Tuesday Apr. 17th, 2007

Digital Changeling > Gaming > Session Notes > S is for SmartLink > Tuesday Apr. 17th, 2007

Session started at 6:58 pm on 4/170/2007

Attending players: Joe, Michael, Ben, and Eva

Presiding GM: Aaron

(Raised Agility from 4 to 5 = 5 * 3 = 15
Raised Intuition from 3 to 4 = 4 * 3 = 12
Raised Charisma from 2 to 3 = 3 * 3 = 9
total spent = 36 karma)

(Other folks are doing some book keeping as well. Drew binds a spirit. We digress into talking about ABCs for a while.)

During our day of hiding we spend some time talking to the newer folks about how we knew Rice. We also have an interesting conversation with Ajax and Drew about Ajax's history and how bizarre the northern lands are. Frikkin Quebecois.

We have about a week off after our last job. I spend a lot of time at the dojo. I don't know. I've been feeling restless lately. Training hasn't been quite enough. Yorick's around some. He doesn't like to come in on weekends though.

I managed to track down a pirated copy of the old Chan film, "Legend of the Drunken Master". It's not the original form of the film, I think it's a rip off of the old Phillipine release from 1978, but someone slapped a decent set of subtitles on it somewhere along the line.

I'm still keeping my eye open for an original disk. I'm not holding my breath though. Chan had a resurgence in popularity around 2040 and I think collectors snapped up many of the remaining copies. I might be able to get my hands on a reprint from around the turn of the century if I'm lucky.

It's December 1st.

"Your wife and child were killered? er, murdered?"
~ Drew

Ajax is talking about maybe needing our help getting revenge on his family's killers at some point in the theoretical future when he has leads. I think most of us are good with that... anyway, he buys us dinner and prattles for a while. Drew is very insensitive to him. I'm going to have to watch out that he doesn't hit Ajax too far below the belt. I don't want to spend more nights keeping Ajax from choking on his own despair and vomit if at all possible.

Well, I guess I don't have to worry about that. Drew bolts on our last day of "vacation". He leaves Ajax a short and somewhat cryptic email saying that things have improved up north and he's going back to Quebec.

(Note: In real life Joe was there playing Drew for this whole session, but the next week he discovered that he would not be able to continue playing. It was decided that the simplest way to handle it was to not have dragged him with us into a run he wouldn't be able to escape half way through.)

The next day, we have a dinner date to meet up with Vasquez. Vasquez gives Ajax some details for a meet at the Seattle Tacoma Airport in two days. We would apparently have to show up ready for action. Exciting.

We are a little worried about where the run might be sending us. There are unspecified private corp tickets attached to the meet info. So in theory it could be just about anywhere. Drew is apparently especially nervous because he might have problems if he ends up in the wrong part of this continent.

The rest of the dinner is uneventful.

The next day, Ajax tries to do some looking into where those tickets might be taking us. He's going to be at that for hours, so the rest of us go about our days as normal. I spend a little bit of time thinking about what I need to pack for the run, but most of it is just the stuff I would wear on a normal run.

(Ajax gets into the node. It's a huge airfield, full of vehicles, both flying and on the ground. He watches the traffic for awhile before he figures out where the corporate flight plans he wants are, in one of the data screens in the control tower. He finds six corp flights leaving in the right time frame:)

(Wuxing to Hong Kong
Special Clearance Doc Wagon flight to Boston
Horizon to Quebec City
Renraku to Osaka, Japan
Aztechnology to Cancun
Sader Crup to Houston)

I get a message from Ajax around 1pm saying that he's got six possible canidates. The six cities are a bit exciting. I'm pretty sure that I do not want to go to Cancun. Boston's a little questionable too, although we might be able to make that one work. There are also Quebec City, Hong Kong, Osaka, and Houston.

(We discuss the effectiveness of a bandolier of kittens for someone practicing blood magic.)

We talk about it a bit. Since we don't have an offer of pay yet, it would be extremely unprofessional for them to force us to take the run. So if they are going to send us somewhere objectionable we should be able to either not go there or get back without leaving the airport. I'm still not super comfortable with this, but it shouldn't go south immediately.

The next day we are all packed and outside the airport at the appointed time. Yorick has brought some suspiciously large boxes that roll along after him automatically. I was pretty much set to go with my normal gear and a small duffle bag with a change of clothes and a toothbrush.

The guards let us pass through security without even looking in our general direction. The gate we were told to go to holds an unmarked private corporate jet. They let us in with no issues. The inside of the jet is what I would call opulent. An assistant sort of person meets us. He identifies himself as Jackson.

He stows our stuff and offers us drinks. Ajax and Yorick have champagne. I politely decline so we don't all get drugged at once. Jackson goes out of his way to make it clear that going on the flight does not force us to take the job. He says they will be willing to bring us back to any airport of our choice if we decline.

Having chairs in an airplane that swivels all the way around is creepy. I have to admit, it's not nearly as unpleasant as the last time I flew somewhere. Leg room is nice.

Once we get up to altitude, an orc woman joins us from a private cabin of the plane. She's rather very attractive for an orc. She greets Ajax and asks to be addressed as Mr. Johnson. She wants us to get into a corporate agricultural facility in a certain place after a certain time. She doesn't care how we do it and hasn't even mentioned collateral damage or discovery.

After some quiet conversation, Ajax asks her about the approximate size of the facility. She says its about 1200 people and about twice the size of downtown Seattle. Ajax refuses to poke at the location any more. We agree to the job.

The target is in the bottom of the gulf of Mexico, a GamaTech kelp farming facility in international waters. Apparently someone in GamaTech has found a way to genetically modify kelp to increase their production, but the international corporate courts will be inspecting the facility shortly. We are to introduce the retrovirus that will make the genetic changes to the kelp stock as quickly as possible after the inspectors leave. So there is more of a secrecy thing than she had suggested.

According to Ajax she's probably doing it so that the inspectors won't be able to steal information on why their kelp will be doing so well.

The inspectors are expected imminently and will probably only be there for a few days. We've got about three hours before we land on the floating air strip above the facility.

She's offering us 40K and 10% up front. Ajax barters her up to 45K NY.

She gives us a chance to confer and plan. We know we want uniforms, plans and schedules, as well as whatever other info we might have plausibly hacked from the place. We also want some info on how we are being extracted.

Ajax goes back to her to talk about the things we want. She offers us uniforms passkeys and cover jobs that even come with living quarters. Awesome. The other shoe is going to have to drop really hard to make up for this being so easy to start out with.

Ajax collects our pre-pay and a map of the facility with most of the info we wanted. There is a central dome and seven radial domes ranged around it like spokes on a wheel. The farming is done in the triangular space between the domes. The central dome is labeled as "The Hub" and the outer domes are A through G. How terribly creative of those corp architects. The Hub has the elevator up to the floating air strip on the surface.

Our cover jobs give us quarters in C, one room with four bunks. That'll be fun. The target is over in dome G in room G71. The area is labeled as kelp processing. The notes on the data suggest that they handle incoming crop as well as out going spores.

(Before you ask, no I have no idea how one processes kelp spores. I would have expected them to just float around and handle the initial growth on their own...)

The Johnson hands over a tube of "toothpaste" that contains the retrovirus. Fun. It sounds like Ajax is going to end up a computer tech and Yorick and I will probably be doing physical harvesting out in the ocean. Fortunately I'm a pretty good swimmer.

She sends us our cover ids:
Ajax = Christian Garoway
Lume = Earleen Raydel
Yorick = Jamie Willhemus

(Drew would have been Clayton Line.)

We round up our weapons so they can deliver them to our room around security. Yorick has them send some of the boxes back to Seattle for him, since heavy weapons are probably not called for on this run.

End of Session