to disable the trigger mechanisms in order to prevent a messy scene in the confined quarters. X threatens the group "that they don't know who they're fucking with", however they press on and manage to overcome the terrorists, with Shy taking down her old employer using a narcojet syringe to the neck.
Aftermath
With all four terrorists secured and Theta-Seven still in their custody, the group contact Slater to clean up the mess and take his prisoners off of their hands. The CIA agent proceeds to pay the group for their services, but not before thoroughly debriefing them, checking their commlinks for any evidence of the bunker and forcing those who were at the meeting to submit to being dosed with laes so that they forget where it is (the remote tech support who never entered the bunker in the first place avoids this). Theta-Seven is placed back into cold-storage, and the Crying Masks are taken away to be interrogated so that the CIA can begin tracking down Harbinger.
Rewards
20k nuyen
5 karma
20 CDP
For everyone but M3chan1c:
+1 notoriety (for betraying the J)
For everyone but M3chan1c and Iron:
+2 CIA reputation
-2 Humanis Policlub reputation
-2 Winternight reputation
For Chófer:
Optional Quality: Hair Trigger @ chargen price
Optional Quality: Special Modifications @ chargen price
For Eidolon:
Optional Quality: Perfect Time @ chargen price
Optional Quality: Special Modifications @ chargen price
For Ez-Azael:
Optional Quality: Watch the Suit @ chargen price
For Iron:
Optional Quality: Hi-Rez @ chargen price
For M3chan1c:
Optional Quality: Hair Trigger @ chargen price
Optional Quality: Special Modifications @ chargen price
For Shy:
Optional Quality: Agile Defender @ chargen price
Game Quotes
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Eidolon: Morals can get you in real OpSec binds... I suppose this is for the best though... even if my track record is looking less pristine with these turnabout gigs on the J. Aren't we supposed to be professionals who do the job we're paid for? No wonder employers won't tell runners anything, even if it makes things hazier with regards to planning and fallout Chófer: "well.. originally i was willing to do the job without knowing much of the details but.. yea no amount of money in the world is enough to break out one of those creatures" Ez-Azael: "What an utter fucking shit-show... Granted, I don't fully remember anything after talking with the new Mr. J when trying to work with the prior Mrs. J, but it was all kinds of sketchy on top of having a strong hunch that Mrs. J was connected somehow with the psychos that caused... Crash 1.0 or 2.0? I'm too angry to remember correctly right now, and this whole thing is just blood-boiling. I don't like either of them, but I'd take this Mr. J over this Mrs. J. At least I'm not dead or in prison... yet..."