What's in the Stash
Roll d66 (two dice, first as tens and second as units, 11 to 66) for what's behind the locked cage, under the junk, or inside the crate. Some of it is worth a laugh. Some of it changes the whole Score.
| d66 | The Haul |
|---|---|
| 11 | Pre-Ban Fireworks. Professional-grade rockets and chrysanthemum shells, sealed in the original packaging, faded labels in Greek and Chinese and one language nobody recognises. Somebody stashed them during the confiscation and never came back for them, and fifteen years later they are still live, still perfect, and still humming with the specific menace of things that want very badly to go off. Enough here for a serious show, or one catastrophic accident, and honestly the line between those two is the whole game. |
| 12 | A Dead Writer's Blackbook. A battered sketchbook of unreleased pieces, tag styles nobody's seen, and a hand-drawn map of every safe wall and hidden spot in the sector, annotated in a private code and the occasional furious note about a rival. Worth a fortune to the right crew, a death sentence in the wrong hands, and haunted, according to everyone who's held it, by the sense that the artist is reading over your shoulder and judging your linework. They are. They had opinions. They still do. |
| 13 | Custom-Mixed Colours. A locker of hand-blended paint nobody alive can replicate, each can labelled in a dead artist's shorthand, including a red so bright it leaves an afterimage and a black so deep it looks like a hole punched in the wall. Every can is a piece of the person who mixed it. Use them and you're painting with someone's ghost. Sell them and you'll spend the rest of your life explaining to the scene why you did that. |
| 14 | An Old Access Card. A scratched employee keycard for a facility that swore it decommissioned this system years ago. It still works. It really, really shouldn't, and the moment it gets swiped, somewhere a very old computer wakes up, checks a name that's been dead for a decade, and cheerfully lets the Crew in while quietly flagging a supervisor who retired in disgrace. The card is warm. Cards should not be warm. |
| 15 | Slow-Burn Fuse Wire. Coils of precision fuse, the one thing you cannot improvise, cannot fake, cannot cook in a bathtub. Without it you're just throwing coloured powder at the sky and hoping. With it, the whole show fires in sequence from a single trigger, timed to the second. It's wound onto a spool that used to belong to somebody famous, and there's a note taped to the core that just reads "for the big one. you'll know." Maybe the Crew knows. Maybe they will. |
| 16 | Contraband Souvlaki. A whole cooler of the good stuff, still warm somehow, from a cart that got impounded for "unlicensed joy," which is a real charge Talos invented on the spot. It feeds the block, buys a mountain of goodwill, and makes an unbeatable bribe for a certain junkyard dog, a hungry informant, or a Hero who forgot to eat before the job. The foil is still hot. Nobody in the Crew is going to admit how much this find means to them, but it means a lot. |
| 21 | A Memory Chip. Half a map, an encrypted ledger, or a recording somebody died to hide, sealed in a chip still warm from the last hand that held it. The other half is out there somewhere, and now the Crew knows exactly what it's worth, which means so does everyone the previous owner ever talked to. Plug it into the wrong thing and it phones home. Plug it into the right thing and it starts a war. There is no wrong thing that isn't also, somehow, the right thing. |
| 22 | A Sack of Metal Salts. Strontium for red, copper for green, sodium for a gold that hurts to look at. To Vivid it's tracked inventory with a serial number on every grain. To the Crew it means the sky doesn't have to burn just one colour, and a chemist would trade a kidney for the barium alone. The sack is heavier than it looks, hisses faintly if it gets wet, and absolutely must not, under any circumstances, get wet, which the storm drains find hilarious. |
| 23 | Yellow Dust. A shimmering, metallic powder that makes any Talos officer who eats it bigger, faster, and much harder to drop, deeply illegal, obscenely valuable, and the single fastest way to get the entire city's worst attention. Holding it is a target. Selling it is a betrayal of everything the scene stands for. Destroying it is the right thing and also throwing a fortune down a drain, and the Crew is going to argue about this for the rest of the Score whether they mean to or not. |
| 24 | A Talos Part. A chunk of chrome exosuit, a sensor array, a targeting module, an entire servo-arm still twitching with residual charge. Sell it and eat for a season. Reverse-engineer it and know how the Dogs think. Bolt it onto something that was never meant to have it and build a machine that should not exist. All three ideas are terrible. All three are on the table. The arm, left alone in a corner, will slowly, patiently try to salute. |
| 25 | Red Easter Candles. A tin of hand-rolled candles, the kind nobody makes anymore, the kind the Candle Woman climbs rooftops to hand out one at a time. Worth nothing on any market and worth everything to anyone who remembers. Every Hero who takes one gains 1 Flow, and remembers, all at once, exactly why they climbed all those stairs and picked up a can in the first place. Light one and the whole Crew goes quiet for a second. Let them. |
| 26 | A Crate of Vivid Cash. Bundled, banded, and profoundly boring: clean corporate money that spends anywhere and traces straight back to whoever it was lifted from. Enough to fund a season of Scores, or to get the whole Crew killed if they flash it wrong in the wrong taverna. It even smells corporate, like new plastic and air conditioning, and every note has a tiny Vivid logo watermarked into it that seems, in certain light, to be watching. Spend it fast. Spend it far away. |
| 31 | The Original Blueprints. Rolled paper plans for the building the Crew is standing in, or the one they mean to hit next, showing every service duct, sealed room, and forgotten stair Vivid scrubbed from the digital record. Suddenly the walls have doors nobody remembers, the maze has a solution, and there, in the corner, in pencil, some long-dead architect has drawn a little room labelled only with a question mark that appears on no other copy of anything, ever. |
| 32 | A Signal Jammer. A heavy grey brick of ex-military electronics that kills every camera, radio, and drone link inside a block for exactly as long as its dying battery holds, which is one use, maybe two, and no take-backs. Silence, on a timer, right when it counts most. It runs hot enough to fry an egg, ticks down with an audible clunk, and the moment it dies, every device it was smothering wakes up furious and starts screaming at once. |
| 33 | Somebody Else in the Cage. Not a thing, a person: a writer, a witness, a rival scooped days ago and left in here, blinking in the sudden light, dehydrated, and absolutely full of information nobody expected to still be breathing. Getting them out was not the plan. It is now. They also, immediately, have three urgent opinions about the Crew's exit strategy, a cousin the Crew simply must meet, and a strong sense that they were left here as bait, which, uncomfortably, checks out. |
| 34 | A Jar of Living Bees. Baba Yorgos would pay handsomely and everyone else would ask why there is a jar of bees here at all. A sealed hive of extremely awake insects, useless to almost anyone, priceless if you know a beekeeper, and a genuinely unhinged weapon in a pinch. Do not shake the jar. Do not tap the jar. Do not, as one Crew famously did, "just have a quick look," because the bees have been waiting in the dark for exactly that, and they remember. |
| 35 | The Wrong List. A ledger of names, addresses, and payments that reads like a delivery manifest until the Crew realises it's a Vivid informant roster: every writer in the sector who's been quietly selling out the rest, dated, priced, and initialled. Ruinous in the open, priceless as leverage, and heavy in a way paper shouldn't be, because at least one name on it is going to be someone the Crew trusted, and they're going to have to decide, tonight, what that's worth. |
| 36 | A Rooftop Beehive of Antennas. Not loot to carry, loot to use: a working pirate transmitter rig, cassette deck and all, that the Underground Radio has been missing for a month and mourning on air. Return it and the Crew owns a favour from the one voice the whole city trusts. Keep it and, for one glorious reckless night, the Crew is the Radio, broadcasting to two hundred million people who have no idea who just took over their frequency and are extremely curious. |
| 41 | Prototype Wheels. A set of unreleased Vivid mag-lock wheels that grip any metal surface, walls, ceilings, the underside of a moving train, until the charge runs dry with no warning and at the worst possible height. Wildly illegal, faintly humming, gorgeous, and exactly one incredible trick away from being confiscated straight back off your feet. They also make a soft, happy chiming noise when they lock on, which is adorable right up until it gives your position away mid-heist. |
| 42 | A Box of Fake IDs. Two dozen forged Vivid credentials in a spread of faces and clearances, good enough to walk past a bored guard, nowhere near good enough to survive a real scan. A whole night of pretending to belong, as long as nobody looks twice, nobody asks a follow-up question, and nobody notices that four of the photos are visibly the same person in different hats. The Understudy made these. The Understudy was, as ever, having a little too much fun. |
| 43 | The Champagne Problem. A pallet of looted luxury nobody down here can use: vintage wine, gold watches, a fur coat, a solid-gold statue of a Vivid CEO's own dog. Worthless to a writer, gold to the right fence, and an instant death sentence if the Crew gets caught hauling exec toys through the South, where owning a watch like that is a confession. The fur coat, it should be noted, is warm, ridiculous, and someone in the Crew is definitely going to want to keep it. |
| 44 | A Talos Uniform. A full chrome exosuit shell, powered down and cold, hanging in the dark like a gutted knight. Wear it and pass, badly, for the enemy. Sell it and retire. Strip it for parts and build something that should not exist. Every option ends in a fight eventually, and the suit, once someone climbs in, boots up with a cheerful chime and a synthesised "Good evening, Officer," which is going to haunt whoever's wearing it for the rest of their life. |
| 45 | The Recipe. A grease-stained card in an old hand: the exact formula for something the city lost. A banned pigment. A firework shell. Mama Roula's actual, genuine, argued-over sauce. A chemistry Vivid buried on purpose. Whoever holds it holds a thing money can't buy back, and the moment the Crew reads it, they become the only living keepers of it, which is an honour and a burden and, in Mama Roula's case, a matter she considers strictly need-to-know and will fight about. |
| 46 | A Wall of Blackbooks. A cabinet stuffed with the sketchbooks of a dozen writers, some living, some gone, some vanished into the Memory Ward, a decade of the scene's ideas locked in one place. The artists want them back. A collector wants them framed. Talos wants the names inside. And the Crew, flipping through them by torchlight, is going to find at least one book that shouldn't be here, belonging to someone who is very much still around and very much did not know it was missing. |
| 51 | The Stray. A half-starved dog, cat, or one deeply indignant goat that's been locked in here long enough to consider the Crew literal gods descending from the light. It will follow them out, into the chase, into the heist, into everything after, loyal, loud, and utterly unpredictable, appearing underfoot at the worst and occasionally the perfect moment. Ice Cream the cat started exactly this way. So did two of the scene's best mascots and one genuine disaster. Roll the dice on this one. The city always does. |
| 52 | A Case of Contraband Instruments. Bouzoukis, a clarinet, a hand-drum, all seized from a street band for "unlicensed assembly," which is Talos-speak for "three people were having too good a time." Useless in a heist, priceless at the party after, and the single fastest way to turn a rescued block back into a living neighbourhood overnight. Hand these back and somewhere within the hour there is music, and where there's music the Radio comes, and where the Radio comes the whole sector remembers it's alive. |
| 53 | A Vial of Antidote. A labelled medical kit that counters Yellow Dust, dropping an Enhanced Talos from unstoppable back to merely armed and annoyed, mid-fight, in front of everyone. Vivid keeps these for lab accidents. One dose, one desperate moment, and a very short shelf life once the seal cracks, so the Crew has to decide right now whether to save it for the boss or use it on the wall of muscle currently trying to introduce them to the pavement. |
| 54 | The Sealed Letter. A physical, handwritten, wax-sealed letter, which in 2048 means somebody went to enormous, deliberate, almost insane trouble to say something no system on earth could read, copy, or flag. It's addressed to a name the Crew knows, or one they're about to. The wax is stamped with a symbol nobody recognises. Do they deliver it, and stay clean, or open it, and carry whatever's inside for the rest of the campaign? The letter does not care. The letter has been patient for a long time. |
| 55 | A Drum of Glow. Industrial photoluminescent pigment, the stuff Vivid uses for safety lines, that drinks light all day and burns bright for hours in the dark. Paint a piece in this and it screams off the wall at midnight, straight into every camera and every dreaming window for a kilometre. The drum sloshes, stains everything it touches a permanent ghostly green, and turns anyone who handles it carelessly into a walking beacon that Talos can follow home like a lighthouse doing it a personal favour. |
| 56 | The Foreman's Keys. A heavy ring of physical keys, every one labelled in faded tape, for a facility that swore blind it went keyless a decade ago. Half the locks are long gone. The other half open exactly the rooms the digital system pretends do not exist, the ones with no cameras, no records, and no reason to be sealed this well. The ring is worn smooth from one person carrying it for thirty years, and one key on it is filed down to nothing, opening a door nobody has found yet. |
| 61 | A Frozen Body of Evidence. A hard drive, a black box, a cold-storage file that proves a Vivid crime big enough to actually matter: a rigged lottery, a buried death, a whole stolen block. Explosive the second it reaches the Radio, and lethal to carry until it does, because the moment Vivid realises it's missing, every resource in the sprawl turns to finding it, and the Crew is now the most important courier in the city whether they wanted the job or not. Tick tick tick. |
| 62 | The Trophy Wall. Confiscated crew colours, snapped boards, cut-out chunks of famous walls: Talos keeps them mounted like hunting trophies, dated and catalogued, a museum of everyone they've beaten. Every single item belongs to somebody in the scene who thought it was gone forever. Return one and make a friend for life. Return them all and become a legend the Radio names for a year, and leave the empty wall behind with the Crew's colours in the middle of it, which is the whole point. |
| 63 | A Pallet of Nothing. Shrink-wrapped, guarded, alarmed, and utterly worthless: expired ration bars, blank forms, dead stock Vivid insured for more than it could ever sell for. The real question, the one that should make the Crew's neck prickle, is why anyone is guarding garbage this hard, with this many cameras, behind this good a lock. Move the pallet and find out. Whatever it's standing in front of, whatever it's a decoy for, is the actual score, and somebody very clever hid it in plain, boring sight. |
| 64 | The Old Radio Archive. A crate of cassette tapes: forty years of pirate broadcasts, dead DJs, banned songs, and one recording everybody's heard about and nobody has heard, the one they say the last DJ made the night before they vanished. History the city was forbidden to keep, purring on magnetic tape that could snap if you breathe on it wrong. The Radio would trade almost anything for this. So would three collectors and one Talos archivist who has been hunting it, quietly, for years. |
| 65 | A Working Grapple Line. A Vivid rescue-crew rig: motorised winch, a hundred metres of line, a magnetic anchor that bites concrete or steel like it means it. The single best way down a tower the Crew has ever held, and it only works twice before the motor burns out with a smell of hot copper and regret. Two trips. That's it. The Crew is going to spend the rest of the Score arguing about when to spend them, and they're going to get it wrong at least once. |
| 66 | The Master Key. A single Vivid admin credential, physical fob and passphrase both, that opens doors, cameras, and locks across the entire corporate grid. The score of a lifetime and a countdown in one object, because the instant it's used, Vivid knows it exists, knows it's loose, and turns the full weight of the sprawl to hunting it back. Hold it and the whole city is a locked box the Crew has the key to. Use it and the whole city becomes a net closing on wherever they used it. Choose the moment like it's the only one that matters. It is. |