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GIG: Riders on the Storm
Out here, the city's rules don't reach. Just the wind, the sand, and the weight of your choices. The desert is unforgiving, choom, it's one of the few things even the corporations can't bastardize. It's too wild, too barren, even for them. There's a grim silence in this wind, just quiet enough to make you reckon with yourself. Before the day is done, that may prove the hardest part.
// The Sunset Motel – Badlands, NC
// 04:42 — Local Signal Active
// Gig Continuation: Here
Mortality Clause Active: No safety nets. No plot armor. Just you, the dust, and whatever's chasing you.
@Jocelyn Tashiro
@Nessa Graves
@Vex Kiranova
@Tyler "Minx" Dawson
@Dmitri Antonov
@Xasha Callisto
@Omega
@Beau Frost
@Ryan Graves
The hum of the vending machine in the motel lobby was the only mechanical noise for miles. Its tired compressor sighing beneath a hand-scrawled sign: OUT OF ORDER. The Sunset had seen better days, but none recently. Peeling wallpaper. Buzzing fluorescents. Rusted ice bucket overflowing with melted cubes and shotgun shells. The air carried the smell of cigarettes and phosphorous, and the water hadn't run properly for months. This was a place the world forgot. Exactly why Red chose it. // The Sunset Motel – Badlands, NC
// 04:42 — Local Signal Active
// Gig Continuation: Here
Mortality Clause Active: No safety nets. No plot armor. Just you, the dust, and whatever's chasing you.@Jocelyn Tashiro
@Nessa Graves
@Vex Kiranova
@Tyler "Minx" Dawson
@Dmitri Antonov
@Xasha Callisto
@Omega
@Beau Frost
@Ryan Graves
A wall clock in the office—still analog—ticked past 04:32. The window was closing.
Outside, the wind had picked up. The Badlands carried a dry static charge now, like the desert was holding its breath. Distant thunder? No—tires on asphalt. Still far, still faint. But it meant what it meant. The crew was scattered across the motel's sun-bleached premises. Some perched on the cracked second-floor balcony, surveying the highway through scopes and optics. Others crouched beside their rides, neon underglow flickering faint against the dusty concrete. Cigarettes burned low. Smart shotgun chambers racked. Implants hissed and whirred as final calibrations were made in hushed focus.
Room 7's curtains were drawn. Inside, the tub glowed faint green-blue, full of ice and interface cables like the world's most illegal jacuzzi, except covered in ash burns and beer stains. Somewhere, a netrunner's breath quickened as connection pulses snaked through local airspace, searching for satellites and interference. The motel router—jury-rigged and patched through a drone antenna—flickered uncertainly. The target's convoy would come from the east, headlights cresting the hills like ghosts. Three vehicles. Armored transpo in the center, escorts on both ends. No AVs. No drones. At least none they could see. They had to trust their intel, only way to keep a steady hand on a job like this. There was room to keep it discreet, if they wanted to, which meant the stakes were real.
The target? A rogue Arasaka executive, name scrubbed from public systems, fingerprints ghosted. No face. No file. Just a data trail that shouldn't exist and a one-time signal ping that lit up half a darknet forum before vanishing. What's known is this: they're defecting to Militech. Not for ideology—never is—but for something bigger. Could be leverage. Could be blackmail. Could be they're running from something worse than either corp. Red's intel says the exec is carrying something sensitive: data, tech, maybe names. It's enough that both sides are pretending this handoff isn't happening at all. No news. No heat. Just a quiet corridor through the Badlands and a briefcase no one's supposed to open.
But secrets like that don't stay buried once the rat's out of the cage. Not out here.
No orders. No hand-holding. Just a single immutable truth: something was coming down that highway, and every choice made from this point on was a commitment—to the gig, to the crew, to the story that might get told about this night, if anyone lived to tell it. There was still time—barely. Time to dial in your optics, tune the hiss out of your cyberware, whisper a prayer to whatever junk-code deity still listens to edge-runners on the most pathetic corners of the net. Time to disappear into your thoughts or find comfort in the presence of the others, however temporary that comfort might be.
A faint shimmer on the horizon—just a mirage at first, caught in the static heat haze of the cracked earth. But through scopes, cyberoptics, and high-end glass: the shape emerged.
The three vehicles, as promised.
An armored personnel transport, matte black and low to the ground like a predator on wheels, its contours too perfect to be off-the-rack. Flanked by two escort sedans—smoked glass, Militech-issue run-flats, heat diffusers stitched into the hood, maybe a pop-up turret or two buried somewhere in the frame. No AVs overhead. No drones in the lead. Just the hush of black steel and momentum cutting through the night like a blade.
They didn't look like they were expecting trouble. That might be their last mistake. The convoy moved slow, steady, certain. Like they owned the road. Like the desert would bend for them.
But the desert doesn't bend.
It buries.
And this morning, just as the blood meridian crests the east, it awaits it's next companions.
Another ruin for it to swallow, another name to lose beneath its shifting dust.
Its newest Ozymandias.
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