Never let Captain Cancer talk to anyone

I am so angry about the last few days that I'm not sure I even want to write them up here. Seriously, by the time we were done I was ready to murder everybody around me.

Okay, deep breath. Relax. Let's take this one bit at at time.

To start with, everyone on Lightspeed's data server now hats me for saving De La Mar's life. Even the few who have pointed out that, if anything, her death would cause GOD to crack down even harder really aren't helping. I'm the queen of unpopular right now.

As if that wasn't enough, I had a 'morning after the morning after' talk with Blindsite over coffee, pretty much confronting him over the fact that he lied about his Focus. He admitted that yes, he wasn't telling the whole truth there but there were reasons for that. His ability to use actual spells, even if limited, is his 'big secret' and he doesn't want to give it away because it could be useful to his job and all. That bit I could understand, although he was still being very squirrelly on what exactly he was doing at Deck-Con.

He definitely wasn't working with Livewire, and we had the distinct impression that he was actually one of Kristoff's crew. Furthermore, we were getting the impression that he was the one who knocked out Livewire. He wouldn't say a word on either of these two things, of course, because of professional privacy and all, which I can respect. On the other hand, given that Kristoff's entire team were ring-ins from New York, I'm rather dubious on his story that he lives in a squat in the barrens and that his dad was some old-time Runner from Atzlan.

So in short, I have very few reasons to trust him at all.

Ion Roarke; Druid, Talismonger and
classic car connoisseur

That was a bad enough start to the day, but Captain Cancer managed to make it worse. He had been talking to Ion Roarke, an associate of Abbey's who Is a professional Talismonger, Magical Scholar and, as a bonus, a practicing Druid. CC was following up on the whole Azzie infighting mess that I wanted to get the hell away from, and was looking for a good 'in' with the Azzie Special Acquisitions department. Ion said he could help with that if CC was willing to do him a favour in return.

In this case, Ion wanted us to look into reports of Toxic Shamans in the Barrens, specifically working with the Rusted Stilettos (Those guys. I mentioned I was sick of them, right?). He wanted us to follow up on a recent job of ours where we tracked down a Toxic Shaman who was responsible for killing some guy at the Tacoma docks. Ion had reason to believe that there was more then on Toxic involved, and that there was something far bigger going on. This seemed fair to CC, so he agreed ti Ion's terms.

So in other words, Captain Cancer just talked us into doing another freebie, and furthermore did it without even asking everybody else if we wanted to do it in the first place. Yay.

He let us in on this and, after I was done tipping his head off, we set out to begin our investigation. The first step was to go back to the scene of the crime and take another look at it astral to see if we could find anything there. Sure enough there was the aura of our victim and the Toxic shaman, but there was also something else going on there which CC deduced to be an Alchemical Preparation. So now we have Toxic shamans and their toxic cocktails. Great.

Some poking around revealed that the dead body was a guy called Goya who regularly came to the docks to meet this one ship. The ship, in turn, did routine cargo runs between Seattle and Havana. We suspected that the ship was moving drugs and that Goya was a local representative, which gave us something to work with. It also tied back to the Rusted Stilettos' efforts to get into the Drug trade, specifically with the Awakened drugs that Sharps filched from the house of Kristobal that got this whole mess rolling in the first place.

The local crime scene was controlled by the Yakuza, so that meant any drug movements needed to be handled with their oversight. Fortunately, we were able to find a cotnact who was willing to give us some information. Murasama was a local runner who was also Yak affiliated and, because this whole mess wasn't hateful enough, worked out of a Bunraku parlor nearby.

We arranged a meeting and headed there (me resisting the urge to punch out every damned Yak in the place and maybe just burn it to the ground a little). Murasama himself cut a rather distinctive feature; he was an aggressively shirtless Oni, bright red and completely ripped. You get the picture that he'd never worn a short in his life. And if he did wear one, it would just have his naked torso printed on it anyway. Oh, and Captain Cancer was totally gay for his pecs, but that's by the by.

At any rate Murasama confirmed that Goya did indeed work for the House of Kristobal and that yes, he did move drugs through the region. He'd apparently been geeked after arranging some sort of meeting with a local fixer who called himself 'Six Finger Discount' who was acting as a broker for the HoK with their dealings with the Rusted Stilettos. Murasama was very obviously disdainful of the man, suggesting that he talked big but was a lot smaller then he thought. He also suggested that we might do a favour for him (Read: The Yakuza) in future, but I was able to talk him out of that.

Also I wanted to kill Captain Cancer some more by the time we were done.

So having gotten out of there without being in debt to the Yaks, we did some digging on Six. The good news was that that there were some runners he regularly dealt with, which meant we had a way to find him. The bad news is that it was out good friends, Slackintosh and Snig the Axe. Oh joy.

Slackintosh had been lumped with investigating some strange chemical that Six had 'recovered' which we figured was the same alchemical prep as the one we found traces of at the docks. She’d had no luck with identifying it, so we used that as leverage to arrange a meeting with her in an abandoned park. She showed up late, largely because she had first stopped to make sure we weren't being followed, scope the place out and be ready to geek us all with a sniper rifle if needs be. She's a wonderful person.

Not pictured: Creepy kid going "La la la la la laaaaaa"

We explained to Slack what was going on and how we needed to find Six. She was being her usual uncooperative and argumentative self, until we pointed out that he was probably in a lot of trouble given that there was a chance that Toxic shamans could be involved. That was enough to get Slack to be cooperative with and tell us what was currently going on. Six had gone to some meeting between the HoK and the Stilettos, and had taken Snig with him as a bodyguard.

No way this wasn't ending in violence.

Slackintosh's van, complete with blacked out windows

We immediately set off after them, arriving at their meeting spot in the middle of another lovely stretch of urban wasteland in Glow City. The scene before us conformed my suspicions. On one side were the representatives of the House of Kristobal, all heavily armed and ready for violence. On the other side were the representatives of the Rusted Stilettos, mostly Orks but with a machine-gun toting Troll at the back. In the front of their group was an Ork in ragged robes with only his eyes visible, a look that couldn't have been any more obviously a Toxic Shaman if he'd been wearing a shirt with 'I am a Toxic Shaman' printed on it with matching blaring AROs. There was another Ork with him who was armed with an ugly-looking sword which also was lit up in the astral, which made us figure him for an Adept or such.

And Six Finger and Snig were between the two groups, both of which were definitely getting antsy and with an urge to kill (So like me when Captain Cancer was explaining how he got us into this mess...)

I didn’t like the idea of the Stilettos and the HoKs forming any sort of alliance, plus, of course, Toxic mage, so I quickly set up a plan. We fanned out, Runners and Drones taking cover as we snuck towards the group from all sides. I sent off priority targets to our various members, planning for Slackintosh to geek the Shaman first, because that's why you have a sniper (Geek the mage. Any other use for the sniper is incidental). Unfortunately, he seemed to have been tipped off at the last moment and so while he was hit (and hit bad) he wasn't down.

Biggest risk: Tetanus (Plus Toxic adept...)

Regardless, I opened up on the sword Ork who turned out to be an adept, given the way he danced between my fragging bullets. Freddie's Rotordrones laid down a wave of Neurostun grenades that got most of the Stilettos and HoKs, only to suddenly go offline. It wasn't a hack, but rather something none of us saw coming; the HoK rep was actually a Technomancer and had just hacked Freddie's RCC.

While he was rebooting, Fredie jumped into the Steel Lynx and rolled it onto the field and then cutting down the Troll with a burst of fire. Snig aided things by engaging in a little bit of hacking himself. In this case, he hacked off the Technomancer's head with his axe. It's the most helpful that Snig's ever been in his life.

The Mage tried to fry me with a radiation bolt, but I got out of his way. A burst of rifle fire finished him off, while the Adept came after Captain Cancer, only to eat an overpowered Stunbolt that finished him off. And, for his part, Six Finger ran off and cried like a small girl. Actually, I got to admit, that was a pretty good fight. Definite highpoint of the day

We tagged and bagged the bodies of both the Shaman and the Adept for the bounties, because we still needed to make some cash off this mess, especially after all the ammo we burned through. We also stole their commlinks for Neon to sift through for details. Her data-dumpster-diving told us that the Stilettos were looking to form a partnership with the HoKs to buy and distribute Awakened drugs in Seattle although this did seem to be a bit out of their normal MO.

The control room of a deralict nuclear reactor. I see
nothing at all that could possibly go wrong here

So in the spirit of making his life as difficult as possible and because what's the worst that could happen to him (He gets more cancer?) Captain Cancer bought himself a Hazmat suit and headed into the ruins of the Renton Nuclear Reactor to investigate things further. Besides the fact that it was more intact then you’d expect (Because, what do you know, nobody would be crazy enough to go in there!) what he found was a bizarre shrine to radiation in the station's main control room, complete with a summoning circle.

Combined with some scraps from the commlink data, he was able to figure out what the Stilettos were actually up to. They were aiming to seed awakened drugs across the city, treated with the Alchemical prep their Shaman had created in order to produce a conduit for a mass summoning of Toxic spirits. So in short, very very bad.

Ion was very impressed with the work that CC had done and said he'd get him a way to get in on the Special Acquisitions department. We also managed to not only walk away with the bounty, but we got a call from our friend, the overly enthusiastic Ares Johnson. He said he'd heard about what we did (How? I swear, he must be tapping our comms or something) and was really happy about it; in effect, he retroactively hired us and paid us for the job. He also said that he was going to get a KE unit set up in the area to stop gang activity which is a really strong 'sounds benevolent but actually is a great first step towards a takeover' move. Thanks a heap. Still, money, so not all bad? I guess? I dunno

And, for all his good Karma, Captain Cancer then went and blew it by making an incredibly clumsy pass on Manx ("Want to see my Magic Lodge?") which she shot down and pretty much said 'never speak to me again you creep' in reply. Oh well, CC. Maybe Murasama's free.