Shadowrun: Legwork

(guest post by Michelle)

And we’re back with our runners after a night of intrigue and getting hired for a retrieval job. Morning comes early after a night of drinking, dancing, doing business and nearly getting shot. The gang’s on a deadline, though, and there’s no time to sleep in when money’s changing hands. They started out by meeting up for breakfast – syntheggs with enough ketchup to mask anything, and enough soykaf to make the morning worthwhile. They react in their usual fashions – that’s still too much like food for Coil, who prefers a nice protein paste shake; normal fare for Kombucha, Hocus, and Diablo; and Cappy turns it down flatly but politely, sticking with soykaf.

Once they’ve broken their fast, they head out to the Gorpmobile and go through the crate of TeeHee’s belongings from his office, provided by their contact. In going through the crate, they discover that a) TeeHee is not much for housekeeping, b) he likes Urban Brawl and is a big Seattle Screamers fan, c) that he has a lighter from a decker hangout called the Breadboard, some organic tea from a grocery store called Orion’s that actually smells like a nice green tea blend, and a holocube with some various pics of TeeHee and his friends from Seattle University, including one of a professor, an older guy holding a deck in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. There’s some generic other circuit boards, blank data chips, a microtool set, and some general desk doodads as well, all of them with a fine layer of dust and the occasional crumbs.

They also load up the surveillance footage that Roxanne provided them. They can see a blonde elven woman, a clear human street Sammie, and another human guy who seems more fight oriented and less stylish come into the building and down the hallway to an office. They go in, are off camera for a few moments, and then come out with TeeHee by the arm, escorting rather than dragging the guy. He’s carrying a small messenger bag and looks excited.

The four of them get almost to the door before the siren starts. Once outside, the security hits like a cloudburst of gunfire, sudden and everywhere all at once. There’s lightning bursts that look like an elemental at work, even, seemingly belonging to the elf woman. The runners are professionals and hold their ground as they make it toward the car waiting on the street. Halfway there, the elf gets shot. The muscle guy runs for it and pushes TeeHee into the car, while the Sammie yells out “Freya!” There’s clearly a difference of opinion between the two fighters, but the Sammie movie like lightning and grabs the elf woman, loading them both into the car so quickly it’s practically blurred on the footage.

Between the footage and the items, they’ve got about three different directions to look into. If the runner who was shot survived, then she’d need medical care, and if she was a mage, then it’s no slap patches and quick ERs for her. She needs long-term doctoring that’s magic-user friendly. So to find her, they’ll need to track down a doc, probably one that doesn’t work for/with DocWagon and has a deferred payment plan available – that means street docs. In addition, they decide that Orion’s Grocery and the Breadboard are the best places to start looking for TeeHee, figuring that if they find him, they’re one step closer to the chips. A quick bit of searching gets the address of the grocery, then, and off they all go.

So as they drive over, a bit of Matrix knowledge on the part of Coil and Shadowrunning lore on the part of Diablo zero in on who Flair is – turns out he’s a retired SU prof named Norris Hendrix, also known as Flair, one of the OG Shadowrunners. Hendrix was a legend among SU students as well as the decker community as a whole, given that he was one of the architects of the Matrix and a pioneer of Matrix geometry. TeeHee was apparently one of his proteges.

Flair had a bad run against some IC and went down, staying in a coma for a couple of years. When he came back, he wasn’t quite the same – traumatic brain injury will do that to you. He retired, and now he’s consulting on a more or less legal basis, of late for Hollywood Simsense Entertainment (HSE). Turns out they’re a competitor to GTI. Interesting coincidence, that.

Regardless, they soon arrive at Orion’s, which is just over the border in the Barrens from Bellevue. The area’s a bit down at heel, but the working classes can still rent a relatively safe if shitty apartment hereabouts. You can see the edge of paycheck-to-paycheck to the east from here, though. They park, and Kombucha sets Edith Piaf (his arachnodrone) to watch the van. They all go into Orion’s Organic Grocery, whereupon Cappy brightens up at the smell of actual food and Hocus is deeply confused at the assault on his senses. The store’s a mom-and-pop establishment, with security cages around the cash registers, a buzzer in the back with a low-tech security camera setup, and a few rows of not-terrible canned goods and staples with some fresh actual food (both ready-to-eat and ingredients) in the back of the store. An older human woman comes out and greets the group, asking if she can help them.

Being the negotiator, Cappy takes the lead in talking to her while everyone else goes shopping. Cappy buys an apple and offers a bit to Hocus, who is discomfited at how…. APPLEY it smells. It’s not a great selection, but there’s some definite local suppliers represented and what’s there is good quality. The lady, one Madisynn Orion, directs Kombucha to the organic tea, which matches what they found in TeeHee’s stuff. Kombucha realizes he can get the ingredients for a new batch of gorp here, so he loads up, and Madisynn recognizes what he’s making and invites him back, with a business card that’s also a disposable radon tester.

Cappy charms the lady, who doesn’t recognize TeeHee, but does know Flair. He does most of his shopping there, but she doesn’t spend a lot of time talking to him as her husband, Rank, is the jealous type and doesn’t like the way Flair chats Madisynn up. With a twinkle in her eyes, she rings up purchases and suggests they stop back by after noon, as Flair is almost never in before then.

From there, as they step out, they see that there’s a place with a circuit board sign hanging out about three blocks down. Coil identifies that as the Breadboard, which happens to be where they were looking to go to next. They walk down and it is a decker hangout from the word go. If you’ve got an AR eye up and a wireless connection available, you can see the menu visual and place your orders via signal. If not, you have to wait for physical service. The place is full of metal and skin bodies, most of them looking at devices or into the middle distance. When the group comes in, they all mostly focus for a moment, but seeing Coil reassures the clientele that there are no strangers here, and so the group gets ignored again. They all squish into a larger booth and a waitress comes over – an ork with steel capped tusks, twin datajacks, and a Screamers tattoo on her arm, as well as a deeply on-point eyeliner game going on. There’s a cook in the open kitchen behind the bar making syntheggs and soyjacks, and everyone except Cappy decides on breakfast for lunch, while Cappy sticks to the apple.

Diablo is taken by the waitress and decides to shoot his shot, and ends up with her number for later. They’re able to confirm that Flair does come in sometimes, but more than that they’re not willing to say. They agree to tell him the group wants to talk to him, though. After razzing Diablo about his level of game, they compare notes and decide to do a bit more research from the handy virtual jackpoint. Kombucha is able to identify the car used in the surveillance, a Ford Nightrunner, and do a bit of tracking. It was headed east into the Barrens. Coil sets up a quick bot to scrape mentions of TeeHee, while Kombucha tracks down Lone Star reports – a burnt-out black Nightrunner was picked up a few days ago in the Barrens. A bit of quick thinking identifies the closest junkyard to the place, “Barrens Pull-a-Part” and they decide to go look that up while they wait for Flair to show. Edith climbs up to the top of the sign to watch for Flair, and Coil sets Rufus up to watch Edith and boost her signal/place a call if Flair shows up while they’re gone.

As they get in the van, Diablo notes that there’s three Blood Rager gangers with colors flying on bikes, riding in formation down the street. Given that this is Crimson Clash territory, this seems ill-advised at best and downright suicidal at worst. They don’t seem interested in the group, though, so nobody gets in the way.

The Barrens Pull-a-Part is about 20 minutes away, as the Barrens suffers greatly from “you can’t get there from here” syndrome, which doesn’t mean you can’t get there exactly, but your route will be neither quick nor direct. Upon entering the junkyard, they’re greeted by an elf in a set of grimy coveralls who introduces himself as Scooter and immediately gets Kombucha’s mostly undivided attention. He says they did get a burned out car a couple of days ago – it’d pretty much been there probably a week before they got called out to tow it. He pulls out a printed map of the junkyard and circles the car’s location. The team heads back and starts checking out the car. It’s a mess – burned to within an inch of its existence. There’s no physical evidence to speak of, except that Hocus is able to detect Freya’s astral signature on the car thanks to some baked on but not obliterated blood evidence – the kind of thing Freya would have cleared if she’d been able. Without anything else but maybe a lead to come back and do some talismongering for Hocus later, Freya’s signature, and an elf that’s totally Kombucha’s type, they decide to head back to Orion’s.

As the group in the Gorpmobile gets within a few blocks of the store, Rufus/Edith raise a signal – Flair is in Orion’s, being helped by a somewhat surly older man – ostensibly Rank Orion keeping Flair firmly at arms length from his beloved Madisynn. Flair takes it all in stride, though, and leaves with two bags of groceries, heading away from Orion’s/the Breadboard and back down the street toward an apartment building. Coil dismisses Rufus and has Edith follow Flair from the rooftops as the van hangs back – no one wants to spook Hendrix, certainly not before they figure out where he’s going.

A block up and over and Flair enters a three-story walk-up apartment building. Edith slips in the slow-closing door, and sees Flair check his mailbox and then trudge up the stairs – no elevator here. Kombucha has her follow Flair up to the third floor and then slip into the apartment behind him, as she’s spider sized and extremely sneaky.

Flair’s apartment is a studio roughly the size of a box of tissues, or at least it feels like it. He’s got a very small kitchenette with a hot plate, dorm fridge and a sink, a small bathroom with shower, an alcove with a bar across it for a closet, a dinette set, a double bed, and a work desk with a chair. The carpet pattern is 20^th-century Stains and the window has a lovely view of the brick wall across the alley through the bars across it. On the floor, his feet sticking out from behind the workdesk, sits TeeHee with his eyes closed, jacked into his deck and with his fingers fluttering across the keyboard. Flair walks over to the kitchenette and starts putting groceries away, setting the teakettle on the hotplate and getting out mugs.

Seeing the threat is minimal, the runners get out of the van and walk up. They knock on Flair’s door, and at first he doesn’t answer. He pulls a big folding screen out from the closet area and puts it in front of TeeHee after pulling a blanket over him, then puts the work chair in front of that. It’s not like there’s an extra room to hide him in, after all. He takes a pistol and puts it in his waistband, in back, under his old SU sweatshirt, and calls out that he doesn’t want whatever they’re selling.

Cappy steps up and explains that they just have some questions, that they’re looking for TeeHee but only want to talk. Flair immediately employs his best grumpy old man manner and insists the kid’s not there, but Edith gives the team their proof. Finally Cappy convinces Flair to let them in to talk, and so Cappy and Hocus step inside, with Kombucha and Coil staying with the van. Diablo stands out of sight while this discussion goes on, but when Flair lets them in, he steps forward and blocks the door closing with his hand. Flair is concerned and annoyed, but he’s been in the game a long time. Once he sees Diablo’s gigantic troll self, it’s not a question that the door on his shitty apartment would have really kept the runners out anyway.

The three go in, and Cappy sits with Flair while Diablo goes over and pulls off the cover from Tee Hee. Flair makes a real effort at convincing the team that the kid isn’t a threat, and nobody gets out a weapon. Instead, Hocus fills the mugs with tea while everyone talks and Kombucha and Coil listen in from the van.

Flair wakes TeeHee from his coding daze (Coil make sure he wasn’t in the Matrix, just jacked in locally to his deck) and hands him a cup of tea. Hocus verifies that TeeHee is healthy, but somewhat flat of affect as a general state of being about most things except maybe for coding, the Seattle Screamers, and Flair. TeeHee immediately admits that he did let the runners in to steal the chips, he doesn’t know where they are now, and Flair had nothing to do with any of it. His loyalties clearly aren’t with GTI – he says he’s a shadowrunner now (and Flair harumphs and rolls his eyes) and he says he feels bad about Urlan and Roxanne, but Junior said they were going to shelve the project, which is the best work TeeHee (aka Tadashi Hawkins) had ever done, while Junior was going to use the chips to take the company to the next level, as well as rehiring TeeHee, giving him a raise, and buying him a Fairlight Excalibur deck (a piece of info that made Coil’s eyebrows raise in sympathy – no wonder the decker turned on GTI).

TeeHee admits that Junior has backups of the data that Urlan doesn’t know about. The team that helped with the theft has the chips – that was part of the deal. TeeHee hasn’t been paid anything yet, and wasn’t supposed to be until after Friday – he was just supposed to lay low and stay out of sight/off the Matrix. He doesn’t really feel stupid yet, but odds are good that blessed ignorance won’t last. Flair asks them to just leave TeeHee with him, but the team isn’t sure that’s a great idea – after all , they were able to find him and Flair without much hassle, and Flair isn’t exactly in a secure area. Cappy offers one of his many real-estate hidey-holes in Renton as a place for the pair to lay low that isn’t otherwise connected with them. 

It’s not a bad plan, but will the two take the team up on it? Is anyone going to call Roxanne and get her in the loop? Will Kombucha’s next batch of gorp taste any better than it sounds? Tune back in to find out!