Wednesday, 21 August 2024

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.

From its position on the floor, the Smasher tried to shatter Flex's shin, the kick hard enough to bend the blade that blocked it, while Flex pressed the advantage and continued shredding away the remaining arm.  The Peacock made it to their feet and moved up behind Flex to join Jar in just shooting Smasher as much as they could; the small rounds from their stolen SMG weren't doing _much_ but the crew were in a situation where every little bit counted, and it was starting to show, as the "neck" began to contract in spasms.

In the Matrix, Paxos saw Smasher doing something, and its cyberware started to turn back on.  The vents on his back started to glow, and the air in the cabin got noticeably warmer as his system overclocked.  Fortunately, Flex severed its remaining hand with his blades, and The Peacock placed another bullet perfectly in its sensor array and partially blinded it.  Based on the lack of reaction to being shot in the "skull", the crew realized Smasher's brain must have been... somewhere else.

Paxos got into a race with Smasher, trying to shut things off faster than it could restart them, her body temperature rising as she tried to keep pace without any cooling.  Simultaneously, Smasher kicked Flex's shin hard enough to cause the knee to bend to the side, and he joined it in close combat on the floor while Jar continued to hose it down with HMG fire.  Suddenly, all of the wounds Smasher had taken hit a tipping point, and, with one last short circuit hack from Paxos, it fell and, after sputtering out "fffffucking edgerunneeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrs", finally went silent.

Finale
Jar finally put out the flames engulfing himself and went to grab his luggage to start the zero-g fashion show.  The Peacock and Flex, meanwhile, groaned in pain ("Is this what being shot feels like?  This sucks!"), and Paxos found a first aid kit from one of the doctors smasher had ripped in half and started patching up their wounds.  The Peacock took Yorinobu's solid gold pistol as a trophy (they couldn't use it, due to the biometric lock), while Jar emerged from the kitchen wearing the first of his zero-g outfits (mostly feather boas and little else) and started performing his own private little fashion show with the blood-soaked meeting table as his catwalk.

Paxos went and grabbed Yorinobu's head and, after removing any trackers, started probing the implanted agent, looking for money.  There were dozens of drained bank accounts, and it was looking like a waste of time until she stumbled upon one last secret digital hiding place that Hanako and Michiko must have missed, which contained a cool one million eddies.  She yoinked it, then shoved Yorinobu's head in a box as evidence for their employer.

The crew waited for a few minutes for Jar to finish his show, then headed up to the locked cockpit door, bypassing a petrified stewardess on the way.  Paxos took the lead in "negotiations" and waved at the security camera, showed off Yorinobu's severed head, and shouted that there was fifty thousand eddies for each of them if they let the crew into the cockpit and forgot this whole thing ever happened.

The door rotated open almost instantly, the three flight crew apparently having come to the decision that the doors were going to get opened either way and this way they could at least (probably) survive.  The Peacock took over the controls, and informed the others that this was where they parted ways, as they were riding this sucker to the moon.  The rest of the crew nodded, and headed back to the cargo bay to put on their skydiving gear before they passed the point of no return.

They were all ready to go and waiting with the cargo bay vented when The Peacock gave the signal to jump, and Paxos, Jar, and Flex leapt out into space.  After a while they were low enough to deploy their wingsuits, and began the lightning-quick yet very long descent down to the Hawaiian Islands.  Jar and Flex landed smoothly, while Paxos winged a coconut tree but was mostly unharmed.  As they lay in the white tropical sand, they looked up, but were unable to see even a trace of the suborbital.

In the cockpit, The Peacock wrenched on the controls, abruptly changing course, and the roar of the engines drowned out the shouts from the pilots who had been insisting the whole time that this wasn't possible.  Against all their protestations, they brought the shuttle onto a perfect course which would make moonfall in a few hours, then turned to give the rest of the pilots a smug glance.

When they docked at Tycho moonbase, dozens of corporate security surged aboard the second the airlocks connected, but found only the confused and terrified crew, and The Peacock strutted off into the spaceport.  As they went, they realized they'd been noticed by a small child holding a toy spaceship, who waved at them.  The Peacock flipped them a shard with one eddy on it and nodded before continuing into the colony.

Epilogue
The Peacock, having flown higher than any bird had flown before, sent the vast majority of their wealth back to their sisters through channels Paxos had arranged, and stayed on Tycho.  After getting another round of extreme cosmetic surgery to evade the Arasaka Moon Ninjas, they spent what they'd kept on starting a private tourism company flying shuttles over famous sites (like the moon landing location, and the real moon landing location).  Their memories continued to slowly melt away, and within a few years they already couldn't remember who they'd been before the moon at all.

Paxos made her getaway to Peru as planned and finally shook Militech, but now found herself on the run from Arasaka.  It didn't take long for all of the forged documents, bribes, and last-minute flights under a false identity to add up and leave her bankrupt.  In the end she hung up her cyberdeck and became an independent taxi driver, and, other than some nightmares that they'd found her again, Paxos lived out the rest of her days in relative comfort.

Jar burned through the payout on a single trip to a Milan fashion show where he spent hundreds of thousands on haute-couture.  Before long, he was back in Night City where he spent the rest of his life as a middling ripperdoc struggling to pay off the debts he owed to the Voodoo Boys.  But he looked fabulous while doing it!

After Specter's death, the Wingless Dragon Gang (which was really more of a loose confederation of solos) dissolved.  Every year, the surviving members would get together at Afterlife on the anniversary of the Boss' death, but within 5 years, there were only two left.  Two years later, the gang and its members were entirely forgotten.

Flex spent a few years in Central America waiting for the heat to cool down, then returned to Night City and opened up a combination yoga studio/martial arts dojo/bar.  Business was slow, but he was able to coast off of the payout from the big job for a few years.  Between the combination of his giant cybernetic arms and his radical "no cyberware, all natural" beliefs, most patrons were very confused.


Notes:
More ignoring of zero-g, where fires don't work and people can't fall down.  Don't worry about it.

Checking Yorinobu's head for money was actually The Peacock's idea.

The roll to make it to the moon was Pilot (Air) at a -8, which for The Peacock is no big deal.  Should it have been harder?  Yeah, probably, but it was cool so it gets a pass.

A quick overview of misc behind the curtains things:
  • Some people's rivals never showed up.  Every time there was a job with another crew (this happened at least three times I recall), they would have been on that crew.  That includes Casper (Specter's rival), Fred Runt (Jar's), and Davis Numbers (The Peacock's).  Later, Lin Ru joined the team because he needed to pay the crew back.
  • Skeleton Man is dead.
  • The two surviving clones of Mary Jane were shipped off to Kang Tao HQ in Shenyang.  The leader of the program responsible for this was Jane, The Peacock's last sister.
  • Hanako and Michiko formed an alliance, splitting off US and Japanese Arasaka between them.
  • The crew's employer for the final mission was Militech.
  • The other options were as follows: Extract a VIP was Kang Tao, who were looking to torture Yorinobu for intel after he broke their alliance.  Protect a VIP was obviously Yorinobu.  And the secret fourth option of "extract intel from a corpo VIP's agent" would have been from Hanako's people, but it went to the rival team from up top.  They failed in their mission but survived.
  • Fernandez, Jar's tech fence, was an undercover cop who decided he would just arrest the crew the next time they showed up after their very high profile flight from Militech tower, but purely by coincidence, the crew never went back!
  • Felix Chudwell, the Santo Domingo politician who got The Peacock's nomad family arrested, was in bed with the Mox.  They gave him the drugs he needed to frame people (and later for personal use), and he helped them with their rapid expansion into the district.

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