Dead Ringer
| Dead Ringer | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
| ShadowHaven | Major Corp | ||||||||
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Tempest Nautilus Dada Goliath Pockets |
Character1 Character2 | ||||||||
Summary
Runners investigate some ghost taxis! Blood mages and cyberware chop shops expanded out into some spooky nonsense.
Background
Six disappearances. All enhanced individuals. All hailed GridGuide cabs within spitting distance of Touristville. All vanished without a trace.
The pattern was too precise for random street crime, and too clean for a gang war. The Johnson, Mei Shin, a GridGuide subcontractor with more guts than budget, hires a team to investigate the disappearance of her boyfriend, Izaak Durrell. An ork with full cyberarms, chrome eyes, and a blue-collar routine. He disappeared after entering a cab registered as decommissioned.
Turns out, someone’s reprogramming junked cab VINs and disabling their Matrix visibility. Passengers with visible augments are hit with a hidden Slab autoinjector the moment they buckle in. Once unconscious, the car auto-paths to Z-06, an abandoned Yellowcab overflow lot.
There, victims are pulled from the cars by hired muscle and shuttled through back alleys to a chop shop run out of a defunct mortuary. But the real horror starts under the lift. The shop boss is working with a toxic blood mage, sacrificing cybered-up victims to fuel blood spirit rituals. The ware is harvested. The bodies aren’t wasted either.
The Meet
The party make their way there with varying degrees of success. Pockets pays off a contact to take his SIN around town. Meanwhile, Nautilus and Goliath both spend a point of edge making their way through the Renton checkpoint. Though, they make it there pretty unscathed.
Dada does the speaking with help from Tempest for some gear rates on skill softs and a portion of the pay up front (5,000 nuyen)
Tempest garners that the Jhonson had some personal connection to the man in question.
The Plan
The plan was to do some legwork, identify the vehicles in question, and try their best to get on location ASAP. Though to be honest, planning didn't go much further than that.
The Run
Goliath moved to a previous scene of the crime and got into a taxi matching the description of the 'ghost taxis' in question. After some checks, he identifies that the seatbelt is hooked up to some kind of mechanism, and gets stuck with an automated injector with slab in it. This paralyzed him, and a little spider drone put his commlink in a faraday cage in the center console.
Tempest, noticing the AR feed from his contacts going dark, quickly astrally projects out to the location and follows the taxi back to a garage.
The group goes to investigate, Tempest sends Dada up to the roof to get access to a datatap with levitate and some invisibility. Dada (with a considerable amount of luck) manages to get some info on the location on Goliath's location, and the location of a turret inside. Nautilus sends up a fly spy to investigate further, finding that there was a vehicle en route to their location due to them parking in view of a camera.
They scatter, and as the man gets there he sends a message out to the location. They ambush him, incapacitating him after he gets a message out. Tempest mind probes him for information, getting the location of an alleyway, and the name of the man's boss Sarah.
After going to investigate, the spider scares them into putting down the fly spy and the group opts to follow behind Tempest to kick down the door after some astral reconnaissance.
They are met with a spell as Tempest tries to rush the wards, and the mage says over the intercom that she's going to kill the guy if they kick their way in there. They listen, and decide to follow up on her deal to give the J a strawman's body for the job and to let her live in exchange for the man's life. The J is happy to have her lover back, and everyone goes home with varying levels of happiness about the situation.
Aftermath
Sarah is free in Redmond, and will likely be returning with more sociopathic logic and blood magic.
A cyberware chop shop has completely avoided detection and will likely continue their operations on a smaller scope and more research into individuals (No more runs on these people for a while)
Rewards
Rewards: 18 RVP 20k nuyen (10 RVP) (or x2 in gear rates on skill software), 16 CDP (8 RVP), 2 free CDP,
Optional Reward (wip contact): [6 - 8 RVP] Connection 3, Loyalty 3 | Blood Mage (Sarah) [May purchase up to 5 loyalty],
Tempest @Eva (VotW|HotT|EotT|WS|FotD): Battle Hardened 1 (2 RVP),
Nautilus @Syphilen(🧛|👴|:tm:): Mundane Ascension!, Sharpshooter (4 RVP),
Dada @Scranton: First Impression (11 RVP),
Goliath @Rex (Goliath/Meltdown): Drug Tolerant (6 RVP),
Pocket @Joshybones (Pockets): Declined Qualities.
Game Quotes
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Goliath - A fairly standard search and rescue job, I ended up taking a gamble but it paid off in the end due to the others improvisation. We ended up negotiating a deal to get the target back alive, ideally it wouldn't have been necessary but sometimes you gotta compromise.