GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 20: Setup

Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Coming Up With A Plan

With help from Jar on the back-end, The Peacock impersonated a Night Corp employee and called into Militech's logistics division, asking for plans for the tower because they were getting a new set of automated garbage trucks and needed precise measurements.  Plans in hand, Paxos and Specter analyzed them, looking for weak points and places suited for long-term habitation where they might be storing Mary-Jane, The Peacock's sister.  Two places stuck out: animal pens (used for live ammunition tests, naturally), and some of the security holding cells about halfway up the tower.

Typically, the cells were for relatively short-term while they worked out extradition treaties with whichever company's agents had been captured (mercenaries like the crew would simply be killed).  In terms of alternate entry points, there were multiple AV landing pads at different heights, rather than a single hangar, and the "gorilla chute" which let out waste from the animal pens on the fifth floor.  They also learned some fun facts: at 71 stories aboveground, it is 1 higher than Arasaka Tower.  After its construction was completed, a city ordinance was passed banning construction over 69 stories.

Figuring flying in on AV sounded better than the gorilla chute, they started looking into them.  Jar looked into the specific models that were in use so they'd blend in, while The Peacock reached out to, Kei Honda, a certified pilot they knew who flew under Airs United, one of many fly-by-night (literally!) companies that existed to ferry executives who felt being driving to work was below them.  Kei wasn't working with Militech at the moment, but to give them a start she knew a company that did: 1776 Holdings.  Specter went dumpster diving outside their offices to see if they'd thrown out anything interesting, but got distracted instead and didn't find anything.

Paxos looked into 1776's finances and discovered that they were contracted to specific executives, not Militech specifically.  As a result, all of the clients were registered and some sleuthing discovered two she thought they could impersonate: with a little make-up, Paxos could look like Hua Luo, while Jar was the spitting image of Fenris Moneaux.  As the cherry on top, Fenris was into fashion, which meant Jar could actually disguise for once, and the more he heard, the more he was on-board.  This Fenris guy flew in every day, at his own expense, for no reason?  Now this was a man with taste!

The Peacock spent some time watching the AV loading docks in North Oak, then went around the local bars after work looking for security guards they'd recognized.  Once they had the location, Jar and Specter camped out until one left, drunk, at which point they threatened him with a shotgun and the rocket launcher.  Once he'd been coerced into an alleyway, Paxos interrogated him at gunpoint.  They didn't learn too much: personal guards were signed into the tower with their execs, so they didn't have any building access of their own, and there was an "optional" (read: mandatory) President's Day party at the tower coming up on the 19th.

The building would be empty for about half the day as a result, though that also meant they'd have a harder time excusing why they were there.  After The Peacock's failed attempt to follow their other sister, Emma, Jar put together a tracker and had Specter plant it on her on the NCART, then the next day they broke into her apartment (Paxos hacked the security) and took a look around while she was out.  Of note were a cluster of shards scattered on the coffee table; a quick scan revealed them to mostly be about law and medicine.  In particular, the laws governing legal personhood, and how people could sell off their genome, bodily fluids, cloning rights, and so forth.  The medicine shards were too dense for either of them to understand, so they swiped some for Jar to read later.

Jar spent that night reading the shards and learning about Monad's Disease, a rare auto-immune disease which was usually fatal.  There had been some promising treatments, but it was still far to early to refer to anything as a "cure".  Some of the studies suggested people with it were less likely to reject cyberware and so could implant more with fewer immuno-suppressants.  It took some digging, but a lot of the papers he read turned out to be funded by Militech subsidiaries.  Looked like a solid guess why Mary-Jane had signed up with Militech, and this presented a complication: if she had Monad's, she probably wasn't going to be well enough to be running around a tower or parachuting out.

They decided to shelve that for now, and went to go case the tower to check for escape routes since they wouldn't have a getaway car stashed in the parking lot.  The Peacock and Specter went into the public areas with a disguise from Paxos, while Jar sexually harassed distracted guards.  The Kiroshi blimp that circled Corpo Plaza was juuuuust under the rooftop, which meant they'd probably be able to get aboard with a grapple gun.  Another thing that stuck out was an AV that stayed in location all day on the 69th floor landing pad, which after some digging in city databases was discovered to belong to Night City Division Chief, Deforest Snelling.  Lastly, there was always the option of base jumping from one of the top floors, though that ran the risk of being shot by drones and/or AVs and/or helicopters.

Specter reached out to a buddy, Gizmo Chang, for details on Snelling's AV and learned that in addition to the fancy gold plating and rhino horn trim (rhinos had been extinct for over a decade), it had upgraded thrusters to compensate for the extra weight which should give it extra maneuverability.  Afterwards, Jar and Specter went out to Fenris Moneaux's mansion in North Oaks and snuck inside, climbing up palm trees and hiding in bushes to get the best possible angles of the exec talking.  Paxos edited it down, and The Peacock went through and read Fenris' lips: they didn't get much, though they did learn of his schedule which would make impersonating him easier.

Finally, they went back to Paxos' old apartment and took a look around to get an idea of how Militech kill squads operated.  Specter forced the door open with a crowbar ("Can you believe the landlord changed the locks?"), and then the others examined what they could of the "crime scene".  Jar determined they'd been using Militech Ajax rifles by the spray patterns, while Paxos and The Peacock did what they could to recreate the tactics the kill squad had used.

By this point, the plan had more or less taken shape and only the finishing touches were needed.  On the morning of February 19th, they were going to split into two teams and break into the mansions of Fenris Moneaux and Hua Luo and disable them and their guards.  For help with this, Jar reached out to an old friend who was a cat burglar, one Kyle Selene.  With Jar and Paxos acting as the execs, with The Peacock and Specter as their guards, the crew would drive to the AV pickup at the edge of the city and be brought into the tower, then make their way to the cell blocks where Mary-Jane was most likely being held.  Once they had collected her, they would continue up to the 69th floor where they would steal Deforest Snelling's AV and fly off into the sunset.

Notes:

We realized during this session that I don't think I've written down anywhere what Specter's gang actually do.  So far it seems "be cool", "hang out", and "do drive-bys".  None of those are really bringing in a lot of cash.

Jar will impersonate Fenris Moneaux with... default Acting.

The alternate name for this session was "somehow stretching 8 dice rolls out to 3 hours".

The Peacock at one point brought up the option to do "9/11 2" as a distraction with AVs, as Corpo Plaza has 3 big towers (Arasaka, Militech, and Kang Tao).