Session Report – Woodchipper – Job Six: Ludovic’s Hell, Part 3

[This job happened March 21st, May 2nd, May 9th, May 23rd, June 6th, June 20th, June 27th, July 18th, July 25th, August 8th, and August 22nd.  This part covers events related to this run on (in-game) April 6th, 2076.]

[As I sat down to write this, I discovered that between April 5th and 6th, only three attempts were made on Vic, not the required four attempts, two each day.  Killroy should have done a second attack on Sunday the 5th.  All things considered, the Johnson wasn’t likely to complain that one of the 14 attacks did not happen – what if he made the Pleiades Group angry at him?  Safer to just pay them and hope to never cross paths with them ever again – those people are crazy dangerous.]

PCs Involved
The Fin – female human con artist and gambler from India, by way of Russia, posh and elegant
Killroy – male human street samurai, specializes in hand-to-hand combat (and apparently machineguns)
Seul-ki – androgynous human from Korea, a laconic expert with swords
Bookie – male elf alcoholic hacker, favors whiskey with a whiskey chaser

NPC’d
Ash – male human car shaman/rigger, speaks in the third person and follows The Spirit of The Road


Sunday, April 5, 2076
EDIT: While Seul-ki and Ash were wrapping Vic up in duct tape, they also tagged him with a number of subdermal tracking devices.  They knew Knight Errant would probably scan Vic again, so some were active but others were inactive with timers and placed in a variety of places in Vic’s body.  Places Vic might not want surgically opened for extraction of the tracker.  [I forgot to add this point in my write-up, but it was important for the rest of the run.]


Monday, April 6, 2076
4:05 AM
Vic woke up with a dry mouth, a side-effect of the sedatives he’d taken to get to sleep last night.  He got up and ambled mostly nude into the bathroom to get a drink.  “Funny.  I thought I wore my pajamas to bed,” he thought to himself.  “I must have kicked them off in my sleep.”  He flipped on the light so he could see and squinted at himself in the mirror.  His breath caught in his chest and his eyes opened widely despite the painful amount of light.  He stumbled backwards and fell, letting out a mad wail that bubbled up from the depths of his being.

His body and face were covered in threatening graffiti and dick-drawings, drawn on his flesh with ink!

~*~

Two blocks away in his car, Ash came to from running the crawler drone he’d hidden in Vic’s luggage while helping Seul-ki at the safe house [see Part 2].  Once Chaney Paragon Technology security had retrieved Vic from Knight Errant and moved Vic to this corporate safe house, Ash had waited until the all lights went off and activated the drone.

Ash picked this model of drone for its concealability and stealth options.  Once free of Vic’s luggage, it carried the Sharpie marker with it up onto the bed and started drawing on Vic.  Ash had started with drawing on Vic’s face and then methodically covered Vic’s body, spreading the artwork out as he could.  Luckily Vic was taking sleeping pills to sleep and never woke up, even when the drone had to tug on Vic’s pajamas to uncover more area to draw on.  Once Ash felt he was done, he had the crawler drone climb up into a vent in the bathroom and position itself so it could see the mirror over the sink.  Then he waited for Vic to wake up.  After catching video of Vic’s face as he saw the drawings, Ash backed the drone around a bend in the ventilation and parked it there.

The best part was that the drone was carried into the heavily warded apartment inside Vic’s luggage, so Ash didn’t have to breach the wards to pull this off.  Humming a classic Elvis ditty to himself, Ash calmly drove his Rover away from the area, trying to think of a way to top this.

6:35 PM
Seul-ki was sitting in Arashi Ramen eating a bowl of Ramen while observing the Canal Station Condos across the street through a video unit set up across the street behind her.  The restaurant was closed for business so she’d made the ramen herself with things in the kitchen, but it allowed her to observe the unassuming corporate condo Vic was currently stashed in without being seen herself.  Plus, if the ramen shop owners had really meant to keep shadowrunners out, they’d have gotten better locks.

Earlier in the day, Seul-ki had tried a different mix of makeups as a disguise and they had reacted badly with each other, leaving her makeup the color of Tang.  Initially displeased with the effect, she had come to terms with it and decided it was just as good of a disguise as what she had intended to do.  If anyone asked about it, she would tell them this was the desired effect.  Cat was strong with her this night.

The tracker placed Vic in a different third-floor condo from the one Ash had found them in.  Bookie had tracked ownership through a series of shell corporations back to Chaney Paragon Technology, which meant they were still unhappy with Knight Errant’s treatment of Vic the previous day and were still using their own corporate security to protect him.  Good.

Seul-ki’s plan was to sneak into the condo, pin a sheet of parchment with threats on it to the master bedroom door using an ornate dagger, and sneak back out without anyone in the condo the wiser.  The video camera provided a good view of the living room now that the south side of the building was in shadow and the interior lights were on.  The security guards watching the televised urban brawl game would remember to close the heavy curtains soon and block all view into the condo and Seul-ki planned on being gone before then.

After finishing her meal and placing the dishes she’d dirtied in the sink (it would have been very disrespectful to leave a mess), Seul-ki exited the through the kitchen door and relocked it.  She walked around back and crossed Russell Avenue to the sidewalk space under the balcony for the Chaney Paragon Technology condo.  No one was on the small side street and most of the security was in the entrance to the sunken parking lot and on the doors in the adjacent utility entrance for the building.  Between the two secure areas was a gap in the camera coverage just large enough for Seul-ki’s needs.  Standing a few feet back from the wall, Seul-ki leapt up and ran up the side of the wall to the third floor landing.  Seul-ki grabbed a bit of architectural decoration and hung in place, listening to see if she’d been noticed.  She could hear the two security guards cheering one of the Seattle Screamers players and other background noises, but no alarm.  Then she heard a commercial break start on the television and one of the guards getting up to refill drinks.  Perfect.

Once the guard was in the kitchen area, Seul-ki silently swung herself onto the balcony.  Using a tool, she lifted the blocking bar on the sliding door and picked the lock.  She slid the door back just far enough to let herself in.  Seul-ki paused to determine if the guard on the couch had noticed the door opening, but he was on his commlink, apparently checking game stats.  Seul-ki decided to leave the door open to save time leaving [this turned out to be a very good idea] and snuck along behind the couch to the bedroom door.

Just as she was drawing the dagger she was going to pin the note to the door with, the second guard stuck his head out of the kitchen to ask the first guard a question and spotted Seul-ki.  His “What the fuck!?” warned the first guard something was up and a three-way brawl erupted in the living room!

Seul-ki was able to avoid their initial attacks, but it was a near thing as they were very competent.  Having no quarrel with the security guards and starting to get boxed in, Seul-ki slammed the dagger into the bedroom doorframe, yelling aloud, “Vic!  This one’s for you!”  She then ran along the wall over and past the guards and dove through the partially opened sliding glass door.  Once on the balcony [and with initiative again], Seul-ki leapt over the bannister and down to the ground, her light body adept power to avoid taking any damage from the fall.  She then sprinted back across Russell Avenue and around the corner to 20th Avenue.  Literally leaping across 20th to where her motorcycle was parked, she hopped onto it and sped away, completely out of sight from the condo balcony.

Once out of the immediate vicinity, she checked the recorded feed from the camera.  It recorded the entire encounter with the guards and then guards entering the master bedroom.  When they came out with Vic, Vic finally saw the dagger in the door frame and clearly lost his shit.  Satisfied she met the job requirements for this attack, she signaled the camera to stop streaming video and shut down.  This caused the camera and mount to retract into a protective and camouflaged case below the lip of the roof, greatly reducing the odds Knight Errant would find it.

End of Part 3

[So that’s the end of Part 3.  Part 4 will cover the two attempts on April 7th and maybe the final two on the 8th, maybe not.  Depends on how many pages the write up is for the 7th.  I already suffer a bad case of Wall o’ Text and I’d like to keep that under control.]

[Another note in regards to something Vlad Malkav asked in the comments a couple days ago.  One of the reasons the Pleiades Group has a low Public Awareness as a group and as individuals is that they plan their runs to end before any kind of law enforcement or corporate security can respond.  The group spends a good deal of time planning our runs with an emphasis on not being seen until we are on the way out, if then.  Seriously.  For complicated runs we’ll spend 2-3 sessions planning it out and hammering on the plan to look for gaps before our characters will start the run.  Sometimes things go pear-shaped anyways and we have to take measures (see Cleanup on Aisle Sin and the end of Valkyrie Ride for examples), but that’s just life as a shadowrunner.]



The other jobs are:

Overview
ZAT SIN Codes
Aquamatics Schematics
The Mendoza Hit
Yak Money
MoM Defense
Ludovic’s Hell – Part 1
Ludovic’s Hell – Part 2

Ludovic’s Hell – Part 4
Ludovic's Hell – Part 5