I presume Duck grabbed the secretary and gun and anything else of potential use/value?

As Duck walked away, there were a couple of quiet "THHHP", "THHHP" sounds.  Junior's head The top and back of Junior's skull exploded outward, spattering blood and grey matter on the surrounding debris.

"Didn't wan' da Doc Wag'n folks 'succitatin' 'im.  Duck, kin ya give da sec'tary ta Snakey?  It's gonna be broadcastin' 'til I fixes it.

I gots ta get scarce.  Ya 'k ta meet wit' Noruas an chat wit Freya?"

"E'S ALL YERS.  DA JAMMIN'S COMMIN OFF PERDY QUICK, SO I'D BE MOV'IN 'IM SOON"

She left it unsaid that they should remove the Docwagon bracelet.  They seemed like a relatively bright bunch.

After pausing to make certain that the gangers didn't show a hostile response to her shots and waiting for the adept to provide the secretary, she retracted her miniturrets back into the roof of the van and pulled out of the alley.

If the gangers are bothered to have the merchandise damaged, they don't act on it. As the van pulls away, the second biker rides up and catches Junior under the chin with a jagged hatchet. With some hefting, the body goes over the back of the bike, ichor dumping down around the stained muffler and rear wheel. With that, she hauls off, the leader following a moment after. A few more bikers are still lurking around the area, picking through the remains of the battle for any salvage and watching for trouble. But they won't hang out for long.

On the walk back the clinic, White Duck sees both Lone Star and Docwagon choppers fly past, always keeping a safe distance as they scan the area with spotlights and a host of invisible sensing instruments. They're still hovering outside when White Duck arrives at the clinic door. The clinic is still buttoned up, with the vagrants inside now holding little paper cups of weak soup, as they wait for either medical service or safety outside.

Noruas is feeling much better. He'll still be limping until he gets some proper rest, but all his bits are approximately where they should be. He's served the bill for $100 and told to get the hell out. Freya is waiting in her room if you have more questions for her.

"We'll meetcha two at Fragged up Franks at noon.  Keep yer heads low.  Da star's gonna be sniffin aroun fer a bit."

The bar was far enough away to be outside any Lonestar activity associated with their most recent activities, but close enough it shouldn't be too hard for the decker and adept to make it if they were forced to do so on foot.  Though she doubted Lonestar would put up enough of a dragnet to have roadblocks.  The price the local gangs would extract in damaged equipment and personnel made that unlikely for a low-level exec like Junior.  It wasn't as though they'd murdered a AAA CEO or something.

As soon as she had the pocket secretary in-hand, Copperhead headed out, working to put maximum distance between herself and the inbound choppers.  Her drone dropped in altitude, cruising much closer to street level, losing itself in the electronic noise of vehicular traffic.  Her jammer silenced, eliminating any possibility of triangulating her position based on the electronic noise.  Once she'd put a good 5 kilometers of distance and was confident that neither her van nor the drone had picked up a tail, she parked under a convenient overpass that wasn't occupied by squatters or others likely to pay too much attention to what she was up to.

The driver panel opened and she emerged into the rear.

"Dat was a bit messier dan I'd 'spected."

We can fast forward this a bit if you want.  I plan to disable the antenna on the secretary, make a copy of the data on it and grab what I can from the copy that's not encrypted.  I'll also do a bit of a paint job on the van to make it a less exact match of any description or video from the scene of the fight (covering up bullet holes, adding a racing stripe or two, etc.)  I figure there's about 60-90 minutes between now and noon?

Caduceus was not too upset that they no longer had to deal with Junior. The shaman hopped back into Copperhead's vehicle and rode with her to the rendezvous point, helping with his spirits and magic when needed.  A little concealment from a city spirit here and there to make them less noticeable, a little bit of a Trid Phantasm or Physical Mask to disguise their vehicle, or a bit of Clairvoyance to peek around a corner when necessary.

He definitely breathed a sigh of relief if/when they made it out of hostile territory, however.  Replying to Copperhead's comment, he said, "Messy.  Yeah.  That's an understatement.  I did not expect a low-key hospital visit to turn into such a..." he searched for the word, "...tornado of drek."

Duck flicks out his cigarette at the door, putting it right into his stride so that it's under the ball of his foot when it hits he ground. He  pops into the clinic, paying Freya a visit first by simply dipping his head into her room's door.

"Say, if you ever want to go on an incredibly interesting date with an incredibly good looking guy (that's me) sometime, my number's good for that. Oh, and for work stuff too. Yeah." He says with a charming smile, moving on to pick up Nouras and heading out to find a way underground.

"Come on. We need to get our suits cleaned if we're going to a fancy party." He says, hqnding the dwarf an invitation to the party.

"I totally kicked that guy's ass for you, by the way. Nobody shoots my buddy in the gut and gets away with it." He grins down to Nouras and leads the two to the nearest entrance to the ork underground.

EDIT: Added a little color to this post. No, not figuratively, I literally forgot to color in Duck's words.
This message was last edited by the player at 12:34, Fri 22 July 2016.

Noruas smiles at the mention of a fancy party.  It had been years since he and Miyuki crashed a party of the like.  He grabs an alcohol wipe from one of the stands and quickly releases himself from all the blood that was in his hands.

Two questions, he quickly replied as they walked on, Did you get a recording of Junior's beating?  And how much heat are we going to pack for this party?

As Duck walks along with Nouras, he draws a fresh smoke and lights it.

"Yeah, probably. Not sure CH's cams will entirely capture the smugness of that bastard, or if her cameras were high-res enough to get good motion capture on my strikes, but knowing CH, probably. As for heat, I dunno, that's to be discussed. I'm sure you can probably tell that I can grievously injure someone with a paper airplane if I want, but guns aren't my thing. That's on y'all."

The dwarf casually tosses the wet wipe aside and laughs.

Yeah, for you maybe.  But the rest of us are still mere motrals.  We need our guns, and preferably, EX Explosive rounds.

So are we skipping ahead to the Ork Underground or are we gonna be walking through tall grass here, if you get my drift?

That's up to Bear, but realistically he just wants to go down there for a fresh change of clothes.

Duck makes his way through a series of tunnels, some eerily quiet and others packed and heavily trafficked by the fringes of metahumanity. Duck seems right at home, even visibly appearing more comfortable as the two venture deeper underground. They find themselves at an abandoned subway station within about thirty minutes, and after arguing with a troll dry cleaner in Japanese for a good fifteen minutes, she agrees to take their blood-stained clothes and clean/patch them. Duck leads Nouras two doors down, to a location called Crane's comics. A human of Amerindian/Hispanic descent is inside, haggling with an ork that doesn't look like he gets out much over the price of a vinyl sculpture of a rather voluptuous woman with purple hair and a skimpy outfit. She calls Duck over, Duck states a price, and the ork sighs and pays up. He moves back to Nouras and shows him around.

Inside the confines of the abandoned subway terminal's once-quiet cylindrical hallways rests a small row of about ten different shops, all repurposed over the years to serve the clientele that usually inhabit the Orc Underground. This particular old corner bookstore houses two shops- an antique, real-paper comic store run by Duck and a talismonger's shop that sells natural foods and materials for ritualistic purposes, which occupies what used to be a built-in coffee shop back when the station was populated and the location served Corporate America. A place that used to sell digital paperbacks and soycaf now exists to serve the denizens of the underground, so while the essence of what once was there still lingers, the flavor of the place has changed dramatically.

Duck himself lives in the back room of the shop, with his inventory all kept out on the sales floor, the back room is larger than some small surface-level apartments. The whole place is protected by one of those shopping-mall style garage-like rolling metal grates, and Duck locks himself in when the store closes, which turns out to be whenever Duck decides it's closed.

Moving to a small clothing rack in the corner, he fishes through the various vintage tees and hands Nouras a vintage Wolverine T-shirt and some XXL Batman-logo childrens' pajama pants to change into, pointing to a door to the back.

"At some corp suit party? Doubtful packing ANY heat is going to be practical. Security's gonna be tight and it could compromise us. Besides, after you see those vids, you might just realize you already got two guns right here." he holds up his fists comedically, but, given the location of Junior's brains at present, he actually isn't kidding at all. Duck was like one of those vivdly colorful snakes- pretty to look at, but all that color and flash was supposed to serve as a warning. Duck's physical appearance was relatively unimposing. In fact, he looked like the type of guy who would help an old lady cross the street, but Nouras likely knew better at this point.

"We may need them if we end up tailing someone out, which I'm anticipating we'll need to do. The astral is no-doubt going to be packed too, so maybe we should have Cad suit up as well and join us. CH seems a little sour and looks a lot runner, so we may want to have her on overwatch as per our normal modus operandi. Maybe after this is all said and done, we can throw a little shindig ourselves and have her as the guest of honor."

Freya regards White Duck's offer. "Yeah? I'll keep that in mind. Say, maybe pass me the dwarf's number before you leave?" She winks.

"I'll probably be here for another day or two, just to be sure I'm straight. If you need any more questions answered--maybe don't bring along the running gunfight with you."

The invitations: each invitation is a specially monogrammed, gilt-lettered invite to the HSE Premier Party at an address on Queen Anne's Hill, as 'honored guests' of Mr. Pengrave.

The pocket secretary is locked. Fortunately, Junior planned to guard it with his fist more than his passwords, and Copperhead's computer skill is nothing to sneeze at. It takes about an hour to pop it open, and it's quite the treasure trove. His calendar shows he's been meeting repeatedly with Pengrave of HSE, and his call list includes half a dozen calls to Tee Hee, Pengrave, and someone named Cooperman.

The man was also quite the fan of dictations. There's miles of the stuff, ostensibly 'for his book'. Half of it is rubbish. The other half sounds like it could be marketable until you stop and really think about it and realize it's also rubbish. He has long lists of corporate structures and new simsense projects, people to hire or fire, and some choice words about Manes.

There are a few other nuggets, including "note to self, Val is running Cleo, and Griffin's messed up with Jack." He also has several versions of a speech he plans to give at the Global board of directors meeting on Friday, lambasting Urian's leadership and the significant financial losses for the company.

His notes include plenty of phone numbers and a few addresses, none check out as anything interesting, but also character strings that look suspiciously like passwords. Most have their purpose clearly written next to them ("HotShortStack.com", simsense data stores, and the like). Three of them do not.


At this point, I am considering this chapter closed. You have /two nights/ left to get three chips, so you may want to consider splitting up or doing some more research with the hours you have available. It is currently evening, around 6:00pm Wednesday. Getting washed, dressed, and to the party will take a few hours. Expect to arrive fashionably late :) (Maybe Junior's wearing capes everywhere wasn't such a bad idea after all, and he does seem to have a thing for 'street chic'.)

I'll leave the thread open for WD/Noruas to continue their chat, and any other post-battle activities CH/Caduceus get up to. I'll post karma momentarily.

KARMA! Hurrah. Things moved very smoothly, even against pitched odds. +2 karma for everyone. White Duck especially shined in regards to jumping in and excellent descriptions. An additional +1 karma to him.

Yeah, alright.  Let me see if I can ask around regarding our host for this party.  Got anywhere I can plug in safely and leave my meat for a few hours?

Duck chuckles. "Yeah, but we never use it. This old store used to have a public access feed before these tunnels were shut down. Not sure if it's still working, honestly, but uh, you can try it if you like."

He points to a low wall along one of the coffee shop's borders. Uncomfortable-looking plastic and chairs line the way for several dusty ports lined along the wall. The small coffee tables are cluttered with paraphernalia from the talismonger's shop and old collectibles from Duck's. Looking at some of the merchandise, it's hard to tell which.

None of the ports are immediately functional--but with a little tooling, Noruas can get enough of a connection out to at least check his email. No full-on VR until he takes the time to do a more thorough job.

With the exterior of the van cleaned and visually adjusted, the drone re-charged and the gun barrels cleaned, Copperhead drove the pair of them to the bar she'd mentioned earlier, ordering an enormous plate of nachos and a double-expresso coffee.  She sort of felt like a beer, but she'd seen a few too many fellow soldiers and not the odd runner who'd failed to adhere to the "no drinking while on duty" adage.  And a runner was on duty from the time the fixer called until the nuyen was in the bank and your feet were up on the end table.

She handed the secretary to the mage to see what sense he could make of things while they waited for the other two.

"Da passwords could be fer 'is office 'puter.  I'm tinkin a break-in der could be good.  Before dey figgers out he ain't comin back and changes all da locks.  Da J kin mebe keep some o da heat off too.  An we should figger out who dese Cooperman an Pengrave dudes are.  Woulda been better if we coulda talked ta da orc 'fore 'is head got smushed."

I'm assuming the other two of you are coming so we can share intel?

"Yeah, it's hard to read the thoughts in a smooshed head," Caduceus said with a shrug.  He was not a fan of violence and Junior's death had certainly been a violent one.  There wasn't much they could do about it now though, so he opted to focus on the information they did have.  Uprooting secrets was a snake shaman's specialty.  He took the secretary and helped to sift through the information.

After a bit of thought he said, "Well, we know Tee Hee was involved with the chips, so that implies that these other two were too.  Actually, now that I think about it, Tee Hee's fixer was named Cooperman, wasn't he?  Pengrave sounds kind of familiar too..."  The neurons in Caduceus' brain were firing like crazy now, searching for the appropriate connections.  Junior, sim chips, corporate deals...  Then it hit him.  "Wasn't Pengrave the Hollywood Simsense guy?  The one that was in talks with Junior's company?  Seems likely a guy in his position could have some use for some stolen chips."

Looking through some of the other tidbits he said, "I don't know what 'Val is running Cleo, and Griffin's messed up with Jack' is supposed to mean, but it sounds important.  Could be people who slotted the dangerous chips.  As in Val is running the Cleo chip alright, but Griffin got messed up after slotting the Jack chip.  Could mean something completely different though."  He shrugged.

Looking at the list of passwords, Caduceus smiled.  "Heh, he thought he was being clever, didn't he?"  He pointed a finger down the list of passwords.  "What he failed to realize though, was that by labeling his other passwords, he practically tells us what these last three are.  Just think of what you know he would have a password to, like his office computer, then see if it is anywhere on the list.  If it's not, then it is a safe bet that it is one of the unlisted ones."  He checked through the list to see if his list included a password for his office computer and/or his home security, which seemed like another likely candidate.  He then shared his findings with Copperhead.



For a bit of a refresher, here is a quote of a bit of what we have learned about Pengrave and Cooperman already. (and Junior, for that matter)

Looking at dustiness of the place, Noruas quickly fixes it up and plugs in to check out his email.
This message was last edited by the player at 13:31, Tue 26 July 2016.

Copperhead had already told you over the radio where to meet.  I'm not sure whether we're assuming wireless email or not?  But you could certainly phone her if you want to change plans.  She'll get grumpy(ier?) though because the nachos are already on the table . . . ;>

Duck meets up with the rest of the group after Nouras is finished and the two get their suits cleaned. He doesn't seem hungry. Instead, he hands the two their party invitations.

"Looks like we've got a party to attend this evening."

Copperhead looked for a napkin to wipe her hand before accepting the proffered piece of glittering cardboard.

"What fer?"

She opens the card and reads before interjecting over top of any explanation.

"Jun'r was talkin' ta dis Pengrave dude a bunch.  Da party is mebe a chance ta get close ta 'im.  Dunno if we should all go in though.  Dis face ain't da best in a party crowd."

She handed the invite back before grabbing another nacho loaded with soy cheese and and red lumps that were likely supposed to resemble tomatoes.

Noruas was tempted to grab some nachos as well but thought better after looking at his cleaned suit.

I'll need you guys to give me a few hours to check the place out in the matrix.  That way I'll be able to provide some intel in case you need it.  Anybody know if we have a stable connection around here?  I also need someone to watch over my body.  Thanks.

I'll let Papa rule on the quality of the connections here.  I'd picked the bar with the expectation some decking might be necessary, but don't know what quality of connection might be expected in a "connected" bar.

"Well, in that case, CH, we'll have to round up a few beers and bottles and throw you your own shindig once this is all through. You probably saved my hoop back there, which is much appreciated, so I at least owe you that much." Duck lights up a smoke, but sits on the outside of the table and blows it away from the group.

"I have a hunch we'll find one of the chips with Pengrave, or at least get a lead to it from there. Hmm, the evidence suggests we'll probably find another with Cooperman. I think Cad's onto something with the Cleo and Jack thing. Maybe we give a call to Roxy- she might be able to shed some more light on what these chips do and how it might be related." looking to CH's to-be-unused invitation, he considers.

"Think we should give her that invite?"

Noruas can slide a hundred nuyen to the lady behind the bar and get private access to the network jack, buried somewhere in a snake's nest of old power and telecom cables. The connection isn't great--he won't be burning rubber. But for basic surveillance, it should suffice. If Noruas wants to run a line out to a table by the bar, he can at least veg somewhere more comfortable than 'beside the trash cans'.

Who's Roxy?  Did a search and the name isn't coming up

"Should mebbe chat wit da J.  If da slips is slotted, best ta know if der's any tricks ta gettin dem out.  An mebbe fin out what day does.  Er at least if der's any 'cautions we otta be takin.

Ya be wantin o'erwatch 'er should I be doin somethin' else, like mebbe hittin Jun'rs office?"