So, recently managed to do my first real full-on SR mission last weekend for the group I game with (we pass around the GM hat). The team is fairly well known in the Shadows by now, and they had acquired a cargo sub both to strike out into a new way of making money, and to give us a mobile base to avoid the enemies of one of the characters (her parents as it turns out. It's a long story.) So, I decided to send the team to Madagascar, with a team of Atlantean Foundation eggheads after being hired by an Adjutant to the Mystic Knights who is heading up their research into the Great Dragons. They'd found a location that was potentially a former lair of a Great, and were sent in to investigate.
The session was mainly puzzle-based, as the rest of the party have literally decades of experience on me. They ran into an Awakened variant of the Marine Iguana, essentially an aquatic Deathclaw ala Fallout, and succeeded in capturing a live specimen as well as a couple of eggs, as well as a pool that was still slowly purifying water pulled from the sea into True Water. They also found a strange effect where the deeper they went into the cave, the more powerful a spirit would become. One of the characters tried to send a watcher spirit deeper into the cave. It went in about 2000 feet, and then it's connection snapped. What came back up the tunnel was a Force 3 Free Spirit. Eventually as they continued down the cave, the background count began to skyrocket. Hitting a Positive EIGHT at the very bottom. One of the casters was using cleansing over and over, but the background count kept on creeping back up, faster and faster the deeper they went. And then when they hit the bottom, they found a skeleton of a dragon that was taking up fully half of the 200 foot circular room. And clutched between its massive claws was a massive faceted stone of some kind.
And then the caster went through Dracomorphosis. Yeah, he was a latent drake, and the background count finally got to him. It was hilarious, he HATES dragons due to a combination of factors. One, he's a Neo-Anarchist from Berlin, and he was in Met 2K when Sirrugh started his rampage, so he's seen some bad stuff connected to dragons.
Eventually, we manage to secure the stone, a couple of other nick-knacks, and a couple of claws from the skeleton, as well as the live specimens of the Deathclaws and a couple of other odd species that have been affected by the background count.
Here's where I get evil. As they're cruising back to Seattle, the sub gains the attention of a TRULY massive Kraken. As they had two parabiologists on hand, they were able to discern that Krakens don't like sunlight, and surfaced. Between the speed they were going at, and the light, the Kraken broke off chase. They receive a message from their employer directing them to preform a handover at sea instead of risking the items and the knowledge gained by hitting land. They were a bit suspicious of this, and called their employer via satphone to verify. He'd never given any such order. The nominal leader of the group ordered an immediate sweep of the sub with a Non-Linear Junction Detector. In the end, it turned out that one of the Atlantean eggheads was a mole for the Draco Foundation. She was also the group's recorder and camerawoman. She had a shunt in her camera that sent everything she recorded to a mini-sat uplink in the camera after it was recorded. And she'd gotten shots of EVERYTHING. Including the caster's Dracomorphosis.
Luckily, the team was able to slip past the mini-armada that was ready to intercept them, and got in contact with their employer through a secure method. Namely all the casters and every spirit they had, ally and bound, moving in force to find their employer and get new instructions. Said employer re-directed them to a different district to offload the cargo, and managed to scramble a sizable force of personnel to dissuade the Draco Foundation from trying anything. So the team got paid, but now they're known entities to the Draco Foundation.
