Thursday, February 08, 2007

Deal with the Dragon

Six, Glyph, Ki-Rin, Ash

The runners are on a run to find and man called Brent Masters for a marketing company. They discovered that another running team seemingly working for a rival corporation had snatched Brent Masters.
Tracking down this other team of runners, they found that Brent Masters was seemingly in the Astral Plane. Impossible as he is mundane and also his meat body was also trapped.
The runners learned that there was a pocket of astral space that had been formed by a mage calling himself The Laughing Man. This astral realm was created in 1906 to stop an incursion of horrors, instigated by the Shedim, Allisom.
This astral realm had been closed with a magical seal that the Laughing Man enchanted and then hid.

Upon his return to the real world thanks to Dominic Cross, Allisom sought and found this seal. The enchantments placed on the seal made it impossible for Allisom to break it, so he engineered a situation that saw the running team that had tangled with him before in possession of the seal, ready to break it on his behalf.

Thursday 31st August 2070 13:00

Ki-Rin caught up with Ash as he headed back toward the house where they had last seen Brent Masters in the astral pocket. Ash had the statue and the plan was to see the man, and then smash it. Beyond that they were guessing what they should do. Something caught their eye….

Six was at home; his conversation with Ash had troubled him. Sure enough Ash was probably making a mistake but they were still his team. Skimming through the news feeds he came across a report about the explosion that they had caused a couple of days previously and the report said that amongst the bodies of staff and security, three dead were found to be that of Brent Masters, Philip Rudd and Martin Beecher. Their quarry, employer, and the supposed protagonist for this seemingly simple run they had embarked on. Suddenly things were starting to click into place, Six fired out a quick text message to warn the others.

Ki-Rin, Glyph and Ash were forced to dive for cover as shots impacted around them, they drew their weapons and returned fire. Five men wearing bulky form fitting armour equipped with some kind of glide wings had dropped out of the sky and were firing stick shock rounds to drop the runners. The team killed three of these before they were dropped.

Ash, Ki-Rin and Glyph woke in a large vaulted room that overlooked the city of San Francisco. They picked up their message from Six that they had been played and the runners pondered their situation.

The massive double doors opened behind them and there stomachs clenched in fear as a Great Dragon strode in. It looked around at all of them before fixing Ash with its gaze and demanded to know who they were. Mild hysteria took over and Ash back chatted the dragon. His smart tongue stopped running off when the dragon picked him up, and then threw him hard into the ground. Ki-Rin decided to lay the boot into the Dragon, and although doing no damage, he did attract the attentions of the dracoform. He dodged a few attacks before being swatted to the ground; Glyph was pinned to the spot with a combination of awe and fear.

The dragon demanded to know why they had the Lightbearer seal, and eventually Ash told him the entire story of this shadowrun to date.

The dragon announced that he was called Alamais, and that he knew of this Shedim, Allisom, and the Laughing Man, and also knew of Cross Applied Technologies. He decided to not kill the runners because in reality they did not know what they had in their possession and did not know the lengths Allisom was prepared to go, to be able to frag with the runners. Alamais decided to tell the runners about Shedim. How they have to find and corrupt a host, this takes time and effort, however Allisom had put into place a program of vet growing hosts, in a Cross project called Legion, and another project to give this hosts life, in effect, this project was called CORe.

The CORe project was being overseen by a man Called Simon Crusher, and the dragon told Ash that if he wanted to be able to buy enough time to prepare and be ready to fight Allisom, then killing this man would force Allisom to be more careful with its hosts.

It just so happened that Alamais also wanted Simon Crusher dead, so was prepared to remunerate the runners if they were successful. The dragon decided that the total compensation to be paid would be negotiated at a later date. The runners took their lives and made to leave.

Meanwhile Six had really begun to get worried, nobody had replied to his text saying that they may be in trouble, and a ring round of every contact he knew turned up naught. He did have a subscription on Ash’s pickup, and located where that was parked. Driving up to the car he found Lone Star surrounding the area, a clear sign of a gun battle in evidence… Six remembered that he had stealth tagged Ash and turned it on. The location was at a skyscraper in the business district of San Fran. The base of a corporation called Alamais Foundation. Six screamed across town thoughts of his friends in trouble rushing through his head.

The rest of the team descended in the lift and found themselves in the lobby area of a corporation. Security personnel went about their business side by side with secretaries and clerks. The runners, made their way over to the low designer leather sofas, sat down and sparked up a cigarette.

Six arrived. Snatched up the grenade launcher and the heavy machine gun from the back of his car and strode across the lawn area. The security personnel saw the threat and locked down the building, Ki-Rin also saw the oncoming rigger and headed off a bloody situation.

The whole team sat around in the lobby area and filled in the blanks. And now Ash had cut a deal with a dragon. Six was set to walk out again, but Ash asked that his buddy be on the team to watch their backs.

The team decamped to a better location. A stuffer shack. And Ki-Rin got down to some matrix tracking of this Simon Crusher. It seems that the man had disappeared from the records about seven years ago. But there was a slim data trail. Back in his university days, he had bought into a racehorse with a few friends, and one of them was still about in the San Francisco area. A man by the name of Philip Meyers. Meyers is one of the owners of an exclusive stables just outside Golden Gate national park, and the runners leapt into their vehicles and headed out that way.

Arriving at the stables they could see that it was packing up for the day. Staff were leaving. There were however a few people settling down for a quite drink in one of the office come meeting buildings. Six and Glyph decided to pose as boyfriend girlfriend looking to getting into horses.

They headed over and got talking to one of the members of staff. Eventually he began to give them the guided tour. Taking the cue, Ki-Rin headed in posing as an electrician he sauntered into the offices and came across someone else working on a computer. Ki-Rin distracted him long enough to deploy his shock glove, and then a swift punch in the face knocked him out cold. He then found that the man he had knocked out was the man they had come for, Philip Meyers.

Ki-Rin bundled him back to the car and the team withdrew to a secluded picnic spot for an interrogation. With the aid of some hacking of his Comlink, and some well targeted violence, they were able to get out the fact that he was meeting with Simon Crusher the next day at Fairplex Park, for the unlimited horse race meet for lunch. Ki-Rin took a nanopaste scan of the mans face and then they took him to a ISO container owned by Ash and locked him in.

The runners made plans to get into the racetrack the following day disguised as Meyers (and others) to make the meet with Simon Crusher.

Friday September 1st 2070

The runners headed to the track, and eventually got in, although there were some dicey moments when security wanted to see tickets. Ki-Rin had to work hard to smooth it over electronically. They also had to throw a few bribes to get some weapons in also.

The runners were shown to the table with Six waiting nervously as Meyers, and Ki-Rin as his bodyguard. Glyph and Ash were on hand nearby. As the other table guests arrived Six realized that they couldn’t just kill Crusher here without an exit plan, and the team formulated a plan to plant a stealth tracking tag on their mark. Ash made a few bets on the horses.

The plan was seamless, once Simon arrived Six kept him talking. Glyph moved in and hustled him nothing more than a distraction, Ki-Rin stepped up having positioned himself to be the first of the bodyguards on the scene, and in one smooth motion deftly palmed the stealth tag under Simon Crushers collar.

Six began to get nervous, and as they now were able to follow their mark, they decided to split and get out of the horseracing track before their ruse was rumbled.

Back in downtown San Francisco the runners turned on the stealth tag and picked up the signal in the air headed north. The runners followed the helicopter in the cars on the ground and are about 4 hours behind when Simon Crusher lands.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's not often i feel good about being threatened into doing a Dragons donkey work. But i'm happy that we managed to pull off that little stunt with no claret being spilled.
We rock!

Owain said...

It's not often I see Ki-Rin not blowing people to little pieces.

Anonymous said...

I don't think that's fair, i''m more of a surgeon than a butcher.

Anonymous said...

A surgeon with shaky hands perhaps?

Anonymous said...

Woah...After reading this a very popular SR saying dropps in mind: "Never deal with a dragon..."

I would love to play mouse and take a quick look at the story from Thorn...

Seems to get quite nasty...hehe

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