Session 07 — Downtime, Deals, and the Long Way to the Moon

Summary

In-game date: the same night as Session 06’s raid, a couple hours later, continuing directly with no time skip. The crew brings Mr. Zip’s stolen helicopter back to Goose Salvage and throws an impromptu party while it’s stripped of Continental Brands markings. Isabella confronts Broker furious about the raid and refuses to go down with him if the Escalante/Continental Brands play collapses; he spins it as corporate damage control anyway. Kenny, still coming down off synthcoke, drunk-dials Unity with a rambling apologetic voicemail; she shows up in person furious and scared, tries to slap him, and storms off after he garbles the story of the raid (Dr. Willie is fine, it was Dr. Brightowski who died).

Misty appeals to Golden Girl (absent this session) for help freezing what’s left of The Calling as a stopgap — and reveals, for the first time, what the collective consciousness actually feels like from the inside: losing it now would be worse than never having had it, and Choo-Two is “poison” to what they’ve become. Separately, Felix is approached by Zach the Hot Dog Maniac with a job from his still-unnamed employers: sneak up to the Moon, steal a sample of the low-gravity chemical Continental Brands has been shipping down as Nonh, and gather intel — 1,000 EB each, expenses covered. The catch is getting there: a derelict, decommissioned CB spaceship sits near Port Fantôme, and the engine it needs was recently acquired by the Pacifica Confederacy, who’ve set up camp uncomfortably close to Mr. Zip’s nomad clan.

The session shifts into a downtime week. Broker does damage control with Alvin Partridge and goes shopping (SMG, armor-piercing and rubber rounds, a bonus for Isabella). Felix haggles a week of synthcoke, splits it with Kenny, and picks up a rockerboy client on the side. Kenny gets his muscle and bone lace installed by Dr. Willie and starts building a two-week “linear frame” project, triggered by recurring coke-fueled visions of his father — the hulking, hyper-competent edgerunner he doesn’t yet feel he’s become. Mr. Zip takes the crew (minus Golden Girl, who stays behind with Misty) out to his home camp, Ziptown, introduced on-screen for the first time: run in practice by matriarch Mira Stojanovic, wary of the Confederacy’s growing presence nearby. Zip trades the stolen helicopter for a gyrocopter plus 6,000 EB (split five ways, with 1,000 set aside for upgrades), levels his Nomad role to 5, and gets his Zipmobile upgraded to a high-performance ground car with bulletproof glass, courtesy of camp mechanic Vesna Ratchet. The session ends with the crew mostly at leisure — Kenny and Felix trading a guitar solo and a terrible harmonica performance at the party, reputation gains all around, and the Moon job left to simmer for next time.

Key Events

The Party at Goose Salvage

• Hours after the Continental Brands raid, the crew is unwinding at Goose Salvage while the Second Sons scrub CB branding off the stolen helicopter; both synthcoke users (Kenny and Felix) are officially crashing, no longer high
• Isabella confronts Broker directly, furious about the raid jeopardizing Escalante’s play for a partnership with Continental Brands via Alvin Partridge; Broker deflects with a rehearsed gift-basket-and-reassurance strategy and a speech about risk and reward. Isabella refuses to go down with him if it collapses and storms off — the clearest crack yet in their dynamic
• Kenny, still jittery and coming down, fixates on tinkering with a still he built for The Second Sons and pours drinks from a batch of homemade gin (juniper sourced from what he claims is the only juniper tree in Southtown)
• Kenny drunk-dials Unity, leaves a long rambling apologetic voicemail, gets teary, and hangs up — then is “suddenly attacked” mid-call: it’s Unity herself, arrived in person and furious, trying to slap him. His drunken dodge (rolled as Brawling) keeps him standing. She confronts him about the “you were going to die” voicemail and what would’ve happened to the dog if he hadn’t come back; he garbles the story of the raid badly enough that Peyote jokes it’s “the second episode of Dustin voicing upset women tonight” — Unity storms off just as Isabella did
• Zach the Hot Dog Maniac compliments the crew on the low body count at Continental Brands and offers Felix a bump of synth coke before getting to business

Misty’s Appeal

• Misty approaches, still limping from being shot in the ankle by Mr. Continental, faint purple light still in her eyes, and appeals to Golden Girl (absent this session) for help — specifically, whether Golden Girl’s cryogenics knowledge could freeze the bare minimum of The Calling until a cure or new Nonh supply is found
• Misty, speaking as/for the collective, explains what losing the connection would actually cost: “you don’t understand what being alone feels like after you’ve stopped being alone… if the whole dies, the parts die too.” She states outright that Choo-Two is now poison to what they’ve become — “you might as well dump us in the bay.” Kenny (improvising a guess at what Felix, absent from the conversation, would say) offers only that there isn’t much anyone can do right now

The Moon Job

• Zach the Hot Dog Maniac pulls Felix aside — his still-unnamed employers (“the kind of guys who don’t put ketchup on their hot dogs,” per Felix’s own read) want CB to fail, not out of compassion for The Calling but because it’s convenient. He wants the crew to sneak up to the Moon, procure a sample of the chemical CB has been synthesizing there under low gravity (the same base compound behind Nonh/Vilify), and gather whatever intel they can on the operation
• Payment: 1,000 EB each on success, expenses covered up front; getting there under the radar (not a commercial flight) is the crew’s problem
• The route: a decommissioned CB ship sits derelict near Port Fantôme — Kenny’s home waters — but it needs an engine, and the local drift community there is possessive of its derelicts. Conveniently, the Pacifica Confederacy “made off with” an orbital engine not long ago and has recently made camp uncomfortably close to Mr. Zip’s own nomad territory
• Mr. Zip proposes bringing along members of The Calling — and Dr. Willie — to be “contained” off-world rather than left to decay in South Bay; Zach is open to it (“I’d rather they be up there than down here”), and separately offers to fund cryostasis for the collective if the space plan falls through, noting Golden Girl already knows how to run cryo (“like little breadsticks”)
• Timeline: the engine won’t even reach the Confederacy’s camp for another 7-8 days; the whole plan is realistically about a month out. No commitments made yet — explicitly left as a hook for next time
• Felix negotiates hot dogs up front as a show of good faith (ten, plus toppings) and tells Zach he’ll be in touch after checking with the crew

Party Continues

• Felix, left alone with Zach’s offer, tries to impress the crowd with a digital harmonica performance (badly, by his own admission) while Kenny — still holding court from earlier — drowns him out with an unplanned Powerglove solo that pulls the whole party’s attention away; even Zach comes over to physically stop Felix mid-song

Downtime Week — Broker

• Reports to Alvin Partridge to do damage control over the CB raid, spinning it as an unnamed “mysterious bandit” contractor operation gone slightly sideways; passes a Business roll (+3 luck) framed as “radical candor” and comes away with Partridge’s continued confidence in the Continental Brands play
• Shopping: an SMG, armor-piercing rounds, rubber rounds, and a personal care pack; gives Isabella a 300 EB bonus and a card thanking her for her work
• Looks into a subdermal grip / smart gun setup, learns it requires a neural link first (a significant installation — confirmed to take only 4 hours with no formal recovery time in the rules) and a hidden holster upgrade; no purchase made yet
• Collects a standard week’s paycheck (200 EB) from routine exec work

Downtime Week — Fix-it-Felix

• Buys a week’s worth of synthcoke, haggling the price down to 100 EB and splitting half with Kenny (“you get me high, I get you high”) — the two dub themselves “Bump Brothers”
• Rolls a bad week personally (a coke-fueled blur he can’t fully remember) but professionally lands a new client, signing a local rockerboy to a gig for a 12% cut (200 EB)
• A bribery-skill upgrade glitches on the VTT sheet mid-session; Peyote manually fixes it (Meta/Errata)

Downtime Week — Kenny

• Calls Dr. Willie to reschedule his muscle and bone lace installation — opens with a joke pretending to still be “Jean-Jacques Français Bacchan” before admitting it’s him — confirms the appointment is genuine and he’s paying; installation goes ahead this week (visibly bulkier afterward, described as “feeling a little hollow, but looking pretty good”)
• Tells Willie he’s feeling responsible for The Calling and expects to have a solution “on the way” — asks him to buy some peace with the collective in the meantime
• Begins building a “linear frame,” a two-week cyberware fabrication project (DV 24 Fabrication roll, spent 5 of 6 luck, rolled a 26 with Cybertech) — narrated as compelled by recurring visions, worse when high, of his father: a “big hulking beast of a man, hyper competent edge runner” that Kenny knows in his core he isn’t yet, but feels he has to become to keep surviving
• Mentions to Dr. Willie that he’ll have something else to get installed in about a month — unspecified, left for later
• Confirms he doesn’t have time this week to build Mr. Zip’s requested ammo; defers to Felix instead

Downtime Week — Mr. Zip and Ziptown

• Takes the crew (Kenny, Broker, Felix — Golden Girl stays behind with Misty) out via car and helicopter to his home camp, Ziptown, introduced on-screen for the first time; he lets the crew believe the camp was named after his own nickname, when it’s actually the reverse — “Zip” is where he got his nickname from in the first place
• The camp is thrilled to see “Rad” back, wary of the rest of the crew (especially Broker, whose corporate fashion draws stares); matriarch Mira Stojanovic greets Zip, orders food for the visitors, and warns him the Pacifica Confederacy has been encroaching on Ziptown’s territory and may be “gathering for something bigger”
• Zip recounts the Continental Brands raid to Mira as the reason for the hot helicopter; negotiates a trade — the camp can’t fence a stolen CB helicopter outright, but agrees (after a haggle roll) to swap it for a gyrocopter plus 6,000 EB, converting the helicopter into the camp’s own fleet
• The crew splits the proceeds: 1,000 EB set aside for gyrocopter upgrades, the remaining 5,000 divided five ways (1,000 each, including Golden Girl in absentia)
• Zip levels his Nomad role to 5 (300 IP), unlocking access to helicopters, high-performance ground cars, and speedboats; chooses to upgrade the Zipmobile from a compact ground car to a high-performance one (40 move, double the old car’s speed) rather than take a second vehicle
• Camp mechanic Vesna Ratchet installs a bulletproof glass upgrade (15 HP per window) on the upgraded Zipmobile at no cost, as a courtesy for the role level-up; new paint job requested: black with three white stripes down the center
• Buys handcuffs, replenishes the armor-piercing grenade he used on the Continental Brands helicopter pilot, buys a clip of Smart Heavy Pistol ammo for his Nova Model 757 Cityhunter revolver (haggled from 500 to 400 EB, 18 rounds), and puts a point into Library Search
• Confirms his final armor decision from Session 06’s open thread: upgrading to Light Armor Jack
• Earns a reputation point from the DM for the helicopter heist and jump, logged in-sheet as “cool fighting moves”

Standout Quotes

“Camaraderie. Camaraderie always stays.” — Broker, to Isabella

“You know what stays, Isabella? You know what stays.” “Connections.” — Broker and Mr. Zip’s player, XStryker (out of character)

“Just feed the dog… everything okay, and that she’s so cool and he hopes that she’s not mad at him for being such a shitty person.” — Kenny Log-ins, drunk-dialing Unity’s voicemail

“You called me to tell me you were going to die.” “Well, I’m sorry about that. I think I said I might die because I might have died… if I hadn’t called you, then you would’ve shown up to work and the door would have been locked and the dog would have been hungry.” — Unity and Kenny

“You feel that if we die, I die. It’s hard to explain, just that when this consciousness is ingrained, it’s deep. If the whole dies, the parts die too. And your cure, putting Choo-Two in my body — that cure is poison. You might as well dump us in the bay.” — Misty, appealing on behalf of The Calling

“My bosses aren’t looking to save your spooky friends because they discovered compassion. They just want Continental Brands to eat shit. Right now, those are basically the same job.” — Zach the Hot Dog Maniac

“I’d rather they be up there than down here. They can stay contained up there.” — Mr. Zip, on exiling The Calling to the Moon

“We’re not bank, I tell you.” — Mira Stojanovic, negotiating the helicopter trade

“None of those fucking synthrocks.” — Mr. Zip, on Ziptown’s real rocks

“It came to me in a dream. Coke-fueled dream.” — Peyote Quixote (DM), on why Kenny’s makeshift extra seats are hanging from the bottom of the helicopter

“Increasingly when I’m high — and even more when I’m not high — I’m just seeing the shadow of my father. This big hulking beast of a man, hyper competent edge runner. And I know in my core that I am not that, but I need to be that if I’m going to continue surviving.” — Kenny Log-ins, on the visions driving his linear frame build

“Nice tits, bro.” “Oh, thank you. Tell Dr. Willie he did good work, right?” — Fix-it-Felix and Kenny, on the muscle and bone lace

Open Threads

• The Moon job: Zach’s employers want a sample of CB’s low-gravity chemical and intel on their lunar operation — 1,000 EB each, no formal commitment made yet. Requires the derelict ship near Port Fantôme and an engine currently held by the Pacifica Confederacy. About a month out.
• Who does Zach actually work for? Still unnamed. Their only stated motive is that they want Continental Brands to fail.
• Exiling The Calling to the Moon vs. cryostasis: two competing stopgaps for the collective’s decay, both floated but neither committed to.
• Isabella and Broker: the clearest sign yet that Isabella won’t cover for Broker unconditionally if Escalante’s Continental Brands play collapses.
• Unity and Kenny: she’s now seen him drunk, high, and nearly dying twice — how much more of this relationship can take before it breaks.
• Kenny’s father: the “hyper competent edgerunner” visions driving the linear frame build are the most direct on-screen gesture yet toward his unconfirmed life path backstory.
• Kenny’s unspecified next cyberware: mentioned to Dr. Willie as “about a month out” — no details given.
• The Pacifica Confederacy’s buildup: Mira warns they’re “gathering for something bigger” near Ziptown’s territory — a likely target once the crew needs that engine.
• Felix’s synthcoke dependency continues, now shared with Kenny as “Bump Brothers.”
• Golden Girl’s roommate (unnamed, potential story hook) — still open.
• Kenny’s custom “smart” ammo — still pending; deferred to Felix this week since Kenny had no downtime free.
• Golden Girl’s absence this session — unaddressed in-fiction beyond staying with Misty.

Meta / Errata

• In-game date: continues directly from Session 06’s ending, same night into the following downtime week — no time skip until the week itself
• IP awarded: 100 per player, including Golden Girl’s absent player (DM’s stated policy: doesn’t want players falling behind on IP due to absence)
• Payment: helicopter traded to Ziptown for a gyrocopter + 6,000 EB, split 1,000 EB each after setting aside 1,000 EB for gyrocopter upgrades
• Reputation awarded: Kenny and Mr. Zip both received a reputation point this session for the Session 06 raid’s standout moments (Kenny’s hack, Zip’s helicopter jump); logged via the sheet’s reputation-with-reason mechanic
• Rules confirmed: cyberware installation takes 4 hours with no formal recovery time as written; Nomad role rank 5 grants a new vehicle OR an upgrade to an existing one, not both; vehicle upgrades beyond the free role-based one are rarely available on the open market
• VTT technical issues: Felix’s bribery skill upgrade failed to save correctly and had to be manually corrected by the DM; general confusion over slash-command dice syntax early in the session
• DM note: flagged this as a deliberately lighter “shopping episode” session after the intensity of Session 06’s firefight

Player Notes

• Two separate confrontations this session — Isabella vs. Broker, Unity vs. Kenny — both play out as women in these characters’ lives refusing to just absorb the fallout of the crew’s increasingly dangerous work without pushback. The DM lampshaded it directly (“the second episode of Dustin voicing upset women tonight”)
• Misty’s appeal is the first time The Calling’s psychology has been voiced in genuinely sympathetic, first-person terms rather than through Martin Gorsky’s spokesperson framing — reframes the “cure” the crew has been pursuing as something closer to an amputation than a rescue
• Kenny’s linear frame monologue is the most explicit the character has been about his own psychology on-screen — previously his father was only background material; now it’s actively driving his choices
• Ziptown’s introduction gives Mr. Zip a fully realized home base for the first time — and he’s happy to let his crew believe the town was named after him rather than the other way around
• The crew now has a gyrocopter, an upgraded high-performance Zipmobile with bulletproof glass, and a dangling job offer that could send them off-world — a significant escalation in scope from the street-level plot the campaign started as