Week 51 debriefing: Putting the "vent" into "adventure"

The Location: Da Nang Open City
The Mission: Obtain weapons prototypes and/or data from a ronin-run Ai-Jinn weapons facility.
The Team: Shinobu, Tansai, Silvia, Hugo.

How it went down:
The team met near the facility, and Tansai provided the newcomers with grounded armour to cover her indiscretion in combat. The team gathered on the roof, and planned to enter through an unguarded vent that filled with gas hot enough to melt any agent alive every 5 minutes on the dot. Tansai sent in a hornet drone to investigate the vent, discovering most of the layout before it was melted. There were two passages and many holes leading down to machinery, one of which would be difficult to pass.

Assured she could get in and out by the drone footage, Silvia went in to find a way through the vent. She found a grate that could be pushed aside easily enough, but there was a laser grid in the way. As none of the team had laser-handling equipment, Tansai went shopping to buy a mechtronics toolkit and some Equilibrium, leaving the rest of the team hiding on the roof. She disabled the laser grid manually, the best solution the team had, and then left the vent just in time to avoid being melted.

Silvia went through the vent and into the facility, discovering a series of automated machinery building tactical laser guns of a new design. The rest of the team followed, Hugo briefly falling but making it out fine through the claustrophobic tunnel, and found 5 personnel and 2 loading robots. Silvia took a gun from the production line and Hugo snuck right past the console operators with the incredible stealth skills of a 6-foot-tall mountain of muscle and discovered that the guns had 3 emitters rather than the usual 1, only to be spotted while taking quantum photos.

Combat began with Tansai trapping the 3 console operators in riot foam with her grenade-shooting arms while Hugo fought a robot and Shinobu duelled one of the scientists who was carrying a plasma katana. Silvia tested the new gun on a robot and found that despite being a laser weapon it had recoil, and produced a continuous beam as long as the trigger was held. The robots were armed with similar weaponry and Hugo learned that it had powerful armour-piercing capabilities the hard way, but was able to destroy one robot with his own special gun that shoots things with invisible and electric. Two Centaur droids came through from the entrance, and Tansai and Hugo both fell briefly to the gunfire of the droids and a technician who was able to reassemble a laser gun from parts in 12 seconds. Silvia and the technician got into a gunfight while Shinobu avoided the remaining loader-bot and fought the other technician katana-to-katana, and Tansai was able to disable the Centaurs with a grenade barrage. The remaining robot was destroyed, Hugo and his gun terrified the console operators into surrender, and the katana-wielding technician was cut down.

Tansai administered medical treatment to stabilise the wounded technician while Shinobu and Hugo used their data leeches to gather data. The team took a crate of the laser guns, activated invisibility fields, and easily snuck out unnoticed with no confirmed loss of life.

Shinobu’s comments: “Those guns are pretty impressive, I’m not looking forward to going up against them again, but by finding out they exist now we can plan against them before they go into mass distribution. We had good teamwork going there, and everyone contributed significantly to the mission’s success. As first missions for Oracle go, I don’t think I could have asked for better.”

Data Sales:
5 Laser Beam weapons (Tactical) - Bought by the WF. Sensible given that the Ai Jinn could be fielding these weapons very soon.
Laser Beam schematics - Bought by the WF. Again, likely so they can understand their enemy all the better.
Laser Beam factory schematics - Bought by the Ai Jinn before the auction. The factory equipment is the key to manufacturing these laser weapons in an economical fashion and is apparently a Ronin/Shi Yukiro speciality the Ai Jinn do not want to lose.

Comments from CEO Lee:
Well done everyone on what I would consider a textbook mission.

Laser Beam weapon details
Class: Tactical Firearm
Damage: XS x D4 Laser damage
Cost: ????
Range: Medium
Rate: 1
EMPS: 6
Ammo: Energy Cells (treated as a machine weapon for ammo consumption)
The 'laser beam' class of weapons are entirely dependant on the user aiming the long-lived beam at a single point on the target in order to deal damage. The energy output of the weapon is phenomenal and it is a miracle of engineering that the lens systems do not melt more often. The weapon will fail like a plasma weapon and deal 10d4 damage to the user when it does so.
Note: Despite being a laser weapon, the Laser Beam cannot be calibrated to bypass shields.