Amnesia Rush
| Amnesia Rush | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven Ancients Laesa Syndicate | Cutters | ||||||||
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Oathbane Babylon Kitsune |
Ace, Grenadier Fuzzy, Druid Mage Sam, Samurai Wheelman Howitzer, Tactician | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Oathbane's Technomancer cover (only for the team and Argent) | The Cutter rookies were brought alive to the Ancients, to an unknown fate. | ||||||||
Summary
In which the runners are hired to recover a big delivery of laes that was stolen by a team of ambitious Cutters rookies.
Background
Early on the 9nth of december, the laësa syndicate managed to smuggle in a significant dose of laës through the Tacoma airport of Seattle, but to do so they had to bribe some officials in advance. One of these officials happened to be a relative of Howitzer, a rookie of the Cutters gang looking to make a name for himself. When he heard about this bribe, he used his little bud of influence to recruit fellow cutters and glean some info on the path the cargo was the most likely to take.
At about 9h30 AM, Howitzer put his plan into motion. His Grenadier Ace planted a bomb right in the middle of a crossroad, and his mage camouflaged it expertly. Once the bomb planted, the Cutters team retreated behind a dilapidated store and waited for the convoy to pass. 10h24 is the time when the convoy passed over the explosives, and thus when the detonation occured, a short scuffle happened but it was over before it started. The Laësa rigger died in the crash, leaving only a Troll to defend the convoy, the second bodyguard mage having surrendered fast after recognizing a pal of his among the aggressors. Indeed, it turns out Fuzzy, the mage from the cutters and Vulture, the one from the convoy were both of the same Druidic tradition, and even initiated together at the same place. The Cutters quickly beat the troll guard into submission, and ran off with the Laësa palette in a GMC Universe van, boosted by the help of an air spirit.
On the way they called on their Cutters superiors to secure themselves a hideout until they can deliver it to them, which they got in the form of a small underground apartment in the mines of the Carbonado region.
At about 11h, Argent gets the word about the incident and seize the opportunity to look good to it's boss, he goes on scene and calls up a team of runners in the hope that they can get the package back before the Cutters manage to make it disappear.
The Meet
Argent's team of runner being completed, at the price of airlifting Oathbane from Redmond, he waited for them on the site of the explosion. Meanwhile Tusk, the Troll bodyguard of the convoy, covers up the cadaver of the now deceased rigger. The team mostly gets there in time, and they see what is obviously the scene of an ambush, a small truck is overturned and the road is damaged. Argent meet the runners and thank them for their expediency, before explaining to them the little he knows. Babylon turns out to act as the face, and they learn that during this ambush a large quantity of Laës was actually stolen, Argent offers the team 10 000 each Nuyens for their retrieval of the package. Everyone seems okay with that to his surprise and when the question of what to do with the actual stealers came up, argent could not care less about their fates, in retaliation for the dead rigger. However Vulture (the convoy's mage) bugged him into promising 2 000 Nuyens each for the recovery of the organizer of the ambush, and 4 000 Nuyens for the whole team. Oh, and Babylon managed to tip off Argent on the nature of his matrix specialist.
The Runners having accepted this deal, they went ahead and started examining the place.
Investigation
When asking around, they quickly discovered from Tusk that the ambushers actually were from the Cutters gang, and there were four of them. Babylon took the initiative of checking the overturned truck to see what info it had in memory from it's camera. She managed to extract the data with success, and with the help of Oathbane removing artifacts from the video, they had a clear feed of the camera around the time of the events. Watching the tape, they learnt the explosive was actually invisible, and had a good view of the ambushers while they shot at and pummeled Tusk into the ground, interestingly, Vulture was seemingly not attacked during the Ambush. At the end of the video, they could see a GMC universe speeding away with unnatural speed towards the south east.
To glean even more information, Oathbane decided to hack the host of a nearby pawn shop. Easily marking her way in, she entered an host sculpted after an old far west shop, where she did not loose time before marking the camera's icon, A spyglass looking outwards of the host. She then threaded herself a Cookie shaped edit sprite to recover the data from the Spyglass, 01 the world tree came to her aid by dissolving the matrix protocols around the Spyglass and her Cookie aggregator, his roots penetrating and fooling the device and it's host into letting this info be copied.
Babylon used this time to invoke a force 5 spirit and assense the local space, perceiving traces of a spell cast here recently, she memorized the aura associated with it before Oathbane sent to her and Kitsune the result of her hacking shenanigans. The video featured the ambushers clearly setting up the scene about an hour before the actual ambush, and then deliberately not shooting at the mage, which did not attack them either. They decided to send the video to Argent by DNI, who gave them 5 minutes to interrogate the mage before he has to take diciplinary action against him.
Kitsune stepped up to the challenge, and Probed the mind of the hesitating mage. She managed to read his surface thoughts, and thanks to the help of Babylon and her own social skills, they managed to know that he knew the opposing mage in a way, that they initiated together in a cave in Carborado, and they got an idea of how the mine entrance looked like.
With all of that info, the team felt confident and decided to get moving. Seeing the group lacked a fast transport for the newly discovered techno and scooter user, Argent lent the team one of his bikes.