The Repo Run

Premise

Dynalar Financial Services holds the note on a Dragoon full-body conversion, serial DFC-0447, four payments delinquent. The asset is currently occupied by Sergeant Amos Tull — decorated Corporate War veteran, folk hero of the Fourth Street bridge collapse rescue, and the closest thing the district has to a saint. Dynalar's usual repo contractors have all declined the work, which is why the fee is six times market rate and the job packet arrives with a liability waiver the length of a novella. The instructions are clean: recover the chassis intact. The packet is silent on what happens to the man inside it.

Scenes

1. 1

   The Job Packet

   Dynalar Financial Services, floor 23 — a repossession department decorated like a dental office

   Account manager Felicity Ordoñez walks the crew through the file with the practiced neutrality of someone who's rehearsed being recorded: purchase 2043, veteran's financing program, flawless payments for two years, then four consecutive misses starting five months ago. No response to notices. She slides across the loaner-body case (it hums), the decanting authorization, and the waiver. A Human Perception read catches the tell: Ordoñez has the account's full transaction history on her screen, angled just barely toward the crew, showing WHERE Tull's money has gone the last five months — and she leaves the room for four unexplained minutes.

   Decision point: Read the screen she left turned toward them (learning the destination of Tull's money before ever meeting him — and that Ordoñez wanted them to know, which is its own puzzle), or play it straight and go in with only the official file?

   If they go sideways: If the players try to negotiate Tull's debt down at the source, Ordoñez is genuinely sympathetic and genuinely powerless — but she lets slip the number that matters: the account is 31,000eb from current, and Dynalar's board reviews 'reputational-risk repossessions' Thursday. There's a clock and a price. The whole job just became optional, if the crew can find 31k in three days.

   Human Perception + EMP — DV 13 to clock that Ordoñez is helping; DV 15 to also catch that she's frightened of someone inside her own department
2. 2

   Saint of Fourth Street

   Tull's district — the rebuilt bridge, the gym where he coaches kids, the noodle stall that won't take his money

   Scouting Tull is like scouting a parade. The Dragoon is unmissable: three meters of matte-gray war chassis painted over with hundreds of tiny handprints — the district's kids add one each year on the anniversary of the bridge collapse. He coaches, he hauls, he pulls a drunk out of a storm drain while the crew watches. The money trail (from Ordoñez's screen, or a DV 13 Streetwise through the district) ends at a hospice on Calloway: eleven beds, all occupied by men and women in their fifties with the same diagnosis — cascade rejection syndrome, the thing that kills first-generation full-borgs. Tull's platoon. He's paying for all eleven beds, and beds cost more than a Dragoon note.

   Decision point: Approach Tull straight — a repo crew announcing itself to a war hero in front of his district — or keep the advantage of surprise and case the hospice instead, where the actual story (and the actual leverage) lives?

   If they go sideways: If the players stake out too long and too visibly, the district notices for them: a twelve-year-old with a handprint on the Dragoon walks up to their vehicle, knocks on the window, and says 'Sergeant Tull says you can come have noodles if you're going to keep watching him.' Tull has known since hour two.

   Streetwise + COOL — DV 13 to trace the money to the Calloway hospice; DV 15 to learn the eleventh bed was filled two weeks ago — by the platoon's old medic, whose arrival started the missed payments
3. 3

   The Sergeant's Terms

   Wherever the crew finally talks to him — noodle stall, gym office, or mid-repo-attempt

   Tull doesn't run and doesn't fight. He sits down with the crew — servos sighing like a building settling — and negotiates his own repossession with the calm of a man who's read his contract more carefully than Dynalar has. He'll surrender the chassis voluntarily, this week, on two conditions: the crew gives him seventy-two hours first, and nobody ever tells the district it was voluntary. He needs the Dragoon for one more job — the hospice's eleventh patient, his old medic Dr. Okoye, has a cascade window closing fast, and her one shot is an experimental neural graft available only at a clinic in the flooded quarter, through structural collapse zones only a Dragoon can carry a med-pod across. After that, he says, the body's just a payment he can't make.

   Decision point: Take the deal (seventy-two hours of liability with a six-figure asset the crew is contractually holding), refuse and do the repo now on a saint who won't resist while a dying woman waits, or the third option Tull hasn't priced: help him do the flooded-quarter run and get the chassis back to Dynalar inside the window — making the crew accomplices, couriers, and repo agents on the same invoice.

   If they go sideways: If the crew attempts the decant immediately, Tull complies — and the scene plays out in front of the gym, at four in the afternoon, with the kids watching, because he refuses to hide it. Run the district's reaction honestly. The crew gets the chassis and the district gets the crew's faces, forever.

   Human Perception + EMP — DV 13 to confirm every word is true; a critical also notices what Tull didn't say — he never mentioned what happens to HIM after the surrender, because he already knows the loaner body can't do search-and-rescue, and he's decided not to care in front of witnesses
4. 4

   The Flooded Quarter

   The drowned blocks past the seawall breach — four stories of waterline, collapsed skywalks, and the Meridian Clinic on high ground

   The run is everything the brochures said the Dragoon was for: Tull wades collapsed arcades chest-deep with Dr. Okoye's med-pod overhead while the crew handles what he can't — navigation through the skywalk maze, a scavver toll crew that wants the pod's oxygen bottles, and the surprise that was always coming: Dynalar's fallback retrieval team, tipped off (by Ordoñez's frightened colleague, if anyone traced that thread), arriving early with instructions that describe a chassis and do not describe a rescue. They light up the quarter's drowned silence with drone spots and a bullhorn offer: walk away, full fee anyway, asset seizure in progress.

   Decision point: The retrieval team's offer is real — full pay, zero further risk, and all it costs is standing in waist-deep water watching them decant a war hero mid-rescue with a med-pod on his shoulders. Fight a professional team, negotiate under a bullhorn, or find the third route across the quarter while Tull does the one thing the Dragoon does that the retrieval team's specs don't: keep going anyway.

   If they go sideways: If the crew took the chassis back in scene three and skipped the run, this scene arrives as epilogue instead: the retrieval team was ALSO sent — Dynalar double-booked the contract — and the crew must get their legally-repossessed Dragoon past a rival crew with the same paperwork and fewer scruples. The quarter, the toll crew, and the fight happen anyway. The med-pod doesn't.

   Athletics + DEX — DV 15 crossing the skywalk maze under drone light; Autofire/Handgun vs the retrieval team (four pros, waterline cover); Paramedic DV 13 to keep Okoye's pod stable through any of it

NPCs

Endings