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Entry 24: 20.07.70>
Revelations and retribution overnight – in roughly equal measure. Again I’m feeling calmer now that we’ve taken action, made a stand, and done something proactive to look out for our own rather than sitting back and letting life happen to us.

Glyph, Ash and I hauled ass down to the airport and took delivery of the little turboprop plane I’d leased for the flight into San Fran. The whole city was shrouded in fog but good to his word, Drifter was waiting for us when we touched down – when you know you’re walking into trouble it pays to have as many friends as possible watching your back.

Wasting little time, we blazed right on over to Daisy’s and did a cautious little recce. Our suspicions were raised that someone was mooching around inside – Drifter covered the front and Glyph headed for the rear while Ash and I made our way inside. Man I felt for Ash as we crept across the blackened remains of his sister’s lounge. Some sort of freak ass explosion had made the room bulge outwards, literally pushing every single item as far up against the walls as it would go. I made my way into the bathroom, covering the hallway as Ash crept down to surprise the lurker. I only heard one shot – Ash drilling the little toad – and it was a good job he’d controlled his temper enough to use Stick Shock because the intruder was prettied up with a Lone Star badge proclaiming him to be part of some sort of Occult Investigator. While Ash made with the thumbscrews, hot coals and whatever else passes for torture and interrogation in a young woman’s kitchen, I switched on the lights and found that Daisy had been graffiti-ing the tiles in her shower with lippy. The phone number got me through to some Corp-line with an automated switchboard. Clearly Daisy had tried to send us a message but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.

Fortunately, Ash was a bit more savvy. The Occult Investigator was a dwarf by the name of Glyn Boucher who was investigating the activity of a Spirit of Man. Daisy’s place had all the clues that pointed to this spirit’s involvement apparently but the only lead Boucher could share with us was a suspicion that a recently elevated Corp called Genesis had some sort of tenuous involvement. Having learnt that there’s no point pissing off Lone Star unnecessarily, Ash let him go and we pooled our ideas.

Glyph had managed to retrieve some video feed from Daisy’s front door and that showed Daisy and Blake being bundled out of the flat by the same spirit-creature we’d faced at April Walkers talismongery in Birmingham, Alabama. Creepy Little Bastard. Realising we’d need a mage to have any hope of tracking a spirit, we picked one at random from the White Pages – dude by the name of Starr who seemed to have all the right professional credentials.
Ash set to work on Daisy’s little conundrum to see if he could fathom out what the hell clue she’d tried to leave us.

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It was about then that several things started to come together and point in the same direction for us. Lone Star’s finest had tipped us off to his suspicions about Genesis, while Starr returned to confirm he’d traced the CLB back to the very same corporation. Ash found out that Daisy hadn’t stored his telephone number next to his name in her PAN. Instead there was some random number that he didn’t recognise. It all made sense when he called the number lipsticked on the shower wall though – the random number activated a stealth tag, which we assumed Daisy was concealing about her person, and the locator on the stealth tag also pointed us towards Genesis.

It was clear we were going to head down there and kick some fucking heads in so we cruised around our apartments to tool up. Every single place had been trashed and the gift of a grenade booby trap had been left for each of us.
We assume this was done by the Triad when they came looking for us. Clearly originality is not one of their strong points!

There was nothing doing at our pads so we settled for beating the morning rush to head over to Genesis. Remoting the transit, I hit the gate hard and with all of us clustered in Drifter’s Americar, he ramped us up the steps, through the plate glass and into the lobby. Startled security guards are no match for pissed off professionals and we were past them and following the locator beacon fixed on Daisy’s Stealth Tag before they had time to sound an alarm.

We’d learnt that Genesis had only just acquired extraterritoriality but we weren’t expecting to find their HQ building an empty shell. The place was all but devoid of life. Clearly the Corp was in the process of moving in – everything was still shrouded in bubblewrap and protective polythene and bar those corpses in the lobby there was not a guard, nor an employee to be seen. We made five floors before the CLB spirit appeared out of nowhere and started laying in to us. It was a desperate fight and if I’m honest, I think it was only weight of numbers that helped us succeed. Just like before we had to literally beat the shit out of it, flay the skin from its hide and turn it white with fear before it disappeared. Fighting spirits is so unsatisfying – how do you know when you’ve geeked the damn thing and it isn’t going to come back?!

Anyway I digress, needless to say, we made the top floor without any further interruptions and it was freaky drek central in the penthouse. Daisy was sitting in some sort of bondage contraption with her head wrenched back and drips of liquid silver pooling on her forehead and running off down her face. Ash and the others claimed they could see the shimmering form of a woman, stood behind and slightly to one side pouring that drek on to the girl. I couldn’t see it, but Ash evidently saw enough to take confident aim.
That huge boomstick of his roared once, twice and the body of Solace slumped to the ground. Course, she’s supposed to have died once before so we did one, sharpish, grabbing Daisy and buggering off pronto.

We know curiosity killed the cat but we couldn’t help scoping out the basement level before we left and it was there that we made our big revelation. Computers and other equipment branded with the Cross Applied Technologies logo made it clear that the Corp was being reborn as Genesis.
Regular readers will know we have something of a grudge against CAT so we couldn’t just stand by and let this happen. Fortunately Glyph still had plenty of those explosive charges left in her satchel. As we drove away watching the complex sag down into its own basement, we felt a certain sense of grim satisfaction. If Cross are being resurrected maybe all that Allisom nonsense isn’t over either… We’ll muse on it during the flight back to Atlanta.

Mood: Satisfied. Daisy is safe. Ash is happy. But Cross have Blake AGAIN…
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