Mars City Shadowrun | Adventure Log

Spirited Competition

7 Contenders for Spirit of the City and Black Lodge Intel

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
The Detective
Otters aka Roadkill
Pepper Jack

The remaining infiltration team, having barely escape the Black Lodge neighborhood before the ritual disruption caused a massive disaster, floats around in Lake St Clair for a while before Wood Raven finds them and hauls them back to shore, tactfully not mentioning the wreckage of his nice stealth speedboat. He tells them that a spirit dog showed up in front of him and guided him out to their floating wreckage raft, and Otters feels that Dog has perhaps repaid the favor owed to her.

When they get back to shore, Wood Raven helps Otters do some emergency drying out of all the drones and the team links back up with ChewGum and The Detective at the main offensive line/distraction attack position. TD had been helping with tactics and coordination. Creep also eventually shows up, a bit too late to assist, reporting that the spirits that attacked and chased him, trying to steal his leg, suddenly vanished.

Not getting any response on the radio, they decide to check up on the Belle Isle crew, and head that way, while Creep works on cracking the safe that Dig stole. Finding some explosives inside, he gets PPJ to use his spectral hand to disable them, and gets in. Creep is also a little weirded out, as is TD, by PPJ’s whole deal and backstory, especially given the revelation of there having been another PPJ in Black Lodge custody. At their insistence, though TD is much gentler about it, PPJ cuts himself and to his great relief, bleeds red.

Inside the safe are a number of Tarot cards and a sheaf of papers. The Tarot cards included 2 that the team hasn’t seen before related to the Seelie Court, one that was stolen from Smoach and Myrryr’s office, and one that was a component of the Crystal Bloodblade, which the BL has some historic interest in. There is also a mysterious 5th card, which seems to be from an entirely different Tarot. Creep stashes them for now, and finds that the mystery 5th card has some kind of repellent function with the standard 6th World Tarot cards, but manages to jam them all in his leg.

Looking at the sheaf of papers, they find it encoded using a language none of them are familiar with, though CG recognizes the use of ideograms, and PPJ spots some linguistic similarities to Sperethiel. TD is able to recognize some cryptographic qualities, and thinks it likely is using an ancient/obscure language as a cipher, rather than fully being written in alternate syntax etc.

PPJ checks the journal that he grabbed off Freddy Bales’ dad, who seems to have used the nom de guerre “Karyos”. The journal is also encoded, but has two other interesting features. One, there is one half of a key to the cipher in it. 2, it seems to have been magically linked to one or more other books, like a written version of Mindlink, but the spell seems to have recently collapsed.

Creep remembers that Penelope Beans was also in the BL sanctum basement, and suggests they check on her shop in Hamtramck after checking out Belle Isle. They arrive at the Isle to find it truly devastated. It seems the BL attackers were eventually fought off (likely unable to summon reinforcements given the team’s assault on Casa Aurelius), but at great cost. Most of the buildings are damaged or levelled, the Cleansing ritual has stopped, and a major portion of the populace has been killed or injured.

After using magic, drones, leadership, flexibility and strength to dig through the rubble, they manage to help pull out Rose and D2 (aka Daiyana Dimeeko) the sole survivors of the Belle Isle/Windsor crew. Rose seems embittered by her continual losses and a bit in shock. D2 is more pragmatic and explains that the BL was close to overrunning them so she was forced to set off some defensive demo charges she had placed around to protect the ritualists as long as she could.

She tells the team that the BL used some kind of horrifying new weapon that the survivors here are referring to as “ghost bombs”- some kind of alchemical container in which they had trapped dark spirits, including some of the ones that came through the rifts, during their various rituals and experiments. When opened or broken, the spirits madly attack anyone in their vicinity, which caused mass casualties and distress. The ritualists were also attacked in astral space by some massive conjured spirits, who luckily vanished right around the time the BL ritual went sideways in Casa Aurelius, so the team did still manage to help here, indirectly.

They eventually find a badly wounded Jaga recuperating inside a large congregation of plant life, and leave her to heal (with some guards), but Walker in Ways and most of the other ritualists have been slain. Dig offers to return to help more soon. Otters finds Howell killed, alongside his 2 cyber-tigers, and while talking to survivors TD and CG hear of a Vatican Sacred Detective who came to their aid, as well as one of the 36 Hidden Righteous Ones who awakened during the fight and managed to keep many civilians safe from the dark spirits, but unfortunately both of them were slain as well.

CG coordinates with The People of the Book to get their mobile crematorium and burial preparation team down here to help out, and Creep and Dig manage to make everyone uncomfortable by suggesting they call the ghouls to eat other remains, before TD smooths things over by clarifying that the ghouls will of course only eat BL remains, which everyone seems ok with. The team hauls the BL bodies off to one side and calls the ghouls. Then they head to Hamtramck.

Good thing they invested so heavily in the district! Local volunteer firefighters managed to quickly extinguish the massive blaze that broke in Penelope Beans’ shop and keep it from spreading. Investigating the burnt remains, they find evidence of alchemical arson, seemingly the same powerful fire magic that destroyed Smoach and Myrryr’s office. They find burnt reagents, tools, books and supplies, and a slagged anthrodrone covered in the melted remains of it’s realistic features “skin”.

Dig uses the catalog spell to search for anything else unusual, and finds a shovel head (the handle burnt) away from the other tools, as well as one loose floor tile. PPJ pries it up and digs a bit til he finds a book- it’s still warm from the extreme heat of the fire but this looks promising. TD goes to open it, carefully not exposing their skin, and barely avoids getting jabbed with a spring-loaded neuro-toxin needle. Looking carefully inside their seem to be no further traps, and this looks to be the other half of the cipher.

A number of pages were torn out and are missing, so there’s no further info than that, but the team can tell this was also part of the linked books spell that Karyos’ was also bound to. This one is also inert. TD hauls their open air bathtub up to the roof of the Tin Can since the team abandoned their safehouse out back, and they all head back to the Plat Zone to rest and work on cracking the code.

With TD and Creep’s skills and focus, and both halves of the key, they manage to make sense of the documents. It seems that the BL had initially conceptualized their Horror-summoning and binding plan based on some research done by something called “Project PILLAR”, run by the Ordo Maximus. The BL has apparently heavily infiltrated the OM and has good sources there, but seems concerned that the legendary vampire hunter Martin deVries may be onto Project PILLAR, so the OM set a trap for him, after being tipped off by the BL.

The BL doesn’t know how this went, as they heard no more from their spy in the OM, and then have lost comms due to the Blackout. The sheaf of papers also includes a lot of technical info about their rituals and plans, the ghost bombs, etc. The journal also proves interesting- it seems that everyone in the BL is constantly scheming. Karyos was worried that a subordinate wad trying to supplant him (the woman who lead the ritual where CG almost got sacrificed and Dog got split up), while also trying to supplant his own superior (Penelope Beans).

He complains that Beans has such a strong position due to her successful longterm infiltration of the IOND, which greatly upsets PPJ. He knew the Boston chapter of the IOND was compromised, but this implies a much larger corruption in his organization. Karyos knows that he needs to pull off something big to compete with Beans, so he made a deal with the Null Sect, through the rogue Brackhaus that the team recently exposed, to assist them with something called “Project IXION”. He apparently knew the Blackouts were coming, to some extent, and was able to prep for them.

He had already spent years building up the local BL presence, recruiting many to move to Detroit from DeeCee when the BL lost their power base there, feeling that ARES would be good protection against UCAS Shedim counterstrikes. He ramped this up even further in prep for the Blackouts, and then triggered his plan in the background while everyone else was distracted by bugs and no power. He also hints at a larger goal beyond his own/the BL’s power- humans need to be able to protect themselves properly against “deep/distant metaplanar threats” and this is how he sees to do that.

With all this disturbing paydata to mull over (and decide who to sell to), the team finally rests. The next day, they get a call from Ringmaster to come meet him and some other Plat Zone Irregulars in a large open lot not too far away. He warns them not to freak out as a portal opens and they hear a distant screaming. As a massive flaming buffalo head at the front of a biomechanical train emerges, they see another rift tear open and the train start entering that as it exits the other. It slows a bit as it moves until once “car” segment irises open and two figures inside frantically toss out a bunch of hardcases before leaping free themselves.

One of them semi-frantically asks if anyone has anything they can pay the train with to make sure it departs peacefully, and Creep offers up the Coin of Woe from his leg, since Cholula is no longer there to protest. The woman accepts it, and tosses it to another flaming buffalo head at the rear of the train as it prepares to scream- it instead chomps down on the Coin, and leaves peacefully, the rifts closing behind it one after the other. And thus also departs whatever remains of Iva Linus Hathaway.

The women uncloaks herself and reveals that she is Dr. Dyna Mite, the metaplanar travel researcher, who recognizes Creep, Dig, and CG. She seems a little horrified that they had a Coin of Woe, but explains it was actually perfect currency, as those trains consume souls to run- efficient travel, but costly and dangerous. She tells them a little more about other “ghost trains” which tend to run more regionally or along their old tracks, rather than free-roaming “Iron Buffalo”.

They chat a bit and catch up, and she explains that she had to leave Seattle, where they last saw her, saying that the Ordo Maximus was after her- she doesn’t know why exactly, all she was able to determine was that it had to do with something called “Project AVERNUS”. The team makes note. She also gives them the brief news update from outside- Free St Louis is official to go along with Seattle, the Sioux Nation has renamed themselves Oceti Sakowin after retaking a bunch of their ancestral lands, and they seems to be doing well in their new turf so far as they go the power back on quickly. Blackouts continue throughout the UCAS, with varying degrees of severity, but it seems like the Grid Pirates/Blackout Boyz haven’t been nearly as active anywhere outside of Detroit, though present in a number of cities.

As the other figure from the train uncloaks herself, she and Ringmaster engage in a handshake-to-hug, and the team recognizes Arleesh’s voice, Kendra de Santos. They all head back to the SCIF at the Plat Zone, and get into it. De Santos provides them with a bit more news from outside, and suggests that the BL ritual implosion that killed thousands of civilians in Casa Aurelius will be excellent PR to recruit for the Rogue Lodge, and then briefs the team on that a bit as well.

Ringmaster provides PPJ with some messages- Darien Black summons him to Denver, promising some information about his disappearance but not acting nearly as fatherly as PPJ always hopes, Jonny Silver survived the Wild Hunt and celebrated with a 100 hour set on a riverboat down to Free STL, and is now back in Denver running Perinawyr’s label and club, since P has been banned from Denver by Ghostwalker, and Prot0 is also apparently back in Denver, but in a secretive “international terrorist on the run” way. Guy is in the wind, presumably with Berto, and de Santos explains that Aylin now works, with her mother, for Grey Cell, and has been especially useful on anti-Fear the Dark and Ordo Maximus ops, being infected herself.

With this news confirming that PPJ will be headed to Denver alongside most of the team, de Santos suggests that it would also be a great town to recruit for the Rogue Lodge in, since they can’t operate as “openly” as usual given GW’s autocratic control. de Santos and Ringmaster next explains that as well as valuable medicines, reagents and the like that they brought on the train, they brought some more of the artifacts that the ASPS made in Chicago to establish a Spirit of the City there, and plan to do the same process here.

They hint that they aim to establish Detroit as a longterm R&D and training base for Grey Cell, as well as wanting it to stay free in general, which the team gets on board with. They say they will also need ritualists to stabilize and sustain the SOTC, esp as it first gets going, and Dig immediately volunteers to remain, distressing Creep, who is still reeling from Cholula’s loss, while also becoming closer and closer to cyberpsychosis himself. They decide to table it for now and talk about the job at hand.

Ringmaster provides them with a list of 7 likely candidates, though he says they are free to seek out more, and suggests they check them all out, and use their influence around town to bring different factions on board to help establish one as the new SOTC. With the Belle Isle cleansing ritual down, and the BL having fucked up local mana space significantly, this project should take some priority.

The team heads out to start their investigation, starting up near Hamtrack along 8 Mile at the Magic Bag theater. There, they interact with some Juggalos, who seem appreciative of the team’s efforts to get food and other supplies to town and distro’ed around, and introduce them to their spirit leader, Hatchetman. Dig stays in the van, refusing to say a single “woop woop”, even though Dog has some affinity for the callouts to “family”. The rest of the team spends a few hours there, and feels a beneficial sense of chaos, at least for the in group. The spirit seems to be engaged in voluntary karmic pacts with it’s followers, and seems focused on keeping them safe and well but also very willing to turn on outsiders.

They aren’t totally sold but other than Dig are not inherently opposed. Next they head to the Motown Museum in Downtown, and party with a mix of spirits and metahumans, who are rotating through various instruments, keeping a dance party going. The Museum seems impressively intact, and TD sees that some of The Keepers seem to use this as a safe downtown spot to sleep. They chat with Smokey, who seems to be “in charge”, and who explains that music is necessary for rebuilding, and people need to cut loose after all the trauma. They dance a bit, and Smokey even gets an earworm stuck in Dig’s mind, after he claims to never have cared about music.

Smokey seems to recognize the balance of business and art needed to make it work, so a strong contender currently. They head for the next one, at an old Ford plant turned museum in Dearborn. They find a bunch of gaunt but muscular workers laboring away to repair the surrounding area, under the guidance of an imperious spirit named “Henry”. They question him a bit, and he seems to have strong feeling about his paternalistic role towards his workers, and his vision for a city rebuilt for the “right” kind of people. Dig is totally onboard but most of the rest of the team is suspicious, especially given Ford’s political history.

They next head up to the Blight, to track down a spirit called simply “Blight”. They find some toxie cultists who call themselves the Scions of the Blight, hanging around the area known as the Rusted Heart. They take the team to a toxic pool, which bubbles and spews forth strange, rapidly growing and decaying vines and plant life, rapidly disassembling nearby structures. The spirit talks through it’s acolytes and calls for an end to Anthropocene- metahuman supremacy must be abolished, cities destroyed, and the world rewilded, through mutation, just another word for rapid change.

CG and Dig are entranced and want to sign on. They spend some team helping tear down some nearby infrastructure, while Dog feels a bit ambivalent and many of the others more so, though also participating for now. They head out but Dig is really onboard. They rest up after a long day before hitting up the remaining 3. The next day they start off with “Hatcher”, at the old Solidarity House in the Docklands. They find a mixed group of dock workers, downtown working class survivors, and Betas/Deso Angels hanging out, shooting the shit, drinking and organizing.

Behind the bar, Hatcher pours the team some drinks. Dig drinks a bunch extra when PPJ, Creep and Otters all refuse (2 for sobriety, 1 for no mouth). Hatcher seems pleased at Dig’s ability to toss them back but less impressed by his admitted lack of physical prowess. They chat for a while, and Hatcher comes across well- recognizing the need for employment and the ability to survive/make a living for the people of Detroit, but wanting to protect all the little people from corpo degradation. PPJ also picks up a buggy vibe in general, and realizes Hatcher may have multiple meanings.

Inquiring about bugs, Hatcher explains she’s against queens the same way she’s against bosses- she’s for collective organizing and power. They hang for a while and have a good time, before heading for the shores of Lake St. Claire, where they encounter Three Fires- 3 spirits who have sat themselves around a campfire, exchanging stories and gossip as a means of doing business, all seemingly having arrived via spectral canoes. These seem to represent the Council of 3 Fires, the Ojibwe, Ottawa and Potawatomi people whose ancestral homelands encompass the whole metro area.

They have a long and fruitful conversation, in which the spirits tell the team that especially with the news from out West, it is only a matter of time until all their lands are returned to them, but that the days of mass expulsions are over- assuming the UCAS doesn’t force their hands again. This seems to be more the long game vision though, and a Free Detroit seems reasonable in the meantime- always fun to stick it to DeeCee, plus the people here deserve better than either the Feds or ARES. The team chats and hangs for a while before leaving, also feeling these spirits are strong contenders.

Lastly, they track down Singing Sam, who seems to be glitching between classic Mafia attire and a more modern Triad look. They chat with him for a while and Dig manages to magically chill him out enough that he accepts the shift in local organized crime, taking on a Triad look fulltime. Dig also gets Smokey’s song stuck in Singing Sam’s head, who walks off whistling it with a purpose, seemingly reinvigorated. With all the info in, the team puts together a ranked choice ballot and votes. Hatcher wins out eventually, though the range of opinions was quite wide.

With this decided, they call on all the factional rep and contacts around town, distributing the ASPS artifacts around to everyone they can get onboard, and de Santos leads a ritual at the Plat Zone, setting up Hatcher as the SOTC. Hatcher’s first order of business is setting up a spirit council with the other contenders, all of whom accept except Henry, who prefers to go it along on executing his vision. The team hopes by not giving him more power, they staved off a “paper clip problem” situation, and are encouraged by Hatcher’s action, though Creep is disappointed not to have returned the control of the city directly to it’s Native people.

With that done, Brunwyn gets in touch and tells them that with Otters’ mapping data and the intel they managed to salvage from the rogue Brackhaus that the team revealed, she has managed to track down the “center” of the zap zone and presumably the source of the Blackouts- the old main power station from the wired grid on Zug Island, in the Detroit river. She tells the team it’s time to do some recon and plan their assault- they need to get the power back on.

The other big news is that with the SOTC chosen and initially established, the sky finally returns to Earth normal and the leylines around town start to normalize. Shortly after this occurs, SK troops who had held off a nearby Quebecois invasion attempt, enter Windsor in force and make short work of the “True Canadian” separatists there, focusing on lightning strikes and quick surrender once SK gains control of the airport. This puts them on a more even footing with Wuxing locally, given the heavy Triad influx, leaving AZT in the weak position of the corporate triad in town at the moment.

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NOV/2023

Turning the Tide

Mourning, Healing, and Disrupting More Rituals

Runners
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
and the mysterious return of: Pepper Jack

The team spends a few days healing, repairing armor, gear and drones, and resting. ChewGum composes another memorial poem for Cholula, which is quickly shared around the memorial boards around town, and posted at the Plat Zone alongside CG’s memorial to Locke. Condolences for Cholula’s death come in from various different avenues, though there is also some relief from those who are still concerned about Betas as a phenomenon. CG also spends some time in his ritual space and summons a detritus spirit, a new entity he has learned to engage with, which will hopefully disturb others less than the corpses he usually summons.

Ringmaster calls them over to the Plat Zone for a meeting, and explains a strange situation to them. He had teams out fighting leftover spirits and closing rifts all over Downtown, cleaning up after the team shut down the big BL ritual, and one of them encountered someone. He helped them fight off some spirits and close a rift, and said some stuff about Denver and some other things, while seeming very confused. Ringmaster brought him here and got him fed, but wants the team to do a debrief on him.

He brings them back into the SCIF room at the back of the Brickhouse, and they are surprised to see that the man sitting there looks to be none other than former team member Pepperjack, who they are all very familiar with from the team file, especially having recently reviewed some of PPJ’s notes on the Denver “reality rips” while fighting rifts here in Detroit. He does indeed seem quite confused, and Otters does careful etiquette work to try to bring him up to speed while introducing the team.

PPJ seems to really hate blood mages and initially has some trouble with Dig who explains Red magic somewhat poorly, insisting it is based on the power of blood. Otters explains that it’s not quite like that, and tries to explain the Tzuri group, which then leads into CG, who they have to convince PPJ is not a shedim. Luckily, once they explain that they are fighting the Black Lodge, PPJ agrees to assist. His memory has some major gaps, but he slowly recalls stuff from before his disappearance in Temple of Terror IV that checks out with the team file, so they believe it to truly be him.

PPJ refuses Dig’s offer to read his mind to try to restore missing memories, still not quite trusting him. They check in with Ringmaster and tell him that PPJ’s story checks out, and that he will be working with them for now. Ringmaster thanks him, and in payment for his assistance agrees to attempt to contact some of his former team members (Jonny Silver, Guy, Prot0, Aylin etc) when able, as well as get a message out immediately to Darien Black via TM comms.

Ringmaster explains that they need to round up every ally they can to hit the Black Lodge in their fortified wall neighborhood, before they can complete whatever it is that they’re attempting now. The team decides to host another shadow meeting at the Plat Zone, and splits up to contact everyone they think can help. PPJ is delighted to hear that one of his contacts, Erika Knowles, is in town, so he agrees to tag along to that meeting as well as a bunch of the other ones since he actually seems the closest to a “face” on the team at the moment, with The Detective still occupied in rebuilding Hamtramck.

Creep has also been off comms for a while, scouting out the BL defenses, but they leave him a message and hope he checks it. CG and PPJ head up to Hamtramck and give TD a brief on the plan, as well as Sikh Burn and their other allies. They agree to send what help they can, with Sikh Burn planning to attend the meeting to represent their area. They stop in at Penelope Beans’ shop to get PPJ stocked up on reagents, as he reappeared with very little equipment and no money.

PPJ is instantly weirded out by Beans, who he has actually heard of before- she was listed as the info broker/supply point of contact for IOND shadow ops in Detroit when PPJ was doing that work for Darien Black back in Denver. She asks him about his affinity for crystals suggestively and he deflects, which also weirds CG out a bit. CG starts to notice that there seems to be a tiny lag in Beans’ responses, and they quickly assense her, finding no aura at all. Not having time to investigate further, they tag this to look into, buy their reagents, and head out.

Back at the Plat Zone, the team starts questioning PPJ about some of the things that Beans said about him, and he reveals that he has a blood Crystal spine, but refuses to acknowledge that it is blood magic at Dig’s consternation. When Otters scans him more thoroughly, she finds another small implanted crystal alongside the spine, which PPJ has no memory or knowledge of. He now agrees to let Dig read his mind, and Dig goes all out, finding that there is a large blank period between his disappearance in Boston and reappearance here, though it is only about 1/10th the amount of time that passed on Earth, implying some metaplanar travel and time distortion.

PPJ has only faint memories of a mazelike city, and being kept there against his will and forced to do things, and Dig is able to get a little more info there, and recognizes the memories of the city as “Dis”, that chaotic city that the team had caught a brief glimpse of, and managed to get a Quicksilver plate of, on the moon, through an anomalous portal there. But what does it mean? Dig analyzes the mystery crystal further, as it seems connected to PPJ’s brainstem, and tries to detect thoughts on it. It seems alien in nature- he’s unfamiliar with it as either a tech device or a magical spell/construct and can’t fully make heads or tails of it, but can tell it is storing something.

Also it seems to be made of the same material as the manatech weapon chips that TM’s have been digging for around the Scar blast zone. Dig decides to Mind Probe the crystal as well, and finds that it is storing some of PPJ’s missing memories, somehow, as well as working similarly to a Blood Crystal, in terms of providing an implant-like function in exchange for essence that would be lost if it were removed. He sees PPJ fighting and performing surgeries (making Chimeras, similar to the ones encountered at Site 000), all seemingly not under his own control, or in a kind of daze.

A cloaked figure eventually takes PPJ away after quickly implanting this crystal, and leads him on a mad flight through the chaotic streets of Dis, before shoving him through a portal, leading him into what looks like Kadath. PPJ stumbles through Kadath for a while before tumbling out into Detroit, and being found by Ringmaster’s crew. PPJ, with some memories restored, compares notes with the team on how terrifying Kadath and the Bone Bridges beyond are, and is disturbed when Otters seems to be a little too interested in Bridge building.

Otters also insists on deeper scans, and runs a comparison with Chimera samples they got for Knowles in Site 000, and finds that PPJ has been altered. She then does a thorough radar scan, and finds the alteration- an extremely long tongue that wraps around the interior of PPJ’s skull, like a woodpecker. However, it seems more lizard-like when Otters yanks it out to full extension and runs a series of experiments. It seems to extend very rapidly to a 3-4 meter range, and be both prehensile and very sticky.

PPJ goes along with this, but then, disturbed, leans on a wall, and is horrified when his hand phases through. He tells the team he can feel inside the wall and seems upset so they yank him out, pulling some drywall with. After some experimentation, he finds he can make his hands spectral, and slide them through solid surfaces, though it doesn’t work on objects and he can’t bring stuff back through. The team, thoroughly creeped out, takes notes, but it seems like since PPJ is as surprised as them, they stick with him for now.

They round up a number more allies from all over town, and get ready for the big meeting. Everyone shows, with the exception of Creep and Jaga/Walker in Ways. After some deal-making, overseen by Ringmaster, it shakes out as follows: The Betas will get to keep former ARES HQ tower, now renamed Freehive, as a base for their new style of merge, the University will remain a free enclave, Hamtramck assures it’s ongoing semi-independence, the gang coop assures it’s dominance of local street level crime (with a pro-social aspect), Biyu lays claim to syndicate control of Detroit via the Triad, with the ports under Wuxing’s aegis, and SK and AZT makes plans to split up the rest of the town, seeming to recognize that a somewhat freeform area can be useful to both their corps, with appropriate controls in place.

Otters makes the case for the streets as best she can after Ringmaster pushes a bit, and the corporate triad agrees- Brunwyn makes comparisons to Berlin having it’s uses, Cehualli seems happy to have space for some black labs and also an opportunity to make ARES look bad on a massive PR scale, and Biyu seems quite thrilled with holding onto everything she managed to grab during the crises here. Ringmaster side channels the team to tell them that he has some plans in the works he will bring them further into later also, to help ensure the city stays free.

With the meeting concluded and everyone onboard, Brunwyn privately insists on 2 more personal conditions for her assistance- PPJ will be interviewed by an SK doctor once Detroit reopens, and the team will assist her with getting the matrix issues resolved. She compares notes quickly with Otters and thinks that together they should be able to finally determine the origin of the Zap Zone. She explains that the rogue Brackhaus the team helped take out a few days back had apparently been working for the Null Sect inside the corp, having been lured into their employ with promises of treatment for his CFD infection, which he kept secret from the corp for fear of the obvious repercussions.

The team agrees, and Brunwyn signs on fully as well. The team gets a panicked message from Creep, saying he couldn’t make the meeting as he got ambushed by some people who tried to steal his leg. He got away for now but needs to keep running/hiding, and go dark while he does. They also haven’t heard from Jaga and Walker in Ways still, so bird Dig and Otters in a VTOL zip over to Belle Isle, and find it under attack both physically, from a few dozen well-armed and armored BL soldiers, as well as on the astral, where some powerful spirits are assaulting the cleansing ritual.

Both Dig and Otters are quickly spotted, though it seems the battle is pitched enough that they make their escape without coming under attack. Returning to the Plat Zone and reporting in, they all decide that they need to launch the attack on Casa Aurelius immediately, with at least some BL forces elsewhere engaged, and hope that splitting the BL’s attention can help their allies on Belle Isle. Wood Raven comes through with a stealthed rocket speedboat for the team to use to insert via Lake St. Clair, and Patricia Loveland (finally meeting in person now that Cholula is dead, though she still distrusts the Betas), Erika Knowles, and Ellis manage to make some quick and dirty mini-portal closers for the team to distribute around the area once they sneak in.

Everyone else will assault Casa Aurelius’ defenses from the land side, hopefully distracting the defenders and allowing the team to pull off their risky alpha strike. They get a number of side messages offering big paydays in exchange for paydata and items recovered from the BL stronghold. The team drives to the waterfront east of the Bligh, and loads up into the boat. Otters steers it down, remaining out of sight of guards on the shore. PPJ spots some patrolling spirits, and they make a plan. Otters, with her new sniper drone, and CG with his rifle, both take down one of the two guards on the beach they choose for their landing.

PPJ hits one of them again with a spell to keep him down, while Dig uses magic hands to pull them both into the water until they drown, while also hopefully concealing any TacNet signals. They approach, with Otters accidentally beaching the boat on some tank traps, but not catastrophically. Dig uses magic hands again to lift up the concertina wire strung along the shore, careful not the break the circuit flowing through it, and the team sneaks up to the mana barrier in between spirit patrols.

Dig reshapes his aura to look like Freddy Bales, and easily slips through. He then assists the others as they power down their various magics and enter, and has en easy time bringing all the drones through as he has “legitimate access”. The team sneaks through town, seeing the battle kicking off on the land side, as well as hearing distant muffled sounds of fighting ongoing from Belle Isle. Otters begins planting their mini-portal closer bombs via stealth drone at magical junction points spotted by the mages, as they all conceal themselves from foot patrols. One of which comes by seeking Freddy Bales- apparently someone detected “his” entrance through the barrier.

Dig does some quick bird recon, and finds Bales’ manor, figuring it’s a good target for looting. CG finds a sniper perch to keep a lookout and cause a distraction if needed, and Otters keep planting charges. Dig and PPJ head to the manor, and PPJ pulses the front to shut down electronic defenses, using his spectral hand to unlock the deadbolt from inside the door. They enter, and poke around, finding a study, where Dig uncovers a safe set in the floor, which he magically shapes concrete to free and then lifts out with his magic hands. PPJ reaches around inside but can’t open it, so they bring it with for now.

Otters has most of the charges planted when CG spots some other BL snipers taking high vantage points in preparation for the area’s defense. He takes them out with his rifle, but then has to flee, getting tagged a couple times by guards as he runs away. He leads them on a chase for a bit, allowing Otters time to plant the last few charges, before CG runs out of the barrier towards town, fleeing to the safety of his allies’ assault lines. He gets hit a few more times but luckily is defended by his spirit and mostly takes them on the armor.

Meanwhile, PPJ and Dig have found a secret door down to a sound-proofed and well-appointed basement. Sneaking forward, they find Bales’ dad in conversation with none other than Penelope Beans herself! Both appear to be BL leaders, and strangest of all, they have another PPJ tied to a chair in a vault room in the basement. They get in a magical fight, managing to take out Bales’ dad as Beans tries to seal the vault door. Dig prevents it with magic hands as PPJ quickly grabs a journal that slid out of Bales’ dad’s robe when he collapsed to the floor and died.

They get in a brutal magical slugfest with Beans, who deals them both a lot of damage before Dig finally manages to smack her with his magic hand, distracting her. Otters, searching for them now that the charges are planted, finally locates the basement, and rushes to their aid, blasting Beans with a Mule drone, killing her. Otters says they need to get out of there, and heads back upstairs, hearing some guards approaching, reporting 2 “high value assets’” biomonitors just triggered.

Otters waits for an opportune moment, and then detonates the charges outside to distract the response team, before fleeing out the back, telling the others to follow. In the basement, PPJ is befuddled by his seeming exact double, and the double (drugged and slurring) keeps insisting that he is the real one, and that the false one will bleed purple. Dig gives in and cuts the double, who seems completely horrified to see purple blood pour from the wound.

As PPJ tries to get them to leave and figure it out later, Dig fires the double with a lightning bolt, and then flees. The team races away from the back of the mansion as pressure builds in the air, heading towards the boat. Dig manages to hoist it off the tank traps partway with magic hands and Otters rocket boosts the craft free, though it is holed and taking on water. CG keeps shooting on the town side as the mana barrier starts to crackle and destabilize. Vihn Trong and other mages race forward to contain the expected blowback as best they can, as Otters races the boat straight away out into the lake.

As the district implodes inside the barrier and then explodes out from it in a massive pressure wave, the mages are able to deflect it out into the lake. The boat is flipped, but Otters in the VTOL and bird Dig manage to fly through it, and then are able to make enough of a drone raft to hoist PPJ up and keep him from drowning. They are eventually rescued by some allies after a while floating, during which they watch the astral sky stabilize to a more normal appearance. Not quite regular night stars yet but getting closer!

View

NOV/2023

Rifts vs Riffs

The Black Lodge Makes Their Move, Cholula Makes His Exit

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
Tabasco aka Cholula

Dig starts off the day by heading up to his magical order meeting at the zoo. Everyone trickles in, with Freddy Bales there before even Dig, and his usual preppy self, and then the other 2 showing up, concealed (Norman Burger) or wrapped up in defensive magic (Marjo-Lin). Dig gives an inspiring introduction to the day’s lesson plan, and Bales gives him a subtle thumbs up, casually undermining his authority as per usual. The initiation goes well however, and everyone succeeds under Dig’s guidance, gaining access to new powers and abilities.

Dig heads back, and the team briefs with Ringmaster- the rifts are still popping up, and still need to get looked into- he’s trying to keep anyone he can off the Downtown streets, whether that’s getting them out of the district or underground (where there don’t seem to have been any rifts yet). They head out and Creep and Otters work up a rift map of the known occurrences thus far, and start trying to guess where others might be based in their estimation of the cause/origin in the portal weapon that Vogel detonated to end the bug threat.

Dig casts a massive catalog spell to seek the strange reflective black metal, and they quickly find a rift. Two large horned apes in heavy smoking armor wielding greataxes have cornered a group of civilians and already taken some heads. The team decides they have to get involved, and CG debuts his new astral combat spell which he just learned from Dig earlier in preparation. They manage to send the two spirits back through the rift and get a drone in just in time to get some sensor data before it snaps shut. Dig also gets some magical analysis done. Unfortunately, the van takes some heavy damage from one of the axes.

The drone through the rift saw that the spirits, after being disrupted in our plane, seem to have reformed in Kadath, not healed but healing, so probably for the best that the team didn’t follow them in. Otters once again sees “through” Kadath to a Bone Bridge, but perceiving it through drone sensors seems to blunt the impact to some degree. Dig manages to determine that the rifts seems to be temporarily reaspecting their immediate area into effectively being a part of Kadath, which is probably why most of the spirits stick pretty close to them.

He also sees some magical tendrils drifting away from the rift towards the area of Downtown under the Scar, which looks unusually turbulent today. Otters and Creep have also compared some notes while updating their rifts map, and determined that they have a centerpoint- the former plaza/park that was right out front of ARES HQ downtown, next to the site of the detonation that caused the Scar. They head that way, stealthily, to see what’s up.

They manage some good recon without getting spotted, but what they see is pretty awful- a circle of 12 Black Lodge mages have a massive magical dome up around their ritual circle, and seem to be pulling some kind of cyclonic astral tunnel down from the Scar, though it seems to travel through and beyond Kadath now, as if they have redirected that astral effect. It hasn’t touched down yet, and seems to progress in jerks and starts, likely as more rifts open, from what they can tell.

They also have 4 heavy gunners set up in well defended positions with good views watching for any mundane threats approaching, and 2 adept guards with mage blades fighting off any spirits. Interestingly, the strange spirits that have emerged from the rifts seem drawn to this place, so they have their hands busy, acting as a quick response force to keep them from reaching the ritual dome.

The team tries to call it in to Ringmaster, and finds that either the magic or a jamming field is blocking comms, so they retreat a bit to call it in. Feeling that the threat level warrants it, they also decide to try to use their last two major arcana. Dig easily activates The Eclipse card, and sees a horrifying vision of the future if the ritual succeeds, which seems hyperreal to him, but is undetectable to the others. It shows the cyclone touching down, and the BL using this ritual plus others around town to fragment and capture a Horror from beyond the Chasm, across the Bone Bridge, chaining it with incantations and bindings as they slice it apart to make it manageable.

As this occurs, Dig sees in the vision, the local astral plane is immediately reshaped and made terrible, almost like an inverse of the establishment of a Spirit of the City, and much faster. Dig gets the feeling that even though they seem barely able to hold the containment, this will grant the BL an almost unimagineable amount of power, at least locally. He emerges from the vision trance to find the card gone, with no time having passed for the others. He describes what he saw, and they make the call as Creep tries to puzzle out the Discipline card.

Ringmaster instructs them to attack as they likely can’t afford to wait, and says he will call for aid but needs the team to slow or stop the ritualists in the mean time as it will take some time to muster assistance. Creep finally chills out enough, with CG’s assistance, to center himself, and lay out and clean all his gear in prep for this upcoming monumental task, and succeeds in activating Discipline. It manifests as a powerful Task spirit, in the guise of Rosanne era John Goodman, who says he will assist Creep and protect him during his upcoming ordeal. A drone zips in close to the van and a prerecorded message from Wood Raven wishes them luck, dropping off two missiles to get revenge for all the Swarm members lost to spirits and rifts lately.

Feeling as prepped as they can and with no time to waste, they make a quick plan of attack and head back to the ritual area. Creep and Cholula approach through the DDB tunnels, planning to attack from the East, where the final big bug breakout left a large opening, while the rest of the team hits from the SW. They set their mission timers, and wait to hit “go” until they see some strange spirits on the approach to distract the mageblade guards.

As some horrifying birdmen (who seem to perhaps have been lured here by small figures who slip away) attack, the team makes their move. Otters hits the spirits and mageblades with simultaneous missile and overlapping fields of fire from the two Mules, which takes out the mageblades and damages the spirits. The team finds the other 4 guards quite a bit harder, and gets into a brutal shootout with them, with Dig launching magical attacks from the cover of the van, CG sniping from extreme range at height, Otters firing from the van and two drones, and Creep and Cholula making their approach and hitting the opposite corner guard with flaming arrows, elephant guns and spirit powers.

The guards, heavily armed and armored, make fairly short work of both Mules and the van, spinning up their miniguns with devastating effects. Creep almost takes a couple bad hits that John Goodman saves him from, and Cholula gets tagged a couple times. Luckily, between Cholula’s flaming arrows and the spirit’s accident power, they manage to detonate their guards gun, and are able to chip away at his armor, even while coming under fire from one of the remaining guards.

CG has range on the guards, whose high rate of fire miniguns can’t reach his sniper perch, so he contents himself to just pick away at their armor when he can get a shot in, and also provide counterspelling support in case the ritualists get involved, which half of them quickly do. They turn to face outwards, and somehow channel some of the ritual energy into the 3 attacking birdman spirits, seemingly sucking their essence into the ritual and increasing it’s power and stability via their sacrifice.

Otters sneaks out of the van, staying in cover, and starts piloting the snake drones into the combat area to attempt some sneak attacks. Dig slips out in animal form and keeps launching spells. They gradually whittle away the guards, eventually finishing them off, but unfortunately have come to the attention of the ritualists, who have begun to target them with that same energy draining effect that destroyed the spirits. Luckily, with the guards gone, they are relatively free to maneuver so Creep gets John Goodman to massively increase his speed and plants all the team’s explosives around the magical barrier, detonating them and cracking it.

As the mages flip between targets, Cholula is badly injured and forced to retreat into the tunnel, while Creep is nearly killed, though John Goodman saves him, pushing him out of sight and getting destroyed in his place. Dig and CG are both targeted and injured, though they manage to stay in the fight with their counter-spelling. They all pour fire onto the damaged magical dome, including Cholula arcing explosive arrows out of cover, as Otters, badly injured herself from dumpshock, crawls forward to grab one of the Mule’s guns, as a distraction, before going prone and hot into the snakes.

They manage to crack the dome, destroying the mage’s magical protection, and begin attacking directly. CG starts blasting them with the sniper rifle, while also telling Cholula to reemerge from his hiding place to attack as well, he quickly lights some on fire. With all this distraction, Otters manages to successfully KO a couple mages with the snake drones’ darts- when they lose focus, they themselves are sucked into the ritual and destroyed. It seems to become more chaotic and less stable with each mage lost, but the team doesn’t have a better plan and only intermittent comms so they continue.

Dig is forced to hide himself behind a summoned concrete shield to break line of site as he is almost killed, and then turns to a bug and sneaks into the ritual circle while maintaining his concrete manipulation spell. CG covers him with sniping and counterspelling as best he can. Cholula is badly injured and nearly killed by the mages, who also finally manage to destroy the snake drones with lightning bolts, also nearly killing Otters from the dumpshock. As CG watches his team fall in horror through his scope from far away, Dig makes a last desperate move, pulling on his reserves of good fortune to shape concrete in such a way as to disrupt the ritual circle and it’s runes and markings.

With all the mages still alive and focused, they might have stood a chance, but as is they lose control. As they start getting hit with the massive drain of the failed ritual, and Dig flees the side effects, the BL mages begin bursting and being sucked into the ritual. The final mage throws back his hood, and shouts a horrified “teach! no!” revealing himself to be Freddy Bales, before slapping his hands together and himself exploding. He seems to have been the ritual leader, and the team sees that although the astral cyclone withdraws without ever having made touchdown, he was able in his final moment to redirect much of the energy of the ritual and it’s many sacrifices somewhere to the East.

Unfortunately, they also see that being the last one the ritual was tied to, Cholula has also been destroyed and sucked in, his limited essence and force providing some further power to some dark purpose as he is annihilated. Having nothing left of him to even try to heal, Dig and CG hustle to stabilize and heal Creep and Otters, and begin collecting drone and van parts they can salvage, as the reinforcements finally arrive. Brunwyn sent along her personal guards, who tell the team they are sorry they missed the fight (sincerely) but suggest a meeting with their master soon. A variety of other runners and Plat Zone regulars also show up, and secure the scene and provide support and transport to the team.

Dig invents a new drink called “The Cholula” and everyone takes shots of it back at the Plat Zone. Creep gets a new cyberarm to try to buff up his failing body a bit- it’s barely even surgery since he has the quick release ports. Dig is in a weird mental state, seeing as he lost a friend and also a student betrayed him, so he sentimentally holds onto Creep’s meat arm (literally), planning to keep it in the Vault of Ages. The team debriefs with Ringmaster, as CG does some scouting to the East to see where all that mana went. Upsettingly, it seems that the walled Casa Aurelius district is now covered in a fully opaque magical barrier, with armed guards patrolling outside.

The team remembers that Freddy Bales introduced them to an older man who he identified as his father at the museum gala in that district, and are horrified to confront the fact that although they were able to halt the main ritual, the threat of the Black Lodge may not yet be over. Passed on CG’s and other scouts’ reports, Ringmaster says they likely have a little time to heal, re-equip, and muster allies, since the BL seems to be on a defensive footing, but that they shouldn’t delay an assault for too long, as who knows what kind of nefarious deeds the BL might get up to in the meantime.

However, some good has come of the team’s actions already- they prevented the primary ritual, and this seems to have closed the Scar, as well as ending the sporadic rifts opening around town. None have been sighted since the ritual was disrupted, and Ringmaster has teams out cleaning up any straggler spirits and making sure their associated rifts close. The spirits seem to all be from the deep metaplanes or beyond- some are what are often classified as “lesser Horrors” or “Tzitzimine.”

The team rests and heals for a few days, with Otters, in a chipper mood as always, sharing memories of Cholula with those who will listen. Marjo-Lin tells Dig that she and some other Keepers were the ones that lured the birdman spirits over to the ritual, having heard Ringmasters call for aid, and also tells Dig she’s sorry for what happened to his magical order- apparently Norman Burger was another one of the BL ritualists! ML tells Dig that she was a bit surprised as she never got a human supremacist vibe off of either one, but this does explain Bales’ skill as masking his aura and appearing innocuous.

Dig briefly considers killing ML as well, just in case, but Otters talks him out of it. For one, she’s an ork, making her very unlikely to be a Black Lodge member. Also, she’s one of The Detective’s close contacts in the Keepers. For now, the team rebuilds and begins to try to figure out what to do about Casa Aurelius- a rich human-centric district makes a lot of sense as a BL stronghold.

View

NOV/2023

Corporate Confusion and Dodging Rifts

SK Internal Politics Come to a Head!

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
Tabasco aka Cholula

While resting and repairing at the new Plat Zone safehouse, the team gets a few messages. Peregrine says that he has a Johnson who specifically requested their team for a job, and Ringmaster says he needs some recon done around town on some rumors of small rifts appearing and vanishing ever since the Black Lodge ritual got disrupted and imploded. Creep pushes hard for doing the Peregrine gig for some solid non-magical payday times, and the team eventually agrees, though Cholula and Otters hope to maybe encounter some rifts on the way to get some quick intel.

They head out towards The Dom enclave, and only make it halfway before encountering a rift- 3 strange corrupted spider hybrids with long spindly legs are dragging a pile of drugged and bound captives back into a rift. CG sets up the quicksilver camera while the rest of the team engages the spider’s in combat, with Otters firing the van gun while Cholula charges in. He spots that the spiders have bound the captives with some sort of magical webbing after disabling them with a toxin, which he almost falls prey to himself.

They manage to defeat the spiders, and save the final captive as the rift puckers shut with an audible snap. Doing some investigation onsite, they are able to find a small fragment of unidentifiable black reflective stone, and crumbled and burnt remains of some more of the stuff. This seems to be what AZT mentioned the TM’s have been digging for, and doing some quick CSI, Otters is able to determine that the magitech weapon that detonated over Downtown, creating the Scar, could have shot shrapnel out to this locaiton.

Dig is able to detect some magical traces, that suggest that this tiny fragment was part of a larger whole, powered by sacrificial magic some time previous, and to do with portals or gateways. It seems to still have a small amount of power onboard so they stash it in Creep’s leg, and head back to the Plat Zone, with CG using his medkit to stabilize their rescued victim. At the Plat Zone, Dig asks if there are any TM’s around, and Electric Blue comes forward, and volunteers to touch the weird fragment at Dig’s request.

He says he feels a little more connected and whole, so Dig checks him out in the astral, and sees that he seems to have a possibly temporarily enhanced essence, but that this has drained the small remaining power from the fragment. It doesn’t seem to be instantly addictive, but EB does his best to describe the feeling, and how he can understand the pull of this would have, especially to anyone who had lost some of their essence to injury, implant, etc and wanted to restore that connection.

Ringmaster seems worried about this development, and even more worried about what the team tells him they briefly glimpsed through the rift, which he confirms with a look at the quicksilver plate. It opened into the infinite maze of Kadath, and though only Otters say through and beyond, her report of seeing the construction of a Bone Bridge is upsetting, Ringmaster warns her to guard her mind and dreams, but since she lacks the ability to reach the astral plane herself, thinks she should be reasonably safe for now. He requests more info, as they team continues their travels around town.

Continuing on their way, they reach the bar adjacent to the bank that is now included in the expanding Dom “safe zone”. They enter the bar, and find one of the Brackhauses from the hotel mission awaiting them with their bodyguards. Now appearing with a feminine aspect, and unclear which was the “true” appearance if either, the team decides to refer to this one as “Frau Brackhause” for expediency. The young Vietnamese street mage and Black troll bodyguard are keeping an eye on the meet from different points in the bar, but give the team a nod of recognition from their last encounter in the DDB.

Sitting down, Frau Brackhaus gives them the rundown- she wants to sabotage the other Brackhaus (who the team decided to refer to as “Herr Brackhaus” for expediency). She tells them that she will make sure their team is recommended to him for a job he is putting together, and that all she wants them to do is record the meet and the job, leaving themselves out of the footage, and plant a program in a system they will access as part of the job. She gives them a chip with the program on it, and asks if they want to negotiate.

Lacking the skill, Otters requests “a little more money than your initial offer”, and she chuckles and tells them what she’ll pay. They agree, head back out to the van, and shortly receive a radio call from Herr Brackhaus, requesting a meet, in a short while at the same bar. They agree, and Otters circles the block until it’s time to head back in. They find Herr Brackhaus waiting at a different booth, but with his 2 twin adept bodyguards similarly deployed keeping an eye on things. They seem a bit less friendly to the team.

HB explains that he wants the team to break into an electronics store and swap out some data cores, and then break into an apartment and steal any electronics present and fence them at the Trading Post, where he set up an account that will deliver their pay. The store break-in must be unnoticed and the apartment must be somewhat obvious. If this all goes well, he requests they come meet him after at the bar atop the hotel where they first met.

Dig inserts the program that Frau Brackhaus gave them into one of the data cores, and they decide not to investigate either that or the cores themselves. They reach the address of the store in the Golden Mile shopping district along the west riverfront, and do some quick recon. The lone proprietor seems to be running in and out of the store doing sales outfront and inventory inside, while a guard watches the front. It’s in a recently converted Stuffer Shack, so all the disused vents and grease traps are still onsite but not running.

There’s an emergency exit on the alley at the back, and no running security cameras, so they go for an old school distraction out front while other sneak in. Cholula and CG feign getting into a fight while Dig does some magical mood manipulation, and Creep sneaks in a vent and opens the alley door for one of the Mule drones, which Otters rigs in and uses to swap the 3 data cores. The distraction works, but the market seems to have some magical security as a guard comes running warning everyone of magical manipulation. Cholula tries to hip check him and gets whacked, hard, with a stun baton for his trouble.

Dig becomes visible, announces he is the magical mastermind, and then turns into a bird and flies off. With the guard a bit distracted by this, Cholula and CG take this opportunity to flee, with all 3 feeling they may not want to return to the market for a while. They head to apartment next, luckily encountering no more rifts on their drive across Downtown. They start doing recon on the apartment, and are hyper-suspicious of the fact that it seems to be a regular nice condo in a guarded building without any traps or special security.

Cholula and Creep sneakily scale up to the unit while Dig watches for ambushes and guard patrols, and CG and Otters drive back to the Plat Zone to pick up the VTOLs to load the goods. On their way back, they spot some horrifying floating heads with dangling tentacles chasing and capturing some children, and decide to ignore it, feeling underpowered. They both take a hit with their rep with the Keepers in response. They get the VTOL’s and head back, returning to the team with no further trouble, having also reported in their new sighting to Ringmaster.

The team executes a simple B&E with no issues and gets a good haul of high end consumer electronics, as well as a monogrammed shaving kit, though it doesn’t appear to have been used and has no ritual samples. They head to the Trading Post, sell the goods, and get paid as promised. They head to the Dom again and call Frau Brackhaus on the mesh network. FB thanks them for the data they got, pays them, and tells them to do the same thing again for whatever job HB offers them next (record, report in, get paid twice). They agree and head back to the hotel.

They spot the floating tentacle heads again, this time with no kids, but looking a bit inflated and moving slower. Otters takes a pot shot but they seem especially resistant to physical weapons, so she speeds away. They drive off and call it in to the Plat Zone on the radio. At the hotel, realizing that some of them had gotten spotted during their attack there, only CG and Otters head in, getting a pat down but not an especially hard time from the concierge. They reach the bar up top, and find the troll crooner, matronly info broker and other regulars ensconsed as usual, with some patrons drinking by the windows and calling out when they spot new rifts popping up around Downtown.

They head to HB’s corner booth and slide past his alert twin guards. He kicks them over a heavy armored case, and explains that he has a ton of corp scrip that he needs to swap for liquid assets, via a Triad exchange, and also use this to buy a short term Triad safehouse. Once the team makes the swap, returns with spendable currencies, and gets the safehouse set up, he’ll have one last task for them, and pay double of the last job. They agree, grab the case and head out. They encounter another rift near the scar, with a huge mass of flesh, eyes, and mouths chasing and absorbing some survivors, and growing as it does.

As Otters prepares to fire, it foes invisible, but Dig and Cholula confirm it is still around, so the team opens up as best they can. It moves upsettingly quickly once attacked, and gloms onto the van, beginning to absorb Cholula. Luckliy Dig is able to do some magical damage, and Otters uses a slick van maneuver to break it’s hold and throw it off, after which it retreats to its rift. Dig almost follows it in, but is talked out of it just as the rift snaps shut, with some of the team vowing not to stick around if he does. Both Dig and Cholula really want to enter a rift though!

After some discussion, Dig flies ahead to give Grandmother Biyu a respectful heads up about the double Johnson situation on this job so she doesn’t waste a good safehouse, and she has them meet with her semi-captive TM Tater, who seems to still be working off his debt. They make the cash exchange at truly extortionate rates, and get the safehouse address and details. Otters, fearing more rift encounters, decides to solo VTOL back to the bar, and uses the rooftop bar since she was already screened for entry, though she is patted down once more.

She passes over the much lighter case, and passes along the address. HB then gives them the final task- a hit on the local SK middle manager who is overall in charge or the corp’s ops here during the Blackout. HB explains that he has personal beef with this manager, and that instead of seeing HB’s promise and advancing him, the manager has been wasting both of their time playing HB off against another local Brackhaus while he claims all the credit for their successes. Otters asks a few questions but agrees- it seems this middle manager is the guy whose monogrammed shaving kit they found earlier. HB is able to provide them with some ritual samples, however.

Otters zips over to the Dom and back to the Plat Zone, getting approval to continue from FB, who seems quite content with how this is all going. All she wants is for them to tell her first when the hit is done. Otters tries to make sure the team isn’t going to get any blowback, and FB suggests that so long as they did their job and aren’t on the recordings, there shouldn’t be any issues. Dig uses the ritual samples to track the guy down, after which the team decides that the easiest option is just to have Dig do the hit too, since he can mask his magic.

He flies to the manager’s location as a bird, astrally disguises his aura to look like a rift and casts an illusion of a rift crackling with lightning, and the bursts the manager with a lighting bolt. Hearing some panicked screams from witnesses and passers-by about how “oh god the rifts shoot lightning now” and similar, he flees the area. With that done, Otters VTOLs back to the Dom, gets paid, and gets a “well done” from FB, who explains that as the survivor of this whole situation she will have greater discretionary budget available soon, and likely more use for the team.

They decide not to report in to HB, not wanting to get in whatever trap FB has set for him, and skip the final chunk of their pay. Dig muses about how cheap it is for someone to get the team to kill someone, especially when they don’t even bother to pick up the money. They rest up as CG initiates again to get the Flux metamagic to conceal his astral comings and goings from the Black Lodge, who almost surely have a ritual sample of his. Dig also levels up his astral combat with Dog’s approval, to better fight these disutbing rift creatures. Checking the team file, they can find no mention of any of them from the Denver section, the last time sporadic rifts were spitting forth monsters and sucking civilians back through.

Ringmaster says he needs them to keep looking, which they plan to do after Dig does his monthly magical order meeting. First, however, they are summoned to a meeting with Brunwyn on her boat. They all attend besides CG, who is busy building up and using his new magical lodge at Plat Zone, and Cholula, who is still concerned about being captured and exploited by corps as a specimen. The rest of the team goes to the meet and gets a light warning about interfering too much in SK internal business- Brunwyn seems amused with how all the squabbling of the mortal employees in town has gone up to this point, but wants to make a point that she is paying attention and has noticed the team’s involvement.

She turns to walk away, dismissing them, and DIg having missed the point asks “so why did you ask us to meet?” after which Creep has to intercede and explain what just happened, after which they exit, with Baritone also telling them they’ll likely receive some more work soon. They head back to the Plat Zone, and rest up while Dig heads out for his meeting, before they head back out to get to the bottom of these rifts…..

View

NOV/2023

Rescue Mission and Ritual Disruption

RIP Chewgum? Nah

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
Tabasco aka Cholula

The team, newly tipped off to some strange rituals occuring around town (performed by mysterious cloaked figures) head out to investigate, unable to find any initial traces of ChewGum. Cholula hangs back initially to finish healing, while TD keeps helping out in Hamtramck. Dig, Otters, and Creep navigate their way over the partially blown bridges to Windsor, which is starting to feel a bit separate- the physical difficulties of travel there currently manifesting in some slight cultural drift.

They head to the necropolis and check on CG’s bolthole there, finding all his stuff intact, but some evidence that someone had been there before them- a few well-concealed trackers, and some kind of hard to see trick with the door that they didn’t spot in time. Worried about who might come looking, they hid and surveil for a while, and eventually see a watcher spirit turn up, see them, and flee before they can engage. Dig tries to track it but something obscures his ability to do so. They are concerned that this watcher looks similar or perhaps identical to the one that was following Bloodripper when they ambushed him.

After waiting long enough (and getting enough drones on surveillance) to be convinced noone else is coming right now, they track down the ritual site – at an intersection of leylines in the cemetery complex. Dig checks it out, and Creep doses himself with some eye drops provided by the Walker in Ways, which allow anyone with their natural eyes to gain astral perception for 1 day/night rotation, with some costs.

The ritual looks like a large force endeavor, with a ton of reagents expended, and a sacrifice component, though someone has cleaned up the astral area since, making it hard to get specifics. Dig thinks he could recognize the cast if he encounters them or their signature. While checking the expended reagents for evidence, Dig recognizes some as of a brand he’s bought from Grandmother Biyu before, and heads over to her base to enquire.

Creep and Otters head back to Detroit proper on foot to meet up. Dig confers with Biyu, and she confirms that the reagents are hers, processed and sold at a Triad facility on the Dockfront. She gives Dig the location and calls ahead to tell them to cooperate. Dig flies over after radio-ing the others to meet him there. They link back up at the facility, and after some initial pushback the on-site Triad security let them talk to one of the clean-suited techs working there, who pulls up their purchase receipts, and confirms that they have sold a few large batches recently to the same person: Liam the Black.

They say he seemed kind of sleazy and they were surprised he had the kind of resources needed, but he had paid in full. The team heads back to the Plat Zone, and confers with Ringmaster, who tells them that Liam is a burnt-out street mage with no real pull except his natural sleazy charisma, who has apparently collected a small cult, but is not regarded by Ringmaster (or others) as a serious player in town. He is able to provide a location for the cult’s base though.

The team heads over and surveils it for a while, watching as the small group becomes increasingly debauched while Liam promises over and over that they’ll all be magical again soon (worrying). Eventually, everyone at the house crashes, and Otters sneaks a drone in, drugs Liam, and leaves him vulnerable to Dig’s mind probe, with which they get a lot of useful detail.

Apparently, Liam has been purchasing the reagents on the behalf of a woman named Helene Baptiste, who looks down on him, but is convinced he’s successfully using her to gain his power back as he believes she is connected to the Black Lodge. They get a few different locations from his mind where he’s made deliveries, including near the Windsor necropolis, so they think he must be delivering near the planned ritual sites, since Baptists seems not to think much of his acuity or consider him a risk or threat.

Not having anything else useful in his brain, they leave him and the cult be, but Otters and Creep stick around to watch and see if they lead them anywhere while Dig goes to check the other ritual sites. He finds more evidence of massive rituals, made to trap or contain something powerful, using tons of reagents plus sacrifice, and then astrally cleansed. Checking in with Ringmaster again, they hear of rumors of missing street mages around town, and get worried that CG might be the next likely victim for the upcoming ritual.

All they know is that it is at the University by Bloomfield, so they head up there and poke around, pretty quickly finding a leyline convergence at the library, and spotting a ritual in progress in the basement, which is closed to the public currently. Not wanting to step on any toes, Otters calls up Ronnie’s Raiders to warn them that the team is gonna have to do an op on their turf, while Creep sneaks in through the vents with mouse Dig and some of Otters’ drones.

Creep is able to get into the ritual chamber and slip mouse Dig out of a vent, while spotting 6 mages chanting in Latin and walking along a large ritual circle around a nude CG who is bound to a stone slab, seemingly magically summoned up from the poured concrete floor of the chamber. He seems drugged but alive, so Dig dashes over to him, slipping inside the magic circle without getting noticed, and uses his mindlink spell to get into communication with CG.

Creep relays all this to Otters, who is able to use it as proof of nefarious happenings in his meeting with Ronnie and Prof. Vinh Trong, who both seem confused and upset at the news. Ronnie calls an emergency meeting of the Raiders to try to coordinate an evacuation of civilians from the immediate area, while Trong starts pondering containment spells in case something goes wrong, and requests that they attempt to preserve the library.

Cholula gets eyes on some guards in armored suits watching the basement stairs, and sees them get a call just after this, with one of them heading downstairs to warn the ritualists. Conferring mentally, Dig and CG determine that if they can take out the ritual leader the force of it should harm the other mages present, and will at least be a good distraction. Using a consensual mind probe, Dig is able to identify which cloaked figure is Baptiste, the leader, from CG’s drugged memories. As Otters rushes back and gets the rest of her drones in position, they launch their attack.

Creep shoots Baptists, blasting through her armored cloak and magical protections, just before Otters darts her with two snake drones, flat-lining her. This causes the desired magical feedback as the remaining mages struggle to hold control of the ritual. Creep shoots another one of them, further hindering their ability to do so, and one of them lets out a frantic “oh no!”. Meanwhile, Cholula and one of the Mules have gotten into a fight with guards up top but manage to drop them quickly, and get the basement stair door open using one of their keycards.

Dig pulls CG free of the slab and his restraints using his magic hand, and starts hauling both of them towards the stairs when the ritual goes fully out of control and they are both pulled into astral space. They see a portal to some deep, distant point, but are more distracted by seeing Dig’s mentor, Dog, being pulled apart into multiple different aspects or segments and seemingly scattered. Dig hears a distressed whimper as this occurs. CG decides to stay astral for now, as he seems more functional there, but Dig is able to focus and maintain his spell, and keep hauling them to the stairs, which allows him to return primarily to his body.

The team all exfils up the stairs and out the front as they feel magical pressure building behind them, and then with a large pop, a huge section of the library building explodes outwards (seemingly only contained by Trong and some assistant’s frantic efforts) before imploding back in on itself, leaving a massive scooped out crater. The team sticks around to “help” but doesn’t have much to do. They try to warn Trong and others of the Black Lodge threat, but he seems to honestly believe it is just a conspiracy theory.

Ronnie seems a little more receptive, but hints that the team should be on their way since they just ran out of the library right before it exploded. CG finally rallies from his stupor as the drug wears off, and he and Dig are a little surprised when Freddy Bales seems to recognize mouse Dig and comes over to talk to them. Cholula, suspicious, tries to plant a tracker on Bales after he makes some pleasantries and then leaves to try to help Trong with magical cleanup, but Bales not only notices the tracker but almost manages to sneak it back onto Cholula. Detente.

The team heads back to the Plat Zone, and shares their intel with Ringmaster, who seems very worried and says he need to look into some things. Dig rushes them out the door again, hearing another astral whimper, to see what happened to Dog and if they can do anything. CG also wants to swing by his bolthole to grab his stuff. They head back to Windsor, and CG gets re-equipped, finding a few more tracking tags in the process as they do a more thorough search.

They also find a rippling magical dome at the previously examined ritual site. Dig manipulates his aura to appear like Helene Baptiste’s, and after a few attempts, gain entry. He find an aspect of Dog (pack mentality) here, and manages to call on his connection to his mentor to get this aspect to trust him and follow him out of the circle, after which it quickly vanishes, though distressingly it seems to have been made to manifest as the other team members can all briefly see it also. Being further concerned, Dig urges speed to the next few ritual sites.

At the next, on the waterfront, they find another magic dome, this one having attracted a bit of a crowd. CG takes some quicksilver pics, while Dig once again enters as Baptiste and manages to lure this aspect of Dog (play and chasing) out, almost getting bitten in his mouse form to do so. When the plates develop, CG spots that same watcher spirit observing them again, but it is gone by the time they look in astral…. this is starting to get suspicious. They head to the next site, some woods near the Blight, and find another trapped aspect (loyalty and friendship), which Dig again calls on his ties to his mentor to entice out.

Feeling like they’ve discovered about 3/4 of the fractured Dog, they head back to the Plat Zone to inquire about fresh leads, and hear of one more rumored ritual site in the DDB. They leave Ringmaster their data and the quicksilver plates so he can make some calls, and head down. They eventually track their way to the site where they fought the escaped lab experiment dog of Aurand’s, and find another magic dome there.

This is Dog’s protectiveness/aggression, and it is very backed in a corner with hackles up, giving off intensely scary growls. Otters says she’s got this, and Dig pulls her through the barrier, again posing as Baptiste. Otters totally confidently approaches, grabs Dog by the scruff, and firmly walks it out, with Dig pulling them through again. With this last aspect of Dog free and the 4 pieces reunited, Dig feels his connections to his mentor return, and both he and Otters feels that they can call upon Dog for direct assistance in return, as Dog seems unusually locally present still.

Heading back to the Plat Zone, they once again debrief Ringmaster and he shares some intel he got from the outside, riskily using TM’s to do so, bypassing the Null data blockade via Resonance dives. Based on the ritual used, and how it all worked, and the fact that it was able to make a mentor spirit manifest and the break it up to trap it, they collectively speculate that the Black Lodge may have been trying to splinter and capture a Horror, which might have been what they were preparing to summon. Or, this may have all just been a test run.

Once they start speculating, though, they realize that the Black Lodge may have been behind much of what’s been going on in Detroit, as a blacked out post-corporate city would be the perfect place to run a bunch of dark magic experiments. The team wonders if the BL perhaps was assisting the Malakim in harming ARES internally, ensuring both their weakening and their disastrous move, as well as if the BL was quietly boosting the Shadow, Famine, and other dark magic cults to try to create or summon a powerful spirit (maybe even a spirit of the city) that they could bind.

With this intel, plus some other Blackout knowledge, as well as some other tidbits and overall synthesis of what’s going on, the team decides to pull the trigger on the CEO Tarot card. Otters presses the button, and a logo appears in her RCC of each of the Big 10 Mega’s, with a small inset of their current CEO. After some debate, they decide to go with AZT, as they and Ringmaster agree that either AZT or SK are the two least likeliest to be infiltrated by the BL at their highest levels, SK cause of Dragons, AZT cause of 4th World enmities between factions of immortal humans.

Otters presses the button, and Flavia de la Rosa picks up. She seems intrigued but not patient, and Otters gives a quick synopsis of how she got her number, and what she and the team can offer. de la Rosa is interested enough to stay on the line, and seems like a skilled social operator, using effective mirroring and asking insightful questions as Otters shared the agreed upon paydata.

Asking what they want in return, de la Rosa is happy to offer eventual transport out, saying that there is a lot going on in Denver that needs looking into, which seems like a perfect place for a skilled team to travel next. She offers them a vacation diversion on the way, but Otters, having heard tell of the team’s last vacation disaster, demurs. They also get AZT to agree to air drop in food, to be distro’ed by G’ma Biyu but with AZT logos, which will be good PR. de la Rosa is also happy to promise some future equipment to get them geared up for their Denver trip, once the city reopens.

She also sends along a news update packet at Otters’ request, to get caught up on the outside world. Saying they likely will not speak again, she instructs them to turn to Cehualli for other local needs in the meantime and cuts the call. Interestingly, only the AZT icon vanishes from Otters’ RCC, so it seems like the other 9 CEO’s are still on the table for future calls, though punching this one through the Resonance was all that Ringmaster’s comms team can manage for now.

With that having gone fairly well, the team debates what to do with all the intense news they received in the packet- Seattle is officially free! The UCAS seems to be in a state of collapse! The Returned and Chimeras are popping up everywhere! Dig wants to broadcast it all on a public wideband, but they hold off for now to debate a bit first.

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OCT/2023

Hamtramck Under Attack

Toxic Hugs

Runners
Creep
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
Cholula

The team wakes up in the safehouse, with DIg having some disturbing memories of hyper-realistic dreams of vine-strewn deep matrix locales. CG races in, shouts that the are is under attack, grabs his magic flaming sword, and runs back out into the street, The rest of the team hurries to get dressed while Otters and Cholula give Dig a quick once-over and declare him cleared for action, though worried about what the vine dreams might mean….

Cholula dashes out and hearing multiple sources of gunfire and toxic spellcraft, sneaks up onto the bar roof to get a vantage. Otters army crawls to the van and launches the fly-spy swarm to get some overhead for the TacNet. Dig turns to a bird, and also gets airborne, while Creep sneaks out the front door, and The Detective hunkers down inside to avoid stray bullets and provide some guidance.

Cholula and the drones spot 2 groups of attackers, lighting fires, casting spells, and firing guns, approaching from opposite corners of the district. They also see a massive manifested sludge spirit in the middle of the district, wrecking house. Locals are fleeing and hiding, but being herded inwards, so the team gets involved. Cholula gets spotted by a mage, who launches an acid stream at him, but he ducks down behind the roof edge and hears it sizzle on impact.

Creep sneaks over to the mage targeting Cholula, while they see CG racing over to confront the other attacking opps team. They lost sight of him and he’s quickly out of TacNet range, which surprises them as the local mesh net is fairly robust- and just then, they get an alert that their TacNet is under attack! Dig flips into the matrix via his bird trode and finds a large corrupted Sprite wrecking house in there, seemingly one of the kidnapped e-life forms from the SpriteLoks driven mad in captivity.

Luckily it doesn’t seem to be targeting them specifically, just destroying things in the vicinity, but the local mesh is in bad shape. Dig confronts it, partially to stop Otters from shutting down the TacNet in a panic, since they need it up. Meanwhile, in meatspace, Creep shoots at the mage, seemingly a leader in the toxie faction that was running the grub labs, based on the skin mask he wears. One of his acolytes, wearing the armored rad suit with skin patch, dives in front of the shot and goes down.

Interestingly, the group seems to be half toxie cultists and half Blackout Boyz, and they don’t seem that familiar with working together, though each reasonably skilled. Dig continues fighting/distracting the sprite in the matrix, and Cholula comes under attack from the sludge spirit, which astrally steps up onto the roof he’s perched on. Otters, seeing this, opens up on the spirit with the van HMG, blasting off a bunch of it’s goopy armor but splashing Cholula with acid.

Cholula tries to bite the spirit, misses, and gets grabbed in a harsh grapple, taking more acid damage, and then is shot in the back when Otters misses on her next burst with the HMG. Cholula is then KO’ed in astral by the sludge spirit, who starts hauling his body off, down the street. Creep has also gotten himself into some trouble, getting surrounded by the opps team that he attacked, so he hides the leg that has all the team secrets in the alley and starts rolling around trying not to get shot, they seem like they are also trying to take him alive.

Otters, being the only one mobile, has to make a hard choice, and races over to Creep, blasting another toxie cultist with the van as Creep pops a smoke grenade and starts falling back. HMG suppressive fire forces the attackers to retreat as well. Luckily, Dig finally manages to best the maddened Sprite in matrix combat without taking much damage himself, and flips back to meatspace, flies over to the sludge spirit, and blasts it with a massive lightning bolt, destroying it but showering the KO’ed Cholula with yet more acid.

Dig then magically heals Cholula, who uses his return to consciousness to good effect, sneaking around to the side as Otters advances the van under HMG suppressive fire. Creep sneaks around to the other side, as Dig flies above, aiming for a triple “pincher” maneuver. Cholula manages to KO the toxie mage and one of the Blackout Boyz with Narcoject arrows while the team guns/magics the rest of the enemies down, allowing none to escape.

They load up the prisoners into the van, and dose them with Gamma Scopolamine to keep them docile. Dig calls on his spirit to assist and unleashes a massive Mind Probe on the toxie leader, Father Gorgon, who puts up a strong resistance but is unable to hold back the mental assault. Dig rifles through his secrets, and then for some reason decides to kill him by channeling lightning directly into his eyes, causing them to burst and run down his face like badly cooked eggs. The smell of frying flesh suffuses the van. The other paralyzed captive watches in horror.

They find out the following info: Gorgon was a cult leader of his faction of toxies, along with the other mage “Mother Gorgon”. Viking Cowgirl is the leader of the Blackout Boyz, or at least the one in charge of coordinating today’s actions. Both factions have been heavily depleted by the team’s recent attacks, and have worked together before but are both paid by some unknown outside party. The goal of today’s attack was to destroy district infrastructure, a project the toxies are often paid for (they’ve been behind the mesh network attacks), and also to capture specific targets if spotted- these being all 6 members of the team.

They had also been paid, alongside other local mages of questionable morality, to prevent or destroy any astral forms attempting to get messages into or out of Detroit, ensuring a near total information blockade, with the matrix down and MET2000 patrolling the land and sea exits. They’d also worked some additional jobs as backup for the Blackout Boyz but don’t know further details. It seems like the only survivors of this group are Mother Gorgon and the cultists with her.

This, suddenly, makes the team worry about where CG is, as he hasn’t turned up yet. They race over to the other side of the district (not very far), and find signs of a battle but no ongoing combat. Dig recovers the burnt hilt of CG’s flaming sword but it seems inert, so Otters gives it to a local kid who they find and question who saw some stuff.

Apparently, CG raced into the attack, flaming sword assisting him momentarily before turning on him at a crucial moment. He did manage to fry one of the toxie attackers before this. But, distracted by that angry spirit trapped within the blade, he was unable to also defend himself against the attackers and was KO’ed and captured- they called off their assault and fled while the rest of the team was still bogged down in combat on the other side of the area.

Not having any better leads at the moment, they check on the neighborhood, with TD saying they will focus on this for now. Finding no further attackers or threats, they tell everyone to come out and start rebuilding, and find that luckily casualties were pretty low- mostly Children of Loxley who were on patrol and whatever random civilians had the bad luck to be out in the open, as well as the occasional stray bullet or spell that punched through a wall or window.

Dig, slightly rested, and with the benefit of the secondary effect of the Gamma Scopolamine, is ready to question the second subject. Otters tries the social route first, without much success, but gets a little info. the BB’s seem to view themselves as guns for hire just trying to survive, who scored a sweet contract which also ensures their families/dependents are provided for (if local). He seems to think that the team is going to torture and kill him, based on what he has seen so far, and Otters doesn’t really convince him otherwise, so he isn’t overly cooperative.

Feeling they’ve hit a dead end, Dig gets the others to hold him and lands on his head, doing another Mind Probe. Things the team learns: they don’t know who they’re working for, or where they deliver the TM’s. due to liberal use of Laës provided by Stanli the Candyman, who also takes it to forget the transaction. They also don’t know where their families actually are, though they get regular trid calls (the team worries these could be faked easily by Null Sect). He thinks they’re doing some weird matrix ritual with the van routes, and has seen some matrix vines, but hasn’t heard of the Null Sect. The BB’s were all hired/assembled after the Blackouts started. They were behind the assassination of various scientists that Brunwyn was trying to acquire.

He also has some upsetting news from outside, seemingly gleaned from the vans getting some amount of comms in. The UCAS has declared martial law, due to the Blackouts, and has cut off aid to ALL former ARES locales- including Detroit, declaring it ARES’ responsibility to care for their citizens and former employees. ARES has also stopped supplying any aid to any UCAS locales, claiming it is the government’s responsibility. This leaves a lot of newly ex-corpos in a real shit situation- arcologies and facilities with no power, food, or water coming in etc. Also, there are some disturbing rumors of some III Corps members returning, often very confused and distant…

They call into Ringmaster, and ask to come to the Plat Zone to debrief, and head over. Once there, they decide they better actually fully relocate for now, just in case, so Otters spends some time hauling drones and gear over to a Plat Zone apartment while Creep and Cholula get healed up in the basement clinic and Dig rests from all his spellcasting. Once they resettle, they debrief with Ringmaster, and he shares some info as well: he believes that the Grid Pirates/Blackout Boyz are attempting a theoretical ritual to alter the “Sprite of the Grid”, effectively a matrix equivalent to a “Spirit of the City”.

He explains that this is a fairly new concept, revolving around the “noosphere” as an equivalent to astral space, and based on the severely limited comms he’s been able to get in/out via brave TM’s risking Null Sect attack- it seems that even with the matrix down, Resonance wells can still be found. He also says he’s heard some other reports of the III Corps vets and others, which are becoming collectively known as “the Returned”. He shares some rumors of anachronistic figures appearing who seem to have disappeared in both recent and much older history (Yucatan rebels and WWII soldiers from the Pacific theater), as well as some III Corps vets returning with what sound like chimeric mods like what the team encountered outside Site 000 in PA.

This is all very upsetting, and Ringmaster offers to pay the team to stay involved, though they settle for healing + safehouse for this batch of info. Dig flies up to G’ma Biyu and debriefs her on the latest re: vans, he also tells her where to pick up Father Gorgon’s body, which she says she should be able to process into some interesting reagents. She pays them another installment for their ongoing investigation, and also says she’s heard some rumors of a strange cloaked group doing small, dark rituals in obscure places around town. Dig returns to the team with this news, just as they get a radio call from Jaga at the water treatment plant.

She says that during their ritual a few nights back, they spotted a strange mana spike from the direction of the Windsor cemetery (where CG has a safehouse)- it looked like some bad mojo but came and went pretty quickly, and they’ve been too occupied to investigate it further. The team decides to look into it, though Cholula stays behind to heal more, still being pretty wrecked. Otters is also feeling antagonistic towards CG, in a way that seems unusual for her, and the team speculates that the love potion may have worn off. What this means for CG, who drank one of the love potions as well, they do not know! But they hope that perhaps investigating these dark rituals will lead them closer to finding him, as they have no current leads…

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OCT/2023

Mystery Vans Go Boom

Explosive Secrets

Runners
Creep
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective
Tabasco aka Cholula

CG sits out the van job in order to try to repair their rep with Ringmaster. He first replicates some food, then practices astrally cleansing his aura off of it to not be traceable, using his spirits to see how well he did. After figuring out the right balance there, he distros the food to the gang coop for further distro-ing in their area. He also throws in some resources and barter to fund the initial supplies. While doing this he also starts marveling at the amount of money he and Dig have given to Penelope Beans in the last few months, and wondering what army of reagent collectors she is funding…

Dig also throws a bunch of resources into rep management, but in a more hand-off way, acquiring more supplies for people to build, repair, and expand mesh nets around town. He also hears some disturbing tales of repair and install crews being attacked or killed, as well as mesh gear being ripped off or destroyed. Having heard rumors of this a few times now, he inquires further, and is disturbed to hear that the one unifying marker on the attackers spotted by sensors and/or surviving witnesses is a patch of skin adhered somewhere to their armor… more toxie activity?

The team puts that aside for the moment to focus on Cholula’s lead- he has managed to find a spot that the van he shot the tracker arrow into goes, once per day. They head over to the industrial riverfront area, and find a cop bar called the Crown Vic. Surveilling it for a while, it seems like a community hub for ex-LEO and families, with the bar still serving hooch from a still and people gathering around trash barrel fires to share gossip, barter, etc.

Reviewing Cholula’s previous surveillance footage, Otters and TD manage to recognize the three people who show up in the mystery van- all local freelance runners with a rep for taking a lot of corp jobs- meaning, in the case of Detroit, ARES. So seemingly all deniable assets on the ARES payroll, raising the question of whether this is still an ARES op or if they just for cut loose in the move. TD determines that the cops and ex-CorpSec hanging out at the bar seem to know these 3 and have a antagonistic but semi-friendly relationship, once again implying past corp affiliations.

Otters sees that when the van shows up corresponds with a swell in attendance at the bar, and that the crowd kind of rushes it though they don’t seem to be giving or receiving anything, until she realizes that they all seem to be checking devices- it seems the roving signal from the van allows for some limited matrix communication, though Otters is sure it is also skimming the traffic that passes through it, and doubts this is altruistic.

They wait for the van to arrive again, which it does, and Creep sneaks up and magnets on underneath it while finding a spot to plug in a data tap to give access to the system to Dig, who is flying above in bird form. Otters is also up in the VTOL keeping an eye on things and piloting the flyspys, one of which is able to detect the explosives packed into the van behind various panels and such. Streaming this feed to TD, they tell the crowd to back away from the vehicle, as it is rigged to blow, and share the feed as proof.

Meanwhile, Dig has backdoored into the van system via the data tap, but finds a nasty surprise waiting: a Null Sect entity! Recognizing the iconic toothed triangle, Dig decides to try to garner some data as he can’t get a good read on it’s power level. It quickly attacks him, maxing out his biofeedback protection on his deck- it seems to somehow be bypassing his device and hitting at him directly. He is also horrified to find himself link-locked when he tries to jack out, and fails to disconnect, sending out a panicked message.

Otters pulls an intense aerial maneuver, manage to fly right up to bird Dig, open the VTOL, and use surgical tools inside to carefully pull off his bird-sized trode while also catching him as he crashes from dumpshock. Creep pulls the data tap and begins exfiltrating as Otters hears a worried “intruuuuuudddddeeeeerrrrrrrrrr…..” staticky cry from MAMA and shuts down the TacNet. Suddenly worried about what drastic action the NS will take to cover knowledge of their presence, TD starts trying to work their way out of the crowd while continuing to encourage others to also get clear.

Both TD and Creep are caught in the edges of the blast as the van blows big, shredding 2 of the 3 runners who had remained by it, as well as killing or injuring many in the crowd who had pushed up to get good signal. TD and Creep both manage to get away, though not without some worries, and link up at the team van nearby, where Creep leaves TD in charge of keeping an eye out and heads out again, as he has spotted Cholula pursuing the loan surviving mystery van runner as he flees on foot.

They link up and manage to trail the guy back to the garage next to the Senator hotel downtown, where they’d previously seen some of the vans exit. Following him in, they trail him to the lower level, and see him use some kind of hidden control inside a parked car that activates an elevator concealed beneath. He begins descending, and they wait til the elevator has bottomed out before stealthily jumping into the opening after him.

Meanwhile, Otters and bird Dig, in the VTOL, have managed to find TD and the team van just in time, as some downtown scavs are starting to look pretty interested in acquiring the van for themselves, and TD isn’t much of a combat driver. Otters takes the wheel and guides both craft over to the Platinum Zone, where they report into Ringmaster, catching him up and asking for some assistance. He shares some intel with them as well, and gathers some additional hackers from the comms station to isolate and reboot the TacNet.

When they do, they manage to destroy a small foreign code fragment, which looks like some kind of digital vine, which Ringmaster explains is the NS’ way of both marking and acclimating to their turf (he thinks, a lot of this is conjecture). MAMA was totally shredded in her effort at defense, but the TacNet luckily is saved. They briefly mourn the loss of their agent, deciding they will name the eventual replacement STEPMAMA. Dig flies north to G’ma Biyu’s to report in as well, and she congratulates him on good progress, but still wants more info.

Back under the garage, it looks like the 2nd basement level was sealed off at some point, and there are half a dozen mystery vans parked down there. The runner they’re following heads over towards a door in the corner, this level seems about half as big as the one above, from what they can see. They race to catch up after he passes some biometric scans to be allowed entrance, and manage to slip in the door right behind him.

Inside, they are a bit surprised to find 19 people, all of whom have the look of van crews: local runners with mixed gear and specialties. 9 appear to be hot bunking, while 9 more are eating and cleaning weapons and such. They start to ready weapons in response, but Creep leaps forward, yanking out his bandolier of frag grenades and suggesting they be allowed to walk out or all will die. Unfortunately, his speaker is kind of tinny and everyone is talking at once so only Cholula really hears him. Cholula then shoots the runner they followed here in the chest with a flaming arrow, causing him to drop and everything to kick off.

Cholula dashes for the door, hauling Creep, as the sleeping runners rally and the other 9 give chase and fire on them. Creep is badly wounded, maybe killed, and Cholula’s armor is shredded. He chucks the grenades behind them, and gets a lucky bounce, with the detonation leaving mostly carnage in their wake. Unfortunately, the parked vans then start trying to ram Cholula. Also, the explosion was bad enough to finish off Cholula’s armor and do some actual damage, plus Creep is now partially disassembled. Cholula manages to scoop his torso and limbs up, making sure to grab the leg with all the secret team gear inside.

Cholula does some impressive dodging and weaving, seemingly achieving the near impossible, while avoiding getting his by any of the vans. Luckily there seems to be only a solitary entity controlling them. He then pulls off an impressive called shot, bypassing the armor and detonating the explosives pack in one of the unpiloted vans, clearing his way to exit elevator. He dives into the parked car and starts frantically pressing buttons, somehow achieving the correct sequence to get the elevator to begin rising, as one final van makes a frantic rush and detonates.

Cholula hunkers down in the dummy car, which he is blown out the back of by the force of the explosions, but he is still, barely, on his feet. The explosion also seems to have damaged the elevator so he frantically tosses all Creep’s parts up and then jumps after as another van races over below. Getting free to the sound of whirring and grinding behind him, he uses his previous recon knowledge of the area from the hotel mission to get atop a nearby roof without getting spotted, though he nearly falls a couple times and is at the end of his rope.

Not having any means to heal Creep he does what he can to stabilize his torso, and hopes for rescue, as he also doesn’t have any means to communicate. Luckily, Otters and Dig and TD, back at the Plat Zone, are all starting to feel that it’s been a little long since they heard from that team, and TD at least knew what direction Creep had head in pursuit, so Dig tasks a spirit with using the Search power to locate them, which it does. However, Dig went a little too hard on the summoning, and passes out after relaying the info.

Otters gets up in the VTOL with a radio, and flies circles in the area until she spots them, landing on the roof and frantically packing Creep in while hooking up the med drone to his various components. It doesn’t look great. Desperate, Otters send the drone on auto-pilot over to Leanna Octave’s, and then calls in on the radio for extraction from the Plat Zone. Cholula helps her descend from the rooftop, and they get picked up by some Plat Zone runners in one of the jury-rigged chem fuel vans.

Back at the Plat Zone, some of them rest while the rest review Cholula’s footage. They get face images of most of the runners they saw, and pass those along to Ringmaster to try to ID, and TD suggests also comparing to the “missing persons” message boards at various enclaves. They also spot some interesting details: there are no TM’s, or space to detain TM’s or other prisoners anywhere onsite. There are old mechanical hookups in one corner of the garage, though they didn’t get a great look at them. There is a banner with “Blackout Boyz” spray-painted on it. There are 12 maps up on the walls with routes and timetables, and a roving schedule of which team drives which route- implying they’ve taken out about half of their operating strength.

And perhaps most interestingly, there are plentiful supplies down here, all bearing the insignia of the Freedom Network, who the team knows from Seattle is often used as an unwitting meatspace cutout by the Null, whether directly or via their street wing, Popular Will. As they’d previously been involved with TM kidnapping and Null brain-in-jar experiments and such in Seattle at least, this all checks out, and gives more suggestions as to how this whole op works. However, this looks like it was just a staging ground for the vans, so there must be at least one more facility….

Also the lack of comms gear and astral barrier (earth and glowmoss panels) that concealed leave Otters wondering how they receive updated instructions, and she starts wondering about the route the vans are driving, and how the Null is moving about with no active matrix, other than the hyperlocal signals from the vans. Knowing that the van route traces old 1.0 Matrix infrastructure routes, she starts to worry that the Null are using those to travel and communicate, and decides to make another visit to the Run and Sollars library soon to look for old maps and layout and stuff, so they can start cutting off those pathways.

They get a radio call from Octave, reporting that Creep barely survived, but she had to do some radical cyber-mods to put him back together, so all of his limbs are detachable now. He’s not yet conscious, and Cholula and Dig are also still both banged up, so they spend the day charging tech, patching armor and resting. Creep finally flies home the next day, with some new cyber and a lower essence, and they all start catching up on how wild that mission was.

Before they can get to deep, though, CG races inside to sound of gunfire and screams from nearby, and frantically announces: “Hamtramck is under attack!!”

View

OCT/2023

The Grub Hub Hubbub

Never Forget!

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective

The team finally follows up on CG’s famine investigation, and calls up Pretty out at the relocated Long Pig Farms. She reports that her and the other ghouls have been bogged down defending their turf from ex-ARES Corpsec militias, as well as packs of roving hunger-crazed survivors. However, the Bee spirit BETAS and some other locals they’ve befriended have all banded together with them, so they have a big farm compound and are trying to get another harvest in with whatever they can get to grow in the strange astral light.

The team asks them to snag any of the hungry people they come across, as Pretty reports that they often have lower essence than it seems like they should, and thus don’t make the best meals. Still, trespassers = free food. The team spends a while patching armor, catching up on sleep, charging all their gear, and refreshing all their rituals and magical supplies, and CG also trades a little more info on the famine situation with Penelope Beans.

They listen to a new dating show on Radio Free Detroit called “Motor City Meet Cute” while The Detective gets high in their dry tub outside, and Pretty calls to report that they caught a live one, with the weird “missing essence” problem. The team heads out to the farm the next morning, and Otters gets some more usable data points for her attempt to map where the center of the Zap Zone blast occurred.

They meet up with Pretty and Rains, who both seem a bit exhausted, but who lead them through the recently fortified farm complex to a reinforced paddock where they’ve chained up a gaunt human man, who is idly clawing the ground, almost like he’s trying to dig something out. He seems minimally aware, so Dig mind probes him, and finds that he is experiencing a depersonalization, akin to cyberpsychosis, but not triggered by any obvious source of the massive essence loss.

They think about it a bit, and compare notes and knowledge, and determine that Vamps, Shadow Spirits, or some other critters could be the source, but nothing points to any of those in particular. Diving further, Dig discovers that they guy is totally addicted to the SnakAttak Packs, and that acquiring more is his sole desire- he seems to have been near-mindlessly searching for other food to trade for them when captured.

Scanning him astrally, Dig does detect the same dark magic that was present in TD when they ate some of the chips, but in a larger quantity. Probing to the very depths of the man’s near-empty mind, Dig manages to get a good idea of the location where the food for chips trades occur, and then he and CG stick around to watch some ghoul farmhands consume the man, which they make short work of- they complain that there isn’t much to him, but Dig is relieved to see that whatever the dark magic is doesn’t seem to transfer, and reports to Pretty that it should be safe to keep eating any interlopers.

The team heads north, following bird Dig, who is astrally scouting the area the man thought of. They find a large ARESFood complex, with one of the buildings running off a generator on limited power. Desperate-looking individuals queue and mill about carrying whatever food they’ve scavenged out front until they are let in by security, after which most of them leave through one exit with chips in hand. However, some small number don’t emerge at all.

After some further drone, astral, and physical recon, plus an infiltration by TD posing as a hungry wretch with some emergency rations to trade, the team discovers what is happening here. Guards, who are all wearing armored chemsuits with metahuman skin patches sewn on somewhere, manage the queue and keep things orderly. The hungry are let in, and sent to one of two machines by a scientist inside, and either drop their food into a hopper or are fed into an industrial dissolver.

Those that drop food in the hopper then head to the exit where they are given an amount of bag of chips that seems to correspond to their essence. Upsettingly, while whatever food they bring in seems to be the basis for the chips, one of the additives is from compressing some sort of enormous grub, kept out of sight of the line, with multiple piled containers showing they’ve been at this for a while. The ones sent to the dissolver all seem to be super low essence, when the team compares data. Following a slurry tube into an adjacent building, the team finds two more of the skin-patch guard pouring it into 55 gallon drums, sealing them up, and loading them in a van.

Mouse Dig and Creep are almost killed when Creep slips partway into the dissolver solution, but escape, and the team decides to wait and follow the van. Otters does so via van initially, but seeing that they seem to be heading towards the Blight, switches to VTOL with mouse Dig along for the ride, as the van battery won’t get them home after that long of a drive north.

They park the van, and the rest of the team, at Moreau’s, who is thrilled to see them as he needs to offload Dr. Aurand back onto them. He has hooked her brain in a jar up to a low end spider mech body, but says he will do no more for someone so unethical and will no longer tolerate her presence. He also seems to have taken a full turn against making biodrones, though he says he will still of course care for them at the facility.

Aurand loads up in the van, where Creep tries to get her to watch Roseanne, which she refuses. Meanwhile, Dig and Otters track the van to another old, abandoned Chrysler warehouse in the Blight, in the Toxic Valley Exclusion Zone, which also seems to have been reactivated. Some new duct and pipe work runs from the side of the building into the ground, and there is a high force ward around the structure.

Dig gets worried he got astrally spotted by something large, pale, and slimy and Otters sees something with a skin mask coming out with a rocket launcher, so they delta outta there, following the valley towards the lake, and are disturbed to find numerous drain and runoff systems converging into a major spillway into Lake St. Clair, the sprawl’s primary water source. So it seems like these people are also poisoning the water, as well as the desperate hungry locals.

The link back up with the team and head back towards the safehouse, before deciding they don’t want Dr. Aurand to know where it is, so they foist her off onto Leanna Octave, both of them seem excited about expanding their surgical and experimental frontiers together. They make some calls and Dig flies up to visit G’ma Biyu.

She offers assistance as well as some guidance for their plan, and they also enlist the help of Cehaulli, the somewhat creepy AZT mage and fixer. They decide to keep it to a tight circle, as surprise will be critical. Remembering some rumors they heard from The Swarm, they head out the next day to the former ARESpace/EVOSpace collab area past the destroyed Damien Knight Int’l airport.

Once there, Otters gets some more good data points for the Zap epicenter, and Dig does a massive Catalog ritual to look for parts, while Otters and the others grab some additional supplies from the safehouse after securing the area as best they can. After a mammoth effort, they have assembled two scrap planes, using up basically all the remaining parts, fuel, and engine components, which Otters is pretty confident she can get airborne, though they’ll have to glide from there.

They get a delivery of a bunch of fertilizer and other supplies from Pretty and other friendly farmers, once again massively depleting available stock, on Biyu’s suggestion, and her demolitions expert, a very full-of-themselves individual named Xero Dae, comes out and rigs everything up. Creep heads back to Hamtramck to The Trading Post and picks up another HE rocket for the launcher, and a rigger interface for Otters’ plane, so she can pilot remotely from the VTOL behind it.

Dig quickly learns a little piloting from some simulators that Otters has handy, and plans to fly his plane physically before bailing out as a bird. TD sneaks up to the first factory to keep an eye on things and be able to stay on comms to Dig and provide leadership, as that facility has low magical security. CG and Creep sneak up to the other facility in the Blight, Creep with the rocket, and CG with his sniper rifle.

Otters and Dig manage to get airborne, and fly the planes towards their targets, both gliding in to stay as stealthy as possible. CG manages to snipe another guy in a face-mask coming out with a rocket launcher when the plane gets close enough to be notable, and Creep hits the magical ward with the rocket, to knock it down enough for the plane to hit full force. Dig manages to fly his plane as a chimp, before switching to steering with magic fingers and diving out the side, turning to a bird midair.

Both planes hit their target factories and blow big, levelling the structures, as well as some of the surrounding area. The team in the Blight also sees a magical blue circle glow suddenly with some sigils they recognize from Cehualli’s robes as their is some kind of small implosion, and Otters has the feeling of something powerful happening that she is unable to detect, other than a sort of hair-raising feeling.

They link back up at the safehouse, and report into Cehualli, who sends them a big payment, but seems exhausted by his banishment ritual- he is thrilled the team came to him with this and excited to work together again. They then decide to all watch a new (old) flatvid that Creep has been saving for a special occasion to celebrate, and pop in some Harry and the Hendersons.

Deciding it would be better projected, they radio Ringmaster, who seems busy but says they can use the venue space at the Plat Zone. They head over and start watching, with Dig creating a magical contentment aura. Ringmaster is rushing back and forth but stops to say hello, and Creep mentions that the team was involved in the two huge explosions. Ringmaster pauses the playback and insists on an explanation. When everyone continues to seem too chill for his liking, he uses some kind of device that shuts down all of Dig’s spells, so he is suddenly nude and everyone is less chill.

TD pushes back on Ringmaster, insisting that the team remain freelancers who don’t “owe” him anything, and he pushes back on that re: the state of the city, and what he perceived to be the mutually cooperative nature of their relationship. After tensely working their way towards a middle ground, the team lays out what happened, and Ringmaster explains that he is not unhappy with their work, or even not being in the loop ahead of time, but instead with not being informed about the involvement of people he considers close allies in what appeared to be a major, random attack, for which he has been seeking explanations and doing damage control all night while they kicked back and watched vids next to his office.

They then kinda see his point, and everyone is feeling a little down, until Stitches comes up from the basement, fresh out of a gory surgery and needing a break, and they get the sitcom party started again. With Dig having promised Biyu that they’ll be looking into mystery vans again next, they all eagerly await Cholula’s report on what he found while trying to get a signal from his tracker arrow that he had fired into one of them….

View

OCT/2023

The Vault Opens

Peregrinations

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective
Tabasco aka Cholula

The team receives a frantic radio call from a Cutters members named Lil Caesar at The Dom – Peregrine managed to open the vault, but something came out, caused some chaos and is now chasing Peregrine. The team loads up and races over, minus Dig, who is mid-ritual restoring the golems.

When they arrive, they find LC, a Scottish Troll, waiting for them, and do some quick investigating. It looks like 2-4 large animals of some sort charged out of the bank vault, through the lobby, down the steps, and down the street towards Downtown. Cholula and CG head out to start tracking the beasts and hoping to help Peregrine, while the rest of the team keeps investigating onsite.

Creep and TD question LC a bit, and take a look at the damage inside, while Otters examines wounds outside and determines that whatever did this has both sharp claws and some kind of multi-pronged horn or antler. The beasts seems to have been just bulling through a crowd rather than specifically attacking, aside from two mangled Cutters who look to have tried to get in the way.

Lacking medical skills and supplies, the van team heads out to catch up to the trackers, who have made impressive work of tracking the trail of destruction towards Downtown. The van catches up and Otters gets Morticia out front and spots Peregrine getting cornered into a dead-end alley by the beast- there are indeed four, and something is deeply wrong with them.

They appear at first to be mutated deer, but also have the face of a bear below their twisted, dripping antlers, long hairless muscled arms ending in sharp claws, in addition to their 4 hooved legs, and exposed rib cages, dripping some kind of ichor, which seems to disappear shortly after it hits the ground- looks like we’re dealing with spirits! Luckily the team brought LC along, who says he is decent at fighting these things, and seems like a bit of a wildass.

The team engages, and finds that there non-magical weaponry is hardly having any effect. One of the beasts gores Peregrine badly, and drives him back into the alley. Creep, Cholula, and LC charge forward, trying to save Peregrine, while Otters engages at a distance with the van, TD provides leadership (which LC happily accepts), and CG fires with his shotgun and uses his spirit to lower the beasts defenses.

While the non-magical gradually chip away at the spirits, LC is doing massive damage with his magic punches, and Cholula takes a hint and starts biting the spirits with his jaw. Creep also spots that all 4 beasts have some sort of antique collars buried deep in their muscular neck flesh, glowing with strange runes and arcane sigils. Seeing that the collars seems to be regenerating the spirits, they adjust their targeting.

They eventually manage to destroy all 4 collars and 3 of the spirits, with the final spirit only attacking CG’s spirit. Otters accidentally misses with the HMG and knocks CG prone (luckily only wrecking his armor), and then has a bright idea. Since the last spirit seems “freed”, if they all play dead, the spirit may accept that is has achieved dominance and leave them be.

Cholula, having raced to the alley, slams a trauma patch on Peregrine after stuffing his guts back in, and then also drops prone when he emerges from the alley and sees everyone else doing that. The spirit raises it’s head, paws the ground a few times, huffs, and then dissaparates. The team breaths a sigh of relief, dusts themselves off, and then races back to The Dom since none of them have any better medical ideas, with Creep hanging back to collect what he can of the destroyed collars.

They get to The Dom with the trauma patch still working, but find the medical staff there overloaded and under-supplied dealing with the other casualties from earlier. LC and Cholula race across the roofs over to the Plat Zone to restock, and LC gets distracted talking to Ringmaster about suit tailoring for dwarves, trolls and others outside the fashion norms. Cholula stays on task, gets what he needs from Stitches, and they dash back.

The rest of the team heads into the Vault to check things out and collect their reward, and find it disappointingly empty of treasure. They carefully check for traps, and then investigate. They find a broken summoning circle, where Creep recognizes the same runes and sigils as from the collars. It is atop a wrought-iron gantry set exactly center in a near perfect sphere made of brick. There are bone fragments and cloth scraps underneath it, which Creep slips through and grabs. CG does some astral investigation, and finds that the ritual has been disrupted, and though this still seems like a bestial magic locus, the leylines connected are fading back again a bit.

The medical staff says they’ve done what they can for Peregrine, but he’s still in rough shape. Everyone heads back to the Tin Can to debrief and drink while Otters secretly works on the van out back, so that LC doesn’t learn their safehouse locale. They have some fun before LC heads out, and then Cholula stays up late to recharge the van since Dig is still working on his rituals. It occurs to him that LC would probably like another electro-charge-bike, so he collects some parts and runs it over to The Dom.

There, he sets up a public charging station out front, which instantly gets swarmed, while LC madly pedals away. Cholula spots a draconic form flying over him, before turning into Brunwyn Harridan as she alights into the medical area through a window. He sends LC up to investigate and takes over on the bike. LC pushes into the medical area, and sees Brunwyn and Peregrine shaking hands, seemingly cementing some sort of deal.

Pushing it a little bit, LC asks what this is all about, and Brunwyn explains that she is taking over providing supplies to The Dom, and will clean up “the mess” in the basement. LC, feeling slightly intimidated, backs out at that point, and reports into Cholula. Cholula races back to the safehouse to debrief with the team. Meanwhile, Otters has taken the VTOL to Run and Sollars private library to research the bank.

With the help of The Cartographer, she finds info that a fur and lumber fortune family scion mysteriously vanished in the late 1800’s, after he developed a fascination with the spiritual and occult. He had been meant to run a new family establishment- the bank which has subsequently become The Dom. Otters head back to report in.

Meanwhile, back at the safehouse, CG has done a Ritual of Bone on the fragments, and gotten a small amount of info- TD oversees to provide some guidance. They determine that whoever this was came from wealth and sought forbidden knowledge, that he joined and investigated various cults and secret societies in pursuit of knowledge, and that some secret society seemed to be behind it all- which the team puts together is likely the Black Lodge.

Meeting up, the team shares all their info, and puts the story together as best they can. It seems like a mana spike must have occurred to allow the ritual, but it was likely corrupted by bad or toxic reagents from the time, as well as a lack of full understanding of how the magic works. It looks the caster was trapped and killed, and slowly ground to bits over the centuries since by the trapped spirits. The ritual circle was likely meant as a controller for the collars, which would have given the caster significant power, especially at the time.

Then, they decide that Brunwyn must either be behind one of the two SK Brackhauses, or have taken over their op to supply The Dom, likely wanting control over the bestial power center as their primary goal, though the good PR never hurts. They decide to look into the famine problems next, worried about more dark spirits gaining too much power….

View

SEP/2023

Tunnel Rats

Ambush in the MCDB

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective
Tabasco aka Cholula

The team starts the day after the lab raid fresh, and begins discussing how to parcel out the info and who to sell it to. After some options and debate, they decide to go with Cehualli for a big payday with some options for non-monetary recompense. He is delighted, creepily, to receive the info and says he is glad they were finally able to work together. He transfers them a large sum of nuyen, as well as a sapphire weapon focus for Dig and a Tarot card for CG- one of the last few they haven’t seen before, the Chief Executive.

The team spends a while puzzling over the card before noticing what looks like a button in the holo-projection. They decide to delay pressing it for now, and Creep stashes it in his leg with the rest. They decide to visit Peregrine next, having requested to be kept updated by him and having received an update message. They head down to the rechristened “The Dom” enclave, and find it looking healthy and somewhat bustling. Aid supplies are being distributed out front and an informal barter market has taken over much of the lobby, alongside a notice board and wall of the missing, similar to the ones that Ringmaster and Deadline have been setting up at other enclaves.

TD tries to get a feel for any creepy/culty/etc stuff going on and can’t detect it, but notices that the people here seem to be working together symbiotically unusually well. Dig and CG take a further look at the leylines, and determine that they seem to be surfacing further, presumably as Peregrine makes progress on opening the vault below. They look bestial in some way, but not quite familiar to Dig, and using his arcanoarchaeology knowledge he determines that the locus was likely a mana spike in Victorian times, that someone managed to capture, use or contain in some way. This rouses the team’s interest to say the least.

They have a chat with Peregrine and he gives them some updates on the enclave and seems his usual friendly self, though his mysterious connections still leave them with some suspicions. He wants to hire them to secure transport of some supplies (food, meds, filters, etc) from a promising new supplier he is trying to establish a relationship with, but he’s been having some trouble in the Down Below from some former ARES/Mafia goons who have started up a protection racket covering some of the main junctions, including the point where the handoff is to be made tomorrow.

The team requests some time to discuss, and Peregrine exits to let them chat. They check and noone seems to be monitoring, though Otters is delighted to find a functional local mesh. They decide they want a share of whatever’s in the vault as payment, and Peregrine agrees, with some limits due to lack of knowledge, once he returns. Creep and Cholula head down to scout the route, and Dig turns into a wolf to help. Using their extensive tunnel maps and Dig’s powerful nose, they plot out as direct a path as possible while avoiding major settlements and intersections.

They head back to the safehouse, rest, and make a plan. The next day they head back underground a few hours early, with Dig and Cholula using a mindlink to stay in touch while each patrolling half of the route and using magic and/or might to keep it clear. The rest of the crew posts up in or near Knight Junction, where the exchange will take place, and quickly spots some plain clothes ARES goons filtering into the crowd. Since the goons haven’t spotted them, they decide to trigger an ambush, and manage to quickly take 2/3 of them out, with the other’s retreating, hauling their wounded and leaving their dead.

Meanwhile, Dig has spotted 4 more ARES goons wearing heavier armor posted up alongside the route, who start racing for the Junction when gunfire pops off. Dig and Cholula give chase and come under fire themselves, and have to fall back a bit, though Cholula manages to get word to the rest of the team and they set up a quick pincer. Dig hits the armored goons from behind with a powerful spell, driving them towards the Junction, where the team makes quick work of them with another fusilade, supported by two other runner types that Otters quickly hires who were scoping out the Junction.

As Creep examines the corpses, he notices that although they have ARES armor, their weapons and gear are all Onotari Arms. He makes note for later. The two other runners, who the team has recognized as the guards they saw via clairvoyance in the suite of one of the two Brackhauses at the hotel downtown, make their exit. A short while later, another well-armored squad enters, hauling some crates on air cushion sleds.

Although they are not branded or obviously labelled in any way, they are clearly SK, or meaning to look like them, down to the slight AGS accent of the one who speaks, though all wear full-face visors so it is hard to tell who is who. The speaking one passes over the goods and says to pass along the message to Peregrine that they consider this all satisfactory and will trade again in future. The other four pop out mobile field stretchers and load up all the enemy corpses and haul them off.

Otters gets the Mule drones to haul the supply sleds, and they carefully make their way back through the tunnels to The Dom without any further trouble. They hand over the goods to Peregrine, who seems quite happy with their performance, and tells them he’ll be in touch as soon as he cracks the final layers of security on the vault for their payment. He also tells them to refer lone/small group survivors to him as needed- he is trying to expand The Dom’s footprint to house more, as well as connecting other enclaves to secure safer housing for those that want it.

The team heads home, rests up, and gets ready to face whatever comes next…

View

SEP/2023

Corpse Bonfires and BBQ's

Grinding Bones and Raiding Labs

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective
Tabasco aka Cholula

The team all debriefs together after their separate missions, and decides that next up they need to take out Bloodripper, as he has gone from violent thrill-kill ganger to fulltime serial killer. They make a series of elaborate plans for trap scenarios and the like, before deciding their best bet is a simpler plan. They find a mostly empty shuttle parking lot in Dearborn near some factories, and Dig hides the van with Otters, Cholula, TD and himself inside under some concrete, using magic, while CG waits in the center of the lot with a ring of grenades strung around him, just far enough that he won’t be hurt when they detonate but close enough to be able to cover any direction that Bloodripper may approach from.

CG also reveals the existence of his own personal VTOL and private Bolthole, sharing the details in case anything happens. Some on the team are quite shocked by this revelation, especially Cholula, though they all also recognize it as a pro move and wonder if they should do the same.

Creep hides under a nearby abandoned car, and CG tells his spirit to start using powers once the fight kicks off. Having a left a note at their safehouse with their specific location, CG sends out a cryptic radio broadcast intended to lure BR to the note, and thus to the trap. After waiting around for quite a while, and believing themselves to be watching carefully, they are surprised when BR suddenly appears at the edge of the grenade circle, having spotted the poorly concealed trap.

CG explains that they’re just for lubrication and exciting fireworks, so BR spurs his bike forward over the line, and dismounts before embracing CG in a crushing embrace. CG’s spirit reports that it can’t see BR in astral space but that a Watcher spirit seems to be following/observing. As the team failed to trigger their ambush when BR wandered in, they scramble to catch up as CG is slowly being crushed to death- BR seems to think this will be a worthy devotional act.

Creep says “fuck it” and shoots BR, blowing off most of his armor, as Dig finally gets it together and gets the concrete moved so Otters can drive the van up and open fire with the HMG. Unfortunately, CG’s spirit uses the accident power on BR and he seems to attempt to protect CG from the gunfire but fails and trips, throwing both of them into it’s path. BR is killed, spectacularly, and CG is badly injured, though the team manages to stabilize and heal him somewhat as they race over.

With that settled, they scrape BR’s remains onto his burning, ruined motorcycle and let it burn. They swing by the Plat Zone to check in with Ringmaster, since it’s been a while, and debrief on all the dark spirit business. They confirm that as a syndicate hitman, pre-Blackout, BR was likely a devotee of Cernobog, and most likely has been manipulated by a spirit of pain and disease named Crepitus into believing that he is sacrificing to Cernobog while actually empowering it.

RM congratulates them on their success effectively ending the shadow zombie threat, though news of Shedim involvement is upsetting to him. Also, he has now taken to wearing a biohazard suit, well-tailored of course, to keep others safe from his HMHVV infection, as he explains he was able to avoid infection and is himself now also a carrier. He offers the same tech to Dig, who refuses, and gently warns the team again about the risk.

They talk about other Spirit threats- Famine aka Mezcallus Negh seems like the next biggest one, and they hope that Crepitus will be diminished by it’s acolyte’s destruction, assuming it doesn’t have others. Luckily, the Mafia got mostly wiped out and the Vory doesn’t really have a toehold, so they don’t think there will be any obvious candidates. They also figure they better deal with Pygmy and Li Wei at some point, who have joined forces under the moniker “The Blood Knights”, claiming to be hooders keeping Detroit free from the corps, which to them entails sacrificing any corpo citizens they get their hands on in blood magic rituals. Effective perhaps, but maybe not cool.

Putting that off for another time, they decide to follow up on a lead from Erika Knowles about some stolen ARES data and tech, and determine that it is likely in the possession of Tilda Aurand, the same doctor they were looking for in relation to the various collared lab animal escapees. On the way, Dig calls Grandma Biyu to float the idea of hosting corpse bonfires adjacent to food giveaways, and she eagerly agrees, since Ringmaster is also throwing in some support.

Biyu explains that due to a new local alliance between the Seoul’Pa and the Reality Hackers and the Triad, they will also be able to make these into the central nodes of further mesh nets as they continue to expand. The team, as usual, worries what all these alliances will look like when things reopen someday, but for now they are doing the best they can. They start tracking down the lab via the hacked collar that Dig managed to salvage, and eventually do home in on the signal- a facility seemingly contained behind and under a streetfront pet store.

Creep heads in to investigate, and works his way down a partially exposed secret elevator shaft. He is almost overwhelmed by some kind of venomous mice, who swarm him as he tries to clamber back out, so Cholula races in to try to rescue, and almost succumbs himself. Using some clever combo’s of flashbangs and smoke grenades, Creep manages to drive the mice hoard back, while Cholula accidentally covers himself in lube with a bad grenade toss.

Dig comes in and Pulses the mice after Cholula fails to Animal Control them and reports that they may be biodrones- which Otters thought was impossible due to size. They get Cholula out, and CG finds a pet wash station to get him cleaned up, while Otters and Dig dissect a sample mouse that Creep retrieves. They find it suffused with nanites, with no other implants visible, and Dig manages to Pulse in time to keep either of them from getting the nanites in themselves.

They regroup and all head down, aside from Creep and CG, who do some recon and keep an eye on things up top in case of a trap. TD holds up a note in front of one of the cameras in the store, which appear hardwired to something below, offering to talk rather than fight, and with the elevator powers back up and takes them down, avoiding the lubed mouse pile at the bottom of the shaft. They enter a wrecked lab, and searching for traps, Cholula finds that the defenses were all turned inwards when they were destroyed.

They find a series of rooms with bashed open doors, all also from the inside. though the enclosure cages all seem to have opened normally…. as they head further in, hall lights turn on and off to guide their path. They check out more experimental rooms, and finding some of the notes it looks like this is where the collared animals all came from. There are various destroyed drones around, which seem like the only facility staff, but which were only able to contain about 1/2 of the escaped test subjects.

Coming to final vault door, it hisses and opens, and they hear a faint crackly voice requesting assistance. They find a brain in a jar on the floor with a small speaker attached, and determine that this is what remains of Dr. Tilda Aurand. She convinces them with knowledge of the escaped subjects, as well as by leading them to discover her body, which is on ice in the back, with the lid of her skull removed like an egg cup. She requests that they remove her from this place along with her body, from which she hopes to grow a wimp clone.

Dig asks why they should bother, and she points out that the server stack is slagged and says she is the only source of the knowledge now. Dig offers to Mind Probe her, but the rest of the team figures it’s better to have a new friend, so he doesn’t. She requests they provide her with a visual sensor, so Cholula slaps one of his surveillance dots on the brain jar and gives her control. Otters notices that she has both a nice deck and rig incorporated, and they see that the jar seems to have rolled free of an anthroform drone when it was wrecked fighting an escapee.

She explains that Otto Hendricks sent hitmen after her when she fled ARES with all her data during Latvian Gambit to this lab that she had slowly and methodically set up in the background over years while planning her escape. That was when she was forced to freeze her original body and transfer her brain to this slapdash arrangement. CG assenses and she is indeed alive, and free of nanites, so they agree to her terms.

She provides them with a magical research paper as initial proof of the quality of her info, and keeps trickling more info to them as they remove her from the facility. This includes intel on various ARES projects- security dinosaur biodrones, Encounter Suits for more safely exploring the Deep Metaplanes, as well as intel about who knew what and when- apparently the Bottleneck portal closer devices, including the massive one that Vogel set off to end Latvian Gambit, were based on tech stolen from the mysterious metaplane of Dis, and the development of the ALPHA merges and the metahuman possessions of bugs on Colony/Vhortas were based on tech stolen from AZT from their cyberzombie research.

This is all big paydata, and the team needs some time to discuss who to pass or sell it on to. For now, they have a quick debate about what to do with Aurand. Dig wants to kill her, as she seems like a pretty objectively mad scientist with low ethical qualms about her actions, plus they’ve got what she knows now. The rest of the team votes to try to help her get a body and make a new ally. Giving her a few options, she chooses to be taken to Moreau for his biodrones expertise, as she doesn’t trust Ellis (a former coworkers) and doesn’t know Leanna Octave, and seems suspicious of her new turn towards nanotech.

The team drives her over to Moreau’s facility, and then settles in to figure out where to sell the data.

View

SEP/2023

Shining A Light

Taking the Fight to the Shadows, Once Again

Runners
Creep
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective

The team decides to finally follow through on helping Smoach finish off the Shadow Spirit threat in town, partially in revenge for Myrryr’s death. Otters fixes up the van and replaces the wrecked Mule drone with parts from RRR, and finds out that their numbers have been significantly reduced due to some treachery and infighting spurred by a local, now deceased, fixer named Florio. Rubberhead still gets them what they need though, and tells them that they have more shielded solar, chemical battery, and old-school combustion engines up and running for vehicles, drones, generators etc that they are selling around town. The team is also starting to see more local mesh nets up and running after they distro’ed the know-how on the radio.

Following Smoach’s freshest lead, they find a busted up combustion van, that seems to have been on corpse collection duty. 2 bodies left behind are possessed by Shadow spirits, one of whom was the driver who is scarifying his face in the ritual manor while still half-launched through the windshield. The team waits and observes while the 2 spirits extricate themselves and take some medical tools from the van, and then Creep sneaks after them when they leave on foot. Otters and Dig approach and take a look at the crashed van, which seems to have run into…. nothing?

Dig decrypts the hardwired camera footage while Otters secures the scene. The Detective ends up talking to and calming some locals who approached and seem super traumatized. As they calm them, they notice it has an astral effect- some sort of pooling fear dissipates. TD tells the team and Dig gets airborne to take a more thorough astral look, and sees that the path Creep is following the Shadow spirits on is one outer tendril of a web of fear that they seem to be reinforcing- almost as if someone is trying to create leylines or aspect the local manasphere in preparation for a larger invasion.

Dig reports back while Smoach uses his TM abilities to retain comms with Creep as he gets further away. They take another look in the astral and notice that their is Famine feeling coming from the North and West, which seems to be somewhat bolstered by the Fear and vice versa, though their effected areas seem to carefully not overlap. Using Dig’s astral map. Smoach’s surveillance intel, and everyone else’s knowledge of the city, they determine where the Shadow spirits are headed: the locus of fear Downtown, the cities largest emergency shelter, which also serves as the overflow morgue for mass casualty incidents. Reviewing the video footage from the van, it looks like Shadow spirits ambushed it with a invisible barrier wall while the van was full of corpses (likely either for ghoul food or cremation, depending), and then killed the survivor of the crash. A swarm of bats flies in and the bodies rise and take off en masse, leaving the driver and one in the back behind to loot.

Creep sees that the Shadows are trying to terrify and harass any people they come across, and briefly chase but don’t attack them. The team decides that they need to limit the spread of fear, and after all bolstering themselves against the existential dread of what they’ve encountered, aided by a happy spell from Dig and some Guts, they race down to pick up Creep and destroy the spirits. They make short work of their bodies with gunfire, and Dig manages to disrupt their astral forms with spellcraft, and then sees a truly horrifying sight- an awful ravenous bat-like maw visible in the distance near the Scar in the astral sky seems to consume the spirits instead of allowing them to travel back to their homeplace when disrupted, and seems to both gain power and become somewhat more proximate in doing so.

Dig reports this in, and Smoach shares some of his more obscure research, which turned up hints of the Horrors, and something called The Book of Harrow, that Myrryr had been obsessed with. The team, worried, decides they need to cheer up the town before they head to the morgue/shelter, and head to Biyu’s while Dig naps to recover from drain. He stays behind at Biyu’s to rest and learn an astral armor spell while the team distro’s food (to fight the famine) alongside a stirring spiel from TD (to fight fear) and some data chips that Creep loads the 10 best episodes of Rosanne onto (which are received with all the enthusiasm of a religious pamphlet by most).

They do successfully change the vibe a bit with the effort though, and TD can see that they seem to be constraining the spread of the Fear tendrils if not actively pushing them back. After Dig rests they head Downtown to check out the locus. They find it well-marked and signed as an emergency shelter, and it seems not to have been fortified, likely as a trap for desperate survivors to enter. Using their maps and knowledge of the DDB, they determine roughly where an emergency exit should be down there, and decide that they should hit it from both sides in a pincer.

While surveilling, Otters spots someone else also surveilling, so they pull back and used one of Creep’s LRAD’s to tightbeam a message over to the area, after Dig assenses and can’t find anyone, but detects a deathly aura that they all assume means Shedim. Recalling that Shedim have supposedly heavily infiltrated UCAS SpecOps, they think this may be the team they heard was in town, and assume that an enemy of an enemy could at least be a temporary ally? They get a radio call from Marshall Eugene Trapp shortly after, in which he circumspectly offers to pass along a message, and tells them to come meet with him in person to keep if off radio.

They head to his office in West Downtown, and he refuses to confirm or deny knowing of any sort of SpecOps in town, but goes over their plan with them and confirms with Otters that if the runners cover the aboveground exit, Smoach can guide the other team down to the emergency exit, where they will breach and drive anyone inside out into the team’s field of fire. The team agrees, and arms up with some rocket launchers and heavy duty ammo for fighting spirits. They head over and set up their ambush, with Creep making a large lube field while Otters rigs some grenade tripwires at choke points.

Dig hides as a mouse in Creep’s pocket, who has a grenade bandolier and flamethrower ready to go. TD has their flamethrower ready in the van as well, while Otters rigs the van and mounted weapons. They get a stream from Smoach who says he’ll follow the Shedim team in and maintain comms as long as he can. They see the team, very pro, having cleared a space in the survivor encampment around the door, apply det-cord, blow the door, and breach very quickly. They race into a long dark tunnel with flickering emergency bio-lights, all cement block.

After a long eerie traversal, they enter a huge morgue chamber, also badly lit, which the team at first thinks is strewn with bodies, but instead see are all unzipped, empty body bags. Smoach pans around and they see that all the freezer corpse lockers have been opened, with the sliding slabs partially out. It is very creepy, with no bodies in sight, until Smoach zooms in on one of the soldiers checking the body bags, and sees one of them unzip from the inside, from which a corpse sits up and detonates a suicide vest. The feed cuts out. Up top, Creep notices some ripples in one of the areas where the lube has pooled a bit, just before he hears the terrifying sound of hundreds of mostly bare feet running up the dark ramps towards them.

They prepare a bounding overwatch in case they need to advance or retreat, and slam some combat drugs as a huge zombie hoard charges forth up both ramps in a horrifying flesh wave. Otters cuts down the first few ranks with suppressive fire, with Creep supplementing with chucked grenades. The subsequent ranks stumble over the first as they fall, and slide through the lube field into the grenade traps, as Otters follows up with a rocket, and TD reloads the launcher. Dig is frantically trying to disrupt spirits in the astral plane but has to flee the sheer number of spirits that the team has disembodied there.

He continues trying to fry them but see that those spirits that can are taking to dead bats littered around the parking area in an attempt to escape. TD and Creep open up with flamethrowers while falling back, while Otters uses the remaining rocket and suppressive fire to continue scything through the zombie hoard. As they are further thinned out, the team starts to hear and see automatic weapons fire from behind the hoard as well, it seems some of Shedim team survived.

With the Shedim survivors entering and fighting with brutal efficiency on the astral as well as the physical, the team just manages to prevent a mass bat breakout. They may not have got them all but they definitely disrupted a lot, and destroyed the necessary hosts of many more. Dig and TD can already feel the fear locus lessening in power from their actions here. Without any further convo, the Shedim head back belowground, with only Creep spotting two of the less damaged zombies from first wave rising to join them, seemingly providing hosts to some of the Shedim whose bodies were destroyed in the suicide bombing in the morgue.

The team heads home to rest and mourn Smoach’s death, though he at least went in with his eyes open and chose to be there. They find Chew Gum and Cholula waiting for them, saying they have an upsetting report from their investigation into Bloodripper’s whereabouts…..

View

SEP/2023

Against the Order

Chemical Clouds Over Downtown

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
The Detective
Tabasco aka Cholula

The team gets everyone into position and triggers the assault against the OOSG fortified warehouse. Rose is providing TM comms support to boost the range of the TacNET, giving everyone some critical bonuses, while ChewGum and the spirits watch the back for anyone trying to escape towards the river. Otters keeps the van out of sight for now, running the RCC from inside the smuggling compartment, while The Detective rides inside, keeps an eye out locally, and provides leadership and oversight via the TacNET. DIg and SINder set up to provide magical cover for the assault team, while Bard is covering from a sniper perch.

The assault team approaches, with Cholula and the Windsor crew members Signpost, Smaug, and Lunatech easily hopping over the fence that rings the building. Otters’ mule drone gets hung up for a moment at the fenceline while also providing covering fire for the bounding overwatch maneuver. Creep sneaks up without anyone seeming to notice him. As Cholula turns to help out the drone, some panels on the warehouse wall drops and two of the ballistas fire massive bolts into the drone, destroying it. Bard takes out one of their crew with a well-placed sniper shot, while Dig keeps missing over and over with lightning bolts.

Signpost cracks open some more defensive paneling and those 3 slip inside, with Creep sneakily following, and Cholula ascending to the roof. CG opens up with suppressive fire on the back wall, keeping everyone trapped inside with the spirits on overwatch. The ballistas next turn their fire on Bard’s position, and he is hit and drops off the TacNET, seemingly unconscious or dead. SINder seems to be distracted trying to help him, and Dig manages to distract one of the ballista crews with another unusually weak spell, but it provides enough cover for Cholula to manage to light them on fire with phosphorus arrows.

The Windsor crew takes out the other ballista crew, as Cholula comes under fire from a crossbow-wielding knight, and a half dozen other knights charge and dogpile the Windsor crew, wildly swinging their claymore’s in some kind of combat frenzy. One of them seems to be the obvious leader, who Creep and Cholula mark out on the TacNET. They appear to be making short work of the outnumbered Windsor crew, so Creep and Cholula open fire on them as well, revealing their positions.

Dig also launches some spells at those he can see, and CG starts descending from his perch to breech from the rear and help. Otters moves the van closer for support and extraction now that the ballistas are out of commission. Cholula gets hit by a couple of stun grenades and is forced to retreat, and Creep has to fall back outside after two of the knights charge up towards his position. CG’s spirit manages to cause one of them to fall on his own sword during the attack, injuriously, and Dig snags the other one with his magic fingers to keep him from catching Creep.

Creep leaves a grenade behind and detonates it, shredding the knight’s armor. He still charges out in pursuit, and Otters drops him with the van HMG. Dig approaches closer to get into the fight as well and almost gets tagged with some kind of nasty toxin thrown by the leader. It seems to briefly increase his drain, but he feels like he dodged something worse. CG blasts his way in from the back and opens up on the OOSG knights who have been hacking up the Windsor crew.

Singpost looks dead, Smaug is badly injured, and Lunatech also looks pretty hurt but is sneakily hauling herself free over towards the pile of toxic chemical barrels in one corner. She starts fiddling with some tubes and wires connected to them when she gets there while Otters takes out another OOSG knight who tries to come after Dig in the doorway, and CG frantically dodges attacks from the 2 who charge him. The leader manages to counter a powerful spell from Dig, and starts swinging his sword at him after annihilating Dig’s spirit with his mageblade.

Dig dodges impressively well with some assistance from Otters and TD, and manages to hold the leader just long enough with his magic fingers to allow himself to escape to a safer distance. Unfortunately, SINder was trying to use his own spell to haul the KO’ed Smaug out the door to safety, and Smaug is cut in half by the OOSG leader. Lunatech seeing this, and with 3 knights remaining and them team out of good ideas on how to fight them effectively, and with the van damaged from another sword blow, makes a decision, and shouting “to the MOOOOOOOOON” ignites some det cord she has wound around the chemical drum tubing she has spliced together.

CG goes down under the OOSG assault, though his spirit is able to keep one of the knights from stopping Lunatech. Cholula decides on a crazy rescue plan, and takes a running jump off the roof of the van and goes into a sliding dive to grab CG and get them both out the back of the warehouse before it blows. TD grabs Creep into the van as Otters spins it around to put the open door away from the warehouse and the van between Dig and the warehouse.

It blows big and Dig manages to leap into the open side door as the van is blown towards him. CG and Cholula roll free with some more help from the plant corpse spirit, and get picked up. Rose and SINder haul a bandaged and unconscious Bard down, still impaled with a massive ballista bolt, and get back to their vehicle to head home and try to regroup, much depleted. The team heads back to their safehouse and rests.

The next day, they package up their assorted intel, and Dig heads up to Smoach’s to get help interpreting it. He promises they will help Smoach deal with the Shadow spirit threat soon. Smoach ID’s the toxin used on him as “Void Blast”- it apparently messes with channeling, and would likely have done a lot of damage as well if it had hit full on. He also ID’s a key sigil that the team saw on the OOSG bladed as “St. Hubert’s Key” a symbol of a sort of purification- he’s heard some Catholic’s think there is an artifact affiliated that can stave off or prevent HMHVV infection. But this seems darker, like they wanted to “purify” the world of the Infected.

This would explain the noxious chemical cloud over the part of downtown where the fight took place, where some of whatever was in the barrels is still burning, or at least smoking. Smoach also ID’s the sigil on the necklace the leader wore, which is what he used to counterspell Dig, as a rumored symbol of a shadowy group called the “Cult of the Great Hunter”, and explains that he had thought they were just a paranoid internet rumor. Supposedly, they were some 4th World humans who didn’t hide during the transition to magical downtime, and instead spent the time hunting and killing dragons, fae, and others while they slumbered or sheltered in their Kaer’s. As well as, rumors say, continued their work into the 5th World, and beyond, up to the present- though once again, Smoach says this is all just fringe rumor stuff, or so he thought.

With data in hand, Dig flies down to Brunwyn’s yacht, and passes it over. She seems thrilled that them and the Windsor crew took the initiative and dealt with the OOSG, and after Dig fumbles around a bit, gives him some money. She says that she has to rescind a few previous job offers, as some of the people she’s been seeking have been found, either by herself or others, in which case they did not survive. Someone else appears to be hunting the scientists that she’s been collecting. However, she says she can always find work for a quality team, and seems happy with their performance here. After casually intimidating Dig a bit, he leaves and visits Grandmother Biyu, who tells him she has another lead on the mystery vans.

Returning to the safehouse, Dig reports back on all this, and they decide to split the pay between Otters getting her mule replaced and sending a bunch to the Windsor crew. They also get some new updates= apparently Canadian separatists have blown the 3 main bridges from Downtown to Windsor, cutting the SE district off significantly from the rest of town. Cholula is still super stressed about the threat of Bloodripper, so he and CG agree to try to track him down.

The rest of the team decide to finally help Smoach deal with Shadow spirits, and start readying themselves to deal with that threat once and for all.

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AUG/2023

Who Will Tilt at Those Who Tilt at Windmills

Tying Up Some Loose Ends

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective
Tabasco aka Cholula

While the crew is running errands for Biyu, Cholula organizes the new gang coop to strike/eliminate the 696 Slayers, who everyone has some degree of beef with, and who seem to be a growing threat to Motor City with their nihilistic embrace of violence, cannibalism, and a growing cult-like adoration of Gorechuk Bloodripper, who also problematically is still magically in a twisted sort of love with Chew Gum. Luckily Cholula is better at strategizing than talking, and comes up with a plan good enough that all members of the coop throw is some means of support, and the mission is mostly successful. The 696’s are wiped out, their current captives freed, their turf reclaimed. BUT- Bloodrippers escapes, screaming out a vow of vengeance on all who oppose him, and Cholula specifically.

With that problem dealt with, for now, Cholula returns the safehouse for a well-earned rest and links up with the rest of the crew before they head back down to the Old Dominion bank Downtown to talk their way in on behalf of Peregrine. They spend some time planning, and decide their best move is to invite the Cutters to join the gang coop, and spend some time getting couriers from the Keepers to deliver a dossier The Detective compiles on the proposal to all the members.

They have a radio call, and find that the different factions all have some different ideas of how voting, decision making etc should work. Some of the more classic gangs have sent a higher up to make the decisions for them, while other newer cooperative orgs have sent elected delegates with pre-approved limits etc. The team gets everyone to agree to assign Ronnie’s Raiders the task of coming up with some proposals for internal governance, which the group (primarily college students and teachers) eagerly agrees to.

For now, they get everyone on board with inviting the Cutters, though it also raises the question of what will become of the coop once the Blackout ends (if the world outside survived), as the Cutters will be the dominant faction locally, and have better international connections than any other member group outside of the Ancients. This is tabled for the time, as a “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” problem. The team compiles their proposal for the Cutters knowing what little they know about their local situation leadership, mostly based on an interaction Cholula had during Latvian Gambit.

Once Downtown, they talk their way into the well-fortified bank, finding that even though ARES cut the Cutters loose, they managed to hang onto a lot of heavy armament. After a comically bureaucratic process, they finally get through to Ripper, the local leader. She remembers Cholula, though seems surprised at his updated appearance and change of moniker. Using this friendly lead-in, The Detective makes the deal, though Ripper proves a canny negotiator and TD has to contact Peregrine to confirm a few changes to the proposal.

After all that’s done, they chat a bit and head out, and then get very stressed out when Dig suggests that Peregrine could be a Null Sect member, especially since he’s suspiciously new to town and they haven’t interacted in person. However, they quickly find a friendly dwarf walking in and introducing himself, still using the unidentifiable pan-Euro accent that made Dig initially suspicious. He pulls a power move of getting patted down and then passing over a wicked looking concealed blade that the security missed.

He converses briefly with the team, and then says he has to get to work taking a local census, addressing needs, and taking a look at the vault downstairs that he’s so eager to get to. Ripper had said they hadn’t had any luck gaining access yet. Almost as an afterthought, Peregrine manually lock picks his way into the 7 Sisters message drop, and Otters leaves a note for Astrid Case with their radio code. Taking a look at the astral situation around the bank once they leave, they notice that it seems likely some old leylines converge underneath it, though they can’t get a good feel for their initial aspect or for what might be at their crossing, as earth and/or other magical barriers prevent it.

Following up on a tip from Ripper, they go examine the nearby site of a blood magic sacrifice one of her scouts found. They ID the victim as likely being one of the Jaguar Guards in town with the AZT mage Cehaulli, and get some intel on the crime itself- a prolonged and painful ritual bleeding resulting in sacrifice to power the caster. CG also gets an image of his face using the Mortis Optigram- an Aztlaner man with a face repeatedly tattooed over and over such that none of the individual designs are decipherable. They call it in to Cehualli on the van radio.

He and The Detective chat a bit, and he reveals he had already found and investigated the site, and confirms that it is the work of the serial killer they are hunting, who he says is a Path of the Sun extremist heretic. TD still doesn’t like Cehualli overall, but he seems to appreciate them reaching out and views it as an expansion of their relationship, so he shares some further info, in case the team can track down the killer. They decide not to pursue it for now, but to keep their eyes open.

Back in the van, they get a call from Astrid Case, responding to Otters’ note. After she strongarms them a bit, she gives into their threat to reveal her involvement in the planning runup to the Blackouts, as she says whoever was paying her retainer before missed the most recent payment. In agreement to keep her name out of it, she tells them she was paid a lot of money for about 6 months of prep work, via a shell company she didn’t bother to try to track beyond the Carib League. She did pick ups and drop offs from an office Downtown, near the Senator hotel, but only ever directly interacted with drones or Camden Espinoze.

She gives them the address, but tells them the property was rented by the same shell company that paid her so they likely won’t get much from that. They head over to investigate, and find the office burned out in an intentional arson. Examining the setup, it was obviously rigged to burn professionally, and probably had been set up to go up at a moment’s notice while it was operational. It looks like the office was run exclusively by drones (which are totally slagged), and it seems like office sounds were broadcast over speakers while standees and cardboard furniture would give the impression of a bustling space behind the privacy frosted windows and doors.

Based on their investigation, they determine that this must have been the work of the Null Sect- who else could run this level of scheme, with this result, using only drones, with this kind of funding? It feels like solid inference, even though they lack direct proof. They head back to Biyu’s, and get paid for their investigation, as well as for the assassination. She also cooks them up a nice dinner as usual. She seems at least semi-aware of the Null Sect, and warns them against saying too much about them over comms, even in the Blackout, but compliments them on a job well-done.

They rest up again at the safehouse, and wake to some distressing news: Neverland Candy Shoppe has been torched, with no known survivors. They head down there to see if they can help, and find Lunatech and Smoach looking pissed, but unable to even search for survivors given the ongoing extreme heat of the shell of the collapsed building. Dig summons a water spirit, and Creep uses it to get inside, where they find a torched and melted body pile near the center of the blaze, bearing marks of archaic weaponry. They deduce that this was the work of the Order of St. George, and decide to put an end to them.

They say they will track them to their base, while Smoach and Lunatech round up their crew to support the assault. Dig, as a wolf, starts tracking, and then CG uses one of his spirit powers to make him considerably faster so that wolf Dig can easily pace the van. Cholula also tracks on foot but falls far behind. They find the OOSG fortress, a barricaded riverfront warehouse, with ease, but come under bombardment while parked outside discussing what to do.

Otters manages to dodge the flaming ballista bolts, and they retreat, finding a rendezvous point with the Windsor/Belle Isle crew. With roughly even numbers contributed by both groups, they plan an assault using bounding overwatch, with about an even split between the close quarters and ranged teams. Otters parks her body in the van, to use the HMG for covering fire while sneaking a cloaked Mule in alongside the CQC team.

Cholula gets shot at again while doing some recon, and thus confirms that the OOSG has at least some members who can see and target astrally, which also explains how they made the van so easily. This complicates things a bit, but just furthers the argument to hit them fast and hard. Everyone loads up, tightens the straps on their armor, and gets ready to charge…..

View

AUG/2023