Infused with the bloodthirsty powers of the loa, the party hijacks a skycar and with the probable help of Coriolis locates the place where the Panteras des Oro hang out in North Town. They crash the air taxi into the nightclub that is the home of Quimichipilli, Nahuatlan leader of the Panteras, whose gang runs chips, clonal parts and other contraband for Espectro, the head of the Laguna Ghost Cartel. Coriolis urges them on, hoping to rescue a teknikal by the name of Frontral from Panteros captivity, where he was being tortured to reveal the secrets of the Alpha Rats blank gang. Maddened by their AI fusions, the players storm the nightclub and execute dozens of Panteros, finally assassinating Quimichipilli in a haze of blood and bone.
Coming out of their berserker trances, they find themselves trapped in the nightclub with a police SPAT team (Special Powered Armor and Tactics) and rapid response aerodynes closing in. The party forces a gang doctor to perform emergency surgery on their wounded, then brutally executes him for his complicity in the Panteros’s crimes. With Frontal’s help, they escape the into the maintenance tunnels of the shipping container stacked apartments around them, confusing the police teams hunting them. A bout of extreme nausea caused by a helicopter’s sonic inducer momentarily slows them down, but some clever hacking manages to down the chopper for repairs. Frontal reveals himself as a blank with perfect control over his phantomic enviroment, transmogrifying himself into a dog-headed street hacker. He urges them to descend into Negativland with him, promising a haven where people aren’t tracked and nobody will be able to locate them.
The team accepts and descends beneath San Angeles into a place of buzzing white noise, strange cryptnets and fragmented languages, where various ethnicities huddle together to escape the ever-present gaze of the groundscan above and where it’s every man for himself.
Despite assurances of gratitude, Frontral quickly abandons the party to their own devices, and they find themselves being nibbled on by strange digital lifeforms that want to eat into their systems and cyberdecks. Negativland is a full net ecosystem, with innocent flora being grazed upon by lower fauna and finally eaten by the sophisticated code of apex net predators. The Crypt here is deep, full of rogue expert systems and alien AIs eager to consume and breed with human networks.
While looking for a doctor the team encounters Dr Adra’s clinic, a place of unsanitary medicine and quite horrifying cybersurgery. Dr Adra is a scientist of the most mad and twisted kind, taking augmentations to immoral levels of mutation and transplantation, unrestrained by any of the laws found above in San Angeles. The streets of Negativland are filled with her creations: prostitutes with genitals melded with fish, soldiers with animal arms and insects grafted to their bodies, and fantastical chimerics of all kinds. Mr Sega trades Dr Adra’s healing services for a third hand grafted to his wrist.
Moving on they encounter the Night Market, where every service and good is for sale; all worthless when you have only legal dollars and nothing of value to barter. The team approaches a restaurant and some mercs to see if they can hire themselves out. Tang starts a fight and within seconds the two mercs are beaten to a pulp and a bounty is put on the party’s head. Some kids with an AK-98 try to splatter the group with autofire, but showing remarkable restraint Rooster manages to hack their gun and send them packing without killing them.