Where the Hunter and Hunted play
| Where the Hunter and Hunted play | ||||||||||
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| Part of Emerald City Clash | ||||||||||
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| Factions Involved | ||||||||||
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ShadowHaven Knight Errant | West Coast Monolith? | Dark Metaplanar Entities | ||||||||
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Dice Huntress Sea Shepherd Limitless | Unknown Member | Possessed Centipede Body (Shedim possession) | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | ||||||||||
| Despite various injuries, no runners were killed | Chose death over interrogation | The body was destroyed | ||||||||
Summary
A horrific massacre, that could only be pieced back together. Those accountable for the people of Avondale, both before and after, were dead or chose death. All that was left after the fact was a case to close and runners left to dark and worried thoughts.
Background
There was an emergency call to the Redmond Knight Errant division. A crazed gunner was attacking the people there. The preliminary investigation into the call led to silence. Surveillance after the fact only reveals empty streets. Avondale was always quiet. Always silent. Always closed off. And then after a collective scream, it returned to how it was.
Silent
Jane Dior, part of the round up crews that head into the barrens and "one of the good ones" if one believes in such parlance, found this deeply alarming. Other forces were spread too thin with the ongoing gang war. She could only rely upon runners at this point. She'd have to make some calls fast.
The Meet
The meeting was done over matrix call, rushed as it was. Dice, Sea Shepherd, Limitless, and Huntress were called upon to do the investigation. Jane had little to go on, and the most the runners could figure out was reputation around Avondale. How quiet it is, how most avoided it. She offered about 4k in pay to each team member to settle the matter quickly. Limitless bargained to dock her own pay in exchange for a favor, and Dice managed a minor pay raise. But the matter was adjourned quickly. None there had the callousness to demand more pay in a crisis like this. They had bodies to investigate.
The Plan
Was there much to really plan for here? They had the logistical matter of getting Sea Shepherd into the fray, but otherwise there were only bodies to find. Trails to follow
The Run
Preliminary investigations were...grim. A body in the trunk of the Knight Errant officer's car, hogtied and desperately trying to escape only to die in the car. The bodies had been...dragged...out of the empty streets out of the fact. Huntress noticed one standout however: a trail of footsteps laden with blood, wandering down into a building and down dark steps. The air, the background, was rancid with fear...the pain of mass murder. And, as the team descended, finding traces of a rifle shot, found guts hanging on the door to an indoor gymnasium, the dread clinged tighter, tighter, and tighter still. And, perhaps unfortunately, the vanguard of this ragtag investigation realized the source of it.
A deathly aura emanated from the corpse of a massive invae. A centipede, infested now by a shedim, had been disturbed in its domain.
The fight was harsh, and brutal, but magical support and fated hatred burst through the beast in measure. Limitless's vendetta fueled her impatience, and as she spotted a small tunnel she could attempt to climb through to hunt further...she did. She had told her teammates to be more reasonable, to complete the job and send the evidence gathered so far to the lieutenant. But...Huntress and Dice could not be so callous. At the very least, the team did not find another invae to attack them. A blessing, then, that the tunnel itself was the only remaining obstacle before continuing with the investigation. The invae was once a twisted protector of this place. It most certainly did not use the rifle.
Their continued investigation revealed more of the scene: a man in a mask who blended into the background, whom the locals noticed in passing, was the most likely suspect of the massacre. He attacked at ground level, brisk and brutal. He was apparently wounded when civilians were armed, he was lured into a maintenance closet, and they shot him. They did not survive the encounter, but he was wounded. He was also responsible for the death of the questionable KE officer. The strangeness then, was that the trail of blood was gone, somehow, when the masked man left the scene. But his trail was visible in the shadows, at least for a time. He somehow managed to just...disappear. The team would have lost him were it not for Dice and Shepherd's combined efforts into summoning spirits to track him, and a picture drawn by a child who, thankfully, managed to escape, and had left their art of "the man in the woods" at home.
They found him in the Plastic Jungle. They arrived quickly, as he was still healing, Huntress prepared to cover Limitless from above as the utterly mundane runner approached boldly. She confronted the man on his motives, asked him to come quietly. He revealed he had planted C4 to cover himself. "If I go down, you're coming down with me."
She tried to shoot at him. He was faster than her, but not Huntress. Unfortunately, the dead man's switch on the c4 triggered upon his death. Limitless barely survived but managed to be healed by Shepherd at least.
They had found their suspect. They could not reason out why. Maybe the invae. Maybe something else. He seemed to belong to the West Coast Monolith.
Why is a question that still lingers.
Aftermath
Jane got her report, and Limitless's snark and cop disdain got Huntress to smack her in the stomach when she gave the same callous attitude towards the WCM.
When Huntress questioned other WCM members connected to the Haven...they had either no care or no warmth to answer her with.
The question of why lingers still.
Limitless learned there is no Arthur Zarunath in the archives of SIN registry. Either he was erased, or he never existed.
Rewards
4,000 Nuyen (2 RVP)
2,000 Nuyen Negotiation Bonus thanks to Dice
1,000 Nuyen bonus if the team sells the patch to gangs
5 Karma (5 RVP)
8 CDP (3 RVP)
+1 Knight Errant Reputation (what the hell)
Wimmu mundane ascension EXCLUSIVELY FOR BUYING LUCKY AND EDGE NOTHING ELSE
Game Quotes
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
"...Just a bunch of dead ends. I don't even feel alive anymore when I do this..."