Wages of Sin: Beginnings

The four players begin in the hold of a cargo liner, three of them having spent thirteen weeks in cryo and one who's been stuck in a closet with a half dozen other androids. 

Defrosted, they shuttle down to Anvolla. They are two marines, an android scientist, and a teamster. Upon arrival they find themselves in a city the size of New York stuffed into what amounts to some very large cargo containers. 

Anvollapolis is a mega-city holding billions wrapped in a steel ziggurat to protect them from the radioactive atmosphere outside. The people on the edge and the bottom suffer nearly constant radiation poisoning. 

Our crew debarks from the shuttle into Westcheap, a bottom floor district near the middle of the ziggurat, populated by service and tech workers in tiny honeycombs of apartments surrounded by cheap neon lowglow. Kiosks everywhere selling everything, the flashing yellow lizard of MegaYUM industries on a dozen different signs, lurid pink tongue flicking eternally. You can almost hear the high-pitched "YUM" from the commercials. Everything smells like sweat and burning solder.

First order of business is to pick up their ship. Back in the core they all signed up for Kerebos Bounty Hunting Academy, which they'd seen on late night commercials, promising every finisher a good job. It nowhere specified where, and all four have discovered the answer to that is the ass end of them rim. The deal is simple: all four get a kcr a month, and they owe 2kcr for the ship at the end of every month. The rest they make from bounties. Some deal Kerebos cut with the powers that be to flood the zone with bounty hunters instead of paying for real law.

Halfway through Sinnit Bend, on the way to the main spaceport, they realize everyone else is wearing rebreathers and after briefly considering buying a rebreather for 15cr from a street urchin, instead walk back to Westcheap and pick them up for 500cr a pop (250 for a dog-sized one, as one of the marines has brought his canine companion for some reason), wondering how bad the others must have been.

They head back and realize someone is trailing them. The marine with the dog takes the dog off to have a shit and see if he can get behind the guy as the rest of the team keeps going. Instead the follower bumps into him hard. There's a brief, unimpressive tussle and the marine catches the young man red-handed -- just a pickpocket. He punches the young guy in the nose, and before he can pick himself up off the ground, the marine tosses a bag to him and walks off saying "At least you got something for your troubles." 

Still on the ground, the guy opens the bag to discover it's full of dog shit.

As they walk away, they hear the neighborhood kids shouting "shitbag" at the young guy who has earned himself a new nickname.

They finally reach the spaceport, stand in line for a half hour while electrobhangra fries their brains, and eventually reach the counter only to discover that their ship was delivered with a crack in the engine and sprayed radioactive material all over the interior and is being cleaned at Kerebos's cost. But they're stuck on Anvolla for a week.

They find some cheap apartments and hit BountyNet, hoping to raise a little cash while they wait. They've never taken an official bounty, so they're limited to Bounty Level 1 cases until they've completed one. There's exactly one of those available, so when they get up the next morning they take it and contact the MegaYUM Industries contact, which turns out to be an AI email that gives them very little information.

Someone stole some food waste from a MegaYUM Supermarket and they want the criminal turned into the police. There's footage of a person in a balaclava, but not much else to go on. They make some calls and do some footwork and eventually figure out that the guy came in through the roof, then wheeled a bunch of food waste out the back to an arterial cart -- these cargo shuttles that run material around the ziggurat -- and followed the waste into the tunnel.

They'd previously searched around on the Anvollan internet for information and seen local teens joyriding the carts, so they assumed he got away in the same cart in which he stole the food waste. They have the number of the cart, and after some convincing, have a person inside of Amstel Green -- the cart service -- who is willing to look up who rented that particular cart, and we ended the evening as they made there way there to get their first solid lead.

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