Back From The Dead
| Back From The Dead | |||||||||
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Moth Pell Purkinje Roadkill (Inactive) | Disassemblers | ||||||||
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Wounded:
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Killed in Action:
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Summary
Two shadowrunners in over their head call for backup after the street sam has his cyberlimbs stolen by a ghoul gang. The backup recovers them, and more.
Meet
Near midnight, Waspkeeper sends out an alert to any shadowrunners in the Redmond area. She helps defend Rebuilt, who has been stripped of both cyberlegs and his characteristic jacked-up throwing cyberarm. The team responds to the call within minutes, loaded out for heavy combat. Waspkeeper explains that she's going to get Rebuilt to a street doc, but the team needs to recover his cyberlimbs, which were likely taken to a Disassembler gang warehouse 100 meters from their current location. As the team begins to discuss options, they spot a pack of feral ghouls attempting to ambush them and leap into combat.
Run
Purkinje's drones are quick on the draw and lay down a zone of suppression fire, bombard the pack with a HE grenade, and then intercept sprinters with a monofilament chainsaw. Two fall dead in this assault, and Roadkill finishes the stragglers off with a dangerously close grenade. With the area clear, Waspkeeper extracts Rebuilt and sends the team on their way.
Pell and the drones lead the team quietly through the streets and alleyways, avoiding any ghouls that may have been attracted by the sounds of combat. Soon, they arrive outside the warehouse. A quick once-around reveals each door is guarded by two trolls, and all are armed with screech rifles. The roof has a drone rack with a dozen roto-drones that are also armed with screech rifles. Purkinje hacks the RCC controlling the drones, installs a rootkit to switch its friend-foe detection upon reboot, and then reboots it. The team administers ondansetron to protect themselves from nausea if they get hit by the screech rifles, then Roadkill leads them in a diamond formation to assault the most defensible side of the building.
Pell, Eris, and Galatea make quick work of the door guards and secure the team's flanks as Roadkill tosses a grenade inside. The Disassemblers are quick to react, and one shoots Purkinje with a screech rifle, knocking her over. Pell is also dinged at this point. Purkinje powers through it and calibrates the team's gear to improve combat efficiency, and Moth rallies the team to pick up the pace. A surgeon scrambles the drones, not realizing they've been programmed to attack the disassemblers. They swarm the surprised Disassemblers, taking out several. Galatea rushes inside and uses the shelves as cover to engage clusters of foes in melee combat while Eris presses on the squad's left flank and seizes control of another side of the building. Roadkill and Pell open fire on the Disassemblers in view, keeping them pinned down. Moth keeps the team focused, and Purkinje begins running combat analytics to protect the team from incoming attacks. The rotodrones take out most of the remaining gangers, at which point Galatea and Eris close in on the surgeon, who deactivates the drones.
At this point, it becomes apparent there is a cage full of people likely snatched off the street and someone the Disassemblers had just captured after she tried to run away. The surgeon produces a grenade and pulls the pin such that if he gets attacked, the striking lever will be released, and the explosion will kill all the prisoners. Moth tries to negotiate with him, which ends up distracting him from what Eris does next: fire ex-ex slugs at his grenade hand such that it gets blown off at the wrist and flies into another section of the warehouse, where the blast is contained. Galatea then puts gel rounds in his head until he goes unconscious.
Aftermath
The team saves the prisoners and helps them get home. Any surviving Disassemblers are captured and turned over to the First Nation gang, who are known enemies of Tamanous, with whom the Disassemblers work. Rebuilt's cyberware is recovered intact, and the remaining cyberware is salvaged, as its owners are well dead by now.
Rewards
- 4,000¥
- 8 Karma
- +3 Faction Rep, Streets of Redmond
- +1 Faction Rep, First Nation
- -2 Faction Rep, Disassemblers
- -3 Faction Rep, Tamanous
- 2 CDP
AAR
Purkinje
I'm not sure whether to be pissed or proud. This is the first time my drones have seen heavy combat, and I'll be damned if their tactics weren't top-notch, but Eris there at the end did the most reckless thing I've seen. The other riggers seemed impressed, and it is impressive, but... ugh. I'm gonna have to mull this one over. In the end, we saved some lives and ruined some baddies. I'll call that a win.
Moth
Moth here. Run #9.
This was a wild run. And it felt good. Helping a fellow runner.
When I saw the message from Waspkeeper about Rebuilt having his limbs stolen… I just can’t even imagine. Not everyone knows that I have a cyber arm. It’s a long story. I don’t talk about it. But if I lost my arm, I’d be lost.
So, when my buddy Roadkill – a good medic/samurai, a good leader – when he put a team together to help out within minutes of the distress call, I showed up. Roadkill knows I will do what it takes to help people in need.
We just met right in the field. Waspkeeper and the poor guy. Still trying to get him out of danger. This was tough territory. Deep in the barrens. We were only about 100 meters from the disassemblers warehouse where they’d taken his cyberlimbs. It was me, Roadkill, and Pell – a street druid type.
Folks were dressed for heavy combat. I felt a little nervous. I had the right heart for this job, but maybe they needed a hitter more. And then Purkinje arrived. With Eris and Galatea. I was so glad to see them. I’ve spent more time with them than most. I knew they weren’t going to let anything happen to me!
We had just started discussing how best to approach the warehouse when we caught sight of feral ghouls bearing down on us. The disassemblers use them like scouts. I froze. Ghouls! But the rest kept their heads on and killed them quick.
Eris started shooting – suppressive fire. Galatea drew a crazy chainsaw. She hucked a grenade at them. They had to run towards us to get out of the way. One ran right into the chainsaw.
They were so close.
Roadkill landed a grenade – a flash bang – with insane precision. Like if we’d been an inch closer, it would have blinded us too.
After that, they were easy to finish off.
We got Waspkeeper and Rebuilt safely into a vehicle. Roadkill and I checked him to see if he needed any healing. It was just the trauma of it. What he needed was his limbs back.
We made our way to the warehouse and scouted it out.
Purkinje hacked into their security system, and switched the 12 drones on the roof so that they would fire on the bad guys and protect us. That would prove really helpful!
Roadpool got us organized into a diamond formation (with me in the center) to launch a coordinated assault.
There were so many guards outside the warehouse. And inside the warehouse. Big tough trolls with sonic guns.
But also we realized there was a cage of people needing rescue! Other folks they’d captured for limb-parts. And were going to feed to this disposal pit of ghouls. Horrible! We’d needed to save them!
And thus began a huge battle!
Roadpool got in there shooting and throwing grenades. He took care of all the ghouls.
Pell was shooting like crazy, taking out some of the troll guards.
Eris stayed outside initially, taking care of the exterior guards.
Galatea charged in, making mincemeat of the interior guards.
I was trying not to panic, and encouraging everyone to shine over the DNI. There was a moment when the battle began where the guards fired hard into Purkinje. Knocked her to the ground. I pulled her out of the line of fire. But thank goodness she was okay!
Purkinje was giving us defensive support – ‘I am the firewall’. And those re-programmed drones that the bad guys had intended to use on us? They all went to town killing the bad guys. Yay!
The leader inside was a surgeon type. He was dragging one of the victims towards an operating room.
We slowly cleared the room towards him. It was tough. But this team was top-notch combatants. They were getting it done!
We finally got down to just us and Mr. Surgeon.
And he pulled a grenade! He threatened to kill all the innocent people in the cage if we didn’t let him go!
I counter conned him. I told him to name his demands and we’d let him go, so long as he put down the grenades and didn’t hurt anyone, in exchange for giving us the records so we could return all the stolen cyber-limbs.
Honestly, I think I’d persuaded him.
But it was hard to know. Clock was ticking down. He had that live grenade in his hand.
So Eris – who is programmed to be a little arrogant, very much a takes the initiative type, and I happen to know why she’s programmed that way – decides she’s got this all figured out.
She shoots the grenade out of the surgeon’s hand into the back end of the warehouse where it explodes far from the rest of us. It took his hand clean off. Wham. Bam. Thank you, ma'am.
We were all just standing there amazed for a moment. Needless to say, that was the end of him. They put him down quick.
I ran over and got the victims out of the cage, and soothed them down with some gentle talking. They’d been traumatized enough.
They remembered who they were. We’d saved them all. It was just a matter of getting them all home at that point. To the extent any of them had cyber-limbs missing, we returned them.
We were able to find Rebuilt’s cyberlimbs so they could be returned.
We tried to figure out if we could get anything else back to the person it belonged to, but unfortunately most of the amputees had been fed to the ghouls once stripped for parts. Ugh.
But we saved all the ones we could.
We turned in the guards who were just knocked out to a rival gang – First Nations. They would make them suffer, and maybe use the information to shut down more disassembling.
There was, of course, an after party at my house.
Pell
Well, that went rather well. We saved a bunch of people, got Rebuilt's 'ware back and none of us got seriously hurt. Although, shooting a troll with a machine pistol, even with APDS, doesn't work all that well. Need to get better firepower or a spell to deal with that.