Crimson Dawn (part 13)

Every time Ashely clocked off at Vendor Mammoth, it was with no small sense of relief. It meant that once again she had escaped the purgatory of idiot customers, idiot workmates, piped muzak and constant looped safety announcements of the latest alleged bargains for the day, and that she would be free to live her life a little for the next few hours. Or, at least, until she next stepped back through the gates of hell itself to live out her endless torment of greeting customers with a false smile.

What made today's release feel even more like a blessing was a message from Slicer on her comm, arranging a meet for tomorrow night. What was unusual was that he was asking her to come to the same detract facility that she'd been training at before. Maybe he's just skipping a step, she considered as she sent back a reply, indicating that she'd be there.

And so, one very boring day later, Crimson arrived at the site in question, her mind racing with the possibilities of what could be there. Even then, what she found was quite unexpected. Slicer was there, but his Rapier was now parked next to a row of other racing bikes. With him were a half dozen humans, male and female, and what a rather awkward-looking Elven man. Each of them were dressed in biker leathers, adorned with red and white stripes and each carrying one of the training rifles.

Demon Rats are the worst thing ever

This is a great place for a covert meeting, and is very relaxing
to boot

The meeting Me, Freddie and Neon set up with the SK security boss went well. She chose a nice cafe with real coffee that was by Central park, which added a charming old-world atmosphere to our discussions of espionage, intrigue and attempts to deliberately induce a large-scale pandemic. We explained what we had found and then arranged to safely hand over the CFD tablets that Teh Dave had been using. She said she'd have them analyzed to find out more about them and, hopefully, where they came from. We also explained his supply chain and how it went back to a man we thought was with Renraku. She offered to investigate further.

As we were wrapping up there, Dayglo told us that she had a job and arranged a meeting. Her contact was from Renraku (Funny that) and wanted to meet us in the middle of Central Park. (How very Cold War!) She was rather open with us about what she was after, given that this was a job of opportunity and was definitely on a limited timetable. What had happened was that Doctor Abigail Hughes, a researcher at Mindstorm Neurotechnologies had vanished, and she wanted to find out where they were and, if possible extract them.

In other words, somebody at the same company that we had just foiled an attack on. Funny that.

A pain in the (robo) pants

So after the arse-up at the end of the last run, Minster was left babysitting Slayer for a few days until Walter Johnson got back. Given the spare time now on our hands, we took it upon ourselves to get back to the investigation that we'd come to New York for in the first place. Fortunately, we'd found ourselves something that resembled a lead, courtesy of the rather distinctive missing runner Robopants. She'd worked with two others in past, Mudbug and Ripstar, and we knew where to find the latter.

Ripstar hung out at the Link Club. She was an Ork street racer who ran with a tricked-out Americar and liked to use it to swindle Corp kids out of their expensive rides. Based on this, we told Freddie to take the lead, given that the pair of them had a lot in common, like a love of driving fast in unlikely vehicles. At first he hit it off, with the pair of them talking about (what do you know) street racing, and her recognizing him from several vids that got out of Seattle. They even went out for a practice race which Freddie won, clearly impressing her.

Sadly, he tried turning the conversation to Shadowrunning, only to fumble it badly. She told him to push off.