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….

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….

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…

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.

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…..

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.

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…..

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective

The team decides to hold off on tracking down the escaped critters lab, and Cholula heads off to keep an eye on the 696 Slayers and start plotting the gang coop mission to take them out. The rest of the crew decides to knock out the assorted jobs they have for Grandmother Biyu. They head down to the Long Storage facility first and try to contact Static, the AI landlord, who appears to be absent or offline. They break in, and are nearly overwhelmed by the terrible odors coming out from many units. There are also a lot of obvious signs of looting and other break-in’s.

Luckily, Dig as a dog has an excellent nose and tracks down the unit they are looking for with ChewGum and necro spirit assistance, and they manage to talk their way in without any trouble, despite some home-built auto-turrets that Tator has rigged up. He turns out to be a somewhat chaotic-seeming dwarf with nano-tats, who seems to be a Technomancer who ended up in deep debt to the Triad. He says it was actually kinda lucky since he was in a Farady’ed holding cell when they Blackout hit, so wasn’t effected as many TM’s were, and now can work down his debt at an accelerated rate.

He has the pieces of the previous mystery vans the team blew up, which Biyu seems to have retrieved after they tipped her off. He also has a more intact third van, as well as a cracked-open SpriteLok. He explains that he managed to bust it open and free the captive Sprite onto the local hardwired grid, and when the team, worried for Static, asks if he say anyone else on there, he says it looked empty to him. He also agrees to free the Sprite from the Spritelok that the team recovered, since they don’t have a handy grid to let it stabilize on.

He passes on some intel he’s scraped from the van’s nav and comms systems, and Dig and Otters manage to retrieve a bit more, recovering another few days of Jackpoint logs from the first few days of the Blackout- it seems there is a lot of live information manipulation happening, and confusion as to where is or isn’t blacked out, what caused it, what’s happening etc. Also, there was at least one sighting of somewhere wearing a III Corps jacket who appeared mutated in a fight inside the ARCHology in St. Louis. Based on team file records, the team speculates that the Black Lodge portals used to construct that facility may have been involved….

They also review the info Tator found. It looks like Camden Espinoza, who they previously extracted for Brunwyn, made the offline GridGuide substitution as well as the hardened map devices that the vans use. So the team now has the route, as well as knowing a little more about Espinoza’s role. They also trace it back to Run and Sollars Private Library, where the map Espinoza used came from. They decide to head there later and check that out as well.

They stop by the port and pass along the small mystery package to a somewhat chastened-looking Triad LT, who is missing an ear. They then swing by the container graveyard adjacent, and with a clever idea from Creep track down the seafood container they are looking for via it’s massive heat output from it’s (luckily) still working AC. They manage to get it all loaded into the van as well as a trailer they buy from Rubberhead at the Triple R for this purpose.

Managing to speed by various hungry survivors on the way with no serious problems, the team drops off the seafood and reports in to Biyu, who pays them the first increment and also buys the trailer off their hands. They next head to Casa Aurelius and pull off a quick assassination, blasting the shit out of an elf businessman with CG’s shotgun from the open side door of the van before Otters speeds off while under covering fire from the machine gun mounted on the roof.

With that done, they rest up and then head to the library the next day. Luckily TD and Otters have good reps there since they didn’t call ahead, and TD manages to con The Cartographer into showing them the visitor log by claiming they are trying to help find out who kidnapped Camden Espinoza, as his family has been asking around. They get the name Astrid Case, ESQ, which Creep and TD recognize as being the honorific for a lawyer.

Knowing only one set of lawyers in town, they head to Belle Isle, and find Sahara Jones working for STV, having been left behind in the chaotic ARES withdrawal. Happy to see her previous saviors, she helps them out for free, and tells them Case is a local hardline corp rights attorney with a high fee who works for a boutique firm. She gives them the mailing address they have on file- an old bank downtown. They head there next.

The bank is under control of the Cutters, who took it over after ARES cut them loose back during the bug crisis. It looks like they have a civilian community there also, though the relationship is unclear. Dig notices an unknown number trying to call them, and puts it through. They make contact with the fixer Peregrine, who they’ve heard of but not interacted with yet. They agree to work with him to get an in with the Cutters, make sure the civvies are being taken care of well, and get him access to the basement, in exchange for him getting them the info they need on Case.

With some recon ahead, they start talking through some plans for how to get the Cutters on board, but since Peregrine is offering resources and material support, they think they can make it work without excessive bloodshed, though he seems open to a change in gang leadership as needed.

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

After retreating from the guards’ raking fire during the extraction of Camden Espinoza, Cholula spends some time tracking the mystery vans he saw fleeing the scene on his surveillance cam. He manages to keep pace on the rooftops for a bit with the movement power, but starts to lose them, so he tags one with a detachable shaft tracking arrow, and hopes to pick up the signal again someday. He then tries to get back to the safehouse but gets pinned to the ground with a spear thrown by Bloodripper, who wants to say hi to ChewGum in his own special way.

Cholula manages to start wiggling himself free off the spear, but his dripping fluids seem to have attracted some hungry-looking humanoids wearing lab collars- possibly the same ones the team has been hearing about? Regardless, they seem somewhat intelligent and attack with a pack tactic that proves damaging and effective. Cholula chooses to flee and manages to make his escape, retreating to the nearby Plat Zone for now to heal and rest, before eventually making his way back to the safehouse.

When the rest of the team arrives back from the gang coop meeting, they find him there, and decide it’s time to deal with both the critters and Bloodripper. They have the brilliant idea to combine both into one plan, and head up to 696 Slayers turf, where CG multiplies some food to impress the gangers (and hopefully stop them from killing for a bit, as they seem to have begun eating their victims), and instructs Bloodripper to hunt down the Critters for him.

Bloodripper agrees, behaving in an almost parodically chivalric fashion. He packs up some (metahuman?) meat to go in a tray from the school cafeteria, and the team heads off. They decide to check in with someone about getting paid to end the critter threat, and call up Ringmaster who seems to want them to look into it but is initially surprised they aren’t doing it solely because the critters have eaten some of their contacts, most recently some Keepers. He also tips them off that there have been reported attacks amongst the survivor communities newly moving into the DDB.

Otter zips over to Moreau, not having checked in on him since the Blackout started, and worried he may be involved. She also wants to drop off a radio with him to keep in better touch. She finds Moreau having fortified and extensively trapped the approach to the Bloomfield Nature Reserve, though from an aerial view, she can see paths in marked by small piles of meat, presumably so animals can safely find their way through.

She manages to make contact through Moreau’s e-dog, Buddy, and safely lands. Moreau seems like he’s been spending too much time with the animals and has lost the habit of regular speech, but otherwise “ok”. He does also seem to be feeding the animals metahuman meat and also possibly eating it himself, from those who come to the nature reserve looking to eat the animals there. He put up warning signs so he feels it’s only fair. Otters passes over the radio, and Moreau gives a tip about the rogue ARES animal scientist who might be behind it all, as well as a lead on some hackers who may have some info, the Coquillards.

The team decides to investigate the underground while Bloodripper is on the hunt above. They head down and find some survivor communities, unfortunately Dig has taken the form of a large wolf and terrifies the mostly blind (in the pitch black) guards they first find and some gunfire is exchanged. Luckily noone is badly hurt and The Detective manages to talk everyone down as they explain that Dig is a human shapeshifter and not the beast that has been hunting down here.

After comparing accounts and reviewing the most recent crime scene they can find amongst the poor fortifications and tent and tarp dwellings, they decide that this almost surely isn’t the same critter as the pack aboveground, and start to get worried that Ringmaster might be hunting when he turns into a werewolf. Dig wants to stop investigating and go confront him/protect him, as these civilians are worthless in his eyes, but Otters manages to determine that the behavior doesn’t match up with a werewolf of Ringmaster’s intelligence.

They track some old blood traces deeper into the tunnels, and all take Guts. This pays off when they are able to shrug off some sort of mystical fear, though Otters is partially paralyzed by a chilling howl from below. The largest Barghest any of them have ever seen charges up from the dark and tries to chomp on CG, though Cholula bravely dives in the way, taking the damage. Dig blasts it with lightning as Otters opens up with the guns on the Mule drones, and Cholula manages to drop it with a flaming arrow just before it gets another attack in.

They wait for the white phosphorus to burn out, and then Dig and CG start harvesting reagents while Otters gets what she can from the crispy collar. It looks like a basic RFID tracker with a shock electrode, but most interestingly has a number stamped on it. The team hauls the remains back to the survivor camp to show them that the beast is dead, and encourage them to better defend themselves. Otters rigs up a simple telegraph between two station’s communities, and show them how to do it by stripping old tech, and Cholula promises to come down and train them sometime.

They at least seem to have enough food- crates of old emergency shelter rations from earlier in the century.The team heads back aboveground and checks in with Ringmaster, who also seems relieved it wasn’t him behind the attacks, but spurs them to keep looking. He also tips them off to some animal fights run by ex-Mafiosos down by the Docklands. They head home and rest, but are disturbed to hear in the morning Radio Free Detroit that the 696 Slayers have been on a rampaging hunt across town and residents are advised to avoid them at all costs.

This triggers another discussion about what to about Bloodripper and crew, which quickly gets sidelined when they decide to go to the animal fights instead. There they find another dog with a collar, seemingly a loyal companion to the ex-Mafioso running the fights, after talking their way in by offering to do some vet care. Otters spends a depressing day patching up survivors from the Pit, but they do get some good info- none of the other animals have the collars, or seem enhanced in the same ways as the collared animals.

They get the info from the ex-Mafioso about where he found the dog, with a promise to sell him any more promising animals they encounter, and head up to Vendor’s Row to look for more clues. They check in with G’ma Biyu while they’re up there, who gives them another job as well as a clue- she had her people take out another enhanced dog that was roaming the area and attacking people, and provides the cut collar to prove it. Cutting apparently bricked it, but they get another number.

They decide to use the day old possibly metahuman meat tray as bait in a variety of locations within their search grid, observed by drones, while Creep cuts himself a little and the rest of the team watches his back at a 7th location. Luckily, nothing attacks Creep, and when reviewing the camera footage, they spot mostly various survivors excited to find free meat and asking too many questions. The only one that stands out is some sort of enhanced cat which seems very stealthy.

They head to that location and Dig manages to track it back to it’s lair, taking the form of a great cat and intimidating it while also using magic to make it more docile. It uses some of it’s strange abilities but Dig doesn’t fall for them. Cholula offers to try to knock it out with arrows, but Otters quickly intervenes and manages to lure it out and calm it. Dig hacks the collar and they manage to get the RFID signal, which they can probably use to find link devices if they ever find themselves within range.

Otters delivers the cat to Moreau, to try to rehab it, and they make plans to try to find the location all these experimental animals have been coming from after they rest up again. When they awaken the next morning, they find the 4 critters from the aboveground pack all staked to the ground outside the safehouse with one of Bloodripper’s spears, with a note saying that he thinks they found them all, and that though they killed some of the gang, they weren’t particularly satisfying victims. He also summons CG to visit him.

Guess the team better deal with that soon too! Perhaps they will take Biyu’s advice and turn their new gang coop against the 696.

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective

The Detective manages to convince the other team (possibly one of the Brackhaus’ guards? Likely the one from the roof bar if so) to disengage, as Otters has successfully grabbed the target and spirited him away in the VTOL. Realizing that they are really blown though in terms of attention, Otters, Creep, and CG all sneak out under cover of CG’s spirit’s powerful silence and concealment effects, barely avoiding some very alert hotel security staff. The Detective decides they want their money’s worth, and rushes back to their room, purposefully dishevilling it before taking some Bliss in a filled tub.

The onsite security does room sweeps, and TD manages to bluff just well enough to not get in trouble, since they can’t find anything in the room, but seem suspicious about Creep having left without anyone taking note, as his arrival was noticed. Regardless, TD gets their desired soak and trip, so all is well, enough. When the other team gets back to the van, they find Otters’ surveillance drones waiting along with a note from Cholula that says he “went to check something out” and to leave without him.

They do. Heading for the preprogrammed rendezvous with the VTOL, they find Smaug and Lunatech from the Windsor crew waiting to accept the handoff and presumably deliver the guy to Brunwyn. Dig requests a little time to look into the wrecked deck they also snagged, and after confirming that they weren’t followed, Smaug sets up a perimeter. Dig manages to pull a tiny amount of data off the deck, with Otters helping to write a quick program to collate the fragmentary bits into something useful.

They find a few useful things: the target was a longterm MCT data and device architecture specialist, who had been targeted for extraction before (possibly why he was using an assumed name). He was looking into shared vulnerabilities amongst various devices, and trying to design a new in-house MCT device architecture that would not have the same flaws. He was in a virtual meeting with his bosses when the Blackout hit, his deck bricked, and he flatlined.

Dig also tries to read his mind, but there is nothing there- he seems brain dead or close to it, and only his wife’s careful ministrations likely kept him alive this long. They write up their findings and pass it along with the deck and the guy, which Brunwyn accepts as the pro move it is, offering them more work and sending along their pay, along with the promised “on-time” bonus.

They head back to the safehouse and rest up, and decide to look into Howell’s “unite the gangs and enclaves” mission next. Instead of calling him for more (/any) details, they just dive in, reviewing the intel Cholula has been gathering on his semi-nightly prowling of the city. They make a list of the promising factions to ally, and start making plans and dividing up work amongst themselves. They also decide to resolve smuggling out the Toronto Mayor and his ARES lover.

TD calls up the UCAS Marshal, Trapp, and hints that they have a line on a government official in danger. Trapp agrees to a meet, seemingly also not wanting to give up his safehouse location, they settle on a high end street market Downtown, which the Marshal reports has become somewhat of a trade bazaar during the Blackout. They pass along their intel and Trapp agrees to contact the lovers at the hotel and either keep them safe or get them out, he is light on details. But it seems like the team made a good impression.

Otters decides to do a little shopping while there, and they head down to the most red market-y shop in the area, where they see a classically costumed bandit dropping off some assorted loot. Wanting to know more, they try to approach, but blow it, and the figure rappels away, and they return to the safehouse. They take the next day off while CG summons a new corpse spirit into the body he was gifted by Bloodripper, and Dig has a meeting with his magical order.

Freddy Bales is there first, as usual, and is his usual obnoxious, helpful self. The others roll in, and Dig talks up the gang unity mission a bit more. They all initiate while Otters, who accompanied Dig over, alternates between watching and wandering the mostly abandoned zoo. It seems like the remaining zookeepers have had to prioritize saving the less edible animals.

After the meeting, Marjo-Lin gives Dig the Discipline Tarot card, and they banter about their somewhat at odds Mentors (Dog vs Lion), and ML says that Lion told her that she had smelt Dig in one of her realms- the Hermit’s cabin perhaps? Regardless, the card is a reward for his perseverance in getting Order going. ML also reports that the Keepers have lost some members to attacks from those mysterious collared critters.

After splitting up the job of convincing different factions to show to the big meeting, The Detective contacts Ringmaster, who agrees to host with Marv at the Plat Zone, specifically the Brickhouse, and to distribute a radio to any faction who attends as a reward. TD also gets Creep to make pizza, though he says all he can promise is a sauced flatbread, but CG learns a spell to multiply the matter significantly.

TD contacts the Keepers, who agree to attend. Creep heads out the Metal Maniacs first, and finds them seeming even more post-human, as well as seemingly “upgrading” some local street kids, who are serving as lookouts- it seems they are both expanding and fortifying. Creep decides not to become a Monad, though they make a good case that “our AI brethren need homes right now more than ever”. Leanna Octave agrees to send a delegation to the meeting, though.

Creep then sneaks up to the Blight and finds the Nightmare’s base of ops. This does indeed seem to be veterans of the Urban Brawl team protecting a civilian enclave, and he uses his sneaking skills to impress them into coming, though they say they will only do so if the Maulers aren’t invited. Creep points out that since the Maulers absolutely will be invited, it “could” be a good time to raid their turf, if someone wanted to.

CG gets Sikh Burn to agree to attend, easily, as a rep for the Children of Loxley, who have also been expanding, protecting the Hawala network and mesh net that the People of the Book have been building. Disturbingly, some malefactors have been targeting the mesh tech, as well as sometimes the people sent out to repair it. CG then hoofs it to the Bligh with spirit cover, and convinces the Maulers to attend, using his good rep with them for leverage. They seem depleted and a bit more desperate with Kong’s death and the various defections to other new gangs.

Dig flies around to round up his targets- the Ancients are an easy yes as he helped rescue some of them from ARES prison, though they are still a small faction. He then heads to north Oakland County and finds the student enclave, Ronnie’s Raider, where he once again encounters Freddy Bales, who happily introduces him to some assorted professors and Ronnie herself, who seems like a tech wiz- the enclave has a lot of clever sensors and traps rigged up of various tech levels.

Otters heads west to Dearborn to go another Red Market, and manages to make contact with a thief there who will neither confirm or deny if they are a member of the Ghunday, although the filmic bandit outift suggests they likely are. Otters passes along the invite, which includes the other guests, and gets a bad feeling this may just be a way of telling some thieves who to steal from at what time. Otters also barely spots a stealth blimp, and sends out a wideband appreciation text, but receives no response. Back at the Scar Wood Raven agrees to send some of the Swarm along, though he seems mostly interested in the promise Dig has made of a free power charging station- he has made another bike golem in his downtime, to leave running at the Plat Zone.

With everyone (possibly excluding the Ghunday) agreed to attend, the team links back up and heads to the Plat Zone to set up. Marjo-Lin comes by to perform a solo set as promised, the rest of Glock .50 having left for Denver after Latvian Gambit to start recording their debut for Silversound Records. She seems to have brought all of the Keepers with her, possibly lured by free food. The Swarm rolls up and quickly monopolizes the charging station, with many of them dropping off into BTL stupors as quickly as they can.

The Maulers and Nightmares both send small delegations and make nasty eyes at each other, but keep the peace at the meeting as promised. Marv sitting out front with his assault cannon probably helps. Lady Jain herself shows up on behalf of the Ghunday and seems to take a shine to/be working something up with the Keepers. Sikh Burn trades some tactics advice with the Nightmares, and talks about the experience in Hamtramck and what of the community successes there they can export elsewhere.

The Ancients, Metal Maniacs and non-BTL’ed Swarm exchange Blackout tech and implant tips and tricks with Ronnie’s Raiders, who seem pretty engineering focussed, and Ancients and Swarm talk about high speeds and hot races. Meanwhile, the team watches for trouble, makes sure everyone has food, drink, power etc, and TD circulates, pulling on their rep to try to get everyone to sign up.

With some impressive networking, TD manages to get everyone present to agree to a loose coop- basically they won’t attack (or steal) from other factions who have also joined. Both Lady Jain and one of the Nightmares make some quick calls after, possibly ensuring a backup plan for if the meeting went poorly isn’t executed. With that out of the way, the team parties with everyone present for a while, everyone rocks to Marjo-Lin’s sparse but intense set, and then one of the Metal Manias closes it down reading a posthuman manifesto of some sort, as Creep promised they could.

This kinda kills the mood, so everyone goes home. They call Howell to report success, and he seems surprised since he had a whole job planned, but figures this is still job done overall, so slides them some pay and offers some work as well. The team is getting a solid rep in town, and has good amount of jobs available to choose from, even amidst the confusion.

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

The team does some initial recon on the hotel that the scientist they have been tasked with retrieving was last seen at. Otters flies by with the VTOL, and even with all the digital security obviously offline feels like she almost got spotted. However, she gets a good look at the layout and general vibe- fortified but seemingly still a functional hotel, though with much more overt security than usual. Dig does a flyby as a bird and also gets some intel- 3 mana barriers are up, and he is able to tell that someone inside one of them is also thinking about the team’s target: Camden Espinoza. Unfortunately, someone behind the next mana barrier spots him and he gets slapped with a hit of pure mana before fleeing- at least it seems they were aiming to wound rather than kill! The only thing he saw was a flash of golden eyes.

The team rests up and finishes doing repairs from the last run-in with the mystery vans, and heads to the area late the next morning. They park behind a semi-wrecked Taco Temple adjacent to a news building with a large billboard across the street from the hotel. Cholula scales the building and billboard, leaving a camera set up to watch the parking garage entrance while he watches the front. Otters strings up some drone relays to keep comms semi-functional, and The Detective walks up to the front door, unarmed, and successfully both doesn’t get shot (there are some bodies stuck in the razor wire perimeter) and negotiates for a reasonable price for a room with an obsequious concierge.

Told that guests are acceptable so long as they also check weapons and go through security, TD brings in Creep, who hides a glass cutter, a gun, and Dig (in mouse form) in his pockets well enough to dodge the search. They find an unoccupied room a few floors down from TD’s room and cut one of the windows open, and Otters flies ChewGum and herself in, and then sends the VTOL over to perch on the billboard next to Cholula and await extraction. They split up to explore the hotel, with CG holding down their entry point and keeping comms updates going to and from Cholula.

Dig and Creep do some magical investigation with support from Otters, and manage to figure out that the lowest level mana ward seems to be a large MCT contingent, possibly including a family but with a lot of supplies and security. The highest level mana ward is the rooftop bar, where The Detective heads. They see a troll crooner singing his heart out on stage while looking only a little bored, and meet the Madame who oversees the establishment. Deciding to make a little harmless trouble, TD orders a drink for one of the two people making eyes at each other across the room while pretending not to.

And perhaps most importantly, TD tries to do some casual surveillance on the golden-eyed middle-aged man in the corner, who is attended by two similar looking female bodyguards- 1 appears cyber and one an adept, but TD can’t get a read on the guy at all. TD also gets spotted and summoned over, and goes. They have a brief but largely friendly chat, where they realize they’re looking for the same person, but not necessarily on behalf of the same person. The man tries to hire TD and team out from under Brunwyn, but TD refuses, feeling honorbound.

The man takes it fairly well, but says they will then be competitors on this job, though he hopes TD will give him a chance to hire directly in the future. He then gives a sharp whistle and his 2 guards leap up in unison and race to the elevator and stairs. TD, aiming for cool, stays and finishes their drink before making their goodbyes. Meanwhile, Dig, Creep and Otters have looked into the remaining mana ward and see that it encompasses the penthouse level, which has it’s own elevator key and locked off fire stairs.

Doing some careful, and higher level, magical investigation, Dig is able to spot yet another golden-eyed middle-aged man with two guards- this time a large Black troll with a ton of tattoos and a Vietnamese teen who looks to be a mage. Aiming not to attract their attention just yet, they head back to the meeting room and all debrief together. TD gets a feeling they were followed on the way and finds a hidden camera that they destroy, when they double back to check.

Putting their heads together, the best they can come up with is that this seems to be two people both aiming to appear as the SK archetypal Johnson, Hans Brackhaus. Since both SK and others use this ID for true and false flag ops, the team feels a little over their head and is glad to be working for neither, though the strong hints of SK association that Brunwyn gives off don’t make them feel much better. When TD head back to their room to take a bath and get high, they find a note waiting.

The woman they bought the drink for at the bar is requesting assistance. TD grabs Otters and they head to her room. She explains that she (an ARES financial corpo who took some leave not expecting the Blakcout) and her secret lover (the mayor of Toronto) were having an illicit meetup post-Latvian Gambit but are now stuck in the hotel. Worried about how an ARES association will play right now, the Mayor hasn’t yet left his wife as promised and doesn’t want to be seen in public- hence the glances across the bar that TD spotted.

This woman wants them to smuggle her and her lover out of town, in the hopes of beginning their life together. She seems fairly drunk. TD and Otters asks some questions, and get some useful info from her in exchange for agreeing to help. She takes them, wobbily, to a room that she says always has room service being delivered and dishes carefully stacked out front but that noone goes in or out of. Taking a quick magical look, Dig spots two tween teens, a middle-aged woman tending to someone in a homemade bio-bed, and in the bed itself: Camden Espinoza. He looks fried, possibly brain-dead, and has a burnt-out high-end MCT deck next to him. Looks like someone physically pulled the plug.

The team quickly fills Cholula in and rallies back to grab the guy, getting the VTOL in position near his room’s window. Unfortunately, Cholula spots a figure in camo crawling down the outside of the building, just as the team inside spots 2 more cloaked figures at opposing hallway corners. Cholula manages to narcoject the figure outside, and then Otters rams their unconscious form with the VTOL, breaking their gecko grip and sending them plummeting to their death, which alerts the guards below. Cholula fires off a few distraction arrows around the guards to keep them occupied before being forced to flee, retrieving his camera and Otters’ drones on the way.

Inside, Dig has made a huge magic hand and flicks open the room’s barred door. Creep chucks a couple thermal smoke grenades but throws badly and both roll back towards the team so the scene is chaotic. CG sends his spirits after the two cloaked figures, and manages to delay one with various powers while his cat corpse spirit is destroyed by the other. He blasts out the window in the room with his shotgun while Creep covers the family and Dig uses his magic hand to get Camden and his deck into the VTOL while Otters pilots. TD keeps everyone working together while trying to figure out a plan…. maybe now that they have the guy the other team will give up?

Outside, Cholula quickly scans the cam footage he retrieved and spots something interesting: just after everything kicked off, two of the mystery vans stealthily snuck out of the parking garage, driving off in the opposite direction of the fight before quickly turning in opposite directions off the main street….

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

Cholula has been haunting the streets of Motor City, checking out the developing gang scene. Some seem relatively pro-social, some less so. He begins hunting the most thrill-kill gang he can find, the 696 Slayers, further depleting their numbers from the massive hit they already took from the team (unbeknownst to one another). ChewGum stocks up on reagents (Penelope Bean is still getting a supply from…. somewhere?) and does some investigation into the mysterious critter attacks.

Using some intel from the Keepers and other contacts, he manages to find a site of a recent attack, and with a ritual and some tracking and assensing is able to piece together what happened. Some horrifying looking creatures attacked in a group of 3-4, ripping two civilians apart. The creatures seem very hungry but not malicious. And they are indeed wearing some kind of RFID collar. He pegs this as “needs further investigation” and rejoins the crew, meeting up with Cholula just outside Casa Aurelius’ guarded walls.

Inside, Otters and The Detective approach Corinna (the Nadja Fixer, seemingly in from Chicago) and Eugene Trapp, a UCAS marshal, who are discussing dangerous bounties in town. Otters talks about killing a Wendigo and Corinna extracts herself as Otters and TD chat edgily back and forth with Trapp for a bit- he is some kind of canine SURGE, and seems to make note of their scents.

As the party seems to be winding down, and they have other allies present they can ask for more info on other attendees as needed, they head out. Otters and TD wait in the van while Creep and Dig as a mouse sneak up onto the roof through the vents and then let themselves down in a guard blindspot that TD spotted. They get in the van and slip back into the smuggling compartment for now. After they watch a series of guests leave via various, mostly unpowered, conveyances, the staff and guards finally start filtering out.

They see the guard that DIg mind-scanned carrying a hard case big enough to contain the data cube, but he splits off from the rest of the guards and hops into a matte-black, fully tinted van that pulls up just as he’s exiting the building. Otters leaves the parking lot and posts up in a stealthy spot further down the road, and CG and Cholula set up in outside the main gate to the area, having communicated with the team via stealth VTOL.

They get lucky and guessed right as to the black van’s route, and Otters quickly scoops up the 2 outside the gate as Creep and Dig get back out of the smuggling compartment once they’ve cleared security. Otters tries to subtly follow, with the VTOL aloft to triangulate. As they continue, they head into the ruined area of Downtown, which seems like a good spot to lose pursuers. Seeing the van ahead slow, Otters pulls into a side street and sends the VTOL in for a closer look.

They see one of the white vans with the dishes pull up alongside, both side doors slide open, and somethings get passed back and forth. Unfortunately, the white van as usual gives off a brief burst of signal and seems to spot the VTOL in the matrix, and the white and black vans peel off in opposite directions. After a quick debate, Otters guns it and follows the black van.

Not waiting this time, Otters opens fire, damaging the vehicle. She is also gaining on them, and the other driver, while capable, doesn’t seem to match her level of skill. The back door flings open, and a short human inside fires a rocket at the team van, with Otters managing to avoid a direct hit but catching some shrapnel. Otters fires back and blasts the human back into the opposing van.

Dig magically sends his sight over into the other van, and sees a team of 3, plus the guard, with the human on the floor either dying or dead. They look like shadowrunners but not total pros. As he watches, the guard lifts the launcher and fires another shot at the van- direct hit! Massive damage, but Otters keeps them on he road. Creep and Cholula return fire, lighting both the man and van on fire, as CG orders his spirit to cause the man to have an accident.

Dig also spots one of the mystery boxes hooked up to a power cable, seemingly powering the van, and the team decides they better grab it. Creep crawls onto the van roof as Otters maneuvers into position to see the box clearly. Dig uses magic fingers to yank it free of it’s bolts but it’s still hanging by the power cable, which Creep manages to shoot through with impressive aim just as the guard fumbles his launcher reload and detonates the black van.

The wreck crashes and burns hard, and the team van is almost wrecked as well in the shrapnel cloud. The mystery box, though damaged, appears mostly intact, and Dig attempts to analyze it magically but can’t make much sense of it. There doesn’t seem to be anything living inside when CG assenses, so they head back to the safehouse to rest, heal and examine further. While Otters and the repair drones patch up the van and the golem pedals away, recharging it, the team sleeps and recovers.

In the morning, they call up Smoach and he agrees to come take a look. Dig says he’s got some tasks for the day, and heads off to Stanli the Candyman’s house/fort. The rest of the team reports into Howell and gets paid for dragon investigating and gala info, sending the data device over his way along with a written report on what they learned. He says he’ll examine it all and get back to them about it, but in the meantime he has a client looking to get some of the gangs in town working together.

Cholula is stoked about this since he wanted to do it anyway. TD bites the bullet and radios up Cehualli, and the AZT agent hints that he works for Armando Salazar, the AZT operative depicted on the Hermit card, He provides two tasks for the team, and offers to pay in info, artifacts, or nuyen as desired. One, they are to track down an ork serial killer named Pygmy who has fled here. Two, if they encounter anything interesting ARES left behind or lost in the move, they are to sell it on to Cehualli. TD agrees, for now.

Down at Stanli’s, Dig in bird form gets a tense introduction to a member of the Reality Hackers, who seems to have fled Seattle after killing a demiGOD. Dig, going against the team’s plan, sells this individual the Damien Knight snuff BTL he’s been working, and mixes up some alchemical drugs to go along with it to really heighten the experience for the topline customers. The RH-er trades him a very fancy attack-focussed deck and gives Dig access to an RH gear mefeed, if he ever gets regular matrix. Stanli also reups DIg on some drugs, stoked about this wild new product the he can now peddle to a local populace with a lot of hate for ARES.

Back at the safehouse, the team readies for Otters’ scheduled meeting with Brunwyn Harridan, though Cholula decides to stay behind to keep an eye on Smoach as he examines the device. Smoach manages to figure out what it is: a horrifying prison for a sprite, who in it’s frantic attempts to escape, generates the electricity the device is pumping out even as it’s code degrades into madness. He’s injured in the attempt to communicate, and suggests they need to free it onto a larger grid in the hope that it can stabilize somewhat there.

They share some beers and sad conversation, sitting together and pondering the darkness of the world. Smoach also reports that FTD seems defeated locally, but that the Shadow spirits are likely still a threat, and he has a next lead on where to look, when the team is ready. On the river south of downtown, the team finds the Austrian ork Baritone waiting for them in a dinghy. They hop aboard and he rows them out to a very sleek modernist houseboat, which CG spots as having impressive aesthetic flourishes, and Otters ID’s as also being very fast and potentially deadly.

They are ushered aboard by a German hobgoblin named Geraldo who seems to have weapons hidden all over his person- Creep is impressed. Brunwyn herself gestures them back into a tastefully appointed state room, and is once again dressed to the 9’s, though more subtly than at the gala. She waves away her guards when they subtly inquire if they should join. Based on the whole vibe and a quick chat via mesh network, they assume this is all an SK opp, so good to be careful, though it may be too late as they are already in the room.

After some banter, they get down to business- Brunwyn wants them to grab up some scientists, data and matrix specialists specifically, off a list of names that she has. She will pay well, she states, in a form of the team’s choosing, and a barely detectable tempestuousness crosses her features when TD dares to negotiate. She quickly recovers her charm however, and agrees to a short timeline for the job for bonus pay. TD, feeling like there isn’t another better option, agrees. They get some intel, and Brunwyn tells them where to meet and by what deadline.

They head back out, likely having just made a deal with a dragon, and link back up with the other teammates at the safehouse, where they see Dig’s impressive new deck, which he flew back clutching in his bird claws while using an illusion to make it look like a fish. They get another call from Howell, who seems to have been investigating along some of the same lines as the team, and reports that he got a lot of good data from the gala, but that specifically he wants to know more about a group calling themselves the “Grid Pirates” who seem to be the ones kidnapping TM’s.

They are also likely behind the mystery power boxes, which Howell names a “SpriteLok” based on recovered data., It seems likely they are selling/renting them around town, including to the gala for the event, though the renters likely don’t know what they are and are smart or desperate enough not to ask. The team reports that there is at least one surviving white van, and Howell says he’ll do more digging but likely have more work for them soon. Some of the worst news: the GP’s must have at least one Dissonant or otherwise corrupted/coerced TM and/or powerful sprite under their control, as they would be required to trap the sprites in the devices as the Faraday cage exterior of the SpriteLok is assembled around them….

Runners
Creep
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective

ChewGum heads out to restock on reagents and look into the rumors of strange animal attacks that The Detective picked up. Cholula continues prowling the permanent twilight feeling strangely at home. The rest of the team starts looking into “new dragon in town” rumors for Howell. Based on his initial intel, they head Downtown, with Dig arriving first in bird form. He does some astral investigation and finds some talismongers harvesting reagents, who take a shot at him when they spot a “magical bird.”

He then becomes a man to try to explain, and they take another shot at him, thinking he’s a shapeshifter- these don’t seem like ethical talismongers. He eventually convinces them he’s just a mage, and tries to get some info out of them but fails to catch them in an obvious lie and retreats. Meanwhile, Creep and TD encounter an Order of St. George foot patrol- 2 archers and 2 broadsword wielders in medieval appearing but seemingly modern armor. They approach peacefully and TD makes a judgement call to not try to ape their archaic speech patterns in case they take it as an insult.

The OoSG knights explain that they too have heard rumors of a dragon, and are hunting it as all foul wyrms are a threat to metahumanity. They seem excited to be hunting “worthy prey” instead of merely nests of ghouls and other flesh-eaters. They also obliquely praise strong leaders of a fascist variety to these don’t seem like good people either. Unfortunately, they do seem very well-equipped and capable, the team was hoping they were just LARPers.

They manage to exchange some info though, and get shown a high quality sketch of the dragon on a scroll that the knights say is a composite from multiple “enhanced interviews” with witnesses. After the knights also reveal that they are hunting a nest of ghouls in Windsor that the team figures out is some friends of theirs, they quickly make their exit and plan to warn their allies. Creep and TD finally arrive to Dig’s location on foot, and they track the pair of talismongers down again, with Creep hanging back in case of trouble. TD has better luck socially, and manages to bribe them with a certified credstick for some info.

They’ve heard rumors of dragon sightings from some sketchy street contacts and are looking for any kind of windfall- scales, spit, shit, whatever- anything from a dragon in valuable. They explain that their contacts are mostly addicts and street people of various sorts, and that many members of both groups are ending up Downtown as it’s a bit of an open/chaotic zone right now, with large swaths under noone’s control. They pass along a description, which matches the OoSG sketch, and also say their contacts refer to the dragon as “she” for some reason.

TD thanks them, and after refusing to purchase any of their sketchy wares from inside their voluminous coats, they head out to seek out a street reporter named Miles Two-Go that might have more info. They find him along with a bunch of riggers and gangers hanging out in the Scar zone- Dig is still feeling a bit bad there from the strange mana ebb but not as strongly as before. The crowd here seems to be racing modded vehicles that they’ve attached space rocket boosters too, having hauled a bunch over on horses and carts from the ARESpace/EvoSpace facility out by Knight International.

They meet the man in charge, a troll named Wood Raven, who seems like a philosophical speed demon, but explains he’s trying to give all the riggers and go-gangers in town something positive to do so they don’t totally lose their shit. The team chats a bit with a few Ancients that Creep recognizes from the prison break, and they also warn Lunatech (from the Windsor crew) about the OoSG threat, and she says she has to go make some radio calls. They also manage to get a few other Ancients freed from an obviously annoying conversation with the reporter they seek.

They find that Miles Two-Go is a scoop-chasing conflict zone photojournalist, and another mediocre-to-bad person. He seem full of himself, sleazy, and annoying, though not unskilled. He shows them some partial images of the dragon he’s managed to capture with some bashed together old-tech trail cams he’s rigged up around Downtown. He explains that if he got some kind of crude mesh network up and running he could get the cams to talk to each other and likely get better images as they could retarget on the fly based on each previous cams data.

The team agrees to help him out, reluctantly, but recognizes that they can use and then abandon him at least. Feeling like they’ve got enough for now, they head back to the safehouse to link up with Otters, who has been charging and prepping her drones for the night ahead. They stop on the way to steal some formal wear (black suit and tux) from a prom store Downtown that hasn’t been looted yet. Otters drives them to Casa Aurelius, and they find the exclusive gated neighborhood still has a few lights on, it looks like some industrial generators are powering guard station lights at the checkpoint entrances as well as some street lights and other public features.

if any of the visible mansions that rise over the security wall have lights on, they’re keeping it to themselves- candles, chemlights and the like are all that is otherwise visible. The team heads in- SIN scanners are still down so they breeze through with their gala tickets, with Dig as a mouse hidden in Creep’s pocket, and Creep hidden in the smuggling compartment. They stop at another fancy clothes store, this one seems to be open, and get some accoutrements and additional items to spruce up their looks, though the proprietor seems annoyed at being unable to custom tailor the garments at the moment.

TD successfully navigates the uptight rich lady social dynamic though, and they head to the gala, with Creep and Dig sneaking out a few blocks away. TD and Otters wait in the van til Dig and Creep make their entrance to make sure there aren’t any issues that require assistance or extraction. Dig creates an illusion of some teens setting off fireworks and cursing at the guards before running away, with Creep using a carefully buried flashbang to help sell it. The guards give chase, and Creep manages to melt a small hole in the door just before another pair of guards comes around the building to replace them.

Dig shifts into cockroach form, and squeezes through the welded hole, turning back to a man inside and pushing the door open for Creep. Creep is appalled at Dig’s lack of stealth in doing so, especially since the only reason the fire alarm didn’t go off appears to be the lack of wireless. They sneak up to the 3rd floor and find a weird shielded data cube with no ports and a number of cables running out of it. It looks newly, but securely, installed. Creep tries to get a data tap into one of the cables, but they seem to be outputting electricity only- nothing goes in, and no data goes either way. A mystery!

Meanwhile, TD and Otters successfully enter, passing through a mana barrier after showing their tickets to the bored teens and young adults staffing the gala. The security staff seems much more alert and competent, but still a bit complacent inside. They find a candlelit event room, 3 stories high, topped with a cupola letting in some of the strange starlight. An 8-person orchestra is playing some atonal modern classical that seem to be creating an audio dithering effect, allowing for the feel of a full room of people talking while also creating some privacy for the individual conversations.

They take a quick survey of the room, and notice some interesting individuals around, as well as few friendly faces (Ringmaster, Pretty, and Ellis are all in attendance). Upstairs, Creep and Dig have managed to sneak into the ductwork and navigate to a duct overlooking the gala, and successfully manage to hand off the device they snuck in to TD via sleight of hand, without security noticing anything. However, a few people in the crowd seem perhaps to have spotted it- interesting.

Creep and Dig surveil astrally and aurally while TD and Otters begin circulating. The pair on foot initially spend some not very productive time talking to a city councilor (the lone survivor of the Shadow attack on the council), who is speaking to an empty chair. After TD determines that no entity occupies the chair, and that the man seems to be badly in the grip of PTSD, they make a polite exit. Creep overhears the museum curator and host, Stella Hoargrave, doing her bubbly socialite thing, but seemingly with a bit of a frantic edge. She performs her one tiny magical ability of making small lights over and over with a canned bit about it finally being useful.

Dig spots a few different magical beings in the crowd, but focuses his efforts on seeking anyone with knowledge of technomancer kidnapping. His first spotting: Rose and SINder! A technomancer and her brother, who seem to be thinking a lot about missing TM’s. Also, this is likely the other runner team that Howell told them would be doing the other half of the job while the team carries around the device he gave them. Dig decides not to make contact, but tells the rest of the team that the pair is there.

Otters and TD next approaches two very fashionable elf woman, both of whom might have witnessed the device handoff. The first seems to be a Nadja clone (or Nadja Daviar herself?) and they steer clear for now, but the second woman has eyes perfectly matching the description and image of the dragon! She introduces herself as Brunwyn Harridan, and her bodyguard as Baritone, and seems delighted to make their acquaintance. Otters advertises herself as a local expert, and they set up a meeting for the following day to discuss things further, before Brunwyn gets back to socializing.

Otters then heads over to chat with some professorial looking types, happy to hear that they are discussing hard sciences instead of liberal arts, but fails to insert himself into their convo until TD makes it work. They discuss the rift and the footage Otters got inside the Scar right after it was created, as well as both prof’s theories- Simone Palomer is an astral travel expert and Vinh Trong is a “rules of magic” specialist, carrying a large bound tome mounted to his chest in a modified baby bjorn.

After they say their goodbyes with a promise to continue sharing info, Otters heads off to chat up Red, the vampire, and TD heads over to a mysterious troll woman who seems noticeably unobtrusive to TD’s studied eye. Red seems amiable and he and Otters chat for a bit about threats in town and the worsening situation for the Infected in Chicago. TD finally manages to corner the troll woman, and discovers that it is Patricia Loveland, who agrees to talk after confirming that “the abomination” (aka Cholula) is not present.

Loveland warns TD again about the threat of even “friendly” bugs, and TD tries to counter with more experiential data, which Loveland brushes off, saying she’s read the Jackpoint posts, and disagrees with the Monad comparison. Unable to reach a common ground on BETAS, they agree to leave it there for now and discuss other issues. Loveland shares some info about other party guests as a sign of good faith- her fellow expat DeeCee operatives Cass Wandering Horse and Sahara Jones (now working for STV it seems) are both there, as is an AZT mage named Cehualli and a few other interesting individuals.

Otters helps ID one of them, a buff troll woman, as an ARES heavy hitter named Ruby- kind of a one-woman clean-up crew. Both she and Loveland wonder why ARES left Ruby behind, and who she might be hunting. The whole crowd also turns to watch the final, stylishly late, attendees arrive- a Tir royal throuple, entering ethereally bedecked in high Elven fashion. Otters makes a quick stylistic analysis and guesses they are Tir Tairngire rather than Tir na nOg, but isn’t sure. Regardless, intriguing….

Dig, hiding still and magically scanning, spots the newest member of his magical order, Freddy Bales, introducing an older also visibly wealthy man who could be his father to the 2 professors. Loveland hints to TD of Black Lodge presence in town. The team spots Julia Pesina wandering the crowd with her ever-more battered camera drone Grover in tow, filming guests and getting short interviews, though some guests seems to intentionally avoid her. TD heads over to the AZT mage after Otters confirms with Red that the farm and their neighbors have been suffering some crop failures, and warns them of the corrupted AttakPak snacks.

TD tries to shock the mage into admitting some knowledge of corruption or other things but he manages to get them on their backfoot instead by referencing the team’s extensive recent use of Tarot cards. He suggests he’s just as happy to be an enemy as a friend, and TD chooses friend (for now at least). They have some loaded banter for a while before Cehualli suggests they ought to discuss things further soon, in more privacy. As this convo wraps up, Dig finally gets another hit on his spell: one of the guards is thinking of kidnapping TM’s! Dig ID’s the guard to the rest of the crew and they start pivoting the job over into a kidnap mission.

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective

The Detective, while wandering around and checking in on the city and their contacts, has collected some intriguing new rumors to follow up on. The Keepers warn of strange animal attacks, with the animals all seen wearing some sort of collar. There is a new, well-resourced, fixer named Peregrine setting up operations Downtown. Food hoarding is becoming obvious and may lead to shortages. Blight gangs are running newly amok without Kong or ARES to restrain them. And there’s a hot new snack on the street- AttakPak! TD tracks some of these snacks down and eats half a bag, as well as doing their best to analyze them- they seem filling but not nutritious, perhaps useful but a little dangerous in these hungry times. They do some astral analysis and notice some dark magic on the half-full bag but fail to get further info.

They head back to the safehouse and link up with everyone else, who is recuperating from the FTD ambush, and they collectively debrief. CG offers to take a deeper astral look at TD post- summoning a new plant spirit, after Dig fails to get any useful info. Everyone patches themselves up as best they can and rests a bit while some calls with more job offers come in on the radio. Howell wants them to investigate some dragon rumors and also do some intel gathering at a gala, Grandmother Biyu wants them to acquire an abandoned bread truck and keep looking into mystery vans/TM kidnapping.

Biyu also asks for contact info for the Skins gang, having heard they took a beating during the FTD ambush. She seems excited about the prospect of them teaming up with the Triad to gain some further status/supply/protection in exchange for help moving product, food, etc through the DDB tunnels, avoiding some of the dangers present on the surface, with an increasingly stressed out populace becoming more and more agitated each day the Blackout drags on. Dig and the team agree and pass along the info, though they start to wonder if they may someday be too deep in the Triad’s pocket.

They finally search the Mage on the Hill’s duffel, and find a collapsed masked ward, which likely fell apart when he died. Inside, amidst various dingy changes of clothes and an empty book, they find another one of the Tarot Queens, and spend some time analyzing it and guessing what it might do. They also realize that they once again have all 4 fours in their possession, and after identifying the common “heart” imagery amongst them, manage to activate the set and change the cards into 4 vials. Otters drinks hers immediately and finds herself feeling very loyal to CG. CG then drinks his and feels very beneficent to himself.

Dig suggests that maybe this is some sort of “love potion” so both Dig and TD hold onto their doses for now, awaiting a better use. They rest, and the Golem bikes away, recharging their tech. The next day, after CG summons a new spirit to replace the ones he lost in the ambush, the spirit analyzes the AttakPak snacks and TD as well, and finds traces of Corruption magic on both. This rings a bell for CG, who remembers discussing a famine spirit with Cass Wandering Horse. The team also gets worried about possible connections to Taco Temple, since they still haven’t quite figured that one out.

With food feeling a bit urgent and the gala not for a few days yet, they decide to tackle the bread truck first. They do some recon passes (Otters in a VTOL and Dig as a bird), and find the truck parked directly behind a private school for mid-level corpo kids. It looks like it had pulled up the loading dock the night of the Blackout and then got abandoned. An incipient go-gang seems to have taken over the school lot for their own use, and the team ID’s them as the newly formed 696 Slayers, who seem to be made up of some riggers and some ex-Maulers.

They also seem to have some prisoners, and based on their human skin flag and their Reaver-style vehicle decorations and home-made weaponry, these guys look pretty dark and fucked up. But the truck seems intact so game on! They make a plan and head over once night falls, hoping some of the gang will be out raiding or whatever. Creep sneaks up while the van parks a ways back, but he spots one of the mystery vans cruising by on a side street, and weirder yet, gets a burst of wireless signal from it. He races back to the van and they give chase, with Dig and Morticia getting airborne to assist.

Through some skillful driving and excellent triangulation, Otters manages to track the van down, catching another wireless burst- however, as the team’s devices all ping back, the other van also notices them. They start blasting at each other while Otters gives chase. The other driver seems quite skilled and almost surely a rigger, but not quite as good as Otters. They manage to critically damage the other van and Creep attempts a boarding action but just misses and crashes to the road, which turns out to be good as the other van slows to a halt and then explodes.

The team van is badly damaged, but still functional, so they gather what intel they can from the scene (not much) and head back to the bread heist. Otters deploys the mules and creeps the van up into LOS, while Creep sneaks in again. He cuts into the bottom of the truck and confirms that there is A LOT of bread in there, and then guides Otters in to access the manual controls and get it in neutral, while he sets a grenade trap closer to the gangers. Dig summons a massive beast spirit to help push the truck and then flies over the gangers in the schools quad/field to try to distract them.

He finds them doing some gnarly torture under hot lights that they seems to be running off a poorly-maintained school generator, and uses mob mood to amp up their blood frenzy. After quartering two captives with their combo of electric and diesel vehicles (presumably also charged or filled off the gennie), half of them head out, leaving the other half of the gang on foot. It seems like in a Blackout even go-gangs have to make sacrifices.

Creep doubles back to help Otters after she gets halfway through figuring out manual controls and then gives up in frustration, and finishes the job. Otters sneaks back to the van under concealment from CG’s spirit as CG and TD sneak up to the van, CG steering while TD gets on the roof to act as lookout and support. Creep lubes up the initial push zone to help get it rolling and then manages to yank open the fence gate on the back of the lot, but this causes a lot of noise, and the remaining gangers respond.

The first batch of them to arrive set off the grenade trap and are all killed or badly injured, and the rest take cover while taking the occasional pot shot. Between the 2 mules pulling and the spirit pushing, they get it slowly moving, but CG is initially unable to get his spirit to use the movement power effectively, so Otters repositions the van and cuts down the remaining gangers with the turret, while Creep climbs atop the truck and also picks a few off. Unfortunately one of them seemed to be talking to someone on a big whip antennae radio, so they get worried there may be more coming.

They keep pushing as best they can and are struggling a bit until Otters brings the van in behind to help push, and CG finally gets his spirit to add some magical movement. Now they’re cruising- still very slow, but steady. Unfortunately, TD spots and smells a diesel smoke cloud and they hear some loud engine noises approaching. The leader of the gang, who Dig had ID’ed as one “Bloodripper” from his earlier surveillance, appears to have some cruel looking home-made spears he is preparing to throw. Otters fires on them, as does Creep, and they manage to take a few gangers out, crashing their bikes, but Bloodrippers nails Creep with a spear, near killing him.

TD frantically tries to save Creep’s life, managing to help stabilize him, while providing leadership for the team. CG is keeping the truck on the road, and Dig uses an illusion to distract the gangers, though Bloodripper doesn’t fall for it. Otters tags him with some fire from one of the mules, and Bloodripper takes out the van with another spear. Dig tries to catch the other gangers in a big spell, but it flops, and they are feeling pretty desperate. Otters manages to get the van safely stopped but is stuck inside, since CG can’t stop the truck if they want to get it to Biyu. They inevitably leave Otters behind, with her trying to get the mules in to defend herself as the gangers start cutting into the van with large diesel saws.

Dig, needing a hail mary, tells CG to prepare to shout as loud as he can to leave, and flies down as a bird and chucks his “love potion” at Bloodripper, scoring a direct hit. The gangers keep cutting into the van as CG tells them to go home. Amazingly, Bloodripper responds, calling off the goons and they all peel out back towards the school. Dig flies surveillance for a few hours while Otters patches the van up enough to be able to limp home, with the near invisible mules firing off occasional shoots over the heads of anyone who comes close.

CG and TD arrive out front of Biyu’s and CG slams the brakes for the first time, with TD having to grab the spear impaling Creep to keep from flying off the top. They also share the info they gathered about the mystery van. Biyu seems thrilled and says that she can deal with the bread and truck from here, and offers 3 payment options- they choose the highest nuyen value, though that won’t be immediately useful most places, in honor of Creep’s wishes, and then haul Creep back to the safehouse to try to patch him back up. It looks like he’ll have some permanent internal damage from this one. Otters slowly rolls in with the busted van shortly after, and everyone crashes after a long day.

They take the next day off to heal and patch up, and get gala details from Howell. They start planning outfits and who will attend vs who will be in support roles. They also get the latest news updates from Radio Free Detroit- it seems like they’re stuck here for now, with the UCAS declaring martial law and MET2000 locking down all city exits, but the Blackout Blitzes have continued to provide occasional supply drops, and Otters is thrilled to find that the Trading Post is still semi-operational, and gets yet another repair drone. With everything recharged and repaired, they get ready to party.

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
Tabasco aka Cholula

The team convinces the Mage on the Hill to assist them, though he seems somewhat disgusted by their unique style of banter. However, he swore a pact and must aid when asked, so he will. They also discuss whether to use any other Tarot, and CG pulls out the Queen he was given to summon aid later, if the situation seems desperate enough to pay the currently unknown cost. They take the freshly golem-charged van with 2 Mule drones and the crew all loaded up down to Belle Isle for the ritual/ambush. Unable to reach The Detective, who’s off checking up on contacts, they leave without them.

Upon arriving, they coordinate with the ritualists, who are actively working, and pick spots to set themselves and their allies up for the ambush. They put Myrryr on surveillance on the far eastern point, to watch for what they consider an unlikely approach over the water. The post the Mage on the Hill atop the SE building, CG on the central north building, Creep on the edge of the ritual to the west in hiding, Otters in the smuggling compartment in the van, harwired in, with the Mules within short distance antenna range, and Dig and Cholula atop the central ritual building, the highest point.

They assign the Windsor crew to the north edge of the bridge from mainland Detroit, but tell them to come up behind anyone who comes over it for a pincer. They have Rains and the Skins wait inside the ritual effect area as a reserve to mask their auras, but tell them to keep an eye towards the southern bridge towards Windsor. Then, they wait, with some bird control and flashlight signals planned with comms all fucky as they are.

Shortly thereafter, the Windsor crew reports two buses seemingly running on magic stuffed with Shadow zombies coming from the north bridge, while the Mage on the Hill reports a mass of ghouls with a strange astral signature coming from the south bridge. Creep jumps on the lead Shadow bus and shoots the driver through the windshield, while CG instructs his spirits to use their accident powers on those inside. The Windsor crew engages the second bus in a firefight, pulling it off the attack.

Rains and crew rush out to fight the ghoul swarm, pulling about half of them off, while Otters begins firing between van and Mules into their midst, dropping many but not slowing them at all- they seem to be moving unnaturally, both in terms of their speed and the way they move- it almost looks like the murmurations of a flock of birds. Otters, as an animal enthusiast, makes note to pay attention to this as the fight continues, and incorporates into her targeting solutions as best she can.

Cholula blasts off a fire arrow at the first zombie bus as Creep finishes off the driver and dives off. The bus careens into one of the buildings and a bunch of zombies tumble out, some lighting themselves on fire on the way, though not seeming to particularly care. Otters manages to cut a chunk of them down with auto-fire before the ghoul mob swarms the van, doing a surprising amount of damage. CG activates the Queen card, and flaming sword manifest, with a voice saying that it will protect him.

Creep gets up behind the zombies and flamethrows a few more, before the remaining 5 surround and nearly kill him. Thinking him dead, they carve some strange marks into his skin before rejoining the fight. Meanwhile, the Mage on the Hill has reported that he cannot sense their scout to the east (Myrryr) and fears an attack, and CG heads out to check on her, coming under nearly fatal attack from the FTD vampire leader amidst his customary bat swarm. Dig blasts the bats with a huge spell as a spirit appears and takes control of the flaming swords and starts clearing out the wounded bats.

With the vampire now exposed, Dig and CG’s spirits start targeting it as CG reloads to wood rounds in his shotgun. Unfortunately the Shadow Succubus has used all this chaos to sneak up to the ritual building and gets Cholula to shoot at Dig, narrowly missing due to Dig’s defensive spells. The Mage on the Hill starts levitating over to help and then goes astral to fight the spirit, doing some massive damage before getting one-hit killed and falling to the ground, where his corpse bursts apart. The Succubus then races over and seems to destroy the Tarot spirit, which has badly wounded the vampire.

Dig’s spirit goes astral to defend him and is also quickly torn apart by the returning Succubus. The vampire makes a diving attack directly at CG but misses, clumsily, just as Cholula nails him with an arrow, causing him to crash to the ground, where CG finishes him off with wood rounds, halting his regeneration. As he desicates before him, 3 Tarot cards fall from his pocket- some of the ones the team was missing from the recovery at the Shadow farm! CG pockets them for now and rushes back to defend Otters and the van from the swarming ghouls and zombies, who have almost destroyed while Otters continues chewing through their numbers.

Clinically, Otters is interested to see that the ghouls seem to act more and more feral the less of them that there are, and wonders how this all interacts with the hive mind rumors. But also she is a little concerned about getting peeled out of the smuggling compartment and eaten. With CG distracted, both of his spirits are killed by the Shadow Succubus, who then turns to the ritual building. Luckily their allies seem to be holding to the west, as no further ghouls or zombies have joined the main fight.

The Succubus sinks one it’s shadowy hands into the center of the ritual circle and sends forth a terrible pulse of entropic energy, killing nearly half the ritualists and wounding the rest. Cholula races downstairs and tries to bite it in the astral, just missing, as Dig pummels it with an overcast spell. The Succubus does another negative energy pulse, and seems to be trying to corrupt the ritual itself. This also kills the remaining ritualists besides Jaga and Walker in the Ways, who along with Dig barely survive.

Cholula pulls out all the stops, and calling on his newly enhanced spirit connection manages to land a powerful blow on the spirit, disapparating it back from whence it came. Outside, CG and Otters mop up the last of the ghouls and zombies shortly afterwards, with the van barely surviving. The cloaked Mules proved invaluable though, and Otters is excited about making good use of 3 intersecting fields of fire. They head out to check on allies, and find nearly dead Creep, luckily stabilized by his trauma patch. Cholula manages to save Dig’s life with another trauma patch, though as Jaga and WitW check the other ritualists none of the rest are as lucky- all appear drained of life and unrecoverable.

The Windsor crew, though badly battered, seem to have all survived from good use of tactics and massive expenditure of ammo and spell-power. Luckily none of the ghouls or zombies brought ranged weapons. Rains and the Skins did not fair as well, losing 3/4 of their number, especially since Rains explains that the hive mind has some sort of hypnotic or seductive quality by which they managed to entrance a portion of his crew, who turned on the others. It was a real bloodbath and he had to resort to indiscriminate explosives, but managed to hold back the additional ghoul tide.

They find Myrryr drowned to death in a few inches of water, presumably the work of the Succubus planning to leave a useful host body for another zombie. Those who are survived are grateful to the team for ending this threat and preventing the corruption of the ritual, but the price was high. Patricia Loveland gets back in touch afterwards, recognizing the team’s skill, utility, and sincerity, though still not trusting or communicating with Cholula.

Hearing the night’s report on Radio Free Detroit after they limp back to the safehouse in the damaged van and patch Creep up back to consciousness, they find out that TM’s are waking back up and complaining of headaches, mood swings, and forced Subermersion into the Resonance Realms. This reminds them of the terrifying thing Rains mentioned- those of his crew who were turned by the feral ghoul hivemind started muttering about something “deep… underneath… rising”.

They report Myrryr’s death into Smoach, who seems to retreat into his Bug City survivor PTSD-protective space, and vows never to let anyone get close to him again, while he plans to dedicate himself to hunting FTD and other nefarious forces in her memory. The next morning, the Tarot sword, whose ephemeral flame had gone out when the Succubus slew the spirit wiedling it, starts flaming again, and CG hears the voice say that he is once again under it’s protection, still unsure of what the cost will be….

Creep tries again to convince everyone to stop doing jobs to help people and try to get paid, so they start looking over their jobs list for good opportunities of what to do next.

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
Tabasco aka Cholula

After ensuring there are no more attackers at the Platinum Zone, Otters figures out how to hook up one of the mule’s partially charged batteries to the dead van and get it running long enough to get back to the safehouse, where Dig immediately goes to sleep to heal up from damage from the fight. The rest of the crew frantically tries to contact people via radio, succeeding in eventually getting ahold of most of the people they had previously built HAM sets for.

They then check on Zennia at the bar, and find that it’s shot to shit and there some bloodstains around. Creep finds that all the messenger birds on the roof have been burned by an area spell also. They track some drag marks through Hamtramck and find a wounded Sikh Burn guarding the People of the Book burial society- he reports that Zennia didn’t make it but that he and some Children of Loxley managed to fell the attackers.

The team heads inside and examines the body- the ritualists there have stabilized them to prevent further possession, and the team sees that three more shadow zombie assailants have been cut apart by Sikh Burn’s flaming sword. As well as Zennia, the bartender and some patrons were also killed, though it seems like she was the target, as ChewGum uses a creepy spell to review the last thing she saw- muzzle flash in a dark room.

After the team gets ahold of the WIndsor crew, they also hear that some shadow zombies made an attempt on Howell, but his biodrones and the timely arrival of some assistance from said crew held the attackers off. The team puts together that there was a coordinated hit on a bunch of different fixers. After hearing Julia “Deadline” Pesina return to broadcasting on radio with the matrix down, they also hear that some other fixers, community organizers, and street docs who they didn’t know were also attacked or killed, including the entire civilian government of the city (with potentially one missing survivor). Technomancers seem to mostly be comatose or non-communicative, and lots of e-life forms are missing.

So it seems like the shadows either knew what was coming, or took quick advantage of the opportunity. The team spends the next day hiring out some remote research on alternate power generation schemes, and Otters manages to rig up CG’s scooter as a pedal-power generator, with instruction passed along from Run and Sollars archive via the Windsor crew. She calls into Pesina to share this info also. Dig spends the day crafting a golem to pedal the bike, and start charging the van, though first they power up all the drones and the team’s tech. Creep, and the the others, are very disturbed when he looks outside and see that not only is it still dark when it should be daytime, but that the stars are wrong. The Detective heads out to check in on the Keepers and other contacts.

Dig turns into a horse and Otters crafts a quick saddle + bag, and Cholula hops on. They head out to Grosse Pointe to see if Leanna Octave survived. Creep uses his magnet hand to cling to the top of the VTOL, while Otters hot rigs it from inside to run aerial surveillance and backup. Creep has done some quick and dirty antenna repairs so they have LOS comms and about 100m signal otherwise. They reach the Metal Maniacs clinic and find the usual bunch of cybered-up weirdos out front, though there are less than usual.

Heading in, Cholula finds Octave examining and disassembling some corpses for parts- she explains that whatever the pulse was was super damaging to Monads and anyone else running a lot of nanites, so their numbers are bit depleted. It doesn’t seem like they were hit otherwise though. She bemoans the loss of their SIN business income, and says they’ll need supplies for upkeep before long. Cholula tries to pry for more info on the SIN stuff but doesn’t get much, and decides to continue not telling her that he is part bug.

As the gangers outside are starting to eye Dig a little hungrily, Cholula makes his exit and hops back on, and rides Dig over to Vendor’s Row to check on Grandmother Biyu. Creep and Otters split off to check on Ellis. Biyu and the Triad seem pretty dug in, and are bolstering their defenses further. She explains that they were attacked but that the attackers were “dealt with” and doesn’t provide further info, though she confirms they were more shadow zombies when asked.

She tells the team to start looking into food security as her people are doing, as that will likely be an issue soon. She also tips them off to a few mysterious rumors- someone has one or more working vans in town, and they’re using them to snatch up technomancers. Biyu also wants the team to extend an offer of safety and employment to any TM’s they come across on her behalf, saying she wants to start a local “sector”, whatever that means.

They head back to the safehouse, though Dig insists on stopping to steal some food on the way- Cholula guides him past a guard with a shotgun and Dig uses magic fingers to fill his saddle bag up. They raid the Tin Can food supplies when they get back too, and find other regulars there doing a sort of wake for the recent dead, and drinking all the booze. Meanwhile, Creep spots a bunch of scattered individuals standing slackly throughout the Scar zone, with no discernible pattern, as they fly by. They land in the skyway level of ARES former HQ tower, the lower levels being fortified, and find a slightly tense Praxis waiting for them with some other Deso Angels.

Praxis asks if they’ve seen any bugs around, and they report they haven’t, realizing that the Deso Angels here, being Mantids, need to eat bugs at least occasionally- uh-oh! One of the other members mutters something about how they should’ve left when they could, but the DA’s guide them further into the building where they find Ellis and some other Betas. They discuss the attacks, and Ellis reports that they came under attack from a bunch of seemingly feral ghouls here, except that they also seemed to have some kind of hivemind- she suggests checking in with Pretty out of the farm to see if she knows more.

Ellis also speculates that the shadow spirits, or some other entity, may have made use of the lasting effect of the Scar to somehow twist astral space, explaining the permanent twilight and strange stars. She is also not sure where the stars are from, but confirms with Creep that they appear fixed in place- there having been no visible relative movement. She also tips them off that they found the corpses of a huge amount of the new Alphas, drained and desiccated underground, and wonders if Vogel used them in some kind of massive sacrifice- but also wants to know where the original Alphas that she had put Vogel in touch with wound up.

They speculate a bit that possibly they secured transit to Vhortas/Colony, which could explain why Otters was able to see empty insect plane corridors when she briefly got a drone into the rift. Regardless, without further evidence they’ll have to leave it a mystery for now. They decide to push the battery range on the VTOL and zip over to the farm, finding Rains and Pretty holding it down with other ghouls and some Bee cult Betas, but with a massive burning corpse pile on the lawn.

They were also attacked by shadow zombies, and wonder if the shadow spirits left something behind- the team immediately gets stressed about the Coin of Woe in their possession. They suffered some casualties but managed to fend them off. They were also attacked by some Infected-phobic rednecks using old bio-diesel farm trucks, but managed to fight them off too. They also seem worried about food security, and are trying to organize with their friendlier neighbors- they say the militia types seem to have come from further out near Ann Arbor.

They fly back to the safehouse and the team debriefs on all the info. They also hear on Deadline’s nightly broadcast that more militia tried to demand tribute from the Platinum Zone but that Marv blew up one of their trucks with a rocket launcher and they fled. She shares Otters’ pedal-power generator plan as best she can over the radio, and also reports that a lot of sprites, AI’s and other e-life forms are likely trapped in offline hosts and devices, so that if anyone is out there hard-wiring and encounters any, to please free them or deliver a device with them on it to the Plat Zone for protection.

They make a few more radio calls, having also left parts and schematics where needed on all their visits throughout the day, and confirm with their assorted allies that they’re on for the big trap tomorrow, and ChewGum visits Penelope Bean, who is really excited about embracing the Hawala system with the nuyen exchange not running. She also agrees to pass along a request for aid to the Mage on the Hill, if she can find him. She otherwise seems her usual chipper (/appropriative) self.

They rest, and on awakening the next day decide to use a couple Tarot cards in hopes of some additional aid before they head to Belle Isle for the ambush. Creep activates the “Higher Power” card, and gets a non-transferable one-person ticket to Zurich Orbital, which will bypass SIN scans (though not weapon scans). Initially a bit annoyed, he realizes eventually this could lead to a big payday for him, so ends up a little happier. Everyone takes turns messing around with the Threshold card, until Otters accidentally activates while walking though the door to try it outside.

The door becomes black void, and Otters steps through. She finds herself confronting a sort of mirror version of herself who says “REMEMBER” and Otters begins to remember what happened in Florida, and then just “nopes” back out the door. Seeing that the void remains, Dig jumps through, and confronts a mangy, toxic dog- a real lone wolf, who tries to force him into a paradigm shift. He resists, proving his loyalty to Dog and the pack, and initiates. He also realizes this was likely a confrontation with the Dweller on the Threshold, and the he should know be able to project to other metaplanes.

As the door remains, Cholula jumps though, with Creep attempting to follow, though Creep bounces off the suddenly solid surface. Cholula sees all his parent there: a Beetle Queen and 2 humans- they seem about to tear each other apart but he manages to do an incredible leadership maneuver and get between them and talk them down. He emerges feeling better integrated with his bug self, and finding that he is no longer Blighted. Creep tries again to go through but the void dissipates and he stumbles out into the street.

They become suddenly aware that they just activated multiple Tarot cards in their safehouse and partially outside and get a little stressed about who might have noticed. But they are interrupted before they can spiral too much by the arrival of a bald grizzled man, dressed in rags, carrying a single duffel bag, who says “I heard you requested my aid” – this seems to be the Mage on the Hill- but can they convince him to assist them?

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

The team freaks out after acquiring all the data as both Creep and Cholula start to enter anaphylactic shock from the spore exposure. Luckily the rest of the group’s full seals hold, and they manage to get them out via some quick-thinking and a near grenade disaster from Otters. They navigate back out via the train tunnels but have the feeling that something might be following them. Once back aboveground, they contact Dig, who recommends quarantine until they can make sure the spores aren’t contagious.

Jaga helps set up a sealed treatment area at the safehouse, and monitors them with Dig for a day while drones work on patching them up, but luckily they seem to be improving and non-contagious. They heal up for another day while Dig fills them in on happenings aboveground, and they all decide where to sell their score from the last mission. They end up selling all the experimental tech to Zennia, who pays well and seems eager to sell it on, and all the data to Ellis, who is eager to receive it and requests first look at anything additional they find.

The team then decides to start looking into how to take down the local Fear The Dark chapter for good. Dig researches the Higher Power Tarot card, and with some help from Fargus Sol determines that it doesn’t do what they likely need it to for these purposes- i.e. beam sunlight directly in a focused point. They think about planning some kind of ambush at the upcoming “Bye, ARES!” block party that the Plat Zone is hosting, but that’s coming up too soon.

After consulting with Walker in Ways, they settle on a different plan- WIW and their shamanic group will plan out a massive cleansing ritual to expand the magical cleanup they’ve been doing on the river outwards into the rest of the city, slowly expanding over time as they cleanse new areas. Dig, CG, and Jaga will assist with this. The rest of the team, and a bunch of other hired assistants, will provide recon and security around the site, and watch for FTD/fight them when they arrive.

The team uses favors owed by Julia Pesina to report on a piece about this upcoming ritual and spread it around, to make sure that FTD hears about it. With a few days to wait until that happens, they stock up on gear (wood pulp bullets and the like) and finish healing and patching armor. They all head over to the Plat Zone party in their street gear, with Otters bringing her new array of drones, freshly out of their boxes, in the van. CG, The Detective and Creep take up surveillance positions just in case anything kicks off after grabbing food from CastIron.

Cholula dances while assensing, vibing on the energy of the room. Otters monitors comms to watch from suspicious traffic while Dig keeps an eye on the matrix, and both of them notice a lot of posts pouring in, seemingly notifications of the death of various East Coast deckers and TM’s. Ringmaster calls them back to the situation room, where they monitor a disturbing thread on Jackpoint right up until there is a disturbing inaudible rumble, and bright flash, and all the lights go out.

Checking things further, it seems like the power is fully down, and a lot of batteries are fully or partially drained. Before they can determine anything else, gunfire breaks out outside. The team outside engages with a group of 6 gunmen, which they quickly realize are shadow spirits inhabiting disguised corpses, who are firing indiscriminately into the crowd. They manage to take them out though Creep and CG are both near killed, with Cholula also joining the fray.

Inside, Dig just barely manages to get in front of the swing of a monofil whip that an invisible assassin had intended for Ringmaster, getting badly injured in the process and splashing Ringmaster with his blood. The assassin chops Otters’ gun in half after she ineffectually fires before Dig manages to fell them with a massive lightning bolt- Dig approves of this show of pack loyalty. Unfortunately, Dig is a carrier for HMHVV so warns Ringmaster of his new lycanthropy risk- certainly much better than dead.

Otters, frantic about the lack of matrix connection and drone feeds, races outside to the van, weaving through the frantic crowd and finds the locks engaged and powered off, so has to hardware her way in. The drones are all powered off but seem to have some varying level of charge left, though no way to recharge if drained at the moment, and the van seem drained but otherwise fine, aside from antennas which seem universally fried. Otters is having to find all the clunky manual controls since usually all of this done via ARO.

Dig and Ringmaster, using magic and charisma, manage to start organizing and calming the crowd, and the weary Latvian Gambit vets present get back to work trying to figure out what happened and what it means. The team all eventually joins up and speculates a bit too, as they hear gunfire, screams, and breaking glass all around the city, and are able to see the stars for the first time in a while (or for some, probably the first time ever). Otherwise the night is only light by muzzle flashes and bonfires…..

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

The team heads into the DDB to begin their multi-phase series of jobs down there. They spend most a day navigating a long series of deadly traps after reaching the site of their showdown with Otto Hendricks, and attempting to explore deeper into his area. Luckily with careful drone recon, good sensor use, and some quick-thinking, they take minimal damage and clear/mark a mostly safe passage to a back entrance to the lab, which they manage to access.

Unfortunately, they then to blind a gun turret by throwing a sleeping bag over it and it fires, detonating some C4 strapped to an adjacent wall and triggering a cave-in. They spend another good portion of a day excavating their way back into the lab to find it in a state of disarray, but they do manage to salvage some useful info, while also potentially exposing themselves to deadly toxins.

It seems that Hendricks (whether initially on ARES’ behalf or on his own initiative) had been manufacturing some experimental weaponry based on spores, toxins, and modified acids, and providing it to GreenWAR cells, possibly for false flag operations, possibly to make Vogel look bad, given his past ties to eco-activist groups. The bio-containment on the experimental weapons lab failed due to the explosion/partial collapse the team triggered, luckily all of them except Cholula and Creep have full seals on their armor, and Creep is running an internal air tank…..

They continue digging around and find a few former SCIF chambers, now rendered non-secure by the structural damage, where people were doing old-school offline paper-based research, data collation, and investigation, into two primary areas of interest: what’s up at the new ARES HQ site in Atlanta (they seem to have semi-secretly bored a huge shaft underneath it) and what is up with ARES’ metaplanar activities. It seems likely based on all this that ARES has/will have a new portal to Vhortas and their fortified base “Colony” there, in the shaft underneath their new HQ, as the construction of that began shortly after their space station portal was shut down.

ARES also is using a lot of materials to build the HQ that have no clear sourcing- could be standard corp shell games, or could be a metaplanar origin there too. The team also finds a disassembled portal closer, with some notes about it. The magical part of the payload is missing (either removed or expended) but the notes suggest that even Hendricks and crew didn’t fully understand how/why these worked. There is also a suggestion that ARES was attempting to find a way to use bugs as magical batteries, and an explanation of how Firewatch members were chosen for service at Colony (awakened members) or for turning into ALPHAs (mundanes).

This is all good paydata for some various Johnsons, so the team decides to return to the surface, collect Dig from whatever animalistic magic quest he went off of, get paid, and patch up themselves and their armor before heading back underground for the next stages of their missions.

Runners
Creep
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
Tabasco aka Cholula
ChewGum
and guest appearance from: Erika “Scully Beyonce” Knowles

The team briefly rests at the missing runner’s basecamp, and then makes a plan to head back in to try to hack the military base using Dig’s planted data tap. Using the radar sensor, biodrone surveillance, and electronic warfare scanning they manage to avoid getting spotted while Dig gets a hack going. Miraculously, Dig manages to grab some data before getting spotted by the active security, and they pull his plug just in time as some alarms go off. Otters speeds away from pursuing vehicles with sensor guidance, and then sneaks through the fog.

They successfully evade their followers, and Dig uses an illusion to distract most of the surveillance and comms blimps outside the fog while Otters sneaks them through farm fields back onto the highway. They return to Detroit, and review the data on the way. It seems like the attack they witnessed was carried out by a cadre of vampires with no insignia, many of whom died in the attack. But the target seems to have been a structure housing an “anomaly” a bit below ground level that was adjacent to the comms HQ. They don’t find any more data on that, but do discover that 2 of the runner crew were captured by the military and are being interrogated to see if they had any advance knowledge of the attack.

They package everything up and send it on to Ringmaster, who pays them well. Cholula also finds the Hermit 6WT card stuck in his armor, presumably from the body pile he was pulled into, and after briefly examining it, Dig activates it. It pulls the team to a cabin that seems to exist on some other plane, with a bed for each of them, some crystal lights on the walls, a single door, and some ominous blood stains. They find an hourglass carved into the floor under one of the beds, and looking outside get the feeling that large predators are fighting other large predators in the dense woods and other environs surrounding the cabin.

Dig almost runs off into the wilderness before Dog reminds him that it is dangerous to go alone, and they close up the cabin after getting worried the light might attract attention. The beds are all quite comfortable, though Otters is worried since neither her drones nor the van transitioned with them. They go to sleep and as soon as Dig loses consciousness, they all find themselves back in their van, feeling well-rested. They get back to Detroit and head to their safehouse after dropping off Erika Knowles to report into Ringmaster.

They check in with some contacts and pick up some potential work, and catch up on the news from around town. ChewGum has been busy in their absence, tracking down leads on work and being gifted a tarot card of his own, from the People of the Book, who tell him it will summon a powerful defensive spirit, but that there will be a cost to the summoner. They add it to Creep’s stash, and decide that next up they will head underground to pursue a few jobs at once- the Betas are looking for lost ARES research, Zennia wants experimental tech, they need to break up Fear the Dark’s local chapter, and they need to chase down those Shadow bats.

They get an updated map from Rains and Pretty, who are busy setting up and fortifying Long Pig Farms’ new operation in town, with the help of the Bee cult, some of who are also transitioning to Betas currently. They also check in with Fargus Sol about Arleesh’s feeling towards Betas (cautiously optimistic) and their new Tarot info. He also sends them some money and suggests that they may have found themselves in the Hunter’s Realm, a super-predator breeding and hunting ground that is also used as a metaplanar survivalist prison- the meaning of the hourglass they found being a magical tattoo depicting the time a prisoner there has left to serve.

They gear up, and prepare to head underground!

Runners
Creep
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective
Tabasco aka Cholula
and guest appearance from: Erika “Scully Beyonce” Knowles

The team continues their investigation at the missing runners’ basecamp. The limited autopsy capacities reveal horrifying and unknown genetic fusion techniques that leave no surgical scars. Knowles takes some samples for later, as the rest of the crew reviews the runner’s logs she was able to retrieve using a provided crypto-key from their erstwhile employer. They decide to continue further in, using the runners’ data on military security ops as a baseline.

They find a huge corpse pile ahead while scouting with the biodrone, and Cholula investigates on foot, and is almost pulled in by another chimera with huge gorilla arms and empty voids where it looks like some cyber-eyes might once have been. They get in a disturbing fight with two of the “gorilla” chimeras, two more “flying squirrel” chimeras, and a hidden sniper, who Otters manages to take out with the van-mounted HMG. Luckily the team mostly avoids damage, though one of the squirrels escapes.

When checking the corpses after, they seem to mesh with what they’d previously see on the autopsies performed at the base camp. The mods are all extreme and seamless, in an unexplainable way. Then they find the sniper’s body, who has been given some large lens eyes, and is wearing what seems to be a WWII-era Russian winter camo uniform, and using era appropriate gear as well. Knowles confirms that the Nazi’s certainly had an interest in the arcane, and there was a major Kaer beneath modern Chernobyl, so it’s possible someone could have stumbled in and been preserved to the modern day, but that doesn’t explain the changes.

They examine the body pile, and find that it is a mix of runner corpses and National Guardsmen, mostly PA with some OH mixed in. There are also a lot of unassigned limbs and other body parts, most of which have some amount of cyberware, badly damaged in the crude and violent removal. Some of these parts could be III Corps but there isn’t enough to be sure. They take more samples for later analysis. The bodies also show signs of predation, as if the various chimeras have been feasting on them, and seem to be rotting at a much decelerated rate- about 1/10 what would be expected, which lines up with the reduced rate of aging Knowles had noticed on the shark-lion corpse, as well as how an elderly Russian sniper could still be alive.

They head further in and the signal degradation is getting bad enough that Otters has to pull the biodrone back in. They spot some mil patrols with the onboard radar and via electronic warfare, using stealth tags the runner team planted to supplement their perception. They manage to sneak within 1/2 km of the fortified base walls and get some looks, and Creep and Dig (in mole form) sneak closer. Creep gets up to the walls, and reports that the security construction the runners had reported on seems to be basically finished- razorwire perimeter, sensor strewn killing ground, then fortified high wall with guard towers and klieg lights.

Dig digs his way down, and finds that the further down he goes the better the mana feels. He rests a bit low down before tunneling back up inside the base, and spots a construction drone. Unfortunately a mole with a data tap in it’s mouth is a strange sight and a guard spots him and starts to give chase. The van is having to constantly maneuver to avoid patrols and is occasionally losing comms with Creep, who is acting as a relay to Dig on the inside, though Dig can’t respond due to his device being too weak to punch through the jammers the base is using.

The van and Creep detect 7 hypersonic, baffled aircraft zip by overhead towards the base, and Creep warns Dig. Dig manages to use the distraction of some ensuing gunfire to escape the guard pursuing him and slip the data tap onto one of the construction drones before fleeing back underground. The van picks up Creep since they lost comms to Dig, and does a circuit around the base, dodging patrols, as they try to figure out what is happening. Otters sends out all the fly-spys on autopilot, hoping some will return with some info. Only one makes it back, but it does gather some useful intel.

The team (except Cholula and The Detective, who remained at the body pile due to Cholula being badly effected as a dual-natured being) all feel a massive explosion that seemingly occurred somewhere underground. The lone surviving drone confirms that a non-descript building next to what looks like the main HQ/comms center has collapsed on itself, so it seems like the explosion took place under there. Creep hears about half as many hypersonic aircraft leave as arrived as gunfire continues. The whole thing took about 11 minutes in total- real pro, whoever it was.

Dig emerges aboveground after waiting a while, somewhere outside the perimeter but not sure where he is. Scared and feeling a bit hopeless he waits a little more until Creep luckily picks him up on sensors again, and Otters scoops him up in the van. They head back to the body pile and manage to track down The Detective and Cholula, who have retreated after Cholula lost it a bit from the spookiness and his reduced abilities, though TD managed to keep him from totally running off. They all return to the runners’ base camp to think about next moves, with Dig pushing for further investigation via data tap and most of the team leaning towards exfiltrating.

Runners
Creep
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective
Tabasco aka Cholula

The team preps to head out to Site 000 to start their investigation for Ringmaster, and spends some time massively upgrading the stealth, sensor and mobility capabilities of the van to try to be ready for whatever they find there. Chew Gum, having heard in Ringmaster’s briefing that the area seems bad for spirits, decides to sit this one out and spends some time harvesting plants, tracking toxic magic (finding some power areas), seeking Li Wei (finding some blood magic traces but no hard evidence), seeking out bat swarm sightings (they seem to be flying in and out of the Detroit Down Below), and taking care of some personal business.

The rest of Ringmaster’s briefing consists of recovered logs from a PA National Guard unit that was first on the scene and seems to have also gone missing. He also has some reports from Asgard Data Haven of a runner crew hired to go in a bit after that, who reported in a few times before vanishing. And last, he has an agent on the ground he wants the team to make contact with if they can- codename: Scully. She was following up on the runner team’s reports but has also been out of contact for around a week. The other big news is that Ellis took the team’s advice and posted on Jackpoint, introducing the concept of Betas to the runner world, at least. Also Long Pig Farms is relocating to Detroit, fleeing persecution, and The Betas are working with some ghouls to make better clonal stock, as they need the same quality of body to inhabit that the Infected due to eat.

The team pays Grandmother Biyu for some SIN upgrades to make sure they can travel, and she hires them to look into who else is making high quality SINs in town, when they’re back from their trip. Otters smuggles Cholula out past MET2000 hovercraft in the sub, and drops him at the rendezvous point, and the van gets out past more MET2000 border guards doing magic scans (seemingly checking for bugs) with the rest of the team aboard. They pick up Cholula and head to the Bravo Company training complex in central Ohio to brush up on some squad tactics before the mission.

They all learn a new tactic to help with moving under fire. They decide to sleep there as Otters and others are worried about highjackers on the highway amidst the auto-haulers, though Dig mocks them all for giving in to fear. They eat some bland nutritious mush in the morning (explaining why all the mercs were so excited about Castiron’s cooking perhaps), and head out. Driving past the exits towards Dutchville (a relatively newly incorporated town built around a Wuxing shipping subsidiary), they find all the exits closed and guarded by UCAS MP’s- small groups but still.

They also notice that Dutchville has been scrubbed from digital maps and GridGuide- as if it never existed. So they navigate using geotags, and Otters slickly takes the van off-road in a blind turn between two auto-haulers. They activate their active camo, signature masking, and vehicle radar, and cut across farm fields, bypassing fences and army surveillance/comms blimps as they travel. Cholula and Dig start to notice a bad magical feeling once they hit about 12km out from their destination, and start to really feel the effects at 10k.

Creep, keeping a close eye on the radar while Dig monitors army comms traffic, manages to help Otters steer them around the limited patrols on the way in. Right at the 12km mark, all the fences and everything suddenly cuts, along what seems to be a lengthy curve. The level of the ground drops about a foot, cleanly, and Otters eases the van down onto it’s tracks onto the seemingly freshly exposed dirt- there are some other vehicle tracks and a few footprints, and a dense fog ahead starting at the 10k mark. The fog seems to dome upwards, and it looks like the army is using aerials/blimps to keep a comms line open- as the team watches, they see some light flashing in the upper area of the fog dome near the center, which The Detective things is some kind of IF/F sequence, presumably to verify that comms coming from within the obscuring fog haven’t been compromised.

The team prepares to head in, and begins. Otters keep her new biodrone aloft as a spotter, while everyone else carefully peers around with various modes of perception. Spotting some kind of shape in the dense fog, they head towards it, and find a lone desiccated stump. Searching it, they find a hardened data chip, which after Dig breaks the encryption, contains more comms logs from the missing National Guard unit. They report on bad astral feelings, and something following them. The team, spooked, continues. They find another irregularity another few km in, as well as spotting sensor shadows of their own, and getting worried something may be following them as well. The fog is giving back a lot of weird readings, and something is playing havoc with their navigational systems, so Cholula is mostly dead reckoning.

They are also losing comms access to the outside, which also should obscure them further from army blimps, so good and bad. They send an initial report to Ringmaster to report they are going dark, and he wishes them luck. Approaching the next object, they find a small clearing in the fog, where a strange grid of pairs of combat boots it set up, 13 columns by 7 rows, standing in perfect parade formation as Cholula spots. Creep and the mule start knocking them over, which achieves no effect, but they do notice that all the boots appear like unique pairs- similar make/brand, but a variety of year of manufacture, level of wear, etc. The Detective tries one on and finds it damp from the fog but nothing else of note.

While knocking over boots, Creep eventually finds another comms chip from the Natl Guard, which Dig cracks. They get more reports of feeling hunted and haunted, and manaspace growing worse- which Cholula and The Detective confirm. Signal is getting worse too as they get closer to the epicenter, both seemingly at a steady rate, so Otters pulls the biodrone in much closer. They are all getting pretty worried at this point, as the sensor shadows are also showing up in the astral, and the Natl Guard reports having some of their people MIA.

They press on, and Cholula steers them towards a feeling of water ahead, where Creep detects a slight dip in the landscape. They find what looks like the bottom portion of a dried up stream bed, but as with everything else it seems like about the top 12 inches is gone. Creep spots a hardened milspec case carefully place in the center, and opens it, finding a 3rd chip. Dig cracks it, and they get what seems likely to be the final log from the Natl Guard- they report firing on shadows as more and more of them vanish into the fog. They also found what seemed like a local landmark but turned out to be some sort of astral effect or illusion as the stream was gone in realspace. They also report having travelled much further than they should have to reach it.

While the team is stressing about this, a horrifying sound comes from out of the fog, and Otters is paralyzed, while the others are variously effected. Luckily, Otters was already jumped in hot to the van and drone, so still has some capacity. Creep peers around and then jumps back just in time as what looks like some sort of terrible hybird seemingly swims through the air at him, biting with the head of the shark, while it’s lion’s paws pull it along at alarming speed. All of this attached to the torso of a troll, wearing a shredded military uniform. Cholula misses with a fire arrow, Dig misses with a machine pistol, and Otters opens up with the van machine gun.

A hit! Unfortunately, this thing seems to have some kind of hardened exterior- the gun does a lot of damage but it seems to soak quite a bit of it, though not like a spirit would…. Also unfortunately it seems to recognize the danger from the van and pummels it badly, nearly wrecking it in one hit. Dig pulls out all the stops and blasts it with a lightning bolt as it start to shove itself into the van through the open side door- the mana here is weird and sludgy and irregular, but Dig manages to control it well enough to do some more major damage.

Otters, desperate, turns the machine gun on the van itself, shooting through the roof to hit the beast inside, and manages to fell it before it can kill anyone in the van, though the van takes more damage and is on it’s last legs. Everyone’s paralysis gradually wears off as Dig shoots the thing over and over with his machine pistol, to make sure it stays dead. While collecting themselves, they hear a voice call out, and after exchanging some confirmational chatter, find out that this is “Scully”, aka Erika Knowles, who Creep explains they know of through a convoluted link of runners in the team file, from her Boston days.

She seems happy to see them, and suggests they get back to her base camp with the body to talk further and do some analysis. They manage to navigate there, though doing so in the fog is quite confusing, and Otters is glad she’s been leaving a breadcrumb trail on an offline map to try to follow back out later. They find that Knowles has set up in the somewhat shredded basecamp of the missing runner team, and has another partially dissected hybrid on one of the cots. They haul out the one in the van (massively heavy), and she cuts it open, showing the team how the strange head and limbs seems perfectly grafted the host body, seemingly a troll torso, with some kind of advanced tech- this is beyond 6th World bio-surgeons, as far as she knows, as there is no surgical scarring, or sign of exposure to known mutagens.

She also fishes out some dog tags from the creature’s stomach, and everyone else things he must have eaten a soldier, but she explains that swallowing one’s own dog tags is often a soldier’s last desperate act in the face of certain death, hoping that their body can later be ID’ed and perhaps returned to their family. Disturbingly, the tags are neither from the National Guard nor III Corps, but from the Aztlan national army from about 8-10 years ago. Knowles says all of this lines up with her analysis of the other hybrid, though she didn’t retrieve ID from that one. She plays the team a helmet-cam video that the runner team recovered on one of their recon missions, which seems to show III Corp finding themselves enveloped in fog as comms go down, and they come under attack from unknown forces.

She says she also recovered more logs from the runner crew, which she offers to share with the team, but first they brief her on the updates from Detroit- the Scar, the Betas, etc. She is a bit overwhelmed but luckily they confirm that she herself isn’t magical, so she won’t spot Cholula out, while she takes in the info. She seems very serious and driven, but thrown off by her time in the fog- neither of her hardened chronometers are in agreement, and neither align with the team’s estimate of what day/time it is. They decide to rest and patch up the van before heading further in, or bugging out to report what they’ve found so far…..

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

Creep catches up with the team after one of his occasional “wander around and get the lay of the land” multi-day solo adventures. There seem to be no ALPHAs left anywhere that Creep has seen- which is disturbing to say the least, as the bug-killing manatech device didn’t have infinite range, as proven by the Bee cult’s survival by the Blight. That said- less ALPHAs and no bugs seen, so that’s good in it’s own ways. The team speculates a bit as to what this all might mean. Cholula gets a call back from Jaliyah Angel in Seattle that the ASPS is sending a Shedim specialist, Patricia Loveland, from DeeCee, to look into the Shadow spirit corpe possession issue, at the team’s request.

Chew Gum also follows up with Cass Wandering Horse, the contact he was given by The Walker In Ways, who are both also looking into local magical weirdness post-bug. Cass has a lot of tips and rumors, but not alot of hard info, as he explains he is also fresh in from DC. He seems to be a NAN political operative who left when things started heating up along the borders, though he may be interested in some political realignments in Detroit now. However, he gives some good tips for a promise of future info or services rendered, and the team starts digging.

They look up 3 of the spirits/ancient gods Cass had mentioned, and do some info trading around town to find out more where they can. They get some good leads but no hard evidence, and check in with Ringmaster, who confirms that he will pay for further investigations into any/all magical threats in the city. He also confirms that the job to investigate the missing III Corps at Site 000 is still a go, so the team plans to leave for that once they get the sub back (as they will need to smuggle Cholula safely out of town, as he is detectable as a bug, which surely someone will be looking out for).

They call Loveland, and share a lot of info re: Shadow spirits, possession vs inhabitation, gateways vs portals vs rifts, belief powering magical potency, and the like. This all seems promising until Cholula outs himself as a Beta, without much of an explanatory lead-in, and Loveland cuts the call, texting the rest of the team that they’ve been compromised. They hope she’ll come around after further digging on her own, as she is also connected with Old Crow, Jackpoint etc amongst other runners resources.

Otters manages to get a Fly Spy into The Scar above downtown, and before the drone fails from acid and other elemental damage, she manages to get faint footage transmitted of what looks like barren insect tunnels, which both Ellis and Cholula verify look like Vhortas, minus the biomatter. Ellis hints at strange overgrown ruins in Vhortas that are the only locations the teeming masses of bugs won’t occupy, but neither Ellis no Cholula are able to comprehend why from their limited memories.

Ellis also shares info about the other end of the Daedelus space station portal that ARES was maintaining until the team shut it down. ARES was able to establish a stable fortress, called Colony (Damien Knight was never one for clever names it seems) using some very advanced magic, this is where the original Beta’s live- though these are all Firewatch members sent to the insect plane on the principle that if bugs can inhabit humans here, maybe humans can inhabit bugs there? Which seems to have had some limited success.

However, given the endless nature of the plane, Ellis doesn’t think they’d ever be able to “defeat” the bugs- so she isn’t sure what these empty tunnels signify, though it could be an area of Colony- perhaps the magitech device from Vogel linked up with something on the other side. Apparently, according to notes Ellis was able to recover, ARES had managed to stabilize Colony enough that non-merges could safely live there for some time, though she is not sure if they have survived since the space portal was closed (or if another has been opened….). Based on the Manus Ruinae containment lab that recent former team members raided in Seattle, this all certainly seems possible.

Ellis is also worried about what happened to the ALPHAs, and reveals that what Vogel asked her to do was broker contact- she isn’t sure that it occurred, or what was discussed, but she had enabled Vogel to access the ALPHAs secure comms network. She had been hoping to discover some means of saving or stabilizing them, but no luck so far. She still hopes to find a way to allow the original Betas from Colony to return, which they currently can’t do due to evanescence issues. Regardless, she wants more data and suggests to the team that a lot of ARES offices, black sites, and also the HQ could make good targets for raids if they want that kind of work, there’re plenty of other at it currently.

They also discuss the situation undergound, and get worried about what threats still lurk in the Detroit Down Below now that the bugs are gone, since Ellis reports that some ghoul allies have recently gone missing. They discuss a variety of different hypotheses and theories about it all, before finally getting the sub, fully repaired, back from Goober, and getting ready to get underway out to Dutchville.

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

The team recuperates from the Shadow spirit raid, and gets some investigation updates from Smoach and Myrryr, who also accept a Tarot card as payment. They’ve ID’ed the Wendigo, and got some more info about what occurred- it looks like the strange orb was a portal to the Shadow plane (or at least one of it’s moons), and the one of the two spirits likely escaped through or was on the other side when the team attacked and closed it. It’s unclear if this spirit took some of the Tarot cards with or if they were expended in opening the portal. Castiron brings in a bat that he managed to bring down from the swarm, while he was fleeing in fear of the Wraith. He also returns half of his pay, since he feels like he didn’t help much.

S&M pass along a strange artifact, known as a “Coin of Woe”, which can be created by Shadow spirits by draining the essence of a living being- this coin is gold, showing that it was drained from a metahuman, and has Iva Linus Hathaway’s face on one side. Cholula holds onto it, and dedicates himself to finding a way to free her or return her to some form of life, though his initial research doesn’t seem promising. S&M also warn that although those coins can sometimes be used as metaplanar currency, their possession is also a serious crime in many planes.

CG examines the bat, and finds that it seems to have been possessed by a shadow spirit at some point, similar to the “zombie” corpses they encountered at the farm- disturbing! However, he prepares it and he, Dig, and Jaga cleanse their safehouse of magical taint, and rebuild their magical lodges. CG also resummons two of his Necro spirits, one into the bat. The team decides they need Jackpoint access to further their research abilities, so they put together an info file on the truth of Latvian Gambit with a lot of combined knowledge from themselves and the team file, and get Old Crow to agree to upload it as a membership application once he is clear of the city.

ARES and the UCAS are engaged in escalating back and forth over the disaster, and Vogel gives a major and provocative speech, ending with the revelation that ARES will relocate their corp HQ to Atlanta in response to the UCAS provoking them, and tries to place the blame for the “terrorists” behind Latvian Gambit at the feet of the UCAS for not reporting their activities and breaking up their cells. The team plans to possibly further refute much of this info when they themselves aren’t in ARES’ backyard, though the boards are already going wild.

Otters finally finishes building her first biodrone with Moreau, and The Detective does some bliss in their tub while catching up with the Keepers. The mafia bug infiltration con seems to have had some major effects- lots of infighting at the port, and a lot of dead bodies turning up nearby/in the river. Also- someone seems to be surveilling The Detective’s apartment- wearing a high end camo suit, so the Keepers haven’t gotten a good look. The Detective forgets to report this for a while, as they are high.

The next day, when they think to mention it, Cholula is finally back to full health, which required eating a lot more meat than usual (and having some interesting new thoughts and memories), he and CG head up to The Detectives zone with biodrone support, while Dig as a dolphin and Otters in the VTOL head down to try to retrieve the sub. Otters is able to spot the camo suit man with the biodrone and provide a targeting solution to Cholula, who KO’s him with a Gamma-Scopolamine arrow.

They zip tie him, and haul him into The Detective’s apartment, after taking his external comm and a bunch of kidnap supplies he has on him. They wait an hour and then question him once the truth serum kicks in. He caves pretty quickly and reveals that he is the recent ex-husband of Lindsay Turpentine, and that the family knows that The Detective is responsible for Michael and Carol’s deaths. The Detective tries to dodge blame for this, not fully inaccurately, but the man doesn’t believe them. He thought he could get back in Lindsay’s good graces by kidnapping The Detective and delivering them.

They debate about what to do, before questioning him some more and finding out that he’s been live-streaming the whole encounter. Dig, from afar, panics and tells them to get out of there, which they ignore while Cholula debates the ethics of killing him, since via his code he doesn’t really deserve to die. He fills up the tub they have him in, jic. They keep talking for a bit while an increasingly stressed Dig tries to convince them to leave every time his dolphin form surfaces and gets comms back.

Eventually Cholula agrees, and flips the still paralyzed man over, face down, in the full tub, and leaps out the window. CG and The Detective leave the normal way, with The Detective trying to gather up essentials on the way. They just get clear as a missile flies down and obliterates the building. Yikes! They all regroup at the Hamtramck safehouse while The Detective mourns the loss of their disguise collection. Meanwhile, Dig and Otters have a relatively easy time retrieving the sub, and buy some supplies to do a quick patch up job on it. They load Old Crow aboard to smuggle him outta town, and send it to Chicago to get more fully repaired by Goober, with Otters piloting the first leg of the trip past the ARES cordon which is still nominally being enforced.

The team all get a call from Kong up in the Blight, who wants them to look into a kind of culty group of farmers whose area has recently been added to his turf (he seems to be expanding). The team does some research and doesn’t find much, so does some recon and finds that it seems to be a group of Bee spirits, mostly good merges, that are distributing non-magical food to the surrounding area. Still- creepy and worth checking out. They call Ellis, who confirms that Bees often try to live in harmony with the surrounding area but are suicidally defensive. She says they could be good candidates to join the Betas since they already prioritize some of the same principles and communal attitudes.

The team calls up Kong to see if a peaceful solution is good with him too, and he says he’d prefer bugs get killed but that so long as the team gets them off his turn he doesn’t care much. They approach the church/farm lot, and The Detective has a lengthy convo with the Pastor, who turns out to be a Bee Shaman. They eventually bring in Cholula as proof of what the Beta option could look like, and the hive discusses, eventually agreeing to go along with the plan.

The team gets a bus from Kong to transport them all out to the now-empty shadow farm, and arrange for some of Ellis’ people to meet them there. They then also call up Pretty and try to set up a ghoul/bug farm coop, or at least get that started, since it sounds like Long Pig Farms may be looking to vacate Chicago in the increasingly hostile to the Infected environment there. They also report in on the info they learned about Fear the Dark, and Pretty pushes them to go after the vamp that escaped and hopefully finish off the local chapter’s leadership.

The big news when the team wakes the next day is that ARES didn’t just move their HQ- they fully left. They abandoned tens of thousands of local low-level employees and bailed basically overnight on the whole city. Horizon PR is desperately trying to spin the move in a positive way, but it seems ARES’ internal turmoil isn’t fully resolved- this does not seem like the plan Vogel presented, although it could also be a response to the info the team leaked on Jackpoint, especially with the UCAS announcement that they are rescinding the Business Recognition Accords in order to investigate just what happened in Detroit, and to III Corps.

CG, worried about a repeat of Chicago, checks in with Ringmaster, who says he has a lot of work for the team if they’re looking- a lot of the mercs have left, and he needs people looking into all sorts of local issues, as well as what happened to III Corps, if they want a trip out of town. The team also calls up The Walker in Ways, and gets contact info for someone named Cass Wandering Horse, with WiW telling them that they are also concerned about the spiritual future of Detroit, and that Cass has been doing some investigations along these lines, though he also has his own agenda….

Plenty to do! Back to work.

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

The team keeps partying for a bit at the Platinum Zone, though they announce that the party will have to end in the next day or so as stocks are running low and Marv needs to resupply. The team decides it’s time to raid the Shadow spirit farm, get revenge for Iva, and get their Tarot cards back. First though, Chew Gum needs to start setting up a new lodge and prepping a fresh corpse vessel. So they decide to figure out what to do with their safehouses. Since they’ll soon be fighting the Shadow spirits that are the ones who know the locations, they decide to enhance the security (and comforts) of the Hamtramck safehouse and ditch the bolthole in Windsor. Creep flirts a bit with the AI landlord, Rutledge, who seems potentially interested.

Dig inquires again about hiring others to assist with the mission, and this time Ringmaster has some suggestions- he also wants intel on what the Shadow spirits are up to beyond Tarot, if anything. The team winnows down the potentials list and sends out job offers to those who look promising. They call in their favors with Ellis to get some assistance from the Betas/Deso Angels, and hire Old Crow and Sikh Burn with the promise of Tarot card payment, and also SINder and the bounty hunter duo Charlie Foxtrot and Moondog for cash. Walker and her dog Tofu turn them down, not interested in payment and trying to help their community area, and Smoach and Myrryr offer recon/investigative assistance but are not combatants.

Jaga comes along for healing support, and Ringmaster manages to scrounge up a decent van that the team buys to replace their busted one. Cast Iron also hires on for cash, though he seems worried about the dark spirits and says he hasn’t been in the field in a while. The team makes a plan, with Old Crow’s tactical input proving quite useful, and they plan to start the attack late the next day. First, Tabasco decides to take Ellis and Praxis up on their offer of change, and against many on the team’s advice, merges with a Goliath Beetle spirit who they were able to save while it was injured, and who accepted their offer of sanctuary.

Tabasco upon returning, finds that though he still has his own, human, memories, he also has memories of his time amongst a teeming mass in Vhortas, before being pulled through by a shaman to fight in this battle, being injured and separated from the horde, and being approached by an inquiring mind of a type it was previously unfamiliar with. As Tabasco’s new insect half wakes to full sapience for the first time, he finds that he feels he needs a new name, and requests that everyone now call him Cholula. Responses on the team to this development are mixed, but everyone adheres to the name request.

They meet up with their hired support near the farmhouse by Ypsilanti, and see a bat swarm flying back towards town as they approach. Foxtrot and Moondog get creeped out by Cholula and bail on the mission, saying that they know the team is good with the Plat Zone so they won’t make trouble, but they don’t want any part of whatever “this” is, though Cholula tries to explain. Otters opens up with the van HMG on the barn on the property as everyone else approaches, though Cholula and CG both get mind-controlled and fire at each other, luckily missing.

A Wendigo and a mass of what looks like trid zombies pour out of the barn, all badly injured, and Creep hits them with the rocket launcher, along side more fire from Otters in mule drone and van. They cut down the mass quickly, with Sikh Burn and Cast Iron going around and making sure they all stay dead. Dig start watching for mental manipulation while preparing to cut off TacNET access/shut down weapons as needed if so, and intervenes a few times. As they breech into the house, the spirit retreats into the astral, where it comes under attack from dual-natured Cholula and the Betas, Deso Angels, SINder and Old Crow.

The team all manages to shake off the fear that the spirit tries to emanate out, except Castiron, whose bad past experiences with dark spirits sends him fleeing for a time before he regains his composure. The Shadow spirit starts taking damage and is forced to defend itself, as other team members start sneaking inside and reclaiming some of the Tarot they’ve seen scattered around in what appears to be a ritual circle. Otters also manages to shoot and destroy a disturbing obsidian orb that is at the center. This seems to weaken or distract the Shadow spirit momentarily, and also forces a vision of one of the Shadow moons into the mind of CG and Cholula.

They press the attack in the astral, with one of the Deso Angels and one of the Betas killed and the other 2 badly injured, and both SINder and Old Crow flatlined with Jaga desperately trying to keep them alive. Cholula is the last down, not quite able to finish the spirit off, at which point it manifests and Otters one-shots it with the HMG. Jaga asks The Detective to choose healing priority, and they split it up as follows: Dig tries to save Cholula, but it’s dicey and unclear if it will take. Otters loads Old Crow into the VTOL and zips him back to the Plat Zone, which saves his life but harms his magic. And Jaga manages to stabilize SINder, who seems physically ok but mentally scarred by the experience.

Sikh Burn, meanwhile, wildly slashes at wispy shadows in the main house, fearing spirit regeneration (correctly), and Foxtrot and Moondog finally roll back up, Dig having called them back for extra money in a moment of desperation. They help confirm the place is clear, and the team calls in Smoach and Myrryr for investigative help, with CG and others assisting. It seems like the spirit they fought was a Wraith, the Shadow warrior class, and very deadly- S&M are impressed they survived. They got most of the Tarot back, but all the cards with bloody handprints, along with a few others, are missing.

Checking the “zombies” they find that they were seemingly possessed by low-force Shadow spirits, and were being cursorily patched back up/reassembled- so this is where at least some of the bodies have gone. Checking the Wendigo, they find a scarified “Fear the Dark” across her chest, and worry about who might have escaped in that bat swarm. S&M confirm that the second Shadow spirit, likely a Succubus, was recently at the house, but is not currently around/detectable, so seems to have retreated, fled, or just been out. But, for now, victory! They pay everyone out, and head back to the safehouse for the first time in a while to rest.

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective

Dig heads off to attend to his magical order while the rest of the team is poisoning Michael Turpentine. He barely makes it through some active combat while disguised as a bird and masked, but does arrive intact. The 2 members of his order trickle in, along with a preppy, affable, new potential named Freddy Bales. Bales has to step in a few times to provide additional instruction where Dig fails in the moment, but they all successfully take on animal form, though only Dig and Bales manage to initiate, as the other 2 weren’t properly prepared, Dig not having told them to expect that as a monthly component of the meetings. They all take off, and Dig focuses on internalizing some things he learned about instruction from Bales.

Everyone else rests up and stocks up on some gear at the Platinum Zone, with Creep getting a rocket launcher and Chew Gum learning to cast spells from Li Wei, who encourages him to grow his power. They receive the bounty payment from ARES for killing Otto Hendricks, routed through a series of cutouts as promised, and split it up once Dig returns. Tabasco, still in a weird mental place, bows out of the subsequent mission to seek further upgrades, to be ready to take revenge on the Shadow spirits. He also prefers to stay at the Plat Zone and fight ALPHAs than go to bug vs ARES central.

The rest of the team gets the call in the morning to go grab Carol and get him to ground zero- the bugs have a huge new crater just in front of ARES Tower, and are pouring out in what looks like a suicidal final attack. ARES forces have fallen back to the Tower and surrounding plazas and are waging a desperate defensive action, but could be overrun. The various merc forces are effectively unable to reinforce as they are fending off ALPHAs (and trying to save/rescue the civilian populace, unlike ARES). The team heads north, with Otters in the VTOL, Dig in bird form, and the rest on foot. They also call Ellis and their ghoul allies to warn them to stay away from Downtown/out of the astral due to an unspecified “mana threat”, and tip off the Irregulars as well.

Under The Detective’s guidance, they use some small unit tactics to safely avoid entanglements on the way, and find a somewhat gray-skinned Carol waiting in the irradiated van. They all hop in and plot a route, with Creep’s extensive knowledge of the city from his nighttime prowling providing excellent navigation.They exit the NGZ to the north of the nuclear blast zone and swing around west, entering back in through Irregular controlled turf in Zone 4. From there, they cut into Downtown from the west, with Otters carefullly sneak-driving to avoid trouble.

Otters flies CG in the VTOL up to a forward vantage point to get eyes on, and Dig accompanies as a bird. Dig decides to snag an ARES comm from one of the many corpses, so that ARES hopefully won’t shoot the van as it approaches, and CG provides sniper cover against some spirits as Dig gets it and flies away. However, some ARES drones almost spot CG so he as to hide for a bit before Otters can fly him back out, he got good overview info of the battle ahead though.

Dig and CG head back to the Plat Zone to help there, worried about the mana effects of the device in the van. Otters, with Creep’s help, hides her body in some rubble and remote pilots van and VTOL from there. She also uses the electrochromic coating to make the van look like an ARES vehicle to match their stolen comm signal. Unfortunately, this attracts some ARES stragglers in the neighborhood who try to get to the van for a ride to safety, pursued by bugs. Otters gives them some covering fire from the HMG but then speeds off, and the ARES survivors are quickly cut down.

Getting closer to the battle, Otters switches to full speed approach as the few square miles around the Tower are basically flattened rubble piles and mounds. It’s rough driving, but Otters is managing, partially using the VTOL to have an overhead view to steer from. She dodges the blasts of some stray ARES shells, though the van takes some flack damage. They manage to speed right up towards the crater, as a large amount of bugs split off from the main assault across from them and race towards the van. Otters uses HMG suppressive fire to corral them into a close center, while Creep leans out the side of the speeding van and launches a rocket into the bugs’ midst, holding on with his magnet hand and The Detective supporting.

They smash through the remaining bugs and Otters pulls a bootleg turn to swing about and stop, flinging the back doors open. Carol has been loosening all the bolts on the device’s frame, and with the help of the mule drone, hauls it out to the crater edge. Just as he does so, a massive insect emerges right behind him. Creep fires his last remaining rocket, and barely misses, still doing a decent amount of damage. Carol chucks some FAB grenades into the crater while running forward and pulling some ripcords on his armor, which starts emitting a stream of FABIII. He calls out to the team that they must trigger the device!

Creep races out and with The Detective’s encouragement, Dig’s previous explanation, and Otters providing covering fire from the mule and the van, manages to input the trigger sequence correctly on the first try. He dives back into the van as Otters revs it and peals out, having seen the 10 second countdown start. They gun it as a far away as they can before the detonation, which peppers the van with shrapnel, along with a following shockwave that flips them and wrecks the vehicle- luckily not badly enough to severely hurt those inside.

There seems to have been some kind of EMP effect as well though, as comms go down and Otters loses connection. Luckily the effect field seems fairly limited and she has a good view through the more distant VTOL of what happens: after the initial explosion and shockwave, some kind of rift opens in the sky about the Tower and plaza and some sickly green energy pours through. When it touches the energy emitting from the increasingly unstable area where the device was, a second magical shockwave pours out. This seems to kill smaller bugs where they stand, and paralyze or send into paroxysms the larger insects. Shamans appear to be driven mad and are easy targets for ARES sharpshooters, though Otters also spots some amongst the ARES troops falling and seizing- either bug infiltrators or mages, presumably.

This magical wave also hits at the Plat Zone, and both CG and Dig take some damage that feels like bad drain, while also making them somewhat nauseous, though they manage to shake it off. They do some others around them who were more battered fall, and help get them down to the medical area, where Jaga, though puking, is helping to heal and stabilize. Back at the front, Otters picks her body up with the VTOL, and then locates the van crash site via dead reckoning and regains point to point comms with Creep, the mule and The Detective. CG and Dig get the Quicksilver camera airborne to get some magical pics of whatever just happened, and get a few usable plates of the rift and immediate after-effects.

They initially plan to head back to the Plat Zone, but instead decide to do one more recon on the battlefield. From a distance, they see a lot. ARES troops are casually executing any surviving bugs and shamans, the bugs seemingly unable to move or defend themselves and the shamans stumbling, maddened, from the crater. There is much cruelty from some of the troops, though the majority appear to be just mechanically slaughtering. They see Carol also crawl forth from the crater, arms raised and shouting something, holding a commlink in one hand. The matrix appears to be down but the team’s devices all seem to work, so they try to get a message to Carol that they can come grab him, but give up on this after he is quickly surrounded by ARES forces.

Shortly thereafter, an armored platoon shows up, which looks to be Zone 4 and 6 survivors, having cut through the remaining ALPHAs to get here. General Ritter (aka Grey Ghost) emerges and confabs with some other ARES leaders on the ground. Tensions seem high but he distributes some info that seems to calm things. At this point, a heavily armored Arthur Vogel emerges, seemingly have claimed control, suggesting the Knight has indeed died or been incapacitated. The armored command of the conventional ARES forces at the Tower seem to refuse this transfer of command to Vogel and open fire on the newly arrived troops, but it seems like Ritter was prepared for this possibility, and the fascist Downtown commander Danforth and his loyalists are quickly gunned down.

Vogel gets Carol free and they shake hands, but amidst the chaos and confusion, the team sees a figure in blood-spattered heavy armor walk up behind Carol and calmly shoot him the head repeatedly. This figure rips off their helmet, and the team sees it is Carol’s brother- Michael Turpentine! Screaming something about “betrayal” as far as they can tell, he continues shooting Carol’s corpse as he himself is gunned down and turned to pink mist by Vogel’s bodyguards with their railguns. The team, shocked, pauses to reflect for a moment, until Creep realizes that Carol was how they were going to get paid, and against better advice, heads over to Vogel, who luckily recognizes him before Creep is destroyed by railguns as well.

Vogel seems at least put out by Carol’s death, but also very busy, and confirms that he will ensure the team is paid before sending Creep on his way, quickly muscled out of the inner circle by bodyguards. However, Creep manages to slickly pocket the commlink that Carol was holding. They all head back to the Plat Zone, marked as friendlies by Vogel’s command (it seems that all Irregulars have been). Hearing celebratory shouts and gunfire from the battle zone, Dig and CG were hoping for the best, and as the rest of the team arrives and new trickles in of bugs dropping citywide, and ALPHAs either killed or in retreat, a massive party starts.

Dig takes a celebratory BTL to celebrate, and plans to accompany The Detective back to their safehouse in Oakland County so they can do some Bliss and take a bath while Dig keeps an eye on things. The rest plan to stay and party. First, though, Otters shares the VTOL footage, and Creep shares Carol’s comm. Dig manages to hack it even while high, and they find that it is basically a high-end burner through which Carol had been communicating with his brother. It seems like it started out with Carol trying to provide anonymous help, but his bro figured it out, and eventually used it to track Carol’s location and kill him.

There is an attacked vid file that Dig opens, which shows the cybereyes perspective of Michael as he psychs himself up in a bathroom mirror to give Damien Knight the chess piece. He is talking initially about how this can secure him a permanent board place, and also get Carol safely back on the corps’ good side. He heads into an ornate conference room past two muscle-bound, oiled up teen bodyguards. Knight greets him as he enters, almost calling him Carol again before correcting, and asking for help getting into his battle armor, which “must have shrunk since last time.” As Michael moves to present the chess piece, Knight begins hacking, and his veins start turning black and bulging out as he falls to the floor.

Michael panics and tries to catch him, but then has to defend himself as the 2 guards outside rush in and assume he did this (which he did, though he doesn’t know it yet). He kills the two teens, seemingly horrified, and then seems to put 2 and 2 together. Sensing that Carol has been working at cross purposes, he starts strapping on what he can of Knight’s armor and looks into another mirror, vowing revenge, as Knight’s body dissolves into the carpet behind him, before the feed cuts.

Dig suggests they make a snuff BTL of Knight’s death/a brother’s revenge, but the rest of the team convinces him to hold off for now, though Otters confirms it will be a best seller for sure. They share some info with Ringmaster before getting into serious partying, and Dig and The Detective take off, with Dig getting the first look at The Detective’s strange shabby chic abode. They stop at Grandmother Biyu’s on the way so Dig can tip her off that now is a good time to make a move on the mafia- any dead can be claimed as bugs, and their mages were surely effected by the mana blast wave, and with Knight gone they’ve lost their best ally in ARES. Ravenheart approaches CG and asks if he has seen Li Wei- apparently Wei’s blood magic got the better of him while fighting off a major ALPHA assault earlier in the day and he hasn’t been seen since. A rogue blood mage is a big problem, though Ravenheart would like to help him if possible.

After the partying, everyone crashes. The next day Dig and The Detective return, and the matrix starts gradually coming back online- not just the local net but the whole deal, it seems that ARES jammers are offline for the first time in a while. The team gets their remaining pay from Vogel, and also sees that Jackpoint is back up! A new group called the GOD-Slayers claims credit for helping end the embargo, alongside many thanks to the Nexus and Asgard Data Haven for assistance and secure backups. The big news, as well as Detroit and the death of Knight (assumed in battle) and the return of Vogel (previously thought dead) is “what happened to III Corps?”

From the currently available info, it seems like the entire III Corps, plus everyone else within a large radius around Dutchville, PA, all vanished off the face of the earth. There were strangely/conveniently no satellites overhead when it happened, and noone on the boards has been able to get sat feeds overheard since. Attempts to send drones have failed, so intel is low. But speculation is high. Perhaps something to investigate? However, the boards are warning runners not to try to leave Detroit JUST yet, in case whoever is controlling the satellites that enforce the cordon haven’t stood down yet.

The situation in the UCAS as a whole looks a bit dicey- Colloton has pulled back military forces to defend important installation and major cities, in the wake of the III Corps disaster and what’s happening in Detroit, and this has left some borders vulnerable, which the CAS, NAN, and other bordering nations are all too happy to exploit. Detroit also seems to have suffered badly- civilian casualties are estimated to be around 150k so far, and that doesn’t even include the SINless, DDB dwellers, and Irregulars from out of town. ARES forces also took a bad hit, though they aren’t revealing any internal info, external estimates are putting their losses at 60%+ of their military and auxiliary capacity. But- there have been no signs of bugs in the NGZ since the device went off, so Latvian Gambit may have kind of worked?

Otters heads out with mule and VTOL to salvage what she can from the now-less-irradiated van, and finds scavengers picking over the battlefield all over, with more official ARES salvage ops nearer the Tower. However, there seem to be less bodies around than there should be… and the rift is still glowing green above the Tower. Otters manages to save the concealed turret and HMG but the rest is a wash, either wrecked or already picked over. She heads back, the mule dragging the expensive turret and gun. When she gets back she reports the weird missing corpses, and CG and some others go out to investigate, grabbing a few corpses they do find to analyze.

With Ringmaster’s support, CG gets some space to do a ritual of bones, and finds that all the corpses were touched by some kind of corrupting energy, not strongly enough to have an effect, but strongly enough to leave traces. The thing it feels most similar to is Shadow magic. Examining the Quicksilver plates, they also see a massive Scar through Downtown, centered on the blast, that seems to be a powerful mana ebb or dead zone. When the team talks to their ghoul friends (yay functional matrix!) the ghouls report that Downtown is kind of a no-go zone for the dual-natured right now- bad vibes. Dig also calls Freddy Bales to thank him for his assistance during the magical order meeting, which Bales is his usual affable self about.

They decide that first off, they want to hire some assistance and go after the Shadow spirit farm and get their Tarot back (if they can), and then maybe help Ringmaster with all his new investigation needs, as he seems worried about the rift, which reminds him of the Watergate incident that brought Shedim to our place, as well as interested in what happened to III Corps. Also maybe help Biyu against the mafia, maybe help the ghouls against Fear The Dark, etc. Many jobs available, and maybe the city is finally free of bugs and checkpoints! It definitely seems like, for now, ARES is defending their HQ and licking their wounds. However, with all the bug tunnels, sinkholes and collapses are common, so travelling the city is far from “safe”.

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Tabasco
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective

The team spends a bit more time going back and forth on the bounty question at the Platinum Zone while also putting together their gear needs list to fight the Shadow spirits who stole their Tarot. They get another call from Carol and finally answer. He tells them he knows they’ve been dodging his calls and have been in touch with Ellis, but that he has a 3-4 part offer for them from Vogel, who he says is finally positioned to make his move. They agree to hear him out, and he says first off, Vogel has a message to pass to Ellis- essentially, offering amnesty for her faction if she gets on-side ASAP and answers a few basic questions satisfactorily. The team agrees to pass to along, at least.

Next, Vogel has two jobs for them, the first is to pick up a large device that it being air-dropped in shortly, stash it somewhere where it would be difficult to access or track magically, and leave it there with Carol. An optional stage 2, which they also accept, is to pick Carol and the device up from this location and get them into the center of the ARES vs Bugs fight Downtown at the moment of Vogel’s choosing, he thinks it will only be a few days from now. The team negotiates pay, and gets all the relevant info.

2nd job, Carol doesn’t know any details, but Vogel has prepped an info packet they can examine before negotiating pay, though they have to agree to the job before they can see it. They do so, and he passes them an encrypted file that MAMA has the key to decode. It seems they are meant to use Carol’s brother, Michael as a trojan horse of sorts to get a toxin attack in range of Damien Knight. Further assistance incoming via drone once they agree to terms. They negotiate with Carol for a major payday, and he takes off.

The Detective calls Ellis and passes along the message/warning, as well as Carol’s current contact info, she thanks them for it and says she’ll ponder it, quickly, and decide what to do. The team decides to use the van to conceal the device (and Carol) in the radioactive zone on Vendor’s Row, and head to Triple R to get radiation shielding upgraded, as well as add a concealed turret for the upcoming Downtown run. While they upgrade, Otters flies Tabasco in the VTOL, along with bird-form Dig over to the drop site, way on the west side in some farm country near Livonia.

They arrive and spot a half-size shipping container dropping down with 4 small corner chutes deployed a short while later. Unfortunately, they also spot an incongruous swarm of bats hanging out in the area, seemingly keeping an eye on them and the crate. Otters flies Creep over as well while they debate what to do. After some attempts to influence the swarm with spirit powers are counter-acted, Tabasco decides to take action, and shoots a bat. He is then quickly felled by a massive spell, and fall out of the tree he was perched in.

Creep tosses him in the VTOL and Otters zips him back to the Plat Zone for healing, as Creep pops some smoke grenades before nearly getting felled by another spell. Dig finally spots the caster- a powerful high level initiate is in bat form amidst the swarm, and with that Dig and Creep retreat inside the crate. Unfortunately this lets off a tiny moment of astral visibility to the strange and powerful magical device within. It looks similar to an ARES portal closer from Project: Bottleneck, but significantly modified. Dig analyzes it with his magic a bit, and gets spooked again.

They hear a voice with a Germanic accent outside the door, as Creep welds it shut from the inside and Dig holds it closed with magic fingers. The voice offers them power and safety if they hand over the device, which they refuse. Creep threatens to set it off rather than give it up, which the voice seems to believe. It asks where they are taking it and on who’s behalf, and Creep answers honestly, without explicitly identifying Vogel. The voice seems satisfied and says so long as they don’t deviate from their plan, he will merely watch, but that if they try to pull a fast one, they will have an issue.

The van finally arrives to find Creep and Dig still hiding inside (the crate seems EM shielded and they have lost comms inside), and they get the device loaded into the van and head out of there. They park it in the rad zone, fine-tuning their placement to maximize the effect while ensuring Carol and the van will survive without too much effect. Carol arrives, and Otters passes backup control to him in case of a comms loss. They then head back to the Plat Zone on foot, and start working on the next job.

Step one- they need an intact pheromone gland from an original ALPHA. They spend some time monitoring comms frequencies until they hear a promising alert for ALPHAS nearby from a spotter. They call out as “engaging”, and head out, using some tactics to proceed quietly and set an ambush. It works surprisingly well with The Detective providing some critical leadership. They take down the new ALPHAs before they even can respond, though the lone original ALPHA nearly kills Dig with a burst from their Excalibur. The team manages to finish them all off, and Creep and The Detective start burning the other corpses, while CG and Dig carefully extract the gland, Dig once again using esoteric magic to perform skills he doesn’t seem to possess, and declaring himself a surgeon.

They head back to the Plat Zone and debate whether to try the next step themselves or not, eventually deciding to contract it out to Stanli the Candyman. Dig flies over with the gland, and passes it off. Stanli takes a look at the instructions, and seems legit surprised. The team pays him extra to tell them what they are crafting, as they are also paying him to forget the whole thing after. He explains that essentially he will be able to extract and refine some pheromones from the gland to make a targeted toxin, so that when whoever they inject it into comes into smell-range of the target gene markers they will emit the tailored toxin.

Once they have the toxin, Dig flies back, as Stanli smokes some läes to forget. A drone delivery arrives, with a business card with Michael Turpentine’s number on it, and a small fancy box. Opening the box, they find a black chess king piece. Creep and Dig manage to put together that likely is the piece given to Aurelius, the ARES founder, in Big D’ Will, with the rest of the set given to Knight. Supposedly Knight has been seeking to acquire the piece in the years since the last of Aurelius’ line died, but has not succeeded. Putting it all together, they realize that giving this piece to Michael will allow them to get close enough to dose him with the tailored toxin, and that this piece will ensure Michael a meeting with Knight shortly thereafter.

They remember that Hendricks controlled the ALPHA breeding lab for some time, and ponder if he altered their genes to specifically want to target Knight if they encountered him, or if someone else did… regardless, they have their job to do. The Detective calls Michael’s private line, and arranges a meeting in the fancy Downtown hotel that he and some other corp higher-ups seem to be living in during the fighting. The Detective goes alone, smuggling in a flyspy that is being hot rigged by Otters, and with others on remote backup, watching through the Avatars linked tattoo that CG possesses.

Michael already seems hyped and a little drunk when The Detective arrives, and Otters manages to slip the drone past the observant corpsec onsite. The Detective goes along with Michael’s bro-y vibe, and gives him a big backslap just as Otters tags him with the drone’s injector, which seems to have been the perfect distraction, though Michael seems to be coming down with something a bit as they continue drinking. The Detective passes over the piece, and the team is a bit horrified to hear on the comms how desperate Michael still is for the approval and corporate success that has destroyed his family, especially as he casually reveals Damien Knight’s human-centric metaracism- mistaking him for his brother, etc.

Regardless, Michael seems well-satisfied, believing that this will ensure Knight remembers who he is and trusts him, and he tells The Detective he won’t forget them and what they’ve done for him. The Detective feels a little bad, as they know how this is likely to end, so gets out of there quickly, with Otters managing to sneak the drone back out as well. With that done, they just need to amass personal gear and wait for Vogel’s call to deliver Carol and the device….

Runners
Creep
Chew Gum
Dig
Tabasco
Otters aka Roadkill
The Detective

Upon emerging from the tunnels and regrouping, the team finds that the Desolation Angels had managed to hold back a larger ALPHA assault, though a few got past, and they suffered some casualties. The injured and unconscious on the team get hauled to the triage center in the basement and treated, while the rest merely rest up. When everyone awakens, Praxis offers Tabasco the chance to join up with Ellis and them as a full time bug hunter but he turns it down for now. The team then gathers and begins discussing what to do with the info they have. Lacking some situational context, they report in to Ringmaster and Rifleman.

Rifleman thanks them for the mapping data and tells them that the Irregulars were able to make some good raids with it, though in response the tunnels have been flooded with some kind of modified Seven-7, making it very dangerous to operate underground for the moment. Which has also made the ghouls and BETAS/Deso Angels even more valuable allies. He leaves them with Ringmaster to discuss how to get paid.

Ringmaster tells them that there’s a large bounty for proof of Hendricks’ death, but it is through ARES, so he’d have to use a series for cutouts to get it, which would eat into the payday. They could also go to Vogel, though the pay would likely be less, but it would allow him to make some moves ahead of ARES knowing of the power vacuum underground. In the end, the team fills Ringmaster in, and then sells the info to Ellis, in order to let her make some moves herself for her new faction. They get significantly less pay but tighten their bonds with Ellis.

They then try to call home to make sure Iva is ready for incoming repair work, but noone picks up at the safehouse! Otters flies Tabasco up there in the VTOL and does some surveillance on the way- looks like bugs are falling back to Downtown fully, as are ARES forces as mercs and Irregulars try to kill ALPHAS and save civilians- the big battle may be reaching a finale! On reaching the safehouse, they find the entrances covered with magical vines, but no other obvious issues, though they can’t get in.

Dig flies up in bird form to join Tabasco as Otters drives the rest up in the van, carefully, to avoid combat encounters. Tabasco inquires with Zennia, but she says part of what they pay for is privacy, plus the neighborhood seems kind of edgy and post-combat themselves. Chatting further, it turns out there were some desperate bug breakouts, followed by the poison gas, and though they were contained, there were some local casualties and noone has seen Jaga- unusual but she keeps odd hours and wanders a lot.

The team, recognizing Jaga’s green magic as the source of the vines, manages to communicate their good intents and is allowed in past the magic barrier, after CG slips through and reports it looks like a major brawl took place inside. There is a lot of blood, Dig’s golem is shattered, and CG’s lodge has been desecrated, seemingly by shadow magic. They find a badly injured Jaga in a seed pod that seems to have preserved her, and Dig manages to heal her with a massive spell.

Questioning her, they find out that Iva seems to have been mind-controlled into letting the Hands of Fate into the safehouse and guiding them to the Tarot cards. By the time Jaga realized what was happening, they were already fighting the golem- they came in concealed and under a large area silence effect, making it extra creepy, but she says there were multiple metahumans and at least two massive shadow spirits in the astral. Quickly analyzing the scene before fleeing, they see at least 5 distinct blood traces- likely Iva (who is missing), Jaga, and 3 others.

Most of the blood seems to have come from one individual who looks to have been sacrificed to ruin CG’s lodge. The team flees back to the Platinum Zone, since Dig and Tabasco are both still badly injured, and they pay to get their armor fixed there. They rest again, and discussing next steps decide to hire Smoach and Myrryr to look into this further, and also make sure they didn’t get attacked too. S&M seem glad to hear from the team, their office was ransacked but they had taken precautions and their card is safe. They agree to investigate, and suggest that based on HOF SOP, Iva may still be slowly dying somewhere, if it isn’t already too late. While starting their investigation at the safehouse, they find a sketch of the 10 of Blades in Iva’s area, altered to have her face, and suggest the team think of places she might be. They head north to check the spot where they found Roderick.

It occurs to the team that they haven’t checked the bolthole, and they call into the radio there, hearing what sounds like knife actions and blood dripping. Tabasco insists on being flown down there immediately, with Dig accompanying in bird form, masking himself as best he can, worried about a trap. Tabasco rushes in, but unfortunately seems to have fallen under a dark influence and finds himself compelled to shoot the suspended and badly cut up Iva with a white phosphorous arrow, surely killing her. He still tries to apply a trauma patch, but lights himself on fire in the process. The team triggers the narcoject in his auto-injector, which they had added in case of mind control, and Otters rigs his body out of there back into the VTOL.

They call the landlord and have another humorous convo where she seems fine with their misadventures so long as they pay for the damage, as the rental market is in a current slump due to the crisis. They say they’ll get back to her but arrange for ghoul-based body disposal once the fire goes out. Knowing that Tabasco won’t be able to handle what he did (even though it wasn’t his fault), the team comes up with a lie- Iva was already dead, and Tabasco lit the unit on fire in anger, and asked to have his memory (and the footage) erased.

Otters calls up Howell, who helped her forget some of her past in Florida, and he provides an intro to a local dealer/info broker named Stanli the Candyman. Howell warns Dig that Stanli is forgetful but loves setting traps. Dig approaches carefully, avoiding various dangerous and deadly traps, and has an odd convo with Stanli, who seems to have started smoking some of the laës while waiting for Dig to arrive. He sells him a vial of the injectible variety and also some other drugs, and they does Tabasco, back at the Plat Zone for now til they figure out what to do re: safehouses.

Dig proposes that they can’t let themselves be bullied, and keeps almost giving up the lie to Tabasco, but Tabasco seems willing enough to go along with it that they all manage to keep it together. Eventually, everyone gets talked into Dig’s plan, which is to hunt down the Hands of Fate/shadow spirit and get their Tarot cards back. Jaga, Dig and CG do a massive ritual to track them down, with The Detective being flown around Detroit in the VTOL as the spotter. They eventually track them to a dilapidated farmhouse way outside of town near Ypsilanti.

Not wanting to rush into an incredibly dangerous situation, they start making lists of necessary gear and the like. Meanwhile, Tabasco heads out to Metal Maniacs where he gets hand razors installed and pays one of the gangers there to buff him like Iva used to. They accidentally trigger his orgasm switch while doing so, which is a weird experience for him. Creep hides the remaining 2 tarot cards (sealed up) in his leg waste compartment, and heads up north to try to get his parachute back from the jailbreak mission.

When he arrives, he sees that new go-gangers have taken over the whole area around the Blight, and the jail is badly burnt down. He chats with some Ancients, including the 2 the team rescued, and they confirm that anything flammable at the jail is long destroyed. Oh well. One of the Ancients, who seems magical, warns Creep that some kind of dark spirit is pursuing him, and gives him some tips on how to ditch it. He accepts a ride from them back to the north edge of the NGZ, and hides out near the nuke detonation site for a while to ditch astral tracing, then sneaks back to the Plat Zone, where he gets a biopocket installed to hide their remaining few major arcana from astral sight.

The team continues to go back and forth on whether to cash the ARES bounty before it’s too late, since CG gathered some bio-samples of Hendricks’ exploded corpse, with Dig adamantly for it, Tabasco adamantly opposed (ARES killed his parents, as he says) and the rest of the crew vacillating between. However, they need to gear up for this shadow spirit raid….