I Think I'm Sick and I Want to Go Home
| I Think I'm Sick and I Want to Go Home | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
| ShadowHaven | Twin Pines High School Administration | ||||||||
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Aster Coyotl Roadkill (Inactive) Nova Kid |
Assistant Vice Principal Custodian Rent-a-Cop | ||||||||
Summary
In which the runners are hired to break a bunch of high school delinquents out of detention.
Background
Harold Walton is an aspiring young decker attending a prestigious private school who has all the money he could ever need. He has a group of friends with whom he's drifted apart from recently, and wants to get everyone together to see a local up-and-coming artist that they're all fans of perform at Underworld 93. Unfortunately, all of his pals have landed themselves in after-school detention for various reasons. Fortunately for them, Harold also has a mother who works as a Johnson for Microdeck whose credentials he's managed to steal so that he can make a job post on the Haven and get some criminals to break them out.
The Meet
The runners are asked to meet at the Main Place Arcade in Bellevue at their earliest convenience, and everyone manages to arrive within an hour or so without issue. When they show up they find an ARO pointing them towards someone waiting at a donut shop, which Roadkill IDs as an anthrodrone with semi-realistic features; Harold communicates with them via this proxy for the meet. He explains that he wants 5 willing targets extracted within the next several hours and brought to an address in Tacoma, for which he'll pay them 6000 nuyen each. Aster and Coyotl tag-team the negotiations and bargain him up to 10k each, on the grounds that it's a big ask for a short timeframe, and he agrees. Harold then makes the unwise decision to attempt to hack Nova Kid's deck, which bounces the mark back, and he informs the rest of the team; the faces proceed to give him the side-eye and demand an expense account, and Harold('s drone) sheepishly hands them 5k nuyen on a credstick, as well as the names and photographs of their targets, before slipping away into the crowd - the team elect not to follow or attempt to trace him.
The Plan
Seeing as they'll need to transport 5 people, Roadkill (whose van seats 6) heads over to the site in his own vehicle while the rest of the team pile into Aster's. A couple of quick matrix searches reveal that the address for the site of the "extraction" is in fact a private high school (Twin Pines, sponsored by Microdeck), while the location they're to drop the targets off at is revealed to be Underworld 93 - there's a collective groan as the team realize the nature of their objective.
Nova Kid hits the school's host to get the information the team will need. Slipping inside silently, he finds the record's office (student files) while avoiding the notice of the patrol IC and the custodian/spider. He disarms the data bomb on one of the files and finds the detention list with 4 out of 5 of their targets on it, as well as the room they're in on the third floor. He also snags a map of the building, but is deterred by the encryption on the files for the emergency and security response plans.
Searching around for icons on the host, he finds two personas with 3 marks from it and one with 1 from it - the two with 3 marks look to be the spider and a high-rating commlink likely belonging to faculty, while the third one is a lower rating commlink which they believe belongs to a student; hacking the last one, he discovers that their fifth target is registered as the owner and decides to call it. Having the faces do the talking, they convince the kid (named Brian) that a friend of theirs hired them to break him and 4 others out to go see a show. Brian doesn't recognize the names of the other kids and is perplexed at first, but upon hearing the artist's name he puts it together that Harold must be behind it. He agrees to go along with the plan, but reveals he can't contact the others (they're in detention and have had their commlinks taken and placed in a Faraday cage, while he's using his to work after-hours on a project on the school's host as punishment for some academic transgression). Learning that the others are being supervised remotely via a teaching drone, the team starts to put together a strategy.
The plan is to have Nova Kid brick the teaching drone, then intercept the call between the assistant principal's commlink and the custodian/spider's deck. Posing as the custodian, they'll tell the principal they'll take care of it, then "call the repair people" (actually the faces), who will then have a way to enter the building and make contact with the targets before ushering them out a rear exit to the van. Aster and Coyotl use the majority of their expense account to procure a pair of quick-and-dirty, just-needs-to-look-good burner SINs from their forgers in order to sell the con and avoid having this trace back to them (a wise decision).
The Run
Nova Kid manages to easily brick the Renraku Job-o-Mat lecturing to the kids before getting a mark on the commlink and the deck, then uses reckless hacking to masquerade without needing 2 marks on each device, pulling it off with liberal application of edge. Successfully posing as the custodian to the principal, Aster imitates him and successfully cons the boss into thinking he'll take care of things and not to worry about it. Coyotl dresses up as a new repairman (complete with eleectrocromatic Ares Victory: Industrious jumpsuit) while Aster poses as his supervisor (who of course needs to accompany the probationary employee, don't ask questions). The two of them manage to lie their way past the rent-a-cops guarding the school while Roadkill vehicle etiquette's his way into the parking lot (helped by the chameleon coating on his van matching the company that the team is posing as) and makes contact with Brian, telling him to sneak away when he's able while the others are retrieved.
Making their way to the detention room, the faces encounter the custodian, who's come to investigate the broken drone and is wondering why the repair people have arrived before he called them. Aster spins some magnificent bullshit about the company monitoring telemetry data and pulls off 11 hits to sell the lie, keeping the custodian distracted while Coyotl heads inside to round up the teens (who predictably give him a bunch of grief over being an obvious changeling). While the spider is distracted, Nova Kid loops a few cameras to give the team an egress window, and after a bit of persuasion Coyotl manages to convince them of the truth of their intent and leads them to the stairwell, leadership-ing them to help sneak past the custodian.
After a few picked locks, the group and the kids make their way to the van without being seen or picked up on camera, and Roadkill guns it towards Underworld 93 - thankfully they avoid the 405 Hellhounds on the highway and manage to make it there without any trouble after one more persuasion test to keep the kids from just bailing now that they're free. They're a bit perplexed in that none of the teenagers seem particularly acquainted with one-another, but all of them seem eager to see the show.
Aftermath
Arriving at Underworld 93, the kids hop out and get in line for the show while the team calls Mr. J to report a success. Thanks to his earlier failed hacking attempt and his desire not to tarnish his mom's credentials with the Haven, Harold wisely elects not to attempt to screw the runners on payment and instead sends his drone up to the van with credsticks for everyone before joining his old friends for the concert. Happy ending for all - except the kids, all of whom are going to be in massive trouble with their parents after they find out about this stunt.
Rewards
10,000 nuyen
3 karma
2 CDP
Game Quotes
Coyotl: [with admirable patience and restraint] “No, you’re thinking of shifters, I’m a changeling.” Ignorant/Disrespectful Teens: [confidently] “No, no I totally I heard somewhere that changelings eat people too.” Coyotl: [pained sigh] |
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Nova Kid: Thought it was just going to be a simple job, you know, where it hack into the place and if things go south, maybe have to deal with a few gangers. but no turned out that we had to help, get a kid's friends out of they're school...It's a odd job but sure worth the cash, just the little punk thought he could hack me...then again as a kid i wouldn't had gotten caught like him.