Runners
Aleiron Grey
Butter
Eion Smash
Grackle
Three Card
Watt Tinbo
Yanko Lazer
Butter attempts to take Grackle further under his wing, and they begin working together in the machine/repair shop to try to start making some armaments, as instructed. 3 Card does her best to keep Eion from losing his mind in the “too nice” conditions, by destroying his mattress and getting them shitty, hard jobs. Yanko falls back on sex for drugs trades, but eventually rallies to doing something useful and gets assigned to a cleaning crew, where he eventually tracks down a really good, concealed stash spot for the gear the team is making/acquiring. Watt continues to collect parts from his tech work detail and smuggle them back to the cell, to eventually make jammers, or upgrade other devices if they can get hold of them.
Aleiron and Sharky are the first to come under attack from Mafia goons, specifically some Leather Devils. Sharky loses it and kills them all as Shark takes him over. Luckily he exits his killing frenzy before taking out Aleiron as well. Unfortunately, this is well past his 3rd demerit, so he gets transferred to D Block to begin serving the rest of his sentence in suspended animation, plus 3 more manslaughter charges tacked on. Aleiron gets off with a night in the hole, which isn’t as bad as it could have been.
Watt comes under attack next, by a member of the Leprecunts, once again with the guards looking the other way. He gets badly injured, but nerve strikes and temporarily paralyzes the Irishman, then impersonates him to get the guard to open the locked bathroom they are in. The guard seems surprised but plays it cool, and Watt goes along with it. As he officially “slipped and fell”, there is no punishment.
Imaginary Annie Goldsmith visits again, and plans out with Watt how to use his dog Ada to smuggle in a basic commlink for the team. She tells them that based on her digging, it looks like the person likeliest to have set them up is indeed the mysterious fixer Rex Simmons, with help picking them all out from Theo “Flipside” Harrison. It is unclear how involved Flipside was, but she says she’ll keep looking. She also smuggles in a hairshirt for Eion to make his life more miserable, which helps.
Eion and 3 Card successfully grab the comm from Ada while out on a work detail, and Yanko gets it safely stashed. Watt collects enough parts to upgrade it to have limited hacking capabilities, and they agree that’s a good move. Aleiron and 3 Card begin scouting out people to recruit to a con/cult while planning out what the belief system will entail, and the team also begins developing a secret language for use amongst themselves.
3 Card and Eion come under attack the next day, from a pair of hulking Spikes. They barely escape with their lives, killing one and knocking the other out. They spend some time in solitary for it, but the guards once again try to play it cool as an industrial accident. Yanko also ID’s 2 members of The Disassemblers on his crew, who seem to have a strong interest in caustic chemicals and take a disturbing glee in dissolving rat corpses and the like. He thinks they could prove useful yet…. He comes under attack by a Scatterbrains members with vials of acid the next day, but manages to knock him out with his elemental electricity. Yanko leaves the body to the Disassemblers, who begin gleefully experimenting with various chemicals, leading to some horrible smells and noises as he exits. He also manages to grab one last acid vial for his own use.
Aleiron spends some time doing library research on various topics and passing useful texts along to the team, as well as beginning to recruit for the cult. The Koshari tell the team to take out a few members of the Blue Dragons, a Yakuza affiliate, which the team is worried about, as they just barely got off the syndicates bad side. However, they need Koshari protection inside, especially having heard that there are regular sweeps for magic users, who are taken off and not seen again. So, the team decides to try to find a way to get to the BD’s without getting spotted/caught.
Watt makes a deal with the Reality Hackers to smuggle some gear in for them in exchange for hacking assistance, and also upgrades the commlink the Ada smuggled in to be able to hack. Imaginary Annie visits again, and they get her the list of needed items. She tells them to have a viable escape plan ready to go within a month, in case she can’t stall the legal process as much as she would like. They get hustling. Yanko finds some old, sealed, steam tunnels under the prison while cleaning, and uses his acid vial to weaken the spot welds on one that’s especially shoddy. 3 Card makes a deal with the Vory V Zakone to gain access to the basement through the kitchen by getting transferred to the dishpit crew in exchange for planting a datafile on a certain system in the admin wing.
Watt calls in the favor with the RHers to plant the info, and Eion smuggles them in the promised gear from Ada. Eion is barely holding it together, spending a bit of time in solitary due to his attitude. However, he gets a little intel on the secretive “D Block,” which seems to be fully underground and guarded mostly mechanically. Butter and Grackle continue bonding, but manage to smuggle the team a crowbar to use to pry open the steam tunnel cover. Yanko, 3 Card, Eion, and Watt, being the team’s best unarmed fighters, head down to the basement through an enormous grease trap with the Vory’s help. They manage to sneak past the cleaning and maintenance crew down there, as Yanko knows the area pretty well by now. They pry open the cover, and carefully place it atop a debris pile to appear as if still attached from a distance.
Entering the tunnel, they begin mapping it out on Watt’s comm while Eion makes grease marks on the walls in case the tech fails. They eventually find a body, looking to have been eaten by large rodents, near a mark scratched into the old brick wall with an arrow pointing forward and a crude skull. The corpse is wearing tattered prison uniform bits, and looks to be 5-10 years old. So apparently they aren’t the first to have this idea. Eion, feeling that they’re better knowing than not, ventures forward. He and 3 Card eventually find a collapsed section of tunnel with a drop of unknown height below and the sound of some sort of equipment running faintly in the distance. Before they can investigate further, Yanko and Watt dash up to warn them that some heavy boots are approaching from the direction they came- they aren’t sure if they are guards or what, but they overhead one of them say “Another one from Elisa, eh?”. There are at least 2, whoever they are, seemingly transporting a 3rd, who could be heard making muffled noises.
After a brief debate, the team decides to get ready and fight the newcomers, especially if they are guards, as this could give them some useful gear, or at least some info if they can take one alive to question. They quickly kill one of the men and disarm the other. They turn out to be trustees, in this case ex-runners recruited by an LS employee named Elisa Seawind to do her dirty work inside the prison. After 3C convinces him to spill the beans in exchange for his life, he fills them in on how it works: Seawind recruits promising “talent” when they enter the system, and either gets them released early or gets them special privileges in exchange for working for her. In the case of these 2 trustees, that means using a secret tunnel in the medical facility in A block to bring “problem prisoners” down here and throw them in the hole.
He doesn’t seem to know much more than that, so they kill him (breaking their promise, but how can they trust him?) and toss both bodies down the hole. Then, they check the prisoner, who is still alive. It is none other than the obnoxious ork decker, Chaimberlain ‘Drekbomb’ Jackslaw. They are quickly annoyed by him, but realize he could be useful, and make a deal to bring him food and some supplies in return for him mapping the tunnel system. They leave one of the trustee’s tasers with him for protection, and trade the other to the Vory for future kitchen smuggling. They cash in quickly, when they realize that the hole gives them a perfect secret way to do their job for the Koshari. Yanko does some recon and finds a time when 4 Blue Dragons will be on an unsupervised cleaning crew, and the team ambushes them.
They grab the cleaning cart, and hide it in the steam tunnels, dumping all 4 bodies in the hole. Sadly, it looks like Drekbomb is totally inept at survival, given his poor mapping efforts thus far. They let the Koshari know that it’s done, which is fortunate timing since the Black Coats come shortly thereafter, sweeping the cell blocks for magic users. The team gets the feeling that some of the Koshari’s awakened members are using masking metamagics to conceal themselves and their allies from detection. However, some others are not so lucky, and the team sees (and hears rumors) of a number of prisoners being taken away, including Sharky- so there is at least one way out of D block…. However, comparing the dates of the Black Coats visits to the missing prisoners list, they account for about 1/3rd of the names. Another 1/3rd appear to line up with those “transferred to Asamando” aka dumped in the hole in the basement, which perhaps has ghouls at the bottom, given the euphemism. The final 1/3rd is still a mystery, the only clue to which is that all the names included are for prisoners between teens and late 20’s in age.
The team continues using Vory access to the basement to keep scouting the tunnels, sending 3C to the medbay due to paralysis caused by Watt’s nerve strike, in order to try to help them find the secret access point there. 3C cons her way through medical interactions, claiming the paralysis is a long-running condition and stomping around to help “walk it off”. She notices while near the bathroom that the attached storeroom has 2 chest freezers, one of which appears to be unplugged- the access point perhaps? Below, the rest of the team manages to track the trustee’s path partway, and then explores a bit til they hear some noise from above, and find a spot they think is likely the access point- a newer ladder with a retrofitted cover have been inserted.
With this info, they feel like they can proceed on another mission- getting the Project Pegasus info from a prisoner in A block. They make another deal with the Vory to get kitchen access, in exchange for which Grackle agrees to take out 2 human supremacist Troll Killers who have been causing some trouble for some of the Vory’s subsids. Luckily, the other Halloweener in here is back out of solitary and sharing Grackle’s cell (in Sharky’s absence), and Grackle convinces him to help. They arrange to have him working at the machine shop, where the 2 men also work. Grackles tells Jack O’Lantern that the men have been talking shit on the ‘Weeners and Jack fashions them some crude shivs. He tells Grackle to sneak around behind them while he approaches from the front. He walks right up to the men and stabs one in the throat before he figures out what’s happening. Grackles slices the other’s legs before tossing his knife to Jack and sneaking off again. Jack leaps at the other man, slicing and stabbing wildly as Grackle returns to Butter’s work station and tries to keep his head down.
They hear some screams, shouts, and gunfire as guards try to break up the fight, and shortly thereafter, the shop is locked down as 3 bodies are wheeled out on stretchers- looks like Jack and one of the Troll Killers are definitively dead and the other isn’t looking good. However, Butter and Grackle manage to bluff the guards that they didn’t see anything and don’t know anything, and are eventually returned to their cells, as the whole facility seems to be on lockdown now…. Meanwhile, Aleiron has been spreading the word amongst her cult that something isn’t right in the prison, especially in the basement, and that more disappearances should be expected, by which they will know that her predictive abilities are accurate. She keeps working her regular job, as does Watt, so that the whole team isn’t gone every time something suspicious happens. Aleiron also makes a deal with a member of the Nova Rich to make sure the prisoner they need to question is sent to medical at the right time, in exchange for NR getting the drugs from medical, which will require the medic and guard to be taken out.
Eion gets his arm infected by smearing shit in a wound, and letting it fester for a while, before getting sent to medical, along with 3C, who is “paralyzed” again. Yanko sneaks into the tunnels and waits til he is needed near the entrance to medical. They clean Eion’s wound and dose him with antibiotics, and tell him to wait while they run some further tests, before turning to 3C. They get distracted when another man is brought in, also paralyzed. They run some tests to make sure there isn’t some kind of outbreak/contagion, but the NR member who dropped him off winks at Eion and 3C, so they think it’s likely a drug effect. They know they have less than an hour to question him and take out the medic an guard (as the medic disables the local security and cameras for a short period whenever the NR come to buy drugs off of her, scheduled for later this morning). They wait as long as they can, to let 3C regain some movement, and then attack.
Eion and 3C manage to stop the medic from sounding the alarm, which is more difficult due to the fact that she just disabled security features, but both get ko’ed by the guard. Yanko, hearing struggle, gains access to the room using the crowbar, and manages to take out the guard and finish off the medic without raising the alarm. He lets the Nova Rich guy in to grab the drugs, and is frustrated in his ambitions to get some for himself, although he does manage to secure a stimpatch to wake 3C back up. They quickly question the man, and find out that Project Pegasus was a NeoNET initiative to entrap Monads who were trying to get safe passage to the Roskosmos facility in Russia. However, some well-armed Monads apparently interfered in a handoff on neutral ground, rescuing some of their people from corp capture, but resulting in a very public firefight. This guy and his security subsid took the fall for it, but they got cushy prison spots and compensation waiting outside if they stay quiet.
3C kills him, reasoning that the info is more valuable if no-one else has it, and drops his body into the tunnels. Yanko and 3C together manage to drop Eion in as well, before Yanko ko’s 3C, leaving her right on the edge of death, perfect for their cover story that unknown persons attacked medical. Yanko bleaches everything down and then exits, careful to leave no trail to the freezer/ladder, even tipping some stuff over on top of it to make it look less suspiciously clean. He hauls the corpse to the hole, and dumps it in. He finds Drekbomb, who whines about being hungry, but he convinces him to help move Eion, who is pretty injured. They return to find Eion’s wound being gnawed on by devil rats, and scare them off in time.
They haul him to the pit and try to tend his wound as best they can, but Yanko realizes he didn’t grab any medical supplies in his rush to escape, and he needs to get back to the kitchen ASAP, so he knocks Drekbomb unconscious to keep him from messing around, and leaves Eion a stun baton, hoping he’ll wake up first. He gets back upstairs just as a facility lockdown is called, and the Vory give him a look. The teams spends the next 3 days locked in their cells with minimal food and no movement allowed.
Meanwhile, Eion finally wakes up downstairs, right around the same time as Drekbomb. Assessing the situation, it looks not great. His arm has a huge chunk missing, and is infected again, and they have no food or supplies. He dresses his wound as best he can, and manages to hold the infection off for now with his impressive dwarven fortitude. However, when no food is forthcoming 2 days later, and unable to rest sufficiently to heal, he feels that drastic measures must be taken, and kills Drekbomb in his sleep- a possibility Drekbomb seems to have been worried about, due to his irregular sleep schedule and locations, but Eion is a far better survivalist. He then field dresses the corpse as best he can, dumping all the useless bits and implants and such in the hole. He gorges himself on the edible bits, and finally gets a good nights rest. He figures the corpse will keep him fed for a few days at least before it turns, unless he can somehow cure it….
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