Zone Klamath is less a destination than a home turf for anyone living the posthuman life, a tight, always-on neighborhood where Splicers, borgs, and heavily modded performers blend work, residence, and nightlife into the same few blocks. The streets are lined with low-rise venues, chem shops, and small apartments stacked over studios and clubs, and while normies pass through, they do so as outsiders, adjusting to a culture built around visible transformation and reputation. For regulars like a Splicer, a full borg, or a high-end working girl assassin with heavy chrome, Klamath is familiar ground: you know which clinics are worth the risk, which gangs are performing versus hunting, and how quickly a night can shift from business to spectacle. It’s a place where upgrades are currency, identity is curated, and everyone is at least partly on display, but beneath that surface, there are doors you don’t open and alleys you don’t walk down unless you’re ready for what’s behind them.
The Target
SOURCE NPC #1’s information comes through in fragments, half-finished notes, clipped audio, and a few tense in-person exchanges, filtered by the fixer into something usable. The clinic’s public-facing areas are limited to intake, processing, and a morgue that serves as a hard boundary. Beyond that, there’s definitely space he’s never accessed, but he’s seen materials, bodies, equipment, sealed containers, and moved through it late at night, usually between shifts. Logs don’t match what he’s seen. Things go in and don’t come back out, at least not on paper. The fixer’s takeaway is simple: the morgue isn’t the end of the line, it’s the checkpoint before whatever the real operation is.
SOURCE NPC #1’s edge is language. He’s picked up enough overheard Chinese from senior staff to flag patterns: repeated references to a “lower level,” “stability issues,” and “non-viable samples,” along with explicit instructions not to bring certain subjects back upstairs. He doesn’t fully understand the context, but the tone changes when they talk about it, more clinical, more controlled. Staff behavior shifts near the morgue as well; some aren’t allowed past it, while others are clearly being vetted for access. Security tightens in that corridor, better badges, heavier doors, more cameras, but it’s not a constant lockdown. The system relies on routine and hierarchy more than discipline. From one overheard conversation, filtered through SOURCE NPC #1, then cleaned up by the fixer, the PCs also get a disturbing piece of context: something about a “strain gland” project. It sounded like a pitch, or at least a demonstration, with the Receptionist discussing stability, output control, and “market viability” with someone who was clearly not an internal staff member. SOURCE NPC #1 didn’t understand the science, but he understood the tone; it was being sold.
What the PCs get out of it is practical, not complete. SOURCE NPC #1 can provide current access codes for the upper levels, rough timing on low-activity windows, and a sketched layout up to the morgue. He warns that the facility feels off, behind schedule, strained, like something isn’t working the way it should. The fixer frames it plainly: you’ll be able to get in and move around early if you’re careful, but once you hit that corridor, you’re past anything SOURCE NPC #1 understands. Whatever’s beyond it, it’s where the real risk starts, and whatever they’re building down there, it’s not just research anymore.
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