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.

One big dogpile of drek

You know what? The last few days have just been an utter fragging trainwreck. Trying to make sense of it all, even in hindsight, is not easy. So if this reads like a rather confused mess, then sorry, that’s just how it was. Oh, and Captain Cancer was involved, so you know, that’s not going to help any either.

Okay, so I’ll break it down from the start and try to recount the events as they happened, The first leg was Fat Yak hiring us again, bot to do a job and also do him a favour. The job part was simple; despite our defusing a potential Gianelli-Yak war, it appeared that the Gianellis were still getting ready for a conflict regardless. Specifically, Rosetta Gianelli had been making a lot of noise of late, and he wanted to know what she was planning.

More dangerous acquaintances

It’s been a while since I did a round-up of people we know (for better or for worse) and a lot has happened since then. Alphonso being no longer my boyfriend is about the least important, actually (Unless you’re his nuts or his car), which means that there's actually a lot of ground to cover.

Not pictured: BBQ sauce

I'll start with the one who is, at least to my mind, the most important at the moment. Mark Hawkins is an Ares Johnson who's very... Enthusiastic. That's probably the best way to put it, He's loud, he's bombastic, he's outgoing and he claims to be on our side. He also says he’s trying to work for the good of the people and make life better for those in the Barrens, which is all well and good in theory. In practice it feels less like he’s making their lives better as it does like a blatant Ares land-grab in territory that nobody else has a claim on.

Never let Captain Cancer talk to anyone

I am so angry about the last few days that I'm not sure I even want to write them up here. Seriously, by the time we were done I was ready to murder everybody around me.

Okay, deep breath. Relax. Let's take this one bit at at time.

To start with, everyone on Lightspeed's data server now hats me for saving De La Mar's life. Even the few who have pointed out that, if anything, her death would cause GOD to crack down even harder really aren't helping. I'm the queen of unpopular right now.

Never work with Children, Animals or Metasapients

Captain Cancer's new toy

Having not been paid for some time now, we were anxious to get back to proper actual work. So when I got a call from the (new) Ares Johnson, we were more than happy to meet him, even if it was, as per normal for him, under rather odd circumstances. For starters, he’d contacted me directly rather than going through a fixer. And then we were Meeting him face to face at a waterfront warehouse, rather than the usual sort of Johnson hangout. Sadly, this meant no steak, but there was more to it than just that.

But we needed money, especially Captain Cancer who had just blown a small fortune on buying himself an Ares Duelist drone and an assault rifle for it. Oh, and he also bought himself a reloading drone, obstinately so he could reload the dualist but actually so it could give him fresh cigs while in the field. His logic was that it meant he would have something else to protect him in a firefight, which seemed semi-reasonable. (Anyway, his drones are now called Thinman and Runt.) Thus we agreed to the meet, and headed towards the docks.

We know what you want. We know what you need. We know where you live.

With Wraith gone, something strange has happened. I seem to have become leader of the team somehow. It's odd, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. On the upside, it does appear that everyone recognizes how just plain awesome I am and is willing to listen to me and let me call the shots. On the downside, there's a lot of responsibility and crap that comes with it, which is not helpful when really all I want to do is just run off to do my own thing.

The last little job we had pretty much covered the pros and cons of it, while also leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth, a sort of 'I don't like the way this is going' thing.

It started off with me out at the Skeleton having a good time and, amazingly enough, being recognized for who I am and what I do. An Elf Runner called Blidside approached me in the club, saying he remembered me from Penubra when everything went bad with the Azzie Johnson. I played innocent, saying that I was just there for a good time and had nothing to do with what went on and Jaguar Guards storming the place and all that crap in the spirit of covering my ass, and he seemed to buy that.

Street Legends and other lies

One of the reasons for our break was due to the death of our regular Johnson. I liked Ares Johnson, but I really didn't know what was going to come next, especially given the mess that lead to his demise. So when a new Areas Johnson just walked into the firehouse (I just realised that I haven't written anything here about the firehouse. I should, because it's pretty amazing) we were rather surprised for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is we have no idea how Ares knew were we lived, so holy crap what the hell security.

New Ares Johnson. He's... enthusiastic

Anyway, the new Johnson was... Enthusiastic to restart our working relationship, to say the least. Actually, he was pretty damned excitable about just about everything full stop, which is one of those traits that can be good or bad in a Johnson. To get the ball rolling, he offered us a simple job; tunes out that our old friends the Rusted Stilettos have been getting their hands on shipments of factory fresh Krime weapons as well as a fresh supply of drugs, and he wanted to find out how and why. It seemed a little odd - we couldn't immediately see his angle in this or what he was getting out of it - but we took the job regardless because hey, money is good.

Cluster-fragged sixteen ways to Sunday

Calling today a complete clusterfrag would be an understatement. The worst part of it was that we lost one of our allies, that rarest thing in the shadows; a Johnson who is good to the team and doesn’t try to screw you over.

Ares Johnson, RIP

Ares Johnson (We call him that because we never knew his real name. But that’s the rules) was good to us from day one. We didn’t initially know that he was from Ares, but he sent subtle signs. Like the fact that he was clearly a grizzled veteran. Or the cowboy accent. Or the fact that he liked to meet the team at steakhouses where he’d buy us all massive steak dinners (One of which was the first time Abbey had ever had Steak!). That sort of subtle sign.

And as we did more jobs for him (all of which paid very well), we managed to get ‘in’ with him as we found out more about what was going on. It was a complex mess involving a MCT AI research facility, a plot by elements of the Salish-Shidhe Council to engineer an incident that would allow them to annex Seattle, Bug Spirits, illegal street races, fire drakes, jumping out of hotels and fighting helicopters, the assistant to a Tir Tangire prince, stealing weapons research without hurting anyone in the process, the deaths of Wraith’s old team and, above all else, a Crazy Digital Murder God (I’ve heard the preferred terms are ‘AI’ or ‘Xenosapient’, but I think that this is more accurate) who was involved in manipulating all of the above in order to improve MCT’s market share. I am not making this up.