SCL
Contact: Dept. Firearms Regulatory Service
Package: Investigative preferred
Consolidated Bonus Scheme: 250c per Op + team bonus
Investigate increased levels of firearms trafficking in Lower Downtown. Media blackout in operation. Contact J. Palmer, FRS for details.
Behind the scenes: The FRS has become concerned at a sudden growth in high-quality firearms on the black market in Lower Downtown. Since the weapons are all top-end SLA equipment, it has been decided to impose a media blackout on the investigation - it would look bad for SLA to be seen to have lost control of their arms shipments, wherever they should be coming from. To compensate the team for the loss of revenue, the FRS will pay a cash bonus on completion of the mission (the amount of the bonus should be tailored to the number of Ops and the needs of the campaign).
The firearms are being distributed by a Krosstown Traffic affiliate called Black Vitae who are looking to break away from KT's shadow and become a power in their own right. News of their ambition reached certain people, and they were contacted through unidentified cutouts and offered the merchandise.
Naturally, Black Vitae are playing this as close to the chest as possible, and they're reasonably intelligent. Rather than peddling the weapons direct themselves, they have used them to leverage a position of authority whereby other people purchase them wholesale from BV, then sell them on in smaller batches to local suppliers, who in turn sell them retail to the customers. Whilst the Ops can probably safely intimidate answers out of the first tier or possibly two, after that their best bet is to go in undercover. Bear in mind that at this point in time, KT are unaware that BV are thinking treason, and until the Ops have enough proof they'd best tread carefully so as not to wind up with KT on their trails.
The climax of the White BPN is a raid on the Black Vitae headquarters. BV have taken over an old, half-ruined office block and refurbished the inside. Remember that they have access to top-whack weaponry, and no compunction about using it. Successful Ops will discover a large number of crates of SLA weapons (GM's who, like me, offer bounties on returned equipment should probably impose a reasonable limit here :) ), but the most interesting find are a half dozen crates of AA4 Support Revolvers. These formidable 11.5mm short rifle round revolvers are only made on Artery, and there should not be any way for this many of them to be on Mort. Cloak Division (in fact Internal Affairs, but the Ops will probably never know this) will take notice of the report on this investigation and issue a covert Grey BPN to follow the discovery up:
SCL
Contact: Department Universities
Package: Media Preferred, consideration given to photogenic teams
Consolidated Bonus Scheme: 300c per Op
Well turned out team required for recruitment drive on Artery. Contact Ms. C. Mitchell.
Silver? Well yes. Cloak don't want to spook whoever is responsible for the arms smuggling, so they've set up a cover for the team. Ms. C. Mitchell is an IA operative posing as a member of the recruiting section of the Universities department. The real BPN is:
SCL: n/a, direct issue
Contact: n/a
Consolidated Bonus Scheme: 450c per Op
Investigate source of arms smuggled to Mort and take appropriate actions.
Behind the scenes:
Cloak arrange to have the team shipped out to Artery as part of an apparent recruitment drive. Play up the violent atmospheric conditions, the strangeness of the tube system, everything that makes Artery different from Mort (a brawl with some Shivers who are REALLY hard might not go amiss if your Ops are used to lording it over the ones back home ;) ). The Ops have no existing contacts here, and all Streetwise or similar rolls are at a negative modifier for unfamiliarity, which should also be played up. Make them really feel alone here, cut off from any of their familiar support and dangling on the end of a thin thread.
How simple or complex the investigation is really depends on the nature of the Ops in your team, but eventually they should discover - perhaps through a weapon serial number prefix - that the weapons were all made at a site that was supposed to have been dismantled and its resources reallocated long ago. Guess where that site was...
The Angel storm is the worst and most persistent on Artery, covering the central portion of the Angel complex where SCL's are high and trigger fingers fast, and the Ops are heading out into the teeth of it for what they fondly believe is their final showdown with the bad guys.
INTERLUDE: So who's responsible for this? If you don't want to complicate matters, well, take your pick; if you have a favourite bad-guy soft company du jour, use them. Dark Night are an obvious choice (this is just a little more elegant than their usual technique of dumping a load of DN weaponry onto the streets). My personal choice, however, is - nobody knows. And I mean nobody. All the information that would identify the people responsible for this plot has been neatly excised from the minds of the factory staff by high-level ebb powers. This is part of an ongoing background plot in my WoP involving Players from outside the SLA structure (if I can get hold of more information about the Truth then I'll tailor accordingly; at the moment, well, suffice it to say that it involves Conflict War survivors, maybe the Kilneck, and possible even Bitterness. The truth is out there - but the lies are in your head...).
COMPLICATION: So why was a perfectly good factory making commonly-used items shut down? Most people believe it was because of the Angel storm, but this is not entirely true. The weapons manufacturing section of the factory was always more in the nature of a front than anything else.
Everyone (out of game) knows that it is the Deathwake device that makes Stormers sentient. And that before the DD, biogenetic constructs were nothing more than mindless automata. Of course, there's a use for mindless automata...
Many years ago, Karma decided to try out ways of utilising their failures. One idea that came up was using them as warrior drones, like those of an ant's nest. And like an ant's nest, they would run from a single brain (the queen, if you like). When the Angel complex was set up to build stormers, a side project was to also create the mass-produced drones for experimentation. The drones were implanted with computer links, through which instructions were issued from a central computer, nicknamed Teacher. It seemed to work - except that the Angel storm caused corruption in the computer's complex command structure and the drones started attacking anything that moved. The destruct order was given, and the complex evacuated.
But of course, things didn't go to plan. Instead of blowing up, the computer - and therefore the drones - shut down and went to 'sleep'. Ironically, in the purges that followed this debacle, the people who knew that the facility wasn't destroyed were among the heads that rolled. Now there are people in the facility again, running power, tapping computers - causing trouble.
At the height of the showdown between the Ops and the arms smugglers, a lightning strike hits the factory. All power goes offline for a few short heartbeats, before coming back on. That's when the voice from the speakers is heard:
"Emergency power: active. Systems check: active. Condition red. Unauthorised intruders on site. Communications systems: inactive. Emergency protocols engaged. Intruder termination begins."
Teacher begins activating drones according to its emergency protocols (remember that Teacher is not an AI, rather an advanced expert system). Suddenly arms dealers and Ops alike are fighting for their lives against ruthless, implacable killing machines. Play it like Aliens; darkness, shadowy shapes, sudden brutal death. Their only hope is to find Teacher (the chips in the heads of the drones should clue them in if they haven't already worked it out) and shut it down.
Permanently? Well, that depends on you...
If the Ops manage to survive this horrifying encounter, they should think carefully about who they tell what. Discretion (ie, Cloak find out and nobody else) will be rewarded equally discreetly by Karma for keeping them out of it (perhaps the team is selected to field test some new items and/or gain sponsorship if they qualify). Going to the media or attempting blackmail will almost certainly result in prompt termination.