Like Shooting Stars Burning Up The Night

## Background

A teenage Ork girl spontaneously combusted while performing in a community arts center play, with no indication of why. With the local neighborhood being prejudiced against metahumans, legal investigation of the death would go nowhere.

## The Meet

The Johnson proved to be the girl's father, seeking some measure of vengeance or at least closure for his daughter's death. The team didn't even ask for payment after hearing his story.

## Run

The only trace left of the girl was ashes and burn marks upon the stage. Dreamer performed a necromantic ritual upon the remains, determining that the death had indeed been magical in nature, and caused by someone other than the girl herself. Obtaining a copy of the script, it unfortunately proved to be in Latin which nobody spoke. Ophis reached out through their fixer to contact a linguistics specialist who did speak the ancient language, and could translate. Pooling the team's knowledge of magical phenomena, they considered the lines spoken by the girl - an invocation of plea to a deity of fire - and judged that the performance might have drawn the attention of a wild spirit.

Dreamer proceeded to re-enact the fateful scene, reciting the lines until a small, almost infantile wild spirit of fire appeared. Unable to convince it to manifest, Dreamer and Ophis questioned the weak and simple-minded spirit but struggled to get any useful information from it. He conjured up a more powerful fire elemental to possibly translate and convey concepts better, but this proved equally fruitless. Around this time, Ophis noticed that the school's Ward was missing - an odd thing for a building that would be protected. After the mundanes pursued an ultimately pointless red herring involving a discarded flare gun left beneath the stage, Dreamer, Vulcan, and Hydra went searching. Hydra found the room where a Lodge had existed. The room had been completely dismantled, even the floor demolished and carted away.

Back in the auditorium, a breakthrough was made in identifying the wild fire spirit to be one that possessed hosts instead of materializing. Combined with its simple-minded insistence of being 'invited', but the inviter being 'rude', the pieces finally fell into place. The spirit, drawn by the words of the play, attempted to possess the ork girl after taking her speech as an invitation. The girl attempted to resist the unexpected and unwanted possession, and in the ensuing struggle to take control of her body, the spirit's flames ignited in the physical world and burned her to death accidentally. The only remaining loose end was to find who had ordered the ward demolished, allowing the spirit to enter the school. The theater director was the only person who had that authority, and so the team decided to pay her a late-night uninvited visit after getting the address from the Johnson. One hacked door, panicked old lady, and somewhat forceful questioning later, they learned that the theatre program had faced shutting down from lack of funds until a new patron offered to donate money. A member of the anti-Awakened group MAMA, their condition of the donation was to demolish the magical ward protecting the arts center, which the director complied with from necessity. Not waiting to wipe her memories, the team fled shortly before police arrived, summoned by unknown means.

## Aftermath

The failure to cover their tracks meant the director was able to give detailed descriptions of the home invaders. The Johnson got the closure he wanted, but without anyone to blame for the loss.

## Rewards

* 9 Karma
* 2 CDP
* +1 Public Awareness (Home Invasion)

## Player After-Action Reports

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