Episode Seventeen: The Battle of Tentacle Temple, Part Two, Part One - kaseido/NeoTokyo GitHub Wiki

25 Minsky

[NOTE: there was a temporal retcon to eliminate the six-hour gap between the battle and showtime]

At the Temple

It’s 11:30 PM. The Battle is over, TraumaTeam having evacuated all the survivors: nearly all of your forces and the heavier of Bai’s, the posergang having been ground to bits by the Gorn and Church forces. Armand extended his TraumaTeam coverage to everyone fighting for you, except for the Gorn, who they just threw up their hands and walked away from. The Gorn are back at their clubhouse in town, ready to watch the liveshow and hype Star’s social media.

The Bai command team is intact and onsite: Jie, execs Noriko and Katsu and bodyguard Chao Lu-Wo (all identified by Armand from drone footage), and Jie’s lieutenant Carlo DiRossi (known to Star from the benefit concert).

A counterattack has taken out half of Carbide’s drones, the ones on an arc nearest the command team. There’s a crowd of over 700 fans outside, with extensive brawling among Chaos’s fans, Star’s fans, and Churchgoers. It’s still at entertainment-level, not a riot, and nothing like the urban warfare of an hour or so ago.

Carbide and Paragon have taken and secured the catwalk-level office inside the warehouse, securing Lady Chaos’s netrunner Bizzgal. Stephane-Louis is restrained and apparently unconscious in a corner of the warehouse at ground level, while the band is doing sound checks. They don’t know yet that Paragon has taken control of the sound/light system and the turret – nor did they discover the obedience drugs in the fog machine.

At the safepenthouse

Before the battle, the Team agreed to a deal with Armand and Netwatch, as contractors investigating the wheat-nanites in return for immunity for previous actions. Through the evening Armand has been scheming against the Bais, using the noodle-shop evidence from Netwatch.

• Armand has flipped Harb, offering him his father’s Board seat and a promotion to EVP in return for accepting him as CEO and Chairman.

• He’s gotten his own conviction and bounty reversed by a Temporary Committee judge.

• He’s gotten a conviction against Bai Wen-Yi for treasonous activities (i.e., drawing down the wrath of Netwatch through production of controlled substances), who was arrested at the family compound in the Spire.

• He only managed an arrest and interrogation bounty on Jie (NB20k for delivering her alive to agents of Antoine or the Temporary Committee). The judge wasn’t convinced she was carrying out orders she knew to be against corporate law. However, he’s within his rights to put out a hit on her as a now-disobedient employee, which he hasn’t done.

• He got a message to the command team about all this, offering Jie an out, to turn herself in alive. She – rightly – didn’t trust him and hung up on him.

Star won over Lavinia From Accounting with revenue projections for the liveshow of the showdown. Antoine is under strict orders not to poach her from the Church.

Birdseye has produced and released an “In Memoriam” documentary on the Sekushina Meido maids, blaming their deaths on Bai Jie.

Star has called for an armored escort from the Spire Samurai to accompany her arrival with Vir. They’ll be acting as a mobile soundsystem with boomboxes.

The Goals and the Plan

The plan is for a diva-battle showdown, to reclaim the Church, Star’s fanbase, and Stephane-Louis.

Something will probably also have to be done about Jie, unless she decides to prioritize survival over revenge.