Cascade Cola
| Cascade Cola | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of Devil's Night Part of It's a Small Underworld After All | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven Sons of Sauron | Ten Thousand Lions | ||||||||
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Chameleon Count of Three Sizzles |
Sheung Fa Sòh Jyū 10,000 Lions Sze Kau | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| None | Two 10,000 Lions Sze Kau | ||||||||
Summary
A Pre-Wireless Matrix vending machine in Old Rockford, a mostly abandoned Anglo town in the Cascade Ork tribal lands of the Salish-Shidhe Council. A missing Sons of Sauron operative. Deadly Triad operators. And a rumored trove of orichalcum worthy of a dragon’s hoard…
Background
Sizzles is looking to move into the Ork Underground (the real Ork Underground, not touristy Tuskville.) Hoping that Hez-kukra will make the proper introductions, Sizzles is tasked with a favour in return: discover what happened to a SoS cell operating in Cascade Ork tribal lands that has gone silent.
The Meet
After meeting with Hez-kukra and taking on the favour, Sizzles subcontracts out to former running mates Count of Three and Chameleon. They agree to go on the mission, deciding that using a hunting trip for cover will also afford them to have a real hunting trip. Salish-Shidhe Council in late summer is a lovely place, after all. Besides, they’re just investigating a missing person. How dangerous could it be?
The Plan
Hez-kukra had been communicating with his SoS compatriot through a very strange and convoluted method. The town of Old Rockford is a sleepy place. Its convenience store/gas station/diner had an old, pre-wireless Matrix vending machine out front. The machine is so old that the operator would have to make a comcall to the machine to check on its stock. Hez-kukra would spoof the old distributor number and call the machine on the last day of every month…while his SoS contact would manually adjust the stock to convey a message.
Low on Grapeshot (Blast Your Tastebuds!™ )? Need a new shipment of explosives.
Low on Mountain Green (High Attitude™? A shipment of reagents is available to be picked up.
And so on.
Given the machine is the only lead, and Hez-Kukra (by design) knows nothing about his contact, the team plan to head to the outskirts of Old Rockford, set up a hunting camp, and then casually stroll into town the next day and start their investigation at the vending machine.
The Run
The team gears up and dresses up like Anglo hunters making a trip, and cross the border without difficulty.
The team sets up a basecamp outside of Rockford, and spends the night camping. The team takes turn on watch, wary of paracritters, and on the second shift the Count of Three becomes aware that a creature of some sort is trying to sneak into the camp. Bamboozled by a clever creature, Count wakes the team, and Chameleon uses Astral Perception and spots an aura slinking away from the campsite with a sleeping bag in tow. When confronted, they find a Bandit inside. When offered survival bars from their kits, it trades one item of the Count’s stolen gear per bar. Eventually they overload it with bars, give it a small bag, and expect it to leave. But seeing a cushy opportunity it acts cute and convinces the Count to let it stay with them, for now.
The next morning they go shooting, and bag two deer. Cleaned up they load them in the back of their rented Toyota Gopher. They roll into town. The town is dead quiet. Sizzles inspects the vending machine while Count and Chameleon go inside to subtly case the place and look for clues, under the pretext of needing ice and coolers. There is a flustered and irritated ork inside that tries to shoo them away as fast as possible.
Outside, Sizzles breaks into the machine with his hardware skill and sets up a data tap. Hacking into the machine, he finds that it’s old promotional camera (to create goofy caricatures of purchasers on the machine’s LED screens to amuse children) has been activated every month for the past few years, as the contact comes to break into the machine. Covering his tracks well, the SoS operative forgot about the small promotional camera. His visage is taken from the data, cleaned up, and Sizzles begins a long combing through the deep dark areas of the Matrix, trawling for some leads.
The team heads back to pack up their campsite and returns to town to go to the diner. The irritated ork returns, tells them to order whatever, and disappears back into the back. The Bandit joins the team under the table as Sizzles and Count feed it eggs, when (after a long delay) the food is brought out. The team sits for hours, discussing possibilities, while Sizzles dealt with his long Matrix search.
Nearly finished with his search and with no soykaf ever having been offered, Sizzles decides to go into the back of the empty diner to make some. While he’s back there he takes a look around with and with a good perception roll notices the walk-in cooler is ajar, and the employee area has some old holoprojector personalizers on their lockers (some real 2030s rural life tech) projecting happy family events. Taking a peek into the cooler, he discovers nine bodies of people who have been executed and dumped. Sizzles recognizes a couple faces in the pile from the holo videos of the diner staff.
The team decides to call the ork back out and ambush him. They do, successfully, and perform enhanced interrogations on him. He confesses that he doesn’t work here, and says that he didn’t kill the diner crew. When pressed he says he’s a subcontractor from Spokane, and reveals that he’s an adept face dancer, reverting back to his normal Native American human face. He says that the people who contracted him were Honkers, Hong Kong Chinese guys who were deadly/serious and were hunting for some trove of orichalcum that had been discovered nearby. The team disabled him after having previously squelched his comlink and, having been told the Hong Kong agents had headed north east, decided to go driving in that direction.
Sizzles finishes his search and determines that their contact is a Mr. Gilbert of Spokane, who owns a rural wedding venue north east of Old Rockford. The team heads there. When Sizzles calls the venue the woman working says that Mr. Gilbert has been away for days on a fishing trip, which he takes frequently, but has no idea where he is. She forwards his comlink number to Sizzles on the pretext that he’s wanting to speak to him directly about booking the venue but is unable to reach him.
When they arrive at the venue, they walk in to discover two Chinese men in armored suits talking about purchasing a wedding package. Sizzles and the Count distract them with a performance, acting dramatically like they’d finally found the place they intended to get married. Chameleon used the distraction to press the flesh and plant a bug on one of them at the counter. The team decides to leave but overhears the men rushing the woman to officiate a ceremony for them right away, clearly hoping to disengage from the process they’ve already started to go pursue the team or return to the rest of their own team.
Out in the parking lot, the team considers and decides they’re going to pull on masks and go back inside in dramatic fashion and shoot it out.
Shootout occurs, the two Hong Kong men being wired to the teeth and well-trained. One takes the woman hostage while the other engages in a firefight. The hostage-taker is executed by Count, the sniper, with a perfect shot through his eye and back out the other side. The other combatant eventually goes down as well after fierce fighting.
Sizzles squelches the woman’s comlink, as well as a young girl who had been working on her pre-semester starting school work. The team drags the men out into the parking lot and trauma/stim patch one of them back to consciousness.
They attempt to extract information out of him but he refuses. And only when they decide to wake the other man up that he shouts and says he will help, eyes watering, telling them they can have exactly one question. They ask him where Mr. Gilbert is, and he tells them that the team has Mr. Gilbert and are forcing him to show them where he hid the orchicalcum. At the end of the sentence a magical geas activates and pops him with an aneurysm, though the team is able to save his life with their medkit and some lucky rolls.
Sizzles, checking the comlinks for more information discovers that the rest of the Triad squad are up further to the northeast at a very small cemetery. With their man Mr. Gilbert seemingly alive.
The team races north east, discovers that their actions have sent one Salish police cruiser to its demise at the hands of the Triads further north. The team prepares but only half-executes an ambush on the remaining Triad squad, and a massive shootout takes place in the cemetery. Eventually the remaining Triad, the rest of his team down, surrenders.
Mr. Gilbert is retrieved from inside one of the graves he’d been digging up, and the team learns that he’d been stalling them for time. The Triads had brought a mage but he’d targeted and sniped him when they rolled into town, before they subdued him, so without mind magic to probe or compulse him he was playing the part of the fool, not remembering where exactly he’d buried the orhicalcum treasure.
The surviving Triad, the Sheung Fa Sòh Jyū, told Chameleon that he respected the team's sense of honor when they allowed him to try to stabilize his one still-living-but-dying soldier. Acknowledging that he’d been bested, and sensitive to his responsibility to stay hidden (and unable to kill the team as witnesses) he decides to connect with them professionally. Better to build a relationship with someone who could ruin you than to have them be strangers, still able to ruin you at their will.
Aftermath
The team hired a coyote to transport the Count, Sizzles, Mr. Gilbert, their gear, and the Count’s new little friend Mahúya the Bandit back to Seattle. As Chameleon crossed over using his legal SIN, he returned via bus. SoS operative rescued, Triads foiled, Mr. Gilbert revealed that there was no orichalcum trove. He’d pulled off a successful bombing of a Humanis Christo-Fascist event further north in one of the small Anglo power centers remaining in Salish and had gotten greedy. Suspecting Humanis would send thugs out to avenge the bombing, he put out a carefully planted rumour of an orichalcum discovery, hoping that the greedy Humanis thugs would come looking for riches while they were looking for vengeance. Unfortunately, his Matrix rumor was too successful and instead he attracted a much more dangerous fish in the 10,000 Lions Triads.
Rewards
“Cascade Cola”
Deadly TL - 20 RVP
8,000 Nuyen (4 RVP) Optional Gear: HK Urban Combat Submachine Gun
12 Months Low Lifestyle (Ork Underground, “Black Burrows Apartment”) (6 RVP)
10 Karma (10 RVP)
Optional Contacts:
Sheung Fa Sòh Jyū of the 10,000 Lions (Connection 4/Loyalty 1)