Hmm, I'm going to need a roll from someone.

Someone roll 6d10e7 for Rose's Intelligence + Occult to find Mystical Bullshit (TM).

Also, roll Wufan's 9d10x7 Perception + Investigation for less Mystical, but still important, things, like "stuff we can convert into cash quickly and discreetly."

If you want to enhance them with magic, please do.
 
Enhancement rolls!

Rose is a human predator - and worse, an economist. The psychopathic part of her brain is very good at telling what people value, and what they do with it. Where they hide it, how they protect it, and how to take it from them. Time to let it out of its box for a bit.

(Enhancing with Mind+PU)



Nice.

Wufan is trained in evidence tampering and investigative techniques. He knows exactly what can be meddled with and moved without raising alarms, and what's too risky to touch.

(Enhancing with Mind+Entropy)



Goddamn it Wufan.
 
Rose is drinking his luck and laughing like a vampire countess.

(Rose will discover, if she pushes it, that Wufan has no interest at all in white girls and considers her constant vampire aura to be sexual harassment in the workplace.)

B-but it's Rose.

... Clearly it's because she has Entropy 2 now. Damn luck vampires and their cheating ways.
 
Last edited:
Rose is drinking his luck and laughing like a vampire countess.

(Rose will discover, if she pushes it, that Wufan has no interest at all in white girls and considers her constant vampire aura to be sexual harassment in the workplace.)
"Oh I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to harass you. I... I can be asian, if that would make it better. I can be asian all the way down to the DNA."
 
Wufan: "You're still not a proper filled TA-RZ6 Form followed by a sequenced and reported RD 7EAD actionable strike with detailed AAR plus IWY-8 QM form Rose. "

Jamelia's recent dalliance with family drama has left Job feeling rather cold.

Who's Wufan to deny Job someone to hold through the night?

Hmm, I'm going to need a roll from someone.




How average.



Not even average.

wufan youre letting the whole team down
 
Update CLXX: A Perfect Heist...
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.​
 
Last edited:
Oh god, there are some choice bits of loot here. I definitely think we should take the Spear of Destiny, because holy shit. Yeah, it might be a knockoff, but do you really want to risk leaving it floating around if it isn't?
 
Last edited:
Oh god, there are some choice bits of loot here. I definitely think we should take the Spear of Destiny, because holy shit. Yeah, it might be a knockoff, but do you really want to risk leaving it floating around if it isn't?
The true spear of destiny... wouldn't resonate with falsehood. Not saying it's useless, but the Lance of Longinus this ain't.

Is there any reason at all to grab either of the explosive loot choices? Those seem more like things to maybe use int he extraction than things to try to take with.

I find the file cabinet full of documents tempting.

The book is probably a copy of the Book of Caine. It won't be the original, though, and the only people who'd really want it would be vampires.

The uniform and medals look like they might be there mostly for nostalgia value. We should probably skip them.

That's another point. Some of this stuff is usable, some is renderable, some is salable. For the stuff that's mostly salable... who would we be selling it to?
 
Last edited:
I think we also found the Holy Grail.

I am curious about the sarcophagus though, and who it's for.
 
Along with how much we could get for stuff, I'm also thinking we might want to take into account how useful any of this stuff is for the what-his-face we're stealing this from. Not to benefit us in any particular way, but just because they're probably not up to anything good with it so if we can hinder that a bit, it'd probably be a good thing to do. So I think we should try and grab some of the more potent magic artifacts, and both of those sets of papers sound like things that are fairly important. I mean, the housing projects could just be a way to generate income, but I feel like there'd have to be some fishy shit a hemophage could get up to with that sort of thing. Just as a way to get more v-addicts, at least.
 
Loot

[x] An old-style Iteration X quantum computer, potentially rich with valuable data.

oh hai there special projects division, I was wondering when you'd show up.

[ ] A chest of ancient gold coins. It seems to lack any mystical significance, but that's a lot of gold.

It's money, but it's not that interesting. Pass.

[ ] 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.

Unfortunately, unless the artist turns out to be famous or something, these probably aren't that easy to pawn, and while getting yanked into a nightmare world through a canvas (for instance) is fun it's also kind of irrelevant. They are easy to move, though.

[x] 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.

I didn't choose the Eva life, the Eva life chose me. However, the only good IC justification is Donald wanting to con some Choristers out of their tass/render it down. It's apparently got some serious mojo, so it'd probably give us a good return, even if it's as fake as a big budget Hollywood flick.

[ ] 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.

Old collectibles? Cool, and also easy money. Matter 4 can preserve them, so long as we follow Henriette's instructions. On the other hand, cumbersome.

[ ] A file cabinet full of documents.

Could be useful, could be utterly useless. Cumbersome as all hell. Couldn't we have looked through it?

[ ] An Egyptian sarcophagus. Scans show that someone has stuffed it full of Semtex for an entirely inexplicable reason.

Pfff. Unfortunately, the Sarcophagus isn't easy to pawn (or move) quietly. Semtex might be useful, though. Put it down as a maybe.

[ ] A large harp which plays itself as things move around it. The strings are a bright red fiber.

Mystery box option? Sure.

Plunder

[x] Several briefcases worth of hundred dollar bills.

It's a rich vamp's world.

[ ] 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.

Interesting, but I'm not sure how useful it'd be. Not magic, and worthless to mundane sources - we'd have to sell it to vampires or mages interested in vampire lore, which is a pain.

[x] Mystic jewelry which seems to call out to the hemophage vitae in Rose, suggesting that she can manipulate it somehow.

Use for paradigm stretching? Render down into tass? Sell it with no regard for the consequences?

So many options. I'm taking it, more for paradigm reasons.

[ ] Sheet music which seems to spell out some sort of mystical musical ritual.

Render it into prime? The ritual might be cool, but we're rather paradigm locked out of it, and finding a buyer would probably be irritating because most people don't need sheet music.

[ ] 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.

use it. what could go wrong?

But yeah, free prime, and probably quite a bit of it. Awful resonance. While I'm all for making Rose embrace vampirism a bit, this feels like pushing it.

[x] 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.

Jamelia: What's that- *flashback time*

Donald: Uh.

Donald: Boss?

Jamelia: *be unconscious*

Doubt we could use it, but it's 'easy' to pawn to wizards (cause everyone wants magic swords) and rendering it down won't have the same nastiness as vampire stuff.

[ ] 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.

Nasty resonance. Some neat lore, maybe. It's like a compromise between the Chalice and the Book.

[ ] Ownership papers for various low-class housing projects in Los Angeles.

Money? (I don't know how real estate works)

[ ] A gold-plated AK-47 which makes Rose actively uncomfortable. It resonates with death and more than its share of war crimes.

Not even cool nasty resonance. We could probably sell it pretty easily though. Pass.

[ ] A set of medals and an officer's uniform from the Napoleonic Wars, very well preserved.

Oh man that'd piss off LaCroix. I'm tempted to yank it just for the 'it belongs in a museum' line potential.

Evacuation Considerations:

Well, we've got an exfiltration route planned - load ourselves into the truck. We haven't tripped any alarms yet. I'm tempted to go for a high speed, low drag option. Have someone leave the vault for a bit, and make sure the path to the garage is clear. Once the delivery is mostly unloaded, Rose grabs the stuff (the computer would probably have to be strapped to her back) and bolts so that we lose the guardian that's going to wake up. However, this means we can't take super-cumbersome loot.

I think we also found the Holy Grail.

'Holy'.
 
The true spear of destiny... wouldn't resonate with falsehood. Not saying it's useless, but the Lance of Longinus this ain't.

It's not resonating with falsehood. It's projecting an aura of falsehood, but as a Mage, we can see beyond that to see that it has some serious mojo. It could well be the legitimate Spear with a 'this isn't the real deal' effect stuck on it so people fall into the exact trap of thinking 'eh, it's just a knockoff. Cool to have though.'

I really think we should grab it, because even if, after actually analyzing it properly, we determine that it's a fake, it still 'has some serious mojo' which means if we render it down into tass or sell it on vbay we should be able to get a fairly good price in value for it.
 
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.
[X] 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.
[X] A file cabinet full of documents.

Early Hollywood originals are rare. Which means valuable.
And this is his superduperSEEEKRIT! vault. If it was boring documents, they'd be in the office upstairs. What's in here is stuff he wants hidden and safe.

...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.
[X] 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.
[X] 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.

That liquid is either valuable to powering up Rose, or full of juicy Prime to be rendered down. And swords are always fun/renderable for tass.

Open to ideas on how to evac, but Henriette 'discovering' the secret underground escape tunnel that opens into the vault sounds good.
 
Can't we just, like, ditch a drone in the vault to read through the documents while we scram with the rest? It's not like we need to take time to hack it. Even if there's a cipher, the drone can transmit the data out and we can decode it later.
 
I think we also found the Holy Grail.

I am curious about the sarcophagus though, and who it's for.
I'm pretty sure that's a cup that caught some of Chrit's blood while he was on the cross, and not the actual Grail. Probably.

Anyways, magic Enlightened Science can probably help here!

______________________________________

Donald was idely watching some cartoon about horses, trying to remember if it was traditionalist propaganda because of the omnipresent magic, or technocratic propaganda due to the conformist aspect. Maybe it was both? As the pink one multiplied herself, he heard the infiltrators finally reach the vault, where his assisstance would be needed the most.

"We've got a lot of stuff here Donald. Not sure if we're going to get it all in the van." The Void Engineer's clipped tones reminded Donald far too much of what a male Jamelia would be like. Secretive, by the books, Asian (the Middle East is Asia, right?)...

Flipping the channel to the camera Wulfan had on him, Donald grinned, both because the chest of gold coins was investment after his own heart, and because he could almost taste the value in the room. "No Wulfy, we can fit it all. You just have to follow my advice. And make sure you grab the haemophages on the way out." He then flipped open his laptop and pulled up his contacts list. Now who can I sell a trove of magic vampire shit to at this late hour?

Correspondence 4/Entropy 4 effect (might be better modeled as two effects, I don't have enough system mastery to tell), with Donald's specialties of Narrative Inevitability (the empty vault at the end of the heist) and multitasking (he's doing it while watching a pony show). Enhanced by Intelligence+Leadership? (I'm not sure what the best ability for this would be). Also enhanced by Guo and Rose, as they have relevant spheres. The effect is a Correspondence teleport of the goods (through the medium of... picking them up and moving them. Science), combined with an Entropy blessing to make sure they get to the drop-off point in one piece.
 
[X] An old-style Iteration X quantum computer, potentially rich with valuable data.

Link to Computer?

[ ] A chest of ancient gold coins. It seems to lack any mystical significance, but that's a lot of gold.

Gold is...gold, but gold is also just 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.

Lewd and scary. Hmm...good for Primal energy, but not actually interesting

[ ] 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 false Longinus?
Meh.

[X] 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.

Something to do with Planet Hollywood?

[X] A file cabinet full of documents.

Bland, probably not inherently valuable, but prized sufficiently to put in a vault with all these interesting things?

[ ] An Egyptian sarcophagus. Scans show that someone has stuffed it full of Semtex for an entirely inexplicable reason.

What I'm thinking is that this makes a fantastic diversion and coverup.

[ ] A large harp which plays itself as things move around it. The strings are a bright red fiber.

Spooky~

[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.

Human skin book of vampire lore...not reallyo ur area of interest.

[ ] Mystic jewelry which seems to call out to the hemophage vitae in Rose, suggesting that she can manipulate it somehow.

Vampire magic item, but goes further down the vampire route for Rose.
Maybe

[ ] Sheet music which seems to spell out some sort of mystical musical ritual.

RD knowledge for RDs.

[X] 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.

Holy Grail huh.
I'll take it. For the energy if nothing else.

[X] 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.

It's a magic sword. Use it or dispose it, tis cool.

[ ] 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.

Not really interesting.

[ ] Ownership papers for various low-class housing projects in Los Angeles.

This is...actually somewhat interesting to see what it relates to, but I don't know how we can exploit this without exposing ourselves.

[ ] A gold-plated AK-47 which makes Rose actively uncomfortable. It resonates with death and more than its share of war crimes.

Man with the Golden Gun.

[ ] A set of medals and an officer's uniform from the Napoleonic Wars, very well preserved.

Historical value?

[X] 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.
-[X] There's that sarcophagus full of explosive to repurpose...
 
Back
Top