The Brat

So I’ve been rather distracted given all that’s happened of late. It’s hard not to be, what with Bug Spirits, Crazy Digital Murder Gods and other such crap. This means I’ve been overlooking something in my journal here which I should have gotten around to long ago.

She's not a kid, and she'll point it out every
chance she gets

Neon is our team’s Decker. We first met on the first run that Me and Freddie worked together on, which in retrospect was the start of this whole Dr Akabe revenge plan/Crazy Digital Murder God/Whatever else mess. Don’t get me wrong, she was actually pretty damned useful on that one run, barring one problem that, in all fairness, she really couldn’t have planned on in advance and definitely falls under the “things that Johnson should have told us” list. Of course, given who the Johnson was and why they were organizing that run, the omission might have been deliberate.

The thing is, though, Neon’s really good at what she does. She’s a master of sneaking around the Matrix and does a lot of things that helps the team. I mean, there’s the usual stuff of stealing Paydata or erasing records or whatever else that you need a Decker for, and that’s pretty wiz. But there’s a lot of other Stuff she does, like messing with security systems, faking passes, bypassing locks, shutting off cameras and the like that’s insanely helpful on a run. Wraith is really good at finding ways to utilize her skills, often thinking of something creative for her to do in support of whatever our objective is.

Crimson Dawn (part 3)

The Redmond Barrens were rarely quiet, even in the dead of night. The streets were usually just as lively after sundown as they were during the day, echoing with the sounds of life on the edge. More than just the usual hustle of day to day traffic, there was so much more that could be heard.

The roar of engines, the blare of music, raucous arguments, the distant wail of sirens, honking horns and, more often than anyone from Seattle's better districts would be comfortable with, the sounds of gunfire.

In among the cacophony that was Redmond, there was one rather odd noise. The irregular but at the same time almost rhythmic sound of wood striking wood, punctuated by cries and shouts. This odd sequence was coming from the roof of a run-down apartment block, one seemingly otherwise no different from the numerous others of its kind around it.

Diplomatic incidents

The last few days have been complicated, to say the least. A lot of things happened, and we’re not entirely sure of what’s going to come of all of it. In fact, to be honest, our team has either achieved a major breakthrough or is completely screwed and under somebody’s thumb, and it’s hard to tell which.

How we got to this point is complicated to say the least. Following our trip to the foundation, we found a whole pile of useful information on Pierce and his crazy plans as well as his insane Bug Shaman allies (They’re Bug Shamans, of course they’re insane) and their own goals and how they were going to execute them. This also came with a bit of good/bad; the bad was that their intended sacrifice/host for the bug queen was Snow Fox, the daughter of a major Salish tribal leader and also Wraith’s fiancée (or something). The good was this meant we had a way to find her.

Data Dumpster Diving

So I said that I'd talk about what we found in the foundation. One of the reasons why I hold off adding it to the last post is because, well, there's a lot of it and a lot of it ties into other stuff that we did, and that last post was already as confusing as all get out. So here we go.

No good can ever come of this

The first run where Me, Freddie and Neon worked together had the three of us head to MCT's Cavilard Research Facility to take out one Dr Shin Okabe. This was not an extraction or anything; this was all wetwork and ensuring that he was dead. However, in retrospect, it seems that was what got the whole damned ball rolling and started us on this mess that has gotten us where we are now, fighting a Crazy Digital Murder God and his Bug Shaman allies. No, really.

In order to explain things a bit more, I need to quickly cover a bit more about Dr Okabe. See, the Doctor was not only an expert in computer software design and development with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and behavior, but he was also a Technomancer. (Geez, this sounds good, doesn't it? Read on, it gets better). But before that, he was one of those creepy-as 'Otaku' guys. Oh, and he used to work for Renraku. Oh and guess where he was during the late 2050s. If you answer involves a certain arcology that was taken over by a Crazy Digital Murder God, then you're correct. I told you it got better.

Sim Hell

Stylish early 20th century Me

I’m going to start this by assuming you know what the Foundation is. If not, go ask a Decker like Lightspeed or Neon and they’ll explain it to you (even if that explanation is ‘blah blah blah blah blah nerd stuff’) then come back.

So now that we all know what it is, let’s give you some background. We’d discovered that Pierce was a crazy digital murder god, and we discovered that he had some crazy long term plan. We didn’t know the full details of said plan, however, only bits of it. Added to that, we had no idea where Pierce was hiding, which meant that if we ‘killed’ him in the Matrix, he’d just run off to his safe haven to recompile. Above all else, to this, Pierce himself had deleted all the data we needed on his creation and function down to the point of destroying the research facility host.

The good news was that in theory it survived in the Foundation of the research facility where he was ‘born’. Added to that, Neon had been able to drop an anchor into that Foundation’s Portal Node, which mean that in theory she could get into it again. Unfortunately, we could only do it by jacking in through a friendly host’s foundation and then jumping across from there. The upside is that we know somebody who runs their own data store that we could use. And so Lightspeed joined us on this crazy little trip, which proved to be very useful.

I realised that I've been mis-spelling Abbey's name all along

She also often wears a mask, but that doesn't make
for as interesting a picture

Okay. Time for me to talk about Abbey.

Um... actually, I don't have much to say about her, really. We've only worked together a few times, and it's really hard to get a read on her. She's quiet and elusive, and definitely likes it that way. I really don't know much about her beyond ‘human’ but there's a whole bunch of stuff that I've figured out or that I’ve heard from various other sources. Oh, and apparently Abbey is not her street name, but like Freddie, she hasn't had much luck in making something stick.

So let's look at the things we know and what that means for the team. The first thing is that Abbey is an awakened adept. However, she's not the typical 'run around screaming and leaping off stuff and punching people and making them explode' type that you often find in Runner circles. Rather, she's actually more about agility and stealth then anything else, and has a number of tricks that make hr really damned good at it.

I am a fragging motorcycle ninja

Me on my bike. It's fast enough to keep up with me

So a lot of runners have different definitions of what constitutes a "good" run. Some say it's one where you never have to engage in a fight at all, and nobody ever knows that you're there. Others think it's when you reduce the place to rubble and leave nothing but dead bodies and burning wreckage in your wake. I think if you asked any two runners, they'd say completely different things.

Now what I think was one of the best damn runs I’ve ever been on was definitely on the more colourful, loud and public end of it. But all things considered, it worked out pretty well for us. Not only because of what happened on the job, but because of what we got out of it in terms of fringe benefits and other things. Even if there was one catch.