Fragging Bug Infestation
| Fragging Bug Infestation | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven Kalanyr Interpol | Cassandra Withers | ||||||||
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Wychking Pulse Katherine Tyler |
Mimic Mantises Orchid Mantises | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Lady of Pain, Wychking's ally spirit, was disrupted. | Cassandra is dead and her breeding lodge is razed. | ||||||||
| Initiation ordeal and ascension for all party members. Some Mantises escaped. | |||||||||
Summary
Taru completes a memory op and shoulders most of the political fallout, preventing the UCAS FBI from becoming Ares 2.0.
Background
Delphi nervously bit the bullet and met with Wychking to tell her that Cassandra Withers is a Mantis spirit. Immediately Taru dosed herself with Laes, called Interpol and arranged for a memory op, erasing her own memories to eliminate all suspicion of her being aware of the truth. The Lady of Pain kept these memories hidden from her and bided her time while Interpol scouted the political terrain.
The Meet
Wychking sends a hiring message to the Haven app for a few enterprising teammates. They meet at a rye granary in Everett due to Rongoteus, Wychking's bound Great Form Plant spirit, being a minor god of rye and sowing its seed all over the fertile, slashed and burned woodland after her fire spirit incinerated a great deal of the woods. Rye grows rampantly in Everett now and the granary has a minor business of turning it into whiskey. Taru, on the other hand, informs the team that Interpol has finally come up with some plans to take action on Cassandra. She elaborates the target, where she is and that she has to die. Offering Laes in case they want to leave, both Pulse and Kate choose to commit to the bit. Wychking Laeses herself again, telling them they'll meet again in 24 hours. The Lady of Pain guides her to do the proper preparations, allowing Interpol to source some raw materials for the job. Rachel Rosen also provides a healthy amount of KE-IV for the job.
The Plan
Wychking meets with Kalanyr and asks for his aid in getting to the feds' HQ with a legal meeting. The big slug has connections and pulls strings to get a CIA contact to smuggle some of their materiel in as well as forge a fake story for meeting with Cassandra; a supposed Aztlan diplomat having been infested along with his entourage, now driving in a convoy towards Seattle. Taru needs to coordinate with the FBI to prevent them from coming in so they won't need to execute an Aztlan ambassador on sovereign territory.
The Run
The fakes hold up. Nearly twenty corps cadavres blockade a lower level and secure the FBI saferooms from escaping bug spirits. Wychking, Kate and Pulse go up the elevator and go meet with Cassandra regarding the topic at hand. Due to Taru having no memory of any of the plans, the mantis' attempts to perceive any hidden malice fails completely due to there not being any. Eventually, Taru reaches a basic underlying plan and offers to depart immediately after her team has suited up. They meet in five minutes in Cassandra's office, but during a coffee break Wychking's ally notices a Mimic Mantis in the break room. Taru isn't informed to keep the illusion up further, and it's only when they're face to face with the woman that Pain Girl relays the memories and information to the magician. A violent battle full of toxic gas and insecticides ensue in the office. Kate blockades the office door, forcing the infested Cassandra to be covered in KE-IV and begin melting from the compound corroding infested flesh.
Cassandra breaks out, heavily injured, leg chopped off by Kate and screaming for help. Kate kicks her jaw into a splintered mess, a Guardian Spirit runs down and executes the mimic mantis Thompson and Taru's magic wraps several Bug Zapper spells around Cassandra. With a lot of guns pointed at the mage and CAS soldier, Taru points towards Cassandra and elaborates that she's an insect spirit. With all of her hate bearing down on the bug, the Finn forces her to confess openly that she's a mantis spirit, giving the team more breathing room. The Lady of Pain notices an astral message being sent, however, and beats the Masking roll to see that Cassandra is an impostor, a mimic mantis with body sculpting. The true Withers is somewhere else, something Wychking relays to the on-site leader of the FBI security team.
Meanwhile, Pulse manages to fight off a demiGOD in the Matrix host, securing files both related to the mission and related to his own interests. Files detailing Seattle's runner communities and Cassandra's preferred personnel assets both are acquired and the former is erased entirely. He gets out, but only just. The feds lower their guns and start doing a wide sweep while Taru forms a high-Force Bug Zapper and orders every man, woman and non-binary individual to walk through it. A woman begins protesting about how fascist and infringing upon personal freedoms this kind of jackbooting is and as a response Wychking allows her to not walk through the barrier. Instead, she's Insecticided by Taru on the spot, exposing her to be a Mimic Mantis as well. As the woman's body burns and screeches in an inhumane voice, the remainder of the FBI employees understand how underequipped they are mentally to deal with an infestation.
Once the main offices are secured, Wychking begins thinking of tracking the real Withers. Pulse and her combine their heads; with Wychking's knowledge of Mantis preferences, behavior and anatomy Pulse can pinpoint areas in the ACHE that suit their breeding needs the most and spots a potential candidate on a lower level. The team begins to embark ASAP, but the fire spirit reports that the corps cadavres are slaughtered by True Form Mantis Soldiers.
As the team begins breaching the breeding lodge full of mosquitos and mantises, Pulse finds a good spot to hide away in while Kate takes point and Wychking provides support for both by sequestering areas of the corridors with Bug Zappers, Insecticides, Manabolts and supportive magic. She's stretched thin, but Kate's sword rends through host after host after host. All spirits, friend and foe, find the excessive use of Blight uncomfortable, but the Invae are far more hampered by the KE-IV gas grenades. Wychking sends periodic visual feed compilations and reports regarding the situation to Interpol who are increasingly concerned by the extent of the infestation. They send remote astral support to watch the ACHE from the outside and potentially catch escaping stragglers.
Finally, the team manages to push all the way into Cassandra's domain. Wychking prepares to put everything she has into a single, astrally explosive spell, but the Lady of Pain stops her and insists that she doesn't throw herself into lethally critical condition again. Demanding to perform her job for once, the ally spirit shoulders the pain instead and warps the very astral space by filling the room with a flesh-rending hurricane of bones as a F24 Slash from the demigod of the underworld shreds almost everything and everyone in Cassandra's room. The magical backlash is far too much and the ally spirit's form is ripped in half by the strain, disrupting her back into her native plane.
Cassandra's nearly dead, however, and the fire spirit's oppressive presence and Wychking's timely intervention, spotting a window of opportunity, manages to wrap her astral form in the Invae hunter's vengeful magical power, incinerating her soul and disrupting her back into Vhortas.
Aftermath
Wychking and Kate are evacuated via Interpol medivac. Pulse extracts himself through a less corporate way, having gotten some juicy as hell intel to share in datahavens. Taru's imprisoned in Interpol headquarters on the Zurich-Orbital station, waiting for court hearing for several war crimes committed on sovereign soil. Interpol had no legal jurisdiction and although she wasn't officially employed, Interpol officially agrees to punish her according to international treatices. In-house, however, she's congratulated for her work in cutting through the red tape and given extremely top-level augmentations to pay her for her troubles. Her ally is gone for some time, something she promises to atone for. Erika has also taken notice and is nearly completely certain Wychking is one of their lost projects, although they can't tell exactly which one. Their interest in her grows and one day she may have to choose between her life's work at Interpol and her patriotism with Erika.
Rewards
- 100,000 nuyen (50 RVP)
- 30 karma (30 RVP)
- 2 CDP
- +2 Public Awareness
- +1 Wild Reputation
- Optional Gear Reward: Deltaware augmentations
- For Kate:
- Ascension rewards (costs up to 5 RVP)
- -10 UCAS FBI rep (for international espionage)
- +5 CAS FBI rep (because they like her moxie)
- Magic Resistance + Perfect Time + Quick Config @ chargen price
- For Pulse:
- Ascension rewards (costs up to 5 RVP)
- +1 street cred (for deleting the Seattle FBI field office's runner file)
- +2 additional public awareness (for posting about it on the Matrix)
- -10 GOD rep (along with Rai and Rei the twin demiGODs as enemies)
- +10 Streets of Seattle rep
- +10 Black Hat Hackers rep
- Wanted: UCAS FBI (100,000 nuyen bounty) + Data Liberator
- Daredevil + Ninja Vanish + Online Fame (can pick up @ chargen price)
- For Wychking:
- IG 8 discount
- Delta clinic access (15 RVP)
- +10 INTERPOL rep
- 1 Chip owed to Kalanyr
Game Quotes
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Wychking: "Kalanyr sent me a message. My pronunciation isn't the best, but I understand the message. Ist das der Zerstörer oder der Schöpfer? Mit der Glut des Hasses schwenken wir die Schwerter. Ist das unser Schicksal oder unser Wille? Wir werden kämpfen, bis dieser heiße Wind unsere Flügel nimmth."