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

[Bob Schroeck]

Well, we had a session yesterday, but unfortunately I didn't take any notes this time. Tiffany has a sore throat so the session was actually going to get canceled, but Attila, Peg and I talked Helen into a low-key, "let's catch up our character sheets and do maintenance stuff" kind of session. (And Tiffany will also get this when she's feeling better.) Which was why I didn't take notes at first -- then it mutated into outright roleplaying after an hour or so and it didn't occur to me to start taking notes until well into the evening. So all of the following is from memory. Since Attila and Helen are on the board, even if they're mostly lurkers, if I get anything wrong I'm sure they'll post corrections.

We started, as I said, with maintenance stuff, the biggest part of which was figuring out where we were on the calendar. While Helen had had a firm start date in late spring 2055 for the beginning of the campaign, we've been going through a year of gaming saying things like, "on the next Saturday X" and "after a week, Y", and actually had no idea what the current date really was. We sat down with a browser open to a copy of the 2055 calendar and this thread, and worked it out on almost a day-by-day basis, and basically, as of the end of last night's session, it's something like the 20th of June. Which I just realized means that shortly Lukas isn't going to have to worry about school for a two and a half months... cool.

We all also had something like 25 Karma banked up, plus what we got at the start of yesterday for the previous session, so we were also applying that. I'd already marked down the bonding cost for the Rank 3 weapon/power focus that I've had for months now. I started the game with an unbound Power Focus 2 as part of my initial purchase of equipment; I gave it to Ylva since I got the knife, and Peg spent 10 points right away to bond that.

Anyway, since Helen was dealing with each of the three of us separately, what happened is that three separate one-on-one games evolved out of the individual maintenance sessions. At one point they all intersected -- you'll know that when we come to it -- then diverged again.

So let's get started. Basically we took off from a little after the point where the last session ended -- we were in our part of Northrhine-Ruhr (not Berlin as I've been saying for over a year), or at least close enough to it that we could break off and head back to our lives.

The portion of the last game where Bikavèr sold off our "salvage" from the Himmelsrecken was really part of his storyline, strictly speaking, but Helen picked up with him some time after the sale. Attila, if you're reading this, can you please flesh out what Bikavèr did? Because it's the part I remember the least about since I was busy studying my character sheet and planning my changes while you were doing it. What I recall is Bikavèr heading back to Magda's place and picking up some equipment; he also initiated to Grade 3, if I recall correctly. And dammit, I'm drawing a blank -- I know you did more than that before the afternoon of 19 June, Attila, but I can't remember what. I can't even recall what new Phys Ad abilities you bought with the magic point you got from your initiation.

Ylva arranged to have Valentine send the information about her father to her uncle (with whom she's staying in Germany) through multiple anonymous redirects. This resulted in the two of them heading back to Sweden for several days for a memorial service -- during which time Ylva reported in to her grandfather, who is the closest thing to a "handler" that she has. In addition to the service itself, she spent time in the wild with him, reconnecting with her roots and communing with Wolf.

When she got back from Sweden, she too initiated -- to Grade 1, performing an Astral Quest ordeal to reduce the cost. Because Helen wasn't prepared to run it as a roleplaying exercise, she let me guide Peggy through the process using alternate "pure die rolls" method. Ylva was roaming the metaplanes looking for Wolf for quite a while before reaching the Citadel -- the destination of all Astral Quests -- on her very last legs before passing out from the strain.

Oh, and she spent two of her last three Karma on raising her Charisma from 1 to 2, doubling the awesome impact of her personality on the people and spirits around her -- and coincidentally making it possible for her to summon spirits whose Force rank is actually half her Charisma (and thus no longer have to take outrageous drain to summon anything at all).

Lukas went right back home late in the morning, found his father was in their apartment, and assured him that he'd had lots of fun at the sleepover with his friends. Father Veidt, as always more or less oblivious to his son except to note that he's, like, there and alive, absently approved, ruffled his hair, and went back to the office to do some overtime.

After Dad left, Lukas was thinking about Ylva and how weak she was at conjuring, and decided to try his hand at using his Enchanting skill to design a spirit focus (for Field spirits) for himself. If it worked, he'd make one for her to help her conjure Forest spirits. So he spends the next four days working up a formula for a Force 3 Field spirit focus.

Meanwhile Wednesday at school, Lukas gets called to the principal's office. Confused at what's going on (because to the best of his knowledge he hasn't done anything to merit an unexpected summons), he of course goes there. The principal informs him that congratulations are in order -- Lukas has won one of the academic prizes for which he was nominated, awarded by Saeder-Krupp to outstanding students in the corp school system. And the award ceremony is today, right after school, and a shuttle will be picking him up and bringing him to the office of his father's boss, Werner Taube, where he'll receive the award.

Alarm bells ringing like crazy in his head, Lukas thanks the principal and ducks into the boys' room on his way back to class. He rings up Bikavèr on his cell phone and tells him something fishy is going on. Bikavèr, being the world's most confident 8-year-old, reassures him that if the rest of the group don't hear from him by the end of the day, they'll break him out of wherever Saeder-Krupp has him.

Well, after school, Lukas takes the shuttle, and while it does take him to the building where his father (and his father's boss) works, when he's led upstairs they go right past Herr Taube's office and to a conference room, where he's told to enter alone. Wishing desperately that he could have gotten away with bringing his knife focus to class, Lukas does so.

Inside is a single well-dressed man, who introduces himself as (forgot his first name) Erdsblut, a very highly-placed officer in the Saeder-Krupp security forces. And he wants to talk to Lukas about the international incident they almost caused over the weekend. He pops up a snippet of S-K surveillance video of the fight with the fire elemental at the border. Basically it boils down to wanting to know why we were in Westphalia, what we did there, and why we had a member of the Himmelsrecken with us on our way out. He emphasizes that while S-K doesn't really like Westphalia, we need to be on good terms with them (among other reasons because they're the breadbasket of the region).

Lukas is torn between his recently-acquired runner paranoia and his impulsive nature; he hems and haws a bit, and finally comes out with an abbreviated summary -- friend looking for father, which led accidentally to the Himmelsrecken, and hiring Gunther away from them, and that the Himmelsrecken are trying to figure out how to reverse goblinization. I got the impression that Erdsblut's kind of like a parent who has to take a child to task for something the parent actually thinks is kind of cool and amusing, but has to be a hardass about it anyway. He wants to meet with the group as a whole, and also interview Gunther in-depth. But other than that, he assures Lukas that we're really not in trouble, but should be aware that now that S-K knows about us, they're going to keep an eye on what we're up to. He gives Lukas a phone number and says if it ever pops up on one of our phones, we're to answer it immediately. And he'll be in contact soon to arrange the meet.

He shoos Lukas out, and Lukas heads home. When he gets there, he calls Bikavèr to forestall a raid on the megacorp and runs down what happened. He also contacts everyone else, and texts the phone number to everyone along with the warning that if it shows up, it's to be answered, no questions.

Bikavèr talks to Gunther about S-K Security wanting to interview him. Gunther has one main concern -- he has an elderly grandmother in a nursing home in Westphalia and is worried that the Himmelsrecken will use her to get back at him for his defection. Bikavèr being Bikavèr, he takes that number he just got for Erdsblut and calls him up and basically asks him to move Gunther's grandma into a local facility. Surprisingly, Erdsblut agrees.

A day or two later, Lukas' phone rings and Erdsblut's number appears on the caller ID. Interestingly, it's actually him, not a secretary or flunky, and he arranges to meet us all (including Yoruichi -- puppeted by Attila for the scene -- and Gunther) at a mall food court on Saturday afternoon. We meet up outside the mall and stroll on in. We find Erdsblut in jeans and polo shirt by himself at a table in the food court, drinking a strawberry shake. I won't go into detail, but basically, the meeting is amicable. He buys us lunch, confirms that Gunther's grandmother has been moved to a facility that is both good and affordable at his salary, then makes an appointment to meet with him later. He repeats that S-K Security is going to keep an eye on us, but we're free to do what we want, as long as we don't cause another international incident. Ylva speaks up at this point and tells him that the matter is very personal for her, and IIRC, she flat out said she's going back in to find and retrieve her father's remains. (I know she expressed that intent a couple times during the session, and I think one of those times was this meeting.)

All in all it was a friendly meeting. He bids us a good day, and strolls out, slurping the last bit of his shake before dropping it in the trash and disappearing into the crowd.

Anyway, after that, only two things of note happened before the end of the session. Lukas put two of his remaining Karma toward his enchanting skill. Then he took his new formula and a virgin telesma (the specially-prepared item to be enchanted, in Shadowrun parlance -- in this case a hand-selected and -shaped fieldstone) and spent four more days doing the actual enchanting, at the end of which he spent the necessary Karma to finish the process. So now he has a working Force 3 field spirit focus.

While he was doing that, Bikavèr had talked Ylva into getting cultured Tailored Pheromones, to boost her Charisma. This, however, costs about four times as much as she has handy, so the two of them went ghoul hunting again. They travel to a location the proper name of which I missed, which is massively overbuilt and has almost no natural area left. It, or the section they went to, has the nickname "Zombietown". I missed most of their travel, but they eventually found a nest of 11. They surprised the entire nest; Bikavèr attacked and killed three, and Ylva dropped a Stunblast in the middle of them. Between her new power focus and her Initiation grade, she had a 9-meter radius of effect, which actually covered the entire chamber they were in, and then some. She maxed her successes, they failed their rolls to resist, and she knocked all the survivors out. They then waltzed through and cut throats (and ears for the bounty). With a better choice of middleman than we've had before, they get the entire bounty, 110,000 nuyen.

And that was it for the night.