Durgama Takeover

“Do you want me to tell you what I saw?”
Cresencio had old-fashioned 5th-gen maya mesh implants. There was visible circuitry under his face, and the glasses he wore over his eyes were an endlessly shifting series of colors that moved in time with his smart clothing. He yellowed teeth and short, curly hair that seemed just as prevalent on his arms and chest as on top of his hair.
“It’s not really what I saw,” he said. “It’s what I heard. And felt, amiko. The heat, the flame, the sensations of batalo are unlike anything you get to experience sitting behind a desk.”
The keiretsu staffer furrowed their brows. What could they do, though? Crescencio was a lifetime, platinum-plus employee. The ability to back-talk his employers, his landlords, and his interrogators was all a benefit of the hypercorporate system that he so cherished.

“The first thing I felt,” he said, without prompting, “was some bad news. I could see this Bureau agent yelling over a microphone at somebody, and another guy on his comlog and they were pissed.”
“It sounded like there was something about following and observing some employees here at Gekidan. Pretty nuts. But the other guys, the one he was yelling at, sounded like they had something in mind. Extraction. Maybe elimination. That’s when the shooting started, and I realized that the guys doing the shooting were ALEPH. They move fast, really fast. At that point, well, time seemed to slow down…”

DEPLOYMENT
I, playing Haqq, lost the roll. Gealhart did an AMZING job taking pictures, so I’m just going to link the deployment photo here. Seriously, he labeled them and everything.
I placed the Zhayedan on the left, by the plaza; I really wanted him to be able to move and take out a LOT of targets.
On the walkway, I had all my infiltrators, specialists, and camo chaff like the Daylami.
I also had a hidden deployment hassassin alongside the Zhayedan for backup.
My opponent had some bounty hunters on the left, along with his Asura+Yadu fireteam. On the right, he had a pretty beefy Dakini core. My plan was to use Knauf to take them apart, and if that didn’t work, send suicidal irregulars after them.

TURN 1
The Yadu and Asuras DESTROYED my camo spam. MSV3 does the work! I had a pretty reactive turn, and while I didn’t get any real damage in with it, it wasn’t useless – I ate up a LOT of ALEPH’s orders. I was only sad he took out my Fiday without him getting to do any damage.
Gealhart got a console, which was bad for me – a lot of my cheap pieces were dead, including some specialists.
Bottom of one, I broke out; the Mukhtar went in close with MSV2 to take out his overwatch bot, and then I used Knauf to slice away at the Dakini fireteam
I didn’t know how to take out the Asura so I gambled and had the Kum Biker (Zamira) get in there with the flamethrower. It did one wound, not awful, not terrible, not great.
Then, the thing I was really hype for – the Zhayedan – went for Shakti and the Asura. He surgically took them apart with Marksmanship and the gigantic HMG.

“It was pretty nuts. All of a sudden, the guy – the O-12 bureau guy I saw – he starts to act kinda funny. And I see these big robot ladies, they start walking all over him. It’s pretty wild, and all of a sudden they get in close and BOOM, he goes down. Guess he wasn’t part of their bureau after all.
But then, it turns around, and all of a sudden BOOM BOOM BOOM, there’s just this WILD gunfire. There’s a rocket from the roof and it looks like the big lady with the robot hair is just shooting EVERYTHING she sees. There are guys I didn’t even know were there, and they drop down dead.
It was total chaos. I hear an explosion and see a motorocycle go flying through the air. There’s a few minutes of quiet… and then the gunfire REALLY starts. What I heard earlier was nothing, man, NOTHING, compared to the THD-THD sound of someone’s machine gun.”
Crescencio slammed his arms on the table to simulate the sounds.

Turn 2

Steve takes out some of my orders, and spends a lot of orders on Hussein Al-Djabel. He takes out some more of my bots, but Hussein eats up so much time he can’t do that much.
I send Knauf out, and he blasts the shit out of most of his guys. The Zhayedan works on it, too. I send one of my specialists up and finds out the decoy target.

“So, things go quiet, and that’s when I know they’re serious. Because when it’s quiet, it doesn’t mean that they’re shooting – it means that guys are thinking, yeah? I hear this loud CRACK, so loud, SO loud, and then I see a bot fall off the roof. It just turns into a ragdoll, tumbling down, but missing its processing core.”
Crescencio took off his sunglasses.

TURN 3
A quieter turn; I lose the Zhayedan once Gealhart uses the bounty hunters. But at this point, I’ve eaten up his orders and his fireteams and his best specialists. Yeah, I lose a lot of guys, but I’m feeling good – I just need one kill and I’m golden. After all, I’ve identified his designated target and protected mine OK.
On my final turn, the Zhayedan, who was killed from an ABH, getsu p thanks to Regen.

Crescencio smiled. “Anyway, that’s pretty much all I saw. I think a couple of the guys got plugged.”
“Guys?” asked the Gekidan staffer.
“Yeah, guys. I mean OUR guys. But it was out of my field of vision and sensors. The patina didn’t even show blood. So it must have been pretty surgical. Either way it seems like the ALEPH dudes had to pull out.”

The Gekidan employee quietly tapped a few messages out on her comlog, aimed at her handlers – and from her handlers, to the Old Man.

Bismillah – They don’t suspect a thing. We will continue to observe and report on the Speculos until they attempt to make a move. Hopefully, we can use their behavior to future improve our own impersonation methods.