Fat Yak Noodle Soup

There are a number of reasons why Mister Johnson does the whole Mister Johnson thing. Deniability is key amongst them; if you don’t know who he is and who he works for, the grossly illegal activities he’s paying you to engage in can’t be traced back to anyone. It’s also a good why to hide his agenda, especially when what he’s asking you to do is actually pretty dubious, even by Shadowrunner standards or when he’s looking to screw you over for whatever reason.

I mention all this because the latest run I went on ended up having one of these. The worst of it is that they were on the surface a rare case of a Johnson that was completely open and transparent about their identity and agenda. Which really meant that he was lying through his teeth.

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.

Magnets, how the frag do they work?

Racing seems to have been the theme of the day for this last Run. Not that It was about racing, mind you, but racing was how we got into it. Freddie had been asking around about the street racing community again with an eye to getting back into the competition. While he was away, the new top dog in town was a relative newcomer called Bruno who was tearing up the scene in a Eurocar Northstar; a massive, turbo-charged, peasant-crushing SUV designed for the stupidly rich people and corp execs. That’s the sort of car that’s well beyond the reach of your average street racer, which was turning some heads.

On a related note, I’d been doing more combat bike training with Cwildred which was turning out to be not only useful but pretty fragging awesome. In the latest round of training she’d been teaching me to jump my bike off things (Cars, roofs, highway overpasses) which is the sort of thing that is useful in a chase as well as being just plain cool. So we’d been trashing a couple of rental Growlers along the way; no sense in destroying my good bike while practicing after all.

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.