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Journal of Shadowrunner in New York, #1.

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jamesfirecat

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« on: <02-09-12/2129:42> »
What follows is the journal I wrote up to help me better get a hang on my Shadowrunning Character Longshot a gnome who was originally created by Aztechnology to be a mindless killing machine.

Luckily, between the training and the brainwashing stages of the process he was rescued from the facility where he was being trained and subsequently fell in with the Changeling Shadowrunners Association (Denver Local 272) who would go onto become known as Sea Lion Team Seven after doing a major favor for Ghostwalker and going legit…ish….

A few months down the line however he repaid the team by kicking them out of the city while they were pulling a run in New York.

At least he kicked most of them out.

One friend’s character by the name of Doctor Xerxes became a prime runner and got a job with Doc Wagon, while a second friend’s character

Red an Ork Street Samuri went a lot more legit than the rest of us and now works primarily for the ZDF though she still takes a few running jobs every so often.

Another friend’s former character Cypher is a technomancer who after managing to become a prime runner and reach street cred levels which meant that his name would be a household word retired from the shadows to play himself in a trideo series recounting his adventures as a shadowrunner, well that and to finally tie the knot with his squeeze Mary (also a technomancer) who he already went on a journey into the resonance realms in order to rescue her from being mind controlled by a free sprite (but that's a story for another time, all be it an awesome story) but as for the rest of us, we had to make our way in a strange new world where corporations played a far greater role in our runs than ever before.


As for the people still involved here's a breakdown of them

Longshot: Gnome, street samuri, shooter.
Hummer: Elf, face.
Gumbo: Human, face.
Bishop: Fomori Mage.
Banshee: Fomori, Mage..
Scratch Monkey: Orc, technomancer.

Now that I've got all that out of the way, here is the first journal let me know if there is anything else that you feel needs to be spelled out for the journal to make sense.  (Also sorry if some of what I’ve just said is effectively repeated at the start of this journal entry, I originally wrote it with only showing them to my team in mind but they liked them enough that I felt I should share them with a broader audience)




Shadow Run Journal
Entry #1

Mission Quote:  Alright boys get your top hats ready, its go time.

Meta Quote: 'Congratulations, after two runs here I really do feel like my character is living in a futuristic dystopia.'

The Run: Ready, Set, Gogh!

Well another day another newyen, and of course another run in order to move that newyen from the pocket of some guy who doesn't even need it in the first place considering how many others he has. 

It still smarts every morning when I wake up thinking about how Ghostwalker tossed us out of Denver.  Well 'us' may be overselling it a little.  I was lucky enough to get accepted by a bunch of pro runners like Sea Lion Team Seven, though I don't have anywhere near the rep that most of them did. 

It seems like those major players somehow managed to skate out from under Scaly G's wrath one way or another.  Cypher's show(s) is (are) still on the air so unless he's involved in one of the weirdest hostage situations imaginable (and a much better actor than most of his performances on said shows would suggest (I kid cause I love, and hopefully he won't sick some kind of meme virus on my com that will make it only address me out of phrases out of his show (actually that'd be pretty cool, 'Confound Dean Costello he drives me to Ponies!'))) and the doctor is still practicing fairly openly. 

Red hasn't shown up in two runs either, so at least I'm not the only new blood around.  There’s also a new mage named Bishop and some guy named Hummer whose job I'm not even sure of yet.  Anyway, moral of the story, stranded in New York, not allowed to return to Denver till Ghostwalker is done having his time of the century, or we build up a big enough stockpile of bitz and bros to take him out, plant a flag on his corpse and declare ourselves the new Dukes of Denver. 

Not that it’s likely to happen any time soon at the rate we can expect to make money as the newest runners on the block, but it's nice to have goals. 

So as for this week's adventure, it all starts when we get contacted by Peace Man.  Now, normally I'm inclined to like Orcs (especially the ones who have learned that pound for pound gnomes are stronger than them) but given that this guy was our New York contact for the job that gave Ghostwalker a chance to shut down the haunted nuclear missile silo we'd been operating out of, I was less than pleased to see him again. 

For all I know, this run is gonna get us kicked out of New York and we'll end up sitting on a dust mound somewhere our AROs pleading 'Will run for food.  Or give blowjobs, we're not that picky.' 

Granted, another run would give me a chance to take out some of the ill will we've all (or at least I sure have) been slowly building up towards our new location.  Say what you want about Denver and how it was a criminal hell hole run by various mobs who each wanted to seize the biggest piece of it they could without pissing off Mayor Top Hat and Scales, but; well it was a criminal hell hole run by various mobs who each wanted to seize the biggest piece they could without pissing off Mayor Top Hat and Scales, it was a perfect place for runners! 

Not only that, it was about as far away as you could get from Aztechnology's reach given the way that they'd gotten their asses handed to them by its current mayor none too long ago.  As for the rotten apple, there are rules and sensors every which way, and if you're not careful even a little thing like going for a subway ride with your favorite Ares product will get you in trouble. 

So we long story made short, we agree to do his run and find out the meet in a few hours at some upper-class club named The Marquee.  Clearly, whoever our Johnson is, he's new to the business since hiring Shadowrunners is typically done in a place where the doorman doesn't even bother asking if they can take your coat knowing how many weapons you've got stashed in it. 

Still, The Marquee does qualify as a themed bar, so the group packs up what little gear we can get away with in public and head out.  Turns out that the theme for the bar is 'over the top' as our new Mr. Johnson (who even goes so far as to tell us we call him “Vincent”) who is going to hire us comes off as more queer than a dragon deciding to suddenly turn his back on a group of runners who did him a great big favor and have tried to stay in his good graces since then. 

It takes all types, but I'm still glad that his interest in Changelings was limited to Scratch Monkey (who looks like what you’d get if you crossed an orc with an ape last time I checked) rather than small men with metal legs and backward facing knees. 
He wants us to steal Starry Night, not the actual painting, but a piece of transgenic art by the same name. 

Which is a shame because the original Starry Night is a  painting (duh) the new one is a great big fish tank with a bunch of fish in it, which obviously is much harder to hide and move than a piece of cloth and canvas.

That said, he was willing to pay us the somewhat standard 10,000 New Yen or thereabouts, I don't pay too much attention while the faces do their face thingies, Gumbo is part of the old guard of Sea Lion Team Seven after all.  I'd say that he could charm the non-existent pants off a dragon, except for the fact that if he could then we wouldn't be stuck trying to reestablish ourselves in New York would we? 

But we get our job assigned to us, snatch the fish (alive, but their tank is optional) within the next week.  After Scratch Monkey takes the time to so a little tech research on the place we decide to go take a look around the old fashioned way.  Turns out this art museum is six floors tall and evidently has better security than that Mafia Don's place we broke into back in Denver (which coincidently happened to be the last time Sea Lion Team Seven got involved in the art fencing business).

 Okay maybe not 'better', but at the very least different.  For one thing, almost as soon as we start walking in, Gumbo gets made, and ejected from the building.  It turns out that they've got mages constantly casting 'detect gun' spell to make sure their guests aren't packing, and not even the one he had built into his cyberarm could escape their notice.

As for the other security measures, there are cameras everywhere, guards patrolling, and biggest problem of all, spirits. 

Spirits that can always find you if you're trying to sneak about.  That means that a lot of clever plans aren't going to work.  Even worse, it turns out that Starry Night is owned by the place itself at this point rather than the artist so there's no chance that we can trick them into thinking that its real owner wants it back. 

Scratch Monkey does his normal technoy thing and takes over the building's security system, though that does us less good than you might think.  He browses through their security handbook and it turns out that rather than being maintained by the mages on sight the spirits are on loan from other mages.  Other mages whose names weren't mentioned and we have no way of tracking down, so we can't just whack them at the right time to make the spirits suddenly go poof. 

The place always has two mages on call, and they're from a pool of eight guys who do twelve hour shifts, so there's no way we're going to convince two of them to “call in sick” and show up as their replacements.  The only good news is that at night there are fewer guards around the place, and that there’s going to be some fancy smanshy party six nights from tonight, on the very edge of our mission window. 

Bishop takes some time to observe the pattern of the spirits and notes that what with their being three full floors to explore per spirit, one only goes through the room every two minutes.  Not exactly a great big time frame to work with, but doable.  So we head back home to plot a little bit more. 

On the ride there I us my  com to get in touch with my new Neo Anarchist buddies (the one part of New York I DO like) telling them that I'll doing a run in the area and asking them if there's anything that I could do for them in the area.  As it turns out, one of their cells recently got their nose bloodied by the same company (Securecorp) that is paid to guard the museum.  Just the museum however, outside the building is under the jurisdiction of NYPDInc.  So if something goes badly wrong in there, then Securecorp is going to end up getting bossed around by their own more successful rival, not to mention looking like incompetent drek heads. 

Needless to say, they also want me to make sure that the Neo-A's can't be connected to the disturbance.  Looking over the guard's handbook that Scratch Monkey sent to the entire team I find out that NYPDInc will have a response team on hand in about 300 seconds if they get contacted.  Not a lot of time to make an exit (especially lugging a three hundred pound fish tank) but people don't contact Sea Lion Team Seven for the easy jobs. 

So back at the hideout (an abandoned police station) we agree that and Gumbo will be taking the ROFLcopter to the museum and hover over the roof.  Bishop, Scratch Monkey, and Hummer will go in.  Scratch Monkey will hack the tech system again, Bishop will watch, wait for the spirits to do a pass by, and then levitate the fish tank into a staircase that will lead up to the sixth floor and then up to the copter while we lower ropes to them to hoist them up and we all fly off. 

This plan is known as operation 'Gone in Ninety Seconds' and hopefully by the time the spirits even realize something is wrong we'll be leaving the museum’s airspace.  Keeping my side job (or 'burrito' as they are known among more professional runners) in mind I stash half of my 'sign up bonus' from the Neo-A movement onboard the ROFLcopter.  Yep, two cans of one kilogram rating ten foam explosive each set on a sixty second timer. 

Nobody notices them and in things start to go off like clockwork.  The only problem is that over our coms Bishop and Hummer start discussing how if all goes according to plan they should be able to escape by walking right through the front door after they drop Starry Night off in our copter.

That might have been just a tiny bit awkward for me (the sacred Sea Lion Team Seven code of “Runners before Chummers” means that I can't risk blowing up part of the place with our guys inside it, even if there is no physical evidence to tie them to the theft or the bombs, you can never be sure with magic, mages are a tricksy lot) but luckily I convince them that walking is for losers and they get in the copter. 

Sadly, we don't use one of our spirits to make the ROFLcopter break Mach One (that kind of thing does tend to stick out) but my bombs sixty second delay is still enough to get us away from the place before they start rounding up suspects and pepper spraying them.  We call up Vincent and get a drop off location. 

Bishop goes to astrally check it out and make sure that there aren’t any unexpected surprises waiting for us, that would be especially bad on this run, since it's not like there is much of a black market for extremely large, heavy, and recognizable pieces of transgenic art.  The best we'd be able to do to salvage things if we got betrayed would be to box up the fish and send them to Denver where our favorite fixer Tabby could eat them as the world's most expensive sea food special. 

When Bishop gets back he says that he got jumped by some kind of spirit dressed like an insurance salesman.  Just as we're about to book it we get a com call from Vincent who claims that he just had his astral defense expert got attacked by some guy and his pet spirit and he needs to relocate the drop off. 

A lot of painful glares later; we land the ROFLcopter in the right place and bring out the goods.  Vincent wavers a bit on the payment since Bishop attacked one of his favorite mooks but Gumbo convinces him that it was his own guy’s fault for drawing a gun on Bishop even if Bishop responded to a request for identification with a stunbolt to the face (or any other convenient nearby part of the body).  After that, just for lulz he manages to convince the guy that he shouldn't have hard feelings towards us just because we attacked him for trying to do his job (on second thought, why should he, he's a long way from the first guy we've attacked just for doing his job!)

Our new cred sticks in hand, we pile back into the ROFLcopter and away we go, run completed!  At least that was what we thought, then all of a sudden all our coms start flashing, and to make it worse a helicopter which has decided to start matching our flight pattern is flashing warning lights at us in time with the coms. 

The voice on the other end of the com wants us put down in a nearby communal helicopter landing lot thingy and while their copter isn't armed, we decide to give them at least a chance to explain themselves.  It turns out its some Horizon muckity muck and his security squad (which includes the guy Bishop stun bolted) who evidently is the boss of Vincent.  He thinks that Vincent's love of collecting art is getting in the way of him doing his job, so he needs to be taught a lesson.

So Mr. Horizon wants us to steal back Starry Night and two other pieces of artwork from Vincent's place.  If we don't do it, then he's going to release trideo of us delivering Starry Night to Vincent and getting paid for it. 

It is at times like this when I really, really, miss Cypher.  He would have given that guy a lesson in what happens when you try and blackmail runners who happen to have a minigun pointed right at you.  He also offers to give us some pathetically bad fake ids, or let us move into some pathetically run down hovel in Queens if we do the job for him.

Now on one hand this guy is a dick, more to the point he's a corporate dick; on the other hand, Vincent while treating us like much less of a dick was hiring us to steal something that should be on display for the public's enjoyment so that he a corporate bigshot (well medium shot) can have it all to itself.  If we take this new job we'll be able to give Starry Night back, and drop off some other bits of purloined culture for the good of the people. 

After weighing the two choices back and forth, I decide that while I don't like knuckling under to some corporate bigwig who isn't even willing to pay for our platinum package, I won't raise too much of a fuss.  So we fly over, and while the security system has already been altered to make sure that nobody will show up even if we Pink Mohawk in through a wall, our even newer Johnson made it clear he'd prefer we didn't. 

The art is on the 50th floor of a penthouse, and there's one guy watching the cameras and one at the door of the building.  So yeah, Scratch Monkey takes over the cameras again, then me and Hummer sneak in to get the art. 

Then the two of us realize that even working together we aren't strong enough to lift Starry Night.  So we call up Bishop and he sneaks in also, he levitates it like before we send it up to the ROFLcopter, they drop us down ropes and we climb back in leaving nobody the wiser till Vincent gets back to his home. 

We report our success, and go check out our newest safe house.  It doesn't look all that safe, and it honestly doesn't look all that much like a house either.

 Owning it is probably going to be more trouble than it's worth, especially since as soon as we're done having Gumbo negotiate our staying there with the place's other occupants (luckily it turns out that Dame Fettidina of the Neo Roaches is a surprisingly benevolent ruler, though King Brie the demon rats is a cruel tyrant and we may need to organize a regime change unless we wish to simple abide by his demands for cheese) I get a call from my Neo-A associates.  They were very pleased with my performance and now I can drop in on any of their safe houses throughout the city if the need arises. 

They don't say if I can bring the rest of my group or not, but if we find ourselves in a bad enough situation that we need to find out, well it'll be the least of our problems.  So leaving our new carrion consuming friends /roommates to their own devices, we take the ROFLcopter back to our new base of operations, Police Station D (it's not as good for keeping away unwanted guests as our former digs back in Denver but it'll do for now) and that's all she wrote when it comes to this run!
« Last Edit: <02-09-12/2141:08> by jamesfirecat »