PinkCat: Running in the Shade “Blast from the Past” (A different sort of SR campaign report)

To understand what is going on here, you had best read the first PinkCat: Running in the Shade post, but short summary, this is a campaign report for our Shadowrun campaign set in NorCal through the filter of a cartoon made by one of the team members.  If you want read the previous stories after the initial wave there is Episode 4, and Episodes 5 and 6.

Episode Seven: Blast from the Past

Guest Starring: Clawz.

The team is called by Ice Wolf, an old school shaderunner merc, to retrieve some data from an old BigGunCo facility that is scheduled for demolition and rebuilding (as a ice cream factory).  The old facility is big and creepy and poorly protected, so Pink and company get inside easily and then it become a Scooby Doo-like chase by crazy robots through abandoned offices and factory floors, complete with rows of doors gag, until the secret command room is discovered and shut down.  The data is recovered, Glitter get some new robot toys and they get paid!

What really happened:  We are called to a meet at the Cafe Chrome which, twenty years ago, was a runner hotspot, now it is just limping along.  PinkCat sets up her white noise generator only to find one already running, which pleases her.  We meet our contact, an older woman with obvious old style interface plugs, who hired us to (hopefully) retrieve data from an old building about to be demolished.  The data in question?  Information on the Kitsune, one of the early cyberdecks, the company (Hamamatsu Photonics) that produced it long since absorbed by larger rivals and this design office abandoned for years.   Because the building had been abandoned for years, the security around it was pretty minimal, mostly to keep out squatters.  So, getting in was easy, finding anything useful was the challenge!  Finally hit the former presidents office and found, and opened, a wall safe finding a briefcase, a wade of old cash, a change of clothes and a key card.

So, we head to the only place we have not fully explored, the basement.  There we found a card reader hidden next to some shelving bolted to the wall (and thus unstolen by scavengers).  It opened a hidden door into a waiting room, complete with coaches and a receptionist’s deck (with a 20 year old “Soy Delight” bar in of the drawers!) all with power.  The inner door had a palm lock to go with the key lock, so PinkCat hacked the system (“classic!”) which Sparky spoofed the palm lock.  On the far side were two automated gun mounts which we disabled very carefully, only to reenable them when we discovered that the complex was being infiltrated by devil rats!  We hid while the automated guns chewed up most of the rats, but about half a dozed got threw and tried to chew us up.  Bladez was able to deal with most of them.  Once the rats had been dealt with we found the secret testing lab, the data and a prototype Kitsune deck.  We back out, sealing overthing up and dropping a tracker at the hole they devil rats dug in.  We meet with our employer, who is in fact the former shadowrunner / decker Silver Fox, give her the data, get paid and trade the prototype deck for a future favor.   And now we hope to turn the secret lab into our secret liar (Bladez is especially excited as it means he can move out of his mom’s home).

Notes: Devil rats sure are annoying!  Luckily we only faced a few more than our number but PinkCat was not thrilled with the slaughter even if it was necessary.  Hopefully, PinkCat now has a mentor to teach her a few things before her naïveté gets her killed.

Photo by Mario Goebbels and used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Next Episode (“The Concert!”) here.