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.

After a few seconds, The Peacock heard Sota Nagasawa say "what was that?!" in Japanese then start laughing, and told the others over comms that they needed to move up to help, and the crew grouped up, then charged up the staircase with Jar in the lead due to his subdermal armour.  He spotted Sota laughing and Specter's hand poking out from under the concrete and then opened fire with his shotgun, but to no avail.  Paxos stepped forward and her implanted monowire whip unspooled from her index finger before lashing out at him and slicing away a chunk of his armour.

In return, Sota stepped forward and tore a pair of deep gashes in Paxos' leg with his katana.  Surprising everyone (including herself), this sent Paxos into a berserk rage.  Jar ruined one of Sota's eyes with a shotgun blast,  and Paxos beat away more of his armour with a pair of whip strikes, but he somehow stayed on his fight until The Peacock hit him in center mass with a charged tech round.  The gunman ran down the stairs just in time to eat a facefull of buckshot, and with all their foes dead, Paxos shook off her rage.

Jar walked up to confirm Specter was dead and... yeah, there's no coming back from being crushed like that.  Before they had a chance to grieve, a pair of teens with a sword and a police baton rushed the crew from the top of the stairs.  The Peacock took one out with a pistol round to the chest, then Jar stepped up to meet the other and slammed a fist into his nose which sent him sprawling to the floor.  Jar took a minute to patch up himself and Paxos, then the crew went back to the digsite.

Moving On

After another 30 minutes of hooking up the power connections they needed Jar asked The Peacock to go in and look for traps before he flipped the switch.  They found vents for nerve gas and pointed them out so Jar could disconnect them, and after a few snips, the system was powered on, and some seized hydraulic arms in the floor (probably a defense measure?) jerked a bit before going still.

By the time Jar was out of the hole, Paxos had finished rebooting her deck, so she swung down and jacked in.  Everything was so old it was practically moving in slow motion, and the ICE was so out of date it was hard to tell if it was even trying to stop her.  After five minutes, she had transferred over all of the data in the vault to her 'deck and jacked out, just in time to hear motorcycles pull up outside.  More Tyger Claws.

Paxos Pinged and detected around a dozen people above them, so the crew jimmied open the door to the parking garage, closing it behind them.  Thanks to a bit of luck, Paxos was now in range of Sota's agent, which she hacked to get access to his bikes encrypted access key.  As they crossed the garage, she decrypted it on the fly, and had a digital key that would be good for the next half hour or so.  Jar opened the garage door, and The Peacock and Paxos ran out.

Jumping onto Sato's bike, The Peacock did a burnout and revved the engine to get the attention of the kids keeping watch, then sped off.  With everyone distracted, Jar easily snuck away into the night and made it back to The Peacockmobile where he held tight.  Now pursued by several Tyger Claws on bikes, The Peacock heard gunfire and headed toward it, rounding a corner to find themselves in the middle of a shootout between two Northside gangs at a street market.

The Peacock swerved between stalls then went into a slide to dodge under the bullets, while one of the Tyger Claws met a grisly end behind them.  The next block, they used a downed metal awning in front of a scorched pharmacy as a ramp to jump a pair of cars, and the Tyger Claws crashed and burned when they tried to follow.  They regrouped with Jar at the Peacockmobile with perfect timing, just minutes before Paxos' decrypted key was going to expire.  A quick call to Oni Tokugawa and they headed off to the Afterlife for the handoff.

As they walked down the stairs to the club, Jar made some last minute adjustments to his outfit; the blood was throwing the colour pattern off, but he was going to own it.  They were let in ahead of the line and walked in back to the private room where Tokugawa was already smoking a cigar, though he dropped a smile when he saw Specter was missing.  The crew took their seats across the holographic table and Paxos slid across the shard with the paydata.

Tokugawa inspected it on a burner agent, grunted that it looked legit, and slid them back a shard with the agreed upon $140k, with an extra $500 tacked on.  Stubbing out the cigar, Tokugawa told them to have a good time, and, with a solemn nod, left the room.  The crew spent the rest of the night in the club talking up Specter, mentioning in particular that he'd killed the cyborg assassin Yokai earlier that night.  Apparently that was good enough to get a drink named after him, so the "Specter Over Northside" was added to the bartender's repertoire (for now, at least).

Notes:

Specter's death was incredibly unlucky.  Five hits, randomly rolled the skull (0.5%), then the first 3 stripped a bunch of DR, then the 4th rolled almost max damage and sent him past a single death check (the 5th did next to nothing).  He then rolled a 18, and using Luck to reroll, got a 17 and 15.  With HT 12, he would have been mortally wounded but still alive on a 14 or better.  Between the headshot and the failures, this was a 1/200,000 event.

Prior to Specter's death, Paxos' player linked Queen's Who Wants To Live Forever in the group chat, which I believe may have cursed him.

The whole "encryption key" thing for the motorcycle was to justify some way to make stealing cars hard in-universe.  It worked out well enough this time.

With the death of a PC, Specter's player has the choice between a handful of semi-randomly generated Solo NPCs.  Among them is Emma Watson, The Peacock's sister.