[This session happened November 3rd. Things got complicated and panicky for a while.]
PCs
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)
Bookie – male elf alcoholic hacker, favors whiskey with a whiskey chaser
Murdoc – male elf kilt-wearing street mage, at home with the hobos
NPC’d
Prometheus – male human street samurai, handy with any firearm
Thursday, February 27, 2076 [The Action Continues]
Having just slain Jasper Spears, the dwarf target on the team’s hit list, Killroy beheaded the dwarf and took stills using the Image Link in his cyber eyes. Void retrieved her throwing knives while Murdoc continued to suppress the astral signature of the spell he had just cast. [As the only one who could clearly hear outside the silence bubble, Murdoc was the only one allowed to make a hearing Perception check to notice the group had been noticed. He failed to roll enough hits AND glitched, so what happened next was a bit of a surprise. It wasn’t the last for the night.]
Killroy rapidly left the room to get into position to attack the next office down the hall while Void started bagging the body for later transport. Killroy’s movement led to him stepping outside the silence bubble, just as the third target, Dexter Baldwin, stepped out of his office to check on Jasper. Dexter, upon seeing an blood-spattered obvious shadowrunner with a katana in the hallway, dropped his Defiance EX Shocker taser pistol and drew his Colt America L36 pistol, loaded with APDS rounds. Killroy did his best to cut off the hand holding the pistol to avoid triggering the building lockdown, but Dexter was equally determined to not lose that hand and kept it just out of Killroy’s reach [Dexter used Edge and rolled very well]. Dexter then tried to kill Killroy with the pistol, but Killroy stepped aside just enough to avoid being hit, but he could do nothing about the sound of the gunshot [Killroy used Edge to not get shot]. The gunshot alerted Murdoc to happenings in the hallway and he stepped out into the hallway and forward enough to bring Dexter and Killroy into the two-meter radius of the silence bubble, but the damage had been done. Security alarms went off, lights started flashing, and everyone heard the sound of the armored security gates rolling down into place on the exterior of the building. Leaving the building had just become much, much harder.
Killroy was able to hit and kill Dexter on his next attempt. With the alarm tripped, the need for silence was gone and Killroy sheathed his sword and pulled out his Ares Crusader machine pistol [named “Steve”]. Time was now critical and he still had two more targets to kill. Looking ahead with Astral Sight, Murdoc noticed an air elemental hovering over the door, but only said, “Heads up,” out loud.
Killroy charged forward to the edge of the alcove that held the doors to the last two outer offices. Listening, he heard individuals moving around in each office, preparing weapons. Knowing the occupant of the corner office was Awakened with Astral Sight [from Murdoc’s previous astral scouting trip], Killroy lobbed one of the last two NeuroStun IX gas grenades he had into the office. Immediately after, a young Chinese woman, Marie Chang, stepped into the doorway in front of Killroy [not the corner office, the one next to it], and fired a short burst from her Colt America L36, tagging Killroy. Killroy’s armor and augmentations absorbed most of the damage, but not all of it. [He took 2 Stun here, which was critical later.] Then the air elemental manifested out of the corner office door and attempted to engulf Killroy. Being warned by Murdoc kept Killroy from being surprised and engulfed [plus he spent Edge to improve his defense roll as being engulfed by an air elemental is no bueno].
Meanwhile, Void finished bagging the dwarf’s body and moved to the hallway to see what was going on. Prometheus switched from his Defiance EX Shocker to his SCK Model 100 submachine gun and continued to cover the door the HRT would have to come out of, knowing they would show up soon. Murdoc moved down to the corner where Killroy was so he could see into the offices to cast spells as needed.
At this point, several things happened almost at once. A grenade popped out of the corner office and landed at Killroy’s feet. Killroy identified it as a smoke grenade and kicked it into Marie Chang’s office while near simultaneously shooting a single shot from his machine pistol at the air elemental, disrupting it completely [another Edge point spent to good effect]. Murdoc cast a lightning bolt over Killroy’s shoulder to hit Marie, injuring her. Then Althea Leafhawk, the last of the five targets, bolted out of the corner office through the space the air elemental had previously occupied, ran past Killroy at the door and Murdoc at the corner, continuing down the connecting hallway. [To clarify, she ran down the other end of the “L” of corridors, not towards Prometheus and Void.]
Void immediately gave pursuit, her Physical Adept powers allowing her to reach the corner and move well past it in less than a second. Killroy stayed with his current target and attacked Marie, but missed. Murdoc recklessly cast lightning bolt twice at the same time [which seemed to improve his casting], seriously injuring Marie. Marie took this as a good time to flee, staggering past Killroy and Murdoc, back down the way they had come – right towards Prometheus. Prometheus fired his SCK Model 100 and, surprisingly, missed.
Marie fell down anyway.
While Prometheus was looking down the hallway at Killroy and Murdoc, confused as to what had just happened, Murdoc’s eyes rolled back into his head and he suddenly slumped to the floor, followed quickly by Killroy. The NeuroStun IX gas from Killroy’s gas grenade was filling that entire corner of the floor! [Killroy would have avoided falling unconscious from the gas for the first round, except Marie’s hit had done juuuust enough damage that he was KO’d by the gas. Tense faces all around the table at this point.]
Void chased Althea down, just as Althea slammed [and locked] the door to an executive office at the end of the hallway. Void paused to take in the situation and review an AR map of the floor. According to the map, Althea was trapped in that office with no way out, but Void was not one of the heavy-hitters of the group and was leery about pressing on by herself. Void could just hear the elf woman yelling at building security, apparently through a commlink. She clearly heard the words “shoot through the walls” being used and informed Prometheus over her commlink. Prometheus thanked her for the warning, taking the time to put a bullet into Marie as a coup de’grace before picking a more defensible spot to cover the door to the HRT ready room.
The HRT team made their presence known by shooting through the wall – the wall between their ready room and the executive office Althea was in. Void heard the overfire make spak-spak-spak noises as the bullets passed through the office walls just to her left. Deciding the hallway was way too exposed when facing assault rifles but unable to retreat due to the NeuroStun IX gas, she instead leapt up into the crawl space above the dropped ceiling tiles, neatly replacing the tile she pushed out of the way behind her so there was no sign of which way she went. Up in the crawl space, Void discovered that most of the walls on the floor did not extend all of the way up to the next floor. Taking advantage of this, she moved forward, her Light Body power allowing her to walk on the dropped ceiling without breaking through.
Once over the executive office, she heard Althea and the head of the HRT squad discussing tactics. Althea wanted the attackers dead, but thought that the team attacking might be the Pleiades Group, which suggested caution. [Hearing this, the players became excited that their characters were starting to get known.] The HRT sergeant decided they were safe enough for now and called for backup. Shortly after, Void heard him report to Althea that additional HRT squads would arrive in 2-3 minutes. He then ordered two of his troopers to hold the ready room door while the rest would hold the executive office. Void relayed all of this to Prometheus.
Prometheus, no longer forced to wait to shoot the HRT squad when they moved out, started shooting any cameras and security sensors he could see, partially to blind security and partially to convince the HRT squad that the attack was still active so they would stay put. Then he remembered he had his grapple gun and used it to fish Murdoc and Killroy from the gassed corner. Once out of the area of the gas, they both started to recover. They were awake but disoriented within 30 seconds [which is also when the gas dissipated].
After briefing Murdoc and Killroy as to the current situation, Prometheus took the last NeuroStun grenade down the hall and closer to Void so she could drop it into the executive office. She silently moved over to Prometheus and retrieved the grenade from him. She then quietly returned and dropped the grenade into the executive suite. It quickly knocked out Althea and the three HRT troops in the office. It took some time to reach the other two in the ready room and those troopers made panicked calls to building security before passing out. Void re-boosted her strength, lifted a drop-ceiling panel, and threw two knives into Althea, killing her. Void then took a picture of the dead elf with her commlink and replaced the panel. [NeuroStun is heavier than air, so once it stopped actively expanding she was relatively safe.]
Once again awake, if not fully recovered, Killroy took immediately to opening an escape route through an outer-wall conference room. The original plan had been to use his katana to break open one of the exterior windows so the team could rappel down to the ground and have Sin drive them away in a waiting car. With the security shutters down, that plan was no longer certain. He was able to break the glass with ease, but the metal shutters were another matter. His first two attempts were very promising, but then he ran out of gas and could not completely open an escape route. [He burned his last Edge on his first two attempts, removing the limits and make his 6’s explode, but was 2 points shy of breaking through. After that, none of his weapons could do enough damage to get past the armor of the armored shutters.]
The group discussed their options quickly, as they knew more HRT squads were on the way and they were starting to feel very trapped. The only option was to wait for the NeuroStun IX in with the HRT squad on this floor to dissipate, go in, take some of their assault rifles, and use those to blast the rest of the way through the armored shutters. This left a much narrowed window of escape before the rest of the HRT squads arrived, but it was better than doing nothing.
While waiting for the gas to dissipate, Void put Dexter and Marie into body bags while Killroy and Prometheus prepared. Allowing a few extra seconds for the gas to disperse, Killroy kicked open the door to the executive office. He and Prometheus entered the office and each grabbed an assault rifle from one of the slumbering troopers. Killroy immediately ran back to the conference room and used the underslung grenade launcher to blast through the remaining metal shutters. Prometheus took the time to drag the dead elf back with him to Void, who retrieved her knives from the body before bagging it.
With the metal shutters now breached, Killroy and Prometheus looked outside to see how bad the situation was. There were several news drones hovering in the area and an increasing number of Knight Errant patrol cars were accumulating at the base of the building. Rappelling down and simply driving away was no longer an option. Prometheus used his internal commlink to call Sin [His cyber-commlink has a high enough rating that the jammers on the building exterior did not completely block it] and tell him to come back with the Ares Venture – it was the only way they could escape now. Sin agreed and turned the smuggling craft around before going to maximum thrust. No longer needing to “fly casual”, he was able to reduce the estimated time back to the building to 3 minutes. The HRT teams would arrive on the 12th floor in 1 minute or less.
To buy the needed time for Sin to arrive, Killroy and Prometheus took the assault rifles, opened up the elevator doors for each of the three elevators [two regular and one freight], and launched grenades at the approaching elevators. They did not destroy the cars or kill the approaching HRT squads, but they did damage the cables and guides, triggering the automatic safety breaks and stopping the cars completely. Void used her locksmithing skills to break the locks on both stairwells in the locked position. The team then fell back to the conference room where the breach was and waited. [Much in-game sweating happened here.]
Sin arrived in the Ares Venture just before the HRT teams could make it to the floor the shadowrunners were on. The team loaded the 5 bodies and then themselves into the modified aircraft while the HRT squads were attempting to break down the stairwell doors. Knight Errant was able to get spotlights on the aircraft from the ground, brilliantly lighting up the sides so the message “Fuck the Po-Po,” painted tall on both sides, was readable for at least a mile around.
Once the team was on board, Sin immediately flew the craft away. To discourage media and police drones from following, Killroy and Prometheus used the stolen assault rifles to shoot several of the tailing drones out of the sky. The rest decided to veer off after four drones were destroyed this way. After another 5 minutes of nap-of-the-earth flying [to avoid being tracked by radar], the overburdened aircraft returned to the warehouse hangar and landed. The team disembarked with the bodies and quickly left the area in a “borrowed” van.
The kill shot photos of the targets were sent to The Fin so she could forward them to Numbers as proof the job was done. The Fin was at Pier 62, creating plausible deniability for herself and attempting to ignore the media stunt showing on the AR TV displays. Surprisingly (to The Fin anyway), Numbers was expecting her call and already knew the job was done. After arranging payment, submitting the [padded] expense report, and dispersal of funds to the group, The Fin paid more attention to what was on all the AR television displays. Apparently, an attack had happened at a Federated-Boeing office building and the attackers had escaped in an Ares Venture with the words “Fuck the Po-Po” clearly painted on the sides. Video of the aircraft was on every local station and starting to appear on some of the national stations.
The Fin ordered a bottle of a particularly strong alcohol and started drinking it.
End of session
[This session ran long, which made work the next morning somewhat painful, but we wrapped the run. I think we were starting to get a little punch-drunk at the end because having our stealth-based team escaping in a VTOL with “Fuck the Po-Po” painted on the sides where the police and the media could clearly see it was uproariously funny to the entire group.]
[This was a close thing for the PCs. The addition of the air elemental threw a wrench into the players’ plans, but not as expected. Instead of mixing it up with Killroy, it kept him from closing the door to the corner office before the gas grenade went off, with near disastrous effect on the attack team.]
[The aftermath of this attack will start a second corporate conflict in Seattle, this one between Federated-Boeing and Sikorsky. Sikorsky wanted some quiet payback for the killing of their Johnson at the Tacoma Ferry Terminal, what they got was a media spectacle. Sikorsky but won't back down from what happened as it just made the reputation of an exec or two inside the company and Federated-Boeing cannot shrug off the attack without a loss of reputation. Federated-Boeing HAS to strike back at Sikorsky, but it will take time as their entire local cadre of Johnsons just got very dead. They will have to bring in new people to re-establish their street connections and get that ball rolling again. Plus, they need to plug the holes in their security and check to see if there are any others beyond the ones used on this run. There will be some new job openings in Facilities Security very, very soon.]
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
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