The Devil You Know
| The Devil You Know | ||||||||||
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| Part of Hail to the Pumpking | ||||||||||
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| Factions Involved | ||||||||||
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ShadowHaven Krimelin Andromeda Crowley | La Gendarmerie | SEA Triads | ||||||||
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Augur Roadkill Hakim al-Ghayb Renato | Constable Labeau | Assassin Bayinna | ||||||||
Summary
The gang extracts a Demoncaller from being pinched by angry triads and feds.
The Meet
Meet occurs in one of the Sea-Tac Mall's many cafes, where Krimelin elaborates he's got a friend framed for various crimes like murdering Wiccan covens. The friend's in danger and needs extraction, but he can't attend personally. He's offering the runners a fair amount of solid, pure gold as a reward if they agree -- after some checking that they're not about to extract a horrible POS, the team agrees.
The Plan
Augur arranges a commercial airliner flight while Roadkill pops Long Haul and starts a long drive across the continent of North America from Seattle to Quebec.
The Run
Hakim happens to just perfectly catch a sighting of Andromeda Crowley, the VIP in question, exiting a motel room. Since Augur's heading to Quebec via airliner, they arrive way sooner and inspect the place. Signs of blood magic and struggle are found in the motel room, alongside mentions of Project Babel, Carmilla and some kind of focal point or auction. Seeing a pool of blood in the bathroom and discovering awakened drugs, Augur grabs a sample of both and books it before cops find the crime scene.
Roadkill identifies the blood sample, having seen plenty of bloodwork as a medic. It's human, contains protein markers from all kinds of metahuman tissue instead of just blood and shows traces of Crimson Orchid. Renato's past in the slammer reminds him of some trade routes the South-East Asian crime syndicates, some subservient to Hong Kong's triad had in northern NA. With bribes, investigations and quick thinking in identifying familiar astral signatures with assensing, the team finds a secondary hideout in the industrial sector of Montreal. So far, they've avoided raising any ruckus with evidently illegal ware and kept quiet on the radar, allowing them to sneak in with Augur's illusion magic undetected.
They manage to sneak up on a tattooed man in an armor jacket keeping Crowley imprisoned and find a number of bodies -- they disarm, ambush and memory wipe the man while freeing Crowley, who claims the man is a fed sent to track her down. Later, as they ask Crowley some specifying questions, she asserts to the team that the trails of blood magic in the motel room and the dead bodies weren't hers, but a magical acquaintance she met with when she was on the run and tight on help. After she realized what they were on about, she ran for it and got caught by the fed.
Aftermath
Fortunately, with burner fake SINs provided by the runners' contacts, some cosmetic disguise work and driving in Roadkill's ambulance back to Seattle, Crowley's extracted without too much fuss before the authorities can zero in on her. Her accusations of treason and forbidden magics in Quebec, UCAS, CAS, SSC and CFS go unanswered for now. Krimelin is glad and offers the party a dead drop and some old foci he had laying around that he can't use. All of them appear to be related to the transfer of suffering in some way.
Rewards
- 13,000 Nuyen (6 RVP + 1,000 Nuyen Bonus)
- 3 Karma (3 RVP)
- 4 CDP (1 RVP)
- Optional Contact: Krimelin, 3/1 FBI's Most Wanted (6 CDP or 3 RVP)
- Optional Gear: May exchange Nuyen and Karma at Gear Rates for Qi Foci containing Transmit Damage, Empathic Healing and Kiai