The GM had contracted some kind of LARP plague, and wasn't able to run the game. The rest of us still wanted to play though, and one of the group just happened to have something prepared...
After seeing Bross, Rolando and Requiem standing by doing nothing while a ganger was about to beat up old people and children, Quinton Smith was starting to worry about the gradual erosion of the team's humanity. It was clear that everyone was in desperate need of some kind of therapy. He decided to try a simple roleplaying exercise.
Nemo agreed to run a one-off game of Night's Black Agents for the group, with some pre-genned characters. It was set in the present day, but in a bizarre alternate reality where nobody had any cyberware but computers were impossibly powerful. All the characters were CIA agents. It would be a good opportunity for the team to practice behaving like normal people.
Quinton selected Hung-Ke Lee, an American hacker for his character. Rolando picked Oliver “Ashcan” Quinn, Irish explosives/wheelman and former member of the IRA. He made a creditable effort at keeping the accent going.
Requiem initially wanted to play the French assassin, but this didn't seem like a particularly theraputic choice. Instead she selected Persephone Cardiff, a British analyst who previously worked for MI5. Persephone was blonde, blue eyed, and could easily pass for Scandinavian. Requiem had always wondered what it was like to be blonde.
Bross/Marlon unsurprisingly had a lot of trouble choosing a character. He also considered the French assassin and flirted with the idea of playing the Colombian thief, but ultimately settled on Mace Hunter, American infiltrator and con man. (Immediately renaming him to Dick Hunter). Dick had acting experience, and was highly skilled at disguise, enabling him to effortlessly slip into different roles.
Perhaps this wouldn't be quite so therapeutic to Marlon after all?
Consulting their personality and relationship descriptions, Quinton and Requiem both discovered their characters were huge fans of Dick Hunter, having complete confidence and trust in him. Oddly enough, nobody entirely trusted the deranged Irish bomber. What was he doing in this CIA cell anyway?
We received our assignment. As is traditional, all rules about the CIA only operating overseas were immediately chucked in the bin and we headed for Virginia with fake FBI badges to look into a large agri-business called Bio-Novis. An extremely popular company, regarded as highly innovative and good to work for - with the slight caveat that nobody seemed to know what the company actually did. We had only one lead - someone called Eddie Joiner, who was somehow involved in financial irregularity and was supposed to be coming forward but hadn't.
Some initial surveillance at Bio-Novis HQ got us information on their security - seriously locked down. We decided the best plan was to kidnap one of the employees (preferably one who looked a bit like Dick) and use his credentials to get Dick into the building. Then we remembered that we were actual legitimate government agents with badges and everything, and were able to do stuff like question people.
Surveillance identified a suitable person to talk to, and rather than pick him up at work, we decided to be less conspicuous and go to his house instead. Dick took the back entrance (yes, jokes were made) while Hung-Ke Lee and Persephone covered the front.
Once picked up, we bundled him into the van. Lee was about to make the house look like it had been robbed, until we remembered again that we were legitimate government agents, and just left a note on his door to let his friends know that he'd had an emergency and couldn't make the game.
We questioned the man without any violence or even any threats, just showing him our badges, and he was quite willing to talk. We learned more details about Bio-Novis. The CEO was Catherine Alto. Her husband, Owen Alto, was also high up in the company. Our man worked in experimental farming, producing medical cannabis with an extremely fast yield.
He knew Eddie Joiner, and was a bit worried about him. He'd looked bad a week ago at the running club but didn't want to take time off. Now he was actually off sick. Eddie's hobbies including running, hiking and weightlifting, so he should have been very healthy. His actual job was chemical compliance and risk assessment, but like most people high up in the company, he didn't actually do much of that work himself.
Our man didn't know much else that was useful, but he did have a laptop with access to the company's VPN. That was enough to let us corroborate what he'd told us, and also pick up more information.
We learned that Bio-Novis had a data recovery pick-up scheduled, and decided to intercept it. Dick posed as an employee of the data company, and Oliver drove us to the HQ where we picked up a lot of old hard drives scheduled for destruction. The data on them was encrypted, but with a brilliant hacker like Lee on the team, we were soon able to read what was on them.
(There was a brief digression at this point on the subject of data storage. We were skeptical when Nemo started describing terabytes of data ("That's, like, more data storage than exists in the world!") and when he got onto petabytes and exabytes we accused him of making up words. Quinton couldn't believe that with all this computing power, he still had to use a keyboard and screen to access it instead of just plugging in his neuralware. And for some reason we all felt that for the hacking he really needed five additional monitors, a blowjob and someone to point a gun at him.)
What we learned from the recovered drives was disturbing. There was, as we had suspected, a pattern to the layout of the lab buildings in Bio-Novis farmland. It took Oliver to figure out what it was though. The position of the buildings matched the stars in the constellation Ophiuchus - the serpent bearer.
There was more. Cannabis wasn't the only thing the company was farming. There were also animals, and a lot of them were being born stillborn and deformed. Cows were dying of stress fractures caused by physical trauma. Security dogs had been found killed and gutted.
(Requiem reckoned it was aliens, but Quinton didn't think proper CIA agents would jump to the alien hypothesis quite that fast, so GMOs were picked as a more plausible conspiracy.)
Based on the recovered data, experimental farming was only the outside image of what Bio-Novis did. They collected data about people. Vast amounts of data.
We still wanted to find Eddie Joiner though, and having obtained his phone number, we did some triangulation and tracked him to North Dakota. We decided against a 27 hour drive to get there and decided to fly instead, remembering once again that we were a legitimate government agency and could do things like use an official CIA aircraft to get there.
We found Eddie Joiner in a farmhouse in the back of beyond. After a brief stand-off where we remembered we were legitimate government agents with badges and didn't have to go straight to shooting, we realised that the extremely unwell looking man before us bore little resemblance to the middle aged fitness addict that had been described to us.
Dick called a friend in the CDC and described the symptoms. Persephone suspected radiation, but the CDC thought organo-phosphate poisoning was more likely. Eddie was still well enough to talk though. He was able to tell us that Owen Alto (who was incidentally not being faithful to Catherine) had been kidnapped in Dubai (or at least, that's what Catherine thought.) Catherine had embezzled large amounts of company funds to allow her to pay a ransom for him. He also knew that the injured cows were due to some experiments that Bio-Novis were doing on predators.
At that point, Persephone's combat sense activated (apparently she did have one thing in common with Requiem) and she grabbed Eddie to throw him to the ground, preventing him being shot by a sniper outside. Unfortunately, the round instead went through Eddie's laptop where he had all the evidence of everything he knew.
Dick ran outside to deal with the sniper. He got shot, through and through, but brushed it off and caught the sniper. Oliver got back in the van to run the sniper over if he tried anything silly like running away any more. Persephone got a phone call from a friend, wanting to know if she was in North Dakota, and if she was in any way involved in a meth lab that local law enforcement were on their way to.
It was clearly time to leave. They all piled into Eddie's jeep, along with Eddie who didn't feel he had anything better to do with what little was left of his life at this point. For part of the drive they were pursued by a garbage truck, which Oliver easily outdrove, but more worryingly, the data signal on their phones kept cutting out. Not entirely unlikely when driving through rural North Dakota, but it seemed to be a bit more than that.
("You can do netrunning on a phone???")
Oliver took us to an airport, where we ditched Eddie's jeep and went to talk to the huge crowd of emergency services personnel who were gathered there. Our badges got us past the barriers and in for the proper briefing in the hotel lounge. Oliver and Persephone went straight to the bar to investigate the whiskey supplies.
The problems with the data signal didn't only apply to us. It was happening all over the US. We finally managed to get in touch with our contact in Canaveral. There was something in the sky that shouldn't have been there.
("It is aliens!")
Catherine Alto and Bio-Novis had thought they were collecting data as a disaster recovery project. In fact, they had been given the job by the very people who were about to bring about that disaster. Bio-Novis had played right into the aliens' appendages.
There were five days of silence before the attack came. When it did, it lasted only nine hours. Humanity surrendered.
("Sorry, guys. This was supposed to be therapeutic. I didn't expect it to get this dark.")
Has playing a tabletop roleplay game positively affected the team's sanity? Will Marlon be able to let the Dick Hunter personality go? Find out in the next bizarre episode of Ramos Reportage!
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