Children for Men
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ShadowHaven Stygian Fletchette Dr-Boo Esper | |||||||
Summary
The team is hired to help salvage the remains of a failed semi-prime run which has gone disastrously bad. Some ethical complications come up along the teams extraction as they find themselves in a complicated relationship between: Mitsuhama Computer Technologies, a giant mega-corporation that tolerates failure, not at all; Biogene, a biotech company who's stated mission purpose is to create artificial human flesh to help HMHVIII victims deal with their condition better; and their own ethics.
The team in the end chooses neither of the corporations and rather chooses to do as moral of a thing as they can.
Background
Located in the wonderful state of CalFree, Another runner team was hired by MCT to extract women that were kidnapped and forcibly impregnated in a science experiment to make bio-links from a company called Biogene. The other runner team is doing well and manages to successfully extract multiple women until-unbeknownst to them, they are tracked down by Biogene HTR forces and hit by severe firepower and overwhelmed. It turns out they wanted to save multiple women, and that required detoxing the women, and waking up their biolink babies, allowing them to be traceable. MCT had given them instructions to keep the women sedated, so the biolink babies wouldn't be trackable wirelessly by the opfor. The teams hacker, who has been offsite notices his teams frag-up and hires a new team of runners to recover the lost pieces his team dropped, in an attempt to still receive the payday from MCT. Meanwhile yet another runner team is in Palo Alto, destroying an MCT black-site. [link to run later]
The Meet
Four runners are invited to a Matrix chatroom while they are attending to various personal business in the CalFree city of San Francisco. The runners accept, and meet an icon who is a paper-origami man with blood staining one arm. He tells the runners he has an urgent job to them that requires them to be able to bypass police checkpoints and offers them 6,000 Nuyen to extract a woman from a parking garage in the center of San Francisco to a black-site in Palo Alto. Without bothering to negotiate he raises the reward to 10,000 Nuyen if they go immediately.
The team suspects something is up but goes anyways as the Johnson is clearly under time stress.
The Plan
Esper, who happens to be closest to the coordinates their Johnson has shared with them picks up a set of clothes on the way to the location. Dr. Boo sends a medical Evacuation drone ahead of him to help pick her up. Meanwhile Flechette parkours his way through the city to get to the location while Stygian drives a rental car through traffic.
As soon as they get to the location, the Johnson calls them up to tell them that Palo Alto is no longer a viable exfil location and they need to go to Reno In the PCC. This poses no problems to Dr. Boo who has an entry visa to the PCC.
The Run
The runners come to the parking Garage where the woman is bleeding from her feet. Assensed for magical abilities, she seems completely mundane. The team loads her up into the medical Evac Drone and puts her into Dr. Boo's Emergency Vehicle. The emergency Vehicle has Electromagnetic coating, and Dr. Boo is unable to find any wireless signals emanating from the woman that might have doomed the previous runner team to death. He correctly assumes that as long as she is inside his van, the team will be safe as there is no way a wireless signal can escape a Faraday cage. The rest of the team makes their way into the Van, and they drive off across the Bay Bridge towards Reno.
Meanwhile the Johnson has given them access to the wireless security feeds surrounding the demise of the previous runner team, where eight people have been violently killed: Four Runners and Four pregnant women. There are some Yakashima mages patrolling the scene doing odd ritual magic, to determine who the dead runners worked for.
The team does some digging while on the road to find out: the woman was forcibly impregnated by Biogene, Implanted with a baby biolink, and rescued by a previous runner team.
The team starts to do some digging into the other team, and finds out that the decker's shadow-tag was Papercut. Papercut's icon is conspicuous, as even in hosts where it is not proper etiquette, his icon is always an origami man.
Their Johnson turns out to be Papercut himself: hired by MCT to extract a woman and her baby to MCT, for about 30,000 Nuyen a head. The team confronts him about this discrepancy and he offers them the money, though he is apparently in no position to offer the money, as he is subcontracting out the work his own runner team failed to accomplish, without MCT's authorization. The runners are cautious about what this means for their own positon, should they complete the job, as MCT is known for severely punishing anyone involved in a negative PR incident, and the runners are sure that Papercut is not in good standing with MCT, and therefore associating with him would be highly dangerous..
The runners know MCT is clearly unhappy with how the previous runner team has fragged up. After a spirited debate of what to do with the woman, the team opts to betray Papercut to keep the woman safe.
The team correctly assumes both Biogene and MCT will pay a fair amount of money to aquire the location of Papercut, as MCT wants hims silenced for his failure, and Biogene would want him to learn more about who hired him.
Stygian contacts Biogene while Esper contacts MCT, both selling the corporations the location of Papercut. Additionally, they tell them both that the woman is dead, killed in the carnage in San Francisco. They provide a fake coroners report to back up their claims and lay low for a few weeks before smuggling themselves back to Seattle.
Aftermath
Papercut is presumed dead. The runners spend a while setting up a fake sin and setting up anti-Biolink measures in the woman's home to prevent discovery, after they deliver the baby for her. Many of the runners spend a lot of their own money to ensure the woman is well hidden. MCT is upset the team sold the information to Biogene, as they explicitly stated their price for the location of Papercut was for exclusive access to their former runner.
Biogene presumably has gone back to kidnapping and impregnating women to create new Biolinks.
Rewards
Dr. Boo:
- 7k nuyen
- 11 karma
Esper, Fletchette, Stygian:
- 3k nuyen
- 13 karma
Stygian:
- Owes One Rating 2 Favor to Madame Butterfly
Everyone:
- 2 CDP
- -1 MCT Faction
- +1 League of Extralegal Gentlemen Faction
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Esper
This was by far the most infuriating situation I've been in since my escape from the Evo Corporation's property. I know what it's like to grow up a child in a testing program, looked at as a corporate asset. I wasn't about to let that happen to someone else if I could help it.
Dr. Boo
I'm unhappy with the decision the team made in the end. It wasn't logical. Luckily for them, it would also be illogical to work against my team even if they are busy killing fellow runners and betraying Johnsons, and just generally not doing the jobs they were hired to do. I admit, it was an unfortunate situation, the best way to damage Biogene for doing something so heinous would have been to give the baby to MCT. Alas, I'll take the hit with MCT to keep the other runners 'happy'.
On the positive side, my van is extraordinarily well equipped for this kind of run in the future. My paranoia prevented us from being splattered on the pavement like that previous team of runners. Hit me up if you need me and my van again!