Shadowrun: Dragonfall Part #29

Part 29: Darkness

Part 29 - Darkness

When we last left off we were about to decide the fate of Thorvald Enstad, shadowrunner and as it turns out, unhinged sadist.

It was pretty close but with a voting result of uh let's see... 42-1 in the favor of ridding the world of the bastard, the decision has thus been made.

[Kill him.] No deal. You've had this coming.

We let Glory do the honors as per her request. Doing the job this way rewards us with a measly 1 Karma point.

I told you. I honor my deals.

I said "integrity."

[He shakes his head.]

Not "honor." I remain convinced that you are thoroughly *dishonorable,* shadowrunner. A woman of honor would never have allowed her target to live as long as you did. Whatever your motives might have been, honor was not among them.

Damn, we're getting a straight dissing here. There's one last Shadowrunner choice above, though it does little at this point beyond saving a bit of face by skipping the chastising:

quote:

(Shadowrunner) It isn't your place to judge my integrity, lapdog. Leave that to Herr Fuchs.

No matter. The letter of your contract has been fulfilled. Your job here is done. I will inform Herr Fuchs of the mission's completion, and of the circumstances surrounding it.

And with that, the mission is over. But... it doesn't really feel right, does it. I mean we acted downright amateurish. I wanted to show off this path first because it had the most content in it, but maybe Eiger was right earlier, compromising our professional integrity over a measly trinket isn't how we do things. And we don't even get the trinket because we killed him before he could tell us where it is!

No, this will not do. So let's go back a bit and take it from the top.

I think we'll have something better than just a "thank you" to bring back to Herr Fuchs. But he's sure to appreciate the sentiment.

Say good night.

Love the angelic halo-like animation of Karma gain when we're about to murder a defenseless prisoner. Putting Thorvald down immediately is the only way to get this 3 Karma, you lose it if you so much as listen to what he has to say first.

One would probably feel worse about this had we not visited that alternate timeline in which showed his true colors.

[Glory calmly inspects the body. She shakes her head slightly.]

Pity. I'd have liked to hear what he had to say.

Trust me, you wouldn't have.

As if we would've ever done otherwise. Please, give us some credit here.

Time to leaves this place behind, there's nothing more here but some unpleasant memories.

As before, our return trip is interrupted by Frankenstein's Company Man and his butt-buddies.

My, my. The intrepid Rosa, with no rigger in sight. I must admit, I am surprised.

Yeah? Well that makes two of us, who the hell are you?

A lot of people underestimating our professionalism here, and so baselessly too. A bit insulting really.

It was a long and arduous run, but we made it through somehow. Time to go home and report on a job well done. Maybe sleep for a day.

No one having separate sitting frames makes this train ride feel a lot more awkward than it should.

Rosa. I trust that I’m catching you at a good time?

As good a time as any. What’s up?

I have made contact with another prospective client. A rather elusive woman of Aztlaner descent. She calls herself “Frau Müller.”

What’s the job?

She will not say. Not to me, at any rate... she has insisted that she will speak only with you. She wants to meet with you in a half an hour's time, at a location of your choosing.

Against all RPG conventions, this "half an hour" will not in fact stretch for as long as we want it to. We can't go on a new run until we deal with this business back at the Kreuzbasar.

Then how do we know that this isn’t a huge waste of time?

An impressive sum, Rosa. Quite enough money to justify a meeting, I would think. If you don’t feel that she’s on the up-and-up, you can always refuse the job.

That's more than double than we were promised for this run, and since it surely can't be more than twice as big of a pain in the ass as this job was, I'd say the math is on our side here.

That’s a lot of money. All right, count me in.

Very good. I will instruct her to come to the Kreuzbasar. Where would you like to meet?

We can choose between the U-Bahn platform, the park and the cafe, but it makes no practical difference.

Cafe Cezve. Altuğ’s going to find out about this anyway... might as well have this discussion in comfort.

Noted, I will set up the meet. Rosa, there is one other thing. You sh--

...Well shit, this day just keeps on giving doesn't it. Can't imagine we can just wait here and hope some maintenance person gets things fixed, either. Alright, everyone out of the train and let's survey the situation.

Aren't German trains supposed to be reliable? What a pain in the ass... And you can barely see a thing in here too.

It looks like the whole station's lost power.

We should try to find a fuse box.

Restoring power to an entire train station will probably take a bit more than replacing a busted fuse, but it's not like we have any better ideas.

There's a doorway on the other side of the tracks, but there's no visible way across aside from this retracted bridge. Guess the train only has doors on one side.

Figures. Haven't these people ever heard of backup power?

Well, let's look around on our side first. Seems like a real lively joint.

Could we have found the hideout of the infamous gang of Slav Squatters? They say that anyone who so much as gazes upon their mystical air-sitting technique immediately pulls a muscle in both legs simultaneously. Chilling.

Well that was unexpectedly easy. Still need to find a home for this little guy though.

Just like in Gesundbrunnen station, the easy exit's buried under a ton of rock. Whoever's maintaining these tunnels is doing a pretty lousy job.

The old dimly-lit bathroom shares with us its bounty of a single Advanced Medkit. But more importantly...

This appears to be what we were looking for.

We can't control the entire station's power from here, but two slots labeled "BTHRM" and "TRACK" can be interacted with. The fuse in the latter appears to be busted but the bathroom lights are working, so if we just switch those around and then...

There we go. Let's go try that bridge again.

Hooray for extremely simple puzzle-solving! Let's go check out that door over yonder.

No kidding, you seem likely to be eaten by a grue in a place like this. Any chance Max has a flashlight functionality somewhere in there? No?

At least we have these icons guiding our way. This appears to be a door, but one that's stuck shut and which takes 6 Strength to force open. We can barely lift a stat sheet containing a number that high, but that's why we have crew members.

Crumbling hotel walls, secret entrances to gang hideouts, maintenance area doors... Eiger is like our very own skeleton key. Or maybe more like a skeleton wrecking ball but hey, can't argue with the results.

The door leads to a small storage area, and after fumbling around a bit we find a powerful hand grenade within. Probably should've waited until the lights were on before prodding blindly in here, huh.

There's nothing else useful in this small space, so we return to the previous room and slowly wade our way through the darkness and duck through the second door at its end.

Visibility continues to be remarkably poor aside from a dim red light occasionally coming into view in the back of the room.

Ah, this oughta do it. We'll just flips this thing and... let there be light! And a functional train, hopefully.

Now that's strange, I'm relatively sure my request didn't include armed mercenaries trying to kill us. Now let's face it, it would've taken one bad gambler to bet on this having been just a freak blackout, but it sure would've been a pleasant change of pace.

If these guys had invested in some nightvision equipment and started shooting in the dark, we would've been in some real trouble here. At the very least they should've brought superior numbers. People are very bad at ambushing in these games.

Anyway, these guys are all relatively beefy, with 55 or 60 HP each. Only the Captain has any real armor though, not that armor is much of a factor against us.

Between our lightning and disabling spells, Glory's abilities, Max's taser and Eiger's concussion grenades we have so much AP damage that small groups like this are easily locked down at least for a couple of turns. The Captain manages to land a decent crit on Glory, but as the first merc bleeds and/or burns to death, it's pretty obvious from the start that this fight was never going to go their way.

Of course from a gameplay perspective, having a tough fight in a spot like this where you just returned from a run would've maybe been a bit of a dick move.

Such concessions are cold comfort for these guys of course.

At least the captain was nice enough to bring us a souvenir. We'll have to have someone take a look at this once we're back home.

Three more mercenaries are waiting in the previously pitch-black maintenance room, one of them a mage. What the hell was you guys' plan anyway, shouldn't you have backed up the first group or something instead of just sitting here in case they got wiped out?

In their defense this is a pretty good room to have an ambush in since there are no good spots for us to attack without being exposed. Even as Eiger brings down the mage, she and Glory share a nasty concussion grenade hit which crits her out cold.

Ever a big proponent of the eye for an eye principle, Max tasers the living daylights out of her in response.

While the two troll women are taking a nap, we bring down the same darkness to the Captain's world as they brought to ours earlier. With both enemies out of the action, it's all cleanup from here.

Next time you want to take our lives in a cowardly ambush, at least put some effort into it. You had such a great opportunity with this whole blackout business and just squandered it like idiots. For shame.

That sure was unexpected bit of excitement there. Since it appears that whoever sent them had only saved up enough money for six mercs this week, we're now officially in the clear.

We make our way back across the tracks (raising the access bridge behind us to clear the way for the train of course) and hop into the train which hopefully doesn't have a bomb in it or something competent like that. We need to inform Paul about this attack, and to find out what he was about to say before the call cut off. Plus we have this PDA now, and we have to go meet this client too.

Another busy day ahead it looks like. See you then!

***