Things not to feed to cows

So I say that I’m done taking jobs for Ares Johnson, so naturally I took a job from Ares Johnson. Its how the world works.

The job in question was, simply put, a complete nightmare. It was a mess from the very start and only snowballed from there. I’d like to think that something came from it, but really, apart from the Yens, nothing is coming to mind.

Anyway, to get back to what happened: Ares Johnson asked for a meet. That at least was an improvement over his prior habit of walking into our home and making a public nuisance of himself (Yeah, it looks terrible when a Suit walks into your place of residence and trashes your street cred to boot). And it was at a Steakhouse (Ares Johnson, what a surprise) so there was some good food on offer.

The first part of it was him presenting us with his very humiliated fourteen year old son. Said brat was there to apologise for basically giving Ishtar access to his dad’s commlink and letting her set up her own PR shenanigans. That had not gone over well with Ares corporate or his dad (or Abbey, given that she nearly got herself shot) so the apology was much appreciated. It was, by the way, the only good part of the whole mess.

Once the son was safely shoed off, Ares Johnson got down to business. He wanted to hire us for an off the books job, one that was going to be funded out of his personal discretionary fund and not Ares corporate. That’s the sort of thing that should ring alarm bells, but for whatever reason, we didn’t get up and leave right there and then. He explained that it was a missing person case; he had an associate of his, an investigative mage by the name of Nicole Brunsen who was an ex-Ares employee. She’d gone into private business of her own, but had gone missing while investigating Carlinville in Illinois. She had been looking into missing persons there before she herself had vanished. Johnson wanted us to track her down, find out what was going on and, if possible, get her back.

We agreed, although I am still wondering why.

Freddie's new toy, a Tundra-9

This of course left the issue of how we were going to get to Carlinville which was still three thousand-odd kilometres away. Freddie had an idea about that. In truth, he’d had an idea about doing such for some time. With our fund provided by S-K, we had enough to buy a Renault-Fiat Tundra-9 cargo plane which would just happen to be big enough to transport the team and the Van, and have the range to make the trip easily. Furthermore, it was an entirely legal purchase that we could make through our high-end fake SINs. Thus it was an easy manner for Mister Bob Fernley (from the UCAS forestry department), who had all the appropriate lines and is a fully-qualified pilot, to purchase the plane. And as a bonus, it’s amphibious, so we have more options for parking it.

Now flying Air Freddie, we made the trip there with ease; having a fake SIN of that high quality and following regular flight paths tends to alleviate too many questions. Fortunately for Abbey and Captain Cancer we didn’t stay long in Chicago, as both of them were getting the hell creeped out of them by the magical background in the city. Our main job was to recon Brunsen’s office, which turned out to be harder then expected. She kept everything super-analogue and offline, which meant that Neon couldn’t just get in there and pilfer her records. Instead, Abbey had to break in and steal them while I kept watch outside. From what she found, Abbey confirmed that Brunsen was in Carlinville, and had been trying to meet a man named Chapman who might have known something about the disappearances.

With no reason to stay in the city any longer, we continued the investigation by heading further south to Carlinville. Our initial recon of the town didn’t really suggest much; it was a cattle town, with all of the production owned by several agricorps (or agricultural divisions of bigger corps). We did note that the cows we saw didn’t exactly look healthy, and that there were a few people that were watching us suspiciously. We definitely got a ‘small town with a secret’ vibe coming out of the place, but couldn’t immediately find this Chapman. So we decided to improvise.

Since people had been disappearing in the town, we figured that the people most likely to disappear was those who would not be noticed as being missing. So when a German tourist rode into town looking for a stopover on a biking tour (read: me with the lamest cover story I could think of and playing up the accent) I practically screamed ‘bait’. The reception I got was... Not unfriendly, but definitely wary. Oh, and there was no beef on the local pub menu, but that’s not exactly a sign of something amiss. In a Cow town all the production probably goes to fill corp quotas anyway.

I retired for the night and then immediately went to waiting by the door, ready to ambush anyone who came in. Sure enough, it happened exactly as predicted, with two of the bar staff coming to try and take me. Instead, the both went down fast to my shock gloves, before being tied and subject to a little bit of friendly questioning. They cracked easily, saying that they were just following orders to ‘acquire’ people and send them to one of the farms out of town. They had no clue why, but they were being paid to do it. Furthermore, they needed the money, as all the cows in the town were getting sick and production was falling off, thus killing their income. They knew about Brunsen, saying that she had been nosing around before she also ‘disappeared’.

Leaving them be, we headed to check out the farm. At first it seemed like a rather generic agricultural setup, but there were a few things amiss. For example, the supposedly sleeping hick by the barn had an Ares Alpha by his chair, which is not the sort of firepower you usually need for pest control. Deciding that we were on the right track, we quickly dispatched him with a shot from Captain Cancer’s sniper rifle (See? Better when not mage-ing) before me, Abbey and Freddie’s Steel Lynx headed inside.

Bug spirits. Yeaaaahhhhh no.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a bunker underneath the barn. By moving carefully (Okay, and also having Neon kill the surveillance) we were able to make it a good way in before encountering anyone or anything. Unfortunately, when we did find something, it was not pretty. We wandered into some sort of barn that was filled with various animals and people who had all been infected with Bug spirits and turned into freaky creature-insect hybrids. And yes, this included a cow.

Moving further in, we found a scientist and a heavily armed guard in a shielded research facility. In the middle of it was Brunsen, secured in some sort of containment tube. Abbey did a quick assensing of her, only to find that she had been infected with a Wasp Queen spirit (and that Abbey now needs to clean her astral eyes out) and that the researcher was also some sort of shaman (guess what type). Acting quickly and decisively, Freddie simply opened up on the Queen with the Lynx’s main gun, killing it instantly. That didn’t go over too well, however.

I took out the Scientist fast with my shock gloves; as much as I wanted to geek her on the spot, there were questions that needed answering. In response, the goon had a go at me, proving to be both well-armed and heavily cybered. I hit him a couple of times, but he didn’t go down as fast as expected. So Freddie tried something different and sideswiped him down with the Lynx. We tied and mage-bagged the Shaman but ran into a problem on the way out. Some bright spark had opened the cages and the creatures inside were now running amok.

That turned into a bloody gunfight with me and the others only barely getting away after expending a lot of ordinance, and Captain Cancer coming in to join us. With Buggy McShamanpants now heavily sedated, we planned to do a quick rendition on her to a nearby warehouse to find the truth about what was going on. Only then we hit upon another problem, one that looked like it would rather fatally compromise our escape plan. An Ares Firewatch HTR team was heading right for us, in a heavily armed LAV.

Its all fun and games until the HTR turns up

Captain Cancer came up with a plan to buy us a time. Thinman would be sent out with a rocket launcher (Why does Captain Cancer have a rocket launcher? Wait, it’s because he’s a crap mage) to at least distract it while we got away. Freddie was running him, allowing the poor idiot drone a modicum of mobility and ability to hit what he aimed at. What actually happened was unexpected, as the missile struck the LAV hard, nearly knocking it out of the sky and definitely doing enough damage to cause it to veer off.

That gave us the time to start driving and not look back at all. We didn’t stop until we got back to Chicago, and then got onto the plane as fast as we could. It wasn’t until we touched down again in Seattle that we roused the Bug Shaman, and even then kept her as sedated as possible while we asked a few questions. A combination of a drug cocktail and a suggestion spell kept her pliable and talkative, but the results were a little unsettling. Well, okay, a lot.

She was working for Ares corporate, and the goal was to try and weaponise Bug Spirits. They had been kidnapping people to use as test subjects; Brunsen was chosen because she was a suitable replacement for their Wasp Queen after the last one died. Oh, and their failed test subjects were being mulched and fed to the cows, which is why the cows were getting sick. So in the end, we felt that a little bit of poetic justice was warranted and fed her to a woodchipper.

We told Ares Johnson about what had happened. He was… not happy, to say the least. But still, he did pay us. And hopefully, that’s the last I ever see of him.

The best way to deal with a Bug Shaman