For Us It Was a Tuesday

Deuce Traveler · Mar 24, 2015

It’s night by the time you make it to the derelict shipping district, the only sounds around you being the slight buzzing from nearby powerlines and the late barking of various semi-feral mutts communicating to one another from yards of rundown homes and rotten smelling alleys. The sky is overcast, hiding the moon and the stars, while a soft drizzle of rain muffles the sounds of your party member’s griping to one another.

There it is in front of you: the Hep-Happy Warehouse, complete with its happy-face logo and anthromorphic packrat mascot, spray-painted to the front of the structure’s rusting exterior. Officially, this building is empty and abandoned, which would explain the municipal government’s warning signs taped to the windows and the various chain links held together with corroded locks at the main entrance. But your fixer claims there are automated defenses inside, and a secretly running mainframe, housing a large electronic volume of research notes your client desperately wants you to copy, before wiping out all data on the mainframe so others cannot duplicate your efforts. This raises a lot of questions for you, such as what was really being conducted at this facility, but a paying job is a paying job, and you’ve got some bills overdue and appetites to fulfill.

Strahd_Von_Zarovich · Mar 24, 2015

The semi giant Troll scans the surroundings with his Thermographic vision and grunts without saying anything. Floch is here to help them, bash some skulls if needed and return back for the credits. The others will look into the files, the mainframe and the electronics. He is here to remove any opposition and nothing else. If he was all alone he would carry the hard drives of the mainframe after tearing them from the main computer and breaking down the automated defences but the others are here to collect the data secretly, as much as they can and shut down the defences remotely.

Shayuri · Mar 24, 2015

Following sedately in the troll's wake is a ripple in the air; the hint of a female outline just barely visible if you know where to look. In the meatworld, Echo is barely there at all...just a ghostly presence wrapped in ruthenium polymer and ballistic fibers. If you want to see Echo, the true Echo, you must look into the Matrix. There, the dark and dirty alleys are overlaid in paths of light, with the icons of programs and passerbys flitting constantly past. Far overhead in the blank black sky is the giant orb of the Grid Overwatch, constantly scanning the traffic below for signs of malcontents.

Here, Echo is another creature entirely. A swarm of orbs of varying sizes, all orbiting one another in such a way as to create a humanoid form. Each orb is a little different than the others. This one has a stripe of another color along the equator, and that one looks metallic instead of simply glossy. Keeping count is impossible, the way they constantly rotate and jostle each other. Hundreds? Thousands?

Well before they'd arrived, Echo had switched her persona to run 'silently,' no longer broadcasting itself to the other denizens of that electronic elysium. Because it was still affecting the Matrix, a sharp-eyed observer might notice it...but Echo was even more skilled at being unseen in the Matrix than she was in the dry, dreary world of flesh and blood.

As the team approaches the warehouse, Echo sends a flotilla of those little spheres out and they zip around, assessing the warehouse's Matrix presence. Such an old abandoned building shouldn't have any real activity online. Maybe a few RFID sources from boxes or products that hadn't been moved and the batteries hadn't run down yet. Certainly nothing like a host system or server would have. Discovering such a thing would do a great deal to bolster their mysterious client's claims.

(OOC - Matrix Perception. 13 dice. 5 successes. 13d6 → [2,1,6,1,1,6,2,4,1,5,6,2,5] http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4804498/ )

Deuce Traveler · Mar 24, 2015

OOC: Roll with invisible castle when it works. Honor system when it doesn't.

galenbd · Mar 26, 2015

Prometheus stood looking at the warehouse impassively. Likely if the building is uninhabited, astral scouting would just see some electronics with no understanding of their value.

Prometheus shifts his sight to the Astral plane and looks over the outside of the building, not really expecting to see anything.

(OOC : Astral Perception - 2 hits )

CanadienneBacon · Mar 26, 2015

Thistle fussed with a buckle on her too-short pleated skirt. She edged further away from Prometheus. Ugh. Such a little freak, that one. He gives me chicken skin. And not the good kind. A noise across the way caught Thistle's attention. She looked up, scanning the street and houses. Just to be sure, she fingered the trigger on her Super Warhawk. Locked and loaded. Just gimme something to put a hole in.

Unsung · Mar 26, 2015

The sunglasses hung around her neck. The hair, cut into a spiky, intimidating style by someone who knew better about this business, lay flat now.

'Salvatierra'-- the handle she had chosen for herself still sounded odd to her, even now-- looked up the street, down it again. Her eyes tilted up, following the rooftops, the skyline beyond them. Counting alleys. Every corner, every window. It wasn't even something she was aware she was doing, anymore. Just habit.

She found she was calm, numb, ready. If she could be back in the bar tomorrow morning without firing a shot, that was fine. If she had to empty every clip she had before the night was over, that was just as well, too. It was all the same, all good. Surviving was just another habit at this point. After Bogota. After Aztlan, Amazonia, and all the rest of that drek.

Good to still have purpose, though, whatever happened next. The best defense, after all, was one that never needed to be put to the test.

Deuce Traveler · Mar 26, 2015

It just seems like any other, ugly and otherwise quiet night.

Floch
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The building is putting off a warmer thermographic signature than you were expecting. It looks abandoned, but only a building internally heated would give off pockets of warm air of slightly higher temperature than the outside cool night.
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Echo
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There seems to be no connection to the Matrix coming from the building. Power cables that would normally lead to the building appear cut at junctions awy from the structure. But your spheres encounter resistance just past the padlocked doors. The building is resonating with power, likely from an internal source of some kind, and similar power signatures are coming from below the ground level, indicating some sort of basement subsection. Also, you are detecting some very Matrix-like vista that you can enter, almost like a pocket dimension Matrix sealed off from the Matrix you are familiar with. It seems that there is some sort of heavy-duty electronically sealed door just past the rusting doors in front of you.
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Prometheus
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You look over the outside of the building and sense nothing at first, except for the dim outline of objects only real to those in the physical world. Just past that, however, you detect a strange wall barely beyond the outer skin of the building. Pushing further you soon realize that there is an astral barrier covering the entire building (including what seems to be an unknown basement level), preventing you from traveling astrally inside, though you imagine once you enter the structure you'll be able to move around more freely. What truly worries you is the feel of this barrier, as it is more alien in nature than similar barriers that you've encountered before and you are left with a natural instinct of repulsiveness. It would take a lot of effort to create a barrier like this, and it is also guaranteed to attract some sort of attention and response to those of an arcane nature in the local area given enough time.
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galenbd · Mar 26, 2015

Perplexed, Prometheus looks again and considers what other things he's seen in Astral space that might be similar.

Deuce Traveler · Mar 26, 2015

Prometheus
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What you are looking at is raw astral force powered by a magical energy that seems to slightly warp the fabric of reality touching it. Really trippy stuff, and it brings back a few lessons you were taught by your mentors sometime back. It is said that the Awakening was caused by reality-affecting outer entities trying to break a toe-hold into our reality, and though they were stopped, enough magic leaked in to shape the world you know today. Think Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath or other types of beings that the sicko called Lovecraft somehow imagined, though a bit less powerful and more susceptible to good ol' incendiary bullets and mana blasts. Still, you wouldn't want to tangle with one strong enough to erect a barrier like this if you didn't have to do so, and you can only imagine the twisted magical dangers that its presence must have created inside.
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