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.

After trailing the Cartel to the white bunker where the heavily-cybered mercs seem to be based, the team backs off and regroups. Florence recalls them to HQ for a mission debriefing, but when they arrive the safehouse is eerily quiet. The machines are humming, the counter-surveillance fields are active, but Francis is nowhere to be seen. A nice corporate gentleman in a grey suit enters the room and introduces himself as Graysmith, from Radial Helix HQ.

That’s when a massive processing mass entity contacts Shoji; making the link time suddenly slows down as a free AI named Coriolanus tells them they have to survive the next 30 seconds, and if they do it will help them. Circumstances have changed, it says, as it shows live footage of El Halcon, the SSP inspector and the team’s police friend being arrested on trumped-up charges of corruption. Mr Graysmith is extremely dangerous and will kill you all, it explains.

Time resumes to normal, the safehouse rooms turns into phantomic jungle and Mr Graysmith becomes a wolf-headed killer, moving at monstrous speed and ripping Tang’s arm off, then trying to breaking his spine. Graysmith is a cleaner, a heavily-cybered terminator who removes all loose ends. Overmatched, the team fights desperately to live, and with some deception and martial arts moves manages to eventually kill him.

Coriolanus opens the safehouse vaults to them and the PCs make some amazing and grisly discoveries: the bloody body of Florence in a cabinet, for one, but also a line of prototype helmets with holographic animal masks overlaid on them. The inscrutable AI tells them they have a choice: to run away before their former employers eliminate them or to don the masks, fuse with some strange AIs and become instruments of the gods.

The players choose the animal masks and are overcome by personality fragments of human veterans of World War 3 who fought the Chinese in Hawaii and committed atrocities. Coriolanus also performs cyber-surgery on the PCs and implants them with new augmentations attuned to the masks, granting them new powers but at the cost of some of their personalities. (see animal mask descriptions from Hotline Miami on the front page).

With the team unable to get into the arcoblock where Pico Navarres lives without pissing off 5 different gangs, the decision is made to catch him while he’s on his vector bike in the Death Race, an annual sporting event popular with the lower and upper classes alike. The race starts in North Ring City, proceeds in a no-holds-barred way through the slums and officially ends on Avalon, although nobody in recent memory has made it that far without getting blown away by the mega-corporate security armies. Whoever finishes the closest to Avalon is declared champion, and any methods – by hook or by crook – are legal. Some take superfast sports cars, some vector bikes, some aerodynes, some APCs, some microgliders, it doesn’t really matter what vehicle it is. Weapons of almost any kind (barring ABCs) are allowed, and teams sometimes group together for protection or to eliminate stronger opponents.

As luck would have it, the PCs come across a gang squabbling over a beat-ass truck jury-rigged with machineguns and heavy armor. The owners get whacked by some Panteras de Oro, who in turn get their asses handed to them by Tang, Rooster & Sega, who take ownership of the old dodge to get into the Death Race. Sega and Rooster mod the truck for greater speed, lighter armour and a homespun bio-interface control rig that lets Rooster redline the beast to an optimal state. The monster truck is nicknamed “Numbskull” and the team is ready for the race.

As the crowds mill around the starting line and dozens of vehicles loiter on the ground and in air above the slums, the air becomes thick with pheromonal scents, phantomic overlays, digital graffiti, Sureno cooking and oiled weapons primed for use. The race starts in chaos as a Muslim suicide bomber blows a fifty-person hole in the starting line, and the whole convoy rushes out of the staging area southwards towards glory!

Rooster hacks into Pico’s vector bike and inserts both a tracker and a backdoor for future use, but Pico quickly outdistances them. Various speedsters try and fail to blow up Numbskull, bystanders take pot-shots at the racers from their balconies, hacks and viruses fly through the air back and forth until finally the seeker team drives off the beaten path into a long, wide concrete floodway in an industrial area, where they almost catch Pico until a sleek, monad-controlled APC ambushes them with micro-drones and rips their softwar defences into shreds. Numbskull loses a tire and its control rig, and while it’s being repaired the contoured, fuligin-black APC attacks with small aeromorphic drones. Rooster duels the monad AI in cyberspace and takes over the drones, eventually kamikazing them into the APC.

The chase resumes through the Chinese sector, and the team makes heavy use of Imago hacking to disguise themselves from security and bystanders, all the while capturing Pico. It seems that somebody was trying to eliminate the clerk as well. The team eventually leaves the race and heads downtown, interrogating Pico in the meantime. Chuck learns that Pico was being manipulated by Lisa Langford, one-time girlfriend of Mark Smith and a common denominator across many of the people involved in the PAD theft at police HQ. Lisa is also associated with Bioliberty, a group trying to free what it considers to be enslaved AIs used by corporations and governments. She may have connections to an even more nefarious hacker collective called Tabula Rasa.

The team hands Pico over to El Halcon, the SSP liaison, and returns home to rest and await new instructions.

After a day of convalescence, the group decides to investigate Mark Smith at his home again, this time taking greater precautions not to be spotted, marked or trailed in any way. Leaving their heavy gear behind, they infiltrate into Orange County again, take turns on the stakeout using disguises, use numerous hacks to avoid detection and manage not to be spotted. Which gives them the perfect vantage point to see a convoy of heavy security aerodynes land and disgorge the leader of the Laguna Cartel, el Espectro himself, right to Mark Smith’s apartment. And the lady who meets this feared cartel boss is none other than Lisa Langford, in a new form.

The next visit is to Mark Smith, a crime analyst working at police HQ who lives in Orange County, in the Anglo sector of San Angeles. The PCs decide to visit him at his middle-income residential condo. Taking the maglev train several dozens of miles east, they arrive to find the place is a nice suburban garden complex, but are accosted by an aggressive cyborg before they can meet with Mark or investigate his apartment. In the ensuing battle, Tang loses his arm, Rooster deploys his drones, people get shot, and the police High Threat Response team comes in fast and hard. Shoji escapes undetected but the rest of the group are arrested and arraigned in Orange County, later to be released on bail set by El Halcon, who isn’t too happy about the fights they seem to be provoking. The team begins to get suspicion; more counter-surveillance steps are required.

The cyborg, despite having started the fight, is also released on bail and picked up by an expensive aerocar that is linked to the Cartels. The team is warned by Florence to be very careful with that particular criminal group, as it has tentacles everywhere, even in the police force. The PCs track the cyborgs to an expensive low-rise building in the Sureno district that is heavily fortified, both physically and digitally. Deciding that caution is the better part of valor, they leave it alone.

Focusing on the next target, Pico Navarres, Seeker Team 5 decides to travel to the dangerous North Ring-City zone, an almost-lawless area of slums and favellas, concentrated in massive decaying arco-blocks around the former downtown of LA, where the only nuke hit on the American mainland occurred during the Third World War. The radioactive core is being cleaned and reconstructed by ecoformer machinery, but the areas around it are inhabited and teeming with the scum of San Angeles. Unfortunately the only way to get to the North is through downtown, which has a heavy security screen that prevents weapons and drones from going north, so the team decides to make a deal with a local ganger to smuggle a piece of bioware inside Chuck’s body in exchange for weapons on the slum side, plus orientation in this twilight realm. The bioware proves quite problematic as it grows inside Chuck and almost kills him, turning out to be some kind of biologics organism that is extracted by a corrupt PurLife doctor on the North Ring City side. Chuck recovers and the team gets the scoop on what’s happening with Pico.

Apparently Mr Navarres may be a lowly hygiene committee clerk at police HQ, but in North Ring City he’s a member of the Panteras des Oro and a renowned magnetobike racer. And the Death Race 3000 race is just about to start that very day!

Florence assigns the team a new mission, to assist the cops in watching four people who are suspects in the theft of a fragment of a police quantum tetrad database. The “yetzah” (victory) fragment may have been exfiltrated somehow, but it’s impossible to copy and has not been sold…yet.

After getting a complete scrubdown from The Finn and a strong lesson in communication security, the group meets with el halcon, a famed police investigator leading the hunt for the traitor. He advises caution, watchfulness and observation over action, then flies them aboard a police aerodyne to Avalon, the wealthy megacorporate enclave off Santa Catalina Island.

The Red Blossom Gardens are the residence of a General Systems executive named Zhang Jiamin, head of the network security unit that built the SAPD’s icewalls. The team observes Zhang’s itinerary, notices he has police protection in the form of a tactical mek, and after much deliberation decides to make friends with him.

After a practice match of kendo at the budokan, Tang offers to work for Zhang as a bodyguard. Chuck has dinner with Zhang at the Melange restaurant while Shoji and Sega infiltrate his apartment through the terraced gardens. Inside, Shoji finds communications with a law firm, an insurance company and work colleagues, but nothing incriminating. The only oddity is a heavy processing connection that Shoji traces back to the foreign Pacifica grid, whereupon he can go no further.

Shoji makes it out fine and after debriefing the team on his findings decides to head back to the city so as to escape investigation. The rest decide to leave to ask Florence’s permission for more tools, but just as they are about to board a COMAC Sky Whale megalifter, Zhang calls them and asks to talk with them over drinks.

The team accept and visit his his apartment, where he professes his knowledge of their deceptions and claims to be innocent. It is only when Chuck reveals the group’s discovery of his connection to Pacifica that something truly shocking happens.

To Be Continued!

Florence tasks the team with finding one Tiberius Lopez, union leader of the Constructors & Photonics Engineering Union in San Angeles, who is very late for an important meeting and was last seen taking an aero-taxi towards The Breakers, a desolate slum zone by the waters of the bay. Tracking the aero-taxi, the seekers encounter a pack of cyber-hounds, controlled by some unknown instinct or hidden master, most of whom are dispatched by Rooster‘s and Simon Tang’s guns, but one of which eviscerates poor Miguel Santos, the team’s netrunner.

A little while later a crash site is found, with the remains of the aero-taxi being scavenged by the Meat Boys, acromegalic self-improvement through bioware fetishists and rude boys, who attempt to waylay the party but are cut down swiftly by the combined efforts of the team and a newcomer, one Shoji Kitamura, a ninja of some kind. Anomalous digital readings are detected by Atari the Gargoyle all around the crash site, but no police seem to be responding. Then a figure emerges from a stealth cocoon and is recognized as Tiberius, who immediately runs off towards a ruined shopping mall.

Following the trail, the team splits up, with Tang going through the smashed crypropalan architecture of the mall and eventually emerging in a Chinese Night Market, while Atari hurts himself on the glass-like shards of the coral fibre architecture. Atari detects a railgun powering up, and the team retreats for a while, then decides to follow Tiberius’s expected path to a nearby favela. Florence beams a narrowcast transmission and demands that the team capture Lopez ASAP. Rooster is contacted by a strange Crypt entity calling itself the Coriolis Pragmatics Investigule, which gives him a data dump of top secret meetings, psychological profiles being tampered with and Intelligence Support Activity special operators switching Tiberius’s cyber arm with another one.

Following their target into the shanty town the team is ambushed by a group of Xuan Feng “Whirlwind” Chinese commandos, highly-skilled tier 1 operators armed to the teeth with stealth suits and EMXRAD railguns, who take down Shoji and Tang in a hail of energized kinetics. Tiberius is revealed in the middle of the shanty town just as a Chinese infiltration amphibious vessel drives up and a team of Guoanbu intelligence operatives hustles him away. That’s when Tiberius’s new arm explodes in a thermobaric reaction that destroys the Chinese team and levels a large chunk of the favela market.

Finally the police decide to show up, med-evaccing Tang and Shoji to a SAPD hospital and arresting the survivors of Seeker Team 5. After a lengthy interrogation, signed statements disavowing any knowledge of any police or army presence at the site of the aero-taxi crash, the team is released without charge, and with a knowing wink from Police Colonel Cabrera.

Florence apologizes for the mess the team had to slog through; he had no knowledge that they were being used as bait by a SAPD/US intelligence hit on a group of Guoanbu illegal operatives. The team is given a promotion to Tier 9 and new augmentations for excellent service. Miguel is buried quietly on the outskirts of Orange County and Atari, traumatized by the violence, decides to go on a sabbatical.

Radial Helix – Seeker Team 5

Control: Florence

Player – Character, Ethnicity, Age.
Wes – Shoji Kitamura, Japanese, 38.
Darren – Rooster, Anglo, 40.
Collin – Charles “Chuck”, Anglo, 51.
James – Simon Tang, Chinese, 51.
Chris – Atari, Pacific Islander, 40-50.

http://youtu.be/kxgsLzU_ruM