A pain in the (robo) pants

So after the arse-up at the end of the last run, Minster was left babysitting Slayer for a few days until Walter Johnson got back. Given the spare time now on our hands, we took it upon ourselves to get back to the investigation that we'd come to New York for in the first place. Fortunately, we'd found ourselves something that resembled a lead, courtesy of the rather distinctive missing runner Robopants. She'd worked with two others in past, Mudbug and Ripstar, and we knew where to find the latter.

Ripstar hung out at the Link Club. She was an Ork street racer who ran with a tricked-out Americar and liked to use it to swindle Corp kids out of their expensive rides. Based on this, we told Freddie to take the lead, given that the pair of them had a lot in common, like a love of driving fast in unlikely vehicles. At first he hit it off, with the pair of them talking about (what do you know) street racing, and her recognizing him from several vids that got out of Seattle. They even went out for a practice race which Freddie won, clearly impressing her.

Sadly, he tried turning the conversation to Shadowrunning, only to fumble it badly. She told him to push off.

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.

Where even the architecture tries to kill you

Our trip to New York has managed to be full of surprises, both good and bad. This last run was no exception, although I'm going to say the good won out this time for a number of reasons.

We'd gotten nicely settled in to our new hideout, with any lingering concerns over Full Otto's rather unexpected demise somewhat offset by the fact that we live in an awesome penthouse abetment with swimming pool, gym, massive lounges, massive bedrooms and whatever else. You know, the little things. However, we did need work to help support our luxurious lifestyle, as well as the job that had bought us to New York in the first place. Dayglo had found us something that looked to be fast and financially very lucrative.

Crimson Dawn (part 12)

Slicer had called Ashely while she was at work (Staff weren't allowed to use Commlinks while on the floor except for work purposes), leaving behind a rather short and almost erse message for her to meet him at his place that evening. While that wasn't unusual in and of itself, what had struck her was the way he was handling it. Usually he gave her more notice, and usually his approach was more suggesting or asking then the almost demanding tone she was getting here.

None the less she was still eager to go. It wasn't just that every little bit helped bring her further and further into the world of the Shadows and the life she so craved that id it. It was the fact that, at the same time, every little step made Ashley's life seem just that extra bit more unbearably bland and dull. With nights filled with action, violence, excitement and danger, a day of telling customers where to find toilet paper and about this week's sale on Soy Chips seemed even more banal then ever.

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.

Crimson Dawn (Part 11)

The address that Crimson's fixer had given her was, at first glance, entirely unremarkable. The Belleview neighborhood was a nice, anonymous, middle-class one, filled largely with corp wageslaves living their boring corp wageslave lives; certainly it was a far cry from the Barrens neighborhoods where she’d so far spent the majority of her Shadowrunner career. Save for a discrete codelock on the door, the storefront looked like any other in the suburban strip mall she was currently strolling through.

The whole thing was rather missable, but if a person knew what to look for, they’d also see that there was something inside that somebody wanted people to keep away from. Not that it bothered Crimson at all as she pressed the button on the intercom. "Name and business?" The curt, clearly artificial voice on the other end began.

"Kaitlyn Vermelho. I have an appointment." A flick of her commlink sent the code her Fixer had provided to the system.