GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 22: Family Reunion

Characters:

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

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Kidnapping

With the guard bleeding out of his empty eye socket on the floor, the crew headed down the hall to regroup with Specter.  There were four cells with floor-to-ceiling glass (assumed bulletproof) facing the hallway, one of which was blocked off by curtains.  The cell adjacent held a bunch of medical equipment and was connected to the curtained room by a door inside.  Paxos ran a Ping on the curtained room and detected the kind of devices you'd see if someone was living there (TV, kettle, microwave, etc).  There was also a person with the typical cyberware, including a biomonitor.  The dying man on the floor also had a biomonitor.

Paxos spun up a Jam to hopefully convince whoever was monitoring the biomonitor that it was a false alarm or something while frantically getting into her netrunner suit as quickly as possible.  While she was undressing, she also let the others know that there were gun turrets concealed in the ceiling of the hall, though if they came online odds were the crew were dead anyway.  The Peacock searched the guard's body and grabbed his ID badge, which they swiped through the card reader on the cell with the medical equipment.  It blinked green and the glass door slid open.

Specter and The Peacock drew their weapons and continued onto the side door and went into the curtained room, which looked to have been converted into something resembling a slightly large studio apartment.  Standing in the corner was Mary Jane, The Peacock's sister, though she looked gaunt and sickly, with an IV running to her arm.  The Peacock told her who they were, but given they'd had extensive reconstructive surgery a month or so ago, she didn't believe them.  They tried to think of some touching family memory only the two of them would know, but came up totally blank.

Deciding to ignore their failing memory for now, they tried to argue that nobody else would try to pretend to be them to get her to leave, but she was unconvinced.  In a last ditch effort, The Peacock asked her to come up with a memory that only they would know instead, and Mary Jane, still clearly not believing any of this, asked the name of Emma's friend they'd gotten killed when they were kids.  Again, The Peacock drew a blank.  After a moment, they looked to Specter and told him to take her out to the hallway where Paxos' Jam would stop her biomonitor from alarming; she'd realize how much better it was on the outside after a while.

Meanwhile, a half-dressed Paxos noticed the camera behind her had terminated her connection: it was being reset.  She spun around and, the microsecond it came back on, hacked it and looped the footage again, hoping she'd been quick enough to fool whoever had reset it.  As she finished, she started to develop a fever from doing something so tricky without any cooling, and asked Jar to go check the cell for any uppers she could use to mitigate the wave of exhaustion that was about to hit.

He came back with a syringe of mega-adrenaline and told her to hold still as he injected it straight into her heart.  Paxos suddenly felt great and, as she was in the process of zipping up, Specter brought out a struggling Mary Jane.  After confirming the jam was still up, he knocked her out with a choke hold and laid her on the collapsible stretcher that Jar had been assembling.  They headed back to the elevators, but partway there the lights flashed red and a siren blared: they'd been caught.

Going Loud

They sprinted through the floor to the elevators without issue until the last hallway, where a turret spun down from the ceiling.  Rather than a typical gun, though, it had some sort of nozzle fed by tubes, and it began spraying globs of goop at the crew, who were single-file down the narrow hallway.  Specter, The Peacock, and Jar all dodged out of the way, and the goop hit Mary Jane before solidifying, bonding her to the stretcher.  A precision shot from Specter severed the feed tubes and the turret rapidly depressurized, a pile of goop slowly dribbling out beneath it.

After a quick confirmation from Jar that the goop wasn't melting Mary Jane's skin or anything, they reached the elevator door.  Jar yelled for the others to cover for him as he started ripping out and resoldering cables to force one to come to their floor for pickup.  At that moment, though, the crew's luck ran out, and a group of four guards in bulletproof vests rounded a corner and opened fire with revolvers (the most american gun).  Specter and The Peacock returned fire, but while they took out one of the guards, Specter got shot in the left arm, bad enough he couldn't move it.

Paxos started her usual combat hacking routine, but, thanks to that adrenaline shot, found she couldn't concentrate and manual typing on her 'deck wasn't any better with her fat-fingering the wrong keys.  Another goon landed a lucky shot, hitting Specter in the head, and he went down.  The Peacock moved into cover behind a ceramic planter and started charging their tech pistol.  Jar shouted that he just needed ten more seconds, and Paxos hacked the goop gun; if someone walked under it, they were in for a world of goop.

Most of the goons concentrated fire on Jar, who had his back turned and wasn't wearing armour, but the rounds pinged uselessly off his subdermals.  Another fired a shot at Paxos, but she dropped to the floor to dodge it.  Specter recovered, grabbed his dropped pistol, and opened fire at the same time as The Peacock fired their fully-charged tech pistol at the same target.  Their target staggered forward right under the goop gun, and was subsequently gooped by Paxos, leaving him a sitting duck.

She followed up by hacking into the systems of another guard, overcharging the batteries in his internal agent and setting his head on fire; after a bit of screaming, he collapsed.  Return fire from the remaining guards shattered the planter The Peacock was hiding behind, and pinged off Jar again.  Specter started to take aim but he went limp as he lost consciousness from blood loss.  Finally, the goons caught on to why they couldn't hurt Jar and one of them shouted out that "the guy with the feather boa" had subdermal armour.

Instead, they shot at The Peacock, but just hit the planter some more.  The Peacock shouted that they were down to their last two shots, and started charging their tech pistol to make it count.  Paxos drew her spare and got ready to toss it while simultaneously starting the process of hacking into a guard who'd jammed his pistol and was taking cover in a doorframe.  The guard who had been gooped, meanwhile, hit her with a round from his revolver, and while her netrunner suit absorbed some of the impact, the pain left her stunned for the next few seconds.

The Peacock fired their charged shot at the goop man, which sent him falling backwards at the knees, his legs still frozen in place by the solidified goop.  The last guard took up position in the door and cleared the jam, while The Peacock charged their last shot.  The Peacock sprung up to shoot, but saw the guard had been waiting for just this opportunity; they dove through the air while firing and avoided the incoming fire while disabling the man with a lucky shot to the arm that sent him groaning to the floor.

Right as the firefight concluded, the elevator dinged open, and Jar pulled in the stretcher then started giving Specter first aid while Paxos and The Peacock went around stealing revolvers and spare speedloaders from the dead or disabled guards.  On the long elevator ride up to the 62nd floor, Jar patched up Specter as best he could in such a short timeframe, while the others reloaded all the revolvers and passed them around so everybody had a bit more firepower.

The Final Stretch

Figuring there was going to be some sort of turret outside the elevator when the doors opened, The Peacock asked Jar to bodyblock for their sister who was still out cold on the stretcher; Jar said he'd do it for five large and they shook hands.  Everyone else got into cover, and the door *dinged* open, revealing a trio of corpos chattering about stock options.  A robotic voice emanated from the ceiling outside, blaring "ON THE FLOOR NOW" in monotone as a gun turret swung down and opened fire.

Specter got the jump on it and shot out its optical sensors with a precision burst from one of the stolen revolvers, causing it swing randomly.  Two of the corpos dropped in time, but the third was shredded by random gunfire, eliciting screams from her coworkers.  The Peacock ran out directly under the turret, which they figured would be safe, while Paxos started trying to breach in and shut it down.  Specter ran over to cover behind a couch, while The Peacock examined the turret up close and determined the weakpoint was the belt feed for the ammunition and shouted this out to the others.

Jar, still shielding Mary Jane, took a shot but did no real damage, but Paxos finished her hack anyway and shut it down.  The crew took off at a sprint toward the executive elevators which could take them to the 69th floor where they planned to steal the gold-plated AV.  After a bit of discussion, Paxos hacked the cameras and looped them to show the crew waiting, but in reality the crew headed to the stairwell, hopefully drawing any security away from themselves.

Unfortunately, the crew ran into another group of guards coming down the stairs, though they at least managed to catch them by surprise.  Specter stepped up to the landing the front two were running down, dropped his revolver, and punched at the face of the man in front, but his momentum carried him out of the way.  Paxos spun up a Jam to keep them (or their biomonitors) from giving away the crew's position.  With poor visibility due to Specter standing in the way, The Peacock charged their pistol.  Jar, who was bringing up the rear and carrying the stretcher, fired off a snapshot at one of the guards above him and missed.

The ricochet hit another guard, but his kevlar negated it.  While keeping the Jam up, Paxos breached the systems of the guard Jar had shot at and short circuited his cyberware, taking him out of the fight.  The pair of goons in the lead drew their stun batons, while the survivor in the rear readied his pistol.  Specter took out the closest man with a blow to the face with his gorilla gloves, but his next target fended him off with the stun baton.  The Peacock shot the other guard who was still standing in the chest with their charged pistol, killing him instantly.

The last guard tried to radio in that they needed backup but only got static, then tased Specter with his stun baton and stepped on top of him to press The Peacock in melee when Specter collapsed to the ground, convulsing.  The Peacock missed their shot, which left them wide open for a return strike, but luckily their kevlar suit mitigated the electrical shock.  Paxos ran a Ping to be able to see past her allies then started breaching, while Jar just sat there, gun drawn in case The Peacock went down.

The Peacock raised their gun to fire again only for it to be batted aside by the guard's baton, but as he wound up to deliver another blow, Paxos finally finished her hack and short circuited the 'ware in his head, causing it to burst into flame.  The guard collapsed, and, after waiting a few seconds for Specter to recover from being stunned, the crew continued their ascent.

Exhausted, they finally made it to the 69th floor.  With no time to rest, they continued at a dead sprint toward the AV pad and their escape.  On the way, something in an office caught Jar's eye and he shouted something about a "limited edition Lizzie Wizzie kimono" but the others told him to stay focused, so he abandoned his prize.  They finally made it to the armoured door to the external landing pad, which Specter and The Peacock pried open.  Standing on the platform in front of the gold-plated AV was Emma Watson, ponytail blowing in the wind.  

As before, she had a shotgun in her meat arms while her third arm was holding an SMG.  Without a word, she opened fire on the crew who were stacked up in the narrow hall to the door, hitting Specter square in the chest with a slug.  In response, he triggered his sandy and stepped out onto the platform, firing off a series of volleys from one of his stolen revolvers at her third arm, stripping off some of her subdermal armour but not really damaging it.

The Peacock attempted to tell her that, despite how it looked, they were her sibling, Pat, and that they were just there to rescue Mary Jane, but she ignored them entirely.  Paxos breached into Emma's systems, while Jar just held back with the stretcher.  Specter opened up with his revolver again but it jammed, so he dropped it and drew another, which he fired into Emma's third arm, this time doing enough damage to destroy it completely.

In response, she stepped forward and unloaded a pair of slugs directly into Specter's skull.  The first failed to penetrate the bone, but the other shattered his skull and left him bleeding out on the ground.  The Peacock, trying to avoid killing their sister, fired at her hand, but the bullet pinged harmlessly off of her armour.  Paxos finished her hack and short circuited Emma's skull implants, setting her on fire but not taking her down.  Jar tried to take a shot but his gun jammed.  Emma stepped toward The Peacock and hit them in the arm twice with shotgun slugs, but the kevlar took most of it, and as she moved to fire again, she collapsed.

Notes:

This is probably the most narratively exciting session we've had purely due to dice rolls.  All the humanity loss The Peacock has sustained from installing all this cyberware to help in their quest to find their sister robbed them of every memory of her.  Jumping through the air and shooting while shouting "Aaaah".  A turret in a public area just ruthlessly gunning down an executive because it malfunctioned.

The mega-adrenaline gave Paxos a few FP back, and made her Euphoric (-3 to every roll, more or less).  A fair trade, I'm sure.

To quote Specter on discovering there was no penalty to shooting while prone: "Worm meta confirmed".

For their outstanding performance in the firefight, The Peacock has gained another The, making them The, Peacock, The.

The Peacock's reconstructive surgery meant that neither Mary Jane nor Emma recognized them.  In Mary Jane's case this wasn't super relevant (it made the rolls harder), but in Emma's it meant she opened fire immediately.

Specter was mortally wounded in the fight with Emma, and was in fact one away from instant death.

Ruled on the fly that short-circuiting a piece of cyberware located in a limb/extremity does less damage than to the skull or torso.  More of a balance concern than a flavour one.