Resources
- DeeCee: Conspiracy Theories
- Political Runs: Dirty Tricks
- Seattle Politics: Seattle Sprawl
- Faces/Cons: Cutting Aces
Seattle's congressional delegation (
Seattle Sprawl. Ruling the Queen City, 24):
- Senator Charles Seaver (Republican)
- Senator Helen Royer (Democrat)
- Representative Erik Shira (Republican)
- Representative Katy Rozman (Technocrat)
- Representative Benita Saver (Democrat)
- Representative Sharron Lu (New Century)
- Representative Robert Wheeler (Technocrat)
- Representative Samuel Lamptey, Jr. (Republican)
Senator Seaver is currently (as of
Cutting Aces, early 2079) running for governor in the special election now that Brackhaven's out, but there's also speculation that he's a shedim or something else. Senator Royer is Charles Royer's daughter, so there's a political dynasty at play if you want to involve that. Fun fact, Rep. Lamptey's father is (or was intended to be, anyway) the Seahawks troll linebacker profiled in
Prime Runners and would be in his twenties.
Anyway, I guess it depends a lot on how deep you want this to go. The blackmail/nondescript danger angle is easy, but that would probably be handled by said politician's local fixer because it's not that big a deal and they can just reach out to KE or Lone Star and have a company man deal with it if not done with off-duty personnel. The blowback if it were to become public is minimal because it can be covered up by the press and corps. I figure if you want the politician to get personally involved, it requires higher stakes.
Perhaps something like this: Someone in the politician's immediate family got into a high-stakes deal, maybe thinking they were going to help the relative if the deal went off without a hitch. Maybe it's someone who feels overlooked or taken for granted and they figured this would make them a more respected or useful person in the politician's inner circle. Basically, a Fredo. But they're a Fredo and they're dumb, and now the deal is blowing up in his or her face and the politician learns about it either from the relative or from one of their fixers or even from a contact who would exploit this but they owed the politician a favor and giving a head's up makes them even. So the politician hires the runners to plant a macguffin that would put the blame on someone else and minimize the blowback to something acceptable if at all, but the runners also have to covertly babysit the relative after they plant the evidence to make sure the relative doesn't say or do something stupid while the evidence is uncovered and the heat dies down on them.
So the Face and TM get to build and plant the evidence while the Gunslinger and Mage follow Fredo around and discreetly keep them out of trouble with innocuous "accidents" or even some not-so-subtle ass kickings to those who insist on dragging the relative back into trouble because they
know he or she was involved and want to exploit that fact, evidence be damned, and probably could get Fredo to admit it if they get close enough. So by this time, the whole team is going to have to stop the bad guy from reaching Fredo or maybe they have to go back and add more evidence to what they planted in order to frame the villain and make it look like the villain is just trying to frame poor, innocent Fredo instead of taking responsibility. It would be even better if the villain is someone that they can't just kill outright (or at least not until the climax) because they're a bigwig on the UCC or in Seattle politics. But then at the climax, when the pressure is on the villain because the runners have framed villain and now the authorities and/or villain's own corp is on his or her ass, villain tries to take out Fredo and politician out of spite and anger and so the runners end up fighting off a hit squad, kill the villain, and the politician and Fredo come out victorious and the runners look like heroes.
Epilogue: Politician set up Fredo from the beginning to improve his or her reputation and political capital for some future dealings, and villain was
innocent of the whole deal until the runners got involved.
