Diplomatic incidents

The last few days have been complicated, to say the least. A lot of things happened, and we’re not entirely sure of what’s going to come of all of it. In fact, to be honest, our team has either achieved a major breakthrough or is completely screwed and under somebody’s thumb, and it’s hard to tell which.

How we got to this point is complicated to say the least. Following our trip to the foundation, we found a whole pile of useful information on Pierce and his crazy plans as well as his insane Bug Shaman allies (They’re Bug Shamans, of course they’re insane) and their own goals and how they were going to execute them. This also came with a bit of good/bad; the bad was that their intended sacrifice/host for the bug queen was Snow Fox, the daughter of a major Salish tribal leader and also Wraith’s fiancée (or something). The good was this meant we had a way to find her.

Council Island is a very attractive place when you're not
fighting murderous bug spirits

Through Lightspeed’s Data Server, Wraith found a Shaman called Dirt Wolf whom he tasked with finding Snow Fox astrally. See, the thing about Wraith’s cool tats is that they used to be magically active (and thus cooler) and, more importantly, she was the one who did them for him. That provided some sort of spirit link that allowed Dirt Wolf to track her down and find where she was. Unfortunately the result was that she was in the middle of Council Fragging Island, which would make getting to her hard.

Dirt Wolf also wished us luck and announced that he wad going to be leaving town. Funny that.

So all we needed to do was get into a heavily guarded secure diplomatic compound so we could fight bug spirits. Easy. The good news is that we had a number of things going for us to make it easier. The first was that Wraith had a contact who could get us access to the island, even if not into the specific individual building that we were after. The second was that Freddie had recently upgraded the Freddiemobile with a number of new additions; chameleonic outer skin, morphable license plates and spoofed RFID chips that allowed him to turn it into whatever other sort of Bulldog van he wanted.

Because we were fighting bugs, we also invested a not inconsiderable amount into gearing up with all manner of goodies; APDS and explosive rounds, insecticide arrow heads, anti-bug grenades and the like. There was one other thing that we had up our sleeves. As I mentioned, Theresa was more than a little in the KE/Ares bad books because of the mess at the detention facility. In the spirit of getting her one in the ‘win’ column, we convinced her to lend us the prototype Perseus anti-bug chemical launcher. We spun this under the idea of a field test, promising that we would bring it back intact and also yield valuable test data.

So we snuck onto the island disguised as a food delivery van, making sure that Wraith did any talking that needed to be done. We quickly located the specific building that we were after, a donut-shaped lodge belonging to a Victoria Stone, a high-ranking Salish council member and apparently another member of the crazy bug conspiracy. And at this point, things took an unexpected twist.

Remember how I said that Wraith has a plan for everything and likes to play it sneaky? Well he abruptly deiced to throw both those elements out the window. Rather then playing it all sneaky and subtle, he decided to get out of the Van in full kit and head to the house. This seemed to be more then a little crazy to us, but listening in on his comms (DNI is a Runner’s best friend) showed method to his madness. He basically went to Stone as an informant, telling her that she’d been sprung and that if she was going to make her move, she should make it now. This meant that she was vulnerable and exposed as she tried to accelerate her timetable.

And so as she and her malformed bug mutants went to get Snow Fox, Wraith went to the front of the house with her (normal) security detail to keep an eye on things. And by that we mean that as soon as their backs were turned, he dropped a grenade on them. At the same time, I’d creeped close to the house and took the opportunity to rush in, helping deal with the guards with Wraith. Matters were further aided by Captain Cancer conjuring up an illusion of an armed team attacking the house from the other side and further drawing off the guards.

With them either distracted or dead, we headed into the middle of the facility while Freddie’s drones and Captain Cancer provided support. There we came across Stone’s malformed mutant bug guards and the crazy lady herself, who had a mana barrier around her. This resulted in the perfect opportunity to field test the Perseus which I did so with a certain amount of glee. The end result was that the gun fired globs of bug spray into the bugs that they did not like. In fact, so much so that it cause one of their heads to explode. Not gonna lie, that was awesome.

On the other hand, one of them did impale me with its horrible bug claws. That was a lot less awesome. Nearly dying is not cool.

Meanwhile, inside the Mana Barrier, Vicky as getting ready to bug-ify Snow Fox while i had my hands full with the bug mutants. As bad as it looked, it turned out that the combination of Wraith firing APDS rounds and Captain Cancer’s magic was enough to penetrate it or shut it down or something (Don’t ask me, I don’t know how magic works). This was followed by Wraith putting a trio of rounds into Vicky, which made her very dead. Bug Shaman or not, APDS rounds at short range will do that.

Unfortunately, that’s when the security forces showed up to ruin the party. We were in a bad situation to say the least, what with being wounded and surrounded by both the Diplomatic Security forces of several of the NAN and Knight Errant forces. This was where Wraith had another plan, one that was as bold as the whole ‘walk in the front door’ thing. He ordered us to surrender; well, most of us that it. He tasked me with getting away and ensuring that the Perseus prototype didn’t fall into anyone else’s hands. I devised an escape plan that would have worked had I not actually run into Theresa on the way out and thus rendered it mostly invalid as she stashed me while taking both the Perseus and my Smartgun footage of it in action (Exploding bug heads will be great for marketing)

Wraith, Freddie, Captain Cancer and Neon were all detained by KE cops for several days who questioned them about what the hell had gone on. And then… they released them without further issues. Even though they’d broken into diplomatic territory, assaulted foreign nationals and blown the place up, it seemed that KE were happy to let them go for whatever reason. Maybe Theresa pulled strings, maybe there was something else at play. I don’t know. All I do know is that my getting away was key to Wraith’s plan. As he explained it, it means that I wasn’t on KE’s books now, which makes sense.

So now we’ve got the Bug Shaman half of this insane plan shut down. Time to go after the Crazy Digital Murder God himself.