Never deal with a company run by a dragon either

Gah. Not sure how the hell I'm going to write up the last few days. I am so angry on so many levels and feel a need to punch people around me a lot so maybe, just maybe, this will help.

Okay, stepping back. We'd gotten back from Atzlan and operation screw people over to double dip on the pay. Things had been pretty quiet since then. I'd been getting more and more quietly frustrated because, while I’m flush with cash, I’m also very much nearing the end of my upgrade cycle on my Augmentations. Most of them are at the a stage where improving them will eat more essence then I have (my Cyberdoc pointed me to an essence calculator app) to the point where whenever I add an item to the list and the result is 'you're dead'. My best bet is to go backwards and then start replacing what I have with the same thing only in an higher grade. Either that or somehow manage to gain access to Deltaware. Not likely.

So to blow off steam I’d been spending a lot of time clubbing and making sure I avoided anywhere that Blindsite might be because that would be so many levels of awkward. It also meant that I was spending very little time at home.

Captain Cancer's Mid Life Crisis

Also, for no real reason, Captain Cancer bought a bike and was modifying the ever living hell out of it with Freddie and Benny's help. By the time he was done, he had a Harley Scorpion with a built-in concealable RPK Heavy Machine Gun. Not entirely sure how much use he'll get out of it, but hey. It's his money, I’m not going to stop him.

At any rate, during one of the few moments where I was at the firehouse and Captain Cancer wasn't we got an unexpected and rather unwelcome visitor. A KE patrol car pulled up outside the front, one of the officers inside getting out and very deliberately putting his gun down and approaching unarmed, hands out. As unhappy as I was with KE basically acing like they suddenly owned the area, I was double unhappy with them basically parking in front of the place (the sort of image it sends is not a pretty one) so I must admit I was not very receptive to the officer when he asked to talk.

He was actually asking for our help, despite how snappy I was being back to him. Ever since the collapse of the Rusted Stilettos leadership and KE setting up shop in Glow City, there had been a large scale exodus of people from the area (funny that). Most of them were dependants (Women and children mainly) and KE had no idea where they were going and claimed to be concerned about it. I agreed to help, but only after I made them promise that they'd not come around here anymore.

Meanwhile, Captain Caner had been out on a lunch date with Livewire. I wasn’t privy to all of what went on, but the gist of it was that she was in the poop with SK over what happened at Deck-Con. She had been bought on as additional security detail, largely to help set up a watcher spirit. When that had failed and she'd been knocked out, they'd decided they were not happy at all with her performance. She was trying to get back into their good books by finding out who was behind the assassination attempt on De La Marr and was asking for our help.

It's hard to shoot hoops without a basketball. Or, for that
matter, hoops

Lining up our two impromptu jobs we decided to take a look into the missing people first, which had us immediately think of Cinders and her team. This hunch turned out to be entirely on the ball as their school safe house now looked more like a refugee camp. It was pretty much flooded with people, most of them Orks and Trolls and all of them in the 'poor filthy and with nothing left' category. A quick chat with Malthus confirmed our suspicions that these were the missing people, who had decided to leave glow city for a number of reasons. Chief among them was that the near-collapse of the Rusted Stilettos leadership had also killed any sense of order in the district, and none of them actually were very fond of KE being there. Funny that. Malthus was helping to get them organised and move on to the Ork Underground, which would generally be a better deal for them then hanging out in Glow City.

So with that problem solved (I called the KE officer to explain the situation and subtly remind him of our agreement) I decided to have a chat with Cinders about her situation. Unfortunately, things still weren't looking too much better for her team, as there was a lot of disagreement as to where they were going. Pinpoint was the biggest single problem, as he felt the team were taking too many "charity" jobs and not actually making enough money for him,. I suggested that she needed to talk things through with him and sort out what he wanted. I also suggested that she needed to do more with them as a team, and not just jobs. Although shooting hoops with Pinpoint probably wouldn't help him win him over any.

Moving on from there we arranged to met Theresa to try and figure out who was behind the attempted assassination. Unfortunately, her news was entirely bad. Somebody higher up the food chain at Ares had gone entirely over her head and gotten Kristoff's team out of prison before 'disappearing' them. This likely meant that whoever had taken them (and I had some suspicions...) was turning them into in-house runners. Sort of a 'work for us and we won't detonate the cranial bombs. Oh did I forget to mention we installed cranial bombs' kind of deal.

Unfortunately, it meant that we were now out our best line of questioning, especially given that the only member of their team who wasn't behind bars was very dead. (That was an awesome shot, Abbey, but also very unhelpful at the same time). However, we did have one line of questioning left to us, albeit a dubious one, in the form of the two rednecks that had been their fall guys.

Theresa arranged for us to see William Robertson aka Jack Johnson aka the Ork guy who had replaced his fingers with explosives. He wasn’t doing so well in prison because, what do you know, he had no fingers. That was enough to get us some leverage over him (We hinted that fingers could be in his future if he cooperated) and find some details about what they were doing there. The pair of them had gotten their fake SINs from Nightshade and been sent in to cause a distraction while she snuck in. It became clear that after the rest of Kristoff's team got busted, she'd deiced to carry on herself with the logic that splitting the pay one way instead of five meant she'd make a fortune off of it.

We found who had crafted the fake SINs, being a scummy dealer who worked out of the Crime Mall in Redmond. He venire that they were his work and, what do you know, all four of them had been bought by Nightshade. She'd pretty much out and requested ones that had nothing on them except for the Deck-Con access, and would immediately look suspect as to draw more attention onto those two and away from her.

Unfortunately this didn't tell us who was actually behind it all. It also left us with one line of enquiry and, well, I didn't like it in the least. I had to talk to Blindsite. The theory was that I'd keep him busy while Neon rifled through his commlink for info which, while admittedly pretty scummy, was the best we could manage.

We arranged another meeting in a decent coffee shop in Downtown. The pair of us ended up just talking for a while, mostly about our backgrounds and the like, and how it was clear that the trust issues we both had were getting in the way of our relationships. He talked about his father who had been a runner in Atzlan, and how complicated their relationship was with his mother. Likewise I opened up about my parents, how they had been runners in the F-State and how they had managed to make their relationship work, overcome their trust issues with each other and actually loved each other very much.

And then after all that, I asked him about DeckCon, figuring that by this stage if we didn't trust each other a little we were getting nowhere. He actually was rather open about it all, explaining that while he'd been there as personal security for the first two days, on the third he'd been hired by Nightshade to supplement her one-man operation. And while he had been mainly there to quietly knock out the Watcher through disabling Livewire, he’d managed to see who had hired her.

It was the fragging Renraku Johnson. Unbelievable. I really should have followed through on me and Wraith's plans and geeked him when I had the chance.

So we made a few half-arsed comments about maybe giving things a second try and suggested that we might talk again before we left. I had the info I needed (and Neon could verify some of that through his commlink info) but mostly I was surprised that he had been so cooperative given all our past drama. It was only after I got back to the van and reported in that Captain Cancer mentioned that he'd put Blindsite under an influence spell.

So I slapped him. Hard.

Once that was done with, we reported back to Livewire. She was happy that we'd gotten her hoop out of the fire, which seemed to be putting a nice end to this whole fragged-up mess. So when we got a call to arrange a meet, I was a little wary. It was the S-K Johnson who had hired us for the Deck-Con job in the first place, and she had an offer for us. And, because these things are never easy, she wanted to meet at an arrivals lounge at Tacoma international airport.

Hello, I am obviously manipulating you
for my own unfathomable ends. Also my
boss is a dragon.

Moderately intrigued we agreed to the meet, finding her at the designated place at the designated time. As we got in, a Sub-Orbital flight pulled up with the first passengers disembarking as we met her. She directed us to one of them, who she addressed simply as 'Mr Brackhaus'. Yes, the infamous Mr Brackhaus of Shadowrunner legend and myth, equal parts Johnson and Boogieman. And he wanted to hire us, with some strong implications that this was not a job we wanted to say no to.

His pitch was actually pretty interesting in and of itself. There had been a number of disappearances of high-profile Runners in New York of all places, and Brackhaus wanted us to investigate it. The logic was that as outsiders we'd have our own perspective on the New York runner community that wouldn't be colored by prior experiences, which could be useful in this case. It's a long-term job, so we'd be pretty much free to work whatever other jobs we wanted on the side.

It was an odd offer, but we took it no less. Each of us had our own reasons, although again, the 'probably not good for your health if you say no' factor was a big part of it. For me, it was a change of location and a chance to get away from a number of things here. With that, Herr Brackhaus thanked us, said he looked forward to seeing us in New York, and then got back on the same plane he'd arrived on.

So now we need to pack and get ready for a road trip while also wrapping up things here. Neon managed to work out a deal to look after the firehouse while we're gone; she got a Runner she used to work with called Recoil to move in there. (I was surprised that Neon had worked with anyone before us; I mean what was she at the time? Fifteen?). Ion said he could get us in on the ground floor with somebody he knew over there by the unlikely name of The Ballard of Pudding Quest, which as strange as it was, is a definite start. And so we're off to the Big Apple.

No more Renraku Johnson, Ares Johnson, Azzie Johnson Lady and her BS politics, Rusted Stilettos, Twitch and his team, Lightspeed disapproving of everything we do, KE goons walking into our house for a chat, Glow City, awkward conversations with Blindsite and a zillion other things. I can't wait.