Cleverbot (Face Man with Mind Control)
Gundroid-16 (Cowboy Shooter)
Inspectron (Investigator with a Drone)
00:03 November 7th 2077, Streets of Renton - Pursuit
The party sped through the neon-lit streets in the Murderwagon, escorting Mr. Adams and Dr. Barkley in Adams' Mazda 16 and pursued by a pair of TriOpticon pursuit police cruisers, which were shortly joined by a bright green Lamborghini. Gundroid missed with a hilariously inaccurate burst from his rifle while driving, but the others held their fire, not trusting their pistols against the heavily-armoured pursuit vehicles, which were quickly gaining ground.
Inspectron tried to convince Cleverbot to Mind Control some other driver on the road to slam into the TriOpticon goons, but he refused to risk harming any innocents. Gundroid started aggressively weaving in and out of traffic, which kept the TriOpticon cruisers at distance, but the driver of the Lambo was skilled enough to continue to close the gap. This proved to be his undoing, however, as, thanks to the reduced range penalties, Cleverbot was now able to Mind Control the driver of the Lambo, though Gundroid then shot out one of its tires, and it was T-boned while running a red light.
Despite the pileup, and Gundroid pulling a hard right down an alley, the TriOp cruisers were able to keep the Murderwagon in sight. Inspectron pulled up a map of the city on his internal computer and plotted an escape route through some construction areas, and, with some skilled driving, they were able to finally shake their pursuers. Gundroid signalled Adams by flashing his hazards (they'd never been given his commlink number), and they pulled into a parking garage where they discussed their next move.
Interrogation
Inspectron hacked into their captive's cyberware and disabled all recording devices, to make sure nobody was listening in. Adams passed Cleverbot directions to a local safehouse (and his contact info), and they reconvened once they were all settled in to the secret basement suite of the Mirage hotel. Now that they had some room to breathe, Adams and Barkley agreed to wait until after the party had a chance to "talk" to their prisoner. The captive was brought into a makeshift interrogation room, zap-tied to a chair, and waterboarded, amongst other unpleasant things.
Questioning proceeded efficiently, punctuated by the occasional blow from Gundroid, revealing the following:
- He (Blackshade) was an orc shadowrunner, working with the others in the Lambo; the driver (Green Keys), passenger (Brick), and a hacker in the trunk (2-Stickz)
- They were hired by one "Mr. Johnson" (obviously TriOpticon in hindsight) to listen in on the meeting; he was way too bland to identify
- The runners knew that the party were androids, and had an anti-android stance
- Despite hating androids, the runners were just in it for the money
- He had a girlfriend and 4 children
Their questioning completed, Gundroid thanked Blackshade for his assistance and then snapped his neck.
Planning
The party emerged from the interrogation room to find Mr. Adams busy on his commlink, though he soon turned to the party and announced that he had been coordinating with some of the other members of the meeting, in particular Bonehead and Zephyr, to plan a raid on TriOpticon's main facility tomorrow at midnight. Cleverbot asked if Adams knew why TriOpticon would be after him, but he only replied that they'd been feuding for a long time and it had gotten kind of personal. The runners' names didn't ring any bells either.
Adams had come across intel that TriOpticon had acquired something juicy and were storing it in the basement of their main facility. Nobody was sure what, exactly, but it would surely be worth a lot of money and piss them off, so it was worth stealing. Gundroid looked at Dr. Barkley, who responded with a nod that somehow said, thanks to a crit on Gesture, "Everything he's saying is 100% true and you should go along with this plan, it's a good idea".
A plan quickly developed. Cleverbot would be sent in beforehand, posing as a security guard, to gain access to any security systems or keycards they'd need. Zephyr and Bonehead would go in and cause two distractions on one side of the facility, while Gundroid and Inspectron would enter on the other side, where Cleverbot had disabled security in advance. The androids would regroup at the central elevators, the only ones with access to the basement, and head on down. They'd then grab whatever the package was, and exfiltrate the same way.
Androids don't sleep, so the party had time to do a little bit of prep work. Inspectron did some hacking and pulled a building plan from TriOpticon, as well as one other interesting tidbit: the hallway left of the elevator bank in the basement was designated "fuel cell storage". They added "grab some spare fuel cells" to their list of objectives, and Cleverbot and Inspectron worked together to forge a TriOp security guard ID (Jim Carrey) and disguise for Cleverbot. Gundroid swapped the Murderwagon's license plates and found a place to park close to the target.
00:00 November 8th 2077, TriOpticon Head Office - 4 Days Remaining
Cleverbot showed up to "start his first day" as a security guard at the TriOpticon HQ, a menacing monolith towering over 600m, and, after making it past the guards in the lobby easily enough, followed the augmented reality signs to the security office, where a platoon of guards had gathered. Several spiders - corp-employed hackers - lay in padded chairs, directly monitoring the building's sensors through a neural link.
The guards started going through shift change, when the security captain, Chief O'Brien, noticed Cleverbot and asked who he was. Cleverbot stuck to his story of being Jim Carrey, new security guard, and passed without suspicion. The distractions started right on schedule, and Cleverbot disabled the sensors on the other side of the building to let the others in. Gundroid slammed through a ground-level window and started towards the elevators, followed by Inspectron, and Cleverbot moved to regroup with them.
Just before they made it to the elevators, Stonehead called in saying he was pinned down and needed help. Gundroid sprinted through the slick corporate halls, arrived in an exhibit hall behind three corpsec goons, and opened fire with his wrist-lasers. Two died from laser bursts to their unarmoured necks, but the last shot went wide, and the surviving guard ran into cover behind a glass exhibit case, though he was too surprised to return fire. Gundroid sprinted towards the exhibit and tried to do a sick backflip overhead but clipped the case with his foot and landed awkwardly on his side; in spite of this, his laser shots connected and downed the last guard.
Gundroid sprang back to his feet and sprinted back towards the elevator, running into the slower Inspectron on the way, where they regrouped with Cleverbot, who used his ID card to open up the elevator and send it to the basement. The elevator opened and a quick look saw a security booth to the left. Inspectron got his drone out to take a look, but Gundroid was already around the corner and charging the two guards inside, one of whom was facing the wrong way.
He downed the first guard with another burst to the neck then tumbled into cover behind the booth, and the second, startled, slammed a big red emergency button. The door at the end of the hall opened up, revealing a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger half-covered by steam. He stood there a moment before his arm transformed into a heavy laser cannon and he raised it to shoot a thick blue beam at Inspectron, as Gundroid was fully out-of-sight. Fortunately, Inspectron he was able to dodge and drop out of the way as the beam disintegrated a chunk of wall, and he yelled for Cleverbot to get into cover.
Cleverbot disregarded this, stepped out into the hallway, and Mind Controlled the Arnoldbot. The last threat taken care of, Gundroid vaulted into the security booth and grabbed the remaining guard, yelling at him to shut off the alarm. The guard said that he hadn't turned on the alarm, and pleaded to be spared; at the same time, Gundroid noticed a trio of buttons on a segment of the console labelled "Android Activation"; "Destroy", "Control", "Free Will". Gundroid choked the guard out and ran over to where Arnoldbot had come from, only to find it a mostly-empty android storage room, much like the one they had started in. Cleverbot asked Arnoldbot to dress himself as a guard and carry him around.
The Warehouse
Now mildly worried they had fallen into a trap, the party headed back and went through the right door, where they found a lab for constructing androids, but no fuel cells. Concerned, they tried the last direction: straight ahead. Beyond the door was a vast warehouse, filled with dozens if not hundreds of inactive androids standing still, their heads bent over slightly. At the far end were another two doors, one labelled "Graveyard", the other "Fuel Cells".
Gundroid shot out some cameras on the ceiling and then sprinted towards the Fuel Cells door, which opened to reveal a storage facility for a crapload of fuel cells. Ignoring the "DANGER - HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE" sign, he slotted two fresh ones, noted he now had enough power for 100 years, and then shoved a bunch more into his hollow chest cavity and pockets. Now loaded down with enough cells to keep them on for centuries, he checked out the graveyard, where he found a pile of ruined android parts, including one that looked just like Mr. Adams.
Gundroid ran back to Inspectron, Cleverbot, and Arnoldbot, noticing a perfect copy of himself standing in the crowd, and the others swapped over to new power cells. Their mission done, Gundroid headed to the security office, intent on freeing the rest of their android brethren, and hit the "Free Will" button. The party ran back to the elevators, seeing the rest of the confused androids through the still-open door to the right, though one of them seemed more aware and started to follow the party: a dwarf. Ultimately, he was unable to make it to the elevator before they mashed the "Close Doors" button, and headed back up.
On the ground floor, the doors opened to reveal seven TriOpticon SWAT troopers armed with rifles pointed right at them, and Gundroid triggered his wired reflexes. His servos screaming with exertion, he leapt out of the elevator and opened fire with his mounted laser pistols and a pair of SMGs, and, before anybody could react, seven troopers lay dead, their visors shattered or melted from a hail of shots to the eyes.
Still running at redline, Gundroid sprinted through the building (at Move 16), and brought the Murderwagon around to rendezvous with the others. They sped off through the night, with Arnoldbot, and were soon passed by six helicopters from TriOpticon doing a sweep of the area. They didn't find anything.
Debriefing
Back at the safe house, the party found Adams and Barkley relaxing and watching TV. Gundroid informed Adams that they knew he was an android, and that there would be a lot more androids on the streets pretty soon.
08:00 November 8th 2077, The Safe House - Post-Credits
The party answered a knock on the door, and found the dwarf that had tried to follow them in tattered clothes, with half its face missing, chrome skull exposed. In a monotone, mechanical voice, he announced: "My designation is Probability/Luck Extrapolation Bot, or PLEB. We need to go back... in time."
Notes:
During the interrogation, we went nuts with Complementary Skills and bonuses; waterboarding counted as torture for +6, and we ran good cop/bad cop/really bad cop with Cleverbot Acting, Inspectron questioning with Interrogation, and Gundroid breaking limbs with Judo and Karate.
Halfway through the interrogation, Gundroid failed Bloodlust, and the tone changed rather abruptly from "what should we do with this guy" to "what species is this guy, I need to add my kills to the proper tally".
Before disposing of Blackshade's body, Inspectron wiped his internal commlink clean, and Gundroid then slagged the drive (and most of his skull) with a pistol round, "just to be sure".
We joked that, given the amount of high-level criminals targeting corporations, half of all security guards are actually plants and work less than one shift before mysteriously vanishing.
The power cells were described as "the power cells from Terminator 2". At first, Gundroid didn't want to shove a bunch of high-explosives in his pockets, but Overconfidence won out.
Gundroid finally got to use his Wired Reflexes (aka Altered Time Rate 1, Enhanced Dodge 3, and Extra Attack 2), and it was as insane as I'd hoped, with Skill-22 after targeting the eyes with the laser pistols.
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