Session Date: 03/14/2025
Friday, September 22nd, 2045
Emerick
Today is the day of the invention fair for Ida Mueller! Around 8am, Ida texts Emerick with event details: when and where to show up, where to meet her, looking forward to working with him, etc. It’s a positive and happy demeanor about the day and everything. If he has any questions beforehand don’t hesitate to ask, she’ll gladly help him.
He takes the day to get cleaned up and get ready for the event.
Ryne & Saint
Ryne wakes up in a weird stupor. He feels groggy, not quite himself. He is at the warehouse and in his bedroom. Ryne checks himself over and finds a few new bruises and scars - one of those is from the surgery to remove his cancer, but he doesn’t know if anything else was done to him. He returns to Saint to get his board back.
Saint is in his clinic and still pretty salty, as he’s still addicted to things. He has a meeting with a therapist after his last patient of the day. He gets a patient out of the clinic and Ryne walks in, asking if he has his board. Saint is a bit antsy as he’s closing up. He grabs to board and hands it over to Ryne. Saint grumbles and comments that it was his only ride and turns to walk off, cursing.
Ryne stops him and Saint asks what the fuck he has to say because it better be life or death. Ryne says that he has cancer, and Saint asks what? And Ryne says that well, maybe he has cancer. He asks if Saint can check and Saint ushers him inside and tells him to sit his ass down, and then finds a medscanner and scans him to check. The system reads back the regular output, but also outputs he had surgery done in two spots yesterday: his chest, and his head, and there is no cancer detected.
Saint asks why the hell he came in here asking if he had surgery yesterday? Ryne says that he didn’t know if he had surgery, and he doesn’t trust it, and asks where. Saint explains he had surgery in his chest and eventually gets to the point that his head also was operated on. Ryne admits he only had lung cancer, and Saint asks for confirmation, which Ryne gives. Saint backs up a little bit to the door.
Saint admits that he doesn’t trust himself in the same room as Ryne: he’s seen Ryne kill people with zero remorse and perfect efficiency, but he couldn’t take down Steele. Ryne says he managed to hold Steele back, and Saint says it isn’t the point: he doesn’t trust Ryne to act chill. Saint asks Ryne to leave, as he has a therapy appointment.
Saint
Goes to therapy to get rid of his synthcoke addiction.
Ryne
Goes to therapy to fix his head and gets 16 whole humanity points.
Sulfur
Sulfur gets up and is pleasantly surprised to find that the cat is doing nothing, just sleeping. He startles awake.
Molly sends him a text and she says she has a lead, but she needs the team to help. He asks when the help is needed: Sulfur can wrangle them all up. Molly says that she can meet anytime over the weekend, but no later than Monday the 25th.
The lead is a groupie of the band. They’re interrogating the person right now, so we don’t need to assemble right now, but once they get the information out of the groupie then they can start to formulate a plan.
Sulfur goes and gets his armor repaired and buys some paint to make his armor look less clownish. Once he gets the armor back, he paints it so that it’s black. He tries to put a punisher skull on the chest, but totally fails and accidentally SOMEHOW adds additional polka dots. Ripperoni pepperoni. He decides to swap to ponchos to hide this mistake.
Emerick
He makes it to the invention fair early and Ida is there as well. It’s in a convention hall that has rooms rented out for everyone’s booths and inventions. Everyone’s setting up and there’s a ton of up and coming techs with their own ideas and approaches to things here. If there is a need? A tech-based solution is likely here.
He gets sent through and as he walks through the halls, he sees people selling things from new cyberlimbs to black ICE programs to new cyberdecks, upgrades, anything you could possibly want. There are some arms dealers there selling new weapons or people trying to break into the exotic modification market with weapons. There are also a lot of security solutions - architectures with special features, as an example. It’s a showcase and also a salesfloor.
Emerick does eventually make his way to the main stage, finding Ida on the stage talking to her assistants. She’s got a dataslate and is checking items off of it, eventually turning around to review the venue and seeing Emerick there. She approaches and shakes his hand and the two exchange pleasantries.
About halfway through the event, Ida will take the stage and has a one hour panel talking about the future of NET security. She encourages him to go and mingle, but he must return for the NET security panel.
Groups of Interest
He roams and finds a few groups of interest:
There is one group he notices immediately because they’re a little out of place: a very small group, relatively unknown techs and they finally scraped enough money together to show off what they’ve been working on. They are in the linear frame market and are working on developing a series of industrial frames to help in every aspect of the typical job markets (construction, medical services, etc). Their stuff is a little rough around the edges and definitely needs funding before it can really break into the market. The team are very passionate about what they are doing, but they don’t have a lot of the polish that others do - the gear they are developing is a lot of concept and the prototypes they do have are very alpha.
There was another group developing weapon upgrades for modifying exotic weaponry. This catches Emerick’s eye because one thing they had said was that they wanted to develop an upgrade to remove the rate of fire limiter on the Perseus. As he films them going through their spiel, someone speaks up and asks if this is them? The person shows a video on their Agent and it shows footage of the gentleman representing this company demonstrating the Perseus upgrade. All that it does is turn it from ROF whatever to an only autofire handgun. Yes, but that’s not the upgrade they are selling now. The upgrade in the video is a product failure of the upgrade: they were trying to streamline their testing process and the trigger got stuck. The man shot his own eye out during that test. Emerick helps him course correct with a well-placed question, and he finishes his presentation.
Ida’s Presentation
Emerick interviews a few others, but Ida eventually gets called to the stage. Emerick returns and records her going up to speak at the stage. She begins to give her spiel, and she presents her latest and most recently updated Spyder Bot 0.9, the final iteration before final release. The bot is far more sleek now, more form-fitting and compact. They clearly used a lot of pop-up weaponry to hit all the multi-functions they want to do. The key thing that Emerick notices is that the cyberdeck is still very plainly seen on the back of the bot, and he deduces that they want to sell this as an in-home netrunner to manage your net architecture while you’re away. This is the public pitch: you can have your own personal dweller while you’re away from home for like 5k eds. Emerick realizes that Ida is going to be spying on everyone all the fucking time.
A few spyders crawl onto the stage to show off how you can customize them all. It’s a fully modular device with some 100 customization modules that are tailor made to the spyder bot itself. The caveat is that you have to have a NET architecture and it must be integrated/hard wired into it at all times.
She confirms the release date will be early January 2046. She then announces that a series of demo stations will be rolling out onto the floor for everyone to review and see how they work. These stations have a simulated NET architecture to demonstrate how the bots work and what they can do, what an attack looks like, etc, etc.
Emerick goes through and looks over the bots, and there is one Spyder that is able to disengage from the NET architecture it’s guarding should the owner have some sort of medical emergency. The bot will go in and administer enough aid to hold them over until emergency services can be called over.
Someone at one of the demo stations does try to steal one of the spyders and the gentleman is promptly arrested. Emerick very quickly notices that the individual trying steal the bot was a Tyger Claw.
At the end of the night we review the footage and everything Emerick’s collected and they work out how to edit the story. The Perseus upgrade gets cut because it was too painful to watch. It’s montaged a little bit and given edits. Emerick does his written portion over the weekend and forwards it to her team to review and posts once he gets the okay.
Spyder Bot
The public is being sold on the fact that they are buying a security system for their house. Ida will be able to spy on everyone with this.
Biotechnica would have access to everyone’s medical information as well, if they want the medical upgrades.
Phoenix
Emerick calls Phoenix and asks to meet for coffee. She agrees and Emerick copies everything he knows about the Spyder Bot to a memory chip. They review the data and Phoenix realizes that she’s been handed a smoking gun.
Saturday, September 23rd, 2045
Sulfur & Emerick
Sulfur asks Emerick for a favor and he agrees. They meet at a warehouse at a specified time and Emerick goes in with Sulfur and finds the secret team that Sulfur worked (and works) with. The warehouse is a little run down, but the group has some fun toys: a tank, some neat vehicles, an armory. It serves its purpose.
A woman steps forward and shouts out to Sulfur and calls him over. She’s wearing a tank top, cargo shorts, and is holding a wrench with blood on it. We approach and as we follow Molly, we hear a blood curdling scream as someone’s being tortured. Sulfur asks if this is the guy and Molly sarcastically responds that they decided to torture a random person. They haven’t decided how many pieces to leave this guy in when they’re done.
Molly reports that this guy has been pretty responsive but is holding out just a little bit on the last piece of information. Molly offers to let Sulfur finish the torture, and he agrees. Emerick stays the fuck out of that room.
At some point in the next series of events, Emerick finds a picture of young Garf with her family before she was an exotic. He tucks those into his wallet to keep them safe and not losing them.
The Torture
The groupie explains he’s told them everything already, but he doesn’t know the person that they’re looking for. The guy doubles down on this and Sulfur ultimately hands him a grenade and tells him to hold it while they talk. Michael - the poor sap - doubles down that he has no clue who the woman that Sulfur is looking for is, and Sulfur says that the only way that Michael makes it out of this alive is to work for him and do what Sulfur wants. Michael agrees.
Sulfur asks Molly if a microphone and video recorder can be installed in him, and Molly agrees. Sulfur feels that he has more to say, but the guy will piss himself before he figures out what there is to say. Sulfur figures that it’s better to let him go so he’ll squeal on his own later rather than try to get it out of him now.
Rely pipes up and says that he knows that they are trying to keep this low key, but they could actually install a BD recorder and know his last thoughts as he dies. Sulfur says that’s awful, but they should totally do it because that’s so useful.
Sulfur: Getting Rid of Witnesses
The group finally convinces Sulfur that they actually need a ripperdoc to install this. He finds the oldest, weirdest, least qualified ripperdoc and convinces him to go back to the warehouse with him. The ripperdoc installs a neural link and the BD recorder and then Sulfur walks him home. The old man bends down to tie his shoes and Sulfur puts the old man out of his misery. Sulfur takes the wallet and heads out.
Inside of the wallet is…
- Photo of Frank’s family
- Honorary trauma team executive card
- Picture of Frank with a younger Saint, holding a fresh medtech certificate
Notably, there’s no ID.
A Trauma Team representative visits Saint and lets him know that Frank is dead. They explain he was shot in an alleyway, they aren’t sure what exactly what happened. Saint breaks down and swears to rain hell down on whoever killed Frank. The Trauma Team representative explains that they would love to extend an offer to let Saint work for Trauma Team member, in whatever capacity he wants.
Sulfur & Emerick @ The Warehouse
Sulfur returns after taking care of Frank and Relay comes out with blood on her hands. She says she got him to speak, and she plays back the BD footage. The data is rough. Relay can’t stress it enough to Sulfur: he doesn’t want to see this. Sulfur explains he’s skinned a woman in Malaysia, and Relay says that she understands, but Sulfur doesn’t wish to see it.
She starts the footage and the very early footage had Mayday present. As the footage continues, Mayday continues to keep looking worse. It seems she is being treated as some sort of groupie in the band, but… Worse.
There is one piece of footage where Relay does just get up and leave. The footage continues and Sulfur sees Michael (from his pov) - drugged out of his mind - seeing the rest of the band beating the shit out of Mayday. It goes on for quite some time and, eventually, she’s just left, motionless. The rest of the BD footage she is never seen again.
As her condition worsens through the footage, Sulfur’s fist clenches tighter and tighter. By the end of the footage, Sulfur is in a white hot silent rage, clearly formulating his next steps.