Insane In The Membrane

## Background

A mysterious corporation is buying up large tracts of land in Redmond, occupying the Barrens and working to decontaminate the area. In the heart of Glow City, a toxic shaman has amassed a cult of radiation-worshipping mutant slaves, and the corp wants this threat dealt with preemptively.

## The Meet

With no public transportation to Redmond, every runner except Squint was able to fly or drive themselves. Squint had to hike in from the edge of the Barrens, arriving late to the meet. An old man named Knockers was there to greet them, acting as a host until the Johnson, a young man with red hair, arrived. The parameters of the job were laid out - receive a large paycheck for killing the toxic shaman and his cultist followers. A bonus was offered for retrieving a disabled armored transport from the cult's compound, and Rad-cloaks were provided to the team along with a functional APC.

## Legwork

The first thing the Runners did was determine that none of them could drive a ground vehicle of this size. Grond attempted to use magic to instill himself with expertise in giant armored cars, trying multiple times before finally giving up. With no other options, they found a nearby soldier and hired him as a driver+medic to deliver them to the site and back. Enter Specialist Jenkins, the most overqualified guard in Seattle.

## Run

It was a long, slow ride to Glow City along abandoned roads. The only excitement was when a back of mutant ork bikers tried to ambush the APC, swiftly being slaughtered by knives, mind magic, and Queen straight-up roundhouse kicking a moving bike into scrap metal. Another ork fell before her mighty blood axe as she literally clotheslined him with it.The lone survivor was mind-probed, obtaining fragments of memory behind a shattered insane psyche. He saw a strange ritual performed on an ork who had been grabbed up by a similar biker gang. A horrifically mutated ork chanted, and poured toxic waste with a large rusty ladle over the ork whose mind Grond invaded.

Reaching the compound itself, much debate ensued over the best way to approach the buildings undetected. Windwalker summoned an incredibly powerful tornado spirit at the cost of a fair bit of stress damage to himself, and reluctantly used its services to place the transport under a shield of magical concealment to get close to the camp. While Windwalker himself waited in the transport with the soldier, the other three launched their assault from multiple angles simultaneously. Squint began planting knives in the surprisingly resilient super-mutant orc cultists, while Queen raced ahead to clobber more distant sentries. Grond repeatedly attempted to mind-control the gathered cultists into suicide, but their unnaturally resilient willpower made it a slow process with only one at a time succumbing.

Meanwhile, Windwalker's tornado spirit had been unleashed with a simple command - kill the toxic shaman and all of his allies. It swept into the largest building, finding the primary target there, and proceeded to comply with its orders by electrocuting the shaman into a pile of smoking ashes with one bolt. Its next target was the now-unbound toxic spirit of radiation the shaman had Conjured - but Queen had other ideas. She leaped into action, charging into the building and delivering a mighty punch to the sentient, howling column of compact nuclear fire before falling back to the ground with her arm almost melted off and horrific burns to the rest of her body. The tornado spirit finished off the badly wounded toxic spirit, clearing the way for Squint to rush in and drag Queen free of the irradiated building. This brought him into view of the armored transport they had been offered a bonus to recover, which turned out to have functional weaponry manned by cultists. The mighty cyclops barely held his feet under the onslaught of machine gun fire, but endured long enough for the tornado spirit to finish its job by slaughtering the cultist gunners.

The runners were ready to evacuate and deliver the horribly irradiated Queen to a decontamination chamber, but Grond insisted on delaying while they tried to fix the broken transport. Specialist Jenkins, trying to hold the sloughing skin in place with bandages, protested. "You really want to let your comrade suffer like this for a few nuyen?!" The young man had become somewhat enamoured of the large, brave woman. He wasn't sure if Queen was insane, or just fearless, but regardless, he'd been impressed by her actions on the Run thus far. More attempts to magically instill automotive knowledge failed, and in the end they simply hitched the armored vehicle to the back of their functional one and slowly towed it back to base. Queen was rushed into intensive care for radiation treatment, while the others collected their pay and went to sleep off significant magically-induced headaches.

## Aftermath

The runners received a full payout for the run, and a bonus for recovering the armored transport. The delay in time this cost them resulted in Queen suffering additional radiation poisoning, though, resulting in a treatment regiment of chemotherapy to kill her super-cancer. The exact details of the toxic ritual used to create the super-mutant orks remained unknown.

## Rewards

* 6 Karma
* 52,000 Nuyen
* 2 CDP
* The reclamation corporation was willing to sell the runners vehicles or heavy machine guns at a 50% discount, up to 20,000 nuyen worth.
* Queen recieved Spc. Jenkins, the driver/medic, as a bonus contact.
* Queen was given the negative quality Weak Immune System to represent her ongoing cancer treatments.
* Windwalker gained an ordeal credit towards initiation for cleansing the world of a toxic cult.

## Player After-Action Reports

*In Character* accounts of events, general impressions, or memorable moments