[This session happened August 7th, 2017, and was run by New GM. The scheduling conflicts for different people continued, hence the two week delay between sessions. Other than that, it was a great session wherein we achieved…well, I’ll let you read it and see.]
PCs
Baelthor – male human mage with a loud mouth
Void – female night elf 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)
Sin – male human rigger, knows exactly the wrong thing to say and says it
Wren – male human that registers as an elf, no explanation as to why
Prometheus – male human street samurai, handy with any firearm
NPC’d
Bookie – male elf alcoholic hacker, favors whiskey with a whiskey chaser
The Fin – female human con artist and gambler from India, by way of Russia, posh and elegant
Dai – male human fixer who operates in Cara’Sir, recommended by The Fin
July 5, 2076
Morning
Having spotted the magical support for the competing teams, the Pleiades Group suddenly felt time pressure to complete the job. Bookie spent some time doing research on the wage mages working for New Dawn Technologies. He was able to identify the two mages on the payroll and some background on them. They appeared to be well paid by New Dawn Technologies and lived in a corporate compound on the other side of Cara’Sir. A very secure compound. This suggested that bribing them or otherwise removing them from the picture would be unlikely to succeed and might alert security something was going on.
In the meantime, Killroy spent seven hours assembling the thermal bombs for the job. This effort resulted in four thermal bombs that would fit within the server units and have enough power to destroy the servers and still set the building on fire.
9:00 PM
With the sun starting to set, the group moved their supplies for the run from the apartment into Sin’s GMC Bulldog. Bookie ran on the New Dawn Technologies security systems and programmed the sweep camera facing the street on Building 55 to slowly shorten its sweep so that by 9:30 PM there was a gap in the video coverage allowing unobserved access to the corner of the building.
9:30 PM
The GMC Bulldog arrived and Sin parked it exactly within the newly created blind spot in the perimeter video surveillance. Prometheus stepped out of the Bulldog and fired his grappling gun, neatly dropping a grapple line on the corner of Building 55. He pulled it tight and tied it off on the Bulldog before signaling to the infiltration team to exit the vehicle.
The infiltration team (Void, Killroy, Baelthor, and Wren), currently invisible thanks to Baelthor [who took STUN from the Drain casting improved invisibility on himself, Void, and Killroy] and Wren [who handled his own improved invisibility], exited the vehicle. Void ran up the line [literally] to the roof of Building 55 while Killroy, Baelthor, and Wren used climbing grips to work their way up the line. Once all four were on the roof, they signaled Prometheus via microtransceiver and he applied a catalyst stick to the stealth rope, quickly dissolving it. Killroy picked up the actual grappling hook and put it in his satchel to return to Prometheus later.
The infiltration team then made their way across the rooves toward their target. There was a three meter gap they had to jump across to get to Building 36. Void made the leap easily, but Wren needed to be “assisted” [thrown] across the gap by Killroy. Baelthor and Killroy made the leap with little difficulty.
To get from Building C to Building B they had to rappel down two floors using more stealth rope. Once on the roof of Building B, they applied a catalyst stick to this line – their path back would be inside the buildings. They then ran the length of Building B to Building A, staying in the shadows as much as possible, where the roof access hatch they wished to use was located.
Void quickly picked the lock on the hatch, defeating the alarm system on it with ease. To bypass the mana barrier on the access hatch, Baelthor dropped the improved invisibility on Killroy [who would have no luck pressing through the barrier without losing the spell or triggering an alert]. Baelthor and Wren both safely pressed through the ward in one go without disrupting it. It took Void two tries [she tied on the first roll].
The infiltration team made their way down the stairwell, Bookie looping the cameras just ahead of them on each landing. To access the kennel area and the two server rooms, they needed to move through the central corridor for this floor, which is where a basilisk was slowly patrolling. In fact, the basilisk in this hallway was right at the door to the stairwell when they peeked in. Luckily it did not see them peeking. They waited a minute while it lumbered down the hallway away from the door. Once they felt it was far enough away, they quietly opened the stairwell door and darted over to the door to the kennel area. Void quickly bypassed the lock and all four runners piled into the kennel, closing the door behind them. The click of the stairwell doorway closing made the basilisk pause and look, but not seeing anything edible it did not turn back.
Baelthor immediately started locating the correct cages from the client-supplied list and took samples from the research creatures within them. [The client supplied training in this back in Seattle, which Void and Baelthor took as the two most likely to be on this part of the job.] Killroy suggested that Void and Wren sneak over to the server rooms now while Baelthor was taking the biosamples. Void concurred and she and Wren checked the hallway to see where the basilisk was now.
[New GM made a roll on Void’s current Edge to see how lucky she was and rolled a good number of successes.] The basilisk was down at the far end of the hallway, scrabbling at the door that separated this hallway section from the next one. The basilisk was apparently aware of the basilisk on the other side of that door and distracted by it. Void and Wren took advantage of the moment and snuck to the doorway for the first server room [it was just the other side of the stairwell door]. It took Void nine whole seconds to bypass the lock, which seemed much longer while they were in a hallway with a basilisk and no cover.
Once safely on the other side of the door, Void and Wren set to the various tasks they needed to accomplish. Wren found an obscured access port on a server unit, plugged in the remote access point Bookie had provided, and activated the device, tucking it under a wiring bundle. This would provide Bookie with a backdoor into the server to run Nuke from Orbit through at the end of the next phase of the job. Void meanwhile quickly planted two of the incendiary bombs inside two other server units and then opened the fire suppression system. She rewired some of the internal circuits of the suppression system so that the system would appear active, but was actually deactivated, and then closed it up. She and Wren then carefully snuck through the hallway to the next server room and repeated the process, this time with Wren planting the bombs while Void disabled the fire suppression system here.
This part complete, Void contacted Killroy over her microtransceiver to report they were done and to find out if the biosamples collection was complete. Killroy reported Baelthor was just finishing. Void could hear the basilisk plodding down the hallway and relayed that information to Killroy. Killroy updated her and Wren when the basilisk could be heard at the door to the kennels. He further advised that Baelthor was done getting the samples here and they were ready to leave. When Void heard the basilisk plod past the door to the server room she and Wren were in, she relayed that to Killroy, counted to 15, and then she and Wren exited the server room, moving as quietly as possible to the stairwell door. At the same time, Killroy opened the door to the kennels and he and Baelthor stepped over to the stairwell door. Baelthor quietly opened the stairwell door and all four runners piled into the stairwell, letting the door close behind them.
[At this point in the evening it was getting late, so we started speeding things up in order to wrap up for the evening. A side effect of this is that the last part of the run was more of a summary punctuated by a few dice rolls. On the other hand, our plan was working and as long as we didn’t screw up, the rest should have been the smooth ride it was.]
After their heart rates had reduced a little, the group climbed the stairs to the third floor and started making their way across to Building C. They then made their way across two large open office areas in Building B to the cross-building access to Building C. In Building C they located the stairwell closest to the aviary on the first floor and descended to the first floor. There they had to wait for yet another basilisk to go by before accessing the aviary.
Inside the aviary, Baelthor and Void split up the list and started collecting samples while Killroy and Wren kept an eye on things. One of the biosamples Void had to collect was from a bird the size of an ostrich with sharp talons.
Once the biosamples were collected, the group exited the aviary and made their way to the roof of Building C. This access hatch had a fire trap on it, which needed to be carefully bypassed without triggering it, in addition to the ward, THEN the lock had to be defeated and the alarm disabled. Void made it look easy despite some sweating on her part [she’d been literally burned by hellhounds before and so fire traps made her nervous].
Eventually the team returned to the roof of Building 55 and signaled to Prometheus. Prometheus stepped out of the GMC Bulldog again and fired his grapple gun at the corner of Building 55, neatly dropping the line on the corner. Killroy tied the line off on a convenient A/C unit and then cut the grapple free, placing it in his satchel next to the first one. Prometheus tied off his end and signaled the line was ready to be used. The infiltration team pulled out zipline hooks and rode the zipline down to the ground outside the boundary of the New Dawn campus. When all four were down and inside the Bulldog, Prometheus applied his catalyst stick to the stealth line, eliminating the evidence, and then climbed back inside the Bulldog. Sin then drove the Bulldog away, taking time to verify they were not being tailed before heading to the safe house.
Bookie programmed the sweep camera on the street side of Building 55 to slowly go back to normal, eliminating the gap in the video surveillance.
End of Session
[This session started to run a bit long, as I mentioned, so we wrapped it up a little quicker than normal. We wanted to finish this part of the run to avoid having it stretch across to game sessions. This turned out to be a fortuitous decision as two things happened that pushed the next session all the way back to September.]
[The first thing that happened was I went into the hospital the next night with atrial fibrillation. This means my two atria (the smaller chambers on top of the heart) were not in synch with the rest of my heart and were busy doing their own thing. My ventricles were, as a result, double- to triple-timing it to try and keep my blood circulating. This is a disconcerting sensation, to say the least. Long-story-short, I spent the next three days in the hospital and went home with a set of prescriptions for my heart and to bring my high blood pressure under control (it mostly is now). We skipped the next game session so I could recover some more and the one after that due to scheduling issues.]
[The week after that, Hurricane Harvey (slowly) rolled into Texas and dropped enough rain to push the Earth’s crust down 2 cm over an area roughly the size of New Jersey (33,000,000,000,000 gallons of rain for those curious). I’ve lived in the Houston area for decades and have never seen that much rain and I’ve experienced the phenomena I call “The Week That It Rained” several times. Luckily only one family I know personally had to be evacuated, but neighborhoods around mine took extensive flooding damage, including complete submersion of the ground floor of many houses. Even now there are businesses that have not fully recovered or closed permanently.]
[Perhaps not surprisingly, New GM incorporated this event into the next session. See you next report when Typhoon 42 unexpectedly rolls into Tir Tairngire and throws a wrench into everyone’s timing!]
Session 1
Sessions 2 and 3
Session 4
Sessions 5 and 6
Session 7
Session 8
Hurricane Harvey!
Session 10 (not yet written)
Session 11 (not yet written)
Session 12 (not yet written)
Session 13 (not yet written)
Session 14 (not yet written)
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