Shadowrun Pub
General => Creative Corner => Topic started by: kv on October 04, 2004, 05:56:04 PM
-
It started a few days before Christmas, in Seattle. I was enjoying the smoke, synth-weed, and music of a jazz bar, the most expereinced runner of our group was staying at home watching trideo, and the other two were at the mall trying to gets some NERPS for family for Christmas.
They were waiting in line at the Arcology, I was getting stun damage breathing in the "magical" fumes of the club, and I decided to go out and grab something to eat. I wandered to the stuffer shack across the street, where the lone ork kid on duty was reading a magazine and looking bored. As I wandered in, for the first time in my life, a soy dog smelled really good. I mean, like good enough to eat. So I walked over to the kid and asked for one. I nearly drekked a kilo of plasteel when he told me that soy dogs were temporarily priced at 150Y a pop. I still had a little money from my trip up from Boise, so I shelled out the newyen for the dog and ate it.
While I was doing this, I noticed some people gathering outside the store and looking angry. I opted to move to the magazine stand and ignore them, in hope they'd rob the store and leave me alone. No such luck. As I started looking through the magazines, the kid behind the counter gave me some line about Stuffer Shack not being a library.
I shot back with "Yeah, cause if this was a library, I'd be able to take it home," and the kid left me alone. Probably had better things to do than getting yelled at by me. Judging by the crowd in front of the store, he had bigger problems. I wasn't really certain what they were there for, but the crowd had grown to about fifty people, and they were looking less and less happy. I decided to leave about the same time that three of them entered the store. I mean, I'm a black man and an elf, so I'm no stranger to a protest or even a good riot, but usually I'm on the crowd's side. These guys, one HUGE ork that looked like he was contesting for troll citizenship, and two decent-sized human chummers. None of them seemed to happy to be there, but they were yelling at the kid about soy prices and some such. I mean, I had just paid for the soydog, so I was right there with them, but when I tried to say something, they turned on me.
"Only rich fools can afford dem- like dis chummer!" the big ork said.
"What?" was the only response that I could seem to muster. It didn't make sense. So I did what I usually do in situations like that one. I ran. I crossed the store, vaulted a shelf, and pulled my gun from my belt and tried to scare some yokels out of my way. They didn't budge, so I swerved toward the glass front of the store and fired a couple shots into the plexiglass. It didn't shatter or go down like I had hoped, so I put my shoulder into it. At first, nothing happened, then the whole window pushed out, and fell over like a sheet of wood. It didn't even shatter when it fell. It was just one big plastic sheet- now with several angry protesters underneath it. I ignored them and tried to run up the sheet and jump past the crowd, but I didn't get a good foothold on my push-off, and landed somewhere in the middle. These fraggers started swinging with me in the middle of the crowd, so I used my third shot from my six-shooter to try and push a path out. I got one guy- he fell down, but it seemed like where ever I pushed, there were two anti-elf fraggers ready to take his place. But I kept pushing, and I started to make progress through the crowd.
Then things started to get ugly. I mean, even uglier. Some fraggers in the crowd had enough foresight to bring bats and brick to this shindig, so those started flying. They might've started in on the clerk too, but I wasn't worried about his hoop. I caught a baseball bat to the side of the head, so I unloaded the rest of my pistol pushing through the rest of the crowd. I pushed out the back, and when some of them tried to follow, I pointed my gun at them, hoping they hadn't been counting my shots. They hadn't because they looked at my empty gun as a threat and let me go.
I ran a couple blocks, then stopped and checked the growing knot on the side of my head. It was big, but hadn't broken the skin, so I was okay. No need for a hospital visit. I could just go home and put ice on it. So I looked around, stole a Ford Americar, drove it most of the way home, and then dumped it three blocks from my house.
Oh, I'm a car thief. Did I mention that? Yeah, black elf from Boise. I was raised on the elven side, so I've been subject to all sorts of racism. Anyways, I know my way around electronics, so I took up liberating cars as I finished tech school. Beats flipping burgers at McHughs, especially with a tech school education.
Anyways, I got home and had been there for about and hour when Mr. Fix It called. Now, if you don't know Mr. Fix It, please go back to school and give up dreams about shadowrunning. I've heard runners scoff when they hear that I use him, but they all know who he is, so I figure that's a good sign. Of course, he's one of two people I know in Seattle, so even if he wasn't any good, I'd still have to rely on him. As it was, that 150Y soy dog had put me in a pretty desperate financial strait, so I asked what the work was, and he told me to meet him and some other people at the Zero-G Club. It's in Bellevue, hidden among fifty thousand other trendy clubs. Its one distinguishing feature is that it's built like a parking garage, and once you get inside, it's all hollow. I mean, the entrance is halfway up the building, and is encased in a plasteel cage. But that's only because the entire floor of the club is a bunch of real steel cage balls with seats mounted everywhere inside. The electromagnets in the floor, ceiling, and walls pulls these cages around the places like a pinball machine. Only we're the pinballs. They put me in the waiting area with three other guys, one of them looking a little grim, and wearing all black... Clerick was the name he gave me, so I don't know him by anything else. I'm guessing he's a pretty experienced runner, and that's only based on the fact that he seemed to know what he was doing no matter what the frag was going on. One of them was dressed in old UCAS fatigues, and carried this weird bulging golf bag, which I've found out carries his sniper rifle. He seemed a little dopey, but he knew his tactics. I'll get to that later. The last guy was dressed up like he was about to go to a gothic ballroom dance. I mean, red velvet, black leather, white hair and everything. I think he even had cyber eyes, because they were this freaky red color that set my teeth on edge.
Anyways, these fraggers all climb into the same “meeting room” that I am, and we all face the old-fashioned flat screen that I’m assuming is going to be Mr. Fix It. Mr. Fix It is a weird guy. I don’t know what’s up with him, but his smile is like three times the size it should be. I mean, the guy had to have surgery to make his teeth that big. It’s kinda scary, because I thought it was just a matrix host until I met him in real life… nope, those huge teeth are real.
So Mr. Fix It comes up on screen, and the ball starts bouncing around. Now, I’ve been to a meeting in a strip club, I’ve even been to one in a bunracu parlour, but this was distraction on a level I’ve never before experienced. If you watched MFI on the screen, it made you motion sick, and if you watched the room to keep your bearings, it was hard to keep up with MFI’s proposal. I know, because I tried both. Next time I’ll just bring Dramamine and tough out watching the screen. As it was, he offered us a job, told us some details, and we accepted. Didn’t negotiate, didn’t haggle, didn’t ask for perks. By the time he got around to asking any questions, one of the guys had thrown up whatever he had eaten for lunch, and I wasn’t far behind.
We didn’t even get any up-front money. That was a damn shame. But at least we got out of that ball before I blew chunks.
-
So we all left the place with the Semi-ballistic tickets to San Fransisco in our pockets, and we decided to have a ‘team meeting’ together to put together some kind of plan. I stole a bulldog step-van, and we sat in there and tried to figure something out. I knew MFI, so I called him and asked what he would give us as up-front money. He tried to say that it wasn’t part of the deal, but I’m a pretty persuasive guy, so I got him to admit he had tried to stiff us. So I got 5,000Y out of it. I tried for 10,000Y, but that didn’t go too well, so I stuck to five grand. That bought me a contact in San Fran that I could get a gun from, because they sure as hell weren’t going to let a black elf into Saito’s San Fran with one in the first place. The other guys all called around, and we finally got everyone to where they were going, everyone changed (me into some non-puked on clothes), and we drove to the airport and left the van in long-term parking. While we were waiting on our flight, we convinced the experienced runner, Clerick, to shell out the cash to hire us a rigger to fly us… oh, I haven’t told you about the job yet.
Each week, sixty or so shipments of Soy come up to Seattle from Aztlan for sale in the Emerald City. Most of it gets sold to the Salish and Tir, but a good part of it stays in Seattle, where every runner gets his or her daily proteins from the flavor packet that comes with they soy they buy. In the past two weeks, not a single shipment had gotten through untainted. Someone was hiring runners to contaminate, or in some cases, destroy the soy shipment, causing an increase in soy prices.
It was our simple job to stop this from happening. Of course, we weren’t part of the “Official” train escort, so it was our job to catch up to the train doing close to five hundred kph, get onboard, and then stop these guys from trying whatever it was they were doing. We had tickets to San Fran, and a general estimate of when the train would be where… and we had a tip that the soy wouldn’t be contaminated until it reached the Seattle border. Enough for an attempt at a run, right? Right.
So we convinced the experienced runner to call someone and try and get us some more info, and then we called all of our contacts and tried to get some sort of armament for taking this train. Out of nowhere, the dopey-looking soldier guy comes up with a great plan for getting onto the train using a grapple relay and stealth lines and a grapple gun. My gun contact could get us that stuff, so that we had covered, but someone had to get us up in the air. I mean, I have a VCR and I do rig, and not too badly, if I do say so, but I’m not so good when it comes to VTOL technology, and specifically when it comes to the t-bird that we’d need to go that fast to catch the train.
So the scary goth chummer calls up a friend of his and somehow gets us hooked up with a dwarf rigger in SanFran who’ll run us along the train for 10,000Y. We didn’t have anywhere near that kind of scratch, so we all looked to the eldest runner, who ended up bankrolling most of our expedition. He paid for the grapple, the ropes, the rappelling gear, the magnetic gloves, the kneepads, the high-speed facemasks and glasses, the Glocks for everyone to take on the tbird, although I bought my own AV rounds because it sounded like a good idea. He even bought a .50 cal sniper rifle that had been modified for burst-fire (not because we wanted it, but because it was the only one that the guy had in stock).
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The semi-ballistic trip was uneventful, other than that they strip-searched me because I’m black and they had nothing better to do at SeaTac. When we get to SanFran, I get strip-searched once because I’m an elf, an extra time because I’m black. Racist fraggers.
We hop a cab to the place where our munitions contact was, buy all this stuff, totally about 20,000Y. (Which we promised to reimburse Clerick with after the run- 20,000Y from all our takes) we hop back in the cab, and for 1,000Y (of my money), the cabbie takes us to the pickup terminal, so we skip the first security check. Once we’re inside the baggage terminal, we have one more checkpoint before we can get to where our rigger is waiting. As the most charismatic and sexiest fragger of the group, I go up and flirt with the gay jap guard and slip him some newyen to let us through the checkpoint alone. Only the obviously gay jap guard must’ve still been in the closet, because he didn’t want to show it in front of the other guard. But we bought him off anyways, and got to our flight.
This dwarf chomba was a pretty slick. She filed some bogus flight plan stating that we were a tourist group, and so she could take us pretty much anywhere in SanFran without raising alarms, aside from some restricted airspace. Which, unfortunately, was directly where we were headed.
We deviated from our flight plans shortly after takeoff, catching up with the mag-rail train from Aztlan as it passed through the SanFran metroplex. The rigger chicka got us into position with about a minute before the authorities would start looking for us, and we were scared drek-less as the goth fragger didn’t grab anything as the door opened. He almost got fragged that soon, but he grabbed something on his way out the door and held on. The military chummer fired his grapple, secured the line, and then pulled it loose. Apparently it hadn’t anchored right and we would’ve all died. So he fired a second one, and that one held a little bit better. He secured himself to it, and then slid down the line to the train. As he left the tbird, the winds hit him, whipping him around and pulling one iof his hands loose. He still (luckily) stuck to the line, and slammed into the train at about half speed. It didn’t seem to phase him, and he took of the rappelling gloves and switched to the magnetic ones we had bought. Those alone with the magnetic shoes and kneepads kept us from flying off the train to certain death. I’m glad someone thought to buy them.
As he secured the line, Clerick attatched himself to the rope and pushed out into the wind. It tossed him like the first guy, and he lost his handhold as well. He slammed into the train as well, and changed into his gloves. It was just me and the Goth, so I attatched him and then myself as he climbed back into the cargo area of the tbird. The Goth, with no luck at all today, was pulled completely free of the rope with his hands and slammed into the train face-first. I even winced as he hit. I gulped down my bile and jumped out of the tbird. As I was pulled into the wind, I lost both hands on the rope, attached only by my rig. I’m also grateful that someone thought to buy that. I slammed into the train at full speed, and I’m pretty sure I knocked a tooth loose, and I wasn’t feeling so good. They helped me unlock myself from the rope, and the military guy used a catalyst stick to cut the tbird free. They helped me climb down, and I used my tech toolkit to open the keypad that sealed the entrance shut. I almost lost it, because I only had three tries, but as I tried the third time, the wind shook me and I hit a 7 instead of a 5, like I meant to, and the hatch opened.
-
We all managed to get inside, but with the hatch open, it wasn’t much better than the outside. The winds whipped around the cabin, and the only person who got solid footing, even with the magboots, was Clerick. He closed the hatch, and as we and the three guards inside the room we trying to reorient ourselves, he started shooting. I mean, he killed two of the guards before I even got off a shot. He’s damn fast.
By the time that the military guy even had his gun out, the fight was over. His name was Braggs, by the way. I found it out afterward when we had some time to talk. So he pulled out the .50 cal that we had bought, started assembling it, when the door opens and there’s seven guard sitting there with swords, and being all …glowy… I mean, I don’t know much about magic, but it seemed like magic to me. So they wade in, and I’m trying to disarm the alarms that the first guards set off, and I’m about done they start attacking us with swords. So Clerick and the Goth guy go to it with them, each one racking up a kill about every two seconds, and I get hit from behind and run away. I mean, I’m not good in a fight. Ask my sisters. So I ran and hid behind the two guys who were doing a pretty decent job of clean up.
After about six seconds, we runners are the only ones left standing. The goth and Clerick go down the hallway the guards came down looking for anyone else, and Braggs and I start assembling his gun and trying to get into the driver’s compartment, respectively. Man, I have to say it was impressive to watch him assemble that gun. Looked like he could’ve done it blindfolded… or maybe had practice doing it blindfolded. I don’t know. It was slick in any case.
I was trying to get into the drivers compartment without much success, when the goth guy comes back up the hallway and asks for my help. I go down the hall, and it’s the internal hallway in this mag rail train, so there’s all these vats of soy waiting for distribution in Seattle, and as near as I can tell, they’re fine. So we get to the back of the train, where the second set of guards is supposed to be stationed, and the door is locked. I mean, locked good. Someone had even already started taking apart the keypad next to the door to try and get in. So I tinker with it for a minute, and the door opens.
I mean, I now understand what people are talking about when they say that watching a good fight is like watching a ballet or an opera. It was a thing of beauty. Clerick walked through these guys like they were standing still. I mean, they literally didn’t have time for the little ‘o’s of surprise to leave their faces before they got hit. The goth guy wasn’t even a step behind him, either. Where Clerick would miss a guy or turn to fight someone else, Goth would step in with a punch or a roundhouse kick and clean up. It was like a garbage disposal of fighting perfection.
As we cleaned up these guys, I noticed (from the back of the winning team) that these guys in all black, who I assume are the people we were sent here to stop are tampering with his big unit with biohazard warnings all over it. I mean, the big warnings, the kind you can read even though they’re in Spanish. I mean, I don’t speak a lick of Spanish, but I can read a label that says “Gamma-Anthrax”. So the runners were going to pump this into the soy to contaminate it.
They we discovered that the fraggers at Aztech had shipped this with the soy on purpose, and the terrorists were just taking advantage of the problem. About at this point, Mr. Fix It called all of us who had cell phones at the same time, in a big conference call. He says the group who wanted the soy destroyed just called and offered us 300,000Y to finish the job they hired their group to do.
We regrouped and found Braggs standing over three bodies in the front- apparently someone had come out of the drivers compartment, and he had dealt with them. The goth was in favor of taking the pay raise, and no one else cared, but I’ve heard too many runners tell stories about the unprofessional way that Johnsons dealt with them, so I decided (along with my group) to stick to the job we’d been hired to do.
Of course, Aztech wasn’t going to be happy that we had killed their guards, even if we had saved their shipment, so we reset the autopilot and told the train to stop and let us off outside Seattle before arriving at its destination.
We got paid, and we went home. I’d consider it a job well done.
-
it was too. that was a fun run to GM.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
Fun to play, too...
We need to play Shadowrun again.
-Kid Vid
-
It's your turn to GM. write something up and take my birthday off. *shrug*
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
Sounds good to me. I actually have Jury Duty that day, so I'm probably going to have the day off anyways.
-Kid Vid
-
reporting or just calling in?
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
I have to report, but that's cool. I'm going to do it, if i can. I've never been on a jury before. And jury boredom is about the same as any other boredom, but I can listen to people and kind of "space out" for a while.
- Kid Vid
(Juror #6)
-
LOL we'll have to watch 'jurry duty' with polly shore if you get it.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
Classic Pauly Shore....I've never done jury duty myself. If you do then you got to tell us about it.
-
Been there, done that.
drug dealer. had about eight Kelo's of Crack in his bedroom wall.
found him guilty.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
LOL....then I feel the judical system was carried out. ;D
-
yup yup.
deep fry the sucker
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
I don't know why they would even have a trial for that.
-
Cause. If they don't stand trials for the people who are "probably guilty" the next ones to go are the ones that "might be guilty", and Hell, that could include me!
-Kid Vid
-
But come on, if they caught him with the stuff in the walls then it must be his..right?
-
What if the guy that used to live there had stuff it into the walls, walled up, gone outside, and gotten shot in an unrelated gangwar. New guy moves in, is stupid enough not to check the wall, the cops bust in, and find several kilos of crack in his wall...
-
It's actually probably, but I'd say highly unlikely. That still doesn't change the fact that it's possible!
-
he said it wasn't his crack, in his bedroom wall, in his house, under his bed.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
That's true too, ROOT, but I gotta go with Ingo.
-
Ooh... that almost sounds like a Shadowrun storyline...
You come home to find the Star tearing your new place apart- looking for some stolen tech they recieved an "anonymus tip" was stashed in your wall.
The Corp doesn't care, because they know you didn't steal it, but they force you to work for them to pull off the charges.
Hmm... Assault, Grand Theft, Murder, Manslaughter, Attempted Murder... Conspiracy to Commit Murder, Consipracy to commit Theft. Public Endangerment, Fraud... Wow. There's a lot of charges invloved in a single Shadowrun!
;D I love it!
-Kid Vid
-
especialy if you have to do so many runs to clear each charge
-
That's true too, ROOT, but I gotta go with Ingo.
Oh, didn't say it was a probably story, but I was argueing that there could've been other possibiliteis than the obvious one. And that's why you need a trial.
-
he said it was his brothers.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
Then he was aware of it, and an accessory to the crime.
-
nah, it was probibly bouth of theirs.
at least that's what i got out of it.
i still gave em' posession (9/10ths of the law right?)
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
Sorry, I believe I missed a word or 2 up there.
Even if his explantion is true, he's aware of it, and so an accessory to the crime.
Accessories get the same punishement in such cases, as I recall, in which case your evaluation was correct. Especially if the charge was "possession", which does not imply ownership.
Besides, I never argued against your interpretation, but only whether a trial was necessary.
-
*shrug* no hard feelings, i didn't take it that way at all. LOL i just thought that with everyone discussing it, that it would be cool to give a little more information, so that we could speculate about deeper things than how the crack magicly got into his wall.
and then elvis... with a copy of his fingerprints went in and took some, so that it would look like he was stealing some of it at the same time...
-RuskIFace the Pirate
-
The simple fact is that the judicial system allows for all persons accused of breaking the law the chance to defend themselves against said accusations. Innocent until proven guilty.
BTW, great story Kid.
So Aztech was transporting Gamma-Anthrax in the same room as the soy, and hired a bunch of runners to board the train and contaminate the soy?
Interesting... wonder why they bothered to send the soy in the first place.
Anyway, I might have to steal certain choice parts from that little escapade :)
-
actually, aztech had something of a stranglehold on the soy market, and this shipment was a rush shipment to stop the shortage caused by a lot of black op shadowruns going on sponcered by wuxing (who wanted aztech to fall on their face, and then 'swoop in and save seattle' earning some PR points at the same time of takeing over the soy buisness. so, it was Wux's runners on the train trying to contaminate it with aztech's own gamma-anthrax, and when the big W's runners failed, it was worth it for them to put a lot of money out to pay off the new runners to complete the job. aztech was just paying to protect their own shipment, but they figured that it was pretty much safe, with the bullet train and guards and all, but they figured that if one shadowrun team had a chance, then a second would have that same chance to stop them.
that's the background (the runners only picked up part of it) *grin* one of the bad parts of running a really twisted run, sometimes they don't pick up all of the twists, but *shrug* at least it's still fun right?
-RuskiFace the :ruski:
-
Alrighty then.
One of the big disappointments I've had about coming up with intricate plots is that my players don't learn enough of what's going on to appreciate it!! :-[
-
yea, after about three plot twists, they never see past the first double cross.
-RuskIFace the Pirate
-
I would bet the soy was all ready contaimnated much better to blame it on some lunitics
-
Nah, the soy was good. (as good as soy gets)
Aztech made a mint off of it, even with the runner fees.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
true but as a plot hook would be great
you ship out a batch of contimanted soy hire two groups one to contaminate itt the other to stop them then can always recup your losses with the insurance after all it was the terists that contamnited it and you did hire a team to stop them you recup your losses with the insurasnce and generate good PR
-
I don't think most megacorps admit to running shadowruns...
And I think it would probably be worse PR to admit that it was possible to contaminate your soy supply.
-Kid Vid
-
Tryue kid so true
-
"Yeah, uhh... we accidently almost contaminated the soy you're all eating, and we're not sure how the runners did it, so it might happen again... But we stopped them for now!"
-Kid Vid
-
you have a point altho why they would ship amthrax with soy conffuses Me
-
because you can't ship anthrax by it's self. it was probibly catagorised as 'paperclips' on the shipment manufest, and they probibly payed the 2% office supply terrift tax on them.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
The Possession of a Class C Controlled substance (Legality code Z) is subject to federal law, so if AZT was caught shipping it, not only would their PR hit a brick wall, the UCAS and other Federal Gov'ts would be blowing a gasket. Even the Corporate Court would put a huge mandate on AZT for posing such a threat to everyone that way.
But AZT could just get their PR machine going, like they always do, and avert disaster.
-
*shrug* well, lucky for them, it made it, and only shadowrunners were the wiser.
(and the street price dropped it's index by 1)
-RuskiFace the Pirate
helping make the world a little worse every day!
-
Now, my question is, why didn't the runners grab the Gamma-Anthrax? I mean, that's one cool mantle-piece to have!
-
i think they didn't want to jump off the train with it...
-RuskiFace the Pirate
"what's that cracking sound?"
-
Yeah.. you did read the rest of the run, right?
There's no way, with the run of luck we had been having, that I wanted to have some Gamma Anthrax with me when we tried to cross back over the border. Or even tried to get past my landlord with it. Snoopy old bastard!
-Kid Vid
-
yea, he goes through your garbage you know, looking for reasons to call the cops on you.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
Hey, it's not my fault he didn't like me dating his daughter!
I mean, I was a gentleman! I gave her cabfare! Part of it, anyways!
-Kid Vid
-
LOL yea right.
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
Well, I told her of a guy I know who might give her a ride for free. It's not like I have extra money for cabfare as it is. There hasn't been a recent hiring craze for non-otaku teen deckers.
If i had money, I'd probably pay rent. Or buy real food.
-Kid Vid
-
Well, you are about to become 'old school'
and that datajack you had drilled into you skull is going to be almost worthless with the new wireless stuff coming out...
-RuskiFace the Pirate
-
This is a post to keep the General Fiction area full of nice old things to read.
-RF