How Many Walls
| How Many Walls | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of Blood and Soil | |||||||
| |||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
|
| |||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| 12 Human Supremacist thugs | |||||||
Summary
A team of runners helps protect metahuman communities from public shooters.
The Meet
The team is suddenly alerted by a recorded message from an ork woman begging for help in the middle of a firefight. They are given a waypoint in Carbonado and immediately go there as quickly as possible. Glamor runs into some trouble getting an air spirit to help her go fast, but it works eventually. Calypso uses her super-fast cyberlimbs to skate there faster than some civilian cars can drive, and Waspkeeper drives there in her GMC Bulldog. Neko is stuck taking public transportation, but attempts to provide remote matrix support. When the team arrives, the ork woman explains that a bunch of human gangers in bandannas firing automatic weapons from a truck were shooting every metahuman they could see, and they took off a few minutes ago. The team sets out to find them.
The Run
With her Detect Footwear spell, Glamor looks for signs of any fast-moving feet as Waspkeeper drives the team around. They spot a bunch of combat boots floating above the ground, and the team prepares to round the corner to deal with the terrorists. The air spirit engulfs the driver, suffocating him immediately, and the passenger takes the wheel. Waspkeeper fires her Thunderstruck through the axle, slowing it down to a crawl. Calypso snipes a machine gunner in the truck bed. Glamor follows up with a big ice sheet that causes the truck to spin out, and the rest of them die or are knocked unconscious in the car crash, which unfortunately wings a civilian. Neko spends time trying to locate any icons, but is unable to spot any, and concludes their personas must be operating out of a host. She arrives while the team is tending to the wounded civilian.
Calypso slaps a stim patch on one of the unconscious terrorists, who spouts a bunch of racial slurs and says he won't talk. Glamor convinces him to talk, which he does by saying there were more of them about to kill a bunch of elves. Neko jacks in to one of their commlinks and finds they're logged into a host called EndFinity Message Boards. While she examines the host, Glamor calls Alice "Pink" Herrington for information about EndFinity. With some convincing, Pink tells her that EndFinity is a message board full of "definitely just memes" that lead to a toxic, irony-poisoned online community shooters keep coming from. After some convincing, she also reveals that someone she knows who lurks on the forums believes there are supposed to be two attacks in Puyallup soon, one in Carbonado and the other in Tarislar. Neko searches the matrix to confirm this, and further finds that Knight-Errant doesn't seem to be coming to Tarislar's aid, despite the under-the-table contract Calypso knows they have to maintain an effective A rating despite being designated a C security zone.
Waspkeeper drives them to Tarislar on the double, and they arrive quickly to find the sound of more gunfire. Using the same search methods as before, they find a second truck with more terrorists. This time, Neko cracks their host and avoids the IC to interfere with their communications and weapons while Calypso, Waspkeeper, and Glamor engage the enemy directly. Having been warned of the danger, these terrorists had prepared ahead of time and were not surprised to see the team. The machine gunner lays down a base of suppressing fire, causing the team not to be able to do much until Waspkeeper finds the right moment to snipe him with her Thunderstruck. Seeing their heavy weapons person down, the terrorists start shooting civilians on the street to force the team to either retreat and tend to them, or place themselves in harm's way to protect them. Calypso, however, speeds out of the Bulldog and hops in the truck bed, at which point she shoots the driver, crashes through the window into the cab, and steers the truck straight into the nearest solid wall, killing all of the terrorists in the crash and almost knocking herself out in the impact.
Aftermath
The team receives medical attention for their drain and injuries. Further digging into EndFinity reveals one of their most influential memers was possibly a Humanis social engineer, but the connection was tentative. Neko later gathered Spider and Purkinje to destroy the small host from its foundation so they wouldn't have an easy time reorganizing for any further terror attacks.
While there were a few deaths, the team acted swiftly enough that the wounded were largely able to be saved without lasting injury. The ork who called for help tells the team they scrounged together a reward from various community members, and gives each of them 2,000¥.
Rewards
- 2,000¥
- 6 Karma
- 2 CDP
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Calypso
Ok, so, these guys were a bunch of drekheads and I'm not a fan... I'm thankful they had nice, slow vehicles though, otherwise they'd have shot a lot more civilians before we got them handled. Sidenote: Just because you can outrun the vehicle, jump in, and crash it into a wall, doesn't mean you *should*. Because... owwwww...