Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour
| Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour | |||||||||
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| Part of The Opera House Slasher | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven Ragers | Major Corp | ||||||||
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Boss Lady Argentum Olivia Silence Runner4 |
Character1 Character2 | ||||||||
Summary
A traumatized mother hires a team of runners to find her son's body after he's murdered by a serial killer.
Background
A sadistic killer with a love for opera music has started prowling Seattle over the past few months, targeting SINless metahumans. Their latest victim was a young dwarf man named Alex Garcia, who ran away from home as a teen after a fight with his mother Susan. Susan received a package containing a simsense recording of the killer murdering her son, his finger, and a taunting note. Distraught and not knowing who else to turn to, she asked Gutshot, a member of the Tacoma metahuman Ragers gang, for help, who in turn figured the best thing to do would be to hire shadowrunners to investigate.
The Meet
The runners are told to meet at Sailor Mike's, a vaguely nautical themed working man's dive bar near the Tacoma docks. Lady Argentum gets some strange looks, but the runners manage to squeeze into a booth with Gutshot and Susan without much issue. Susan is distraught, so Gutshot leads things, explaining they can't afford to pay much but that they just want the team to find the body of Susan's son Alex so he can be properly put to rest. When the runners agree to do the job, Gutshot gives them a package from Spee-Dee Courier Services containing Alex's severed finger, a note claiming that Alex missed his mother, and a datachip containing a recording of the Slasher killing Alex.
The Plan
Boss plays the recording, hoping to find some clues. He witnesses the Slasher finding a homeless Alex on the streets of Puyallup, befriending him over the course of several days over a shared love of music, taking him out on a date to a sleazy Loveland bar The Big 'O', leading him into a motel room and making out. The recording takes a turn for the sinister when the Slasher pauses to stare into the mirror, at the viewer more than herself, as she reapplies her lipstick. Alex is paralyzed by some toxin in her lipstick, then brutally murdered while she sings along to the titular opera song. Finally, the killer stares into the mirror once more as she cleans the blood off her hands, face morphing from that of an elf woman to one of an ork man.
Olivia pulls some stills from the recording to avoid anyone else having to experience the simsense recording, and performs psychometry on the severed finger. She relives the Alex's last moments through his perspective instead. Excitement, lust, confusion, betrayal, and then pain as he is paralyzed and murdered. She manages to figure out that he was killed at the Loveland Sleep-n-Slot, giving the team another clue.
The Run
Boss calls up Brainchild to search the Matrix for information on their suspect and victim, but little useful turns up. Olivia calls up Pozemka to ask if he knows whether or not "Rock", the paralytic agent she figures was used, is the kind of thing that can be easily cooked up in a home lab or if it'd require a more advanced facility. The team figures the toxin would've originally come from a medical corp, and then either stolen or sold to less-legitimate suppliers.
The crew heads to The Big 'O' and Boss chats up the bartender. He gathers that "Chelsea" had been showing up with Alex for the past few weeks on Thursday karaoke nights, but hasn't shown back up since. Boss leaves the bartender a message to deliver if "Chelsea" ever shows up, asking her to meet him at the room where she killed Alex. She does not respond.
They rent the room where the murder happened, and Boss chats up the receptionist at the motel. The old ork woman remembered "Chelsea" renting the room, and having to get a chop shop to pick up Alex's body in the morning because of the murder. She threw the murder weapon out in the dumpster behind the motel, and offers Boss the business card of the chop shot that picked Alex up: Leroy's Pick-A-Part Auto Salvage and Body Shop.
Lady Argentum sniffs out the murder weapon from out of the trash, Olivia performs psychometry again and this time picks up on feelings of disgust at Alex and nostalgia towards the music that were left out of the simsense recording. She figures the killing must've been racially motivated, despite the killer disguising themself as various metahumans. After the first night of staking out the motel room proves fruitless, the crew heads to Leroy's in the morning.
At the run-down scrapyard/body shop, Boss engages in heated negotiations with Leroy, a ruthlessly greedy old redneck who has little sympathy for Lady Argentum's attempts to apply to his humanity. While he has zero interest is giving away a perfectly good corpse just to appease a grieving mother, he does get talked down to a price of 4,000¥ instead of 8,000¥. When he goes to shake on the deal, Boss tazes him with his shock hand and Lady Argentum grabs the body and runs. A longer altercation with the man's guard hellhounds is avoided when Boss threatens him into calling off the hounds and accepting the loss before things got messy, and the runners delivered Alex's body back to a proper funeral home in Tacoma.
Aftermath
The Opera House Slasher eventually hears from the bartender that "the Boss" was looking for her. Susan gets some small amount of closure by giving her son a proper burial.
Rewards
4,000¥ (2 RVP)
5 Karma (5 RVP)
2 Bonus CDP (1 RVP)
2 Base CDP
+2 Ragers Faction Rep
Optional: Gutshot C2 L1 Rager Lieutenant (2 RVP)
Optional Plot Hook: The Opera House Slasher is aware of Boss