Never deal with the minions of a Dragon either

So I think we all were in a bad mood after the whole debacle with Ares Johnson and the bugs, not withstanding Freddy having a new toy to tool around with. So there was a lot of blowing off of steam in the aftermath, with some of us letting go and trying not to dwell. Oh, and Freddie spending his time messing with the new plane. See? I told you.

Oh yeah, a Dragon had flown into Seattle and made a big show of it. I should have mentioned that last time, but what do you know, I was in too pissy a mood to mention it. However, Seattle’s runner scene were basically going crazy trying to figure out who this guy was and what he wanted. Because Dragons are basically bad news incarnate.

I decided to take Cwildred out for a night of partying and dancing, seeing as I owe her big time for all the mad biking skills she taught me. So basically the pair of us were bouncing from club to club and event to event and having a great time. We were enjoying ourselves, forgetting our worries (bugs, corp politics, creepily possessive older brothers) and instead getting a touch drunk, dancing and ogling cute dumb elf guys with tight butts.

At club number… I forget, one of them, we ran across Tyler who joined in on the festivities. He was very happy about my returning his stolen goods, and was glad to join in on the festivities. Along the way, me and Cwildred were pretty heavily flirting with him, and I learned that either he can’t speak German or at the very least, he was too drunk to know it when I whispered something very dirty in his ear. (Cwildred doesn’t know German either, but by that point she was so drunk that she would laugh at anything)

Anyway, we were enjoying the live act by some German band who’s lead guitar was a buff Elf guy who had lots of tats and wasn’t wearing a shirt. I swear, he was eying me the whole night. At any rate, once his set was done he came over to join the three of us in the giggling mass. Cwildred was all over him, but I swear he was still more interested in me. I am that awesome.

Meanwhile, Captain Cancer had a night out with his Oni Yak ‘friend’ and a bunch of other Yak guys that also apparently ended with everyone taking their shirts off. He thought he was being followed by some Ork chick, but by that point he was probably too busy staring at Oni pecs.

It's a home, a way to get around and a lifestyle all in one

Back on my side of things, one thing led to another and I eventually woke up on Tyler’s luxury yacht (yes!). Tyler himself wasn’t there as he had to go do arms dealer stuff, but he left a note thanking me for last night and telling me that I had the run of the yacht for the day. So after stealing a swimsuit (he apparently had one handy for this sort of emergency) I decided to do some serious lounging. I also checked in with Cwildred to confirm that a) she was good b) she’d wound up in bed with the German rocker and c) her brother didn’t approve of any of it.

I eventually made it back to the firehouse to find that Neon was engaged in an intense matrix battle with somebody having a go at our system. It was such an intense battle that she was in full Matrix sim and could only communicate through messaging me. I immediately put everyone else on alert, which was when Captain Cancer staggered in.

The next thing I knew there was a roar of gunfire as the sentry gun we’d set up in the basement opened up. The feed from the camera suggested that there was something big and reptilian down there, and that while the sentry gun was slowing it, that would not stop it.

I headed down there to sort it out. Using the Sentry to suppress the target and give me an opening, I hit it with a grenade from my Alpha. That seemed to hurt it (but not blow it apart) and it retreated. I was hesitant to follow, given that it would mean chasing a huge scary reptilian beast into the darkness. Not a bright move. Instead I got drones into the air to find where it might emerge and take the chase from there.

We found no trace of it, at least nothing obvious. Instead what we did find at a nearby sewer entrance was a severed Troll arm. As weird as that sounded, we took it to use as evidence. I mean, it’s not like it was a distinctive lead (‘one armed Troll in Seattle’ barely narrows it down) but it was a start.

Neon had managed to end the Matrix attack, which left us free to begin investigating. Poking around gave us an ID on the creature, and it was in the decidedly not good category. It was a Drake, which for those who don’t know, is a Metahuman with the ability to shift into a dragon-like form with a number of draconic abilities. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Drakes are almost always in the service of Dragons, one way or another. And since an unknown dragon had just flown into town…

The good news was that we had something to work with. Using our contacts through Lightspeed’s server, we tracked down a mage who knew a bit about rituals who might have been able to locate the arm’s owner. It was somebody we’d met before, a mage called Livewire who’d had the misfortune to awaken after she’d gone full Street Sam and chopped out a lot of herself for ‘ware. So like Captain Cancer in reverse, but still a better mage.

It turned out that our Drake was holed up in one of Seattle’s swankiest and most expensive hotels, the sort of place that visiting corp suits, big name celebs and only the best fake SINs stay. It’s also the sort of place that we extract people from, but that’s by the by. Obviously we couldn’t go in fully armed, despite Captain Cancer having some ideas about using Freddie’s plane to stage an attack. Instead we went a bit more subtle.

This is not a good look

Neon confirmed that our targets were staying in the penthouse suite (of course), so we started with some force recon. Me and Captain Cancer went in, dressed nicely and carrying concealed weapons. Freddie was on standby with the Rotordrone cavalry. With some nice bypasses, we were able to make it up to the penthouse for a discrete look around. That lasted whole seconds.

Not only was the Troll-Drake in residence, but he had a team with him. Which meant that the pair if us were outnumbered and didn’t have most of our guns at hand (so in my case, a Predator and shock gloves). So our recon quickly turned into a violent, suite-destroying gunfight with the Rotordrones tearing up the place. Unfortunately, one of them turned out to be a mage and nearly fragged three of the drones with a single lightning strike.

We did get them down though. The troll was definitely fragged, with the other three captured. Turned out that one of them was the rocker who had been eyeing me last night, and had been doing such because he was under orders to follow me. Likewise, the Ork who had been chasing the Oni sausage party was another of them. A bit if prompting and magical assistance got the full story. They worked for some great Dragon that nobody had ever heard of called Dezarus and he had some interest in our team. We sent a reply to the effect of “frag off, lizard lips” before getting the hell out of there.

Of course, now we have a new problem with a Wizworm prying into our business, which cannot possibly end well. Tyler had joked that he has a place in Cuba that we can hide. All of a sudden, that's looking like a good idea. Plus now I need to tell Cwildred that her date was a drake. Best not let her know she was the consolation prize.

There was one final weird twist to all this. The next day, I was approached in a bar by some creepy elf in clown makeup. He simply told me that he was impressed with what we had done with those drakes, and felt that it was the right move. Sure, whatever you day. Creep.

This is not creepy at all