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Night's Black Agents: Hipster Pirates of the Celtic Sea

GOKL returned to playing the modern age vampire conspiracy game Night's Black Agents after a brief hiatus. Darren - Eclipse Phase's infomorph DANAI -  joined us as a burnt Russian agent Nikolai Kaidanovsky, a medical doctor. (No, Darren had not seen Pacific Rim.)

The Story So Far

The agents had been investigating Emartech Pharmaceuticals, the corporation which was experimenting and mass producing a certain type of blood. This blood had been tainted with a mutated mycoplasma haemocanis virus and had been used as a possible biological agent. In Sweden, the group had recently encountered a white supremacist terrorist group whose members were infused with this blood to wreak havoc during Eurovision 2013. The blood gave their operatives superhuman powers.

The previous session was not blogged about here. Why? Because I failed a roll during an impromptu seduction scene on the head of human resources of Emartech in Cardiff, Wales. And Misha had to bail Zlatan out of the hotel causing both IDs to be burnt. It was an embarassment. Sami and Misha was calling for Zlatan to have a "Walk with Zlatan" all the way driving back to London.

And Suddenly...

Elsewhere, the Russian, Kaidanovsky, had been investigating old Soviet experiments on extrasensory perception from the 1980s when he received a burn notice from his superior. The General informed him that a Norwegian container ship Heimdall was en route from Sweden to Wales. This mysterious cargo had been hastily taken out of Sweden and sent to Emartech in Cardiff. He was told to meet up with freelance agents in London who had discovered documents pertaining to his investigation while they were in Sweden.

The team, upon arriving in London, received an online dead drop communique from Hagar Thurson, their Swedish ally, telling them to expect Nikolai at the airport.

They pick up Nikolai in their Lada Niva and interrogated him as Zlatan drove around London. Abraham van Helsing, the surviving borzoi hound, sniffed Nikolai and gave him his thumbs up, though he did not have any proper thumbs. Although Nikolai kept calling Russia the Soviet Union for some reason, they cleared him to join the team.

Planning Begins

When informed of the Heimdall, the agents realised that this was the ship that was en route to Cardiff port that the NGO there - an Emartech dupe - was supposed to protest against when it docked. Zlatan thought they should intercept and try to find out what's on the ship before they entered UK waters. If it was meant for Emartech, then there might be a clue to the haemocanis virus-infected blood that had been going around Europe.

The team thought to call their hacker Jacob (whose player Macx was absent - and left his PC visiting his Point of Stability in Italy) to hack the AIS database to track the course of the Heimdall, but Sami did it immediately via the Marine Traffic website. (Actually Sami's player Ivan did it on his tablet during the game and provided live AIS tracking of ships in the Celtic Sea, which was pretty freaking cool. Night's Black Agent is definitely a game where players need to use mobile devices as live props on the fly.)

Misha discovered where her British Intelligence handler Emilia Sanderson kept a rigid inflatable boat away from prying eyes and clandestinely "borrowed" it as well as other nautical gear from its dock for the group's seagoing caper.

In the meantime, Zlatan shopped around for weapons and tactical gear. He found some Balkan gunrunners running MP-7s outside London. They might have been Balkans but Zlatan wasn't sure. They might have been from Peoria for all he knew. On the way back to base, a police car attempted to intercept him. But Zlatan employed his Afghanistan War driving skills to weave through the night traffic and lose the cops.

Operation Begins

Everyone wore Arabic keffiyeh, night vision goggles and a kerchief over their mouth - even Abe the dog. Zlatan thought the keffiyeh made everyone look like hipsters.

So some time after midnight, when the Heimdall was 10 miles from the UK shores, the hipster pirates of the Celtic Sea fouled up the container ship's propellers by dumping a steel cable mesh netting onto the path of the ship. They infiltrated over the side and onto the Heimdall, leaving Nikolai and Abe to guard the boat which was tethered to the larger ship by cables.

Sami with an MP7 and Misha with a sword stormed the bridge while Zlatan covered them with his starlight scoped-sniper rifle. Sami's fluency in Arabic convinced them that they were some sort of unlikely modern day Barbary Pirates - even if Misha looked very obviously an Asian woman. The captain told them that the cargo they obviously wanted was below deck and was guard by two Welshmen. Zlatan smashed their radio before proceeding.

They raided the cargo bay and discovered a structure made for medical experiments, constructed from two cargo containers. Powerful UV floodlights shone upon it. The first Welshman, Jones, immediately saw that they had been boarded and yelled to his partner the second Welshman also named Jones. The second Jones quickly slammed the med bay's door shut from within. Zlatan shot the first Jones in the chest before melting off the med bay's door lock with liberal application of thermite.

The team swept into the container, weapons aimed and in full intimidation mode. The compartment had biological lab equipment and a computer terminal. Another locked, heavier class of security door led into a much more secure clean room. The second Jones surrendered and told them that they had absolutely no idea what they're dealing with.

Sami pulled up the CCTV feed from inside the clean room on the terminal.

Within were a series of cages. Within each cage was a dog. Wild dogs.Their eyes were red and bloodshot. As soon as the team activated the monitor, every dog - all of them unmoving and maintaning the same waiting stance - turned to look at the camera as if they knew they were being watched. It was unsettling. Why were these being delivered to Emartech Pharmaceuticals in Cardiff?

Stay tuned for the next exciting session of Night's Black Agents.

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