A maintenance-caste fixer agrees to testify against the cartel that files her people as nonexistent, and three factions converge on the one room she feels safe in before the hearing transport arrives.
The Situation
Mai Otomo keeps the water ledgers for Sublevel 7 of the Maintenance Belt, the undercity that runs Neo-Tokyo and appears on no census. She logged eleven months of skimmed allocations and a cartel-run "attrition list" that decides which families lose pressure first. At 0210 a Tribunal transport arrives at the Kanda freight cage to carry her up to a hearing that could end the skim. She is holed up in the Boiler Chapel, a converted steam shrine, and she will not move without people she trusts at her back.
Three parties already know. The Otis Cartel wants her silent by any reading of the word. A Tribunal handler wants the ledger more than the witness and will leave her behind to get it. And a rival sublevel crew wants her debt, not her testimony, and will trade her to whoever pays.
Objectives
- Primary · Get Mai and a verifiable copy of the ledger to the Kanda freight cage before the transport leaves.
- Secondary · Keep the attrition list intact as evidence. A wiped ledger still saves Mai but not her neighbors.
- Secondary · Walk out without burning your standing in Sublevel 7. The Belt remembers who spends its people.
The Clocks
- Main · Transport window. The cage departs on Turn 8. Miss it and the next is in three days, which Mai does not have.
- Pressure · Cartel net. Every raised alarm or open fight advances a 4-step clock. At 4, Otis enforcers seal the sublevel stairwells and the only way up is the flooded service main.
- Quiet · The handler's patience. After Turn 4 the Tribunal handler stops waiting and moves to extract the ledger alone, with or without Mai.
Leverage Points
- The steam grid: the chapel and its tunnels run on manual pressure valves. Operators can vent a junction to blind a corridor, flush a flooded main, or cook a room. It cuts both ways.
- Mai's dead-man copy: she has split the ledger across three caretaker drives hidden in the sublevel. Whoever helps her recover them earns trust the cartel cannot buy.
- The attrition list names a cartel lieutenant's own family three slots from losing water. He does not know. He can be turned.
- A maintenance freight exo sits charging in the chapel undercroft. Loud, slow, and strong enough to carry a person through the flooded main or tear a sealed gate.
Opposition
- Otis enforcers (cartel) · disciplined, gel-and-baton, under orders to take Mai breathing if they can sell her, dead if they cannot. They fall back rather than die for a paycheck.
- Handler Reuel (Tribunal) · calm, well-armed, genuinely believes the ledger matters more than one woman. Will cooperate right up to the moment the math changes.
- The Kasa crew (rivals) · three sublevel runners holding Mai's debt paper. Bored, broke, and open to a better offer or a credible scare.
Climax Variable (d6)
Roll when the squad reaches the Kanda freight cage.
| d6 | Twist at the cage |
|---|---|
| 1 | The transport is early and already pulling out. One operator must ride the coupling or hold the gate. |
| 2 | Handler Reuel is aboard and will take the ledger but bar Mai. Make the case, or make a scene. |
| 3 | The flooded main backs up into the cage well. The exo crosses it. People do not. |
| 4 | The turned lieutenant arrives with his family, asking the same passage you promised Mai. |
| 5 | The Kasa crew sells your position. Otis hits the cage as the doors cycle. |
| 6 | The ledger copy you carry is the wiped one. The intact list is still on a caretaker drive in the chapel. |
Breadcrumbs
A caretaker drive carries a second file Mai never mentions: a sublevel map marked with cartel "dry rooms" across four Neo-Tokyo wards. It points past this mission, to who upstairs signs the attrition lists. Seed it early so attentive operators reach the cage already knowing the skim does not start in the Belt.
The Not-Line
This is not a shootout in a shrine. It is a timed extraction where the hardest choices are about who you leave behind and which truth you can prove.