Runners
Hotkey
Avocado
Carol Turpentine
Kitten Caboodle aka Kit
Creature
Keg

Tate needs the team to get over to his office post-haste: a medical alert has just activated which was last assigned to Melissa Truman, the missing heir from a few jobs back, who has been outh of site for the last 2 decades, and he needs the team to find her (or at least the alert bracelet) and figure what’s going on. They agree and head to his office. He gives them the rundown and they negotiate pay, but as they’re heading out they realize that his receptionist has been eaves-dropping, and after some fast hacking from HK see that 2 messages were sent- 1 to a local fixer named Anastacia and 1 to Sarah Silverleaf. Silverleaf sent back payment as well, which Carol reports to Tate. He says he will deal with his disloyal receptionist, and encourages the team to hurry.

Not wanting to lose any slight edge they might have and/or let someone else get there first again, they don’t do any shopping and head straight to the last ping from the bracelet, near Truman Tower, now Spire Enterprises. On the way they decide to put their good rep and networking to use and call up a bunch of local gangers and hackers to make some light mayhem for any other teams trying to reach the job site, hoping this will slow any adversaries. They also receive calls from Silverleaf and Candice Phillips offering higher pay for a last minute job, but they shut them down, having already made an agreement with Tate.

They reach Spire, and drop Avocado off as a faux street doc to seek info from what seems to be the remains of a large firefight. The rest of the team heads to the last ping location and starts looking for tracks. Avocado has good luck, meeting a friendly ganger named Staci who helps him get vid footage, showing a young woman running away during the battle. Staci confirms this woman always wore an old weird bracelet, and offers to help Avocado find her, after sussing out some of what he’s up to- however they both seem to have her best interest at heart and agree to team up.

The rest of the team does find some tracks and they converge on the Haymarket Nation community, which has declined from it’s heyday as a smuggler’s hub but still has decent numbers. Avo and Staci head in and find the missing woman (Katy) absent and her residence trashed. Luckily, a hidden escape tunnel wasn’t found, and they follow it out, to avoid anyone watching. As they prepare to join the rest of the team, a surveillance drone tries to suicide bomb then, but Carol spots it and snipes it. HK also upgrades their tracker’s capacity and they get another ping. They also get an alert from some of their hacker and ganger hire-ons that another team is approaching, and HK recognizes them as the ex-NeoNet team that they’ve run into a few times. He manages to convince them to back off in exchange for partial pay and the info the team has so far, so they can offer up a convincing “sorry we failed” excuse to their Johnson.

They head North, into the Shattergraves, and encounter the third pursuit team, the Ares mercs that Carol had previously met, trying to subdue Katy with non-lethals. They succeed as the team approaches, and the team rushes in – Kit wants to keep things non-lethal also, but Staci doesn’t seem so inclined, and Creature notices a mother’s protective instinct at play, and begins to suspect that Staci might be Melissa Truman. The team downs the Ares mage first, which unfortunately ends the spell he was performing to keep a huge mosquito spirit at bay- it rises from the earth and pulls the mage down before attacking both teams.

Creature lobs in a lube grenade to add some chaos, and with Avo’s help gets their team out of the effect field while the Ares team is still trapped in it fighting the bug. Taking pity, they help deal with the bug, which flees below ground before disruption, and leave the Ares team to get off the lube slick, having lost half their number in this encounter. Carol gets a stern rebuke from Candice, and feels he has lost some ground there. HK manages to spot a tracker on their car as they head to Tate’s, and they fry it. They get paid, and Melissa tells them some of her story. Tate seems surprised that she’s been undercover all these years, and she advertises the quality of the face-changers at Lincoln Park. She agrees to a potential interview on Kit’s shadowcast in the future, once she gets a chance to get her and Katy settled back into the family.

The team heads back to Ahabitat to take some well-earned RNR, with no jobs on the immediate horizon for the first time in a while!