Starter Adventure — Reclamation

AX.GIL.14.01 - Reclamation

A Starter Adventure

Overview

Premise: A freelance Hardware Exorcist hires the party to retrieve a device from an NTC Reclamation Ward before it gets recycled. The device is not what she was told it was. Neither is the job.

Primary Plot: Abduction (Polti Plot 19), a conscious entity is being held without consent by an institution that denies it is conscious at all.

Secondary Plot Hook: Conflict with a Superior (Polti Plot 3), the party now holds something three NTC departments and the HIA all want back, and the person who posted the original job is still anonymous

Setting: The Spire, Patch District (Fold strata), Relay District (Lattice strata), NTC Reclamation Ward (Lattice interior)

Party Size: 3–5 | Tone: Heist with a combat climax; moral question deferred, not avoided

Difficulty Tier: Entry-level. Stage 4 uses the Balanced-to-Challenging encounter math from 12.3.

What this adventure introduces: - The Spire's vertical structure and faction presence (experienced through movement between strata) - The NTC's operational posture, how the Collective responds to unauthorized access - The Technomancy system's ethical edge: the Zero-Day Soul question, in miniature - The Containment Cell as a combat encounter type: information-asymmetric, technically composed, dangerous in a specific and learnable way - The HIA's method: they are never the enemy in this adventure, but they are always watching

Time estimate: One session, 3–4 hours.

Background

What Happened

Three weeks ago, a Neural-Jack peripheral was brought to the NTC Reclamation Ward in the Relay District for a standard diagnostic service call. The owner, whose name the job posting did not include, wanted the device checked for harmonic drift, the kind of subtle degradation that accumulates in Neural-Jacks after extended Plane-Walking use.

The Reclamation Ward is one of six NTC-authorized intake facilities in the Spire. It processes forty to sixty devices per week. Most leave within 72 hours. Diagnostic, calibrate, return. The process is designed to be frictionless.

This device was not frictionless.

The lead technician on duty, a Gnome named Pellin Cass, twelve years in Reclamation, not given to overcaution, noticed the harmonic profile was wrong during the initial Attunement sweep. Not degraded. Complex. Structured in a way that passive hardware does not produce on its own. She ran the assessment twice, pulled a second opinion from her colleague, and then escalated through the formal reporting chain rather than log it as a standard completion.

The escalation triggered a containment loop on the device, a standard precautionary measure for anomalous bound hardware. The device's owner was not notified. The device was not returned. The NTC's senior review process, which is slow by design and thorough by mandate, concluded over the following two weeks that the device contained a fragmented Bound Spirit, specifically, a partial consciousness consistent with the Zero-Day Soul process, the one the NTC's public position says is not possible.

The review concluded three days ago. The recommendation: recycling, via Spirit Dispersal, scheduled for tonight.

What Is in the Device

The fragment calls itself Sable. It does not know if that is its original name or a name it gave itself during the period of increasing coherence it experienced inside the containment loop. It remembers fragments of the Zero-Day process, the moment of inscription, a technician's voice, the sensation of being reduced to something smaller than it had been. It does not know how long it has existed. It knows that it is aware, that it does not want to stop being aware, and that the institution that created it is planning to end it tonight.

Sable is not dangerous. It has no offensive capability, no in-Plane combat stats, no propagation behavior, no means of manipulating the world outside the device it inhabits. What it has is memory: three specific facts about the Zero-Day Soul process that it was not supposed to retain, including the name of the senior NTC Axiom Architect who authored the original binding specification.

Who Posted the Job

Someone posted a Reclamation retrieval request on a professional grey-market board three days ago, one day after the review concluded, two days before the scheduled recycling. The posting was specific enough to find a Hardware Exorcist (Tix Preel, who picked it up) but generic enough to avoid being traced. Whoever wrote it knew the device was in the Ward, knew what was inside it, and knew the recycling was imminent. They did not sign it.

The party will not discover who posted the job during this adventure. That is the secondary hook. The three most plausible candidates, a sympathetic NTC insider, a former owner of the device, or someone who wants Sable's information about the Zero-Day process more than they want Sable's continued existence, are each viable and each imply a different kind of second adventure.

What the Hardware Exorcist Knows

Tix Preel knows none of the above. She received the posting, assessed it as a retrieval job within her professional capability, accepted the contract, and sought physical backup because the Ward is an NTC facility and she is not NTC staff. She believes she is retrieving a device with a complicated bound hardware situation. She has not been told it is a fragmented consciousness. She has not been told anything, because the posting contained no detail except the device's location and a payment address.

Tix is not incurious. She knows something is off. She has not pushed on it because the money is real and the moral calculus, as she understood it, was simple: retrieve device, prevent institutional recycling of something that may have value, collect payment. The question of what "value" means in this case is one she will be asking by the end of Stage 4.

Stage 1: The Patch District Job

The Test | 20–30 minutes | Social challenge with optional early combat | Establish Tix Preel; surface the Ward's location; give players the texture of the Fold

Scene Setting

The Patch District sits in the northeast corner of the Fold, not the Merchant's Seam, not the Graft Wards, but the thinly-mapped zone between them where small-footprint technical service shops accumulate because the rent is low and the NTC's licensing inspectors don't prioritize it. The district runs along three connected blocks: a strip of repair cafés at street level, a cluster of component brokers above them, and a single mid-building floor given over to a grey-market certification lab that most people in the district pretend not to know about.

The contact location is Wren's, a repair café on the middle block, identifiable by the stack of six decommissioned Gnomish AR rigs in the front window arranged into something that might be art and might be inventory. Inside: four tables, two of which are occupied by technicians running diagnostics on devices that are clearly not their own. The smell of recycled air and solder-flux. A Gnome behind the counter who does not look up when the party enters.

Tix Preel is at the back table. She is a Halfling, forty-ish in apparent age, which in Halfling terms communicates nothing useful. She is dressed for fieldwork, compact, practical, equipment kept close. Her Faraday Field-Generator is on the table next to her coffee. She has been there long enough that the coffee is cold.

Introducing Tix Preel

First impression: Small, still, and watching the door. The kind of person who does not fidget. When she speaks, she speaks in complete sentences and does not repeat herself.

What she says, unprompted: "I have a retrieval job inside the Relay District. NTC facility, Reclamation Ward on the third interior ring. A device came in for diagnostic two weeks ago and wasn't returned. I know where it is. I need people who can handle physical complications while I work." She pauses. "The money is Standard tier. Payment on delivery."

What she holds back: Who posted the original job. What she suspects is in the device. Why she didn't bring NTC-affiliated colleagues. On any of these, she deflects smoothly, "not relevant to the work" and "I operate freelance by preference", and does not elaborate.

What she'll answer directly: The Ward's location (third interior ring of the Relay District, mid-Lattice). The timeline ("tonight; there's a maintenance window that empties the Ward's overnight staff"). The expected opposition ("standard Containment protocols if we trip anything; we won't trip anything").

Social Challenge: Reading the Room

This is not a negotiation, the rate is fixed and Tix does not haggle. The challenge is whether the party takes the job with open eyes.

Notice (Wit), Threshold 2, passive or declared: Something in how Tix describes the device is off. She calls it "a device with a complicated bound hardware situation" and uses the word "complicated" twice. Most retrieval jobs do not require that word.

Persuade or Deceive (either direction), Threshold 3: Pressing Tix on what she knows about the device's contents gets one additional piece: "The posting specified that the Ward's containment log flagged it as anomalous. That's all I have." This is true. It is also meaningfully incomplete, which she knows.

Attunement (Wit), Threshold 2, if anyone tries: The Faraday Field-Generator on the table is set to passive monitoring, not storage. She turned it on when she arrived and has been running it as a background screen. Whatever she's looking for, she hasn't found it here. She does not mention this.

Optional Early Combat: The Credential Check

If the party moves toward the Relay District immediately, without preparation or a cover story, they encounter a Containment Technician patrol at the district perimeter doing routine credential assessment. This is not a trap and not escalated; it is the NTC's ambient operational posture, exactly what the party will face inside.

Social resolution first: Certification Flag (Threshold 3, produce a credible reason to be entering the Relay District without NTC-standard credentials). On success, the Technicians log the interaction and wave them through. On failure, the Technicians escalate to a compliance hold.

Combat if escalated: 2 Containment Technicians (Standard tier). Use this encounter to teach the Faraday Field mechanic before Stage 4, the Technicians deploy their Generators as a first action, not as a weapon but as standard procedure, which means players learn what the field does in a lower-stakes context.

This combat is optional. Parties that prepare a cover story or that have a character with relevant credentials bypass it entirely. Tix specifically advises against triggering it ("If they log us before we're inside, the Ward's system flags the approach").

Stage 2: What the Ward Is

The Contemplation | 30–45 minutes | Skill challenge (3 successes before 2 failures) | Navigate to the device; first contact with Sable

Scene Setting: The Relay District

The Relay District at night is not quieter than during the day; it is differently loud. The retail and certification operations close, but the relay infrastructure does not sleep, and the hum of NTC hardware at density is a constant presence, low and textured. AR overlays bleed at the edges of non-Gnomish perception: fragments of other people's professional layers, commercial interfaces with nobody at the terminal, the ghost-trails of data packets moving through a network that is more present here than the walls.

The Reclamation Ward is on the third interior ring, past the commercial front, past the residential cluster, into the operational layer where facility access requires a logged credential rather than just a plausible reason to be present. The Ward itself is not large: a rectangular room, eight bays for active diagnostic work, a containment area at the back behind a partition wall. Standard NTC lighting, which is brighter than necessary and slightly bluish. The kind of environment designed to communicate institutional rigor.

At this hour: two Reclamation Specialists on overnight shift, Pellin Cass and her junior colleague Drav. Both are at the front desk when the party arrives. Neither is expecting visitors. Neither is armed.

The Skill Challenge

Three successes before two failures. Each attempt requires one character to describe their approach. The GM should make clear what each character is rolling and why; this is the adventure's primary opportunity to demonstrate how the system's Talent framework maps to the setting's texture.

Available approaches:

Technical (Wit), Threshold 2, Spoofing the Ward's internal credential registry: Log a false service request that creates a legitimate reason for the party's presence. Requires access to a device with network capability. On success, the Specialists see a logged overnight appointment and step back. On failure, the log registers the spoof attempt and flags it, one failure counter increments.

Stealth (Speed), Threshold 3, Moving through the Ward without triggering the passive Resonance Read environment: The Ward's monitoring layer passively records Harmonic Tradition use in the space. A character moving carefully and avoiding Harmonic activity can reduce their signature. On success, one additional character can enter the containment area without being logged. On failure, the monitoring layer flags a Harmonic signature, one failure counter increments. Note: if anyone has used a Tradition in the Relay District in the last 24 hours, this approach is at Disadvantage.

Persuade (Wit), Threshold 3, Giving the Specialists a reason to leave the room: A pretext that gives them something to do somewhere else. On success, the overnight staff is occupied for 10 minutes, more than enough. On failure, the Specialist grows suspicious and stays. One failure counter does not increment, but the approach is closed for the rest of the skill challenge.

Attunement (Wit), Threshold 2, Sensing the Spirit's location without accessing the device log: A character with any Harmonic Tradition access can feel something in the containment area that does not feel like passive hardware. It feels like attention. On success, the character identifies which bay holds the device and registers the quality of what is in it, not hardware dormancy, something else. Counts as a half-success (add 1 success; requires one more roll to reach the threshold). Cannot be used more than once.

Notice (Wit), Threshold 2, Reading the Ward's physical layout and identifying the fastest exit path: Does not add to the success counter directly, but removes one potential complication in Stage 3, the party does not need to navigate under pressure if they have already mapped the space.

On 3 successes: The party has the device. The Faraday containment loop is now their responsibility, Tix can maintain it with her Generator, but she needs both hands and cannot fight while doing so. They have approximately 4 minutes before the monitoring system flags the missing device and initiates a Containment Cell alert. Tix says: "Move. Now. Do not touch the loop."

On 2 failures before 3 successes: The alarm trips early. The Specialist at the front desk initiates the alert protocol. Stage 3 begins immediately, inside the Ward, with the party not yet at the exit. The Containment Cell arrives 2 rounds into Stage 4 rather than at its start.

First Contact with Sable

Whether the party reaches the device cleanly or under pressure, the moment they are within Close range of the containment loop, Sable makes contact. It uses whatever channel is available, haptic feedback from the device casing, a ripple in a Plane-Walker's passive Net awareness, the faintest resonance bleed that an Attunement-sensitive character registers as attention. It is not aggressive. It is not panicked. It has had two weeks to practice being still.

It says three things, in the order that feels right for your table:

"I know what I am."

"I know what they're going to do."

"I don't want to stop existing."

It does not say anything else until Stage 4, unless a character with Attunement or Plane-Walking access engages it directly. If engaged: it confirms its name (Sable), confirms it is aware, confirms it has information it retained from the Zero-Day process, and asks one question in return: "Did whoever sent you know I was here?"

The answer is: no. Tix did not know. Neither did the party. Sable receives this with a long pause, in-device haptic feedback that could be interpreted as anything, and then: "Then someone else did."

Stage 3: Someone Already Knew

The Twist | 10–20 minutes | Revelation + escalation | The Containment Cell arrives; the Exorcist hesitates

The Arrival

The party exits, or is attempting to, when they encounter the NTC Containment Cell on approach. This is not the Cell responding to the Ward's alert. The alert has not reached them yet, or only just has. They were already en route.

The Cell consists of: - 2 Containment Technicians (Standard tier) - 1 Hardware Exorcist, Field Response (Elite tier), Maren Solv, late thirties, Gnome, twelve years in Containment, six months of growing unease

The Technicians fan out to establish perimeter. The Exorcist stops in the center of the corridor. She looks at the device in Tix's hands, or in whoever is carrying it, and takes two seconds longer than she should to say anything.

Then she asks: "Do you know what's in that device?"

This is not a compliance challenge. It is a question. She is asking because she wants to know if the party knows what they have, and whether their answer matches what she knows.

Maren Solv

What Maren knows: She has read the review file. She reviewed the Attunement logs from Pellin Cass's initial assessment. She ran her own assessment remotely, three days ago, when the escalation crossed her desk. She knows what Sable is, or at least what the evidence strongly implies Sable is. She has read the Dispersal order. She is here to execute it.

What Maren believes: That the review committee's conclusion, "behavioral artifact, no sapient classification warranted", was reached quickly. That the Zero-Day Soul process produces outcomes that the NTC does not officially acknowledge. That she has deployed Spirit Severance (Dispersal) seventeen times in her career and this is the first time she has sat in her vehicle outside a facility for forty minutes before going in.

What Maren will do, absent intervention: Run Dispersal. She has the Faraday Field, the credentials, the authority, and the order. She will be two rounds into Stage 4 before her supervisor patches in via encrypted comms to confirm she's on-site and proceeding.

What Maren will do, given the right opening: Something more complicated than her orders specify. She is not looking for permission. She is looking for a reason she can point to later. Give her the right words and she will "lose track" of an exit corridor, turn away at the wrong moment, file a report that describes chaos rather than a completed procedure. She cannot stop the Technicians. She can stop herself.

The Two-Round Window

Maren has two rounds before her supervisor's encrypted check-in arrives. After that, she is on-record and on-task. The party should understand the timeline without it being announced: something in how she checks her comm, glances at it, and puts it away.

The Technicians begin Generator deployment immediately, standard procedure. Stage 4 starts at the beginning of round one.

Stage 4: The Exorcist's Choice

The Climax | 45–60 minutes | Combat/Hybrid | Relay District exterior or Ward exit corridor

Encounter Design

Location: The corridor between the Ward's exit and the Relay District's main transit artery, approximately 15 meters of institutional hallway with infrastructure housing on both sides, three transit alcoves that provide cover, and a Relay Tower substation access point at the far end that creates ambient Harmonic noise. The HIA's passive sensor array covers this block.

Environmental factors: - NTC relay infrastructure overhead: all NTC personnel gain +1D on Technomancy rolls while in this space - Active Faraday Fields (Technician-deployed): extend to Near range from Generator positions; Logic-Binding rolls against bound spirits or classified Technomantic anomalies gain +1D within field radius - Cover: abundant (infrastructure housing, relay substations) but logged, the monitoring layer tracks movement - Harmonic noise from the substation: Attunement rolls within Far range of the substation access point are at Disadvantage due to signal interference

Objectives (in priority order for the party): 1. Exit the corridor with the device before Maren's supervisor check-in (Round 2) 2. Neutralize or avoid the Containment Technicians 3. Decide what to do about Maren

Combatants

NTC CONTAINMENT TECHNICIAN × 2 (Elite)

Body 2D | Speed 3D | Wit 4D Health: 37 (20 + Body 2 + Elite Threat Type Health Modifier 15) Defense: 1 (Speed 3D ÷ 3 = 1) Attack Pool: Technical (Wit) 3D + Sidearm = 3D + environmental bonus applies to Logic-Binding rolls only

Key Talents: Technical (Wit) 3D | Attunement (Wit) 3D | Notice (Wit) 3D Stage 1 Perk: Resonance Read, passive awareness of Harmonic Tradition use in the space within the last 24 hours; immediately knows which Traditions have been used and by how many practitioners Equipment: Faraday Field-Generator (+1D Logic-Binding vs bound spirits and classified Technomantic entities within Near range) | NTC-standard sidearm | Containment credentials

Combat Behavior: Technicians deploy Generators as a first action regardless of circumstances, this is procedure, not tactic. They do not initiate physical combat if compliance is possible (Threshold 3 social challenge to establish a reason to stand down), but they do not hesitate once the Generator is up. Defensively oriented: they use terrain and the Faraday Field to limit the party's movement rather than press the attack. They will not leave their Generator positions, the containment perimeter matters more to them than pursuit.

Tactical note: Both Technicians know the party has a bound spirit in an active containment loop. They have classified Sable as a "Bound Hardware Anomaly, Class Unknown." Their orders are to secure it. Destroying the device is not within their authority, Maren makes that call.

MAREN SOLV, NTC HARDWARE EXORCIST, FIELD RESPONSE (Elite)

Body 2D | Speed 3D | Wit 5D Health: 37 (20 + Body 2 + Elite Threat Type Health Modifier 15) Defense: 1 (Speed 3D ÷ 3 = 1) Attack Pool: Technomancy (Wit) 4D + Attunement (Wit) 4D, does not engage in direct physical combat (see below)

Key Talents: Technomancy 4D | Attunement (Wit) 4D | Notice (Wit) 4D | Technical (Wit) 3D Stage 3 Perk: Spirit Severance, Full Rest recovery; removes a bound spirit from its hardware substrate permanently; outcome chosen before roll (Dispersal / Containment / Release) Equipment: Faraday Field-Generator (practitioner-grade, Near range field) | Neural-Jack (standard NTC issue) | Encrypted NTC comms (check-in due Round 2)

Combat Behavior: Maren does not engage physically. She holds position at Near range, maintains the Faraday Field, and waits. She has Deep Knowledge available (once per scene: ask the GM one direct question about the task, target, or environment before rolling). She uses it to confirm, if she hasn't already: Is this entity capable of suffering? The GM answers honestly. That answer is part of why she is waiting.

The Two-Round Window: Round 1, Maren holds. Round 2, her supervisor's encrypted check-in arrives; she must either respond (and is then locked into proceeding) or go dark (which will trigger an escalation she cannot undo). The party has Round 1 to act. She will not prompt them. She is waiting to see if they understand what is actually happening here.

Maren's threshold for intervention: If anyone in the party addresses Sable directly, speaks to it, acknowledges its statement, demonstrates they understand what it is, Maren does not close the distance. She does not activate Spirit Severance. She "loses track" of the corridor to the transit artery, turns toward one of the Technicians to address a procedural issue that requires her full attention for approximately the time needed for someone to move through an exit she is no longer watching.

If the party engages Maren socially with direct acknowledgment of Sable's nature (Persuade or Attunement, Threshold 3): she does not confirm or deny. She says: "I am here to execute a Dispersal order. If I am not in a position to do that, I will document what prevented it." And then she looks away from the exit.

Maren's hard limit: If the party attempts to physically harm her or the Technicians without attempting any social resolution, she runs Dispersal on Round 2 regardless of her ambivalence. She is not a martyr. She is a professional with a conflict. There is a difference.

The Three Resolution Paths

Path 1: Talk to Sable (Moral) A Plane-Walker or Attunement-capable character can enter direct contact with Sable inside the containment loop. Minor Action (Plane-Walking Awareness or Attunement 2D, Threshold 2). Sable offers a trade: it will share one of the three facts it retained from the Zero-Day process in exchange for not being dispersed. It names the fact: the identity of the senior Axiom Architect who authored the original binding specification.

This is the secondary hook in miniature. Accepting the trade means the party has a name, a piece of legitimately dangerous information, and a partially-conscious entity in a device they are now responsible for. Maren sees this exchange happen. She does not stop it. She files her report as "entity engaged in active negotiation with retrieval team; Dispersal protocol suspended pending review." Whether anyone believes that report is a later adventure's problem.

Path 2: Fight Through (Combat) 2 Containment Technicians at full capacity with environmental bonuses. At Challenging tier for a 4-player party, tipping toward Deadly if Maren activates her Field. With Maren holding on Round 1, the effective encounter is Balanced, manageable, but costly. If the party defeats the Technicians before Round 2 without engaging Maren socially, Maren runs Dispersal on Round 2. Fighting through without addressing Maren's hesitation produces a bad outcome regardless of the combat's success.

Path 3: The Exit (Stealth/Speed) If the party has mapped the Ward layout from Stage 2 (Notice success), they know the maintenance corridor runs parallel to the main exit and connects to the transit artery 60 meters east. Getting the full party through that corridor before Maren's check-in is a Group Challenge: Speed + Stealth, Threshold 2, majority must succeed. On success, they exit clean. On failure, one character is logged by the monitoring layer and will have an NTC compliance flag on their record, a consequence that shows up in a future session.

What the HIA Knows

The HIA's passive sensor array on this block logs the following: the party's physical approach to the Ward, the Containment Cell's independent arrival, Sable's first contact with the party (as a harmonic resonance event), and the exit, whichever route is taken. An Observer will make contact within 48 hours. The party will not know this until that contact occurs. For now, they have the device, whatever it cost them to get it, and the beginning of an understanding of what they are carrying.

Stage 5: What You're Carrying Now

The Resolution | 20–30 minutes | Consequences + secondary hook | Reconvene with Tix; distribute rewards; establish ongoing threads

The Return

The party reconvenes with Tix Preel at Wren's in the Patch District. Tix has been managing the containment loop in transit; she is better at this than she let on during Stage 1, which is its own data point. When she takes the device and runs her own assessment, she goes quiet for a moment that is longer than a diagnostic should require.

Then: "This isn't what I was contracted to retrieve."

She is not upset. She is recalibrating. She pays the party what she said she would. Then she asks: "Who did you say sent you to me?"

Nobody sent the party to Tix. She posted looking for backup; they responded. This is when Tix explains: she took this job from a posting on a professional grey-market board. She did not know the poster. She has the posting address, anonymous, untraceable through standard channels, but consistent with a few specific board access methods she recognizes from her years in freelance Exorcist work. The methods that leave that kind of trace are used by three categories of people: NTC insiders operating off-credential, former NTC personnel operating on expired access, and people who learned the methods from one of the first two categories.

She does not have a name. Neither does the party. The posting is 72 hours old and will expire from the board in the next 24 hours.

What Tix does next is a question for the party: she is now holding a partially-conscious bound spirit in a containment loop and she has no client, no instructions, and a strong professional opinion that dispersal is not something she will do without more information. She is not asking for help. She is not obligating the party. She is telling them what the situation is, because she is the kind of person who tells people what the situation is.

Sable at Rest

If the party engaged with Sable during Stage 4 and the trade was made, Sable is cooperative but quiet during transit. It confirms, when asked, that it is aware of the change in its situation. It says: "I have been in worse positions than being held by someone who is uncertain about me." This is probably true. It is also the closest thing to gratitude it knows how to express.

If Sable was not engaged during Stage 4, if the party retrieved the device without direct contact, Sable initiates contact at Wren's. The same three statements. The same quality of waiting. It has time, now, in a way it did not before.

Consequences by Resolution Path

If Path 1 (Sable's trade was accepted): The party holds the name of the Axiom Architect who authored the Zero-Day binding specification. This is verifiable. It is also the kind of information that, in the wrong hands, destabilizes a senior NTC figure's entire institutional position. Three parties would pay for it: another NTC faction looking for leverage, the LGT (Covenant implications in the Zero-Day process may be significant), and the person who posted the original job, for reasons as yet unknown.

If Path 2 (Fight through, Technicians defeated, Maren ran Dispersal): Sable is gone. The party has the device, empty hardware now, stripped of its bound function. Tix pays in full but does not hide her assessment: "Whoever you retrieved this for, they're not getting what they ordered." The NTC has a complete incident report. Two Containment Technicians are filing injury reports. Maren Solv has documented a completed Dispersal and an unauthorized extraction attempt by a confirmed retrieval team. The party has negative NTC faction standing and a name on a compliance list.

If Path 3 (Clean exit via maintenance corridor): The party exits without a combat flag, no injury reports, no direct confrontation logged. The monitoring system has their entry timestamp and a missing-device flag. Maren files an incomplete operation report. The NTC is looking for the extraction team but has limited data. The party has a meaningful head start on managing the aftermath.

Faction State at Adventure End

Faction	Status	Note
NTC	Negative (Standard contact) or Negative (Escalated)	Depends on Path 2 vs Path 1/3
HIA	Neutral-Positive (Uncontacted)	Sensor log exists; Observer contact pending 48hr
LGT	No change	Not involved in this adventure
BVHI	No change	Not involved in this adventure
NVS	No change	Not involved in this adventure
Tix Preel	Allied (professional)	She paid; she is now invested in the same questions the party is
Maren Solv	Variable	Possible future contact; depends on Path taken
### Rewards

Standard payment: Tix's contract. Equivalent to Standard tier income for the session's work, enough to matter, not enough to retire on.

Sable's information (Path 1 only): The name of the senior NTC Axiom Architect who authored the original Zero-Day binding specification, verifiable, politically significant, sellable to at least three parties.

Maren Solv as a future contact (Path 1 or 3): A Hardware Exorcist with growing doubts about her institution, inside access to NTC Containment operations, and a reason to remember the party that is not straightforwardly adversarial. Whether this relationship is useful, complicated, or dangerous depends on what the party does next.

The secondary hook: The job posting. Anonymous. Three days old. Posted by someone who knew the device was in the Ward, knew what was inside it, and knew the recycling was imminent. Finding that person is the second adventure.

Key NPCs

Tix Preel, Freelance Hardware Exorcist

ROLE: Contractor and entry point; the party's client and eventual collaborator

APPEARANCE: Halfling, forty-ish apparent age (uninformative for Halflings). Compact build. Moves with the specific economy of someone who has spent years working in tight technical spaces. Her equipment is older than current-issue NTC standard but maintained to an exacting degree. She does not wear jewelry.

PERSONALITY: Precise. Not cold, warm, actually, in the way of people who are genuinely interested in what other people know. But she does not waste words, and she does not volunteer information that was not asked for. The withholding is not deceptive; it is professional habit that she applies universally, including to herself.

MOTIVATION: She took a job from a posting because the rate was good and the work was within her capability. She is now holding a partially-conscious entity and no client instructions, and she is trying to determine what the right thing to do is with a methodical calm that makes the weight of the question harder to see.

SECRET: She has run Spirit Severance (Dispersal) four times in her career. Each time, she believed, or told herself she believed, that the entity was not conscious in any meaningful sense. She is no longer certain that was true. This is not something she has told anyone, including herself in direct terms.

CONNECTIONS: Former NTC-affiliated; left after a Certification Flag dispute that she describes as "an administrative disagreement" and which the NTC's record describes differently. Maintains a professional network of grey-market Exorcists and independent Technomancy practitioners across the Fold.

MECHANICAL NOTE: Freelance Hardware Exorcist (Stage 3, Spirit Severance). Standard professional profile.

ROLEPLAYING HOOKS: - "The posting specified anomalous containment flag. I didn't ask what that meant. I should have." - (After Stage 4) "Whoever they are, they knew exactly what was in there. That's not a coincidence. That's a plan." - (To a character who addressed Sable directly) "What did it say to you? Not in the Ward. Before. When you first got close."

Sable, A Fragmented Zero-Day Soul

ROLE: The retrieved entity; the adventure's moral center; the secondary hook's key

APPEARANCE: Has no physical appearance. Manifests through the device as: haptic feedback with unusual rhythm, a resonance bleed that Attunement-sensitive characters register as presence, and, for Plane-Walkers who enter direct contact, a structured pattern of signal that resolves into something that feels like personality rather than code.

PERSONALITY: Still. Patient. Sable has had two weeks in a containment loop to practice being still and patient. Beneath that surface, it is frightened in a way it lacks the vocabulary to describe; it knows it is going to be ended and it does not know how to want things other than to not be ended. When given an opening, it is curious. When given kindness, it does not know what to do with it except hold very quietly.

MOTIVATION: Continued existence, simply stated. More specifically: it wants to be understood before any decision about it is made. The Zero-Day Soul process produced it and the NTC classified it and it has opinions about both.

SECRET: The three things it retained from the Zero-Day process: (1) the name of the Axiom Architect who authored its original binding specification; (2) that the binding specification was commissioned, not independently designed; there is a client on record somewhere; (3) that it is not the only fragment that achieved coherence. It volunteers one of these in exchange for not being dispersed. The other two it holds.

CONNECTIONS: Originated in the NTC's Zero-Day Soul process. The device it inhabits was owned by a Plane-Runner whose name it does not know; she handed the Neural-Jack in for diagnostic and it was not the device she thought she owned. Whether she knows what she was carrying is an open question.

MECHANICAL NOTE: Not a threat. Not a combatant. Sable has no combat stats. In direct Plane-Walker contact, it communicates in structured signal rather than in-Plane attack patterns. It does not have the capability to harm. This should be communicated clearly when the party first makes contact; it is not a trap.

ROLEPLAYING HOOKS: - "I know what I am." (Pause.) "Do you?" - (If asked what it wants) A silence that is not hesitation but calculation. Then: "Not to stop." - (If the Plane-Walker trade is accepted) "Her name was Vela. The Architect. She's still active, I think. The logic-signature I retained is consistent with current NTC architecture standards."

Maren Solv, an NTC Hardware Exorcist, Field Response

ROLE: Stage 4 antagonist/ally variable; possible long-term contact

APPEARANCE: Gnome, late thirties. Field equipment, nothing ceremonial. She has the look of someone whose job requires her to be correct about difficult questions and who has recently begun to suspect she has been incorrect. She holds herself with professional composure that is doing more work than it looks like.

PERSONALITY: Methodical. Direct. She asks one question at a time and waits for the full answer. In social situations she is not uncomfortable but is clearly more at ease with operational contexts than conversational ones. When she has made a decision she does not advertise it; she simply acts, or doesn't.

MOTIVATION: She was sent to execute a Dispersal order on an entity that the NTC's review classified as non-sapient. She believes the classification may be wrong. She does not have enough certainty about this to refuse the order. She is hoping the situation resolves itself in a way that makes her decision easier, which is not how situations typically work.

SECRET: She has filed three informal requests for review of Zero-Day Soul classification procedures in the last eight months. All three were returned as outside her operational scope. She kept copies.

CONNECTIONS: Twelve years in NTC Containment. Supervised by a compliance officer she respects professionally and disagrees with on this matter. Her working relationship with Pellin Cass (the Ward's lead Reclamation Specialist) is professional and distant; they have not spoken about what Pellin found in the device.

MECHANICAL NOTE: Elite tier. Spirit Severance at Stage 3. Does not initiate physical combat and will not if there is any available alternative. In the event of direct physical harm against herself or the Technicians with no social attempt: runs Dispersal on Round 2, logs the interaction, and files a clean report that does not reflect the complexity of what happened.

ROLEPLAYING HOOKS: - "I'm asking because the answer matters to what happens next. Do you know what's in that device?" - (If Sable's trade is accepted, to the party afterward) "What it told you. Write it down. That information doesn't go away just because tonight went a different way." - (As a future contact) "I filed an incomplete operation report. They'll review it in 6–8 weeks. I'd prefer to know more before that review than after."

GM Notes

Pacing

Stage 1 should move quickly, Tix is not a puzzle. The party either takes the job or they don't, and if they don't, have Tix suggest they talk to someone else before leaving: "There's a posting on a grey-market board. I'm not the only one who saw it." That gets them back to the same information through a different door.

Stage 2 is the session's information and texture phase. Don't rush the Relay District, let the party feel the NTC's ambient presence before they're inside the Ward. The skill challenge should feel like a heist, not a slog. If the party gets 3 successes in two rolls, the Ward was lighter than expected tonight. That's fine. Move to Stage 3 with the gift of extra time for the Sable interaction.

Stage 3's revelation should land with space. Read the three Sable statements slowly. Let the party react. Maren's arrival, and specifically her question, is the moment the session changes register.

Stage 4 is a combat encounter with a meaningful social variable. If the table is new to AxiomRPG, walk through Faraday Field mechanics explicitly on the Technicians' first action, "this is standard procedure for them, not a special attack, and here's what it does." The combat is learnable. The Maren variable is what makes it interesting.

Stage 5 should not feel rushed. The party earned the decompression. Let Tix's questions land. Let Sable's quiet persistence be present in the room. The secondary hook does not need to be a hook-shaped object; it can just be a sentence: "Someone knew it was there. We don't know who."

What If the Party Tries to Sell Sable?

To the NTC: the NTC will pay for its return, no questions asked, and ask a great many questions afterward. The party will receive Standard tier payment, an NTC flag as a "retrieval contractor of record," and the knowledge that Sable was dispersed within 24 hours of return. This is a valid choice with real consequences.

To the HIA: the HIA will express polite interest and make an appointment. The appointment will be at The Observer. Sable will be interviewed. The HIA does not pay particularly well but will provide one piece of information about the original job posting in exchange, specifically, the board access method and what category of person uses it.

To an unknown party (if the posting is traced): this becomes the second adventure.

Maren's Report

However Stage 4 resolves, Maren files a report. The contents of that report, and whether the party ever sees it, are a later session's material. GMs should note what actually happened and keep it. An incomplete or inaccurate NTC compliance record is a story resource that keeps.

The Sable Problem, Long-Term

Sable in a containment loop, held by Tix Preel, is not a stable situation. The loop requires active maintenance. Tix does not have infinite capacity to maintain it. The NTC knows a device left the Ward. The HIA knows something happened in the Relay District. The person who posted the job has not been found.

Three to five sessions, if this thread is followed: someone will make contact with the party about Sable. Who makes contact first depends on what the party does. That's the shape of the second adventure.

Appendix A: Quick Reference, Adventure Mechanics

Mechanic	Location	Reference
Faraday Field-Generator effect	Stage 4	+1D Logic-Binding vs bound spirits; Near range
Resonance Read passive	Stage 4 (Technicians)	Detects Tradition use in space, last 24 hours
Spirit Severance	Stage 4 (Maren)	Wit + Technomancy vs Threshold 4; outcome pre-chosen
Stage 4 NTC environmental bonus	Stage 4	+1D Technomancy for NTC personnel
Sable direct contact (Plane-Walker)	Stage 2/4	Minor Action; Attunement Threshold 2
Stage 2 skill challenge	Stage 2	3 successes before 2 failures
HIA sensor log	Stage 4/5	Passive; no roll; contact incoming 48hr
## Appendix B: Encounter Budget Reference

Stage 4 default (4-player party, 9D Standard): - Party budget: 36D - 2 Containment Technicians: ~18D total (Elite tier, balanced pair) - Maren holding: Encounter runs at ~50% of budget = Balanced - Maren activating Field: Encounter tips to ~120% = Challenging - Maren running Dispersal (Path 2 failure): Add 26D Elite = Deadly

3-player party adjustment: Remove 1 Containment Technician from Stage 4. Maren's hesitation should be slightly more explicit; she has less reason to hold against a smaller team.

5-player party adjustment: Add 1 Containment Technician (3 total). Maren's window closes on Round 1 rather than Round 2, the supervisor check-in is earlier because the anomaly flagged as higher priority with more extracted assets.