How to dress for the revolution

Our Cuban holiday came to an end, but not without a little bit of excitement along the way. But then, since we’re Runners, that’s probably to be expected. Our very nature is about performing illegal acts for profit, so it’s rare that life is dull.

Bur for a week, at least, it had been nice and relaxing. I had been playing the part of the wealthy upper-end tourist, staying at the best resorts, relaxing on the best beaches and eating real meat and seafood at some pretty nice restaurants. Either that or hanging out with Tyler on his yacht, so you know... Shortcut had been off at the former US Navy golf course at Guantanamo Bay, which is apparently the cheapest and least touristy one on the island. Also it features extra hazards in the form of unexploded mines, so yeah.

And Freddie had managed to get into a race, because he’s Freddie. He pitted our rental ’55 Chevrolet against a massive Cadillac driven by a greasy local. And then Shortcut entered his golf cart just to be sure. Even though he was racing without the benefit of his Vehicle Control Rig or being able to jump in or anything else like that, Freddie still managed to smoke the guy. He’s just that good. And while Shortcut did come last, he didn’t do that badly by comparison.

The landmines may affect your handicap

Tyler interrupted our farting around to bring us back to the issue at hand. While the MCT chopper we had been tracking had dropped off the radar, there was the more immediate concern of the guy who had stiffed him on the arms sale and tried to walk off with the weapons. He’d identified the guy as being Victor Christoph, a nth generation Russian-Cuban who had connections to one of the island’s drug syndicates, but now seemed to be in the wind. He was hoping that we would find Vic and get an answer as to why he’d tried to get one over on his arms dealer.

This meant that we needed to get in with the Cuban underworld and Runner scenes, something that we admittedly knew little about. Furthermore, as foreigners, we were also going to have issues fitting in. However, we did have a few assets on our side that we could use.

A bit of recon found us a surprisingly dingy seaside bar (so it was dark and grimy in a well lit, sunny kind of a way) that was a favoured hang-out for criminal types. It was also very much a ‘man’ bar, which meant that our usual plan of me going in there and charming the socks off everyone present wasn’t going to work. Instead we sent in Shortcut, with me discretely coaching him through his commlink. He in turn used one of his assets and approached the only other Dwarf in the bar – because every Dwarf knows every other Dwarf.

That yielded some useful information and told us a surprising amount about the broader situation. It seemed that Victor was specifically involved with Deepweed, which only occurs naturally in a few places off the Cuban coast. Given that they were the world’s biggest supplier of magical goods, it’s possible that MCT was trying to find some way to gain exclusive control over the source. The problem was that now that Vic’s allies had gone up in smoke he was having to answer to a number of people, chief among which was a figure known simply as The Jazz. He’d gone into hiding and really did not want to be found.

This meant it was time for us to get keyed into the local Runner community. We’d found a place which was a meeting place for them; your basic grimy low-level bar where everybody keeps to themselves. The problem is that again, we were foreign, which meant that nobody would want to talk to us. Good thing I’d done a crash course in Spanish, right? However, even then I would be decidedly American in style and look. I mean, yes, I could have dressed down but really, who wants to get about in poor people clothes?

Eventually I compromised and went for the military chic look that’s popular amongst Cubans, especially with the Runner community. Dressed down fatigues, with an ascot and a beret for accessories, plus of course thick army boots that I got in a state that made them look well-used without being disgusting. I have to admit, I looked fantastic. What makes it even more amazing was that Freddie of all people helped me put together the outfit.

It enabled me to blend in fantastically. The military look was a hit, and represented a good chunk of those present in the bar (and surprisingly enough, there was a lack of the Seattle-style Murder Hobo variety runner). I pulled off a few enquiries and got the location of an old Soviet bunker that people liked to use while the heat was on. Okay, so it would be an awful place to hang out in, but I have to admit that it would be secure, if nothing else. I sent that info to Freddie and Shortcut, who headed out there to recon the site while I continued gathering intel.

One of the bar’s features was a bulletin board. I don’t mean as in a matrix host, I mean as in a cork board thing on the wall that people stuck notes to (The Matrix infrastructure here is terrible. They have Matrix cafes, for frags sake. How 2050s can you get?). Perusing through that I found an ad that looked promising, given that the poster was trying to dispose of some gear (specifically a pile of otherwise unused AK-97s) in a hurry. I took the number, figuring that could also be our boy.

The last word in safehouses

Freddie and Shortcut found the bunker, only to discover that the door had already been forced. The inside had been trashed, with the furniture wrecked and a stray commlink on the floor. It started ringing as they entered, which turned out to be me calling the number on the ad. So Vic had been there, but seemed to have been forcefully removed. What else was there, however, was a crocodile-man Beast spirit which attacked the pair of them. And to think, this is the one time that Freddie had gone in on foot, rather then using a Drone. They did manage to defeat it (however that works) which left them with an Astral Signature that Shortcut could trace.

I rendezvoused with them and we followed the trail, which led us to a former coastal village that had been wrecked in a storm and left to rot. A flyover using Freddie’s new Optic-X2 drone told us that there was at least two people there at the centre of the ruins, gathered around a large bonfire. Shortcut and I headed in on foot to investigate further, with Freddie on standby with the drones. We could see that one of the men was of the wild, beardy and shitless type, while the other, apparently Vic, was tied up. Some assensing by Shortcut told us that the bearded wierdo was awakened, and the person who had summoned the Crocodile man. Furthermore, the bonfire itself was magical, and likely being used in some sort of ritual that would likely not end well for anyone, especially not Vic.

The Behemoth, alias Crocapottamus

Oh, and there were a pair of behemoths lurking in the water, heading towards me.

Shortcut took out the bearded guy, but the creatures had definitely spotted me and were not happy about it. I quickly scurried up to the roof of one of the ruined buildings as they closed in. I fed one of them a burst from my Alpha but it barely seemed to notice. In reply, it turned on the building, smashing it apart. I jumped onto a second one, but still had the problem of having a pair of massive crocosauruses after me.

Shortcut managed to pull one of them off of me, with it instead going after the unconcious form of The Jazz. Freddie dealt with the second one through cutting it down with the gun on his Steel Lynx. That left Shortcut free to extract Vic, while leaving the Jazz to deal with the last Behemoth. We got out of there with Vic initially greatful until we shoved him in the Bulldog’s smuggling compartment and headed to a warehouse for a Rendition.

Not that it was needed, as he was ready to spill the beans in exchange for a ticket out of there. The revolutionary group he’d been working for were looking to seize a chunk of Cuba with MCT’s backing in order to secure control of the Deepweed supply. He’d stiffed Tyler in order to pay off a few key allies, such as The Jazz. Of course, now that the militia group had gone up in flames, MCT had lost their way in which meant that now his former allies were looking to settle debts, and thus why he’d gone into hiding. We thanked him and put him on a speedboat that was going to take him to a smaller island somewhere in the Caribbean where he could lie low.

Tyler was happy with our findings. While he had obviously lost out on the deal overall, he’d gained a lot of insight into what was going on and a whole pile of intel that would be useful to him in the future. This did leave the MCT thread hanging, but since we weren’t going to be paid to look into it, we also weren’t that inclined to care. Their plans had been thrown, and there was every chance that the intel on what they were trying to do might make it into somebody else’s hands, so we’ll call that a win.

So we all headed back to Seattle. Well, Freddie, Shortcut and Neon flew up in the plane. I took the slow route back on Tyler’s yacht.