Breakout
As the game begins, the players don't have many places to turn. Through his contacts in prison and out, Fujiwara has managed to set up a meeting with Tatase Goku's personal assistant, who has learned of his boss' dishonourable deeds and wants to escape, but is too scared to take any action himself. Instead he agreed to provide the team with Tatase's itinerary for the next few days, before blowing town. The meeting is set for 2200 on Tuesday, in The Crater in Downtown's docklands area.
In the meantime, no doubt the team will be interested in getting some clothes, and maybe guns and other technological tools. The best bet would be to stick to the poorer areas and head into little mom-&-pop stores, although even they would call the cops upon seeing people in Lone Star prison duds buying civilian clothes, so hefty bribing (with what?), extreme sweet-talking (like 5 successes against a shopkeeper's Willpower of 3), trickery or murder will be required to keep them quiet. A small clothes shop contains D3-1 shoppers. Once they've got some normal clothes, if they desire, they can freely go to a more up-market store and kit themselves out in swanky armoured suits or whatever.
To get money to start off with, assume that any random passweryby has a certified credstick on them on the roll of a 4+. An Intimidate test against their Willpower giving two successes will get them to fork it over (if in an appropriate situation, like dragged down a dark alley), and extra successes scare them too much to report it. The stick contains 2d6 x 10Y. Lone Star notice the disturbance on a roll of 5+.
Guns require law-related things like permits and SINs, so they might prove a little more problematic. A small gunstore owner could be persuaded to write a moderate amount of stuff off as lost or damaged stock for a somewhat hefty (for him, at least) bribe (say, double the price), but if they want some heavy artillery (anything bigger than an SMG) they'll have to come up with another way of going about it. Stealing will result in an immediate call to Lone Star (gun store owners have a Panicbutton[tm] system installed). Gunshots will alert passers-by, the people in the adjascent shop, etc. Again, D3-1 other shoppers.
Dingy general stores keep solvent for jack-stoppers hidden away and will part with a can for an extortionate 50 nuyen. A bookstore will have a variety of skillsofts up to rating 4 on display, but might have something with a bit more kick stashed away in the back (make with those Etiquette tests - 3 successes against TN4 required). Check out the SR3 rulebook on page 296 to get a list of prices, and on page 223 to determine the program size. Skillsofts have a multiplier of 3 for base skills or 2 for specialisations. Be sure to note the program sizes, because this'll determine how much stuff Fujiwara can have in his brain at a time.
Fujiwara can access his secret Swiss bank account containing 20,000Y using a certified credstick to download the money onto - he'll need to go into a bank to do this, and it requires a voiceprint (get the player to speak the character's name aloud), a fingerprint scan and a passcode (Intelligence test, TN5 to remember the code, with three attempts - if Fujiwara's player fails them all, do not let him have the money, they'll have to come up with another way of getting moolah). The bank charges a 2% fee to create the certified credstick.
Hung Out to Dry
By Wednesday morning, it will be common knowledge in the underworld that the team has escaped, although Lone Star are doing their best to keep it from the media. The Yakuza are under orders from Tatase to eliminate them, no questions asked, and whilst the average kobun on the street might not understand why these guys are such a major target, he's sure not going to disobey. The Mafia want these guys for less sinister but no less dangerous reasons - revenge for the killing of Sofia Villante. If the Mafia get hold of them, they'll be strapped to a chair with their trousers round their ankles looking at a large grinning Italian man holding a pair of garden shears before they can say "Ogenki Clinic". Lone Star, of course, want to cover up the rather monumental PR blunder of having their greatest score in ages break out from a high security prison convoy. They'd prefer to take them in alive, but that might not be so easy, so dead will suffice.
The massive influence of these three organisations means that the team have just about zero places to turn to that they can trust. Any known contacts they might have had in the past will be under observation, and anybody found to have helped them will be losing fingers\nads\freedom pretty quickly. Any fixer, fence, informant, shadowrunner or whatever has far more incentive to turn them in than to help them out. So they're pretty much on their own - make sure they know this. Furthermore, the team was an individual cell as opposed to part of an army of kobun - so there aren't any members of the Yakuza that will help them out of a sense of cameraderie, because they didn't actually have any comrades.
Tatase's Empire
Tatase has his fingers in his share of pies (the team will know about all of this) - he practically runs the Yakuza's prostitution racket in the Downtown area of the Metroplex. This is organised along similar lines to a corporation, with him as CEO and various lieutenants taking charge of the different districts, but reporting to him. Yakuza brothels operate by hiring the best girls in the area, and attracting those working for their competitors over to working for them instead. Inevitably this results in the opposition resorting to force, at which point the Yaks are free to respond in kind. Yakuza prostitutes tend to have cyberware built in to alter their behavioural patterns to whatever the client may desire - this same ware can also be used to block their memories of the client, if needs be.
Tatase also controls a fair amount of the BTL chip and drug trade coming through the Seattle docks. Japanese dock workers in the pay of the Yakuza take delivery of the cargo and pass it along to Tatase's distributors, who send it down through their networks of dealers for sale on the streets. At the moment, Tatase is looking to move into the lucrative world of the CalHot BTLs - bringing them up from the California Free State. It's for this reason that he's meeting with the Triads to try to hammer out some kind of mutually beneficial deal.
Tatase operates a number of gambling dens in the Downtown district. There's a mixture of types of places - dingy little warehouse casinos, Japanese dens where games like mahjong, fan-tan and pachinko are played, and high-class executive clubs that cost 250Y just to get in the door. Each of these is run by a manager, and each manager reports to one of Tatase's lieutenants, one for each administrative area as defined by Tatase.
Tatase is directly answerable to Hanzo Shotozumi, oyabun of the Yakuza in the Seattle Metroplex.
The Crater
Although its origins have been long forgotten by the folks that inhabit this conveniently-shaped pit, it remains a popular place with the docklands folks to hang out in the evenings, place bets, drink and socialise, and create noise and throngingness - which also makes it popular with Shadowrunners, drug and BTL dealers, organised criminals, street gangs and other shady individuals who need to meet people out of the public eye. There's an entrance fee of 5Y on the gate, and there's stadium vendors wandering amongst the crowd selling beer and soy-dogs. Tonight's entertainment is Drone Deathmatch - an evolution of the Robot Wars television program with that guy from Red Dwarf. Two riggers have their prized battle drones go to it in the arena at the base of the crater, whilst punters sit on the coliseum-style seating around it and yell for their favourite drone. When the meeting takes place, up-and-comer Crusha is taking on the oft-repaired veteran The Renton Renegade. Crusha is a tracked box-shaped vehicle with a hydraulic piston-driven crushing machine mounted on the front and arm-mounted chainsaws. The Renton Renegade has a more humanoid form but with tracks instead of legs, with a drill arm, a pneumatic punching arm, a claw arm including snips, and a blowtorch arm. The battle goes on in the background of the meeting, with an announcer giving excited commentary over a PA system and bookies taking bets in electronic cred-stick readers. Eventually Crusha backs The Renton Renegade up against a wall and charges it, grabbing it in its crushing device. The Renegade snips off Crusha's right track and tries to blowtorch and drill through its hull, but the crushing continues bending it out of shape until one of Crusha's chainsaws breaches the fuel tank for the blowtorch, resulting in a large fireball explosion. The Renton Renegade's rigger jumps out of his box and runs across to Crusha's rigger's box and plants the other rigger (an ork) one on the chin. They go at each other for a little while until they're torn apart by adjudicators, whilst the screams of somebody with a ringside seat as he examines the lump of shrapnel in his shoulder provide backing music.
Anyway, the man they're here to meet is Ryo Kaneshiro, Tatase Goku's personal assistant. He's dissatisfied with his boss and although he's too wimpy to do anything himself, he's kept in touch with Fujiwara whilst he was in prison, and now he sees the opportunity to either have his boss offed, or to cause enough confusion to enable him to escape. His plan basically consists of: hand over boss' schedule for the next three days, stick around for that long so as not to arouse suspiscion, put boss on plane to Japan if he's still alive, and spend the rest of his days sipping margaritas on a Cayman island.
He's dressed down for the occassion and is sitting quietly in one of the seats about halfway up the side of the crater. He bows slightly in greeting, waits for the team to sit down, and briefly explains his story. He also urges them to be careful, because he'll be accompanying Tatase to most of his business meetings. He hands over a pocket secretary with only one file on it: the itinerary (give the players the handout), bows again, and leaves quickly. The players will be familiar with any given location on the itinerary, and know their way around the Metroplex well.