Mission 19 – By Any Means Necessary

MISSION 19 – BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY Written by: Marius          Played on: 11 Jun 2010

PREVIOUS: Side Mission 02 – Delivery Assistance

NEXT: Side Mission 03 – The Bleeding Edge, Chapter 1 – Part 1

The team and I get a call from Mikael, who wants to meet us in the Sioux sector; he is calling us on the recommendation of his cousin despite our prior interactions. We arrive at a DIY storage place and head to unit 224.

A black European sedan is parked with a sewn doll on the trunk waving at us… shit is never just normal is it. My comlink is having connection issues as we enter the storage area. Outside are two large trolls who reek of death; they are zombie trolls. Inside are many Vory soldiers, Clint says he can sense some type of shamanistic magic.

Inside we find our contact along with two scantily clad Russian women. He tells us of a brothel in the Triad controlled area that he feels would be better utilized under Vory control; he would like us to convince the Triads that it is no longer profitable. While he does not want to “hinder our creativity” he says there is a bonus in it for us if we leave it standing.

Mikael provides us with a data packet; the two managers Sun-Yat and Chiang are listed along with two VIP clients, Amelia Earis and Argyle, and also 17 hookers and staff. Our pay is contingent on accomplishing one of two goals. The first being to kill all the hookers and staff, the second would be to kill one of the two VIP clients and both managers. To complete these pays 3000¥; if we leave the building standing we get an additional 4500¥.

We discuss it and decide the safest bet to ensure payment is to kill everyone.  

By this point, that plan is really no surprise to me anymore. Killing everyone is always the plan.

We do some research and discover that Amelia is the new leader of the Fronts. Argyle is a former Vory who collects body parts for the Tamanous ghouls; and he used to collect from Doc Tico. While we are contacting Doc Tico we do a look and see on the brothel, which involves Cho going invisible, a plan I am sure will involve us launching into combat… but it all goes off without a hitch.

Doc Tico calls back and tells us the location of our meeting with Argyle, it’s at the ghoul school. FUCK. This place has been a thorn in our side for far too long, we decide to raze the building… it’s the only way to be sure. Cho and I enter and place the three charges in structurally important places. In the mean while Clint and Levi have made contact and at one point are escorted right past us into the cafatera where there are about five unarmed ghouls in jumpsuits.

The school is the same one from Critical Care where the team rescued the ork females before. The cloning operation there was run by the same group of ghouls. Though they no longer actively use it for projects due to it being compromised, they are still willing to use it as a meeting ground.

Levi says something dumb to the contact and tips him off, Clint and Levi book it out of the building. By the time they clear the doors I am cocked and locked in the turret cannon.  As the first ghoul clears the doors I ruin his day, the second is taken out by Wheeler and his hand cannon.

A few more ghouls clear the doorway, but at this point Levi and Clint are far enough away that Cho sets off our charges. An explosion rocks the earth and Levi may have been a bit to close and is thrown to the ground but not injured badly. Cho makes her way around the back, as the cafeteria is still standing, and finds our target alive. A grenade is thrown into the building and after the blast nothing is left alive. One VIP down.

We head back to the Jade Crane, our plan is to jump the curb and kill the two guards out front. This is a success! Jade and I exit Thumper and run around back to the two doors Cho told us of out back. The rest of the team enters via the front and I hear Wheeler yell, “everybody on your fucking knees!” then he opens fire several seconds later. The team begins killing wait staff, guards, and patrons alike.

The indiscriminent killing of patrons in addition to the staff and security earned the group some notoriety. While it wasn’t forbidden by the Johnson, it did represent some bad karma.

Jade and I burst through the back doors into a kitchen area. I dispatch two kitchen staff with bullets, Jade kills the third by smashing his face into the grill then she moves into the main room and helps Levi kill everyone in it. I move up the stairs with Cho.

As we reach the landing at the second floor Cho comes face to face with two guards, Cho returns their missed fire knocking one to the ground; as she appears to have the situation well under control, and as I am eager to kill at least one hooker, I move on. Wheeler and Clint are up to the third floor, I hear gunfire but they are pretty mum over the coms, with the exception of Clint saying “she ran into my blades” in a mock defensive tone. 

The guy I ran past shoots Cho, perhaps I should have remained behind to help her out. She kills her attacker and we both enter separate rooms. My room is full of tubes, and Cho must be in the control room because she informs me that only tube three is occupied. I walk up to the tube, riddle it with bullets, and turn and run toward the stairs to assist Jade in the defense as a large group of Triad are now arriving.

Jade rushes outside and mounts the turret. Cho subvocals that floor two is clear. Jade reports a car down as Levi says “What!? This motherfucker is tough.” I stop almost at the bottom of the stairs as Jade and Levi report that they have the situation under control. I run back up the stairs to meet Cho on the 3^rd floor.

All communications are halted as Jade fills the channel with evil laughter, at the same time I hear a burst of heavy weapons fire and hear a car crash outside. Screaming is heard from the third floor as Cho and I move up to the fourth. I burst through the first door I see, and as it latches behind me gas fills the room. I communicate with the rest of the group and Levi asks about symptoms as he makes his way my direction, at a dead run; I hope.

Cho bursts through the door and fires a shotgun at the window in the room. It remains solid after spiderwebbing, but a 6” hole in the center is allowing the gas to escape. As not to get into the room she extends her shotgun and I grab on, she pulls me to safety. I begin recovering as Levi casts a healing spell. We clear the rest of the floor, and enter the room with the gas, which has now cleared. It is a security room. We smash everything, including the servers.

Jade reports multiple vans are arriving. She opens fire on them as we all begin heading that direction. Three vans are disabled and burning by the time we clear the front doors, a 4^th stops and deploys 5 soldiers. We dispatch a few in various methods,  I cringe as Wheeler hits a guy with his Panther. The guy literally explodes, a fine red mist is all the evidence that person was ever there at all. Clint levitates one into the air with incredible force.  As the last one is killed by Cho we all enter Thumper.

As we round a corner a van hits us. We attempt to make our escape whilst I riddle the nearest van with bullets, Cho puts a grenade through the window of another. I ask aloud, half joking as it has been a few moments, “Has the guy you levitated landed yet?”  Clint shrugs, grinning as he ignites the driver seat of the van that struck us. A loud ‘splud’ sort of noise is heard as the guy Clint levitated smashes into the turret, covering it in gore.

Many more vans approach; I man the turret as Wheeler attempts to flee. The battle rages for several blocks. All pursuers are destroyed or lost. We head to the meet with Mikael.

When we arrive he informs us we did not kill all the hookers, but accomplished one of the deliverables, and caused no structural damage to the building. We are paid in full.

PREVIOUS: Side Mission 02 – Delivery Assistance

NEXT: Side Mission 03 – The Bleeding Edge, Chapter 1 – Part 1

Mission 15 – Critical Care

MISSION 15 – CRITICAL CARE Written by: Levi          Played on: 23 Jan 2010

PREVIOUS: Mission 14 – Wetwork, Pure and Simple – Part 3

NEXT: Mission 16 – Primal Forces

There is a ring stain from where a glass has been set in the top-left corner of the page.

The call was around 3 pm. The fixer was polite. The meeting was at the Five-by-Five.

The noise filters out as I come in with my associates. Bars were beginning to blur together day by day; greasy holes in the walls for rats to hide in. Our weapons were checked at the door fairly coarsely, and we were directed into a side room.

I kept mostly to myself upon entering. Foodstuffs, a Johnson, and two bodyguards. Was I dreaming, or had I seen this before? I was having more of these Shadowruns in my sleep now than awake. When no one was looking, I plugged my nose and found I could not breathe through it. Awake.

The Johnson said he sought us for investigation and recovery. He told us he would prefer it kept quiet versus being done quickly. He offered us four-thousand each. My ears pick up only the meat, and four-thousand did not seem adequate to me. I suggested to the tap-dancing caster that he attempt to persuade more out of our business partner. He agrees to add an additional thousand.

Our Johnson introduced himself as Brett Fuller once we are committed to the job, a representative of the DocWaggon Company. He told us that persons had gone missing that were registered with their insurance. He went on that their built-in tracking systems and bio-alert systems within said individuals have not gone off, and the reasoning behind it seemed to be… difficult to fathom.

Each member’s contract with the company was high ticket. They were all female; all young. All orcs. Amusing that anyone would care about disappearing orcs to begin with… but they would likely not do well to have the public discover that they were linked to these disappearances, regardless of race.

This run was suppossed to be linked to the Runner’s actions in An Ounce of Prevention where I forgot to tell them about a data chip they could have sold. The data chip contained a list of Doc Waggon contracts along with medical data such as gender, race, age, etc.

While looking into the dissapperances, the team would have realized that they were all related to the data chip they sold many months ago and that, while not directly, they were responsible for the dissappearances and lent a moral responsibility to the run.

Alas, I forgot it, so the run simply became just another job.

It was little to go by, and I let my partners do most of the soil fingering. One of the orc women had disappeared at a mall, and after obtaining the tapes from the event, we discover that her transmissions to DocWaggon cut off very casually as she was shopping.

No one was around, and she did not seem to notice. She stepped out into the street later on, and for reasons off-camera, passed out. A small crowd collects, and a vehicle resembling the make of a Docwaggon truck pulls up to collect her, and leaves. It is not registered, and from our investigations, no official DocWaggon vehicle ever arrived on the scene.

I feel an itching frustration that I need to get out while the less grotesque woman calls up Loco, the mad, to see if he, in his junkyard car-toy world, has heard anything about such a vehicle. He directs us to a dealer known as the Duke.

Buzzing continues as we go to pay the Duke a visit. I anticipate the opportunity to interrogate, but it doesn’t really come up. This Duke seems a clean fellow, for a troll mechanic anyway. Works on vehicles from a gutter shed. He smokes, I notice, as does everything around him.

I bring myself out of my head briefly while we look over his facility. It comes to reason very swiftly that he did do work on rigging a vehicle to look like a Docwaggon truck. However, the man appears innocent enough. His paperwork is crude, his filing sloppy. Nothing shines through that he is someone who would require his throat cut open to provide us with the names of the culprits with the car.

Perhaps we could have saved ourselves some time in finding a more gestureful and swift way of asking him for their contact information and their address… instead, the Jade creature takes him upstairs to persuade him. The persuasion is very loud, and takes all night. In the morning, we have their address information, and, for perhaps the first time, I witness the troll whore as tired.

We are given an address, which appears to be legitimate… on Sesame Street. Our targets are Burt and Ernie. I presume that the Duke was given false information and was too stupid to check it over. Still, we visit the home to search for clues. It turns out that the car is in the garage, and the culprits are INDEED named Burt and Ernie.

When we enter the house, they make a meager defense before we bring them to the edge of death and back again. I may have accidently shot the other mage in the scuffle… at least, I’d like to think I did.

There is a wet stain on the paper here.

We find out fairly swiftly what the situation is. These two blokes, probably lovers by the look of their abode, once worked for DocWaggon. They were fired… however, a programmer from the company named Mr. Carl Weiss hires them back for private work. This man would remotely shut down the tracing mechanisms within these female orcs, before the two lads would collect them in their fake wagon and turn them over to a place they referred to as “the Farm” and an individual named Arnold. 

When asked to take us there, despite their predicament, they refused in abject terror. Arnold. Carl Weiss. – We inform our Johnson, who puts him on watch. Continuing our dramatic acts of subtlety, we decide to head directly to the farm, binding and taking Burt and Ernie along for the ride.

I seem to remember we picked up a girl, who was frightened of something, and nearly as frightened by our deployed turret. At this point, the vehicle’s company was so erratic that I just tried not to care. It turned out that she was being hunted down by a load of gang members. Who were they again… well, they’re dead now. Suppose it doesn’t matter.

The gang was in fact the Aurora Angels, which the group tangled with in The Flip Side. Of course their presence was completely coincidental, they weren’t looking for the team; but in a game where players assume the world revolves around them, they assumed Base 13 was back for some revenge and set to decimating everyone there.

The woman they picked up was simply stranded after the gang attacked her vehicle earlier in a random bit of violence. After dealing with the Aurora Angels, they dropped her off enroute to their destinatoin.

The toppling bodies helped to clear my head, somewhat. Our van rumbled towards the address of the “Farm.” It appeared to be a rundown school, long since abandoned. It was guarded, however, by watcher spirits, although poorly. We managed to infiltrate the complex without being spotted.

I remember dust. We navigated through collapsed entryways like a maze, eventually finding our way downstairs. Therein, we came to a set of locked doors. After opening them, we discovered the locked doors contained a room filled with some odd dozen ghouls, which attacked us. I’m pretty sure I shot another one of my teammates then, but who can keep track of these things? A lot of firing… a lot of killing. They all together go, all together.

It appears that this room was locked to keep these mad ghouls in, not intruders out. While my associates travel upstairs, I stay behind to nuzzle through the bones in the corners, looking for signs of the females we were there to obtain. Noise commences upstairs, and outside.

Recasting invisibility on myself, I come upstairs to find a load of fire elementals and several armed, mentally-present ghouls engaged with my teammates. I do what I can, see… and they all go away. Lights out.

I do, however, remember the glorious mess we uncovered. It turns out that the complex was gathering orc women in order to impregnate them with some kind of ghoulish half-breeds, I think. That or they were just making fodder meat without brains for them to eat. Either way… it was a delightful experiment; exquisite to watch this dark dream smash to pieces under our heels.

Our targets were found there, mostly in good condition, along with many other women in different levels of pregnancy. My associates were taken back, filled with crude senses of vengeance and disgust. I only enjoyed the wave of sensation from opening such a wonderfully buried closet.

Clint, the tap-dancing dwarf, did not fare so well in combat. Neither did the Jade creature. Turns out, while we were battling our way up top, that our support on the exterior was in equal levels of conflict. They lived, however… as I happened to be around.

We called in extraction for the women after clearing the complex of rotted life. I am fairly sure we did not burn the place down, but I’d like to remember it as if we did… if not, maybe I will go back there on my free time one of these nights.

He did not.

We received an extra bundle of currency for our speedy and thorough service. Women saved, a horror house shut down, and street rats put out of their stupid heads and bodies.

If only everything wasn’t so blurry through bourbon.

PREVIOUS: Mission 14 – Wetwork, Pure and Simple – Part 3

NEXT: Mission 16 – Primal Forces

Mission 07 – An Ounce of Prevention

MISSION 07 – AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION Written by: Jade          Played on: 22 Aug 2009

PREVIOUS: Mission 06 – The Flip Side

NEXT: Mission 08 – Chasing the Dragon

Got call frome overly happy fixer to go talk to a doctor Jonson, Doc Tico.

The team was hired by a local doctor, Doc Tico, to retrieve some high end drugs from a Doc Wagon facility in Denver. He perfoms a lot of pro-bono work for the poor, and wants some supplies to do higher end work on Runners and those in the Shadows who can pay to finance his clinic.

He has additional reasons, but he doesn’t explain them to the team.

He say we steal drugs for him from hospital place. We go to place and little violent asian follows a patient home and beat her.

Me and Wealer and Marius go to her so we can help hijack the ambulence we call for her, so we can get into hospital place. Dwarf mage stay at hospital place and fly onto roof, we learn later he get shot and run away for drugs, not even set anyone on fire :(.

“How many Shadowrunners does it take to change a lightbulb? All of them! Never split the party!” Clint took off on his own to infiltrate the hospital and quickly found himself in over his head. He did manage to escape, but was effectively out of the mission from there on.

We beat the crap out of the 4 guards and take over ambulence, Jade look mean, make little people cry ^.^ .We have driver get us into hospital place and others go inside. Jade was sad she no get to hit/sex people.

The team managed to infiltrate the facility with little problem, and even managed to make their way up to the storage room, before having any difficulties and using force.

Also, a GM failure occurred. While they were in the room, they were suppossed to uncover a data chip with some valuable pay data on it. The run paid pretty low compared to their effort and their general going rate, so the data chip was to be sold to get them some extra credits.

It was also suppossed to tie in to a later run, which was caused by their selling of the data. Oops.

Others are about to find drugs when lots of sirens sound, many hurting prison men are brought to the hospital place, Jade warn others. Jade then bring ambulence around to loading doc to pick up runner friends and drugs, by now sick of listening to Dwarf Mage bent out of him mind on his own drugs.

We let paramedics go and have driver bring us back to the van, we go pick up drugged Dwarf and go to visit Johnson man. We deliver 12 cases of drugs to Johnson man and he give us money. Not worth the trouble for crazy Cho girl, her face all over net by now…

The guards the team took out earlier were wearing full armor and helmets. Wheeler and Marius infiltrated the Doc Wagon facility wearing their armor and helmets.

Cho did as well, however, they had damaged the last two helmets with head shots on the guards and so they were unusable. She ended up being spotted on a number of cameras walking around the facility.

Poor Johnson man is haveing sell bits of people for food for bad folk, we offer help, he say no. Not enough money, going to have to pull double shift at the club this week :D.

The final bit of this, was that the team found out another reason Doc Tico wanted the extra money. It turned out that, in order to keep his clinic open and free to the poor people of the area, he had been selling off trash organ tissue to a guy by the name of Argyle.

Argyle represented the Tamanous, a ghoul group in the area that is heavily involved in organ legging and other unsavory opperations. Doc Tico wanted nothing to do with them, and used this opportunity to get money so he wouldn’t have to rely on them to fund his clinic.

PREVIOUS: Mission 06 – The Flip Side

NEXT: Mission 08 – Chasing the Dragon