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Early in the morning of the 17th of March, 2057 Nina and Leto finished a run that started late the previous afternoon. Following Nina's Wakeup, and the messages she gets from Nick, Nucleus and Billy He-Who-Walks-With-Bear, may he rest in peace, tracked Iris down to an abandoned church, a former Universal Brotherhood office, on Telegraph Av. in Touristville, Redmond, you called in favors and gathered as many people as you possibly could to find her down in the Insect Hive.
Roadblock, James McQuaid, John McQuaid, Grind, Nucleus, Billy He-Who-Walks-With-Bear, Maximilian, "Cheech" and "Chong", two associates of Maximilian, Wedge, Nina and Leto yourselves ventured down into the bio-mechanoid caverns to face Flesh-Form spirits, twisted and mutated humans acting as hosts for weaker insect spirits, and True-Form spirits, insect spirits strong enough to exist on the physical plane without the aid of hosts.
Along the way, slaughtering massive numbers of Flesh-Form spirits you found pods, thousands of pods where humans and insect spirits were being merged into hideous Flesh-Form spirits. Nucleus and Billy He-Who-Walks-With-Bear, with the aid of Leto and his newly acquired magical powers, took on the True-Form spirits.
After about an hour of fighting you found the main chamber and the fighting got worse. You pulled back into the hallway from where you came and held a fortified stand there. After long minutes of an oncoming barrage of Flesh-Form spirits and a few True-Form spirits the first of you died. Many had already suffered numerous smaller wounds but James McQuaid, 24 years old, was the first to die. Soon after his brother, gone into a killing frenzy due to the death of his twin brother, pulled out several grenades and jumped headlong into the main hall after which you could hear several muffled explosions and high-pitched screams by the many bugs he took with him.
Slowly the Insect spirits stopped coming. Sporadically one would still try to cross the wall of dead Flesh-Forms at the entrace to the tunnel. Grind had torched the pile of dead Flesh-Forms with his flamethrower to create a burning wall against which the Flesh-Forms had little defense. But still they came.
You pushed your way back into the large cavern. There you found thousands of pods all tended to by drone insect spirits, the working class among the spirits. They left you alone as long as you did nothing to harm the pods, or the queens spirit. A large bloated wasp spirit that kept laying eggs, or rather, laying pods into which the captured humans could be inserted for transformation.
At the head of it all, stood a crazed human shaman,...an insect shaman who held a number of still untransformed humans as hostages at gunpoint, including Iris. He ordered you out of the cave. You complied by backing off. You tried to negotiate for the freedom of the girl but to no avail. You came up with a plan, a plan of attack. Nucleus would cast a spell on the little girl that would be able to partially shield her from the gunshot. At the same time there would be an attack made by Grind who was the best marksman in the group. He would shoot at the shaman with EX explosive bullets and take him out. Nina and Leto would attack the queen spirit to provide for a distraction.
A lot of shots were fired. Iris got hit twice, once by a friendly bullet. She was rushed off to the hospital by Maximilian and his one remaining henchmen. Before being rushed off, Billy He-Who-Walks-With-Bear made the ultimate sacrifice for the girl and gave his life to stabalize and heal her.
Wedge and Grind continued to set explosive charges throughout the tunnels under the protection of Nucleus and Roadblock and the entire church went up in an explosive flame.
The girl was brought to the hospital with two gunshot wounds. One to the shoulder and one to the leg. Unfortunately the doctors were unable to save her leg, and there are talks of replacing it with a cloned bio-engineered leg or a cybernetic replacement.
It is now Saturday the 18th of March, 2057 and everything is well. The run scheduled for Mr. Darke is due Thursday the 23rd of March, 2057 and a meeting has been scheduled for 3:00 AM that very day in Everett on the roof of Novatech’s soon-to-be new office for the trade.
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