Re: OOC7: The OOC Awakens
I had suggested having him humiliated in private with a recording so we'd have leverage. That was risky, but manageable because we'd have insurance Humiliation in public is a different beast - we lose the leverage and just have the cost. In fact, we have a higher cost because if Junior doesn't take action against us, he loses face. Private humiliation he could just have sucked up if the consequences of acting on it were too high. As well, you've just disfigured him. That's not the sort of thing you can just paper over. Every time he looks in the mirror, he'll have a permanent reminder of us and how much he hates us.
Sending a strike team against us is just biz. That's not making a mortal enemy. We're going to be on the pointy end of a lot of strike teams from a lot of corps and individuals. Once the run is over, he'd probably forget us and us him. Someone trying to kill me because their objectives oppose my current employer's objectives is not personal. I might well go to work for them next week. Our objective was to extract information and dissuade further intervention until after the run was done without provoking any desire for intervention after the run was complete. Now, it may be that Junior is the sort of opposition that holds a grudge and he may hold a grudge down to the messenger level rather than the "who hired the messenger" level, but that's not something we can assume yet and it's actually pretty rare in this world.
However, we've just made it personal, so he's now a permanent enemy going on from this run. And if we take him out, we have a whole lot of witnesses who saw us taking on one of Seattle's elite business tycoons. Hard for Lone Star to ignore that.
We're always going to have opposition. Sometimes that opposition might be people we want to impress because we'd like to work for them next time. Sometimes it's people we'd rather avoid in the future, but don't want to annoy. Occasionally we might have opposition we want to take out, but it would be best to make that decision as a team in advance and figure out how to do it with minimal long-term fallback on the team. And sometimes we'll be forced into taking someone out in a messy way and then figure out how to deal with the consequences it.
We've sort of backed our way into the last situation. I'm not exactly sure how we get out of this yet, but I'm sure we can figure out a way.
The good news is the witnesses in the area likely have a code of silence. No one's going to go running to the cops. But if the cops come in hard and heavy with nuyen to spend and pressure to bear, at least some of the locals will crack. Plus the bikers and driver and bodyguard have at least some allegiance to this guy, even if only financial, so they'll certainly share what they know to Junior's corp.
What that means is that we absolutely *can't* kill him right now and he has to be seen alive in public after this if we take him away (which is probably a good idea - things are too hot for us to interrogate him here). But we need him to die soon from something that looks accidental. I.e. He needs to die before he can put in place too much of a machine aimed at mulching us.
My current brain-storming includes a delayed-action poison that isn't likely to be picked up in a standard autopsy and manifests as something esle, a subsequent vehicle accident, an attack from someone who isn't us. Something that's not going to make Lone Star take on too much digging. (I doubt many people like him or will miss him, so there won't likely be pressure to investigate if there's a decent cover story.)
But as I said, OOC I'm fine with what you're doing. This particular guy pushes all the wrong buttons given your back story, so go ahead and make him bleed. Copperhead will sit there swearing at you under her breath and trying to figure out how to dig herself (and perhaps the team) out from under the pile of dreck that's now forming. However, in the end, we'll muddle through. :>