And another thing
I’ve been wondering lately
Am I crazy
To believe in ideals?
I’m a betting man
But it’s getting damn lonely.
Oh, honey, if only
I could be sure what I feel.
What’s my scene? (I’m dying to know)
I’ll never know.
Well, I concede
I’ve been caught in someone else’s scene (but that’s not me).
Where, oh where, oh where can my scene be?
Please answer me
What’s my ..?

 

A month passed after they killed the Purifiers, and nothing came our heroes’ way. Adam Lee spent the time fruitfully, preparing a safe house that they could begin to set up as a base of operations, the others searching out equipment and training. Jayden did a job for some old Filipino friends, the men who taught him how to fight with knives calling him in to do an extraction in New Horizon, for which he was paid with a qi focus[1]. They waited, hiding in their low-rent apartments and waiting for something to come up.

Of course something came up. New Horizon is a big city, and its claws cast long, dark shadows. Anansi called them with an urgent job – a woman called Rosemary from Rego Corp needed their help urgently. They broke off their lazy weekday afternoon and swung around to her offices, a small section of a penthouse space protected by serious troll guards who took their weapons and slapped disabling locks on their cyberware as soon as they walked in the door. This kind of office was obviously not the office of a corp that does anything – Rosemary was a broker for other corps, an agent. She was polite but dismissive – shadowrunners were clearly beneath her, but desperate times called for desperate measures. They wondered how often she found herself in desperate times – perhaps if the desperation is a calendar event, it’s time to start thinking things are going wrong?

Rosemary’s situation was simple. A group of student activists from New Horizon University of Technology – commonly referred to as NHUTs – had taken possession of a pharmaceutical company in the industrial zone, and were threatening to blow it up. They were in a stand off with police, and surely within a few hours it would all come to a head. Rosemary did not care at all about the students, the pharmaceutical company or public safety, but she did care about one of the student gang, a young man called Lionel Harper. She would pay the PCs very good money to get in, get Lionel Harper and get him out. She did not care who died in the process, but it was imperative that no one know he had been there, or that he had been taken out, and he had to come out unharmed.

From the dismissive air of her speech, and the way she spoke about Lionel and the students, it was abundantly clear to the ‘runners what was going on here. Lionel was the child of a rich corporate Somebody, he’d fallen into the wrong crowd, the wrong crowd was about to get wasted, and Daddy wanted Lionel out before whatever second tier corp owned this facility went fully mediaeval on these pesky students. But Daddy didn’t value Lionel enough to cut a deal openly with any other corp, so Daddy wanted to pay a few expendable nobodies to do the dirty work, and if everything went wrong, so what – he wouldn’t lose any money, easy come easy go. No doubt some PR flak was already preparing a story about how Lionel got caught up in a raid during his Work Experience week, poor kid was training in pharmacy so he could help the refugees in the Indo Zone don’t you know, isn’t it sad how these student radicals destroy so much that is good in the world with their misplaced activism? We’ve all seen the news … but better if the future heir is rescued, moderately unhurt, sees his friends (comrades?!) die in fire, and learns the error of his ways. We were all young once, right?

They nodded sagely, took the address, and left. Swung past a few people’s houses to pick up gear, and headed over to the scene of the crime. It was a typical third rate corporate facility, a factory jutting over the river, the front of the building a suite of offices and reception rooms. Like many third tier corporate types the boss had got delusions of grandeur, in this case leading him to build a kind of tower on the third floor of the office space that looked over the factory area. This factory was a series of balconies over a workshop floor, all covered in a glass roof, so the boss could look down on all the work of his eager little minions. The group’s hacker told them that whatever this corp made was semi-illegal, it had a section of the factory overhanging a canal where boats could load and take away whatever semi-dodgy pharma the company was producing, and it was nestled in between two other similarly proto-legal gangster companies. Take one look at the hacker’s report and everyone thought, “Dragon’s balls those students are doing the right thing,” and then “sucks to be them.”

The police and some corporate troops had gathered out front but weren’t going in yet, because rumour had it a senior exec had been inside when the hit went down. The PCs decided not to try and sneak in through the riverside, but instead found an old sewer entry from below that apparently even the corporate owners were unfamiliar with – some remnant from when New Horizon was actually New, that maybe the students had found out in that devious way that students do. Apparently some of these students had studied urban planning, so it stood to reason that they would know about it – though why urban planning majors were raiding a pharmaceutical company armed with AK-97s was outside our ‘runner’s knowledge. Kids today!

They entered the sewers, Adam Lee complaining vociferously about the stench, the moss and the architecture. After a few nasty encounters with the filthy water they found themselves in the older, original works, old stone tunnels that smelt more of must and rot than sewage, and were so dark it felt as if the walls were sucking in the light. Somewhere on that careful journey to the bowels of the corporate office Jayden felt something, a shrieked warning from his eagle spirit, and they stopped at his hiss. They stood in the dripping darkness, filthy water slicking around their legs, and watched as a little distance up ahead something horrid and huge swarmed past them. It wasn’t one thing, but a multitude of large, writhing bodies, glowing subtly in the deep darkness of the pits, skittering and hissing quietly, moving with careful deliberation around the edge of the water. Rats maybe, or lampreys with legs and a shared consciousness – they could not tell in the clammy dark, only that something vaguely luminous passed them by. Jayden held Genji’s arm in an iron grip, invisible in the darkness, Genji held Adam, and in a chain they stood perfectly silent as the throng slid past. They waited for the sound and the glow to subside, and Jayden was just about to motion the passing of the threat when somewhere to their right, in the path of the swarm, someone screamed. A horrible storm of chittering gnawing sounds clattered down the corridor, accompanied by desperate screams that soon faded into begging and then gurgling.

They ran to the entrance to the corporate offices. Here they found a small sealed door that opened into a small antechamber. They pushed in, stripping off protective gear and securing the door behind them. They were in, though they did not know what waited for them above. Adam Lee cast his clairvoyance spell and sent an invisible eye questing, revealing that their room opened into a larger sub-basement room, a kind of control room that held a lot of the equipment for monitoring and controlling the office environment above. This room had been taken over by two students, one of whom was lounging in the middle of the room holding a large pistol, and the other of whom was sitting in a hoverchair holding a pistol and looking intently at banks of CCTV screens. This was their entry.

For lack of any better strategy, Jayden and Genji charged in. They hurled the door open and Jayden was on the standing student before he could blink, wicked knife at his throat, snarling, “Drop it and give in!” Before the student could move Genji had his pistols on the sitting man, and they both decided to surrender. The sitting man was revealed to be a disabled student, the hoverchair his only means of movement, but his chair also contained an advanced cyberdeck. T-Rex, their technomancer, destroyed the deck, and they tied their two captives far away from the room’s controls. They then set about systematically deleting all video of the students’ attack, used the cameras to find Lionel, and turned off the feed.

Lionel was up on level 2, in the factory part of the building, in a group with the two leaders of the raid – an Orc and a human, and a bunch of activists. There were other activists at the front of the building, armed and facing off with the police through a wall of corporate glass across a small open square. The police were moving resources in but not acting too quickly. They had probably half an hour to make their move. They moved up, slipping past the activists in the entry way and taking a set of spiral stairs up to the second level. Here they hid in the shadows of the doorway to the pharma factory, watching the students. There was some kind of argument happening, with the Orc leader and the human leader debating what to do next and some of the surrounding students looking decidedly uncomfortable – perhaps they had realized there was no way out of this occupation except foot first, or covered in disgrace. It was then that the PCs heard that the students had planted a bomb in the basement, where the computer equipment was.

Well then, time to move. They all looked at Jayden. Lionel was in there, and these were students. Jayden could be in there, grab Lionel and get him back – or at least have a knife at his throat – before the rest of the students could blink. The rest, they guessed, would be random noise.

Jayden was just about to move when the back wall of the factory exploded. That wall had two blast doors, sealed now, but they blew in like sheets of china under the force of whatever explosives had been loaded on the outside. Even then they held up for a moment, and instead of a roaring wall of fire everyone inside the factory was treated to a blast of warm air and a loud clang! as the doors fell slowly forward. From the rush of smoke and sparks two men came rushing forward, one an orc in body armour carrying a heavy rifle, the other a pale elf armed with a single assault rifle. As they watched in horror a grenade bounced out of the shadows and burst around the students in a cloud of gas.

Jayden looked around at his team, shrugged, took a deep breath, and ran forward to grab Lionel. The students were falling over in spasms as the gas spread, Lionel the first to drop, but the gas was not enough to take down Jayden, who grabbed Lionel’s supine form, yelled “We’re just here for the kid!” and started dragging him out of the cloud. Genji stepped out of the shadows and opened fire on the elf, while John, who was sequestered on the balcony above, took a shot at the Orc.

That was when the mage appeared, with his three spirits of air. They started laying about them with bolts of lightning while the mage took cover behind a pillar. Two of them killed students, while another laid into Jayden with a huge bolt of force, knocking him back and nearly blasting him into unconsciousness. Holding Lionel’s stunned form, there was nothing he could do. The mage, hidden behind his pillar, made a gesture, and two of the air spirits drifted away down the hallway into the main offices, firing bolts of force as they went. Somewhere out the front, responding to the chaos in the rear, the police opened fire. Their window for extraction had fallen from 30 minutes to three.

The other spirit continued to fire bolts of force down into the gas cloud, killing another student. The Orc fired at Genji, and the elf took down one of the student leaders with a shot to the face. The party, still confused, weren’t sure what to do or who to shoot – until Adam Lee used his telekinesis spell to lift that annoying mage out from under cover and into the middle of the open space above the factory floor. The mage hung there in the air, looking shocked and horrified at his powerless position, calling to his spirit to come and rescue him – and John shot him in the head. Free from the cover, hanging there in open space, he could not dodge or avoid what was coming[2]. Moments later Adam dropped his bloodied, broken form to the factory floor, just to make sure.

They skirmished a little more, but by now Genji had managed to break the Orc, who was now badly injured, and Jayden was dragging Lionel back into cover. Now that pale elf held up his hands and in a decidedly Russian accent yelled “Okay chummers, time to deal! We see you just want the kid! Let’s all chill down and we’ll let you get your mark out!”

They agreed, and the elf gave them a few moments to get their man out. Unfortunately Jayden had succumbed to his injuries while they talked, and Adam had to sneak out of cover to help him up and drag Lionel into cover, the kind of situation that a fast-thinking, cold-hearted elf might turn to advantage, but their mage was dead and the Orc was badly hurt, so probably for the best. Below them they could hear the sound of gunfire and screams as the students went to war with The Man. They dragged Lionel and Jayden out, and headed down.

Their exit took them past the main foyer, which was a hell of gun fire and broken glass as the students tried to hold off the incoming corporate soldiers and police. John grabbed the nearest student as they passed and told him that his leaders were dead and it was all done, tried to grab him away, but the student shook off his arm. He yelled a little more and a few moments later three students – a scared boy, a girl making brave face like a teenager on her first date, and a gruff older man with dead eyes – slipped out with them, taking the stairs down to the basement two at a time. They slammed and locked the door behind them, grabbed the two tied up student prisoners, checked once to make sure they’d locked down the video of the scene, and ran out the basement entrance. As Genji stood at the hatch covering their exit he heard a deep, rumbling roar – the bomb going off in the computer room. Whatever the students had hoped to achieve, it was done.

They left, dragging their five students past the area of the slithering terrfiying sewer monster and out to the more modern parts of the New Horizon sewers. Here they parted ways with a few choice words about student life, and headed back to the surface. Once they had made a suitable distance from the collapsing student sit-in they called Rosemary and made the exchange. It was tense, and there were some blood tests, but fortunately they had grabbed the right guy. They left their job satisfied that they had done all they could not to cause more death than they had to, and that five young people would become perfect students by next semester.

On the far side of town, smoke rose from a shattered building, and the few surviving student activists were led away to be ransomed or indentured. Lionel returned to whatever corporate arcology he had been rebelling against. In the tunnels under New Horizon, hungry things stirred and roiled, thick in the shadows.

Nothing had changed.

fn1: Apparently Shadowrun requires you to roll for every effort to spend xp, but our GM has decided we don’t have to do that if we tell a story about how we got our training. I had to roll anyway. GMs – arseholes, all of them!

fn2: Resisting levitation is a Body check, which for a wizard is incredibly difficult. Levitating people and dropping them is absolutely the best attack – especially if your opponent has already burnt all their counter-spelling points resisting a direct attack spell I forgot to mention!