#6 Ascension

The story so far: We're playing a fool-punching shadowrunner who betrayed a Seattle employer to save thousands of lives in the Antumbra nightclub. Now in San Francisco, he's been connected to the company that owns the nightclub in hopes of discovering damning evidence on the most evil megacorporation of all: Aztechnology. With the help of his plucky sidekick, Hailey, our hero is ready to tear down some corporate walls: literally if he has to.

The fog of war is pretty dense today.

Not the friendliest guard we've ever seen.

Those quotation marks were pretty audible.

I know we were asked to make a fuss, but I'll try to avoid it if I can.

...I cannot.

I can't remembering this happening more than once before. That means I've taken either Security or Corporate as an Etiquette on nearly every Antumbra run ever.

Oh well, plan B.

1nv4d3r sucker punches him and an alarm goes off! Hailey snipes him from across the room before he can do anything else. Also, we get this for combat music.

...I'll take it!

Hearing boots on the other side of the door, we take position behind it, with Hailey crouching behind cover. Opening it reveals two guards, waiting.

Brave, fool-punching ork that we are, we run and hide.

One more guard appears, the drone soaks up a lot of damage, and then we attack. The first guard goes down in no time, and his friends run into the room to try and clear us out.

We clear them out instead and send the half-slagged drone ahead to guard the next door as Hailey gets to decking.

Hailey prepares to enter the Matrix.

Combat in the Matrix interface is like playing a mage/shaman. ESPs act like summons, to attack enemies and protect your avatar. Programs are like spells. Your deck determines how much of each you can carry, how much 'IP' or Matrix health your avatar has, and how fast you can move. Hailey, being a college-aged girl who isn't particularly rich, has a basic deck.

That will change.

We have an enemy program in front of us and two possible directions to go in. At the bottom left you can see our security counter. When it reaches the exclamation point, an alarm goes off and a whole bunch of security programs get dropped on our location. There are two kinds of enemy programs called Intrusion Countermeasures: black and white IC. Most are white IC - they attack your avatar and chip off IP from it. Lose it all and you're forcibly logged out.

The security counter is higher than it should be because I missed a screenshot so I had to log back out of the Matrix and log in to get it and security got worse.

It's all your fault. Attacking this guy summons another.

But we deal with the first one handily.

His backup is a Sentry IC - basically a buffer/debuffer.

Annoying but not as deadly without his attack dog friend.

We deal with it easily and take the door on the left.

Attacking this White IC summons another.

I have the sinking feeling we're going to run out of time.

What I'm not showing is that in between every few turn cycles in the Matrix, the game switches me back to 1nv4d3r standing around awkwardly, waiting for Hailey to finish. This works best when something is actually happening in meatspace, but clearly it isn't.

Sort of desperate for extra actions, we summon our Assassin ESP.

As the name implies, these fragile programs can do a great deal of damage.

We take out the two nearby enemies and end up facing down a White Sparkly IC near to the datastore we want to access.

Dumb names aside, these programs are like glass cannons. They take two turns to charge, then blast their enemies hard afterward. Hailey takes (virtual) cover while she sends the Assassin to access the data store.

Our Assassin gets blasted.

Whoops. Turns out the point of this hub was to ensure our SIN was in the system, but it's already too late for that. We may have wasted all this time for nothing.

We backtrack post haste.

Perhaps unlike the official campaigns, there's nothing forcing us to fight ICs rather than just run through everything, aside from the risk of get knocked out of the system.

Our path is set...

Turns out I'm wrong. The data store is inaccessible.

I attack from where I am. It turns out to be a grievous error.

See that red spiky-bro who just materialised next to our avatar? That's black IC.

See that "host damage"? It's exactly what we're afraid of.

It's a hard-fought battle, with me refusing to take cover lest I lose a precious turn in doing so, but most of the enemy projectiles miss and we finally prevail.

We get our paydata and skedaddle to the exit.

One more turn...

...and the alarm would've gone off.

Our hero immediately runs over and heals Hailey.

Once again, they take positions by the door...

The room seems empty but we've seen enough action trideos to know how that goes.

We send in the drone as a scout... and it's empty. Whoops.

Eyes on the prize, team.