Magitek Enterprises

## Background

Magitek Enterprises is a company that provides magic and technology services.

## In Corporate SINs

Magitek contacted Elsie one evening at 7:30. A research team comprised of one researcher (also referred to as an engineer) and two assistants (one of them was subsequently called by her first name, Terra) had gone missing a one hour earlier.

MMFEC were soon on their way to Magitek's Bothell unremarkable offices, in a generic corporate park.

Despite repeated inquiries, the subject of the team's legal and experimental research was to remain secret. Magitek wanted information about the location their team, and their extraction if they had been abducted. Payment was discussed and agreed upon. Fang didn't like that corporate interests were clearly put before the people's.

Miss J contacted Ma1nfram3 to offer her own deal. This run could somehow be related to Hand of Dusk. As they made clear in Ep 51, MMFEC were aware that getting information, let alone sharing it with Miss J, was betrayal of Magitek's trust in itself.

Ma1nfram3 started investigating the activities of the group before their disappearance, using the key time points she was able to retrieve from the corrupted surveillance Magitek could provide. This uncovered a clue that later proved important: Terra was wearing a necklace in the morning's piece of footage where she was working with her two assistants (a human and an ork) but no longer in the pieces taken after lunch. At around 5:30 PM, on the latest relevant video, Terra was seen standing, her two colleagues prone on the ground. Gassed, as Fang immediately thought?

Mordecai summoned Beast Sharky to offer a spirit patrolling the premises fifty grams of reagents in exchange for information about the researchers. This spirit mentioned a breach of security that had occurred earlier. Ma1nfram3 then found the relevant footage, showing two individuals escorted out hobbling, stumbling, to a nondescript shadowrunning van.

Terra's personnel file taught Elsie she had been a lower-level assistant with an undergraduate degree for three years, with no incidents to report.

Fang's hypothesis that the kidnappers were Scarlet Fyre was soon all but dismissed.

Mordecai, determined to know more about Magitek's research, which they had volunteered was magical in nature, detected unusual astral signatures in trees on the premises. These were similar to that of the dual-natured (also described as different) mana barrier he had detected earlier. This same mana barrier later caused him a weird tingle and was found to also be an actual wall. Magitek was as adamant about withholding information about the barrier as they had been regarding their research.
Cromwell's critical glitch at fetching a piece of unusual tree provided Elsie the opportunity she needed to palm a sample herself, undetected.

As MMFEC were wondering whether it had been the same Terra the whole day, Lauren asked Cheryl how Ma1nfram3 would check this. Ma1nfram3 eventually compared palm scans taken at different times and found that they were very close but different.

By that time, it was clear something had happened during lunch. MMFEC found out these employees had had lunch that day, as usual, at the food court of a mall nearby.

After Mordecai found traces of magic at the place where the van that had taken the missing team away, MMFEC were off to the mall and its food court.

Mai1nfram3 jacked into the mall's host, looking for relevant security footage. Her

> *They're trying too hard!*
>
>

 and easy hacking job meant the mall had invested more in Matrix fancy than Matrix security.

Ma1nfram3 hacked into the mall's advertising history to try and follow Terra's trip in the mall. Lauren likened this to *undoing gift wrapping*. Encryption meant the data were seen only by Horizon, which ran the ad services. It turned out Terra had visited the food court, "Veronica's Diary" and "Never 22".

Elsie interrogated people, found out that Terra shopped at Veronica's Diary.

Mordecai started on a creepy 10-minute long side quest that involved harassing a lady who was in no way related to the run.

Their investigations led Elsie to guess that Terra's alleged kidnappers would have swapped her with their own person in a discreet location, such as Veronica's Diary's bathrooms.

Ma1nfram3's investigations showed that Terra had *lost* her necklace before joining her two colleagues at the food court. She also saw the shadowrunners' van. Later, she saw Terra leaving a dressing room, alone, and in different clothes. She didn't return to the food court with her coworkers and nobody else left the dressing room.

Fang and Cromwell, after a discussion involving bras and straps, entered Veronica's Diary together, posing as a mistreated husband and mistress, to get information about and retrieve the lost necklace. Fang also shopped for a yellow bra she used as an excuse to go to the dressing rooms, with Cromwell in tow. Cromwell detected an astral signature he inferred was related to the mage abducting Terra. The clerk came back with the necklace they were looking for. Their mission there finished, Fang and Cromwell, who were willing to spend more time in the dressing room, were reminded of the store's policy against so-called indecent acts in the dressing rooms.

Meanwhile, Elsie had started investigating the dressing rooms of Never 22 while trying to resist an itch to steal something.

Mordecai had to feign interest in buying messaging boxers to approach and astrally investigate the dressing room pinpointed by Ma1nfram3. He found that an *Influence* spell had been cast, and that an *Illusion* spell was ongoing at the time. All in all, the store's clerk had a hard time managing strange customers, Lauren a fun time playing here and teamwork paid for MMFEC.

Using the footage of the cameras hacked into by Ma1nfram3, MMFEC ultimately found out how Terra had left the mall and been replaced with a mage.

Ma1nfram3, running the plates, and Sharky, following the mage's spell, both managed to track the van that had taken the research team away from the mall to the place where it had stopped and on to its present trip on SR 522. With their two vans and Elsie's bike, using their skills in unison, from close by or from farther away, MMFEC followed the van to the warehouse where it stopped. The fact that another van an two vans were also there could only mean that the captives were going to be transferred to a different team and the transfer did take place. The outfits of the new captors, their van and their bikes, all suggested that they were on the level of Scarlet Fyre.

As all the vehicles involved left, MMFEC's job was made easier by the tracker successfully placed by Cromwell on the "new" van's back door.

In case it was not clear enough to MMFEC already, Elsie was scolded by Lauren's sarcastic Miss J for letting the exchange to a better team take place.

As the kidnappers' van was not speeding, MMFEC could come close enough for Ma1nfram3 to break into the vehicle and "own" it, which started an epic battle on moving vehicles between a mostly adequate team and a really adequate one.

The kidnappers summoned a spirit of their own.

Ma1nfram3 didn't manage to cause real damage to the van she had hacked into.

After the biker she had assaulted failed to flip Fang from his bike, Fang was successfully hit by a spell that urged her to leave the scene and go back home. Mordecai failed to dispel this spell.

As one of the kidnappers used a grapple gun to jump on MMFEC's van, Elsie shouted:

> *These guys are the worst!* (even comparing them to Becky).
>
>

To which Lauren replied:

> *These guys have a job, you're attacking them.*
>
>

Elsie then immediately failed to hit this guy with a called shot.
By the time two drones flew out of the kidnappers' van towards Dynah, and Lauren cruelly remarked that

> *You made your choices. Live with it!*
>
>

it had become clear MMFEC were no match for that team.

The straw that broke the troll's back was the kidnappers' spirit lashing out at Cromwell with massive (22, Armor -7) fire damage on Cromwell, who had to use edge to resist it. Still, as he had gone berserk, he proceeded to attack the spirit rather than than flee, but soon passed out, was kicked down and had to permanently burn edge to avoid death.

Instead of pressing their advantage, the kidnappers pulled away faster. Rubbing MMFEC's nose in it, Lauren remarked that:

> *The mage seems pretty content.*
>
>

Elsie, looking for Cromwell, had to avoid the cars that had started to rear-end each other after the traffic had brutally stopped, before she could collect him. She would then wait with him for DocWagon, knowing that Knight Errant would not interfere.

After Elsie had remarked that *Our two tanks are out of the game* and Mordecai had taken some more damage, Ma1nframe suggested that they GTFOH. Land Sharky started slamming the ground for lack of a vehicle to hit, and the drones shot one of Dynah's tires before Ma1nfram3 and Mordecai renounced and got out. Fang was still running home under the influence of the mage's spell.

The episode concluded with Lauren narrating that MMFEC would grudgingly be given ¥6,000 each for finding the research team, and the disappointed client would give them a bad review on ShadowYelp. Miss J simply thanked them for their efforts. Lauren's final words:

> *So, MMFEC lives to, mostly lives to run another day.*
>
>

The next episode started with Cromwell recovering in a hospital room.

1. ↑ See Ep 50. This took place several days after Elsie's birthday. Magitek had found MMFEC thanks to great reviews on the Shadowrunners' Yelp.
2. ↑ And no, there was nothing for MMFEC to see beyond that door.
3. ↑ Spoiler: the details didn't matter in the end.
4. ↑ I don't remember this being discussed in depth, but it suggests that the barrier is related to Magitek's mysterious research.
5. ↑ Thus concludingEp 50.
6. ↑ There are also a Soyway and a RadioShack selling mementos of the '90s in this mall. Because why not?
7. ↑ Real time.
8. ↑ Which reminds me of an early episode where Elsie did something very similar, by the way.
9. ↑ thus depriving me of a funny update to Fangwell and MMFEC of a dressing room-related meme to go with *Buffing in the bathroom*.
10. ↑ In something I would call the 6th World equivalent of Chinese Shadows.
11. ↑ 7 if I count well: MMFEC's 2 vans and 1 bike, 1st baddies team's 1 van, 2nd baddies team's 1 van and 2 bikes.
12. ↑ Note: how could they have prevented it? Were they too slow despite their effective teamwork? Not clear to me.
13. ↑ Dynah? My notes are not clear.
14. ↑ A running joke whose origin I don't recall.
15. ↑ Tony may have used the word *used* but burned seems fitting, considering.
16. ↑ Speaking of traffic, Seattle Street News relayed several traffic warning alerts about this incident. See here, here and here.
17. ↑ Ep 51.