Contacts in the Mess

Human Advertising Blimp Pilot; Gambling Debts; Discreet Aerial Recon.

We’re cleared for extremely low altitude flight over most areas. I see a lot of interesting stuff. And it isn’t hard to clamp a passenger camera to the fuselage...

Honestly, this job could probably be done by replacing us with remote control riggers, but the first time someone does something disastrous with a remote blimp, it’ll make a lot of headlines.

Ork Aegis Cognito Intelligence Officer; Resisting My James Bond Complex; The Spy Who Bribed Me.

I don’t have the budget to do proper clandestine surveillance on the Havens, so I ask nicely instead.

You tell me something I don’t know and I’ll tell you something I think you’ll find interesting.

Yes, you should assume I’m lying and that there are a dozen covert assets in place, but you folks really don’t make enough trouble to rate that kind of investment.

Even a top-notch independent intelligence agency doesn’t have much budget for dealing with the Havens, but they have to keep up. (For more on Aegis Cognito, see (3rd ed.) Loose Alliances p68.)

Human AresSpace Research Scientist; Investors Don’t Appreciate Long-Term Research; Haven Sponsor.

The Havens are doing some of the most advanced research on closed-loop recycling and self-sustaining technology!

Those of us with ambitions of retiring on Mars are very interested in the work you’re doing.

I’ve got a truckload of gear from Ares Medical that might interest you, and half a ton of simulated carbonaceous chondrite asteroid material that I would like your recyclers to work on processing into feedstock.

Ork Anarchist Black Cross Operative; Wanted Criminal; Fake SIN Purveyor.

You folks aren’t in the habit of carrying serious contraband, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to craft some passports for you.

Can you stash some revolutionaries quietly for a few months? They have a lot of heat on them right now.

Runner’s Companion p126. Anarchist Black Crescent and Black Star are similar organizations.

Elf Anarchist Robin Hood; Wanted Criminal; Laundered-Money Philanthropist.

I’m not going to wait around for the megacorps to implode. I’m hastening it, one heist at a time.

There’s nothing more satisfying than pulling off a successful grift on these corporate slags.

Human Antifa Activist; Wanted Criminal; Former Neighbor.

If we stay on the defensive, we’ll be overrun by the bigots and corporatists. The planet is too small for us to keep our distance. We have to take the fight to them.

Sometimes publicity is a more effective weapon than violence. Sometimes a bit of violence provides publicity. The important thing is scaring the hardliners and encouraging the fence-sitters to edge away from them.

I respect the Havens’ choice, and I’m not going to bring any heat down on them.

Ork Broadcast Pirate; Pissed Off Oligarchs; 🎶 We Love Dirty Laundry 🎵♪.

Corporate interests go to all kinds of trouble to suppress anything from news that makes them look bad to musicians that won’t sign with a label.

If this job doesn’t kill me I’mma retire to a Haven.

No Future p98

Cascade Ork Talislegger; Border Patrol Hates Me; My Favorite Smuggler.

We can get you in and out of Seattle, no problem.

That particular rare ingredient does grow in our territory.

There are some idiots who think they can strip-mine our territory for short-term profit, and I could use some help dissuading them.

Dwarf Decker; Insatiable Curiosity; We’re Officemates.

Awwwwww yeahhhhh we got some serious bandwidth today, chummer!

I can’t see how you can stand living someplace where everyone is poking their nose into your business.

Good grief! Your cheese puffs have already gone bad! Haven’t you Havenly types ever heard of preservatives?

It’s important for a decker not to get traced back to their permanent residence, so you have a small group that rents a jackpoint (outside the Havens) with multiple exit routes, the office. The one who gets traced pays first and last month’s rent on the next one.

Elf DocWagon High Threat Response Paramedic; Dangerous Job; Exchanging Favors.

I appreciate the impromptu hospitality last week; there’s no way our patient could have survived until we got to a regular medical facility.

In High Threat Response, we have a lot of latitude to fudge inventory.

I have a patient who needs to vanish before someone cracks our records database; can you arrange for a stay at one of those sweet little bed-and-breakfast places across the street from a competent doctor?

Dwarf Fence; Cops Sniffing Around; Turning Hot Goods Into Nuyen.

That shouldn’t be hard to anonymize.

Very distinctive. Valuable, but hard to sell without attracting attention.

Ork Investigative Journalist; Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable; 🎶 We Love Dirty Laundry 🎵.

This job requires a lot of disguises. Revealing too much truth tends to get you a date with a car bomb.

Doing real journalism will get your certification revoked by the Journalism Protection Agreement. (No Future p110)

Human Mr. Johnson; Shadowrunners Are Crazy; Mutually Profitable Arrangements.

My employer has analyzed the sample of the paydata you have provided and would be interested in purchasing the rest of it.

While I would prefer to acquire talent for my employer, our psyops team believe that it is more likely that the Havens could pull off a successful extraction of disgruntled researchers than a megacorporation, and denying them those talents is itself valuable to us. This chip contains a set of dossiers on Universal Omnitech personnel, including a Chief Scientist, with psychological profiles, personal security measures, histories, and daily habits.

Deniable assets have recently liberated some trade secrets from Renraku, and I would like them packaged for general use and published on the scatterweb under your Public Privateering License; this immunizes us from a Corporate Court audit. This may trigger retaliation, so you’ll want to make sure that their wrath is visited on an appropriate target.

Should you be successful, I can arrange for a truckload of advanced medical equipment— a few years behind the state of the art, but of great use to you— to vanish from inventory.

Corrupt Elf Lone Star Cop; I Serve Too Many Masters; Looking the Other Way.

I have enough evidence to convict in this grocery bag here. It’d be a shame for all this other stuff to gather dust in an evidence locker. My boyfriend is fond of silk and cashmere, and I happen to have his measurements...

A steady supply of Haven-made goodies makes sure that he is patrolling other places and still getting credit for keeping the peace in this district.

Honest Elf Lone Star Cop; Too Honest for My Job; Real Coffee Isn’t a Bribe.

You’ve been giving them Haven-made presents for years and handing them the occasional collar when someone in the Havens is a grade-A jerk who won’t take quit doing that, or just go away for an answer. They may come work in your Haven if they get fired for doing their job too well.

Ork Mafia Capo; Cutthroat Competition; Mutual Respect.

The capo famiglia was very pleased with the gifts you sent, and would like to inquire about having a few people apprentice in your vertical farms and vatlabs. He will continue to support our understanding about avoiding entanglement between our respective affairs.

Your Havens are a terrible market for our products and services. If you take over we’ll all have to go straight. But the food will be good!

As it happens, we could spare some space in a shipment going that way, as long as you avert your eyes from the rest of the cargo.

The Mafia have rackets in smuggling, hijacking, drugs, chips, gambling, prostitution, fending, loan-sharking, money laundering, and protection. Supporting the more civic-minded people in the Gianelli family, who run organized crime in Puyallup, is a calculated better the devil you know scenario. While most of the apprentices who come to learn how to work a vertical farm go back to Perdition to use their skills to grow drug crops, some decide that they’d rather stay in the Havens, and even bring their relatives.

Human Metroplex Guard Quartermaster; My Boss is Even More Corrupt than I Am; Always Has Military Surplus.

We just got a shipment of surplus goodies from the Pentagon and it would be kind of convenient if I could just happen to be out of them by the time some of the Humanis-kissers come round looking for an upgrade.

Orders are to keep this hush-hush, but the Governor seems to be expecting trouble soon. Tell your people to be careful and fab up extra medical supplies... the Havens might have a bunch of new citizens.

It’s an open secret that the Seattle Metroplex Guard— nominally there to defend Seattle against attack, but in practice mostly used to bash heads when riots get too big for Lone Star to handle— is plagued by corruption, internal strife, and general incompetence, and that its top officers would prefer to keep it a humans-only club.

Human Mothers of Metahumans Activist; The Wrong Political Activity Can Get You Fired; Rumormonger.

I agree that the state of our democracy is terrible, but I haven’t given up on reforming it yet.

When the cameras are in front, make sure a good mix of people is visible. When the cops are in front, move the humans to the front.

I talk to a lot of people, and I’m hearing a trend lately...

The Humanis policlub may recruit extremists for the Human Nation and Alamos 20,000, but they also run charity schools, health clinics, Little League games and its own trid channel, and they’ll keep gang violence out of human neighborhoods if the cops won’t. We can’t be all protests all the time; we have to be even better at positive action than they are.

Troll Rainbow Warrior; One Step Ahead of the Law; Partner in Environmental Cleanups.

I’m glad to see the Havens doing so much to fix messes, but we need more people fighting the polluters.

TerraFirst! are very careful to go after facilities, not people; we wage economic warfare, just as Globewatch do on the Matrix. Dead bodies are not a good way to persuade people to join your cause. You want that, join Greenwar.

I’ve got some heat on me right now; I’m going to go lend a hand with the Mutter Erde policlub in Europe for a while. Here’s a one-time pad so we can keep up secure correspondence.

Ork Salish-Shidhe Coast Guard Officer; Perennially Understaffed; Cascade Ork Party Buddy.

Technically, we’re required to inspect any vessels entering Puget Sound that aren’t properly registered with the Seattle authorities. You aren’t hauling novacoke or BTLs or military hardware or anything else that will come back to bite me for letting it through, right? I have heavy-duty smugglers to catch.

The amount of pollution coming out of Seattle has a lot of the Salish-Shidhe folks very cranky. Are you sure it wouldn’t work to stage a coup and put the Havens in charge?

Dwarf Shortcut Surveyor; I Try Not To Think About It; We Trade Map Data.

Regular mapsofts are programmed for streets and the rules of the road. But sometimes you need to know where you can go based on where your vehicle can fit, and what it can drive through. At Shortcut we map structures to the centimeter to know what kind of vehicle can navigate them, and figure out which walls you can plausibly drive through if you really need an escape route. It’s kind of like Waze for shadowrunners.

Driving through a shopping mall isn’t that bad an option. People will usually scatter out of the way, and corporate security is less likely to open fire on you when there are that many bystanders. Even Kane isn’t dumb enough to mow down pedestrians. Make my next whisky a double, please.

Human Simsense Star; I Signed a Ten Year Contract; My Island of Sanity.

The Havens are one of the few places I can go where I’m not mobbed by paparazzi and raving fans.

Of course we're all crazy. We have to make ourselves feel anything the script calls for, physically and emotionally, no matter what’s going on in our lives. Simsense is to method acting what extreme sports are to PE class.

The catamaran over to Santa Cruz Island was the best thing I ever discovered.

Simsense is rare in the Havens; most entertainment is, at most, trideo. Perdition pop culture does leak in, but it reflects Perdition values and doesn't catch on as well.

Elf Software Pirate; Wanted Criminal; All the Latest Warez.

Digital rights management puts information in chains. I liberate it.

I crack simsense movies, too, but they’re ginormous and hard to distribute over the Matrix, so I always need people to help move chips. I always strip off the mandatory introductory ads, of course, which makes it an improvement on the original product.

That’s from an independent production house, not a soulless conglomerate. Buy a license; their prices are reasonable.

Human Squatter; Self Control Issues; Trades Intel for Food.

People like me are damn close to invisible. I see a lot.

I tried living in your damn Haven a few years back. The damn Aunties told me I needed to go to fragging anger management therapy! I don’t need fragging anger management therapy!

You Havenly are better than the damned Universal Brotherhood. They’re a fragging cult. Don’t like to let people walk away.

Human Temporary Worker; Economic Uncertainty; Trove of Insider Information.

Sure, I know the internal jargon for that corporation. I can even recommend some deserving individuals for your next social engineering project.

Haven credits are just another form of corporate scrip. If it isn’t portable, it isn’t wealth.

Human Transhuman League Activist; Chrome Ain’t Cheap; Always On the Cutting Edge.

Panhumanity is taking evolution into its own hands. Modern cyberware is going to look unimaginably crude in a short time; magic and technology will eventually converge.

We have the resources to feed and educate the world. It’s criminal that billions of people are having to struggle for survival instead of being free to bring their talents to building the future.

Superhuman intelligence is clearly possible— look at the Great Dragons. We need to catch up.

The Technocratic Party’s central philosophy of better living through technology is a good start, but they aren’t willing to offend their corporate sponsors by making the kind of fundamental changes we need.

Havenware is intriguing, but it’s years behind the state of the art.

(Transhuman League: Loose Alliances p43,147)

Vampire Superhero; Every Thrillgang in Redmond Wants to Stake Me; We Trade Intel.

I’m Batman.

Criminals are a cowardly and delicious lot.

I didn’t have a choice about becoming a vampire. Muggers, rapists, and murderers have a choice. They choose wrong.

You know the Batman of Redmond isn’t a rumor. You trade intel on goings-on in the Barrens. He eats a few dozen people each year, and is meticulous about making sure they’re doing harm to others before considering them prey. He’s also meticulous about making sure he doesn’t create more vampires.

Ork Thrillgang Member; Adrenaline Addiction; Trades Intel for Luxury Goods.

You won’t catch the Redmond Wreckers selling out to a Haven! We don’t need your crazy tech to defend our turf! No one tells us what to do!

Can you bring more jelly doughnuts next time?

Human UNATCO Agent; Under Pressure; Unofficial Affiliation.

We’ll keep an eye on that gene splicer with the attitude problem. Thanks for the heads-up.

If any of these drekheads show up, we’d appreciate a tip-off.

Yes, some of our operatives fall into the overzealous category. I’ll make sure those guys never go near your turf.

The UN Anti-Terrorist Coalition, headquartered on Liberty Island in New York, is part intelligence agency and part police. (For more on UN institutions, see Loose Alliances p64.)

Dwarf UNHCR Agent; Overworked and Understaffed; Humanitarian Assistance.

The Havens are my favorite extralegal organization.

There’s this crisis where we can’t officially help out, but I think we can make it worth your while...

The UN High Commission for Refugees, headquartered in Geneva, has their hands full. (For more on UN institutions, see Loose Alliances p64.)

Elf Yakuza Kyodai; Paradox of the Honorable Criminal; Fellow Tattoo Enthusiast.

The oyabun was very pleased with the gifts you sent, and would like to inquire about having a few people apprentice in your vertical farms and vatlabs. He will continue to support our understanding about avoiding entanglement between our respective affairs.

The Shigeda-gumi are one of the few clans to follow the New Way, valuing the contributions of metahumans, women, and people without pure Japanese blood. The Shotozumi-gumi and the Kenran-kai are much more traditional and have trouble with this.

Traditionally, the Yakuza could be relied on to protect the common folk, and provide justice where no one else could. Now those are some conservative values worth preserving. Too many clans want nothing more than profit.

As it happens, we could spare some space in a shipment going that way, as long as you are thoroughly incurious about the rest of the cargo.

All the kumi in Seattle report to the Watada-rengo back in Chiba. Akira Watada may be the oyabun there, but we all know he reports to the Ryumyo. The Great Dragon.

The Yakuza have rackets in smuggling, drugs, chips, gambling, prostitution, loan sharking, money laundering, fraud, and extortion. Supporting the more civic-minded people in the Shigeda-gumi, who run organized crime in the Redmond Barrens (as well as Everett, Snohomish, and Auburn), is a calculated better the devil you know scenario. While most of the apprentices who come to learn how to work a vertical farm go back to Perdition to use their skills to grow drug crops, some decide that they’d rather stay in the Havens, and even bring their relatives.