Farmageddon II

Every run has its after effects. You do one thing and it sets off a whole series of other effects. Some of these are planned and were intended to occur. Others are collateral damage, the unplanned results of your actions. And then there are the times when it will generate further runs, as in this case.

Some time ago we burned down an Aztechnology experimental farm at the behest of an elderly (and creepy) Ork doctor. They were trying to develop blight-resistant strains of grain as a way of overcoming the problems that had been plaguing their food production for the last few years. We put a stop to that branch of the research, but it seemed that they had a lot more then just that one farm in the pipeline. The same Doctor had become aware of this, and had hired us to continue wrecking their agricultural plans.

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.

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.

Farmageddon

So remember what I was saying about Captain Cancer relying a lot on technological gear rather than his own magic? Yeah, well there’s times when he really gets carried away with that. And then there’s other times when he goes so decidedly off-mission that I wonder why I even put up with him. Don’t get me wrong, this time did actually work out well for us, but at the same time also made our newest job a lot more complicated for the sake of it.

Having recovered from nearly killing himself on the last job, he was ready to go for this newest one. Our contact in this case was a doctor working in the Ork Underground who had a distinct beef with Aztechnology (But then, who doesn’t?). He also was rather creepy, but that was by the by. We met in his office in the underground. Oh, and in the name of making things nice and awkward, Captain Cancer insisted on wearing a physical mask spell to make him look like an Ork, which is a massive no-no and a good way to get yourself killed if caught. Or, you know, I could have killed him myself.

Don’t let your babies grow up to be crime lords

I finally managed to score some downtime, and by that I mean more than just a couple of hours clubbing and some sleep between Runs. It actually felt good. Yeah, I know what you’re saying; why wasn’t I bouncing off the walls looking for some action? Well the truth is that even I need a little break every now and then. Being this awesome is tiring work, you know, especially given that It involves a lot of running, leaping and shooting.

One of the highlights of this break was actually meeting the contact that S-K had set us up with as payment for the whole New York Crazy Digital Murder God mess. I really didn’t know what to expect; a boring guy in a clean suit was the most likely, but then, it could be anything. Instead, Tyler, our contact, turned out to be a remarkably casual and polite Elf Guy in a bright floral shirt. So while I wasn’t sure what to expect, I know I wasn’t expecting that.

How not to be a Mister Johnson: A beginner’s guide

So Freddie’s still on the shelf thanks to a combination of extensive cybersurgery (new reaction enhancers and an updated control rig) and a desire to spend even more time tuning up his van. I thought this left just me and Neon active on the team with Abbey doing her usually lurking and not being noticed thing, but, well it turned out I was wrong, unfortunately.

Our latest cruel mockery of a job began when Captain Cancer (And isn’t that a bad enough start already?) got a call. The person on the other end didn’t identify themselves, but it was clear that they were in pain just form their voice. They said that they were a Runner and that they had been double-crossed by their Johnson, and that they needed help. They offered to pay us what they would have been paid by the Johnson.

Sim Hell (Remastered)

I hate the foundation.

But we had to go there anyway in order to kill Pierce, so I really had no other option. And so, Me, Freddie, Neon and Captain Cancer (Best not to ask where he came from) plummeted into it, knowing full well that we'd end up having to navigate nonsense dream logic in order to find the nodes and their connections. In theory all we needed to do was indentify the control node and then interact with it to destroy the hose. Of course, since it could be anything and the interaction could be anything, that just meant we were casting a very wide net.

We got an eleventh hour call from Dayglo, which was her asking for help to go reclaim the spirit of the Brooklyn Bridge form Aztechnology for some random neo-anarchist reasons. We said 'yeah, that's nice, will totally get on it' in a way that was a massive brush-off and instead asked her to watch Nobosuke Yamura’s yacht. With that minor obstacle out of the way, we jacked in.

Rock Lords, interior decoration and Tea Houses. Find the connection

Freddie and Wraith were off doing stuff (Freddie was looking into Street Races or something and Wraith? Well Lofwyr alone knows) when we got two job offers drop in our lap at once. I figured that Yens are good, so I looked into them a bit further. The first one was coming from a Renraku Johnson so I was immediately 'Nope nope nope nope no way in hell." Seriously. I never want to work for themn again ever.

The second one was odd that it came to Captain Cancer of all people, and was passed to him through a strange source. The request for a meeting had been delivered via a local weirdo called - and no, I am not making this up - the Ballard of Pudding Quest. The guy had apparently heard of Captain Cancer, even if the good Captain had never heard of him. Added to that, the meeting was going to be in, of all places, a tea house in Chinatown. Yeah, getting stranger by the minute.

That moment when you wish you'd geeked somebody when you had the chance

Word of warning. After the events of the last couple of days I am so angry that it is going to be very hard for me to give an even remotely coherent summary. So yeah. If there’s huge gaps in this summary I don't frakking care.

This whole terrible downhill slide began in the aftermath of our execution of Teh Dave and the mess with Doctor Hughes. The SK Johnson had asked Us to follow through with racking down everyone he had infected, which then meant finding the people that Teh Dave's underpaid bar staff had sold the CFD bombs to. All of which was resulting in a massive headache-inducing mess of people to track down and find out just how badly they had been infected and how heavily subverted they were.

The good news is that Teh Dave had a list of all the people he had infected. With Minster's aid, we were able to compare that to Runners he knew in New York and find out who were on the known to be missing list. From what we had found, some were more vulnerable to the infection then others, most notably those with more augmentations. Of those he’d infected, we found only two that were still missing and unaccounted for, which is good after a fashion.

Babysitting with Battleaxes

Despite the temptation to lounge around in the pool in our penthouse apartment (You would too, admit it), we had actually made some progress on the investigation that had bought us to New York in the first place. For starters, we had a name for the creepy ripper doc we'd spied on. What we found interesting is that yes, Doctor Sleep was indeed a ghoul, but people seemed to be okay with going to him no less. I know I sure as hell wouldn’t, and that was before we did some more digging to give us good evidence that he was still using dangerous (ie, CFD vector) techniques in his surgery.

We knew that Full Otto had been to see him for gene therapy treatments (in his case, to deal with Cybernetic Rejection. The irony, it burns), but Fast Pig hadn’t. On the other hand, it's also possible that Fast Pig could have been infected vua Full Otto, so yeah. Neon managed to pull his records, which while they were full of dates, visits, procedures, augmentations and the like, were also full of very obvious aliases. However, she was able to rig up a facial recognition program that would match footage of his visitors. Of course, that still meant tracking them down.

Welcome to New York

New York is the city that never sleeps and where everything happens at once. That certainly seemed to be the case when our flight touched down at Empress Hitomi airport (Stupid Shiawase ruins everything. Megacorp history proves this point). As soon as me, Freddie, Neon and Captain Cancer were off the plane, we were approached by s guy offering us a job. See, New York.

Teh Dave, as he introduced himself, had apparently heard about is from my fixer. He immediately assumed that Freddie was in charge because of his "thick and authoritative moustache" (In all fairness, I will give him that; Freddie does have a pretty awesome 'stache) and opened negotiations. He did seem to be a bit surprised when I took over, even when both Freddie and I pointed out that I was the team leader. You can tell this relationship is already off to a great start.

Community Warfare

Recoil. Likes: Shotguns and Chilli sauce.
Dislikes: Talking about her old team

We're now on our way to New York. Of course, before we got there a lot of things decided that they were going to resolve themselves at once on us in the most messy way they could, because you can't just walk away and hope that things will just go away on their own. Nope, it's never that simple. Instead it has to be one massive clusterfrag of everything going wrong at once.

Stepping back a bit, we were getting ready for the trip to New York. Packing was proceeding well, and Recoil the house-sitter was settling in nicely. And by that I mean she was sitting on the couch playing video games with Benny. Turns out that she's really good at tactical shooters, which meant the pair of them were really enjoying co-op mode. And she'd already does a guest appearance on one of Benny's "Unboxing the Video Game and the pizza" vids, so clearly all was going well.

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).

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.

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.

Deck-Con report, days one and two

Just when I thought that our jobs couldn't get any stranger, they go ahead and manage to become stranger still.

The Job started off on an odd note. The Johnson arranged to met us at the nightingale Clinic, a high-end body shop in the heart of Downtown Seattle. Intrigued, me, Freddie, Captain Cancer and Neon headed there to see what was going on and what this job was all about. On arrival, we were greeted by the receptionist who was expecting us, but addressed us by aliases and then showed us through to a consultation room. Things didn't get any better after that.

Inside we met with our Johnson, a woman who was taking the oddly anachronistic step of wearing glasses (Rather then just getting new eyes, because with the expensive suit she was wearing she certainly could afford it). She explained that she was hiring us for a very specific reason. We were going to be attending Deck-Con, the biggest Matrix and Tech expo in the world, because Danielle De La Mar, architect of the new "safe" Matrix would be there as one of the guest speakers. More to the point, there was going to be an attempt on her life as she made a keynote address on Saturday, the third day of the convention, Our job was to prevent that from happening.

Runception

Most days when you're on a Run, you don't ask questions, Even if you don't know who your Johnson works for, you can pretty easily guess their motivation from what you're doing. Other days the Johnson is good ad hiding their true motivations and goals, to the point where what you're doing seems nonsensical. And then there are the times when not only are you at cross-purposes with another run, but the two are so mutually contradictory as to make you wonder what the hell is going on. The last Run we were on was that three times over.

Things started out pretty straightforward. I was at the skeleton and flirting with Blindsite (apparently, he thinks I am awesome, which means he's got good taste) when I was contacted by the EVO Lizardman Johnson that Offroad had worked for before. He arranged to meet us at a warehouse near the Tacoma docks (no. Not the same one as last run) to sort out the details. When we arrived there was when things began to get a little odd, as not only was the Johnson in attendance, but there was another figure who arrived in a Bentley Concordat, the sort of car you only associate with Johnsons or big-name celebrities.

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.