Session 5: The Old College Try - kaseido/NeoTokyo GitHub Wiki
304 Rand 1 Sun
The team returns to Ruin Island after their time at The Wreck. Lane’s got messages from a couple other candidates for the job.
Lane contacts Erissa: she can get lots of tech stuff done. “I tech, I don’t talk. No talking to people, people are no.” Lane is used to that. “If I have to talk to somebody, I’ll probably just punch ‘em, it’s simpler.” Lane invites her over to meet the rest of the team.
Erisa stops at the bar to pick up a drink before heading to the table in the back. Rina’s still wearing the ruined, burned hoodie: they haven’t swept for bugs yet. She peers out from underneath the hoodie, stares for a bit, and says “hi.”
“Looks like you had a rough day.”
“I saw my family.”
Rina goes immediately back to Candy Crush on her Agent. Lane asks Rina if they can trust Erisa. Rina suggests a test. “If you had a key that might explode, but you need this key to do what you need to do, what would you do? how would you check it?”
Erissa asks if it’s solid or electronic. It’s both, and could be booby trapped in a couple ways, both mechanical and netrun. She can do the physical side. Rina approves, but just keeps staring at her. Erissa stares back, unblinking.
Lane does a library search on Erissa: she’s just a street rat doing petty electronics crimes. She was mentored by Carbide before he and his team left 15 years ago. She’s moved out of Old Dome and is just wandering Koto City. She’s about 27.
Lane takes the call from Kestrel. He looks like someone who should have background music and a breeze wafting through his tech hair. He’s taken his time to look appropriate for an interview. His voice is obviously modulated to sound smoother and deeper. He’s rather soft-spoken and tentative. Lane asks about his skills: driving, tracking, and capturing or eliminating targets. Lane thinks tracking would be extremely useful, along with capturing. She invites him over.
He looks like a perfectly normal being, but Rina can tell significant portions of his body are mechanical-cold: he’s really cybered up. He sits, and shrugs off his jacket, revealing tattooed arms: a kestrel on one side and stacks of pouring credit chips on the other.
Lane is very impressed by his strategic presentation. “This guy’s in!”
Rina sniffs Kestrel. He looks back and forth between her and Lane. “I cannot decide which of you is the most beautiful.” He sounds smooth, but comes across as a novice at flirting: something’s not quite right.
Erissa slides down in her seat until just her eyes are showing over the table. Rina’s skepticism is large 😊 Lane appreciates the effort, thinking he might get better at it if they give him a chance. The Vole behind the bar is starstruck, and giving them thumbs-up.
Kestrel says this is his first job with a team he can call his own: that’s genuine emotion! He’s found something awesome. Lane says she’ll be gentle with him, he says he’ll protect them.
Lane briefs the new folk on the job. They don’t show the Dragonfly, just says they have the key.
Kestrel thinks it’s excellent that they want to liberate Alice.
The teams heads upstairs to the cabinet of clothes that has scorch marks on it: Lane tells the new people that’s all she has left in the world. Kestrel asks suspiciously about their access to a medtech. He asks Erissa about her knowledge of cybertech: she knows a little but it’s not her thing. He explains he’s a full-body conversion. Rina is nodding emphatically. Kestrel explains he was once a Borg. “Oh that’s different,” Rina says. “Careful of those clothes! I worked hard for them!” Rina’s curled up napping in the pile of them. Erissa wishes the bugs could be reprogrammed to just send back the same Happy Aura song over and over. Rina writes and uploads a program to do just that, playing “Love Is A Magic Dance,” a B-side. Rina gets a new hoodie off the pile.
Everybody, including Jiefan, gets student IDs. They just leave the clothes strewn all over – but Erissa sorts them into piles by color, but not by type. Lane’s fine with that.
Lane goes over the plan again: go to the security office and loop the cameras in the MIRU building, then walk on in.
They get to the metro station. Sister Lara walks over, Rina kneels down and bumps heads with her, then Lara jumps up onto her shoulder. “This is my sister!” Lane thanks Lara for helping them. Erissa asks Kestrel if he has a catbrain emulator. “No? Was I supposed to bring one?” Rina’s ears twitch. Erissa explains that Rina’s the only one who can talk directly to Lara.
“How do I act like a student?”
“Follow me, look lost, and nod when I talk. If you’re all just silent, you’re acting like students. But act like you belong there.” Kestrel mimics Rina’s posture, as the casual stance of a student.
Erissa: “I think I should have been a janitor, but it’ll be fine.”
Lara’s inside the hoodie and wrapped around Rina’s neck like a very fancy scarf, to keep out of the drizzle.
Rina gets past the password in the Security building, tries to slide past the black ICE but gets caught. She easily blows it away, but is stymied by the security at the lower level. She looks over the employee schedule she got. She tries re-encoding the tags into Cyrillic but no luck. She jacks back out. “Well, we just have to not get caught.”
They consider whether to disable the cameras on the MIRU building. Lane suggests they just go in rather than taking the chance of triggering an alarm. They just walk in the front door.
They enter the elevator, but there’s no button for the basement, just a key card slot.
Rina can’t find an access point, but when they walk around the building to the breakroom, she notices the same vending machine setup as the security building had, and jacks in. She gets personnel records with access level information, and a floor plan for the basement level. She notes the SECURE ACCESS ONLY door on the basement level.
In the netrun, she identifies levels below the basic security:
She determines BRANCH PURPLE is a security level. BRANCH ORANGE has more security. She couldn’t get into BRANCH BLUE on the first attempt but does on the second: all the black ICE and all the files, which are probably proprietary tech information. She doesn’t care about those.
Back up to the personnel records. She wants to duplicate access for one of the professors with the info for Lane’s ID, and the same with the grad school level for the others. Everybody else gets PURPLE access.
There are 17 people scanned in but not out. No ORANGE level currently.
They send the info to the badge printer. The door is locked. Rina kind of just stops, but Erissa gets them in.
They head to the elevator.