Found Arcana – Chapter 4 IC
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Found Arcana – Chapter 4 IC
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>> Mato, I can sharpen your natural senses to help to find it once I am out of the matrix. It was indeed troublesome, an assassination against a major criminal element seemed like a real possibility.
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Mato moved purposefully through the gallery, sniffing around. It was hard work, considering the various materials the objects were made off.
But finally he stood before a small painting with a thick frame. The paint smelled fresh and when he looked closer, the frame was obviously much thicker than you’d expect. The painting was of that of a young, blond man, smiling at the viewer.Jawsey tracked the tendrils on the astral. Quite a lot of the objects here have auras – most show some kind of passion and/or meaning, making them genuine art pieces. But quite a lot are dull gray, lacking any kind of emotional investment, indicating either cheap reproductions or mechanically produced items.
Not all tendrils end somewhere, but a few are connecting the entrance area and the office with the card, while others have attached themselves to a few select obects: A machete made from pure gold, a giant matroshka puppet, the creepy leather figure on the cross in the entrance area as well as a small series of very abstract looking, spiky metal sculptures as well as the image Mato is just looking at closer.AM finds the matrix around here pretty much stuffed with signals. Careful adjustment of the matrix filters, reveal three silent running sensor RFIDs, overlooking the inside of the gallery.
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<<Found it.>> Mato tells the team, even though Jawsey is out and about on the astral and won’t get the message until he’s back at his body.
<<There’s some sort of connection between the card and this painting. I feel a chill whenever I step through the connection. And this frame seems to be the source of our Semtex.>>
Mato doesn’t know anything about explosives or demolitions. Nor, to his knowledge, do Jawsey or AM. He resolves to read up on them should he survive next few hours, or next few minutes.
He doesn’t know where Jawsey’s mind is, or what it’s paying attention to, but he tries to signal him with Plains Sign Language to pay special attention to this painting to see if there’s anything special or unique about it.
<<AM, can you run an image search on the young, blond man in this picture? Don’t forget we have that MonaLisa subscription which helps with facial recognition. Or maybe we could just ask Janet. I want to know if it’s a portrait of one of the Russians, or their children. Maybe they’ll be guaranteed to congregate in front of it, setting them up for an assassination en masse.>> Mato pats himself on the back for having trotted out two of the few French words he knows.
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Nice job Mato, I’ll have a look. In the meanwhile, I found three sensor icons which are not mine. I am marking all the icons which are mine, let’s see if we can physically locate them. I would have hacked these in a heartbeat – but there are explosives so I am not sure I should take the risk while the gallery is open.
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AM does the search and the results prove Mato’s theory. He privately clucks with approval as his hunch turns out to be correct.
<<Yay team. What are we on the hook for, contractually? Do we just need to resolve the mystery of last night’s break-in or do we need to neutralize any and all potential threats? At what point are we paid and successful? My concern is that this will only be Plan A, and that there will be Plans B and C in place as well. We’re dealing with heavy hitters here, both in terms of resources and technical expertise, and might find ourselves overwhelmed and outgunned if we’re not careful.>>
Mato wishes he knew more about explosives to figure out if this is a shaped charge, meant to wipe out a specific area, or if it’s basically intended to bring the whole place down, Russians, Italians, and all.
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>> Janet talked about resolving a mystery, and we have some confidence that three new sensors were planted, and that the painting is rigged to explode. We solved the mystery – she likely wants us to stick around – but perhaps we can improve our terms a little bit – considering there is an actual bomb int the gallery.
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When Jawsey returned to his body to report his findings, and to determine what Matt had been trying to tell him, he found messages that the rest of the team had also found a lot.
“There is still a mystery that Janet doesn’t even know about, with these tendrils of magic. If we are going to do anything about the bomb I can get a spirit to use the guard power– won’t do a lot but may help prevent a slip of fingers”
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>> Mato, Jawsey the card happens to be connected to the painting with explosives. Let’s carefully examine all other objects that it is connected to.
Feeling good about herself, she has begun hacking one of the silently running icons to figure out what kind of sensor it is, and where it is located.
Spoiler: -
Taking on the sensor tag was no problem: The simple system transmitted a steady stream of visual data to somewhere in the Matrix.
By going to the start of the file, AM was able to make out a man with a balaklava who had just placed the sensor tag on the ceiling of the gallery, before packing up a small tool bag and leaving the cone of observable area. It seemed as if the sensor tag had been the last thing the man had installed. -
>> got some photos, but he’s wearing facemask so facial recognition would be tricky. She marks the likely location in AR, and then moves to AR herself. Exiting the room, she activates astral perception and walks and marks all the objects that are connected to the card, assensing them, and carefully observing them. She shares the map with the team, mainly to benefit Mato that cannot easily observe the mana.
orokos.com/roll/774469]Assensing[/url]: 8d6t5 3
orokos.com/roll/774470]Perception[/url]: 11d6t5 7 -
<<Is there a timestamp on that image?>> Mato asks. <<That might help us narrow down who could have placed it.>>
<<Do we just see his face or can we infer his physique or metatype or anything else like that? Let’s cross-reference with the Piscato brothers, or the ‘boys from maintenance’. Maybe they’re not the culprits; maybe they were just bribed to add a little sensor tag, ‘no harm, no big deal’ etc.>>
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You are brilliant today Mato, and yes there is a timestamp, it matches the reported breakin, will try to identify the man once I finish marking the statues for you.”
(Jack correct me if I am wrong).
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Going over the recording, AM was pretty sure, the bug was placed at about 2:31 last night. Running the masked figure through various image recognition services and got a few results:
– The man was pretty certainly 1.72m high, probably weighed around 80kg, muscular and probably lightly augmented with genetic or bio enhancements for his reflexes. He was pretty certainly a human male between 21 and 45 years – or an elder person with a very active and healthy lifestyle, also left handed.
Referencing the personal files, the Piscato brothers did not fit the profile.Spoiler: -
Spoiler:
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Mato stands up a little straighter at AM’s compliment. While observant and occasionally insightful, he’s rarely accused of brilliance and he finds that he rather likes it. He would pop some Psyche to celebrate if 1) it didn’t cost so much and 2) his nephritic screen wouldn’t chew it up and spit out it in short order. Oh, and also his debilitating fear of narcotics, given his family history.
<<Alright, working in the middle of the night with a mask. Could be a guilty technician so far. EXCEPT they usually don’t have genetic or bio enhancements for reflexes. So it sounds like we’re dealing with a hard boi, a professional. I guess that makes sense, given the Semtex. Left handed should help narrow down the list at least.>>
Mato moves to examine the other objects connected to the card, as indicated by AM’s ARO.
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“AM you felt the magic tendrils too, right? And how one go to artworks, while some just end? I want to work together to make a map, see if there is a pattern that we can’t see while wandering this fragging maze of rooms. And we should detail all the connected objects to see if we can find anything in common. Maybe get whatever details the gallery has about them? Like that … thing in the entrance. What is that leather made of?”
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“Yes, I am making an AR map so that Mato sees them too. Here, I am sharing the file with you two. “ With Jawsey’s focus she checks the statues, and other objects connected by the tendrils of mana, and tries to figure out some patterns. She feels particularly sharp and confident due to the blessing of her mentor.
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Based on the mapping, two things became clear: The two spiky statues formed a same sided triangle with the rigged painting and when Mato sniffed at them, he immediately recognized more Semtex. Although they were separated from the painting through drywall, that would have offered very little protection from their blast.
The creepy crucified leather statue revealed a certain taint on the astral – something very wrong had touched the thing on the magic side of the world, giving it an aura of menace and hunger.
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When AM observes this pattern, she tries to understand the magical, arcane properties of it.
AM thinks about these explosives and reads whatever she can find on the subject. She examines the statues and painting, and tries to figure out a way to disarm them. She understands that there should be some triggering mechanism, and with a bit of luck it is connected to the matrix and she can hack it rather than gamble which wire to cut in the trids it is always the red wire – but that is poor education in explosives.
Spoiler: -
Very, very carefully, AM removed the back of the picture. Inside she found a sandwitch made from a steel plate with plastique explosives and ball bearings as topings. A small sensor tag was wired to the detonator. Whatever the sensor was supposed to see, it obviously wasn’t AM looking at it closely. Pulling the wires out was a bit nerve wracking, but produced the desired result of making the bomb safe…ish.
That left the two other metal sculptures with the pointy bits…
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