Run 9. Perfect Shooter

Saturday April 15th 2070

Six, Ki-Rin, Ash, Ono.

Six got a call from Kitty, There was a race meet and its new owner was thrashing about Six’s old car.
Six knew he couldn’t race for pinks, so resolved to race a kiddie he had beaten a few times already, a quick 5grand if he wins the race.

Six did win, but it was tight.

Friday April 28th 2070

Ash gets a call from a Mr. Gage. He invites the runners out to dinner in the most expensive hotel in San Francisco. Over lobster he tells the runners that he works for the marketing company Horizon, and that they have been running an advertising campaign for the Perfect Shooter simsense game.

Trouble is, the board of directors have heard Perfect Shooter spoken about in the same breath as Dreamseed, and they don’t know what this Dreamseed is. Will it affect their marketing strategy?

Although Gage doesn’t think so, the run’s pay is very rich 100,000 a piece, and the runners find it very hard to turn him down.

They retired back to Ki-Rin’s place and got down to some investigations. Ki-Rin, Six, and Ash all bought the game Perfect Shooter and began playing immediately. They all loved it; Real time FPS credits accrued power up game. The games engine was as good as real life and some of the other players in there could be professional solders the way they handled themselves.

Ki-Rin looked at the back code but found nothing suspicious, Six hit the game forum and asked about Dreamseed, and one user entertained the idea. Ono hit the internet and found a book called the Dreamseed theory; he went out to Waterstones and picked up a copy of the weighty tome.

Ono read through the book, the first few pages he read avidly, but slowly lost interest, and the book was completed by skim reading in short order. It’s main thrust was about the 4th 5th and 6th world, and the way mana ebbs and flows, the books conclusion was that the world would end in some kind of demon infested scourge.

Failing to see any connection to the Perfect Shooter game, the ideas were generally put on the back burner.

Six received an email from one of the games, with a few simple words. Dreamseed War. Dreamseed Trickery. Dreamseed Malady. The email also detailed an address, 1244 Denny Tower, Seattle. The runners mused the info further and discussed at length heading out to Seattle.

Eventually they did, choosing Ash’s boat as the best way to get past security border and such. The ride was arduous but they made it to rainy Seattle in the early hours of the next morning.

After spending the night in a hotel, Six acquired a 4x4 crew cab from Avis truck rentals and the runners headed over to the address. Upon opening the door the runners were hit with the stench of decaying corpses. 2 lay bloated and blackened from 3 weeks of decay. Carefully looking around the house the runners found a photo of three flatmates, one of which was Ash’s younger brother, the other two… now dead. They also found a letter to a MR. Joshua Philips congratulating him on winning the Perfect Shooter tournament and inviting Josh to attend Cross Applied Technologies to pick up his grant.

Ash quickly guessed that his little bros had changed his name and got out of shadowrunning while Ash was in jail. The scary thing is that he also seems to have drawn a weapon and shot his flatmates in cold blood because of this Perfect Shooter game.

The runners wanted to find out what happened when players entered into the grand tournaments, but getting the required credits was proving time consuming. They tired cheating to no avail, and then decided to piggy back another player and join him in a tournament when he accrued the required points.

Ki-Rin was rewarded when his carefully edited computer code returned the PAN of someone who had been invited to join the tourney. Following the data trail, he found the player in the real world, but couldn’t trace where the tournament arena was. It was being re routed through a multitude of Satellites, a trick Ki-Rin learned of in the military.

The runners went round to this kids house and watched him and his family (and the postman) for two weeks. They scrutinised the mail but didn’t manage to intercept the golden letter from Perfect Shooter.

Someone thought about heading back into the CATCo mainframe and searching for Joshua Philips’ name and see what that turned up, they weren’t surprised when his name appeared to have been logged, but then was changed to 145-Seattle. This code name then seems to have been shipped out to a CATCo storage depot in the North Cascades National Park.

May 12th 2070

The runners headed off with their new lead. And came across the area designated as the CATCo storage depot. Sneaking through the dense forest surrounding the depot, Ash and Ki-Rin came across a AR red line on their PAN’s. A visual warning told them that they would be subject to corporate law if they were caught, and they decide to not get found… And then Ki-Rin thought about their PAN’s and the fact that they tripped off an automated warning. Rather than press on into trouble they backed off to come back without their Comms broadcasting to the world.

TBC…