GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 34: Riding Off Into the Moonset

Characters:

Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Buntaro "Flex" Tanaka - Replacement Solo

Shutdown

Flex continued brawling with the surviving Molecule Smasher, slowly wearing away at the armour on its one remaining arm, while The Peacock landed an aimed shot to the sensors on the "skull" only for the bullet to ricochet harmlessly off of the protective diamond lenses.  Jar hefted the HMG he'd cut off the deceased Smasher and the ensuing wild spray caught the mechanical monster in the torso a few times with high-caliber rounds that seemed able to wound, but not to kill.

Paxos hacked into Smasher's systems and turned off the "super sandevistan" on its spine before it could ramp up to full heat, succeeding at the hack the exact moment that a pair of cooling vents opened on its back.  Noticing the electronic threat, Smasher turned and a panel fell away from its chest as it fired an incendiary grenade at the back of the cabin; the entire crew but Flex were set aflame, and while Jar was able to ignore it with his armoured skin, Paxos and The Peacock dropped and started rolling.

Despite the sandevistan being shut down, it was clear that Smasher's reaction time was still increasing, as it effortlessly batted away the next pair of strikes from Flex, then forced him back with a devastating right hook that he barely managed to parry in time.  Though Jar was fine, the HMG didn't like being on fire and jammed, but after a quick smack it was back to firing full-auto while making some concerning noises.  With another quick hack from Paxos to shut down one of Smasher's legs, the sustained fire was enough to drive him down to the floor, sparking.

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 33: Beginning of the End

Characters:

Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Buntaro "Flex" Tanaka - Replacement Solo

Final Preparations

Before anyone else could board, Jar popped open a locked maintenance hatch in the ceiling of the cargo hatch, and took a look around the cabin; the hatch came out in the kitchen, which looked out into the main seating area where a meeting table took up half the length, but there were too many cameras in for Paxos to deal with them all at once, so he retreated back to the hatch and sat tight with everyone else.  Within twenty minutes, they heard a loud bang outside and the main hatch to the outside slid open to reveal a spiderlike luggage drone sliding up a ramp that had mated to the outside of the hull.

Paxos quickly hacked it to ignore them, and it dutifully placed Yorinobu's things, including two refrigerated crates which were connected to the kitchen above via dumbwaiter.  As the drone worked, the ship shook as the passenger gondola attached to the cabin above them and crew began to board.  The luggage drone retreated to the ramp and the exterior hatch slid shut, and soon enough the crew were pressed down into the hard metal floor as a dull roar reverberated through the ship from the engines and they took flight.

Within a few minutes they were out of the atmosphere and into zero-g.  Jar couldn't handle being in space very well and lost his lunch, and Flex was looking a little green, but Paxos and The Peacock were unbothered.  After doing their best to clean up the floating vomit, the crew settled in and waited for food to start moving up the dumbwaiter.  The plan was for Flex to burst through the door to the meeting room with his mantis blades out while everyone was busy eating their fancy bento boxes (or whatever rich people ate on a private suborbital).

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 32: One Last Job

Characters:

Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
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.

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 31: Turned Tables

Characters:

Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Smoke Cloud

After a quick bribe tossed to the local PD, the crew spent two days arranging to purchase some gear on the black market.  At the meet in empty lot in Japantown, the seller showed up in a van with a small crew.  Eddies and a briefcase full of armour-piercing ammo and flashbangs changed hands, but as the seller turned to leave, a sniper took him down with a round to the back.  The rest of his group piled into the van and left the crew on their own, in a gravel lot with precious little cover save a light rain, their own car over 50m away.

The Peacock could tell where the shot had come from, and turned around to see the glint of a sniper's scope on the rooftop of a vocational school across the minor street behind them.  They quickly pulled a smoke grenade from their armour's tactical pockets and dropped it at their feet, concealing the entire crew.  Paxos ran a ping, and with that, The Peacock took aim at the sniper through the smoke, but unfortunately the shot went wide.

The sniper dropped down and crawled out of sight, but the crew were a bit pre-occupied by fully-automatic fire coming in from the direction of their car.  Fortunately, the smoke hid them, and of the torrent of bullets, only a single shot hit Paxos in the thigh, largely stopped by her armour.  The crew ran south, abandoning the car and leaving the smoke and an outbuilding between themselves and their assailants, then jumped two stories down onto a pile of garbage in an alley.  Other than Jar landing face-first, nobody was harmed, and they dusted themselves off and escaped.

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 30: A Specter Is Haunting Northside

Characters:

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

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Explosive Finale

As Specter bounded up the stairs, the majority of the gunfire missed due to his chameleon skin, and the bullets that did connect merely bounced harmlessly off of his metalgear armour.  He got a good look at the person he figured must be Sota Nagasawa, who was holding a fancy tech rifle.  His hair was lime green, and his black and gold biker gear had a katana at the hip.  He appeared otherwise unarmoured, and stood beside the rifleman at the top of the stairs and behind four other Tyger Claws with big pistols.  Specter returned fire, turning all four of the goons into red mist and hosing down Sota as well.

Unfortunately, he had subdermal armour and took only light damage, though his torso was a mess of shattered metal and synskin.  Sota dropped his rifle and his katana flew into his hand as he lunged down the stairs, swinging wide and missing Specter's midsection.  The rifleman fired a burst and in a stroke of phenomenal luck, hit Specter in the head five times.  His heavy armourjack helmet deflected most of the bullets harmlessly, but one struck in the one gap between armour plates and penetrated into his brain... killing him instantly.

As he fell, Specter's arm acted on reflex and his internal grenade launcher activated and fired into the ceiling.  A concussive blastwave full of shrapnel blew into Sato and the gunman, though they both survived, and just as the coast looked clear, a chunk of concrete the size of a table broke free from the ceiling and fell onto Specter's corpse, crushing all but his right hand into chunky salsa.  The others heard his communicator go dead, but figured it had probably just been damaged in the explosion.

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 29: One Man Army

Characters:

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

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Silent Assassin

The lead ganger opened the door, and was shocked when Specter greeted him with a flurry of cybernetic fists to the gut, that he somehow managed to block.  The Peacock, meanwhile, snuck out a side door and got the enemy netrunner in the neck with a taser dart, leaving them spasming on the floor.  Paxos fried one through the walls with a short circuit, and Jar punched the goon Specter had been working in the groin, the shock of which knocked him straight out with a short yelp.  Specter ran up to the last gangoon still on his feet and took him out with a blow to the solar plexus that sent him stumbling past The Peacock.  

The crew teamed up to stomp the 'runner until they were out of commission (with Jar, of all people, dealing the final blow), then dragged their defeated foes into the "body pile" in the excavation room and got back to digging.  Specter took a break, exhausted from the strain of his sandy and the chameleon skin, while Paxos kept watch through the walls with her Ping soft.  After another half-hour, their shovelling was rewarded with the satisfying *thunk* of metal-on-metal, and Jar got out the plasma cutter to break into the vault itself.

While he was cutting, another ganger came into Paxos' x-ray vision at the base of the stairs, and, though muffled through the doors, his voice was loud enough that they got the gist: he'd brought a bunch of the initiates to help move bodies.  The leader moved into the parking garage and asked where everyone was, in a shout, and where the lights were.  With some quick hacking into the dead netrunner and the shouting ganger's agents, she was able to send a message that appeared to be from the 'runner saying that they didn't want any kids getting in the way.

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 28: Garage Door Opener

Characters:

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

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Waiting For Grout To Dry

The crew debated over what to do next for a while until they realized that the gunfire had stopped.  The Peacock could hear what sounded like casual chatter from upstairs, suggesting the Tyger Claws had won, and Specter was sent up to take a look.  Through eavesdropping, he learned that they were calling Sota in early, so security would be ramping up tomorrow, then headed back down the stairs to regroup.  The crew decided to climb back out the hole in the cells, but as The Peacock went they knocked loose some concrete chunks which were followed by a pile of soil: if anyone looked in the cells in the next few days, it'd be obvious that something had been inside the basement.

On their way back to the car, they rounded a corner directly into the results of a firefight.  A Trauma Team medic was going from body to body, checking for paying clients and then loading them into the gleaming white AV, while a pair of armed guards stood with assault rifles at the ready.  When they saw the crew, they raised them, and one ordered them to freeze, but the other lowered his rifle whispered "hey, that's the Jar!  Better leave these guys alone".  The medic finished loading the last of the wounded then banged his fist twice on the side of the hull; at that, the guards loaded up and the AV sped off towards the nearest hospital.

Paxos looked over those the four who were left: two of them looked to be small-time gang members judging by their lime green bandanas, while the other two seemed to have been their victims.  They hadn't been harmless, though; judging by the wounds on the gangers, one of the victims had pulled a gun and been a good enough shot to take them down with her.  Paxos asked for the first-aid kit and stopped the bleeding of the non-gang members, and started patching one up as best she could.  Before she could start tending to the other, The Peacock got bored and said they were leaving with the car.  Her desire to help outweighed by her desire to not take transit, Paxos went along.