So I went up to Vermont to visit my old college buddies and go to a gaming convention in West Leb¹. We did pretty well in the conquest department at the con, but that's another story. Anyway, between events, we wandered back to Robb's house, and played some Shadowrun using a combination of our old 2nd Edition books and Robb's brand new 3rd Edition book.

We had a party of three, all using archetypes, 'cause we didn't want to take the time to make characters. There was my Combat Mage², Phil, Elroy's Weapons Specialist³, Kiera, and Jimm's Dwarf Mercenary, who I don't believe had a name at that point, but later became Nikola. Robb was game master.

So it started out in the usual way... we were hanging around a bar in New Orleans, and got a call from a Johnson, who wanted us to play courier with a "package". Under further questioning, it turned out that the "package" was a human female, who was currently the unwilling guest of a third party. So I, being the mage, took leave of my body and did some scouting around the area where we were supposed to pick her up. I didn't see much, but someone tracked me back to my body, and grounded out a fireball through one of my foci. Everyone in the bar died except for the three of us and the troll who was tending bar. We staggered out the (flaming) back door, and I took my best shot at healing the lot of us. Didn't work so well, because I was wounded, but I managed to get the dwarf healed.

Anyway, we then took off before the cops and firemen noticed us, and went off to steal a boat so we could drift down-river to the crypt in which the chick was being held, which happened to be near the Mississippi, in a ghoul-controlled area. So we found a marina where the rent-a-troll was sleeping and started to sneak in to steal a boat. Then the dogs showed up. I tried to mana-ball them, but failed miserably, so Jimm blew them away with his FN-HAR. This is not the level of subtlety we were looking for. The troll woke up and came after us, so we shot him until he fell down (unconscious, but not dead), and we stole a big red cigarette boat (all the better to make the fast getaway afterwards).

After figuring out, more or less, how to drive a boat (none of us had a Boat skill), we anchored a ways downriver to wait for morning before entering the ghoul-controlled area. Morning came, and we landed near the crypt and dashed over to it. I did a quick astral recon, and located the chick, and two ork guards with halberds standing on either side of the door, and also a dead mage (astral drain is a bitch, especially for spells like fireball). So we went over to the door, I cracked it open, and Elroy rolled a couple of grenades in. We slammed the door and waited. The orks came bursting out, wounded but unfazed (hey, they were orks), halberds swinging. So we shot them, then went inside and upstairs to liberate the chick. About then we heard sirens, so I did another astral recon, and spotted a bunch of Lone Star boats down around our boat, so we decided not to leave that way. After we'd walked a couple of miles (the ghouls were sleeping, fortunately), the chick regained consciousness. We decided we'd unbind her, if only so she could walk her damn self.

Turned out her name was Friday (Robb'd been reading too much Heinlein), she'd been kidnapped by one batch of thugs, and another batch of thugs (our employers) was trying to snatch her for reasons of their own, but she'd really prefer not to be in the custody of either of them. So we told her, sorry, but we were under contract to bring her to our employer, and then mentioned casually that our contract ended the moment we delivered her. So she hired us to get her away from our original employer, contract effective the moment our old one expired, of course.

We went back to Friday's place and rested up until the deadline for the delivery approached. Then we went out to the warehouse where the delivery was to be made, with Kiera carrying Friday, loosely bound, over her shoulder. We went up to the warehouse office, Kiera dumped Friday on the desk in front of our employer, and grabbed the credsticks he tossed on the table. Our contract thus dutifully fulfilled, we were free to act when Friday pulled free of her bonds, stuck a Remington Roomsweeper⁴ under Johnson's chin and pulled the trigger. Johnson's troll bodyguards were already turning to shoot us when Friday moved... he'd apparently already planned to double-cross us. I took an Uzi burst in the chest - my armor jacket was the only reason I didn't buy it then and there - and decided it was a good idea to spend the rest of the fight hiding under the desk. Friday killed the bodyguards, then ran downstairs to fight with the guards below. Kiera just started chucking grenades through the office windows onto the warehouse floor, while Jimm raised his FN-HAR up over his head so he could shoot over the windowsill and started gunning down guards. Eventually they all died. We were all still alive - barely - except Jimm who was completely unhurt.

We staggered off before the cops showed up, and got a job with Friday's employers, who claim to be a secret branch of the UCAS government, and who patched us all back together (except Jimm, who, as I said, was completely unhurt). Such was our first run.

«¥»

Anyway, that was the end of the con, and Jimm went back home. Robb took over running the campaign Elroy had been running, and introduced Phil and Kiera into that campaign. The already existing party consisted of Jay's street samurai, whose name I forget, Jeff's elf chick, Kaya, or some such, and a troll physical adept named Jared, who was originally Robb's character and became Robb's NPC.

When Kiera and I showed up in Buffalo, on a mission to check to see if Jared was a bug, among other things⁵, I tracked the party down in astral space while Kiera transported my body to a place across the street from their motel room. Jay had just gotten out of the hospital after getting mangled in the previous session and rejoined his buddies at the motel, when someone knocked on the door, claiming to be room service. Jay opened the door, and got shot. Someone else smashed through the window, and it turned into a huge battle, which I sat and watched from astral space. The elf chick got shot in the pancreas, and Jay got shot repeatedly and rendered unconscious. Jared finally killed the intruders, and searched the bodies to find Humanis Policlub calling cards. Finally, Kiera showed up with my body, and we wandered over to offer our assistance. Between Kiera's first aid and my healing, we patched Jay and Jeff back together, then dragged them off to a doc to get Jeff's pancreas replaced.

Jay recovered reasonably quickly, and Jared stayed behind to watch Jeff while Kiera and I wandered off to do something... I forget what, exactly. Anyway, it was only the three of us that walked into the yakuza ambush. It wasn't much of an ambush, really... we were walking along, and noticed this guy following us. Then we noticed another guy hiding behind a car, across the street from a guy hiding in an alleyway. Kiera and I dived for cover behind the car, and came up with guns out, aiming at the guy behind us. He sprayed us with a flechette gun, which scratched Kiera's cheek, Kiera pumped three rounds from her pistols into him, and he went down. I switched targets, leaned around the back of the car, and opened up on the guy in the alleyway with my Heckler and Koch⁶. Two bursts and he went down hard. Jay, meanwhile, attempted to tackle the guy on the other side of the car. Yes, tackle. Everyone else we met - enemy, friendly, or neutral - he wanted to shoot. When we got to the guy he needed to shoot, he tried to jump on him. Go figure.

Anyway, the yak pumped three rounds into Jay, dropping him⁷, and walked over to look at him. Discovering that Jay wasn't actually one of his targets, he just kicked Jay, instead of putting the finishing round into the back of Jay's head as he lay unconscious on the ground. Then Kiera spun around, leaped up on top of the car, and pumped three rounds into the guy from her pistols. He staggered, but didn't go down. Then I popped my head up high enough that I could see him through the car windows, and mana-bolted him, turning him into a fine red mist.

We checked the foolhardy street samurai and the yakuza, and discovered that one of each was still alive, so we dragged them both back to the doc's - the yak in cuffs. We got Jay put back together yet again, and made an unsuccessful attempt at interrogating the yak (we got the poison tooth out okay, but couldn't figure out how to stop him swallowing his tongue). So Kiera and I went back out, with Jared this time, to dump one slightly used yakuza back at the scene of the ambush. I did a little astral scouting around to make sure that Lone Star wasn't about, and found that they weren't, but there was another yak hiding in the alleyway. So I manifested myself to him, and when he got done shooting, I asked him why they were after us. He was uninformative, so I asked him to convey our humblest apologies for whatever we might have done to his boss, and told him in which dumpster he might find his colleague.

Then we went to an ork bar. I'm not sure why, other than the fact that the maitre'd at the restaurant we went to first was unimpressed by the fashion statement Kiera and I were making with the flechettes sticking out of our jackets. So we hung around in the bar for a bit, drinking battery acid and refusing to be intimidated by a couple of trolls who didn't like humans much. As we were leaving to pursue other business, Kiera reached into her pocket, pulled out one the Humanis Policlub calling cards, handed it to the nearest troll, and said, "My card." Then looked at us and said, "Run."

So we ran. It took the trolls a second to figure out what she'd just given them, then they ran after us. With shotguns out. They shot at our troll, which didn't hurt him much, but made him real unhappy, so I stunballed them, and they fell down. We figured it wouldn't be long before the rest of the bar patrons came after us, so we climbed up a fire escape to hide. Well, Kiera and Jared climbed. I levitated⁸. They were only about halfway up when about a dozen orks from the bar showed up, so they hid. Kiera was lying on the fire escape muttering, "I'm a fire escape. I'm a fire escape. You don't see me. I'm a fire escape," and they believed her. Jared was pressed up against the wall muttering, "I'm a small building. I'm a small building. I'm a small building on a fire escape," and the orks looked up and said, "What's that small building doing on a fire escape? Hey, wait, that's not a building!" and started shooting. So Kiera dropped concussion grenades on them, which didn't do much, because they were orks, after all. So I stunballed them, too. Area-effect spells work beautifully on mobs.

So we all climbed up on top of the building and I attempted to lecture Kiera about things like common sense and at least having a reason for doing it before taking actions that might get us all killed. Yelling at Kiera is like yelling at a cat.

Then a helicopter full of yak showed up, so we ran down the fire escape on the other side of the building. This batch of yak had a mage with them, and my spell defense couldn't quite stop the fireball. It hurt. A lot. We took cover in the building across the street, and Jared and Kiera sent various nasty projectiles in the direction of the yakuza. The mage tried to nail Jared again, but my spell defense worked that time. We retreated into the next room to get out of his line of sight, and Jared and Kiera rigged up a quick booby-trap with a grenade and a bent metal door, while I fired my H&K through the wall at the yaks to convince them to keep their heads down⁹. Then we ran away.

We ended up at a decker bar that Jared knew of, and I did some healing and, after discovering that our doc was dead and Jeff and Jay had disappeared, we decided it would be best to hang around there for a few days. The Coyote shaman (Adam) that had been with Jared's group before we showed up came by there later, and we decided to hook up with him and continue with our original objective, securing the 40k¥ that Jared and friends needed to get out of trouble with the corp they were in trouble with¹⁰.

So we went and picked up das boot that we'd rented, and the guns Kiera'd found us a job smuggling to Thunder Bay, and set out across the lakes, with Kiera and I posing as German tourists¹¹, an invisible troll, and Coyote-boy hiding in the cabin. We got up to Sault Ste. Marie without much trouble¹², and stopped there to wait for daylight before tackling Lake Superior and the toxic critters that lived therein.

Just as Jared, Kiera, and I were coming back from getting something to eat in Sault Ste. Marie, having left the Coyote to guard the boat, some orks tried to sneak onto the boat - we still aren't quite sure why. Adam spotted the one sneaking down the dock, and wasn't at all surprised by the two that leaped out of the water onto the boat. Kiera pulled out her Predator, drew a bead on one of them from fifty feet away, and blew him back into the water. Adam turned the other into a fine red mist with a manabolt, and the one on the dock turned around to see Jared bearing down on him at about 50 mph. He shot Jared, significantly annoying him, so Jared turned him into a pretzel and threw him into the water. There wasn't anyone left to question, so we didn't feel particularly safe about hanging around, so we took off in Das Boot.

Lake Superior was as nasty as advertised - we got powerballed by a merrow shaman at one point, and we all would have had died, except I'd thought to put up wards on the boat while we were crossing Huron, and they saved our butts. Kiera got several chances to use her Ingram Valiant LMG - she blew the head clean off a lake serpent with a single full-auto burst at one point. Jared got to feel what it was like to be harpooned by a merrow. We finally made it to Thunder Bay and dropped off the guns, in exchange for a bunch of cash and a new mission... to smuggle a couple of orks into Quebec. So Jared and Adam shipped off the 40,000 nuyen to pay off the guy in Burlington who wanted them dead, and we loaded the orks onto our boat and headed back across Superior. We made the second crossing in daylight, so we didn't have much trouble with the critters.

When we got back to Sault Ste. Marie again, we stopped to hang out for a few days and spend some of our freshly gotten gains. The shaman and I both picked up new spell formulae, and Kiera went bike shopping. Shortly afterwards, Kiera staggered into the apartment where I was studying, with a bullet hole in her. Apparently, she'd been out test-driving a bike and got jumped by a go-gang. In the process of fighting them off, she leaped from her bike to one of the ganger's bikes, shot the ganger (whispering "Nice bike," in his ear as she did so), and threw him off and took control of his cycle without falling off herself¹³. I think Kiera wants to be a movie star when she grows up.

Anyway, Kiera came home with a nice pre-owned Yamaha Rapier and a fresh bullet hole. We got her healed, and spent a uneventful day or so studying spells. That's when we got word from Coyote-boy (who was back at the docks piddling in corners to mark out his lodge) that someone had stolen our orks, right out from under Jared's nose. So we all rushed back to Das Boot, and Adam called up a lake spirit to track down our orks. It found them, held captive on a hovercraft halfway to Milwaukee. We gave chase, but the hovercraft was faster than Das Boot, and, while Adam and I could keep up with them in astral space, their vessel was heavily warded, and we didn't relish an astral fight with their mage through the wards, even two on one.

So we just followed them to their destination, a warehouse in Milwaukee, and plotted a rescue. I'm sure we had a plan when we started, but when it came time to actually do something, none of us were really sure what the plan was, so we just winged it. We ended up splitting into two teams - myself and Jared, and Kiera and Adam. Kiera and Adam, invisible, snuck in the back door and to the crates the kidnappers were keeping their prisoners (including our orks) in. Then Jared and I attacked the group guarding the hovercraft, as a diversion. As soon as alarms and such started going off and the inside guards headed towards the front of the warehouse to see what was going on outside, Adam let the invisibility drop and threw up a barrier over the crates they were hiding amongst, and Kiera started lobbing grenades at the supports holding up the warehouse and the warded office the enemy mage was in.

This inspired the inside guards to turn back around and head for the crates. Meanwhile, Jared and I finished off the outside guards, and I telekinetically opened the front door. Jared tried to rush the front door and got manaballed by the enemy mage. I was farther from the door, and out of line of sight, so I ordered Jared to take cover and started moving towards the door, picking off guards with my H&K as I caught sight of them. None of them got a shot off at me... none of them lived long enough to after I spotted them¹⁴.

Kiera ran out of grenades (without bringing down the roof as she'd planned), so she started using her pistols, and Adam was lobbing manaballs around the inside of the warehouse. I ran out of targets, so I switched over to astral sight to locate the enemy mage, who Adam had just told me had gone invisible. He was unfortunate enough to be trying to sneak through the front door past me just as I turned on the astral eyes¹⁵, so I emptied my H&K's clip¹⁶ into him at point-blank range.

A moment later, Kiera blew away the last of our active opponents, a physical adept, just as he was trying to get out the back door, so I dropped the empty clip, slapped in a new one, and walked over to the last living enemy, who'd survived through having the common sense to lay down his weapon and lie down on the floor with his hands on the back of his head without even being asked, after I blew away four of his buddies with as many bursts without even giving any of them the chance to get a shot off at me¹⁷. In recognition of his superior intellect, I didn't shoot him, just handcuffed him.

It occurred to us, about then, that these guys probably have no clue whatsoever who we are or what they did to piss us off, and also that our response was completely out of proportion to their offense. They stole our orks, so, instead of simply taking them back (which we could have done, especially after getting Kiera and Adam into the warehouse, invisible), we responded with lethal force, eliminating all but one of the twenty or so people that were in the buliding, and even going so far as to cut down those that didn't surrender as they tried to escape. I think the lesson here is: "Don't screw with the... uh... whoever we are, because you won't live long enough to regret it."