A job back home in Hamburg

Spark's contact Ana got at her about an urgent job, a pickup, if the crew was ready and available ASAP. We'd have to go to the dock ward. Of course.
A woman answered the comm pickup at the dockside bar Wolf's Den. "I'm wounded and need discreet transportation to my safe house. Directions on pickup."
Linus, an Ork mechanic who runs a shop near my house, is not answering his comm so I couldn't get us a vehicle conducive for the job. (I only own a dune buggy and a heavy duty motorcycle.)
Great. Blitz went invisible and headed out of Spark's flat looking for a car to swipe. The two of them hacked a car. And it worked. Huh. Guess they're worth keeping around. I pushed Blitz into the back seat and grabbed the wheel.
It was a crowded night at the professional bar. The Human woman we needed to collect was in a back booth shielding an injury and nursing a drink. Her long ponytail spilled out from under her shooter's cap and she was in nondescript clothing. "What took so long?" she said in German. We handled the terms and the plan.
In her attempt to leave she doubled over and grabbed the table, her satchel swinging into view. We left, Spark leading her with me near our guest. I had Blitz hang back and cover our six. "The Johnson I just did a job for, his goon squad," she said when I asked her who I would be trying to avoid on the drive to her place. In the back seat on the way there, Blitz peeled off the woman's jacket, and there was a lot of blood. As we got closer to her place, she said: "Um, the neighborhood we are now is really 'haggard.'" She asked us inside to get paid. Yes, please.
The apartment building was a concrete pre-fab hell hole. Deep in the bowels of the building it seems to transform into a reasonable place to live. Once she got into her unit she sat down at a desk with a lamp on and her laptop open. "What's your fee?" she asked us. Spark said: "Four thousand for quick extraction. Four thousand for the patch up." "Done," she said, adding to Blitz, "Hey, big boy, can you get me a beer from the fridge and get one for yourself?" I sat on my haunches near the unit's front door. The room is stocked with boxes with the logos of high tech armament companies.
She wanted to go get the money for the job she had just done, to be able to pay us. Before we could leave, she shouted: "We've got company!" as she saw people moving in on the building from her laptop security camera feed. We all grabbed some payload, me getting a Remington bolt action rifle.
Two idiots came down the stairs toward us. "I want to get us out of here, through these fools, find that fucker and get our money," she said. "I appreciate the assistance you offer but you are our meal ticket so stay behind me," I said to her. We headed out of her unit into the hallway.
Blitz sent out a blast of stun energy that knocked the first two enemies onto their asses. We head for the vehicle, hugging the walls of the hallway. It was dark.
More foot falls were coming toward us. Spark snuck up to the corner and flipped a grenade (courtesy of our current employer) around the corner. Whoa. I hooked an arm around our employer and pressed her against the wall to protect her from any blast. She urged me up to the two stunned goons, then executed them. Whoa again.
The grenade rolled away from us, and the intended victims panicked and ran, well, right at us! BOOM! Dust, debris, smoke and trash all sandstorm'ed the hallway. Blitz threw a hand out at one bad guy, and flung him at the wall. I flipped my cyber-eyes over to thermographic mode, shot the lone remaining threat and rounded the corner. The hallway area ahead was clouded with debris. An engine (or more than one?) was revving outside and the sound of more footfalls could be heard. I peeked up the stairs to the surface and natural light was poking into the building. There's one bad guy crouched at the top of the stairwell.
My attempt to indicate to Blitz that there was one foe at the top of the stairs was lost in the fog of war. He advanced past me, unlimbering his borrowed shotgun and firing up the stairs. Spark followed, firing her pistol and killing the man at the top of the stairs. Return fire hits Spark from an unseen shooter. Blitz continued running crouched over up the stairs, slinging his weapon, swinging his head in pursuit of the threat to neutralize it. We strode up the stairs and saw that there was a guy in the driver's seat of an Escalade-looking truck in the alley. Another dude was between the truck and us. "Take them out!" I yelled to Blitz, pointing at the two targets. Our employer nudged me aside and gunned down a bad guy who was hiding up the fire escape. Nice.
Blitz blasted the foe standing outside the vehicle but he stayed up. Spark shot him and advanced on the truck. The vehicle lurched backward, trying to flee. "We need to take that truck!" I continued to yell. So Blitz strode up to the truck and sent a stunning concussion at the driver. It slammed him out cold, but the air back went off. Regardless, the four of us hopped in.

The team does the leg work // Then the job

Spark ducked into the alley I was in, drew her Ares Viper and pulled the trigger. A flechette round exploded from the barrel, back out into the street. It didn't miss but it was hard to tell how much damage the victim took.
Blitz yelled: "What's going on out there?!" His magical energy continued to crackle. I spun around and shoved my gun barrel into the skulker's back to make sure he didn't go anywhere. I couldn't see Braun from where I was.
Out in the mouth of the alley the garbage of the street stirred as an elemental manifested. The Elf shot at it. (I wasn't even sure if it would work.) But the flechettes seemed not to harm it.
I screwed the silencer on the gun and did little more than execute the skulker. "GO!" I shouted at Blitz so he could deal with the elemental. And, oh, did he ever.
An arch of electricity ripped down from above, struck the elemental and seemed to affect it. The elemental came at us, a swirling mist of barely tangible mater. My vision went hazy and I felt my breath stolen away. Black spots grew in my sight line, compounding the slight sense of nausea I felt from killing.

The Elemental that attacked us

I fled back to the main street, looking for the mage but instead I saw an armored patrol van of the Army. So I stepped back into the alley and yelled at the crew to flee down the way to the other end, to get away from the elemental and the patrol van.

Blitz cast another spell at the elemental, shattering it, then backed down the alley away from me. I hugged the wall and raced to catch up with the team, past the elemental clinging to existence.

I led the team stealthily toward the objective. I say 'stealthily' because that was my intention. But...

Well, it went fine but it took sooooo long and was quite stressful. We ducked under an obstacle and got back out onto the thoroughfare.

The Outpost loomed in front of us; I expected Braun to clue us in but he was in a shell shocked haze, like was just idling along next to us.

The Outpost

The battle scarred neighborhood showed all the signs of combat. In a reasonably unaffected area, a sign blinks: The Outpost and Open below that. Upon entry the silence was deafening. A number of older male veterans of combat sat around while a bartender cleaned glasses. Spooky quiet. I scanned for Powzu as the Elf led the way to the bar. Braun stayed outside, with a comm channel open.

The other two retired to a booth while I approached a lone dwarf at the bar. "We are on a bit of a look around and I hope someone might be able to help," I said, then motioned to the bartender to get us a round. A surprisingly dance-able tune came on the digital jukebox, courtesy of Spark. I slid 100 Nuyen to the Dwarf under a napkin.

Once I got a chance to talk to the others Blitz told us there were several enemies here, including one in a side room near the bar. I blustered into that room, and deflected an attempt at my legs by someone there. I shoved my gun into their chest: "We talk or you die," I said. But it's Powzu. He told us he didn't have the materiel but knew it was still in the place Braun thought it was. We went back into the bar and Powzu went out to talk to Braun, and the rest of us went back to the booth.

A drink to calm the nerves

I toasted to the Dwarf's good favor, for in Poland it is known that Dwarves are lucky in finding things.

Braun headed home to the hostel and Powzu came back into The Outpost misty-eyed. He bought a round for us. He confirmed that the cache was weapons, electronics and high tech stuff, including a laser gun!

The Russians still didn't know but they're basically on top of it, he told us. It's in the floor boards of a room in a functioning hotel that sees a lot of Russian guests staying there. I asked for his blessing to go get the cache. He nodded, and told us that it's on the third floor of a four-story building. He gave us a secured comm. He also said he knew about the mage that summoned the elemental as the only threat they hadn't been able to neutralize. "He's on over watch most of the time," he told us.

We took a different route back to the hostel, gave Braun the update and got some shut eye.

The next day we cased the hotel. Spark went through Powzu to rent a panel van for several days. I drove it around the area with Blitz in the back doing astral things. I saw a lot of security cameras. Blitz and Spark went inside the hotel, the Ork invisible and the Elf as a Russian tourist type. I found a spot to park the van within sight. On stake out in the van I saw no cops or security. The people who stay in the hotel seem of various blue collar professions, mostly of ill repute. A few delivery vehicles come and go during the day, using the loading dock out back.

After all the legwork we made a plan. Spark will go in the door of the hotel room in which the cache is secreted within the floor. I will go up on the roof and repel down to the room's window by rope. Blitz will go invisible again and be at Spark's side, ready to sneak in when he can. The Elf will talk her way in under the cover story of being a hotel manager looking into reports of leaky pipes. Blitz will get the window open for me so I can get the cache out through the window later.

During the infiltration we all get into the room without a hassle. A husband, wife and their boy and girl are staying in the room. We tried to talk them into cooperating, noting that we were there for gear and NOT to harm them. Spark hustled them into the bathroom and I ripped up the carpet to get to the gear. Once I got the cache open there's a laser weapon and a six-pack of beer. I cracked a can and poured some out for the members of the Polish Army who'd been lost in all this, especially the members of the Black Star.

I secured the weapon and some of its accessories then repelled down to the street. I got to the van while the other two fled the scene. The mage finally makes their presence known when my mates appeared outside the hotel and were waiting for me to pick them up. We made a fighting retreat with Spark firing a round at the mage.

We contacted Powzu, dropped off his comm and the 'five-pack.' He sent us on to meet Braun at the alternate rendezvous after he'd left the hostel.

Braun took the laser and gear, and told us to split up and go back to the helicopter, the crew together and him with the weapon. He met us at the helo and we extracted back to Hamburg in a strictly uneventful exfil.

Session One - 10.28.19

Chapter One: A Visit to the Motherland
(all art by Paul Benjamin)

Swift Spark's contact Ana checked in with an offer.
Ana has a contact in the Polish resistance army, the Armia Krajowa, a surviving - maybe the only surviving - member of a unit that was decimated in fighting inside the city of Szczecin.
The contact, whom we would learn later was going by the code name of Braun, needed help from people like us to find a weapons cache that had been stashed and then lost during a previous operation.
The location, Ana told Spark, was a true war zone still, even a few months after the initial frantic fighting that broke out on November 2, 2062, when the Russians invaded. Well, it was according to her admittedly outdated intelligence.
We'd need to get our hands on some type of paperwork (physical or digital, that was up to us) to be able to move around the city without getting hassled by the Russians, or worse the guns come out.
If we wanted the job, we could meet Braun in Hamburg, the German city where I've lived the four years since my parents had us smuggled out of Poland. Ana told Spark: "Let me know .... well, I'll know if it goes well."

Swift Spark

Spark called me and Blitz about the job offer. I said I'd at least take the meeting. Blitz, young and ready to prove himself worthy of the offers, was in too.
I went to collect Spark, a Russian Elf of indeterminate age. It's hard to tell how old Elves are, and she's no different. I'd ask but I haven't really known her too long, less than a year since I helped get her and Blitz out of the Ukraine before whatever was chasing them caught up. She looks to be in her mid 30s, so that means she is probably closer to 70. She tries to hide most of her cyberware, but it's there. She's some kind of scientist, I haven't really asked too many questions. It's probably what landed her in a situation that required she flee in the night with the help of an Ork smuggler. Blitz, the Ork younger than me, was with her at the time, and has been hanging around in Hamburg ever since we got here. I'm supposed to help them either get on their feet and go where they want or keep them moving on to a new place until something safe can be found. He's a spell slinger, though I admit I don't know much about the arcane arts. But he's impressionable and tails me like a puppy sometimes so I have to play big brother and help him along.
We all congregated at The Jaguar, a dark dockside bar full of dock workers, paramilitaries and 'Runners. Or wannabes. We had a photo of Braun and he was there at the bar by himself.
We are a motley group so I never know what a potential employer will think of it all. There's me, Topo, real name Feliks Nikolaiczyk, 20 years old, Ork since birth, a short Mohawk hairdo currently dyed the blue of water at night. There's the aforementioned Spark, athletic, and Blitz, who is about a 0.2 meters shorter than I am and built thicker compared to my lean, tall build. Different Ork meta-types, ya know?
We collected Braun after a quick introduction, and spirited him off to a booth where we could see the doors and have cover if things went sideways. He speaks Polish, his native language and mine as well. He and I exchanged hellos and he became visibly more at ease. I had to translate for Blitz but we all agreed that our middling abilities with English made it the language for this conversation.
He got to the background right away. During General Andrzej Woskoi's First Barrage his unit, known in the streets by the locals as the Black Star, took major casualties to a man. Braun, unsure if anyone else in the unit had survived, fled the city. But, he said, he needs to recover a cache. The best bet, he said, is a member of the unit, possibly the last still alive and in the city, a soldier named Powzu. If he's still alive and in the city, Braun said, he's the one who will know its fate. Any others who survived the initial slaughters went mad or fled back to civilian life and hid their involvement even to their own psyches. Braun slumped in his chair. "If we can find my man, find these weapons, maybe we can fulfill our mission."
Braun asked more about our backgrounds, starting with me as the obvious fellow Pole. I was born in Rzeszow to an American mother and Polish father who met through Amnesty International. They worked with local political prisoners (and possible future targets), getting them out of the city and even the country with the help of smugglers and pathfinders, often members of the military. When they themselves became targets, they fled with me with a lot of help from the same contacts they'd used on behalf of others in need. We got to Germany. I chose to stay and do the same thing I'd seen those who helped save us do, and I have ever since. They headed back to North America. Braun approves, offering his respect for the work I do now.

Topo

Blitz told his story next. It's a tale cloaked in the veil of a teen who still doesn't understand how it all went wrong but he had to flee the military academy he was enrolled in that was connected to his mother's research company.

Blitz

"How about you, ma'am?" he asked Spark. Her answer, like every thing else about her, was clinical. She studied applied sciences in Russia before the Russo-Ukrainian war. She was hung out to dry in a secure site in the Ukraine for two decades, escaped and now looks to help her comrades, brothers and sisters of Russia in similar straits.

"I don't have too much for payment," Braun admitted, as the discussion turns to how much it would cost to obtain our help. "But, if this goes well, there will be much more to do." He offered us 3,000 Nuyen each. It will do, I assured him. Perhaps later the job will yield us some military tech, contacts and future work. He said that could be arranged.

Here's the basic plan: Braun has a helicopter that can get us across the Germany-Poland border and drop us at a private air strip outside Szczecin in the early morning two days from now. We walk in, set up shop, find the contact, find the cache and get out.

"Hey, I got the next round," Blitz said enthusiastically. He looked to me for some spending money, I gave him enough for the drinks and he headed off to the bar. I know what's going on though I can't explain the facts of it. Just that I've seen him do this stuff before. He got out of sight and cast a spell on Braun, telling me and Spark later that he was getting in his head to find out just what he wasn't telling us about the mission. Turns out it was that Szczecin was a "really bad scene," with mental images of violent massacre that messed Braun up in the brain and the heart.

Once the Ork and the drinks arrived, Braun answers some questions. The cache? It's two foot lockers, though he declined to go into detail on the contents, saying it's classified. He switched gears, locking in the terms of payment that include incidentals and the promise of future work. We all agreed to take the gig. He'd meet up with us for the chopper ride out of the city in a day and a half. That ends the meeting.

Now we needed to hustle and get some documentation. I know that in situations like we're headed into the preference is paper IDs, a driver's license or a passport. Get some grainy head shots of each of us, pasted to good paper stock with all the right things printed in the right places, including the stamps. Blitz went to work finding a contact in the Hamburg underground who can do the job on short notice.

The lead was a gang that works in illegal tech that includes forgery. The Tirpitz. I've heard of them, they hang at a dive bar near the one we met Braun at. We headed there, arriving in front of a row of motorcycles of all varieties, most sporting the insignia and colors of the gang. They're predominantly Orks, so hopefully me and Blitz being there would help. Inside a heavy metal band composed entirely of Orks thrashed away on stage. Virtually everyone inside was standing around, with barely a table to speak of.

There's a ganger of some stature posturing near the stage, and I approached, speaking English and trying to exude confidence. 'I belong here' is the message of the body language I used.

This guy, Luther, said he'll send someone out to handle the request. I stressed that I was prepared to pay a premium for the rush job. He nodded.

Soon after we get the call to go upstairs for a meeting. Blitz had just recently come back in from an encounter out front by the bikes, where a Troll in the gang decided to turn his youthful interest in the bikes into a stressful test drive of the nine-footer's massive motorcycle. The test drive under duress lasted all of seven seconds, but Blitz managed to not crash and make a graceful exit to the roaring laughter of the assembled onlookers. My how far out of our comfort zones we'll go when a person who scraps the ceiling looms over you.

Long story short we got the IDs and got gone. We had plenty of preparations to do before the flight out.

Most of the time I stay in a mid-level apartment with a garage connected to it. The place sits on the outskirts of Hamburg, the kind of place I can leave in a dune buggy and not draw too many strange looks.

I packed for the trip, filling a rucksack with a medical kit and replacement supplies, some tranq patches, my GPS unit, survival kit and spare rations and wire clippers. Survival knife on my belt and Ares Predator III in a shoulder holster under my armored jacket. There's spare ammo and a silencer for the gun too. Made sure my Rating 2 ID purchased the other night is in my pocket and headed for the public transit then on to the meet-up to get to the helipad.

"Don't be flashy about it," Braun said about our pay load and gear. It's a short flight, during which I pointed out a few of the places I and other smugglers cross from Germany into Poland. Most of them are running contraband, some of us are bringing people in or out.

Szczecin is a mixture of bombed out neighborhoods and places that look barely touched, as if the residents can, on a good day, pretend none of this even happened. We took a bus from the landing site to the city via the main road and hit a check point about a half mile from the city gates.

The Elf breezed through. I wasn't even close enough to her to hear the cover story. I was too busy preparing to give the local Polish soldiers the story of why two Orks are coming to this hell hole on their own accord. We stepped up, offered our IDs, and got the once over from one guard in fatigues who checks the paperwork. "We're here to party," I told the other soldier, hinting that my German cousin is with me for an adventure. The soldier wished us well while cheekily musing on the worthlessness of German beer compared to the Polish options. I promised to drink my 'cousin' under the table with a healthy dose of the local stuff.

Braun got through the check point with no issues. He's quiet, introspective. "This place has changed a lot. We'll have to do our best," he mused to none of us in particular.

Braun found us a place to set up, a coffin hotel in a district where he says his unit was once stationed. He had obvious jitters. "That used to be a factory," he said grimly of a place that's been leveled and is now a sad, gray park.

Who are our local allies? Who knows and is sympathetic to the cause? I found a small sub corp of Saeder Krupp, where an overseer on site is sympathetic to the Domestic Army (the AK). Word is he eats his lunches at a nearby cafe. I took the description - gray haired and dressed in business casual clothing - to the place and tried to find him. It's a small place and he was not hiding so I found a stool next to him at the counter where he was already eating.

I threw out some intentionally clumsy banter about the weather and the war and the boys who will never get to fight again. He took the bait, engaging with me after I had to push a little to elicit a response. "Seems quite the coincidence you'd make such statements to me, a stranger, no?" he said, and I copped to being on the lookout for those who agree with what the Black Star fought for. He told me that there's a place called The Outpost that sometimes veterans of the war go to. Sounds like a social club of some kind, and so I thanked him, and told him that if he has more to say he can leave messages here for me. I paid both bills and tipped the waitress well, noting that there might be people asking about me and if she takes their info I'd be appreciative. "The coffin hotel I am at does not offer messaging services."

Spark found a news document that details a commemoration of the Black Star in the neighborhood where we are staying. Some locals set up a memorial for the unit recently. We decided to check it out, though Braun said he has another lead he wants to follow up on himself. So I headed out, stopping at a vendor to buy a bouquet of flowers that come from the region I grew up in, one far from here. The other two shadowed me at distance, looking out for any interest I attract, good or bad.

Up ahead I saw the site, an alley where two buildings that still stand were hit by some type of explosion and the rubble of each building's corner piled up to make a sort of sheltered hollow of brick. It was papered over with photos and posters of people who have gone missing. There were candles and crucifixes and all types of tokens and memorials. One photo drew my eye, a group that has been here and took a picture of themselves at the shrine posted it here among the items. Among the people in the photo is Powzu. I had been recording the entire trip with the Opti-cam installed in my right cyber eye. I zoomed in on the photo, hoping a good image will be useful to Braun later. "Hey, try to get an image of the over there," I heard from Blitz through the ear plug unit of my phone. He was across the street from the memorial with Spark, and was pointing to the place I should be looking for. "I detected an Astral presence that had a sinister and satisfied reaction to you arriving at the shrine," my fellow Ork said, taking a moment to dodge a few construction workers who are bustling around that sidewalk. I got some more video and then kept walking in the opposite direction of the hotel, making sure to take a long, meandering path back to the hotel to make tailing me as hard as possible.

The other two were already at the hostel awaiting my return. We talked over the situation, comparing notes while we waited for Braun to get back from his part of the mission. "Whatever it was wasn't good, boys," said Blitz of the presence he detected.

"I did get a lead on some supplies and crates that got hijacked but it's too early to tell," said Braun when he got back. We shared our tale.

When I showed him the photo, he was shaken. "That's him, that's Powzu! Frag, he's alive!" But Braun did not recognize anyone else in the photo. Invigorated by the breakthrough he agreed to come with us to The Outpost. It was about 4 p.m. so we decided to make our way there, figuring that if it is a social club of sorts then it would be late enough in the day that people might be there. I finally holster up my pistol, having eschewed it so far since entering the city. The rest are armed as well.

I noticed that Braun had to psyche himself up to go. I told him that I've talked to others in similar situations while en route out of their compromised location, those who have suffered. "I feel like I'm going to see a ghost," he admitted. I squeezed my thumbs, a Polish tradition to foster good luck. He smiled, making the grip with one hand while clapping me on the back with his other hand. "Let's go brothers - and sister," he said.

We walked and talked, trying to let this be a moment of normalcy, never knowing just when things might get crazy. The Poles pass in the street, so many just living their lives and trying to cope with the conditions.

A Dwarf pedestrian

On the way, Spark spied a presence duck out of sight farther down the street as we approached. Blitz reached out with a spell to ascertain if it is a friend or foe ahead of us. My supposition: foe.

I jogged out toward the person, asking if we should pursue. Blitz came up with me, to take advantage of some type of scrying or the like. The other two hung back a bit, guarding our six.

I drew my pistol from inside my jacket, keeping the Predator in my off hand because it conceals it between me and anyone who might notice a firearm. I snuck up around the corner, spotted a human male crouching in the alley. "There's your guy," I whisper to Blitz, and he seemed to switch modes from spying to attack mode. He went deeper into concentration, staring at the target then releasing the hand he holds to his temple and splays his fingers out toward the man. The target's legs went out from under him as if he was hit by a car. I ran up on the man with the heavy pistol extended; he gave up immediately, putting his hands above his head in surrender.

Behind me out in the main street where two of my companions stand, I heard the crackle of energy like a frayed power cable in a storm.