Literal Drek
| Literal Drek | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||
| Factions Involved | |||||||||
| Renraku, "The Beast" | Ryujin Gen, John, Booker, Shepard, and Brick | ||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
| None | None | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| 4 Renraku in House runners | None | ||||||||
Background
After Riley Martinez went rogue in It's The Principle Of The Matter, Renraku was suspect of the entire team for being too attached to the project. After recovering Riley, but not the data and getting an insulting video of it flushing down the drain, Renraku decided to internally deal with this by getting some of their elite runners to get it out of the sewers, though they didn't know where. Part of Riley's original team, Ryujin Gen, is worried that he is going to lose his job because even though he knows they recovered Riley, no news of his team continuing the work has been mentioned.
Meet
The Runners all meet at a tourist trap of a location in Downtown, The Cyberdeck, made it make meatspace look like the Matrix. The staff apparently has BTL personalities to complete the experience. The Runners are led to the backroom called the Foundation, where they met their Johnson, who seems very inexperienced and nervous. The Runners easy outwit the Johnson into spilling all that he knows about the situation, which isn't even as much as one of the Runners, John, who disposed of the data that he is currently looking for. The Runners make him agree to giving them more money and a decent amount upfront, totaling to 16k nuyen each. The Runners agree to find this physical data, even though all the Johnson knows is that his fellow researcher Riley was captured and should have had the data.
Run
The Runners are quickly made aware of all that John knows in regards to the data, telling them that it was flushed down the drain in Everett. With the knowledge that they need to go into the sewers, they gear up with gas masks, hazmat suits, and chemseal FBA ready to bring the noise, complete with ex-ex and lots of explosives. They also learn that a new disease, Awakened Sewer Rot has been spreading down there, but more pressing than that is that Ghouls live in the sewers and HMHVV is a serious problem.
The Runners descend into the sewers a couple days later, suited up in their gear and they find that it is filled with immobilized people, in various states of decay and filth. Booker manages to completely navigate the Runners to the flow that they should be going, following all the waterways that the datachip should have gone. Along the way, the Runners run into four ghouls who are installing cameras, that are slaved to a host called, Kyle's Fun Time. The Runners are disturbed by this and are passing by them when they overhear the ghouls talking about another maintenance team going quiet and the Beast. They stop them, shake them down at gun point and they figure that there is another Runner team that they will need to stop in order to get this data, and they are already a couple hours behind.
They arrive at the central refuse pool and sure enough, there are the enemy Runners digging through drek and there is the Beast, sound asleep. They throw a flashbang in and kick it off. The enemy is only slightly caught off guard as the enemy shotgunner takes the flashbang while the rest pile on fire, literally as the mage in the back throws fire at the group. Booker skims over to deal with the mage, only to be meet with a sword adept as well. The sam of the group lays down fire into the rest of the Runner Team as Shepard is able to take down the enemy Runners with power, single shot rounds. The Beast is awoken with all of this and goes out charging towards the noise of the Booker, the mage, and the adept. It screams at them all as Booker lays some heavy firepower into it. By this point, the two gunner enemies have been taken out by Brick and Shepard and Shepard is firing Sun Beams at the creature. The mage runs over to attack the Runners while the adept abandons the mission. Shepard finally vaporizes the creature while Brick and Booker clean up the remaining enemy. They spend some time cleaning through the shit, and find the datachip in the bag labeled, <3 Kyle.
The Runners make the drop and get the rest of the pay, encouraging the Johnson to not continue this line of work.
Aftermath
Renraku is confused, but pleased that the data was been retrieved. While they are still worried about the team, they at least know they care enough to solve the problem while they couldn't. They haven't heard back from their Runners, so they figure they died in the sewers. Kyle got to see a lovely show of Runners fighting Runners fighting Beasts and is quite pleased with how it went. He just sends a smiley face to John.
Rewards
16000 Nuyen and 7 Karma +1 Renraku
Player Characters
Booker
John
Record Date: 2-17-2079
Record Tags: [Shadowrun], [Renraku], [Retrieval], [Kyle]
It isn't often that something comes full circle in such a tidy way. Well, metaphorically, at least. The Johnson was, unsurprisingly, one of the parties formerly responsible for Riley Martinez' work. Turns out that when you take something away, they're going to want it back. Who'd have thought. More unexpected was the complete lack of professionalism on his part. I'm starting to wonder whether we shouldn't have just taken the pay up front and dumped him in the sound, but I get the feeling that we won't be seeing this one around the shadows anymore, so no wasted effort there. Anyways, the J had almost no information on the actual data we were going after (note: job well done), so the job was something of a wild goose chase. If I hadn't put the data down here with my own hands, I might have believed that. Regardless, it was off to the sewers.
Normally, this would not be my kind of gig, but given my rather familiar history with the target in question, it seemed like a solid bet. The team, naturally, was a bunch of burly bullet-throwers---some of whom I've seen before---who were apparently happy to sign up for a vacation down to filth-encrusted ghoul-town. Luckily, at least one was a staggeringly good tracker, so at least we weren't wandering around aimlessly in the drek. As expected, we found Kyle's handiwork down there; less expectedly, he had apparently hired a team of (admittedly rather polite) ghouls to do the installation. A show of force and a few quick words got us a heads up on a second Renraku retrieval team as well as a gruesome local denizen which had taken up residence in the main collecting pool. The Renraku goons showed up about the same time we did, and they had apparently started searching for the datastick directly in front of the unconscious sewer fiend. No thanks to my footwork, they noticed us, and things got loud quickly. (Note: for such a frequent day tripper to the urban playground, I have a bad habit of being seen.) My gun-toting human-ish armadillos hosed the place down with lead, and pretty much everyone who wasn't us had a very bad day. (Note: next time I go down into a sewer where everyone is wearing chemsuits, don't bring toxin ammo. Idiot.) Anyways, after an unpleasantly long bout of sifting through literal drek, we found a very familiar bag, contents intact. The Johnson was comically inept during the hand-off, but we got paid.
It wasn't the most glamorous work I've done, but then again, if I wanted glitz, I'm in the wrong business.
Action: Set aside some time to walk the walk downtown. Maybe *without* being seen this time?
Action: Consider expanding my ammunition library. Too reliant on the chems.