Digital Apotheosis

Nothing to do with anything, but I broke up with Alphonso. Turns out I wanted a stable mature long-term relationship and he wanted a trophy Shadowrunner girlfriend he could show off to all his racer buddies. His loss.

So that aside, let's talk Pierce. Thanks to Neon's efforts, we know how to kill him. Disrupt him in the Matrix, then take out the device that he uses as his refuge when he flees there to recompile. Of course, that means fighting a Crazy Digital Murder God in their native environment as well as then walking into what was doubtless going to be a well-prepared, well-defended secured facility that would be on alert and ready for us. Easy, huh?

Fortunately, the first step was kind of solved for us. Pierce had asked to meet us at Dante's Inferno, in the name of sorting things out and clearing the air between us. This gave us an opening, from which we came up with a plan. I had the brilliant idea of "tagging" Pierce with a program that would make the Club's IC see him as being a hostile intruder and try to take him out. It'd also sharpie him up (so to speak) so we could trash him in the matrix and confirm that he'd fled to his home base.

And to take care of that we had some thermite.

Neon began work on the program, Wraith got the thermite and all was set. We met Pierce in the club as planned. Me, Wraith and Captain Cancer kept him nice and distracted by talking about him, his plan, what we'd done to it and so on. We also kept randomly changing topics or talking over each other or even saying just plain contradictory things so that he'd be off-balance and not notice what Neon was doing until it was too late. We sent the "go" signal to her, and when she hit it all hell broke loose.

The response was immediate; the club went on high alert as all its ICs suddenly turned hostile and zeroed in on his virtual form. It twisted and distorted and bent in all sorts of just plain wrong ways as he tried to fight them off, but it was clear that he was in trouble. So much so that he decided to set a stealthier Assassination drone on Neon to stop her. I shoved her on the floor to get her out of the way, and then me and Wraith leaped on the stupid thing. Wraith managed to get it to stab itself with its blade while I bashed it stupid with a tray, knocking it offline.

At that point Pierce left the building so to speak as his image, as freaky distorted as it was, winked out. Neon was able to conform that he'd fled back to his point of origin, so we headed after him with all speed. The bad news is that said haven is inside an old MCT robotics factory that he'd recently bought back on-line and would almost certainly be crawling with killbots. Furthermore, it would be on alert, given that we'd just tried to murder the guy running it.

Of course the Digital Murder God has Murderbots

So we didn't exactly take a subtle approach. Instead, me, Wraith, Freddie, Captain Cancer and the Drones crashed in through a window, guns blazing. The caught the security force in the process of deploying, which was good given that it was made up of well-armed humanoid attack drones being run by Pierce's systems. We had the advantage of high ground and were able to quickly mow through the bulk of them before they could react, using a combination of autofire, grenades and spells to chop them down with speed. Added to that Neon was able to take over the factory’s security systems, stopping their weapon turrets from coming online.

And then it went bad, because it always does.

Facing two of these on the same killer cyborg is obviously
not a good thing

Remember Pierce's trio of super murder Cyborgs? We met number three. This thing was a hulking mass of metal that had once been human but now was more machine then anything else. It also, by the way, had a pair of Vindicator Miniguns attached to weapons arms on its back, and had no qualms about indiscriminately spewing shots at anything that it came across. It trashed one of Freddie's rotordrones and nearly geeked me in seconds.

The good was that it was also very slow and thus an easy target. The bad is that it was so heavily reinforced that our weapons were really not doing much against it, and even Captain Cancer wasn't able to hurt it too much with his magic. Wraith did come up with something though that definitely fell into the 'crazy and suicidal and brilliant' bucket that he engages in so often. He was able to half rush it, half sneak it and plant one of the thermite charges on its back without getting himself geeked.

The results were spectacular. He burned a huge hole through it, slagged the spare vibroblade it had stashed there for emergencies and most importantly wrecked one of the Minigun mounts. And the stupid thing was still alive.

So then it was my turn to do something awesome; in this case, I used the opening generated by it now being blindsided and made a fast as all hell dash around it and stabbed it through the hole Wraith had burned in its back. That was enough to finish it off, the thing half collapsing, half freezing up in one giant mess of flesh and tech and whatever else was in there.

With that out of the way, we headed to the basement and the mainframe in there which was Pierce's haven. He wasn't happy to see us, as you can imagine, but then went and did something we didn't expect at all. He begged for his life

And Wraith chose to spare him, more or less.

We slagged the computer and the rest of the factory. But we also extracted his hard drive before we did, and took it back with us. From there, Neon was able to hook it up to a 'dumb' terminal that had no external access to the Matrix or anything else, and then we put inside a Faraday Cage so there was no way for him to get out. And from there we told him that he was at out mercy and that he'd better start talking if he wanted to remain alive (and I said this while I had a hammer in hand, just to emphasis the fact that he was now so very mortal.) Amazingly enough, he did. And in doing such, he tied the last few threads together.

We'd only been partially right when we pinned this on Dr Okabe's long-term revenge plan. The truth is, this was a Renraku op all along, designed to discredit and harm MCT's reputation while allowing them a chance to get back into Seattle where they are most assuredly not welcome. And that in turn was being run by a Renraku Johnson who we'd worked for a few times but had otherwise fallen under the radar for us.

See, this Renraku Johnson had taken an interest in our team, and had tried to recruit us to become one of their 'in-house' runner teams. We'd all said a big emphatic 'no' to him and he'd let it go, even if he was a bit disappointed. Of course, in retrospect that also means that in doing such, he was actually trying to make sure that we wouldn't get in the way of his op, now that we were in effect part of it. Instead, he'd give us jobs that would steer us away from Pierce while also discretely moving the plan along.

But then things had fallen apart. So when the team (sans me) were arrested by KE, Renraku Johnson had been the one who sprung us. This was because he figured that Pierce had become a liability, and that we would decide to go after him with the very real intent of shutting him down permanently. That would nicely wrap up loose ends, especially if some of us got ourselves killed along the way.

Except, of course, he didn't expect us to spare Pierce. Hell, I didn't expect us to spare Pierce, and a part of me still wishes we hadn't

So now we've eliminated one threat, but we also know that we have a very dangerous, very powerful and very well-connected enemy who probably has a vested interest in our staying quiet. The only good news is they probably don't know that we have Pierce, which gives us that much to use against them in future.

It's less a win as it is just moving the fight to the next stage