We know what you want. We know what you need. We know where you live.

With Wraith gone, something strange has happened. I seem to have become leader of the team somehow. It's odd, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. On the upside, it does appear that everyone recognizes how just plain awesome I am and is willing to listen to me and let me call the shots. On the downside, there's a lot of responsibility and crap that comes with it, which is not helpful when really all I want to do is just run off to do my own thing.

The last little job we had pretty much covered the pros and cons of it, while also leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth, a sort of 'I don't like the way this is going' thing.

It started off with me out at the Skeleton having a good time and, amazingly enough, being recognized for who I am and what I do. An Elf Runner called Blidside approached me in the club, saying he remembered me from Penubra when everything went bad with the Azzie Johnson. I played innocent, saying that I was just there for a good time and had nothing to do with what went on and Jaguar Guards storming the place and all that crap in the spirit of covering my ass, and he seemed to buy that.

The interesting thing is that he recognized me as Crimson having heard about me from the crowd at the Skeleton and was actually looking to me for info about being a runner and what it was like and all., that. It was flattering, to say the least, and I was almost having a good time, when lo and behold who should show up but the (new) Ares Johnson looking for me. Talk about your mood killers, huh?

I spoke to him, and he said he wanted to hire the team and said he'd meet us at the Firehouse, which was already just a bit off-putting, I mean, I know he pays well and takes us to Steakhouses but... Seriously, meeting in our place is just a bit on the 'no thanks' side of it. However, a job's a job and I agreed to the meet, the pair o us heading back there to meet the team.

The job he had for us was a bit odd, to say the least. It was a case of 'not officially on the books, doing this for personal reasons' which can be good, can be bad. Good because it means the Johnson has a personal investment on making sure this all works out, bad because it also means that there's a lot of way that all involved can get hung out to dry.

What was going on was he was investigating the death of an Ares suit (and one of his own subordinates) who had ODed on a magically awakened drug known as Pixie Dust. Officially it was none of Ares' business and his own damned fault, but Ares Johnson wanted us to find out where this crap was coming form and shut it down. He was willing to throw a lot of cash at us to make it happen as well, so we took the job. Besides it’s hard to say no to somebody who knows where you live.

The good part is that a magically awakened drug is not going to be common, and is more likely to be sold to the rich brats downtown then the Barrens street rats. That gave us an angle to work from in starting our investigation. A bit of poking found us a likely place; a club called Syberspace (Yes, spelled like that. How lame can you be?) in Downtown which is a preferred hangout of Rich Corp kids with more money than brain cells.

Me and Abbey (Yes, she was here and not off doing her stuff. Crazy, huh?) headed for the club with the rest of the team on surveillance and backup. And just to be sure, we'd both hidden guns under our club dresses, just in case. With that being said, Syberspace was actually kind of lame. The club itself was a dingy basement that had been left with just bare concrete functionality. Its big angle was that it had a constantly changing ARO environment which meant that the club and its people could be whatever and whenever.

Me, I didn't see the draw. I go to a club to be myself and have a great time and let people see how awesome I am. If I wanted to mess around in AROs, I'd stay home and murder people in Miracle Shooter with Benny. But it was our lead, and I did have a pretty cool ARO outfit on (The neon-trim costume with matching skin and hair details inspired by what i looked like in the Foundation of Lightspeed's data store) so it wasn't a total loss.

It wasn't long before we spied somebody moving through the crowd and clearly dealing. In ARO he had a rather obvious cartoon Goblin look, which made him easy to follow. A quick Astral Assensing by Abbey told us that the stuff he was moving was awakened, which suggested that he was our man. Captain Cancer reported a second guy outside in a mask who was working the crowd, giving out samples and clearly hooking the kids enough to make them want more once they got in.

Abbey left the club, following the masked guy back to his car and waiting for him to collect more product. Her plan was to actually hide in his car and use that to locate their headquarters. To aid her in that, Captain Cancer had dressed her up with a Masking spell to make her look like a Rusted Stiletto. Unfortunately, she was jumped as she was clearing out their boot, which meant that she had to make a break for it on foot carrying their product. Of course, being an Adept and all, she left them in her dust.

Once she was safe, she then poured the drugs out onto the ground while spilling out something obscene ion Or'zet. Nice.

Having lost all their product, Drool the Dog Faced Goblin left the club to rendezvous with his buddy and head back for more. And while Abbey wasn't in their car, we'd tagged it and put one of Freddy's fly-spies on it just to be sure.

Halloweenies

The car headed back to the Barrens (what a surprise!) and specifically to a seedy dive that could be generously called a bar (and more honestly called any number of other things) called the Jackal's Lantern. It was a known Halloweeners hangout, as if that wasn't obvious from the name (They have no imagination), so we deiced to play it cautious and survey the place to find out what was going on. Captain Cancer went astral to take a look inside, which revealed out big surprise of the day.

One of those inside the bar was magically active; specifically, it was Sharps. Some discrete listening in made it clear that the little brat had deiced to go into business for herself, taking the drug supplies that the House of Christobal had sold to the Stilettos and instead turning it over to the Halloweeners so she could get in on the action.

So we had a nice case of converging purposes here. We wanted to shut down the Pixie Dust trade and Neon wanted to get even with Sharps (Neon is hilarious when she's vengeful. It’s like watching an angry kitten) for zapping her. Plus it gave us a nice bonus, because Sharps was using Rage's commlink to deal with the HoC. Neon was able to break into her comms easily enough, and eavesdropped on a call that could be traced all the way back to the Carib League and a rather ominous sounding dealer who was not at all happy with her taking over the business even if it was in the name of her personal initiative.

After a bit of a debate, Sharps and the local Halloweenie boss decided to take a bunch of goons and a truck to her stash in order to collect more Pixie Dust. It turns out she'd been keeping it secret from them as a way of getting some leverage, but losing a night's sales as well as pressure from her suppliers was making them a lot less willing to play nice with her.

We'd figured out a rather simple plan. We follow them to her stash then we ambush them and knock them out, then we destroy the drugs and turn them all over to Knight Errant. Simple. And given how frazzled Sharps was getting, they were distracted enough so that they didn’t even notice us tailing them back to her hideout in a collapsed car park. Se, she'd done something moderately smart and blocked the entrance with a chunk of debris that she could only move by magic. Smart that, make yourself useful.

They got to loading, which provided us with all the distraction we needed. On my signal we moved in, and I made a rather good first impression. I launched a grenade full of Neuro-Stun at Sharps that managed to hit her dead in the chest, knocking her over before she immediately got a lungful of it. Freddie's Rotordrones got most of the rest with more of the NS grenades, with Abbey mopping the survivors up. And Captain Cancer managed to send one grenade flying off into space or something.

After emptying the truck, we secured them in it (including bagging Sharps so she couldn't magic her way out of the situation) and then had it autopilot to a spot where KE were waiting following a tipoff.  Given that they were all members of a known gang, were in the presence of magically active drugs and one of them was using magic without a license, I'd say that we're not likely to see any of them in a hurry.

We confiscated Rage's Commlink so we could do a little more investigation of what was going on. Oh, and we also burned the Pixie Dust. So even if she does get away from KE somehow, Sharps will have a lot to answer for. Sadly, we couldn’t find any more on what happened to Twitch or his crew. Besides the fact that we didn't have much time to talk to Sharps, it's become pretty clear that what she did to him was opportunistic, and that she'd found him after he somehow wound up back in Seattle with no memory of the intervening events

After all was said and done, we informed Ares Johnson that the job was finished. So he took us all out for steaks while we filled him in on the details and handed over our pay. He seemed rather grateful for what we'd done, explain that he thought that the Megas ignore SINless barrens dwellers way too much and that they deserved better. Which, coming from a suit, is pretty damned chilling.