All our moral quandaries over what we were going to do regarding Mister
Johnson's job offer were nicely put aside when we got a request for a meeting
from Big Zam. Given that he was the one providing our housing (Oh and that he
was a mob boss and a Cyclops and had several Minotaurs on call...) Orca and I
pretty much dropped everything and headed to his restaurant where he wanted to
meet. And after a nice light lunch we got down to business.
This was a follow through of sorts to our previous job we'd done for
him where we sabotaged Metatron, a drone racer. It seemed that Big Zam was not
the only one interested in fixing drone racing, as one of the other racers, an
adept by the name of Bok-Bok had disappeared. Mister Zam wasn't happy with
this, because with her disappearance, there was every chance that Metatron
could get a shot at the finals again, which was not what he wanted. Added to
that, the next race was in two days, so we needed to find her fast. He offered
us a generous amount of pay, so we agreed to locate her for him. That and,
again, housing and Cyclops mob boss.
Orca and I split up to follow a few leads. Orca headed to the nightclub
where Bok-Bok was last seen to find out what had happened there and see if there
were any useful leads. What she found wasn't exactly helpful; Bok-Bok had been
there, hanging out with her usual crowd and doing her usual stuff, and nothing
untoward seemed to have occurred. There had been some people watching her,
however, which suggested something bad had happened,
On the other side, I found Bok-Bok's drone dealer to be rather
talkative, especially after I bought a Tanamyre Echidna surveillance drone from
him (I have plans for it). He revealed that Bok-Bok had ordered a whole pile of
expensive specialty racing parts like rotors and actuators form him but hadn't
yet picked them up. Given how much those parts must have cost her, it was clear
that her disappearance was not intentional on her part. She'd clearly been
taken, but we still needed to find out by whom and where.
We decided to check out her apartment next, figuring that she might
have been taken from there. What we did find managed to make things a million
times more complicated. I had Louie and Baxter up, buzzing around the place to
check it out, when somebody tried to hack into my RCC through them. Fortunately,
they did a completely arse job of it, but it was enough to alert me as to what
was going on.
The flies buzzed around and spotted a clearly conspicuous Holden Bulldog
van parked nearby. Orca and I figured it was the source of the attack, and
moved towards it, only to have it take off at speed (Or., at least, what passes
for speed in the Bulldog's case). I took off after it, which was actually not
that hard given that my Hotspur is more than twice as fast as it. Unfortunately,
they decided to resist by continuing their hacks, which turned out to be even
more ineffective then the first free attempts.
Orca tried slowing it down with a few spells and a shock arrow, and then
I added Rotordrones to the mix. Neither really worked; the Bulldog might be as slow
as a wet weekend, but it is still a tough bastard. So I instead went for the
less sophisticated approach of simply running it off the road, something that
their driver was clearly not ready for. They ended up hitting something and I
boxed them in, leaving them surrounded by Rotordrones and willing to talk. And,
as said, that’s where it got complicated.
The guys on the Bulldog were another runner team who had been hired to
find Bok-Bok. Only their employer wasn't Mister Zam or anyone connected to
them. Rather, their employer was a spirit called "Lygon" (Possibly
the spirit of Italian restaurants with overly aggressive staff outside of them)
which added a whole new layer of weirdness since spirits aren't exactly known
for their clear motives. Anyway, there were four of them; Mister Teeth (Their
heavily armed Ork driver), Mystagouge (mage), Squirmy (Dwarf infiltrator) and
Offsite (Their Decker who had bricked her own deck while trying to hack my RCC.
That'll teach her). Putting aside their unprovoked attack and my wrecking their
Bulldog in reply, we agreed to work together since it was clear we were after
the same thing.
Getting back to Bok-Bok's apartment, we found that it had been
thoroughly trashed, suggesting that she had been taken from there. With that in
mind, orca spoke to some of Big Zam's people, feeding them the descriptions of
the people who had been watching her at the club. They snatched up with some
known Russian Mob enforcers, who seemed to have it in for Big Zam. It turned out
that Zam had hit one of their chem labs in a bad part of town, and this
kidnapping might have been in revenge for that.
 |
| The backup getaway car |
The other good news was that Bas finally answered his phone, and
decided to help us on this op. (I mean, seriously, how can he miss a phone
call? He's a Technomancer. You're basically calling his head?) He met us and
Teeth's Team (Who after getting their Bulldog wrecked had switched to their
backup car in the form of a rusty old Corolla) and decided to check out the
chem lab. By a fortunate coincidence, there was another conspicuous looking
Bulldog there (Okay, look, I drive around in a racing truck, Yeah, it's not
exactly low profile, but if you see someone driving around in a Bulldog, you
generally assume they're up to no good) which was loading up with the same
three goons that Orca had seen at the club.
Orca hid in their Van (Using the smuggling compartment in the Bulldog's
floor because there's always a smuggling compartment in a Bulldog's floor. See?
Conspicuous!) before they drove off, getting a nice amount of distance between
them and the chem lab. Bas then hacked it with his brain, causing the van to
pull over so we could intercept it. As the goons climbed out, Orca flattened
one of them from behind. The other two quickly surrendered.
 |
| Not even remotely legitimate |
We dragged them off to an abandoned storefront for a bit of
questioning, Under pressure from Mister Teeth (Having an Automatic shotgun
shoved in your face does tend to loosen lips) they admitted that, yes, they did
kidnap Bok-Bok. The problem was that she was being held in a swanky upper-class
home in a good part of town. So not just would it be full of Vory goons with
AKs and possibly all manner of other defenses, but if we did start anything
then an Archeron HTR team would be three to five minutes away at best.
Bas was able to confirm that their host was full of nasty IC and wired
up with more alarms then god. An astral scan of the place only added to the
problems, showing that it was full of both Wards and odd astral signatures in
the garden. Not spirits or the like, but definitely not something mundane
either. Obviously a frontal assault wasn't going to work, and after abandoning
a few plans like machine-gunning the garage or having drunks htrow up on their
lawn, we opted for a sneaky approach.
After Bas suppressed their alarms, Orca and Squirmy went in silently,
breaking in to the upper floor. They figured that Bok-Bok was being held in one
of the three warded rooms (Because its what you do to lock up an adept), and
checked them out. Fortunately, they found her quickly, and after rousing her
and explaining what was going on, they decided to get out of there. And they almost
made it out safely too.
 |
| Aggressive garden statuary |
Unfortunately, it turned out that the strange astral signatures were
Gargoyles hiding in the garden. Orca discovered this when one of them leaped
out and tried to eat her, which did throw a spanner on their escape. I quickly
activated my rotordrones and sent them in, allowing Orca to get away while I
poured fire onto the stupid thing. It eventually went down, hard (No really, it
died and turned to stone in mid-air and shattered when it hit the ground) ad we
got the hell away from there.
So at the end of the day Bok-Bok got back to the races, Big Zam was
happy, Lygon was happy (We think, because who knows with spirits) and we made a
few Yens along the way. All in all a pretty good one.
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