Shadowrun (was: Now that Helen and Atilla have moved back to our area...)

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, I finally have a few minutes to sit down with my notes.

So the game picked up where we left off, with Bikavèr and Valentine huddled around the now-unlocked door in one end of the "Welcome" building, with the field spirit still concealing them. From their vantage point outside the fence, Lukas, Ylva and Yuroichi spot a pack of some kind of canine creatures -- maybe hellhounds, maybe more bogies, we can't tell -- coming from the east. We let Bikavèr and Valentine know, and when we do, Valentine suggests that the rest of us join them because she doesn't think that she can disable the complex's defenses to let us through from where they are.

So when the guard dog-things go past, Bikavèr comes back to the fence to get Lukas, Ylva and Yuroichi inside. Ylva briefly considers taking up a sniper nest in a tree, but we (the players) point out to Peggy that if she does that, she'll miss all the action. So Ylva doesn't do that.

Bikavèr carries Lukas, Ylva and Yuroichi over the fence one at a time, coming dangerously close to faceplanting while carrying Ylva and all her gear. Together we all stealth over to the "Welcome" building -- barely so, for Lukas. Before we step into the building and out of the domain of the field spirit, Lukas gives it one last task -- to use its Accident power to give us a way out under the fence where we came in, by collapsing the ground or something to give us wiggle space big enough for Bikavèr to get through.

While he does that, the others realize they can hear heavy vehicles on the other side of the main "factory" building in the center of the complex.

We enter, and find ourselves at one end of a hallway running the length of the building, with a plassteel security booth about halfway down on the left; fortunately the angle is such that we just see the sheen of the window facing onto the hall, but not the guard inside. We hear people sparring through a door to our immediate left, and what sounds like idle conversation drifting out of a door ahead on the right.

While Lukas calls up a Force 6 hearth spirit to Conceal us here, Ylva goes astral and scouts the building, finding three areas that are warded and about a dozen adults scattered throughout the unwarded areas, including a few sleeping in a barracks while two more are taking showers.

She returns to her body and gives us the rundown. With her info, we make our way through the building, knocking out (mostly) the security staff, relying on a combination of Stealth, speed and Force 6 Concealment to cover us. (Anyone who got knocked out was also ziptied and gagged.) Ylva, Yuroichi and Bikavèr rapidly take out the sleepers and the folks in the little gym -- with two fatalities, including a naked guy in a shower who thought it was a good idea to try to rush a nine-year-old with a rifle trained on him when she surprised him and told him "Freeze!"

Lukas has the spirit Alienate the guard in the booth. (For those who don't know the system, Alienation effectively turns its target invisible, inaudible and intangible so they can have no affect on the world around them. It's not perfect -- a difficult roll on the right skill or attribute will let them get through it momentarily -- but for our needs, which is to keep him from sounding the alarm for a few minutes, it's perfect.)

When we get down to the booth we discover that it's across the hall from the building's computer room, which has the usual big glass window facing out onto the hallway. (This, as it turns out, is one of the warded areas.) As we approach, Valentine botches her stealth and one of the two techs in the glass room notices a little Elf girl where she most definitely should not be. He rushes out into the hall to confront her, and Bikavèr sucker-punches him while Ylva props the door open.

The other tech notices this and goes to hit the big red panic button on his console, but before he can, Yuroichi flash-steps to his side and knifes him.

Valentine plugs into the computers while Lukas keeps an Astral eye on the Alienated security guy. Bikavèr, Yuroichi and Ylva continue through the building taking out the rest of the staff on duty, aided by the surprise factor inherent in an invading force of heavily-armed schoolchildren suddenly appearing out of thin air in the middle of the night inside the security station. When they finish, all that's left is the last two warded areas, both of which are behind some heavy doors.

Meanwhile, Lukas notices that the guard in the booth is trying to hit his panic button. Because he does have a remote chance of success, Lukas goes out into the hall to make faces at him through the plassteel wall of the security booth in an effort to distract him. "Don't bother," Valentine says, "I've got control of the building systems and his button isn't going to do anything." She then tells us that one of the last two warded areas are an armory and its own dedicated guard booth, and maybe we'd like to raid it?

Indeed we do, so all of us (other than Valentine) pop the door to the hallway to the guard post, inside which is a guy whose evening is suddenly a lot more interesting than he ever expected it to be. Ylva drops her guns out of his sight and then walks up to his plassteel window. "Have you seen my daddy?" she asks with big innocent eyes and honeyed tones.

The guard blink-blinks. "Who are you? What's your name?"

Her eyes get bigger and her lip quivers. "We were camping nearby and he went away and didn't come back..."

Innocent blonde nine-year-olds looking for their daddies are not in the Himmelsrecken guard instruction book, and combined with the rest of us piling into the little hallway, this guy fails his Keep Cool Under Pressure roll and starts freaking. He tries to get into the armory behind him while yammering on a walkie-talkie. "It's jammed," Valentine assures us over our private link. "In fact, I've screwed with their jamming so we're the only ones with working comms right now." She then takes over the building P.A. in the booth and says, "You should let us in. It'll hurt less that way."

Bikavèr starts punching the passteel, starring and cracking it on his first hit. "You might want to stand back and cover your eyes," Valentine says over the P.A. just before Bikavèr's second hit shatters the plassteel, and the guard is utterly boggled at its destruction. Bikavèr steps through the shattered wall, looms over the guard, and bellows "KNEEL!"

Ylva scampers after him and walks up to the guard. "So you really don't know where my daddy is?" she asks.

Faced with the overwhelming power brought to bear by this group of children, the guard makes his Common Sense roll and gives up. Bikavèr briefly interrogates him -- we find out his name is Gunther and he's little more than a rent-a-cop. He has seen some interesting things around here, like prisoners that go into the main building and never come back out, and that they're using lots of chemicals, including stuff we figure out from his description is DMSO. Bikavèr then offers him twice his current pay and pick of the stuff in the armory if he'll come to work for us.

This naturally makes the rest of us go, "What?" And while we discuss this, Valentine warns of a shift change coming in an hour. She also pulls Ylva aside and lets her know that she's found a record of Ylva's father and the group he was leading getting captured by the Himmelsrecken when they witnessed the delivery of a truck full of chemicals to the complex. But she needs access to the commander's computer -- currently turned off and behind a locked door in the last warded area -- to get more.

While Gunther is under guard, Bikavèr breaks down the door to the commander's office and gets the computer turned on. The next half hour is spent ransacking the armory and loading all the goodies we can get onto a wheeled cart we found inside, while Valentine ransacks the commander's computer. When she's done she takes Ylva aside and tells her that she thinks Ylva's father is almost certainly dead. She's learned that the Himmelsrecken have been researching the mechanism of goblinization so they can figure out how to reverse it. Apparently one of the things they've learned is how to trigger goblinization, and Ylva's father probably became one of the test subjects -- who never survive the testing.

Ylva is not happy, but we have more important concerns right now -- like getting out of this complex and then out of Westphalia. We beat feet, dragging half the armory and Gunther the guard along with us as Valentine remotes our van to drive up almost to the complex gates. One of the last things she does before she jacks out of the security systems is set the complex defenses to let us out while opening fire on everything but us, including (of course) the Himmelsrecken forces.

Lukas conjures his most powerful spirit yet -- a Force 8 field spirit -- to Conceal us and the van, and because of the power of the spirit takes physical damage from the drain he doesn't reduce; he wipes a trickle of blood from under his nose. Under its protection and while the complex is in chaos behind us, we throw everything into the van and leap in, except for Bikavèr and Ylva (the latter with her Barrett) who climb onto the top of the van. (So she can shoot anything that gets through the Force 8 Concealment, while he keeps her from falling off.)

We book for the motel where we left Wolfgang and Roksa the construction orc, warning Wolfgang that we're there and to be ready to literally jump into the van when we get there in, like, five minutes. We get there, and a little negotiation with the spirit adds them to the Concealment. (The spirit seems amused at us for some reason.) They pile in the massively-overfull van and we're off to an abandoned/blocked border crossing, very fast, with Bikavèr and Ylva holding on for dear life to the roof.

It's like a hundred miles to Berlin, we have a full van, half a Himmelsrecken armory, it's dark out, and we're wearing tactical gear. If I had thought to actually say this, followed by "Hit it", I would have been far cleverer than I actually was at that point.

Anyway, as we race down the highways and side roads in the dark of the early morning hours, there are all kinds of Westphalian police and military vehicles going past us and critters flying over us, and none of them notice us. We pull off the main road and find ourselves at the blocked and shut-down border crossing -- with a minefield and a concrete barrier between us and (relative) safety.

Ylva summons a Force 1 spirit -- and spends some Karma for rerolls to get seven services out of it. She directs it to use its Accident power to disable six mines in a "lane" for us to reach the concrete wall -- and for its last service to tell us how many mines are left in the lane and where they are. It comes back and tells us there are only two mines left between us and the wall and vanishes back into astral space.

Valentine very very very carefully navigates the van over those last two mines until we're right by the wall. Then Bikavèr gets out and does his wrecking ball impression. (Those physical adept Automatic Successes are seriously OP.) It takes him several more blows to break down the barrier than it took to break the plassteel back at the complex, and just as he finishes, the Field Spirit lets Lukas know that a fire elemental, set to watch the border crossing, is setting fire to the woods around us. And then it attacks.

Lukas tries to Banish it, since he had so much luck with those toxic spirits only a few weeks earlier, but it's a Force 10 spirit and he doesn't do more than distract it long enough for Bikavèr to attack it astrally. As usual with Bikavèr and non-inanimate targets, one hit and it's destroyed.

Bikavèr gets back on the van and we cross back into our native land at something like 3 or 4 AM. As we drive back to the sprawl, Lukas has a conversation with the Field Spirit, who is quite interested in us. Bikavèr and Ylva join the conversation when the spirit observes that we seem ... unusual for non-Astral creatures in its experience.

At 8 AM we're in Lünen, on our way to Dortmund, and we rent a second van (from the same service that Bikavèr, Ylva and Yuroichi used a couple weeks earlier) to relieve the overloading/overcrowding of the Eurovan. We redistribute the contents, inventorying our take as we do so, and the continue on the way home. After those of us who wanted some of the gear took it (Lukas took a grenade launcher and a mix of ammo), Bikavèr took the remainder to his contact Magda to fence it.

Magda is very maternal toward Bikavèr -- she wants to know what we were doing in Westphalia and why. He explains to her satisfaction, then negotiates 55K nuyen in cash and 35K nuyen in trade credit for the stuff from the armory.

The 55K plus money from Yuroichi outright buys the warehouse we were going to get. We talk Gunther into being our security guy, and hire Roksa to do the remodeling we're going to need; Yuroichi also covers their salaries and materials for the remodel until we get another influx of cash.

And that's where we left off, except for the spending of Karma.

EDIT: And I forgot the quotes from this session:

Helen: (to Ylva) So you're hoping this is another stupid guard?
Tiffany (Yuroichi): It's worked well so far.

Gunther: (about how the Himmelsrecken are just as scary as Bikavèr) They do sick stuff like that, too.
Bikavèr: Yeah, but I'm only eight years old.

Me: We're the kind of thing trained professionals don't expect!

Field spirit: Aren't you all young for humans?
Lukas: I've been told I'm a prodigy.
Field spirit: And the others?
Lukas: They're just weird.