Session 16: Squid Game - kaseido/NeoTokyo GitHub Wiki

304 Bezos 2 Earth - Money

After the first torpedo strike, a dozen figures boil out from the geothermal facility, swimming towards the team’s sub, carrying some sort of pike. Over everyone’s agents and the sub comms is a kraken/human hybrid: “Patriarch Armitage foresaw your coming. We will not permit you to kill us all!”

After a very sincere apology from Lane, she adds, “Hey, let’s talk about this, maybe we can offer something better – we are not here to hurt you. We may be able to come up with another solution. Trust me, you don’t want to fight us.”

“What you’re saying makes no sense but you sound sincere – why are you attacking us?” (Lane rolled a 34 against a 24DV)

“They are doing some wicked things including attacking my friends, dear, sweet cats.”

“What are cats?”

“Your church was probably trying to keep you away from people like them – they are the kind of people who hurt others, not people like us. After this is over, we’ll be happy to compensate you and help in any way you can.”

Rina sneaks up next to Lane: “They could probably help us pull his legs off!”

Lane says, “Is there anything your church teaches about attacking land dwellers who’re bad people? Don’t you want to stand against them? They are taking your power from you! And your political power and your religious power if you will let them!”

She tells Rina to look really cute, like a fuzzy octopus. “Please help us stand against these evil land dwellers who are trying to take from you! They might be pretending they’re friends, but they may not be friends. Why do you think they’re down here, they don’t have friends anyplace else. Please help us stand against the bad people – they’re not the friends you seek.”

The Major asks what they’re down here to do. “But it’s where we’re born! And where Patriarch Armitage comes to bless us!” “Who was there first?!”

“The Great Old Ones we are descended from!”

“They made us!”

“They may have made your bodies but they did not make your souls – aren’t they from the Old Ones?”

“They are interlopers: we will take them away and you can serve the Old Ones here.”

“But what about our creches? If you take them away, there will be no more of us!”

Rina tugs on Lane’s arm “Seize the means of production!” She runs off to get the other doctor. “What do you know about bioengineering human hybrids?” Rina immediately calls Nymphie. “Your life kind of lacks purpose. Want some purpose?”

“I thought I was doing fine?”

“You’re treading water and you know it. We’ve got a whole colony of fish people who need help down here – they’re from some kind of weird squid cult.” Nymphie says they have Shiori now, who’s the best on the planet. Rina links Nymphie, Delucca, and Lane.

Lane makes the pitch. The Major agrees: they’ll cut the power to Zhukov’s lair. She tells them that the labs are on the top level, right behind Ops. That has to be protected at all costs. Lane agrees that after this is all over, they’ll connect the merkraken with the resources they need. They arrive at the mined approach to the base. Time to re-evaluate the massive destruction diversion part of the plan: they don’t want to hurt the creche. Lane agrees, and they suit up.

They decide to split into teams: Rina and Bathory, Rook and Moopsie, with the others following behind.

Rina and Bathory hack the first mine at 65 meters out: she sends the process over to Rook. Rook accidentally triggers the next mine to arm, but gets it hacked just in time. She tries to hug Moopsie but just bounces off.

The mine hacking proceeds apace, and they clear a path to the lair’s cargo bay doors. Rina hacks in without tripping an alarm. They get out of their hardsuits. Rina finds a net access point just outside an office, but can only get cargo manifests from there. Suspecting there’s someone in the office, the team decides to bypass them.

Rina climbs atop Moopsie and goes for the vents. Moopsie’s used to it, from well before she was a robot. Rina takes off the vent cover. She gets in hacking range, gets in, and finds the cargo files: the items they’ve been tracking did in fact pass through here. She comms back, “Don’t mind me, don’t open the door, give me a minute.” She wriggles backwards, takes off her boots, and drops them down to Moopsie.

Jiefan and Bathory clear the doors, into a hallway with a door ahead and long corridors to right and left. They split into three teams.

Rook, Moopsie, and Kniffin take the forward door. They enter, crouched behind machinery, and can tell there’s someone else there. They back out. Lane and Bathory clear one hallway, finding a room with technicians discussing the power outage. Jiefan’s team finds a parallel hallway on the other side. Rina finds the server room from her position in the vents.

The group on the left sneaks into Power Gen without being seen by the technicians. Lane knows they can’t fix the power because it’s just not coming. They all sneak off. On the right side, Kira’s heard voices up ahead. Her group ducks into the server room.

Rina wants the comm system and cameras, and personnel records. She gets in to the personnel records easily, and sends the information to Rook. She finds Zhukov is here, along with a full platoon of security troops, and a total of about 40. She also gets the creche worker profiles, including the director, Dr. Osminov. There was a bunch of new hiring right around the time BADI was dismembered. No luck getting into the cameras, but does get into comms. They are labeled, but there’s no system map. She’s tapped into all the comms.

She hears the life support tech reporting in: everything is still working on emergency power. She sends back a message asking for how long they have: six hours. Engineering tells her they’re working on backups to pull online.

She gets blueprint schematics to everybody. She tries for door access and gets all the blue doors. Next floor up, 4 red doors, not behind blue doors. She concludes the red doors are to Zhukov’s suite. She flags those doors and runs a cross-check against blueprints to find Zhukov’s suite. She tells the team she can lock all the other doors when they’re ready to get to that level.

Lane wonders how many of the 40 or loyal versus hired hands. 12 Ops technicians, 8 lab, 20 security, plus Zhukov. She concludes that, though it’s 5 AM, most people are at their stations, due to the emergency.

Rina locks the doors to Power Gen, Engineering, and Life Support. She determines Zhukov is in Ops. Half the squad is on the Ops floor and half is off-duty in their barracks.

She gets elevator controls, and shuts down the right side elevator. The two guards there decide to do a patrol round. Jiefan’s team ducks into the server room. Rina sends a message: “Good idea taking one elevator offline, but now security’s pissed: you might want to explain to them it allows them to breathe longer.” Comms light up in a flurry of confusion.

The guards discover Jiefan’s group! Rina locks the doors and cuts their comms. The team takes them down easily, but Kat got solidly shot. At Rina’s suggestion, Jiefan and Kira take their security badges.

Rina’s got cameras! The other elevator and both stairwells are clear. She locks the blue doors on both sets of stairs – not the red locks on the top floor. They’ve cleared the bottom level: time to head on up.