Never deal with a company run by a dragon either

Gah. Not sure how the hell I'm going to write up the last few days. I am so angry on so many levels and feel a need to punch people around me a lot so maybe, just maybe, this will help.

Okay, stepping back. We'd gotten back from Atzlan and operation screw people over to double dip on the pay. Things had been pretty quiet since then. I'd been getting more and more quietly frustrated because, while I’m flush with cash, I’m also very much nearing the end of my upgrade cycle on my Augmentations. Most of them are at the a stage where improving them will eat more essence then I have (my Cyberdoc pointed me to an essence calculator app) to the point where whenever I add an item to the list and the result is 'you're dead'. My best bet is to go backwards and then start replacing what I have with the same thing only in an higher grade. Either that or somehow manage to gain access to Deltaware. Not likely.

So to blow off steam I’d been spending a lot of time clubbing and making sure I avoided anywhere that Blindsite might be because that would be so many levels of awkward. It also meant that I was spending very little time at home.

Luchadores make everything better

Well, I'm now officially broken up with Blindsite too. We both came to the conclusion that we couldn't trust the other, and we couldn't say things that would make us trust the other without compromising the jobs we'd done and, in my case, the rest of the team. So next thing I know we're both walking away and I did tear up more than a little in front of him.

Okay, and I might have ended up locking myself in my room and burying myself under my pillows for a bit as well.

While that little dramafest was unfolding, we got offers for two jobs more or less at the same time. Captain Cancer got a call from Ion about a job that was related to the whole Aztechnology Unusual Acquisitions thing he'd been looking in to. The Johnson in question turned out to be the head of Unusual Acquisitions (so the same guy that Abbey and I robbed, for those of you keeping track) who was looking to us to acquire something unusual (as one can imagine).

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.

Deck-Con report, days three and four

Strictly speaking this report ends at the end of day two with the visit from the Jonson who had hired us asking for our status check. She also bought in a small surprise in the form of Abbey who had been added to the roster with her own brand spanking new fake SIN complete with VIP access and paycheck. So that was good, as we now had an extra set of eyes that had the advantage of being absurdly sneaky which would doubtless come in handy for dealing with what was ever increasingly looking like a pre-staged assassination.

Day three rolled around and we were now in action, as this was the day that De La Mar was supposed to arrive, give her keynote address and hopefully not be assassinated. (Well, hopefully for us. Not so good news for the Shadow community, but a job's a job, right?). Today we were in full swing with our plans, keeping a close eye on her schedule and movements throughout the con, as just about anything could be a clue as to what was about to unfold. Protect the VIP apparently means being pants on head retarded paranoid after all.