Ghost Story
The Runners: Myles Knight, Silak, Six-Killer, Klyde Scope
The Job: No employer
The Real Deal: The runners find out that they are being haunted by the spirit of a young, ork boy after Myles Knight is put in the hospital room the boy died in. The players must put the spirit to rest in order to return to their normal lives. (This adventure originated from the Super Tuesday! Shadowrun sourcebook. This story is based solely on the premises put forth in said book, drekcettera, drekcettera. The happenings in this story are based of the actions of Philadelphia's Phinest. 'Nuff said.)
The Breakdown:
The runners are riding home one night after their encounter with Riv, the toxic shaman from the Toxic Candidiate. Klyde's cellular phone rings, and when he answers it, he is shocked to hear from an anonymous caller telling them that Myles Knight has been shot and admitted to Seattle General Hospital. Klyde asks who the caller is, but all he can provide is that he is an old friend of Myles' and that he just wanted to let the team know. The man hangs up, and the players speed off to SeaGen.
When the runners arrive at SeaGen, they are immediately noticed (see Dragon Hunt)but are allowed in only after being thoroughly disarmed, not even permitting so much as a shockglove into the hospital. The players get the info on where their fallen chummer is resting, or so they say. As soon as they get the room number, they are up and running to see if Myles is going to be all right.
Before the runners' arrival, Myles lies sleeping under the influence of sedatives and has his first encounter with a force that he does not understand. He dreams of being all alone inside of his hospital room, all is dark and strangely quiet. His body is sore and his skin feels like it is at least twice to large for himself. He tries to move, but only strains himself in the process. Then he feels the weight of something soft being pressed into his face...suffocating him. He tries to scream but only lets out a muffled whimper. When the dream ends, he bolts upright and screams. When he starts screaming, the rest of the team arrives.
Myles screams out that someone just tried to kill him, and the runners immediately search the floor, disrupting the usual order of things in the gunshot ward, thus drawing the attention of security. After they are brought to the desk, they explain the situation and security makes a more ordered investigation of the ward. No dice. Security comes up with nothing, either corporeal, astral, or video taped. No one, save the runners and nursing staff, have entered the room.
Myles asks for his drugs to be cut back and for one of the runners to stay with him another night in the hospital room. Six-Killer, for reasons unknown, decides that he will stay with Myles and oversee his security along with Silak. After keeping alert until sometime after three in the morning, Silak and Six-Killer, ever vigilant, are both asleep. Soon, Six-Killer is visited by the unrelenting force.
This time, Six-Killer is in the hospital, but there is much more going on now. The hospital is bustling now, orderlies scrambling for needed supplies, doctors darting back and forth, and patients screaming. Six-Killer is innundated with images of people writhing in pain, doctors with confused looks, and a feeling that there is no order in a once sane world. Then, as soon as it began, the images fade away, and it is only himself in the dark hospital room. Then, he hears a voice; a voice of what sounds like a child. "I'm sorry," it says weakly, "I didn't mean for it to happen. I didn't want to be like this!" The room slowly begins to fade out, the hospital bed seems to be the last thing left in the swirling darkness of the dreamscape. "No! Get away! I'm still Kenny! It's Kenny! No!" the voice screams. Blood begins to pool on the bed as the dream ends. Six-Killer awakens to find himself drenched in sweat, and then the voice whispers again, saying, "I'm still Kenny."
Looking up after the dream ends, Six-Killer sees that the Trideo unit is turned on, displaying late night newscasts of the Political Campaign on the local Seattle Trid Station. He jumps when the trid shatters its display screen after displaying a picture of Kenneth Brackhaven. Myles and Silak awaken after hearing the noise and ask what happened. Six-Killer says nothing, just that the trid just broke suddenly. The next morning, the doctors look at Myles' wounds and toss the runners from the hospital back onto the rainy streets.
Quickly dismissing the dreams and the spontaneous implosion of the trid, the runners return to their flop, and begin discussing where to find their next job, when they hear something crach in another room of the flop. They rush to the room to find their own trid smashed and in pieces all over the floor. Six-Killer feels a chill pass through him and he remembers the dream again. He pushes it to the back of his mind and agrees to go out and look for work with the others again. On his way out, he sees an ork boy, no older than twelve (still pretty big, considering that orks reach physical maturity around 11 or 12)out of the corner of his eye. It freaks him out to say the least when the ork boy vanishes as quickly as he appeared, and he informs the team about his encounter. The first one to figure out what's happening is Silak. He announces that the team is being haunted by something, and whatever it is will not stop until it is avenged, or given notice. Believing this to be true, the team sets out to unravell the mystery... and buy another trid.
The runners consult their regular decker, Jack the Ripper, and ask for a little info from SeaGen hospital pertaining to the room in which Myles was attended to. After indexing a search for any patients by the name of Kenny, they get twelve such persons, two fitting a metahuman profile. But the biggest surprise of all, is that the Arch-Conservative presidential hopeful, Kenneth Brackhaven himself is listed as having been in that room on Goblinization Day and was attended to by Dr. C. Falt. Six-Killer requests that Jack deck into Brakhaven's datafiles, a feat that Jack asks no less than 10,000 nuyen for. Eventually, Klyde talks him down to 7,750 and Jack asks that the runners stay by the phone.
Two hours later, Jack returns the call and says that the system is too well protected to hack into. The only thing that turns up about Brackhaven is his current location (campaigning in U.C.A.S. proper) and the address of the local Seattle HQ for the campaign, headed up by Carl Brackhaven, the uncle of the presidential hopeful. Jack hangs up, leaving the runners to get in touch with Carl.
After a short trip and another ork sighting, this time by Myles, the runners pull up in front of the campaign HQ and go to meet the man behind the Brackhaven Campaign in seattle. Silak, having a keen sense of self-preservation, decides to stay in the car, away from the eyes of anyone from the Arch Conservative party (See Super Tuesday! for the truth about the biases of Ken Brackhaven). The runners ask to see Carl Brakhaven, and they are taken to his office (once again after a thorough disarmment) and they begin to ask questions that Carl doesn't like. Questions about Ken's visit to the hospital back on Goblinization Day. Carl tells them that Ken was checked in after being Diagnosed with Vitas III, and was treated by the best doctors at the time. After making a remarkable recovery, Ken went on to take control of the family empire and that you couldn't even tell he had been sick. After changing the subject and telling the runners that the offices were closing, the runners are thrown out once again to the street.
Sensing that the lead to Campaign HQ has turned up as a wash, the runners decide to track down Dr. Falt. After a quick sprinkling of nuyen to some contacts, the players discover that Dr. Falt has turned Street Doc, and has a clinic on the edge of the Redmond Barrens. They track down her liasion Walks-With-Yen, a fixer in the area who screen all of Dr. Falt's clients. After getting there, Walks takes them to Christine Falt, an aging doc with a grudge against the SeaGen hospital. After asking about attending Brackhaven's treatment, she tells them that Brackhaven didn't have Vitas III, but that he was goblinizing into an ork. She further explains that Brackhaven had a "Miraculous Regression" and that the goblinization process did not finish, reverting Ken back into a human again. Only being an intern at the time, Falt smelled drek and when she inquired into the matter to the good doctor who had taken her place in Brackhaven's treatment, she was fired. The runners try to get more out of her, but Falt knows no more. What she does do, is give the team another address, belonging to the replacement doctor's assistant nurse, a Dr. Johanssen who was sleeping with him as well. She wishes them luck and tosses them back on the streets... again.
The runners begin to smell the drek they've stepped into while on the ride home. Klyde once again gets a call from an anonymous caller, stating only "I have 10,000 friends who want to talk to you." After giving an adress in the Tacoma Metroplex, the caller hangs up. The runners, always in the mood to make money, go off to see what they have to do to get 10,000 nuyen. Besides, it's practically on the way to the nurse's home. They arrive in TacMet and find the address to be a fairly upscale bar. When they enter, they check their weapons at the door, and are greeted by a man, non-descript and polite. The man identifies himself as the placer of the call and asks them to sit at a table at the far end of the bar to discuss a business matter.
The man explains that the runners are getting into it over their heads. The man offers them 10,000 nuyen if they drop the investigation. Klyde is tempted to say yes, when he feels the spirit's prescence turning his veins to ice water. Klyde declines, saying that he can't do that. the man only says, "that is unfortunate" and leaves, disappearing into the night.
The runners pursue their new lead after parting with the "polite man" and arrive at an enormous home in one of the ritziest parts of town. They stride up the driveway and knock on the door. An older woman answers the door, asking what the runners want at such a late hour. When they ask about her time with Dr. Falt, Johanssen immediately becomes bitter, making scathing remarks about Falt, calling her an "unproffessional, untrustable tramp." When saying that that was what Falt had said about her, the nurse immediately decides that it is time to end the conversation. When she goes to close the door, Klyde kicks it in, demanding more answers. Then he sees the blinking PANICBUTTON by the door and realizes that it's time to run, and fast, before Lone Star arrives.
The runners, for the third time in 48 hours recieve another cellular call, this time from the nurse. She explains that she couldn't talk in the open with the runners, and asks them to meet her practically in the heart of the Redmond Barrens, where she will fill them in on the story. The players get really happy and drive off to the location they are to meet at.
When they arrive, they find the location to be a spot only comparable to their worst nightmares. The moon shines brightly above the ruins of the wrecked department store the players stand before. they enter the buliding to find it empty, save for rats. But soon, Klyde picks up a sound from his amplified hearing; a ticking noise. Myles follows Klyde to the sound only to find a bomb, with only ten seconds left on the counter. Needless to say, the runners turned tail and bolted. Six-Killer and Myles make it out in time, but Silak and Klyde are blown out by the blast. The burns weren't light, but they weren't fatal either. Before Silak can pick himself up off the 'crete, he is hit in the upper leg by an arrow of all things, from a sniper set up on an adjacent rooftop. He swears, firing blindly into the sky. Let the firefight begin.
Gunshots rang out en masse as the runners fired blindly at an opponent they could not see. Silak spends his last bit of effort casting his detect enemy spell, only getting a vague impression of where the sniper stands. After pointing out the approximate location of the attacker, Klyde tosses two offensive grenades at the roof top, almost collapsing a corner of the building, and most likely killing innocent (?) onlookers inside the crumbling squat. Soon, the assault ends as Silak loses track of the would be assassin, and the runners, fearing for the chance of their last hope at a lead, begin the rush back to the nurse's home, only to find that it has been broken into and the power lines cut.
To make a long story short, the players enter the house to find that it has been rigged with traps meant to ensnare or otherwise keep the runners busy. After Klyde triggering just such a trap, smoke fills a corridor on the uppermost floor, allowing the sniper (also a phys ad) a chance to strike. He slams into Klyde knocking him down with Killing Hands, probably breaking a couple of ribs. Myles pursues the assassin only to find that he has once again vanished. Silak tries again to locate him with another spell, finding nothing. The runners find the nurse tied to a bed and gagged just as the assassin strikes again, landing an another arrow into Silak's arm. Myles steps in, lead hosing the assassin into a bloody mess on the floor.
The team unties the nurse, who instantly bursts into tears. Johanssen explains that the assassin came minutes after Lone Star left and was intending to kill her after she had served her purpose as bait. She tells the runners about files that will answer all of their questions about Brackhaven in her attic. Voila, they have the files and find out some nasty drek about the good old Brackhaven bunch. They now have shocking data on OP chip and hardcopy of Ken Brackhaven Sr. killing his own son after he goblinized. Brackhaven Sr. then replaced him with a brainwashed orphan with facial and body modification, thus creating a puppet Brackhaven that would grow up to be everything that his real son wasn't. The team knew exactly what to do.
After a call to Arthur Vogel, the runners present him with the info. Vogel is eccstatic, asking the runners how much they want. They merely ask for another promised favor, and the next thing they know, Ken Brackhaven is up on the stand the next day, admitting the whole scandal, after an anonymous source posted the news on a local newsnet revealed the ugly truth behind the true identity of Ken Brackhaven Jr.
The runners feel like an incredible burden has been lifted off their shoulders as the spirit, once bound to them, releases the runners from their debt. The ork materializes to Silak, eerily saying, "Thanks for understanding," and vanishing into the night.
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