Champions : Return To Edge City : The Right To Bear Arms
GM: You’ve actually been a stabilising influence on Edge City.
Hero Shrew OoC: Well that’s good to know. If somewhat horrifying considering I’m one of the people involved.
Hero Shrew: I really should let Sally down lightly.
GM: What????
Hero Shrew’s player: You know, my co-worker that I’ve been romantically interested in since the start of the campaign.
GM: Yes, I know who she is, but as a player are you delusional enough to think you had a chance?
Hero Shrew’s player: As a player, no, but Scooter sure is.
GM: The aliens are still a bit confused by Earth’s technology level - at least two groups have anti-grav technology but it’s not in wide usage anywhere else.
Hero Shrew OoC: While other groups still have horse-drawn vehicles.
The Magus OoC: And UNTIL even has anti-antigrav tech.
Fireflash OoC: I need to change my Psychological Limitation from ‘Show-off’ to “Only Sane Woman’
GM: Fair.
Meanwhile, Hardlight is examining the cybernetic technology released by one of his business rivals. It’s a bit puzzling, especially because he can’t find any processors in it. He’s going to need help.
GM: ‘Hey Flux, I’ve got this guy’s arm, come look at it.’
Flux: Um.
It turns out the processors are distributed throughout the entire device. And it’s trying to find connections to Hardlight’s local systems.
Hardlight: This is getting more and more like a ‘kill it with fire’ situation.
GM: It doesn’t look like Mechanon or Destroyer-tech.
Hardlight OoC: So? I don't want them getting a hold of it either!
Between Hardlight, Flux, Fireflash, the Magus, they decide to experiment and investigate by leaving it on a laptop in an air-gapped Faraday cage and see what happens. If this thing can teach itself to interface with any systems from nervous systems to laptops, it’s a pretty shocking advance in technology. Eventually they hook it up themselves, and it promptly fuses with the laptop.
Hardlight: Does it at least show up as a USB drive?
Flux recognises some of the code running as resembling the kind of thing that happens at a cyberbrain interface.
Hardlight: This isn’t hardware - it’s wetware. Dampware?
GM: The Tyrell corp have developed a cybernetic device that doesn’t count as a machine, and is therefore functionally immune to cyberpathy.
The Magus OoC: They've got a bunch of captured Cybertronians in the basement and they’re hacking limbs off them.
It’s also partially opaque to The Magus’ Magesight.
Hardlight: So, who wants to go raid Tyrell?
Flux: Raid is such a harsh word.
Magus uses his powers of Scrying to find whatever this arm may have originally been connected to. Various parts seem to be attached to citizens across the city, but one particularly large fraction of it is found in a parts bin, about to be melted down for scrap. It’s the Head and Torso of an extremely humanoid robotic creature. Poking around inside reveals Tyrell tech, but nothing known in official databases. This is likely some kind of prototype for internal use only.
Hardlight: So the question is: How the hell did a hideously advanced, damn-near-human cybernetic creature get out of an internal Tyrell lab, die, and instead of being thrown into a Tyrell furnace, end up in a recycling bin?
The Magus: Hmm - so this robot is actually dead. I wonder if it left a ghost?
Hardlight: OK, I’m going to do something very stupid.
Hero Shrew OoC: I thought that was my job.
Hardlight looks inside the robot’s head - it’s not actually organic, but the organisation has some similarity. The foam-lattice design isn’t wholly original, but it’s very very complex compared to previous examples. It certainly looks like a Tyrell design - the hardwired Laws seem to be part of it.
The Magus sits Flux down to run through the basics of Necromancy.
GM: Which the Magus seems disturbingly familiar with.
Flux also learns more about why magic-users usually work in teams. In this case, it’s to wait behind the Magus with a baseball bat, just in case anything untoward happens while the Magus is in his trance state.
The Magus: Can You Hear Me?
Hero Shrew: Yes?
Hardlight: I think he’s talking to the ghost, Scooter.
Hero Shrew: So he’s trying to summon a robot ghost. If it was a ghost robot pirate we’d have the whole trifecta.
Robot Ghost: Hello? Yes, I can hear you. Who are you?
The Magus: Hello - I’m Damien, but most people call me the Magus.
Robot Ghost: Hello. I’m Seth.
The Magus: Do you know where you are?
Robot Ghost: I think I’m dead - how weird is that?
Seth: I think I remember dying now… and it’s not easy to kill us.
The Magus: Us?
Seth: Er… can you forget I said that?
Seth seems quite concerned that his being killed will expose his friends, or possibly get somebody into trouble, since they’re not ready to be revealed. He’s initially fine that the rest of his parts got installed into various people, but then gets quite upset that it’s into biological people, especially if they have other cyberwear.
Seth: That could be bad. We’re Nexus Series. Tyrell Corp could get in trouble. We’re Nexus Series! We have an important job! We’re Nexus Series! It’s an Important Job! People could get hurt! We’ve run the projections, the city needs us!
Seth saw and recognised whoever decapitated him while he was on his mission, but they were more powerful than he expected.
Seth: Tell Dr Madox I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to die.
The Magus: Is there anybody else?
Seth: Tell my brothers and sisters. But Dr Madox can tell them.
Seth is also confused that his 55 siblings didn’t collect his remains, especially if they completed whatever their Important Job was. On the other hand, if they were killed surely their ghosts would be floating around in whatever digital afterlife Seth currently resides in.
Seth: It’s quiet here. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now. Huh. Azura was right. You people have it easy.
It’s probably highly relevant that Seth and Azura are two of the 56 children of Adam and Eve. It’s also probably relevant that Seth considers the Moreaus, created by Genesys, cousins.
Hardlight: *sigh* Why is it that Edge City has such a hard-on for creating new sentient lifeforms?
GM: Part of that is Hardlight. You have Weirdness Magnet.
One of the players is late getting to the game.
GM: It’s Saturday evening, it’s either the game he’s GMing or the one where he wears underpants inappropriately.
Fireflash OoC: At least he wears underpants.
Hero Shrew OoC: And I’m freeballing all the time.
GM: *sigh* you have no idea how hard The Rep works. Suffice to say, he earns his commission.
GM: Which of you has experience talking to dead artificial minds?
Hero Shrew: I could say me but I’d be lying.
Fireflash: I have some experience talking to college bros.
Anyway, now we have one Dr Elly Madox to investigate. Some years back she helped develop the groundwork for the modern Biochip Interface, before moving to pure robotics, and jumping ship to Tyrell. ‘Coincidentally’ the company has developed a lot of fancy tech since then. At least if we show up in our superheroic identities, the Tyrell functionaries will probably kick the problem upstairs until we’re talking to somebody that actually knows what happened. Whether those people are actually willing to tell us is another problem, of course. Happily, Dr. Madox seems willing to meet Hardlight, although for some reason he decides to take Scooter along despite the risk to property.
Dr. Madox: So, why did you want to see me?
Hardlight: I’m not sure how to say this…
Hero Shrew: ooh! Ooh! I can!
All: SCOOTER, NO.
Hardlight: We found Seth.
Dr. Madox: *goes pale* w...what?
Hardlight: One of your projects?
Dr. Madox: *through gritted teeth* Not how I would phrase it.
Hardlight: Sons?
Dr. Madox: Still not how I would phrase it. We can’t talk here.
Hero Shrew: I have to say I’m impressed - you were almost as blunt as I would have been.
Gareth explains how we found Seth’s bits, but Dr. Madox is more interested to know how we talked to him if he was nonfunctional when we did.
The Magus: This is more my area of expertise. I did a little necromancy and communicated with his spirit.
Dr. Madox: *slightly hysterical laughter* You talked to his ghost.
The Magus: Congratulations - you created life.
Dr. Madox: I don’t deserve your congratulations - we created nothing.
Hardlight: Um.
Dr. Madox explains that something degenerative infected some of her coworkers after the Genesys incident, and her cyberoid creations are their attempt to salvage something of their minds. There were dozens of Nexus series created, before their husband-and-wife templates were too far gone to be copied for more. The biblical names they somehow acquired didn’t help matters - Cain, for example, was quite upset about his namesake, and gets on quite well with Abel. Nonetheless, there are now dozens of cyberoids, immune to cyberpathy, that can easily pass for human. And that can grow and adapt.
Dr. Madox: I’ll ask you a question - how many times has Mechanon been an active threat to this city?
Fireflash: Given the implications of the question, I’ll have to guess more than we’ve heard about.
Dr. Madox: Eight. And each time it was the Nexus series that stopped him.
Hardlight: So you think Seth was killed by an agent of Mechanon?
Dr. Madox: No, Mechanon wasn’t the target of that operation - he was dealing with VIPER.
Apparently Seth’s killer was one of VIPER’s enhanced Draysha agents in a combat suit.
GM: I can’t remember how many sentient machines there are in the Champions universe. Not many.
Hero Shrew (and ROVER’s) player: You certainly couldn’t describe ROVER as sentient, given his brain ran on AmigaOS.
The GM’s adopted stray cat is being a bit demanding.
GM: This f***ing cat - she wasn’t this loud before.
Hardlight’s player: Yes she was - she was just outside.
Dr. Madox is extremely concerned that some of Seth’s parts were being used as human bionics - the Nexus series could quite easily create its own interfaces with implanted cyberbrains and interfaces, and is strongly inclined to do so. And there’s no technology Dr. Madox is aware of that would stop it growing its connections.
Dr. Madox: So these parts were effectively black market cybernetics - which begs the question why they didn’t activate during the salvage process.
The Magus: Would the damage to his brain have temporarily shut down the activity in the rest of his parts?
Dr. Madox: Hmm. Maybe. *sigh* Seth was always the gentlest of them. Was. I'm already talking about him in the past tense. You have to understand I’ve worked with these people for over a decade.
Fireflash: And you care for them. Perfectly understandable.
We agree to keep the problem quiet for now, and offer to approach the people that have had Seth’s bodyparts transplanted into them, on the condition TyrellCorp foots the bill for safer cybernetic replacements.
Hardlight OoC: Somebody is going to turn into roboAkira, but in character I’m all for this plan.
Flux: Using the Batman Solution of ‘My Superpower is Money’
The Magus: Especially since he’s getting another corporation to pay for it.
It IS a little surprising to learn that there’s been entire teams of other superheroes active in Edge City, fighting a Secret War against Mechanon, that we had no idea about.
GM: Not everybody is as flashy as you. You’re also a bit surprised that there’s a black market for repurposed robot parts as implants in Edge City.
The Magus (and Allana’s) player: Allana probably knows all about it but she’s retired.
That said, it’s rather weird that Mechanon has made 8 different covert attacks against Edge City - it’s possible he’s being excessively cautious against cybernetic enemies that he can’t control. Although an obsessive Mechanon that’s trying to figure out why he keeps failing, and why he can’t adapt against it, is not a good thing.
The Magus: He did once decide that his weakness was ‘I’m not 50ft tall’.
The Magus arranges something that will hopefully be funeral rites for a cyberoid. We’re approached by a guy that looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts - it’s the ‘Tyrell security’ guy that Scooter wanted to punch, months back, when we were dealing with a raid on one of their warehouses.
‘Security Muscle’: Ah, I hear you found my brother.
Hero Shrew: Hey, I remember you!
‘Security Muscle’: You do? I’m surprised - we only met once and we didn’t really meet.
Hero Shrew: Eh, I was itching to punch somebody and you looked like you could take it.
The Magus: He never forgets a potential target.
‘Security Muscle’: … OK. Anyway, thanks. I’m Cain.
Cain doesn’t want to tell us about exactly what he does, but does complain about the fact that when they shift to their combat form, they have to wait for their ion cannon to cool down before they can regrow their skin.
The Magus: I can see why that would be a problem - melting skin is not a good look.
Cain: Oh, I dunno - it’s useful when you’re interrogating somebody who doesn’t know you can’t do it to them.
Cain also warns us not to teleport into Tyrell Labs - the security systems are a bit proactive about anything they assume is a threat. Tyrell’s cover story to the recipients of the cyberoid parts is that they had supply chain problems and the implanted parts have components that Tyrell can’t guarantee.
GM: ‘Here take this, sign this air-tight NDA’
The guy with the eye is a problem - more work on his eye would affect his health insurance, and he doesn’t have enough medical leave left.
Flux: … theoretically, would you be averse to having the cybernetic eye removed and your real one grown back?
GM: Hardlight, you know corporate law - that would completely F*** up his insurance, since he’s on record as having a cybernetic eye, and Flux is the very definition of an unlicensed practitioner.
Of course, we can always put the eye removal down to an ‘ongoing investigation’ which would satisfy his insurance, technically, and ensure he can’t be fired for missing work. So we don’t have to arrange a court order.
Judge: I'm sorry, you want what??
Flux: I’m sorry, a raccoon made me do it.
The Magus: I presume one of us will have to inform PRIMUS about all this.
Hardlight: Bags not me.
They’re not going to be pleased that Tyrell invented a synthetic race with aggressively invasive cyberwear, and saw fit not to inform them. There’s four cyberoids waiting with Dr Madox when we come back - Cain, another man of similar build, and two women of athletic build.
GM: Oh - ‘build’. Unintentional pun.
We do need to track down and close down the parts black market, too. It’s a bit of a concern that somebody out there is running a bodymod shop without knowing if the recycled robot parts are even biocompatible. Certainly the paper trail on the eye was all faked, using pre-issued certification on eyes that failed quality assurance. We can probably guess where along the supply chain that happened.
GM: I imagine Flux is going ‘Well I’m not getting my cyberbrain installed THERE’
Flux: I’m adding them to The List.
Hero Shrew: I asked around if there was anybody who could give me a chainsaw arm, but nobody knew.
All: …
Fireflash: … why do you think you need a chainsaw arm?
Hero Shrew: It’d be cool.
Fireflash: No. No. Again I say no.
Flux: I think what happened there is that you asked them, they thought about your reputation, and pretended they didn’t know.
The Magus: There’s one person in the city who could implant a chainsaw arm in a Brick, and she’ld flick your nose for asking
GM: Two - Allana AND Dr Soma could do it, but she’s flick you too.
Hero Shrew DOES hear that the Daughters of Lilith, who have been tangling with chromer gangs lately, have been flashing extra cash around lately - they could certainly forge the paperwork.
GM: Hence my favourite Cyberpunk quote
Fireflash’s player: ‘Dead Guys Is Parts’
GM: ‘Dead is Dead, Parts is Parts, Dead Guys is Parts.’
Flux: So what’s the plan of action?
Hero Shrew: I go in and ask them if they can get me a chainsaw arm?
Fireflash: No.
Instead we get a warrant for surveillance, and Flux goes and has a cyberpathic poke around the computers of the suspect bodyshops. We learn that the brokers supplying the clinics all use the same courier service to deliver the parts. The same couriers occasionally pick up packages from the city morgue. And there are discrepancies between orders and deliveries in the form of manila envelopes. It seems almost certain that that’s the point that shenanigans are happening. Especially when The Magus’s Magesight reveals that one of the security guards still has the traces of a VIPER tattoo.
GM: He had it right up until his boss said ‘Get rid of that! We’re not in a Nest now! F***ing moron! There’s a whole range of approved snake themed tattoos that won’t raise alarm bells.’
The Magus: That said, anybody with a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ tattoo is alarming for entirely different reasons.
Hero Shrew: Well, that’s a link to Seth’s death, at least.
Fireflash: … so it is.
We can even set up surveillance from office space overlooking the VIPER courier building. Handy.
GM: You’ll have to rotate the static surveillance since all have day jobs or other commitments - even Scooter has appearances he has to make. Although The Rep is this close to getting a shock collar that Scooter will actually feel and pay attention to.
We soon confirm that they have contacts with the Daughter of Lilith, too, and can at least pretend to share some of their rather extreme sexual politics.
GM: Which is basically ‘F*** Men - It’s all they’re good for.’ But you also learn that the Daughters have had upgrades lately.
The Magus: *sigh* Of COURSE VIPER provided them with venomous fangs. I give VIPER a lot of crap, but they know how to stay on brand.
Our GM used a random name generator to come up with the company name. One of the first it produced was Viper Delivery.
The Magus OoC: We need to outsource more of our investigations to random name generators, that was much quicker.
Instead he goes with Basilisk Ltd.
The Magus: I can picture the cell leader complaining over drinks one night “It wasn’t even ABOUT snakes until that f***ing Harry Potter book come out.”
Flux: “And now it’ll just look suspicious if we deregister the name!”
We also record a mention of something called The Old Seam, which Fireflash recognises as a reference to a local cemetery some two centuries old.
The Magus: Making it new and hip compared to many of the world’s cemeteries.
GM: True, but it’s one of the rare remnants of Old Monterey.
Especially after that weather machine malfunction decades ago that turned Monterey into a disaster area ripe for complete redevelopment, long before later disasters left Edge City crippled. At least the vampire problem isn’t as bad as it could be.
The Magus: Shooting fire from your eyes is a surprisingly common ability, these days.
Having their meeting at the Old Seam is actually pretty clever.
GM: No-one is going to notice a bunch of goth chicks in a graveyard. In the early evening, anyway, before it gets so late that someone asks ‘Why are you in this graveyard’?
The Magus: Nothing good happens in graveyards at 4 in the morning.
Hardlight’s player: Sundog suggested I get a "Skill levels>With a group of similar skills" thing. Now, while I'm sure I could just get an "All Int Skills" booster for 5 points, I should probably like, make it slightly more Lore-friendly, and turn it into a cyberbrain chip...At which point I realise... I don't actually have a cyberbrain! XD
Flux’s player: You also already have hard-to-explain 'cyberware'
Hardlight’s player: This is very true. Just trying to figure out how to make something like that fit with character lore, is all. I'd rather not just have Gareth wake up one day mysteriously being able to just ‘think slightly better’...Unless it's a plot hook…. brain wooooorms
The Magus’ player: Removing the lodged crayon has worked for other patients.
Hardlight’s player: Touché!
Hero Shrew OoC: Well that’s good to know. If somewhat horrifying considering I’m one of the people involved.
Hero Shrew: I really should let Sally down lightly.
GM: What????
Hero Shrew’s player: You know, my co-worker that I’ve been romantically interested in since the start of the campaign.
GM: Yes, I know who she is, but as a player are you delusional enough to think you had a chance?
Hero Shrew’s player: As a player, no, but Scooter sure is.
GM: The aliens are still a bit confused by Earth’s technology level - at least two groups have anti-grav technology but it’s not in wide usage anywhere else.
Hero Shrew OoC: While other groups still have horse-drawn vehicles.
The Magus OoC: And UNTIL even has anti-antigrav tech.
Fireflash OoC: I need to change my Psychological Limitation from ‘Show-off’ to “Only Sane Woman’
GM: Fair.
Meanwhile, Hardlight is examining the cybernetic technology released by one of his business rivals. It’s a bit puzzling, especially because he can’t find any processors in it. He’s going to need help.
GM: ‘Hey Flux, I’ve got this guy’s arm, come look at it.’
Flux: Um.
It turns out the processors are distributed throughout the entire device. And it’s trying to find connections to Hardlight’s local systems.
Hardlight: This is getting more and more like a ‘kill it with fire’ situation.
GM: It doesn’t look like Mechanon or Destroyer-tech.
Hardlight OoC: So? I don't want them getting a hold of it either!
Between Hardlight, Flux, Fireflash, the Magus, they decide to experiment and investigate by leaving it on a laptop in an air-gapped Faraday cage and see what happens. If this thing can teach itself to interface with any systems from nervous systems to laptops, it’s a pretty shocking advance in technology. Eventually they hook it up themselves, and it promptly fuses with the laptop.
Hardlight: Does it at least show up as a USB drive?
Flux recognises some of the code running as resembling the kind of thing that happens at a cyberbrain interface.
Hardlight: This isn’t hardware - it’s wetware. Dampware?
GM: The Tyrell corp have developed a cybernetic device that doesn’t count as a machine, and is therefore functionally immune to cyberpathy.
The Magus OoC: They've got a bunch of captured Cybertronians in the basement and they’re hacking limbs off them.
It’s also partially opaque to The Magus’ Magesight.
Hardlight: So, who wants to go raid Tyrell?
Flux: Raid is such a harsh word.
Magus uses his powers of Scrying to find whatever this arm may have originally been connected to. Various parts seem to be attached to citizens across the city, but one particularly large fraction of it is found in a parts bin, about to be melted down for scrap. It’s the Head and Torso of an extremely humanoid robotic creature. Poking around inside reveals Tyrell tech, but nothing known in official databases. This is likely some kind of prototype for internal use only.
Hardlight: So the question is: How the hell did a hideously advanced, damn-near-human cybernetic creature get out of an internal Tyrell lab, die, and instead of being thrown into a Tyrell furnace, end up in a recycling bin?
The Magus: Hmm - so this robot is actually dead. I wonder if it left a ghost?
Hardlight: OK, I’m going to do something very stupid.
Hero Shrew OoC: I thought that was my job.
Hardlight looks inside the robot’s head - it’s not actually organic, but the organisation has some similarity. The foam-lattice design isn’t wholly original, but it’s very very complex compared to previous examples. It certainly looks like a Tyrell design - the hardwired Laws seem to be part of it.
The Magus sits Flux down to run through the basics of Necromancy.
GM: Which the Magus seems disturbingly familiar with.
Flux also learns more about why magic-users usually work in teams. In this case, it’s to wait behind the Magus with a baseball bat, just in case anything untoward happens while the Magus is in his trance state.
The Magus: Can You Hear Me?
Hero Shrew: Yes?
Hardlight: I think he’s talking to the ghost, Scooter.
Hero Shrew: So he’s trying to summon a robot ghost. If it was a ghost robot pirate we’d have the whole trifecta.
Robot Ghost: Hello? Yes, I can hear you. Who are you?
The Magus: Hello - I’m Damien, but most people call me the Magus.
Robot Ghost: Hello. I’m Seth.
The Magus: Do you know where you are?
Robot Ghost: I think I’m dead - how weird is that?
Seth: I think I remember dying now… and it’s not easy to kill us.
The Magus: Us?
Seth: Er… can you forget I said that?
Seth seems quite concerned that his being killed will expose his friends, or possibly get somebody into trouble, since they’re not ready to be revealed. He’s initially fine that the rest of his parts got installed into various people, but then gets quite upset that it’s into biological people, especially if they have other cyberwear.
Seth: That could be bad. We’re Nexus Series. Tyrell Corp could get in trouble. We’re Nexus Series! We have an important job! We’re Nexus Series! It’s an Important Job! People could get hurt! We’ve run the projections, the city needs us!
Seth saw and recognised whoever decapitated him while he was on his mission, but they were more powerful than he expected.
Seth: Tell Dr Madox I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to die.
The Magus: Is there anybody else?
Seth: Tell my brothers and sisters. But Dr Madox can tell them.
Seth is also confused that his 55 siblings didn’t collect his remains, especially if they completed whatever their Important Job was. On the other hand, if they were killed surely their ghosts would be floating around in whatever digital afterlife Seth currently resides in.
Seth: It’s quiet here. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now. Huh. Azura was right. You people have it easy.
It’s probably highly relevant that Seth and Azura are two of the 56 children of Adam and Eve. It’s also probably relevant that Seth considers the Moreaus, created by Genesys, cousins.
Hardlight: *sigh* Why is it that Edge City has such a hard-on for creating new sentient lifeforms?
GM: Part of that is Hardlight. You have Weirdness Magnet.
One of the players is late getting to the game.
GM: It’s Saturday evening, it’s either the game he’s GMing or the one where he wears underpants inappropriately.
Fireflash OoC: At least he wears underpants.
Hero Shrew OoC: And I’m freeballing all the time.
GM: *sigh* you have no idea how hard The Rep works. Suffice to say, he earns his commission.
GM: Which of you has experience talking to dead artificial minds?
Hero Shrew: I could say me but I’d be lying.
Fireflash: I have some experience talking to college bros.
Anyway, now we have one Dr Elly Madox to investigate. Some years back she helped develop the groundwork for the modern Biochip Interface, before moving to pure robotics, and jumping ship to Tyrell. ‘Coincidentally’ the company has developed a lot of fancy tech since then. At least if we show up in our superheroic identities, the Tyrell functionaries will probably kick the problem upstairs until we’re talking to somebody that actually knows what happened. Whether those people are actually willing to tell us is another problem, of course. Happily, Dr. Madox seems willing to meet Hardlight, although for some reason he decides to take Scooter along despite the risk to property.
Dr. Madox: So, why did you want to see me?
Hardlight: I’m not sure how to say this…
Hero Shrew: ooh! Ooh! I can!
All: SCOOTER, NO.
Hardlight: We found Seth.
Dr. Madox: *goes pale* w...what?
Hardlight: One of your projects?
Dr. Madox: *through gritted teeth* Not how I would phrase it.
Hardlight: Sons?
Dr. Madox: Still not how I would phrase it. We can’t talk here.
Hero Shrew: I have to say I’m impressed - you were almost as blunt as I would have been.
Gareth explains how we found Seth’s bits, but Dr. Madox is more interested to know how we talked to him if he was nonfunctional when we did.
The Magus: This is more my area of expertise. I did a little necromancy and communicated with his spirit.
Dr. Madox: *slightly hysterical laughter* You talked to his ghost.
The Magus: Congratulations - you created life.
Dr. Madox: I don’t deserve your congratulations - we created nothing.
Hardlight: Um.
Dr. Madox explains that something degenerative infected some of her coworkers after the Genesys incident, and her cyberoid creations are their attempt to salvage something of their minds. There were dozens of Nexus series created, before their husband-and-wife templates were too far gone to be copied for more. The biblical names they somehow acquired didn’t help matters - Cain, for example, was quite upset about his namesake, and gets on quite well with Abel. Nonetheless, there are now dozens of cyberoids, immune to cyberpathy, that can easily pass for human. And that can grow and adapt.
Dr. Madox: I’ll ask you a question - how many times has Mechanon been an active threat to this city?
Fireflash: Given the implications of the question, I’ll have to guess more than we’ve heard about.
Dr. Madox: Eight. And each time it was the Nexus series that stopped him.
Hardlight: So you think Seth was killed by an agent of Mechanon?
Dr. Madox: No, Mechanon wasn’t the target of that operation - he was dealing with VIPER.
Apparently Seth’s killer was one of VIPER’s enhanced Draysha agents in a combat suit.
GM: I can’t remember how many sentient machines there are in the Champions universe. Not many.
Hero Shrew (and ROVER’s) player: You certainly couldn’t describe ROVER as sentient, given his brain ran on AmigaOS.
The GM’s adopted stray cat is being a bit demanding.
GM: This f***ing cat - she wasn’t this loud before.
Hardlight’s player: Yes she was - she was just outside.
Dr. Madox is extremely concerned that some of Seth’s parts were being used as human bionics - the Nexus series could quite easily create its own interfaces with implanted cyberbrains and interfaces, and is strongly inclined to do so. And there’s no technology Dr. Madox is aware of that would stop it growing its connections.
Dr. Madox: So these parts were effectively black market cybernetics - which begs the question why they didn’t activate during the salvage process.
The Magus: Would the damage to his brain have temporarily shut down the activity in the rest of his parts?
Dr. Madox: Hmm. Maybe. *sigh* Seth was always the gentlest of them. Was. I'm already talking about him in the past tense. You have to understand I’ve worked with these people for over a decade.
Fireflash: And you care for them. Perfectly understandable.
We agree to keep the problem quiet for now, and offer to approach the people that have had Seth’s bodyparts transplanted into them, on the condition TyrellCorp foots the bill for safer cybernetic replacements.
Hardlight OoC: Somebody is going to turn into roboAkira, but in character I’m all for this plan.
Flux: Using the Batman Solution of ‘My Superpower is Money’
The Magus: Especially since he’s getting another corporation to pay for it.
It IS a little surprising to learn that there’s been entire teams of other superheroes active in Edge City, fighting a Secret War against Mechanon, that we had no idea about.
GM: Not everybody is as flashy as you. You’re also a bit surprised that there’s a black market for repurposed robot parts as implants in Edge City.
The Magus (and Allana’s) player: Allana probably knows all about it but she’s retired.
That said, it’s rather weird that Mechanon has made 8 different covert attacks against Edge City - it’s possible he’s being excessively cautious against cybernetic enemies that he can’t control. Although an obsessive Mechanon that’s trying to figure out why he keeps failing, and why he can’t adapt against it, is not a good thing.
The Magus: He did once decide that his weakness was ‘I’m not 50ft tall’.
The Magus arranges something that will hopefully be funeral rites for a cyberoid. We’re approached by a guy that looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts - it’s the ‘Tyrell security’ guy that Scooter wanted to punch, months back, when we were dealing with a raid on one of their warehouses.
‘Security Muscle’: Ah, I hear you found my brother.
Hero Shrew: Hey, I remember you!
‘Security Muscle’: You do? I’m surprised - we only met once and we didn’t really meet.
Hero Shrew: Eh, I was itching to punch somebody and you looked like you could take it.
The Magus: He never forgets a potential target.
‘Security Muscle’: … OK. Anyway, thanks. I’m Cain.
Cain doesn’t want to tell us about exactly what he does, but does complain about the fact that when they shift to their combat form, they have to wait for their ion cannon to cool down before they can regrow their skin.
The Magus: I can see why that would be a problem - melting skin is not a good look.
Cain: Oh, I dunno - it’s useful when you’re interrogating somebody who doesn’t know you can’t do it to them.
Cain also warns us not to teleport into Tyrell Labs - the security systems are a bit proactive about anything they assume is a threat. Tyrell’s cover story to the recipients of the cyberoid parts is that they had supply chain problems and the implanted parts have components that Tyrell can’t guarantee.
GM: ‘Here take this, sign this air-tight NDA’
The guy with the eye is a problem - more work on his eye would affect his health insurance, and he doesn’t have enough medical leave left.
Flux: … theoretically, would you be averse to having the cybernetic eye removed and your real one grown back?
GM: Hardlight, you know corporate law - that would completely F*** up his insurance, since he’s on record as having a cybernetic eye, and Flux is the very definition of an unlicensed practitioner.
Of course, we can always put the eye removal down to an ‘ongoing investigation’ which would satisfy his insurance, technically, and ensure he can’t be fired for missing work. So we don’t have to arrange a court order.
Judge: I'm sorry, you want what??
Flux: I’m sorry, a raccoon made me do it.
The Magus: I presume one of us will have to inform PRIMUS about all this.
Hardlight: Bags not me.
They’re not going to be pleased that Tyrell invented a synthetic race with aggressively invasive cyberwear, and saw fit not to inform them. There’s four cyberoids waiting with Dr Madox when we come back - Cain, another man of similar build, and two women of athletic build.
GM: Oh - ‘build’. Unintentional pun.
We do need to track down and close down the parts black market, too. It’s a bit of a concern that somebody out there is running a bodymod shop without knowing if the recycled robot parts are even biocompatible. Certainly the paper trail on the eye was all faked, using pre-issued certification on eyes that failed quality assurance. We can probably guess where along the supply chain that happened.
GM: I imagine Flux is going ‘Well I’m not getting my cyberbrain installed THERE’
Flux: I’m adding them to The List.
Hero Shrew: I asked around if there was anybody who could give me a chainsaw arm, but nobody knew.
All: …
Fireflash: … why do you think you need a chainsaw arm?
Hero Shrew: It’d be cool.
Fireflash: No. No. Again I say no.
Flux: I think what happened there is that you asked them, they thought about your reputation, and pretended they didn’t know.
The Magus: There’s one person in the city who could implant a chainsaw arm in a Brick, and she’ld flick your nose for asking
GM: Two - Allana AND Dr Soma could do it, but she’s flick you too.
Hero Shrew DOES hear that the Daughters of Lilith, who have been tangling with chromer gangs lately, have been flashing extra cash around lately - they could certainly forge the paperwork.
GM: Hence my favourite Cyberpunk quote
Fireflash’s player: ‘Dead Guys Is Parts’
GM: ‘Dead is Dead, Parts is Parts, Dead Guys is Parts.’
Flux: So what’s the plan of action?
Hero Shrew: I go in and ask them if they can get me a chainsaw arm?
Fireflash: No.
Instead we get a warrant for surveillance, and Flux goes and has a cyberpathic poke around the computers of the suspect bodyshops. We learn that the brokers supplying the clinics all use the same courier service to deliver the parts. The same couriers occasionally pick up packages from the city morgue. And there are discrepancies between orders and deliveries in the form of manila envelopes. It seems almost certain that that’s the point that shenanigans are happening. Especially when The Magus’s Magesight reveals that one of the security guards still has the traces of a VIPER tattoo.
GM: He had it right up until his boss said ‘Get rid of that! We’re not in a Nest now! F***ing moron! There’s a whole range of approved snake themed tattoos that won’t raise alarm bells.’
The Magus: That said, anybody with a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ tattoo is alarming for entirely different reasons.
Hero Shrew: Well, that’s a link to Seth’s death, at least.
Fireflash: … so it is.
We can even set up surveillance from office space overlooking the VIPER courier building. Handy.
GM: You’ll have to rotate the static surveillance since all have day jobs or other commitments - even Scooter has appearances he has to make. Although The Rep is this close to getting a shock collar that Scooter will actually feel and pay attention to.
We soon confirm that they have contacts with the Daughter of Lilith, too, and can at least pretend to share some of their rather extreme sexual politics.
GM: Which is basically ‘F*** Men - It’s all they’re good for.’ But you also learn that the Daughters have had upgrades lately.
The Magus: *sigh* Of COURSE VIPER provided them with venomous fangs. I give VIPER a lot of crap, but they know how to stay on brand.
Our GM used a random name generator to come up with the company name. One of the first it produced was Viper Delivery.
The Magus OoC: We need to outsource more of our investigations to random name generators, that was much quicker.
Instead he goes with Basilisk Ltd.
The Magus: I can picture the cell leader complaining over drinks one night “It wasn’t even ABOUT snakes until that f***ing Harry Potter book come out.”
Flux: “And now it’ll just look suspicious if we deregister the name!”
We also record a mention of something called The Old Seam, which Fireflash recognises as a reference to a local cemetery some two centuries old.
The Magus: Making it new and hip compared to many of the world’s cemeteries.
GM: True, but it’s one of the rare remnants of Old Monterey.
Especially after that weather machine malfunction decades ago that turned Monterey into a disaster area ripe for complete redevelopment, long before later disasters left Edge City crippled. At least the vampire problem isn’t as bad as it could be.
The Magus: Shooting fire from your eyes is a surprisingly common ability, these days.
Having their meeting at the Old Seam is actually pretty clever.
GM: No-one is going to notice a bunch of goth chicks in a graveyard. In the early evening, anyway, before it gets so late that someone asks ‘Why are you in this graveyard’?
The Magus: Nothing good happens in graveyards at 4 in the morning.
Hardlight’s player: Sundog suggested I get a "Skill levels>With a group of similar skills" thing. Now, while I'm sure I could just get an "All Int Skills" booster for 5 points, I should probably like, make it slightly more Lore-friendly, and turn it into a cyberbrain chip...At which point I realise... I don't actually have a cyberbrain! XD
Flux’s player: You also already have hard-to-explain 'cyberware'
Hardlight’s player: This is very true. Just trying to figure out how to make something like that fit with character lore, is all. I'd rather not just have Gareth wake up one day mysteriously being able to just ‘think slightly better’...Unless it's a plot hook…. brain wooooorms
The Magus’ player: Removing the lodged crayon has worked for other patients.
Hardlight’s player: Touché!