[gilga]

Agency, about a week after the first paying job.

Arthur's gig was a life-line the first paying job for the team, and the performance was flawless. Yet, Halloweens are very dangerous which meant laying low for a while to cool down. Luckily, they do not seem to be actively looking for the team.  Unluckily, it has been a week of laying low and no client has approached the agency. After being bolted in the agency for about a week, and especially not taking the car out fearing that some Halloweener would tie the knots, the team is now pretty sure that nobody is after them.  Yet, they wonder how far the next paying job is, and with so much debt - each idle day seems like a terrible waste. 

This morning you have a team meeting, AM seems to be getting restless with the lack of action. After spending a week with the little woman, the team already knows that she has it worse than the rest, the last job barely covers her interest on the debt and her share of the rent - nothing more. Luckily for her, she is not one of the tax-payers in the group.  Technically, you do not need a formal meet - being stuck together for a week. Yet, AM returns with fresh coffee and chocolate flavored cookies, which is a good reason to visit the dining hall.

[Tecumseh]

Mato keeps weird hours. His sleep regulator means that he can get by with only three hours of sleep a day. He seems like a night owl, but really he can knock off at 4am and still be awake for sunrise at 7am. Mato has a perch at a window that looks out over the street. He seems to just... watch. Maybe he's keeping an eye out for Halloweeners, or maybe he's just studying Touristville as it passes by.

The mid-late September weather is starting to turn toward autumn. Some rain makes it easier to stay indoors for long periods of time. Mato goes on a self-improvement kick, talking MadCat into giving him an introduction to armoring while watching back-to-back trid shows about the basics of wilderness survival and sleight-of-hand. The latter come easily, given his cybernetically augmented agility. The survival tips make sense to him, but remain theoretical at this point.

He also sneaks off to a gym in Bellevue to get some exercise. He practices running on a treadmill without his skimmers, and then takes some swimming lessons. His cyberlimbs make him float like a stone, but at least they're strong enough to keep his head above water. Watching him swim is a bit like watching a blender spin as Mato churns the water in a brute-force approach to buoyancy.

He gets back from the pool and showers thoroughly, as the lingering smell of chlorine bothers his olfactory boosters. Exiting the shower, he smells soykaf. He follows his nose to find AM with fresh soykaf and cookies. Mato is inwardly delighted, having worked up an appetite at the pool. "What's the occasion?" he asks, taking a seat at the table in his fluffy pink terrycloth bathrobe.

[Beta]

'Laying low,' it had such a better sound to it than 'being a recluse.'  Jawsey was so happy that he'd gotten the rest of the team to agree to 'lay low with him for a while.  It kept his lack of desire for going out stand out less.

It wasn't that he didn't have plenty to do.  The first day had been occupied soothing his cranky back and resting up from the strain of more magic than he'd been able to safely handle.  This had looked an awful lot like spending most of the day loafing in bed, but was driven by reasons of medicine rather than pure sloth.

The recovery day had given him plenty of time to contemplate the struggles he'd had with magic on the recent run.  It had been, frankly, embarrassing.  He wasn't claiming to be powerful, but he'd struggled to be able to to do anything with his magic.  Once he was feeling more up for it, he took advantage of their superior grid access to find far more information on magic than he'd read up until now.  A couple of days of reading and practicing had cleared him of some misconceptions on how the whole thing worked, and he fancied that his skill truly had improved.

But rather than stay focused on practicing the skills, his attention shifted to information he'd found on how to strengthen one's basic magical gift.  And so he started a series of magical observations and practices.  Astral atunement, studying one's own aura and how it met the broader astral, meditation, holding of mana, and more.  This had looked an awful lot like sitting on a pillow on the floor of his room.

After several days of this, he'd been more than ready for a distraction, so was glad of the opportunity to head to the common room, help himself to caff and cookies, and chat with AM and the rest.

"Figuring that it is time lay more highly?  Or is there some other order of business?"

[Jack_Spade]

Bobby had not been as confined as his chummers, thanks to the fact that he could go out in nearly any shape - as long as it wasn't his human one. Something curious had happened when he turned the boy into a puck. He had strained the very limits of his abilities to change form - and somehow transcended them. Not only had he reduced the boy's mass over the limit he thought he was capable off, he had done so partially against the boys will. Now he had found, during his nights out, that he could take the smaller shape of a house cat just as well as that of a grizzly - and he could turn a rat into a turtle even against that critters desires.

Mato's interest for armoring came at the right moment, as he now had to rework his critter armor, so it would expand enough for his new black bear form. When AM called the meeting, he had just stashed the last of his supplies - while practicing his Orangutan form. He still wore a pair of stretch pants an so made his way in ape form to the dining room. With the long arms it was no problem to grift some of the cookies from half the room away.
With the trode band on his head he asked through the matrix:
<<What's up? Time to start the shit flinging again?>>

[gilga]

AM seemed annoyed by the *dress code* of the house. "Mato please be more dressed the next time you come here, I can't concentrate like this... I am a woman you know" she said with a wink. She frowns when Bobby arrived as a great ape and just shrugs annoyed.  The meeting was getting stranger, and then she felt like an idiot for commenting on Mato's appearance when Bobby does not even arrive in meta-human form.

She replies to Jawsi, and addresses the rest as well  "We are still broke - and we need multiple paying jobs a month to get ahead. One of these days things will not work out so well, so we must have some redundancy.
Nobody knows we exist, except a few people asking for directions, and a homeless guy trying to squat in our garage. Nobody even entered this place looking to employ us. It is not that we are expensive, we are completely anonymous. We need a reputation. We should not just sit on our asses waiting for things to just happen to us, we need to be more proactive in finding employment."

[Beta]

Jawsey sighed. Here is was, the need to go grubbing for work.  He knew that people tended to like him and that he could generally play them well, but this sort of thing still filled him with dread.  Probably because people with money were often people with power, and his experiences with people with power had largely ranged between malicious indifference on the good end to outright homicidal on general principle on the bad end. 

On top of which, he would like to focus on those exercises that were supposed to strengthen his magic.  It seemed like he may have to deal with meat space much more than he'd really like, and that meant being good at more than the astral side of magic.

But he was an elf, he was supposed to live a long time if he didn't get himself killed young, and a good mattress and hot showers made his body vastly more tolerable.  So grub for money he would have to do.

"Any ideas on how?  I'm sorry to say that it isn't something I've done much of yet.  I'd had a few bits of work come my way from people I know, but nothing on the scale that we need, mostly just astral scouting or overwatch."

[gilga]

AM replies "We all have contacts that we can use, a favor here and there? Even some drek job is better than nothing. Perhaps some can network to us more into the kind of people that hire the like of us. There is Arthur our former client, we know that he deals with expensive, dangerous and desirable magical tarot cards... but he does not know that we know, to him transaction is over.  We do have some magical talent - and can perhaps help him acquire more cards - or perhaps he can network us to his employer or something. We do have some potential with the occult, I mean three of us are awakened for crying out loud. Arthur risked his son for that card - he must require some help in that department, especially after the danger struck so close to home.

Perhaps we can pressure him a bit, about the subject. We did save his child, he'll listen to us. If he does this crazy arcane shit then he may need our help with other manners as well, or at least can recommend us to one of his clients, or something... I don't have all the answers, but after missing out on a payment once, I can't just relax and read a book an experiment with my mojo... It took me two weeks to recover from the beating I was given. she says, a bit shaken by speaking of that experience.

[Jack_Spade]

Bobby returned to his normal form, hiking up his pants in the process: "Yeah, I hear you. The family is far from forgiving where debt is concerned. I forked over my complete share of this run to keep them away for the month, but I'm far from comfortable with our current situation.
I can ask Lysander and Livewire about work, but I don't expect much from them.
Captain Razak hasn't answered my call even though he was the one who suggested I join this outfit. Maybe we just need to do a bit of vigilante work - beat up criminals and steal their stuff. Those guys aren't particularly likely to go to KE or Lonestar about that."

[Tecumseh]

"We need a marketing plan!" Mato says with surprise conviction. He stabs the table with his index finger so hard that it leaves a dent. "My parents were corpers; my dad did finance while my mother did marketing. She did lots of these. You all remember the NanTek suite that High Plains Coding rolled out, right? The one that became the de-facto standard for generating nanoforge templates. No? Well that was her marketing plan."

He gets down to work. "We'll need a Matrix site. Nothing too complex; just a storefront for our capabilities and contact information. AM, you can do that, right? Jawsey can help you with translations. Let's get Japanese at least, Russian and Spanish next. We can put a basic analytics suite on our host to perform some site tracking, maybe figure out what content is resonating most with our potential customers. We'll need an outreach plan, something to get our name out there. I'll work on the strategy and metrics for success for that, so we can hold ourselves accountable. Bobby can..."

Mato casts a stray glance at Bobby, uncertain of whether he was going to be human, bear, ape, fox, eagle, naked, clothed, etc. Living with Bobby was weird. "... maybe work up some content on magical threat resolution."

Mato types furiously on his commlink, his cybernetically agile thumbs flying over the miniature keyboard as he records his thoughts.

[Beta]

Jawsey keeps a vaguely interested and encouraging look on his face, to keep from gaping open-mouthed.  It seemed that Mato had hidden depths that Jawsey hadn't even thought to look for.  Maybe it was the 'ware talking?  Certainly there was so little left of the orc's aura that it was a bit of a challenge to even tell that he was alive.

Eventually he responded "Translations, certainly I can do that.  I don't know much about business plans -- or business in general -- but I'm willing to read over it all to proof-read and all of that."  He definitely figures that it needs review by someone who is not Mato.

"In the meantime, I will reach out to my contacts too -- there may be things that they didn't look to me for as an individual, where they might be interested in us as a group.  Some of those contacts are on the more magical side of things, who are less likely to look for us on the matrix."

[Jack_Spade]

"Hm, I'm not sure I have any other threat solution to offer than beating the shit out of whatever threatens you. But if you want, we can make an image video with me playing some kind of dangerous critter that you heroically beat away. Then we'll just need an annoying jingle and lots and lots of tags that we place around the city to advertise our services: anyone getting close gets hit with our ARO and our advertising spot. Just have to make the video cool enough for people to watch it before filtering it out." Bobby replied. "In any case, I'd like to keep my ability out of the official records - it works best as a surprise."

[gilga]

AM blushes a bit when Bobby changes into his human form again. Now she has to men in partial clothing in the room, but at least Bobby wears pants. She makes herself some soycaff and curses herself for not being confident enough to establish some dress code for what essentially became her home.

She shrugs "Criminals are people too you know... we don't always have a choice in what we become."
She is more open tot he video suggestion.
 "Well... It can work... Gangers would love it."

and is taken by Mato's buissnes plan.
I can certainly make a website or a digital front for us - perhaps multiple fronts for different clients. Kind of like a business card, crystalize who we aspire to be.  I like the magical threats section, I think that having such a site would help us approach Arthur regarding the cards. SINNers don't like to work with shady criminals. So appearing more respected has its merits."

#I changed her to blue so it is different from Mato's red.

[Tecumseh]

"Yes!" Mato enthuses at Bobby's suggestion. He snaps to emphasize his assent, which comes across as a metallic plinking sound of titanium-on-titanium.

"That is so wiz; I love it! You'll be like 'RAAWR!' and I'll be like 'YEAH!' It'll be just like that Regional Geographic trid, Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory."

This idea clearly captivates Mato, who busily starts writing it into the business plan, his fluffy pink bathrobe shaking in excitement.

[gilga]

AM said "Great, let's do a trid, but for the spirit's sake, get dressed or people will think it is a porn movie. " She said clearly uncomfortable with the situation.

[Jack_Spade]

"I'm wearing trousers, ain't I." Bobby got up and stretched. He had eaten well in the last weeks and a thin fat layer had begun to form again on his body - which was good when you wanted to spend your time as lightly dressed as he did.
"I'm going full throttle and appear as a grizzly. I already know where we can film that: There is a dump half a block out from here. Besides rats and bussards their shouldn't be anyone disturbing us."
He went and picked up an armor jacket as well as a pair of sandals, making him look like a particularly militant hippie.