JB CLXX: A Perfect Heist...
Henriette has been up for twenty seven hours by this point, and is at least partially running on something she calls coca-coffee. It's coffee which replaces the water with Coke. It tastes
horrible. She really misses Keep Awake right now. Not only does it taste less horrible, but it also works better. Honestly, she's functioning more now less because of the caffeine and more because the sugar in her brew is letting her overclock her ADEI. They don't have much time to get things ready, which means she needs to push herself now so she can take some time out to rest just before the operation starts. She's monitoring her own vitals and knows her own safety margins, so she'll be fine.
Body working on autopilot, she lets her hacked BLO handle the final points of assembly of the latest drone. She's got her ADEI running CAD/CAM programs and in this case, it involves her manually assembling the motherboard. Which is tiresome, entirely predictable work and thus can be left to subroutines while the rest of her brain deals with more important issues - or catnap. Which she really needs to do again at some point.
"Right!" she informs Rose and Wufan, not meeting their eyes because the CAD/CAM needs a visual link on the target. "Both of you take a USB stick. They're loaded up with intrusion software of Virtual Adept design to cover our trails. Now, plug these into any USB-capable device you find in the building that you can. They'll dump backdoors into the USB drivers, and then I'll have root access to the network."
"Are you going to steal his Amazon Prime account?" Rose asks brightly.
"If he's got it linked to a credit card? Yes," Henriette responds tersely. "But security hardware as well. I'll tell you if you need to leave it plugged in for the remote access. If you get that onto any closed networks they have that control security, I'll control the cameras. They'll only see what I want them to see."
Her hands finish assembling the drone's motherboard, and she slots it into the chassis, screwing in the magscrews. The entire thing is only the size of a credit card, so naturally she makes it sound a lot easier than other people would find it. She places it with the others in the rack. "These are remote access drones. They've got cameras, programmable RFID, and a microflight system that's good for ten minutes of flight. They spoof being swipecards so you can get in past security, but can also fly to scout out the place if needed - well, technically it's gliding. Battery life is only a few hours, but that's all we need. I'll have a few latch onto the LAPD monitoring vehicles and take control of their communications. If they try to call for backup, they'll be talking to me. In which case they'll be told to standby and await further orders."
"What's the fallback?" Wufan says perfunctorily. Henriette... doesn't actually mind him, by the standards of the Void Engineers. He expects everything to be done professionally and with reserve plans. She's dealt with tightasses like this before. Sure, he demands a lot from her, but she's good enough to have already planned this out in advance.
"The primary plan is, of course, you not being noticed," she says. "The fallback is the communications spoofing. The reserve is..." she sends a command to the laptop in front of her while she begins to assemble another drone, "... this location."
"An Endron corporate office," Wufan says neutrally.
"Yes. If the LAPD tries to raise an alert, I've got a power surge prepared for the substation that supplies them - again, more VA code. It'll fry their server room and start electrical fires. The local emergency services will be distracted by this - and so will the local Union. They'll be busy trying to work out who was behind this, so any lower priority alerts from a monitoring team that might get out will be pushed down the queue."
"Why that target?"
"Two reasons," Henriette says. "Firstly, Endron is an enemy of humanity and the Union. It'll inconvenience them to have investigators snooping around the place. Secondly, I still owe them some payback after they interfered in a mission a few months ago when we were sterilizing a shapeshifter-controlled node."
"I missed that one," Rose says, shaking her head.
"The Void Engineer support was useful," Henriette adds, feeling strangely uncertain about that. No, that's silly. The Void Engineers were useful there. She doesn't like them, but she's not so petty to deny credit where it's due.
"I'll take a look at that," Wufan says. "I want to see a report on collateral and risk before I'll agree to that."
"Preliminary report is in there," Henriette says immediately. "Got to work on this and get more times done. Full write-up later."
"I'll leave you to that," the man says, walking out.
She gets back to working. After a bit, she glances at Rose. "You can go too," she says.
"Your blood sugar is low and you're tired," Rose says softly.
"Yes, it probably is. Do you have anything else to contribute?"
"I do, actually!" Rose says. She takes a bottle of mineral water from the minibar, and pours Henriette out a glass, adding something to it. "Drink this. It'll get rid of the headache. Trust me. I'm a doctor."
"... I don't trust people who tell me to trust them," Henriette grumbles, drinking. Her headache does clear up. "What was that?"
"I might not be quite as good at chemistry as Serafina, but I'm not useless!" says Rose, pouting. "You can basically think of it as super-aspirin - it uses it as a base. You're mostly baseline. If you push your body too hard, it
will collapse."
"... bet you wouldn't say that to Director Belltower."
Rose glances at her reflection in the counter and tilts her head slightly. "I suppose she just has much more experience at pushing herself than you do," she says after a pause. "Also, just at a biological level she's better at it than you. Tell me if you start feeling ill again and I'll see if I can help, but you are going to have to sleep soon." She pauses again. "And thank you, Henriette. I know you're pushing yourself to make sure everything is ready, and we couldn't do it without you."
Henriette flushes, the rush of blood getting through her BLO which is rather busier at the moment manually controlling her hands. "It's n-nothing," she says. "I'm just doing it because it has to be done for the mission."
"And we really appreciate it. I'm sure Wufan does too. He just doesn't say it," Rose says, as she heads out again.
Rose is far too sunny sometimes, Henriette considers. Although it is nice to feel appreciated. She returns to work, feeling nearly 100% again. She must not have noticed how much the headache was weighing on her.
***
"Have I ever told you the definition of insanity?" Thorn asks from inside the full-length mirror. She's changed outfits once more, and the catsuit she's wearing now is most certainly not field issue. Too much cleavage, for one.
Rose frowns. The zipper of her own suit has gotten caught. Again. "Generally psychiatrists try to avoid using that term these days."
Thorn tuts at her. "You can't deflect me that easy - I'm in your head. It'll take more than an argument about how the Technocracy loses control of its own words to put me off."
"Is it when you talk to yourself, and yourself answers back?" The zipper finally slides down, and Rose pulls on the millimeter thick suit. It slides oddly over her skin, far too heavy for something as thin as it is.
Thorn grins. It's not particularly nice. "Interesting thought, but no. You need to work on your put-downs." She sighs, slumping over the edge of the bed. "Are you really going to try this again?" Rose doesn't bother answering. Hemophage biology is highly morphic. Unusually so, given how it's basically dead. Her flesh can reshape itself in all sorts of ways, most of them unstable and rather gross. A rare few of them are useful and easy to handle.
The softsuit collapses, the matter that had been holding it up vanishing into near-dimensional space. Inside something small struggles for a moment, before escaping through the neck. It's a bat. A
vampire bat.
Unfortunately they are also very stereotypical.
In the mirror, Thorn pulls on an elaborate red-lined black cape. She smirks at the bat.
Thorn, Rose decides, is still a bitch. Some things never change. The air twists, and excess matter is pulled back into real-space. The combat construct stands up, scowling at her hallucination. The softsuit remains crumpled accusingly on the floor behind her. A moment passes. Thorn gives her a suggestive leer. Waggles her eyebrows.
"Not. One. Word." As far as hisses go, it's a good hiss. She has some snake genes in her fang structure, after all.
Thorn's leer simply gets more lascivious. "Oh Mr. Guo is that a stick up your ass or are you just happy to see me?"
Rose sighs. Nudity might not be much of a taboo among the Progenitors, but Serafina had at least
tried to give her daughter some modesty.
"Fine. We'll try your plan."
***
Rose sashays around the corner. Yes. Sashay is certainly the word. Her black-clad feet squeak on the floor. Her new garment is still damp. She's just getting Henriette's opinion on it. Yes. That's all. Even Thorn agrees that it would be good to get another woman's opinion on it, before she shows it to anyone else.
Admittedly, Thorn grins with far too much fang when she says that. But it's the thought that counts, right?
"Oh, Henriette?" Rose asks.
The other woman is hunched over a desk, doing something with some kind of Iterator-y tool. It looks a bit like a wrench. Actually, it might be a wrench. Rose doesn't really knows much about that sort of thing. "What?" is all the response she gets. Not even a look.
"I've run into a problem. I'll be making use of built-in shape-shifting functionality, but that means I can't carry anything with me and so given I need to get some tools inside..."
Henriette doesn't look up. "Supply drop. Got it. Provide me with the coordinates and I'll have a Masses-tech drone convey it. There's a six kilo limit per drone - try to keep under it." Her hands move with the kind of precision that Rose herself is capable of as she builds an add-on module for Wufan's varigun.
"Have you been eating?" Rose asks her.
"Yes. I've got it scheduled on my to-do list. I had a bagel one hour and sixteen minutes ago." She pauses. "I put some of the leftover Chinese in it. I'm fine."
Henriette is taking the fun out of it by not looking. She should be admiring her new figure-hugging outfit. "Just tell me if you get the headache again."
"I will. I'm fine. Now, you're standing in the way of the light. Please go, Rose, I have a lot of work to do and almost no time to do it in if I want to schedule some sleep on top of getting everything ready. I've added equipment conveyance to my TODO list. It should be ready, but it won't get done if you try to distract me."
Thorn sighs loudly as Rose slinks out. "I see that two-faced bitch didn't take the bait," she says dryly. "I wanted to see the look on her face when she saw you looking like that. Think of helping her get over her ex and the split. Which is to say, her ex got split."
"Two-faced?" Rose whispers, slightly confused. "I... haven't seen that from her. She's just a bit mean all the time."
"Well, yes. That's because you've only seen one of her two faces. Well, almost. You saw a glimpse of her other face in the reports on Moscow."
Rose nods. "The side when she's less mean and she's more of a hero."
Thorn sighs patronizingly. "Yes. Sure. You can believe that if you want. You wouldn't even get the joke if I called her Janal-retentive."
"... do you mean anal-retentive?"
"Case in point."
***
Henriette has no idea what Rose was wearing. It looked skin-tight, black, and wet. She hopes it wasn't some kind of horrific insectoid carapace. She can really do without Rose turning into a bug-lady. But she clearly wanted attention, and Henriette wasn't about to give it to her.
Especially if she's decided something stupid like 'let's turn into a spider-woman so I can crawl on walls'. Henriette is entirely willing to go her lifetime without seeing half-spider, half-human monsters,
thank you very much. Werewolves are bad enough. If she starts having to deal with werespiders, she may well scream. And then break out the flamethrowers.
Deep inside, Henriette shudders. She never used to be scared of spiders. Not before Autochthonia. There are memories deep down there, repressed - and she knows she's repressing them and it's her doing it, not what the Void Engineers did to her. Iteration X used to like spider imagery. They liked their access to the old-style 'Digital Web'. She remembers things out there which were... well, they had the same resemblance to a spider as a de-skinned HITMark has to a human being.
That'll go on the long-term TODO list. 'Resolve fear of spiders by reminding self that normal spiders are not crystal-and-silicon monsters larger than a mecha'. Great.
God, she's so fucked up. And she's not the only one.
She adds a medium-term TODO. 'Explain to Rose that it's not nice to flaunt one's looks, no matter what the Progenitors say.'. If she's going to have to be a big sister to Mari, she might as well re-purpose some of that for Rose. She's acting erratic, trying to pretend that everything is all right. She can't lie to Henriette. Not about that, when Henriette has experience with bad mental places. She spent a long time trying to pretend that everything was all right after Autochthonia, and now in hindsight of course she was lying. She wasn't all right. No one is all right after seeing what she saw and having their brain mucked up and being crippled.
Rose is lying too. Even most HITMarks would be glitching after a month of solid combat engagements. Humans? That's burn-out waiting to happen.
She sighs. She... she wants Serafina back too. It's nice to have someone warm and comforting and soft around. Sure, she's just as manipulative as Director Belltower, but she makes it feel softer and less obvious. Which... might be a sign that she's better at it. But between the two of them they helped Henriette pull herself back together and... and Serafina is Rose's mother and Henriette spent most of her life working and trying to be good enough to get her mother back. So Rose is probably feeling the same, too.
If they can just find Serafina from the records, then she can help Rose and... and Henriette won't have lost yet another... another... person. Yes.
She realises that her workflow is empty. She's been lost in working meditation - a little something she invented by hybridizing some of the things Director Aristide taught her with her own natural Iterator superiority to an old NWO quack. And her short-term TODO list has reached "TODO: Sleep."
Exhausted, Henriette just about manages to crawl into the bed not three meters from her workbench and is asleep before she can even vocalize the command to turn the lights off. They turn out, though, as her ADEI sends the signal. And when she dreams, the machine that's been in her brain since before she was decanted dreams too.
***
Donald's fingers tap a beat on the side of his laptop. His human ones, at least. The sound of his
other fingers drumming is something he'd rather avoid.
It's midday, but with all the blinds drawn the room certainly doesn't look like it. Henriette's still working away, he thinks, and Wufan's been doing...
something with his varigun. Rose's spent the past hour or so in her room. All of them should be getting some sleep sometime this afternoon. They'd need their focus for tonight's operation.
Donald, on the other hand, doesn't have much of anything to do. He cycles through the security cameras. Maybe he'll order in something nice for... breakfast? Dinner? Ugh.
Night jobs. Still, they'd perform better if they had a good meal. It's not much of a contribution, but it's something.
"Henriette doesn't like Indian food." The voice is right next to his ear.
Donald
jumps. A bit. He certainly doesn't flail, and Rose does not end up having to catch his chair. And his laptop. No sir.
"Feeling stressed?" she laughs.
He hadn't even heard her
enter. It wasn't surprising she could, but generally she was a bit more accommodating of people who weren't loaded with sensory packages stolen from across the animal kingdom. "Not really, just- Rose."
"Yes?" she replies, all innocence.
Donald swallows. "What are you wearing?" It's black. And glistening. Tight in ways that make a mockery of innocent intentions.
Rose frowns. "My personal shape-shifting capabilities don't extend to things as inorganic as Iteration X armor. So I made my own." She shrugs, setting off interesting shifts in the dark material. "It's not like making leather is hard - even the Masses can do it."
She's
teasing him. He... isn't sure how to respond to that.
Better move to safer ground. "So, you're good for the infiltration?"
"Henriette's delivering the rest by drone. I'll be fine."
Donald quirks an eyebrow at her. "More drones? She needs to get some sleep."
"You've been pulling the same hours she has with less excuse." Ouch. "Is something bothering you?"
Quite a lot of things are bothering Donald. Half of them involve Rose or the Spy's Demise, and are thus off-limits. But it would be hypocritical to brush her off entirely and then worry about how she pretends everything's fine. So - he sighs - honesty time.
"I'm not a jet-setting super-spy with a magical dick." Okay that's quite a bit more flippant than what he'd been aiming for.
Rose chuckles. "Very specific."
"Ugh, that came out wrong. It's just... this sort of field work. I'm not very good at it. Without my assets, my contacts... how am I supposed to tell you or Mr. Tight-ass how to run an infiltration? Or Henriette how to get into their systems?" His hand, his metal hand, balls into a fist strong enough to bend steel.
"You feel like you can't do anything?" she asks. He nods slowly. There's a statement that could be taken in many ways. "Donald. How do you think
I feel when you and Director Belltower are trying to figure out who you can trust in the Union?"
He's not really sure how she feels. That's part of the problem. "You're not bad at it yourself. You held them together in the Demise."
She flashes him a smile. "In a fight, maybe. The kind of favor trading you get up to? Even if I wasn't a construct, I'd be hard pressed to keep up."
He frowns. The glass ceiling isn't generally spoken about so frankly. "You learn fast enough. Basic hypereconomics in a week, wasn't it?"
"And you seem to have forgotten
comparative advantage." Rose leans forward and looks him dead in the eye. If Donald weren't as intent on the conversation as he is, he might have been flustered. Instead he's flustered because of the conversation. "You gave us a target. We'll get you your assets. Trust me."
She sashays out. The door closes with a quiet click. Donald stares after her for a moment, and then rubs his eyes.
"Damn it." She'd managed to avoid her own issues. Again.
***
The smooth cycling of the varigun makes a soft click in the dark Los Angeles morning as Wufan Guo waits for the signal. Perched on a roof out of sight of the various watchers, the man looks more like a gargoyle than anything living, too still and silent to be flesh and blood. He watches a lone bat make its way to the property and shifts slightly, running through the shot in his mind's eye. The grapnel would have to be carefully aimed and timed so as not to draw attention. Beside him, the other end of the line is anchored securely, ready to release on his command.
Inelegant, he thinks. Cinematic might be another good description of the plan - the Financier's hobbies were noted clearly in the briefing. If he were a more expressive man, he might have frowned. Sykes is competent, at least, even if his plans tend towards high-speed ziplining. The street lights flicker briefly. Problems in the grid, or so the story will go. Nothing to remark upon in California. Lieutenant Langley's contribution to this part of today's operation.
A clock comes to life in his mind, forcing the irrelevancies out. His focus narrows. He abstracts the world away. Obstacles. A large empty space, which had to be crossed quickly. Three LAPD Sympathizer lookouts on this side of the property. Surveillance cameras. Target. A dusty attic window, already unlocked by Constable Ashford.
Signal.
The streetlamps flare like miniature suns, too bright to look at. He takes the shot. The power grid fails, and the watchers are blind. A back-up generator comes to life, trying to restore the property's electronic eyes.
Wufan Guo is already inside when the streets are lit again five seconds later, disguised and ready to go.
***
For Rose, it's much easier to disappear unnoticed into the mansion, flying in as a bat, shifting back, and retrieving her equipment and a disguise. Hemophages have their pseudo-psionic methods of fooling human minds into ignoring them, and she can do much the same. It's not actual invisibility-she has an entirely different set of biofunctions for that, Bayesian fast pattern-matching chromatophores to fool sensors-but it makes this long, slow infiltration a lot more relaxing. People might notice a smeared blur on the walls, but they don't notice the hemophage "psychic" masking that she invokes. She could drop the chromatophores back to standby, throw her disguise off to reveal the skintight garb she wears underneath, slink through the premises like some sort of erotic nightmare, and people wouldn't notice. Or if they did notice, they'd discount her as someone with perfectly good reasons to be there. Why fool the visual processing capabilities of a human brain, when you could simply supply it with a ready-made excuse to ignore what it saw?
The drugs don't hurt. Her first action was to find their food and spike it before anyone could act. They're barely awake, minds foggy. They might realize something is wrong-probably not, though. The guards barely even glance around. They probably wouldn't be able to recognize their own mothers in this fugue state.
She should feel bad about using her hemophage advantages as blatantly as this, but she doesn't. There's plenty of legitimate Technocratic equipment which does the same thing with subsonics and pheromones and electromagnetic fields. It's something she has and she's using it for the good of ideals she still believes in. It's in some ways one of the few things she has left. Her body and her looks and her skills and her capabilities. Her looks and how they can be oh so deceiving. The guards here ignore her. A pretty woman in the mansion is nothing unusual, she must be eye candy for Mallion and his guests, right? They're only human, or v-addicts at best. They see her beauty and don't understand how skin-deep it is, how it conceals weaponized biology that puts her combat performance well past a HITMark's.
Much like her, the pictures and riches he sees in Martin Mallion's mansion are misleading. He wouldn't and hasn't put anything particularly valuable outside. This is just bait, a decoy for a thief who manages to make it in so that they wouldn't cart off the
real goods, the treasures stored in the reinforced safe and panic room that Henriette says the mansion's basement has been converted into that she heads towards. Something easy to grab and easy to take away that keeps them away from the
real valuables.
Rose realizes that she was mentally underestimating the sheer expense Mallion had gone through to secure Lacroix's belongings, and the sheer ability of Sleeper security systems. She goes down the stairs into the basement, sees the false wall hiding the vault that Henriette's scans have revealed. Behind it is a thick metal door, dozens of centimeters of polished metal, strong enough that even she can't brute force the workings of the vault door. Electronic eyes stare at her, dead and unresponsive. Henriette's worm has already wreaked its havoc on the CCTV system, made sure that the machines Lacroix trusted his wealth to have become his foes. There are guards here, skin pale and chest unmoving. But even so, Rose notices that they look tired. They probably are bonded to Lacroix, addicted to his vitae. She darts in, plants the microdrones where Henriette needs them, and darts back out, faster than any human can.
"Can you get us past this?" Rose asks. "I can probably handle the hemophages." She definitely can with Guo if he can eliminate one silently. And that's assuming they decide to stay on guard when they're vulnerable. Hemophages are notoriously vulnerable during daylight hours, slow and clumsy and easily dispatched.
"Definitely. That's why I'm here." Henriette nods. She takes a moment to look "I'd take it slow, though, if I were you."
"That being?"
"The vault itself is vacuum sealed. Mallion seems to have disguised the vacuum pumps as part of the ventilation system. The Syndicate must really not have looked closely at his associations if he could install something like this. This is going to be a minor problem. One moment..."
"Oh?" Rose asks, already considering her options. Unlike a hemophage, she does need to breathe. Unlike a human, though, her body is significantly better adapted to trace or no-oxygen environments. She can hold her breath for quite a while. "You don't need to worry about it, I can survive vacuum for a half-hour or so, and you can get me out by then."
"Stop that!" Henriette says huffily. "I was just warning you so you didn't try to charge in, not because I can't defeat it. There isn't any masses-made security system that I can't crack in my sleep." she says proudly. "So you don't need to hold your breath." It's fairly obvious to Rose that Henriette is exaggerating her prowess just slightly, but she says nothing. "Equalizing the pressure is going to take a while, though. So you might want to take a little time."
Rose nods. "Certainly." She walks back up, ignored by all. She'll get Wufan and plan to silently neutralize both hemophages if they're still around. As far as complications go it's not much of one.
***
The vault hisses open, its guards gone. It's midday, and they won't be doing much of anything with the hot sun beating down on Los Angeles. Even if they woke up for some reason, in the daylight hemophages are weak and vulnerable. Rose looks into the vault, scanning warily for any traps-mundane or mystical, hemophage Reality Deviance at work. There's quite a few of both.
"If we take anything, we're going to activate some kind of guardian." Rose says. "There might be a little noise. And I'm not sure if it'll alert Lacroix the moment we act."
"We work under the assumption that it does, then." Guo says. "We plan out exactly what we're going to take before we take any action. That way we minimize the time spent with the enemy on alert. We can assume that the moment LaCroix starts to move, the LAPD sympathizers will also be informed, and may take action or increase their observation. Lieutenant Langley, prepare the fallback."
"Got it." Henriette says. "I'm ready to hit the Endron servers when you make your move."
Rose nods. It makes sense. She examines the contents of the vault. There, a treasure chest, probably centuries old, its insides full to bursting with gold. There's open suitcases and duffel bags, full of hundred-dollar bills. But she's not interested in the money. She's interested in finding much more valuable tools. Reality Deviant artifacts-dangerous to possess, but incredibly valuable. They could be recycled-rendered down into base materials for resources and Prime Energy. Or they could be sold. More portable and more valuable-but also commensurately more dangerous to sell. But they're on the run, they need resources, and this is the easiest way to get them.
There's a weathered statuette that gives Rose a faint, inexplicable feeling of unease. A picture of an incubus, its patterns hypnotic and undeniably psychoactive. An old leather-bound book. An icon with three figures on it, smelling faintly of blood. It could have been Christian-but there's something off with the figures, something cruel and malicious in their faces and something predatory in their eyes. The sculptor must have been good-superhumanly good-to get those details working. There's a set of rings which seem to call to her-whispering in a dead language about her "revenant blood." There's even a Hermetic-forged blade sitting there. But the Reality Deviant tools she's seeing aren't concerning her. What mainly concerns her, and what is distracting Wufan, is the elephant in the room. Or rather, the quantum computer in the room.
"How did a hemophage get their hands on an old-style Iteration X quantum computer?" Wufan breathes, looking at the man-sized tower distractedly. "There's probably something important we can retrieve from it. Resources are secondary." He's been examining the gray metal and blue cooling elements of the tower intently, careful not to move it or otherwise trip any alarms which might exist. "Langley. Run an ID number for me." He recites methodically the alphanumeric serial code.
"That's a Special Projects Division quantum computer. It's for predictive modeling and strategic assistance." Henriette says. "Built... 1974. How does Lacroix have one of those? And how did it get into his hands? We need to take a look at what data it contains. This could be important."
"I agree." Wufan says. "We'll be moving it."
"Don't forget to grab anything valuable you can." Henriette sends. "Money, assets that we can liquidate, even..." she sighs "...Reality Deviant artifacts we can sell or recycle."
So, this is a good time to ask for player input. You've infiltrated without a hitch, but when you steal things, things are going to get hairier. This means that you may want to plan out how exactly you're going to get out of here.
Loot...
So, choose three things you're looking for from this set of bulky or otherwise difficult to move objects. One of them has already been chosen for you.
[X] An old-style Iteration X quantum computer, potentially rich with valuable data.
[ ] A chest of ancient gold coins. It seems to lack any mystical significance, but that's a lot of gold.
[ ] Several old paintings which seem to have mystical power imbued in their paint and their artistry. Most of them show scenes which are terrifying and ever so slightly tinged with eroticism.
[ ] A long spear with an eternally bloody tip. There seems to be significant mystic power to the spear, but yet it seems to project an aura of falsehood.
[ ] A sizable collection of original film reels from the early days of Hollywood. Many of them seem to be using nitrocellulose, which makes them very old, and also very likely to catch on fire and/or explode under the right circumstances.
[ ] A file cabinet full of documents.
[ ] An Egyptian sarcophagus. Scans show that someone has stuffed it full of Semtex for an entirely inexplicable reason.
[ ] A large harp which plays itself as things move around it. The strings are a bright red fiber.
...and Plunder
Same thing. Choose three things in total from the moderately more convenient stuff that can be easily carried out. One has been chosen for you.
[X] Several briefcases worth of hundred dollar bills.
[ ] A leather bound book with vampire symbolism on it. The cover says that "Cain lives in death." The leather appears to not be cow leather.
[ ] Mystic jewelry which seems to call out to the hemophage vitae in Rose, suggesting that she can manipulate it somehow.
[ ] Sheet music which seems to spell out some sort of mystical musical ritual.
[ ] A chalice with a vibrant red liquid inside. Despite being unsealed and exposed to vacuum, the liquid has not evaporated. The liquid smells of human blood, but with significantly more mystical force.
[ ] A Hermetic Sword of Mars. Most Technocrats can identify these weapons-they were a common tool of House Janissary, wielded easily by even untrained men and women and capable of cleaving through even heavy cyborg armor.
[ ] Various hemophage icons with their own mystic properties. Rose doesn't really understand them, and doesn't really want to. Suffice to say she wants to have them recycled.
[ ] Ownership papers for various low-class housing projects in Los Angeles.
[ ] A gold-plated AK-47 which makes Rose actively uncomfortable. It resonates with death and more than its share of war crimes.
[ ] A set of medals and an officer's uniform from the Napoleonic Wars, very well preserved.
Evacuation Considerations:
So, with that in mind, how are you going to get yourselves out of the mansion?
[ ] Maximum speed, maximum violence. The hemophages are asleep, and you can cut through a bunch of v-addicts and random mooks like, well, a plasma cannon through a stack of butter.
[ ] There's mystical warding on the vault, but the great thing about Reality Deviance is that generally it isn't compatible with modern communications techniques. Henriette can make sure no alarms get tripped, but that isn't going to help much if LaCroix's team of hit-ghouls is right next door or if he has other assets that can operate in the daylight.
[ ] Maybe we should consider that whole 'burrowing underground' thing again.
[ ] Write-In.
