The Gallo Brothers, Plural (1/16/2024)

GM: Sean Nittner
Players: Karen Twelves, Eric Fattig, and Adrienne Mueller
System: Blades in 68′

Intel Heists

Two things we established in previous sessions were that:

Little Gallo is not the athlete that Nav is. He’s not jumping down from a second story building onto pavement below.
If Little Gallo was taken by force or subterfuge, there would be retributions from the Carver family, and likely from their backers (Mack Ransom et al)

What this meant was that rather than breaking in and stealing him, the Dirt Baron’s best move was to find, well dirt that would get him free.

Threats and Opporunities

Con jobs and political maneuvering in media are usually reliant on secret and dangerous information that the protagonists discover and use to their advantage. To give the Barons a clear sense of the levers that were already available to pull and the threats already in place I used a set of index cards to represent opportunities (top row) and threats they potentially knew about. Since they were operating in their hunting grounds (Silkshore doing an Intel Heist) they got +1D on Gather Information checks to find out more about these. Here’s how the cards started.

The top row represented the opportunities they already had that, with some work could turn into leverage:

Tracking: Nav gave Little Gallo a tracking device last time they met. She made him swallow it at the time but it’s been weeks. Does he still have it?
The Ledger: During the last bit of personal business Paolo pilfered a ledger between Castelle Fane (SMF) and Mack Ransom (sponsoring the Carver family). The ledger was encoded, but with some work they might find incriminating evidence.

The second row were the threats they knew about or at least suspected were there:

Mack’s Silver Bullet: Mack himself seemed to be very nonchalant about the ransom situation (maybe because it’s in his name!). Clearly had a card up his sleeve if he was pushed too far.
Gallo’s Debt: The ransom for Little Gallo kept going up. It started at 4 stacks and it was up to 20 by the time they started the score. It seemed like whenever they did try to pay to get him back, the price would always go up. What would happen if they refused to pay?
Carvers Backed into a Corner: It was clear by now to the Barons that the Carvers weren’t the masterminds of this plan. Yeah, they held Little Gallo, but they were taking orders from someone else. Their pride was hurt and they didn’t like how this was all going down…what would happen if they were pushed too far?

Opening

[Last session the crew decided they were going to do the Little Gallo job. It only paid 2 stacks, but cementing their friendship with the Gallo Family was worth it]

We saw Elliot and Jestine Carver leaving the Velvet Veil with looks of concern on their face. They just delivered bad news and weren’t sure what the Gallo family was going to do with it. Dossani Gallo gave Paolo a look from the bar that summoned him and the other Barons to her office.

“The said the price has gone up to 20 stacks. We might be able to get it, but if we do there’s no way we can make the payment due to the bank (she didn’t say the name, but it was Strangford-Michter Financial). I want my son back, and I don’t care about the Carvers or that swine Mack Rason think about how we get him. Will you help me?”

Paolo assured their ward boss the would find her son and got to digging into the details.

Prep

Normally Blades doesn’t encourage a lot of time spent on prep, but since they were in their Hunting Grounds and doing an intel heist (they plan was to find information they, or Dossani, could use as leverage to get Little Gallo free) they got a free downtime action and +1D on gather information checks.

The Ledger: After hours of decoding, Paolo and Delta (with some help form GRD-9 as well) were able to determine what Castelle had meant to pass to Mack. The ledgers showed the profits they would both make upon acquiring the casinos, and how they could, semi-legally, ratchet up the payments from the Carvers until eventually they’d have to default on their loans. It took someone with a strong financial mind to make sense of it all, but if they could, this was proof that the SMF and Mack were conspiring to take the casinos for themselves, or worse turn the Carver family into in-debt employees that have to run it for them.

A short trip to the Imperial Plaza and a comedic talk with Caton in the coat check revealed that though SCORPION syndicate has dealings with Strangford-Michter, they are currently copacetic and seemed to be serving the interest of both parties. Caton did let them know that Chago normally doesn’t deal with the CEO Castelle Fane directly. Instead she send her assistant Kassius Carver to handle the day to day interactions. Whatever dealings they have, he’s sure to be privy to them.

Tracking Little Gallo. As the Barons approached the Blue Sunrise, Nav pulled out the tracking receiver to see what signal she picked up. Nothing. Either Little Gallo had been moved or her tracker was destroyed.

Talk with the Carvers

The Carvers, Elliot and Jestine were not easy to win over. They had a lot of reasons to distrust the Barons (last time they came into the place Nav was caught breaking into the back and Delta wrenched their security systems apart before bloodying their head of security Wilde).

They had a few cards to play however. The first, and most obvious was that according to the decoded ledger, Mack and SMF were manipulating the Carvers and planned to oust them. The second was that someone (probable Wilde) had installed a second security system [Delta detected it when he was trying to figure out the interference that was preventing his own recording] that had a feed going somewhere out of the building.

Elliot still didn’t like the idea of working with the Barons. Despite Paolo’s smooth words, he believed they were just proxies for the Gallo family and therefore couldn’t be trusted.

Nav and Paolo, however, applied logic and charm that eventually ran Jestine over. She admitted that she believed the ledger, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. They were held ransom just as much as Little Gallo was. If they tried to balk, SMF could call the loan and they’d never be able to pay it. In order for them to break from Mack Ransom and SMF, they’d need a safety net of their own. The only thing that might help (or hinder) was their brother Kassius. They had a falling out years ago and Kassius now works for Strangford-Michter. He might be able to help. Or he might just stab the Barons in the back, like he did his own brother and sister!

During all this, Wilde did appear, tried to convince the Carvers to kick the Barons out on the street, and was accused of secretly working for Mack. Everyone seemed suspicions and concerned, but the Carvers didn’t take any action while Nav, Delta, and Paolo were present.

The Splendor of Six Towers

Except for Rowan house, all the the original manors in Six Towers have been torn down and replaced by six skyscrapers who now claim the titular emblem of the district. One of those is the Comber House building, guarded for two blocks in every direction by Ironclad Protection, a private security form. Inside Comber on the top floors are the SMF offices, and that’s where the Barons were headed…for meeting with Kassius Carver.

Paolo eventually talked his way in the the building with Delta as his assistant. As the entered the elevators Delta felt his recording devices being to dampen, as though there were some interference that caused his ultraplasmic batteries to fade. When he tried to turn it on, a figured appeared beside him, visible only to Delta. The man, a resonance echo from his psychedelic swirling complexion asked Delta to kindly refrain form any recording while on the premises. When Delta asked him to leave the man looked wistful and explained that was not possible. His fashion was dated and Delta suspected he had been in Comber house for a very long time.

No Deal

While Paolo and Delta were escorted to a conference room, Nav, disguised as a maintenance worker waited for Kassius to leave his office so she could break in.

[Note this is where the Infiltrator move had HUGE effect. SMF is Tier 4 and is definitely warded against intrusion. Under normal circumstances, as Nav was literally breaking into the HQ, I would have applied the full tier difference and said any attempt started at Desperate/Zero effect. The best result she’d get is determining there was no way in without getting caught…but, because of Infiltrator, SMF’s tier did not apply. Kassius’ door not only had a sparktech keypad but the key needed to be turned in exactly a specific sequence, which Nav defeated by lifting a key off a security guard and watching another employee as they used a similar key to open another door in the building. Also, her maintenance disguise was branded perfectly to look like she belonged there. I changed it from Desperate/Zero to Risky/Standard to get in!]

Since Delta wouldn’t fit in any of the conference chairs, Kassius had to custodians remove a few of the chairs and bring in a bench so he could sit beside Paolo. Delta declined and instead stood behind Paolo, trying to activate his recording devices. The figure appeared and once again beckoned that Delta be as good a guest as they were hosts. When the figure moved across the room, Delta could see a black void that broke up the otherwise swirling colors in his back. It looked like this echo still carried the memory of his own murder.

As the negotiations started (Paolo posing as someone with an interest in casinos) the polite facade quickly wore away. Kassius knew about the Dirt Barons and their affiliations with the Gallos and he assumed they were just here to distract him. He was about to leave the meeting when Paolo dropped the emotional bomb, that they were also here to help his family, the Carvers.

This got his attention. It was clear Kassius was conflicted and there was a lot of pain their. He finally admitted that SMF had a similar contract in place with the Gallo family and others he would name….however he did’t have to because this discussion kept him in taking long enough for Nav to do her work in his office.

C is for Crime

Kassius office was well appointed. On one wall was a grand landscape of Six Towers from a bygone era. She looked behind it to see if there was a safe but instead found a strange inscription on the back of the painting…written in Hadrathi! Without time to translate it, she took the painting down from the wall, took a few pictures of the back and then put it back, making sure it lined up perfectly with the dust that had formed around it.

She then got to rifling through Kassius file cabinets looking for and kind of crime-type documentation. Here attempt attempt to unlock the cabinets trigged some kind of alarm and she hid behind the door as a maintenance worker and two Ironclad Protection security agents inspected the room. Thankfully she noticed that the room used the same Tomorrow Program security device that the Baron’s had, so she knew just were it’s blind spot was. The worker reviewed the recording, saw nothing out of order, and told everyone it was a false alarm.

[Note to Sean: was this help from the Anixis Field Unit?]

Once again alone, Nav dove back into the records [this time Desperate/Standard] and found what she was looking for. Evidence that the same scheme that was being done to the Carvers, was also being done to the the Lounge Rats. A coordinated effort to back casino owners and them make their rent impossible to pay so they had to foreclose on the business. Or at least that’s what he hoped it would all say when they got back to the base and deciphered it!

Gallo’s Reunited

The Carvers, now in a tentative truce with the Gallos and Lounge Rats, and with the underhanded dealings reported by the Dirt Barons [More on that below] returned Little Gallo to their care. To impress Nav he had kept the tracking device even after excreting it. He hid it in his shoe!

There was a huge family dinner held in the Veil that the Barons were invited to. They got paid the two stacks promised and Dossani offered them something more. A chance to be a part of the family. Each character has the option of taking the Gallo Family as their backing faction. The ability to call on them for favors (and be expected to do favors in return). [Because Nav as an operative automatically has a backing faction, the AFU, I gave her the option of having a second faction. Normally you can only have one. Also normally it takes completing a long term project to get a factions backing, but returning not one, but two of her sons made an impression on Dossani].

Val Gallo was embarrassed that the Dirt Barons got back Little Gallo when he couldn’t. He was infuriated that Little liked Nav so much and looked up to her. Val stared daggers at her all night, but she just smiled back, enjoying the victory!

What’s Next

We did payoff and some of the faction work (+1 with Gallos) but need to review the rest of the faction status changes (SMF is very unhappy with them), heat, and the trouble engine. Then we’ll jump into personal business.

Also, for the sake of wrapping up the score for the night we glossed over what official the documents were turned over to in order to put pressure on SMF. The players all looked at their contacts and the one that made the most sense was Bowman, Nav’s contact at the Palace…and her rival!