The Team

## Fargo Shadowrunners

So, Fargo is just big enough and has enough trouble to support shadowrunners, sure. Part-timers mostly, people who will do the occasional crime for money, but generally speaking only one team at a time of full-time shadowrunners. For the last quarter of a century the Team has been run by the Underberg Family and can be hired by reaching out to them.

### The Current Team

*To fuck around is metahuman, to find out is divine...*

-Ki-Rin
(Registered as "Team: Counting Coup" with the Draco Foundation)

The latest incarnation of the team is a six-person squad made up of a combination of locals and outsiders, formed by the Underbergs in the wake of the destruction of the previous Team.

Currently Active

* Gild -  A relative newcomer, social engineer, ran some with the previous Team, also co-founder of MALSIN
* Ki-Rin - A Drone rigger from out West, rumor pegs her as a technomancer, co-creator of the Veritas worm
* Techno - A hot-shot decker who might be an AI , co-creator of the Veritas worm
* Ivory - Their new Mage, hit it big in Denver and then returned to Fargo for reasons he refuses to make clear.
* Fade - What's the deal with this guy? Seems to have come out of nowhere. Definitely a PhysAd, might be more...
* *Hyde* - Not a lot of info here. If you have something on this one, pop it in MALSIN and we'll post it here.

Former Members

* Linc Yellowjacket - Has retired to focus on the Linc-Up
* Ether - Has made it known that she is no longer available for general 'running
* Alvie Kelp - A runner from Back East. Sniper and infiltration expert. Word on the street has it that she's out-of-town for awhile.

These guys have been operating since last summer, and so far they've been wildly successful on the jobs they've done. The Underground Rumor Mill has been buzzing with their exploits (names courtesy of the wags over at Matrix Free Fargo).

* "The Organ Trail" - The theft of a black-ops genetically-engineered bovine immune organ from the experimental Ag Labs at NDRU. While not as well known, this run has had far-reaching effects, both discrediting the Old Man 's heir Dr. Richard Kaeding and accidentally catapulting hero-cop Russell Tallboy to Matrix stardom.
* "Get Me From The Church on Time." - This is the big one so far. The daring daylight extraction of GCS exec Nelson Klein from Last Lutheran Church during The Old Man 's funeral. It was big, flashy and utterly successful. It has gathered them a cult following (follow Race Cannon on YouTrix for the viral footage) and provoked a response from local law enforcement .
* "Payrolled" - A good old-fashioned false flag operation, to incriminate the Group in the eyes of NeoNET and foul the massive ass-saving loan from the latter to the former. While there were complications including a Mana Storm, a simultaneous attempt at skulduggery by Foxtrot Uniform's own Ramon Torres that got him kill, a Matrix Brawl with NeoNET's own Novamind F AI and Gild having an extended chat with a security Technomancer, for the most part they were able to do the job and leave just ahead of CorpSec. Honestly, what gave them the most trouble with a side-gig where Doc Guana asked Gild and Linc to save Race Cannon from the Storm (and his own idiocy) when he took a bunch of mana-storm-chasers out in the Tin Box to see the River at Her meanest. Which, unfortunately they did. The rescue mostly went off well (with the exception of an angry Goose spirit) but Race posted the footage with Linc and Gild's faces on it. There was a race to remove the footage from YouTrix which ended with Techno re-introducing "rick-rolling" to the Sixth World.
* "Farmerun" - The team is hired by Ares Agribusiness to find out what's been killing workers (and spooking the Roamer families that provide them) during the sugar beet harvest. They manage to clear the local ghouls from blame, they rally the families untangle a web of Crystal Ag corruption, Jack cultists, soul (and essence) -draining dreams and finally confront the mysterious spirit possessing the Jack leader and eating field workers' souls. This mostly goes as planned.
* "Comcall of the Wild" - The team is hired by Cave Callahan to go up north, past Winnipeg and retrieve the footage from the latest "Neil the Ork Barbarian" sim, which he has bankrolled and which director Eric Jonrosh has absconded with, as well as the entire crew. It turns out that the crew has lost their drek, done some bad chips and been possessed by strange spirits. What follows is a long series of encounters with the various possessed cast members in which they are, by and large, stunned and exorcised, culminating in a confrontation with the tech chief, who has been possessed by a spirit that is using a local Numbers Station to form a portal to the metaplanes. This also ends in the subject being stunned to shit and the portal fading away.
* "The Last Strand" - The week before Thanksgiving 2075 the team was hired by the new leader of the PPU to retrieve some information that the late weatherman Eric Strand had been gathering for the PPU on his off time. The last person known to have had their hands on it was the detective Natalie Dickinson, in the pay of Strand's grieving family, who, unfortunately had taken a 20-story header off the top of the Block the night before and was very, very dead. And everybody, from JointSec, to ADA Joanna Kramer (ex-wife of Strand) to Ares (using a shadowrunner named Catspaw they'd hired from Tsehestano) was looking to get their hands on it. During the legwork, Linc was called away to intercept the astral form of Harukor the missing Knight Errant mage in the West Acres Memorial, during which he confronted the gray spirits the team had encountered before and which Linc now dubbed 'Wailers' and alerted the SINless communities to their presence. This led to a meet with the Riverling crews in which it was discovered that the thief Sundown was the last to have the information and that she was trapped in the maintenance shafts of the Block. At pretty much the same time, Kramer was shot on her way to meet with Helen Ness of the Group and the Block was now on lock-down. The Team, now accompanied by local guide Race Cannon so-called "Riverling Shadowrunner", raced to retrieve Sundown, leading to a short, complex confrontation that saw them blow a hole in the Block, shut down the TransForum's broadcasts, possess some drones, kill a bunch of cops, crash a police helicopter and saw Techno slug it out with TANNIN in a porn server. In the end, though, they got Sundown out, they escaped JointSec and they got Sundown and the info back to the PPU, who, promptly broadcast the truth of the Old Man's death over the currently empty airwaves...

**A Week in Scourgeatory**: alright, this is Gurkha, I'm going to come out from behind writerly curtain to editorialize a little on this one, because there's a lot going on, because I was there and because the official sources are putting around a lot of bulldrek about these events. The events of the week of Dec 16-21 were pretty complicated so I'm going to break it down into four sections. This is the straight chip-truth and you're not going to be getting that anywhere else.

* **Opening Moves:** So, early in that week, Linc went chasing after irregularities in the local ley lines (Ghost knows I don't know drek about it, if you want to, ask a mage) and hit the beehive, scaring up a Hoodlum attack. Taking advantage of this, Linc bound the Hoodlum, gathered a whole bunch of the great and the good from both sides of the shadows (JL, Perfection, the boys from the Pontoppidan Society and others) to ask it some hard questions. A lot of disturbing answers came out of that little session, and I don't understand all of it, but the big take-away was that TANNIN (and TANNIN's partner-in-crime Ness) had been working with some big bad THING from beyond our plane (the sperethiel term they used was ***'**Erendis*') to bring it through to our world and that THING had been slowly corrupting TANNIN's operations and weaving a spell into its code (which should absolutely **not** be possible, but what the drek do I know?). And it was revealed that a ritual to bring this 'Erendis' through to our world was in the offing for the night of Fri Dec 20, the Winter Solstice at the end of this very week. Of course, we didn't get to finish largely due to an interruption by JointSec goons and everybody had to go to ground. But not before Linc gave the Hoodlum one last command: Go Punch Hector Belasco in the Dick. Which it did.
* **Wasted Acres:** After a quick-but-complicated visit to the hospital bed of Hector Belasco, The Team sat out both the manhunt and manablizzard of Wed Dec 18 (during which I'm told they had to deal with some of the nasties that come with manablizzards sometimes) in an Underberg safehouse. There they were contacted by Race and Max Lou, who hired them to fetch Race's chief, the enigmatic Riverling technomancer The Source, back from a mission to Wasted Acres, where she'd disappeared into. They tracked the Source as far as the ruined mall at the epicenter of that wasteland itself and fought Dissonance-possessed drones, cybered-up ghouls and the Group's own runner Catspaw, who'd been sent in before them, all of which they dispatched with their usual high-octane talent for violence. They ended up having to confront the master of this army of the infected and possessed, the Group's head of R&D, the mad mage Dr. Courtney Rugen, who had been experimenting on The Source to try and find a way to manipulate the Resonance 'Project Calling Bird'. Rugen's time in the massive background count of Wasted Acres had gone entirely toxic, even though she was a hermetic. The team captured her and took a side trip to Chicago to sell her off the DIMR. While there, they hired on three of Linc's old gangmates as muscle (Chele, Cutter and Mote).
* **Holiday Party/Practice Run:** In an attempt to get paid for stopping the ritual, the Team waylayed/kidnapped Ness' rival and a potential sacrifice for the ritual Logan Offutt on Thurs night and he told them about the manipulation of the ley lines being done from Belasco's home lab in the Harwood Securitract, and they negotiated a handsome payment from him to burgle/shut down said lab. They discovered upon arrival that Hector was holding a Solstice party (a little early, he did, after all, have a 'work thing' the next night) and sent one team in to infiltrate the lab while another team sowed chaos. This included, among other things, Gild infamously lighting the 7th floor tennis court on fire with an incendiary grenade and Techno suborning the BSI troop's heads-up displays. When an alarm went off, Hector cleared out his guests just before he was blown to hell with grenades. The Team grabbed notes, blew up the lab, fled the scene ahead of UCAAF fighter craft and went to get paid.
* **Attack the Block:** The morning of Fri Dec 20 started badly with Offutt not showing up to the agreed upon meet with the Team to pay them. Turns out he and several of his magical circle at Centralia Commune north of town had been caught up in a BSI sweep and were being held for custody. The Team knew now that not only was breaking up the ritual that night the only thing that could save Fargo from an ancient god of slavery, but also their last, best chance of being paid for it. They contacted their allies (Sèvis nan Eksil, PPU, Crop Circle, Roamers, Riverwalkers etc) and came up with a plan. Linc transferred the spirit of missing Knight Errant mage Harukor (who he'd been carrying around in himself since October) to Soteria, summoned a couple of major league spirits and they concocted an approach by which they would attack the block on three fronts: Physically, with the PPU (and a possessed Russell Tallboy!) doing a diversionary attack, and also sending Soteria (w/Harukor) and Russell into Scourgeatory itself to cut the connections to the material plane, Magically, with the Team wiping out the back-up mages and disrupting the ritual and Online, with Techno and Kirin blocking TANNIN with spam and ransomware and Veritas, the cutest little worm program you ever saw. And it worked! After a lot of violence, TANNIN was working on purging the ERENDIS code corrupting its system, the ritual was stopped, Ness was killed (along with a lot of BlockSec and all of the Supermodern Design Team) and closed the gate to Scourgeatory, driving the Wailers from our world (for now anyway).
* **PS: An Aftermath:** Of course we all know what happened after that. The SDF descended on the Block, GOD descended on the Grid, Ares called in the Group's debts and took over and now the cops in our streets are Knight Errant instead of BSI. And the Team? I heard they got away, although you're going to have ask someone else if you want to know where, 'cause I ain't saying.

### 2076

* **Things to do in Denver while you're WISE:** After all the fallout from the events of December, the team looked mostly to their own business, (some bowing out of the Game for good, at least for now). What were they up to? Ask 'em yourself, kid, where I come from "snitches" still get stitches, *so ka*? Anyway, as always its the Family that called them together. My sources say that Carla Myhre has taken Brady's place as the Family's liaison to the Team and she called them in to deal with the WISE situation (you remember those WISE chips from a couple months back, right? Ugh. Nasty stuff) up in Winnipeg. Word is they hung around there a bit, did some digging and then headed down to Denver, where it turns out they were making the fraggin' things. Once they got down there, well, its Denver and things apparently went the way things usually do once you cross those borders into the FRFZ, and stepped shin-deep into some kinda twisted-up bulldrek involving a corporate cop sting, another shadowrun team, the Russian Mob and maybe a Drake, along with a lot of magic and bullets, depending on who you ask. Anyway, my old chummer High Crane says it all ended up for the best, and the one thing I can tell you is that there haven't been any new WISE chips on the streets since then, and the Family, the Tiospaye and the Chinook have been bringing the boot down on anyone who has any old ones...
* **Cabin in the Woods:** OK, now this is kinda what 'running is all about. Because you've probably already read about this 'run, only you didn't even know it. Remember that shareholder meeting the Group and Ares held at the end of March? The one where Logan Offutt got his hoop kicked around in public by Heather Evanston? Well, the Team was behind that. Turns out ol' Logan was planning a little shareholder palace coup, based around a deal with a bunch of investors to buy out Ares' interest in the Group. But somebody put down good nuyen to have them disrupt all that. And that they did, 'cause no sooner are they on the job, stuff starts happening, rumors about Nelson Klein resurfacing, Kendra Westby (who just happened to be one of the brains behind Logan's little play) being found handcuffed in the basement of the Gardner, and taking a 'leave of absence' shortly thereafter, bits and pieces of various financial indiscretion here and there, ending in a marvelous bit of chaos involving the Rose Creek militia and some red mescaline at Logan's personal hunting lodge, all of which had the cumulative effect of spooking even the most hardened suits, and sent Logan's investors running. And that's how you do it, effective enough to see it in the papers, but done skillful enough that nobody can connect it to you...

And that was just the beginning of a busy year for our home Team, mostly out-of-town as the corpos pick up the pieces after last year, and things get back to "Normal" around here. This includes, but is not limited to... (I'll flesh these out when I've got some slotting spare time or if somebody else volunteers... \*hint, hint\*)

* Breaking legendary revolutionary (and Ivory's old chummer) Rakim 6 out of prison.
* Going to the premier of the next big Neil the Ork Barbarian movie...
* Run overseas in Cairo, reppin' the home town in the big leagues...
* And now, rumor has it, they're back in the 'Plex, finally sorting out all the Kooba bulldrek...

### The Previous Team

The previous Shadowteam (usually simply called 'The Team' or 'The Fargo Team' by out-of-towners) was a three-runner squad, with numerous part-timers hired on to fill the gaps when the need arose. They operated from the early 2060's to 2075 when they were geeked in the field, best as anyone can tell on the evening of 7/3/75 or the morning of 7/4/75, the day their bodies were found washed up on the banks ofthe Red River.

* Roadwork - Rigger and leader of The Team
* The Thunder - local sports star turned runner in the Shadows
* Lady Lightrider - mage and the conscience of the team.

#### Other Runners

Roadwork's Team often worked with other talent as the jobs required it and there are some notable names in surrounding areas who have worked with them.

* Golden Boy - Winnipeg's own PhysAd superhero
* Iktomi - Drek Hot decker out of the Oceti Sakowin
* Lake Rat - Rigger and Smuggler, Works out of Detroit Lakes with the Lake Devils
* Popcorn - Outlaw Tech from Seattle, worked with the Team until joining the Tiospaye.
* Gild - Started out doing contract work with this version of the Team
* Ether - Used to hire on occasionally as extra muscle with the Team during the early 60's.

### Earlier Versions of the Team

**The First Fargo Team (Mid-2030's to Mid-2040's)**

**The "New Team " (2046 to 2059)**

### Other Teams

* Other Places also have Shadowrunners

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