Today I'm struggling with a bout of writers block. At the suggestion of a friend I'm working at a piece of fiction. This is not it.
Wednesday nights have been the night I go out and game with my friends for over a year. I've recently been absent for almost three months. I was pleasently surpirsed to see the younger members of the group had matured some in that time, although clearly not enough to know better than to make political jokes at the table. The game was Shadowrun, and it was our second session.
Our group was a Cybered-Up street samurai, a literal one since his player is Japanese, a revolver using gunfighter, who's player shows up in a cowboy hat, and a weapons and infiltration expert, who drew as little attention as possible, which is good. The last three members of the group are where we get strange, we had one player insisting his character believes he is Hellboy and that he was therefore absolved from creating a background for him other than that his parents were from Greece so his troll could have devil horns. Unprompted he included that his character's real name was Anung un Rama, I had to leave to take a phone call, but by the time I was back his character was named Peter. Then we have Joker, a seventeen year old rich brat with a massive comic collection and dead parents operating on the principle that if he does enough horrible things he's bound to create one superhero. Finally, there's me, my character is more or less Spider Jerusalem, the GM even let me stat out a bowel disrupter. To give my character more usefulness than simply drinking, doing drugs, and yelling at people I built him to be a Rigger, in essence I have a small computer connected to my nervous system, I use it to control robots, my five "spider"-bots.
When this session started we were already on a job, after taking a few potshots out my window with the disrupter I called the spider-bots and we got in the car. Jo, who since his dead folks were loaded, lives across the street, he decided he needed to steal a school bus, and the street sam was there to help. The infiltration expert walked and the troll-who-would-be-Hellboy got rendered unconscious, since he technically wasn't part of the team yet and needed a reason to go to the job site and help us out. Now I'm not quite sure what happened in between, my travel time always seems to get fuzzy in this game, but the next thing I know I'm flying down the highway with a military police car in pursuit.
Now, I know this play, so I gunned it. The GM rolled something behind his screen and then the spider-bots started acting screwy. They started pulling stuff apart and making it into something else in the backseat of my car. Just as I was getting worried this cop was gonna chase me until I ran out of gas one of the spider-bots opened a window and threw something out. The black object bounced off the road and then the cop car vanished in a small flash of light, the little fuckers had made a Singularity Grenade out of spare parts, I swear, I love those little bastards more and more every day.
So we get away from the cops and sometime later pull up to the job site. I decide to wander around and get the lay of the land. The general layout was like this, there's a large park to the south, across a roadway, and on the north side of that roadway, divided by a connecting road there's a parking lot and the medical lab we're there to burgle. As I'm wandering through the park wondering how we're going to get in there without being noticed our troll friend gets himself pasted by an ambulance, which then crashes into the security check point. Jo and the street sam had given up on the school bus when it encased them in fire-resistant foam and had stolen a van instead, I wish they had just stolen the van, no they duct-taped five katana across the hood, and they used their sword-van to t-bone the crashed ambulance.
I ran over to the troll, who taking my advice on building the character closer to what he wanted had done away with cyberware and had gone with being an Adept instead. First I handed him a joint, and told him "smoke this, trust me, I'm a doctor." which I'm not. He smoked it and immediately began to Astrally Project, it was some real good shit. I also slapped him with a stim patch so he wouldn't pass out and die before he got picked up by an ambulance, since the one that hit him was no longer of any use. Since the spider-bots were already out, about, and no doubt up to something devious I left them to it and stood around observing, observing and smoking, being just shy of useless. The street sam had been running his motorcycle from the back of the sword-van to the park across the street, so he hadn't been there when Jo, the gunfighter and the infiltrator had run through the security point and he decided it was time to catch up. He bolts through the check point and it goes nuts, it had been rerouting systems when the rest of the team had gone in.
The troll had been playing with things on the astral plane and his heart stopped, I pulled a trauma patch out of my jacket pocket and restarted his heart, his player looked at me dumbfounded, I just chuckled, he was technically brain dead until the magical healing on the ambulance could restore his mind. A few minutes later the ambulance appeared in the form of a hover craft, I waved a random credential at them without turning around, yelling "Don't mind me, I'm with the press!" and they nodded and scooped the troll up. With my character's mechanically enhanced hearing I heard them discussing in hushed tones the state of the patient, "What the hell is he on? Is... Is he astrally projecting? No, that's not in his file. Well how should I know? ...And who resuscitated him already?"
Around then one of the spider-bots came up to me, handed me some keys, showed me an explosive charge it found, and asked me to follow it. They ask questions now, great little bastards. I told it to hide the bomb in the park across the street, away from the car. It lead me to the back entrance, where it disabled one of the building Security Bots. So with the robot down and keys in hand I unlocked the door, and popped my head back around the side to see the troll getting out of the ambulance. "Hey! Flatline! Come'er!"
He did, I pointed at the robot and said, "I need me a working van to take that thing in... better make it a truck, there's a parking lot across the street, find what ya can." He ran off to his new task and I went inside. I found the lunch room, complete with a liquor cabinet. The spider-bot with me handed me a bag and scuttled off to somewhere. So I started loading that sucker up as most of the team was at work infiltrating the labs, looking for what we were being paid for. I heard someone coming and hid under the table in the centre of the room. When the two workers began serving themselves from the buffet table I took aim and shot one with the disrupter, the results were nigh-catastrophic, I'll save you from the details but the second guy was still there flicking at his lighter trying against all hope to clear the smell. Then I shot the second guy without turning the disrupter down. His lighter decided to work as I hit him, the combustion of the methane set off the fire systems and the labs upstairs began filling with water.
I climbed up the back of the robot on my way out and began tinkering with it. When I finally got enough hits to do what I wanted I reversed it's target recognition system, authorized employees are targets; else not, and I needed to give it a go command, but I couldn't remember the damn keyword from the Movie, I looked at the GM and realized, he was giving it to me, "War." and one of my own "Verbalize, 'Rock'", so it stomped off down the hall shouting "War...Rock...War...Rock" killing any guard, accountant, or lab tech it came across... I booked it back to my car. By the time the robot was leaving the first floor the bomb in the park had gone off, killing the street sam's bike, love those spider-bots.
The team ran into some trouble and were beaten to the objective, or just beaten in Flatline's case. Jo had put out a post on his personal message board the second things looked tough and had gathered up a gang of street kids who planned to make him king. As Jo's gang and the police riot teams arrived my kill-bot flung itself out a window, jarring it's targeting system and setting it to "free-for-all". To get out of the building Jo stole a guard uniform and ran out screaming, the gunfighter and infiltrator made much more subtle exits, the street sam... how did he get out? Back on point, Flatline got locked up in a prison cell, and decided to make his escape just as the police reached his floor. He was shot and killed resisting arrest. My spider-bots made for me, but there was one stop that needed making. As Jo ran screaming towards the Halloweener's, yup that's what the gang is called, he flung off the guard uniform and demanded to know "Where's my crown and where's my popcorn?"
The popcorn was spider-bot delivered, that was it, they we're back in the car and me and my bots made our escape.
-James
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment