Session 2 — The Tangle

Played Monday, September 7, 2026.

The middle act of a single mission. Session 1, Session 2 and Session 3 together make up one job, the Sato job, tracked in the group’s VTT as Mission 2, “Ghost Route.” Session 1 was the entire Legwork phase. This session is the Mission/Action phase, picking up exactly where that one left off and running through to Get Paid. Session 3 is the breakout the crew commits to here. The contract’s bookkeeping resolves in this session: the legwork clock cashes out into the Get Paid roll, directives are marked (including for moments from Session 1), and end-of-mission experience is awarded. The GM held back only the “when the mission ends” mark, because the crew chose to extend the job.

The crew finds Mara Sato, learns who she really is, learns what she was actually sent to steal — and then spends the better part of an hour deciding what to do about it.

Summary

Following the trail into the Switchback, Neon Drift calls in an old Van Life contact, Slim Jimmy, who points the crew to the Tangle via a Lucky Strike kid named Mike. They find Mara Sato there — exhausted, bloodied, and armed — and take her at gunpoint into the van.

Two revelations follow immediately. First: Iona Glass is Mara’s mother, a fact Iona deliberately withheld when hiring them. Second: Mara didn’t steal the arcology keys at all. A VYRAL contact gave her the keys as payment for retrieving a data stick from NSMC’s Under Sector tunnels — and the file on that stick turns out to be clean, high-resolution footage of the crew’s previous job, faces and van clearly identifiable. A camera Bullfrog missed.

After a long, circular debate, the crew commits to a plan: hand Mara back to Iona to close out the contract, keep the data stick unless it’s specifically asked for, take the money, and then come back and break Mara out. Bullfrog doctors the footage (scrubbing everyone but Muktar) and quietly hacks the REIS van waiting in the garage. Iona pays two cred a head and takes her daughter. The breakout is next session.

Key Events

Into the Switchback

The GM opens on the Switchback proper — “a knot tied in concrete and steel, a hundred roadways folding over and under one another until direction stops meaning much” — with REIS checkpoints deciding who climbs and who gets turned back, and a broken neon sign buzzing NO ACCESS MOTEL over a dead ramp.

The crew formally moves from Legwork into the Action phase. The legwork clock stands at one tick, from Muktar’s failed Assess against Iona Glass in Session 1.

Neon Drift declares a contact and rolls Hit the Street — an 8, a weak hit. He picks attract unwanted attention and your contact needs help, and the GM ticks the action clock one segment to represent the attention.

Slim Jimmy

At a roadside night market (Neon spells it out: K-N-I-G-H-T market) deep in the Switchback, they find Slim Jimmy — a former Van Life member who was never a driver. He was Van Helsing’s copilot, never earned a van of his own, and now sells scavenged junk and barbecued sewer rat off an overturned bucket. He is markedly thinner than Neon remembers; he credits the rat (“turns out rat has naturally occurring Wegovy”). He sold his cyberware to survive, so Neon has to dig out an ancient tablet — one that still says Apple on it — to show him Mara’s photo.

Muktar sizes him up immediately and finds something to admire: Jimmy gave up the van and made his own way. (“It takes much strength to stop living in a van down by the river.“) Muktar also corrects Jimmy on Bullfrog’s name — “his name is Mr. Bullfrog. He deserves your respect” — which Bullfrog takes as the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about him.

Jimmy’s price for the help: a flux capacitor for his rat BBQ rig. Neon has one — Van Helsing’s — sitting in the van, and hands it over, marking off the gear. He also floats getting Van Helsing back on wheels so the two can run a food truck together.

Mike and the Lucky Strikes

Jimmy drags a scruffy kid out of a hidey-hole: Mike, wearing a Lucky Strike patch — the gang Speckz Arioso grew up in. Mike saw Mara yesterday, coming up out of restricted-access NSMC tunnels and heading west into the Tangle: alone, on foot, and looking badly rough. He reports Lucky’s still running the gang, alongside members named Jimmy (a different Jimmy), Art, Science, and Philosophy.

Speckz admits he grew up alongside them. Mike offers to take him to Lucky right then; Speckz defers until the job is done, and takes a contact number instead. Mike then vanishes back down his hole “like a rat.”

En route, Muktar lays out Under Sector background for the crew: he was born there, and the black salt is what gave him his scaling. NSMC has a total monopoly below — and by the terms of the accords, NSMC supplies black salt to the other corps but is barred from using it themselves, having to buy the finished product back; in exchange, the other corps are supposed to have no presence in the Under Sector at all. Muktar knows firsthand that they operate there anyway.

His read on Mara also shifts here. Where in Session 1 he admired her for taking fate into her own hands, the more he learns, the more he fears she’s being pushed: “the more we learn, the more I fear that she is just simply being used as a pawn.”

Finding Mara

The Tangle is where the Switchback “stops looking like infrastructure and starts looking like scar tissue.” They find Mara where three service lanes knot together under a collapsed flyover: mid-thirties, dark hair pulled back, REIS Transit Systems uniform under a rain-stained jacket, sling bag strapped tight, grime in her hands, dried blood on one sleeve, days without sleep. Her hand goes inside her jacket the moment she sees them — practiced, not theatrical.

Speckz opens with “your mother hired us to find you” (a joke, at the time), then wants to shoot her legs with gel rounds. The table works through whether that’s Mix It Up or Play Hardball; he settles on drawing the gun and threatening instead, rolls Play Hardball — a 9, weak hit. She takes her hand out of her jacket and agrees to come, on condition she gets to ask questions too. Then, just before climbing in, she yells “Help! Help, I’m being kidnapped!” — the weak hit’s consequence. Nobody within earshot cares. It’s a Tuesday afternoon.

Mara’s Story

In the moving van, Mara drops both bombs.

Iona Glass is her mother. Speckz’s joke was accurate. Mara is estranged and openly contemptuous — “she’s a fucking psychopath” — and explains the lack of family resemblance with a shrug at Knight City’s cosmetic-alteration ads. She works “at this level” because she failed to get into a good college and no corp would take her; her mother has spent her life lording over her and refusing to let her out from under it.

She never stole anything from REIS. A man from VYRAL offered her a deal: steal a data stick out of NSMC, and the access codes are hers to keep and disappear with. She went down into the Under Sector, got the file, and deliberately never looked at it. REIS is cancelling the codes as fast as it can find them — she’s been dodging checkpoints all day — and her drop with the VYRAL contact is in roughly twelve hours at a public train station. VYRAL isn’t paying her in money; VYRAL is paying by scrubbing her tracks.

Bullfrog, who has spent the scene ostentatiously not looking up from his screen (and offering her a handful of synth bacon), talks her into letting him open it. He runs his program SIF, decrypts it in one pass with no roll, and plays it.

The Footage

It’s the crew. Their previous job — the one that exposed the VYRAL/NSMC wetware program — from a better angle, on a cleaner camera, with all four faces easily identifiable and Van Buren plainly recognizable. Every other camera in that op was tagged Kessauer; this one is tagged NSMC. Bullfrog missed it when he wiped the footage.

Mara, watching the crew’s faces, connects it herself: the Velvet Bailiff aired the fuzzy version of this raid all over VYRAL, and her VYRAL contact specifically wanted this file. Speckz’s opening position is that the video is obviously doctored and clearly not them. Mara nods along vigorously: “I agree. It’s clearly doctored. Everyone will believe that.”

The Hour of Deliberation

What follows is, by the table’s own accounting, roughly an hour of real-time debate. Options raised and discarded:

• Kill the VYRAL contact at the drop (Muktar’s preference; Speckz volunteers his sniper rifle). Undercut by the fact that the drop is a public train station, and that VYRAL would presumably just film the shooting too.
• Fake Mara’s death — bring Iona a severed pinky as proof. Mara volunteers her own finger. Killed by the obvious problem that a corpo director will not accept a finger, and by Bullfrog’s inability to explain how they’d have recovered the file from a body that supposedly exploded.
• Sell the arcology keys instead of collecting from Iona (Mara’s suggestion — she’d copy them). Rejected as trading one enemy for several.
• Just let her go and pretend they never found her. Rejected by Neon on the grounds that it isn’t narratively interesting, and by everyone on the grounds that nobody gets paid.

Muktar swings back and forth, at one point pledging his Rontai — the chained mining drill head he fights with — to Mara’s freedom, and later arguing they should skip the payday entirely rather than hand her over. Mara herself pushes back hard on the plan to return her: “I don’t wanna just do this on the fly, guys… this is feeling really fly-by-night to me.”

The unlock comes mechanically. Bullfrog wants to Assess the situation for a way to get Mara back out of REIS Six; the GM points out that would really be a fresh legwork/research pass. Then the table remembers Bullfrog is holding two undeclared Intel, which can be spent retroactively as “of course I had this prepared.” That settles it.

The plan: turn Mara in to Iona, keep the data stick and only surrender it if Iona explicitly asks for it, collect payment, then come back and break her out. Mara will tell her mother essentially the truth — she was unhappy, she was leaving — minus the file.

Doctoring the File

Bullfrog rolls Act Under Pressure, invoking his program Manipulate for +1 forward (the GM allows it despite “pressure” being a stretch). An 8 — weak hit. He scrubs three of the four crew members out cleanly. He cannot do anything about Muktar, who is simply too large, and who passes a mirror that catches him dead-on.

Muktar accepts it without hesitation: “I would prefer that I was not in it, but… I’m willing to take the heat to free Mara Sato.” Bullfrog also quietly admits he already made a backup of the original.

The Handoff

Speckz floats setting up a sniper perch overlooking the meet. The table talks him out of it — that’s an Infiltrator’s Covert Entry, and he didn’t take the sniping move; the GM’s summary is “Iona and her cronies are gonna be sitting there while this guy’s tiptoeing through the parking garage.” He rides in with the crew instead, walking Mara out with a pistol held behind her so the handoff reads as a capture.

The REIS Six parking garage this time holds four unmarked black Cadillacs and one unmarked black van. Before anyone gets out, Bullfrog console cowboys into the van — clean, no complications — and banks three holds, saved deliberately for the breakout. (Mechanically Bullfrog can make the connection, but Neon would have to be the one to actually drive it remotely.)

Iona arrives in a white suit with roughly half a dozen suited men. Muktar steps out with the Rontai’s chain wrapped around his neck and the drill head hanging chest-high; one of the suits elbows another and whispers, “is that Ora?” Muktar doesn’t react.

The moment Mara steps out, Iona’s control drops completely — the composure “melts” and she runs forward — and snaps back the instant Muktar puts himself between them. Muktar calls her on the omission: not telling them Mara was her daughter put Mara in more danger than necessary. Iona’s answer is pure corp: “It is not commonly known within the company that she is my daughter, and I prefer to keep it that way. You’ll forgive me if I don’t know how loudly your tongues wag.”

Get Paid

Muktar rolls Get Paid — a 5, plus +5 from the five unticked segments left on the legwork clock. The crew picks three:

• Paid in full
• It’s not a setup or an ambush
• You learn something from the mission (everyone marks XP)

They deliberately decline “the meeting doesn’t attract the attention of outside parties.” The GM’s response: “I will be frank. That’s exactly what’s gonna happen.”

Payment is two cred each — a two-cred job, as established when they got the job badly. Nobody asked for the data stick, so nobody handed it over.

Speckz then rolls Assess on Iona (a 10) to read whether the “dinner with my daughter” line is genuine, gaining hold. The GM agrees both Speckz’s Assess hold and Bullfrog’s console-cowboy holds carry over into the follow-up mission, since it’s effectively Mission 2A.

Two suits move to Mara’s shoulders — she walks willingly, but isn’t given a choice. Iona throws her arms around her; Mara very tentatively returns it. Then she’s put in the black van, everyone piles into the Cadillacs, and they drive out of the garage.

Muktar, before they go, asks what happens to her now, and invites himself to dinner. He is not welcome at dinner. Neon offers parting parental advice: “sometimes you gotta let your kids breathe.”

Standout Quotes

“Some people, to illustrate bonds, slice their hands open and do a blood handshake. In Knight City it’s a bacon handshake. That’s what really bonds people together.” — SiliKen

“It takes much strength to stop living in a van down by the river.” — Killjoy Keegan (Muktar), to Slim Jimmy

“Why does my mom want me? Because she’s a fucking psychopath, that’s why.” — SiliKen, as Mara Sato

“Do you know who I am? I am the Bullfrog. Getting you out is petty work for someone like me.” / “I’m sorry — no, I don’t know who you are.” — Duskit (Bullfrog) and SiliKen (Mara Sato)

“I pledge my Rontai, my gladiatorial weapon, to your freedom. I will ensure that you will not be fooled into fate again.” — Killjoy Keegan (Muktar), to Mara Sato

“If she knows about the file, then you do not have a way out.” / “You’re probably right. But it is incumbent upon me to try.” — Killjoy Keegan (Muktar) and SiliKen (Mara Sato)

“In the Under Sector, wealth is measured in warmth.” — Killjoy Keegan (Muktar)

“Everyone has a choice to choose their own fate every day.” — Killjoy Keegan (Muktar), when asked how he feels about killing VYRAL employees who never got that choice

“Mr. Muktar? You’re very hard to scrub out of the video.” / “I am famous.” — Duskit (Bullfrog) and Killjoy Keegan (Muktar)

“It is not commonly known within the company that she is my daughter, and I prefer to keep it that way. You’ll forgive me if I don’t know how loudly your tongues wag.” — SiliKen, as Iona Glass

“As a fellow parent, I just gotta leave you with some advice — sometimes you gotta let your kids breathe. You gotta let ‘em be themselves and spread their wings.” — regular human faits (Neon Drift), to Iona Glass

“You’re a mercenary in a cyberpunk universe. Make messes, clean them up. That’s what you do.” — SiliKen

Open Threads

• Mara Sato is in Iona Glass’s custody — the crew has promised to break her out, and all four PCs committed to honoring it. Resolved in Session 3.
• The crew’s faces are on an NSMC camera. The original, undoctored file still exists — Bullfrog kept a backup — and the doctored version still shows Muktar.
• The drop that never happened. Mara’s VYRAL contact expects a data stick at a public train station in roughly twelve hours. Nobody is going to be there, and VYRAL will notice.
• Outside parties noticed the handoff. The crew traded away “the meeting doesn’t attract attention” on the Get Paid roll, and the GM confirmed something is coming of it.
• Muktar was recognized as Ora by one of Iona’s security detail — his rising public profile is now a concrete liability.
• Iona Glass’s real job. Mara’s guess is that running the arcology-key access is what her mother actually does, beneath the Corporate Risk and Recovery title — but she admits she doesn’t know.
• Lucky Strike wants to catch up. Mike gave Speckz a contact number and an open invitation to see Lucky; Speckz deferred until after the job.
• Bullfrog’s secret side job from Session 1 is still unmentioned to the crew — and the file he pulled then was Kessauer-encrypted while this one was NSMC, so they are not obviously the same job.
• Slim Jimmy and Van Helsing’s food truck — Neon floated reuniting them if he can get wheels under Van Helsing.

Meta / Errata

• Legwork moves still work in the Action phase. Declaring contacts, Hit the Street, and Research remain available during Action so long as the fiction supports it — confirmed and used immediately (Neon declared Slim Jimmy mid-Action).

• Undeclared gear and Intel exist specifically so the crew can shift into Action without pre-planning: spending them is narrative permission to retcon (“of course I had this prepared, I’m a pro”). Bullfrog’s two banked Intel resolved the whole breakout-planning deadlock.

• Play Hardball vs. Mix It Up — Play Hardball is a threat of violence you intend to carry through; Mix It Up is when you are actually attacking. Speckz drawing and threatening was Hardball; shooting her legs would have been Mix It Up.

• Assess vs. Research — Assess is a fast size-up that grants hold; Research takes time, answers questions, and yields Intel usable later. Reading a face in the moment is Assess, not surveillance.

• Eye for Detail (Speckz’s move) requires actual surveillance of a person or place — trailing, watching daily life — and doesn’t apply to studying someone’s expression during a conversation.

• No basic move covers forgery/doctoring or hiding yourself. Those are gated behind playbook moves (the Infiltrator’s Covert Entry for sneaking into position, for example). The GM allowed Act Under Pressure + the Manipulate program for doctoring the video as a narrative fit.

• Get Paid adds the unticked segments of the legwork clock — here +5, which is why the roll landed comfortably despite a 5 on the dice.

• Staking (p. 127) — after Get the Job, each character stakes 1–3 cred on the mission’s success; on completion you get back double (triple if the job pays well). The group hadn’t done this, so the GM retroactively ruled everyone staked 1 and got 2 back.

• Holds carry over between linked missions — the GM allowed both Bullfrog’s console-cowboy holds on the REIS van and Speckz’s Assess hold on Iona to persist into the follow-up.

• Breakout structure: the GM framed the Mara breakout on-mic as a new “mini mission” (“Mission 2A”) with no legwork phase: action only, starting with a pre-ticked action clock at 1800 (“target is on full alert”), roughly the second tick. The wiki treats it as the final act of the Sato mission; see Session 3.

• Experience is awarded for the whole mission, not the session — four base marks (accept the mission, determine where she was headed, deliver her back, get paid) plus one for “you learn something from the mission” = five each, before directives. Several of these were earned back in Session 1 and only marked now. The GM withheld the “when the mission ends” mark since the crew opted to extend the job into the breakout.

• Directives are likewise marked at mission end, and can cite moments from either session. This is why Neon’s Intimate mark points at a Session 1 scene rather than anything that happened on-screen in Session 2.

• Directives: Muktar marked Strange (persuading the others toward his beliefs about fate — the GM credited pushing the crew toward the job that frees someone over the job that pays). Neon marked Intimate, citing the moment back in Session 1 when he pulled the van over to dig out a shaker vest because Bullfrog claimed a COPD attack — Bullfrog was in fact faking it to cover the secret hack he was running at the time, which Neon still doesn’t know. Speckz got neither Filial nor Vengeful, and still hasn’t named a person for Filial — “former sergeant” or Lucky were both floated. Bullfrog swapped Deceptive for Illustrious, with everyone’s agreement that it fits him far better, and marked it.

Player Notes

• Session ran ~3h45m on a Monday, unusually for this group.
• The GM was off the grid camping and hadn’t read Session 1’s writeup before running; the recap was reconstructed live from the table’s collective memory plus the players’ own AI summaries.
• Next session confirmed: Saturday, October 3, 10 AM. The group is at Super Game Weekend on the 19th.
• Long tangent on Slay the Spire and the origin of “Mom, don’t come in, I’m slaying the spire” — a running joke from Duskit’s time caring for his mother.