The Cabinet
Written by: Null Kit
If my peers are to be believed, and I have no reason to doubt them, most shadowrunning teams are fluid in their composition. Experts on relevant fields are hired and passed on by the relevance of their skills to whatever task the Fixer needs accomplished, and disbanded after the fact to mitigate potential trails. In the case of our Barkeep however, that simply wasn't sufficient, too unreliable, too inconsistant. In lieu of traditional hiring/disbanding practices, he hand-picked the most competant and professional shadowrunners in the Raleigh area and kept them on permanent retainer, a 'dream team' of some of the CAS's most dangerous and respected mercenaries to accomplish any task given to them, centered out of the basement of his own eatery, 7 Bones Gastro. And then they all died, cest la vie. Not one to be dissuaded however, the Barkeep persisted in his dream with what little was left, deciding if he couldn't pick the best from the rest, he'd make the best of the best, with the motley crew of rookies he had at his disposal. We're still waiting to see where this goes.Structure
As you would expect, the whole syndicate has fun with a naming convention based on drinks. The head of the group is the Barkeep, his associated on retainer are named after types of booze, third-party hirings are Mixers and subcontractors are Chasers.
Public Agenda
The Barkeep's agenda in making this illicit syndicate is officially (or at least the closest aproximation of 'officially' that can come from such a group) an attempt at regulating and organising shadowrunners in the Raleigh community to maximise reliability and minimise collateral damage from conflicting interests. I'll leave it to you to decide if this agenda is believable.
Assets
With the majority of procurement based on owed favors and friends-of-friends, it's difficult to precisely define what counts as an asset. What we can be certain of as belonging to the Cabinet is aproximately twenty shadowrunners of varying skill and experience kept on retainer, including a trained physician for emergency treatment and installation of acquired cyberware and bioware, operating primarily out of the 7 Bones Gastro. The Barkeep's slush funds are limited, but monetary clout matters little when the list of people indebted to him include The Pack ghost cartel, several noteworthy socialites and politicians, and even a group of free spirits.
And a bakery. Can't forget the bakery...
History
I can't pin down for certain when exactly our Barkeep began to implement his idea of a unified shadowrunning team on semi-permanent retainer, but communication records procured from data-caches written by my predecessor would mark the first use of the Cabinet name around 2070, making it a relatively new concept. The original Cabinet consisted of John's most trusted shadowrunners, all considered the cream of their respective crops in Raleigh and willing to cooperate fully with oneanother, a trait that isn't as common as one might think. After a couple of trial runs doing jobs for one of Raleigh's more prominent political forces, the Cabinet was founded in officiality and unique identifying callsigns were given out to the Barkeep's dream made manifest.
Said callsigns can be found carved into their favourite barstools, forbidden for anyone else to use. The callsigns, I mean.The Cabinet ran succesfully for several runs, fully acclimated to eachother's presence and moving fluidly as a team in unison. The first setback met by the Cabinet was in '72, when a misalligned breaching-charge led to the team's decker suffering a serious injury, taking him out of comission for a month and a half. Knowing the risks of running without on-site matrix support, Barkeep made the reluctant decision to call in a temporary replacement in the form of one of the Cabinet members' younger sibling: Myself. I was hired as a temporary contractor onto the team and given the 'provisional callsign' of Brandy, but that's all you need to know for this article. Despite his misgivings at having the role of matrix support filled in by an admitted novice, the subsequent two runs remained succesful, in no small part due to the small role that matrix support played in them. When the team's regular Decker fully recovered from his injuries, I was kept on retainer in a secondary support role, focussing on data-gathering and electronic reconnaissance. The Cabinet's biggest downfall could come quickly in spite of this growing success in early 2073. An entity, whose identity and agenda remains frustratingly difficult to piece together, contracted the Cabinet to procure a package from a secure facility and stow it in the nearby Universal Omnitech School of Medicine for safekeeping. In retrospect, the run being a set-up was obvious: The package was naught but a sealed container of commercial-grade explosives, set to detonate when carried out of a a nearby RFID's signal-range. I was the only survivor, by sheer fortune of the Cabinet's physician-on-retainer being in the area and making a risky solo extraction. For two and a half years, the Cabinet was for all intents and purposes dead. The Barkeep's dream-team vanished in a puff of smoke and fire, his investments all for nought. Present circumstances however, would callously limit any time of mourning the Barkeep had: favors were still owed, debts paid, contracts needed to be done. With the greatest of reluctance, the Barkeep began to build anew. Pulling together a new ragtag group from what few contacts he had left at that point, he decided that the next best thing to having his dream-team is to make one from scratch, turning rookies into legends himself. And the rest is history.
"Order Up."
Founding Date
2071
Type
Illicit, Syndicate
Demonym
Order
Leader
Subsidiary Organizations
Location
Controlled Territories
Notable Members
Friendly
The Pack have loaned one of their enforcers, Ripshot, as a Shadowrunner to fill the Cabinet's need for combat-expertise in exchange for favourable contract-conditions.
Non-Aggression Pact
In spite of recent conflicts of interest, the Horse Dancers have agreed to a truce between themselves and the Cabinet, allegedly in admittance of the usefulness of having deniable assets outside of the gang for purposes of subterfuge and deception.
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