Session 17

In this week's session, the party was contacted by the Missouri Cell for assistance in an operation in Chicago.  The party initially met their contact in St. Louis, and got the mission details: breaking into a lab in a skyscraper in downtown Chicago and extracting a server and a prototype weapon.  The server was an ex-Singularity Foundation machine the Word had taken, so the Missouri Cell hoped that Simon would be able to access the machine and quickly determine what information might have been compromised, then return the server and the prototype.

The party assembled in Chicago.  Shin needed to find a way to sneak his Power Armor through a crowded city, so instead of attempting to be stealthy, the party instead bought an oversized gorilla suit, and had Shin stand on a street corner holding a sign advertising a local business wearing this suit over his PA(L).  When they got the signal, they entered the building, donned ski masks to hide their faces from the cameras, and found that the Missouri personnel had already emptied the lobby.  They proceeded to the lab floor.

On the lab floor, they encountered a room full of scientists, a prototype HPG cannon, and a battle-armored test subject, who had no weapon, but proceeded to punch his way through the party.  A series of exceptionally bad rolls saved the party from any fatal harm (David took 1 point of damage from a glancing blow to his arm and Simon's leg was broken) before Clark turned the prototype on the battle armor, destroying that unit and severely injuring both himself and Simon (breaking Simon's other leg.)

Not trusting the Missouri Cell, Simon wiped the hardware they were supposed to steal, and David destroyed the prototype.  They tied up all the scientists (Shin and David were in favor of killing them to prevent their research from being continued, Clark refused to participate), but eventually settled on removing their hands, in one of the more horrifying decisions I've seen the party make to date.  Having accomplished that, they took the server they were sent to retrieve, and returned to the lobby.  Once they reached there, David triggered the demolition charges he had set in the lab, killing the maimed scientists and destroying any surviving equipment.  They then handled the wiped server over to their contact, claiming it was wiped and the prototype was destroyed in the fighting, and then returned to Denver.

There were also a few amusing moments, such as when the ComStar group got pulled over by TerraSec while driving to St. Louis, and when Shin, after disabling a door while trying to open its electronic lock, ended up bursting through an internal wall while wearing a gorilla suit over power armor.