Okay peeps. Gimme some shiny ideas.
Our plucky operatives have infiltrated the factory-island of Zanzibar, where the megacorp Ikea-Stewart makes their prefab office modules. (You can buy a whole office, smartly decorated, and all wired up, and then ship it around the globe to whatever office block your job takes you to!). They have already planted the trojan horse in the office software template that will do who-knows-what for their employers. They’re on their way off the island (planning on stowing away inside a prefab office as it’s put onto one of the nuclear-powered Monsanto-Maersk superships in the harbor).
But. In their initial research, they did discover an odd thing. The Jozani forest, at the core of the island, is the only bit that hasn’t been paved over and industrialized. And in the middle of that forest are three, large, building-shaped heat signatures, at least according to satellite imagery. Reckoning that whatever Ikea-Stewart is hiding in the middle of a forest in the middle of a factory in the middle of a heavily-fortified island must be valuable, the operatives are going to take a peek before leaving the island.
Of course I, the MC, have no freakin’ idea what those heat signatures actually are. Any ideas? What’s something appropriately valuable and appropriately dangerous for these poor saps to wander into?
The heat signatures are from concealed hydroponic and glow-lamp growing-bunkers. And what are they growing? Marijuana? Opium? Hardly anything so tawdry as that! Civet coffee! Coffee cherries are fed to civets who excrete out partially digested coffee-beans which are harvested from the dung and the process is said to add to the coffee’s aroma and flavour once roasted. (Current-day prices are up to $600 a pound.) It has gained an underground following among the world’s most high-priced office executives.
But why do they have to conceal the operation? Let’s say an outbreak of the SARS II epidemic in 20xx led to fears that it was spread by a species of civet and the coffee was made illegal for fear it would spread the disease. (This is not the case.) So big money, big illegal, the price has multiplied, very UGLY armed security people and, not only that, the PCs will discover the civets have been mutated to be king-sized and in the gun-happy confusion, some will get loose from their thick cages to attack them.
That’s my pitch, Mr. Spielberg. Do I get the job?
en.wikipedia.org – Kopi Luwak – Wikipedia
Heavy Cyber munitions factory and depot.
Radioactivity-induced genetic mutation experimental facility.
The God server, which usurps all traffic and data from all the world’s servers, including the encrypted ones, but is unknown to the world at large.
Super exclusive hidden resort for corporate team building exercises, cyber surgery, mental reconditioning and psychological surgery, all conducted by rigorously shackled AI “leadership team”
Colin J WELCOME TO ZANZIBAR RECUPERATION FACILITY. YOUR NEEDS ARE BEING ASSESSED NOW. INSUFFICIENT CYBERNETIC AUGMENTATION DETECTED. INSUFFICIENT LOYALTY CONDITIONING DETECTED. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE GREEN ROOM. THERE ARE WARM COOKIES. YOU MUST COMPLY.
The server farm for all the spyware installed in the prefabs. The trojan they have installed will let their clients listen in to the feeds from a specific set of modules but this server farm listens in to ALL of the prefabs and analyses the data. Most of it is low level and pretty useless at a corporate level but every so often an unguarded executive will mention something of value to the sort of subordinate who would work in this sort of prefab.
For a group of operatives the data is much more valuable – a great way to get low level data that is of value when infiltrating somewhere – background about employees (“I’m absolutely skint right now…”, “Dammit I lost my pass again!”), security sweeps (cameras picking up when guards do their routes), when an office is most likely to be empty etc.
Update: thanks for all the ideas, guys, it really got my brain going. I really liked all the left-field crazy stuff, but as this is Mission #2 I wanted to keep things a little more reserved; we’re still building theme. So I took those as inspiration, and when I looked back to my notes I saw that one of our operatives was actually raised by Ikea-Stewart before being kidnapped by another corp.
So when they hacked their way through the forest to get to the installation (and killed a supposed-to-be-extinct native jaguar), that operative started recognizing things. Like he’d seen that tree right there before. He knew before he saw inside the building that there would be long wooden benches and rocking chairs in the hallways. And when they got close enough to see inside the buildings, they found them full of kids. Kids who could easily be the operative’s brothers, sisters, and siblings. And the player put two and two together and said, “Holy shit, is this where I grew up?!?” Later he reported that he was very satisfyingly creeped out.
The team was running low on intel and gear, though, so they decided to document the place and bug out before they were caught. I’ve no doubt, however, that we’ll be coming back, one way or another, to the Zanzibar Creche.