@Everyone:
Completely soaked by the rain despite his poncho, Spiderman watches the rest of the team exit the Pearl Tongue and run into the alley following the girl in the red rain coat. After hesitating for a moment, he curses, puts his sunglasses back on and then begrudgingly jogs down the empty street towards the alley to catch up with you.
Bessie Mae keeps up the brisk pace which your AR compass shows you is in an almost due southward direction but the route quickly begins to take twists and turns in order to navigate around buildings and other impasses, yet continues in a gradual southward meander. After about 30 min of hiking you can finally see Sheldon's wall as she takes you into an abandoned crumbling warehouse which lies right up against it. Nestled in a corner surrounded by fallen brick and plasticrete she removes a wooden pallet that uncovers the entrance to a tunnel that's about 5m long and comes out into another warehouse which your coordinates indicates to be located on the other side of the wall surrounding Crimson Crush's turf. Following her out of this second warehouse you continue down southward through neighborhoods which look even more and more as if a bomb had hit.
Spiderman, who since the moment you met him has remained completely silent, comes in closer to the group and in mumble which is almost inaudible in the rain tries to let you know how he feels.
"There's been stories about a girl in a red rain coat...people from the neighborhood been tellin'em...local shamans even tell gangers to stay clear of her. That must have been the smuggling tunnel we been looking for ever since we started catchin' Stilettos comin' all the way from Glow City slinging chips on our turf."Occasionally you pass groups of onlookers which all exhibit the same reaction at the sight of the red rain coat. Be it a grey haired troll interrupting his smoke, flicking the half-finished cigarette into a puddle and going back indoors or an ork mother cooking on a little gas burner under a tarp awning nervously clutching her breast-feeding baby even closer. Even as little huddles of gangers stare down Spiderman who snarls back at them as they notice his colors, the thugs simply keep their ground and remain weary of the red rain coat.
You have been hiking behind her for almost an hour now and the time is
18:30. The dusk giving way to night does nothing to halt the rain as you enter an abandoned industrial zone dating back at least to the 2050's. The Crash 2.0, which along with the chaos and havoc it brought, also spread the schematics for desktop forge technology all over the world. Sometimes all it takes is that perfectly planned shadowrun at the right moment in history to up-end entire industries. Desktop manufacturing had now rendered several manufacturing centers like this one obsolete.
Your commlinks, which long ago have been trying to deal with high static levels, are now occasionally dropping their connection to the matrix entirely as you appear to be entering a dead zone. Your last known connection was routed through street lamp nodes to the 228th Ave overpass which looms above you. High-up leaning against the guard-rail you see a few individuals looking off towards the horizon. Woofer cues the image magnification on his cyber-eyes and as he zooms in, the warpaint on their faces clearly identifies them as Blood Mountain Boys who, as B.B. had already mentioned a few days ago, control the toll stops along these highways; however, they seem completely oblivious to you.
After walking under rusted cross-walks and in between outdated cold-fusion generators you come out onto the other end of the industrial zone and what looks like a complete wasteland.
Bessie Mae picks her way gracefully around debris and gravel not looking back even once to ensure that you are following and it's a bit of a challenge to not lose her but at the same time not slip and impale yourself on a rusted girder. It's stretches of the barrens like these that under the night sky almost seem like glorious monuments to the absolute victory of free market capitalism which by the simple laws of economics, eventually stabilizes itself into a perpetual state of corporate feudalism. Although labor unionizing has been illegal for decades, you vaguely remember that about 5 years ago the previous administration began a project to clean-up and re-introduce basic amenities to the worst of these wastelands under fear that metahuman rights groups had formed a coalition strong enough to begin a viable underground unionizing campaign. Money was allocated to setup contracts that the Megas could bid on and then carry out the urban renewal project. The idle Mesametric Beaver construction drones that litter your path are a reminder of how cancelling this project was one of the very first acts Governer Brackhaven carried out as soon as he came into office. He changed the contracts to no-bid and rendered the project dead in its tracks by awarding the bulk of them to Evo which decided the money would be better spent giving literacy commlinks to SINless children which substitute a series of icons and spoken commands for the ability to read and write. They touted it as a key element in their No Metahuman Left Behind campaign which was a big hit for PR....but not so good if this was the squat you called home.
Well, maybe it was a bit of a boon for you if this was the squat you called home but you were the type of person who just wanted to be left the hell alone.
After 15 minutes of walking through this shit-hole you come to a clearing in the buildings and nestled in the middle of the block is what maybe was once a parking lot. At the far end of the 20mx20m lot you see a low lying building with a steel stylized christian crucifix jutting out of the ground about 10m in front of it. The archtecture looks like something out of the turn of the millennium back when they'd build churches to look hip and "modern" but now only looked woefully antiquated and in this case, almost completely dilapidated and blackened with layers upon layers of mold and polluted soot.
After crossing the parking lot the girl in the red rain coat approaches the crucifix which has a plaque under it which reads "Our Lady Queen of Peace." She leans on the crucifix swinging around to face you and points back toward the entrance to the church. Bessie Mae pulls her hood away and her black hair slowly becomes wet as she stares blankly at the team. Before one of you has a chance to say something, she utters in voice filled with far more expression and cadence than the one she used at the Pearl Tongue.
"Your playful journey ends at these humble doors
Who would have thought salvation lay in the hands of whores,
Eternity for the one who enters,
Or turn away now, the choice is yours." Then she simply remains silent but doesn't take her eyes off of you as rainwater streams down her face.
@Cynthia, Mercedes & B.B.:
As you approached the church you felt a very strange sensation as something about this place messes with the personal connection you have to your "gifts". Particularly Cynthia who is accustomed to manipulating ambient mana can feel this area brimming with a slightly elevated level of turbulent mana eddies which occasionally course through her body and make any attempt to gather magical energy quite distracting.
[OOC: visibility is partial light, matrix status is dead zone, this is a +1 mana domain which is not aspected to any of your traditions. So Magic attribute is effectively reduced by one. For you adepts, eliminate 1 power point of adept powers which don't work in this zone.
I'll also let you retroactively state some things you might have done during the journey that are common sense preparations without the knowledge of what comes ahead, but they would have to be things which you can do while hiking....no stops along the way.]