Wine Tasting in K-Town
| Wine Tasting in K-Town | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
| ShadowHaven | AG Chemie | ||||||||
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Ellis Red Ribbon Sizzles Trace Triage |
Blossom Cobra Girl Natasha Whiplash ZigZag | ||||||||
Summary
The team is hired to provide security for a one day Wine industry conference in Kaiserslautern by Prof. Dr. Franz Andreas Buhl, owner of Weingut Reichsrat von Buhl. The Bundeskriminalamt believes that the Great Badisch Crusade (GBC) is planning a terrorist attack on the Wurstmarkt. The BKA believes that there is a small chance that there will be an associated attack on the wine industry conference that precedes the Wurstmarkt. Prof. Dr. Buhl is much more worried about wine industry shenanigans. His worries are well placed.
Background
The wine industry is the second largest employer in Badisch-Pfalz; AG Chemie is the largest. The leading vineyards are all organic so they aren't in the market for chemical pesticides and fertilizers. However fermentation is one of the earliest biological technologies harnessed by metahumankind...and AG Chemie has substantial assets in the field of agricultural biotechnology (especially yeasts). The application of Green Magic to vineyards and the production of wine is controversial but growing in popularity. Weingut Reichsrat von Buhl is the leading proponent while Von Winning Winery are opponents.
In 1718 Pierre Jordan purchased the family's first vineyards in Pfalz. In 1849 the will of Andreas Jordan distributed the vineyards to his children Ludwig Andreas, Josephine and Margaret, This created three smaller wineries"Geheimer Rat Dr. von Bassermann-Jordan", "Reichsrat von Buhl", and "Dr. Deinhard" (now the von Winning winery). Over the years the relationships between the three family firms has waxed and waned. Currently there is fairly intense market competition complicated by the disagreements over Green Magic and the recent purchase of Geheimer Rat Dr. von Bassermann-Jordan by an outside family the Niederbergers. As fate would have it Charles Niederberger holds an MBA from Tilburg University. He concocted a plan with a fellow alumni that works at AG Chemie. They hire a team of out of town runners to extract Dr. Pascal Wegmann-Herr, a Green Magician and the featured speaker at the conference. After a week of interrogation they can drug & dump him in the country side. The conference will be disrupted to the detriment of Reichsrat von Buhl and suspicion will fall on von Winning winery. With the information gleaned from Wegmann-Herr AG Chemie can decide whether or not to pursue Green Magic. AG Chemie then backs the Niederberger family in taking over the appropriate competitor.
The Meet
The runners all converge at the Lucas Palace front desk exactly at the appointed time and are escorted upstairs to an ostentatious suite. After introductions they get down to business. Buhl explains his worries about the conference. The runners question Buhl about the conference, the Great Badisch Crusade, MET2000. Following Buhl's lead about industry competition they discuss the historical background of the three wineries and the current state of affairs...from Buhl's viewpoint. Inevitably the topic of compensation arose. A flat 25,000 nuyen, free commercial travel, onsite food & lodging, a GMC Armadillo and a civilian rotodrone. Armed with the free ids and travel papers provided by *CIA Bill* they left the hotel. The time till their flight was spent busily making arrangements with a smuggler to ship a weapon for the rotodrone and matrix searches for more legwork.
The Flight
Security checks at SeaTac went smoothly and the runners rested well on the flight. Once the flight landed in Frankfurt and met their escort, the team took mass transit to Mannheim at the other end of the sprawl. Then a short trip on light rail to Kaiserslautern station. The short walk to Design Hotel Zollamt was uneventful but the team was spotted at the station by the astrally lurking *Blossom*, the senior mage on the opposition team. Two magically active, one heavily cybered, one hanuman, and a nondescript human of questionable provenance. Concluding that its a team of four runners and a grunt she went back to her body to warn her companions.
The Hotel
The runners approached the hotel warily examining the hotel and nearby surroundings - visually, on the astral, and on the matrix. Seeing no obvious threats the team entered the lobby. There were roughly a dozen people some seated in chairs some standing by the front desk. The runners using AR or VR soon noticed there were two more matrix personas in the room than meat bodies. The runners using Visual perception noticed their Johnson, Buhl seated in a corner conversing with a bearded man and a very attractive human female in a sports jersey and snug denim jeans. At that point Cobra Girl the opposition decker tried to place a mark on Sizzles. Sizzles responded in kind but successfully. Cobra Girl jacked before Sizzles could get a location. The attempted hack set off a stream of DNI chatter. The team grabbed their room keys and rushed upstairs. Red Ribbon examined the hotel security systems and was underwhelmed. Sizzles hacked the unknown persona in the lobby and upon determining his location to be the MET2000 training facility decided to logoff. The entire team used contacts with shadow connections to determine the possible identity of the opposition runners and contacts with corporate knowledge to check on AG Chemie and the Neiderberger family. Seeing the outline of their opposition. The outline of a plan took shape.
The Plan
Plan I
The runners headed back to the lobby to finalize a plan of action. The corner where Buhl, The bearded man, and the beautiful woman was empty so the team gathered there. They decided to be proactive. They were suspicious of Charles Neiderberger and had found out that the family had a guest house on one of their properties. Immediate surveillance seemed in order and the team headed out in their armadillo. They parked in a scenic bypass close to the guest house with Red Ribbon in the cocoon, Sizzles in the command chair, Triage on a bunk astrally projecting. There was no apparent astral or matrix activity. Red Ribbon launched a flyspy for a closeup examination. The flyspy was blocked by a damper going down the chimney but his microphone picked up chanting. When broadcast over dni it was identified as a ritual to summon a watcher. Going up the chimney the drone carefully circled the house looking through windows. The two mages and the decker were on the first floor. In the second floor master bedroom the bearded man could be seen lying on the bed nude with his wrists fastened together. A few seconds later the beautiful woman came out of the walk in closet wearing the snug jeans but no sports jersey.
A hostage situation or a *hostage* situation with a safe word?
Plan II
The question was soon made moot by a comcall with Mr. Johnson - Buhl was panicked by the missing mage and panic turned to rage at the notion of 'maybe he's just tied up at the moment' and told the team to bring him back regardless. With Buhls curses still ringing in their ears the flyspy picked up the sound of the garage door opening. Visual observation showed the door opening while astral observation revealed a watcher very slowly circling the guest house. A quick circuit showed that the bearded man was still nude and unmoving on the bed; the three runners were busy setting lodges and some interior cameras. Amanda Jones the seductress was the person in the Americar. The team came up with a high risk, high payoff plan: Triage summoned an air spirit to observe the movement of the watcher so that ellis can sneak to the house with being observed by the watcher. Climb to the second story bedroom window [observed on the matrix and visually by the drone to be unlocked and with no alarm].
The Run
The first step was to intercept the Americar. At the end of the drive a right turn would bring the car towards them a left turn takes them away. Rather than rely on luck Sizzles hacked the courtesan's phone and then her car and set its course to a GPS location just meters in front of the armadillo. The courtesan, who was on her way to the remaining opposition runners to get paid was upset and got angrily out of the car when it came to a halt. She was met by Trace who used Mind Probe to rip the details of the plot from her mind. The remaining members of the opposition (rigger and street samurai) were returning with some extra local muscle and interrogation gear. The Mind Probe left Amanda's brain spinning but truly enraged. She pulled a light pistol and prepared to shoot Trace when she was hit by a stick-n-shock croosbow bolt. The team left her flopping on the roadside foaming from the mouth but alive. The team headed to the guest house with urgency.
Ellis made quick work of getting into the bedroom and slapped a high rating stim patch on the heavily drugged academic. After using her lockpicks to remove his constraints Ellis tried to urge the befuddled mage to climb out the window and down the rope with her assistance. Wegmann-Herr was confused and drug befuddled but refused - no way was he climbing naked out of the second story window....regardless of the number of standing backflips the monkey-woman did to indicate urgency! Ellis grabbed his boxer shorts and, after checking with triage on the location of the watcher, helped him to the ground. With some stealth and a great deal of urgency Ellis and the mage made it to the Armadillo.
Aftermath
The team stopped to buy some vending machine flats for Wegmann-Herr before returning to the hotel. Their Johnson, Buhl, was quite relieved and pleased. The conference itself was still to come so the team finished their delayed preparations for site security...there was still an opposition runner team out there after all. Now that they were fully prepared nothing occurred. They eschewed the farewell dinner after the conference ended. Just as well, a new round of plotting was underway...
Rewards
13 RVP
24,000 nuyen (12 RVP)
1,000 nuyen (negotiation bonus)
1 Karma (1 RVP)
Optional contact: Prof. Dr. Franz Andreas Buhl. Connection:6, Loyalty:1 (6 RVP)
Fluff: A free bottle of award winning wine every year at the time of the Wurstmarkt
Game Quotes
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Sizzles Decker's log: with a little help from my friends.
My first trip to Germania! I'm starting to feel positively cosmopolitan. a real "citizen of the world".
This one was low-impact thanks to a really good team. RR and Trace are absolute intellectuals, and Ellis and Triage both favor a low-footprint approach. I wasn't sure what to make of Ellis to begin with - that's right diary, I'll admit only to you that I didn't know what the frag a hanuman was. Still, she was careful, quick, and precise - can't ask for more than that. No wild cards on the crew - good comms, good teamwork. RR is cool as hell - I hope she'll hang with me again. A little overeager to run over an escort, maybe, but hey, she managed to squash the urge. Triage was...well, I want to say "withdrawn" - not exactly a friendly type, but he was sharp-eyed and didn't need anyone to tell him how to coordinate. At the end of the day, I was mostly a ride-along on this one. Trace is a hell of a detective, RR provided the necessary physical surveillance, Ellis did the second-story work perfectly, and Triage provided full magical coverage. I guess I was the "analyst" on this one. You don't generally think of a shadowrunner team as needing one of those, but hey, the job is different every time. The pay was decent, though if I read the news afterward right, things got a lot messier after we left. Not sure if there's gonna be much work left in K-town after a successful consolidation. I guess AG Chemie decided the fastest way through was a hefty helping of greenmail.
Triage: I do not understand people. A pretty woman asks you to and you suddenly forget you have a pretty important job to show up to? Anyways, I digress. The run went as smoothly as could be hoped for. Everyone knew their role perfectly, and while there was one woman who probably didn't have a great time due to a electric bolt, we at least did do non-lethal. Looking back on it, I think Red Ribbon was joking when she mentioned running her over. Never met a hanuman before, and at the risk of offending cultural stereotypes, I will say Ellis climbed like fire up an oil slick. Most people don't outrun a watcher. Between Trace and Sizzles, we managed to get most of the information we needed before we even got to the country. Again, it was a simple and clean run. And I got to bag some wines that probably cost more than my apartment, which is nice.
Trace: See now if running the shadows were always like this, I'd be doing it more. Paid trip to the EuroZone and the Palatinate Forest in the autumn? Wine tasting? Beautiful strangers, no one getting shot (crossbows don't count, I checked.) No one dying? Family businesses being reunited? This is some real happily-ever-after work and I refuse to hear otherwise. Body Count (of the violent variety) continues to hold blissfully steady at zero.
Red Ribbon: This was an excellent team for the job. If every one was so well-coordinated, runners wouldn't need to carry so many guns around. I'm really beginning to like Sizzles and Ellis, and Trace didn't seem like a half bad guy himself.
At the end of the day, I didn't need to jump on any turrets or do any crazy driving at all. Sizzles drew who we needed right to us, Trace pulled the info right out of her head, and Ellis got in and out quick with scouting help from Trace and yours truly. Feels good to not be hung up about the actual consequences of the job, as well. What do I really care if some wine company gets taken over? Use magic, don't use magic... whatever. I got paid.