Characters:
Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner
Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc NPC
Buntaro "Flex" Tanaka - Replacement Solo
The Calm Before The Storm
The crew jumped out of the traincar as the doors were closing, and The Peacock took a look at the assailant Flex had decapitated. They had a burner agent, but they had left it connected to their implanted one, an obvious security breach which revealed that they were Militech after all. They took a few more steps to the severed head and recognized it as one of the goons they'd seen in the building behind the Tyger Claws base they'd just raided in the last mission. The agent seemed to have a wealth of information on the crew's activities, but they heard people walking up on to the train platform and got away from the scene before somebody called the cops.
As they left the station, they noticed there were none of the usual transit cops, which combined with the empty station implied that Militech had paid them off. not that it mattered; their assailants were dead, and at some point the corp would right this whole op off. After the incident on the NCART, they all splurged on some taxis ($60!) to get the rest of the way home. Close to a month passed before their next job. The Peacock spent time with their sisters, and started making preparations for leaving the city with their nomad family.
Paxos spent a week filling out (forged) documents for her upcoming move to Peru, but unfortunately the weak and fragmented administration she was hoping to take advantage of lost her paperwork in the mail. Flex continued just hanging out around the city, while Jar ran his ripperdoc business to kill time. Some news broke during their time off: Militech was cleared of all accusations of illegal human cloning when no clones could be found, and Jackie Wu was released from house arrest.
A week later, Arasaka filed a lawsuit over BioDyne, a recent Militech acquisition, over patent infringement. It seemed that the patents in question pre-dated the crash, so they hadn't been in the system. A Militech spokesperson claimed that this was Arasaka engaging in disgusting profiteering and damaging the well-being of patients, which might have been more convincing if Militech's version of the drug in question, Firmitas, wasn't already going for over 1000eb a dose.
Moving on from her last failed scheme, Paxos used some shell accounts and shady banks in the Cayman Islands to arrange up a money-laundering operation that would convert her eddies into Peruvian Sols when needed. As she was finishing up, more news broke that caught The Peacock's attention. Their enemy, Santo Domingo district administrator Felix Chudwell, had been caught up in a scandal where the "tough on crime" politician had been caught on film in a drug den. For his part, his staff were claiming these were all deep fakes, and that he would never do such a thing.
In other news, the Arasaka aircraft carrier Kujira was finally leaving Night City, after a full two years in the bay. Official channels said that a long-delayed modernization had finally been completed, while others speculated that this was due to some internal politics between the three siblings and their factions.
The Biggest Leagues
The next day, a missile struck Yorinobu Arasaka's mansion in North Oaks, the blast wave large enough to shatter windows halfway across Japantown. Though Yorinobu's people were silent, an independent media known as Trevor Nakada (Paxos: "The guy who was at Arasaka Tower?") had obtained and released footage of Yorinobu being unloaded from an ambulance and taken into Arasaka Tower on a stretcher. Just before midnight, rumours broke that Yorinobu was being taken back to Japan for medical care.
Soon enough, all of their agents were ringing off the hook. The Peacock got a call from Alison Wonderland, who had a job to extract a corpo VIP to a secure location for 500k. While their crew was the first one she was shopping it to, there was a lot of competition so they had two hours to decide. Jar, meanwhile, was on the phone with Reality Black, who was only slightly less condescending than she had been in the past.
She told him he'd just won the lottery, and all he had to do to claim his prize of five hundred thousand eddies was kill one little VIP. Paxos had a slightly different chat with Regina Jones, who was offering a bodyguarding contract: if they got a VIP to the spaceport, they'd get a fee of 300k. Flex, meanwhile, had turned his phone off to engage in mindfulness exercises.
Everybody hung up and quickly got talking (even Flex, eventually), and after a bit of brainstorming a way to do two jobs at once, they settled on Reality's job to kill the VIP, who they assumed (correctly) to be Yorinobu. Over the holo, she gave them the deets: someone at Arasaka had leaked that Yorinobu was taking a suborbital out of the spaceport to Chiba in four days. Right now, he was at the tower, which was locked down tight. By comparison, while Arasaka leased a private hangar from Orbital Air, they weren't in charge of security at the spaceport, so it was a softer target.
By the time negotiations concluded, it was around 4AM and Jar had swindled their fixer out of another two hundred thousand upon completion of the mission, based on them definitely needing to leave Night City afterwards. The briefing over, Reality hung up with a yawn, and the crew got to planning. The first step was to figure out which spaceplane was Yorinobu's, and this took a bunch of effort. Paxos and The Peacock called in favours with planewatchers to help sort it out, while Jar went and chatted up pilots and flightstaff at the spaceport bars.
One Last Plan
After a long day of collating data from this wide variety of sources, Paxos was able to sort out that they were looking for the spaceplane registered JX0023, aka the Akaryu, and that the source of the leaks to the media was Kazumi Kanata, former head of Arasaka R&D who had been fired after their heist at the tower. There were also rumours of a protest being put on downtown for legalization of sex work on the day of Yorinobu's flight, which would likely disrupt the route to the spaceport. It was suspected the Mox were coordinating it.
Through Jar's carousing they also learned that one of the crew, Chikako Akamatsu, had gone deep into debt patronizing her favourite host at the Velvet Midnight host club in Kabuki, and Paxos went to try to find her. Chikako showed up just before midnight, and some intimidation got the host to pepper a few pre-arranged questions into their conversations.
They didn't learn anything too critical. Of note, she bragged a bit about being the personal chef on Yorinobu's space plane (he had a whole different crew at each of his homes as well). Apparently it was a very exclusive position, and all staff were personally vetted by Yorinobu Arasaka, which meant infiltrating as one of them was probably off the table. It also sounded like he typically travelled in a convoy of armoured SUVs, though she didn't give a precise number.
The Peacock spent a day casing the spaceport and collected what notes they could on camera positions and defenses, then went with Flex and broke into Kazumi Kanata's new place after dark. She had money, so the new place had some security, but it was no corpo ant farm and they easily made their way inside. On the countertop was a business card for Trevor Nakada, which claimed he worked for Arasaka Intelligence, beside a shard containing the info she had leaked as well as some other tidbits.
Of note, it had the real photos of Yorinobu, walking into Arasaka Tower in what seemed to be perfect health, and it detailed that the convoy would be escorted by a Type A12 armoured hovertank; hitting them on the road would be a bad idea. They cloned the shard, then left and brought the intel to Paxos who had been researching the model of spaceplane they were dealing with. There was no easy way to sabotage it from the outside, and if they had to get inside anyway, they might as well use conventional weapons rather than explosives.
She did at least learn of a bunch of potential entry points; sure, they involved climbing up a fuelling launch vehicle, but that beat trying to take on tank. At this point, Jar started getting a bunch of outfits together that he thought would work well in zero G, but was torn away by The Peacock to go back to the spaceport and try to help them do some lip reading. Jar went up to a pair of workers on a smoke break and got their attention by asking for directions, and then they continued their conversation while facing The Peacock's vantage point.
Lucky for them, one of the workers started ranting about the "external security" Arasaka was bringing. The one guy she'd heard of, Casper, was supposedly a pretty big deal, which meant he was probably going to have an ego to match. On top of that there was the tech girl, hacker guy, and driver; what if they were the ones driving the tank? Okay, probably not the tank, the Arasaka boys would want to use their new toy.
Eventually she calmed down, and they went over the crew for the flight: Yorinobu, his four bodyguards, two doctors, a nurse, the personal chef, three pilots, two stewardesses and- at that point, she turned away, and The Peacock only picked out a single word: gestalt. Good news/bad news: it seemed like the rival crew would not be boarding the spaceplane, but it was really starting to look like the crew was going to have to go to space.
Stowaways
After blowing $40k on tickets for a civilian suborbital to Buenos Aires they had no intention of taking, the crew entered the Orbital Air spaceport with their luggage, which contained only clothes for Jar and one emergency wingsuit each. In the main lobby, they joined the line for security scans, and one at a time walked through the narrow passage, had a brief interview with a security officer, and consented to have their dangerous cyberware disabled until they arrived at their destination before being allowed into the terminal proper.
Once in, they milled about before regrouping with Jar in a disused washroom where he overrode the shutdown and got all their 'ware back online. After consulting with their maps, Flex forcibly removed a door, strike plate and all, and they proceeded to the private terminal unnoticed. By the time they arrived, the launch vehicle was already nearly finished moving down the track from the hangar, and began to rotate to face the sky.
The crew had no choice but to climb the 200 feet emergency evacuation ladder to the cargo bay, but on the bright side, it meant they'd be aboard before Yorinobu or his people. Several harrowing minutes later they made it to the hatch, the spaceport far below them, and with the intel they had from earlier, Jar popped it open, and they crawled inside.
Notes:
Flex's player joked that The Peacock is now going Hollow since they have no motivation to do heists anymore.
My stance on Johnny Silverhand's plot to nuke Arasaka tower: he didn't nuke them hard enough. All he did was take out a branch office with nobody important. If you're going to do adventurism, at least do it right.
At first we forgot about the modifiers for clue skills I implemented that make them better or worse against certain groups (Accounting is better against corps etc), and it made the rolls REAL hard. I was wondering why the numbers were so low until about four checks in and then we remembered and actually had to retcon a bit, but it all worked out in the end.
A long-running joke this campaign is that Adam Smasher 2, aka Molecule Smasher, will show up at one point. After The Peacock's lip reading session, Paxos' player noted that the thing the worker said as she turned away must have been "Molecule Smasher", as that's the only thing worth keeping secret. Specter's player noted that he probably has "infinite skill"
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