Session 11: The Heist

It is very rare for a job to go as smoothly as this one.  Especially when you consider how very wrong it almost went during preparation.  I owned the security system.  There's no other way to put it.  I made it my bitch and taught it tricks.  I'm a little disappointed at not getting some of the video I'd have liked, but it's fine, it didn't matter.

BurnedOut drove us out, all but the troll, and parked well out of the way.  I think he could have been closer, a lot closer, especially if things had gone poorly, but that doesn't matter.  He is no longer relevant to this story, since all he did was play solitaire and draw on the HUD map.  Oh, and not get us more money for our spectacular showing.

I set up shop near the yoga studio I was in during the prep.  What can I say, the instructor is hot.  Daedelus was well entrenched in his guard role.  Whisper and Nutgoblin followed the same path Whisper used during prep, when he failed so miserably.  This time he didn't need to touch anything, though, he just had to be quiet, and he can be quiet like a champ.  Pigfaces, on the other hand, are not well known for their light feet, and there were a couple times when that could have been the end for us.  Lucky him that we were so well on point.

I was easily able to keep the path ahead of them clear, while also keeping the path behind open for patrols.  The patrols were a little erratic at times.  It would have been nice if they had defined routes.  Not like that would have been less secure, since walking random paths leaves the possibility of forgetting areas or just leaving them alone for extended periods.  Whatever, that's the bank's problem, not mine.  I did my job like a boss.

The weakest link in all this was Denis and his terrible acting.  I thought he was supposed to be some sort of con man, but maybe that only works from the concept of no one believing a Troll has enough to rub together to be clever with.  I might be prone to believing that after the outrageous spectacle he made of himself several times during the operation.  Despite his highly suspicious and over the top antics, he managed to sneak them in the building and through the vault door twice, which was all he ever needed to do.

Considering how straight forward the path should have been, they ended up having to take the most convoluted path to avoid the other guards.  Doesn't matter, though, cause it worked out.  Whisper got Ratbag to the server room.  Presumably he attached something to something, imprinted his Office Space code, and didn't completely waste his time and money.  I honestly kind of hope he screwed the whole thing up and gets nothing out of this.  Then they got out again, free and clear.  And the only thing to blow up was the bathroom due to ancient oatmeal raisin cookies being, apparently, the natural enemies of Troll bowels.  There is also rumor that he may have soiled an elevator.

So then, after the cleanest heist I've ever seen, "The Face" doesn't even try to renegotiate the terms of the deal.  Made us go from A-list cleaners to bumpkin thugs in half a heart beat.  Still, it's nice to have a payday, even if it only barely pays me back for what these jokers have already squeezed out of me.

Come on Herc, you and me.  No stealth, no one to watch Code Goblin, no get away car.  We got this!

He meant Code Goblin.  Presumably Burnout will be in the car, yes?

I hope we're doing the heist tomorrow, and Whisper is kind of important since he's the one doing the actual escort.  Burnout is actually the least necessary character since he's the wheel man.  Dave is the inside man, Shadowhawk will be altering video feeds to allow Whisper and Code Goblin to sneak through the bank and access the vault room.  But Whisper is the only one that is actually going to be in there illegally doing heisty stuff.

Also I can do Sundays.

Session 10?: Preparing for the Heist

It has recently come to my attention that this group of runners has agreed to participate in a bank job.  Apparently this is going to be one of the most white collar heists ever, because rather than robbing the place, we're escorting some trumped up hacker wannabe to a data center in the vault where he wants to upload a remainder virus to steal unlimited amounts of fractions of pennies.  It's actually a pretty good deal because we get paid as long as we're not caught.  It doesn't matter if he succeeds or not because whatever comes out of it is unrelated to us.  Personally I hope he screwed up big time because would teach that pig nose hipster his place.

The troll, me and the other elf had a get together with Gobstopper about a week early to prepare the plan.  We threw around a lot of ideas, the orc predictably did not have any ideas of his own.  They weren't overly excited about my idea to infiltrate through the loading dock and mascaraed as repair techs in order to connect to the camera there and break into the network.  The plan we finally agreed on was almost as good, and involved me not being seen which was doubly appealing.

The plan was to have Whisper do his "thing" to get onto the roof.  He would evade whatever guards might be there and, following my carefully defined instructions, attach a wifi receiver onto the only camera on the exterior of the building, just off roof.  I would be available at a nearby Yoga gym, getting my stretch on, in case he ran into any problems.  In the mean time Darrel the Troll would apply for a security position at the bank.  He has some well falsified credentials and Goblin Bait assured us they would be short handed on heist day.  I didn't have any misgivings, Whisper had always seemed competent enough where the running, jumping and shooting were involved, so what was a little impromptu repair work, right?

As it turns out it was everything.  Infiltrate an office building?  No problem, door wasn't even locked.  Scale a building?  Easy peasy, plenty of gear for the job.  Avoid detection?  Got look outs and everything, no problem with stealth.  Remove the casing on a Mk II swivel cam and insert a modulated phase input device into the spare triple prong expansion slot with hyperdense callibrations and a mullet? Nope, that of all things is beyond him.  Not only did he manage to jam it into a memory slot it shouldn't have even fit into, he did it in such a way that the case wouldn't go back on.  He also took so long doing it wrong that the guard got back to the roof before he'd finished.

Of course the guard saw what happened.  A whole half of the camera was missing and the wires were spilling out.  To his credit, while he wouldn't know an emulated differential set from a tertiary emancipation port, he is definitely able to think on his feet.  While the guy was leaning half way over the rail getting a face full of bad engineering he got an ass full of taser followed by a mouthful of concrete when he went tumbling over the edge.  Unfortunately Whisper hadn't been fast enough to stop him from calling for backup on his comms.  He was able to plant the casing and get out before they showed up, though.

This is where things go from bad to amazing.  I'm completely in favor of failing to success.  While Whisper run off to drown his sorrows, or whatever, I got the number for their security company, spoofed it like a boss and let BurntElf make the call as if he were customer service calling about an alarm light on their main switch.  I thought he sounded a little stiff and unconvincing, but they bought it.  He scheduled to have technician Jack Handie "Yes I know I have a robot hand and my name is hand, thanks for mentioning it, I've never heard that one," come in to do repairs.  After a little shoddy work forging an ID and buying a polo shirt I was set to do the work I wanted to do myself in the first place.  As a second bit of Karmic failure, Devin got a call back about a sudden opening in security and asking him to come in immediately about the position.  Some celestial being is definitely dropping the ball with us, but all the better cause I like winning.

I was fashionably late to the appointment, showing up just at the end of the window, bothered some girl who looked like she was about to start counting some old lady's pennies to open a mediocre savings account for some kid that rarely even comes to see grandma.  Wouldn't you know I got helped immediately.  The manager didn't even seem to give it a second though, brought me up to the camera and it was all of twenty minutes before I had the device in the proper place, and the camera as good as new.  Better than new, cause now it was an open door for me to play with at my leisure.

While I was pretending to fix their tampered with camera Daniel got his introductions and a tour.  This is where our lives become a breeze.  His tour included the specific room we need to infiltrate with Gobsmacked.  So, to sum up.  We now have unrestricted access to the bank's security.  I shouldn't even need to worry about Matrix security because their network is offline and I own the point of entry.  I should be able to take all the time I need to fully infiltrate and effectively own every inch of this thing by the time we're ready to go.  We have a man on the inside.  We know exactly where we need to go.

I need Durdsly to get me a list of guards that will be on duty that day and even better if I can get their patrol routes.  Then, if our luck continues, I can get recordings of them as well as of blank hallway to feed to the security room while Whisper and Baggage are wandering through the building.  Lastly we need access to the vault itself, but that might already be taken care of at this point.

My understanding was that there was a break