Characters:
Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc
Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner
The Meet
The crew (minus Specter) walked through the main floor of Lizzie's , shrouded in purple lights and slow music, to the office of Susie Q. She was typing away at a terminal as they entered, and didn't look up. A black woman, she had a mismatched upper faceplate in a different skin tone, and a dozen or so magenta spikes projecting out of her forearms that Jar identified as a dart weapon. Jar opened the conversation by complimenting her on the "spike gauntlets", but she skipped the small talk and went straight to business.
Susie tapped some commands into the terminal then swung the monitor around so everyone could see the grainy security camera footage as she narrated. A joygirl, Napalm Jane, was found strangled to death in the Jade Oak Motel a few days ago. On the monitor, a dark-skinned man in a trenchcoat with close-cropped hair walked into view with the girl on his arm. The tape fast-forwarded, and the man left, alone. Jar muttered "Johnny White...", recognizing the man as a solo and frequent client of his.
Folding her arms, Susie asked if it was going to be a problem if Jar knew this guy, but Jar waved her off, assuring her that he was a pro. Figuring they had enough to go on, Susie turned back to the terminal and got back to work on spreadsheets, reminding them to bring him in alive, and call for the dropoff when they had him. Jar insisted on having a default dropoff in case things were hot, so she relented and, not looking up, said they could bring him 'round the back of Lizzie's if it came to that.
Picking up the Trail
Back in the car, Paxos asked for the rundown on Johnny from Jar: he was a solo, and preferred to use an Arasaka Nowaki assault rifle that he'd tricked out a bit. If firearms were out of the question, he carried around several wooden baseball bats, regularly breaking them on his victims. In terms of cyberware, he had all the typical stuff (cybereyes, implanted agent, interface plugs, memory shard slot) as well as implanted muscle fibres and a smartgun link.
They went to a Budget Arms vending machine and picked up some more stun batons and stun guns, and went to go stakeout Johnny's fourth floor "apartment" in Pacifica (Jar had dropped off some things there in the past). After most of a day watching, Johnny didn't show up at all, but a blonde woman did leave "his" apartment. Peacock asked around and learned that nobody had seen Johnny in the last little while. Late at night, Specter spotted a group of Animals gangers, all over 6' and totally ripped, walking towards them carrying weapons (one had an impact), with his ex, Sarah, in the lead.
Peacock floored it and they fled Pacifica for now. On the way to the highway, Jar noticed someone wearing a pair of his shorts on the sidwalk as they sped through the slums. After some discussion ("We could go back with disguises!"), the crew drove to the Jade Oak Motel to see if they could wrangle any clues. It was a dumpy place, two floors in a U shape, in perpetual shade from the towers that neighboured it, with peeling paint and rusted handrails; the green and white neon sign advertised hourly rates.
Jar and Paxos walked into the front office, where a bored, bubblegum chewing clerk with a pink mohawk had her feet up on the desk while playing some game on a tablet. Jar demanded to rent the "best room" for his "upcoming film project to record the real Night City!". The clerk responded in a monotone voice that rates were hourly, and when he pressed the issue further, getting up in her face, she asked him to leave and offered to assist Paxos... who was in the middle of hacking into the network.
Simultaneously holding a conversation and drifting through cyberspace, Paxos awkwardly said she was looking for a normal room, and the clerk once again gestured at the sign and asked how many hours she wanted. Pretending to have second thoughts, Paxos said that actually, she'd go somewhere else; the clerk didn't care. In reality, she'd snagged the data they were after: only two people had rented rooms around the time Johnny had killed Napalm Jane. Of course, neither were named Johnny White.
One room had been rented to a "Fox Hohstadt", the other to "Anatoly Kargin". Hohstadt had rented 103, while Kargin had 216. After a quick review of the security footage, Paxos was confident that "Kargin" was Johnny White, and they went to scope out the room. Jar popped the cyberlock with a swipe of his toolhand, and they walked into the (fortunately unoccupied) motel room. It was expectedly filthy, with Peacock's UV vision showing splashes of various fluids almost everywhere (including the door knob, bed, and ceiling).
It was immediately apparent that the place had already been cleaned, but they weren't sure if the NCPD had come through or if someone had just thrown the corpse in a dumpster (as one does). Figuring they wouldn't find anymore info, they left with plans to continue the stakeout in Pacifica the next day. After another three hours surveilling Johnny's apartment from Peacock's car, they decided to move in. Paxos walked up the stairs and ran a Ping program to see what devices were in the apartment, in reality a room from one of the never-completed motels that filled the waterfront of Coast View.
She went over the ID codes and picked out multiple firearms (though no Nowaki rifle), a TV, a terminal, some VR equipment, and other various household junk. Paxos waved the others up and they stacked up in front of the door. Jar used his toolhand and a shim to pick the lock (though it took a use of Luck), and opened it a sliver. Inside, the blonde woman was wearing a VR headset and giving some sort of presentation that sounded like a weather report, while a toddler played with some cyberblocks in an enclosure. Notably, Johnny White was not present.
Paxos hacked the woman's agent, and found a text conversation between her (turned out she was named Saffron) and "Johnny", mentioning that he was going to have to lay low for a while in Rocky Ridge. Peacock suggested taking the toddler hostage, but eventually the crew settled on just hacking the cameras to edit themselves out while Specter snuck up and put Saffron in a chokehold to interrogate her.
Despite Paxos' urging to "act natural" (despite being suddenly grappled by someone she couldn't see who threatened her and her child's lives), Saffron understandably let out a small yelp and immediately answered the questions posed to her. The audience who had tuned in for the weather report were all pretty confused when she suddenly started talking about "the secret basement in Lot #17 in Rocky Ridge". The crew had what they needed, so they left; as they went, the toddler waved and said "bye-bye".
Showdown
The sun was high in the sky as the crew stepped out into the dust of Rocky Ridge, and towards Lot #17, a ruined two-story house with peeling red paint. With stun guns at the ready, the crew headed inside. There was no obvious basement, but Peacock spotted a bulge under the worn carpet and lifted it up, revealing a steel hatch and a keypad. Jar shorted out the pad and Specter opened the hatch, then headed down the narrow staircase underneath it.
At the bottom of the staircase was a short hallway, and then a metal sliding door. Paxos Pinged and detected a handful of guns, including a Nowaki, as well as cyberware matching Johnny White's profile. They all readied their weapons (Specter turned on his cyberfists) and Specter opened the door. On the other side, was a tiny room the size of a closet. Johnny White was sitting on a cramped bed surrounded by canned food and bottled water, his pants off, wearing a BD rig.
Specter's cyberfists suddenly glitched out and his fingers went limp, resulting in his first punch lacking much force. Peacock made up for it by hitting Johnny with a stun gun from behind, and that was enough for Specter to put him in a chokehold. Peacock put him in handcuffs, then duct-taped his legs and mouth while Paxos Shut Down his implanted Agent so he couldn't call for backup. Before they left, Specter grabbed the Nowaki and two Arasaka pistols, all of which had smartgun attachments.
Once they had Johnny in the backseat, Jar made the call to Susie Q to tell her they had the package. She told them to bring him to the Jade Oak Motel, and hung up. They rode their mostly in silence; Johnny struggled against his restraints but sandwiched between Jar and Specter, there would have been nowhere to go anyway.
They pulled up to the Jade Oak Motel to find dozens, maybe even a hundred, sex workers and/or Mox gangers (it's hard to tell them apart) all holding things like crowbars, baseball bats, or lengths of chain. Specter got out of the car with his rifle on his back, and Maki, who was watching from the second floor balcony with a katana, shook her head and mutered "every damn time". Jar dragged Johnny out of the car, then dumped him in front of Susie.
She walked up, drew a pistol, shot Johnny in the kneecap, then shouted for the other girls to make a lesson out of him, in case any other johns got the wrong idea. As the muffled screams echoed off the concrete, Jar asked Susie if he could take the body once they were finished. She shot him a look of disgust but then shrugged and told him to go nuts. After the girls were finished, Jar crouched down next to the body and determined that only the cybereyes and audio were salvageable, so he beheaded Johnny's corpse and put the head in a chinese takeout container.
Downtime
Jar repaired the 'ware and sold it all to Miguel Fernandez, his usual fence, and used some of the profits to pay for cleaning the blood out of Peacock's car. Jar and Peacock each took one of the Arasaka pistols, and Peacock even got a Subdermal Link installed in their hands. Meanwhile, Paxos was doing some online shopping when her agent got a call, ID reading "NCPD". She dropped her voice an octave and said "uhh wrong number", only to hear Mithradates, her boyfriend, say "What? No, no, no, this is definitely Ruby's number!".
Turned out this was his one call. He'd been on the way to pick up some Militech chick in his taxi when the corpo security ran up to him and started shouting, then yanked him out of the driver's seat and threw him on the pavement for "trespassing". They'd handed him off to the NCPD, and now he needed bail (in reality this was a bribe, as nobody expected some lowlife street scum to ever actually show up again). She put on a disguise, then took the NCART to the station and paid his bail; Mithradates was still kinda freaking out that his boss would fire him for missing a day's work.
Over the next week, Specter and Jar both did some more virtual counciling sessions and picked up another order of SSRIs to alleviate his burgeoning cyberpsychosis. Peacock bribed Felix Chudwell's secretary for a copy of his schedule and shadowed him around town. Though they didn't learn anything incriminating so far they would keep this up in the future.
Sex and Drugs
Jar got a call from Jackstadt, the smuggler they'd evac'd a couple weeks back. He was back in Night City, and had a job for them. He was 6th Street for life, obviously, and lately they'd been having a problem: the Mox were moving into Arroyo, and apparently getting into the drug trade. Notably, the pigs weren't hassling them, despite the bribes 6th St paid them. Anyway, the higher-ups wanted them to find the stash house and destroy the drugs. They wanted video evidence as proof, so he'd send along a hundred eddies for a Microvideo implant.
Jar asked what drugs they were, but Jackstadt said he didn't know, which sparked an argument ("How do you not know what's on the street, you're a smuggler!" "Yeah, for like, guns and missiles and shit, man! Drugs ain't my thing!"). This tipped Jar off, and through further bullying, he pried out some info: Jackstadt wasn't working for the "higher-ups". This job was for the fucking NCPD, officer Pascal Buchanan in particular, in exchange for keeping Jackstadt out of the slammer. Their eddies were as good as anyone else's, so he still agreed to take the job, though at a higher rate.
After some discussion with the crew, Jar got chipped with the microvid (Peacock's oculars were already bursting at the seams with sensors, and other two were still 'ganic). First, Peacock found a low-level dealer working for the Mox. Then Jar took her out and got her drunk, at which point Paxos came in and threatened her in an alley until she told them what she knew. The drugs in question were Blue Glass, a low-level hallucinogen that was sold in sheets which were then crushed and snorted. They were being sold out of the back of a department store that doubled as a brothel on Valley St.
Turned out the reason the Mox were encroaching on 6th Street territory was that girls working at the brothel (including this dealer) had gotten together, killed their pimps, and gone to the Mox for security. They went to go scope out the place and Specter realized it was the same one Warsaw had asked him to check out, which meant he'd fucked up big time (Specter: "Eh"). It was flanked on either side by cyberware clinics, one a dumpy ripperdoc's with a sign permanently set to closed with a VRcade on the second floor, the other a corpo-friendly unit that was now sporting Mox tags. Across the street loomed the Pacific Angel Hotel.
Specter did some recon around the loading dock while Peacock went into the storefront (after Paxos disguised them, of course). Inside, most people seemed to just be normal customers, but Peacock tailed a few shady types and discovered that one bank of changerooms was connected to the brothel. A few "undercover" Moxes wandered the store as security. Meanwhile, both the front and back entrances had small groups of obvious Moxes lazing around. There was a fire escape on the western side they could possibly use to get up to the roof, where there was a door which looked to have a conventional lock.
Paxos rang up her old friend Sabela Elara, a trauma team doc, and asked what would be the worst way to store methamphetamines. Turned out a variety of household chemicals would do the trick (hydrogen peroxide was the easiest to come by). With business out of the way, they caught up and chatted for a while; Sabela's brother, Ezra, had recently gotten divorced and wasn't taking it well.
Notes:
Security cameras in 2077 are still grainy black and white with no audio. They're mostly for insurance so why spend the extra money on a nicer one?
Smart guns are a category of gun that shoot gyrojet rounds that can be steered, including around corners, typically used by those with bad skill but lots of money. A smartgun is a weapon attachment that lets the user see through and gives various bonuses to any gun. This has caused some confusion.
Ruled that hacking two cybereyes is done at -5 (or two separate actions), because otherwise having one is usually strictly better.
Again, they were almost defeated by a conventional lock. Everyone forgot about the last time, so nobody bought Lockpicking or Forced Entry. Oh well, maybe next time.
Jar is at a permanent penalty to side jobs, because one of his main clients is dead.
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