In attendance:
- Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 4)
- Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 3)
- Beauregard McCaffery, the Thinking Man's Gangster (Mercenary, Lvl 3)
- Troy Giovanni, Hood in Over His Head (Criminal, Level 1)
Sax the Knife was Level 3, enough to adopt a Fire Cult Fanatic as part of his Crew. Ignacio the Burned Man joined the team for the mission.
The illusionists John and Jo created a three dimensional projection of the target building: the United Meat Train headquarters.
They explained the team's objectives:
Embers are going to handle the Sink. They've got everything set up for a controlled burn.
Here's the issue, though: Meat God isn't intelligent. It's a big dumb ball of fear and violence. It knows how to puppet people and make them feed it, but it doesn't know the first thing about strategy or logistics. That's what UMT does for it. They think it'll make them a whole lot of money, so they've got the whole branch office dedicated to babysitting it.
We're sending you in to the region headquarters to do a little cleanup. Think of it as a failure-to-stop drill. Fire Cult's going to torch the body, and you're going to shoot the head.
Your mission objectives:
- There's a communications relay broadcasting the Meat Signal, keeping the cube jockeys on-message. Take it out and the drones will "wake up".
- Destroy their server farm. They're not going to have backups because the OS they run now isn't compatible with any normal computer system. It's too... fleshy.
- Killing the suits isn't going to do anything unless we shut down their management fast track program. They're doing this thing with all the biomass from the sacrifices where they "upgrade" their executives. Put a stop to it.
- We think they picked up a self-repairing machine from the Serpent Ruins - the same one we were trying to grab. If you find it, steal it back or smash it to pieces. Otherwise, it might just undo all your work killing people and breaking things.
- Undercover, with as much concealed carry stuff we can fit, in a disguise of your choice
- Loud, with the best equipment we can give you, inserted kinetically at a location of your choice
The players decided to divide their forces, sending some in undercover to scout the place, before deploying the rest of the group as a strike team.
- UNDERCOVER
- Cassie
- Leon the Chthonicist (NPC Crew)
- Troy
- Hatchet Hands Harry the Hitman (NPC Crew)
- STRIKE TEAM
- Sax
- McCaffrey
- Ignacio the Fire Cult Fanatic (NPC Crew)
The undercover team disguised themselves as maintenance workers. The Occultists provided them with access cards that would pass security inspection, and charms which would mask their psychic signatures to pass as meat cultists. They could carry equipment under their coveralls and in their toolboxes.
Darla the Technomancer had prepared a treat for the assault team: several suits of power armor. In addition to carrying their own weight and providing armored protection, the suits would also enhance the wearer's effective strength. (17 AC, +1 STR bonus) The strike team also loaded up on flamethrowers, grenades, explosives, and a necklace of fireballs gifted by the Fire Cult. They also took a handful of scrolls (which were promptly forgotten about).
Finally, everyone took a headset keyed into the group's mesh network, and a thermos of Moe's Special Blend. The former would allow communication inside the building, while the latter was rich enough in protein and tomato sauce to stop bleeding.
(Buying Lester's recipe book from the Underworld Vault was an outstanding move, which would save the team several times during the operation).
The undercover team would enter the building disguised as maintenance workers. They'd scout the interior, find something important, then call in the assault team by breaking a capsule of smelling salts given by the Occultists. The assault team would be inserted onto the roof and immediately start shooting. This would distract the security around the undercover team's objective and allow them to sabotage it. The assault team would be inserted via a strange device created by urban shaman Loy: an egg of stone and rebar, which would "hatch" them on the roof of the building when the signal was sent.
(Loy was an NPC from the early days of Cow Town. We had one hundred percent player turnover since he last appeared, so seeing him again had zero impact on the players. This was a recurring theme, and I dropped the rest of the cameos I had planned - describing them all as "someone you've never seen before")
The quiet team deployed to the streets of Cow Town. The United Meat Train Branch Headquarters looked like a normal seven story tower until they passed inside the bubble of its protective glamour. Then it looked like a giant finger, with a layer of protective integument covering most of the building's structure.
They ignored the main entrance and went looking for the basement loading dock. There was a group of slaughterhouse workers and meat bosses unloading a cargo container of prisoners nabbed by the Cow Town Police, herding them down an ominous hallway toward a room filled with rows and rows of cages. The undercover squad slipped through a door into the basement foyer, and Troy used his technological acumen to bypass the secure door to the Executive Upgrade Suite. Inside, a group of slaughterhouse workers and office drones fussed over a crucible filled with molten human fat and a human shaped mold, watched over by a tallowy titan crouched in the corner. They decided to come back to this room later.
The foyer stairs led up to the ground floor. The security room was filled with Coal City Cops, staring at blank static on the camera feeds, which gave off a fleshy hum. After a few false starts, the undercover team learned from the employees on the third floor IT room that the server farm was on the fourth floor. They grabbed an elevator up to floor four. They passed through a cube farm filled with meat collar workers tapping away at computers, and peered through the glass doors of the server farm. Inside were rows and rows of brains, wired into computers by living nerve channels, tended by altered medics and a strange chrome crab, which Leon recognized as the living machine. They decided to break the smelling salt capsule and summon the strike team.
The smell of cardamom filled the ready room in the Occultist's Hideout. The strike team climbed into the stone egg. The next moment, they had "hatched" on the roof of the building, with no memory of the intervening period, or why they were dripping with industrial solvents. They placed a breaching charge on the roof and blew a hole to jump through. It led down two stories to an atrium on the sixth floor. McCaffrey and Ignacio breached a secure door and tossed grenades and fireballs into a room filled with mysterious communications equipment. Sax kicked the door at the opposite end into an office, spraying down a meat executive and his lawyer with 5.56 NATO.
A trio of flesh hulks charged out of the communications room and went to town on the assault team. Ignacio was grabbed and crushed, but McCaffrey held his own, hacking away at the beasts with a blessed sabre that peeled them apart. The meat lawyer sealed Sax's mouth shut with a gag order spell, and the meat executive melted his flesh with his meat management ability. Sax killed them both with a spurt from his flamethrower.
Downstairs, the bad guys weren't leaving the server room, despite the sound of explosions from upstairs. The meat collar workers had quotas to meet. A meat cop led a group of tattooed vampires through the room, headed for the roof. Cassie clandestinely followed them, with Troy trailing after. They passed through a room full of crush cages, with prisoners yelling at them to open the cages. Troy quickly found the button to open them all at once, which was good because that's when a meat executive and ancient vampire came into the room from the adjoining sacrifical chamber. Troy ran upstairs while the prisoners mobbed the suits. He stepped in a bear trap in a room full of office supplies and was set upon by a pack of wendigos, who hadn't spotted Cassie as she stealthily followed the vampires through the room. The wendigos immediately began arguing about what to do with him. They had snuck into the building to hunt something exciting, trapping a maintenance man in a bear trap wasn't their idea of fun. He convinced them to go upstairs and look for something scarier to fight. Cassie returned to rescue him from the bear trap.
(The undercover team completely forgot about their NPC followers during this segment. I didn't have the bandwidth to remember and account for them at every stage of the game)
Upstairs, Sax and McCaffrey destroyed the transmitter, ending the meat signal. This had an immediate appreciable effect on the office drones throughout the building, who immediately panicked when they found themselves trapped in an office building covered in skin and blood, with no memory of how they got there. They were quickly set on by a vicious two pronged assault, from a meat executive leading a group of slaughterhouse cultists, and the police/vampire squad that had worked its way up the building. They dispatched the cultists with fireballs and flamethrowers, but the vampires paralyzed Sax with their stunning gaze and quickly overwhelmed him. The vile creatures severed an artery and punctured one of his eyes as they scrambled all over him, trying to peel open his power armor. Cassie killed them from stealth with a hand grenade, which also fucked up one of Sax's arms. McCaffrey caught the meat executive in a running tackle and tossed her six stories out the office window.
The two teams regrouped, treated the worst of their wounds, and planned their next move. They had accomplished one of their three objectives, and thrown the headquarters into disarray. But they had two more to go, and now the cult knew they were coming.
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