>>18305008

When we last left off, the team had been recruited at gunpoint to kill the proxy-nightmare hacker Two-Times, as he had made off with Ares' experimental datadog. The mission was to neutralize the hacker and retrieve the dog to have the data on it erased. The payment was one million nuyen and, after a little nagging from TwoDee, the dog itself. The punishment for failure, death.

Because of the aforementioned proxy nightmarehood, the team was bound for Vegas to hunt down a master of disguise named Joy, one of Two-Times' confidants. A compulsive gambler, Joy would be SOMEWHERE in Vegas. The problem, of course, was that he could also be ANYONE in Vegas.

The team had a few hours on the plane in which to prepare for this first leg of their mission. Dervish did some skillsoft training, Tank dicked around and watched trid, TwoDee compiled and registered a few more
sprites, and Geppetto had a more...interesting task.

>>18305089

You see, Geppetto was not happy with his spirits. The callousness of one particular Spirit of Man had nearly cost Dervish his head, and had in fact already cost him part of it, if not the whole. Dervish seemed to be mostly back to normal, but the high-caliber rifle round jiggling around in his skull was a serious reminder that all was not well on the Astral Plane.

Geppetto traveled to the plane of his Mentor Spirit, Adversary. Adversary manifested as his doppelganger, cruel and pale and eerily beautiful. The two eyed each other for a brief moment, and then Geppetto posed his request: he wanted his spirits to be properly obedient.

Adversary grinned, revealing thin, sharp teeth, and chuckled deeply. It promised Geppetto that his spirits would follow his every whim to the letter and the--pardon the pun--spirit, whatever he wished, if he would but allow Adversary a small...service.

Anything, Geppetto said.

Adversary made his offer thusly: It had been so long since he, a spirit of innumerably high force, had smelled the human refuse on the material plane, had tasted their rancid air...and, why, Geppetto really had no purpose for sleep anymore, being a banshee, no? Adversary wanted--needed--an avatar, and if Geppetto could just sleep nightly as normal, then he would be returned to his bed, unharmed, by morning, and all would be as it should be as far as he was concerned. A pittance, really. Like a time-share on life.

Huzzah! I found you, runners!

Welcome back TwoDee!

>Archangels ipasve

Yes, captcha, the archangels must have been passive at this moment, otherwise they never would have allowed Geppetto to do this.

>>18305201

Geppetto agreed, with a few exceptions:

1) No endangering the team, directly or indirectly.
2) Any team member could tell Adversary to wake Geppetto up in an emergency, and he would hold up to it. If Adversary (or his proxy, as it turned out, a Force 14 Black Magic Free Spirit) felt that this was being abused, he could call for a renegotiation of contract.

Adversary made a toothy smile and said that this would be fine by it. It would hopefully be seeing Geppetto...soon.

With a smile, Geppetto woke up in his airplane chair and knew that it was the dawn of a new era.

The team arrived in Vegas and felt like they were being watched. They didn't look like mobsters (well, everyone except Geppetto), gamblers, or depressed sararimen looking to feel something, so the city wasn't especially welcoming to them. The ambiance just wasn't there. Even the Matrix felt weird to TwoDee, all gambling sites and virtual slot machines and none of the pervasive corporate propaganda of Seattle.

Vegas being a mob-controlled town in NAN territory probably had something to do with that.

Not wanting to ring anyone's bells, the team bought two rooms at a midprice Radisson off the strip, and began setting up.

Go on OP

>>18305218
>>18305282

Thank you thank you. I have no notes for this, so I'm going all from memory, so it may take a while to type out each post. Hope you're okay with that.

>>18305298

It was at this point in the session that Tank dropped the bomb. Namely that this would be his last session because his player suddenly had family obligations on our normal Shadowrun nights. None of us were, say, bawling that he had to go, but it was kind of dick on all involved that it had to be dropped on us so suddenly that he was dropping out of the game. He also couldn't reschedule, because this was family obligations of the "his Dad, the only member of his family who drives, believed that games were a waste of his time and banned his son from playing them so he could have more FAMILY TIME" variety.

>inb4 shouldn't be playing with high schoolers; he's older than I am

Considering Tank was deeply entrenched in the plot and his sister had been effectively adopted by TwoDee's girlfriend by this point, there wasn't really much of an option left. He had to disappear or get killed off, because the GM did not particularly relish the thought of GMPCing Tank's character for the entirety of the Two-Times arc, which he had planned as a year-long multi-continent bonanza.

So, the GM insured Tank's player it was okay, and although he was a little annoyed that all the metaplot he'd written up for Tank was getting abandoned (thereby wasting hours of his time) that Tank would get written out of the story. Tank's player didn't exactly like the sound of this, but he didn't have much of a choice because he was bouncing at this point.

>>18305369

So, that night, 2D called up his girlfriend to make sure that she and Arianna were okay, Dervish decided to take a walk to scope out Vegas, and Geppetto fell asleep and promptly got back up again. He cordially introduced himself to 2D, who in turn identified himself as a big fan of Adversary's work and offered him some AR shades.

Adversary: "Oh? And these are?"

TwoDee: "AR Shades. I get rights to the footage, by the way."

Adversary: "Oh, you mortals. Well, try to keep up, hacker."

With a piff, he was gone.

A few minutes later, there was a click behind 2D's head. 2D sighed loudly and put his hands up.

2D: "Make it quick, please."

The runner behind him responded with a terse "kay," before pulling a cloth over his face and chloroforming him.

Across the strip, Dervish didn't notice the immensely strong troll physad shadowing him until the arms locked around his throat, putting him in a sleeper hold.

>>18305420

2D blinked groggily and woke up. He glanced to his left, and saw Tank. Then he glanced to his right and saw Tank. Upon closer inspection, he realized that is was more like there was half of Tank on either side of him. And more elsewhere in the room, resembling something like a very clean gibbing.

Creepily enough, some of the parts were still breathing. Well, gurgling, rather. The whole hit reeked of magic.

Naturally, 2D flipped a shit, staggered out of the room, and called 911. An operator picked up and announced, "Emergency services, sir, what seems to be your problem?"

2D was still cogent enough to deny all involvement with this fucked-up bullshit, lest he be implicated in Shadowrunning.

2D: "THERE'S A DEAD TROLL ALL OVER MY ROOM AND I DON'T KNOW HOW HE GOT HERE."

Operator: "..."

2D: "AAAAAAAAAAAH."

Operator: "We'll send a CrashCart team right away, sir. Hold tight."

2D: "FUUUUUUUCK."

>>18305510

In Seattle, you see, emergency services are run by DocWagon, which is an independent AA corp that does purely emergency medical work. However, Evo Biomedical found that DocWagon's business model worked so well that they bloodily ripped it off for their own competing subsidiary, CrashCart. The two franchises would normally come down to a difference in preference and metroplex contract bidding, but in this case 2D had a very real cause to be worried: he had pissed off Evo in the past, and even though they were nominally at a truce now, he didn't know if some young idiot on the ER team would have gotten the message by now.

After a bit of fidgeting, he resolved to play it cool. Evo didn't know what he LOOKED LIKE, right? He decided to edit Tank's name out of his room, to make it look like he really DID have no idea how his room became filled with dead, twitching trollparts, and hacked the hotel node posthaste.

Jumping into the hotel's registry, 2D was surprised to find another hacker. After a quick stand-off, he identified the other hacker as a member of the killer runner team from Tank's enemy quality that he had never bothered to hide from or dissuade (the ones who had his real SIN name, which he had bafflingly signed into the hotel with, and whom had access to a helicopter), and oddly enough they were working at parallels. The UCAS has sort of a runner brotherhood thing going on; you don't dick over other runners for no reason. 2D, Geppetto, and Dervish weren't involved aside from hiring Tank on, so the killers weren't going to penalize them unjustly.

>>18305638

Thus, Tank was made to look like a dude who had busted into 2D's apartment with intent to do terrible things, and the enemy running team was erased from the footage, becoming mystery runners once more.

2D logs out and sits back down, waiting for CrashCart and, although a little more self-assured, still terrified that they'll recognize him.

Dervish, meanwile, wakes up in an alleyway and begins rocketorcing towards the hotel, realizing just how long he's been out, and that someone (or everyone) is probably dead by now.

2D stood outside the room as a team of heavily-armed Gas Mask Mooks (not linking to TVTropes because I'm not an attention-whoring prick attempting to emotionlessly codify a fandom of my choosing) in Evo paraphenalia scoped out his room. Not wanting them to stick around too long, but also not wanting to cause suspicion, he resolved to be as mundanely unpleasant as humanly possible.

CrashCart Operative: "Sir, what did you say happened?"

2D began openly bawling, grasped weakly at the Evo soldier's hazard suit, and dribbled snot all over it.

2D: "I DON'T KNOOOOW! I WAS HERE WITH MUH-MUH-MUH-MY FRIEEEEENDS, AND I DON'T KNOW WHERE THEY AAAAARE, AND THEN THIS BIG 'OL TROLL CAME INTO THE ROOO-HOO-HOOOOM, AND HE WAS GON 'TA, GONNA...TUH-TUH-TUH-"

CC Operative: "Uhm...take your time, sir."

2D: "TUH-TUH-take ADVANTAGE of MEEEEEEE!"

At this point 2D broke into hysterical sobbing, falling to his knees and melodramatically trailing snot and tears all the way down the operative's hazard suit.

2D: "AND THEN I WOKE UP AND HE WAS DEAAAAAAD!"

>>18305736

At this point, CrashCart took custody of the body and decided to cede control of the crime scene to HardCorps, the local cop corp.

Now, let me go down the list of PMC professionalism, starting with Ares Firewatch.

>Firewatch: The best of the best, multinational commandos equivocal to a high-tech, magically active Navy SEAL corps.
>Knight Errant: The mass-produced, military-scale footsoldiers of Ares, whom Firewatch recruits from.
>Lone Star: The crappy corrupt version of Knight Errant, with shittier training and gear.
>WildCat: Lone Star without the money, protocols, or restrictions.
>HardCorps: The ghetto reject version of WildCat.

So, a bunch of dudes in ill-matching grey armor jackets with peeling patches that read "HARDORPS" (the C and D were kind of stuck together but the graphic design was shitty) and wildly nonstandardized firearms, all with the safety off, poured into the apartment.

>>18305856

2D was promptly questioned by a depressed inner city orc who seemed to be stuck in a rut, and a hispanic human who seemed WAAAAY too eager to read conspiracy into things. Without any prompting from 2D (indeed, at first he did not let 2D speak at all), the human decided that Tank was part of an EVIL SHADOWRUNNING TEAM that was going to rob/rape/kill/maybe all of the above/ poor Stuart the IT specialist, and after a disagreement over the loot there was a ferocious gunfight that somehow ended with no bullet holes in the walls, and Tank lying in cleanly-separated pieces around the hotel room.

To illustrate this, he swung around a troll-sized (troll metahuman adjustment) Ruger Super Warhawk magnum pistol, with the safety off. He nearly cold-cocked his partner multiple times, only slowing his wild gesticulations when he accidentally planted a round in the hotel room's couch, punching a fist-sized hole through it.

The partner agreed that evil shadowrunners were probably to blame, if only to get his partner to stop swinging a 50-cal handgun around like a parade baton.

>>18305856
(aside - isn't WildCat the Sioux nation special forces? not a private police force?)

>>18305995

2D decided that he wanted these two numskulls out of his room, and without any physical ability to throw them out, he instead resorted to weepy mode again, this time with the added unpleasantness of mild racism.

2D: "I HEARD ABOUT RUNNERS ON THE NEWS! They have BLADES in their arms and replace their eyes with ROBOT EYES and I hear they put ROCKETS IN THEIR LEGS for illegal STREET RACING like in the MOVIES and I hear a lot of them are ORCS! They sound like horrible people!"

Orc Officer: "Rockets in...what!?"

Human Officer: "Exactly! There's our suspect! Look for orcs with rocket legs!"

2D would have been be more worried if HardCorps as an organization wasn't actively incompetent. As the officers cleared out, though, they passed by Dervish, who stepped out of the elevator as they entered it.

The look on the orc officer's face as Dervish announced "officers," and passed by them was a thing of beauty. 2D giggled like a schoolgirl as Dervish approached his room.

Dervish: "What's so funny?"

2D: "Nothing, just this thing with HardCorps. Oh, dude, you will not BELIEVE how Tank just died."

>>18306028

Ah, this.

Our GM did a little tooling around with the PMCs. I never asked, but I think his particular beef with WildCat is that it's one of the few things in the fluff that the devs just love to suck the dick of. In Sixth World Almanac alone there's all this talk of "WildCat is so cool, they eat Red Samurai for breakfast they're so badass," and I think it reminded the GM of Harlequin, so he replaced them with some other military branch and turned them into an ignominious PMC. If you wanna keep the line intact in normal canon, just replace WildCat with NeoNet's Minuteman Security Services

Minuteman

>>18306184
(cool - just curious)

>>18306184

Well I cocked up the end of that post didn't I. I don't even know what happened there.

>>18306089

So, at this point, 2D is feeling dandy because Evo hasn't pegged him, and Dervish is back to provide him with much-needed security. Which is good, because he had an errand he wanted to run, considering it wasn't that late in the night by this point.

2D had plugged John for any Tamanous hideouts in the Vegas area earlier, since they'd been incredibly useful thus far, and considering that they were seeking out a presumably-hostile Face Adept, they'd probably have a body to dispose of soon. He'd gotten the address on a back-alley black clinic off the strip, but didn't want to go marching into ghoul territory without a little backup. Hence, the Dervish.

As they approached the clinic, there was a cavalcade of noises. A weird drilling noise sounded from a basement window, while the "thuk thuk thuk" of hammer blows echoed from behind the clinic. Dervish clutched his head, the drilling noise putting him into PTSD mode from all the surgeries that his poor, metal-laced bones sustained, requiring 2D to keep him steady for a moment.

Curious of a potential threat, 2D peeked around back to check the drilling noise and saw...

Geppetto, wearing fancy AR shades, crucifying a dude in the alleyway upside down.

This was where 2D got a message from one of his contacts, HawtSawce, a Chaos Engine infobroker.

HawtSawce: "There's this guy on the forums who said he knew you. Asked for everything I could find on the crucifixion of Saint Peter. Any, uh, any comment on that?"

2D texted back, "You wouldn't believe it if I told you."

2D: "...Which is why, once I've blurred out all the faces and voices, the feed is going up on the boards tonight."

>>18306294

So, since, due to his contract, Adversary was (weirdly) the safest place to be, 2D dragged Dervish over into the alleyway. As Dervish took his meds and recovered, they made small talk with Satan as he reenacted Saint Peter's death with what we later found out was a local deacon.

When Dervish recovered, he and 2D entered the clinic, walking through the front door. There, they met a very pleasant, pretty young nurse, who promptly changed her tune (and her magically-maintained disguise, back to her natural ghoul rictus) when 2D name-dropped John.

She escorted them down into the basement, where they met David Pitweiler, an ooooold ghoul who's so far gone that he talks through a vocorder because his vocal cords fell out. A talented street doc, Pitweiler operated while inside a special hazard suit that basically held his body together. Dervish, always a fan of invasive surgery, promptly submitted to a diagnostic while the opportunity was being bounced around, and this is when Pitweiler broke an...issue to 2D and Dervish.

>>18306357

Namely that, unlike the team's suspicions about Dervish, he wasn't a clone.

He was clones, plural. A big 'ol amalgamation of bioware that thought it was a dude. Pitweiler had no idea how he was even alive, being functionally a Frankenstein's monster.

Hello, GM's justification for his amnesiac character taking the Biocompatibility AND Type O System qualities.

So, the sort of expenses that went into Dervish were the sort of thing that, obviously, only the Big Ten could manage. Pitweiler casually warned Dervish that he was...probably wanted by at least one of the Big Ten. Moreover, if he was captured by any of them, he could probably expect to not live long, at least not without seeing a vivisection table.

That learned, Dervish asked for more cyberblades, please.

>>18306440

2D added that there was a dude nailed to the wall of the clinic that would probably need disposal.

Pitweiler sighed melodramatically through his vocorder, and sent the nurse to do some house cleaning.

The next day, Dervish was still under the knife and 2D had only had about half a night of sleep, having instinctively watched on Dervish's surgery to make sure that there was no funny business (thankfully, Pitweiler only ate the parts that wouldn't be going back into Dervish anyway). Geppetto had a full, extremely restful night of sleep, and resisted a giggle when he learned that Tank had been brutally murdered.

2D, wanting to make some more contacts in the Vegas area since contacts were the only way to find a shapeshifter in hiding, trolled the job market on a Jackpoint subsidiary, and found a promising lead. Namely, amongst all the "YO CAN YOU BEAT UP THIS NERD FOR CASH" offers, there was a comment that read,

"I have an offer of employment for young entrepeneurs such as yourselves. Meet in room 432 of the Caesar's Palace Hotel and Casino at 4:30 PM today if you are interested. --J"

FUCK, I was wrapping up this length of the story so I tried to archive the thread so I could refer to it next thread, and archived the wrong one. Anyone wanna try to archive this one properly?

Sure. Copied your variables wholesale.
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/18305008/

>>18306515

While 2D was working on this lead, Geppetto, the mafia member in the party, tried to track down the local don, but to no avail, considering the Consortium owns like half the casinos on the strip and he could have been in any one of them.

Dervish, with his tiny list of contacts, went out on a complete fucking limb and asked his sensei if he knew anyone in the area.

Weirdly enough, the reclusive Mexican gladiator gave us the best lead. He had served, you see, with a special ops unit during Operation Omega, and one man from the team, whom currently went by Donald Kane, had gone on to become the Security Director for the Consortium.

With a few new contacts and a Johnson meet upcoming, we prepared to take the hunt for Joy in earnest.

That's where my hastily-scratched-out scribblings about this session run out, so I'll have to plug my GM and the other players to recall the details in between this and the main Joy run. I'll get back to you guys soon, maybe tomorrow.

Now if you don't mind, I'm going to run off to dinner since I've been doing this for hours.

NEXT TIME: SHADOWRUN STORYTIME 6, IN WHICH THE TEAM HUNTS JOY AND GETS A NEW INFILTRATOR

>>18306694

Hahahaha, your name has me laughing so hard, you have no idea.

>>18306694
>>18306723

Thanks, by the way!

>>18306723
I'm performing a menial task for you in cyberspace, why do you think I picked it, channer?
Also voted down the one you archived wrong.

>>18306779

Sweet. I'm doing the same thing with my phone, with any luck we can bury it with the filters.

Incidentally, I know this thread was a little lackluster compared to the last four, but bear with me as the story moves on: the Joy run features a ninja who's actually cool, and then the team goes to Neo-Tokyo.

And then Dervish becomes a trucker named Amerika-San.

I'm not kidding.

>>18306827
There's just no wacky Tank antics this time or shit hitting the fan. Adversary should help replace some of the comedy relief, I hope.

>>18306851

It's also mostly legwork and infodumping. I did have a lot of fun recounting the Tale of TwoDee and the HardCorps Officers, though.

Next story, though, mang. Next story will have heists and ninjas and shit.

On that note, the significant other is asking that I stop procrastinating and get dinner with her, so I'm out. I'll pop back in to keep the story going if it's not too late, but in all realism I shold probably be studying.

Alright. That is my cue.
> [x] The Mecha

>>18306888
Fuck yeah, right on time.

>>18306851
Speaking of Tank. What happens to his sister?

Nah. never mind. No time to post.

boooo

>>18306935

That's the subject of a spoiler, so I won't make too big of a point of it now. At this point in the story, she's in the custody of 2D's girlfriend.