Week 58: The World is Not Enough (for Shap)

Alternate title: There can be only one!

Location: Below a mountain in the Spanish Pyrenees.
Mission Brief: Infiltrate a secret broadcasting facility for the Tex Callahan show.
Team: Ace, Karishma, Fenris, Silvia, Shap.


After following leads, including directly Hacking a satellite from space, Ace discovered a hidden Bright and Sunny Media installation buried deep within a mountain near the E.I. skiing resort of Candanchú in the Spanish Pyrenees. Looking at the satellite had shown that the Live Tex Callahan feed was being intercepted and sent to and received from this location and the ingoing and outgoing feeds were subtly different. Only one entrance was discovered, although many of the rooms in local hotels were permanently booked by B&S. The entrance was some sort of vent which was pushing air through the mountain, allowing the glacier to cool it. It was covered with a laser defence grid and full of pressure plates and other systems to detect intruders, although the hot vent was noticeable devoid of thermal sensors.. It also didn’t possess any turrets or any other form of automated defence system.

Some of the team spent time in the resort under the guise of a company team building exercise as cover before they all met outside the entrance to the vent. As the team slowly and carefully navigated the tunnel of traps it seemed Karishma might not have been suited to this part of the mission as she slipped and fell. Luckily Shap managed to catch hold of her before she could hurt herself or trigger any warnings. The rest of the decent went without incident several kilometres into the mountain.

At the end of the shaft the team found themselves in a very large generator room in which a huge number of generators were all creating power. They were designed to be very efficient and not produce much heat, or much power which was why so many were required although the team did not yet know what they were powering. Stealth fields were activated and the team scouted out the area, avoiding pressure plates on the floor. On their way to the exit Silvia’s motion detector started to bleep and the shimmery form of 6 invisible lupine creatures jumped silently out of the long shadows between the generators. Thus began the most silent combat ever fought, as the enemy were totally silent and the team didn’t want to alert anyone to their presence. Karishma fired nuts and bolts made of mental force, Ace fired concussion grenades silently into a Cyberwolf’s face, Fenris fired poison arrows that knocked one of them out, Shap attacked a wolf single handed with a sword and Silvia fired horribly poisonous spikes from her shoulders. Things didn’t go so well for the last two as Silvia had her throat torn out and Shap was eviscerated. Ultimately the team was victorious and used their med packs to return their fallen comrades to good health.

As no alarm had been raised the team was still undiscovered and pressed on into the next chamber, in which was a very large transmitter capable of transmitting though the rock and ice in strange and interesting ways. Karishma stayed to study the device while the team split up to explore the other two exits from this chamber. Cables ran out of the transmitter in two separate directions and examination of the direction most of the cables went found a server room the size of several football pitches entirely full of servers. Rows and rows of them in every direction and patrolled by Centaur droids armed with fire fighting equipment and non-explosive precision weaponry. The other way, where the thinner cables went, let to a control room in which five people were connected to machines via neural interface, while a sixth person shouted instructions to them. On closer inspection the room contained a vast array of monitors showing Tex Callahan from multiple different angles and it was clear the shouting person was directing the proceedings, instructing the technicians to adjust camera angles. On closer inspection it was clear that the technicians were also editing the footage, removing people from the shot and touching up events such as missed bullets into hits and shots from a sniper some distance away appear to come from Tex.

In the server room Ace hacked the system despite its high level of security only to find that none of this massive array of computers actually held any data. It was all processing power being used to edit the stream at incredible speeds. Both the Raw and Edited feeds could be accessed and while he didn’t have much storage space relative to the shear flow of information much of both could be recorded. The team decided to kill two birds with one stone; they would attempt to bypass the electronic lock on the other door out of the Directors room and see what was beyond while also getting footage of the most drastic changes to the Live feed by waiting until a dramatic fire fight was in progress and the Director and his Crew would be most distracted. This didn’t quite go according to plan.

It seems the Director was more observant than we gave him credit as despite the drama unfolding on the screen he noticed the shimmer of invisibility and, almost faster than the eye can see, rolled to the side and drew an impressive plasma weapon, firing it at Fenris. Then Shap broke his neck and he collapsed to the ground, lacking a med-pack but luckily possessing an oxygenator in his brain which allowed him to survive. Then things went weird and awesome.

By the ancient rite of succession Shap had killed the Director, and thus Shap had become the Director! Stepping up to the podium he quickly evaluated the scene, moments before Tex was due to kick in the door, and started giving direction. The technicians were somewhat confused by this but they were professionals and did their job with pride. Shap directed the cameras to new and sometimes impossible angels, paying no regard to the Tex Support team which was doing it’s best to make Tex look awesome while staying out of sight. Huge edits were made at near impossible speed and the whole scene may go down in Tex history as one of the best and most memorable fights for months, if not years. People will look at this footage for years to come in director school but the huge defences between the raw and output footage caused by the rapid edits made very good information to fill up an internal hard drive. With plenty of Quantum camera footage taken, data extracted and a team of Technicians collapsed through over exertion the team escaped to the mountain. As a finale they escaped by ski and board while chased by E.I. skidoos, skiers and helicopters. Having a helicopter of their own, as well as a sense of action and drama, the team avoided pursuit and escaped over the border and away.

Ace's comments:

A very good mission with a rather unexpected, yet satisfying conclusion. The team worked well together and we sure got what we came for, and plenty more besides. Although we were trying to be subtle I'm not really sure what effect hijacking the world’s most popular TV show will have. We now return you to your regularly scheduled missions. Good work everyone.

Information Sales:
Facility Maps & Details - Bought by E.I
Tex Callahan: Shap Director's Cut - Bought by E.I
"Director" system details - Bought by E.I
Tex Support - Allowed to go to auction. Bought by the WF. I think they're a mite upset about this, but not at us for once.

Comments from CEO Lee
Can't talk now. Figuring out how to spend this much money. How do the E.I manage this?
Erm... Upset E.I... bla bla bla watch out... yeah that should cover it.