Ghostbusters

## Background

Roughly a month prior to the run, a strangely bland man appeared in the management team at Polaris Solutions, a scientific research company operating in Snohomish. Electronic records indicated his career with the firm stretched back for years, and every person who interacted with him came away convinced they remembered him as well. Only the security chief, who kept independent records and had never met 'Mr. Smith', remained aware of this intruder. Unable to prove it, he went looking for deniable assets to solve the problem for him.

## The Meet

Marta's bar was chosen as the meet location. The team assembled ahead of the scheduled time, and were waiting when the Johnson - clearly ex-military by his dress and bearing - arrived. He explained the issue, and told them he wanted "Mr. Smith" forcibly extracted for questioning. The man's ability to alter memories made him likely to be a mage, but he must have had megacorporate-grade hacking support to alter the electronic records so thoroughly, and the Johnson wanted to know who.

## Legwork

Armed only with a grainy security photo of 'Mr Smith', they went on a deep data trawl for anything of use. Trample was able to trace the shell corporations owning Polaris back to a division of Ares Macrotechnology, figuring out the firm existed as a speculative research branch investigating potential cutting-edge tech. Its current line of focus was in non-chemical propulsion systems for extra-orbital vehicles, i.e. ion drives. Efforts to identify Mr. Smith failed, as his image was so incredibly generic as to resemble artificial stock photos of 'Corporate Executive, Male'. They scouted the Polaris campus, finding it relatively lightly guarded and in a forest-ringed valley away from any potential witnesses.

## Run

Initial infiltration was simple - Epitaph leading the way for Grzegorz and Ulster to infiltrate past the unsuspecting security guards. With Trample suppressing automated security, they made their way to the top floor with a plan to wait in Mr. Smith's office until he arrived in the morning. To their surprise, he was already in said office, and attempted to use mind magic on them as they entered. Grzegorz effortlessly reflected the compulsion back onto him, but in the process opened his Astral Sight and discovered that 'Mr. Smith' was in fact a spirit of unknown type and origin. This resulted in internal strife within the team, as Trample's shamanism ran headlong into Grezgorz's fundamentalist beliefs with regards to harming the spirit with Blight anti-magic toxins if it did not cooperate willingly. Forced into action by the impending expiration of the compulsion spell, the trio engaged the spirit; after finding it predictably resistant to mundane weaponry, Grzegorz used his Blight rounds and inflicted severe damage on the being. It proceeded to dematerialize and flee on the Astral plane. Furious with the others, Trample departed and left them to find their own way home.

## Aftermath

The Johnson was not happy that they had gotten into a violent gunfight in the building he was officially responsible for security over, but agreed they had complied to the best of their ability and managed to force the infiltrator to flee. The pay was transferred without incident.

However, several days later the runners were summoned back to the bar by Marta, who said some strangers had arrived asking questions about their recent job and the team that had gone on it. Warily gathering, they found two people waiting - a human man in a black trenchcoat, and a troll sporting a violently pink mohawk crest. Grzegor swiftly identified both of them as spirits as well. The following conversation explained that they were from an alternate metaplane resembling a dark, twisted mirror of this one, ruled by hostile megacorporations. The spirits and others like them, manifesting as totems of sorts representing differing approaches to shadowrunning, sometimes used the material world as a backdoor to strike at their native enemies. But now those enemies, in the persona of generic-looking corporate 'suits', had started visiting the mortal world too. This one had been working to shift the research of Polaris towards weaponization of ion projection, and others like him were infiltrating other megacorps for unknown but surely malevolent ends.

## Rewards

* 5 Karma

* 20,000 Nuyen

* 2 CDP
* 1 level of Knowledge: Spirits

## Player After-Action Reports

*In Character* accounts of events, general impressions, or memorable moments