[This session happened on September 14th. We missed a week playing due to Labor Day activities, after missing a week because I wasn’t ready to run due to Real World Issues, so it was good to play again.]
Player Characters
The Fin – female human con artist and gambler from India, by way of Russia, posh and elegant
Sin – male human rigger, knows exactly the wrong thing to say and says it
Void – female human physical adept B&E specialist, a shadow that blends in easily
Killroy – male human street samurai, specializes in hand-to-hand combat (and apparently machineguns)
Murdoc – male elf kilt-wearing street mage, at home with the hobos
NPC’d Characters
Bookie – male elf alcoholic hacker, favors whiskey with a whiskey chaser
Prometheus – male human street samurai, handy with any firearm
Thursday-Friday, February 13-14, 2076
At Midnight, The Fin received a phone call from Svetlana, a fixer contact who specializes in shopping around wetwork opportunities and odd jobs. [This was going to be an odd job.] Svetlana had a rush job where the client was looking for “the Monkey Burger team.” Svetlana vouched for the fixer brokering the job and claimed the job appeared to be real. Was The Fin interested? After thinking it over for a moment, The Fin said she was willing to accept the job. Svetlana then asked The Fin to meet her at Olga’s Tea House in Tacoma as soon as possible. The Fin said she would be there in an hour.
Forty-five minutes later, The Fin was at Olga’s, make-up and clothes fashionably perfect, hair in that “I just kicked someone out of my bed to be here” style [because she had]. Svetlana was sitting at a table in a back corner, her two bodyguards occupying the two tables in front of Svetlana’s table. The crowd in Olga’s was giving them a wide berth. The Fin was recognized by the bodyguards as she walked up and allowed to sit at Svetlana’s table without any hassle.
After the pleasantries of greeting each other, Svetlana got down to the point: the job was to destroy as many free-standing Monkey Burger operations as possible in the Seattle Metroplex in the next 36 hours…oh, 35 hours now. The Fin was nonplussed for a moment and then asked Svetlana to repeat herself, not certain she had heard correctly. Svetlana repeated what she had said and then provided some additional details:
- 8 of the 16 Monkey Burger locations had to be destroyed by 6:00 AM, Saturday, February 15, or there would be no pay.
- Each location destroyed paid 3000¥.
- There was a 10,000¥ bonus for destroying all 3 Flagship locations.
- There was a 26,000¥ bonus for destroying all 13 drive-through locations.
- “Destroyed” meant “it would cost more to fix it than tear it down and start over”.
- The deadline was 6:00 AM, Saturday morning.
- Payment would be made upon verification of destruction, but no later than Noon on the 15th.
And that was pretty much it.
The Fin immediately sent a “We’ve got a job – get to the office ASAP” group message to the team and then attempted to get more money out of the deal. Svetlana was firm on the price for the job and The Fin recognized this, so she left to bring the job to the team. [The Fin rolled 6 hits on Negotiation, but so did Svetlana, giving The Fin 0 net hits and no extra money.]
Friday, February 14, 2076
By 2:00 AM, everyone but Prometheus and Bookie were at the Pleiades Group offices in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood. After The Fin laid out the job, the group immediately started planning. Pretty much the entire team agreed that they would have to hit all the locations at once and preferably when they were closed so no employees or customers would get killed. This was a job for explosives!
Sin put his engineering skills to work and went over the plans of the Monkey Burger locations the team had acquired the last time they were paid to attack them. [See the blog entries for the Monkey Business run.] He located the perfect locations in both the Flagship and drive through locations to maximize destruction with the minimum amount of commercial grade explosives. [He used Edge and rolled 10 hits on his Engineering roll, which I allowed to be used to reduce the quantity of explosives.] The rest of the team then started calling their contacts, looking for 10 kg worth of explosives as soon as possible, with cost being no option. [This meant they were willing to pay the 400% maximum extra dice on the availability roll.]
Killroy’s arms dealer contract, Leona Kinkou, came through first. She was able to locate and deliver the first 10 kilo package by 7:00 AM [I rolled the necessary successes plus two more, with the extra hits each reducing the time by half]. She also lucked into another package after Killroy stated he needed more if she could get it. The second package arrived at 10:00 AM [this time three extra successes], but she couldn’t get any more for a full day [zero extra successes], which Killroy accepted as it would replace the 10 kg he started with. He then set to wiring up the 30 kilos of explosives as demolition charges [20 kg plus the 10 kg explosives he already had from a previous run that ended up not needing them]. The Flagship locations would take 4 kilos each, while the drive through locations would only need 2 kilos, allowing him to make packages for the three Flagships plus 9 of the 13 drive through locations.
At the same time, Void’s asked he fence, Sarah, if she had access to 10 kg of commercial grade explosives. It was a long shot, but it couldn’t hurt to ask. Sarah said she happened to know where to get ahold of 10 kg of commercial explosives, no questions asked, but it would take nearly 24 hours before she could get it – did Void still want it? Void said yes and arranged delivery. Meanwhile, The Fin was able to locate another 10 kg of explosives through her “acquisitions” contact, Aung San, who commented that there seemed to be a run on the explosives right now, so she could not secure and deliver the explosives until 2:00 AM Saturday morning. After checking with Killroy that 2:00 AM would be soon enough, The Fin asked Aung to get the explosives and deliver them.
After contacting Sarah, Void spent some time checking out the Monkey Burger locations to see if security had been upgraded. It had. There were three times as many cameras in place and more security goons in place. The windows now all appeared to be bulletproof and all the external doors and locks had been upgraded. Not so high that Void couldn’t bypass them [the corporate work recently had challenged her with higher grade locks], but noticeably better. Void reported this information back to the Group.
The team planned out the delivery route, planning to hit the Flagship locations first (as they closed at 9:00 pm), and then the drive through locations in Bellevue, Downtown, Tacoma, and finally Renton (all of which closed at Midnight). After the Downtown drive through locations, the last 20 kg of explosives would be available and Killroy could make the last four demolition charges for Void to place. To keep things as safe as possible, Murdoc would make Killroy and Void (the delivery team) invisible and Sin would remotely drive one of his rigged vehicles with the delivery team (and the explosives) inside.
Then the team went to their respective homes and rested until the run, except Bookie who spent some time to find appropriate music to record the explosions to.
~*~
At 8:00 PM, Void and Killroy loaded the demolition packages into Sin’s car. Sin then remotely drove them on the planned route, observing all speed limits and warning signs.
Against all odds, there were no major traffic accidents nor gang wars anywhere along the route. Void and Killroy were able to bypass the improved security measures and plant all the charges with little difficulty, including stealing a shake machine and a crate of strawberry-banana shake mix at Murdoc’s request. By 4:00 AM all the devices were in place and awaiting Killroy’s signal to detonate. Sin placed several of his aerial drones around town to “just happen” to be in the right place to record the explosions across the city.
At 4:30 AM, Saturday, February 15th, every standalone Monkey Burger establishment in the Seattle Metroplex, all 16 of them, exploded, assuming foolproof disguises as piles of burning rubble.
It was not long after that that the first news stories about fires at fast food restaurants started appearing on the local news channels. By 5:00 AM the news channels realized that ALL the Monkey Burger establishments in Seattle were destroyed and started reporting that fact. By 6:00 AM, the national news started reporting on the unusual news story, speculating on what it meant and who might be responsible.
Watching the media frenzy slowly start up, the Pleiades Group sat in their office, eating pop corn and watching the music video Bookie had created with Sin’s video footage and the 1812 Overture.
At 7:00 AM, full payment for the job was deposited into the Pleiades Group’s bank account. The Fin subtracted the expenses from the job [buying all those explosives] and split the remaining money with the entire team, putting the rounding amount into the Group kitty.
End of Session
[This one wrapped up pretty quick. I wasn’t certain how the players would face this challenge and was ready for a one-by-one approach if necessary. They wisely chose the explosives route, but even that would not have covered all the locations if Sin had not had that amazing roll and reduced the amount of explosives needed at each location. I played a little fast and loose with the explosives amount needed, but it provided just the right amount of tension as the team scrambled to track down enough to do the job. Killroy’s contact rolled well for the first two batches of explosives and all the other rolls made just the necessary number of hits to deliver in one day.]
[Next session, September 21, we are just doing character maintenance as no one has updated their characters in Hero Lab since we started, just keeping track of things on paper. This will let me print out updated characters for everyone and make certain no one missed any Karma. We may also play board games or watch Sneakers as most of the group hasn’t seen it.]
[After that, I’m running the next run (on September 28th) as I have an idea. Due to my Day Job picking up, it’s taking me longer to prep for the run, so another week off is welcome. Then the other GM needs to run a couple runs. So expect the next real session report on October 5th.]
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