Runners
Aleiron Grey
Butter
Eion Smash
Grackle
Three Card
Watt Tinbo
Yanko Lazer

The team starts getting ready to trigger their escape plan. They bribe the Reality Hackers with more gear and a promise of some future work to assist in gathering info. Between the RH’s and asking around the prison, they find out that last 1/3rd of the of the missing prisoners on their list are technomancers, who are gathered up when detected and sold off in a monthly auction to various corps- Mitsuhama Computer Technologies and Horizon seem to be frequent buyers. Horrified by the likelihood of corporate torture and vivisection, Watt vows to try to free those that he can.

The team also finds out what they can about D Block cold storage, and the inmate they have to get out of there- it seems that she is housed under an alias and was thrown into D Block almost immediately upon arrival. They can’t find out more about her true ID, but seeing as Elisa Seawind was the one who approved the transfer and edited the file info, they assume she’s a runner being kept on ice for some reason. Aleiron gets a lecture about how awful D Block is by tricking a guard, and they confirm that it will mostly be mechanical/drone security- not many cameras and not much metahuman presence. Supposedly the interface for retrieving prisoners’ pods is simple, so they hope to be able to bypass it easily.

Meanwhile, Eion has run into some trouble: after attracting a large amount of rats with Drekbomb’s corpse, and starting to teach a promising few some useful tricks, he hears some commotion in the steam tunnels, and hides himself and the corpse just in time as some guards in full tactical gear start searching. He manages to elude them while holding the rats at bay, but uses most of DB up doing so. The guards seem to be working directly for Seawind, and looking for evidence of where everyone has been disappearing to. Eion has to stay on the run in the tunnels as the patrols continue for the next while. He manages to climb a ways down the hole, and finds that the jagged collapsed portion empties into slick mud chute after about 5 meters. He can see heat sig’s at the bottom that look like some small moving things and a larger stationary object.

He manages to teach 3 rats some tricks (mostly to keep the other rats from eating him), by feeding them DB’s portion of the food that Yanko continues to deliver, believing them both to be alive. However, Seawind’s patrols found the opened grate and welded it shut again, so he’s having to just kinda mash all the protein paste through the bars. Yanko has also been moving useful bits of sharp metal and other supplies the hole underneath the mechanic’s shop to the team’s hidey hole, in preparation. Unfortunately, all of this smuggling has cut into his drug acquisition time, so Aleiron makes a deal with the Nova Rich instead. She agrees to ensure the murder of an NR members parents within 2 months, to ensure that he still receives the family inheritance upon is release. He fears they plan to transfer control to his younger sibling due to being ashamed of his circumstances. In return, he gives the team so cram to keep themselves going and a cocktail that Yanko chose to wake up the cold storage prisoner.

3C and Butter spar some, working on combat skills, and Butter designs a boring drone that he can juryrig out of all the scrap bits they’ve been saving. Butter also makes a fake cover for Watt’s datajack, which Watt manages to carefully open without injuring himself, under the pretense of needing special tools for his IT work. Feeling as ready as they can get, they all put in for transfers to the cleaning crew, which due to the cult spreading rumors of something “wrong” in the basement, and the fact that a number of prisoners have vanished, is currently understaffed. They get the transfers, and work a few days to get the routine down, as well as warn Eion of when they’ll move. Yanko also figures out how to concoct a bleach bomb to clear the bottom of the hole of threats before they go in.

The day of, the team is on 2 cleaning crews of 4, having convinced 2 cult members to come with. Each crew has a guard overseeing (with the new tighter security). At the preset time, both teams attack, unfortunately failing to fell the guards before they can call in the attack, partially due to one of the cultists slipping and knocking himself unconscious. Watt and Grackle try to impersonate the guards, confusing things a bit, but aren’t able to keep it up long. Grackle and Aleiron race for the tunnels in a panic while everyone else hightails it to the hidey hole to get supplies. Eion, hearing the sound of a prison alert system, uses the crowbar to pry open the grate again with a massive feat of strength, as Aleiron and Grackle arrive and yell back for the others to hurry. Eion heads into the tunnels to direct them team along the correct path.

The rest of the team grabs the stashed gear, and hightails it to the tunnels as they hear the riot squad chasing after them. Butter barely dodges a shotgun blast as he rounds a corner, and only avoids an SMG burst as it hits the cultist right behind him. He staggers as he is hit with another shot, but manages to stumble out of sight for a moment and dive into the tunnel behind the rest of the team. Eion sees some flashlights headed down the tunnels from another direction looking to cut them off, and calls on the team to hurry. Yanko chucks his bleach bomb towards the lights to slow them down, which seems to help, and the team dive into the hole, not having any time to dally. Slamming into a pile at the bottom, Eion is the only one to avoid injury as he had time to scout it out a bit.

The rest of the team hears a sort of humming and sucking sound coming from a large machine next to them, and some slavering noises coming from the darkness nearby… The team splits in 2, with Eion, 3Card, and Yanko heading off to fight tunnel ghouls in the pitch black, while Butter, Grackle, Aleiron, and Wat break through the wall behind the machine. They determine that the machine is a sump pump, removing water from the adjacent area, which they decide must be D Block cold storage. After getting his boring drone to help out, they manage to open up a human-sized hole.

Getting in, Wat manages to hack access into a pod on the lowest storage level and fake a medical emergency. Wat, Aleiron, and Grackle all grab hold as the retrieval arm hauls the pod up to the gantry at the top of the deep cavern. They hide as an alarm rings, and a medic and guard enter. They manage to disarm and incapacitate the guard, and intimidate the medic into surrendering and leaving. Wat hacks access into the control system for the arm, and retrieves the pod they were after. They ride it back to the bottom, and pull the woman inside out, who introduces herself as Shri Moreau. Correctly assessing that Aleiron is the semi-leader of the party, Shri starts subtly undermining her.

They rejoin the rest of the team, and manage to revive 3Card, injured by ghouls, using the medic’s kit. They head further into the tunnel, descending through water until they reach an area they’ll need to swim to cross. They enter, and fight off another ghoul in the murky water, before emerging to find the ghoul’s feeding area. They emerge victorious after a brutal brawl with a variety of infected variants. They continue down the tunnel, eventually finding a split that seems to head towards either Vashon of Fox Island. Yanko wants to go to Vashon and sneak in through a club in the tunnels there, to get drugs and new clothes, but is outvoted. The team heads to Fox, and ascends a long rusted ladder, emerging into a fenced in area surrounding the concrete pad poured over the tunnel mouth.

They flee through the fence, but alert some drones to their passage, and have to destroy them. They flee to the nearby woods to plot their next move. As the begin crashing from cram, they realize that they are all in somewhat wet clothes in the winter in a remote setting, and decide to build a shelter in the woods (where the KE drones don’t seem to want to go), while 2 of their healthier members scout ahead. Aleiron communes with Wolf, who offers aid to her pack. A spirit wolf comes running along atop the soil, leaving no trace, and leads them to the magical lodge of a shaman named Chavo. He helps them get the rest of their team back to the lodge with the help of his ally spirit, and heals everyone up while they rest.

He tells them that this is the Forest Lodge, and that they will be safe from the law here. Aleiron finds some appropriate gifts to present, and the team rests and heals for a bit. Chavo provides them a commlink, and they make contact with Trailblazer to make arrangements to get off the island and back to the city. They arrange a point of contact, and head out from the lodge. They hide in a place in town with a friendly talislegger for the day, and then are smuggled to the coast, where they hide in some tidal caves for a few days while they make contact with Imaginary Annie Goldsmith to arrange a longer term safehouse.

They settle on Stuck’s Carnival, and contact Trailblazer to get there. She arranges to smuggle them in a van through Salish territory around the outside of Seattle and back in to Auburn. They arrive safely, owing more and more favors with each stop. They get dropped in the basement of a casino, and meet Mitch Stuck himself, who says he has a use for them. He puts them up in a safehouse in exchange for doing some semi-specified future work for him. They agree, settle into the safehouse, and get real excited to find that Annie made good on her promise of tracking down their gear. They check it all, change ID’s on comm’s etc, and get ready to do some work.