In good Spirit
| In good Spirit | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven Vincent Malrone | Culprit | ||||||||
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Sibyl Delphi Quoth | |||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Justice has been served. | |||||||||
| Investigation of a murderer | |||||||||
Disclaimer / Re-runs
I may re-run this due the low player count. So if you would like to participate in future iterations, don't read further then Summary. And if not obvious, most of the text are contentwise my product, but the textwork did an AI. It's ment to entertain ;-)
Summary
As rain knifes down the alleys of Seattle, another body hits the books. Touristville — that sleepless, soulless corner of Redmond — just got one corpse richer. It won’t be long before the ever-helpful Knights arrive to trample what could’ve been a forensic goldmine, muddling the traces of a very personal sin.
But before that happens, a call goes out. Vincent Malrone — PI, ex-cop, noir cliché with a fondness for bourbon and bad decisions — strikes a deal. Payment's on the table, a riddle wrapped in blood and bottle caps... but Vince is busy. Busy chasing curves that belong to the wrong waitress. A waitress, unfortunately, still married. To a troll. With an emotional support chainsaw.
So the job slips through his fingers and into the shadows.
Another call. A landline crackles in Shadowhaven — old-fashioned, like everything Vince touches — and a job offer rolls across the wires. Three runners answer. No introductions. No guarantees. Just the kind of professionalism that smells like cigarettes, wet asphalt, and trouble.
What follows is a story you’ve heard before. A meet at the bar, a dead man slumped over a bottle, and a trail paved in whisky and poor decisions. But through smoke and static, the golden questions still glimmer:
Who did it? Why? And how?
Background
Roy Birkland wasn’t famous, but in Touristville, he passed for a name. An adept with a nose for spirits — the liquid kind — and a reputation for stealing more than just glances. Recipes, mostly. A talent for taste turned into a curse when you built your name on the backs of better brewers.
He ran a bar called The Lonesome Spirit, and if that ain’t a metaphor, nothing is. Somewhere between the neon grime and the old dart trophies, Roy made enemies. Two of them had had enough.
What followed wasn’t rage. It was chemistry. Cold. Precise. A slow-burn recipe designed not to kill instantly, but to wait — for the right mix, the right sip, the right fool.
Roy took the bait. And that made him a story. The kind that ends with three strangers picking through the pieces
The Meet
They say the dead don’t talk — but sometimes, they leave a mess big enough that someone has to clean it up.
The Lonesome Spirit was never a loud place. It wasn’t built for crowds, and it didn’t want them either. Wood, leather, and just enough pride to make up for the parts time had eaten away. On that day, the air smelled like cheap disinfectant and something worse — the kind of quiet that sets in when life walks out. Roy hadn’t been dead for long when the call went out, not to the law, but to Vincent Malrone — private investigator, cynical romantic, and chronically unlucky.
Malrone, however, had already complicated someone else’s evening. A waitress, a husband, and an emotional support chainsaw had ensured his sudden unavailability. When the message crackled through his old landline in Shadowhaven, the job passed to those who didn’t ask too many questions.
Three runners picked up the call.
They arrived at the bar with the kind of caution that only the wise or the burned can muster. The lights flickered in that timeless way, more memory than electricity, and the smell of dried blood hadn’t yet been chased out by cleaning crews or corporate reports. Vince was already there, looking like someone who’d spent more time in back alleys than beds — his suit wrinkled, his eyes tired, and a cigarette that hadn’t been lit for taste in years.
He didn’t talk much. Just laid out the facts with the practiced apathy of someone who’s seen too many of these things go sideways. Payment was offered, expectations lowered, and warnings given with half a shrug and a glance at the door. The runners listened — not because they trusted him, but because the job was real, and the corpse was cooling fast.
There was no fanfare. No grand reveal or dramatic music. Just a dead man in a quiet bar, and the slow realization that this wouldn’t be simple. But they stayed, because something about the scene demanded it — maybe the blood, maybe the silence, maybe the way Roy looked like he still had something to say.
The Trail
A stamp on the whisky labels left behind at the crime scene didn’t scream “clue,” but for those who know how to listen, it whispered the next address. The Two Drops—a modest, worn-in bar not far from The Lonesome Spirit, beating heart of a fringe circle of homebrew enthusiasts and stubborn idealists. It was a place held together by dusty bottles and the shared weight of a lost cause.
Tam ran the joint. Once a chemist who’d believed in better things, now just another soul pouring drinks for those trying to forget. Slug kept the door and his eyes open. They weren’t shaken by the runners, but the death of Roy—a familiar face with too many loose ends—had hit harder than they wanted to admit.
There was no magic in the air, not the flashy kind, anyway. But the place had spirit, carved out of mundane hands working toward something real. It offered no hard evidence, but it offered a name: Kreznik.
The trail led to Redmond, where city maps go to die. An old washing station, forgotten by zoning boards and mercy alike, had become Kreznik’s refuge. A lab of metal and ghosted dreams, abandoned only recently—and not willingly. The man was still there, preserved in a vat of his own making, his last mistake etched into a slippery catwalk and a fractured skull.
The tank didn’t speak. But his computer did, and so did the chaos of papers scribbled in half-legible brilliance. Somewhere in the noise was a pattern, and somewhere in that pattern: Tagwise.
He wasn’t hard to find. The Pit doesn’t hide its broken. Among the screams and makeshift shrines to fleeting highs, Lethe’s Cradle waited beneath the surface. A hospice in all but name, where pain meets resignation and the caretakers don’t flinch. Tagwise had found his way there—staggering and singing through one last high, dreaming with glassy eyes of oblivion.
He didn’t fight the runners. His mind was too far gone. But in between the rhymes and laughter, he gave them what they needed. The final verse. The last bitter truth.
Aftermath
Tagwise's mind—what little was left of it—most likely met its end in a stewpot for some infected, served up with gentle hands and no judgment. It was a cruel end, maybe, but one he had chosen in his own twisted way. Roy, by contrast, got something like dignity. Delphi paid, Tam organized, and a few familiar faces showed up to mutter words of respect over the casket of a man who'd burned too fast, too loud, and too alone.
Kreznik ended in ashes. No mourners. No music. Just a name scribbled into dust and a flame that reduced brilliance to bone. They gave him a ritual, the simplest there was. Maybe it was enough.
And when all was said and done, the city exhaled and forgot.
Three men, bound by a shared obsession, a blend of genius and spite. Friends, maybe, in a different world. Enemies by timing, victims by choice. Now they were gone. And their story, like so many in the shadows, would never be told—except by those who know where to look.
Rewards
Threat Level Low 9 RVP
- 4,000 Nuyen (2 RVP)
- 7 Karma (7 RVP)
- +2 CDP (Base)
Game Quotes
Player After Action Reports (AARs)
Sibyl: I've never worked with another Seer before this job; never thought I would work with two. Delphi and Quoth are top notch talent, I've learned a lot from them. It's clear that I've had too much focus on acquiring information and not enough on acquiring knowledge. I think I'll stop by to chat with Tam and Slug about funeral arrangements for Kreznik, having his corpse in the boot of my car makes me nervous.