So you need a bunch of soldiers. What’s a shadowrunner to do? Break out four buses fulla inmates from Corocan maximum security that’s what. Compound gets assaulted by a full-borg and some keener with a Panther cannon. When the dust settles, hundreds of inmates have been released and piled into a convoy of buses that head out to relieve Bakersfield. Coincidentally, they were probably the best selection of hired guns you could find in Corocan. Weird how they assign cells, right?
The Siege of Bakersfield, as it later came to be known, was a long meatgrinder with runners and whatever forces they could pull together fighting a holding action against Japanese forces. The balance only shifted with the arrival of the Desert Rats, an elite armoured company formerly of the UCAS army. After skirmishing with the more numerous Japanese armoured divisions for the better part of a day, the Rats assaulted the Japanese formation head on. Despite being outnumbered, the ballsy move took the Japanese forces by surprise, shattering their lines and effectively ending the siege.
Of course, that wasn’t the end of the violence, not by a long shot. Watson’s documentary finally saw the light of day, revealing a grab bag of atrocities from shot up schools to mass graves. The J-corps were less than impressed by this and a new front opened up in the war, this time in the Matrix as corp deckers struggled to smooth it all over. As soon as they removed one offending stream however, another has already taken its place.
Almost lost in the midst of the tank battles and digital war, nobody really paid attention to a one-line headline out of Halferville about an elf terrorist being caught trying to sabotage the refinery there, but that little headline almost set the Warrens on fire over the next couple months. First the perp was dead, then in a coma, then escaped with a 250 K bounty on his head. No big deal so far, right? Then the rumor drops that this fragger’s in Aurora. Gangs start fightin’ each other over next to nothin’ bunch of random elves get dragged out of Tir Llewn and beaten to death… Lone Star sends in a 20-man squad only for them to get blindsided by a go-gang. Four of them make it out alive. Got so crazy DocWagon actually suspended their services to the Warrens, unless you were a Super-Platinum member of course.
Things settled down for hot minute before some fragger put his location up for auction on the trix. Naturally it didn’t matter who won, pretty soon everybody knew Laz was holed up at the Crank. A whole new wave of violence broke out between the various gangs and bounty hunter teams, but it wound up with a couple dozen of the Horsemen storming the place only to be blindsided by a bounty hunter team just as they’d found him. At which point Mafen puts in an appearance and all hell breaks loose. Him, Tycho and Laz get out, but the Horsemen got their butts kicked and are very disappointed in Tycho’s performance. In all the commotion that followed, the bounty on Laz was very quietly withdrawn.
Meanwhile, California was not quite on fire, more a low boil that was getting hotter. During the spring, General Jace Gill, son of Custos Theodore Gill, had been on the news telling everyone how CalFree agents had intercepted a shipment of VX gas bound to Japan’s 3rd Marine Division. The odd bit is that nothing came of it for months, until California Tower, the JPC headquarters in San Francisco, and the Bear’s Lair, an old nuclear bunker that CalFree used as strategic HQ, both got hit in the same day with the stuff. Teddy Gill and damn near everyone else in the base die and soon after Jace Gill is sworn in as the new Custos (after the two folks before him in line were unexpectedly unavailable) and begins a brutal purge of the military and government. The attack on the California Tower left thousands dead and crippled the Japanese forces in San Francisco. In the end imperials forces withdrew from the city, burning the tower behind them, all 120 storeys of it.
Up in Roseville, in Japanese-held territory, tensions between the locals and the occupying forces have been deteriorating for months. Things come to a head when the police are replaced with Imperial Marines who wind up killing a bunch of kids who talked back too much. A couple hours later there are riots in the streets, then across the whole Sacramento metro. This all neatly coincides with some ‘accidental’ radio interference from a UCAS carrier group who happened to be stationed in San Francisco and a CalFree offensive from the north.
As the war stutters back to life in California, refugees flood into the relative safety of the Denver metroplex: more than 100,000 in a few months. Business is good in the people smuggling trade, with rumors of mass murder and trafficking on the side, and the population of the Warrens sees a major uptick in pissed off Californians. Someone was bound to snap eventually: too much hate in too little space. At the start of June, a mob of about 50 refugees invades Little Chiba with makeshift weapons looking for revenge on the Japanese or anything vaguely Japanese-looking. The Yakuza step in and in short order the mob is either dead or vanished.
It wasn’t just relations between the Cali refugees and the Denver natives that were at an all time low that summer though, there was also plenty of racial animosity going around. A policlub called the Tusk Liberation Front, or TLF, appeared in Denver fronted by an ork called Reginald Mouzone, with backing from several shady characters including one Connor Seale, the purported brains of the outfit, at least to start out. The TLF spend most of the summer greasing palms and makin’ buddy-buddy with the CalFree refugees, as well as getting their hands on a little firepower, naturally. The two groups arrange a protest rally, October 7th at the Denver Fairgrounds to tell the world of the injustice faced by the ork, the troll and the refugee.
Into this situation comes Jeremy Falloon, the UCAS representative on the Council of Denver. He’s courting re-election and his analysts have decided that being seen as sensitive to the needs of minorities would be good for his chances. Thus, in defiance of all probability, the TLF, new kids on the Denver block, get a face-to-face sitdown with Falloon at their rally. Did I mention that Mouzone was now leader in fact as well as name? Apparently there was a rather violent changing of the guard, and somehow the TLF ended up in bed with the Horsemen.
The date of the rally rolls around and security is TIGHT. Knight Errant are out in force and the crowd of near three thousand is also liberally sprinkled with plainclothes members of Falloon’s security detail. A couple of brawls are put down quickly and relatively quietly, and for a while everything looks all nice and tidy. Mouzone gives a speech, bit of a barnstormer if you like that kinda thing, and shakes hands with Falloon. Connor Seale lurks the wings, fuming that it should have been him. It was almost entirely peaceful, right up to the gunshot.
Whoever the gunman was, they were a good shot, Mouzone’s head pops like a balloon and from what I could patch together afterwards /the same round/ clipped Falloon. Mouzone’s bodyguard, some street sammie named Citak, tries to get in to help and gets torn to pieces by KE gunfire. Almost instantly the whole thing goes from protest to riot. By the end of the day there are more than fifty dead and hundreds either injured, arrested or both.
For almost a week it was like none of the news stations could agree on whether or not Falloon was alive or dead: there was a total info blackout. What did make the news was a massive uptick in anti-ork hate crimes and a massive law enforcement crackdown on metahumans of all stripes. It was far from the best time to be a shadowrunner, especially a metahuman shadowrunner. Connor Seale resurfaces as acting president of the TLF and issues a sympathetic statement, which allays precisely nobody’s suspicions: KE very much wanted to talk to Mr. Seale, while he preferred to remain in hiding. A couple days later, the TLF gets branded as a terrorist organisation, at least by the media, and word gets around that Connor is holed up somewhere in Orktown.
Out on the street, word is that Orktown’s on lockdown, and heaven help you if you’re in there and you aren’t an ork. The border between Orktown and Tir Llewn sees an increasing amount of violence as racial tensions mount. The gangs of course, deny all knowledge, but anyone could see it was only a matter of town before things flared up.
On October 13th, the flare came. In the Grok Apartments, a crumbling tower block on the border of Orktown, a pair of silver canisters explode dispersing a cloud of Seven-7 throughout the building. The gas is colourless, odourless and utterly lethal. Within minutes, the entire building is a tomb, families and ganges piled together against the doors and windows as they tried to escape the gas that had already killed them. Minutes later a contingent of Demo Boyz and Horsemen arrive, and as a few of them recover what loot they can from the slaughter, the rest head straight for Tir Llewn on a mission of vengeance. Naturally, the Silver Thorns give a good account of themselves with long arms and bows, but a single panther cannon shot blows a hole in their defences and a full-on race war kicks off in the Warrens, complete with runners piling in on all sides, buildings blowing up, the works. It all comes to a head on October 25th in what became known as the October Surprise: a small skirmish quickly escalates into a pitched battle with a posse of Horsemen rampaging into Tir Llewn. Final count is almost three hundred dead in one night.
Now up to this point, not many folks had heard of Derek O’Neal. He was an ex-CalFree vet who was the only human on the TLF’s side of the table at the October 4th rally, and billed himself as some kind of metahuman rights activist. Stretched credulity a little bit when he put in an appearance on the news and was all of a sudden talking about how metahumans in Denver were “tribal and war-like”. Weird that he changed his mind so fast on that if he was so clued into metahuman issues, but maybe not so weird considering now many Humanis talking points he managed to trot out during interviews under the header of “I’ve heard people say this”. You gotta wonder who the guy hangs out with. Even had helpful suggestions to “fix the Warrens issue”, whatever the hell that means, and to let law enforcement stop and frisk any “suspicious” individuals belonging to any “organised disobedient group”. For the young or terminally naive, that means “whoever the hell they feel like”. Thus was proposition 87-B born, and boy did it take a while to die.
It didn’t help matters when somebody tried to ice Falloon again. This time the plane he was supposed to have already boarded exploded at the terminal. Him and Derek O’Neal (apparently his new best buddy, make of that what you will) escaped unscathed apart from a couple bruises. Shortly afterwards Connor Seale was announced as the prime suspect, which is pretty impressive for a guy who’d been holed up in the Warrens for the last week. The momentum behind prop 87-B builds and metahuman shadowrunners all over Denver get a little more nervous. Hector Ramirez is the only council member that is vocally opposed.
November rolled around, and with it the UCAS presidential election. The big names were General Angela Colloton, formerly of the UCAS military, and Nadja Daviar, Kyle Haeffner’s VP, voice of Dunkelzahn and total mystery. Beyond the fact that she’s been VP for the best part of two decades, the woman is a complete cipher. There are several attempted runs on the Draco Foundation, among others, attempting to procure any information on her, a couple are even rumoured to have succeeded. Mark Ryan, the guy who ran on mandatory government registration for the Awakened was a non-starter and barely gets any air time past August. The biggest developments came late in the day when Colloton’s Technocrats pushed through legislation to trial matrix voting at the election. Obviously there was considerable grumbling from a variety of folks on security grounds, but these were overruled. It was after the election that everyone would discover they’d been horribly right.
For the first few hours of the election, things seem fine. The matrix-based systems mean vote counting is both fast and efficient. Then the counts freeze, updates all stop. Of course this is blamed on “technical difficulties” but it quickly becomes obvious that several groups have been interfering with the count, including CATCo, the company running the counting systems. Speculation runs wild and the various political camps begin to blame each other in the confusion.
When the truth came out, it wasn’t pretty: widespread magical tampering, mysteriously missing ballots, unauthorised access to the trix-based voting systems. That last one turned out to be particularly juicy when it was discovered that a lot of that access came from the CATCo hosts. That really got everyone’s attention and what had been political needling got worryingly close to calls to violent action. Haeffner attempted to restore calm, but by that point everyone was already to paranoid for trust. Naturally these conditions are rich pickings for shadowrunners as each political party jockies against the others and corporations look for any sign of weakness. Despite the precarious situation, business is booming. Only problem? This time the man knew they were coming. A few runners make serious names for themselves, but a whole lot more wind up dead or worse.
In the end, the election results are indecisive, with the margins coming down to statistical noise. After weeks of speculation and not inconsiderable tension as both UCAS and Ares armed forces assumed positions of readiness, a series of closed door meetings produced a compromise: Colloton will become the 9th president of the UCAS (and the first woman to hold the office) and Daviar will remain in place as VP. Exactly what kind of deal was struck in those meetings was never revealed. The last bit of fallout from election season came a few months later, shortly after inauguration day when it hit the news that Haeffner would not be making the usual tour of the speaking circuit, but undergoing Leonization. Now far be it for me to cast aspersions on the man, but his press office seemed just a bit too keen to point out that the ‘donation’ of this therapy had absolutely no influence on any policy decisions made in office…
