Night of the LADs

Dom Ackland, a world-weary tea-stained detective sort of guy, tells the Squad that a new cognate has begun operating in Sector 51 in the last week or so. Modus operandi: victims are overpowered, presumably by several killers, and dissected. Special attention is paid to liver, spinal column and skull. At least one of the cognate must have some medical/post mortem experience, as the incisions are textbook. Organs and flesh are removed from the corpses and taken away by the killers.

Shivers have disposed of about 20 corpses matching the MO in the last few days—mainly street scum. No witnesses to any of these killings have come forward to the Shivers. As the cognate are this active it is essential that they be identified and stopped quickly.

A nanomachine plague has been released into Sector 51. This plague turns people and corpses into cannibalistic zombies (‘lads’). If the PCs can’t deal with it quickly they will get buried in the living dead.

The initial infection of the LAD nanovirus hit the vermin rat & roofrunner population of Sector 51 (Upper Downtown). The plague caused 100% mortality among these wee beasties, but several of the rats survived as rat-lads for a few days. Sewer pigs also were infected and started dissolving into stinking piles of goo—local gossip is full of ‘exploding pig’ stories. Carriens are immune to the infection for some reason.

Case zero, seven days ago (t–7), was Bakelite Townsend, a ratcatcher. He was bitten by one of the rat-lads in the course of his work. He made it to the local medical centre but ‘died’ in the surgery of Dr Peter Jenkins. Rotund, jolly Dr Jenkins put the body in the cool room and came back after hours to do a post-mortem (Dr Jenkin’s one sin, a morbid fascination with forensic pathology). Bakelite arose and chewed the doc’s face off to get at his brain, before fleeing through a fire escape.

Some hours later, Doc Jenkins also arose as a lad. He stalked and killed Dribble, a senile street dweller who had been sleeping nearby, in order to repair his face (it’s OK now, if pale, and when he smiles the scars show…). The next day (t–6) he returned to work and began taking excessive interest in live tissue samples and blood tests.

Bakelite and Dribble both fed on more streetdwellers over the next two days, creating another 4 lads.

On t–4 Dr Jenkin’s enthusiasm to get a sample from Vikki Mylar (a 16-year old hoping to get recruited by SLA) was misinterpreted as a sexual assault by her and she kicked him in the nuts and raised the alarm. Dr Jenkins fled in panic ahead of being fired for misconduct. He returned to his flat and brooded until the virus’s hunger sent him out on the streets late that night. He met up with Bakelite and Dribble’s crew and joined them in taking down a pair of Monarchs. Dr Jenkins showed the other lads how to best carve up the bodies to get at the juicy bits. The bodies were found by locals who reported it to the Shivers—the Shivers photographed the crime scene then bagged the bodies and disposed of them into the sewer system. [Cut to ‘Night of the LADs II’: a gaunt lad wearing a tattered Monarch shirt struggles out of a body bag just before it can float into the roaring sewerage mangler, and crawls ashore…]

Since t–4 Jenkins, Bakelite, Dribble and the other lads have continued to neatly feed, creating even more lads. By t=0 there are about 40 of them (Fibonacci is a bitch). The fact that bodies are just tossed into the sewers rather than being taken away to be burned, or even stored in morgues, leads to the lads staying local and breeding fast in the sewers. What’s left of Dr Jenkins is especially keen to preserve the new lads, as he sees them as being his children—taken away from life’s pain through his surgical skill and made immortal and perfect, just like him.

Leading up to t=0, the lads will have pretty much scared all the street-dwellers off the streets—into shelters or distant sectors. On t=0 a dozen lads led by Bakelite will attack the occupants of a ramshackle apartment block, Charters Towers. PCs should be in a position to intervene. The fight is on.

As the PCs continue their investigation the number of new lads will grow very quickly, unless the PCs are really on the ball. Newly-created lads still look fairly alive and are much better at luring fresh victims into private places, but lack the desperate ferocity of the older lads.

Given the nature of the contagion, fulfilling this BPN is pretty close to impossible—especially if the PCs can’t kill the lads quickly in the first few days when there are less than a hundred of them. It’s also likely to lead to PC deaths (or at least a conversion of the game from ‘SLA Industries’ to ‘Zombie: The Shambling’). Here are some ideas nonetheless:

1. Convince Dom Ackland to reinterpret the ‘cognate’ mentioned in the BPN to cover all the lads, and then shoot them all. This may take a while, but 3ird Eye interest in footage is definite.
2. Link the contagion to Karma’s LAD and blackmail them into helping clean it up. Karma will pay hush money/SCL bonus to the PCs, which puts the PCs into the middle between Karma and 3ird Eye.
3. (Merciful) Perhaps the lads are vulnerable to aerosol antibiotics, which can be pumped into the entire sector to clean it out.
4. (Merciful) Perhaps the LAD nanovirus also has an absolute lifespan hard-coded into it, so that on t=10 or so, all the viruses will self-destruct and all the lads will just collapse into puddles of inert goo.
5. If the PCs are ineffective, SLA Industries will raise many red BPNs to seal the sector off completely, welding steel over all access points. Live steam, plasma and/or aerosol necrotising nanomachines will then be pumped into the sector to purge it of all life/unlife, including the PCs.

This BPN does not explore where the LAD contagion came from in the first place. Here are some possibilities, which lead onto further BPNs if Karma, Dept Investigation, 3ird Eye, or even Dept Ebb/Dark Lament like the PCs’ style:

1. Accidental release from the sector’s Karma-subsidiary lab into the sewers.
2. A DarkNight plot to discredit the LAD process.
3. Karma testing a new bioweapon on an unsuspecting populace.
4. Bitterness’s response to LAD.
5. There’s something in the sewers—the right mix of industrial effluent and the body of a previous LAD recipient.
6. A cheesy excuse to pastiche ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Army of Darkness’…(naaaahhh…)

The LAD viral nanomachine converts living people and recently-dead bodies into lads. The virus is spread by body fluid-to-fluid contact—i.e. unbroken skin is enough to stop the contagion (unless as a GM you’re feeling particularly vicious…). The virus remains virulent in spills of blood etc for up to 24 hours and in corpses for 200 hours or so, plus or minus the ongoing condition of the organic material. The transformation takes about an hour for a living person (symptoms: fever, hunger for flesh, hysteria/catatonia (including possessed limb syndrome), wounds heal, culminates in a coma of 1-100 minutes duration during which the body may as well be a corpse), and 3 hours for a corpse (symptoms: tetanic twitches, slow wasting, wounds slowly heal).

Lads are pretty much up against it. The virus keeps them fresh and animate, but being imperfectly implemented, has a couple of side-effects:

1. When the initial infection is complete (i.e. a live or recently-dead victim becomes a dead lad), he/she/it loses 1 DIA & 1 CONC. But on the plus-side, the lad gains 1 STR, 1 PHYS and Psychosis/6…
2. The virus gets exhausted. For every 5 HITS the virus attempts to repair (at 1 HIT every 2 rounds), the virus repairs only 4 (the lad loses 1 from their permanent HIT total) and the lad loses another 1 DIA and 1 CONC. Effectively the virus is wasting away the lad’s flesh and nervous system in an effort to keep the body functional. When the lad reaches a permanent HIT total of 0 not even the virus can resurrect it and it turns to crumbly gunk.
3. For much the same reason, about every 24 hours the lad loses 1 HIT, 1 DIA and 1 CONC. Older lads are shrivelled, gaunt, skinless corpses with only one thing on what’s left of their minds: brains…
4. (2) & (3) can be offset by the consumption of living flesh, especially liver, marrow, spinal cord and brain. A lad cannot gain nourishment from normal food, but fresh, quivering live tissue and warm, soft brains are just what the lad desires. A fresh victim’s worth of new tissue will offset the wasting effect for 24 hours or 20 HITS. Typically, a lad eats just what it needs and leaves the fresh victim to rise as a new lad, hungry for flesh to repair the damage to its body.
5. The virus can keep dismembered pieces alive. These pieces are nearly mindless but instinctively predatory—it’s just a pity they tend not to be able to feed from their victims. Also, the virus can reattach dismembered bits to other bits (regardless of whether they originally came from the same body…). These dismembered body parts then attack aggressively, and also try to slither towards each other to join up and hopefully regain the use of a digestive system.
6. By all means, infect PCs. Have dead PCs come back lusting after the remaining PCs’ brains. Do the whole Army of Darkness thing with lad-infected limbs turning against their still-living owners. Make PCs have to chop off limbs just to keep from becoming lads. Or more mercifully, allow a BOOPA medikit’s broad-spectrum antibiotics to ward off one dose of the virus, so that as the medpack runs out the PC will get more and more keen to avoid fights with lads…

As you can probably see, lads are very tough to kill—at least permanently. What tends to happen is PCs shoot them into lying still, or chop them up, but then a few rounds later the lads are regenerated and up again looking for brains. Three ways to deal with lads more permanently present themselves:

1. Damage the lads enough to completely exhaust the regenerative capabilities of the virus (which for a lad with 10 HITS = 10 + 9 + … + 1 = 55 HITS between meals…). Pushing them into industrial processes works too.
2. Heat the lads’ flesh (through burning or boiling etc) to 70°C or over for 2 minutes. For those of you with ovens, 70°C core temperature is about medium-rare, which will take several hours for a human-sized hunk of flesh at an oven temperature of 220°C or so. You do get a lovely crispy skin, however.
3. Inject the lads with BOOPA medikit antibiotics.