And this is why I hate going to Stuffer Shack

Sometimes you get people who decide to find the most complicated solution to a problem that they can. Today was one of those days. (Okay, it was yesterday now, but bear with me)

Misery in convenience store format

Benny needed Pizza at 2 AM and I got sent to Stuffer Shack to get him some. Why? Because nobody else was available to or something. At any rate, that was the first indication of just how badly things were going to go. I mean, Stuffer Shack was its usual nightmare of horrible people – the clerk who wished that he was somewhere else, the woman with a crying baby, the guy licking the tubs of ice-cream in the freezer, the hobo asleep in one isle and the like. Some of the many reasons why I hate that place.

Oh, and there was also this one other guy there. He was buying cigarettes and trying to (no, I am not making this up either) use magic to get out of playing for them. A part of me thinks “just how desperate and/or lame do you have to be to use magic to get out of paying at Stuffer Shack” and then the other part of me thinks that “hey, at least he can magic. That’s a useful trait, right?” I mean, Wraith has been mentioning that we need a magic person on the team for some time now. Abby doesn’t count as all she does is punch things and run up walls.

And then a car bomb went off outside, and three goons came running into the store, which only made things a little bit worse. I mean, I’m at a Stuffer Shack. It’s bad enough as it is. Me and the Mage managed to take care of them; knocking two down and scaring the third off with a bit of magic of his own. One of the cleaner drones tried to attack the mage, but the decided that sweeping up burning debris was more important.

It’s then that we find out that the goons were actually after the woman and her brat with intent of geeking them both. Definitely not cool in my book. And so we decided to help them out because we’re actually decent people. Really. One quick call summoned Freddie and Neon (the latter of whom I have just found out wears fuzzy pink pajamas. Neon, you are such a kid) to investigate further, which turned up an ID on who had hacked the drone. Meanwhile, me and the mage had found out that the likely source of the attempted hit on the woman was her baby daddy. Who was an Azzie executive. Noice work.

Short version is that we traced the hack to a crappy try-hard Decker who was a member of the 405 Hellhounds. We tracked him to their local hangout and managed to extract him via a combination of a Physical Mask on the Mage to make him look like one of them and me using my natural wit charm and dead sexy good looks. Once we got him, he was more than ready to cough up the info on contacting the Azzie exec in question.

We staged an ambush for him, the Mage using an illusion to flush out a hidden sniper that he had lying in wait just in case. One quick firefight later, we had three dead Azzie goons and one exec in custody. And that’s when it got stupid.

Turns out that the Azzie exec wasn’t actually the Baby Daddy. Rather, what had happened was that the actual guilty party was a higher-ranked and rather valuable exec (oh, and married too) who’d knocked her up and then reneged on a promise to get her a job. So she’d decided to blackmail him instead. So in the name of protecting a valuable exec, an Azzie "troubleshooter" had decided to simply kill mom and the kid to fix the problem. In turn, the troubleshooter had hired a quartet of gangers to do as messy and amateurish a job as possible. Which had got said troubleshooter tied to a chair, being questioned and, incidentally, under a physical mask to make him look like a leather daddy.

So in the end, he worked out a deal. The girl gets a job and regular child support from the baby daddy (the word ‘Daddy” is getting a lot of work here today). She in turn stops blackmailing him and plays nice. And the Azzie troubleshooter gets to go free. Oh, and we regularly check in on the girl just in case they decide to solve the problem by making her go away, which could then result in an Azzie exec not only being revealed to being a philanderer but also being complicit in murder.

Oh and as a bonus? It looks like we’ve managed to recruit the mage onto our team. So we can call this a win, even if we didn’t get paid