Meeting April Turner. Yakuza and Guns.

Ash, Ki-Rin, Six.

Tuesday 18th July 2070

Ki-Rin had been overseas helping one of his contacts for a few weeks, but as he flew back towards UCAS airspace, his comlink pinged with a few messages; one was from Six warning of possible trouble, so Ki-Rin gave him a call. Six gave him a very rough outline of the situation and Ki-Rin decided to join the party.

Ash and Sickle were en-route to Charleston on the east coast express train. Six was on his way back to Atlanta in his car after chasing Binary Pulse/The Cowboy.

The runners were hit with another vision. Snow again, this time he was at a warehouse in a train marshalling yard. He handed over a microdisk to someone unseen, and then there was a high-pitched whining sound and then the vision ended.

Ash blinked as the train made it’s way through a marshalling yard. Ash saw the same warehouse that he had seen in the vision. Ash phoned Six and told him that he had located the location of the marshalling yard and that he will be back in about 4 hours once he had got on a train to make the return journey.

In the meantime Six gave Ki-Rin a detained run down of all that had happened so far. Ki-Rin was sceptical of these visions, which he himself had not been having while overseas, but he took a look at all of the footage that the runners had gathered and gave his opinion of what might be going on.

They eventually decided to meet up with Ash at the train yard, and when the return train Ash was on came near to the yard, he jammed on the emergency brake. After the train had rapidly decelerated, Ash leapt out and went to ground until the fat controller gave up the chase.

Six and Ki-Rin drove past the warehouse and saw a pair of goons stood at the rear of the building near a door. Ash walked past the front and saw that the roller shutter door was half open. He suggested that Six sent the Flyspy in to have a look about. There were three yard workers inside who seemed to be waiting for something or someone.
The runners chose to wait and see what happened and enjoyed a quiet smoke of their preferred brand.

Half an hour or so passed and then the Yakuza turned up. A transit van pulled round to the roller shutter door. Six’s old muscle car headed round toward the rear. That meant that Yutaka Seto, the Yakuza Oyoban’s son was here. They came equipped for action, and went into the warehouse guns blazing. They had clearly come for hostages, using stick shock rounds to drop the warehouse guys. They quickly bundled one of them into the transit for questioning. The Yakuza came for the crates though, and as soon as the warehouse was clear they brought up a curtainsider and began to load the crates in.

The runners were holding a watching brief, and as soon as they saw the crates were loaded with weapons and munitions, they decided that they were going to take the lot. Moving in close, the runners waited for the Yakuza to load up all of the crates before attacking.

The gunfight was fast and short lived, Seto was able to make a break for it, clocking a good look at Ash before being forced to flee under a hail of bullets, and the runners quickly secured their load and drove away with 100+ guns and ammo to suit.

Six calmly parked up and waited for Snow to turn up while Ash and Ki-Rin looked at making moves at selling on the weapons that they themselves hadn’t laid claim to. Eventually Six contacted Carlo to see if he was interested in the weapons and Carlo said that he would come back to him.

While Six waited he received a phone call. From the woman from Orange Jays, the hippy shop he had left his contact details at. The woman on the phone named herself as Jay and said that April was prepared to meet up with them. She implied that they already knew what Six was really after and Six guessed that April had put to use her long time learned Decking skills to have a poke around in Six’s past.

Without a better lead Six agreed to the meet and the three of them headed back to Birmingham (Alabama). The truck full of weapons was left in the care of Glyph and Sickle.

Jay, met with the runners and told them that they would have to ride in her jeep, so that she could protect April’s hiding place, and once en-route she case sleep on them. Waking some hours later, the runners were understandably annoyed at being magicked, but they found themselves at the side of a large lake surrounded by woodland. Jay, and a slight attractive woman in her forties stood talking by a Ford Americar.

Jay cam across and told the runners that she had studied their auras and had seen that they had been damaged somehow. That essence was leaking into the astral plane and that they should be experiencing vivid dreams and other connections to the spiritual world.

Then, April came across and told them that she wanted to warn them of the trouble that they were getting involved with. She used to be a runner and her old team had broken up after a run had gone sour. The team’s mage, a girl called Solace had been taken by a free sprit that they were trying to banish and the rest of the team took her loss badly.
Now it seemed that the spirit was back in the form of Solace, wanting to find all in that team who knew it’s real name, the only thing that had power over a spirit.

The runners listened and then got back to the job in hand. They had been paid to find 3 people. One was already dead. One was Snow, their contact. And one turned out to be a charming woman who just wanted to settle into a quiet life. The runners weren’t prepared to hand them over to their employer, but at the same time they were fully aware that they had jacked far too many runs lately and that another DNF would harm their reputations irreparably. The runners decided to make moves at handing over faked info. They would stage some kind of death of April and Snow, and although the details hadn’t been worked out yet they took a face mask of April to use on some other poor sap they would kill.

The runners got back into the Jeep with Jay, who began to drive them back to town.

TBC…