It's time for Mengkare's monthly business trip, where he delivers powerful magic items to the Abadarans for them to sell! (Mengkare keeps his gigantic-pile-of-treasure* in a bank vault, like a normal person, unlike some dragons he could name).
Okay, shift to human form, plane shift to his crafting demipla- how did a snake get in ther-
*this is a one-syllable word in Draconic
Welcome to Night City!
Hear the dull background roar of traffic! Smell the unique scent of trash and smog and plastic! See the artful graffiti over worn walls, illuminated by harsh artificial lighting! This filthy run-down alleyway in Arroyo is an excellent holiday destination. There's even a homeless guy asleep in a corner.
His startle reflex is to cast Time Stop and then figure out what the fuck.
In the next (subjective) 12 seconds he determines that: 1) this is not an assassination attempt; 2) those lights that don't look like a Continual Flame also don't show up to his permanent Arcane Sight; and 3) this place really stinks.
Tongues. Dominate Person on the homeless guy: ANSWER MY QUESTIONS TRUTHFULLY. "Where am I?". (If the guy managed to sleep through that he'll wake him up and try again).
"What the fuck you're in my alley! Are you with the 'tinos? I didn't do nothing!"
"You are going to ANSWER MY QUESTIONS until I understand what's going on, and then I will leave you alone because clearly no one will believe anything you say anyway" (even if they would he'd just erase his memory, he may be Evil but he doesn't kill people when he doesn't have to). "Now, like I said, where am I?"
"Jesus fuck, Night City, magic man. Arroyo! Southeast part of the city. Valentino territory."
"Who's the most powerful person in the city whose name you know?" (This guy is kind of useless and that's a good way to find someone better than that).
"The most deadly son of a bitch in the city is obviously Adam Smasher. Scary mother fucking borg working for some Arasaka prick."
Adam Smasher is currently cleaning and double checking some of his many, many guns in a mostly bare metal room.
Scales of Deflection (he's encountered guns before and knows how they treat armor that tries to block them instead of redirect them). Invisibility. Greater Teleport. Does he bump into him invisibly standing perfectly still in a corner before the ten-minute casting time of Geas is over?
Adam Smasher continues cleaning his weapons, appearing completely nonchalant, as he tries to pin down the location of the fucking ninja who thought he could sneak up on him. Nothing in any EM band, no loud sounds...
...But you still breathe, bitch.
After finishing with maintenance on a Burya, he looks it over, moves as if to put it to the side just like all the rest, and-
-Turns his wrist without the rest of his body and fires two high velocity steel slugs out the brutal Soviet revolver into the corner of the room he's tracked the breathing to, even as he also leaps from the heavy steel chair and launches all four hundred pounds of his metal frame towards the intruder, sweeping his limbs in entirely unnatural ways permitted only by being a full mechanical conversion rather than weak meat.
AC 48 says lol.
Okay, Geas isn't gonna cut it, Greater Possession.
Is he really sure about that. The Burya is basically a handheld fucking autocannon and Smasher is very very very good at killing things in melee. Oh, and also his shoulder mounted machine gun is firing now too-
-He fails the save, though.
And now we are going to stop firing things, stop moving, call of any alarms that might have been raised, and sit down, so he can go back to laying that Geas, got it? (he's gotten way less frustrated with people since he realized that if you don't like what they're doing you can just make them stop).
Tch. Too bad that Adam Smasher randomly screaming and shooting at thin air isn't exactly unprecedented. He's definitely not going to help the fucker engage with his systems or volunteer any code words or anything though.
He's going to probe at whatever this fuckery is for weakness the entire time.
He can try.
Geas: DO NOT RESIST MY SPELLS. Pop out of him. Dominate Person. DON'T TRY TO CALL FOR HELP OR LEAVE.
(he's visible again)
What about trying to kill him again. That's not calling for help or leaving.
That's kind of annoying. DON'T MOVE.
He's not going to bother trying to get him to tell him stuff. Detect Thoughts.
Hate. Analysis of the threat. Fucking MEAT with TRICKS barged into his HOME when he was on DOWNTIME and is probably going to kill him when it's done with him. This isn't a normal hack. Vivid mental images of murdering the ninja for SNEAKING AROUND and fucking with his head. Comparisons to past fights; Using his hacks, his rocket launcher, his limbs, his machine gun and his array of lovely firearms. Is this how Adam Fucking Smasher who crawled up from the gutter goes out? Fuck off and die, sneakmeat.
Well apparently he's not going to think of anything useful on his own.
ANSWER MY QUESTIONS (If you let them lie they usually don't realize you can tell what the truth would have been from their thoughts). "Who might check on you?".
"Dispatcher." Or Yorinobu, or someone on Dispatch's team, or those public relations meatbags. He legitimately does not recall most of these folks' face or name, he doesn't care enough. He could look at recordings to get more info but fuck this guy. He knows Yorinobu though; He's the one currently holding his mercenary contract and he does have some minimal standards.
(Oh, this guy has a boss, sounds like he might be a good next target).
"When would that happen?" (he'll make him access those logs after he's gotten whatever he can get from him not knowing that his thoughts are being read).
"Dunno." They let him off the leash to fuck some people up maybe once or twice a week. It's his favorite time of the week, every time.
"Do you expect anyone to notice that there's anything weird going on if I spend the next few hours asking you things?" (He's way less cooperative than the first guy but it's much easier to force cooperation than competence).
"Heh. No way to know for sure, is there, sneakmeat? Could be I get called in for a job any second, you know."
The ninja presumably has some way to deal with the surveillance. If he's too much of an idiot for that maybe the netrunners will notice something's off.
Uh oh.
"Is there anyone who could be watching us right now if they wanted to?"
Fucking netrunners, always monitoring everything. Can't resist getting their data-fingers in every camera and sensor no matter how much you try keeping them out. He's got ICE but an Arasaka runner was the one who installed that shit, so...
"No. I insist on privacy in my quarters." Lie.
Okay, there's apparently something along the lines of a scry on here at all times, but not enough like a scry for his Mind Blank to beat it, that's a problem, let's see how big of one it is.
It's possible that there's at most one more guy he has to control in order to erase any records of him being here, if that's true he can just do that as a stopgap until he orients to just what's possible here.
Probably it's not that easy, in which case he can't actually pull off not leaving a trace behind and should just kidnap Smasher and let them try to look for his current face, which he'll just never use again.
Either way it's not worth keeping up the illusion that he's able to lie just to make interrogating him more convenient, if it means these "cameras" will pick up more of what he's doing.
(This is the sort of thinking you can do in ten seconds, at Int 26)
"How many people would I have to control in order to get all the records from when I showed up and on erased?"
"-If you get the head of Night City security right now and then Yorinobu Arasaka and they both came down on purging shit that might work. UNLESS THEY RUN OFFSITE BACKUPS RIGHT FUCKING NOW NOW NOW DO IT!"
Yeah, he's not doing that without time to plan.
It seems likely that Smasher has something tracking his location, which is a problem, he wants to get somewhere he can't be followed to until he knows more.
Does a Flesh To Stone work on him? (He does, after all, have significantly less flesh than the targets the spell is usually used on do).
Flesh to Stone affects Adam Smasher normally. And he can't resist Mengkare's spells. All of his flesh becomes stone.
None of it was visible from the outside, though. So in effect he goes completely still except for automatic systems now registering his biopod's 'death' and sending out electronic warnings.
Well, he tried. Miracle(Disintegrate). Have a nice time in the Abyss.
He's going to try getting some information from someone who isn't going to have all these pesky contingencies.
Invisibility. Greater Teleport back to the ally. Is the homeless guy still there?
He is not.
There's some girl in a buck-a-slice uniform taking a smoke break, though.
Hm. He's getting tired of being jumped, Foresight.
Oh. He's definitely not on Golarion anymore. He's only got thirty seconds of prophecy with it but it's really detailed.
That makes some things a lot easier. What would she say (and think, Detects Thoughts again) if he Dominated her and asked if anyone would notice if she disappeared? It can't raise alarms if it doesn't happen in the real timeline.
She would say that her boss would notice she didn't come back, and also freak out in confusion, what the fuck, is some Netrunner fucking with her??? Don't you have better targets??? Sick fucker amusing themselves fucking with people, did her ex put you up to this,
That doesn't matter, humans go missing all the time anyway. Unless this will cause problems within thirty seconds, he'll cast Flesh to Stone before she even knows there's anyone there, catch the statue, cast Rope Trick, and bring it inside with him (he has 43 Strength, lifting a human-sized statue is approximately effortless). Will anything go wrong with that in his Foresight range?