INTRODUCING...
Beatle (they), a tough Onychophoran (think sea slug velvet worm alien person) bodyguard with cyberarms and a motorcycle, willing to put in the muscle to get the job done
Judith "Judy" Catisios (she), a slimy casino-dealer-turned-troubleshooter who can't help sticking her nose where it don't belong, big square glasses and shaggy hair and a beat-up 1998 suzuki carry
Iffemeral "If" Alzasche (she/ze/zir), an athletic dog girl tennis instructor who moonlights as a mecha pilot in the criminal underworld
After character creation I began by reading the following intro crawl text aloud, which I composed in a fugue state while sleeping on a futon, because roleplaying games are nothing if not an exercise in inflicting the depths of your self-indulgence on your friends:
They say the Archon Valeria was slated to marry, but on the eve of her inauguration, her groom was lost to the stars. That same night she put on her mourning veil and locked herself away behind the Godjamb. That was seventy-two years ago. Since then she's made only the most token of public appearances, a rare wave of a gloved hand from a mecha-drawn carriage to reassure her people her heart's still beating in there, always flanked by her sworn order of knightly guardians, and always hidden beneath that veil. But it's her total absence that has proven her greatest asset, letting her coast through reelection after reelection, no candidate able to mount an offensive against her sheer inertia yet.
It's no wonder the hands-off approach is so popular around here. The city of Azimuth—its lush, teeming canopies, its waterlogged alleyways and crowded light-rail platforms and thousands of ramshackle-stacked secondhand storefronts and cantinas and common arcades, neon-drenched nightclubs, derelict factories, sweltering, humid apartments—hell, the people of Azimuth have long since learned to fend for themselves down here. Up in the Citadel, a few hundred reps and corpos jockey for scraps of Valeria's power, funneling whatever residue they can scrape up back to their cronies before they get backstabbed or reconglomerated again, never really able to get the gendarme to back them up.
Down here, though? Some folks will give you the same yarn—shit and misery, nothing but money and blood. But I gotta be honest. Lately I've been feeling like it's a different story. There's something about this summer—some kind of shift in the air, I can taste it, like white wine. It's like, there's nobody holding you back. Everything is up for grabs. And if you believed everything coming out of those swampwave radio transmissions, you might even think the whole world was about to shift right out from under you, like some kind of Better Heaven was just right around the corner.
I gotta imagine that's why these three are here sticking their necks out now — holed up in a karaoke room at the back of the Blonde Dove, Basin District, off the TriZe Lift 90q, paying by the minute for an encrypted audience with that ghost they call Three Pisces. But I guess there's no way to know yet—only a way to find out.
Three Pisces contacted the crew through a hacked jukebox transmission around midnight from a karaoke room in the back of an occult dive bar called the Blonde Dove. Three Pisces' sigil emerged from the darkness and brought with it the smell of the sea, the sound of the ocean.
CONTACT - THREE PISCES:
No one really knows who's behind III.Pisces. People say it might be a higher-up in the planetary security complex, a corporate whistleblower dealing info on the sly, a rogue cryptovirus whose programming broke loose, or just some script kid hiding behind a web of proxies and a voice modulator. What people do know is that III.Pisces gets results. Simply paint the proper sigil in a triple-routed dark web corner of the Space and III.Pisces will pull the strings for you—that is, if you're willing to pay the price.
Three Pisces (via)
FAVORS: fix (illicit programs, classified documents, occult secrets), stable, shark
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| CUPBEARER (Jacob Earl) |
With the job secured the crew got down to business, revving up their vehicles and heading out for midnight rendevousz with their contacts as black rain poured down on the green neon-lit streets of Azimuth.
Beatle and Judy paid a visit to aluminum tycoon Priceless Vows, rolling up to her chataeu in the Aluminum District… while Iffemeral went down to the haunted docks along the bay to look for Kreevil Smoth.
PRIM & IMPROPER
CONTACT - PRICELESS VOWS, a.k.a. PRIM
Azimuth's premiere aluminum tycoon and heiress to a mecha industry fortune, Prim is used to getting what she wants. You'll often find her relaxing poolside on her climate-controlled chataeu's rooftop gardens, doted on by her entourage of cyborg servants and offworld concubines. Though the aluminum mines have long since dried up, Prim still holds massive sway in the star courts, and her cunning smile and deep pockets can get just about anything on or off Azimuth.
FAVORS: stable, ride, fence
Buzzing their way through the gate, Beatle and Judy were greeted by Prim's skeletal cyborg butler Colonomus and led into the chataeu's vast immaculate plush parlor, a huge baroque couch and a roaring fireplace greeting them. Prim came down the spiral staircase, yawning, platinum hair up in curlers, and gave them what she knew.
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| AGONY Ghoul (Kow Yokoyama) |
Two mecha squads were engaged in a skirmish somewhere out in the jungle along the River Gryx. One unit was composed of a few AGONY Ghouls — mass-produced heavily-customizable four-legger light weapons platforms — led by a strange and immaculate centaur-shaped aluminum frame that danced through the air with grace and carved through the opposing squad. Zooming in on an emblem emblazoned on its shoulder depicting a bull with a banner in its mouth, Prim could give them a name: BEHEMOTH.
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| Mystery aluminum mech (Bernard Chan) |
They opposed a group of strange squat and tubular assault mechs, unusual models not found in public records, who provided fire support for CUPBEARER.
As the skirmish commenced, the aluminum frame carved through the opposing squad with a silver lajatang, but in approaching CUPBEARER, their tactics changed: they deployed grapple-ropes and stunning weaponry, seemingly attempting to capture it intact. CUPBEARER unhinged its jaw and unleashed a massive kinetic shockwave, sending every unit flying and cutting the camera feed as it squished the camera drone like a mosquito.
Beatle keyed into Prim's affect as she told them what she knew about BEHEMOTH — that they were some naive political group of upstart firebrands, that they were certainly doomed to failure, and no, she had no idea how they got their hands on one of her aluminum frames, and if she did she'd have already made a million off the free publicity. In between the lines—giving her the read adjective—Beatle noticed her blushing and fidgeting with her shawl, which they saw barely concealed a love bite on her neck. It seemed likely that Prim had taken a lover among their ranks, and that might have something to do with the mech, but maintaining their professional distance, neither Judy nor Beatle pushed the matter, and soon they were back out into the pouring rain.
VULTURE'S ROOST
CONTACT - KREEVIL SMOTH
Don't let that ruby red chassis fool you: KREEVIL SMÖTH isn't a top-of-the-line corporate-sponsored new model cyborg. He's an amalgamation of one-hundred-percent DIY recycled gutter trash, spruced up only by his own exquisite craftsmanship. A truly self-made man, KREEVIL knows the value of looking good, and he's renowned among Azimuth underworld for spinning gold from rusted second-hand junk. Just don't ask him where it came from.
FAVORS: chop, fix (recycled cyberware and jury-rigged weaponry), splice
Meanwhile Iffemeral consulted with KREEVIL SMOTH, a.k.a. THE VULTURE. She found one distributed consciousness-body of the ruby red cyborg in stasis in an abandoned crane box control tower office and its eyes flared to life as she approached. After passing up on an offer for a new upgraded cyberspleen, If got down to business. Iffemeral showed Kreevil some sketches ze had taken of the CUPBEARER schematics, which Kreevil recognized as an antique model that had been out of production for nearly a century. Each one had been decommissioned and its parts shipped down the river. If anyone was capable of getting an antique like that running, Kreevil said, it would be "Sister Eidi and her freaks from the Godjamb." Merely having to speak the name seemed to make the cyborg scoundrel uneasy…
The crew reconvened at a bus stop in the Basin District around one in the morning, the night rain showing no sign of letting up. They resolved to catch up with beloved bad boy WINTER REEVES for more information on this BEHEMOTH group. Judy sent him a "wyd" text and he responded with a slew of emojis and sent his location. After a quick ride to the city's NuNEX — a massive transit center where all lines meet — they found him posted up with his boys at the back of a food court, knocking back diet soda and cough syrup.
CONTACT - WINTER REEVES
Nobody runs it like Winter Reeves. The failson scion of the corporate family behind the debunked WorldEX project, all that he knows is living large. Brought up in the corporate boardroom, he's now living out his traplord fantasies with his boys, rolling deep on the socials, amassing consumer gadgets and dubious body mods, and strengthening his undeniable pull in the local scene.
FAVORS: date, shark, deal
Winter gave Judy the "what's up big sister" treatment, his dozen wallet chains jangling, his frosted tips frosty, his fresh neck tattoo looking excellent. When Judy asked about BEHEMOTH, one of his boys showed off a darkweb viral video of a massive silhouette lurking through the midnight jungle and flipping over a humvee. At the end of the video, that same emblem appeared, the bull with the banner in its mouth, but this time in crisp high-definition. Now the writing on the banner was legible. It read: Battalion Engage! Here Ends Morbid Eternity, To Heaven!
The video was uploaded from a burner account—apparently it kept getting scrubbed off the major platforms, but it kept popping back up. Judy dove into cyberspace on her technospecks and routed the IP address GPS coordinates off the burner, giving the uploader a sticky located adjective. It had been uploaded from a newly-renovated offworld gentrification neighborhood showroom complex just a few stops north-north east on the NuNex metro called FreshDev SubBlock QUARD 33-D, and it looked like the smartphone that posted it was still there, too. The crew made haste for the subway platform.
NUNEX RED
NuNEX was still crowded, even at this time of night, by people getting off work and getting on, commuters and overnight office shifters and goth kids headed back and forth from clubs and skeletal audodroids of all kinds. As the subway arrived and the crush of bodies poured onto the platform, Iffemeral was seized by a pair of arms from the crowd, and felt sudden white hot metal pushing into her back. A masked red-robed figure commanded in her ear, "MEDDLE NOT WITH WHAT YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND." The white-hot iron left her branded (sticky) with a strange cybersigilist symbol.
The crew sprung into action. If dove to the floor and activated her stealth suit and combed through the crowd for more assailants, parsing two strange armored goons with bulbous glass helmets who were toting heavy plasma blasters and lighting them up on Judy's HUD. Two quick shots from Judy's stinger pistol made short work of the parsed targets, a bullet to the dome shattering glass while blue fluid drooled out onto the concrete and the subway crowd went scattering.
Meanwhile Beatle grabbed the red-robed figure and held them by the neck over the crowd, the white-hot branding iron clattering to the floor. What did they say? Tune in next time to find out!!
