Awakening Apocalypse - Chapter 2: The End of the Beginning

Heartbreak

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[sblock=OOC]Actions:
-Move from AR to VR
-Mark host network (Hack on the fly: 11)
-Enter host network
-Spoof Command on the Emergency door (unlock, no alarm)
-Spoof Command on the security camera

I have very little idea what I'm doing here...[/sblock]

Saint parks his car and watches Heartbreak do his thing. He exits his vehicle and lights a smoke. Saint rarely smokes and really only does so as an excuse. Two guys sitting in a parking garage looks weird, but one guy grabbing a nap while the other takes a smoke break is hardly irregular. He takes a few short drags and waits.

Heartbreak engages hot-sim mode on his cyberdeck, and immediately a rush of excitement washes over him. The landscape of the Matrix opens wide before and above him, and he notes with satisfaction that there is even more form and substance in the Matrix than the last time he hot-simmed. In the real world he was crushed, his life ruined because he just wasn't quite good enough. But here, he's a titan of raw, unstoppable power. Power feels good.

With an act of will, Heartbreak's icon changes, and he becomes an old-fashioned baseball player, with tall socks and cleats and a cap, and a bat resting on his shoulder. Against a stronger host, he would have to find a vulnerable point in the real world to gain unauthorized access to their network, or smash through a firewall, but here Heartbreak is able to stroll lazily onto the Crash Test Industries network, which looks like a series of interconnected sports game fields, carefully designed to look old-timey with 16-bit graphics and fun blocky sprites. After today, CTI will certainly spend the money for real network security. Heartbreak can't help but smile with satisfaction of the knowledge that his cyber-attack will be analyzed over the coming days by a group of panicked guys in suits, wondering just what in the hell could have gone so terribly wrong!

Heartbreak obtained 6 successes with his roll, however due to his comlink attributes, his Sleaze limit is 3 and therefore three successes are discounted. The CTI network obtained 1 success with its opposed roll. Heartbreak successfully marked the CTI host using "hack on the fly" complex action.

Heartbreak also confirms what he had suspected all along. The emergency exit doors are alarmed. Not obvious alarms that blare loudly and alert crowds, but rather they're designed to send a silent signal to the CTI Security team, alerting them when the doors are opened from inside the underground garage or the building. Each of the doors has a camera watching from the other side, so CTI will be able to see the intruders the instant they open a door.

The hacker attempts to put marks on the garage emergency door, to disable the alarm. The effort again goes swimmingly, and Heartbreak is able to command the alarm on this door to shut down. However, as soon as any of the CTI agents (including IC programs) notice the alarm is down, they will immediately be able to bring it back online.

Heartbreak again obtained 6 successes with his hack on the fly roll to obtain a marks on the garage door alarm. Again, his limit reduces this to 3 successes. This time, the device gets zero successes, and Heartbreak easily obtains his mark, allowing him to spoof the command. The door is not locked, so no spoof was required to open it.

For his final trick, Heartbreak also spoofs a command on the security camera watching the door from the other side. This is as easy as his last two hacks, and the camera silently obeys the spoof command and shuts down. Heartbreak cannot know how long the downed camera will go unnoticed by CTI, however.

Heartbreak gets a sudden ominous feeling. He realizes that he has neglected to switch his icon to silent mode. At the exact moment of this realization, he spots a patrol IC zipping from icon to icon in the host, examining them at random. The patrol IC looks like a referee with a whistle. If it spots Heartbreak, the IC will almost certainly recognize him as not having authorized access to this host. Heartbreak has a quick decision to make...will he switch to silent mode and hope to be overlooked by the IC? If he does so, his Matrix dice pools will be reduced by 2, but the host will have a much harder time finding him. Or, he can decide not to run silent, and just count on brute power to smash through the host's defenses while using his full dice pools.

The back doors and cameras on the main floor (where Skinny and Casper are) have not been tampered with yet. If Skinny and Casper go through these doors, they'll be spotted by CTI security instantly. Heartbreak can see the AR icons and interact with his entire squad, and can easily communicate with all of them.

** We're not ruling out that approach, Casper explained silently via AR messages, ** We're seeing what the situation on the ground is so we can adapt as needed. The instant shots are fired, there's a distraction, but guards will also go on high alert. That makes stealth harder. Ideally, we can get in without needing that. If we need it, we'll use it, but I'd like to keep that ace up our sleeves a bit longer if possible.

(OOC - Any feedback regarding Casper's actions; need any dice rolled, etc etc?)

Shayuri said:

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.

Click to expand...

The ceiling is very high in the public areas, with no obvious areas for her to enter or escape from. The vaulted ceilings are meant to add to the illusion of largeness in the public area. Further complicating this is the fact that there are security cameras mounted on the ceiling all over the place. They're probably just passively recording and not being actively monitored, but it is another thing to consider.

Near the center of the public floor is an escalator coming from the public garage. The escalator opens up to the most impressive and busy part of the public area.

Casper observes the employees and workers coming in and out of the restricted areas, which nearly surround the public space with the exception of the west lobby entrance. These doors are not locked, which leads Casper to believe that there are probably "tiers" of restricted areas. The places for food preparation, low-level employee lounges, equipment staging areas, and other similar places are not protected by anything more than the workers themselves possibly noticing. They're coming in an out all the time, and Casper can't see any way to reliably predict when one of these doorways will be clear. If she chooses to enter the restricted areas through the employee work doors, she better be ready with a good story to explain herself!

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.

Click to expand...

Casper is not able to see any indication of where all the materials for this event are stored.

Heartbreak

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[sblock=OOC]
Mosier, I neglected to give you my deck attribute array. HB is running a Microdeck Summit w/ Attack 1, Sleaze 4, Data Processing 3, & Firewall 3. It's running Virtual Machine with Exploit and Sneak.

As far as I can tell, his actions so far have mostly been Sleaze actions.[/sblock]

Saint nods and flicks the cigarette to the ground. He trots to follow HB to the door he's unlocked and cracks it open slightly to peer through. If it's clear he'll head in.

Saint and Heartbreak both enter the restricted area through the underground garage emergency exit door closest to Saint's car.

The door leads to a short hallway, with a door on the right, and a stairway at the end of the hall. There is a stale smell in the air, and the hallway has bare concrete flooring, unpainted steel rails on the stairway, and naked fluorescent light strips along the ceiling.

Heartbreak knows the layout of the building well enough to tell that the stairway goes up to the first floor, where it intersects with the first floor emergency exit hallway, where Casper and Skinny are just on the other side of the door. From there, the first floor hallway branches out into many areas, including the backstage area of the showroom, the Pow! demonstration prep area (including the two parts of Pow! that will be mixed just prior to the event), and various other lower-importance areas, like the employee lounges, He also knows that the basement level door in front of him leads to a branching hallway going to the security and surveillance offices, accounting, the mail room, and other medium-importance areas. Still below him, on level basement-2, are more important areas such as research and development, executive meeting rooms, information technology, and human resources.

All of the doors in the restricted areas are alarmed. The doors leading to important areas on the basement level are also electronically locked. The doors leading to important areas on basement-2 are electronically locked, and manually locked from the inside. Heartbreak will not be able to completely unlock the doors in basement-2. Good old-fashioned lock picking (or brute force) will be required to open those.

Heartbreak will be able to monitor the security cameras and personnel movements while he is accessing the CTI network, and help the others to navigate if/when they enter these areas. While in AR, Heartbreak's network infiltration adds +2 dice and +2 to the limit for any stealth based tests the group uses to evade CTI patrols and agents. If he is in cold-sim VR, that bonus increases to +3, and in hot-sim the bonus increases to +4. Starting now, Heartbreak is accumulating overwatch score which will eventually lead to his discovery and possible capture. Also, he will have to make occasional opposed rolls vs. the host's patrol IC.

Heartbreak

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[sblock=OOC]
Current Deck stats: Attack 1, Sleaze 4, Data Processing 3, & Firewall 3. Running Virtual Machine with Exploit and Sneak.[/sblock]