Zero Blitz

## **Metaplot Summary**

One cold winter day, a job posting appeared. It was poorly made and had somehow slipped through the carefully-designed cracks of the Farmer’s Market screening procedures, but the 20 large NuYen it offered meant that fixers snatched it up before anyone noticed. It wanted only one thing - *FOOTBALL* - and it wanted it to be played by the book. Whose book? Nobody knows, but it was going to be a nice, clean game of football, by God, even if that football happened to be a little larger than historical regulation permitted and also contained 9 kilograms of extremely high grade plastic explosives. The field was 16.6 kilometers long and ran over lakes, rivers, highways, and through houses and office buildings, but the players wanted the win, so they swallowed their pride and ran the yards.

With ALL-CITY toprocking into the endzone, the first game was decided; Federated-Boeing was defeated 7-0. The New York Jets were back, baby, and they were riding high on their first win in over 60 years. Suck it, AFC East.

Now "FOOTBALL FEVER" has taken over Seattle. The jobs are coming fast, easy, and always high paying, though they universally come with bizarre requirements and zero explanation. Who’s this mysterious Johnson? An AI? A dissonant technomancer? A dissonant AI? Some sicko with an American football fetish? Is it just some elaborate troll or modern art?

## **Factions**

### **football football foOTBALL FOOTBALL**

Foot… Ball? Nobody really has any idea what’s going on here, except that these jobs are highly unconventional and the runners are generally hand-picked by the Johnsons. They seem strangely excited about the awakened, and especially enamored with dog shifters.

**???** - A nearly incoherent Johnson with an extreme aversion to matrix users and a penchant for FOOTBALL. They occasionally have lucid moments and are able to communicate clearly for only brief periods of time. Their meets are like a fever dream and their counter-offers are inscrutable. They only communicate through obvious proxies. They’re also apparently maintaining a stat tracker for their employees, which is posted to the Farmer’s Market BBS and updated after every “game.”

**Laika** - Originally speaking through the “football”/”star” recovered by Yubbe, Laika prefers to communicate via voice projected through small speakers and is always concealed by complicated repeater networks. She speaks with a significant time delay, but otherwise seems very lucid and normal when compared to her colleagues. She’s often vague to the point of frustration and is very quick to dodge any and all questions. She normally has very strict job requirements.

**Tycho/Sarasti** - Utilizes distributed networks for messaging to communicate to most people. He’s recognizable thanks to a 72 character line limit and a habit of prefacing every line of text with a percent sign. He seems just as confused as the runners he hires, but assures them that it’s for the best; after all, it's hard for anyone else to know what you’re doing if *you* don't even know. He seems a bit more jaded than the others, but is apt to ask for feedback and makes an effort to accommodate his employees.

**Azad** - A magician. Not on great terms with Tycho/Sarasti. Prefers voice communications, and sounds like an effeminate man in his late 20s. Claims to have a ThD from MIT&T but hasn’t used magic in a long while, making basic mistakes when speaking to Khen and Yubbe.

#### Goals

Nothing that anyone can really understand here as of now. ~~EXCEPT GET TOUCHDOWNS~~