Street Legends and other lies

One of the reasons for our break was due to the death of our regular Johnson. I liked Ares Johnson, but I really didn't know what was going to come next, especially given the mess that lead to his demise. So when a new Areas Johnson just walked into the firehouse (I just realised that I haven't written anything here about the firehouse. I should, because it's pretty amazing) we were rather surprised for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is we have no idea how Ares knew were we lived, so holy crap what the hell security.

New Ares Johnson. He's... enthusiastic

Anyway, the new Johnson was... Enthusiastic to restart our working relationship, to say the least. Actually, he was pretty damned excitable about just about everything full stop, which is one of those traits that can be good or bad in a Johnson. To get the ball rolling, he offered us a simple job; tunes out that our old friends the Rusted Stilettos have been getting their hands on shipments of factory fresh Krime weapons as well as a fresh supply of drugs, and he wanted to find out how and why. It seemed a little odd - we couldn't immediately see his angle in this or what he was getting out of it - but we took the job regardless because hey, money is good.

What we'd gathered told us that the Stilettos were currently trying to push back into Touristville and take turf form our kinda-sorta-allies the Brain Eaters. We decided to start there and get an idea of what was going on. We headed into the Skeleton, which has become Wraith's favourite hangout to impress girls with his tales of life as a runner. However, he wasn't with us today, so it was my turn to show off. I picked out a sleeveless, backless number, and then set my tats to a skeleton pattern on my arms and spine and really showed off on the dance floor. The crowd ate it up. We also got some leads, with Freddie meeting a Brain Eater mechanic who pointed us to one of their hangouts.

Whole that was an awesome party (I swear, half the guys there were staring at me, tongues on the floor) it didn't get us any leads. So we tried plan B; Captain Cancer headed out for a walk, pretending to be a drunk and lost corp tourist who was practically begging to be mugged. And so when a pair of Brain Eaters came along, I was ready to jump them, the pair of us quickly knocking them down. We got a bit of info out of them, most notably the location of their hangout, which lead to the next step of their plan.

Krime Spree. Useful for shooting walls in front of you, not so
useful for anything else

Captain Cancer used a Physical Mask to disguise me and him as these two Orks (get this; I do a better impression of a male Ork then he does!) and we simply strolled into their camp in an old car park. The place was full of boozed up Orks and piles of shiny new Krime SMGs and Shotguns, and even a pair of LMGs. They'd been carefully tag erased and the like, but a few discrete slight of hand tricks meant that Neon could get in and track them. We also met with their leader, a Giant (as in one of those weird Norwegian Troll variants) called Joturn who seemed to have big plans for launching an invasion of Touristville.

A quick sneak around his carpark camp found a map of Touristville with two marked locations, which seemed to confirm our fears. Making excuses, the pair of us headed out and dropped the masks, looking instead to investigate these two sites. The first was a very literal dead end; what we found there was an abandoned storefront full of freshly dead Rusted Stilettos, including a heavily cybered lieutenant who had been blasted with a shotgun at point blank range. The only witness we could find was a nearby hobo who claimed that the devil killed them by breathing fore on everyone. Not helpful.

The second site was a derelict office building, its ground floor heavily barricaded and full of panicky Brain Eaters who were dug in and ready for the worst. I managed to (mostly) discreetly extract their lieutenant, a woman called "Pepper" of all things, and get some info out of her. It seems that their other site was attacked by an unknown party who came in, killed everyone there and left without saying a thing.

That left us with only one possible lead, being a commlink we recovered from the dead Stiletto lieutenant. That lead us to a safe house in the Barrens, one that I could only describe as a hole. Not just because it was small and seedy, but because it was literally below ground, in the basement of a ruined building. Getting to the Safehouse did give us one clue we were on the right trail; the presence of a shiny new Yamaha racing bike almost certainly belonged to its occupant. Captain Cancer went astral and checked the place out, confirming that there were two people inside; one with lots of Cyber, and the other awakened. Figuring that this was going to get messy fast, we came up with a plan; kick the door in and start with a hail of neurostun gas grenades.

That’s when it went good and bad. The good part was the awakened target (a human woman) went down fast. The bad was a shocking development; not only was the cybered-up human male ready for us, but he was actually moving faster then I was. That's a little scary.

He also nearly reduced me to minced meat with a full-auto combat shotgun, which is a very deadly weapon to be facing in a close-quarters battle in a tiny room, especially when it's being wielded by a guy who is moving so fast tht even I can’t catch him. The good of it is, that as fast as he was, I'm still amazingly fast too; I was able to get pasdt his initial attack and managed to subdue him without too much further harm. And that's when it got even more shocking.

See, I recognized him. The guy’s name was Twitch, and he was a Grade A Prime Runner, a Street Legend. The guy was a part of some awesome team that had been active for decades and who normally hung out in a penthouse apartment in downtown Seattle. And here he was, filthy, disheveled and wounded and holed up in a tiny bolthole out in the middle of the Barrens and popping gangers. It's not the sort of thing that Prime runners do, not the least of which is because it's beneath them and they have better places to hide. So definitely something weird going on.

(And I'm not just saying that because I have a bad past with veteran runners who are wired for speed)

Twitch, a Prime Runner. Not pictured: Penthouse
apartment, fleet of LAVs, glamour, massive
parties or private data server. Also not pictured:
bleeding out in a hellhole in the barrens

Twitch was... A mess. Even after he was roused, he was still disheveled, slurring, and with huge gaps in his recall (so again, like the other veteran runner I knew...). Apparently 'something' had happened in South America, and he had lost everything or the like. All he had left was the girl, Sharps, who had been attacked by a group of Rusted Stilettos. After he'd rescued her, he'd sworn to get revenge by taking down as many of them as he could, and specifically their boss; a Troll called Rage (So original!)

We explained our situation, and he agreed to help us. We'd have to take Rage alive to question him, but Twitch got to frag every other Stiletto he came across. And, as a bonus, once we were done with him, Rage was his. The secret was to lure the guy out (because nobody felt like going to his hangout in the wreckage of a melted down nuclear reactor in the heart of Glowtown) which bought us back to Joturn, his last remaining lieutenant.

Captain Cancer recreated our disguises, and the pair of us walked into his carpark fortress, planning to lure him out and take him down. Unfortunately, Joturn was on to us fast, so we had to improvise. Me, Twtich and Freddie's drones were enough to take out the thugs, while Captain Cancer fried him with a rather impressive lightning bolt. Taking his thankfully un-fried commlink we called up Rage and taunted him into coming for us. Knowing that his lieutenants had been taken out by an Elf girl probably didn't help any.

With that in mind, we set ourselves up. Me, Freddie, Captain Cancer and Twitch hid behind the makeshift barricades of Joturn's carpark fort, while Neon tracked him from the van. Shard hid out with her, because traumatized girls are not the most useful thing in a fight. We also laid several makeshift mines around the place to help slow him down. And then he appeared, a massive Troll with a massive sword on a massive motorbike, barreling towards us. We hit the mines, and that was enough to wreck his bike.

Unfortunately, it just made him mad. Because it turned out that Rage was not only as mad as all hell, but also hopped up on Kamikaze which made for an ugly combination. So he was shrugging off all our Neurostun grenades and Captain Cancer's stunbolts while just getting angrier and angrier. And Twitch wanted to go full Shotgun Murderer on him as well, which meant that he was going to end up killing our only lead if we didn't do something fast,

Wraith would have had a pan. But he wasn't there. So it was down to me.

I did the only thing I could think to do; I bolted out of cover, ran at him, leaped on his back and planted my shock gloves on his face. And he kept going. So I kept shocking him, and didn't stop until he was finally down on the ground. We quickly took his commlink and threw it to Neon for her to mess with, while we questioned Rage himself (after securing him with steel cable, because Troll on Kamikaze).

Rage was talkative, especially when Captain Cancer was able to mess with his drug-addled brain. Turns out that the drugs and guns were coming from the House of Christobal, a Cuban drug syndicate with Voodoo connections. The Stilettos were meant to act as distributors, and the guns were there for some extra firepower to help them along the way. So all up, a bit of a mess.

Then it got worse when we realized that Sharps had Stunbolted Neon and ran off with Rage's commlink. Turns out that she was never a victim and had been using Twitch all along, but we have no idea what for. Ugly. Captain Cancer offered to take the guy in until he figured himself out, which meant that he'd have a twitchy, amnesiac, burned out shotgun maniac living in his apartment for the moment. Better them then me

On the upside, we finished the job and got paid, and our new Johnson took us out for steak. So we can put this in the win column at least.