Episode 5: Corporate Espionage on Nippon.

So the Rubato makes her way to Nippon after the brief and amusing stop over at the sludge ball of plasma leeches and Popsicle people. It is wonderful to get back to civilization; clean baths, hot showers, good food, antibiotics, directed marketing spam barely filtered by your cybernetic firewall....

It seemed to be a milk run. Set down deliver some data and furniture then catch a show or whatever the crew does to relax in civilization. But nothing is ever that easy. AS it turns out, the data delivery was subverted. Jacques and Aerick misrouted the delivery based on a bribe offer from root@sapporo.net.

Aerick returned to the Rubato and told Captain Platt of what had happened. Jacques.... jumped ship. The group was forced to go inform Nashuro Tadjusumi of Tadjusumi Industries what had happened. Mr.Tadjusumi saw fit to not prosecute the group, rather hire them as an action team to track down who was undermining his corporation.

This lead to significant amounts of investigation and misdirection. On further research the group found out that the payment and initial contact was routed through – thanks to the expert hacking team lead by Ninjasatui Hostings There were two interesting results of all of this - the account that had been responsible for the payments and the misdirection was owned by onreJames Tadjusumi, and an employing of Haddington Industries blew up the secure server farm of Manjasuro Consultings.

Of course, one of the interesting asides of all of this was that Aerick was investigated for fraud as random bytes of credits were being added and subtracted from his bank account forcing his holding company to freeze his assets for a time.

In the end, the party confronted James Tadjusumiin a local tea shop. There was significant opportunity for mayhem, but in the end they decided to back off in exchange for the release of Aericks assets. Having escaped by a hair's width from violence, the group reported their findings to Nashuro Tadjusumi – who promised to have a conversation with his son.

A few days later, Tadjusumi Industries announced a new self-repairing carbon-fiber which sent its stock soaring. One would assume that Nashuro and James came to some sort of agreement.