The missing Ocean Blue exec.

Friday 25th August 2070

Six, Sickle, Glyph, Ash, Ki-Rin

Ash was contacted by Ka-Hil who arranged for him to meet up with Halifax at Cable Tower, the magical groups headquarters in San Francisco. Ash duly did and after spending some time with the group he began to learn the intricacies of being an adept.

Saturday 26th August 2070

Six was invited to a street race. This point to point street race was organised by a guy called Loton, a man well known on the street racing circuit for organising pukka races. Six took the chance laid down 5k against some of the fastest cars on the roads. It was close, and ended up crossing the line at the same time as the Ferrari Fiorino driven by some French Playboy. Six realised that it was time to put some big effort into speeding up his machine.

Tuesday 29th August 2070

Snow got back into town and was fed a job by a man called Martin Becher. He worked for a marketing company called Ocean Blue, who had lost one of their employees. Brent Masters was a sales executive who was in the process of closing a marketing deal with a Chinese company called Tau-Sang which would be worth 15m to Ocean Blue when he went missing. Now Tau-Sang were getting nervous and were looking to pull out of the deal. Becher wanted Brent back fast, (or if not Brent, then his internal comlink would do, it has all the records of the Tau-Sang deal on and should be able to save the deal) the money on the table was ¥500,000 to get Brent back before Tau-Sang sign on the bottom line a week on Friday.

The runners took the job and began some back ground checks.

Tau-Sang, a construction company was looking to expand its market in the UCAS. Ocean Blue, Horizon and Cascade were all looking to win the advertising and marketing contract from Tau-Sang which would nett 15m over the next 5 years. Brent Masters was the young exec who had Tau-Sang eating out of his hand, and he had the deal sewn up. The runners got hold of his home address and headed round their for a quick clue look.

Ki-Rin got onto the video feeds while the other runners got busy inside and Ki-Rin turned up the last time Brent was seen, leaving his apartment 2 days ago with two very attractive women. They headed out to a limo and drove away. He then did a background check and got lucky, some records for the vehicle were doctored and it turned out that a Mr. Johnson was driving it, it also gave an address for this Mr. Johnson.

The runners headed round and checked it out. Six sent in the flyspy drone, while Ash took a look with astral perception. On the mundane world there was little cause concern, Six saw a few things which would indicate that this house was some kind of criminal or shadowrunner flop house, Ash saw a sort of astral shadow over the building. Having not had his abilities for very long it was hard to make any sense of what he saw.

Once the runners had assured themselves that the house was empty, they went in. Not taking any chances they went in SWAT style by the numbers. Six kept watch out the back and Ash watched the alley.

Once inside the runners found a few bits and pieces, of interest. There were some charcoal drawings of the skeletal remains of ruined buildings. And there was a business card belonging to Philip Rudd from Cascade. The runners had found the corp. who arranged the snatch on Brent.

Ash meanwhile was viewing things on the astral plane and saw not the magical mirror of the mundane world, but a distorted view of San Francisco. The building they were stood in was broken, and he could see through the absent wall, the scene of a rubble strewn Old San Fran. There was a bright glow from Silicon Valley with some things spiraling around the edge of the light.

Turning to view the other runners auras, he was shocked to see that they were not their but Brent Masters was! Brent seemed equally shocked to see Ash, but began blabbering on about how he had to help him, and that the Laughing Man would help.
Brent then seemed to stop seeing Ash, he despaired and then went to walk out of the room. Ash followed him but he vanished, and slowly the scene changed back to the reflection of the mundane world any other mage would expect to see.

The runners were concerned and worried for Ash after he told them of what he had seen, and their lack of comprehension at what was going on, Ash phoned Halifax.
Halifax hinted that it might be some kind of astral meta plane but assured Ash that he wouldn’t have been able to perceive it. Meanwhile Ki-Rin got searching on the Laughing Man, but all he found was an old Matrix address to the now closed down Denver Datahaven.

Six then called the other members of the team. It seems the residents of this runner flop house were home. And they were armed with containers of petrol and explosives. The runners set themselves up in the hallway and when the residents returned they dropped all of them in a few seconds. Only one shot came back in the runners direction. And they managed to keep two of them alive.

The girl, a mage called Duo, and the face of the team called Banner were the survivors of the bloodbath, and when the runners brought them round to question them, they knew the score. They answered Ki-Rin’s questions without resisting. They had been employed to snatch Brent Masters and brought him to their flop house until the morning when they could hand him over to the Johnson. Then within minutes he disappeared. Banner was a bit freaked out by this, and not only loosing the rep on the job, their apartment seemed to have turned into some kind of freaky mindfuck. Being subjected to visions of a ruined San Francisco, a glow covering the landscape. Banner decided that it was time to raie the house to the ground, claim the insurance and get out of San Francisco before their street rep takes any more hits.
Duo told the runners a bit more. She suspected that what they were seeing in the astral plane, was some kind bubble astral plane and that Brent Seemed to have been dragged into it.

The runners were at a dead loss again. Six complained that this might be another of their own runs going south. They guessed that this astral realm was coming into contact with the mundane realm, and when that had happened Brent Masters had somehow got snatched up, they wondered if his casual drug use might make him more suseptable to the astral plane. They also thought about the pulsing glow which Ash had guessed was in the Silicon Valley area of the city. The runners began wondering if they should stay the night at this house? Maybe they would get a better idea of what is going on if they did.