Never work with Children, Animals or Metasapients

Captain Cancer's new toy

Having not been paid for some time now, we were anxious to get back to proper actual work. So when I got a call from the (new) Ares Johnson, we were more than happy to meet him, even if it was, as per normal for him, under rather odd circumstances. For starters, he’d contacted me directly rather than going through a fixer. And then we were Meeting him face to face at a waterfront warehouse, rather than the usual sort of Johnson hangout. Sadly, this meant no steak, but there was more to it than just that.

But we needed money, especially Captain Cancer who had just blown a small fortune on buying himself an Ares Duelist drone and an assault rifle for it. Oh, and he also bought himself a reloading drone, obstinately so he could reload the dualist but actually so it could give him fresh cigs while in the field. His logic was that it meant he would have something else to protect him in a firefight, which seemed semi-reasonable. (Anyway, his drones are now called Thinman and Runt.) Thus we agreed to the meet, and headed towards the docks.

When we arrived, Mister Johnson was carrying a sack which looked like it had something angry inside it trying to punch its way out. This is where it managed to get even weirder, when he opened the bag and revealed that inside was somebody who would be working with us for this op, namely a Pixie mage who called herself Tornado. Turns out that Tornado had been a part of a run on a nearby Ares shipyard that had gone bad, and had been rounded up by Knight Errant in the aftermath. Why it had gone bad was the main reason for our being here.

Knight Errant - To serve and protect
those who can afford it

What had happened was a fight had broken out between them and some other group that had also attacked the yard. Tornado had seen flashes of what looked like green lightning, which definitely fell into the 'not good' category. What made it even more suspect is that KE had quickly closed the investigation, saying it was SINless on SINless violence and thus nobody they cared about, which seemed rather strange when there was magic involved. Thus Mister Johnson needed us to check it out and find out what exactly had happened and why someone had swept all this under the rug.

Our first stop was to speak to Theresa, who had very little to say on the matter. Apparently she wasn't involved in the case, but was able to find out that it was supposedly being handled by Sean McAllister, an Elf Adept. A quick call to the appropriate station revealed that McAllister had very suddenly gone on leave that every morning. That was about as suspect as all get out, so we figured that McAllister was almost certainly the one who had hushed this all up and had some vested interest in doing such.

Following out info we were able to locate his apartment, which was in a surprisingly nice part of town. Quick recon told us that he wasn't at home, but some investigation with Fly-Spies told us that he had a not inconsiderable arsenal hidden in his apartment, and that some of it had been taken out recently. We were able to access his apartment’s systems (courtesy of a Fly-Spy headbutting the on switch followed by Neon doing her thing) to reveal that he'd pretty much gone out that morning. Also, the guy was a lot better off both in terms of comforts and finances then a cop should have been, which told us straight away that he was supplementing his income.

Captain Cancer and Tornado had a bit of a poke around and ran into one of the other residents who knew Sean. Tornado hit him with some spell that made him incredibly compliant, and the resident was able to tell us quite a bit more. McAllister had been seen hanging around with a rough looking man with Cybereyes, and the pair of them, both carrying a lot of weaponry, had climbed into a Bulldog Van and headed off in the direction of Redmond. Everything about the other guy screamed 'merc', giving us some hints as to where his extra cash was coming from.

Of course, looking for one Bulldog in the Barrens would be a nightmare, so we decided to narrow it down a bit. Using a burner Commlink, I put in a call to him, pretending to be an Aztechnology telemarketer trying to peddle new talismans. McAllister flipped out and blew his top straight away, demanding to know how we got his number and so on. In response, I kept playing my 'happy little corp drone' act (Thanks Ashley. Turns out your bland fake enthusiasm was good for something) so we could keep him on the line and Neon could trace him. She got a fix on the location and I dumped the comlink, then we were on our way.

Rar, I eat teh brane

Our boy was hanging out at an old housing estate deep in Redmond, a place that was loveless and cheerless even before decades of neglect and vandalism had gotten to it. When we arrived there were no immediate signs of him and his men, but I got Captain Cancer to do an astral sweep to see if they were still there or hidden. What he found was the astral signatures of a lot of Ghouls. However, a recon sweep with the Fly-Spy showed that they were being kept in cages in the central courtyard around some sort of now abandoned camp.

As it was our only lead, Captain Cancer, Tornado and Thinman set out to have a look over the site, with the Rotordrones overhead to provide fire support. Their investigation of the camp revelaled that apart from the cages full of drooling, rebid, feral ghouls, there was nobod there. Unforrnately, ther were sensors and tripwires which Captain Cancer propntly managed to set off, opening the cages and releasing a truckload of hungry, angry ghouls.

Captain Cancer began to run like hell while Tornado tried to fly the hell And let out the longest stream of profanities I have heard in a long time. Unfortunately, the Ghouls were faster, so the pair of them needed to fight, while we were running to back them up. Captain Cancer used Thinman to buy him some time, which resulted in the Duelist spraying wildly with its rifle and actually managing to keep some of them off Tornado's back before it went down, hard. Cancer in the meantime had thrown up a barrier spell to block off the Ghoul rush...

..and left Tornado on the other side. So while she was trying to fly away from them, she was also blasting them left right and center with lightning. Support arrived in the form of the Rotordrones, which engaged in a little bit of gratuitous overkill, spraying automatic fire into the Ghoul swarms. Likewise, I was lobbing grenades from my Alpha into them, albeit while keeping back as far as I could. A pair of them nearly got Tornado - she was pretty much snack sized to them - but the last few shots were able to take them down.

Wading through the resultant piles of ghoul gore, we found something interesting at the site. There was one Ghoul remaining, a non-Feral who was actually rather scrawny by Ghoul standards and was hiding in the bottom of his cage. He begged for his life, and was eager to spill the beans on what had happened. McAllister had been hanging out with a group of mercs, and they had been using this one guy to infect SINless Barrens trash in order to make an army of ghouls.

...I am so sick of these guys

This rather ghoulish plan (Pun unintended) was because the group were bounty hunters who specialized in taking down valuable but expensive targets. Their objective today was a Ork Toxic Shaman who was working with our old friends the Rusted Stilettos and hung around in Glow City. The idea was to use the army of ghouls to distract and take out the Stilettos, while the mercs geeked the Shaman and then claimed the standing bounty on his head. McAllister had gotten wind of this guy through the incident at the docks, and then used his position at KE to ensure that he could go after the guy himself and thus pocket all the money.

While it was tempting to just leave the Stilettos to it, I quickly figured that as ugly as they were, an army of radioactive ghouls would be a lot worse. After recovering the wreckage of Thinman (We can rebuild him, we have the technology) we headed on in towards Glow City, figuring that what was about to go down would be impossible to miss. Sure enough, we quickly picked up comms traffic indicating that a major fight was underway between the Stilettos and an army of ghouls in an old shopping mall.

Glow City. The crappiest part of Seattle, which says a lot

I figured that it was best if we ended this fast. As much as we didn't like the Stilettos, Ghouls were just too big a problem to ignore. On the other hand, leaving a Toxic Shaman in play would also be a bad plan. (Or the worst case scenario that a ghoul bit him and we ended up with an infected toxic shaman. Definitely a 'do not want') I decided to split our forces; Captain Cancer and Tornado would take out the Shaman, while me and Freddie (jumped in to his Steel Lynx) would handle the mercs and specifically try to hunt down McAllister.

Abandoned shopping malls, where you can find all the awful
you could ever want at competitive prices

Our entrance was supported by the Rotordrones who dropped in through the roof, opening up on both Ghouls and Stilettos to Thin out their numbers and clear a path for us. They also served as a handy distraction, allowing me to take out one of the mercs via shock glove with ease. Through his commlink we found that there were two more on the ground floor, while a third, apparently McAllister, was working his way towards the top of the mall.

We set out in pursuit, aiming to take him out fast. Unfortunately, he managed to get the drop on us and put a bullet into my side, nearly taking me out on the spot. He leaped away behind an old information Kiosk, which would up being shredded - along with him - by Freddie's Steel Lynx. It would have been hilariously anti-climactic if I wasn't lying on the floor in considerable pain.

Meanwhile, Team Magic had made contact with the Toxic Shaman in a sporting goods store at the top of the center, where he'd taken refuge from the Rotordrones. The pair of them opened up on him with their own spells, only to find that he as rather resilient and good at counter-spelling. And when that failed, he went after Tornado with a golf club, which in many ways was more immediately life threatening then him throwing around bolts of deadly radiation.

Captain Cancer was able to slow his advance by throwing a barrier spell around him, just as he fired off another round of radioactive lightning. This resulted in his own spell bouncing back on him and frying him from the inside, leaving him very, very dead.

The pair of them quickly rendezvoused on our location, where Captain Cancer was both able to patch me up and get McAllister back from the brink. Once he was awake and able to talk, Tornado hit him with a Truth spell, which greatly aided the interrogation. He confirmed all that we needed to know; that he'd been pillaging the KE armories for his own hunts, that he'd been feeding KE info to his chummers in order to make work, and that he really didn't have any moral issues whatsoever with thriving SINless people into ghouls to use as cannon fodder. What a charmer, huh?

So we dragged him off back to Ares Johnson, explaining the whole mess. We also handed in the body of the Toxic Shaman for the bounty, because while we had it seemed like a shame to let it go to waste. KE raided McAllister's place, confiscating all his 'borrowed' police gear, but the Johnson also let a few of the non KE pieces in his collection 'fall through the cracks', so Captain Cancer got a Sniper Rifle out of the deal. He thanked us for what we had done, talking about how while KE was a corporate police force, it should be all about 'protect and serve' and how it shouldn't abuse the power invested in it for its own interest. Which coming form a suit pretty much screams 'I’m up to something'.

For her part in this, Tornado was free to go. I'm not sure what her next move will be; stay with ius or move on or whatever. I'm not sure if I could work with someone as impulsive and headstrong as she seems to be, but we'll see.