Given half a Chance
Spending most of 2074 in the California Free State, fuming and frustrated at their abrupt and unplanned departure from Seattle, the team mined as many contacts still willing to take their calls, largely coming up short. Whatever Baker did to ruin their reputations, he did it well and largely their calls went unanswered. Finally, a casual acquaintence of a former friend’s roommate’s drug dealer agreed to pass their names—and their predicament—to a fixer named Georgia. She said she didn’t have anything right that moment, but she had a soft spot for sob stories and their story was the sobbiest she’d heard in a while.
Nearly two months went by before they heard back from the Seattle-based fixer. “How do you feel about trains?”
The team was contracted to provide security for two purebred Afghan hounds on a trip from CalFree to Seattle, just in time for a New Year’s party their owners were hosting. It was an unglamorous, insulting gig, but it got them back to the Metroplex.
Georgia even threw in a small bolthole in the Puyallup Barrens they could use while they got their feet back under them. She promised she’d have another gig soon, and sure enough, less than a week later, another call came in with the time and date for a meet with a new Johnson. The job was a simple pickup-and-deliver gig in Auburn, but it would put more nuyen in their pockets and start them running again under the rainy Metroplex skies they knew and loved.
They were home.
The team wasn’t ten meters out of the meeting when bullets started flying. Local gangers kicked down the door of the bar in whose back room they met the Johnson and started spraying lead into the terrified patrons. One went down immediately—a middle-aged human who dove to protect his much younger dinner companion—while an ork took three in the chest and bled out slowly behind a toppled table.
Taking offense at the seemingly random assault, the team sprang into action, returning fire, tending to the wounded, and—in Kyle’s specific case—charging one of the assailants directly through a large plate glass window. With one ganger dead, another beaten into unconsciousness, and the third having fled into the night, the Shadowrunners dusted themselves off and left for the job they were hired to do: convincing some novice Shadowrunners that the goods they stole were too hot to put on the open market.
Having succeeded in the negotiation, and managing to buy the item from the young team for less than the Johnson had set aside in escrow, the party found themselves with a bit of cash on hand and further proof that the well-connected Georgia could trust them to get a job done on-time and on-spec. Based on their success she promised she’d be calling them for more work sooner rather than later.
The next time Cee’s phone rang, however, it wasn’t their Fixer. A mysterious woman invited the team to a luxurious Italian restaurant in Tacoma for lunch, suggesting she had work they would be uniquely qualified for. Nervous and wary, but hungry for more action, the team agreed to meet.
They met one “Ms. Camille” who seemed to have the run of the place. She revealed that the first man who died in the tavern shootout was in fact her boss, a rather prominent member of the southern Metroplex mafia. Leandro Gianelli was a capo, in charge of gambling houses and bookies. She wanted to hire the runners to determine what he was doing meeting at a dive bar in Renton, far away from his base of power, who orchestrated the hit, and any other dealings he had been keeping away from the rest of the organization.
They would be kept on retainer, with money flowing each week so long as they made progress on the case. Not terribly enthusiastic about getting in bed with the local mob, but heartened to learn that their involvement was solely through Camille and not the greater organization—not to mention thinking fondly about the piles of nuyen she promised for low-level detective work—they took the job.
Returning that night to the scene of the attack, they consoled the bartender who had been shaken by the burst of violence. They learned more about Leandro and his friend, and that they had met at the small pub once a week going back two months or so, and that while the bartender thought she was a call girl, she never saw anything physical between them. He obviously doted on the woman, going so far as to buy expensive tea for the bar to stock just for her, but “maybe he was just lonely and wanted a friend.” They did learn that the bar was in Seoulpa Ring territory and that other mobsters weren’t welcome. Leandro had managed to fly under the radar, at least until his untimely demise.
A Knight Errant detective espied the runners entering the bar and introduced himself, saying he had a “particular interest” in the case of the dead man. He was quick to offer that the party wasn’t in trouble but that any information they could offer would be a big help. They declined, intent on tracking down Leandro’s enemies based on a small hot-sheet Camille had provided. They also learned from the bartender that the woman—who went by the name Anna—likely had a pimp in the area, a real piece of work named Dimitri.
It was time to pound the pavement.