Awakening Apocalypse - Chapter 2: The End of the Beginning

(OOC :: Yah shows how ignorant of the rules I am lol. Didn't know they didn't stack. Oh well. If for some reason I have to ditch a layer of clothing I'm still protected.)

Saint turns to Heartbreak,

"We can drive my car into the parking lot. I have my rifle in the trunk. I can't conceal it but while in the garage it's relatively close in case I need the fire power. Maybe from in there we can access the rest of the building."

Heartbreak

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12th December, 2011 - 12:30pm

Casper and Skinny

The two infiltration experts, ironically, are in the group that walks through the front door, just like any other tourist or customer. There are so many people in the public area of the Crash Test Industries campus that nobody really notices Casper and Skinny, even though Skinny looks like he just lost a fight with a truck.

Once the two get past the open air market and enter the building through the lobby, both are nearly overwhelmed by the bustle of the place. There are huge displays all over the place, showing pre-taped interviews with the project managers, developers, and supervisors of the Pow! drink line. It's all part of the pre-release buzz for the product. Even more amazing, people are absolutely eating it all up. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people throng the area, from one advertising display to the other, making the place uncomfortable to navigate.

The first thing Casper notices is that the public area is cleverly designed to look huge, but it would actually not be all that impressively large without the buzz and commotion. The restricted, employees-only areas of the building easily add up to double or even triple the size of the public area, and that only counts the first floor! Casper and Skinny both know that below them and above them are even more restricted areas, accessible through various locked doors and guarded elevators.

Casper and Skinny are both equipped with AR-capable comlinks, which means they can communicate with each other about as easily as with a cell phone. It also means that they can send (and receive) visual information directly to their retinas via their visual displays (if they're wearing them). This is probably the easiest way to send information quickly to each other.

The most relevant info Casper and Skinny have found by casing the public access area is as follows:

-The public entrance to the Showroom is guarded by two men in business suits. They appear to be relaxed and at ease, and they're even answering questions and making small talk with customers. These men will only allow access to the event to people who show a press invitation, which contains a small datachip the guards scan with a handheld device. Heartbreak may be able forge the data on these chips, or trick the device to accept a worthless paper as legitimate.
-The emergency exit doors in the public areas are hidden from the public view, behind cleverly designed architecture and furniture arrangements. Apparently someone in Crash Test Industries REALLY hates the idea of the public being able to see any of the building's emergency doors. These doors will open freely from this side (obviously), and they connect to public and restricted areas alike (including the Showroom), as all areas of the building share the same network of emergency exit routes. The hard part won't be getting into the "back of house" areas, but remaining undetected while they're in them.

Heartbreak and Saint

Saint parks the car in the underground lot beneath the CTI building. He notices the emergency stairwells here, leading up to the street level, and the rest of the building. Heartbreak finally sees the CTI network host through AR. Heartbreak doesn't expect to have much trouble hacking in this host. He doesn't "feel" the Matrix here yet, because he hasn't seen the place through VR.

The most notable thing Heartbreak has found relating to the CTI host network is its rating of 2. Apparently CTI hasn't gotten the memo that deckers are a real danger, otherwise they would have created a much more robust network.

Once Heartbreak connects to the host in hot-sim or cold-sim VR, he'll be able to sense the other Runners' locations based on their comlink pings. Heartbreak also knows that there is a security camera on the other side of the emergency exit door. Finally, he has discovered that there is a backup in case the presentation goes badly today. CTI is ready to play a (completely false) pre-recorded video to all the people in the public space who won't be present for the live Pow! demonstration. These people will be completely clueless, thinking they're watching live positive reactions to Pow! even if the event goes badly.

Apparently CTI isn't quite as dumb as they first appear!

Casper shows up wearing a festive ensemble; a t-shirt, jacket and a pair of jeans that she's programmed to be spattered with colors that match Pow! promotional materials she went hunting the Matrix for the previous night. She's all smiles, fawning over the displays like any of the enthralled sheeple that wander the area, and sticks close to Skinny's side throughout.

Her sunglasses tick merrily though, overlaying augmented reality across what she sees. With a few discrete control motions, she clicks past the many layers of promotional material; advertisements and cartoon characters and embedded captions that give inane descriptions of the long and noble history of the drink's conception and execution. A custom AR filter instead counts heads to get a crowd estimate, and creates a quick and dirty topography map of the public showroom area as she looks around. She zooms in on the goons guarding the entrance to the showroom and gets still shots and a little vid footage of some of the press staff going in.

All that done, she marks entrances and exits, with some quick, furtive stills of the emergency exits taken as she walked around the building with Skinny. Then Casper turns her attention from getting back there, to staying unseen. The easiest way to do that, she knew, was to not be where people expected you to be. In most cases, that meant going vertical. With her glasses, a quick glance could become a photograph she could view without anyone noticing a thing. She started getting a series of shots of the ceiling and floor.

A big event like this had a ton of electronics, wires, lights, all stashed out of sight. The prettiness was an elaborate facade pasted over the top of a big, churning machine of images. There should be little ways for the crew running the event to slip into those guts, to address problems or move quickly and quietly from one place to another without being seen by the audience. Nothing wrecked immersion like seeing someone rushing around. It made people wonder if something was wrong. And for her purposes, it was great, because what let crew move around unseen might let her and Skinny move around unseen.

Her knife of course is hidden inside the hem of her jeans down at her ankle, and she has her taser on its slide rig up her jacket's sleeve. The crossbow and heavy pistol are back in the car for now.

Casper quickly bit the tip of her tongue to keep herself from snapping, then whipped up a quick AR message to pop up on Skinny's image link.

**Lets not discuss this outloud.

**The job is to be discrete. Any kind of firing + alarms pretty much wrecks that. Lets keep this quiet as long as we can. Looking for ways to keep out of sightlines once we're in, also exit plan. What kind of nonlethals do you have? I have a Pulsar.

Casper chuckles. This was a bigger crew than she'd worked with before...the nature of her specialty was often fairly solitary...and while it was nice having people who had her back, it did come with the price tag that you had to actually communicate with them.

**I think I misunderstood your intent then. I thought you wanted to move now. But yes, once we hear from the hacker about the drone status, we'll be ready to make our move. I'm thinking the drones opening fire should ideally wait until after the POW starts having an effect on people if possible, but they'll be good distraction if something goes wrong and we have to pull out early. What do you think?