Session 8: July 25, 2009
Friday, February 21st, 2020 - about 1300 hours
We meet our intrepid group once more as they go out on a time honored chore: apartment hunting. After all, C-4’s family may have swanky digs in Little Italy, but sooner or later they are going to tire of A) some number of strangers shacking up in the guest rooms night-after-night, and B) that terror of a youngest child roaming the halls.
So, C-4, Marcia, and Red pull up in front of a promising find in the nearby Northside District. It’s a red-brick building, part of the original city construction as envisioned by the great Richard Alix Night (R.I.P. 1998) and one of the last remaining dedications to Mr. Night’s record of selfless public service. Or that’s what the beer-stained, bullet-holed, used-to-be-brass plaque on the cornerstone says. The dive in question is the Taira apartment complex, a low-rent, no-responsibility place where the management makes twenty copies of the key, doesn’t ask questions, and responds to a death in the apartment by selling a second copy of the key to someone else. On the whole, very anonymous, but very precarious. Understandably, they turn right around and march out the chain-link gate.
Friday, February 21st, 2020 - about 1200 hours
Meanwhile Asus and Louis are dead asleep in a coffin house at 12:01. Or they would be had the lights not snapped to 150% day-time brightness accompanied by air-raid sirens. The 90 or so odd coffins need cleaning, the occasional body disposal, and a few repairs, all before 4 o’clock, or the three guys overseeing operations will get the shaft from their manager. The two are hustled out of the coffin house and are sent down the street when they ask for coffee and internet access. Louis has had very little luck. Emily Wong with WNS shoots down his request to print a story on the rockin’ party he hosted last night – “WNS is paying you for the scoop on very important issues. If you are not concerned with those issues, then get your fat ass off the couch and get concerned, got it?” His blog remains covered in muffins – even his background has been changed to muffins by Rache. He goes to check his bank account. Gone. All 20eb of his within it have vanished. Several more minutes of back-and-forth between Louis and his unseen antagonist result in a near-pancaking-by-Genius-Car and a really creepy anthropomorphic muffin filling the screen before Louis shuts off the dataterm in question. Rache is on a muffin streak lately, and no one can be quite sure why.
Friday, February 21st, 2020 - about 1530 hours
The second prospect on the list for our intrepid hunters of living quarters is considerably better. An assembly of three similar condos, each with a for-rent sign in front, the same number on each. After two or so rings, someone picks up, and responds to the tour request with, “Of course! I’ll be right out!” Out the door of a small one-person house nearby comes a jocular, vaguely Hispanic-looking guy. “Good afternoon!” he enthuses. Introductions go around the four, after which the landlord, a Mr. Jaime Reyes, takes them into one of the condos. It’s a 3 bed/3 bath arrangement with kitchen, dining room and living room plus some, central heating, with a fenced-off, shaded, communal car-park in the back, currently home to a pair of Genius cars, a pick-up truck, and a classy sea-green sedan. The kitchen is somewhat skuzzy, the bathrooms need a fair amount of cleaning, and the carpeting looks old and ratty. After some quick negotiations, C-4 manages to barter down the rent to a mere three-k per month. Yeah, it’s expensive – but what do you expect for a decent 3-room property? The deal is signed for two condos – one for the guys, one for the gals, and the trio pile into the van to go get dinner. Oh, and to pick up the comatose Casio. And Holoman. To watch over Casio. In the new condos the PCs just leased. While the two of them are homeless. Observe Holoman’s somewhat glum expression. Oh well – could be worse. They could have left Louis behind to keep a watch.
Speaking of – the wayward party duo meet up with the house-hunting trio at the Medici family’s apartments for dinner – leftover three-cheese ravioli and home-made breadsticks smothered in garlic butter. Midway through the meal, C-4’s phone rings. It’s Zacharias – Zed for short – with his first lead on Xanatos, and requesting a meeting at the Night City Museum. It’s a short drive into the city-center in the North of town, but due to some bickering between C-4 and Louis in regards to his propriety in a museum, our intrepid… er, “heroes” arrive half-an-hour late while Louis and Asus are left at the condos. Wait, I thought we just said that… nevermind.
Friday, February 21st, 2020 - about 1900 hours
The museum is a grand sight, and it’s quite evident that someone’s spent a liberal ton of money here to create and maintain a pristine white interior, as graffiti-free a façade as can be maintained in the neighborhood, and a post-modern smorgasbord of moving art projected onto viewing screens lining the outside of a giant spiral ramp twisting its way up all four floors of the structure. In the center hangs a glittering glass chandelier upon which even more images are projected in a faint ghost of themselves. Displays range from a simply video-diary of one’s day, taken through a cyberoptic and edited down to a 1-hour “highlights reel,” to a scene being played out symmetrically by two different actresses, to a Jackson Paulick-esque parade of colors, to the filming of a small colony of butterflies as they whirl around within a containment box.
During the half-hour wait, Zed has been wandering from one display to the next, and C-4, Marcia, and Red finally catch up with him at the very last exhibit on the fourth floor, a tasteful portrayal of a kitchen’s daily routine, performed by an invisible man. A small packet of insta-eggs opens itself in midair and pours the delicious concoction onto a small, classy self-skillet on the counter-top. At once, the mix sizzles and hardens into oh so scrumptious Atkins-Insta-Egg, which the self-skillet flips in the air for show before letting it slide onto a plate set between a slice of Atkins-Bread-and-Breakfast toast with butter and a glass of refreshing Atkins-Citrus-Crush Orange Juice – all part of a nutritious and delightful breakfast! (Artwork Paid for by the Atkins Food Group, all rights reserved) Understandably, Zed is somewhat ticked about the time he has spent watching and listening to this drek, but all’s well when C-4 offers him a Tupperware of her mother’s ravioli-
-And before he can react, Zed sees a gunmetal object pointed towards him. Three gunshots ring out, nowhere near as deafening as they should be, and he feels a pair of bullets smash into his armored vest as he goes flying backwards, out cold from the impact by the time his head falls into the canvas display screen. The Insta-Egg yolk bleeds down into his eyes as he lays there stunned from the brutal attack.
Red reflexively swings around, pulling his firearm – in a split second his weapon is on target, and he looses a double-tap. The first bullet goes wide, but the second flies true and smashes a mook’s head like a melon. In a surprisingly unlucky moment of fate, Marcia’s needlegun jams on its first round. Thankfully, the second gunman in sight is caught in the middle of bringing his weapon around – a 9mm slug bores through the mook’s brain, courtesy of C-4. The trio dive for cover behind the half-wall ringing the inside edge of the spiral, C-4 dragging Zed in behind them where he comes to in moderate distress due to the nasty bruise he’s going to have. Over their heads, bullets rain in from two goons across the spiral from them.
Red swings his arm over the ledge and fires off two more shots – one mists a goon’s head, and the other forces a mook to dive for cover, which he uses to run a small ways down the ramp, followed by a softly cursing C-4 – where are her explosives when she needs them? With a bit of coaxing, Marcia’s finicky weapon spits out the jammed needle, and she chambers another one before firing it at a mook coming up the ramp a floor below. It flies true and imbeds itself in the mook’s armor, and he drops out of sight because he just got hit by a really scary ass needle. Meanwhile, Zed pops an octagon to dull the pain, then pulls out his digital camera and flips it to the video setting before playing it across the area over the wall. With it, he can see two mooks across the spiral from him, two more coming up the spiral a few floors down, and two stationed in the information desk in the center of the first floor – right beneath the chandelier… Hmm… He backs up against the far wall, out of sight of all the mooks, and aims carefully for the motor assembly holding up the glass and metal mobile with his .44 revolver. Meanwhile, a mook spots Red coming down the spiral and snaps off a shot at him – it misses.
Red’s doesn’t though – yet another head opens up in a bloody mess as the solo pushes forward around the spiral, braining another two as he comes around the bend. With magazine limits in mind, he tucks away his handgun, planning to pull his other one before reloading again while Marcia and C-4 follow close behind. Meanwhile, Zed takes the shot – the roar of a .44 rolls through the museum and masks the sound of the impact as the huge bullet cores the motor assembly. Over the cacophony of gunshots ringing through the building, he can distinctly hear the sound of a chain unspooling as the entire assembly drops two feet. Satisfied with at least distracting a great many people, Zed turns and enters a service and maintenance room where he finds a fusebox.
When he flips the switch, the entire museum goes dark. People continue screaming, but the gunshots stop – no one can see anyone else to shoot, and Zed dashes out the door of the service room, tossing his lit penlight over the side of the spiral while shouting “Grenade!” More important than that, though, is the ominous sound of the chain running out. Silence dominates the museum for a moment before—
CRASH! The entire glass and metal assembly smashes into the first floor down below, doing unspeakable horrors to the two unfortunate mooks behind the info-desk. Now the entire room really is silent from shock.
The first sound to come is the sickening crunch of Red smashing a trench spike through the head of a mook as he continues down the spiral, oblivious to the fact that he just ran past the stairs. The mook falls limp and Red moves forward, one hand on the railing, when he unexpectedly bumps into another mook – the one Marcia mentioned was incapacitated. Except this guy most definitely isn’t paralyzed, because he swings his SMG around and hauls back on the trigger. Red barely has time to swing, miss, and shout, “OH SHI—“ before twenty bullets slam into his armor.
None of them bite into flesh, but imagine what it would be like to take twenty slugs of dense metal-jacketed lead to soft yielding armor on the upper legs, hip, groin, and stomach. Needless to say, Red vomits in the mook’s face and collapses to the floor.
Marcia, cementing her reputation as “The one who will fuck you up in hand-to-hand,” darts forward and smashes the guy’s face with an elbow and putting him down for the count before she and C-4 drag Red back towards the stairs where Zed stands, having heard a whisper of Chinese below him. Bluffing his way down, he falls at the feet of the confused mook and babbles on for a few seconds before placing the barrel of a .38 snubnose in the groin of the poor sap and pulling the trigger. Zed is spackled with blood, gunpowder, and hot gas as the mook’s family jewels and plenty more are crushed by the bullet. Standing, he leads C-4 and Marcia, carrying Red, down the stairs onto the first floor as automatic weapons fire rings out in the spiral.
The hail of bullets outside is Louis’s grand entrance. Alerted to the situation by “a disturbance in the force,” he and Asus hightailed it over to the museum just in time for Louis to dash in, blindly volley off thirty rounds from his autopistol, and dash up the ramp, shooting anyone he finds. Asus, meanwhile, is following him more cautiously, checking each victim in turn. Civilian, civilian, civilian… uh oh. Two mooks open fire at Louis, tagging him once. The raging black man shrugs it off and keeps firing even as sirens start to sound in the distance as the police close in.
C-4, Marcia, and Red’s unconscious form make it to their minivan and haul off into the night, belching black oily smoke behind them. Louis and Asus leap into the latter’s motorcycle and similarly jet off into the night with a soft electric purr. Zed, however, walks nonchalantly towards his old, beat-up Civic. He doesn’t have much to hide, he believes, and hopefully the police will be more inclined to speak with him than put him behind bars. His Honda pulls out of the parking lot just in time for a NCPD Crown Vic and a Max-Tac van to block off the roads. Cops spill out, weapons at the ready as they form a perimeter and Max-Tac dashes in. Zed looks around at the winking red and blue lights of a loitering AV-4 as the scene fades to black.
Friday, February 21st, 2020 - 1939 hours
Night City MaxTac Team Bravo scrambled in response to reports of large firefight and possible hostage situation in the Night City Museum. Northern Units placed on alert, with Precinct One patrol units scrambled to respond. Overall ground control has been ceded to Sgt. Max Hammerman for the duration of the crisis. Response code Delta-4. On scene officers requesting forensics teams and two meatwagons and as many ambulances as can be spared. Updates pending.
END SESSION
Friday, July 31, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Cyberpunk Archive, May 16, 2009
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – about 1230 hours
Returning from our week-long hiatus, we find that Marcia is bored. Very bored. A few hours ago, she arranged for a seemingly decent fellow to receive an Internal Geiger Counter, and since then there hasn’t been any traffic. This all changes when her buzzer goes off.
Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of customer she wants. Standing outside the locked front door is a ‘Dorph addict looking to feed his hunger for the numbing drug. Marcia turns him away, which only makes his request turn into a demand. Pretty soon, he’s cursing up a storm and hurling invective at her through the intercom. He doesn’t seem to be leaving either. When Marcia asks Casio for help dealing with the situation, the netrunner gives a curt reply: “I’m busy right now; deal with him.”
Meanwhile, a few blocks north, C-4 is on her Vespa and headed back home, when she hears both a gunshot and the subsequent whine of a bullet overhead. Glancing around quickly, she sees that the gunshot came from within a Pre-fab modular home and continues on her way unphased. It’s a daily occurance. Alert, she next spots a NCPD Police officer walking the beat.
Wait, what? This isn’t really “deep” in the Combat Zone, but it’s the CZ nonetheless – what’s a cop doing here, and especially a beat-cop? They normally walk the streets of Moderate Zone neighborhoods and shopping centers, showing the badge and other stuff like that – and cops don’t come down this far south unless they’re responding to an “Officer Down” call. Alerting the beat cop to his location, C-4 points north – That way to safety – then continues.
When she turns the corner and arrives on the apartment complex’s street, C-4 sees what Marcia has already noticed: the ‘dorpher has been confronted by a trio of punks in grungy clothing. None of them have visible cyberware, and none of them have visible weapons, and all of them have a large vocabulary of four-letter words which they are hurling at one another with supreme gusto.
Sneaking up to the roof of the complex, C-4 watches as the four street folk descend into a scuffle. Three on one is normally a bad matchup, but when the one is on 2020’s version of PCP, it’s an even fight. Amused, C-4 starts up her music player and plays the Looney Tunes anthem. One of the punks is distracted and ends up eating a boot – oops. This enrages the other two punks, one of whom pops rippers from his hand. Suddenly the ‘dorpher’s odds dramatically plummet as he gets slashed several times before one punk puts him in a headlock while the other approaches with his bloody blades. It’s at this point that the same dumbass Rookie haplessly happens upon the scene and shouts, “Police, Freeze!”
Yes, the Rookie got lost, and is now twenty meters away from severe injury and dismemberment. Fortunately, C-4 intervenes – perfectly cooking a glowstick grenade into the midst of the brawl and knocking all three active combatants on their backsides. The Rookie calls in a clean-up crew which arrives in an AV-4 and picks up the four combatants plus a newly chastised Rookie.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – about 1300 hours
Meanwhile, Red continues on his little jaunt through the Combat Zone, having thrown his loot up into the heavens and received cold, hard cash in return. After a brief passing between him and a quartet of nomads riding sturdy bikes, Red is distracted by a butterfly – it lands on his nose, flaps its wings once, then takes off again. When he regains his composure, Red realizes that he stands ten meters away from a parked car – a black Ford Crown Victoria with heavily tinted windows and a single green vine stenciled on the driver’s door – a Biotechnica sedan.
More importantly, a gruff man is standing on the sidewalk. He sports a forest green flak-jacket layered over a black bodysuit and field-cap. The Biotechnica logo is brazenly displayed on his cap, shoulder, and left breast-pocket; trailing from his right sleeve, a wire neatly fits into a port in the handle of his Sternmeyer Type-21 Heavy SMG held at the ready at his waist. He is intimidating as hell, and says three words: “Back off, punk.”
Red, feeling quite overconfident after his earlier encounter with a pair of boosters, decides to be cute. In response to his insipid line of questioning, the Biotechnica guard demands once more that Red back away and find a different route to his destination. Red asks, “How do you know that I’m not carrying explosives in this bag?” The guard, not blinking an eye, shoots a bullet through the duffel bag, wrecking a MAC-14. “That’s how.” The gunshot causes two more guards in identical garb to open their doors and step out of the parked Crown Vic, each brandishing heavy pistols. Sufficiently chastised, Red backs off.
Back at the apartment, Holo-man hands a newly acquired Internal Geiger Counter to Marcia, who calls the foreman in to get the surgery done early. He arrives, pays, signs a letter of consent to surgery and excusing Marcia from any malpractice suits (hah) and then goes under. The surgery is successful and Marcia wakes the foreman and sends him on his way. All the while, C-4 has been playing romantic Christmas music loudly through the wall of the apartment, much to Marcia’s consternation. Marcia’s reward for the surgery? A net profit of 200eb in addition to a nice tip in regards to an herb shop in Chinatown.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – about 1430 hours
Waiting at the mouth of an alley, Red is greeted by a fellow who introduces himself as Trout – the recipient of Red’s duffel bag. The fishy man accepts the delivery and hands Red a small data-chit – an electronic receipt to return to Murdoch. As he walks back out onto the street, Red watches as a banged-up Mitsubishi hatchback skids to a halt on the side of the road. Its armored hide is covered in bullet dents, burns and other scars of combat, all glossed over with liberally applied checkered paint, and the Combat Cabb logo is emblazoned across the driver’s door. Out stumbles a dizzy passenger who tosses a 50eb bill into the driver’s window and walks away. How convenient!
Red arrives back at Murdoch’s corner a few minutes later and gives Murdoch the data chit. Slipping it into a chip reader, Murdoch grunts and hands Red his pay, plus a 50eb bonus. Red then hands it all right back, asking instead for a cleaning kit for his pistols. Rummaging around for a few minutes, the dealer finally finds what he’s looking for and hands Red a small leather pouch with just about anything a solo could need to maintain his pieces.
As Red returns semi-triumphantly to the apartments, C-4 is finishing up a batch of glowstick grenades (glowsticks imbibed with a stable liquid explosive and an electronically timed detonator). They cost 10eb each to make and have a base market value of around 40eb. Marcia answers her buzzer and receives a straightforward customer – a fellow got into a mid-afternoon barroom brawl and suffered a rather nasty cut. A simple affair of sewing him up and treating him for infection, she charges 75eb for the visit. Hey, if you don’t want to pay, feel free to bleed on the street.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – about 1800 hours
As evening strikes, the four munch down on some kibble (yum yum delish!) and go for a stroll in Chinatown. Asus, wistful for a word from his family on the road to the ruins of Los Angeles, keeps an eye out for an internet café while Marcia goes in search of the aforementioned herbal shop and C-4 cackles manically while in search of fireworks. Of course, they have to navigate huge crowds – it’s the New Year, and the entirety of Chinatown is ringing in the Year of the Rat with fanfare and fireworks and parades.
Present too, however, are the ruffians of Chinatown including an 11-year-old boy with sly hands disguised in the throngs of revelers. Red, walking beside Asus, is barely able to feel the kid’s fingers gently start to lift his wallet from a pocket. With lightning speed, Red snatches the kid’s wrists and slams him into the ground. After retrieving the kid’s ill-gotten wares, Red hauls him up by his windbreaker and makes his way towards two beat cops walking the crowd, accompanied by an alert Asus.
And a good thing too – Asus spots a disturbance behind him that Red misses – a pair of rather shady-looking goons is pushing their way through the ground towards them. Unfortunately for Red and Asus, it looks like the goons will catch up with them before they reach the cops, so Red attempts to completely lift the kid off the ground by his jacket.
WHUMP! The kid wriggles out of his windbreaker, hits the ground and gets up running, escaping before Red or Asus can do anything about it and leaving the Solo with a kid-sized windbreaker in his hand and nothing else. Shrugging, Red begins to rifle through the jacket, finding a small switchblade before…
“Into the alley. Now.” The growl is accompanied by the smack of rounds being chambered in rather large-caliber auto-pistols.
Asus twitches first, spinning and striking out with the stock of his rifle – he succeeds in buttstroking the arm of the goon directly behind him. Red, meanwhile, quickdraws his Sternmeyer Type 35’s and attempts to pistolwhip the fellow behind him into submission – unfortunately, Red’s balance is off and his attack only deals a glancing blow to the goon’s face. Meanwhile, Asus’s goon fires a shot from his pistol, barely missing Asus’s stomach as the Nomad steps inside the goon’s reach. Red’s goon is luckier, firing a single shot into the Solo’s center mass! The bullet slams into Red’s hardened jacket and is halted, but the trauma going past punches against Red hard – it may have cracked his sternum, or at least that’s what it feels like.
Asus attempts to pull his rifle back so that he can shoot his goon at point blank, but the goon grabs ahold of the rifle and wrenches it, causing Asus’s sweaty hands to lose grip – the rifle pops into the goon’s hands! In a frenzy from the impact of the .45 caliber round, Red fires twice with both of his guns at the goon before him, shredding the hapless bloke: one in each arm and two in the torso – needless to say, the goon goes down with massive injuries.
Asus, meanwhile, leaps forward and tackles his goon to the ground next to his writhing, mortally wounded compatriot. Pressing down on the rifle, Asus crunches the barrel into the goon’s neck. It’s at this point though, that Red realizes that the two cops are on their way over, and they don’t look too happy. From a quick glance, the solo can see at least six badly injured civilians, victims of through-and-through shots. Delivering a swift coup-de-grace to his downed opponent, Asus stands and joins Red in GTFO’ing, and together they barely manage to avoid the police manhunt by fleeing for about twenty minutes.
Unfortunately, neither of them has any idea where their panicked flight has taken them. They stare around the neighborhood in puzzlement… Lost in Night City – not good.
GM'S NOTE: Okay PCs, this was your real first taste of combat. Remember a few lessons from this: 1) Combat is fast. This entire encounter took 3 turns from the goons’ threat – that’s approximately 10 seconds, give or take. 2) Combat is brutal. This isn’t D&D where you compare stats and subtract HP from both combatants until one of them reaches 0 and magically turns into a pumpkin with loot. A total of six bullets were fired in the engagement, 2 by the Tong goons, 4 by Red. Those four bullets effectively swamped the guy’s damage chart, shattering both arms and collapsing a lung, and he didn’t have a chance in hell of surviving them. That also works the other way though, so this is the general rule for survival:
PLAY SMART! If you don’t know if an action is smart or you can’t think of anything besides “Point gun at man, pull trigger,” then feel free to ask me. I made a mistake by not informing Calvin that his Solo would probably have known that a pistol-whip wouldn’t have that much effect on a target he couldn’t see. I’ll do better next time.
So, I’ll be out of the country for about a week and a half starting from Wednesday. Contact me via Facebook if you need anything, and I’ll try to make it to internet access at least once daily.
END SESSION
Returning from our week-long hiatus, we find that Marcia is bored. Very bored. A few hours ago, she arranged for a seemingly decent fellow to receive an Internal Geiger Counter, and since then there hasn’t been any traffic. This all changes when her buzzer goes off.
Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of customer she wants. Standing outside the locked front door is a ‘Dorph addict looking to feed his hunger for the numbing drug. Marcia turns him away, which only makes his request turn into a demand. Pretty soon, he’s cursing up a storm and hurling invective at her through the intercom. He doesn’t seem to be leaving either. When Marcia asks Casio for help dealing with the situation, the netrunner gives a curt reply: “I’m busy right now; deal with him.”
Meanwhile, a few blocks north, C-4 is on her Vespa and headed back home, when she hears both a gunshot and the subsequent whine of a bullet overhead. Glancing around quickly, she sees that the gunshot came from within a Pre-fab modular home and continues on her way unphased. It’s a daily occurance. Alert, she next spots a NCPD Police officer walking the beat.
Wait, what? This isn’t really “deep” in the Combat Zone, but it’s the CZ nonetheless – what’s a cop doing here, and especially a beat-cop? They normally walk the streets of Moderate Zone neighborhoods and shopping centers, showing the badge and other stuff like that – and cops don’t come down this far south unless they’re responding to an “Officer Down” call. Alerting the beat cop to his location, C-4 points north – That way to safety – then continues.
When she turns the corner and arrives on the apartment complex’s street, C-4 sees what Marcia has already noticed: the ‘dorpher has been confronted by a trio of punks in grungy clothing. None of them have visible cyberware, and none of them have visible weapons, and all of them have a large vocabulary of four-letter words which they are hurling at one another with supreme gusto.
Sneaking up to the roof of the complex, C-4 watches as the four street folk descend into a scuffle. Three on one is normally a bad matchup, but when the one is on 2020’s version of PCP, it’s an even fight. Amused, C-4 starts up her music player and plays the Looney Tunes anthem. One of the punks is distracted and ends up eating a boot – oops. This enrages the other two punks, one of whom pops rippers from his hand. Suddenly the ‘dorpher’s odds dramatically plummet as he gets slashed several times before one punk puts him in a headlock while the other approaches with his bloody blades. It’s at this point that the same dumbass Rookie haplessly happens upon the scene and shouts, “Police, Freeze!”
Yes, the Rookie got lost, and is now twenty meters away from severe injury and dismemberment. Fortunately, C-4 intervenes – perfectly cooking a glowstick grenade into the midst of the brawl and knocking all three active combatants on their backsides. The Rookie calls in a clean-up crew which arrives in an AV-4 and picks up the four combatants plus a newly chastised Rookie.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – about 1300 hours
Meanwhile, Red continues on his little jaunt through the Combat Zone, having thrown his loot up into the heavens and received cold, hard cash in return. After a brief passing between him and a quartet of nomads riding sturdy bikes, Red is distracted by a butterfly – it lands on his nose, flaps its wings once, then takes off again. When he regains his composure, Red realizes that he stands ten meters away from a parked car – a black Ford Crown Victoria with heavily tinted windows and a single green vine stenciled on the driver’s door – a Biotechnica sedan.
More importantly, a gruff man is standing on the sidewalk. He sports a forest green flak-jacket layered over a black bodysuit and field-cap. The Biotechnica logo is brazenly displayed on his cap, shoulder, and left breast-pocket; trailing from his right sleeve, a wire neatly fits into a port in the handle of his Sternmeyer Type-21 Heavy SMG held at the ready at his waist. He is intimidating as hell, and says three words: “Back off, punk.”
Red, feeling quite overconfident after his earlier encounter with a pair of boosters, decides to be cute. In response to his insipid line of questioning, the Biotechnica guard demands once more that Red back away and find a different route to his destination. Red asks, “How do you know that I’m not carrying explosives in this bag?” The guard, not blinking an eye, shoots a bullet through the duffel bag, wrecking a MAC-14. “That’s how.” The gunshot causes two more guards in identical garb to open their doors and step out of the parked Crown Vic, each brandishing heavy pistols. Sufficiently chastised, Red backs off.
Back at the apartment, Holo-man hands a newly acquired Internal Geiger Counter to Marcia, who calls the foreman in to get the surgery done early. He arrives, pays, signs a letter of consent to surgery and excusing Marcia from any malpractice suits (hah) and then goes under. The surgery is successful and Marcia wakes the foreman and sends him on his way. All the while, C-4 has been playing romantic Christmas music loudly through the wall of the apartment, much to Marcia’s consternation. Marcia’s reward for the surgery? A net profit of 200eb in addition to a nice tip in regards to an herb shop in Chinatown.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – about 1430 hours
Waiting at the mouth of an alley, Red is greeted by a fellow who introduces himself as Trout – the recipient of Red’s duffel bag. The fishy man accepts the delivery and hands Red a small data-chit – an electronic receipt to return to Murdoch. As he walks back out onto the street, Red watches as a banged-up Mitsubishi hatchback skids to a halt on the side of the road. Its armored hide is covered in bullet dents, burns and other scars of combat, all glossed over with liberally applied checkered paint, and the Combat Cabb logo is emblazoned across the driver’s door. Out stumbles a dizzy passenger who tosses a 50eb bill into the driver’s window and walks away. How convenient!
Red arrives back at Murdoch’s corner a few minutes later and gives Murdoch the data chit. Slipping it into a chip reader, Murdoch grunts and hands Red his pay, plus a 50eb bonus. Red then hands it all right back, asking instead for a cleaning kit for his pistols. Rummaging around for a few minutes, the dealer finally finds what he’s looking for and hands Red a small leather pouch with just about anything a solo could need to maintain his pieces.
As Red returns semi-triumphantly to the apartments, C-4 is finishing up a batch of glowstick grenades (glowsticks imbibed with a stable liquid explosive and an electronically timed detonator). They cost 10eb each to make and have a base market value of around 40eb. Marcia answers her buzzer and receives a straightforward customer – a fellow got into a mid-afternoon barroom brawl and suffered a rather nasty cut. A simple affair of sewing him up and treating him for infection, she charges 75eb for the visit. Hey, if you don’t want to pay, feel free to bleed on the street.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – about 1800 hours
As evening strikes, the four munch down on some kibble (yum yum delish!) and go for a stroll in Chinatown. Asus, wistful for a word from his family on the road to the ruins of Los Angeles, keeps an eye out for an internet café while Marcia goes in search of the aforementioned herbal shop and C-4 cackles manically while in search of fireworks. Of course, they have to navigate huge crowds – it’s the New Year, and the entirety of Chinatown is ringing in the Year of the Rat with fanfare and fireworks and parades.
Present too, however, are the ruffians of Chinatown including an 11-year-old boy with sly hands disguised in the throngs of revelers. Red, walking beside Asus, is barely able to feel the kid’s fingers gently start to lift his wallet from a pocket. With lightning speed, Red snatches the kid’s wrists and slams him into the ground. After retrieving the kid’s ill-gotten wares, Red hauls him up by his windbreaker and makes his way towards two beat cops walking the crowd, accompanied by an alert Asus.
And a good thing too – Asus spots a disturbance behind him that Red misses – a pair of rather shady-looking goons is pushing their way through the ground towards them. Unfortunately for Red and Asus, it looks like the goons will catch up with them before they reach the cops, so Red attempts to completely lift the kid off the ground by his jacket.
WHUMP! The kid wriggles out of his windbreaker, hits the ground and gets up running, escaping before Red or Asus can do anything about it and leaving the Solo with a kid-sized windbreaker in his hand and nothing else. Shrugging, Red begins to rifle through the jacket, finding a small switchblade before…
“Into the alley. Now.” The growl is accompanied by the smack of rounds being chambered in rather large-caliber auto-pistols.
Asus twitches first, spinning and striking out with the stock of his rifle – he succeeds in buttstroking the arm of the goon directly behind him. Red, meanwhile, quickdraws his Sternmeyer Type 35’s and attempts to pistolwhip the fellow behind him into submission – unfortunately, Red’s balance is off and his attack only deals a glancing blow to the goon’s face. Meanwhile, Asus’s goon fires a shot from his pistol, barely missing Asus’s stomach as the Nomad steps inside the goon’s reach. Red’s goon is luckier, firing a single shot into the Solo’s center mass! The bullet slams into Red’s hardened jacket and is halted, but the trauma going past punches against Red hard – it may have cracked his sternum, or at least that’s what it feels like.
Asus attempts to pull his rifle back so that he can shoot his goon at point blank, but the goon grabs ahold of the rifle and wrenches it, causing Asus’s sweaty hands to lose grip – the rifle pops into the goon’s hands! In a frenzy from the impact of the .45 caliber round, Red fires twice with both of his guns at the goon before him, shredding the hapless bloke: one in each arm and two in the torso – needless to say, the goon goes down with massive injuries.
Asus, meanwhile, leaps forward and tackles his goon to the ground next to his writhing, mortally wounded compatriot. Pressing down on the rifle, Asus crunches the barrel into the goon’s neck. It’s at this point though, that Red realizes that the two cops are on their way over, and they don’t look too happy. From a quick glance, the solo can see at least six badly injured civilians, victims of through-and-through shots. Delivering a swift coup-de-grace to his downed opponent, Asus stands and joins Red in GTFO’ing, and together they barely manage to avoid the police manhunt by fleeing for about twenty minutes.
Unfortunately, neither of them has any idea where their panicked flight has taken them. They stare around the neighborhood in puzzlement… Lost in Night City – not good.
GM'S NOTE: Okay PCs, this was your real first taste of combat. Remember a few lessons from this: 1) Combat is fast. This entire encounter took 3 turns from the goons’ threat – that’s approximately 10 seconds, give or take. 2) Combat is brutal. This isn’t D&D where you compare stats and subtract HP from both combatants until one of them reaches 0 and magically turns into a pumpkin with loot. A total of six bullets were fired in the engagement, 2 by the Tong goons, 4 by Red. Those four bullets effectively swamped the guy’s damage chart, shattering both arms and collapsing a lung, and he didn’t have a chance in hell of surviving them. That also works the other way though, so this is the general rule for survival:
PLAY SMART! If you don’t know if an action is smart or you can’t think of anything besides “Point gun at man, pull trigger,” then feel free to ask me. I made a mistake by not informing Calvin that his Solo would probably have known that a pistol-whip wouldn’t have that much effect on a target he couldn’t see. I’ll do better next time.
So, I’ll be out of the country for about a week and a half starting from Wednesday. Contact me via Facebook if you need anything, and I’ll try to make it to internet access at least once daily.
END SESSION
Monday, May 11, 2009
Cyberpunk Archive, May 9, 2009
GM's NOTE: I've gone back and retconned some names, some because I accidentally identified the wrong NPC, and some because I don't remember what name I gave them on the fly. Most notably, the high-level Netwatch official is actually Magnificent Curtis - Edger is in fact a Night City-based netrunner, and not a member of Netwatch.
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2020 – about 1600 Hours
Two weeks earlier, Aces (BJ) finds a vintage Winchester M70 rifle that is a significant object of desire for him. On the rack at a pawn-shop owned by a gruff man named Tommy, the gun won’t find someone else’s hands for less than two-grand of eb or a huge favor. Since Aces doesn’t have the former, he’s got to settle for the latter, and he does – getting instructions to deliver a small parcel to a fellow called Curtis on the Northeast docks.
Aces heads up via MagLev and makes contact with Curtis, who instructs him to leave the package on a bench in the park. They are observed by a man with mirrorshades reading a full sized newspaper. In the park, Aces leaves the package as instructed, but it is snatched up almost at once by the man in mirrorshades. Following the man, Aces approaches him as he awaits pick-up and challenges him in regards to the parcel. The man drops a flashbang, blinding and stunning Aces, and when the nomad comes to, the man in mirrorshades is gone.
Returning to the Combat Zone, Aces attempted to fool Tommy into thinking that he’d delivered the parcel, but Tommy had already gotten an e-mail from Curtis in regards to that. Pulling a shotgun on Aces, Tommy said, "I like your style kid, it'd be a shame to waste you. Now get out."
Upon returning to his flat, Aces found an angry, untraceable message awaiting him courtesy of Curtis, who turns out to be Magnificent Curtis, or more formally: Director, Netwatch Pacifica.
Monday, February 17th, 2020 – about 1900 Hours
We find the PCs at a gathering downstairs in the lobby of their apartment building. “Casio,” the landlord, has organized the mixer in time honored tradition to welcome her newest tenant, a fixer by the name of “Holo-man.” It is an enjoyable social, with the dozen or so tenants getting to know their neighbors. Shepard, friend of several of the tenants as well as Holo-man, shows up with news for him which only Red (Calvin) overhears:
[snip - Only Calvin can know this until the relevant plot is resolved]
Afterwards, the party winds down and everyone heads to bed.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 - 0600 Hours
Red awakes bright and early, shrugs on his clothes and gets down into the lobby just in time to partake in some of the piping hot coffee and a synthdonut set out by Casio. He hits the street at around 0640, tossing the empty cup aside and making his way around town. Stopping by Murdoch, the corner weapons dealer, Red is asked for a job. Murdoch’s normal courier hasn’t shown up today, and Murdoch needs a weapons shipment delivered to a fellow about twenty blocks from there. Red agrees, and receives a duffel and the instructions to use the shipment if he needs to. After walking a good distance, Red takes a peek inside: 2 MAC-14s and 2 Colt AMTs – fairly ubiquitious pieces, good for the average edgerunner. A few more steps however, encourage him to check again as he can hear something else jingling. He finds a secret compartment in the bottom containting a mint-condition/factory-fresh smartchipped Militech Renegade SAW, street value around four-grand in eb. Someone is planning to do some damage.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – about 0700 Hours
Meanwhile back at the apartments, C4 (Yisu) is up and about, blasting Beethoven’s Fifth at top volume (enough to wake up Marcia [Olivia] next door). The two of them get ready and open business for the day, Marcia by hanging a “the Doctor is IN” sign outside, and C4 by walking over to the Forlorn Hope and asking Blue Ibis for a tip. The fixer obliges and points C4 towards an old watering station (storage unit used as a water “tower” of sorts) that has fallen into disrepair. For 200eb, C4 detonates it as requested, but not before dyeing the water a bright turquoise and arranging the explosives to implode the container and spray water hundreds of feet into the air.
Marcia, meanwhile, has received her first customer of the day – a newly promoted Foreman at a mine to the east of Night City who wants an Internal Geiger Counter installed to monitor radiation levels within the mineshaft. He offers her 400eb for the procedure and she schedules him out for 1400 hours on Thursday, Feb. 20th. After sending him on his way, she hits up Holoman to see if he can scare up the actual piece of cyberware itself, and he pledges to have it to her by 1500 hours this afternoon for 200eb.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – 1200 Hours
Aces, ever the heavy sleeper, wakes when a nearby building detonates and a shower of blue liquid splashes across his window. Fending off his hangover with a beer, he stumbles downstairs and asks Casio for some work. She tells him the location of an intersection in a commercial district in the Moderate Zone and asks him to cut the power in the area if nearby cars start honking their horns. He obliges, grabs a cup of cold coffee and a half-eaten donut and gets to the intersection without fanfare. Standing there for ten minutes, he is approached by a cop, but manages to talk his way out of any trouble despite having a hunting-rifle slung over his shoulder. Finally, his moment comes when the ferrocrete canyons come alive with the braying of dozens of parked cars. He unslings his rifle, racks a round into the chamber, and shoots the nearby transformer, cutting power to the block around him. Unfortunately, this draws the ire of a nearby storeowner, who starts taking potshots at him with a Federated Arms X-9. Returning fire, Aces grazes the storeowner’s leg, and the hapless fellow falls to the ground. Before any law enforcement arrives, Aces jets and comes back to the apartment to find Casio waiting with a payment of 200eb.
And Red’s random encounter finishes out the session, as he comes face to face with a pair of Smashed boosters. He readies his weapons and stands his ground as they hassle him, managing to unnerve the follower, but the Alpha booster steps up to the plate and charges Red, cybernetic fist cocked for a punch to end all punches. It doesn’t land though, as Red ducks the punch, pivots on one foot, and trips the hapless booster, who eats concrete. Bad. As a finishing touch, Red draws his large caliber pistol on the floored Alpha and one of the MAC-14s on his follower (who flees in terror) as a nearby building implodes and showers the scene with a torrent of blue liquid. Stripping the concussed Alpha of anything valuable, he comes up with a small gold necklace, a banged-up DaiLung Cybermag, and a few rounds of 6mm ammo, which sell for a total of 81eb. Things are lookin’ up.
END SESSION.
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2020 – about 1600 Hours
Two weeks earlier, Aces (BJ) finds a vintage Winchester M70 rifle that is a significant object of desire for him. On the rack at a pawn-shop owned by a gruff man named Tommy, the gun won’t find someone else’s hands for less than two-grand of eb or a huge favor. Since Aces doesn’t have the former, he’s got to settle for the latter, and he does – getting instructions to deliver a small parcel to a fellow called Curtis on the Northeast docks.
Aces heads up via MagLev and makes contact with Curtis, who instructs him to leave the package on a bench in the park. They are observed by a man with mirrorshades reading a full sized newspaper. In the park, Aces leaves the package as instructed, but it is snatched up almost at once by the man in mirrorshades. Following the man, Aces approaches him as he awaits pick-up and challenges him in regards to the parcel. The man drops a flashbang, blinding and stunning Aces, and when the nomad comes to, the man in mirrorshades is gone.
Returning to the Combat Zone, Aces attempted to fool Tommy into thinking that he’d delivered the parcel, but Tommy had already gotten an e-mail from Curtis in regards to that. Pulling a shotgun on Aces, Tommy said, "I like your style kid, it'd be a shame to waste you. Now get out."
Upon returning to his flat, Aces found an angry, untraceable message awaiting him courtesy of Curtis, who turns out to be Magnificent Curtis, or more formally: Director, Netwatch Pacifica.
Monday, February 17th, 2020 – about 1900 Hours
We find the PCs at a gathering downstairs in the lobby of their apartment building. “Casio,” the landlord, has organized the mixer in time honored tradition to welcome her newest tenant, a fixer by the name of “Holo-man.” It is an enjoyable social, with the dozen or so tenants getting to know their neighbors. Shepard, friend of several of the tenants as well as Holo-man, shows up with news for him which only Red (Calvin) overhears:
[snip - Only Calvin can know this until the relevant plot is resolved]
Afterwards, the party winds down and everyone heads to bed.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 - 0600 Hours
Red awakes bright and early, shrugs on his clothes and gets down into the lobby just in time to partake in some of the piping hot coffee and a synthdonut set out by Casio. He hits the street at around 0640, tossing the empty cup aside and making his way around town. Stopping by Murdoch, the corner weapons dealer, Red is asked for a job. Murdoch’s normal courier hasn’t shown up today, and Murdoch needs a weapons shipment delivered to a fellow about twenty blocks from there. Red agrees, and receives a duffel and the instructions to use the shipment if he needs to. After walking a good distance, Red takes a peek inside: 2 MAC-14s and 2 Colt AMTs – fairly ubiquitious pieces, good for the average edgerunner. A few more steps however, encourage him to check again as he can hear something else jingling. He finds a secret compartment in the bottom containting a mint-condition/factory-fresh smartchipped Militech Renegade SAW, street value around four-grand in eb. Someone is planning to do some damage.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – about 0700 Hours
Meanwhile back at the apartments, C4 (Yisu) is up and about, blasting Beethoven’s Fifth at top volume (enough to wake up Marcia [Olivia] next door). The two of them get ready and open business for the day, Marcia by hanging a “the Doctor is IN” sign outside, and C4 by walking over to the Forlorn Hope and asking Blue Ibis for a tip. The fixer obliges and points C4 towards an old watering station (storage unit used as a water “tower” of sorts) that has fallen into disrepair. For 200eb, C4 detonates it as requested, but not before dyeing the water a bright turquoise and arranging the explosives to implode the container and spray water hundreds of feet into the air.
Marcia, meanwhile, has received her first customer of the day – a newly promoted Foreman at a mine to the east of Night City who wants an Internal Geiger Counter installed to monitor radiation levels within the mineshaft. He offers her 400eb for the procedure and she schedules him out for 1400 hours on Thursday, Feb. 20th. After sending him on his way, she hits up Holoman to see if he can scare up the actual piece of cyberware itself, and he pledges to have it to her by 1500 hours this afternoon for 200eb.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 – 1200 Hours
Aces, ever the heavy sleeper, wakes when a nearby building detonates and a shower of blue liquid splashes across his window. Fending off his hangover with a beer, he stumbles downstairs and asks Casio for some work. She tells him the location of an intersection in a commercial district in the Moderate Zone and asks him to cut the power in the area if nearby cars start honking their horns. He obliges, grabs a cup of cold coffee and a half-eaten donut and gets to the intersection without fanfare. Standing there for ten minutes, he is approached by a cop, but manages to talk his way out of any trouble despite having a hunting-rifle slung over his shoulder. Finally, his moment comes when the ferrocrete canyons come alive with the braying of dozens of parked cars. He unslings his rifle, racks a round into the chamber, and shoots the nearby transformer, cutting power to the block around him. Unfortunately, this draws the ire of a nearby storeowner, who starts taking potshots at him with a Federated Arms X-9. Returning fire, Aces grazes the storeowner’s leg, and the hapless fellow falls to the ground. Before any law enforcement arrives, Aces jets and comes back to the apartment to find Casio waiting with a payment of 200eb.
And Red’s random encounter finishes out the session, as he comes face to face with a pair of Smashed boosters. He readies his weapons and stands his ground as they hassle him, managing to unnerve the follower, but the Alpha booster steps up to the plate and charges Red, cybernetic fist cocked for a punch to end all punches. It doesn’t land though, as Red ducks the punch, pivots on one foot, and trips the hapless booster, who eats concrete. Bad. As a finishing touch, Red draws his large caliber pistol on the floored Alpha and one of the MAC-14s on his follower (who flees in terror) as a nearby building implodes and showers the scene with a torrent of blue liquid. Stripping the concussed Alpha of anything valuable, he comes up with a small gold necklace, a banged-up DaiLung Cybermag, and a few rounds of 6mm ammo, which sell for a total of 81eb. Things are lookin’ up.
END SESSION.
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