Hell or High Water
| Hell or High Water | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven Aztechnology Woedica Kryptman | The Thing In The Mist | ||||||||
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Black Lotus Duchess Entropy Fed Up | Spirit Ship of Man | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| None | None | ||||||||
Summary
The runners are hired to investigate an entity deep into the ocean, gathering as much info as possible.
Background
Two Aztechnology transport ships carrying valuable cargo have been sunk in the northern Pacific with little to no clues of what actually happened and how the events unfolded. While running internal investigations, someone in the magic department hires some shadowrunners to delve deeper.
The Meet
The meet was at a structure in the Aztechnology extraterritorial grounds, where the Johnson, Woedica Kryptman, a supernatural phenomena expert, explained what happened, and also that both ships were protected by a warding metamagic, and that pirates and other corps have already been excluded from the suspects list. She later offered a selection of one of two azzie boats, to be used by the runners as they please, and the services of an azzie mage, to replicate the exact same wards present on the sunken ships.
The Plan
The first idea was a pure recon: get on the boat, drive it as near as the site of the disappearances, and sort things out from there.
The Run
While reaching the place, Entropy started looking into the astral for awakened menaces, and found one, specifically a force 10 spirit of man with a slight taint of toxicity, taking the form of a boat, staying idle below the water surface. After some ulterior research, it was discovered that whatever it is, it comes from north, specifically the seas near Alaska, it is active only in conditions of heavy mist, and that locals avoid it by chanting christian hymns and sacrificing paperback bibles and other such pieces of christian literature by throwing them in the ocean. After some discussion on wheter or not that was enough to obtain their fair share of pay, the runners decided to proceed investigating. Black Lotus proposed getting a cheap imbarcation, having the azzie mage ward it in order to make it a bait for the spirit, and then bringing it into its territory, to get footage of the attack and maybe other informations on the entity. So they did, Fed Up got a barely floating piece of wood from Sid, to be delievered to the shore, where the ward was to be laid. The runners then came back on the shore, picked up the second ship (having it piloted via a drone proxy (Blinky) by Fed Up), and the entity actually attacted the boat, however it happened at a distance where noise caused the rigger to lose connection. Using Entropy's cleansing capabilities, the mist was expelled backwards just enough to allow the boat with the runners to get closer in order to re-establish signal, and recover the footage of the attack, after the which the team tried to exfil, while collecting additional informations (and footage) while escaping safely to the shore.
Aftermath
The Johnson found the footage and informations gathered to be barely sufficient, and definetly not worth a full pay, but with some back-and-forth negotiation in which she was made aware that was the absolute best they could do without dying and that not giving the pay they were promised would have been seen quite poorly by the shadow community of Seattle, she yielded and accepted to give an almost complete pay.
Rewards
30k nuyens to each of the players, with no chance to convert it in magical gear, augments or drones.
FedUp will Work for the People for 5 karma. He will pay 10K Nuyen worth of speeding tickets anonymously.
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Black Lotus: "It's genuinely fascinating how this run was both incredibly stressful and mind numbingly boring. I got my hair ruined by seawater, almost came into contact with a furious wild spirit AND had to deal with the complete magical illiteracy of the two wheelmen only for an azzie suite to complain about my professionalism? But again, I didn't get shot and 30k are 30k, so it's a win in my book"
Duchess: "I'm about as Awakened as a brick, but I still managed to find out more about this spirit with two simple phone calls than both of our Mages combined. And Fed Up's drone managed to find out the rest by recording the destruction of the rowboat we used as bait. Honestly, the only useful thing either of our mages did the whole time was find out that something called "Cleansing" can push back the mist. Which really does just go to show that the Awakened aren't as glam as they like to think they are. I don't know. Perhaps working alongside Babylon all this time has simply given me unrealistic expectations of how much Mages should contribute to a run. Regardless, chalk this one up for the mundanes".