GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 23: Emergency Brain Surgery

Characters:

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

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Takeoff

Jar broke into the electronic locks and hotwired the AV while Paxos and The Peacock dragged Specter and Emma aboard, followed by Mary Jane on the stretcher.  Paxos tried to Jam all the trackers in everyone/everything, but failed due to the euphoria from the uppers she was on, which meant Jar was going to have to do some open-brain surgery (with only a first aid kit) to disable/remove everything before they switched to the getaway AV under the overpass in Japantown.  He started on Mary Jane as The Peacock throttled up the thrusters and they lifted off.

A single large drone shot out of a magnetic launcher and opened up with a hail of fire from its gun, but The Peacock was able to put sufficient distance between them for it to be ineffective.  As they flew away, something in Mary Jane's skull started beeping, and Jar shouted for The Peacock to turn around: she had a cranial bomb installed and it looked like it was rigged to blow if she got too far away from Militech Tower.  They took the AV back into a circling pattern around the tower to stall for time, but Jar would need 8 minutes, which was an eternity when fleeing from armed drones.

More drones were launching every minute from the launchers, and soon enough an entire swarm was after them, but The Peacock outmaneuvered them with ease with the luxury AV's superior handling and speed.  It was all going too smoothly, so nobody was surprised when an NCPD attack helicopter swooped up from the skyscrapers and commanded them over the radio to land or be fired upon.  Rather than landing, The Peacock went off in a tighter spiraling pattern around and down the tower.  Trying to keep up, a pair of the severely-outclassed drones rammed into one of the AV landing pads on the side of the tower, sending it plunging down to the streets below.

Careful to stay in "head not exploding range", The Peacock then zoomed up to the top floors of the Kang Tao tower which were being reconstructed and flew through a narrow tunnel of concrete support beams, but this time their pursuers made it through and let forth another volley of fire, as well as one of the homing missiles, but thanks to the difficult terrain everything missed.  Continuing the aerial display, The Peacock rounded Militech Tower and just pulled up out of the way of the Kiroshi blimp that circled the plaza; one drone collided with the side, forcing it into a controlled landing, while the helicopter was forced to back off.

Jar finished the surgery and chucked the bomb implant out the window, and once it was safe, The Peacock suddenly dropped down to street level and flew into the tunnel in the center of the district; the drones followed and continued firing near-blindly, shredding a car and its passengers in the process.  Now that they could leave, The Peacock sped off and parked in an alley in Vista Del Rey.  Jar started patching up the bullet wounds of everyone who was bleeding (starting with The Peacock!) so nobody would risk bleeding out.  In the process of working on Emma, he discovered that she was in as bad shape as Specter and would likely be dead in a manner of hours without urgent surgery.

Fly, You Fools

While he was working, though, two of the Militech drones tracked them down thanks to the sisters' implants.  The chase began anew in a hail of automatic gunfire, but a detour through Valentino territory resulted in the drones taking potshots from some gangers on a roof that gave the crew an opportunity to flee through a cloud of red white and blue smoke that had been set off by 6th Street for President's Day.  Jar finally got back to the surgery to remove the trackers implanted in the sisters while they continued to lay low.  Paxos asked if anyone knew a ripperdoc, and Jar said he knew a "Chromedome" in Arroyo, so they started flying towards the his shop.

The way to the ripper ended up being pretty roundabout, as they were first forced to detour to Japantown when more drones intercepted them.  Right as they lost those by diving in between a cluster of towers connecting walkways, the NCPD helicopter caught up to them.  The chopper radio'd them again, this time telling them to cease or be killed.  Without waiting for a response, the pigs opened fire with the chopper's autocannon;  The Peacock swerved out of the way and the shells tore a nearby car apart.

As their HUD flashed MISSILE LOCK, The Peacock plunged their AV to just twenty feet off the ground, almost scraping the heads of pedestrians enjoying an outdoor President's Day festival (sponsored by Militech).  The cops fired anyway, but the missile got tangled on a banner and detonated in the crowd.  That gave them the distraction they needed to break line of sight and they were, once again, off to Arroyo and Chromedome.

As the AV touched down, the sign out front flickered to "OPEN", and everyone but Jar was surprised to see it was right beside the department store that the Mox were running a brothel out of.  Chromedome hustled out of his shop, his round metal skull cap shining in the sunlight in contrast with his dark skin.  Hocking out a gob of phlegm into the gutter, the short ripperdoc asked who needed work, and Paxos and Jar dragged Emma and Specter into the operating room.  Paxos also decided to stay behind, since her uppers were wearing off and she didn't know how bad the crash would be.

Once everyone was out, The Peacock immediately took off again with just Jar and an unconscious Mary Jane.  Jar finally finished disabling MJ's trackers, so they headed to the backup AV under the Japantown overpass, avoiding one last pair of drones on the way.  While The Peacock transferred Mary Jane's stretcher over, Jar made arrangements with Oni Tokugawa for a safehouse in Little China, then they boarded their new, trackerless AV and took off.

R&R

Back at his shop, Chromedome asked Paxos what he was dealing with and who to start with first.  She explained that:

• Specter was on death's door
• Emma wasn't much better
• She'd taken a shot of mega-adrenaline to the heart and was feeling great

Chrome decided to start on Specter first, and while she waited, Paxos suddenly felt all the energy she'd been given drain away, and she lost consciousness as a thin line of blood trickled down from her nose.

A little over an hour later, Specter came to in a wheelchair and took a look around.  He saw a ripper he didn't know working on the woman who'd almost killed him, shrugged, and went back to sleep.

Another hour later, he was woken up when Emma had regained consciousness and was shouting threats at the ripper while waving a chair around.  Apparently she wanted to know why her implanted agent wasn't working and where her sister was or something.  Specter yawned and said that he'd answer all her questions after he'd had 8 hours of sleep and, somehow that convinced her.

Notes:

Total Kill Tallies:
The Crew: 4

Militech: 18 (the drones knocked the landing pad loose and it squashed people on the ground)

NCPD: 16 + 1 injured in car crash

I ruled that Jar can use Quick Gadgeteer to do surgery related to implants rapidly, but not general surgery to heal Specter/Emma etc.

Drivers have such insane driving skill that nobody with anything reasonable has even a chance of keeping up.  Drones had 12, helicopter had 14 + 2 handling.  The Peacock has a 19, and a 21 for ground vehicles.  The same issue occurred in our Waterworld campaign where Cap'n Chang could drive circles around everyone else in his boat.  I'd say this is because Action's chase rules use Quick Contests rather than the typical Attack/Defense sequence in combat, where because defenses are almost always lower than the attacks, even a highly skilled character runs the risk of being hit (especially in modern/action settings where guns can hit multiple times).  The biggest risk to a high-skill driver is running out of ideas for Stunts/Stunt Escapes for their PC to do.

Something I've said multiple times during this game is that the medical and housing situation in this game are miles better than real life because I wanted to eliminate friction and excess bookkeeping since I know my players don't care for it.  It takes something away from the setting, but what're you gonna do.  I mention this here because the same is true for having drones and helicopters constantly hunting down the PCs: how do you make it so that it's something interesting rather than just "oh and then you speed away in your super fast flying car" over and over again?  The cranial bomb was a fun situation, but after that it became quite repetitive.  Now that they're trying to lie low with super high heat something's going to happen, and that'll be fine, but that initial response seems difficult to run.

The drones had Unliving which meant shooting them was basically pointless thanks to them reducing all incoming damage to 1/3.  This led to The Peacock just taking Move over and over again while staying at Long range until the helicopter showed up and they figured the homing missiles were a big enough danger to warrant something else.

Forgot bleeding rolls at first, and once I remembered both The Peacock and Paxos went to exactly 0, but stayed conscious.

Specter rolled a crit on his default roll to convince Emma to stand down at the end.