Runners
Carol Turpentine
Kitten Caboodle aka Kit
Creature
ThinkTank
goodbye to: Hotkey
and introducing: Aradia, the Street Witch

After his lightning strikes, almost getting caught by GOD, and pulling off some epic hacks and getting paid, HK has decided it’s time to retire from the group and spend more time with his family. He agrees to take one of the memory alteration potions from Patty C to remove some specific memories of the safehouse location, and gets removed from the team TacNET. Creature makes a small spiderweb present for him, which his daughter enjoys, and he offers to still do remote hack for hire jobs sometimes when the team needs him.

With Avocado occupied attuning himself to their safehouse environment, finally fulfilling his dryad nature, the remaining team head out to meet up with Maggie Goldberg about a job. They also hear that a new Johnson in town is hiring to find out who did the boat heist, and Carol coordinates with Candice Philips to frame a rival at ARES, which will have the dual effect of getting everyone off of the team’s tail, as well as making LoneStar look bad for arresting the ARES guy based on bad evidence when it turns out it wasn’t actually him.

They meet Maggie at the Open Enclave, and are introduced to Aradia, a street witch from Metropole who recently arrived in town, and who Maggie says has useful skills for the job. Which is, to quickly ruin a man’s life in order to get him in an unstable mental position to further some goal Maggie has. She gives them different target areas, limitations, and timelines and they agree on a fee. With the room rented for the day, the team stays there to start planning, and get to know Aradia a bit.

They come up with some solid schemes and start putting them in motion. That night, Kit drives Aradia by the man’s residence, and she casts a Foreboding spell on the master bedroom, just for a little bit, to throw him and his wife off before they sleep. The next day, Kit rents a dump truck from Goober and Carol buys a bunch of sand/dirt mix to load it up with, and TT and Kit dump in all over the driveway and lawn, making a big show of being ostentatiously sloppy, while the couple is at work. Aradia helps Carol complete the ARES con also.

That night, Aradia casts foreboding again, and then with TT and Carol works up a disguise for the next day’s plan. Creature is mostly gathering supplies for these various schemes inside the Zone, due to xyr unique appearance. The next day, Aradia, in disguise as a possible undercover restaurant critic, heads to the wife’s restaurant, while Kit does some light hacking and poses as a nearby restauranteur and calls in to warn that a critic is coming through. Aradia does some subtle social hacking to get the mood right, and then manages to entice and heavily flirt with the wife, who opens up about some trouble at home since the kids went off to college. She leaves but hints that she will return “soon.”

She then changes her disguise for the next day, in a way that should at least still be subconsciously recognizable by the wife without being overtly identifiable, and gets some fake medical records from Dr. Tate. Since it’s a weekend, they need to get the wife out of the house, so TT goes to the restaurant and blows up one of the toilets with a small charge, while pretending it was troll bulk, and fleeing quickly. With the wife rushing off to deal with the crisis, Aradia shows up, pretending to be the target’s previously unknown love child. She totally cons him, and Carol, watching the live footage, spots another angle to exploit: the couple’s son is still trapped in Boston.

Aradia gets the target to open up a bit, and also to introduce him to his wife, which as planned makes the wife very uncomfortable as she seems to partially recognize Aradia but can’t quite figure out what the fuck is going on. The target notices the discomfort, and Aradia arranges to meet him privately the next day. Carol, TT and Aradia compose a message saying they have info about the missing son, and Kit calls in a favor from a Yakuza contact. They then hire a hacker named Kobold, who seems to be running another job against the target’s workplace, to send the message to the target’s terminal, and make sure it gets opened, which Kobold will use as a spear-fishing attack to gain others access, and which will get the target in trouble at work when the security breach is traced.

The next day, Aradia meets the target a cheapish hotel near O’Hare, and fakes her own death using slab. Kit’s Yak contact calls on a burner set up for this purpose, until the target picks up, and explains that his fake daughter owed them money, and that now that she’s dead the debt transfers to him. The Yak, Ken Ichiro, offers to help deal with the body, with the understanding that this is a further favor he’ll owe them for. Ken also help him concoct a cover story for his wife. Kit and Carol, in disguise, show up at the hotel as the Yak disposal team, and further spook the target, who scampers off home, thoroughly destabilized.

The next day they hear from Kobold that he took the spear fishing bait, and she got what she needed and made sure security would notice where the breach came from. Figuring this is job complete, they report in to Maggie, who seems well-satisfied, and pays up. They are about to head back to the safehouse and part ways with Aradia for now, when she enquires if they have any Tarot knowledge (as they’ve dropped some Seelie Court hints), and reveals that she also possesses a card, and one the team hasn’t seen: The Avatars, one of the greater arcana. This seems to ensure her place on the team, at least for another run, as they agree to share knowledge and keep collab-ing for the time being.